It’s true, perhaps, that corvids are opportunists that benefit when a kill happens. But opportunity is not limited to food. In fact, it would be difficult to explain this (and vast terrains of largely ignored animal behavior) according to principles such as competition or ‘fitness = survival = reproduction’.

If the corvid in this video is engaged in competition or fitness behavior, it’s profoundly difficult to imagine how risking its life (not merely to cars but to nearby alert predators such as raptors) in order to insure that another creature is »not killed (and thus doesn’t become available food)… is an expression of competition, fitness, or even survival.

Situations like this one directly demonstrate the glaring omissions of our clinical ideas of what organisms are and do. The skeleton misses the actual animal.

It’s clear the bird is profoundly invested in its sense of relation with the hedgehog. It’s very literally risking its own life, and taking on a problem that we would imagine to be outside the scope of its common concern. What’s the payoff there?

I suspect that the hedgehog is not capable of traversing the curb. Perhaps the driver became involved. It’s really a very complex scene, that we should resist dismissing. Animals care for each other (and there are aspects of this that are more commonly demonstrated by young animals). We should pay careful attention to this. It means they have minds, and imaginations.

The bird, to become interested in the problem »for the hedgehog (an ostensible benefit to the bird, because a crushed hedgehog is edible), has to »imagine a situation that has not yet occurred (which also means it knows what roads are, and something of what cars do).

And then decide to »gamble to insure it doesn’t. If it can imagine that situation, it can imagine the risks involved, and these are not merely cars.

And still it chooses to aid another animal.

And commits. And follows through.

Which means »it wants something to not happen. In a serious way. A way worth risking its own life…

Life recognizes itself in the vast world of living beings. It’s not merely competition, or ‘survival’. It’s care. Memory. Recognition.

Relation.