The first book (1898) on what became reinforcement learning starts with pages of anger on how stupid animals are: "Dogs get lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices it or sends an account of it to a scientific magazine. But let one find his way from Brooklyn to Yonkers and the fact immediately becomes a circulating anecdote" 😂

Sometimes I wish I could have worked in that age.

Knock your socks off here, it's well worth a read: 

https://archive.org/download/animalintelligen00thoruoft/animalintelligen00thoruoft.pdf 

 And don't imagine that cats get off lightly either. "Thousands of cats on thousands of occasions sit helplessly yowling, and no one takes thought of it or writes to his friend, the professor; but let one cat claw at the knob of a door supposedly as a signal to be let out, and straightway this cat becomes the representative of the cat-mind in all the books."