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