The most famous passage from Adam Smith’s work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is it:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from concern for their own interests. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-esteem, and never speak to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
However, a few sentences before, Smith writes:
No one has ever seen a dog fairly and deliberately trade one bone for another with another dog. No one has ever seen an animal by its natural gestures and cries signify to another, this is mine, that one is yours; I am ready to give this for that. When an animal wants to obtain something either from a man or from another animal, it has no other means of persuasion than to win the favor of those whose service it requires.
I wonder if Smith underestimated the capacity of animals, or at least cats, to engage in exchanges.
Look at this heartwarming video. I found the idea plausible that the cat thought he was trading something that someone else thought was valuable, a leaf, for something he valued, a piece of fish.
HT to my lovely wife, who is always looking for sweet animal stories.
