Rural and urban foxes just as smart as each other, study finds. Might the same be true of humans? – Scotsman comment

Urban living has not made our fellow mammals better at puzzle-solving than their country cousins

In Arkansas Traveller, a 1992 song by Michelle Shocked, an apparent city-dweller spars with a local in the countryside. One barb by the former, “hey farmer, you're not too far from a fool, are you?”, is met with “just a barbed-wire fence between us” in response.

Does urban living somehow make us smarter? Do ‘country cousins’ deserve their reputation or have they been unfairly besmirched? A new study – admittedly of animals but, hey, aren’t we all? – may, just possibly, shed some light.

Hull University researchers spent two years studying wild foxes at 104 locations in Scotland and England, leaving puzzles that offered a reward for successful completion. There was a theory that urbanisation had made foxes smarter because of city life’s greater range of challenges. But while the researchers found that the city foxes were “bolder” – more prepared to touch the puzzles – they weren’t apparently any better at solving them than their rural counterparts.

However, perhaps the foxes were adopting the farmer’s role. Why solve a human city-slicker’s puzzle, when there’s an easier meal to be found?