> many animals can distinguish independently small numbers, like 3 or 5

This is called subitizing. It's distinct from counting. We can see the difference in humans with Simultanagnosia, who are unable to count beyond the subitizing range. Subitizing is categorizing the scale of a small gestalt group.

The only thing I've ever seen where an animal appeared to demonstrate counting (up to 3) without training was in rhesus monkeys (maybe also chimpanzees?), but even that experiment could be explained through temporal gestalt. (It's the only reason I know of for them to not have been able to go higher than 3 in that experiment in the context of many other things that they can do.)

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somethingweird 3 days ago | parent [-]

Even parrots can count to 6 and more, I would be surprised if primates couldn't.

	▲	BugsJustFindMe 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		At least one has maybe been shown to be able to do that with 30 years of focused training, but none have been shown to be able without training. Wild parrots have only demonstrated subitizing and size discrimination, not counting. The overeager do quite often confuse subitizing and size discrimination for counting, though. That's its own problem.