In Sweden, a pilot programme was led by a startup “Corvid Cleanig” corvid (type of crow from crow family) in 2022. Crows were enrolled to pick up cigarette butts from the streets of Södertälje (near Stockholm).  The corvids are often considered the most intelligent birds and are among the most intelligent animals in general.  For each cigarette filter a crow drops into a customised vending machine, the bird receives food in reward. The company says the birds are not trapped but participate voluntarily. The startup team and researchers drew conclusions on the corvid family’s well-documented intelligence and capacity for tool-use and problem-solving. “They are wild birds taking part on a voluntary basis,” says Christian Günther-Hanssen, the founder of Corvid Cleaning, the company behind the process.

Cigarette filters are a major part of urban litter in Sweden accounting for around 60 % of items in trash counts on roads, and the project aims to reduce municipal street-cleaning costs while engaging wildlife in a novel way. The initiative is still at pilot stage; questions remain over expandability and scalability. As a progressive nation, the bird welfare by ministry is also a point of strict adherence as cruelty against wildlife. The government of Sweden is also worried about human behaviour, whether this practice will shifts focus away from changing human behaviour. Data collected from Günther-Hanssen, C. and researchers  for using wild crows to collect cigarette butt waste in Sweden is published in Journal of Environmental Innovation.  

Cigarette butts are harmful items.  They have nicotine, tar, microplastics, and heavy metals inside of them. They are highly contaminated in nature. The environmentalists fear the consequences  during high rainfall and floods. The founder of the vending box says the crows are very intelligent they don’t eat the filters; they simply carry them in their purpose to get a peanut.

Conclusion

This is a wrong way of human beings asking another species to help us overcome our weaknesses. We are asking for help from the crows. We are the most ill-mannered species that can’t quit our habits and we cooly forget to throw the trash in dustbins. While smoking we forget to think about the consequences of it every step of the addiction. When we throw trash on roads, we forget what we leave behind as we continue to walk forward and into our own lives. But we are the species capable of building a machine that imagines partnerships across evolutionary boundaries. While humans do utilize animals for a variety of tasks such as agriculture, transport, and assistance roles, for medical inventions many people hold diverse views on these relationships. The extent to which animals are used varies widely across cultures and industries, and this practice has evolved significantly throughout history.  

Crows are called intelligent birds due to their advanced problem-solving, tool use, and impressive memory capabilities. They can recognize faces, plan, and exhibit complex social behaviours like cooperation and communication, which is why they are considered among the smartest animals on the planet. Crows have exceptional memories and can remember specific human faces for years after a single encounter. They can even hold grudges, sometimes passing down their negative reactions to people who have hurt them. Crows are so smart due to their dense neuron packing in their brains, which gives them high cognitive abilities despite not having a prefrontal cortex like humans. Crows score an average of 100 with a standard deviance of 15 points in IQ tests.

In our so-called modern societies, we hold many ethical discussions, movements, and laws dedicated to animal welfare, which focus on ensuring animals are treated compassionately.  The conversation around human-animal interactions is complex, spanning historical necessity, cultural practices, and contemporary ethics regarding awareness and animal rights

The wild birds carry out the task as they receive a little food for every butt that they deposit in a commissioned machine. The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation says that more than 1bn cigarette butts are left on Sweden’s streets each year, representing 62% of all litter. Günther-Hanssen the founder of Corvid Cleaning estimates his method could save at least 75% of costs involved with picking up cigarette butts in the city. The use of animals in psychological research is a complex issue with arguments both for and against it.

The Nordic countries comprise of a geographical and cultural region in Northern Europe and the North Atlantic, where they are most commonly known as Norden which literally means ‘The North’. It includes Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden including their associated territories Greenland, Faroe Island and Aland Island. The population of the Nordic countries belongs mainly to Scandinavian or Finnish communities. And their main religion is Lutheran Christianity.

The Bloomberg Innovation Index which uses parameters such as research and development spending, value-added manufacturing, productivity and the concentration of high-tech public organizations scores. In its 2017 innovation index has announced Sweden at number two and Finland at number five in the top five! Bloomberg Indiex is called ‘The battle of ideas’.

Every year, the World Economic Forum releases its Global Competitiveness Report on the state of the world’s economies based again on innovations and productivity, which takes into account things like the quality of scientific research at universities, company spending on R&D (research and development), collaboration between universities and industry, patents, and the number of engineers and scientists in each country.

The 2016 ranking by WEF puts Sweden in the top 10 countries for the ease of doing business. The WEF looks at data on areas as varied as the soundness of banks to the sophistication of businesses in each country. It then uses the data to compile a picture of the economy of almost every country on earth. In WEF’s index also Denmark is lauded for its leadership in world for renewable energy technology, with 140% of the country’s energy being met by wind power.

Finland is “well positioned in terms of innovation,” WEF says, with its capacity to innovate supported by the excellent availability of scientists and engineers and a high degree of collaboration between universities and industry. The government funds high amount on R&D as well as corporate innovation projects.

WEF recognizes Sweden for its several high-profile technical success stories over the past decade; WEF thinks that Sweden is well equipped to embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with a strong score on technological readiness and ranked within the top 10 in innovation. However, the availability of scientists and engineers is falling. It is a reminder to the country that renewed efforts are required to invest in human capital and skills to ensure long-term competitiveness and innovation capacity, for which Nordic countries are known.

Since 2008, Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization release the annual Global Innovation Index (GII). Basically, it’s a list of the most innovative countries in the world. In its 2016 GII index Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland have scored high numbers.

The GII index also recognizes Sweden for its improvements in the basic factors of competitiveness, especially the macroeconomic environment. Sweden’s labor market functions reasonably well and the country is reported to have a high employment rate, with a high level of women’s participation in the workforce. Though WEF index suggests that Sweden has dropped its performance in terms of the effect of taxation on incentives to work, and restrictive labor regulations are perceived as the second-most problematic factor for doing business. In addition, the availability of scientists and engineers is falling, which is a reminder that renewed efforts to invest in human capital and skills are necessary to ensure long-term competitiveness and innovation capacity. What we need to note is that Swedes themselves promote an atmosphere of great personal ambition.

The Nordic countries share a common economic perspective. They are all small, open economies in which foreign trade has great economic significance. These countries have evolved rapidly from poor, agrarian countries into modern industrialized economies among the most competitive countries in the world. The “Nordic model” is therefore considered attractive by other countries in world by both individuals and policy-makers. The model is based transparency, pragmatism and the nationalist spirit among the citizens. These smaller countries are proud owners of large public sectors, including welfare services, and high taxation. And, they have performed so well economically.

Though there are some notes of cautions for these countries such as:  small, open economies are particularly vulnerable to international economic fluctuations. For example, in the financial crisis of 2008, Iceland was hit hard. Though, Finland and Sweden endured severe economic crises in the early 1990s, and Norway experienced a banking crisis around the same time. In the 1980s, Denmark suffered a serious structural crisis that led to the implementation of a comprehensive emergency program famously known as “potato diet”. The crises of the 1990s also led to many structural changes in the Swedish and Finnish economies, and Iceland is now going through the throbbing process of transformation.

But it is really appreciable these small Nordic countries are dominating the innovation indexes in research, infrastructure, institutions, market and business sophistication, and a commitment to knowledge and creativity!! The Nordic countries pride themselves on the honesty and transparency of their governments. A point to note here is that Nordic governments are subject to rigorous inquiry: for example, in Sweden everyone has access to all official records. Politicians are disparaged if they get off their bicycles and into official limousines. Transparency tops the governance of these small yet dynamic countries.

The Nordics have added two other important qualities to transparency: pragmatism and determinedness.  When these countries realized that the old social democratic consensus was no longer working, they let it go with remarkably little fuss and introduced new ideas from across the political spectrum. They were absolutely determined in pushing through reforms. It is stupidity to mistake Nordic geniality as their vulnerability. Pragmatism explains why the new consensus has quickly replaced the old one. Nordic countries can often seem to be amalgams of left- and right-wing policies.

They still have plenty of problems: their governments remain too big and their private sectors too small. Their taxes are still too high and some of their benefits too generous. The Danish system of flexicurity (flexi security) puts too much emphasis on security and not enough on flexibility. Norway’s oil boom is threatening to destroy the work ethic. It is a bad sign that over 6% of the workforce are on sick leave at any one time and around 9% of the working-age population live on disability pensions. But the Nordics are continuing to introduce structural reforms, thought bit slowly, they are continually working on them. The lesson the world should take from them is their ability to invest in human capital and protect them first.