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When I was a kiddie reading natural history books, it seemed pretty common to see the opinion that almost everything except humans were operating completely on instinct. Now after much more actual study of the behavior of various creatures, its obvious that just about everything is more complex and capable of learning than we thought. Fish can be trained to do stuff.
For a while, there was a big gopher snake that had an understanding with me. He learned quite quickly that I would just say hello and go politely around him on the path to the mailbox, so he could just continue sunning himself and need not slither off. After a while, he took to coming out in the morning from below the duck deck and sunning himself in the duck area. This upset the ducks. So I would go down, greet the snake, open the duck gate to let the ducks out, then sit quietly right next to the snake, just a foot away, drinking my coffee. It was neat to have a large snake be that comfortable with my presence. And gophers were a big problem, so I really valued having a resident gopher snake. The snake, in turn, was well protected in my yard. He did not have to worry about being stepped on, as my SE trained eyes always saw snakes before I stepped on them. The calls of the ducks made it obvious when there were any predators around of the size to harm ducks or large snakes.
I once watched a small rabbit train the duck flock to become habituated to him. Day by day he would come a little closer to the flock, always approaching at an angle rather than directly, never looking directly at them (as predators do), always pretending to eat grass, which was sparse and coarse there. So the grazing was just to tell the ducks he was a fellow herbivore minding his own business. After a while, this rabbit developed the pattern of sleeping at night and early morning. He would wait until I let the ducks out of their pen, then out he would hop and do his foraging with the ducks, protected by the fact that there were always some ducks on watch for any danger and ready to give loud calls (backed up, where necessary, by the human)
The ducks could see any hawks except from one direction, over the house. However, jays would see anything from that direction, and the ducks honored and responded to the jay alarm calls and backed them with their own. It turns out to be common in mixed flocks in nature that all species have their own instinctive alarm calls but also learn to respond to the alarm calls of all the other species.
These animals are all smarter and more capable of learning than once we thought.
