If you haven’t heard, it’s time you did. The Swedish city of Södertälje, close to Stockholm, is embarking on an experiment. It will slash its street-cleaning costs by employing crows trained to pick up cigarette butts.

No, I’m not blowing smoke. Cigarette butts make up 62 per cent of all street litter in conscientious Sweden. Södertälje spends 20 million kroner (€1.9 million) on picking butts alone – up to 2 kroner (20 cents) a butt. Trained crows, which will be paid in food, will cut costs by up to 75 per cent.

It should work. Birdbrains get bad publicity among us humans. But it’s estimated that New Caledonian crows have the intelligence of seven-year-old humans. Apparently, it’s easier to train crows to pick butts than to train adult humans not to drop them in the street.

It’s not the first time that crows have attracted global attention for their intelligence.

Three decades ago, a BBC documentary (and, since then, countless YouTube videos) showed them cracking walnuts at the traffic lights.  While the lights were red, the birds dropped a nut in front of a wheel. The lights went green, the cars set off  and crushed the nuts beneath their wheels. When lights went red again, the crows picked up the booty.

In Japan, the birds get us to work for them. In Södertälje, birds will work for us. Not for the first time, of course.

Just over a century ago, during World War I, when telegraph communications were unreliable, trained carrier pigeons were extensively used to pass urgent messages.

Two pigeons became war heroes. ‘Cher Ami’, whose stuffed body is today in the Smithsonian museum, carried a dozen important messages at Verdun, for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. ‘President Wilson” lost a leg during the Mense-Argonne offensive, although he lived for another 11 years, and his stuffed body is today honoured with a place in the Pentagon, just outside the Chief of Staff’s office.

Södertälje, close to Stockholm, is employing crows trained to pick up cigarette butts. Photo: Shutterstock.com

Cher Ami and President Wilson stand apart from the crows who’ll work in Sweden. They belong to a special category of creatures that includes Bucephalus – the horse of Alexander the Great – and Marengo, Napoleon’s. Closer to our times, there have been Ham the Astrochimp and Félicette the cat, who were trained for space flight and survived it, unlike Laika the dog, who didn’t.

Such creatures are legendary figures. They have their own Wiki page and a biography that is part of human history.

The crows in Sweden are unlikely to be known by their names, should they even be given any. They will be like peasants and factory workers, people deemed without history, except as a mass. They will be like the drug-sniffing dogs at customs, trained for our service.

It’s easier to train crows to pick butts than to train adult humans not to drop them in the street- Ranier Fsadni

They would be unlike drug mules, cart horses, silk worms and laboratory mice, which also work in our service but without training and, alas, nothing in it for them except, often, suffering.

In another sense, the crows will be different from the dogs. Crows are not domesticated. Dogs have long been part of human society, as pets with names, sometimes as substitutes for children. Or even an alter-ego: attend a dog show and it’s hard not to imagine that some owners find, in their dog’s prize, an emotional satisfaction akin to getting a school certificate.

Birds have their own societies. Budgies, parrots and mynah birds might entertain the family but they’re kept in cages, part of the household but not the family. If birds get to be part of the green economy, the basis will be a pact, not friendship.

That’s what’s new with the Swedish experiment: a pact with an undomesticated animal species. To see what this might turn out to be like, we have to turn to fiction.

Decades ago, Italian writer Primo Levi wrote a short story in which an enterprising salesman, known only as Simpson, developed a way to communicate with insects. First, he danced with bees. Then, he created a pan-flute to warble messages to dragonflies, which brought him delicious blueberries from across the valley.

With ants, he struck a pact. They would move their colonies out of his villa and micro-clean it; in return, he would maintain the walls they needed for their intricate network. Flies were more easily bribed.

Primo Levi called the story Full Employment. The ingenious Simpson was soon working on getting ants to use their mandibles to construct the thinnest of wires, and then selling their labour to electronics factories for a fraction of the human cost.

As with any Levi story, there is a dark cloud. Simpson’s assistant was as enterprising as his boss. He trained eels to carry small balls filled with heroin across the oceans.

The experiment in Södertälje is not dark. But, with Levi’s help, we can see how the environmental crisis means something more than the devastation of the planet. It is also – or can be – the threshold of a new creation in which the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve get a second chance to gaze with wonder and define their relationships with other species.

It was intelligence that enabled our ancestors to become human. But we may need the intelligence of other species to remain so.