Can animals do maths?

I believe that mathematics is perhaps the hardest intellectual discipline in the entire world. History, philosophy, languages, and the other humanities are easy by comparison. They’re all about learning and remembering places, dates, names, and concepts. They can be difficult because of the sheer volume of stuff you have to remember, but they are still fundamentally simple. If you can remember who’s screwing who on a TV sitcom, then you can be a good humanities student.

But maths is different. You need to understand abstract concepts, understand more abstract concepts that build upon the abstract concepts you’ve already learned, and be able to make rapid and accurate connections between these theoretical ideas. It’s like a pyramid, if even one of the foundation bricks is missing the building falls down. I suppose this is why students who slack off in primary school find maths nearly impossible when they enter high school. The groundwork isn’t there.

I have a question…can animals do maths? I don’t mean being able to count, that’s an entirely different thing. I mean being able to add up sums and visualise math concepts in their heads, the way we humans do.

We have animals that can use tools, and we have animals that have languages. We even have animals that seem to understand simple morality and right-vs-wrong (mostly dolphins and primates). But I have never heard of an animal that was able to do maths. Does one exist?