"Pigeons Can Read A Little Bit, New Research Shows," says Popular Science.

After narrowing down to the four brightest birds out 18, over eight months of training, the advanced-class pigeons were taught to distinguish four-letter words from non-words. They were even able to tell the difference between correctly spelled words and those with transposed characters, like "very" and "vrey,"" or words with different letters included to make them completely misspelled.

This isn't reading. Or not in the way that humans read. This is pattern recognition. There is no understanding of the meaning of the word. There is no move from signifier to signified.

This is, however, similar to the ways in which computers "read" students' essays. They also look for patterns. They aren't evaluating the content or the meaning or the beauty of the prose. (Students, of course, learn in turn to write in obedience of the patterns that give them the highest grades. Students are trained like pigeons.)