Quotes About Behavior

Animals should be given a chance to express their natural behavior.

Imagine you're a writer, and you have decided to offer your readers a firsthand account of the politically correct primate, the idol of the left, known for its "gay" relations, female supremacy, and pacific lifestyle. Your focus is the bonobo: a close relation of the chimpanzee. You

food-deprived chickens that were not particularly good at noticing the finer distinctions of a maze task.5

Jolted by a twentyfold increase in testosterone, a bull changes into a sort of spinach-eating Popeye, a self-confident jerk ready to fight anyone in his path.

When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as "anthropoids" (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape's kiss "mouth-to-mouth contact" so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth's gravity a different name than the moon's, just because we think Earth is special.

Priority of access to food is an important function of dominance. Since most dominance interactions and virtually all agonistic episodes [conflicts] between adult females and males occur in feeding contexts, I find much less meaning in dominance occurring in the non-feeding context. Moreover, there is no difference."26

Young female primates are as infant-obsessed as girls, whereas male interest in infants reflects an almost technical curiosity rather than a nurturing tendency. Young male chimpanzees often carry babies in an awkward manner without letting them cling to their bodies as ape babies love to do. I have watched in horror as young males inspect a small infant by stretching its limbs to the limit, sticking their big fingers down its throat, or making it the object of a tussle with a male peer.

Ernst Mayr characterized the Cartesian view of animals as dumb automatons.2

A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival.

There is no single form of cognition, and there is no point in ranking cognitions from simple to complex. A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival. (p. 200)

First, the behavior should not follow directly from present needs and desires. Second, it should prepare the individual for a future situation in a different context than the current one. The girl needed a spoon not in bed, but at the chocolate pudding party she expected in her dream.11

The Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz told us that we lack control over our aggressive instincts. Not long afterward the British biologist Richard Dawkins stated that our chief purpose on earth is to obey our "selfish genes.

Such cases deserve attention since they show that apes do not have to be prompted by experimental conditions concocted by us humans to plan for the future. They do so of their own accord.

Primates are in fact natural conformists. Not only do they imitate, they also like to be imitated.

In a similar study, human adolescents going out with a date were instructed to mimic their date's every move, such as picking up a glass, leaning an elbow on the table, or scratching their head. The date reported liking him or her much better than those whose date acted independently. They don't realize why they feel differently, but evidently on some level we regard imitation as a compliment. It

We now know that dogs and horses yawn in response to human yawns—dogs do so even if they only hear their owner yawning—and that yawns often spread among monkeys in a group. We

American naturalist William Morton Wheeler made the English term popular as the study of "habits and instincts."11

La comunicación permite a los miembros de una especie reunirse y coordinar sus vidas tanto en un sentido positivo, por ejemplo, en las tareas cooperativas de las abejas o de las jaurías de perros salvajes, como en un sentido negativo, por ejemplo, cuando un ruiseñor macho canta a pleno pulmón para mantener a los rivales fuera de su territorio.

ethology's focus was on behavior that develops naturally in all members of a given species.

homosexual, most humans may be at the heterosexual end, but every bonobo is totally bi, or a perfect Kinsey

Considering how much animals act like us, share our physiological reactions, have the same facial expressions, and possess the same sort of brains wouldn't it be strange indeed if their internal experiences were radically different?

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape.

In the same way that humans have a "handy" intelligence, which we share with other primates, elephants may have a "trunky" one. There

Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The