Quotes About Ethology

If the murder rate that Jane Goodall saw among the several dozen chimpanzees she studied in Gombe were extrapolated to New York City, for example, there would be over fifty thousand murders a year there. "Man is the only animal that kills for pleasure" you hear people say. What poppycock!

Notwithstanding the claims of ethologists such as Frans de Waal, 46 there is nothing corresponding to the apparatus of government – in the very broadest sense – in animals.

Rejection of science and free discussion are, of course, characteristic of all totalitarian movements; thus, nonbiblical astronomy was heretical to the Inquisition, unpalatable anthropology was Jewish to the Nazis, unsatisfactory biology was banned as bourgeois in Stalin's Russia and irritating ethology is sexist (and unpleasant psychology is chauvinist) to these ladies.

Play seems to be one of the first activities inhibited by the presence of an observer until a group becomes well habituated. For this reason, I consider it more common than previously thought.

It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.

Do "superego" and "id" reveal any more about our inner selves than Apollo and Dionysus? Evolutionary behavioralism and ethology may tell us more about who and how we are as scientific fact, but the poetic concentration of our traits into the personalities of gods, demons, and monsters are easier for some of us dull-witted ones to hold in our heads than the abstractions of science.

And if it goes against common sense, so much the worse for common sense. We don't allow common sense to override scientific discoveries when it comes to the ethology of other species, like spiders or fish, so why should we grant it veto power over discoveries about the ethology of human beings?

These "anthropologists of peace" (who in fact are rather aggressive academics—the ethologist Johan van der Dennen calls them the Peace and Harmony Mafia) have maintained that humans and other animals are strongly inhibited from killing their own kind, that war is a recent invention, and that fighting among native peoples was ritualistic and harmless until they encountered European colonists.10

intense stereotypies—stereotypies an animal spends hours a day doing—almost never occur in the wild

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

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.

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

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

This was a natural step, because whereas behaviorists were mostly psychologists, ethologists were mostly zoologists. They discovered that behavior is not nearly as fluid and hard to define as it might seem. It has a structure, which can be quite stereotypical, such

Ethologists are often accused of drawing false analogies between animal and human behaviour. However, no such thing as a false analogy exists: an analogy can be more or less detailed and, hence, more or less informative.

There's about as much educational benefit studying dolphins in captivity as there would be studying mankind by only observing prisoners held in solitary.

Hediger (1950) mantiene que «cuando dos animales se encuentran por primera vez, el que es capaz de intimidar al otro se definirá como el socialmente superior de los dos, de modo que una decisión social no siempre dependerá de una pelea; en ocasiones, bastará con un encuentro».

Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.

Immanuel Birmelin, an ethologist at the Society of Animal Behavior Research in Germany, explained how patient he'd had to be in order to run a test to see if cats can count: "One of the cats would do the test once in the morning—only!" he recalled. "Another would do it once in the afternoon—only!" It had taken him four years to show that cats can count to four.