Word: behavior
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Siviy, a psychologist at Gettysburg College, you'll see that the bigger rat lets the smaller rat win every now and then so that the smaller rat will keep playing. That, he says, could be interpreted as a sense of fair play, although he emphasizes that a rat's behavior is probably Darwinian--based not on thoughtful consideration but on what has worked in the past to keep species alive. "I can't see a rat sitting around and contemplating the ethical consequences of what it's doing," he says...
...Bowling Green State University in Ohio, psychologist Jaak Panksepp is similarly leery of using words like morality and ethics to describe animal behavior. He is sure that rats and other animals do experience joy, sadness, anger and fear--because the wiring of the brain is set up to generate those feelings. (Actually, Panksepp discovered a few years ago that rats chirp in laughter, albeit in response to tickling, and in a register too high for the human ear to detect.) Nobody has yet found the neurocircuits for ethics or morality, however, so Panksepp is reluctant to comment about those qualities...
Both those results can be explained in part by self-interest. But De Waal has also observed behavior that can be seen only as empathetic. When a male loses a fight and sits on the floor screaming, the other chimps will comfort it. "They come over to these distressed individuals and embrace them and kiss them and groom them, and try to calm them down," De Waal says. True, there's an implied benefit for the comforters--the hope that others will do the same for them if they end up in that situation--but that's a level...
...birds, says Dan Blumstein, a former student of Bekoff's, now studying animal behavior at UCLA. While he hasn't addressed the question through formal research, Blumstein has seen hints of behavioral rules in songbirds. A given species tends to have similar songs but with local "dialects" that vary from one territory to another. If a bird sings with a nonlocal accent, he says, "everybody knows: 'Oh, my God, there's an invader.' Then they get upset and kick it out." The question, Blumstein says, is whether that's a sign of ethics or just instinct...
While some behaviors are obviously instinctive, Bekoff is convinced that others are not. "If you study animals in the complex social environments in which they live," he says, "it's impossible for everything they do to be hardwired, with no conscious thought. It really is." And once again, he cites play as perhaps the most obvious example. Play between dogs involves extremely complex, precise behavior, he says. "They're really close, they're mouthing, but they don't bite their own lips; they almost never bite the lip of the other animal hard, nor the eyes, nor the ears...