What Is the Study of Animal Behavior?
The study of animal behavior focuses on answering Dutch ethologist and ornithologist, Nikolaas Tinbergen's four questions--the kinds of things that caused the behavior, how the behavior develops within the animal's lifetime, what function the behavior serves and how the behavior evolves over time. A basic understanding of ethology helps pet owners understand what causes their pet's behavior.
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Ethology
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Ethology is the scientific term for the objective study of animal behavior. Ethology tries to explain the complicated interaction between innate behavior and the environment. Animals inherit predictable behavior from their parents, but some of those natural behaviors can be bred out of a species, such as domesticated cats and dogs versus their wild counterparts, says PetPlace.com.
History
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In 1973, Konrad Lorenz, Karl von Frisch and Nikolaas Tinbergen shared a Nobel Prize for developing the study of animal behavior, or ethology. Its origins, however, trace back to Charles Darwin. He was the first to compare the behaviors of one specie of animal to another closely related specie, according to Bellarmine.edu.
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Methods
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Two contradictory methods exist for studying animal behavior--behaviorism (focused on learned behavior) and traditional ethology (focused on innate behavior). Innate behavior is instinctive. It is what an untrained animal will do on its own--hunt, eat, sleep, nest. Learned behavior is trained behavior. The training can be passed on from a human to animal, or from animal to animal, like a mother duck herding ducklings across the street or gorillas grooming each other. To study a species' customs and character, you need to observe it in a natural setting. To study the underlying behavioral principles, you sometimes need to create different environments for the species, says PetPlace.com.
Discoveries
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Animal behaviorists have determined five major ethological discoveries to explain animal behavior. They include fixed action patterns, sign stimuli, imprinting, vacuum activities and displacement behaviors. Fixed actions patterns are intrinsic, psychologically encoded behaviors, like a bird's mating dance. Sign stimuli are innate triggers for behaviors necessary to a species' survival. A great example of sign stimuli are a peacock's colorful plumage to attract a mate. Imprinting happens during early life periods with rapid and sometimes permanent learning. When a young kitten recognizes the adult animal caring for it, that is imprinting. The imprint does not need to be a mother cat. If the caregiver is a dog, the kitten will still view it as the mother figure. Vacuum activities are repetitive behaviors that occur without external stimuli, such as a caged mouse building a nest even though it has never seen one. Displacement behaviors are behaviors that seem out-of-context and occur when the animal is motivated to perform two or more behaviors at once. Dogs that greet and cower at the same time are showing displacement behavior.
Behaviorism vs. Traditional Ethology
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Traditional ethologists focus on innate patterns of behavior, while behaviorists focus on learned behavior. Behaviorism is largely confined to laboratory studies, while ethologists base results on field studies in natural environments. The conclusions of both fields are necessary to explain all kinds of animal behavior. To plan a program to modify behavior, scientists rely more heavily on behaviorism-based learning theory. Most dog training programs, for example, rely on behaviorism rather than ethology, says PetPlace.com.
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References
- Photo Credit dog image by Michal Tudek from Fotolia.com
