By David Wojick |November 24th, 2020|Environment|
In addition to studying complex human reasoning, I have been observing complex instinctive reasoning in animals for many years. Instinctive behavior is often thought of as simple, perhaps even mindless. I came to a very different conclusion, that an instinct is basically inherited expert knowledge. Instinctive behavior is often very complex, involving sophisticated concepts, expert knowledge and a lot of decision making.
So I wrote up my observations and hypotheses, in the form of a four year long series of 46 short blog articles. The blog title is Horse cognition and other critters (of which many are discussed). It runs around 30,000 words so there is lots of stuff.
My approach is one I call “robotic analysis” which means asking what a robot would have to sense, understand, know and decide in order to do what the animal does instinctively.
This does not mean the animal’s behavior is robotic, far from it. Artificial intelligence robotics tries to model intelligent behavior. For example, developing the self driving car required a lot of study on precisely what we do when we drive. Knowing the difference between a pedestrian, which can move, and a mailbox which cannot (except under extreme circumstances).
Here are snapshots of a few of the many blog articles, to give you the flavor of the findings:
The amazing cow circle. June 2015
A small herd of cows and their calves is threatened by dogs. The cows do not all face the dogs. Instead they form a defensive ring with each cow facing out. The calves go to the middle of the ring. Consider what is required. The cows have to recognize the threat as calling for a circle. They have to know how to form that circle, which is far from simple, especially since some are facing away from the dogs. The calves have to know to go to the center.
Baby behavior. May 2016
A baby bird hides under my riding mower as I approach, planning to mow. When I sit on the mower it runs out and hides under my truck. This baby knows when to hide, where to hide and how to hide. It also knows when to change hiding places. These are complex behaviors.
Instinctive learning. April 2016
A bird building a nest flies long distances to specific places to get materials. The bird must know what it wants at that point in construction and it must have already learned where the right stuff was.
Not knowing how to trot. October 2013
Two legged critters like us can only walk forward one step at a time, but four legged folks can do it a variety of ways. In horses one of these ways is the trot. However, most Tennessee Walking Houses cannot trot, even though they are as physically capable as other breeds that do trot, which is most of them. Walkers lack this instinctive knowledge.
I began this research many years ago when my wife and I, avid backpackers, camped near an active beaver pond. The beaver pair was still building their dam. My first career was designing earth dams for the US flood control program, so the dam interested me.
I was amazed to find that it was much more sophisticated than our dams, which are basically carefully prepared piles of dirt. The beaver dam was a lattice of sticks, supporting a mud and rock wall on the upstream face. Building this complex structure is an equally complex process, including felling trees for the wood materials. I discuss this in the December 2013 article Meet the beaver.
There is also a lot on the robotic analysis research method, as well as on the overall concept of an instinct as an unlearned body of expert knowledge.
When an expert looks at a situation that falls under their domain of expertise, they see and think things that non-experts cannot do. In many cases instinctive behavior in animals is just like that.
Animals live complex lives that we do not understand. Both domestic animal husbandry and wildlife management depend on how well we understand the animals we are caring for or care about. Robotic analysis is a way to understand a lot more.
Author
David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. For origins see
http://www.stemed.info/engineer_tackles_confusion.html
For over 100 prior articles for CFACT see
http://www.cfact.org/author/david-wojick-ph-d/
Available for confidential research and consulting.
Interesting subject, the book Guns, Germs and Steel comes to mind
on how some human groups were able to domesticate certain animals and plants
and therefore had an advantage over other groups that couldn’t domesticate
their native animals.
The reintroduction of grizzly bears is now going through some interesting
changes in behavior with human interaction in both food supply (grains & domestic
livestock) and learned (pepper spray) and bluff charging while not being shot and
some use of dogs to teach avoidance. Learned vs inherited or both
Seems to me that the difference between prey/predator animals and machinery is that chaos factor is part of the animal kingdom and not the “machine’ or robot kingdom. Corvids like crows have a higher number of ganglia in their brains than we mere mortal Hoomans, and will not only recognize a cat, dog or Hooman, but will also report it. Instant memorization of human facial features, among other things, plays a part in that.
That applies to migratory birds, too – the youngest members of the flock memorize the route south in one trip, and use that memory to find their way back home.
Frankly, since I feed the birds a lot in the cold weather, I know that they will line up on the roof of the house next door and watch to see how soon I emerge from The Cave to put food on the rails for them. Squirrels, too – they’ll know when I’m going to put apples or peanuts on the rails.
The critters have extremely complex brains, that function in ways far beyond any kind of robotic engineering.
“Corvids like crows have a higher number of ganglia in their brains than we mere mortal Hoomans, and will not only recognize a cat, dog or Hooman, but will also report it. ”
Reminds me of an article I read once… i was fascinated.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
Then there’s this:
https://www.sciencealert.com/crows-ravens-corvids-best-birds-animal-intelligence
Behavior is not one or the other – instinctual or learned. It is a combination of these things in complex evolved creatures.
An ameba has instinctual behavior, but can learn to a very small degree. The learning is most likely chemical in nature and obviously not the growth of new nerve cells since it has only one cell.
Something as complex as a cat though can have both instincts and learning that adds on top of that. A cat institutionally chases after a small moving object, but can also learn all sorts of hunting tricks to entrap the prey. Anyone who thinks cats do not learn such behavior has never owned, or at least paid attention to a cat.
There can be many basic instincts underlying a complex “learned” behavior – think of learning as the complex behavior that maximizes the instincts benefits (usually).
The example of cows forming a circle – this is called emergent behavior and is based upon some very basic instincts that would seem to have little to do with forming a circle but when practiced by a “herd” a circle emerges. There doesn’t have to be any learned behavior here at all. Just as birds flocking is an emergent behavior, not learned.
I suspect there are some really interesting emergent behaviors from basic instincts in humans as well, but no one is allowed to think that way about a human. Tribal behaviors, religious behaviors, and even panic hoarding are all likely emergent behaviors from some instincts we are born with. In humans at least there is some early programming occurring right after birth and those “impressions” will follow the person through the rest of their lives – but humans can often learn to repress such impressions.
I had a couple of Doves decide they wanted to build their nest in my porch fern hanging in a basket. They had two fledglings and I tried very hard to not panic the parent on duty by talking in a soothing voice as I came out the door to water plants. Eventually the parents stopped flying off when I came out – if I was talking. They had keyed into my voice, not my looks. Then they disappeared and left two almost ready to fly birds in the nest…I keep talking when I was around them to keep them settled. One day I walked out and saw them on the side of the nest watching me in what looked like panic. I said something soothing to try to calm them down. They both jumped over onto to me! They considered me safe despite I was one very poor looking bird. Even after they had taken flight, for weeks they would come down to me if they heard me. What would I call this behavior? Instinctual? Learned? (I never taught them to come to me) It was definitely complex, and there must have been one or more instincts involved. It certainly wasn’t learned.
Do they cleverly work out new ways to catch mice or do they learn what doesn’t work and stop doing that?
“I suspect there are some really interesting emergent behaviors from basic instincts in humans as well, but no one is allowed to think that way about a human.”
I saw a tv program some time ago where they would put young children, about one year old, in a bare room with their mother standing while holding them, and then a stranger to the baby would enter the room and stand near the mother and baby without any other interaction, and you could see the babies slowly lean away from the stranger. Nobody taught those babies to do that. They were born naturally leery of unknown things.
I think this natural instinct in humans is related to racism. The fear of the unknown. The cure for unreasonable fear is to become familiar with the unknown.
I read an article not too long ago that was saying that humans had the “kind” gene for 82 million years. The “kind” gene is demonstrated when one human does something for another human based on alturism rather than for selfish reasons.
The reason they used the 82 million year figure (I think that was the number) was because that was when humans and rats diverged on the evolutionary scale. The article was about the rats showing altruistic behavior with other rats.
So I guess altruism is an inherited trait of a lot of animals.
There are videos of animals of one species rescuing individuals of another.
My neighbors had an English sheep dog. It was raised in New York City and had never seen a herd animal. They took it to the parent’s house in the country and it herded several goats onto a flat bed trailer and kept them their all day. Of course it’s some sort of inherited memory.
Or there has been selection by sheep-owners for dogs that run in circles .
Takes more than running in circles. Check this remarkable drone footage out of a dog herding sheep, . https://twitter.com/i/status/1325566773899501568
A good cow pony doesn’t have to be trained.
even dog breed that are NOT herders can show the ability
my Irish wolfhound would would help me herd muscovy ducks into their pens
very slow n gently and all by his own volition to do so.
present dog one of 5 has worked out how to hunt lizards n mice in long grasses
she sits back then front leg pounces in the area to make them move when theyve escaped her first attempts
and shes endlessly patient in the doing of it
hours or days but she will catch them
to my dismay when its a lizard;-((
and panic when its a damned tiger snake like last xmas effort!
Did your dog get bit by the Tiger snake? You guys sure have a lot of nasty crittes in your neck of the woods. 🙂
I have poisonous copperhead snakes around here, with a cottonmouth or two thrown in. Every once in a while one of my dogs will get bit by a copperhead. They all survived, but the bite would swell up badly in some cases, the size of a baseball or bigger.
I don’t think copperheads are as lethal as some of the snakes you have where you live.
I was raised on a farm around animals and spent a lot of time watching them. First thought I want to share is animals (most anyway) are not at all dumb, there’s a difference in how fast they think but certainly not dumb. They most certainly sit there cogitating on things and figuring them out. Which brings in point number two and what this article is about, how much is a learned behavior and how much is instinct and I would say it’s a bunch of both. A cow learning how to test if an electric fence is on or off is not instinctual, a horse purposely pushing another horse through same said electric fence so she can get out without receiving a shock certainly is not instinctual. A heard animal catching motion out of the corner of their eye and running away from that motion is most certainly instinct. We can also teach animals to overcome their instincts (learned behavior) which is what a bunch of what we do when training animals. It’s not instinctual for a horse to accept something on their back (that’s where mountain lions land to bite through the neck after all). No matter how many generations of horses we’ve bread we still have not been able to breed out that instinct so must instruct every generation individually.
Secondly this is about Tennessee Walkers and correcting the OP misinformation about their gaits, Walkers are the only breed I’ll ever own after having riding them for years. Walkers are a gaited breed, their two gaits are a flat walk and running walk. It’s actually one gait with speed being the difference between them. Anyway the gait is a cross between a pace and a trot. That means walkers are capable of all three means of locomation. A “naturally” gaited walker needs no training to maintain their gait. A pacey walker means they lean more towards a pace a trotty walker means they lean more towards a trot. Pacey and trotty walkers do need training to maintain flat walk and running walk. Whichever gait they lean towards naturally can be fully trained also so you can turn a pacey walker into a full blown pacer. Walkers also have another gait that is not so fondly called the broken washing machine because that’s what it feels like you are riding . What is the broken washing machine? That’s when they are doing a bit of everything and you are getting tossed all over the place! It happens when training young ones and they’re not sure what you want out of them but also happens with inexperienced riders and arethey sending conflicting messages to the poor horse and it’s trying to do what you ask.
Used to have a dog who would be annoyed with us if we left without paying her sufficient attention. She would get trash out of the wastebasket in the upstairs bathroom and bring it down to the door from the garage where we would enter upon our return.
She didn’t bring a slipper or a sofa pillow or any such. Not from closer areas.
Somehow she figured the negative vibes associated with bathroom trash would make her point when other items would not.
I remember when I was a bit older than being “a kid”, my sister’s boyfriend gave her a pure bred Irish Setter puppy.
When he was a few months old I took him to my friend’s house. When he saw their canary in it’s cage he went into a perfect “point”.
(He was a registered pure bred with the AKC so there was no “Goa’uld” in his blood and no scars on his neck.8-)
Interesting thanks.
Animals of course have instincts, whereas humans do not except for basic life-starting actions like suckling to get nourishment.
It strikes me that it is challenging to separate taught behaviour from instinctive and theorize how natural selection affects both.
The bird knows to shelter from threats above it, and perhaps big threats like you. That knowledge keeps it from getting eaten by hawks, thus it lives to reproduce.
Birds need to learn how to get food, crows keep their young with them through their first winter, whereas Great Blue Herons do not (their survival rate is only 50%). Crows may be smart birds in general, ravens are even smarter
Animals like cougars teach their young to hunt, but apparently could do better, as young cougars have attacked children. (Complicating that is that cougars are territorial, thus young ones have to work harder to find food sources. (Cougars usually go for prey no taller than they are, so a defense against them is to look tall. OTOH, bears know about standing height.)
Environment and means of living are key factors. Edwin A. Locke described the mis-represented experiment in which a chimpanzee was compared to a four-year-old in ability to find a banana when the box was moved within a room. The child did far better than the chimpanzee, grasping the concepts. But Ed pointed out that chimpanzees have to be more spatially oriented as they often move by swinging between branches and vines in the jungle.
Some animals are Darwin Candidates, like some humans. The clan of Southern Resident Killer Whales on the inner coasts of BC and WA are too _culturally_ dependent on a single source of food – big fish, whereas transient KWs are more versatile. Off the coast of Norway, orcas have learned to corral herring to gulp many at once – families/clans may die out, the species will continue. (A single herring takes energy to catch, and may be difficult to find by eco-location.)
Explorer John Rae told of a tribal group who came to the HBC fort he was running at the time asking for food. While HBC would provide food if it wouldn’t leave themselves short, in that case Rae taught the slow-witted people how to catch fish in a nearby lake.
One thing that animals and birds and fish are good at is living their life their way, in accordance with their identity. Comparisons with humans is very difficult. Ascribing human-like characteristics to animals, as Walt Disney did, is entertaining but not meaningful. A frequent problem is not giving animals much credit for capability.
One eco-idiot neighbour was feeding raccoons near the doors to her apartment. Being smart, they figured out that good food came from inside those openings. So when someone left a door ajar for their cat or fresh air, racoons raided their kitchen. When challenged, the eco-idiot said ‘those poor little things wouldn’t hurt anyone.”, ignoring that they are wild animals who will defend themselves and their young as they see fit, not as she fantasizes. So raccoons who’d been transiting the neighbourhood for years without harming anyone except perhaps a dumb dog or two had to be trapped and exported, which is very hazardous to them physically and because they’d be dumped in a location they have to find food sources in and possibly fight for territory.