Animals in the wild have the instinct to survive. They will attack, but only when hungry or when being treatened. If you give an animal food and show it that you don't want to hurt it, then what does the animal 'think' or 'feel'? Does he trust you? Can you get a crocodile to like you, if you follow the above procedure from early age? Example: a ferret. When breeding them, they sometimes throw in a wild variant, to keep them vivid. A young ferret will bite you, and they are much more agressive than dogs. Over time, they completely change and seem to become a pal. So what is the basic nature of an animal? Do they have characters like humans? There seems to be no 'evil' in animals. They say that ferrets know very quickly that they are not supposed to urinate on the floor, but they'll only use their toilet if you convince them, by being friendly. You can not train a ferret by rubbing its nose in its filth.
I am not an animal expert but I guess it depends on the intelligence of the animal I don't think you can train a mosquitos no matter how hard you try.
Nah, animals attack for other reasons. Lionesses go around slaughtering cheetah cubs tor educe the competition for their own young. Horses beat each other up for dominance of the group. Cats torture mice. Dogs get together in packs and rip sheep apart for fun. Animals are just like us. Oh wait! We are animals! Actually our TV news just a couple of weeks ago showed a family in Thailand that raised and trained a crocodile from its earliest days. It sleeps in a bed with one of the family's children. I think they're idiots, and one day that beasty will eat the kid. They're exactly the same as us, just with fewer gadgets.
I was going to launch into this thing about MY ferret but it ended up unrelated. I can tell you though that my ferret's personality is NOTHING like the apparent norm you've alluded to. I sometimes think animals are more PURE than us. Possible sweeter too because they're not manipulative. But I don't think there's any hidden character we haven't, and possibly can't, delve into. Their nature is, well...pretty natural. Is it possible that we're still misinterpreting animals after all these years? Is it possible that their feeling are unitelligible to us? Maybe. But I doubt it. I say take the whole thing at face value.
So isn't your ferret a friendly stinky playful animal with a strong 'personality'? Maybe they'll put tape around his mouth to keep it shut at night. I hope so.
Actually, there were some cases in Russia. Some rich people bought young corcodiles and raised them in a bathtub and then they somehow escaped into the sewer and started killing people. One of the crocodiles killed an old man in his toilet. It came up through the sewer... Ouch.
I know of a guy who had a water moniter (type of moniter lizard) as a pet. He let it roam around the house and sit on his lap.
pure vs intelligence i heard this story from a behaviourist in which some monkeys (or half monkeys) that were kept near people would terrorize every animal that they thought was less intelligent than them. A bit like being bullies in school. they were certainly not that 'pure'. maybe intelligence is not such a good thing after all
I feel humans are merely animals that are very good at what we do. Of course I hold animals in high regard.
thought Apes, as humanity's closest relatives, show unexpected abilities. Researchers from St Andrews in 1999 counted 39 different ways in which chimpanzees deal with food: since these differ according to group and geography, they have used the word "culture" to describe these differing methods. One female chimpanzee in Kyoto two years ago convinced researchers that she can place Arabic numerals in ascending order one to nine. Two rhesus moneys called Rosencrantz and Macduff astonished a team at Columbia University in New York in 1998 by distinguishing groups of objects numbering one to four. Chimpanzees in large captive colonies forge alliances, switch sides and doublecross each other. They have also been seen in the wild systematically searching for leaves that have a medicinal effect: from such observations, a new branch of research has been born. It is called zoopharmacognosy. Keith Kendrick at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge years ago astonished the world by revealing that sheep could recognise up to 50 other sheep, and up to 10 human faces for at least two years after first seeing them. If a sheep can tell the difference between other sheep from flash cards and screen pictures, it must have a sense of these other sheep even when they are not there, and perhaps also have an idea of "self": a sense of ewe and "I". More disconcertingly, pigs have demonstrated their own theory of mind. Mike Mendl of Bristol university revealed at the British Association science festival in 2002 that experiments showed that a stronger pig that did not know where the food was hidden learned to follow the weaker, but better informed animal, to the trough. At which point the weaker pig would start to use distracting behaviour to keep the bully pig guessing, and only dive for the rations when not being watched. That is, a pig could guess what another pig was thinking and outsmart it. In a human, this is called "intelligence". Betty the crow lives in an Oxford laboratory. She repeatedly picked up a straight piece of wire, bent it into a hook and used the hook to lift an appetising treat from a tube too deep for her beak. She had, puzzled observers reported in the journal Science in August, never seen a piece of wire before. So an animal far removed from humankind could identify a challenge, contemplate a simple matter of physics, identify a tool shape, select a raw material, make a tool and retrieve the reward. (tim radford)
is there a doctor in the house? Animals wounded in the wild or stricken by disease possess a remarkable ability to treat their ailments, according to new research that has important implications for humans. Examples of this new work include observations of capuchin monkeys that rub their fur with millipedes containing insect-killing chemicals called benzoquinones; chimpanzees who eat the pith of the plant Vernonia amygdalina to kill off intestinal worms; and domestic cats which eat houseplants or chew woolly jumpers to make themselves sick and so rid their bodies of poisons. Even more surprisingly, scientists have found that some creatures are adept at helping people to overcome diseases. 'Dogs are particularly good at this,' said Professor Keith Kendrick, of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge. 'They have a stunning sense of smell and can detect when chemical changes occur in their owners. Dogs can tell long before the event when a person is going to have an epileptic fit. Obviously that is a talent with very important implications.' Kendrick this week begins a series of public lectures on animal senses at Gresham College, London. Another favourite animal cure that has recently been uncovered by scientists is eating clay to absorb toxins and pathogens - one favoured by mountain gorillas and chimpanzees. 'The stuff is excellent if you have had a stomach bug or something similar,' said Dr Cindy Engel, whose book, Wild Health, is published by Phoenix this month. The effectiveness of animal self-medication is also revealed in studies by William Karesh of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. He and his colleagues have studied a range of wild animals and found that most were in remarkably good condition. Blood tests carried out by Karesh revealed that most of these creatures had been infected by extremely unpleasant viruses and bacteria, infections that usually kill domestic animals but which had been dealt with by their wild counterparts. This discovery may explain why many wild animals become sick and die in captivity - because insufficient attention is paid to their living conditions. Another example of animals' self-medicating prowess is provided by elephants which make pilgrimages to a cave complex at Mount Elgon, an extinct volcano in western Kenya. They dig out the soft rock in the cave walls, grind and then swallow it. And the reason? Sodium is a vital ingredient in stimulating bodily defences against toxins that major herbivores will encounter in many of the plants (robin mckie)
