• Question: How does human behaviour impact upon the behaviour of other species we interact with?

    Asked by snacks to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 17 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      Great question. There are lots of aspects of human interactions with other animals, but I’d like to focus on the question of language. Do other species have language, and how could evidence for this be affected by interaction with humans? I’ve read about cases where a researcher or pet-owner has shown that an animal can learn to understand many different words and produce appropriate responses, even from instructions in the context of simple sentences. I saw a BBC Horizon documentary about dogs, in which they featured a woman in Germany who had a pet dog that could fetch hundreds of different toys to command. That’s pretty impressive. However, is this evidence that dogs have language, or just that this single, quite intelligent dog has been intensively trained to perform certain tasks? It’s not always clear whether particular claims of intelligent behaviour in animals are based on the interactions between humans and those animals or actually reflect something that can be generalised to other members of about that animal species. When it comes to language, there’s no getting over the fact that human babies can, as long as they’re exposed to human language around them, learn to understand, speak and develop higher-order concepts (like being able to attribute mental states, beliefs and intentions to others) really rather quickly and with much much less intensive training.

    • Photo: Mariana Vargas

      Mariana Vargas answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      We all (specially pet owners!) know that our behaviour can affect other animals. How does it do it? great question! although it is not my area of expertise, I can say that all the sensory information is taken in by their senses. For example, for many mammals vision and smell play a very important role. After being processed by cells in their eyes and nose these stimuli are taken in by the brain cells and processed in the brain cortex (the “peel” of the brain). After being processed they often produce specific behaviours, the ones we notice the most of course are those invovling movement, that means that “motor neurons” (or cells from the brain and spinal cord that have the power to move the muscles) have been activated as a response to those initial stimuli. Many animals can recognise faces too, and often a facial expression is processed by the visual neurons for a quick response to fear, anger or threat.

    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      Massively. One only has to look as far as domesticated animals for proof. But it’s even more pervasive than that. Human activity has produced fundamental changes to many, many species. We’ve hunted several to extinction or near extinction (wooly mammoths, right whales, eagles, tigers, etc), essentially ending any behaviour at all from them. Others have had to change their behaviors and habitats either because we’ve pushed them out (think culling of the rain forests) or because we’ve introduced new species into their habitats that competed really well with the natives (e.g. grey squirrels pushing red squirrels almost entirely out of the UK or the pathetic fate of the kakapo in New Zealand). Several species of whales are having to change their mating songs to compete with all the acoustic noise in the oceans that humans have introduced. So yes, the effects humans have had on other species is profound.

      It’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. Throughout history, species interact and affect one another so it’s not like we’re doing anything fundamental different from other species. We may be taking it too far — a difficult thing to judge — but these interactions are part of nature and only those species capable of adapting continue to succeed. That’s just evolution.

    • Photo: Anne Seawright

      Anne Seawright answered on 18 Mar 2010:

      Good question and the answer is hugely! Most of the work I have done looks at how humans have interacted with animals for them to develop patterns of behaviour and most of the treatments we use involve the owner changing their behaviours and interactions to impact on the animals behaviour. Everything that a dog or cat (or any other animal) does is based on learning that if they do X behaviour they get Y outcome. If that outcome is positive for the animal then they will do the behaviour more and if it is negative then they will do it less, so what response a person gives to an animals behaviour will hugely influence what the animal learns and how it wil behave in the future.

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