Lecture 1

Question 1

What is animal behavior?

Answer 1

How an animal reacts to stimuli in the environment or physiological change (sound, temp, air quality, people, spacing etc.)

Question 2

What is social behavior?

Answer 2

Forming co-operative and interdependent
relationships…”
◼ Banks and Heissey (77) – “Social behaviour is comprised of those patterns of behaviour that involve two or more members of a species and include aggression and spacing, reproduction, parental care or aid related behaviour and social organization

Question 3

What is Ethology?

Answer 3

The scientific and objective study of animal behavior, its causation and function, especially under natural conditions

Question 4

What is applied ethology?

Answer 4

Behaviour of domestic animals

Includes farm animals, but also zoo animals, pets etc

Question 5

Who is Karl von Frisch?

Answer 5

studied the behaviour of bees, the bees performed the Waggle dance to communicate information to the others.
Honeybees communicate the location of food sources or new hive locations to other bees via the waggle dance

Question 6

Who is Konrad Lorenz?

Answer 6

First to describe and name the imprinting behaviour
Geese that were not incubated by mother imprinted on him and followed him around

Question 7

What are Nikolaas Tinbergen’s 4 questions?

Answer 7

1) Function - What is the trait there to do?
2) Development - How did the trait come
to be?
3) Evolution - What is the phylogenetic
history of the trait?
Was it present in distance ancestors?
4) Mechanism - How does it work?

Question 8

What are the 3 important topics in Ruth Harrison’s book “Animal Machines”?

Answer 8

Brought both animal behaviour and animal welfare to the forefront

1) sow gestation stalls - birth + feeding young
2) battery cages for chickens
3) tying up veil cows - only fed milk to keep meat white

we don’t do any of these anymore

Question 9

What is animal behaviour?

Answer 9

How an animal reacts to stimuli in the environment

difficult to measure —> can look at production, stress levels, physiological levels etc. there is no absolute measurement

Question 10

Internal motivation VS. External motivation

Answer 10

Internal: comes from within (hunger)
External: comes from outside stimulus (calf crying)

Question 11

Domestic animals compared to wild counterparts

Answer 11

They are in a different environment, the pets get fed but have the same behavior as the wild just the time of expression changes