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Animal Behaviour Quotes

Browse 7 quotes about Animal Behaviour.

Animal Behaviour Quotes

“Even today’s highly overbred domestic pigs still possess the behavioural repertoire of their free-roaming cousins. So, what would happen if the borders fell down? Sows would lay down in comfort to feed their young. They would create nests for them in small, leafy ditches, and wouldn’t have to push their noses into sad imitations over a blank, slatted floor. A sow spends the first days after birth alone with her young before gradually introducing them to the family. Free-roaming pigs also follow the kindergarten principle: if a sow needs to go and look for food, another will look after the little ones. ~ Hilal Sezgin”

“[Dolphins] produce signature whistles, which are high-pitched sounds with a modulation that is unique for each individual [...]. Females keep the same melody for the rest of their lives, whereas males adjust theirs to those of their closest buddies, so that the calls within a male alliance sound alike. (p. 262)”

“Why did Dodgson just stand there like that? That's not the way to act around predators. You get caught around lions, you make a lot of noise, wave your hands around, throw things at them. Try to scare them off. You don't just stand there." "He probably read the wrong research paper. There's been a theory going around that tyrannosaurs can only see movement. A guy named Roxton made casts of rex braincases, and concluded tyrannosaurs had the brain of a frog." "Roxton is an idiot. He doesn't know enough anatomy to have sex with his wife. His paper was a joke." "What paper?" "Roxton believed that tyrannosaurs had a visual system like an amphibian: like a frog. A frog sees motion but doesn't see stillness. But it is quite impossible that a predator such as a tyrannosaur would have a visual system that worked that way. Quite impossible. Because the most common defence of prey animals is to freeze. A deer or something like that, it senses danger and it freezes. A predator has to be able to see them anyway. And of course a tyrannosaur could.”

“We sat perfectly still in the dim light as the wolf approached closer, head cocked, mouth closed, and ears semi-erect. With these signs of both curiosity and trepidation, it took a step forward and then backed off a ways, then took a few steps forward again. It lifted its nose and sniffed intently, and finally stopped at about eight feet away. For a moment all three of us were perfectly still, wondering what was going to happen next.”

“Why is it that the difference between humans and animals is so insisted on? If this were a simple division as between different subjects then why is there so much impassioned writing about it? Why need humans insist on their wearisome catalogue of language, writing, works of the imagination, conceptual analysis and so forth, as differing them from other animals? Why do people angrily dispute any suggestion that, for example, ants build cities or that chimpanzees love their young, rather than that they follow instincts which do not include human feelings? Why the grudging admission by scientists, only within this century, that animals feel pain? Why do our modern languages slip so easily into animalistic words like bestial or feral to indicate a moral distinction between us and them? Why are internalised thoughts so embedded that set animal and spiritual at different ends of a spectrum? The answer is easily given. It is because of the still inescapably present inheritance of religious thought. ~ Peter Ellis”