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Animal Behavior
Interspecies Enemy Identification Depends on Facial Recognition
The formation of social groups is believed to confer a survival advantage to individual members of the group (reviewed by Marzluff, Walls, Cornell, Withey, and Craig, 2010). For humans, these advantages include the sharing of resources, information, skills, and childrearing tasks. Social groups are not limited to humans, but are also evident in species as diverse as ants, yellowfin tuna, and coyotes. However, our understanding of interspecies social interactions and the potential survival advantages that they confer are not understood to the same degree.
Domesticated animals, like dogs and cats, can readily distinguish friend or foe based on past interactions. Non-domesticated animals like the American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) seems to have the same capability. To better understand the parameters of 'enemy' recognition in crows, a group of researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle studied this phenomenon during a trap and release encounter. Essentially, Marzluff and colleagues (2010) proposed that crows remembered...
Being captured was interpreted by the crows as an adverse experience. The association between the mask and the adverse experience was tested, by researchers walking through the crow territories after they had been released. The main dependent variables measured were scolding, following, and mobbing.
Results
A Mask worn during trapping (enemy mask) elicited a significantly stronger scolding response than masks not worn during trapping (neutral masks) (Marzluff, Walls, Cornell, Withey, and Craig, 2010, 702). In addition, enemy masks had no effect on crows that had never been trapped. The variable 'no mask' had no effect, as long as the person was not present during trapping. In addition, a hat worn during trapping was capable of eliciting a significant modest scolding response, but not a red arm band.
One of the more surprising results was that the scolding response…
References
Marzluff, John M., Walls, Jeff, Cornell, Heather N., Withey, John C., and Craig, David P. (2010). Lasting recognition of threatening people by wild American crows. Animal Behavior, 79, 699-707.
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The well-being of an animal, preservation of species and biological diversity is always given first priority when it comes to deciding upon the appropriateness of research to be undertaken (Lin, 2013). It reaches a point in time when some animals have to be released to the wild from the zoos. This is normally conducted in accordance with IUCN/SSC/Reintroduction Specialist group guidelines. Before the animals are released to the wild, they
Animal Testing Negatives of Animal Testing Outweigh Its Positives and Therefore Should Not be Allowed Many cures and treatments have been developed in the last three hundred years due to advances in medical technology. These developments are sometimes attributed partly to the fact that scientists and researchers have been able to use animals as "guinea pigs" for testing new medications or treatment methods before passing them to human volunteers. There is strong
Two main aims of the zoos are highlighted by the author in the article. Firstly, zoos provide the environments that are suitable and represent some level of wilderness. Secondly, the zoos must provide entertainment to the visitors. But the zoos have been criticized by the author. One of the most important facts in these cases is the relationship between pornography and zoos as given by the authors. The way
These experiments are done to see how the humans fair on with the treatment or the diseases without putting much consideration to whether it would survive or die FRAME Reduction Committee, 2005() Some other ways in which animals are unethically used for scientific purposes include in cases where Genetically modification is done on animals where some of their genes are added or removed as per type of experiment done, use
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