Hey all, I bet a lot of you already know this stuff, although perhaps not in scientific lingo. Anyway, I'm here to talk about the whys and hows of animal behaviour. So that the next time someone says 'well, animals mate only to procreate, they don't enjoy it' you can now correct them.
You see, there are two different ways of explaining animal behaviour and how it works, and both are correct. They just focus on two different things, they are like two sides of a coin. Let's start with the one the person above is probably thinking about: ultimate causes.
- Ultimate causes of animal behaviour - All animals have instincts, which are genetically inherited. This is why dogs, even if they have been brought up without other dogs, will still walk on all fours, bark and sniff. This is why humans (we are just another animal, remember this) across all cultural boundaries still have some behaviours in common, such as laughing.
In an evolutionary sense, one could say the reason to why these behaviours exist is because at first, they arose through mutation. They then spread through the population and continue to exist, because they were of some advantage. The individuals who lacked these instincts probably perished.
To take a really simple example: the ultimate reason to why any animal eats, is because they will otherwise starve and not spread their genes. So any animals who don't have the instinct to eat now and then, will die out, leaving only animals with the instinct to eat.
But the animal itself is not conscious of this. As far as I can tell, the only animal who has written books about natural selection and genetics is our species. So, if the dog doesn't understand the evolutionary advantage of eating instead of starving, why does he choose to eat? This leads us to the other side of the coin:
- Proximate causes -
Genes are not magic. They control only which chemical components (proteins) are manufactured and when. Different proteins and other biochemistry in our bodies make us into who we are: nerves, brains, muscles and so on.
So, the gene for the instinct to eat doesn't actually tell our brain "eat, or you'll starve!" in words. What such behavioural genes do, are to switch on and off different chemicals which act like signals. Hormones, signal substances, etc. They create different sensations for the organism. For instance, the signal for eating is the feeling of hunger. Hunger is an unpleasant feeling, but by eating, the unpleasant feeling disappears.
These physical signals are considered the proximate causes of animal behaviour.
Why is this important to know for zoophiles? Well, in the discussion of mating and whether or not animals can truly enjoy it, anti-zoos claim that since animal mating is an inherited instinct, they cannot feel any pleasure from it. They assume that the animals do this kind of boring, menial activity because they want to spread their genes.
That is not true. Yes, the reason to why the behaviour of mating is widespread, is because it leads to offspring who probably inherit the same behaviour, who then get more offspring than those who lack the instinct etc.
But just as the dog doesn't think about vitamins, calories, survival of the fittest etc when he eats (he is just hungry), he doesn't think about puppies, pregnancy or survival of the fittest when he wants to mate (he is just horny). Also, if he afterwards remembers that the process was enjoyable, he will probably try to do it again, which could lead to even more offspring. All this, just by chemical signals which govern feelings and sensory input, no thoughts at all about the survival of the species.
And we humans have similar instincts. This is why people who have never been taught that intercourse can lead to children still want to have sex. This is why we have different hormonal reactions to sexual stimuli. It's because we are animals with instincts. Just like when we choose to eat, we usually give no thought about starvation, we just eat because we are hungry and the taste of food is pleasant.
So, a summary: Ultimate causes ("they do it for the survival of the species", "they mate to get pups", "kittens play because it helps with adult survival skill") are how we explain behaviour from a purely evolutionary standpoint, it has nothing to do with how the animal thinks or feels about the behaviour.
Proximate causes are explanations to why the individual animal is motivated to carry out the behaviour, and here it's often tied to things like hormones and electrochemical reactions in the brains - sensations and feelings. Hunger, pleasure, fear, pain, and so on.
Err... was this understandable? English is not my first language, and it has been some years since I studied ethology.
Read more: https://dishmansbio208.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/proximate-and-ultimate-mechanisms/ https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Animal_Behavior/Scope
tl;dr: An animal can both mate "for the instinct of procreation" and feel pleasure from it, they are not opposites, only two different ways of explaining the behaviour. Proximate causes are the how, ultimate causes are the why, and animals are generally not aware themselves of ultimate causes behind their behaviour. Also, humans too have instincts, we are not different from other animals in this regard.
I remember looking at a thread on yahoo answers, and I saw someone say they thought animals had sex because "they know they're fulfilling their purpose of creating another member of their species." It's like some people have a weird problem with the idea that animals just get horny and have sex.
It's strange that when it comes to many things, they assume that animals have no complex thoughts. But when it comes to sex, suddenly animals must have studied evolutionary theory!
Religion has so much to answer for!
Well maybe animals do have sex with the purpose and intent of creating new members of their species. Maybe they experience pleasure while doing it but then again maybe they don't. Maybe they just simply know that sex passes their genes along so they regulate the act of sex within their nonhuman societies. We don't have any evidence that they definitely do experience pleasure from sex (other than the desire and satisfaction from the understanding that they will have offspring). It could be possible that many nonhumans care a lot more about the procreative aspect of sex than they care about the so-called "fun" of sex. I would say that in many cases humans are the exact opposite of that and have a greater tendency to enjoy sex as recreation with no interest in child rearing. Take for example Koko the gorilla. For those who don't know Koko was a gorilla who was taught how to communicate in sign language. She was an ape who seemed to understand that she was a gorilla and was not a human. I recall that she was kind of obsessed with the idea of becoming a mother. She really wanted to be a mother. Her interest in sex itself seemed to be a lot less in my view. And also, who knows how much of her interests and disinterests were influenced by her communications with humans and whatever ideas the humans were exposing her to to cause her identity to be formed in one way or another. She was said to be attracted to both gorillas and humans, which is interesting. She also made passes at Robin Williams when he visited her. Am I to take this as a desire to do sex for the sake of it? Or was she much more interested in motherhood and perhaps desperate as she was getting older? Zoophiles, in my experience, tend to shy away from some of these more harder questions and observations. I think it's all well and good to desire to have loving, romantic relationships with other species but at some point you have to wonder what animals would think about such fantasies, right? The fantasies involve them after all. Shouldn't their opinions of such fantasies be of importance/interest? We absolutely must understand them ACCURATELY, indeed. I'd wager to say that most all things about the minds and emotions of animals are at present a large unknown. Much scientific investigation is needed to know how animals actually perceive and think about life. Until that happens you can bet that bestiality will not be tolerated by many. Many zoophiles claim to love animals, but if you really love animals wouldn't you seek to have an accurate understanding as to how animals perceive the world and how they feel/think about life? We need to make objective observations and not frame the behaviors of animals in accordance with our own desires.
And one other thing- scientists have discovered that bears are capable of doing "poker face." While they appeared calm on the outside and their behaviors indicated that they were calm their heart rates were greatly increased as drones flew near to them. This means that some animals may have the ability to hide their true feelings from the detection of others. So simply observing the behaviors of animals may not be enough to know how they feel about things.
You may as well use Occam's razor and assume they have sex because of instinct and because they realize it feels good, rather than assume they do it because they have some kind of genetic memory like in Assassin's Creed.
The bottom line is, we don't want to assume- We want to know
This is kinda important for us. I'm always on the lookout for ways we may be fooling ourselves (I think most people do that most of the time), because only by finding out when I'm fooling myself can I stop doing so and learn the truth, whatever that happens to be.
"This is why humans (we are just another animal, remember this) across all cultural boundaries still have some behaviours in common, such as laughing."
Huh, guess feminists like humans. (couldn't resist)
I don't get it.
Neither do I…
Okay so you two could just be fucking with me as a joke, but I'll explain it anyway, there's the stereotype of feminists not being funny and being just generally not humorous. So when he says "Such as laughing" I'm saying they don't understand that human behavior.
Jokes on you: I'm a woman AND a feminist. :P
Your first post was very vague, and made it sound like feminists weren't human...?
I was hoping people could think through the joke but I was sadly mistaken, in hindsight it was a little too vague.
Excellent write up Susitar.
Great post, very interesting but also easy to follow. Its nice to be able to confirm what you always thought was the case and back it up with science.
the english was fine by the way.
So animals only have sex for pleasure, eh? Animals don't know that when they have sex that that act will result in offspring, huh? That sentiment seems to contradict evidence. For example, why is it that male bears will readily kill baby bear cubs who are the offspring of a female bear that the male knows he has never mated with but will not kill babies from mothers that he knows he has mated with last spring? It seems like somehow male bears understand that the act of sex results in baby bears and that his kid is his kid? Female bears are also known to be promiscuous and mate with as many male bears in the area as they can and this seems to provide some protection to her cubs in the following years. Again, this seems like an interest that bears have in making more bears. Particularly when it comes to passing forth their own genetics. I know it seems hard to believe, but animals seem to have some way of knowing about this stuff. They are like natural born scientists seemingly. Either that or they have intricate intelligible languages that humans have been unable to detect as of yet or have not been extremely attentive to and made it a point to really learn.
The workings of ursine societies also raises more questions about what it must be like to be them. How can any female bear stand to have sex with the "man" who murdered her no doubt precious "children" (because the female bear comes back into heat when a male bear kills her cubs this allows the male to mate with her)? I get the impression through my observations and knowledge about bears that they are very emotional creatures and I wonder how they can cope with such a world.
That's why even though I'm attracted to an animal, I really dislike animals in general. They're basically psychopaths.
EDIT: Because they think things like "I'm going to murder those babies so I can fuck their mom" and "the way that guy murdered my babies really turned me on, I want to fuck him"
I think it's somewhat doubtful that they are simply just psychopaths. I think they need to survive in a harsher environment with a harsher climate.... I guess it is a little bit weird that creatures don't just live with humans and live in the same manner as humans. I think this has to do, in part, - especially in the case of bears- with the probable idea that humans reject bears. Bears wouldn't really mind being friends with humans but humans usually don't want bears around. Bears are, as of yet, unpredictable in behavior. The bottom line is, I don't really know why bears do things which would be recognizably psychopathic if humans were to do the same thing. Perhaps a lot of these animals actually are psychopathic in their thinking or perhaps there are other things going on which would explain this behavior. Such is not yet known. If it's true that the thinking of animals is psychopathic by nature, how is it possible for animals to form loving bonds with other animals (including humans)? So much of the true workings of the minds of animals is as of yet shrouded in mystery.
Hey hey! You don't know exactly how they think! You can't know that they think in exactly that way. Who KNOWS how a nonhuman beast thinks?! They are genetically different from us humans. We need to trace their mental connections in order to know how they think. Perhaps in their culture the male understands that he must destroy potential future rivals of his. We humans would find such thinking to be unsavory but if you are a beast of the field that must survive in the wild and was raised around other bears your whole life I bet you'd be like how you would live in Rome. It could be possible that the female bear may not like mating with the murderer of her cubs. But she lost the fight as far as protecting her cubs goes. And there is also some evidence which suggests that animals sometimes "forget" about their young if they are separated from their young for a long enough period of time- they then lose their "motherly instinct" as is said. Ain't that weird? If we really want to connect with animals, we need to know all the facts about how it is that they perceive this existence on our pale blue dot.
I guess I accidentally anthropomorphised them.
Eh. That is okay. It's possible that they DO think exactly like you expressed... But I'm sure there are other possible explanations for how they experience such situations and what their take on it is. There are a lot of things that animals do that humans would have nothing to do with. I think that indicates we likely have differences between our minds and theirs. Anthropomorphism is beginning to be more accepted as a means by which to understand animals in the scientific community in more recent years. More enlightened years, you might say.
Occam's razor: The bear doesn't have to consciously understand that killing a cub will lead to the bear mother being receptive earlier than otherwise. It can all be governed by instincts. An inherited aggression towards cubs that don't smell like one's own.
Think of some instincts that humans have. Heterosexual men are usually drawn towards women who look healthy and able to give birth to healthy children (symmetrical, wide hips). Do these men think "those hips will decrease the risk for dying in childbirth"? No, they think "hey, that's hot". A behaviour can have very clear evolutionary advantages, but the creature itself doesn't probably think about it consciously.
So, the bears killing cubs because it will lead to them being able to mate with the mother earlier while at the same time decreasing the competition from some other male, that's the ultimate cause. That is why evolution has selected for this behaviour.
But the bear probably just thinks "hey, unfamiliar cub, I'll kill that bastard and then fuck his mother, yeah!" (except not in words, but you get the idea). The proximate cause is 1. the stimuli of a female bear with another male's cub 2. which gives off certain electrochemical reactions in the animal that leads to motivation for violence.
Very clear. Thanks for writing!
Not only that, but if that trait is established at one point in evolution, I would expect it to remain apparent in multiple species which have that ancestor in common, whether it remained an advantage or was at least not detrimental.
I really can't figure out how someone could reasonably conclude animals understand that copulation directly results in childbirth months later.