Uniquely Human behaviors

That may be because it is addictive, but the rats don't know that before they take it, whereas your average human user knows all this beforehand and still takes it.

Ok Grand Duke, I'm not sure I agree on the examples you sited, because for me they fall into the category of "risky choices". But I can take it further and link it to K's mortality suggestion... what if I suggest that we are the only animals which can commit suicide. Not just drug use or risky behavior, but bullet to the head type stuff.

Suicide is defined by an intentional act of self destruction, as opposed to an accidental one, and it implies an understanding of mortality (the fact that we can die).

An animal may do something mortally risky. For example, a squirrel may run across a busy highway and get killed, but the result certainly isn't the squirrel's intention.

Well, there are animals who "crawl off to die" - suicide?

littlek- My "take" on animals who crawl off to die is purely subjective. I think that live beings (including humans) have a sense when life is about to leave them. One of the things that humans do while they are dying is "disconnect" both physically and psychologically from everything that they have known on this earth.........including people that they have loved. In the end, we all die alone.

It is not too much of a leap to suppose that animals have that same sense of impending death, and that crawling off to die is the way that THEY disconnect!

yeah, so not suicide. BUt it does show a sense of mortality. Even if it's just a sense at the very end.

Self destructive behavior is certainly not unique. For the male of certain species (the praying mantis comes to mind), the simple act of mating yields certain death.

Of course for human males mating is self-destructive but yields only economic hardship, difficulty focusing and a loss of sleep.

But in this case, morality and mortality are related, aren't they.

Play serves largely to reinforce social connections, of which adult cats (except in domestication) rarely have any. Q: do adult lions exhibit play behavior?

As to the addiction question: it seems to me that our attraction to addictive substances proceeds in spite of, rather than because of, our knowledge the ill-effects. Why do we try them? Why, because other people do, and like it. Animals exhibit the same sort of behavior: if one of my dogs finds a tasty pool of vomit in the park (gross but true) the other will see her wanting to eat it and will exhibit the same behavior. The visceral desire to feel good is deeper -- and so more ancient, and so more common to animals -- than our ability to reason through consequences and shape our behavior accordingly.

I somehow think the praying mantis doesn't have a clue what the consequence of his little dalliance will be going in (not unlike many human males so how can you call it self-destructive?

Cannot tell you about lions, PD, but feral cats and kittens play exactly the same as my house cats. This is personal observation.

Hmmm. Do you see feral cats as groups or as individuals? I know that a lot of ferals are frequently found as colonies of females, for whatever reason.

Living in a world of symbolic meaning. We are the only species that assigns a symbol (gives a name) to everything then acts on the basis of those meaning rather than the reality behind them. We have been living in a cyber universe for the past 70,000 years.

At this point, we have two adult females, and a kitten of unknown sex. They seem to hang out together from time to time. Sometimes, one will disappear for a few days. One of the other girls has been missing for months. She had a history of disappearing for long intervals, but never this long. At one time we had a massive tabby tom that got along well with the group, but he has disappeared too. Anyway, they don't seem to be solitary by choice.

Well, they do have thousands of years of being selected for sociability behind them.



Verra true. Makes me wonder about antecedent behavior in the animal kingdom...

Ok Littlek I guess I agree but you know the primordial soup. I do think when humans crawled out of it on four legs and then evolved we immediatly started looking around for mind altering drugs so we could be in the no where.

I don't think homo sapiens are the only animal that takes drugs to "feel" good. As for uniquely human behavior, we're the only ones that worships a god we can't see nor hear.

Music. We have the ability to communicate emotion through music. Mozart, dead all these years, can still bring tears or elation.

Hmmm.......................But what about whales? They exhibit song like behavior.

What about birds? Many species sing their little feathered hearts out. When a male bird sings during mating season, its purpose is to get a partner. How different is that when a young man sings a love song to his beloved?

Neither whales nor birds actually sing. We call them song because we hear music in the sounds, but neither have rhythm. We can also hear music in wind or water, for example but you'd not call those sounds music. We hear music when none really exists. Music has yet to be displayed in any animal save us.

Believe it or not Primates have moralities similar to ours Psychological studies have been done on this.