From: IN%"Michalchik@aol.com" 1-DEC-2005 17:24:07.52 To: IN%"securtis@uiuc.edu", IN%"thomassebastian10@yahoo.com", IN%"Applied-ethology@sask.usask.ca" CC: Subj: RE: cows mounting on humans ! In a message dated 12/1/2005 10:55:03 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, securtis@uiuc.edu writes: Yes, many domestic Bos taurus cows in estrus -- given the opportunity -- will mount a human -- frontwise, backwise, sidewise, whateverwise -- often causing serious injury due to bumping heads or flying hooves or crushing or some such in the process- Naive neophytes walking amongst dairy cows in drylots soon learn to keep an eye out for a cow walking intentionally/purposefully in their direction- You know they never teach you the really important stuff about farm life on kids shows. I had to go live in Iowa for a few years to find out that if you pass out in a pig pen, the pigs will eat you. I wonder what other bizarreness lurks in rural life. From: IN%"mimidrake@frsc.us" "Mimi Drake" 7-DEC-2005 12:38:08.05 To: IN%"Applied-ethology@sask.usask.ca" CC: Subj: A Dog's Laugh Has Calming Effect Any body else with experience in this or have sound bites to upload so we can hear what they are talking about? Someone was discussing this and said the sound, characterized as a "laugh", was a fast, panting sound. It was from a Golden Retriever with a ball in its mouth which it had just retrieved, and the dog was wagging its tail at the same time. Mimi Drake From the ABC web site: Sound of Dog's 'Laugh' Calms Other Pooches Researchers: Canine Laugh Is Long Loud Panting Sound A group of researchers says dogs 'laugh' by making a long, loud panting sound. (ABC News) Dec. 4, 2005 - Researchers at the Spokane County Regional Animal Protection Service in Washington state say sometimes a bark is just a bark - but a long, loud panting sound has real meaning. They say the long, loud pant is the sound of a dog laughing, and it has a direct impact on the behavior of other dogs. "What we found is that it had a calming or soothing effect on the dogs," said Patricia Simonet, an animal behaviorist in Spokane who has studied everything from hamster culture to elephant self-recognition. "Now, we actually really weren't expecting that." Nancy Hill, director of Spokane County Animal Protection, admits she was skeptical at first that this noise would affect the other dogs. "I thought: Laughing dogs?" Hill said. "A sound that we're gonna isolate and play in the shelter? I was a real skeptic . until we played the recording here at the shelter." When they played the sound of a dog panting over the loudspeaker, the gaggle of dogs at the shelter kept right on barking. But when they played the dog version of laughing, all 15 barking dogs went quiet within about a minute. "It was a night-and-day difference," Hill said. "It was absolutely phenomenal." Officials say it works every time, and researchers across the country are taking note. "The laughing sound that they make is something that was not even considered a vocalization until this study was done," Simonet said. Those who study dog behavior have varying opinions about exactly what Patricia Simonet's "dog laughing" sound really is. What they do agree on, however, is that to other dogs, it is at least a sound worth keeping quiet to listen to. From: IN%"margory@rcn.com" "margory cohen" 7-DEC-2005 19:52:39.92 To: IN%"margory@rcn.com" "dog" CC: Subj: From CNN: Scientists decode DNA of dogs CNN - 12.7.2005 - Scientists decode DNA of dogsfyi. -margory cohen San Francisco, CA Scientists decode DNA of dogs Wednesday, December 7, 2005; Posted: 4:44 p.m. EST (21:44 GMT) Tasha, the boxer whose DNA was sequenced. BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Mankind's best friend for thousands of years is ready to teach new tricks to science. The genetic makeup of the dog -- in this case a boxer named Tasha -- has been deciphered and should help identify genes that make both dogs and people vulnerable to cancers, heart disease, diabetes, epilepsy, blindness, deafness and even some psychiatric disorders, scientists said Wednesday. The work is the first virtually complete decoding of the species and illuminates the blueprint that shapes everything from the smallest Chihuahua to the biggest Great Dane. Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read," quipped Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, crediting the late comic Groucho Marx. "We're here to unveil the book of the dog." Collins and other researchers made their announcement at a Boston dog show. The research, overseen by the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, was published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. The researchers used the DNA of a family pet whose owners wish to remain anonymous. The female boxer named Tasha was chosen from more than 100 candidates because her DNA looked especially amenable to identifying its 2.4 billion chemical building blocks. But it turned out that any dog would do, said Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute. // The results are more complete than those announced in 2003 for the DNA of a male poodle named Shadow. Scientists have also deciphered the DNA of mice, rats, chimps, chickens and of course humans, as well as many other organisms. // The new work also identified signposts along the canine DNA that will help spot genes that predispose dogs to certain diseases, some of which they share with humans. In fact, it may be vastly easier to find disease genes in dogs than in people. Intensive breeding has left its mark in the dog genome so that finding DNA regions with disease genes "is like hitting the side of a barn," Lander said. // Dog DNA is already teaching several lessons about human DNA. For one thing, comparisons between DNA of dogs, humans and mice revealed elaborate controls on the activity of certain human genes active in early development, Lander said. The three-way comparisons also showed that some genetic features found in humans but not mice aren't really unique to people, but also appear in dogs, he said. "The more species we look at, the more, frankly, we find that humans are not exceptional here," Lander said. Researchers also estimated that dogs have 19,300 genes, almost all of them canine versions of genes found in people. Prior studies have indicated that people have about 3,000 more, but Lander said the dog analysis "is leading us to question whether those are in fact real human genes." Some proposed human genes, he said, are now "suspect" and may not be genes at all. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. From: IN%"randihelene@tillung.no" "Randi Helene Tillung" 14-DEC-2005 02:32:46.23 To: IN%"APPLIED-ETHOLOGY@sask.usask.ca" CC: Subj: Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't Fascinating experiment below. Randi Helene Tillung --------------------------------------------- Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/science/13essa.html December 13, 2005 Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't. By CARL ZIMMER I drove into New Haven on a recent morning with a burning question on my mind. How did my daughter do against the chimpanzees? A month before, I had found a letter in the cubby of my daughter Charlotte at her preschool. It was from a graduate student at Yale asking for volunteers for a psychological study. The student, Derek Lyons, wanted to observe how 3- and 4-year-olds learn. I was curious, so I got in touch. Mr. Lyons explained how his study might shed light on human evolution. His study would build on a paper published in the July issue of the journal Animal Cognition by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, two psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten described the way they showed young chimps how to retrieve food from a box. The box was painted black and had a door on one side and a bolt running across the top. The food was hidden in a tube behind the door. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Before they opened the door, they pulled back the bolt and tapped the top of the box with a stick. Only after they had pushed the bolt back in place did they finally open the door and fish out the food. Because the chimps could not see inside, they could not tell that the extra steps were unnecessary. As a result, when the chimps were given the box, two-thirds faithfully imitated the scientists to retrieve the food. The team then used a box with transparent walls and found a strikingly different result. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door. The researchers turned to humans. They showed the transparent box to 16 children from a Scottish nursery school. After putting a sticker in the box, they showed the children how to retrieve it. They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box tapping. The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the room, telling the children that they could do whatever they thought necessary to retrieve it. The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. "It seemed so spectacular to me," Mr. Lyons said. "It suggested something remarkable was going on." It was possible, however, that the results might come from a simple desire in the children just to play along. To see how deep this urge to overimitate went, Mr. Lyons came up with new experiments with the transparent box. He worked with a summer intern, Andrew Young, a senior at Carnegie Mellon, to build other puzzles using Tupperware, wire baskets and bits of wood. And Mr. Lyons planned out a much larger study, with 100 children. I was intrigued. I signed up Charlotte, and she participated in the study twice, first at the school and later at Mr. Lyons's lab. Charlotte didn't feel like talking about either experience beyond saying they were fun. As usual, she was more interested in talking about atoms and princesses. Mr. Lyons was more eager to talk. He invited me to go over Charlotte's performance at the Yale Cognition and Development Lab, led by Mr. Lyons's adviser, Frank C. Keil. Driving into New Haven for our meeting, I felt as if Charlotte had just taken some kind of interspecies SAT. It was silly, but I hoped that Charlotte would show the chimps that she could see cause and effect as well as they could. Score one for Homo sapiens. At first, she did. Mr. Lyons loaded a movie on his computer in which Charlotte eagerly listened to him talk about the transparent plastic box. He set it in front of her and asked her to retrieve the plastic turtle that he had just put inside. Rather than politely opening the front door, Charlotte grabbed the entire front side, ripped it open at its Velcro tabs and snatched the turtle. "I've got it!" she shouted. A chimp couldn't have done better, I thought. But at their second meeting, things changed. This time, Mr. Lyons had an undergraduate, Jennifer Barnes, show Charlotte how to open the box. Before she opened the front door, Ms. Barnes slid the bolt back across the top of the box and tapped on it needlessly. Charlotte imitated every irrelevant step. The box ripping had disappeared. I could almost hear the chimps hooting. Ms. Barnes showed Charlotte four other puzzles, and time after time she overimitated. When the movies were over, I wasn't sure what to say. "So how did she do?" I asked awkwardly. "She's pretty age-typical," Mr. Lyons said. Having watched 100 children, he agrees with Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten that children really do overimitate. He has found that it is very hard to get children not to. If they rush through opening a puzzle, they don't skip the extra steps. They just do them all faster. What makes the results even more intriguing is that the children understand the laws of physics well enough to solve the puzzles on their own. Charlotte's box ripping is proof of that. Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions. As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn't understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate. Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing. "Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought," Mr. Lyons said. We don't appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well. "It is so adaptive that it almost never sticks out this way," he added. "You have to create very artificial circumstances to see it." In a few years, I plan to explain this experience to Charlotte. I want her to know what I now know. That it's O.K. to lose to the chimps. In fact, it may be what makes us uniquely human. From: IN%"Michalchik@aol.com" 14-DEC-2005 16:16:21.97 To: IN%"randihelene@tillung.no", IN%"APPLIED-ETHOLOGY@sask.usask.ca" CC: Subj: RE: Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't It is an interesting experiment but both the conclusions and the title are plainly wrong! This is a blatant case of anthropocentrism. Right at the beginning of the article the chimps prove that they are perfectly capable of learning by imitation if they have a reason to. The only thing this experiment shows is that while both humans and chimps are capable of imitating, human children are more prone to imitating without understanding the actions of human adults than adult chimps are. From: IN%"brucef@peta.org" "Bruce Friedrich" 14-DEC-2005 17:07:44.30 To: IN%"APPLIED-ETHOLOGY@sask.usask.ca" CC: Subj: RE: Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't Agreed. It's comical the degree to which humans will go to make their research match their preconceptions. This is one of the more amazing recent examples. The chimps beat the humans, so let's just change everything around so we can claim the reverse. ________________________________ From: Michalchik@aol.com [mailto:Michalchik@aol.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 4:44 PM To: randihelene@tillung.no; APPLIED-ETHOLOGY@sask.usask.ca Subject: Re: Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't It is an interesting experiment but both the conclusions and the title are plainly wrong! This is a blatant case of anthropocentrism. Right at the beginning of the article the chimps prove that they are perfectly capable of learning by imitation if they have a reason to. The only thing this experiment shows is that while both humans and chimps are capable of imitating, human children are more prone to imitating without understanding the actions of human adults than adult chimps are. From: IN%"datakoll@yahoo.com" "gene daniels" 14-DEC-2005 19:29:45.88 To: IN%"Michalchik@aol.com", IN%"randihelene@tillung.no", IN%"APPLIED-ETHOLOGY@sask.usask.ca" CC: Subj: RE: Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't this appears to be true of the boat tail grackle-the bird does what he wants to do not what you want. In action, BTG may proceed along your lines of thought such as follow directions to a food source or may not. To state the BTG is not capable of following directions is error. Michalchik@aol.com wrote: It is an interesting experiment but both the conclusions and the title are plainly wrong! This is a blatant case of anthropocentrism. Right at the beginning of the article the chimps prove that they are perfectly capable of learning by imitation if they have a reason to. The only thing this experiment shows is that while both humans and chimps are capable of imitating, human children are more prone to imitating without understanding the actions of human adults than adult chimps are. --------------------------------- Yahoo! Shopping Find Great Deals on Holiday Gifts at Yahoo! Shopping From: IN%"datakoll@yahoo.com" "gene daniels" 15-DEC-2005 02:37:35.97 To: IN%"Michalchik@aol.com", IN%"randihelene@tillung.no", IN%"APPLIED-ETHOLOGY@sask.usask.ca" CC: Subj: RE: Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don't this appears to be true of the boat tail grackle-the bird does what he wants to do not what you want. In action, BTG may proceed along your lines of thought such as follow directions to a food source or may not. To state the BTG is not capable of following directions is error. Michalchik@aol.com wrote: It is an interesting experiment but both the conclusions and the title are plainly wrong! This is a blatant case of anthropocentrism. Right at the beginning of the article the chimps prove that they are perfectly capable of learning by imitation if they have a reason to. The only thing this experiment shows is that while both humans and chimps are capable of imitating, human children are more prone to imitating without understanding the actions of human adults than adult chimps are. --------------------------------- Yahoo! Shopping Find Great Deals on Holiday Gifts at Yahoo! Shopping From: IN%"pets@barkcontrol.com.au" "Bark Control Australia" 15-DEC-2005 22:26:57.55 To: IN%"applied-ethology@sask.usask.ca" "Applied Ethology Discussion List" CC: Subj: Fw: Proceedings from the 5th International Veterinary Behavior Meeting It seems after all of my efforts I have missed out on my copy of the proceedings in which I think I have a co-authored paper. I emailed organisers, ordered from the recommended distributor in my part of the world, gave payment details, waited patiently, then it never arrived. I have just checked Amazons and it does not seem to tbe there anymore. Sold out by now I suppose. The Australian distributor needs to not be included in any future distributions. Does anyone know if there are any proceedings still available anywhere, though by now I am feeling like they are unobtainable. Jackie Dr Jacqueline Perkins BVSc hons MACVSc (animal behaviour) BA Veterinary Behaviour Consultant ----- Original Message ----- From: "Trisha Simonet" To: Cc: ; ; Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2005 3:19 PM Subject: Re: Proceedings from the 5th International Veterinary Behavior Meeting >I just ordered a copy of the proceedings from amazon.com for $62.95 (US). >It was effortless. > > Trisha > > On Nov 1, 2005, at 5:30 PM, DebHdvm@aol.com wrote: > >> The information below is all I was given. >> >> Below is information for ordering copies of the Proceedings from the 5th >> International Veterinary Behavior Meeting that took place in Minneapolis >> in July 2005. >> >> Title >> Current Issues and Research in Veterinary Behavioral Medicine: Papers >> presented at the 5th International Veterinary Behavior Meeting >> >> Purdue University Press >> ISBN # 1-55753-409-8 >> >> For those living in the United States or Canada the book can be ordered >> at 1-800-247-6553. >> >> I also have been provided a list of international representatives for >> specific >> areas below. Customers can contact their local representative. >> >> >> INTERNATIONAL SALES CONTACTS >> >> Africa, Latin & South America, India - Cranbury International >> Tel. 802-223-6565; eatkin@cranburyinternational.com >> >> Australia & New Zealand - Footprint Books Pty Ltd. >> Tel. (+61) 02 9997-3973; sales@footprint.com >> >> Canada - Scholarly Book Services, Inc. >> Tel. 1-800-847-9736; Customerservice@sbookscan.com >> >> Southwest Asia, Korea, China, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan >> - APAC Publishers >> Tel. +65 6844 7333; sgohapac@singnet.com.sg >> >> Japan - United Publishers Services Limited; Tel. (03) 3291 4541 >> >> UK, Europe, Israel, Middle East - The Eurospan Group >> Tel. +44 (0) 20 7240 0856; info@eurospan.com >> >> >> If this will not work, request the book by sending an email (without >> payment information) to orders@bookmasters.com >> >> Debra F. Horwitz, DVM DACVB >> Veterinary Behavior Consultations >> 11469 Olive Blvd. #254 >> St. Louis, MO 63141-7108 >> Phone and fax: 314-567-4131 >> e-mail: DebHdvm@aol.com