Animals Have Culture? Animal Culture Term Paper

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Since animals do not have a large brain capacity to accommodate such acts, normally the types of behaviors taught to these animals are usually simple and straightforward to master (Heyes, 1996).

Use of teaching as a mode of behavioral transmission among animals is where an animal trainer takes time with the animal showing them how things are done such as requesting of food or even developing routes or ways to obtain the food among other trainings. As mentioned earlier, learning is somehow restrictive towards a given group of animal species, those with a higher capacity to master what they are taught. Some of these cultures are self-taught as a survival tactic, they are usually passed from the parent to the sibling. For instance, siblings of the killer whales are taught to fend for their food through pushing of the Pinnipeds to the shore intentionally for them to be able to easily catch and eat them (Laland, 2009).

When you compare all these transmission modes, language is specifically used on animals with a high potential of developing a culture.

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Though the mastery of language use among animals requires lengthy training, many have achieved to train these animals to communicate. Language has some relation to imitation because for the animal to master how to talk, it should also have the capability to imitate things done by the trainer such as talking. The most common development done in this area entails, training of parrots and dogs to speak.

All in all, culture can be developed in animals, but there are some factors which may hinder their adoption and conservation of those behaviors, these include; the inhibition of adoptive behavior because of cultural conformism, development of culturally isolated sympatric groups and the evolution of maladaptive behavior among animals. These factors can affect habitat suitability, movement, genetic structures and animal reaction to anthropogenic effects, which in turn have an important role in developing of animal culture (Whitehead, 2010).

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