Near the top of my ever growing list of advantages of getting older is how much easier it is to admit I’m wrong. For those of you who have yet to see this quality in me, this podcast should convince you. Granted I probably don’t like being wrong any more than anyone else, but in a field like behavior it happens a lot for multiple reasons.
One is because, while our knowledge of training has bubbled along nicely, our knowledge of domestic animal behavior has lagged. My guess is that this results from a semantic mix-up. In this country knowledge of behaviorism, a training method, is easy to confuse with knowledge of how animals actually behave which is referred to as ethology.
Another reason animal behavior provides its share of reasons to rethink and even recant old ideas is because we’ve lacked the technology to study what is going on in the brain of human and nonhuman animals in the past. As this has become more sophisticated and available more ego-busting but nonetheless delightful studies such as the one discussed in this podcast are bound to occur with more frequency.
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