I hope it helps you. In the past 30 years, human knowledge about animal behavior has been greatly improved. Many detailed studies show that the behavior of animals is far more complicated than imagined, which is changing our understanding of animals. "Excerpts from New Books" has just published an article "Can animals have feelings? Today's article is about the "consciousness" of animals. Compared with emotion, "consciousness" was considered to be unique to human beings in the past. The author of this book provides us with a lot of materials about the complex thinking process (thinking and feeling) of animals, trying to make progress on the road of finding animal consciousness. It seems that human research on animals is entering a new stage. This is actually a new understanding of human status in the universe. This is very interesting and philosophical. Let's pay more attention to everything on the edge of life and the whole living environment. What does the monkey mumble? Many people have a prejudice when they look at animals, thinking that animals are simply stupid. They will take the fight between the bird and the image in the mirror as an example, pointing out that this shows that the bird's intelligence is extremely low, because it obviously does not realize that there is no real opponent in the mirror. However, just finding a few bizarre stories, as simple examples of animal thinking, is not enough to prove that all animal activities are just blind or instinctive reactions to the surrounding environment. On the contrary, the more we know about animal behavior, the more we will find that this simple and stupid behavior is just some exceptions. In fact, animals can make very complicated judgments about the environment. In many cases, animals are smarter than humans who study them. The study on the snoring of black-faced monkeys is the best example. The black-faced monkey is a small and exquisite black-faced monkey. They are very social animals. They always stay in a fixed small group, foraging together, grooming each other and being vigilant. Their communication system is extremely complicated. Vervet monkeys's grunts are soft and repetitive, low and short, and are sometimes described as a series of low barks. At first, people thought it was just a way for monkeys to keep in touch. Later, Cheney and Safran made a long-term study of these monkeys in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, and kept recording and analyzing these grunts. They used a spectrograph (which can analyze the sound frequency and print out the frequency pattern). To their surprise, the instrument showed four different purring patterns. These different sounds are made in different environments: the first is when you meet a monkey with a high social rank, the second is when you meet a monkey with a low social rank, the third is when you arrive in an empty field, and the fourth is when you meet a strange monkey. An exciting scene appeared when the recorded purr was played to a group of wild monkeys. They carefully chose the right time and quietly turned on the equipment placed near the unsuspecting monkey. Just when a monkey was really whispering to the monkey in the bush, the monkeys started to act. If the sound is played by high-ranking individuals in society to low-ranking individuals, they either stare at the direction of the tape recorder or leave. However, if the sounds made by low-level individuals to high-level individuals are played, the listener does not respond, which shows that monkeys can really distinguish different information-this is by no means a natural simple response to external stimuli. Female ostriches show more unusual skills in some aspects, but they are also more puzzling. No matter what standards are used, an ostrich can be regarded as a strange animal, not only because of its indecent appearance, but also because of its peculiar breeding habits. Ostrich couples often kidnap other ostrich chicks and mix them with those forcibly adopted. The successful kidnappers drove away the real parents and took care of all the chicks as their own. However, their whole nest of chicks will be taken away by another ostrich couple, and the kidnappers will mix their chicks to form a larger nest. This strange and persistent kidnapping seems to be a dilution strategy adopted by ostriches to protect their young. In any case, any flock of chicks is very attractive to predators, so putting your chicks around other chicks will greatly reduce their chances of being hunted. Female ostriches effectively hide their young in a shelter composed of other young birds. The more chicks they prey on, the stronger their own chicks are protected. As a result, this behavior of robbing other similar chicks has intensified. What a strange "train of thought"! The Battle of Mating: Fighting with wits In fact, the response of animals to natural stimuli is not always simple. In the two main areas of animal life-sexual behavior and aggressive behavior, we will find that animals can not only distinguish each other, but also have the magical ability to predict the behavior that their companions will make. The terrible mating battle between male red deer is very telling. The remote island of Ram is far from the west coast of Scotland and is located in the south of Skye. Fiona Guinness has been studying red deer on the island for many years. He cooperated with a research team at Cambridge University to observe the habits of red deer in detail. Ram Island is isolated from the mainland, and the red deer on the island have no chance to communicate with the red deer on the mainland, so he can accurately record the genealogy of each red deer, as well as their birth, mating and death. For most days of the year, red deer are quietly grazing, and females always keep loose formation, while males are relatively more dispersed or gathered in small groups. But autumn came and the peace was broken. The strong stag becomes very aggressive. He circled a group of female deer as his property and tried his best to prevent other male deer from approaching. A stag occupies about 20 or more female deer, which is a long and exhausting job. In five or six weeks, it must always be vigilant and ready to fight. It has little time to eat, its health is greatly damaged, and its challengers become relatively strong because they don't need to spend energy to protect the doe. This means that although it can beat all its opponents at the beginning of the breeding season, it will be difficult to meet the challenge of young bucks in the end. From mid-September to the end of autumn at 10, deer kept fighting for mating rights. After rounds of long roar, the real battle began with a powerful roar from both sides. It is found that only after this round of roaring competition, the bucks have accelerated their pace with each other, and both sides will lower their heads and start the top corner. Clutton Brock and Steve Alben set out to test a hypothesis, that is, perhaps, as people have always imagined, shouting matches is just threatening opponents; More importantly, this may be a means for bucks to estimate the strength of their opponents. Obviously, by roaring, the stag immediately made a rough estimate of the situation. Just as boxers are graded according to their weight, animals only fight opponents with the same weight, size and social class. For the roar of young challengers, the larger and older stags with breeding groups only need a few roars to make them retreat voluntarily. Red deer, like humans, stop fighting when the outcome is clear. It is not a simple thing to send out a series of howls quickly. In fact, only healthy male deer can do this. In other words, such a stag insists on fighting for a longer time, because both roaring and fighting depend on strong chest muscles, so making a high-frequency roar is really closely related to winning the battle. For the challenger, the roar is a reliable and safe indicator. A stag that overpowers itself in a roar, or growls many times in a short time, can usually defeat itself in a battle. Mastering the information provided by the roar is much more reliable than estimating the opponent through other more prominent features, such as the length of the passing angle. A stag may be healthy and strong when it just grows horns. However, in the breeding season, it is difficult for group owners to supplement enough food because of constant fighting. This will lose 20% of your summer weight. At this time, although its angle is still the same, its combat effectiveness has been greatly reduced. What those young competitors need to know is not how strong the owner is at the beginning of the breeding season, but what his physical condition is at the moment. The horn of the group owner will not reveal its actual situation, but the roar will. At this point, the challenger will ignore the host's huge figure and formidable horns. When he found that his master could only make six roars per minute, and his roars reached eight per minute, he would stare at the other person's slightly atrophied shoulder muscles, move back and forth, and then attack. As a result, the female deer will have a new and younger mate as the father of the fawn in the coming year. Animals insured for survival can also adjust their behavior through learning to adapt to their special environment. The learning ability of animals can be seen everywhere. For example, a group of hens are pecking quietly. It seems that there is no shadow of learning, but in fact, every hen has studied and found her place in the flock. Learning is usually very painful. When hens were first put together, they fought with each other. But after a few days, the chickens became quiet. After a few weeks, everything became peaceful and tacit, except for a hen with high social order who occasionally barked at chickens with low social order. Pecking order is the real life of hens, at least in the flocks where hens know each other. Like other animals, retreat and mutual retreat constitute the main body of hen's life. The apparent harmony is because it is not easy for everyone to find their own position. They also realized that in the long run, instead of continuing to fight bloody battles with powerful opponents, they should take the initiative to retreat, which seems to gain more benefits. Chickens with low social class will give up food breaks in front of hens with high social class when necessary. This kind of learning is the need of social life and can't be separated from it all the time. Many animals, from foxes and squirrels to birds such as swamp tits (European birds) and tits (a North American bird whose appearance and behavior are very similar to swamp tits, which makes the cooperative research between Toronto and Oxford easy to realize), have the habit of storing food when there is enough food, and will come back to take out food after a while. If the fox catches too many seagulls and chickens and can't eat them all at once, it will bury the rest. The fox can remember two or three places to store food. Swamp tits and tits can store hundreds of kinds of food a day, and each kind of food is stored in different places. After a few days, they will find food again. Food is carefully hidden behind a small piece of bark or in a tree hole. Vampire bats have a vicious reputation, but in fact they are very social animals, at least in treating their own kind. Their feeding style is really disgusting-they feed on the blood of larger mammals, especially cattle, donkeys, pigs and other domestic animals. It is this unusual way of eating (most bats feed on insects and nectar instead of blood) that makes the social behavior of vampire bats different. They like to live in groups. Because there are always some nights, some bats can't find large animals suitable for sucking blood, and they will soon be in danger of starvation. What is really noteworthy is that in this case, vampire bats will adopt the strategy of feeding each other. Fortunately, the vampire bats who had a big meal flew back to the cave where they lived, and they would feed some of their blood to the bats who were still hungry. Gerald Wilkinson is determined to find out the secret. He spent a lot of time carefully observing vampire bats living in tree holes. He noticed that finding or not finding food on a particular night was basically an accident. There is no individual who is good at finding food and can always feed himself, and there is no individual who can never find food. Those who have fed other bats may need to accept the kindness of other bats in a few days. Wilkinson found that vampire bats preferred bats that had saved themselves. They remember who is the most generous when they are unlucky, and these bats will become the object of their life-saving meal. They ignored the bats that didn't help them. By maintaining this relatively fixed close cooperative relationship, vampire bats overcome the instability caused by their unique eating style. Bats that try to cheat everyone, but only take and don't pay, will be punished for a long time. It may be successful for a while, but when it is hungry again, other bats will not feed it, and it will only starve to death. Give as much as you can to others. This is the insurance that vampire bats prepare for their future. "Friendship between friends should always be maintained", an old saying comprehensively summarizes the real life of vampire bats, and losing friendship means death. In the past thirty years, human knowledge about animal behavior has been greatly improved. Many detailed studies show that the behavior of animals is far more complicated than imagined, which is changing our understanding of animals.