I receive many emails with questions about animal behavior. Most of them involve practical issues, but, now and then, someone poses a more complex question. Here is my answer to one of the latter, one I’d like to share with you because it addresses crucial issues in our understanding of animal behavior and training.

Dear ….,

Thanks for your comment, which allows me to clarify a few issues. By no means do I see animals as biological robots, nor do I regard the Skinnerian approach as the truth, the only truth, and nothing but the truth; quite the contrary. Please consider the following passages from “Mission SMAF—Bringing Scientific Precision Into Animal Training”.

“In fact, I suspect that [communication] even involves more than what science can describe with the intrinsic limitations of its key concepts and methods, no matter how stringent they are.

It seems to me, therefore, that our goal must not be to oppress or suppress emotions, but rather control them and use them advantageously. Emotional arousal proves to be necessary to learn and the right amount of emotional arousal even shows to increase the efficiency of learning processes.”

A very non-Skinnerian statement, I would say.

As to my own method to analyze learning processes in artificial set-ups (like in animal training), I write: “In a crude sense, SMAF is an oversimplification of complex processes […] certainly not an attempt to reduce complex mechanisms to a few formulas. In the end, [its] value depends solely on its successful application to solving practical problems; beyond that, it has no value.”

Operant conditioning (when we use it correctly) is an efficient model of behavior for animal training because we control the conditionals to some extent (as Pavlov explains in his original writings, not the subsequent translations). Whilst operant conditioning is adequate for analyzing behavior at a particular level, beyond that, it becomes too crude an instrument. To understand behavior in a broader sense, we must turn to evolutionary models and concepts—variation, selection, adaptation, fitness, function, evolutionary strategies, ESS (evolutionarily stable strategy), costs and benefits, and so forth. My approach to behavior is therefore a classical ethological one, in the tradition of von Frisch, Lorenz, and Tinbergen—firmly grounded in evolutionary biology and in philosophically coherent reasoning.

Greetings,

RAA

 

The core of the argument is reductionism, the view that we can reduce complex processes to the sum of their simpler parts. In a sense, all science is reductionistic. We attempt to explain complex processes with a few notions well organized in little boxes. That is a process that seems to suit our human brain particularly well.

However, we must bear in mind that our interpretations, independently of how good they are, are just our pictures of an elusive reality. They suit our particular umwelten,* but definitely not all of them. They explain parts of it from specific angles so we can make sense of it. Newton and Einstein—the classical example—are (probably) both right, each explaining reality at a different level.

There’s nothing wrong about being a reductionist if only we do not get greedy and attempt to explain far too much with far too little, as in, “That’s it, this is the way things are. Period.” Simplifying often gets us to the point that complicating and oversimplifying have both missed.

In animal training, one theory or method can be as good as another depending on its foundations, approaches, what it attempts to explain, and the practical goals it aims to serve. If both are based on reliable evidence, use well-defined terms, and are logically sound, there’s little to choose between one or the other.

If only animal trainers understood that, I believe we would forgo many senseless disputes. Then again, we can brag about being the most emotional creatures on this big blue marble of ours, can’t we?

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* Umwelt (plural umwelten) in ethology means the world as it is experienced by a particular organism.

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References

Abrantes, R. (2018). Mission SMAF—Bringing Scientific Precision In to Animal Training. Wanka Tanka Pub.

Lorenz, K. (1937). Über die Bildung des Instinktbegriffes. Naturwissenschaften, 25, 289–300. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01492648

Павлов, И. П. (1926). Двадцатилетний опыт объективного изучения высшей нервной деятельности (поведения) животных. Ленинград: Научное химико-техническое издательство. (Pavlov, I. P. (1926). Twenty Years of Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activity (Behavior) of Animals. Leningrad: Scientific Chemical-Technical Publishing House.)

Skinner, B. F. (1938). The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Uexküll, J. von. (1934). Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen: Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten. Berlin: Julius Springer. (English translation: A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning, translated by Joseph D. O’Neil, University of Minnesota Press, 2010.)