SIERRA CLUB: ‘Scientists have long disdained anthropomorphism, or the notion that whatever emotions humans experience, animals must, too. A species’ behavior, biologists held, was determined solely by what it ate, what was out to eat it, and its drive to kill or forage. That’s what wildlife biologist Dr. John Shivik was taught in graduate school—that animals operate simply by instinct…
As Shivik, the author of 2014’s The Predator Paradox: Ending the War with Wolves, Bears, Cougars and Coyotes, continued to study wildlife and commune with fellow biologists, evidence of animal personality kept piling up… The playfully enlightening Mousy Cats chronicles the author’s deepening understanding that, like people, all animals are individuals—and that their internal conditions and behavior patterns are major factors determining their outcomes…
The book details experiments that demonstrate how every insect, fish, bird and mammal is its own special snowflake, and how such individual characteristics render them adaptive to changing environmental conditions. These studies of animal emotion and individuality, Shivik writes, are freeing wildlife biologists up to use the term “personality”—some are going so far as to use Meyers-Brigg categorization to describe creatures including dolphins. In the process, they are breaking science free from some bounds of unconscious bias, i.e. errors of omission due to anthropocentric hubris’. SOURCE…
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