… I still don’t understand why some domesticated animals, like pigs, can be said to have no wild instincts while other domesticated animals such as cats and dogs, often still retain some wild instincts and are also considered fully domesticated.
I suspect some answers may be in Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, but I lent my copy.
But pigs do have wild instincts; put them on soft ground and they’ll root, give them enough thatch and they’ll build nests. Given their high intelligence, which means they can comprehend their own suffering, it’s pretty sad that we keep them on cement slabs, inhaling their own high-methane shit fumes.
Humans, by comparison, are pretty sorry when it comes to instictive behavior. We’re born knowing how to suck a tit, and that’s about all.
If you don’t think pigs have any wild instincts, I suggest you seek out a herd of feral swine and try to pet the nice piggies. I’ll come visit you in the hospital afterwards.
I wasn’t talking about feral swine – that sounds like wild boar, not domesticated barnyard pigs. Nor am I convinced that merely rooting in the soft earth is wild animal instinctive behavior when pretty much all terrestrial mammals (and plenty of non-mammals) do it.
The assertation that farm bred pigs have no wild instincts is something that was said on this website, not by me. Perhaps someone can elaborate why that author is wrong.
A definition of what exactly constitutes wild animal instinct would help eliminate this kind of confusion.
Thank you.
Feral swine are domesticated pigs that have escaped from captivity and resumed a wild existence.
Wild boars are pigs that have never been domesticated. Feral swine/pigs are derived from domesticated stock and often resemble Wild Boars (their ancestor) very closely. Domesticated pigs will very quickly go feral and revert to something much like the ancestral form in a few generations. Feral swine occur in many places in the world, including the southern U.S., where they are called Razorbacks.
That website is hardly scientific, and is loaded with inaccuracies and questionable statements. The statement that pigs have "none of the natural instincts’’ of Wild Boars is simply ridiculous. Many breeds of pigs will easily survive in the wild if they escape and soon give rise to feral populations.
Okay. Got it about pigs. (I don’t eat pork, my knowledge is limited.)
So what exactly are wild animal instincts?
Are there any domesticated animals that can be said to have NO wild instincts? How about chickens? Or poodles? Never heard of a feral poodle.
The site Askia referenced doesn’t allow cut and paste but if I understand it correctly they are referring to the kind of pig that has been selectively bred for meat. It is not that this kind of animal lacks the instinct for survival so much as the physical ability. They are intended for slaughter before maturity and to gain so much weight that if they were to live to adulthood they would be probably be unable to walk, let alone fend for themselves.
This definition of “instinct” is from Merriam-Webster.
In general, an instinct is usually considered to be an innate, unlearned response to a stimulus, and is more complex than a simple reflex.
Many books have been written debating what behaviors are due to instinct and which due to learning, particularly in “higher” vertebrates such as mammals, so I’m not going to attempt to “exactly” what instincts are.
In any case, that web page was using “wild instincts” in a very loose sense, not the way an animal behaviorist would probably use it.
No. All domesticated animals have at least some of the instincts of their wild ancestors.
Fair enough, Colibri. I’m going to quibble with one aspect of your definition. It may be more precise to call it an innate, untaught response to a stimulus. All behaviors are learned, usually by example or self-discovery, but some behaviors have to be taught. Social mores, for example. I’d guess oral language is another, but maybe not the chemical language of ants and other insects.
What are some specific animal behaviors that are considered wholly instinctive? Anting, by birds? Dogs burying bones? Cats bathing themselves? The temperament of grizzly bears?
And swim. 
Part of the problem here is that you, and that web site, are using “instinct” in a non-technical sense. The term “instinct” has a rather specific meaning to animal behaviorists, even if they debate exactly what the definition is. In any case a behavior that is due to “self-discovery” (whatever that might mean to an insect) could hardly be said to be “learned” in any sense an animal behaviorist would recognize.
I don’t know specifically about those examples, though some may be. (“The temperment of grizzly bears” would not be a good example, since it is not a “complex and specific response to environmental stimuli,” as in the definition I quoted.)
Some of the more complex instinctual behaviors in birds are courtship displays. In many birds the song is also innate, although in others it is learned. Mammalian behavior tends to be learned to a greater extent than that of birds, but many aspects of mating and feeding behavior are instinctual.
I don’t know about newborn, but if you hang a very young baby by it’s hands and let it’s feet touch the floor, it’ll go through something very much like walking motions.
Also, newborns instinctively grasp.
And cry.
There’s more, IIRC.
I really don’t want to come off snarky or ungrateful or anything, especially since you’re the only person who has taken the time to provide specific examples and a definition, but you would GIVE me a specific animal behavorist definition of “instinct” instead of the Merriam-Webster definition, I’d be happy to learn from it. (Bah. I re-wrote that two times and it still sounds snarky.)
What about animal behavorist experiments where one rat learns to do all kinds of irrational behavior to get food rewards, like running a maze, turning a lever, etc.? No one running the experiment actually teaches the rat anything. The rat teaches itself, through trial and error. Self-discovery. Although I concede if you refine the environment enough, some conclusions are inevitable, although that’s not teaching in a way No Child Left Behind would recognize.
So if courtship displays are purely instinctual, is there any way to eliminate or surpress that instinctive behavior through selective breeding? Assume I have hundreds of years to invest in this. Could this work in mammals?
I didn’t think it was snarky. The Merriam-Webster definition I gave you is pretty much the one most animal behaviorists would give. However, Merriam-Webster also gives a couple of other non-technical meanings for “instinct” (bolded).
If the website thinks that pigs don’t have any “wild instincts,” they are either using instinct in a different sense than 2a, or else are just ignorant about pigs. I suspect both. It looks like they are using “wild instincts” to mean “an inherent capacity to survive in the wild.” However, many domestic pigs do have that capacity.
I thought you might be using a broader definition than 2a when you suggested “the temperment of grizzly bears” as an example of an instinct, since as I said above that would fall outside that definition. Perhaps that was not your intent.
This is still learning. It would be an example of an innate, instinctual, unlearned behavior if the rat were able to find its way through the maze on its first try, without ever having seen the maze before. And some animals are capable of doing the equivalent of this – for example, juvenile migratory birds that are able to find their way to the wintering grounds, sometimes thousands of miles away, without being taught by or following their parents and without ever having seen the route before.
Yes, courtship behavior can be altered through selective breeding. The courtship behavior of domestic dogs, if it can be called that, is vestigial compared to that of the ancestral gray wolg.
While the “temperment of grizzly bears” is probably too vague to label instinct, we can say that some of the complex behaviors of bears - say, binging on food in the fall and finding and creating a nest for pseudo-hibernation in the winter - are instinctual.
I think many of the newborn reflexes are termed reflexes because they aren’t complicated behaviors, or coordinated behavior patterns. They’re literally “stroke her foot and the toes splay” in complexity - just like your foot jerks when hit with a reflex hammer. Perhaps the Moro Reflex is a last remnant of a more complicated survival instinct, but without a hairy momma to grab onto when you feel yourself falling, it’s pretty useless.
For housecats, stalking and pouncing appear to be instinctual, although there is some evidence that actual killing of prey needs to be taught. One of our cats was orphaned well before weaning or hunting instruction, and he stalks and pounces just fine. He just doesn’t know what to do with the mouse if he lands on it. Stalking involves several behaviors, including freezing, crouching, tail twitching and slow walking towards a stimulus. Pouncing requires aim, coordinated muscle contraction and an awareness of the body’s position in space.
For my husband, reaching for the remote control whenever he sits on the couch seems to be instinctual, although he claims it’s a reflex! 
Say what?
Bears do not undergo true hibernation the way some rodents do. They just become relatively inactive.
They become very inactive. They enter a sleep state, their metabolism slows, they don’t come and go or eat (except for their cubs, who nurse). It takes them a long time to recover.
Sounds like pseudo-intellectual nitpicking to me.
Only if you don’t consider the term “hibernation” to have any particular meaning. It’s impossible, according to my understanding (gleaned, I believe, from much smarter folks in other threads on this very board) for an animal of that size to hibernate, since the term involves body temperature dropping so low that a creature the size of a bear wouldn’t be able to warm up again before death from hypothermia. Only small animals hibernate. Bears do not. They are not nearly as inactive as true hibernating animals. And if cubs nurse, they clearly are not hibernating at all.