Understood that an animal can benefit from training if you’re trying to get it to do something that it wouldn’t ordinarily do in the wild. And that’s not just getting it to do tricks, but even physical feats that it might not be called upon to do, e.g. a horse being trained to race at specific distances. My question is whether there are things that animals do in the ordinary course of their lives in the wild that would benefit from more training or practice than they actually get, to the point that it would be theoretically worthwhile for them to engage in it.
For example, suppose instead of sleeping most of the day, a lion would practice some sort of exercise, whether speed or strength, I imagine it might make it faster or stronger and this might help it capture more prey. OTOH, it might be that by nature it needs the rest, and losing that would outweigh any advantage that it might get by exercise. Or similar if you taught a chimpanzee some techniques that might help fighting leopards. The specifics are not important here - the same general question applies to any other animal, in one form or another.
Essentially, the question is whether the lifestyles that animals naturally lead in the wild (as opposed to their physiology) is completely optimized in terms of maximizing their survival.
You discount the energy costs of such training. Lions sleep most of the day because their hunting technique is costly and not very guaranteed. They’re reducing energy expenditure to the minimum and gambling their energy reserves in stalk-and-pounce hunts to achieve the best balance of cost and benefit.
If practice and training, beyond basic skill development (i.e., “play” as a cub), were going to be beneficial, don’t you think it would have provided sufficient reproductive advantage to become pervasive and instinctive? But no, like most felids, lots of rest punctuated by highly-directed bursts of activity seem to have been the natural selection winner.
Practice makes perfect, if it’s perfect practice. I think the animal would need some kind of insight on what it was trying to get better at, and thus motivation to break down the desired improvement into smaller skills and practice those. IOW the lion would have to know that he needed to practice his windsprints or whatever.
Natural selection sort of takes care of the bad hunters by letting them die already. So they already “practice” that, although via trial and error.
Are you talking about self directed training, like the play of cubs mentioned up-thread? Or are you thinking about human directed training. Human evaluates hunting technique, identifies areas where most prey is lost and trains the animal in ways to better those outcomes?
The second is an interesting question. Could you make a super-predator via training?
While you’re at it, provide weapons and ammunition.
Lions with guns. I bet lion poaching is reduced.
ETA: Facetiousness aside, there is some precedent. Dogs and wolves are similar pack-hunting animals (being directly related). We allow “packs of dogs” advantages wolves would only dream of: reliable food sources outside of hunting, transportation to new hunting grounds, strategic thought. And packs of dogs can hunt wolves, where as wolves would probably defeat dogs in an “even” fight.
But that’s not just training a wild animal. That’s drafting it into the “human” team. I don’t think there’s any threshold of involvement lower than that. As a species, we’re not really altruists. We meddle with animals for our own good, not because we think we can improve them but leave them independent.
I didn’t discount it. Possibly you skipped the part where I wrote “OTOH, it might be that by nature it needs the rest, and losing that would outweigh any advantage that it might get by exercise.”
Just watched a rerun episode of Nature last night on PBS that comes very close to addressing the OP; “Pets: Wild at Heart”. It focuses more on the social life of pet-quality animals and how kittens and puppies play and how this trains them for an adult life in the wild. An hour long but it’ll get you part of the way to your answer.
After reading the title, I was thinking about maybe the OP was suggesting we train our dogs to use the indoor toilet facilities to aid in the disposal of wastes.
My life would be so much easier if the dog could just use the potty.
But for the life of me, I cannot teach him how to hold the newspaper.
Muscle Memory would apply to animals as well as it does humans. Humans, by repetition of movements, acquire muscle memory that is useful later
when that movement is called upon.
It’s not the rest so much as they have limited caloric intake and they can’t use it up by going to the gym all day. You can only do that if you have a surplus of calories, and if you have that you don’t need to improve your hunting skills.
Yes, young animals do practice. Young beavers learn dam making, polar bears need to be taught how to catch seals. I think most animals would have enough instinctual behavior to survive without training and practice, but it has to be an advantage to instinctively practice those skills as well. I’m sure some animals would benefit from additional training but life in the wild is precarious and staying alive occupies most of their time already.
But this is something that the horse would do in the wild. Horses are prey animals, and their instinctive response to danger is to run away. They are faster than most other animals, at least for a short distance, and thus can escape & survive. Humans simply took this instinctive horse behavior and used it create the sport of Racing. (The specific distances of various races is controlled mainly by the jockey; note that the ‘Triple Crown’ in racing involves the same horse winning 3 races of different distances.)
Doesn’t even take a pack of dogs – a single sheepdog, working with a human shepherd, can protect a flock of sheep from attacks by wolves.
And another big advantage for the dogs is that they get veterinary care, both preventative care & treatment for injuries. In the wild, injury usually results in death fairly soon, either from infections, or because the ‘healed’ anumal is unable to compete for food and soon starves.
I don’t really think animals have a big shortage in quantity of training. Animals practice crucial survival skills intensively when young and many of their parents have decades of practice to draw on. When it comes to humans and their extremely specialized training regimens like marathon running or weight lifting, I’m not sure these confer real survival benefits in a wild setting. In fact, our top athletes injure themselves in ways that would kill a lion unless the lion also mastered surgery and physical therapy.
However, there is not just a matter of more practice, but different technique. It’s like teaching a human swimmer how to upgrade the breast stroke to the butterfly stroke, or training a jumper to use the Fosberry flop. Every top human has some kind of coach to help them in this respect, and when someone has a breakthrough technique, everyone else steals it.
Training like that could certainly be useful to primates. There are numerous examples of learned behaviors that enhance their survival, like using water to separate grain from sand, sticks to collect insects, rocks to smash coconuts, etc. These behaviors are not universal across the species shows - they are learned and taught. I’m sure there are plenty of other tricks you could teach them if you were inclined to do so.
In fact, I wonder just what you could teach chimps to do in terms of survival skills if you wanted to. Could you teach them to make spears and start fires? (Maybe it’s better not to find out )
Another interesting example of the effects of intensive training can be found in greyhounds used for racing in the USA and greyhounds (aka galgos) used for hunting live hare in Spain. Brief disclaimer: I’m going to go against the “doctrine” of my friends in greyhound rescue with my statements here. Starting with: greyhounds and galgos are essentially the same breed, just intermixed with different breeds at various times so they look and act a little differently but they are both running/hunting machines and only a trained eye can spot the visible differences.
USA racing greyhounds are trained to race by playing on the chase aspect of the dog’s normal hunting behavior. Speed and enthusiasm are rewarded and the dogs are cared for in an environment that resembles a human military school. They never have to ask for what they want but are instead told what to do, when and how. As a result, the dogs have a large culture shock when they’re retired and adopted because now their owners expect them to ask for what they want (“Do you need to go out Fido?”) and decide for themselves how to fill their days. It’s not unusual for a newly retired dog to enter his new home as a pet and stand in the middle of the room, staring, because he doesn’t know what to do and nobody is telling him.
Also greyhounds are notorious two-dimensional thinkers. They rely on humans to solve their problems for them. They often don’t realize they can jump a short fence, for example, so they’re easily kept in a yard.
On the other hand, Galgos are trained much more loosely, encouraged to run loose after the game. They’re not well taken care of so they are known for doing their own problem solving. They will easily jump fences, baby gates, and get into the pantry. If you don’t tell a galgo what to do, he’ll immediately find his own fun rather than waiting to see what you want.
There are physical changes as well: racing greyhounds quickly develop large, well-defined muscles similar to human body-builders. Galgos on the other hand develop long, thin, wiry muscles similar to human marathon runners. These physical differences mean that greyhounds go faster for short sprints while galgos don’t go quite as fast but can run for miles at a stretch.
I like to tell adopters that greyhounds are like Maseratis and galgos are all-terrain vehicles. But it’s all because of the training they get.
I’d thought that was the whole point of modern falconry. You acquire, with the correct permits and training, a young adult raptor. You house it safely, you teach it to hunt using its own instincts, and you feed it until it is very successful. Then you release and adult that can compete better. Because raptor chicks achieve this on their own with very low frequency. What I don’t understand is how the raptor will now understand that humans <> food and security.
Where else can we do this? Well, black bears for a start. After a few years with their mother, she goes back into heat and ignores them. Many just haven’t picked up sufficient survival skills and just starve. However there doesn’t seem to be a serious lack of black bears in the woods that can support them, and having them not fear humans, or have bears associate humans with food, is a problem, not a solution.
A similar thing occurs with cheetahs. Again, a few years are spent playing and learning with mom, then she up and leaves. A pair of orphaned twins will often (if National Geographic specials are accurate) just sit around starving, until something clicks and they catch something. Or they just die.
Maybe its all about cost, necessity and our imperfect understanding of what natural selection pressures are really needed to maintain a health species and a healthy ecosystem, and what pressures we can circumvent to preserve a species, and I guess, make an ecosystem we think the world we’re stuck sharing with animals needs.
The BBCs “Secret life of the cat” documentary addressed the issue of parent-kitten training at one point, where it ran experiments on the various cats that were being tracked for the documentary, to see which ones were the best hunters, and why.
The ones with “hunting mothers” - where the mother was an outdoor cat who did indeed hunt for at least some of her food, and the kitten had stayed with her for long enough - were noticeably better at the hunting task than other cats, even if they themselves were leading a pampered sheltered existence.
Clearly in that case, yes, their ‘natural’ behaviours included at least some component of being trained by an expert.
Whether a human would be able to train a kitten to be a good hunter, in the same way a mother cat can, is another question.
I don’t think releasing a highly trained bird is the point of modern falconry. At least some falconry techniques the bird is simply not going to be able to use on its own - having a hunting partner means the bird can down bigger game, relying on the human to help kill it, or working with a dog that flushes game from hiding. Raptors, normally solitary hunters, in falconry learn to hunt as part of a team. The birds stick around because by doing so they eat more reliably (a falconry bird is typically fed even if the day’s hunt is unsuccessful). It’s strictly a business arrangement as far as the bird is concerned.
That’s different than rehab.
I will note, more specifically to the OP topic, that you don’t actually want super-efficient predators. If the predators get too good they might wipe out the prey and then starve to death.
Are you (OP) suggesting a benefit at the individual level, group level (hunting pack or even extended elephant clan) or species level (allowing for in the last level a bit of fantasy/IAmEvolution thinking)?
The outline test case would be:
find an orphaned cheetah or two, teach it to do all those normal cheetah things, i.e., get to the click level mentioned above;
Score that level as Normal, add human-source HighTest training;
Release, rescore for HighTest.
The problem is at the outset with 1): It’s hard enough to parameterize normal behavior (i.e., in the wild). Once you release the cheetah to observe, then you have queered the experiment because a certain non-controlled learning has taken place.
Given that problem, it would seem that you would have to base the experiment on yet another difficult assumption, of the continued “teaching” of HighTest to another naive, normal individual (offspring, say) and/or look for the presence of HighTest in larger groups, which ounces the problem (squares it?) with the “cultural learning” issue which may be a species-specific thing to begin with, eg those Japanese macaques).
Good luck with that.
ETA: It just occurred to me that the chimp-stares-at-black slab-coin-slowly-drops, and later, creepy-music-the-whole-clan does the same, touchs it, and you know the rest, would be pretty solid evidence of that kind of thing for the last set of circumstances I just mentioned. If we had HighTest slab material.
I don’t know any examples where animals would benefit from more practice, but I personally know of examples where wild animals benefited from learning something new.
My father grew corn for several years. Then, one year, a squirrel discovered that corn was good to eat. Shortly thereafter, all the rest of the squirrels learned, and my father had a lot of trouble growing corn after that. So that was a short-term advantage, because my father stopped GROWING corn, but had it been a wild crop, it would have been a long-term benefit to the squirrels.
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