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A Certain Kind Of Animal

Posted on 08/09/2011 by admin

There was a youtube video on a few years ago about two men who adopted a baby lion and had to let it go back to the wild after a year or so. The experts said the lion would never recognise them and might be dangerous to them but they still went to the nature reserve and the lion not only recognised them but bounded over to them to play. In India where there are precious few tigers left a man looks after cubs and to watch him bathing in the river with two or three tigers playing with him is an incredible if slightly unnerving sight.

Although we know that animal minds do not progress as far as human minds, they develop along similar pathways. They have to learn what is safe and what is dangerous and they do most of that from their parents.  It is possible through neglect to breed an adult human who is a sociopath and it is possible through care to have a dangerous animal that responds to certain cues not found in the wild.

There is no exact science about this and some experts would say make sure the animal is well fed before drawing conclusions, but learning is how survival works when you have a brain. It is after all why we developed the brains we have, so we could learn to be less wild.

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Children’s author, novelist, editor and poet.

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