Animals perform behaviors that resemble play, including crows sliding on plastic lids and orcas draping dead salmon across their foreheads. Similar behaviors have been observed across birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, cephalopods, and insects. Researchers increasingly believe these activities have evolutionary importance even when benefits are not immediately obvious. Play is defined as combining actions from different contexts such as aggression, dominance, and predation, arranged in sequences that are fairly random. This differs from defensive or aggressive behavior, which follows more predictable patterns. Play can include actions like growling or biting followed by play bows, running away and returning, or rolling on.
"Play combines actions from different contexts, like aggression, dominance, and predation, but in sequences that are fairly random. So it's just a kaleidoscope of different behaviors that you typically see in other contexts."
"When Bekoff first started studying play in animals about 50 years ago, most researchers treated the term as a catch-all. "Play was just a garbage pail." "When animals did things that people didn't understand, it was just called 'play.'""
"For instance, consider the difference between a dog at play and a dog that is defending itself. The aggressive dog might flatten its ears, then growl, and then attack - all of which are relatively recognizable and predictable behaviors - whereas a playful dog could still growl or bite, but might then perform a play bow, or run away and come back, or roll on"
Read at Big Think
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]