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calveless wonder
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i think snarf is gonna be my new avatar
OKizap1 said:please back that up with a more valid evidence
How do other animals get security and trust? - Security
By Barbara Smuts
The desire for trusting relations and a secure social environment, and the anxiety and fear that accompany distrust and insecurity, are fundamental not only for humans but for all social mammals. Our ancestors undoubtedly cared about "social security" long before we became fully human. By studying other animals perhaps we can gain insights useful in our current efforts to create a more secure world for ourselves and other species.
For any mammal, security begins with the mother. About fifty years ago the British psychiatrist John Bowlby proposed that mammalian infants instinctively desire maternal proximity. This makes sense, Bowlby argued, because the infant's survival depends not only on periodic access to mother's milk but also on her constant protection from predators. Thus, natural selection has endowed infants with a suite of emotions and behaviors, which Bowlby subsumed under the label "attachment," that motivate the infant to seek and maintain maternal contact even against great odds. Experiments by Harry Harlow and others showed that infants become attached not to their source of nourishment but to whomever (or whatever) they can cuddle with. He called this "contact comfort," and we all know what it feels like, whether the object of our attachment is the mother, a teddy bear, or a lover.
Bowlby found that infant primates who had regular, reliable contact with their mothers used them as a "secure base" from which to investigate the world. Any caregiver of young infants is familiar with this phenomenon, which is especially salient in novel circumstances or environments. The child initially dings to the caregiver, then, comforted by this contact, he or she ventures out to explore, returning periodically to the caregiver for reassurance. Bowlby theorized that an infant whose mother or other caregivers reliably provided such a secure base will tend to develop a secure and confident attitude toward the world, whereas those who lack such a critical early experience will tend toward chronic anxiety. Bowlby's collaborator, American psychologist Mary Ainsworth, showed that as early as one year of age, infants could be classified as securely or insecurely attached. Similar variability in attachment relationships has been documented in other species, such as rhesus monkeys and domestic dogs.
RELATIONSHIPS WITHIN SOCIAL GROUPS:
For social animals, including humans, attachment to other members of the same species, whether to the group as a whole or to a few select individuals within the group, remains important throughout life. Just as the infant needs the mother to survive, social animals need friends, allies, and mates to survive and reproduce. And just as the infant relaxes when in contact with the mother and feels anxious when separated from her, social mammals feel pleasurable emotions when near familiar others and experience anxiety and fear when alone. Researchers agree that these emotions evolved in order to motivate animals to seek the benefits of companionship.
In many social mammals, the desire for friendly relations comes into conflict with the need to compete for resources, including mates. For this reason, animals often fight with fellow group members. Although such altercations could in theory make animals very insecure around one another, several mechanisms reduce the negative effects of conflict.
Zoologists have known for over a hundred years that most animal fights involve ritualized aggression rather than injurious physical contact. Savanna baboons, for example, stare, raise their eyebrows, and pant-grunt to scare another baboon. The target of the threat may look away, fear-grin, or raise the tail to signify acknowledgment of the other's superior rank. He or she is then likely to move away and relinquish whatever resource is being contested, thus avoiding bloodshed.
About twenty years ago primatologist Frans de Waal discovered a second way in which social animals maintain good relations; they reconcile after conflict. After a fight (ritualized or otherwise), the former opponents are actually more likely to come together in a friendly way than they are during a neutral context. Each species has characteristic ways of reconciling; stumptail macaques approach from behind and "hold bottoms," baboons draw near and make friendly sounds, chimpanzees literally kiss and make up, and bonobos (pygmy chimps) often engage in sexual (or homosexual) contact. If you are skeptical that nonhuman animals really reconcile, observe your dog the next time you express displeasure with her; she will probably try to lick your face or seek out other friendly contact shortly afterwards.
Such reconciliations reassert the bond between individuals and therefore enhance their sense of security. In macaques, for example, signs of anxiety, such as scratching and yawning, dissipate after a reconciliation. Indeed, such contact has been shown to reduce the chances that fight will reoccur, so the enhanced sense of security is real.
A third way that primates and other social mammals enhance security is through routine behaviors that seem to say, "We remain friends." In savanna baboons, for example, as troop members wander in and out of close proximity during the day, they frequently pause briefly to look deeply into one another's eyes while touching, patting, or even hugging. A baboon will participate in such "greetings" anywhere from a dozen to over a hundred times a day, and some pairs will greet virtually every time they meet. Greetings occur between males, between females, and between the sexes, and animals of all ages, including young infants, participate. Similarly, in the domestic dog group I am currently studying, brief nose-to-nose contact or licking around the mouth occurs throughout the day. Suppose it were common, whenever familiar people met, to gaze into each other's eyes and exchange a gentle touch. Surely this would increase feelings of trust.
I experienced something like this with the baboons I studied. When I first encountered them, they were extremely wary of humans, and it was difficult to get close to them. But once I learned their sounds and body language, I was able to employ baboon language to gain their trust, and they gave me similar signals in exchange. Eventually, they would take naps beside me on the ground and allow infants to jump on me during play. It is hard to imagine two more meaningful demonstrations of trust!
Another way that animals develop and maintain trust is by moving in synchrony or vocalizing together. Among the wild dolphins I studied, the surest evidence that two or more individuals had a tight bond was the way they frequently surfaced to breath together, as if they were linked by an invisible cord. Pair-bonded gibbons routinely sing duets and wolves howl in solidarity with other pack members.
Play is still another way in which social relations are affirmed and security enhanced. In most mammals, adult play is rare, but it is common in dolphins, members of the dog family, great apes and, of course, humans. The importance of play in reestablishing trust between species is vividly described by Benjamin Kilham, who raised infant black bear cubs and introduced them to the wild. When he encounters one of his now-grown bears in the woods, tension prevails until Kilham and the bears have had a good wrestling bout. After that, they can cuddle up to share a nap.
The ability to give and receive signals of reassurance and trust is especially important between animals that have some reason for insecurity, such as a human and a bear, or two members of the same species who differ greatly in power. Male baboons are twice as large as females and possess long, razor-sharp canines that can inflict lethal wounds. Males who have recently moved into a troop sometimes commit infanticide, and so females, and especially mothers, are extremely insecure around these guys. In order to become integrated into the group, a male must somehow gain female trust. He does so by approaching a particular female over and over, stopping the instant she shows the least sign of nervousness, and then sitting quietly, occasionally making friendly faces and noises at her, until she moves away. After days or even weeks of persistence, she may come to accept him, or even groom him. A male must woo female after female in this way, and it can take over two years for him to become fully integrated. Patience and sensitivity are critical; without these abilities, he will never succeed.
Because power differences persist even among fully integrated members of a baboon troop, there is a constant need for males to reassure females, and for high-ranking animals to reassure those less powerful. Thus, whenever a baboon wishes to make a non-hostile approach to a weaker animal, he or she must make a friendly face and give a gentle grunt. This allows the approached animal to trust the other's intentions. Similarly, if a baboon wishes to approach a higher-ranking animal, he or she will move forward hesitantly, eyes on the other, waiting for a signal that it is OK to move closer. Brief mutual eye contact accompanied by a soft grunt will do the trick.
In some social animals, such as wolves and chimpanzees, the first sign that a relationship is in trouble is the absence of such routine reassurance signals. A male chimpanzee who decides to challenge a former ally will first cease friendly greetings. Similarly, a dominant male will refuse to offer reassurance to a potential rival until the rival bows to him. In other words, a dominant male does not trust another male who refuses to ritually honor the former's higher status.
We might think that dominant animals, with their superior power, are the most secure, but this is not always the case. Because high-ranking animals have a lot to lose, they may tend toward anxious vigilance, constantly on the alert for signs of disrespect. Perhaps for this reason, high-ranking female baboons appear to experience more stress than their subordinate counterparts. One way a dominant animal may increase his or her sense of security is by avoiding despotism. Among chimpanzees and wolves, anecdotal evidence suggests that tolerant, relatively benign leaders are less likely to be challenged.
These examples from other species tell us that trust and security do not depend on absolute equality (which is as rare among other animals as it is among humans) but rather on mutual acknowledgement of established relations. Furthermore, such acknowledgements must be embodied in ways that guarantee honesty, or at least decrease the ease of deception. The Israeli zoologist Amotz Zahavi was the first formally to suggest that honest signals are critical to animals. There are at least two kinds of honest signals, those that cannot be faked, and those that involve some cost. I believe that baboon greetings often include mutual eye contact because the eyes cannot lie; pupils automatically contract when an animal feels anxiety and enlarge when an animal is relaxed, so pupil dilation is thus an honest signal of emotional state. Costly signals often involve physical vulnerability. Thus subordinate chimpanzees bow to their superiors, rendering themselves vulnerable to an attack, and male baboons, when attempting to establish a mutual alliance, take turns holding one another's genitals in their hands.
We may not want to precisely mimic baboons, but it is critical to recognize the importance of nonverbal communication in establishing trust among humans. It is easy to mislead others into trusting you with words, but harder to lie with the face and body. Undoubtedly, this is why, among tribal people everywhere, friendships and alliances are established through various forms of touching, and through dance, song, and other kinds of ritual that embody cooperation.
SECURITY BETWEEN ENEMIES?
So far I've been talking about security and trust among animals that live together in a group, animals who rely on one another in all sorts of ways. But a sense of security can also develop between animals who are chronic rivals. For example, when the individuals or groups that share a territorial boundary are closely matched in power and capable of inflicting mutual injuries, it is often in the interests of both parties to establish a truce. Such truces are reinforced through ritualized communication, such as mutual posturing at the territorial boundary or exchanges of vocalizations. Each time members of rival groups meet at a territorial boundary and do not harm one another, security and trust presumably increase. Members of such groups sometimes even feed peacefully side by side on superabundant resources in areas of territorial overlap, as occurs in the baboons I studied.
A sense of security can develop between members of different species, including even prey in relation to predators. Because it is extremely costly for prey animals to flee every time they spot a predator, they become extremely skillful at inferring predators' motivational states through observations of their body language, movements, and so on. Similarly, animals that could harm one another but have no reason to do so, like baboons and warthogs, learn how to read one another's intentions so that they can relax and ignore one another most of the time. In addition, wild animals gain security by trusting the sensory skills and judgement of other species. Baboons are good at spotting predators visually, whereas impala have better hearing and sense of smell. When the two species intermingle, the security of both increases. When I was in the midst of the baboon troop, animals that are normally extremely wary of humans, like bushbuck, warthogs, and bat-eared foxes, walked right up to me; a warthog even let her babies play at my feet. These animals glanced at me curiously, dearly aware that I was not a baboon but willing to trust entirely the judgement of another species.
It seems likely that human hunter. gatherers developed live-and-let-live relationships with some of the more dangerous animals around them. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas in her book Tribe of the Tiger writes of one such truce between the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert and local lions. Lions could harm people, but people could also harm lions with their poison arrows. It was in the best interests of members of both species to avoid the chronic insecurity of mutual enmity. As in the case Thomas describes, these truces were probably based on individual recognition on both sides and passed down through the cultures of each species.
Such truces remain possible today. Because most wild species have been around humans for hundreds of thousands of years, they tend to be extremely skilled at reading human intentions, just as prey read their predators. Modern-day researchers, through sensitivity to the species they study, establish trust that allows them to closely approach potentially dangerous wild animals without invoking fear or threat. Examples include Mark & Delia Owens with lions and spotted hyenas, Ian Douglas Hamilton and Cynthia Moss with African elephants, Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and many others with wild apes, and Timothy Treadwell with grizzly bears. In principle, people everywhere could establish such secure relations with local wildlife, as illustrated by a forested suburban community in Pennsylvania that includes twenty black bears within its midst. Of course, for such mutual security to develop, modern humans must both value wild animals and be willing to make compromises to live side by side, since mutual trust nearly always involves compromise.
INTERGROUP HOSTILITY
Although nonhuman animals can develop highly sophisticated systems of social security, this isn't always the case. A few mammals, like wolves and chimpanzees, have "fission-fusion" societies, in which the members of a given social group come together and split apart into smallish parties of variable size, depending on the food supply and other factors. Due to the variable party size of these species, during inter-group encounters individuals from one group can greatly outnumber those from another group. Because the match is so uneven, it is not very risky for the larger party to attack the smaller one; under these circumstances, members of the outnumbered party are often seriously injured and sometimes killed. Among undisturbed wolves in Denali Park in Alaska, for example, at least half of all adult mortality occurs during inter-pack aggression. In both wolves and chimpanzees, whole groups can be wiped out during a series of encounters, and when this occurs, the winners take over the territory of the losers. With the threat of death from neighbors looming so large, everyone lives in a state of chronic insecurity. Humans, too, can be considered a fission-fusion species, and, as primatologist Richard Wrangham has shown, intergroup hostility among chimpanzees and human hunter-gatherers shows some striking similarities.
Severe hostility occurs when a number of conditions co-occur: (a) animals form tightly knit, territorial groups; (b) critical resources, such as food, land, or mates are controlled by groups; (c) situations exist in which the much greater size or power of one group allows them to attack another group with relative impunity; and (d) winning groups receive considerable benefits. Because party size and power can fluctuate, each group poses a threat to the other, and because winning is so valuable, neither side is willing to back down. Any similarities to the present international scene are probably not coincidental.
INCREASING SECURITY
The behavior of other animals shows that you do not have to be friends to establish a fairly secure relationship. You just need mutual recognition, that it is in one's own interest to avoid violence. One could argue that increasing global insecurity requires recognition that the costs of chronic mistrust and violence are in fact greater than the benefits to be gained by winning, and that rival parties have more interests in common than they suppose.
Barb Smuts has investigated social behavior in wild baboons, chimpanzees, and bottlenose dolphins and is currently studying play among domestic dogs. She received her Ph.D. in biology at Stanford University and is on the faculty of the psychology department at the University of Michigan. She wrote "The Gorilla's Embrace" in Whole Earth, Summer 1999.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2002_Fall/ai_93135758/pg_1
izap1 said:
ya know.. i have not read this thread, maybe i should..
Here is an observation, just from this post that you made..
Why are you using sex in an attempt to control him?? Sex to a man is a communication of acceptance and an indicator that he is loved and wanted.
This is just from the terms and words you used to describe this situation..
sorry if I'm off, but i suspect that i am not..
all the whey
New member
velvett said:
Great stuff velvett.
But, I think you were right on in your first post. (about not knowing they would have the opportunity)
