Question: how do animals react to you

Edward Codling answered on 15 Jun 2011:

Hi imaperson – this is a really good question!

At home I have loads of pets (2 fish, 2 cats, 4 chickens!) and they react well to me – but they know that I am the person who feeds them and they are used to me! Hence it would be very difficult for me to run an animal behaviour experiment with my pets – they wouldn’t act very naturally because they would know to react to me.

When we are running simple behavioural experiments on animals (e.g. a group of fish) it is very important to try and get their behaviour to be as natural as possible – and we definitely don’t want them to react to us. Otherwise we can’t be sure that what we are seeing is their usual behaviour and then results from the experiment won’t be as useful. In our fish experiments we actually film them swimming around in a child’s paddling pool where we have added a screen around the edge with some curtains! We want to be sure that the fish are behaving naturally and then if we play a sound or introduce some food on the other side of the pool we want to be sure that they are reacting to this and not to us.

In general, it is often very difficult to do animal behaviour experiments and make sure that the person collecting the data or observing doesn’t change the animal’s natural behaviour in some way.

I hope this helps answer your question – let me know if you want more details!