Are Wild Animals Just Like Us?

The fundamental flaw with calling humans trying to understand animals from a human paradigm “anthropomorphising” is the ingrained but unsupported assumption that all/most human motivations are exclusive to humans.

In fact, humans share a great deal of our motivations and behaviours with a wide variety of animals, especially mammals.

Obviously there are many, many cases of incorrectly assigning human-experienced motivations to animals, but the fact that we can use even these flawed models to understand and predict animal behaviour begs the question of just how inaccurate they really are.

> There was an orca group that used to put salmon on their head and just swim around with it. That is a fad, because I think it disappeared after a while.

just like me fr