Animal Behavior

It is well-realized for long time that animals are able to learn some skills and display some behaviors to help them get some food and survive in specific situations. For example, a dog might learn to open a door to reach some food, or a mouse could climb to an upstairs by using only single thread. Almost all of learnt behaviors were adopted to benefit their own; however, some animal adopted behaviors may contribute several advantages to human and considered to be social behaviors also. From my experience, chimpanzee behavior is a good example. When I was in Thailand, I used to visit the Safari world zoo, one of the most famous zoos there. There was a chimpanzee with which visitors could take a photograph and shake hand. He was very clever. It was not surprised that he could shake hand and could smile to take a photograph. These actions could be taught and practiced as we could always see in a circus or a zoo. His behavior making me very surprised was that he could understand human language!!! After I took a photo with him, he looked very unhappy. He shook a staff’s pants, and ran around. I wondered what he was doing, and then the staff said “You can’t go now because there still are many tourists. Be patient!”. This made me very wonder, so I decided to wait until there are no tourists to see what the chimpanzee wanted to do. Then, he shook the staff’s pants again but that time the staff said “O.K., now you can go!”. He immediately ran into nearby bush and urinated. I saw that and could not stop laughing, but still be surprised how he could understand complicated language like this. It was very uncommon sentences to talk with animals which I used to know such as “Stop!”, “Wait!”, “Go!”, or anything like these. Therefore, I talked with his trainer about his actions. His trainer told me that he had never taught the chimpanzee about that before, but he had raised the chimpanzee since the chimpanzee was very young and lived together all the time. When the trainer wanted to go to the toilette, he had to ask his boss in the zoo, and went together with the chimpanzee as usual. This might be the source of the learnt behavior of the chimpanzee. From this experience, there could be no doubt that a chimpanzee is very intelligent. It may learn and adopt some social behaviors from human and acts like does human as well.