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21| How and why do animals play? — Gordon Burghardt
105 Plays11 months ago
Many animals play. But why?
Play has emerged in species as distinct as rats, turtles, and octopi although they are separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
While some behaviors — hunting or mating for example — are straightforwardly adaptive, play is more subtle. So how does it help animals survive and procreate? Is it just fun? Or, as Huizinga put it, is it the primeval soil of culture?
Our guest this week is Gordon Burghardt, a professor at The University of Tennessee and the author of the seminal The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits where he introduced criteria for recognizing animal play.
Gordon has spent his career trying to understand the experience of animals. He advocates for frameworks such as critical anthropomorphism and the umwelt so we can judiciously adjust our perspectives. We can play at being other.
This week Multiverses is brought to you by ... the internet.
Links
Milestones
(00:00) Introduction
(2:20) Why study play?
(4:00) Criteria for play
(5:00) Fish don’t smile
(5:50) The five criteria: 1. incompletely functional
(7:40) 2. Fun (endogenous reward)
(8:20) 3. Incomplete
(9:45) 4. Repeated
(10:50) 5. Healthy, stress free
(13:30) Play as a way of dealing with stress (but not too much)
(16:40) Parental care creating a space for play
(17:45) Delayed vs immediate benefits
(20:45) Primary, secondary and tertiary play
(26:00) Role reversal, imitation, self-handicapping: imagining the world otherwise
(31:00) Secondary process: play as a way of maintaining systems
(33:37) Tertiary process: play as a way of going beyond
(34:45) Komodo dragons with buckets on their heads
(39:22) Critical anthropomorphism
(42:40) Umwelt — Jakob von Uexküll
(49:18) Anthropomorphism by omission
(53:00) Play evolved independently — it is not homologous
(53:45) Do aliens play?
(1:00:10) Play signals — how to play with dogs and bears
(1:04:00) Inter species play
(1:09:00) Final thoughts
Recommended
Transcript
The Joy of Play Across Species
00:00:00
Speaker
don't need to be told to play. It comes naturally, instinctively, joyfully. As Taylor Swift put it, play is going to play, play, play. But why do we do this? Where does this urge come from? The question becomes even more mysterious when we consider the fact that many distinct species play. Even ones which are separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
Introducing Gordon Burghart and the Study of Play
00:00:24
Speaker
I guess this week is Gordon Burghart, a professor at the University of Tennessee. He's an ethologist, so he's interested in animal behaviour. He's also a herpetologist, so he's
00:00:33
Speaker
He's particularly interested in reptiles. Gordon has made many contributions. He introduced the concept of critical anthropomorphism, which is where we neither blindly accept that animal behaviour that seems somewhat human-like really does represent analogous emotions or instincts to those that we have.
00:00:56
Speaker
Nor does critical anthropomorphism demand that we deny animals the possibility of having some human-like characteristics. And indeed, it asks us to use our own understanding of ourselves and to see where that might justifiably apply to animals.
The Role of Play in Animal and Human Culture
00:01:14
Speaker
But Gordon is perhaps most known for his contribution to animal play. His 2006 book on the genesis of animal play laid out five criteria for understanding
00:01:23
Speaker
where play was happening in animals, and this really helped put the field on a solid footing. The more I reflect on this conversation, and on play in general, the more convinced I am that play needs to be more than just a footnote in animal behaviour, but rather it's a central pillar to animal culture, and in that I include human culture. And I find myself agreeing with the quote that Gordon puts at the beginning of his book. It's a quote from Johann Huitzinger, and it goes like this,
00:01:51
Speaker
Now in myth and ritual, the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin. Law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primeval soil of play. I'm James Robinson, you're listening to Multiverses.
00:02:25
Speaker
Gordon Berghout, thank you for joining me on Multiverses. I'm glad to be here. I think many people might think that play is a curious subject, but it doesn't necessarily deserve serious academic attention in animals. Why should we study play in animals?
00:02:46
Speaker
For one thing, it is a very common behavior that animals do. It's been known, of course, for that mammals and some birds play a lot, you know, dog puppies and cats and horses and animals that we're familiar with.
00:03:01
Speaker
But we now know that many other animals play, including lizards and turtles and crocodilians and fish and amphibians, insects, octopus and a whole variety of animals. So the question is why they do that and how did it originate and so on. For a long time it was thought that play was just a property of
00:03:28
Speaker
higher intelligent animals, mainly. And so anything that wasn't the mammal or a few birds was not considered a play. They always had reasons to exclude what looked like play as play. And that was part of the problem in play.
Defining and Identifying Play in Animals
00:03:49
Speaker
But of course, play being sort of fun and not serious, supposedly,
00:03:55
Speaker
of the
00:04:03
Speaker
people didn't always recognize behaviors that we now understand to be play as play. And I think perhaps that harks back to the fact that everyone pre-scientifically, as it were, thinks we know what play is when we see it. But to really understand play in very different species, you mentioned Crocodilia, for example, we need a proper set of, you know, a proper definition to be able to recognize it.
00:04:30
Speaker
Right. We need to have some criteria for recognizing play that are relatively clear and allow us to define or identify it if it occurs in animals that we don't know or think play or in context in which we don't think would be playful, but may turn out to be.
00:04:54
Speaker
And one of the things is that with the idea that animals are having fun when they play, you know, they smile, wagtails, things like that. Well, that's a good clue with mammals, for instance, but it's not going to help you with a turtle.
00:05:10
Speaker
the
00:05:25
Speaker
disparage any possibility that animals such as fish could engage in playful behavior. So we look at animals, mammals mainly, and we say, oh, this is play because they're enjoying it. But we need something a little bit more solid than that. And that's been one of your kind of major contributions, although there's lots of things for us to talk about. But
00:05:48
Speaker
Yeah, can you take us through the eye of criteria that you came up with for putting play on a kind of solid academic footing? Right. I tried to look at all the definitions that were out there about play behavior and try to find those that covered all kinds of play. There were some criteria for play that involved just social play, like play signals and so on. And that would obviously only involve animals that playing with each other.
00:06:18
Speaker
But animals play solitarily. They play with objects and toys and things like that. And so if it's got a social signal as part of the definition, then it won't cover those kinds of plays. So what I tried to do was come up with the five criteria. And one of the things is when you look at the behavior, it's
00:06:38
Speaker
It's not completely functional or adaptive in the context of what you see it in completely functional is what I call, I called it. Uh, so you say that Alan may look like they're fighting or wrestling and so on, but you know, it's not serious fighting, but it doesn't mean it doesn't have any function. It might be helping them in many ways, develop their muscle skills and, you know, practice movements and things like that.
00:07:08
Speaker
But on the surface, it doesn't seem to be functional as the behavior itself, or like with a cat playing with a rubber mouse. It clearly knows it's not food, but it attacks it, releases it, attacks again, and does things with it. And so that would be another indication of behavior that
00:07:33
Speaker
was incompletely functional in the context in which it is expressed. Another criterion would be that it is done for its own sake, or voluntarily,
Characteristics and Occurrence of Play Behavior
00:07:50
Speaker
for fun. Any one of those criteria or those statements would fit. In other words, the animal's not coerced into doing it. So that's important. So even like with kids, if they're forced to play, then it's not really play from their perspective. And we have to look at the animal's perspective or the child's. And then
00:08:20
Speaker
A lot of times behavior is incomplete or awkward or appears earlier in life than it normally is necessary for serious purposes. So like with rats, it turns out that rats are one of the most playful species and they've been the focus of the most played research of any animal are rats.
00:08:49
Speaker
But they primarily play when they're young. For a period after weaning for several weeks, they are really motivated to play in very complex social ways. Later in life, they may still play with objects and do other things.
00:09:08
Speaker
It sort of wanes. And so we often think about play as something that's a characteristic of the young animals. But not only, the first documentation I had of playing a turtle was of a turtle that was older than me. Was this a pig face? Yes, that was a pig face at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.
00:09:35
Speaker
So that's another one of the criteria. Either it looks different than the normal behavior, or it appears earlier in ontogeny than would normally appear. And then the behavior has to be repeated. If you see a one-off example of a behavior, we can't say that's playing. An animal comes up to an object,
00:10:04
Speaker
pushes it and then walks away, doesn't do anything more with it, wouldn't say it'll play, but it's just sort of a curious exploration, exploratory response. But if it will come back to the object, picks it up, manipulates it, and does things in a repeated fashion, then we can... that's one of the criteria. So it has to be...
00:10:31
Speaker
the the
00:10:54
Speaker
Animal has to be relatively healthy, stress free, not imbued with competing needs or fears, social problems, social stress and things like that. And that's why often we find animals that play a lot in captivity.
00:11:21
Speaker
if they're kept in good conditions in captivity and they don't have to deal with predators and finding food and things like that, they have more of the time and the resources to engage and play. And one of my first ideas was that this was a sort of way of escaping boredom. Right.
Stress, Environment, and Play
00:11:45
Speaker
Yes, I mean, I really like this sort of criteria and
00:11:51
Speaker
One of the reasons is the point that you made earlier, where it doesn't specify any particular characteristic of play or sort of form of play. It doesn't say, oh, it's going to be kicking a ball or moving around or interacting with others.
00:12:11
Speaker
it just gives this very raw, yet quite restrictive enough set of criteria. So we have the functionally incomplete and end in itself, which there's interesting links between these, of course, because if something were functionally complete, then it means that oftentimes it wouldn't be an end in itself. You wouldn't do it for the pure pleasure of the activity. And of course, then there's the link to it being
00:12:38
Speaker
either propocious or structurally different. Again, if it weren't functionally incomplete, it seems, you know,
00:12:47
Speaker
it wouldn't necessarily be precocious because you'd already be doing that activity seriously. And so, yeah, there's kind of interesting, almost conceptual overlaps. One thing I'm curious about is whether you see any of those criteria somehow more fundamental than the others. For instance, if we see all of the
00:13:12
Speaker
first four criteria satisfied, but animals sort of stressed, might we say, oh, despite, you know, despite it being under stress or ill or whatever, it's playing nonetheless. Well, uh, we do know that there are, uh, it's evidence that play may be a way of dealing with stress. So mild stress, uh, and boredom of course is a, is a stress. Uh, so, uh,
00:13:40
Speaker
the the
00:13:58
Speaker
because there is this internal motivation to engage in this behavior. But if there is some stress in the environment, like food shortages and so on, studies have shown that in monkeys, for instance, and the same species in populations where there's plenty of food or maybe not so much food of a more harsh environment, the same species
00:14:28
Speaker
Has different levels of play behavior. No and animals that live in seasonal areas where there's a dry season and a wet season and when the dry season There's not much food and so on play goes down and then when the food comes out in the wet season of food eating Monkeys and so on you see the increase in play. This has been shown on howler monkeys for instance
00:14:56
Speaker
So there's quite a bit of evidence showing that the resources available to the animal, nutritional resources, among others, but they're very important, can provide the context of which play is seen more often.
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah,
Play in Language Learning and Skill Development
00:15:14
Speaker
yeah, I think such a previous guest was Simon Kirby, who studies language evolution. Perhaps his kind of central thesis is that while humans don't have any sort of special brain for language learning, the removal of certain selection pressures has meant that we're able to interact much more, imitate each other much more and sort of
00:15:37
Speaker
pass down a communication system because we're not in such fierce competition with one another. We can sort of get closer as it were and collaborate more. And so it's interesting again how they're the kind of removal of stress. I think language itself is very, very playful.
00:15:54
Speaker
the the
00:16:15
Speaker
practicing and you know at night they'll sort of say words and things those seem to fit the play criteria and they've even been identified in parents language learning that they have they babble yeah yeah yeah I certainly find myself babbling sometimes I try not to do it too much on this on this podcast but yeah I think I mean it speaks to that point and again that just the
00:16:45
Speaker
thinking of parents, it's clear that parental care creates that space, I guess, for players. So perhaps that's why part of why it's much more recognisable in some species rather than others. Right. I think parental care provided a buffer the animals in a way from having to deal with a lot of the serious issues that for survival on their own.
00:17:12
Speaker
the fifth
00:17:42
Speaker
but we have an animal that's born in
00:17:46
Speaker
Less developed states. I mean the reptiles are really precocious. They have all their functional system Going locomotor and sensory whereas you know like a human baby or a rat pup is born blind and Ears are covered and so on as maybe a number of days before the eyes open before the ears function normally and and and so on so that
00:18:14
Speaker
then the parents providing the food and protection and a warm, safe place. But they're in a relatively boring area, and as they're developing, they have their behaviors that are the instinctive kind of mechanisms or behavior systems that are going to need to
00:18:42
Speaker
exploit for survival. They're ready to go. And so in that environment, they're going to be start practicing or playing or want to do something because it's important to keep the body moving. And that's, so we have to, we talk about what, what is play for. We have to distinguish between the delayed benefits, you know, the
00:19:10
Speaker
idea about the practicing for future, you know, the fighting ability or forging skills, or the immediate functions of play in providing exercise, getting the heart moving, sensory motor coordination, and those kinds of things. So we have mostly immediate and delayed functions of play.
00:19:39
Speaker
And often we don't recognize the need to distinguish those. Yeah. And it's interesting what you said.
Evolutionary Perspectives on Play
00:19:50
Speaker
It's interesting how the fragility of certain species creates this kind of duty of parental care or the necessity of parental care. And that opens the space for play. And at least from a human perspective, that seems like a very good thing. I'd say in general.
00:20:10
Speaker
humans, we have a very positive view of play. However, I did want to point out that I think your definition leaves out any kind of valence there. It doesn't say play is positive or negative. It's just if you fit these criteria, it counts as play. But you're not making any kind of argument for play being beneficial, even adaptively.
00:20:39
Speaker
Right, it could have no real function at all. And that's what I talk about, primary play, process play versus secondary versus tertiary process play, which I think maybe is sort of an evolutionary trajectory that play has taken.
00:20:58
Speaker
so that it has become, I think, quite important and maybe essential for us becoming human in a way and our cognitive skills and emotional
00:21:16
Speaker
complexity may be really due to playful. And maybe talk us through that. So I guess primary play is almost like those proximate causes. What sparks it in the first place? And it might be, like you say, boredom in an animal, which has just got an excess of resources and energy.
00:21:44
Speaker
you know, it's testing out its instincts. So that would be sort of at the, I guess, least adaptive or useful. It's more or less just an outlet. Right. This was the basis of the surplus energy theory of play off in the 19th century. Schiller and Spencer and some of those people, which was then attacked by other people who
00:22:14
Speaker
have the practice theory that will play really with practice for serious adult behavior. And both of them ignored the functions, immediate functions of play, what it provides for the animals emotionally and in terms of physical development. But it is true that
00:22:44
Speaker
behavior can manifest itself in many different ways. But the surplus energy idea was one of the things that was a spark in my mind. But I thought it was more than just energy, metabolic energy. It was also the resources. So time is a resource. So that's why the parental care provides the space.
00:23:14
Speaker
And animals that can do more things with their body have a richer instinctive repertoire of behaviors. You're going to find more play in animals that can do more things with their bodies. And I started my career focusing on snake behavior and snakes.
00:23:39
Speaker
really have some limitations, right? They don't have limbs. They don't have mobile faces and things like that. And so I discovered samples of play in lizards are very closely related to snakes. But there's not too many good examples that we can identify as play in snakes. There are some. But
00:24:09
Speaker
They have fewer ways of fitting those criteria. Right. I guess maybe the onus is sort of on us to see. They could actually be quite playful, but it might just be very hard to recognize, I suppose. The play could be extremely subtle, or maybe even
00:24:34
Speaker
more or less invisible, like be kind of internal. I don't know. Well, one of my ideas has been that in child studies, they talk about pretend play and pretense and socio-dramatic play and imagination. And I think that
00:25:04
Speaker
These may have developed out of physical play So that we get to the point that we don't have to actually We do the behaviors we can mentally Rehearse them. Yeah, you know minds so we can say I Want to find the best way home driving home I can Imagine well if I go this way well, there's a traffic light there. There's
00:25:33
Speaker
maybe congestion there on the roads. And so I don't have to actually do it and then learn through trial and error, like an amaze, which is the best way home. But I can make a mental map and then explore that. And I think play can provide the resources for animals
00:26:04
Speaker
still have the mental capacity to internalize and so have mental play and so imagination pretense come out of
00:26:19
Speaker
of that behavior. Yeah, I think it's really interesting how a lot of play does seem to involve imitation. I mean, one of your criteria is repetition, and one often sees, you know, children, but also animals kind of imitating other animals, older animals, but with variation. So it's almost like, and that's very similar to what happens when we're thinking about things like your example of driving home,
00:26:49
Speaker
one has this internalized model of the world where you're making changes. But perhaps the entry point to that is a more external behavior where you might, another example would be role reversal, where one animal pretends to take to the role of another or play fighting where
00:27:18
Speaker
animal handicaps, it's self handicaps. And all these things are sort of, I guess, variations or changes of our normal patterns of behavior, kind of explorations that maybe can laser be internalized, like you say. Right. Well, you brought up some of these additional criteria that we use for social play that aren't
00:27:45
Speaker
relevant to object play and locomotor play and so on. And that is, as you pointed out, road reversals. An older or a stronger or more skilled person engaging in a game with a child, or you see this in bears, you see this in apes too, will downgrade their ability
00:28:14
Speaker
the the the
00:28:43
Speaker
They take turns being on top and the bottom and pinning each other and so on. But in a serious fighting, you know, there's no, there's no opening for, you know, fun, right? Because you really engage in a serious interaction dealing with a resource that one wants, or they both want, and they're fighting for.
00:29:13
Speaker
Yeah, I just want to compete the come back to your previous thought on the primary, secondary and tertiary roles, just to make sure that was completely closer to folks that. And let me try to state this back, I might get this wrong, but so you have so the primary elements of play might be just you know what what sparks it in in the first place, what gets it off the ground, right? It could be motivational conflicts, for instance. You know, I don't know
00:29:43
Speaker
the the
00:30:02
Speaker
doing something others. So that's a mild stress, a conflict, and spend your time in a video game. And of course that can become sort of destructive for the individual or socially, just like play that may be fun and socially engaging, like can turn into serious gambling and where people lose resources or
00:30:33
Speaker
you know, the blue zone can lose everything. And so play can turn into an addiction in a way. So I guess that's the primary cause of the forms of what gets the ball rolling. But then then the second real ones, which
00:31:00
Speaker
are sort of where the play becomes adaptively sustaining, I suppose, in that it owns or sort of keeps the eye in, maintains, yeah. That's the one I'm looking for. So this is what I call secondary process play, where the play has a role in maintaining the system. And we know, for instance,
00:31:30
Speaker
in the right
00:31:56
Speaker
They really can't deal with it because they needed light experience to maintain the visual system. And that can also work with the motor system. And so this is where these immediate effects of play may
00:32:23
Speaker
are taking the process so that when the animal is moving and engaging in play, what it's doing is not so important as the fact that it's doing something, that it's engaging in complex behavior, perceptual motor coordination, and so on.
Creativity and Expertise Through Play
00:32:44
Speaker
He's kind of exercising. He takes skills. And an old fellow like me, we're
00:32:53
Speaker
Mostly be active right and exercise and so on which is much better for me if I'm playing pickleball or something That's you know enjoyable that's play But the function is that it keeps your heart Going and maintains. It's not giving me skill to become a you know champion or but it's just maintaining my systems and so I think a lot of play can be
00:33:23
Speaker
a way of maintaining the behavior systems of the cardiovascular system, the muscular system, the perceptual coordination systems and so on. And then tertiary play is the play where it actually helps you move to another level of expertise. And this is where
00:33:51
Speaker
what we call creativity may come in, or it helps you get another level of social abilities in dealing with people and helps with your imagination or creativity. Scientists and artists, I think, are known for tertiary
00:34:23
Speaker
like dealing with things and coming up with new hypotheses, new ideas. And you have to do that by combining different elements and that sort of a playful kind of activity. Yeah, yeah. From that to this point that the definition sort of
00:34:51
Speaker
these criteria sort of remove our blinkers and allow us to look further afield from animals. Do you have any particularly favorite examples of play perhaps in unexpected species or places? Well the Komodo dragon is one of my favorites. We had some here at the zoo and we studied them at the national zoo but also in our local zoo here in Knoxville and
00:35:21
Speaker
They just like to put pails and boxes and stuff on their heads and walk around with them. And that was really amazing to me. And I think I have some ideas where it comes from, but orangutans and apes are known for putting things on their heads, cabbages and stuff like that. And, uh,
00:35:51
Speaker
you know, whatever they can put, they like to put things on their head and walk around with them. And, but here you see the Komodo dragon doing that. And it's intentionally depriving itself of the ability to see. Yeah, that doesn't seem useful. So most animals wouldn't want to do that, right? Because they're prey, but the Komodo dragon being the sort of the king of the island,
00:36:21
Speaker
doesn't have much fear that he's going to be attacked, perhaps. And so engaging in that behavior is, I've never seen it in other lists. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I've seen some videos of a very famous Komodo dragon playing with your shoe as well.
00:36:50
Speaker
Well, I have two questions. One is, do you still have that shoe? And secondly, I was curious to know, yeah, why might Komodo dragons want to put things on their heads? Yeah. Well, no, I don't have the shoe. But I think that these animals are, they bring down, you know, a Komodo Drake can bring down a water buffalo.
00:37:19
Speaker
bigger than several. And as it sits there, it attracts many other animals, other dragons, and they come in a communal sort of feast, and they tear it apart, and they have to put their head deep into the carcass to get the food and the bones.
00:37:50
Speaker
And that sort of, you know, when you're putting something in like that, you're not, you know, you're blinding yourself and so on. And yet you have to do that to get the food. And so I think that this playful behavior with the pails and boxes derives from their need to sort of put their
00:38:20
Speaker
heads deep into a carcass to get food. So it comes out, I think multiply behaviors originate in a behavior system that's evolved behavior system or instinct is sometimes called instinctive systems. Yeah. So it's as if we animals
00:38:46
Speaker
have this kind of compulsion to do certain things for adaptive purposes. But then play is doing those same things, but as you say, it's functioning complete, or structurally different from the actual useful behavior. And that's sort of the start of this pyramid that
00:39:07
Speaker
then they later create some adaptive behavior. You might discover, oh, actually doing this is useful. This helps me survive and procreate. Yeah, yeah, that's really fascinating. On the subject of reptiles, I know you're a passionate advocate for reptiles and for trying to
00:39:35
Speaker
argue for a better understanding of them.
Unique Perspectives of Different Species
00:39:38
Speaker
You mentioned earlier how they don't have facial expressions. They don't have ears that can sort of droop, let us know that they're unhappy or smiles. They don't scream or laugh. So it's very hard for humans, I think, to empathize or understand the world of reptiles.
00:40:05
Speaker
How do we go about improving that with reptiles and in general? How do we go about better understanding and moving away from our anthropocentric viewpoint if we should do that? Well, I think that it is very important we need to move away from being anthropocentric and anthropomorphic in uncritical sense.
00:40:32
Speaker
And one of the ways is by observing the animals and doing experiments to see what stimulates them, what are their, what's their perceptual world, what's important to them, their unveiled. And we all have our own
00:40:54
Speaker
those the environment around us that is salient and as meaning to us, but it can vary between different species in the same environment or fly a dog a human in the same environment maybe find different things that are salient but different humans in the same environment and
00:41:21
Speaker
due to their past experiences, their age, their gender, whatever, may find different things salient and respond differently to stimuli. So we assume that something that's painful to me would be painful to you, but that's not locked in as a certainty.
00:41:48
Speaker
But since we share the same species, we assume those things. But it's taste, for instance, and food preferences are a good example where people can have very great differences
00:42:09
Speaker
and saying something is good, something tastes bad, and if you're both the same species, right? And I found early on in my work with snakes even that they have even the snakes from the same litter, brothers and sisters had different food preferences right at birth. And so these are evolved types of systems that go back to way back in time.
00:42:40
Speaker
Yeah, I want to. Yeah, I mentioned again, or this this or go over the the the oomvault of this concept introduced by Jacob on a skill skill, difficult name. Yeah, it's such a beautiful idea, and it's been around for for quite a long time, and it's in some ways very simple. It's just, you know, we have to understand that each
00:43:09
Speaker
Each animal has its own sensory way of perceiving the world. And I suppose, as you say, depend not only on their sense equipment, but maybe their experience of the world as well. And it seems so simple, but I think it does move us away from, I guess what I want to say is
00:43:33
Speaker
one sometimes thinks of anthropomorphism as just describing intentionality and emotions to animals, but it's actually much broader than that. It's like you said, it might just be ascribing to them similar tastes and preferences as us. For example, like we might be puzzled why, you know,
00:43:56
Speaker
lizards might seem particularly docile and slow, but it might be because we've got them in a room at human room temperature, not at the preferred room temperature of a lizard. And just another example, I think we see slowness as a sign of unintelligence. But of course,
00:44:16
Speaker
Clotus isn't anything to do with intelligence. It's to do with how fast you process things. One can imagine, just as a thought experiment, an extremely intelligent lizard or animal that just takes a long time to come up with answers because it's just moving at a different metabolic pace. It's living on a different time scale as it were. That's very important. I feel like
00:44:46
Speaker
It was a revelation to me just reading some of your comments on anthropomorphism that it's much broader than just looking at intentions and emotions and describing them or not ascribing them to animals.
00:45:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, perhaps you can, I know there's been some interesting examples where, for example, with play, because we don't study necessarily the animal in their kind of natural preferred environment, we might miss things. I'm thinking particularly here of amphibians. I don't know if you have some examples there. Amphibians? Yeah, I would say turtles and things. Oh, turtles.
00:45:30
Speaker
Yeah, big face of course was the first one that I really studied, first reptile that I really studied and we got a lot of videos. And it was a big, very big turtle, very old male turtle. And in a concrete aquarium, I mean, couldn't do too much. And it was starting to,
00:45:58
Speaker
Self-mutilated self and scratch and you know and the keeper got very concerned about this He said well, maybe the animals bored and so he Started putting in balls and hoops and hoses and things for the animal to engage with and he really Did so and The level of self-abuse you might say went way down
00:46:28
Speaker
So that was one of the first inklings that these animals, A, could get bored just because they're sort of, you know, the zoo. And you see them sort of sitting there doing nothing like a museum diorama.
Play in Captive Animals and its Misinterpretations
00:46:48
Speaker
That doesn't mean that that's what their life is really like. They can be very active.
00:46:55
Speaker
and so on. And you pointed out the role of temperature, for instance, having the proper temperature and humidity and other features for many of these animals are very important for their survival. And we're doing much better with keeping amphibians, frogs, salamanders, and reptiles in captivity
00:47:21
Speaker
essentially developed some really sophisticated ways of controlling things like temperature, humidity, raising the proper types of food, keeping it on the right environment. So that's very important. But in the frogs, what I saw was wrestling.
00:47:51
Speaker
These are poison frogs, which are a diurnal frog, which most frogs are not eternal, and secretive, and they're very prone to be predated. But these poison frogs are very toxic, brightly colored, and signal to other animals that don't mess with us because, you know, it's not good.
00:48:22
Speaker
These animals, and others had found too, would hop around and engage in wrestling behavior and doing various things that if you saw them in the rats, rat pups that were doing all this play fighting, you'd call it play. But the herpetologists weren't calling it play, they were calling it
00:48:50
Speaker
non-agonistic fighting, something like that, serious fighting, which really played, because they know that there was no injuries or wasn't serious. And so that was sort of a, what blinders were that, well, frogs can't play, or maybe they can't play, therefore it's got to be something else. Yeah. There's a kind of, you've commented on,
00:49:19
Speaker
anthropomorphism by omission, which I kind of think of almost as anti-anthropomorphism, that one assumes that there are certain things that are kind of uniquely human or maybe mammalian like play. And so they just can't exist in other species or other kingdoms. And so one sort of
00:49:45
Speaker
We can sometimes go too much in the opposite direction away from anthropomorphism. And in your story about pig face, you mentioned that the keeper thought, well, this animal is bought. And again, to many that will seem a very human emotional attitude. But
00:50:07
Speaker
it seems like he was right. And so actually, sometimes we ought to describe these kind of human, what we think of as quite human characteristics. Well, that was the background for my concept of critical anthropomorphism. Yes. And where we don't deny that we are animals too, and that we have emotions and feelings and responses to environments. And those can be clues to how another animal might also
00:50:37
Speaker
another species might also respond to that environment. It doesn't prove anything, but it gives the insight that, hey, maybe this is also happening with this other animal. And so the herpetologist named Dale Marcellini, who was trained with one of the leading reptile ethologists, Charles Carpenter, really had
00:51:07
Speaker
you know insight to say, hey, maybe it's bored, you know, that was, uh, and, um, so if it's bored, what do you do? You give an animal something to, to do to just like concrete, you know, Tom basically, uh, and, uh, turn, you know, for now to be, uh, uh,
00:51:36
Speaker
help the animal individually, it's welfare, but also broke open the...
00:51:50
Speaker
the limitations on where we see play. And then there was old stories about playing fish. And again, they were all dismissed. And this was before there was good video and things like this. So it's all anecdotes and stories that people could dismiss. But now we got lots of good video and examples.
00:52:20
Speaker
of a play in all these other animals. It's not nearly as common as in mammals and birds, but it pops up throughout the animal kingdom in many places. And so I think that it's when the certain set of criteria and the animals' biological features permit
00:52:51
Speaker
plague is one of the behaviors that emerges. Yeah, that's interesting. So it seems that it's not, would it be right to say that it's not evolved at a single point? It's not homologous, but it's, it pops up, like you say, and it seems to have popped up independently in all over the place. Yeah.
Play's Evolutionary Independence and Civilization Impact
00:53:14
Speaker
In fact, that it occurs in invertebrates as well as vertebrates. Yeah.
00:53:20
Speaker
They split off, you know, how many hundreds of billions of years ago? Million two years ago With animals that probably did not play at all
00:53:36
Speaker
yet independently seems to ever have a reason. Yeah, so we see it optimally. I have a very speculative question here. The next person that I'll be interviewing is Sean MacMahon, who's an astrobiologist. And obviously, there's no ethology in astrobiology yet, because we've not discovered anything. There's no aliens.
00:54:02
Speaker
whose behavior we can study. But let's speculate that we find an alien species, and not only that, we find an intelligent one. The most likely scenarios we find some bacteria or something like that. But let's suppose we meet an intelligent species.
00:54:25
Speaker
Completely alien. Do you think it's likely that we'll see play, or we would see play in that species? Well, that's a very interesting question and scenario. What would these organisms look like? I remember going back to the War of the Worlds.
00:54:55
Speaker
you know, with these aliens from Mars, you know. So we have difficulty entering the world of other animals on this planet. And a completely alien life form, we have to find out a lot more, like what do they eat or how do they survive and all these things that
00:55:24
Speaker
And we need to have what in ethology we would call the ethogram, a good descriptive categorization of the elements of their behavior and the context in which they occur and the sequences and so on. And that's why a lot of, for a lot of animals, we do not know how they play or if they play because you just don't know enough about them at all.
00:55:54
Speaker
They've been so a little studied. I think that's a duly cautious answer. I would love to believe that play could occur across the space-time continuum. Again, the lovely thing about the criteria is
00:56:22
Speaker
It doesn't require that that species of arms or legs or whatever, it can still play. And I do wonder, what makes me wonder is that, if we're not only supposed to suppose that the species was intelligent, but that it had some kind of civilization and technology and so forth, I kind of feel that maybe play is
00:56:47
Speaker
that kind of tertiary play, that tertiary process of play, is almost, it might be a necessary building block to get there. You might really need to mess around with things and reconfigure things in that playful, creative way where, you know, there's no clear
00:57:07
Speaker
There's no clear purpose to it. The purpose is quite far off. So it's not functionally complete. You're repeating yourself, but trying variations. You're doing it for pleasure. So it feels like to get there, play might be quite an important step on the journey. Right. No, I think if we could find it in alien life forms, that would
00:57:37
Speaker
really cement the idea that play is an extremely important means for organisms of mankind to evolve and to develop, to be complex and intelligent and so on.
00:58:08
Speaker
again emphasise that there's certain movements which really promote play very strongly, like the kindergarten movement, which I think is a wonderful thing, for example. But you give some great examples of the fact that play can be, you know, it's not necessarily a good thing.
00:58:33
Speaker
Perhaps it could move civilization forward, but it could also it can be regressive you mentioned how it can turn into addictions and it can become compulsive and. And also, even where it's not compulsive there might be.
00:58:49
Speaker
There's quite an old example in your book of, I think it's Edward Thompson, who talks about a sparrow dropping stones on a poor toad, or who's stuck in a fence post hole. Not cruelty and torture can be from the perpetrators viewpoint play, not from the victims. Same thing with teasing and bullying. Often the
00:59:18
Speaker
the the
00:59:49
Speaker
or she is doing. Yeah, I think it's important to, yeah, that we keep this in mind because there can be a danger of maybe over prioritizing play. And sometimes one needs to have other forms of learning, for example, I think. Yeah, it's interesting as well. I mean, there's, when I think of play fighting,
01:00:18
Speaker
in contrast to that sparrow and toad example, there's often like a kind of ritual, which like a dog's bowing, which both dogs kind of sign up to the play fight and signal to each other with this, this meta communication. I find that example, sorry. Yeah, that's another one of the signs of social play are these play signals that only occur in a playful context. And the play bow is one that's been very highly
01:00:51
Speaker
studied particularly by Marc Beckoff who's one of the early play scholars who focused on tainted play and the signal and of course you know about the tail wagging and so on but the play bow is interspersed within the wrestling and so on
01:01:15
Speaker
to play about. And there are some animals that have vocalizations, for instance, that only occurred during play. And I raised bear cubs for a while and were very playful, but they made no sound during play. Play got pretty rough and they got annoyed maybe with each other. Then you would start hearing a little growl or a little whimper or a little sound. And then you knew that
01:01:46
Speaker
One of the participants was getting a little annoyed or tired or wasn't that playful for them anymore.
01:01:58
Speaker
but play itself was always silent. But that's not true with other animals. So you have to know the species that you're dealing with. You can't make a statement that, well, play is quiet or play is noisy.
Interspecific Play and Its Implications for Diversity
01:02:13
Speaker
Kids play. There's an old paper on glee and kids. Really funny little paper on the
01:02:29
Speaker
the the
01:02:40
Speaker
What's funny about the dog-sparing example is, to me, that almost seems something that does work across species. Because when one looks at martial arts, it's always begins and ends with a bow. So the striking thing there is actually that seems to have, that tradition seems to have somehow evolved separately in very, very different contexts.
01:03:10
Speaker
one can see that about is kind of a position of deference and, you know,
01:03:19
Speaker
One opens oneself up there because you can't quite see everything. So it kind of makes sense that in both species, actually, it serves this role as a market, perhaps. But yeah, on the other hand, like you say, if you're playing with children, it can be a great sign if they're making lots of noise. But a great tip if you're playing with bears, when they start making noise, you might want to slow it down or call it off.
01:03:48
Speaker
And another thing that I've been interested in recently is play. We play with dogs and cats and other animals. They play with us, right? But animals play with each other. And so I've been very interested in interspecific play. Right.
01:04:11
Speaker
and others have also because that indicates how alien species can understand each other and engage in play fighting, you know, wrestling and chasing games. And so there's some beautiful examples out there of a cat and a turtle playing tag.
01:04:41
Speaker
the the the
01:05:09
Speaker
a rabbit and a dog playing with a dog. I mean, things that you would not expect animals that are probably maybe raised together or get to learn that, you know, out of danger to each other. And yet, and so they can start to signal and appreciate what the other one is signaling and that this is
01:05:37
Speaker
meant to be a fun or rewarding in some way encounter. So there are many examples of birds playing with dogs. I mean, it's just amazing. We have a paper that came out this year on that.
01:06:05
Speaker
I recently retired and I'm starting to go through all my old films and things. And one thing that I did many years ago at Knoxville Zoo was raise a lion cub. All of a sudden the zoo, which was more of a menagerie here in Knoxville at that time. Now it's a very good zoo. The lions got head cubs and they didn't know what to do with them. And so Jack Hanna and I, there were two cubs that called Megan Amy.
01:06:34
Speaker
and Jack Hanna, who later became a zoo director and well-known TV personality, took one of the cubs and I took the other one home and raised it in our yard and I would take it out in the yard and it got much bigger than any cat. And one day
01:06:57
Speaker
The neighbor's dog came, there were no fences in our yards, came over and I discovered I had this film of the dog and the lion playing with each other, rustling and so on. And they immediately could understand the signals and the intention that it wasn't, you know,
01:07:25
Speaker
adversarial type of process at all. And that's sort of, I think, pretty remarkable for us to think about how animals that are so different can somehow appreciate this.
01:07:46
Speaker
Yeah. With a dog and a human, well, they're domesticated with this so long and so blah, blah, blah, to explain why they will play with us. But when animals of different species play with each other, it's telling us something I think pretty profound about behavior and how we interact.
01:08:15
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. When a dog and a turtle do not live in the same, you know, at least naturally, not in the same kind of habitats, and probably wouldn't have anything to do with one another able to interact in such what seems such a complex, you know, almost ritualistic way, it is
01:08:39
Speaker
That does seem strangely optimistic. If I can think back to the extraterrestrial alien species again, one hopes that should that ever happen, I think it's unlikely in our lifetimes, but should that happen, we'd find players a way of getting along on some kind of common ground there.
01:08:59
Speaker
I think that's a, that's a duly optimistic point to end on. I wonder if you want to share any final thoughts or message to the world, as it were.
Encouraging Play for Child Development
01:09:11
Speaker
Well, just that I think being playful and giving kids in particular opportunities for recess and for being outdoors and getting into nature, that's where too many
01:09:26
Speaker
children are not getting the experiences that I had and other people our generation had growing up because you know there's dangers out there and there's pics and there's you know germs and enemies and you know bad people which is sort of true and we need to deal with that but we
01:09:49
Speaker
need to let kids get out and be kids and climb trees and explore things. And there was some really interesting work being done by a variety of researchers on children's play and importance of play and what the consequences may be of not allowing kids to play in terms of providing resilience, helping them deal with things that felt outright.
01:10:19
Speaker
There's an important theory there about play as a way of dealing with misfortune or misadventures. By brisky play, balancing things and climbing and so on, and you learn how to deal with things that don't work out. Sometimes, you know, accidents can happen that may be serious, but relatively rarely.
01:10:45
Speaker
It's important to learn how to fail in a relatively safe context. Yeah, I think that's a lovely message. Thank you so much, Gordon.
01:10:58
Speaker
It's often hard on this podcast because I talk to people who've done so many things and you've clearly done so much, not just on play, but with reptiles and bringing the unvelts into the discourse as well. So I feel like we've just scratched the surface of all your research, but it's been lovely. OK, well, I enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.
01:11:36
Speaker
you