{"id":57342,"date":"2013-09-24T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T17:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=57342"},"modified":"2013-09-24T13:02:58","modified_gmt":"2013-09-24T18:02:58","slug":"a-sweet-and-a-sad-story-of-animal-nurture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/09\/24\/a-sweet-and-a-sad-story-of-animal-nurture\/","title":{"rendered":"A Sweet and a Sad Story of Animal Nurture"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently across two examples of cross-species education. \u00a0Both illustrate that what we often consider instinctual must also often be learned, revealing that nature and nurture are not competitive forces, but deeply interconnected. \u00a0The first is adorable to the point of making me cry from laughter, the second is so sad I can hardly stand it.<\/p>\n

Here’s the first. \u00a0A sheep tries to teach a young bull how to head butt. \u00a0Words don’t do justice to the care and patience shown by this teacher.<\/p>\n

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Perhaps the bull just isn’t ever going to understand, but the fact that the sheep seems to understand that the bull doesn’t understand, and then thinks of an idea of how to fix that, is amazing to me. \u00a0Presumably, he would take as much care with a young sheep who would be predispositioned for head-butting, but might still benefit from some instruction.<\/p>\n

Here’s the second. \u00a0Remember the movie Free Willy<\/em>, where the captive killer whale is freed by a little boy? \u00a0Well, in true Hollywood irony, the whale that played Willy, Keiko, wasn’t freed at the end of the movie, of course.<\/p>\n

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After the movie was released in 1993, however, people joined in a movement to free him. \u00a0After 22 years in captivity, humans — who count as animals in this story —\u00a0spent a decade and 20 million dollars<\/a>\u00a0trying to rehabilitate him to the wild, attempting to teach him how to feed himself and bond with wild whales. \u00a0He continued to seek out humans, even after he was left to fend for himself, and died in 2003 from pneumonia.<\/p>\n

There are lots of lessons to take from this story. \u00a0One is the importance of nurture in making us what nature intended us to be. \u00a0Keiko was a social individual who learned how to be a captive killer whale. \u00a0Given the opportunity, he never could be the wild killer whale he once had the potential to be. \u00a0Or, at least, we’ll never know if he could.<\/p>\n

Whenever we talk about human biological imperatives, we should remember the patient sheep and the friendly killer whale. \u00a0We need each other to become human, and we can become human in many different ways, depending on what is demanded of us. \u00a0Nature never works alone. Without each other, we simply don’t become recognizably human at all — as one of the worst cases of child neglect<\/a> taught us only too well — regardless of our biological potential.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently across two examples of cross-species education. \u00a0Both illustrate that what we often consider instinctual must also often be learned, revealing that nature and nurture are not competitive forces, but deeply interconnected. \u00a0The first is adorable to the point of making me cry from laughter, the second is so sad I can hardly stand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":57348,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[155,664,15],"class_list":["post-57342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-animals","tag-biology","tag-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/09\/Screenshot_128.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57342"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57347,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57342\/revisions\/57347"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}