Robin Abrahams, our psychology editor, writes in Salon: “What kind of a pet owner voluntarily submits her dog for laboratory experiments? The kind who very much hoped that the scientists would give out bumper stickers that read, “My Dog Is an Honor Student at the Harvard Canine Cognition Lab,” that’s who. Now that the academic […]
Tag: animals
Body Mass Index (BMI),1901
This 1901 image, from the Scientific American Reference Book published in 1905, is in a tangential way a forerunner to the biomedical concept, refined years later, called Body Mass Index (BMI). It shows the collective body mass of several kinds of farm animals raised in the United States with that of the Eiffel Tower and […]
Self-Control in the Chicken
“Can Domestic Fowl, Gallus gallus domesticus, Show Self-Control?” S.M. Abeyesinghe, C.J. Nicol, S.J. Hartnell, and C.M. Wathes, Animal Behaviour, vol. 70, no. 1, July 2005, pp. 1–11. The authors, at the Silsoe Research Institute in Bedford, U.K. and at the University of Bristol, report [AIR 16:1]: An important aspect of cognition is whether animals live […]
“Watching animals not have sex”
“I’ve spent a lot of my career watching animals not have sex.” —University of California Riverside biologist Marlene Zuk, quoted in the New York Times Magazine article “Can Animals be Gay?” NOTE: For reasons unclear (perhaps reflecting the persistent influence of puritanism?), the Times article does not mention Kees Moeliker’s Ig Nobel Prize-winning study “The […]