Some Fun Anti-Social Livestock Behavior
Egg Eating. Chickens, being chickens, are unfamiliar with anatomy. They do not realize certain facts about themselves and their loved ones. Your average chicken is not born with the knowledge that her own eggs are edible. If a chicken sees enough broken eggs though her tiny chicken mind gears up. Chickens love to eat egg yolks as who doesn't, and once they learn that eggs break, there is no stopping them. Try to kill any chicken who eats an egg because she will do it again and spread her bad habit to the other hens. Maybe off her in front of the other chickens to make an example?
Beehive Robbing. Okay this is my favorite antisocial animal behavior. If you are a beekeeper, apparently your bees will sometimes get this antisocial tic. Instead of going out and foraging for nectar themselves, in an area understandably dense with bees, the bees of one hive will just break into a neighboring hive and steal their honey. This is full of parallels to human etc. and even better this is not a learned behavior. It can be bred into or out of bee strains. Oh if it were only so easy in mankind. Insects are like tiny robots that are better than us in every way.
Sheep Escapism. I just read about this one. Stiles are a favorite topic of mine and maybe I will write about them later. A simple kind of stile, for when an arbitrarily wide road needs to pass through a fence, is just a deep ditch, with steel bars running perpendicular to the roadbed. The cars can drive over them like going over railroad tracks. Of course hoofed animals can't balance on the narrow bars, and thus can't cross. Outstanding. I cannot think of a good substitute for this kind of baffle.
Some sheep, however, have learned to cross these stiles by lying on their backs and lurching like a very happy dog until they have worked themselves over. Needless to say, they can learn this behavior from one another, and once one sheep has figured it out it becomes impossible to keep them in their meadow. I can only imagine the frustration of a sheep farmer who has already lost so much business to New Zealand and now this.
Beehive Robbing. Okay this is my favorite antisocial animal behavior. If you are a beekeeper, apparently your bees will sometimes get this antisocial tic. Instead of going out and foraging for nectar themselves, in an area understandably dense with bees, the bees of one hive will just break into a neighboring hive and steal their honey. This is full of parallels to human etc. and even better this is not a learned behavior. It can be bred into or out of bee strains. Oh if it were only so easy in mankind. Insects are like tiny robots that are better than us in every way.
Sheep Escapism. I just read about this one. Stiles are a favorite topic of mine and maybe I will write about them later. A simple kind of stile, for when an arbitrarily wide road needs to pass through a fence, is just a deep ditch, with steel bars running perpendicular to the roadbed. The cars can drive over them like going over railroad tracks. Of course hoofed animals can't balance on the narrow bars, and thus can't cross. Outstanding. I cannot think of a good substitute for this kind of baffle.
Some sheep, however, have learned to cross these stiles by lying on their backs and lurching like a very happy dog until they have worked themselves over. Needless to say, they can learn this behavior from one another, and once one sheep has figured it out it becomes impossible to keep them in their meadow. I can only imagine the frustration of a sheep farmer who has already lost so much business to New Zealand and now this.
posted by apk01004 at 11:28 PM
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