Joseph Garner Animals Quotations

Behavior is like an organ as much as a lung or a heart is. Like an organ, behavior highly affects us, and it's the animal's first and last resort for defense. Animals change their behavior in order to meet challenges in the environment.

There is a lot of merit in studying abnormal behaviors just in terms of figuring out ways to control them for the welfare of both companion animals and those bred for production agriculture. Another benefit is that if animal abnormal behavior is caused in the same way as in humans, then we may have a whole new range of model animals for studying human mental disorders.

A lot of the time I will go in a room and see that three or four animals right next door to each other are feather pickers, but that doesn't mean that they've learned it from each other. We wondered if unsocial things in the environment might be responsible for this apparent clumping of behavior.