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Article: Are dogs people too? Animal behaviour.(Animals have personality too)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- February 26, 2005
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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And now to found my cult
Animal personalities are as clear-cut and distinctive as human ones
SOMETIMES it takes science a while to prove the obvious. Any dog owner could tell you that dogs have personalities, and could describe that of their own pooch. And to be fair to the science of animal behaviour, that would also have been true of any researcher in the field 70 or 80 years ago. But the creed of behaviourism, which began to take over the subject in the 1930s, eschewed such sentimentality. In an attempt to bring rigour to the field, animals were thought of as machines (which, in a sense, they are). The analogy, however, was pushed too far, and became ...