Understanding Behaviour:From Crickets to Elephants

‘Scientists have reported that elephants grieve their dead, monkeys perceive injustice and cockatoos like to dance to the music of the Backstreet Boys’ writes Hal Herzog in his 2010 book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals. Behaviour is ubiquitous across the animal kingdom and has been a source of endless fascination for thinkers. Philosophers and ethologists have studied behaviour in a variety of living organisms, from microscopic cells to complex mammals, for almost half a decade now. Veteran ethologists Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, and Nikolaas Tinbergen received the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their studies on animal behaviour. Since then, the field has grown manifolds with researchers all over the world studying different aspects of behaviour, using tools as diverse as microscopy, field observations and computational analysis.