What is Ethology?

Ethology is the branch of science that studies the behavior of animals, including humans. Rituals such as obedience, disobedience, mating, domination, leadership, etc., can be identified through the analysis of the movements that a particular group performs daily.

Throughout this research, biologists can analyze, identify, and describe body and facial movements (in more developed animals, such as hominids) to understand the social formation and development of a particular species in its habitat, to understand correlations between animals of the same species, and between animals of different species in abiotic environments.

Studies of animal behavior divide the causes of any behavioral movement into two groups: those related to the activity of internal and physiological development systems, and those related to issues of adaptive value and historical review.

Behavioral observations are made in the habitat where the specimen to be analyzed is identified, and rarely outside environments (such as laboratories and zoos) and habitats where it is confined, as it is believed that only research in the natural environment can truly demonstrate social behavior.

In captivity, animals tend to perform conditioned exercises, which can affect researchers’ interpretations and lead to research errors. After interpreting the results, it is possible to verify if these conclusions are used by caretakers of captive animals, as they can show, for example, that if the animal is stressed and allowing the caregiver to intervene in the behavior prevents the ritual from endangering the survival of the animal or the herd.

Analyzing animal behavior is a process as old as human existence, as our ancestors observed the movements of other animals: obtaining food, avoiding a certain food group, protecting themselves from predators, then domesticating and raising some groups of animals to survive, protect crops and herds, cattle, sheep, and more.

Charles Darwin was the first biologist to develop and describe ethology as animal behavior (including Humans – The Book: Emotional Expression in People and Animals), and he believes that the behavior expressed today is one of the influencers of evolutionary natural selection. Some of the behaviors observed in evolved species are conditioned responses to what our ancestors experienced.

For example, even today, babies pull the hair of those who approach them, which is associated with their behavior of clinging to parents during displacement.

Behavioral research is attractive to fields beyond zoology and is used even in the analysis of human behavior. Although this research is as old as that developed by Darwin, it is only in the 20th and 21st centuries that this type of research related to human activity and developed by psychologists, marketers, sellers, and anthropologists has become common.

One of the main reasons these specialists use ethology is to understand repetitive behaviors in order to identify and classify them to develop tools to classify, for example, common behaviors in psychopaths, understand how relationships develop, directions of interest or not in a particular object, society’s structure, patterns of responses to certain actions and reactions, etc.