Isn't this true for all animals? How does a cat know that he is a cat? He never sees himself in a mirror but somehow knows that he is like other cats. I understand that they observe other cats' behavior, but how does he know initially that he is like other cats without seeing himself. This must be something innate. Also for birds mentioned in the article, they must know innately that they are cowbirds.
Cats are social animals. Kittens learn a lot from play fighting with each other.
A lone cat can survive but they behave differently than a cat raised with peers. You can also tell a difference if a cat is raised among dogs. Kittens are friendly and will socialize with most creatures until a certain age where their disposition changes to be a bit more reserved.
Years ago, a neighbor of mine had a young pit bull dog -- well, two actually. But the dog in question had been raised by a cat. So one day I'm leaning on the chainlink fence talking to my neighbor. A grey tomcat I had at the time beside me, the neighbor's pit bull beside him. As soon as the dog saw my cat, he laid down with his nose pressed to the fence, beseechingly whimpering for attention from my cat. Cat stood back about a foot from the fence doing cat stuff, hissing, arching his back, and pressing against my leg for a sense of security. The cat was clearly puzzled. Funny, but intriguing. The dog, however, was very comfortable with other dogs as well, but the cat really took him someplace emotionally, almost like he was seeking to re-experience the feeling of being a coddled puppy/kitten again.
On the flip side, we had a cat when I was growing up that had been reared by our dog, and must have been separated from its mom and all other cats at a very young age. The dog had recently had puppies at that stage, and they had all been given away. So, she thought that this was a weird looking puppy that had come back. She dearly loved that puppykitten.
That cat never learned how to meow. It would open its mouth, there would be silence for a few seconds, and then there would be a tiny squeak. It was clearly trying to bark, and failing. Every time.
Fortunately, that cat did learn how to use a litter box. But she never tried to run outdoors.
<<<Fortunately, that cat did learn how to use a litter box. But she never tried to run outdoors.<<<
This is hard wired cat behaviour. Big cats do this too. They dig and bury because they are predators and don’t want to leave their wee/poo scent trail.
Domestic cats do this too. Except the parasite in cat’s urine makes rats lose their fear instinct and makes them suicidal..thereby luring them to the waiting hungry cat’s maw.
[..]Researchers have known for a few years that a rat infected with Toxoplasma loses its natural response to cat urine and no longer fears the smell. And they know that the parasite settles in the rat’s amygdala, the part of the brain that processes fear and emotions. Now a new study in the journal PLoS ONE adds another bizarre piece to the tale: When male rats infected with Toxoplasma smell cat urine, they have altered activity in the fear part of the brain as well as increased activity in the part of the brain that is responsible for sexual behavior and normally activates after exposure to a female rat.[..]
I'm not quite sure what sort of mental model one must have to pose such a question (maybe some sort of reincarnation-like spirituality where all animals and humans have the same soul/spirit substance that after birth has to figure out what kind of animal it was slotted into this time?).
How does a rock know to be a rock? Why doesn't it get confused and become water?
A cat doesn't need to know that it "is a cat". It just has a cat brain and a cat body, so it does cat stuff.
Of course, there is some learned behavior, parental socialization and some "culture"-like practices is certain species, but it's not like cats may forget "how to cat". Do you think a fish may get confused and suddenly forget to be a fish and instead act like a mouse?
Questions like these were mostly answered decades ago, at least operationally.
Broadly, most of behaviour is more-or-less mechanical, stimulus-reponse chains, while some behaviour has a "transmitted" component (aka "culture"), but learning is itself generally of the first order (like how children learn to walk and talk automatically); and then there is third-degree learning: the learning process itself comes to be self-reflexively the subject of culture, and this seems to be somehow the essence or crux of what differentiates humans from animals.
> "In laboratory experiments, cowbirds and other brood parasites that spend too much time with their foster families end up learning their host species’ songs, picking up their behaviors, and attempting to mate with them."
Clearly, this would be an evolutionary dead end for the cowbird species as such mating attempts would be unlikely to result in viable offspring. The reason that doesn't happen appears to be that cowbird parents and their offspring maintain a kind of distant relationship until maturity.
As usual, some people jump on these issues to promote their various ideologies, be it 'biological determinism' or 'social constructionism'. Notably the psychologists and politicans (i.e. German fascism promoted genetic determinism, Russian communism promoted phenotypic plasticity) are the ones who came up with these simplistic one-dimensional concepts, reality being far more complex in every case.
I believe it is actually entirely education and socialization.
I have seen or read plenty online about animal pups that were raised by a different species. And I also remember there being a famous case of a human that was raised by wolves.
