Animals and Humans
Name four ways humans rely on animals.
Food, fiber, research, companionship, service, transportation, sport, entertainment, conservation, or land management.
Which group of animals contributed significantly to the development of the polio vaccine?
Primates
What is evolution?
The process through which populations change over successive generations
What is the difference between a domesticated animal and a tame animal?
Domestication occurs across a population over generations. Taming occurs within an individual animal’s lifetime.
How do genetics and the environment work together to shape animal behavior?
Genetics contributes instincts and inherited tendencies, while the environment, management, and learning affect how behavior develops.
Approximately what percentage of dietary calories comes from animal products in the United States compared with the world overall?
About 27% in the United States and 17% globally
Give two reasons animals are used in research.
To understand how life works, model human biology, model other animals, or advance the health of the species itself.
What is the primary difference between natural and artificial selection?
Nature determines reproductive success in natural selection, while humans choose desired traits in artificial selection.
What is the difference between a feral animal and a wild animal?
A feral animal has domesticated ancestry but lives without human care. A wild animal does not have domesticated ancestry.
Which sense does the vomeronasal, or Jacobson’s, organ enhance, and what does it help animals detect?
Olfaction. It helps detect pheromones and other chemical signals.
After cattle, this animal provides the second-largest share of the world’s milk.
Water buffalo
What animals are not covered by the Animal Welfare Act?
Purpose-bred mice, rats, and some birds
What are the three basic principles of natural selection?
1. Ability to Vary
2. Reproduce in Excess
3. Changing Environment
Put the four phases of domestication in order.
Animal attraction, animal keeping, animal breeding, and intentional selection.
Match each example with its mode of learning:
1. Habituation
2. Classical conditioning
3. Operant learning
4. Imprinting
How did the shift toward a more energy-dense, omnivorous diet affect the human gut, digestion, and brain?
Gut size and digestive effort decreased, while brain size increased.
What are the three R's in research, and what do they represent?
Replacement: Use non-animal alternatives whenever possible.
Reduction: Use the fewest animals necessary to obtain reliable results.
Refinement: Improve procedures to minimize animals’ pain, stress, and discomfort.
Which mechanisms of evolution introduce genetic variation, and which mechanisms act on existing variation?
Mutation and gene flow introduce variation. Natural selection and genetic drift act on existing variation.
What are the three “pushes” toward domestication?
Climate warming, human expansion, and resource depression.
What is an ethogram, and which approach to studying animal behavior commonly uses one?
An ethogram is a catalog of the behaviors an animal displays in its environment. It is commonly used in ethology, which studies animals in their natural or usual surroundings.
A community has land that cannot support crop production and limited access to machinery. Explain two ways animals could help the community.
Animals could graze non-croppable land and convert forage into food or fiber. Draft animals could also provide affordable, renewable labor.
How does the perceived importance of scientific knowledge affect public support for animal research?
As the perceived importance of the research increases, opposition decreases and support increases.
A trait helps an animal survive during a cold period. The climate then becomes much warmer, and the same trait reduces survival. Explain how natural selection could affect the trait over time.
The trait was initially selected for, but the environmental change could cause it to be selected against. Individuals without the trait may survive and reproduce more successfully.
Name four traits that would make a species more suitable for domestication and explain why they would help.
Possible traits include living in social groups, having leaders and followers, promiscuous mating, precocial young, a varied diet, low fear of humans, and low stress during confinement.
What is stereotypic behavior, what may cause it, and how can enrichment affect it?
It is repetitive behavior with no apparent goal or function. It may develop when animals lack physical or social resources. Enrichment can reduce the behavior but may not eliminate it completely.