Animal Behaviour and Cognition

This is a book review of Tigers Are Our Brothers: Anthropology of Wildlife Conservation in Northeast India, authored by Dr. Ambika Aiyadurai. The review discusses the key themes and takeaways from the book.

In this chapter, we assess the impacts of such transformations on the lives of India’s largest land mammal, the Asian elephant and discuss the adaptations displayed by this species to human-induced change, with a particular focus on how the successful exploitation of rurban agricultural resources has allowed for the appearance of spatially and temporally flexible behavioural innovations that, in turn, have impacted the life-history strategies of a threatened elephant population in a peri-urban region of southern India

This study highlights the importance of understanding behavioural changes displayed by animals in response to human interactions; such knowledge could be crucial for the planning and implementation of management and conservation strategies for endangered species such as the lion-tailed macaque and possibly other wildlife in the increasingly anthropogenic landscapes of the tropical world.

To survive and persist in fragmented, human-dominated landscapes, especially in the Anthropocene, elephants often need to modify their behavior. In this chapter, using empirical data, the authors assess the behavioral adaptability of elephants, as determined by their innate biological variables, such as age, sex, and grouping patterns at the population level, and discuss the impacts of global climatic changes on the behavior and distribution of Asian elephants, as evidenced through their own studies. 

This study investigated factors related to people’s choice of conflict mitigation strategies against commensal monkey species in two regions in india.

This study examines the link between shoaling decisions and behavioural traits in a hatchery reared population of an endangered megafish, the Deccan mahseer (Tor khudree).

This paper proposes a practical framework to assess the spatial reliability of frugivores as seed dispersers and posits that it is essential to maintain viable populations of macaques across their range and keep human interventions at a minimum to ensure that they continue to reliably disperse the seeds of a broad range of plant species in the Anthropocene. It further suggests that this framework be used for assessing the spatial reliability of other taxonomic groups as seed dispersers.

Although animals are the primary focus of studies in human-animal studies (HAS), very few ethologists engage with this discipline. Insights from HAS can help provide a deeper and richer understanding of animal behaviour and humananimal interactions. HAS perspectives regarding animal and human spaces, the sociozoological scale theory, and the concepts of animal agency and intersubjectivity in human-animal interactions help demystify puzzling aspects of human-wildlife conflict scenarios and impel a re-examination of ethological dictums and methodologies. We argue that inputs from human-animal studies will aid in the growth of ethology.

The authors have studied the attitudes and perceptions of forest department personnel regarding the management of human-rhesus macaque conflict (HRMC) in Himachal Pradesh, northern India.

In this commentary, authors identified challenges and opportunities at human-primate interfaces in light of COVID-19, focusing on examples from Asia, and make recommendations for researchers working with wild primates to reduce zoonosis risk and leverage research opportunities.

This study deals with human-wildlife conflict in the form of crop-and livestockdepredation and exploits Conditioned Taste Aversion (CTA) strategy, a non-lethal and effective method to control crop damage caused by vertebrate pests, to reduce crop damage.

In this chapter, using empirical data, the authors assess the behavioural adaptability of elephants, as determined by their innate biological variables, such as age, sex and grouping patterns at the population level. They also discuss the impacts of global climatic changes on the behaviour and distribution of Asian elephants, as evidenced through studies conducted on these aspects.

This study explored the relationships between the personality traits boldness, activity, exploration, and sociability, and lateralized utilisation of brain hemispheres in the hatchery-reared juveniles of Deccan Mahseer (Tor khudree), an endangered megafish inhabiting the rivers of central and southern India.

Increasing anthropogenic pressures has led to the fragmentation of Asian elephant habitats, affecting their numbers, demography and ranging patterns across their range. Baseline information on the demography and population dynamics of free-ranging Asian elephants is often unavailable. Population monitoring at the landscape level has many constraints, including those of visibility, habitat, terrain and field logistics, among several others. While knowing elephant numbers may be important for managing local populations, demographic parameters and distribution patterns are perhaps more crucial to ascertain long-term trends for conservation.

This study examines the extent and nature of harvest of non-timber forest products (NTFP) by local human communities residing adjacent to the Hollongapar Gibbon Sanctuary in the Upper Brahmaputra Valley of Assam, northeastern India.

This study presented two case studies—the Jigokudani Monkey Park, Japan, and the Telaga Warna Nature Recreational Park, Indonesia—where the authors provided quantitative assessments of people’s motivations for visiting managed (monkey parks) and unmanaged (incidental) monkey tourism sites. They further showed that management regimes, socio-demographic attributes, previous experience of interactions with macaques, and feeding them play a role in people’s desire to visit macaque tourism sites.

In this chapter, the authors investigated the affective ethnographies of non/humans and delineate what this offers for an understanding of animals’ geographies or the sentient lives of animals within wider social and political ecological contexts.

This paper discusses mental health ecologies in different registers: subjectivity being environmental, its scale being relational rather than binary, enmeshed in the dynamics of other-than-human life, and involving conversations between medical and vernacular practices rather than hierarchies of knowledge.

In this chapter, using empirical data, the authors assess the behavioural adaptability of elephants, as determined by their innate biological variables, such as age, sex and grouping patterns at the population level. They also discuss the impacts of global climatic changes on the behaviour and distribution of Asian elephants, as evidenced through studies conducted on these aspects. They discuss how elephants, in general, avoid areas of high human use.

This study is conducted in a biodiversity hotspot in southern India to examine the knowledge level of rural school children regarding the mammalian species in their region. The results of the study showed that school children were able to recognize regional mammalian species that are publicized by media sources, but had little knowledge about their conservation status or more significant information about them.

This report was prepared in response to the Forest Advisory Committee’s (FAC) recommendation to conduct “a multiple seasonal replicate study on biodiversity assessment” of the 3097 MW Etalin Hydro Electric Project (HEP) in Dibang Valley, Arunachal Pradesh. The review has found that the study was conducted in under five five months from February to June 2018 and cannot be considered as a ‘multiple seasonal replicate’ study as it does not represent three seasons in Arunachal Pradesh.