MinuteEarth

Why Pets Have Surprisingly Small Brains

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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:

  • Domesticated animal: a species of animal bred by humans over generations to become nonreactive and gain characteristics suitable for life as a farm animal or pet
  • Tame animal: an individual animal raised in a way that it has become less dangerous and frightened of people
  • Feral animal: an animal that escapes from captivity or domestication (& regains some similar & some different characteristics compared to its pre-domesticated state)
  • "Fight or flight": an instinctive physiological response to a threatening situation that readies a creature to either to resist forcibly or escape
  • Limbic system: the brain’s “panic button” - a system of nerves and networks near the bottom of the cortex that controls basic emotions (e.g. fear, pleasure, anger) and drives (e.g. hunger, sex, dominance)
  • Telencephalon: the most developed and anterior part of the forebrain, consisting chiefly of the cerebral hemispheres, and the brain region that shrinks most in domesticated animals
  • Domestication: a sustained multigenerational, mutualistic relationship in which one species (e.g. humans) assumes a significant degree of influence over the reproduction and care of another species (e.g. cows) in order to secure a more predictable supply of a resource of interest (e.g. milk/meat/traction), and through which the domesticated organisms gain advantage over individuals that remain outside this relationship (e.g. aurochs, which went extinct), thereby benefitting and often increasing the fitness of both species involved


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