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Some North American red squirrels are born with silver spoons in their mouths. They live in pine forests, where adults guard their food stores. Many baby squirrels cannot survive the winter without a cache of their own. But every year, some squirrel mothers leave their territory, bequeathing all of their food to one or more of the remaining babies. These young squirrels are much more likely to survive until spring.
There are other examples of species in the animal kingdom that share resources such as land, vehicles, and shelter between generations. In Article published last month in Behavioral Ecology, a trio of researchers argues, we should call this phenomenon the same thing we call humans: intergenerational wealth.
These young, pinecone-rich squirrels are privileged children, scientists say. When George Orwell wrote in “Animal Farm” that some animals were more equal than others, he was trying to shed light on the human-ideological contradictions of the time. The researchers hope to use the analogy in reverse. They say applying a human lens can help us understand the roots of inequality in animals.
Jennifer Smith, a behavioral ecologist at Mills College in Oakland, California, said the idea for the paper arose early in the pandemic in conversations with colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles (of course) on Zoom. They’ve seen how Covid-19 has highlighted health and other inequalities around the world. Scientists began to wonder if they could learn more about inequality by studying animals.
Dr. “We found a lot of examples when we started looking,” Smith said.
Young red grouse are more successful in establishing their territories when their fathers and other relatives are nearby. Hyena daughters born from high-ranking mothers inherit their status and earn money from fresh meat. Some chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys crack nuts using stone tools their parents used before them.
Animal wealth can also be passed on to unrelated people, as is the case with paper wasps that inherit communal nests or communal nests. hermit crabs looking for better real estate.
To study wealth transfers between animals, scientists can ask concrete questions: Would a lizard living with its parents survive longer? Does a monkey with access to larger nutcracker rocks continue to have more children and grandchildren? Biologists can explore animal privileges without addressing all the cultural complexities of the issue in humans.
Dr. By looking for similarities between privilege in humans and animals, Smith hopes to unlock a greater understanding of inequality in the natural world. “It’s very exciting for me to study the rules of inequality in non-human animals,” he said. “It was quite surprising to see this in so many different genres. And we’re just touching the surface.”
Next, he plans to expand his research by looking at wealth and privileges in thousands of more animal species.
Terms like “privilege” and “maintain the cycle of privilege” are somewhat unusual to use in animal research,” said Jenny Tung, an evolutionary anthropologist and geneticist at Duke University who focuses on how social factors affect health in primates, “partly because they’re a bit loaded for us to read as humans. ” But he thinks the idea of using a human lens to look at how animals transfer resources is promising.
Dr. “This is potentially extremely useful,” Tung said. The idea opens up a box of tools for finding ways to understand where inequality among animals comes from, he said.
Siobhán Mattison, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who studies inequality in human societies, thinks there is potential to combine the anthropology of privilege with animal biology. “Humans are animals,” he said. “We are undoubtedly affected by some of the things that trigger inequality in other animals.”
That doesn’t mean animals can answer every question about how inequality arises in humans, added Dr. Mattison: “Humans are much more cooperative than most other species.” “Our cultural institutions can strengthen inequality, but they can also fight against it,” he said.
Dr. While Smith hopes that insights primarily from humans can teach him more about inequality in animals, he thinks science could also work in the opposite direction. Some of the rules that scientists discovered in animals may also apply to humans.
Still, he stresses that finding inequality in nature is not the same as justifying it. His research “can be misinterpreted by saying, Dr. “Well, it’s ubiquitous, so we can’t do anything about it,” Smith said.
Unlike other animals, “We can understand this phenomenon,” said Dr. “And then we obviously moved on to choose how we would use that knowledge to create social change,” Smith said.
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