If a baby macaque monkey must be separated from its mother, it should be pre-fed formula before its separation at around day 5-6. If a milk bottle is always present and the infant routinely lifted to the bottle to feed, it will learn to feed itself in about 30 hours. Peer contact before the age of 5 months is desirable and as little as 1 hour per day produces socially adequate monkeys. A peer, adult male, unrelated adult female, or older juvenile can be used as a mother-substitute but if a peer is used, excessive clinging results from continuous contact with the same peer(s), and excessive aggression results if contact is with only one other animal. Self-injurious behaviour (similar to human stereotypy and not human SIB) results when young monkeys cannot direct aggressive play towards another monkey because one is not present during the day when the appropriate direction for such behaviour is practised. If the young monkey is subjected to altered levels of aggression, their subsequent aggressiveness will be similarly changed, even when there is no opportunity for modelling. It is as if there is some mechanism for copying those levels of aggression which they receive. During therapy of isolate monkeys, infants keep aggression levels low. Aggression levels are also determined by visual stimuli, animals that can never see other animals showing no aggression and those intermittently viewing them showing low levels when interacting with others in darkness. Interference with visual interaction by foliage or by visual screens also reduces aggression by at least half in animals such as monkeys and farmed bulls, deer, and chickens where aggression is problematic. Personality, is less able to predict behaviour in macaques than dominance rank. High dominance rank protects animals from stress during fights, while large changes in rank are stressful in new groupings.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:642742 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Chamove, Arnold Shirek |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/30109 |
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