Feeding The Bears
I saw this in the New York Times Magainze and thought it was a great metaphor for all things one may try to control (bad habits, overindulgence, work, clients, teenagers, drivers on highway, etc., and of course with the elections coming up...)
"Bear managers and park wardens have tried aversive conditioning before: in Banff, for instance, they used to drive up to bears eating roadside vegetation and blast them with water cannons. But as St. Clair points out, that kind of hazing not only violates several principles of animal learning theory (among them, that punishment should be immediate, consistent and not signaled in advance); all it ultimately teaches the bear is that, through a series of our bylaws, the only humans who will hurt it are humans in uniforms arriving in trucks between the hours of 9 and 5. According to St. Clair, hazing also ignores a breakthrough in animal psychology known as the Garcia Principle (after John Garcia's work with rats in the 1970s), which suggests that, no matter how hard you try, you may never be able to get an animal to associate food with pain. "It makes complete sense," St. Clair says. "In terms of survival, a bear has had no evolutionary reason to associate food with danger."
From "The Bears Among Us" by Darcy Frey, New York Times Magazine, November 25, 2007
I ask: What is your inner bear? What is your inner Park Warden? What is your food?
"Bear managers and park wardens have tried aversive conditioning before: in Banff, for instance, they used to drive up to bears eating roadside vegetation and blast them with water cannons. But as St. Clair points out, that kind of hazing not only violates several principles of animal learning theory (among them, that punishment should be immediate, consistent and not signaled in advance); all it ultimately teaches the bear is that, through a series of our bylaws, the only humans who will hurt it are humans in uniforms arriving in trucks between the hours of 9 and 5. According to St. Clair, hazing also ignores a breakthrough in animal psychology known as the Garcia Principle (after John Garcia's work with rats in the 1970s), which suggests that, no matter how hard you try, you may never be able to get an animal to associate food with pain. "It makes complete sense," St. Clair says. "In terms of survival, a bear has had no evolutionary reason to associate food with danger."
From "The Bears Among Us" by Darcy Frey, New York Times Magazine, November 25, 2007
I ask: What is your inner bear? What is your inner Park Warden? What is your food?
posted by adam_styles at 10:35 AM
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