2007-09-13 23:50:08 · 6 answers · asked by Anonymous in Science & Mathematics ➔ Zoology
yes they can , that's why quite often if you get a rescue dog it will be very nervous, if it has been abused in any way it will always remember. they can learn to re trust but they still remember.
2007-09-13 23:53:36 · answer #1 · answered by andallthatjazz1984 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Of course they can. How do you think they learn things? All animals retain learning, however, what they retain and how long varies. For example, it's been proven that all animals retain negative associations longest (for example, being bitten by another animal or being shocked by an electric fence) and will avoid those situations. It takes much more calm interactions in the same situation to get an animal to trust that the negative event won't happen again. This is why people often have trouble with dogs and horses learning to fear something and it takes a long time for the animal to re-learn that it's not a situation to fear. Animals also learn quickly about very positive things and remember them well such as sources of food or sources of safety or comfort. Things that have less strong motivations associated with them (strongly negative or strongly positive) are often not retained with as much strength and take more repeated conditioning for the animal to recall something about the event.
2007-09-14 04:46:06 · answer #2 · answered by SC 6 · 0⤊ 1⤋
If you mean do animals have a memory, then of course they do. Don't you have a dog or cat that knows you? That wouldn't be possible if it forgot you every time you walked away.
Anyway, it depends on the animal, and different animals have different capacities for memory. How much they actually understand time, I have no idea. You need to go do a literature search to see what experiments have been reported. (Try google scholar or a university library.)
2007-09-13 23:55:57 · answer #3 · answered by Raichu 6 · 1⤊ 1⤋
if animals didn't have memories they would get hurt by the same thing, they wouldn't be able to find anything, and they'd never learn the signals we use to train them.
what the dog whisperer says is that dogs remember the bad thing that happened to them but they don't live in the past. its the people that have trouble moving on.
2007-09-13 23:59:40 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 1⤋
Only some animals ( so don`t expect a crocodile to give you gratitude for remembering that you brought a peace of meat ) especially mammals and birds
2007-09-14 01:46:14 · answer #5 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋
Yes, they do remember and just as in our case, they also get conditioned by the past.
2007-09-13 23:58:41 · answer #6 · answered by Swamy 7 · 1⤊ 1⤋