William James and Konrad Lorenz are at a café in the middle of Piccadilly Circus having coffee, smoking cigars, deep in conversation.
J: What say you about this Konrad, I have a Scotch terrier that used to live in the barn, and I recently moved him into my home. In the barn, he had this nasty little habit of burying things into the ground, and upon being moved into the house continued with the same behavior. After a few days, he eventually stopped trying to dig altogether. How would you explain this?
L: I believe that your carpet was not the right stimulus for your beloved terrier. An animal needs to have a specific stimulus in order to elicit a certain response; in this case, the dirt would elicit the digging. Because the dog was not in an environment that had dirt readily available to him to be able to dig, he had no need to do so.
J: Okay, but why did he continue, if even for a few days, to try to dig into my carpet and deposit useless items such as gloves into the floor?......
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Approximate Word Count: 1000
Approximate Pages: 4 (260 words per double-spaced page) |