Can Animals Negotiate?

Territorial conflict may be the textbook case of animal negotiation. Conflict over a territory is a classic zero-sum competition. Either a competitor wins and takes the territory, or loses and leaves. Can animals ever achieve win-win negotiations?

Shared Territory of Cats

Surprisingly, some animals can coexist peacefully while exploiting the same territory. Cats are an intriguing case in point. When cats hunt at night, their hunting places may overlap with those of other individuals. Yet, they do not cross paths. This is because they operate at different times. This phenomenon is referred to as a temporal territory.

One might argue that the cats have an implicit agreement to operate at different times, We do not know if this timing is negotiated in any way, such as the dominant individual choosing when to be out and subordinates falling in line. The arrangement may be purely reactive: One cat returns to its resting place while another is active.

Negotiating Rough-and-Tumble Play

Most young mammals engage in rough-and-tumble play when they are well-fed and safe. This activity includes many movements seen in predatory behavior and aggression. So, the youngsters must signal playful intent. That is accomplished using playful body language, e.g., a play face for dogs and laughing in children.

This is a form of negotiation. The target individual is being told, “If I attack you, it is not a real attack but a play bout.”

Large individuals must calibrate the vigor of their play to match the size of their play companion. In this way, they avoid hurting their companion, which would scare them and bring the play bout to a speedy end.

Play negotiation is remarkably sophisticated. This means that a Great Dane pup can play with a young Chihuahua. Very different species can play together, such as ravens playing with wolf pups.

Such arrangements resemble political coalitions where individuals put aside their differences to pursue a common interest—in this case, having fun. While enjoyment is the immediate goal, animal behaviorists posit health advantages of play, whether this is reducing stress, obtaining exercise, or defending a desirable body weight.

Animals Negotiate Leadership

Young mammals negotiate play relationships where the varied interests of individuals that differ in size and strength get resolved satisfactorily. Among social animals, such as wolves and monkeys, adults may cooperate to their mutual benefit in a number of different contexts. A flock of birds may mob a predator to keep it away from their nests. A troop of monkeys often come together for joint defense of their territory, and the same pattern is widespread among social primates and other mammals (e.g., hyenas, prairie dogs).

Such coalitions are hard to interpret (1). It is unclear whether the joint defenses are negotiated in any meaningful way, or whether they are an incidental result of animals moving about together and responding individually to threats posed by predators and competitors.

In some situations, a negotiated outcome is the most plausible interpretation, however. This reasoning was applied to chimpanzee alliances (1). The alpha male monopolizes breeding although females often copulate with each of the adult males in the group, a strategy that is believed to defend her offspring against infanticide by the males.

Sometimes, a pair of young males who have a bond of friendship combine their resources to defeat the alpha. This maneuver means that they share breeding opportunities under the reasoning that half a loaf is better than no bread. By working together, they negotiate new leadership of the group that works to their mutual benefit in access to food and to mates. That animals reach negotiated outcomes in such situations implies that they can deal with concepts of fairness upon which coalitions rest.

Fair Pay for Monkeys

This notion was confirmed with blinding clarity in experiments on monkeys that worked for various rewards in a setting where they could observe other monkeys being rewarded for their efforts (2). While learning theorists preferred a low-level explanation for animal learning as the formation of new associations such as that between pulling a lever and getting food, some social animals behave as though they perceived an underlying contract, like that between an employer and an employee.

Monkeys prefer grapes to cucumber but will work for either reward. If switched from grapes to cucumber, they are not pleased but continue to pull their levers for cucumber reinforcement. However, when the monkeys could see other individuals getting grapes when they got cucumber, they downed tools, i.e., refused to work.

The researchers labeled this as monkeys rejecting unequal pay. The subjects were conscious of getting a raw deal and rebelled by going on strike. When human employees do this, we say that negotiations broke down.