In some ways, we learn from animals. There’s a scientific method called biomimicry, where scientists study animal’s behaviors and imitates them or uses them as inspiration for developing new technology. Sometimes, animals also act like us. Take for example group decisions. Several research suggest that some animals arrive at an agreement by voting. Yes, they practice democracy too. Here are some examples how they do it from earthdate.org, biologicaldiversity.org and Treehugger.
According to a study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, African wild dogs make consensus decisions by sneezing. Their sneeze is a short, sharp burst of air from the nose. Sometimes these dogs sneeze at rest. But most sneezes occur during the pre-hunting ritual known as a rally. These wild dogs embark together to hunt only when there’s enough sneezing at a pack gathering.
In meerkats, the animals that Richard Park saw in an island in the movie “The Life of Pi”, social cohesion is vital for survival. Movements must be made together. Meerkats use their voices to vote on when to move on. To get the group to head to a new patch quickly, an individual will emit a “moving call.” Three is evidently considered a quorum among meerkats. If three or more individuals make moving calls within a short period of time, the group will speed up its movement, but only one or two individuals calling does not affect the speed.
Ants vote with their feet. Rock ants, found in the south of England, choose their new nest sites based on criteria such as entrance size and darkness. They appear to use a simple voting system: individual ants will leave the nest site if it does not perceive the site’s quality to be high enough. When enough ants have accumulated at a site, it is deemed to be suitable, and the ants move in. The ants in favor of the move bring the rest of the colony along by picking individuals up and hauling them to their new home. If the quality of the nest subsequently deteriorates, the process will repeat, with individuals again drifting away to another site until enough of the colony have left the original nest and joined the new site.
The red deer of Eurasia live in large herds, spending lots of time either grazing or lying down to ruminate. Some deer are ready to move on before others are, and scientists have noticed that herds only move when 60 percent of the adults stand up — essentially voting with their feet. Even if a dominant individual is more experienced and makes fewer mistakes than its underlings, herds typically favor democratic decisions over autocratic ones.
Like the red deer, the African buffalo are herd herbivores that often make group decisions about when and where to move. In the 1990s, researchers realized that what initially looked like "mundane stretching" is actually a type of "voting behavior," in which females indicate their travel preferences by standing up, staring in one direction and then lying back down. On days in which cows differ sharply in their direction of gaze, the herd tends to split and graze in separate patches for the night."
If all animals can vote together, will they agree to start a revolution against humans because we are causing the loss of their habitat and extinction? What do you think?