Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

How to Make A Turkey Stew

Indeed, animal behavior provides many cases of how such triggers work. Take the mother turkey and its natural enemy, the polecat. When a mother turkey sees a polecat, she automatically starts squawking, pecking, and clawing in anger. Even a stuffed polecat elicits the same rage from the turkey. However, what animal behaviorist M. W. Fox found was that if you put a tiny tape recorder inside the faux cat and let it play the cheep‐cheep sound characteristic of baby turkeys, mama turkey not only welcomes the polecat but even gathers it underneath her. Turning off the tape recorder, however, sends her back into a frenzy of rage.¹⁴

The mother turkey is exhibiting what animal behaviorists call a fixed‐action pattern—a sequence of intricate behaviors of the type involved in a mating ritual, for instance. Fixed‐action patterns always run the same way and in the same order, as though they have been preprogrammed into the animal's behavior. What is especially interesting, for our purposes, is that they are triggered by specific parts or attributes of the enemy, not by the enemy as a whole. For instance, a male robin's territorial instincts are provoked by nothing more than the clump of red breast feathers belonging to its rival. Sans red fluff, another male robin can sail through without a challenge. But the threatened male will pounce on red feathers even if they are just lying around on the ground or even if they are attached to another species of bird. The red ...