Animal fables for traders

This fable is about the stupid monkey, the mad pigeon and the cunning fish. Any resemblance to reality can only be a coincidence!

The stupid monkey

There are really two monkeys here, but one of them gets badly played and the other does not, as tends to be the way. Let us say one is lucky and the other is unlucky.

The lucky monkey gets food every time it rolls over on the ground. The unlucky monkey sometimes gets food and sometimes does not when it rolls over. The lucky one recognises the connection between rolling and food, and starts to regulate its own feeding. The unlucky monkey does not recognise the system, because there is no system at all: whether anything follows its performance is completely random.

Then the researchers decide not to feed the monkeys after they roll. The lucky monkey, having recognised the system earlier, stops after a few attempts. The unlucky monkey, never having worked out which roll would earn it food, does not stop, and keeps on performing furiously, if not until the end of time then for a very long while.

The mad pigeon

The experiment is known as the “dancing” or “superstitious pigeon”. The researchers set up a room and put a pigeon in it with the aim of messing with it. They watched what it did and occasionally, at random, gave it food.

There was absolutely no system connecting the bird’s movement and the food, and yet the poor animal tried to decode the undecodable. What the researchers noticed was that the pigeon danced ever more complicated choreographies: it linked the randomly appearing food to whatever movement it had made just before.

I swear it would not surprise me to learn that the monkey experiment and the pigeon experiment were run by the same crowd…

The cunning fish

This is not an experiment but an observation: anglers sometimes meet hardened, streetwise fish that simply cannot be caught. These creatures are capable of eating up the bait thrown in as groundbait and then leaving without a word, or of nibbling all the way around the bait on the hook and only then moving on. The sour face of the angler is the icing on the cake. What a mixture of metaphors, good grief…