We say things like “lizard brain” to describe crocodiles and other dangerous reptiles. As in they can’t be trained or don’t have feelings. Is this actually the case? What about lizard brain in the context of turtles & tortoises?
In: Biology
“Lizard brain” is a term that dates back to phrenology, which was a pseudoscience movement that thought you could determine intelligence and personality by measuring people’s heads. It doesn’t have any real meaning, at least not in being able to differentiate between lizard brains and mammal brains.
If you just search on youtube you’ll find plenty of videos from people who have trained pet reptiles. This includes alligators and crocodiles, which make surprisingly good pets if you can afford to properly care for them. Alligators in particular have roughly the same cognitive ability as a cat and behave very similarly to them when raised in captivity.
In terms of reptiles having feelings – reptiles typically don’t display emotional behaviors that people find familiar. IE, a dog will actively seek out humans to cuddle with them. Since humans also exhibit this behavior we associate dogs as having a humanlike emotional attachment to people.
Reptiles will cuddle, but don’t usually seek it out. Reptiles do form very close attachments to their owner, but the emotional behaviors they exhibit are sufficiently different from human emotional behavior that its hard to quantify whether they have the same emotional view of their owner as something like a dog would. They might, but that’s a matter of internal perception and while their external behaviors show clear signs of attachment they are fairly different from those of a human or dog.
But if your question is specifically about turtles – turtles are kind of their own thing. Turtles are *extremely* dumb, their intelligence is more comparable to insects in that they just kind of move towards food and eat it.
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