The dominant view in Western thought, from Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Marx to the present, is that private property is a human social construction that emerged with the rise of modern civilization (Schlatter 1973). However, evidence from studies of animal behavior, gathered mostly in the past quarter century, has shown this view to be incorrect. Various territorial claims are recognized in non-human species, including butterflies (Davies 1978), spiders (Riechert 1978), wild horses (Stevens 1988), finches (Senar et al. 1989), wasps (Eason et al. 1985), nonhuman primates (Ellis 1985), lizards (Rand 1967), and many others (Mesterton-Gibbons & Adams 2003). There are, of course, some obvious forms of incumbent advantage that partially explain this phenomenon: the incumbent’s investment in the territory may be idiosyncratically more valuable to the incumbent than to a contestant or the incumbent’s familiarity with the territory may enhance its ability to fight. However, in the above-cited cases, these forms of incumbent advantage are unlikely to be important. Thus, a more general explanation of territoriality is needed. In non-human species, that an animal owns a territory is generally established by the fact that the animal has occupied and altered the territory (e.g., by constructing a nest, burrow, hive, dam, or web, or by marking its limits with urine or feces). In humans there are other criteria of ownership, but physical possession and first to occupy remain of great importance.
Since private property in human society is generally protected by law and enforced by complex institutions (judiciary and police), it is natural to view private property in animals as a categorically distinct phenomenon. In fact, however, decentralized, self-enforcing types of private property, based on behavioral propensities akin to those found in non-human species (e.g., the endowment effect), are important for humans and arguably lay the basis for more institutional forms of property rights. For instance, many developmental studies indicate that toddlers and small children use behavioral rules similar to those of animals is recognizing and defending property rights (Furby 1980).
Originally Posted by Xerographica
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