Nature and Nuture/ Animal Unit in Acting

The discusssion we are having about how nature and nuture affect human beings reminds me of a unit of study I did last year in Advanced Acting. For one month we did an animal unit in which each student researched an animal and eventually began acting as that animal. I choose a sheep, and I would crawl around the stage as a sheep. We did different exercises to simulate the life of our animal. We explored their living space and sleeping and eating habits. We began interacting with the other animals with a watering hole exercise. In order to think as an animal we had to use only our naturalistic instincts to guide us rather than our conscience.
However, the point of the unit was to transform from an animal to a human with personality traits that could be compared to the animal. For example, sheep have great maternal instincts, so my character was very warm and nuturing. We did exercises as human characters that paralleled those we did as animals. The watering hole ws paralleled with everyone in a Starbucks. As animals our only instinct was to get to the water. However as humans we had the knowledge to stand in a line and wait our turn to order. The preditor prey exercise was paralleled witht the balloon exercise. We were given the situation that we were all stuck in the basement of the building and only one man and one woman could be allowed to leave, the rest would have to die. Each person was given a balloon, and in order to kill someone you had to pop their balloon. In the animal world this taskwould take very little time, because it is survival of the fittest at its most basic. In the human world, it took a while. People were afraid to just automatically try killing. We tried to compromise with people and convince them to kill themselves but nobody would do it. People finally buckled down and a mass killing ensued. I was one of the first to go. I tried to gain sympathy simplyly by saying my newborn baby was a floor above the basement all alone, but no one caved. It came down to two men and two women. They tried to form alliances working with the human value of trust. In the end, the game was still survival of the fittest.