a mating one?

Cleaning themselves /primping both my cat and dog do that all the time

Wide open question! Dogs, circle before laying down. Monkeys, use sticks to eat termites and ants. Cats, ignore you unless they want something. Humans, make assumptions without basis.

A fighting one!!!!!

cocking it leg or squatting for a wee.

I'm not convinced that animals have ritual. If I were to guess, I would say that elephants visiting the grave sites of their dead would be the closest thing.

Animals that clean themselves often such ast cats, rats and rabbits have a very ritualized a.k.a. stereotypical cleaning behaviors.

racoons washing their food.

orangetans use leaves as napkins :)

A cat going in a circle a couple times before it lays down to nap.

the "love-mating dance" I'm thinking of the peacock with his beautiful tail trying to impress the female.

Wolves roll over and expose their bellies and necks as a submission ritual.

Dogs sniffing each others butts. And some dogs sniffing other butts........

Grooming, courting, preparing for offspring, hunting, etc. For example, female rabbits, when they're pregnant, pull fur from their undersides and collect grass to line the nest.

The death ritual

female mantissa turns around the male before making love, then after full satisfaction she kills the male.

in the sense that rituals provide us with a sense of comfort & re-assurance, animals sure do. I know for a fact that cats develop their own individual "rituals" distinctive from inherited behaviors--turning a circle before lying down might be inherent, but licking the pillow for 2 minutes before sleeping is one cat's ritual. Elephant answer is a good one--something to think about.

"A ritualised behaviour is any highly stereotyped, repetitive kind of action, that an animal does, and an animal behaviourist would usually associate that with some kind of display, so most sexual or aggressive displays are associated with ritualisation to a lesser or greater extent." "The long call, the typical call that gulls make that you think of when you?re by the seaside, the male swings its head down below its breast and throws its head back with its beak wide open and gives that typical seagull call, now that?s a highly ritualised display and that particular display is a territorial display, it says ?I own this spot? or ?I own this territory?, depending on where the gull is. But there are lots of other kinds of ritualised displays. One of the ones that I like best of all is the one performed by Australian magpies, and this is a singing display and its actually, the song is actually used very frequently on the soundtrack of things like Neighbours. What happens is, these birds are group-living, group-territorial, and they roost together in some trees and at dawn, they fly down from their roosting trees, and usually stand around a fence-post or a bush and it looks really weird, and then they all start that wonderful warbling, and this might be four or five of them, doing a group chorus, highly ritualised, highly stereotyped, and after about ten minutes they all fly off, and go about their everyday business. And I suspect that that?s something to do with bonding." Source and further information: http://www.ravenfamily.com/ffetch/ritual/unirite.php Further information: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/ritual.shtml

My dogs each go in circles before they lay down to sleep, it is a ritual from when they needed to pack down leaves and whatever else for their bed at night when they slept in the wild.

Cats that cover their poop.

Stalking their prey. Finding a mate.

Most animal 'rituals' are really just instinctive behavior. Which suggests that humans are instinctively religious.

1) Our dogs ALL bounce back and forth at the end of the leash/rope, sniffing the ground, before they finally find a spot to poop. (They they "crab crawl" a few feet until they're done!) Come on! You're just gonna put a pile of doo there! LOL 2) Our little dog, when he's done, stiff-legs it, scraping the ground - leaves and grass - toward the pile.

With regards to anthropology, a ritual is something performed as a part of worship, not a repetitive behavior. As such, I'd agree with the elephants visiting the graves of their dead would be the closest to a ritual (by way of ancestor worship perhaps).

cleaning themselves

Animals do not perform rituals. Cults of people perform rituals who are dangerous people. There is something wrong with them in the head. Animals are pure and have a different brain to humans which means they do not create a system in their mind. You don’t see animals wearing robes and masks performing rituals. That’s for dangerous people.