Inquiries into human faculty and its developmentGalton, Francis
Science
Inquiries into human faculty and its development
Galton, Francis
Ability; Eugenics
_Fondness of Man_.--Secondly, it must cling to man, notwithstanding
occasional hard usage and frequent neglect. If the animal had no
natural attachment to our species, it would fret itself to death, or
escape and revert to wildness. It is easy to find cases where the
partial or total non-fulfilment of this condition is a corresponding
obstacle to domestication. Some kinds of cattle are too precious to
be discarded, but very troublesome to look after. Such are the
reindeer to the Lapps. Mr. Campbell of Islay informed me that the
tamest of certain herds of them look as if they were wild; they have
to be caught with a lasso to be milked. If they take fright, they
are off to the hills; consequently the Lapps are forced to
accommodate themselves to the habits of their beasts, and to follow
them from snow to sea and from sea to snow at different seasons. The
North American reindeer has never been domesticated, owing, I presume,
to this cause. The Peruvian herdsmen would have had great trouble to
endure had the llama and alpaca not existed, for their cogeners, the
huanacu and the vicuna, are hardly to be domesticated.
Zebras, speaking broadly, are unmanageable. The Dutch Boers
constantly endeavour to break them to harness, and though they
occasionally succeed to a degree, the wild mulish nature of the
animal is always breaking out, and liable to balk them.
It is certain that some animals have naturally a greater fondness
for man than others; and as a proof of this, I will again quote
Hearne about the moose, who are considered by him to be the easiest
to tame and domesticate of any of the deer tribe. Formerly the
closely-allied European elks were domesticated in Sweden, and used
to draw sledges, as they are now occasionally in Canada; but they
have been obsolete for many years. Hearne says:--
"The young ones are so simple that I remember to have seen an Indian
paddle his canoe up to one of them, and take it by the poll, without
experiencing the least opposition, the poor harmless animal seeming
at the same time as contented alongside the canoe as if swimming by
the side of its dam, and looking up in our faces with the same
fearless innocence that a house lamb would."
On the other hand, a young bison will try to dash out its brains
against the tree to which it is tied, in terror and hatred of its
captors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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