The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal ObservationsHornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Science
The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations
Hornaday, William T. (William Temple)
Animal behavior
The Malay Sambar Deer of the Zoological Park have one droll trait.
The adult bucks bully and browbeat the does, in a rather mild way,
so long as their own antlers are on their heads. But when those
antlers take their annual drop, "O, times! O, manners! What a
change!" The does do not lose a day in flying at them, and taking
revenge for past tyranny. They strike the hornless bucks with
their front feet, they butt them, and they bite out of them
mouthfuls of hair. The bucks do not seem, to know that they can
fight without their antlers, and so the tables are completely
turned. This continues until the new horns grow out, the velvet
dries and is rubbed off,--and then quickly the tables are turned
again.
No other deer species of my personal acquaintance has ever
equalled the American elk of Wyoming in recognizing man's
protection and accepting his help in evil times. It is not only a
few wise ones, or a few half-domestic bands, but vast wild herds
of thousands that every winter rush to secure man's hay in the
Jackson Hole country, south of the Yellowstone Park. No matter how
shy they _all_ are in the October hunting season, in the bad
days of January and February they know that the annual armistice
is on, and it means hay for them instead of bullets. They swarm in
the level Jackson Valley, around S. N. Leek's famous ranch and
others, until you can see a square mile of solid gray-yellow
living elk bodies. Mr. Leek once caught about 2,500 head in one
photograph, all hungry. They crowd around the hay sleds like
hungry horses. In their greatest hunger they attack the ranchmen's
haystacks, just as far as the stout and high log fences will
permit them to go, and many a kind-hearted ranchman has robbed his
own haystacks to save the lives of starving and despairing elk.
The Yellowstone Park elk know the annual shooting and feeding
seasons just as thoroughly as do the men of Jackson Hole.
Once there was a bold and hardy western man who trained a bunch of
elk to dive from a forty-foot high platform into a pool of water.
I say that he "trained" them, because it really was that. The
animals quickly learned that the plunge did nothing more than to
shock and wet them, and so they submitted to the part they had to
play, with commendable resignation. Some deer would have fought
the program every step of the way, and soon worn themselves out;
but elk, and also horses, learn that the diving performance is all
in the day's work; which to me seems like good logic. A few
persons believe that such performances are cruel to the animals
concerned, but the diving alone is not necessarily so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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