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
In the actual practice of herd leadership in species of ruminant
animals, the largest and most spectacular bull elk or bison is not
always the leader. Frequently it has been observed that a wise old
cow is the actual leader and director of the herd, and that "what
she says, goes." This was particularly remarked to me by James
McNaney during the course of our "last buffalo hunt" in Montana,
in 1886. From 1880 to 1884 he had been a mighty buffalo-hunter,
for hides. He stated that whenever as a still-hunter he got "a
stand on a bunch," and began to shoot, slowly and patiently, so as
not to alarm the stand, whenever a buffalo took alarm and
attempted to lead away the bunch, usually it proved to be a wise
old cow. The bulls seemed too careless to take notice of the
firing and try to lead away from it.
The Sixth Law. _Of food and territory, the weak shall have their
share._
While this law is binding upon all the members of a wild flock, a
herd, a clan or a species, outside of species limits it may become
null and void; though in actual practice I think that this rarely
occurs. Among the hoofed animals; the seals and sea-lions; the
apes, baboons and monkeys, and the kangaroos, the food that is
available to a herd is common to all its members. We can not
recall an instance of a species attempting to dispossess and
evict another species, though it must be that many such have
occurred. In the game-laden plains of eastern Africa, half a dozen
species, such as kongonis, sable antelopes, gazelles and zebras,
often have been observed in one landscape, with no fighting
visible.
With all but the predatory wild animals and man, the prevailing
disposition is to _live, and let live._ One of the few
recorded murders of young animals by an old one of the same
species concerned the wanton killing of two polar bear cubs in
northern Franz Joseph Land, as observed by Nansen.
The Seventh Law. _Man is the deadliest enemy of all the wild
creatures; and the instant a man appears the whole herd must fly
from him, fast and far._
In some of the regions to which man and his death-dealing
influence have not penetrated, this law is not yet on the statute
books of the jungle and the wilderness. Sir Ernest Shackleton and
Captain Scott found it unknown to the giant penguins and sea
leopards of the Antarctic Continent, I have seen a few flocks and
herds by whom the law was either unknown or forgotten; but the
total number is a small one. There was a herd of mountain sheep on
Pinacate Peak, a big flock of sage grouse in Montana, various
flocks of ptarmigan on the summits of the Elk River Mountains,
British Columbia,--and out of a long list of occurrences that is
all I will now recall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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