The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations — John Shaqi
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 early winter we usually found the walrus in smaller groups
up in the bays. This was after the ice had begun to make, and in
coming to the surface to breathe the animals found it necessary
to butt their noses against the ice to break it. I have seen this
done in ice at least four inches in thickness. In some instances
I have seen a fractured star in the ice, a record of an unsuccessful
attempt to make a breathing hole." Around these breathing holes
we frequently found fragments of clam-shells, sections of
crinoids and sea-anemones. It is evident that after raking the
bottom with his tusks and filling his mouth with food, the walrus
separates the food he desires to retain and rejects on his way up
and at the surface such articles as he has picked up in haste and
does not want.
"From the fact that the walrus is easily approached it is a simple
matter to kill him with the modern high power rule. It is
therefore to be hoped that future expeditions into the arctic seas
will kill sparingly of these tremendous brutes which from point of
size stand in the foremost rank among mammals."
The Elephant, Rhinoceros and Hippopotamus. _Individual
Elephants_ vary in temperament far more than do rhinoceroses
or hippopotami, and the variations are wide. In a wild state,
elephants are quiet and undemonstrative, almost to the point of
dullness. They do not domineer, or hector, or quarrel, save when a
rogue develops in the ranks, and sets out to make things
interesting by the commission of lawless acts. A professional
rogue is about everything that an orthodox elephant should not
be, and he soon makes of himself so great a nuisance that he is
driven out of the herd.
The temperament of the standardized and normal elephant is
distinctly sanguine, _but a nervous or hysterical individual is
easily developed by bad conditions or abuse_. Adult male
elephants are subject to various degrees of what we may as well
call sexual insanity, which is dangerous in direct proportion to
its intensity. This causes many a "bad" show elephant to be
presented to a zoological garden, where the dangers of this mental
condition can at least be reduced to their lowest terms. Our
Indian elephant who was known as Gunda was afflicted with sexual
insanity, and he gradually grew worse, and increasingly dangerous
to his keepers, until finally it was necessary to end his troubles
painlessly with a bullet through his brain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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