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
A thousand times in my life my blood has been brought to the
boiling point by seeing or reading of the cruel practices of
ignorant and vicious men toward animals whom they despised because
of their alleged standing "below man." By his vicious and cruel
nature, many a man is totally unfitted to own, or even to
associate with, dogs, horses and monkeys. Many persons are born
into the belief that every man is necessarily a "lord of
creation," and that all animals per se are man's lawful prey. In
the vicious mind that impression increases with age. Minds of the
better classes can readily learn by precept or by reasoning from
cause to effect the duty of man to observe and defend the God-
given rights of animals.
It was very recently that I saw on the street a group that
represented man's attitude toward wild animals. It consisted of
an unclean and vicious-looking man in tramp's clothing, grinding
an offensive hand-organ and domineering over a poor little
terrorized "ringtail" monkey. The wretched mite from the jungle
was encased in a heavy woolen straight-jacket, and there was a
strap around its loins to which a stout cord was attached, running
to the Root of All Evil. The pavement was hot, but there with its
bare and tender feet on the hot concrete, the sad-eyed little waif
painfully moved about, peering far up into the faces of passers-by
for sympathy, but all the time furtively and shrinkingly watching
its tormentor. Every now and then the hairy old tramp would jerk
the monkey's cord, each time giving the frail creature a violent
bodily wrench from head to foot. I think that string was jerked
about forty times every hour.
And that exhibition of monkey torture in a monkey hell continues
in summer throughout many states of our country,--because "it
pleases the children!" The use of monkeys with hand-organs is a
cruel outrage upon the monkey tribe, and no civilized state or
municipality should tolerate it. I call upon all humane persons to
put an end to it.
As an antidote to our vaulting human egotism, we should think
often upon the closeness of mental contact between the highest
animals and the lowest men. In drawing a parallel between those
two groups, there are no single factors more valuable than the
home, and the family food supply. These hark back to the most
primitive instincts of the vertebrates. They are the bedrock
foundations upon which every species rests. As they are stable or
unstable, good or bad, so lives or dies the individual, and the
species also.
In employing the term "highest animals" I wish to be understood as
referring to the warm-blooded vertebrates, and not merely the apes
and monkeys that both structurally and mentally are nearest to
man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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