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
We now come to a consideration of simian mental traits of very
different character. Another male orang, named Dohong, of the
same age and intellectual caste as Rajah, developed a faculty for
mechanics and invention which not only challenged our admiration,
but also created much work for our carpenters. He discovered, or
invented, as you please, the lever as a mechanical force,--as fairly
and squarely as Archimedes discovered the principle of the screw.
Moreover, he delighted in the use of the new power thus acquired,
quite as much as the successful inventor usually does. At the same
time, two very bright chimpanzees of his own age, and with the
same opportunities, discovered nothing.
[Illustration caption: THUMB-PRINT OF AN ORANG-UTAN
A group of fourteen experts in the New York City Departement of
Criminal Records were unable to recognise this thumb print as
anything else than that of a man]
[Illustration caption: "RAJAH," THE ACTOR ORANG-UTAN
In three lessons he learned to ride a tricycle]
Dohong was of a reflective turn of mind, and never was entirely
willing to learn the things that his keepers sought to teach him.
To him, dining at a table was tiresomely dull, and the donning of
fashionable clothing was a frivolous pastime, On the other hand,
the interior of his cage, and his gymnastic appliances of ropes,
trapeze and horizontal bars, all interested him greatly. Every
square inch of surface, and every piece of material in his
apartment, was carefully investigated, many times over.
When three years old he discovered his own strength, and at first
he used it good-naturedly to hector his cage-mate, a female
chimpanzee smaller than himself. That, however, was of trifling
interest. The day on which he made the discovery that he could
break the wooden one and one-half inch horizontal bars that were
held out from his cage walls on cast iron brackets, was for him a
great day. Before his discovery was noted by the keepers he had
joyfully destroyed two bars, and with a broken piece used as a
lever was attacking a third. These bars were promptly replaced by
larger bars, of harder wood, but screwed to the same cast-iron
brackets that had carried the first series.
For a time, the heavier bars endured; but in an evil moment the
ape swung his trapeze bar, of two-inch oak, far over to one side
of his cage, and applied the bar as a lever, inside of a
horizontal bar and from above. The new force was too much for the
cast-iron brackets, and one by one they gave way. Some were broken
off, and others were torn from the wall by the breaking of the
screws that held them. Knowing that all those brackets
must be changed immediately, Dohong was left to destroy them;
which he did, promptly and joyfully. We then made heavy
brackets of flat wrought iron bars, 1/2 by 21/2 inches, unbreakable
even with a lever. These were screwed on with screws
so large and heavy that our carpenters knew they were quite
secure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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