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
As soon as the brackets were made secure, Dohong turned his
attention to the two large sleeping boxes which were built very
solidly on the balcony of his cage. Both of those structures he
tore completely to pieces,--always working with the utmost good
nature and cheerfulness. Realizing that they could not exist in
the cage with him, we gave him a permit to tear them out--and save
the time of the carpenters.
Dohong's use of his lever was seen by hundreds of visitors, and
one frequent visitor to the Park, Mr. L. A. Camacho, an engineer,
was so much impressed that he published in the _Scientific
American_ an illustrated account of what he saw.
For a long period, Dohong had been more or less annoyed by the
fact that he could not get his head out between the front bars of
his cage, and look around the partition into the home of his next-
door neighbor. Very soon after he discovered the use of the lever,
he swung his trapeze bar out to the upper corner of his cage,
thrust the end of it out between the first bar and the steel
column of the partition, and very deftly bent two of the iron bars
outward far enough so that he could easily thrust his head outside
and have his coveted look.
One of our later and largest orangs made a specialty of twisting
the straw of his bedding into a rope six or seven feet long, then
throwing it over his trapeze bar and swinging by it, forward and
back.
Time and space will not permit the enumeration of the various
things done by that ape of mechanical mind with his swinging rope
and his trapeze, with ropes of straw _twisted by himself,_
with keys, locks, hammer, nails and boxes. Any man who can witness
such manifestations as those described above, and deny the
existence in the animal of an ability to reason from cause to
effect, must be prepared to deny the evidence of his own senses.
The individual variations between orangs, as also between
chimpanzees, are great and striking. It may with truth be said
that no two individuals of either species are really quite alike
in physiognomy, temperament and mental capacity. As subjects for
the experimental psychologist, it is difficult to see how any
other could be found that would be even a good second in living
interest to the great apes. The facts thus far recorded, so I
believe, present only a suggestion of the rich results that await
the patient scientific investigator. In the year 1915 Dr. Robert
M. Yerkes, of Harvard University, conducted at Montecito,
southern California, in a comfortable primate laboratory, six
months of continuous and diligent experiments on the behavior of
orang-utans and monkeys. His report, published under the title of
"The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes: A Study of Ideational
Behavior," is a document of much interest and value. Dr. Yerkes'
use of the orang-utan as a subject was a decided step forward in
the study of "animal behavior" in America.
IX
THE MAN-LIKENESS OF THE CHIMPANZEE
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