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
To men and women who really know the vertebrate animals by contact
with some of them upon their own levels, the reasoning power of
the latter is not a debatable question. The only real question is:
how far does their intelligence carry them? It is with puzzled
surprise that we have noted the curious diligence of the
professors of animal psychology in always writing of "animal
_behavior_," and never of old-fashioned, common-sense
_animal intelligence_. Can it be possible that any one of
them really refuses to concede to the wild animal the possession
of a mind, and a working intelligence?
Yes. Animals do reason. If any one truth has come out of all the
critical or uncritical study of the animal mind that has been
going on for two centuries, it is this. Animals do reason; they
always have reasoned, and as long as animals live they never will
cease to reason.
The higher wild animals possess and display the same fundamental
passions and emotions that animate the human race. This fact is
subject to intelligent analysis, discussion and development, but
it is not by any means a "question" subject to debate. In the most
intellectual of the quadrupeds, birds and reptiles, the display of
fear, courage, love, hate, pleasure, displeasure, confidence,
suspicion, jealousy, pity, greed and generosity are so plainly
evident that even children can and do recognize them. To the
serious and open-minded student who devotes prolonged thought to
these things, they bring the wild animal very near to the "lord of
creation."
To the question, "Have wild animals souls?" we reply, "That is a
debatable question. Read; then think it over."
METHODS WITH THE ANIMAL MIND. In the study of animal minds, much
depends upon the method employed. It seems to me that the problem-
box method of the investigators of "animal behavior" leaves much
to be desired. Certainly it is not calculated to develop the
mental status of animals along lines of natural mental
progression. To place a wild creature in a great artificial
contrivance, fitted with doors, cords, levers, passages and what
not, is enough to daze or frighten any timid animal out of its
normal state of mind and nerves. To put a wild sapajou monkey,--
weak, timid and afraid,--in a strange and formidable prison box
filled with strange machinery, and call upon it to learn or to
invent strange mechanical processes, is like bringing a boy of ten
years up to a four-cylinder duplex Hoe printing-and-folding press,
and saying to him: "Now, go ahead and find out how to run this
machine, and print both sides of a signature upon it."
The average boy would shrink from the mechanical monster, and have
no stomach whatever for "trial by error."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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