Animal behavior; Animal intelligence; Natural history -- Outdoor books
We know that the animals do not think in any proper sense as we do, or
have concepts and ideas, because they have no language. To be sure, a
deaf mute thinks without language because a human being has the
intelligence which language implies, or which was begotten in his
ancestors by its use through long ages. Not so with the lower animals.
They are like very young children in this respect; they have
impressions, perceptions, emotions, but not ideas. The child
perceives things, discriminates things, knows its mother from a
stranger, is angry, or glad, or afraid, long before it has any
language or any proper concepts. Animals know only through their
senses, and this "knowledge is restricted to things present in time
and space." Reflection, or a return upon themselves in thought, of
this they are not capable. Their only language consists of various
cries and calls, expressions of pain, alarm, joy, love, anger. They
communicate with one another, and come to share one another's mental
or emotional states, through these cries and calls. A dog barks in
various tones and keys, each of which expresses a different feeling in
the dog. I can always tell when my dog is barking at a snake; there is
something peculiar in the tone. The hunter knows when his hound has
driven the fox to hole by a change in his baying. The lowing and
bellowing of horned cattle are expressions of several different
things. The crow has many caws, that no doubt convey various meanings.
The cries of alarm and distress of the birds are understood by all the
wild creatures that hear them; a feeling of alarm is conveyed to
them--an emotion, not an idea.
How could a crow tell his fellows of some future event, or of some
experience of the day? How could he tell him this thing is dangerous,
this is harmless, save by his actions in the presence of those things?
Or how tell of a newly found food supply save by flying eagerly to
it? A fox or a wolf could warn its fellow of the danger of poisoned
meat by showing alarm in the presence of the meat. Such meat would no
doubt have a peculiar odor to the keen scent of the fox or the wolf.
Animals that live in communities, such as bees and beavers, coöperate
with each other without language, because they form a sort of organic
unity, and what one feels all the others feel. One spirit, one
purpose, fills the community.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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