Animal behavior; Animal intelligence; Natural history -- Outdoor books
Wild animals are trained, but not educated. We multiply impressions
upon them without adding to their store of knowledge, because they
cannot evolve general ideas from these sense impressions. Here we
reach their limitations. A bluebird or a robin will fight its
reflected image in the window-pane of a darkened room day after day,
and never master the delusion. It can take no step beyond the evidence
of its senses--a hard step even for man to take. You may train your
dog so that he will bound around you when he greets you without
putting his feet upon you. But do you suppose the fond creature ever
comes to know why you do not want his feet upon you? If he does, then
he takes the step in general knowledge to which I have referred. Your
cow, tethered by a long rope upon the lawn, learns many things about
that rope and how to manage it that she did not know when she was
first tied, but she can never know why she is tethered, or why she is
not to crop the shrubbery, or paw up the turf, or reach the corn on
the edge of the garden. This would imply general ideas or power of
reflection. You might punish her until she was afraid to do any of
these things, but you could never enlighten her on the subject. The
rudest savage can, in a measure, be enlightened, he can be taught the
reason why of things, but an animal cannot. We can make its impulses
follow a rut, so to speak, but we cannot make them free and
self-directing. Animals are the victims of habits inherited or
acquired.
I was told of a fox that came nightly prowling about some deadfalls
set for other game. The new-fallen snow each night showed the
movements of the suspicious animal; it dared not approach nearer than
several feet to the deadfalls. Then one day a red-shouldered hawk
seized the bait in one of the traps, and was caught. That night a fox,
presumably the same one, came and ate such parts of the body of the
hawk as protruded from beneath the stone. Now, how did the fox know
that the trap was sprung and was now harmless? Did not its act imply
something more than instinct? We have the cunning and suspicion of the
fox to start with; these are factors already in the problem that do
not have to be accounted for. To the fox, as to the crow, anything
that looks like design or a trap, anything that does not match with
the haphazard look and general disarray of objects in nature, will put
it on its guard. A deadfall is a contrivance that is not in keeping
with the usual fortuitous disarray of sticks and stones in the fields
and woods. The odor of the man's hand would also be there, and this of
itself would put the fox on its guard. But a hawk or any other animal
crushed by a stone, with part of its body protruding from beneath the
stone, has quite a different air. It at least does not look
threatening; the rock is not impending; the open jaws are closed. More
than that, the smell of the man's hand would be less apparent, if not
entirely absent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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