Animal behavior; Animal intelligence; Natural history -- Outdoor books
The correspondent who had the experience with his pointer dog relates
this incident about his blooded mare: A drove of horses were pasturing
in a forty-acre lot. The horses had paired off, as horses usually do
under such circumstances. The doctor's thoroughbred mare had paired
with another mare that was totally blind, and had been so since a
colt. Through the field "ran a little creek which could not well be
crossed by the horses except at a bridge at one end." One day when the
farmer went to salt the animals, they all came galloping over the
bridge and up to the gate, except the blind one; she could not find
the bridge, and remained on the other side, whinnying and stamping,
while the others were getting their salt a quarter of a mile away.
Presently the blooded mare suddenly left her salt, made her way
through the herd, and went at a flying gallop down across the bridge
to the blind animal. Then she turned and came back, followed by the
blind one. The doctor is convinced that his mare deliberately went
back to conduct her blind companion over the bridge and down to the
salt-lick. But the act may be more simply explained. How could the
mare have known her companion was blind? What could any horse know
about such a disability? The only thing implied in the incident is the
attachment of one animal for another. The mare heard her mate calling,
probably in tones of excitement or distress, and she flew back to her.
Finding her all right, she turned toward the salt again and was
followed by her fellow. Instinct did it all.
My own observation of the wild creatures has revealed nothing so near
to human thought and reflection as is seen in the cases of the collie
and pointer dogs above referred to. The nearest to them of anything I
can now recall is an incident related by an English writer, Mr.
Kearton. In one of his books, Mr. Kearton relates how he has
frequently fooled sitting birds with wooden eggs. He put his
counterfeits, painted and marked like the originals, into the nests of
the song thrush, the blackbird, and the grasshopper warbler, and in no
case was the imposition detected. In the warbler's nest he placed
dummy eggs twice the size of her own, and the bird proceeded to brood
them without the slightest sign of suspicion that they were not of her
own laying.
But when Mr. Kearton tried his counterfeits upon a ring plover, the
fraud was detected. The plover hammered the shams with her bill "in
the most skeptical fashion," and refused to sit down upon them. When
two of the bird's own eggs were returned to the nest and left there
with two wooden ones, the plover tried to throw out the shams, but
failing to do this, "reluctantly sat down and covered good and bad
alike."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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