Animal behavior; Animal intelligence; Natural history -- Outdoor books
A college girl told me an incident of a red squirrel she had observed
at her home in Iowa that illustrates how shallow the wit of a squirrel
is when confronted by new conditions. This squirrel carried nuts all
day and stored them in the end of a drainpipe that discharged the
rain-water upon the pavement below. The nuts obeyed the same law that
the rain-water did, and all rolled through the pipe and fell upon the
sidewalk. In the squirrel's experience, and in that of his forbears,
all holes upon the ground were stopped at the far end, or they were
like pockets, and if nuts were put in them they stayed there. A hollow
tube open at both ends, that would not hold nuts--this was too much
for the wit of the squirrel. But how wise he is about the nuts
themselves!
Among the lower animals the ignorance of one is the ignorance of all,
and the knowledge of one is the knowledge of all, in a sense in which
the same is not true among men. Of course some are more stupid than
others of the same species, but probably, on the one hand, there are
no idiots among them, and, on the other, none is preëminent in wit.
Animals take the first step in knowledge--they perceive things and
discriminate between them; but they do not take the second
step--combine them, analyze them, and form concepts and judgments.
So that, whether animals know much or little, I think we are safe in
saying that what they know in the human way, that is, from a process
of reasoning, is very slight.
The animals all have in varying degrees perceptive intelligence. They
know what they see, hear, smell, feel, so far as it concerns them to
know it. They know their kind, their mates, their enemies, their food,
heat from cold, hard from soft, and a thousand other things that it is
important that they should know, and they know these things just as we
know them, through their perceptive powers.
We may ascribe intelligence to the animals in the same sense in which
we ascribe it to a child, as the perception of the differences or of
the likenesses and the relations of things--that is, perceptive
intelligence, but not reasoning intelligence. When the child begins to
"notice things," to know its mother, to fear strangers, to be
attracted by certain objects, we say it begins to show intelligence.
Development in this direction goes on for a long time before it can
form any proper judgment about things or take the step of reason.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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