in captivity were either born in captivity or captured when in
their infancy, and therefore have no ideas of freedom, or visions
of their wild homes; consequently their supposed "pining for
freedom" often is more imaginary than real.
Art. 18. A wild animal has no more inherent right to live a life
of lazy and luxurious ease, and freedom from all care, than a man
or woman has to live without work or family cares. In the large
cities of the world there are many millions of toiling humans who
are worse off per capita as to burdens and sorrows and joys than
are the beasts and birds in a well kept zoological park. "Freedom"
is comparative only, not absolute.
Art. 19. While the use of trained animals in stage performances
is not necessarily cruel, and while training operations are based
chiefly upon kindness and reward, it is necessary that vigilance
should be exercised to insure that the cages and stage quarters of
such animals shall be adequate in size, properly lighted and
acceptably ventilated, and that cruel punishments shall not be
inflicted upon the animals themselves.
Art. 20. The training of wild animals may, or may not, involve
cruelties, according to the intelligence and the moral status of
the trainer. This is equally true of the training of children, and
the treatment of wives and husbands. A reasonable blow with a
whip to a mean and refractory animal in captivity is not
necessarily an act of cruelty. Every such act must be judged
according to the evidence.
Art. 21. It is unjust to proclaim that "all wild animal
performances are cruel" and therefore should be prohibited by law.
The claim is untrue, and no lawmaker should pay heed to it. Wild
animal performances are no more cruel or unjust than men-and-women
performances of acrobatics. Practically all trained animals are
well fed and tended, they welcome their performances, and go
through them with lively interest. Such performances, when good,
have a high educational value,--but not to closed minds.
Art. 22. Every bull-fight, being brutally unfair to the horses and
the bull engaged and disgustingly cruel, is an unfit spectacle for
humane and high-minded people, and no Christian man or woman can
attend one without self-stultification.
Art. 23. The western practice of "bulldogging," now permitted in
some Wild West shows, is disgusting, degrading, and never should
be permitted.
Art. 24. The use of monkeys by organ-grinders is cruel, it is
degrading to the monkeys, and should in all states be prohibited
by law.
Art. 25. The keeping of live fishes in glass globes nearly always
ends in cruelty and suffering, and should everywhere be prohibited
by law. A round glass straight-jacket is just as painful as any
other kind.
Art. 26. The sale and use of chained live chameleons as ornaments
and playthings for idiotic or vicious men and children always
means death by slow torture for the reptile, and should in all
states be prohibited by law.
II. MENTAL TRAITS OF WILD ANIMALS
VI
THE BRIGHTEST MINDS AMONG AMERICAN ANIMALS
We repeat that _the most interesting features of a wild animal
are its mind, its thoughts, and the results of its reasoning._
Besides these, its classification, distribution and anatomy are of
secondary importance; but at the same time they help to form the
foundation on which to build the psychology of species and
individuals. Let no student make the mistake of concluding that
when he has learned an animal's place in nature there is nothing
more to pursue.
After fifty years of practical experience with wild animals of
many species, I am reluctantly compelled to give the prize for
greatest cunning and foresight _in self-preservation_ to the
common brown rat,--the accursed "domestic" rat that has adopted
man as his perpetual servant, and regards man's goods as his
lawful prey. When all other land animals have been exterminated
from the earth, the brown rat will remain, to harry and to rob the
Last Man.
The brown rat has persistently accompanied man all over the world.
Millions have been spent in fighting him and the bubonic-plague
flea that he cheerfully carries in his offensive fur. For him no
place _that contains food_ is too hot or too cold, too wet or
too dry. Many old sailors claim to believe that rats will desert
at the dock an outward-bound ship that is fated to be lost at sea;
but that certificate of superhuman foreknowledge needs a backing
of evidence before it can be accepted.
Of all wild animals, rats do the greatest number of "impossible"
things. We have matched our wits against rat cunning until a
madhouse yawned before us. Twice in my life all my traps and
poisons have utterly failed, and left me faintly asking:
_Are_ rats possessed of occult powers? Once the answer to
that was furnished by an old he-one who left his tail in my steel
trap, but a little later _caught himself_ in a trap-like
space in the back of the family aeolian, and ignominiously died
there,--a victim of his own error in judging distances without a
tape line.
Tomes might be written about the minds and manners of the brown
rat, setting forth in detail its wonderful intelligence in quickly
getting wise to new food, new shelter, new traps and new poisons.
Six dead rats are, as a rule, sufficient to put any _new_
trap out of business; but poisons and infections go farther before
being found out. [Footnote: For home use, my best rat weapon is
rough-on-rats, generously mixed with butter and spread liberally
on very thin slices of bread. It has served me well in effecting
clearances.]
The championship for keen strategy in self-preservation belongs to
the musk-oxen for their wolf-proof circle of heads and horns.
Every musk-ox herd is a mutual benefit life insurance company.
When a gaunt and hungry wolf-pack appears, the adult bull and cow
musk-oxen at once form a close circle, with the calves and young
stock in the centre. That deadly ring of lowered heads and sharp
horns, all hung precisely right to puncture and deflate hostile
wolves, is impregnable to fang and claw. The arctic wolves know
this well. Mr. Stefansson says it is the settled habit of wolf
packs of Banks Land to pass musk-ox herds without even provoking
them to "fall in" for defense.
Judging by the facts that Charles L. Smith and the Norboe brothers
related to Mr. Phillips and me around our camp-fires in the
Canadian Rockies, the wolverine is one of the most cunning wild
animals of all North America. This is a large order; for the gray
wolf and grizzly bear are strong candidates for honors in that
contest.
The greatest cunning of the wolverine is manifested in robbing
traps, stealing the trapper's food and trap-baits, and at the same
time avoiding the traps set for him. He is wonderfully expert in
springing steel traps for the bait or prey there is in them,
without getting caught himself. He will follow up a trap line for
miles, springing all traps and devouring all baits as he goes.
Sometimes in sheer wantonness he will throw a trap into a river,
and again he will bury a trap in deep snow. Dead martens in traps
are savagely torn from them. Those that can not be eaten on the
spot are carried off and skilfully cached under two or three feet
of snow.
Trapper Smith once set a trap for a wolverine, and planted close
behind it a young moose skull with some flesh upon it. The
wolverine came in the night, started at a point well away from the
trap, dug a tunnel through six feet of snow, fetched up well
behind the trap,--and triumphantly dragged away the head through
his tunnel.
From the testimony of W. H. Wright, of Spokane, in his interesting
book on "The Grizzly Bear," and for other reasons, I am convinced
that the Rocky Mountain silver-tip grizzly is our brightest North
American animal, and very keen of nose, eye, ear and brain. Mr.
Wright says that "the grizzly bear far excels in cunning any other
animal found throughout the Rocky Mountains, and, for that matter,
he far excels them all combined." While the last clause is a large
order, I will not dispute the opinion of a man of keen
intelligence who has lived much among the most important and
interesting wild animals of the Rockies.
In the Bitter Root Mountains Mr. Wright and his hunting party once
set a bear trap for a grizzly, in a pen of logs, well baited with
fresh meat. On the second day they found the pen demolished, the
bait taken out, and everything that was movable piled on the top
of the trap.
The trap was again set, this time loosely, under a bed of moss.
The grizzly came and joyously ate all the meat that was scattered
around the trap, but the moss and the trap were left untouched.
And then followed a major operation in bear trapping. A mile away
there was a steep slope of smooth rock, bounded at its foot by a
creek. On one side was a huge tangle of down timber, on the other
side loomed some impassable rocks; and a tiny meadow sloped away
at the top. The half-fleshed carcasses of two dead elk were thrown
half way down the rock slide, to serve as a bait. On the two sides
two bear guns were set, and to their triggers were attached two
long silk fish-lines, stretched taut and held parallel to each
other, extending across the rocky slope. The idea was that the
bear could not by any possibility reach the bait from above or
below, without setting off at least one gun, and getting a bullet
through his shoulders.
On the first night, no guns went off. The next morning it was
found that the bear had crossed the stream and climbed straight up
toward the bait until he reached the first fish-line; where he
stopped. Without pressing the string sufficiently to set off its
gun, he followed it to the barrier of trees. Being balked there,
he turned about, retraced his steps carefully and followed the
string to the barrier of rocks. Being blocked there, he back-
tracked down the slide and across the stream, over the way he
came. Then he widely circled the whole theatre, and came down
toward the bait from the little meadow at its top of the slide.
Presently he reached the upper fish-line, twelve feet away from
the first one. First he followed this out to the log barrier, then
back to the rock ledge that was supposed to be unclimbable. There
he scrambled up the "impossible" rocks, negotiated the ledge foot
by foot, and successfully got around the end of line No. 2.
Getting between the two lines he sailed out across the slope to
the elk carcasses, feasted sumptuously, and then meandered out
the way he came, without having disturbed a soul.
All this was done at night, and in darkness; and presumably that
bear is there to this day, alive and well. No wonder Mr. Wright
has a high opinion of the grizzly bear as a thinking animal.
In hiding their homes and young, either in burrows or in nests on
the ground, wild rabbits and hares are wonderfully skilful, even
under new conditions. Being quite unable to fight, or even to dig
deeply, they are wholly dependent upon their wits in keeping their
young alive by hiding them. Thanks to their keenness in
concealment, the gray rabbit is plentiful throughout the eastern
United States in spite of its millions of enemies. Is it not
wonderful? The number killed by hunters last year in Pennsylvania
was about 3,500,000!
The most amazing risk that I ever saw taken by a rabbit was made
by a gray rabbit that nested in a shallow hole in the middle of a
lawn-mower lawn east of the old National Museum building in
Washington. The hollow was like that of a small wash-basin, and
when at rest in it with her young ones the neutral gray back of
the mother came just level with the top of the ground. At the
last, when her young were almost large enough to get out and go
under their own steam, a lawn-mower artist chanced to look down
at the wrong moment and saw the family. Evidently that mother
believed that the boldest ventures are those most likely to win.
Among the hoofed and horned animals of North America the white-
tailed deer is the shrewdest in the recognition of its enemies,
the wisest in the choice of cover, and in measures for self-
preservation. It seems at first glance that the buck is more keen-
witted than the doe; but this is a debatable question. Throughout
the year the buck thinks only of himself. During fully one-half
the year the doe is burdened by the cares of motherhood, and the
paramount duty of saving her fawns from their numerous enemies.
This, I am quite sure, is the handicap which makes it so much
easier to kill a doe in the autumn hunting season than to bag a
fully antlered and sophisticated buck who has only himself to
consider.
The white-tailed deer saves its life by skulking low in timber and
thick brush. This is why it so successfully resists the
extermination that has almost swept the mule deer, antelope,
white goat, moose and elk from all the hunting-grounds of the
United States. Thanks to its alertness in seeing its enemies
first, its skill and quickness in hiding, _and its mental
keenness in recognizing and using deer sanctuaries,_ the white-
tailed or "Virginia" deer will outlive all the other hoofed
animals of North America. In Pennsylvania they know enough to rush
for the wire-bounded protected area whenever the hunters appear.
That state has twenty-six such deer sanctuaries,--well filled
with deer.
The moose and caribou dwell upon open or half-open ground, and are
at the mercy of the merciless long-range rifles. Their keenness
does not count much against rifles that can shoot and kill at a
quarter of a mile. In the rutting season the bull moose of Maine
or New Brunswick is easily deceived by the "call" of a birch-bark
megaphone in the hands of a moose hunter who imitates the love
call of the cow moose so skilfully that neither moose nor man can
detect the falsity of the lure.
The mountain sheep is wide-eyed, alert and ready to run, but he
dwells in exposed places from the high foothills up to the
mountain summits, and now even the most bungling hunter can find
him and kill him at long range. In the days of black powder and
short ranges the sheep had a chance to escape; but now he has none
whatever. He has keener vision and more alertness than the goat,
but as a real life-saving factor that amounts to nothing! Wild
sheep are easily and quickly exterminated.
The mountain goat has no protection except elevation and
precipitous rocks, and to the hunter who has the energy to climb
up to him he, too, is easy prey. Usually his biped enemy finds him
and attacks him in precipitous mountains, where running and hiding
are utterly impossible. When discovered on a ledge two feet wide
leading across the face of a precipice, poor Billy has nothing to
do but to take the bullets as they come until he reels and falls
far down to the cruel slide-rock. He has a wonderful mind, but its
qualities and its usefulness belong in Chapter XIII.
Warm-Coated Animals Avoid "Fresh Air." On this subject there is a
strange divergence of reasoning power between the wild animals of
cold countries and the sleeping-porch advocates of today.
Even the most warm-coated of the fur-bearing animals, such as the
bears, foxes, beavers, martens and mink, and also the burrowing
rodents, take great pains to den up in winter just as far from the
"fresh air" of the cold outdoors as they can attain by deep
denning or burrowing. The prairie-dog not only ensconces himself
in a cul-de-sac at the end of a hole fourteen feet deep and long,
but as winter sets in he also tightly plugs up the mouth of his
den with moist earth. When sealed up in his winter den the black
bear of the north draws his supply of fresh air through a hole
about one inch in diameter, or less.
But the human devotees of fresh air reason in the opposite
direction. It is now the regular thing for mothers to open wide to
the freezing air of out-doors either one or all the windows of the
rooms in which their children sleep, giving to each child enough
fresh air to supply ten full-grown elephants, or twenty head of
horses. And the final word is the "sleeping-porch!" It matters not
how deadly damp is the air along with its 33 degrees of cold, or
the velocity of the wind, the fresh air must be delivered. The
example of the fat and heavily furred wild beast is ignored; and I
just wonder how many people in the United States, old and young,
have been killed, or permanently injured, by fresh air, during the
last fifteen years.
And furthermore. Excepting the hoofed species, it is the universal
rule of the wild animals of the cold-winter zones of the earth
that the mother shall keep her helpless young close beside her in
the home nest and keep them warm partly by the warmth of her own
body. The wild fur-clad mother does not maroon her helpless
offspring in an isolated cot in a room apart, upon a thin mattress
and in an atmosphere so cold that it is utterly impossible for the
poor little body and limbs to warm it and keep it warm. Yet many
human mothers do just that, and some take good care to provide a
warmer atmosphere for themselves than they joyously force upon
their helpless infants.
No dangerous fads should be forced upon defenseless children or
animals.
A proper amount of fresh air is very desirable, but the intake of
a child is much less than that of an elephant. Besides, if Nature
had intended that men should sleep outdoors in winter, with the
moose and caribou, we would have been furnished with ruminant
pelage and fat.
VII
KEEN BIRDS AND DULL MEN
If all men could know how greatly the human species varies from
highest to lowest, and how the minds and emotions of the lowest
men parallel and dove-tail with those of the highest quadrupeds
and birds, we might be less obsessed with our own human ego, and
more appreciative of the intelligence of animals.
A thousand times in my life my blood has been brought to the
boiling point by seeing or reading of the cruel practices of
ignorant and vicious men toward animals whom they despised because
of their alleged standing "below man." By his vicious and cruel
nature, many a man is totally unfitted to own, or even to
associate with, dogs, horses and monkeys. Many persons are born
into the belief that every man is necessarily a "lord of
creation," and that all animals per se are man's lawful prey. In
the vicious mind that impression increases with age. Minds of the
better classes can readily learn by precept or by reasoning from
cause to effect the duty of man to observe and defend the God-
given rights of animals.
It was very recently that I saw on the street a group that
represented man's attitude toward wild animals. It consisted of
an unclean and vicious-looking man in tramp's clothing, grinding
an offensive hand-organ and domineering over a poor little
terrorized "ringtail" monkey. The wretched mite from the jungle
was encased in a heavy woolen straight-jacket, and there was a
strap around its loins to which a stout cord was attached, running
to the Root of All Evil. The pavement was hot, but there with its
bare and tender feet on the hot concrete, the sad-eyed little waif
painfully moved about, peering far up into the faces of passers-by
for sympathy, but all the time furtively and shrinkingly watching
its tormentor. Every now and then the hairy old tramp would jerk
the monkey's cord, each time giving the frail creature a violent
bodily wrench from head to foot. I think that string was jerked
about forty times every hour.
And that exhibition of monkey torture in a monkey hell continues
in summer throughout many states of our country,--because "it
pleases the children!" The use of monkeys with hand-organs is a
cruel outrage upon the monkey tribe, and no civilized state or
municipality should tolerate it. I call upon all humane persons to
put an end to it.
As an antidote to our vaulting human egotism, we should think
often upon the closeness of mental contact between the highest
animals and the lowest men. In drawing a parallel between those
two groups, there are no single factors more valuable than the
home, and the family food supply. These hark back to the most
primitive instincts of the vertebrates. They are the bedrock
foundations upon which every species rests. As they are stable or
unstable, good or bad, so lives or dies the individual, and the
species also.
In employing the term "highest animals" I wish to be understood as
referring to the warm-blooded vertebrates, and not merely the apes
and monkeys that both structurally and mentally are nearest to
man.
Throughout my lifetime I have been by turns amazed, entertained
and instructed by the marvelous intelligence and mechanical skill
of small mammals in constructing burrows, and of certain birds in
the construction of their nests. Today the hanging nest of the
Baltimore oriole is to me an even greater wonder than it was when
I first saw one over sixty years ago. Even today the mechanical
skill involved in its construction is beyond my comprehension. My
dull brain can not figure out the processes by which the bird
begins to weave its hanging purse at the tip end of the most
unstable of all earthly building sites,--a down-hanging elm-tree
branch that is swayed to and fro by every passing breeze. The
situation is so "impossible" that thus far no moving picture
artist has ever caught and recorded the process.
Take in your hand a standard oriole nest, and examine it
thoroughly. First you will note that it is very strong, and
thoroughly durable. It can stand the lashings of the fiercest
gales that visit our storm-beaten shore.
How long would it take a man to unravel that nest, wisp by wisp,
and resolve it into a loose pile of materials? Certainly not less
than an entire day. Do you think that even your skilful fingers,--
unassisted by needles,--could in two days, or in three, weave of
those same materials a nest like that, that would function as did
the original? I doubt it. The materials consist of long strips of
the thin inner bark of trees, short strings, and tiny grass stems
that are long, pliable and tough. Who taught the oriole how to
find and to weave those rare and hard-to-find materials? And how
did it manage all that weaving with its beak only? Let the wise
ones answer, if they can; for I confess that I can not!
Down in Venezuela, in the delta of the Orinoco River, and
elsewhere, lives a black and yellow bird called the giant cacique
(pronounced cay-seek'), which as a nest-builder far surpasses our
oriole. Often the cacique's hanging nest is from four to six feet
long. The oriole builds to escape the red squirrels, but the
cacique has to reckon with the prehensile-tailed monkeys.
Sometimes a dozen caciques will hang their nests in close
proximity to a wasps' nest, as if for additional protection. A
cacique's nest hangs like a grass rope, with a commodious purse at
its lower end, entered by a narrow perpendicular slit a foot or so
above the terminal facilities. It is impossible to achieve one of
these nests without either shooting off the limb to which it
hangs, or felling the tree. If it hangs low enough a charge of
coarse shot usually will cut the limb, but if high, cutting it down
with a rifle bullet is a more serious matter.
[Illustration with caption: HANGING NEST OF THE BALTIMORE ORIOLE
(From the "American Natural History")]
[Illustration with caption: GREAT HANGING NESTS OF THE CRESTED
CACIQUE As seen in the delta of the Orinoco Rover, Venezuela.]
To our Zoological Park visitors the African weaver birds are a
wonder and a delight. Orioles and caciques do not build nests in
captivity, but the weavers blithely transfer their activities to
their spacious cage in our tropical-bird house. The bird-men keep
them supplied with raffia grass, and they do the rest. Fortunately
for us, they weave nests for fun, and work at it all the year
round! Millions of visitors have watched them doing it. To
facilitate their work the upper half of their cage is judiciously
supplied with tree-branches of the proper size and architectural
slant. The weaving covers many horizontal branches. Sometimes a
group of nests will be tied together in a structure four feet
long; and it branches up, or down, or across, seemingly without
rhyme or reason.