builded better than he knew, and I am not sure that the accidental
result, the change in the dog’s habits in one particular, will not be
regarded as the most important gain by those who are fond of dogs and
by all who recognise that, in spite of some disgusting instincts which
can’t be changed, the dog is and probably always will be with us--our
one and only four-footed associate.
XXIV
THE GREAT DOG-SUPERSTITION
No person can give a careful and loving study to animal life for a
long period without meeting with species exhibiting aptitudes of which
a great deal might be made in a domestic state, and which, together
with their beauty and cleanly habits, seem specially to fit them
for companionship with man in a greater degree than those which we
now possess. For it is an undoubted fact that some animals are more
intelligent than others, slight differences in this respect being
perceptible even among the species of a single group or genus. We
measure the animal mind by ours; and looking down from the summit of
our mountain the earth beneath us at first seems level; but it is not
quite level, as we are able to see by regarding it attentively. Even
more important are the differences in temper, ranging from the morose
and truculent to the placable and sweet; more important, because
compared with this diversity in disposition that which we find in
intelligence is not great. There are also animals solitary by nature,
and almost or quite incapable of any attachment excepting that of
the sexes; while others are gregarious or social, and able to form
attachments not only among themselves, but also with those of other
species, and, when domesticated, with man. There is a third matter,
which is doubtless the most important of all, to be considered when
weighing the comparative advantages of different kinds, namely, the
habits, or instincts, which change so slowly that they are practically
immutable, even in altered conditions, and which, in the domesticated
or pet animal, according to their character, may prove a source of
pleasure and profit to man, or, on the contrary, a perpetual annoyance
and trouble. When our progenitors far back in time tamed the animals
we now possess, it cannot be supposed that they expended much thought
on such considerations as these: probably chance determined everything
for them, and they took and tamed the animals which came first to
hand, or which promised to be most useful to them, either as food
or in assisting them to procure food. If they were barbarians they
would think little of beauty, little of the small differences in
intelligence, and of the much greater differences in disposition, and,
naturally, nothing at all about certain instincts in some animals which
would become increasingly repugnant to man in a civilised state.
We have the dog so constantly with us; the grand result of centuries
of artificial selection and training is so patent to every one, that
we have actually come to look on this animal as by nature superior
in mental endowment, genial qualities, and general adaptiveness to
all others. Yet the qualities which make the dog valuable to us now
formed no part of its original character; it is valuable chiefly for
its various instinctive tendencies, and these are a later growth
and purely the result of individual spontaneous variations, and of
man’s unconscious selection. The dog’s affection for his master--the
anxiety to be constantly with and to be noticed and caressed by him,
the impatience at his absence and grief at his loss, and the courage
to defend him and his house and his belongings from strangers--this
affection of which we are accustomed to think so highly, regarding
it as something unique in Nature, is in reality a very small and a
very low thing; and by low is here meant common in the animal world,
for it exists in a great many, probably in a large majority, of
mammalian brains in every order and every family. Nor is it confined
to mammalians. The duck does not occupy a distinguished place in the
scale of being, and the lame duck that attached itself to Mr. Caxton,
and affectionately followed him up and down in his walk, might seem an
exceptionally gifted bird to those who know little of animal life. It
is of course here assumed that Bulwer did not invent the lame duck: a
peacock or bird of paradise, with all its organs complete, would have
suited his fancy better. Probably the incident--for such incidents
are very common--was told to him as true, and thinking that it would
give a touch of reality and homely pathos to the description of Mr.
Caxton’s mild and lovable character he introduced it into his novel. A
friend of the writer owned a duck far more worthy of admiration than
Bulwer’s immortal bird. This was not a domestic duck, but a teal,
which he brought down with his gun slightly wounded in the wing, and
feeling all at once a strange compassion for it, he tied it up in a
handkerchief and carried it to his home in the suburbs of a large town.
The captive was turned into a courtyard and its wants attended to; it
soon grew accustomed to its new mode of existence, and furthermore
became strongly attached to all the members of the family, seeking for
them in the rooms when it felt lonely, and always exhibiting distress
of mind and anger in the presence of strangers. When a cat or dog
was fondled in its presence it would run to the spot, administer a
few vindictive blows to the animal with its soft bill, and solicit a
caress for itself. The most curious thing in its history was that it
took a special liking to its captor, and singled him out for its most
marked attentions. When he went away to business in the morning the
teal would accompany him to the street door to see him off, returning
afterwards contentedly to the yard; and in the afternoon it would again
repair to the door, always left open, and standing composedly on the
middle of the step wait its master’s return--for this teal took count
of time. If, while it stood there watching the road, a stranger came
in, it would open its beak and hiss and strike at his legs, showing
as much suspicion and “sense of proprietorship” as a dog does when it
barks and snaps at a visitor. Its owner’s arrival would be greeted with
demonstrations of affection and joy, and following him into the house
it would spend an hour or two very happily if allowed to sit on his
feet, or nestling close against them on the hearth-rug.
The behaviour of this poor teal might seem a very great thing, but it
amounts to very little after all; the memory that all animals have,
and perhaps a little judgement--the “small dose of reason” which Huber
found that even insects possessed--and attachment to the beings it
was accustomed to see and associate with, and who attended to all
its wants and gently caressed it. In the matter of the affections
it has no advantage even over Darwin’s celebrated snail. No doubt
the self-sacrificing snail proved too much for Darwin’s argument, as
Professor Mivart has pointed out; fortunately the case of the teal,
which can be substantiated, does not prove too much for the argument
contained in this article. To be astonished at the display of such
faculties and affections in a bird so low down in the scale would show
ignorance of Nature. And there is no doubt that most men are very
ignorant about her; so ignorant that if the teal had the place in our
life which belongs to the dog, and had been with us for centuries, a
companion and pet in our houses to the exclusion of other kinds, we
should now believe that it surpassed all other creatures in human-like
feelings; our periodicals would teem with anecdotes of its marvellous
intelligence; innumerable books would be written on the subject, and
the psychological biologists would put it next to man in their systems,
one step below him on the throne of life, and far above the general
herd of animals.
It is a fact, that might well stagger belief in the dog’s superior
intellect, that mammalians so low down as rats and mice when properly
treated and trained make attached and intelligent pets; and that a
mouse, or a sparrow, or a snake, or even a creature so small and far
down in the organic scale as a flea, may be taught, without very
great difficulty, to perform tricks which, if performed by a dog,
would be pronounced very clever indeed. Most people who witness
the pretty performances of small mammals, birds and insects--which
are usually up to the level of the dog’s performances seen at the
music-halls--probably think, if they think anything at all about
the matter, that the exhibitor in such cases is the possessor of a
mysterious kind of talent by means of which he is able to make these
small creatures come for a few moments out of the instinctive groove
they move in to do the things he wishes, much as little toy ducks and
swans, which are hollow inside, are made to swim round in a basin of
water after a stick of loadstone; only in the case of the exhibitor
of animals the loadstone is hidden from the spectators. His trick, or
mysterious talent, consists in the knowledge that the animal he wishes
to train is not a little hollow duck or automaton, but that it has
faculties corresponding to the lower psychical faculties in man, and
that by the exercise of considerable patience it may be made, when the
stimulus is applied, to repeat again and again a few actions in the
same order. The question which concerns us to know is, has the dose
of reason or have these lower psychical faculties in the dog been so
greatly developed during its long companionship with man as to raise
it a great deal nearer to man’s level, and place a great gulf between
its mind and that of the pig or the crow? The gulf exists only in our
imagination, and the “development” is a fairy-tale, of which Science
was probably not the original author, but which she has thought proper
to include, somewhat amplified and with new illustrations, in the
recent editions of her collected works. The dog, taken directly from
a wild life, if taken young, will be tame and understand and obey his
master--numerous instances are on record--and if patiently trained
will perform tricks just as wonderful as those that were related to
an astonished audience at the late meeting of the British Association
by a well-known writer and authority on zoological science. And in
the mammalian division there are hundreds of species, some higher,
some lower than the dog, which may be taught the same things, or other
things equally wonderful. These greatly vaunted performances of the
dog only prove that its mind is, and ever will be, what it was when,
thousands of years ago, some compassionate woman took the pup her owner
threw into her arms, and reared it, suckling it perhaps at her own
breast; and when in after days it followed at the heels of its savage
master and astonished him by assisting in the capture of his quarry.
It is not, then, the dog’s intelligence, which is less than that
of many other species, and is non-progressive in spite of all that
training and selection can do, which makes it valuable to us. Nor has
it any advantage over other species in those qualities of affection,
fidelity, and good temper about which we hear so much rapturous
language; for these things are lower down than reason and exist
throughout the mammalian world, in animals high and low, little and
big, from the harvest mouse to the hippopotamus. The dog is more
valuable to us than other species because we have got him. We inherited
him and were thereby saved a large amount of trouble. He is tame;
the others are wild. His intellect is small and stationary, but his
structure is variable, and, more important still, so are his instincts;
or perhaps it would be more correct to say that new propensities, which
often prove hereditary, and which by selection and training may be
fixed and strengthened until they are made to resemble instincts, are
of frequent occurrence in him. The more or less settled propensities in
our domestic animals, originating in the domestic state, are no doubt
in one sense instincts, since they are of the nature of instinct and
its beginnings; but the difference between them and the true natural
instinct, which has had incalculable time to crystallise in, is greater
than can be expressed. The last is the rock and eternal; the others
are snow-flakes, formed in a moment, that settle and show white, and
even before our sight is withdrawn melt away and vanish. This same
variability, or habit of varying, is in some vague way taken as a proof
of versatility; hence one reason of the popular notion that the dog is
so vastly superior to other four-footed creatures. If a dog could be
taught to turn a spit, find truffles, save a man from drowning or from
perishing in a snow-drift, point out a partridge, retrieve a wounded
duck, kill twenty rats in as many seconds, and herd a flock of sheep,
then it would indeed be an animal to marvel at. These are special
instincts or incipient instincts, and to bestow such epithets as
“generous” and “noble” on a dog for pulling a drowning man out of the
water, or scratching him out of a snow-drift, is fully as irrational
as it would be to call the swallow and cuckoo intrepid explorers of
the Dark Continent, or to praise the hive-bees of the working caste
for their chastity, loyalty, and patriotism, and for their profound
knowledge of chemistry and the higher mathematics, as shown in
their works. Cross the dogs and these various propensities, which
being useful to man and not to the animals themselves are preserved
artificially, fade away and disappear, and from moving artificially
apart in twenty different grooves the animals all revert to the one
old simple groove in which they were first found by man. This much may
then be said in favour of the dog: he is plastic. The plasticity is
probably due to domestication, to the variety of conditions to which
he is subjected as man’s companion in all regions of the globe, the
selection which separates and preserves new varieties as they arise,
and the crossing again of widely separated breeds. That he is plastic
must be our excuse for determining to make the most we can of him to
the complete exclusion of all other species, which might or might not
prove plastic in the same degree. The fowl and pigeon are plastic,
while the goose, guinea-fowl, pheasant, and peacock vary little or not
at all. Nature may have better things than the dog, but we cannot guess
her secrets, and to find them out by experiment would take a very long
time. A bird in the hand, any bird, even a cock-sparrow, is better than
all the birds of paradise that are in the bush. The other animals will
serve us for sport while they last; and when they are gone we of this
age shall be gone too, and deaf to whatever unkind things our posterity
may say of us. The dog is with us, esteemed above all brutes, our
favourite, and we shall give him no cause for jealousy.
If we had him not, if we had never had him or had forgotten his
memory, and were to go out again to select a friend and companion from
the beasts of the field, the wild dog would be passed by without a
thought. There is nothing in him to attract, but on the contrary much
to repel. In a state of nature he is an animal of disgusting habits,
with a vulture-like preference for dead and decomposing meat. Cowardly
he also is, yet when unopposed displays a bloodthirstiness almost
without a parallel among true beasts of prey. Nor does he possess any
compensating beauty or sagacity, and compared with many carnivores he
is neither sharp-sighted nor fleet of foot. Some keen genealogist might
be tempted to ask, Which wild dog is here meant? He may follow his
fancy and choose his own wild dog--jackal, dhole, baunsuah, wolf; or
take them all, and even include the coyote, as Darwin did. The multiple
origin of the domestic dog is by no means an improbable theory; but it
is also highly probable that the jackal had by far the largest share in
his parentage. There are also reasons for believing that most of the
wild dogs, including the dingo, have sprung from tame breeds; and, as
a fact, the wild dogs with which the writer is most familiar are known
to be the descendants of domestic animals which ran away from their
masters and adopted a feral life.
Out of this same coarse material man, unconsciously imitating Nature’s
method, has fashioned his favourite; or rather, since the dog has
become so divergent in his keeping, his large group of favourites,
with their various forms and propensities. Only now, too late by
some thousands of years, he is able to see that it was a mistake to
go so low in the first place, to have contentedly taken base metal,
dull-witted barbarian that he was, when he might just as well have
taken gold. For the baseness of the metal shows in spite of much
polishing to make it shine. Polishing powders we have, but not the
powders of projection; and the dog, with all his new propensities,
remains mentally a jackal, above some mammalians and below others; nor
can he outlive ancient, obscene instincts which become increasingly
offensive as civilisation raises and refines his master man.
How did our belief in the mental superiority of this animal come to
exist? Doubtless it came about through our intimacy with the dog,
in the fields where he helped us, and in our houses where we made
a pet of him, together with our ignorance of the true character of
other animals. All animals were to us simply “brutes that perish,”
and “natural brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed,” with no
faculties at all resembling ours; and when it was discovered that
the dog could be made to understand many things, and that he had
some feelings in common with us, and was capable of great affection,
which sometimes caused him to pine at his master’s loss, and in some
instances even to die of grief; and that in all these things he was, or
seemed to be, widely separated from other domestic brutes, the notion
grew up that he was essentially different, an animal set apart for
man’s benefit, and, finally, that he had been specially created for
such an object. Thus, Youatt says, “The dog, next to the human being,
ranks highest in intelligence, and was evidently designed to be the
companion and friend of man”; and in another place he says that it is
highly probable that he descended from no such inferior and worthless
animal as the jackal or wolf, but was originally created, somewhat as
we now find him--the associate and friend of man.
This was not so very hard to believe in the pre-Darwinian days, since
domesticated dogs, and even some of the breeds which we now possess,
were known to have existed between three and four thousand years ago,
while the world was only supposed to have existed about six thousand
years. It seems probable that this curious superstition of the dog’s
special creation grew up gradually and only became popular in very
recent times. It was gladly seized on by the poets, who made as much
out of it as they had formerly done out of the melody of the dying
swan; and the artists were not slow in following their example. A dog
may be choked with pudding, but the human mind greedily gulped down
as much of this mawkish dog-sentiment as any person, with misdirected
talents, chose to manufacture for it.
Before proceeding with the story of our dog superstition, I will here
interpose a remark anent that which obtains in the other half, or more
than half, of the world--the East. “The people of the East,” says
Youatt, “have a strange superstition with regard to the dog.” Strange
indeed, almost incredible to our properly enlightened Western minds!
We, who in a manner despise these “people of the East,” and object to
many of their habits with regard to personal cleanliness, and so on, to
be told that our friend and associate the dog, our pet who shares our
living and sleeping rooms, and is caressed with our hands and lips, is
an unclean beast and unfit to be touched by man! And so we find that
the East is East, and the West is West, with regard to this as well as
to most things, and that there are two great dog superstitions. And now
to proceed with the story of the one which is ours.
In due time the evolutionists came, teaching that the earth is old,
that all the living things on it are the descendants of one or of a
very few primordial forms, and as a consequence of such teaching the
special creation of the dog was no longer tenable. How then came the
dog-superstition--the belief in its superiority--to survive so rude
a shock? For the evolutionists taught that all the brutes possess,
potentially and in germ, all the faculties found in man, and the
conclusion seems unavoidable that there must be a correspondence in
the physical and psychical development, and that the root of the
higher mental and moral powers must exist in the animals of the
highest grades; that the mammal must be more rational than the bird,
and the bird than the reptile, and the reptile than the fish; and
that the hyena, civet, and mongoose are nearer to us than the dog,
the cats above the mongoose, and the monkeys higher still. Why then
was not the dog relegated to a lower place? Dr. Lauder Lindsay has
given the reason: “The mental scale--the scale of intellectual and
moral development--is not quite synonymous with the zoological scale.
The most intellectual and moral animals are not necessarily those
nearest to man in the classification commonly adopted by zoologists.”
Furthermore it has been assumed that contact with man has had the
effect of enlarging the dog’s mind, and making him, beyond all other
animals, intellectual, moral, and even religious.
It ought to be a great comfort to those who devote themselves to canine
pets, and to canophilists generally, to know that the philosophers
are at one with them. To some others it will perhaps add a new terror
to existence if students of dog-psychology generally should feel
themselves tempted to imitate a recent illustrious example, and go
about the country lecturing on the marvellous development of mind
in their respective pets. Leibnitz once gave an account of a dog
that talked; and quite recently a writer in a London journal related
how, in a sheltered spot among the rocks on a lonely Scotch moor, he
stumbled on an old shepherd playing whist with his collie. Nothing
approaching to these cases in dramatic interest can be looked for in
the apprehended discourses. The animal to be described will as a rule
be of a quiet, thoughtful character proper in a philosopher’s dog;
not fond of display or much given to wild flights of imagination. He
will only show that he possesses that faculty when asleep and barking
at the heels of a dream-hare. He will show a deep affection for
his master, like the teal spoken of in this article; also a strong
sense of proprietorship, again like the teal and like the tame snake
described by White of Selborne--a display of intellect which strangely
simulates an instinct common to all creatures. And he will also show
an intelligent curiosity, and examine things to find out what they
are, and prove himself a very agreeable companion; as much so as Mr.
Benjamin Kidd’s pet humble-bee. Moreover he will be accomplished enough
to sit up and beg, retrieve a walking-stick from the Serpentine, close
an open door, etc.; and besides these ordinary things he will do things
extraordinary, such as picking up numbered or lettered cards, red,
blue, and yellow, at his master’s bidding; in fact such tricks as a
pig will perform without being very learned, not a Porson of its kind,
but only possessing the ordinary porcine abilities. In conclusion the
lecturer will bring up the savage, not in person, but a savage evolved
from his inner consciousness, and compare its understanding with that
of the dog, or of his dog, and the poor savage will have very much the
worst of it.