they were capable of conceiving such a thing, that would establish
their claim to be regarded as reasonable beings. I should as soon
expect a fox or a wolf to make use of a trap to capture its prey as to
make use of poison in any way. Why does not the fox take a stick and
spring the trap he is so afraid of? Simply because the act would
involve a mental process beyond him. He has not yet learned to use
even the simplest implement to attain his end. Then he would probably
be just as afraid of the trap after it was sprung as before. He in
some way associates it with his arch-enemy, man.
Such stories, too, as a chained fox or a coyote getting possession of
corn or other grain and baiting the chickens with it--feigning sleep
till the chicken gets within reach, and then seizing it--are of the
same class, incredible because transcending the inherited knowledge of
those animals. I can believe that a fox might walk in a shallow creek
to elude the hound, because he may inherit this kind of cunning, and
in his own experience he may have come to associate loss of scent with
water. Animals stalk their prey, or lie in wait for it, instinctively,
not from a process of calculation, as man does. If a fox would bait
poultry with corn, why should he not, in his wild state, bait mice and
squirrels with nuts and seeds? Has a cat ever been known to bait a rat
with a piece of cheese?
Animals seem to have a certain association of ideas; one thing
suggests another to them, as with us. This fact is made use of by
animal-trainers. I can easily believe the story Charles St. John
tells of the fox he saw waylaying some hares, and which, to screen
himself the more completely from his quarry, scraped a small hollow in
the ground and threw up the sand about it. But if St. John had said
that the fox brought weeds or brush to make himself a blind, as the
hunter often does, I should have discredited him, just as I discredit
the observation of a man quoted by Romanes, who says that jackals,
ambushing deer at the latter's watering-place, deliberately wait till
the deer have filled themselves with water, knowing that in that state
they are more easily run down and captured!
President Roosevelt, in "The Wilderness Hunter,"--a book, by the way,
of even deeper interest to the naturalist than to the sportsman,--says
that the moose has to the hunter the "very provoking habit of making a
half or three-quarters circle before lying down, and then crouching
with its head so turned that it can surely perceive any pursuer who
may follow its trail." This is the cunning of the moose developed
through long generations of its hunted and wolf-pursued ancestors,--a
cunning that does not differ from that of a man under the same
circumstances, though, of course, it is not the result of the same
process of reasoning.
I have known a chipping sparrow to build her nest on a grape-vine just
beneath a bunch of small green grapes. Soon the bunch grew and
lengthened and filled the nest, crowding out the bird. If the bird
could have foreseen the danger, she would have shown something like
human reason.
Birds that nest along streams, such as the water-thrush and the
water-ouzel, I suppose are rarely ever brought to grief by high water.
They have learned through many generations to keep at a safe distance.
I have never known a woodpecker to drill its nesting-cavity in a
branch or limb that was ready to fall. Not that woodpeckers look the
branch or tree over with a view to its stability, but that they will
cut into a tree only of a certain hardness; it is a family instinct.
Birds sometimes make the mistake of building their nests on slender
branches that a summer tempest will turn over, thus causing the eggs
or the young to spill upon the ground. Even instinct cannot always get
ahead of the weather.
It is almost impossible for us not to interpret the lives of the lower
animals in the terms of our own experience and our own psychology. I
entirely agree with Lloyd Morgan that we err when we do so, when we
attribute to them what we call sentiments or any of the emotions that
spring from our moral and æsthetic natures,--the sentiments of
justice, truth, beauty, altruism, goodness, duty, and the
like,--because these sentiments are the products of concepts and ideas
to which the brute natures are strangers. But all the emotions of our
animal nature--fear, anger, curiosity, local attachment, jealousy,
and rivalry--are undoubtedly the same in the lower orders.
Though almost anything may be affirmed of dogs, for they are nearly
half human, yet I doubt if even dogs experience the feeling of shame
or guilt or revenge that we so often ascribe to them. These feelings
are all complex and have a deep root. When I was a youth, my father
had a big churn-dog that appeared one morning with a small bullet-hole
in his hip. Day after day the old dog treated his wound with his
tongue, after the manner of dogs, until it healed, and the incident
was nearly forgotten. One day a man was going by on horseback, when
the old dog rushed out, sprang at the man, and came near pulling him
from the horse. It turned out that this was the person who had shot
the dog, and the dog recognized him.
This looks like revenge, and it would have been such in you or me, but
in the dog it was probably simple anger at the sight of the man who
had hurt him. The incident shows memory and the association of
impressions, but the complex feeling of vengeance, as we know it, is
another matter.
If animals do not share our higher intellectual nature, we have no
warrant for attributing to them anything like our higher and more
complex emotional nature. Musical strains seem to give them pain
rather than pleasure, and it is quite evident that perfumes have no
attraction for them.
The stories, which seem to be well authenticated, of sheep-killing
dogs that have slipped their collars in the night and indulged their
passion for live mutton, and then returned and thrust their necks into
their collars before their absence was discovered, do not, to my mind,
prove that the dogs were trying to deceive their masters and conceal
their guilt, but rather show how obedient to the chain and collar the
dogs had become. They had long been subject to such control and
discipline, and they returned to them again from the mere force of
habit.
I do not believe even the dog to be capable of a sense of guilt. Such
a sense implies a sense of duty, and this is a complex ethical sense
that the animals do not experience. What the dog fears, and what makes
him put on his look of guilt and shame, is his master's anger. A harsh
word or a severe look will make him assume the air of a culprit
whether he is one or not, and, on the other hand, a kind word and a
reassuring smile will transform him into a happy beast, no matter if
the blood of his victim is fresh upon him.
A dog is to be broken of a bad habit, if at all, not by an appeal to
his conscience or to his sense of duty, for he has neither, but by an
appeal to his susceptibility to pain.
Both Pliny and Plutarch tell the story of an elephant which, having
been beaten by its trainer for its poor dancing, was afterward found
all by itself practicing its steps by the light of the moon. This is
just as credible as many of the animal stories one hears nowadays.
Many of the actions of the lower animals are as automatic as those of
the tin rooster that serves as a weather-vane. See how intelligently
the rooster acts, always pointing the direction of the wind without a
moment's hesitation. Or behold the vessel anchored in the harbor, how
intelligently it adjusts itself to the winds and the tides! I have
seen a log, caught in an eddy in a flooded stream, apparently make
such struggles to escape that the thing became almost uncanny in its
semblance to life. Man himself often obeys just such unseen currents
of race or history when he thinks he is acting upon his own
initiative.
When I was in Alaska, I saw precipices down which hundreds of horses
had dashed themselves in their mad and desperate efforts to escape
from the toil and suffering they underwent on the White Pass trail.
Shall we say these horses deliberately committed suicide? Suicide it
certainly was in effect, but of course not in intention. What does or
can a horse know about death, or about self-destruction? These animals
were maddened by their hardships, and blindly plunged down the rocks.
The tendency to humanize the animals is more and more marked in all
recent nature books that aim at popularity. A recent British book on
animal life has a chapter entitled "Animal Materia Medica." The
writer, to make out his case, is forced to treat as medicine the salt
which the herbivorous animals eat, and the sand and gravel which grain
and nut-eating birds take into their gizzards to act as millstones to
grind their grist. He might as well treat their food as medicine and
be done with it. So far as I know, animals have no remedies whatever
for their ailments. Even savages have, for the most part, only "fake"
medicines.
A Frenchman has published a book, which has been translated into
English, on the "Industries of Animals." Some of these Frenchmen could
give points even to our "Modern School of Nature Study." It may be
remembered that Michelet said the bird floated, and that it could puff
itself up so that it was lighter than the air! Not a little
contemporary natural science can beat the bird in this respect.
The serious student of nature can have no interest in belittling or in
exaggerating the intelligence of animals. What he wants is the truth
about them, and this he will not get from our natural history
romancers, nor from the casual, untrained observers, who are sure to
interpret the lives of the wood-folk in terms of their own motives and
experiences, nor from Indians, trappers, or backwoodsmen, who give
such free rein to their fancies and superstitions.
Such a book as Romanes's "Animal Intelligence" is not always a safe
guide. It is like a lawyer's plea to the jury for his client. Romanes
was so intent upon making out his case that he allowed himself to be
imposed upon by the tales of irresponsible observers. Many of his
stories of the intelligence of birds and beasts are antecedently
improbable. He evidently credits the story of the Bishop of Carlisle,
who thinks he saw a jackdaw being tried by a jury of rooks for some
misdemeanor. Jack made a speech and the jury cawed back at him, and
after a time appeared to acquit Jack! What a child's fancy to be put
in a serious work on "Animal Intelligence"! The dead birds we now and
then find hanging from the nest, or from the limb of a tree, with a
string wound around their necks are no doubt criminals upon whom their
fellows have inflicted capital punishment!
Most of the observations upon which Romanes bases his conclusions are
like the incident which he quoted from Jesse, who tells of some
swallows that in the spirit of revenge tore down a nest from which
they had been ejected by the sparrows, in order to destroy the young
of their enemies--a feat impossible for swallows to do. Jesse does not
say he saw the swallows do it, but he "saw the young sparrows dead
upon the ground amid the ruins of the nest," and of course the nest
could get down in no other way!
Not to Romanes or Jesse or Michelet must we go for the truth about
animals, but to the patient, honest Darwin, to such calm, keen, and
philosophical investigators as Lloyd Morgan, and to the books of such
sportsmen as Charles St. John, or to our own candid, trained, and
many-sided Theodore Roosevelt,--men capable of disinterested
observation with no theories about animals to uphold.
IX
DO ANIMALS THINK AND REFLECT?
When we see the animals going about, living their lives in many ways
as we live ours, seeking their food, avoiding their enemies, building
their nests, digging their holes, laying up stores, migrating,
courting, playing, fighting, showing cunning, courage, fear, joy,
anger, rivalry, grief, profiting by experience, following their
leaders,--when we see all this, I say, what more natural than that we
should ascribe to them powers akin to our own, and look upon them as
thinking, reasoning, and reflecting. A hasty survey of animal life is
sure to lead to this conclusion. An animal is not a clod, nor a block,
nor a machine. It is alive and self-directing, it has some sort of
psychic life, yet the more I study the subject, the more I am
persuaded that with the probable exception of the dog on occasions,
and of the apes, animals do not think or reflect in any proper sense
of those words. As I have before said, animal life shows in an active
and free state that kind of intelligence that pervades and governs the
whole organic world,--intelligence that takes no thought of itself.
Here, in front of my window, is a black raspberry bush. A few weeks
ago its branches curved upward, with their ends swinging fully two
feet above the ground; now those ends are thrust down through the
weeds and are fast rooted to the soil. Did the raspberry bush think,
or choose what it should do? Did it reflect and say, Now is the time
for me to bend down and thrust my tip into the ground? To all intents
and purposes yes, yet there was no voluntary mental process, as in
similar acts of our own. We say its nature prompts it to act thus and
thus, and that is all the explanation we can give. Or take the case of
the pine or the spruce tree that loses its central and leading shoot.
When this happens, does the tree start a new bud and then develop a
new shoot to take the place of the lost leader? No, a branch from the
first ring of branches below, probably the most vigorous of the whorl,
is promoted to the leadership. Slowly it rises up, and in two or three
years it reaches the upright position and is leading the tree upward.
This, I suspect, is just as much an act of conscious intelligence and
of reason as is much to which we are so inclined to apply those words
in animal life. I suppose it is all foreordained in the economy of the
tree, if we could penetrate that economy. It is in this sense that
Nature thinks in the animal, and the vegetable, and the mineral
worlds. Her thinking is more flexible and adaptive in the vegetable
than in the mineral, and more so in the animal than in the vegetable,
and the most so of all in the mind of man.
The way the wild apple trees and the red thorn trees in the pasture,
as described by Thoreau, triumph over the cattle that year after year
browse them down, suggests something almost like human tactics. The
cropped and bruised tree, not being allowed to shoot upward, spreads
more and more laterally, thus pushing its enemies farther and farther
away, till, after many years, a shoot starts up from the top of the
thorny, knotted cone, and in one season, protected by this
_cheval-de-frise_, attains a height beyond the reach of the cattle,
and the victory is won. Now the whole push of the large root system
goes into the central shoot and the tree is rapidly developed.
This almost looks like a well-laid scheme on the part of the tree to
defeat its enemies. But see how inevitable the whole process is. Check
the direct flow of a current and it will flow out at the sides; check
the side issues and they will push out on their sides, and so on. So
it is with the tree or seedling. The more it is cropped, the more it
branches and rebranches, pushing out laterally as its vertical growth
is checked, till it has surrounded the central stalk on all sides with
a dense, thorny hedge. Then as this stalk is no longer cropped, it
leads the tree upward. The lateral branches are starved, and in a few
years the tree stands with little or no evidence of the ordeal it has
passed through. In like manner the nature of the animals prompts them
to the deeds they do, and we think of them as the result of a mental
process, because similar acts in ourselves are the result of such a
process.
See how the mice begin to press into our buildings as the fall comes
on. Do they know winter is coming? In the same way the vegetable world
knows it is coming when it prepares for winter, or the insect world
when it makes ready, but not as you and I know it. The woodchuck
"holes up" in late September; the crows flock and select their rookery
about the same time, and the small wood newts or salamanders soon
begin to migrate to the marshes. They all know winter is coming, just
as much as the tree knows, when in August it forms its new buds for
the next year, or as the flower knows that its color and perfume will
attract the insects, and no more. The general intelligence of nature
settles all these and similar things.
When a bird selects a site for its nest, it seems, on first view, as
if it must actually think, reflect, compare, as you and I do when we
decide where to place our house. I saw a little chipping sparrow
trying to decide between two raspberry bushes. She kept going from one
to the other, peering, inspecting, and apparently weighing the
advantages of each. I saw a robin in the woodbine on the side of the
house trying to decide which particular place was the best site for
her nest. She hopped to this tangle of shoots and sat down, then to
that, she turned around, she readjusted herself, she looked about, she
worked her feet beneath her, she was slow in making up her mind. Did
she make up her mind? Did she think, compare, weigh? I do not believe
it. When she found the right conditions, she no doubt felt pleasure
and satisfaction, and that settled the question. An inward,
instinctive want was met and satisfied by an outward material
condition. In the same way the hermit crab goes from shell to shell
upon the beach, seeking one to its liking. Sometimes two crabs fall to
fighting over a shell that each wants. Can we believe that the hermit
crab thinks and reasons? It selects the suitable shell instinctively,
and not by an individual act of judgment. Instinct is not always
inerrant, though it makes fewer mistakes than reason does. The red
squirrel usually knows how to come at the meat in the butternut with
the least gnawing, but now and then he makes a mistake and strikes the
edge of the kernel, instead of the flat side. The cliff swallow will
stick her mud nest under the eaves of a barn where the boards are
planed so smooth that the nest sooner or later is bound to fall. She
seems to have no judgment in the matter. Her ancestors built upon the
face of high cliffs, where the mud adhered more firmly.
A wood thrush began a nest in one of my maples, as usual making the
foundation of dry leaves, bits of paper, and dry grass. After the
third day the site on the branch was bare, the wind having swept away
every vestige of the nest. As I passed beneath the tree I saw the
thrush standing where the nest had been, apparently in deep thought. A
few days afterward I looked again, and the nest was completed. The
bird had got ahead of the wind at last. The nesting-instinct had
triumphed over the weather.
Take the case of the little yellow warbler when the cowbird drops her
egg into its nest--does anything like a process of thought or
reflection pass in the bird's mind then? The warbler is much disturbed
when she discovers the strange egg, and her mate appears to share her
agitation. Then after a time, and after the two have apparently
considered the matter together, the mother bird proceeds to bury the
egg by building another nest on top of the old one. If another
cowbird's egg is dropped in this one, she will proceed to get rid of
this in the same way. This all looks very like reflection. But let us
consider the matter a moment. This thing between the cowbird and the
warbler has been going on for innumerable generations. The yellow
warbler seems to be the favorite host of this parasite, and something
like a special instinct may have grown up in the warbler with
reference to this strange egg. The bird reacts, as the psychologists
say, at sight of it, then she proceeds to dispose of it in the way
above described. _All yellow warblers act in the same manner_, which
is the way of instinct. Now if this procedure was the result of an
individual thought or calculation on the part of the birds, they would
not all do the same thing; different lines of conduct would be hit
upon. How much simpler and easier it would be to throw the egg
out--how much more like an act of rational intelligence. So far as I
know, no bird does eject this parasitical egg, and no other bird
besides the yellow warbler gets rid of it in the way I have described.
I have found a deserted phoebe's nest with one egg of the phoebe
and one of the cowbird in it.
Some of our wild birds have changed their habits of nesting, coming
from the woods and the rocks to the protection of our buildings. The
phoebe-bird and the cliff swallow are marked examples. We ascribe
the change to the birds' intelligence, but to my mind it shows only
their natural adaptiveness. Take the cliff swallow, for instance; it
has largely left the cliffs for the eaves of our buildings. How
naturally and instinctively this change has come about! In an open
farming country insect life is much more varied and abundant than in a
wild, unsettled country. This greater food supply naturally attracts
the swallows. Then the protecting eaves of the buildings would
stimulate their nesting-instincts. The abundance of mud along the
highways and about the farm would also no doubt have its effect, and
the birds would adopt the new sites as a matter of course. Or take
the phoebe, which originally built its nest under ledges, and does
so still to some extent. It, too, would find a more abundant food
supply in the vicinity of farm-buildings and bridges. The protected
nesting-sites afforded by sheds and porches would likewise stimulate
its nesting-instincts, and attract the bird as we see it attracted
each spring.
Nearly everything an animal does is the result of an inborn instinct
acted upon by an outward stimulus. The margin wherein intelligent
choice plays a part is very small. But it does at times play a
part--perceptive intelligence, but not rational intelligence. The
insects do many things that look like intelligence, yet how these
things differ from human intelligence may be seen in the case of one
of our solitary wasps,--the mud-dauber,--which sometimes builds its
cell with great labor, then seals it up without laying its egg and
storing it with the accustomed spiders. Intelligence never makes that
kind of a mistake, but instinct does. Instinct acts more in the
invariable way of a machine. Certain of the solitary wasps bring their
game--spider, or bug, or grasshopper--and place it just at the
entrance of their hole, and then go into their den apparently to see
that all is right before they carry it in.
Fabre, the French naturalist, experimented with one of these wasps, as
follows: While the wasp was in its den he moved its grasshopper a few
inches away. The wasp came out, brought it to the opening as before,
and went within a second time; again the game was removed, again the
wasp came out and brought it back and entered her nest as before. This
little comedy was repeated over and over; each time the wasp felt
compelled to enter her hole before dragging in the grasshopper. She
was like a machine that would work that way and no other. Step must
follow step in just such order. Any interruption of the regular method
and she must begin over again. This is instinct, and the incident
shows how widely it differs from conscious intelligence.
If you have a tame chipmunk, turn him loose in an empty room and give
him some nuts. Finding no place to hide them, he will doubtless carry
them into a corner and pretend to cover them up. You will see his paws
move quickly about them for an instant as if in the act of pulling
leaves or mould over them. His machine, too, must work in that way.
After the nuts have been laid down, the next thing in order is to
cover them, and he makes the motions all in due form. Intelligence
would have omitted this useless act.
A canary-bird in its cage will go through all the motions of taking a
bath in front of the cup that holds its drinking-water when it can
only dip its bill into the liquid. The sight or touch of the water
excites it and sets it going, and with now and then a drop thrown from
its beak it will keep up the flirting and fluttering motion of its
tail and wings precisely as if taking a real instead of an imaginary
bath.