Animal Life and Intelligence

by C. Lloyd Morgan

That the bodily feelings and wants occupy a large relative space in the conscious life of brutes can scarcely be questioned. On the one hand are the dull pains resulting from the organic wants and appetences, and driving the animal to their gratification; the keen pleasure that accompanies this gratification, when intelligence is so far developed that it can be foreseen, being a pull in the same direction. And on the other hand are the pleasures of the normal and healthy exercise of the sense-organs and bodily activities giving rise to the pleasures of existence, the joys of active and vigorous life. In the main, these bodily feelings, or sense-feelings, as they are sometimes called, seem to cluster round three chief centres—food, sex, and the free exercise of the bodily activities, including in some cases what seems to be play. Give a wild creature liberty and the opportunity of gratifying its appetites; allow its bodily functions the alternating rhythm of healthy and vigorous exercise and restorative repose; and its life is happy and joyous. It is not troubled by the pressure of unfulfilled ideals. The very struggle for existence, keen as it often is, by calling into play the full exercise of the activities, ministers to the health and happiness of brutes as well as men. Sir W. R. Grove has preached [HP] the advantages of antagonism. Speaking of the rabbit, he says, "To keep itself healthy, it must exert itself for its food; this, and perhaps avoiding its enemies, gives it exercise and care, brings all its organs into use, and thus it acquires its most perfect form of life. An estate in Somersetshire, which I once took temporarily, was on the slope of the Mendip Hills. The rabbits on one part of it, that on the hillside, were in perfect condition, not too fat nor too thin, sleek, active, and vigorous, and yielding to their antagonists, myself and family, excellent food. Those in the valley, where the pasturage was rich and luxuriant, were all diseased, most of them unfit for human food, and many lying dead on the fields. They had not to struggle for life; their short life was miserable and their death early; they wanted the sweet uses of adversity—that is, of antagonism." Without endorsing the view that these rabbits were unhealthy only because they had too much food and comfort—for the food, though abundant, may have been in some way noxious, and the damp situation may have been prejudicial—we may still believe that a struggle for life is better for animals (and men) than unlimited ease and plenty.

Under the influence, then, of these bodily pleasures and wants, the activities of animals are drawn out and guided. As Darwin says, in his autobiography,[HQ] "An animal may be led to pursue that course of action which is most beneficial to the species by suffering, such as pain, hunger, thirst, and fear; or by pleasure, as in eating and drinking, and in the propagation of the species; or by both means combined, as in the search for food. But pain or suffering of any kind, if long continued, causes depression, and lessens the power of action, yet it is adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil. Pleasurable sensations, on the other hand, may be long continued without any depressing effect; on the contrary, they stimulate the whole system to increased action. Hence it has come to pass that most or all sentient beings have been developed in such a manner, through natural selection, that pleasurable sensations serve as their habitual guides. We see this in the pleasure from exertion, even occasionally of great exertion, of the body or mind—in the pleasure of our daily meals, and especially in the pleasure derived from sociability, and from loving our families. The sum of such pleasures as these, which are habitual or frequently recurrent, give, as I can hardly doubt, to most sentient beings an excess of happiness over misery, although they occasionally suffer much. Such suffering is quite compatible with belief in natural selection; which is not perfect in its action, but tends only to render each species as successful as possible in the battle for life with other species, in wonderfully complex and changing circumstances."

Passing now from the bodily feelings and wants to the emotions, there can be no question that the simpler emotions, of which I have taken fear and anger as typical, are shared with us by the dumb brutes. And the interesting observations of Mr. Douglas Spalding showed beyond doubt that they are instinctive—their manifestation being prior to, and not the outcome of, individual experience. Writing in Macmillan's Magazine, he says, "A young turkey, which I had adopted when chirping within the uncracked shell, was, on the morning of the tenth day of its life, eating a comfortable breakfast from my hand, when the young hawk in a cupboard just beside us gave a shrill 'Chip! chip! chip!' Like an arrow, the poor turkey shot to the other side of the room, and stood there, motionless and dumb with fear, until the hawk gave a second cry, when it darted out at the open door right to the extreme end of the passage, and there, silent and crouched in a corner, remained for ten minutes. Several times during the course of that day it again heard these alarming sounds, and in every instance with similar manifestations of fear." And as an example of combined fear and anger, Mr. Spalding says, "One day last month, after fondling my dog, I put my hand into a basket containing four blind kittens three days old. The smell my hand had carried with it sent them puffing and spitting in a most comical fashion."

A remarkable instance of inherited antipathy in the dog was communicated by Dr. Huggins to Mr. Darwin. He possessed an English mastiff, Kepler, which was brought when six weeks old from the stable in which he was born. The first time Dr. Huggins took him out he started back in alarm at the first butcher's shop he had ever seen, and throughout his life he manifested the strongest and strangest antipathy to butchers and all that pertained to them. On inquiry, Dr. Huggins ascertained that in the father, in the grandfather, and in two half-brothers of Kepler the same curious antipathy was innate. Of these, Paris, a half-brother, on one occasion, at Hastings, sprang at a gentleman who came into the hotel at which his master was staying. The owner caught the dog, and apologized, saying he had never known him to behave thus before except when a butcher came into the house. The gentleman at once said that was his business.

That many animals display affection towards their offspring and their mates, towards man and towards other companions, is a matter of familiar observation. Often the attachments are strange, as of cats and horses, or contrary to instinctive tendencies, as between cats and dogs. Sometimes they are capricious, as when Mr. Romanes's wounded widgeon conceived a strong, persistent, and unremitting attachment to a peacock;[HR] or even insane, as where a pigeon became the victim of an infatuation for a ginger-beer bottle. Strong attachment to man is often exhibited. Every one knows the story which Mr. Darwin tells[HS] of the little monkey who bravely rushed at the dreaded baboon which had attacked his keeper. A friend of my own (the Rev. George H. R. Fisk, of Capetown) tells me the following story (which may be added to the many similar cases reported of dogs) concerning a favourite cat he had as a boy. It happened that the children of the house, my friend among the number, were confined to their room by measles. Their mother remained with the children by day and night until they were convalescent. She then came down and resumed her usual daily life, but was shocked at the appearance of the cat, which was little more than skin and bones, and would not touch food or milk. The cat seemed to know that Mrs. Fisk could help her, and gave her no peace till she had taken her upstairs to the convalescent patients. To Mrs. Fisk's surprise, the cat snarled and beat the young master with her paws. Why the cat chose this peculiar method of venting her feelings it is difficult to say. But immediately afterwards she went down into the kitchen, ate the meat and drank the milk which she had before refused to touch. Early next morning she mewed outside the young master's room; and, having gained admittance, sat at the foot of the bed until he woke, and then licked his face and hair.

This leads us on to the class of sympathetic emotions. For the sympathetic emotions are those which centre, not round the self, but round some other self in whose welfare an interest is, in some way and for some reason, aroused. Not long ago, at the Hamburg Zoological Gardens, I saw two baboons fighting savagely. One at last retreated vanquished, with his arm somewhat deeply gashed. He climbed to a corner of the cage and sat down, moodily licking his wound. Thither followed him a little capuchin, and, though his bigger friend took mighty little notice of his overtures, seemed anxious to comfort him, nestling against him, and laying his head against his side. So far as one could judge, it was not curiosity, but sympathy, that prompted his action.

The following example of sympathetic action on the part of a dog towards a stranger-dog is communicated to me by Mrs. Mann, a friend of mine at the Cape. Carlo was a favourite black retriever, and a highly intelligent animal. "One day," says Mrs. Mann, "a miserable-looking white dog came into our yard. Carlo went up to him, looking displeased, dog-fashion, and ready to fly at the intruder. It was clear, however, that some communication passed between them, for Carlo's wrath seemed disarmed, and he trotted into the kitchen, coming out again with a chop-bone (one with a good deal of meat on it) which the cook had given him. On looking into the yard, the miserable cur was seen enjoying the bone, Carlo sitting straight up watching him with a look of satisfaction."[HT]

That dogs feel sympathy with man will scarcely be questioned by any one who has known the companionship of these four-footed friends. At times they seem instinctively to grasp our moods, to be silent with us when we are busy, to lay their shaggy heads on our knees when we are worried or sad, and to be quickened to fresh life when we are gay and glad—so keen are their perceptions. Their life with man has implanted in them some of the needs of social beings; and as they are ever ready to sympathize with us, so do they rejoice in our sympathy. To be deprived of that sympathy, to be neglected, to have no attention bestowed on them, is to some dogs a punishment more bitter than direct reproof. Mr. Romanes quotes[HU] an account given him by Mrs. E. Picton of a Skye terrier who had the greatest aversion to being washed, snarling and biting during the operation. Threats, beating, and starvation were all of no avail; but the animal was reduced to submission by persistent neglect on the part of his mistress. At the end of a week or ten days he looked wretched and forlorn, and yielded himself quite quietly and patiently to one of the roughest ablutions it had ever been his lot to experience.

So far I have been content to credit animals with very general and simple forms of emotion—anger, fear, antipathy, affection, and some form of sympathy. If, on the perusal of familiar anecdotes, we also credit them with jealousy, envy, emulation, pride, resentment, cruelty, deceitfulness, and other more complex emotional states, we must remember that every one of these, as we know them, is essentially human. It is necessary to insist on the need of caution and the danger of anthropomorphism. This is, perhaps, even more necessary in the case of the emotions than in that of the perceptions, which we have before considered. Even among men, different individuals and different races probably vary far more in their emotions than in their perceptions. The emotions of civilized man have assumed their present form in the midst of complex social surroundings. They one and all bear ineffaceably stamped upon them the human image and superscription. In terms of these complex human emotions we have to decipher the simpler emotional states of the lower animals. We call them by the same names; we think of them as like unto those that we experience. And we can do no otherwise, if we are to consider them at all. But let us not lose sight of the fact that all we can ever hope to see in the mirror of the animal mind is a distorted image of our own mental and emotional features. And since the mirrors are of varying and unknown curvature, we can never hope to be in a position accurately to estimate the amount of distortion.

Remembering this, it is always well to look narrowly at every anecdote of animal intelligence and emotion, and endeavour to distinguish observed fact from observer's inference. If we take the great number of stories illustrative of revenge, consciousness of guilt, an idea of caste, deceitfulness, cruelty, and so forth, in the higher mammalia, we shall find but few that do not admit of a different interpretation from that given by the narrator. A cat's treatment of a mouse is adduced by a number of witnesses as illustrative of cruelty; but others see in this conduct, not cruelty, but practice and training in an important branch of the business of cat-life. That is to say, the act, though objectively cruel from the human standpoint, is not on this view performed from a motive of cruelty. Some time ago I ventured to stroke the nose of a little lion-cub which had tottered, kitten-like, to the bars of its cage. "I wish," I said shortly afterwards to a distinguished animal painter, "you could have caught the look of conscious dignity (I speak anthropomorphically) with which the lioness turned and seemed to say, 'How dare you meddle with my child!'" "I have seen such a look and attitude," said Mr. Nettleship; "but I attributed it, not to pride, but to fear." Mr. Romanes quotes,[HV] as typically illustrative of an "idea of caste," the case of Mr. St. John's retriever, which struck up an acquaintance with a rat-catcher and his cur, but at once cut his humble friends, and denied all acquaintanceship with them, on sight of his master. I, on the other hand, should regard this case as parallel with that which I have noted a hundred times. My dogs would go out with the nurse and children when I was busy or absent; but if I appeared within sight, they raced to me. The stronger affection prevailed. A dog is described[HW] as "showing a deliberate design of deceiving," because he hobbled about the room as if lame and suffering from pain in his foot. I would suggest that there was no pretence, no "deliberate design of deceit," in this case, but a direct association of ideas between a hobbling gait and more sympathy and attention than usual. I am not denying objective deceitfulness to the dog any more than I deny objective cruelty to the cat. My only question is whether the motive is deceit. We must not forget that the deceitful intent is a piece, not of the observed fact, but of the observer's inference. Mr. Romanes, for example, tells[HX] of a black retriever who was asleep, or apparently asleep, in the kitchen of a certain dignitary of the Church. The cook, who had just trussed a turkey for roasting, was suddenly called away. During her temporary absence, "the dog carried off the turkey to the garden, deposited it in a hollow tree, and at once returned to resume his place by the fire, where he pretended to be asleep as before." Unfortunately, a perfidious gardener had watched him, and brought back the turkey, so that the retriever did not enjoy the feast he had reserved for a quiet and undisturbed moment. Assuming that the gardener and cook were accurate in their statement of fact, the deceitful intent is an inference on their part, or that of the dignitary of the Church, or Mr. Romanes. I do not deny its correctness from the objective standpoint. Deceitfulness is apparently exhibited by children at a very tender age. But for us civilized adults deceit and its converse, truthfulness in action, mean something a good deal more definite than for dogs and infants.