Natural Wonders

by Edwin Tenney Brewster

Not many young creatures, such as we commonly see, do so much playing as puppies and kittens, tho boys and girls do a great deal more. In fact, the wiser any animal is when it grows up, and the more it is able to do then, the more playing it does, and the more interesting games it plays, when it is small. Calves and colts and lambs do not play especially interestingly, because wild cows and horses and sheep do not do much except eat, sleep, and run away from something that threatens to eat them up. But young squirrels, kept in cages, sometimes play at burying nuts in the floor of their cages for their winter supply of food; and young beavers, kept as pets in the house, have been said to play at building dams of chairs, canes, and umbrellas, across the parlor floor. Always, however, no matter how tame the grown animal is, the kitten plays at being a wild cat, and the puppy plays at being a wild dog, and the little boy plays at being a wild Indian; all because cats and dogs and men have been tamed and civilized for only a short while, but ran wild for ages.

There is one game that we all play, children, kittens, puppies, monkeys, and I don’t know how many other young creatures—and that is make-believe fights. We do it with sticks and snow balls and wooden swords; the little animals chase one another back and forth, and pretend to bite and scratch in the fiercest manner, as if they were fighting for their lives. Most animals do have to fight for their lives, many times over; so did most men in earlier times, before we had policemen and jails, and when everybody had to look out for himself.

Did you ever notice that a kitten is ticklish in just the same places that you are? You stroke the kitten’s back or head or legs, and it is as pleased as can be. But you touch it along the front of the body, or around the front of the neck, and at once it begins to bite and scratch and protest its best. All creatures that can be tickled at all are ticklish in the same places; and all these places happen to be precisely the spots where the great blood vessels and other important vital organs are close to the surface, and where, therefore, a wound would be most deadly. So when little animals play at fighting and pretend to bite one another, they bite hard enough to tickle. They don’t like to be tickled any more than you do. So they learn to protect those ticklish places in their play, and when they get to be grown up and fight in earnest, they have already learned not to get bitten in those spots where the bite would do most damage.

So the young animal’s instinct is to play at doing whatever his ancestors have been doing for work; and he has this instinct in order that he may like to do when young what he must do when old; and so have practice in doing it, and learn to do it well. Unfortunately, as men become more and more civilized, they have continually to do more and more new things, while they still persist in liking to do the old ones. That, I suppose, is why some boys and girls do not like to work.

XV
Some Instincts of Chicks and Kittens

It certainly is a most fortunate circumstance that all animals are born with a natural instinct for doing the particular things which they will have to do to make a living in the world. It would certainly be most inconvenient if moles and rats had an instinct to fly, and birds wanted to hide in drains and cellars; if cows thought they must dive into the water to catch fish, and seals tried to come ashore and graze in the pastures. As it is, each creature has the particular set of instincts which make it want to do the things which it can do best.

You remember what I told you in first pages of this book about the little chick inside the egg. It lies quietly and grows, until it is twenty-one days old. On the twenty-first day of its fife, for the first time, the chick feels the instinct to peck. It has no idea why it wants to peck, nor what will happen if it does. He only knows that pecking against the inside of his shell is precisely the one thing that he wants to do. So he pecks away—until, presto! out he comes into a new and very much larger world.

By and by, after the chick has got rested and dried off, he staggers up on his legs, and begins to look around him. His eye catches some small object—peck! he goes again, and catches the bit in his mouth the first time he tries, unerringly. It took you weeks to learn to put your hand where you wanted it; in fact you couldn’t so much as put your fingers in your mouth till you had tried many times. But the chick is born with the pecking instinct, and hits at the very first shot.

Yet the chick does not know what to peck at. He simply lets drive at whatever chances to catch his eye—a bit of gravel it may be, or something very nasty, or even a fleck of light on a blade of grass. What is good to eat and worth pecking at, he has to learn by trying just at you do. Neither does he know anything about drinking. In the course of time, as he goes about pecking at all sorts of things, he snaps at a dew drop on the grass or a sparkle of sun light on the water in his drinking vessel. So he gets his first drink; and in the course of time, he learns what water looks like.