Mr. Stone writes to me from Norbury Park concerning two of his dogs, one large and the other small. Both being in a room at the same time,
one of them, the larger, had a bone, and when he had left it the smaller dog went to take it, the larger one growled, and the other retired to a corner. Shortly afterwards the larger dog went out, but the other did not appear to notice this, and at any rate did not move. A few minutes later the large dog was heard to bark out of doors; the little dog then, without a moment's hesitation, went straight to the bone and took it. It thus appears quite evident that she reasoned—'That dog is barking out of doors, therefore he is not in this room, therefore it is safe for me to take the bone.' The action was so rapid as to be clearly a consequence of the other dog's barking.
Again, Mr. John Le Conte, writing from the University of California, tells me of a dog which used to hunt rabbits in an extensive pasture-ground where there was a hollow tree, which frequently served as a place of refuge for the rabbits when they were pressed:—
On one occasion a rabbit was 'started,' and all of the dogs, with the exception of 'Bonus,' dashed off in full pursuit. We were astonished to observe that the sedate 'Bonus,' foregoing the intense excitement of the chase, deliberately trotted by a short cut to a hollow oak trunk, and crouching at its base calmly awaited the advent of the fleeing rabbit. And he was not disappointed (they frequently escaped without being reduced to this extremity), for the pursuing dogs pressed the rabbit so hard that, after making a long detour, it made for the place of refuge. As it was about entering the hollow trunk, the crouching 'Bonus' captured the astonished rodent.
Similarly, Dr. Andrew Wilson, F.R.S.E., writes me as follows:—
There is a shrubbery near the house, about 200 or 300 yards long, and running in the shape of a horseshoe. A small terrier used to start a rabbit nearly every morning, at the end of the shrubbery next the house, and hunt him through the whole length of it to the other end, where the rabbit escaped into an old drain. The dog then appears to have come to the conclusion that the chord of a circle is shorter than its arc, for he raised the rabbit again, and instead of following him through the shrubbery as usual, he took the short cut to the drain, and was ready and in waiting on the rabbit when he arrived, and caught him.
A somewhat similar instance is communicated to me by Mr. William Cairns, of Argyll House, N.B.:—
I was watching the operations of a little Skye terrier on a wheatstack which was in the course of being thrashed, when suddenly a very large rat bounced off, just from under Fan's nose. It darted into a pit of water about a dozen yards from the stack, and tried to escape. Fan, however, plunged after, and swam for some distance, but found she was being left behind. So she turned to the shore again and ran round to the other side of the pit, and was ready and caught it just on landing.
I never saw anything more remarkable. If it was not reason, I do not know how it is possible that it could come much more closely to the exercise of that faculty.
Dr. Bannister, editor of the 'Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases,' writes me from Chicago, that having spent a winter in Alaska, he 'had a good opportunity to study animal intelligence in the Eskimo dogs,' and he reports it as 'a fact of common occurrence,' when the dogs are drawing sledges on the ice near the coast, that on coming to sinuosities in the coast-line, they spontaneously leave the beaten track and strike out so as to 'cut across the windings by going straight from point to point' of land. This is frequently done even when the leading dog 'could not see the whole winding of the beaten track; he seemed to reason that the route must lead around the headlands, and that he could economise travel by cutting across.'