Ways of Nature

by John Burroughs

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.