Dogs will occasionally eat carrion, but sparingly, and apparently as a relish, just as we sometimes eat odoriferous and putrid cheeses, and the Turks, assafœtida.
Carnivora and insectivora would much prefer to do their own butchery; hence, when they come upon their prey apparently dead, they will leave it alone and go in search of other quarry, unless they are very hungry.
Tainted flesh is a dangerous substance to go into any stomach, unless it be that of a buzzard. Heredity and environment have made this bird a carrion-eater, hence, like the jackal, the hyena, and the alligator, companion scavengers, it can eat putrid flesh with impunity. Other flesh-eating animals avoid carrion when they can, for long years of experience have taught them that decaying meat contains certain ptomaines which render it very poisonous; hence, they let dead, or seemingly dead, creatures severely alone. Again, these creatures can see no object in mutilating an animal which, in their opinion, is already dead.
In this discussion of the means and methods of protection that are to be observed in the lower animals, I have brought forward only those in which mind-element was to be discerned. Mimicry and kindred phenomena hardly have a place in this treatise, for they are, undoubtedly, governed and directed by unconscious mind, a psychical phase which, as I intimated in the introductory chapter of this book, would be discussed only incidentally.
FOOTNOTES:
[108] Instinct does not preclude intelligent ideation. In the lower animals death-feigning is undoubtedly instinctive; yet the recognition of danger, which sets in motion the phenomena of letisimulation, is undoubtedly due, primarily, to intelligent ideation in a vast majority of animals. Otherwise this earth would be a lifeless waste.—W.
[109] Dyticus marginalis. Vide Furneaux, Life in Ponds and Streams, p. 325; foot-note for orthography.—W.
[110] Mr. George Mattingly, Owensboro, Kentucky.
[111] Letisimulation, apparently, is not confined to animals; we see that certain plants have acquired a habit that is strikingly like death-feigning. We are apt to regard the plants as being non-sentient, yet there is an abundance of evidence in favor of the doctrine that vegetable life is, to a certain extent, percipient. Darwin has shown conclusively that plant life is as subject to the great law of evolution as animal life; he has also demonstrated, in his observations of insectivorous plants—the sun-dew (Drosera rotundifolia) especially—that these plants recognize at once the presence of foreign bodies when they are brought in contact with their sensitive glands;[A] he has likewise shown that plants, in the phenomenon known as circumnutation, evince a percipient sensitiveness that is as delicate as it is remarkable.[B] Hence, we need not feel surprised when we find, even in a plant, evidences of such a widespread stratagem as letisimulation. The champion death-feigner of the vegetable kingdom is a South American plant, Mimosa pudica. In the United States, where in some localities it has been naturalized, this plant is known as the "sensitive plant." A wild variety, Mimosa strigilosa, is native to some of the Southern States, but is by no means as sensitive as its South American congener. The last-mentioned plant is truly a vegetable wonder. At one moment a bed of soft and vivid green, the next a touch from a finger and, in the twinkling of an eye, it has changed into an unsightly tangle of seemingly dead and withered stems. In this case death-feigning seems absolutely successful as far as protection is concerned; for surely no grass-eating animal would touch this withered stuff, especially if there were other greens in the neighborhood. Death-feigning in plants, and kindred phenomena, are not due, however, to conscious determination; they are, in all probability, simply the result of reflex action.
[A] Darwin, Insectivorous Plants, Chap. V. et seq.