Question 3.—How would you teach him?
Answer.—"You put figure 2 on the blackboard and touch him, on the leg twice with a cane, and so on."
The counting tricks of trained horses seem to us marvelous because we are not acquainted with the simple but important fact that a horse instinctively raises his hoof when one pricks or taps his leg in a certain place. Just as once given, the cat's instinct to claw, squeeze, etc., you can readily get a cat to open doors by working latches or turning buttons, so, once given this simple reflex of raising the hoof, you can, by ingenuity and patience, get a horse to do almost any number of counting tricks.
Probably any one who still feels confident that animals reason will not be shaken by any further evidence. Still, it will pay any one who cares to make scientific his notions about animal consciousness to notice the results of two sets of experiments not yet mentioned. The first set was concerned with the way animals learn to perform a compound act. Boxes were arranged so that two or three different things had to be done before the door would fall open. For instance, in one case the cat or dog had to step on a platform, reach up between the bars over the top of the box and claw down a string running across them, and finally push its paw out beside the door to claw down a bar which held it.
The animal's instinctive impulses do often lead it to accidentally perform these several acts one after another, and repeated accidental successes do in some of these cases cause the acts to be done at last in fairly quick succession. But we see clearly that the acts are not thought about or done with anything like a rational comprehension of the situation, for the time taken to learn the thing is much longer than all three elements would take if tackled separately; and even after the animal has reached a minimum time in doing the acts, he does not do the things in the same order, and often repeats one of the acts over and over again, though it has already attained its end.
The second set comprised experiments on the so-called "memory" of animals. I will describe only one out of many which agree with it. A kitten had been trained to the habit of climbing the wire-netting front of its cage whenever I approached. I then trained her to climb up at the words "I must feed those cats." This was done by uttering them and then in ten seconds going up to the cage and holding a bit of fish to her at its top. After this had been done about forty times she reached a point where she would climb up at the signal about fifty per cent of the times. I then introduced a new element by sometimes saying, "I must feed those cats," as before, and feeding her, and at other times saying, "I will not feed them," and remaining still in my chair. At first the kitten felt no difference, and would climb up just as often at the wrong signal as at the right. But gradually (it took about four hundred and fifty trials) the failure to get any pleasure from the act of climbing up at the wrong signal stamped out the impulse to do so, while the pleasure sequent upon the act of climbing up at the other signal made that her invariable response to it. Here, as elsewhere, the absence of reason was shown by the cat's failure at any point in these hundreds of trials to think about the matter, and make the easy inference that one set of sounds meant food, while the other did not. But still better proof appears in what is to follow. After an interval of eighty days I tried her again to see how permanent the association between the signal and act was. It was permanent to the extent that what took three hundred and eighty trials before took only fifty this time, for after fifty trials with the "I will not feed them" signal, mixed up with a lot of the other, the cat once more attained perfect discrimination. But it was not permanent in the sense that the cat at the first or tenth or twentieth trial felt, as a remembering, reasoning consciousness surely ought to feel, "Why, that lot of sounds means that he won't come up with fish." For instead of at first forgetting and for a while climbing up at the I will not feed them, and then remembering its previous experience and at once stopping the performance it had before learned was useless, the cat simply went through the same gradual decreasing of the percentage of wrong responses until finally it always responded rightly.
What has so far been said is true regardless of any prejudice or incompetence on my part, for the proof in all cases rests not on my observation, but on impartial time records or such matters of fact as the escape or nonescape, the climbing or not-climbing of the animals. I may add that in a life among these animals of six months for from four to eight hours a day I never saw any acts which even seemed to show reasoning powers, and did see numerous acts unmentioned here which pointed clearly to their absence.
All that is left for the fond owner of a supposedly rational animal to say is that though the average animal, the typical dog or cat, is by these experiments shown to be devoid of reasoning power, yet his dog or her cat is far above the average level, and is therefore to be judged by itself. He may claim that just because my average animals failed to infer, we have no right to deny inference to all, particularly to his. Is it not fair to ask such a one to repeat my experiments with his supposedly superior animal? Until he does and systematically tries to find out how its mind works and what it is capable of, has he any right to bear witness? It may also be said that of the number of people who witnessed the performances of my animals after they had fully learned a lot of these acts, but had not seen the method of acquisition, all unanimously wondered at their wonderful intellectual powers. "How do you teach them?" "Where did you get such bright animals?" "I always thought animals could think," and such like were common expressions of my visitors. The fact was that the dogs and cats were picked up in the street at random, and that no one of them had thought out one jot or tittle of the things he had learned to do. The specious appearance of reasoning in a completely formed habit does not involve the presence or assistance of reasoning in the formation of the habit.
Here, at the close of this account, I may signify my willingness to reply, so far as is possible, to any letters from readers of the Popular Science Monthly who may care to ask questions about any feature of animal intelligence.