How animals talk

by William J. Long

What gives me to be free to woman’s and man’s good-will? what gives them to be free to mine?

Again, our familiar human experience may throw some clearer light than ever comes from the laboratory of animal psychologists upon the action of gregarious brutes in their so-called blind panics, when they are said to be governed by some extraneous or non-individual herd impulse. How such a theory originated is a puzzle to one who has closely observed animals in the open, since their panics are never “blind,” and their “extraneous” impulse may often be traced to an alarmed animal of their own kind, or even to an excited human being, whose emotions are animal-like both in their manifestation and in their irritating effect. A dog is more easily roused by human than by canine excitement. A frightened rider sends his fear or irresolution in exaggerated form into the horse beneath him. The herd of swine that ran down a steep place into the sea were [[131]]possessed, I should say, not by exorcised demons, but by the hysteria received directly from some man or woman of the excited crowd in the immediate neighborhood. Panic is more infectious than any fever, and knows no barriers between brute and human. Indeed, in a frightened crowd in the Subway, in a theater where smoke appears, or in any other scene of emotional excitement, you may in a few minutes observe actions more panicky, more suggestive of a herd impulse (if there be such a fantastic thing in orderly nature), than can be seen in a whole lifetime of watching wild animals.

In my head at this moment is the vivid impression of a night when I was caught and carried away by a crowd of Italian socialists, twenty thousand frenzied men and a few ferocious women, that first eddied like a storm-tide about the great square under the cathedral at Milan, howling, shrieking, imprecating, and then poured tumultuously through choked streets to hurl paving-blocks at the innocent roof of the railroad station, as at a symbol of government. The roof was of glass, and the clattering smash of it seemed to get on the nerves of men, like the cry of sick-em! to an excited dog, rousing them to a senseless fury of destruction. Clear and thrilling above the tumult a bugle sang, like a note from heaven, and into [[132]]the seething mass of humanity charged a squadron of cavalry, striking left or right with the flats of their sabers, raising a new hubbub of shrieks and imprecations as the weaker were trampled down. Fear? That crowd knew no more of fear just then than an upturned hive of bees. They met the charge with a roar, a hoarse, solid shout that seemed to sweep the cavalry away like smoke in the wind. Unarmed men swarmed at the horses like enraged baboons, hurling stones or curses as they went. The rush ended in a triumphant yell, and riderless horses, their eyes and nostrils aflame, went plunging, kicking, squealing through the pandemonium.

There must have been something tremendously animal in the scene, after all; for when I recall it now I see, as if Memory had carved her statue of the event, an upreared horse with a crumpled rider toppling from the saddle; and I hear not the shouts or curses of men, but the horrible scream of a maddened brute.

It was the night, many years ago, when news of disaster to the Italian army at Adowa broke loose, after being long suppressed, and I learned then for the first time what emotional excitement means when the gates are all down. One had to hold himself against it, as against a flood or a mighty wind. To yield, to lose self-control even for an instant, was to find oneself howling, reaching [[133]]for paving-blocks, seeking an enemy, lifting a bare fist against charging horse or swinging steel, like the other lunatics. I caught a man by the shoulders, held him, and bade him in his own language tell me what the row was about; but he only stared at me wildly, his mouth open. I caught another, and he struck at my face; a third, and he shrieked like a trapped beast. Only one gave me a half-coherent answer, a man whom I dragged from under a saber and pushed into a side-street. His dear Ambrogio had been conscripted by the government, he howled (I suppose they had sent his son or brother with a disaffected Milanese regiment on the African adventure), and they were all robbers, oppressors, murderers—he finished by jerking loose from my grasp and hurling himself, yelling, into the mob again.

Had I been a visiting caribou, watching that amazing scene and knowing nothing of its motive, I might easily have concluded that some mysterious herd impulse was driving all these creatures to they knew not what; but, being human, I knew perfectly well that even this unmanageable crowd had taken its cue from some leader; that the senseless emotion which inflamed them had originated with individuals, who had some ground for their passion; and that from the individual the excitement spread in pestilential fashion until the whole [[134]]mob caught it and bent to it, as a field of grass bends to the storm.

Therefore (and I hope you keep the thread of logic through a long digression), when I go as a man among caribou or wolves or plover or crows, and see the whole herd or pack or flock acting as one, as if swayed by a single will, I see no reason why I should evoke an incorporeal swarm impulse, or “call a spirit from the vasty deep” of the unknown to explain their similarity of action, since there are natural causes which may account for the matter perfectly—familiar causes, too, which still influence men and women as they influence the remote wood folk.

No, this is not a new animal psychology; it is rather an attempt to banish the delusion that there is any such thing as a distinct animal psychology. Science has many forms, and still plenty of delusions, but there is a basic principle to which she holds steadily—namely, that Nature is of one piece because her laws are constant. It follows that, if you know anything of a surety about your own mind, you may confidently apply the knowledge to any other mind in the universe, whether in the heavens above or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth. The only question is, How far may the term “mind” be properly applied to the brute? [[135]]

That unanswered question does not immediately concern us, for in speaking of mind we commonly mean the conscious or reasoning human article, and we are dealing here with the subconscious mind, which seems to work after the same fashion whether it appears on two legs or four. A dog does not know why he becomes excited in a commotion that does not personally concern him, or why he feels impelled to hasten to an outcry from an unknown source, or why he looks up, contrary to all his habits, when everybody else is looking up; and neither does a man know why he does just such things. Man and brute both act in obedience to something deeper, more primal and more dependable than reason, and in this subconscious field they are akin; otherwise it would be impossible for a man ever to train or to understand a brute, and our companionable dogs would be as distant as the seraphim.

When, therefore, the same unreasoning actions that are attributed to a mysterious collective impulse among birds or animals are found among men to depend on a succession of individual impulses, it is good psychology as well as good natural history to dismiss the whole herd instinct as another thoughtless myth. The familiar social and imitative instincts, the contagion of excitement, the outward projection of emotional impulses, [[136]]the sensitive bodily nature of an animal which enables him to respond to such impulses even when they are unaccompanied by a voice or cry,—these are comparatively simple and “sensible” matters which explain all the phenomena of flock or herd life more naturally and more reasonably.