THE LAWS OF THE FLOCKS AND THE HERDS
Through a thousand generations of breeding and living under natural conditions, and of self-maintenance against enemies and evil conditions, the wild flocks and herds of beasts and birds have evolved a short code of community laws that make for their own continued existence.
And they do more than that. When free from the evil influences of man, those flock-and-herd laws promote, and actually produce, peace, prosperity and happiness. This is no fantastic theory of the friends of animals. It is a fact, just as evident to the thinking mind as the presence of the sun at high noon.
The first wild birds and quadrupeds found themselves beset by climatic conditions of various degrees and kinds of rigor and destructive power. In the torrid zone it took the form of excessive rain and humidity, excessive heat, or excessive dryness and aridity. In the temperate and frigid zones, life was a seasonal battle with bitter cold, torrents of cold rain in early winter or spring, devastating sleet, and deep snow and ice that left no room for argument.
At the same time, the species that were not predatory found themselves surrounded by fangs and claws, and the never-ending hunger of their owners. The air, the earth and the waters swarmed with predatory animals, great and small, ever seeking for the herbivorous and traitorous species, and preferably those that were least able to fight or to flee. The La Brea fossil beds at Los Angeles, wherein a hospitable lake of warm asphalt conserved skeletal remains of vertebrates to an extent and perfection quite unparalleled, have revealed some very remarkable conditions. The enormous output, up to date, of skulls of huge lions, wolves, sabre-toothed tigers, bears and other predatory animals, shows, for once, just what the camels, llamas, deer, bison and mammoths of those days had to do, to be, and to suffer in order to survive.
With the aid of a little serious study, it is by no means difficult to recognize the hard laws that have enabled the elephant, bison, sheep, goats, deer, antelope, gazelles, fur-seal, walrus and others to survive and increase. From the wild animal herds and bird flocks that we have seen and personally known, we know what their laws are, and can set them down in the order of their evolution and importance.
The First Law. There shall be no fighting in the family, the herd or the species, at any other time than in the mating season; and then only between adult males who fight for herd leadership.
The destructiveness of intertribal warfare, either organized or desultory, must have been recognized in Jurassic times, millions of years ago, by the reptiles of that period. Throughout the animal kingdom below man the blessings of peace now are thoroughly known. This first law is obeyed by all species save man. We doubt whether all the testimony of the rocks added together can show that one wild species of vertebrate life ever really was exterminated by another species, not even excepting the predatory species which lived by killing.
No one (so far as we know) has charged that the lions, or the tigers, the bears, the orcas, the eagles or the owls have ever obliterated a species during historic times. It was the swine of civilization, transplanted by human agencies, that exterminated the dodo on the Island of Mauritius; and it was men, not birds of prey, who swept off the earth the great auk, the passenger pigeon and a dozen other bird species.
The Second Law. The strong members of a flock or herd shall not bully nor oppress the weak.