The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

by William T. Hornaday

A herd of about thirty elephants, under the influence of a still alarm and sign signals, once vanished from the brush in front of me so quickly and so silently that it seemed uncanny. One single note of command from a gibbon troop leader is sufficient to set the whole company in instant motion, fleeing at speed and in good order, with not a sound save the swish of the small branches that serve as the rungs of their ladder of flight.

In the actual practice of herd leadership in species of ruminant animals, the largest and most spectacular bull elk or bison is not always the leader. Frequently it has been observed that a wise old cow is the actual leader and director of the herd, and that "what she says, goes." This was particularly remarked to me by James McNaney during the course of our "last buffalo hunt" in Montana, in 1886. From 1880 to 1884 he had been a mighty buffalo-hunter, for hides. He stated that whenever as a still-hunter he got "a stand on a bunch," and began to shoot, slowly and patiently, so as not to alarm the stand, whenever a buffalo took alarm and attempted to lead away the bunch, usually it proved to be a wise old cow. The bulls seemed too careless to take notice of the firing and try to lead away from it.

The Sixth Law. Of food and territory, the weak shall have their share.

While this law is binding upon all the members of a wild flock, a herd, a clan or a species, outside of species limits it may become null and void; though in actual practice I think that this rarely occurs. Among the hoofed animals; the seals and sea-lions; the apes, baboons and monkeys, and the kangaroos, the food that is available to a herd is common to all its members. We can not recall an instance of a species attempting to dispossess and evict another species, though it must be that many such have occurred. In the game-laden plains of eastern Africa, half a dozen species, such as kongonis, sable antelopes, gazelles and zebras, often have been observed in one landscape, with no fighting visible.

With all but the predatory wild animals and man, the prevailing disposition is to live, and let live. One of the few recorded murders of young animals by an old one of the same species concerned the wanton killing of two polar bear cubs in northern Franz Joseph Land, as observed by Nansen.

The Seventh Law. Man is the deadliest enemy of all the wild creatures; and the instant a man appears the whole herd must fly from him, fast and far.

In some of the regions to which man and his death-dealing influence have not penetrated, this law is not yet on the statute books of the jungle and the wilderness. Sir Ernest Shackleton and Captain Scott found it unknown to the giant penguins and sea leopards of the Antarctic Continent, I have seen a few flocks and herds by whom the law was either unknown or forgotten; but the total number is a small one. There was a herd of mountain sheep on Pinacate Peak, a big flock of sage grouse in Montana, various flocks of ptarmigan on the summits of the Elk River Mountains, British Columbia,—and out of a long list of occurrences that is all I will now recall.

It is fairly common for the members of a vast assemblage of animals, like the bison, barren-ground caribou, fur seal, and sea birds on their nesting cliffs, to assume such security from their numbers as to ignore man; and all such cases are highly interesting manifestations of the influence of the fourth law when carried out to six decimal places.

The Eighth and Last Law. Whenever in a given spot all men cease to kill us, there may we accept sanctuary and dwell in peace.

This law comes as Amendment 1 to the original Constitution of the Animal Kingdom. The quick intelligence of wild animals in recognizing a new sanctuary, and in adopting it unreservedly and thankfully as their own territory, is to all friends of wild life a source of wonder and delight. With their own eyes Americans have seen the effects of sanctuary-making upon bison, elk, mule deer, white-tailed deer, mountain sheep, mountain goat, prong-horned antelope, grizzly and black bears, beavers, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, sage grouse, quail, wild ducks and geese, swans, pelicans brown and white, and literally hundreds of species of smaller birds of half a dozen orders.