Wild And Free

All normal vertebrate animals exercise their intelligence in accordance with their own rules of logic. Had they not been able to do so, it is reasonable to suppose that they could never have developed into vertebrates, reaching even up to man himself.

According to the laws of logic, this proposition is no more open to doubt or dispute than is the existence of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. But few persons have seen the Canyon, and far fewer ever have proven its existence by descending to its bottom; but none the less Reason admonishes all of us that the great chasm exists, and is not a debatable question.

To men and women who really know the vertebrate animals by contact with some of them upon their own levels, the reasoning power of the latter is not a debatable question. The only real question is: how far does their intelligence carry them? It is with puzzled surprise that we have noted the curious diligence of the professors of animal psychology in always writing of "animal behavior," and never of old-fashioned, common-sense animal intelligence. Can it be possible that any one of them really refuses to concede to the wild animal the possession of a mind, and a working intelligence?

Yes. Animals do reason. If any one truth has come out of all the critical or uncritical study of the animal mind that has been going on for two centuries, it is this. Animals do reason; they always have reasoned, and as long as animals live they never will cease to reason.

The higher wild animals possess and display the same fundamental passions and emotions that animate the human race. This fact is subject to intelligent analysis, discussion and development, but it is not by any means a "question" subject to debate. In the most intellectual of the quadrupeds, birds and reptiles, the display of fear, courage, love, hate, pleasure, displeasure, confidence, suspicion, jealousy, pity, greed and generosity are so plainly evident that even children can and do recognize them. To the serious and open-minded student who devotes prolonged thought to these things, they bring the wild animal very near to the "lord of creation."

To the question, "Have wild animals souls?" we reply, "That is a debatable question. Read; then think it over."

METHODS WITH THE ANIMAL MIND. In the study of animal minds, much depends upon the method employed. It seems to me that the problem- box method of the investigators of "animal behavior" leaves much to be desired. Certainly it is not calculated to develop the mental status of animals along lines of natural mental progression. To place a wild creature in a great artificial contrivance, fitted with doors, cords, levers, passages and what not, is enough to daze or frighten any timid animal out of its normal state of mind and nerves. To put a wild sapajou monkey,- weak, timid and afraid,-in a strange and formidable prison box filled with strange machinery, and call upon it to learn or to invent strange mechanical processes, is like bringing a boy of ten years up to a four-cylinder duplex Hoe printing-and-folding press, and saying to him: "Now, go ahead and find out how to run this machine, and print both sides of a signature upon it."