“ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY.”

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2094, 31 May 1907, Page 1

“ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY.”

In his “Brier-patch Philosophy,’

Mr. William J. Long (“Peter Babbit”), the Amorican naturalist, writes suggestively on the futility of the elaborate and often intensely cruel experiments practised, on animals with a view to test their sensory and observing facilities, and the limitations of their reasoning powers. All such experiments, lie argues —as Dr. Garth Wilkinson pointed out long ago—are conducted under abnormal conditions of the nervous system, due to pain or terror, and the conclusions drawn from such are not only worthless, but often exactly opposite to the truth. Says Mr. Long: “The point is 'not whether animals think habitually or are governed by thought, but whether or not they are capable of thinking. If you were to prepare an elaborate system of experiments upon some unknown tribe of men from the Atlantic, you would probably arrive at the fact, which you already well know, that men in the mass are• generally thoughtless; that they are largely governed by habits, appetites, passions, prejudices, and traditions, and that there is little free will among them. Some of your exceptionally thoughtful men often remark that true thinking :s the rarest thing among men, though they have brains evidently organised for thoughtful purposes. If thought be rare among men, it will naturally be much more so among animals, whose lives are much simpler than our own. That animals sometimes think is more than probable. “These experiments themselves are of a kind to prove nothing, except perhaps your psychologists’ lack of humor. Traps, and cages, and spring-doors are all so utterly foreign to the animal’s daily life that to draw a rational' conclusion”from their actions under such circumstances has about as much value as to judge men and women in a shock-panic, or when they are shut up in a burning building. If the Rabbit could catch a Chinaman and fasten him in a , devil-waggon, and fix the sparker, , and pull the lever, and send him off j whizzing, and then watch his ac- ; tions, he would conclude, after the ; manner of your psychologists, that men are governed by the peculiar . form of reflex action known to you as ; hysteria, and to us as the March ; madness. Yet the conditions would be no more confusing to tlio China- ' man than are those that confront the : animal when he is taken from the woods and liberty, to be shut up ,n one of your trap-door inventions. A thousand experiments may prove to a ■ professor’s satisfaction that his particular caged animals aro governed by blind fright or blind habit, but his deduction that animals cannot think ; is overthrown by a single fact' or observation that points unmistakably to the opposite conclusion. The mental quality of animals will never be determined by experimentation.”