Animal Behaviour.

Maoriland Worker, Volume I, Issue 1, 15 September 1910, Page 14

Animal Behaviour.

In the July number of " M'Clure's " Mr John Burroughs has a very interesting article on the behaviour of animals and the development of instinct. Wβ are all, he contends, more or lees creatures of habit, but of acquired habits lather than of inherited habits. But what the wild creatures shall do, where they shall live, what they shall eat, is determined by their organisation. Acquired habit or experience modifies the covirse of their lives very little.

" With our domestic animals/ continues Mr Burroughs, " the case is different : they are useful to us mainly on account of their acquired habits. We have trained them to do our bidding. The horse in the harness or under the saddle, the ox in the yoke or hitched to plough or the cart, the dog trained to point, to retrieve, to trail, the performing animals in the circus or in the menageries, all act from acquired habits. Their natural instincts have been eradicated or greatly modified. We have- trained them to our own wills, as we train a tree to some arbitrary pattern. If let alone a few years, the clipped tree will go back to its natural form ; the domestic animal, if given a chance, quickly reverts to the state of its wild brothers. Man himself, in war, in camps in the woods, or among the mines, tends to revert to a state of barbarism.

In calling instinct inherited habit we do not, of course, clear up the mystery. Perhaps we only substitute one mystery for another. There remains the mystery of inheritance, which we think we can track to certain parts of the nucleus of the germ cell, and there our analysis stops.

* there is no such thing as instinct in the abstract, but there exists in our minds an idea of instinct that is a generalised form of the concrete examples we have seen. There is no such thing as maternal instinct, it is contended, but only " impulses that have to do with young, which females possess and males lack ;no such thing as a homing instinct, but only an attachment from some particular place to which the animal has learned the way. In short, " instinct is not a faculty, but a reflex."

What men possess and share with the lower orders are impulses — involuntary, spontaneous impulses to do certain specific things; and this is what we mean by instinct. The " impulses that have to do with young, which females possess and males lack " —what is that by the maternal instinct? It is not acquired, it is latent in the female, and is developed when her young are born. In the insect world it is active before the young are born, and leads to solicitude about the young that the mother is never to see. There is the nesting instinct in birds, which is stronger in the female than in the male; the stalking instinct in the cat is stronger than it is in the dog. We form an idea of these various unconscious responses or reactions to external conditions, and we call it instinct.

Can we argue that there is no such thing as the mating instinct among animals, from the fact that it works differently in different species? There may not be such a thing as the " homing instinct," in the sense in which we used to believe there was in pre-evolutionary days—a blind impulse that carries an animal back home unerringly, and that acts independently of sight or sense. Although this is still a mooted point, I do not believe that a wild animal ever gets lost, though we know domestic ones do. The domestic animal's instincts are by no means as sure in their action as are those of their wild brothers. But Ido not believe that a wild animal finds its way home in the same way that a man does—by a process of calculation and judgment, and memory of familiar point. I have seen the muirs in Bering Sea fly for many miles straight home to their rookies through a dense fog; and the fur seals in the vast pathless Pacific find their way back each spring to their breeding-rocks in Bering Sea. I cannot see how their sense of sight or smell could aid them in such cases. President Roosevelt told mc of a horse he had in his ranch days that returned to its old home, seventy miles away, by taking a direct line across the prairie,, swimming rivers in its course. Mow did the horse know the way ? Wild animals probably have a sense of direction that is enfeebled or lost in domestic animals —a sense that civilised man has lost also, but that is keen in barbarians.

But it is necessary, Mr Burroughs contends, to study animals carefully in their natural conditions. Short cuts to animal psychology through laboratory experiments are of little avail. Can the real instincts of any wild creature be shown Ci in gaol"? What sort of a figure does a mountaineer cut in a city ? He may be able to find his way over the mountains even at night; but put

him down in a city, and he will be lost at once. Unnatural conditions make both man and beast unnatural. You can prove by laboratory experiments that animals do not reason, i.e., they have no mental processes similar to our own ; but the observer in the field knows this. "We see that the caged bird or the caged beast does not reason, because no strength, of bar or wall can convince it that ft cannot escape. It cannot be convinced, because it has no faculties that are influenced by evidence. It continues to struggle and to dash itself against the bars, not until it is convinced, but until it is exhausted. Then, slowly, a new habit is formed—the cage habit, the habit of submission to bars or tethers. Its inherited, habits give place to acquired habits. When we train an animal to do certain " stunts/ we do not teach it or enlighten it, in any proper sense, but we compel it to form new habits. We work with the animal until it goes through its little trick in the same automatic manner in which its natural instincts were wont to work. ... In the laboratory you may easily learn how a mink or a weasel kills a chicken or a rat; but how does it capture a rabbit by fair running in the woods or fields, since the rabbit is so much more fleet of foot? It is this interplay of wild, life, the relations of one animal with another, and how each species meets and solves its own life problems, that interests us, and can afford us the real key to animal behaviour. What can the keeper of the Zoo really learn about his animals that is valuable and interesting? Or what does the public get out of its Sunday or holiday visits to a zoological park besides a little idle amusement? The beasts there are all prisoners ; and they are more dejected and abnormal than human prisoners would be under like conditions, because they are more completely cut off from their natural surroundings."