Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/190

178 Curiously enough, when the pig is used for hunting purposes, the dogs, usually so eager for the chase, sullenly retire from the field and refuse to associate with their bristly competitor in venery. Possibly the hereditary and ineradicable enmity between the dog and hog as domestic animals may be a survival of the fierce antipathy which is known to exist between the wolf and the wild boar. In Burmah the ringed snake is trained for the chase, and is especially serviceable in flushing jungle-cock, since the reptile can penetrate the thickest underbrush, where it would be impossible for a dog or a falcon to go.

The tamability of an animal is simply its capability of adapting itself to new relations in life, and depends partly on its mental endowments, but still more upon its moral character. It is quite as much a matter of temperament and social disposition as of quickness of understanding. The elephant, dog, and horse among quadrupeds, the beaver among rodents, and the daw and raven among birds, are, for this reason, most easily tamed, and show the most marked and rapid improvement in consequence of their daily intercourse with man. Intellectual acuteness without the social affections and kindred moral qualities rather resists than facilitates domestication. Of all domestic animals the cat was the most difficult to tame, and it needed the patience and persistence so strongly characteristic of the ancient Egyptians, sustained by religious superstition, in order to accomplish this result. Even now the cat, although extremely fond of its home and capable of considerable attachment to persons, has never been reduced to strict servitude and become the valet of man like the dog, but has always remained to a certain degree what it originally was, a prowling beast of prey.

Barking in dogs is a habit due to domestication. The wild dog never barks, but only howls, like the Himalayan buansu, or merely whines, like the East Indian colsum; and the domestic dog reverts from barking to howling when it relapses into its primitive state. Wagging the tail is another mode of expression which the dog has acquired through association with man. It is well known, too, that a dog which has been reared by a cat adopts many of the habits of its foster-mother, such as cleaning itself with its paw; by continuously pairing such dogs and rearing them under like influences it would be possible to produce a canine species with feline traits, which should become permanent and transmissible.

A recent writer. Dr. Leopold Schutz, professor in the theological seminary at Treves, who may be taken as an extreme representative of the old orthodox school of zoöpsychologists, maintains that animals do not think, reflect, form purposes, or act with premeditation of any kind, have no freedom, no choice,