Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 August 1882 — Trainable Animals. [ARTICLE]

Trainable Animals.

First, only the most highly organized animals are amenable to exercise, or, what means the same thing, trainable. After the generally-distributed oompan ions of men, the horse and the dog, the most teachable animal is the elephant. Charaisso found intercourse with the apes on board the Rarik uncommonly instructive, “for,” as Calderon says of the ass, “they are almost men,” and he made the profound remark that they might be able to bring themselves up to the mark if thev did not lack the property which Newton held to be one with genius, steadfastness. Carnivore*, with the exception of the cheetah (Felis jubata), ruminants and rodents exhibit only moderate teachability; yet Herr Fritech considered the draught-oxen at the Cape of Good Hope wiser than the horse, and in Brazil and Thibet sheep are trained to carry loads. Among the birds, the higher ones are the parrots, starlings, bullfinches and canary birds; the falcon ranks with the cheetah in teachableness. Chameleons, snakes and carp are only moderately teachable. The training of bees is only apparent; they always perform their trick under a kind of compulsion. The immense host of other creatures all around us show no more aptitude for trainiug than they do, for the reason that every animal within its own circle has no need of instruction; what we call instinot affords to animals, without efforts of the individual, more than any exercise can. What practice could teach birds to build warmer nests, to find the way south more certainly, oi bees to solve their geometrical, spiders their mechanical problems? Instinct and perfectibility complement eaoh other, as it were, in the ascending series of animals to a growing sum, so that, the more instinct retreats before perfectibility, by so much does the living being stand at a higher stage. Secondly, although the animals we have named, and many others beside, are susceptible to exercise aud trainable, animals still do not of themselves exercise and perfect themselves, but do so only when man takes them to school. Therefore, the animals around him appear less susceptible to training, the lower the stage at which he himself remains. Higher races of men would certainly have tamed the beautiful zebra and quagga ; the elephant, brought with Hannibal over the Alps, fell back with Northern Africa into wildness. Only nutritive and formative augmentation of advantages which an animal may have acquired in the wild state could come into consideration here, and these would have to be hereditary to lead to perfection in a course of generations. —Popular Science Monthly.