Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 143, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 July 1917 — ANIMALS HAVE NO INSTINCT [ARTICLE]

ANIMALS HAVE NO INSTINCT

Acquire Their Knowledge of What Is Good to Eat and What la Harmful by Experience. “Animals seem to acquire their • knowledge of poisonous plants from experience, and not by any innate instinct ; our domestic animals, when transported to other countries, at first eat poisonous plants, which they learn afterwards to avoid. Snell observed that strange sheep frequently fell victims to the poisonous hellebore that grows abundantly in the valley of the Ahn, but that it is carefully avoided by the sheep of the neighborhood, writes Raymond Crawford in the London Lancet. “Lambs and calves, grazing in the same field as their mothers, are far more prone than they to eat poisonous plants. Morgan concluded from observations of feeding young birds with various caterpillars, beetles and worms, that, In the absence of parental guidance, young birds have to learn by experience what Is good to eat and what is not, and that they have no instinctive aversions. At first they peck at everything, but once they have found that a particular thing is distasteful or harmful, in future they entirely avoid it."