The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

XII THE MENTAL AND MORAL TRAITS OF BEARS Considered as a group, the bears of the world are supremely interesting animals. In fact, no group surpasses them save the Order Primates, and it requires the enrollment of all the apes, baboons and monkeys to accomplish it. From sunrise to sunrise a bear is an animal of original thought and vigorous enterprise. Put a normal bear in any new situation that you please, he will try to make himself master of it. Use any new or strange material that you please, of wood, metal, stone or concrete, and he will cheerfully set out to find its weakest points and destroy it. If one board in a wall happens to be of wood a little softer than its fellows, with wonderful quickness and precision he will locate it. To tear his way out of an ordinary wooden cage he asks nothing better than a good crack or a soft knot as a starting point. Let him who thinks that all animals are mere machines of heredity and nothing more, take upon himself the task of collecting, yarding, housing and KEEPING a collection of thirty bears from all over the world, representing from ten to fifteen species. In a very short time the believer in bear knowledge by inheritance only, will begin to see evidences of new thought. In spite of our best calculations, in twenty-two years and a total of about seventy bears, we have had three bear escapes. The species involved were an Indian sloth bear, an American black bear and a Himalayan black bear. The troublesome three laboriously invented processes by which, supported by surpassing acrobatics, they were able to circumvent our overhanging bars. Now, did the mothers of those bears bequeath to them the special knowledge which enabled them to perform the acrobatic mid-air feat of warping themselves over that sharp-pointed overhang barrier? No; because none of their parents ever saw steel cage-work of any kind.