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

The Moose is a weird-looking and uncanny monster, but he knows one line of strategy that is startling in its logic. Often when a bull moose is fleeing from a long stern chase,--always through wooded country,--he will turn aside, swing a wide semicircle backward, and then lie down for a rest close up to leeward of his trail. There he lies motionless and waits for man-made noises, or man scent; and when he senses either sign of his pursuer, he silently moves away in a new direction. The Antelopes of the Old World. The antelopes, gazelles, gnus and hartebeests of Africa and Asia almost without exception live in herds, some of them very large. Owing to this fact their minds are as little developed, individually, as the minds of herd animals generally are. The herd animal, relying as it does upon its leaders, and the security that large numbers always seem to afford, is a creature of few independent ideas. It is not like the deer, elk, sheep or goat that has learned things in the hard school of solitude, danger and adversity, with no one on whom to rely for safety save itself. The basic intelligence of the average herd animal can be summed up in one line: "Post your sentinels, then follow your leader."