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

III. THE HIGHER PASSIONS XVIII THE MORALS OF WILD ANIMALS The ethics and morals of men and animals are thoroughly comparative, and it is only by direct comparisons that they can be analyzed and classified. It is quite possible that there are quite a number of intelligent men and women who are not yet aware of the fact that wild animals have moral codes, and that on an average they live up to them better than men do to theirs. It is a painful operation to expose the grinning skeletons in the closets of the human family, but in no other way is it possible to hold a mirror up to nature. With all our brightness and all our talents,--real and imitation,--few men ever stop to ask what our horses, dogs and cats think of our follies and our wickedness. By the end of the year 1921 the annual total of human wickedness had reached staggering proportions. From August 1914 to November 1918 the moral standing of the human race reached the lowest depth it ever sounded since the days of the cave-dwellers. This we know to be true, because of the increase in man's capacity for wickedness, and its crop of results. After what we recently have seen in Europe and Asia, and on the high seas, let no man speak of a monster in human form as "a brute;" for so far as moral standing is concerned, some of the animals allegedly "below man" now are in a position to look down upon him.