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

A herd of about thirty elephants, under the influence of a still alarm and sign signals, once vanished from the brush in front of me so quickly and so silently that it seemed uncanny. One single note of command from a gibbon troop leader is sufficient to set the whole company in instant motion, fleeing at speed and in good order, with not a sound save the swish of the small branches that serve as the rungs of their ladder of flight. In the actual practice of herd leadership in species of ruminant animals, the largest and most spectacular bull elk or bison is not always the leader. Frequently it has been observed that a wise old cow is the actual leader and director of the herd, and that "what she says, goes." This was particularly remarked to me by James McNaney during the course of our "last buffalo hunt" in Montana, in 1886. From 1880 to 1884 he had been a mighty buffalo-hunter, for hides. He stated that whenever as a still-hunter he got "a stand on a bunch," and began to shoot, slowly and patiently, so as not to alarm the stand, whenever a buffalo took alarm and attempted to lead away the bunch, usually it proved to be a wise old cow. The bulls seemed too careless to take notice of the firing and try to lead away from it. The Sixth Law. Of food and territory, the weak shall have their share. While this law is binding upon all the members of a wild flock, a herd, a clan or a species, outside of species limits it may become null and void; though in actual practice I think that this rarely occurs. Among the hoofed animals; the seals and sea-lions; the apes, baboons and monkeys, and the kangaroos, the food that is available to a herd is common to all its members. We can not recall an instance of a species attempting to dispossess and evict another species, though it must be that many such have occurred. In the game-laden plains of eastern Africa, half a dozen species, such as kongonis, sable antelopes, gazelles and zebras, often have been observed in one landscape, with no fighting visible.