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

But it is only on rare occasions that elephants communicate with each other by sound. I once knew a general alarm to be communicated throughout a large herd by the sign language, and a retreat organized and carried out in absolute silence. Their danger signals to each other must have been made with their trunks and their ears; but we saw none of them, because all the animals were concealed from our view except when the two scouts of the herd were hunting for us. In captivity an elephant trumpets in protest, or through fear, or through rage; but I am obliged to confess that as yet I cannot positively distinguish one from the other. Once in the Zoological Park I heard our troublesome Indian elephant, Alice, roaring continuously as if in pain. It continued at such a rate that I hurried over to the Elephant House to investigate. And there I saw a droll spectacle. Keeper Richards had taken Alice out into her yard for exercise and had ordered her to follow him. And there he was disgustedly marching around the yard while Alice marched after him at an interval of ten paces, quite free and untrammeled, but all the while lustily trumpeting and roaring in indignant protest. The only point at which she was hurt was in her feelings. Two questions that came into public notice concerning the voices of two important American animals have been permanently settled by "the barnyard naturalists" of New York. The Voice of the American Bison. In 1907 the statement of George Catlin, to the effect that in the fall the bellowing of buffalo bulls on the plains resembled the muttering of distant thunder, was denied and severely criticized in a sportsman's magazine. On October 4 of that year, while we were selecting the fifteen bison to be presented to the Government, to found the Wichita National Bison Herd, four of us heard our best bull bellow five times, while another did the same thing four times.