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

The Orang-Utan is mentally next to the chimpanzee. The Indian Elephant in mental capacity is third from man. The high-class domestic Horse is a very wise and capable animal; but this is chiefly due to its age-long association with man, and education by him. Mentally the wild horse is a very different animal, and in the intellectual scale it ranks with the deer and antelopes. The Beaver manifests, in domestic economy, more intelligence, mechanical skill and reasoning power than any other wild animal. The Lion is endowed with keen perceptive faculties, reasoning ability and judgment of a high order, and its mind is surprisingly receptive. The Grizzly Bear is believed to be the wisest of all bears. The Pack Rat (Neotona) is the intellectual phenomenon of the great group of gnawing animals. It is in a class by itself. The White Mountain Goat seems to be the wisest of all the mountain summit animals whose habits are known to zoologists and sportsmen. A high-class Dog is the animal that mentally is in closest touch with the mind, the feelings and the impulses of man; and it is the only one that can read a man's feelings from his eyes and his facial expression. The Marvelous Beaver. Let us consider this animal as an illuminating example of high-power intelligence. In domestic economy the beaver is the most intelligent of all living mammals. His inherited knowledge, his original thought, his reasoning power and his engineering and mechanical skill in constructive works are marvelous and beyond compare. In his manifold industrial activities, there is no other mammal that is even a good second to him. He builds dams both great and small, to provide water in which to live, to store food and to escape from his enemies. He builds air-tight houses of sticks and mud, either as islands, or on the shore. When he cannot live as a pond-beaver with a house he cheerfully becomes a river-beaver. He lives in a river-bank burrow when house-building in a pond is impossible; and he will cheerfully tunnel under a stone wall from one-pond monotony, to go exploring outside.