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

The Fuegians have long been known to mariners and travellers. They inhabit a region that half the year is bleak, cold and raw, but they make nothing save the rudest of the rude in canoes--of rough slabs tied together and caulked with moss,--and rough bone- pointed spears, bows, arrows and paddles. Their only clothing consists of skins of the guanacos loosely hung from the neck, and flapping over the naked and repulsive body. They make no houses, and on shore their only shelters from the wind and snow and chilling rains are rabbit-like forms of brush, broken off by hand. These people are lower in the scale of intelligence than any wild animal species known to me; for they are mentally too dull and low to maintain themselves on a continuing basis. Their hundred years of contact with man has taught them little; and numerically they are decreasing so rapidly that the world will soon see the absolute finish of the tribe. In the best of the three tribes, the Tchuelclus, the birth rate is so low that within recent times the tribe has diminished from about 5,000 to a remnant of about 500. Now, have those primitive creatures "immortal souls?" Are they entitled to call chimpanzees, elephants, bears and dogs "lower animals?" Do they "think," or "reason," any more than the animals I have named? It is a far cry from the highest to the lowest of the human race; and we hold that the highest animals intellectually are higher than the lowest men.