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

Bright minds are more common among the chimpanzee species than among the orangs. Three chimps out of every five are good for training, but not more than two orangs out of five can be satisfactorily developed. Some sensitive minds shrink from the idea that man has "descended" from the apes. I never for a moment shared that feeling. I would rather descend from a clean, capable and bright-minded genus of apes than from any unclean, ignorant and repulsive race of the genus Homo. In comparing the chimpanzees of Fernan Vaz with the Canoe Indians of the Strait of Magellan and other human tribes we could name, I think the former have decidedly the best of it. There are millions of members of the human race who are more loathsome and repulsive than wild apes. The face of the chimpanzee is highly mobile, and the mouth, lips, eyes and voice express the various emotions of the individual with a degree of clearness and precision second only to the facial expression of man himself. In fact, the face of an intelligent chimpanzee or orang-utan is a fairly constant index of the state of mind of the individual. In their turn, those enormously expansive lips and keen brown eyes express contentment, doubt, fear and terror; affection, disapproval, jealousy, anger, rage; hunger and satiety; lonesomeness and illness. The lips of the chimpanzee afford that animal several perfectly distinct expressions of the individual's mind and feelings. While it is not possible to offer a description of each which will certainly be recognizable to the reader, the two extremes will at least be appreciated. When coaxing for food, or attention, the lips are thrust far out beyond the teeth, and formed into a funnel with the small end outermost. When the chimpanzee flies into a rage at some real or fancied offense, the snarling lips are drawn back, and far up and down, until the teeth and gums are fully exposed in a ghastly threat of attack. At the same time, the voice gives forth shrill shrieks of rage, correctly represented by the syllable "Ee-ee-ee!", prolonged, and repeated with great force, three or four times. On such occasions as the latter, the offending party must look out for himself, or he may be roughly handled.