24 Animal Intelligence 



unless he is a trained scientist, there are really in this field 

 special objections to the acceptance of the testimony about 

 animals' intelligent acts which one gets from anecdotes. 

 Such testimony is by no means on a par with testimony 

 about the size of a fish or the migration of birds, etc. For 

 here one has to deal not merely with ignorant or inaccurate 

 testimony, but also with prejudiced testimony. Human 

 folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in 

 animals. They like to. And when the animal observed is 

 a pet belonging to them or their friends, or when the story 

 is one that has been told as a story to entertain, further 

 complications are introduced. Nor is this all. Besides 

 commonly misstating what facts they report, they report 

 only such facts as show the animal at his best. Dogs get 

 lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices it or sends an 

 account of it to a scientific magazine. But let one find his 

 way from Brooklyn to Yonkers and the fact immediately 

 becomes a circulating anecdote. Thousands of cats on 

 thousands of occasions sit helplessly yowling, and no one 

 takes thought of it or writes to his friend, the professor; 

 but let one cat claw at the knob of a door supposedly as a 

 signal to be let out, and straightway this cat becomes the 

 representative of the cat-mind in all the books. The un- 

 conscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless com- 

 pared to the unconscious neglect of an animal's mental life 

 until it verges on the unusual and marvelous. It is as if 

 some denizen of a planet where communication was by 

 thought-transference, who was surveying humankind and 

 reporting their psychology, should be oblivious to all our 

 intercommunication save such as the psychical-research 

 society has noted. If he should further misinterpret the 

 cases of mere coincidence of thoughts as facts comparable 

 to telepathic communication, he would not be more wrong 



