i33 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



FACT AND FABLE IN ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY 



By Professor JOSEPH JASTROW, 



UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 



"A /T~AN has ever been ready to show his esteem of animal ways, even 

 -*-»-■- to the veneration that in early times took the form of animal 

 worship. The cunning and courage of animals, their passions and 

 endurance, their keenness of sense and mastery of instinct, appealed to 

 the man of nature as enviable qualities. The wolf that he feared, or 

 the horse that be subdued was equally to him a fellow being. He was 

 aware that the animal scent was truer, the animal sense of direction 

 surer, than his own. Matching his wits against theirs, he knew that 

 he might be outwitted by animal wile, might be overcome by animal 

 daring. In his mythology he constructed beings endowed with super- 

 human qualities by fantastic combinations of the animal and the 

 human form; and in his fables, from iEsop to B'rer Babbit, he gave 

 to his favorite animal the hero's part in his simple plots. He placed 

 himself under the protection of some sacred animal as a totem, and 

 held it as likely that the souls of an animal could be made to inhabit the 

 bodies of a man, or that by some magic he could be transformed into 

 their semblance. 



It is quite possible that some obscure and disguised variety of this 

 same instinctive feeling may still affect our estimates of what animals 

 do, and of how they feel and think. We know so intimately how our 

 domestic pets enter into the routine of our lives, share our moods and 

 occupations, that it seems plausible to suppose that only a lack of 

 speech prevents them from expressing a knowledge of our thoughts and 

 sympathy with our feelings. But when we reflect upon the matter 

 more soberly, we realize that we must not allow our prejudices to affect 

 our judgment of what their behavior justifies us in concluding in re- 

 gard to their intelligence. In considering what kinds of minds they 

 have and how they use them, we must never forget how different are 

 their needs from ours, how easily an action on their part may seem 

 to be full of meaning to us (because if performed by us it would be 

 done for definite reasons and purposes), and yet may be for them a 

 rather simple trick to gain our favor. This, indeed, is the difficulty of 

 the whole problem. We can judge what animals think only from 

 what they do; yet what they really do may be wholly different from 

 what they apparently do. It is we who unintentionally read into the 

 action the meaning that it has for us. The way out of this difficulty 

 is not very simple nor very direct; and it is the psychologist's business 



