WHAT DO ANIMALS KNOW? 



his steel trap fastened to the top of a pole in the 

 fields. The rabbit that can be so easily caught in a 

 snare or in a box-trap will yet conceal its nest and 

 young in the most ingenious manner. Where instinct 

 or inherited knowledge can come into play, the 

 animals are very wise, but new conditions, new 

 problems, bring out their ignorance. 



A college girl told me an incident of a red squirrel 

 she had observed at her home in Iowa that illus 

 trates how shallow the wit of a squirrel is when con 

 fronted by new conditions. This squirrel carried 

 nuts all day and stored them in the end of a drain 

 pipe that discharged the rain-water upon the pave 

 ment below. The nuts obeyed the same law that the 

 rain-water did, and all rolled through the pipe and 

 fell upon the sidewalk. In the squirrel s experience, 

 and in that of his forbears, all holes upon the ground 

 were stopped at the far end, or they were like pockets, 

 and if nuts were put in them they stayed there. A 

 hollow tube open at both ends, that would not hold 

 nuts this was too much for the wit of the squir 

 rel. But how wise he is about the nuts themselves ! 



Among the lower animals the ignorance of one is 

 the ignorance of all, and the knowledge of one is the 

 knowledge of all, in a sense in which the same is not 

 true among men. Of course some are more stupid 

 than others of the same species, but probably, on the 

 one hand, there are no idiots among them, and, on 

 the other, none is preeminent in wit. 

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