THE ANIMAL DISLIKE OF SOLITUDE 



MOST animals have such a dislike of solitude that 

 nothing less than some form of social banishment 

 enforced by their species can ever induce them to 

 seek loneliness and seclusion. When they do fall 

 under any such social ban pronounced by their com- 

 panions, they not unusually revenge themselves on 

 the world by ' keeping a pike,' as proposed by Mr 

 Weller, senior, with the important difference that they 

 seek satisfaction from travelling humanity by taking 

 toll of persons instead of purses ; and the wayfarer 

 pays the penalty of animal exclusiveness by being 

 eaten by some mangey and ostracised tiger, or knocked 

 down and stamped in the mud by an elephant or 

 buffalo crossed in love. 



Voluntary recluses are almost unknown in the 

 animal world. Perhaps the one consistently unsociable 

 creature in Europe is the hamster, an ill-tempered, sulky 

 little rodent. As the squirrel was said, by the old 

 Norsemen, to bring all the news of the animals to Thor, 



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