THE ANIMAL SENSE OF HUMOUR 73 



more refined form. We recently heard of a young 

 cat which conceived a great dislike for a peacock 

 which was fed from the windows of the house, and 

 took the following method of expressing its aversion. 

 When the peacock was anxious to display its charms, 

 and had spread its tail and was moving slowly back- 

 wards and forwards, the cat used to rush out on to 

 the lawn and jump through the peacock's tail. The 

 effect of this was to entirely disconcert the peacock's 

 swagger, and leave the cat a moral victory. Even 

 this, though the effects were hardly such as the human 

 sense of humour interprets with satisfaction, may have 

 been due to another feeling. The cat, for instance, 

 may have taken the peacock's movements as an in- 

 vitation to play, and the humour may be only due to 

 the incongruity of the peacock's frame of mind and 

 the cat's interpretation. But we have no doubt what- 

 ever that the dog does really possess a sense of 

 humour of a kind not very much different from our 

 own. It is by no means universal, or even common. 

 But then humour, or even a slight sense of the 

 comical, is by no means equally distributed among 

 men. There are prosaic men and women, and there 

 are matter-of-fact dogs. These have their good 

 qualities, like matter-of-fact people. For purely 

 business purposes they are often the best. We once 

 owned, for instance, an excellent retrieving spaniel of 



