ANIMALS AT PLAY 



OUR estimate of the sense of pleasure possessed by 

 animals has suffered from a double set of errors. 

 The older ethical writers were leagued against them 

 and declared that the only pleasures which they 

 shared with ourselves were those of touch and 

 taste, and that they had no enjoyment of the senses 

 of hearing, scent, or sight, but such as suggested 

 the presence of their prey, or of their own species. 

 Modern feeling, on the other hand, has inclined to 

 go to the other extreme, by attributing an excess 

 of human emotion and sentimentality to these very 

 simple natures. It will not, however, be difficult 

 to show that, so far from the sense of pleasure in 

 animals being limited to touch and taste, or the 

 love of fighting so generously conceded by Dr Watts, 

 they do, in fact, share with ourselves many of the 

 pleasant emotions excited by sweet scents and sounds,* 



* The writer's experiments on the animal liking for perfumes and music are 

 described in Life at the Zoo, 



85 



