PRACTICAL JOKES. 543 



reality, seriousness, there are others that naturally confound 

 the two ; or they may be at a loss, as children, and even men 

 so frequently are, to discriminate between them. There is 

 apt to result, in such cases, especially in touchy, testy, cap- 

 tive animals, a dangerous and instantaneous loss of temper 

 and patience, a sense of irritation likely to lead to acts of 

 retaliation or punishment. 



Repeated acts of annoyance are of course correspondingly 

 more liable to beget furiosity. So that there is always 

 danger to man himself from his tormenting, teasing, irri- 

 tating, annoying, torturing or tempting even such docile 

 much-suffering animals as the elephant, horse and dog, and 

 still more so the captious and captive inmates of menageries 

 or Zoological Gardens, or of drawing-room aviaries. 



On the other hand, the consequences to the animals ex- 

 perimented on are sometimes equally unexpected and unin- 

 tended by man. Thus a wild forest bear, to which some 

 American-Indian huntsmen fastened a buffalo bell, was 

 * found dead of fright and starvation ' fifty miles distant 

 from the place where the obnoxious and alarmingly sonorous 

 instrument was attached to its neck, as an official informs 

 us. 



Some of man's modes of capture of the lower animals have 

 all the aspect and effect of practical jokes. When, for in- 

 stance, he wishes to capture old wary monkeys, he first gets 

 hold, sometimes, of a few unwary young ones, paints them 

 over with a mixture of treacle and tartar emetic, and then 

 sets them free. The joyful parents lick their recovered off- 

 spring, with the natural result that they suffer, as man would 

 do under similar circumstances, from a prostrating nausea 

 that renders them an easy prey to man (Cassell). He may 

 have other objects in view in the perpetration of his practical 

 jokes on other animals ; for instance, when his purpose is to 

 purchase the silence of a barking dog or cackling goose, that 

 would otherwise be a tell-tale to his nocturnal burglary or 

 poaching. 



