A Letter from Mr. Long 
fox will put his foot into it without a question. He 
claims also that a fox in the wilderness knows as much 
as in a settled community. That must be @ priori 
knowledge, for he has certainly never tried the wilder- 
ness fox. Personally, I have trapped foxes in both 
places and I have invariably found that the wilderness 
fox is an innocent when compared with his brother of 
the settlements. And this, contrary to Mr. Burroughs’ 
absolute decree, is the 
result of teaching and 
experience. 
Mr. Burroughs denies 
absolutely the story of 
the fox that brought 
poison to her young. 
There is a difficulty in 
that story which I hope 
some day to have Mr. 
seton ex- 
plain; but Pe ; 
Mr. Bur- ye 
roughs does “es 
not discover f* - 
it. Yet most Ji RL 
of it is true 
to both fox and wolf natures as I know 
them. Mr. Richard Maddox, an Eng- 
lish gentleman who has hunted each 
year for over twenty years in the Cana- 
dian Rockies and in Ontario, told me 
that a mother wolf brought poison to 
her two cubs that were kept chained on 
his ranch and killed them both in pre- 
cisely this way. 
Mr. Burroughs treats my own books, and especially 
my “ School of the Woods,” with even less courtesy. 
He denies the facts absolutely because he has not seen 
them on his farm, and therefore they cannot be true. 
He also denies the theories. There is absolutely no 
such thing as an animal teaching her young — “ there 
is nothing in the dealings of an animal with her young 
that in the remotest way suggests human instruction.” 
29 
