Appreciations of Mr. Long and his Work 
pleasure to know that more of them may be looked 
for from the same genial hand. 
From Our Animal Friends, August, 1901 
NN 
' are heartily glad to welcome a book on 
natural history which tries to tell the truth, 
and not to cover it up with a mass of mawkish 
sentimentalism. A great many goody-goody books of 
the natural history kind have been published 
lately, and they have been doing a consider- \ 
able amount of harm by making the impres- a 
sion that the love of animals is not a rational \ 
sentiment, but is founded, to a large extent, 
on silly pretense. There is any amount of Mh 
harm in the making of that impression. All 
animals are not lovely either in form or in 
any other respect. The hippopotamus, for 
example, is certainly not a beauty; the skunk 
is not a desirable neighbor; the weasel is the 
most ferocious, bloodthirsty, and wastefully 
murderous little wretch that ever slew its own kin, 
murdered a score of domestic fowls in a hencoop, or 
throttled as many more brooding birds, all in the 
course of a single night’s amusement. You may not 
love the owl nor care to make a pet of him, but you 
are ready to forgive his faults when you learn that he 
has dined upon a weasel. The most foolish thing that 
can be done, and it has been done extensively of late, 
is to try to invest wild animals with all the virtues of a 
lofty human civilization. The love of a human mother 
is a lifelong principle as well as an instinctive affection ; 
the love of a bear, or a fox, or a weasel for its young is 
purely instinctive, and as soon as the young are able 
to go alone, the wild parents drive them mercilessly 
away, never again to recognize them as their offspring. 
Since that is the fact, it is worse than folly to teach 
children the contrary. Children ought to be taught 
nothing but the truth; and they ought to be taught 
the lesson of mercy to animals, wild and tame, not 
because of fictitious virtues which those poor creatures 
cannot have, but just because they are poor creatures 
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