THE BRUISED SERPENT 177, 
has no instinctive fear of the lion; if he has never 
been mauled or attacked by them, nor associated 
with horses that have learnt from experience or 
tradition to dread them, he exhibits no more fear 
of lions than of zebras and camelopards. The fact 
is the horse fears in different regions the lion, wolf, 
puma, red-skin, and rattlesnake, just as the burnt 
child dreads the fire. 
But here is an incident, say the believers in 
Darwin’s notion, which proves that the fear of 
certain animals is instinctive in the horse. A 
certain big-game hunter brought home a lion’s 
hide, rolled up before it was properly dried and 
wrapped up in canvas. It was opened in the 
stable where there were several horses, and the 
covering was no sooner removed and the hide 
peeled open than the horses were thrown into a 
panic. The true explanation is that horses are 
terrified at any strange animal smell, and a powerful 
smell from the hide of any animal unknown to 
them would have had the same effect. That fear 
of a strange animal smell is probably an instinct, 
but it may not be. In a state of nature the horse 
learns from experience that certain smells indicate 
danger, and in Patagonia and on the pampas, 
when he flies in terror from the scent of a puma 
which is imperceptible to a man, he pays not the 
slightest attention to the two most powerful 
mammalian stenches in the world—that of the 
skunk, and that of the pampas male deer, Cervus 
campestris, Experience has taught him—or it has 
