24 Animal Intelligence 
unless he is a trained scientist, there are really in this field 
special objections to the acceptance of the testimony about 
animals’ intelligent acts which one gets from anecdotes. 
Such testimony is by no means on a par with testimony 
about the size of a fish or the migration of birds, etc. For 
here one has to deal not merely with ignorant or inaccurate: 
testimony, but also with prejudiced testimony. Human 
folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in 
animals. They like to. And when the animal observed is 
a pet belonging to them or their friends, or when the story 
is one that has been told as a story to entertain, further. 
complications are introduced. Nor is this all. Besides 
commonly misstating what facts they report, they report 
only such facts as show the animal at his best. Dogs get 
lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices it or sends an 
account of it to a scientific magazine. But let one find his 
way from Brooklyn to Yonkers and the fact immediately 
becomes a circulating anecdote. Thousands of cats on™ 
thousands of occasions sit helplessly yowling, and no one 
takes thought of it or writes to his friend, the professor; 
but let one cat claw at the knob of a door supposedly as a 
signal to be let out, and straightway this cat becomes the 
representative of the cat-mind in all the books. The un- 
‘conscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless com- 
pared to the unconscious neglect of an animal’s mental life 
until it verges on the unusual and marvelous. It is as if 
some denizen of a planet where communication was by 
thought-transference, who was surveying humankind and 
reporting their psychology, should be oblivious to all our 
intercommunication save such as the psychical-research 
society has noted. If he should further misinterpret the 
cases of mere coincidence of thoughts as facts comparable, 
to telepathic communication, he would not be more wrong 
