ANIMAL COMMUNICATION 
There is one other human practice often attrib- 
uted to the lower animals that I must briefly con- 
sider, and that is the practice, under certain cir- 
cumstances, of poisoning their young. One often 
hears of caged young birds being fed by their parents 
for a few days and then poisoned; or of a mother 
fox poisoning her captive young when she finds that 
she cannot liberate him; and such stories obtain 
ready credence with the public, especially with the 
young. To make these stories credible, one must 
suppose a school of pharmacy, too, in the woods. 
“The worst thing about these poisoning stories,” 
writes a friend of mine, himself a writer of nature- 
books, “is the implied appreciation of the full effect 
and object of poison— the comprehension by the 
fox, for instance, that the poisoned meat she may 
be supposed to find was placed there for the object 
of killing herself (or some other fox), and that she 
may apply it to another animal for that purpose. 
Furthermore, that she understands the nature of 
death —that it brings ‘surcease of sorrow,’ and 
that death is better than captivity for her young one. 
How did she acquire all this knowledge? Where 
was her experience of its supposed truth obtained ? 
How could she make so fine and far-seeing a judg- 
ment, wholly out of the range of brute affairs, and 
so purely philosophical and humanly ethical? It 
violates every instinct and canon of natural law, 
which is for the preservation of life at all hazards. 
105 
