WAYS OF NATURE 
they did get the stick through, it was always by 
chance. 
It has never been necessary that the dog or his 
ancestors should know how to fetch long sticks 
through a narrow opening in a fence. Hence he 
does not know the trick of it. But we have a little 
bird that knows the trick. The house wren will 
carry a twig three inches long through a hole of 
half that diameter. She knows how to manage it 
because the wren tribe have handled twigs so long 
in building their nests that this knowledge has 
become a family instinct. 
What we call the intelligence of animals is limited 
for the most part to sense perception and sense 
memory. We teach them certain things, train them 
to do tricks quite beyond the range of their natural 
intelligence, not because we enlighten their minds 
or develop their reason, but mainly by the force of 
habit. Through repetition the act becomes auto- 
matic. Who ever saw a trained animal, unless it be 
the elephant, do anything that betrayed the least 
spark of conscious intelligence? The trained pig, or 
the trained dog, or the trained lion does its “ stunt” 
precisely as a machine would do it — without any 
more appreciation of what it is doing. The trainer 
and public performer find that things must always 
be done in the same fixed order; any change, any- 
thing unusual, any strange sound, light, color, or 
movement, and trouble at once ensues.. 
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