CHAPTER XII 



ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY 



IN no branch of study is the student confronted with more difficulties 

 in the way of separating fact from interpretation, and explanation 

 from description, than in the field of Animal Psychology, and this, 

 notwithstanding the fact that Animal Psychology owes its entire value 

 to its ability to explain and not to describe. 



The tendency of the human mind to read into an animal's actions 

 the same motives and reasons that cause man to react in a similar man- 

 ner is difficult to overcome. In fact, a definite word, anthropomorphism, 

 is in common use among psychologists to describe just this tendency to 

 humanize animals. 



Still, the only way we have of interpreting the behavior of an 

 animal must be in terms of human understanding, for we have neither 

 language nor imagery which can bring to us the sensations, emotions, 

 and driving force of an organism so totally unlike ourselves as an insect, 

 for example. 



As one writer has said, anger with us is always associated with an 

 increase in heart beat and a more rapid breathing, and our nerves are 

 all "set on edge," but an insect has a totally different set of blood- 

 vessels, an entirely different breathing apparatus and a different nervous 

 system. What are its accompanying sensations when it feels angry? 

 In fact, a wasp often bites off its own abdomen when angry. How can 

 we, when our respective organisms are so unlike, know much about how 

 such animals feel? 



Further, all of us have observed that probably most plays and 

 novels hinge their plot entirely on some misunderstanding. If human 

 beings, who have a common language to make themselves understood, 

 are so frequently misunderstood, how much more will we not misunder- 

 stand and misread the actions of animals entirely unable to tell us any- 

 thing in terms which are understandable to both ? 



It is for reasons of this kind that many throw up their hands in 

 despair and insist that we never can know anything at all about the 

 animal mind, but that if we wish to establish an animal psychology 

 anyway, there is only one way to go about it, and that is, merely to. 

 study the behavior in the laboratory under set conditions so that we 

 can learn just how each animal reacts to a given stimulus. Such a 

 method assumes that all .animals of the same sex, of the same age, and 

 in the same state of health, will always react in exactly the same way 

 when the same stimulus is applied under the same conditions. 



