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. 

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