Animals and Death

I

INSTANCES begin to accumulate suggesting a changed view of the mind or nature of animals, at any rate of birds and mammals. Of course the old distinctions between reason and instinct stand, and the contrast is useful, even though the two are dovetailed. But each is a crude conception. The point in animal psychology that has been too much disregarded may be called, for want of a better word, mood.

To take one set of feelings, it is a mistake to suppose that nervous morbidity and excessive sensitiveness are maladies peculiar to the animal who supposes himself to be the head of the world, the apex of evolution, the being for whom the rest were created. Similarities of mental condition, parallel with similarities of structure, can be traced all down the scale of mind, and many of them are startling. Recent inquiries and some collating of older evidence suggest that animals low in the evolutionary grade are capable, on occasion, of euthanasia, of deliberate selfsacrifice, of calculated self-slaughter, and of the killing of offenders.

Let me take a few examples that have come within the scope of my own experience. Some years ago in Britain a prolonged attempt was made to naturalize that attractive bird, the American robin. It is of the thrush tribe, very closely akin to three of the commonest birds native to Britain — the song thrush, whose notes have been made famous through an ingenious poem by Robert Browning, the blackbird, perhaps the best singer in the British Isles, and the fieldfare, which nests in Scandinavia, but spends the winter in the British Isles. It seemed likely that the American robin, being so similar in habits, especially in nesting habits and in anatomical structure and biological ‘points,’ would take kindly to the new home. My coöperation in the experiment was invited.

The birds bred well, both those that we put out into wild nests of the native thrush and blackbird and those brought up in captivity. Every method we could think of was adopted, in order to miss no chance of a successful issue. One was to release the old birds and keep the young encaged. They both consented to the arrangement. The parents seemed quite at home in the gardens where they had their being, and were very diligent in visiting the cage and feeding the young through the bars. The growing chicks looked cheerful and healthy. No single experiment of this nature failed in the early stages, but none succeeded in the later. At a particular moment the young birds died, yet gave no indication, even to the most expert ornithologists, that they Avere out of health. Not in all cases, but in several, an autopsy revealed that the birds had swallowed small green tips of yew or other hard and indigestible evergreen, and doubtless had died of it. The food, entirely unnatural to the bird, was of course prescribed and brought by the parents, in order presumably to save the young from the pains of imprisonment. It was remarkable that the result was prophesied at the beginning of the experiment by one villager who had been something of an aviculturist.

Very soon after the catastrophe the old birds vanished and were never seen again. The impulse to migrate is very strong in the species, and of the many hundred that in several successive summers enjoyed the lovely garden of a fifteenth-century house in the south of England not one was ever seen again, alive or dead, after the fall of autumn. They vanished no man knows where, driven south by a yearning too deep for resistance.

It is of course possible that the young died of a balked instinct. This may affect a bird or a lower mammal very much as a ‘repression complex,’ so called, may affect a child. But most birds can live the instinct down. A certain young cuckoo — it belonged to Mr. Benjamin Kidd, an authority on evolution — lived happily enough in the house, but toward evening, at the due period of migration, it would fall into a sort of trance, become oblivious to its surroundings and the voice of its owner, and show life only by the slight but quite regular and rhythmic beating of its wings. It survived the period without any apparent loss of health. The migration instinct is as strong in the cuckoo as in the robin. We may therefore perhaps safely conclude — as all who investigated the incident agreed—that the young robins died, as the villager said they would, of deliberate poisoning.

One very curious instance of selfslaughter occurred some years ago while I was visiting a wide area of fenland suddenly flooded. A considerable covey of partridges, a heavy, short - winged species that flies fast but very soon wearies, in the way of most groundnesting birds, was observed flying over the flood. The slowness of their flight suggested that they had come a long way. Quite suddenly, with no warning, the whole number dived headlong into the water. It was never determined why they did this. It is possible — perhaps probable — that one of the leaders fancied the water was land, as airmen have done before now, and that the rest followed like sheep. But the whole number drowned themselves. Not one escaped or apparently tried to escape.

II

Animals quite frequently meet their death through obstinate adherence to a strong intention. A well-known man of science — he was one of Luther Burbank’s regular correspondents — was walking along a canal when he saw a rat swimming across from the far side. For mere wantonness he prevented the journey by tapping the water with his stick. The rat dived and, swimming under water, made attempt after attempt to effect a landing. The canal was only three or four yards wide. The obstinate creature utterly refused to give up its purpose, and, after a last vain attempt to cross, dived once more and a minute later floated to the top of the water, dead. It had drowned itself from inability to surrender an intention, a purpose, a conviction.

A fate very much like voluntary suicide is of course the common lot of many arachnids and other insects. Their way of instinctive immolation on behalf of the race is not the immediate theme; but the more a man probes into the life of animals, the more frequently and persuasively do instances of queer analogies confront him. An immense gap separates the creature endowed with little ganglionic centres everywhere and anywhere about its body or limbs from animals with a central brain, capable of receiving general, correlated, and conscious experiences. But there are likenesses that transcend even that barrier between genera. The sense of maternity rises — or descends — to a mere instinct in the most reasonable and becomes almost reasoned in the most instinctive. The bark moth, after laying her eggs, lies down and dies incontinent in the passage, blocking the only doorway by which an enemy may approach the eggs.

Perhaps the grimmest of all the more common spectacles of an observer of invertebrate life is the advance of the small male spider to his almost certain death. The desire to propagate the species is overwhelming, but it does not, we may presume, blind him to the risk he runs. With what qualms and cautions, with what quick movements this way and that, he approaches the gigantic female! The spider’s eyes gleam watchfully, sacrificially. He makes his rush, and a few seconds later the hungry female has fastened her fangs in him and presently devoured him to satisfy her insatiable greed for food necessary to supply her output both of eggs and of webbing. Some of the blind or nearly blind spiders meet a similar fate, and the extreme tactile caution of their approach seems to suggest that they too are conscious of the risk they run.

Less suddenly dramatic, but not less grim, is the yearly murder of the drones in a hive of honey bees. The worker bees told off to this most socialistic job give one the impression that they dislike the duty, but obey a categorical imperative. It was not till last year, while observing a very strong swarm of crossed Italian and English bees, that I discovered how — in many cases — the death is compassed. The small wnrker attacks, as everyone knows, the base of the wing, just above the hinge, and continues to file away at it, however violently the heavy drone hauls her hither and thither over the alighting board or among the grasses. But very often the work is not completed. The drone shakes himself free and sets out triumphantly on wings more powerful than any worker possesses. He enjoys a last ecstasy. The filing has so weakened the shaft that of a sudden it breaks, and the drone crashes like a broken aeroplane — the most saddening sight the eyes can behold — or a bird shot in mid-flight. The fall even of this little and now useless insect, is depressing to watch; but there is certainly no pain, as we understand the word, either in anticipation or in fact.

III

To return to the higher animals, with their central brain and sensitiveness to pain — a great number are victims of the extremes of impulses, the very strongest of which are not directly connected with reproduction. Birds and mammals perish in hundreds from the irresistible impulse to migrate. The most notorious are the lemmings, which will throw themselves by the company into sea and lake in circumstances which give them no chance whatever of reaching the other side. They are influenced doubtless, like the shades in Vergil, ‘ripæ ulterioris amore,’ but the effect is wholesale suicide. Perhaps the simple rat whose fate was chronicled above was the victim of some far-off inherited pressure such as moves these foreign cousins of his genus. Who knows?

The migrations of tribes of this class of animal are curious to watch. One of the strangest in my experience occurred in Australia, in the ’back blocks ’ of New South Wales. The mice, which had been noticeably few, suddenly collected and began to move across country in hordes, devouring everything in their way and paying no heed to any obstacle. They went through the rare house they met as a shell might go, utterly destroying bedding and upholstery as well as anything that might be called food in the ordinary sense. While they were on the move they evinced no sort of fear whatever. Presumably the pangs of hunger or the sense of impending hunger drove them as the Furies drove Orestes. Under its pressure they ceased to be free agents. Great numbers were killed.

Excess of fear may have the same effect as want of fear. I have seen a large number of birds kill themselves from the blindness of fear or extravagant desire to escape. A pheasant, in an open wood, crouched among the dead leaves as the bird loves to do to avoid detection. I walked up to see how near she would let me come, and presently greatly regretted the unhappy act of curiosity. She rose within a yard or two, flew with unusual clatter and great acceleration of speed into the very middle of a slender tree trunk, and fell stone dead. Partridges and grouse are singularly careful to avoid telegraph wires until they are alarmed beyond the normal, when they will crash into the wires with utter obliviousness. I once saw five partridges out of fourteen kill themselves at one moment. They flew into a great mass of wires close to a post, a barrier singularly obvious even to a blear-eyed man at a considerable distance.

The general avoidance of wires and of trains was acquired by birds and other animals with surprising celerity. One man of science claimed that he could trace the effect in the brain of the bird by a study of its anatomy: the swallows of his youth, he alleged, had a minute cell less in the brain than the swallows of his old age. But the veteran theorist was not supported by his fellows!

In certain places both wire and trains levy their yearly toll of victims; but the loss by both was progressively smaller, year by year, in earlier times. Are we to suppose that some inherited memory has added these artificial risks to the list of those more instinctively evaded?

IV

There is a ‘ blessed word’ of the moment, used in all sorts of connections by men of science to explain strange movements. It is ‘tropism.’ Word and theory are borrowed from the botanists. They argue, for example, that a moth immolates itself in the light for exactly the same reason that a sunflower turns to the midday sun — because it must; because the light affects its mechanical structure so that the turning movement becomes compulsory. Like most words in -ism, tropism carries us little further. Some moths fly to the flame and are killed or wounded. Some, after one or two flights toward the danger, fly off again and escape into the cool, dark night. Tropism doubtless means something in botany; and life rises in such gentle gradations that it may mean something also for the invertebrates; but the meaning is quite whittled away when we come to higher beings, though the metaphor may be useful. A humorist might be allowed to say that a woman who could not pass a hat shop was a victim of tropism!

Here are two examples of the relation of very different animals to death — examples that can have nothing tropistic about them.

A colony of rooks, perhaps the most intelligent of the crow tribe, was recently observed sitting in solemn conclave, like the Church authorities round the Jackdaw of Rheims, about the person of one of their number. Their notes rose and fell with that harsh variation that always suggests conversation and debate. It continued for a while, when the assembled judges and juries suddenly fell upon a delinquent and put him to death. Why he was killed, what incident had preceded, the observer did not know; but of the deliberate killing, preceded by a period of debate, there seemed to be no doubt. Quite certainly rooks are as capable of communal action as the hive bees, but it proceeds from a motive powder that is less instinctive, that is more reasonable. The rooks condemned a citizen to death in the straightforward human meaning of the phrase.

The domestic dog, developed from a tribe nurtured in the psychology of the herd, has acquired an individual sensitiveness, a most human sentimentality, that may be said to have substituted suicide for assassination. Dogs in packs will kill and eat a fellow who has offended. Instances of this sort of savagery were observed more than once by the members of Scott’s expedition to the Pole. A rage against one member of the team would possess the rest, and plausible reasons for these outbreaks of hate were usually found. At any rate, a common purpose to kill a particular member of the pack was shared by the rest without exception, and it proved very difficult to protect its life. One cannot really trace the origin of such brain storms in the dogs. It may be that the condemned member was in some way ill, and that the fact was diagnosed by the senses of the others, perhaps by their master sense of smell. An old deep instinct — seen still in some savages, as in the Red Indians of tropical South America —that it is better to kill the useless may have worked in their subconscious selves, but our knowledge of the dog under closer domestication hardly holds up the theory. Authentic instances of deep grief at a master’s absence or death are many. A number of dogs have been known to starve themselves to death from mere grief.

Doubtless elemental savagery will reappear in sudden bouts in some domestic dogs, collies and terriers especially, and is never far from the surface in the wolfhound. Any excitement may rob them of their well-tutored manners and morals. A surprising example occurred at an English country house inhabited by ardent doglovers. The family were driving out of the gate in sight of the dogs, when the wheels struck a post and the carriage was upset. In an instant the dogs, mad with excitement, rushed up and began falling on their fond masters and mistresses like wolves on sheep, and were with difficulty hauled off. That was mere relapse to the savagery of the pack; but the most intelligent of dogs, spaniels and retrievers and others, could hardly be so seduced from their allegiance. Most of them, especially spaniels, which the anatomists decide have the most highly developed brains, are unqualified sentimentalists. They are moved to extreme action, not by ‘tropism ’ or reflex action, but by such moods as sway men and women and children,especially children. It is a common parlor trick to persuade pet dogs to ‘die for their country.’ They can also do the trick with intention in real life by virtue of a quality that they hold in common with humanity. May we conclude that reason is not a late appearance, developed by the confliction of instincts, but a quality as common to the mental half of animals as the eye to the bodily half?