THE CANINE INTELLECT.* Tins book is a kind of Self-Help
for dogs, in which Mr. Williams has faithfully and successfully discharged the function of Dr. Smiles in his parallel work for Man. We notice that it has not been thought worth while to reserve the " right of translation," and if only it could by any contrivance be translated into a form in- telligible to the canine mind,—published simultaneously in Skye and Newfoundland, with notes by a Great St. Bernard,—what an era it would make in the history of the canine race. All that dogs need, in order to gain a definite advantage over man " in the con- flict of race" is a power of profiting by "cumulative" experience. Give them once a history and tradition, and we should find their co-operative powers equal, perhaps superior, to man's. If the individual wisdom shown by the different canine heroes in this book could once be combined or exchanged, there is no point of development which the dog would not shortly attain. That dog,s have logical, generalizing, imaginative, co-operative, organizing powers, are capable both of hero-worship and of a collected, self-sustained life, we undertake to prove out of the " authentic narratives" of this work,—and we attach, by the way, the more value to that epithet " authentic" that the marvellous story, for which no authority is cited, of the Florentine dog Borrinowski and his secretary, who go out of town every autumn to the baths of Lucca, is taken word for word from the columns of this journal. On the whole, it is far from difficult to conceive that creatures so individually distinguished,—creatures which have in more than one instance shown a genius for cooperation, might yet contrive to record and combine their experience on a larger scale, and to hand it down from generation to generation. If dogs can conspire and confer together for any intellectual end, —as we shall prove,—there can be no reason, in the nature of things, why, from this germ, a canine polity or widely organized society should not spring up, for which these half-yearly con- greases at Islington and Cremorne, where the same leading canine minds may generally be observed, would form an admi- rable starting-point. The beginning of human law and eiviF- zation is, it is said, in a chain of oral tradition. Why may not a chain of latrant tradition serve as the first vague seed of the same power for the dog?
The notion may sound visionary, but let our readers consider only the powers which we can prove the dog to possess. It has long been matter of notoriety that the dog can realm out a hypothetical disjunctive syllogism, as Dr. Newman long ago explained in " Loss and Gain." A dog in tracking his master has frequently been known to stop at a point where three roads meet to smell at two only, and then by a process of logical exclu- sion to take the third rapidly without smelling, but with bis nose high in the air. It is obvious, therefore, that he (in effect) reasons thus :— " Data mid their Ways. Illustrated by numerous ...4,needotes, compiled from authentic sources. By the Rev. Charles Williams. With woodcuts. London : Moutiedge.
" My master has gone by either route, A, or B, or C, He has not gone by route A or B, Therefore he has gone by route C."
Well, that is no new story, and there are a hundred more striking testimonies to his reasoning powers. Bewick describes a dog which, being deserted by his masters, naturally set up for himself, and hunted sheep in Northumberland. He was a gourmand, and only ate a portion of the fat about the kidneys and then let them go alive; but the farmers objected and began hunting him. Accord- ingly lie took up a thoroughly scientific base of operations, on a rock on the Heugh Hill: near Howick, where lie had a simultaneous view of four converging roads, and there ho baffled his pursueis for more than a year. He always had ono, or more than one, line of communication open, and evidently attached as much importance to it as do the Confederates to the holding of Atlanta, Georgia, where many lines of railway unite. This dog was a strategist, which implies not only syllogistic power, but a good deal more,— a forecasting judgment to select a strong position when no enemy threatened as well as the understanding to perceive that if the enemy advanced by one route lie might escape by three others.
But even this was only a solitary and self-sustaining dog,—a kind of canine Crusoe,—and had uo opportunity of showing the full organizing power of the canine intellect. What shall we say to the dog of Tilesius who (it is impossible to say " which") had been worried by another of greater strength ? It was observed that, for some time after, he abstained from half of his allotted food and formed a store of his savings. After a lapse of some days be went out, brought several canine neighbours home, and feasted them upon his hoard. His master watched in surprise, saw them all go out together, and, following them, found they proceeded by several streets to the skirts of the town, where they singled out a large dog, assailed him in common, and severely chastised him. Now, here we have a dog clearly understanding the economical doctrine of capital and wages ; and also appreciating fully the power of co-operative institutions. Mr. Mill defines " capital " as "the accumulated savings of labour employed in reproduction," but he afterwards explains, we believe, that ho does not mean to refuse the term to savings employed in any way which is really essential to protect the process of productive industry, whether by equipping a police force or a defensive military expenditure. Now, grant that the dog's food was wages for service,—say as a watch-dog or sheep-dog—and how obvious it is that this dog was a capitalist, that had saved its wages to assist it in protecting its productive industry for the future by the infliction of a rigid punishment on canine crime. Perhaps the only economical error it committed was in paying the wages before the work was done—but the time of paying wages is, after all, a matter of custom, and in the case of military work like this, it is always well to serve out the rations before battle, as canine, like human soldiers, probably fight better on a full than empty stomach. That dog might have been carried on to the theory of Rent and international (or say, intergenerical) exchanges. It might at least have been taught, in place of hoarding, to establish a bank of deposit, and issue notes - on a reserve of bones instead of bullion. Perhaps, hoivever, the retrievers could scarcely be trusted to leave their deposits on call. How easily a dog can be made to understand the nature of a government liability the story of the Chesterton collector of assessed taxes will show, who left an " assessed-tax " paper on a gentleman possessing a small white bull-dog,—in reality a de- mand for that animal's tax. No one was at home, and the collector thrust the paper under the door. Looking through the window, the collector saw the dog's eye fixed upon him. The dog then deliberately took the paper in his mouth, placed his feet on the fender, and thrust the collector's demand into a low
fire, there holding it till it was entirely consumed. The dog did not choose his master to be " affected with notice." No doubt he would in like manner have destroyed an overdue bill presented for payment.
Then, there are imaginative dogs, like Sir Walter Scott's dog,
Camp, who, chastised once for maltreating a baker, never after- wards, to the last moment of his life, heard the least allusion to the story in whatever voice or tone it was mentioned without getting up and retiring into the darkest corner of the room in visible distress. Then, if you said, "the baker was not hurt after all," or, "ire was well paid for his misfortune," Camp came forth, capered, barked, and rejoiced. What can be clearer titan that the incident had pained the dog's imagination ? That baker had been his innocent victim. Nothing but "poetical justice" for the baker could relieve his conscience. He liked to fancy a recompense to the baker for that unfortunate moment when he fell under his own suspicions. And what, again, could be more imaginative in conception than the chastisement inflicted
by Mr. J. G. Wood's friend, the Newfoundland dog, who after suffering much from a small tormentor took the cur in his mouth, swam well out to sea, dropped him there, and swam back. The
dog evidently shrank from the coarse shedding of blood, but conceived a subtler and more terrible revenge. He dropped the dog in the depths of the " unplumbed, salt, estranging sea." He left the poor little cur on the waste of waters, in the full certainty it could not return, and thus saved himself the vulgar feeling of murder, while the picture of the castaway struggling on the desolate watery levels probably haunted that animal's dreams for ever. Then there was the satirical dog, that observing how dead a custom church-going was with his master and mistress, took them off by voluntarily attending every Sunday during the church's repairs, and sitting alone for an hour in the desolate family pew. No human being could conceive a finer irony. And there is the dramatic dog, of infinite craft and resource, which combined the pleasant practice of bunting sheep at night with the humble prisoner's attitude in the morning,—returning in time to get his head into the collar by which he was supposed to be tied up throughout the night, and acting the impatient prisoner to the life.
But nothing is more remarkable in the human character of the canine intellect than its great capacity for legal figments. Mr. Darwin says that even herds of wild dogs, with the keenest appetite for sheep, will agrae to consider a flock of sheep, under the protection of the shepherd's dog, aQ, in effect, a herd of dogs, voluntarily investing the sheep with the nature of their associate and protector. It is not fear of the dog, for they are numerous, and would cheerfully tear away food cut of his mouth; it is not real blindness to the eatability of the sheep ; but it is a professional etiquette to regard the dog as choosing only dogs for his asso- ciates, just as it is only decent to assume that the society in which you meet a friend in the streets is up to his own intellec- tual level, and to ignore any deficiencies that may appear. Canine good breeding requires that the sheep should be regarded as dogs, and dogs accordingly they are, for that is the only recognized category for the companions of dogs. So we know a dog who has learned to enter heart and soul into the legal fig- ment of "nolo episcopari." If offered a canine dainty, she will not only not take it, but back away from it, round and round the room, with obviously injured feelings, until the offer is accompanied by the words, "Now, you may," when she takes it with perfect good breeding and delicacy. She feels, with the Spanish gentle- men who never accept an invitation to dinner till it has been three times repeated (knowing that the first two requests are mere complimentary acts), that a show of reluctance ought to precede the acceptance of any offer, and sooner than violate so fine an etiquette, she would go without the offered morsel.
With powers of a nature thus various and refined, what does the dog want but cumulative experience to give him the highest chances in the conflict of race ? That he can recognize painted likenesses is well established by Mr. Williams' anecdotes, and possibly, therefore, a hieroglyphic written language of a pictorial kind might still be open to him. If he once got the art of re- cording the canine experience of the past, the late Mr. Buckle could, we are sure, have proved that canine civilization would progress even faster than the human.
Previous page
