ANIMALS AND FEAR

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 52, 29 August 1914, Page 4

ANIMALS AND FEAR

THE SUPPOSED DREAD OF DEATH

.. The question of what is meant by consciousness in animals, raised by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell in his recent presidential address to the Union of Scientific Societies at Bournemouth, is one of exticme difficulty. It has.now been recalled by a London paper that some years ago a German investigator placed a number of single-celled animals in a drop of water under the microscope. They were^wimming actively in the film of water*.' wKeri the investigator touched the surface of the cover-slip with a redhot needle. One of the anunalculae was killed, and soon a clear space was formed round the coipse, the smvivorsi keeping from it. An imaginative commentator called this a case of nekrophobia, suggesting that these minute creatures feared death. Later workers showed that a dead piece of protoplasm exuded into the water some substance different from the natural reaction of living piotopla.sm. Most animals shrink or struggle when they come in contact with conditions that are unfavourable, behaving precisely as we do when we are feeling discomfort or pain. In many cases, before physical pain or discomfort can actually be felt, the higher animals show the symptoms that in our case we associate with fear. But do they feel pain, do they remember pain, and consequently experience fear? In our own case the capacity to feel, to remember, and to dread pain is associated with the activity of the cerebral hemispheres of the brain, and if these be drugged we are unconscious. A frog, whose cerebral hemispheres have been destroyed, if placed in hot water, will make a sudden and violent effort to escape. Wo ourselves, under a light anaesthesia that inhibits consciousness, will struggle violently to avoid pain.f It certainly seems most probable that consciousness is something that may be added to the behaviour of animals, not present at all in the lowest forms, and Vcomirtg in | slowly and gradually*" as the scale of life is ascended. The supposed fear of death is one of th.6 most salient instances of the I fashion in which we are inclined to attribute our own sensations to animals. According to their individual disposiI tion and habits, animals react only to the immediate stimuli that reach them, and pain would have to be severe, repeated many times, and associated in the i most direct way with a very simple I sense-impression before the senseimpression by itself would arouse in them shrinking or thte signs of fear.