MENDS OF ANIMALS

Gisborne Times, Volume LXIV, Issue 10193, 4 January 1926, Page 2

MENDS OF ANIMALS

SOME CURIOUS FACTS.

When the' psychologists shall have resolved the last mystery of the human race, there will he an attractive field of research awaiting them in the record of unexplained behaviour in the brute creation. To this has just been added the case of Prince, a terrier of Darlington. Some time ago the attention of Prince was riveted by a certain motor-car, the property of a gentleman living in the same neighbourhood. Although the car in question was in no way conspicuous among good cars, something about it fascinated tlie dog. Prince took to haunting the lock-up garage, and when, the car was taken out he would jump aboard the footboard and remain there throughout the journey. All means of discouraging him, even the most forcible, were tried 1 in vain; nothing could prevent him from attaching himself to the car for the duration of the journey. Once, having travelled by it to Redcar, he left the car for a moment at the halting-place; tbe car owner gave him the slip, and Prince bad to walk 20 miles to get home. Far from being dashed by this experience, Prince merely made it a rule never to leave the car when on a journey ; and he is accompanying it on all its travels to this day. How is this odd obsession to be explained ? There can surely be nothing about one particular' motor-car that has awakened some inherited memory from the dim memory of the canine past. How explain so many other curiosities of conduct in animals? A distinguished critic has lately written of a large and lumbering bulldog of his which could not be dissuaded from climbing every ladder that 't saw—even the painter’s lofty ladder set up against a bouse it would scale, to the terror of the man at work. Again, there is to-day a catresiding in King's Bench Walk winch cannot endure the whistling of one particular piece of music—a movemerit from a certain Beethoven, sonata The first few of the hated notes will fetch it hurrying to put ai: end to the outrage by face and gesture. Then there was «he cat described' by Frank Bucklnnd. A fisherman’s pet, it formed for itself a habit of plunging into the sea from its master’s boat and catching fish in its jaws. Here, it may be said, there was an intelligible motive, but hardly strong enough for a ca.t to take a bath. Most of us, perhaps, have met with cases of animal eccentricity less marked than these, yet as difficult to explain, despite the countless ag.*s of man’s companionship with the domestic creatures. As Hamlet did not ouite .sa;-, •‘There are more things hi dogs and cats, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”