DO ANIMALS REASON?

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 13980, 16 August 1909, Page 3

DO ANIMALS REASON?

The June .iitmibcr of " McC'iure's Magazine " contains a curious aim lnu-icsiiiig article by Mr Jb. T. Brewster entitled -"The Animal Mind lrom the Inside. ' it is interesting be-l-uu.su it gives ;i number of ascertained tacts as to the behaviour of ditlereiu annuals placed jn pai tX-ular circuinstaucc»; curious because occasionally it is difficult to determine whether the unter means wnat we should naturally take Jinn to mean. His article is an essay written with the object of proving, in. opposition to other American naturalists, that animals do not reason, and at the outset we lincl ourselves doubtful unether we know exactly what '.lie word "reason" convex"s to him. Jio begins with two statements. "Animals do not reason at all. Men do not reason by any means as much as they are commonly suppo.sc.tl to." Sow, botii those statements can be accepted at once. (Jut is that what Mr Brewster means? It so. he spoils his argument with his illustration. Jlo takes the well-known >yl!ogism: "All men are mortal; S;>cr;itc» is a man ; therefore Socrates is mortal." lie calls that "the type of all reasoning." Then lie goes on io inquire how often a man reasons. a.KJ he imagines himself writing a Liie of Socrates and devoting years to the work. "In the end, J produce a monumental work that remains for centuries the standard authority on I he lile of Socrates. Vet I need not have reasoned once during the whole process." With a statement such as that xve are at sea at once. Mr Brewster has not reached out his own assertion. A standard Life of Socrates compiled without reasoning is :t coni tradietiou in terms. I But let hi see what is the detailed

evidence which he brings forward to prove that ''animals do not reason." It is very interesting; the pains taken by the experimenters have been immense. The general idea seems to have been to set a number of different animals certain problems to solve, am! to note the manner in which the animals solved them. Here is an experiment with a racoon. ''Coon No. o Las been fed from a box with an outward swinging door. Imagine for a moment what a man would do: then compare this, with what the coon did." The coon began by rolling over and over pushing against nothing till at last he stood -on his head; after a little in's hind-foot slipped and touched the lever and .released the door. Next time he was hungry -'he got in front of the , box, stood on his head, and pawed the corner of the box until his Jimd-loot slipped again. Eight times he followed this procedure; then he discovered that, after his hind-foot had struck the ' lever, an added push with his forepaws helped to expedite matters. At the twenty-eigth trial lie discovered that standing on his head was not an essential part of the process, nevertheless,, lie persisted in putting his hind-foot on the lever before pushing it down with his front paws." Eventually he discovered that one fore-paw would do. " Vet," Mr Brewster urges, '"if the right man had seen him for the first time when he was making the hundredth trial, and after ho had forgotten to stand on his head, and forgotten to use three paws, and forgotten everything else except to put out one hand and push, what a story it. would have made!" The coon was not reckoning, he argues; hi was merely forming a habit. Take another instance, a puzzle set for a rhesus monkey. "The monkey, following the usual procedure, learned to get his food from a box, the lid of which was fastened with a key. The key, however, could not be withdrawn from the lock. After the monkey had become familiar with the device, and could operate it as readily as r man could do, the experimenter took the key out of the lock and laid it on the floor in front of the box. The monkey picked up the key, played with it, but made no attempt to use it. Then the experimenter todk up the key, and, fifty times in succession, with the monkey two feet away and watching the motion, he unlocked the box." Did the monkey understand:' "Me would have starved before lie would have imitated that simple act." Possibly a rhesus monkey would; but suppose a chimpanzee had been in the place of the rhesus monkey, and had used the key in imitation of the man, would Mr Brewster admit that the chimpanzee had reasoned:-' Another interesting experiment was made with rats. Messrs Carr and Watson, of Chicago University, devised a model made on the principle of the maze at Hampton Court; the rats were to find their way to food in the middle. The maze was designed on the lines of the trombone, and the passages could be lengthened or shortened at will. Seven rats, one of then, blind, were then trained till they could ri}n through the maze at full tilt without making a mistake. Then the pas sages were shortened by • two or tnrei feet, and all seven rats, in broad daylight, dashed straight into the one walls of the passages. It took the rati as long to learn their way round tin maze with the shortened passages at it had taken to learn it in the first instance. Then tlie passages were lengthened again, and again it took the rats as long to rclearn the original distance' as it had taken to learn it to: the first time.' " Leg-memory " tin experimenters call this memory of right distances, and Mr Brewster suggests as a parallel altering the length of a ten-nis-court, and tiien watcning a good player reel off double faults. But, again, we may ask, if an intelligent doji had been trained to know his way about the maze, and then had gone right through it with the altered passages, would that be admitted as an instance of reasoning:-' If so, was the experiment tried with a dog? and it not, what is its value except as regards the intelligence of rats:-