WHAT ANIMALS REMEMBER

Waikato Times, Volume 102, Issue 17242, 29 October 1927, Page 16 (Supplement)

WHAT ANIMALS REMEMBER

NOSE AND MEMORY RELATED. Think of the wonders a dog performs as its mind and memory, grow. We can train dogs to do. almost anything, but far better.than our training is their own. There is a certain dog which has never been taught a trick, yet he is a wonder. When the maid takes the morning tea up to the bedroom up bolts the dog with her to his master and mistress. He knows not only the clothes they are to wear, hut the order in which they are to be put on, and he brings them one by -.one. Yet if he: is >n the street he is not

certain that his master is his master / until he has smelled at his . clothing. The nose is the great interpreter, the trigger which sets most animal minds and memories in action. A sheep does not know her lamb by voice or form; she knows it only by scent. . During the lambing season death strikes here and there in the flock, and lambs are left motherless and ewes lambless. The problem is how to get a lambless ewe to adopt an orphaned lamb. The only course found practicable is to strip oft the skin of* the dead Jamb, tie it upon the bereaved-one, and present it to the mother of the lamb that is dead. Grotesque 'as the little orphan now looks with its overcoat, it does not seem strange to the sheep. She smells the fleece and accepts the masquerading lamb as her own. Nose and memory are closely associated, then, in animal’life. A butterfly smells out the scent of its own species; moths find their way to one another in the dark by the same organ; wolf to wolf, fox to fox, horse to horse, elephant to elephant, lion to lion—they follow their noses. They remember the characteristic scent. The elephant may crash a man to death and break out into the forest, but it can be recaptured and set to work again with perfect safety. The horse would not work for us if it were to build up into its experience all ■ its memories of successful battle with Jts groom or its breaker. Cattle would defy us, the carnel would trample and bite us to death, donkeys would clash their way to freedom if they could understand and co-ordinate what they remember, building up experience and reasoning from it as a human does. . Memory of this kind, however, has its limitations. Our own higher memory enables us from our knowledge of' the past to foretell an eclipse 10,000 years ahead or guard against famine. The animal mind, while not forgetting an event, does not realise its significance. Animals do not understand, though they may not forget. That is a mercy for us; hut, oil the other hand, if they ■ forget, in the manner of insects and amphibia, then! they would be equally useless, for they could never realise that they were mastered.lt' would seem as if their type of memory were fashioned for the special advantage of ths_ one creature capable of profiting by it—Man himself.