So
exactly is this the case that in some species there are a few large,
overgrown, lazy ants in each nest, which do no work themselves, but
accompany the workers on their expeditions; and the sole use of these
idle mouths seems to be to attract the attention of birds and other
enemies, and so distract it from the useful workers, the mainstay of the
entire community. It is almost as though an army, marching against a
tribe of cannibals, were to place itself in the centre of a hollow
square formed of all the fattest people in the country, whose fine
condition and fitness for killing might immediately engross the
attention of the hungry enemy. Ants, in fact, have, for the most part,
already reached the goal set before us as a delightful one by most
current schools of socialist philosophers, in which the individual is
absolutely sacrificed in every way to the needs of the community.
The most absurdly human, however, among all the tricks and habits of
ants are their well known cattle-farming and slaveholding instincts.
Everybody has heard, of course, how they keep the common rose-blight as
milch cows, and suck from them the sweet honey-dew. But everybody,
probably, does not yet know the large number of insects which they herd
in one form or another as domesticated animals. Man has, at most, some
twenty or thirty such, including cows, sheep, horses, donkeys, camels,
llamas, alpacas, reindeer, dogs, cats, canaries, pigs, fowl, ducks,
geese, turkeys, and silkworms.
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