I presume that most persons who have observed animals a great deal have
met with cases in which the animal has acted automatically, or
instinctively, when the stimulus has been a false one. I will relate one
such case, observed by myself, and which strikes me as being apposite to
the question I am considering. It must be premised that this is an
instance of an acquired habit; but this does not affect my argument,
since I have all along assumed that the huanaco--a highly sagacious
species in the highest class of vertebrates--first acquired a habit from
experience of seeking a remembered refuge, and that such habit was the
parent, as it were, or the first clay model, of the perfect and
indestructible instinct that was to be.
It is not an uncommon thing in the Argentino pampas--I have on two
occasions witnessed it myself--for a riding-horse to come home, or to
the gate of his owner's house, to die. I am speaking of riding-horses
that are never doctored, nor treated mercifully; that look on their
master as an enemy rather than a friend; horses that live out in the
open, and have to be hunted to the corral or enclosure, or roughly
captured with a lasso as they run, when their services are required. I
retain a very vivid recollection of the first occasion of witnessing an
action of this kind in a horse, although I was only a boy at the time.
On going out one summer evening I saw one of the horses of the
establishment standing unsaddled and unbridled leaning his head over the
gate.
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