Here the exciting cause--the cry for
help--is not strong enough to produce the illusion which is sometimes
fatal to the suffering member; but each dog mistakingly thinks that the
others, or one of the others, inflicted the injury, and his impulse is
to take the part of the injured animal. If the cry for help--caused
perhaps by a sudden cramp or the prick of a thorn--is not very sharp or
intense, the other dogs will not attack, but merely look and growl at
each other in a suspicious way.
To go back to Azara's anecdote. Why, it may be asked--and this question
has been put to me in conversation--if killing a distressed companion is
of no advantage to the race, and if something must be attacked--why did
not these rats in this instance attack the cage they were shut in, and
bite at the woodwork and wires? Or, in the case related by Mr. Andrew
Lang in _Longman's Magazine_ some time ago, in which the members of a
herd of cattle in Scotland turned with sudden amazing fury on one of the
cows that had got wedged between two rocks and was struggling with
distressed bellowings to free itself--why did they not attack the
prisoning rocks instead of goring their unfortunate comrade to death?
For it is well known that animals will, on occasions, turn angrily upon
and attack inanimate objects that cause them injury or hinder their
freedom of action. And we know that this mythic faculty--the mind's
projection of itself into visible nature--survives in ourselves, that
there are exceptional moments in our lives when it comes back to us; no
one, for instance, would be astonished to hear that any man, even a
philosopher, had angrily kicked away or imprecated a stool or other
inanimate object against which he had accidentally barked his shins.
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