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By Root 489 0

hair of the rabbit offered to her. Facts such as these, which might be multiplied, suggest that neither the predator's fierceness nor the timid hunted creature's shyness is an expression of its essential or inmost nature. These contrasting attitudes arose because they were needed for survival; when the need is satisfied or removed, the conduct and the accompanying emotions vanish. This conclusion was reached by the ancients: in his essay on abstinence from flesh, Porphyry quoted with approval Aristotle's statement that if all animals enjoyed abundant food, they would not act ferociously toward each other or toward humans.

What remains in the animal when these disruptive tendencies have been neutralized or eradicated? Either indifference to creatures of other kinds or a measure of positive attraction. Social or gregarious animals are, as a rule, little drawn to animals of other species as long as they can find comrades of their own kind, but in

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the absence of these they may seek heterogeneous companions. A solitary horse at pasture stays nearer his master than does one with equine friends. Some kinds of birds that, even outside the nesting season, retain too much territorial exclusiveness to associate with others of their kind nevertheless attach themselves to mixed parties of distinct species, one individual of the exclusive species in each flock, as though preferring some companionship to a wholly solitary life. The pretty Slate-throated Redstart of the Guatemalan highlands is a good example of such behavior.

Under domestication, when people have brought together creatures of diverse sorts with little regard for their natural affinities, the most incongruous companionships may grow up between individuals deprived of access to others of their kind. Domestic horses have contracted friendships with a swan and a hen, and wild mustangs with bison. Dogs have accepted as comrades a variety of animals that they usually persecute, including a deer, a peccary, an otter, a lioness, rabbits, and squirrels. Crows can be trained to dwell peacefully with owls. These are a few of the strange companionships that naturalists have recorded (Dobie 1945).

Just as evolution has covered certain animals with hard carapaces or sharp quills to protect their tender flesh, so it has overlaid their basically pacific nature with fierceness, to help them survive in a fiercely competitive world. But the fierce temper is as superficial as the protective integument. Hereditary enmity, the normal relationship between predator and prey, tends to disappear if individuals of both categories are reared together soon after birth, before one has learned to kill and the other to fear, and if enough food is provided for both. Even animals as fierce and powerful as lions, leopards, bears, and wolves will grow up as affectionate friends of the person who attends them gently from an early age. Perhaps only animals of very low intelligence, which seize their prey by a reflex act little subject to inhibition by the higher nervous centers, are intrinsically incapable of becoming trustworthy companions. Without the ferocity fomented by hunger, and the timidity of victims of predation, the whole animal kingdom might become the pacific community that Isaiah envisioned.

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Sexual Rivalry

The second great source of strife in the animal kingdom is sexual rivalry. Whereas hunger brings discord between different species and is far less a direct cause of conflict between animals of the same kind, the reverse is true of the enmity stirred up by the reproductive passions. This is displayed almost exclusively between individuals of the same species and sex, usually between males, although in a few kinds of birds in which the usual roles of the sexes in courtship and parental care are reversed, as in the phalaropes, jacanas, and Spotted Sandpiper, the female is more aggressive than the male. Among vertebrates, sexual jealousy does not, as a rule, arise until the animal approaches reproductive maturity, and in nearly all species