THE ANIMAL SENSE OF HUMOUR.
SO many of the higher powers of human pleasure may be traced in their first form among the other vertebrates, that it seems difficult to deny positively the faculty for any of the simple mental and aesthetic pleasures to animal understand- ing. Colour and music, scents and sounds, and the various " cosmetics " of a simple toilet, are all within the scope of their enjoyment; and readers of the Spectator will, perhaps, recall the fact that in many forms of play, sometimes of a rather elaborate nature, animals find a pleasure similar to that which the same amusements arouse in mankind. There are no limits to their enjoyment of that kind of " fan " which romps and make-believes of all sorts, especially mock-fighting and serio-comic farce, excite in their minds. But the sense of fun, which may be defined as the merriment which takes form in play, is, we think, in some few animals, capable of a further development. That refined sense of the incongruous or the odd, which we call " humour," is probably possessed in a large degree by a few animals ; while in others some of its elements are so often present, that it would be difficult to deny to them a share in it. We fancy, however, that humour in its most developed form is possessed by dogs alone among the animals ; and that they have acquired the faculty partly from man. The power of laughter is peculiar to man, and the sense of humour may be said, speaking generally, to be also his special property. In seeking to disentangle the " manifestations" of humour in the animal mind, we must carefully distinguish between the instances of the conscious
appreciation and enjoyment of what is comical, and the ex- treme but involuntary comicality of many animals them- selves. There are at least a dozen species whose form and actions are so absurdly humorous that it is next to impossible not to read into an interpretation of their thoughts some- thing of the feeling which they excite in ourselves. A polar bear in the ordinary enjoyment of his tub, or an eagle-owl holding a young rabbit in one claw, and a duckling in the other, and making alternate efforts to swallow each whole, while his eyes wink in time to the gulps, look as if they were consciously performing for the public amusement, though neither is the least aware that it is doing anything odd, or would hesitate for a moment to leave off and claw the spectator the instant he appeared on the wrong side of the bars. We recollect a perfect instance of apparently intentional humour, performed by an intelligent and serio-comic raven, the pro- perty of a river-keeper, which always accompanied its master when engaged in assisting his employers in catching a basket of trout. The raven soon comprehended that the object of the rest of the party was to get things to eat out of the stream. That he knew, first, because he saw it; and, secondly, because he was often given a small trout. So he went off fishing on his own account, and returned with a small drowned kitten, which he poked into the hole in the top of the basket, among the fish. Now this, in a human being, would be humour of a nasty, low kind, only fit for horrid schoolboys ; but still it would be humour. Whereas the raven was in sober earnest, and very pleased with himself for his success. Mark Twain's imaginary description of the efforts of the blue jay to fill up a hole with nuts, when the " hole " was a crack in the roof of a house, is hardly more comical than the reality of some instances of animal stupidity ; yet we never saw the slightest approach amusement in one animal at the mistakes of another, though dogs, so far as we can venture to interpret their thoughts, do really feel amusement at the mistakes of men.
Yet many animals have a keen appreciation of the peculiar and unpleasant form of humour which consists in inflicting annoyance and mortification on others. Instances of this indulgence in its crudest form must be familiar to most observers. Given a cow lying down and comfortably chewing the cud, there is hardly a fox-terrier living which can resist the temptation of rushing up and barking at its nose, until the persecuted animal forsakes comfort and repose, and rises awkwardly to its feet to drive off the tormentor. " Monkey- tricks " have passed into a proverb for the description of this side of humour, though not every monkey is so clever as the ape which was seen to pass its hand behind the back of a friend in order to tweak the tail of a third, whose resentment naturally fell upon its nearest neighbour. But all the cleverest species of birds and animals seem to share the unholy amuse- ments which the light annoyance—not the permanent inj ary- of others affords. A jackdaw of the writer's acquaintance had an ingenious method of tormenting the numerous dogs of the establishment, which was most comic to behold, and which owed something of its finish to a more artistic con- ception of the humorous side of teasing than most jackdaws are credited with. It was an extremely hot summer; and the dogs, of which there were three, spent the greater part of the day dozing peacefully on the lawn. Being all either Clamber spaniels or setters, they had fine silky coats, which extended to their feet, little tufts of flossy fur sticking out between their toes. When a dog was comfortably asleep, with its feet stretched out, dreaming of partridges, the jackdaw would hop gently round, and then make a sudden dive at these fluffy tassels between its toes, which never failed to wake the dog up with a quick sense of discomfort, which a tug at the hair anywhere else on its body would never have provoked. At another house, a tame magpie was kept in a stable-yard with a couple of kestrels. The kestrels were in the habit of sitting on the sides of the water-pails set to warm in the sun outside the stable-doors. The magpie being in want of amusement, hit on the following plan. He cautiously approached a kestrel from behind, and, seizing the bird's long tail in his beak, gave it one or two -violent pulls and pushes, and having worked the kestrel quite off its balance, with a good forward push, pitched it into the pail, or so far in as its flapping wings allowed. The magpie then " saved itself " with great haste in the hay-rack above the manger. In this case the joke was paid for ; one of the kestrels, more wide- awake than usual, caught the magpie as it was approaching, and drove its claws into the practical joker's legs until his screams brought help. Sometimes the animal practical joke takes a more refined form. We recently heard of a young cat which conceived a great dislike for a peacock which was fed from the windows of the house, and took the following method of expressing its aversion. When the pea- cock was anxious to display its charms, and bad spread its tail and was moving slowly backwards and forwards, the cat used to rush out on to the lawn and jump through the peacock's tail. The effect of this was to entirely disconcert the pea- cock's swagger, and leave the cat a moral victory. Even this, though the effects were hardly such as the human sense of humour interprets with satisfaction, may have been due to another feeling. The cat, for instance, may have taken the peacock's movements as an invitation to play, and the humour may be only due to the incongruity of the peacock's frame of mind and the cat's interpretation. But we have no doubt whatever that the dog does really possess a sense of humour of a kind not very much different from our own. It is by no means universal, or even common. But then humour, or even a slight sense of the comical, is by no means equally distributed among men. There are prosaic men and women, and there are matter-of-fact dogs. These have their good qualities, like matter-of-fact people. For -purely business purposes they are often the best. We once owned, for instance, an excellent retrieving spaniel of the simple order of mind, without a grain of humour. This dog accompanied us unasked when we wanted to shoot a bull- finch in the garden to stuff. The gun went off, and the poor 'bullfinch dropped. Now, this dog bad been used, when the gun was fired, to go and look for a dead or wounded rabbit. So, instead of looking under the apple-tree, he disappeared into the hedge, and in a few minutes he returned with a rabbit in his mouth. So much for the value of a matter-of-fact dog. The serious business of a dog's life—if we except collies, and the Dutch cart-dogs—is sport ; and it is in matters connected with sport that the development of humour is most often seen. The first and most amusing step is to see the grave and serious dog unbend to snit the humour of his master. The spectacle of a carefully educated setter's demeanour at a stack-threshing, should his master take a share in hunting mice, can never be forgotten. At first he sits down and looks on. Then, after a little encouragement, he joins in the fun, with a look which clearly says : " Well, if you will do it, I don't mind, just for once." Then all his dignity goes. He curls his tail, jumps about, and enjoys the joke; but never loses his sense of the impropriety of the whole thing. St. John had a dog which always joined in the rat-catcher's work, but cut him and his curs if he saw his master. Our own dog never took a part unless he saw his master engaged also, except when he went to bed at night in the stable. Then his whole demeanour changed. He would wag his tail like a cur, and sit waiting till the corn-bin was opened to give the horse his last feed, and try to catch the mice that rushed out when the lid was raised. His appre- oiation of the ludicrous grew with his knowledge of the world ; and though he never showed the slightest inclination to indulge it by annoying other creatures, and never even chased a cat unless he were told to, he was always immensely amused when we did anything which struck him as incorrect. His behaviour on the first occasion on which he saw a wild- duck shot was unmistakable. The bird—a teal—fell in a pond, and the setter, who was an excellent water-dog, swam in, and brought it to land. The bird was alive, and as soon as he had reached the bank, the dog set it down and danced round it, and then came back and looked up doubtfully, wagging his tail just as he did when mouse-hunting, evidently meaning to say : " Here's a lark, you've shot a duck." As he had left it on the other side of a ditch, we told him to go and fetch it. But Jack,' like Sally Harowwell in " Tom Brown," would have nothing more to do with it, and though we endeavoured to per- suade him that it was all right, like a true-born Suffolker as he was, he " knowed better," and we had to fetch it ourselves. He behaved in exactly the same way when we shot a black rabbit. Nothing would persuade him that it was not a cat ; and he would do no serious work for the rest of the day. Like many other dogs, this one had the greatest dislike to being laughed at,—a fact which, in itself, goes far to show that, with the sense of humour, animals possess its frequent
concomitant, a dislike of ridicule. But in no case have we seen the least approach to the sense of humour, in its developed form, in wholly wild creatures. In animals, as in man, humour is the result of civilisation, and not, as we understand it, a natural and spontaneous development.
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