ANIMALS IN FAMINE.
THE recent rains in India will bring relief to the famine- struck animals before they lighten the sufferings of their owners. The green-staff will spring up and give food for the cattle long before the grain can ripen and provide a meal for the peasant. But the animals will have time to recover their strength and be ready to do their work in preparing the ground for the next crop, and the actual loss of life among the beasts of the field will be arrested. This is said to have been less than in many Indian famines affecting much smaller areas. The total failure of the grain crops was due to absence of rain at a definite point of time when it was necessary to its germination. But there has not been such a protracted and general drought as to bring on the whole animal population a famine in the form which causes most suffering to them.
In their wi id state most animals live under the incubus of two sources of terror,—death by violence from their natural foe or foes, and death by famine. The greater number are never far removed from the latter possibility; it is the inevitable sequence of disablement, weakness, or old age, and if not cut off by pestilence, violence, or fatal accident, they have all to face this grim spectre in the closing scene. Yet in most cases dread of the latter is not present to their consciousness in the form of apprehension,—only as shadowed out by actual reminder caused by scarcity of food at a par- ticular time, or a total failure, which drives them to wander. But the fear of the " natural enemy " is always vivid and oppressive, and alters the whole course of their everyday life. The deer on certain of the Highland mountains, exposed in any hard winter to almost inevitable famine, do not profit by experience of famine. Experience of danger from man makes them the most wary of animals ; they sleep with waking senses, feed by night, are constantly under the influence of this besetting terror, and take every measure which experi- ence suggests to guard against the enemy. Experience of famine leaves them no wiser than before. They do not abandon the spots in which they suffered in previous years until they actually feel the pinch of hunger, and they return to the same inhospitable ground when the scarcity has passed. Yet when confronted by the two terrors—hunger and man— they are simply insensible to the fear of the latter usually so dominant. Starvation looms larger than any terror from living foes, and they invade the rickyards, and almost enter the dwellings of their only hereditary enemy. The recent accounts of the behaviour of four thousand starving elk in the northern territory of the United States correspond exactly with those of the Highland deer in the hard winter of 1893. They approach the buildings for food, and can hardly be driven f coin the stacks of hay. Yet only one herbivorous animal out of all the multitude of species has ever thought of making a store of hay against a time of famine, and this is one of the most insignificant of all, the pika, or calling hare of the Russian steppes. There would be nothing very extraordinary in the fact if social animals, such as deer, cattle, or antelopes, did gather quantities of long herbage, like the tall grasses of Central Africa or of the Indian swamps, and accumulate it for the benefit of the herd, and combine to protect it from other herds, or if they reserved certain portions of the longer herbage for food in winter. The latter would perhaps demand a greater range of concepts than the former. But the brain-power of the improvident deer must be equal to that of the squirrel or field- mouse, which seldom forget to lay aside a "famine fund." In temperate climates, prolonged frost or snow is the only frequent
cause of famine among either beasts or birds. This cause is not constant, season by season, but it occurs often enough in the lifetime of most individuals of the different species to impress their memory by suffering. In the plains of India, and even more regularly in the plains of Africa, the summer heats cause partial famine to all herbivorous animals, and this condition is recurring and constant. Brehm has described the cumulative suffering of the animal world, of the " African steppe," mainly from famine, at the close of this regular period of summer drought. We cannot suppose that in this case the terror of starvation is wholly forgotten in the brief time of plenty. The neglect to form any store, or to reserve pastures in climates sufficiently temperate to spare them from being burnt up with summer heat, suggests the question whether these " hand-to-mouth " herbivorous animals rely on any natural reserves of food not
obvious to us. This is a natural device, just as the Kaffir, when his mealies fail, lives on roots and grubs, or the insect and vegetable eating rook becomes carnivorous in a drought To some extent both deer and cattle do rely on such reserves. When the grass is burnt up, trees are still luxuriant, and it is to the woods that the ruminant animals look as a reserve in famine. The fact was recognised during the siege of Paris, when all the trees of the boulevards and the parks were felled late in September that the tens of thousands of cattle might browse on the young shoots and leaves. It is this habit of hungry cattle which makes the space under all trees in parks of the same height,—that to which cattle can lift their heads to bite the branches. When the wood or forest has been enclosed previously, the whole of this stock of food, reaching down to the ground, instead of to the " cattle line," is at their service. In a paragraph quoted in the Globe of June 28th, from some remarks of Sir Dietrich Brandis, lately chief of the Forest Department of the Indian Empire, special mention is made of the part played by this "reserve " in the economy of animal famines in India. During the years of drought and famine in 1867 and 1868, the cattle (of all the inhabitants) were allowed to graze in the Rajah's preserves at Rupnagar. The branches of the trees were cut for fodder. The same was done in Kishangarh, and a large proportion of the cattle of these two places were preserved during those terrible years.
But there are regions, like the African steppe, where the summer famines among animals are more frequent than in India, and where there is little forest available as a reserve store of food. Certain animals " trek" for great distances to escape from the famine area. Birds leave it entirely. But the greater number of the quadrupeds stay and take their chance, the stronger of hunger, the weak of famine and death.
If we examine the stores made by most of the vegetable. eating animals which do lay by a "famine f and," we find a rather carious similarity in the food commonly used by them. They nearly all live on vegetable substances in a concentrated form —natural food-lozenges, which are very easily stored away, There is a great difference, for example, between the bulk of nutriment eaten in the form of grass by a rabbit, and the same amount of sustenance in the "special preparation" in the kernel of a nut, or the stone of a peach, or the bulb of a crocus, off which a squirrel makes a meal. Nearly all the storing animals eat " concentrated food," whether it be beans and grain, hoarded by the hamster, or nuts and hard fruits, by the squirrel, nuthatch, and possibly some of the jays. But there is one vegetable-eating animal whose food is neither con- centrated nor easy to move. On the contrary, it is obtained with great labour in the first instance, and stored with no less toil after it is procured. The beaver lives during the winter on the bark of trees. As it is not safe, and often impossible, for the animal to leave the water when the ice has formed, it stores these branches under water, cutting them into lengths, dragging them below the surface, and fixing them down to the bottom with stones and mud. This is more difficult work than gathering hay.
Birds, in spite of their powers of locomotion, suffer greatly from famine. Many species which could leave the famine area seem either deficient in the instinct to move, or unwilling to do so. Rooks, for instance, which are now known to migrate across the Channel and the North Sea, will hang about the same parish in bad droughts and suffer acutely, though they might easily move to places where water, if not food, is abundant. The frost famines mainly affect the insect-eating birds ; and as these live on animal food, which would not keep, they could not be expected to make a store. But there is no such difference of possible food between birds which do make stores and birds which do not. Why, for instance, should the nuthatch and the Mexican woodpecker lay by for hard times while the rook does not P Domestic animals in this country are very properly guarane teed by recent legislation against being left to starve by their owners. It is not often that the owner of any domesticated animal is so careless of his own interests as to do so when the creature is capable of work, or so inhuman if it is not. But instances do occur to the contrary. The law does recognise an implied right on the part of the animal to this exemption from the great curse of animal existence, if man has exacted from it a previous tribute in the form of work. But there is a border. land of animal domestication in which this implicit duty of
man to beast is seriously neglected, partly because the work done by the animal is less obvious, though the animal is kept for the pr. fit of man. There are great areas of new country in Argentina, the United States, and Anstr4lia where the raising of stock, whether sheep, cattle, or horses, is carried on without much regard to the limits set by famine in years of frost or drought. The creatures are multiplied without regard to famine periods, and no reserve of food is kept to meet these. Natural laws are left to work in bad times, and this " natural law " is death by famine. Conse- quently, at the present time we hear of multitudes of starving horses on the ranches of Oregon, and in Australia during a drought, or in Argentina after protracted drought or cold, sheep and cattle die by tens of thousands by the most lingering of deaths. There is something amiss here in the relations between man and beast which cannot be justified even on "business" grounds.
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