WILD HORSES' COMMUNICATIONS WITH EACH_ OTHER.
- [To THE EDITOR 07 THE " SPECTATOR.° have read with interest your articles on the instinct of cattle. That cattle and horses can communicate intelligence to each other, and are endowed with a certain amount of reasoning faculty, the following facts are pretty -conclusive- proof. I once purchased a station on which a large number of cattle and horses had gone wild. To get the cattle in, I fenced the permanent water (a distance of twenty miles),. leaving traps at intervals. At first this answered an right, but soon the cattle became exceedingly cautious about entering- the traps ; waiting outside for two or three nights before going in, and if they could smell a man or his tracks, not going in at all. At last they adopted a plan which beat me. A mob would come to the trap-gate, and one would go in and drink, and come out; and then another would do the same, and. so on, till all had watered. They had evidently arrived at the- conclusion that I would not catch one and frighten all the others away.
To get in the wild horses, six hundred of which were running on a large plain (about twenty thousand acres),. I erected a stock-yard, with a gradually widening lane, in a hollow where it could not easily be seen, and by stationing horsemen at intervals on the plain, galloped the wild horses in. My first hunt (which lasted for some days) was successful, the- wild horses heading towards the mouth of the lane without much difficulty; but, of course, some escaped by charging- back at the stock-yard gate, and in other ways. My second hunt, about a month later, was a failure; every mob of horses on the plain seemed to know where the yard was, and would not head that way. This seems to show that the horses that escaped from the first hunt told all the others where the stock-
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