Humour in Animals.
IIAVE animals a sense of humour ? It is a difficult question to answer, because. when we analyse animal. behaviour we have little certainty about the, whys and wherefores of. any of their actions, let alone, any certainty of such a motive as a sense of the ridiculous,.
Yet there are. occasions when we seem to see that wicked little imp that presides over our sense of humour, peeping forth from the behaviour of the higher mammals and the more intelligent birds. Take, for instance, an episode I witnessed the other afternoon. I have a pair of tame otters, the most charming, intelligent, and playful of creatures, known as Madame Moses and Thomas Romeo. The old lady, despite the fact she is a good deal the smaller of the two, keeps Tom in order, They play and romp madly together, but Toni has to. mind what he is doing and be careful, for if he gets too rough she promptly turns upon him. Well, they had been having a. hearty romp, making the water in their pond fly far and wide, when Moses broke off the game, in order to come ashore to. me. Tom watched her swim away, then dived, came up behind her, and, just as she was climbing up the bank, leant forward, and delicately nipped the extreme tip of her tail. Madame jumped round with an angry cry, but Tom had flung himself far out of her reach, and was floating on his back in the middle of the pool, with an expression of complacent wickedness . that I have seldom seen equalled. If that otter was not enjoying the joke I can only say he looked like it.
Of course, the spirit of mischief does not necessarily imply a sense of humour ; yet again, a little later, I wit- nessed a happening that seemed fraught with humour. My terrier, Tiny, is on the best of terms with the house- hold cat, and the latter is certainly not afraid of her, -in fact, have seen the two play together. Well, the at was following me up the drive, when Tiny who had gone on ahead, looked around, drew back on, to the grass, crouched, and waited in a tense attitude until the cat was level with her, when she rushed with loud barks upon poor puss. The cat, taken by surprise, turned tail, bolted down the drive, jumped on to the drive gate-post, and spat vigorously at the yapping terrier ; but puss was out of reach, and in a moment or two Tiny gave it up, ran after me,-and. left the cat to jump down. This she soon did, ;though looking ruffled and annoyed ; however, she• was not too upset to 'follow. us, but her. fluffed-out tail, and the angry spit she directed at the dog, warned the latter not to play any more jokes. If the terrier did not play a deliberate, purposeful, practical joke, it certainly had all the appearance of it.
To jump now from mammals to birds, the impish spirit that animates the different members of the crow family . is well known, whether. one takes the spritely jackdaw or the more stately raven. I have told elsewhere (in my book, Animal Mind) how Ben and Joe, my two pet ravens, combined to tease the cats, one taking the victim's attention while the other tweaked her tail, and that when puss turned upon the aggressor raven number two seized the opportunity.- to attack her from the other side ; but what I want to stress " here was the wicked satisfaction, that seemed to . pervade them during and after • the performance. They appeared thoroughly to enjoy teasing the cat, and to experience keen satisfaction in the joke.
In fact, I find it impossible to deny the higher creatures a sense of humour of the practical joke variety ; though such behaviour as I have described above _could, of course, be explained as due to this, that, and the other. You might even reduce it to terms of stimulus and instinctive response, and declare the whole sequence of actions to be automatic ! But when you have watched the creatures themselves, noting each fleeting expression, and the continuous stream of emotion and undeistanding that their gestures bespeak, you cannot doubt, after all, that their springs of action_ are similar to ours. For, undoubt- edly, the human. .intellect differs in degree rather than in kind from the minds of what our Victorian grandparents termed the " poor dumb animals," and we may look for humour, of a sort, in the highest mammals and birds. I do not mean that delicate perception of the ridiculous that makes a: humorous cartoon amusing to us, or which flavours an ironical sentence ; not huinour, in fact, of the isuhite; sophisticated sort ; bUt its lowly cousin of the practical joking kind. The former has an element of self-consciousness, for human humour can laugh at itself, but the animal sees no joke in its own troubles, only in pulling its friend's tail: Introspection has no part in the " April shower and sunshine " existence of the creatures furred and feathered; They may see the fun of teasing a comrade, in fact undoubtedlY do, but I ques- tion if even the most highly intelligent of animals, such as the chimpanzee, have the perceptual power to appreciate an elaborate joke or the finer shades of humour. Professor Kohler, in his Mentality of -Apes (p. 87) says, speaking of the chimpanzees he observed so painstakingly and minutely, " it is one of the chimpanzees' choicest pleasures to tease each other or third persons," and further on refers to the way they played' practical jokes on the fowls, offering theni bread, _ and then snatching it away, " at one meal this joke will be repeated fifty times."
But between this street-arab type of joke, and the kind of thing that makes Punch a joy, there is a wide gap ; yet can we doubt that the one is the outcome of the other, and that our perception of humour has been evolved from the more primitive type, FRANCES FM'.
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