My Literary Zoo

Bayard Taylor loved and appreciated animals, and in an article in the Atlantic Monthly of February, 1877, on Studies of Animal Nature, he says: “If Darwin’s theory should be true, it will not degrade man; it will simply raise the whole animal world into dignity, leaving man as far in advance as he is at present.”

He adds: “I have always had a great respect for animals, and have endeavoured to treat them with the consideration which I think they deserve. They have quick perceptions, and know when to be confiding or reticent. I have learned no better way to gain their confidence than to ask myself, If I were such or such an animal, how should I wish to be treated by man? and to act upon that suggestion. Since the key to the separate languages has been lost on both sides, the higher intelligence must condescend to open some means of communication with the lower.

“The zoölogists unfortunately rarely trouble themselves to do this; they are more interested in the skull of an elephant, the thigh-bone of a bird, or the dorsal fin of a fish, than in the intelligence or rudimentary moral sense of the creature. But the former field is open to all laymen, and nothing but a stubborn traditional contempt for our slaves or our hunted enemies in the animal world has held us back from a truer knowledge of them.

“In the first place, animals have much more capacity to understand human speech than is generally supposed. Some years ago, seeing the hippopotamus in Barnum’s Museum looking very stolid and dejected, I spoke to him in English, but he did not even move his eyes. Then I went to the opposite corner of the cage and said in Arabic: ‘I know you; come here to me.’ He instantly turned his head toward me. I repeated the words, and thereupon he came to the corner where I was standing, pressed his huge, ungainly head against the bars of the cage, and looked in my face with a touching delight while I stroked his muzzle. I have two or three times found a lion who recognised the same language, and the expression of his eyes for an instant seemed positively human.”

He also tells his experience with a tame lioness in Africa. “In a short time we were very good friends. She knew me, and always seemed glad to see me, though I sometimes teased her a little by getting astride of her back, or sitting upon her when she was lying down. When she was in a playful mood she would come to meet me as far as the rope would let her, get her forepaws around my leg and then take it in her mouth, as if she were going to eat me up. I was a little alarmed when she did this for the first time; but I soon saw that she was merely in play, and had no thought of hurting me, so I took her by the ears and slapped her sides, until at last she lay down and licked my hand. Her tongue was as coarse as a nutmeg grater, and my hand felt as if the skin was being rasped off.

“There was also a leopard in the garden with which I used to play a great deal, but which I never loved so well as the lioness. He was smaller and more active, and soon learned to jump upon my shoulders when I stooped down, or to climb up the tree to which he was tied, whenever I commanded him. But he was not so affectionate as the lioness, and sometimes forgot to draw in his claws when he played, so that he not only tore my clothing, but scratched my hands. I still have the marks of one of his teeth on the back of my right hand.