Animal Spirits

Animals know when you are afraid of them. You may have your fear under perfect control, — no running, no screaming, no climbing fences, — but the animals find out about you. Large dogs step silently out of shrubbery toward you; and all kinds of bats, cows, wasps, and mice go out of their way to meet you.

I myself am not afraid of animals, but my sister Barbara is. It has been my duty all my life to act, now as her protectoress, now as decoy. I have chased mice with slippers and drymops. I have caught bumble-bees and June-bugs. I have herded cows. Whenever hunting-dogs appear on the horizon, I have to run away, trailing one wing. There is no telling when I may have a chance to be of service, for Barbara encounters danger everywhere, in the most unlikely circumstances. You might think, might you not, that the shopping district of a manufacturing town would be comparatively free from cows? Yet it was in this kind of place that Barbara had her most notable adventure.

We were rounding the corner by the fish-market one day, when the only herd of prize cattle ever marketed in our district struck the town. The beautiful animals were moving along in orderly procession. Street-cars were stopped for them, and small boys trotted at their heels.

‘If you stand here quietly by the corner,’ said I to Barbara, ‘they will never notice you.’

Barbara, white to the lips, obeyed. She would have stepped inside the door at the corner, except that it chanced to be the entrance to the bar-room of a saloon — this in the days before the Amendment. On came the cattle, glancing pleasantly from side to side. And the leader glanced at Barbara. Instantly a glint of malice kindled the eye of that cow. She braced her black-andwhite legs, drew a deep breath, and then, with that peculiar upward curve of the tail like the curve of the lion’s tail on a coat-of-arms, she charged. Not at me, of course. At Barbara. Barbara hesitated for one moment, and then vanished through the green door, into the saloon.

Barbara says that, until you have actually been in a saloon, you do not realize that the company there can be so reassuring. Bar-keeper and patrons alike rushed to her defense. But the cow, pausing wistfully outside the door, drew in her horns, gave me one disappointed confidential glance, and went off down the street.

Horned cattle, of course, are easily the most terrible of all animals; but dogs, being more numerous and lighter on their feet, are harder to escape. Fear of dogs, I understand, is not necessarily a fear of their bites. If you really fear dogs, you fear the whole dog. You are afraid of his jumps, his rough feet, his bark, his cold nose, his sniffing at your ankles, and his way of looking at you over the whites of his eyes. But Barbara says that the most terrifying thing about dogs is the way in which they sometimes walk toward a person whom they suspect of fear. They assume a gait like what used to be called the ‘high-school step’ — a noiseless walk in which each foot in turn is lifted very high, suspended loosely for a moment from the knee, and brought down perpendicularly on the toes. It is a walk at once stealthy and purposeful. All dogs can do it. The sweetest old loafer of a Saint Bernard in town will do this step when he sees Barbara coming, and the fox-terrier next door goes around that way for an hour after she has passed his house. When dogs come toward Barbara at this half-prancing, half-furtive pace, it seems to her that she simply cannot bear it. Far rather a sudden bite, direct, soon over.

The person who fears dogs is not particularly worried about their going mad. During a mad-dog scare, however, when all dogs are required by law to wear muzzles, the absence of a muzzle is something to be looked into. Barbara and I were on a cross-country walk with friends one day, just after such muzzlelegislation had gone into effect, when we heard a great baying and yelping behind us in the woods.

‘A dog after a rabbit,’ said we, placing Barbara in our midst and hurrying a little toward the ferry where we were to cross the river.

But at that moment, out rushed the dog, a vast black-and-tan hound, head down, eyes straight ahead. His muzzle had come off and was hanging over his shoulder like the side-car of a motor-cycle. He came straight to heel — Barbara’s heel.

Now, as everybody knows, mad dogs always run in a straight line. No bee could have made a straighter line than this dog described after Barbara. Mad dogs do not drink water. This dog drank none. Mad dogs pay no attention when you speak to them. We told this dog to go home, and he paid no attention. It did look like rabies.

‘Do you suppose that he would eat sandwiches?’ said I, opening the lunch.

He accepted chicken sandwiches to the number of five. We left him lunching, and took the ferry in haste. Halfway across the stream we looked back, and there he was, watching us mournfully from the shore. Even at that distance, we could see that he was watching Barbara.

I should be sorry to have Mr. John Burroughs catch me nature-faking. Therefore, on the subject of the mentality of animals I draw no inferences. But I confess that I did once try a little experiment. I dressed entirely in my sister’s everyday apparel, shoes and all. I adopted her unobtrusive manner, and her most accustomed hat, and I made a tour of all the best watchdogs in town. I went first past her worst persecutor, the fox-terrier next door. Instead of exchanging a friendly smile with him, as is my custom when alone, I went flitting quietly past, holding my breath, feeling as much like Barbara as I could. When I was well beyond his house, I looked back, and there sat Victor the terrier on his front doorstep, his head cocked indulgently at me, one ear standing straight up in the air, the other folded back on itself like a kid glove turned wrong side out; his bright, beady eyes perfectly round with inquiry. He did not bark or move. When he saw that I was lingering by the hedge, he came trotting down the drive, wagging his short little tail and asking if there was anything that he could do for me. If I had been Barbara, he would have left his doorstep before I had made three paces along his sidewalk, and his barks would have been exceeded only by his leaps and bounds.

I tried this same thing on Hiram the Airedale, on Kells the Irish setter, and on Miss Wide-Awake, a frightful Belgian police-dog who rushes at Barbara with pointed jaws. In spite of my manner, in spite of my costume, these dogs all received me with uniform courtesy and well-bred assurances of esteem.

Beyond this point I am not competent to investigate. I do not know what to make of it at all. But, like all other ignorant persons, I know what I think. I think that it is nothing you do or leave undone that tells animals whether or not you are afraid of them. They know.