Well, then. It is admitted that you use animals
as appetizers to sweeten your fare.
1 Why, therefore
2
. . . Animal intelligence, on the contrary, allows no
room for useless and pointless arts ; and in the case
of essential ones, we do not make one man with constant
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study cling to one department of knowledge
and rivet him jealously to that; nor do we receive
our arts as alien products or pay to be taught them.
Our intelligence produces them on the spot unaided,
as its own congenital and legitimate skills. I have
heard that in Egypt
3 everyone is a physician ; and
in the case of beasts each one is not only his own
specialist in medicine, but also in the providing of
food, in warfare and hunting as well as in self-defence
and music, in so far as any kind of animal has a
natural gift for it. From whom have we swine
learned, when we are sick, to resort to rivers to catch
crabs? Who taught tortoises to devour marjoram
after eating the snake?
4 And who instructed Cretan
goats,
5 when they are pierced by an arrow, to look
for dittany, after eating which the arrowhead falls
out ? For if you speak the truth and say that Nature
is their teacher, you are elevating the intelligence
of animals to the most sovereign and wisest of first
principles. If you do not think that it should be
called either reason or intelligence, it is high time
for you to cast about for some fairer and even more
honourable term to describe it, since certainly the
faculty that it brings to bear in action is better and
more remarkable.
6 It is no uninstructed or untrained
faculty, but rather self-taught and self-sufficient -
and not for lack of strength. It is just because of
the health and completeness of its native virtue that
it is indifferent to the contributions to its intelligence
supplied by the lore of others. Such animals, at any
rate, as man for amusement or easy living induces to
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accept instruction and training have understanding
to grasp what they are taught even when it goes
contrary to their physical endowment, so superior
are their mental powers. I say nothing of puppies
that are trained as hunters, or colts schooled to keep
time in their gait,
7 or crows that are taught to talk,
or dogs, to jump through revolving hoops. In the
theatres horses and steers go through an exact routine
in which they lie down or dance or hold a precarious
pose or perform movements not at all easy even for
men
8; and they remember what they have been
taught, these exhibitions of docility which are not in
the least useful for anything else. If you are doubtful
that we can learn arts, then let me tell you that we
can even teach them. When partridges
9 are making
their escape, they accustom their fledglings to hide
by falling on their backs and holding a lump of earth
over themselves with their claws. You can observe
storks on the roof, the adults showing the art of
flying to the young as they make their trial flights.
10
Nightingales
11 set the example for their young to
sing ; while nestlings that are caught young and
brought up by human care are poorer singers, as
though they had left the care of their teacher too
early.
12 . . . and since I have entered into this new
body of mine, I marvel at those arguments by which
the sophists
13 brought me to consider all creatures
except man irrational and senseless.