Lorenz - King Solomons ring: new light on animal ways

Split open the kegs of salted sprats,

Made nests inside mens Sunday hats,

And even spoiled the womens chats,

By drowning their speaking

With shrieking and squeaking

In fifty different sharps and flats.

Robert Browning

Why should I tell first of the darker side of life with animals? Because the degree of ones willingness to bear with this darker side is the measure of ones love for animals. I owe undying gratitude to my patient parents who only shook their heads or sighed resignedly when, as a schoolboy or young student, I once again brought home a new and probably yet more destructive pet. And what has my wife put up with, in the course of the years? For who else would dare ask his wife to allow a tame rat to run free around the house, gnawing neat little circular pieces out of the sheets to furnish her nests, which she built in even more awkward places than mens Sunday hats?

Or what other wife would tolerate a cockatoo who bit off all the buttons from the washing hung up to dry in the garden, or allow a greylag goose to spend the night in the bedroom and leave in the morning by the window? (Greylag geese cannot be house-trained.) And what would she say when she found out that the nice little blue spots with which song birds, after a repast of elderberries, decorate all the furniture and curtains, just will not come out in the wash? What would she say, if I could go on asking for twenty pages!

Is all this absolutely necessary? Yes, quite definitely yes! Of course one can keep animals in cages fit for the drawing room, but one can only get to know the higher and mentally active animals by letting them move about freely. How sad and mentally stunted is a caged monkey or parrot, and how incredibly alert, amusing and interesting is the same animal in complete freedom. Though one must be prepared for the damage and annoyance which is the price one has to pay for such house-mates, one obtains a mentally healthy subject for ones observations and experiments. This is the reason why the keeping of higher animals in a state of unrestricted freedom has always been my speciality.

In Altenberg the wire of the cage always played a paradoxical role: it had to prevent the animals entering the house or front garden. They were also strictly forbidden to go within the wire netting that fenced in our flower beds; but forbidden things have a magnetic attraction for intelligent animals, as for little children. Besides, the delightfully affectionate greylag geese long for human society. So it was always happening that, before we had noticed it, twenty or thirty geese were grazing on the flower beds, or, worse still, with loud honking cries of greeting, had invaded the closed-in veranda. Now it is uncommonly difficult to repel a bird which can fly, and has no fear of man. The loudest shouts, the wildest waving of arms have no effect whatever. Our only really effective scarecrow was an enormous scarlet garden umbrella. Like a knight with lance at rest, my wife would tuck the folded umbrella under her arm and spring at the geese who were again grazing on her freshly planted beds; she would let out a frantic war-cry and unfold the umbrella with a sudden jerk; that was too much even for our geese who, with a thundering of wings, took to the air.

Unfortunately, my father largely undid all my wifes efforts in goose education. The old gentleman was very fond of the geese and he particularly liked the ganders for their courageous chivalry; so nothing could prevent him from inviting them, each day, to tea in his study adjoining the glass veranda. As, at this time, his sight was already failing, he only noticed the material result of such a visit when he trod right into it. One day, as I went into the garden, towards the evening, I found, to my astonishment, that nearly all the grey geese were missing. Fearing the worst, I ran to my fathers study and what did I see? On the beautiful Persian carpet stood twenty-four geese, crowded round the old gentleman who was drinking tea at his desk, quietly reading the newspaper and holding out to the geese one piece of bread after another. The birds were somewhat nervous in their unaccustomed surroundings and this, unfortunately, had an adverse effect on their intestinal movements, for, like all animals that have to digest much grass, the goose has a caecum or blind appendage of the large intestine in which vegetable fibre is made assimilable for the body by the action of cellulose-splitting bacteria. As a rule, to about six or seven normal evacuations of the intestine there occurs one of the caecum and this has a peculiar pungent smell and a very bright dark green colour. If a goose is nervous, one caecum evacuation follows after another. Since this goose tea-party more than eleven years have elapsed; the dark green stains on the carpet have meanwhile become pale yellow.

So the animals lived in complete freedom and yet in great familiarity with our house. They always strove towards us instead of away from us. In other households, people might call: The bird has escaped from its cage, quick, shut the window! But, with us, the cry was: For goodness sake, shut the window, the cockatoo (raven, monkey, etc.) is trying to get in! The most paradoxical use of the inverse cage principle was invented by my wife when our eldest son was very small. At that time, we kept several large and potentially dangerous animalssome ravens, two greater yellow crested cockatoos, two Mongoz Lemurs, and two capuchin monkeys, none of which could safely be left alone with the child. So my wife improvised, in the garden, a large cage and inside it she put the pram.

In the higher animals the ability and inclination to do damage is, unfortunately, in direct proportion to the degree of their intelligence. For this reason, it is impossible to leave certain animals, particularly monkeys, permanently loose and without supervision. With lemurs, however, this is possible, since they lack that searching curiosity which all true monkeys display in respect of household implements. True monkeys, on the other hand, even the genealogically lower-standing new world monkeys (Platyrrhinae), have an insatiable curiosity for every object that is new to them and they proceed to experiment with it. Interesting though that may be from the standpoint of the animal psychologist, for the household it soon becomes a financially unbearable state of affairs. I can illustrate this with an example.

As a young student, I kept, in my parents flat in Vienna, a magnificent specimen of a female capuchin monkey named Gloria. She occupied a large, roomy cage in my study. When I was at home and able to look after her, she was allowed to run freely about the room. When I went out, I shut her in the cage, where she became exceedingly bored and exerted all her talents to escape as quickly as possible. One evening, when I returned home after a longer absence and turned the knob of the light switch, all remained dark as before. But Glorias giggle, issuing not from the cage but from the curtain rod, left no doubt as to the cause and origin of the light defect. When I returned with a lighted candle, I encountered the following scene: Gloria had removed the heavy bronze bedside lamp from its stand, dragged it straight across the room (unhappily without pulling the plug out of the wall), heaved it up on to the highest of my aquaria, and, as with a battering ram, bashed in the glass lid so that the lamp sank in the water. Hence the short circuit! Next, or perhaps earlier, Gloria had unlocked my bookcasean amazing achievement considering the minute size of the keyremoved volumes 2 and 4 of Strumpels textbook of medicine and carried them to the aquarium stand where she tore them to shreds and stuffed them into the tank. On the floor lay the empty book covers, but not one piece of paper. In the tank sat sad sea-anemones, their tentacles full of paper.