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Inquiries into Human Faculty
a single body. When animals are not gregarious, they are to the herdsman
like a falling necklace of beads whose string is broken, or as a handful of
water escaping between the fingers.
The cat is the only non-gregarious domestic animal. It is retained by its
extraordinary adhesion to the comforts of the house in which it is reared.
An animal may be perfectly fitted to be a domestic animal, and be
peculiarly easy to tend in a general way, and yet the circumstances in
which the savages are living may make it too troublesome for them to
maintain a breed. The following account, taken from Mr. Scott Nind’s
paper on the Natives of King George’s Sound in Australia, and printed in
the first volume of the Journal of the Geographical Society, is particularly
to the point. He says
“In the chase the hunters are assisted by dogs, which they take when young and
domesticate;
but they take little pains to train them to any particular mode of hunting.
After finding a litter of young, the natives generally carry away one or two to rear; in this
case, it often occurs that the mother will trace and attack them; and, being large and very
strong, she is rather formidable. At some periods, food is so scanty as to compel the dog to
leave his master and provide for himself; but in a few days he generally returns.”
I have also evidence that this custom is common to the wild -natives of
other parts of Australia.
The gregariousness of all our domestic species is, I think, the primary
reason why some of them are extinct in a wild state. The wild herds would
intermingle with the tame ones, some would become absorbed, the others
would be killed by hunters, who used the tame cattle as a shelter to
approach the wild. Besides this, comfort-loving animals would be less
suited to fight the battle of life with the rest of the brute creation; and it is
therefore to be expected that those varieties which are best fitted for
domestication, would be the soonest extinguished in a wild state. For
instance, we could hardly fancy the camel to endure in a land where there
were large wild beasts.
Selection.—The
irreclaimably wild members of every flock would
escape and be utterly lost; the wilder of those that
