I
Sagacity was the prevalent term in nineteenth-century Britain for the intelligence of animals. On this subject there is an orthodoxy of opinion, which this chapter sets out to nuance. Briefly stated, the orthodox opinion is that sagacity helped to order creation hierarchically, with human beings on top. Harriet Ritvo (1987) suggests that sagacity distinguished animal intelligence from human intelligence, noting that should it be “attributed to human beings it often had an ironic or less than flattering connotation” (pp. 37–38). For Ritvo, the “concept of sagacity actually reinforced human dominion. It could be defined so that the animals that exemplified obedient subordination had the largest measure.” Under this maxim, domesticated animals, especially dogs, were the most sagacious. Rod Preece (2005) asserts that sagacity has been used for animals where reason would be employed “if the discourse were about humans,” denying animals access to “the favoured category of reason” (p. 56). Diana Donald (2007) notes that animal sagacity “was measured by the docility of tame or tameable species; or, failing that, by the impulses of familial tenderness that were thought to offer a moral example to humanity” (p. 106). Animal intelligence therefore served to reflect an anthropocentric view. This intelligence, however, differed in kind, rather than by degree from human intelligence, a fact ascribed to the era’s distinction between instinct and reason (p. 107). Though Donald notes the increasing fuzziness of this distinction, the superiority of human intellect was still retained (pp. 109–110).
II
Sagacity has etymological roots in the Proto-Indo-European base *sag-, meaning “to track down, trace, seek,” and, indeed, in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century England the term generally referred to a keen sense of smell (see Sagacity n.d.). Its Latin equivalent, sagacitas, stands for “quickness of perception,” and the English usage clearly has ties to the French sagacité, which resembles “shrewdness.” Sagacity is therefore ambiguously defined. Samuel Johnson (1755–1756) represented this confusion in his Dictionary, defining the term as relating to “quickness of scent,” to “acuteness of discovery” and to being “quick of thought”; it was synonymous with “penetration.” Johnson took special care to show where sagacity referred to thought (in humans) and where to scent (in animals).1 Yet there was a blurring of the lines. The “sagacious” actions of scenting animals were colloquially celebrated as much for intellectual display as for olfactory prowess.
To fully grasp what was meant by sagacity in animals, we must first understand its bearing on human intellect. Sagacity was political more often than zoological. “Political sagacity” was commonly ascribed to those public figures who were bestowed with a natural gift in debate or in diplomacy. It served sometimes to satirize but more frequently to honor the intellectual cunning of “great men.”2 In one notable and useful passage, William Minto (1881) tried to weigh the nous of Edmund Burke, whose political sagacity he deemed not “of the first rank” (p. 440). Yet he noted that it is “of course, unprofitable to argue regarding a term so vague” (p. 440). Even among those dealing in human intelligence, sagacity was a slippery term. But it was without doubt a natural intellectual quality to be valued.
With this usage in the cultural background, observers and gatherers of anecdotal evidence on animal sagacity saw no clear distinction between scenting and thinking, since finding a scent and following it betrayed discriminatory powers of mind. An end was apprehended through an apparent process of deduction: Scent equals the previous presence of another animal; it went that way; if I want (to eat, kill, or mate with) it I must follow the scent. Sagacity therefore referred to processes of deduction, regardless of the capacity to follow scent. The elimination of the distinction between scenting and thinking made ascriptions of human sagacity equivalent to ascriptions of animal sagacity. As one purveyor of anecdotes remarked in 1824, animals could “outstep that faculty which forms part of their nature” and “display an extraordinary sagacity which … seems to approach reason” (Anonymous 1824:5–10). This elision, from scenting to thinking, broadened the category of sagacious animals from its most obvious association with dogs to include potentially any “intelligent” animal.
Anecdotal stories for children and adults alike made the most of sagacity’s greater import. In Stories of Animal Sagacity, the author undertook to prove to his young readers that animals were capable “of exercising a kind of reason, which comes into play under circumstances to which they are not naturally exposed” (Kingston 1874:13). This was sagacity, which was largely reserved for “those animals more peculiarly fitted to be the companions of man,” but probably existed “in a certain degree among wild animals” (p. 13). For many writers, the concept of sagacity allowed them to endow animals with human-like reason without going so far as saying so explicitly. As early as 1742, Dennis de Coetlogon (pp. 1–2) proclaimed that “all learning,” without “natural sagacity” was “in effect nothing.” In keeping with orthodox ideas, the sagacity of animals provided examples from which men might learn: “It is this great Sagacity which teaches Men and Beasts, to take care of themselves; it is thus that Men were instructed and learn’d from the Sagacity of Animals, many useful particulars for the cure of human Maladies.”
Even among those more sceptical that sagacity could be defined as reason, this capacity was nevertheless “superior to mere instinct as ordinarily displayed” (Pardon 1857:180). George Frederick Pardon took great lengths to demonstrate how apparent animal cognition was not the same as human reason and how in most cases animal intelligence could be explained by instinct. Man, after all, was, “from his superior intellectual organization,” “the natural protector and ruler over brutes” (p. 207). Nevertheless, Pardon had to err on the side of caution, since the “intelligence of animals seems sometimes to lead to very remarkable results, and occasionally to the formation of plans that the reason of man would probably have failed to adopt under circumstances of a similar nature” (p. 179). Likewise, Priscilla Wake-field (1811), in a book whose title seemed to conflate sagacity with instinct, sounded a note to the contrary with regard to the most intelligent of animals. “Quadrupeds, after man, are the most intelligent of the lower world,” she said, “and the most capable of deviating from the instinctive impulse.” This was “evinced by innumerable well-attested instances of sagacity, that seem to be the result of reflection and experience, in the horse, the dog, and the half-reasoning elephant” (pp. 277–278).
The notion of contiguity in nature was taken to extreme lengths by J. E. Taylor (1884) who wrote a treatise on the Sagacity & Morality of Plants. Taylor (pp. 4–5) thought that the “intelligent acts” of animals proceeded from “cerebration, exactly in the same way as the intelligent and rational actions of men.” If sagacity had previously been thought to denote in animals a “different kind of mentality” to that in humans, then this usage was “old-fashioned” and would “soon become extinct.” In a similar vein, John Selby Watson (1867) wrote a pseudo-scientific treatise with the singular object of showing that “inferior animals … have a portion of that reason which is possessed by man” (p. 1). The refusal to admit this was borne “from fear of admitting them to be on a level with ourselves” (p. 2). For this classically educated clergyman such fears were unwarranted. He made this clear in his precise definition of reason, which included not the “higher” qualities of “abstraction and generalization,” but rather the “power of understanding … what is presented to the observation, and of forming conclusions from experience, so as to conceive of consequences, and to expect that what has happened under certain circumstances at one time will happen under like circumstances at another” (pp. 1–2). Watson clearly thought sagacity to be synonymous with reason, so defined. Most explicitly, anecdotes of the sagacity of dogs proved them “to have some share of the reason which pre-eminently distinguishes man” (p. 60, see also pp. 459–460).
Charles Darwin did not radically alter the debates about the status of animals (Boddice 2009:279–284, 317–324; Preece 2003). Age-old disagreements about their rationality continued as before, but with an altered vocabulary and, admittedly, in much greater volume. For all those, like Watson, and later George Romanes, who argued for the logical connectedness of human and animal minds, there were other prominent voices who dissented. William James (1878) argued that animal sagacity involved mental processes that “may as a rule be perfectly accounted for by mere contiguous association, based on experience,” unlike higher human reasoning, which was unempirical and based on applied theories and prior knowledge in connection (pp. 237–249, 260). Similarly, C. Lloyd Morgan (1890–1891), lamenting tendencies to anthropomorphize, plainly stated that “in man alone, and in no dumb animal, is the rational faculty”: “the pity of it is that we cannot think of [animals] in any other terms than those of human consciousness. The only world of constructs that we know is the world constructed by man” (pp. vi, 335).
Darwin himself struggled to map the theory of evolution onto the mind and encouraged his young disciple Romanes to push the field. Prominent scientists grappled unsatisfactorily with the concept of intelligence—not to mention sagacity—in man as well as in animals. T. H. Huxley, for example, was not above name calling in terms running contrary to the principles of Darwinian contiguity in human and animal intelligence. He even wondered about the mental capacities of Darwin himself: “Exposition was not Darwin’s forte—and his English is sometimes wonderful. But there is a marvellous dumb sagacity about him—like that of a sort of miraculous dog—and he gets to the truth by ways as dark as those of the Heathen Chinee” (quoted in Cock and Forsdyke 2008:129). Sagacity was clearly not quite human reason (or at least not quite civilized enough) for Huxley, but it did nevertheless facilitate arriving at the right answers to rational questions! Darwin himself wrote Romanes in 1881, with regard to the manuscript of Darwin’s work on worms (see Darwin and Seward 1903). “In the middle,” he said, “you will find a few sentences with a sort of definition of, or rather discussion on, intelligence. I am altogether dissatisfied with it.” He could not pin down what he meant by “intelligent,” but knew that “it will hardly do to assume that every fool knows what ‘intelligent’ means.” He expressed pity for Romanes, whose work dealt precisely with this issue (pp. 213–214).
Romanes (1882:2–17) himself, in his most famous work, Animal Intelligence, used the term sagacity, but left its ambiguity intact. Although he went to some lengths to establish the distinctions between reflex action, instinct, and reason, he did not mention sagacity in his introduction. This makes his subsequent use of the term irritatingly unclear. Thus we are left to wonder at the meaning of “an instance of sagacity—indeed, amounting to reason—in a dog” (p. 466), as well as the displays of “remarkable sagacity” in elephants, which were “probably fabulous” (p. 386). He detailed “unusually high” displays “of sagacity” in elephants, juxtaposing the term with references to “higher mental faculties” and “docile intelligence” (pp. 396–397). Thus he elevated the concept of sagacity, associating it directly with reason, as opposed to some form of naturally occurring intelligence between instinct and reason. Canine intelligence, in particular those manifestations of it in a dog’s powers of communication, is given by Romanes as “sagacity.” Indeed, Romanes’s usage would make canine sagacity akin to “a high degree of intelligence” (p. 447). After dealing with dog emotions and capacities to communicate, Romanes pursued “cases showing the higher and more exceptional developments of canine sagacity,” deploying anecdotes to make his case (pp. 447–470).
As Romanes’s work on animal and human psychology developed, his usage of the word sagacity and his dependence on anecdotal evidence declined. The word does not appear in the more complex if less widely read sequels to Animal Intelligence, entitled respectively Mental Evolution in Animals (1883) and Mental Evolution in Man (1888). Romanes worked tirelessly to establish that animal and human psychology differed only by degree and not in kind. As he strove for analytical precision, sagacity fell away as a useful concept. Nevertheless, Romanes never ceased to admit that his science was necessarily anthropomorphic: “We must always remember that we can never know the mental states of any mental beings other than ourselves as objects; we can only know them as ejects, or as ideal projections of our own mental states,” he stated, continuing that “it is from this broad fact of psychology that the difficulty arises in applying our criterion of mind to particular cases—especially among the lower animals” (1883:22). Note that “higher” and “lower” are established a priori, on the basis of similarity to human physiology.
Analogies of mind depended on inference rather than on fact. Judging animal minds was by Romanes’s own definition a reflexive activity without any objective basis. This inherent anthropomorphism in studies of animal minds was ultimately rejected by Lloyd Morgan, who ushered psychology toward behaviorism. Yet anthropomorphism essentially defined sagacity’s meaning, for it placed animal cognition into human categories of understanding. Discussions of the intelligence of animals were rooted in a desire to explain, justify, or apologize for the intelligence of humans, whether distinct or not.
The fine distinctions employed to explain the origins or ends of thinking in animals are crucially important to the understanding of sagacity and also for grasping the richness of anthropomorphism in nineteenth-century discourse. The aforementioned orthodoxy can thus be modified: Sagacity could earmark an intelligence as lower than, and different in kind to, that of humans, or it could distinguish the human and the animal mind by degree only, or it could establish human-animal contiguity through a form of “natural” ingenuity (distinct from instinct), or it could even mean “reason.” Applied to humans it was more likely to be honorific than derogatory and referred in both humans and animals to a shrewdness in problem solving. Sagacity’s meaning, ultimately, was dependent on context. Turning now to the rat, fox, and dog, it will emerge how the concept of sagacity could be played out in varying contexts.
In accordance with Jonathan Burt’s (2006) claim that rats hold a “central, sometimes disturbing, role in human culture,” serving as dark “mirrors” of human beings (pp. 7, 13), nineteenth-century stories of rat sagacity typically style the rat as either thief or villain. The Quarterly Review (“Rats” 1857) pronounced that “the sagacity of the rat in the pursuit of food is so great, that we almost wonder at the small amount of its cerebral development. Indeed he is so cunning, and works occasionally with such human ingenuity, that accounts which are perfectly correct are sometimes received as mere fables” (p. 130). If rats stole with human ingenuity then they were guilty of the crime of theft.
Two story forms are oft repeated by different writers, involving the stealing of eggs and the consumption of oil or other liquids in bottles. The method of stealing eggs involved the placing of an egg on the belly of one rat lying on its back, which then allowed other rats to pull it along by its tail. The safety of the egg was thereby ensured, and the tellers of anecdotes wondered with some awe at the collaboration, communication, and intelligent problem solving of the animals involved. Similar accounts note the effective teamwork of rats moving an egg up or down stairs, handing the precious food to each other to assure its safe passage. Rats consumed cooking oil (or sometimes treacle or jam) by removing corks from bottles and dipping in their tails. They could then easily lick their tails clean and repeat until the oil was consumed (“Sagacity of Rats” 1825; “Rats” 1857:130; Anonymous 1862:262–263; Jennings 1885; Morris 1885; D. 1896:120–124; Lee 1852:264; Rodwell 1858:93–95; Romanes 1875:515, 1882:361–363; Pardon 1857:180; Kingston 1874:224; Sax 1992:101–109; Watson 1867:289–297).
The reaction to these acts of sagacity was usually to the detriment of the rat. James Rodwell (1858), perhaps the chief expert on (destroying) rats in the nineteenth century, thought that “if rats could by any means be made to live on the surface of the earth instead of in holes and corners… there would not be a man, woman, or child but would have a dog, stick, or gun to effect their destruction, wherever they met with them” (p. 2). The rat’s ability to evade human traps and death at human hands made it a threat. Its intelligence added to its reputation of malignancy. The Quarterly Review (“Rats” 1857) referenced its “wonderful presence of mind” when in danger, remarking on its “reasoning power”: “The sagacity of the rat in eluding danger is not less than his craftiness in dealing with it when it comes” (p. 134). “Man” was the rat’s “most relentless and destructive enemy,” due to “the repulsive idea which attaches to this animal under every form” (p. 137). The reputed anecdotist Mrs. Lee (1852) filled her book with stories of killing rats. Rat sagacity lacked morality, leading to “mischief”: the eating of human food, the undermining of houses, the burrowing through dams, the destruction of drains and the committal of “incalculable havoc, in every place and every thing” (p. 262). A ferocious, immoral rapacity defined their inferiority to humans. They partook “of the character of the wolf, and in their cunning, of that of the fox” (Kingston 1874:223; see also Watson 1867:289, 299; Romanes 1882:361). The rat combined the qualities of what were colloquially considered to be the most vicious, noxious, and intelligent of animals. Its emotions did not appear “to be of an entirely selfish character,” rats having been “frequently known to assist one another in defending themselves from dangerous enemies” (Romanes 1882:360). This combination of qualities, together with the absence of conscience, was a nightmarish proposition to be extinguished at all costs. Rat sagacity threatened human dominion.
Foxes are proverbially clever, cunning, and sly: qualities synonymous with sagacity. The fox’s proverbial cleverness has been endlessly documented (e.g., see chapter 3, Wallen 2006). The nineteenth century’s unanimous acclaim for the superior intelligence of the fox was coupled with an overwhelming desire to kill it. Stories of the sagacity of foxes generally took two forms. Either the fox demonstrated its cunning as a rogue, through the stealing of food from humans (this is generally given as a reason for killing it), or the fox showed its sagacity in escaping from those trying to kill it. A significant ritual element of foxhunting was the concept of fair play, and nothing appealed more to the minds of nineteenth-century sportsmen than the prospect of a worthy opponent (Boddice 2009:290–291, 298–299). Unlike thoroughbred hounds, designed by man to pursue, the fox’s mind was a product of nature (Marvin 2001). Its cunning made it fair game, but it also murkily reflected human reasoning. The depraved fox served as an analogy of humanity’s inner beast.
W. H. G. Kingston (1874) demonstrated the lessons for humanity to be drawn from animal intelligence in his Stories of Animal Sagacity. Of the fox he said that “no other animals so carefully educate their young in the way they should go…. He is a good husband, an excellent father, capable of friendship, and a very intelligent member of society; but all the while … an incorrigible rogue and thief.” The moral was immediately forthcoming: “Do not pride yourself on being perfect because you possess some good qualities. Consider the many bad ones which counteract them, and strive to overcome those” (pp. 194–207, especially 196–197). All very well for humans, but the fox’s moral character—encapsulated in its sagacity—was beyond redemption. The example bolstered the fox’s status as malignant, destined to be routed out and killed. Mrs. Lee (1852) illustrated this tendency well. “The fox is generally a suspicious animal,” she said. Regardless of the degree to which the animal was habituated to the company of man, “he seems to think he is going to be deceived and ill-treated: perhaps he judges of others by himself.” Accordingly, Mrs. Lee’s anecdotes tend to end with the killing of foxes, despite the fact that they are “much too coy and clever to be easily entrapped” (pp. 174–176). Watson (1867) too noted the fox’s “amiableness,” despite “his craftiness,” and he provided numerous examples of the fox’s sagacity in escaping its fate at human hands (pp. 259–263).
Wonderment at fox intelligence—its stark refusal readily to submit to its “fate” without putting man “to all his shifts” (“Morality” 1870, quoting Earl Winchilsea)—was heightened by foxes’ independence of human influence. Romanes, recognizing this, dedicated a separate chapter of Animal Intelligence to foxes, wolves, jackals, etc., on the basis that “from never having been submitted to the influences of domestication, their mental qualities present a sufficient number of differences from those of the dog” (1882:426). The qualities of these animals were determined precisely by the lack of mankind’s civilizing influence. To arrive at an understanding of their character, one must “subtract from the domestic dog all the emotions arising from his prolonged companionship with man, and at the same time intensify the emotions of self-reliance, rapacity, &c.” (p. 426). Relying on well-rehearsed anecdotes, Romanes concluded that the sagacity of the fox (comparably with the rat) was “of a very remarkable order,” nothing short of reason (pp. 426–429). But the assumption of this sagacious character’s “rapacity” provided justification for the human proclivity for killing foxes.
Anecdotal accounts of canine sagacity are the most difficult neatly to summarize because of their sheer volume. F. O. Morris’s Records of Animal Sagacity and Character (1861), for example, devotes 109 pages to the first chapter, on the sagacity of dogs, out of a total of 302 pages including 27 additional chapters. The dog, clearly, was considered the foremost of sagacious animals. Watson (1867) set out to prove that dogs “have some share of the reason which pre-eminently distinguishes man” and used sagacity interchangeably with “reason” and “intelligence” (p. 60). Kingston (1874) noted the “staunch fidelity … courage … devotion and generosity” exhibited by the dog, marvelling at “his wonderful powers of mind,” and ranking it “the most sagacious of all animals” (p. 52). The dog’s closeness to its human “owner” defined its superior intelligence. More than any other animal, the dog demonstrated “delight in the companionship of man” (D. 1896:60). In a stronger sense, it was the human’s intelligent crafting of the dog’s character that defined dog intelligence as an analogue of that of humans.
Canine sagacity was widely, and anthropomorphically, understood in these terms. Priscilla Wakefield (1811), for example, noted that dogs “seem highly favoured” with regard to intelligence, possessing “more sense than most of their fellow-brutes” (p. 90). She reasoned that this was because they lived “on such a very familiar footing with man” and that they “owe part of their superiority to that circumstance.” Charles Hamilton Smith (1839) thought that a dog’s sagacity, among other qualities, made it impossible for humans to withhold their “admiration and affection” (p. 78). All the more so since dog intelligence directly aided the “higher purposes” for which man was “created.” “Subordinate creatures,” he thought, were “so constituted as to be important elements of co-operation,” and “were called into existence to further [human] design, and to facilitate his intellectual development” (p. 103). In other words, if dogs were considered sagacious, then they were so for man; they were designed to be understood in human terms. If Canis familiaris could be traced to several distinct species of wild dogs, then variations were caused by man for his own ends.
This point was taken to its logical conclusion as evolutionary theory advanced. Romanes (1882) thought that dog intelligence was “special,” having been “from time out of record … domesticated on account of the high level of its natural intelligence.” What began with “natural” sagacity was “greatly changed” by “persistent contact with man, coupled with training and breeding.” This contact caused “general modification in the way of dependent companionship and docility” (i.e., the capacity to learn or be educated) as well as “a number of special modifications, peculiar to certain breeds, which all have obvious reference to the requirements of man” (p. 437). The implications of human intervention in the selection and breeding of dogs were realized by Romanes with all the grand eloquence he could muster in support of Darwin’s theory of natural selection: “The whole character of the dog may therefore be said to have been moulded by human agency with reference to human requirements.” Elaborating, he observed that “for thousands of years man has here been virtually, though unconsciously, performing … a gigantic experiment upon the potency of individual experience accumulated by heredity; and now there stands before us this most wonderful monument of his labours—the culmination of his experiment in the transformed psychology of the dog” (pp. 437–438). If sagacity in the case of the dog can be demonstrated to mean exactly what Ritvo stated it meant—obedient subordination—then this in large part was because humans had themselves created it. Dog sagacity was not threatening, malignant, or immoral—as in the case of the rat and the fox—because it was understood to be a human form of intelligence, instilled and controlled by human hands.
IV
John Selby Watson (1867) summarized speculative thought on the reasoning capacity of animals, incorporating the concept of sagacity: “We have now sought for indications of reason and understanding through the inferior animal creation from the elephant to the ant and the beetle,” he said, finding “signs of intelligence in various creatures … quite distinguishable from the mere promptings of instinct.” Watson pointed out “how dogs distinguish themselves by their general sagacity and perception of things,” and he paid attention “to the exhibitions of sagacity and artfulness in monkeys and rats, cats and foxes” (p. 459). “With all these particulars before us,” Watson (p. 460) said, “may we not say of many of the animals of the present day, as Milton made the angel say of those in Paradise,
They also know
And reason not contemptibly?”
The quality of sagacity was widely distributed, not particularly favoring animals that associated closely with humans over those deemed wild and untameable. Yet the meaning of sagacity varied according to the context of human-animal relations. The mind of a dog represented the mind of man, since its intellect had been developed by and for man; the minds of rats and foxes could only be understood through human standards and categories of intelligence. Sagacity could be either allotted in greatest measure to those animals most obedient to man, since man had a great share in its being there at all, and therefore to animals that were analogously most like man by contrivance, or allotted in greatest measure to those animals most fiercely independent of man, and, in fact, in direct competition with man’s means of survival, and therefore to animals that were analogously most like man by nature. In either case, sagacity was defined anthropomorphically. The character of an animal was determined by the way in which its sagacity was presumed to have been acquired. An animal whose intelligence was independent of man often commanded respect but nevertheless was subject to elimination. Conversely, those intelligent animals that assisted man and depended on him tended to be honored and protected. Leonard Larkin saw this as early as 1879. Responding to a lecture by Romanes given in 1879 (see Romanes 1877–1879), Larkin pointed out that animal intelligence was “only our own reflected by them…. They have nothing of it themselves and would never have it unless they were brought into connection with man” (p. 15).
Animal sagacity was significant principally in its human implications. In partial accord with the assertions of Ritvo and Preece, I have argued that sagacity in some animals denoted animal subordination, even faithful obedience. In dogs, especially, sagacity was taken to be a human accomplishment. In other cases, sagacity in animals could not be ascribed to human intervention, and, where animals competed directly with humans, this intelligence was maligned, however remarkable. Precisely, therefore, when these animals were most intelligent, they were the least subordinate and the least obedient. In an anthropocentric world such a sagacious animal sealed its own fate.
Notes
This chapter presents a development of the argument, using largely new
material, of Boddice 2009:284–304.
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