Born Free: The Full Story [antikvár]

Preface Whether fact or fiction hes at the root of tales which credit the Assyrians with having trained lions as cheetahs, greyhounds or retrievers are today trained to hunt in co-operation with man, the Adamsons can certainly claim to be the first for several thousand years to have made an approach to achieving that result with a lioness - and that, not by any deliberate attempt to do so, but merely by allowing the animal to grow up in their company and never allowing her nature to be subjected to the strains of being confined in any way. The history of their lioness 'Elsa', reared from earliest infancy to three years old and finally returned to a wild life, forms a unique and illuminating study in animal psychology - a subject to which the last half-century has seen a wholly new approach. Pardy, no doubt, in revolt against the tendency of nineteenth-century writers to attribute to animals anthropomorphic qualities of intelligence, sentiment and emotion, the twentieth century has seen the development of a school of thought according to which the springs of animal behaviour are to be sought in terms of 'conditioned reflexes', 'release mechanisms', and the rest of a wholly new vocabulary which is regarded as the gateway to a clearer understanding of animal psychology. To another way of thinking which cannot reconcile that mechanical conception with the diverse character, inteUigence, and capabilities exhibited by different individuals of the same species, that gateway to understanding seems as far removed from truth as the anthropomorphism of a previous generation.