Are Animals Ever "Bored?"

1893

Surely mankind has sufficient faults and failings of its own to answer for without being called upon to assume the responsibility of animal failings as well. An American author has discovered that domestic animals, such as cats or dogs, are not only subject to ennui, but also display their feelings under that infliction after very much the same fashion as their human friends, a fact which no one who has kept tame animals will be tempted to deny.

But from this fact our contemporary, The News, leaps to a perfectly unwarrantable conclusion and boldly asserts that ours is the fault, that mankind has inoculated the beast creation with its own particular disease and that it is civilization "which produces ennui, not only in man, women and children, but even in cats and dogs." "We may well blush," it continues, "when we think how man has demoralized the dog. We have taught the dog to be bored. We have corrupted him by our society." And again, "Ennui is one of man's many inventions, but he has taught the unprofitable vice to the domestic or at least to the household animals — pupils only too apt in evil."

Was ever so monstrous a charge leveled against our innocence! The next thing we shall be told is that we are the cause that dogs do bark and bite and that whatever may have been the morality of Dr. Watts his natural history is no better than his poetry. The News, if it is so assured of the demoralizing influence it has exercised upon dogs, is welcome to blush for itself. We prefer to maintain that dogs sorrow under boredom for the same simple reason that they delight to bark and bite, "for 'tis their nature to." — London Spectator.