Books: Mutual Aid
P >>
P. Kropotkin >> Mutual Aid
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23
"For several hundred yards from the shore the air is filled with
gulls and terns, as with snow-flakes on a winter day. Thousands
of plovers and sand-coursers run over the beach, searching their.
food, whistling, and simply enjoying life. Further on, on almost
each wave, a duck is rocking, while higher up you notice the
flocks of the Casarki ducks. Exuberant life swarms
everywhere."(1)
And here are the robbers--the strongest, the most cunning
ones, those "ideally organized for robbery." And you hear their
hungry, angry, dismal cries as for hours in succession they watch
the opportunity of snatching from this mass of living beings one
single unprotected individual. But as soon as they approach,
their presence is signalled by dozens of voluntary sentries, and
hundreds of gulls and terns set to chase the robber. Maddened by
hunger, the robber soon abandons his usual precautions: he
suddenly dashes into the living mass; but, attacked from all
sides, he again is compelled to retreat. From sheer despair he
falls upon the wild ducks; but the intelligent, social birds
rapidly gather in a flock and fly away if the robber is an erne;
they plunge into the lake if it is a falcon; or they raise a
cloud of water-dust and bewilder the assailant if it is a
kite.(2) And while life continues to swarm on the lake, the
robber flies away with cries of anger, and looks out for carrion,
or for a young bird or a field-mouse not yet used to obey in time
the warnings of its comrades. In the face of an exuberant life,
the ideally-armed robber must be satisfied with the off-fall of
that life.
Further north, in the Arctic archipelagoes,
"you may sail along the coast for many miles and see all the
ledges, all the cliffs and corners of the mountain-sides, up to a
height of from two to five hundred feet, literally covered with
sea-birds, whose white breasts show against the dark rocks as if
the rocks were closely sprinkled with chalk specks. The air, near
and far, is, so to say, full with fowls."(3)
Each of such "bird-mountains" is a living illustration of mutual
aid, as well as of the infinite variety of characters, individual
and specific, resulting from social life. The oyster-catcher is
renowned for its readiness to attack the birds of prey. The barge
is known for its watchfulness, and it easily becomes the leader
of more placid birds. The turnstone, when surrounded by comrades
belonging to more energetic species, is a rather timorous bird;
but it undertakes to keep watch for the security of the
commonwealth when surrounded by smaller birds. Here you have the
dominative swans; there, the extremely sociable kittiwake-gulls,
among whom quarrels are rare and short; the prepossessing polar
guillemots, which continually caress each other; the egoist
she-goose, who has repudiated the orphans of a killed comrade;
and, by her side, another female who adopts any one's orphans,
and now paddles surrounded by fifty or sixty youngsters, whom she
conducts and cares for as if they all were her own breed. Side by
side with the penguins, which steal one another's eggs, you have
the dotterels, whose family relations are so "charming and
touching" that even passionate hunters recoil from shooting a
female surrounded by her young ones; or the eider-ducks, among
which (like the velvet-ducks, or the coroyas of the Savannahs)
several females hatch together in the same, nest. or the lums,
which sit in turn upon a common covey. Nature is variety itself,
offering all possible varieties of characters, from the basest to
the highest: and that is why she cannot be depicted by any
sweeping assertion. Still less can she be judged from the
moralist's point of view, because the views of the moralist are
themselves a result--mostly unconscious--of the observation
of Nature.
Coming together at nesting-time is so common with most birds
that more examples are scarcely needed. Our trees are crowned
with groups of crows' nests; our hedges are full of nests of
smaller birds; our farmhouses give shelter to colonies of
swallows; our old towers are the refuge of hundreds of nocturnal
birds; and pages might be filled with the most charming
descriptions of the peace and harmony which prevail in almost all
these nesting associations. As to the protection derived by the
weakest birds from their unions, it is evident. That excellent
observer, Dr. Coues, saw, for instance, the little cliff-swallows
nesting in the immediate neighbourhood of the prairie falcon
(Falco polyargus). The falcon had its nest on the top of one of
the minarets of clay which are so common in the canons of
Colorado, while a colony of swallows nested just beneath. The
little peaceful birds had no fear of their rapacious neighbour;
they never let it approach to their colony. They immediately
surrounded it and chased it, so that it had to make off at
once.(4)
Life in societies does not cease when the nesting period is
over; it begins then in a new form. The young broods gather in
societies of youngsters, generally including several species.
Social life is practised at that time chiefly for its own sake--
partly for security, but chiefly for the pleasures derived from
it. So we see in our forests the societies formed by the young
nuthatchers (Sitta caesia), together with tit-mouses,
chaffinches, wrens, tree-creepers, or some wood-peckers.(5) In
Spain the swallow is met with in company with kestrels,
fly-catchers, and even pigeons. In the Far West of America the
young horned larks live in large societies, together with another
lark (Sprague's), the skylark, the Savannah sparrow, and several
species of buntings and longspurs.(6) In fact, it would be much
easier to describe the species which live isolated than to simply
name those species which join the autumnal societies of young
birds--not for hunting or nesting purposes, but simply to enjoy
life in society and to spend their time in plays and sports,
after having given a few hours every day to find their daily
food.
And, finally, we have that immense display of mutual aid
among birds-their migrations--which I dare not even enter upon
in this place. Sufficient to say that birds which have lived for
months in small bands scattered over a wide territory gather in
thousands; they come together at a given place, for several days
in succession, before they start, and they evidently discuss the
particulars of the journey. Some species will indulge every
afternoon in flights preparatory to the long passage. All wait
for their tardy congeners, and finally they start in a certain
well chosen direction--a fruit of accumulated collective
experience--the strongest flying at the head of the band, and
relieving one another in that difficult task. They cross the seas
in large bands consisting of both big and small birds, and when
they return next spring they repair to the same spot, and, in
most cases, each of them takes possession of the very same nest
which it had built or repaired the previous year.(7)
This subject is so vast, and yet so imperfectly studied; it
offers so many striking illustrations of mutual-aid habits,
subsidiary to the main fact of migration--each of which would,
however, require a special study--that I must refrain from
entering here into more details. I can only cursorily refer to
the numerous and animated gatherings of birds which take place,
always on the same spot, before they begin their long journeys
north or south, as also those which one sees in the north, after
the birds have arrived at their breeding-places on the Yenisei or
in the northern counties of England. For many days in succession--
sometimes one month--they will come together every morning
for one hour, before flying in search of food--perhaps
discussing the spot where they are going to build their
nests.(8) And if, during the migration, their columns are
overtaken by a storm, birds of the most different species will be
brought together by common misfortune. The birds which are not
exactly migratory, but slowly move northwards and southwards with
the seasons, also perform these peregrinations in flocks. So far
from migrating isolately, in order to secure for each separate
individual the advantages of better food or shelter which are to
be found in another district--they always wait for each other,
and gather in flocks, before they move north or south, in
accordance with the season.(9)
Going now over to mammals, the first thing which strikes us
is the overwhelming numerical predominance of social species over
those few carnivores which do not associate. The plateaus, the
Alpine tracts, and the Steppes of the Old and New World are
stocked with herds of deer, antelopes, gazelles, fallow deer,
buffaloes, wild goats and sheep, all of which are sociable
animals. When the Europeans came to settle in America, they found
it so densely peopled with buffaloes, that pioneers had to stop
their advance when a column of migrating buffaloes came to cross
the route they followed; the march past of the dense column
lasting sometimes for two and three days. And when the Russians
took possession of Siberia they found it so densely peopled with
deer, antelopes, squirrels, and other sociable animals, that the
very conquest of Siberia was nothing but a hunting expedition
which lasted for two hundred years; while the grass plains of
Eastern Africa are still covered with herds composed of zebra,
the hartebeest, and other antelopes.
Not long ago the small streams of Northern America and
Northern Siberia were peopled with colonies of beavers, and up to
the seventeenth century like colonies swarmed in Northern Russia.
The flat lands of the four great continents are still covered
with countless colonies of mice, ground-squirrels, marmots, and
other rodents. In the lower latitudes of Asia and Africa the
forests are still the abode of numerous families of elephants,
rhinoceroses, and numberless societies of monkeys. In the far
north the reindeer aggregate in numberless herds; while still
further north we find the herds of the musk-oxen and numberless
bands of polar foxes. The coasts of the ocean are enlivened by
flocks of seals and morses; its waters, by shoals of sociable
cetaceans; and even in the depths of the great plateau of Central
Asia we find herds of wild horses, wild donkeys, wild camels, and
wild sheep. All these mammals live in societies and nations
sometimes numbering hundreds of thousands of individuals,
although now, after three centuries of gunpowder civilization, we
find but the debris of the immense aggregations of old. How
trifling, in comparison with them, are the numbers of the
carnivores! And how false, therefore, is the view of those who
speak of the animal world as if nothing were to be seen in it but
lions and hyenas plunging their bleeding teeth into the flesh of
their victims! One might as well imagine that the whole of human
life is nothing but a succession of war massacres.
Association and mutual aid are the rule with mammals. We find
social habits even among the carnivores, and we can only name the
cat tribe (lions, tigers, leopards, etc.) as a division the
members of which decidedly prefer isolation to society, and are
but seldom met with even in small groups. And yet, even among
lions "this is a very common practice to hunt in company."(10)
The two tribes of the civets (Viverridae) and the weasels
(Mustelidae) might also be characterized by their isolated life,
but it is a fact that during the last century the common weasel
was more sociable than it is now; it was seen then in larger
groups in Scotland and in the Unterwalden canton of Switzerland.
As to the great tribe of the dogs, it is eminently sociable, and
association for hunting purposes may be considered as eminently
characteristic of its numerous species. It is well known, in
fact, that wolves gather in packs for hunting, and Tschudi left
an excellent description of how they draw up in a half-circle,
surround a cow which is grazing on a mountain slope, and then,
suddenly appearing with a loud barking, make it roll in the
abyss.(11) Audubon, in the thirties, also saw the Labrador
wolves hunting in packs, and one pack following a man to his
cabin, and killing the dogs. During severe winters the packs of
wolves grow so numerous as to become a danger for human
settlements, as was the case in France some five-and-forty years
ago. In the Russian Steppes they never attack the horses
otherwise than in packs; and yet they have to sustain bitter
fights, during which the horses (according to Kohl's testimony)
sometimes assume offensive warfare, and in such cases, if the
wolves do not retreat promptly, they run the risk of being
surrounded by the horses and killed by their hoofs. The
prairie-wolves (Canis latrans) are known to associate in bands of
from twenty to thirty individuals when they chase a buffalo
occasionally separated from its herd.(12) Jackals, which are
most courageous and may be considered as one of the most
intelligent representatives of the dog tribe, always hunt in
packs; thus united, they have no fear of the bigger
carnivores.(13) As to the wild dogs of Asia (the Kholzuns, or
Dholes), Williamson saw their large packs attacking all larger
animals save elephants and rhinoceroses, and overpowering bears
and tigers. Hyenas always live in societies and hunt in packs,
and the hunting organizations of the painted lycaons are highly
praised by Cumming. Nay, even foxes, which, as a rule, live
isolated in our civilized countries, have been seen combining for
hunting purposes.(14) As to the polar fox, it is--or rather
was in Steller's time--one of the most sociable animals; and
when one reads Steller's description of the war that was waged by
Behring's unfortunate crew against these intelligent small
animals, one does not know what to wonder at most: the
extraordinary intelligence of the foxes and the mutual aid they
displayed in digging out food concealed under cairns, or stored
upon a pillar (one fox would climb on its top and throw the food
to its comrades beneath), or the cruelty of man, driven to
despair by the numerous packs of foxes. Even some bears live in
societies where they are not disturbed by man. Thus Steller saw
the black bear of Kamtchatka in numerous packs, and the polar
bears are occasionally found in small groups. Even the
unintelligent insectivores do not always disdain association.
However, it is especially with the rodents, the ungulata, and
the ruminants that we find a highly developed practice of mutual
aid. The squirrels are individualist to a great extent. Each of
them builds its own comfortable nest, and accumulates its own
provision. Their inclinations are towards family life, and Brehm
found that a family of squirrels is never so happy as when the
two broods of the same year can join together with their parents
in a remote corner of a forest. And yet they maintain social
relations. The inhabitants of the separate nests remain in a
close intercourse, and when the pine-cones become rare in the
forest they inhabit, they emigrate in bands. As to the black
squirrels of the Far West, they are eminently sociable. Apart
from the few hours given every day to foraging, they spend their
lives in playing in numerous parties. And when they multiply too
rapidly in a region, they assemble in bands, almost as numerous
as those of locusts, and move southwards, devastating the
forests, the fields, and the gardens; while foxes, polecats,
falcons, and nocturnal birds of prey follow their thick columns
and live upon the individuals remaining behind. The ground-squirrel--
a closely-akin genus--is still more sociable. It is given to
hoarding, and stores up in its subterranean halls large amounts
of edible roots and nuts, usually plundered by man in the autumn.
According to some observers, it must know something of the joys
of a miser. And yet it remains sociable. It always lives in large
villages, and Audubon, who opened some dwellings of the hackee
in the winter, found several individuals in the same apartment;
they must have stored it with common efforts.
The large tribe, of the marmots, which includes the three
large genuses of Arctomys, Cynomys, and Spermophilus, is still
more sociable and still more intelligent. They also prefer having
each one its own dwelling; but they live in big villages. That
terrible enemy of the crops of South Russia--the souslik--of
which some ten millions are exterminated every year by man alone,
lives in numberless colonies; and while the Russian provincial
assemblies gravely discuss the means of getting rid of this enemy
of society, it enjoys life in its thousands in the most joyful
way. Their play is so charming that no observer could refrain
from paying them a tribute of praise, and from mentioning the
melodious concerts arising from the sharp whistlings of the males
and the melancholic whistlings of the females, before--suddenly
returning to his citizen's duties--he begins inventing the most
diabolic means for the extermination of the little robbers. All
kinds of rapacious birds and beasts of prey having proved
powerless, the last word of science in this warfare is the
inoculation of cholera! The villages of the prairie-dogs in
America are one of the loveliest sights. As far as the eye can
embrace the prairie, it sees heaps of earth, and on each of them
a prairie-dog stands, engaged in a lively conversation with its
neighbours by means of short barkings. As soon as the approach of
man is signalled, all plunge in a moment into their dwellings;
all have disappeared as by enchantment. But if the danger is
over, the little creatures soon reappear. Whole families come out
of their galleries and indulge in play. The young ones scratch
one another, they worry one another, and display their
gracefulness while standing upright, and in the meantime the old
ones keep watch. They go visiting one another, and the beaten
footpaths which connect all their heaps testify to the frequency
of the visitations. In short, the best naturalists have written
some of their best pages in describing the associations of the
prairie-dogs of America, the marmots of the Old World, and the
polar marmots of the Alpine regions. And yet, I must make, as
regards the marmots, the same remark as I have made when speaking
of the bees. They have maintained their fighting instincts, and
these instincts reappear in captivity. But in their big
associations, in the face of free Nature, the unsociable
instincts have no opportunity to develop, and the general result
is peace and harmony.
Even such harsh animals as the rats, which continually fight
in our cellars, are sufficiently intelligent not to quarrel when
they plunder our larders, but to aid one another in their
plundering expeditions and migrations, and even to feed their
invalids. As to the beaver-rats or musk-rats of Canada, they are
extremely sociable. Audubon could not but admire "their peaceful
communities, which require only being left in peace to enjoy
happiness." Like all sociable animals, they are lively and
playful, they easily combine with other species, and they have
attained a very high degree of intellectual development. In their
villages, always disposed on the shores of lakes and rivers, they
take into account the changing level of water; their domeshaped
houses, which are built of beaten clay interwoven with reeds,
have separate corners for organic refuse, and their halls are
well carpeted at winter time; they are warm, and, nevertheless,
well ventilated. As to the beavers, which are endowed, as known,
with a most sympathetic character, their astounding dams and
villages, in which generations live and die without knowing of
any enemies but the otter and man, so wonderfully illustrate what
mutual aid can achieve for the security of the species, the
development of social habits, and the evolution of intelligence,
that they are familiar to all interested in animal life. Let me
only remark that with the beavers, the muskrats, and some other
rodents, we already find the feature which will also be
distinctive of human communities--that is, work in common.
I pass in silence the two large families which include the
jerboa, the chinchilla, the biscacha, and the tushkan, or
underground hare of South Russia, though all these small rodents
might be taken as excellent illustrations of the pleasures
derived by animals from social life.(15) Precisely, the
pleasures; because it is extremely difficult to say what brings
animals together--the needs of mutual protection, or simply the
pleasure of feeling surrounded by their congeners. At any rate,
our common hares, which do not gather in societies for life in
common, and which are not even endowed with intense parental
feelings, cannot live without coming together for play. Dietrich
de Winckell, who is considered to be among the best acquainted
with the habits of hares, describes them as passionate players,
becoming so intoxicated by their play that a hare has been known
to take an approaching fox for a playmate.(16) As to the rabbit,
it lives in societies, and its family life is entirely built upon
the image of the old patriarchal family; the young ones being
kept in absolute obedience to the father and even the
grandfather.(17) And here we have the example of two very
closely-allied species which cannot bear each other--not
because they live upon nearly the same food, as like cases are
too often explained, but most probably because the passionate,
eminently-individualist hare cannot make friends with that
placid, quiet, and submissive creature, the rabbit. Their tempers
are too widely different not to be an obstacle to friendship.
Life in societies is again the rule with the large family of
horses, which includes the wild horses and donkeys of Asia, the
zebras, the mustangs, the cimarrones of the Pampas, and the
half-wild horses of Mongolia and Siberia. They all live in
numerous associations made up of many studs, each of which
consists of a number of mares under the leadership of a male.
These numberless inhabitants of the Old and the New World, badly
organized on the whole for resisting both their numerous enemies
and the adverse conditions of climate, would soon have
disappeared from the surface of the earth were it not for their
sociable spirit. When a beast of prey approaches them, several
studs unite at once; they repulse the beast and sometimes chase
it: and neither the wolf nor the bear, not even the lion, can
capture a horse or even a zebra as long as they are not detached
from the herd. When a drought is burning the grass in the
prairies, they gather in herds of sometimes 10,000 individuals
strong, and migrate. And when a snow-storm rages in the Steppes,
each stud keeps close together, and repairs to a protected
ravine. But if confidence disappears, or the group has been
seized by panic, and disperses, the horses perish and the
survivors are found after the storm half dying from fatigue.
Union is their chief arm in the struggle for life, and man is
their chief enemy. Before his increasing numbers the ancestors of
our domestic horse (the Equus Przewalskii, so named by Polyakoff)
have preferred to retire to the wildest and least accessible
plateaus on the outskirts of Thibet, where they continue to live,
surrounded by carnivores, under a climate as bad as that of the
Arctic regions, but in a region inaccessible to man.(18)
Many striking illustrations of social life could be taken
from the life of the reindeer, and especially of that large
division of ruminants which might include the roebucks, the
fallow deer, the antelopes, the gazelles, the ibex, and, in fact,
the whole of the three numerous families of the Antelopides, the
Caprides, and the Ovides. Their watchfulness over the safety of
their herds against attacks of carnivores; the anxiety displayed
by all individuals in a herd of chamois as long as all of them
have not cleared a difficult passage over rocky cliffs. the
adoption of orphans; the despair of the gazelle whose mate, or
even comrade of the same sex, has been killed; the plays of the
youngsters, and many other features, could be mentioned. But
perhaps the most striking illustration of mutual support is given
by the occasional migrations of fallow deer, such as I saw once
on the Amur. When I crossed the high plateau and its border
ridge, the Great Khingan, on my way from Transbaikalia to
Merghen, and further travelled over the high prairies on my way
to the Amur, I could ascertain how thinly-peopled with fallow
deer these mostly uninhabited regions are.(19) Two years later I
was travelling up the Amur, and by the end of October reached the
lower end of that picturesque gorge which the Amur pierces in the
Dousse-alin (Little Khingan) before it enters the lowlands where
it joins the Sungari. I found the Cossacks in the villages of
that gorge in the greatest excitement, because thousands and
thousands of fallow deer were crossing the Amur where it is
narrowest, in order to reach the lowlands. For several days in
succession, upon a length of some forty miles up the river, the
Cossacks were butchering the deer as they crossed the Amur, in
which already floated a good deal of ice. Thousands were killed
every day, and the exodus nevertheless continued. Like migrations
were never seen either before or since, and this one must have
been called for by an early and heavy snow-fall in the Great
Khingan, which compelled the deer to make a desperate attempt at
reaching the lowlands in the east of the Dousse mountains.
Indeed, a few days later the Dousse-alin was also buried under
snow two or three feet deep. Now, when one imagines the immense
territory (almost as big as Great Britain) from which the
scattered groups of deer must have gathered for a migration which
was undertaken under the pressure of exceptional circumstances,
and realizes the difficulties which had to be overcome before all
the deer came to the common idea of crossing the Amur further
south, where it is narrowest, one cannot but deeply admire the
amount of sociability displayed by these intelligent animals. The
fact is not the less striking if we remember that the buffaloes
of North America displayed the same powers of combination. One
saw them grazing in great numbers in the plains, but these
numbers were made up by an infinity of small groups which never
mixed together. And yet, when necessity arose, all groups,
however scattered over an immense territory, came together and
made up those immense columns, numbering hundreds of thousands of
individuals, which I mentioned on a preceding page.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23