Aristotle and Caustic Projectile Defecation

Given the title of this post, you may be wondering what on earth this could possibly be about. Well, deep within the bowels (sorry!) of Aristotle’s œuvre lurks this fragrant little gem regarding the defensive capabilities of the bison.

It tosses up dust and scoops out the ground with its hooves, like the bull. Its skin is impervious to blows. Owing to the savour of its flesh it is sought for in the chase. When it is wounded it runs away, and stops only when thoroughly exhausted. It defends itself against an assailant by kicking and projecting its excrement to a distance of eight yards; this device it can easily adopt over and over again, and the excrement is so pungent that the hair of hunting-dogs is burnt off by it.

Heavens, that’s quite some party trick. Mercifully, the excreta does not always posses these properties:

It is only when the animal is disturbed or alarmed that the dung has this property; when the animal is undisturbed it has no blistering effect.

I see. Best to approach by stealth then?

















Interestingly, the tactical deployment of fecal matter apparently even plays its part in childbirth:

When the season comes for parturition the mothers give birth to their young in troops upon the mountains. Before dropping their young they scatter their dung in all directions, making a kind of circular rampart around them; for the animal has the faculty of ejecting excrement in most extraordinary quantities.¹

Hmmm. It’s obvious that while Aristotle had the heart of a good empiricist, he was nonetheless a little too gullible at times. Aristotleans have however tried to defend his lapses. In Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction, Jonathan Barnes acknowledges that in this case “Aristotle was taken in by a tipsy huntsman’s after-dinner yarn” but nonetheless takes a swipe at “killjoy scholars who have felt obliged to point out the deficiencies of the work [History of Animals],” as if it were in the poorest of taste to criticize Aristotle or acknowledge his mistakes. On the same page, however, Barnes offers an assessment of Aristotle’s ‘experimental method’: “His whole procedure was, by any scientific standards, slapdash.”² [Myself, I’m wondering if it would be ‘killjoy’ to note that Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction is just a very lightly revised edition of his Aristotle from Oxford’s earlier ‘Past Masters’ series, thus giving him two books for the effort of one?]

As for Aristotle, it’s best we leave him to the company of his huntsmen and their fevered imaginations, hoping they don’ t all get blind sided by a stray volley of scalding excrement.


CITATIONS:

1.  Aristotle, History of Animals, Trans. d’A.W. Thompson, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Ed. Jonathan Barnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, 630b 5-18. Also online here.
2.   Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p.20.

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