Under The Same Circumstances,
It Would Have Been Quite Impossible To Have Deceived
A Dog.
The evidence in favour of and against the acute
smelling powers of carrion-vultures is singularly balanced.
Professor Owen
Has demonstrated that the olfactory nerves
of the turkey-buzzard (Cathartes aura) are highly developed,
and on the evening when Mr. Owen's paper was read
at the Zoological Society, it was mentioned by a gentleman
that he had seen the carrion-hawks in the West Indies on
two occasions collect on the roof of a house, when a corpse
had become offensive from not having been buried, in this
case, the intelligence could hardly have been acquired be
sight. On the other hand, besides the experiments of Audubon
and that one by myself, Mr. Bachman has tried in the
United States many varied plans, showing that neither the
turkey-buzzard (the species dissected by Professor Owen)
nor the gallinazo find their food by smell. He covered portions
of highly-offensive offal with a thin canvas cloth, and
strewed pieces of meat on it: these the carrion-vultures ate
up, and then remained quietly standing, with their beaks
within the eighth of an inch of the putrid mass, without
discovering it. A small rent was made in the canvas, and
the offal was immediately discovered; the canvas was replaced
by a fresh piece, and meat again put on it, and was
again devoured by the vultures without their discovering
the hidden mass on which they were trampling.
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