Wilhelm from the east
Wilhelm von Osten (born November 30, 1838 in Schönsee bei Thorn ; † June 29, 1909 ) was the owner and trainer of Klugen Hans, who was known at times as a wonder horse .
Life
Von Osten was the son of a manor owner. He attended high school in Koenigsberg up to Tertia . Then he switched to the trade school in Gdansk and finally to the mechanical engineering school in Berlin . He became an elementary school teacher and worked as such in Siegen , Holzminden , Lyck , Lemgo and Barmen . In 1866 he moved to Berlin, where he bought the house at 10 Griebenowstrasse. In 1888 he bought his first horse, a stallion that he called Hans and initially used mainly as a carriage horse. From the fact that Hans independently assessed whether and how he could pass a driveway with his car, von Osten concluded that the horse was capable of conscious deliberations and began to train it. Hans I was finally able to pull the wagon as desired without rein aids and only on call and to indicate numbers up to five by stamping on it. He died of a bowel obstruction at the age of twelve. Von Osten kept his skull, the bulge of which he interpreted as an external sign of a particularly large brain.
In 1900, from the east in Russia, the then five-year-old black Orlov trotter , later known as Kluge Hans, bought and started training again. After his first attempts to draw the public's attention to the animal had failed, he published an advertisement for sale in the military weekly on June 28, 1902 :
- I want to sell my 7-year-old, beautiful, lamb-pious stallion, with whom I am trying to determine the intellectual ability of the horse. He differentiates between ten colors, reads, knows the four types of invoices, etc. from Osten , Berlin, Griebenowstraße 10.
The desired reactions did not materialize, but after another advertisement in the Deutsches Officierblatt, inviting von Osten to view the animal, Major General Eugen Zobel reported and attended the training in the narrow courtyard of the house. In the summer of 1904 he published various articles about von Osten and his horse and made them known. Von Osten wanted to have his results confirmed by a scientific commission. A petition to the emperor, which he had made for this purpose, had been answered hesitantly. After all, he now had a great influx of onlookers who watched Hans being presented by CG Schillings . At the beginning of August 1904, the Minister of Education, Dr. Studied the horse with some gentlemen from his ministry and asked him a few questions. According to an article in the Staatsbürger-Zeitung on August 13, 1904, he showed the greatest admiration for Hans' abilities.
However, this did not satisfy von Ost's desire for a “scientific” examination of the case. C. G. Schillings therefore wrote an appeal to the participants of the 6th International Zoological Congress in Berlin to put together a commission of inquiry. Eventually the director of the university's psychological institute, Professor Stumpf , was given the task of investigating the case. Stumpf had already met the clever Hans in February 1904, but now, together with his assistant Oskar Pfungst , initiated extensive investigations that began in September 1904. This September commission came to the conclusion that Hans was not guided by either arbitrary or involuntary help in his answers, but dared not attempt to explain his exceptional achievements. One of the first people to support the theory that Hans was controlled by minimal physical reactions from his examiners was the painter Emilio Rendich . On March 14, 1905, he published his discovery in the Berliner Zeitung. In order to substantiate the fact that animals react to minimal signs that are barely perceptible to humans, he trained his dog Nora to perform similar feats as Hans did. Even months before this publication, according to Rendich, he had shown Nora to various members of the commission, including Stumpf himself. In a second series of investigations from October 13, 1904, the commission members checked the theory and found that Hans actually failed if he could not see the questioner or if he himself did not know the answer to the question asked. That was the end of the career of the wonder horse. Stumpf and Pfungst immediately submitted writings according to which the case with this discovery was closed.
Von Osten, however, advocated the theory that the investigative commission had redressed Hans and thus falsified the results. At times he thought about moving abroad with Hans, but then stayed in Berlin. Supported by the businessman Karl Krall , who had initially followed the development of the clever Hans from a distance, he undertook further experiments with the horse, which also included blinders. After a few weeks of getting used to it, according to Krall, Hans answered correctly again even without visual contact with the questioner. But these results no longer interested the public. In the following years, von Osten and Krall worked together with the horse; von Osten still believes that Hans could think for himself, Krall first of all in the endeavor to test the horse's perception possibilities.
On July 12, 1907 he moved from the east to his estate in Sternberg in the Neumark and only returned sporadically to Berlin. Hans stayed in the stable and in the narrow courtyard, which had circumscribed his range of motion for years, and was looked after by the master carpenter Bernhard Piehl, who lived in the house. Tests were still carried out on Hans to see if he had responded to involuntary whispers. Krall tried in vain to bring his research results, which included two volumes under the title Zur Tierseelenkunde , to well-known publishers. Von Osten suffered from a painful illness in the last years of his life - after all, liver cancer was diagnosed - and was bedridden from January 1909. During this time he expressed hatefulness to Krall about his horse and wished him an end to the mortar wagon. Contrary to reports to the contrary, he did not give the clever Hans a pension, but bequeathed him to Karl Krall without financial support.
Wilhelm von Osten was buried on July 3, 1909 in the Zionskirchhof ; two days later, the clever Hans was transported by train to Mettmann , where he was housed on an estate. The horse suffered from a hoof disease due to years of improper keeping by von Osten, among other things, and was brought to Elberfeld in August , where Krall continued his experiments with him until 1916.
Services
While von Osten needed his first Hans as a carriage horse, the second horse was kept exclusively as a test subject. It was taught for several hours in the morning and in the afternoon, only had access to the narrow, paved courtyard of the Berlin house and was sometimes in a physically neglected state. A photo from the time of the blinker tests shows clear curls in the mane. Von Osten, who was obviously of the opinion right to the end that the horse could really read and count, left no records and was mostly undiplomatic in dealing with his visitors; He was reluctant to respond to Krall's suggestions for examination methods and usually quickly returned to his old teaching style. However, von Ost's attempts to prove the horse's thinking ability sparked extensive disputes over animal psychology.
literature
- Karl Krall, Thinking Animals , Leipzig 1912
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | East, Wilhelm von |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German horse dresser |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 30, 1838 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Schönsee near Thorn |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 29, 1909 |