Over inanimate objects and plants we have this great emotional advantage
that we can love them, whereas they cannot love us, nor even one
another, though related by marriage, like flowers.
Animals, however, can love both us and one another and be loved; and
this establishes a distinction between them and lower beings, and a
relationship with us, that warrants us in placing their attachments
under the head of Personal Affections.
Calderwood is sufficiently liberal to admit that, to a degree animals
may be included in our affections. But Adolf Horwicz who has written the
most complete, and, on the whole, most satisfactory analysis of the
human feelings in existence, denies this. “Love is and remains a
personal feeling,” he asserts; it “can only be referred to persons, not
to things. The tenderness of American ladies towards dogs and cats is
simply a gross emotional caricature.”
So it is, very often, especially in the case of ladies who neglect their
children and make fashionable pets of animals, changing and exchanging
them with the fashion. But it is simply absurd to mention this case as a
fair instance of human love towards animals. How many of the greatest
geniuses the world has produced have become famous for their
affectionate devotion to their dogs! “A dog!” says an old English
writer, “is the only thing on this earth that loves you more than he
loves himself.” And should we be morally inferior to the dog—unable to
love him in return? especially when we remember that “histories,” as
Pope remarks, “are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of
friends.”
Vischer, the well-known German writer on æsthetics, goes so far as to
admit that whenever he is in society his only wish is, “Oh, if there was
only a dog here!”
There is something much nobler and deeper than sarcasm on humanity in
Byron’s famous epitaph on his dog:—
“Near this spot
Are deposited the remains of one
Who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
And all the Virtues of man without his Vices.”
I wonder if Horwicz could read the following exquisite prose poem of
Turgenieff without feeling ashamed of himself:—
"We two are sitting in the room: my dog and I. A violent storm is raging
without.
"The dog sits close before me—he gazes straight into my eyes.
"And I too gaze straight into his eyes.
"It seems as if he wished to say something to me. He is dumb, has no
words, does not understand himself; but I understand him.
"I understand that he and I are at this moment governed by the same
feeling, that there is not the slightest difference between us. We are
beings of the same kind. In each of us shines and glows the same flame.
"Death approaches, flapping his broad, cold, moist wings....
"And all is ended.
"Who then will establish the difference between the flames which glowed
within us two?
"No! We who exchange those glances are not animal and man.
"Created alike are the two pairs of eyes that are fixed on each other.
“And each of these eye-pairs, that of the man as well as that of the
animal, expresses clearly and distinctly _an anxious craving for mutual
caresses_.”
It is a vicious trait of the human character that it soon grows callous
to caresses, and that the unmasked expression of tender emotion is
regarded as undignified and in “bad form.” It is the absence in the
dog’s mind of this ugly human trait that makes him such a delightful
friend and companion. However much you caress and fondle him, he will
always be anxious and grateful for the next gentle pat on the head, the
next kind look, and will never despise you for any excess of fond
emotion lavished on him.
The greatest flaw in Christian ethics is, that it takes so little
account of this capacity of animals for affection, and our duties
towards them. The duty of kindness towards animals is indeed, as Mr.
Lecky remarks, “the one form of humanity which appears more prominently
in the Old Testament than in the New.” “Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth
of the ox that treadeth out the corn,” is a precept which deprecates
even a very modified form of cruelty to animals. Had this precept been
given in a more generalised and comprehensive form, what an incalculable
amount of suffering might have been saved the animals that had the
misfortune to be born in Christian countries, as compared with those in
the Oriental countries.
According to Mr. Lecky, Plutarch was the first writer who placed the
duty of kindness to animals on purely moral grounds; “and he urges that
duty with an emphasis and detail to which no adequate parallel can, I
believe, be found in the Christian writings for at least 1700 years.”
Some of the earlier Greek philosophers had based this duty on the
doctrine of the transmigration of human souls into animal bodies; and it
is related that Pythagoras used to buy of fishermen the whole contents
of their nets, for the pleasure of letting the fish go again. Leonardo
da Vinci, from less superstitious motives, used to buy caged birds for
the same purpose; and similar traits are told of other men of genius who
were sufficiently refined to recognise the evidences of emotion in
animals. In our times, finally, we have a man, Mr. Bergh, who devotes
his whole life to the object of establishing the personal rights of
animals to kind treatment on legal grounds.
But, after all, the most influential friend animals have ever possessed
was Darwin, who, by establishing their relationship to man on grounds
which no one who understands the evidence can question, for ever
vindicated for them the privilege of personal affection. The very
grammar of our language has been affected by Darwinism. Formerly, it was
customary to write “the dog _which_ jumped into the water to save a
child.” Now we say, “the dog _who_ jumped into the water.” In other
words, animals are no longer regarded as “things,” or animated machines,
but as persons.