The essays devoted to animals are three in number, with the titles: “Whether terrestrial or aquatic animals are the more intelligent?” “That animals have the use of Reason”; “On the habit of eating flesh.” The two first are in the form of dialogues, and the third is a familiar discourse, a conférence, such as those which now form a popular feature of the Roman season. Through these studies there runs a vein of transparent sincerity: we feel that they were composed not to show the author’s cleverness or to startle by paradoxes, but with the real wish to make the young men for whom they were intended a little more humane. Plutarch did not take up the claims of animals because good “copy” could be made out of them. As his wish is to persuade, he does not ask for the impossible. It is the voice of the highly civilised Greek addressing the young barbarians of Rome: for to the Greek’s inmost mind the Roman must have always remained somewhat of a barbarian. There is great restraint: though Plutarch must have loathed the games of the arena, he speaks of them with guarded deprecation. He makes one of his characters say that the chase (which he did not himself like) was useful in keeping people from worse things, “such as the combats of gladiators.” He is genuinely anxious by all means to persuade some, and for this reason he refrains from scaring away his hearers or readers by extreme demands. Though he has a strong personal repugnance to flesh-eating, he does not insist on every one sharing it. Anyhow, he says, Be as humane as you can; cause as little suffering as is possible; no doubt it is not easy, all at once, to eradicate a habit which has taken hold of our sensual nature, but, at least, let us deprive it of its worst features. Let us eat flesh if we must, but for hunger, not for self-indulgence; let us kill animals but still be compassionate—not heaping up outrages and tortures “as, alas, is done every day.” He mentions how swans were blinded and then fattened with unnatural foods, which is only a little worse than things that are done now. What is certain is, that extreme and habitual luxury in food has spelt decadence from the banquets of Babylon downwards.
Plutarch goes on to ask whether it is impossible to amuse ourselves without all these excesses? Shall we expire on the spot, are the resources of men totally exhausted, if the table be not supplied with pâtés de foies gras? Is life not worth living without slaughter to make a feast, slaughter to find a pastime; cannot we exist without asking of certain animals that they show courage, and fight in spite of themselves, or that they massacre other animals which have not the natural energy to defend themselves? Must we for our sport tear the mother from the little ones which she suckles or hatches? Plutarch implores us not to imitate the children of whom Bion speaks, who amused themselves by throwing stones at the frogs, but the frogs were not at all amused—they simply died. “When we take our recreation, those who help in the fun ought to share in it and be amused as well.” Thus does the kind Greek philosopher exhort us
“Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”
Did Wordsworth know that his thought had been expressed so long before? It matters little; the counsels of mercy never grow old.
With good sense and in that spirit of compromise which is really the basis of morality, Plutarch argued that cruelty to animals does not lie in the use but in the abuse of them; it is not cruel to kill them if they are incompatible with our own existence; it is not cruel to tame and train to our service those made by nature gentle and loving towards man which become the companions of our toil according to their natural aptitude. “Horse and ass are given to us,” as Prometheus says, “to be submissive servants and fellow-workers; dogs to be guardians and watchers, goats and sheep to give us milk and wool.” (Cow’s milk seems to have been rarely drunk, as is still the case in the Mediterranean islands and in Greece.)
“The Stoics,” says Plutarch, “made sensibility towards animals a preparation to humanity and compassion because the gradually formed habit of the lesser affections is capable of leading men very far.” In the “Lives” he insists on the same point: “Kindness and beneficence should be extended to creatures of every species, and these still flow from the breast of a well-natured man as streams that issue from the living fountain. A good man will take care of his horses and dogs not only when they are young, but when old and past service.... We certainly ought not to treat living creatures like shoes or household goods, which, when worn out with use, we throw away, and were it only to learn benevolence to human kind, we should be merciful to other creatures. For my own part I would not sell even an old ox.”
Here I may say that Plutarch should have thanked Fate which made him a philosopher and not a farmer. For how, alas, can the farmer escape from becoming the accomplice of that which the Italian poet apostrophizes in the words—
“Natura, illaudabil maraviglia,
Che per uccider partorisci e nutri!”