CHAPTER XIII.
Animals.
Animals stand midway between things and persons. We own them, use them, kill them, even, for our own purposes. Yet they have feelings, impulses, and affections in common with ourselves. In some respects they surpass us. In strength, in speed, in keenness of scent, in fidelity, blind instinct in the animal is often superior to reason in the man.
Yet the animal falls short of personality. It is conscious, but not self-conscious. It knows; but it does not know that it knows. It can perform astonishing feats of intelligence. But it cannot explain, even to itself, the way in which it does them. The animal can pass from one particular experience to another along lines of association in time and space with marvelous directness and accuracy. To rise from a particular experience to the universal class to which that experience belongs; and then, from the known characteristics of the class, to deduce the characteristics of another particular experience of the same kind, is beyond the power of the brute.
The brute likewise has feelings; but it does not recognize these feelings as parts of a total and permanent self. Pleasure and pain the animal feels probably as keenly as we do. Of happiness or unhappiness they probably know nothing.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
Animals can be trained to do right, but they cannot love righteousness. They can be trained to avoid acts which are associated with painful consequences, but they cannot hate iniquity. The life of an animal is a series of sensations, impulses, thoughts, and actions. These are never gathered up into unity. The animal is more than a machine, and less than a person.
THE DUTY.
We ought to realize that the animal has feelings as keen as our own.—We owe to these feelings in the animal the same treatment that we would wish for the same feelings in ourselves. For animals as for ourselves we should seek as much pleasure and as little pain as is consistent with the performance of the work which we think it best to lay upon them. The horse cannot choose for itself how heavy a load to draw. We ought to adapt the load to its strength. And in order to do that we must stop and consider how much strength it has. The horse and cow and dog cannot select their own food and shelter. We must think for them in these matters; and in order to do so wisely, we must consider their nature, habits, and capacities. No person is fit to own an animal, who is not willing to take the trouble to understand the needs, capacities, and nature of that animal. And acts which result from ignorance of such facts as can be readily learned are inexcusable.
