The Human Side of Animals | Page 3

only a
little lower than himself? The poet has truly said that "the beast is the
mirror of man as man is the mirror of God." Man had to battle with
animals for untold ages before he domesticated and made servants of
them. He is just beginning to learn that they were not created solely to
furnish material for sermons, nor to serve mankind, but that they also
have an existence, a life of their own.
Man has long preached this doctrine that he is not an animal, but a
kinsman of the gods. For this reason, he has claimed dominion over
animal creation and a right to assert that dominion without restraint.
This anthropocentric conceit is the same thing that causes one nation to
think it should rule the world, that the sun and moon were made only
for the laudable purpose of giving light unto a chosen few, and that
young lambs playing on a grassy hillside, near a cool spring, are just so
much mutton allowed to wander over man's domain until its flavour is
improved.
It is time to remove the barriers, once believed impassable, which
man's egotism has used as a screen to separate him from his lower
brothers. Our physical bodies are very similar to theirs except that ours
are almost always much inferior. Merely because we have a superior
intellect which enables us to rule and enslave the animals, shall we
deny them all intellect and all feeling? In the words of that remarkable
naturalist, William J. Long, "To call a thing intelligence in one creature
and reflex action in another, or to speak of the same thing as love or
kindness in one and blind impulse in the other, is to be blinder
ourselves than the impulse which is supposed to govern animals. Until,
therefore, we have some new chemistry that will ignore atoms and the
atomic law, and some new psychology that ignores animal intelligence
altogether, or regards it as under a radically different law from our own,
we must apply what we know of ourselves and our own motives to the
smaller and weaker lives that are in some distant way akin to our own."

It is possible to explain away all the marvellous things the animals do,
but after you have finished, there will still remain something over and
above, which quite defies all mechanistic interpretation. An old war
horse, for instance, lives over and over his battles in his dreams. He
neighs and paws, just as he did in real battle; and cavalrymen tell us
that they can sometimes understand from their horses when they are
dreaming just what command they are trying to obey. This is only one
of the myriads of animal phenomena which man does not understand. If
you doubt it, try to explain the striking phenomena of luminescence,
hybridization, of eels surviving desiccation for fourteen years,
post-matrimonial cannibalism, Nature's vast chain of unities, the
suicide of lemmings, why water animals cannot get wet, transparency
of animals, why the horned toad shoots a stream of blood from his eye
when angry. If you are able to explain these things to humanity, you
will be classed second only to Solomon. Yet the average scientist
explains them away, with the ignorance and loquaciousness of a fisher
hag.
By a thorough application of psychological principles, it is possible to
show that man himself is merely a machine to be explained in terms of
neurones and nervous impulses, heredity and environment and
reactions to outside stimuli. But who is there who does not believe that
there is more to a man than that?
Animals have demonstrated long ago that they not only have as many
talents as human beings, but that under the influence of the same
environment, they form the same kinds of combinations to defend
themselves against enemies; to shelter themselves against heat and cold;
to build homes; to lay up a supply of food for the hard seasons. In fact,
all through the ages man has been imitating the animals in burrowing
through the earth, penetrating the waters, and now, at last, flying
through the air.
When a skunk bites through the brains of frogs, paralysing but not
killing them, in order that he may store them away in his
nursery-pantry so that his babes may have fresh food; when a mole
decapitates earth-worms for the same reason and stores them near the

cold surface of the ground so that the heads will not regrow, as they
would under normal conditions, only a deeply prejudiced man can
claim that no elements of intelligence have been employed.
There are also numerous signs, sounds and motions by which animals
communicate with each other, though to man these symbols of
language may not always be understandable. Dogs give barks
indicating surprise,