Intelligence of Animals (1857)

AUTHOR: Child, Lydia Maria

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

In this article, Child emphasizes the facts of animal sentience and cognition and calls for the respectful treatment of animals, promoting animal welfare and “affectionate companionship.” Her starting point is the obvious fact of animal sentience and  cognition: “Even the smallest and most common animals sometimes give indications of thought, feeling, and memory,” she writes, so much so that it becomes difficult “to define the boundary between instinct and reason” (221). She then gives several examples from her own experience: three wasps observing her in just the same way that she is observing them (which prompts Child to assert that there “was something so human about their proceedings” and to ask: “What am I to them?” (223)), a cat adopting kittens after the premature death of their mother, a particular look, again “so human in its expression” (226), by an ox, another ox communicating his dissatisfaction by means of “strik[ing] the floor heavily three times” (227), and a colt playing with “a string of bells” (228) with which its mother had just been harnessed for a drive. These examples lead Child to assert that “[t]he natural dispositions of animals differ, as do those of mankind; but the intelligence and docility of brutes, as well as of human beings, is wonderfully increased when they are judiciously reared, and treated with habitual kindness” (228). For Child, “affectionate companionship” is the only appropriate relationship with an animal (her prime example for such companionship is the relation between “Arabian horses […] and their masters”). “The whip,” in turn, “is a detestable instrument” as “it stupefies the intellect, and infuses malignity into the disposition, whether tried on children, slaves, or animals” (228-229). Child then provides an example of such affectionate companionship (between a colt and its patient owner) before concluding: “If men would educate animals in a sensible and patient manner, and treat them with habitual gentleness, it would produce intelligence and docility apparently miraculous, and realize on earth the prophecies of the millenium” (230).