Letters of Lydia Maria Child (1882)
AUTHOR: Child, Lydia Maria
PUBLICATION: Letters of Lydia Maria Child. Ed. John Greenleaf Whittier, Wendell Phillips and Harriet Winslow Sewall. Boston: Hougton Mifflin, 1882.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a2001.05.0190
https://archive.org/details/letterslydiamar00philgoog/page/n14/mode/2up
KEYWORDS: animals, animal sentience and cognition, animal welfare
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Bergh, Henry. “An Address”
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Howells, William Dean. “Qualities without Defects”
---. “The Fundamental Need of Humane Education”
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Moore, J. Howard. “Discovering Darwin”
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---. High School Ethics
---. “How Vegetarians Observe the Golden Rule”
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Neff, Flora Trueblood Bennett. Along Life’s Pathway
Parker, Theodore. “Of Conscious Religion as a Source of Joy”
Pillsbury, Parker. “A Sun-Burst Letter”
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Trine, Ralph Waldo. Every Living Creature
Woolman, John. The Journal and Essays of John Woolman
SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):
In some of her letters, Child addresses animal sentience and cognition, and voices her support for animal welfare. She argues for compassion and benevolence based on human superiority. For example, in an 1864 letter to Eliza Scudder, she expresses her wish that “there were not such a wall of partition between us and the animal world,” because it “would be so curious and entertaining to understand what they are about, and to help them in emergencies by our superior strength and wisdom” (182). Child's arguments for treating animals with kindness and respect are welfarist (as also expressed in, for example, “Intelligence of Animals”). In the rest of the letter Child recounts how she failed to raise a swallow after its nest had fallen down the chimney and its mother had abandoned it. In a letter to S. B. Shaw in 1873, Child affirms that she has “taken a lively interest” in the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” and has “been a member of the Boston society from the beginning” (213).
She is convinced that “man does not yet sufficiently recognize his kindred with animals” (213-214). “If they were tenderly and rationally treated from their birth,” she continues, “I believe it would make a vast change in the development of their faculties and feelings” (214). The human should be “a companion and a friend”: on this point, see again her “Intelligence of Animals” where Child uses the same example of “Arabian horses” and their masters (214).