Letters of Lydia Maria Child (1882)

AUTHOR: Child, Lydia Maria

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

In some of her letters, Child emphasizes animal sentience and cognition, and voices her support for animal welfare. She does not question human superiority, however, but argues for compassion and benevolence based on this 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). Human superiority is thus not only a fact for Child, but it would even hold if there was no barrier between the human and animal worlds. Child's interest in animals primarily derives from a thirst for knowledge, and her 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”; Child even uses the same example of “Arabian horses” and their masters (214).