Qualities without Defects (1910)

AUTHOR: Howells, William Dean

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

The essay briefly touches on animal welfare within a broader discussion of duty. It opens with two fictional characters sitting on a bench in Central Park, New York, observing “a man feeding a squirrel with peanuts.” That the “squirrel had climbed up the leg of the man's trousers” (156) in order to be fed, one of the friends considers symptomatic of the detrimental effects of human civilization that reduces these animals “from their native independence to something like the condition of those pauper wards of the nation on our Indian Reservations, to whom a blurred image of the chase offers itself at stated intervals in the slaughter of the Government's dole of beef-cattle” (156).

The two friends then enter into a conversation about “[k]indness to animals” (156), which one of them relates back to the “eighteenth-century … universal humanitarian movement,” Abolition, and prison reform, “when the master began to ask himself whether the slave was not also a man and a brother, and the philanthropist visited the frightful prisons of the day and remembered those in bonds as bound with them” (157). The conversation touches on earlier instances of “benevolence toward dumb creatures,” including the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi; the high regard of certain animals like “cats, crocodiles, cows … among the Egyptians”; the status of the “serpent” in certain forms of “popular religion”; the kindness that the Stoics apparently extended to animals, as well as that evidenced in romantic poetry (157-158). The conversation then focuses on a much more general comparison of Stoic and Christian morality and the notion of duty. This, however, prompts one of the friends to return to the question of kindness to animals, claiming: “If I really loved that squirrel, if I were truly kind to animals, if I studied their best good, as disagreeable friends say they study ours, I should go after him and give him a hickory-nut that would wear down his teeth as nature intended; civilization is undermining the health of squirrels by feeding them peanuts, which allow their teeth to overgrow” (162). The two friends then return to the more general question of duty.