Mark Twain's Notebook (1835-1910)
AUTHOR: Twain, Mark
https://archive.org/details/marktwainsnotebo0000twai_q3r3/page/n7/mode/2up
KEYWORDS: Abolition, animal welfare, anthropocentrism, food, vivisection
---. The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau
SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)
In his notebook, Mark Twain expresses concern for animal welfare and repeatedly compares animals favorably to humans, maintaining that “[t]here are no wild animals till man makes them so” (372). He criticizes the anthropocentric worldview, often inverting the hierarchy: non-human animals are repeatedly presented as more intelligent and morally superior, as when he writes that
[m]an has been called the laughing animal, to distinguish him from the others, but the monkey laughs and he has been called the animal that weeps – but several of the others do that. Man is merely and exclusively the Immodest Animal, for he is the only one who covers his nakedness, the only one with a soiled mind, the only one under the dominion of a false shame (242).
On another occasion, he reports that Joseph Twichell sent him a newspaper article “in which it is said that I am living in penury in London and that my family has forsaken me. This would enrage and disgust me if it came from a dog or a cow, or an elephant or any other of the higher animals, but it comes from a man, and much allowance must be made for man” (327).