of five years and nine months had a kitten of which he was very fond. One day, after two or three days' absence from the house, it came back with one foot much mutilated and the leg swollen, evidently not far from dying. "When" (writes the mother) "he saw it, he burst into uncontrollable tears, and was more affected than I have ever seen him. The kitten was taken away and drowned, and ever since (a month) he has shown great reluctance in speaking of it, and never mentions it to any one but those who saw the cat at the time. He says it is too sad to tell any one of it." The boy C, when only four, was moved to passionate grief at the sight of a dead dog taken from a pond.
The righteous indignation of children at the doings of the butcher, the hunter, and others, which deserves a chapter to itself, shows how deeply pitiful consideration for animals is rooted in their hearts.
It is sometimes asked why children should take animals to their bosoms in this fashion, and lavish so much fellow-feeling on them. It seems easy to understand how they come to choose animals, especially young ones, as playmates, and now and again to be ruthlessly inconsiderate of their comfort in their boisterous gambols; but why should they be so affected by their sufferings and champion their rights so zealously? I think the answer is not hard to find. The sympathy and love which the child gives to animals grows out of a kind of blind, gregarious instinct, and this again seems to be rooted in a similarity of position and needs. As M. Compayré well says on this point: "He (the child) sympathizes naturally with creatures which resemble him on so many sides, in which he finds wants analogous to his own, the same appetite, the same impulses to movement, the same desire for caresses. To resemble is already to love."[1] I think, however, that a deeper feeling comes in from the first and gathers strength as the child hears about men's treatment of animals I mean a sense of a common danger and helplessness face to face with the human "giants." The more passionate attachment of the child to the animal is the outcome of the widespread instinct of helpless things to band together. A mother once remarked to her boy, between five and six years old, "Why, R, I believe you are kinder to the animals than to me!" "Perhaps I am" (he replied); "you see they are not so well off as you are." May there not be something of this sense of banding and mutual defense on the animals' side too? The idea does not look so absurd when we remember how responsive, how forbearing, how ready to defend a dog will often show itself toward a "wee mite" of a child.
The same outpourings of affection are seen in the dealings of
- ↑ Op. tit., p. 108.
