Alice and Animal Ethics

I’ve realized over the course of my life that the key to animal ethics is compassion for animals: to act as if they have feelings and needs just as human beings do. All my life, I have winced in the movies where the animals get hurt.

When Old Yeller had to be shot because of a disease he contracted, I was sad and angry. When the one of the two dogs from Where The Red Fern Grows died, I felt the pain of his little sister and how she could not carry on without her big brother. Animals have feelings as well and that is the first step to truly realizing that mistreating animals is like mistreating human beings.

One major trend I’ve noticed is that children are usually more sympathetic to animals than adults are. Combined with a greater sense of imagination as well as a tendency to be naturally compassionate (due to their innocence I presume), children, no matter how they end up as they get older (hunter or vegetarian, PETA or peta—people for the eating of tasty animals), are more likely to sympathize with animals. For example, my mom and step-dad are considerably unsympathetic toward animals. They like them well enough, but lack compassion for them and my step-dad even sees is as a “weakness of character” (Course Anthology 322). However, my brother, who has been brought up to be very rough, manly, and conservative, is very compassionate toward animals just as I am. When he was about 7 years old, we watched a movie called Far From Home together. In the movie, the dog helps the main character survive in a forest while trying to make his way back home after a shipwreck. Near the end of their journey, the dog falls from a very great height into a river and appears to die (even though he survives and makes it home in the end). My brother, watching alongside me, began to cry at this part. His behavior definitely contradicted how he had been brought up (it leaned toward my behavior) and my only reasoning behind this was that children sympathize easily with animals. Also, Alice shows her understanding of animals when she is talking to the dormouse. While talking with the dormouse, Alice more than once accidentally talks about cats and the eating of mice and rats, which of course makes the dormouse anxious and upset. However, Alice regards the dormouse as a being with feelings and understands that she may have “hurt the poor animal’s feelings” (Carroll 26). Thus, the treatment of animals is a definite aspect of the Alice books, especially because all the animals convey their feelings through speech, which is more difficult in real life.

Due to their imagination, children often talk to animals as if they can understand them, which I am convinced that they can. Although they may not understand exactly what you are telling them, I’ve always felt that animals can understand if you’re hurt or sad or excited and share your emotion in a way that makes animals special companions to us. Alice likes to talk to her cat in Through the Looking Glass as though it can understand everything she is saying and shares her thoughts very freely with it. In a way, Alice may be using the kitten as something to take care of. Young girls often like to have something to take care of and in the way that Alice refers to the kitten as “Kitty, dear” and “mischievous darling” (Carroll 139, 141), I would believe that Alice likes to give back to animals because of the companionship they give her. Companionship is another way of accepting animals as more than just what we had for lunch. Many people learn to accept animals as their best friends or members of their family, proving that they see animals “more and more the aspect of gentle friends” (Course Anthology 320). By accepting animals as friends, Alice, and people in general, are displaying a good sense of animal ethics.

Animals are a huge aspect of human life. Rescue dogs save lives every day, service dogs guide the blind and deaf, but most importantly, they are a part of many people’s every day life. Arriving home to find a friendly dog wagging its tail in greeting or curling up on the couch with a little kitten are two of many ways that animals can have a positive impact on someone’s everyday life. People can improve on animal ethics simply by accepting animals as our companions and trying to understand them as creatures with feelings and needs. As important as animals are to the human race, they deserve better treatment and more consideration, which I think is evident in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.