Mark Twain’s Book of Animals

AUTHOR: Twain, Mark

KEYWORDS: Abolition, animals, experimentation, race, slavery, vivisection, war, women's rights

Twain, Mark. The Pains of Lowly Life
Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Trixy

SUMMARY (Bryn Skibo, edited Deborah Madsen)

A central theme of Twain's writing concerns the reversal of human superiority in favor of other animals because humanity is cruel, greedy, and unable to do what is right, even while knowing right from wrong (a major difference between humanity and other animals). Several of Twain’s stories feature hunting or fighting, and both are usually presented negatively. Generally animals are to be treated very well, respected for their abilities (communicative, intellectual, and otherwise), while hunting for sport and sport-fighting are decidedly negative.

INTRODUCTION: Twain’s lifelong question was “what kind of animal was man after all? And what obligations - if any - did he owe the other creatures with whom he shared the earth?” (1). Twain grew up in a household which respected other living beings: his mother actively advocated for animal welfare, berating a cartman for abusing his horse and obliging him to promise not to do it again, adopting cats throughout the city, refusing to keep animals caged, and refusing to kill pests. This compassion influenced Twain, he wrote: “‘for more than fifty-five years I have not wantonly injured a dumb creature …’” (2). This started when Twain killed a songbird and felt “grief and remorse” (3). While Twain supported killing for food, he opposed killing for sport: “Despite his disapproval of the wanton cruelty that hunting as a sport condoned, Twain did not object to killing animals for food, … Given that adults in the nineteenth century often viewed boys’ killing small wild animals with approval – as ‘a rehearsal for the activities of manhood,’ as Katherine Grier has observed – Twain’s revulsion from hunting as sport or pastime is notable” (4). Some we love, some we eat: “Neither Twain nor Jean [his eldest daughter] avoided eating meat. But the issue … [of] what - and who - becomes ‘supper’ would trouble Twain well into his later years, as a piece like ‘The Victims’ clearly demonstrates” (6). “By the same token, Twain found that shining a spotlight on the cruelty with which humans treated animals could be a useful strategy for illuminating human hypocrisy, misplaced moral pride, and unwarranted sense of entitlement and superiority - qualities that became increasingly salient for Twain as the years wore on” (8).

Twain’s animal welfare pieces include the 1890 Letter to Anti-Vivisection Society (reprinted as The Pains of Lowly Life; “A Dog’s Tale”(1903 ); "A Horse’s Tale" (1905/6) and his reversal of human superiority in “Man’s Place in the Animal World” (1896): “I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the ‘lower animals’ (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the results profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that the theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals” (32).

PART ONE: 1850s and 1860s

“Cruelty to Animals I”:
Twain witnesses a cartman forcing his horse to pull an over-burdened cart to exhaustion and is surprised no bolt of lightning strikes him down: “It is likely Providence wasn’t noticing” (38).

“Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”:
Smiley is a man who owns a variety of animals on whom he gambles; most of them are fighting animals (dogs, cats, cocks), one is an asthmatic horse, and another is a jumping frog who is beaten because a stranger filled it with buckshot.

“Cruelty to Animals II”:
Twain’s letter on Henry Bergh and the newly-founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: “Nothing that concerns that happiness of a brute is a trifling matter with him – no brute of whatever position or standing, however plebian or insignificant, is beneath the range of his merciful interest” (46).

“Pilgrims on Horseback”:
“We pleaded for the tired, ill-treated horses, and tried to show that their faithful service deserved kindness in return, and their hard lot compassion. But when did ever self-righteousness know the sentiment of pity? What were a few long hours added to the hardships of some over-taxed brutes when weighed against the peril of those human souls? ... They must press on. Men might die, horses might die, but they must enter upon holy soil next week, with no Sabbath-breaking stain upon them. Thus they were willing to commit a sin against the spirit of religious law, in order that they might preserve the letter of it” (54).

PART TWO: 1870s and 1880s

“The ‘cocking-main’ is an inhuman sort of entertainment, there is no question about that; still, it seems a much more respectable and far less cruel sport than fox-hunting - for the cocks like it; they experience, as well as confer, enjoyment; which is not the fox’s case” (94).

PART THREE: 1890s–1910

“Letters from a Dog to Another Dog Explaining and Accounting for Man” (1891):
“I claim that a Dog placed in Man’s situation, and hampered by the myriad pathetic slaveries to which he is subject from his cradle, would gradually and surely deteriorate, and at least turn into a  thing which would be to all intents and purposes a Man” (99). “No Man has ever possessed that common and inviolable heritage of our race, Freedom of Conscience, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Action. ... I ask you, what would a Dog be without these. … as for free of action - why a Man’s cook can put limits to that” (99, 100). “Give a Man free of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of action, and he is a Dog; take them from a Dog and he is a Man” (100).
Chapter II:
“If we say that all Men are selfish - which is true - we do not need to add that all Men are also cruel; for that follows without argument” (100).
Chapter III
Twain reverses human superiority: “Man has exactly reversed our ancient Dog-philosophy of late, and claims that he has ascended - note that word - from us! From us and the rest of what he calls the ‘lower’ animals. Meaning, observe you, that this ascent has been from false to true, from coarse to fine, from ignoble to noble. It is certainly very odd, very curious, that man, who, during all these ages and aeons, has been universally and without dissent considered the base original from whom all the other animals have ascended, patiently conquering their way toward the perfection which they finally achieved, suddenly steps to the front and claims place as the latest result himself!” (101).
Chapter IV:
The “author” sets the following sins solely at Man’s feet: Malice, envy, ambition, lust of vengeance, cruelty, murder, immodesty, base spirit, boot-licking servility, slavery: “Slavery. No animal inflicts it but Man and the Ant; no animal endures it with contentment and transmits it to his posterity without shame but Man alone” (102).
Chapter V
The “author” groups nations as breeds: “Germans, French, English, Irish, Pawnees, Turks…” (103), reversing human exceptionalism: “Think of any nation among Men making serious claim to being the moral equals of the St. Bernard Dog” (103).
Chapter VI
A diatribe against monarchs and standing armies.

“The Sailors and the St. Bernard”:
Sailors take on a St. Bernard at port and the dog quickly becomes an adored member of the crew. He saves their lives one night when a fire breaks out near powder kegs; as the ship burns, the captain loads everyone into the lifeboats but ties the dog to the mast because it would be too costly in space and food to bring him with them. The crew try to rebel but the captain pulls his pistol on them. The dog cries for them, before being consumed by flames. They feel this will come back to them. They are rescued quickly afterwards; so the dog was killed unnecessarily. The rescuing ship lost its captain and part of the crew to sickness, so the rescued captain takes over. They sail into doldrums and do not advance for days. One day, they spy a ship and are convinced they have been saved, but it is a dead ship; the crew died over 12 years ago: “[i]t was our fate foreshadowed” (116).

“Man’s Place in the Animal World”:
The narrator reverses human superiority: “I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the ‘lower animals’ (so-called), and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals” (117).

The premise of the text is the narrator’s use of the scientific method to differentiate between species, taking the following to be true:
There is one species of humans, though they differ in race, mental acuity, etc. Most quadrapeds are the same, though they differ in food preferences, etc. Reptiles, fish, etc. are also approximately the same. With this in mind, the narrator sets out some of his experiments on differentiating and establishing the hierarchy of animals. An earl was taken on a buffalo hunt where, for “sport,” they killed 72 buffalo but only ate part of one: “They had charming sport” (118). The narrator allowed an anaconda to eat 7 calves, but it stopped at 1 and could not be persuaded to eat more. The earl, then, “wantonly destroys what he has no use for, but the anaconda doesn’t” (118).

Similarly, the narrator finds that other animals accumulate stores of food, but do not hoard their wealth beyond what they need to survive (unlike wealthy humans). In respect to women’s rights: “Roosters keep harems, but it is by consent of their concubines; therefore no wrong is done. Men keep harems, but it is by brute force, privileged by atrocious laws which the other sex were allowed no hand in making. In this matter man occupies a lower place than the rooster” (119). The narrator cites a variety of historical and geographical examples of human brutality to the human “other”: Native Americans gouging prisoners’ eyes, kings killing their familial rivals, zealots torturing nonbelivers, etc. (119). “Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. It is a trait that is not known to the higher animals” (119). Similarly, humanity is the only animal “that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War” (120) and, in relation to colonialism, “Man is the only animal that robs his helpless fellow of his country - takes possession of it and drives him out of it or destroys him” (120) and slavery: “Man is the only Slave. And he is the only animal who enslaves” (120).  “Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, … and sneers at the other nations…” (121). “He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight” (121). Mankind claims to have reason (the narrator finds that humanity comes last when judged by its own priorities), but is foolish (the narrator claims to have locked a variety of animals in one cage, and they made friends, but to have locked a varieties of nationalities and religion in another, and they killed each other), and morality (which is what makes man do wrong; in some cases, the French, they have immorality, which makes them even worse). Mankind suffers dreadfully from diseases of many kinds which inflict humans of any age; animals generally die from old age.

“Hunting the Deceitful Turkey”:
Twain writes about a turkey hunt he experienced as a boy, where he vowed to take a turkey alive, and so chased it through the woods for over ten hours before she flew to the top of a tree and looked down on him with what he considered amusement. The adult hunters would sometimes “stun” a squirrel by shooting a branch above the one on which the squirrel was hiding, hit the squirrel, and let the dogs shake it to death when it fell. If they accidentally shot the squirrel in the head in the process, they would not put it in the kill bag out of hunter pride (136).

“Letter to the Anti-Vivisection Society” (reprinted as The Pains of Lowly Life):
A forceful denunciation of the practice of vivisection and the practitioners of vivisection to the point where Twain outright rejects experimentation on living, conscious animals, despite any findings which may come from it.

“The Victims”:
Much like ““Man’s Place in the Animal World,” Twain charts an upward trajectory of beings, based on what they hunt: from molecules to anthrax to spiders and pill bugs to sparrows, foxes, and Sierra Lions, and to elephants, each killing and eating the next smallest as they need. The final entry is “Little Jimmy Gem-of-the-Creation Man” who, like all the “child” creatures before him, “begged” to go to a picnic, and while he is away, the parent hunts the necessary meal for dinner. Except the human parent (here a father) hunts other humans: he “...hid behind a rock and shot little Jumbo Jackson dead with a magazine rifle and took his tusks and traded them to an Arab land-pirate for a cargo of captive black women and children and sold them to a good Christian planter who promised to give them religious instruction and considerable to do, and blest the plantar and shook hands good-bye, and said ‘By cracky this is the way to extend our noble civilization,’ and loaded up again and Went for More” (143-144). The lesson of the simple story is, like “Man’s Place in the Animal World,” that humans are the only animals to practice cruelty, murder of their own kind, enslave, and act from greed.

“Extract from Adam’s Diary: Translated from the Original MS”:
A humorous journal narrative from Adam about meeting Eve, not know who or what she is, how she eventually gets them expelled from Eden, their eventual family, and his perplexity over what the animal is that Eve has found. He believes it to be a fish, then a kangaroo, then a bear. When Cain is born and grows up, Adam admits that “if Cain had stayed a bear it would have improved him” (149).

“Assassin”:
A short paragraph explaining how it is that Twain does not hunt or injure dumb creatures anymore. While his mother admonished him from hunting, he did it anyway, and one day killed a songbird mid-song: “its song quenched and its unoffending life extinguished. I had not needed that harmless creature, I had destroyed it wantonly, and I felt all that an assassin feels, of grief and remorse when his deed comes home to him and he wishes he could undo it and have his hands and his soul clean again from accusing blood. One department of my education theretofore long and diligently and fruitlessly labored upon, was closed by that single application of an outside and unsalaried influence” (155).

“The Jungle Discusses Man”:
The Fox, having returned from distant and foreign lands, tells the other animals about humans, beginning with Christian missionaries and soldiers (they taste good because they praise themselves every day) and discussing clothes (the animals find it silly that humans wear clothes even if it is not cold). “‘It must be a dirty-minded animal that will be nasty in God’s presence and ashamed to be nasty in the presence of his own kind’” (158).

“Was the World Made for Man?”:
The narrator stands slightly to the side of public and scientific opinion, believing that it is likely that the world was made for Man, but it is important to wait for all the evidence first. The narrator explains the geological creation of the world, stage by stage, in groupings of hundreds of millions of years, beginning with the oyster, since the oyster was clearly made for mankind: “It was foreseen that man would have to have the oyster. Therefore the first preparation was made for the oyster. ... An oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a scientist has; and so it is reasonably certain that this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen-million year was a preparation for him; but that would be just like any oyster, which is the most conceited animal there is, except man” (162-163).

“The Edisons of the Animal World”:
A dialogue between a Young Man and an Old Man; the former argues for human superiority while the latter argues against, producing stories and evidence of animals learning, having excellent memories, building finer (larger, proportionally) homes than “uncivilized” or “savage” peoples do, etc. Finally: “The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot” (195).

"A Horse’s Tale":
Told initially from the perspective of Soldier Boy, Buffalo Bill’s war horse on the plains, the story moves eventually to bull-fighting, which is then compared to lynchings. When a timid bull is brought to the ring, the crowd disapproves that the bull’s legs are severed and this produces comedy, with one man saying he “‘laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks to see it. When he has furnished all the sport he can, he is not any longer useful and is killed’” (224-225). To this, his interlocutor responds: “‘Well, it is perfectly grand, Antonio, perfectly beautiful. Burning a nigger don’t begin’” (225). The horse, Soldier Boy, is stolen from his base, taken to Spain, and traded repeatedly until he becomes a mount for bullfighters. A little girl whom he loved sees him in the ring as he is gored, and she races to his side, where he dies. The bull hits the little girl, and she also dies.