People like to think they understand animals. Parents teach their toddlers to speak by quacking like ducks, oinking like pigs, and mooing like cows, which is, when you consider it, a strange way to learn a language. In classic children’s books, characters team up with critters, usually dogs, but sometimes spiders and pigs, as in E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, or beavers and lions, as in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. But what do animals think about when people are not around? And what would they say if they could speak in their own right?
More than other genres, fables take the measure of animal-human relations. In them, critical moral instructions are distilled from the behaviour of animals. Aesop’s clever parables, like “The Tortoise and the Hare,” probably freed him from slavery. In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a man, disgusted by his own species, hangs out with a race of superbly intelligent horses. As he realizes...
Allan Hepburn is the James McGill Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University.
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