Lewis Carroll's Magnifying Glass on Animal Treatment

Throughout elementary school and all the way through 9th grade I was the proud “mother” of my two guinea pigs, CJ and Laser. They were brothers but looked completely different – CJ was black and white and Laser was completely white with sharp red eyes (hence the name “Laser”…). Though they mostly ate, slept, and ran around in our garage, I absolutely adored them. My little brother and I would spend hours every night cleaning their cage, cutting carrots and celery to give them as treats, and creating obstacle courses made out of “Legos” around our garage for them to run through. I’m not sure how it started, but soon after we received the guinea pigs as gifts from a friend, my family and I began a strange ritual of making up voices for the animals since, really, they didn’t seem to have much of a personality to us at that point. We gave them both heavy Brooklyn accents (again, no clue as to what was going through our minds at this point…_) and made up little conversations they could be having with each other and with us as we watched them eating hay or “popcorning” (the phrase guinea pig lovers know as describing the way they jump around when they’re excited or happy) around the garage. “Shhhpinn,” (oh yeah, they also had a lisp…) my mom would exclaim as she pretended to be CJ, “please feed me! And not any of that gross celery either, I want apples!”(Me playing some kind of game with little CJ when he was about 4 years old). After we spent more time with CJ and Laser and learned more about their individual personalities, the “voices” we made up for them seemed less necessary, yet the habit stuck.

As I read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and took note of the way he anthropomorphizes the creatures in both books to the point where they can talk like humans, walk like humans, and basically are humans, I was immediately reminded of what my family and I did with our guinea pigs. Why does Carroll give the animals in each story the ability to talk? Well, why did my mom choose to have Laser the guinea pig ask me about how a history test went as I fed him? The sad truth is, we as humans find it difficult to relate to animals on even a basic level. Especially, I think, is this true with pets, for we feed them, we keep their environment clean, we control much of their lifestyle. We are in a position of power over them to the point where it is difficult to put ourselves on their level and truly understand what is going on in their minds. This is not to say that we do not bond with them, as Alice does with her cat Dinah. Yet Alice’s relationship with Dinah is one of master and pet, she scolds and speaks to Dinah as though she is nothing but….well, her pet. But if animals could talk in real life, as they do in Wonderland and the Looking Glass world, it would certainly be easier to see them as having the same feelings and basic rights as we do. We begin to think, subconsciously I would hope, as Carroll suggests, “that man is infinitely more important than the lower animals.” (Course Anthology, 324). Alice, even, treats the animals she comes in contact with in both stories much the same as people in the real world do. There are instances where she talks down to the animals, as she does when she argues with the Pigeon in Wonderland, instances in which she insults them, as she does when she cruelly asks the mouse “Ou est ma chatte?” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 26). For me, the most obvious example of Alice considering these animals to be “lower” than herself, is when she chooses to kick Bill the lizard, “…to see what would happen next.” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 43). Carroll uses the narrow-minded lens through which Alice views the animals around her to make obvious that treatment of animals as if they are worth less than we as humans, or as if their feelings are any less real or important as ours, is simply wrong. I believe he emphasizes this by making these animals as human-like as possible – so we as readers could take out the descriptions of the animals, replace them with human descriptions, and read the book never knowing that Alice was kicking a talking lizard named Bill but rather kicking a talking person named Bill. Would Alice kick a man named Bill for no obvious reason? I doubt it. Carroll’s human/animal parallel is drawn effectively in this way.
While reading Carroll’s works, I began to ask myself what I thought about animal cruelty and, more importantly, what defined it. One of my guinea pigs, CJ, had to be put down after he suffered a sort of stroke. At the time, I couldn’t understand how my parents could condone the murder (as I saw it) of my little animal. Of course, I now understand the act of putting animals out of pain to be a reasonable and good practice. Jude, from Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the obscure”, felt the same way when he “could rest no longer until he had put [the rabbit] out of its pain [… and so] he struck the rabbit on the back of the neck with the side of his palm, and it stretched itself out dead.” (Course Anthology, 222).

(Since you are all familiar with my LOST obsession by now, I thought I'd share this clip in which the character Ben displays several unnecessary forms of animal cruelty [assuming you count stuffing an animal in a bag, giving it a sedative with no cause, and possible murder via fright as animal cruelty...] - quite the opposite of Jude's treatment of a rabbit in his life!) The issue of animal cruelty starts to get messy when it comes to things like hunting, eating, capturing and enclosing animals in a zoo, and more. Carroll touches most on is the eating of animals, as referenced in the scenes in which Alice is scolded for eating a piece of mutton with whom she has had a conversation of, “Mutton– Alice: Alice – Mutton.” (Through the Looking Glass, 262). Carroll chooses to capitalize the word “Mutton” in another attempt to anthropomorphize an animal in order to further his feelings that the eating of animals is a practice he does not approve of. I'd be willing to bet that, were Alice introduced to a live sheep, she wouldn't even consider eating it.

(Hmmm....before....image courtesy of http://www.recollections.nma.gov.au/shared/libraries/images/temporary_exhibitions/farmers_stories/mitchell/pet_sheep_large/files/17634/Pet-sheep_w480.jpg)

(...and after. Think I've lost my appetite. image courtesy of:http://img.chinaa2z.com/uploadpic/AboutChina/20070924/200709241114171574/2007071101394132849.jpg))

Overall, I was most touched and impressed by the way in which Carroll allows the reader to sympathize with the animals in his story by showing them cruel or, at best, hypocritical behavior on Alice’s part. Certainly the strength of his convictions have caused me to look deep into certain decisions I make regarding animals that do not usually cross my mind; decisions like eating meat, sitting idly by when my brother goes hunting, or even picking my cat up to play with while she is sleeping comfortably in the corner. I think that was one of Carroll’s goal with his Alice books – to allow us to examine our own convictions and question our own ideals, especially with respect to animals.