As to the servitude of animals and the labor we impose on them, its justification lies first in the principle of legitimate self-defense, to which we have just now alluded. Many of our domestic races would, in a savage state, become veritable wild beasts. The wild hog is, they say, the wild boar; the wild dog, the jackal; the wild cat belongs to the leopard and tiger family. In reducing these sorts of animals to servitude, and in making of them companions and help-mates in our work, we thereby deliver ourselves from dangerous enemies. Domestication is better than destruction. Add to this, that if we except the first animals which have passed from the savage state to the domestic state (which, as to our domestic races, is lost in the night of time and escapes all responsibility), the present animals, born in servitude, know no other state, do not suffer from a want of liberty, and find even, thanks to our cares, a more certain subsistence than if they were free. They are, it is true, sacrificed by us to our wants, but they would be so by other animals in the savage state. Whether a sheep be eaten by men or wolves, it is not to be more pitied for that, one way or the other. The right of man over animals being set aside, there remains an essential duty respecting them, namely: not to make them suffer without necessity. Fontenelle relates that, having gone one day to see Malebranche,[55] at the fathers of the _Oratoire_, a dog of the house, big with young, entered the room and rolled about at the feet of the father. After having tried in vain to drive it away, Malebranche gave the dog a kick which caused it to utter a cry of pain and Fontenelle a cry of compassion: "Oh, pshaw!" said father Malebranche, coolly, "do you not know that these things do not feel?" How could this philosopher be sure that _these things_ did not feel? Is not the animal organized in the same manner as man? Has he not the same senses, the same nervous system? Does he not give the same signs of impressions received? Why should not the cry of the animal express pain as does the cry of a child? When man is not perverted by custom, cruelty, or the spirit of system, he cannot see the sufferings of animals without suffering himself, a manifest proof that there is something in common between them and us, for sympathy is by reason of similitude.