But much more difficult to contend with than any anti-humanitarian arguments is the dull dead weight of that unreasoning prejudice which cannot see consanguinity except in the conventional forms, and simply does not comprehend the statement that “the animals” are our fellow-beings. There are numbers of good and kindly folk with whom, on this question, one never reaches the point of difference at all, but is involved in impenetrable misapprehensions: there may be talking on either side, but communication there is none. Tell them, in Howard Moore’s words, that the non-human beings are “not conveniences but cousins,” and they will answer, assentingly, that they are all in favour of “kindness to animals”; after which they will continue to treat them not as cousins but as conveniences. This impossibility of even making oneself intelligible was brought home to me with great force, some years ago, in connection with the death of a very dear friend, a cat, whose long life of fifteen years had to be ended in the chloroform-box owing to an incurable ailment. The veterinary surgeon whose aid I invoked was an extremely kind man, for whose skill I shall always feel grateful; and from his patience and sympathetic manner I thought he partly understood what the occasion meant to me--that, like a human death-bed, it was a scene that could never pass from the mind. It was, therefore, with something of an amused shock that I recollected, after he had gone, what I had hardly noticed at the moment, that he had said to me, as he left the door: “You’ll be wanting a new pussy-cat soon.” Richard Jefferies has remarked that the belief that animals are devoid of reason is rarely held by those who themselves labour in the fields: “It is the cabinet-thinkers who construct a universe of automatons.” One is cheered now and then by hearing animals spoken of, quite simply and naturally, as rational beings. I once made the acquaintance, in the Lake District, of an old lady living in a roadside cottage, who had for her companion, sitting in an armchair by the fire, a lame hen, named Tetty, whom she had saved and reared from chicken-hood. Some years later, as I passed that way, I called and inquired after Tetty, but learnt that she was dead. “Ah, poor Tetty!” said the dame, as tears fell from her eyes; “she passed away several months ago, quite conscious to the end.” That to attribute to a dying bird the self-consciousness which is supposed to be the special prerogative of mankind, should, to the great majority of persons, appear nothing less than comical, is a measure of the width of that gulf which religion has delved between “the beasts that perish” and the Christian with his “soul” to save.