Animals exhibit examples of sociability, courage, resource, and again, of cowardice and viciousness. Why do we not say of one tree that it is less teachable than another, as we say that a sheep is less teachable than a dog? It is, of course, because plants cannot think, and where the faculty of thought is wholly wanting, there cannot be more or less quickness or slowness, more or less of good qualities or of bad. Yet it must be allowed that man’s intelligence is amazingly superior to that of animals. But what does that prove? Do not some animals leave man far behind in the keenness of their sight and the sharpness of their hearing? Shall we say, therefore, that man is blind or deaf? We have some strength in our hands and in our bodies although we are not elephants or camels. In the same way, we should be careful not to infer that animals lack all reasoning faculties from the fact that their intelligence is duller and more defective than man’s. “Boatfuls” of true stories can be cited to show the docility and special aptitudes of the different children of creation. And a very amusing occupation it is, says Plutarch, for young people to collect such stories. In the course of his work, he sets them a good example, for he brings together a real “boatful” of anecdotes of clever beasts, but at this point he contents himself with observing that madness in dogs and other animals would be alone sufficient to show that they had some mind: otherwise, how could they go out of it? The stoics who taught the strictest humanity to animals rejected, nevertheless, the supposition that animals had reason, for how, they asked, can such a theory be reconciled with the idea of eternal justice? Would it not make abstinence from their flesh imperative and entail consequences which would make our life impracticable? If we were to give up using animals for our own purposes, we should be reduced ourselves almost to the condition of brutes. “What works would be left for us to do by land or sea, what industries to cultivate, what embellishments of our way of living, if we regarded animals as reasonable beings and our fellow-creatures, and hence adopted the rule (which, clearly, would be only proper) to do them no harm and to study their convenience.” Many a sensitive modern soul has pondered over this crux without finding a satisfactory solution. Plutarch says that Empedocles and Heraclites admitted the injustice, and laid it to the door of Nature which permits or ordains a state of war and necessity, in which nothing is accomplished without the weaker going to the wall. For himself, he would propose to those “who, instead of disputing, gently follow and learn” the better way out of the difficulty—which was introduced by the Sages of Antiquity, then long lost, and found again by Pythagoras. This better way is to use animals as our helpers but to refrain from taking life.