The like pervading guidance of taste by pecuniary repute is traceable
in the prevalent standards of beauty in animals. The part played by this
canon of taste in assigning her place in the popular aesthetic scale to
the cow has already been spokes of. Something to the same effect is
true of the other domestic animals, so far as they are in an appreciable
degree industrially useful to the community--as, for instance, barnyard
fowl, hogs, cattle, sheep, goats, draught-horses. They are of the
nature of productive goods, and serve a useful, often a lucrative end;
therefore beauty is not readily imputed to them. The case is different
with those domestic animals which ordinarily serve no industrial end;
such as pigeons, parrots and other cage-birds, cats, dogs, and fast
horses. These commonly are items of conspicuous consumption, and are
therefore honorific in their nature and may legitimately be accounted
beautiful. This class of animals are conventionally admired by the body
of the upper classes, while the pecuniarily lower classes--and that
select minority of the leisure class among whom the rigorous canon that
abjures thrift is in a measure obsolescent--find beauty in one class of
animals as in another, without drawing a hard and fast line of pecuniary
demarcation between the beautiful and the ugly. In the case of those
domestic animals which are honorific and are reputed beautiful, there
is a subsidiary basis of merit that should be spokes of. Apart from the
birds which belong in the honorific class of domestic animals, and which
owe their place in this class to their non-lucrative character alone,
the animals which merit particular attention are cats, dogs, and fast
horses. The cat is less reputable than the other two just named, because
she is less wasteful; she may even serve a useful end. At the same time
the cat's temperament does not fit her for the honorific purpose. She
lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of
status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of worth, honor,
and repute, and she does not lend herself with facility to an invidious
comparison between her owner and his neighbors. The exception to this
last rule occurs in the case of such scarce and fanciful products as
the Angora cat, which have some slight honorific value on the ground
of expensiveness, and have, therefore, some special claim to beauty on
pecuniary grounds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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