"Better Friends": Marshall Saunders Writing Humane Education and Envisioning Animal Rights

To alter the stories about animals that we read to our children will not be so easy, since cruelty is not an ideal subject for children's stories. Yet it should be possible to avoid the most gruesome details, and still give children picture books and stories that encourage respect for animals as independent beings, and not as cute little objects that exist for our amusement and table.

(Singer, Animal Liberation)

My boys, in caring for these dumb creatures, have become unselfish and thoughtful. They had rather go to school without their own breakfast than have the inmates of the stable go hungry. They are getting a humane education, a heart education.

(Saunders, Beautiful Joe)

Between 1893 and 1927, Margaret Marshall Saunders (1861–1947) published twenty-four books, most of them narratives about animals written for young people. Her first book, Beautiful Joe, a Dog's Own Story, was the first Canadian book to sell more than a million copies, and Saunders remains one of the best-known and favourite Canadian authors of literature for children and young adults. "With its emphasis on the alleviation of animal abuse," Gwen Davies contends in her introduction to the 2001 Formac edition, "Beautiful Joe established themes that would be redeveloped in one form or another in Saunders's twenty-three subsequent novels" (vi). In her attention to alleviating animal suffering, Saunders closely follows the thought of Jeremy Bentham, who argues, "The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" To this end, her body of writing for children develops a trenchant set of pedagogies and rhetorical strategies in support of humane education. In my epigraph, animal-rights activist Peter Singer notes the importance of teaching children to consider the interests of animals. Writing several decades before Singer, Saunders worked toward this goal throughout her career as she navigated among conflicting cultural discourses about animals and developed her conclusions about the place of non-human animals in a moral system and about how to consider animals for their own sakes.

Saunders was not, however, without her own conflicts about animals and their rights, and it is in these conflicts that her fiction is most interesting and relevant. Through her body of work, Saunders tacitly organized an ethics of animal rights, an undertaking as difficult for her as it is for us and many of our leading thinkers today. For example, in "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights," Emmanuel Levinas tells the story of Bobby, a dog who faithfully greeted Levinas and the rest of his unit of prisoners at work in a Nazi labour camp. Levinas details how Bobby, by meeting them morning and evening with his barking and wagging, restored humanity to the men, who "despite all their vocabulary [were] beings without a language," but he concludes by declaring Bobby "the last Kantian in Nazi Germany" (153). As Paola Cavalieri makes clear, Levinas's definition of the dog as Kantian "derogates Bobby himself: for a nonhuman animal to be a Kantian means to accept one's status as a thing" (103). John Llewelyn is even more emphatic as he considers both Levinas and Kant on humanism and ethics and comes to the conclusion that "there is no place for direct responsibility to Bobby here" (191–92). Like Levinas, Saunders was absolutely certain about the ability of animals to bring out the humanity in humans, about their gift for making us better than we otherwise might have been. While she worked to move past valuing animals only for what they can do for us, in order to value them for themselves, Saunders often followed hierarchical western thought and depicted animals as things. In Beautiful Joe, she argues that cruelty to animals is never acceptable, but she also depicts animals as objects for human pleasure, "for our amusement and table," as Singer puts it (215). Saunders reconsidered that stance in her fiction in later discussions of vegetarianism and in her movements from endorsing to condemning the use of performing animals. Although other scholars have made meaningful analyses of her conflicts...