Plutarch, De sollertia animalium
Harold Cherniss and William C. Helmbold, Ed.

Soclarus. Yet it is astonishing how greatly man surpasses the animals in his capacity for learning and in sagacity and in the requirements of justice and social life.

Autobulus. There are in fact, my friend, many animals wliich surpass all men, not only in bulk and swiftness, but also in keen sight and sharp hearing¹; but for all that man is not blind or crippled or earless. We can run, if less swiftly than deer ; and see, if less keenly than hawks ; nor has Nature deprived us of strength and bulk even though, by comparison with, the elephant and the camel, we amount to nothing in these matters.² In the same way, then, let us not say of beasts that they are completely lacking in intellect and understanding and do not possess reason even though their understanding is less acute and their intellect inferior to ours ; what we should say is that their intellect, is feeble and turbid, like a dim and clouded eye. And if I did not expect that our young men, learned and studious as they are, would very shortly present us here, one with a large collection of examples drawn from the land, the other with his from the sea, I should not have denied myself the pleasure of giving you countless examples of the docility and native capacity of beasts - of which fair Rome³ has provided us a reservoir from which to draw in pails and buckets, [p. 345] as it were, from the imperial spectacles. Let us leave this subject, therefore, fresh and untouched for them to exercise their art upon in discourse.

There is, however, one small matter which I should like to discuss with you quietly. It is my opinion that each part and faculty has its own particular weakness or defect or ailment which appears in nothing else, as blindness in the eye, lameness in the leg, stuttering in the tongue. There can be no blindness in an organ which was not created to see, or lameness in a part which was not designed for walking ; nor would you ever describe an animal without a tongue as stuttering, or one voiceless by nature as inarticulate. And in the same way you would not call delirious or witless or mad anything that was not endowed by Nature with reason or intelligence or understanding ; for it is impossible to ail where you have no faculty of which the ailment is a deficiency or loss or some other kind of impairment. Yet certainly you have encountered mad dogs, and I have also known of mad horses; and there are some who say that cattle and foxes also go mad.⁴ But dogs will do, since no one questions the fact in their case, which provides evidence that the creature possesses reason and a by no means despicable intellectual faculty. What is called rabies and madness is an ailment of that faculty when it becomes disturbed and disordered. For we observe no derangement either of the dogs' sight or of their hearing; yet, just as when a human being suffers from melancholy or insanity, anyone is absurd who does not admit that it is the organ that thinks and reasons and remembers which has been displaced or damaged (we habitually say, in fact, of madmen that they ‘are [p. 347] not themselves,’ but have ‘fallen out of their wits’), just so, whoever believes that rabid dogs have any other ailment than an affliction of their natural organ of judgement and reason and memory so that, when this has become infected with disorder and insanity, they no longer recognize beloved faces and shun their natural haunts - such a man, I say, either must be disregarding the evidence or, if he does take note of the conclusion to which it leads, must be quarrelling with the truth.⁵