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Animals

“I knew him by his voice”: Can Animals Be Our Friends?

Stephen Clark examines how far Aristotle’s concept of friendship might apply to animals, among themselves and between us and them.

One of the stories told about Pythagoras is that he rebuked a man who was beating a dog, with the words “That’s a friend of mine – I knew him by his voice.” The story is told to illustrate, maybe to mock, the Pythagorean belief in metempsychosis – the thought that souls migrate into new bodies when their present body dies. But let this pass: metempsychosis isn’t my concern. I shall also not be addressing (neo-)Cartesian arguments against animals having consciousness, beliefs, desires and affections. I shall take it for granted that no reader seriously disputes the thesis that vertebrates, at any rate, have a point of view, are conscious – that there is ‘something it is like’ to be a bat, a cat or a crocodile.

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