Taking Their Freedom; Taking Our Humanity 3-12

Good people get cheated, just as good horses get ridden. ~Chinese Proverb

The use of the first person in the tale of Black Beauty can at times cover the windows of insight it seeks to create. I know that the voice is meant to be somewhat hypothetical -- certainly, horses do not converse in the same way that humans do. The voice is at times so "human" that it becomes questionable whether the novel is truly representative of an animal's opinion. Thus a wall cannot help but be constructed because we know, as readers, that the narrative voice is somewhat faulty. At the same time, by giving the horse a voice, the author is constructing a window of insight into a horse's mind and calling for a more ethical treatment of animals. Literally coming from the horse's mouth, the ethical standards of treatment Black Beauty lays out must be taken as truth.

There is a wrong and a right way to treat animals, according to Black Beauty. Even if Black Beauty is confined to wear a bit in his mouth and a saddle across his back, he outlines ethical treatment within such restrictions, noting after that "if any one wants to break in a young horse well, that is the way." "That is the way" suggests that there is no other ethical way for a human to break in a horse. Moreover, because Black Beauty outlines his "breaking in" so specifically, he provides no excuse for people who stray from such an ethical path.

If Black Beauty's word was not enough, the little old man who washes him later in the novel provides further evidence for the reader. After he notes that he can tell how a horse was raised within the first "twenty minutes"(57), he talks of how "fidgety, fretty" and "afraid of you" the ones who were abused are. According to him, "their tempers are mostly made when they are young," making this period of "breaking in" appear extremely crucial to a horse's existence. This combination of human and animal opinion throughout Black Beauty is an extremely effective means of communicating the importance of compassion for animals.

I could read a thousand scientific articles about what distinguishes animal from human. But, in the end, it seems to be books like Black Beauty and films like "Earthlings" that end up mattering for me. I believe that, by and large, ethics is a gut feeling. It is with the nausea I felt watching animals being abused in Earthlings and reading about Ginger's maltreatment in Black Beauty that I know my humanity must rest, at least slightly, on my treatment of animals.

This picture depicts the painful bearing rein Ginger was often forced to wear (on the left), keeping a horse carrying a heavy load from stretching its neck. It is juxtaposed against the "gentle man's horse" who is allowed free movement as it pulls a load.

The most important quote I found to be in Black Beauty is when Black Beauty's master says to Sawyer, a man who has just injured his very own innocent pony,
"Mr. Sawyer, that more unmanly brutal treatment of a little pony it was never my painful lot to witness; and by giving way to such passions you injure your own character as much, nay more, than you injure your horse, and remember, we shall all have to be judged according to our works, whether they be towards man or towards beast"(43).
This quote captures, to me, the close ties between our humanity and our treatment of animals. It is fascinating to me that he dares to say that the injury the man takes on is far greater than the physical injury he inflicts. By hurting animals, this man has sacrificed his own integrity. He calls the exertion of force exactly the opposite of what Sawyer had intended -- "unmanly." The power this man experiences, hurting an innocent creature, is not only an illusion, but an unknown danger to the man's own humanity.

The more this course carries on, the less I seem to need scientific evidence as to why man is different from animal. I'm not sure that it matters much anymore. Learning that we are all "God's creatures," as Black Beauty notes, or perhaps less spiritually, we are all fellow inhabitants of the earth, the less I care about the differences. For this reason, I ultimately found the "human" voice of Black Beauty to be of little disturbance to me by the end of the first part. I believe that by outlining a specifically and distinctly ethical treatment of animals, the reader is able to distinguish better between what is right and what is wrong. For other readers, however, who may not trust a horse's voice, the alternating perspectives in Black Beauty provide major incentive for the reader to pay attention. While Black Beauty can talk about the pain he feels from such maltreatment, it is perhaps the distinctly negative effects on our humanity that seem the most threatening.