Ezra Klein contra (extreme) Homo economicus [Don't torture pigs]

Ezra Klein, What the Cult of Efficiency Costs Us, NYTimes, June 14, 2026.

The opening:

Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, offered the graduates of Wesleyan University wise counsel in his commencement speech a few weeks back. “You are about to step out into a world that prizes efficiency and the annihilation of drift and friction above all else,” he said. “Our entire economy is built on rewarding companies that are efficient at making a profit, not based upon how they treat their workers, the social value of their product or the impact they have on the community.”

“You didn’t design this world,” he continued. “You didn’t choose it. But you will live with the consequences of this cult of efficiency. And you will have to choose which side you are on.”

Efficiency inflicted on pigs:

In 2016 and 2018, voters in Massachusetts and California passed ballot initiatives banning, among other things, the sale of pork from pigs confined in gestation crates. These crates confine breeding sows — large animals, often 400 to 500 pounds — in two-by-seven-foot cages in which they cannot so much as turn around, much less root or socialize. Because sows are often reimpregnated about a month after their piglets are born, they can spend years of their lives in these crates.

I watched, in the interest of fairness, a video from an arm of the National Pork Board on why gestation crates are good for pigs. It features row upon row of sows penned between bars so narrow they cannot turn around. It is no way for any animal to live, particularly not one as smart and as social as a pig.

There are studies I can cite on the psychic and physical violence these crates inflict on pigs — the elevated cortisol levels, the sores, the obsessive biting of metal bars — but I think the way Kristof puts it is simpler and more honest: “Think of your dog enduring what pigs face, and you realize that the moral cost is incalculable.” The difference between dogs and pigs is neither their intelligence nor their sentience. It is our willingness to admit their intelligence and their sentience. It is our decision to extend them our compassion and concern.

Homo economicus:

In traditional economics, prices are the informational lifeblood of an economy: They reveal the cost of materials and labor, the balance of supply and demand. But much can be hidden in prices. Perhaps it is artificially low because waste is being dumped into the rivers or workers are being robbed of their wages or the burden is borne by animals that will spend years of their lives without the comfort of their herd or the ability to feel grass beneath their hooves or turning around when curious about a sound. When that happens, we have sacrificed compassion for cost.

Most of us know by now that the lives animals lead in factory farms are often hideous. A 2019 survey by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future found that a majority of Americans wanted stronger oversight of confined animal feeding operations and a plurality wanted a ban on new ones. Those numbers were even higher when the same pollsters asked Iowans and North Carolinians, where majorities favored a ban on new concentrated animal feeding operations, in part because these operations often impose terrible costs on the human beings who live near them.

There's much more at the link.

Social learning for food among cockatoos

Kate Golembiewski, What’s Safe to Eat? Birds of a Feather Learn Together, NYTimes, May 2, 2026.

By watching their peers, dolphins learn to capture fish in empty conch shells, then ferry the shells up to the water’s surface in order to eat. Octopuses can master experimental tasks by watching their tankmates in the laboratory. Crows follow the cues of others in their flock to attack specific humans who have harassed fellow crows in the past.

Scientists call it “social learning,” and it essentially means monkey see, monkey do, an adage that turns out to apply to many animals beyond just primates. Now, a study of Australia’s sulfur-crested cockatoos shows that the birds employ social learning to understand whether unfamiliar foods are safe to eat.

In more forested areas of the cockatoos’ native range in Australia, New Guinea, and Indonesia, these mohawked parrots eat plant roots, seeds, fruits and insect larvae. But the birds have learned to thrive in urban environments. “They’re everywhere in Sydney,” said Julia Penndorf, a behavioral ecologist and lead author of the study in PLOS Biology, who encountered the birds as a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra.

In urban areas, the birds have expanded their diets to include nonnative plants and nuts, including almonds and sunflower seeds people offer to them, and they can be seen prying the lids off garbage bins in order to forage.

“The big issue with urban birds is, they kind of eat everything,” Dr. Penndorf, who now works at the University of Exeter, said. This expanded diet is high-risk, high-reward: the birds have more options for food, but there’s always a chance that strange new snacks might be poisonous.

Dr. Penndorf and her colleagues wondered if the highly intelligent cockatoos might owe their varied urban diets, and, in turn, their takeover of the city of Sydney, to social learning.

The rest of the article discusses an ingenious experiment by which Penndorf and her colleagues verified that cockatoos could learn what foods to eat from one another,

Dolphins getting stoned

Scientists Caught Dolphins Doing This for 20 Minut https://t.co/RuQgbsKvK6 via @YouTube

— Bill Benzon, BAM! Bootstrapping Artificial Minds (@bbenzon) April 8, 2026

Philosopher-Cat, contemplating the world

Today: #Lookout

We've so enjoyed looking out with you today, through rocks, windows, ancient buildings, trees and doors, to gardens and beaches and amazing skies - and looking at the lookers-out, human, canine, feline etc!

Thank you!🪷 pic.twitter.com/wm9ehFMbly

— Daily Picture Theme (@DailyPicTheme2) March 20, 2026

A single mutation gave horses a temperament amenable to human riders

Tibi Puiu, A Single Mutation Made Horses Rideable and Changed Human History, ZME Science, Aug. 28, 2025.

Horses didn’t just change how people traveled. They rewired the course of civilization. Yet scientists have always puzzled over how, exactly, wild steppe animals transformed into the rideable companions that pulled chariots, carried warriors, and eventually powered empires.

Now, a sweeping new study of ancient horse DNA offers a precise answer: a genetic quirk in a single gene, called GSDMC, helped turn skittish animals into the creatures humans could saddle and ride. Once that gene variant spread, humanity’s history took off at a gallop.

Researchers led by Xuexue Liu and Ludovic Orlando analyzed horse genomes spanning thousands of years, tracking 266 genetic markers tied to traits like behavior, body size, and coat color. Their results, published in Science, suggest that early domestication didn’t begin with flashy coats or taller frames. Instead, the first breeders unsurprisingly selected for temperament.

One of the earliest signals of selection appeared at the ZFPM1 gene, linked in mice to anxiety and stress tolerance. That genetic shift, around 5,000 years ago, may have made horses just a little calmer — tame enough for people to keep close.

But the real game-changer came a few centuries later. Around 4,200 years ago, horses carrying a particular version of the GSDMC gene began to dominate. In humans, variants near this gene are associated with chronic back pain and spinal structure. But for horses and lab mice, the mutation reshapes vertebrae, improves motor coordination, and boosts limb strength. In short, it made horses rideable.

There's more at the link. H/t Tyler Cowen.

Alien creature

Photo not from today (June) but right place and species. Late afternoon snorkel at Cabbage Tree Bay reserve (the 'Bower'), minus camera for the first time in 15 years(?). Clear water and 4-5 giant cuttlefish roving, displaying, competing, hunting. pic.twitter.com/7wtUvbscGq

— Peter Godfrey-Smith (@pgodfreysmith) August 17, 2025

Duck on a post

Understanding transformers and communication among sperm whales

Mar 5, 2025
Allen School Colloquium Series Title: Discovering & Engineering the Computation Underlying Large Intelligent Agents
Speaker: Pratyusha Sharma (MIT)
Date: March 3, 2025

Abstract: The richness of language and intelligent behavior has often been attributed to latent compositional structure. Can we build tools for discovering how deep networks learn and represent this latent structure implicitly? And more importantly, can we use this knowledge to improve generalization in largely structure-less general purpose models or refine our understanding of the world they describe? In this talk, I present three perspectives to answer these questions. I will discuss experimental methods to functionally characterize the space of learnt solutions in LLMs and demonstrate how this understanding can be used to improve their empirical generalization in a gradient free manner, sometimes by as much as 30% points on language understanding benchmarks. Following that, I show how to decipher the structure of another (black box) language-like system, the naturally arising communication system of sperm whales in the wild, discovering for the first time a unique combinatorial communication system. Finally, I apply insights from these results to equip embodied agents with a latent language of thought–-hierarchical and compositional — and show how it can enable long-horizon reasoning and planning in these systems.

Bio: Pratyusha Sharma is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, advised by Antonio Torralba and Jacob Andreas. She studies the interplay between language, sequential decision making and intelligence in natural and AI systems. Before this, she received her Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Her research is published in interdisciplinary journals like Nature Communications, etc. and in academic conferences across machine learning, natural language processing, robotics, and marine biology. Her research has also been featured in articles in the New York Times, National Geographic Magazine, BBC, etc. She was recently a speaker at TED AI and was selected as a Rising Star in EECS, Data Science, and GenAI.

Her webpage, with links to her papers.

Looking out of the window

Trina Schart Hyman (1939-2004 )
Children’s book Illustrator
Lovely homely illustrations a pleasure to post. That’s a big dog guarding the door pic.twitter.com/d98FFOCSC9

— helen warlow (@HWarlow) November 28, 2024

A virtual rodent predicts the structure of neural activity across behaviors.

Aldarondo, D., Merel, J., Marshall, J.D. et al. A virtual rodent predicts the structure of neural activity across behaviors. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07633-4  

Abstract: Animals have exquisite control of their bodies, allowing them to perform a diverse range of behaviors. How such control is implemented by the brain, however, remains unclear. Advancing our understanding requires models that can relate principles of control to the structure of neural activity in behaving animals. To facilitate this, we built a ‘virtual rodent’, in which an artificial neural network actuates a biomechanically realistic model of the rat in a physics simulator. We used deep reinforcement learning to train the virtual agent to imitate the behavior of freely-moving rats, thus allowing us to compare neural activity recorded in real rats to the network activity of a virtual rodent mimicking their behavior. We found that neural activity in the sensorimotor striatum and motor cortex was better predicted by the virtual rodent’s network activity than by any features of the real rat’s movements, consistent with both regions implementing inverse dynamics. Furthermore, the network’s latent variability predicted the structure of neural variability across behaviors and afforded robustness in a way consistent with the minimal intervention principle of optimal feedback control. These results demonstrate how physical simulation of biomechanically realistic virtual animals can help interpret the structure of neural activity across behavior and relate it to theoretical principles of motor control.

Note: I wonder if they named the simulation "Bostrom."

Whale vocalization, phonemes? (was Disney there first?)

Carl Zimmer, Scientists Find an ‘Alphabet’ in Whale Songs, NYTimes, May 7, 2024.

Ever since the discovery of whale songs almost 60 years ago, scientists have been trying to decipher their lyrics. Are the animals producing complex messages akin to human language? Or sharing simpler pieces of information, like dancing bees do? Or are they communicating something else we don’t yet understand?

In 2020, a team of marine biologists and computer scientists joined forces to analyze the click-clacking songs of sperm whales, the gray, block-shaped leviathans that swim in most of the world’s oceans. On Tuesday, the scientists reported that the whales use a much richer set of sounds than previously known, which they called a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.”

People have a pho-ne-tic alphabet too, which we use to produce a practically infinite supply of words. But Shane Gero, a marine biologist at Carleton University in Ottawa and an author of the study, said it’s unclear whether sperm whales similarly turn their phonetic sounds into a language.

“The fundamental similarities that we do find are really fascinating,” Dr. Gero said. “It’s totally changed the way we have to do work going forward.”

Clicks, not melodies:

Sperm whales don’t produce the eerie melodies sung by humpback whales, which became a sensation in the 1960s. Instead, they rattle off clicks that sound like a cross between Morse code and a creaking door. Sperm whales typically produce pulses of between three and 40 clicks, known as codas. They usually sing these codas while swimming together, raising the possibility that they’re communicating with one another.

ChatMOBY-DICK?

Microphones deployed in the Caribbean are capturing ocean sounds 24 hours a day, and scientists are programming computers to learn how to pick sperm whale songs out from the background noise.

Dr. Andreas and his colleagues are also training artificial intelligence programs similar to ChatGPT. After listening to the sperm whale songs, these models might learn to recognize not just rubato and ornamentation, but other features that scientists have missed.

The hope is that computers will then be able to compose whale songs of their own, which could then be played to the whales.

That effort leaves other experts skeptical. Luke Rendell, a marine biologist at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, worries that the A.I. models assume whale songs are a kind of language, rather than something more like music.

“I’ve no doubt that you could produce a language model that could learn to produce sperm-whale-like sequences,” Dr. Rendell said. “But that’s all you get.”

There's much more at the link.

Meanwhile, back in 1946 Disney release Willie the Operatic Whale. Here's a clip (watch it now, before Disney snatches it away):

One study shows that male bonobos engage in violence more often, though less intensely, than male chimpanzees

Phie Jacobs, Bonobos, the ‘hippie chimps,’ might not be so mellow after all, Science, April, 12, 2024.

Chimps (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) are the closest surviving relatives of modern humans. That makes them interesting subjects for scientists studying how aggression evolved in our own species. But the two apes are very different in their behavior. Chimps are patriarchal, forming all-male coalitions that patrol their territory; they react violently when they happen upon an outsider or neighboring clan. “Chimpanzee intergroup encounters are not possible,” Mouginot explains. “They will kill each other.”

Bonobos—which some have called “hippie chimps”—are far more peaceful, says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke who wasn’t involved in the new research. Their societies are dominated by females, and amicable interactions between communities are commonplace—and frequently marked by displays of enthusiastic sexual activity. And although bonobos are no strangers to conflict, scientists who study the apes have never witnessed a lethal encounter. As far as we know, Hare says, “no bonobo has ever murdered another bonobo.” [...]

Field researchers tracked 12 male bonobos from three communities—from the moment they woke until they settled down for the night—at the Kokolopori reserve, located deep within the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They did the same with 14 male chimps from two communities at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Every time an ape attacked or charged an adversary, or was on the receiving end of such aggression, a researcher was there to document it.

The results, Mouginot says, “really came as a surprise.” Overall, male bonobos turned out to be about three times as likely as chimps to engage in aggressive behavior. Although none of the encounters were lethal—and the team didn’t track the severity of injuries—bonobos weren’t afraid to push, hit, and bite their foes. Their aggression didn’t appear to be a turn-off for female bonobos, who actually preferred to mate with aggressive males. [...]

But whereas male chimpanzees frequently ganged up to or defeat rivals or bully females, bonobo males mainly participated in one-on-one fights and rarely attacked members of the opposite sex. In fact, males were far more likely to be on the receiving end of violence from groups of aggressive, dominant females.

There's much more at the link.

H/t Tyler Cowen. 

More –

• about the bonobos in the NYTimes. 
• The original research: Differences in expression of male aggression between wild bonobos and chimpanzees.

Moby Dick speaks (has vowels)

Previously it was thought that mostly the number of clicks and their timing matters.

We identify two discrete patterns that we call the a-vowel and the i-vowel. We also observe clear trajectories in formant frequency that we call diphthongs. pic.twitter.com/2zPrKE193f

— Gašper Beguš (@begusgasper) December 5, 2023

The human voice is the most fearsome sound on the African savanna

Lesley Evans Ogden, Watch How Animals React to the Scariest Sound on the Savanna, NYTimes, Oct. 5, 2023. The article opens:

Panting after chasing the impala now in its jaws, a leopard drags its prey to a shady spot beside a water hole. Before it can sit down to feast, a voice, seemingly out of nowhere, begins speaking calmly. “It is very difficult to talk in Afrikaans …,” begins the bodiless voice. The leopard pauses, glances toward the source of the sound and then drops its hard-earned quarry and runs.

This leopard has unwittingly abandoned its lunch in the service of science. Researchers analyzed thousands of video recordings to reveal a hierarchy of fear in a suite of mammals living in and around Kruger National Park in South Africa. While lions have been nicknamed the king of beasts, the videos show that for wild mammals on the savanna — from tiny antelopes to massive elephants — the scariest, most lethal predator of all is us.

The sound of human voices, the researchers found, evokes more fear than the sounds of snarling and growling lions. This underlines that our species is recognized as uniquely dangerous, “because we are super lethal,” said Michael Clinchy, a conservation biologist at Western University in London, Ontario.

The researchers hope that understanding this universal fear of humans could assist the goal of preventing wildlife poaching.

Elephants charge lions:

Like the other mammals on the savanna, elephants fled when they heard human voices.

“They just high-tail it out of there,” Dr. Clinchy said.

But when it came to their response to lion sounds, the elephants were a notable exception. Instead of fleeing, elephants ran toward the source of the sounds, in some cases smashing into the devices violently.

What about odors?

Chris Darimont, an ecologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who was not involved in the study but reviewed the paper for the journal, praised it while noting that its focus on sounds was a limitation. He hoped future research would incorporate olfactory cues.

There's more at the link.

Cat Island off the coast of Japan

Skippy, author of "From Grundrisse to Hundrisse: How the dogs broke out of the pound and created a socialist utopia"

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum - Justice for Animals

Cows dying in a barn fire, chimpanzees struggling to survive in a shrinking jungle, and whales stranding with kilos of plastic in their stomachs. Animals are in trouble all over the world. And we, humans, are causing their suffering. Our species dominates the lives of other animals everywhere on the planet. According to world renowned philosopher Martha Nussbaum, animals should be able to live a flourishing, natural life. And as the earth’s dominating inhabitants, we have a responsibility to secure this freedom of other species. Come and learn from Spinozalens laureate 2022, who will plead – via Zoom – how we can treat both domestic as well as wild animals ethically.

Justice for Animals | Lecture via Zoom by philosopher Martha Nussbaum | Tuesday 8 November 2022| De Lindenberg, Nijmegen

H/t 3 Quarks Daily.

Should animals bear criminal responsibility? Do they have rights as well?

It’s not animals that interest me so much as robots and AIs. But let’s set that aside while we look at this article:

Ed Simon, If animals are persons, should they bear criminal responsibility? Psyche/Aeon.

From the essay:

Dismissing animal trials as just another backwards practice of a primitive time is to our intellectual detriment, not only because it imposes a pernicious presentism on the past, but also because it’s worth considering whether or not the broader implications of such a ritual don’t have something to tell us about different ways of understanding nonhuman consciousness, and the rights that our fellow creatures deserve. From our metaphysics, then, can come our ethics, and from our ethics can derive politics and law. There need not be a return of animals to the stand as defendants, but they’ve already had legal representation as plaintiffs. The Nonhuman Rights Project, led by the US attorney Steven Wise, has filed briefs on behalf of creatures such as the four captive chimpanzees Tommy, Kiko, Hercules and Leo in New York in 2013, and more recently Happy the elephant, a solitary pachyderm at the Bronx Zoo.

Later:

The possibility that an animal could be found either innocent or guilty evidences a formidable respect for nonhuman consciousness, a sense that, despite their profound otherness, they are still invested with the powers of thought and intentionality. Contrasting modernity’s largely instrumental understanding of animal-hood, whereby their only functions are as pets, beasts of burden or food, Evans argues that in ‘ancient and medieval times domestic animals were regarded as members of the household and entitled to the same legal protection as human vassals,’ concluding that, before the Enlightenment, animals were ‘invested with human rights and inferentially endowed with human responsibilities’. None of this is to pretend that scholastic theologians were somehow nascent PETA ideologues; meat may have been expensive and rare on peasant tables, but there were precious few vegans during the Middle Ages. Rather, it is to claim that culturally and theologically there was an understanding of animals – their individual uniqueness and independence, as well as their relationship to humanity – that was arguably more sophisticated than the dominate schema that came to prevail.

Now things get interesting:

To claim that an animal is a type of intricate robot – a demonstrable falsehood for anyone who has ever had a dog or cat – is both a less true and a more pernicious myth than the one that puts a pig on trial. It would be both overly reductionist and unfair to blame René Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637) for the widespread instrumental view of animal worth. More accurate to say that Descartes either anticipated or took part in a burgeoning shift of modernity that increasingly separated humanity from the animal kingdom of which we are a part, and which did so by rendering our fellow animals as without voice, without mind, without worth beyond what they can do for us.

But we are now living in an age where we must ask: What about intricate robots? Do they have moral standing? Do they have rights, a question that has been addressed in various ways here at New Savanna?

What about Lake Erie, is it a juridical person? We’re living in a topsy-turvy world which poses such questions to us.

There is more at the link.

H/t 3QD.

On the subject of birdsong, music or not? [common glad impulse]

Ian Rose, Every Good Bird Does Fine, Jstor Daily, July 20, 2022.

Is birdsong music? The question has been around since Aristotle.

One hundred years ago, in 1922, the American musician and scholar W. B. Olds contributed to this debate with “Bird-Music,” an essay whose very title itself demonstrates his position. Olds makes the case that not only is birdsong music, but it’s uniquely beautiful and powerful. To him, each species of bird is a star in its own right, and he gives special mention to a few common American birds; the field sparrow’s song is “a perfect accelerando,” while the song of the white-throated sparrow compels him to ask, “Where is there to be heard a finer legato or more definite rhythm?” Above all, Olds seems most inspired by the tiny ruby-crowned kinglet: “It seems scarcely believable that such a cascade of sparkling tones, extremely high in pitch but wonderfully clear, could proceed from so small a throat. The musician who has not heard it has something to live for.”

The format and timing of “Bird-Music” are important to consider. Olds presents his subjects’ songs not in sonograms (the soundwave format often used to visualize birdsong) nor in the often clunky pronunciation found in bird identification guides (“rat-shrrow!”). Instead, he charts them on standard musical scales. He notes that at the time of publication, musical notation like this had only recently begun to be widely taught to students, not just in private music academies but in public schools. His tablature would be familiar, and even playable, by any young piano student today. Every good bird does fine, if you will.

Olds has a contemporary ally in Hollis Taylor, a zoomusicologist and composer. In Is Birdsong Music, from 2017, she lays out the evidence accumulated since “Bird-Music,” from both the scientific and musical canons. Her conclusion is clear: “To withhold the label music from birdsong is outdated and arrogant.”

There's more at the link. [H/t 3QD]

In a couple of weeks Charlie Keil and I will be publishing Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature, where we quote from W. H. Hudson, Chapter XIX, “Music and Dancing in Nature,” The Naturalist in La Plata (1895):

Birds are more subject to this universal joyous instinct than mammals, and there are times when some species are constantly overflowing with it; and as they are so much freer than mammals, more buoyant and graceful in action, more loquacious, and have voices so much finer, their gladness shows itself in a greater variety of ways, with more regular and beautiful motions, and with melody. But every species, or group of species, has its own inherited form or style of performance; and, however rude and irregular this may be, as in the case of the pretended stampedes and fights of wild cattle, that is the form in which the feeling will always be expressed. If all men, at some exceedingly remote period in their history, had agreed to express the common glad impulse, which they now express in such an infinite variety of ways or do not express at all, by dancing a minuet, and minuet-dancing had at last come to be instinctive, and taken to spontaneously by children at an early period, just as they take to walking “on their hind legs,” man's case would be like that of the inferior animals.

I was one day watching a flock of plovers, quietly feeding on the ground, when, in a moment, all the birds were seized by a joyous madness, and each one, after making a vigorous peck at his nearest neighbour, began running wildly about, each trying in passing to peck other birds, while seeking by means of quick doublings to escape being pecked in turn. This species always expresses its glad impulse in the same way; but how different in form is this simple game of touch-who-touch-can from the triplet dances of the spur-winged lapwings, with their drumming music, pompous gestures, and military precision of movement! How different also from the aerial performance of another bird of the same family – the Brazilian stilt – in which one is pursued by the others, mounting upwards in a wild, eccentric flight until they are all but lost to view; and back to earth again, and then, skywards once more; the pursued bird when overtaken giving place to another individual, and the pursuing pack making the air ring with their melodious barking cries!

Humans and Dogs in Wuthering Heights

An old post that I've decided to promote to the top of the list on general principle.

* * * * *

I first published this note on The Valve for December 30, 2009. It speaks to my recent posts on animals, especially in cartoons (e.g. Where'd the Animals Go?). Humankind's history of domestication and mutual adaptation with dogs is perhaps deeper than that with any other animal.

About a month ago I posted a bleg in which I asked whether or not anyone knew of any critical work which looked at Wuthering Heights in relation to contemporary lore and literature on feral children. In that bleg I quoted this important description of Heathcliff from chapter 10 in which Heathcliff is likened to a wolf:

Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is: an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I’d as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter’s day, as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He’s not a rough diamond--a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.

The wolf, of course, is biological cousin to the many forms of domestic dogs, and various forms of dogs do appear throughout Wuthering Heights. In particular, violence between dogs and humans takes place at important transition points in the novel. I’ve collected five such passages in this post and italicized the dog references within each passage.

 

* * * * *

Chapter I: Lockwood has rented Thrushcross Grange and goes to Wuthering Heights to pay his respects to his landlord, Mr. Heathcliff. In a sense this is the the most important transition of all because it gets us and Lockwood into the Wuthering Heights world.

I took a seat at the end of the hearthstone opposite that towards which my landlord advanced, and filled up an interval of silence by attempting to caress the canine mother, who had left her nursery, and was sneaking wolfishly to the back of my legs, her lip curled up, and her white teeth watering for a snatch. My caress provoked a long, guttural gnarl.

'You'd better let the dog alone,' growled Mr. Heathcliff in unison, checking fiercer demonstrations with a punch of his foot. 'She's not accustomed to be spoiled--not kept for a pet.' Then, striding to a side door, he shouted again, 'Joseph!'

Joseph mumbled indistinctly in the depths of the cellar, but gave no intimation of ascending; so his master dived down to him, leaving me vis-a-vis the ruffianly bitch and a pair of grim shaggy sheep-dogs, who shared with her a jealous guardianship over all my movements. Not anxious to come in contact with their fangs, I sat still; but, imagining they would scarcely understand tacit insults, I unfortunately indulged in winking and making faces at the trio, and some turn of my physiognomy so irritated madam, that she suddenly broke into a fury and leapt on my knees. I flung her back, and hastened to interpose the table between us. This proceeding aroused the whole hive: half-a-dozen four-footed fiends, of various sizes and ages, issued from hidden dens to the common centre. I felt my heels and coat-laps peculiar subjects of assault; and parrying off the larger combatants as effectually as I could with the poker, I was constrained to demand, aloud, assistance from some of the household in reestablishing peace.

Chapter 6: Catherine and Heathcliff travel to Thrushcross Grange and look in through a window where they see Isabella and Edgar Linton fighting over a lap dog. Catherine is so badly bitten by a bull dog that she has to stay at the Grange for a month to recover. When she returns to the Heights she’s somewhat estranged from Heathcliff.

Old Mr. and Mrs. Linton were not there; Edgar and his sisters had it entirely to themselves. Shouldn't they have been happy? We should have thought ourselves in heaven! And now, guess what your good children were doing? Isabella--I believe she is eleven, a year younger than Cathy--lay screaming at the farther end of the room, shrieking as if witches were running red-hot needles into her. Edgar stood on the hearth weeping silently, and in the middle of the table sat a little dog, shaking its paw and yelping; which, from their mutual accusations, we understood they had nearly pulled in two between them. The idiots! That was their pleasure! to quarrel who should hold a heap of warm hair, and each begin to cry because both, after struggling to get it, refused to take it. We laughed outright at the petted things; we did despise them!

Heathcliff is telling the story to Nelly Dean, who’s telling it to Lockwood, who in turn is telling it to us. The story continues:

'Hush, hush!' I interrupted. 'Still you have not told me, Heathcliff, how Catherine is left behind?'

'I told you we laughed,' he answered. 'The Lintons heard us, and with one accord they shot like arrows to the door; there was silence, and then a cry, "Oh, mamma, mamma! Oh, papa! Oh, mamma, come here. Oh, papa, oh!" They really did howl out something in that way. We made frightful noises to terrify them still more, and then we dropped off the ledge, because somebody was drawing the bars, and we felt we had better flee. I had Cathy by the hand, and was urging her on, when all at once she fell down. "Run, Heathcliff, run!" she whispered. "They have let the bull-dog loose, and he holds me!" The devil had seized her ankle, Nelly: I heard his abominable snorting. She did not yell out--no! she would have scorned to do it, if she had been spitted on the horns of a mad cow. I did, though: I vociferated curses enough to annihilate any fiend in Christendom; and I got a stone and thrust it between his jaws, and tried with all my might to cram it down his throat. A beast of a servant came up with a lantern, at last, shouting--"Keep fast, Skulker, keep fast!" He changed his note, however, when he saw Skulker's game. The dog was throttled off; his huge, purple tongue hanging half a foot out of his mouth, and his pendent lips streaming with bloody slaver.

Chapter 12: Heathcliff elopes with Isabella Linton. Suave charmer that he is, he hangs Isabella’s dog.

'She abandoned them under a delusion,' he answered; 'picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. I can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character and acting on the false impressions she cherished. But, at last, I think she begins to know me: I don't perceive the silly smiles and grimaces that provoked me at first; and the senseless incapability of discerning that I was in earnest when I gave her my opinion of her infatuation and herself. It was a marvellous effort of perspicacity to discover that I did not love her. I believed, at one time, no lessons could teach her that! And yet it is poorly learnt; for this morning she announced, as a piece of appalling intelligence, that I had actually succeeded in making her hate me! A positive labour of Hercules, I assure you! If it be achieved, I have cause to return thanks. Can I trust your assertion, Isabella? Are you sure you hate me? If I let you alone for half a day, won't you come sighing and wheedling to me again? I daresay she would rather I had seemed all tenderness before you: it wounds her vanity to have the truth exposed. But I don't care who knows that the passion was wholly on one side: and I never told her a lie about it. She cannot accuse me of showing one bit of deceitful softness. The first thing she saw me do, on coming out of the Grange, was to hang up her little dog; and when she pleaded for it, the first words I uttered were a wish that I had the hanging of every being belonging to her, except one: possibly she took that exception for herself. But no brutality disgusted her: I suppose she has an innate admiration of it, if only her precious person were secure from injury! Now, was it not the depth of absurdity--of genuine idiotcy, for that pitiful, slavish, mean-minded brach to dream that I could love her?

Chapter 17: Catherine Linton has died in the previous chapter. We’re at Wuthering Heights, miserable home of Isabella and Heathcliff; Hindley and Hareton live there as well. Isabella is pregnant. Hindley takes a shot at Heathcliff; Heathcliff beats him half to death. The next day Isabella flees:

'The back of the settle and Earnshaw's person interposed between me and him; so instead of endeavouring to reach me, he snatched a dinner-knife from the table and flung it at my head. It struck beneath my ear, and stopped the sentence I was uttering; but, pulling it out, I sprang to the door and delivered another; which I hope went a little deeper than his missile. The last glimpse I caught of him was a furious rush on his part, checked by the embrace of his host; and both fell locked together on the hearth. In my flight through the kitchen I bid Joseph speed to his master; I knocked over Hareton, who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway; and, blessed as a soul escaped from purgatory, I bounded, leaped, and flew down the steep road; then, quitting its windings, shot direct across the moor, rolling over banks, and wading through marshes: precipitating myself, in fact, towards the beacon-light of the Grange. And far rather would I be condemned to a perpetual dwelling in the infernal regions than, even for one night, abide beneath the roof of Wuthering Heights again.'

I find this incident particulary telling, set as it as, amongst some much violence between humans and however briefly the puppy hanging is mentioned. Just another day at the Heights.

Isabella gives birth to Linton Heathcliff a bit later in the chapter.

Chapter 18: Catherine Linton (the younger) goes from Thrushcross Grange to Wuthering Heights and her dogs get into a fight with Hareton’s.

The summer shone in full prime; and she took such a taste for this solitary rambling that she often contrived to remain out from breakfast till tea; and then the evenings were spent in recounting her fanciful tales. I did not fear her breaking bounds; because the gates were generally locked, and I thought she would scarcely venture forth alone, if they had stood wide open. Unluckily, my confidence proved misplaced. Catherine came to me, one morning, at eight o'clock, and said she was that day an Arabian merchant, going to cross the Desert with his caravan; and I must give her plenty of provision for herself and beasts: a horse, and three camels, personated by a large hound and a couple of pointers. I got together good store of dainties, and slung them in a basket on one side of the saddle; and she sprang up as gay as a fairy, sheltered by her wide-brimmed hat and gauze veil from the July sun, and trotted off with a merry laugh, mocking my cautious counsel to avoid galloping, and come back early. The naughty thing never made her appearance at tea. One traveller, the hound, being an old dog and fond of its ease, returned; but neither Cathy, nor the pony, nor the two pointers were visible in any direction: I despatched emissaries down this path, and that path, and at last went wandering in search of her myself. There was a labourer working at a fence round a plantation, on the borders of the grounds. I inquired of him if he had seen our young lady.

'I saw her at morn,' he replied: 'she would have me to cut her a hazel switch, and then she leapt her Galloway over the hedge yonder, where it is lowest, and galloped out of sight.'

You may guess how I felt at hearing this news. It struck me directly she must have started for Penistone Crags. 'What will become of her?' I ejaculated, pushing through a gap which the man was repairing, and making straight to the high-road. I walked as if for a wager, mile after mile, till a turn brought me in view of the Heights; but no Catherine could I detect, far or near. The Crags lie about a mile and a half beyond Mr. Heathcliff's place, and that is four from the Grange, so I began to fear night would fall ere I could reach them. 'And what if she should have slipped in clambering among them,' I reflected, 'and been killed, or broken some of her bones?' My suspense was truly painful; and, at first, it gave me delightful relief to observe, in hurrying by the farmhouse, Charlie, the fiercest of the pointers, lying under a window, with swelled head and bleeding ear. I opened the wicket and ran to the door, knocking vehemently for admittance. A woman whom I knew, and who formerly lived at Gimmerton, answered: she had been servant there since the death of Mr. Earnshaw.

. . . . . .

This, however, is not making progress with my story. Miss Cathy rejected the peace-offering of the terrier, and demanded her own dogs, Charlie and Phoenix. They came limping and hanging their heads; and we set out for home, sadly out of sorts, every one of us. I could not wring from my little lady how she had spent the day; except that, as I supposed, the goal of her pilgrimage was Penistone Crags; and she arrived without adventure to the gate of the farm-house, when Hareton happened to issue forth, attended by some canine followers, who attacked her train. They had a smart battle, before their owners could separate them: that formed an introduction. Catherine told Hareton who she was, and where she was going; and asked him to show her the way: finally, beguiling him to accompany her. He opened the mysteries of the Fairy Cave, and twenty other queer places.

That’s 18 out of 34 chapters. I’ve not had time to scout out the rest of the book for such incidents. Truth be told, I didn’t have time to scout out these five cases either. I just took them from old notes. Apparently that’s as far as I got with this project back in the day. Still, it’s enough to give you a sense of how dog imagery is used in the book.