Animal Empathy

Throughout most of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice is smaller than her normal size and interacts with anthropomorphized non-human animals who talk, act, and sometimes dress as people do. Her ordinary human identity is repositioned in this context, and Alice has multiple opportunities to gain insight into the lives and minds of non-human animals. Yet Alice repeatedly fails to empathize with the animals around her or to recognize the predatory nature of her own behavior toward animals. The book raises questions about the relationship between human and non-human animals and the possibility or impossibility of interspecies empathy.

After an extended fit of crying as a giant girl, Alice finds herself shrunk down and swimming in a pool of her own tears, where she meets a mouse who has “slipped in like herself” (18). Alice is both cause and companion of the mouse’s suffering, but she still has trouble empathizing with the mouse. Her first words to the mouse are about a cat—“Où est ma chatte?”—and she tells the mouse about her cat Dinah—“a capital one for catching mice” (18)—despite the mouse’s obvious discomfort. Alice changes the conversation by discussing a dog that lives near her house but lets slip that “it kills all the rats” (19), and the mouse immediately swims away, perhaps demonstrating its own empathy for another species—rats—in addition to a fear of predators. Despite all her missteps with the mouse, Alice learns little, and later scares off numerous birds by again discussing her cat, Dinah: “Why she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it” (26). Alice seems incapable of rethinking her anthropocentric notions about animals—birds and mice are pests, cats and dogs are friendly and helpful pets—even when these notions might put her in danger, as when she attempts to play with a puppy that is rather larger than she is and risks being eaten or trampled. Alice escapes from the puppy unharmed, and as she walks away thinks “what a dear little puppy it was” (33 emphasis mine). Even though Alice’s body is shrunk to the height of a few inches, she stills perceives the puppy as “little,” because her mind is still the mind of a regularly-sized human girl. She is unable to empathize with prey animals even when she nearly becomes one.

It is difficult to blame Alice for her lack of empathy because the text points to some reasons why empathizing with animals might be difficult. The Cheshire Cat points out that different species express emotions differently when he says, “you see a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad” (51). Of course, the Cheshire Cat is not mad—at least not for this reason—cats merely express themselves differently than dogs do. To further complicate this idea, a human author has determined how both dogs and cats express pleasure and anger, reasserting that humans can understand animal emotion. Then there’s the Mock Turtle, a creature whose constant and causeless sorrow draws little or no empathy from Alice (or readers) because it seems so senseless. And how should Alice feel about the animals who seem to lack empathy for each other, for example the March Hare who pinches the Dormouse or the White Rabbit who bullies his lizard-servant Bill? Alice may have little empathy for the creatures of Wonderland, but they don’t always seem to have much empathy for each other.

Alice’s seeming lack of empathy for some of Wonderland’s animals may also stem from her belief that animals exist for (or should be used for) meeting human needs. The animal for whom Alice feels the most empathy for is her cat, Dinah, who Carroll first introduces as simply “Dinah,” allowing the reader to momentarily think of Dinah as a person. In contrast to the Wonderland animals, Dinah is off-stage, mute, and her defining character trait—catching mice and birds—is a service to humans, and possibly a large or small part of the reason Alice’s family keeps her. As a cat, Dinah has been designated as a “pet” and therefore worthy of Alice’s concern. By contrast, when the Gryphon and Mock Turtle are singing and dancing the lobster quadrille and mention a whiting (a talking wonderland creature), Alice almost slips and tells them she’s eaten whiting for dinner. When the Mock turtle then asks if Alice knows “what they’re like,” she replies, “They have their tails in their mouths—and they’re all over crumbs” (80). Alice has only encountered whitings as food, so she sees them as food rather than as animals, even after hearing a song in which a whiting speaks.

However, not every creature in Wonderland can speak. In the queen’s croquet game, the humans (or Wonderland analogues of humans) play using hedgehogs as balls and flamingos as mallets, and both animals are mute. This may be emblematic of using animals for sport in general, as in hunting, horse and dog racing, bull baiting, etc. Here, the animals literally become objects—croquet balls and mallets. There is no discussion of cruelty, but the Wonderland animals resist Alice’s attempts to use them. The hedgehogs keep running away, and the flamingo refuses to keep its body in the “correct” position, instead twisting around to “look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing” (66). The flamingo forces Alice to face it, but the flamingo’s puzzled expression indicates that it does not understand her or her actions, just as Alice cannot understand it. Or is the flamingo’s puzzlement and Alice’s laughter a communication of what they both understand—the absurdity of the situation? Perhaps empathy is possible, even with mute animals used as gaming objects.

There is one moment in the text when Alice seems to empathize with an animal’s perspective and recognize herself as a predator, and this occurs when the pigeon mistakes Alice for a serpent. Alice insists she is a little girl but says that, “little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do” (43). To this, the pigeon replies, “I don’t believe it… but if they do, why, then they’re a kind of serpent” (43). The pigeon’s conclusion is “such a new idea to Alice, that she [is] quite silent for a minute or two” (43). Carroll doesn’t specify what Alice thinks about in this moment, but it seems as though Alice recognizes her own predatory nature, recognizes that she is, to the pigeon, just another serpent.

Along the lines of empathy and animals, it might be interesting to think about how people in Wonderland are not really people. They’re regular height is much shorter than Alice’s, and they act and speak in ways very similar to the animals around them. This may be a reference on Carroll’s part to evolution—a recognition that humans are animals. Alice has problems communicating and empathizing with the animals of Wonderland, but maybe this is not due entirely to their animal nature. Maybe miscommunication and lack of understanding characterize our many attempts—verbal and non-verbal—to reach out to the human and non-human animals around us.