MORAL RESPONSIBILITY. 197 



may fitly be spoken of as a race or breed by themselves a 

 race or breed morally and mentally defective. The same 

 would be the result, according to the law of heredity, were 

 man artificially to breed animals with a special aptitude to 

 some particular vice say, theft. The hereditary transmis- 

 sion of a criminal disposition or tendency in the sheep- 

 stealing dog is as certain or as probable as is the inheritance 

 whether in man or other animals of any other parental 

 peculiarity mental, moral, or bodily. So that man incurs 

 necessarily a very grave responsibility when he either trains, 

 encourages, or permits subject animals to indulge their 

 natural or acquired vicious propensities for theft, murder, 

 assault, or destructiveness. 



Whether or not man assigns to, or admits in or for, the 

 lower animals any kind or degree of moral responsibility, 

 these animals themselves have in connection, for instance, 

 with the discharge of duty notions of responsibility or 

 accountability. Not only so, but they apparently recognise 

 both responsibility and irresponsibility in their offspring and 

 their fellows, as well as in other species and genera, including 

 man. Thus they distinguish mental defect in their offspring, 

 and make the proper allowance for all its disabilities. The 

 dog that is the playfellow of the human child or infant 

 appears to recognise the irresponsibility of the latter for its 

 thoughtlessness, its incapacity for proper behaviour ; and 

 the result of such a measure of discrimination is wonderful 

 forbearance under the teasing or provocation to which the 

 lower animal is sometimes habitually subjected by its cruel 

 little human tryant. The dog submits quietly to treatment 

 from a child that it would at once resent from an adult. 



There is a voluntary assumption of responsibility in foster 

 parentage. 



In health and in ordinary circumstances certain animals 

 can prevent, control, or direct given courses of conduct or 

 action ; but there are forms or states of mental disease for 

 instance, insanity, and exceptional mental conditions, such 

 as fright or panic in which self-control is lost, and their 

 responsibility for the resultant action becomes, or should be- 

 come, either absolutely or partially removed. There are, in 



