Sample Memoir
When I was two or three, a Cocker Spaniel lunged at me, knocked me to the floor. I was frightened of dogs for years. One day my brother Paul picked a stray terrier off the street and brought him home. We couldn’t find his owner, so kept him and called him Whitey. My fear waned; I came to like dogs, then love them.
Might dogs be persons? What makes an animal a person? Does some criterion exclude dogs from the category of persons? It probably won’t do to say, possession of language, because some adult dogs respond to words more appropriately than do human infants; and we want to think of human infants as young persons. It probably won’t do to say, moral behavior, because some adult dogs treat human beings more morally than some human beings treat other human beings; and yet we think of immoral human beings as immoral persons.
Could we say that dogs lack sufficient resemblance to human beings? I don’t know. I think of my dog, Molly, as the descant in my life. A descant in music is a melody that differs from the main melody radically, yet differs in a way that complements the main melody. We don’t say that because it differs from the main melody it is not a melody. Perhaps our dogs are “persons of descant,” who differ in a way that complements us.