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2. Sounds. Humans are notable for their ability to speak words. When they make other sounds they more closely resemble animals, and so lend themselves to comparison.
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Two of the enemy’s men entered the boat just where this fellow stood in the foresheets; he immediately saluted them with a ladle full of the stuff, boiling hot which so burned and scalded them, being half-naked that they roared out like bulls, and, enraged with the fire, leaped both into the sea.
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Defoe, Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)
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“Certainly not!” shouted Mr. Pickwick. “Hurrah!” And then there was another roaring, like that of a whole menagerie when the elephant has rung the bell for the cold meat.
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Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1837)
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His phrase was greeted by a strange laugh from a student who lounged against the wall, his peaked cap down on his eyes. The laugh, pitched in a high key and coming from a so muscular frame, seemed like the whinny of an elephant.
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Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
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By the same token, human speech, when it does take the form of words, can be compared to the noises of animals to put the speaker into a bestial light.
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“Where’s the girl?” says he, with a voice as loud as the braying of a jackass.
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Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King (1888)
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Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after him. Drunkards had reeled by, cursing and chattering to themselves like monstrous apes.
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Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
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Quivering with rage, I returned to my bedroom. “Intolerable,” I heard myself repeating like a parrot that knew no other word.
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Beerbohm, Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton (1919)
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The tone of a voice:
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Her voice sounded to him like that of a broken-throated lamb, so painful and weak it was, with the plaintive stop in the utterance.
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Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859)
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His voice was thin like the buzzing of a mosquito.
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Conrad, Chance (1913)
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3. Resemblances in character and ability. Many human traits can be found in purer form in animals. Strength and tenacity are common examples; and these sometimes are cases where a comparison to an animal will elevate its subject rather than reducing it in stature.
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Harry, champion, by acclamation, of the college heavy-weights, broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots of pluck, good-natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed bison in the crack of hand-to-hand battle!
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Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859)
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And she had found a will like that of a crab or a boa-constrictor, which goes on pinching or crushing without alarm at thunder.
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Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)
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Ignorance, insensitivity, and other brute traits likewise find their epitome in animals, which can make less flattering reference points for human versions of the same.
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. . . the Duke of Albemarle, who takes the part of the Guards against us in our supplies of money, which is an odd consideration for a dull, heavy blockhead as he is, understanding no more of either than a goose. . . .
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The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1667)
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To talk to those imps about justice and mercy, would have been as absurd as to reason with bears and tigers. Lead and steel are the only arguments that they understand.
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Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)
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Ready in gibes, quick-answer’d, saucy, and
As quarrelous as the weasel.
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Cymbeline, 3, 4
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With the possible exception of the last, those examples involved general references to animals not distinguished for their wit. The comparison can be made more specific by putting the creature into a particular circumstance.
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Empire has happened to them and civilization has happened to them as fresh lettuces come to tame rabbits. They do not understand how they got, and they will not understand how to keep.
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Wells, An Englishman Looks at the World (1914)
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They may even be suffering quite terribly by it. But they are no more mastering its causes, reasons, conditions, and the possibility of its future prevention than a monkey that has been rescued in a scorching condition from the burning of a house will have mastered the problem of a fire. It is just happening to and about them.
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Wells, War and the Future (1917)
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He went home as a horse goes back to his stable, because he knew nowhere else to go.
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The Education of Henry Adams (1918)
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A human behavior or quality of character may be diminished precisely because it is shared by animals.
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Boswell. “But will you not allow him a nobleness of resolution, in penetrating into distant regions?” Johnson. “That, Sir, is not to the present purpose: we are talking of sense. A fighting cock has a nobleness of resolution.”
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Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791)
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’Tis no great valor to perish sword in hand, and bravado on lip; cased all in panoply complete. For even the alligator dies in his mail, and the swordfish never surrenders.
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Melville, Mardi (1849)
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No doubt behind these legal rights is the fighting will of the subject to maintain them, and the spread of his emotions to the general rules by which they are maintained; but that does not seem to me the same thing as the supposed a priori discernment of a duty or the assertion of a preexisting right. A dog will fight for his bone.
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Holmes, Jr., Natural Law (1918)
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4. Prospects for improvement. Humans may have dispositions that are hard to change; such immutability is clearer in the case of animals, and may be illustrated accordingly.
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I confess, that practically speaking, when I have learned a man’s real disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, “A cur’s tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years’ labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form.”
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Thoreau, Walden (1854)
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If the typical criminal is a degenerate, bound to swindle or to murder by as deep seated an organic necessity as that which makes the rattlesnake bite, it is idle to talk of deterring him by the classical method of imprisonment. He must be got rid of; he cannot be improved, or frightened out of his structural reaction.
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Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law (1897)
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A related application is the analogy to what is inevitable in animals to describe what is inevitable in humans, or some particular type of them.
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[T]he cosmopolitan is basing his whole case upon the idea that man should, if he can, become as God, with equal sympathies and no prejudices, while the nationalist denies any such duty at the very start, and regards man as an animal who has preferences, as a bird has feathers.
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Chesterton, Thomas Carlyle (1903)
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