Victorians, including artists and writers were influenced by the society around them. A class structured hierarchy naturally expressed itself in imagery of animals, especially dogs. Thus just as there were wealthy and poor, powerful and powerless people, this view was extended to animals such as dogs. Thus dogs could be used as an image of human society.

Some people, being powerless, could be called (and treated) as "dogs". To be treated as a "dog" was based upon the idea that animals have no rights and no property. In fact, another analogy was to "children".

Children are defined "legally" as having either no rights and no property, or at least, curtailed rights and curtailed access to property. "Curtailed" meaning that their rights and property are under the control of others during a period of tuteledge. One should take care not to be overly literal. From a legal point of view, children included such classes of people as slaves, new-world indians, women, minorities such as races, such as Jews, and (of course) the young. The term "child" was a legal view that might apply to a slave that was 70 years old, for example. These questions naturally were seen as analogous to that of animals.

At this same historical period, it became common to express an interest in racial issues. Darwin's ideas (1859) were extended (improperly) to society: Social Darwinism (Francis Galton, 1860). Horses might be classified as "thoroughbreds". Certain "breeds" of dogs (code word for "social order") were viewed as superior to "mixed" breeds. These views were analogous to views of people as mixed, as in mulattos, mongrews [not a misspelling of mongrel], quadroons, octaroons, etc. Questions as to inate goodness, inate badness. Could there be animals that were inately vicious? Thus in Dickens' "Oliver Twist" the nature of characters seems immutable: Sikes is naturally evil, Rose Maley and Oliver Twist are naturally good, Monks is naturally evil (its inherited you know, nosebleeds are a sure sign), Fagin is (without question) evil.¹

A closely related issue is the basis for treating dogs as without rights. Not only does this enter upon the question of legal rights (as well as moral ones) to be accorded to animals (or plants or inorganic, non-living nature), but is relevant to treating other human beings as non-humans as well. As an example, in Dickens's time, the Irish were often viewed in England as "simian-like" (non-human) ². The issue is too far afield to enter into here, except for a few comments. One reason that non-humans are treated as having no rights is that it is questioned if non-humans communicate with a language. One reason that this is questioned is the failure to appreciate that different languages may have an entirely different "semantics" than a human language. Instead a human semantics may be used (foisted), leading to absurd results. Thus strong evidence by many researchers now exists that show that birds use a language as complex as human languages (Chomsky type 2, or context-free languages). Another reason that languages are usually recognized as only being human is that linguistic capabilities are limited to perception of human sensory apparatus. Thus non-humans may use electromagnetic languages, polarized light, etc., but a language in this area may simply go unrecognized. DNA and RNA appear to have a linguistic basis more complex than that of humans, too (the semantics being those of molecular forces). ^{3, 4}