Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [114]
One might take the case of Horton the Elephant versus Mayzie the Lazy Bird to be a simple legal custody battle. Well, perhaps not so simple. “Completely unprecedented” might be a better way to describe it. However, treating this case as a parental rights question would lead us far afield into tricky metaphysical discussions concerning when a yolk becomes a bird and whether “a person’s a person, no matter how small” (Horton) (a question Horton is forced to answer in a separate court appearance). Arguments over ova indeed arise outside the pages of Dr. Seuss, as modern-day divorced couples fight over rights to frozen embryos. However, I would rather avoid such difficulties by thinking of the egg, at least for the moment, as mere property rather than as a potential partridge, for even Mayzie herself uses the term stole rather than birdnapped, indicating that for her it’s a question of property rights, not parental rights. Taken this way, Horton Hatches the Egg raises a fundamental question of property rights: How should we decide who owns what?
How would you like for your eggs to be fixed?
Scrambled with labor, please! Really well-mixed!
Both petitioners claim property rights to the egg in question. Mayzie, lazy though she is, certainly has a strong claim insofar as she laid the egg in the first place, but Horton has since provided the elephant’s share of the work in terms of actual incubation. But how in the world could the egg become Horton’s property? One highly influential theory might say it has to do precisely with the work that Horton has done to care for it. In “Of Property,” John Locke (1632–1704) explains that if there is anything that an individual owns outright, it’s his or her own labor. “Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”1 Indeed, we would have to say that Horton has certainly put a mastodonian effort into incubating the egg, sitting on it for three complete seasons—even enduring a mountain-climbing expedition and an ocean voyage while persevering on his precarious perch.
Locke takes this metaphor of putting a lot of work into something quite literally. “Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”2 By putting work, which is undeniably yours, into something, you make that something yours. But of course one can’t just take any old thing and mix a little labor with it to make it yours. Locke explains that this labor-mixing idea does not work for things that are already some other individual’s property. It does work for things that nature provides. The earth provides certain resources to us all in common, free to any who would take them and make use of them. “[A]ll the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds, belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous hand of nature; and no body has originally a private dominion, exclusive of the rest of mankind, in any of them, as they are thus in their natural state.”3
And so the question now becomes whether or not the egg was in its “natural state,” in common to everyone, or whether it was already someone’s property. Mayzie clearly thinks the egg was already her property before Horton “stole” it. Yet elsewhere in Dr. Seuss eggs seem to be quite easily appropriated as if they were in a state of nature. In Scrambled Eggs Super!, Peter T. Hooper travels the world gathering eggs left and right (and even north-east, in the case of the South-West-Facing Cranes) from various fowls to make his famous “Scrambled Eggs Super-dee-Dooper, Special de luxe a-la-Peter T. Hooper” (Scrambled). Some of the birds do seem to mind his taking them, so that he has to rely on sneaky tricks and fleet-footed beasts to get away with the goods, but he never seems concerned