The story of Brenin and the "car-deck guy" reappears in The Philosopher and the Wolf. And you can't hold a person or a creature morally responsible for something over which he or it has no control. Reflecting on his off-the-cuff response to the man on the ferry, Rowlands came to see that the reason he hadn't blamed Brenin for wrecking the car was that the wolf was not a "moral agent" - it was not capable, in other words, of evaluating its actions in terms of abstract moral principles. Rowlands assured him that he didn't, and that in any case he couldn't hold Brenin responsible for what he'd done. The man hesitated, fearing that Rowlands intended to kill the animal. When he returned to the car deck to survey the damage, Rowlands asked an attendant if he could borrow a knife to cut down what remained of the car's ceiling panels. The wolf reacted to this confinement by destroying the inside of the vehicle - upholstery, seatbelts, the lot. Rowlands had locked Brenin in his car, leaving just a single window partly open. A few years ago, the philosopher Mark Rowlands began a book on animal rights by telling a story about a ferry crossing from Pembroke to Rosslare that he once made with his pet wolf, Brenin.
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