Against Celsus 4.78

Next he raises against himself what is said on behalf of human beings, that the irrational animals were made for them. And he says: "If someone should call us rulers of the animals, since we hunt the other animals and feast on them, we will say: why were we not rather made for them, since they hunt us and eat us? Moreover, we need nets and weapons and many men to help us, and dogs, against the animals we hunt; but to them nature has given weapons at once and of themselves, easily subjecting us to them." Here too you see in what way understanding has been given to us as a great help, better than any weapon the wild beasts seem to have. At any rate, we who are far weaker in body than the animals, and than some of them exceedingly smaller, master the wild beasts through understanding, and hunt even such enormous elephants. Those that are by nature capable of being tamed we subject to our tameness; against those that are not, or that do not seem to us to provide any use from taming, we take our stand with such security that when we wish we keep such great beasts shut up, and when we need food from their bodies we kill them just as we do the animals that are not wild. The Creator, then, made all things servants of the rational animal and of its natural understanding. For some purposes we need dogs, for example to guard flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, flocks of goats, or houses; for others oxen, for example for farming; for others we use yoke-animals or beasts of burden. So too the race of lions and bears, leopards and boars, and the like is said to have been given to us to exercise the seeds of courage in us.