In Chapter 11, Prendick makes his second escape from Dr. Moreau's house and encounters the Ape Man. The Ape Man's hands are key to his anthropomorphism, and Prendick's hands are key to the Ape Man's recognition that he is a human:
His eyes came back to my hands. He held his own hand out, and counted his digits slowly, “One, Two, Three, Four, Five—eh?”
I did not grasp his meaning then. Afterwards I was to find that a great proportion of these Beast People had malformed hands lacking sometimes even three digits.
The Ape Man can also speak human language more than some of the other Beast Folk can, but this focus on hands is important. The hand is a common symbol of humanity. Hands with opposable thumbs are one of the adaptive traits that have allowed humans to build civilizations where we can make use of collective resources to survive. Hands also allow humans to write, an ability that has often been treated as a sign of a person's humanity. Additionally, there is a philosophical and artistic tradition of treating hands as a symbol of God and God's will as He works it through humans.
Prendick not only recognizes the Ape Man as more human than the other Beast Folk, but the Ape Man also recognizes his own kinship with Prendick because of their "complete" hands. It makes sense in the context of the novel that the Ape Man sees his hands as a mark of "completeness" and humanity. Moreau genuinely seems to struggle with shaping animals' feet, hooves, and claws into hands with five fingers. The Ape Man's five fingers do, in fact, bring him closer to "human" according to Moreau's definition. The fact that many of the other Beast Folk have fewer digits is, in the context of the novel, a sign that they are incomplete humans.
Although the hand is a popular icon representing humanity, the idea that five fingers makes a creature human is ableist. Many humans do not have five fingers on each hand. Furthermore, many humans cannot write with their hands. The Ape Man's pride in his hands betrays the fact that Moreau is interested in a kind of eugenicist "perfection" of the human form. He is not interested in creating people out of animals, but rather in creating a specific kind of person out of animals. The Ape Man is one of his nearest "success" cases, but Moreau dismisses him as imperfect because he sees him as closer to a Black person than a white person. Moreau imagines apes, Black people, and white people to be on a continuum from imperfect to perfect, just as he imagines animals, disabled people, and non-disabled people on a continuum from imperfect to perfect. Moreau's ultimate goal is to turn animals into "perfectly" white, non-disabled people.
In Chapter 16, Prendick joins in the pursuit of the Leopard Man after the Leopard Man breaks the Law by killing a rabbit. Although everyone treats the Leopard Man as an animal who is beyond saving, Prendick anthropomorphizes him:
It may seem a strange contradiction in me—I cannot explain the fact—but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes, and its imperfectly human face distorted with terror, I realised again the fact of its humanity. In another moment other of its pursuers would see it, and it would be overpowered and captured, to experience once more the horrible tortures of the enclosure. Abruptly I slipped out my revolver, aimed between his terror-struck eyes and fired.
Prendick kills the Leopard Man to save him from going back to the House of Pain to be tortured more. He acknowledges the "perfectly animal attitude," and yet he recognizes an "imperfectly human face" and a human gleam in the Leopard Man's eye. Even though Prendick knows that the Leopard Man started out as an animal, and even though he has behaved like an animal by killing a rabbit, Prendick can't help but see the Leopard Man as an "imperfect human."
Vivisection in many forms had been outlawed because of its cruelty to animals. It would not have been out of the norm for Prendick to take mercy on a creature he saw as fully animal. Prendick's emphasis on the human aspects of the Leopard Man as his motivator for shooting him reveals that he is thinking about the spectrum of human rights as well as animal rights. Further vivisection would theoretically make the Leopard Man even more human. Moreau wants to have it both ways, using the rationale that the Leopard Man is an animal in order to carry out painful operations to make him more human. Prendick can't shake the feeling that the more human the Leopard Man became, the more the torture would be an issue of human rather than animal rights. Underlying Prendick's action here is a deep fear about subjecting humans or human-like creatures to the kind of torture Moreau carries out on his island. Given the racially coded ways Prendick describes many of the animals, this moment can be taken as a hesitant critique of scientific racism, which claimed that Black people were less evolved than white people and that they did not experience human suffering in the same way. Prendick never fully articulates an opposing stance, and the novel buys into many aspects of scientific racism. Nonetheless, Prendick shoots the Leopard Man because he can't bring himself to see the creature as less than human and therefore undeserving of human rights.
