The Cage is an ironic short science fiction story written by Bertram Chandler.

In his story the narrator presents how the outlook of one group of people can influence another group with different views. He refers also to the theory of natural selection and the philosophy of Hobbes, in which human beings fight for their natural needs as animals if these needs became endangered. In the story the narrator describes a group of people who travelled in an interstellar liner Lode Star and had to take an emergency landing on an unknown planet. During the reparation of the spaceship an explosion destroyed both the liner and some people, including the captain, who tried to fix the damage. A group of shipwrecked humans remained on the unfriendly planet, which firstly deprived them of their clothes. Since they needed to organize themselves they legislated rules they had to obey. The most problematic rules were concerned with the relationships between women and men since there were only thirteen women to twenty men. They chose monogamous relationships but with the rule that if two men adored one women they would fight over the lady and the winner, referring to natural selection, would become the one who possesses the source of his affection. During one fight over a woman six people were picked up by an alien hunting spaceship and placed in a zoo on a different planet. The conditions they were kept under were similar to the planet which they settled on after the explosion of Lode Star: always hot and drizzling, though no hostile local animals, ample local food, water and breathable air. Firstly, only four of the people appeared in two separate cages. The two others became the object of experiments on the vivisection table. Since their captors were a different shape, they treated human beings as non-sentient animals. Despite the peoples trying to prove their rationality, none of their behaviour indicated that they behaved judiciously. The pictures of Pythagorass Theorem and their manual dexterity, shown by the weaving of baskets, did not prove their intelligence. Once a mouse-like animal appeared in their cage. They called it Joe and decided to trap it. Their action reached out to their captors who found the deed accurate only to sentient beings because: Only rational beings put other beings in cages.