My essay will explore the animal treatises of Plutarch of Chaironeia (ca. 45–120 CE) from a resilience perspective. In these texts, namely De sollertia animalium, Bruta animalia ratione uti and De esu carnium probably written in the last decades of the first century CE, Plutarch tries to prove that animals do possess reason and that their intelligence in many ways equals (and sometimes surpasses) that of humans. I argue that Plutarch’s anecdotes of the intelligent character of animals can be understood as ‘narratives of resilience’ that characteristically present non-human animals in precarious situations that they master with a ‘resilience’ of their own – a resilience that involves environmental forms of reasoning and understanding, and a resilience that humans would be well advised to respect and even to learn from. As I will show, the resilience of animals is contrasted with the lack of resilience on the part of humans, whose appetite for meat and luxury is depicted as a weakness. Plutarch’s narratives of resilience aim to persuade recipients to perceive animals as important benchmarks of ethics and justice; and at the same time to encourage them to think about alternatives in dealing with them.