On The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee

A faculty member recommended a book to me this spring called "The Lives of Animals", which it turns out is kind of an important book. The first half of the book is a semi-fictional story of a famous, elderly author who is invited to speak on any topic that she wants and, instead of talking about her poetry, talks about animals and ethics and why we should all be vegetarian. This is weirdly modeled after real-life lecture series at [Ivy-league school name here]. The trick is that, while the character gets to say all kinds of true or real things to defend vegetarianism, Coetzee doesn't really have to stand behind the more controversial statements (like when she equates the eating of meat to the genocide of the Jews during the Holocaust). Anyway, the second half of the book is a real-life philosopher, poet, primatologist, and maybe a few others, who write essay responses to the fictional story at the beginning. Peter Singer even goes so far as to make a fictional story about a Princeton philosopher who is asked to respond to a fictional lecture . . . META!!!! Anyway, I took some notes and overall it was a very interesting book and one that got me thinking more, even if it was at times a bit over the top with the fictional conceits.

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"Animals are not believers in ecology. Even the ethnobiologists do not make that claim. Even the ethnobiologits do not say tha the ant sacrifices its life to perpetuate the species. What they say is subtly different: the ant dies and the fucntion of its death is the perpetuation of the species. The species-life is a force which acts through the individual but which the individual is incapable of understanding. In that sense the idea is innate, and the ant is run by the idea as a computer is run by a program."

Earlier on the page, Elizabeth Costello (the character in the book) says

"The irony is a terrible one. An ecological philosphy that tells us to live side by side with other creatures justifies itself by apealing to an idea, an idea of a higher order than any living creature. An idea, finally --and this is the crushing twist to the irony--whcih no creature except Man is capable of understanding. Every creature fights for its own, individual life . . . "

Kafka's "Red Peter" story is mentioned and maybe I should read it.

"The children's film Babe, about an intelligent and sensitive pig who learns to herd sheep, begins with a scene in a factory shed that directly evokes both German expressionist film and the specter of the Nazi death camps." Marjorie Garber - talking about the comparison that the Costello woman makes to the holocaust and how she imagines that maybe the whole world is engaged in a crime of "stupefying proportions" that we all sort of ignore, like peole did to the Nazi death camps. Hmm.

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Wendy Doniger

"The belief that animal are like us in some essential way is the source of the enduring and widespread myth of a magic time or place or person that erases the boundary between humans and animals. The place is like the Looking-Glass forest where things have no names, where Alice could walk with her arms around the neck of a fawn. The list of people who live at peace among the animals would include Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the many mythical children who are raised as cubs by a pack of animals, like Romulus and Remus, Mowgli, and Tarzan, like Pecos Bill (suckled by a puma) and Davy Crockett (raised among mountain lions). T.H. White, translator of medieval bestiary, imagined the young King Arthur's education by Merlin the magician as taking place among ants and geese and owls and badgers. This myth is very different from the mythologies of bestiality, which imagine a very different sort of intimacy) though the two intersect uncomfortably in the image of 'lying down with' animals, literally sleeping with animals.) Our myths general do not define animals as those with whom we do not have sex (though the president's elegant wife, Oliva Gerrard, favors this distinction.)"

She also talks earlier about

"The argument that humans (but not animals) are created in the image of god is often use in the West to justify cruelty to animals, but most mythologies assume that animals, rather thanhumans, are the image of god--which may be a reason to eat them." 100

And later, she quotes Xenophanes, Greek philospher "If cattle and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their feet, horses would draw the forms of god like horses."

[Sorry, I get excited whenever there is a connection to drawing. And also horse gods. ]

Finally, there is a really wonderful essay by Barbara Smuts about companionship with animals where she talks specifically about her relationship to her very smart dog that she has taught all kinds of lovely things to. I actually copied the entire article and saved it to my computer, so I can read it someday when I get my very own dog and want a humane and reasonable way of thinking about my companionship with it. :)