Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare [1st ed.] 9783030554293, 9783030554309

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THE PALGRAVE MACMILLAN ANIMAL ETHICS SERIES

Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare Michael J. Gilmour

The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series

Series Editors Andrew Linzey Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics Oxford, UK Clair Linzey Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics Oxford, UK

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our treatment of animals. Philosophers have led the way, and now a range of other scholars have followed from historians to social scientists. From being a marginal issue, animals have become an emerging issue in ethics and in multidisciplinary inquiry. This series will explore the challenges that Animal Ethics poses, both conceptually and practically, to traditional understandings of human-animal relations. Specifically, the Series will: • provide a range of key introductory and advanced texts that map out ethical positions on animals • publish pioneering work written by new, as well as accomplished, scholars; • produce texts from a variety of disciplines that are multidisciplinary in character or have multidisciplinary relevance. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14421

Michael J. Gilmour

Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare

Michael J. Gilmour Providence University College Otterburne, MB, Canada

ISSN 2634-6672       ISSN 2634-6680 (electronic) The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series ISBN 978-3-030-55429-3    ISBN 978-3-030-55430-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustraion: The Protected Art Archive / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editors’ Preface

This is a new book series for a new field of inquiry: Animal Ethics. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the ethics of our treatment of animals. Philosophers have led the way, and now a range of other scholars have followed from historians to social scientists. From being a marginal issue, animals have become an emerging issue in ethics and in multidisciplinary inquiry. In addition, a rethink of the status of animals has been fuelled by a range of scientific investigations which have revealed the complexity of animal sentiency, cognition and awareness. The ethical implications of this new knowledge have yet to be properly evaluated, but it is becoming clear that the old view that animals are mere things, tools, machines or commodities cannot be sustained ethically. But it is not only philosophy and science that are putting animals on the agenda. Increasingly, in Europe and the United States, animals are becoming a political issue as political parties vie for the “green” and “animal” vote. In turn, political scientists are beginning to look again at the history of political thought in relation to animals, and historians are beginning to revisit the political history of animal protection. As animals grow as an issue of importance, so there have been more collaborative academic ventures leading to conference volumes, special journal issues, indeed new academic animal journals as well. Moreover, v

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we have witnessed the growth of academic courses, as well as university posts, in Animal Ethics, Animal Welfare, Animal Rights, Animal Law, Animals and Philosophy, Human–Animal Studies, Critical Animal Studies, Animals and Society, Animals in Literature, Animals and Religion—tangible signs that a new academic discipline is emerging. “Animal Ethics” is the new term for the academic exploration of the moral status of the non-human—an exploration that explicitly involves a focus on what we owe animals morally and which also helps us to understand the influences (social, legal, cultural, religious and political) that legitimate animal abuse. This series explores the challenges that Animal Ethics poses, both conceptually and practically, to traditional understandings of human–animal relations. The series is needed for three reasons: (1) to provide the texts that will service the new university courses on animals, (2) to support the increasing number of students studying and academics researching in animalrelated fields and (3) because there is currently no book series that is a focus for multidisciplinary research in the field. Specifically, this series will • provide a range of key introductory and advanced texts that map out ethical positions on animals; • publish pioneering work written by new, as well as accomplished, scholars and • produce texts from a variety of disciplines that are multidisciplinary in character or have multidisciplinary relevance. The new Palgrave Macmillan Series on Animal Ethics is the result of a unique partnership between Palgrave Macmillan and the Ferrater Mora Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. The series is an integral part of the mission of the Centre to put animals on the intellectual agenda by facilitating academic research and publication. The series is also a natural complement to one of the Centre’s other major projects, the Journal of Animal Ethics. The Centre is an independent “think tank” for the advancement of progressive thought about animals and is the first Centre of its

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kind in the world. It aims to demonstrate rigorous intellectual enquiry and the highest standards of scholarship. It strives to be a world-class centre of academic excellence in its field. We invite academics to visit the Centre’s website www.oxfordanimalethics.com and to contact us with new book proposals for the series. Oxford, UK Oxford, UK

Andrew Linzey Clair Linzey

Preface

Sitting proudly on my bookshelf is an early edition of Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel Black Beauty bearing the inscription, “To Michael from Grandma [Ethel] Stanley, 1974.” It was first presented to her, according to an earlier inscription, on September 30, 1917. She would have been eleven at the time, just a generation removed from Sewell. I wasn’t much of a reader in 1974 so this book collected far more dust than dogears for many years to come but, though Grandma Stanley could not have known it, in time Sewell’s autobiography of a horse proved transformative. Stories change us. To read them is to see the world with new eyes. Sewell’s Black Beauty awakened a sensitivity to animal suffering that is never far from my mind. Along with literature, direct encounters also inform our views about animals and their wellbeing. One incident stands out in memory. It was a long low barn, dimly lit, the air thick with dust. Having never been on a farm this was all new to me. I was nineteen at the time, in the fall of 1986, and in my first year of university at a small rural campus on the Canadian prairies. An area farmer needed able-bodied workers for a few hours and offered each of us $25 to do some ‘chicken catching.’ Coming from the city I had no idea what that meant but money was in short supply and that was incentive enough to go along. This was more than thirty years ago but I recall certain details. We arrived after dark. Chickens covered the entire floor of the enormous barn, sitting or standing listlessly. Our job for the next few hours was to reach under the birds and quickly ix

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grab their legs before they fully woke up, then lift them so they were upside down. They start flapping their wings immediately so it’s physically taxing––my arms, shoulders and back ached for days afterwards. The more experienced and stronger ‘catchers’ managed two birds in each hand. Once we had our chickens, we took them outside to waiting trucks and lifted them to others who stuffed the startled birds into small cages. After each delivery we returned to the barn for more, repeating the process until the floor was empty of living birds. The process was not smooth. A bird might slip away at some point and have to be wrestled down. The lids on the cages were shut quickly and often caught a wing or a foot or a head. And worst of all was the feeling of occasional breaking bones when grabbing or carrying the startled birds. Their bodies seemed brittle. I now regret my participation in that ‘chicken catch,’ and having since learned more about the factory farming of chickens for meat and eggs, I’m left with three lasting impressions. The first is the brutal force of human domination of some animals. Those birds––manipulated into docility by the lighting––were completely powerless against the muscle and machinery driving that business. The second is the unnaturalness of that low, dark, stinking place. Chemicals, overcrowding, body manipulation (through selective breeding, beak cutting), shortened lives. Third, it made me realize the enormous distance between the barn and the dinner plate. At that time, I had no idea what meat and dairy production involved. Not really. Literary horses like Black Beauty and his friends, and real, frightened, fragile chickens. The ones products of the imagination, the others actual, vulnerable, sentient beings. And all of them, in their own way, whispering a compelling challenge to my then habitual indifference to animals as neighbours deserving moral consideration. Stories do not always remain between the covers of books. They linger, sometimes attach, unbidden, to the stuff of our lives. To meet and enjoy fictional animals is to risk meeting them again in unexpected ways. I cannot hear a toad without smiling, as the sound brings Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) to mind. Am I less likely to throw a stone at one for having read that book? Another encounter. The punchline of the Good Samaritan parable comes at the beginning of that famous story rather than the end, and it is not Jesus who delivers it but instead a nameless onlooker. When Jesus

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asks what is required of people to inherit eternal life, that onlooker cites Torah: love God and love your neighbour as yourself (Luke 10:27; cf. Leviticus 19:18; Deuteronomy 6:5). Jesus agrees with him, but the man presses further, asking, Who is my neighbour? Jesus’s story about an assault and robbery, and the unlikely hero who comes to the victim’s aid is both commentary on the portion of Torah recited, and an answer to the man’s question. As the parable illustrates, love is owed to a stranger left for dead on the side of the road. Your neighbour is the one in need. Your neighbour is the one in need, even when they are not part of your community. We are to love across boundaries. Love not only family and tribe, or those of our race and nation, or gender and religion, or sexual orientation and socio-economic status. Love not only the citizen but also the refugee. Simply love your neighbour as yourself, says Jesus. Love the one in need as you love yourself. That’s all it says. My neighbour does not always look like me or believe like me but that’s no matter. Jesus collapses the two great commandments of Torah. If we love God, we love our neighbours, whoever they are. We love our neighbours because we love God. Animals are neighbours too. There’s nothing in the story limiting this boundary-defying love to bipedal types. If this sounds odd, note the vague kinship between the parable of the Good Samaritan and Jesus’s remarks about an animal fallen into a pit (Matthew 12:11): “Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out?” Of course you will. Yes, this is self-­ serving to a degree (sheep have economic value) but it remains aiding a distressed animal for its own sake is a religiously sanctioned response. You are not to pass by one in its moment of need any more than you pass by the human victim of a robbery laying in a ditch at the side of a road. You help, and you do so even if it is the Sabbath. Humans extending kindness to nonhumans––Jesus expects it of the God-fearing. And perhaps it deserves notice it works both ways in the parable. The Samaritan is not the only one who helps the injured man because he places the stranger “on his own animal” to get him to an inn for care (10:34). A brief hint of cross-species compassion? The parable of the Good Samaritan is a work of fiction. Jesus often told stories as a way to teach. For me, just as Grahame’s The Wind in the

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Willows enriches my experience of the croaking toads I hear, Jesus’s parable now attaches to a real-world encounter with a real-world animal. A few years back a student contacted me about a stray dog she found injured at the side of the road after being hit by a car. She stopped to help, taking the puppy she named Daisy to a nearby veterinary clinic even when unsure how to fund the expensive surgery/amputation needed to save her. This was a costly act of kindness. Costly just like the kindness shown by the Samaritan (“he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend’” [Luke 10:35]). She met one of God’s creatures in need––like a sheep fallen in a pit, like an injured man on the side of the road––and ignoring the species divide offered a boundary-transgressing act of mercy. The tripod Daisy now lives with me, forever in my mind intertwined with Jesus’s parable and this student’s enactment of its ethical mandate. Story meets reality, fiction meets fur. This book considers that step. How do works of the imagination shape our attitudes and behaviors toward actual animals, and what do they contribute to debates about ethics? Through consideration of a very small sampling of representative works, I suggest authors (1) educate by revealing otherwise hidden worlds; (2) empathize with the vulnerable, inviting and urging readers to do the same; and (3) envision new possibilities for human-nonhuman interactions. In the 1923 publication translated as Civilization and Ethics, Albert Schweitzer insists a person is truly ethical, “only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life that he is able to assist and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.” Such a person does not ask whether and to what extent this or that life deserves sympathy. Leaf or flower, worm or insect, all life is sacred. Ridicule for being sentimental is sure to follow but such an individual is undeterred. A time will indeed come, Schweitzer predicts, when people will recognize thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with ethics. “Ethics is responsibility without limit toward all that lives.” The year 1923 also witnessed the publication of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office. In it he writes of a paradisal island called No Man’s Land where animals have (note the vaguely biblical phrasing), “lived at peace for a thousand years.” Dolittle is indeed “the first human in a thousand years that has set foot” there. He alone among people, the island’s

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residents recognize, presents no threat. He alone, to borrow Schweitzer’s description, responds to the compulsion to “help all life that he is able to assist.” Indeed, the Doctor spends “several days” offering the animals advice and tending to their various ailments. The simultaneous publication of these very different books offers a convenient segue into our subject. At the risk of being overly fanciful, Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle is a playful, top-hatted version of Schweitzer’s “truly ethical” person. The two writers envision a kinder, enchanted world where there is reverence for all life and a willingness to care. The one travelled there by means of rigorous theological and philosophical inquiry, the other by means of highly imaginative storytelling. Our concern is with the second path. Otterburne, MB, Canada

Michael J. Gilmour

Contents

1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal Welfare Movements and a Literature of Compassion  1 2 It’s a Bad World for Animals: Activism and Sentimental Literature 45 3 Eating Meat, Eating Misery 77 4 Lessons on Animals and Science with Doctor Rat 99 5 St. Francis Visits Rabbit Hill: Visions of Coexistence123 6 A Sort of Temple: Religious Themes in Animal Literature157 7 The Mark of Cain: Human Hunters and Animal Predators191 8 Animals, Mourning, and Cat-lovin’ Bastards225 Index251

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About the Author

Michael J. Gilmour  is Associate Professor of English and biblical literature at Providence University College, Canada. He is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and the author of Eden’s Other Residents: The Bible and Animals and Animals in the Writings of C. S. Lewis.

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1 Introduction: The Parallel Voices of Modern Animal Welfare Movements and a Literature of Compassion

My father recited poems out loud at home. I have vivid memories of him reading “The Bells Of Heaven” (Ralph Hodgson), “Snake” (D. H. Lawrence), and a poem I have never been able to relocate about a fox caught in a trap with young in the den. The innocence of anymals and the cruel power of humanity was manifest in sorrow, anger, even bitterness in my father’s soft voice. Already then, his sentiments echoed my own experiences with humanity and anymals in rural America. I also recall my mother singing the folksong, “The Fox Went out on a Chilly Night,” and how my father would say, “The fox has to eat, too.” I realize now that the poems themselves might never have reached me if my parents had not read and sung to us when we were young. Through their voices—through this shared experience of literature—I gained more than what was written on those dog-eared pages. —Lisa Kemmerer, Montana State University Billings, philosopher-activist

Personal correspondence. On her use of the term anymal, see Prof. Kemmerer’s “Verbal Activism: ‘Anymals’,” Society and Animals 14.1 (May 2006): 9–14. It is a contraction of any and animal, which indicates all individuals of any species other than the speaker/author. She prefers it to the regular spelling because it avoids the suggestion humans are not themselves animals, as well as the dualism and alienation implied by the prefixed term nonhumans or the qualifier other animals.

© The Author(s) 2020 M. J. Gilmour, Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare, The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9_1

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Animal stories are metonymic. Esther is perhaps the most famous pig in the world as I type this, and the accounts of her adventures, beautifully and humorously reported by her caregivers Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter, belie the idea of pigs as mindless automata. They give her a voice, they tell her story.1 She is a personality, complete with an emotional range and a capacity for pleasure and pain. She is mischievous, and able to bond with humans and other nonhumans. Though anthropomorphism and sentimentalism invite the ridicule and censure of some, such stories, fictional and nonfictional, are persistently popular and effective tools for promoting kindness to animals. Jenkins and Walter persuade their readers to see more than meat the next time a livestock truck passes on the highway. The nameless pigs on that truck are just like Esther. They too have personalities. They too have a capacity for pleasure and pain. Though it took me many years to realize the potential of literature to further the efforts of animal compassion agendas––the long-neglected copy of Black Beauty mentioned in the Preface left closed and unheeded–– other readers and writers long before and since Anna Sewell credit stories for awakening an affection for nature and the desire to care for it. Jane Goodall, for one, identifies fiction as a formative influence: As a child I was not at all keen on going to school. I dreamed about nature, animals, and the magic of far-off wild and remote places. Our house was filled with bookshelves and the books spilled out onto the floor. When it was wet and cold, I would curl up in a chair by the fire and lose myself in other worlds. My very favourite books at the time were The Story of Dr. Dolittle, The Jungle Book, and the marvelous Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books.2

1  Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter, with Caprice Crane, Esther the Wonder Pig: Changing the World One Heart at a Time (New York: Grand Central, 2017); and Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter, with Caprice Crane, Happily Ever Esther: Two Men, A Wonder Pig, and Their Life-Changing Mission to Give Animals a Home (New York: Grand Central, 2018). 2  Jane Goodall, with Phillip Berman, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey (New York: Warner, 1999), 11.

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As she puts it elsewhere, “I learned from nature. … I also learned from the books that my mother found for me about animals. I read and read about animals. Doctor Dolittle and Tarzan and Mowgli.”3 This book approaches storytelling as a form of animal advocacy and considers the contributions of literature toward a widened circle of care. With Jane Goodall, I include Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle novels among my favorites in the category and refer to them throughout. There are a few reasons for this. Not only does the central character model kindness to animals and confront forms of cruelty, but the stories also illustrate a useful way to approach conversations about welfare. Many find the objectives of advocates to be extreme, unrealistic, and divorced from all that is familiar. Meals without meat? Clothes without leather? Science without laboratory rats? Circuses without elephants? Impossible. This is the way we live and the way it’s always been. In many contexts, to suggest we do without such uses of animals is to shut down the conversation even before it begins. But literature often succeeds where communication in other forums breaks down. When couched in a compelling story, we tend to be more amenable to new ideas. Consider Lofting’s opposition to fox hunting. Allyson May’s study of this English pastime observes how soldiers returning from the Great War viewed it in different ways. For some, their experiences on the battlefield provoked “nostalgia, affection for the pre-War, comparatively innocent world of the hunting field,” but for others, Lofting among them, the War resulted in “a heightened compassion for the suffering of animals as well as men.” Fox hunting was no longer an innocent distraction. Indeed, it was during Lofting’s time as a soldier in Flanders and France that his Dolittle stories first appeared.4 According to Gary D. Schmidt, “None of the novels can ever be read outside the context of … the trenches of the 3  Jane Goodall and Marc Bekoff, The Ten Trusts: What We Must Do to Care for the Animals We Love (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 69. In Reason for Hope, she also writes appreciatively of The Wind in the Willows and George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871), both of which involve, in very different ways, highly imaginative depictions of animals (11–12). 4  Allyson N.  May, The Fox-Hunting Controversy, 1781–2004: Class and Cruelty (New York: Routledge, 2016), 74. See too chap. 6 of May’s book, “The Flight from Modernity: Nostalgia and the Hunt.” She closes that chapter observing that fox-hunting’s survival “past the Great War and the Second World War into the twenty-first century in many ways can be explained by the very fact that it is not modern” (184). Italics original.

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First World War, where horses, unprotected against the green billows of gas that belched across the fields and cascaded into the trenches, died screaming out of burning lungs.”5 This is where Lofting’s longing for a kinder relationship with nature begins: While he could somehow avoid despair and place the war in the context of a reasonable explanation––these were apparently rational creatures who had consciously decided to commit atrocity––he could not accept the destruction of horses. While the troops could protect themselves against the green gas that poured into the trenches and coated the landscape, the horses could not. It sprang into their lungs, blistered their tissues, and led to agonizing death.6

The Dolittle stories, Lofting explains, began life as letters home to his children during the War, and the idea of a medical person caring for animals has direct connection to what he saw: One thing … that kept forcing itself more and more on my attention was the very considerable part the animals were playing in the World War and that as time went on they, too, seemed to become Fatalists. They took their chances with the rest of us. But their fate was far different from the men’s. However seriously a soldier was wounded, his life was not despaired of; all the resources of a surgery highly developed by the war were brought to his aid. A seriously wounded horse was put out by a timely bullet.7

There is even evidence his tenderness toward animals extended beyond the battlefield. The usually placid Lofting once attacked three men, one armed with a knife, who had hobbled some wild horses. Having dispatched the three, he cut loose the horses, emptied the rifles, and, wiping the blood from his cheek, sauntered back to his camp, unruffled, to read a story to his son.8  Gary D.  Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, Twayne’s English Authors Series 496 (New York: Twayne, 1992), 51. 6  Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, 13. 7  As cited in Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, 6. 8  Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, 2. Schmidt here relates the anecdote as told by Lofting’s son, in Colin Lofting, “Mortifying Visit from a Dude Dad,” Life 30 (September 1966), 128–30. 5

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The result of those wartime experiences was a fictional world depicting an alternative vision of human-animal relations, with deep criticisms of many entrenched attitudes and activities, fox hunting among them: “‘What a childish sport!’ [Doctor John Dolittle] murmured. ‘I can’t understand what they see in it. Really, I can’t. Grown men rushing about the landscape on horseback, caterwauling and blowing tin horns––all after one poor little wild animal! Perfectly childish!’”9 But his response involves more than ridicule and disdain. Dolittle inevitably comes to the aid of animals in distress in all the stories. On one occasion during his travels, he meets a mother fox named Nightshade, and she asks him to look at one of her pups who has something wrong with his paw. While attending to the cub, they suddenly hear the approach of hunters.10 The account of the vixen’s terror––the despair of a mother helpless to protect her children––highlights the brutality of the sport. The same pack and the same hunters killed Nightshade’s sister the week before.11 Dolittle hides the mother and babies in his pockets before the dogs arrive, and once they do, tells them to lead the horse-riding men in another direction.12 Having addressed the immediate threat, Dolittle then listens to Nightshade as she relates at length another occasion when fox hunters threatened her life. The first-person, point-of-view description is unsettling. Nightshade, the vixen, paused in her story a moment, her ears laid back, her dainty mouth slightly open, her eyes staring fixedly. She looked as though she saw that dreadful day all over again, that long terrible chase, at the end of which, with a safe refuge in sight, she felt her strength giving out as the dogs of Death drew close upon her heels.13 9  Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2 (1924; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 173. He describes fox hunting as “childish” again on p. 170. 10  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 166–68. 11  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 168. Dolittle’s opposition to sport hunting is longstanding. The sound of the horses, dogs, and hunters’ shouts reminds him of an earlier experience that “made him an enemy of fox hunting for life––when he had met an old fox one evening lying half dead with exhaustion under a tangle of blackberries” (168). 12  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 168–71. Dolittle, of course, speaks animal languages. 13  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 176. Full account, 174–77.

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As readers of these stories come to expect, the good Doctor comes up with a solution for her and her family. Because dogs rely on scent, he recommends spirits of camphor and eucalyptus as a way to mask their smell and throw pursuing dogs off the trail. He wraps vials of these medicines in handkerchiefs. Nightshade is to carry them and when dogs give chase, drop a rock on one of them to break the glass and role on the damp, smelling cloth. It proves so effective foxes all over the region request their own so-called Dolittle Safety Packs.14 The result is far reaching: “‘It’s no use,’ Sir William [Peabody] said [to a companion], ‘we can’t hunt foxes in this district unless we can breed and train a pack of eucalyptus hounds. And I’ll bet my last penny it’s Dolittle’s doing. He always said he’d like to stop the sport altogether. And, by George! so far as this county is concerned, he’s done it!’”15 Within this imaginative space, Lofting brings a fox hunt to an end. He enacts a welfare fantasy. As the child narrator of the earlier book The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle puts it, being part of the great man’s animal-filled, animal-friendly household is “like living in a new world.”16 In this episode, Lofting educates readers by showing them what this past time actually involves, awakens empathy through a sympathetic portrait of a terrified, desperate mother, and in highly imaginative fashion envisions the possibility of an end to senseless bloodshed. Such fantasies––maybe, just maybe––lead us to wonder what we might do for animals in our own ‘county,’ how we too might create a “new world.” Art precedes reform. A visit to Toad Hall is incentive enough to stop throwing stones. Some theorists recognize literature’s potential to disrupt prior understandings, to render strange the otherwise ordinary. Terry Eagleton, for one, writes of Bertolt Brecht’s ability “to unsettle [audiences’] convictions, dismantle and refashion their received identities, and expose the unity of this selfhood as an ideological illusion.”17 He “uses certain  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 177–84.  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 184. 16  Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 1 (1922; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 60. 17  Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 162. 14 15

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dramatic techniques (the so-called ‘estrangement effect’) to render the most taken-for-granted aspects of social reality shockingly unfamiliar, and so to rouse the audience to a new critical awareness of them.”18 To adapt the concept to the present issue, welfare-leaning animal writing has a defamiliarizing, estranging effect. By questioning and often refashioning received behaviors, unconventional possibilities present themselves (Dolittle’s “new world”). And so it is we have a substantial number of writers who imagine life without fox hunts, or meals without meat, or clothes without leather, or science without vivisection. Writers sometimes acknowledge this capacity of storytelling to unsettle the taken-for-granted and spark a realignment of priorities. When discussing the stories read to him when a boy, Richard Adams, one-time president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the author of Watership Down mentions the Lofting series with particular fondness, and credits them for his turn toward advocacy. Hugh Lofting “wrote with warmth and humor, and again, the characters are likeable and well-drawn. In the best of the books the narrative grip is powerful. Above all, the author obviously felt real compassion for animals. If I am up to the neck in the animal rights movement today, Dr. Dolittle must answer for it.”19 He develops this point again later: “there is nothing amiss with the Doctor’s passionate concern about the abuse of animals. He turned me against circuses, fur coats and other such evil things––for life.”20 Taking my cue from Jane Goodall and Richard Adams, I also look to Lofting for wisdom in the pages that follow. This is not, therefore, a work of traditional literary criticism. I write with advocates in mind, aiming to persuade them that the arts bring much to the formation of humane values. It is a potential resource for reform efforts. As much as possible I allow the novels and poems introduced to speak for themselves, with only minimal interaction with scholarly analyses of

 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 162.  Richard Adams, The Day Gone By: An Autobiography (1990; London: Penguin, 1991), 22. 20  Adams, Day Gone By, 106. If Lofting was progressive in his thinking about animal welfare, he was also mired in some of the worst prejudices of his historical moment. As often noted in the critical literature, early editions of the stories include some egregious racist remarks. Later editions of the books remove offensive passages. 18 19

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them. What the book contributes, I hope, is a way of reading that brings the welfare interests of creative writers to the forefront.

Welfarist Reading From Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan to the work of primatologist Jane Goodall; from gassed horses on the battlefields of World War I to Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle; from The Wind in the Willows to the sound of croaking toads I hear. The boundaries between real and imagined animals are often porous, and the potential for the experience of one to shape our experience of the other, in both directions, is ever present. Writers help us see animals we might otherwise overlook. To meet Esther the pig in print is to view those inside the livestock trucks we pass with new eyes, and our interactions with real animals intrude on our experience of fiction, the way Daisy the tripod is for me a marginal gloss to the parable told in Luke 10:25–37. Readers’ propensity for mingling the imagined with the real and vice versa makes animal literature a rich resource for the promotion of humane themes. As C. S. Lewis puts it, in verse, our “love” for Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle or Nutkin in the Beatrix Potter tales “no doubt–– splashes over on the / Actual archtypes,” by which he means the real hedgehogs and squirrels that lie behind those artistic representations.21 Literature helps us “love” the animals we meet after closing our books. Those who advocate for animals bring a different set of concerns and questions to literature than those typical of other critical approaches. A welfarist perspective, for lack of a better term, is attentive to ways animals appear in fiction and verse. It considers what this novel or that poem teaches us about animals and our interactions with them. It looks at ways art surfaces ethical questions by critiquing cruelty or exhibiting models of compassion, both of which invite a reassessment of our own actions. Use of the term welfarist criticism is idiosyncratic so perhaps an analogy helps to clarify my objectives. This reading strategy employs a hermeneutic of suspicion like that found in Marxist literary criticism, which maintains 21  C.  S. Lewis, “Impenitence,” in Poems (1964; New  York: HarperOne, 2017), 5–6. Lewis first published this poem in 1953.

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works of fiction do not exist independently of historical contexts. Literature is ideological and individual works expressions of class conflict. Ideology, according to Michael Ryan, refers to “the beliefs, attitudes, and habits of feeling which a society inculcates in order to generate an automatic reproduction of its structuring premises. Ideology is what preserves social power in the absence of direct coercion.”22 Literature potentially perpetuates and legitimizes the dominant, structuring premises. If there is a hidden subtext below the surface that perpetuates power structures serving the interest of some, while oppressing many more, the critic’s role is to expose those potentially damaging biases. If we examine the law, politics, religion, education and culture of class-­ societies, writes Terry Eagleton, “we find that most of what they do lends support to the prevailing social order. And this, indeed, is no more than we should expect. There is no capitalist civilisation in which the law forbids private property, or in which children are regularly instructed in the evils of economic competition.” Art and literature often contribute to this bolstering of the status quo. While it is true there “is no sense in which Shelley, Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Brontë, Dickens, George Orwell and D. H. Lawrence were all shamelessly pumping out propaganda on behalf of the ruling class,” if we consider “English literature as a whole, we find that its critique of the social order rarely extends to questioning the property system.”23 Welfare-inclined animal literature and criticism reveal hidden ideologies. Most works of fiction reinforce a worldview that privileges people over other animals, maintaining might is right, that human reason is the measure of all things, and that the exercise of “dominion” over the earth and its creatures is a God-given privilege. Such assumptions are often implied when not stated directly, a habitual default insisting, That’s just the way it is. In addition to explicit arguments asserting humanity’s right to rule, there are also ‘gaps’ in the vast majority of stories where animals are present. Think of stories about pre-mechanistic warfare with armies on horseback, where nothing is said of the injuries from spears or bullets  Michael Ryan, “Political Criticism,” Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. G. Douglas Atkins and Laura Morrow (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 203. 23  Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 153–54. 22

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or green gases those horses sustain. Think of meals around the campfire or dinner table that say nothing of the sacrificed animals supplying the meat. Think of the leather and fur characters wear. Think of the animal labour supplying the muscle for travel and construction in historical fiction. All are untold stories. The unacknowledged animal is everywhere in fiction. But when writers shift focus, when they privilege animal wellbeing and tell their stories, ‘the way it is’ is suddenly open to scrutiny.

Telling Their Own Stories Isa Leshko admits the early stages of work photographing elderly animals for a book involved a degree of self-interest. It offered a way to confront her own fears about aging and decline. But she and the project transformed after spending time with her subjects and learning their stories: “I became a passionate advocate for these animals, and I wanted my images to speak on their behalf. It seemed selfish to photograph rescued animals for any other reason. From that point on, I approached these images as portraits in earnest, and I endeavored to reveal something unique about each animal I photographed.”24 Some creative writers think of their art in similar terms. Katherine Applegate says this about writing the children’s novel The One and Only Ivan: “I wanted to give [the gorilla] Ivan (even while captive behind the walls of his tiny cage) a voice of his own and a story to tell.”25 And indeed, Ivan and his friends have stories to tell, and they are not all pleasant. They include acts of human kindness but also cruelties. The novel presents the good and the bad, and because of this has a pedagogical function. It is a work of the imagination but also an education in what human interactions with animals––at their best, at their worse––look like. The story is a peek behind the surface veneer and carnival atmosphere of a cheap shopping mall zoo attraction. Veneers hide something less appealing underneath. What goes on after closing hours at this particular mall? 24  Isa Leshko, Allowed to Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 11. 25  Katherine Applegate, “Author’s Note,” in The One and Only Ivan (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 308.

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There is a substantial library of animal stories of the last two hundred or so years, roughly the period of modern animal welfare movements, doing the same thing. These stories take readers to places they do not usually go and show them things they do not usually see. They offer glimpses of torments animals endure at human hands. What might a once-free-roaming gorilla think after years of confinement in small quarters? We do not know all there is to know about the cognitive processes and the emotional lives of other species but that there are cognitive processes and emotions in nonhumans is plain to see. Though a highly imaginative fantasy, the exercise of exploring how animals perceive human behaviors is a valuable one, as is the ability of storytellers to show us a broad spectrum of human-animal interactions. Between the lines of such stories are ethical questions. Is it possible a caged animal is unfulfilled? Are the entertainments gained by circuslike spectacles really worth the pain and distress inflicted by trainers on those required to perform? This desire to give suffering animals a platform to tell their stories puts Katherine Applegate in good company. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty is justly celebrated as the template for welfare-oriented animal autobiographies, and as Jane Smiley observes, its author’s “motive for giving voice to a horse was not entertainment, but moral teaching.” Her self-appointed task as an author, “was to propose ways for equine mistreatment to be mitigated.”26 To read Black Beauty is to experience something of what it is like to have an uncomfortable bit in the mouth, to be worked to exhaustion, to be left in the cold, to be whipped, abused, underfed, and neglected. For many readers, then and now, consideration of ways our actions help or harm animals is not reflex. Sewell understood this, and like Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan, the objective is welfare reform. Black Beauty is a work of fiction, but Sewell expects the story to detach from its ink and paper to persuade readers who interact with actual horses to be kind. In that way, it is a confrontational book, challenging such  Jane Smiley, “Foreword,” to Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (1877; New York: Penguin, 2011), ix. Many note the contributions of Sewell’s Black Beauty toward greater awareness of animal suffering. “The novel had a very powerful impact on the public,” writes Paul Waldau, “and it, along with much other literature modeled on it, increased concern greatly for not only the welfare of work animals but for dogs as well” (Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], 42).

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things as fashion as it concerns horse-drawn carriages, and economic expediency in businesses relying on animal labour. Ethical arguments in animal literature are always Davids facing any number of self-concerned Goliaths.

Questioning Authority “Do not accept injustice even if you hear it in my name.”27 This, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues, is the import of the strange story related in Genesis 18 about God’s plan to destroy the cities of the plain. When God announces it, Abraham questions the justice of the intended action: “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? … Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (18:23, 25).28 It is an extraordinary scene and an unexpected question to ask. Does Abraham really think he is more righteous than God? If we go back a few verses, Sacks suggests, there is an important clue putting the exchange in context: The LORD said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice; so that the LORD may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” (Genesis 18:17–19)

That initial question, which Abraham overhears, is an invitation for him to act, and it sets the terms of the challenge. “God is inviting Abraham to respond,” according to Sacks. God chose Abraham to keep the way of the Lord, to do what is right and just. By not hiding plans to destroy the cities on the plain, Sacks notes, God puts Abraham in a position to respond using those very terms.

27  Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning (New York: Schocken, 2011), 243. Italics original. 28  Here and throughout I use the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, unless otherwise indicated.

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Abraham is to be the voice of the right (tzedakah) and the just (mishpat). These then become precisely the words he uses in his challenge: ‘righteous’ (tzadikim) and ‘Judge/justice’ (ha-shofet/mishpat). Abraham challenges God because God invites him to challenge God.

The story contrasts with that of Noah who, while making the ark, does not protest God’s announced plan to destroy the world. “That is what made Abraham, not Noah, the hero of faith,” Sacks continues. “Noah accepted. Abraham protested. The religion of Abraham is a religion of protest against evil, in the name of God.”29 My interest in this biblical commentary is more rhetorical than theological. Though hardly an exact analogy with the Abraham story, the literature discussed in this book is in most cases a literature of protest. What interests me about this reading of Genesis 18 is the questioning of moral authority, the challenge of what is otherwise sacrosanct, which in Abraham’s case would be any and all acts of God. To question this authority, according to Sacks’s reading, is appropriate. Genesis affirms Abraham’s willingness to protest and question.30 Conventional thinking places humanity at the centre of all things and there is a tendency to recoil from the idea of any debt of moral consideration owed to nonhuman life. Humans hunt, eat, sacrifice, and vivisect animals. We use them for entertainment and labour. It is in our interest to do so. If indeed humans are the measure of all things, an instrumental use of animals––they are here for our use, to do with as we please––is the de facto good. To challenge such presumption is akin to Abraham challenging God but that is, at least in the opinion of many authors, what righteousness and justice demand. Many creative writers of the last two hundred years––again, roughly the time of modern welfare reform efforts––challenge the ‘god’ of anthropocentrism, the elevation of humanity above all else. Animal literature is often a literature of protest, putting before readers human acts toward animals deemed absurd or abhorrent. Ideal readers of this literature choose not to accept (as Noah does) but rather to question, protest, and resist (as Abraham does). They creatively 29 30

 Sacks, Great Partnership, 243, 244.  Sacks, Great Partnership, 244.

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reject cruelty and invoke alternatives to entrenched self-interested behaviors. The imagined spaces such authors put before us are sites of moral response, of attempts to realize dreams of peace. During a brief stop in the little town of Monteverde, in the Capa Blanca Islands, Doctor John Dolittle engages in a form of protest against bullfighting, which occurred there every Sunday, and resulted in the death of six bulls and many horses each time. (After teasing and angering the bulls, each one “was allowed to tire himself out by tossing and killing a lot of poor, old, broken-down horses who couldn’t defend themselves … [then] a man came out with a sword and killed the bull”).31 The Doctor is rarely angry in these stories, but becomes so on this occasion. He despises the bullfights, which he describes as “a cruel, disgusting business.” They are in his view ridiculous, “cruel, cowardly shows.”32 When he says this to the wealthy Don Enrique Cardenas, a very powerful and influential person on these islands, Dolittle finds himself voicing an unpopular, contrarian view. Said differently, he questions an accepted good, he challenges authority, he confronts a cultural norm. When Don Enrique takes offense, Dolittle sees an opportunity. He insists he can outperform the best matador in the ring, and puts the following proposal to the incredulous Don Enrique: “‘If I can do more with angry bulls than can [the matador] Pepito de Malaga, you are to promise me that there shall never be another bullfight in the Capa Blancas so long as you are alive to stop it. Is it a bargain?’”33 Dolittle succeeds, of course. He first speaks to the bulls who are only too glad to play along if it ends the weekly slaughter. When the big day comes, Dolittle has the bulls performing various tricks before the mostly delighted crowd, and those same bulls run the celebrated Pepito de Malaga out of the ring. Some are angry because Dolittle’s performance threatens their way of life, which to them is a long-established good. When Dolittle calls for the release of five bulls at once during the fight, Pepito the matador objects, demanding Don Enrique not allow it because “it was against all the rules  Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 156–57.  Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 156, 157. It surprises the narrator Tommy Stubbins to see the usually mild-mannered Dolittle “red in the face with anger” and it reminds him of the Doctor’s similar reaction when speaking about zoos keeping tigers and lions in captivity (156; cf. 57–58). 33  Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 159. 31 32

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of bullfighting.”34 Dolittle does not play by the rules though. He thinks differently, he sees animals differently, he treats them differently. This fanciful, highly imaginative character illustrates a confrontation with established norms, with authority, with rules, with what the townspeople and their beloved matadors accept as business-as-usual and good. Simply questioning the appropriateness of bullfighting proves to be an affront to them. This is clear from Don Enrique’s warning to Dolittle before the fight: “you are merely throwing your life away, for you will certainly be killed. However, that is no more than you deserve for saying that bullfighting is an unworthy sport.”35 Lofting uses fiction to ask difficult questions, interrogate unexamined norms, and confront the status quo. Like Abraham, he and other animal-friendly writers are iconoclastic. They are defiant toward that which is––often blindly, unthinkingly––sacrosanct. Some literary theorists of recent years also include a critical animal ethics approach that disrupts habitual, anthropocentric ways of thinking. Josephine Donovan uses the term animal-standpoint criticism for analyses that deconstruct ideologies of exploitation and dominance.36 This approach begins with the premise animals are subjects, not objects, “they are individuals with stories/biographies of their own, not undifferentiated masses; that they dislike pain, enjoy pleasures; that they want to live and thrive; that in short they have identifiable desires and needs.” Literature, as Katherine Applegate’s remarks about Ivan attests, has the capacity to give animals a voice. The failure of authors to do so “is a central concern of animal-standpoint criticism.”37 As Carol J. Adams puts it, “Animal defense theory argues that we must consider the individual animals. We must not let the fate of individual animals become deflected by concerns about species, or habitat, or the environment, or determined by what some consider to be humans’ needs to eat and experiment upon animals. It is as individuals that animals experience the consequences of  Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 166. Italics added. Polynesia the parrot likens Dolittle breaking the rules of bullfighting to his sailing methods (166–67; cf. 147). Though he breaks the rules of navigation, he always gets where he wants to go. 35  Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 159. 36  Josephine Donovan, The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 95–96. 37  Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 99. 34

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their oppression.”38 This approach, Donovan continues, identifies “authorial and critical blindness that often accompanies animal representation, questioning the absences and elisions, the lapses and lacunae in texts where animals appear.”39 Is the suffering of animals represented in stories taken into account? What about critical analyses of that literature? Many of the stories considered here do. They challenge indifference by bringing animals from the margins to the centre of fictional worlds. They give them a voice and acknowledge their particular interests. They also protest human-caused distress and so, to borrow Lisa Sainsbury’s term, they are instances of “moral creativity.”40 Humane fiction allows animals their subjectivity, considers their particularity, and recognizes their capacity to suffer or flourish. Other stories discussed are not particularly concerned with welfare themes but nonetheless surface issues warranting ethical consideration. Hunting stories by their very nature, regardless of authorial intent, are likely to turn some readers’ thoughts toward the pursued animal’s experience. Ernest Hemingway writes of his great passion for bullfights and so stands in sharp contrast to the views reflected in the Lofting story just described. However, his reflections on the fights are as likely to repulse as impress, depending on the reader, and for this reason potentially shape a reader’s opinions one way or the other.41

38  Carol J. Adams, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (1994; London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 34. In a similar spirit, cf. S. Louise Patteson’s Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1901), 88–89: “pardon me if I mention something that may seem very trivial to you, but which I consider of great importance. A cat should have a name, because it adds to her dignity, and commands respect for her. Moreover, it enhances her commercial value to be thus individualized, and lifted above the general mass of her kind.” 39  Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 99. 40  Lisa Sainsbury, Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life, Perspectives on Children’s Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 167. 41  See e.g., Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner, 1932).

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 nimal Welfare and a Literature A of Compassion Paralleling the rise of animal welfare movements in the nineteenth century is the emergence of a body of writing sympathetic to the activism and calls for reform coming from societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, anti-vivisection organizations, and the like. Mark Twain illustrates this alignment of artistry and activism well. “His identification with the animal welfare movement motivated him to write various polemical texts,” explains Hadas Marcus. She lists among them Twain’s “Cruelty to Animals I” (1864), “Cruelty to Animals II” (1867), an 1899 letter to the London Anti-Vivisection Society, and the novella A Horse’s Tale (1907), which is a protest against bullfighting.42 Writers with an aversion to cruelty, recognizing the potential of compelling stories to educate and win sympathy, paired animal causes with fiction. My aim here is to identify textual moments where views about the morality of human-caused animal suffering and creativity meet. I focus on a relatively few examples offering a kind of ethical discourse about animals very different from the more abstract arguments of, say, philosophy or theology. Storytelling, like myth, tells us much about our world and our interactions with it, and for this reason is crucial for ethical formation. The kinds of stories I examine are not all alike in the degree of emphasis placed on animal welfare efforts. Some, like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, focus on it almost entirely whereas in others, like Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), it is incidental. These two examples do not explicitly mention any welfare organizations by name, but a number of others do. A mystery surrounding a lost and suppressed will is a storyline in Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo. This will, it turns out, includes a sizable bequest to an Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.43 The children’s book The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White includes a brief episode affirming the work of the Audubon Society,  Hadas Marcus, “An Ecocritical Approach to Cruelty in the Laboratory,” Journal of Animal Ethics 6.2 (2016): 228. 43  Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 3 (1925; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 228–29, 247–48. 42

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founded in 1905. According to one character, the organization “‘is kind to birds’” and he decides to give them money “‘to help birds’” because some of them are “‘in real trouble. They face extinction.’”44 Here, in a fun and lighthearted story, is an educational moment, a signal to readers to consider a serious conservation issue. The adult speaker explains to a child what extinction means: “‘[It] is what happens when … you don’t exist anymore because there are no others like you. Like the passenger pigeon and the eastern Heath Hen and the Dodo and the Dinosaur.’” Young readers likely appreciate the lesson because immediately after these words, another adds, “‘The Trumpeter Swan was almost extinct. … People kept shooting them. … But now they are making a comeback.’”45 Since this remark comes near the end of the story and after readers have come to know and love Louis the trumpeter swan and his family, to learn the species almost disappeared likely comes as a shock. That human action is responsible for the near tragedy (“‘kept shooting them’”) is sobering and puts an ethical dilemma before them. An author’s ability to encourage a bond between reader and nonhuman characters in stories is crucial for the promotion of sympathy and attention to welfare topics. As Donovan notes, with reference to a Leo Tolstoy short story about a horse, “As the reader has come to know Strider as a subject, his death necessarily evokes feelings of sadness, compassion, and sympathy, as well as anger at human indifference to the fate of this remarkable and admirable animal.”46 S.  Louise Patteson tells us plainly she considers her children’s story about cats an effort to promote the activities of an animal welfare organization. In the Preface to Pussy Meow: An Autobiography of a Cat (1901), she explains its genesis: In the fall of 1895, while the National Convention of the S. P. C. A. was in session in Cleveland, a group of people stood in the assembly room one day discussing “Black Beauty” and “Beautiful Joe.” One expressed the hope 44  E. B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan, illustrated by Edward Frascino (New York: Scholastic, 1970), 196–97. 45  White, Trumpet of the Swan, 197. Italics original. There is also a storyline about hunting to extinction in Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee’s Maybe A Fox (New York: Atheneum, 2016). See e.g., 169–70. 46  Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 117.

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that as the horse and the dog had now secured a public hearing [in those books], some one [sic] would be willing to undertake the same for the cat.47

Here the connection between a humane organization and creative writing is explicit, and the appeal for a story following the animal autobiography template modelled by Sewell and Margaret Marshall Saunders makes it clear these advocates valued storytelling’s power of persuasion. “That same evening,” Patteson continues, “‘Pussy Meow’ began writing her story,” and the impetus behind the work is unambiguously a welfare agenda: Its only object is to breathe out the joys, the sorrows and the longings of a misunderstood and much maligned fellow-creature, and to secure for her the consideration which humanity owes to the dumb.48

Patteson and those encouraging her efforts recognized a gap in protection efforts. The status of cats in the nineteenth century (“much maligned”) was rather ambiguous. They were, as Janet M. Davis puts it, “conspicuously absent as a subject of sustained programmatic concern.”49 There are various reasons for this exclusion, among them superstitions, the belief they carried diseases, and most significantly the threat they posed to songbirds. Davis reports the hostility against cats was such that “bird protectionist members of the Pasadena Humane Society … proposed a feline extermination program in 1903.”50 As for cats, admits one character in Patteson’s novel, “‘I never before thought they were good for  Patteson, Pussy Meow, “Preface,” n.p. Within the story, the feline narrator echoes this concern for overlooked species in remarks about Billy the pig: “When Billy was led back to his pen, he grunted his thankfulness to his friends the best he knew how. As for me, I concluded to put Uncle Ellison’s plan [for kind treatment of pigs] into my story; for who knows but some of the boys who read it may be farmers someday, and will want to try it?” (45). Like Sewell’s Black Beauty and Margaret Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe, the basis for Patteson’s vision of animal compassion is Christian piety. Guy and his mother, Meow’s “mistress,” enact the humane values inculcated throughout the book. They also read the Bible and pray every day after breakfast (e.g., Pussy Meow, 64). There are references to Sewell’s Black Beauty and Saunders’s Beautiful Joe in Patteson’s novel as well. Guy reads them both (28, 29). 48  Patteson, Pussy Meow, “Preface,” frontmatter, unnumbered page. 49  Janet M.  Davis, The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 12. 50  Davis, Gospel of Kindness, 12–13. 47

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anything, having been brought up to think of them as uncanny creatures, something to be abhorred and dreaded.’”51 The alignment of the novel and organized efforts to protect animals occurs again in Sarah K. Bolton’s “Introduction” to the book, which cites remarks attributed to Queen Victoria at the jubilee meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: “‘No civilization is complete which does not include the dumb and defenseless of God’s creation within the sphere of charity and mercy.’” Bolton refers to various groups, connecting their welfare work to the story she introduces: There are homes for cats in Dublin, in London, and other English cities, as well as some in Egpyt [sic] and India. The Gifford Sheltering Home for Animals, in Boston, is doing great work; also the Frances Power Cobbe Refuge in Indianapolis, Indiana. We are teaching our children to be kind to every living creature. May this story of “Pussy Meow” help forward the good work.52

These remarks foreground the important role of organized animal protection from the outset and literature’s welcome contribution to it. Some contemporary writers do the same, as a few examples show. In Peg Kehret’s children’s book Ghost Dog Secrets (2010), a Humane Society and its volunteers feature prominently. The teacher Mrs. Webster, herself a volunteer with an animal rescue group, helps her sixth-grade students who want “to do something to help those puppy mill dogs” they hear about on the evening news. She organizes their efforts to raise money and collect supplies.53 The book urges readers to do the same, to act on behalf of animals. In a sense, Kehret breaks ‘the fourth wall.’ The term comes from the theatre and indicates transgressions of the boundary separating actor/stage/fiction from audience/gallery/reality. As used here, I mean writers who break out of the confines of imagined spaces to engage readers directly. They blur the lines between the story and daily experience,  Patteson, Pussy Meow, 87.  Sarah K. Bolton, “Introduction” to Saunders, Pussy Meow, 15. Italics added. 53  Peg Kehret, Ghost Dog Secrets (New York: Puffin, 2010), 12. Italics original. There are numerous references to the Humane Society, Animal Control, and animal control officers throughout (e.g., 73, 76, 130–135, 139, 142, 149, 165, 181, 186). 51 52

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inviting readers to let the former intrude on the latter. Do not stay in imagined spaces, they insist, but turn to the actual animals you see around you. Black Beauty does this when he highlights one of the takeaways from the story: “if any one [sic] wants to break in a young horse well, that is the way.”54 The dog Beautiful Joe closes his autobiography with a direct address, asking boys and girls to “‘be kind to dumb animals, not only because you will lose nothing by it, but because you ought to; for they were placed on the earth by the same Kind Hand that made all living creatures.’”55 In Ghost Dog Secrets, Kehret’s clearest invitation for audience participation connects to Wendy, a girl who is enthusiastic about helping homeless cats. She knits cat blankets for the Humane Society, even starting a club to get others involved, and then delivers them to the shelter at the close of the story. Just five pages later, in the back matter of the book, Kehret supplies instructions for readers to make cat blankets themselves for the same purpose: “Using two strands of 4-ply yarn, cast on 33 stitches. Knit every row for 66 rows,” and so on. The knitting instructions are an invitation to continue the kindnesses modelled by Wendy, Rusty, and their friends. This novel breaks out of the confines of an imaginary world in other ways too. The backmatter includes website addresses for the Humane Society of the United States and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals so readers know where to find further information about animal cruelty laws (under the heading, “Learn how to help”). In addition, the author’s biography on the inside back cover notes Kehret is a past winner of “the Henry Bergh Award from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” and that she “help[s] animal rescue groups.”56 Susan Hughes’s Wild Paws series also combines storytelling with a humane education and mentions welfare organizations both real and imagined. She bridges fiction with nonfiction most explicitly in her dedications. The books Lonely Wolf Pup (2003) and Bunnies in Trouble (2004),  Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (1877. New York: Penguin, 2011), 13.  Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe, ed. Keridiana Chez (1893; Peterborough: Broadview, 2015), 270. 56  Kehret, Ghost Dog Secrets, backmatter, pages unnumbered. 54 55

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to illustrate, include thanks to the staff of the Muskoka Wildlife Centre for their assistance. In Cubs All Alone (2004), she acknowledges the Idaho Black Bear Rehabilitation Center, and in Orphaned Beluga (2004), she thanks a veterinarian named Sylvain De Guise of the University of Connecticut who specializes in belugas.57 Her young protagonist Maxine Kearney volunteers at the (fictional) Wild Paws and Claws Clinic and Rehabilitation Centre, and each book relates the adventures she and her friends undertake on behalf of a different species (bears, rabbits, a beluga whale, a wolf, a bobcat). Other examples of animal stories incorporating animal welfare organizations, real or imagined, include certain books by British author Holly Webb, such as Harry the Homeless Puppy, which is about, in part, “a home for unwanted dogs,” and The Shelter Puppy.58 Melissa Hart’s Avenging the Owl includes website addresses for various organizations supporting wildlife, including Hawkwatch International, “a nonprofit dedicated to preserving raptors and their habitat,” and The Peregrine Fund, “a nonprofit working to conserve birds of prey.”59

The Animal-Friendly Writer and Ethics Much of the literature discussed here reflects an attitude toward nature that is not dominative but rather inclined toward ethical reflection: “The mentality involved in an aesthetics of care is thus nonviolent, adaptive, responsive, and attentive to the environment, perceiving other creatures as subjects worthy of respect, whose different voices must be attended to, and with whom one is emotionally engaged, interwoven in an ecological and spiritual––subject-subject––continuum. Such a mentality may, it is hoped, foster a moral and ecological sensitivity.”60 Philosophical and critical perspectives such as those found in the works of Josephine Donovan 57  Hughes further grounds the last-mentioned book in a real-world situation, noting, “This story is based on [De Guise’s] real-life rescue of an upriver beluga whale in Canada” (Susan Hughes, Orphaned Beluga, Wild Paws [Toronto: Scholastic, 2004], frontmatter, unnumbered page). 58  Holly Webb, Harry the Homeless Puppy (London: Little Tiger, 2015), 9; The Shelter Puppy (London: Little Tiger, 2018). 59  Melissa Hart, Avenging the Owl (New York: Sky Pony, 2016), 214. 60  Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 10, referring to Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992).

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and Carol J. Adams have a creative counterpart in a range of stories that in various ways seek to educate readers about human-caused animal suffering and to persuade them to choose nonviolence by promoting empathy and envisioning new behaviors. Certainly realizing this threefold objective is no easy feat but artists are uniquely positioned to gain a hearing and hold their audiences’ attention. Fiction is often deliberate in its efforts to win sympathy and promote reform, with authors writing for animals and in response to cruelties. In David Duchovny’s Holy Cow, the narrator Elsie the cow is understandably horrified and angry when she discovers the awful truths about factory farming. She notes dairy and meat-producing operations contribute to water shortages, force chickens, cows, and pigs to live in unimaginably cramped conditions, and overuse antibiotics, which results in the appearance of dangerous superbugs.61 But her angry tone is not all that helpful, in the opinion of her editor: “‘You do realize you are insulting your entire audience, i.e., the human race? Not what I’d call a winning strategy. Cows don’t buy books.’” This editor urges a gentler approach, suggesting “‘A spoonful of sugar helps the globe-warming, drought-inducing, superresistant-­ bacteria-creating medicine go down. Don’t forget the spoonful of sugar, sugar.’”62 Compassion-concerned animal literature embraces this editor’s philosophy. The serious discourses of scientists and philosophers have their place, but they do not reach or convince all audiences. Cows and canaries have something to say as well, and poets and novelists give them a voice to do so. Duchovny’s approach is clever. Most don’t want to know where their cheap meat comes from or what goes on in abattoirs. He is aware of this and gives readers what Elsie’s editor has in mind. A little bit of sugar, humor in this case, earns a hearing. But is the study of animal ethics through the lens of creative writing a useful exercise? This is an important question and one returned to throughout. At this point, I merely mark my agreement with Susan McHugh’s observation back in 2009 regarding the broad disciplinary neglect of animals generally: “Animals abound in literature across all ages and cultures, but only rarely have they been the focal point of systematic 61 62

 David Duchovny, Holy Cow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 56.  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 55, 57.

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literary study.”63 Similarly, theologian and ethicist Andrew Linzey finds the relative silence of English literature departments surprising: For the most part … courses in literature have left animals to one side. This is a rather puzzling omission. Puzzling because writers of all genres have written extensively, perceptively, and almost always provocatively about our relations with animals—and often to significant moral effect. None have done so more forcefully than poets who have frequently anticipated and championed a more peaceful and less exploitative relationship with other creatures.64

A shift appears to be in the offing, however. Tzachi Zamir refers to the gradual turn of Anglo-American moral philosophers toward literature as they find “in its form, content, or experience important modes of thought that are decisive for comprehensive moral reflection.” These philosophers maintain “some sensitivities or aspects of moral reflection are significantly deepened by engaging with literary works.” Zamir includes himself among them, commenting on the experience of reading J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals: “I do not think I would have written a book on animal ethics without the push I had received from Coetzee’s work. … something in [it] brought home to me the enormity of the animal issue and why I should be concerned with it as a philosopher.”65 This deepening of moral sensitivities made possible by literature is not easily encapsulated by definition or description (Zamir’s “something in [it]”) nor is it a matter of simply identifying techniques in the writer’s toolbox. For this reason, the approach largely employed below is to introduce a number of writers, Coetzee among them, who urge (or at least attempt to urge––not all succeed) readers to expand the circle of compassion beyond species  Susan McHugh, “Literary Animal Agents,” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 487.  Andrew Linzey, “Preface: Animals, Literature, and the Virtues,” in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), xvi. This book is an anthology “designed to employ the power of fiction to illuminate our moral relationship with animals” (back cover). I discuss a number of stories found in this anthology. 65  Tzachi Zamir, “Literary Works and Animal Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp and R. G. Frey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 932, 953. For his more extensive discussion of morality and the nonhuman, see Zamir’s Ethics and the Beast: A Speciesist Argument for Animal Liberation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 63 64

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lines. An immersion in these stories with relatively minimal commentary seems a reasonable strategy for getting closer to that elusive “something.” When selecting novels to illustrate animal welfare literature, or literature providing a basis to explore welfare themes, I chose examples representing some of the obvious forms of human-animal interaction: use of animals for food (Chap. 3); use of animals for scientific research (Chap. 4); confinement and coexistence with nonhuman animals (Chap. 5); animals and religion (Chap. 6); and, overlapping with the section on food, hunting (Chap. 7). The books discussed are not all ‘high’ literature nor are they uniform in genre. I include children’s books alongside horror alongside comedy, but most of them, in different ways, attempt to awaken (or inadvertently awaken) compassion for the nonhuman or tell animal stories that compel serious reflection on the morality of human actions toward them. Most stories considered include at least one of the following features. First, they foreground individual animals. The use of story to win support for advocacy efforts often focuses on the plight of a particular representative of the species in question. This is the case in various books already mentioned, including Sewell’s horse Black Beauty, and Saunders’s dog Beautiful Joe. The effectiveness of narratives centred on individuals is evident in a form of storytelling often used by welfare organizations. Shelters regularly solicit support or encourage adoption through stories about the animals in their care (“she was abused before coming to us”), sometimes even using the first-person (“Hello, my name is _____. I’m a well-mannered lab-border collie mix looking for a loving home”). Second, the stories considered go beyond use of animals as mere figures of some human reality. When Gregor Samsa awakes from a troubled sleep to discover himself “transformed into a monstrous vermin” at the opening of Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, he awakes not from a nightmare but into one.66 But the story is not really about the other-than-­ human creature Samsa becomes. Rather, it concerns a perceived loss of dignity owing to the dehumanizing deprivations experienced in his career. We see this, rather humorously, as his thoughts shift almost  Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, in The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, ed. Jason Barker, trans. Donna Freed (1915; New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003), 7.

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immediately to this subject after becoming aware of his newfound state, as though that subject were as troubling as his new, insect-like form: “Oh God,” he thought, “what a grueling profession I picked! Traveling day in, day out. It is much more aggravating work than the actual business done at the home office, and then with the strain of constant travel as well: the worry over train connections, the bad and irregular meals, the steady stream of faces who never become anything closer than acquaintances. The Devil take it all!”67

What is disturbing about this scene is the suggestion that the everyday, monotonous responsibilities of modern life distort and destroy the individual. Samsa dutifully provides for his family’s needs, doing what his parents and sister, and his society expect of him. It is the drudgery of this, the banality facing modern, urban people that transforms Samsa. The possibility we might also wake up into such a nightmare is what makes Kafka’s parable so distressing. But again, it is not really about the nonhuman in any real sense. Instead, the animal books concerning us here are actually about animals, not humans disguised with feathers and fur and exoskeletons. In addition, such writers who tend to be sensitive to welfare issues usually resist diminishing the nonhuman through simile and metaphor. “Yeah, we care about how we look,” says Elsie, “And we don’t appreciate it that when you people think someone is fat you call them a cow. And pigs aren’t very happy about the whole ‘pig’ or ‘swine’ thing, and chickens are pissed too about the ‘chicken’ thing.”68 In the 1967 film Doctor Dolittle, the titular character also bemoans the frequent use of animals in insults directed at other people. Remarks like stubborn as a mule, stupid as an ox, slimy as a snake and crafty as a fox, “really get my goat,” sings Rex Harrison.69 Josephine Donovan argues such language is a form of fictional violence against nonhumans:  Kafka, The Metamorphosis, 7–8.  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 5. On degrading animal imagery, see too Adams, Neither Man nor Beast, xxxi. 69  The song is “Like Animals,” in Doctor Dolittle, directed by Richard Fleischer, music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, Lionel Newman, and Alexander Courage (Twentieth Century Fox, 1967). My 67 68

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…one of the most common devices that exploit animal pain for aesthetic effect is the animal metaphor, or, more specifically, the animal ‘stand-in’ or surrogate, where the animal acts as a substitute for a human and/or is employed as an objectified vehicle through which to reveal or express human feelings. Using animal death and agony to dramatize, symbolize, or comment upon the emotional state of the human protagonists continues to be a standard fictional device.70

She supports the claim with a long list of short stories by reputable writers in which “the moral reality of the animals’ own suffering is elided.”71 Third, and sometimes overlapping with the first criterium, the books considered here depict in story form experiences facing actual animals as a way to inform readers about real-world ethical concerns. Sometimes a specific situation lies behind the story. One of the better-known examples from children’s literature of recent years is Katherine Applegate’s Newbery prize winning novel The One and Only Ivan, mentioned above. As she explains in an author’s note, the inspiration for her fictional tale was a true one. The real Ivan spent nearly thirty years in a Washington state, circus-themed shopping mall.72 Thanks to the persistence of activists on his behalf, Ivan’s circumstances improved dramatically when rehomed in Zoo Atlanta. Applegate incorporates this example of public intervention on behalf of a vulnerable animal as well. In the novel, concerned people mobilize when they see pictures of the sharp-bladed “claw-stick” used to train the baby elephant Ruby, and they call for the mall to be shut down.73 Inspectors begin to assess all the animals’ health and the conditions in which they live,74 and eventually Ruby, Ivan, and the others move to the more spacious environs of a proper zoo where they are able to live with transcription. Though quite humorous, the lyrics are remarkably progressive, offering a sharp critique of human indifference to animals. For a rejoinder to the term “stupid chickens,” see Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8 (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2020), 203–204. The novel presents a picture of chickens as complex beings, most directly in descriptions of the white leghorn hen Bwwaauk, who escapes from an industrial egg operation (35, 170–72, 200–202, 248). 70  Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 46. On this, see too 47, 48, 100–101. 71  Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 47; cf. 46, 168. 72  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, backmatter, unnumbered page. 73  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 229–32, 235; cf. 151–52. 74  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 234, 235.

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others of their own kind. Julia and her father George, the protestors, inspectors, and zoo personnel, all acting on the animals’ behalf and agitating for better care, are central to the story. The elephant Stella foreshadows their efforts: “‘Humans can surprise you sometimes. An unpredictable species, Homo sapiens.’”75 Though a highly imaginative work, it yet remains grounded in identifiable situations (capture of exotic wild animals, abandonment of dogs, harsh training methods used on performing animals, zoos, etc.). Fourth, many of the welfare-leaning books discussed employ religious or otherworldly language and imagery. Authors introduce other-worldly themes for a variety of reasons. For some, religion provides a source of moral authority from which to condemn cruelty and promote kindness. For other writers, the inclusion of ‘animal theologies’ or forms of ‘animal spirituality’ illustrates the meaning-full existence of other sentient beings. The species-specific origin narratives in Richard Adams’s Watership Down and The Plague Dogs, for instance, afford a dignity to rabbits and dogs respectively; they see themselves in these mythic tales. This is, of course, analogous to the Hebrew Bible, which in the first creation story presents humanity as made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and in the second introduces Adam and Eve as its central characters. Adams’s stories do something similar. Religious language thus provides a kind of ‘vocabulary’ to elevate the perceived worth of animals. To be sure, religion is not always friendly to animals and a number of authors identify it as part of the problem, and ultimately at the root of a thoughtless, cruel, human dominion of nonhuman life. In Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse, On Turning Her up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785” (published 1786), which concerns a distressed animal suffering as the result of an unwitting act, the poet invokes religion by his apologetic reference to “Man’s dominion” over nature (cf. Genesis 1:28), which he admits has “broken Nature’s social union, / An’ justifies that ill opinion, / Which makes thee startle, / At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, / An’ fellow mortal!” (ll.7–12).76  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 104; cf. 173.  Robert Burns, “To a Mouse,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors, 9th ed. vol. 2, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2013), 85–86. Unwitting harm owing to human action is a topic addressed by other writers too. For instance, we read of “careless” 75 76

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The analyses of selected works below lean toward what Josephine Donovan refers to as “the emotional meaning” of creative writings. She and others challenge the dominant Kantian approach to ethics with its emphasis on decision-making “based on abstract universalizable principles disconnected from particular contexts and purged of emotional and personal evaluation.”77 Whereas the formalist aesthetics in the Kantian tradition privilege the quantifiable (“the framed, geometric properties of art”), Donovan offers an alternative emphasis on “the nonphysical aspects of the universe,” which is to say the spiritual, emotional, and psychic.78 Her work on aesthetics grows out of a feminist ethics of care, a theoretical lens proving to be enormously consequential in contemporary writing about animal compassion. The theoretical lens provided by feminist care approaches to ethics and aesthetics suits the present book because many early voices in the humane movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spoke from the margins. Marginalized people often have valid alternative perspectives to the dominant views because they see painful realities firsthand in ways others do not. Usually, these perspectives are “elided by controlling ideologies, which are motivated to distort the truth to perpetuate the status quo.” Women, therefore, “may be seen … as providing an alternative perspective––that codified in the ‘caring ethic,’ which is rooted … in women’s historical social and economic practices.”79 To illustrate this, consider Anna Sewell’s views about horses in Victorian society. As a woman, as one not in the upper classes, and as an invalid, she offers a way of looking at animals very much at odds with the social elites and business-­ minded characters that populate Black Beauty. They see horses largely in economic terms, and in some cases with attention to their appearance alone. Old, injured, and ‘used up’ horses are unable to make money as acts causing the death of animals in Sara Pennypacker’s Pax, among them, the plowing of fields killing mice, in an echo of Burns, as well as the damming of rivers, which kills fish ([New York: Balzer and Bray, 2016], 64–65). 77  Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 1–2. 78  Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, viii. 79  Josephine Donovan, “Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals,” in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 189.

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machines of transport, and/or do not look elegant enough to pull the carriages of the fashion-conscious well-to-do. Sewell sees animals differently, in part because she too is powerless in some senses, and she too understands physical pain, which is often discussed in the book. And of course, as a voiceless (politically speaking), disabled woman, she confronts the status quo by giving a voice to others who are voiceless. Black Beauty is an animal’s autobiography. We see the world as experienced by its equine narrator and his friends. Empathy for suffering animals involves acknowledgement of common experience, a recognition of a shared creatureliness. This means that some literature simultaneously articulates concern for oppressed people. Historian Janet M. Davis observes a connection between American abolition efforts in the nineteenth century and a form of storytelling urging animal welfare reform. An emphasis on the bodily suffering of slaves resulted in “a new genre, the cruelty narrative,” which “pulled their readers into a sympathetic relationship with suffering slaves, based on the recognition of humanity’s universal capacity to feel pain.”80 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852) proved to be crucial for the emergence of animal cruelty narratives, even though its focus was human slavery. Davis credits this novel with reinforcing “the synergetic relationship between the treatment of animals, human bondage, and moral character,” adding that animal cruelty “helped define the violent, amoral universe of the slaveholder.” Stowe’s “juxtaposition of kindness, bondage, and suffering helped shape a symbiotic movement language and an expansive field of reform.”81 Stowe herself “perceived many common threads between the institutionalized oppression of a specific group of humans and the institutionalized oppression of nearly all nonhumans.”82 It is interesting to find Richard Adams, one of the most widely read animal writers of the late twentieth century, 80  Davis, Gospel of Kindness, 40. Davis attributes the term cruelty narrative to Elizabeth E. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82.2 (1995): 476–77. On connections between early animal rights efforts and abolition, see too Diane L. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States (Athens, Ohio: Swallow/Ohio University Press, 2006), 24–28. 81  Davis, Gospel of Kindness, 42. 82  Beers, Prevention of Cruelty, 25.

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remarking on the impact left by Uncle Tom’s Cabin when young. His early reading opened the way to new pleasures and endless discoveries, but also to “grief and fear.” Stowe’s novel disturbed him as a child: “Simon Legree, his dreadful plantation and his two black torturers Sambo and Quimbo have never really left me.” Though he does not make the connection between abolition efforts and animal welfare explicit, perhaps it is not coincidental he transitions from remarks about Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its depictions of evil, to one of his own novels: “Many years later, when I came to write Shardik [1974; a novel about a bear] I found that the inexorable course of the story compelled me to create the character of [the slave trader] Genshed. He had to be the most wicked, cruel man I could devise.” He modelled Genshed on Legree.83

 nimal Literature as Moral Argument: Mapping A Cruelty and Kindness “What do you call someone who throws a mother cat and her kitten into a creek,” asks the narrator of Kathi Appelt’s remarkable novel The Underneath, “who steals them from the hound who loves them … what do you call someone like that?” The trees, we’re told, “have a word: evil.”84 Literature sensitive to animal suffering tends to be blunt when assigning blame, and acts of kindness and cruelty are invariably a measure of character. There are plenty of over-the-top villains in literature unfriendly to animals, often introduced as the foil to some kindly hero or heroine whose mercy puts their cruelty in sharp relief. Every Cruella de Vil needs a Dearly family, every Uncle Andrew needs a Polly and Digory. At other times, insensitivity toward animal wellbeing is more ordinary looking, and for this reason all the more pernicious. Outside of fiction, we rarely see the kind of “evil” Appelt’s trees describe––such overt violence exists but is typically clandestine––but less dramatic forms of morally dubious behavior occur around us all the time. Sometimes average, normal, people do mean things. 83 84

 Adams, Day Gone By, 100, 101, 102.  Kathi Appelt, The Underneath, with drawings by David Small (New York: Atheneum, 2008), 85.

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E. B. White addresses this kind of seemingly innocuous indifference in The Trumpet of the Swan through incidents attached to a boy named Applegate Skinner who attends the summer boys camp where Louis the swan works as bugler. Appelt’s trees would not likely describe him as “evil” but he is a rather contrarian child who tells the camp director Mr. Brickle he does not like birds. This is not the only time he says this. When some boys tease Skinner, he is so upset he takes a canoe onto the lake without permission and soon finds himself in trouble. The canoe tips, and he nearly drowns. People rush to help but find he is too far away, and it ends up being Louis the swan who rescues the boy. His attitude toward birds remains the same though: “‘I’m grateful to Louis for saving my life. But I still don’t like birds.’”85 Throughout this scene, White sets up a lesson for readers. A distinctive feature of this episode is the marked emphasis on the boy’s poor decision to paddle alone, which he knows to be wrong. This occurs while ignoring the bad behavior of the other children. The novel does not censure the boys who tease Applegate beyond the bellowing “‘Quiet!’” of the tent leader.86 Three times we read how Skinner’s decision to do this was an act of disobedience: “he was disobeying a camp rule”; “‘You’re not supposed to go out alone in a canoe’”; “‘Applegate Skinner broke a camp rule, took a canoe.’”87 Skinner is thus a bad boy within the moral logic of the story, and we must therefore view his dislike of birds, the only other thing we know about him, as a character flaw. White reinforces this point by contrasting Skinner with the novel’s main human character, a young boy named Sam Beaver. The boys’ names invite the comparison. Sam shares his last name with an animal (Beaver), whereas Applegate’s surname suggests violent action against animals (i.e., skinning). The story about Skinner just described––from initial admission about disliking birds through to maintaining this dislike after Louis saves his life––frames a brief episode showcasing Sam’s love of animals and desire to help those in need. A skunk wanders into camp with a can stuck on his head. Sam is playing tennis with Skinner at the time, which  White, Trumpet of the Swan, 95, 109.  White, Trumpet of the Swan, 104. 87  White, Trumpet of the Swan, 104, 108. 85 86

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also signals a juxtaposition of the two boys. It is Sam, not Skinner, who first lays down his racket when they see the skunk; it is Sam who voices the obvious (“‘That skunk is in trouble’”); it is Sam who recognizes the moral obligation to respond when a fellow creature suffers (“‘He’s going to need help,’ said Sam. ‘That skunk will starve to death if we don’t get that can off’”); and it is Sam who ultimately rescues the animal.88 Sam’s willingness to help despite the hazard associated with proximity to a frightened skunk contrasts with Skinner’s persistent and unwarranted dislike of Louis and other birds. Such contrasting of good and bad behavior is a familiar device in other animal-friendly children’s stories. Patteson’s Pussy Meow relates an incident involving a cruel neighborhood boy who terrorizes the feline protagonist-­narrator and her friends. Eddie is one of the first people she meets. The fact he has “no one to play with” suggests he is on the fringe, defiant of the expectations of polite society.89 In that respect, he is rather like the friendless Applegate Skinner. Meow describes Eddie as “our little tormentor” and he often harasses her and other kittens when they are outside, unsupervised. On one occasion, Eddie ties Meow’s friend Toddy to his velocipede and rides “up and down the sidewalk as fast as he could” until a neighbor intervenes. When the cat’s owner learns about it, she takes action: …as she had warned [Eddie] already many times to let her kittens alone, she said she would report the case to the “Humane Agent.” I never learned what the gentleman did [Meow, reflects], but from that day Eddie did not trouble us for a long time, and we think that next to mistress and the [good] boy [Guy, who lives in Meow’s home], the Humane Agent is our best friend.90  White, Trumpet of the Swan, 100–102.  Patteson, Pussy Meow, 25. 90  Patteson, Pussy Meow, 26. On the “Humane Agent,” see too 82, and for the narrator’s hope that more communities will establish humane societies, 82–83. This convention of attaching ill-­ treatment of animals to misbehaving children is widespread. A rabbit lists possible disasters resulting from a new human family moving into the area in Robert Lawson’s Rabbit Hill. After mentioning dogs, cats, ferrets, shotguns, rifles, explosives, traps, snares, and poisons, she adds, “There might even be Boys!” ([1944; New York: Puffin, 1972], 28, italics original). In Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians, a small boy holds out a piece of bread, taunting the desperately hungry dogs Pongo and Missis. They approach cautiously “with love” but the boy then throws a 88 89

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Reporting Eddie to the “Humane Agent” indicates his actions are a serious offense, meaning Patteson rejects any ‘boys will be boys’ excuse. She also affirms the value of institutional welfare efforts by having Meow laud the agent’s response. Most young readers presumably sympathize with the anthropomorphized kittens and dislike the mean Eddie, and even though the “Humane Agent” is not a major character, they likely share Meow’s appreciation for the protection he provides. This promotion of welfare organizations in Pussy Meow occurs again when Patteson integrates a Band of Mercy club storyline. The nineteenth-­ century Band of Mercy movement promoted animal welfare and proved to be widely popular, particularly in the United States. Band of Mercy members took a pledge: “I will try to be kind to all harmless living creatures, and try to protect them from cruel usage.”91 Patteson promotes the Band of Mercy clubs and their values through Willie’s story. He receives a kitten as a gift on Christmas morning, complete with a note from Mrs. Santa Claus. Mrs. Claus sends the kitten because, she explains, “‘you belong to the Band of Mercy.’”92 Patteson maps out the moral spectrum involving animals in ways young readers are not likely to miss. Whereas Santa brings Willie his longed-for gift, he passes by cruel Eddie’s house.93 Perhaps the assonance of their names (good Willie/bad Eddie) is Patteson’s way of reinforcing the moral options they represent and making them more memorable.

rock at Pongo, injuring him. The boy lures Missis by the same means again later. When there is no rock at hand, he throws the piece of bread at her “with rage, not love.” Repetition of the term love signals a contrast between the dogs’ civilized, humane, loving behavior with that of the uncivilized, cruel, and unloving child (1956; with illustrations by Michael Dooling [New York: Puffin, 1989], 69–72). I give other examples of naughty children and animal cruelty elsewhere. 91  Taken from Davis, Gospel of Kindness, 48. These welfare clubs traced their roots to the temperance movement in England. Founded in Leeds in 1847, working class children belonging to Band of Hope clubs pledged to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, and profane language (46). The lineage is plain to see. As Davis notes, “The Bands of Hope and its animal protectionist descendant used a universal, inclusionary rhetoric of kindness” (48). By incorporating the movement to her story, Patteson echoes Margaret Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe, which also promotes the Band of Mercy clubs. 92  Patteson, Pussy Meow, 100. On the boy’s letter to Santa Claus requesting a kitten, see 87, and on the Band of Mercy, see too 125–27. 93  Patteson, Pussy Meow, 98–99.

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Patteson appears to suggest Eddie’s cruelty as a child foreshadows his long-term moral trajectory. She links Eddie in the reader’s mind with a notorious character in another widely read children’s story of the time. Meow remembers that “cruel boy” Eddie at the very moment her caregiver, the boy named Guy, reads about Jenkins, the villain in Margaret Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe. The implication is that Eddie is yet another manifestation of the same savagery leading to Joe’s marred appearance (Jenkins cut off the dog Joe’s ears and tail with an axe). The pedagogical function of introducing Jenkins is explicit: “Who could read of the cruel blows and kicks and all the other insults which [Joe] suffered so patiently at the hands and feet of old Jenkins, without feeling in his inmost soul that henceforth he would defend and protect all helpless and harmless creatures?”94 Such writers expected cruelty narratives to win sympathy and inspire a caring response. Will Morton, another cruel boy in Patteson’s novel, is older than Eddie. Early in the story he throws stones at Meow, and she suspects he would have killed her had not a neighbor intervened. She never forgot him “for from time to time I would see him pass our house, usually puffing away at a cigarette, and accompanied by rough looking hard-faced boys.”95 His cigarettes and the company he keeps are clearly part of a code, signaling bad behavior generally. Will Morton’s reputation among animals and that of his family is entirely negative. They abandon animals when they go away from home on trips, leaving them out in the cold, which sometimes results in their deaths. Will often skips Sunday School to be “with his companions, smoking and listening to rude stories,” and when his mother asks, he drowns unwanted kittens.96  Patteson, Pussy Meow, 29.  Patteson, Pussy Meow, 20, 81. 96  Patteson, Pussy Meow, 79, 80, 81, 225–226. Fittingly, the name Morton brings the French mort, death, to mind. Alcohol and animal abuse are often aligned. For instance, Jenkins in Saunders’s Beautiful Joe is a heavy drinker, as is Gar Face in Appelt’s The Underneath (see e.g., 20, 22, 64–65, 119, 120, 212–14, 242–45, 284, 285). Other examples appear throughout. Dodie Smith’s villain Cruella de Vil represents a lighter, playful version of this pattern. Among other things, she was expelled from school for drinking ink (Hundred and One Dalmatians, 8). Cruella is villainous, of course, because she wants to make fur coats of the dalmatians’ fur. This fashion obsession makes her the literary descendent of a woman in Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle’s Puddleby Adventures who buys a dalmatian because he matches her polka-dot silk gown. It humiliates Dapple to be an accessory in the “woman’s wardrobe,” a mere “boudoir ornament” (in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete 94 95

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When Will Morton throws stones at Meow, a boy named Teddy is with him, and a neighbor rebukes him for watching the cruel act, and not doing anything to stop it: “‘Teddy dear,’ said she, ‘I am surprised to see that you will allow such a heartless thing as this to happen in your presence. Think how your mother would feel if she knew of it.’”97 That this woman says nothing to Will suggests he is an outcast, as though the boy and the boy’s family were incorrigible. As it turns out, Teddy is one of Guy’s friends and actually kind to Meow and other animals. The rebuke from the neighbor woman and Meow’s critique (it is “a pity that he should ever have been with that cruel boy”98) indicate children are responsible for their actions and inaction. They are not only to be kind to animals but also to intervene when necessary. As suggested earlier, Patteson appears to rely on assonance in some of the children’s names to illustrate points on the moral spectrum: Will(ie)/Teddy (bad/good); Will(ie) Morton/Willie Cotton (bad/good); Eddie/Teddy (bad/good). A similar comparison of conduct appears in Peg Kehret’s Ghost Dog Secrets, mentioned above. On the way to school, Rusty Larson observes a dog chained to a tree on a cold, rainy morning, with tail drooped between his legs, and without a doghouse, food or water. This neglect troubles him, and he thinks about the dog throughout the school day. The opening chapter also introduces Rusty’s classmate Gerald Langston. As with the examples above, this bad actor is distanced from more sympathetic characters. The other children dislike him because he cheats on tests, makes fun of other kids, and trips people. He is also mean to animals, as Rusty explains:

Collection, vol. 3 [1952; New York: Aladdin, 2019], 317). Also like Cruella, this woman is domineering over her husband (317). For another storyline addressing animal cruelty in relation to fashion, see the episode about the green-breasted martins, hunted because their feathers look good on felt hats (421–37, esp. 425–26). 97  Patteson, Pussy Meow, 20–21. Welfare-oriented animal stories often stress the need to intervene in cases of cruelty, and as is often the case, Anna Sewell’s novel is a likely template for later books. When the suggestively named Mr. Wright first appears, the cab driver Jeremiah Barker points him out to his daughter and says the man is “a real gentleman” because he is considerate and kind to people. He is also, we learn a few paragraphs later, kind to animals and steps in to help when he witnesses the abuse of a horse (154, 155–56). 98  Patteson, Pussy Meow, 28–29.

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In fourth grade our teacher had a classroom guinea pig, and Gerald used to poke the guinea pig with the point of his pencil. Shannon Whitehouse finally told the teacher about that and nobody called her a tattletale. I wished I’d been the one to stand up for the guinea pig.99

Mentioning Shannon’s intervention accomplishes two things at once. First, it valorizes kindness to the vulnerable, and second, it frees animal protection from any negative stigma. No one in the classroom, Rusty explains, “squealed” on Gerald’s other bad behavior because to do so is even worse than his teasing, tripping, and cheating. But to call out animal cruelty is appropriate and beyond censure, and by praising Shannon Whitehouse, Kehret signals to readers defense of the defenseless is always the right thing to do. This aside about Shannon’s kind act also anticipates Rusty’s plan. Though he missed an opportunity to come to that guinea pig’s defense and regrets this failure (“I wished I’d been the one to stand up”), he decides to do better for the chained-up dog. The first steps he takes attach to assignments given that day at school. When required to write a poem, he gives expression to his grief about the dog’s suffering, which, in effect, tells readers it is okay to be sad when animals suffer. It is not something to be embarrassed about. Rusty’s poem concludes, “As I ride past, the dog’s image blurs / Through wet windows, and my tears.”100 Furthermore, the homework assignment given by the teacher sets Rusty’s adventure in motion. Students are “‘to think of a problem that you personally can help to solve,’” and the boy immediately decides the issue he wants to address is the neglected dog.101 After school, he rides his bike to see if he is still  Kehret, Ghost Dog, 3.  Kehret, Ghost Dog, 5. Italics original. A chained-up dog also figures prominently in Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath. The baying, blues-singing bloodhound named Ranger spends years chained to a post, which accounts for repeated reference to his loneliness (e.g., 6–7, 10, 16, 24, 141, 231, 263). Gar Face is the dog’s master and throughout there is emphasis placed on his cruelty in leaving the dog to languish: “she [Ranger’s friend, a kitten] would not leave Ranger. One day she would figure out how to unfasten the chain, and they would leave this God-forsaken house with its terrible tenant and never look back” (117). As it turns out, an ancient snake breaks the chain, finally releasing Ranger from his bondage (307–308). Here, the author maps out the moral spectrum by contrasting the civilized, loving, ‘humane’ behavior of an animal, and the uncivilized, hateful, ‘beastly’ actions of a person. 101  Kehret, Ghost Dog, 7. 99

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chained. When he finds him there and notices the “row of ribs pushed up against his fur on each side,” he buys the dog a hotdog and promises to return.102 The contrast between Rusty (and Shannon) and Gerald is straightforward, and readers learn kindness is heroic. The alignment of good characters with animal compassion is so deeply entrenched storytellers play on the convention at times, surprising readers who assume they know an individual’s motivations. We find this kind of plot twist in one of Susan Hughes’s Wild Paws stories. In Cubs All Alone, Max and her friend Sarah help Abbie, owner of Wild Paws and Claws Clinic and Rehabilitation Centre, capture and care for two orphaned black bear cubs. Mr. Perch shot the mother bear, and he is less than welcoming when Abbie, Max, and Sarah come to his property in search of the vulnerable cubs. The man’s son also proves unhelpful when Abbie and the girls first see him. The younger girls know him from school and when they ask for his help finding the young bears, he abruptly refuses.103 Max and Sarah have a low opinion of Matthew Perch. He is a loner and the kids at school are afraid of him. Max thinks he looks “mean and nasty,” and suspects this extends to animals.104 “‘He probably doesn’t care a thing about animals,’” Sarah explains to Abbie, “‘especially baby ones.’” When they observe Matthew watching from a distance during the rescue of the cubs, they suspect he is up to no good.105 Later at the Centre, the girls meet Matthew again, this time when caught in the act removing the carriers with the orphans. Much to their surprise, they learn he is actually anxious to help the cubs. He feels bad because his father killed their mother and believes they deserve to be in the wild, not locked in cages. Once they explain this is their ultimate objective too, and that the cubs are not yet able to survive in the forest without their mother, he becomes their willing ally.106 Stories exploring human-animal interactions by locating characters on a moral spectrum take all forms, even appearing in such an unlikely book  Kehret, Ghost Dog, 8–9.  Susan Hughes, Cubs All Alone, Wild Paws (Toronto: Scholastic, 2004), 10, 13–14, 15. 104  Hughes, Cubs All Alone, 12 (always alone, scared of him), 26 (“nasty”). 105  Hughes, Cubs All Alone, 16, 26. 106  Hughes, Cubs All Alone, 60, 61–62. 102 103

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as Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006), where a military dog handler reflects on the bonds between soldiers and their K9 partners.107 The scene in question involves an interview with Darnell Hackworth in the years after the zombie plague ended, and like Matthew Perch, he too is an unexpected friend to animals. Hackworth and his wife now care for retired army K-9 veterans on a farm, and during an interview he discusses ways militaries around the world used dogs in the fight against the living dead. The bond between dogs and handlers Hackworth describes contrasts sharply with the United States Army’s tendency to view animals as mere machinery. He tells of one female handler executed for trying to rescue her K-9 partner when swarmed by zombies. He then goes on to illustrate the depths of the human-animal bond by noting the high suicide rate among handlers after losing their partners: At Hound Town [a K-9 urban warfare school] I met handlers from thirteen other countries. They all said the same thing. It didn’t matter where you were from, what your culture or background, the feelings were still the same. Who could suffer that kind of loss and come out in one piece? Anyone who could wouldn’t have made a handler in the first place. That’s what made us our own breed, that ability to bond so strongly with something that’s not even our own species. The very thing that made so many of my friends take the bullet’s way out was what made us one of the most successful outfits in the whole fucking U.S. military.108

Hackworth’s deep connection with dogs was unanticipated. He tells the interviewer how he used to hate dogs and would drive by a pet store near his home confounded by all the “sentimental, socially incompetent losers” shelling out money for them.109 It all changed during the war after escaping Atlanta at the height of the zombie apocalypse, while heading toward the Colorado Rockies, running and scavenging, with rickets and

 Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (New York: Three Rivers, 2006), 290. On the military uses of dogs, see 282–92. 108  Brooks, World War Z, 290. 109  Brooks, World War Z, 292. 107

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fever, a mere 96 pounds. Witnessing a disturbing instance of animal cruelty changed everything: I found these two guys under a tree. They were making a fire. Behind them was this little mutt. His paws and snout were bound with shoelaces. Dried blood was caked on his face. He was just lying there, glassy-eyed, whimpering softly. You know, I honestly don’t remember. I must have hit one of them with my bat. They found it cracked over his shoulder. They found me on the other guy, just pounding his face in…. The Guardsmen had to pull me off, cuff me to a car hulk, smack me a couple times to get me to refocus…. “Calm the fuck down,” the LT [lieutenant] said, trying to question me, “What’s wrong with you? Why’d you do that to your friends?” “He’s not our friend!” the one with the broken arm yelled, “he’s fuckin’ crazy!” And all I kept saying was “Don’t hurt the dog! Don’t hurt the dog!” …. “Buddy,” [the LT] said, “I think we got a job for you.” And that’s how I got recruited. Sometimes you find your path, sometimes it finds you.110

This novel, of course, is gory and violent all through in keeping with the genre’s conventions so this impassioned defense of a helpless mutt is rather unexpected. A similar effect occurs in Stephen King and Owen King’s novel Sleeping Beauties in which the animal control officer of the town of Dooling, Frank Geary, beats a “dog-torturing monster” named Fritz Meshaum to within an inch of his life. Geary finds the near-dead dog chained to a tree, with all its legs broken, and is unable to control his rage. “It had been a little dog,” Geary reasons after nearly killing the man, “and little dogs couldn’t fight back. There wasn’t any excuse for it, for torturing an animal like that, no matter how ill-tempered it might be.”111 Usually, protectors of animals are sympathetic characters in fiction, kind to both humans and nonhumans. Hackworth certainly is, despite his aggressive outburst. King and King are no doubt aware Frank Geary is a departure from the convention––violence and rage toward other people typically motivate his actions. An exception that proves the rule.

 Brooks, World War Z, 290–91.  Stephen King and Owen King, Sleeping Beauties (New York: Scribner, 2017), 254. Full scene, 252–54. 110 111

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References Adams, Carol J. 2018. Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals. London: Bloomsbury. Adams, Richard. 1991. The Day Gone By: An Autobiography. London: Penguin. Appelt, Kathi. 2008. The Underneath. With drawings by David Small. New York: Atheneum. Appelt, Kathi, and Alison McGhee. 2016. Maybe A Fox. New York: Atheneum. Applegate, Katherine. 2012. The One and Only Ivan. New York: HarperCollins. Beers, Diane L. 2006. For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States. Athens, OH: Swallow/Ohio University Press. Bolton, Sarah K. 1901. Introduction. In Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat, ed. S. Louise Patteson, 11–16. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co. Brooks, Max. 2006. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. New York: Three Rivers. Burns, Robert. 2013. To a Mouse. 1786. In The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., vol. Volume 2, 9th ed., 85–86. New York: Norton. Clark, Elizabeth E. 1995. ‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America. Journal of American History 82 (2): 463–493. Davis, Janet M. 2016. The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donovan, Josephine. 2016. The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2007. Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals. In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol J.  Adams, 174–197. New  York: Columbia University Press. Duchovny, David. 2015. Holy Cow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Eagleton, Terry. 2008. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 1983. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2011. Why Marx Was Right. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Goodall, Jane, with Phillip Berman. 1999. Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey. New York: Warner.

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Goodall, Jane, and Marc Bekoff. 2002. The Ten Trusts: What We Must Do to Care for the Animals We Love. New York: HarperCollins. Hart, Melissa. 2016. Avenging the Owl. New York: Sky Pony. Hemingway, Ernest. 1932. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner. Hughes, Susan. 2004a. Cubs All Alone. Wild Paws. Toronto: Scholastic. ———. 2004b. Orphaned Beluga. Wild Paws. Toronto: Scholastic. Jenkins, Steve, and Derek Walter, with Caprice Crane. 2017. Esther the Wonder Pig: Changing the World One Heart at a Time. New York: Grand Central. ———. 2018. Happily Ever Esther: Two Men, A Wonder Pig, and Their Life-­ Changing Mission to Give Animals a Home. New York: Grand Central. Kafka, Franz. 2003. The Metamorphosis. 1915. In The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Edited by Jason Barker. Translated by Donna Freed. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics. Kehret, Peg. 2010. Ghost Dog Secrets. New York: Puffin. Kemmerer, Lisa. 2006. Verbal Activism: ‘Anymals’. Society and Animals 14 (1): 9–14. King, Stephen, and Owen King. 2017. Sleeping Beauties. New York: Scribner. Lawson, Robert. 1972. Rabbit Hill. 1944. New York: Puffin. Leshko, Isa. 2019. Allowed to Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, C.S. 2017. Impenitence. In Poems. 1964. 5–6. New York: HarperOne. Linzey, Andrew. 2010. Preface: Animals, Literature, and the Virtues. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan, ix–xx. Waco: Baylor University Press. Lofting, Colin. September 1966. Mortifying Visit from a Dude Dad. Life 30: 128–130. Lofting, Hugh. 2019a. Doctor Dolittle’s Circus. 1924. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Volume 2. 1–315. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019b. Doctor Dolittle’s Puddleby Adventures. 1952. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Volume 3. 249–512. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019c. Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo. 1925. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Volume 3. 1–248. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019d. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle. 1922. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Volume 1. 1–314. New York: Aladdin. Marcus, Hadas. 2016. An Ecocritical Approach to Cruelty in the Laboratory. Journal of Animal Ethics 6 (2): 223–233. May, Allyson N. 2016. The Fox-Hunting Controversy, 1781–2004: Class and Cruelty. New York: Routledge.

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McHugh, Susan. 2009. Literary Animal Agents. PMLA 124 (2): 487–495. Patteson, S. Louise. 1901. Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs& Co. Pennypacker, Sara. 2016. Pax. New York: Balzer and Bray. Ryan, Michael. 1989. Political Criticism. In Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. G.  Douglas Atkins and Laura Morrow, 200–213. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Sacks, Jonathan. 2011. The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning. New York: Schocken. Sainsbury, Lisa. 2013. Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life. In Perspectives on Children’s Literature. London: Bloomsbury. Saunders, Margaret Marshall. 2015. Beautiful Joe. 1893. Edited by Keridiana Chez. Peterborough: Broadview. Schmidt, Gary D. 1992. Hugh Lofting. Twayne’s English Authors Series 496. New York: Twayne. Sewell, Anna. 2011. Black Beauty. 1877. New York: Penguin. Smiley, Jane. 2011. Foreword. In Black Beauty, ed. Anna Sewell, ix–xiii. New York: Penguin. Smith, Dodie. 1989. The Hundred and One Dalmatians. 1956. Illustrations by Michael Dooling. New York: Puffin. Unferth, Deb Olin. 2020. Barn 8. Minneapolis: Graywolf. Waldau, Paul. 2011. Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Webb, Holly. 2015. Harry the Homeless Puppy. London: Little Tiger. ———. 2018. The Shelter Puppy. London: Little Tiger. White, E. B. The Trumpet of the Swan. Illustrated by Edward Frascino. New York: Scholastic, 1970. Zamir, Tzachi. 2007. Ethics and the Beast: A Speciesist Argument for Animal Liberation. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2011. Literary Works and Animal Ethics. In The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, ed. Tom L.  Beauchamp and R.G.  Frey, 932–955. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2 It’s a Bad World for Animals: Activism and Sentimental Literature

Literature can awaken the empathetic imagination. Even anthropomorphic works can do this. For example, the books about Babar the Elephant, which I loved as a child, or Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice. I loved the mice, Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, and totally identified with them. The effect of this early reading was that I have never doubted that animals were subjects, including mice, invertebrates, and insects. As an adult, Tolstoy’s moral fables, such as “Esarhaddon, King of Assyria,” have inspired my own animal fiction, such as “The Hunt” or “Mother Whale.” —Josephine Donovan, Professor Emerita of English, University of Maine

On January 10, 1937, the Rector of Wark-on-Tyne, Spencer Wade, preached a sermon on Romans 8:19–22 at Hexham Abbey. In it, he acknowledged the church’s failure to take animals seriously:

Personal correspondence. Donovan’s academic work includes The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016) and The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, which she co-edited with Carol J. Adams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Her animal fiction appears in the journal Between the Species. © The Author(s) 2020 M. J. Gilmour, Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare, The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9_2

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Unfortunately, in the past we have received little help from theologians. We must rely therefore upon saints, mystics, [and] poets, for a wholesome interpretation of the mind of Christ on this vital question. There can be no doubt that it is one of the leading tasks laid on our generation of Christians to develop this department of Christian ethics.1

Christians likely find this statement rather damning, and rightfully so, but for readers of English literature, it speaks of a potential. If the theologians and clergy fail animals, and fail those of us who seek their wellbeing, turn to the poets. To be sure, Christian theology has come a long way on this issue since Rev. Wade made this remark almost a century ago but this insight regarding the resources in the poets deserves our notice. If we know cruelty and indifference to be wrong, and if the dominant discourses of moral authority—whether theology in the church, or government policy, or the medical establishment, or educational institutions—if these sidestep responsibility for animal protection or rationalize their human-caused suffering, they must not have the last word. The arts have something to say precisely because they are able to speak apart from, and outside of, the strictures of these authoritative discourses. Some academics working in the area of animal protection make similar claims as those in Rev. Wade’s homily. For Paul Waldau, if the work toward reform is to progress, there must be an interdisciplinary approach, and those who “study the wide variety of ways other-than-human animals are being engaged in sciences, the arts, and our humanities fields will be needed.”2 Some remain sceptical whether the humanities and the arts have any contribution to make, as illustrated by a question put to J. M. Coetzee’s fictional novelist, Elizabeth Costello: “‘Do you really believe … poetry classes are going to close down the slaughterhouses?’”3 It is a question 1  Spencer Wade, “Christ and the Lower Creatures,” published by The National Council for Animals’ Welfare, n.d., p. 2, taken from the John Ptak Collection of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare Printed Education Materials 1882–1937 (MC00620), Special Collections Research Center at NCSU Libraries; https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/mc00620-001-bx0001-023-001. Emphasis added. 2  Paul Waldau, Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 102. Cf. 160–61. 3  J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Vintage Books, 1999), 103; J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 58. Coetzee first introduced Elizabeth Costello in lectures delivered to Princeton

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worth pondering, asked by the novelist’s son John who is rather embarrassed by his mother’s outspoken, argumentative defense of animals.4 For his part, he answers the question in the negative. In a world shaped by economics, government policy, tradition, and human self-interest, literature is impotent. I suspect John’s opinion is the broad consensus. Does poetry, literature, the fuzzy, sentimental arts—do these really have anything to add, anything to offer real animals? Shouldn’t we look instead to the placard waving activists instead? But some writers think literature is indeed an impetus for reform. The greatest of all animal-friendly poets is, of course, Charlotte. Her magnum opus5 was as simple as it was elegant, the words “SOME PIG!” woven into a web, all caps with an explanation point. This literary achievement really does shut down a slaughterhouse, at least for a moment. Charlotte’s creative efforts save Wilbur the pig’s life, and allow others to see him as the loving, gentle, beautiful creature he is.6 Art helps us see what is right before our eyes. No wonder E. B. White’s 1952 children’s novel Charlotte’s Web closes with a lovely tribute to that arachnid poet: she “was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”7 There is an echo of that touching story in Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan, where again University in 1997. The Lives of Animals reappears as chapters 3 and 4 in Elizabeth Costello. For her part, Costello is not sure literature makes a difference but at the same time she insists silence while animals suffer is not an option (Elizabeth Costello, 104). Consideration of the plight of animals is characteristic of the South African novelist’s later work though not unrelated to earlier writings, as Randy Malamud observes. “The haunting trauma of inequity resonates eloquently, and intricately, throughout his canon,” he writes, and “For the last decade and a half, Coetzee has increasingly turned his attention to how moral inequities play out in the realm of anthrozoological relations. His examination of animal rights and the traditions of human dominance grows clearly out of his earlier engagement with the sins of apartheid” (“Coetzee and Animals, Literature and Philosophy,” Journal of Animal Ethics 2.2 [2012]: 212). On Elizabeth Costello, see too Timothy C. Baker, Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 45–52, which focuses on Costello’s lecture on Kafka. 4  Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 104. 5  I take some liberty using the term this way. For her part, Charlotte identifies her egg sac as her “‘magnum opus … my great work—the finest thing I have ever made’” (E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web, 60th Anniversary Edition [1952; New York: Harper, 2012], 144–45). 6  White, Charlotte’s Web, 78. She later writes “TERRIFIC” in a web she spins near Wilbur (94), and then “RADIANT” (114). 7  White, Charlotte’s Web, 184.

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we see the triumph of art over animal cruelty. Like Charlotte the spider, Ivan the gorilla saves a dear friend with a single word. By finger-painting “HOME,” he orchestrates events leading the rescue of a baby elephant from her miserable confinement. That single word inspires activists to protest cruel conditions in a circus-mall, and ultimately leads to the rehoming of all its poorly treated attractions.8 Fanciful and idealistic in both cases, obviously, but I find these images of literary activism absolutely enchanting. Art saves an animal’s life; art awakens human admiration for the nonhuman world; art inspires a new way of conceiving human-animal interaction. If John’s question to his mother Elizabeth Costello about the efficacy of literary activism deserves serious consideration, Charlotte’s efforts do as well. Which is it? Is literature impotent, or does literature have the capacity to rescue animals? This is a debate worth having. Spencer Wade closes his 1937 homily as follows: “My time is exhausted, my voice must cease. If I have failed to persuade you [in my exposition of Romans 8:19–22], then listen to another cry.” And here he reads lines by the Irish poet James Stephens: I hear a sudden cry of pain     There is a rabbit in a snare: Now I hear the cry again,     But I cannot tell from where. And I cannot find the place     Where his paw is in the snare: Little one! Oh, little one!     I am searching everywhere.

“This may be the voice of James Stephens the poet,” Rev. Wade concludes, “the spirit is the spirit of Christ. ‘Be ye merciful, as your Father also is merciful.’”9  Katherine Applegate, The One and Only Ivan (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 215.  Wade, “Christ and the Lower Creatures,” 2. He cites here Luke 6:36.

8 9

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Sometimes, certain kinds of discourse fail animals. Imagine Spencer Wade in his pulpit, trying to capture the urgent need for human response to animal pain, and searching for a vocabulary to inspire his congregants to act. In this moment, only the language of the poets proves sufficient for the task. Literature indeed has something to contribute to animal advocacy efforts.

L iterature that Educates, Empathizes, and Envisions Billed as the first anthology designed to employ the power of creative writing to illuminate moral relationships with other animals, the publication of Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature in 2010 represents an important milestone in the strategic appeal to fiction in aid of humane causes. It is telling the editors of this collection are not literary critics but rather widely published and highly respected specialists in other academic fields. The late Tom Regan was an American philosopher known for his writings on animal rights, and Andrew Linzey is a British theologian whose pioneering efforts sparked religious interest in animal ethics. With this turn toward imaginative writing in Other Nations, Regan and Linzey both acknowledge the arts offer something to animal studies distinct from the argumentation found in other forums. “What literature can do—as can probably no other discipline—is to reconnect us with the world of animals,” as Linzey puts it. “No matter how much we may learn about animals from disciplines such as psychology and biology (for they have much to teach us), that knowledge cannot replace the insights that can come from the disciplined exercise of our imagination.”10 Literary exploration of human-animal relationships is of course nothing new, Regan points out, nor is there consensus on questions of morality: “Well before animal rights was recognized to be the important issue of social justice that it is, writers were seeking to plumb the depths of the human psyche, there to find how much cruelty, how much compassion, resides  Andrew Linzey, “Preface: Animals, Literature, and the Virtues,” in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), xviii.

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in each of us. Not surprisingly, not all these literary explorers have returned with the same message.” Regan then explains the anthologized writers assembled range from messages of hope to despair, with some content with the status quo regarding human-animal relationships, and others urging reform.11 Both editors raise and answer ethical questions about human-animal interactions in their own publications but in Other Nations, they allow the assembled works of the imagination to speak for themselves. There is very little by way of commentary in Linzey’s “Preface” or Regan’s “Introduction.” They organize the readings into issues of contemporary concern—human-animal encounters; animals as companions; animals as prey; animals as tools; animals as food—but do not offer explanatory preambles for these sections, as editors often do in anthologies. They also allow stories representing opposing sensibilities to stand side-by-side, which, owing to the lack of editorial intrusion, forces readers to work out for themselves answers to questions raised. Though I am not neutral in my approach—an obvious welfare agenda shapes my selections and commentary (including remarks on short stories in Other Nations)—I try to follow Regan and Linzey’s lead to some degree by allowing the works treated to stand on their own, to ‘speak’ for themselves with as little interference on my part as possible. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the focus here is on stories that foreground individual animals, go beyond use of animals as mere figures of human experience, introduce religious or otherworldly language and imagery, and tell of the experiences of actual animals through fiction. But how does provocative storytelling lead readers to ethical reflection? Oftentimes, advocacy-leaning literature involves three elements: 1. this kind of writing educates by illustrating what cruelty and indifference look like; this often involves taking readers to places otherwise hidden (e.g., into research laboratories or abattoirs), or showing them how certain human actions cause pain and distress

11  Tom Regan, “Introduction,” in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 2.

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2. this kind of literature empathizes; by means of an imaginative leap, many authors present readers with an animal’s point-of-view (as in the story about the hunted vixen Nightshade, mentioned in the opening chapter); such stories depict animals’ emotions, and allow readers to ‘experience’ their traumas, to inhabit their minds and bodies, to look through animals’ eyes; when Black Beauty is cold or thirsty or in pain or frightened, we are too 3. this kind of literature envisions; stories present readers with alternatives to humanity’s heavy-handed approach to other sentient beings; some animal stories are unrelentingly bleak but many others optimistic or aspirational; what human-animal relations are now, need not be so in future; change is possible, reform an option A short overview of Katherine Applegate’s beautiful children’s novel The One and Only Ivan illustrates this triad of characteristics, which is so typical of welfare-oriented creative writing.

Katherine Applegate, Art, and Advocacy The story touches on a number of animal welfare themes and offers a vision of human kindness to other species. As mentioned already, Ivan is a silverback, an adult male gorilla who is an exhibit in the Exit 8 Big Top Mall and Video Arcade. His home is an enclosure with three glass walls and a fourth painted with jungle scenes. He is not alone in the mall. The mall-based zoo and circus is home to several others, some of whom perform, others like Ivan merely on display. His closest friends include an elephant named Stella, and Bob, a stray dog who lives in the mall.12 Early in the story, Ivan thinks little of the past or future. Gorillas do not complain, nor do they look back or look forward. The implication is that Ivan does not dwell on what he lost when taken from his twin sister Tag, his mother, and jungle home at a young age nor does he dream of a better tomorrow. This changes when ten-year-old Julia befriends him. Julia’s father is a night janitor at the mall, and while he works, she sits 12

 Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 34–36. Applegate’s sequel is The One and Only Bob (2020).

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with Ivan. Their friendship is a natural one, Ivan surmises, because they are both great apes, and both artists. Ivan starts drawing when Julia gives him a crayon and a piece of paper,13 and this commences a gradual widening of Ivan’s world. It is art—Julia’s and Ivan’s—that ultimately saves the mall’s sad animals. Ivan admires Julia’s artistic skills. Her pictures are like “pieces of a dream” whereas his own are merely “the things in my cage, simple items that fill my days: an apple core, a banana peel, a candy wrapper.” He hopes one day to “draw the way Julia draws, imagining worlds that don’t yet exist.” Like Ivan, we too tend to be unimaginative with respect to human-animal relations. Dominance and exploitation are routine, and alternatives difficult to conceptualize. Julia’s drawings in crayon and pencil, and Ivan’s slow progress as an artist enact a reimagining of the treatment of the mall animals. Early on, Ivan is not even aware of what he lacks. His small domain, as he calls it, and vague memories of life before capture are all he knows. When a small boy looks at him through the window of his enclosure and cries on Ivan’s behalf, thinking he must be the loneliest gorilla in the world, Ivan wants to tell him it’s not so bad. With time you get used to it. The situation gradually changes though, in step with his artistic maturation, as Ivan slowly realizes he is lonely and weary of life in the enclosure.14 Stella the elephant lives a larger life. She is, in a sense, less confined than Ivan because of her memory. “‘Memories are precious,’” she counsels him. “‘They help tell us who we are.’”15 In time, Ivan’s recollections of life before the mall slowly begin to stir. A memory surprises him as he recalls his father snoring peacefully under the sun. And then it all comes back. He blocked the traumas of early life, which include the slaughter and mutilation of his family, and it is art, Julia’s drawings and Stella’s

 Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 51, 20, 16, 19.  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 17, 20, 21–22, 25, 51. 15  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 53. Stella recalls every detail of her life (27). Like Stella, the captive elephant narrator in a Rudyard Kipling poem—presumably Kala Nag from the story “Toomai of the Elephants” though it is not attributed to him—has a long memory and laments confinement: “I will remember what I was. / I am sick of rope and chain” (The Jungle Book [1894; London: Arcturus, 2017], 142). 13 14

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storytelling, that allows this to happen.16 When the baby elephant Ruby grieves the loss of her aunt Stella later in the novel, Ivan is desperate to console her, and when she asks for a story about his past, it is only with an effort he is able to recover the long-suppressed memories. “‘Once upon a time,’” he begins, “‘there was a gorilla named Ivan.’” This too is art, and it saves Ruby and Ivan both. The tale is a record of happy days as a young gorilla, but also truths about his family’s pain and the human wickedness responsible for it: “One day … the humans came.”17 Before her death, Stella’s memories offer solace but not solutions to cruel realties of the life she knows. She grieves when Ruby first arrives to the mall because she knows the life awaiting the young one. Ivan tries to soothe her, assuring her it will be alright, but Stella insists “‘it will never, ever be okay.’” From her point of view, memories are an escape, but human-caused suffering is intractable, something to be endured. Performing elephants in circuses, she tells Ivan, look far off into the distance to avoid seeing the human spectators.18 Like Ivan, Stella, Ruby, Bob, and the other animals, Julia has her own share of worry and sorrow (her mother is ill, her father weary), and her circumstances are also a kind of unwanted confinement because the family’s resources are limited.19 But she has a lively imagination, the ability to imagine a better world. Julia embodies an animal compassion that first recognizes the distress of fellow creatures (e.g., she chooses to sit near Ivan when doing her homework and drawing, knowing he is lonely; she knows Bob’s name and is able to touch him when other people cannot; she recognizes when Ivan wants her attention), and is willing to do something about it. Their lives improve drastically because of her efforts.20  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 87, 144, 169–73.  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 122, 128. 18  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 70, 12. 19  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 43, 155, 15. There is a similar dynamic in Applegate’s later novel Crenshaw. Like Julia, young Jackson does not come from a wealthy family. His father is sick with multiple sclerosis and his parents struggle to feed their children and pay the rent. They live for a time in their car. Also like Julia, Jackson loves animals. He wants to become an “animal scientist” and his imaginary friend Crenshaw is a cat (Katherine Applegate, Crenshaw [New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2015], 8 [his career goal], 40–41 [his father’s illness], 44–47 and throughout [his family’s poverty]). 20  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 43, 47–48, 76. 16 17

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Applegate’s novel constantly mentions forms of abuse. It is, to use the terms introduced above, an education. The novel takes us behind the scenes of circus life, to the experiences of animals hidden away from the gaze of spectators after hours and behind closed doors. There are several examples. Stella remembers a bull elephant in a circus injured by a claw-­ stick, who after defending himself disappeared. She herself has scars left by the chains used to confine her, and an injured foot prone to infection, the result of a trick the circus trainers forced her to perform. Her current owner refuses to treat the infection because of cost, and eventually this leads to her death. Ivan’s friend Bob the stray dog, though free, also knows human cruelty. He used to have siblings, but people tossed them from a moving truck when they were only weeks old. The others did not survive. Ivan eventually remembers the horrors inflicted on his twin sister Tag and his parents in the jungle, and his own capture and humiliations when forced to act like a human.21 Applegate juxtaposes these abuses with acts of compassion. The story thus encourages empathy and envisions other ways for people to interact with nonhumans. Ruby tells the story of a whole village coming to her rescue when she fell into a deep water-filled hole and nearly drowned. Everyone came to help get her out, she recalls, then found and returned her to her family. Stella says she’s heard of such rescue stories before and adds, “‘Humans can surprise you sometimes. An unpredictable species, Homo sapiens.’” Bob is incredulous and does not understand why some people show such extraordinary kindness while others are so heartless as to capture and abuse Ruby in a circus.22 The One and Only Ivan is the story of animals who have reasons to distrust and fear people, but who gradually discover some eager to befriend and protect them. Ivan makes a promise to the dying Stella to give Ruby a better life than the one she endured. He soon regrets that promise, admitting privately he is unable to save himself, let alone another, but in time he finds a way, using his finger-painting art. In the end, he saves not only Ruby but himself and the others from the mall-circus (“‘Ruby’s safe. Just like I 21  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 28–29, 30–31, 89, 114 (Stella); 35 (Bob); 129, 170, 128–43 (Ivan). 22  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 104 (cf. 173, when Ivan recalls these words), 105.

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promised,’” Ivan whispers to the departed Stella near the end of the story).23 There is a cautious note in Applegate’s happy ending. There is much debate about zoos and what if any purpose they serve.24 Some animal literature depicts them as hellish prisons, depriving animals of their liberty and any semblance of a meaningful existence. When a caged hyena witnesses the arrival of a mighty eagle to a zoo in William Kotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat, he despairs at the indignity shown to this most magisterial of creatures: “with the entrance of the Lord of the Sky, I can feel our dreams fading. That one so wild, whose nature is of the freest and most high, that such a one should be taken and brought here fills us with the terrible reality of our situation, that we are prisoners to the end of our days and no power on earth or in heaven can ever save us.”25 Others stress the conservation and education benefits zoos offer. Though Ivan and Ruby’s new home provides them with a better life, Applegate acknowledges the ambiguities involved. When Ivan first sees a zoo on television while still in the mall, he recognizes it is not a perfect place; if it were, it “would not need walls.” But if not the best possible setting for the orphaned, lonely Ruby, it is at least an improvement over the cruel, confined circus-mall. The mall, Ivan explains to Ruby, is not a home but a prison. The zoo is still a cage, he admits later, but she is safe there.26 It is art, finger painting and storytelling, that rescues Ruby. To keep his promise to Stella and rescue the young elephant, Ivan uses the finger paints Julia gives him. He paints pictures “for Ruby” to communicate her plight, along with a symbol representing the zoo. In time, he manages to spell the word “HOME,” which he sees on a billboard slogan within his sightline. He identifies it as the important word, having heard his handler Mack repeat the phrase many times (i.e., it is the twelfth word of the  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 112–13, 118, 294.  For an overview of ethical questions raised by zoos, see e.g., Waldau, Animal Rights, 136–42. 25  William Kotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat (New York: Open Road, 1976), 59. For another statement about the unyielding strength of humans in relation to animals, see e.g., Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. The despairing, cruelly treated horse Ginger says, “men are stronger, and if they are cruel and have no feeling, there is nothing that we can do” ([1877; New York: Penguin, 2011], 162). Black Beauty recalls the remark later (192). 26  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 186, 240, 290, 294. 23 24

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slogan).27 Slowly, activists learn of the gorilla’s messaging and in time pressure the mall to close and rehome the animals. Like the titular spider in Charlotte’s Web, Ivan’s writing saves a vulnerable, dear friend.

Richard Adams and Sentimentalism “‘Of course it’s sort of sentimental,’” says the wise parrot Polynesia to Dolittle’s biographer Thomas Stubbins. “But some people like a little sentiment in their books.”28 There is a long tradition of animal literature with a humane agenda, with novels as diverse in time and character as the anonymously published The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765)— with its heroine Margery Meanwell insisting she “could not endure to see even a dumb animal used with cruelty, without trying to prevent it”—to Michael Faber’s dark sci-fi novel Under the Skin.29 A common complaint about many such books is an overreliance on pathos. We tend to be wary of stories that play on our emotions, especially when there’s an obvious agenda.30 We also consider excessive emotion to be a cop-out, a literary 27  Applegate, The One and Only Ivan, 175; cf. 159–60, 173, 187, 197–99. Julia does not understand Ivan’s art initially (206) but in time figures out the puzzle’s meaning (211–12). Julia is able to communicate with Ivan and understand his objectives because both are artists (203). Eventually Ivan gets a proper sized canvas (a long white wall at the zoo) and suitable material to paint with (mud), at which point he becomes fully an artist (291). In The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, Hugh Lofting tells the story of a silver fidgit fish who learns to read and speak English in a way similar to Ivan, by connecting the sounds spoken by a person as they point to signs on the wall (in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 1 [1922; New York: Aladdin, 2019], 187). 28  Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 3 (1925; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 7. 29  I cite a facsimile reproduction of the 1766 edition of Goody Two-Shoes (London: Griffith and Farran, 1882), 20, available at (http://archive.org/stream/McGillLibrary-­PN970_R53_ H5_1830-­2006/PN970_R53_H5_1830#page/n1/mode/1up). Michael Faber’s Under the Skin (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000) raises, in a round-about way, disturbing questions about the brutal treatment of animals in laboratories and industrial-scale farms. This unsettling novel, according to Baker, highlights “the potential arbitrariness of both species and linguistic divisions” (Writing Animals, 13). 30  Immanuel Kant emphasizes a rationalist approach to ethics in Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) that distrusts sympathy and sentiment as a basis for ethical argument. For a summary and critique, see e.g., Josephine Donovan, “Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals,” in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), esp. 174–76; and Aesthetics of Care, esp. chap. 1.

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and rhetorical shortcut, a way to bypass more demanding forms of story construction. Anyone can play on a reader’s sympathies but not everyone is able to develop plots and characters that simultaneously persuade. Literary tastes ebb and flow, to be sure. In remarks about Jack London (1876–1916), Ernest Thompson Seton (1860–1946), and Charles G. D. Roberts (1860–1943), Marian Scholtmeijer notes the Darwinian conception of nature as red in tooth and claw influenced some authors to “supplant Victorian neurosis over bloodshed among animals with assent to the ongoing battle in the wild” and to “undermine that anthropomorphism which allows wild animals to be assimilated by the tender sentiments of the reader.” Such commitment to relentless realism is not necessarily easy for animal writers, or uniformly successful. The writers just mentioned “really want to sentimentalize over the wild animal victim … they would like nothing better than to be allowed the luxury of pity. Sometimes they do, but more often they take flight from what they consider weak emotionality into forced neutrality or celebrations of heroism.”31 But despite the turn away from sentiment and empathetic connection at the end of the Victorian period in academic circles and among some educators, Suzanne Keen notes anthropomorphism “has proven difficult to stamp out.”32 Richard Adams’s 1977 novel The Plague Dogs is part of this venerable if oft-criticized tradition of humane storytelling, but the author not only anticipates the complaints just described, he embraces them. It is reasonable to posit animal advocacy is part of his agenda given his connection to welfare efforts. Adams was president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals from 1980 to 1982 but he appears to suggest there are limits to what such organizations are able to achieve, and indeed, art has the potential to push the animal agenda forward in ways they cannot. Earlier in the chapter, we considered whether literature has any contribution to make toward animal protection with reference to Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and White’s Charlotte. Adams also looks to  Marian Scholtmeijer, Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 100, 119. On the rise of “the realistic animal story,” with reference to Roberts and Seton, see too Keridiana Chez, “Introduction,” in Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe, ed. Keridiana Chez (Peterborough: Broadview, 2015), 15. 32  Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 68. 31

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imaginative writing to persuade, signalling its potential to further welfare objectives. He does this by mentioning the RSPCA in his vivisection novel in an unexpected way. In The Plague Dogs, the RSPCA supports the cruel laboratory in the story “on the grounds that the experiments and surgery would redound to the benefit of animals in general.”33 This unexpected comment reflects controversial positions taken by the RSPCA at points in its history. Though soon after its founding in 1824 it denounced vivisection as “unchristian,” by the 1870s, the organization lobbied for regulation of vivisection as opposed to an outright ban, and this lenient position proved to be an impetus for the rise of anti-vivisection societies.34 Similarly, in later years, Adams himself left his position as president of the RSPCA because of the organization’s deficient responses to animal issues.35 His novel does what the RSPCA was unable or unwilling to do. Adams takes up the anti-vivisectionist cause in fiction. In The Plague Dogs, scientists consider animal protection protests “sentimental nonsense”36 but Adams undercuts such critics and uses self-mockery to make his point. When Ronald Lockley enters the story, he grumbles about dewy-eyed animal stories, with obvious reference to Adams’s better-­ known novel Watership Down: … ignorant sentimentality about animals and birds can be as bad as deliberate destruction …. Well-intentioned amateurs like that chap Richard Adams—fond of the country—reasonably good observer—knows next to nothing about rabbits—hopelessly sentimental—everyone starts thinking rabbits are marvellous when what they really need is keeping down if they’re not to become an absolute pest to the farmer—37  Richard Adams, The Plague Dogs (1977; New York: Vintage, 2016), 9.  A.  W. H.  Bates, “A Spark Divine? Animal Souls and Animal Welfare in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey (London: Routledge, 2019), 361, citing an SPCA Minute Book of 1832. See too Diane L. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States (Athens, OH: Swallow/Ohio University Press, 2006), 22–23; and Darryl Jones, “Introduction,” in H.  G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), xxv–xxvi. 35  Hadas Marcus, “An Ecocritical Approach to Cruelty in the Laboratory,” Journal of Animal Ethics 6.2 (2016): 228. 36  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 144. 37  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 485–86, cf. 487. 33 34

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Adams’s self-deprecating humour undermines the critics by weaving into the story the very objections they have, thus creating an opportunity to respond. Lockley’s friend Peter Scott answers these charges about over-­ sentimentality, presumably giving voice to Adams’s own views: … I think that for ordinary, non-specialist people, a certain amount of anthropomorphism’s probably useful in helping them to arrive at feeling and sympathy for animals—that’s to say, readiness to put the good of a species, or even just the welfare of an individual creature, above their own advantage or profit. We can’t all have scientific minds.38

Adams’s defense is a simple one. He is aware, like Rev. Spencer Wade, that some discourses are unable to address welfare questions, which is why anthropomorphic, sentimental, pathos-laden stories are not without purpose. By acknowledging the criticisms and explaining his reasons, Adams gives readers permission to engage the story on its own terms. He invites them to play along, as it were, to entertain the moral arguments put forward. What Lisa Sainsbury writes about Adams’s Watership Down applies to The Plague Dogs equally well. The novel “represents the natural world with ethical purpose and utilizes anthropomorphism to pull its reader into the land and consequently into the sphere of environmental ethics,”39 and to this I would add, to pull readers into moral questions about human treatment of animals specifically. Sainsbury explores ways children’s literature contributes to young readers’ progress toward moral agency, which she describes as a kind of rebirth: “the child wakes into a new phase of awareness that transforms the individual into a being of a different (moral) order and it is a second birth that presses close upon the first, so that it occurs during childhood or adolescence.”40 She distinguishes cognitively restrictive moralizing from ethical discourse, which promotes philosophical enquiry: “I accept that while moralizing often seeks to tell children what to think, it can also contribute to a process whereby children are shown how to think.” Her  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 488.  Lisa Sainsbury, Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life, Perspectives on Children’s Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 112. 40  Sainsbury, British Children’s Literature, 2. 38 39

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book involves close reading of a small number of focus texts, and through these she illustrates “how books encourage philosophical enquiry and seek to engage the reader in an exchange of ethical discourse.”41 Though she does not discuss The Plague Dogs, these observations describe Adams’s novel well, even if not a children’s book. He encourages serious consideration of the ethics of vivisection (and more) without simplifying the issues, and by means of characters debating and modelling alternative ways of viewing animals he encourages moral reflection (i.e., shows readers “how to think”). Before turning to ways this sympathy-generating anthropomorphic storytelling encourages serious attention to the humane treatment of animals, an important concern noted by Scholtmeijer about use of “sentimental anthropomorphism” for ethical purposes deserves notice, namely that it becomes another kind of violation: “When a mystic like Margery Kempe [ca. 1373–ca. 1438] sees ‘Christ being beaten’ when she is in fact looking at a suffering horse, she is doing a disservice to the animal. With sentimental anthropomorphism, what suffers is not the animal per se but a phantom person standing in for the animal. The approach may well prevent abuse, and that is a fine thing, but animal autonomy has evaporated in the process.”42 To a degree, Adams manages to avoid this. His rabbits in Watership Down and the dogs and fox in The Plague Dogs behave physically in ways consistent with the habits, strengths, weaknesses, and environments of their respective species. As he puts it in the Introduction to Watership Down, his “anthropomorphic story” follows “the idea of Rudyard Kipling, in his two Jungle Books. That is to say, although my rabbits could think and talk, I never made them do anything physical that real rabbits could not do.”43 Even if this insistence on realism lessens concern about the substitution of “a phantom person” for an animal in Adams’s stories, the validity of Scholtmeijer’s point about the limitations of this literary form for ethical argument remains. Adams’s first strategy for generating sympathy for animal suffering involves a kind of blurring of genre categories. The Plague Dogs is a flight  Sainsbury, British Children’s Literature, 6, 8. Italics original.  Scholtmeijer, Animal Victims, 62–63. 43  Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972; New York: Scribner, 2005), xiii. 41 42

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of fancy in which readers (but not human characters in the story) understand the animals’ speech and have access to their thoughts.44 As such we willingly suspend our disbelief as we enter the story, but at the same time, realism constantly intrudes. Adams ‘interrupts’ readers frequently, never quite permitting full escape into fantasy. The Plague Dogs is a story about two test subjects who escape an English laboratory where they endure horrific experiments. Rowf is a black mongrel forced to tread water in a metal tank to test his endurance. When he succumbs and sinks hours later, they revive him, and after recuperation put him back into the tank to repeat the experiment. And then again. And then again. Experiments on Snitter, a smaller fox terrier, focus on the brain. He has an enormous gash from the nape of his neck to his forehead. If Rowf suffers from severe post-traumatic stress as a result of repeated drownings, Snitter straddles the line between sanity and madness as a result of his brain injuries. This novel differs from other stories about vivisection in one important respect. Unlike Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), Mark Twain’s A Dog’s Tale (1903), C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945), William Kotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat (1976), or Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), to name a few, Adams is explicit about the relationship of his fiction to research in the real world. He explains in a Preface the experiments described have “actually been carried out on animals somewhere.”45 This is an unusual preamble for a novel and it certainly heightens the tension; readers must face the truth that the brutal, often-­ meaningless tests described occur on actual dogs, cats, birds, rats, and more. It also signals this book is more than a spirited yarn. It is simultaneously a statement about the morality of animal research. Yes, it is fantasy, but real-world concerns are never far away.  Cf. Catherine Parry’s remarks about John Lever’s Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood (2009), in Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 177–78. 45  Adams, The Plague Dogs, xviii. Other writers likely do the same—the point is they do not state this outright. H.  G. Wells reflects the vivisection debates of the late nineteenth century in his famous novel on the subject (see e.g., Jones’s “Introduction,” xxv–xxvii). Frequent reference to animal experiments occurring at Cornell, Harvard, Columbia, Creighton, Yale, Rochester, Johns Hopkins, and MIT lends a degree of verisimilitude to Kotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat, 21, 23, 24, 38, 42–43, 169, 174. For helpful remarks about vivisection stories, see Marcus, “An Ecocritical Approach to Cruelty,” 223–33. She focuses on Mark Twain’s A Dog’s Tale (1903) and The Plague Dogs, both the 1977 novel and the 1988 film adaptation. 44

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Adams mingles fact and fancy in other ways too. As the novel draws to its satisfying conclusion, he again blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction by the entrance to the story of Peter Scott, mentioned above. He appears at a crucial moment in the dogs’ adventure but also at a marked break in the novel. The closing words of what we might call the novel’s first ending suggest Rowf and Snitter drown in the ocean while trying to swim away from hunters and toward the longed-for, mythical Isle of Dog: “Cold. Sinking. Bitter, choking dark.” The next page offers a colloquy between reader and author that pleads for an alternative conclusion to the story: “Good author, please / Dredge those dark waters Stygian / And then, on some miraculous breeze, / Bring lost dogs home to vanished man!” The author agrees to do so, and then offers a more felicitous resolution involving the reconciliation of “bird, beast and man” by means of a savior, the wise and generous Peter Scott.46 Sir Peter Scott is an actual person, a renowned ornithologist and conservationist who arrives at the crucial, climactic scene when the canine heroes Rowf and Snitter are about to sink. Scott is the story’s deus ex machina, conveniently on a yacht at the right place and time, and able to pull the dogs from the water when all seems lost, thus allowing an alternative to the first ending described above. It is interesting to note Adams uses the feminine Dea ex Machina as the title for chapter 48 of Watership Down, and there is a resemblance between the two scenes with respect to the human-animal interactions depicted. In that book, a farm girl named Lucy Cane rescues the rabbit Hazel from a cat, and then, with the family doctor’s help, she takes him back home to Watership Down.47 This is the only scene in the novel where humans do anything other than threaten and harm rabbits. The doctor’s name, appropriately enough, is “Adams,” suggesting the author playfully writes himself into that story just as he does in The Plague Dogs (see above). Adams the doctor in Watership Down encourages a child’s natural inclination to be kind to animals, just as Adams the author encourages the same in his readers through fiction.48  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 480, 481. Italics original.  Adams, Watership Down, 456, 459. 48  On children’s inclination to be kind to animals, compare Doctor Dolittle’s critics who accuse the great man of never growing up, which is clearly an unintended compliment (Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2 [1924; New  York: Aladdin, 46 47

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Scott’s rescue of the dogs is a remarkable moment. Rowf for the first time meets a kind human, and Snitter—because of Scott’s intervention— reunites with his devoted owner, long thought dead by the desperate dog. Adams even cites at length excerpts from the British Who’s Who, as if to reinforce this interruption of the fantasy by a real-world hero.49 Why do this? Animals suffer terribly in this world, as Adams’s note about the actual-occurring animal experiments reminds us, but so too does human kindness. By allowing a real-life deus ex machina to break into the story, Adams suggests there is room to reimagine human-animal relations outside the confines of fiction. In addition, Peter Scott is not alone on the yacht. With him is the naturalist and ornithologist Ronald Lockley, also mentioned above.50 Readers of Watership Down recognize the name because in it Adams refers to Lockley’s book The Private Life of the Rabbit.51 Adding further to this real-but-not-real effect in both The Plague Dogs and Watership Down are the books’ settings. As he explains in an opening note to the latter, “Nuthanger Farm is a real place, like all the other places in the book.”52 A second strategic use of sympathy-generating anthropomorphism in The Plague Dogs is the alignment of animal and human suffering. Perhaps the most touching moment in the story involves a fleeting encounter between the terrified, emotionally unstable Snitter, and a heart-broken, lonely Jew named Mr. Ephraim.53 Ephraim is a businessman who arranges a hunt to track down the sheep-killing dogs Snitter and Rowf. Initially, it is an advertising gimmick for his business, a way to generate good will

2019], 159). Sainsbury notes Richard Adams’s appearance in Watership Down resembles the arrival of Miss Potter at the end of Beatrix Potter’s 1908 children’s book The Tale of Samuel Whiskers (Ethics in British Children’s Literature, 202n. 20). Perhaps this self-inclusion in Watership Down and The Plague Dogs owes something to her influence. Adams mentions her book The Tale of Mr. Tod in his memoir. The Plague Dogs features a tod (i.e., a male fox). The doctor in Watership Down is possibly a nod to Adams’s nature-loving father as well. Adams’s father and grandfather were both doctors (Richard Adams, The Day Gone By: An Autobiography [1990; London: Penguin, 1991], 1, 2 [doctors], 20 [The Tale of Mr. Tod]). 49  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 482–83. 50  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 484. 51  See e.g., the Acknowledgments in Watership Down, and pp. 22, 161. 52  Adams, Watership Down, vi. 53  Mention of his aversion to pork earlier in the story foreshadows the relevance of his religious heritage for the episode with Snitter (Adams, The Plague Dogs, 163).

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with customers, many of whom are poor farmers concerned about the loss of livestock. The crucial moment occurs when Ephraim is alone in the wilderness. Solitude is painful for him. As the narrator explains, “the memories induced by solitude … speak with the voices of hell.” Those memories are horrors rooted in the Holocaust. Ephraim thinks about his parents during this hunt for the dogs, “gone without strength before the pursuer; then of his Aunt Leah, vanished more than thirty years ago into the night and fog of desolate Europe, slain by God alone knew what sword in the wilderness.” His traumatized brother testified against Dr. Dering, “the self-styled experimental research expert of Auschwitz.” By the last in particular, Adams ensures readers do not miss the parallels between the Ephraim family’s experiences and those of the dogs. Ephraim, we read, has the mind of a “frightened dog,” and when he says aloud to himself it’s “a bad world for the helpless,” he unwittingly echoes Rowf ’s oft-repeated phrase, “it’s a bad world for animals.”54 Immediately after this summary of personal and family traumas brought on by his wilderness solitude, Mr. Ephraim sees Snitter approaching. He raises his gun to shoot but as he slips off the safety latch, he has a change of heart, after noticing the scars left by the scientists at the laboratory: … more remarkable and arresting than all else [in Snitter’s appearance]— and at this Mr. Ephraim stared, at first incredulously and then with growing horror and pity—was a deep, hairless cleft, barely healed, pink as the inside of a rabbit’s ear and showing the white marks of stitches running clear across the skull from nape to forehead—a terrible gash, giving the dog an unreal appearance, like some macabre creature from a Kafka fantasy or a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.55

54  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 180 (Ephraim); 27, 47, 61, 158, 207, 282, 313 (Rowf ). Rowf ’s bleak assessment is reminiscent of the sadness among animal friends in Sewell’s Black Beauty. When the horse Ginger learns of the plan to sell her friend Black Beauty, she says to him, “‘I shall lose the only friend I have, and most likely we shall never see each other again. ‘Tis a hard world!’” (104). Ephraim’s bittersweet memories of hunted and lost loved ones also resembles the experience of the tod’s family. When Snitter asks his fox friend what happened to his mother, he answers with a single word—“‘Hoonds,’” which is to say dogs killed her during a hunt (Adams, The Plague Dogs, 169). This revelation anticipates the tod’s own death by dogs during a traditional English fox hunt. 55  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 181.

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Mr. Ephraim’s binoculars blur with tears, his intent to kill gone, and he begins the slow process of coaxing the terrified dog to himself. Remarkably, mystically, deep suffering calls to deep suffering. The torture Snitter endured, the ongoing pain, and near madness left in its wake suggest to Mr. Ephraim a kindred spirit. He himself is an outsider, a lonely Jew amongst gentiles who know nothing of his family’s tragedy. But in this dog, he sees a fellow being who understands only too well what it is to be lonely, and one who understands the kind of medical experiments endured by Ephraim’s older brother. This dog also understands what it means to be hunted, as Mr. Ephraim’s parents and Aunt Leah were hunted during the war, and what it is to be alone in the wilderness—an important term in Jewish religious thinking—haunted by memories of death and loss, as Mr. Ephraim is at this very moment. We also glimpse this spiritual connection between the two from Snitter’s perspective. He hears the man’s invitation to come. It is attractive because he longs for human company and protection, but he also associates the sound of the man’s voice, a human voice, with “Death.” The man is one of the many human hunters searching for him at that very moment, and yet Snitter approaches cautiously. As he does, the ringing in his head gradually takes the form of a “lament”—another important term in Judaism—takes the form of a song given by the wind, which Snitter obediently carries toward the man: “From Warsaw and from Babylon The ghosts will not release the lives. A weary burden falls upon The groping remnant that survives. So this distracted beast contrives His hopeless search as best he can. Beyond the notebooks and the knives A lost dog seeks a vanished man.” 56

The song returns to Snitter later when he first glimpses the sea from a distance. The song on the wind has its origin in suffering (the loss of human kindness, vivisection, scientists cutting him, the resulting madness) but now promises healing and wholeness: “‘Come, lost dog; seek your 56

 Adams, The Plague Dogs, 183. Italics and quotation marks original.

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vanished man.’”57 Mr. Ephraim’s voice is the voice of Death. To seek the vanished man—a longing to return home, for happiness and human kindness—risks seeking Death itself. A dog cruelly tortured approaches a man cruelly tortured, and for a moment they find solace in one another. For a brief moment, readers see that violence to one species is violence to all. The encounter is short-lived, however. Seconds after Snitter gets into the car, hopeful for peace at last, he sees one of the other hunters approaching. In the startled mayhem that follows, Mr. Ephraim dies when his gun goes off accidentally. A third use of sentimental anthropomorphism is Adams’s inclusion of a canine spirituality, a striking example of the mingling of religious language with welfare-inclined storytelling. Rowf relates a story learned from his mother when a pup, a version of the biblical origin narratives.58 The maker in this case is a great dog in the sky, made of stars. This deity creates animals and sets them in their respective environments—birds in trees, rats and mice underground, cats in houses, fish in water, and so on. The star dog entrusts the care of his animals to human beings, giving them dominion over the earth (cf. Genesis 1:26): “‘I want you to remember all the time that if I’ve made you the most powerful animal it’s so that you can look after the others …. You’re in charge of the world. You must try to act with dignity, like me.’” Humans even name the animals in this version of the story, as they do in Genesis 2:20. The star dog gives humans permission to “‘kill what animals you need—not too many—for food and clothing and so on’” but the caveat about care and imitating the creator’s dignity puts restraints on that permission.59 It goes badly. When the star dog visits, he does not find the humans right away, echoing God’s search for Adam and Eve in the Garden of  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 256. Italics original.  Adams does this in Watership Down as well. For the rabbits’ creation story, see 26–29. For some bovine theology, see David Duchovny’s Holy Cow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). “Oh yeah, we believe in God,” says the narrator Elsie, “In the shape of a cow” (6). Elsie also refers to Mother Earth as “our god” (181; cf. 203–04). Cf. 11, 164 (on God and Eden). 59  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 153. 57 58

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Eden (Genesis 3:9). Instead, the star dog comes across a frightened young badger who explains how men tore up the family’s den and took his parents away. The star dog finds the mother and father badger in the company of people, placed in a ring and made to fight dogs. The star dog ends the violence and one of the onlookers explains what they are up to: “‘You said we could make use of the animals, so we were just having a bit of sport. After all, animals are given us for our amusement, aren’t they?’” There are other crimes. The star dog finds a river with its fish destroyed, and men “sticking iron, pointed things into a wretched bull and making it rip the stomachs out of a lot of poor old broken-down horses” while they watch, laughing.60 Perhaps Adams’s fondness for Hugh Lofting’s Dolittle stories accounts for his choice of terms here: “a bull was first made very angry by teasing …. Next the bull was allowed to tire himself out by tossing and killing a lot of poor, old, broken-down horses who couldn’t defend themselves.”61 The star dog finally has enough of the humans’ abuse of power. “‘Because thou hast done this thing,’” he says, in what is an unambiguous allusion to Genesis 3:14 in the Authorized (King James) Version, thou art cursed above every beast of the field. They will continue to live their lives as before, without reflection or regret, and I will speak to them in their hearts, in hearing and in scent and instinct and in the bright light of their perception of the moment. But from you I shall turn away for ever [sic], and you will spend the rest of your days wondering what is right and looking for the truth that I shall conceal from you and infuse instead into the lion’s leap and the assurance of the rose.62

This is a poignant retelling of the Genesis creation stories because in Christian tradition, the serpent in the Garden of Eden cursed by God in Genesis 3:14 is the devil, the deceiver who tempts Adam and Eve toward disobedience. The devilish villains in Rowf ’s tale, however, are humans. This story also indicates animals are innocent of moral failings, so their  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 155–56.  Lofting, Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 157. 62  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 157. 60 61

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suffering because of humanity’s disobedience is all the more tragic. No wonder, as Rowf says, it’s a bad world for animals. In Watership Down, the rabbit Captain Holly thinks similarly: “[other animals eat animals because of need but] Men will never rest till they’ve spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.”63 All religions insist there is more than what we see, something beyond the physical senses, something other than the mundane. Adams’s playful introduction of an animal theology creates an imaginative space for readers to entertain the idea of something startling, namely, that the human-­ animal relationships we see all around us—animals hunted, animals subjected to experiments, animals despised, animals disregarded; animals as mere meat and labour and entertainment—is woefully blinkered. An unseen, unappreciated meaningfulness attaches to them. There is richness and complexity in animal lives, and it is something beyond our comprehension. The image of the ‘religious animal’ is a creative way to capture something of that untold, inaccessible story, and a reminder animals are not just fur, skin, and teeth. Rowf, Snitter, and their fox friend are spiritual beings with their very own canine theology, and this sympathy-generating anthropomorphism suggests they too maintain this world is not as it should be. Like us, they long for something better. As Rowf and Snitter search for a way out of the laboratory early in the book, they enter the sparrow and finch aviary of the Animal Research, Surgical and Experimental laboratories (with its mocking acronym, A.R.S.E.). “These particular sparrows,” we read, “had cost rather more than two farthings for five,” which alludes to Jesus’s words in Luke 12:6 (cf. Matthew 10:29). But whereas Jesus describes divine concern for fallen birds, the sparrows in this aviary have no reason to trust to such a felicitous end: There was a special providence in their fall; but whether they fell to the ground with or without your heavenly Father, or mine, or [the scientist] Dr. Boycott’s (for he had, albeit unacknowledged, the same One as you and I), there is no telling.64  Adams, Watership Down, 151.  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 35.

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Though subtle, this wry reference to the Gospels highlights the cruel indifference of those experimenting on these birds. Jesus cares for sparrows but Dr. Boycott and the other whitecoats (as the dogs refer to them) do not. Adams also hints at this exclusion of nonhuman species from religious/moral consideration a few paragraphs earlier. The dogs see a door barring entry except for authorized personnel. We’re told the term “personnel” applies to men and women at the facility, even though the dogs smell rats in that room. Rats are in the forbidden room but are not considered authorized personnel (i.e., they are not human women and men). The word “personnel” indicates human beings only, the narrator explains, as in the Prayer for All Sorts and Conditions of Personnel in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and in the old hymn, which appears in the book slightly paraphrased: All Personnel That on earth do dwell Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.65

Perhaps it is worth notice this well-known hymn reaches back to the sixteenth century but in later incarnations often appears with the Doxology added as a closing verse, and the Doxology includes the phrase “Praise Him, all creatures here below.” There is no mention of the Doxology here. The laboratory’s scientists do not consider “all creatures” significant. Rats and birds are not creatures of status, they are not authorized personnel. The animal-excluding hymn (i.e., without the Doxology tagged on) reflects the tendency to deny nonhumans moral status, even though Jesus in the Gospels says otherwise. Throughout The Plague Dogs, we also have hints of a canine heaven on earth. Snitter once had a good human master but was separated from him and taken to the laboratory. Brain damage caused by experiments now cloud his memories, but glimmers of this golden past remain: “Snitter scratched at his split head. ‘Milkman, rhododendrons, newspapers— linoleum smells nice too—and sort of tinkling, windy noises came out of a box—used to make me howl, then rush out of the garden door—cats 65

 Adams, The Plague Dogs, 34. Italics original.

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cats quick quick wuff wuff!’”66 Rowf has had no equivalent experience of kindness from humans and Snitter’s longing to find such a master means nothing to him. Humans as torturers is all he knows. Snitter attempts to console Rowf as they swim into the ocean in the closing pages of the book, not to the Isle of Man but to the longed-for Isle of Dog. Snitter glimpses heaven in that moment and sees Mr. Ephraim and the tod, both now dead, waiting for them. He has a hellish vision too, of a man lashing all animals with a whip.67 This longing for and journey toward a peaceful post-mortem haven resembles the close of Hazel’s story at the end of Watership Down. Fourth and finally, I turn to Adams’s use of a dramatic conversion story to urge engagement with ethical questions, a conversion story celebrating sentimental anthropomorphism. Mr. Stephen Powell is a scientist at the Lawson Park facility, and responsible for most of the experiments described in the novel, including the repeated drownings of Rowf. As mentioned earlier, the dog is left struggling to stay afloat for more than two hours, and after sinking to the bottom of the tank exhausted, Powell pulls him out, resuscitates him, then repeats the experiment. Though we wince at descriptions of the work, almost immediately, in the opening pages of the book, we suspect Powell has reservations about it too. When the mongrel sinks and he presses his supervisor for permission to pull out the drowning dog, there is “a shade of anxiety creeping into his voice.”68 Powell evolves as the story unfolds, and increasingly finds his complicity in a vast array of animal tortures troubling. When told about a new experiment involving dogs in refrigeration units with a built-in escalator and movement deterrents, we see further cracks in Powell’s stoic demeanor. The idea is to replicate freezing arctic conditions, forcing dogs to travel thirty to sixty miles to get to their food. The idea disturbs Powell who asks for another to take the assignment. Dr. Boycott finds his protégée’s reluctance troubling: “To his horror, Dr. Boycott saw—or thought he saw—tears standing in Mr. Powell’s eyes.”69 This is a crucial moment.  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 151.  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 477, 497; cf. 475 (heavenly vision); 498 (hellish vision). 68  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 4. 69  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 380. 66 67

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Boycott knows emotion has no place in this kind of work and he begins to doubt Powell’s competence. There is one lab animal in particular that wins Powell’s sympathy. The scientists put a monkey in a cylinder for what is called a social deprivation experiment. They leave the animal alone for an extended period of time, with no light, and limited room to move. Boycott asks how long to date the monkey lived in these conditions: “‘Forty and a half days,’ replied Mr. Powell. ‘I believe it’s going to die. I wish—I wish to God—’”70 Here again a flicker of emotion, an acknowledgment of animal suffering, and an implied question about the value of such brutal research methods. Boycott notices and shortly afterwards recommends Powell be fired because “he has allowed himself to express inappropriately emotional feelings about a proposed experimental project.”71 There are other ways Adams maps out Powell’s progress on the issue of animal compassion. It is revealing to discover he reads Doctor Dolittle stories to his daughter.72 Hugh Lofting’s children’s books are about a character who interacts kindly with animals, helping them whenever able. Adams here suggests reading animal literature has the potential to transform the indifferent, and indeed, he knows this from personal experience. He himself credits literature, including the Lofting novels, for his lifelong interest in animal welfare. In The Plague Dogs, the most unlikely of characters, the very scientist who torments Rowf and Snitter, undergoes just such a moral awakening, owing in part to oft-maligned, anthropomorphic, sentimental stories not unlike Watership Down and The Plague Dogs. Adams juxtaposes the fantasy world of the talking, feeling, thinking, at times even theologically and philosophically sophisticated dogs and a fox, with at least four other forms of discourse about animals. Rowf and  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 428 cf. 6.  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 432. When Powell learns this, he releases the monkey from its cylinder in an act of defiance and smuggles it out of the lab (442–45). Apparently, what the fictional Powell experiences reflects something of what actual lab workers go through. See e.g., Nina Kranke’s “How the Suffering of Nonhuman Animals and Humans in Animal Research is Interconnected,” Journal of Animal Ethics 10.1 (2020): 41–48. Among her findings, she notes, “at least some human laboratory workers involved in animal experiments suffer from guilt, emotional strain, discomfort, or even trauma” (47). 72  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 354, 496–97. 70 71

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Snitter tell their own story, but others tell it too. There is the language of scientific research that focuses on the animals’ bodies and behavior, with their biological makeup contributing to medical studies and more. There is also the language of British politicians and military leaders for whom the escape of potentially dangerous, plague-ridden dogs has implications for policy, public opinion, poll numbers, and election outcomes. Newspaper editors and reporters for whom the mystery surrounding the runaway dogs and the secretive, possibly nefarious activities of a little-­ known laboratory is a media sensation. With some selective reporting, rhetorical flourishes, and appropriate spin, they generate a wide readership intrigued by the dogs’ plight. And then there is the story told by farmers in the region. The escaped dogs kill sheep and are a real, if sometimes exaggerated threat to their bottom line. They see the dogs through an economic lens. And this brings us back to Adams’s remark cited earlier: “‘a certain amount of anthropomorphism’s probably useful in helping them to arrive at feeling and sympathy for animals …. We can’t all have scientific minds.’”73 These other forms of storytelling—the biological/scientific, the political, the sensational, the economic—are ineffective when it comes to addressing welfare concerns. By anthropomorphizing the dogs and fox in Doctor Dolittle fashion, by generating sympathy for the physical and emotional distress of other sentient beings, Adams confronts readers with a moral dilemma. As Rowf says, it’s a bad world for animals. Humane fiction holds up a radical alternative, positing it need not be.

References Adams, Richard. 1991. The Day Gone By: An Autobiography. London: Penguin. ———. 2005. Watership Down. 1972. New York: Scribner. ———. 2016. The Plague Dogs. 1977. New York: Vintage. Applegate, Katherine. 2012. The One and Only Ivan. New York: HarperCollins.  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 488.

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———. 2015. Crenshaw. New York: Feiwel and Friends. Baker, Timothy C. 2019. Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bates, A.W.H. 2019. A Spark Divine? Animal Souls and Animal Welfare in Nineteenth-Century Britain. In The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, 361–370. London: Routledge. Beers, Diane L. 2006. For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States. Athens, OH: Swallow/Ohio University Press. Chez, Keridiana. 2015. Introduction. In Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe, ed. Keridiana Chez, 11–35. Peterborough: Broadview. Coetzee, J.M. 1999a. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Vintage Books. ———. 1999b. The Lives of Animals. Edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Donovan, Josephine. 2007. Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals. In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol J.  Adams, 174–197. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2016. The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. New York: Bloomsbury. Donovan, Josephine, and Carol J. Adams, eds. 2007. The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Duchovny, David. 2015. Holy Cow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Faber, Michael. 2000. Under the Skin. Edinburgh: Canongate. The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes. 1882. 1765. Facsimile of the 1766 edition. London: Griffith and Farran. http://archive.org/stream/McGillLibraryPN970_R53_H5_18302006/PN970_R53_H5_1830#page/n1/mode/1up. Jones, Darryl. 2017. Introduction. In H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Oxford World Classics, ed. Darry Jones, ix–xxxiii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keen, Suzanne. 2007. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kipling, Rudyard. 2017. The Jungle Book. 1894. London: Arcturus. Kotzwinkle, William. 1976. Doctor Rat. New York: Open Road.

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Kranke, Nina. 2020. How the Suffering of Nonhuman Animals and Humans in Animal Research is Interconnected. Journal of Animal Ethics 10 (1): 41–48. Linzey, Andrew. 2010. Preface: Animals, Literature, and the Virtues. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey, ix–xx. Waco: Baylor University Press. Lofting, Hugh. 2019a. Doctor Dolittle’s Circus. 1924. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Vol. 2, 1–315. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019b. Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo. 1925. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Vol. 3, 1–248. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019c. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle. 1922. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Vol. 1, 1–314. New York: Aladdin. Malamud, Randy. 2012. Coetzee and Animals, Literature and Philosophy. Journal of Animal Ethics 2 (2): 212–215. Marcus, Hadas. 2016. An Ecocritical Approach to Cruelty in the Laboratory. Journal of Animal Ethics 6 (2): 223–233. Parry, Catherine. 2017. Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Regan, Tom. 2010. Introduction. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey, 1–18. Waco: Baylor University Press. Sainsbury, Lisa. 2013. Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life, Perspectives on Children’s Literature. London: Bloomsbury. Scholtmeijer, Marian. 1993. Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sewell, Anna. 2011. Black Beauty. 1877. New York: Penguin. Wade, Spencer. n.d. Christ and the Lower Creatures. Published by The National Council for Animals’ Welfare, p. 2, taken from the John Ptak Collection of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare Printed Education Materials 1882–1937 (MC00620), Special Collections Research Center at NCSU Libraries: https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/mc00620-001-bx0001-023-001. Waldau, Paul. 2011. Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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White, E.B. 2012. Charlotte’s Web. 1952. 60th Anniversary ed. New  York: HarperCollins.

3 Eating Meat, Eating Misery

The arts have had a huge influence on my life’s path. It started with learning about photography through the conflict and street photographers at Magnum Photos. These were people who traveled, explored, got into the thick of life, tried to understand things, made art from it, shared stories, created change. When I say, “they made art from it,” I mean they captured moments–– whatever those moments were––in an engaging way. They made time freeze and made us think. That is still a wondrous thing to me. Jane Goodall and Marc Bekoff’s The Ten Trusts (2002) opened a whole new world to me about animals, and what we must do to save them. Tolstoy’s short stories about our relationship with animals are simple, direct, moralistic, and I admire how he can express a depth of emotion and meaning in so few sentences. My book, HIDDEN: Animals in the Anthropocene (2020) was inspired by war photographer James Nachtwey’s book Inferno (1999), which is an historical tome about our treatment of one another. I wanted to create something similar, but about our relationship to animals. Along the way I

Personal correspondence. For McArthur’s compelling photography, see her books We Animals (Brooklyn: Lantern, 2013/2017), Captive (Brooklyn: Lantern, 2017), and, with other photographers, HIDDEN: Animals in the Anthropocene, published by the advocacy group We Animals Media (2020). © The Author(s) 2020 M. J. Gilmour, Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare, The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9_3

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have also been greatly inspired by the work of artist Sue Coe. I find her, and her work, so raw, direct, honest, and brave. —Jo-Anne McArthur, photojournalist, activist, Executive Director of We Animals Media

When a sausage manufacturer offers John Dolittle a large amount of money to have Gub-Gub the pig work for them advertising their product, the Doctor and Gub-Gub reject the idea at once.1 Lofting is here well ahead of his time, critiquing the myth of ‘happy meat,’ which is so prevalent in marketing. The absurdity of the idea is also apparent from a scene occurring in Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, as a large, bovine-type quadruped approaches Zaphod Beeblebrox’s table: “‘Good evening,’ it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, ‘I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?’ … ‘Something off the shoulder perhaps?’ suggested the animal. ‘Braised in a white wine sauce?’”2 This animal is an enactment of the “sleight of hand” Carol J. Adams describes in The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990) with reference to the parallel oppressions of animals and women: “For centuries–– from happy mammies to smiling broiler hens [in meat marketing]––those on the receiving end of violence have been portrayed as delighted to fulfill the duties of their perceived functions.”3 Animals, advertisers tell us often, want us to eat them.4 Of course, this is ludicrous. Compare Zaphod Beeblebrox’s bovine-type quadruped with Elsie Bovary, the bovine-type narrator of David Duchovny’s Holy Cow. She describes life on the farm before the “Event” (see below) as largely positive for her and the other animals, though separation from her mother––taken from her early in life, though she does not know why––is clearly a lingering trauma, evident from constant references to her absence.5 At least initially, her views on humans are simple, characterized 1  Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2 (1924; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 498, 522, 534. 2  Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Nearly Definitive Edition (1980; London: Heinemann, 2014), 231. 3  Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Continuum, 2010), 36. 4  Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat, 82–83, etc. 5  David Duchovny, Holy Cow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 6–7, 10, 12, 13, etc.

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by a simple exchange. She’s a happy cow. The herd gives milk, humans provide food.6 But this naïve outlook quickly gives way to harsh realities. The book straddles a middle space between a children’s story and adult fiction. Elsie gives her tale a “PG” rating when remarking on the usefulness of sex scenes and foul language to help sell books.7 At the same time, references to Babe, Charlotte’s Web, and Animal Farm seem to signal the capacity of animal stories, even children’s books, to address serious themes, namely death and killing animals for food in the first two, and tyranny in the last.8 These references and the self-conscious remarks about straddling the line between adult and children’s fiction occur immediately before Elsie’s discovery of the “Box God,” what she calls a television. This encounter with human technology, the “Event,” is the means by which she ultimately discovers the horrors of factory farming, “huge industrial meat farms the size of a small town” as the voice on the television puts it.9 Obviously, this is an unlikely topic for a ‘pure’ children’s story. What Elsie sees on the television disturbs her, and the pictures of enormous farms with chickens, pigs, and cows, with their rivers of blood, provoke a crisis. She now recognizes humanity’s relationship with the animal world is fundamentally characterized by betrayal, and any positive feelings she once had about her farm home disappear. She no longer likes this awful world, as she often puts it.10 The theme of betrayal repeats. Elsie insists humans have no right to be called animals anymore owing to this broken trust and near the end of the story she remarks on the great gulf between humans and other species: “Only man has separated himself from the great chain of being and from all the other animals, and I think that has been to his great detriment, and sadness, and to ours. I can no longer be part of the herd. I want to be heard.”11  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 5, 11–12, etc.  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 29–30. 8  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 7, 29, 146, 182. 9  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 34–35. Italics original. 10  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 35, 37, 40, 50, 52. Cf. remarks by Rowf, Ginger, and Captain Holly, cited in Chapter 2. 11  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 204. On humanity losing the right to be considered animals, see 54, 56. The theme of broken trust appears often in welfare-minded stories. In Sara Pennypacker’s Pax, for one, the boy Peter feels shame for not protecting a dependent fox, for letting him back into the wild when unable to care for himself: “‘I raised him from a kit. He trusted me. He won’t know how to 6 7

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Elsie connects the images on the television screen to the mystery of her mother’s disappearance: One day, as I was banging my head against the stall wall [after seeing the television], I stopped and just spoke one word: Mom. I just kept repeating that word over and over, Mom, Mom, Mom. And I realized I’d been heartbroken over her disappearance. … I realized Mom didn’t leave me. She was taken away. She was taken away and killed, and then she was eaten.12

Grief then gives way to anger over humanity’s use of animals more generally: You humans drink our milk and eat the eggs of the chickens and the ducks. Isn’t that enough for you? Isn’t it enough that we give you our children and what’s meant for our children? And if not, when is it enough? All you humans do is take, take, take from the earth and its beautiful creatures, and what do you give back? Nothing.13

Elsie has many reasons to be angry with human use of animal bodies but given her bovine perspective it is no wonder leather and food are high on her list. Unless she escapes the farm (she’s planning at this stage to visit India where cows are sacred), she faces “death, being eaten and turned into shoes, jackets, couches, car interiors, and baseball gloves.”14 Others share her concerns. Her friend Tom the turkey promotes vegetarianism, even recommending Tofurky brand meat-free products as a Thanksgiving substitute.15

survive outside’”; “‘I let it happen.’” He admits his culpability, acknowledging if Pax were to die, “‘it would be my fault’” (New York: Balzer and Bray, 2016), 74, 123, 88; cf. 242–43, 271. An old, wild fox who befriends Pax also considers humans untrustworthy or “false-acting.” To explain his meaning, he refers to a person “enticing a sheep from its flock with a soothing voice and then butchering it” (63, italics original; cf. 196). 12  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 53, 54. 13  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 54. 14  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 68; cf. 62–63 regarding leather. 15  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 203.

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Animal Predators E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952) engages the frightful topic of death gently but directly. By allowing Wilbur to express fears about his own looming demise, and to grieve Charlotte’s passing, White shows readers it is acceptable, even desirable to talk about mortality. Within these broader reflections on death, Charlotte also addresses the disturbing issue of predation. Wilbur is initially horrified when she explains the purpose of her web and he thinks Charlotte cruel and bloodthirsty.16 She later defends herself, explaining how she bites flies before eating them (anesthetic) so they don’t feel pain.17 The story turns, of course, on Wilbur’s discovery that he too, like the flies, is in a web of his own, that people intend to kill and eat him.18 Wilbur “burst[s] into tears” as he tells Charlotte he does not want to die. This pig’s reaction, supported in this instance by Garth Williams’s illustration of Wilbur running with eyes shut and three large teardrops falling, carries the reader into a familiar emotional space. People also cry when they are afraid and see no way out. The same occurs when Gub-Gub the pig hears a pirate say, “I want that. … pig,” and “We’ll have pork chops … for supper.” Like Wilbur, “Poor Gub-Gub began to weep.”19 Wilbur’s fear of death is a recurring topic, which motivates Charlotte to intervene and rescue him.20 However, despite the questions the book raises about human consumption of animals, there is frank acknowledgement that in the animal world this is inescapable. But there is a difference between what animals/insects do, and what humans do. Charlotte has no option: “‘You mean you eat flies?’ gasped Wilbur,” to which she responds, “‘I have to live, don’t I?’”21 Though not asked directly, the book subtly invites readers to wonder whether this is true for humans as well. Must they also kill and eat other creatures to live? Just because animals eat other animals is not in itself  E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web, 60th Anniversary Edition (1952; New York: Harper, 2012), 37–40.  White, Charlotte’s Web, 38, 48. 18  White, Charlotte’s Web, 49–50, cf. 40. 19  White, Charlotte’s Web, 51; Lofting, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, 389–90. 20  White, Charlotte’s Web, 62–63 etc. (fear of death); 51 etc. (Charlotte’s plan). 21  White, Charlotte’s Web, 39. 16 17

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justification for human consumption of other creatures. There is a similar line of thought in Duchovny’s Holy Cow, though Elsie’s contrast of carnivorous animals and humans is more direct: “‘Yes, we kill to survive, some of us have to, but it’s not the type of killing humans do; there’s no hatred or joy, only necessity.”22 Lofting makes a similar point when distinguishing the situation of wild and domestic animals. Dolittle scolds hunting dogs for pursuing foxes for sport, pointing out wild animals need to get food for themselves whereas they have it given to them.23 To be sure, not all stories affirming the goodness of animals pose questions about human consumption of them, and there are often inconsistencies. In the Lofting novels, Doctor Dolittle is a protector of animals and yet eats meat, including bacon and spareribs, which seems a strange choice given Gub-Gub the pig is part of his household. (The 1967 Rex Harrison film addresses this inconsistency by depicting Dolittle as a vegetarian). Dolittle’s friend Matthew Mugg is a great friend of Puddleby’s cats and dogs, and yet makes his living as a rat catcher, even though rats are welcome members of the Doctor’s private zoo.24

Humans Compared to Animal Predators Farley Mowat recognizes our tendency to consider “sanguinary and cruel” all carnivores excepting ourselves.25 The equation of the hunter with villainy is a familiar trope but the alignment of good and evil, friend and 22  Duchovny, Holy Cow, 9; cf. 54, 204. Indigenous human hunters’ think in similar terms in the Charles A. Eastman short story “The Gray Chieftain” (1904): “The Great Mystery has made them [bighorn sheep] what they are. Although they do not speak our tongue, we often seem to understand their thought. It is not right to take the life of any of them unless necessity compels us to do so” (in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan [Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010], 114). 23  Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2 (1924; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 171. 24  Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 1 (1922; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 49, 53 (bacon), 75 (spareribs); 13–14 (Muggs). For another example of animal-friendly writing with inconsistencies regarding food, see e.g., Michael J. Gilmour, “Myth and Meat: C. S. Lewis Sidesteps Genesis 1:29–30,” in Ethical Vegetarianism and Veganism, ed. Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey (London: Routledge, 2019), 94–102. The chapter focuses on Lewis’s science fiction trilogy (1938–1945) and the Narnia novels (1950–1956). 25  Farley Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (1957; Toronto: Scholastic, 2006), 177–78.

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foe, innocence and cruelty with predator and prey are hardly rigid in animal literature. The moment predators become prey themselves our sympathies tend to shift. Mowat’s humorous stories about the horned owls Wol and Weeps who lived with his family illustrate the potential for sympathetic accounts of hunters. He first writes of them in the chapter titled “Owls Underfoot” in The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (1957), a book based on recollections of the author’s childhood in Saskatchewan and Ontario in the late 1920s and 1930s, and then again in Owls in the Family (1961).26 Mowat owes his fascination with owls to a teacher who enlists him to find a nest so he can photograph great horned owls. After finding one, they build a blind close by, which affords opportunity for close observation. Mowat’s initial reaction is revulsion. “At first they seemed no more than brute beasts,” he admits, “bloodied with the game they brought back, yellow-eyed and savage to behold.” Soon, however, he sees the situation in new light. He recognizes their “appetites, and fears, and perhaps pleasures too were not so very different from my own.”27 Like them, we too struggle to provide for our bodies, and like them our bodies are fragile. Compassion drifts beyond our own species when writers offer us a window into an other’s, any other’s story. Acknowledgment of a shared creatureliness changes perspective. A wolf in a leghold trap is as tragic as a rabbit in a snare. It all depends on what story the author chooses to tell. Mowat’s tale also aligns the boy narrator (himself ) and the owls as fellow hunters. Much of The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be relates the author’s childhood memories of bird hunting with his father, and his enjoyment of this activity is evident throughout: “I heard the quivering sibilance of the [ducks’] wings [overhead]. I reached out my hand and touched the cold, oily barrel of my gun lying in the straw beside me; and I knew a quality of happiness that has not been mine since that long-past hour.” Mowat even hunts one of the owls he observes from his teacher’s blind, after a fashion. Once their birdwatching is complete, the boy takes one of the owlets from the nest and makes a pet of it. He names the still-flightless  The boy protagonist and narrator in the earlier book is Farley Mowat himself. The main human character in the later book is Billy. The owls’ names remain the same. 27  Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 171. 26

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owlet Wol, a nod to Christopher Robin’s wise old friend in the Winnie the Pooh stories.28 The new pet leads Mowat to reflect on predator behavior in animals and humans, and the differences between them. When describing Wol’s formidable hunting prowess, he notes the bird’s restraint. Wol kills other animals, including neighbourhood cats, but he is seldom the aggressor. Cats and dogs, like humans, “developed the unnatural blood lusts that go with civilization,” and they find Wol’s restraint “rather baffling, for he used his powerful weapons only to protect himself, or to fill his belly, and never simply for the joy of killing.” Though Mowat does not moralize and is not squeamish about bloodshed in nature, his account of Wol’s behavior juxtaposes the bird’s temperateness with the unreflective, indiscriminate, purposeless violence of human predators. There is, “no moral or ethical philosophy behind [Wol’s] restraint––there was only the indisputable fact that killing, for its own sake, gave him no pleasure.”29 That is a striking remark, set as it is alongside Mowat’s own recollections of “the quality of happiness” he experiences when hunting for sport. Mowat does not condemn killing other animals but some human treatment of them earns his censure, and there are even occasions when intervention to limit suffering is necessary. When the boy hunts with his father, they are anxious to find those birds only injured by gunshots in order to end their misery. Mowat also condemns the infliction of gratuitous suffering, such as that endured by the second horned owl to enter the story. The author-narrator Farley happens upon other boys holding the bird captive in a barrel and “intent on destroying him by inches. Bedraggled, filthy, and exhausted, he was a pitiful sight when I first beheld him.” Mowat rescues the hapless bird by giving the boys a prized hunting knife in exchange, a costly gesture, he makes clear. He then cares for the owl and names him Weeps because “he never got over his oil-barrel experiences, and he never stopped keening as long as we knew him.”30 Mentioning this long-lasting consequence of the trauma further condemns the other boys’ actions.  Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 48, 171.  Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 177. 30  Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 68–69 (injured birds); 172 (rescue of Weeps). 28 29

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Readers sensitive to welfare concerns likely find Mowat’s book inconsistent in its affirmations of animal worth; the authors’ attitudes toward hunting and domestic animals (e.g., letting dogs roam free) certainly reflect different times. He published the book in the 1950s and it relates stories mostly from rural areas in 1930s Canada. To approach Mowat’s story from a contemporary welfarist’s point of view is to find much to celebrate but also much to question. Mowat’s owl stories depict a profound human-animal bond with free-living animals but his decision to take an owlet from the nest in the first place is arguably an infliction of senseless harm. Once his teacher finishes taking pictures, Mowat decides, “I was not yet ready to sever my acquaintance with these interesting birds and so I carried one of the young ones home with me.”31 His motive is nobler than those of the boys who torture Weeps but his actions also have negative consequences. When the Mowat family moves away from Saskatoon in 1935, they leave the owls with a farmer some 200  miles away from the city, knowing the dependent birds could never survive in the wild. Because Mowat tagged the owls, he later learns Wol’s fate. Having escaped the cage where he was kept, the owl made his way back to the family’s home in Saskatoon, where the new owner of the house shot and killed the bird. “So in the end,” Mowat writes, “Wol went back to that home which he had known so well. It took him almost three years to find his way, yet he succeeded.” It is difficult not to interpret the family’s departure as the betrayal of a dependent bird. Mowat certainly recognizes the bird’s bond with the family in his closing remarks on the episode: “I can guess at his thoughts as he landed in the familiar poplars and then dropped contentedly down to light upon the windowsill, and to rap imperatively upon the glass with his great beak. … I hope that death was mercifully quick.”32 The sentiment is kind but Mowat’s initial act of removing the bird from its natural setting for selfish purposes triggered the very events leading to this violent end. The owls only inflict harms to survive. A person inflicts harms for curiosity and convenience.

31 32

 Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 171.  Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 194. Ellipses original.

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Toxic Masculinity and Meat Some stories explore the dynamics of socialized, gender-normative attitudes toward nonhuman animals, as well as the killing and consumption of them. In the three examples considered below, stories by Robert McAlmon, J.  M. Coetzee, and João Ubaldo Ribeiro, an inclination toward sympathy and kindness clashes with gender expectations. Robert McAlmon’s “The Jack Rabbit Drive” (1929), to begin, set in a town in rural South Dakota, questions familiar assumptions about masculine toughness. There is concern about the damage to crops caused by “burrowings and nibblings,” and the solution put forward is an extermination of the “thousands” of animals responsible.33 They do this by scaring rabbits with shouts, guns, dogs, and horses, chasing them toward a fence where there is no way of escape, and there slaughtering them en masse. The culling proves to be traumatic for a boy named Horace who witnesses the brutal end to the drive. Horace struggles with what he understands to be an ideal masculinity, a topic he dwells on often. He realizes he may need to fight Billie if called “mamma’s boy” in order “to show which was the best fighter in town of their age,” and he is sheepish when playing with his friend Sally Porter. She is fun to be with though he wishes she were a boy; he would even play dollhouse with her if other boys do not see.34 Despite such a clear awareness of familial and societal expectations, Horace finds his desire to be a ‘proper’ boy complicated by an aversion to animal cruelty, and sensitivity to their suffering and death. Each time the issue comes up, there seems to be a feminine counterpoint exacerbating his discomfort. He lives with guilt and fear for killing (he actually only stunned) a chicken with a thrown stone. After that, he does not want to play near Mrs. Lincoln’s home and her chickens because he fears she is angry with him.35 When Sally tells a story about their dog ripping a rabbit apart, Horace quickly turns the conversation in another direction, and conspicuously and 33  Robert McAlmon, “The Jack Rabbit Drive,” in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 44. 34  McAlmon, “Jack Rabbit Drive,” 44. 35  McAlmon, “Jack Rabbit Drive,” 45.

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defensively reflects again on what it means to be a proper boy/man: “‘I’ve never seen a jack rabbit. Only them pet rabbits I had when I was a baby two years ago. Gosh, I was mad at mamma for making me wear skirts a whole year after Billie had been wearing pants, but it wasn’t as bad as Freddie having to wear long hair up till just last month. His mamma wants to make a girlboy out of him.”36 After the mass slaughter of rabbits occurs, the boy and his female friend react differently: “Sally was ready to go home, though she was still looking fascinatedly at the pile of rabbits. Horace had a moment of aversion to her because she leaned over and touched one and didn’t seem to feel sorry for it.” Whereas Sally is willing to touch dead rabbits and even takes one home for dinner, Horace is not so at ease. When she presses him on the latter, the issue of food sourcing confronts him, as if for the first time: “You aren’t going to take that rabbit home, are you? [Horace asks Sally.] You couldn’t eat it, could you?” “Why not? Mamma feeds us rabbits lots of times.” “But it’s dead,” Horace explained. “Every meat you eat is. That’s what happens to all the cows that get shipped out of the stock yard every week.” Horace’s mind was stalled. He couldn’t think. He changed the topic…37

This is a disturbing moment for a boy who just witnessed the slaughter–– by dogs, by clubs, by guns––of hundreds if not thousands of rabbits, and he is unable to process the resulting emotions. He refuses to speak to his mother about what he saw, in part because she told him earlier not to go watch. When he shows signs of being ill at the dinner table, his older brother tells his concerned mother not to baby him, meaning Horace risks ridicule if he admits the hunt frightened him, which amounts to another threat to his masculinity. The story closes with Horace having a nightmare about what he witnessed, with rabbits attacking him: “everywhere rabbits were nibbling about him, so many that he could not walk without stepping on them. They nibbled at his feet too, trying to eat him 36 37

 McAlmon, “Jack Rabbit Drive,” 48.  McAlmon, “Jack Rabbit Drive,” 50.

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up. … many others came, running straight at him to knock him down and cover his face and body with their cottony bodies. They would smother him.”38 It is possible for contemporary readers to distance themselves from this story to some extent. Its early twentieth-century rural American setting is remote. Some might assume more humane ways of culling invasive species are the modern-day norm. But one thing readers cannot escape is McAlmon’s descriptions of the rabbits’ death. Like a number of other stories considered elsewhere, the descriptions of the killings are graphic: “Rabbits smashed into the impenetrable fence to be beaten on the head by men or boys jumping about. Before struck, terror was making the rabbits squeal. A continuous ripping, tearing sound, punctuated by the thump, thump, thump of clubs against the light-boned heads of the rabbits, went on.”39 The descriptions potentially disturb readers the way they trouble Horace, who is unable to shut out the horrors witnessed. His mind continually reverts to the rabbits, “how their furry flesh had been torn, their squeals, the fear in their eyes.”40 He wants to come to terms with the violence––this is what becoming a man requires––but struggles to do so. A “flood of nervous images of rabbit carnage” makes him shudder and he “want[s] to shut the thought out” and again, a feminine presence complicates his experience further: “He even felt impatient with his mother when she began talking to him and so prevented him from thinking about the rabbits. He liked to think that as he shuddered he was trying to shut out the white ripping and squealing image.”41 Readers potentially experience in parallel with Horace the struggle to erase disturbing images. Perhaps as a result, they too must face the questions about meat consumption the boy is unprepared to engage.

 McAlmon, “Jack Rabbit Drive,” 51, 52.  McAlmon, “Jack Rabbit Drive,” 49. 40  McAlmon, “Jack Rabbit Drive,” 51. Anna Sewell’s account of hunting a hare has a similar effect: “The hare tried to get through the fence; it was too thick, and she turned sharp round to make for the road, but it was too late; the dogs were upon her with their wild cries; we heard one shriek, and that was the end of her” (Black Beauty [1877; New York: Penguin, 2011], 7). A man and a horse die during this particular hunt after a tragic fall, which puts the hunt in a bad light (8–9). 41  McAlmon, “Jack Rabbit Drive,” 51. 38 39

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In J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, David Lurie’s tough masculinity gradually gives way to gentler qualities often thought of as feminine. This softening of his character is particularly evident in his attitudes toward animals as he moves incrementally from indifference to love. Bev Shaw operates the Animal Welfare League.42 When Lurie first meets this amateur veterinarian, he recalls the story of St. Hubert giving refuge to a hunted deer. Saint Hubertus urged compassion toward hunted animals, sparing them unnecessary pain. Bev Shaw is also a kind of religious figure, “a priestess, full of New Age mumbo jumbo, trying, absurdly, to lighten the load of Africa’s suffering beasts,” and some comments by David on eating meat leads her to voice religious-sounding remarks about having to justify ourselves at “the Great Reckoning.”43 Initially at daughter Lucy’s request, and later on his own initiative, David helps Shaw at Animal Welfare, and finds solace there from his own deteriorating circumstances. His gradually evolving relationship with her further parallels this transformation.44 He does not find her physically attractive and yet they have a sexual relationship, meeting for their trysts at the shelter. At the same time, he initially finds her views about animals distasteful and yet gradually adopts them. Among other duties, he helps Shaw euthanize many of the unwanted dogs at the shelter and this leads to a kind of emotional breakdown: “Tears flow. … He does not understand what is happening to him. Until now he has been more or less indifferent to animals.”45 A somewhat odd response to this awakened (feminine) emotion is David’s concern about the dignity shown the dead animals, a dignity denied them in life. One of his jobs is to take euthanized dogs to the incinerator and he is careful in the way he goes about this. Shaw euthanizes animals on weekends when the incinerator is closed so he keeps the bodies overnight at his daughter’s house rather than dump them with other refuse left for burning. Furthermore, he places them in the incinerator himself. Because of rigor mortis, the dogs’ legs get caught in the conveyor moving items into  J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999; London: Vintage, 2000), 72–74.  Coetzee, Disgrace, 84 (“priestess”); 81, 82 (“Reckoning”). 44  Coetzee, Disgrace, 148–50. 45  Coetzee, Disgrace, 143. 42 43

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the fire and impatient workmen break the bones with shovels, so they fit better. David finds this intolerable, so he places the corpses in the furnace himself. At the last, he is able to call mercy killings at the clinic “love.” The novel closes with him carrying one of the dogs inside to be euthanized, showing him a form of “love.”46 David is not an animal “saviour,” but he offers them respect in death when no others do. The irony is clear. “Curious,” the narrator observes, “that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to the service of dead dogs,” especially in light of his callous attitude toward other creatures. Earlier, when asked if he likes animals, David answers the question flippantly by saying he must because he enjoys  eating them.47 But his relationship with food is complicated. He develops a bond with sheep purchased by his neighbor Petrus, who intends to slaughter and feed them to guests at a party.48 Petrus leaves them tied on a grassless bit of ground, without food or water, and David feels pity for them, eventually moving the sheep so they have access to both. He later tells Lucy he doesn’t want to attend the party precisely because those sheep are to be the meal served: “‘I am disturbed. I can’t say why.’” Though he attends anyway, he is conflicted; when handed a plate with two mutton chops, he decides to eat them and “ask forgiveness afterwards.”49 The book presents a series of vulnerable, marginalized categories of people, of victims and their abusers. David is both. On the one side, he is a white South African; a womanizer; a professor abusing his authority by seducing a young female student; and a john hiring the prostitute Soraya who encroaches on her private life. On the other, he is beaten and badly injured during a home invasion while staying with his daughter in the Eastern Cape, and later self-conscious about his appearance, when he notices people looking at him and his marred appearance. Reference to David’s “skullcap” (a bandage needed for his burned head) follows soon 46  Coetzee, Disgrace, 219, 220. For other stories remarking on euthanasia as an act of compassion, see e.g., Sewell, Black Beauty, 176; and S. Louise Patteson, Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1901), 76–77. On the use of chloroform as a humane way to end an animal’s life, see 31, 82–83. 47  Coetzee, Disgrace, 146, 81. 48  Coetzee, Disgrace, 123–27; esp. 126–27. 49  Coetzee, Disgrace, 127, 131.

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after remarks about the mockery of Jews, suggesting a further connection to marginalized people. The setting of those antisemitic comments is a party at which David is one of only two whites. He also realizes he is an “outsider” among women and female victims of male violence.50 David’s connections with animals (the sheep, the dogs), both a flippant indifference and concern for their wellbeing, seems to reflect these abuser/abused, violator/victim bifurcations. The complications occurring in David’s relationship to food are part of this. João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s short story “It Was a Different Day when They Killed the Pig” also explores the equation of masculinity with violence toward animals. The boy Aloísio is determined to watch bravely as his father kills the sow Noca, a step necessary in his mind to win his father’s approval and become a man. Ribeiro stresses the gendering of animal slaughter in this story and it is part of a larger code of behavior. Whereas the boy’s father picks up his daughter and lets her sit on his lap, he does not allow a similar intimacy to Aloísio. The boy’s mother only does so a “very few times.”51 A father’s affection for a son is unlike that shown to a daughter. In this story, the intimacy shared between father and son occurs in relation to, and is dependent on, the boy’s response to events surrounding the killing of an animal. When Aloísio’s sister cries upon learning Noca is to die, Aloísio notes a difference between himself and her: “If it was me … people would laugh. But he got over that quickly, because he remembered that his sister was a woman and women cried a lot.”52 Father and son bond as they distance themselves from such feminine emotional outbursts. Aloísio “wanted very, very much to be a man, he wanted nobody to be ever, ever able to say that he had not been a man even if only for an instant.” As he and his father walk to the place of  Coetzee, Disgrace, 130, 135, 140–41.  João Ubaldo Ribeiro, “It Was a Different Day when They Killed the Pig,” trans. João Ubaldo Ribeiro, in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 168. 52  Ribeiro, “It Was a Different Day,” 168. For a non-fictional account of a man grappling with grief at the death of an animal, with consideration of gender expectations, see e.g., Edward C. Sellner’s Our Dog Red: A Small Token of Remembrance (Eugene: Resource, 2019): “Weren’t men supposed to hide their feelings, and not be so vulnerable about expressing them? A number of participants [in the grief group] acknowledged how they felt a bit crazy to be so affected by their loss [of a pet]” (53–54). 50 51

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slaughter, he takes this step toward manhood and gains the approval he craves when his father conspiringly whispers, with reference to his sister, “Women are like that.”53 Because he does not cry in that moment, Aloísio’s father accepts him as a man. Before the slaughter of the pig, it is clear this is a difficult step for the boy to take because there is also something of a bond formed between him and the doomed Noca. He speaks to the sow on occasion, but she does not answer, and he speculates about the reason for her silence; Noca does not answer because “she knew that one day he would betray her and would be watching her execution in all coldness, learning in that operation the manner in which he would kill his own pigs in future.”54 His connection with the animal is a kind of forbidden fruit. Noca is a nursing mother (feminine) and a favourite with Aloísio and the other children who visit her. Participation in her slaughter as witness is necessary, in his mind, if he is to break with the feminine and the childish. Like McAlmon’s account of the rabbit cull, Ribeiro’s description of the killing of Noca is gruesome, with repeated mention of the blood, smells, and sounds involved. Aloísio is there but clearly traumatized as his father and other men perform the act. He is horrified but remains stoic and only after he is out of sight of his parents, is he free to react, throwing up and shedding tears, a response that leaves him feeling ashamed. The story closes with Aloísio overhearing his father speak approvingly of the boy’s behavior and courage during the killing of the sow: “He is a man, the father said [to the boy’s mother] with admiration, and Aloísio felt his eyes wet, and pride with sickness again.” The pairing of the terms pride and sickness seems particularly important in the closing lines of the story. He feels pride at becoming a man, but memories of his betrayal of Noca and his (feminine) tears remain with him. He imagines family gatherings in future, and has the impression if anyone speaks to him, “he will begin to cry without ever again being able to stop.”55 These are the last words of the story and they suggest the masculinity achieved by the boy is just a veneer. The tears are just below the surface––the tears shed for pride, yes,  Ribeiro, “It Was a Different Day,” 168.  Ribeiro, “It Was a Different Day,” 166. 55  Ribeiro, “It Was a Different Day,” 169, 170. 53 54

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but also for slaughtered animals––and they threaten to erupt. This story undercuts the kind of masculinity associated with violence toward animals (“ashamed”) because it refuses to accept the bloodshed needed to achieve it as an unqualified good.56 Whereas these stories by McAlmon, Coetzee, and Ribeiro complicate cultural expectations about male dominance over other animals and meat consumption, others celebrate a different kind of masculinity. A number of welfare-oriented authors aware of the tendency to align manhood with indifference toward suffering offer clear alternatives. Sewell’s Black Beauty is a case in point. Joe Green is fourteen when he comes to work with the equine narrator and other horses at Squire Gordon’s Birtwick estate. When sent on an errand with Beauty he comes upon a carter flogging two horses mercilessly. They strain at a cart loaded with bricks that is stuck in mud but are unable to move it, and all the while “the man, fiercely pulling at the head of the forehorse, swore and lashed most brutally.”57 Joe stops and pleads with him to let the horses alone, even offering to help unload the cart to free it from the mud, but the man refuses. Joe then rushes to the nearby home of the master brickmaker Mr. Clay for help to stop the cruel beating. Later, the magistrate calls on Joe to give testimony against the carter, and he willingly does so. Justice follows, based on the evidence the boy provides. Sewell offers here a sharp critique of the kind of ‘masculinity’ the carter represents. Not only is he senselessly vicious in his attack on the horses, he is also foolish because he does not recognize their inability to free the cart, is “the worse for drink,” and without the respect of any of the other males in the scene (the brickmaker, the magistrate, Joe, Joe’s supervisor John, and even the male horse Black Beauty who participates in the rescue). Joe, on the other hand, is the very model of bravery and kindness. He sees the horses in distress and stops to help. He is courageous, a boy confronting a drunk adult with a whip in hand, and willing to give  For theoretical perspectives on gendered attitudes toward animals and their treatment, see e.g., Carol Adams, “‘A very rare and difficult thing’: Ecofeminism, Attention to Animal Suffering and the Disappearance of the Subject,” in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 591–604. 57  Sewell, Black Beauty, 73. 56

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testimony before a magistrate without a hint of concern about possible reprisal. Sewell closes the scene stressing Joe’s maturation into manhood. In the days following, Black Beauty observes “a change had come over Joe. John laughed, and said he had grown an inch taller in that week.” It was as if, Beauty suggests, “he had jumped at once from a boy into a man.”58 Compassion is a positive masculine trait in stories like this. To be a strong, respected, courageous male, one does not need to be cruel to animals.

The End of (This Chapter on) Meat Alice Walker’s wonderful short story “Am I Blue?” tells of a horse whose suffering leads him to put up “a barrier” to protect himself against further cruelties.59 The owners of this horse leave him alone in a meadow most times. The narrator is a neighbor who befriends the horse, often feeding him apples. She is “shocked” to remember how well human and nonhuman animals are able to communicate. Blue’s owners betray him. Another horse arrives and the two bond, but once she is pregnant, they take her away, leaving Blue alone once again.60 The neighbour watches Blue’s grief, and admits complicity in the myriad ways we cause animals to suffer and, as in other stories, it manifests as complications in her relationship with food. The story closes with a dramatic gesture by this narrator: “As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out.”61 Literature offers readers a chance to ‘befriend’ the nonhuman characters they meet within the pages of books, and this shift in orientation toward animals-as-deserving-consideration threatens indifference toward them, including those killed for food. This complication with dietary  Sewell, Black Beauty, 75.  Alice Walker, “Am I Blue?” in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 182–87. Carol J. Adams includes a lengthy excerpt from this story in Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (1994; London Bloomsbury, 2018), unnumbered frontmatter page. 60  Walker, “Am I Blue?” 185–86. 61  Walker, “Am I Blue?” 187. 58 59

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choices appears in numerous forms. Doctor Dolittle is a reluctant but committed vegetarian in the 1967 film adaptation of the Lofting stories. “Sides of beef ‘n’ chops ‘n’ steak ‘n’ veal, and pork, of course, my favourite meal,” sings Rex Harrison in the title role. “And then I hear poor Gub-­ Gub [the pig] squeal. Oh me, oh my––a reluctant but sincere vegetarian am I.”62 Similarly, the farmgirl in E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web struggles with the idea of eating Wilbur the pig. There is perhaps also a version of this theme in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871). When Alice joins the two Queens at table, the Red Queen thinks she looks shy so introduces the girl to the joint of mutton just placed before her. The leg of mutton then gets up and bows to Alice, who respectfully returns the greeting. ‘May I give you a slice?’ [Alice then] said, taking up the knife and fork, and looking from one Queen to the other. ‘Certainly not,’ the Red Queen said, very decidedly: ‘it isn’t etiquette to cut any one you’ve been introduced to. Remove the joint!’ And the waiters carried it off, and brought a large plum-­ pudding in its place.63

Strange it is, but worth remembering is Lewis Carroll’s concern about animal cruelty. He was an antivivisectionist and published his essay “Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection” in 1875. The use of animals in scientific research is the topic considered in the next chapter.

References Adams, Carol J. 2018. Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals. 1994. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2010. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. 1990. 20th Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum.  “The Vegetarian,” in Doctor Dolittle, directed by Richard Fleischer, music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, Lionel Newman, and Alexander Courage (Twentieth Century Fox, 1967). My transcription. In the Hugh Lofting novels, Doctor Dolittle is not a vegetarian. 63  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Oxford World’s Classics (1865, 1871; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 234. 62

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Adams, Carol [J.]. 2006. ‘A Very Rare and Difficult Thing’: Ecofeminism, Attention to Animal Suffering and the Disappearance of the Subject. In A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton, 591–604. New  York: Columbia University Press. Adams, Douglas. 2014. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. 1980. In The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Nearly Definitive Edition. London: Heinemann. Carroll, Lewis. 2009. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-­ Glass. 1865, 1871. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coetzee, J.M. 2000. Disgrace. 1999. London: Vintage. Duchovny, David. 2015. Holy Cow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Eastman, Charles A. 2010. The Gray Chieftain. 1904. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan, 108–116. Waco: Baylor University Press. Gilmour, Michael J. 2019. Myth and Meat: C.  S. Lewis Sidesteps Genesis 1:29–30. In Ethical Vegetarianism and Veganism, ed. Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, 94–102. London: Routledge. Lofting, Hugh. 2019a. Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan. 1924. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Volume 2, 317–592. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019b. Doctor Dolittle’s Circus. 1924. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Volume 2, 1–315. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019c. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle. 1922. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Volume 1, 1–314. New York: Aladdin. McAlmon, Robert. 2010. The Jack Rabbit Drive. 1929. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey, 44–52. Waco: Baylor University Press. McArthur, Jo-Anne. 2017. Captive. Brooklyn: Lantern. ———. 2013/2017. We Animals. Brooklyn: Lantern. McArthur, Jo-Anne, et  al. 2020. HIDDEN: Animals in the Anthropocene. We Animals Media. Mowat, Farley. 2006. The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. 1957. Toronto: Scholastic. Patteson, S. Louise. 1901. Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co. Pennypacker, Sara. 2016. Pax. New York: Balzer and Bray. Ribeiro, João Ubaldo. 2010. It Was a Different Day When They Killed the Pig. 1991. Translated by João Ubaldo Ribeiro. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey, 164–170. Waco: Baylor University Press.

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Sellner, Edward C. 2019. Our Dog Red: A Small Token of Remembrance. Eugene: Resource. Sewell, Anna. 2011. Black Beauty. 1877. New York: Penguin. Walker, Alice. 2010. Am I Blue? 1988. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey, 182–187. Waco: Baylor University Press. White, E.B. 2012. Charlotte’s Web. 1952. 60th Anniversary Edition. New York: HarperCollins.

4 Lessons on Animals and Science with Doctor Rat

As a child, some of my favorite books conveyed subtle or direct messages about animal sentience and cognition to young audiences. Now that I have spent decades researching nonhuman animals in visual culture and literature, I can reread these children’s books from an ecocritical perspective. Doing so, I understand how they shaped my lifelong feelings of compassion and love towards animals. Two that were influential were the beautifully illustrated books The Story of Ferdinand (1936) by Munro Leaf and The Story of Babar (Histoire de Babar, 1931) by Jean de Brunhoff. The former features a nonviolent bull who escapes death because he preferred to sit and smell the flowers rather than fight, while the latter book portrays an orphaned elephant whose nurturing mother is shot before his very eyes. In recent years, I have explored art and fictional works focusing on abhorrent topics such as vivisection, hunting, factory farming, slaughterhouses, the fur industry, extinction, and loss of biodiversity. Two of the most compelling works I have

Personal correspondence. Hadas Marcus is an associate fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, and an active member of the Research Forum on the Human-Animal Bond at the Tel Aviv University Porter School of Environmental Studies. © The Author(s) 2020 M. J. Gilmour, Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare, The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9_4

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written about are the rather maudlin A Dog’s Tale (1903) by Mark Twain and the disturbing story “The Slaughterer” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1967). ––Hadas Marcus, Tel Aviv University, Oranim College of Education, Israel  

“‘It’s just a rat, for God’s sake.’”1 So spoke a surprised lab supervisor to John Gluck at Texas Tech University in the 1960s. At the time, Gluck was an undergraduate student whose clumsy first attempt to remove brain tissue from a living rat resulted in the animal’s death. It surprised him to learn this mattered so little in that place (it was “an extra”), that there was no interest in determining the actual cause of death, and that the only thing remaining to do after the botched experiment was throw the corpse into a garbage bin. His initial assumption that nonhuman subjects mattered proved to be misguided, at least in the opinion of this supervisor. What else did he expect? It’s just a rat. This nonfictional philosophical memoir2 includes many such episodes. Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals is the story of the author’s evolving relationships with other creatures and his emerging awareness of the researcher’s moral responsibility toward them. He begins with his childhood fascination with wildlife and love of family pets, but then charts the steady “erosion” of an instinctive abhorrence at causing harm to other living things. His own development of an it’s-just-a-rat attitude was gradual. Steps contributing to this included hunting rabbits with friends—often maimed, not always killed ‘cleanly’—and temporary work on a ranch that included the brutal castration, branding, and dehorning of cattle.3 In both cases, the acceptance of his peers proved intoxicating and encouraged the stifling of squeamishness about inflicting pain on defenseless 1  John P.  Gluck, Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist’s Ethical Journey (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 36. For an introduction to concerns regarding use of animals in scientific experimentation, see e.g., Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, eds., The Ethical Case Against Animal Experiments (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018); and Hugh Lafollette, “Animal Experimentation in Biomedical Research,” in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp and R. G. Frey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 796–825. Lafollette argues, “Defenders of the practice carry the moral burden of proof. The moral onus always rests on anyone who wishes to harm sentient creatures, to do what is, all things being equal, a moral wrong” (820). 2  My term but cf. Gluck, Voracious Science, 284–85. 3  Gluck, Voracious Science, 25–29.

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animals. A similar craving to belong and gain the respect of others occurred while at university, especially from professors whose research, they insisted, required the sacrifice of some for the sake of a higher good. Their approval further steeled him against sentimentalism.4 Relevant here is a remark by Carol Adams who notes the education of scientists necessarily requires students to distance themselves emotionally from the animals involved in their research and indeed, the protocols of scientific investigations reinforce this: “Experimenters do not see themselves as agents of pain, cruelty, etc., because they do not see themselves as agents. Routine and ritual insulate them from their activities. By viewing animals as tools toward their research ends, they render the transitive verb intransitive; they eliminate agency.”5 Peter Singer discusses the education process as well, noting the difficulties students face if they refuse to participate in experiments on living animals.6 But chinks in the logical armour defending against emotional attachment to research subjects gradually emerged during Gluck’s long career, and much of his book documents how justifying deprivations, electric shocks, and more on monkeys and rats proved problematic. One poignant turning point in his ethical journey serves to illustrate the kinds of dissonances with which he grappled. He credits a stray dog with bringing “warmth and a focus of care beyond my self-centered attention” into his home and marriage, and further describes the extraordinary efforts he and his wife took to care for this German shepherd mix. The costs in time, money, and convenience were considerable, even to the point of buying a house with a yard to accommodate the new family member. The sharp contrast between domestic and professional behavior, between his efforts to keep a dog contented and healthy and his daily treatment of animals in the lab proved startling. Beyond providing clean cages and fresh food, the comfort of those lab animals was “not an issue.”7 Other pangs of conscience would follow.  Gluck, Voracious Science, e.g., 33.  Carol J.  Adams, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (1994; London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 28. 6  Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, updated edition (1975; New  York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 69–70. 7  Gluck, Voracious Science, 131–32. 4 5

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The use of animals for scientific advancement is a polarizing subject, of course, and frequently those invested in the debate speak past one another. One thing Gluck’s book makes clear, however, is that altruism motivates many on both sides. Those wanting to empty the laboratory cages altogether often insist any knowledge gained by experimenting on living animals is ill-gotten, but Gluck reminds us compassion motivates many working in research facilities too. He writes movingly of his father and the “life-destroying repercussions” of early onset Parkinson’s disease that transformed his life and the lives of other family members caring for him. Watching his father’s struggle “weighed heavily” on his mind, contributing to his interest in neuroscience. He also refers to the anxiety and depression that “plagued” his sister and grandmother, which also explained in part his career choices.8 One of the book’s stated aims is to help protectionists better understand what he calls “the scientists’ plight” and thereby encourage more effective dialogue between the two camps.9 Gluck writes as a scientific insider, as a one-time practitioner of the animal research methodologies he now critiques. Gluck worked as a behavioral scientist from the 1960s through to the 1990s but eventually left this career to devote himself to the complexities of animal research ethics. This was no easy decision.10 Some colleagues were suspicious of the “turncoat” who changed sides11 but this double perspective is what makes the book so fascinating. It is easy for scientists to mock the emotional outbursts and sentimentalism of sometimes-shrill advocates who, they insist, do not understand the importance of scientific inquiry and the costs of progress. At the same time, those advocates often caricature all those working in laboratories as insensitive sadists. What we find here is a beautifully told story of one who sees the issues from both sides, who challenges both stereotypes, and in the process, presents compelling reasons to consider the animal’s point of view, which is a key concern in the unfolding argument.12 His extensive work with  Gluck, Voracious Science, 21, 171, 40.  Gluck, Voracious Science, xiv. 10  To illustrate his early intellectual reservations, see e.g., Voracious Science, 157–60, regarding his first reaction to Peter Singer’s seminal work Animal Liberation (1975). 11  Gluck, Voracious Science, 280–81. 12  Gluck, Voracious Science, e.g., 38, 147–50. 8 9

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laboratory animals, which he describes with often-disturbing detail, assures him an audience with others doing similar work. At the same time, what he describes as his “ethical awakening”13 is a remarkable turn toward animal compassion sure to inspire advocates. The book urges animal welfare reform. Gluck has much to say about institutional animal care and use committees (IACUCs), and he puts forward ways for them to improve how they operate.14 He argues that philosophical analyses of animal ethics, and political and institutional regulations alone do not result in significant protections for animals unless certain conditions inform the work of IACUCs. Heading a list of eleven such conditions is the crucial need for committee members to value animal lives “at least as much as they value animals’ usefulness in research.”15 This captures well the argument put forward in the book. This work of nonfiction brings into view a world of animal suffering— the scientist’s laboratory—few see firsthand. Fiction does something similar. It reveals hidden places, and to see is to have opportunity to question whether the practices revealed are morally defensible. We rarely see video footage or photographs of factory farm operations and slaughterhouses unless provided by the covert investigations of animal welfare activists, and obviously illegal cruelties such as dog and cock fighting are clandestine. Animal experimentation is also largely hidden from view, and indeed, the remote setting of H.  G. Wells’s vivisection novel, “a small volcanic islet, and uninhabited” offers a tidy metaphor illustrating the broad tendency to keep the disturbing realities of animal experimentation out of the public’s view.16 When Edward Prendick first hears the name Moreau, it is vaguely familiar to him and he slowly recalls why. He remembers a gruesome pamphlet circulating called The Moreau Horrors,  Gluck, Voracious Science, xiv; cf. 143–52.  Gluck, Voracious Science, xiv; chap. 7. 15  Gluck, Voracious Science, 279–80. 16  H.  G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Oxford World’s Classics, ed. Darryl Jones (1896; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5. According to Adams, the way most people learn about experiments involving other animals, whether scientist to scientist or animal supporters to their audience, “is through representations and reports. The denial of access of most lay people to scientific laboratories reinforces the dependence on representations and reports, visual and verbal texts, to communicate the details of the encounter between the arrogant human eye and other animals” (Neither Man nor Beast, 19–20). 13 14

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which described grim experiments performed by the eminent physiologist. “He had to leave England,” Prendick reflects. A journalist obtained access to his laboratory in the capacity of laboratory assistant, with the deliberate intention of making sensational exposures; and by the help of a shocking accident—if it was an accident—his gruesome pamphlet became notorious. On the day of its publication, a wretched dog, flayed and otherwise mutilated, escaped from Moreau’s house.17

The doctor “was simply howled out of the country” and though somewhat ambivalent about vivisection himself, Prendick admits Moreau possibly deserved this exile because “some of his experiments, by the journalist’s account, were wantonly cruel.” It is the absence of an intelligible object in Moreau’s science that troubles Prendick. He is not squeamish about pain itself but rather bothered by apparently “aimless investigations.” As he puts it, “It was the wantonness that stirred me.” The Beast People, the distorted creatures produced by Moreau’s barbaric work on that remote island, live in “one long dread” of the man.18 Use of the term “dread” in this context recalls a consequence of humanity’s fall into sin and the conditions of the post-diluvian world described in the book of Genesis: “God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered’” (9:1–2). Moreau’s disturbing research continued after his exile, but now removed from sight, performed far away from England and in the privacy of his uninhabited, volcanic islet. Nonfiction like Prof. Gluck’s Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals or Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975)19 help illuminate the shadowy places where human-caused animal suffering occurs, making visible and known what is otherwise largely hidden and unfamiliar. The stories told by creative writers do the same and at least for some of them,  Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 30–31.  Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 31, 85. 19  Singer, Animal Liberation, esp. chap. 2. 17 18

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animal-­welfare is the motivation. Like Wells’s unnamed journalist hoping to make “sensational exposures,” novelists and poets appeal to “the conscience of the nation,”20 as the examples explored in this chapter illustrate.

Laboratories from the Animals Point of View We learn on the opening page that the titular narrator of William Kotzwinkle’s 1976 novel Doctor Rat is insane, made so by laboratory tests performed on him involving mazes, shocks, and more.21 Doctor Rat is quite unexpectedly a staunch apologist for such laboratory research, and he spends his days arguing its value with the facility’s other caged subjects or “basic models.”22 With a twisted logic recalling the ‘happy meat’ advertising mentioned in the previous chapter, he tries to convince them how fortunate they are to be part of such important research. Animals, in his view, are duty-bound to participate in the scientific enterprise, and this includes himself. When the (human) Learned Professor who runs the lab ties a string around Doctor Rat’s upper incisors and hangs him by the teeth, his passivity is clear: “I am now permitted to hang by my teeth in the air … what fun, swinging back and forth here.” Frequently, he describes the purpose of animals in terms of their usefulness to humans. A dog, for instance, is a “convenient evolutionary offshoot expressly designed for the laboratory.”23 It comes as no surprise other animals subjected to tortures do not share Dr. Rat’s views. A dog tied to a treadmill and forced to run in extreme heat until death as part of a heatstroke study communicates incomprehensibly with the other lab animals. Doctor Rat refers to these telepathic messages as “revolutionary material,” “revolutionary signals,” and “intuition-­pictures.”24 These pictures involve animals running free of  Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 30, 31.  William Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat (New York: Open Road, 1976), 1, 2, 4, 15, etc. 22  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 29 and throughout. 23  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 14, 29. Dr. John Paul Dudley’s Homo et Canis; or, The Autobiography of Old Cato (1892) also uses an animal’s voice to argue against animal welfare but, unlike Kotzwinkle’s novel, without irony. Keridiana Chez describes it as a “medical treatise masquerading as an autobiography” (“Introduction,” in Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe, ed. Keridiana Chez [Peterborough: Broadview, 2015], 11n. 2). 24  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 7, 21, 14; cf. 19. 20 21

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human oppression and control, chasing an allusive, “mysterious scent” that promises utter contentment and unhindered liberty. One of the domesticated dogs chasing this instinctive, dreamlike promise of freedom sees it this way: In its place [i.e., domesticated life] is a feeling of solidarity such as I forgot existed: to be with one’s own, to follow one’s own law, to hear the sound of one tongue speaking in the wind, with sunlight coming through the leaves, lighting the forest floor. I see a bright hallway of trees ahead of me, endless and beautiful. Out here, racing toward the sunset, my heart is my own and I’m free! …. I exert myself to the fullest, enjoying my run. Without human eyes upon me, I’m unself-conscious. I’m myself, a dog in motion, howling and happy.25

The suffering dog on the treadmill shares this fantasy through a non-­ verbal, intuitive wavelength form of communication, a vision of liberated animal life, flourishing and free of human tyranny. He pursues this vision even while forced to run for days on end, until he drops dead.26 Though Dr. Rat ridicules this paradisal dream, insisting this dog’s ideas are a “perverted” view of life, a chorus of other animals also intuit a life beyond, a life other than mere suffering in a lab. One of the maze rats speaks of “a fountain of light inside me” and suggests “we come from that fountain.”27 Doctor Rat disputes the claim animals can be happy apart from humans and free of suffering, that there may be a value in them (“light”) beyond their function as test subjects. As he sees it, “the rat is man’s best friend” and the rat’s reason for being is to give everything for humans: “That’s our purpose, that’s why we’re here on earth!” and “we’re here to serve humanity selflessly in every way we can.”28 He later gives this line of thought a theological spin, appealing to St. Thomas Aquinas. Animals have no feelings, no spirit, and no soul. Humanity has dominion over the earth, and so every right to “twist us and starve us and cut off our tails because that’s

 Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 10–11.  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 7. For some of the grim description of this dog’s suffering, see 17. 27  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 18, 8–9. 28  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 15, 19; cf. 102. 25 26

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the law!”29 Ultimately, as he frequently reminds those in the laboratory, death is the only freedom. Death is the “all-inclusive doctrine.”30 Dreams of freedom from suffering are no more than groundless fantasy. But this pattern repeats, with animals the world over responding to the non-­ verbal, telepathic, intuitive wavelength signals sent by the laboratory dog, and it includes an instinctual call to gather as one, to unite the animal soul even though (Christian) humanity insists there is no such thing.31 Of course, the key is to remember Doctor Rat is broken, and from the first page to the last that tortured creature reminds us he is insane, caught, as he puts it, in a mad symphony.32 His capacity to imagine a freedom other than death, and a painless life of flourishing is long gone whereas other test subjects, including the treadmill dog, hold on to vestiges of hope for a more peaceful existence. A great gathering of species is the result of the telepathic connection between all the animals on earth. When this meeting, first glimpsed in the visions of the tortured treadmill dog, culminates, the only animal missing is the human, the last to arrive. The “man’s” approach has great potential, suggesting a unity of all sentient beings, but it ends in disaster: “‘MAN IS COMING! LOOK, BANANA MICE, MAN IS coming through the trees!’ How suddenly he has appeared. Why does he wear the bushes of the jungle [camouflage] on his head? Now he approaches us, like a tree that walks. But the meeting is complete! We’ll surge together with man. We’ll know the wonderful moment of all hearts beating as one!”33 The hoped-for Eden collapses into a dystopian nightmare, however. The camouflaged humans bring guns and the novel closes with grizzly descriptions 29  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 19. For an introduction and critique of the Thomist view of animals, see e.g., Dorothy Yamamoto, “Aquinas and Animals: Patrolling the Boundary?” in Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 80–89. Peter Singer discusses Aquinas’s views and influence in Animal Liberation (193–96), published around the same time as this novel. Presumably this influential book brought Aquinas to the attention of many in the animal movements of the day, perhaps Kotzwinkle among them. 30  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 9. 31  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 190, with 19: “‘Haven’t you read St. Thomas Aquinas? Animals have no soul!’” 32  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 97. 33  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 163.

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of the slaughter of the animals in what is provocatively described as the “Final Solution.”34 Even the unicorn is among the victims, and the “Animal Soul” disappears.35 “We made our bid for existence,” thinks a despairing sloth, “and lost.” Doctor Rat alone survives, presumably because he is the only animal on earth who accepts humanity’s dominion and its agenda for nonhuman life without question, and in the final lines of the book, he leaves the destroyed laboratory homeless, lonely, and dragging his tail.36 Kotzwinkle’s disturbing novel highlights the brokenness of human-­ animal relations. The different species in the laboratory share a form of wordless communication based on sensory impulses, Doctor Rat explains, but he also observes humans do not share this ability of cross-species communication. The Learned Professor’s “intuitive wavelength is encrusted.”37 The implication is that a form of communication—at minimum, we might suppose, capacity to sympathize with the pain of other species—is possible but stifled. There is much in this novel to explore in connection to welfarist concerns, including devastating descriptions of the life and death of animals on factory farms, as viewed from the 34  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 193. A number of other writers invoke the Holocaust with reference to human cruelty to animals. See e.g., Richard Adams, The Plague Dogs (1977; New York: Vintage, 2016), 180–83; and J.  M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Vintage, 2003), 63–66, 94. In David Duchovny’s novel Holy Cow, Jerry the pig (ironically) converts to Judaism and takes the name Shalom because he fears what awaits him in future. “‘They’re gonna eat me just like they’re gonna eat you,’” he says to Elsie the cow. “‘It’s a damn holocaust in here’” ([New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015], 76; on Jerry’s Judaism, see 78–82). On references to the Holocaust in stories involving animals, see e.g., Josephine Donovan, The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 40–42, 162–65; Randy Malamud, “Coetzee and Animals, Literature and Philosophy,” Journal of Animal Ethics 2.2 (2012): 214; Natalie Woodward’s “Eternal Mirroring: Charles Patterson’s Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust,” Journal of Animal Ethics 9.2 (2019): 158–69; and Catherine Parry, Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 135–51, with particular attention to Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil (2011). 35  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 184, 187, 190. Other stories involving the human mistreatment of the unicorn include C. S. Lewis’s poem “The Late Passenger,” first published in 1948, and Timothy Findley’s novel Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984). Both are set in the days of Noah and the flood. For a first-person account of Noah’s flood from the perspective of a long-living turtle who witnessed the deluge, see Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake (1923, 1948; in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 4 [New York: Aladdin, 2019], 580–672). Dolittle first meets Mudface the turtle in Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office (1923). 36  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 191, 193. 37  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 7–8.

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perspectives of a pig and a cow, and a glimpse of oppressions endured by those confined in zoos from that of a hyena.38 Few books about animal oppression are as despairing, even apocalyptic as Kotzwinkle’s. His vision of a gathering of all species and the uniting of “Animal Soul” is a kind of modern, dystopian, Noah-less Ark. Here too a cataclysm destroying life on the planet occurs, a consequence of human evil (cf. Genesis 6–8). This time, however, the attempt to save all species on the planet comes from the animals themselves, and it fails. Humans make the world intolerable for them (labs, zoos, factory farms, hunting, and fishing and whaling to extinction), and then they enact the “Final Solution” to destroy them all. There is no rescue of representatives of all species. There is no salvific Ark. The only animal that remains is an insane, cocaine-addled rat.39 He alone looks on human violence against other species with approval. A similarly ironic approval of human actions against animals appears in James Lever’s Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood. The chimpanzee Cheeta of Tarzan movies fame (also cocaine-addled, on at least one occasion), tells his story out of gratitude to humanity, “for everything you have done for animals and for me.” He wants to buy every human a drink for getting him out of the violent African jungles. He refers to his captors as “rescuers.”40 He anticipates a time when alpha-ruled and predator-­ filled jungles will be a thing of the past, thanks to human action. There are more tigers in American zoos than in the wild, which is a good thing for prey animals like himself. He expects one day soon he and others “will be able to walk, hop and scurry safely through these wonderful new tigerless—and leopardless? a personal request—forests in relative peace.” It is good for tigers too as they no longer need endure long stretches of hunger when the hunting is not good. Even climate change is a win for the animal kingdom; it is “good news for seals, great news for the rehoused [polar] bears, all thanks to your ingenious ‘global warming’ idea!” He assesses the aggressive harvesting of the world’s waters the same way, admiring the audacious and inspired plan “to clear the oceans of the  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 50–55, 57, 44–46, 58–62.  Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 161. 40  James Lever, Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), xvi, 32, 33. 38 39

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planet of all the death that teems in them.”41 But just as Doctor Rat is an unreliable narrator, so too is Cheeta. Doctor Rat is insane, which clouds his ability to reason clearly. Cheeta is unreliable for other reasons. He is a heavy drinker and himself a victim of animal abuse, which is to say he is beaten into submission, and he lives in such fear of assignment to a research lab he does whatever he can to please the Hollywood bosses—he is in no position to be critical of human behavior for the better part of his adult life. An example of his clouded judgment occurs when he witnesses an organized dogfight. He wrongly assumes the crowd of people surrounding the bloody mayhem want to stop the animal violence but are simply powerless to stop it.42 In the end, however, we discover Cheeta’s narratorial posture is all a ruse. He knows all along humans are “omnicidal. You kill everything,”43 which is perhaps the most disturbing line in whole book. The haunting memory of his brief time in a research facility, and fear of returning to it if he steps out of line, is as terrifying to Cheeta as any alpha-male chimpanzee or jungle predator. But Me Cheeta is also a story about the bonds of affection that cross species lines, offering a striking alternative to the ‘omnicidal’ madness its narrator describes. I return to this book again in Chaps. 5 and 8. Like Me Cheeta, Vivien Alcock’s The Monster Garden also offers an imagined alternative to the brutal, inconsiderate use of animals for scientific purposes. It is an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) for children. The connection to Shelley’s dark tale is clear in the admission that opens the book: “I shouldn’t have done it. I didn’t really mean to, but that’s no excuse, of course. I should have known better with a name like mine. Frances Stein. Called Frankie for short.” Frankie is the daughter of a scientist but unlike her brothers has no opportunity to participate in the research going on in her father’s laboratory but when her brother steals live cells, she sees an opportunity: “Either you give me some or I tell Dad.”44 He acquiesces, and from these  Lever, Me Cheeta, 219, 221.  Lever, Me Cheeta, e.g., 209, 253 (fear of laboratories); 199 (misunderstanding dogfight). 43  Lever, Me Cheeta, 301. 44  Vivien Alcock, The Monster Garden (1988; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000), 1, 7. 41 42

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she creates a monster she names Monnie. Though initially she finds the creature repulsive (“I hated it. I wished it were dead”), in time she cares for the misshapen creature, even coming to love it (e.g., “I must keep my [scientific] notes short. I must be the cool observer. I must avoid filling the pages with the silly little things that made me love Monnie”).45 The story challenges a purely instrumental evaluation of nonhuman life.46 The scientific world, a male-dominated world associated in her mind with her father and brothers, reflects this view. She tries to behave as she believes scientists ought but struggles to do so. She assumes it is a “flaw in [her] character” that she cannot nonchalantly think only of the good of humankind, “and forget that some small, shivering creature may enjoy the sunlight” as much as she does. When her brother advises practicing clinical detachment by squashing an ant, she is unable to do it. Instead, she pricks her thumb to feed Monnie blood, which illustrates a degree of self-sacrifice on behalf of the vulnerable creature.47 This act, according to Lisa Sainsbury, represents a key moment in Frankie’s ethical maturation. By using her own blood, Frankie establishes “a genetic and maternal bond,” and by choosing to nurture the creature, she distances herself from the masculine-dominated, instrumental use of nonhuman life and “the fraternal and Cartesian stance.” Frankie’s relationship with Monnie involves her establishing “an ethical model that draws together related concerns of feminism and environmentalism in a refusal of the fraternity of ethical reason.”48

 olitical and Imaginative Opposition P to Vivisection Literary protests against the use of animals in experiments occasionally parallel those occurring in the political arena. One famous instance of these debates from the early years of the twentieth century erupted in  Alcock, The Monster Garden, 13, 80.  For helpful analysis of this book, see Lisa Sainsbury, Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life, Perspectives on Children’s Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 152–60. 47  Alcock, The Monster Garden, 13, 14. 48  Sainsbury, Ethics in Children’s Literature, 155, 156, 152. 45 46

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Battersea, London. Advocates condemned an experiment on a living dog, and commemorated the victim’s memory with a statue in 1906 with a provocative anti-vivisection plaque, which read, “Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?” As Coral Lansbury explains, this became the focal point for riots on the issue, with defenders on both sides. The dog became “a symbol of feminist outrage and working-class resentment.” Those conducting such research defended themselves, declaring they were rational and reflective men of science, whereas the women and workers defending the dog were “emotional and irresponsible acolytes of a brutal and unsanitary past.” They dismissed the backlash against their scientific efforts as “a denial of progress, relic of a time when sorcery and sentimentality dragged at the skirts of science.”49 Some authors at the time supported the antivivisectionists’ cause through their writing—George Bernard Shaw even attended the unveiling of the statue—and ever since, a number of works have served to educate audiences about brutalities occurring behind the closed doors of laboratories, and to challenge the gendered stereotypes (sensitive women vs. rational men of science) sometimes introduced to the vivisection debates. They often highlight male defenders of animals, for instance, as though to demonstrate they too have the capacity for empathy. Though the scientific world described in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs is male dominated, it is also the case the human heroes of the story who go to great lengths to rescue the canine victims of scientific research are male. The story gives men permission, in effect, to side with animals against scientific institutions. The best-known vivisection novel is H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, mentioned above, but it does not generate sympathy for animals the way others do. C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945), by way of contrast, introduces one of the animals who eventually finds himself in the clutches of the novel’s scientist villains. The bear Mr. Bultitude lives 49  Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985), 3. For discussion of the role of women agitating for humane practices, and their recognition of the intertwined oppressions of women and animals, see Adams’s Neither Man nor Beast. She notes, “The antivivisection movement of the late nineteenth century was predominantly composed of women who saw themselves as the referent in vivisectionists’ activities” (25–26).

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in a house with the story’s heroes and is inevitably viewed with sympathy by readers when employees of the laboratory capture him. The workers who do so drug the bear, who is in a cage by the time he wakes up. Lewis then describes the bear’s reaction to his confinement in moving fashion. Mr. Bultitude “discovered that walls met him in three directions and bars in the fourth. He could not get out…. Sorrow such as only animals know—huge seas of disconsolate emotion with not one little raft of reason to float on—drowned him fathoms deep. In his own fashion he lifted up his voice and wept.”50 But in Wells’s novel, the “puma” and “staghounds” mentioned early in the story are little more than background. There is no emotional connection established between them and readers as there is with Mr. Bultitude because we never have opportunity to ‘meet’ them as individual personalities. In the Wells story, the first hints of animal suffering (“yelped” etc.) occur ‘off stage,’ and do not awaken any real concern the way Lewis’s story does.51 It is rather the mystery of it, not the animal’s pain that interests the narrator. Wells locates the sounds of an animal’s pain, explicitly, in the background. When Prendick notices an animal’s screams (“as if all the pain in the world had found a voice”), his pity has limits. Despite the “emotional appeal” of those cries early on, it is the sound that troubles him, not the cause of that pain itself.52 The constant noise of suffering animals hardens Prendick in time: “I heard without a touch of emotion the puma victim begin another day of torture.”53 But when Prendick hears what he thinks are human sobs, he reacts differently. He catches his first glimpse of a lab victim and wonders if vivisection is occurring on humans, and then realizes he is in danger of becoming a vivisection subject himself. He is (almost) trapped like a “hospital rabbit” awaiting the vivisector, which is to him a “fate more 50  C.  S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (1945; London: HarperCollins, 2005), 487, cf. 427–28. Lewis took the name Mr. Bultitude from F. Anstey’s 1882 comic novel, Vice Versa, or A Lesson to Fathers. Timothy Findley also generates sympathy for a victim of vivisection in Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984; Toronto: Penguin, 1996). Mottyl the cat is nearly-blind because of Doctor Noyes’s experiments, and her kittens also suffer greatly (e.g., 18–19). 51  Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 31. 52  Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 33, 44 (background noise). Montgomery also finds the animals’ screams annoying (34). 53  Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 86.

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horrible than death … torture.”54 This moment of horror at being the victim of experimentation possibly informs a storyline in C. S. Lewis’s science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938). Lewis admits in his Preface there are “Certain slighting references” to stories of this type, and adds, “The author would be sorry if any reader supposed he was too stupid to have enjoyed Mr H.  G. Wells’s fantasies or too ungrateful to acknowledge his debt to them.” He also mentions Wells in the novel itself. Two men, one of them a vivisecting scientist, kidnaps Ransom, the story’s protagonist. While on board a spaceship travelling to Mars (called Malacandra), Ransom overhears their plan to hand him over to creatures on the planet. He then contemplates suicide as a preferable alternative. Ransom even recalls Wells’s stories at this moment: Somebody or something [on Malacandra] had sent for him. It could hardly be for him personally. The somebody wanted a victim—any victim—from Earth…. But what was a sorn? [the Martian species in question] …. His mind, like so many of his generation, was richly furnished with bogies. He had read his H. G. Wells and others. His universe was peopled with horrors such as ancient and medieval mythology could hardly rival.55

The term vivisect appears in the immediate context as well, and Ransom is desperate to escape torture. In this way, he resembles Prendick: “If escape were impossible, then it must be suicide. Ransom was a pious man. He hoped he would be forgiven…. he stole back into the galley and secured the sharpest knife.”56 Prendick reacts the same way, preferring suicide to laboratory torture, and so considers drowning himself. His is a middle position. He is critical of the extent of mutilation (e.g., “so cut and mutilated as I pray I may never see living flesh again”), and even questions Moreau on this: “‘Where is your justification for inflicting all this pain? The only thing that could excuse vivisection to me would be some application’” though he cannot imagine what that might be.57 Moreau accuses Prendick of being a  Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 46, with 44–45.  C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (1938; London: HarperCollins, 2005), 31. 56  Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 32. 57  Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 48, 56 (drowning), 62, 65. 54 55

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materialist, insisting that as long as visible or audible pain makes him sick, so long as his own pains drive him, and so long as pain underlies his propositions of sin, he is an animal. Moreau dismisses pleasure and pain as a lower form of existence, as something to rise above: “‘Pain! Pain and pleasure—they are for us, only so long as we wriggle in the dust.’”58 Moreau’s Frankenstein-like project involves pushing beyond the animal nature: “‘Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say, This time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own.’” Questions about morality play no part in this pursuit: “‘To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter. The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.’”59 Moreau’s efforts to turn animals into human-like creatures through operations on living flesh is a grotesque parody of God making Adam and Eve. He does not tell the monsters he produces about the taste of blood (cf. Genesis 1:29–30), and the god-like Moreau “rested from work” (cf. Genesis 2:2–3). The beast people even worship Moreau, a twisted form of religious devotion. Prendick thinks of the creatures Moreau creates as “caricatures of my Maker’s image” (cf. Genesis 1:26–27).60 As seen in Chap. 2, English antivivisectionists mobilized in the nineteenth century at least in part because the RSPCA’s opposition to experimentation was tepid. Coral Lansbury notes the council of the RSPCA included scientists with licenses to vivisect, individuals who even appointed the inspectors charged with regulating the 1876 Act to Amend the Law Relating to Cruelty to Animals.61 Among those unsatisfied with the RSPCA’s response to the issue was the nineteenth century Anglo-Irish writer and activist Frances Power Cobbe who proved to be a formidable critic. She questioned the moral legitimacy of half-measures. Among other things, she served as editor for Zoophilist, a weekly journal of the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection, an organization she founded. She also launched a petition (called a Memorial)  Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 65, 66.  Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 69, 66. 60  Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, 59–60 (animals into humans); 71 (no taste of blood); 67 (resting from work); 53, 80 (worship); 86 (“Maker’s image”). 61  Lansbury, Old Brown Dog, 9. See too 192n. 16. 58 59

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calling on the RSPCA to work toward legal restrictions on vivisection. The organization’s response was inadequate in Cobbe’s opinion,62 involving little more than further investigation. This perceived indifference to the Memorial “led to the founding soon after of a more focused antivivisection movement in England.” Owing to the sensationalism and hysteria characterizing these efforts in the mid 1870s, the RSPCA, oddly, distanced itself from antivivisection movements.63 Perceived indifference to animal suffering by governments or institutions motivates writers to step into the breech. As mentioned earlier, creative writers take us places to which we otherwise have no access, including the scientist’s laboratory. They also count on readers’ affection for specific animals, as in the case of Lewis’s Mr. Bultitude, Lever’s Cheeta, and Findley’s Mottyl. The power of suggestion is also a tool in a novelist’s bag of tricks. Koztwinkle, Lever, Lewis, and Wells all take us into scientists’ laboratories but sometimes the mere mention of such places, without any commentary, is enough to spark concern, regardless of the author’s personal views on the subject. Toward the end of Farley Mowat’s novel about his childhood dog Mutt, a brief episode raises questions about the ethics of animal experimentation in just this way. The family is on a sailing holiday, and when stopping in the harbour at Kingston, Ontario, Mutt runs ashore at first opportunity and disappears. A local offers the family a word of advice: “‘Best keep him tight aboard …. Hear some turrible things about them young medical students up to the university. They be awful hard on dogs…. Turrible things, they do.’”64 The story then focuses 62  According to Judith E. Hampson, “it soon became clear [to Cobbe] that the Society would commit itself to no more than a moderate, fact-finding approach” (“History of Animal Experimentation Control in the U.K.,” International Journal for the Study of Animal Problems 2.5 [1981]: 238). 63  Deborah Rudacille, The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The Conflict between Animal Research and Animal Protection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 43–44. On Cobbe’s efforts, see 40–48. Rudacille draws on Richard D.  French’s Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 82, when discussing Cobbe and the emergence of antivivisectionist movements separate from the RSPCA. See too Paul S. White, “The Experimental Animal in Victorian Britain,” in Thinking: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, ed. Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 59–81. White includes a brief description of an RSPCA trial of those performing an operation involving the injection of alcoholic substances into the thigh of dog, “which had been brought into the room strapped to a board, struggling to free itself from its fetters” (67). 64  Farley Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (1957; Toronto: Scholastic, 2006), 227. S.  Louise Patteson writes about the same threat to domestic animals. The feline narrator overhears someone

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on the family’s frantic and humorous efforts to find Mutt before he ends up on the dissection table. Mutt is fine, as it turns out (“closeted with a dead whitefish” under a dock the whole time the family searches)65 but the contrast between this known, beloved pet and reference to anonymous stray dogs and cats regularly handed over to Kingston’s medical students by the local dog catcher is jarring.66 We ‘know’ Mutt, so hope for his safety but have no connection with the others. Mowat does not dwell on the point but simply raising the possibility of Mutt suffering this fate is enough to encourage reflection on the ethics of animal research in a way anonymous and nameless strays do not. We do not learn about Mutt’s time with the whitefish until the very end of the Kingston episode, which is to say Mowat allows readers to ‘live with’ the possibility of his capture and torture as long as possible.

Responding to Laboratory Cruelties If some writers are subtle and indirect on the issue of animal experimentation, others are blunt and angry. This is the case with the Paul McCartney poem “Looking for Changes,” in which the speaker sees a cat with a machine in his brain, a rabbit with tears in her eyes, and a monkey forced to smoke cigarettes. He gives voice to his anger after witnessing each cruel experiment. I want to see the scientist put that machine in his own brain. Let’s make lab workers pay for every eye unable to cry its own tears. Every time that cigarette-smoking monkey coughed, the narrator laments, “The bastard [who gave it to him] laughed his head off.” The poem’s message is a simple one. The changes called for in the title are for new ways to treat our fellow creatures, a plea repeated two times.67 After educating readers about the cruelty of experimental work, the poem urges empathy and speaking of “the fashion in schools and colleges to dissect cats” and how at night boys catch as many as they can for the purpose. Most of those captured are pets because “they are so much more tame than others, and more easily caught” (Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat [Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1901], 109). 65  Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 232. 66  Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 227. 67  Paul McCartney, “Looking for Changes,” in Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics 1965–1999, ed. Adrian Mitchell (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 86–87.

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envisions a world without this senseless violence. There is a similar angry tone in a Lewis Morris poem. The speaker begins addressing a loyal companion dog, and then moves on to animal-kind more widely. It is both an admission of human betrayal of nonhumans, and a promise to fight on their behalf against the priests of the great Goddess Science who tortures them in laboratories. Shall I consent to raise A torturing hand against your few and evil days? …. And while the raw flesh quivers with the pain, A calm observer stand …. Great Heaven! this shall not be, this present hell And none denounce it ….68

Though highly sentimental, the poem captures a sense of the moral urgency driving nineteenth-century resistance to vivisection. The Preface of this anthology—first published in 1893—mentions a collection put together by Frances Power Cobbe titled The Friend of Man—and His Friends the Poets, the chief aim of which “seems to have been to attack the practice of vivisection.”69 The editor explains the purpose of his own book is wider than Cobbe’s, but acknowledges his indebtedness to her volume. Literature speaks, writer to reader but also writer to writer. An interesting example of the latter is evident in Richard Adams’s The Plague Dogs. As noted elsewhere, Adams acknowledges Hugh Lofting’s Dolittle stories as a formative influence. C. S. Lewis also appears to contribute to Adams’s creative work and ethical views. Adams is not explicit about this connection but there are clues suggesting Lewis’s writing on the use of animals in science shaped The Plague Dogs to some extent. It is interesting to observe, for one thing, that the epigraphs to Adams’s novel are an excerpt

68  Lewis Morris, “To the Tormentors,” in The Dog in British Poetry, ed. R. Maynard Leonard (1893; San Francisco: Chronicle, 2005), 280–81. 69  Leonard, “Preface” to The Dog in British Poetry, vii.

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from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline mentioning an animal experiment, and another from Samuel Johnson commenting on that passage. Queen:              I will try the forces       Of these thy compounds on such creatures as       We count not worth the hanging, but none human … Cornelius:              Your Highness       Shall from this practice but make hard your heart.                  —Shakespeare, Cymbeline There is in this passage [from Cymbeline] nothing that much requires a note, yet I cannot forbear to push it forward into observation. The thought would probably have been more amplified, had our author lived to be shocked with such experiments as have been published in later times, by a race of men that have practiced tortures without pity, and related them without shame, and are yet suffered to erect their heads among human beings.                      ––Dr. Johnson70

Both passages, Adams’s epigraphs, appear in C.  S. Lewis’s 1947 essay “Vivisection.” Lewis cites the Shakespeare passage when lamenting broad indifference to animal experimentation, as though it were unremarkable and morally neutral. Not so in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, he argues, when “a man was not stamped as a ‘crank’ for protesting against vivisection,” mentioning Lewis Carroll as an example of one protesting on similar grounds to those he gives in this essay.71 For Lewis, Samuel Johnson is an eighteenth-century voice of protest to be reckoned with; Dr. Johnson’s “mind had as much iron in it as any man’s.”72 The inclusion  I take both from Adams, The Plague Dogs, unnumbered frontmatter page.  C. S. Lewis, “Vivisection,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 227. 72  Lewis, “Vivisection,” 227. Italics original. According to Tristram Stuart, Johnson “questioned man’s moral right to kill, and vehemently objected to the cruelty of vivisection” (The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times [New York: Norton, 2006], 252). 70 71

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of these passages seems to indicate Adams read Lewis’s compelling essay, first published as a pamphlet for the New England Anti-Vivisection Society. There are other hints of Lewis’s influence. Adams’s playful use of a witty acronym for the cruel organization “Animal Research, Surgical and Experimental (A.R.S.E.)”73 recalls Lewis’s use of the same device. Like the A.R.S.E., the nefarious National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945), with its ironic acronym N.I.C.E., also experiments on living animals. Both organizations have unlimited government funding, operate out of the public eye and with minimal red tape to hinder their work, are quick to manipulate the public and the media, and obfuscate to avoid scrutiny.74 Both perform purposeless experiments on the mere chance of some useful discovery.75 The public has no idea what goes on at either laboratory.76 Kevin Gumm, writing under the name Digby Driver, is a reporter in The Plague Dogs who uses the press to manipulate public opinion, and by doing so resembles Lewis’s character Mark Studdock in That Hideous Strength.77 Both of them studied sociology.78 In addition, Lewis’s essay and Adams’s novel both align the cruelties inflicted on Jews during the Holocaust with the torture of animals in laboratories.79 The two writers share a common enemy.  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 7–8.  Adams, The Plague Dogs, e.g., 191, 266, 378; Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 15 (“free from almost all the tiresome restraints—‘red tape’ was the word …. free from the restraints of economy”). 75  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 405; Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 130. On the uselessness of some animal experimentation, see the colorful example in Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat, 32. The rhetoric used in defense of such work is often absurd. “Animals are defined as not having feelings, not suffering,” writes Carol J. Adams. “Because they do not write or talk to us in languages we understand or admit as language, we presume to know their intellectual capacity: they don’t have any. Yet, if animals weren’t like humans nothing that applies to humans could be gained by studying them. This is the crux of the problem in justifying animal experimentation”; “Although other animals can be experimented upon only because they are not human, if they were not like humans nothing would be gained for humans by studying them” (Neither Man nor Beast, 21, 27). 76  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 191; Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 160 (“[the public] dismissed the stories as rumours or exaggerations”; cf. 460: “the puppet Director, the dupe of the Institute by whom it duped the public”). 77  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 192; Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 124 (“mug up the facts”). 78  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 217; Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 7 (“a Sociologist and … elected to a fellowship in that subject”). 79  Both writers (Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, 1955; Adams, The Plague Dogs and Watership Down) also tell stories with animal-centric creation narratives. 73 74

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As shown so far, many stories depict forms of human exploitation of other animals, whether for sport and food (Chap. 3) or to advance knowledge through research (Chap. 4). Animal literature also includes a wide array of alternatives to such despotic, exploitative, dominative treatment of nonhuman animals, offering instead fantasies of peaceful coexistence with other species. We turn to this theme in the next chapter.

References Adams, Carol J. 2018. Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals. 1994. London: Bloomsbury. Adams, Richard. 2016. The Plague Dogs. 1977. New York: Vintage. Alcock, Vivien. 2000. The Monster Garden. 1988. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Chez, Keridiana. 2015. Introduction. In Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe, ed. Keridiana Chez, 11–35. Peterborough: Broadview. Coetzee, J.M. 2003. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Vintage. Donovan, Josephine. 2016. The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. New York: Bloomsbury. Duchovny, David. 2015. Holy Cow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Findley, Timothy. 1996. Not Wanted on the Voyage. 1984. Toronto: Penguin. French, Richard D. 1975. Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gluck, John P. 2016. Voracious Science and Vulnerable Animals: A Primate Scientist’s Ethical Journey. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Hampson, Judith E. 1981. History of Animal Experimentation Control in the U.K. International Journal for the Study of Animal Problems 2 (5): 237–241. Kotzwinkle, William. 1976. Doctor Rat. New York: Open Road. Lafollette, Hugh. 2011. Animal Experimentation in Biomedical Research. In The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp and R.G. Frey, 796–825. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lansbury, Coral. 1985. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England. Madison: University of Wisconsin. Lever, James. 2009. Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood. New York: HarperCollins. Lewis, C.S. 1970. Vivisection. In God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper, 224–228. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. ———. 2005a. Out of the Silent Planet. 1938. London: HarperCollins.

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———. 2005b. That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups. 1945. London: HarperCollins. Linzey, Andrew, and Clair Linzey, eds. 2018. The Ethical Case Against Animal Experiments. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lofting, Hugh. 2019. Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake. 1923, 1948. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 4, 379–776. New York: Aladdin. Malamud, Randy. 2012. Coetzee and Animals, Literature and Philosophy. Journal of Animal Ethics 2 (2): 212–215. McCartney, Paul. 2001. Looking for Changes. In Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics 1965–1999, ed. Adrian Mitchell, 86–87. London: Faber and Faber. Morris, Lewis. 2005. To the Tormentors. In The Dog in British Poetry. 1893, ed. R. Maynard Leonard, 279–282. San Francisco: Chronicle. Mowat, Farley. 2006. The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. 1957. Toronto: Scholastic. Parry, Catherine. 2017. Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Patteson, S. Louise. 1901. Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co. Rudacille, Deborah. 2000. The Scalpel and the Butterfly: The Conflict between Animal Research and Animal Protection. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sainsbury, Lisa. 2013. Ethics in British Children’s Literature: Unexamined Life, Perspectives on Children’s Literature. London: Bloomsbury. Singer, Peter. 2009. Animal Liberation. 1975. Updated ed. New York: Harper Perennial. Stuart, Tristram. 2006. The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times. New  York: W.  W. Norton & Company. Wells, H.G. 2017. The Island of Doctor Moreau. 1896. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, Paul S. 2005. The Experimental Animal in Victorian Britain. In Thinking: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, ed. Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, 59–81. New York: Columbia University Press. Woodward, Natalie. 2019. Eternal Mirroring: Charles Patterson’s Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. Journal of Animal Ethics 9 (2): 158–169. Yamamoto, Dorothy. 1998. Aquinas and Animals: Patrolling the Boundary? In Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto, 80–89. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

5 St. Francis Visits Rabbit Hill: Visions of Coexistence

One of the first books I remember being hooked by was The Animals of Farthing Wood, by Colin Dann. I was an animal-loving child, and the rather sweet-sounding book must have seemed a perfect fit to my mother. It was—but I had a love/hate relationship with it. Animals died! Humans were cruel, or just unaware, which was almost worse. I was fascinated and horrified at the same time. And when one of the gorgeous fox cubs died later on in the series, I almost couldn’t believe it. Surely that wasn’t allowed? He was a main character! Absolutely gripping fiction, and a huge influence on my writing now. —Holly Webb, author

We live peacefully with at least some animals. We bond with them, indulge them, and mourn them when they pass. Our relationships with companion animals reveal a deep capacity to love across species

Personal correspondence. Holly Webb is the author of more than a hundred children’s books, many of which promote kindness toward vulnerable animals. Recent volumes in her Pet Rescue Adventures series include The Abandoned Puppy, illustrated by Sophy Williams (Wilton: Tiger Tales, 2018), and The Rescued Kitten, illustrated by Sophy Williams (Wilton: Tiger Tales, 2019). © The Author(s) 2020 M. J. Gilmour, Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare, The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9_5

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boundaries. I passed through the railway station in Garsdale, North Yorkshire not long ago and the statue of a border collie named Ruswarp intrigued me. The memorial commemorates Ruswarp’s devotion to his human companion who died while the two walked together in Llandrindod Wells, Powys (Wales) in 1990. Ruswarp stayed by the body of his friend for eleven weeks in difficult conditions until someone finally found them. The elderly dog died soon after. It is a remarkable instance of cross-species love and loyalty. Or consider Jane Goodall’s account of the incredible commitment of a rescue dog in the aftermath of 9/11. She writes about the nine-year-old Belgian Malinois named Servus who, though he experienced a terrible fall and nearly suffocated in dust while helping rescue efforts at Ground Zero, was unwilling to leave the scene: “To his [handler, Chris Christiensen’s] amazement, Servus refused to get into the car. ‘He just kept looking at me,’ said Chris. They ended up working seven more hours that day.”1 There is no end to such tales of love and loyalty, both real and imagined. From the biblical Tobit’s canine travelling companion, through European funerary art, and into countless contemporary books and films, we find all manner of tales about mutually caring relationships between people and their nonhuman friends.2 There are just as many about forms of coerced detainment of animals, both free-roaming and domestic. Both kinds of stories—those depicting positive interactions with other species, and those relating forms of harsh confinement—have something to teach about the coexistence of humans and animals.

1  Jane Goodall, “Introduction,” in Jane Goodall and Marc Bekoff, The Ten Trusts: What We Must Do to Care for the Animals We Love (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), xiii. 2  On Tobit’s dog, see e.g., Michael J.  Gilmour, Eden’s Other Residents: The Bible and Animals (Eugene: Cascade, 2014), 70–77. On the place of dogs in funerary art, see e.g., Laura Hobgood-­ Oster, A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), chap. 2, “Journey to the Afterlife: Best Friends Forever.”

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Doctor Dolittle Joins the Circus When Hugh Lofting has his kind-hearted hero join a travelling circus, the stories serve as a platform to sketch ways the confinement of animals ranges from cruelty to kindness. Dolittle finds himself in this unlikely situation after meeting the rare two-headed African Pushmi-Pullyu. When the Doctor saves monkeys from a deadly disease, they thank him by offering a solution to the good man’s financial troubles. The Pushmi-­ Pullyu agrees to return to England to participate in a circus as a way to raise money. Dolittle goes along with the idea but the animal’s best-­ interests are foremost in all decision-making going forward. This includes turning down a generous offer from a menagerie to purchase the rare animal once back in England. Dolittle refuses to sell because such places deprive animals of their freedom.3 He also turns down an enormous sum from a circus-owner. In this instance, Dolittle explains the only way for the Pushmi-Pullyu to perform at the circus is if the Doctor himself accompanies the animal because, “I have promised that I myself will see he is properly treated.”4 The circus owner Alexander Blossom finds the man’s unusual perspective on human-animal relations puzzling: “What do you mean [about this promise to ensure the animal is well-­ treated]?” asked the showman. “Ain’t he your property? Who did you promise?” “He’s his own property,” said the Doctor. “He came here to oblige me. It was to himself, the Pushmi-Pullyu, that I gave my promise.” “What! Are you crazy?” asked the showman.

Dolittle wins favourable terms for the Pushmi-Pullyu because Blossom recognizes the animal’s rarity, and the potential for great profit. Not only does he allow the Doctor to come along to ensure the animal’s wellbeing, 3  Hugh Lofting, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 1 (1920; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 423. On the monkeys asking the Pushmi-Pullyu to help the Doctor, see 367. 4  Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2 (1924; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 23.

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he further agrees to leave the Pushmi-Pullyu “entirely free and independent,” with the option of “a day off” whenever he chooses. He also agrees to provide him with “whatever kind of food” he wants.5 Lofting’s Dolittle rejects the concept of ownership repeatedly. He has a large household of animals with whom he shares his home, garden, and adventures and even though the term “pets” appears, it clearly means something very different in these books where the term “family” occurs just as often.6 The many birds and animals that surround him are free to come and go as they wish, are part of all decision-making processes that concern the family, and when they question the Doctor’s actions or give him advice, he listens, trusting to their wisdom. Dolittle’s rejection of the concepts of ownership (“property”) and hierarchy in human-animal relations for both free-living and dependent animals upends the usual view that animals exist to meet human needs (as companions, food, entertainment, labour, etc.). Instead, he understands his position within this interspecies community as one of service and caregiving (i.e., he is an animal doctor), which is a subversive position to assume. Animals are, after all, the usable stuff of the world in the opinion of most, as Catherine Parry writes, and their labour and body parts circulate as social, cultural, political, and economic capital: “The fundamental distinction between humans and animals here rests on the concept of property: While humans believe in and practise a right to self-ownership over their own bodies, no such assumption is made about the relationship of animals with their bodies.”7 Dolittle rejects this norm. Instead of ownership, he frames his relationship with nonhumans as one of mutual care. He is responsible to serve and protect those he lives with, and these  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 24.  E.g., Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 42, 58, 67 (“his pets”), 38 (“his family”). Cf. “family circle” (46); the “Doctor’s family” (47); “his delighted family” (191); “Dolittle household” (265). Occasionally the terms pets and family appear in close proximity, so are clearly interchangeable (e.g., 66, 75). 7  Catherine Parry, Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 162. The subversive character of Hugh Lofting’s books is also evident in Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan, where the Doctor decides to share the money earned by the circus and a bird opera with all those involved: “it is only fair … the animals who have taken so important a part in all our shows should share in the profits” (in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2 [1924; New York: Aladdin, 2019], 546). Dolittle even opens an animal bank for them. 5 6

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v­ arious nonhuman friends help support his work and household in all manner of ways. His attention to the others’ needs is a recurring idea in all the books. For instance: … the Dolittle party (Jip the dog, Dab-Dab the duck, Too-Too the owl, Gub-Gub the pig, the Pushmi-Pullyu, and the white mouse) had returned at last to the little house in Puddleby-on-the-Marsh after their long journey …. It was a large family to find food for. And the Doctor, without a penny in his pockets, had been a good deal worried over how he was going to feed it ….

It works both ways. The reclusive Pushmi-Pullyu “nearly died of embarrassment and shyness” during his first appearances at the circus but is willing to be a public spectacle specifically to help the family with its financial difficulties: “he determined to stick it out for John Dolittle’s sake.”8 Mutual care and service characterize Lofting’s vision of relationships between the species, not oppression or exploitation. But as illustrated many times over in these novels, Doctor John Dolittle does not limit his vision of care to those who are part of his immediate family. Early in Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, Blossom sends a wagon for the Pushmi-Pullyu and his friends, but immediately the Doctor expresses concern about the horse named Beppo who pulls it. Poor Beppo is old and weary, and he tells the Doctor he is tired of circus life. This worries Dolittle who decides to tell the ringmaster Blossom “it was high time Beppo should be pensioned off and allowed to live in peace.”9 Though Beppo says he is able to pull the wagon, Dolittle and his friend Matthew  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 8, 37.  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 28. Dolittle eventually arranges Beppo’s retirement (218) but does not stop there. He purchases a beautiful pasture and calls it The Retired Cab and Wagon Horses’ Association, and then buys all the old horses he meets and sends them there to rest (246–51). On this refuge, see too Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle’s Puddleby Adventures, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 3 (1952; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 382 (cruelty) with, 374, 376, 394–95 (the Association). Lofting’s story anticipates the (farm) animal sanctuary movement by nearly a century. He plans to do something similar for the homeless, half-starved mongrels of London in Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan, 588: “a home for crossbred dogs similar to the rest farm for retired cab and wagon horses.” That plan comes to fruition in Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo (in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 3 [1925; New York: Aladdin, 2019], 33, cf. 212). See too Doctor Dolittle’s Puddleby Adventures, 259, 551. 8 9

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Mugg offer a push to get it started and choose to walk beside it so as not to add extra weight to the old horse’s load.10 This concern for those not part of his immediate circle continues when he tours Blossom’s circus for the first time. The poor living conditions of the circus animals troubles him, and he whispers through the cage bars (in their languages) his intention “to do something” to help them. His concern is again evident when leaving the “evil-smelling menagerie.” As the Doctor passes down the line of cages, he hangs his head, “frowning unhappily.”11 The obligation to care extends to all, not just those closest to us. Activism inevitably follows whenever Dolittle encounters such disregard for others. He finds circus life distasteful for many reasons, including the dishonesty of games rigged against those playing them, but what worries him most “was the condition of the animals.” Their life, he felt, was in most cases an unhappy one. At the end of his first day with the circus, after the crowds had gone home and all was quiet in the enclosure, he had gone back into the menagerie and talked to the animals there. They nearly all had complaints to make: their cages were not kept properly clean; they did not get enough exercise or room enough; with some the food served was not the kind they liked.12

After hearing this litany of irresponsible behavior by the circus animal keepers, Dolittle is “indignant” and pushes for change. There are many examples. For one, when he discovers the snake-handler Fatima uses chloroform on hot days when the snakes are particularly lively, something the snakes detest because it gives them headaches, “this senseless cruelty threw him into a boiling rage” and he immediately complains to Blossom the circus owner. In the end, he buys the snakes from Fatima to secure their liberation from her cruel use of chloroform.13 Though initially his efforts meet with resistance, in time the conditions for all the animals  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 29.  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 31, 32. Under Dolittle’s direction, there are many improvements to the menagerie (see e.g., 217–18). 12  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 38, 39. 13  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 194, 205–06. Dab-Dab the duck, the family’s housekeeper, is rather annoyed Dolittle spends all their money securing the snakes’ freedom, and because he lets them live in the flour bin until they can get a proper bed (206). 10 11

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improve owing to his interventions. Lofting thus models for readers a form of advocacy and protection rooted in a non-dominative respect for other species, and a vision of peaceful coexistence between humans and nonhumans. Lofting differs from other writers who dismiss altogether the form of human-animal community represented by circuses and zoos. But “‘Circuses don’t have to be bad,’” Matthew Mugg says to Dolittle, “‘You could run one that would be a new kind; clean, honest, special—one that everybody in the world would come to see.’”14 At first, Dolittle balks at the idea and plans to leave. He finds it too troubling to see so many unhappy animals he is unable to help. But his new friend Beppo the horse asks him not to give up, using terms similar to those Mugg uses: “we know that if you stay, before long you will be running the whole show the way it should be run…. Only stay. And mark my words, the day will come when the new circus, ‘The Dolittle Circus,’ will be the greatest show on earth.”15 Use of the term “new” by both Matthew and Beppo is simultaneously a critique of circuses and menageries as they are, and an invitation—to Dolittle and to readers—to reimagine the concepts altogether. Is it possible for a confined animal to have a happy existence? Swizzle the performing dog speaks to the Doctor of a “reformed show,” a different kind of circus in which animal wellbeing is front and centre.16 Applegate’s Ivan, Lever’s Cheeta, Kotzwinkle’s hyena and others discussed elsewhere remain skeptical but Lofting’s Beppo and his animal friends at the Blossom Circus trust Dolittle to create something new that has their best interests in mind. Hugh Lofting’s despair resulting from cruelty is evident in all his novels—bullfighting, the confinement of large game animals, hunting, and much besides are regular targets of his ire—but there is an optimism in these books not always found in welfare-oriented writing. A better world is possible if the human friends of animals make it happen. The Dolittle novels are, in that sense, aspirational, envisioning something better for all.

 Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 40. Italics original.  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 41. 16  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 192. See too 204–05. 14 15

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Sophie’s story again scrutinizes the confinement of free-living animals, and Dolittle’s views take a decidedly legal turn. She is an Alaskan seal made to live and perform in a tank a mere twelve feet across, and making matters worse, she is deeply concerned about her husband Slushy. She bursts into tears of joy the first time she meets Dolittle because he alone of all people might be able to help. Her capture separated Sophie and Slushy, who is still in the Bering Strait, and he is now ill with grief for having lost her. She must escape to save him because he no longer eats, and to save the herd that depends on Slushy’s leadership.17 The situation upsets Dolittle. The Pushmi-Pullyu is in the circus of his own accord, he says to his friends, but Sophie is here against her will, and this forced separation is destructive not only to her and her husband: “It is a perfect scandal that hunters can go up to the Arctic and capture any animals they like, breaking up families and upsetting herd government and community life in this way—a crying shame!”18 He is duty-bound to orchestrate their reunion. Here again we see one of Dolittle’s rare flashes of anger, which occur when he learns of such injustices. Abuse of animals is almost the only thing that triggers it. As seen above with reference to the Pushmi-Pullyu, Dolittle rejects the idea of animals as property. The seal’s ‘owner’ Higgins is unlikely to sell her to him, so he decides escape is her best chance, and he raises a legal argument (however dubious in the eyes of the court) to justify his plan: “‘That seal doesn’t belong to those men [Higgins, and the ringmaster Blossom] anyhow. She’s a free citizen of the Arctic Circle. And if she wants to go back there, back she shall go. Sophie must escape”; “That old sour-faced Higgins ain’t got no right to that seal. She’s a free creature of the seas.” When reminded arrest for theft is a possibility, he is undeterred: “‘Let them arrest me—if they catch me. If the case is taken to the courts, at least I’ll get a chance to say a word for the rights of wild animals.” In the end, the authorities do arrest Dolittle. Having disguised Sophie in a lady’s bonnet and cloak to avoid detection, witnesses assume he kills a woman when he throws the seal over a cliff and into the ocean. Fortunately, Dolittle’s long-time acquaintance Sir William Peabody is Justice of the  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 48, 49, 50–51.  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 57.

17 18

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Peace and he drops the murder charge after learning what actually occurred.19 The issue of holding animals captive for entertainment continues in the near context and with a striking choice of terms: “They’ve no right to keep Sophie in this slavery.”20 Lofting sets the Dolittle stories in the first half of the nineteenth century, which is to say in recent memory of abolition efforts in England and during those ongoing in the United States where Lofting lived for much of his life. It seems plausible he hints here at a comparison between the reprehensible enslavement of human beings with the illegal (in his view) capture and confinement of animals. The emancipation by any means of wrongly enslaved animals like Sophie is in the Doctor’s view justified. Respect for moral law supersedes all others. When Sir William Peabody visits Dolittle’s jail cell, almost the first thing the Doctor says to the Justice of the Peace concerns a heated argument they had years before regarding fox hunting. Lofting weaves storylines about circuses and fox hunting because they are both frivolous entertainments resulting in destructive outcomes for free-living animals. One might expect a wrongly accused man facing murder charges to have other things on his mind but the Doctor is singular in his intention to protect and defend, and after discovering Peabody still indulges in the hunt, he resumes the argument started fifteen years before “with great earnestness”: “‘You can say what you like, but the fox is not given a square deal. One fox against dozens of dogs! Besides, why should he be hunted? A fox has his rights, the same as you and I have. It’s absurd: a lot of grown men on horses, with packs of hounds roaring across the countryside after one poor little wild animal.” As he does with reference to Sophie and other circus attractions, he uses a legal argument (“rights”) to make the case but Peabody is deaf to it. As the Doctor explains to the vixen Nightshade later, “‘I’ve been trying to get [Peabody] to give up fox hunting for years.’”21 After this renewal of their argument, Peabody immediately goes on another hunt but the now-released Dolittle interrupts it  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 58, 59. On Peabody’s judgment, see 157–61.  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 64. Later we read Dolittle liberates the circus’s snakes “from a life of slavery” (207). 21  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 157, 174. 19 20

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when he hides Nightshade and her cubs in his pockets, and tells the tracking dogs to go another way.22 His war against fox hunting rages on, but at least on this occasion, the Doctor wins the battle. The Doctor lives in the town of Puddleby and attached to his garden is a zoo. But it is a zoo like no other. Here the doors of the animals’ shelters lock from the inside, not the outside—sometimes the residents like to get away from the other animals, or from people who visit—and every animal living here “stays here because he likes it, not because he is forced to.”23 The outer gate leading into the zoo has a secret latch known only to residents, again securing their privacy.24 There is another important difference. When Dolittle’s young friend Stubbins asks if there are lions and tigers, the good man’s mood changes. There are no “Big Hunters,” he explains. They think only of the countries lost to them where they enjoyed great open spaces, sunrises, breezes, the green shade of the vines, hunting in the ways their mothers taught them, and big-starred nights. As he speaks of this, Stubbins notices the usually reserved, quiet man “growing all red and angry.” He concludes his answer to the boy’s question with what amounts to a sharp critique of zoos that keep large animals and clearly operate under policies very different than his own: “What, I ask you, are they given in exchange for these [things they left in their home countries]? Why, a bare cage with iron bars; an ugly piece of dead meat thrust in their cage once a day; and a crowd of fools to come and stare at them with open mouths! No, Stubbins. Lions and tigers, the Big Hunters, should never, never be seen in zoos.”25 Lofting returns to this theme again in Doctor Dolittle’s Circus. With reference to the diverse collection of creatures kept by the Blossom’s Circus spectacle, Dolittle advocates for their “humanitarian treatment” and “welfare,” and says about their lion and leopard specifically, “‘the big  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 160–61, 169–71.  Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 1 (1922; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 57. On the locks, see too Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, 35–36 (where the good man insists the zoo ought to be the animals’ home, not their prison [35], and Doctor Dolittle’s Puddleby Adventures, 492–93). 24  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, 49. 25  Lofting, Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 57–58. Italics original. He picks up this theme again in Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, 33. 22 23

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hunting animals should never be kept in confinement.’”26 When later he is in charge of the circus, the lion and leopard tell the Doctor they are “weary of confinement” and long “to get out of their narrow cages and stretch their legs in freedom.” He is understanding, explaining “‘I don’t approve of keeping you shut up at all,’” and promises to return them to Africa once he has enough money to do so. In the meantime, he allows them a half hour walk a day away from the circus on the condition they do no harm to any people, a kindness that costs Dolittle a night in jail.27 Dolittle is true to his word, and once he has the resources, sends the circus’s leopard, lion, and elephant back to Africa, and comfortably too, in a lavishly outfitted ship.28 Dolittle has similar views about wild birds. Cages are no place for those born free, and he goes to great lengths to liberate some “unfortunates … pining for their native fields and woods” by breaking into a pet store to set them loose.29 The moral questions attached to zoos are many and often complex, with zoos often listing the protection of needy individuals (e.g., orphaned wildlife), species preservation through breeding programs, and educational benefits among the contributions they make. Critics insist the deprivation of animals’ natural habitats and behaviors is indefensible. Public outrage sometimes attaches to specific animals in poor conditions, as was the case with Arturo the polar bear—certainly to be numbered among Dolittle’s “Big Hunters”—whose failing physical and mental health, while living in the warm conditions at a zoo in Mendoza, Argentina, was widely publicized by news outlets and social media until his death in 2016 at the age of 30. Some find attempts to justify zoos on educational grounds problematic as well: “Undoubtedly, parents think zoos develop interest in nature and respect for animals. These are  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 217, 218, 304.  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, 307–13. Bagheera the panther in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is another big hunter who understands the indignity and misery of confinement. He was born in the cages of the King’s Palace at Oodeypore, and always carried the mark of the collar on his throat. In time, he decided he was “no man’s plaything,” and breaking the “the silly lock” made his way to the jungle (1894; London: Arcturus, 2017), 25–26. 28  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan, chap. 9. See too Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2 (1924; 1950; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 768. 29  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan, 434. For the full escapade of the break-and-enter rescue operation, see 428–38.

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commendable goals but are unlikely to be met by visiting zoos, where children see animals in unnatural surroundings, often forced to perform tricks for food. In such circumstances, animals become anthropomorphized clowns, and children learn it is acceptable, even praiseworthy, to imprison them.”30 David Attenborough offers an alternative perspective. “These days zoos don’t send out animal collectors on quests to bring ’em back alive. And quite right too,” he reflects. “The natural world is under more than enough pressure as it is, without being robbed of its most beautiful, charismatic and rarest inhabitants.” But he still maintains there is value in familiarizing visitors with nature’s wonders and that seeing animals in zoos helps explain the importance and complexities of conservation efforts.31

Coerced Coexistence In sharp contrast with such utopian visions of voluntary, peaceful cohabitation as those found in the Lofting books are stories presenting hellish scenes of the unwanted confinement of animals. For these unfortunates, forced proximity with people is a kind of torture like that experienced by the captured great hunters that so worry Dolittle. I consider two examples—a short story by Leigh Buchanan Beinen, and a parody Hollywood memoir by John Lever—that tease out reasons why captivity brutalizes some free-roaming animals.

Leigh Buchanan Bienen’s Parrot Like Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan and Kotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat, Leigh Buchanan Bienen’s short story “My Life as a West African Gray Parrot” (1981) offers a first-person animal narrative problematizing the confinement of free-living animals. This bird is neglected and unloved, becoming an unwanted burden to her owners once the  John Sorenson, Animal Rights (Halifax: Fernwood, 2010), 113. Full discussion, 113–17.  David Attenborough, Adventures of a Young Naturalist: The Zoo Quest Expeditions (New York: Quercus, 2018), vii. 30 31

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novelty of a mimicking parrot wears off. She now spends her time locked in a cage, usually out of sight. The story opens in darkness, with a cloth thrown over the cage to shut the bird up, as one of the owners puts it. Bienen repeats the word “dark” five times in the opening paragraph. The lady of the house also knocks an aluminum pan against the porcelain sink every now and again, just because, the parrot knows, it causes the bird pain. This narrator is sadly aware of her fate: “I shall never fly again.”32 Unlike most stories about companion animals, the bird’s mistress and master (as she calls them) seem to distance themselves from the bird’s unique individuality. Use of the name Polly on just one occasion, when the pet owners’ enthusiasm was new, appears to be merely a generic, cliché label, rather than a meaningful moniker. In conversations between them, they most often refer to her as “it.” The woman does not even recognize the bird’s gender: “The refusal to acknowledge my sexual identity is a special humiliation. I laid an egg to announce my essentially female nature. Now that she hates and fears me, my mistress always refers to me in the impersonal third person.”33 The most damaging consequence of neglect results from leaving the cage door open. A rat creeps into the parrot’s home and attacks the bird, severely injuring her. In addition to the physical wounds sustained, she notes “the shock to my spirit had been profound.” Significantly, immediately before describing the attack, the parrot reflects on memories of life in the wild and the freedom known before her capture and confinement in pet store and home cages. The trigger is music, which she hears through the closed door of the closet where her cage sits: “The music transported me back to the high trees of the rain forest where parrots flew from limb to limb high above the shrieking of monkeys, never leaving the shadowed protection of branches.”34 Immediately following this happy memory, the rat attacks, nearly killing her, creating a sharp juxtaposition between her confinement, loneliness, and danger, and the remembered freedom, companionship, and safety of life in the wild.  Leigh Buchanan Bienen, “My Life as a West African Gray Parrot,” in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 73. 33  Bienen, “My Life as a West African Gray Parrot,” 78. 34  Bienen, “My Life as a West African Gray Parrot,” 83, 82. 32

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The bird’s injuries are so severe the mistress takes her to a veterinarian associated with a nearby zoo and here, as in The One and Only Ivan, there is reluctance to depict zoos as a perfect place for wildlife, despite recognition it is better than some other options. Here ‘Polly’ is in the care of a kind veterinarian, who speaks “softly” to her, and she credits her slow recovery to his “gentle educated fingers.” Her recuperation includes time in a green-domed aviary at the zoo where she lives with other tropical birds, and here Bienen creates a degree of discomfort for readers. Whereas they are pleased the parrot is here, she is far more cautious. The domed enclosure “imitated the wild” and encourages birds’ “instincts to fly, to be free,” and yet the parrot fears her instinctive longing for freedom and flight. To be captured young, moved from cage to cage, and have the wild African trees a remote memory requires a bird to put up defenses. The zoo’s imitation is an illusion, and the bird hesitates before giving in to the deception. In spite of my condition, I myself was overcome with a memory and desire for flight when I entered the dome, even though it had been years since I had been let out of my cage. The memory of flying overcame me with an exhilarating rush of recognition. To fly, to be free, to soar on a current of wind, seductive memories took over before I was able to re-establish the distance I had learned to impose at great cost to my spirit.35

She closes this reflection by observing the sunlight filtered in through the glass dome of the aviary, filtered through “imported foliage,” which is so different than the dark chill of the room where she spends most her time and to which she soon returns. It is a better setting but still a far cry from her natural habitat. Zoos are an improvement in some cases, but always less than real freedom. She is again in the dark as the story closes, now likening the chill in her cage to a “tombstone,” expecting soon to be “beyond the need to communicate,” and reflecting on her “next life.”36 Confinement, in a home and a zoo, is a lingering death for this parrot. By putting the story in her mouth, Bienen problematizes captivity and  Bienen, “My Life as a West African Gray Parrot,” 85.  Bienen, “My Life as a West African Gray Parrot,” 86.

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challenges casual attitudes toward animal spectacles (zoos, aviaries) and pet keeping, and so posits they are not morally neutral.

John Lever’s Chimpanzee Covert activism lurks in a lot of animal fiction. The use of art to sway opinion is nothing new, of course, and is effective because it often translates difficult subjects into pleasing forms. A skilled painter or poet wins an audience through beauty and provocation, and so fashions an occasion for argument. I say covert because artists do not always announce their agenda explicitly, or in such a way everyone recognizes it. John Lever’s parody Hollywood tell-all is a striking example of this strategy. Cheeta, the simian hero of the MGM and RKO/Lesser Tarzan movie franchise of the 1930s and 40s, buries the lead in his Hollywood memoir.37 The book references animal welfare efforts but its narrator subtly and playful distances himself from them. The humor masks overt activism, and yet puts before readers not easily swayed by sentimentalism or talk of animal rights the troubling subject of animal abuse in the entertainment and research industries. As mentioned before, Cheeta views his capture in Africa in the early 1930s and transport to an American studio as a liberation. Before that happens, alpha males and predators terrify the baby chimpanzee and threaten his survival. Though often brutal in their ‘rehabilitation’ and training methods, Cheeta sees humans as saviors, his capture and enormous success in the entertainment world as a gift. The very notion of human cruelty to animals strikes him as absurd. When commenting on the 1941 film Tarzan’s Secret Treasure, he grumbles how a scene with a boy throwing rocks at a leopard and hyena is unrealistic because “What kind of human was deliberately cruel to innocent animals? You’re just not like  Cheeta needs to clarify his gender. Though actually male, the character Cheeta in the Tarzan films is female. He complains this talent to play the part so convincingly always went unnoticed during award season: “I was (and I think I never got the credit for this when the Academy Award nominations rolled obliviously around each year) female [in the dream that is a film]” (James Lever, Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood [New York: HarperCollins, 2009], 92; cf. 285, 297–300). He also explains his real name is Jiggs, though few, other than his keepers, know him by that name (105).

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that.”38 The ironic distancing from welfare efforts appears in recurring references to Dr. Jane Goodall, who Cheeta always describes in flattering terms: “Dr. Jane Goodall, the charming and still attractive (though frequently wrongheaded) English naturalist.” Cheeta claims his memoir is an attempt to “assist No Reel Apes” and show respect for “the eminent and attractive Dr. Goodall” but he is ambivalent about animal abuse in the entertainment industry, even though he is a victim of it.39 The No Reel Apes campaign opposes “cruelties perpetrated on chimpanzees and other animals in the name of screen entertainment.”40 The copyright page for Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood solicits donations to “the C.H.E.E.T.A.  Primate Sanctuary,” even providing the organization’s website.41 Yet this welfare campaign stands in some tension with Cheeta’s repeated disregard for the issue. He suffers often, sometimes in the form of a beating from what he calls “the ugly stick”42 but invariably dismisses these incidents as needed training or the result of a misunderstanding or insignificant. He also justifies pain endured as necessary for his craft: “That’s the real magic of movies: their flesh and blood. Does Buzz Lightyear ever suffer for his art? No, and that’s why he’s no good.” You want to get rid of the pain the movie studios inflict on their animals, he imagines saying to Dr. Goodall, “But I don’t care about the pain, I care about the art. Anyway, don’t forget: www.noreelapes.something!”43 But we eventually discover Cheeta’s nonchalance toward cruelty is deeply ironic. “Oh yes, dear readers, I was just kidding before about the Project [to clear the earth of wild animals and get them into safe cages] and rehab and all that crap,” he confesses in the closing pages, admitting  Lever, Me Cheeta, 208.  Lever, Me Cheeta, xv. Cf. 285. 40  Lever, Me Cheeta, xv. He also wants “to make damn sure that the Internet Movie Database gets its facts right once and for all” (xv). 41  Other books also make use of paratextual material to promote welfare organizations (dedications, unnumbered back pages, etc.). I include examples elsewhere. 42  Lever, Me Cheeta, 74, 75, 76, 103. On one occasion, Gately the trainer “strode up and brought the ugly-stick down on my back and shoulders more times than seemed strictly commensurate [for a minor outburst]” (162–63). On the use of violence in training animals, see esp. 82–85. 43  Lever, Me Cheeta, 84, 139. 38 39

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he is a cheeky monkey. “I do know you’re terrible killers.” His indictment of humanity is withering but hopeful: Dearest, gentlest, sweetest, smartest, tallest, kindest, funniest, maddest, most thoughtful, most beautiful, most sorrowing, most suffering humans: who are you really? You are the omnicidal. You kill everything—everyone knows it. And even if you think of yourselves as wretched blood-soaked corpse-piling criminals, eye-deep in sin and despised by God for the terrible deeds you have done, I believe in you. Because of him.44

He refers in those last, touching lines to Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller, Cheeta’s long-time friend, and one of the few humans he trusts and loves. The race as a whole is reckless and brutal to animals, though the kindness of a few reveals a remarkable potential for compassion. When Cheeta imagines winning an honorary Academy Award, the first ever given to a nonhuman animal, the speech he rehearses takes seriously the horrors endured by animals in the entertainment industry. He imagines telling the global audience on live television he accepts the award on behalf of all animals, including the two hundred horses killed during the making of the 1936 Errol Flynn film The Charge of the Light Brigade, the elephant whose death by electrocution Thomas Edison filmed in 1903, the swan drowned during the making of the 1948 film Portrait of Jennie, and for “‘every other animal that has ever suffered for its cinematic art.’”45 It takes time but in the last pages of his memoir, Cheeta acknowledges the import of animal suffering, paralleling an ideal reader gradually coming to terms with it. The most disturbing episode in the book is Cheeta’s brief time in a highly-infectious-diseases research facility. He is there as the result of a mix-up, after movers confuse him with another chimpanzee. Scanning the cages filled with all manner of sick and injured animals, he thinks of it as a place of death. The poor caged creatures he sees “were already dead, because nobody was getting out of here alive.” His trainer rescues him but as he does throughout the book, he simultaneously describes abuse while  Lever, Me Cheeta, 299, 300–01. Italics original.  Lever, Me Cheeta, 298. On the death of the horses, see too 133, 186, 199, and on the electrocution of the elephant, 86. The elephant’s name was Topsy.

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turning the story back to the Hollywood dream factory and his own successes: … the lab was … the underside to the Glamour Capital of the World. I’d worked out pretty quickly what it was. It was where you would end up if you couldn’t make it in pictures. And even if you made it, any animal who’s ever seen the once-popular Edison short of an elephant being electrocuted to death in Coney Island will recognize just how brief and hollow the rewards of fame can be! And that’s Hollywood for you: a heartbreaking town.46

Cheeta fears failure in show business because the lab awaits animals whose star power fades. The research centre “would always be happy to take me in, along with all the rest of Hollywood’s rejected,” he muses. He drolly imagines telling others, “‘Oh yeah, I used to be a star. Used to be very close with Johnny Weissmuller. But it’s more rewarding working in medicine.’”47 Lever’s Cheeta both experiences and witnesses abuse. He reports these incidents repeatedly but does not dwell on them, quickly returning again to the gossip and humor that is the heart of the book. But those ‘underside’ stories recur frequently, as do the mentions of the No Reel Apes campaign and its website.48 The contentious issue of animal abuse is there but understated, and this is arguably an effective trojan-horse strategy. While listening to the humorous, heavy-smoking, heavy-drinking, foul-­ mouthed but lovable Cheeta spill dirt on Hollywood elites, we get an education on the abuses endured by animals in the film industry, especially in its early decades. Does it matter, asks Catherine Parry, that most of the “already modest factual veracity” behind Me Cheeta disappeared? She asks this interesting question after describing how the supposed factual framework of the

 Lever, Me Cheeta, 80, 86.  Lever, Me Cheeta, 163; cf. 105, 209, 253. 48  Regarding the website, see Lever, Me Cheeta, 85, 98, 139. The book also mentions the C.H.E.E.T.A Primate Sanctuary, Inc. and its website (http://cheetathechimp.org), and there is a request for donations on the dedication page. 46 47

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story proved to be erroneous after its publication.49 As it turns out, “the chimpanzee now living at the C.H.E.E.T.A. sanctuary—the Cheeta upon whom Me Cheeta is based—was probably born in the 1960s. Thus, he is not the oldest chimpanzee in captivity and could not have appeared as Cheetah [as it is sometimes spelled] the chimpanzee in 1934.” In her opinion, the recent discovery of embellishments in the skeletal outline of the ‘real’ Cheeta’s story is problematic, ultimately undermining the ethical dimensions of the story: Cheeta’s newly fictional past [i.e., the discovery of factual errors and embellishments in accounts of the real Tarzan chimpanzee’s history] diminishes the power of Me Cheeta as a critique of the ways humans treat other animals, for its catalogue of abuses loses the forcefulness of traceable, blameable ‘fact’ when it loses the authority of historical connection.50

I wonder. I confess I’m of two minds on this point. On first reading, I found the Hollywood parody deeply moving quite apart from any debates about the veracity of the story. The critique of human cruelties described struck me as important educationally as an insight into the experiences of animals in filmmaking and laboratory science quite apart from the historicity of the actual animal(s, likely plural,) who appeared in the Weismuller films. To speak only of my own reading experience, the ethical message of the book did not rely on claims about its narrator, of whether the animal at the C.H.E.E.T.A. was actually Cheetah of Tarzan fame. Of course, it’s fun to think they are one and the same, but ultimately it does not matter. I encountered the Cheeta of the book and enjoyed meeting him and learning from him in that imaginative space. Engagement with this character is not only an education. An affection for this (non)fictional chimpanzee also generates empathy for ‘real’ animals experiencing what he endures. I find myself wondering about the actual horses in the entertainment business who suffer and die like those in the Errol Flynn film to which ‘Cheeta’ refers, and the actual animals in research laboratories like the one he sees. I also find myself envisioning a kinder world where  Parry, Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction, 180. See her full discussion of this book, pp. 177–91. 50  Parry, Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction, 180, 181. 49

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unwanted animals find themselves in caring sanctuaries like the C.H.E.E.T.A. rather than sacrificed for human self-interest and vanity, like Edison’s elephant. Fiction often leads us to ethical concerns needing our attention. With respect to welfare issues, maybe it does not matter whether ‘Cheeta’ is actually Johnny Weismuller’s sidekick or a construct, a pure fiction.

Imagining Peaceful Coexistence “We watch in the evenings the two kinds of animals, one wild, the other domesticated, feeding side by side,” writes Canadian author Timothy Findley in a memoir, “with a raccoon matron taking a kibble break while the younger cats entertain her kits. At such moments, it is hard not to think of this place as a kind of paradise. Or, at least, a Peaceable Kingdom.”51 Ridicule of such visions of inclusion and peaceful coexistence is fairly routine. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), a novel about colonial English rule in the subcontinent, explores the complexities of English-Indian interactions, intolerances, and misunderstandings, and considers whether or not genuine friendships and trust between colonizer and colonized, east and west, is possible. Within this fascinating story, a comic conversation explores the limits of Christian inclusivity: … old Mr Graysford and young Mr Sorley, the devoted missionaries who lived out beyond the slaughterhouses …. In our Father’s house are many mansions, they taught, and there alone will the incompatible multitudes of mankind be welcomed and soothed. Not one shall be turned away by the servants on that veranda, be he black or white, not one shall be kept standing who approaches with a loving heart. And why should the divine hospitality cease here? Consider, with all reverence, the monkeys. May there not be a mansion for the monkeys also? Old Mr Graysford said No, but young Mr Sorley, who was advanced, said Yes; he saw no reason why monkeys should not have their collateral share of bliss, and he had sympathetic discussions about them with his Hindu friends. And the jackals? Jackals were 51  Timothy Findley, From Stone Orchard: A Collection of Memories (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 54.

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indeed less to Mr Sorley’s mind, but he admitted that the mercy of God, being infinite, may well embrace all mammals. And the wasps? He became uneasy during the descent to wasps, and was apt to change the conversation. And oranges, cactuses, crystals and mud? And the bacteria inside Mr Sorley? No, no, this is going too far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.52

Are human-centred, hierarchal interpretations of the world—theological, as in the scene above, or otherwise—the only options available to us? Is it possible to challenge ways of thinking and being that deny value to animals beyond what they contribute to human flourishing? Animal literature is able to disrupt entrenched assumptions by imagining humans and other species not as competitors but as community. In the remainder of this chapter, we consider two stories that envision peaceful coexistence among people and other animals.

E. B. White’s Swans We begin with a return to E. B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan, which includes a spectrum of opinions about zoos. Louis travels to Philadelphia at the invitation of a nightclub owner who offers the trumpet-playing swan a paying gig. Louis needs the money to pay off his father’s debts and he decides to live on a lake in the Philadelphia Zoo even though it is risky. The Zoo clips the wings of birds to prevent them flying away so the club owner makes an arrangement with “the Man in Charge of Birds.” The Zoo’s management allows Louis to remain unmolested provided he plays his horn for the Zoo’s guests every Sunday.53 The arrangement satisfies all concerned but questions about the ethics of zoos soon arise. A female swan named Serena arrives unexpectedly when a terrible storm blows her off course, and the two birds soon fall in love. Serena is a rare trumpeter swan and the Zoo does not want to lose her, so the issue of wing clipping is again a worry because Louis wants to return to the  E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, Penguin Classics (1924; London: Penguin, 2005), 34.  E. B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan, illustrated by Edward Frascino (New York: Scholastic, 1970), 145–46.

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wild with Serena after earning enough money to pay off the family debts. When Zoo employees sneak up on her with surgical tools and a net, Louis attacks them, saving Serena’s ability to fly at least temporarily. He then speaks to the “Head Man” and the two explain their positions. That descriptor (“Head Man”) is suggestive, emphasizing the dominative nature of human-animal relations that zoos embody. The Head Man explains he has a “duty to the people of Philadelphia,” a “responsibility to the public” to keep the rare female swan on site. Animals are mere commodities in this context: “‘Serena now belongs to the Zoo. She is the property of the people of Philadelphia. She came here because of an act of God.’”54 Since this assertion of human over animal rights comes near the end of the book, and after readers enjoy Louis’s many adventures as an independent swan, they likely find his arrogance and presumption repellent. The Head Man does respect Louis, however, and he attempts to soften his language by approaching the subject a different way. He offers him a long list of what he considers the benefits of both birds staying where they are: safety from foxes, otters, coyotes; an assured source of food; no fear of being shot; no fear of lead poisoning from shotgun pellets found on the bottom of lakes and ponds; a long life of “perfect ease and comfort” for the couple’s cygnets. He concludes by asking what more could a young cob possibly want? but Louis’s rejoinder is succinct and decisive: “‘Freedom … Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.’” Louis’s human friend Sam Beaver reinforces this when speaking to the Head Man: “‘Louis would pine away in captivity. He would die …. He needs wild places—little ponds, swamps, cattails, Red-winged Blackbirds in the spring, the chorus of the frogs, the cry of the loon at night.’”55 E. B. White’s story is quite nuanced on the moral ambiguities of zoos and ultimately maps a kind of middle ground. Credit for this goes to the boy Sam who understands animals and consistently does all he can to protect Louis and his family:

 White, Trumpet of the Swan, 168.  White, Trumpet of the Swan, 169–70, 170, 176.

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“Listen, Louis,” he said. “How’s this for an idea? You and Serena intend to raise a family every year, don’t you?” “Certainly,” replies Louis on his slate [because he communicates with people by writing]. “O.K.,” said Sam. “In every family of cygnets, there is always one that needs special care and protection. Bird Lake [in the Philadelphia Zoo] would be a perfect place for this one little swan that needs extra security. This is a beautiful lake, Louis. This is a great zoo.”

All agree to this and for years to come, when the Zoo needs a trumpeter swan for its waterfowl collection, Louis brings one of his own as promised.56 Sam Beaver helps redeem the Philadelphia Zoo in the opinion of readers. Visiting Louis there proves to be the “turning point in his life” and he decides to “work in a zoo” when he grows up.57 White presents Sam’s decision as a positive step. The adults he meets admire his understanding of nature and his kindness toward all living things. Sam also defends the widespread claim about zoos’ educational contributions. As he puts it in a poem, “Of all the places on land and sea / Philadelphia’s zoo is the place for me. / …. The entire aim of a well-kept zoo / Is to bring the animal world to You.”58 White’s swan story is ambivalent on the issue, and also open to criticism. Human dominance in zoos is intolerable for Louis and Serena, and the powerful administrator (“the Head Man”) agrees the best place for them is the wilderness. At the same time, the good Sam Beaver eventually works at the Philadelphia Zoo, signalling it is morally acceptable to hold some animals in captivity for human benefit. Who is exempt from confinement? The completely unnatural, anthropomorphized swan Louis gains his freedom precisely because he is more human than bird, able to communicate with people in their language, in ways the other nonhuman characters (including Serena and Louis’s father and mother) cannot. Sam’s rationale for zoos, which rests largely on their educational benefits and entertainment value is therefore suspect. The critique offered by Kotzwinkle in Doctor Rat, which frames zoos as sites of the prolonged  White, Trumpet of the Swan, 172–73, 204.  White, Trumpet of the Swan, 174, 204–05. 58  White, Trumpet of the Swan, 182. 56 57

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torture of freedom-loving birds and animals, contrasts sharply with White’s story. At the same time, White’s depiction of Louis’s longing for freedom, and Sam’s recognition captivity would kill him, acknowledges confinement of wildlife is not morally neutral. Zoos are, of course, human-constructed places. They are artificial and designed to serve people’s interests. But not all accounts of proximity between humans and the natural world occur in such human-ordered locales, and stories depicting movement away from the ‘civilized’ and toward the ‘wild’ represent a different kind of critique of dominative behavior. Children in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), discussed further in Chap. 6, find physical and emotional wellbeing and a sense of community not in the expected places. They move away from the controlled, orderly, indoor, and adult world of a mansion into the (initially) wild, untended, disordered, adult-free space of a hidden garden. There in the presence of long-hidden flora and fauna they discover an otherwise-elusive happiness, friendship, health, and restored relationships. The story presents a welcome communion between flowers, trees, insects, and animals, and the friends who discover that hidden paradise. It still attests to the human tendency toward dominance, with the manipulation of plants, and depictions of life in the garden with attention to what it gives people (e.g., the robin finds the key for Mary, the garden gives pleasures to visitors) but there is an interest in harmonious interactions between the garden visitors and all else that lives there. To the extent the biblical garden is loosely in view, it is consistent with the mythic vision of the first human who also tended the garden and interacted peacefully with its other creatures (Genesis 2:15, 18–29). Burnett teaches readers to see nature, in effect, to leave the confines of human-­ constructed spaces (the children’s bedrooms), to get their hands dirty in the soil, to enjoy birdsong and watch patiently the gradual processes of flowers coming to bloom. Mary Lennox and Colin Craven discover nature is not as threatening as they first suppose, and with Dickon Sowerby’s help they become enchanted with the beauty and mysteries of a much larger, richly inhabited world. Overcoming fear of the nonhuman Other is a first step toward compassionate and morally responsible engagement with those plants and animals, virtues the child Dickon and the adult Ben Weatherstaff model for their young friends. White’s zoo in

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Trumpet of the the Swan and Burnett’s secret garden represent a kind of middle space between the wild and cultivated.

Robert Lawson’s Rabbits When Stubbins, the narrator of Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, sees the great man swarmed by his bird friends after a long absence it brings to his mind pictures of St. Francis of Assisi, which is a fitting image for a character so close to the animal world. Gary D. Schmidt notes “it is almost surprising that Lofting waited until the fifth novel to use it.”59 The patron saint of animals also makes an appearance in Robert Lawson’s children’s novel Rabbit Hill. The animals who live on Rabbit Hill expect new people to arrive at the long-neglected Big House. There are frequent references to food shortages and difficult winters for the animals since the neglect and eventual abandonment of the Big House and its land (e.g., “food getting scarcer,” “food shortage”) so this is an occasion for considerable excitement.60 But they have reason to be wary too. Will these new human neighbors bring guns? Poisons? Traps? Aggressive dogs and cats? The small animals are hopeful but cautious. As it turns out, the people are everything they hope for, and more, both friendly and generous to the animals. When Father rabbit crosses in front of their car, they stop the vehicle, lift their hats, and wish him well. Immediately afterwards, the man puts a sign near the entrance to the driveway that reads, “Please Drive Carefully on Account of Small Animals.”61 The new owners do not permit workers to harm them either. Their worker Louie Kernstawk is not to shoot or trap Porkey the Woodchuck whose burrow is near a section of rundown wall; he is to leave that section of the wall alone. Their gardener Tim McGrath is not  Gary D. Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, Twayne’s English Authors Series 496 (New York: Twayne, 1992), 75. Stubbins’s observation occurs in Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, 30. Another boy has the same impression as Stubbins, telling the Doctor, “‘I thought you must be something interesting when I saw you talking to the birds, like St. Francis’” (Doctor Dolittle’s Puddleby Adventures, 499). 60  Robert Lawson, Rabbit Hill (1944; New  York: Puffin, 1972), 12, 33. The people in the area struggle too, and consider the arrival of new residents a welcome change (e.g., 59, 60). 61  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 77–78. Lawson’s illustration shows several species of small animals admiring the sign. 59

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to use traps or poison to remove the moles that threaten the grass.62 In addition, when Tim discusses a fence for the garden, the new owners refuse. Indeed, before the new owners arrive, the animals observe workers plowing, harrowing, and raking the old disused garden, and most importantly doubling its former size.63 The absence of a fence concerns Tim who warns the homeowners the Hill is full of rabbits, groundhogs, raccoons, deer, pheasants, skunks, and more, and these present a threat to any garden. But rather than despise such creatures these people enjoy them, and in the wife’s reply to Tim, which he passes along to Louie, we have a vision of peaceful cohabitation of species as elegant as it is simple: “‘We like ’em [the animals],’ she sez. ‘They’re so beautiful,’ she sez. Beautiful, mind you! ‘And they must be hungry too,’ sez she.” “‘You’re right, ma’am,’ I sez. ‘They’re hungry all right, as you’ll learn to your sorrow,’ I sez, ‘when them vegetables come up.’” “And then he chips in, the man. ‘Oh, I guess we’ll get along all right with ’em,’ sez he. ‘I think there’ll be enough for all of us—’ us, mind you. ‘That’s why we planned the garden so big,’ he sez.”64

These new people clearly have different ideas about human-animal interactions. Robert Lawson connects these different ideas that the workers find so strange to the books the new couple read. When the moving vans first arrive at the Big House, Tim observes the large number of books they have, and this concerns him. “‘People that reads books much seem to be queer-like,’” he explains to Louie.65 The connection between books and the new arrivals’ unorthodox (to Louie and Tim) notions about animals is important to the story, and the accompanying illustration of this scene makes this explicit. At the very point where Tim voices his reservations about people who read, the illustration depicts an open book lying on the ground, and a rabbit, mouse, and squirrel looking intently at the pages. The text says nothing here or elsewhere about animals looking at a book.  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 81–83.  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 61–62. 64  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 83–84. Italics original. 65  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 71. 62 63

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Lawson connects the homeowners’ neighborliness to area wildlife and penchant for reading in other ways too. The Gray Fox tells his friends about an encounter with the man of the house occurring when he wandered through the yard, as the man has a book in hand. I wasn’t paying much attention, and he, the Man, wasn’t smoking his pipe or I’d have known he was around, when first thing I knew there I was right in front of him, face to face you might say. He was reading a book and he looked up, and what do you suppose he did? Nothing, that’s what. He just sat there and looked at me, and I stood there and looked at him, and then he said, ‘Oh, hello,’ and went back to reading his book, and I went on about my business.66

The homeowners’ determination to share the land and its resources with all residents of the Hill, and repeated references to their gentleness, generosity, and books is a subtle way to mark the implementation of new ideas, of new ways of interacting with deer, rabbits, and mice. When the homeowners do not allow Louie to shoot or trap Porkey the Woodchuck, Tim insists too much reading makes people queer or nuts. When asked to roll the lawn instead of trapping or poisoning the moles to discourage burrowing, he again links one to the other: “‘Discouraged, mind you!’ Tim snorted. ‘Sez he read it in a book.’”67 Books present readers with new ideas, new possibilities. One of the more surprising things these homeowners do is care for distressed characters. They nurse Willie Fieldmouse back to health after he nearly drowns in a rain barrel, and after a car hits Georgie the rabbit, they come to his aid and tend to his injuries.68 These acts go some way toward gaining the animals’ trust though it does not allay everyone’s fears. Suspicions about people run deep among the Hill’s many residents. This emphasis on books (new ways of thinking about nonhuman neighbors) and this rejection of conventional disdain toward so-called pests, challenges readers to re-evaluate their own attitudes toward animals, and indeed to consider their welfare. Lawson’s story models a critical  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 79. Italics original.  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 82, 83, 84. 68  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 88–89, 101–02, 108–10. 66 67

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reassessment of received values, represented by the previous owners of the house, and by Louie and Tim. The young rabbit Georgie invents a song about the expected arrival of new people to the long-neglected Big House on Rabbit Hill. He sings the song to himself repeatedly and before long others, animals and people, pick up the tune and sing along.69 The fact they all sing Georgie’s song, with its emphasis on newness, is a striking way to illustrate a vision of harmony repudiating violence, whether traps, guns, or poisons. The song’s repeated line “New Folks coming, oh my!”70 amounts to saying there’s a new way for humans to interact with nonhuman life—new folks, a new kind of people. The couple who move into Big House model what this new humanity looks like. They are open to new ways of interacting with nature (books), they are generous (an expanded garden allowing all to eat), and they take steps to guard against preventable harms to those with whom they share the land (e.g., a sign warning drivers to watch for small animals). Lawson’s novel presents a vision of peaceful coexistence between human and nonhuman animals echoing the second biblical creation story. As the story goes in Genesis 2:5–17, the earth does not immediately produce vegetation because there is no one to till the soil. For this reason, God creates Adam, the first human, and after planting the Garden of Eden, places him there. Only then do food-bearing plants and trees spring up from the land. Lawson’s story echoes this pattern. Prior to their arrival, there are food shortages. There is great excitement among the various creatures living on the Hill when the rumour of “New Folks” coming to the abandoned Big House first circulates. The previous owners were “‘shiftless’” according to one rabbit, and “‘never planted nothing, never took care of nothing’” according to a woodchuck.71 The animals are hungry because there are no human gardeners, no ‘Adam and Eve’ to till the soil. ‘Adam and Eve’s’ arrival promises to change everything. Genesis presents Adam and Eve as gardeners, of course, so the stress placed on the animals’ hunger and longing for the arrival of “planting  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 40, 44–46, 57–60.  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 45. Italics original. 71  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 12, 16. 69 70

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folk” to produce “Garden vegetables” is conspicuous. Furthermore, the animals approach Adam in the Garden of Eden and all coexist peacefully (see Genesis 2:19–20). Some of the older residents on Rabbit Hill wistfully recall such peacefulness in days gone by. One thoughtful squirrel asks a rabbit, “‘Do you remember the old days when things were good here on the Hill, when there was good Folks here?’” In response, the rabbit says he does, adding, “‘The memory of those times is deeply cherished by all of us, I am sure.”72 Suggesting a connection with the biblical Garden of Eden is not arbitrary. When fondly remembering the time when human presence was good for the animals, the Gray Squirrel mentions children and animals in the celebration of a religious festival: Mind the tree the young ones always used to fix for us, come Christmas? That spruce over there it was, only smaller then. Little lights onto it, carrots and cabbage leaves and celery for your folks [i.e., rabbits], seed and suet for the birds (used to dip into them a bit myself ), nuts, all kinds of nuts for us—and all hung pretty-like on the branches?73

Adam tills the soil in Eden, allowing the vegetation to flourish and animals to eat (cf. Genesis 1:29–30), and he lives peacefully with the animals in the garden. Children on the Hill, in the good old days, fed the animals too. The longing for good planting folk to return to the Big House is a longing for a re-enactment of those paradisal conditions described in Genesis. Like the reference to Christmas, the arrival of St. Francis of Assisi to the story also affirms animal welfare through an appeal to religion.74 The Big House on Rabbit Hill is a site of human habitation in the midst of communities of mice, rabbits, deer, squirrels, and birds, and as such is an  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 12, 14, 20, 21.  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 20–21. 74  On St. Francis of Assisi and animals, see e.g., Roger D. Sorrell, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature: Tradition and Innovation in Western Christian Attitudes toward the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. 42–54; Richard Bauckham, Living with Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011), 36–42, 198–212; Laura Hobgood-Oster, Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), esp. chap. 4, “Counted among the Saints: Animals in Medieval Hagiography.” 72 73

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instructive metaphor. The previous owners of Big House were both indifferent and threatening to nonhuman life sharing the Hill. Their neglect of the garden and surrounding lands—“Them last Folks were slops, that’s what they were, slops. Never done nothing, never planted nothing, never took care of nothing, let everything run down,” as Porkey the Woodchuck grumbles75—represents an abdication of duty, an irresponsible human relationship with nature. In sharp contrast, the new people’s actions and values promise good things for both their human and nonhuman neighbors. We first meet these new people at Big House after the car hits Georgie the rabbit, and they take him in to tend to his injuries. The other animals are aware of this but become increasingly suspicious when they do not release him after a long period of time. Conspiracy theories circulate among some of them. In the case of Georgie’s Uncle Analdas, “Irritation and worry had gradually caused a dark suspicion to take root in his mind, and he now proceeded to voice it.”76 There is speculation the people intend to torture and kill young Georgie. During this anxious period, the small animals on Rabbit Hill notice work going on near the garden, “a lovely spot, a tiny circular lawn sheltered by a great pine tree and sloping down into the rock garden.” There are benches where the new people often sit on warm evenings, “a custom which prevented the Animals from thoroughly inspecting [the work].” Curiosity and fear peak when a large, heavy packing crate arrives. Some of the animals fear the worse. Uncle Analdas suspects it contains traps and spring-guns, poisons and gases. They are unable to see what the workers do with the box’s contents and once they finish, it is still not clear because a tarpaulin covers the spot: “Something stood up in the center, making the canvas look rather like a tent as it shone there in the sunset light.” The mystery remains until the long-awaited Midsummer’s Eve, the time at which the animals agree to wait before eating the vegetables in the new garden. When they approach, the animals see the people sitting on the benches by the circular lawn under the big pine, with the curious tarp-covered item from the box. They approach the garden, almost  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 16.  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 113; cf. 115.

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magically drawn to the site: “Slowly, silently, one step at a time, they moved through the deep grass and the shrub shadows until the clearing was entirely surrounded by an audience of small, tense Animals, waiting for—they knew not what.”77 Midsummer’s Eve has long associations with magic and folklore, but it is also a Christian festival, and perhaps importantly, the festival of St. John the Baptist. The Baptist was the forerunner of Christ. When the animals see the tarp removed, what emerges is a forerunner of a different sort. The people who now live on Rabbit Hill in the Big House represent a new kind of humanity, a new way of living that chooses to share the world with nonhuman neighbors. Within the Christian tradition, the most recognizable forerunner of this kind of compassion is St. Francis of Assisi, a patron saint of animals. When the animals first see a statue of Francis as the tarpaulin falls away, a “deep silence” follows and “it was almost possible to hear the sound of a hundred little breaths caught and released in a sigh of awe.”78 Lawson allows one of the animals to describe the statue and explain its significance: The [blind] Mole grasped Willie Fieldmouse’s elbow. “Willie, what is it?” he whispered. “What is it? Willie, be eyes for me.” Willie’s voice was hushed and breathless. “Oh, Mole,” he said. “Oh, Mole, it’s so beautiful. It’s him, Mole, it’s him—the Good Saint!” “Him—of Assisi? asked the Mole.” “Yes, Mole, our Saint. The good St. Francis of Assisi—him that’s loved us and protected us Little Animals time out of mind—and, oh, Mole, it’s so beautiful! He’s all out of stone, Mole, and his face is so kind and so sad. He’s got a long robe on, old and poor like, you can see the patches on it. “And all around his feet are the Little Animals. They’re us, Mole, all out of stone.”79

The statue is a fountain from which the animals and birds are free to drink, and all around the pool are broad flat stones, “all set out with  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 116, 118, 120.  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 121. 79  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 122. Italics original. Cf. 125: “the Good Saint.” 77 78

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things to eat, like a banquet feast” left there for the animals to enjoy. Willie also notices there is writing on the statue. “What does it say, Willie, the printing?” Willie spelled it out slowly, carefully. “It says—‘There—is—enough— for—all.’ There’s enough for all, Mole. And there is.”80

It is the Red Buck who offers a final benediction on the scene. He leads the entire assembly of animals in a “procession” (a word often used in religious ritual) around the garden after they feast and declares in what is a clear echo of the language of Genesis 1, “‘We have eaten their food…. We have tasted their salt, we have drunk their water, and all are good.’”81 St. Francis of Assisi is the forerunner announcing a new way of living peacefully with nature, and the new residents of Big House enact this compassionate, gentle, and generous communion with animals. The three references to Christianity in this novel—Christmas, Midsummer, and St. Francis of Assisi—subtly ground this story in a religiously-­ informed animal ethic. We turn to other stories with religious or quasi-­ religious content in the next chapter.

References Attenborough, David. 2018. Adventures of a Young Naturalist: The Zoo Quest Expeditions. New York: Quercus. Bauckham, Richard. 2011. Living with Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology. Waco: Baylor University Press. Bienen, Leigh Buchanan. 2010. My Life as a West African Gray Parrot. 1981. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey, 73–87. Waco: Baylor University Press. Findley, Timothy. 1998. From Stone Orchard: A Collection of Memories. New York: HarperCollins. Forster, E.M. 2005. A Passage to India. 1924. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin.

 Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 123. Italics original.  Lawson, Rabbit Hill, 125.

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Gilmour, Michael J. 2014. Eden’s Other Residents: The Bible and Animals. Eugene: Cascade. Goodall, Jane. 2002. Introduction. In Jane Goodall and Marc Bekoff, The Ten Trusts: What We Must Do to Care for the Animals We Love, ix–xx. New York: HarperCollins. Hobgood-Oster, Laura. 2008. Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2014. A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans. Waco: Baylor University Press. Kipling, Rudyard. 2017. The Jungle Book. 1894. London: Arcturus. Lawson, Robert. 1972. Rabbit Hill. 1944. New York: Puffin. Lever, James. 2009. Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood. New York: HarperCollins. Lofting, Hugh. 2019a. Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan. 1924. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2, 317–592. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019b. Doctor Dolittle’s Circus. 1924. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2, 1–315. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019c. Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary. 1924, 1950. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2, 593–871. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019d. Doctor Dolittle’s Puddleby Adventures. 1952. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 3, 249–512. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019e. Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo. 1925. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 3, 1–248. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019f. The Story of Doctor Dolittle. 1920. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 1, 315–426. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019g. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle. 1922. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 1, 1–314. New York: Aladdin. Parry, Catherine. 2017. Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Schmidt, Gary D. 1992. Hugh Lofting, Twayne’s English Authors Series 496. New York: Twayne. Sorenson, John. 2010. Animal Rights. About Canada 3. Halifax: Fernwood. Sorrell, Roger D. 1988. St. Francis of Assisi and Nature: Tradition and Innovation in Western Christian Attitudes toward the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Webb, Holly. 2018. The Abandoned Puppy. Illustrated by Sophy Williams. Wilton: Tiger Tales. ———. 2019. The Rescued Kitten. Illustrated by Sophy Williams. Wilton: Tiger Tales. White, E.B. 1970. The Trumpet of the Swan. Illustrated by Edward Frascino. New York: Scholastic.

6 A Sort of Temple: Religious Themes in Animal Literature

Bree. Mr. Beaver. Farsight. Reepicheep. Aslan. C. S. Lewis’s portrayal of the many-specied Kingdom of God showed me from an early age that we must expect to be surprised and humbled by the depth, creativity, generosity, and power of God’s world. How can I not press “further up and further in,” always pursuing the peace and flourishing of this Narnia? —Sarah Withrow King, Co-Founder and Co-Director of CreatureKind

I have prints of two portraits by Emily Brontë on my office wall. One is a pencil sketch of her dog Grasper, dated January 1834, when Brontë was just 15 years old, and the other a watercolour of her dog Keeper, dated April 24, 1838, when she was 19. The family’s friend Elizabeth Gaskell offers a brief but touching glimpse into the relationship between Brontë and Keeper. Apparently, he was rather willful with a penchant for slipping upstairs unnoticed and stretching out on the beds, “covered over with delicate white counterpanes.” Emily, a tough disciplinarian it turns

Personal correspondence. Sarah Withrow King’s publications include Vegangelical: How Caring for Animals Can Shape Your Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016) and Animals Are Not Ours (No, Really, They’re Not): An Evangelical Animal Liberation Theology (Eugene: Cascade, 2016). © The Author(s) 2020 M. J. Gilmour, Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare, The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9_6

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out, was none too pleased with this behavior but despite their differing views on what constitutes suitable household decorum, there is no mistaking the bond between them. The dog “loved her dearly” and “walked first among the mourners to her funeral.” He, in turn, “was mourned over by the surviving sister [Charlotte].” “Let us somehow hope,” Gaskell continues, “that he follows Emily now; and, when he rests, sleeps on some soft white bed of dreams, unpunished when he awakens to the life of the land of shadows.”1 Modern readers tend to deride Victorian sentimentality about death and pets but Gaskell’s remarks about the reunion of people with their beloved companions illustrate the effortless slippage in animal writing into themes typically falling within the purview of religion. In the immediate context she mentions the “Red Indian Creed” of hunter and dog reuniting in the afterlife, and the term “land of shadows” brings Psalm 23 to mind.2 This chapter examines ways religious (mostly Christian) language informs literature about animals. The founding of two organizations in 1824 make this a convenient, if only loosely adhered to start date for a few notes on religious impulses in writing sympathetic to the humane movement. The first is the establishment of the world’s first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in Britain, which owes much to the religious commitments of its early organizers, among them the Jewish animal advocate Lewis Gompertz, author of Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes (1824), and the Anglican priest Arthur Broome. The clergyman Humphry Primatt’s The Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty (1776) proved to be a valuable resource for the nascent movement. In 1832, the Society declared its proceedings to be “entirely based on the Christian Faith and on Christian Principles.”3 The second organization founded in 1824 is the  Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlottle Brontë, Oxford World’s Classics (1857; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 215. 2  Gaskell, The Life of Charlottle Brontë, 215 with 519n. 215. Brontë did not have time to “fetch stick or rod” when punishing Keeper. There may be an allusion here to Proverbs 13:24 in the Authorized Version (“He that spareth his rod hateth his son; but he that loveth him chaseneth him”; cf. 23:13–14). If so, Gaskell may be subtly justifying Emily’s harsh treatment. The caveat immediately afterwards (that “The generous dog owed her no grudge”) seems to do the same. 3  Taken from Andrew Linzey, Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 187n. 64. Cf. 109. The wealthy Gompertz “spared no effort to put the organization on a sound basis by contributing personally to its funds and by 1

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American Sunday-School Union, which published educational material often promoting humane themes, among them the books Kindness to Animals, Or, The Sin of Cruelty Exposed and Rebuked (1845) and Slim Jack, or the History of a Circus-Boy (1847).4 Janet M. Davis observes that contemporary animal rights authors tend not to discuss the history of the welfare movements. She speculates this has something to do with the pervasiveness of religion among the early thinkers pushing for social and legal reform: A possible reason for this omission is that early animal welfare activism often took place at Protestant churches, whereas contemporary animal advocacy generally occurs in secular spaces. Similarly, the kinship that nineteenth-century activists felt with animals was often rooted in biblical concepts of stewardship rather than biological evolution. In the early twentieth century, growing numbers of humane leaders amplified this human-­ animal kinship with biological, evolutionary evidence, but the early moral impetus for animal activism excluded biological explanations for humanity’s kinship with animals.5

Though contemporary animal protection efforts are usually secular, the religious impulses in many of the early welfare-minded novels warrant consideration not least because of their wide influence. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), for one, is certainly the most familiar. Sewell appeals often to religious argument in support of her ethical views. More recent fiction often includes quasi-religious/spiritual overtones as well. But what

helping his inspectors in their work” (Charles D. Niven, History of the Humane Movement [London: Johnson, 1967], 69). On the possibility the Society’s statement about being “entirely based on the Christian faith” was a way to remove the Jewish Gompertz, see 70–71. Under the patronage of Queen Victoria, the organization became the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1840. 4  Janet M. Davis mentions these examples, and observes, “The Sunday school movement, an enduring innovation of the Second Great Awakening, was a fertile site of popular productions of animal mercy” (The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America [New York: Oxford University Press, 2016], 35). Perhaps there is a reflection of this in Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle’s Circus, in which someone ridicules John Dolittle’s “Sunday school ideas” about animal care (in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2 [1924; New York: Aladdin, 2019], 40). 5  Davis, Gospel of Kindness, 19.

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motivates this convergence of animal protection, religion, and creative writing? This chapter attempts to isolate some of the reasons why.

Animals and Religion For at least some reform-minded creative writers of the nineteenth century, perhaps especially women, literature offered a medium to agitate for social reform when other forums to do so were closed (voting, holding political office, etc.). Storytelling also allowed those denied access to the pulpit a way to address religious communities specifically. A number of poems and pamphlets, Sunday school lessons and sermons, in addition to novels and poems promoting an inclusive Christian ethic appeared in the nineteenth and early twentieth century loosely in parallel with the rise of modern welfare organizations. Christianity has a weak record when it comes to animal protection, and advocates of this period did not hesitate to criticize churches and their members for this exclusion of the nonhuman. The preamble to “Who Seeks Salvation” (1905) by the American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox goes so far as to insist those who seek salvation must “first learn the lesson of kindness to dumb animals, and school and church should teach it.” The poem describes millions of worshippers who “kneel in prayer” for self and sinner, the sick and sorrowing, but offer “never a prayer for our dumb kin.” Further, there is Never a sermon from pious lip Of rich man’s check rein and driver’s whip. Never a protest or pleading word For the tortured creatures of flock and herd.

In addition to the omission of prayer is the lack of support for animal causes: Dimes and dollars are freely given To coax the pagan to Christian heaven. Yet the crime of cruelty walks abroad

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Through the opulent land of a Christian God— The God whose sympathy reached to all, Who noted even the sparrow’s fall.6

The pertinent lines of criticism, including those cited above, she puts in bold font. Sometimes these critiques of Christian indifference to animals are season specific as in J. Leonard Cather’s short article “Advent,” published in December 1930 by the National Council for Animals’ Welfare. If Christ comes to Christendom at Christmastide, He comes through streets hung with carcases of slain creatures, through air heavy with the taint of corruption. His churches are filled with worshippers whose bodies are clad in the skins of tortured beasts, and whose minds in part are turned towards the feast of which in a short time they will be partaking. For men it may be the season of jollity, but for animals it is the season of terror, for it is the season of “sport,” when game on foot or wing is driven, hunted, harried and killed.7

Cather’s jeremiad draws on various biblical references, including Matthew 10:29 (the Father knows every sparrow that falls), Romans 8:22 (all creation groans), Deuteronomy 25:4 (do not muzzle oxen while they tread grain), and Revelation 5:13 (all creatures in heaven and on earth and in the sea bless God). In his “Address to the Boston Public Schools” (winter 1885 and 1886), George T. Angell, founder of the American Humane Education Society and the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, includes the following indictment:

6  Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Who Seeks Salvation” (1905). Found in the John Ptak Collection of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare Printed Education Materials 1882–1937, archive housed at NCSU Libraries (https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/mc00620-001-hb0002-012-001). Another example of Wilcox’s animal-friendly writing is the poem “Voice of the Voiceless,” cited in full as a chapter epigraph in Diane L. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States (Athens, OH: Swallow/Ohio University Press, 2006), 59. 7  J. Leonard Cather, “Advent” (1930). Found in the John Ptak Collection of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare Printed Education Materials 1882–1937, archive housed at NCSU Libraries (https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/mc00620-001-bx0001-003-001).

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Every Saturday night the water was shut off from those stock-yards [in Chicago] until Monday morning. During the long, hot Sundays of summer, while the church bells were ringing, and the Christian people of Chicago were gathering in the churches to pray for God’s mercy, thousands of cattle and other dumb creatures were standing in those great stock-yards, within sight of those church spires, and within sound of those Sabbath bells, from Saturday night till Monday morning without one drop of water.8

Though not building an explicitly religious argument, the implication that Christians ought to know better is no less damning. For some, considering the intersections of animal ethics, creative writing, and religion appears odd, but look deep into Christianity’s source texts and we find animal compassion, and given the Bible’s influence on the western imagination, the convergence of religion, animal ethics, and the arts is understandable. In Jesus’s words about fallen sparrows just noted, there is an implied ethic. You care little for those birds, selling them for next to nothing in markets but they matter to God just the same. Though largely excluded from moral consideration throughout the church’s history, it remains there are compelling theological reasons for animal care, and pious exemplars who model compassion as an act of piety.9 The same is true of many of the world’s other religions, as well as its diverse indigenous traditions.10 Though not the place for a thorough discussion of religious influences on animal welfare movements, we note here five well-represented (mostly Christian) patterns in humane-oriented creative writing. Writers falling into this category frequently (a) align animal cruelty with other vices; (b) employ biblically-based arguments to urge kindness to animals; (c) develop sympathetic characters who model pious animal compassion; (d) 8  George T. Angell, “Address to the Boston Public Schools” (winter 1885–1886), p. 19. Italics original. Found in the John Ptak Collection of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare Printed Education Materials 1882–1937, archive housed at NCSU Libraries (https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/mc00620-001-bx0001-002-001). 9  See e.g., Laura Hobgood-Oster’s Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). 10  About which, see e.g., Lisa Kemmerer, Animals and World Religions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics (London: Routledge, 2019).

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appeal to (an often vague) notion of an animal afterlife; and sometimes (e) consider religion and animals in conflict. I briefly consider each in turn. To begin, the (a) connection of animal cruelty with other vices is widely represented. Cruelty is symptomatic of an irreligious life and authors mark such characters with predictable patterns of behavior; use of alcohol and cigarettes, disobedience to parents and other authorities in stories directed at children, criminal activities, and the like are among recurring tropes. Some writers promoting animal welfare participated in temperance organizations, Anna Sewell among them, so no wonder drunkenness is particularly commonplace in the stories they tell, as in the following scene, discussed earlier: … we saw a cart heavily laden with bricks; the wheels had stuck fast in the stiff mud … and the carter was shouting and flogging the two horses unmercifully…. “Stop! pray stop,” said Joe; “I’ll help you to lighten the cart, they can’t move it now.” “Mind your own business, you impudent young rascal, and I’ll mind mine.” The man was in a towering passion and the worse for drink, and laid on the whip again.

Ginger the horse says of one of her early trainers, he “drank a good deal, and I am quite sure that the oftener he drank the worse it was for me.” Black Beauty suffers life-altering injuries because of the carelessness of a drunk rider.11 Even in books not overtly religious the pattern appears. To give a recent example, in Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Shiloh, Judd Travers drinks, chews tobacco, and abuses dogs.12 The accompanying vices often represent a threat to family life in these stories, and perhaps this explains why some women writers engage the subject. We find the pairing of alcohol and animal abuse in Arthur Huntingdon, the morally bankrupt husband of narrator Helen in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). On one occasion, their dog  Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (1877; New York: Penguin, 2011), 73–74, 25, 95–98. As a result of injuries sustained because of that drunk rider, namely his damaged knees, Black Beauty ultimately ends up enduring years of harsh labor (104–06). On the connection between animal abuse and alcohol in this novel, see too 156, 175. 12  Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Shiloh (1991; New York: Aladdin, 2000), 127, 130, 134, etc. (drinking), 34 (chew tobacco), 4 etc. (abusive). 11

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Dash jumps on Arthur while he sleeps on the couch after taking “an unusual quantity of wine.” When Dash licks his face, the startled Arthur strikes him “with a smart blow; and the poor dog squeaked, and ran cowering back to me,” Helen writes. Later he calls the dog back, but Dash is reluctant to approach. When he calls again, as Helen puts it when confiding to her diary, “Dash only clung the closer to me, and licked my hand as if imploring protection. Enraged at this, his master snatched up a heavy book and hurled it at his head. The poor dog set up a piteous outcry and ran to the door.”13 The book misses Dash but hits Helen, and she asks if that was what Arthur actually intended. The episode at least hints at domestic abuse. Arthur’s alcoholism is also a threat to Helen’s son, and her efforts to protect the boy from his father’s influence is central to the story. Animal cruelty, evident in this and other scenes, is for Brontë wrapped up with other moral failings.14 Like Sewell’s Black Beauty, Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall is also a very religious book. Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath is rich in the mythic atmosphere of indigenous lore and it too connects domestic assault with animal abuse. Gar Face is a violent, cruel man who abuses animals. As a boy he “sneered at kindness” and in this way contrasts with his mother who “loved flowers and birds.” He laces her birdbath with rat poison then laughs when she holds a dead cardinal in her hands. He also leaves a rat in a trap without water or food, and watches it die a slow death.15 The boy is himself a victim of violence at the hands of a drunken father, and this background explains in part his violent ways: “Here then is a hard-edged bitter boy become a man …. Do not cross his angry path.”16 There is an explicit connection between this abusive background and animal cruelty: “The boy’s hatred for the deer [he was hunting] became his hatred for his 13  Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, ed. Lee A. Talley (1848; Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2009), 196. 14  This same pattern appears in her other novel, Agnes Grey (1847). On connections between abusive behavior toward animals and other people in her writing, see Maggie Berg, “‘Hapless Dependents’: Women and Animals in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey,” Studies in the Novel 34.2 (2002): 177–97. Brontë’s representation of exploited and abused animals, Berg argues, is indistinguishable from her analysis of objectified and exploited women (177–78). 15  Kathi Appelt, The Underneath, with drawings by David Small (New York: Atheneum, 2008), 13, 12. 16  Appelt, The Underneath, 14; cf. 13, 48, 270 (drunken father).

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hard-edged father and his runaway mother.” Gar Face, we read elsewhere, “cared little for the deer and wild hogs and raccoons that he shot and killed every day.” He even tries to shoot a hummingbird on one occasion.17 This disdain for animals includes his own dog, a bloodhound named Ranger. In addition to chaining him to a post for many years, he kills the dog’s closest friend, and punishes him harshly for allowing a cat on the property in the first place: he “dragged him into the stinking yard and kicked him hard. ‘Stupid dog!’ he shouted. ‘What good is a dog who can’t even keep a cat out of the yard?’ Ranger felt the steel toe of the boot grind into his side.” The pain from that kick remains with the bloodhound. Later, Gar Face hits the dog in the face with a board before dragging him off to the river to use as alligator bait.18 Religion also provides (b) a recognizable, generally acknowledged authority on which to build the case for reform, at least within some circles, so calls for compassion regularly appeal to biblical texts and theological concepts to urge animal protection. Sewell’s Black Beauty is explicitly Christian and biblically informed. She was, as one commentator puts it, “a natural storyteller, motivated and trained by religious thought to make a moral argument out of all the injustices she saw.”19 According to one character, … if we saw any one [sic] who took pleasure in cruelty, we might know who he belonged to, for the devil was a murderer from the beginning, and a tormentor to the end. On the other hand, where we saw people who loved their neighbours, and were kind to man and beast, we might know that was God’s mark, for [as it says in 1 John 4:8] ‘God is Love.’20

Another character offers practical advice on the proper treatment of animals with an easy slide into the cadences of Proverbs 22:6 in the King  Appelt, The Underneath, 51, 19, 231.  Appelt, The Underneath, 85–86; cf. 253 (the kick); 141 (lingering pain); 261–62, 285 (board and bait). On Gar Face’s plan to use a cat as bait, see 221. 19  Jane Smiley, “Foreword,” in Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (New York: Penguin, 2011), x. 20  Sewell, Black Beauty, 51. These words anticipate Dodie Smith’s aptly named supervillain Cruella de Vil (hear Cruel Devil). On the wordplay, see Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians, illustrations by Michael Dooling (1956; New York: Puffin, 1989), 14. This devil’s ancestral home is, fittingly, “Hell Hall” (58, 95). In keeping with the use of sinister monikers, her henchmen are the Baddun brothers. 17 18

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James Version. Horses “‘are like children, train ’em up in the way they should go, as the good book says, and when they are old they will not depart from it.’” The religious duty to care is evident throughout. We “‘shall all have to be judged according to our works,’” declares one of Black Beauty’s kind masters, “‘whether they be towards man or towards beast.’”21 Sewell’s influence on animal welfare efforts proved to be considerable as later writers recognized the potential of good storytelling for inspiring love for animals and anger toward abusive behavior. One historian points to a trend among animal protectionists of the late nineteenth century to produce “emotion-laden accounts of their subjects.” In the case of Sewell’s story, the horse Black Beauty “endured tribulation with dignity but communicated, reasoned, mourned, remembered, and celebrated the events of his life.” The story “exemplifies the increasingly popular tactic of contrasting admirable virtues of animals with ignoble human behavior,”22 and what is more, it claims the moral authority of the Bible. If God is the creator of animals, it is a sin to hurt them.23 This blending of fiction and religion in support of the animal agenda had a wide reach. In the early 1890s, George T. Angell of the American Humane Education Society published Black Beauty in America to raise awareness of animal suffering, even adding the controversial tagline The “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of the Horse, thus linking the abolitionist movement to animal protection.24 He also advertised a competition for a novel along the lines of Sewell’s book. Black Beauty tells a horse’s story from a horse’s point of view, and Angell wanted a similar book to promote compassion for other species. The winner of that Humane Society book prize was the Nova Scotia author Margaret Marshall Saunders. The American Baptist Publication Society published her novel Beautiful Joe in 1894. Like Black Beauty, it too is an animal autobiography. As seen, Joe is an abused dog, mutilated  Sewell, Black Beauty, 57, 42.  Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty, 31. 23  Sewell, Black Beauty, e.g., 37. 24  Keridiana Chez, “Introduction,” in Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe, ed. Keridiana Chez (Peterborough: Broadview, 2015), 11, 47n. 2. On this, see also Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty, 26, and Davis, Gospel of Kindness, 42, 65, 108. 21 22

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by an owner who chops off his ears and tail. The rescue of this dog and his subsequent adventures in the home of an animal-friendly Christian family provides occasion for a series of accessible lessons on the proper care of pets, farm animals, and wildlife. The novel had wide appeal, was frequently revised to bring it up to date with changing views about animal care, and often translated to expand its audience. Joe’s caregiver is the daughter of a minister, and she and others in the story regularly align kind treatment of animals with traditional Christian virtues like care for the poor, honesty, and temperance.25 One character remarks on God’s judgment of those who are cruel to animals, evoking St. Paul when she says “‘our whole dumb creation [is] groaning together in pain, and would continue to groan, unless merciful human beings were willing to help them.’”26 Saunders’s argument for animal compassion rests heavily on the Bible, including a crucial scene involving the commitment of three young friends to protect all creatures. They acknowledge there are some unanswered theological questions about the nonhuman, such as their fate in the afterlife, but agree “All we have to do now is to deal with the present, and the Bible plainly tells us that ‘a righteous man regardeth the life of his beast,’”27 thus finding in Proverbs 12:10 (Authorized Version) sufficient justification to assert a Christian’s moral duty to care. It seems likely Saunders’s explicitly religious and biblical approach to the topic helped her win the contest. In 1893, a member of the Humane Society committee that selected her book for the prize insisted,  This appears throughout but see, e.g., Saunders, Beautiful Joe, chap. 5.  Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe, ed. Keridiana Chez (Peterborough: Broadview, 2015), 138. Cf. Romans 8:22. According to Chez, Saunders likely bases this character on Caroline Earle White, founder of the first society for the prevention of cruelty to animals in Pennsylvania. See Saunders, Beautiful Joe, 133–39, with editorial comments, 136n. 1. 27  Saunders, Beautiful Joe, 238. Sanders explores the idea of an animal afterlife in her later novel Beautiful Joe’s Paradise (1902). S. Louise Patteson’s feline narrator uses the language of an afterlife when talking about a euthanized cat: “She had gone to her long and peaceful sleep, and I have no doubt that if she ever sees mistress in that beautiful place they tell about, where there are no homeless and hungry creatures, she will thank her for the kind act which ended her wretched existence” (Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat [Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1901], 77). In a heartwarming scene in Dodie Smith’s Hundred and One Dalmatians, an elderly man nearing death mistakes Pongo and Missis as the ghosts of dogs he had when a child: “‘I dare say I’m only seeing you because I’m pretty close to the edge now—and quite time, too. I’m more than ready. Well, what a joy to know that dogs go on too—I’ve always hoped it’” (83). 25 26

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The church owes it to her mission to preach and to teach the enforcement of the “bird’s nest commandment” [in Deuteronomy 22:6–7]; the principle recognized by Moses in the Hebrew world, and echoed by Cowper in English poetry, and Burns in the “Meadow Mouse,” and by our own Longfellow in songs of many keys.

Notice that willingness to find light wherever it may be, whether Moses or Robbie Burns. If you’re part of the church, this Humane Society member insists, you’re under obligation to let the mother bird go free, as it says in Deuteronomy 22:6–7 (i.e., the “bird’s nest commandment”). If you’re not part of the church, and if the Bible carries no moral weight for you, then listen to the poets who make similar claims. Such strategic appeal to the Bible is widespread, as is this openness to finding ethical light wherever it may be. Luke or Longfellow. If it prevents cruelty to a horse or dog, or prevents you taking a mother bird with her eggs, so be it. Religiously based animal stories (c) usually include characters who model animal-friendly behavior in sharp juxtaposition to others who are insensitive and vicious. The latter is a pedagogically important backdrop if we allow some readers are naïve to the kinds of violence directed at animals. Depictions of cruel acts make clear what the problem is, and why the solutions proffered warrant serious consideration. Pictures sometimes aid these presentations. Davis notes the place of “graphic illustrations of slavery” in efforts to spark sympathy with readers, as in Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans (1833) with its “grisly images of shackles, stakes, and cuffs,” and Henry Bibb’s Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave by Himself (1849) with its “stark pictures of bound and naked enslaved men and women beaten by wicked slaveholders.”28 Illustrations add poignancy to animal cruelty narratives as well. Various editions of Beautiful Joe added them to the 1894 text. The 1907 Griffith & Rowland edition, for one, includes a drawing of Joe with his head wrapped in bandages. He lies partially hidden by the shadows of a bush, looking frightened and sad. The picture compliments the scene the dog narrator describes:  Davis, Gospel of Kindness, 41.

28

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At last I could bear the pain no longer. I sat up in my box and looked about me. I felt as if I was going to die, and, though I was very weak, there was something inside me that made me feel as if I wanted to crawl away somewhere out of sight. I slunk out into the yard, and along the stable wall, where there was a thick clump of raspberry bushes. I crept in among them and lay down in the damp earth…. I thought about my poor mother, and wished she was here to lick my sore ears.29

Joe’s musings and the picture in the 1907 edition capture something of the physical pain he endures (bandages) as well as the emotional distress he experiences (his sad countenance; his withdrawal into the shadows of a bush; missing his mother—he is alone in this moment). These words remind readers of his family’s plight. His previous owner Jenkins killed the other puppies in his litter, and “beat and starved” his mother.30 Saunders allows Joe a full range of sympathy-generating emotions, and it is into this sad setting that her heroines and heroes appear. While we respond with like feeling to Joe’s sadness, anger, and fear, we also warm quickly to the efforts of his rescuer, Miss Laura, who finds him under the raspberry bush and does all she can to sooth his hurts and save his life: “Poor doggie,” she said, stooping down and patting me. “Are you very miserable, and did you crawl away to die? I have had dogs do that before, but I am not going to let you die, Joe.” And she set her lamp on the ground, and took me in her arms.31

The extreme contrast between Jenkins and Miss Laura represents the explicitly Christian moral spectrum Saunders wants readers to consider. Jenkins is immoral—a liar, a thief, an idler, a drunkard—and Saunders makes it clear cruelty to animals is of a kind with such irreligious living.32  Saunders, Beautiful Joe, 69 (text and illustration).  Saunders, Beautiful Joe, 54, cf. 59–60. 31  Saunders, Beautiful Joe, 70. 32  While robbing a home, Jenkins steals a family’s silver (Beautiful Joe, 128–29). In what is possibly a subtle nod to the earlier, animal-friendly book, there is a vague resemblance between Jenkins and villains in a Hugh Lofting novel. There too an abuser of dogs trades in stolen silverware and his partner’s name—Jennings—even sounds like Jenkins. See Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2 (1924; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 438, 445 (on the beating of dogs); 450, 453 (on Jennings); 453 (on silverware). 29 30

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Miss Laura, on the other hand, embodies all the Christian virtues and is at the same time an advocate for animals and precocious in her understanding of them. Josephine Donovan discusses Simone Weil’s ideas about “attentive love.”33 According to Weil, love of neighbour involves “a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as [an individual].… For this reason, it is … indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive.”34 As Donovan explains, “attention is central to Weil’s thinking” and an ethics and aesthetics of care emerges from it. It involves seeing and acknowledging the overlooked whenever “the subject is framed according to prescripted value and aesthetic ideals, relegating the overlooked material to insignificance or indeed to nonbeing.”35 Donovan’s engagement with Weil helpfully illuminates the ethical strategy at play in Beautiful Joe because so much of the story involves occasions when (to use Weil’s terminology) “love of our neighbor” emerges from characters who recognize suffering, consider an individual as opposed to “a unit in a collection,” and enact a “way of looking [that] is first of all attentive.”36 Indeed, the biblical language Weil uses (cf. Leviticus 19:18 [“love your neighbor as yourself ”; Matthew 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27) is not species specific, so it offers a religious motivation to show compassion toward unloved, vulnerable, suffering animals. The attention given to Beautiful Joe illustrates these ideas. By his own admission, he is not called Beautiful because he is a beauty, nor is he welcomed into a loving home because he is valuable by the usual measures: “I know that I am not beautiful, and I know that I am not a thoroughbred. I am only a cur.”37 By this remark, as Susan McHugh points out, Joe 33  Josephine Donovan, The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 7–8. See too her “Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals,” in The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 174–97. 34  Weil, as cited in Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 7; and “Attention to Suffering,” 190. 35  Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 7. 36  Taken from Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 7. 37  Saunders, Beautiful Joe, 53. The name Beautiful Joe recalls the name Black Beauty, whose story is an inspiration for the book.

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“echoes popular opinion” regarding mongrels, a prejudice Saunders clearly aims to dispel.38 This is evident not least in Laura’s opinion about mongrels. On the opening page of the book, she says she prefers dogs without breed status because they “have more character than well-bred dogs.”39 After Jenkins mutilates the puppy Joe, which explains why he is “not beautiful,” Miss Laura and the dog’s other human friends love this vulnerable, needy neighbor, looking past his outward appearance (no ears, no tail) and past his low status within a particular collective category (a non-thoroughbred cur). It is this attention to the suffering of an individual that makes the story both charming and instructive in its attempt to promote kindness. Joe is not the only suffering animal who benefits from this compassionate attention to individuals in need. When the main characters come across an abandoned stable, with a cow, horse, and pig left to starve, they again look past outward appearance—the cow’s “backbone rose up high and sharp, her hip bones stuck away out, and all her body seemed shrunken in”; the horse “was now a gaunt-looking animal … that seemed as if he was dead”; and the third “looked more like a greyhound than a pig,” he was so thin—and go to great lengths to save them all.40 They concern themselves with individuals, not the collective category (animals bred for food or labour). Though not necessarily grounded in Christian argument, some stories discuss (d) animals in relation to death and ideas of the afterlife. Stories considering animals in the afterlife, such as Margaret Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe’s Paradise (1902), not only challenge the usual Christian view that animals have no soul or postmortem existence, but also  Susan McHugh, Dog (London: Reaktion, 2004), 140. Full discussion of Beautiful Joe, pp. 139–42.  Saunders, Beautiful Joe, 53. Cf. the narrator of Dodie Smith’s Hundred and One Dalmatians who insists dogs of unknown breed are “none the worse for that, and all of them bright as buttons” (48). Hugh Lofting touches on this issue as well, contrasting people’s tendency to spoil prized breeds while ignoring the needs of others: “‘Why should these pampered pets of society dames have silk sweaters around their silly, fat stomachs, when there are hundreds of good dogs—real dogs, even if they are called mongrels—slinking round the East End of London trying to pick up a square meal?’” (Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan, 532). Jip the dog, a member of Dolittle’s family, is the speaker. See too Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo (in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 3 [1925; New York: Aladdin, 2019], 48, 212), in which Dolittle arranges a solution, namely The Home for Crossbred Dogs. Like Miss Laura in Beautiful Joe, it is the Doctor’s opinion “mongrels often have more character than the purebreds” (215). 40  Saunders, Beautiful Joe, 206, 206, 211. 38 39

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emphasize the value of individual animals in life. If God deems them worthy of life beyond the grave, then they must deserve proper treatment this side of it. Not all stories about animal afterlife have a welfare agenda. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary uses religious language about post-mortem existence/ resurrection. A young girl named Ellie is hysterical when she discovers her beloved cat Church (Winston Churchill) will die one day. Let God get his own cat, she cries. When the inevitable happens, the girl is away from home and her father Louis contemplates the difficult task of telling her the bad news. Before he has an opportunity though, their neighbour Jud Crandall intervenes. He leads Louis to a Micmac cemetery to bury the cat, and when the cat reappears the next day, Crandall explains the mystery. Church is not the first animal to return. The same thing happened to his own beloved dog when he was a boy.41 As the story unfolds, we discover generations of residents passed along the secret of the Micmac burial grounds. The resurrected animals (and people!) are not quite their former selves, and the evil and mayhem of the situation is the stuff of the second half of the book, proving Jud’s observation, “‘sometimes dead is better,’” to be correct. Bringing animals back to life, he notes, is “‘as close to playing God as you can get.’”42 The book taps into the profound grief people experience when they lose a pet, and the longing for a return or reuniting. King uses the biblical concept of resurrection throughout, citing excerpts from the story of Lazarus rising from the dead as section epigraphs (John 11:1–44). Grief is part of that story too. Jesus weeps at the death of his friend (11:35–36). Among novels with a welfare agenda introducing an animal afterlife is Richard Adams’s Watership Down. As the story closes, Hazel greets a stranger who, though unnamed, we recognize to be El-ahrairah, the hero of rabbit folklore. It is the moment of Hazel’s death, and El-ahrairah invites the courageous leader to join him in the life beyond: “It seemed to Hazel that he would not be needing his body any more, so he left it lying on the edge of the ditch…. Hazel followed.”43  Stephen King, Pet Sematary (1983; New York: Gallery, 2019), 37–39, 110, 112, 136–37, 140–55.  King, Pet Sematary, 153, 155. 43  Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972; New York: Scribner, 2005), 474. 41 42

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The episode is of a piece with the worldview the rabbits share, preserved and passed on through oral tradition.44 Dandelion relates the community’s origin story, a mythology around which the rabbits cohere and from which they draw courage, inspiration, and a sense of self-worth. The story’s power is evident when Dandelion’s performance elicits an appreciative growl from Bigwig at the mention of the suggestively named El-ahrairah (i.e., El is a Hebrew word for God). This lupine creation narrative echoes stories  in the Hebrew Bible. Like Abraham, El-ahrairah himself was “the father” of many. When the creator Frith first creates the world, all creatures ate grass, and there was harmony among all species. The rabbits in this new world “wandered everywhere, multiplying.”45 This fecundity is their downfall, however, and when Frith asks El-ahrairah to limit reproduction, the folk hero declines, which amounts to the rabbits’ equivalent of the fall and a kind of Babel-like hubris. My people, he insists, are the strongest. The consequence of this intransigence is predation, which Frith introduces to the world. He gives to the fox and the weasel “‘cunning hearts and sharp teeth, and to the cat he has given silent feet and eyes that can see in the dark,’” along with permission to kill and devour El-ahrairah’s offspring.46 Among other parallels with the biblical creation stories, we read of Frith looking for El-ahrairah in the new-world ‘garden,’ and resting: “every evening, when Frith has done his day’s work … [he] lies calm and easy in the red sky,” which recalls God’s rest after the days of creation.47 Adams is clear Watership Down is not allegory or a parable,48 and there is no basis to suppose the scene involves some subtle religious message. But it does reinforce the notion of shared creatureliness across the species. These fictional animals experience fear and pain, and the story reinforces the belief that each rabbit is important. Weak and preyed-upon they may be, but their lives matter still. Dandelion tells the story well, and it is not  Adams, Watership Down, 25–29.  Adams, Watership Down, 26; cf. Genesis 12:1–20; 17:5 (Abraham); 1:29–30 (eating grass); 1:22, 28 etc. (wandering, multiplying). 46  Adams, Watership Down, 27–28. 47  Adams, Watership Down, 28, 29; cf. Genesis 3:23–24 (looking in the garden); 2:2–3 (resting after creation). 48  Adams, Watership Down, xvi. 44 45

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without consequence for his audience: “even Pipkin [the smallest and most vulnerable among them] forgot his weariness and danger and remembered instead the great indestructibility of the rabbits. Each one of them saw himself as El-ahrairah, who could be impudent to Frith and get away with it.”49 Finally, there are stories that (e) illustrate religion in conflict with sensitivity toward animals. In her beautiful book Allowed to Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries, photographer Isa Leshko includes a striking portrait of Roger, a six-year-old Cornish crossbreed. Roger “was rescued shortly before a Kaparot ceremony performed by ultra-Orthodox Jews to commemorate Yom Kippur. During the atonement ritual, a rooster is swung over each man’s head to symbolically transfer his sins onto the animal.”50 Leshko’s photograph reveals something of Roger’s individuality, elegance, and dignity. To look at it, I find, is to understand better Yoineh Meir’s struggles in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s oft-discussed short story “The Slaughterer.” Yoineh becomes the reluctant ritual slaughterer for the Jewish community of Kolomir and before long, the pious man finds himself questioning the goodness of God, alienated from his community, and plagued by nightmares. He descends into madness and drowns, possibly by suicide, though the community’s rabbi judges his death to be otherwise. Yoineh Meir is responsible for killing many animals and this raises troubling theological questions for him and a profound sadness. He reflects how the month of Elul, a month of repentance and preparation for the New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), once stirred in him an exalted serenity but now, as the slaughterer, his experience is quite different: “In the twittering of the birds he heard the melancholy of the Solemn Days, when man takes an accounting of his soul.” He experiences the time differently in his new role because a “great 49  Adams, Watership Down, 28. For a scene considering the afterlife of chickens, see Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8 (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2020): “When the roof collapsed [during a barn fire], the spirits of a hundred and twenty thousand hens shucked off their cages like twiggy nests and soared into the sky…. this is what chickens believe happens when you die, it is their unified spiritual prophecy” (224). The narrator admits uncertainty about this: “Did all those hens’ spirits really rise? I don’t know” (225). 50  Isa Leshko, Allowed to Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 45.

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many beasts are slaughtered” for these festivals: “Millions of fowl and cattle now alive were doomed to be killed.”51 Those twittering, free-­ roaming birds he hears are beyond the slaughter’s reach, and they speak to him, in effect, as he associates their music with repentance and melancholy. Perhaps what they tell of is a form of human-animal connection without violence. A lost Eden. Other animals ‘speak’ to Yoineh Meir as well. A cock crows and he awakens in a sweat from his troubled, nightmare-­filled sleep. Other birds answer, and he likens the bird sound to a congregation responding to the cantor, and it seems to him “the fowl were crying out questions, protesting, lamenting in chorus the misfortune that loomed over them.”52 How is he to reconcile religious obligation with so much animal suffering? He never resolves the question, and in the end blasphemes and dies; his last words, spoken with fist raised to heaven, are “‘Fiend! Murderer! Devouring beast!’”53 More than once, Yoineh Meir reflects on a rabbi’s teaching that one cannot have more compassion than God. He eventually rejects the notion, claiming he does.54 He discovers an “unfamiliar love” welling up for all creatures, even the mice who can hardly be blamed for wanting crumbs of bread and cheese. He does not understand why the cat is such an enemy to them, which hints at the slaughterer’s recognition that God is also to blame for the violence occurring among nonhuman species. The rabbi may be right. Man cannot and must not have more compassion than the Master of the universe. Yet he, Yoineh Meir, was sick with pity. How could one pray for life for the coming year, or for a favorable writ in Heaven, when one was robbing others of the breath of life?55

 Isaac Bashevis Singer, “The Slaughterer,” in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 158, 159. For the last thirty years of his life, according to Richard H. Schwartz, Singer was vegetarian, a lifestyle choice motivated primarily by his compassion for animals. He was also a patron of the Jewish Vegetarian Society (Judaism and Vegetarianism, New revised edition [New York: Lantern, 2001], 177). 52  Singer, “The Slaughterer,” 158. 53  Singer, “The Slaughterer,” 164. 54  Singer, “The Slaughterer,” 154, 155, 160, cf. 162. 55  Singer, “The Slaughterer,” 160. 51

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Yoineh Meir’s only recourse, the only way to escape violence against animals, is to reject his role as slaughterer (he desecrates the holy instruments, the knives and whetstone, by dropping them in the outhouse pit), his religion, and indeed his life.

Animals as Religion A great deal of writing celebrates a profound sense of communion with nature well-described as spiritual, even if not associated with organized religion. To explore this theme and close the chapter we turn to two well-­ known twentieth-century storytellers.

At Home with Richard Adams When writing of his childhood home, Oakdene, along the Berkshire-­ Hampshire border, Richard Adams stresses the diversity, colours, smells, and delights of the landscape far more than the particulars of the house itself. What is more, there is a clear inclination toward spaces free of human interventions, and an enchantment with wildness. “Only part of the garden was cultivated,” and his absorbing descriptions of plants, insects, birds, and more suggest the allure of untended corners of the family property, including a little copse “known as the Wild Wood,” “rough grass,” and the untamed creatures inhabiting them: “I would catch caterpillars off the leaves, put them down in the open and see how close a blackbird was ready to come to take them. (They never came to the hand, though).”56 This affection for the wildness of the land, and his literal immersion in that world is evident as he climbs in among the plants and trees. This mingling with nature is not dominative and there is an unmistakable humility in Adams’s writing about it. He admits finding in flowers 56  Richard Adams, The Day Gone By: An Autobiography (1990; London: Penguin, 1991), 7. On this affection for the uncultivated, or the less-than-completely cultivated, cf. 13: “It was my father who taught me to recognize and love the birds. That half-wild, wooded and lawned garden was full of them.”

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something wholly other, beyond his grasp and beyond his control. In early childhood, he suggests, “awareness works on two levels at once: there is a paradox. Wonderful things are often apprehended composedly (after all, they’re tangibly there), while ordinary things can seem miraculous in a way in which they never do again.” This recognition of something other-than-tangible seems absolutely crucial for an ethics of care. When describing his fondness for the orange foxweed, he again appeals to this more-than-the-tangible quality of nature: “I loved its colour and vaguely knew it to be a shade uncommon, for you never seemed to find it anywhere else. In my imagination I attributed magical properties to it …. To this day I love to come upon one.”57 The humility emerges in Adams efforts to capture artistically something of the natural marvels he so admires. Rhododendrons affected him more deeply than any other flowers, and on one occasion he experienced “a kind of abasement” in their presence. Art—in his case, words and writing—prove inadequate for the occasion: “there was nothing I could do, adequately to respond to something so beautiful. They were beautiful beyond comprehension, beyond assimilation.” Adams thus challenges a human arrogance blithely claiming mastery over all things. Flowers, fragile flowers, overwhelm and conquer him: “They were beyond anything one could have expected or imagined. Saying even this much is really cheating—bringing in hindsight and words to try to express a child’s incoherent, inarticulate sense of being utterly bowled over.”58 Awareness of the inadequacy of representation appears again when writing admiringly of birdsong. The bird sang ‘Bringing it! Bringing it! Bringing it! Marguerite! Marguerite! Knee-deep! Knee-deep! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! It was, of course, a song thrush, but I didn’t know that then. I just felt it was beautiful—so vigorous and clear—and nothing to interrupt or stop it. But those are words, too. Cheating.

57 58

 Adams, Day Gone By, 8, 9.  Adams, Day Gone By, 8.

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There is no assertion of mastery, the random words given are a mere grasping after sounds in an effort to represent, but they fall far short. He did not even know the bird’s name at the moment described (naming being an Adam-like form of control, an exercise of “dominion” [cf. Genesis 2:19–20; 1:28]), and there is an admission of human limitation. Nothing interrupts or stops those beautiful songs. Nature teems with life and is beyond rule. (In the near context, he says of his mother’s efforts to rid the home of ants, “I don’t think total extermination would have been practicable—not in those days”).59 Adams’s insistence rhododendrons are “beyond assimilation,” and birdsong resistant to description is a statement about the limits of art and its inability to contain nature. The writer’s pen fails. Likeminded painters would say the same of the brush. In some respects, humanity does not enjoy an Adam-like dominion over the earth but is rather more like Job, humbled and left speechless after God shows him the wonders of the natural world, including its animals (Job 40:3–5). The connection between Adams’s excursus about the land surrounding the family home and art is not arbitrary. He begins this section linking nature with literature in two ways. First, when describing the family home, he mentions the “superb view to the south … stretching away four or five miles to the distant line of the Hampshire Downs—the steep escarpment formed by Cottington’s Hill, Cannon Heath Down, Watership Down and Ladle Hill.”60 Apart from this one reference, the name Watership Down does not appear in Day Gone By, and Adams only occasionally refers to his most famous story. This geographical marker likely brings the story of Hazel, Fiver, Captain Holly, Bigwig, and their friends to mind for most readers; presumably, those likely to pick up a memoir by this author know Watership Down.61 The second connection to literature is the name of another favourite place on the family property, namely Bull Banks, taken from Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mr. Tod  Adams, Day Gone By, 9, 10.  Adams, Day Gone By, 6–7. 61  He refers to the story when describing Sandleford Park, near his home: “(It was from here that Hazel and his rabbits were later to set off on their adventures)” (Day Gone By, 27). Adams published his widely read and admired Watership Down in 1972, and the autobiography in 1990. 59 60

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(1912).62 These two references to literary representations of animals appear in the near context of remarks about the inimitable nature of the flora and fauna Adams so admires, their elusiveness, their refusals to be contained. Art at its best directs us back to the real thing, but representation is always incomplete, and it never satisfies. Adams recognizes the limitations of human imagination when immersed in nature. As a child, Bull Banks “could represent anything—a fortress, the council rooms of a kingdom, a series of caves or dwellings, a dangerous jungle. But the reality was often more delightful than pretending. Thrushes, blackbirds and chaffinches nested in Bull Banks.” If the imagination pales alongside nature, so too do attempts at creativity: “Once, I fabricated a nest and brought my sister to see it, claiming to have found it. It didn’t deceive her and I’m glad she didn’t pretend it did.” And once more, this time when describing the water-butt in the conservatory: “You could, of course, sail toy boats on it, but once again reality was more absorbing. In summer it was full of little larvae, which hung suspended, head downward, their tails held by the surface tension.”63 Imagination and art (toy boats) prove less compelling than the larvae of the culicine mosquito. Immersion in nature generates sympathy for others too. The family cook used a traditional wasp-trap with jam and diluted beer in jars. The wasps fell into these, he recalls, and “struggled and drowned. I thought it cruel then and I think so now; the wasps swam a long time.” Adams contrasts the cook’s method with that used by his father, a physician with access to deadly potassium cyanide. He explains approvingly how his father placed small doses of it in nests and each wasp flying over the cyanide “dropped dead instantly.”64 Though a small detail, Adams’s inclusion of time references—“a long time” versus “instantly”—indicates the suffering of other creatures, even feared wasps, is consequential. His recollection of a lesser spotted woodpecker that hit a pane of glass also reveals this tenderness. Though it occurred decades before, Adams affords that bird the dignity of memory and description, remarking on his beauty  See Day Gone By, 20. A tod is a male fox. The dogs Rowf and Snitter befriend one in Adams’s novel The Plague Dogs. 63  Adams, Day Gone By, 7, 12. 64  Adams, Day Gone By, 11. 62

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(“It was a male, with a red crown to its head, a buff-coloured breast and black-and-white speckled wings”), acknowledging his pain (“[he] lay, plainly injured”), and offering an image of human compassion (“My father picked it up …. It died a few moments later in his hand”).65 Art does have important purposes, despite its limitations. The scent of the Siberian crab-apple in bloom has a somewhat Proustian, madelaine-­ esque grip on the novelist: “It is the literal truth that I am half-afraid to smell one now, for it turns my heart over and makes me want to weep for Bull Banks. Bull banks is gone, for ever.” After the war, he explains, the family sold the house, and new owners pulled it down, built over the garden, and felled the great oak trees.66 Literature allows, even if ‘as through a glass darkly,’ a glimpse into the flowers and insects and birds of lost worlds, and potentially awakens concerns about the survival of our own Bull Banks, and the wellbeing of the lesser spotted woodpeckers we may see. Literature about nature, including animal stories, never replicates the real things but it invites and often urges ethical response. The tendency toward a kind of nature mysticism is evident throughout Adams writing, and often attaches to ethical concern. Consider the deep sense of connection to flora and fauna in the following: To look into that receding infinity of bluebells [on a field near my childhood home, when walking with my father] was to become more lost to all else, more teased out of thought, than when looking up into a clear blue sky and trying to imagine what lay beyond. There couldn’t possibly be so many bluebells; yet there they were. Examine a single one: it was perfect. Each one in that infinity was similarly perfect. To grasp this inspired awe as well as delight. Throughout the wood lay the faint but clear scent of the flowers, and somewhere on the edge, in a birch tree, a blackbird would let fall its pausing, unhurried phrases.67

His attentiveness to the flowers and birdsong in this moment is noteworthy. He is aware of the “infinity” of the bluebells but also of “a single one.” He does not lose his admiration for the individual within the larger  Adams, Day Gone By, 15.  Adams, Day Gone By, 10–11. 67  Adams, Day Gone By, 48. See too 91–94. 65 66

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category. We see this again when Adams recalls visiting Mr. Dalby, the head gardener at a grand  estate. He describes with great affection the gardens and greenhouses he was allowed to explore. Ferns were a particular favourite during these visits: I used to try to be left alone in the fern-houses. Then—or so it seemed— the singularity of each fern—the undivided fronds of a Hart’s Tongue, the lacy, weightless quality of a Maidenhair—could impart itself. You had to keep still, as though you were watching birds; ferns spoke in low voices.68

Adams’s attention to particular plants here, as opposed to categories, is noteworthy. Individuals do not get overlooked within a collective. There is acknowledgement once again that each plant has a beauty and ‘voice’ all its own. While this is a lovely description in itself, I suspect the significance of the episode emerges in its connection to the stories he tells immediately before and after. Adams frames his remarks about the “singularity of each fern,” the recognition that each member within the broader category has a value of its own, with discussion about two vulnerable, marginalized categories of people in his community. Immediately before, he writes, “Like all the upper middle classes in those days, I was brought up to regard Jews as beyond the pale … but it didn’t count if the Jews were (a) reliable tradespeople or (b) ladies and gentlemen.” This is not a view he carried into later life: “I feel I have unravelled this strange tangle in which I became unconsciously enmeshed during childhood.” Following the fern story, Adams describes another memory, this time from 1926 when he was six years old, the year of the General Strike. He would see “ragged groups of adults and children” pushing handmade carts in the direction of Penwood, an extensive tract of woodland. In those days, he explains, it was common for the poor of Newbury to trudge the two to three miles up Wash Hill to that woodland for firewood. His remarks reflect sympathy for their plight: “But when you think how quickly wood burns, it still seems sad that they should have found these expeditions worth the time and trouble. They had little, if any, coal to keep in the bath. I used to feel 68

 Adams, Day Gone By, 92.

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uncomfortable and guilty to see them go by. They were hard-faced and ragged, and I knew I didn’t deserve not to be.”69 Adams learned from observing nature the unique beauty, the unique voice of the individual fern and from this, it appears, the unique beauty and voice of each human being. He “unravelled” the antisemitic prejudices absorbed from family and society when a child, and was able to feel sympathy for the poor, recognizing they all were as beautiful in their own way as the ferns in Mr. Dalby’s hothouse. Like religion, Adams spiritual connection with nature offers the experience of transcendence and an ethical formation.

F rances Hodgson Burnett and the Secret Key to Happiness Many other books throughout the period considered promote animal-­ friendly themes but without explicit reference to organized anti-cruelty campaigns or the sustained religious language of stories like Black Beauty or Beautiful Joe. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) is a well-known example. It relates the story of a wholly “disagreeable child” named Mary Lennox. For the most part ignored by her parents before their death, she is rude, self-absorbed, condescending to social inferiors, and wholly dependent on them. She takes no interest in other people, lacks curiosity about the world around her, is physically inactive and lacks an appetite. She does not even know how to put on her own clothes; servants always did this for her, dressing her “like a doll.” She is Mistress Mary Quite Contrary.70 After moving to England following her parents’ death, her transformation into a healthy, curious, socially engaged, imaginative, and caring individual begins, and it corresponds to the spatial shift occurring in her new living arrangements. For the most part, she is left to her own devices in the massive Misselthwaite Manor. She sleeps in an uninviting space, and the nursery “was not a child’s room, but a grown-up person’s room, with gloomy old pictures on the walls and heavy  Adams, Day Gone By, 91, 94.  Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911; London: Arcturus, 2018), 15, 26, 14.

69 70

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old oak chairs.”71 It is only after the young Yorkshire housemaid Martha enters the story that Mary begins to change. When Martha urges Mary to go outdoors and play in the Manor’s vast gardens, insisting “‘It’ll do you good,’”72 it commences a remarkable transformation, one crucially linked to nature. Martha is herself part of this process. Whereas Mary is fearful of the moors, finding them empty and bleak, Martha speaks of their beauty, smells, and colors, and how much she and her brother Dickon find those spaces enriching and full of life. Once outdoors, Mary meets one of the estate’s gardeners, Ben Weatherstaff, who also communes with the natural world—the flowers and trees he tends, obviously, but also the sociable robin who figures so prominently in the story of Mary’s awakened imaginative life. Ben introduces her to the bird who quickly becomes Mary’s constant companion. With her circle of friends beginning to expand, the girl’s wellbeing, mind and body, improve. It is the robin who helps Mary find the buried key, and it is the robin who helps Mary find the hidden door to the secret garden the key opens.73 She becomes a whole person only after she enters that mysterious, sacred space: “she held back the swinging curtain of ivy and pushed back the door which opened slowly–slowly. Then she slipped through it, and shut it behind her, and stood with her back against it, looking about her and breathing quite fast with excitement, and wonder, and delight. She was standing inside the secret garden.”74 Mary Quite Contrary knows excitement and wonder for the first time, and the awakening of this neglected girl’s emotions and imagination and capacity to enjoy the world occurs in parallel with the growth of the long-­ abandoned rose bushes that so fascinate her. She wonders whether those leafless bushes still produce roses after ten years of neglect (a time corresponding roughly to her age). Her discovery of the garden occurs in spring and during her first visit to this sacred space (cf. below), she  Burnett, Secret Garden, 23, 27.  Burnett, Secret Garden, 28. 73  C. S. Lewis gives an appreciative nod to Burnett’s robin in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950). In that story, a robin guides the children—and with them readers—as they take their first steps as a group into the ‘secret garden’ that is Narnia. 74  Burnett, Secret Garden, 61. Italics original. 71 72

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discovers “some sharp little pale green points,” the first signs of life she finds there.75 Use of the descriptor “pale” seems to recall earlier descriptions of the girl herself. The opening sentence of the novel refers to her as “the most-disagreeable-looking child ever seen.” She is thin, has a sour expression and yellow face, and “had always been ill in one way or another.” Even her mother considered her a “sickly, fretful, ugly little baby.” Before finding the garden, she is at one point “pale with rage.” The pale plants, of course, eventually blossom into beautiful flowers and the ugly, contrary child blossoms as well.76 The life-giving hidden garden recalls the Garden of Eden with its tree of life. It too is hidden (Genesis 3:23–24). The biblical story relates the ‘death’ (of a kind) of those banished from it. The Burnett story reverses that narrative sequence—a lifeless girl finds her way into that hidden, nourishing place, and flourishes. There are a number of parallels with the biblical story. Initially there are no plants in Eden because there is no one to till the soil (Genesis 2:5), which corresponds to the locked, walled-up garden that has no one to tend it. God eventually puts Adam in the garden to work the soil and care for it (Genesis 2:15), which is what Mary does when she digs the earth, and clears grass and weeds away from the newly emerging sprouts.77 We also read in Genesis 2 that it is not good for the Edenic gardener to be alone and sure enough, the Burnett novel introduces a helper. The young boy Dickon quickly becomes her closest human friend who shares in her various adventures in the Misselthwaite Manor park. Also like the biblical story, the transformation and paradisal setting of the novel involves animals. They are everywhere in Burnett’s tale. Dickon spends his days on the moors, often interacting with animals and  Burnett, Secret Garden, 63.  Burnett, Secret Garden, 7 (“sickly”), 49 (“pale with rage). On improvements to her health, occurring in parallel with the awakening garden, see e.g., 70–72. 77  Burnett, Secret Garden, 64, 70, 71. As seen in the previous chapter, human gardeners are important to animals in Robert Lawson’s Rabbit Hill as well. As rumors swirl about new people moving into the Big House, there is much hope they are “planting Folks.” The absence of such people presents difficulties for some animals. As a rabbit puts it, “Three years now since there’s been a good garden on this place. Never enough to put anything up for the winters …. I don’t know how we’ll ever make out if [the new homeowners are] not planting Folks” ([1944; New  York: Puffin, 1972], 12). 75 76

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showing compassion to those in need, as evident in his rescue of a fox pup and unwillingness to reveal the whereabouts of nests and dens for fear other boys will harm those living in them. Mary herself never had a pet before arriving at the mansion but as noted quickly befriends the robin.78 There is an extraordinary moment near the end of The Secret Garden that juxtaposes traditional notions of religion with nature as sacred and lifegiving. The sickly boy Colin experiences the beauties of the garden in the full bloom of spring and for the first time expects to live into adulthood. His whole life he heard others speak of his inevitable death but in the company of friends Mary, Dickon, and Ben Weatherstaff, and more importantly in the company of flowers, insects, birds, sunshine, and animals, he feels happy and well. It is “Magic,” he insists, a benevolent force of some kind that inhabits everything. He proposes an experiment that involves calling out to this lifeforce. Morning, evening, and throughout the day, Colin intends to say, “‘Magic is in me! Magic is making me well! I am going to be as strong as Dickon, as strong as Dickon!’” He invites his friends to join him in repeating this as often as they remember. Colin then initiates a ritual, and in a novel otherwise devoid of the language of organized religion, there are some important terms used within the span of a few paragraphs. The friends sit crossed-legged under a tree, in what Colin describes as “‘a sort of temple.’” To Ben, the scene is rather like “a prayer meeting,” something he usually avoids though in this instance he does not mind. Mary finds Colin looking particularly beautiful in this moment, noting the boy “held his head high as if he felt like a sort of priest.” There is something almost beatific about Colin because just as Mary considers this, “The light shone on him through the tree canopy.” Colin proposes swaying and chanting, which further suggests religious ritual, and as he begins, he looks “like a strange boy spirit.” After the boy chants, Ben mumbles, “‘Th’ sermon was good enow–but I’m bound to get out afore th’ collection,’”79 which of course refers to usual practices in a church. The boy then walks around the garden followed by his  Burnett, Secret Garden, 43, 78, 27. See also 111 (Dickon not telling other boys where birds and animals live to protect them from cruelty); and 146 (his rescue of an orphaned lamb). 79  Burnett, Secret Garden, 178, 179–80. 78

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friends, both human and animal; the term “procession” appears twice in the account. Later, Colin equates the “Magic” he so often thinks about with Christianity. He’d never been in church before but when he hears Dickon sing the Doxology, he surmises the “Magic” that heals him is one with the religious beliefs articulated in the song. They are “the same thing.”80 This is a religious scene though not a conventional one. The boy needs to remind Ben they are not in a church.81 Initially, as in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows in which Mole and Rat encounter the god Pan, The Secret Garden presents readers with an animal-accompanied experience of the numinous without direct connection to traditional religion. Ben’s awareness of a resemblance between Colin’s celebration of nature-Magic and church is understandable. The “the mystic circle under the plum-tree” ceremony involves belief in magic and incantations, shouts of thanksgiving and joy,82 a priest, and skylarks singing a doxology of their own.83 There is even an angel, a term applied to Dickon on more than one occasion.84 The garden is a sacred space, one that heals, one inspiring reverence and one committed to love and protection of animals. There is also a sense the ritual is only possible in the presence of the animals: Mistress Mary felt solemnly enraptured. Dickon held his rabbit in his arm, and perhaps he made some charmer’s signal no one heard, for when he sat down, cross-legged like the rest, the crow, the fox, the squirrels, and the lamb slowly drew near and made part of this circle, settling each into a place of rest as if of their own desire. ‘The “creatures” have come,’ said Colin gravely. ‘They want to help us.’85

 Burnett, Secret Garden, 201–02.  Burnett, Secret Garden, 180; cf. 199 (distinguishing the garden from a church). 82  Burnett, Secret Garden, 189, 199, 201. 83  Burnett, Secret Garden, 179, 126, 140, 201. 84  Burnett, Secret Garden, 126, 140. 85  Burnett, Secret Garden, 179. 80 81

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There is no spiritual growth without nature, including animals. No healing, no flourishing. Colin understands this and so it is the formalities of ‘worship’ do not commence until they arrive. There is an ethical undertone to the story though less overt than others considered in this chapter. Animal compassion themes occur entirely in connection with the ‘angelic’ boy Dickon, who carries with him a sense of duty toward the flora and fauna of the moor. All one needs to do to make vegetables and flowers thrive, he explains to his mother, is be friends with them because they are just like the animals: “‘If they’re thirsty give ’em a drink, and if they’re hungry give ’em a bit o’ food. They want to live same as we do. If they died I should feel as if I’d been a bad lad and somehow treated them heartless.’”86

References Adams, Richard. 1991. The Day Gone By: An Autobiography. 1990. London: Penguin. ———. 2005. Watership Down. 1972. New York: Scribner. Angell, George T. 1885–1886. Address to the Boston Public Schools. Found in the John Ptak Collection of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare Printed Education Materials 1882–1937, archive housed at NCSU Libraries. https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/mc00620-001-bx0001-002-001. Appelt, Kathi. 2008. The Underneath. With drawings by David Small. New York: Atheneum. Beers, Diane L. 2006. For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States. Athens, OH: Swallow/Ohio University Press. Berg, Maggie. 2002. ‘Hapless Dependents’: Women and Animals in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey. Studies in the Novel 34 (2): 177–197. Brontë, Anne. 2009. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 1848. Edited by Lee A. Talley. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. 2018. The Secret Garden. 1911. London: Arcturus.

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 Burnett, Secret Garden, 183–84.

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Cather, J. Leonard. 1930. Advent. Found in the John Ptak Collection of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare Printed Education Materials 1882–1937, archive housed at NCSU Libraries. https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/ mc00620-001-bx0001-003-001. Chez, Keridiana. 2015. Introduction. In Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe, ed. Keridiana Chez, 11–35. Peterborough: Broadview. Davis, Janet M. 2016. Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press. Donovan, Josephine. 2007. Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals. In The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, ed. Josephine Donovan and Carol J.  Adams, 174–197. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2016. The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Treatment of Animals. New York: Bloomsbury. Gaskell, Elizabeth. 2009. The Life of Charlottle Brontë. 1857. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobgood-Oster, Laura. 2008. Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kemmerer, Lisa. 2012. Animals and World Religions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. King, Sarah Withrow. 2016a. Animals Are Not Ours (No, Really, They’re Not): An Evangelical Animal Liberation Theology. Eugene: Cascade. ———. 2016b. Vegangelical: How Caring for Animals Can Shape Your Faith. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. King, Stephen. 2019. Pet Sematary. 1983. New York: Gallery. Lawson, Robert. 1972. Rabbit Hill. 1944. New York: Puffin. Leshko, Isa. 2019. Allowed to Grow Old: Portraits of Elderly Animals from Farm Sanctuaries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Linzey, Andrew. 2009. Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Linzey, Andrew, and Clair Linzey, eds. 2019. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics. London: Routledge. Lofting, Hugh. 2019a. Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan. 1924. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2, 317–592. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019b. Doctor Dolittle’s Circus. 1924. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2, 1–315. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019c. Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo. 1925. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 3, 1–248. New York: Aladdin.

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McHugh, Susan. 2004. Dog. London: Reaktion. Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds. 2000. Shiloh. 1991. New York: Aladdin. Niven, Charles D. 1967. History of the Humane Movement. London: Johnson. Patteson, S. Louise. 1901. Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co. Saunders, Margaret Marshall. 2015. Beautiful Joe. 1893. Edited by Keridiana Chez. Peterborough: Broadview. Schwartz, Richard H. 2001. Judaism and Vegetarianism. New rev. ed. New York: Lantern. Sewell, Anna. 2011. Black Beauty. 1877. New York: Penguin. Singer, Isaac Bashevis. 2010. The Slaugherer. 1983. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey, 153–164. Waco: Baylor University Press. Smiley, Jane. 2011. Foreword. In Anna Sewell, Black Beauty, ix–xiii. New York: Penguin. Smith, Dodie. 1989. The Hundred and One Dalmatians. 1956. Illustrations by Michael Dooling. New York: Puffin. Unferth, Deb Olin. 2020. Barn 8. Minneapolis: Graywolf. Wilcox, Ella Wheeler. 1905. Who Seeks Salvation. Found in the John Ptak Collection of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare Printed Education Materials 1882–1937, archive housed at NCSU Libraries. https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/ collections/catalog/mc00620-001-hb0002-012-001.

7 The Mark of Cain: Human Hunters and Animal Predators

It would happen [when I was growing up in my home town of Oxford] as simply as this: sitting, reflecting on the bank of a river or in a wood or in a field, my mind would focus on some natural object and gently a profound sense of well-being would well up within me. An all-pervading sense of the infinite goodness of God the Creator within all living things. … Our cruel, harsh and exploitative attitude to nature, and animals in particular, stems from spiritual blindness. We do not see that the lives of other living creatures have value and worth beyond our narrow anthropocentric horizons. The truth is that our concept of God is still dreadfully narrow. We have failed to connect, to perceive the significances of other worlds, and to feel their pain. We have lost what D. H. Lawrence once called ‘the sixth sense of wonder.’ … The Spirit which animates all life is also the source of all goodness, beauty and creativity not least in poetry, literature, art, music and thinking. What I once thought was a personal, localised set of experiences in my home town is

Excerpt from Glimpses of God, ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok (London: Duckworth, 1994), 21, 22–23. Used with the author’s permission. Prof. Linzey served as a member of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford for 28 years. Among his many publications is Animal Theology (London: SCM / Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994), and Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). © The Author(s) 2020 M. J. Gilmour, Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare, The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9_7

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what I have now come to see as the experience open and real to all in every truly creative human experience. ‘Whatever we create, however truly it reflects our creation, is always invested with something more powerful than the selves which have produced it,’ wrote Laurens van der Post. ‘The power and the glory is at our service, but never of our invention.’ —Andrew Linzey, director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s fictional children are not the only ones to discover a secret garden. The people of Fantippo think fire-breathing dragons inhabit the island called No Man’s Land. As the legend goes, some spell turned the mother-in-law of a long-ago king into one and after banishment to the island, she had offspring. Now, after hundreds of years, the island is full of dragons. No humans dare visit the place. Doctor Dolittle is not just any human, of course, and compelled by curiosity, he and his dog Jip decide to swim to No Man’s Land, which is not too far offshore. But the currents prove too strong, and when close to drowning suddenly, from underneath, a large creature rises out of the water and carries them the rest the way. That creature, a piffilosaurus, shows the Doctor and Jip around the island and explains its unique situation. The story reflects unease with humanity’s proclivity to destroy habitats and harass wildlife. This human-free island is an animal heaven on earth. Doctor Dolittle is the first human visitor to the island in a thousand years, and so also the first to see a piffilosaurus for a long time. Naturalists thought them long extinct. The secret to their preservation lies in their refuge away from human encroachment: “We didn’t want the locals to see us,” said the strange beast. “They think we are dragons––and we let them go on thinking it. Because then they don’t come near the island and we have our country to ourselves. … They think we live on men and breathe fire! But all we ever really eat is bananas.”1

1  Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 1 (1923; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 478–79. For another story about a hidden island paradise for animals, see the chapter “The White Seal,” in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894, London: Arcturus, 2017). Witnessing the clubbing and skinning of fellow seals motivates Kotick to find a safe haven for his kind, away from hunters. When he found it, “Kotick knew by the feel of the

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The truth is, the creature explains further, this is the only part of the world where we now live, “‘where we are left––where we can live in peace.” Human interference is more than a nuisance: Whatever happens, we mustn’t be seen from the shore and have the [locals] coming here. It would be the end of us if that should ever happen, because, between ourselves, although they think us so terrible, we are really more harmless than sheep.2

What specifically the piffilosaurus has in mind––whether his species fears human hunters, destruction of their habitat, enslavement for labour, or some combination of these––is left to the imagination but their extinction would be the inevitable outcome of intrusion. This chapter of Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office, with its striking title “The Animals’ Paradise,” offers a re-enactment of Edenic peacefulness. Like the Genesis story, this island paradise is no longer accessible to people. As the biblical story goes, after God drives Adam and Eve from Eden, he places an angel waving a flaming sword to guard the way back to the tree of life (Genesis 3:24). Here, instead of a fiery sword is the lore about fiery dragons, which keeps visitors away. In addition, the high cliffs along the shore of the island hide the beautiful bowl-shaped valley behind them from view. To Jip, the island is like a plum pudding in appearance.3 The Edenic character of the island continues to emerge as the piffilosaurus shows Dolittle around. This island is entirely populated by harmless, vegetable-feeding creatures. “‘If we had the others,’” he continues, “‘of course, we wouldn’t last long.’”4 The scene recalls the first biblical creation story: “God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for water … that no men had ever come there” (109). Those that follow him to this paradise “play around him, in that sea where no man comes” (113). 2  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office, 479, 480. 3  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office, 480–81. 4  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office, 480.

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food.’ And it was so” (Genesis 1:29–30). Lofting stresses the plant-eating character of this strange world Dolittle visits: Down by the banks of the streams the Doctor was shown great herds of hippopotami, feeding on the luscious reeds that grew at the water’s edge. In the wide fields of high grass there were elephants and rhinoceri browsing. On the slopes where the forests were sparse he spied long-necked giraffes, nibbling from the trees. Monkeys and deer of all kinds were plentiful. And birds swarmed everywhere. In fact, every kind of creature that does not eat meat was there, living peaceably and happily with the others in this land where vegetable food abounded and the disturbing tread of man was never heard.

The absence of predation echoes the prophet Isaiah who writes of a kingdom of peace involving people and animals (Isaiah 11:1–9). As the lone human on the island, Doctor Dolittle is, in effect, Adam in the Garden of Eden: “out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man” (Genesis 2:19). And indeed, the animals do approach the Adam-Doctor: “he was kept busy from morning to night with all the animals who wanted to consult him about different things.”5 The capacity of stories to sketch out worlds that do not exist is part of the magic of fiction. There is an ethical impulse here too. We are not able to hide animals, to create spaces for them beyond human intrusions–– human-caused climate change, for instance, touches all living things on earth––but the ability to imagine safe places where animals flourish is an evidence of sorts that humans can do some things to ameliorate conditions for some animals. While standing on a hill with Jip and the piffilosaurus, the Doctor gazes down over the wide bowl of the island filled with its contented animals, and sighs. He then pronounces what amounts to a benediction:  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office, 481, 482.

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“This beautiful land could also have been called the ‘Animals’ Paradise,’” he murmured. “Long may they enjoy it to themselves! May this, indeed, be No Man’s Land forever!”6

Some things are in our power, Lofting seems to suggest. Some things we can do to alleviate animals’ suffering and the Adamic Doctor Dolittle, who constantly protects other species from human cruelties offers a model of kindness.

Predator-Prey Stories and Bodily Frailty Predator-prey stories serve a variety of purposes. They speak to our deep-­ seated fears, reminding us of our own bodies’ vulnerabilities. Our bodies also tear, break and bleed like those of hunted animals, and we too know what it is to be constantly wary of mortal dangers. At the same time, such stories reveal our capacity for violence, often in unsettling ways. As discussed in Chap. 3, whereas animals kill other animals for food or in selfdefence, humans do so for reasons other than survival. Humans kill for sport. They kill to excess. They are wasteful. For this reason, stories about predators and prey not only remind us of our own susceptibilities, but they also stimulate ethical reflection. The opening pages of Sara Pennypacker’s novel Pax present the powerful bond between a boy and a domesticated fox. Peter’s father insists they send Pax back into the wild, which proves to be a traumatic experience for the two friends. The novel alternates between Pax’s struggle to survive in the wilderness, and Peter’s adventures searching for his friend. Predation and the language of predation figure prominently in both their stories. The adolescent Peter recalls a key childhood event that not only lingers in memory but helps him make an important decision regarding the now-abandoned Pax. He remembers rabbits ruining his mother’s tulips and his father preparing a trap for them. Thanks to Peter’s intervention, he uses a live trap, but tragedy still occurs. The next morning, the family  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office, 481.

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finds the trap knocked over, and inside a dead baby rabbit.7 Coyotes tried to get at it and though unable to reach the body in the cage, their efforts nonetheless proved lethal. The coyotes scared the baby to death. Peter’s mother holds the rabbit’s body to her cheek, and then hands it to her son. For Peter, in that moment, his mother’s body merges with the rabbit’s: “With a single finger, Peter had traced its ears, unfurling like ferns from its face, and its paws, miraculously tiny, and the soft fur of its neck, slick with his mother’s tears.”8 Her tears are part of the boy’s tactile experience of the dead animal’s ears and fur. The significance is clear because the baby rabbit’s death foreshadows the woman’s death soon after. The prey animal’s death and the woman’s mortality are intertwined for Peter, represented by his touch of the tear-damp fur. She dies suddenly in a car accident. Pax’s mother also dies when hit by a car, leaving the kit an orphan. This is why the boy adopts him.9 The shared loss of a mother accounts in part for their close bond. The paralleling of their experiences recurs throughout. Around the time Peter remembers the episode of the rabbit trap, he recalls his profound connection with the fox: “Peter had had the strange sensation that he and Pax merged.” Boy and fox shared good times in the past but now after the father sends the animal away, both experience a profound sadness owing to their separation. Pleasure and pain marked Peter’s relationship with his mother too: “Peter had only two bad memories of his mother. He had a lot of good ones.”10 His friend Vola later speaks to Peter about the interconnectedness of things, and about nonduality, the notion of two but not two, when discussing the boy’s love for the abandoned fox.11 Peter lives with guilt about the deaths of the baby rabbit and his mother. As he sees it, the rabbit died because he was not where he should have been, namely at the trap so he could release it before the coyotes 7  Sara Pennypacker, Pax (New York: Balzer and Bray, 2016), 16–17. For another though very different story involving a mystical bond between a child and a fox, see Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee’s Maybe a Fox (New York: Atheneum, 2016). Here the fox Senna inhabits an in-between space, a real animal but one connected to the spirit world. She thus provides a shadowy connection between the girl Jules and her dead mother and sister. 8  Pennypacker, Pax, 17–18. 9  Pennypacker, Pax, 47, 48. 10  Pennypacker, Pax, 15; cf. 16. 11  Pennypacker, Pax, 186–87; cf. 243.

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arrived. He was also not with his mother when the fateful accident occurred. He was misbehaving shortly before and left at home, and so again not at the right place and the right time. Those mistakes drive the action of the story because after recalling these past failures, Peter realizes abandoning Pax in the wild was wrong. The fox depends on Peter for survival.12 This novel also suggests a similarity between prey animals’ fears and the fears humans experience. As we read about coyotes scaring a rabbit to death, we also learn something of Peter’s near-crippling anxiety, and the way Pennypacker describes it is noteworthy: “Peter’s anxiety began to stir. All day, the whole ride here, Peter had sensed it coiling. It always seemed like a snake to him, his anxiety––waiting just out of sight, ready to slither up his spine, hissing its familiar taunt.” This description repeats: “the anxiety snake struck again”; “Thinking about Pax made the old anxiety snake tighten around Peter’s chest.”13 The predator metaphor––a hunting snake––describes a dread expectation of something bad about to happen. Before separation, Pax also experiences anxiety, a foreboding of something about to go terribly wrong. The opening words of the novel are “The fox felt…,” and the first chapter confirms the animal’s fears to be warranted.14 The day the father sends Pax away, the fox “sensed the tension.”15 Animals have good reason to be anxious when people are around. So many of the threats to survival the fox characters in this novel face are human in origin (leg-hold traps, cars, even bombs during wartime). Because Peter and Pax’s struggles intertwine as they do, it is impossible to read of these foxes in a disinterested manner. If one species experiences anxiety and distress, they all do. The bodies of a baby rabbit and a human mother break. A fox and a boy experience emotional

 Pennypacker, Pax, 18, 48; on Pax’s dependence, e.g., 74–75.  Pennypacker, Pax, 14, 18, 49, 190. On the coyotes scaring the rabbit to death, see 17. Coyotes are a threat again late in the story, when they attack Pax and his new family (255–57, 263–65, 272–73). This time Peter redeems himself, being in the right place at the right time, and able to fight them off. 14  Pennypacker, Pax, 1–7. The quote is from p. 1. Italics original. On Pax’s behavior when “anxious,” see 26. 15  Pennypacker, Pax, 108. 12 13

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traumas in parallel. Animals experience physical pain and psychological distress just as we do and stories reminding us of this invite empathy. Anthropomorphized animals in literature resemble us to a degree and when they experience pain or fear, we recognize it. When this is the case, accounts of human violence against other animals are all the more disturbing––it is as if we ourselves are under attack, experiencing something of the horrors described. Richard Adams stresses the fragility of the animal body (and because of anthropomorphism, something of our own) in Watership Down, and he lingers over the injuries inflicted on a rabbit by a snare: Bigwig was lying on his side, his back legs kicking and struggling. A length of twisted copper [snare] wire, gleaming dully in the first sunlight, was looped round his neck and ran taut across one forepaw to the head of a stout peg driven into the ground. The running knot had pulled tight and was buried in the fur behind his ear. The projecting point of one strand had lacerated his neck and drops of blood, dark and red as yew berries, welled one by one down his shoulder. For a few moments he lay panting, his side heaving in exhaustion. Then again began the struggling and fighting, backward and forward, jerking and falling, until he choked and lay quiet.16

I say Adams lingers over the rabbit’s injuries not only because the specific scene involving the snare is nine pages long, but also because he reminds readers of the episode later. Bigwig survives but there are occasional references to his past injuries, and he is more vulnerable to predators as a result: “The snare had left him weak and overwrought”; “They were all on edge … . Bigwig and Buckthorn smelled of blood.”17 The same is true of Hazel who recovers after a farmer shoots him. He carries the consequences of his wounds for the rest of his life. Adams does not let readers forget the suffering resulting from human attacks on animals, whether by traps or guns. The book includes graphic language of the rabbits’ injuries (struggling, lacerated, blood, etc.) and describes the frantic, panicked struggles of their friends to help. The stories also emphasize the power 16  Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972; New  York: Scribner, 2005), 110. For the full scene involving the snare, and the group’s reaction to it, see 110–18. 17  Adams, Watership Down 123, 125.

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difference between human hunters (explosives, guns, metal wire) and the fragile rabbits’ bodies, and even the deceptions humans employ. The rabbits of one warren lose their wildness because a man feeds them as a way to keep them close by, even shooting animal predators to lull the rabbits into a false sense of security. It is ultimately a trap because he sets snares to keep himself in meat and fur. Adams stresses the humanness of this elaborate scheme: a snare wire fastened to a “man-smelling peg”; “the man would come soon. Perhaps he was already coming, with his gun, to take poor Bigwig away.” As Fiver put it, that whole man-manipulated warren is a “death hole,” snares everywhere, every day.18 To read of broken animal bodies is to remember we too are creatures of flesh and blood. Recognition of a shared creatureliness with an assaulted animal, that their bodies and longings and dreads are in some respects like our own, invites ethical engagement. Predation stories push for a perspectival shift. We are able to empathize with bleeding rabbits because we also bleed.

 elebrating and Lamenting Predation: C A Brief Excursus Henry David Thoreau famously looked to the natural world as a healing balm. “Our village would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness,” he insists.19 As a transcendentalist, nature is not something to dread or fear, a fallen space needing to be civilized, but rather an antidote to corruption. Consequently, he views predation and the cycles of life and death differently than those claiming the world needs redemption. Instead, proximity to these cycles is revelatory and restorative: “We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us and deriving health and strength from repast.” A goodness for one animal (health and strength for  Adams, Watership Down, 112, 113, 115.  Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016), 317.

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the bird) lies in the death of another. The alert human observer also has something to gain, which he explains by way of a short anecdote: “There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this.” Thoreau offers an enthusiastic acceptance and embrace of natural violence. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp,––tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes in has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped.20

Thoreau thus rejects any archetypical paradise lost (literary or religious), the tendency in so many authors to look askance at the wolf ’s capture of the fawn. There is no poison involved when the robin eats the worm. As John Updike observes with reference to this passage, whereas Tennyson’s vision of “Nature red in tooth and claw” desolated him and other Victorian Christians, Thoreau not only accepts but rejoices in it.21 For many other writers, as Updike indicates, predation is an evil. Nature is violent but this violence is hardly something to celebrate, and even less something to imitate. C. S. Lewis, for one, suggests, “We find ourselves in a world of transporting pleasures, ravishing beauties, and tantalising possibilities, but all constantly being destroyed, all coming to nothing. Nature has all the air of a good thing spoiled.”22 Lewis grapples here with classic theodicy. If God created a good world, how do we  Thoreau, Walden, 318.  John Updike, “Introduction,” in Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016), xxi. 22  C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (1947; New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 410. His most substantial work on this topic is the chapter on animals in The Problem of Pain (1940). 20 21

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account for nature’s destructiveness? Is nature fallen in some sense, and if so, how to explain it?23 Theologians, however, are hardly alone in their curiosity about nature red in tooth and claw, and their efforts to reconcile nature’s supposed goodness with its unceasing bloodshed and waste. In Lewis’s own fiction, to illustrate, he attempts to account for animal suffering as the consequence of evil invading what is otherwise good, an echo of the serpent entering the Garden of Eden. In his science fiction novel Perelandra (1943), the demon-possessed scientist Weston arrives to a newly created world and inflicts gratuitous pain on the innocent species living there. The story’s hero Ransom finds him stripping the feathers off birds on one occasion: “A bird, already half plucked and with beak wide open in the soundless yell of strangulation, was feebly struggling in its [Weston’s/the Un-man’s] long clever hands.”24 He also gouges the flesh of small frog-like reptiles, leaving them alive during this senseless mutilation so they suffer longer.25 The situation is similar in the children’s story The Magician’s Nephew (1955). What Aslan the lion creates, including all the animals in Narnia, is good, but he warns of mischief to come through the activities of an evil witch. Like Weston, she too comes from the outside, from another world entirely. The presence of this evil is a threat to animals, and Aslan charges the human rulers of Narnia to protect them when evil comes. The witch’s act of throwing a metal bar at Aslan the lion is the first of many evils against animals to come.26 Whether or not this approach is theologically sound, it illustrates a storyteller’s engagement with the enormous challenge of violence in nature.27 Predation, for Lewis, is an evil, and unlike Thoreau’s position, not something to celebrate.  For discussion of some of the theological issues raised by natural violence, see e.g., David L.  Clough, On Animals, vol. 1, Systematic Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), esp. 121–24, 158–61; Christopher Southgate, The Groaning Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008); and Ryan Patrick McLaughlin, “How Good is Nature? The Fall, Evolution, and Predation,” in The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey (London: Routledge, 2019), 327–36. 24  C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943; London: HarperCollins, 2005), 166; cf. 158, 190. 25  Lewis, Perelandra, 131–34. 26  C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 164 (protect); 127 (witch throws bar at Aslan). 27  For assessment of Lewis’s views, see e.g., Andrew Linzey’s “C. S. Lewis’s Theology of Animals,” Anglican Theological Review 80.1 (1998): 60–81.

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Selective Empathy Consistent empathy is a challenge and examples of selective welfare abound. In one of the delightful James Herriot stories, to illustrate, the good veterinarian laments abandoning his beef and Yorkshire pudding during Sunday lunch after receiving a call from a concerned farmer, but admits it i secures a meal instead s unavoidable: “I could picture only too easily the injured animal [a cow] plunging around in her agony, perhaps compounding the [leg] fracture.” He then says to his wife, “‘the man sounds desperate. I’ve just got to go.’”28 He eats one but treats another. Predation stories, as seen, often do the same as writers lead us to cheer for one side over another. What artistic purposes are served by telling the story of the hungry raptor bird whose hunting prowess secures a meal instead of one about the mouse fortunate enough to evade capture? As suggested, predation stories often reveal deep-seated anxieties and longings, reveal our own vulnerabilities and fragility, as well as our own need to consume. There is in such literature, however, a deep divide separating those viewing natural violence positively, as the way the world is (e.g., Thoreau), and others considering it an evil (e.g., Lewis). There are tendencies, often culturally reinforced tendencies toward the demonization of certain species, and the valorization of others, with snakes, sharks, and spiders evoking a different range of emotions and associations than deer, doves, and dolphins. Storytellers often defy expectations, challenging readers’ reflexive affinities or antipathies. Individual species become whatever writers want them to be; they are in this sense completely malleable. Mice are not necessarily unwanted vermin. Snakes are not necessarily ‘evil.’ While following the adventures of rabbits in Richard Adams’s Watership Down, foxes naturally take on a menacing aspect, but in Adams’s The Plague Dogs, it is a fox (“the tod”) who befriends the domestic dogs at the center of the story and helps them survive. Maggots tend to repel most people, but Hugh Lofting has readers rooting for one in Doctor Dolittle’s Puddleby Adventures. This malleability, this ability to make heroes of, and generate sympathy for even the most unlikeable of creatures serves the ethical agenda by challenging an inclination to privilege some animals over others when it  James Herriot, The Lord God Made Them All (1981; London: Pan, 1982), 13–14.

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comes to welfare and environmental concern. Biases tend to creep into discourses about animal wellbeing. The efforts and resources directed toward domestic animals (especially cats, dogs, horses) tend to be greater than those directed at wildlife rescues. The discourses about wildlife incline toward selectivity as well. For all kinds of reasons, we hear more, perhaps even care more about the struggles of polar bears owing to climate change, or the decline in elephant populations because of poaching than stresses facing other species. Some appear grander or are somehow woven into cultural memory and identity (e.g., polar bears and northern indigenous communities). Some are just cuter than others. At the same time, prejudices and biases also mask cruelties. It is easier to ignore the suffering caused by shark-finning if we consider these creatures ruthless killers. It is easier to ignore pigs, cattle, chickens and more in the food chain if we think them dirty and stupid. Animal literature often undermines such stereotypes, subtly exposing our tendency to marginalize certain species. By granting them subjectivity, by allowing them to tell their own story, by allowing us to see the world from their point of view and appreciate different kinds of beauty, authors create an imaginative space for moral reconsideration. The wide and diverse canon of animal literature teaches us that all species matter. For some, predation in nature provides justification for their own violence toward animals. If a wolf kills a deer, it is appropriate we do the same. But this is an odd line of reasoning and vulnerable to criticism. We insist, on the one hand, we are the rational species and yet defend carnivorous diets by appealing to our ‘animal’ nature. In addition, animals eat what they need to survive but people often eat far more than that. Elizabeth Costello suggests human cultures even introduced religion as a way to justify animal sacrifice, and in turn, consumption of those animals even though they had an innate sense such behavior was wrong: “‘Perhaps we invented gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It’s not our fault, it’s theirs. We’re just their children.’”29

29  J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 41; Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (1999; London: Vintage, 2004), 86.

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Stories have tremendous capacity to break down prejudices against particular animals or species by attributing endearing personalities to them. In this way, they critique usual measures by which people assign worth. Farley Mowat’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be illustrates this ability to spark love for the unlovely in his contrast of two very different dogs. After moving from Ontario to Saskatchewan in the late 1920s, the author’s father wants to take up hunting. He buys almost everything he needs–– shotgun, shooting coat, ammunition, a copy of the Saskatchewan Game Laws, and a handbook on shotgun hunting. All he lacks is a hunting dog. In time, he arrives home with one in tow. His name is Crown Prince Challenge Indefatigable, a field-trained purebred Irish setter, and winner of various cups and ribbons. The dog costs $200. But the Crown Prince does not impress his wife and son (too much drool, too large, too expensive) and the father reluctantly returns him the next day.30 Not long afterwards, a boy from a nearby farm arrives with a wicker basket holding some small ducks and a puppy, all of them for sale. Ducks are more expensive at 10 cents each, the dog 5 cents, and then reduced to 4 cents: “‘He was kind of an accident, you might say. I guess somebody dumped him out of a car right by our gate. I brung him with me in case. But dogs is hard to sell.’” Seeing an opportunity to forestall an inappropriate and expensive purchase by her husband, the woman buys the puppy who in every way contrasts with the pricey Crown Prince Challenge Indefatigable: “‘Isn’t he lovely, darling?’ she asked sweetly. ‘And so cheap. Do you know, I’ve actually saved you a hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-six cents.’”31 Instead of a purebred Irish Setter, this one is a bit of a mystery with no way “to deduce what [this dog’s] ancestry might have been,” and indeed, in most respects he “was very far from any known breed.” Instead of an elaborate pedigree name like that of the Irish setter, the boy names him Mutt.32 The list of unlikely but beloved literary animals is long and varied. On the opening page of Fred Gipson’s frontier novel Old Yeller (1956), the narrator Travis wants to kill the stray who wanders into the log cabin on Birdsong Creek but later says of the heroic  Farley Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (1957; Toronto: Scholastic, 2006), 11–12.  Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 5, 13. Italics original. 32  Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 14, 17. 30 31

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dog, “when I had to kill him, it was like having to shoot some of my own folks. That’s how much I’d come to think of the big yeller dog.”33 The dog Beautiful Joe, as seen, is another well-known, beloved but unlikely literary hero. Affection for even the most frightful, monstrous creatures of the imagination is possible too. Readers feel sympathy for a suffering dragon–– actually a boy turned into a dragon––in C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ (1952), and for Buckbeak, or Witherwings, the hippogriff who lives with Hagrid in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999). There are even stories of bonds formed with insects, as in A. A. Milne’s poem “Forgiven” about a young boy’s concern for a beetle accidently let loose from a matchbox: “[Nanny] said that she was sorry, but it’s difficult to catch / An excited sort of beetle you’ve mistaken for a match.” When the boy finds Alexander Beetle, the insect has an apologetic look, “as if he thought he ought to say: / ‘I’m very, very sorry that I tried to run away.’”34 Indeed, it is surprising how often insects figure in compassion-inclined writing. A respected kindergarten teacher gently persuades a young Richard Adams’s away from cruelty to them: At one time, while I was in the kindergarten, I began, at home, to make a sort of ‘collection’ of butterflies … . I simply caught the butterflies[,] … killed them by pinching off their antennae and heads, and put them loose, all together, in a cardboard shoe-box. One day, when Miss Langdon came to tea, I showed them to her. Without actually saying an unkind word, she succeeded so well in conveying her pity and revulsion that I then and there gave up, and never killed another butterfly.35

This change of heart is not entirely unexpected. Earlier he describes his “distress” over the wellbeing of grasshoppers when trying to move them into a different field.36 One bully, cruel to animals, pulls wings of flies in

 Fred Gipson, Old Yeller (New York: Scholastic, 1956), 1.  A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six (1927; New York: Dell, 1979), 51, 52. There are various stories about insects in the Lofting novels. See especially the second part of Doctor Dolittle’s Garden (1927). 35  Adams, Day Gone By, 95. 36  Adams, Day Gone By, 56 cf. 54. 33 34

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Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty.37 In Elizabeth Charlotte’s Kindness to Animals: or, The Sin of Cruelty Exposed and Rebuked we find a similar lesson, along with concern for the treatment of cats, birds, and mice: “I grieve to remember that this war between us and the smaller animals, and between them and each other, comes from our rebellion against God.” This book’s call for gentleness extends to insects as well: “Does any boy’s conscience smite him at my naming the insects? I hope not. I hope you have not been tempted by Satan to do any harm to the little harmless, often useful, creatures that cross your path.”38 The most striking example of a story urging compassion to insects in more recent literature is Hey, Little Ant, with its touching first-person pleading, “Please, oh please, do not squish me.”39 This potential to feel sympathy, even empathy for and obligation toward unlovely beings relates to Anat Pick’s idea of a creaturely poetics with its emphasis on the logic of flesh. Living bodies, all living bodies, are material, temporal and vulnerable, and attention to the bodily (a concept she draws from the work of Simone Weil) has implications for ethics and offers an alternative to abstract theorizing about rights. Attention is antiphilosophical; it does not produce arguments or truth claims about its object. Vulnerability as an object of attention does not yield a moral “reading.” I am interested instead in the ramifications (for thought and also for action) of being oriented toward vulnerability as a universal mode of exposure. … Reading through a creaturely prism consigns culture to contexts that are not exclusively human, contexts beyond an anthropocentric perspective.40

Pick’s creaturely ethics “does not depend on fulfilling any preliminary criteria of subjectivity and personhood. Its source lies in the recognition of the materiality and vulnerability of all living bodies, whether human  Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (1877; New York: Penguin, 2011), 49–51.  Elizabeth Charlotte, Kindness to Animals: or, The Sin of Cruelty Exposed and Rebuked (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1845), 12, 45, 101. 39  Phillip Hoose and Hannah Hoose, Hey, Little Ant, with illustrations by Debbie Tilley (Berkeley: Tricycle, 1998), 4. 40  Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 5. 37 38

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or not, and in the absolute primacy of obligations over rights. A creaturely ethics, which recognizes in animals an exemplary case of worldly suffering, does not ask, What are the limits of rights? but, What are the limits of attention?”41 Pick’s approach goes some way toward explaining why it is stories of vulnerable dragons, hippogriffs, and stray dogs resonate with readers. We know what it is to experience fear, pain, hunger, thirst, and loneliness. We know what it is to be unlovely. Our own creatureliness provides the basis for empathy with other bodied, literary characters however fantastic they may be. We are able to imagine what the ‘endragoned’ Eustace feels when a tight gold band cuts into his arm, or something of what Buckbeak endures when chained and unable to fly free. As an ill-treated dog aboard a ship puts it, the cabin boy Snooky endured “a good deal of kicking and cuffing” from the mean captain, “And this made him extra sympathetic with me.”42 Stories touching on predator-prey contests vary in perspective, of course, depending on where the author wants readers to direct their sympathies. To illustrate, various stories present foxes as victims of cruel hunts using dogs, as in Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle’s Circus (1924) in which the titular character is at pains to save some. E. B. White, on the other hand, demonizes a fox in his story about trumpeter swans: The fox had been attracted to the pond by the sound of splashing water. He hoped he would find a goose. Now he sniffed the air and smelled the swan. Her back was turned, so he began creeping slowly toward her. She would be too big for him to carry, but he decided he would kill her anyway and get a taste of blood.43

White’s language stresses the potential violence (i.e., use of the terms kill and blood), which sways readers to view the animal as villainous. This imposes an ethical evaluation. The intended killing is ultimately  Pick, Creaturely Poetics, 193.  Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Puddleby Adventures, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 3 (1952; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 265. 43  E. B. White, The Trumpet of the Swan, illustrated by Edward Frascino (New York: Scholastic, 1970), 21 (picture and text). 41 42

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gratuitous because the fox is unable to take and eat the bird. A mere “taste” of her blood hardly justifies (within the world of the story) the loss of a beautiful bird, the ruin of newly laid eggs, and the cob’s distress at losing his wife. Edward Frascino’s drawing on the same page reinforces this, depicting the lurking fox with an unmistakably menacing look on his face. In another use of provocative language in the near context, the adult swans select the location for nest building carefully, wary of the approach of some coyote or skunk “with murder in his heart.”44 The episode with the fox also illustrates a further category of inconsistency common in animal stories, namely the selectivity of human intervention. More often than not, especially in children’s stories, the stress falls on prey animals’ vulnerability as opposed to the needs of hungry predators. Human intervention is usually framed as a kindness, involving the rescue of the defenseless but this is obviously selective. Louis the swan’s verbose father Cygnus Buccinator complains about human boys’ predilection for throwing sticks and stones at birds when he first sees Sam Beaver sitting on a log near his wife’s nest. This is obviously something bad boys do from his point of view, but Sam Beaver, he soon discovers, is not one of them. Sam admires the swans, and simply observes them. However, “Just as the fox was about to spring and sink his teeth into the [mother] swan’s neck, a stick came hurtling through the air. It struck the fox full on the nose, and he turned and ran away.”45 Throwing sticks at some animals is clearly wrong, throwing sticks at others is not. This lesson is clear from the gratitude Sam enjoys from the birds. The swans celebrate his quick thinking and befriend him.

44  White, Trumpet of the Swan, 12. Hugh Lofting writes of a domestic cat attacking a parrot for no apparent reason. A canary relates the story to Doctor Dolittle, saying the cat “‘just wanted to kill–– to kill for the fun of killing’” (Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 2 [1924; New York: Aladdin, 2019], 339). Dolittle finds predation in the animal world troubling. On this occasion, he admits as much to the canary: “‘They’re funny creatures …. There’s no gainsaying that. And their curious habit of killing even when they’re not hungry is very hard to explain’” (340; cf. 435–36 for a similar story involving birds worried about a cat). 45  White, Trumpet of the Swan, 22. The bad behavior of boys is a frequent theme in welfare-oriented stories. Ginger decides boys are enemies of her species because they often throw rocks at horses to make them run (Sewell, Black Beauty, 23–24). Before meeting Guy, the cat Pussy Meow supposes “all boys were rude and cruel” (S.  Louise Patteson’s Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat [Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1901], 28).

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On other occasions, stories with focus on a particular species aim at deep-seated fears or revulsions that attach to them. Jacqueline Pearce’s The Truth About Rats (and Dogs) juxtaposes a boy’s caring relationship with a rat he meets in an animal shelter with his mother’s fears about them. She screams in warning after seeing one near her garbage cans: “‘Don’t get too close. … Rats carry disease, and they can bite.’”46 Melissa Hart’s Avenging the Owl is also a story confronting biases against a particular species. A social worker assigns the boy Solo to a volunteer position at the Raptor Rescue Center. It is the consequence he faces for avenging the murder, as he puts it, “of the only thing that mattered” to him.47 An owl killed Solo’s beloved kitten, and sorrow and anger boil over into bad behavior and hatred for birds of prey. “‘Owls equal death,’” he mutters to Minerva, who works at the raptor rescue organization; Solo struggles to come to terms with the fact that his “kitten was dead.”48 The key lesson of the book comes from Minerva: “‘Life feeds on life, Solo. Get used to it,’” and it is a lesson the boy recalls later on: “I heard Minerva’s voice. Life feeds on life. Get used to it.”49 As seen, there is concern about predation in Sara Pennypacker’s children’s novel Pax as well, and again from different perspectives. Peter’s lingering guilt for not protecting the trapped rabbit from predators leads him to consider his pet fox’s plight. He realizes too late he should have “set the rabbit free,” and also that leaving Pax on the side of the road “hadn’t been the right thing to do.”50 Foxes are both predators and prey in this story. They kill for food,51 but also live in fear of human aggression. The fear of humans is most evident in the vixen Bristle, who only  Jacqueline Pearce, The Truth About Rats (and Dogs) (Victoria, British Columbia: Orca, 2006), 6. For similar reaction to rats and mice, see Lever, Me Cheeta, 232–33. Regarding our fear and dread of certain animals more generally, see e.g., Tom Regan, “Introduction,” in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 2–3. 47  Melissa Hart, Avenging the Owl (New York: Sky Pony, 2016), 1, 2. 48  Hart, Avenging the Owl, 16, 17. 49  Hart, Avenging the Owl, 20, 173. 50  Pennypacker, Pax, 18. An abandoned companion animal is also the subject of Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath (with drawings by David Small [New York: Atheneum, 2008]), which opens with the line, “There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road” (1; cf. 31). 51  Pennypacker, Pax, e.g., 37. 46

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r­ eluctantly befriends Pax. She is wary of Pax because he smells of humans, a smell she associates with the pain and death caused by human traps: “steel, but with jaws and clamps instead of bars. The steel jaws and the snowy ground were smeared with blood”; “a cold, howling wind; a mated pair of foxes in great distress; a cage of steel clamps; blood staining snow. And then, abruptly, nothing”; “blood on the snow and cold steel jaws.” Pax discovers the horrific memory concerns her parents. Her mother was caught in a leg-hold trap and her father tried to rescue her. A human clubbed both of them to death while Bristle and her younger brother watched.52 For readers disconcerted by predation, Pax is initially an ideal character. He is a fox raised by humans and so does not prey on living animals. He is unused to living flesh and unable to eat so much as a worm.53 He is, in effect, a ‘lion lying with a lamb’ when abandoned in the forest by his keepers. Of course, this is not sustainable and after days without food, he is close to dying. He tries to eat rancid, maggot covered carrion but cannot stomach it. He then tries chewing sprouts of clover (‘lion eating straw’) but this too is no solution: “the clover would not sustain him.”54 Pax only survives because Runt, another fox, brings him eggs. Later, when trying to feed himself and his ailing friend Gray, his attempts to hunt prove futile.55 Only gradually does he learn the skill under Bristle’s tutelage, first catching and eating mice, and in time a muskrat.56 Pennypacker’s fox is kind but the author deftly reminds readers biological realities are inescapable.

 Pennypacker, Pax, 42, 66, 86, 90–93.  Pennypacker, Pax, 112. 54  Pennypacker, Pax, 109. 55  Pennypacker, Pax, 107–113, 152–53, cf. 206. 56  Pennypacker, Pax, 233, 253. 52 53

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 uman Predators: Dominion, Bloodlust, H and Greed Stephen Crane’s short story “The Snake” relates a battle between a man out walking with his dog and a rattle snake, and unlike other stories––say those pitting guns against migrating birds––the two sides are well matched: “The man and the snake confronted each other. In the man’s eyes were hatred and fear. In the snake’s eyes were hatred and fear. These enemies maneuvered, each preparing to kill. It was to be a battle without mercy.”57 The story also has an epic quality to it, as it tells of more than these two alone fighting to the death. The man’s wild strength and terror is that of “his ancestors, of his race, of his kind. A deadly repulsion had been handed from man to man”; and again, “the man went sheer raving mad from the emotions of his forefathers and from his own.” For the snake too, the encounter is emblematic of the species as a whole. “To be born a snake is to be thrust into a place aswarm with formidable foes,” we read, before Crane transitions to this particular representative of the species: “As for this snake in the pathway.…” The battle between them is representative of the battle between humanity and nature across time, “a war that had begun evidently when first there were men and snakes.”58 Human dominion ultimately asserts itself. The natural world is an enemy to be overcome in this view. When first he hears the snake’s whistling rattle, the reaction of the man and his domesticated dog are the same: “Like the fingers of a sudden death, this sound seemed to touch the man at the nape of the neck. … The dog too––the same icy hand was laid upon him, and he stood crouched and quivering.” Significantly, the dog plays a passive role. He does not fight the snake. Instead, he “walked tranquilly meditative, at his master’s heels” at the start of the story, and after the killing of the snake, again “walked, tranquilly meditative, at his master’s heels.”59 The dog represents the subjugated, subservient, domesticated, dominated animal, in contrast to the  Stephen Crane, “The Snake,” in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 20. 58  Crane, “The Snake,” 20, 21. Italics added. 59  Crane, “The Snake,” 19–20, 22. 57

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snake’s refusal to back down to the man. The snake “had no knowledge of paths,” which is perhaps a subtle reference to humanity’s (attempted) subjugation of the whole natural world, nor is he willing to give way when this person intrudes: “he had no wit to tell him to slink noiselessly into the bushes. He knew that his implacable enemies were approaching; no doubt they were seeking him, hunting him.”60 From the snake’s point of view, it is a kill-or-be-killed situation. Once the man kills the snake, his bravado suggests a degree of senselessness to the battle waged. Nowhere does the man consider retreating from the snake, leaving the path, and avoiding the fight, and when he does kill it, he gives a grin of victory and says to Rover the dog, “‘we’ll carry Mr. Snake home to show the girls.’”61 This is the first time we hear the dog’s name, and in appears in the same sentence as that name assigned to the dead rattlesnake. Whereas Rover’s name distinguishes that dog from others of its kind, acknowledging his individuality, distinguishing him from other dogs, the dead rattler is given a species label, as though this particular snake is no different than any other. What purpose displaying that reptile’s corpse before “the girls” serves is not clear, but it hints at the individual’s masculine ego, his celebration of a conquest over untamed, un-submissive nature.

Hemingway on the Hunt As its title suggests, Ernest Hemingway’s “The Pleasures of Hunting” emphasizes what pursuing and killing animals does for the one carrying the gun. As in the case of Crane’s short story, there is no consideration of animal suffering at all. The pleasures Hemingway describes centre entirely on himself, both his body and state of mind. “I was completely happy,” he writes of this expedition. I had been quite ill and had that pleasant feeling of getting stronger each day. I was underweight, had a great appetite for meat, and could eat all I wanted without feeling stuffy. Each day I sweated out whatever we drank  Crane, “The Snake,” 20.  Crane, “The Snake,” 24.

60 61

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sitting at the fire at night, and in the heat of the day, now, I lay in the shade with a breeze in the trees and read with no obligation and no compulsion to write, happy in knowing that at four o’clock we would be starting out to hunt again.62

When pursuing his prey, hunting offers moments of “elation, the best elation of all.” Animals only have value to the extent they offer him something. He chooses not to shoot a waterbuck because it is “worthless as meat” (repeated two times) and he had already killed another with “a better head than this one carried,” one presumably better for mounting. He writes how he “admired him [a buffalo] and respected him” but closes the same sentence reporting “all the while we shot I felt that it was fixed and that we had him.”63 Whereas hunting does have spiritual connections for some cultures, Hemingway’s salute to sport hunting is entirely self-­ serving. He does not write of killing for survival but of the entertainment it offers and the satisfaction of bodily appetites. A particularly troubling scene concerns a reedbuck. Hemingway shoots but does not kill the animal. He finds the buck laying on the ground, the heart still beating. He does not have a proper hunting knife so uses a penknife to “stick him.” The gruesome task of finally killing the animal is not motivated by compassion but rather because they want the corpse for food: I felt for the heart behind the foreleg with my fingers and feeling it beating under the hide slipped the knife in but it was short and pushed the heart away. I could feel it, hot and rubbery against my fingers, and feel the knife push it, but I felt around and cut the big artery and the blood came hot against my fingers. Once bled, I started to open him, with the little knife, still showing off to Droopy [his hunting companion], and emptying him neatly took out the liver, cut away the gall, and laying the liver on a hummock of grass, put the kidneys beside it.64

 Ernest Hemingway, “The Pleasures of Hunting,” in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 92. 63  Hemingway, “Pleasures of Hunting,” 93, 90, 92. 64  Hemingway, “Pleasures of Hunting,” 91. 62

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That last remark makes it clear the animal’s experience matters not at all. A lingering death because of a hunter’s incompetence (did not kill with the shot; did not have the right equipment, just a penknife) is, in the end, a chance to show off. It continues with Droopy asking for the knife: “Now he was going to show me something.”65 In light of the title of the essay, and given the amount of space and detail Hemingway gives to this bloody process, this dismemberment of the reedbuck appears to be one of the ‘pleasures’ of hunting. In contrast, literature with an anti-hunting bias typically highlights the animal’s fear and pain. Richard Adams’s depiction of fox hunting in The Plague Dogs illustrates the point, and puts the practice in an awful light.66 In the Adams’s story, “the tod” saves the two canine protagonists many times over, so it is with horror Snitter watches from a distance as the hunt chases down his friend. He turns away at the last moment not wanting to see “the pack close in” and “the blood spurting, the tearing, thrashing and worrying.” The dogs Snitter and Rowf, along with the tod are themselves hunters, killing sheep, chickens, and ducks to survive but the contrast with the fox hunt makes the latter seem gratuitous and cruel: “the huntsman whipping his way into the turmoil and the tod’s body snatched, lifted high and knife-hacked for brush and mask before being tossed back––oh, so merrily––among the baying, tussling foxhounds.”67 Like Hemingway’s hunt, it serves no purpose.

Orwell’s Elephant George Orwell’s often-anthologized short story “Shooting an Elephant” is the first-person narrative of an English sub-divisional police officer in colonial Burma (now Myanmar). He dislikes his job and wants to leave it and is angry at the constant disrespect and mockery from the  Hemingway, “Pleasures of Hunting,” 91, with reference to a technique for gutting the animal.  Richard Adams, The Plague Dogs (1977; New York: Vintage, 2016), 388–90. Other examples of fictional critiques of fox hunting include Robert Lawson’s Rabbit Hill ([1944; New York: Puffin, 1972], 18–19) and Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle stories, as discussed elsewhere. See too Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911; London: Arcturus, 2018), 119. 67  Adams, The Plague Dogs, 390. 65 66

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anti-European Burmese. At the same time, he is sympathetic with the Burmese people, having made up his mind “imperialism was an evil thing.”68 He receives a report about an elephant rampaging through a village bazaar and a request to do something about it, so he sets off to find the animal and eventually kills it. The narrator is clear, however, the story is not directly about the elephant nor the police officer’s actions: “It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism––the real motives for which despotic governments act.”69 Even if indirectly, the story yet tells much about human attitudes toward the nonhuman. The animal in question is not a free-living elephant but rather one tamed and used for labour. He “had gone ‘must,’” and after breaking his chain and escaping, caused a great deal of damage to property in the village, in addition to killing a cow and a man.70 When the police officer finally finds the elephant, he is calm and quietly eating in a field, the rampage over. The officer-narrator then faces a dilemma. He states repeatedly he has no desire to kill the elephant: “I knew … I ought not to shoot him”; “I did not in the least want to shoot him”; “I did not want to shoot the elephant.” It would be “murder” to shoot the animal, he reflects.71 At the same time, he is clearly insecure. He refers to the growing crowds watching him and mentions more than once his aversion to others laughing at him. We learn he receives constant insults in his position, and he mentions the humiliation endured when he tripped during a football match and others laughed at him. Indeed, in the first sentence of Orwell’s story, the narrator admits “I was hated by large numbers of people.”72 He describes being a target and baited by the Burmese people, which are, significantly, hunting terms. Like the dying elephant who, despite repeated rifle shots remains “powerless to move and yet powerless to  George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” in A Collection of Essays (Orlando: Harvest, 1981), 148.  Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” 149. 70  Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” 149. 71  Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” 151, 152, 153. 72  Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” 148. When considering the possibility that the elephant could trample him, this remains a chief concern: “if anything went wrong, those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse …. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh” (154; cf. 153). 68 69

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die”73 near the end of the story, this figure of colonial authority experiences a kind of slow, lingering death, but one caused by insults and disrespect, not bullets. The desire to avoid yet more humiliating taunts forces his decision to shoot the elephant. Orwell dwells on the physical injuries caused to the elephant, which invites comparison with the man killed by the rampaging animal whose broken body he describes with similarly grim detail (“ground him into the earth”; “head sharply twisted”; “an expression of unendurable agony”). We also read how “the friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit,” a simile involving comparison of humans hunting animals with an animal hunting a man. The horrifying death of the man, however, is of little account to the narrator. This individual is “an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie.” Some Europeans later reflect how “it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie.” For his part, the narrator admits being “very glad the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant.”74 The story reveals a disturbing disregard for life, both that of the dead man and that of the elephant. The narrator is metonymic of Empire, embodying its purposeless violence against hapless individuals, and maintaining a sham semblance of control that ultimately inspires ridicule, not respect. The police officer criticizes imperialism as an insider but his indifference to life and purposeless exercise of violence on behalf of an administration he does not respect is emblematic of a vacuous, valueless institutionalism.75 Even if an unintended consequence, and quite apart from whatever “Shooting an Elephant” means with respect to English colonial violence against the Burmese people or the narrator’s psycho-social disfunctions, Orwell’s detailed description of the slow agonizing death of the elephant is likely to shape some readers’ opinions about hunting. The narrator’s  Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” 155.  Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” 150, 150–51. 75  The policeman’s repeated, ineffectual rifle shots as he tries to kill the elephant suggests the empire’s inability to subjugate others completely. 73 74

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actions are senseless––he admits in the last sentence of the story he did it simply to avoid looking a fool before the enormous watching crowd–– and reveal his incompetence. He realizes in hindsight shooting the sideways facing elephant at the earhole would have killed the animal instantly. Instead, because he incorrectly assumed the brain was further forward, his initial shots only injured the animal. He keeps firing but is unable to kill the distressed creature, and Orwell heaps description on description making clear the elephant’s distress: “legs sagging and head drooping”; “the agony of [a shot] jolt his whole body”; “the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead”; “He was dying, very slowly and in great agony”; “I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken”; “I fired my two remaining shots [from the elephant rifle] into the spot where I though his heart must be. The thick blood welled out … but still he did not die; “I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued.” Finally, the narrator leaves the scene, and learns later “it took him half an hour to die.” Even before that happens, however, some in the crowd were bringing baskets to harvest the meat. Did they wait for the animal to die first? It is not clear whether this is the case and it remains a possibility the elephant experienced additional tortures before death as people cut him to pieces. By the afternoon, they had stripped the body to the bones.76 Orwell’s prolonged description of an elephant’s death, like the Hemingway story, reminds readers a ‘clean’ kill is not always achieved. The story also disturbs by raising the spectre of blood lust. Philosopher Tom Regan makes an interesting remark about contemporary societies’ horror at cruelties among the ancients and a tendency to forget some things do not change:

 Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” 155. For another example of the lingering death of an animal denied a lethal shot, see Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath. The cruel Gar Face shoots a deer in its side––his final bullet––then runs the wounded animal down to the point of exhaustion. He eventually finds the animal lying on the ground, “Panting” with “the life running out of it,” at which point he “took his knife and finished it off” (52; cf. 213). His incompetence as a hunter is also evident when he shoots his own dog by mistake (24, 42, 105, 141, 263). His dog survives but suffers from the incident for the rest of his life.

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Today most people find the spectacle of the Roman circus all but incomprehensible. The scale of the destruction, with hundreds, sometimes thousands of wild animals slain to the delight of the spectators, with a carnival atmosphere serving as backdrop, might make us loathe to admit the rich capacity for depravity sometimes lurking in the human breast. And yet echoes of the Roman blood baths live on, in illegal dogfights and festive bullfights, for example.77

The bloodbath Orwell describes is an instance of such a carnival atmosphere. As the narrator draws closer to the elephant for the first time, an immense crowd forms, at least two thousand and growing, with “faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot.” The narrator feels the crowd willing him to pull the trigger, and again, he is afraid to resist knowing they “would laugh at me.” When it is clear the policeman will shoot the elephant, “a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats,” and when he fires the first shot, he hears a “devilish roar of glee” from them.78 There is a oneness between the crowd and the policeman, suggesting east and west, colonized and colonizer, agree on this one thing––all of them together, this enormous group representative of a wide swath of humanity are participants in a senselessly violent, cruel act against an animal. They use this particular animal’s body for labour and after death, for meat, and because of incompetence, deny him a mercifully quick death.

Laurens van der Post’s Whales The narrator in Laurens van der Post’s short story “Hunting at Sea” witnesses the brutal killing of a blue whale and the incident proves profoundly upsetting, as this killing proves to be senselessly violent and cruel, and carried out for no justifiable purpose:

77  Regan, “Introduction,” 2. Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” also appears in the anthology Regan here introduces. 78  Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” 153, 154.

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…soon the thrashing ceased and the whale floated inert on the surface. It was as if a black grave-stone had been raised on the surface of the sea as sign of the guilt of the everlasting Cain in man.79

The South African writer here offers a striking reference. Cain is the first murderer, cursed by God and left to wander the earth (Genesis 4:10–12). It is the first time the narrator witnesses the pursuit and harpooning of a whale and he immediately feels complicit in the violence, as though he too has the mark of the murderer Cain (cf. Genesis 4:15). Though initially curious about the hunt, the pursuit and harpooning of the whale lead him to see its senselessness and barbarism. For one thing, after learning that attached to a harpoon is a grenade, he reacts with revulsion at the unfairness of the hunt as modern technology means whalers’ methods involve “playing” with one of nature’s greatest sea creatures as one plays with trout on the end of a fishing hook: “Since then I have never taken kindly to the thought of either [fishing or whaling] when done for so-­ called sport.” In other times and contexts, he reflects, there is possible justification for such destruction, as in the case of hunting out of necessity: “all revulsions were redeemed by the satisfaction one felt in bringing food home to the hungry.” But no such redemption is possible in the killing of this blue whale. Artificial substitutes for the essential oils hunters of the past sought are now readily available so what, he wonders, “could justify such killing except the greed of man for money, and money, moreover, acquired in the easiest and cheapest way without regard to the consequences?”80 The narrator and witness to the hunt wavers in his admiration for the skills demonstrated by the hunting vessel’s crew, and during the relatively short time of the expedition––the span of a single day––he suddenly takes on a burden of guilt and shame for the destruction of magnificent whales. He watches it all, significantly, from the godlike vantage point of the crow’s nest. After the brutal, slow killing of the blue whale he refuses an invitation to come down to the deck. He admits a degree of  Laurens van der Post, “Hunting at Sea,” in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), 107. 80  van der Post, “Hunting at Sea,” 104, 105. 79

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culpability––he helped spot the whale’s blows, leading to the pursuit and lethal harpoon-shot––but also maintains a degree of distance from the hunters, preferring “to stay up there in the tub where I could have myself to myself.” In effect, he chooses a fringe space, apart from the violence. It is a difficult space to be, marked in the story by the physical challenge as the boat sways dangerously in the surf (“I thought my companion and I would fall out of our tub, so I hung on as hard as I could to its edges”) but also one of impotence. There was nothing the witness could do for the whales killed that day. As he puts it, while watching the death throes of the blue whale, “[I] could influence the affair as little as I could control the longing to do so.”81 Looking down from above, his bird’s eye view reveals human violence against nature. He also sees nature’s own struggle for survival. As the ship heads back to port, he watches great white sharks biting at the whale corpses. Sharks hunt these whales to survive, but humans hunt whales merely out of greed. Trailing behind the ship with its three whale corpses strapped to the side is a baby whale, “wary and nervous as it was of the sharks,” the narrator tells us, …following us at some distance, compelled because its mother was one of the whales tied to the ship’s impervious flanks. It kept us company until, forlorn and desperate, it too was lost in the final fall of night.

This baby whale is a further victim of the senseless, self-serving hunt the narrator bemoans, as well as potential prey to the sharks. The one is preventable, the other not. One possible way to view this touching detail about mother and baby is recognize how human actions add further burden to what is already nature’s struggle for survival. Baby whales must necessarily contend with sharks but the purposeless whale hunt, according to the narrator, is an avoidable harm. Humans hunt whales “without regard to the consequences,”82 and the killing of the majestic blue whale and the likely death of this baby owing to the absence of its mother is one of them. Laurens van der Post’s watcher from the crows-nest proves to be  van der Post, “Hunting at Sea,” 108, 106.  van der Post, “Hunting at Sea,” 108, 105.

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an effective literary device. Just like him, readers sensitive to animal suffering are in an uncomfortable place, seeing a world full of unfair and unjustifiable violence against the world’s creatures, and yet feeling helpless to do anything about it. Positively, the narrator tells the story, or better, he tells their story. He is witness to the avarice motivating the slaughter of a great blue whale and others during that day’s hunt. He is witness too of the forlorn baby. The act of telling such stories, of revealing the wonders of nature on the one hand and the inexplicable, and questionable motivations for destroying it on the other is not an ineffectual response because that godlike, bird’s-eye view confronts readers with the sobering consequences of their collective bloodlust and greed.

References Adams, Richard. 2016. The Plague Dogs. 1977. New York: Vintage. ———. 2005. Watership Down. 1972. New York: Scribner. Appelt, Kathi. 2008. The Underneath. With drawings by David Small. New York: Atheneum. Appelt, Kathi, and Alison McGhee. 2016. Maybe a Fox. New York: Atheneum. Burnett, Frances Hodgson. 2018. The Secret Garden. 1911. London: Arcturus. Charlotte, Elizabeth. 1845. Kindness to Animals: or, The Sin of Cruelty Exposed and Rebuked. Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union. Clough, David L. 2012. On Animals. Volume 1. Systematic Theology. London: Bloomsbury. Coetzee, J.M. 1990. The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. 1999; London: Vintage, 2004. Crane, Stephen. 2010. The Snake. 1896. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey, 19–22. Waco: Baylor University Press. Gipson, Fred. 1956. Old Yeller. New York: Scholastic. Hart, Melissa. 2016. Avenging the Owl. New York: Sky Pony. Hemingway, Ernest. 2010. The Pleasures of Hunting. 1935. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey, 89–97. Waco: Baylor University Press. Herriot, James. 1982. The Lord God Made Them All. 1981. London: Pan.

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Hoose, Phillip, and Hannah Hoose. 1998. Hey, Little Ant. Illustrated by Debbie Tilley. Berkeley: Tricycle. Kipling, Rudyard. 2017. The Jungle Book. 1894. London: Arcturus. Lawson, Robert. 1972. Rabbit Hill. 1944. New York: Puffin. Lever, James. 2009. Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood. New York: HarperCollins. Lewis, C.S. 1994. The Magician’s Nephew. 1955. New York: HarperCollins. ———. 2002. Miracles: A Preliminary Study. In The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, 297–462. New York: HarperCollins. ———. 2005. Perelandra. 1943; London: HarperCollins. Linzey, Andrew. 1994a. Animal Theology. London: SCM/Champaign: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1998. C. S. Lewis’s Theology of Animals. Anglican Theological Review 80 (1): 60–81. ———. 1994b. The Rev. Professor Andrew Linzey. In Glimpses of God, ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok, 21–23. London: Duckworth. ———. 2009. Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lofting, Hugh. 2019a. Doctor Dolittle’s Caravan. 1924. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Volume 2, 317–592. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019b. Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office. 1923. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Volume 1, 427–709. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019c. Doctor Dolittle’s Puddleby Adventures. 1952. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Volume 3, 249–512. New York: Aladdin. McLaughlin, Ryan Patrick. 2019. How Good is Nature? The Fall, Evolution, and Predation. In The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Animal Ethics, ed. Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, 327–336. London: Routledge. Milne, A.A. 1979. Now We Are Six. 1927. New York: Dell. Mowat, Farley. 2006. The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. 1957. Toronto: Scholastic. Orwell, George. 1981. Shooting an Elephant. In A Collection of Essays, 148–156. Orlando: Harvest. Patteson, S. Louise. 1901. Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co. Pearce, Jacqueline. 2006. The Truth About Rats (and Dogs). Victoria, BC: Orca. Pennypacker, Sara. 2016. Pax. New York: Balzer and Bray. Pick, Anat. 2011. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Regan, Tom. 2010. Introduction. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey, 1–18. Waco: Baylor University Press. Sewell, Anna. 2011. Black Beauty. 1877. New York: Penguin. Southgate, Christopher. 2008. The Groaning Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Thoreau, Henry D. 2016. Walden. 1854. Edited by J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Updike, John. 2016. Introduction. In Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley, ix–xxiv. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. van der Post, Laurens. 2010. Hunting at Sea. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan. Waco: Baylor University Press. White, E. B. 1970. The Trumpet of the Swan. Illustrated by Edward Frascino. New York: Scholastic.

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I remember my father reading [D. H. Lawrence’s 1923 poem “Snake”] to me as a child, and I still find it gripping. Perhaps it is the profound sense of the otherness of the snake that Lawrence conveys, or the respectful waiting in second place, or the author’s internal struggle about how humans should act towards other creatures, or the final expressed regret about getting this animal encounter wrong. I leave the poem with a heightened sense both of the strangeness and importance of fellow animal creatures. —David L. Clough, University of Chester

Among other things, the mythic origin stories of Genesis 1 through 9–– which is to say from the creation of the world through to the aftermath of Noah’s flood––tell of a degradation in human-animal relations. God brings the animals to Adam in the Garden of Eden (2:19–20) and there is no hint of violence. It does not last. A moral collapse soon follows: “The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the

Personal correspondence. David Clough is Co-Founder and Strategist for CreatureKind. His publications include On Animals, volume 1, Systematic Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), and On Animals, volume 2, Theological Ethics (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). © The Author(s) 2020 M. J. Gilmour, Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare, The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9_8

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earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (6:5–6). A divine sorrow enters the story. Judgment falls on a now-broken world in the form of a great flood, but God rescues a remnant of humans and other species: “two of every kind shall come [on the ark with you], to keep them alive” (6:20). Peace between the species lasts a short while longer because Noah takes on board “‘every kind of food that is eaten … and it shall serve as food for you and for them’” (6:21). People and animals do not yet eat one another: “‘to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food’” (1:30). When the flood waters recede, this all changes. Animals now fear and dread humankind, and humans eat them (9:1–3) and sacrifice them (8:20). The authors and compilers of the Genesis 1–11 prehistory were not scientists or historians but poets and theologians trying to make sense of the world around them and their relationship with the creator God. Through these mythic stories they try to comprehend the origin of violence and evil, counter the competing religious claims of other peoples, and grapple with their alienation from one another, evident in the stories about Cain and Abel (4:1–16) and the scattering of the tower builders (11:1–9). But what is fascinating for our purposes here is the inclusion of human-animal relations in these theological and poetic visions. The composition and compiling of these ancient stories in Genesis 1–11––originating perhaps between the tenth through fifth centuries BCE––reflects, I think, a profound sadness. These premodern storytellers were not naïve idealists nor delicate sentimentalists. They lived with animals, raised and ate them, and recognized them to be very real threats (cf. 9:5). And yet there seems to be a wistfulness in these and other biblical stories. Our actual lived experience, the world we know, is full of bloodshed and a sense of disconnection from the rest of creation, but we are yet able to imagine peaceful coexistence––between humans and animals, between animals and other animals. Imagine animals approaching Adam, that representative human, without fear (2:19–20). Imagine a cow and a bear grazing together and a child placing her hand over the adder’s den without risk of harm (Isaiah 11:6–8). Imagine ferocious animals coming to

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Jesus peacefully when he is alone in the desert. As the evangelist so simply puts it, “he was with the wild beasts” (Mark 1:13). Like the visions in Genesis and Isaiah and Mark, Hugh Lofting’s Dolittle stories reflect this longing for a utopian, violence-free world, a world in which the animals live together without predation or the “dread” of post-Edenic, post-diluvian humanity: “It was … part of the Doctor’s plan to see what could be done in getting different creatures who were born natural enemies to live together in harmony. ‘Obviously, Stubbins,’ said he, ‘we can’t expect foxes to give up their taste for spring chickens, or dogs their love of ratting, all in a moment. My hope is that by getting them to agree to live peaceably together while within my zoo, we will tend toward a better understanding among them permanently.’”1 There are often musings about a world free of bloodshed in the Lofting novels. Though not theological in orientation, there is a sadness in these books akin to that suggested by the authors of Genesis, Isaiah, and Mark: “it was surprising how, when the danger of pursuit by their natural enemies was removed, all the different sorts of animals took up a new, freer, and more open kind of life. For instance, it was no unusual thing in Animal Town [located in the Doctor’s zoo] to see a mother squirrel lolling on her veranda, surrounded by her children, while a couple of terriers walked down the street within a yard of them.”2 The language here, with its inclusion of species usually hostile to one another and the mention of “children,” is vaguely reminiscent of Isaiah 11. Storytellers, ancient and modern, reflect a sadness about disharmonies between humans and other animals, but simultaneously possess a capacity to explore alternatives. What is within our control? That is the question welfarist writers and readers ask. Not all pain, not all bloodshed in the world is inevitable or necessary. Of course biological and evolutionary realities exist but what is within our power to change? Storytellers reveal the harms we cause, at times reprimanding us and urging us to stay the hand, as if to say that in a violent world, this much at least we can do.

1  Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 3 (1925; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 44. 2  Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, 42.

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Richard W. Bulliet’s historical analysis of human-animal relationships identifies four stages of development he terms separation, when hominid ancestors started distinguishing themselves from other animals; predomestic, which involved new kinds of social, aesthetic, and spiritual developments based on their interactions with other animals; domestic, a time when daily contact with farmed animals were a prominent part of communities’ social, economic, and intellectual life; and postdomesticity, referring to societies still dependent on animals but largely separated from them.3 The transition from domestic to postdomestic conditions in highly-industrialized and technologically-developed societies is not without consequence. For most, there is an enormous physical and psychological gap between them and the animals on which they depend, and they “experience feelings of guilt, shame, and disgust when they think (as seldom as possible) about the industrial processes by which domestic animals are rendered into products and about how those products come to market.” In addition, those who are “guilt-ridden” about these productive animals “feel a corresponding yearning to reconnect with the wild animals that our human ways are rapidly driving into extinction.”4 It seems reasonable to suggest animal fiction gives some expression to this feeling of guilt and alienation Bulliet describes, and perhaps offers relief by reconnecting us, after a fashion, to nature. Mourning is commonplace in animal stories. Humans grow to admire and bond with nonhumans, but often face separations. The loss or death of a companion animal, the fleeting encounter with a free roaming deer or bird––so often the stirring of admiration or affection for another species ends abruptly. The absence of animals from our lives takes many forms. Most animals have shorter lifespans than people. Large-scale farm operations usually keep animals out of sight. A pig looks at us through the airholes in a transport trailer bound for the slaughterhouse––we return only a split-second gaze as the truck speeds past, and then she is gone. Species move further away owing to our encroachments on habitats, or disappear entirely because of extinctions caused by pollution, 3  Richard W.  Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 34–35, and throughout. 4  Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers, 3, 35. On this idea of postdomesticity and guilt, see too pp. 14–15, 18–19.

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overfishing, poaching, and climate change. Zoos close at the end of the day. Laboratories animals are off limits––Authorized Personnel only, as the sign reads in The Plague Dogs. Many forms of human-animal activities are illegal (exotic pet trade, dog and cockfighting) and so clandestine. Out of sight, out of our lives, in one way or another. Animal literature matters because it recognizes such absences and mourning. We need Charlotte’s Web to remind us that behind the terrified stares in the passing trucks are sentient beings whose lives have value. We also need animal literature to disrupt our habitual narcissistic, species-specific self-interest.

 he Erasure of Animals and the Inn-Hospitality T of Luke 2:6–14: A Brief Excursus A little imagination helps when reading Luke’s birth narrative in which animals are at once present and absent. He mentions the manger three times (2:7, 12, 16; cf. 13:15) but leaves it empty save for the holy family and visiting shepherds. There is no mention of animals. Not so the many and varied adaptations of the scene, from Rembrandt’s paintings to A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965). Most part ways with Luke (a nod to Isaiah 1:3?), allowing the animals back into the crèche. “Snoopy, you’ll have to be all the animals in our play,” demands Lucy. The “cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,” as the nineteenth-century hymn goes. Luke’s famous story of inhospitality to the newborn is itself inhospitable to animal witnesses of the incarnation, textually speaking. Luke 2:7 (“she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn”) foreshadows events to come. Jesus’s birth into humble circumstances suits a tale about God scattering the proud and lifting the lowly (1:51–53; 4:18; 6:20), and Mary wrapping the infant in cloth and placing him in a manger anticipates the wrapping of that same body for placement in a tomb (23:53). There is likely no place for them in the inn because of increased travel owing to the census decree (2:1–3) but this episode begins a pattern. Jesus has no place to lay his head (9:58) and is

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often unwelcome (4:28–29). “He came to what was his own,” we read elsewhere, “and his own people did not accept him” (John 1:11). It is curious Luke’s account of this first exclusion––no room in the inn–– simultaneously excludes. Animals are there (it is a manger, after all) but not there (in the text). This continues in the next verses. As Mary cares for the infant, an angel greets shepherds in the fields nearby and here too there is a subtle drift away from animal witnesses. Luke mentions a “flock” (2:8) but says nothing more, even though the announced “good news” and peace on earth concerns them as well (cf. Isaiah 11:6–9; Romans 8:18–23). Who keeps watch over this flock when the shepherds leave for the manger? Do they no longer matter? If “no place … in the inn” foreshadows inhospitality of a kind, Luke’s telling of the story manifests another. His birth narrative ‘erases’ nonhuman animals and he is not the only biblical author to do so. Consider Peter who declares only eight survived the flood, thus writing the vast majority of Noah’s fellow passengers out of the story (1 Peter 3:20; 2 Peter 2:5; cf. Genesis 7:15). Why is this important? Luke’s focus on human actors is understandable. Goats and sheep don’t read books. But this does not mean Christianity has nothing to say about animals and their wellbeing. Luke’s Jesus commends animal compassion (e.g., 13:15; 14:5) but unfortunately the interpretive traditions typically exclude them from theological consideration. There are exceptions, as the discussion of Rev. Spencer Wade’s 1937 sermon in Chapter 2 illustrates, but too often our retellings of the gospel story ‘erase’ the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants on the assumption it concerns humans alone. There is something refreshing and fitting about Lucy’s imaginative commentary on the birth narratives. She makes explicit what is implicit. We need to watch Snoopy baa like a sheep, moo like a cow, and walk like a penguin (as he does under her direction) or read stories that create space for animals. The television-loving Cadpig (runt), one of the puppies in Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians, recognizes something special in a church’s nativity scene where the fleeing dogs find refuge. They assume it is some kind of television and they stare at the platform with its unmoving figures of humans and animals. It captivates the Cadpig: “‘I like it much better than ordinary television. Only I don’t

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know why.’”5 They conclude this house must belong to someone who loves dogs because of all the dog beds lying around (prayer kneeling pillows). It is a striking thought, the owner of the house (God) welcoming and aiding the desperate dogs. The memory of that ‘television’/nativity scene in the “strange, lofty building” stays with the Cadpig, as we read in the closing sentences of the book: “She often remembered that building, and wondered who owned it––someone very kind, she was sure. For in front of every one of the many seats [pews] there had been a little carpet-­ eared, puppy-sized dogbed.”6 Without such stories, we risk a self-absorbed theology indifferent to animals. We must not forget the baby in the manger grows up to tell us, a few chapters later, “not one of them [even the smallest of creatures] is forgotten in God’s sight” (Luke 12:6). An active imagination––a reading between the lines and along the margins––allows us to see the animals so often there but not there, and safeguards against an excluding, anthropocentric, and inn-hospitable Christianity.

Those Sad Stories Say so Much Sadness is widespread in animal literature, and it is important for at least three reasons. First, when human characters grieve for suffering or absent (for whatever reason) animals, it illustrates a capacity to love across species boundaries. When Julia and her father George weep at the death of the elephant Stella in Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan, readers weep with them.7 When Mowgli learns he must leave the jungle and his animal friends and family, something “began to hurt … inside him, as he had never been hurt in life before.” He cries for the first time, not even knowing what tears are.8 A young Farley Mowat goes out walking on an early spring morning but is not alone, for his dog’s tracks are there too. He follows them and reflects on his bond with Mutt: “each pawprint as familiar as the print of my own hand. I followed them, and I knew 5  Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians, illustrations by Michael Dooling (1956; New York: Puffin, 1989), 141. 6  Smith, Hundred and One Dalmatians, 184. 7  Katherine Applegate, The One and Only Ivan (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 117. 8  Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (1894; London: Arcturus, 2017), 33.

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each thing that he had done, each move that he had made, each thought that had been his; for so it is with two who live one life together.”9 Mutt, he soon discovers, died during this walk: “The tracks that I had followed ended here, nor would they ever lead my heart again.”10 This sad but elegant close to the story illustrates the rich and profound ties between humans and their nonhuman companions: “The pace of timelessness between the two of us was ended, and I went from him into the darkening tunnel of the years.”11 Animal stories remind us we are able to connect meaningfully with free-roaming animals as well. In Cubs All Alone, a girl faces the inevitable release of a bobcat she helped rescue. She knows freedom in the wild is the best option for the animal but after forming an attachment, she is sad to see the bobcat leave.12 From affection comes moral consideration. We are less likely to harm those we love. Literature reminds us ties of affection are possible. Second, fiction remind us animals are not soulless, unfeeling automata. If humans love animals, the reverse is also true. Writers often remind us of this in stories involving dogs. Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “Dog Monday’s Vigil” tells of one who waits years at the train station for his master to return from war and ends with a happy reunion: “A black and yellow streak shot past the station agent. Dog Monday stiff? Dog Monday rheumatic? Dog Monday old? Never believe it! Dog Monday was a young pup gone clean mad with rejuvenating joy.”13 The story is a clear echo an episode in Homer’s Odyssey. When the soldier Odysseus returns after many years of war and travel, his loyal canine Argos is there to greet him, recognizing his long absent friend despite the hero’s disguise:  Farley Mowat, Dog Who Wouldn’t Be (1957; Toronto: Scholastic, 2006), 235.  Mowat, Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 238. 11  Mowat, Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, 238. Stories about the bonds between people and their pets are legion. Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Lying Doggo,” to mention just one other in this context, is the story of a family coming to terms with the failing health of their German Shepherd named Grover. As the story unfolds, the family discovers how deeply woven into the fabric of their lives Grover really is, and how much their pet shares in the highs and lows of family life. It is also a touching reflection on the difficult calculations involved in deciding if and when to euthanize a suffering companion animal. The family first meets Grover in a humane society (in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey [Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010], 58). 12  Susan Hughes, Cubs All Alone, Wild Paws (Toronto: Scholastic, 2004), 3, 4, 38–39, 51, 53. 13  Lucy Maud Montgomery, “Dog Monday’s Vigil,” in The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, ed. Jane Urquhart (Toronto: Penguin, 2008), 638. Full story, 635–38. 9

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There the dog Argos lay, full of the vermin of dogs; And then, when he perceived that Odysseus was nearby, He fawned over him with his tail and dropped both his ears. But then he was no longer able to go closer To his master. The man looked away and wiped off a tear. He hid easily from Eumaeos, and he at once asked a question: “Great wonder is it, Eumaeos, that this dog lies here in the dung....” “Ah yes, this is the dog of a man who died far away, And if he were the same in body and in his actions As when Odysseus left him behind on his way off to Troy, You would wonder at once when you saw his speed and his force….” When he had said this [Odysseus] entered the well-situated halls, And he went straight through the hall to the noble suitors. But the fortune of black death took Argos away Once he had seen Odysseus in the twentieth year.14

The soldier arrives home after many years, and his dog alone recognizes and welcomes him. His dog alone never gives up hope of his friend’s return. Third, sadness and mourning in animal literature remind us that alienation from other species has consequences. The absence of animals from our lives, whether resulting from death, forms of erasure and exclusion, or species loss, reveal a desire for community. The story of the Garden of Eden hints at this longing––it is not good for the man to be alone, says God of Adam (Genesis 2:18)––and God brings animals to him. According to the bovine storyteller Elsie Q, “Only man has separated himself from the great chain of being and from all the other animals, and I think that has been to his great detriment, and sadness, and to ours.”15

 Homer, Odyssey, trans. Albert Cook (New York: Norton, 1974), book 17, lines 300–05, 312–15, 324–27. 15  David Duchovny, Holy Cow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 204. 14

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 elfarist Reading as Reconnection W with the Animal World Respectful debate about animal welfare is a rare thing, at least in my experience. The anger directed by advocates toward those who hunt or wear fur or eat meat or watch bullfights invites responses equally severe. Ridicule and disdain move in both directions, and in the heated environments of social media, say, winning an argument one way or the other is unlikely. Literature represents a different kind of discursive space where serious engagement with the animal question is possible; the solitary act of reading is by nature removed from such heated interactions and the resulting defensiveness that stifles other points of view. To live with fictional animals for the time it takes to read a novel or short story or poem is to escape the din of competing voices, to be free of the confinement and rigidity of habitual thought and inflexible tradition, to engage subjects without self-consciousness or interference from our own egos––I can connect and sympathize with animals without embarrassment. It’s a private, safe moment in time. Elizabeth Costello encapsulates well the activist-writer’s objective, which is to move the reader from the page to the pig, from the imagined to the real animal. “‘If I do not convince you,’” she says in a speech, “‘that is because my words, here, lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted, unintellectual nature, of that animal being. That is why I urge you to read the poets who return the living, electric being to language; and if the poets do not move you, I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.’”16 Most have more access to books than prodded beasts, so those concerned with animal protection do well to take advantage of the 16  J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (London: Vintage, 2003), 111. This connection between animal life and poetry observed by Costello is, Michael Malay argues, “a deeply suggestive proposition, one which raises deep questions about the relationship between language and perception––that is, between the limits of our language and what that language allows us to think and feel in relation to otherness.” His book builds on Costello’s remark and offers close readings of poetry “with the aim of examining, testing and ultimately building upon her insights in relation to poetry and animal life” (The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Palgrave Studies in Animal Literature [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018], 2, 3).

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resources such poets provide in their efforts to promote a humane education. As shown throughout, animal stories put a mirror before readers, revealing insensitivities toward the other-than-human. At least potentially, they awaken awareness of a shared creatureliness, allow us to see with new eyes the wonders of nature, and chastise our senseless violence. The D. H. Lawrence poem Prof. Clough mentions in this section’s epigraph describes an individual who sees a snake, admires it, but then for no apparent reason throws something in an effort to kill it. Immediately, the narrator regrets his actions. He alludes to Coleridge’s albatross, and like the mariner is impressed with the immensity of his crime, his senseless attempt to slay an innocent other. Lawrence’s narrator admits his mistake and recognizes the consequences of his action: “I missed my chance with one of the lords / Of life. / And I have something to expiate; / A pettiness.”17 Other fictional characters experience guilt because of senseless human cruelties to animals. Peter, for one, feels it acutely throughout the novel Pax. “You humans. You ruin everything,” a grazing deer communicates to him through a reproachful look.18 The narrow welfarist’s approach to literature employed throughout this book is not one most critics are likely to approve. To look to the poets as a way to better ourselves and our societies is for many an outdated and questionable enterprise. But this fails to recognize the potentially transformative experiences possible for readers. Poetry and fiction allow us to experience animal lives and feel empathy for them, and this often raises moral questions. “The study of literature,” say critics of the idea such sensibilities deserve a place in the classroom, “should be devoted to acquiring familiarity with the various canons of literature, an analysis of these texts, and an awareness of the fruits of literary criticism.” But as Andrew Linzey argues in response, “the two views are not irreconcilable.  D. H. Lawrence, “Snake,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors, 9th ed., vol. 2, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2013), 1298 (lines 71–74). 18  Sara Pennypacker’s Pax (New York: Balzer and Bray, 2016), 54, repeated 261. Italics original. This idea of animals’ justifiable distrust of humans is a familiar theme. Like the suspicious doe in Pax, rats in Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo are wary of one of their own who befriends a human artist: “They didn’t trust Humans, they said, considering them a low-down, cruel and deceitful race, not in any way to be compared with rats for frankness and honesty” (149). 17

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There is no essential contradiction between the classical (and modern) methods of the study of literature and a thoroughgoing appreciation of the heightened awareness that literature can, at best, contribute to the development of moral sensibility.”19 Reading is a risky enterprise, to borrow Robert Waxler’s term, and it applies particularly well when exploring animal literature. There is something unsettling about stories centered on other-than-human characters, real or imagined. We happily suspend our disbelief when entering fairy tales and other fantastic narratives and in doing so, rest our critical guard, so to speak. We do not expect to find something so recognizable in animal characters; the sudden appearance of the uncanny startles and occasionally troubles us. In his study of the terrifying creatures of religious lore, Timothy Beal discusses the paradoxical nature of the monstrous, which is simultaneously in, but not of the world, personifying at once an otherness and sameness.20 He turns to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the unheimlich, the unhomely or uncanny, to explain what he means: If heimlich refers to that which belongs within the four walls of the house, inspiring feelings of restfulness and security, then unheimlich refers to that which threatens one’s sense of “at-homeness,” not from the outside but from within the house. The unheimlich is in some sense what is in the house without belonging there, the outside that is inside.21

Beal finds that one of the functions of the monstrous in religion and the arts is a conservative urge to warn us away from challenges to social and symbolic boundaries, to scare the hell out of us, but as everyone who has watched or read horror stories knows, external threats are not the only things we ought to fear. The monster “is never entirely outside or other, can never be a purely negative image of us and our world. Perhaps part of what makes monsters horrifically unheimlich is that we see ourselves in them. Monsters blur the lines between inside and outside, this worldly 19  Andrew Linzey, “Preface: Animals, Literature, and the Virtues,” in Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), xvii. 20  Timothy K. Beal, Religion and its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4. 21  Beal, Religion and its Monsters, 5. Emphasis original.

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and otherworldly, self and other.”22 One of the risks of reading, to return to Waxler’s term, involves such discoveries. “To read deeply is always a risk,” he explains, because we “are not primarily seeking information or data when we read linguistic narrative, but daring to enter the unknown territory, the other (who is also ourself and not ourself ), the one that puts us into question.”23 We may find something of the monstrous in ourselves when reading horror, and we may find something of the nonhuman in ourselves when reading animal literature. Animal writing blurs boundaries, often leaving the demarcation of human and nonhuman ambiguous. If the discovery of something uncanny in other-than-human characters in fiction unsettles, so too do stories about people who behave in ways no person should. An episode in Woody Guthrie’s 1943 autobiographical Bound for Glory illustrates both.

 his Land Is Their Land Too: Woody T Guthrie’s Cats I admire this book for many reasons, not least for its censure of indifference to the downtrodden. The story takes us to the margins of human society and forces us to observe the irrepressible dignity of those to whom others refuse the term. One scene in particular unsettles in the way Beal describes. Guthrie is a boy of five visiting a relative’s farm when the incident in question occurs. He spends his time with an eight-year-old boy named Lawrence, who leads young Woody to a rosebush where a Maltese cat cares for her newly born kittens. The boys pet the mother cat and enjoy listening to her purr. The story then takes a very dark turn: Lawrence looked out through the leaves of the bushes. “Wonder where Warren’s headin’, goin’ off down toward th’ barn? Be right still; he’s walkin’ past us. He’ll hear us talkin’.” I whispered real low and asked Lawrence,  Beal, Religion and its Monsters, 196.  Robert W. Waxler, The Risk of Reading: How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and the World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 178.

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“Whatcha being’ so still for? ‘Fraida Warren?” And Lawrence told me, “Hushhh. Naw. ‘Fraid fer th’ cats.”24

These fears are well-grounded. Warren hates cats and despite the boys’ best efforts to hide and protect them, he vents his fury after discovering them. The illustration accompanying the story shows the older, larger boy with a kitten in hand, preparing to throw it, and the mother Maltese scratching at Warren’s leg in a futile effort to save her kitten. The description of Warren’s unprovoked, absurd attack on Woody and Lawrence as they try to protect the kittens and the mother Maltese, is graphic: He put the sharp toe of his shoe under the belly of the first little cat, and threw it up against the rock foundation. … He picked the second kitten up in the grip of his hand, and squeezed till his muscles bulged up. He swung the kitten around and around, something like a Ferris wheel, as fast as he could turn his arm, and the blood and entrails of the kitten splashed across the ground, and the side of the house. … Warren took the second kitten, squeezed it, swung it over his head and over the top wire of the fence. The third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh.

All the while, the mother cat and the smaller boys fight with Warren, trying to save the kittens. Warren kicks the Maltese repeatedly till “her sides were broke and caved in” and hurls rocks at her, and at last turns to the beaten boys: “He looked at me and Lawrence, spit on us, threw the loose cotton seed into our faces, and said, ‘Cat-lovin’ bastards!’”25 It is a difficult episode to read and it unsettles for a few reasons. For one thing, it illustrates the potential (sometimes actualized) monstrosity lurking within human hearts. People are capable of senseless cruelties toward animals. Second, it reminds us of our own vulnerabilities. Guthrie signals this when he recalls those abused kittens at the very moment that he thinks of the vulnerable people he sings to later in life (the dustbowl era poor, the down and outs, those on the fringes of society, on skid row). If the lives of kittens mean so little to the bullies of this world, the lives of some people are equally meaningless to them. Warren’s assault of the  Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (1943; New York: Plume, 1983), 77.  Guthrie, Bound for Glory, 80. The illustration of Warren attacking the cats is on p. 79.

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younger, smaller boys shows this. The lesson Guthrie takes from the incident is the need for a response. Those disturbed by an animal abuser’s cruelties should also be disturbed by those who oppress vulnerable people. There needs to be a response. We need to come to the aid of victims, humans or otherwise, even if difficult as the young Guthrie learns when facing Warren. There is a third way the story unsettles the reader. Following the violence, young Guthrie does not abandon the dying mother Maltese, and his act of compassion contrasts sharply with the viciousness he just witnessed. If people are capable of horrific acts, they are also capable of extraordinary kindnesses. The unsettling detail I refer to is not this contrast between Woody and Warren but rather the contrast between the wicked older boy and the mother cat, the heroic and selfless animal victim concerned to protect her babies at great cost to herself. It is she, not he, who is truly ‘civilized.’ It is she, not he, who is moral and by any measure, right and good. The old mama cat was twisting and moaning and squeezing through at the bottom of the wire, and making her way out where Warren had slung her little babies. I saw the old mama walk around and around her first kitten in the weeds, and sniffle, and smell, and lick the little hairs; then she took the dead baby in her teeth, carried it through the weeds. … She laid the baby down when she come to the edge of a little trickling creek, and held up her own broken feet when she walked around the kitten again, circling, looking down at it, and back up at me. I got down on my hands and knees and tried to reach out and pet her. She was so broke up and hurting that she couldn’t stand still, and she pounded the damp ground there with her tail as she walked a whole circle all around me. I took my hand and dug a little hole in the sandy creek bank and laid the dead baby in, and covered it up with a mound like a grave. When I seen the Mama Maltese holding her eyes shut with the lids quivering and smell away into the air, I knew she was on the scent of her second one. When she brought it in, I dug the second little grave….26

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 Guthrie, Bound for Glory, 81.

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Highly sentimental, to be sure, but it is a remarkable story exploring the human-animal bond. The old cat and the young boy communicate with one another, work together, and grieve together. Guthrie stresses the profundity of this cross-species communion even further by noting a rift between the villain of the story and other people. Warren announces his willingness to break ties with the community of civilized, humane behavior the younger boys––the cat-loving bastards–– represent. This is especially explicit regarding his younger brother Lawrence. When Warren screams “‘You ain’t no flesh an’ blood of mine!’” after the attack, he owns the familial break without hesitation: “‘Hell with you, baby britches! Hell with you. I don’t even want to be yore dam brother!’”27 In effect, the cruel Warren steps out of the circle of compassionate human(e) society. In its place, a new community of the caring forms, moments later, as Woody consoles, even serves the despairing mother Maltese. Woody, Lawrence, and the cats all suffer bodily harm during the scene, and this shared suffering, this recognition of a common plight is part of the bond between cats and kids. Woody’s immediate response to the Maltese mother’s desperation enacts, I believe, what Anat Pick describes as a creaturely ethic, which “does not depend on fulfilling any preliminary criteria of subjectivity and personhood. Its source lies in the recognition of the materiality and vulnerability of all living bodies, whether human or not, and in the absolute primacy of obligations over rights. A creaturely ethics, which recognizes in animals an exemplary case of worldly suffering, does not ask, What are the limits of rights? but, What are the limits of attention?”28 Literature reminds us of our connectedness to the world and awakens moral considerations. Waxler suggests literary language “allows us to acknowledge that we are mortal bodies experiencing the world and that we can reflect on that embodied experience,” both our own and those of others. Ethical considerations follow because by this means, “we recognize how the story we are reading is similar to our own story and so we are able to recognize how we are connected to other mortal beings.  Guthrie, Bound for Glory, 80.  Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 193. 27 28

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Another’s story is our story as well.” Literature thus makes ethical demands on us, reminding us “others have (at least potentially) a story to tell.” Acknowledgment of a shared vulnerability and mortality is not to deny differences between us; “Through the experience of language shaped into story, we not only feel empathy and compassion for the other, but we also acknowledge the strangeness of the other. … Stories give us a sense of familiarity, but also remind us of our strangeness.”29 Reading stories by and about people different than ourselves enriches our lives. They enlarge our sense of what it is to be human. In addition, literature safeguards us against indifference and abuses of power. “Literature,” according to Salman Rushdie, “tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be.” Writers push against the boundaries of language, form and possibility and so makes our world feel larger, and inevitably more inclusive: “Literature’s view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself.” However, as he of all storytellers knows firsthand, …the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism, and war. There were plenty of people who didn’t want the universe opened, who would, in fact, prefer it to be shut down quite a bit, and so when artists went to the frontier and pushed they often found powerful forces pushing back.30

Poets and novelists not only reveal forms of injustice but in their own way actively confront them. Animals are also embodied, vulnerable mortals. And is it really extravagant to allow they too have stories to tell? As sentient beings they communicate with one another, seek sustenance, procreate, feel pain, experience emotions, and evade death. In the opinion of some animal behaviorists and scientists, they operate within communities according to  Waxler, Risk of Reading, 12, 10, 9.  Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012), 628. Italics original.

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moral codes of behavior.31 They distinguish friend from foe, adapt to new circumstances, use tools, teach their young, and mourn. The absence of specifically human qualities––so often the measure of worth, whether we refer to forms of rationality, language, or some other criterium or criteria we recognize––is immaterial. A duck’s story differs from my own in most respects but that does not negate its existence. The range of his experiences––the nurture received from parents; the development of skills needed for survival; the search for a mate; response to the instinctive urge to migrate; an ability to enjoy the pond with its ready supply of preferred food; and more––represents a complex narrative of meaningful, embodied existence. Though I understand it little, and my clumsy reliance in anthropocentric language distorts more often than not when trying to describe it, the anatine story unfolding before my eyes as I watch that graceful bird swim across the water is as real as my own. There is good and bad anthropomorphism, according to Andrew Linzey. Bad anthropomorphism projects human needs and emotions onto animals, which is to deny they are beings in their own right. Good anthropomorphism by contrast, recognizes continuities between humans and nonhuman mammals, including the capacity to suffer.32 To adapt Rushdie’s remarks, animal literature of the type explored in this book often encourages understanding, sympathy, and identification with creatures different in kind, and writers doing so also stand at heavily guarded boundaries. To question traditional assumptions about animals and our uses of them often runs counter to custom, religion, political expediency, appetites, and self-interest. At these boundaries too, like those to which Rushdie refers, there are plenty who do not want the 31  See e.g., Frans De Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). De Waal explores behaviors such as fairness and sharing among nonhuman species and its evolutionary connection to the emergence of religion in human societies. Emergence of these ‘good’ actions among primates actually predates religion: “We humans were plenty moral when we still roamed the savanna in small bands. Only when the scale of society began to grow and rules of reciprocity and reputation began to falter did a moralizing God become necessary. In this view, it wasn’t God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around” (220). For additional reflections on altruism among nonhuman species, see Dale Peterson, The Moral Lives of Animals (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011). 32  Andrew Linzey, Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 51–53.

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universe opened, which is to say the inclusion of nonhuman life in moral reckoning.

A Horse with No Name Stories about actual animals regularly feature in welfare efforts, of course. Ingrid Newkirk’s small booklet Love for Animals, Large and Small is clear example. She is president and cofounder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and this 2015 publication marks the organization’s thirty-fifth anniversary. It combines several stories about a diverse mix of domestic, wild, and livestock animals rescued by PETA from all manner of horrors. Chapter titles like “Pulled out of the Trash, Her Name Was Meeka” and “Rescuing a Hurricane’s Forgotten Victims” give some sense of its content. There are elegant drawings by Gloria Marconi, a Foreword by Bob Barker lending some celebrity heft, inspirational quotes from well-known figures (Albert Einstein, Mohandas K.  Gandhi, Margaret Mead), and for a small publication of just under a hundred pages, a disturbing education in the seemingly endless ways humans exploit, hurt, neglect, and kill animals.33 This kind of storytelling, like most of the fiction discussed throughout, also has an obvious welfare agenda. Stories, whether fictional or nonfictional, potentially motivate real-­ world welfare efforts. We do not know the old white horse’s name or gender but the ‘story’ the horse ‘tells’ set in motion a remarkable movement that responded with compassion to the suffering of vulnerable humans and nonhumans alike. Thanks to the horse’s attentive neighbors in nineteenth-century Toronto who took time to ‘hear’ that equine tale and relate it to others, a humane movement took shape. Though usually credited with founding the Toronto Humane Society, John Joseph Kelso is careful to acknowledge the role played by that nameless white horse and anonymous donors. In his 1911 book, Early History of the Humane and Children’s Aid Movement in Ontario, 1886–1893, Kelso traces the beginnings of the Society back to a young merchant named John  Ingrid Newkirk, Love for Animals, Large and Small (Norfolk, VA: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, 2015).

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K. Macdonald who wrote a letter to the Toronto newspaper World where Kelso worked. Macdonald expressed his regrets there was no society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. The impetus behind the letter was “an old and worn-out white horse daily to be seen on the streets.”34 MacDonald was attentive to this horse’s ‘story,’ and moved by it enough to act. The editor of World passed the letter on to Kelso with a challenge: “Here is something for you to advocate.” Kelso did. A favorable comment was inserted [to the paper], with the result that $2 was received in the business office the next day from an anonymous correspondent. A day or two after the acknowledgment was made in the paper $5 was received, and the fund kept on growing, until $74 had been accumulated.35

The ‘story’ that white horse told resulted in compassionate action. Soon after these events, on February 19, 1887, Kelso passed that story along by reading a paper to the Canadian Institute, the result of which was the eventual launching of the Toronto Humane Society. The minutes of that meeting include a lengthy list of objectives for the proposed organization: To stop cruelty to children; to rescue them from vicious influences and remedy their condition; the beating of animals, overloading street cars, overloading wagons, working old horses, driving galled and disabled animals; to introduce drinking fountains [for horses], better laws, better methods of horseshoeing, humane literature into schools and homes; to induce children to be humane; everybody to practice and teach kindness to animals and others.36 34  J.  J. Kelso, Early History of the Humane and Children’s Aid Movement in Ontario, 1886–1893 (Toronto: L. K. Cameron, 1911), 14. For a brief introduction to Kelso, see too Xiaobei Chen, “Kelso, John Joseph,” in The Oxford Companion to Canadian History, ed. Gerald Hallowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 336: “A prominent figure in social and child welfare movements in Canada. His first major reform activity was his leadership in founding the Toronto Humane Society for the Prevention of Cruelty in 1887, which initially attended to both animals and children.” On this, see too Andrew Jones and Leonard Rutman, In the Children’s Aid: J. J. Kelso and Child Welfare in Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). 35  Kelso, Early History, 14. 36  Kelso, Early History, 15.

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The inaugural meeting the Toronto Humane Society followed on February 24, 1887, a meeting that proved “quite successful” according to Kelso. One of the first actions of the newly established Society was campaigning for the horse fountains mentioned in the minutes above. In these early days of the Society, there were only six water troughs available for horses in all of Toronto, three of them owned by saloonkeepers. Things changed once the Society raised the issue with the city council and by the time Kelso published his history (1911), there were “over two hundred fountains in all parts of the city.”37 This episode illustrates the capacity of storytelling to motivate activism. The horse’s non-verbal communication, the merchant’s letter reporting that sad situation to the newspaper, Kelso’s World article, and the paper he delivered to the Canadian Institute resulted in actual water troughs for actual labouring horses.

From Fiction to Advocacy Fiction, as argued throughout, is similarly persuasive and potentially brings real change. Authors themselves recognize this potential and often are explicit about their advocacy agendas. James Lever closes his highly original Me Cheeta with an apology for animal welfare efforts. Blurring the line between fiction and the plight of actual animals, he quietly presents an instance of compassionate intervention that illustrates an alternative to exploitation and indifference. Late in Cheeta’s memoir, we learn of the failing health of his current caregiver Mr. Gentry. Gentry expects to die before long and sets about making arrangements for the aging simian movie star’s future. There is a deep sense of betrayal in the scene. Humans captured Cheeta when an infant in the African jungle, used cruel

 Kelso, Early History, 18. For a fictional counterpart, see Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo, 228. Friend of animals Jonathan T. Throgmorton “did a whole lot toward making life easier for work animals,” including paying “to have drinking troughs put up for horses” (228). Like Kelso and his supporters, there is also a connection between Throgmorton and a welfare organization. He bequeaths one hundred thousand pounds to an Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (229, 238).

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methods to train him, exploited him for profit in the film industry, and now unceremoniously arrange to dispatch him. Gentry’s plan is to hand Cheeta over to a UCLA cognitive research facility, the very thing Cheeta fears most. As the animal actor’s film career is over, disposal in a laboratory is the best idea he has. But it does not end this way. When Gentry’s nephew Don learns of the plan, he recognizes its injustice and cruelty, and intervenes. He is willing to help an animal in need, and for that reason models another kind of human-animal relationship. The story shows readers what advocacy on behalf of an animal, and concern for that animal’s wellbeing looks like. Gentry resists the idea of his nephew taking care of Cheeta––it is too expensive and time consuming––but Don is undeterred: “I love him,” said Don. “Don’t be fucking ridiculous,” said Mr. Gentry. “They’ll kill him.” I thought [says the chimpanzee narrator], Oh, come on, they’ll never kill me. I’m still Cheeta. “Don’t be fucking ridiculous. It’s not some roadside zoo. And it’s not a disease unit.” “Oh, that’s such bullshit. A bunch of torturers in white coats who like to slice up innocent animals’ brains. Then they wash the blood off and go home…” “Look, I know UCLA’s not perfect but what else can I do?” “You can let me have him.”38

That last question Gentry raises––What else can we do?––is a pressing one. What is the alternative to human indifference to animals, and the forms of violence perpetuated against them when a nuisance, or an expense, or ‘useless’? Welfarist literature helps us to imagine possible answers. In this particular story, Don figures out a way to care for Cheeta, thus rescuing him from the torturers in white coats. In addition, Lever leads the reader

38  James Lever’s Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 280. Italics original.

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from fiction to real-life efforts to rescue animals in need by introducing the C.H.E.E.T.A. Primate Sanctuary. I close with two scenes involving the young narrator of The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, Tommy Stubbins. After exploring Doctor John Dolittle’s house, garden, and private zoo, he says, “it was indeed like living in a new world.”39 The Lofting novels reimagine human-animal relationships as peaceful communities of mutual support and respect, but they do not present these communities as a given. They are instead constructed realities. John Dolittle learns the animals’ languages, and then building on that knowledge sets about remaking the world in such a way that promotes their wellbeing. Kelso imagines a Toronto with adequate water-­ fountains for labouring horses, and makes it happen. Don imagines a world with sanctuaries where unwanted chimpanzees live out their lives in peace, and makes it happen. They all envision something kinder and gentler, and make it happen. Dolittle’s home and garden and zoo are a kind of human-made Eden. He does not seek an otherwise hidden Eden (as in the case of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s secret garden, locked away behind a closed door) but instead creates it. What is more, he does not retreat into this Puddleby-­ on-­the-Marsh Eden, there to remain. On the contrary, the novels present Dolittle constantly on the move, actively creating other Edens wherever he goes, remedying the troubled lives of the animals he meets. The Victorian garden is not the real goal but instead it is a starting place, writes Gary D. Schmidt. “For Dolittle––and for Lofting––there is something more important to be done than simply reclining in Eden.”40 Later in The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, Stubbins finds himself alone in the Atlantic Ocean, floating on a piece of the wreckage from the ship Curlew in which Dolittle and his friends travelled. A terrible storm destroyed it and the boy sees no sign of the others. In time he receives a visitor though, Miranda, a purple bird-of-paradise. The frightened boy immediately asks whether the Doctor is alive, and she is quick to say, “‘Of course he’s alive––and it’s my firm belief he always will be.’” Later, when  Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, in Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection, vol. 1 (1922; New York: Aladdin, 2019), 60. 40  Gary D.  Schmidt, Hugh Lofting, Twayne’s English Authors Series 496 (New York: Twayne, 1992), 42. 39

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reunited with the man and enjoying the sense of comfort and safety he gives, and while thinking about the Doctor’s “friendship with animals,” the boy reflects that “ridiculous though it was, I could quite understand what Miranda meant when she said she firmly believed that he could never die.”41 The Hugh Lofting Dolittle stories offer in part a reimagined kind of human-animal interaction, one marked by mutual respect and a desire to help. Dolittle is of course a doctor who takes care of his ailing friends. He is also a great protector of all creatures, and the books relate story after story of the hero’s interventions. He fights cruelty and promotes kindness. For these reasons, the curious remark by Miranda about Doctor Dolittle’s immortality is suggestive, as though Lofting presents Dolittle as an aspirational symbol. As is evident by now, this study is not a conventional work of literary criticism or literary theory because animals are the lens––the only lens–– through which I look at stories. My only interest (on this occasion) in the few select works of fiction and poetry discussed here is a cluster of issues related to animal welfare. Do they stir a Dolittle-esque desire to make the world a better place for them? This longing for a Dolittle-esque “friendship with animals” and an end to the cruelties many of these stories reveal is, I suggest, something that will “never die.”

References Applegate, Katherine. 2012. The One and Only Ivan. New York: HarperCollins. Beal, Timothy K. 2002. Religion and Its Monsters. New York: Routledge. Bulliet, Richard W. 2005. Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-Animal Relationships. New York: Columbia University Press. Chen, Xiaobei. 2004. Kelso, John Joseph. In The Oxford Companion to Canadian History, ed. Gerald Hallowell, 336. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clough, David L. 2012. On Animals. Volume 1. Systematic Theology. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2018. On Animals. Volume 2. Theological Ethics. London: Bloomsbury. Coetzee, J.M. 2003. Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons. London: Vintage.  Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, 205, 208.

41

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De Waal, Frans. 2013. The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates. New York: W. W. Norton. Duchovny, David. 2015. Holy Cow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Guthrie, Woody. 1983. Bound for Glory. 1943. New York: Plume. Homer. 1974. The Odyssey. Translated by Albert Cook. New York: Norton. Hughes, Susan. 2004. Cubs All Alone. Wild Paws. Toronto: Scholastic. Jones, Andrew, and Leonard Rutman. 1981. In the Children’s Aid: J. J. Kelso and Child Welfare in Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kelso, J.J. 1911. Early History of the Humane and Children’s Aid Movement in Ontario, 1886–1893. Toronto: L. K. Cameron. Kipling, Rudyard. 2017. The Jungle Book. 1894. London: Arcturus. Lawrence, D.H. 2013. Snake. In The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et  al., vol. Volume 2, 9th ed., 1296–1298. New York: Norton. Lever, James. 2009. Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood. New York: HarperCollins. Linzey, Andrew. 2010. Preface: Animals, Literature, and the Virtues. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey, ix–xx. Waco: Baylor University Press. ———. 2009. Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lofting, Hugh. 2019a. Doctor Dolittle’s Zoo. 1925. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Volume 3, 1–248. New York: Aladdin. ———. 2019b. The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle. 1922. In Doctor Dolittle: The Complete Collection. Volume 1, 1–314. New York: Aladdin. Malay, Michael. 2018. The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Palgrave Studies in Animal Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mason, Bobbie Ann. 2010. Lying Doggo. 1982. In Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, ed. Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey, 58–73. Waco: Baylor University Press. Montgomery, Lucy Maud. 2008. Dog Monday’s Vigil. In The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, ed. Jane Urquhart, 635–638. Toronto: Penguin. Mowat, Farley. 2006. The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be. 1957; Toronto: Scholastic. Newkirk, Ingrid. 2015. Love for Animals, Large and Small. Norfolk: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Pennypacker, Sara. 2016. Pax. New York: Balzer and Bray. Peterson, Dale. 2011. The Moral Lives of Animals. New York: Bloomsbury. Pick, Anat. 2011. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Rushdie, Salman. 2012. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. New York: Random House. Schmidt, Gary D. 1992. Hugh Lofting. Twayne’s English Authors Series 496. New York: Twayne. Smith, Dodie. 1989. The Hundred and One Dalmatians. 1956. Illustrations by Michael Dooling. New York: Puffin. Waxler, Robert W. 2014. The Risk of Reading: How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and the World. New York: Bloomsbury.

Index1

A

B

Adams, Richard, 7, 28, 30, 56–72, 108n34, 112, 118–120, 120n75, 172, 173, 176–182, 198, 199, 202, 205, 214 Animals, ix–xiii, 2–40, 45–72, 78–86, 79n11, 89–95, 90n46, 91n52, 93n56, 99–121, 123–126, 126n7, 127n9, 128–135, 132n23, 137–154, 138n42, 147n61, 225–248 Animal theology, 28, 68 Appelt, Kathi, 31, 32, 35, 37, 164, 209 Applegate, Katherine, 10, 11, 15, 27, 47, 51–56, 56n27, 129, 134, 231

Bible, the, 19, 162, 166–168 Birds, ix, x, 19, 22, 32, 33, 58, 62, 66, 68, 69, 83–85, 104, 126, 126n7, 133–136, 143–147, 147n59, 151, 153, 162, 168, 174–181, 176n56, 183, 185, 185n78, 193, 194, 200–202, 206, 208, 209, 211, 220, 221, 226, 228, 242 Brooks, Max, 38 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 146, 147, 182–187, 192, 247 C

Cats, 16, 18–21, 31, 33, 53n19, 62, 66, 70, 82, 84, 113n50, 117, 142, 147, 165, 167n27, 172,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. J. Gilmour, Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare, The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55430-9

251

252 Index

173, 175, 203, 206, 208, 209, 237–243 Christianity, 160, 162, 186, 230, 231 See also Religion Circuses, 3, 7, 51, 53, 54, 125–134, 218 Coetzee, J. M., 24, 46, 46–47n3, 58, 86, 89, 93, 108n34 Compassion, xi, 2–40, 49, 53, 54, 71, 83, 89, 90n46, 94, 102, 103, 139, 153, 162, 165–167, 170, 175, 175n51, 180, 185, 187, 200, 206, 213, 230, 239, 241, 243 Cruelty, 3, 8, 10, 14, 17, 21, 23, 28, 30–40, 46, 48–50, 54, 56, 83, 86, 94, 95, 101, 103, 108n34, 117–121, 125, 127n9, 128, 129, 137, 138, 141, 160, 162–165, 167n26, 168, 169, 185n78, 195, 203, 205, 217, 235, 238, 239, 244, 246, 248 D

Dogs, xii, 5, 6, 11, 19, 21, 25, 28, 33–40, 51, 54, 60, 62–67, 64n54, 69–72, 82, 84–87, 88n40, 89–91, 101, 103–107, 112, 116–118, 116n63, 124, 127, 127n9, 129, 131, 132, 147, 157, 158, 163–169, 167n27, 169n32, 171, 171n39, 172, 179n62, 192, 202–205, 207, 211, 212, 214, 217, 227, 229–233 Duchovny, David, 23, 78, 82, 108n34

E

Ethics, animal, 15, 23, 24, 49, 103, 116, 117, 162 F

Factory farms, 103, 108, 109 Fox hunting, 3, 5, 131, 132, 214 See also Hunting Foxes, 3, 5–7, 26, 60, 61, 63n48, 64n54, 68, 72, 79–80n11, 82, 131, 132, 144, 173, 179n62, 185, 186, 195–197, 202, 207–210, 214, 227 Francis of Assisi, St., 147, 151, 153, 154 G

Goodall, Jane, 2, 3, 7, 8, 124, 138 Guthrie, Woody, 237–243 H

Hemingway, Ernest, 16, 212–214, 217 Holocaust, the, 64, 120 Homer, 232 Horses, ix, x, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 14, 18, 19, 21, 25, 29, 36, 55n25, 60, 64n54, 67, 86, 88n40, 93, 94, 127–129, 127n9, 131, 139, 141, 163, 166, 168, 171, 200, 203, 208, 243–245, 247 Humane societies, 20, 21, 33, 166–168, 232 Hunting, 3, 5, 16, 18, 25, 82–85, 88n40, 100, 109, 129, 131–133, 164, 197, 202, 204, 212–216, 219 See also Fox hunting

 Index  I

O

Insects, xii, 81, 146, 176, 180, 185, 205, 206

Orwell, George, 9, 214–218

253

P K

Kotzwinkle, William, 55, 55n25, 61, 61n45, 105, 105n23, 107n29, 108, 108n35, 109, 120n75, 129, 134, 145 L

Lawson, Robert, 33, 147–154, 184n77, 214 Lever, James, 109, 116, 129, 137n37, 140, 245, 246 Lewis, C. S., 8, 61, 108n35, 112–114, 113n50, 116, 118–120, 120n75, 183n73, 200–202, 205 Lofting, Hugh, xii, xiii, 3–8, 14–17, 35, 56n27, 63n48, 67, 71, 78, 82, 95, 118, 125–127, 126n7, 127n9, 129, 131, 132, 133n27, 134, 147, 159n4, 171n39, 194, 195, 202, 205, 207, 208, 214, 227, 235, 247, 248

Patteson, S. Louise, 18, 19, 33–36, 116n64, 167n27 Pennypacker, Sara, 29, 79n11, 195, 197, 209, 210 Pigs, 2, 8, 19, 23, 26, 36, 37, 78, 79, 81, 82, 92, 95, 108n34, 109, 127, 171, 203, 228, 234 Predation, 81, 173, 194, 195, 199–203, 208–210, 227 R

Rats, 3, 62, 66, 69, 82, 100, 101, 106, 109, 135, 164, 209, 235 See also Kotzwinkle, William Religion, xi, 9, 13, 25, 28, 68, 151, 158–187, 203, 236, 242 See also Christianity Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), 7, 20, 57, 58, 115, 116, 116n63, 159n3 S

M

McAlmon, Robert, 86, 88, 88n40, 92, 93 Meat, x, 2, 3, 7, 10, 23, 68, 78–95, 132, 194, 199, 212, 217, 218, 234 Mouse, mice, 29, 66, 127, 148, 149, 151, 175, 202, 206, 209, 210 Mowat, Farley, 82–85, 83n26, 116, 116n64, 117, 204, 231

Saunders, Margaret Marshall, 19, 25, 34, 35, 166, 167, 167n26, 169, 171 Sewell, Anna, ix, 2, 11, 17, 19, 25, 29, 30, 36, 55n25, 64n54, 88n40, 90n46, 93, 94, 159, 163–166, 206 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 174, 175n51 Smith, Dodie, 33, 35, 165n20, 167n27, 171n39, 230

254 Index

Snakes, 26, 37, 128, 128n13, 131n20, 197, 202, 211, 212, 235 V

van der Post, Laurens, 218–221 Vivisection, 7, 58, 60, 61, 61n45, 66, 103, 104, 111–119, 119n72

Whale/whales, 22, 218–221 Whaling, 109, 219 White, E. B., 17, 18, 32, 47, 47n5, 58, 81, 95, 143–147, 207 Wildlife, 22, 100, 133, 136, 146, 149, 167, 192, 203 free-roaming animals, 134, 232 Z

W

Walker, Alice, 94 Wells, H. G., 61n45, 103, 103n16, 105, 112–114, 116

Zoos, 10, 14, 27, 28, 51, 55, 55n24, 56n27, 82, 109, 129, 132–134, 132n23, 136, 137, 143–146, 227, 229, 246, 247