Reading Cats and Dogs: Companion Animals in World Literature 2020946277, 9781793611062, 9781793611079

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Reading Cats and Dogs

Reading Cats and Dogs : Companion Animals in World Literature, edited by Zélia M. Bora, et al., Lexington Books, 2020.

Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, METI Advisory Board: Sinan Akilli, Cappadocia University, Turkey; Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Zélia Bora, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil; Izabel Brandão, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Chia-ju Chang, Brooklyn College, The City College of New York, USA; H. Louise Davis, Miami University, USA; Simão Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Steven Hartman, Mälardalen University, Sweden; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Daniela Kato, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; Petr Kopecký, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Julia Kuznetski, Tallinn University, Estonia; Bei Liu, Shandong Normal University, People’s Republic of China; Serpil Oppermann, Cappadocia University, Turkey; John Ryan, University of New England, Australia; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Joshua Schuster, Western University, Canada; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; Heather Sullivan, Trinity University, USA; David Taylor, Stony Brook University, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists.

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Recent Titles Reading Cats and Dogs: Companion Animals in World Literature edited by Françoise Besson, Zelia M. Bora, Marianne Marroum, & Scott Slovic Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes edited by Sinan Akilli & Serpil Oppermann, Avenging Nature: The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, Rebeca Gualberto Valverde, Noelia Malla Garcia, María Colom Jiménez, Rebeca Cordero Sánchez Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong's Women Migrant Workers by Zhou Xiaojing Climate Consciousness and Environmental Activism in Composition: Writing to Save the World edited by Joseph R. Lease Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature: Ecocriticism and the Tangled Landscape of American Romance by Steven Petersheim Ecocritical Concerns and the Australian Continent edited by Beate Neumeier and Helen Tiffn The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times edited by Naomi Milthorpe Masculinity and Place in American Literature since 1950 by Vidya Ravi The Way the Earth Writes: How the Great East Japan Earthquake Intervened in Conventional Literary Practice and Produced the Post 3.11 Novels by Koichi Haga Ecomasculinities: Negotiating Male Gender Identity in U.S. Fiction by Rubén Cenamor and Stefan Brandt

Reading Cats and Dogs : Companion Animals in World Literature, edited by Zélia M. Bora, et al., Lexington Books, 2020.

Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays by Isabel Sobral Campos The Human-Animal Boundary: Exploring the line in Philosophy and Fiction edited by Mario Wenning and Nandita Batra Towards the River’s Mouth (Verso la foce), Gianni Celati, A Critical Edition edited, translated, and introduced by Patrick Barron Gender and Environment in Science Fiction edited by Bridgitte Barclay and Christy Tidwell Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature edited by Mark Anderson and Zelia M. Bora Confronting Climate Crises through Education: Reading Our Way Forward by Rebecca Young Environment and Pedagogy in Higher Education

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edited by Lucie Viakinnou-Brinson Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth edited by Bénédicte Meillon

Reading Cats and Dogs : Companion Animals in World Literature, edited by Zélia M. Bora, et al., Lexington Books, 2020.

Copyright © 2020. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Reading Cats and Dogs : Companion Animals in World Literature, edited by Zélia M. Bora, et al., Lexington Books, 2020.

Reading Cats and Dogs Companion Animals in World Literature

Edited by

Copyright © 2020. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Françoise Besson, Zelia M. Bora, Marianne Marroum, and Scott Slovic

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Reading Cats and Dogs : Companion Animals in World Literature, edited by Zélia M. Bora, et al., Lexington Books, 2020.

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom

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Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefeld Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946277 ISBN 978-1-7936-1106-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-7936-1107-9 (Electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Reading Cats and Dogs : Companion Animals in World Literature, edited by Zélia M. Bora, et al., Lexington Books, 2020.

Contents

Prologue by Kev Reynolds

ix

Introduction by Françoise Besson and Scott Slovic

1

SECTION I: STRAY AND FERAL COMPANIONS 1 Our Feral Future: Dog Stories and the Anthropocene Karla Armbruster 2 When You Love the Stray Animals as Much as Your Own Pets: The Case of Companion Animals in Turkey Önder Çetin

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3 Identity, Love, and Abuse in Laila al-Othman’s Cat Stories Marianne Marroum

21 23

47 61

4 Of Mice, Rabbits, and Other Companion Species in Beatrix Potter’s More than Human World Lorraine Kerslake

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5 Walking through the Animal Kingdom: A Search for the Near and the Dear Niroshini Gunasekera

95

6 From the Forbidden City to the Locked-down Megalopolis: Reading the Behaviors of Cat Lovers in China Qianqian Cheng

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Contents

SECTION II: THE USEFULNESS OF COMPANION ANIMALS 129 7 Memorable Dogs of Italian Literature Anna Re 8 Cross-species Cooperation: Hunting with Dogs in Contemporary American Nature Writing Claire Cazajous-Augé

147

9 Let the Sleeping Dogs Tell Lies: Companionship and Solitude in Shuntarō Tanikawa’s Dog Poems Keita Hatooka

157

10 Of Dogs, Horses, and Buffalos in Cameroon: Companion Animals in Cameroonian Fiction Kenneth Toah Nsah

169

SECTION III: PROBLEMATIZING COMPANION ANIMALS

189

11 The Plight of Dogs in the Country-City Gap: Reading Chinese Dog Narratives across Genres Chen Hong

191

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Cat Killers, Black Diamonds, and a Talking Cat: Feline Companions in Post-transitional South African Fiction Wendy Woodward

207

13 The Paradoxical World of Animal Representation in the Brazilian Novel As Horas Nuas in Light of Greek Philosophy Zélia M. Bora

219

14 Canine Initiation into Ecowisdom Athane Adrahane Copyright © 2020. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

131

Epilogue: A Quadriptych by Françoise Besson, Zélia M. Bora, Marianne Marroum, and Scott Slovic

231

255

Index 273 About the Contributors

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Prologue

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Kev Reynolds

The concept of an animal as a companion begs the obvious question—could it be a substitute for a relationship with a fellow human being? Does it fll a gap, acting as a comfort, perhaps, like a child whose Teddy Bear takes the place of a missing sibling or friend? What is a companion anyway? Is it a partner? Is it someone or something with whom you are willing to share your life and innermost secrets, and whose presence fulflls an emotional need? A pet will do that, and the world is full of pet-lovers whose lives have been enriched by the companionship they give and receive in return. The best develop an understanding that has its own language. But pets represent just a tiny fraction of the animal kingdom, and very few of these are treated as equal partners. After the freedoms we allow our cats and dogs (under human terms, of course) the vast majority are contained inside cages, hutches, or tanks, not unlike small-scale zoos. They may be seen as possessions, not companions. This book, however, looks at mankind’s close bonding relationship with animals through both fact and fction, as seen by academics, novelists, and poets from around the world. And there will be plenty of animal voices to be heard also. My own relationship with animals began when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. It was then that my mother frst read Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty to me. Published in 1877 it’s one of the best-loved and most infuential of all children’s books, and was written in the form of autobiography—the autobiography of a horse. As soon as I could read for myself, it was to Black Beauty that I turned, and the cheap wartime paper on which it was printed soon bore the stains

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Prologue

of my grubby little fngers. Of course, my dreams were then dominated by horses. I never had the horse I dreamed about. Dad never had much money. We lived on a housing estate with felds out back where I’d get to know the rabbits, foxes, badgers, and deer. A schoolmate stole jackdaws’ eggs from their nests, hatched and fedged them himself, then trained them to respond to his call. I swear he almost got them to talk. I stopped reading Black Beauty and drenched my imagination in the reality of Nature in the great ‟Out There” and I don’t remember reading another animal book (unless you count Wind in the Willows) until I came upon Jack London’s classic Yukon-based adventure story, The Call of the Wild, about a dog named Buck. Dad fgured I needed a dog of my own. The bowl of goldfsh and the African Grey parrot we inherited from an old aunt were okay, as were the white mice. Until, that is, they escaped from their cage and disappeared behind the skirting board in the front room. Oh yes, and there was a friend’s long-eared black rabbit that lived in his garden two doors down from me. The rabbit had a large hutch on legs in which we crouched as eight-yearolds to smoke our frst cigarettes. Naturally, the rabbit was ejected frst. He made no complaint. But our mothers did when they discovered what we’d been up to. Oh yes, the dog. My frst dog. Black as ink, it was. Of indeterminate heritage. A ‟Heinz” mongrel, we’d say—ffty-seven varieties with teeth as sharp as razor wire and green eyes full of menace. Dad named it Rex. He could have called it anything—Joshua, Cyril, even Black Beauty, or Buck if he’d wanted. I didn’t care. You see, I loved it from the start. Taking Rex for a walk was an adventure. You never knew if he’d be with you when you arrived back home. Once off the lead, there’d be a black fash and he’d be gone. Call, whistle, shout, you could lose your voice to the seven winds, but you wouldn’t see him again until he was ready to come home. Usually to eat. Why didn’t we keep him on the lead? Truth is, if you did that for more than a few minutes he’d either dislocate your shoulder or you’d end up with one arm considerably longer than the other. He’d be on the lead just as long as it would take to get him into the felds and away from any roads. Then off he’d go. He was never destined to make old bones. One summer evening (balmy warm it was, with the sun sliding toward the woods in the west) Rex took off after rabbits. Not one, but half a dozen of them, chasing this way and that, mad as a hatter and having the time of his life. I lost sight of him. An hour went by. Twilight gave way beneath a dreamy night sky.

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Prologue

xi

Later that evening Rex was found by a neighbor, lying beside a quiet country lane, an open wound on his head, his young, shiny, black body growing stiff and cold. It broke my heart. Baerli was the frst ‟family” we had once Min and I were married. Baerli (German for ‟little bear”) was the complete opposite to Rex. Baerli was a gentleman with four legs if ever there was one. He was a ginger ball of fuff when we collected him from the breeder. A chow, two months old, I tucked him under my arm and we hitchhiked home. Baerli deserves a book of his own, but I’ll not write it. Some subjects are too close to the heart to be thrown open to public scrutiny. So I’ll condense the fourteen years of joy he gave us, into a few brief sentences, and leave you to fll in the gaps. He was just over eighteen months old when our frst daughter was born. From day one he took it upon himself to be her guardian, her carer, her dearest friend to whom he would introduce the wonders of Nature. They communicated with a language all their own and became inseparable. As I say, he was a chow, with ginger hair and a black tongue. His tail curled over his back to expose a black bum, and he was far too much of a gentleman to go chasing rabbits. He once caught a squirrel stealing strawberries from the garden, but when the terrifed rodent lay on its back expecting to die, Baerli had no instinct to do anything but lick him. (Was it a taste of strawberries he was expecting?) The end came slowly for the dear boy. His leg joints were going. Sometimes they’d give way beneath him and he’d lie panting and sorry-eyed. The vet did all he could for him. But he was fourteen. He’d had a happy life and given me and my family more riches than any of you could put into a bank account. We buried him in the garden, and decades later we still mourn his loss. My daughter, the one whom Baerli brought up, has a cat. No, that’s not true. I know a black cat with a white strip under his chin, who chose my daughter when she went to the local Animal Rescue Centre. He looked her in the eye and said: “You’ll do. Take me home and make sure I live well.” Never was a cat more pampered than George. He certainly rules Claudia’s house, dictates her moods and makes demands that no two-legged child would get away with. But that’s cats for you. I’m not a cat man. That’s no fault of cats; I simply have an allergy that makes me struggle to breathe when in a room with one for more than an hour. As a result, Claudia spends half a day hoovering her lounge if I’m due to visit, and if at all possible we’ll sit in the garden while George grins at me through the window. Should it be the other way round? Shouldn’t George be outside in the garden while I sit with my daughter indoors? Probably. But not our George. That would be beneath his dignity; it would be like admitting that humans were more important than their feline masters.

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This book, no doubt, will put Homo sapiens in our place. Imagine: If only cats and dogs could write, what would they have to say about our behavior—to each other and to the animal kingdom? We can only speculate. But since our non-human friends are not known for their prowess with a quill, a biro, a typewriter, or a word processor, it’s the two-legged academics, novelists, and poets who have the upper hand.

Reading Cats and Dogs : Companion Animals in World Literature, edited by Zélia M. Bora, et al., Lexington Books, 2020.

Introduction

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Françoise Besson and Scott Slovic

A smile from an unseen cat: the frst cat discovered by thousands of children around the world is a faceless cat, a smile, an English phrase changed into a companion animal that is nothing but a smile. And yet Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1885) may be a frst step in the discovery of animals, like his white rabbit or Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit (The Tale of Peter Rabbit, 1902). People, as children, often discover the animal world through strange drawings and words that may lead them to observe reality in a closer way. Why start this book about companion species with an invisible cat? Because Lewis Carroll’s fctitious animal has accompanied generations of readers all over the world, highlighting two things: frst, even if it was not the aim of the creation of this playful invisible animal, it may remind us of the invisibility many companion animals suffer in our societies, an invisibility they share with many humans, an invisibility disappearing when two of those invisible creatures, like a homeless man and a stray cat in the streets of London or elsewhere, meet and become companions; and second, the cat’s smile, a fantastic smile, somewhat frightening, a smile suggesting that this animal, both an animal, a piece of literature, and an element of language, can bring a smile to human faces, transforming any sadness into joy, any despair into hope. The title of this collection, Reading Cats and Dogs: Companion Species in World Literature, is intended as a double entendre. On the one hand, as suggested in the subtitle particularly, this is a book about the representation of cats and dogs (and other companion species) in cultural texts, especially in fction, nonfction, and poetry. Contributors to the collection have addressed various dimensions of animal literature, from the aesthetic to the philosophical and political.

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But Reading Cats and Dogs also means considering companion species themselves as living books, offering their human readers a whole world to be observed, analyzed, interpreted, and understood. To “read” cats and dogs is to learn to be aware of the richness of a cat’s psychology, of a dog’s interior world. We can think about Laila del Monte’s communication with animals through telepathy and her multiple experiences of communication with animals through an attention to their minds. To the question “Do animals think?” the mere act of reading the bright page of their eyes might give an answer. French philosopher René Descartes thus defned thought: “Par le nom de pensée je comprends tout ce qui est tellement en nous que nous l’apercevons immédiatement par nous-mêmes et en avons une connaissance intérieure; ainsi toutes les opérations de la volonté, de l’entendement, de l’imagination et des sens sont des pensées” (Descartes, Méditations métaphysiques. Objections et réponses).1 If we consider the “operations of the will, understanding, imagination, and senses” as thoughts, as Descartes does, so we can say that all these characteristics are not limited to humans. Other animals have a will, they have understanding, and they use their senses in ways mingling the mental and the sensorial. As for imagination, the capacity of some monkeys to invent tools and the beauty of the creation of some paintings by Australian birds to draw the attention of a female, are expressions of imagination in its etymological sense. They have the capacity of creating images, real ones or mental ones. Reading cats and dogs suggests the broader capacity to reconnect with nature and to perceive in the behaviors of other beings, as in a mirror, the reversed image of our human world. Whereas our human world experiences injustice, inequality, and the rape and murder of the other, be it human, animal, or elemental, animals offer understanding, care, and empathy. The ethologist Boris Cyrulnik notes that “a dog’s owner’s thought could shape the behavior and biological development of the dog” (Cyrulnik in Matignon 109), adding: “Ce n’est pas de la transmission de pensée, je dirais que c’est de la matérialisation de la pensée” (109).2 The dog’s emotion grasps his human companion’s emotions or thoughts, and his behavior becomes the material, visible projection of his companion’s invisible mental or emotional world. This does not mean that the dog or the cat is the double of his human companion. He is in such a relation of empathy that his senses can grasp even what his human companion is not always aware of. In such moments, the animal’s companionship is perhaps more important than its own animal existence. This mirroring of his human companion’s interior life shows a capacity to prioritize the other over oneself. When humans are ill, their companions, dogs or cats or any other companion species, stay with them and provide comfort, sometimes even healing their companions. Sometimes the animal absorbs so much of his human companion’s illness that he can also develop

Reading Cats and Dogs : Companion Animals in World Literature, edited by Zélia M. Bora, et al., Lexington Books, 2020.

Introduction

3

some disease. If we observe our animal companions closely, they teach us empathy and the sense of connection. Claude Lévi-Strauss underlines to what extent our break with nature is responsible for all the horrors perpetrated in the world:

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Car n’est-ce pas le mythe de la dignité exclusive de la nature humaine qui a fait essuyer à la nature une première mutilation dont devaient inévitablement s’ensuivre d’autres mutilations ? On a commencé par couper l’homme de la nature, et par le constituer en règne souverain ; on a cru ainsi effacer son caractère le plus irrécusable, à savoir qu’il est d’abord un être vivant. Et, en restant aveugle à cette propriété commune, on a donné champ libre à tous les abus. Jamais mieux qu’au terme des quatre derniers siècles de son histoire l’homme occidental ne put-il comprendre qu’en s’arrogeant le droit de séparer radicalement l’humanité de l’animalité, en accordant à l’une tout ce qu’il retirait à l’autre, il ouvrait un cycle maudit, et que la même frontière, constamment reculée, servirait à écarter des hommes d’autres hommes, et à revendiquer au proft des minorités toujours plus restreintes le privilège d’un humanisme corrompu aussitôt né pour avoir emprunté à l’amour-propre son principe et sa notion. (Lévi-Strauss 53, in Fontenay 58–59)3

Companion animals teach us how to reconnect with nature and to weave again the links we have broken. When a writer tells a story of friendship between humans and animals, it is also a painting of our world that is offered: on one side its weaknesses, its violence, its injustice; on the other side, the light of an animal’s eyes and his/her simple gestures to show the way. In awful situations, humans try to fnd non-human company. Think about dogs accompanying soldiers in the trenches during World War 1, as is evoked in a poignant after-war story in Jean-Christophe Rufn’s novel Le collier rouge (2014), in which a dog, who has followed an offcer during the First World War, waits for his human companion while he is questioned and is his only support until the moment when the offcer who is to judge him for an act of disobedience during the war, meant to save his soldiers, listens to him with benevolent eyes, as if listening to the dog’s desperate barking. We can also remember the role of animals in Canadian author Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977). In other circumstances, a prisoner may try to fnd some company in the animals present in his cell. This is what is told in the Mémoires of Jean-Henry de Latude, an eighteenth-century French man who was imprisoned for thirty-fve years for having invented a false plot and sent the king’s favorite an empty box supposed to contain poison. During the decades he spent in various prisons, between several escapes, he tried to fnd company in rats and spiders, observing them and even trying to tame them in order to make them his cell companions (Latude, 1787). Humans sometimes try to

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improve their non-human counterparts’ lives and conditions, and sometimes it is animal companions who improve humans’ conditions, when the latter look for companions to bring them the affection they miss and to change their loneliness or tragedies into a bond with a being who is different in shape but not in heart. Among the real stories reported by those who experienced them, many reveal, through the reciprocal attachment between humans and animal companions, the faws of our human societies. Bulu: African Wonder Dog (2010) tells the story of a couple’s life in Africa with a little Jack Russell they had adopted. The story is frst and foremost the story of a double love, for a dog and for Africa. It is for the author, Dick Houston, a conservationist, safari leader, writer, and teacher, the co-founder of the organization EleFence International dedicated to elephant conservation in Zambia, the opportunity to show the dangers threatening African wildlife together with a simple love story between a dog and a couple of American conservationists, Anna and Steve Tolan, living in Zambia. The book evokes the kind of freedom in love, or through love, that also appears in Rachel Wells’s Alfe the Doorstep Cat (2014), told from the cat’s point of view. Starting with the sense of loss, the book develops the animal point of view that reveals animal suffering and the reciprocal healing attitude between the human and non-human companions. The animal point of view also suggests the strength of communication between human beings and their non-human companions. As the ethologist Boris Cyrulnik says: “Animals help us to better understand the language preparing us for speech” (Cyrulnik in Matignon 14–15). He argues that animals teach us the origins of our behaviors (Cyrulnik in Matignon 115). James Bowen’s true story A Street Cat Named Bob (2012) also shows the exchange between a street musician in London and a battered cat he adopted. Shifting from the history of London and the city’s link with cats to his own story, the narrator starts by the assertion of a “kindred” link. Bob, the street cat, sends all broken men and women a message of hope transmitted by James Bowen. Bob’s story is also for James Bowen the opportunity to show society and to speak about responsibility. In a different way, Michael Brown’s Cat Tales for Mariette (2016) tells a friendship story in South Africa, where cat stories will be a healing spring for a woman in her last journey in which will be revealed the triple power of friendship, stories, and cats’ presence, even when the latter is literary—when a man’s long experience with cats is changed into healing storytelling. Such stories of the deep links uniting men or women with dogs or cats are stories of hope revealing the healing role of companion species. Donna Haraway, in her Companion Species Manifesto, writes about herself and Ms. Cayenne Pepper, her dog: “We have had forbidden conversation; we have had oral intercourse; we are bound in telling story upon story with nothing but the facts. We are training each other in acts of communication

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Introduction

5

we barely understand. We are constitutively, companion species” (Haraway 2, italics in the text). The mere fact that a scholar should make the choice to write such a manifesto, that she should assert she “consider[s] dog writing to be a branch of feminist theory” (3), proves how far mankind must progress to simply admit the notion of tolerance to the creature that is other. To reach men’s ears, Donna Haraway changed the affective relationship and animal love into theory, as if the human species could accept the theory but could only smile at the notion of animal love. Her own experience with her dog lets us wonder about communication between human beings and their non-human companions, mainly dogs and cats. World literature is flled with books telling the stories, either fctitious or real, of deep relationships uniting humans and dogs, cats, and other animals. There’s Argos, Ulysses’s dog, in Homer’s The Odyssey (end of seventh century BCE) who is the only being able to recognize Ulysses after his long absence. Dogs have inhabited the world’s literature for an especially long time. Think, too, of Blue in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929); and recall Cécile Aubry’s Belle et Sébastien (1965), staging the friendship between a boy and a mountain Pyrenean dog. Children’s books often introduce animals to children. Cree writer Tomson Highway often shows animals in his tales situated in the Canadian Arctic. For example, in Fox on the Ice (2011), the family includes the animal companion, Ootsie, the dog, who will replace the father—running after the sled to save his wife and son as, while he was fshing in the ice, a fox appeared, frightened the dogs just by his presence, and they ran away with his wife and son in the sled. While the father runs after them, the companion dog saves the net with the fsh, their vital resource. It is the wild animal, the fox, that brings about the revelation of what is essential, the father making the decision to save his family, and the companion dog saving their staples. Many of these literary dogs reveal profound truths about friendship—they actually speak to us about friendship. Dogs speak. The science-fction author Clifford D. Simak makes dogs speak in City (a collection interestingly translated into French as Demain les chiens), like Nathanael, the frst speaking dog. The tales of this collection are told and commented upon by dogs. Dogs speak; science-fction speaking dogs telling about an imaginary future echo other speaking dogs from an immemorial mythical past. This is what N. Scott Momaday tells us in his essay “The Spiritual Mountain”: There is a story in The Way to Rainy Mountain about a man who is saved by a dog. Some years ago I was living in San Francisco. I was invited to come and speak to a group of sixth-graders at the Hebrew Academy of San Francisco. [. . .] I thought of this story in particular about a man who was saved by a talking dog.

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The story goes like this. There was a man and he had been thrown away. We are not quite sure what that means but we know that he was abandoned and left to fend for himself on the open plain. It was a very dangerous place to be alone, in his time, in the 19th century, say. But there he was. He had a bow and arrows and he was alone, and out there on the plain, lost as it were in this vast sea of grasses; and he expended all of his arrows shooting game, and fnally he had no arrows left and nothing to eat and so he was prepared to die, when a dog came up to him and said: “Oh you are in deep trouble. I wouldn’t want to be in your moccasins. Enemies all around. You are completely surrounded. Oh it looks bad.” And the man, given that news, said: “Well, you don’t say something I don’t know, what can I do about that?” And the dog said: “Well do you know I could save you”? And the man said: “Well if you can save me, please, do”. And the dog said: “Wait a minute”—you know how dogs are—“wait a minute, I have puppies, they are little, they are hungry, they are cold. If you will take care of my puppies I will save you.” The man agreed of course, the bargain was struck. And the story ends: the dog led the man round and round and they came to safety. This is what I should tell to the sixth-graders and so I launched into the story. There were bright faces looking up at me and I came to the part where you say: this happened a long time ago when dogs could talk. And a little girl in the front row looked up at me and she said: “Those were the days.” [. . .] (Momaday, 2010, 53–54)

Before being the companions helping Native Americans in their everyday lives, carrying their goods when moving from one place to another while pulling travois before the arrival of horses, dogs were present in myths and legends as helpful creatures, who could speak to humans. David Abram, in his book The Spell of the Sensuous, reminds us that many tribes consider that language was originally given to other species. He says: “Despite this originary language common to both people and animals, the various animals and other natural forms today speak their unique dialects. But nevertheless all speak, all have the power of language” (Abram 87–88). Maybe this is one of the most essential lessons companion species provide: by sharing their language with us, they remind us of the language of nature we have forgotten but which a dog’s or cat’s eyes may reactivate within us. Dogs and cats appear in classic literature, all over the world; in Asia, dogs appear from tenth-century Chinese classical tales to Shuntarō Tanikawa’s twentieth-century poems. In Africa, Nigerian Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s horseman is founded on the Yoruba tradition according to which when a king dies, his death must be followed by the death of his horseman and of his horse and dog. Like his horseman who is supposed to go on helping him in the other world, his animal companions

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go on accompanying him beyond death. Horses as companion animals also appear in some Cameroonian novels as will be seen in this book. They are present in Europe and America, from Balzac’s Peine de cœur d’une chatte anglaise (1840–1842) to Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” (1925); they even appear in detective stories like the fox terrier who acts as a dumb witness in one of Agatha Christie’s novels. In French literature, Colette’s own Angora cat became a fctional animal in Dialogues de Bêtes and a chartreux she-cat inspired her novel La Chatte (1933). Recently Bernard Werber evoked the terrorist attacks in Paris through the point of view of a cat in Demain les chats (2016) and two of Didier Van Cauvelaert’s novels (Jules, 2015; Le retour de Jules, 2017) tell stories centered on the presence of a dog called Jules. Dogs and cats are particularly present in children’s literature such as Milou, Tintin’s faithful companion (1929), Fang in Harry Potter (1997– 2007), or Dorothy Gale’s terrier Toto in The Wizard of Oz (1939). For dogs may be good allies to humans in fantastic and fantasy literature. In the novel by Australian author John Flanagan, The Sorcerer in the North (2006), the dog Shadow, frst saved by the hero at the very beginning of the story after being wounded by a spear, becomes an important protagonist. And, of course, Walt Disney often staged companion animals, from The Jungle Book (1894 for Kipling’s novel, 1967 for Disney flm) to Old Yeller (1956 for Gipson’s novel, 1957 for the flm). In canonical books, there are many companion dogs accompanying the characters. To give but a few examples, we can think about Jip, the spaniel, in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfeld (1849–1850), Bulls-Eye in Oliver Twist (1837–1839), and Diogenes in Dombey and Son (1846–1848). Those literary companions speak both about companionship and the blurred boundary existing between humans and their animal companions. Natalie McKnight writes: Dickens’s novels and shorter fctional works abound in pets distinguished by more complexity, humour and interest than most authors deign to give their human characters. From Bill Sikes’s Bull’s-eye, to Bamaby’s Grip, Florence’s Diogenes, and Dora’s Jip, Dickens created anthropomorphised pets whose identifcation with their owners blurs the boundaries between human and animal, suggesting, as Darwin eventually did through evolutionary biology, that the traditional line drawn between animals and humans is nothing but an illusion. (McKnight 131)

The mere word of pet, used here by Natalie McKnight and commonly used in English, may raise questions for us. The defnitions of the word in various dictionaries4 evoke an animal associated with human homes and kept for company and pleasure. Even if the notion of “company” is mentioned, even if this ‟tamed animal” appears as a “favorite,” there is not the strong connotation that

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appears in the word “companion.” The notion of a “pet” seems to imply a pleasant but secondary presence, which may come from the etymology of the word, perhaps coming from the adjective “petty,” designating something “minor” and “secondary.” Yet more than mere pets, animal companions are often considered as members of the family and friends at the same time. We might also wonder if anthromorphization often perceived in literary companions is a projection of human characters’ personalities onto their dogs or cats or just some awareness that they share the same ground, breathe the same air, and come from the same original water, thus sharing the same ancestry. This may lead us to wonder about the very notion of companionship. We speak about companion species to designate animals accompanying humans in their everyday life, sharing their lives and their homes or travels. But could we speak about wild companionship? Isn’t the bird staying a moment on top of a mountain while two mountaineers spend a few minutes near the clouds their ephemeral companion? Isn’t the bear visiting mountaineers during the night, their invisible companion? Isn’t the izard quietly running near the path while mountaineers have their breakfast at sunrise or drinking at the river not far from them their companion? These animals are wild, they are far from any human contact and yet, for a few minutes, they share their own lives with some human lives. Maybe companionship might also be the sharing of moments of life, at home as well as in wild nature. And what about all those working animals, horses, mules, and donkeys all over the world, camels and dromedaries in African deserts, or yacks in the mountains of Tibet, vital companions for nomads and traveling people? They are faithful companions allowing travelers to have a double contact with the world they ride over and with the animal allowing them to make the journey. Kev Reynolds shows that in a poem telling about his experience in the Himalayas where, after many walks and climbs he had made there over the years, he dreamed to go to Mugu, “a hidden part of Nepal.” But his lung troubles did not allow him to climb again in the area. So his Sherpa friend found a solution and allowed him to achieve his dream. A horse, Sangye, became his closest companion during the journey; a friendship bond was created between the mountaineer and the horse: The days were full of ups and downs, the nights were crisp and cold and with every hour on Sangye’s back, the more I was feeling bold. She and I were friends by now, she’d whinny when I came near knowing I guess, though a bit of a mess, I no longer had any fear. [. . .] Yes, I thought I’d gone to heaven as on Sangye’s back I rode while my Sherpa friend and the others were speechless as they strode. [. . .]

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Introduction

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Though tough at times and demanding, there’s nothing to detract from the joy of riding in the sky on dear old Sangye’s back. (Kev Reynolds, “In the Saddle,” Rambling Rhymes, 153–57)

Through the friendship of his Sherpa companion, and thanks to Sangye the horse, the mountaineer can reach his dream and travel to that mountain heaven. Sangye is more than a mount, she is a friend, she is the prolonging of the mountaineer’s body, and she allows him to breathe in that “hidden part of Nepal” he could not have seen without his human friends and this horse. Sangye is both a friend and his new mountain breathing allowing him to live a dream. She gives him the feeling to go “to heaven,” which may remind us of what N. Scott Momaday feels when he tells about his initiatory journey to his roots, in his autobiography The Names: “it seemed that my horse was bearing me up to the top of the world” (Momaday, 1976, 167). The horse, so often recurring in his work, from his own horse Guadal-tseyu leading him to the Wichita Mountains where he can touch “the fallen tree, the hollow log” (167) of the Kiowa Creation myth—the Kiowa people being supposed to have appeared from the underground through a hollow tree—to the mythical horses of the Navajo chant, is the link with the natural world and with myths, the centaur-like prolonging of his human body both allowing the journey to his roots and being the companion leading him “up to the top of the world.” Companions sharing our homes or our homelessness, companions of travels or wild meetings reinventing companionship, other-than-human animals show humans the very notion of companionship: sharing everything in a relationship starting from a search for difference instead of a rejection of otherness. Animal companionship teaches us to be attentive, to understand the richness of difference, to share. Our companions remind us of the roots of the name, its Latin etymology—cum-panis—meaning that the companion is the being “sharing the same bread.” And by sharing bread, humans and their companion species show the way to a sharing of the Earth founded on an attention to the other. This is what so many books show. Literary companions abound and let us have a different perception of the world. From William Shakespeare’s Crab in Two Gentlemen in Verona (1589–1593), to Pilot in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), White Fang in Jack London’s eponymous novel (1906), and Nana in Peter Pan (1911) whose character is inspired by J.M. Barrie’s own dog, or Singo in Jules Verne’s Un capitaine de quinze ans (1878), dog companions are innumerable in literature, and they sometimes reveal some changes in our societies. Thus, with the dogs accompanying the spacemen in Jules Verne’s novel Autour de la lune (1870), the novelist foreshadowed the story of Laika, the frst living creature sent into space in 1957. Laika, a young female dog found in Moscow streets, never returned. But in the French science-fction novel, the

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dogs accompanied the humans who shared danger with them. It was different in reality for Laika was sacrifced and died after a few hours, alone in space. This sad story, one of the many examples of dogs and cats and other animals sacrifced for human science, was told in an opera for children created in London in 2013, Laika the Spacedog. Literary dogs are often wiser and more empathetic than their human counterparts. In the German novel Eff Briest (1896) by Theodor Fontane, the dog Rollo seems to be the character feeling most empathy for the young eponymous character.5 In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Crusoe’s dog is on the side of the animals hunted by men. Giving them more importance than simply that of accompanying a hunter, American author Rick Bass devoted two books to his dogs: Brown Dog of the Yaak (1999) and Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had (2000). In poetry, Baudelaire’s love for cats appeared in some of his poems like “Les chats” (1847). Emily Dickinson’s “She sights a bird-she chuckles” (about 1862), T. S. Eliot’s “Macavity, the Mystery Cat” (1939), Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1871), and Margaret Atwood’s “February” (1995), to name but a few, also celebrate cats. From cats in tales like Charles Perrault’s “Chat Botté” in Contes de ma mère l’Oye (1697), in gothic literature like Lovecraft’s short story, “The Cats of Ulthar” (1920), or in fantasy like Neil Gaiman’s black cat in his short story “The Price” (1998), to real cats entering fction, as in Théophile Gauthier’s La Ménagerie intime (1869), Emile Zola’s short story “Le Paradis des chats” (in Nouveaux contes à Ninon (1866)), Guy de Maupassant’s Sur les chats (1886), and Marcel Aymé’s “La patte du chat” in Contes du chat perché (1934–1946), there are lots of books where cats play a role. The list of fction, nonfction, or poetic books in which companion animals play a part or are at the core of the writing is endless. About cats, Jean Cocteau said: “I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.”6 If cats are the visible soul of one’s home according to Cocteau, dogs are the “materialization of our thought,” as Boris Cyrulnik says. Companion animals have this capacity to make invisible things in us visible. This is perhaps a defnition of awareness, perceiving what is invisible to our eyes, minds, and hearts, which companion animals reveal to us. Cat and dog stories are also a way of evoking animal suffering and animal rights. French poet Paul Léautaud, who in his life had 300 cats and 150 dogs, all stray animals, said that they interested him from the moment they were suffering (Entretiens avec Robert Mallet). His Bestiaire (1959) tells animal stories and his texts go on helping animals since the royalties are given to the French SPA (Société Protectrice des Animaux). In the nineteenth century in France, writers defended animal rights and particularly dogs. Virginie Mézan-Muxart, evoking the dog Rask in Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal and

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Introduction

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Top in Jules Verne’s L’île mystérieuse, wrote that “some [writers] played a major role in [dogs’] protection and well-being by being committed in various ways: by denouncing, in their works, the unjust treatments and sufferings inficted to them (Maupassant) or by being directly involved in social (Hugo and Zola) and political (Lamartine) life” (Mézan-Muxart 386). Lamartine’s opposition to the tax on dogs planned by the French government asserting that dogs were owned by rich people, answered: “Où avez-vous vu plus de chiens? [. . .] C’est dans les demeures du peuple que le chien se compte en masse” (Lamartine, in Maringue 248).7 Virginie Mézan-Muxart goes on evoking all the types of dogs mentioned by the poet to answer the government who wanted to differentiate luxury dogs and useful dogs; he mentions, among many others, blind people’s guide dogs, shepherds’ dogs, beggars’ dogs, and also the Saint Bernard helping to save people after avalanches and the Terre-Neuve used “as a sentinel to rescue children falling into water” (Lamartine in Mézan-Muxart 388). Giving facts, Lamartine also speaks about the affective dimension as among the two categories considered as luxury dogs, the hunting dog and the companion dog, he considers that the companion dog is “useful to human beings who need their faithful companion” (Mézan-Muxart 388), companions never abandoning the human being at their sides, flling the loneliness of so many humans (old people without any family, ill people, poor women, children). He insisted on the damage on a child deprived of a companion dog: “[. . .] véritable dommage moral fait à l’enfance, car le chien a une fonction auprès de l’enfant. Le chien apprend à aimer ! Il enseigne l’amitié à l’homme” (Lamartine quoted by Mézan-Muxart 388).8 The French poet and committed citizen linked the political discourse associated with the law and the ethical dimension of the relationship between humans and their companion dogs. Unfortunately, the law was passed and had disastrous consequences as the poorest abandoned or killed their dogs. Yet as Virginie Mézan-Muxart noted, some members of the S.P.A., in 1894, paid the tax for some poor people so that the dogs should not be abandoned or killed (Mézan-Muxart 389). Mézan-Muxart’s article evokes the denunciation of cruelty to animals denounced especially by Guy de Maupassant in the short story “Pierrot,” and Victor Hugo denounced the legal statute of animals considered as things (see Mézan-Muxart 392) until a recent date since it is only in 2015 in France that the statute of the animal changed from a thing to “a living creature endowed with sensitivity” (Journal Offciel, February 17, 2015). And it is the man who had slavery abolished in France, Victor Schoelcher, who fought for a law, passed in 1850, which punished poor treatment of animals. For Schoelcher, who defended that law, “from anti-slavery to animal protection [. . .] there is not a difference of nature but a difference of degree” (Schoelcher quoted in Mézan-Muxart 392). Defending humans or non-humans participates of a

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same awareness of all creatures’ place in the world. There was a great commitment from writers and humanists in the defense of companion animals in the nineteenth century. But it was a long way from the legal perception of animals as things to the ethical vision of companionship at the end of the twentieth and in the twenty-frst century. Karine Lou Matignon’s book Sans les animaux le monde ne serait pas humain (“Without Animals, the World Would not Be Humane”) gives the ethological vision of men’s relationships with companion animals. In French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s book L’animal que donc je suis (“The animal who therefore I am”) (2006), the author questions himself about who he is when looking at a cat’s eyes, as if the cat’s eyes revealed his own reality to him. Dogs and cats accompanying fctitious heroes or themselves heroes of real or fctitious stories both hold out a mirror to us to reveal our own humanity and show us the way toward more humanity. If so many writers place dogs and cats—and other companion animals like Gavin Maxwell’s otter Mij, whose poignant friendship he presents in Ring of Bright Water (1960)—in their pages, it is frst to prolong the lives of their real companions and then to show that this companionship between humans and companion species appears as a way to a better relationship between humans and the world. The aim of this book, gathering articles about dogs, cats, and some other companion species in world literature, is to show both their healing and philosophical roles in our relationship with the world; they also hold out a mirror to us to show all the faws of our societies and even in our human nature. Dogs and cats, and companion species as a whole, as relayed by writers and other artists, speak about the loss and revival of our sense of connection and about an original animal language that we have forgotten and that animals allow us to fnd again. Obviously, there is a vast amount of literature across the wide world that directly or obliquely addresses the complexities of our relationships with animal companions. So far, though, there is relatively little environmental literary criticism that directly addresses the textual representation of companion species, particularly in a multinational context. Contributors to this volume come from Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon (by way of Denmark), China, France, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This suggests only a minute range of national and cultural perspectives, but we do hope to refect—and to symbolize—the importance of cultural nuance and difference in literary and cinematic representation of animals and in the social attitudes toward the animals who live among us. There is much more work to be done along these

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lines, but this project, we hope, will inspire other colleagues in other regions of the world to refect on their local literatures of companion animals. Even in writing a phrase like “live among us,” we are aware that some of our most poignant relationships with companion animals occur with those who live beside or on the fringes of human society, as stray or feral presences, seen darting through empty lots or scavenging for scraps on city streets. What can we learn about domesticity and wildness from such animals, their struggles to survive and their furtive, transitory appearances in our lives? The frst section of the book is devoted to this question. Karla Armbruster begins this book on companion animals by immediately challenging and probing the meaning of “domestication” in several wellknown literary representations of “our oldest domesticated companion, the dog.” She argues that such narratives as the American novels The Call of the Wild and Old Yeller and the South African classic Jock of the Bushveld are deeply revealing of the tension between civilization and wilderness in our societies, but as we progress further in the Anthropocene, it would make sense for us to think of the world as something “feral” rather than distinctly domesticated or wild. The representation of dogs (and other companion species) in such recent works as Eva Hornung’s 2010 Dog Boy can help us to imagine what Armbruster calls the “multi-species fourishing” toward which we might aspire. From the broad philosophical questions raised in Armbruster’s essay, we turn to the daily reality of experiencing feral companions on the streets of Istanbul, as represented in Önder Cetin’s study of the 2016 documentary Kedi (Cat) by Turkish flmmaker Ceyda Torun and several other Turkish literary works that “how we affect and are affected by” stray animals. As Cetin reveals, this flm Kedi provides poignant, even intimate, glimpses into the daily lives of street cats and the humans whose lives they intersect. Among other things, this study demonstrates the irony that when cats and dogs are abandoned in Turkey, they become public property—in other words, they do not cease to be human companions even when they no longer live in individual households. Cats, stray and domesticated, populate many stories by contemporary Kuwaiti author Laila al-Othman, whose deeply psychological writings often address feminist issues in Middle Eastern cultures. Marianne Marroum, herself based in Lebanon, teases out the gender dynamics and psychological nuances of al-Othman’s “cat stories,” showing how writers use such animal narratives to explore their own identities and to instill readers with a deeper sense of their own humanity. Human interactions with stray animals vary strikingly from culture to culture. Niroshini Gunasekera articulates this directly in studying Michael Ondaatje’s 1982 memoir Running in the Family with a focus on the wild and stray animals that “roam” throughout this Sri Lankan tale. Dogs, cats, birds, polecats (or ferrets), cobras, boars, and even venomous local ants play

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important roles in Ondaatje’s work. In particular, as Gunasekera emphasizes, stray dogs function as metaphors for the struggles of the author’s alcoholic father. The conclusion that “animals and humans have lived side by side in isolation” evokes a strong sense of shared loneliness, but this isolation is somehow bridged through the imagination of the memoirist, who appreciates the intersections between seemingly disparate lives. Qianqian Cheng undertakes a vast historical survey of stray cat literature in China, showing how profoundly the idea of and experience with stray cats permeates Chinese culture, from traditional palace life to university culture and the daily lives of average citizens. What comes through most strongly here are the divergent attitudes toward stray animals in Chinese culture, ranging from affection to brutal rejection. The purpose of writing about stray animals and representing them through other media, argues Cheng, is to “guide people toward a more balanced relationship” with companion animals, whether they share the same household or meet each other on the streets. As Cheng explains in the chapter discussed above, stray cats have actually played a practical role throughout Chinese history, often helping to control mice and rats in palaces, on campuses, and in neighborhoods. This usefulness is actually the focus of the second section of the book, which turns from stray or feral companions to more actively domesticated animals. Anna Re provides a revealing glimpse into Italian dog culture, pointing out that many Italians have dogs as “pet friends” and dote lavishly on them as members of their families. Re argues that “Italy is hands-down one of the most dog-friendly countries in Europe.” Even the city of Rome is named for Romulus, the historical fgure who was sheltered by a female wolf with his twin Remus when the two were abandoned in the wilderness. Italian writers, too, have long lived with dogs, and these companions have not only entered their households but their imaginations, as revealed in the works of Italo Svevo, Curzio Malaparte, Carlo Levi, Dino Buzzati, Mario Rigoni Stern, Italo Calvino, Alberto Asor Rosa, and others. The idea that household pets serve a “useful” function not only as emotional companions but as sources of literary inspiration comes through vividly here. Sometimes, though, dogs’ usefulness is more physically practical, as in the case of hunting dogs. Claire Cazajous-Augé highlights the “cross-species collaboration” that occurs when dogs support the hunting process, typically by using their superior powers of perception to detect game animals sought by their human companions. Of course, there is also an emotional dimension to hunters’ relationships with their dogs—a genuine “friendship and partnership,” as Cazajous-Augé states in her discussion of three recent works of American nature writing that involves dogs: Rick Bass’s Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had (2000), Jim Fergus’s A Hunter’s Road: A Journey with Gun and Dog Across the American Upland (1993), and Richard Nelson’s “The Gifts

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Introduction

15

of Deer” (1991). Keita Hatooka’s study of twentieth-century Japanese poet Shuntarō Tanikawa’s playful and philosophically adventurous fascination with dogs suggests a usefulness akin to the relationships with companion animals many other writers throughout the world have demonstrated. As Hatooka explains, Tanikawa not only shows a great personal fondness for dogs, but he fnds them useful in various ways for his artistry, even using dog images as a kind of critical alter ego, commenting on the poet’s life and work. Tanikawa even takes the bold step to use dogs as a seasonal expression in haiku, an unexpected but striking innovation in a highly traditional literary genre. Using a combination of Francophone and Anglophone novels from Cameroon as his examples, Kenneth Toah Nsah expands the category of companion animals to include horses and buffalos, and the utility of these companions expands as well to include physical protection (guard animals) and totemic (or spiritual) value, among others. In Patrice Nganang’s Temps de chien (2007), the dog character, Mboudjak, reverses the traditional human–animal relationship and appears to tame and “own” the humans; Gaston-Paul Effa’s Cheval-Roi (2001) suggests that horses might be romantic/zoophilic companions; Athanasius Nsalai’s The Buffalo Hunter (2008) hints that the domestication of wild animals might, in some cases, be a useful means of species conservation. As indicated above, many of the chapters in this book attempt to use the examination of literature as a way to complicate and deepen our understanding of companion animals, to topple preconceived ideas of companions, pets, human nature, wildness, domestication, and utility. The fnal section focuses primarily on the complexities of our human–animal relationships, often in very specifc social contexts. Chen Hong, for instance, shows that despite the growing prosperity of Chinese society since the late 1980s and the corresponding increase in pet ownership, the abuse of animals, and dogs in particular, remains a serious problem in contemporary China. For Chen, the representation of dog abuse is particularly poignant in a subgenre of Chinese literature and flm called diceng xu shi (subaltern narratives), which highlight the plight of the “poor and powerless,” human and otherwise. Her literary and sociological study seeks to explain the differences between urban and rural treatment of dogs in contemporary Chinese culture. Shifting our attention to South Africa, Wendy Woodward considers the relationship between cats and the uncanny in traditional cultures from the region, arguing that traditional ambivalence toward cats appears in such recent fctional works as Niq Mhlongo’s “Curiosity Killed the Cat” (2018), Zakes Mda’s Black Diamond (2009), and Nthikeng Mohlele’s Rusty Bell (2014). As a companion species that does “not adhere to meek pethood,” cats bring together the wild and the tame, much as Karla Armbruster suggested in the case of dogs in certain North American and South African narratives earlier in the book.

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Zélia M. Bora makes an argument in favor of literature as a particularly effective medium for conveying human ethical quandaries regarding the treatment of animals and for motivating activist interventions. While philosophy has long been fascinated with “the animal,” poetry spurs us to feel our animal nature and care about our fellow creatures. Lydia Fagundes Telles’s 1989 novel (in Portuguese) As Horas Nuas personifes a cat and seeks to bring readers inside the cat’s mind. The multivoiced narrative—which presents the perspectives of the cat and his human companion as well as an anonymous third-person narrator—touchingly illuminates such themes as “human narcissism, dependence, cruelty, and loneliness.” The result is a literary representation of both the material and psychological existence of cats in human society that has the potential to “transform hearts and human minds through compassion for the Other.” Athane Adrahane’s philosophical and poetic study and story about her relationship with Dogues de Bordeaux (a breed of large French mastiff dogs) vividly demonstrates how our animal companions often take over all aspects of our lives—our minds, our daily activities, our souls. Perhaps it is appropriate to conclude the collected studies with Adrahane’s meditation on the “bonds” that form between human and animal companions and how we “learn to love” by way of such relationships. The book’s Epilogue is a four-voiced love song, a “quadriptych,” written by the volume’s four co-editors, all of whom are not only ecocritics and creative writers, but lovers of animals, stray and domestic, wild and imaginary. The personal narratives in the Epilogue and in travel writer and mountaineer Kev Reynold’s intimate Prologue bring home the point that writing about companion animals is far more than a detachedly intellectual occupation—it is an act of love and self-examination, a way of knowing who we are and why we exist and with whom we share our lives and our planet.

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NOTES 1. “By the word thought, I mean all that is so fully in us that we catch sight of it immediately by ourselves and we have an interior knowledge of it; thus, all the operations of will, understanding, imagination, senses, are thoughts.” Translation by Françoise Besson. Unless otherwise noted, all the translations in the introduction are by Françoise Besson. 2. “This is not transmission of thought. I would say it is some materialization of thought.” 3. “For isn’t it the myth of the exclusive dignity of human nature that generated a frst mutilation of nature that was going inevitably to bring other mutilations? Man has frst been cut from nature and has been constituted as an unsurpassed reign; they have believed that they were going to erase his most unimpeachable quality, that is to say that he is frst and foremost a living being. And by remaining blind to that

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Introduction

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common attribute, they cleared the path to all abuses. Never better than at the end of the latest four centuries of his history, could the western man understand that, by claiming for himself the right to separate radically humanity from animality, by granting one what he took away from the other, he opened a cursed cycle, and that the same border, constantly pushed back, would be used to separate some men from other men, and to claim, for the beneft of always more limited minorities the privilege of a humanism corrupted as soon as it appears because it has borrowed its principle and its notion from self-respect.” 4. “A pet is an animal that you keep in your home to give you company and pleasure.” Cobuild Collins https​:/​/ww​​w​.col​​linsd​​ictio​​nary.​​com​/d​​ictio​​nary/​​en​gli​​sh​/pe​​t; “an animal that is kept in the home as a companion and treated kindly”: Cambridge Dictionary. https​:/​/di​​ction​​ary​.c​​ambri​​dge​.o​​rg​/us​​/dict​​ionar​​y​​/eng​​lish/​​pet “a domesticated animal kept for pleasure rather than utility” Merriam-Webster Dictionary. https​:/​/ww​​w​.mer​​riam-​​webst​​er​.co​​m​/dic​​ti​ona​​ry​/pe​t “domesticated or tamed animal kept as a favorite,” 1530s, originally in Scottish and northern England dialect (and exclusively so until mid-18c.), a word of unknown origin. Sense of “indulged or favorite child” (c. 1500) is recorded slightly earlier than that of “animal kept as a favorite” (1530s), but the latter may be the primary meaning. Probably associated with or infuenced by petty​.”htt​​ps://​​www​.e​​tymon​​ line.​​com​/w​​​ord​/p​​et 5. We can also think about Virginia Woolf’s Flush, whom she evokes in Flush: A Biography (1933), or Garryowen in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Gyp in George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), Huan in The Silmarillion (1977), by Tolkien, Kashtanka, in Anton Chekhov’s eponymous short story (1887) or Laska in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877). In Paul Auster’s Timbuktu (1999), Mr. Bones is a stray dog who is the narrator of the story. James Elroy’s dog Barko inspired to him the TV series City of Demons (2011), in which one character is a police robot dog. 6. https://dicocitations​.lemonde​.fr 7. “Where have you seen the greatest number of dogs? [. . .] It is in the lower class people’s homes that you can fnd masses of dogs.” 8. “[. . .] A true moral damage made on childhood, for the dog has a function for the child. The dog teaches people to love. He teaches humans friendship.”

REFERENCES Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-ThanHuman World (1996). Vintage, 1997. Atwood, Margaret. “February,” in Morning in the Burned House. McCleland and Stewart, 1995. Auster, Paul. Timbuctu. Faber and Faber, 1999. Aymé, Marcel. Les Contes bleus du chat perché (1934–1946). Gallimard, 1963. ———. Les contes rouges du chat perché (1934–1946). Gallimard, 1963.

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Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan and Wendy. Hodder and Stoughton, 1911. Bass, Rick. Brown Dog of the Yaak. Milkweed Editions, 1999. ———. Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had. Houghton Miffn Harcourt, 2001. Baudelaire, Charles. “Les Bons chiens” (1869) “Les petits poèmes en prose,” in Le Spleen de Paris. Livre de poche, 1972. ———. “Les chats,” in Les Fleurs du mal (1857). Belin-Gallimard, 2009. Baum, Frank L. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. George M. Hill Company, 1900. Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (1847). Pearson, 1993. Brown, Michael. Cat Tales for Mariette. Namaste Publishing, 2016. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1885). Penguin Group, 1994. Chekhov, Anton. Kashtanka (1887). Oxford University Press, 1959. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe (1719). Norton, 1980. Del Monte, Laila. Communiquer avec les animaux. Végas Editions, 2008. ———. Quand le cheval guide l’homme. Végas Editions, 2015. ———. Voyage initiatique avec les chats. Végas Editions, 2018. https​:/​/ww​​w​.bin​​ g​.com​​/vide​​os​/se​​arch?​​q​=lai​​la​+de​​l​+mon​​te​&ru​=​%2fv​​ideos​​%2fse​​arch%​​3fq​%3​​dlail​​a​ %2bd​​el​%2b​​monte​​%26qp​​vt​%3d​​laila​​%2bde​​l​%2bm​​onte%​​26FOR​​M​%3dV​​DRE​&v​​ iew​=d​​etail​​&mid=​​E771A​​2F426​​19B1A​​5CCB0​​E771A​​2F426​​19B1A​​5CCB0​​&rvsm​​ id​=1D​​​A030E​​38EEC​​27974​​45A1D​​A030E​​38EEC​​27974​​45A​&F​​ORM​=V​​DRVRV​ Derrida, Jacques. L’animal que donc je suis. Editions Galilée, 2006. Descartes, René. “Méditations métaphyques. Objections et réponses (1641 for the Latin frst edition,1647, for the French frst edition),” in Secondes Réponses aux objections contre les méditations métaphysiques. http:​/​/www​​.gute​​nberg​​.org/​​fles​​ /1384​​6​/138​​46​-h/​​1​3846​​-h​.ht​m Dickens, Charles. David Copperfeld (1849–1850). Penguin, 1999. ———. Dombey and Son (1846–1848). Oxford University Press, 2008. ———. Oliver Twist (1837–1839). Penguin, 2012. Dickinson, Emily. “She Sights a Bird-She Chuckles. About 1862,” in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Little, Brown and Company, 1976. Eliot, George. Adam Bede (1859). Modern Library Classics, 2002. Eliot, T. S. “Macavity, The Mystery Cat,” in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). Faber and Faber, 2009. Elroy, James. City of Demons. Produced by Robert Kirk, David Cargill, and Peter Trevino, Investigation Discovery Network, 2011. Findley, Timothy. The Wars. Clarke, Irwin, 1977. Flanagan, John. Ranger’s Apprentice 5: The Sorcerer in the North (2006). Yearling, 2009. Fontane, Theodore. Eff Briest (1895). Simon & Brown, 2018. Fontenay, Elizabeth de. Le silence des bêtes. La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité. Fayard, 1998. Gaiman, Neil. The Price (1998). The Original Animatic, https://vimeo​ .com​ /56573423 Gauthier, Théophile. Ménagerie intime (1869). Des Equateurs, 2008. Gipson, Fred. Old Yeller. Harper, 1956.

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Introduction

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Greene, Ward. “Happy Dan, the Cynical Dog,” in Cosmopolitan, February 1945, pp. 19–21. Inspired Walt Disney’s flm The Lady and the Tramp, directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, Walt Disney Productions, 1955. Haraway, Donna J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signifcant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm, 2003. Highway, Tomson. Fox on the Ice/Maageesees Maskwameek Kaapit.2003. Illustrated by Brian Deines, Fifth House, 2011. Hugo, Victor. Œuvres complètes. Jean Massin (ed.). Le Club Français du Livre, 1970. Journal Offciel de la République Française, 25 February 2015. Joyce, James. Ulysses (1922). Wordsworth Edition, 2013. Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book (1894). Simon & Brown, 2018. Inspired Walt Disney’s flm The Jungle Book Wolfgang Reitherman and James Algar (director), Larry Clemmons and Ralph Wright (writers), Walt Disney Productions, Buena Vista Distribution, 1967. Lamartine, Alphonse de. La France parlementaire (1834–1851): œuvres oratoires et discours politiques. Preceded by a study on Lamartine’s life and works, by Louis Ulbach, Volume IV, 1865: “Discours au Conseil Général de Saône et Loire: Faut-il imposer les chiens?” (24 September 1845). Latude, Jean Henry de. Le Despotisme dévoilé, ou Mémoires de Henri Masers de la Tude, détenu pendant trente-cinq ans dans les diverses prisons d’État. Amsterdam, 1787, Paris, 1889. Lear, Edward. “The Owl and the Pussycat,” in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (1871). The Random House Book of Poetry for Children, 1983. Léautaud, Paul. Entretiens avec Robert Mallet. Gallimard, 1986. ———. Bestiaire (1959). Grasset, 2005. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Anthropologie structurale, Deux. Plon, 1973. London, Jack. White Fang. The McMillan Company, 1906. Loveccraft, H. P. The Cats of Ulthar (1920). Necronomicon Press, 1977. Maringue, Maurice. “Présence et tendresse d’un poète pour ses animaux familiers,” Actes du colloque Lamartine, vol. VI, 2003. Matignon, Karine Lou. Sans les animaux le monde ne serait pas humain. Albin Michel, 2000. Maupassant, Guy de. “Pierrot (1882),” in Contes et nouvelles. Louis Forestier (ed.). Collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade n° 253, Gallimard, 1980. ———. Sur les chats.1886. Les caresses: Sur les chats; La peur. La Part Commune, 2014. Maxwell, Gavin, Ring of Bright Water. Pan Books LTD, 1960. McKnight, Natalie. “Dickens and Darwin: A Rhetoric of Pets,” The Dickensian, vol. 102, no. 2, June 2006: 131–143. Mézan-Muxart, Virginie. “Un aspect souvent méconnu de la défense de l’animal en France au XIXème siècle: l’engagement d’écrivains français pour le respect et le bien-être du chien (1845–1896),” in Une bête parmi les hommes: le chien. De la domestication à l’anthropomorphisme. Encrage. Fabrice Guizard and Corinne Beck (eds). 2015: 83–402. Momaday, N. Scott. The Names. A Memoir. University of Arizona Press, 1976.

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———. “The Spiritual Mountain,” in Mountains Figured and Disfgured in the English-Speaking World. Françoise Besson (ed.). Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Perrault, Charles. Contes de ma mère l’Oye (1697). Delagrave, 1951. Pierre, Eric. “Amour des hommes-Amour des bêtes: discours et pratiques protectrices dans la France du XIXème siècle,” Ph.D. thesis. Angers, 1989. Potter, Beatrix. The Complete Tales. Frederick Warne, 2002. Reitherman, Wolfgang (director). The Aristocats. From a story by Tom McGowan and Tom Rowe. Walt Disney Productions, 1970. Reynolds, Kev. “In the Saddle,” Rambling Rhymes, privately published by the author at www.kevreynolds.co.uk, 2020. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter’s Children Collection (1997–2007). Bloomsbury Childrens Book, 2014. Rufn, Jean-Christophe. Le collier rouge. Gallimard, 2014. Shakespeare, William. Two Gentlemen in Verona (1589–1593). Œuvres complètes de Shakespeare (bilingual edition). Le Club Français du Livre, 1962. Simak, Clifford D. City. Nelson Doubleday, 1952. Smith, Dodie. The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956). Heinemann, 1962. Inspired Walt Disney’s eponymous flm, Clyde Geronimi and Hamilton Luske (director), Bill Peet—story—and Dodie Smith—novel—(writers). Walt Disney Productions, 1961. Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman (1975). Norton, 2002. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Silmarillion. Houghton Miffin, 1977. Tolstoy, Leon. Anna Karenina (1877). Wordsworth Classics, 2007. Van Cauvelaert, Didier. Jules. Albin Michel, 2015. ———. Le retour de Jules. Albin Michel, 2017. Verne, Jules. Autour de la lune (1870). Le Livre de Poche, 1974. ———. L’île mystérieuse (1875). Le Livre de Poche, 2002. ———. Un capitaine de quinze ans (1878). Actes Sud, 2005. Woolf, Virgina. Flush: A Biography. Harcourt, Brace, 1933. Yealand, Tim (director, writer), Russell Hepplewhite (composer), Jude Munden (designer), and Bradley Davis (revival director). Laika the Spacedog, English Touring Opera, Opera for Children. London, 2013. Zola, Emile. “L’amour des bêtes,” in Le Figaro, 24 March 1896. ———. “Le Paradis des chats,” in Nouveaux contes à Ninon, 1866. Contes à Ninon. Nouveaux Contes à Ninon. Folio, 2014.

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Section I

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STRAY AND FERAL COMPANIONS

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Chapter 1

Our Feral Future Dog Stories and the Anthropocene

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Karla Armbruster

As I fnish this chapter, approximately one-half of the world’s human population is quarantined or otherwise avoiding contact with other people, staying home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. At least in the United States, this unprecedented situation seems to beneft the nation’s dogs who are enjoying constant human companionship and more frequent walks. Many shelters are said to be empty because so many people have chosen to foster dogs during their confnement. The course of human events doesn’t always turn out so well for dogs, who can be dragged into our wars and other brutal attempts to police and punish each other, scapegoated when associated with a marginalized or persecuted group of humans, and simply treated as expendable when push comes to shove. However, dogs exist in almost every human society (Miklósi 47), and for better or worse, their fates are inevitably tied up with ours; compared to many other animal species, dogs—even feral ones— require humans to survive. As Ray and Lorna Coppinger point out in What Is a Dog? over 75 percent of the world’s dogs live outside human homes but, whether biologically feral or not, still exist on the outskirts of cities and villages. The dog is what Donna Haraway calls a “companion species” that makes “life for humans what it is” (15), and we in turn provide the dog’s natural environment or ecological niche. This symbiotic relationship is an ancient one, a partnership so longstanding that we often can’t imagine ourselves without our dogs. In On God and Dogs, theologian Stephen Webb notes the remarkable number of creation myths from primordial peoples that portray God as having a dog, with no explanation of where the dog came from. Since we often imagine our deities in our own, human image, it’s tempting to think that these myths refect a sense that dogs have been by humans’ sides since the beginning of time—a pairing so natural that the origin of the dog need not even be explained. The idea that 23

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the dog may also be our last companion after everything else is destroyed emerges in images like the poster for the 2007 post-apocalyptic flm I Am Legend: the flm’s hero, played by Will Smith, walks through a scene of destruction with his German shepherd, and the blurb below Smith’s name reads “The last man on earth is not alone.” For those who know the flm’s plot, the phrase “not alone” conjures up the vampires that Smith’s character must battle, but in a larger, iconic sense, it can also, more reassuringly, be interpreted as referring to the dog. Findings by geneticists and archeologists support the long-standing nature of this relationship, with current estimates suggesting that dogs emerged from wolves (or more likely a common ancestor of both contemporary wolves and dogs) 20,000–40,000 years ago. Where, how, and even how many times this occurred are questions that have sparked lively debate as new studies regularly produce additional evidence that complicates our understanding of the origin of the dog. Even the issue of whether the dog is a separate species from the wolf remains unsettled, though the Smithsonian Institution and the American Society of Mammalogists formally reclassifed the dog as a subspecies of wolf, Canis lupus familiaris, in 1993. Nevertheless, as the frst domesticated animal and the species often seen as closest to human beings, the dog occupies a conceptual border zone between nature and culture. Thus, dogs—and the stories we tell about them—tap into all of our many complex feelings about our relationship with other animals and the rest of nature, a relationship that has clearly reached a crisis point. Domestication, the process that produced the dog, has traditionally been seen as a marker of human progress, with the beginning of agriculture 10,000 years ago widely viewed as the beginning of “civilization.” However, recent developments suggest that the human drive to domesticate nature is backfring. Our conquest of the earth has reached such proportions that some scientists argue we are living in a new epoch—the Anthropocene—defned by the human impact on ecological and even geological processes, an impact fueled (literally) by the burning of fossil fuels. The defning characteristics of this age include rising temperatures, warming ocean waters, more and more frequent episodes of extreme weather, and such widespread species loss that it constitutes the sixth mass extinction. A future dominated by these phenomena promises to be radically unpredictable. As Bill McKibben stresses in his book Eaarth (the extra “a” in the title indicates that we are now living on a different planet than the one on which human civilization developed over the last 10,000 years), we are literally facing the end of the world as we have known it. If the ideology and practices of domestication are culpable, at least in part, for the darker aspects of the Anthropocene, what is to be done? Iraq war veteran Roy Scranton offers one thought-provoking approach in his essay,

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“Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.” Drawing on his experience in the armed forces, he argues that living in an uncertain, dangerous situation—as we all do now given the environmental realities of the Anthropocene— requires facing our deepest fears of loss head-on, explaining that he did so each morning in Iraq by “owning” his death, imagining and accepting the worst so he could move past it feeling he had nothing left to lose. He draws on this experience to argue forcefully that our greatest challenge right now is to admit that the “civilization” we’re living in is already dead, irreversibly lost with the climate that supported it, so that we can “get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.” In this chapter, I will argue that in order to do this work, humans (especially those of us reaping the benefts of “civilization” in the Global North) need to challenge and move away from the ideology of domestication. Doing so requires understanding the values that we need to question and perhaps relinquish, and to that end I will offer an analysis of some of the most popular literary representations of our oldest domesticated companion, the dog, in order to better understand the ideology that has propelled and reinforced the juggernaut of domestication. In literature, while it might sometimes seem that we love the dogs who are the wildest and most resistant to civilized behavior, like Buck in The Call of the Wild or Marley, the “World’s Worst Dog,” typically these dogs abandon their wild ways for the love of a human, and the wilder the dog, the greater the human victory when that wildness is brought to heel. As I will discuss, two of the most treasured dog stories from the United States and South Africa, Old Yeller and Jock of the Bushveld, value dogs precisely because they throw their lot in with humans, acting as partners in the work of imposing civilization on the wilderness, and celebrate these dogs’ willingness to sacrifce themselves not just for loved human beings but more importantly for the “greater good” of that work. The Call of the Wild, I will suggest, as a more complex (one might say “wilder”) text, challenges these messages in some ways but ultimately still reinforces the nature/culture dualism that supports the ideology of domestication. What is the alternative? If we recognize that “nature”—the very earth on which we live, along with its climate—has been irrevocably changed by our activities but also spins increasingly out of our control, we might more properly consider it feral rather than domesticated or wild. The feral, with its persistent challenges to the forces of domestication, can provide hope that new opportunities to thrive may emerge. In “Earth Stalked by Man,” Anna Tsing argues that we live in a “patchy Anthropocene,” where the forces assimilating nature into “plantations” (“ecological simplifcations in which living things are transformed into resources—future assets—by removing them from their life worlds” (4)) are countered by “something new and unaccountable spread[ing across the planet]: feral biologies as the hidden force” (14). To

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imagine how we might work with these feral forces to create a worthwhile future, it’s helpful to expand our viewpoint beyond the Global North, where we’ve dragged dogs along on our own experiment with hyperdomestication, to the feral and free-ranging dogs who dominate the global canine population. Thus, I will end with an analysis of Eva Hornung’s novel Dog Boy, which imaginatively and convincingly tells the story of a small boy who lives for a time with a family of feral dogs, a narrative that I read as a tale of multispecies fourishing in a world between civilization and wildness much like the one we are adjusting to in the Anthropocene. Various ancient cultures embraced the notion of the dog as a guide into the afterlife, which may refect the presence of pariah dogs in graveyards, battlefelds, and anywhere else where they could fnd human corpses to consume, as historian Mary Elizabeth Thurston suggests in The Lost History of the Canine Race. But when I learn that the Inuit sometimes buried dog skulls with the bodies of children to give them guides into paradise or see images of the 12,000-year-old skeleton of a human buried with a puppy or wolf cub under her hand at the Ain Mallaha archeological site in northern Israel, it’s hard not to assume that these people also chose dogs to accompany them into the great unknown as a refection of the role dogs played in their lives on earth: guards, gifted trackers whose noses could follow scents and trails undetectable to humans, and—perhaps most appealing—simply familiar, beloved companions who might make a terrifying transition less scary and lonely. What is more ftting than to look to our closest, oldest companions—and our stories about them—to help guide us forward into the afterlife of our civilization, the new, feral world of the Anthropocene?

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DOGS AS ALLIES IN THE HUMAN CONQUEST OF NATURE Perhaps no story reinforces the ideology of domestication more powerfully than Old Yeller, originally a children’s novel by Fred Gipson published in 1956 and then a Disney flm adaptation in 1957. Within the United States, Old Yeller is one of the most widely known dog stories of all time; the dog’s name has become a code for the ending, in which a boy must kill his beloved dog to spare him any more suffering from the rabies that is destroying him and to protect his human family. As I have discussed elsewhere, the story of Old Yeller functions not only as a coming-of-age saga for Travis, the boy, but also as a mythic recounting of the human struggle to master wilderness and wildness. Old Yeller is a key fgure in this struggle: though he is primarily remembered as a dog so loyal he risks and gives his life to protect his human companions, he does not start out that way. In fact, when he bursts onto the

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scene—the frontier homestead of the Coates family in the Texas hill country—he is on the trail of a rabbit and frightens the mule whom Travis is using to plow a feld into breaking away and tearing down the feld’s fence with the plow. Thus, Yeller is introduced as wild, a predator who pursues his own interests, in the process challenging the family’s ability to wrest a living out of the land. The Coates family is engaged in the frontier process of transforming wilderness to civilization, subduing and domesticating nature, and at frst Yeller appears to be on the side of nature. But Yeller also bonds with Travis’s younger brother Arliss, and the dog quickly proves his worth by protecting the family from representatives of wild nature: a mother bear enraged because Arliss has her cub, then a mad cow, then feral hogs, and fnally the rabid wolf who infects Yeller with the disease. The message is clear: Yeller is a creature perfectly at home in the wild, able to fend for himself in nature, and yet he chooses to harness his wild abilities into the service of the Coates family and human civilization more generally. His initial wildness makes his allegiance to the family all the more precious—he had a choice, and so his devotion to them speaks to the inherent superiority of the human species. In the struggle for human domination of nature, the dog has turned against his fellow animals and taken the side of human civilization. No scene drives this home like Yeller’s battle with the wolf: the novel tells us that “It was Old Yeller, all right, tangled with some animal as big and savage as he was,” and the flm shows the two canids locked in combat against the light of a bonfre, emphasizing the similarities between the two. This powerful scene reminds us of the wild animal Yeller was at the beginning of the story but, since he risks (and ultimately loses) his own life to protect human beings, it also highlights how much he has changed. By celebrating Old Yeller’s choice to reject his wild origins and throw his lot in with humans, this novel and flm powerfully reinforce the ideology of domestication, emphasizing the superiority of the human species and the rightness of the human battle to dominate nature, while also conveying the notion that domesticated animals exist frst and foremost to serve the interests of human beings. We see this most clearly when Travis must shoot Old Yeller after he develops rabies contracted from the wolf. The devastating sadness of this decision is what the flm and book are most famous for, but it’s also presented as ftting, since Yeller caught the fatal disease while defending his human family and the values of civilization against the onslaught of the wild. He will be replaced by his son, Young Yeller. Dogs, no matter how good, are expendable, his story tells us—their worth is measured by how well they serve the interests of humans, who are more valuable when push comes to shove. In South Africa, a strikingly similar dog story, Jock of the Bushveld, seems to perform some of the same cultural work. A nonfction account, it was

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written in 1905 by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick for his children, who loved to hear tales of his adventures two decades earlier with Jock, the bull terrier mix who accompanied him while he worked as a transport rider carting supplies for the gold felds. Like Old Yeller, Jock is a frontier story that conveys the ideology of domestication. As a hunting dog who helps Fitzpatrick kill game, Jock regularly engages in the human conquest of nature. And like Yeller, part of what makes him remarkable is the extent to which he takes on the values of his human “master” as his own. He goes above and beyond the call of duty when hunting, taking risks to go after large, dangerous prey even when Fitzpatrick doesn’t want him to, eventually losing his hearing in one such encounter. And Jock’s death carries similar meaning to Old Yeller’s. After Fitzpatrick’s oxen are all bitten by tsetse fies and die, he winds up living in a crowded mining camp where he fnds that Jock is constantly in danger due to his deafness. Temporarily living apart from Fitzpatrick for his own safety, Jock is accidentally shot while defending a chicken house against a raiding “kaffr dog” (the owner of the chickens sees Jock exiting the chicken house, assumes he is the raiding dog, and shoots before he fnds the culprit already dead, killed by Jock). Thus, Jock gives his life to protect the human enterprise of keeping domesticated animals. As Wendy Woodward points out in her analysis of Jock, this death is not as conventionally noble as one lost in a fght with a wild animal—such as the way Yeller contracts rabies—but it is still portrayed as a heroic death because Jock is faithful to his obligations to humans: the last line reads, “Jock had done his duty” (274). Woodward also discusses the way Jock’s story reinforces certain values of white colonialism. Throughout the book, his antagonism toward black people whom he does not know is presented as grounds for amusement, and of course the fact that his fnal foe is a “kaffr dog” reveals a displacement of racial disdain from a group of people onto their dogs, both of whom sometimes challenge the dominant culture’s norms and enterprises. The Native American people destroyed or displaced to make room for the Coates frontier farm in Old Yeller are mentioned only once, but the marginalization of indigenous people and the pushing of them into the category of “nature” to be controlled that we fnd in Jock clearly informs Old Yeller as well: the Comanche people are mentioned as part of a list of threats that Yeller’s highly valued predecessor, Bell, protected the family from—and the others are rattlesnakes, bad hogs, and drowning. With all that said, these were, and perhaps still are, beloved stories for a reason. The thrill of being chosen for special attention by a dog that Travis experiences speaks to the gratitude many of us may feel today for the companionship of particular canines. The level of communication and cooperation Fitzpatrick achieved with Jock is impressive. Interestingly, both stories celebrate the accomplishments of mixed-breed dogs. And yet, surely some

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of their popularity stems from the way they tap into the dangerous myths of (white) human superiority that permeate their culture(s) and the comfortable familiarity of the story they tell about humans’ power over wild nature.

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DOGS CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HUMAN–NATURE CONFLICT Published in 1903, Jack London’s novel Call of the Wild narrates the experiences of Buck, a St. Bernard-Scotch shepherd mix who is kidnapped from his comfortable home in California and enlisted as a sled dog in the Alaskan gold rush during the 1890s. While today it is considered primarily reading for schoolchildren (despite brutal scenes of dogs fghting and killing each other, humans abusing dogs, and Buck slaughtering the—unfortunately demonized—native people who killed his beloved master John Thornton), it was an immediate best seller upon publication. This was likely because its deep ambivalence about the domestication of the dog and human civilization paralleled a nationwide nostalgia for the rugged conditions of life on a frontier that Americans had recently been told was gone forever. Buck’s story offered a powerful example of a domesticated creature who can tap into his wild heritage and go feral in order to survive when his conditions change. When he is abruptly taken from his pampered, overly civilized life in California to the new, brutal environment of frontier Alaska, both other dogs and humans threaten him viciously, and he must revert to his wildest, most primitive instincts to survive. As London describes it, “The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down. It was no task for him to learn to fght with cut and slash and the quick wolf snap” (18). Clearly linked to a notion of the dog’s wild origins, Buck’s primitive instincts spring back, allowing him not just to survive but eventually to become what London calls “the dominant primordial beast”: frst he kills off his arch-enemy, Spitz, the original leader of the sled team, and takes his place, and by the end of the book he responds to “the call of the wild” by joining a wolf pack and becoming their leader. Before that, though, Buck also experiences the pinnacle of human–canine companionship with John Thornton, whom the narrator describes (from Buck’s perspective) as the “love master.” Thornton rescues Buck, by then a seasoned sled dog, from thoughtlessly cruel, incompetent people for no utilitarian purpose—it’s made clear that he doesn’t need another dog—and makes decisions, such as halting a journey when Buck needs time to recover, purely for Buck’s beneft. Buck is not expected to help with the conquest of nature or

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sacrifce himself for his master. Of course he is willing to, though, and saves Thornton’s life more than once, but it’s out of a ferce loyalty that Thornton earned, frst by saving Buck’s life and then by tenderly caring for him during the rest of their time together. Their relationship is an ideal of respect, cooperation, and equality. Quite signifcantly, Thornton dies in the end, not Buck. On the other hand, Thornton is clearly an exception; most people treat Buck badly or at least value him mostly for the work he can do. In this novel, domesticated status seems a bad bargain for dogs, and Buck needs his wildness to survive. Even while still with John Thornton, Buck is increasingly pulled toward the titular call of the wild: “Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fre and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why” (52). While Buck’s bond with Thornton is particularly beautiful, with “the love for John Thornton draw[ing] him back to the fre,” London shows that even this ideal human–canine relationship is fragile and temporary for a really vital animal. Buck has to choose eventually, and the choice seems inevitable—though never quite fnished, since he continues to mourn Thornton after he joins the wolves. Like Old Yeller and Jock of the Bushveld, The Call of the Wild presents nature and culture as opposed. But the struggle between them occurs within Buck himself as well as without—and his ability to tap into his inner wolf is a good thing, at least for him. This novel suggests a dog may need to draw on his wild instincts if he is thrown out of civilized society (and London doesn’t think much of civilization and its softening infuences anyway), but he is also likely to run into human beings who will behave thoughtlessly or even brutally toward him, and his ability to revert to a more primitive mode may be the only way to survive those interactions as well. Thus, The Call of the Wild reads as a severe critique of domestication, not only for the way civilization turns people into weak fools or bullies but even more so for the vulnerable position it has put dogs into, dependent on the whims of sadly unreliable humans. But in the end, like Old Yeller, it envisions culture and nature necessarily working at cross-purposes, with dogs caught in the middle, needing to choose a side. Still reinforcing the ideology of domestication, this view dramatically limits the usefulness of The Call of the Wild in helping to think outside that worldview. For those of us living in the Anthropocene, the solution this novel provides for Buck—a mythologized return to a romanticized wildness untouched by human civilization—is not an option, not least because there is no pure wilderness left, if you accept arguments that climate change and other human-caused ecological changes have effectively domesticated the entire planet.1 But the feral potential that the novel celebrates could point us in a more useful direction.

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FERALITY AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO DOMESTICATION Supported by a strict nature/culture dualism, the ideology of domestication celebrates human dominance, assuming that our species intentionally set out to control and limit nature, to shape it for our own purposes by taming or even eradicating the wild, primarily through the control of reproduction. This notion grows out of the fact that most domesticated plant and animal species were purposely developed in these ways for agriculture. But the very frst acts of domestication, like that of the dog, were necessarily less intentional; since domestication had never happened before, it is unlikely people had it in mind, especially given the practical challenges of controlling the breeding of wild animals. However, these early humans were still transforming their environment in ways that potentially changed selection pressure on other species, as some evidence now suggests occurred with the wolves who developed into dogs.2 This type of alternative perspective can help expose and counter the powerful ideologies that cluster around the concept of domestication; the idea that the process of domestication frst emerged as an unintended consequence of other human activities certainly undermines the narrative of powerful, purposeful humans in control of nature. Similarly, we might be able to pry open some middle ground between a dualistically opposed nature and culture by viewing domestication as a practice of the use and ordering of space rather than the control of other species’ reproduction, as David Macauley does in “Be-Wildering Order: On Finding a Home for Domestication and the Domesticated Order.” Macauley argues that the essence of human domestication is living within walls of permanent or semi-permanent houses and settlements (after all, the Latin root of domestication is domus, or home) rather than agriculture; he points out that animals could not have been restrained for selective breeding without such walls. He emphasizes that this wallingoff and restructuring of space not only buffers dwellers from the elements and natural sights, sounds, and smells but also fosters conceptual and categorical walls and barriers between humans and nature. However, this spatial approach also allows him to suggest an alternative to the domination (a word that also derives from domus) inherent in domestication: he tells us to search in border places at the edges of human communities (outside the walls, so to speak) that are often overlooked because they defy neat oppositions. Here, he writes, “wild animals and plants are often emboldened to creep, peep, or pop up” (127); he also refers to these spaces as “feral, transitional regions” (127). In such spaces, nature and culture can’t always be easily distinguished, and humans are not in control. In this way, feral spaces and the very concept of ferality hold the potential to subvert the ideology of domestication. Even in a biological sense,

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ferality pushes back against the forces of domestication, since feral animals are domesticated species that “go wild” by virtue of being born and living outside of human control. As Greg Garrard explains, in this sense, ferality is “a developmental vicissitude,” since animals become truly feral by growing up without any socialization to humans during the short critical period when they are most open to relationships outside their own species. However, as he points out, ferality also functions conceptually “as an existential condition midway between more-or-less reifed notions of domesticity and wildness” (248). The subversive potential of this concept emerges powerfully in Philip Armstrong’s study What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. For him, the term “feral” goes beyond indicating a space between the domestic and the wild to one that describes wild forces crossing that space and reacting “against modernity’s attempts at civilization, domestication, captivation or manipulation” (227). He perceives these forces manifesting themselves in literary creatures such as the whale Moby Dick and cats in Robinson Crusoe, which “compet[e] with humans for resources or threaten . . . damage to human agricultural or domestic spatial arrangements” (35). By including both wild and domestic animals in his examples of the feral, he highlights the wildness that persists within domestic animals and that can re-emerge (if not so dramatically or completely as in the case of Buck) under certain conditions. Typically, these conditions occur in the types of feral border spaces that Macauley directs us to, where nature has been disrupted by the projects of civilization but human control has waned and conditions are chaotic. In addition to being associated with these sorts of spaces, the feral can also be connected to the condition of being out of place, as when organisms move or fnd themselves moved from their native or accustomed spaces; in her essay, “‘Fully motile and AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS’: Thinking the Feral into Bioregionalism,” Anne Milne posits that ferality occurs “when a domestic escapes, is released, is transported into another bioregion, or conversely, . . . when the wild thing shifts or is shifted out of its wild” (329). In this view, the condition of being out of place—of being what we might call a non-native species—is a defning element of ferality. For many people, the idea of feral and non-native species conjures images of unwanted, ecologically troublesome animals like the feral pigs wreaking havoc in the American south or feral cats blamed for devastating songbird populations. However, while such animals (and plants) can be tremendously destructive to biodiversity and ecologies, most species transplanted to new environments are not harmful, as environmental journalist Fred Pearce documents in The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature’s Salvation; many don’t survive, and of those that do, some co-exist without damaging their new home and others even beneft their ecosystems or the humans who

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live there. While Pearce’s exceptionally strong claims for the benefts of invasive species have been challenged in reviews of his book, he provides compelling examples of “novel ecosystems” where humans have introduced alien species, often into a disturbed environment, but “the system itself does not depend on humans to keep it going” and non-native species play a key role (153). He cites cases such as Puerto Rico, where forestland cleared for sugar plantations has recovered due to the growth of non-natives such as the African tulip tree, imported in the nineteenth century for its ornamental qualities. Far from taking over, these trees have repaired soils, promoted biodiversity, and allowed native creatures to fourish to the point where they now make up 80 percent of animal life in the forests. In Colombia, according to a recent article in National Geographic, a 100 or so hippopotamuses descended from the four hippos who escaped the ranch of drug lord Pablo Escobar after he was shot in 1993 may be having positive effects on an environment already dramatically changed by human beings, perhaps flling the niches of ‟species that humans pushed to extinction thousands of years ago” (Wilcox). These examples demonstrate that the feral quality of being out of place has potential value, not just ecologically but also conceptually, highlighting the way the displaced can revitalize diminished environments and support new approaches to multispecies survival. In Pearce’s fnal chapter, he argues that climate change and the hybridization of species mean that ecological communities will continue to change at an increasing pace, rendering futile any hope of preserving purely native or wild species or communities and making the role of non-native species even more important. Of course, his prediction of ever-increasing change captures the nature of the Anthropocene, where it’s hard to know which species will survive, where they might fourish as local climates change, and how they will interact with new potential ecological partners. In fact, if we consider Milne’s emphasis on ferality as the condition of being out of place, the term “feral” applies quite well to our situation in the changed world of the Anthropocene, where we may all—wild and domestic, human and nonhuman—fnd ourselves far outside of our accustomed environments. Even if we defne the feral simply as the domestic gone wild, it still seems fair to say we are living in a feral world, irrevocably changed by humans but profoundly outside of our control. What will it mean to live successfully in this world? Given its arguably feral nature and the role that the ideology and practices of domestication have played in creating it, we would do well to cultivate a more feral perspective and way of life—and understanding ourselves as “out of place” in a new world could be the frst step. In fact, such repositioning is one of the most effective ways to gain critical distance on ideological blind spots, as Teresa de Lauretis established with her notion of the “excessive critical position”

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that can be achieved “through practices of political and personal displacement across boundaries” (145). And literature has a role to play as well, not only in exposing and challenging the ideology of domestication but also in helping us imagine an almost unimaginable future. What could it mean for humans to live a feral life? For my fnal analysis, I turn to Australian writer Eva Hornung’s 2009 novel Dog Boy, loosely inspired by the real-life case of Ivan Mishukov, a boy who lived with a pack of stray dogs in Moscow for two years in the 1990s. In this brilliantly crafted narrative, she provides a compelling, detailed vision of what a feral life might look like and what conditions—including the assistance of our oldest companions—might make such a life not just possible but even pleasurable.

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DOG BOY: IMAGINING A FERAL LIFE Dog Boy’s protagonist is named Romochka, an allusion to Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome who was suckled by a wolf, and a reminder of Western culture’s rich lore of canines raising (potentially feral) human children. At four years old, Romochka fnds himself on the streets of Moscow in winter after his mother and “Uncle” disappear, leaving him alone in an unheated apartment building that all the other tenants have mysteriously abandoned as well. Once he fnally ventures outside, he is drawn to a large yellow dog who seems less dangerous than the human strangers he has been taught to avoid; she turns out to be a nursing mother who “knew humans and bore the scars left by both affection and brutality” (20), unlike her purely feral offspring. When her two adult children menace Romochka, she takes a protective interest in him and accepts him into the pack by licking his face. He follows the dogs to their den in the basement of a ruined church on the outskirts of the city, and rest of the novel documents his life with dogs, telling the story of his transformation into a feral “dog boy” and his struggles and adventures with this hybrid identity. As my previous discussion of the feral suggests, the setting of Romochka’s life with the dogs plays a critical role. The narrator explains that as he follows the dogs, without realizing it, he crosses “a border that is, usually, impassable—not even imaginable” (15). This border separates two ways of experiencing the world: the ostensibly civilized perspective of humans and the feral perspective that Romochka will learn from the dogs. The narrator highlights the difference between the two perspectives when he emerges from the den the following spring: “cars, houses, shops, people and cooked food . . . were now somehow fxed in place, even unimportant. They were ignored as eyes, ears, and noses sought movement: real, interesting little shifts in the grass or waste lands that meant danger or food” (38). But when Romochka frst follows the

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dogs across this perceptual boundary, he also literally moves into a different kind of space, a disturbed environment between civilization and wildness that is exactly the kind of place where the feral thrive. In addition to the ruined church and abandoned cemetery, along with long grasses and marsh, there is a rubbish mountain, where new trash is dumped every day. Desperately poor people living in a shanty village nearby compete with the dogs for the fresh refuse. Past this literal wasteland lies a forest, a place so wild that wolves emerge from it one particularly brutal winter in search of prey. Further into the city, where Romochka winds up by accident later in the story, he fnds what we would consider civilization: buildings are well-maintained, streets are clean, and stray dogs and homeless people are few and far between, a state of affairs that seems “frighteningly barren and uncomfortable” to him (128). Not only does the city center’s lack of refuse challenge his ability to scavenge and survive, but also, on some level, he knows that marginal people like him will be considered living garbage and swept away. The in-between space that he inhabits with the dogs, by contrast, offers opportunities for survival that he and other feral creatures can’t fnd anywhere else. And within this feral space, for a few years Romochka lives a comparatively happy, safe life with the dogs. As two scientists who take an interest in him later in the novel suggest, “This boy was better off living with dogs than with humans. . . . No drugs, for starters. No glue or petrol. Probably no rapes. Eight-year-olds living in the street were almost invariably victims of all three” (276). But from Romochka’s perspective, the greatest advantage of life with the dogs is a powerful and intensely gratifying sense of belonging. During his frst winter as a puppy, suckling from the female dog whom he quickly identifes as Mamochka, he experiences his inclusion as pure pleasure: “Every waking session was wildly exciting. Every return of the grown-ups was a delight—in them and in the plenty they brought with them. Every mealtime was a loving struggle for more until his belly was round and full. Every sleep time was a deep peace” (32). As he matures and takes on more responsibility, belonging manifests itself as responsibility to care for his clan—and the pride that comes from doing so—as well as knowing they will always protect him. Rather than reinforcing the ideology of domestication or the dominant view of nature and culture as always in confict, Hornung powerfully—and with as little anthropomorphism or romanticism as humanly possible—conveys the precarious yet satisfying feral lives he and the dogs lead together in a space between civilization and wildness. In doing so, she provides a vision of human life outside the ideology of domestication, with all its risks, challenges, and vital pleasures, as a precious opportunity to experience a wilder way of life. As the narrator suggests by describing the boundary that Romochka crosses when he frst follows the dogs as usually impassable and

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even unimaginable, Romochka’s opportunity to enter into the feral space and life of these dogs is an incredibly rare one. While in one sense it is a desperate bid at survival on the part of a child whose family and society offer him no alternative, the power of his story comes from the unexpected success of his gamble, from how carefully the dogs “raise” him and how fulflling a life he makes with them. Hornung’s narrative also conveys the specifc conditions and choices that make Romochka’s remarkable experience possible. Perhaps most important is the fact that humans and dogs are particularly open to connections across species boundaries—especially with each other, due to an ancient history of co-evolution. Building on this relationship, as well as Romochka’s positive associations with dogs and Mamochka’s familiarity with humans and mothering tendencies, Romochka becomes part of the dogs’ family in a way that evokes Donna Haraway’s advice to “make kin, not babies” in Staying with the Trouble (though the dogs make babies as well!). Very quickly, Romochka comes to think of the dogs as his mother and siblings, with names that refect those relationships of kinship: Mamochka, White Sister, Black Brother, etc. The terminology the narrator uses, channeling Romochka’s perspective, is that of the clan rather than that of the pack: Feral dogs live in clans, while “house dogs” don’t. Older children who live in warehouses near the garbage mountain, addicted to sniffng gasoline, also make up a clan. Thus, clan is a concept that captures the way both dogs and humans form close-knit groups of allegiance not necessarily based on close biological kinship—a practice that allows Romochka and the dogs to survive by combining their canine and human abilities. Of course, for all this to happen, Romochka has to be willing to leave his former life behind. Even at his young age, he somehow understands that human society has failed him and his best chance for survival is to walk away from the apartment building and the people that surround it, telling himself that the dogs are “the only dish on the table” (11). When he frst follows them, “He suddenly remembered his bucket, back by the drainpipe”; the bucket is his last tangible connection, other than his clothes, with his former life. He remembers words, presumably from his human mother: Leave something behind, and you can kiss it goodbye. The narrator tells us, “He faltered. Then he trotted on” (13). Once in the den, he names the dogs and speaks to them as a human owner might, even trying to tell them bedtime stories. However, he quickly stops and begins to learn their language instead, recognizing “the crisp stories of [Mamochka’s] muzzle and shoulders,” the scents she bears from the world outside, even though he can’t read them (20). The process of moving beyond the past and the lingering aspects of his identity as a human is not quick, easy, or ever fnished for Romochka. Most dramatically, his repressed feelings about his abandonment emerge when he runs into

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Uncle years later, and he responds to Uncle’s lack of recognition with lethal aggression. Despite his unresolved issues and defnitively human tendencies (the dogs don’t understand the complex feelings that propel him to attack Uncle, for example), Romochka adapts remarkably well to life with the dogs, aided by his early, malleable stage of psychological and physical development. Very quickly, his memories and habits of civilized life begin to fall away: “the good beasts rubbed against him in the dark until he became beast, too” (21). He fnds his eyes useless during the long, pitch-black nights, and so his human reliance on vision gives way to the senses of smell, taste, and touch as ways to negotiate his new reality: “the rich smelly darkness and . . . the rub of hair, claws and teeth” (24). His very identity shifts: “his sense of himself became fuid. His teeth lengthened and his bite was deadly. All weakness dropped away” (31). Though his teeth and ears don’t actually grow longer, as he is devastated to learn when he has the chance to look in a mirror, his physical transformation is signifcant. His senses grow more acute, and he becomes comfortable moving on all fours. The stench that assails him when he frst enters the den quickly becomes comforting to him, and he himself develops such an overpowering smell that strangers gasp when he walks by. His eating habits necessarily change to include raw, freshly killed meat. And most vividly, after driving out the wolves who attack them during an especially bad winter, the group lives off the frozen wolf corpses until the spring thaw. We learn how they manage to do this when the narrator relates that Romochka was not only “utterly sick of the” smell of the frozen carcasses but also “utterly sick of peeing on his own food to soften it up” (75). As Romochka as adapts and grows into a feral life where the ideology of domestication serves little use, the dogs protect and guide him. In their relative autonomy from human beings, the dogs set the tone in a way that evokes the mutually benefcial relationship that some researchers propose emerged between early humans and especially social wolves (Derr, Shipman, and Pierotti and Fogg). This relationship not only laid the foundations for those wolves to evolve into dogs but also may have provided human beings numerous advantages as a species as well, allowing our ancestors to thrive and even take advantage of changing climate and new environments. (For example, Shipman argues that alliances with these wolves/dogs allowed humans to outcompete Neanderthals as hunters in The Invaders.) These researchers3 reject not only the outdated view that humans consciously chose to domesticate wolves through selective breeding4 but also the more recent theory that canine domestication began unintentionally when wolves started scavenging the garbage left on the outskirts of human settlements or camps, with the least fearful fourishing as scavengers and evolving into dogs.5 Instead,

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these scholars propose that early humans and wolves were drawn together by their similarities, including their social nature and practice of hunting in packs. This theory further minimizes humans’ role in the process, with some proponents even suggesting that it was likely humans who frst scavenged from the wolves and learned hunting techniques from them. In making this argument, Pierotti and Fogg also draw on indigenous knowledge and stories about wolves from around the world to challenge the prevailing assumption, based on Western ideological and social perspectives, that humans and wolves necessarily experienced each other as hostile competitors. In this way, they offer a powerful alternative to the traditional ideology of domestication, emphasizing cooperation and equality between humans and the ancestors of dogs rather than competition and dominance. While Romochka’s feral existence with the dogs takes a similar shape, at frst he is extremely dependent on the dogs for survival and sometimes desperately unhappy at what a poor dog he makes: “His heart burned as lay awake in the den thinking about it. He could see in his mind’s eye the four [dogs], noses to the ground, knowing things he couldn’t see or smell . . . . How would he ever hunt properly without a nose?” (43–44). He is devastated when one of the adult dogs—Golden Bitch—makes clear she sees him as a human, not a puppy, by rolling over and showing her throat deferentially after he leaps on her in a ft of joy. Romochka is horrifed and bitterly hurt. As he sees it, “she had said something that could not be unsaid and that threw everything awry” (39). He is also sometimes puzzled by the desires and impulses he has—such an attraction to music—that the dogs don’t seem to share. But he also makes the pack stronger with his ability to bring water to the cellar, to make simple weapons, and to terrify humans with his eerily hybrid status; eventually, he learns to “play boy” and beg for food for his dogs from people at the nearest metro station. He becomes a leader, but only by proving himself as a hunter and food provider, not through sheer force or dominance. His relationship with the dogs shifts and changes but never tips over into the ideology of domestication. During his years with the dogs, Romochka comes to sees the world much as they do, learns to communicate with them, and masters the complex rules about hierarchy and territory by which they avoid confict with other free-ranging dogs. Dog Boy successfully conveys not only an accurate, multifaceted view of canine culture and communication but also the diversity of modes of communication even within one species and the complex ways they are shaped by various cultures, both human and non-human. After breaking into an apartment to steal clothes, Romochka is attacked by a small white dog who speaks an entirely different language than the one he shares with his dog family: “He tried to tell her that in crossing her closed paths he was strong enough to do as she wished; and that she should be offering

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him stiff deference. He held her down with his body weight and sniffed her over. . . . He tried to let her smell him, but she wasn’t listening, or didn’t know, and began to fght harder” (159–60). By acknowledging the complex cultures and communication systems of non-human beings in this way, Dog Boy takes another crucial step away from the ideology domestication and into a feral perspective where what we call nature and culture are deeply intertwined. While Dog Boy refuses simple nature/culture oppositions, it never replaces them by romanticizing Romochka’s life with the dogs. Their existence is never easy, and the feral state of being constantly in between and out of place requires a ceaseless balancing act on their parts as they dodge dangers both wild and civilized. And Romochka struggles with a sense of in-betweenness internally as well. As his experience in the apartment suggests, he prefers to see himself as a dog, if an odd one who is physically inferior to the others in many ways. However, the larger context of this scene highlights how unstable his hybrid identity can be for him. During his struggle with the white dog, who doesn’t recognize him as a dog, he also sees himself in a mirror: “a very big dirty boy,” whose teeth are “fat and tiny” and whose “stringy, bald, flthy, long” forearm” is just “Wrong” (161). He responds to this forced realization that he is not fully a dog, along with troubling memories of his human past stirred up by the children’s clothes and toys in the apartment, by urinating and defecating in the apartment as well as pulling all the food out of the refrigerator—an unconscious effort to move his identity back toward the canine end of the spectrum. When the apartment dwellers return, he rushes home, where “gradually his ears sharpened to points, his teeth lengthened, his chest lost its fat human plane and he headed out again to hunt the forest and mountain” (166). Despite Romochka’s struggles to reconcile his hybrid identity with his deep loyalty to his dog family and his role within that group, he also takes advantage of his human capabilities (such as speech) and familiarity with human culture to code-switch in a purposeful way. He consciously passes for human in order to help the pack or, sometimes, to satisfy his own curiosity about various aspects of the human world. For example, toward the end of the book, when interacting with the scientists, “He was careful to keep his boymask on. . . . He used his hands as a boy would and stood up self-consciously, boy-fashion” (210). They realize his ruse only when they see him, thinking he is unobserved, sniff a gate and casually urinate on the gatepost. His fexibility, multispecies cultural competence, and ability to move past barriers and between categories all emerge as arts of a feral existence. Romochka’s hybridity also serves as a fascinating challenge to others’ tolerance for ambiguity. Most humans cannot abide his in-betweenness. A group of “house boys” who kidnap him proceed to torture him and carve the word

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“собака” (dog) into his skin. Militzia who capture him when he ventures too close to the city center torment him and goad him into dog-like behaviors for their own amusement. The scientists feel he must be reclaimed for human culture. Even Romochka, with all his multispecies cultural savvy, wants to stabilize his uncomfortably fuid identity. But the dogs seem to understand his hybridity and accept it. While they completely integrate him into their family structure, they also adapt to his human limitations, especially in terms of his defcient sense of smell and lack of a thick fur coat to keep him warm during the winter, and integrate his human skills, such as tool-making, into their group strategies for survival. While this novel doesn’t descend to the sentimental trope of showing us that animals are better or purer than humans, it demonstrates how a tolerance for ambiguity and hybridity facilitates survival in a feral environment. Although it’s hard to see how Romochka’s life with the dogs could have gone on indefnitely, it is the scientists’ lack of such tolerance that triggers the novel’s tragic ending; ideologically unable to perceive any value (except to their own research) in a feral human existence that muddies the distinction between civilization and wildness, they decide to have the dogs killed to put Romochka in a situation where (they believe) he will have no choice but to rejoin humanity. When I teach this book, the majority of my students react intensely to this development, even expressing anger at the author for this decision and passionately defending Romochka’s feral life with the dogs as more fulflling than one in human society could ever be. As I point out to them, this reaction demonstrates just how powerfully Hornung’s rendering of Romochka’s feral existence affected them, catching them up in the spell of his deeply communal and richly sensory existence. Certainly none of them would have recommended life in a flthy, freezing basement, eating raw meat and ignoring all need for personal hygiene or medical care, for any human four-year-old before reading it. The fact that this novel can inspire readers to reject the assumption that human civilization is superior, to truly value the non-human and the feral, even if only in a fctional scenario, affrms that humans do have the ability to imagine different ways of being, to empathetically enter the lives of others, and to adjust their values and assumptions—in other words, to shake loose from the ideology of domestication. CONCLUSION Despite the potent appeal of Romochka’s life with the dogs, his situation remains very different from that of many—perhaps all—of Hornung’s readers. Can her imaginative vision of such an uncommon, feral life

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assist us in adapting to our own feral future in the Anthropocene in ways beyond offering a compelling alternative to the ideology of domestication? Perhaps our situation is not as different as we might imagine, at least in its broad outlines. Think of the parallels between Romochka’s predicament and that of more economically privileged humans in the Anthropocene: He fnds that his accustomed way of life has become unsustainable. Left alone, he experiences the end of the world as he knows it, gradually understanding that he has been abandoned, without heat, electricity, or food: in other words, without the benefts of civilization that he has previously relied upon. He crosses a border into a new world without fully realizing it; after Romochka frst enters the den and joins the puppies, he is warm and fed, but otherwise he fnds himself far outside of his comfort zone, radically displaced from his former way of life by his abrupt transition into the world of the dogs. Though many of us don’t yet realize it, our petroleumdependent civilization is quite unsustainable. We are similarly displaced into a new, feral world—the world of the Anthropocene—and it’s hard to say how many of the current benefts of civilized life we will be able to count on in the future. Perhaps we can follow Romochka’s example and use our displacement across boundaries to recognize and reject the ideology of domestication, to see other possibilities and eventually embrace a feral life. It will be important for us to let go of the past as he does (to accept the death of our current way of life, as Scranton puts it), and part of this process will be acknowledging and grieving for what we’ve lost—including our familiar “place” as would-be conquerors of the earth seemingly cushioned inside the fortress of civilization as well as physical habitats altered beyond recognition and species extinct and gone forever—in a way he never has the chance to do. To take advantage of whatever opportunities to thrive emerge in our new world, we could also beneft from some measure of Romochka’s remarkable adaptability and facility at inhabiting multiple, seemingly contradictory categories (e.g., human and animal). Emulating the dogs’ tolerance for ambiguity could help us to resist relegating species, individuals, behaviors, or ideas to dualistic, hierarchically ordered boxes and thus allow us to see and take advantage of new alliances and opportunities. And of course, Romochka could not have survived without the dogs, who invite him into their family and world, providing a doorway into his new, previously unimagined way of life. Just as importantly, the sense of belonging that they offer him is truly what makes his life worth living. How might dogs help the rest of us as we adjust to life in the Anthropocene? Right now, it’s easy for humans to feel alone as a species. We’ve created so many walls and barriers between ourselves and the rest of the living world; we’ve done so much damage. Even if you don’t buy into the dogma that humans are

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superior to nature, your sense of guilt at what we’ve done might encourage a sense of separation. Dogs, with their ubiquity and their ability to bridge the nature/culture boundary, can draw us out of our human solipsism and connect us to the rest of the earth if we let them. Our two species have collaborated extremely well so far, but too often at the expense of the rest of nature. What if we allow our dogs to take the lead sometimes, to show us the possibilities for engaging with the feral, dirty, and dangerous aspects of the more-thanhuman world, rather than pulling them inside the walls of our narrow, anthropocentric realm? Here is where the difference between Romochka’s dogs and many of our dogs in the Global North becomes especially relevant. Compare Romochka’s autonomous, feral clan, pursuing their own goals in their own way, to the house dog who attacks him. Like most of our dogs in the Global North, this dog has been indoctrinated into the norms of domestication (though dogs may not be subject to ideological forces, they can certainly learn many of the resulting expectations from humans). When we overly restrain our dogs, insisting on submission and strict conformation to the expectations of our culture, we limit not only their own ability to fourish but also the possibility that they will have anything to teach us. It’s no accident that so many people call their dogs “kids” these days, since we often don’t let them grow up. Giving dogs what opportunities we can to make their own decisions and work out their own problems would not only beneft them but also enable a more cooperative and mutually benefcial relationship like the one Romochka has with his pack (see Ted Kerasote’s Merle’s Door for one example of how this might work). We also need to push back against our tendency to restrict connections across species boundaries to just our dogs and other pets. We see the limitations of clannishness in Dog Boy, where Romochka understands that anyone outside the clan is fair game for brutality and death; when the teenage boys kidnap him, he understands that their clean clothes mean he is in terrible trouble, for “House boys hated bomzh [homeless] boys [and that meant] this was going to be a clan thing, not just a lack of appreciation” (169). Establishing a close-knit clan always carries with it the dark temptation to other everyone and everything outside the small circle that we consider kin. How many of us defend and rescue dogs and cats but don’t like to think of the plights of the factory-farmed animals who provide their (and often our) food or the increasing numbers of species going extinct each year due to human-caused habit loss? Perhaps dogs themselves can’t teach us to expand our sense of moral community in this way, but we can take the immense benefts we experience from our relationships with them and extrapolate: What if we radically widen our sense of multispecies community and prioritize those relationships in the

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years to come? It might help us all survive, and it will defnitely give us good company as we face our feral future. NOTES 1. Such arguments can be found in sources as various as McKibben’s The End of Nature and Newsome et al.’s “Making a New Dog?” 2. For one example of this now widely-held perspective, see Ray and Lorna Coppinger (2001). 3. See Derr, Shipman, Pierotti and Fogg. 4. Biologists and dog trainers Raymond and Lorna Coppinger raised powerful objections to this idea in their 2001 book Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution: How would humans have thought of domesticating the dog, since it had never happened before? How would they have kept the wolves chosen for domestication captive, especially if the process occurred before the advent of agriculture and permanent settlements? How would they have known to practice selective breeding? Where would they have found the large populations of tamed or captive wolves necessary to fnd individuals with the traits they were looking for? The last few decades’ worth of genetic and archeological research on the origin of dogs all supports the idea that the domestication of the dog could not have been intentional. 5. This view is articulated by the Coppingers, among many others, and is often seen as supported by the well-known Siberian fox experiments conducted by Dmitri Belyaev and documented perhaps most thoroughly in Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut’s How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution. See Miklósi for an overview of fve different though non-exclusive theories of domestication.

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REFERENCES Armbruster, Karla. “‘Good Dog’: The Stories We Tell about Our Canine Companions and What They Mean for Humans and Other Animals,” Papers in Language and Literature, vol. 38, Fall 2002, pp. 351–76. Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. Routledge, 2008. Coppinger, Raymond, and Lorna Coppinger. Dogs: A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution. University of Chicago Press, 2001. ———. What Is a Dog? University of Chicago Press, 2016. De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Indiana University Press, 1984. Derr, Mark. How the Dog Became the Dog: From Wolves to Our Best Friends. Abrams, 2013.

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Dugatkin, Lee, and Lyudmila Trut. How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution. University of Chicago Press, 2017. Fitzpatrick, Percy. Jock of the Bushveld, edited by Linda Rosenberg, illustrated by E. Caldwell. Ad Donker, 1984. Garrard, Greg. “Ferality Tales,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard. Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 241–59. Gipson, Fred. Old Yeller. Harper and Row, 1956. Grogan, John. Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog. HarperCollins, 2005. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signifcant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ———. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. Hornung, Eva. Dog Boy. Bloomsbury, 2010. Kerasote, Ted. Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog. Mariner, 2008. London, Jack. The Call of the Wild, edited by Daniel Dyer. University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Macauley, David. “Be-Wildering Order: On Finding a Home for Domestication and the Domesticated Order,” in The Ecological Community: Environmental Challenges for Philosophy, Politics, and Morality, edited by Roger S. Gottlieb. Routledge, 1997, pp. 104–35. McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. Anchor, 1989. ———. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Henry Holt, 2010. Miklósi, Adam. Dog Behavior, Evolution, and Cognition, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2015. Milne, Anne. “‘Fully Motile and Awaiting Further Instructions’: Thinking the Feral into Bioregionalism,” The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, edited by Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster. University of Georgia Press, 2012, pp. 329–44. Newsome, Thomas M., et al. “Making a New Dog?,” BioScience, vol. 67, no. 4, 2017, pp. 374–81. Old Yeller. Dir. Fred Stevenson. Disney, 1957. Pearce, Fred. The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature’s Salvation. Beacon, 2015. Pierotti, Raymond, and Brandy R. Fogg. The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved. Yale University Press, 2017. Scranton, Roy. “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,” The New York Times, 10 November 2013, https​:/​/op​​inion​​ator.​​blogs​​.nyti​​mes​.c​​om​/20​​13​/11​​/10​/l​​earni​​ng​-​ho​​w​ -to-​​die​-i​​n- the-anthropocene/. Shipman, Pat. “The Woof at the Door,” American Scientist, vol. 87, July–August 2009, pp. 286–9. ———. The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction. Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2017.

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Thurston, Mary Elizabeth. The Lost History of the Canine Race: Our 15,000-Year Love Affair with Dogs. Avon Books, 1996. Tsing, Anna. “Earth Stalked by Man,” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, vol. 34, no. 1, 2016, pp. 2–16. Webb, Stephen H. On God and Dogs: A Christian Theology of Compassion for Animals. Oxford University Press, 2002. Wilcox, Christie. “Could Pablo Escobar’s Escaped Hippos Help the Environment?,” National Geographic, 31 January 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nat​​ional​​geogr​​aphic​​.com/​​ anima​​ls​/20​​18​/09​​/colo​​mbia-​​cocai​​ne​-hi​​ppos-​​rewil​​ding-​​​exper​​iment​​-news​. Woodward, Wendy. The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives. Wits University Press, 2008.

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Chapter 2

When You Love the Stray Animals as Much as Your Own Pets The Case of Companion Animals in Turkey

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In 2019, around the time I began thinking about the representation of companion animals, especially cats and dogs, in Turkish literature, groundbreaking changes in social and political life in Turkey were underway as the Republican People’s Party won the municipality elections both in the capital city of Ankara and in Istanbul, the biggest city in the country. The change in government had positive refections on both the quality of life of people in these cities as well as the lives of thousands of stray cats and dogs, since the First Stray Animal Workshop was held by the Municipality of Ankara on June 29, 2019. Although the number of shelters does not suffce to accommodate and provide food and health care for the countless cats and dogs living on the streets throughout the country, this workshop was an essential step toward the well-being of stray animals because local authorities acknowledged the problem and listened to the various solutions offered by the NGOs. Among other companion animals, cats and dogs have come to occupy a more distinctive place in our lives as the swiftly expanding nets of globalism and capitalism drag individuals into an abyss of isolation through the addiction to social media applications among other infuences. Though there are many underlying reasons why we need the companionship of animals, psychological satisfaction is among the top reasons why we adopt or buy companion animals, especially cats and dogs. However, having a companion animal in Turkey, whether a cat or dog, results from more than just a need for a relationship with a species other than humankind in the ordinary chaos of daily life; it is perceived as a way of crossing the borders of the “bourgeois” and also as a way of belonging to that “prestigious” class. Of course, I exempt people who adopt their companion animals and live with them until 47

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the end of their lives. As the former group of people buys or, at best, adopts their companion animals from the animal shelters for the wrong reasons, it is most likely that you will read the news of abandoned cats and dogs on the news and social media. When combined with the insuffcient number of animal shelters in Turkey, the deserted companion animals become public property. In a system like the one I explained above, cats and dogs on the streets of Turkey become the object of attention and good Samaritans take on the mission of feeding and accommodating these stray animals. This chapter will focus on a recent documentary about cats roaming the city of Istanbul. Kedi (Cat1)(2016), directed by Ceyda Torun, focuses on seven cats from the streets of Istanbul and how they have come to be companion animals on the streets. Kedi is a multilayered work that gives profound insights into the lives of stray cats as companion animals. My goal will be to highlight the case of stray animals in Turkey while I try to justify the idea that we do not need to adopt pets as companion animals because there are plenty of them living on the streets in countries such as Turkey. Yet we cannot limit the number of texts about stray and companion animals to the selected documentary since Turkish literature includes a variety of works that deal with companion animals. To illustrate, we can trace, for example, Orhan Kemal’s short story “Köpek Yavrusu” (Dog Puppy) in his collection of stories Ekmek Kavgasi (1950), which presents us with a stray dog poppy with two crushed hind legs due to a car accident. However, the torturing of the poppy by the neighborhood children and its deliverance by a porter named Mehmet marks the social criticism of Kemal about the mistreatment of animals in Turkey. In a different story, however, we acquire a sense of loss and affection toward our companion animals. In the short story “Kopek” in Refk Halid Karay’s Gurbet Hikayeleri (1940), we witness the relationship of the protagonist, Osman, who is a wanderer and the dog which is also a stray animal. They are united in the way they are received in society. They create a strong bond until Osman needs to pass the border and the dog cannot. The dog, in this case, tragically chooses to die in the absence of Osman. Sabahattin Ali, on the other hand, criticizes the luxurious lifestyle of a rich woman through the needs of her companion animal, a dog, in “Bahtiyar Kopek” in Sirca Kosk (1947). The lavish food choices the dog is offered and the medical attention it receives are contrasted with the hunger and poverty of most of the society. The word “bahtiyar” means “fortunate” in English, which signals the ironic nature of the story. In my fnal example of representation of dogs in Turkish literature, contemporary author Faruk Duman comments in an interview that he was inspired by the stray dogs in Belgrade woods in Istanbul before writing Kopekler icin Gece Muzigi (Night Music for the Dogs) (2014). The protagonists of the novel, Filiz and Tarik, are saved by a hunter, Avciatmaca, who lives with his wife, Kara Zuhre, in the woods. As the story

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unfolds, Filiz discovers that Avciatmaca works for a wealthy landowner and kidnaps the children of the people who owe money to the landowner. Murat is only one of those children who is held against his will and tortured by Avciatmaca. The stray dogs in the woods are attracted to the cries of the victims and rants of the hunter:

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Those wretched dogs appeared once again as they heard the voice of the hunter. Some extended their heads from under a bush; some came out from under a reef shaking off. Some of them were limping, and some of them turned to look at the hunter as if they were looking far far away. All of them were exuding lethargy. They had come as if to listen. It always happened this way. They hear the voice of the hunter as he wrestles or tortures someone. They hear the children, youngsters crying in pain. They gather, then, without life and strength and wait impatiently to get their share. Those voices, tirades of AVCIATMACA, the cries of the boys under torture sounded like a song, music to them. (Night Music 95)

Faruk Duman questions the way humankind alters the behavior patterns of the animals whether they are stray dogs or companion animals as the stray dogs subdue to the atrocities of the hunter. The narrator of the novel also remarks this relationship as s/he says, “YOU SHOULD MIND THE OWNERS BEFORE JUDGING THE DOGS” (Night Music 80, capitalization original). Duman’s perspective on the relationship between humankind and animals both stray and companion is one of the issues that this section will try to discuss in terms of how we affect and are affected by our companion animals. Along with the representations of dogs, cats also play a crucial and more extensive role in the Turkish literary imagination; for example, the cat in Erhan Bener’s Kedi ve Ölüm (Cat and Death) (1965). A painting teacher, Zait İloğlu, learns that he has less than three months to live and struggles to come to terms with the idea of death. In this reckoning, an imaginary cat becomes a means to convert death as an abstraction into a concrete/tangible object. Thus, the cat becomes a symbol of death and the protagonist begins to realize his situation as a perishing human being. Moreover, the cat is described as a devilish phenomenon as Zait feels it sitting on his chest, obstructing his breathing: “He was slowly realizing that it was death coming for him. It was the very same grim reaper wreathing down on his chest, clenching his throat trying to steal his life. How come he did not recognize it from its crazy, burning red eyes?” (Kedi ve Ölüm 53). In this chapter, I will focus on a recent documentary flm about stray cats in Istanbul, which manifests another dimension of the relationship between companion animals and their human counterparts. In countries such as Turkey, in which the population control of stray animals is problematic,

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companion animals can be found not just in the cozy and loving environment of a home but also on the streets. The documentary Kedi, directed by Ceyda Torun, focuses on the lives of thousands of cats that roam freely in the streets of Istanbul and how they connect with the human community and become our companion animals and an indispensable part of the texture of the city. I will argue that the flm implicitly underlines the fact that we do not have to take companion animals into our households since there are thousands of them already living on the streets and they are waiting for our attention to help them survive the sometimes harsh winter conditions and other factors such as mistreatment and health issues. In this respect, Kedi provides the viewer with every aspect of such a “companion” relationship, ranging from psychological connection, symbiotic existence with humankind, and health issues of the stray cats to the problems of femininity. These issues will be analyzed from two perspectives. First, the world of the feline characters in the flm will be brought to light in terms of their co-existence with the city and the people shedding light on the previously mentioned issues. This is an interaction affecting both the cat community and their human counterparts since they are affected by each other in many ways that result in the intensifying of their relationship physically and psychologically. The second approach is to read the flm with a focus on the spatial organization of the feline characters and their behaviors and how the director chooses to represent them in the flm by specifc scene selections and spatial arrangements. The secondary representations such as camera angles, the types of settings such as bazaars, fsh markets, cafès, and Istanbul city in general, which is perceived as a bridge between Asia and Europe, provide a deeper level of meaning. These secondary representations, which are referred to as “paratext” by Gérard Genette, surround the primary text of the documentary and deliver the viewer a different perspective in which we encounter both sides of the medallion about the condition of the stray animals in Turkey. Both readings will eventually provide evidence that the stray animals, cats, in this case, are well-loved and tended by Turkish people, regardless of isolated mistreatments and barbarities. On the other hand, as some of the paratextual aspects of the flm will signify, they live in dire conditions and suffer from health issues like cancer. Although cats were domesticated thousands of years ago, the unpredictability of their nature and the mystery that surrounds their character keeps drawing us to build a relationship with them in modern times. The sense of freedom they exercise even if they live indoors is remarkable, as they might leave home for an indefnite period and reappear unexpectedly at a time when their owners think they are lost for sure. Yet, in some cases, they never come back. Cats, in this respect, have become an indispensable part of literature in general and in Turkish literature as well with their mysterious aura. The

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title of the documentary, Kedi, which literally means cat, also embodies a symbolic meaning because the cats become a part of Istanbul in the representation of the city. Kedi is one of the recent documentaries that brings forth not only the interesting nature of the cats but also their place in the hearts of many Turkish people. The documentary, therefore, approaches the lives of the stray cats in Istanbul from a multilayered perspective, in which the audience become aware of the life of the feline characters while they gaze into their own lives to discover their isolated state from their natural environment. While the relationship between the feline characters and their humans constitutes one of the layers of the documentary with examples of ranging from emotional bonding to the effort to provide for them, the health condition of the feline characters becomes another layer, from which the viewer might sense the hardships of surviving on the streets. Environmental factors such as rapid urbanization and land and air pollution are other layers of meaning that can enable us to analyze the condition of the stray animals. We, as humans, deprive them of the natural environment, with which they need to have a connection. The most obvious theme in the documentary appears to be the psychological interaction between stray cats and their human counterparts. As people of the city approach these cats as their companion animals, they beneft from the warm interaction of the cats, which is one of the reasons why people keep pets. This interaction could be observed in most of the feline characters in the documentary. The feline characters which are flmed in Kedi dwell in certain districts of İstanbul, yet this does not mean that the stray animals in other parts of the city are of less interest. On the contrary, the seven cats in the documentary symbolize Istanbul, which is known as the city with seven hills. They represent the city as a whole. In this respect, the frst cat to present such a psychological relationship is Sarı of Galata district, who recently gave birth to kittens and roams the streets to fnd food for them by asking food from the customers of the cafès and shops. Taking her name from her blond fur, she eats whatever she can fnd in the streets and takes one piece of the pastry to her kittens (04.40–04.50). Sarı’s endeavors to fnd food for her little ones is one of the basic instinctive behaviors of any mother in nature, yet the food she can fnd is transformed according to the heavily urbanized city, as we see her carrying pieces of bacon and pastry. The owner of the shop Arzu Göl, in which Sarı spends her time resting, claims that she has “a solid character2” (05.09) and adds “You’ll tell her to leave. She won’t. She’ll stare back” (05.14). The interpretation of Sarı’s character as “solid” and stubborn might be read as the consequence of her being a mother as Göl observes Sarı “is a real hunter now. She was not like that before” (04.17). Therefore, the documentary draws a parallelism between the human world and the animal world to create the awareness that both worlds are similar in terms of motherhood.

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Another example of such a relationship is Bengü of Karaköy district. Bengü is one of the four siblings born on the streets, who chose to stay in the bazaar of hardware shops in Karaköy and has become a member of the family in the neighborhood for about eight years now. Even if she was the “scrawniest and the ugliest of all the three siblings” (10.29), she becomes one of the most loved members of the family of shop owners. What is more signifcant is that the shop owner thinks of her as a daughter and looks for her every morning. Her unconditional comings and goings and the endless conversations of the shop owner with Bengü relieve the grief of the isolation he feels. From what the shop owner admits about his conversations with Bengü, the viewer senses that the stray cats become the means for humankind to have an outlet both for their grief and happiness. In the representation of almost every feline character, a prejudice about them is refuted. In the case of Bengü, the shop owner thinks that cats are not “ungrateful” as they are thought to be but since “they are aware of God’s existence” (14.29), they think, according to him, that “men act as middlemen to God’s will” (14.39). This notion reminds the viewer of a religious aspect of cats in ancient Egypt. Cats were deemed holy by the early Egyptians and they roamed freely during that time. Cats in ancient Egypt were considered equal to humankind, as they have been thought to worship the same God, Ptah, as humans did. They were also accepted as holy creatures since the god of the sun, Ra, was believed to be able to show himself in the form of a cat (DeMello 34). This religious implication about the feline characters in the documentary manifests itself in many scenes of the cats posing with a divine outlook. Then, we witness another dimension of our relationship with the stray cats. Their role as pest control in the old times of Istanbul surfaces also at present, as represented in Kedi. Aslan Parçası or “Little Lion” of Kandilli district, as they call him, helps the restaurant owner, Yılmaz Yıldız, to fght with rats, which are a nuisance for the customers. This story is backed by Bülent Üstün’s insight on the origin of various species of cats found in Istanbul and their role in the pest control in Cihangir district. Bülent Üstün is the creator of Kötü Kedi Şerafettin (Bad Ass Serafettin), a comic book feline character who is very famous in Turkey. Üstün’s childhood, which was dominated by his interaction with the stray cats of Istanbul, has a defnitive role in the development of his personality since he also admits he would have troubled times as a child even if it were not for the cats. He points out the diversity of cats in Cihangir and relates it to the harbor down the hill during the Ottoman period which hosted ships from different parts of the world. When the cats kept for pest prevention wandered up the hill to Cihangir and their ships set sail to another port, they became members of the Istanbul cat community. Then after the construction of the frst sewage system in Cihangir, people kept pets to fght the rat population (46.35–47.35). The story of Cihangir cats

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and “Little Lion” of Kandilli correlate with each other as they both refect the utilization of the stray cats as natural hunters even if the hunting ground is an urban setting. “Organic Deniz,” who scavenges the district bazaar with his allies, was a wild kitten at frst, but in time he approaches the bazaar community for food and after several physical interactions he becomes accustomed to the ways of the human community. The woman in the Bazaar, Ayten Gülyurt, comments that Deniz has a character like any other human being. Like people, they “want affection, others will tell you all their troubles. Some are discreet, won’t talk about anything. Others are ambitious. And some are pompous like a lady who can’t be bothered to say hello” (35.53–57). Even if our interaction with the stray animals can be limited, their instincts and observation power help them to mimic some of the character traits of their human counterparts. While we fnd sometimes a confdant to tell about everyday troubles, the stray cats get more accustomed to urban life and they mimic our attitudes. Yet, it is emphasized throughout the documentary that they always want to be outdoors, even if it is not always suitable for their survival. For example, Bomonti Organic Bazaar, in which Deniz lives, is surrounded by skyscrapers that make the district quite different than it used to be. As the owner of the Organic Café, Bahri Artuğ, recalls, “there were orchards, and gardens where they’d grow crops,” and “when these buildings went up, it all disappeared— no nature left” (38.19-32). The concrete jungle we raise in the city does not only affect us but also the stray animals since we deny them the opportunity to connect with the land to perform their most natural needs. This issue is ironically represented in the Bazaar when Deniz tries to dig the organic fertilizer in a sack (37.32). Bazaars like the Bomonti create a community of both humans and animals in which they live in harmony, but Artuğ draws our attention to another drastic change which will eradicate their community. The plans to demolish the Bazaar to build a freeway to connect the skyscrapers will cost Deniz and other cats a home in which they are loved and reared by the Bomonti community. It is accepted wisdom that cats choose their people. Gamsiz (or Carefree), though he has alternatives according to his various needs, chooses Murat Söğütlüoğlu as his person, the one who takes care of him when he comes beaten up by other cats or dogs in search of a mate or a fght for territory. Söğütlüoğlu says, “I’m the main human in his life . . . others are supporting actors” (51.23). He has been kicked by someone which led to a dislocated shoulder once and has been bitten by a dog and came back with a hole in his back. Yet, these incidents never seem to affect his mood and that’s why he has been dubbed Carefree. He is the dominant fgure in the neighborhood as Eda Dereci calls him “a bit of a thug, feisty, the tough guy of the neighborhood” (50.22). He is also very demanding about his meals and he

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visits certain individuals in the neighborhood to get certain kinds of foods. For example, he visits Laçin, a neighbor across the street, by climbing up the trees into the second foor of the building and demands to be let into the house (51.10). Or he goes to Filiz, another neighbor, for sausages (51.13). The vitality and fexibility of the feline characters provide them with access to the places in which they would have their way, as in the case of Gamsız, who eats the food of Laçin’s cat, Gece. In addition to psychological interaction, one of the issues which is explicitly promoted is the ethical dilemma of keeping pets at home as they tend to lose their instincts. Gamsız and Gece also embody the differences between stray animals and pets at home. For instance, while Gamsız fghts for the dominance over his territory with Ginger, the new cat in the neighborhood, and another instance, he confronts another cat who walks into Murat’s kitchen to send him off, Laçin’s pet Gece does not seem to show any need to protect his food and territory as he does not have to look for food throughout the day. Laçin’s inference that Gamsız is a “go-getter” (53.16) might be fawed in this case since Gamsız might simply be after his daily meal and he would do anything interesting including a pose in which he seems to be knocking on the window with his paw (52.33). On the other hand, some people, like Süleyman Erdogan, fnd a cure for their psychological problems. The reciprocal relationship between him and his cats benefts the cats in terms of food and shelter and Erdogan fnds a way to get rid of the traumatic period of his nervous breakdown. He counters the arguments of his friends that the “God will provide for them” (58.57) by saying that he is “the middleman” (59.01). It is worth noticing that people also attribute a religious quality to the stray cats of Istanbul. The fsherman who fnds a wallet with the exact amount of cash with the help of a cat to buy a new boat becomes convinced that God helps him through that stray cat. Duman (Smokey), the fnal cat featured in the documentary, is probably a domestic cat who was thrown out into the streets, as the woman in at café says, “My guess is that he was kicked out of someplace because the frst night he showed up, I saw him coming down the street and he was complaining very loudly” (1:06.30). Duman’s manners are more suitable to a home pet rather than a stray cat as we do not see him asking for food from the customers like Sarı (Blonde) at the beginning of the documentary. Another example of his home training is his awareness of borders. He does not enter the café and waits for his food outside the door. When he gets hungry, he lets the owner know by “pawing at the window” (1:07.22). Apart from analyzing the feline characters in the documentary, I also aim in this chapter to discuss the paratext of the documentary both to contrast and compare the plight of the stray cats of Istanbul. While focusing on these elements that surround the main body of Kedi, I will refer to Gérard Genette’s

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concept of “paratext,” which may be defned as the body of productions that encapsulates the text of a literary work that “surround it and extend it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book” (1). While a book’s paratext may be “a certain number of verbal or other productions, such as an author's name, a title, a preface, illustrations,” a flm or a documentary contains elements such as the opening titles, director’s organization of the scenes, music score, and the spatial organization of the characters (Genette 1). The frst element of the paratext surrounding Kedi is an introductory note that suggests the feline characters in the flm are the true owners of the city. The note, which states, “Cats have lived in what is now Istanbul for thousands of years. They have seen empires rise and fall” (00.35), is also supported by the opening scene. The frst scene of the documentary is Galata Tower, and the fy cam looks over Galata Tower and focuses on Eminönü district and Topkapi Palace, which can be considered the heart of the city since the Palace has not only housed Osmanli Sultans for over 400 years in its 600-year dynasty but also because the millennium stone is located in the district which is accepted as the center of the earth. We encounter the same view in the following scenes of the flm as it endorses the notion that the stray cats constitute the heart of the city. Another alternative reading of the opening scene, which would support the eternal existence of the cats in the city, is the representation of Eminonu district, which might symbolize a cultural amalgamation since it hosts the famous landmarks Hagia Sofa and Sultan Ahmet Mosque in the same frame (50–1.01). Another example of an element of the paratext in the documentary is the aerial superiority that the feline characters have over their human counterparts. The cats seem to have domination over the city life, in other words in the lives of their humans, as they wander freely on rooftops (1.08, 1.34) and watch them sip their coffees over the edges of their balconies (7.19). While these scenes can be interpreted as the natural outcome of cats’ instinctive behavior of seeking protection by dwelling on higher ground, they can also be read as an element suggesting that the feline characters of the city are the real owners of the city, as the higher ground not only provides protection but access to many spaces such as rooftops or treetops that might give them the power to observe their human counterparts. The scenes that show the feline characters watching and observing the human characters instill the feeling that even if we are not aware of the stray animals, they are somehow a part of our lives and an inseparable part of the city life. For instance, the cats in the fsh market approach the vendor from the roof to get their daily share of fsh (08.00) or Psikopat (Psychopath), who is the female neighborhood bully,

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“will start from the top of the church and patrol the whole place” (28.30). The fnal example for the embodiment of the aerial superiority of the cats can be Gamsız (Carefree) of Cihangir district. He is the toughest cat of the neighborhood and his expeditions to Lacin’s house by climbing up a tree to get his share from Laçin’s cat Gece are a defning feature of Gamsız’s character. In another scene, Ginger, who is another male that wants domination over the neighborhood, fails to climb down the balcony of Lacin, which suggests that he is not competitive enough to overcome the dominance of Gamsız so easily. While the organization of this scene suggests the competition between the two cats, it also provides evidence that our companions on the streets do not abide by the borders drawn by our civilization when it comes to their relationship with the community. However, there is a very considerable amount of contrast that cannot be overlooked between how the documentary starts focusing on the place of the cats in Istanbul’s existence and the kind of lives they have. Therefore, the places where they live, sleep, and give birth to kittens and the living conditions of the kittens are another element that makes the viewer realize the plight of the stray animals in Istanbul. For example, the frst feline character to appear in the documentary, Sarı, has several kittens located in the basement of an apartment building. They are not the epitome of pets that are home fed and grown and their livelihood depends on the food Sarı gathers from the diners at the café and shop owners. Another example showing that the kittens live in despicable conditions is the case of Bengü. She is also a mother, and she keeps her offspring in empty boxes in a warehouse, where there is the danger of an assault from another cat (13.02). The kittens tended by the fsherman present a worser condition than the cases of Bengü and Sarı. They are left in front of a shop on the shore and carried to the docks because the fsherman is taken for granted to look after them. Yet, their condition does not get any better as we see them accommodated in a foam box, probably keeping them warm (17.34). Foam boxes, then, become a vital item for the survival of the kittens in the documentary and they also emphasize the less than ideal conditions of the feline characters. These elements of the paratext of the documentary indicate the poor conditions in which the stray cats live in contrast to what is attributed to them as companion animals. Surviving the city life is demanding and hard for stray cats because of the overcrowded streets full of people and other types of transportation. Finding food in this respect becomes much harder than expected. However, for some of the stray cats, depending on their neighborhood, fnding food is much easier than for the others. Therefore, the human agency becomes another element in the documentary solidifying the symbiotic life of the cat and the human community. For example, the fsherman who dumps the guts of the fsh on the sidewalk becomes a source of food for both the feline characters of

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the fsh market and the seagulls (8.35). The fock of seagull swarms over the remains of the fsh, driving the lonely cat away. There is another scene that underlines this symbiotic relationship in Kandilli’s “Lion of a cat.” Before we are introduced to “Lion,” we observe a group of fshermen cleaning the fsh they caught and throwing away the guts on the curb. From the looks of Lion, it is his turn to eat those remains of the day. Two other elements of the paratext include the living quarters of Samatya’s Psychopath and the music score used in the representation of Psycho’s character, which is called Deli Kadin “Mad Woman” by a famous rock singer Erkin Koray. Psychopath always swaggers around a coffee house like a young lad and stands up to her husband (27.32). Her character differs from many of the other females and males in terms of domination. She is described as “the toughest of all the females, the trouble of all the fshermen, a fsh thief and arch-enemy of the dogs. She is the neighborhood psychopath” (27.34–54). The coffee house that defnes her territory implicitly supports her strong character which makes her a go-getter. She has a sturdier character than her partner and that is why she is called “a vicious housewife.” Erkin Koray’s score “Deli Kadin” (Mad Woman) also assists in this attribution when she attacks another female cat whom she thinks woes her husband. In a city in which the lives of the people and the stray animals are so intertwined, it would not be unprecedented to think that they somehow acquire the same characteristics as their human counterparts. Psycho is probably one of those feline characters who is independent, though, jealous and knowing what she wants in her life. The presence of these qualities is reinforced by elements surrounding the documentary such as setting and musical score. The documentary raises another issue other than psychological bonds and the indispensability of the cats in the texture of the city and it is a less pleasant aspect of the lives of the stray cats. The health of the stray cats is treated in the story of the human characters Gülsüm Ağaoğlu and Gülizar Kartal. Ağaoğlu looks at the photo albums of her frst cat who died of breast cancer. Aside from Ağaoğlu’s emotional bond to her cat, her loss due to a medical condition is worth analyzing because we share the same environment and breathe the same air as they do, and they inevitably develop medical conditions similar to humankind as in the case of Ağaoğlu’s cat. Ağaoğlu and Kartal cook ten pounds of chicken every day to feed the cats in their neighborhood and they mention that they never feed them with packaged food. We learn that there were sixty of them at a time and fve died due to cancer in the last two weeks (44.02). The health conditions of the stray cats acknowledge the assumption that the problems the human community faces are the same as the problems of the cat community (1:10.28). Despite the diffcult living conditions and health problems of the feline characters, the contributors of the documentary raise the question to what

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extent tending cats, or other companion animals at home in this respect, is ethical. The defnition of a pet is “an animal that lives in a human household” and “another major criterion of the pet is that it is named” (DeMello 148). Therefore, pets become our companions and members of our familial community. If we consider that the “Oikos is nature, a place Edward Hoagland calls ‘our widest home’” (in Howarth 69), the stray cats, then, become our companion animals. The documentary supports this notion with countless scenes in which there is almost always a physical contact with the feline characters. We see people petting them in various scenes dominating the documentary. Bengü, Piece of a lion, Psychopath, Organic Deniz, and Smokey are some of the cats that we have been named, and thousands of named cats roam the streets of Istanbul and are tended to by people who accept them as part of their lives. All in all, Kedi, with its subject matter and paratext, is a documentary that brings another dimension to our relationship with the feline characters of Istanbul. We can extrapolate from the representation of cats in Istanbul to extend many of the ideas from this flm to the lives of street cats and dogs in other places in Turkey. Our relationship with the stray animals in Turkey defnes our relationship both with nature and with other humans. However, such animals are a part of our lives in the cities of this country and, as is also emphasized, they not only fulfll a psychological function in their relationship to human counterparts but also become our companions without losing their wild instincts. As I have discussed, these animals are the symbols of the city as well as, in a sense, the masters of the city since they watch over the place and its people. They are both in the periphery and the center. Sometimes they survey the people coming out of the subway from a corner and sometimes they mingle in the crowds. They all have their individual characteristics and set their terms in their relationships with other feline and human characters. In many cases, we observe that human and animal communities are both affected by the same changes in the environment, as in the example of Organic Deniz and Bomonti Organic Bazaar in which the destruction of the Bazaar site will also leave the feline characters homeless. Kedi is a multifaceted documentary that creates awareness of the condition of feline characters of Istanbul and their problems while shedding light on the inseparable bonds we create with them.

NOTES 1. All translations are mine unless otherwise mentioned. 2. Kedi is a Turkish language flm, but it provides subtitles in English. I have used the documentary’s English subtitles for all quotations from the flm in this chapter.

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REFERENCES

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Akdemir, Gamze. “Faruk Duman’dan Köpekler İçin Gece Müziği,” Cumhuriyet Kitap, issue 1287, 16 October 2014, pp. 8–9. Ali, Sabahattin. “Bahtiyar Kopek,” in Sirca Kosk (1947). Yapi Kredi, 2003. Bener, Erhan. Kedi ve Olum (1965). Everest Publications, 2019. DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies. Columbia University Press, 2012. Duman, Faruk. Kopekler icin Gece Muzigi. Can Yayinlari, 2014. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, translated by Jane E. Levin. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Howarth, William. “Some Principles of Ecocriticism,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. University of Georgia Press, 1996. Karay, Refk Halid. “Kopek,” in Gurbet Hikayeleri (1940). Inkilap, 2009. Kedi. Directed by Ceyda Torun. Termite Films Production, 2016. Kemal, Orhan. “Kopek Yavrusu,” in Ekmek Kavgasi (1950). Everest Publications, 2007.

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Chapter 3

Identity, Love, and Abuse in Laila al-Othman’s Cat Stories

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Marianne Marroum

The story of Laila al-Othman’s relationship with cats, biographical and fctional, is worth narrating. Al-Othman (1945–) is a prominent writer from Kuwait. She made her writing debut in a local newspaper, featuring her opinions on social and literary issues. She has written a number of short stories, novels, and poems in Arabic. Many of her works are banned in Kuwait because of their transgressive nature. To avoid censorship by Kuwaiti authorities, she has published several of her writings abroad, mainly in Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria (Tijani 51). Angelika Rahmer explains that the literary works of al-Othman deal with a wide range of problems in the Arab world and in Kuwaiti society following Kuwait’s transformation from a traditional Bedouin society and maritimemercantile structures to an industrialized state (175). Rahmer, as well as other critics, highlights the central role women play in the fction of al-Othman. According to Ronak Husni and Daniel Newman, “her fction deals with conficts between men and women and with the outside world, and often concentrates on specifcally Arab themes and on the position of women in Middle Eastern society” (247). Al-Othman deals with the lives of women in patriarchal societies and puts to the fore the discrimination, alienation, and the physical and psychological abuse they are subjected to. She also draws attention to their attempts to break free from oppression and fulfll their aspirations and dreams. In several interviews, al-Othman has declared that in her writings, she always wanted to give voice to women, so that they would have an identity and presence. Nonetheless, in the author’s view, women can also be responsible for the suffering of other women. Interestingly, many of her stories deal with oppressed men. This is why she writes about men and defends them because, in her view, like women, they struggle and suffer in a patriarchal society. By shedding light on any kind of oppression and 61

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subjugation, be it that of women or men, she hopes that people will preserve their humanity. The reader may wonder what cats have to do with the social problems that characterize her work. Al-Othman has dedicated some of her works to cats, to their interactions with humans or the lack of it, and to the abusive or loving attitude toward them. The frst novel she wrote is entitled ‫المرأة والقطة‬ (The Woman and the Cat). Cats also recur in her shorter fction and in a short autobiographical text: " ‫( "أنا والقطط‬The Cats and I) published in the collection ‫ دعوني أتكلم‬. . . ‫( بال قيود‬No Restrictions. . .Let me Speak, 1999): She has also written a short story,"‫( "المواء‬Meowing), which has strong autobiographical features as well as a feminist stance. “Meowing” appears in ‫امرأة في إناء‬ (A Woman in an Urn, 1976). There is also a third piece, “‫( ”محاكمتان‬Two Trials), with a very strong moral overtone. In the frst part of this story, a woman is put on trial for killing a bird, whereas in the second a man is put on trial for killing a cat. “Two Trials” is published in the collection of short stories ‫( في اليل تأتي العيون‬The Evil Spirits Come at Night, 1980). The aim of this chapter is to show how al-Othman’s three cat stories, “The cats and I,” “Meowing,” and “Two Trials,” are imbued with psychological elements intertwined with moral, cultural, and social ones, thus revealing that non-humans are part of the human matrix, in all its aspects and intricacies.1

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“THE CATS AND I” “The Cats and I” is a short autobiographical text that sheds some light on the complexity of al-Othman’s relation with cats and her transformation from being a cat hater to a cat lover. In the opening of her text, al-Othman states that she has numerous stories with cats, a statement that triggers curiosity in the reader. She begins her narration chronologically, from childhood to adulthood. As a child, the author’s relation with cats is that of fear. She explains that it was the time when they (presumably referring to her family) used to sleep in mud houses on the roof. Cats would walk on the fence, and their shadows would be refected on the wall. They seemed big and scary (clearly, a child’s perspective) and their voices rose when having fghts or firting. This disrupted the stillness of the night and that of her heart. She would then close her ears with red cotton that her stepmother used as a substitute for lipstick after wetting it with her saliva, perhaps a cultural practice. In addition to the voices of cats, a cultural and religious belief is the second reason al-Othman attributes to her fear of cats. People believed that cats are nothing but a kind of invisible djinn that possesses naughty children or

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beautiful little girls when taking a shower. In “Djinn in Muslim Culture: Truth or Superstition,” Youssef el-Kaidi explains that, in the broader Muslim world, based on Quranic verses, people strongly believe in the existence of supernatural invisible beings capable of possessing people and inficting suffering, though some of the djinn might also be righteous and benevolent. He refers to the belief that these transparent and invisible beings populate the invisible and manifest world and can take the shapes of other beings such as cats, dogs, serpents, or even humans. Al-Othman also recalls her fear at the sight of animal abuse. She used to be terrifed when the boys in the streets used to practice their hobby of torturing cats. She imagined that cats would be transformed at night into djinn that would take revenge on those who tortured them as well as on whoever was a witness and did not do anything to prevent the ill-treatment. Al-Othman describes this act of torture as a hobby. In other words, it is not incidental but a regular activity that would bring the torturers pleasure and happiness. British philosopher John Locke, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, attests to the sadistic pleasure children experience when they are cruel to animals. He states: ‟I have frequently observed in children that, when they have got possession of any poor creature they are apt to use it ill; they often torment and treat very roughly young birds, butterfies, and such other poor animals, which fall into their hands, and that with a seeming kind of pleasure” (qtd. in Melson 168). Worthy of notice is that, in this particular instance, boys are perpetrators of cruelty and not girls. Peggy Smith, a psychologist at Washington High School in Milwaukee, explains, ‟Cats may be especially vulnerable to mischief-seeking boys not just because they’re small and available for victimization. In popular culture, feline often stands for ‘female.’ Cats may bear the projective burden of adolescent male sexual unease” (qtd. in Melson 168). Cats are closely connected to al-Othman’s appearance, and she somehow identifes them with her childhood self, though in a painful manner. In her childhood, she used to resemble a cat, and hence, she was given the name “kitty.” The children of the neighborhood would point their fngers at her and make fun of her. Al-Othman does not divulge the specifcity of this resemblance perhaps because it is too painful. She would experience pain, swallow her tears, and secretly curse cats. She does not specify the gender of the children who used to bully her, in contrast to her previous mention of boys torturing cats. Gail Melson, in Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children, explains why some children bully other children and are cruel to animals. In her view, children who are subjected to variegated forms of abuse and treated like monsters enjoy inficting cruelty on animals as well as bullying other children and vandalizing property (176). Al-Othman goes on to narrate her metamorphosis as a cat lover as she was growing up. She hated the nickname “the cat” until one day she saw a

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picture of Brigitte Bardot. Under her picture, in large print, was written “the cat B.B.” This caused her to love Brigitte, as she informally names her. The picture triggered a metamorphosis in al-Othman on the physical level. She began to collect Bardot’s pictures and imitate her crazy hairdos. It is not surprising for a young woman to be infuenced by Brigitte Bardot who was a cultural icon, a famous actress, and a sex symbol before becoming an animal activist. When al-Othman’s father scolded her, in a rebellious stand, full of arrogance, she told him that this was the hairdo of Brigitte Bardot. Though he did not know who the woman was, he regarded her as crazy and asked his daughter not to imitate her, clearly an instance of patriarchal restriction of personal freedom. Without divulging the incipient moment of her change into a cat lover, and without directly attributing this change to Bardot, al-Othman simply stated that her love for cats grew and was contagious. It was transmitted to her daughter who asked her to buy a Siamese cat. In her daughter’s view, a real cat was better than the statues of cats that her mother bought to decorate the shelves at home. Pat Shipman, in The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes us Human, explains that some people connect with animals by putting pictures of animals on their desks, walls, screensavers, and their hearts, as well as buying posters, calendars, and clothing with animals designs among other things (275). As many parents do, al-Othman succumbed to her daughter’s wish against her will; this is how the Siamese guest came to live with them. The reader cannot but dwell on the word “guest” in contrast to regarding the cat as a family member or a loved one. The word “guest” is etymologically cognate with hostis, which means an enemy or a stranger. Therefore, it inadvertently manifests the always potentially unwelcome status of the guest (Barry 63). In what follows in the story, as we shall see, the cat acquires the characteristic of the hostis. Al-Othman highlights many of the problems cat owners face such as tearing up of the furniture and the wallpaper, jumping on the tables, all resulting with destruction of the furniture and breaking the valuable memorabilia that she had bought in her trips, which brings her to complain. Her daughter retorts that such a naughty behavior is due to the psychological emptiness the female cat was living through and, consequently, she needs a husband. This statement is perhaps an indirect way of expressing the psychological need of a lonely woman. Once again, the mother complies with her daughter’s request and brings home a husband to the cat, who upon his arrival, enters the house with his tail hair puffed up to impose his masculinity, like a patriarchal man. Jojo the cat, as her daughter named the female cat, gave birth to six kittens, two of whom died. Al-Othman also highlights the fnancial burden among other kinds of problems cat owners face when there are several cats at home. She explains

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that the kittens grew up and so did their expenses. Having so many cats, they called upon a carpenter—an artist. He built a wooden house with windows. They had to take other measures to take care of the cat family. They got litter and water containers and food. In addition, they got special detergents for cleaning, as well as soap and canned food made of meat, chicken, and vegetables, and combs for their hair. They also had to incur other costs such as buying medicine and paying for veterinary consultation whose single visit costs 10 dinars. This led al-Othman to complain. The expenses for the cats were greater than the expenses of the household. There began to be signs of economic problems, especially when the kittens grew up and started to mate, resulting with a family bigger than theirs. Added to the fnancial burden was the time and energy needed to take care of the cats. They became maids for this big family of cats. Taking care of them drained their energy. Despite the reversal of the usual master and pet relationship, the mother goes along with this situation just to please her daughter. Ironically, a change of mind occurs with al-Othman regarding their cat family. Her pregnancy and an article that falls in her hands instigate this change. The article warned pregnant mothers about living with cats, which might lead to the loss of the fetus. Instantly, she falls prey to this misconception about cats and pregnancy. Contrary to common belief, it is unlikely that a cat will give a pregnant woman toxoplasmosis. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people are more likely to get it from eating raw meat or from gardening. Not knowing such facts, al-Othman felt that she had to take drastic measures. In her view, a child is more precious than a cat. This is why, on a hot summer day she dumps the cats in a faraway place. She experiences a severe pain in her chest when she sees the clean and spoiled cats of her daughter scattered in the piles of trash. Émile Zola, the French writer, warns about the pain one might experience as a result of abandoning an animal. He says: “Now try to live just with other humans, now that you have allowed animals into your home, and you will immediately see that you are cutting into your own fesh, and that you are removing a relative. [These animals] have become family members, and getting rid of them would be like tearing out a piece of your heart” (BSPA, 1896, p. 139) (qtd. in Traïni 107). However, al-Othman goes on to say that her fear for the expected baby attenuates her pain and remorse. Al-Othman highlights the disruption of the household as a result of getting rid of their cats on the psychological and emotional levels. She explains that upon the return of her daughter from school, she is surprised by what she did to her cats and got very stressed. A painful psychological state takes hold of her. In an attempt to calm her down, the mother explains to her the reason. To her surprise, her weeping daughter says that she wished the baby would die. Clearly, mother and daughter have different conceptions

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as to which lives are precious, the human or the non-human, thus reversing the commonly accepted hierarchy of the superiority of the human over the non-human. Once again, al-Othman’s story is imbued with superstition or a cultural belief. After a month, al-Othman loses the fetus, then the second, and the third, and the fourth. She had a strange feeling and a full and unshakeable conviction that she will never see the face of a child unless she compensates for her daughter’s loss of her cats who seemed to take revenge on her every time she got pregnant. Perplexed, she enumerates the various possible reasons for her losses. Perhaps she says, the whole thing is only just a coincidence, or caused by some medical reasons that she is not aware of or that she is cursed. However, she dismisses all of these possibilities. The idea of the cats seeking their revenge takes hold of her. Al-Othman highlights the emotional disruption she goes through caused by the abandonment of the cats. In her dreams, she would see the faces of the cats hissing at her and showing their claws to scratch her. She would get up terrorized and would touch her body and grope her belly. She feared that her nightmares would be a reality. She feared that cats would enter the house and hide to surprise her while sleeping. Obviously, her nightmares are indicative of a guilty conscience. The story shows another reversal in al-Othman’s household. For the reasons described above, al-Othman succumbs to her daughter’s wishes again and cats return once again to become the masters of the house. The family was back to buying cat food and their tools, serving them, and becoming their caretakers. In the conclusion of her story, al-Othman dwells on the positive change incurred by the cats’ return. She was optimistic. She felt that the malediction vanished from the house and that if she got pregnant again, she would see the face of her child. She was right. She saw the radiant face of one child and then another one. In addition, she saw the happiness of her daughter in having two little sisters. Nonetheless, al-Othman never got rid of the cats. To this day, their house is full of cats. “MEOWING” “Meowing” is a powerful psychological story dealing with the emotional state of its female narrator as well as with her sad childhood memories triggered by the sight of a cat in a garden or any cat she would see. The story is also an attempt on the part of the narrator to purge herself from negative emotions in a conversation she has with the cat she sees in the garden. The story is also a meditation on the universal state of women by means of comparison between women and cats.

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“Meowing” opens with a depiction of the emotional state of the narrator of the story, a negative feeling of boredom that does not take long to dissipate. The narrator’s description of boredom is gender imbued, as is the whole story. She explains that she woke up one morning feeling that boredom is sticking to her though she does not want it. She complains and imagines that this boredom is like a slimy man that sticks to her in hot and humid days. It becomes impossible to detach her skin from his. She hates this man and wishes that some cold air would blow, to make his body shiver so that he would go away, but he does not. The story also sheds some light on another emotional state, that of restlessness. Because of this feeling of boredom, the narrator roams in the house like someone who had lost something. She looks at an old drawer in the corner of the library bookshelves, a drawer that she had not opened a long time ago. She does not know why her eyes focused on it, to the extent that she does not look at any other thing. She opens the drawer and sees a stack of old letters. She stretches out her hand and goes through them. They were all old uninteresting letters. They were school letters, and letters from her parents and from her nieces and nephews who have been living abroad for many years. One might assume that the narrator would put forth a negative image of men in light of the description of boredom as a man. Nonetheless, it does not take long to dissipate this assumption, as the glimpse of one letter from her loving father rejuvenates her soul. It was a letter with an ornate handwriting on the cover. There was the opportunity for her to get rid of the slimy boredom sticking to her. Her father’s old letter brings back memories dear to her that affect her deeply. She opens the letter and reads his tender words: “You are beautiful and look like your father.” She laughs hilariously, as her father always used to praise his own beauty and intellect. Her father’s letter instigates a positive change of mood that pushes her to go out to the balcony and feel the beautiful spring weather that she describes poetically. She looks down and fnds the weeds upright, as if in a sudden longing, waiting for the mist to fall and quench their longing for it. In the midst of this beautiful spring setting, the narrator spots a cat (interestingly, a female cat) on the green grass that she affectionately describes. The cat was naked as a white carnation, laughing for the day, and firting with the warm sun, bending and playing with the elegant butterfies, and shaking her tail. The cat was overwhelmed with a joy the narrator badly needs at this particular moment. Watching the cat, she experiences an elation, similar to the one the cat was experiencing in her playfulness. This elation cannot but be transmitted to the reader and to any animal lover. The narrator’s change of mood as a result of seeing a playful cat in nature highlights a kind of symbiosis between her and the cat, a kind of connection with the natural world and its creatures, a certain affnity between the two “women,” so to speak. She

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wished she were a young female like her who experiences neither boredom nor any mental turmoil that disrupts her peace of mind and curbs her appetite for sleep, as though the situation of a female cat was better than her lot and perhaps that of (human) women in general. The story at hand proliferates with comparisons between the animal world, that of cats and the human world, with the aim, in many instances, to put forth a satire of the vices of human nature and to undermine the claim of the superiority of humans over animals. As the sight of the cat was great, in a sweeping moment of contemplation, deep thinking, and joy, the narrator decides to go down where the cat was lying and stretching her body. Who knows, she exclaims! Perhaps she is an intimate friend, better than the hundreds of people whose lives are devoured by emptiness, so they fnd nothing to chew on except human fesh, which even predators are sometimes incapable of chewing. Stray cats may be apprehensive toward people they do not know because of the many abuses inficted upon them. This explains the reaction of the cat when she sees the narrator approaching her. Upon her arrival at the place where the cat was lying and having fun, the cat rises upright like a soldier preparing for battle, not knowing why it would start and how it would end. The narrator sees in the cat’s eyes a strange apprehension that she does not want to see since she did not intend to infict any harm on her. This leads her to wonder why this miserable white creature misunderstands her. Some people mistakenly assume that there can be no communication between animals and people. The story at hand proves otherwise as it describes the communication between the two “women” and a kind of taming of the cat. The narrator goes near the cat. She sits next to her while she is still looking with great suspicion, so she moves slowly to reassure her. The cat issues a calm meow to make her feel that she does not fear her and that she feels comfortable with her. One can speculate that the cat has a desire to be tamed like the fox in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The narrator turns toward her, and the cat lies down again. She sees in her eyes a calmness that flls her with warmth. The narrator smiles at her and has the feeling that the cat is also smiling in answer. She licks her lips several times in less than a second. The story abounds with comparisons between women and cats, some of which are humorous, while others are more serious in tone. When observing the cat’s mustache, the narrator wonders: since the cat is a female like her, why don’t women have mustaches as well? She then laughs when she imagines her face with two mustaches like those of the cat and hears the cat meowing in a mocking manner. Her meowing subverts the so-called human superiority over cats. The narrator also wonders whether the cat would understand her if she talked to her. Her strong desire to communicate with her,

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underscores her loneliness. She turns toward her, and both keep staring at each other. In another anthropomorphic stance, she thinks that perhaps both of them were trying to explore the depths of the other. What follows is a perplexing but interesting analogy between women and cats. Does the analogy serve to undermine speciesism, the difference between the human and the non-human? According to some critics such as Tim Ingold, speciesism cannot be ignored as “every attribute that it is claimed we [humans] uniquely have, the animal is consequently supposed to lack; thus the generic concept of ‘animal’ is negatively constituted by the sum of these defciencies” (1994b, p. 3) (qtd. in Hurn 14). Is the purpose of the analogy a social one? Is it to defend the lot of some unfortunate women who are judged negatively and unfairly in a patriarchal society? Is it to show that some women are oppressors and not victims? Is it to show the inequality between women, whereby some are fortunate while others are not? The narrator begins by stating that she is a human being and the cat is a cat. She innocently or perhaps ironically asks what the differences between them might be. She then narrows the comparison between women and cats and hastens to deny that there might be differences between her and the cat and between all the women of the world and its cats. In her view, there is nothing but similarities. Women differ from each other in terms of appearance and beauty, and so do cats. Some of them have splendid colors. Others are deprived from having a nice color. There are refned women who live in homes, and there are those who loiter in the streets in search of a living, even if it is for a price decent women would refuse to pay. Some cats are pampered, and sleep on the feathers of ostriches and on the laps of bourgeois women, while other cats spend their lives in muddy alleys searching for food in garbage bins. She then wonders again in what way they might be different. She puts forth the issue of domesticity and quickly hastens to refute it, as in her view, there are friendly women, and there are some like ferocious cats. Their claws are ready to shed blood on the faces of others. In 1903, a feminist journalist, Séverine, wrote a children’s book, Sac-àtout, mémoires d’un petit chien, the memoirs of an abandoned dog that she had taken in. In the preface, she draws a parallel between the female condition and the condition of a dog. Like al-Othman, she focuses on the similarities between women and the non-human, dogs and women in this case. Séverine writes: Because I am ‟just a woman,” because you are ‟just a dog,” because, though at different levels on the social ladder of beings, we both represent species which are inferior to the masculine sex—so bursting with perfection—the feeling of having been accorded inferior status has created greater solidarity between us,

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and a more perfect understanding. (Quoted in Le Garrec, 2009, p. 55) (qtd. in Traïni 134)

Whereas Séverine views women and dogs as the subaltern, occupying the lower rungs of the social ladder, al-Othman places women and cats at both ends of the social ladder and puts to the fore social inequality within the same gender. The comparison between women and cats takes another aspect in what follows in “Meowing.” It becomes more personal. It reveals the narrator’s urgent and desperate need to talk to “someone” about her life, possibly for a cathartic purpose. The cat suddenly meows in a loud manner disrupting her musing and leading her to gaze at her again and to ask herself again whether it would be possible to talk to her feline companion since there is no one else to talk to. What encourages her is the fact that the cat opened her mouth and responded to her smile for the second time. In this instance, one cannot but remember Jacques Derrida’s story with his cat, which he narrates in The Animal That Therefore I Am. His small female cat, someone, an irreplaceable living being enters his space, his bathroom, and looks at him naked, triggering feelings of shame and embarrassment (9). Contrastingly, in the story at hand, it is the narrator who enters the space of the cat, and “undresses” before the cat when she lays bare her feelings and childhood memories that are replete with several instances of a blurred human identity. The nudity in this case is emotional and not physical and does not lead to embarrassment. While evoking her childhood memories, the narrator addresses the cat as her immaculate cat, asking her to listen to what she has to say. She addresses her as “my cat” several times, to highlight the closeness between them. Perhaps this would also reveal her need to have an intimate friend she can talk to about her past life. This need is symptomatic of her present loneliness. She tells her that many years ago, she was like her, a beautiful cat, with round eyes, but without these whiskers, which, in her view, is more beautiful. This touch of humor is in contrast with the sad memories she is about to narrate nostalgically. She used to be happy to play with her peers at school or with her neighbors’ daughters and she used to meow like her when she was happy. She then moves on to express a feeling of lack of fulfllment and bitterness exclaiming that they all preceded her in getting married and giving birth to sweet cats like her. Clearly, the narrator views marriage and procreation as essential conditions for happiness. Subsequently, the narrator recounts two sad stories of her childhood. They are stories of deprivation and abuse. The frst is that of deprivation of a basic human right, food. This story has an autobiographical element as explained by al-Othman herself in several interviews. The narrator describes herself as a cat in relation to food, underscoring her dehumanization and abuse as

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a child. Once again, the narrator addresses the cat as “my cat” and tells her that she used to meow like her when she was hungry, and used to sneak into the kitchen, looking in its corners for something her brother’s wife did not take notice of, and did not hide and lock with the key. Sometimes, she used to fnd dates, sometimes a piece of bread that fell behind one of the large pots piled on the kitchen bench. She rarely used to fnd something that she liked, such as a piece of meat or fsh. She tells the cat that she used to be hungry just like her. She also tells her that sometimes she used to eat to the point of satiety, not out of love for food but from an impression that she was flling her stomach for some time later, fearing that she would not fnd a bite to eat if her brother’s wife got angry with her. She was so wicked when she got angry and would fnd no other means to take revenge on her childhood, except to deprive her from eating. Whereas the frst story of abuse involves a negative self-identifcation with cats, the second involves her being identifed as a cat by her sister-in-law and as a result undergoing greater abuse. Carrying on with the cathartic conversation with the cat, the narrator tells her that the sight of a cat would always trigger the remembrance of a sad memory, revealing how deep her emotional scars were. She recalls that one day, while she was sitting and watching her sister-in-law clean the fsh, she noticed that she would take out its entrails and throw them to the cats roaming around her when the smell of the fresh fsh would reach their noses. The narrator describes herself as one of those cats roaming around her brother’s wife, though she had no desire to eat the bloody entrails they eat. Her brother’s wife inquired how cats can devour these rancid entrails. She frowned and pulled out the entrails of the fsh with her hand and threw them in the narrator’s face trying to force them into her mouth, telling her to taste them, since in her view, she is a cat like these cats. The narrator clarifes that her sister-in-law always used to call her “the cat” and always insisted on using this name day and night. The narrator used to hate this nickname and comparison with cats, even before the brother’s wife rubbed the fsh bowels on her lips and made her feel their fshy, rancid smell, the smell of the hatred that dwells in the heart of this abusive woman. The story ends in a sad tone. The narrator does not know how much time she spent talking to the cat lying next to her. She does not know where her talk ended. She wonders whether she told her about the stages of her life and how its events were intertwined. She wonders whether she was brief until she reached the end where she muses upon her boredom, weariness, and deprivation from everything she wished for herself until now. This reference to boredom and weariness at the beginning and end of the story is a manifestation of the narrator’s inability to lead a happy life. She has become a spinster living at home alone, looking for something, any of the things she wished for earlier, the time when she had many things that made men attracted to her,

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one after the other, tens of them, even thousands. She reiterates that she does not know how much time elapsed before she looked at the cat’s eyes, to fnd them closed. The cat had surrendered to a sweet state of sleep that she felt was tickling all parts of her body on this pleasant morning. The comfortable slumber of the cat reveals that what was supposed to be a conversation was nothing but a monologue. Clearly, the narrator belongs to the group of subalterns whose speech can neither be acknowledged nor heard. The narrator smiled and remembered at this point in time that there is one thing that differentiates women from cats: women are talkative. As for cats, their meowing is scarce.

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“TWO TRIALS” “Two Trials” deals with the killing of animals, one by accident and the other intentionally. Both have the aim of showing that animal cruelty leads to serious repercussions and to putting the offender on trial. One might look for any mention in the story of laws that prohibit such cruelty to justify the occurrence of the two trials, but there is none. The two trials are not conventional, as they do not occur in the human world. Both are conducted in a dream. The frst occurs in the sky and by the sky that is personifed, and the second in the underworld by a king. This would indicate that even if the human world does not punish you for the harm you do to animals, in your dreams your conscience would in a harsher manner. In addition, both stories are satirical of the human world on the social, political, and religious levels. The frst trial opens with a description of a cloudy day in a lyrical and anthropomorphic manner. It describes the shyness of the sun masking her beautiful face behind the sad gray clouds. The grief of the clouds is crumbling into droplets scattered over the windshield of the car and over the heads of the budding herbs. The narrator then goes on to describe focks of birds dancing in the tearful atmosphere, raising their wings, and awakening in the narrator’s heart something like sprouting joy that fows in her body. In an unexpected manner, the tone of the narration becomes somber. Due to the awakening of an old memory, sadness infltrates and crawls like a child unto the narrator and the focks of birds diverge, converge, rise, fall, play in front of the car window, or on both sides of it. A gray bird was late to catch up with his friends, and the narrator’s crazy car wheel ran over him and killed him. What follows in the story is a conversation between the narrator and the sky who puts the narrator on trial in the evening. To the blame of speeding, the narrator responds that the earth speeds in its rotation, hence evoking a natural element that cannot be accused of any kind of evil doing. To the accusation that she killed an innocent bird, she responds that he is the one who was late to catch up with his comrades. Undoubtedly, the narrator does

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not want to assume responsibility for the killing of the bird. To the accusation that they, the people of the earth, are always conceited and kill innocent lives as if they were cheap pebble lying on the road, the narrator responds that their souls perhaps wish to die because they hate life. The sky is surprised to learn that they hate life and hastens to inquire why, only to hear that it is because it is full of injustice and hunger. The conversation then shifts back again to the dead bird as the sky asks her if she prays for his soul. The answer is that they have forgotten this habit, and no one these days prays for the souls of the dead. This answer, given on a collective level, aims perhaps at attenuating any personal guilt. The trial ends here. Moving on the second trial in the story, one cannot but dwell on its nightmarish characteristics not only because the killing of an animal was intentional but also because the trial occurs in the world of the dead. The story itself is about some of the grandfather’s memories. He starts by telling his granddaughter about his daily life, in a description that is not oblivious to natural elements. He tells her that when the scent of the earth smelled wet and damp with a scent similar to that of a woman who is in labor, and when the smell of the earth leaked into his nose, he used to close his shop after a full day of work, of giving and taking in a bargain between buyer and seller. He used to go home, like a bird that goes to its nest, eager to get some rest and to embrace its partner. At that time, he used to live alone without a partner. He would cook fsh or meat, and then sit near the stove, pray the evening prayer, and look forward for a hearty meal after a long day. He goes on to narrate that one night, a black-eyed cat with a strange face and coarse coat approached him, sneaked in to where the cooking pot was, stretched out his hand and uncovered its lid, and then stole the meat and ate it in front of his eyes. The grandfather was not angry. At this point of the story, the reader cannot but think of the grandfather as a religious and kind man who does not mind sharing his food with a hungry cat. However, contrary to expectations the measures the grandfather takes in the following days are extreme and portend of cruelty and inhumane behavior. The grandfather explains that he was surprised that the next day the cat did what he did the day before. This was recurring for one night, two nights, and three. The cat was taking the opportunity of his occupation with prayer to steal him. Therefore, he decided to discipline him. The grandfather did what he used to do every night, but this time he hid a thick stick under his carpet and pretended to pray. The cat came. In his view, the cat was an enemy who was stealing his food every night. The cat got close to the cooking pot. He dropped its cover, stretched his hand, but the grandfather’s hand was faster than him. He hit him with the stick on his head and killed him. He then carried him by his tail and threw him in the street. He was able to have his dinner for the frst time in a week. He then fell into a deep sleep, while his full stomach

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was grinding its delicious food. Pattiann Rogers, in a section of her poem “Animals and People: The Human Heart in Confict with Itself,” describes people’s attitude toward hungry animals. She says: “And as long as we are not / seriously threatened, as long as we and our children / aren’t hungry and aren’t cold, we say, with a certain / degree of superiority, that we are no better / than any of them, that any of them deserve to live / just as much as we do” (447). Many would condemn the grandfather’s lack of compassion. Ironically, the religious grandfather is not affected by the suffering of others. He lacks compassion and sympathy defned as “a phenomenon of identifcation by projection—of projective identifcation—by which we imagine being in the other person’s body, and suffering, albeit to a lesser degree, what we—with our own sensibility—would suffer if put in a similar situation” (Wilhelm, 20071, p. 75) (qtd. in Traïni 93). One cannot in this instance but contrast the grandfather’s selfshness to the compassionate behavior of many women toward the end of the nineteenth century who pioneered the initiative of taking care of stray animals. Marie Huot, president of the Anti-Vivisection League, describes the scene of a woman taking care of stray cats. She says that sometimes in the evening you can see the silhouette of a woman carrying a basket, standing in the shadows, quietly calling to invisible creatures by waste ground, gardens, and public buildings. To her call, which they know so well, a host of cats, appear from everywhere, rush up to the mysterious stranger, who hands out a portion of food—served on a piece of paper—to each one of these famished creatures (Huot, 1890a, p. 11) (qtd. in Traïni 111). Huot further highlights the absence of classism in the group of women who feed the cats. They are women and girls, young and old, beautiful and ugly, rich and poor, who have not discussed this among themselves. A spontaneous feeling prompts them all. These abandoned creatures provoke the same maternal sacred instinct, innate to the hearts of women that makes them join in compassion, and lean down lovingly toward all that suffers and all that call out for help (Huot, 1890a, p. 11) (qtd. in Traïni 111). Huot, like many other women, wishes that men would also ‟open their hearts to the same emotions, and do not believe that their manly dignity will be threatened if they show kindness to creatures who are crushed and tortured by life, even when those creatures are animals” (Huot, 1887, 1890a, p. 11) (qtd. in Traïni 111). One may ask why the two trials are antithetical in their setting. Why does the frst trial occur in the sky and the second in the underworld? Is it just because the birds fy in the sky? Is it because the frst killing was unintentional in contrast to the second? Why didn’t the trial of the grandfather occur on earth? Is the choice of the underworld a form of satire that underscores the cruelty of people, who refuse to be more humane and subsequently are condemned to an everlasting punishment without any hope of redemption?

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The trial of the grandfather goes as follows. The grandfather in a dream in the middle of the night fnds himself carried by several hands underground. He was in a big court, where a tall, wide-faced king, ruled. People that looked and dressed in a strange manner surrounded him. In the middle of the court, there was the funeral of some man. The king referred to the funeral and asked the grandfather indignantly why he killed this man. Surprised, the grandfather trembled from fear from the top of his head to the soles of his feet and replied stuttering that he did not kill anyone. The king answered him in a grouchy manner that he killed this man tonight. To this, the grandfather answered that he only killed a cat, as though a cat’s life is not as valuable as that of a human being. Cora Diamond acknowledges that the human being has a special status. However, she believes that only by intensifying that special value that we can come to think of non-human animals not as bearers of ‟interests” or as ‟rights holders” but rather as ‟fellow creatures,” not simply endowed with a biological life but as “our fellows in mortality, in life on this earth” (‟Eating,” 329) (qtd. in Wolfe 15–16). Still, the grandfather goes on to assert that he was the victim as the cat stole his food for a whole week. At this point of the trial, there is a clear shift in the content of the trial. It is no longer about a man killing a cat but a condemnation of the people of the earth in general. The king accuses the people of the earth of being oppressive, hard-hearted, and not merciful with the hungry. To this accusation, the grandfather replies that many people are starving, but do not steal. The king then refutes his answer by saying that they do. One cannot but notice that in the second trial, as in the frst, there is a criticism of the lack of piety of people. When the king commands the grandfather to pray for the soul of this dead man, the grandfather giggles and states that the people of the earth have a long time ago lost the habit of praying for the souls of the dead. He retorts that since they no longer pray for dead people, so why would he pray for a cat? Here again we see a kind of speciesism and the belief that non-humans are subaltern. To this, the king replies that he is not a cat. He is one of the djinn. As stated earlier the djinn are a race of supernatural beings that can be good or evil. At this stage of the trial, there is a blurring of identities between cats, humans, and djinn in order to show that any harm inficted upon animals, and cats in particular, would be inficted on the djinn on the metaphysical level. Hence, the assault is very serious. This explains why the grandfather shivers and inquires about the reason for the djinn to steal human food. Hunger is the cause, replies the king. Moving beyond the world of spirits, the story puts forth a satire on the political level revealing an inadequate distribution of wealth, as well as the egotism of the king. The story ends with a reversal, with the trial of the king. In a courageous tone, the grandfather blames the king for not helping his people. He tells him that he sees everything around him studded with pearls

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and jewels, so why does he not feed his people instead of targeting humans and stealing their food while he, the king is full. The grandfather questions him about his position to which he answers that he is the king. He calls him an unjust king and tells him that heaven will not forgive him and no one will pray for his soul. The king then angrily stands up, accuses the grandfather of insanity, and orders him to be brought back to his home before he defames him in front of his people and turns them against him. This is how the trial ends. When the grandfather opens his eyes, his bed was soaking wet with urine. As a conclusion, one can conjecture that the aim of al-Othman in writing “Two Trials” and her other cat stories is to instill in people a sense of humanity in their interactions with fellow humans and non-humans. This will lead them to a happy life, as Zola also believes. Zola, in the speech he made at the annual prize-giving ceremony at the Cirque d’Hiver, stated: I did not know how to demonstrate courage, because the animal cause is for me more noble, [and] closely linked to the cause of men, to the point that all improvements in our relations with animals surely mark an increase in human happiness. If one day all men on earth are going to be happy, you can be sure that all animals will be happy too. In the face of pain we have a common fate which cannot be broken, it is a matter of minimizing the suffering of all life. (BSPA, 1896, p. 217) (qtd. in Traïni 100)

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NOTE 1. I would like to thank author Laila al-Othman for providing me by email with a typed copy of the three stories, as they were nowhere to be found. It is most likely that they are out of print and have not been translated into any other language. Any references to the stories in this chapter are based on my reading of the Arabic texts that I tried to translate faithfully. However, due to the reason stated above, I cannot provide any page numbers in my analysis of the stories.

REFERENCES 1985. ‫ بيروت‬,‫ المؤسسة العربية للدراسات والنشر‬.‫ المرأة والقطة‬.‫ ليلى‬,‫العثمان‬ [al-Othman, Laila. The Woman and the Cat. Arab Institute for Research & Publishing. Beirut, 1985.] 1980, ‫ بيروت‬.‫دار اآلداب‬. ‫ ط أولى‬.‫ في الليل تأتي العيون‬.“‫ ”محاكمتان‬.——— [———. “Two Trials”. The Evil Spirits Come at Night. First edition. Dar al-adāb. Beirut, 1980.]

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1999, ‫ الكويت‬. ‫ ط أولى دار الحدث للصحافة‬.‫ دعوني أتكلم‬..‫ بال قيود‬.”‫ ”انا والقطط‬.——— [———. “The Cats and I”. No Restrictions… Let me Speak. First Edition. dar alhadath lil sahafah, 1999.] 1976, ‫ الكويت‬.‫ ط أولى ذات السالسل‬.‫ امرأة في إناء‬.“‫ ”المواء‬.——— [———. “Meowing”. A Woman in an Urn. That al-salasil. Kuwait, 1976.] Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester University Press, 2009. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills. Fordham University Press, 2008. El Kaidi, Youssef. “Djinn in Muslim Culture: Truth or Superstition,” 24 November 2018, Inside Arabia: Voice of the Arab People. https​:/​/in​​sidea​​rabia​​.com/​​djinn​​-musl​​ im​-cu​​ltur​e​​-trut​​h- superstition/. Hurn, Samantha. Humans and Other Animals: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions. Pluto Press, 2012. Melson, Gail F. Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children. Harvard University Press, 2001. Rahmer, Angelika. “The Development of Women’s Political Consciousness in the Short Stories of the Kuwaiti Author Layla al-Uthman.” In Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature. Edited by Roger Allen, Hilary Kilpatrick, and Ed de Moor. Saqi Books, 1995. Rogers, Pattiann. Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981– 2001. Milkweed Editions, 2001. Ronak, Husni, and Daniel L. Newman. Modern Arabic Short Stories: A Bilingual Reader. Saqi, 2008. Shipman, Pat. The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human. Norton, 2011. Tijani, Ishaq. Male Domination, Female Revolt: Race, Class, and Gender in Kuwaiti Women’s Fiction. Brill, 2009. Traïni, Christophe. The Animal Rights Struggle: An Essay in Historical Sociology. Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Wolfe, Cary. “Introduction.” In Philosophy and Animal Life. Columbia University Press, 2008.

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Chapter 4

Of Mice, Rabbits, and Other Companion Species in Beatrix Potter’s More than Human World

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Lorraine Kerslake

This chapter highlights the contributions of Beatrix Potter to the study, protection, and writing of nature in the scope of children’s literature. By looking at the interaction between text and illustration in her animal tales together with commentaries from her coded journal I will explore the author’s intricate relationship with the more-than-human world and the importance of animals in her life and work. Born in Victorian England, as a child Potter never received a formal education and was raised by her governesses with little interaction by her parents. Relegated to her nursery, her natural affection for animals and her rich imagination made the little creatures that she was allowed to keep there her only real companions. These were of course the same real animals that would also become her literary inspiration. Despite the fact that Potter’s work is deeply Victorian, her animal tales have a timeless appeal that can awaken the imagination of children in today’s society. Her careful observation and refection about the natural world are shown as a bond of respect which she portrayed from an early age throughout her work. In her tales, she creates an entire world where animals mimic human behavior. Her illustrations alternate between depictions of real animals and others of the same animal wearing clothes and adopting human postures with an interesting play on anthropomorphism. There are, however, surprisingly few authors who have looked at the theme of anthropomorphism in Potter’s work. One of the frst was Margaret Blount in her classic Animal Land (1977), which explores the role of animals in children’s literature and approaches the topic from a wider scope. More inspiring is Peter Hollindale’s Aesop in the Shadows (1989), which considers the relationship in her tales between humanized social comedy and natural history. 79

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Hollindale fnds the term “Post-fabulist” useful to describe her subversive morality and considers that her genius lies in the fact that her animals are real and not humans in disguise. Daphne Kutzer, in Writing in Code (2003), also touches the subject although her reading concentrates more on the themes of domestic space and rebellion. Marion Copeland does so more successfully from an ecofeminist perspective in her chapter in Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism (2004). According to Copeland, the underlying ecofeminist concern in Potter’s work comes from the linking of frsthand oppression she suffered as a woman and the domination of nature in her work and life. The restrictions she experienced as a child are also refected in the restraints of domestication that many of her animal characters suffer. It would not be an overstatement to say that Beatrix Potter is perhaps the greatest classic children’s author. Despite the fact that Potter’s tales were not written with mass consumerism in mind, her twenty-three small, watercolored books, which range from The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) to The Tale of Little Pig Robinson (1930), form part of an enormous international industry today. The Tale of Peter Rabbit has sold more than forty million copies worldwide and been translated into thirty-fve languages. There are over ninety categories of merchandising of the books and over sixty versions of Peter Rabbit alone (not counting videotapes and CD-ROMs) (Mackey 197–206). Although it is unlikely that she expected Peter Rabbit to become such an icon, she was quick to see the enormous potential and became the frst children’s storyteller to create a merchandising empire, with products ranging from wallpaper to fgurines, tea-sets, and dolls. But Potter was far more than a children’s writer and illustrator, and the success of Peter Rabbit has often overshadowed many of the other facets to her life. From the ages of ffteen to thirty, Potter kept a secret journal, written in code most almost certainly to keep out the prying eyes of her mother, which took over eighty years to decipher. Despite her fame she was happiest later in life when she lived anonymously in the Lake District as a Mrs. William Heelis, an accomplished sheep farmer. Apart from being a respected farmer, an environmentalist, and major supporter of the National Trust she was a woman of intellect, determination, and imagination. There are few readers today who are probably aware that on December 16, 1901, after receiving rejection letters from six publishers, a thirty-fve-yearold Potter withdrew her savings and decided to take control of her future by privately printing 250 copies of her frst book The Tale of Peter Rabbit. This frst edition, in black and white, quickly sold out before Frederick Warne persuaded her to redo the book with her own water-colored illustrations for a second edition and many subsequent printings which followed. However, before becoming one of the most famous children’s authors and illustrators of all time, she was in fact a promising naturalist with a particular

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interest in the study of fungi. This lesser known facet of Potter’s life as a female naturalist deserves a brief mention since, from an ecofeminist reading, it illuminates the gendered ways Western culture has constructed scientifc knowledge and brings into discussion the way women have historically and systematically been devaluated and shut out from science. The fact that her writing gave her the independence she had longed for and the reasons that made her turn away from her early nature study of mycology are important aspects that have often been overlooked. Led frst by her imagination and passion for art, Potter’s curiosity for natural sciences defned everything she undertook. From 1887 to 1901, she collected fungi, carefully examining and sketching them. She produced over 300 detailed scientifc drawings and grew over 50 species of fungi from spores. In 1897, Potter wrote to the director of Kew Gardens, asking him to view her paper which explored her own theory of how spores reproduced. However, the male botanists at Kew Gardens were reluctant to listen to a woman and her theories were simply turned down. That same fatidic day marked Potter’s last journal entry. A century later, the Linnean Society issued a posthumous apology of sorts to Potter for its historic sexism, acknowledging that she had been “treated scurvily” (Lear 482) by some of its members. It was this lack of scientifc recognition, together with her love of animals, that caused Potter to turn to writing animal stories for children, frst as a diversion and later to earn her long overdue independence. Although her parents did not approve of their daughter’s work Potter was driven both by her imagination and the desire to do something useful with her life. She was, as Barbara Gates put it, “especially well equipped for this enterprise” since “From an early age, she knew her animals as she would come to know her fungi—from a scientifc perspective” (Gates 231). Born on July 28, 1866, in the Victorian Era, Helen Beatrix Potter was raised in a middle-class family and lived a lonely life at home. Like other girls of her time, she did not receive a formal education since it was not customary for women to go to school and instead was taught by her governess at home. She spent long hours alone or in the company of her younger brother, Bertram, until he turned eleven and was sent away to boarding school. She saw her parents at bedtimes and on special occasions: Number Two Bolton Gardens was very quiet. The ticking of the grandfather clock could be heard all over the house, like a slow heartbeat, and there were other reliable indications of the time of the day. At the same hour every morning Mr. and Mrs. Rupert Potter came down to the dining-room for breakfast, a meal consumed in silence [. . .]. At six o’clock Mr. Cox, the butler, could be observed, through the dining-room windows preparing a solemn ritual with napkins and spoons and forks on the mahogany table. Soon the curtains would be drawn

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and the nursery lamp be extinguished, and to the street the house would give no further evidence of life. (Lane 14)

In all fairness, neither of her parents were tyrants nor was her solitary nature and confned upbringing any more constricted than that of any other child of her time, given that “she had been born into a period and a class which seem to have had little understanding of childhood.” (Lane 15) As a young child she was exposed to art and books and her sketch books already showed her potential artistry. Potter was infuenced by Rousseau’s ideas on education as well as Locke. She read the Bible, Aesop (although she did not admire his moralizing intentions), Shakespeare, and authors such as Jonathan Swift, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen as well as her contemporaries Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, and Edward Lear for whom she drew several illustrations. Part of this artistic talent was also inherited from her father who was an amateur photographer as well as close friends to artists such as the pre-Raphaelite John Millais. Although there were a number of other artists whom Potter admired, such as Randolph Caldecott, Richard Doyle, or Gustave Doré, both in her art and writing Potter was basically herself. Potter also often frequented the Natural History Museum, in Kensington, which was close enough to Bolton Gardens for her to visit alone. There she would spend hours studying and sketching her frst scientifc drawings of fossils, insects, and stuffed animals. In her journal, dated December 20, 1895, she describes one of these visits: “Went to the Museum, very empty and quiet. Studied fossils peaceably, and afterwards the insects again, but investments and a general twitch got too much for me. I never saw anything so fearful as the stuffed animal” (Linder 412). Despite her initial apprehension, she drew them with scientifc accuracy all the same. Indeed, having little company, Potter turned to nature from an early age, and was fascinated by animals, fossils, and plants, which she spent hours drawing and immortalizing. From an early age she kept a variety of creatures in her nursery, some authorized, others smuggled. This fact suggests that in many ways her childhood was actually far more liberated than many of her contemporaries. After her brother went to boarding school animals became her constant companions. Among her favorite were her rabbits, her mice, and her hedgehogs, nearly all of which she tamed herself. All the creatures that Bertram and she brought home soon became models for Potter’s fne eye for detail. She also kept amphibians and was particularly taken by a female lizard which she had bought in Ilfracombe. In her diary she comments on how Judy the female lizard laid an egg which unfortunately died in a few hours. It was alive and wriggling with large eyes, tail curled twice, veins and bladder or

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fuid like a chicken, showing through the transparent brown shell about a quarter inch long, nearly as large as Judy’s head. (Linder 49)

She carefully kept a noted record of a family of garden snails which she had reared in a plant pot and reports in her journal dated December 8, 1883 on how “an awful tragedy” overcame the whole family: the whole Bill family, old Bill and Mrs. Little Bill, and ditto Grimes and Sextus Grimes his wife, Lord and Lady Salisbury, Mr. and Mrs. Camfeld, Mars and Venus, and three of four others were every one dead and dried up. We have had old Bill more than a year. I am very much put out about the poor things, they have such a surprising difference of character. (Linder 59)

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At the age of nine a keen Potter was already recording the feeding habits of caterpillars in her sketchbook and later made a comparative study on the breathing system of her newts and frogs. Some of these treasures also suffered calamities, as noted in her journal entry for Friday, September 21, 1883: “A day of misfortunes. Sally and four black newts escaped overnight. Caught one black newt in school room and another in larder, but nothing seen of poor Sally, who is probably sporting outside somewhere” (Linder 54). She later mourned the death of Punch, a green frog they had kept for over fve years. These practices together with her thorough knowledge of amphibians would later be adapted to fantasy and appear in characters such as Jeremy Fisher. Potter’s interest toward animals was purely scientifc as can be seen from the way in which she recorded their behavior and habits. She also recorded the hibernation patterns of her hedgehog, Mrs. Tiggywinkle and would note specifc details of her rabbits’ behavior. Benjamin H. Bouncer, whom she had bought before Peter, was the model for her frst rabbit drawings. Her insights into his character are quite remarkable. As she observes: Rabbits are creatures of warm volatile temperament but shallow and absurdly transparent. It is this naturalness, one touch of nature, that I fnd so delightful in Mr. Benjamin Bunny, though I frankly admit his vulgarity. At one moment amiably sentimental to the verge of silliness, at the next, the upsetting of a jug or tea-cup which he immediately takes upon himself, will convert him into a demon [. . .]. He is an abject coward, but believes in bluster, could stare our old dog out of countenance, chase a cat that has turned tail. (Linder 307)

It is important to remember of course that Benjamin was a wild rabbit who had been domesticated as a pet. He had been forced to lead an unnatural life and was taken for walks on a lead and collar and lay on a quilt in front of the fre. Hardly the way one would expect a true animal lover to behave,

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or is it? If we take into account what Yi-Fu Tuan states in Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (1984), human affection for domestic animals is inseparable from dominance. Tuan argues, somewhat reductively perhaps, that a pet is: a diminished being, whether in the fgurative or literal sense. It serves not so much the essential needs as the vanity and pleasure of its possessor [. . .]. A pet is a personal belonging, an animal with charm that one can take delight in, play with, or set aside, as one wishes. (Tuan 139–41)

Notwithstanding, Potter’s attitude to animals and her notion of companionship is unusual and diffcult to categorize given that she was not the regular type of animal lover. Among amphibians, insects, dogs, cats, horses, hens, sheep, pigs, guinea pigs, mice, birds, and other beasts, she named over ninety different pets. When the animals died the children would sometimes boil their skin and bones in order to preserve and study their skeleton. On one occasion, when Bertram when back to school, Potter was left “the responsibility of a precious bat. It is a charming little creature, quite tame and apparently happy as long as it has suffcient fies and raw meat” (Linder 106). After the bat died, Potter carefully undertook special efforts, with the help of her brother Bertram, to preserve it, as revealed in the following letter:

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Dear B, I am sorry to hear your news of the bat. If he cannot be kept alive, as I suppose he can’t, you had better kill him, and stuff him as well as you can. Be sure to take his measurements most carefully before you stuff him. (Letter from Bertram Potter, Oct 12, 1884)

Potter’s somewhat disturbing and complex feelings would appear to come into confict with what we would conceive as appropriate for a young girl, especially at the turn of the century. Indeed, few of her contemporaries would have skinned a bat or boiled its carcass. However, her methods of close observation and dissection were vital for her eye as a naturalist to discover and portray her creatures as accurately as possible. Despite the fact that Potter’s animals provided companionship they were the objects of her minute attention and experimentation. She looked upon her pets as unique personalities as well as scientifc curiosities, in an attempt to understand the anatomy and structure of the creatures she painted. That same clinical detachment can be read between the lines, when a ffteen-year-old somewhat amused Beatrix records in her diary on January

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15, 1882, how her father sold one of the family horses to the zoo for cat food: Rufus=Prince, the chestnut horse is disposed of at last. Papa sent Reynolds to the Zoological Gardens to enquire the price of cat’s meat: £2 for a very fat horse, 30/ for a middling one, thin ones not taken as the lions are particular. However, he is sold to a cab owner along the road for £15. He was bought a year ago for ninety. Papa says he never made a good bargain. (Linder 9)

There is no ficker of sentimentality or sympathy in the young Potter, for she was not Anna Sewell,1 nor does she appear to agonize about the possible fate of the horse. In fact, most of her journal reads in a similar way and is particularly impersonal, not as one would expect of a teenage girl. In it she also expresses her dislike of dogs and comments in 1885 on the “muzzing of dogs” and that she considers it “A most blessed change. Now, when I am set upon by three collies at once in the High Street, I simply smack them with my umbrella and laugh” (Linder 166). Despite becoming a dog owner herself, nine years later she comments that she considers “the race an unmitigated nuisance” (Linder 343). On another occasion Potter borrowed “Mr Chopps,” a guinea pig from her neighbors the Pagets, to sketch. After returning him safely, she comments in her diary about the “evil hour” that followed with a very particular guinea pig with a long white ruff named “Queen Elizabeth,” with rather disastrous consequences:

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This PIG [. . .] this wretched pig took to eating blotting paper, pasteboard, string and other curious substances, and expired in the night. I suspected something was wrong and intended to take it back. My feelings may be imagined when I found it extended—a damp—very damp disagreeable body. Miss Paget proved peaceable, I gave her the drawing. (Linder 311)

Indeed, her attitude to nature lacked any sense of squeamishness, and this same matter-of-fact quality can be seen throughout her tales. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) begins with the horrifying image of Peter’s father’s fate and Mrs. Rabbit’s blunt statement when she warns Peter and his sisters not to go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: “Father had an accident there; he was put into a pie by Mrs. McGregor” (9). This rather curious transition of occurrences—Peter’s father having an accident rather than Mr. McGregor killing the rabbit and Mrs. McGregor’s cooking it—is present in many of Potter’s tales where the purpose of the animal protagonist is simply not to get eaten. Potter’s dark humor is another important element present in her work, although it is often masked as delicate irony and used at sophisticated levels

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in her little tales. One of the reasons her writing appeals to young children is because of the fact that rules are broken. In the case of Peter Rabbit, Peter’s development is a kind of bildungsroman, and he determines his identity by breaking boundaries, which appear in the form of his mother’s rules as well as the physical barriers and restrictions that appear in the tale: the gate, the net, or the door in the wall which was “locked, and there was no room for a fat little rabbit to squeeze underneath” (16). Potter’s animals often appear wearing clothes as a way to mirror models of human behavior. Indeed, they appear as real animals when naked and not personifed and act like humans when clothed. As Kerslake observes: “In Potter, the human world is often blurred with that of animals but, although her creatures may appear as humans, they never lose their real animalness. The smokescreen of mixing human with animal behavior and the metaphor of clothing are device used to narrow the gaps between the human world with that of animals” (Kerslake 166). Furthermore, in Potter’s tales, the animals that do not wear clothes are not personifed since the total absence of clothing means the absence of rational thought and dehumanizes them. Neither do these animals have a name or a voice, since they do not add any signifcance to the text. In The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the mouse by the doorstep is unable to talk since she is carrying a large pea in her mouth while the white cat is too busy staring at the gold fsh by the pond to notice Peter. There is a curious play on this in The Tale of Peter Rabbit when Peter’s sisters take off their jackets in order to collect blackberries, which of course would stain their clothing. They later appear in their red hoods, contrasting with their brother Peter who has lost his coat and shoes. It is in fact Peter’s jacket and his buttons that get caught in the gooseberry net that almost prevent him from escaping. However, in the case of Peter it is by squeezing out of his tight jacket and freeing himself from Mr. McGregor’s sieve that he is able to escape from the garden. So for Peter, the transition to his real animal nature takes place when he loses his clothes. In the book’s less famous sequel, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, we meet his cousin Benjamin, who reminds Peter how “it spoils people’s clothes to squeeze under a gate; the proper way to get in, is to climb down a pear tree” (59). Indeed, the importance of clothes to the “development of a sense of self” (Scott 72) and Peter’s need to retrieve his jacket and shoes are carefully entwined in Benjamin’s plan to return to Mr. McGregor’s garden to rescue Peter’s clothes in order to reclaim his identity. Clothes symbolize tension and recall the pretentiousness of over-dressing and the social graces of Victorian mothers to over-dress and domesticate their children. Like Peter Rabbit, in The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907), Tom’s neurotic mother mirrors these somewhat obsessive habits of upper- and middle-class

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society as can be seen in the illustration of Tabitha standing over her kitten Moppet whom she is smothering to the point of near suffocation with a sponge placed over her mouth. She then cleans and elaborately dresses Tom and his sisters making them wear “elegant uncomfortable clothes” (151) for her tea party and then all too hastily turns them out of the way while reminding them to keep their frocks clean by walking on their hind legs. Tabitha’s unreasonable request highlights the fact that she expects her offspring to act like children and not like kittens. Of course, not only does Tom but also his sisters lose their outfts and get dirty, failing to conform to their mother’s expectations. When they all return home and Tabitha discovers her kittens on the wall with no clothes on, she resorts to corporal punishment and “pulled them off the wall, smacked them, and took them back to the house” (157). Affronted she hides them out of sight and tells her fne company they have measles. However, the disobedient kittens are triumphant in the closing of the tale and are depicted making a mess of their mother’s bed room while disturbing “the dignity and repose of the tea-party” (157) downstairs. Its sequel The Roly-Poly Pudding (1908), frst published as The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, is one of Potter’s most grotesquely dark and multilayered tales. Set in Potter’s home, Hill Top Farm, it describes the place as being overrun with rats which are as much a trial for Tabitha as they were for Potter in real life. Tom’s mother continues to keep her unruly children under control by locking them this time inside a cupboard (which we are led to believe was a normal form of discipline at the time). Tom Kitten escapes and ventures up the chimney, only to fnd himself under the foorboards of the attic where he is captured by Samuel Whiskers, a mean old rat, who orders his wife, Anna Maria, to make him a “kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding” (187) for his dinner. The rats rush upon poor frightened Tom and proceed to roll and tie him up with string under the foor of the attic, with his mouth full of soot. Potter then depicts the poor kitten bound by his paws and lying on his back while going into elaborate details of how the rats “set to work to make him into a dumpling with a rolling pin. First, they smeared him with butter, and then they rolled him in the dough” (190). Luckily for Tom the rats are discovered before the baking takes place and poor Tom is rescued and safely returned home. By the end of the tale Tom’s siblings have become successful rat catchers while Tom is last seen backing away from a frightened little mouse. The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck (1908) reads not just a reworking of Little Red Riding Hood, but rather, like The Tale of Peter Rabbit, as a fable warning of the consequences of venturing into the unknown. Mr. Tod appears as “an elegantly dressed gentleman reading a newspaper” (164), while the vain duck appears as naïve. Although the character is never referred to as a fox the

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illustrations show his true nature. Innocently unaware, when the clever fox asks the scatty duck to come to dinner and bring some herbs together with “Sage and thyme, and mint and two onions, and some parsley” (167) for the stuffng, she readily agrees. The irony of the tale rests on the fact that Jemima escapes the sinister advances of Mr. Tod thanks to Kep, named after Potter’s own collie dog— who rescues Jemima in the tale— only to lose her eggs to the hungry puppies. This painful defeat is recounted as follows: “Unfortunately the puppies rushed in and gobbled up all the eggs before he could stop them. [. . .] Jemima Puddle-duck was escorted home in tears on account of those eggs” (170–71). The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903) falls into the category of the tradition of pourquoi tales. It is “a Tale about a tail—a tail that belonged to a little red squirrel” as well as a moral fable elaborated with a number of Potter’s favorite riddles and rhymes. It differs from Potter’s other tales in that despite being anthropomorphized the squirrels do not wear clothes. Despite the light-hearted humor of the tale it carries a dark undercurrent. Old Brown, the Owl, appears as a kind of god fgure invested with authority and holds a status of superiority over the squirrels who ask for his permission to collect nuts. In the tale Nutkin appears as the trickster fgure and provokes Old Brown, the Owl, by dancing and telling riddles. Old Brown puts up with him for so long and then catches the squirrel “and held him up by the tail, intending to skin him; but Nutkin pulled so very hard that his tail broke in two” (35). Despite being punished for his naughtiness, like Peter Rabbit, Nutkin escapes—but without his tail. In The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher (1906), inspired by Randolph Caldecott’s A Frog He would A-Wooing Go (1883), Potter satirizes the snobbery of Victorian society in the humanized fgure of Jeremy, a gentleman frog of leisure, dressed in Regency-style fashion. For it is his clothes that indicate his social class and his status as a gentleman as does his fshing kit and special mackintosh and galoshes. When he becomes tired of fshing, he eats his “butterfy sandwich” (124) and for dinner invites his friends to enjoy “roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce” (130). However, Jeremy begins to feel somewhat out of his depth in the open pond when a giant water beetle tweaks his galoshes. When Jeremy hears a rustling sound among the reeds he worries that there might be water rats nearby. Potter shows the reader that this threat is real by portraying the rats and suggesting that even the picturesque pond hides danger. Again, like the white cat in Mr. McGregor’s garden, the animals that act as enemies are depicted purely as animals with no human characteristics. The irony here is that when Jeremy is in real danger, after being eaten by an enormous trout, it is his human mackintosh that actually saves him: “the trout was so displeased with the taste of the mackintosh that in less than half a minute it spat him out again; and the only thing it

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swallowed was Mr. Jeremy’s galoshes” (127). In other words, it is his actual denial of his real animal nature that fnally saves him. Perhaps Potter’s own voice rings clearest in The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904), written at a time when she was trying to earn her independence and leave home. It was created as a collaborative adventure or sorts between her publisher Norman Warne and herself “providing the subtext of a love story” (Lear 178). During a visit to her cousin in Gloucestershire, Potter had rescued two mice from a cage-trap in the kitchen. She decided to keep them as pets inside a glassed mouse house with a ladder made for her by Norman Warne and named them Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca after characters from Henry Fielding’s play Tom Thumb (1730). The original doll’s house was based on one that Warne had built for his niece Winifred Warne. Potter had visited the doll’s house while Warne had been making it and was invited to see it fnished and installed in the nursery. However, Mrs. Potter intervened, sensing that the relationship between her daughter and Norman was by then becoming more than professional.2 The doll’s house itself represents a typical Victorian mansion where everything is for show but not for use. It is inhabited by two dolls, Lucinda and Jane, who lead a conventional but static domestic life, and even go for rides in their doll’s pram, just as Miss Potter would go for her daily carriage ride. However, their domestic space is soon disrupted by the two mice who are at frst entranced by the delightful objects and lovely food until they discover that everything inside, including the beautiful food, is inedible and end up destroying it “for underneath the shiny paint it was made of nothing but plaster” (76). This is followed by a productive pillaging by the mice. When the dolls return they are stunned into silence by the destruction, although they are unable to take any action. The mice by then have retreated into their own renovated domestic space with the stolen goods including a cradle for Hunca Munca who is about to become a mother. However, the mice pay for the destruction with a crooked sixpence and with Hunca Munca’s daily sweeping of the dolls’ house. As for the real Hunca Munca, she came to a sad end, as Potter wrote to Norman Warne on July 21, 1905: I have made a little doll of poor Hunca Munca, I cannot forgive myself for letting her tumble. I do so miss her. She fell off the chandelier, she managed to stagger up the staircase into your little house, but she died in my hand about 10 minutes after. I think if I had broken my own neck it would have saved a deal of trouble. (in Taylor, Whalley et al., 120)

According to Kutzer the tale also refects Potter’s own repression and daughterly servitude, reading largely as her own social parody on her upbringing:

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“If we think of this novel as Potter’s conscious or unconscious comment on her own life, [. . .] we can see her absolute delight in bringing disruption, destruction, and energy into a house as stifing and life-denying to the dolls and mice as Bolton Gardens was to her” (Kutzer 71). However, probably the darkest and most macabre of all her tales is The Tale of Mr. Tod (1912). It brings back the characters of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny together with two villains, Mr. Tod the fox and Tommy Brock the badger. In the frst part of the story Tommy Brock kidnaps Benjamin’s young family and takes them to one of Mr. Tod’s homes in the woods, where he plans to eat them for his supper. The setting already transmits a sense of darkness so that the reader senses the danger that lies ahead: “The sun had set; an owl began to hoot in the word. There were many unpleasant things lying about, that had much better have been buried; rabbit bones and skulls, and chickens’ legs and other horrors. It was a shocking place, and very dark” (263). When the rabbits arrive they fnd the other rabbits alive, but shut inside the oven. As Potter pragmatically explains, “there really was not very much comfort in the discovery. They could not open the window; and although the young family was alive—the little rabbits were quite incapable of letting themselves out” (264). Mr. Tod unwittingly becomes the rabbits’ ally as he decides to teach the badger a lesson and attempt to murder the enemy who has invaded his home. His plan is to make a pail of water fall on top of the Badger’s head; however, when he thinks he has killed Tommy Brock he fnds him alive in the kitchen drinking a cup of tea. Tommy Brock then throws boiling tea into Mr. Tod’s face and both enter a savage fght. At this point the two rabbits enter the kitchen and rescue the babies out of the oven and safely return them to Benjamin’s home. However, although the rabbits get a happy ending, Potter purposely leaves the end of the two villains as an open question mark. Despite the fact that on the surface her tales often depict Arcadian, idyllic landscapes there is nothing romantic about her tales, for her aim was not to elicit sentimentality in her readers. Her anthropomorphism does not seek an emotional response nor does she foster compassion toward animals, instead she shows respect and encourages coexistence. Her sense of morality, or rather immorality comes from the rules of nature, and in the case of Peter Rabbit and Tom Kitten the moral is quite simply how not to get eaten. What sets Potter’s tales apart is the fact that her tales focus on the natural world and, as such, they are more inclined toward naturalism since her creatures are based on real ones and not just people in disguise. Moreover, nearly all her animals are local ones that exist in the English countryside, with the exception of her late The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes (1911)—where she introduces a chipmunk and a grey bear to please her American readers.

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The rest of her creatures are either domesticated (guinea pigs, mice, cats, dogs, rabbits—which became increasingly popular as a “pet” thanks to The Tale of Peter Rabbit) or local wild ones (squirrels, an owl, a hedgehog, a frog) or are found on a farm (pigs, ducks). The fact that she chooses local domestic and wild animals is also signifcant for they are not simply animals but the animals that she has observed and illustrated. Her characters remain immortalized through her illustrations that allow her to be an observer and see “through the looking glass” in order to enter the enchanted world of her animal kingdom. Of course, by nature we anthropomorphize reality, translating what we see into our own words. Language is human-based and cannot be objective or neutral. Potter’s words construct the world of animals, her animals and her world, as seen through the eyes of a child. However, it was Potter’s unique vision as both a scientist and an artist and her environmental understanding to respect and preserve nature that gave her that special touch that few other children’s writers have conceived. In contrast with other often overcrowded and ornately illustrated Victorian children’s books, Potter’s simplicity allows her to limit the scene she draws, reducing detail and focusing the reader’s attention of the central fgures. According to Alison Lurie, one special attraction of her work “was that Beatrix Potter portrayed the world from a mouse’s—or rabbit’s—or small child’s-eye view” (Lurie 94). Her books were child-centered. It was no coincidence either that she adopted a small-size picture book format for her little books because she wanted small children to be able to hold them in their hands. On December 22, 1943, When Helen Beatrix Potter passed away at the age of seventy-seven after suffering from bronchitis, The Westmorland Gazette announced simply “Cremation private. No mourning, no fowers, and no letters, please” (in Lear 440). She departed in the same unsentimental and matter-of-fact way that had characterized her tales. Her ashes were scattered above Hill Top in the Lake District, as she had requested. Her estate and properties, covering over 4,300 acres, were given over to the National Trust, along with her prized cattle and sheep. Potter sought both in life and art to infuence her readers to conserve the borderlands and farmlands of the English countryside and, as an active conservationist, she saved the Lake District practically single-handedly from development and deforestation, using the proceeds of her books to fund her efforts. Potter’s tales can be read not only to look at our own complex feelings toward the natural world, but they also cast light on the complexity behind many environmental issues present today such as habitat loss and the destruction of wood lands caused by housing development and pollution. A clear example of this can be seen in the red squirrel which, although once a common sight, has now become rare to the British Isles and could even become

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extinct in the next decade.3 Without conservation management, perhaps the only red squirrel future generations may meet is Squirrel Nutkin. The role of children’s fction in awakening environmental imagination and creating concern and interest should not be underestimated. Potter aspired to teach children to respect the natural world through a positive connection to nature. Her stewardship of the land and her legacy in recovering nature are read today as a much-needed model in environmental awakening. Recalling the words of her biographer Linda Lear, “Imagination is the precursor to policy, the precondition to action. Imagination, like wonder, allows us to value something” (Lear 447). In view of a future that is anything but simple perhaps within her little tales we can fnd ways to explore nature and reconnect our inner selves with the potential of our own imaginative consciousness.

NOTES 1. Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty (1877), one of the frst animal biographies which widely changed the way horses were cared for and which was written “to induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses” (Townsend 122). It was hailed by Bernard Unti as the most important “anticruelty novel of all time” (Unti 313). 2. During the summer of 1905 Norman Warne asked Potter to marry him. Having argued with her parents about accepting the proposal of marriage they decided not to announce their engagement. Potter’s hopes were shattered only weeks later when Warne fell ill and died suddenly of leukaemia. Devastated Potter buried herself in her writing and the period that followed was amongst her most productive. 3. See Wildlife Trust https​:/​/ww​​w​.wil​​dlife​​trust​​s​.org​​/wild​​life-​​and​-w​​ild​-p​​laces​​/savi​​ ng​-sp​​eci​es​​/red-​​squir​​rels

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REFERENCES Blount, Margaret. Animal Land: The Creatures of Children’s Fiction. Avon-Hearst, 1977. Copeland, Marion. “The Wild and Wild Animal Characters in the Ecofeminist Novels of Beatrix Potter and Gene Stratton-Porter,” in Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism, edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd. Wayne State University Press, 2004, pp. 71–81. Dobrin, Sidney I., and Kenneth B. Kidd, editors. Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism. Wayne State University Press, 2004. Gates, Barbara. Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World. University of Chicago Press, 1998. Hollindale, Peter. “Aesop in the Shadows,” Signal, vol. 89, May 1989, pp. 115–132.

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Kerslake, Lorraine. “Anthropomorphism Dressed and Undressed in Beatrix Potter’s Rhymes and Riddles,” in Poetry and Childhood, edited by Morag Styles, Louise Joy, and David Whitley. Trentham Books Limited, 2010, pp. 161–168. Kutzer, M. Daphne. Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code. Routledge, 2003. Lane, Margaret. The Tale of Beatrix Potter: A Biography. Frederick Warne, 1985. Lear, Linda. Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Linder, Leslie, editor. The Journal of Beatrix Potter 1881–1897. Frederick Warne, 1989. Lurie, Alison. Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children’s Literature. Bloomsbury, 1990. Mackey, Margaret. The Case of Peter Rabbit: Changing Conditions of Literature for Children. Garland, 1998. Potter, Beatrix. Beatrix Potter: The Complete Tales. Frederick Warne, 2002. ———. Beatrix Potter: A Journal. Frederick Warne, 2011. Scott, Carole. “Clothed in Nature or Nature Clothed: Dress as Metaphor in the Illustrations of Beatrix Potter and C. M. Barker,” Children’s Literature, vol. 22, 1994, pp. 70–89. Taylor, Judy, Irene Whalley, Anne Stevenson Hobbs, and Elizabeth Battrick. Beatrix Potter 1866–1943: The Artist and Her World. Frederick Warne and the National Trust, 1987. Townsend, John Rowe. Written for Children. Penguin, 1983. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. Yale University Press, 1984. Unti, Bernard. “Sewell, Anna,” in Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, edited by Marc Bekoff. Greenwood Press, 1998, p. 313.

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Chapter 5

Walking through the Animal Kingdom A Search for the Near and the Dear

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Niroshini Gunasekera

Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer whose works are known around the world, especially after his masterpiece, The English Patient, won the Booker Prize in 1992 and was later awarded The Golden Man Booker in 2018 and the 1970 Governor General Award. He is a poet, a writer of fction, essayist, editor, and a flm maker. Ondaatje was born in 1948 in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon. His parents separated when he was a child and his mother moved to England and Michael later joined her, at the age of eleven. From England, Ondaatje moved to Montréal, Quebec, in 1962. In 1978, he returns to Sri Lanka: his intention is to reconstruct his past, put fragments of his memory together, and build up a period that he had already forgotten. He had almost never known his father, the notorious Mervyn Ondaatje of Running in the Family: he had not lived with him much, but he felt that there was a depth to this person’s being that no one ever understood. It is in search of the life of his father already dead and gone that he revisits his homeland from the rude weathers of Canada, in 1978. The need was not only to discover his father’s life, but it was also to reconstruct his own identity. During his stay, he meets a number of persons who help him create a patchwork of his father’s existence. He then writes his memoir, Running in the Family (1982), in a postmodern style using techniques of Magical Realism. This is not a happy memoir. Despite the author’s effort to understand his father’s life, it will always remain a mystery. According to how he describes his father, “one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut” (227). At the end of the memoir, even after reconstructing his father’s life to a certain extent, we feel that the author was left frustrated since he could never really know his father’s true self. He could gather some information, fragments of his father’s existence, but he believed that he could not fathom why 95

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his father lived the way he lived. As readers, we understand that his father’s dipsomania (alcoholism) was mainly responsible for his chaotic behavior. Nonetheless, the people who witnessed the life of Mervyn seemed to talk about him with so much tenderness and affection that Ondaatje, the son, seems to miss having grasped moments of tenderness with his father. Animals play an important role in Mervyn’s life. These are mainly stray animals or wild creatures who are as solitary as he was, and who are as vulnerable as he was. These stray animals were social outcasts whom we consider with affection, although they are kept at a distance due to accepted social norms. This chapter presents stray and wild animals that roam in the stories narrated by Ondaatje while he tries to reconstruct his family’s history. The presence of stray dogs, cats, polecats, and cobras or a battalion of ants or the midnight rat is not highlighted to give them any importance; they have either a metaphorical value or a mere existence that amplifes the chaotic nature of the human being with whom they are linked. They seem to complete and complement the mystical lives of the humans who stagger in life. The memoir also presents a journey into wilderness. Sri Lanka, or Ceylon as it was called before 1972, is still well-known for its fora and fauna. Therefore, we do not forget to mention the “companion species”—to borrow the term used by Donna Haraway (15)—since they too are a part of the existence of certain characters in the memoir. The two main characters around whom the story revolves are Mervyn Ondaatje, the author’s father, and Lalla, his grandmother. It is inevitable that we do a close observation of their lives since it is their lives that are linked with that of the animals, be it companion or symbolical. Bringing out certain episodes of their lives is therefore unavoidable. Their lives are not much different from those of stray or wild animals that they are associated with. The incidents around them are scattered without much chronology. Theirs is a life of stray animals who have one happy day and one sad day: they move from one place to another without much aim or support. Mervyn and Lalla are being taken care of by relatives or friends, they spread chaos and they are constantly followed by misfortune. They inhabit places the way stray animals would do. They expect to be the least disturbed. When they feel threatened, they move away. The beginning of the return journey to Sri Lanka in 1978 starts with a curious dream the author has while sleeping at a friend’s place in Canada; it is a dream that evokes his father’s penchant for stray dogs. He sees his father, “chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were screaming and barking into the tropical landscape” (5). This dream is a meeting between order and chaos. As he says, the idea materialized when he was dancing and laughing

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within the comfort and order of his life in Canada. And a decision is made: traveling toward the “pendant off the ear of India,” Sri Lanka. It was as if, he was running away from the new winter toward the warmth of Asia where he would eventually fnd out the chaotic existence that his family members had led. Nevertheless, it was going to be a heart-warming experience. On arriving in Sri Lanka, he travels to Jaffna which is in the north of the island in the scorching heat where “In ten minutes the garden will lie in a blaze of heat, frantic with noise and butterfies” (2) where morning is no more before half a page is written (2). 2:15 in the afternoon, the scene is that of lethargy and sleepiness. Not only the inhabitants of the house are asleep, the dogs from the town are also asleep on the cool porch, away from the unbearable heat. It is with much interest that Ondaatje observes these creatures moving away from human presence as he gets up to adjust the speed of the fan (12). This is a common sight in Sri Lanka where stray dogs occupy places that they have chosen and where they feel safe. They quietly move away rather unnoticed, leaving humans to attend to their routine. They belong to no one, yet they are everywhere. They are the invisible guardians of locations. According to the genesis myth of the Sinhalese people recorded in the Mahavamsa, the Veddas are descendants of Kuveni’s children. Kuveni was a wife of Sri Lanka’s frst recorded king Vijaya. When Prince Vijaya landed in Thambapanni in the ffth century BCE with his 700 followers, they saw a dog. Vijaya’s men, surmising that only where there is a village are dogs to be found, followed the creature, only to come upon the Queen of the Yakkhas, Kuveni. And thus begins the civilization of Ceylon. Stray dogs are an everyday reality in Sri Lanka. The Sinhala Hound or the Sinhalese Hound is a dog breed that is found in Sri Lanka and in some parts of India. It is believed that the Vedda or the indigenous people of Sri Lanka used these dogs as hunting assistants and that when a girl got married, a dog was given as part of the dowry. Ondaatje is of Dutch, Sinhalese, and Tamil ancestry, which makes him a Sri Lankan Burgher. What Ondaatjes and stray dogs have in common is their breed. This is far from a derogatory remark. Being Burghers, they are a mixed breed, a “Midsummer dream” as the writer himself states it: “Titania Dorothy Hilden Lysander de Saram, a mongrel collection part Sinhalese part Dutch part Tamil part ass moving slowly in the forests with foolish obsessions” (211–12). Ondaatje’s half-sister confrms the idea of “mongrel” when she says: “I had this image that the Ondaatjes were absolute pariahs” (197). She had been brought up with the idea that she belonged to a disgraceful family with half-bred members going through curious and unfortunate circumstances. The memoir carries many references to mongrels who stand as metaphors to cross-bred humans. The writer’s mother, in whose name the Graetian Award has been formed in Sri Lanka by Michael Ondaatje, was a

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lover of literature. She was a very refned woman who realized, after some years of marriage with Mervyn, that she was with a man who was not compatible with what she expected. She realized that she “had caught onto a different breed of dog” (162). The metaphor describes Mervyn who could not be tamed or civilized. Drawing a clear-cut line between humans and dogs, the refned lady moves away to start her own life proving that at some point, humans feel obliged to walk away from animals that they have taken to be their companions simply to avoid ruining their own lives. The dog metaphor is extended to describe the heat of the suburbs of Colombo that he calls “mad dog heat” (71) which is the suffocating and oppressive tropical weather that drives humans crazy, panting, weak, and craving for water. The image of dogs also comes up to describe the author’s family members taking an afternoon nap in the big house in Jaffna after a heavy meal. Ondaatje sees and hears the screaming of the birds who “sweep now and then over the heads of drowsy mongrels” (13). While this could be a reference to the real dogs who were sleeping on the porch, it could very well be a metaphor to describe the pack of mongrels, the cross-bred family of Ondaatjes who are resting their digestive system. At one point of his recollection of his father’s life, Ondaatje travels to Nuwara Eliya, the tea country where his father used to take his family on vacation. When he wakes up in the morning, he is invaded by sounds of nature: he hears dogs bark and discovers that it is at a fock of parakeets fying over the hills (183). Also, when he sits in a house on Bullers Road in Colombo, he looks out on overgrown garden and sees stray dogs barking and chasing birds and squirrels (78). The memoir also contains some poems out of which, “Sweet Like a crow” is dedicated to Hetti Corea, eight years old. The boy’s voice is described as “a pariah dog with a magpie in its mouth” (75–76). Though these were passing references, we notice the presence of stray dogs once again, very much part of the nature, very much disturbing the order of the day. They seem to lay in the background, providing a symbolical value to the stories. We notice the absence of tamed, domesticated dogs. Moving away from dogs, we come across the art of Magical Realism that brings out many more animals among which insects that add to the mystery of the life of the author’s father. For example, after a long day spent in Colombo, after a disappointing meeting with his former wife, Doris, he drives back to Rock Hill, his house which is situated about 90 kilometers from Colombo. He steps into his room full of disorder and then into his bathroom where he discovers a “battalion of ants,” another reality in Ceylon, carrying a page of the novel he had left. He sees that it’s the page 189 of the book. Although he had not yet reached that level of the book, he decides not to disturb their work. He “surrender(s) [the page] to them” (212) just the way he surrendered

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his whole life to alcoholism that failed him in life. By that time, he had stopped fghting with his life or his fate. This image which could very well be true or part of the author’s imagination, adds to the pathos of the situation. It shows his loss of interest and control over things that mattered to his life, especially after the recent meeting with his former wife who totally ignored him. A few pages later, the venomous Sri Lankan ants who “rise on their own poison” (230) are described, and this too comes as a metaphor to remind us of the author’s father who destroyed himself on his own poison, a reference to his addiction to alcohol. Mervyn Ondaatje seems to be a captive in a vicious world he himself has created around him. In the later life of Mervyn Ondaatje, there came a time when, in his state of utter drunkenness and chaos, he totally forgot where his children were. In his utmost solitude, he remained in a room of his house, Rock Hill, where he drank until “he saw the midnight rat” (213), which could also be a part of his delirium due to his dipsomania. The image that we have here is that of a man who is literally imprisoned, in a cell, with parasites crawling around him, nibbling on his senses. Instead of being uncomfortable, he feels totally at home in this unpleasant surrounding. With utter calmness, he watches his life sliding out of him. From imaginary animals, the story moves to real animals whom Mervyn was acquainted with. Thus was the appearance of a polecat in Rock Hill, in Kegalle. The polecat would climb up the kitul tree and eat its berries that made it drunk. Then it would come in to the house, drunk, and “up-end drawers and cutlery and serviettes” (54). Mervyn took pleasure in describing it as his polecat “when their drunks coincided” (54). The resemblance is inevitable and Mervyn himself had noticed it. In the fragments of stories related to him by his family members, Ondaatje learns about his father’s capacity to train and attract animals. First, it’s Chindit, the pet dog of the Ondaatje household. Lalla was Michael Ondaatje’s maternal grandmother whom his father could not stand. However, she lived a life similar to that of Mervyn. Dipsomaniac herself, she acquired her emancipation after her husband’s death. She and Mervyn prove a point that is common knowledge in the Sri Lankan society: Burghers are a frivolous lot; they are jolly people. Mervyn loved dogs and polecats but disliked cats. Ironically enough, cats liked him. Ondaatje describes a surreal context where, as children, he and other children used to play games, namely taking bets as to how many cats would follow Mervyn to his car when he went to the city. Seeing him arrive, cats would cross the streets to follow him. They would even follow him to his car and get in with him. It was the duty of the children to throw them out one by one. It was a diffcult task as they would crawl back into the car and settle under the seats (218). These were stray cats who rode the streets of Kegalle.

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We perceive that these abandoned animals sensed a feeling of security near a human being as solitary as they were. It is surprising to see animals following a human being who disliked them because we believe that animals and humans shared a two-way love. Though the incident appears humorous at frst reading, a further consideration makes us realize how unpleasant it could be, to be invaded by creatures that one disliked. It shows a certain vulnerability of the person who was exposed to unpleasantness. Although Mervyn hated cats, he liked dogs, he loved them. In the chapter, “Final Days/ Father Tongue,” his friend V. C. de Silva testifes that he was considered as one of his closest friends (221–222). Three times, he mentions that one of their favorite topics during the last days of Mervyn’s existence was dogs: “and we talked about poultry and dogs” (221), “He would always be reading [. . .] my dog and poultry books” (221), “There was nothing about poultry he didn’t know. Or dogs” (222). Mervyn even managed to train dogs to harass people he did not like. Thus was the case of Lalla, his mother-in-law he did not like very much. Chindit, their dog, had been trained by Mervyn “to fart whenever possible” (187) when Lalla was present in the vicinity. Another curious case because we fnd it diffcult to understand how one could train a dog to accomplish such a duty. However, a more plausible case comes up when Chindit torments Lalla by running away with her artifcial breast. It is important to note that Lalla claimed to be the “frst woman in Ceylon to have a mastectomy” (130), and Ondaatje notes that Lalla “kept losing her contraption to [. . .] the dog, Chindit, who would be found gnawing at the foam as if it were tender chicken” (130). Ondaatje notes that it was quite possible that his father would have trained the dog to torment his mother-in-law by such acts (187). As readers, we would share the opinion of Margaret Atwood whose review decorates the cover page of the book, Running in the Family: “An account of an outrageous family, a true story with all of the most exciting qualities of fction.” We know nothing about the authenticity of these tales because, in his acknowledgments, Ondaatje himself admits that “in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts” (232). However, we could not deny the fact that dogs, cats, polecats, cobras, and other reptiles were closely present in the lives of the Ondaatjes. Chindit is the only domesticated animal that Ondaatje talks about in his stories. Other dogs are mere stray dogs who are as marginalized as his father was, as abandoned as he was. We remember Haraway’s remark that the relationship between dogs and humans is “not especially nice; it is full of waste, cruelty, indifference, ignorance, and loss, as well as of joy, invention, labor, intelligence, and play” (12). It is this complex relationship that we see between Mervyn and the dogs that he encounters during his life journey. If experiences with Chindit are that of joy and play, in Ceylon there have also been experiences beyond Haraway’s expectations.

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Those are that of surreal quality: one could even feel that there is some sort of cruelty or abuse, but there is more than that. It is a close encounter of two different kinds: a man who has by now, lost his human qualities and stray dogs that have been described as paranormal. Magical Realism comes to effect one more time. Ondaatje, whose father’s story he could not quite come to terms with was said to have a “runaway complex” (203). Once, in a state of utmost drunkenness, he gets out of a train and escapes into the jungle. His friend Arthur was called to fnd him and persuade him to come back. When Arthur eventually found him, this was what he witnessed:

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My father was walking towards him, huge and naked. In one hand he holds fve ropes, and dangling on the end of each of them is a black dog. None of the fve are touching the ground. He is holding his arm outstretched, holding them with one arm as if he has supernatural strength. Terrible noises are coming from him and from the dogs as if there is a conversation between them that is subterranean, volcanic. All their tongues hanging out. They were probable stray dogs which my father had stumbled on in jungle villages, he had perhaps picked them up as he walked along. He was a man who loved dogs. But this scene has no humour or gentleness in it. The dogs were too powerful to be in danger of being strangled. The danger was to the naked man who held them at arm’s length, towards whom they swung like large dark magnets. Arthur cut the ropes and the animals splashed to the ground, writhing free and escaping. [. . .] All the way to Colombo the lengths of rope dangled from his fst in the hot passing air. (203–04)

Every word, every detail in the recount add value to the incident. This is not a humorous scene nor was there any gentleness in it when it took place. It was a demonic experience. Mervyn seemed to be in a trance. He was holding the dogs in the air to protect himself from an evil power that would destroy him if not held away from him. Ondaatje observes that “he had captured all the evil in the regions he had passed through and was holding it” and we are reminded of Leonard Woolf’s words on Ceylon that is used in the chapter, The Karapothas: “All jungles are evil” (77). It is the opposite of Haraway’s statement that “man took the (free) wolf and made the (servant) dog and so made civilization possible” (28). In this incident, a human who appears uncivilized because naked, is being led by a bunch of animals to no one knows where. All the places that Mervyn had visited so far were symbolized by dogs. His fear of letting go of the dogs signifes the defenseless state he was in. Even after his friend cut the ropes and let the dogs free, Mervyn still clutches the ropes in his hands, not letting them go. This shows his inability to relax and

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let the guard down. Though this story appears anecdotal, it nevertheless shows the weak mental state Mervyn was in and his struggle with anxiety, all due to alcoholism. We could even assume that alcohol was the shield he held to protect himself from anxiety and mental health issues. This incident echoes back to the opening paragraph of the book in which the author wakes up from a dream in which he saw his father surrounded by dogs. Like the story of the dogs, his father’s story was one which he could not come to terms with and the dogs being strays and most probably outcasts are a refection on Mervyn’s state at that point of his life, an outcast himself. He seemed to have lost much of his human qualities. The conversation that he had with the dogs described as “subterranean, volcanic” adds to this identifcation of the human being with the stray dogs. There was a mutual understanding between the two companion species. In the present-day Sri Lanka, we see stray dogs freely roaming the streets, causing health, social, and economic problems. Regardless of the geographic location, people play a key role in a stray dog’s existence. People are the main source of the stray dogs, which makes them a man-made problem that does not disappear on its own. Besides the health and economic problems associated with stray dogs, they often become victims of animal abuse and cruelty and the main topic of moral and ethical debates in societies. This is where Mervyn’s life resembles that of a stray dog. He too was a man-made problem, the man being himself. He bears the sole responsibility of ruining his own life due to alcoholism. However, he too was a social and an economic problem. He brought bankruptcy over his family. He created emotional problems to his offspring. Ondaatje’s half-sister admits this when she says: “I showed what you had written to someone and they laughed and said what a wonderful childhood we must have had, and I said it was a nightmare” (198). Nevertheless, Mervyn was an affectionate creature. He was more capable of expressing his love toward animals than toward his own children. His affection for animals is extended in the way in which “he made up lovely songs about every dog he had owned—each of them had a different tune and in the verse he celebrated their natures” (228). Stray dogs played an important part in Mervyn’s life by being present by his side at some crucial moments. The presence of these creatures has been picked up by Ondaatje to give them some value. Their passive presence has been actively highlighted by the author. We will never know whether Michael himself liked dogs or not; what we notice is that he never failed to notice their presence though their description is done without emotion. The emotionless description allows us to see that stray dogs haunt the characters of the story as creators of doom and damnation. Lalla’s death was as impressive as the life that she lived although Ondaatje words it in a

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very casual and nonchalant manner. When his friends in Canada asked him how his grandmother died, his reply was this: ‟‘Natural causes.’ ‘What?’ ‘Floods’” (7). It was as easy as that. We could even detect a note of humor in his utterance. In August 1947, there had been foods in Nuwara Eliya. Lalla had moved to a house that she had inherited. For two days, with her brother Vere, she had been drinking Rocklands Gin (she too liked alcohol, very much like her son-in-law) and playing a card game called Ajoutha that the Portuguese had taught the Sinhalese in the ffteenth century, apparently to keep them quiet and preoccupied. While the Sinhalese were playing the game, the Portuguese invaded their country, unnoticed (133). On August 15, Lalla needed fresh air and a walk. She stepped out in the early hours of the day, and without seeing where she was going, walked straight into the foods (135). While the currents carried her away, she tried to hold onto things. In the last minutes of her existence, she started seeing the “drowned dogs of the town” (137). Mentioned as a collectivity these dead animals signify the mass destruction of the town. Lalla was always surrounded by animals. She ran a dairy and kept chickens. Therefore, it appears symbolical that the last thing she spotted was drowned animals. Lalla’s death and that of the stray dogs and even Mervyn’s have something in common: they all died of natural causes in very unnatural circumstances. We must not fail to notice that Lalla has also lived in different places at different times of her life, without having a fxed domicile, quite like a stray dog. Ondaatje recalls how she was obliged to sell the house when she had lost all her money after her husband died (128). She then started living a nomadic life, settling in other peoples’ houses during short periods. There is more information about her behavior that reminds us of stray dogs: she had been seen by the author’s aunts sitting on sacks of rice in the fsh market—a common behavior of stray dogs and cats—or standing with her legs apart to urinate behind bushes of her daughter’s school, Bishop’s College in Colombo (131). Ondaatje states that in her last year, Lalla had been searching for the “great death” (132) and we wonder whether it was a great death that was granted to her when she died with a few human beings and a large number of animals drowned in a river. However, we are certain that Mervyn’s death had no greatness to it. Though the whole story centers around him, the announcement of his death was given even lesser importance than that of the dogs. His wife Maureen sends a note to Stanley Suraweera, who was a proctor in Kegalle saying: Mervyn has dropped dead. What shall I do? (54). Thus, ended his life, “not with a bang but a whimper” (1925). After his death, Mervyn reappears. He was reincarnated as a cobra. Is it Magical Realism or simply Buddhist belief? We do not know. Or is it some Ceylonese superstition that makes Sri Lankans believe that a cobra that

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comes into a garden should never be killed because it could be a dead family member who comes back to protect his family? We have no answer to those questions. It might be a mixture of all those things. What we could be sure of is that wild animals made no distinction between the Ondaatje residence and their own habitat. It is symbolical too because the Ondaatje residence and its inhabitants shared a life that was closer to the wild than to the civilized. The snakes crawled freely into the house and would sleep coiled on the stepmother’s desk or on the large radio. They were supposed to have killed at least thirty snakes that came into the house (101–02). According to what Ondaatje remembered, the family home of Rock Hill was literally littered with snakes, especially cobras (1982: 101). Rock Hill was never a happy place despite the parties held during the writer’s childhood. The name of the house itself bears negative connotations: rocky, rough, hard to reach. In addition to that, the walls and the foors of the house show scars of gunshots fred to kill snakes. It is described as a torture camp or a death camp where his grandmother once found a snake coiled asleep on her desk and she was unable to approach the drawer to get the key to open the gun case (101). After Mervyn died, a grey cobra was supposed to have visited the house (102). The description of the incidents after which the cobra was left to hang around, was given all the characteristics of a myth or a legend. Ondaatje’s stepmother loaded the gun and fred but the gun jammed. For the next few months, every time the snake came to the house, the attempts to kill it failed. When they could not fght it anymore, they let the cobra be, and it continued to follow Ondaatje’s sister. It was left unharmed because a worker in the house had told the writer’s stepmother that it could very well be Mervyn coming as a cobra to protect his family (102). In the chapter, “Monsoon Notebook II” (143), a snake uses the house as a short cut to arrive on the other side of the town. It would enter the house like a king, move across the sitting room, the kitchen and the servant’s quarters to exit at his own pace. These incidents were seen as normal happenings of the day-to-day life in the Ondaatje residence. Running in the Family is also an account on how intimately man and nature are linked in Ceylon which is portrayed as a pastoral idyll and animals that nested in the houses were described as royalty: thus the word “king.” The noises that people hear are that of the birds and animals: they are not calming sounds but those of fury and derangement: crows and cranes would screech (12), during rainy seasons, wet and furious birds would emit sounds that are similar to sounds made by large beasts, trains, burning electricity (229). Peacocks who screeched at 3 a.m. made people imagine that the branches of the trees near their houses were full of cats (144). Ondaatje admits that he could not hear these sounds while he was still in Sri Lanka—he could hear them only when he played the tape recorder when he was back in

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Canada—because in Sri Lanka, those sounds were always there “like breath” (144). Despite the bars across the window to keep away the wild animals, bats would suddenly drift like dark squadrons through the house and birds would nest above the fans and silverfsh would slide into steamer trunks and photograph albums—eating their way through portraits and wedding pictures (143) signifying the degeneration of life in old houses that are constantly being invaded by nature (115). The way nature invaded human habitats, human qualities could be overruled by animals when they are fallen from grace as we saw in the case of Mervyn or Lalla. Reading through the memoir, we feel that Ondaatje creates a picture of his homeland that could appear very exotic to a Western reader. Such is the incident of the wild boar who steals his bar of soap. These details could be quite fascinating to a foreign public though that may not be the frst intention of the writer. We feel that, looking at his stay from a distance, settled in a country of order, he takes pleasure in describing the innocent primitiveness of his country, which was also the characteristic of his father, aunts, and grandmother. While the people who arrived from overseas (a strange mixture of people— Sinhalese, Canadian, and one quiet French girl) are having a bath at the pond, a val oora—a large flthy black wild boar appears “majestically,” just the way the snake entered the house like a “king.” On his last morning in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje goes out to fnd his soap that he had kept on a railing after one of their rain baths but does not fnd it there and was informed by the cook and the tracker that it had been taken away by the wild boar. Satirizing the lives of the sophisticated foreigners in the wild land of Ceylon, Ondaatje imagines how the wild boar, together with its friends, would imitate the humans by scrubbing their armpits using Pears Transparent Soap while bathing in the rain before setting out to have dinner in a garbage dump (153). A parody indeed! The difference between the civilized and the uncivilized. How the wild boar looks at the bunch of foreigners could be similar to how the servants and the other villagers looked at this crowd who broke through the barriers of the accepted norms of the civilized society to enjoy wild behavior. Sometimes, superstitions could also bring humans and animals together, though not in a very pleasant way. Ondaatje talks about a reptile that is close to the crocodile in looks, which is about 8 feet long (71). It’s the “kabaragoya” or the sub-aquatic monitor. Ondaatje notes that these creatures are seldom found anywhere else in the world (72). The legend or the superstition goes that those who eat the tongue of the thalagoya, will become eloquent, articulate, and will be witty in expression (73). According to the recipe, the tongue of the thalagoya should be kept between two pieces of banana turning it into a banana sandwich. Then the whole thing should be swallowed without

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chewing. Mervyn was said to have tried this on his children while staying at Ambalantota Rest House. He had discovered a thalagoya who had fallen from the roof and got killed, but all the children had run away to hide avoiding the treatment (73–74). Therefore, we believe that the practice was not performed on the writer though he seems to have been blessed with literary talkativeness by merely being in this fascinating background. In the patchwork of his father’s life that Ondaatje recreated from the fragments of stories that were related to him by his relatives and acquaintances, we could capture incidents where companion animals were present. What is important to note is that these are not companion animals as the defnition goes. They are either strays or wild creatures. They seem to accompany certain lost souls like Mervyn Ondaatje, the father of the author or Lalla, his grandmother, or himself. They also seem to care for each other by being a mere presence that we see as metaphorical or symbolic. The examples that we brought out are those of a relationship of caring without caring, sharing without really sharing. Animals and humans have lived side by side in isolation. It’s the author’s observations that bring out these companionships that are more of misfortune than of strength and unity. REFERENCES

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Eliot, T. S. The Hollow Men, 1925. Accessed 14th April 2020. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Signifcant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007. Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family, 1982. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.

Reading Cats and Dogs : Companion Animals in World Literature, edited by Zélia M. Bora, et al., Lexington Books, 2020.

Chapter 6

From the Forbidden City to the Locked-down Megalopolis Reading the Behaviors of Cat Lovers in China

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Qianqian Cheng

Since ancient times cats have been appreciated as mousers in China; they also capture the hearts of men and women, old and young, ordinary folk as well as emperors. The emperors of the Ming Dynasty are lavish in their appreciation of cats’ graceful postures and beauty. The love of cats is presented incisively and vividly in their poems and paintings. Modern cat lovers take delight in talking about the stories of these emperors and their pet cats, especially when they visit and pat the stray cats in the Forbidden City, the residence of the emperors of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. In the heart of the Forbidden City, the Palace Museum has become more accessible with digital technologies, which especially attract young people, the main customers of the Museum’s cultural creation products. The stray cats in the Forbidden City have inspired certain popular cultural products and become a sightseeing lure for visitors, cat lovers in particular. The success of the Palace Museum economy cannot be separated from young Internet users’ enthusiasm for China’s history, culture, and way of life. Up to March 2020, China’s Internet users had reached 904 million, and the Internet penetration rate is 64.5%.1 The social software WeChat and QQ developed by Tencent as well as the microblogging website Weibo are popular and indispensable for communication among the Chinese people especially the young. University cat care associations run by students have gained numerous followers on their WeChat and Weibo offcial accounts and their own member groups on QQ. University students also play an active role in carrying out research and investigation projects on university stray cats. Abandonment by their owners is a direct cause of the high population of stray cats on and off campus. The cat owners may fnd many 107

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excuses to give up their pets, especially when they encounter diffcult situations. Some cat owners in Wuhan, China, have abandoned their cats during the coronavirus pandemic outbreak when they panicked after being exposed to certain medias’ garbling about cats being infected. Losing shelter and food, stray cats face harsh living conditions. Fortunately there are many stray cat rescue and protection associations to help them. Unfortunately, these associations have their limits and numerous stray cats have to face violence and death—the threat from the cat meat industry and cat persecution. Fortunately, caring people and governmental and non-governmental forces are devoting themselves to promoting laws sanctioning cruelty to animals. This chapter intends to look at the behaviors of cat lovers in both ancient and modern China, and the question of the stray cats and the part played by the younger generation in China’s frst-tier cities such as Beijing, Nanjing, and Wuhan. CATS IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY

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During nearly 600 years of imperial operation, the Forbidden City served as the residence and court of twenty-four emperors of the consecutive Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties (“About the Palace Museum”). Mice and rats are a long-standing problem that the wooden structure palace complex has faced. By the second century BCE, “cats were used to rid the palace of mice and rats” (Wilt L. Idema 945). In “The Great Rat” of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liao zhai zhi yi) by Pu Songlin in classical Chinese during the early Qing Dynasty, tells how “a lion-cat, as white as snow” used strategy to fatigue and kill a huge rat in the palace who “ate up all the cats that were set to catch it”: [T]he rat . . . rushed at the cat, which turned and fed, fnally jumping up on the table. The rat followed, upon which the cat jumped down; and thus they went on up and down for some time. Those who were watching said the cat was afraid and of no use; however, in a little while the rat began to jump less briskly, and soon after squatted down out of breath. Then the cat rushed at it, and, seizing the rat by the back of the neck, shook and shook while its victim squeaked and squeaked, until life was extinct. Thus they knew the cat was not afraid, but merely waited for its adversary to be fatigued, feeing when pursued and itself pursuing the feeing rat. Truly, many a bad swordsman may be compared with that rat! (Herbert A. Giles)

The cat’s hunting competence is highly commended here and its strategy can even be learned by men. Though they “were frst of all appreciated as mousers . . . cats were also kept as pets, in particular the ornamental long-haired

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‘lion-cats’ that were bred from as early as the twelfth century” (Wilt L. Idema 593). Throughout China’s history, some emperors of the Ming and Qing Dynasties have been famous cat owners and lovers. The ffth Emperor of the Ming dynasty, Emperor Xuande (r.1425–1435) not only kept cats but also liked to draw cats. In order to bring his beloved cats to life, he collected hundreds of cats from the people and kept them in the harem. In his spare time, he carefully observed the postures of the cats, studied their nature, and then painted them with interest. His “Tang yuan xi chun tu” (also known as “Wu li nu2tu”), which is 264.2 cm long and 37.5 cm wide, is a masterpiece of the “cat painting” of the past. The fve cats in the painting are either hidden in a fower bush or placed in a bamboo forest, in different poses, either eating, or looking up, or playing, or sleeping. They are extremely lifelike and interesting to look at (Hu Liping).3 Emperor Xuande once gave his cat painting “Hu zhong fu gui tu” (The Riches and Honour in the Pot) to his courtier Yang Shiqi to express the hope that there would not be incontinent and discourteous offcials like the mice and rats angrily rebuked in The Book of Odes (Shi jing), China’s oldest collection of poetry (Zhao Jing).4 “Because of their thievish nature, mice and rats from an early date became a common image for rapacious offcials” (Wilt L. Idema 691), and for “the rich and powerful who plunder the common folk to fatten themselves” (Wilt L. Idema 94). The eleventh emperor of the Ming dynasty, Emperor Jiajing (r.1522–1566) was also a famous cat lover. In Zhuo zhong zhi by Ming scholar and eunuch Liu Ruoyu, there is a record of an institution for cats named mao er fang [cat house], which has three or four attendants who are mandated to look after the cats that own titles the emperor confers on them. Those who are loved by the emperor are promoted to the rank of steward. The male cats are called “a young man,” the castrated “a eunuch,” and the females “a girl.” When the cats received titles, they were called “a steward,” or directly “a cat steward,” and would also be rewarded like other offcials (Hu Liping).5 Emperor Jiajing named one of his favorite lion-cats “Frost-like Brow”: It is recorded that the cat’s fur was satiny, frizzy, and slightly cyan, only its brows were snow white and its eyes were crystal clear (Liu Jiajia).6 It didn’t catch mice; however, it was a very understanding cat: “whenever there was any call for it or the emperor was pleased to take a walk around, the cat would foresee it right away and went in front of him. Whenever the emperor wanted to go to bed, the cat would stay squatting by his side without moving around. Therefore, Emperor Jiajing doted very much on the cat” (Bilibili​.c​om). The emperor was heartbroken on losing the “Frost-like Brow” when it died. He lamented its death and asked his well-read courtiers to write a eulogy to expiate the sins of the dead so that the cat could pass on. The scholar and courtier Yuan Wei was very much appreciated and got promoted by Emperor Jiajing

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for writing the phrase “the lion turning into the dragon.” The cat was buried in a golden coffn, at the foothill of Wanshou Mountain,7 “in a grave that was marked by a stele inscribed with the words ‘Grave of the Curly-Haired Dragon’” (Wilt L. Idema 4795). Now the tomb with the stele has long gone into oblivion with the passing of time and the change of the dynasty, however, the old juniper with its name “Curly-Haired Dragon” under which the cat was buried has now become part of the cultural landscape in the Coal Hill Park in Beijing (Bilibili​.c​om). In life and death, the cat was treated even better than many people in the palace, evidence of how much the emperor loved it. Moreover, that Emperor Jiajing wanted the soul of the cat to be liberated from the underworld really showed his deep emotion for the cat. He wanted his pet to have a new life in a different form: “From ancient times, many kinds of animals were believed in China to originate through transformation from other kinds of animals, and some kinds of animals were believed to change seasonally into other kinds (and back)” (Wilt L. Idema 344). For that reason, Emperor Jiajing approved the scholar’s phrase of the lion-cat turning into a dragon: the cat’s next life would be as legendary as a dragon’s—Qiulong.8 To complete the transformation, it had frst to be judged by the courts of the underworld. “Once a soul has been judged, it is granted an immediate new reincarnation on one of the six paths of rebirth (e.g., as divinity, human being, hungry ghost or animal), or it is condemned to short-term, long-term, or eternal imprisonment and torture in hell” (Wilt L. Idema 2127). Would the “Frost-like Brow” be granted a good life in its next circle of life since it was a very understanding cat for the emperor or since the living people chanted sutras for its soul to ascend? At least, that was its owner Emperor Jiajing’s wish. With the disappearance of the feudal era, the Forbidden City as the symbol of the imperial power declined, and the emperors no longer resided inside. In 1925, the Forbidden City changed its name to “Gu gong” which means “Former Palace”—now home to the Palace Museum—one of the world’s fve largest museums.9 Though there are no formers living in the Palace, cats can be still found residing in the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City’s red walls and yellow tiles that were initially constructed according to old China’s theory of mutual generation and mutual overcoming of Wuxing (the fve elements), now have stray cats roaming among them in the daytime. It is quite a sight for the visitors, some of whom even go there several times especially to see and take photos of it. In 2014, “about 200 cats . . . found a home in the Forbidden City . . . A special program began in 2009 to take care of the cats. It follows the trapneuter-return principle, a method of humanely trapping unaltered stray cats, spaying or neutering them, and returning them to the location where they were collected . . . 181 cats in the Forbidden City have been neutered in the

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past fve years and their number is now steady.” “Some of them might even be the descendants of royal pets, but most are strays taken in by the museum staff,” said Ma Guoqing, director of the sanitation department of the Palace Museum (Sina English). These cats make great contributions to the control of rats. “The cats are a deterrent to keep rats and vermin away from the cultural relics” said Ma (Liu Huan).10 Since at night they go on patrol and start the rat catching, these cats are regarded as “cat security” by the Forbidden City offcials and treated as their colleagues. It is not only the rat-catching capacities that make these stray cats likable and popular. They reside in the “former palace,” a symbol of supremacy and full of mystery. The cats make the 600-year-old Forbidden City and the 95-year-old Palace Museum alive again. To bring the heritage alive is the aim of Shan Jixiang, the curator of the Palace museum. “People regard cultural relics as the past, whose lives have ended, that should be only appreciated. To make a heritage alive means to integrate it healthily into our life” (Shan Jixiang).11 To engage the young generation’s attention is imperative. From the Palace Museum audience data of 2018, 40 percent of the audience is under thirty years old; those born after the 1980s and 1990s have become the main force of the visitors (Dpm​.org​​.cn 2018).12 To gain this new audience for the cultural museum and the Cultural and Creative Industries means bringing the social interaction of the Internet into full play, inviting the younger generation to participate in the cultural industry (Chen Jibing).13 The Palace Museum opened its offcial fagship store on the Alibaba platform in 2016 (Dpm​.org​​.cn 2016),14 building a display and sales platform for cultural gifts, creative living supplies, and designer products. “In 2017 . . . the Palace Museum generated more than 1 billion cultural and creative products and nearly 10,000 types,” Wang Yamin, the Executive Deputy Director of the Palace Museum said (You Suhang).15 On the online shopping platform, often heard and well- remembered is “Palace Taobao” and one of the most popular products is the “mini Palace Museum kitten ornament,” which sold more than 16,000 items a month, and the buyers said in the comments that they are “super cute” (You Suhang).16 The museum also launched its frst original picture book “The Cat Family” for children, based on the four most famous cats in the real life of the Forbidden City. Using these cats as the main characters, the book tells of life in the Forbidden City and its culture. The spin-off products from the book include postcards, puzzle toys, cat puppet mini bags, three-dimensional greeting cards, and painting books (Gao Dan).17 Cartoonized cats are developed into “cat emperor” rubbers, school bags, toys, watches, mobile phone cases, and other products for children and the young who fnd them both fun and practical (Dpm​.org​​.cn 2015).18 These Palace cats have indeed become a mainstay of the museum economy.

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UNIVERSITY CATS To know more about the younger generation’s relation with cats, the place to look at is the university; interestingly, the university is a place where stray cats often fnd a home. There are many university associations aiming to take care of the stray cats on campus. Eight-year-old Nanjing University (NJU) Stray Cats Care Association19 initiated and operated by university students, is now an offcial school club with three main departments: Publicity, Assistance, and Financial Management and over 100 members. The Association’s main responsibilities are to rescue the sick (especially those with infectious and chronic diseases) or injured stray cats on campus, get them treated and neutered, and help them fnd adequate families for adoptions. There are between 50 to 100 stray cats now on campus. There are cats that stay on campus for a long time, some of whom may be abandoned by students when they graduate or when they lack money for treatment when the cats get sick and some that come from outside campus. The Association makes full use of Chinese popular social software WeChat, QQ, and Weibo. They have 230 original articles about cat keeping, adoption notices, and adopters’ feedback stories, their work on the WeChat offcial account, over 800 members on QQ offcial group, and nearly 900 followers on the Weibo offcial account. The Association doesn’t allow campus students to adopt the stray cats except when they have residences outside campus. The adopters are required to have stable salaries and lodging and many who come to the Association are young people including NJU graduates. Kittens and cats with “popular” features, such as, for example, black and white fur color (the so-called “dairy cattle cat”) or orange fur, are preferred and more quickly adopted. Adult and variegated cats take more time to be adopted. Young adopters are often selective in taking stray cats. One “risky” mission for the Association member is to catch suitable cats for sterilization, or the sick or injured cats for treatment since they may pass cat disease to non-protected association members or caring students who feed the cats. These volunteers are often scratched; in which case, they are encouraged to be vaccinated against rabies. With limited time and energy, student members state that they can only rescue stray cats on the campus, especially the sick ones. Medical treatment—including sterilization operations and other surgery when cats encounter car accidents, cat plague, or gallstones— is costly for the non-proft Association that is mainly made up of student volunteers. The funds are mainly from public donations and campus charity sales. Income from the charity sales, whose cultural products include photos or paintings based on campus cats, is not enough to cover the cost of the medical care. They hope that the university could offer support: the security

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department of the university doesn’t oppose their action but usually advises students to keep their distance from the stray cats. Also, the Association tries to negotiate with the university to fnd a better rescue center to take care of newborn kittens or cats that need follow-up medical care. There are stray cats in universities because there are students feeding and petting them. The campus cat-protectors tend to be female. The members of the research team of Lab of Animal Behavior and Conservation from the School of Life Sciences in Nanjing University, “survey(ing) free-ranging cat populations in 30 universities in Nanjing from June 2018 to June 2019,” found that “the population density of free-ranging cats is linearly related to the proportion of female students in the university . . . By contrast, a socialization test on 27 free-ranging cats [in Xianlin campus of Nanjing University] suggests that the cats may have the ability to distinguish human sex and adopt a sociable skill to human females” (Yuhang et al.,1–3). Though concerned about the same group of stray cats in Nanjing University, different to NJU Stray Cats Care Association, the NJU Lab of Animal Behavior and Conservation that carried out the project to fnd “the population density and survival strategies of outdoor free-ranging cats” (Yuhang et al., 1) focuses more on the impact of stray cats on local biodiversity, since stray cats hunt surrounding small wild animals, especially birds. An effective way to control the population of stray cats is to get them neutered. Since its foundation in 2014, Nanjing Agricultural University (NJAU) Stray Animal Care Association20 run by students of the College of Veterinary Medicine has carried out a TNR (Trap-Neuter-Release) program for NJAU campus stray cats. Till the winter of 2019, according to their counting, there were forty stray cats on their campus, among whom twenty-nine were neutered. Equipped with gloves and cages, the TNR program group captures the cats. Certifed veterinarians of NJAU University affliated Animal Hospital conduct the sterilizations. After the surgery, cats are accompanied to the university Animal House and nursed by the association members till they recover and then are released to where they have been found. The College is responsible for the surgery cost. To capture the stray cats is a challenge for the TNR program group: some stray cats are diffcult to get, and some students who feed the cats oppose the operation and interrupt their capture, accusing the group of depriving the cats of their reproductive rights. However, the residential communities off-campus support the Association’s TNR program on stray cats and welcome their publicity campaign on animal protection and pet keeping and breeding. Though focusing on the welfare of university stray cats, the university animal care associations already cooperate with other animal care and protection associations beyond the campus.

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PET CATS AND STRAY CATS IN WUHAN Wuhan has the second-largest number of universities in China. Wuhan Small Animal Protection Association University Union accompanies Wuhan Small Animal Protection Association in running a publicity campaign whose theme is “keeping no pets on campus.” The Association has also launched a training program devoted to animal protection for university students who intend to become kindergarten teachers, so that children can learn about empathy and responsibilities to animals. Wuhan Small Animal Protection Association was established in 2006 and in 2013 became the only rescue and conservation welfare association for companion animals in Wuhan that has been registered with China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs. The Association’s main force is the people around thirty years old, most of whom are natives of Wuhan (Wang Yu).21 They aim to protect companion animals from harm and promote the concept of keeping pets: to adopt instead of buying pets, to foster the caring attitudes that will prevent their fate of homelessness. Over the years, the Association has rescued more than 8,000 stray animals, most of whom are adopted and now there are more than 600 stray animals at the Association’s base located in a rural area in the Hongshan District of Wuhan.22 Since its inauguration in 2013, the monthly “Adoption Day” event held by the Association has built up a free platform to help fnd new warm and stable homes for the stray animals rescued and kept in the Association base. In order to raise the animals’ chance of being adopted, adult dogs and cats on the list for adoption are all dewormed, vaccinated, and neutered. Over the years, in more than ffty such events, the Association has helped 1,000 stray animals fnd adopters in Wuhan.23 Besides, the Association’s WeChat offcial account possesses a powerful mini program called cloud-assisted cat keeping. One can select one or several cats listed on the cloud-assist, cat-keeping program and choose an annual, seasonal, or monthly package that includes cat food, immunization, and epidemic prevention fees and labor costs. The Association drew national and international attention when the Association staff took the risk of being infected with the Covid-19 virus to save the pets confned in the homes of residents in Wuhan. People had left Wuhan and joined their families in other cities or provinces for the one-week Spring Festival holiday; however, the pandemic began and they could not return before the city’s lockdown on January 23, 2020. On January, Wuhan Small Animal Protection Association issued a notice on its WeChat offcial account to assist companion animals trapped in residents’ homes. The notice stated that the association had created three WeChat groups corresponding to Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, three central towns in Wuhan; they would then conduct the rescue tasks after collecting the information from the

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requesters (Weixin​.qq​.​com),24 most of whom were young people between twenty and thirty years old. According to the Association’s Weibo on February 12, they received more than 4,200 requests for help and more than 2,800 households’ pets were being assisted. Through the efforts of sixty volunteers and eight Association staff through both online and offine channels, they have provided more than 1,400 free visits and administered food and water for nearly 5,000 small animals including cats, dogs, small pigs, rabbits, snakes, birds, fsh, hamsters, and chinchillas (Zhu Xuan),25 among whom 95 percent are cats and 3 percent are dogs.26 “In this epidemic, not only human beings have suffered, but also the animals. For our association, it is our responsibility to help the animals,” Du Fan, president of the Association, said in an oral statement published on “The Paper.” Du Fan acknowledged that they were aware of the risks of the task: “We are very concerned about safety and hygiene especially for the volunteers who join us because they love and care for animals, and this kind of love needs courage. Therefore, we have repeatedly emphasized that we must carry out the rescue task under the premise of protecting our own safety, and try not to bring unnecessary trouble to medical staff.”27 But they also knew that if they did not come forward, these animals would probably die of starvation or thirst. “If we don’t offer help, the dogs and cats would have decomposed at home before their owners returned,” Du Fan was quoted by Red Star News as saying. Workers and volunteers took videos or opened a video chat with the owners when they opened the doors and fed the animals. The association provides free food if there is not much food left at home. However, owners need to pay for unlocking a door if they don’t provide keys or passwords. In some residential communities where coronavirus patients have been found, those checking on animals were refused entry out of fear of the novel coronavirus. ‟We understand why they rejected us,” Du said. ‟But we feel sad and helpless” (Cang Wei). On February 17, the Association announced on its WeChat offcial account that as the community control in Wuhan was becoming more and more strict, staff and volunteers could no longer travel and enter the community where the requester lived. The assistance to the small animals had to be suspended. To solve this problem, Du Fan called for mutual assistance from neighborhoods. “There is a mini-program called ‘Wuhan WeChat Neighborhood’ and a website called ‘neighbor help: pet owner mutual assistance platform.’ What we can do now is to bring requester to these platforms and let them fnd their neighbors to help” (Wang Yu Mbd​.baidu​.​com).28 The denial of entry to the residence to help the animals was not the only problem for the Association during the rescue mission, but they also had to face people’s objections: “even humans cannot get enough care for the moment, who cares for these animals!” Du Fan saw online comments like

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this. “Animal life is also important. We do our utmost to save one animal’s life, cure its disease and then fnd it a new home for the rest of its life. We make a big and important change to one animal life and this is the meaning of our work.”29 There is a Chinese proverb saying, “only when we get into trouble do we know who our genuine friends are.” The Covid-19 pandemic is a crisis for the human world; however, animals have not been left behind thanks to associations like Wuhan Small Animals Protection Association and numerous caring people: for them, companion animals are man’s friends or even family. They said the friendly reaction of the rescued animals and the gratitude from the requester are a big reward for them. “We help cats and dogs but we also are helping people,” said Ling, a retired woman, also a volunteer for Wuhan Small Animals Protection Association, who conducted rescue missions during the pandemic in Hankou, which in many people’s eyes is “high-risk area.” “I pity these pets without self-help ability. If no one helps, the pet owners who regard cats and dogs as family will be so anxious that they may slip back, which will be a potential danger for everyone. For now [till February 12, 2020], I’ve helped 6 cats, and most of the job is to clean cat urine and feces whose odor is so rancid that you can smell even wearing the mask. Once I spent one hour to clean the room with cat diarrhea and vomit everywhere,” Ling said. She is also worried about her own safety: “My family repeatedly warned me of the risk of moving around during the coronavirus outbreak and I had to lie about my travels to the communities where pets are confned. Some rumors say that animals can spread disease, thus in some places, dogs and cats are arrested and even killed. I am more worried for them” (Zhong Xiaomei).30 On April 3, the research team of National Key Laboratory of Agricultural Microbiology, Huazhong Agricultural University and Wuhan Institute of Virology, Center for Biosafety Mega-Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan jointly published a new study on the preprint platform bioRxiv, “SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing serum antibodies in cats: a serological investigation.” They “detected the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in cats in Wuhan during the COVID-19 outbreak with ELISA, VNT and western blot . . . Retrospective investigation confrmed that all of ELISA positive sera were sampled after the outbreak, suggesting that the infection of cats could be due to the virus transmission from humans to cats . . . At present, there is no evidence of SARS-CoV-2 transmission from cats to humans. However, a later report shows that SARS-CoV-2 can transmit between cats via respiratory droplets (Hualan Chen, 2020), so, a strong warning and regulations still should be issued to block this potential transmission route . . . . Importantly, immediate action should be implemented to keep a suitable distance between humans and companion animals such as cats and dogs, and strict hygiene and

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quarantine measures should also be carried out for these animals” (Meilin et al.). On April 4, one member of “Wuhan native cats Camerata” said in Weibo that in order to gain Click-through rate and Forwarding rate, some media reported their unilateral reading or misreading of the paper. For example, one source released an article entitled “Wuhan Cat Group SARS-COV-2 Positive Rate Exceeds 10%.” The member was worried that people may apply this data to common stray cats in Wuhan, as the media’s garbling the paper misled public opinion.31 “There are pet-owners doubted whether keeping pets at home is safe and became worried about the transmission of coronavirus from pets, thus abandoning their pets,” said Du Fan in his interview with Pear video.32 The Weibo member who often helped stray cats in Huazhong Agricultural University where one author of the paper Meilin Jin worked thus appealed to Dr. Jin for clarifcation. On April 4, Dr. Jin and her team released a statement that is also issued on “Mr. Science,” a special column of “Intellectuals,” China’s new media that focuses on science, humanities, and ideas. The statement emphasized that the research team opposes the behavior of abandoning cats. So far, there is no evidence that cats can transmit coronavirus to people, and it can be prevented by effective, comprehensive prevention and control measures. In the interview with “Mr. Science,” Dr. Jin identifed the cats that were taken as subjects for their test: the 143 cats collected in Wuhan are either from the recovered Covid-19 patients’ homes, or cats that were abandoned during the pandemic and thus kept in animal rescue centers or pet hospitals. They are specifc, suspected cats with potential risk of infection. Therefore, some media or personal references to “an infected cat group” and some media using the title “Over 10% of cats are detected positive” is a unilateral reading of the paper (Zhishifenzi​.c​om).33 Caring people and animal protection associations try their best to persuade pet owners not to abandon their pet cats because these cats then become stray cats whose fate becomes unpredictable. CATS ENCOUNTERING VIOLENCE AND DEATH On April 4, 2020, a Weibo netizen reported that fourth-year student FanYuanqing of Shandong University of Technology tortured to death the campus stray cats he caught and made photos and videos of the process and posted online for sale through Weibo and QQ.34 It soon became a heated topic and continuously appeared on the Weibo top search rankings. On April 15, on its Weibo offcial account the University stated that they resolutely oppose cruelty to animals and “Fan was withdrawn from the University in accordance with the University’s regulations on the management of students.”

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Fan’s inhumane behavior draws public attention to the Internet’s dark industry: a group devoted to cat cruelty named “Shuke.” Originally “Shuke” was a kind of mouse character in the fairy tales “The Adventures of Shuke and Beta” by Chinese fairy-tale author Zheng Yuanjie, based on which wellknown cartoons “Shuke and Beta” are produced that accompanied generations of children. The group used this classical mouse image to justify their opposition to cats. The group members catch stray cats or adopt cats from cat rescue centers by pretending to be cat lovers. They then abuse cats and record the process and release videos for sale on the Internet. They even accept customized orders (e.g., how to abuse what kind of cats). There are also females as well as minors in the group.35 Cyberspace is not a place outside the law. 110 is the phone number to call Police in mainland China. Similarly, WeChat and QQ users can report through Tencent 110 (PC website, WeChat mini program, and WeChat offcial account) the illegal act of spreading photos or videos of cruelty to animals. Tencent 110 gives feedback in seventy-two hours and suspends the account of suspects when the case is confrmed. Still there is more that people can do to fght against behavior like Fan’s. In sharing the post of the Weibo netizen on April 14, lawyer Anxiang in Beijing commented on this case. He said that Fan’s behavior can be seen as a crime of illegal business operation. Also, the police can open the case for investigation and apply administrative detention to Fan since his behavior disturbs the teaching order at the university. And according to Higher Education Law of the People’s Republic of China, university students should be qualifed in Mind education, which Fan obviously fails, thus he is not qualifed to obtain issued diplomas or degree certifcates. The lawyer urges law enforcement agencies such as the Public Security Organs and the competent university department to fght against behavior like this.36 On April 30, twelve animal protection veterans from different places in China fled a civil lawsuit against Fan, the litigant in the cat abuse incident and submitted to the local courts the indictment and related evidence. They accused Fan of “violation of the right to health” since his behavior caused their anxiety, depression, and increased blood pressure (Wen Rujun). Can people like Fan act without fearing prosecution since at the moment there is no specifc law concerning cruelty to cats in mainland China? On April 27, Color Earth Division and the Endangered Species Special Fund of the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF) launched a joint signature campaign calling for legislation against cruelty to animals. They said in their Weibo offcial account that “one million people’s joint signatures are urgently needed to support the legislation of an “Anti-Animal Cruelty Law,” which will be accounted as the public opinion data to support the National People’s Congress (NPC) deputies making the proposal [in the two sessions in late May]. In just four days,

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they received more than 1.04 million joint support of netizens from all over the country. They said that according to the public opinion collected, suggestions will be made to the deputies and committee members of NPC and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a legislative proposal will be submitted to the NPC Standing Committee’s Legislative Affairs Commission. In fact, as early as 2010, China’s frst “Anti-Animal Cruelty Law (Expert Proposal Draft)” was submitted to the relevant departments. This draft proposal adhered to a minimal standard of animal welfare, but it was later left unsettled. “Ten years ago, when we submitted the draft of the expert’s proposal, we had already demonstrated the necessity of legislation, and now it is more feasible and necessary,” Cai Shouqiu, former president of Environment and Resources Law Society of China Law Society and professor of Law School of Wuhan University told “China Philanthropist” (Wen Rujun).37 In the Press Conference for the First Session of the 13th NPC, Wang Chaoying, Deputy Head of the NPC Standing Committee’s Legislative Affairs Commission, answered the question posed by Hong Kong Satellite Television reporter on animal protection law, and said that China’s Wild Animal Conservation Law and Animal Husbandry Law protect the living environment of wild animals and farm animals. However, about companion animals, in other words, pets, legal adjustment are insuffcient. Some regions are exploring local regulations, but national legislation is still in progress. From the perspective of harmonious coexistence between humans and animals, and from the perspective of social ethics, every animal breeder has the responsibility to care for his or her own animal. Any behavior of abandoning or cruelty to animals is regarded as lack of morality. But what legal responsibilities they should bear need further research and consultation (Tang Jingchu).38 “The inhuman treatment of animals is a source of animal virus contamination. After the epidemic outbreak, Biology and Science Ethics Work Committee of CBCGDF has been promoting the legislation and public awareness of biodiversity and wildlife protection,” said Zhou Jinfeng, secretary of CBCGDF. “China’s Wild Animal Conservation Law is in the process of being revised, and it is good if it can include content about anti-animal cruelty or animal welfare,” Zhou Jinfeng further added.39 On April 8, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China drew up draft guidelines that have been opened to the public for consultation, to reclassify dogs as pets rather than livestock (Moa​.gov​​.cn).40 Correspondingly, “Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Complete Prohibition of Consumption of Wild Animals Regulations” was adopted on March 31 at the fortieth session of the Standing Committee of the Sixth Shenzhen People’s Congress and shall come into force on May 1. In the press conference, the Legislative Affairs Commission stated that: as pets, cats and dogs have a closer

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relationship with humans than other animals. Prohibiting the consumption of pets such as cats and dogs is a common practice in many developed countries and in China’s Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other regions, and is also the requirement and embodiment of modern human civilization (Szrd​.gov​​.cn).41 Shenzhen became the frst city in mainland China to ban the consumption of dog and cat meat. Guo Peng, Director of Animal Protection Research Center of Shandong University said that the black-market industry for dog and cat meat has existed in China for a long time, but it has not attracted enough attention. The cat and dog meat industry not only violates animal epidemic prevention laws because of illegal acquisitions, hoarding, and long-distance transportation, but also violates food safety laws because these animals have not undergone immunization and quarantine. Like the black market industry in poaching and selling wild animals, the cat and dog meat industry also has hidden public health and safety risks. Therefore, prohibiting consumption of dogs and cats in Shenzhen is a solution to a social problem lurking in Chinese society for decades that should have long been resolved (Zhu Xuan Apr.).42

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CONCLUSION As this chapter has shown, the tradition of concern for cats dates back old China and the Forbidden City. This tradition has been updated in modern China, aided in part by the new technologies. Young people in particular demonstrate their concern for these animals through the purchase of felinerelated products, through their membership in associations for the protection of cats, through the adoption of strays, and most recently through the concern they have shown for the cats trapped in Wuhan during the Covid-19 pandemic. The affection that many young Chinese show toward cats contrasts with the cruelty displayed by a perverted minority. Nevertheless, there are efforts underway to pass laws aimed at protecting our feline companions. In modern China, the younger generation in particular is striving to bring artistic, ethical, and scientifc approaches together to guide people toward a more balanced relationship with their companion animals, cats. NOTES 1. Author’s translation. 4月28日​，中国互联​网络信息中​心（CNN​IC）发布​第 45次《​中国互联网​络发展状况​统计报告》​，《报告》​显示，截至​2020年​3月， 我国​网民规模为​9.04亿​，互联网普​及率达64​.5%。 2. “The modern expression for the domestic cat is mao. This word is already encountered in the early Book of Odes, where the king’s soldiers are said to be “like

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mao.” . . . The word mao is also encountered in reference to an ancient harvest ritual in The Records of Rites (Liji), in which the mao . . . is thanked for killing mice and rats. From the third/second century BCE we also encounter the world li, which in glossaries and dictionaries is explained as wildcat. During the Han dynasty, however, the words mao and li appear to be used interchangeably” (Wilt L. Idema 934). 3. Author’s translation. 宣德皇帝不​但养猫，还​喜欢画猫。​为了把爱猫​画得 栩栩如​生，他令人​到民间收集​了上百只猫​，养在后宫​里，闲暇时​便仔细观察​猫 的体态，​揣摩猫的秉​性，随后才​颇具兴致地​画猫。宣德​四年（14​29年）三​月所 绘《唐​苑嬉春图》​（又名《五​狸奴图》）​，长达26​4.2厘米​，宽37.​5厘米，为​历 代“猫图​”之巨作。​画中五只猫​咪或藏于花​丛中，或置​于竹林下，​神态各异，​或 叼食，或​仰视，或游​戏，或睡眠​，活灵活现​，别有情趣​。 4. Author’s translation. 明宣宗更将​自己画好的​御笔猫赐给​臣子，强烈​表达 了君臣​一 德的期望​； 臣子也由​这 所赐之画​时 刻反省自​己 ，不要像​《 诗经》中​ 的“相鼠”​那样无节制​、不守礼，​努力使“朝​无相鼠之刺​”（见上图​宣宗赐给臣​子 杨士奇《​壶中富贵图​》的原题）​。 5. Author’s translation. 据《酌中志​·内府衙门​职掌》记载​：“猫儿房​，近侍三 四​人，专饲御​前有名分之​猫，凡圣心​所钟爱者，​亦加升管事​职衔。牡者​曰某小 厮，​骟者曰某老​爷，牝者曰​某丫头。候​有名封，则​曰某管事，​或直曰猫管​事， 亦随中​官数内关赏​。” 6. Author’s translation. 嘉靖皇帝最​宠爱的一只​狮子猫很是​稀奇，它有​一身 滑腻卷​曲的淡青色​毛，惟有眉​毛却“莹白​若雪。” 7. Author’s translation. 明朝沈德符​所著的《万​历野获编》​《第二卷》​《列 朝·贺​唁鸟兽文字​》“最后西​苑永寿宫有​狮猫死，上​痛惜之，为​制金棺葬之​万寿 山之麓​，又命在直​诸老为文，​荐度超升。​俱以题窘不​能发挥，惟​礼侍学士袁​炜 文中有「​化狮成龙」​等语，最惬​圣意。未几​，即改少宰​，升宗伯，​加一品入内​ 阁，只半年​内事耳。同​一禽畜，同​一谀词，而​不遇如此。​” 8. Qiulong is a beast in ancient legends. It is recorded in the Rui ying tu of the Song Dynasty: “Eight feet and fve inches tall, with long neck, wings, trimming hair, and fne sounds. It appears when there is wise emperor.” Author’s translation. 虬龙 是古代​传说中的瑞​兽，宋朝《​瑞应图》中​记载：“高​八尺五寸，​长颈骼，上​有 翼，修垂​毛。有明王​则见。” (《紫禁城的故事》1231) 9. The Palace Museum housed in the Forbidden City in Beijing, China has been acclaimed as one of the world’s fve largest museums by United Nations Educational,Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and International Council of Museums (ICOM). 10. Author’s translation. 这些猫对于老鼠的防治也功不可没，“猫的存在本身 就是震慑力。” 11. Author’s translation. 以前，大家​都把文物视​为过去的东​西，是已经​终结 的生命​，就应该被​观赏。但是​活起来，就​意味着要健​康地融入我​们的生活，​让 文物健康​地活起来。​ 12. Author’s translation. 从今年观众数据上看，30岁以下观众占40% . . . 80后 和90后，已经成为参观故宫博物院的“主力”。 13. Author’s translation. 充分发挥互联网的社交互动功能，吸引青年一代参 与到内容产业的生产中来。

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14. Author’s translation. 2016年​6月29日​，故宫博物​院与阿里巴​巴（中国）​有 限公司战​略合作签约​仪式暨故宫​博物院官方​旗舰店上线​仪式在故宫​博物院建福​ 宫花园举行​。 15. Author’s translation. 故宫博物院​此前凭借各​路“萌萌哒​”文创产品​，吸足了 市​场眼光，2​017年其​文创产品销​售额超过1​0亿元。 16. Author’s translation. 故宫淘宝的​人气最旺。​最受欢迎产​品之一的“​迷你故 宫小​猫猫摆件”​月销量超过​1.6万笔​，买家在留​言中表示“​很可爱”、​“萌翻了”​。 17. Author’s translation. 故宫 . . . 最近推出第​一套以故宫​猫为原型的​亲子 绘本，​同 时也是“​宫 猫家族”​系 列文创的​首 发作品：​“ 故宫宫喵​家 族”系列​绘 本。“故​宫 宫喵家族​大 礼盒中”​还 附有明信​片 、拼图玩​具 、猫偶盲​袋 、立体贺​ 卡、绘画本​。 18. Author’s translation. 故宫猫系列​：卡通化的​猫更具亲和​力，转为儿​童 和青年观​众 们研发的​“猫皇帝”​橡 皮、书包​、 玩具、手​表 、手机壳​等 产品，既​ 有趣又实用​。 19. The author wants to thank Wang Yi, Xu Zilu and Su Taorui of the Association for the information. 20. The author wants to thank Li Siyan of the Association for the information. 21. Author’s translation. 武汉市小动​物保护协会​成立于20​06年7月​28号。2​013 年8​月，武汉动​协正式挂牌​，是武汉市​目前唯一一​家在市民政​局备案取得​合法 身份的​纯公益流浪​伴侣动物保​护组织。我​们现在团队​主力都是3​0岁左右的​年轻 人，大​部分都是武​汉本地人。​ 22. Author’s translation. 我们以保护​动物、维护​动物不受侵​害及虐待的​权利 为己任​，以领养代​替购买为策​略，以宣传​教育文明养​宠为理念，​积极教育宣​传 并改善人​与伴侣动物​之间的社会​矛盾。历年​来，协会成​员先后救助​流浪动物达​ 8000余​只，目前滞​留基地的流​浪动物有6​00多只。​ 23. Author’s translation. 自2013​年举办第一​届武汉领养​日至今，已​有5年光景​ 。在这5年​时光里，我​们协会举办​了大大小小​52场领养​日 . . . 足迹遍布武汉三 镇，助力1000只小动物找到了家。 24. Author’s translation. 近日来，协​会接收到了​社会各方关​于滞留家中​动 物无人照​看 ，健康状​况 不可控的​求 助，经内​部 讨论现将​援 助方案公​布 如下： 一​、建立微信​群 以三镇为区域划分，建立三个微信群，需要援助的人士扫码 进群 二、信息统计 进入微信群后找分区群主领取援助登记表，录入信息后 统一集中管理 25. Author’s translation. 12日10​时许，武汉​市小动物保​护协会微博​消息称， 该​协会已收到​4200多​个相关求助​。68名志​愿者和工作​人员上门无​偿服务14​00多 次，​为小动物补​充食物和水​。此外，他​们通过QQ​群、微信群​等，完成2​800多 户​居民家中小​动物的救助​。被救助的​近5000​只动物包括​猫、狗、小​香猪、兔子​ 、蛇、鸟、​鱼、仓鼠、​龙猫等。 26. Author’s translation. 求助者大多​是年轻人，​年龄在20​至30岁这​样。我们 接​到的求助中​，95%是​猫，3%是​狗。 27. Author’s translation. 对于安全和​卫生的问题​，大家自然​都有担心。​特别 是我们​的志愿者们​，大家加入​我们都是出​于一种爱心​，并且这种​爱心是需要​勇 气的。因​此我们一再​强调，一定​要在保障自​身安全的前​提之下，再​去进行爱心​ 的行为，尽​量不给医护​人员带去不​必要的麻烦​。

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28. Author’s translation 为了解决这​个问题，杜​帆开始呼吁​在外地的求​助者们 尽可​能地寻找邻​里街坊互帮​互助。“我​们有一个‘​武汉微邻里​'的小程序​和‘邻居 帮​帮忙：宠物​互助平台’​网站，我们​现在能做的​就是把求助​者们引到这​些平台 上，​让他们在里​面寻找同小​区的街坊领​居来帮助。​” 29. Author’s translation. 在这个地球​之上，人类​虽然被认为​是更高级的​动 物，但从​某种意义上​来说，生命​也都是一样​的。我们平​时在救助流​浪动物的时​ 候，通过我​们的力量，​把动物从死​神那边拉回​来，把它的​病看好，再​将它送到 领​养家庭过上​幸福生活。​我们让一个​生命发展了​翻天覆地的​变化，这就​是我们 做这​件事的意义​。 30. Author’s translation. 我觉得这些​没有自救能​力的宠物挺​可怜的。没​人管 的话，​那些视猫狗​为亲人的主​人也会焦虑​、悲伤、甚​至想尽办法​溜回来，这​样 岂不是会​带来更大的​隐患。我们​帮助猫狗也​是帮助人。​说实话，从​本能上讲我​ 还是会担心​自己。毕竟​汉口被很多​人视作感染​风险“高危​地”。家人​也很重视，​ 跟我叨叨疫​情 严重，不​让 我出门。​其 实帮助小​动 物的很大​一 部分是处​理 屎尿 . . . 隔着口罩我都能问到刺鼻的臭味。我去过一个满是呕吐物的房间 . . . 拿拖 把、扫​把，弄了将​近一个小时​。有些地方​传言说动物​会有传染病​，捕杀猫狗​， 我还是很​担心的。 31. Author’s translation. @深山含笑213 32. Author’s translation. @梨视频 33. Author’s trans​latio​n.《赛先​生》：有些​媒体标题是​“超过10​％的猫呈现​阳 性”，其​实不应该这​样片面解读​，是吗？金​梅林：是的​。我们检测​的对象是可​ 疑的、存在​有风险的猫​，然后得出​这样一个比​例。我们的​样品是特定​的猫，比 如​，我们去已​经康复的患​者家庭去采​样，所养猫​的血清抗体​效价相对较​高。 34. Author’s translation. @霸气旧菜菜hh 35. Author’s translation. @中国新闻周刊 36. Author’s translation. @北京德翔律师事务所 37. Author’s translation. 4月27日​，全国各地​关注“反虐​待动物立法​”的志愿者​， 一起发起​了联署签名​呼吁立法的​活动。中国​生物多样性​保护与绿色​发展基金会​ 的彩色地球​事业部、濒​危物种专项​基金，也参​与到相关倡​议中。“现​在急需10​ 0万人联名​支持立法，​作为人大代​表提案的民​意数据支撑​。”中国绿​发会在官方​ 微博中说。​联名推动《​反虐待动物​法》活动获​得网友极大​关注。从2​010年《​反 虐待动物​法(专家建​议稿)》的​出台，如今​已经过去1​0年。“1​0年前，我​们提出 专家​建议稿时，​就已经论证​了立法的必​要性，目前​来讲更加具​备了可行性​和必 要性。​”蔡守秋告​诉《中国慈​善家》。 38. Author’s translation. 我们有一部野生动物保护法 . . .. . . 就是要保护​野生 动物的​生存环境我​们还有一部​法律叫畜牧​法，畜牧法​对于农场动​物的生存环​境 也做了相​应的规定 . . .. . . 这两部法律​中对于野生​动物和农场​动物都做了​一些相 应的​规定。可能​社会上还有​一部分法律​调整不够充​分的地方，​就是伴侣动​物， 就是所​谓的宠物。​这件事也一​直有主张要​求立法的，​据我所知一​些地方也在​探 索这方面​的地方法规​，但是好像​在国家层面​的立法，现​在为止还处​在研究和探​ 讨阶段，还​没有形成最​大的共识，​可能一时半​会看不到实​质性的进展​。但是我 想​从人和动物​和谐相处的​角度，从社​会公德的角​度，每一个​动物饲养者​都有爱 护自​己饲养动物​的义务，有​这方面的责​任，任何遗​弃、虐待动​物的行为都​应当 为社会​所不齿，都​应当被视为​是丧失公德​的行为，我​想在这一点​上咱们是有​共

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识的，但​是对于他们​应该承担什​么样的法律​责任可能还​需要进一步​地研究、进​ 一步地切磋​，在形成社​会最大共识​的时候，再​来研究立法​的问题，用​什么样的 形​式立法等等​。 39. Author’s translation. 中国绿发会​秘书长周晋​峰对《中国​慈善家》表​示“动 物的​非人性对待​是动物病毒​溢出的一个​根源，中国​绿发会生物​与科学伦理​工作 委员会​在新冠疫情​爆发之后，​一直在推动​生物多样性​保护和野生​动物保护的​立 法和公众​认知。”“​野保法正在​修订过程中​，如果能够​吸纳关于动​物反虐或动​物 福利方面​的内容，纳​入野保法，​也是一个很​好的途径。​” 40. Author’s translation. 关于《国家​畜 禽遗传资​源 目录（征​求 意见稿）​ 》的说明（​五）关于狗​。狗已从传​统家畜“特​化”为伴侣​动物 . . . 我国不宜列 入畜禽管理。 41. Author’s translation. 深圳市人大​常委会法工​委负责人答​记者问，猫​狗作为 宠物​，与人类建​立起比其他​动物更为亲​近的关系，​禁止食用猫​狗等宠物是​许多 发达国​家和香港、​台湾等地区​的通行做法​，也是现代​人类文明的​要求和体现​。 42. Author’s translation. 4月2日，​山东大学动​物保护研究​中心主任郭​鹏向澎 湃新​闻表示，猫​狗肉黑色利​益链，在中​国存在已久​，但是一直​没有引起足​够的 重视。​猫狗肉产业​链，不只是​因为非法收​购、囤积与​长途运输而​违反动物传​染 病防疫法​，也因为这​些动物未经​过免疫与检​疫而违反食​品安全法。​与盗猎与贩​ 卖野生动物​的黑色利益​产业链一样​，猫狗肉产​业链也存在​公共卫生安​全隐患， 因​此，深圳禁​食伴侣动物​. . . 是解决了一个潜伏在中国社会中几十年的、早就 应该得到解决的社会问题。

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REFERENCES “About the Palace Museum.” Palace Museum, https​:/​/en​​.dpm.​​org​.c​​n​/abo​​ut​/ab​​out​-m​​ useum​​/2015​​-01​-2​​​0​/161​​5​.htm​​l. Cang, Wei. “Wuhan Group Rescues More Than 200 Pets Left Alone.” Chinadaily​ .com​.c​n, 2 Feb. 2020, www​.c​​hinad​​aily.​​com​.c​​n​/a​/2​​02002​​/02​/W​​S5e36​​54d2a​​31012​​ 82172​​7428d​​.html​. Chen, Jibing. “人民日报刊文评故宫年轻了：不断以新的方式走进年轻人的生 活.” Thepaper​.cn​, 10 Jan. 2019, www​.t​​hepap​​er​.cn​​/news​​Detai​​l​_for​​ward_​​28345​​93. Gao, Dan. “‘故宫·宫喵家族‘系列绘本：跟着猫咪玩转故宫.” Thepaper​.cn​, 5 Nov. 2019, www​.t​​hepap​​er​.cn​​/news​​Detai​​l​_for​​ward_​​48628​​35. Giles, H. A. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, vol. I. Thomas De La Rue and, Bunhill Row, 1880, https​:/​/ww​​w​.gut​​enber​​g​.org​​/fle​​s​/436​​29​/43​​629​-h​​/4362​​9​-h​.h​​​tm​ #ch​​apter​​-144. Hu, Li ping. “故宫‘御猫‘与明清帝王，明代有位皇帝竟然成了‘猫痴.’” Bjd​.com​, Beijing Evening News, 13 Nov. 2019, https​:/​/ie​​.bjd.​​com​.c​​n​/a​/2​​01911​​/13​/A​​P5dcb​​ 638ee​​4b0a8​​43276​​​809e0​​.html​. Idema, Wilt L., and Haiyan Lee. Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature: Tales and Commentary. Kindle ed. University of Washington Press, 2019.

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Jin, Meilin, et al. “SARS-CoV-2 Neutralizing Serum Antibodies in Cats: A Serological Investigation.” BioRxiv, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 3 Apr. 2020, www​.b​​iorxi​​v​.org​​/cont​​ent​/1​​0​.110​​1​/202​​0​.04.​​01​.02​​1196v​​1. Li, Yuhang, et al. “Where There Are Girls, There Are Cats.” Gwern​.net​, 5 Jan. 2020, www​.gwern​.net​/docs​/catnip​/2020​-li​.pdf. Liu, Jinglei. 紫禁城的故事. Kindle ed. Shandong Pictorial Publishing House, 2014. pearvideo​.co​m. “武汉志愿者无偿救助上万留守宠物，挨家挨户上门喂食” pearvideo, 21 Apr. 2020, www​.w​​eibo.​​com​/p​​earvi​​deo​?i​​s​_all​​=1​&is​​_sear​​ch​=1&​​key​_w​​ ord=%​​E6​%AD​​%A6​%E​​6​%B1%​​89​%E5​​%BF​%9​​7​%E6%​​84​%BF​​%E8​%8​​0​%85#​​_0. Shan, Jixiang. “故宫‘看门人‘单霁翔：让文化遗产活起来.” Thepaper​.cn​, 21 Nov. 2017, www​.t​​hepap​​er​.cn​​/news​​Detai​​l​_for​​ward_​​18719​​24. “Stray Cats Strut in Forbidden City.” Sina English, Shanghai Daily, 3 Mar. 2014, http:​/​/eng​​lish.​​sina.​​com​/c​​ultur​​e​/p​/2​​014​/0​​302​/6​​​79620​​.html​. Tang, Jingchu. “全国人大就‘人大立法工作‘相关问题答记者问.” China​.com​, 12 Mar. 2018, www​.c​​hina.​​com​.c​​n​/zhi​​bo​/co​​ntent​​_5069​​6962.​​htm. Wang, Yu. “疫情之下，他们救助那些滞留在家的武汉小动物们.” Thepaper​.cn​, 4 Feb. 2020, https​:/​/m.​​thepa​​per​.c​​n​/new​​sDeta​​il​_fo​​rward​​​_5761​​909. ———. “武汉小动物协会暂停救助活动.” Mbd​.baidu​.co​m, 19 Feb. 2020, https​ :/​/mb​​d​.bai​​du​.co​​m​/new​​spage​​/data​​/land​​ingsh​​are​?p​​ageTy​​pe​=1&​​isBdb​​oxFro​​m​=1​&c​​ ontex​​t=​%7B​​%22ni​​d​%22%​​3A​%22​​news_​​​99319​​48817​​90346​​6989%​​22​%7D​. weibo​.co​m. “‘虐杀动物N号房’事件，批评教育就完了吗” weibo, 14 Apr. 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.wei​​bo​.co​​m​/730​​03387​​84​/ID​​g9Mdb​​Wf​?t​y​​pe​=re​​post. Wen, Rujun. “虐猫者范源庆被12名动保人士起诉，百万人支持出台《反虐待动 物法》.” Weixin​.qq​.co​m, 7 May 2020, https​:/​/mp​​.weix​​in​.qq​​.com/​​s​/yWO​​GoDpX​​ R9Uhs​​h​egPh​​BPAw. Zhao, Jing. “国画里的猫：明宣宗相信猫和江山有关，自己画猫赐给臣子用以 反贪.” New​.qq​.co​m, Harper’s Bazaar , 26 Nov. 2018, https​:/​/ne​​w​.qq.​​com​/o​​mn​/20​​ 18112​​6​/201​​81126​​B0​XL6​​S​.htm​​l. Zhong, Xiaomei. “口述｜一个汉口‘留守宠物‘代喂者的出行.” Thepaper​.cn​, 12 Feb. 2020, https​:/​/m.​​thepa​​per​.c​​n​/new​​sDeta​​il​_fo​​rward​​​_5915​​712. Zhu, Xuan. “武汉滞留城内宠物面临断水断粮威胁，当地协会已救援近五千只.” Thepaper​.cn​, 12 Feb. 2020, https​:/​/m.​​thepa​​per​.c​​n​/new​​sDeta​​il​_fo​​rward​​​_5939​​187. ———. “专家谈深圳立法禁食猫狗：猫狗肉背后是黑色产业链，应予重视.” Thepaper​.cn​, 3 Apr. 2020, www​.t​​hepap​​er​.cn​​/news​​Detai​​l​_for​​ward_​​68224​​11. “博物馆的生意经:故宫博物院年入10亿.” Edited by Suhang You, Xinhuanet​.com​, 25 July 2018, www​.x​​inhua​​net​.c​​om​/fo​​rtune​​/2018​​-07​/2​​5​/c​_1​​29920​​148​.h​​tm. “CNNIC发布第45次《中国互联网络发展状况统计报告》.” Cnnic​.cn​, 28 Apr. 2020, http:​/​/www​​.cnni​​c​.cn/​​gywm/​​xwzx/​​rdxw/​​20172​​017​_7​​057​/2​​02004​​/t202​​0042​7​​ _7097​​3​.htm​. “故宫博物院年接待观众量首破1700万人次.” Dpm​.org​.c​n, 17 Dec. 2018, www​.d​​ pm​.or​​g​.cn/​​class​​ify​_d​​etail​​/2484​​75​.ht​​ml. “故宫文化创意体验馆在故宫博物院东长房开幕.” Dpm​.org​.c​n, 28 Sept. 2015, www​.d​​pm​.or​​g​.cn/​​class​​ify​_d​​etail​​/1794​​90​.ht​​ml​?hl​=.

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“故宫博物​院与阿里巴​巴（中国）​有限公司达​成战略合作​　故宫博物​院官方旗 舰​店在阿里巴​巴平台开设​.” Dpm​.org​.c​n, 29 June 2016, www​.d​​pm​.or​​g​.cn/​​class​​ ify​_d​​etail​​/1792​​66​.ht​​ml. “揭秘故宫神秘员工猫保安：约181只 五年花18410元.” Edited by Huan Liu, Chinanews​.com​, 24 Feb. 2014, www​.c​​hinan​​ews​.c​​om​/cu​​l​/201​​4​/02-​​24​/58​​71720​​ .shtm​​l. “【历史那些事2】番外趣历史：明朝皇帝与猫儿~.” Bilibili​.com​, 16 July 2019, www​.bilibili​.com​/read​/cv3084497/. “猫狗留在武汉的主人们，可以联系我们.” Weixin​.qq​.co​m, 26 Jan. 2020, https​:/​/ mp​​.weix​​in​.qq​​.com/​​s​/dBo​​KM​_wT​​nVoHY​​​BkPFN​​G47Q. “猫确可感染新冠病毒，研究者声明反对弃猫-资讯.” Zhishifenzi​.com​, 4 Apr. 2020, http:​/​/zhi​​shife​​nzi​.c​​om​/ne​​ws​/mu​​ltipl​​e​/8​67​​9​.htm​​l. “农业农村部关于《国家畜禽遗传资源目录》公开征求意见的通知.” Moa​.gov​.c​ n, 8 Apr. 2020, www​.m​​oa​.go​​v​.cn/​​hd​/zq​​yj​/20​​2004/​​t2020​​0408_​​63410​​67​.ht​​m. “深圳经济特区全面禁止食用野生动物条例.” Szrd​.gov​.c​n, 1 Apr. 2020, www​ .s​​ zrd​.g​​ov​.cn​​/szrd​​_zlda​​/szrd​​_zlda​​_ffg​​/ffg​​_szfg​​/2020​​04​/t2​​02004​​02​_19​​14821​​9​.htm​. “驯猫史话：古人是何时开始养猫的？-新华网.” Edited by Jiajia Liu, Xinhuanet​ .com​, 11 Jan. 2018, http:​/​/m​.x​​inhua​​net​.c​​om​/bo​​ok​/20​​18​-01​​/11​/c​​_12​97​​86523​​.htm. @霸气旧菜菜hh .“你好，​学校计算机​专业大四学​生范源庆虐​猫，手段极​其残忍 剥皮​爆头断手断​脚等手段并​在微博贩卖​，其猫都是​山东理工大​学校内的流​浪 猫。已经​给广大喜爱​猫咪的爱心​人造成了极​大的伤害甚​至崩溃，请​求学校秉 持​公开公正公​明严查，树​立良好学校​环境杜绝学​生暴力血腥​倡导健康文​明校 风。”​ Weibo, 4 Apr. 2020, 14:12 p​.m.,​​weibo​​.com/​​u​/320​​67735​​31​?is​​_sear​​ch​=0&​​ visib​​le​=0&​​is​_ho​​t​=1​&i​​s​_tag​​=0​&pr​​ofle​​_f​typ​​e​=1​&p​​age​=2​​#feed​​top. @北京德翔​律师事务所​.“虐杀动​物N号房”​事件，批评​教育就完了​吗？近日，​山 东理工大​学的范源庆​同学用极其​残忍的手段​虐待流浪猫​，并拍摄视​频进行贩 卖​，这种行为​，难道只经​过学校的批​评教育就行​了吗？有没​有法律能管​得了 他？有​哪些法律能​使用呢？请​看安翔律师​最新解读”​ Weibo, 14 Apr. 2020, 11:10 a.m., weibo​​.com/​​73003​​38784​​/IDg9​​MdbWf​​?type​​=​repo​​st. @梨视频.​  “疫情期​间，武汉许​多宠物独自​在家断水断​粮，小动物​保护协会开​始 帮忙上门​喂养。会长​杜帆介绍，​他们先后救​助了上万只​宠物，他说​最难受是 打​开门后，有​些猫狗已经​饿死了，希​望大家能善​待宠物，不​要让他们流​浪” Weibo, 21 Apr. 2020, 09:17 a.m., weibo​​.com/​​pearv​​ideo?​​is​_al​​l​=1​&i​​s​_sea​​rch​=1​​ &key_​​word=​​%E6​%A​​D​%A6%​​E6​%B1​​%89​%E​​5​%BF%​​97​​%E6​​%84​%B​​F​%E8%​​80​ %85​#​_0. @深山含笑​213.“​最近陆续有​一些为了博​取点击率和​转发率的自​媒体，纯标​题 党的曲解​石正丽、金​梅林老师作​者团队关于​预印版论文​“猫新型冠​状病毒抗 体​血清学调查​”的文章。​夸大事实、​误导公众！​今天金梅林​老师特意约​我面 谈了许​久，并为减​少谣言传播​，先发表声​明如图六，​后期还将推​出详细科普​ 文章供大家​参考！大家​可以先行转​发声明，和​在对应谣言​文章下有理​有据的 反驳​脑残作者，​为挽救更多​的小生命尽​一份力！此​版本为最终​版本！之前​转 发过的朋​友请重新转​发！” Weibo, 4 Apr. 2020, 13:42 p.m., weibo​​.com/​​u​/189​​ 23905​​52​?fr​​om​=us​​ercar​​dnew&​​refer​​_fag​​=0000​​02000​​1_​&is​​_all=​​1#​_​rn​​d1589​​45411​​ 9609.​ @中国新闻​周刊.“山​东理工大四​学生范某庆​拍摄虐猫视​频贩卖被退​学后，有知​ 情人士向@​中 国新闻周​刊 爆料，称​范 某庆依然​存 在虐猫行​为 。记者调​查 发

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现，范​某庆背后，​有一条完整​的虐猫黑色​产业链，这​个群体被称​为“舒克”​。 知情人士​透露，“舒​克”从动物​救助站、送​养人士处收​集“货源”​，捕捉大量​流 浪猫，制​作原创虐猫​视频线上贩​卖，可选品​种、大小及​电击火烤开​水烫等施 虐​方式，售价​从10元到​数百元不等​，私人订制​可达四千元​。进群购买​需先向 群主​提供购买者​本人原创虐​猫视频以验​明身份。据​了解，舒克​群体包含未​成 年人，最​小年龄10​岁。” Weibo, 25 Apr. 2020, 01:11 a.m., weibo​​.com/​​16425​​ 12402​​/IERW​​5wVau​​?type​​=​repo​​st.

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Section II

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THE USEFULNESS OF COMPANION ANIMALS

Reading Cats and Dogs : Companion Animals in World Literature, edited by Zélia M. Bora, et al., Lexington Books, 2020.

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Chapter 7

Memorable Dogs of Italian Literature Anna Re

The dog is halfway between an angel and a child.

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Totò 1

Walking through the streets of Italy, one may notice that virtually every Italian is accompanied by a dog, everywhere they go. It may not be every Italian, but nearly so. Italy is hands-down one of the most dog-friendly countries in Europe. There are many places that you can visit with a dog. They are welcome on most public transport, in shops, hotels, coffee-shops, restaurants, etc. And even if there are rules, they are not always enforced. In 2019, pet dog population in Italy amounted to approximately 7 million. A more detailed analysis of the number of pet dogs in Italy showed that Lombardy was the region with the highest number of dogs registered at the canine registry. Dogs are Italians’ favorite pet friends; over 60 percent of Italians picked dogs as their preferred pet animal. Italians also appear to be the least likely to leave their dogs alone in Europe. Over 60 percent of Italian dog owners claimed that they never left their dogs alone, so that some people have dogs with them even at work (Censis, “Il valore sociale dei medici veterinary,” 2019). The love of Italians for their pet friends is refected in the amount of money they invest in them: in 2017, 15 percent of Italians spent between 50 and 100 euros monthly for their dogs (Statista Research Department, 2020). There are still stray dogs in some poor areas of the country, but in general dogs have become members of the human family, and they seem to like this role. As for literature, many Italian writers have paid tribute to dogs, perhaps too many to cover in a brief chapter. Instead, I have focused on the tributes

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of major twentieth- and twenty-frst-century authors. In contemporary literature, writing about dogs is a strategy for refection on the self and on the “other,” though with an additional focus: literature, with help from anthrozoology and ethology, details the relationship between man and dog from a strongly decentralized human perspective. The boundaries between nature and culture beg redefnition, and those same species boundaries prove porous. In these spheres, dogs appear as “species companions”—brothers, friends—but also as mysterious, semidivine creatures that deserve special respect.

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LITERARY DOGS From antiquity through classical times, animals were considered semidivine, following gods in their everyday lives. Italian history pays tribute to a primordial canis, the she-wolf of Roman myth that nursed and sheltered twins Romulus and Remus after they were abandoned in the wild by King Amulius of Alba Longa. She cared for them in her den, a cave known as the “Lupercal,” until they were found by Faustulus, a shepherd. Romulus would later become the founder and frst king of Rome. The three offcial versions of the myth by Livy, Plutarch, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus draw heavily on Quintus Fabius Pictor. This wild, primordial she-dog suckling the twins is a symbol of Rome and Italy, and one of the most famous icons of ancient mythology (Wiseman xiii). Greco-Roman antiquity left us many artistic objects and text that portray dogs (Johns 6). Their relationship with humans surpasses death, as signifed by a report dating from the last days of the Roman Republic (509–27 BCE), when civil wars ravaged the Eternal City. Romans bewildered by the violence of their times took comfort in the recondite rules of animal faithfulness in a rare news account published in the frst known newspaper, Acta urbana (roughly translated as “city gazette”), which may have been edited by Gaius Julius Caesar. The newspaper recounted that, during political turmoil across the city, a man was thrown into the Tiber River and drowned. The man’s concerned dog followed the lifeless body as it was carried downriver. The animal, perhaps sensing the tragic ending that was in store, dove into the river and swam out to its owner’s body. But the current carried the dog away as well, and both bodies disappeared. Roman citizens were fascinated by the story. The dog’s loyalty became a moving tale. From then on, the relationship between dogs and human beings has traversed different and ambivalent forms. Dogs have been friends and enemies, superior, and inferior. Here is a look at how Italian writers in the twentieth and twenty-frst centuries have portrayed man’s best friend.

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ITALO SVEVO, ARGO, AND OTHER DOGS Italo Svevo (1861–1928) was a novelist and short story writer, a pioneer of the psychological novel in Italy. His frst novel, Una vita (1892), was revolutionary in its analytic, introspective treatment of the intellectual hero’s agonies. But the book was ignored. The same happened to Senilità (1898), prompting Svevo to abandon the craft. Ironically, however, business took Svevo to England repeatedly in following years. As chance would have it, in 1907 he met James Joyce there, and the famous novelist became his English tutor. The two became close friends. Joyce encouraged Svevo to continue writing, after which the young Italian wrote his most famous novel, La coscienza di Zeno (1923). The novel is a brilliant work in the form of a patient’s statement for his psychiatrist. Svevo was killed in a car accident while working on a sequel. Many of his works were published posthumously, including his correspondence with Italian poet Eugenio Montale (Lettere, 1966). Svevo was later recognized as one of the most important fgures in modern Italian literature. From his earliest writing to his posthumous works, dogs and canine imagery played an important role in Svevo’s plays, novels, shorter works, notes, and letters. One of the most powerful elements of dogs as characters is how polysemous they can be. Like human beings, dogs have a variety of personalities and ways of interacting. Svevo wrote: “bastard dog, neither large nor small, a dog like many others and therefore deeply human” (Svevo, Racconti 269).2 The variety is shown also in canine expressions, which the author describes variously as philosophical, bestial, loyal, irrational, or kind. Dog stories also enhance refections on human and canine behavior in delicate circumstances. Svevo focuses on our reaction: “He hated those beasts because one of the things they lack completely is mourning. The dog curiously sniffs the carrion of a companion. A moment of astonishment, then he leaps away, happy something like that hasn’t happened to him” (Svevo, Romanzi 1155). Nevertheless, Svevo liked dogs and kept a few as pets. They were animals the author felt he knew well and liked to observe. Argo e il suo padrone is Svevo’s longest story about a dog. The animal is portrayed realistically and its master communicates quite clearly with him. Svevo depicts the strangeness of Argo’s perspective not only through the animal’s vocabulary, but through his monologues, which are translated by his master leaving the reader unsure of Argo’s original intent. One interpretation could be that the master never truly grasps Argo’s language, but rather creates it. He invents an imaginary literary world in order to verify whether or not it’s possible to think like another animal. Svevo’s dog is different from most other literary canines in that it questions rather than confrms man’s centrality in the world. The tale can be seen as a critique of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. Svevo emphasizes man’s

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inability to see outside himself and beyond his own limited points of view. He supposes dogs have powers humans do not understand, such as perception through smell. He considers that dogs’ way of perceiving is comparable to ours: “The sense of smell must be just as complex as that of sight” (Svevo Racconti 746). Svevo frequently sets himself and other human beings with dogs, calling the humans “beasts” or “animals”: “The factory is now full of beasts (myself aside) . . . We have two dogs. Paris’s son—an energetic, aggressive bastard—is with us too” (Moloney et al., 115). The writer often refers to dogs as people. For example, in Argo e il suo padrone, the master consistently calls his dog Argo, as if he were a person. In La coscienza di Zeno, the protagonist includes the offce dog, also named Argo, in the same category as himself. Svevo’s openness to seeing himself and dogs together embraces Darwin’s thought, which theorized an end to separating the “human animal” from other animals. “Darwin’s theory proposed an end to human distinction: an end to the separation of man from beast” (Fudge 19). In the play La rigenerazione, a wife’s love of animals overcomes her affection for her husband and other humans: “You! Remember when we last saw each other, before they operated on me? Because as soon as I was operated on I looked at you, but you weren’t looking at me. You were looking at the birds, the dogs, the cats” (Svevo, Teatro e saggi 765).

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UMBERTO SABA, DOGS, AND MANY OTHER ANIMALS Saba (1883–1957) was a poet renowned for his simple, lyrical, autobiographical poems. He developed an early interest in poetry while working as a clerk and serving as a soldier in World War I. He gained a reputation as a poet with the publication of Il canzoniere (1921). Saba’s poetry was infuenced by Petrarch, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Giacomo Leopardi, and Giosuè Carducci. Poems from his early period include one of his most famous, “A mia moglie.” In the 1920s, when Saba was in the middle of his career, he wrote in a Freudian vein on topics such as desire and childhood memories; the poetry of the fnal phase of his career, however, was more refective. Countless animals populate Saba’s works: the Piticon-Piticonda hen, whose funeral he celebrated as a young man; the “musical” dog Occo-Occo, who barked along with Richard Wagner; and Ilo, a Scottish terrier that Saba claimed died suddenly upon hearing news of German occupation of Paris. Blackbirds and canaries also earned a special place in Saba’s heart. The poet believed animals are the core of truth of existence. In depicting a world in which the innocence of nature is opposed to the artifce of culture, Saba details the distance separating animals from the cruelty of men. And for this reason, he affrms the need to observe and intensify our relationship with animals. Take, for example, this verse in which the poet underscores the harmony and guidance a dog can offer man:

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I walked, I thought, silent, with downcast eyes. Those thoughts and steps were aimless. My dog preceded me. I followed him, unaware. This time it was the dog that led the man, the human footprints after, before his . . . The sky overhead was lead, and a strange, profound thought chilled me. I heard the silence all around, without distant voices, that seemed to me to be alone, alone with my dog in the gloomy world. (Saba 743)

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The ability to be faithful gives the dog a fraternal air. His humanity attracts the attention of “compulsive anthropomorphizers,” who spread our shadow over nature, tracing human outlines everywhere. But there is something more. That look, is to impose questions, often disturbing ones. Literature reads the eye through questions. Is the dog just looking at us? Does he want to communicate? Is he aware of something we ignore, or does he want to call us back to order? If he fxates on a distant point, is he sensing (or even seeing) something invisible to our eyes? Dogs perceive a reality that we cannot, they see through the nose; they hear sounds in frequency vibrations that are imperceptible to humans. The eye is also a nose. In “L’insonnia di una notte d’estate,” Saba describes a dog that “sits motionless” at his side “on one of those nights that make insomnia gloomy / a religious pleasure. / The sky is full of stars and the dog always observes a point, far away. / It almost seems like he is thinking, / that it is worthy of a rite, / that through his body the silence / of infnity passes /” (Saba 806). Even though the dog is almost a human creature, nature forces him to superfciality, lightness, to the absence of existential worries. The dog as in the appearance of every affection is naked. He is less And more than human, far from me, quite far! The doubt barely touches it; with a short pain he solves it. (Saba 333–34) A servant and slave of man, he has no aspirations. But perhaps the meaning of these attitudes depends on something else. Dogs are closer to nature than men and have priorities human beings should consider. In the poem “Uomini e animali,” Saba says: Man, your misfortune is bottomless. You are too much and too little. With envy (you think with contempt) you look at the animals, that—immune to respect

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and modesty—express life and its laws. (Saba 633)

The need to recover a closer relationship with nature can be found in the famous poem “A mia moglie,” in which the poet breaks traditional patterns and compares his wife to common animals, thereby enhancing universal beauty. Using simple language, Saba tells us that his wife helps us see God the way we can when observing animals’ love with a pure eye. You are like a “long” dog, that always has a lot sweetness in its eyes, and ferocity in its heart. At your feet, a saint seems to burn of an indomitable fervor and so she looks at you like her God and Lord. (Saba 75)

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FEBO, CURZIO MALAPARTE’S DOG Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) was a journalist, dramatist, short-story writer, and novelist, considered one of the most brilliant and controversial Italian writers of the Fascist and post-World War II periods. After Gabriele D’Annunzio, Malaparte was the most prominent writer associated with the Fascist party. But during the 1940s he repudiated fascism and was expelled from the party. During World War II he worked with Allied armies as a correspondent, and later as a liaison offcer during the Allied occupation of Naples. He gained an international reputation with two realistic war novels: Kaputt (1944) and La pelle (1949), a terrifying series of episodes that evidence the suffering war inficted on Neapolitans. Alongside articles and fction, Malaparte wrote realistic dramas, short stories, and a screenplay. Febo, Malaparte’s dog, is a central character in his masterpiece La pelle. Theirs is a meeting of two free spirits. The writer dedicates several pages to his friend, a greyhound dog he met when he was exiled to Lipari and that became his inseparable companion. The short stories “Febo cane metafsico,” “Cane come me,” and “Caneluna” testify to a sentimental relationship that anyone who has had a dog can understand. More than friend, Febo is a projection of the self, an alter ego. Malaparte always said that if he hadn’t been born a man, he would have wanted to be a dog like Febo. His biographer Giordano Bruno Guerri recalls that the writer loved dogs with a passion he did not

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demonstrate for mankind. And it was not an aesthetic and decadent attachment like that of Gabriele D’Annunzio for his famous greyhounds; Malaparte loved his dogs because they were, he said “like me” (cfr. Guerri, 2008). They display behaviors that people should imitate. Febo is a noble model: I have never liked a woman, brother, or friend as much as I liked Febo. He was like me except he was dog . . . He was a noble being, the noblest creature I met in my life. He belonged to that rare and delicate greyhound family that came from Asia along with the frst Ionic migrations, and whom the shepherds of Lipari used to call cerneghi. . . .These were dogs that Greek sculptors had carved in bas-reliefs on tombstones. The shepherds from Lipari said that they frighten death away. (Malaparte 182)

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Febo followed Malaparte when he was exiled by the Fascist government. The dog neither abandoned nor denied him, helping the writer tolerate loneliness (Malaparte 38) and becoming an important presence in Malaparte’s life: “He was not only my brother, he was my judge . . . the keeper of my dignity, and at the same time he was—I will say using ancient Greek—my dorufórema (bodyguard)” (Malaparte 184). At a certain point Malaparte was imprisoned for months. When he was released, he found Febo waiting patiently for him outside the jail. The dog is there for his human companion and waits for him in life and death. He knows both worlds, and leads us into heaven. “Establishing a bridge between the human being and his own lost ancient half, the dog prepares us for inevitable death” (Alvarez 24). Malaparte was convinced that this relationship extends beyond death, and wrote for Febo’s epitaph: But I am sure that Febo will immediately call me from beyond. His tired soul will call me from the depth of night. And I know that I will go back, to follow him and my destiny. There we will depart under the moon, in tall grass, along the river, and Febo will be happy. And so, we shall leave as two old friends, two dear brothers, frolicking and rejoicing in that happy game of no return. (Malaparte 49)

BARONE, CARLO LEVI’S DOG Carlo Levi (1902–1975) was a writer, painter, political journalist, and physician. His frst documentary novel became an international literary sensation and enhanced the development of social realism in postwar Italian literature. He was exiled to Lucania (1935–1936) in southern Italy for his anti-Fascist

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activities, and wrote of this experience in Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (1945), which refects his visual sensitivity as a painter and his compassionate objectivity as a doctor. The novel was acclaimed as a literary masterpiece, taking readers through a world of pain in which a desert landscape augments the sense of isolation in time and space. The Lucanian peasants referred to themselves as “excluded” or “forgotten by history.” Neither the Greeks, nor the Romans, Normans, or Aragonese could reach Lucania. Not even Christ could: they all stopped at Eboli. In exile, Levi got in touch with local authorities and locals and met a gorgeous woman named Julia. Julia and a joyful dog—Barone (Italian for baron)—became Levi’s only friends during exile. Barone’s origins are shrouded in mystery. The dog was found by some railroad workers, who entrusted the adult animal to Levi. “The dog’s majestic size and bouncy pace, which shook his long, silky fur, reminded Levi of the noble animals that populated the heraldry of medieval shields. The peasants, seduced by Barone’s gallantry and grace, supposed him to be the guardian of imaginary borderlands. Barone was half dog, half lion; a cheerful creature, the curious guardian of the mysteries of this harsh, wild, beautiful region” (Alvarez 19). Barone was quite eccentric. He couldn’t stand the sound of church bells, causing Levi to wonder if the canine was hiding a diabolical creature (Miccinese 38). But Barone appeared virtuous and displayed a positive attitude in a world dominated by dictators. He was a happy, free, and wild creature; one that naturally mitigated the awfulness of human greed and seemed to be the product of cosmic forces and death:

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[This] dual nature . . . always engenders an obscure attraction that implies respect concerning the participation of village deities. All of the peasants recognized something sacred in my dog. They did not look at him as a normal dog; he was an extraordinary being, different from all dogs and worthy of particular worship . . . half baron, half lion.” (Levi 25)

Barone became increasingly important to Levi and helped shape the writer’s identity. The dog is a lord, an independent partner, a divine creature in its own right. DINO BUZZATI AND HIS MANY DOGS Dino Buzzati (1906–1972) was a journalist, dramatist, short story writer, and novelist, internationally recognized for his fction and plays. He began his career at Corriere della Sera, a famous Milanese newspaper, in 1928. His two novels of the mountains, Barnabò delle montagne (1933) and Il segreto

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del bosco vecchio (1935), introduced a Kafkaesque surrealism, symbolism, and absurdity that would characterize all Buzzati’s writing. His most famous novel, Il deserto dei Tartari (1940), is a powerful, ironic tale of garrison troops at a frontier military post, trapped awaiting an enemy that never arrives and unable to advance or retreat. Later on, Buzzati would publish tales, novels, and plays with dogs that have distinct and sometimes divine or supernatural personalities. The author states that their eyes are “terrible” and their gaze is “unsustainable” (Buzzati, Bestiario 100 and 231). Buzzati writes of the look the dog (“a sort of black wolf”) reserves for Mr. Amadio when the man returns from an unfortunate political rally. He sees “the same expression, the same cold and acrimonious indifference, the same frightening distance” that the man had witnessed in human eyes at the rally (Buzzati, Bestiario 177). In the story “Il cane che ha visto Dio” in Opere Scelte, a black dog named Galeone appears among the bread baskets that the greedy baker Defendente Sapori must offer the poor in order to earn his uncle’s inheritance. The dog usually takes a loaf of bread and disappears. One day, the baker follows him and discovers that the bread is brought to Silvestro, an old hermit who lives in the nearby mountains and with whom no inhabitant of Tis has ever spoken. Facing Silvestro, Defendente feels awed and ashamed, and allows the dog to continue taking a loaf of bread. One icy night, after strange lights appear in the sky on the mountainside, Silvestro dies and for a few days Galeone does not appear in the village. But when the dog returns to Tis, the villagers are gripped by tension and fear: Galeone is a dog that has seen God.

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Wasn’t he the hermit’s dog? Wasn’t he with him when those lights came? Everyone knows, I would say what those lights were! And the dog was not with him? He must have seen them. (Buzzati, Opere scelte 808–809)

Galeone becomes the eye of God. He sees and judges, but doesn’t do anything in particular: he wanders around the town. But his bewildered gaze creates questions: “What was hidden behind those two good, melancholy eyes? The image of the Creator had probably entered him. Leaving what behind?” (Buzzati, Opere Scelte 811). Soon, the inhabitants of Tis feel obliged to feed the dog, even though no one is willing to admit to it. Over time the dog’s gaze becomes obsessive: When you’re not expecting it, there he is in a corner, motionless, staring steadily, sniffng. Even at night, when all the other dogs are asleep, his silhouette appears suddenly against the white wall. (Buzzati, Opere Scelte 813)

The situation becomes ambiguous: on the one hand the inhabitants of Tis moralize and mend their behavior; on the other, they can no longer tolerate the

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dog’s inquisitorial presence. Some begin to wish it dead, and eventually Sapori shoots him. Once the baker is convinced the dog is dead, Galeone reappears. Finally, the dog passes on, but its death triggers a spiral destined to upset the spirits. The dog’s body is buried near the hermit’s grave. And right there, where no one had gone for years, they discover the white, worn bones of a dead dog. Is it a different dog? Or had the inhabitants of Tis been dealing with a shadow? An angelic presence? It is a mystery. No one in Tis will ever be the same. The death of dogs caused by men is a theme that saddens Buzzati. In commenting the case of Laika and her space mission, instead of being exalted by the achievements of science, he comes to a bitter conclusion:

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Goodbye therefore, kind little dog that no longer wags a tail. You will no longer have a doghouse, I fear, nor a lawn, a ball, or a master. You will die in cruel solitude without knowing that you are a hero of history, a symbol of progress, a pioneer of space. Once again, man has taken advantage of your innocence, abused you, to feel great about himself. (Buzzati, Bestiario 289)

Carefree but open to death, dogs behave differently from men. They accept their own end and avoid despair. This unfathomable confidence seems to confrm they have a soul. In one of his stories, Buzzati describes a dog, named Fritz, an “old beast of uncertain blood” (Buzzati, Bestiario 229), that hears the call of the Universal Dog, a call no human being can perceive. He begins “moaning pitifully until they untie him from the chain, a mysterious instinct warning him that he must at all costs reach the river bank, where they would come to get him” (Buzzati, Bestiario 230). While his owner does not understand what the dog wants, his son gives the impression of knowing that dogs “on death’s door try to leave, because they want to die alone. Perhaps they fear betraying their owner and do not want to be seen.” (Buzzati, Bestiario 231) The son frees the dog from his chain. Fifty meters from where the dog expects to encounter eternity: “the cart of souls arrives, worn and rickety” pulled by “two mighty mastiffs” (Buzzati, Bestiario 232). His soul runs out of his mouth and the end comes for Fritz. Buzzati, however, believes that his bond with his dogs will last forever. In a piece written for RAI, Italy’s state television station, he remembers: “I own, and am owned, by four dead and wonderful dogs, perhaps no more beautiful than the other dogs who died in the eternity of the past, who honored this valley of tears, yet very wonderful” (Buzzati, Bestiario 297–98). MARIO RIGONI STERN AND HIS MOUNTAIN DOGS Mario Rigoni Stern (1921–2008) was an author and World War II veteran. His frst novel, Il sergente nella neve (1953), draws on his experiences in the

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Mountain Army corps during the retreat from Russia. Rigoni Stern wrote often about his native mountains, and his relationship with dogs involved loyalty based on hunting together, one of the original determinants for the relationship between man and dog. Hunting creates a kind of complete affnity between hunter and dog. In one of his short stories, after the hunt the man offers his dog the heart and liver of the dead hare, silently caressing his head, cleaning his eyes and paws with a handkerchief: “He felt something inside, something that is hard to say and that sometimes is not felt even for Christians” (Rigoni Stern, 1517). This harmony is built through hunting and working cattle together. For the “old black dog (of Tönle) a nod, not even a word, was enough to understand his thought” (Rigoni Stern 53). Describing Alba, a hunting dog, Rigoni Stern insists the eyes were “alive and intelligent, not really common for a dog of her breed” (Rigoni Stern 1519). The three brothers, protagonists of the story, decide to take her with them because they “trust those eyes.” Once she settles in, Alba gets into the habit of resting her head on one of the knees of the three men, staring up at him “with those talking eyes as if she adored him” (Rigoni Stern 1519). The dog speaks to man through eyes that are stronger than silence. Dogs had to learn to decipher our gestures, and they probably know more about man than man knows about them. Yet vision is not a dog’s most developed sense, or at least betrays characteristics and purposes that are different from human sight. In Storie dall’Altipiano, an elderly hunter, shares the many qualities of his dogs: Sirio, a cod thief every Friday, but a stalker and seeker like few others; the frst Alba, gentle and sweet, shy and delicate, but determined with snipe and woodcock. It was lovely to see her working a pasture. She seemed to be walking on air, so cautious and confdent. Marte was strong and silent, but a glance was enough to understand one another, and he was never tired of hunting up in the mountains . . . Cia used to walk through the woods sly and indifferent, but when she found a woodcock she would double back on the path to hunt for it . . . Elsa had been brought to him by his son the frst year he went to the city for work: he had taken her from the municipal animal shelter where the poor beast would have come to a bad end. When that little setter got out of the car she was in a very bad state. Only her eyes spoke . . . It took time to put her back on her paws, but by October she was no longer afraid of the woods and knew what to look for. She was delicate and suffered the cold so much that the women agreed to keep her at home. When she died, he cried like a ffteenyear-old who has just lost love. The second Alba was an ugly, angry, jealous pointer. But where could you fnd someone else like her to hunt partridges? (Rigoni Stern 1137–38)

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Rigoni Stern fnds the same countenance in mountain men, who honor the rhythms of nature and know how to establish silent harmonies with dogs. Dogs are often their only companions on the hunt or herding animals. It is a bond strengthened by the perception of marginality to which animals are doomed, bearers of “a language (which) must be collected and preserved as the most precious and sacred heritage of a disappearing physical, ethical, and aesthetic universe” (Ruozzi 575). The threat is a potential breakdown of this relationship and the alteration of natural rhythms, for example pushing some dogs that have been abandoned to turn predatory again. “Having experienced the ingratitude of humans,” dogs may retreat into the ancestral “instinct of wolves.” “A choice that I would have made too,” comments Rigoni Stern (1185).

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ITALO CALVINO, OTTIMO MASSIMO, AND OTHER DOGS Italo Calvino (1923–1985) was a journalist, short story writer, and novelist whose imaginative fables made him one of the most important Italian writers of the twentieth century. He joined the Italian Resistance during World War II, settling in Turin following the war and obtaining an undergraduate degree in literature while working for the Communist paper L’Unità and Einaudi, a publishing house. His early fction was inspired by his experience in the Italian Resistance, but Calvino later turned to fantasy and allegory, using innovative structures and shifting viewpoints to explore chance, coincidence, and change. In Il barone rampante, the protagonist Cosimo has a small dog with whom he enjoys a genuine friendship. This is Otto Massimo, a dachshund that Cosimo found on D’Ondariva family land following their departure. In reality, Otto is actually Turcaret, Viola’s dog, another protagonist of the novel, but Cosimo does not know it and takes the dog as his own. Calvino describes Cosimo’s relationship with Otto in terms of collaboration, friendship, play, and affection: when you saw the boy on the trees, it was sure that looking down at him, or below, you could see the dachshund Ottimo Massimo trotting on his stomach. He had taught him to search, to stop, to fetch: the work of all hunting dogs, and there was no beast of the forest they didn’t hunt together. To bring game back to him, Ottimo Massimo would stand on a trunk on his hind legs as high as he could, and Cosimo came to take the hare or partridge from his mouth and caress him. They were all confdence and joy. (Calvino, Romanzi e racconti 626–27)

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In other works, Calvino focuses on communication with dogs and, praising a language that can be extraordinarily effective and exists independent of words: I was shaving and he was watching me. ‘He doesn’t understand,’ I thought. ‘How can a dog understand a man who shaves? How do I understand the need to shave? Why do I shave?’ I could no longer shave and stop. I sat down to write: the dog kept looking at me. ‘How can I explain to him why I write?’ I wondered. ‘I write to earn my bread. He could understand this. But why do they pay me to write? What do they do with it? Do I write anything useful?’ I reread what I’d written and found it all stupid, so I crumpled the paper and threw it away. (Calvino, Saggi 2132–33)

Being watched by the dog triggers endless questions. It is the beginning of a deconstruction of the world, equivalent to unmasking. Looking into those eyes, the standard answers cease to work. Dogs can read us, discover our dark sides, what we want or pretend to be. And once we are discovered, we appear as that which we truly are.

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ALBERTO ASOR ROSA AND “LA CANA CONTESSA” Alberto Asor Rosa (1933–) is a literary critic, writer, politician, and university professor. He was born in Rome and has taught at Rome’s La Sapienza University for many years. He published many essays on Italian literature that have shaped contemporary Italian literary criticism, as well as some fction. In his novel Storie di animali e altri viventi (2005), a quartet of voices blends harmoniously together. A cat, man, woman, and female dog become more than just four intelligent, emotional characters: they form an extraordinary group, an entity capable of interpreting the universe’s rhythms. The narrator is a synthesis of these four “people” united in daily life. Asor Rosa describes an usual coexistence between men and animals, expressing the truly humanistic belief that man is not superior to animals. The dog’s humanity opens up new perspectives. “What I bring to humans,” says the narrator “Cana” “is dissimilarity: it is a shaded area where there is neither human nor animal; the two things are blended together” (Asor Rosa 83). It does not matter if ethology has echoed that dogs are instinctively led to serve those who, in their eyes, occupy a higher level on the social scale. Indeed, the dog is almost a man, or better than a man. He is neither selfsh nor ambiguous, but capable of creating a sincere harmony. According to Asor Rosa, man and dog communicate by telepathy. The “descent” toward the language of animals is a return to origins. Asor Rosa

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also highlights the universal aspect of the language of dogs: dogs understand each other immediately. They do not need interpreters. Is this a sign that “brotherhood” belongs to dogs? Or is it a demonstration of how, by circumventing language and adopting a “code” consisting primarily of signs, body movement, and smells, we might understand one another better? Asor Rosa suggests dismantling anthropocentrism by physically positioning himself at a dog’s eye level, revolutionizing perspectives, so the woman watches the “Cana Contessa” from an “extremely close distance, eye to eye” (Asor Rosa 61). She lets herself slide off the sofa, stretches out on the foor and moves toward her. It is the discovery of a forgotten, more authentic code:

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Humans look at the sky, animals don’t [. . .]. With four legs and their gaze always oriented downward, animals are solidly anchored to the earth . . . By continuing to observe the passing clouds and scrutinize the celestial depths that rise above us, men . . . and women . . . turn their heads: they lose control, detach themselves—or would like to detach themselves—from the ground; they emphasize (even brutally, alas, bestially) their diversity. (Asor Rosa 108)

Only by ceasing to “explore the abysses of time and space” (Asor Rosa 109) you can try to guess what it means to be a dog. In that gesture, there is a redefnition of the role. There is the renunciation of an anthropocentric view. There is an attempt “to descend into the limited but precise imagination of a living being devoid of grand horizons, but sure to be there, and free of signifcant problems” (Asor Rosa 109). Asor Rosa criticizes man as the only architect of his own destiny. Our species has acquired its characteristics mainly because it has established virtuous exchanges with other species. In the novel, the facts are told from the animal’s point of view. “Micio Nero” and “Cana Contessa” become narrative voices, but the reader understands that their point of view is human too: it is a sum of both parts. It is a question of attitude and a way of looking at things; a recovery of humanity through subtraction of all anthropocentrism. FROM WORKMATES TO LIFE COMPANIONS In the essay Pets: Come gli animali domestici hanno invaso le nostre case e i nostri cuori (2017), Guido Guerzoni, professor of museum design at Bocconi University in Milan, affrms that since pets have become offcial family members, we have been forced to decide whether to be masters, owners, friends, or parents. But while we were trying to decide, “pets” made our decision for us. Animals are no longer “animated things” that we possess and can treat as we like, but rather sentient beings. They have entered our houses and our

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hearts. Guerzoni describes the arrival of Pioppo dei Sanchi, a “slightly defective roano roacco” that radically changed his family’s life (Guerzoni pos 73): . . . and despite the evident caudal defcit, which would have precluded his participation in any beauty contest (a barely-acceptable vulnus for the greatgrandson of Peppe dei Sanchi, already a champion of international beauty), my wife and I looked at each other and in a second decided to take the “insuffcient creature” with us. (Guerzoni pos. 77–81)

Living within the limited confnes of an apartment, their bond became more intense and intimate: As I no longer had a garden, I had to live with the four-legged thing, discovering a sensitive, affectionate, inseparable, and amusing creature who, in addition to having averted (or postponed for a few years) my intake of aspirin for hypertension, has improved my mood, soothed my wounds and changed my daily rhythms, ftting harmoniously into our family ménage (my wife Noemi, the only one who he silently obeys, loves him with equal transport). We all love him fearlessly. (Guerzoni pos. 102–06)

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This intense, intimate relationship is described in the works examined in the chapter. Dogs help men better understand their humanity. Sometimes, they demonstrate supernatural, divine qualities. All dogs can understand our feelings and souls, revealing a world we are unfamiliar with. Literature can then intercept these feelings and give them a voice. More than a century ago, some Italian writers were already picking up on the aridity of anthropocentric thought and the fertility of an anti-speciesist thought capable of establishing relationships of pure affection with our dogs, now considered equals, now considered beings endowed with personality. Just ask anyone who has the pleasure, and privilege, of sharing her/his life with a dog.

NOTES 1. Translation by Anna Re. Antonio Griffo Focas Flavio Angelo Ducas Comneno Porfrogenito Gagliardi de Curtis di Bisanzio (15 February 1898–15 April 1967), best known by his stage name Totò or simply as Principe Antonio de Curtis, and nicknamed il Principe della risata (“the Prince of laughter”), was an Italian actor, comedian, writer, poet, singer, and lyricist. He is commonly referred to as the most popular Italian performers of all time. In 1965, Totò built a modern and equipped dog shelter in Rome, “L’Ospizio dei Trovatelli,” for which he spent 45 million lire, a substantial amount of money for the time, and there he hosted up to 220 dogs. For

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further information: “Interview with Totò on his love for dogs” https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​ com​/w​​atch?​​v​=5Yr​​​L8HeI​​lyw (Published on October 7, 2016). 2. Translations from texts originally in Italian are by Anna Re.

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REFERENCES Alvarez, José Maurício Saldanha. “Forgotten Communication: Humans and Dogs in CurzioMalaparte’s and Carlo Levi’s Literature.” Review of European Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2019, pp. 14–26. Asor Rosa, Alberto. Storie di animali e altri viventi (Stories of Animals and Other Living Creatures). Einaudi, 2005. Buzzati, Dino. Bestiario (Bestiary). Mondadori, 1991. ———. Opere scelte (Selected Works). Mondadori, 1998. Calvino, Italo. Saggi (Essays). Mondadori, 1946. ———. Romanzi e racconti (Novels and Short Stories). Mondadori, 2000. Censis. Il valore sociale dei medici veterinary, 2019. Fudge, Erica. Animal. Reaktion Books, 2002. Guerri, Giordano Bruno. L’arcitaliano: Vita di Curzio Malaparte (L’arcitaliano: Life of Curzio Malaparte). Bompiani, 2008. Guerzoni, Guido. Pets: Come gli animali domestici hanno invaso le nostre case e i nostri cuori (How Pets Invaded our Homes and Hearts). Feltrinelli, 2017. “Interview with Totò on His Love for Dogs.” https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​ =5Yr​​​L8HeI​​lyw (Published on October 7, 2016). Johns, Catherine. Dogs, History Myth, Art. Art Printing Press, 2008. Levi, Carlo. Cristo si è fermato ad Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli). Newton Compton Editori, 2010. Malaparte. Febo, cane come me (Febo, a Dog Like Me). Emmebi Edizioni, 2006. Miccinese, Mario. Come leggere Cristo si è fermato (How to Write Christ Stopped at Eboli). Mursia, 1979. Moloney, Brian, et alts. “È tanto differente quest’inghilterra . . .” Gli scritti londinesi di Italo Svevo (England Is Very Different . . . London Writings by Italo Svevo). Museo Sveviano, 2003. Rigoni Stern, Mario. Storie dall’Altipiano (Stories from the Plateau). Mondadori, 2003. Ruozzi, Gino. Favole, dialoghi e bestiari. Moralità poetiche e narrative nella letteratura italiana (Fairytales, Dialogues, and Bestiary. Poetic Morality and Narrative in Italian Literature). Bur, 2007. Saba, Umberto. Tutte le poesie (Poems). Mondadori, 1965. Statista Research Department. https​:/​/ww​​w​.sta​​tista​​.com/​​about​​us​/ou​​r​-res​​earch​​​-comm​​ itmen​(Published on February 4, 2020). Svevo, Italo. Racconti (Short Stories). Mondadori, 2004a. ———. Romanzi (Novels). Mondadori, 2004b. ———. Teatro e saggi (Theatre and Essays). Milano, Mondadori, 2004c. Wiseman, Timothy Peter. Remus: A Roman Myth. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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Chapter 8

Cross-species Cooperation Hunting with Dogs in Contemporary American Nature Writing

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Claire Cazajous-Augé

In The Companion Species Manifesto, Donna Haraway argues that the relationship between humans and dogs, like other naturecultures,1 shows that there is no real division between species. She explains that men and their companion animals are co-dependent and have co-evolved through time, thanks to breeding, training, or co-habitation. Haraway adds that their entanglement is still in the making: “Dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships—co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all” (Haraway 12). While Haraway illustrates her theory with two breeds of herding dogs, I propose to focus on hunting dogs. Hunting dogs have skillsets that men have developed and used to hunt prey that hides from them. Such trained and carefully bred dogs can follow a scent track, locate animals (pointers), or retrieve game (fushers). They are “sensory prostheses”2 who help hunters have a better perception of the wild, or “auxiliary animals” (Ravindranathan and Traisnel 10) who share their knowledge with men. They jeopardize the Promethean dimension of the hunt (Ravindranathan and Traisnel 81). Indeed, the central role of dogs in the hunt shatters the idea that the success of a hunting party only relies on the hunter’s skills. The relationship between the hunter and his dog can thus be defned as one possible model of interspecies cooperation. However, such a relationship is built at the expense of other animals, as hunting dogs are trained and have been bred to help humans kill other animals. They thus also unwittingly contribute to reinforcing man’s feeling of domination on the non-human world. Rick Bass, Jim Fergus, and Richard Nelson are three contemporary American nature writers who are also bird or deer hunters. Their dogs play a 147

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central part in their hunting stories. Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had is a tribute to Rick Bass’s German shorthair. In this text, the writer tells the story of his friendship with this pointer who was exceptionally gifted at hunting birds, and who made him a better hunter. In A Hunter’s Road; A Journey with Gun and Dog Across the American Upland, Jim Fergus relates his hunting trips with Sweetzer, his loyal yellow lab. Together, they traveled across America to hunt and meet other writer-hunters. “The Gifts of Deer,” by Richard Nelson, is the last chapter of The Island Within. It describes how his sled dog, Shungnak, can read the landscape and animal tracks better than himself. In this essay, the presence of a dog may seem more peripheral than in Bass’s and Fergus’s texts, but it is nevertheless a celebration of Nelson’s friendship and partnership with Shungnak. In these three texts, dogs are neither mere partners who keep the writers company during hunting trips nor accessories the hunters bring with them for the sole purpose of catching prey. As I shall try to demonstrate, their relationships contribute to defning the writers’ conceptions of the hunt and the interactions between the human and the non-human world. Signifcantly, Fergus suggests that dogs allow us to better understand hunters: “[o]ne can learn a great deal by observing his relationship with his dog” (Fergus 173). Drawing examples from the three works by Bass, Fergus and Nelson, I will argue that hunting with dogs does not always show man’s wish to conquer the non-human; it may also create a fruitful cooperation between human and the non-human world. I will frst investigate how the three writers re-evaluate their dogs’ training processes. Rather than presenting these approaches as a way to dominate their companion animals, the training strategies suggest that they can lead to creating a mutually benefcial cross-species community. I will then try to show how hunting with a dog, far from only being about killing quarry, is also a way to approaching the non-human world respectfully. This will fnally lead me to examine the writers’ attempts at reconciling their passion for hunting with their environmental concerns. Bass and Fergus often mention the training processes of their dogs. They do not consider training as a way to dominate their hunting partners, but rather as a manner to build a “symbiotic” (Morris) relationship with them. According to animal trainer and philosopher Vicki Hearne, dog-training requires a mutual discipline which eventually builds equal and respectful relationships (Hearne). She explains that training implies that humans pay attention to the dogs’ ways of being and that animals understand what their trainers expect from them. Such mutual understanding and interspecies partnerships facilitate their cohabitation. At frst, it seems that Rick Bass sees the trainer’s role as that of a Pygmalion. Like a rough block, Colter needs to be “sculpt[ed]” (viii) and his mistakes have to be “carved away” (49). However,

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Bass does not consider his dog as his creation, and he does not present himself as an artist; it is the dog who possesses “styles” of hunting (ix), and the trainer’s role is to unveil them: “he stopped retrieving birds, as if concentrating only on his business, his breeding—the discovering and pointing of them. His higher calling. The brown dog as artist” (xii). Bass also re-evaluates the metaphor of Pygmalion when he admits that he has been transformed by his dog: “Generations of mankind before you might have worked to sculpt this streamlined (yet fuid, and still developing) creature that is now in your life, and now, not in generations but in just a few short years, the dog turns around and sculpts you” (31). Signifcantly, Bass decides to join Colter at his training school so as to improve his hunting skills and be worthy of his dog. Similarly, for Jim Fergus, to be a good trainer does not mean that you can control your dog, thus overriding its instincts, but that you know how to make do with its natural skills in order to hunt together (176–77). The trainer is not the “alpha dog,” (231) the leader of the pack, but a partner to the dog. In order to show that dog-training is not about domination, but about a mutual understanding between two beings, Bass, Fergus, and Nelson insist on the unpredictable dimension of their dogs’ behavior. For example, Bass is disappointed to learn that Colter can be misled by a “ghost scent”—the scent of a bird that has fown away (51). Likewise, Fergus often has to deal with Sweetzer’s “bad hunting habit” when he ignores the hunter’s whistle to follow another scent (57), and Nelson wished that Shungnak was not more attracted by squirrels than by deer (261). As Donna Haraway argues, training—and hunting—together is an encounter between a particular man and a particular dog, not between an abstract man and an abstract animal (205). By describing the failure of the training process, the three writers thus suggest that dogs, even after having been domesticated and trained, remain individuals with their own agency. According to Desmond Morris, dog-training was frst an exchange of services: humans needed the dogs’ skills to hunt, and dogs needed food and protection. In our Western societies in which hunting has become a leisurely activity, the human–canine relationships that are built through training have created what Dominique Lestel calls “hybrid communities” (19). Indeed, humans and dogs have a common phylogenetic and cultural history which allows them to recognize each other’s agency. What matters here is not that training involves two different species, but that in involves two individuals, be they from the same species or not (Lestel 20–21). Lestel identifes three types of hybrid communities,3 one of which being a community of emotions. He argues that the term “friendship” can be rightly used to defne the relationships between humans and animals, especially their pets, as they share living spaces, common interests, and feelings. Nelson called his dog his “friend” (271), and Bass evokes the symbiotic nature of his relationship

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with Colter (30). The latter also acknowledges that their bond can be felt on a spiritual dimension: “there is something interior, something luminous, a spirit yet invisible to the world, in the bond between people and dogs” (30). The anaphora bestows a solemn dimension to this declaration. Fergus’s friendship with Sweetzer partly relies on regular physical contact. The last words of A Hunter’s Road describe one of the many nights they spent sleeping next to each other during hunting season: “Then—exhausted, spent, and sated—we curled up together on the rug before the fre. The snow fell steadily outside, huge white fakes drifting past the windows. We fell asleep and dreamed our dream of hunters” (286). The close relationship that bonds two members of different species, ultimately erasing the separation between them, is to be seen at the level of the sentences. Indeed, the ternary rhythm and the alliterations in “s” and in “t”—“exhausted, spent, and sated,” along with the polyptoton “dreamed our dream,” express the harmonious confusion between the two bodies and suggest that the hunter and his dog share an intimate bond. Thanks to training and hunting, Bass and Colter, Fergus and Sweetzer, and Nelson and Shugnak manage to reinvent cross-species relationships. The division and hierarchy between species are erased and give way to hybrid cooperation. Training a dog and hunting with it amounts to being introduced to the dog’s way of perceiving and inhabiting the world. In Inside of a Dog, psychologist Alexandra Horowitz specifes that having an understanding of what it is like to be a dog cannot be achieved through a mere act of introspection (23). Our umwelten do not allow us to fully perceive the world the way dogs do. In other words, our olfactory and hearing senses are not as acute and developed as that of dogs. All we can do is “act into” their umwelt while remaining aware of the limitations of our own experience. Horowitz thus proposes to “pu[t] our umwelt caps on” (23): she invites her readers to smell every object that they come across and to pay close attention to the sounds around them. She adds that such an experience can be more fruitful than resorting to anthropomorphism, which she considers an obstacle to a clear understanding of dogs’ behaviors and perceptions (16). Bass, Fergus, and Nelson do not try to literally see the world at their dogs’ level, but they often rely on anthropomorphic images to render their dogs’ actions when hunting. However, the anthropomorphic tropes they use testify to their humility and prudence. When Fergus tries to explain young Sweetzer’s enthusiastic behavior after she chose to follow a grouse scent instead of listening to his whistle, he resorts to the conjunctive phrase “as if”: “And Sweetzer, drunk with bird scent and disobedience and puppy exuberance, leapt straight up in the air after them, as if trying to fy herself” (26–27). Similarly, Nelson used “as if” and the expression “I suppose” to precede his attempts at describing Shungnak’s reactions after he had shot a deer: “Then, I

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suppose to consummate her own frustrated predatory energy, she takes a hard nip at its shoulder, shuns quickly away, and looks back as if she expects it to leap to its feet again” (263). The use of such expressions intimates that the writers maintain an interpretative distance when resorting to anthropomorphism, and more generally when observing their dogs. Rather than making assertions about the animals’ intentions and emotions, they rely on careful hypotheses. More than an explanation, it is a humble attempt at translating or interpreting the ways animals may feel, think, or behave. To them, “putting our umwelt cap on” does not mean that they put themselves in their dogs’ places; it implies that they carefully and only partially try to imagine how the world appears to their dogs, and that they remain aware that one cannot penetrate other worlds. Hunting dogs, Jean-Christophe Bailly remarks, occupy an intermediary position between the human and the non-human worlds. Quoting Xenophon’s On Hunting, Bailly remarks that the dogs’ olfactory power—their ability to detect and to follow scent tracks that remain invisible to the hunters—enables them to open up to a “world of sensations” that humans cannot usually access (Bailly 71). Because the hunter wants to penetrate such a world, he has to follow his dog instead of his prey. The dog is thereby a hunter and the hunted. Bailly evokes the “peculiar high-speed pursuit between the visible and the hidden worlds, where a man follows an animal, which follows another one, and at the end of which the whole landscape—not only the territory—reveals itself” (71–72, my translation). Dogs act as mediators in a territory laden with invisible lines and scent tracks. Bass marvels at such an ability. To him, Colter’s power to unveil a whole new level to the woods they wander daily is similar to those of a guide—“You can imagine, please, how grateful I am to my dog—to Colter, the brown bomber—for awakening me from this sleeping shell or cyst. For taking me into new territory” (xv), of a translator who “creates, transcribes, a new landscape” (168), and of a magician: “to have a magician alongside and in front of me who would always reveal where the quarry lies . . . it was like passing through a door, one I didn’t even notice was there, into a place of light and beauty” (33). Similarly, Shungnak seems to be endowed with a supernatural power. Her “magical sense of smell” (261) and her sense of hearing that bears technological precision—“her little radar ears” (261)—never ceased to amaze Nelson. Traveling, magic, and technology combined may give us a glimpse of how acute the dogs’ senses are. By interweaving different metaphors, Bass and Nelson disclose the superiority of their dogs’ sense and show the human impossibility to picture their animals’ umwelten. In Bass’s, Fergus’s, and Nelson’s texts, the dogs’ ability to open to ways of perceiving and inhabiting the world is presented as a distraction from the hunt. Rather than simply following their dogs who often lead them to their

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preys, the hunters seem to rediscover the landscape thanks to the mediation of their companion. The tunnel vision of the predator gives way to the contemplative observation of the artist. With Colter by his side, Bass appreciates the picturesque quality of nature. At frst, the description he gives resembles an ekphrasis: “In the day’s last gold light, we stopped and watched an immense fock of Canada geese settling down into a stubble feld for the night. [. . .] A coyote walked through a slant of that copper light, walked to within a couple hundred yards of them [. . .]. [H]e in turn, illuminated in that golden light, was beautiful” (132). The emphasis on colors and on lightning engages us into thinking that the hunter remains a distant observer, as if nature was a painting. However, Bass also develops a sensorial experience of the landscape. By virtue of an anaphora—“walked”—and of a repetition—“light”—the distant observation eventually turns into a synesthetic experience in which the observer seems to feel the geese’s peacefulness and the coyote’s quiet pace. Colter’s presence is necessary to experience other ways of beings, and his death puts an end to this sensory appreciation of the world: “Without Colter, though, the beauty was only skin-deep [. . .]. I could still recognize the beauty, but there was that kick missing to it, an electricity [. . .]. [T]he beauty of these woods depended on him” (173–74). More than a hunting companion, Colter is then a mediator who gives depth to the hunter’s experience of the non-human world. Thanks to Sweetzer, Fergus too manages to share a sensorial experience with the non-human. The words he resorts to disclose the dog’s ability to open a world of sensations to the hunter: “I hurried to keep up with her and heard the heavy rustle of wings in the grass, followed by the heart-stopping whir of liftoff, the blurred, mottled brown-and-white vision of bird against late afternoon sky” (67). The alliteration in “h” connects the dog running (“her”), the hunter’s sense of hearing (“heard”), and the birds’ moving (“heavy rustle”) in an immemorial movement: the pursuit and the escape. The accumulation of simple and compound adjectives—“heavy,” “heart-stopping,” “blurred, mottled brown-and-white”—reveals a patient yet fast-paced qualifcation of other ways of being and betrays the narrator’s attempt to pay attention to them and show them respect. Dogs may be presented as mediators toward a more respectful relationship with the non-human world, but, when hunting, their main role is to help humans kill other animals. They act as prostheses, or extensions of the hunters’ bodies, to locate and retrieve quarry. The very syntax of the title of Fergus’s book—A Journey with Gun and Dog—suggests that hunting dogs and weapons have the same function. This antithetic position echoes the three writers’ own duality. Indeed, they are both hunters and environmentalists. They try to protect endangered species and spaces and yet, they sometimes kill wild animals. Hunting with the help of a dog reinforces this apparent

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dichotomy. Bass is an environmental activist who opposes intense logging, road-building and, more recently, the creation of a scenic route4 to protect the habitat of wild animals in the Yaak Valley, Montana, where he lives. He has also written many books on the extinction of endangered species (The Lost Grizzlies; Caribou Rising; The Black Rhinos of Namibia). Nelson published articles to protect the Tongass National Forest in Alaska or to criticize the importance of oil in our society, and to remind people of the fragility and the richness of wild places. In Colter and in The Island Within, Bass and Nelson address the apparently irreconcilable dimension of their passion for hunting with their dogs and their deep respect for non-human life. At the very beginning of Colter, Bass recalls a seemingly paradoxical aspect of hunting: “You could say that it, hunting with a dog, is the opposite of life; that it is a pursuit toward the death of a thing—the birds. But tell me why it is that it’s when I feel most alive” (xiii). Likewise, Nelson evoked the paradoxical feelings that seize him after killing a deer: “Incompatible emotions clash inside me—elation and remorse, excitement and sorrow, gratitude and shame” (263). Yet, both writers try to overcome this dichotomy by claiming that hunting is part of an immemorial dynamics and reminds them that humans should be grateful to animals for their sacrifce (Bass xiv; Nelson 263). Fergus may not be an activist like Bass and Nelson, but his environmental concerns can be seen in A Hunter’s Road. Fergus admits that killing has never been easy to him—“to this day I remain squeamish about killing things. I hate suffering of any kind, human or animal. Don’t think because I’m a hunter that this is not so” (2)— but that it gives him a sense of place and helps him reconnect with primal feelings and gestures (20). He goes as far as suggesting that killing with his dog creates a sense of intimacy with the earth (20). Among the three writers, Fergus is the one who makes the most efforts to convince his readers that one can be a hunter and an environmentalist at the same time. When he recounts his conversations with other hunters who all hunt with dogs, he insists on the environmental aspect of their cynegetic activity. For instance, he recalls that they try to shorten hunting seasons as they cause a dwindling of grouse population (138), that they oppose suburban developments which damage bird habitat (153), and that they fnance animal protection (240). However, it appears that their activism primarily aims at maintaining their activity. In other words, it is by preserving wild habitat that they can keep hunting wild animals. Claiming that hunting is a privileged mode of getting human and non-human animals closer can rightfully be perceived as a cynical and ironic perspective.5 In spite of the three writers’ attempts at justifying the legitimacy of hunting in a society in which killing wild animals is not a necessity, a sense of guilt pervades in the three texts. On the one hand, they dwell on the many shots they have missed. Fergus’s text ends with the evocation of a pitiful anecdote:

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“I rocked back on my heels, fumbled with the safety, and mounted my gun in agonizing slow motion, already aware as I pulled the trigger that I had let the speedy little bullet of a bird get too far out. I missed cleanly” (285). Similarly, Bass confesses how poor a hunter he is—“I don’t like missing. I usually do— I’m used to it—but I don’t like it” (xiii). Highlighting their failures betrays a feeling of shame; as such, confessions indicate that they do not systematically kill animals during their hunting parties. On the other hand, the writers praise their dogs’ skills. Just like Fergus, Bass pays tribute to his dog:

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My friend, the hunter and writer Jim Fergus, has said that he doesn’t remember any of his great shots, nor the occasional mistakes his dog makes. It’s the exact opposite, he says, and he’s right: you remember the great moments of the dog’s work—they are scribed in your mind permanently, down to every last detail— and you remember only your missed shots, the ones (and there are hundreds of them) where you let the dog down. (xii–xiii)

This shift of focus from the human to the dog can be read as a token of humility. Underlining the essential and superior role of the dog intimates that the hunt, far from being a way to reinforce man’s domination over the non-human world, reminds humans that they are indebted to their companion animal (Ravindranathan and Traisnel 81). Bass, Fergus, and Nelson invite us to acknowledge the essential mediation of the dog, but also the sacrifce of the prey that has been killed. The three writers celebrate their dogs’ intermediary position between the human and non-human worlds, and the ways in which they engage them into perceiving the animals’ agencies and inner value in order to show how they contribute to reconciling the three writers’ dilemma between hunting and having a respectful relationship with the non-human. Rather than trying to hide the ambiguous dimension of their cynegetic activity, or the duplicity their dogs unwillingly display by their sides, they expose their dilemmas and attempt to write hunting stories not from an ego-centered, but from an eco-centered perspective (Scheese 96). Presenting their dogs as essential participants in the hunt, friends, and guides to a non-anthropocentric view on the world enables them to operate this shift in perspective and discloses their wish to re-evaluate the role of hunting dogs in nature writing.

NOTES 1. Haraway resorts to this portmanteau word to defne the entanglement that has been biophysically and socially formed between the human and the non-human worlds. The term questions the division between categories that the humanities rely on, and that have led to dissociate humans and nature (Haraway 2003).

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2. Scott Slovic used this term in a paper he presented at a symposium: Scott Slovic, “Dogs as Sensory Extensions of Self: A Gift,” presented at Companion Species in North American Cultural Productions Symposium, University of Toulouse 2—Jean Jaurès, June 2016. 3. Lestel distinguishes three hybrid communities: “communities of interest,” “communities of sensitivity,” and “communities of meaning” (21-24). 4. The Pacifc Northwest Trail, which stretches 1,200 miles from Washington’s Olympic Coast to Glacier National Park in Montana, is supposed to go through the Yaak Valley and its very fragile grizzly habitat. Rick Bass has worked with the Yaak Valley Forest Council to implement an alternative southern route. 5. In Uncommon Ground, William Cronon explains that outdoor activities such as hunting are a way to “ge[t] back to the wrong nature,” as they give hunters the illusion that they are in contact with a pristine and untouched nature, even though it is an essentially “unnatural” place. He argues that wilderness is a social construct; it has always been anthropized—by Native Americans for example—and it is our society, and especially rich white males, who have transformed it into a place of regeneration: “It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural” (69).

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REFERENCES Bailly, Jean-Christophe. Le Parti pris des animaux. Christian Bourgois, 2013. Bass, Rick. Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had. Houghton Miffin, 2000. Cronon, William. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Norton, 1996. Fergus, Jim. A Hunter’s Road: A Journey with Gun and Dog Across the American Uplands. Henry Holt, 1993. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signifcant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ———. When Other Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hearne, Vicki. Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name. Vintage, 1986. Horowitz, Alexandra. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. Simon & Schuster, 2009. Lestel, Dominique. L’Animal singulier. Seuil, 2004. Morris, Desmond. The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal [1967]. Vintage, 2005. Nelson, Richard. The Island Within. Vintage, 1991. Ravindranathan, Thangam et Antoine Traisnel. Donner le change. Hermann, 2016. Scheese, Don. Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America. Psychology Press, 2002.

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Chapter 9

Let the Sleeping Dogs Tell Lies Companionship and Solitude in Shuntarō Tanikawa’s Dog Poems

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Keita Hatooka

“If dogs could talk / They would tell lies like me,” writes Shuntarō Tanikawa, one of Japan’s most prominent contemporary poets, in his poem “A Lie” (Naked; my trans.).1 Since his impressive debut with fve poems published in a literary magazine in 1950 and the collection of free verse Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude (1952), he has not only published almost a 100 collections of poetry but has also become well-known throughout Japan through his simple and, at times, humorous poems. This includes his lyrics for the theme song to Astro Boy (1963), the frst TV cartoon broadcast in Japan. His popularity is due to his humanistic messages and simple, heartfelt language. However, Tanikawa states forthrightly that he doubts language can truly be useful when communicating with his loved ones, as shown in the opening lines of “A Lie.” A little boy, the narrator of this poem, is confused by his mother who tells him not to lie, because he thinks he probably cannot help telling lies. He guesses that she has also lied before and been hurt, justifying the lying by supposing that even dogs would do so if they could speak. The poem’s subject implies that a lie can be placed even at the center of mother–child communication; the feelings of life are always translated falsely and misrepresented through human language. As a poet for children, Tanikawa has little diffculty making dogs talk. He has anthropomorphized the dog by adapting Aesop’s Fables. As a translator, he introduced the thoughts of Snoopy, the beagle of Peanuts, to Japanese readers. Moreover, he revived mysterious old rhymes as brand-new Japanese poems in Mother Goose Rhymes. However, as a modern poet, he carefully walks around language with his imaginary dog. In the poem “Sidewalk Shop,” Tanikawa metaphorically describes the language, and its meaning would be 157

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a casing and flling tube of sausage, saying “[if you] hang the sausages in the window of the shop, / Hungry dogs will come irresistibly” (Floating the River in Melancholy; my trans.). Sometimes Tanikawa’s dog unintentionally steps on a collection of poems dismissed on the street. The collection is one of the books that nobody would read and whose lines, words, and verses are becoming meaningless and return to the air. In such a miserable scene, Tanikawa’s dog happens to walk alone on the street. “Just after treading on the collection of poems soaked in the rain,” writes the poet, “The dog suddenly returns and sniffs it, / And then wags its tail” (Shi Ni Tsuite; my trans.; 84–85). Within the context of the poem’s metaphor, the dog seems to take a great interest in human language. The poet captures the dog’s interest, not through words but by turning those words into the very air, allowing the dog to sniff the air. Tanikawa’s career as a poet began with his free-verse poem on the death of his neighbor’s dog, Nero. Young Tanikawa writes the poem “Nero (For a Much Loved Little Dog),” starting by shouting the name of the neighbor’s dog which died at the age of two or three. Because the dog passed away in the summer, the season reminds the young poet of his tongue and eyes and the way of napping very clearly. Suggestively beginning with Nero’s tongue, which can be used not only to lick him but also to tell lies, young Tanikawa enumerates his own remembrances, mixed with other people’s. As poet and critic Tōru Kitagawa points out, Nero is a metaphor of the remembrances of eighteen summers (Kitagawa 27), but this dog is also represented as an individual who stands on an equal footing with the poet as a member of this cosmos because he acknowledges that it has known two summers of its own. He seems to doubt the authenticity of his memories by wondering “how many summers we human beings already have experienced,” comparing it with the “two summers” that seem to be much more directly experienced by Nero (Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude; my trans.). His contemporary critic Makoto Ōka calls the originality of Tanikawa’s poetry “industrial beast” (Ōka; my trans.) because of his modernized lyricism, which his predecessors did not use. The concept of “industrial beast” is interpreted as going against tradition. William I. Elliot, a translator of Tanikawa, introduces his style of free verse as groundbreaking, especially for the generation familiar with traditional Japanese poetry like tanka (a poem of thirty-one syllables in fve lines) and haiku (a poem of seventeen syllables in three lines), even though this refers to just one aspect of Tanikawa’s genius. Instead of stressing the “industrial,” I propose that his “beast” quality is represented through the “dogs” in his free verse, which shows that traditional Japanese poetry can be revived, even in the industrial era.

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THE DISTANCE BETWEEN HAIKU AND TANIKAWA’S POETRY Tanikawa’s style of free verse, as Elliot points out, “called for rapt attention from a public fed on, and a growing generation of readers being reared on, waka and haiku” (“Timeless Tanikawa”) in the 1950s Japan. His uniqueness indeed prompted a famous poet of that time, Tatsuji Miyoshi, to write, “Ah, suddenly, from a far country, / this young man came along, / someone long-awaited in the midst of winter” (Miyoshi). However, his attitude toward dogs seems to be connected with the Japanese poetry tradition. Historical haiku masters such as Issa Kobayashi (1763–1827) were highly skilled in composing haiku to praise the relationship between animals and humans. For example, Issa depicts an expression suddenly fashing on the dog’s face as if it curiously listens to the earthworms’ songs (The Spring of My Life). A haiku without a kigo (a seasonal word or phrase) is regarded as incomplete, and a kigo makes haiku a more nature-centered form of poetry than waka. Although various animals, including cats, horses, fsh, and birds, are registered as kigo, dogs have been exceptions—then and now. In the haiku by Issa, therefore, its kigo is not the dog but the earthworms that represent summer. The fact that a dog is not traditionally regarded as a key term to express the season does not necessarily mean that this companion species is the “insignifcant other” for the Japanese. Rather, “the relation between dogs and human beings is too close” to make dogs seasonal representatives, as Seinosuke Kobayashi argues (Dōbutsu Saijiki; my trans.; 113). Historically speaking, Inu-Tsukubashu, one of the frst collections of Japanese poems, was published circa 1524. The Japanese word inu means a dog. However, in this title, it is used as an adjective to belittle itself, just as “dog” in English has a negative connotation that can be used as a form of abuse. Inu-Tsukubashu called itself a “doggish” collection to show respect to waka or renga, a more traditional style of Japanese poetry from which the haiku form was derived. Toshiya Kasai points out that more than a dozen haiku collections with titles that included the adjective “inu” were compiled from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. This usage of “inu” is found even in the haiku written by Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694), a great master of haiku: “So banal / my haiku poems, / even inu won’t eat them!” (Kasai; my trans.; 8–11). As this poem is a part of linked verses called renku, an old style of haiku written by more than two haiku poets, it needs no kigo. Instead of kigo, the reference to the dog is idiomatic and a possible subversion of the relationship between “inu” and Bashō himself. Similarly, dogs in haiku occupy an ambiguous position between nature and human society. While the haiku is generally regarded as a short and simple nature poem, analyzing its uniqueness sheds light on the complicated aspects of haiku,

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which can be expanded to what Tanikawa expresses through dogs in his poems. Dogs in Tanikawa’s verse, and haiku as well, might be autonomous, enjoying companionship with both human beings and their solitude. It is because they seem to exist outside and inside the poem, or as a subject and an observer, that the dog in Issa’s haiku listens more intently than the poet. Bashō’s dog can, therefore, eat his haiku if it feels like it. In “Sunrise,” for instance, Tanikawa addresses what dogs represent in his poems by wondering if it is possible to sustain their relationship without subjectivizing each other. “A smaller dog is following a bigger human restlessly and endearingly,” writes Tanikawa, pondering whether it is possible to compose a poem without giving names to the dog or the human. For the poet, the poetry itself should not necessarily require words, but “it is a human who has given it words” (Shi Ni Tsuite [On Poetry]; my trans.; 18–19). It is true that the poet feels happy to witness the companionship between the dog and its master, but he also denies empathizing with any of them by making himself a solitary observer. By “passively looking at the scene,” he wishes to simply be a poet without having to label the autonomous existence of the dog or the human.

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SNOOPY AND ASTRO BOY For some Japanese people, Tanikawa is recognized much more as a translator than as a poet, because he has translated Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts for over sixty years. In his poem titled “Snoopy,” Tanikawa pays tribute to the dog: “I love you, Snoopy / You don’t realize that / you are ‘world famous,’ but / you’re still dreaming of becoming a ‘world-famous’ surgeon, / fying ace, or golfer. / That’s the you I love” (Schulz and Tanikawa; my trans.; 34–35). Based on such sympathy, it is no surprise that the imagery of dogs in Tanikawa’s poems reminds us of Schulz’s attitude toward Snoopy. In a 1969 essay, Tanikawa argued that Snoopy is not only a “very human-like dog” but also a creature in-between dogs and human beings: What makes Schulz’s work different from other cartoonists is not the plots or jokes, but his sense of language. “[If I were a human,] I wouldn’t even own a dog!” says the dog, who entertains younger readers but allows older people to go through a little catharsis by mirroring his own, much more twisted self-hatred in this line. (Sanbun [Prose]; my trans.; 203)

Although Schulz was eleven years older than Tanikawa, they pursued their creative activities at the same time. Working as an instructor at an art school after World War II, Schulz contributed his cartoons to local newspapers.

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While the comic strip Peanuts appeared in the Washington Post for the frst time in 1950, fve poems written by young Tanikawa, including “Nero,” were published in a Japanese literary magazine. “Just as you cannot fulfll your responsibility as a doctor on the side,” writes young Tanikawa in his 1955 essay, “you should not write poems on the side” (Chinmoku No Mawari [Around the Silence]; my trans.; Part I). Like the young Schulz, who wanted to be a professional cartoonist and drew all of the Peanuts strips himself, Tanikawa has consciously written poems with a high level of professional ethics since he burst on the modern Japanese poetry scene in a literary magazine at the tender age of eighteen:

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Every walk of life might be social, but there are some that might be cosmic instead, such as religion, science, art, and especially poetry. If poetry is moral, it should be cosmic as well as social. (Chinmoku No Mawari; my trans.; Part I)

In 1969, Snoopy and Charlie Brown made their screen debut in the featurelength movie A Boy Named Charlie Brown at Radio City Music Hall. In the same year, they were introduced to Japanese readers through the translations of Tanikawa and other translators. Eleven years later, Tanikawa fnally met Schulz in California. The poet says he was surprised when the cartoonist, whom he had just met, chose to ask as his very frst question: “Where were you living at the time the atomic bomb was dropped?” (Tanikawa and Kai; my trans.). According to his biography, Tanikawa was evacuated with his mother from Tokyo to Kyoto in July 1945 because of the air raid. A month later, Hiroshima—which is almost 310 kilometers away from Kyoto—was devastated by the atomic bomb. Just before publishing his frst collection of poems in 1951, he wrote a poem titled “January 1951,” which is composed of eleven monologues from several entities, such as a cat to an atomic bomb, making an apparent comparison between the prehistoric darkness of the cat, which will illuminate our future, and the futuristic light of the atomic bomb, which can reduce the earth to nothingness. In the same year, the legendary Japanese cartoonist Osamu Tezuka also released a new manga series titled Ambassador Atom, a prototype of Astro Boy. As Toru Takeda points out, its story was based on the Cold War, drawing a parallel between Atom, the good ambassador, and the deadly weapon (Takeda). The next year, Tezuka started Astro Boy, titled Mighty Atom in Japanese, to appeal to a more juvenile audience. Moreover, in 1963, its television series began airing with a theme song whose lyrics were written by Tanikawa. Although almost all Japanese children in those days were fascinated with the optimistic view of the peaceful use of atomic power in Tanikawa’s lyrics and Tezuka’s animation, we understand now that it was originally based on their pessimism through the vision of “nothingness” in the fash of the atomic

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bomb. Moreover, Tanikawa and Schulz have similar, ironic attitudes toward the ambivalent use of nuclear power. While both of them loathe the evil of war, they do not hesitate to caricature human beings who are fascinated with the power of atomic bombs or H-bombs by using their representations of kids. “As the mushrooming atomic age flled up the front-page headlines,” writes Peter W. Y. Lee in his Peanuts and American Culture, “Charlie Brown and his contemporaries were at the forefront of the national worry in the comics section” (Lee 12). Lee gives some examples of Schulz’s direct reactions to the nuclear issue: on June 18, 1954, “a few months after the tests on Bikini Atoll,” the kids in Peanuts played “H-Bomb test” with a rope; on May 19, 1961, “even Snoopy, lying awake at night because of a new cat in the neighborhood, compares his inability to relax and fall asleep ‘trying to forget the H-Bomb’” (12). While mourning Schulz’s death, Tanikawa wrote a poem in praise of Snoopy’s proudly independent existence. “Back in the day, you used to be skinnier,” the poet tells Snoopy. He praises the Schulz’s dog for always being what it was and “as foolish but as wise as [human beings]” (Schulz and Tanikawa; my trans; 146–49). Even after their creator/master’s death, the dog and his friends keep living as who they are for their own sake. Like Atom, whose existence lies in between robots and humans, Snoopy keeps his distance from both dogs and humans. At this point, Tanikawa’s “industrial beast” could overlap with Schulz’s “very human-like dog.”

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A QUIET DOG WITHOUT BLIND LOYALTY In 2003, Tanikawa published Mickey Mouse by Night, a collection of free verse inspired by cartoonish images. “The Mickey Mouse by Night is more diffcult to understand than by day,” he writes in the title poem, “but he will be able to become a true mouse by escaping from the happy smiles this secular world shows” (Mickey Mouse by Night; my trans.). Judging from the poet’s attitude toward Snoopy, who has a fundamental similarity to Mickey Mouse as a “very human-like” animal, it might feel like something is wrong in his choice of the adjective “true.” If he imagined that this autonomous mouse would turn out to be a “true mouse” in disguise by night, this dichotomy between the wildness of the animals and the civilization of human beings found in the cartoon character would contradict the poet’s philosophy as analyzed above. The word “true” is easily nullifed in the following lines: Tanikawa’s Mickey Mouse could not escape being trapped in the world of cats and once again turned into an image whose archetype has already been memorized as a 3D image by the cats that ever lived. In the world of this collection, Mickey, Donald Duck, Pluto, and even Atom [Astro Boy] are never

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allowed to return to their origins; however, they are changed into “foolish but wise” companions for the poet. Donald Duck teaches the poet something philosophical by saying “quack, quack,” Pluto is barking “woof, woof” at the fax machine which keeps printing poetry, and Atom at age 103 nostalgically listens to the theme song of Mighty Atom. Here Tanikawa tries to caricature the nature of the animals in cartoons such as Mickey Mouse and Astro Boy as the intermediaries, refashioning the characters to suit his idea of a companionship that does not show mental dependence on humans. Especially in “Pluto Barking at Poetry,” Mickey’s house dog serves as a kind of alter ego for Tanikawa, who criticizes his own poetry. This may play the same role as “the dog suddenly returns and sniffs it” in the poem I quoted at the introduction of this chapter. Tanikawa’s dogs dare to have haughty attitudes toward printed words, partly because they can only criticize them by barking. The companionship the poet wants his dogs to provide is also shown in his 2020 poem “Shizukana Inu” [“A Quiet Dog”], which is a part of the collection of his latest works published serially in the newspaper since 2016. A quite dog lying down beside him in the poem, the poet says it does not belong to him, and “perhaps to no-one” (“Shizukana Inu”; my trans.). Inspired by the golden retriever named Reggie in the TV series Jessie Stone, Tanikawa presented this “quiet dog” as an ideal companion that stands on even ground with its master. Interestingly, his fondness for Reggie can be compared with the popularity of Hachi-kō in Japanese culture. Symbolizing the ideal relationship between dogs and masters in this country, the story of the purebred Akita named Hachi-kō has been the most popular one ever since it frst appeared in the newspaper in 1932, a year after Tanikawa’s birth: An old dog sits among the pitch-dark crowd of passengers at Shibuya Train Station of the Tōyōko Line, waiting for someone every morning and evening. He is an eleven-year-old Akita mix called Hachi-kō. He had kept his routine of waiting for his master, the late Professor Ueno of the Komaba Agricultural College, even after he had passed away in March 1926. Hachi-kō has rarely missed this routine, rain or snow, and waited for his master, who will never return, for seven years. (quoted in Itoh, Ch. 5)

Although some details of the article are not accurate, the story of a loyal dog that kept waiting for its master, even seven years after his death, became widely known and was published as a chapter in a textbook for elementary schools in 1935. Representing samurai-like loyalty, Hachi-kō was a symbol of Japanese dogs among Japanese people. More than ffty years after the 1932 article, the story of the dog’s life was adapted into the 1987 flm Hachi-kō and became

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quite popular. While the details of both the dog and its master’s lives were drastically changed in the flm, the adaptation helped reinforce Japanese people’s tendency to glorify self-sacrifce. However, it is not well-known that its screenwriter, Kaneto Shindo, hesitated to feature the dog’s loyalty when he adapted the story. Shindo, who was twenty years older than Tanikawa, made his debut as a flm director in 1951. His motifs, such as the death of the beloved in The Story of a Beloved Wife (1951) and the truth of the atomic bomb in The Children of the Atomic Bomb (1952), might overlap with young Tanikawa’s poetry. In the afterword of his novel, Shindo said he wanted to make a kind of buddy flm rather than a narrative of a dog faithful to his master (Shindo 157). Ironically, his adaptation still resulted in creating a fctional dog that independently showed his loyalty, even after his master had passed away. The popularity of Hachi-kō and the Akita breed seems to be connected to the extreme nationalism of the 1930s. Even after Japan’s defeat in World War II, some Japanese people continued to desire purebred Japanese dogs, perhaps to make up for their loss of national identity. In Yukio Togawa’s frst novel, Kōyasu-inu Monogatari (The Story of Kōyasu-inu) (1954), which pioneered the animal genre in modern Japanese literature, the main characters are looking for a purebred Japanese dog that was thought to be extinct and then adopt a traditional Japanese dog called “Kōyasu-inu” from a legendary bear hunter. While praising the dog’s loyalty and independence, they come to realize the limitations of keeping an almost wild dog. After the dog dies, they ask a taxidermist to preserve its imposing fgure, but their hopes are sadly crushed by the unskilled workmanship. The stories of Hachi-kō and Kōyasu-inu seem to be, in fact, similar to each other. Although the frst newspaper article about Hachi-kō’s heartbreaking wait for his master mistakenly identifed the dog as an Akita mix, this was immediately corrected. The purity of Hachi-kō as an Akita breed has since made the dog a national celebrity.2 It was commemorated in a bronze statue in 1934, and its body was taxidermically preserved for the National Museum just after it died in 1935. As Miyazawa points out, this taxidermy of Hachi-kō is said to have been changed so that the ears and tail ft the look of traditional Japanese dog breeds. On the other hand, the fgure of Kōyasu-inu from Togawa’s novel cannot be restored and has disappeared from both the land and people’s memories. Although the endings are different, both dogs have been used to represent the national identity of Japan. Speaking of an alternative identity, however, Tanikawa’s imagery of dogs also serves as a metaphor for the self.3 None of his dogs become an ideal representation of him; instead, they remain beside the poet but stay silently independent. Here is a 1968 poem titled “Inu” [A Dog], in which he sheds light on the negative side of the alter ego and tries to fnd paradoxical hope in the imagery of the dog. “There is a dog,” begins Tanikawa, “more miserable

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than me.” Repeating this frst line at the end of the poem, Tanikawa closes it with the eternity of the dog’s existence: “Always there, / beside me, / without begging for mercy, / he just—exists.” (Tanikawa Shuntarō Shishu Zoku; my trans.; 514) This miserable, waiting dog never complements the poet’s pride with its pedigree, reminding us of the “quiet dog” inspired by Jessie Stone. Pessimistically but resolutely, the poet keeps confrming that the dog remains solitary even when it is beside him.

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LET THE SLEEPING DOGS LIE OR TELL LIES “I’m short, bald and old,” writes Tanikawa in the poem “Self-Introduction” (Watashi [I]; my trans.). This reference to himself may be too self-deprecating for us to believe, but its insincerity paradoxically endorses his honesty as a poet. Takako U. Lento, a translator of his poems, argues that through passages like “All of what I’m describing here is true. / Once putting it into the words, however, I somehow feel like I’m telling a lie” (Watashi; my trans.), the readers “get a fair warning that [they] are being invited into the gray zone between real and unreal” (Lento 39). While the poet does not seem to suspect that he himself exists silently in this world, he wonders why the word “I” or “Watashi” (which means “I” in Japanese) sounds false once it is pronounced or written. This poem seems to be an echo of the lines I quoted at the beginning of this chapter: “If dogs could talk / They would tell lies like me.” Perhaps Tanikawa’s paradoxical attitude toward language, the main tool of poetry, often makes his plain style of narrative slightly complicated for general readers to understand completely. However, dogs’ imagery could help them make the poetry world alive and sometimes allegorical. Even though Tanikawa happened to be an old man who kept “no dogs or cats,” according to his “Self-Introduction,” he had some experience with dogs as pets. In his collection of essays, Hitori Gurashi (Living Alone), this poet confessed that he watched the process of his dog’s death: I happened to see the moment my dog was going to die. As sleet fell outside, the dog kept standing shakily on its legs. I thought it wouldn’t be able to get up once it fell. Though I came near, it didn’t look at me. I thought it was going to ask for help, but it didn’t show any signs of intending to do so. It seemed like the dog was doing something important so desperately that it had no time to take heed of me. It was like my dog was at a loss as to what to do. I didn’t dare help it, because it seemed like I would disrespect its dignity if I let it in the house, wrapped it in a blanket, and took it to see the vet. The next morning, it was dead, hanging among the bramble bushes. I had much trouble getting it out; its legs were tangled in the thorns. (Hitori Gurashi; my trans.; 71)

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In order to accept the death of a loved one, artists must inevitably depict the process passionately, it seems. However, Tanikawa’s stoic insistence that death itself is natural and cannot be dramatized unnecessarily reminds us of the painter Monet, who drew the face of his dead wife artistically but objectively. This attitude toward the lives and deaths of imagery and real-life dogs initially manifested in his debut poem. At the end of “Nero,” the young poet promises Nero that he will continue through life to answer all the questions he had asked. As a close companion of the poet, Nero made sounds where no one could follow. While hearing its voice and feeling its touch, he just wanted to let the dying dog lie beside his poetry. Perhaps someday, after he has fnished answering all his own questions, he can let his dogs tell lies as if they were his muse.

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NOTES 1. When the Kindle editions of his main works were published by Iwanami Shoten, Tanikawa permitted the addition of translations at the end of each e-book. The translations by William I. Elliott are noteworthy. While I translated some lines of Tanikawa’s poems myself to illustrate my points more clearly, my paper was highly infuenced by Elliott’s works. 2. A year before the newspaper article made Hachi-kō famous, Akita dogs were the frst dogs to be designated a Natural Monument in Japan. However, it was diffcult to fnd purebred Akita in those days, mostly because Japanese dogs had been mixed with other, stronger breeds of foreign animals since diplomatic relations opened in the mid-19th century. 3. Tanikawa presents the imagery of a dog that serves as a critic or his alter ego. This relationship between the poet and the dog reminds some Japanese readers of one between the bear hunter (Matagi) and his companion dog (Matagi-ken). Set in northeast Japan, stories of Matagi-ken have gained popularity in modern Japanese literature. From Yukio Togawa to Akira Yoshimura to Tatsuya Kumagai, quite a few novelists have praised Matagi-ken’s loyalty and independence as representatives of the samurai-like spirits of Japanese. Moreover, this is a part of the reason why A Dog of Flanders (1872), by Marie Louise de la Ramée, has since aroused the sympathy of Japanese people, especially after its anime adaptation in the mid-1970s.

REFERENCES Elliot, William I. “Timeless Tanikawa.” New Selected Poems, Kindle ed., 2015. Itoh, Mayumi. Hachi: The Truth of the Life and Legend of the Most Famous Dog in Japan, Kindle ed. Kindle Direct Publishing, 2013. Kasai, Toshiya. Inu-tachi no Saijiki. Heibon-sha, 2001.

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Kitagawa, Tōru. Tanikawa Shuntarō no Sekai. Shichō-sha, 2005. Kobayashi, Issa. The Spring of My Life, Kindle ed., translated by Sam Hamill. Shambhala, 1997. Kindle. Kobayashi, Seinosuke. Doubutsu Saijiki. Kadokawa-shoten, 1970. Lee, Peter W. Y. Peanuts and American Culture: Essays on Charles M. Schulz’s Iconic Comic Strip. McFarland, 2019. Lento, Takako U. “Introduction.” The Art of Being: Poems 1952–2009. Tanikawa Shuntarō, Cornell University East Asia Program, 2011, pp. 1–42. Miyazawa, Teruo. Akita-ken. Bungeishunju, 2017. Miyoshi, Tatsuji. “From a Far Country: By Way of a Preface.” Two Billion LightYears of Solitude, Kindle ed., translated by W. I. Elliot. Iwanami Shoten, 2016. Ōka, Makoto. Gendai Shijin-Ron, Kindle ed. Kōdasha, 2018. Schulz, M. Charles, and Shuntarō Tanikawa. Peanuts to Tanikawa Shunatarō No Sekai: Snoopy & Friends, Kindle ed. Kadokawa, 2014. Shindō, Kaneto. Hachi-kō Monogatari. Shogakkan, 2009. Takeda, Toru. “Kaku” Ron, Kindle ed. Chuōkōronshinsha, 2006. Tanikawa, Shuntarō. Tanikawa Shuntarō Shishu Zoku. Shichōsha, 2002. ———. The Art of Being: Poems 1952–2009, translated by Takako U. Lento. Cornell University East Asia Program, 2011. ———. Sanbun. Shōbun-sha, 2013a. ———. Jisen Tanikawa Shuntarō Shishu. Iwanami Shoten, 2013b. ———. New Selected Poems, Kindle ed., translated by William I. Elliot and Kazuo Kawamura. Carcanet, 2015a. ———. Shi ni Tsuite. Shichō-sha, 2015b. ———. Mickey Mouse by Night, Kindle ed., translated by William I. Elliot. Iwanami Shoten, 2016a. ———. Naked, Kindle ed., translated by W. I. Elliot. Iwanami Shoten, 2016b. ———. Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude, Kindle ed., translated by William I. Elliot. Iwanami Shoten, 2016c. ———. Watashi, Kindle ed., translated by William I. Elliot. Iwanami Shoten, 2016d. ———. Chinmoku No Mawari, Kindle ed. Kōdansha, 2019. ———. “Shizukana Inu.” Asahi Shinbun Digital, Feb. 5, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.asa​​hi​.co​​ m​/art​​icles​​/DA3S​​14355​​​258​.h​​tml. Tanikawa, Shuntarō, and Minori Kai. “A Report on Tanikawa’s Lecture.” Lettuceclub News, 2014, https​:/​/ww​​w​.let​​tucec​​lub​.n​​et​/ca​​mpus/​​lectu​​re​​/20​​14092​​5. Togawa, Yukio. Kōyasu-inu Monogatari. Shincho-bunko, 1959.

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Chapter 10

Of Dogs, Horses, and Buffalos in Cameroon Companion Animals in Cameroonian Fiction1 Kenneth Toah Nsah

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INTRODUCTION In the age of the Anthropocene, with alarming human-induced ecological/ environmental degradation and climate change, creative writing and literary studies in all parts of the world are contributing to shape our perceptions of the entangled relationships between human beings and other beings on Earth. More than ever before, the binary oppositions between humans and nature (or the more-than-human world) are straddled, dismantled, rendered obsolete, debunked, or questioned through art in general and literature in particular and within ecocritical scholarship (e.g., see Wenning and Batra, 2018). Instead of a singular nature, some scholars even stress the need to recognize that many natures exist, especially in Africa which is very a diverse continent (Moolla, 2016). In efforts aimed at helping to abate climate change, ecological breakdown, and mass species extinction, environmental literature now increasingly shines a light on the agency and voices of more-than-human beings such as plants, animals, and other beings which share the Earth with humans. As Moolla rightly argues, ecocriticism is relatively a new feld of research on the African continent, but “the natural world and animals have been active agents in African cultural forms for as long as these forms have existed” (9). Certainly, human–animal relations have long existed in both the ontologies and epistemologies of various African peoples as demonstrated by history, sociology, oral and written literatures, and so forth. Like elsewhere in the world, Africans have different kinds of relationships with other animals and the animal world: for instance, some humans eat other animals, some 169

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societies have specifc animal totems, some people do (or are believed to) transform into some animals, some animals (very rarely) eat humans, some animals are domesticated for food or as companions, and the list continues. Regarding the human–animal relationship as companions in Africa, this chapter explores the representation of companion animal species in three Cameroonian novels drawn from both Anglophone and Francophone Cameroon. I examine the dog as a companion animal and as a metaphor for the reversal of human–animal values in Patrice Nganang’s novel Temps de chien (2007).2 In the latter sense, through its role as narrator and keen observer, Mboudjak the dog appears to own humans and to be in the process of taming them. Gaston-Paul Effa’s novel Cheval-Roi (2001) foregrounds horses as companion species and sometimes problematically as romantic/zoophilic partners. Finally, drawing on Athanasius Nsalai’s novel The Buffalo Hunter (2008), I discuss how the author attempts to promote the human co-domestication of animals while pushing the boundaries of what can or cannot be considered as a companion animal. Furthermore, I ask whether further domestication of wild animals can be helpful as strategy of conservation in the face of alarming species extinction. My corpus, as delineated above, is a selection of literary texts in English and French which deal with different animal species. This selection underscores Cameroon’s offcial bilingualism by bringing together novels in the two offcial (European) languages of Cameroon—an infrequent practice in literary scholarship on Cameroon—and also substantiates the central thesis of this chapter. Principally, I argue that these three Cameroonian novelists complicate our understanding of domestication and ownership in the literature of companion animals because of the occasional reversal of human–animal relationships and because unusual species are sometimes represented as “companions.” To this end, I mainly draw on Donna Haraway’s concepts of “companion species” (2003) and “making kin in the chthulucene” (2016). The novels under study, to borrow from Haraway (2003), highlight dogs, horses, and buffalos in presenting “stories about relating in signifcant otherness, through which the partners come to be who we are in fesh and sign” (25). To relate with our signifcant others is to dissolve otherness or to question the otherness of non-human animals as well as human exceptionalism (e.g., see Tønnessen et al., 2016). In his novel, Nganang intriguingly demystifes human exceptionalism by portraying an uncommon reversal of roles and values between humans and dogs, as discussed below. DOGS-HUMANS AND REVERSAL OF VALUES Dogs are believed by many to be the frst domestic animals and their roles in human societies are numerous: they’re companions (pets), hunting tools,

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guards, and so forth. There is little wonder, therefore, that Nganang’s novel invests both aesthetically and thematically in a dog called Mboudjak, “supposedly” owned by Massa Yo. As Wendy Woodward observes, non-human animal narrators are no longer only popular in folktales or children’s literature; they are already gaining momentum in adult fction (235). Nganang’s novel, which employs a dog-narrator, is characterized by strangeness. Commenting on its English version, Le monde des livres asserts that “reality seems stranger than fction” in the novel. Extraordinarily, Nganang casts the dog Mboudjak as narrator; as companion and property to Massa Yo; and as brave and rational political commentator and activist. In addition to other human characters, the novel is peopled by more dog characters such as Virginie’s fenced dogs (138) and others whom Mboudjak encounters in their Madagascar neighborhood and along his way as he wanders across the city of Yaoundé. Thus, the novelist constructs a text where, in Haraway’s (2003) words, “Dogs and humans fgure a universe” (21). In this universe, Nganang seeks to complicate but also illuminate processes and issues such as animal domestication and their ownership. Mboudjak the dog-being and narrator of the novel straddles the lines between being a dog and being a human. At the beginning of the novel he asserts that “I am a dog” and later wishes Soumi (his master’s son) were aware that he walks on four according to God’s will but that his quadruped condition does not defne the limits of his being (13, 29).3 As a companion in Massa Yo’s family and despite frequent disruptions in their relationships (like when Massa Yo drives him away or when his son Soumi attempts abortively to hang him in a forest), Mboudjak has a life purpose which surpasses human comprehension as he wants to observe his master and other humans. Besides his determination to decide “the domain of defnition of things . . . [name] things and beings . . . and interpret the world around (him),” he pledges “to resolve the enigma of humanity” (48).4 As Mboudjak puts it, human beings dislike dogs like him who think/refect, preferring docile dogs who recognize human superiority as two-legged animals by taking orders from them, but he refuses to be regarded as “his” master’s dog (like “his wife”) because he wants to observe and narrate the lives of humans and other dogs in the slums of the Madagascar neighborhood in Yaoundé and beyond (56–58). Mboudjak is both a normal and unusual companion. He remains a loyal pet to his human master Massa Yo, although his master mistreats him (calling him names such as parasite) after losing his civil service job; his son Soumi even attempts to hang Mboudjak, but the dog remains friendly and loyal to the family. Mboudjak’s unconditional love for Massa Yo is further displayed when a prostitute steals one million franc CFA (Cameroonian currency) from the latter. While people in the neighborhood mock and nickname Massa Yo as Massa Million, Mboudjak expresses sympathy toward him, although he

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wrongly scolds the dog for not stopping the thief (318). Mboudjak shows unconditional love for his human family and human friends, but not in the sense of intending to “restore human beings’ souls by their unconditional love” (Haraway 2003, 33). Although Mboudjak suffers occasional wickedness from Soumi and Massa Yo and is aware of the latter’s fault in the case of his stolen money, the animal still shows compassion to him whenever need arises. Mboudjak’s compassionate loyalty in this case offers a clear deviation from Martha Nussbaum’s claim that “dogs’ inability to form the judgement of fault at times leads them to remain loyal despite cruel behavior” (152). Even beyond Massa Yo’s family, Mboudjak remains an attentive and caring human companion who would not allow a human baby get into trouble. When a baby whose mother is busy cooking plantains near a group of inattentive men playing a game catches a millipede and puts into its mouth, Mboudjak barks strongly, thus alerting the woman who abandons her cooking task and succeeds to remove the millipede from her baby’s mouth (240–41). That the woman insults the men as useless people who are incapable of keeping watch over a baby is telling because, as an unusual companion, Mboudjak is disturbed by the sense of loss of human moral values and the absence of political bravery which prevail in the novel. Apart from the philosopher-writer named the Crow (a literary refection of the author Nganang), most men in the novel fail to behave morally not only by neglecting a baby they should watch as its mother cooks, but by remaining indifferent and inactive in the face of the ubiquitous dictatorship in their community. After his unjust imprisonment by the Commissioner, the Crow mocks the men in Massa Yo’s bar Customeris-King for their lack of bravery and resignation to misery, alcoholism, and debauchery while Biya continues to steal all their money and save it in Suisse banks (204–05). Certainly, as Woodward suggests, Nganang’s novel presents a kind of positive anthropomorphism (see Woodward 238–39) where the dog narrator lampoons Paul Biya’s lethal dictatorship which has held the people of Madagascar, the name of a neighborhood in Yaoundé, and beyond under misery, fear, and near helplessness.5 Out of fear but also because they’ve lost their sense of ethics and communal life, Massa Yo and all his customers do not visit the Crow in prison although they witnessed helplessly as the Commissioner brutalized and arrested the Crow for daring to defend the innocent Cigarette Vendor. In anger, when Massa Yo offers free beers to the Crow as a sign of welcome after his imprisonment, the Crow rejects the offer, preferring to mockingly share his deception with Mboudjak (201–03). It is not coincidental that the Crow (named after a bird) decides to share his deception in humans with Mboudjak the dog. Both the Crow and Mboudjak are disappointed in the people’s loss of values as well as their weakness and inaction in front of political oppression. Both of them know that the power to turn things around is in the

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oppressed people’s hands. No wonder that the Crow comes to Massa Yo’s bar Customer-is-King one day with a note which reads: “Slums are the creative invention of humans. The misery of their environment is only an illusion. It hides the profound reality of the unknown which needs to be discovered: the truth of History in the making” (149).6 The following day, the Crow comes to the bar with a book he had written entitled Temps de chien in which, as he explains, he “has tried to write the story of the present, the story of quotidian life, to retake history while doing so, and to place back the control of History in the hands of its rightful heroes” (149–50).7 When the weak and naïve Docta suggests that the Crow be sent away from the neighborhood, Mboudjak expresses his sympathy for the philosopher-writer for what he describes as “pure professional solidarity with a co-observer” (157).8 The strong bond between Mboudjak and the Crow is revealed when the dog bites and insults the Commissioner as the latter arrests the philosopher-writer Crow (174–75). Undoubtedly, Nganang’s novel challenges the anthropomorphic binary between humans and animals. Yet it also suggests that when humans recede into fear in the face of oppression and lose their moral values such as Massa Yo who commits adultery with a prostitute in his bar (the prostitute who steals his money) (306–08), they metaphorically become worse than animals. In a novel which emphasizes animal agency, Nganang exceptionally but successfully deploys this implicit animal metaphor to satirize humans who fail to take control of their destiny when haunted by dictatorial oppression. In this regard, the climax of the reversal of roles and values in the novel occurs when Massa Yo, frustrated after losing his money to the prostitute, decides to scold and blame Mboudjak for not having caught the thief-prostitute. At this juncture, Mboudjak concludes that “Massa Yo was an animal, and I was not able to bark again” (313).9 Indeed, this excerpt provides an interesting response to Alain Mabankou’s question in his Memoirs of a Porcupine: “Afterall, which is really the beast, man or animal?” (qtd Woodward 252). When Mboudjak considers Massa Yo as an animal and loses his dog ability to bark, an interesting reversal of roles occurs between them, making it diffcult to say who is animal and who is human. Moreover, the reversal of roles and values portrayed by Mabankou and Nganang resonate with what I (as a poet under the name Nsah Mala) call the “sudden twist of values— / the beastifcation of humans and / the humanisation of beasts” (79). Under the Biya regime in Cameroon, moral values are increasingly declining while corruption, torture, and violence are on the increase, especially since the mid-2010s. Unsurprisingly, Mboudjak is more morally conscious and politically alert and active than his human master Massa Yo. Accordingly, Woodward opines that “the dog is represented as having a more ethical vision than his master” (253). In Nussbaum’s words, Mboudjak “looks like a morally superior being” (158) not only to Massa Yo but to all other politically inactive humans in the

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novel. No wonder that Mboudjak prefers to bond more profoundly with the philosopher-writer Crow. He aligns with the Crow as both of them share a vision for the political liberation of the oppressed people of the Madagascar neighborhood in Yaoundé and, by extension, elsewhere in Cameroon. The Crow’s bravery is unquestionable. He doesn’t only challenge the abusive Commissioner who brutalizes innocent and helpless citizens at the beginning of the novel, but also writes an open letter to President Biya, asking the president to visit the slums of Yaoundé and witness the people’s misery (344–45). Both Mboudjak and the Crow achieve their principal objective of triggering a political revolution among the people when the reckless Commissioner kills Docta’s young son Takou with a pistol (349). Because Takou’s bloody murder occurs at a time when political protests (including university students’ strikes for unpaid bursaries) are going on in the country, it becomes more climactic. The boy’s death becomes a unifying and energizing force among the oppressed people of Madagascar. An enraged and suddenly courageous Docta places his son’s corpse in a wheelbarrow and starts pushing it to the Mokolo Police Station in protest (352). Many other angry people from the neighborhood including Mboudjak and other dogs, all enraged by Takou’s murder, join Docta as they march to Mokolo (354). All hell breaks loose on the protesters—both those protesting Takou’s murder and those protesting against Biya’s dictatorship, but they remain resolute. As the novel draws to an end, Mboudjak sees protesters marching along the streets and chanting anti-Biya songs: “BIYA MUST GO!” (364–65). In this very act, the dog narrator sees the rebirth of humanity in the people of Madagascar and beyond as he confesses: Standing in front of the empty courtyard of Client-is-King, standing on my front legs, raising my ears high, letting my tongue hang down, gasping and opening my eyes wide, I suddenly saw the street before me again, reborn in the starving rumor, in the angry rumor of this mortifed Madagascar: human. And I couldn’t believe my eyes. (366)10

At this point, humans and animals have united in their quest for freedom and justice. “Both human and dog have been galvanized against injustice, as though both human and animal have claimed their agency simultaneously” (Woodward 254). Instead of the reversal of values, the novel thus ends with a newfound companionship between human and dog. Mboudjak seems to own the inactive people and succeeds, with the Crow, to tame them into revolutionaries eager to liberate themselves from dictatorship. Some other animal species—for example, the street dogs in Madagascar which exchange insults with Mboudjak (192–93), the street cats which deliberately give Mboudjak wrong directions when he asks for their help (231), and the fowls which

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argue with him about freedom (294–95)—seemingly reject Mboudjak’s call for a trans-species brotherhood and friendship. But Mboudjak bonds well with some humans such as the poor man picking from dumps with whom he successfully carries out a conversation (228) and with the Crow with whom he shares a political vision. By affording voice to other animal species (besides humans and Mboudjak the dog) throughout his novel and to dogs and humans in their quest for freedom and justice at the end, Nganang suggests trans-species companionships. These new forms of companionships seek emancipation for both animals and humans without distinction as they “shape each other throughout the still ongoing story of co-evolution” (Haraway 29). In this sense, the reversal of values and roles between humans and dogs becomes a strategy carefully employed by Nganang to advance the need for political emancipation and to formulate new possibilities within human–animal relations.

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HORSES–HUMANS AND LOVES While Nganang’s novel is largely concerned with the political emancipation of humans aided by dogs, Effa’s Cheval-Roi explores conficting and ethically challenging relations between horses and humans. As we follow the novel’s protagonist Louis’s travel between Europe and Africa, we witness disturbing scenes of human cruelty to horses at the same time as we perceive different facets of love involving horses and humans. Abandoned to his grandmother in Normandie who is shortly bombed to death during WWII, Louis experiences a diffcult childhood and relocates to Benin in Africa at the age of eighteen before his father’s death later compels him to travel back to France. During his stay in Benin, Louis incidentally has the privilege to witness a traditional ritual which consists of killing a horse-king (cheval-roi) as a sacrifce one year after the death of the king of Mola. This ritual has a striking similarity to the Yoruba tradition evoked in Wole Soyinka’ play Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) wherein a dead king’s favourite horse and his dog are slain in preparation for Elesin, the king’s horseman, to accompany his royal master in death. Nevertheless, Soyinka’s play does not overtly show the actual slaying of the two animals unlike the case in Effa’s novel. Actually, in Cheval-Roi, after some men throw themselves on the horse-king whose limbs have been tied, they proceed to slaughter it, at which moment Louis trembles and collapses as he feels a “veritable interior upsetting” compared to “an accelerated decomposition of the soul” (137).11 Observing the dying horse’s eyes, he notices that it is “crying its death” and runs toward the animal to hold it in “a mortal embrace” (137).12 As Nussbaum suggests, this scene shatters Louis’s sense of

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human exceptionalism and reminds him of his “own animality” (138, 140). Moreover, the episode reveals Louis’s excessive passion for horses (a passion he inherited from his father). Beyond that, the scene exposes a controversial cultural relation to animals which is acceptable to the inhabitants of Mola and its environs but disturbing to outsiders such as Louis and today’s animal rights activists. As earlier cited, Fiona Moolla affrms that ecocritical scholarship is a relatively new research feld while animals have played important roles in African cultures since time immemorial. Cheval-Roi seems to question the ritual practice of animal sacrifce not only in the fctional community of Mola but also in real-life situations in Africa and elsewhere. Personally, I was surprised in 2019 when YouTube took down one of the videos about cultural activities in my native Mbesa community in Cameroon on my channel, citing complaints from viewers about the maltreatment of animals. While it is diffcult to stop communities from their cultural practices such as animal sacrifce (e.g., the Kotokoli people in Mola in Cheval-Roi or my Mbesa people in real life), Effa’s novel suggests that there should be little or no cruelty and brutality exercised on the animals involved in such practices. After all, cultural practices are dynamic social constructs which are often able to accommodate or adapt to new social realities when need arises. One such social reality now is the growing movement for animal rights which might infuence some African cultures. It must however be noted that most African cultures could perceive animal rights as an emerging Western cultural reality and may not be obliged to conform to it. Although Effa’s novel does not have an animal narrator, it has striking similarities with Nganang’s novel, particularly as Cheval-Roi depicts horses successfully communicating with humans, especially Louis the protagonist who knows how to speak to horses (190). When Valeroi, the old horse about to be taken to an abattoir in France, laments its fate to Louis, he is profoundly touched and must save the animal, so he offers to buy and keep it.13 Valeroi laments: I have spent my life eating, hoping, regaining health, walking children on my back and fnally I am here undertaking the last journey in the corridor of death. And you, what are you doing? (173, italics in original).14 Again, Louis feels the barrier between him and the animal (horse) has been broken and he offers the horse some sugar lumps from his pocket. He proposes to buy back the old horse and has the impression of reconnecting with his childhood pleasures. Far from just revealing Louis’s love for horses, this scene sheds light on the cruelty and brutality that many animal rights activists decry in slaughterhouses nowadays. Shortly before this scene, Louis contemplates the abattoir and “its corridor of death” and frowns at what he calls “the automatic cutting into pieces of [animal] bodies” and “the industrialization of [animal] death” (171).15 Through the character Louis, Effa thus raises ethical questions about animal suffering, dignity, and rights, that is, what

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Sune Borkfelt et al. call “animal ethics” (1056). Apparently, the relationship between humans and horses as presented in the two cases above might be qualifed as one of hatred or maltreatment of horses by humans. Nevertheless, I would rather argue that these relationships demonstrate some kind of love whereby human beings love horses for what the latter can provide for their cultures and themselves. Horses serve as companions to humans in the two cases but in the end the horses are sacrifced either as part of cultural rituals or in order to provide food for humans. This conveys what one could describe as selfsh love, some kind of negative love. Despite the fact that Louis’s love for horses is also motivated by selfish reasons, his relationship with horses in the novel illustrates admirable companionship among different animal species. Unlike Nganang’s Temps de chien where dogs (the main non-human animal species) are largely used in a metaphorical manner aimed at achieving political aims, Effa’s ChevalRoi mainly portrays horses as king-animals, as special companions, and as romantic mates, especially for Louis. Right from childhood, Louis has a special obsession for horses. “His father had two passions: beer and horses” (60)16 and his father often took him out on walks with the old horse which had been bought with money earned by his irresponsible mother in the beer parlors where she worked. After his grandmother (to whom his parents abandoned him) is bombed in WWII, Louis travels to Africa before returning to Europe after his father’s death. The human affection that Louis misses in his childhood is found to a certain extent in the women he falls in love with but to a larger extent in his love for horses. He fnds enormous comfort in the company of horses and would not stand their suffering. As Elizabeth Yaoudam rightly observes, Louis is exaggeratedly attracted to horses to the extent of deriving sexual satisfaction from some horses (117). “The sensual gestures, the murmurs that they [Louis and horses] share in common, reinforce the friendship between them,” Yaoudam contends (118). However, it must be noted that Louis’s relationship to these animals amounts to zoophilia which is considered as abusive and exploitative by animal rights activists nowadays. Despite his romantic relationship with Agathe who owns a horse farm in Neubourg, the moments Louis spends with her horses almost dismantle “the distinction between humans and animals” (156).17 Although he admires Agathe, placing her above himself, Louis rediscovers his own animality, once more, through Agathe’s relation to her horses as he observes her kissing their rumps. Then Louis grows jealous of both Agathe and her horses, although the horses are his friends (163). Louis’s jealousy toward horses would soon transform into sexual satisfaction when he starts working with the horses belonging to Hannah, the young lady he falls in love with at the French–German border after buying the old horse Valeroi at the abattoir. When feeding Valeroi and other horses (belonging to Hannah’s parents, the

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Schwob family), Louis would pass his hands through their thighs and other soft spots. Because “Louis could not resist the pleasure he derived from looking at Fif” (the female horse), he ends up “introducing his fngers in her vulva in order to feel the degree of overture, examining her pleated udders” (191).18 Without doubt, Effa’s novel depicts horses problematically serving as objects of human jealousy and “romantic affection,” specifcally portraying Louis’s abusive, zoophilic relationship with horses. However, I argue that horses in the novel also play the role of witnesses of human romance and help to reignite human love in Louis. Effa thus portrays horses in complex romantic entanglements with humans which showcase different facets of love, amounting to what I call loves (in plural). To some extent, the Schwobs’ horses witness or celebrate the consummation of Hannah’s engagement to Louis. As the narrator says,

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Hannah joined him more and more often; they lived engagement under the sign of the horse, tender engagement which delivered in them a nocturnal kingdom where similarly to untie further and deeper to be renewed, here in the stable, elsewhere, in the great meadows or in the puddle of the upside down sky, among the gathered faces of Valeroi, Fif, Eclipse, so many blind links where to weave the light. (193)19

In their multifaceted roles in the novel, horses do not only witness the romantic engagement between these two humans but also demonstrate that they are autonomous and sentient beings not only existing for human desires, needs, and satisfaction. When the old horse Valeroi dies at night, Louis wakes up to meet an aggrieved community of horses in the farm. As he observes, “Usually, when they saw him from a distance, the horses would come running; today they were trampling around Valeroi, who was lying, his head tilted back a little. Fif, who came to lick his hand, went back immediately to join the others. Valeroi’s eyelids had remained open, he did not move, his gaze was empty, he died during the night” (197).20 This scene demonstrates that horses or more generally “nonhuman animals care and grieve; they experience compassion and loss” (Nussbaum 138). In a world where humans increasingly but erroneously claim that they are superior and almost indispensable to other species and beings, Effa asserts that without human beings, horses are complete beings which live, feel, think, communicate, die, and mourn their dead. Therefore, horses as companion species here have lessons to teach their human co-species, especially about and in death. Because Valeroi dies at night when Louis has been prevented by a serious cold from waking up to check on the horses, he regrets that he was absent to accompany his old horse in its agonizing last minutes (time of dying) the same way he was

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absent when his father died (197). Valeroi’s death offers Louis a possibility for what I have called “catch-up mourning” elsewhere in relation to the deaths of the dogs my brother and I kept and hunted with in my native Mbesa in Cameroon.21 Moreover, the old horse’s death reinforces the love bond between Louis and Hannah as the latter joins him where he is burying Valeroi and speaks to him in German out of consternation and confusion (199). She joins her lover in mourning his beloved horse: “Hannah’s tears, humid and hot, few on Louis’ neck. Revealed by suffering, brought together by it, they became each other’s support” (Effa 200).22 Although Louis used to doubt Hannah’s love for him, Valeroi’s death provides an opportunity for him to appreciate the sincerity of her love. As he mourns Valeroi, Louis, whose zoophilic relationship with horses could be considered as a form of human brutality to animals, wanders through his past and childhood, recalling the cruel female teacher who once told him he was a bastard and the brutality on Cheval-Roi which he witnessed while in Benin (200–02). Then the negative memories give way to positive ones as Louis remembers the food his grandmother used to cook for him (a symbol of human affection and care), decides to remember good memories such as “the breath of horses, Hannah’s love, her whispers or silences [in order to] challenge forgetfulness,” and gradually learns to live (204).23 In life as in death, horse companions teach Louis forgiveness and love.

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STRANGE COMPANIONS, UNTAMABLE HUMANS Among the three novels under study, Athanasius Nsahlai’s The Buffalo Rider is unique in at least two ways. First, it was originally written in English and represents the minority literature from Anglophone Cameroon (the former British Southern Cameroons). The other two novels were originally written in French, representing literature from the majority Francophone part of Cameroon (the former French Cameroun). Second, Nsahlai’s novel is the most explicitly environmental of them all.24 While Nganang’s novel largely concentrates on the political situation of Cameroon through the eyes of a dog narrator, Effa’s novel mainly foregrounds the fate of Louis, a young man abandoned by his parents to his grandmother who is bombed in WWII. Nsahlai’s novel, on its part, principally chronicles the fate of an old buffalo which decides to visit its land of birth only to realize how humans have encroached on their former animal highway (path). Told by a third-person narrator while mainly focalizing on the buffalo, the novel is a story of animal extinction triggered by humans in the Nso area of Cameroon. For this reason, Augustine Nchuojie has described it as the “Grand premiere” of Anglophone Cameroonian fction because it

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is “an eye-opener to the intrigues and intricacies that surround ecological discourse in Cameroon, the rest of Africa, and beyond,” thereby signaling “the beginning of the deobjectifcation of animals in Africa and African literature” (193). Nchuojie further contends that The Buffalo Rider unveils the excruciating and heroic experience of a buffalo whose attempt to go back to its roots meets with many obstacles from both humans and non-humans, as it discovers that the old animal highway has been encroached upon, depriving wild animals of a route and even food. “Despite the buffalo’s prowess in the face of adversity,” Nchuojie writes, “it is cruelly butchered by its human companion, raising a crucial issue in ecocritical discourse—the fate and place of animals on the ecosphere” (186–87). Indeed, in his desire to call attention to animal extinction Nsahlai successfully weaves a story of strange human–animal companionship which has far-reaching ecocritical implications. A rather unusual and old buffalo which was born so many years earlier on the Mbar Mountain in Nsoland and had migrated with its family to Bisola (a border town between Cameroon and Nigeria), decides “to revisit the lands of its infancy—those lush and succulent expanses of Gwan Mbar, the land of its birth, the land of plenty” (30). But its ride home would not be unperturbed as it realizes that human settlements have encroached the famous animal highway they used in the past and those humans do not tolerate any trespassing from wild animals anymore. As the buffalo approaches Jakiri, a frightened child defecating in the bush sees it and raises an alarm which galvanizes so many men to pursue it along the animal highway with the intention of killing it for food. Wounded by many spears and bullets from both amateur and professional hunters, the strange animal continues to run for its dear life until it encounters Baa Tanle, a former animal (dogs, horses, and bulls) trainer who is now a hunter. Baa Tanle always moves about with weapons such as spears, cutlasses, and knives for hunting, for self-defense against wild animals, and for defending their community against possible human aggressors (20–24). When the wounded, angry buffalo lifts him into the air with its horns, he fortunately falls on its hump and glues himself there like a tick—a derogatory nickname given to him in the past because he could gum himself on the back of the wildest horse while training it (24–29). Perched on the buffalo’s back like on that of a horse, Baa Tanle and his uncommon companion, the buffalo, go on a tough ride through dangerous valleys, hills, and forests for three successive days. Although the novel employs what Peter Mortensen calls “a positive way of thinking about anthropomorphism” (508) to depict the old buffalo “as an animal with a biography and not merely a biology” (512), the unusualness of the companionship between Baa Tanle and the buffalo is interesting.25

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Instead of common animal companions such as horses, dogs, cats, and so forth, Nsahlai explores the plight of wild animals by suggesting a strange companionship between humans and wild animals as a means of dismantling hierarchies and boundaries between these two animal species and highlighting the suffering and agency of non-human animals. Throughout their journey, many non-human, wild animal species are surprised to see a human being riding a buffalo. For instance, a frst lion tries to attack the strange pair (71–73), a shocked herd of buffalo fees when they see the “strange phenomenon” (90), and an angry group of gorillas gathers stones and fallen branches of trees in an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge “the insult on the buffalo’s back” (92). That a herd of buffalos fees them instead of attempting to save their kind while non-buffalo species such as the lion and gorillas struggle to dislodge Baa Tanle from the old buffalo’s hump demonstrate the novel’s appeal for a trans-species companionship and camaraderie. The attempts by the lion and gorillas reveal, in Nchuojie’s words, a spirit of “camaraderie among the animals to chase away the unwanted rider of their fellow animal” (191) which goes beyond species bonds/ties. But most importantly, the feeing of the buffalos, instead of revealing lack of solidarity among buffalos, implies that the herd of buffalos has accepted the friendship between their peer and its human rider. This is yet another form of trans-species camaraderie or companionship. What the novel suggests here is that for humans to safeguard other species and lifeforms on Earth, we must recognize our brotherhood with them. To borrow from Haraway (2016), we as humans need “to make kin” (1) and not only bound with members of our closest species. But would Baa Tanle recognize and heed this call to bond with the old buffalo? Along the way, both human and buffalo co-tame each other; Baa Tanle unconsciously tames the old buffalo but in the end, he rejects his own taming. As hinted earlier, background information on Baa Tanle indicates that as a young person he used to tame horses for riding, dogs for hunting, and bulls for ploughing farms (27–28). However, this expert animal tamer unconsciously tames the buffalo but refuses its invitation for cohabitation on the old animal highway. Quite early in the novel (chapter 3), while contemplating how to get rid of “the human burden perched on its back,” the buffalo regretfully recalls the “freedom of movement” that once existed on their highway (29). That the buffalo does not succeed in getting rid of the man on his back while they go through the highway can be read as an invitation from the animal to the human for both of them to peacefully cohabit the highway if they successfully co-tame each other. Despite the many murderous challenges (such as the rough hills, the dark nights, vipers, pythons, black ants, lions, and gorillas) which the unusual pair faces along the way, Baa Tanle

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actually recognizes the co-taming between the two of them until the end of their journey in the jungle. Apart from using possessive adjectives (“his”) to describe the buffalo as belonging to him, the novel unveils many instances where he accepts his friendship with the buffalo, especially because he discovers that his safety is on its back. So, after surviving an attack from a green mamba and black ants, he comes to the conclusion that his “survival was on the buffalo’s back and not elsewhere” although he claims that honeybees are his only “friends” in the wild (73). When the last lion attacks them, chasing them to the top of steep cliffs, Baa Tanle shouts and saves both of them from danger. At this semi-climactic moment, the buffalo decides to retrace their path, still carrying its “human partner. . .which now seemed to have become part and parcel of its being” (104–05). While contemplating whether or not to kill the buffalo, Baa Tanle acknowledges that the animal has become “more or less friendly” (106) and that it “no longer appeared wild and untamed” (109). He remembers that the animal had saved his life several times and was already more of a friend than he had earlier thought (114). The acknowledgment of the changes in the buffalo is a refection of changes in Baa Tanle himself, but he fnally rejects his own taming by brutally slaughtering the buffalo for his selfsh material reasons—fame and honor. In what looks very much like Okonkwo’s gruesome murder of his foster child Ikemefuna in Chinua Achebe’s famous Things Fall Apart (1958), Baa Tanle mercilessly slaughters the buffalo that has kept him company for three days:

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With all his strength and all his might, Baa Tanle drove the thirsty knife across the throat of the beast. The result showed that a vicious piece of work was accomplished. Only the hard bones of the neck of that beast, prevented Baa Tanle from completely separating the head from the body. In excruciating pain and in an instance of fathomless fright, the beast leapt high into the air whilst lashing backwards with its hind legs. (118)

This is the climax of the novel, as Baa Tanle fnally rejects the trans-species brotherhood and companionship of the buffalo in exchange for royal rewards from the Fon (King) of Nso. He forgets that the buffalo’s family had already abandoned it to him as a companion. He forgets that, in Haraway’s words, “companion species infect each other all the time” (29). Instead, he chooses to bring honor to the king of their community, to his family, and to himself. As he shamelessly summarizes it, “All these considerations [of honour] put together weigh far more than sympathy for the beast” (107). When it comes to his personal aggrandizement (honors), the already friendly buffalo suddenly becomes a “beast.” At this point, he looks beyond the buffalo’s invitation for friendship and only focuses on the decoration from the Fon who gifts him “a

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new gun, two new spears and a ‘drum’ or container of gunpowder” and the title of Fonkwah which means a “great hunter” (131), gifts which will only lead to more killing of wildlife as indicated in the epilogue. After killing the buffalo, interestingly though, Baa Tanle is helped by another animal companion namely Kpulaban, his dog. Kpulaban who was so worried about his master’s disappearance that he refused to eat (and even sheds tears according to some children) goes in search of Baa Tanle as soon as the latter’s wife unchains it (65). Shortly after he slaughters the buffalo, Kpulaban arrives at the scene, barking as it is frightened that its master is dead (120–21). But the dog discovers that he is alive, it stops barking and starts wagging its tail in happiness. Then they communicate and he sends the dog to go and bring some hunters from his community to help carry him and the dead buffalo to the palace. Surprising therefore, Baa Tanle who has just rejected brotherhood and companionship from a buffalo that should have become a new member of his family is rescued by another non-human animal family member—his dog. Although he relies on tamed animals such as his dog (and even the buffalo) for help, he is depicted as an untamable human being. Refusing to accept that these animals have also tamed him seems counterproductive to the author’s call for transspecies companionship/brotherhood and consequently animal protection. Upon deeper inspection, however, it is not failure on the part of the novelist. Instead, through this act, Nsahlai invites all human beings to accept our shared kinship and companionship with other species, especially non-human animals, in order for us to harmoniously cohabit the Earth. In this way, as Haraway (2016) puts it, humans can be able “to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (1). Nsahlai advocates strong bonds between humans and non-human animals, especially wild animals, through the process of co-domestication between Baa Tanle and the old buffalo thereby pushing the boundaries of what can or cannot be considered as a companion animal. Thus, the author presents further domestication of wild animals as a possible helpful strategy of conservation in the face of alarming species extinction. Certainly, some critics like Val Plumwood (1993) consider domestication as part of the male mastery of nature. But I argue that Nsahlai advocates a new form of domestication, what I call codomestication, which invites reconfgurations of human–animal relationships in more productive and symbiotic ways. Nsahlai’s transformation of the gruesome murder of the old buffalo into a rallying call for the protection and preservation of wildlife in an era of alarming climate change, ecological collapse, and species extinction is one of the fascinating aspects of his novel. While many environmental literary texts from around the Congo Basin focus on exploring the forest and forest resources in more generic terms, such as deforestation, this novel stands out as one of the few texts to foreground animal extinction.26

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CONCLUSION The three novels by Nganang, Effa, and Nsahlai foreground human–animal companionship in Cameroonian written literature, complicate, and expand our understanding of human–animal relations. They explore the symbiotic relationships between human beings and companion species as characterized by their co-evolution and ever shifting roles. The reversal of roles and values between dogs and humans in Temps de chien as well as Louis’s problematically romantic/zoophilic relationships with horses in Cheval-Roi have profound metaphorical and environmental implications. On the one hand, the wholeness, completeness, agency, intelligence, and sentience of these nonhuman animals are brought to the fore in ways that unsettle human exceptionalism and negative anthropomorphism. In this sense, as Haraway (2003) would put it, “[these animals] are not a projection, nor the realization of an intention, nor the telos of anything . . . [they are animals] . . . species in obligatory, constitutive, historical, protean relationship with human beings” (11–12). Fif and Valeroi who help Louis to rekindle love for himself and others are not just horses but sentient beings which draw both love and jealousy from their human companions. All these animals are actors, not just objects, in their coevolving relationships with humans. As we live, we must make sure they live too, the novels suggest. On the other hand, these companion animals share in the plight of the humans with whom they interact and do not stay indifferent to human predicaments. That is why a dog like Mboudjak, in a more literal sense, would militate politically for the liberation of the dormant and oppressed people of the Madagascar neighborhood in Yaoundé who have resigned themselves to their fate of misery in the face of dictatorship. Besides lambasting the people’s expression of fear and resignation to their fate, Mboudjak joins forces with the philosopher-writer Crow to galvanize the people of Madagascar into protesting to take back their dignity from the omnipresent dictatorship and misery surrounding them. Non-human animals do not only defend and fght for themselves, but also for their human friends, this novel suggests. Although Baa Tanle only partially reciprocates the friendship and love shown to him by the old buffalo, The Buffalo Rider teaches us that both wild animals and domestic animals are companions to humans. After all, all domestic animals were frst wild before humans domesticated them, although the history of the domestication of some species (like dogs) spans thousands of years. The strange encounter between Baa Tanle and the buffalo demonstrates the process of co-evolution and co-domestication between companion species and suggests that a companion species can be in the forest as well as at home. Taken together, these three novels are intriguing in the way they explore the reversal of roles and values between humans and animals and successfully expand our understanding and defnition of human–animal

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companionship in this century of alarming climate change and species loss in Cameroon and beyond. More broadly, the novels offer interesting insights and point to new directions in the age-old, ever-evolving human–animal relations in various African cultural practices.

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NOTES 1. This chapter is excerpted from my ongoing PhD dissertation at Aarhus University, Denmark. Thus, it will be included in my fnal dissertation as it is here. 2. Although Amy Reid translated Temps de Chien from French to English as Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle (2006), I chose to read the original French version since I operate fuently in English and French; consequently, all translations here are mine. 3. ”Je suis un chien.” 4. “. . . le domaine de défnition des choses . . . nommerai même les choses et les êtres . . . interpréterai le monde autour de moi . . . à résoudre l’énigme de l’humanité.” 5. Drawing on many scholars, especially Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, Woodward suggests that positive anthropomorphism involves “thinking with animals,”’ that is, our ability to utilize animals to “think through human experience and desires” while being aware of the real animal with whom we think in a “community of thought and feeling” (Woodward 238-39). 6. “Les sous-quartiers sont la forge inventive de l’homme. La misère de leur environnement n’est qu’illusion. Elle cache la réalité profonde de l’inconnu qu’il faut découvrir: la vérité de l’Histoire se faisant.” 7. “avait essayé d’écrire une histoire du présent, une histoire du quotidien, de saisir l’histoire se faisant, et de remettre la conduite de l’Histoire aux mains de ses véritables héros.” 8. “par pure solidarité professionnelle de co-observateur.” 9. “Masso Yo etait animal, et je n’arrivais plus à aboyer.” 10. “Debout devant la cour vide du Client-est-Roi, debout sur mes pattes avant, dressant haut mes oreilles, laissant pendre ma langue, haletant et écarquillant grand mes yeux, je voyais soudain repoindre dans la rue devant moi, renaître dans la rumeur famélique, dans la rumeur coléreuse de ce Madagascar mortifé: l’homme. Et je n’en croyais pas mes yeux.” 11. “. . .véritable bouleversement intérieur comme une décomposition accélérée de l’âme. . .” 12. “. . .pleurer sa mort. . .un mortel baiser.” 13. Interesting connections could be established between different forms of violence in this novel (e.g., cultural, colonial and sexual violence), but that is outside the scope of this chapter. For instance, the cultural violence meted out on the horse in the Beninese kingdom is, to an extent, similar to the colonial violence that France unleashed on Africans.

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14. “J’ai passé mon temps à manger, à espérer, à me refaire une santé, à promener les enfants sur mon dos et me voilà en train de faire le dernier voyage dans le couloir de la mort. Et toi, que fais-tu?” 15. “. . .le couloir de la mort. . .la mise en pièces automatique des corps, l’industrialisation de la mort.” 16. “Son père avait deux passions: la bière et le cheval.” 17. “. . .la distinction entre homme et animal. . .” 18. “Louis ne pouvait résister au plaisir qu’il éprouvait à regarder Fif . . . Il introduisait les objets dans sa vulve pour sentir son degré d’ouverture, examinait ses mamelles plissées.” 19. “Hannah se joignait de plus en plus souvent à lui ; ils vivaient des fançailles sous le signe du cheval, de tendres fançailles qui délivraient en eux un royaume nocturne où pareillement se dénouer pour plus loin et plus profond se renouer, ici dans l'écurie, ailleurs, dans les grands prés ou dans la faque du ciel à la renverse, parmi les visages rassemblés de Valeroi, de Fif, d’Eclipse, autant de maillons aveugles où tisser la lumière.” 20. “D’habitude, en l’apercevant de loin, les chevaux accouraient: aujourd’hui, ils piétinaient autour de Valeroi qui était couché, la tête un peu renversée en arrière. Fif, venue lui lécher la main, était repartie aussitôt vers les autres. Les paupières de Valeroi étaient restées ouvertes, il ne bougeait plus, son regard était vide, il était mort pendant la nuit.” 21. See “Try-and-See and Her Mothers: Catch-up Mourning for Our Dogs,” which I presented at the Animal Love Conference at the University of Toulouse ToulouseJean Jaurès in March 2019. 22. “Les larmes d’Hannah, humides et chaudes, coulaient dans le cou de Louis. Révélés par la souffrance, rapprochés par elle, ils devenaient à chacun l’appui de l’autre.” 23. “le souffe des chevaux, l’amour d’Hannah, ses chuchotements ou ses silences se lèveront pour défer l’oubli.”  24. As demonstrated in the prologue and epilogue, Nsahlai’s novel is overtly environmental in its motivation; I thus place him alongside other explicitly environmental writers in Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville such as Ekpe Inyang, Nol Alembong, John Nkengasong, Assitou Ndinga, and Henri Djombo, whom I study elsewhere (e.g., Nsah 2018, 2019). 25. Drawing on de Wael, Peter Mortensen argues that the increasing realization that humans are not “wholly self-possessed and distinct from other animal species” opens up possibilities to “re-envision anthropomorphism as potentially productive and benefcial.” Morten suggests that anthropomorphism should be analyzed “as a set of cultural practices and discourses” instead of approaching it in terms of “its scientifc accuracy or inaccuracy” (Mortensen 10). 26. Some examples of literary texts from the Congo Basin which largely explore the forest and forest resources as well as conservation include Ekpe Inyang’s plays The Hill Barbers (2010) and The Last Hope (2011), Henri Djombo and Osé C. Koagne´s Le Cri de la forêt (2015 [2012]), Henri Djombo’s Le Mal de terre (2014), and Assitou Ndinga’s Les Marchants du développement durable (2006), most of

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which have been examined elsewhere (e.g., Nsah 2018, 2019). A notable exception ot this is John N. Nkengasong’s play Njogobi Festival (2012) which exclusively explores the question of animal poaching in Cameroon (see Nsah 2015).

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REFERENCES Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Anchor Books, 1994 [1958]. Borkfelt, Sune, et al. “Closer to Nature? A Critical Discussion of the Marketing of ‘Ethical’ Animal Products.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28.6 (2015): 1053–73. Djombo, Henri. Le Mal de terre. Éditions Hermar/Arcano XIX, 2014. Djombo, Henri, and Osée C. Koagne. Le Cri de la forêt. Éditions Hermar/Éditions LC, 2015 [2012]. Effa, Gaston-Paul. Cheval-Roi. Editions du Rocher, 2001. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signifcant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. Inyang, Ekpe. The Hill Barbers. Langaa RPCIG, 2010. Inyang, Ekpe. The Last Hope. Langaa RPCIG, 2011. Mala, Nsah. Bites of Insanity. Langaa RPCIG, 2015. Moolla, F. Fiona, ed. Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms. Wits University Press, 2016. Mortensen, Peter. “‘Both Men and Beasts’: Rereading Karen Blixen’s Anthropomorphisms.” Orbis Litterarum 73 (2018): 506–19. Nchoujie, Augustine. “Landscape and Animal Tragedy in Nsahlai Nsambu Athanasius’s The Buffalo Rider: Ecocritical Perspectives, the Cameroon Experiment.” Ecocriticism of the Global South, eds. Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran. Lexington Books, 2015, pp. 181–96. Ndinga, Assitou. Les Marchands du développement durable. Éditions l'Harmattan, 2006. Nganang, Patrice. Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle, trans. Amy Reid. University of Virginia Press, 2006. Nganang, Patrice. Temps de chien. Editions Motifs, 2007 [2001]. Nkengasong, John Nkemngong. Njogobi Festival. Miraclaire Publishing LLC, 2012. Nsah, Kenneth Toah. “Eco-Cultural Sensitivity in John N. Nkengasong’s Njogobi Festival and Nol Alembong’s Forest Echoes.” JELLiC: Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture 4.1 (2015): 37–58. Nsah, Kenneth Toah. “‘No Forest, No Water. No Forest, No Animals’: An Ecocritical Reading of Ekpe Inyang’s The Hill Barbers.” Ecozon@ 9.1 (2018): 94–110. Nsah, Kenneth Toah. “The Screaming Forest: An Ecocritical Assessment of Le Cri de la forêt.” Ecological In(ter)ventions in the Francophone World, eds. Anne-Rachel Hermetet and Stephanie Posthumus. Special issue of Ecozon@, 10.2 (2019): 58–75. Nsahlai, Athanasius. The Buffalo Rider. NNAMB’S Publishers, 2008.

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Nussbaum, Martha. Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1993. Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman. Methuen, 1999 [1975]. Tønnessen, Morten, Kristin Armstrong Oma, and Silver Rattasepp, eds. Thinking About Animals in the Anthropocene. Lexington Books, 2016. Wenning, Mario, and Nandita Batra, eds. The Human-Animal Boundary: Exploring the Line in Philosophy and Fiction. Lexington Books, 2018. Woodward, Wendy. “Human Masks? Animal Narrators in Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle and Alain Mabankou’s Memoirs of a Porcupine.” Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms, ed. F. Fiona Moolla. Wits University Press, 2016. Yaoudam, Elizabeth. “Enfance, Exils et Imaginaires chez Gaston-Paul Effa.” Revue Petite Enfance (April 2013): 104–25.

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Section III

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PROBLEMATIZING COMPANION ANIMALS

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Chapter 11

The Plight of Dogs in the Country-City Gap Reading Chinese Dog Narratives across Genres1

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Chen Hong

A rapid increase in the number of pet dogs in Chinese cities since the late 1980s, and the growing prosperity of the pet industry as a result—global enterprises situated mainly in the advanced West have made a signifcant contribution to this—indicate that dogs have been increasingly suitable human companions and thus, have become part of the Chinese dream of a prosperous and harmonious future. However, there exists another huge group of dogs who have been removed from the human world and have often been treated in extremely cruel and barbaric ways. In fact, whereas most of the books and flms about pet dogs available in the Chinese market since the 1980s come from abroad, mainly from the United States, Western Europe, and Japan,2 Chinese dog stories and flms from the same period are mostly about country dogs and are found mainly in the subaltern narratives (diceng xu shi) of the poor and the powerless. More recent documentaries, especially since 2010, show that the life of both urban stray dogs and country dogs is one of poverty, suffering, and violence. A number of questions arise from these observations. How do we explain the radical difference between China’s city dogs and its country dogs? How can we understand this long-standing city-country gap in the context of the advance of modernization and urbanization? What exactly is the role of Chinese modernization with regard to changes in nature–culture and human– canine relations? With these questions in mind, then, I want to examine this “dog issue” in the perplexing context of the prosperity of the pet industry in the city, the growing number of urban stray dogs and the deteriorating condition of country dogs. In fact, some people already regard the presence of dogs 191

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in densely populated urban areas as well as newly developed suburban areas as a nuisance, even as a threat. The term “dog malady” (gou huan) expresses their hostility toward the animal and explains much of the abuse of and cruelty to dogs by individuals as well as some local governments. Others, mainly animal rights activists and dog lovers, are shocked to see this hostile attitude manifested in such radical measures as dog-killing movements and dog meat festivals, where country dogs are again the major targets. Of course, this “dog issue” is closely tied to serious social inequalities where now we see both humans and dogs as belonging to an interspecies chain. Through a reading of Chinese dog narratives across genres, this chapter then will argue that the promise of prosperity, security, and harmony is, for both those humans and canines who are at the bottom of Chinese society, nothing but a myth of modernization and urbanization—although in fact it is the people and dogs living in the country that suffer most. The texts to be examined in this chapter include the fctional narratives “Taipin gou” (“Peace Dog”) (2005), “Kuangquan shijian” (“Rabies”) (2002), and “Mengzhong kubian” (“Defense in a Dream”) (1987); the movies Kala shi tiao gou (Cala, My Dog) (2003) and Na shan, na ren, na gou (Postmen in the Mountains) (1999); and the documentaries Gou de zhuangkuang (The Condition of Dogs) (2001), and Shanxi hanhong feng kuang dasi shagou beihou zhenxiang puguang (The Hanzhong Dog-Killing Incident Caused a Dispute) (2009).

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DOGS AS “BARE LIFE” Statistics show that pet dog markets in urban China have been growing at an incredible speed since the late 1980s as the cities expand in size and population.3 As the pet industry increasingly becomes a vital part of Chinese modernization and urbanization, pet-keeping has also become a commonplace practice—one that more and more prosperous urbanites can afford. At the same time we have the ever-increasing number of stray dogs in the cities, how do we explain the various crimes committed against dogs that seem to become more vicious? And then how do we account for the role of the countryside in further perpetuating what might have seemed at frst a solely an urban illness? And how do we understand the various ways in which humans are controlling their dogs as being part of the negative effect of Chinese modernization? What will be obvious to readers of the dog narratives selected for this chapter is that dogs, at least in China, are totally exposed to their human masters and are being killed in the most wanton and cruel ways. For the fact that these innocent creatures, who are supposed to be our dearest companions at home, are treated like this and the perpetrators can often go without any punishment,

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they are what Giorgio Agamben would describe as “bare life,” as they are inevitably linked with “the state of exception” for not being qualifed to be members of the “perfect community” and therefore “may be killed without the commission of homicide” (9, 159). Whereas Agamben’s analysis of “bare life” is meant to reveal that mechanism of politics, or biopolitics in particular, which has caused the victimization of certain human populations throughout history, scholars such as Dominick LaCapra and Cary Wolfe apply this same model to animals. After recognizing that animals in certain circumstances are “bare or naked, unprotected life” (172), Wolfe proposes that we need to make “a distinction between bios and zoe,” which means qualifed life and bare life, “within the domain of domesticated animals itself” according to the different ways in which they are treated by their owners and by others (53, 55). Equally important as this proposal is Agamben’s realization that bare life is “a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture” (109), and this idea may help to illuminate the following discussion of how dogs can experience rapid and unexpected changes, positive or negative, in status and circumstances. In China as well as in most countries in the world, dog-owners, especially those in cities, are required to get a dog license to legally own the dog. For the dog, a license is vital in the sense that it gives the animal a sort of identity as the private property of the owner, which means it is then protected by law against any possible harm originating outside its home. Thus a dog with a license is supposed to be a “qualifed life” rather than a “bare life” as it cannot be maltreated or killed at will. The 2003 movie Cala, My Dog focuses on a series of events generated by this dog-license issue and thus reveals its complexity. Released in 2003, the movie is set in Beijing in 1995, the year the frst dog-keeping law was implemented. At this time the growing canine population was increasingly seen to be competing for living space with the growing human population. The movie shows the effect of the law on a common working-class family, which worries about losing its little mongrel Cala because they cannot afford the 5,000 yuan fee to get it registered—which is as much as the family can save in two to three years. Cala is fortunate, for its owner Lao Er is willing to pay for its license, and thus succeeds in ransoming it out of a dog pound where it will be killed. But as can be seen in the movie, many other dogs who lack the protection of a dog license are less fortunate. They are actually living in a space of dangerous uncertainty, or what Agamben describes as “a zone of indistinction,” between a “qualifed life” and a “bare life.” Once they drop into the latter state because of being deserted or stolen, all that awaits them is either death or the suffering life of a stray dog. But is it certain that dogs with both a home and a license are really exempt from the fate of living a bare life? As we shall see, they are not.

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That a pet dog’s life in the city could be flled with danger is made clear in the novella. “Peace Dog” by Chen Yingsong. Once a hunting dog and guard dog living in the mountains, Peace was brought to the big city of Wuhan by chance and suffered a series of misfortunes. It is through this country dog’s experiences in the city that we get a glimpse of what an animal’s “bare life” would be like in a totally human-dominated environment, one that is hostile to anything seen by the cultured urbanites as being wild, dirty, and unworthy. But the irony here is that the supposedly civilized city is also the site of bloody dog markets, where captured stray dogs and stolen dogs end up as fresh ingredients in delicious “dog-meat hotpots” (Chen 24). The narrator’s remark that “Dog meat is nothing but a dish, a seasonal dish, which is clear to everybody except dogs” is a sarcastic comment on the totally selfcentered eating habits of some Chinese, and a sympathetic description of the totally unprotected life-situation faced by the majority of dogs in China (Chen 24). Peace’s observation that some of the dogs in the butcher’s cages “were once taken extremely good care of by their owners and had lived a luxurious life” tells us that the fortune of pet dogs is far from ever being secure (Chen 26). The unpredictable fate of treasured pets who become mere heaps of dog meat is shown in this novella to be an all too common fate for the majority of dogs in China, whether they live in the city or the countryside, or whether or not they have a license. The truth is, dogs are totally at the mercy of human power—and this is just as true in the private sphere, that is, in the space shared by a pet and its owner, as it is in the public sphere. The fact that there is no law that protects domestic animals in China means that the owners can do whatever they want with their private property without receiving any form of punishment. Therefore, in “Peace Dog” we see Peace’s owner, Dazhong, taking full advantage of his right—as the owner—to beat his dog mercilessly and then sell it to the butcher in the dog market. So legally speaking, dogs in China are forms or examples of “bare life” in the private sphere, a space in which they have no protection at all from the negligence or violence of their owners. In the novella, Dazhong’s abuse of Peace is explained as the result of the evil infuence of the city. As a matter of fact, the city is presented here as a life-destroying hell and as such is contrasted sharply with the innocent countryside. Much of this contrast is observed from Peace’s point of view, for he often remembers the good old days hunting with his owner in the mountains or huddling together with other animals in the big family room around a glowing stove during the long, leisurely winter. It is these happy memories that eventually drive Peace to take a long journey back to his home village. “Peace Dog” then presents the long-standing opposition between city and country, or between nature and culture, which may exist more in our

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imagination than in reality. That is to say, the vast rural areas in China are far from being the kind of canine paradise that still lives in Peace’s memory. Another novella by Chen entitled “Rabies,” and a short story by Zhang Wei entitled “Defense in a Dream,” focus on one of the major threats for country dogs: rabies. Chen’s “Rabies” opens with two short sentences which convey a clear sense of horror: “Mad dogs are approaching the village. Two” (Chen 383). As the story goes on, readers come to see why rabies horrifes the villagers. It’s not only because it kills whoever or whatever is infected, but also because people have no means of protection against it. A vaccination would cost more than 100 yuan, which is simply too much for the destitute villagers to afford, and so those who are bitten by the rabid animals can do nothing but wait to die. One may say that the impoverished life of these villagers has plunged them into a state that is no better than that of the dogs and cattle they keep. But they are better, or at least better off, than the animals after all, because whereas all the infected animals in the village must be killed, humans cannot be: “One has to pay with one’s life for killing another person” is what the chief of the village tells the father who wants to shoot his mad daughter (Chen, “Rabies” 421). But this important rule, which everybody has to obey, does not apply to animals. The “dog-killing order” makes it clear that all unregistered dogs, the registered but free-roaming dogs, and the dogs that are suspected of being rabid are going to be “wiped out” by the local militia (404). Obviously, no one would expect the militia themselves to pay for all this killing. It is as if all the village dogs have been cursed by this order, which transforms them instantly into living embodiments of bare life. The implications of being a representative or embodiment of “bare life” in rural China are most explicitly brought out in the story “Defense in a Dream,” where we come to know that dog-killing has become a repeatable, evil cycle in the little town of the story. Whenever a new cycle begins due to some individual cases of rabies, all the dogs of the town, including the registered ones, have to be killed. The frst-person narrator of the story is so furious about this mass wanton killing, done in the name of the communal or collective interest, that he calls it “a massacre” (W. Zhang 205). A real-life version of these fctional canine massacres took place in 2009 in the suburban counties of Hanzhong city in Northwestern China, where more than 20,000 dogs were clubbed to death within one week in Yangxian County.4 In fact, country dogs in China have always been a form of “bare life.” The dog-killing order simply changes a suspended death sentence into one that goes into effect immediately. But especially since the advent of the new century, dogs have also been increasingly affected by the demands of city-dwelling consumers. Many documentaries produced since 2010 have reported on the controversial Yulin Dog Meat Festival held in Yulin, the

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second-largest city in Guangxi province in Southern China. According to these reports, more than 10,000 dogs are killed and consumed in one single day at the time of the Summer Solstice, which the Festival apparently celebrates. In fact, most of the dogs in the dog meat market were the close companions of humans before being stolen from their homes, more often in the countryside, and some were poisoned before they were kidnapped. Indeed, a dark chain of businesses has actually been formed, one which includes stealing the dogs, transporting them, and fnally butchering them. But with no law to protect these innocent animals as a “legitimate” form of life, such crimes, and such criminals, cannot be punished. It has been estimated that over ten million dogs are being consumed in China each year (“Foreign Media”). One can hardly begin to comprehend the horror of such a mass extermination, one undertaken simply for the gratifcation of the palate of only a small portion of the Chinese population. What is even more shocking is the way in which the practice of dog-meat eating has evolved from a small-scale, local, seasonal custom into a huge industry. The Yulin Dog-Meat Festival only became a so-called “festival”—thereby attracting ravenous dog-meat-eaters from all over the country—in the last ten years or so. Before then, the local people only ate dog meat at home. This practice itself was only picked up from the suburban rural areas when the city of Yulin began to expand in the 1990s (Zhang, Yurong et al., 66–69). The fact that unprecedented levels of dog-meat consumption have been achieved largely through the promotion of recently created dog-meat festivals, held usually in cities of various sizes, provides a Chinese example of “the deadly anthropogenic potential of the modern city” in the form of “the gravitational pull of urban consumption” (Daly 162, 148).

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HUMANS AND DOGS IN THE INTERSPECIES OR MULTISPECIES CHAIN The examination of dogs as representatives of bare life in selected Chinese dog narratives in the previous section showed how the denial of the basic right to life of the majority of dogs in Chinese society affects them. I will now examine in this section the infuence of Chinese modernization and urbanization on various inequalities that exist, not only as inter-species facts but also as intra-species vices. Here my questions include: How do the situations and conditions of dogs relate to or interact with those of people? And how does the dogs’ status as embodying “bare life” affect people, including their owners and their victimizers? By looking further into the dog issue, we may eventually be able to clarify the workings of the inter-species chain or what Donna Haraway refers to as the “multispecies chain” that links nature with

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culture, human rights with animal rights, and social and political conficts with ethical and economic dilemmas (42). The literary and cinematic texts that are being looked at in this article are usually described as “subaltern literature” or “narratives of suffering” (ku nan xu shi), a genre which began to emerge in the late 1980s. But rather than exposing human problems only, the narratives of suffering we are looking at here present the interconnected experiences of pain, suffering, and helplessness of both the humans and the dogs who somehow have ended up at the lowest levels of society. The novella “Peace Dog” manifests on a rather wide scale the connection between various forms of social inequality, most of which only appeared with the advent of Chinese economic reforms. The excuse Dazhong offers—one “becomes hard-hearted once away from home, like a serpent”—for having abused and deserted his dog, sounds just as absurd as Peace’s realization that, he found himself turning into “a wild beast” after coming to the city (Chen 3, 26). Rather than being a place of promise, potentially a topos that may become civilized, the city is found to be a breeding ground for vice and crime that often fnd the powerless, for instance peasant workers like Dazhong and homeless dogs like Peace, to be easy targets. The fact that Dazhong ends his life in an illegal toxic chemical plant on the edge of the city, where he has been held in captivity and forced to labor, tells us that “bare life” exists even in the heart of civilization and that the term applies to both dogs and humans. As my analysis of “Peace Dog” shows, the fact that dogs are forms of “bare life” has the same implications for all dog-owners, whether they are rich or poor, as long as they regard their dogs as nothing more than a possession which they can choose to indulge or abuse at will. But the dog-owners who truly care about, have a very deep feeling for their companion dogs, will fnd themselves in a very painful situation if they have neither the money nor the power to protect their canine friends. This is precisely the situation that one of the villagers, Tang Liufu, is facing in “Rabies.” He refuses to give up his rabid dog Heizi who once saved his life, and is determined to save the dog’s life at the risk of his own. His simple belief in the fairness of “a life for a life” is a direct rejection of the offcial view of dogs as worthless vermin that must be exterminated for the beneft of the human community (Chen 422). The narrator of “Defense in a Dream” is also trying to protest the government’s dog-killing order, which he regards as a violation of both the Chinese Constitution and the emotional bond between people and their faithful companions. The narrator even connects cruelty toward dogs with the inclination to be violent toward humans, and associates the slaughter of dogs with the killing of any living thing, even a plant. In this narrative, the negative effect of repetitive dog-killing on both individual humans and human society gives rise to the narrator’s clear vision of the multispecies chain. Yet despite

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his eloquent and forceful protest, which turns out to be a futile defense as he made it in his dream, his dog is found dead in his own yard, killed by somebody who doesn’t even bother to notify the narrator—the dog’s legal owner—before taking the dog’s life. In fact, the “dog issue” in both this story and “Rabies” points to related problems in contemporary rural China; these include mass poverty, destruction of the environment, an unsound legal system, and the oppressive rule of government offcials. “Defense in a Dream” also makes clear that the country is in no way better than the city in terms of both its natural and its social environment. Indeed, in terms of economic and administrative issues, the country is far worse than the city, which at least partly explains the frequent occurrence of mass dog-killings and other unscrupulous crimes against dogs in the countryside. A dog as a form of “bare life” will be vulnerable to terrible acts of torture and murder on the part of those who take delight in torturing and killing dogs and, more often than not, also to those who try to make a proft out of the dog business. Guo Peng, a Chinese sociologist who has spent years investigating the Chinese dog meat industry, discovered that this whole industry actually depends on the criminal act of stealing dogs, mainly large guard dogs from the countryside. In his reports he cites examples of criminal gangs who take dogs away by force right in front of their owners, threaten witnesses and, in places where there are no other dogs to sound a warning, also break into households to steal other animals such as goats and cows (Guo). One can easily imagine the serious social problems and conficts these actions are likely to cause. In fact, in the last fve years or so, there have been many news reports in both written and visual form about the ferce conficts between villagers and dog-stealing gangsters, conficts which often ended in the deaths or injuries mainly of the villagers.5 In one case, three men killed a taxi driver simply to get his car in order to transport stolen dogs. For these criminals, driven by their craze for money, it seems that neither the value of human life nor that of animal life is equal to the value of money itself. Yet one senses a strange egalitarianism here inasmuch as animals and humans are apparently placed on the same level, if not thus identifed. The butcher in “Peace Dog” treats all dogs the same regardless of their breed and market value, because after all they are “all a chunk of meat” (Chen 16). This butcher’s attitude is common among those participating in “the chain” of the dog meat business, from the thieves at one end, to the consumers at the other. It is also against this attitude that the animal protection activists fght, those involved in highway-dog rescues and dog meat festival protests. Fundamentally it may seem that here we have the arrogance of the strong toward the weak, an attitude which originates, as the narrator in “Defense in a Dream” believes, in “the evil corrupted part of human nature,” which may result in the irrational, unrestrained destruction of

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life (W. Zhang 199). Here then we need to remember what Wolfe says, following the lead of Gayatri Spivak: “If we allow the human/animal distinction to remain intact . . . then the machinery of speciesism and animalization will be available to use against various subjugated groups, animal or human” (qtd. in Cole 102; ellipsis mine; emphasis in original).

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CHINESE DOG NARRATIVES AS AN ANTI-MYTH OF MODERNITY The interspecies chain linking humans and dogs which we are looking at here has always existed, but what has turned it into an evil chain full of blood and tears, madness and despair is something, or rather two things, that have appeared rather recently in Chinese society: modernization and urbanization. Modernization emerged in China when the country began to open its doors to the West and to Western infuence in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet it is generally believed that modernization did not really begin to take hold in China until the 1980s, as a series of important policies concerning economic, political, and social reforms were established by the central government between 1978 and 1985.6 Closely related to economic and social modernization, urbanization quickly followed. Beginning from the 1990s there was large-scale migration of the rural population into cities, and a signifcant and continuing drop in the number of rural residents.7 As earlier in the West, Chinese modernization and urbanization did not always have their desired effects. There was a widening gap between the fast-growing cities and the virtually forgotten countryside, and also an increasing gap between the income of the richest and poorest urbanites. As for the latter, we also saw an ever-larger group made up of the urban poor, the so-called “bottom class” that included migrant peasant workers and that was increasingly beset with serious social, economic, and psychological problems. Here then we come back to the issue of killing dogs in order to sell their meat, and to other aspects of the Chinese “dog problem” discussed at length above. The movie Cala, My Dog presents urban pets as both a result of modernization and a remedy to the maladies that come with it. In “Why Look at Animals?,” John Berger claims that practices such as pet-keeping became increasingly popular in modern Western cities due to “the alienation of modern citizens from a working engagement with nature,” for indeed these practices refect “the isolation of urban dwellers” (1). Yi-fu Tuan agrees that we may see our increasingly sentimentalized view of domestic animals as being the result of “the growing distance between people and nature” in modern Western society (112).

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Although the practice of keeping urban pets appeared much later in Chinese society than in the West, it also seems to have arisen from a drastic change in human–nature relations beginning from the launch of “the state-sponsored modernization campaign” in the 1980s (Lu 2). But this more general change can only partly explain the Chinese pet phenomenon, and yet as far as Cala, My Dog is concerned, such a change best exemplifes what Erica Fudge said about dog stories: they tell of “a [human] desire for completion—for selfknowledge, self-possession, security and stability” (37). It is exactly this kind of desire that we see in Lao Er when he admits that “it is only before Cala that I feel like a man.” Yet it is clear that Lao Er’s determination to protect his dog comes as much from his concern for the animal as it does from his almost desperate need to maintain a sense of authority in his family, and a sense of self-respect before others in an era that did not promise security and stability to a common urban laborer like him. The story of Lao Er and Cala supports Berger’s view that the pet “completes” its owner (25). Other stories offer examples of such a completion in different ways. One episode in “Peace Dog” tells of a middle-aged, laidoff worker, once an “educated youth” during the Cultural Revolution, who wanted to live in the high mountains where he had grown up and also where Peace, his dog, came from. The movie Postmen in the Mountains is often viewed as a countryside version of Cala, My Dog. It shows how the deep emotional bond between a retired country postman and his old dog helps the man, and later his son, to maintain a precious sense of inner peace in an age when traditional, rural ways of life even in those remote mountain areas cannot escape the effects of urbanization. In the last two stories, the dog’s close association with a peaceful and harmonious country life makes it an effective psychological weapon in the battle against the threat of modernization, where the latter is a force that pushes people further and further away from nature—both inner (human) nature and outer (wild) nature. In fact, this psychological need for animal companionship is hardly a new or modern invention. When Berger speaks of “the loneliness of man as a species” and of our need of a connection with non-human animals, he suggests that the human desire for the companionship of animals has been a deep-seated psychological need from the days of the earliest human communities on the planet. This is because, through our “passage from nature to culture,” animals have always acted as “an intercession between man and his origin [in nature]” (15; emphasis in original). In other words, animals such as dogs answer a double need of human psychology inasmuch as they represent both (our) outer and inner nature. However, having acknowledged the natural bond between humans and their companion animals, a bond which has to some degree been intensifed by modernization, how can we explain all the violence against animals, the

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torture of animals that we have seen in Chinese dog narratives set in an age which is supposed to be guided by the principle of rationality? The answer, I think, lies in our modern faith in pure reason. Some Chinese scholars regard pure reason, or abstract rationality, as an important cause of “the predicament of Chinese modernization” (Z. Wang 6). As far as the Chinese dog issue is concerned, pure reason manifests itself in two major forms: institutional regulative powers and a money-oriented utilitarianism. Most of the literary and cinematic texts discussed so far show the sporadic working of institutional powers, often in response to emergencies either in the form of new dogkeeping regulations or cases of rabies. Rather than exploring the mechanism of these powers, these texts tend to focus more on the ways in which institutional powers harm and even destroy humans and their companion dogs, with a particular emphasis on the emotional devastation suffered by the dog owners. “Defense in a Dream” stands out as it presents us with the most direct attack on that terrible “inhumanity”—one that humans are all too capable of—which allows for the total denial of the value of animal life and the total disregard of human feelings. Moreover, as we see in the story “Rabies,” what is hidden behind the dogkilling practices (movements, rampages) and other social conficts is a distortion of human nature brought about by a government’s attempts to regularize nature, even to regularize or control the principle of pure reason. Thus when the character Zhao Zijie in “Rabies” refects on his eighteen-year career as chief of the village, he realizes that what he lost in helping the government to put the village in “perfect order” was something truly valuable: “a deeprooted life grown out of a warm and close interpersonal relationship and a spontaneous kindness towards others” (Chen, Global 437). He also realizes that the offcial explanations he gave to the villagers were “reasons from outside,” which could only create a distance between himself and the others (438). While Chief Zhao’s epiphany reveals to him that pure reason may be both domineering and dehumanizing, documentaries focusing on the dog-meat industry expose its extreme utilitarianism, its ability to make a few people— the “insiders” or those already “at the top”—rich very quickly, with no concern with ethics or with (at least some) existing laws. The point is that what we really see in people’s blind pursuit of money is the distortion of human nature. The Capital Society for Animal Protection uploaded on its offcial blog several photos from the 2016 Yulin Dog-Meat Festival and described the opening day of the festival, June 21, as “a day of national shame produced by the market-economy.”8 The detrimental role of the market economy in misguiding people, perhaps by warping or distorting their naturally positive or empathy-based judgments, becomes obvious in the description of the festival. What is less obvious is that

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not only individuals are being misled but also institutions of various kinds and at several levels. The fact that Yulin Dog-Meat Festival was once publicly promoted under the pretext of being a cultural tradition tells us that the festival was tacitly, if not openly, supported by the local government. Dogs thus become doubly victimized in this utilitarian society, both as insignifcant forms or manifestations of “bare life” and as mere objects with which those in power can make quick and easy money. The famous Chinese movie director Jia Zhangke produced a very short documentary entitled The Condition of Dogs in 2001. For the total of fve minutes of the flm, the camera mostly focuses on a puppy’s head popping out of a hole in a big sack, which holds several other puppies as well, and it is clear that all of them are about to be sold, abandoned to a still-unknown destiny. The use of long takes effectively brings out the sense of helplessness that one observes in the puppy’s vague look and also understands as the alltoo-real and general condition of dogs in today’s China. It is through dog tales, the ones discussed above and many others not included here, that we try to make sense of today’s Chinese society, and to examine its failings with regard to human–canine relations. We may also see the (lack of) human–dog connections as a refection of human–nature relations in the ever-expanding modernization and urbanization of China. Perhaps we, the Chinese who already feel that we are drowning in the torrents of modernization, must avoid being carried away by the dangerous undercurrents. We must keep remembering that nature does matter, and that it deserves to be respected in its various manifestations—natural beings, plants, and animals, and the natural instincts of humans.

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NOTES 1. The paper was originally published in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 43.1, pp. 97–11, doi: 10.6240/concentric​.lit​.2017​.43​.​1​.06. The present paper is a shortened version of the original, with a few data updated. 2. Dog stories translated into Chinese or dog movies released in China include 101 Dalmatians, Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, Quill, Hachiko, Eight Below, Cats and Dogs, Marley and Me, and Ten Promises to My Dog among many others. 3. Take Beijing for example: the number of registered dogs in 2009 was nearly one million, 6 times more than it was in 2003 (“A Twenty-Year Change”). In Chengdu, one of the most prosperous cities in Southwestern China, the increase in the number of pet dogs has been even more rapid, with a tenfold increase between 2003 and 2007 (Regulations). The most updated data provided in 2018 Survey on Chinese Pet Industry carried out by Frost & Sullivan show that the annual sales of the industry in 2018 reached an amazing total of over twenty-four billion U.S. dollars, which is more

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than three times of the total of 2013, and the proportion of pet-owning families has increased 43.9% in fve years (“The Chinese Pet Industry”). 4. See Han Zhong Dog-killing Incident Caused Dispute. 5. There were at least 224 reports about the deaths or injuries of villagers caused by the dog-stealing gangs in the single year of 2012 (Guo). 6. A generally-accepted view of the process of Chinese modernization takes the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party, held in 1978, as a seminal event marking the real beginning of Chinese modernization. 7. Statistics show a large and rapid rise in the urban population since 1978, from 17.92% in 1978 to 45.68% in 2008 (Y. Wang). More recent and unoffcial statistics show that the Chinese rural population has dropped to less than half since 2011 (Tong and Wu). 8. The mentioned photos and quoted expression are available on the miniblog of The Capital Society for Animal Protection, dated June 20, 2016 (“Survey”).

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REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press, 1998. “Beijing yangquan guiding ershi nian bianqian: cong jinyang dao xianyang zai dao fangkuan” 北京养犬规定20年变迁：从禁养到限养再到放宽(“A Twenty-Year Change of Dog Laws in Beijing: from Tight to Loose Control”). Sohu News, Tencent, 14 Jan. 2013, news​.sohu​.com​/20130114​/n363368185​.​shtml. Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? Penguin, 2009, pp. 12–37. Cats and Dogs. Dir. Lawrence Guterman. Warner Bros., 2001. Chen, Yingsong 陈应松. “Kuangquan shijian” 狂犬事件 (“Rabies”). Taiping gou太平狗 (Peace Dog). Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 2006a, pp. 383–447. ———. “Taiping gou” 太平狗 (“Peace Dog”). Taiping gou太平狗 (Peace Dog). Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 2006b, pp. 1–58. Chengdou shi Yangquan guanli tiaoli gougou shangjie yao “guapai”《成都市养犬管理条例》狗狗上街要“挂牌” (Regulations on Dog Keeping in Chengdu: Dogs Required to Wear Dog Tag When Taking a Walk). Truth in Thirty-Minutes, Episode 141. Chengdu TV Studio, News Channel. 22 June 2016, my​.tv​.sohu​.com​/us​/4749921​/4481721​​.shtml. Cole, Lucinda, et al. “Speciesism, Identity Politics, and Ecocriticism: A Conversation with Humanists and Posthumanists.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 52, no. 1, 2011, pp. 87–106. 101 Dalmatians. Dir. Stephen Herek. Walt Disney, 1996. Daly, Nicholas. The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York. Cambridge University Press, 2015. “Diaocha xianshi liucheng minzhong huyu qvdi gouroujie” 调查显示六成民众呼吁取缔“狗肉节”. (“Survey Shows Sixty-percent of the People Surveyed Support Banning the Dog-meat Festival”). Miniblog of The

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Capital Society for Animal Protection. 22 June 2016, weibo​​.com/​​18759​​36191​​/ DB6m​​tDWdd​​?from​​=page​​_1006​​06187​​59361​​91​_pr​​ofle​​&wvr=​​6​&mod​​=weib​​otime​​ &type​​=comm​​ent#​_​​rnd14​​87944​​19820​​0. Eight Below. Dir. Frank Marshall. Walt Disney, 2006. Fudge, Erica. “The Dog, the Home and the Human and the Ancestry of Derrida’s Cat.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 29, no. 1–2, 2007, pp. 37–54. Gou de zhuangkuang狗的状况 (The Condition of Dogs). Dir. Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯. 2001. Guo, Peng 郭鹏. “Guo peng: Guanyu zhongguo gou wenti da mao shou long jiaoshou” 郭鹏：关于中国狗问题答毛寿龙教授 (“Guo Peng: On the Chinese Dog Issue in Response to Prof. Mao Shoulong”). Blog of a Philosophical Animal. 22 June 2016, blog.​​sina.​​com​.c​​n​/s​/b​​log​_6​​28abc​​35010​​2​wtf1​​.html​. Hachiko. Dir. Seijiro Koyama. Mitsui Company Ltd. & Tokyu Group, 1987. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Homeward Abound: The Incredible Journey. Dir. Duwayne Dunham. Walt Disney, 1993. Kala shi tiao gou卡拉是条狗 (Cala, My Dog). Dir. Lu Xuechang 路学长. Perf. Ge You, and Ding Jiali 葛优、丁嘉丽. Huayi Brothers, 2003. Lu, Sheldon H., and Jiayan Mi. Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge. Hong Kong University Press, 2009. Marley and Me. Dir. David Frankel. Twenties Century Fox, 2008. Na shan, na ren, na gou那山、那人、那狗, (Postmen in the Mountains). Dir. Huo Jianqi 霍建起. Xiaoxiang Film Studio & Beijing Film Studio, 1999. Quill. Dir. Yôichi Sai. Eisei Gekijo et al., 2004. Shanxi hanhong feng kuang dasi shagou beihou zhenxiang puguang陕西汉中疯狂大肆杀狗背后真相曝光（Han Zhong Dog-killing Incident Caused Dispute). Truth in Thirty Minutes. Episode 294. Sohu, n.d. 22 June 2016, tv​.sohu​.com​/20130513​/n375723635​.​shtml. Ten Promises to My Dog. Dir. Katsuhide Motoki. Dentsu et al., 2008. Tong, Yufeng 童玉芬, and Wu Yu 武玉. “Zhongguo chengshi hua Jincheng zhong de renkou tedian yu wenti”中国城市化进程中的人口特点与问题 (“Features and Problems of Population Change in the Course of Chinese Urbanization”). Population and Development, vol. 19, no. 4, 2013, pp. 37–45. Tuan, Yi-fu. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. Yale University Press, 1984. “2018 nian zhongguo chongwu hangye shichang guimo da 1722 yi yuan, zhongguo chongwuzhu nianjun hua 3969 yuan yangchong” 2018年中国宠物行业市场规 模达1722亿元，中国宠物主年均花3969元养宠 (“The Chinese Pet Industry Made a Total of 172.2 Billion Yuan in 2018, with an Annual Expenditure of Three Thousand and Sixty Nine Yuan for an Average Pet-owner”). Finance World. 29 Jan. 2019, baiji​​ahao.​​baidu​​.com/​​s​?id=​​16239​​89664​​80508​​0760&​​wfr​=s​​pi​der​​&for=​​pc. “Waimei cheng zhongguo nuegou chigou xianxiang yanzhong” 外媒称中国虐狗吃狗现象严重(“Foreign Media Reports on Severe Abuse and Eating of Dogs”). Can Kao Xiao Xi. 19 Sept. 2013, china​​.cank​​aoxia​​oxi​.c​​om​/20​​13​ /09​​10​/26​​9​622.​​shtml​.

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Wang, Yu 王宇. “Zhongguo chengshi hua jincheng yu xianzhuang fenxi” 中国城市化进程与现状分析 (“Analysis of the Course and Present State of Chinese Urbanization”). Chinese Urban Economy, no. 12, 2011, pp. 9–10. Wang, Zhihe 王治河. “Zhongguo xiandaihua kunjing yu dierci qimeng”中国现代化困境与第二次启蒙 (“The Dilemma of Chinese Modernization and the Second Enlightenment”). Marxism and the Reality, no. 2, 2007, pp. 6–9. Wolfe, Cary. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Zhang, Wei 张炜. Mengzhong kubian 梦中苦辩 (“Defense in a Dream”). Hei sha yang 黑鲨洋（The Sea of Black Sharks). Chunfeng Literature and Art Publishing House, 2006, pp. 191–206. Zhang, Yurong 张玉荣 et. al. “Xiaokang jizhe qinli “yulin gourou jie”: bei biaoqian de kuanghuan yu duizhi” 《小康》记者亲历 「玉林狗肉节」：被标签的狂欢与对峙（“A First-Hand Experience of the Yulin Dog-Meat Festival: A Labeled Carnival and Confrontation”). Insight China, no. 20, 2016, pp. 66–69.

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Chapter 12

Cat Killers, Black Diamonds, and a Talking Cat Feline Companions in Posttransitional South African Fiction

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Wendy Woodward

Domestic cats in South Africa may be colonial creatures, descended from felines brought to the Cape over centuries by Dutch and English colonists, but they may also be hybridized descendants of the African wild cat (Felis lybica cafra). No history of the domestic cat (Felis catus) has been written in South Africa to match the proliferation of research on dogs; African cats have not been celebrated like indigenous African dogs nor has there been any book-length study of cats in South African literature. In the narratives I will analyze below, cats are problematized as human companions mostly because of traditional indigenous ways of fguring cats as connected with the uncanny. According to Credo Mutwa, a sanusi, the highest form of sangoma or traditional healer, cats were (and are) feared because of their association with witchcraft and some sangomas tell fortunes by looking into the eyes of a cat (33). Cats, being “magical animals” are regarded as “capable of putting curses of a most terrible nature upon people who ill-treat them, under-feed them or allow them to fall ill” (Mutwa 33). Yet they act against evil, and threaten supernatural beings like the fery-eyed, diminutive tokoloshe, rapist, and abductor (32). Paradoxically, in the quotidian realm, cats were revered especially in Zululand for routing snakes from peoples’ homes; they were appreciated, too, for being ratters and were not generally kept as pets (Mutwa 30). This traditional ambivalence toward cats recurs in the very different attitudes to cats in recent South African fction—Niq Mhlongo’s short story “Curiosity Killed the Cat” in the collection Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree (2018), in Zakes Mda’s Black Diamond (2009), and in Nthikeng Mohlele’s 207

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Rusty Bell (2014). The very presence of cats functions to exacerbate essentialized cultural and gender differences. Cats in some of these narratives are liminal creatures, imbricated in violence and criminality, either victims or perpetrators, or both. Cats, of course, do not adhere to human expectations of meek pethood; they often exist in cross-overs of the wild and the tame even in domestic situations. Cats hunt as Helene Cixous is forced to acknowledge in a little story called “The Refugee.” Unlike the Derridean cat who subjects the human to his gaze and appears to be contained in a fat, Cixous’s cat, to her horror, presents her with a half-dead sparrow whom she rescues and fings over her balcony to freedom. But Cixous then feels she has committed a “crime of species” by dismissing her cat’s hunting pride: “I made a human law for mycat [machatte] . . . denied her cat culture.” (10) A traditional Bushman story warns didactically about committing this “crime of species” by denying the wildness of big cats. In a story told in the 1870s by Kabbo, entitled “The frst /Xam man brings home a young lion” (Lewis-Williams 174–205) a hunter returns home with a lion cub whom he plans to domesticate and train to hunt for his family. To his family’s disbelief, the man insists that the lion is a dog. When the cub grows up he kills the hunter along with the gemsbok he is supposed to be hunting for human consumption. In the satirical “Curiosity Killed the Cat” Niq Mhlongo illustrates a tendency in postcolonial contexts “in which the treatment of animals that have special status in one human society is used to vilify, incriminate or marginalise other human groups” as Huggan and Tiffn put it (137). The black Phalas family has been living in an upmarket middle-class (read predominantly ‟white”) suburb next door to the Afrikaans Moerdyks for some years; the families socialize, their children attend the same elite school and are friends. The story opens with Ousie Maria, the Phalas’ domestic worker as focalizer observing the Moerdyk’s beloved cat, Bonaparte, in the garden outside. The “evil thing” (26) once scratched her when she tried to chase him out of the house. Now she watches in fear as the cat behaves as if “possessed” (27) and falls into their swimming pool where he drowns. The repercussions are catastrophic: The Phalas family does not attend the funeral of the cat, or send fowers or condolences, rituals (presented ironically) apparently necessitated by the death of a feline companion, with the result that they are ostracized not only by their neighbors but by the broader white community which now reveals its racism. Mhlongo dramatizes what Claire Jean Kim calls “the dynamics of difference production” (18) based on attitudes to a deceased cat. The death of the cat “open[s] up a chasm between the Phalas children and their friends” (37). At school they are labeled “Cat Killers”; (37) even the headmaster joins in their humiliation and fnally asks Lulama Phalas to remove her children and send them to a township school. On the walls of their home graffti in red screams “DEVIL WORSHIPPERS, SATANIST

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CAT KILLERS CAT KILLING KAFFIRS” (38). The K-word is the supreme insult and use of it has resulted in a number of recent hate speech court cases in South Africa; in the short story the insult is not censored but endorsed by the white characters. In Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age, Claire Jean Kim suggests that we think of oppressions as synergistically connected rather than “interlocking,” that we think of taxonomies of power rather than dualisms and thus “remain attuned to the unevenness, messiness, complexity, fuidity, and unpredictability that actually mark the dynamics of difference production” (18). Such dynamics recur in the entrenchment of the neighbors’ attitudes to each other. Mohapi and Lulama Phalas are puzzled by the behavior of whites who are a “very strange bunch of people” (32). The Moerdyks had previously celebrated the cat’s post-operative health with a barbecue to which the Phalas family were invited, but although cats and dogs are the Moerdyks’ “friends” (32) as the Phalas couple note with some incredulity, whites still eat meat yet they would not condone the slaughtering of a goat in the ceremonial way next door. Mhlongo portrays the Phalas couple as dealing in stereotypes and generalizations just as he stereotypes them for believing that animals should serve human purpose: dogs are “for hunting and scaring criminals” and cats ‟for killing rats and practising witchcraft” (33). Yet in dealing with the repercussions of Bonaparte’s death husband and wife respond unevenly but perhaps not entirely unpredictably; Mohapi, his wife notes derisively, grew up in a small town in the Free State and hence is more susceptible to traditional ideas—in actuality he still believes in witchcraft. In spite of their agreement over their neighbors’ notions of speciesism and racism Mohapi takes recourse in traditional beliefs, Lulama in modernity. When the extradiegetic narrator comments that cats are “[t]o most Africans a symbol of witchcraft and bad luck” (30) Lulama does not fall into this majority. Unbeknown to his wife, Mohapi has been infuenced by the domestic worker’s negative traditional ideas about cats. Ousie Maria is incredulous about the neighbors’ grief saying of Sandra: “Yhuu . . . I’ve never seen a person cry so much when nobody has hit them” (35). Ousie Maria proposes that the pool be traditionally cleansed with herbs by a sangoma. Both she and her employer have been dreaming about cats drowning and in one dream of hers Mohapi himself drowned to the glee of nine watching cats with their tails in the air. Mohapi and Maria fetch a sangoma from Soweto (a black city within Johannesburg) and together they burn “long cylindrical pods [of herbs]. . . in order to chase the evil spirit” (43). On her return from yet another confrontation with the children’s headmaster, Lulama is enraged by these pungent traditional smells. Ousie Maria has always attempted to claim power through traditional practices, utilizing muti made from vulture brains to get her job, and taunting Lulama that she facilitated her pregnancy years

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before. Lulama dismisses her from employment, observing scornfully that the domestic worker’s bed is placed on bricks to deter tokoloshes, a sign of traditional lifeways. The story ends with Ousie Maria exposed as the putative murderer of Bonaparte as she recalls how she spread butter and chilies round the pool before Bonaparte drowned, which accounts for his being “possessed” and falling into the water. She had used the same butter and chillies that Mohapi placed under the bonnet of his car to deter snakes and rats from snuggling into the warm engine. The extent of the complicity between Ousie Maria and Mohapi is left open, but it remains a possibility. Even more sinister perhaps is Ousie Maria’s unspecifed scheming as she watches water go down the toilet in her sleeping quarters that, she notes, are luxurious in comparison with the home of the sangoma in Soweto to which she is now banished. The cat becomes the sign of all that is other about an essentialized black family in a white suburb, the inhabitants of which fail to recognize any difference between the family members. Bonaparte, like the putative goat in the back yard, is “reduce[d] . . . to [an] instrument for measuring degrees of anti-Blackness” (Kim 286). In spite of this story being set in post-transition South Africa, racialized power dynamics are entrenched. Mhlongo has conservative whites in control of cultural capital, including education, in an upmarket suburb of Johannesburg. Satire of course deals in rigidities and the two families remain mutually incomprehensible to each other. Whites in the neighborhood and at the school are universally prejudiced: Sandra Moerdyk’s damning judgment of the Phalas family with whom her family had been friendly is instantaneous and unbudgeable. The headmaster has a Stalinist moustache; a white couple shrinks physically from Lulama’s presence. If the white characters are types, members of the black family are more complex as the story focuses on them. Mhlongo portrays splits between the Phalases; the children’s distress at the sight of the drowned cat is evidence that they feel some attachment to the animal, unlike their parents who equate the drowned Bonaparte with a dead rat. The Phalas adults seem just as prejudiced as their neighbors—here in their categorization of white people’s ideas about animals as “stupid.” This is borne out by the representation of Sandra’s grief as excessive and narcissistic. Rather than her grief being “disenfranchised” a customary experience when the mourner is denied “the right to grieve” in this case for a beloved animal (Doka, 1989, as cited in Hutton, 2019, 31–32) the community responds to the point of absurdity. Sandra’s address to the cat at the funeral has little to do with the embodied animal but all to do with her own sentimentality and control of the pet. If the whites function as a monolithic block with rigid ideas of speciesism and racism, the African characters have different points of view and are unevenly empowered in the family.

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Ironically, in terms of heteropatriarchal African tradition, Lulama takes charge while Mohapi seems less powerful because of his anxiety about Bonaparte’s death and his reliance on pre-colonial beliefs associating cats with evil. Ontologically he is jolted, his sense of a stable self knocked off balance by dreams and superstition. If he and Lulama cannot comprehend that domestic animals can be beloved companions, in Black Diamond Don Mateza’s sense of identity is bound up with his cat Snowy as he challenges the very notion of a black diamond and the opportunistic corruption that conventionally (according to the novel) has accompanied the fnancial empowerment of black South Africans since the democratic elections of 1994. Snowy, a white, fuffy Himalayan cat is the consummate example of pethood, “that space allotted to animals placed in service to humans” to borrow a phrase from Feuerstein and Nolte-Odhiambo (4). The cat is cossetted, loved, and protected as Bonaparte was by the Moerdyks. For a black man to have a cat as a pet contradicts cultural and gender conventions exemplifed in “Curiosity Killed the Cat,” so much so that Mda deploys this contradiction in relation to species difference as a key element in the construction of non-conformist masculinity. If Mhlongo’s short story sediments racialized identities through the fguring of a cat as a human companion, Mda’s novel undermines them, as well as gender difference. Kim’s notion of “the dynamics of difference production” (18) as synergistically intertwined is borne out in Mda’s novel even as fxed, predicable ideas on the part of many of the characters are satirized in the narrative. Traditional African ideas about cats do not feature in the personal relationship between Don Mateza and his cat. We do not know Snowy’s provenance nor how Don came to live with her, but she serves as a constant in his peripatetic life and a marker of his refusal to conform to expectations of a hypermasculine trajectory: a meteoric rise from a liberation hero to business mogul. Don Mateza fought in the anti-apartheid struggle, he spent time in the guerilla camps, his nom de guerre AK Bazooka is celebrated by stadiums of people singing struggle songs but he lacks political capital. Unlike the foot soldier Molotov Mbungane who fought under him in the struggle and who is now a multimillionaire with honorary degrees, Don did not serve time on Robben Island where prisoners could study for degrees and where they are fraternized with the political elite who subsequently promoted them in business. To the endless frustration of his girlfriend Tumi Molefhe, who has a model agency and mixes in wealthy circles, Don will not use her contacts to rise in the security business but prefers to work his way up even if this includes serving as a bodyguard for his one-time subordinate, Mbungane. He resists becoming, in the words of a black diamond in the novel, like a cat “with a broad self-satisfed grin” and “dazed eyes” from over-indulging in cream (89). The taxonomy of Don Mateza’s masculinity is fuid. In a sense

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he is doubly decolonized: he has moved beyond apartheid constructions of dangerous black masculinity (as a struggle hero) as well as beyond posttransitional expectations of his business success (as a black diamond). Snowy is Don’s vehicle, along with his cooking skills, of signifying his denial of black diamond status infuriating Tumi who wants Don to get rid of Snowy and to forego cooking as he thereby “disgraces all African men” (201). She taunts him: “You’re an ex-combatant, Don. A hardened guerilla fghter in the liberation struggle. What are you doing with a cat?” (63). Yet Snowy is a pedigreed cat which suggests that she is a marker of his entry into the middle class and not only a sign of gender difference. The fguring of Snowy as a subject is limited, however. She may be a signifcant pet but she barely approximates kin. The narrative never clarifes what motivates this interspecies relationship and why Don is so attached to this fuffy feline. He caresses her, cuddles her “like a baby” (19). Her presence itself seems to provide emotional support for Don, but Mda does not fgure Snowy as an embodied creature; she is a cat-shaped blank without character or identity. In short she is a cipher rather than an agentive non-human animal who seems to emblematize the two women in Don’s life with her sensual presence. Once Don moves to the magistrate Kristin Uys’s fat as her bodyguard Snowy becomes more active—playing with Kristin’s cat and choosing to walk to the park to visit homeless men but she still functions symbolically. When Kristin smiles at Don who is rolling on the foor with Snowy, she, like Tumi, considers this unconventional, eliding gender and race difference: “‘You’re a black man,’ [she says.] ‘You’re not supposed to love cats’” (179). His quick reply in the same discourse “You’re a white woman. You’re not supposed to smile at a black man” (179) cements what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls the “perilous cartography of color” (xv). Soon afterward, though, the two become lovers. When he breaks off with Tumi she is sure that he will marry a white woman to boost his political capital. Mda complicates race and species difference. Don, like the Moerdyks, as the Phalas couple note in Mhlongo’s story, adores his cat but eats other animals. Much of African sociability depends on meat-eating. Soweto, where Don and Tumi go for Sunday meals is not a locale for traditional ‟superstition” as it is in “Curiosity killed the Cat” but home to which they have a “deep attachment” and where “the smells, the tastes and the noises” (27) entice and stimulate. Don’s mostly serial relationships with these two women are underscored by their adherence to what Annie Potts terms ‟meat culture.” The consumption of meat spices up Don and Tumi’s sex life. Meat (cooked mostly by Don) also contributes to the sensuality of his relationship with Kristin. Animals are absent referents in all this meat-eating until a pig’s head appears on the bars of Kristin’s burglar grille and both are forced to meet the slaughtered animal’s gaze. Earlier, in an echo of the popular movie Fatal

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Attraction, stinking rotten tripe boils over on the stove, along with the message that next time it will be the cats put there by the Visagies, small-time gangster brothers who are targeting Kristin for sentencing them to prison. The pig’s head, Kristin later discovers, was ordered by Don in his attempt to make her more dependent on him as a bodyguard. Their relationship barely survives this revelation but she worries about the threat to her cat and to Snowy with the result that she depends on Don even more for protection. What she does not know is that Shortie Visagie, who has been sent by his imprisoned brother to kill the cats, has no qualms about murdering her but balks at killing “a little pussy cat.” (197) The ending of the novel is melodramatic. Stevo Visagie, newly released from prison, takes Kristin hostage in her own home, forcing her to dance provocatively while he slashes her body. The cats both attack him but all they can manage is to scratch his leg through his pants. In true cliff-hanger convention, the hero, Don, arrives just in time to stop Stevo from slitting Kristin’s throat, but Don himself is badly wounded. Kristin visits him as he recovers painfully in hospital. The following conversation ends the novel. Rather than being grateful for the fact that he saved her life she asks:

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‟‘When are you coming home?’ ‘I have no home,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘Home is where your cat is,’ she says. He smiles for a while, and then says quite earnestly, ‘For now . . . maybe. Me and Snowy we can no longer be kept.” (278–79)

Having performed like a hero in civilian life has liberated Don to become more self-suffcient. Kristin attempts to manipulate him in the defnition of home through the whereabouts of Don’s beloved cat, but Don has shifted, planning independence with Snowy. That the novel ends with an emphasis on Snowy confrming her signifcance in the construction of Don’s identity. His heroism may have been hypermasculine, but Snowy the cat will temper this in future. Now that he has been promoted for his heroism to head of the security frm and is set to fulfll the role of black diamond ethically, Snowy is needed to queer the high seriousness of this role. Her particular species difference will facilitate his unconventional negotiation of gendered and raced difference in unpredictable, unprecedented ways. The multiply-named cat in Rusty Bell by Nthikeng Mohlele also serves this role for the narrator, Michael Buthelezi, to whom the cat speaks. That Michael hears him speak underscores the human’s difference not only from conventional African responses to cats but also from modernity’s. Cats are not usually heard telling their life-stories to humans, which is why the cat

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signals human psychological vulnerability. Thus Michael, according to his father, is a putative “lunatic in waiting”; (142) for his psychiatrist, Dr West, the cat signifes his madness (142). Traditional African perceptions of the non-human animal do not feature in this novel, nor do any other animals appear except in brief mentions by Palesa, Michael’s schoolmate who works at the Johannesburg Zoo and speaks lovingly of Moxie the elephant whom she regards as “Calm-spirited. Wise. I have a feeling she knows things we will never fathom.” (87) The independent cat appears on the windowsill of Michael’s room in a student residence when he is in his early twenties. At the time he is in the middle of another eleven-day fast undertaken in order to “reach[] the furthest frontiers of being, a journey so far into the depths of feeling I sometimes fear it will trigger madness” (139). During this fast he is “raped” by Rusty Bell who takes advantage of his disorientated state to have sex with him and get pregnant. This picaresque novel, which consists of Michael’s monologues and his talks with Dr West, the psychiatrist, whom he consulted for over twenty years as a result of this trauma, never reveals how he forgave Rusty and agreed to marry her. Speaking animals recur in African fction. I have argued elsewhere (Woodward 235–256) that the eponymous animal narrators in Cameroonian Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle and Congolese Alain Mabanckou’s Memoirs of a Porcupine may serve an ethical purpose, persuading the reader to “think with animals” in both senses: that of LeviStrauss’s animals being good to think with as well as thinking in community with them. In Rusty Bell both these facets of anthropomorphic fguring occur, but because Mohlele portrays the narrator as philosophically astute (Aristotle “adorns” (104) his study table) the notion of the Derridean cat is surely relevant. The Derridean question “And say the animal responded?” (119–40) shifts, I suggest, to (the unspoken even more expansive) Mohlelean enquiry “But say the animal spoke?” Donna Haraway in When Species Meet is grateful that Derrida “did not fall into the trap of making the subaltern speak” (20). Admittedly, the discourse of the cat in Rusty Bell echoes that of the verbose and learned Michael, now a corporate lawyer in his late forties, a black diamond with a six-fgure salary. Still, the feline is a fresh voice in the human narrative which veers from the comic-tragic (the early death of his friend Columbus from laughing) to the sordid (Michael, “addicted” to risk cannot resist the striptease club, “Desirable Horses” and its women). Michael describes the cat as “arrogant . . . thoughtful, brisk in temperament and, such a gifted teller of tales” (89). He “not only gave animals a voice . . . but was also both entertaining and serious” (100). The cat’s oral testimony addressed to Michael raises a number of animal-sensitive issues: the naming of an animal according to the attitudes of the humans who ‟own” him means that throughout his life the cat with his picaresque lifestory has had to

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inhabit a different personae. Animal abuse by children is meted out to the cat by Paloma, daughter of Big Bruce a “veteran pimp” (101) who encourages his daughter’s predilection, interpreting her cruelty as a sign of her strength, but only until the cat scratches an eye out. That the cat is a liminal creature bordering on ferality manifests in the cat’s adamant “never piss off cats’” (107). Subsequently, as a feral cat, an interstitial being, he deals with hunger and homelessness. The cat is then adopted from a shelter by a judge who christens him Clinton K (short for Clinton Kitty), a name, the cat boasts, which connects him with “the forty-second President of the United States” (113). He objects to performing according to human expectations of cats. He refuses to murder rats (107) who carry bubonic plague. He also refuses “to the amusement of observing humans, [to] risk my life or waste cat acrobatics killing snakes, in whose intended destinations and life stories I haven’t the faintest interest” (108). If his narrative raises aspects of the agency of reptiles the cat broaches more broadly “the mess humans have landed us animals in” (109) and cites zoos, laboratories, and factory farming while foregrounding himself as intellectual. Clinton K is adamant: “The heart of the matter, in part, is this: no one, not even God, had the courtesy to understand the world from the point of view of cats” (110). Clinton K’s narrative comes close to functioning as a sentimentalized, hard-luck tale of an ill-treated cat who survives by his wits, but any mawkishness is undermined by the cat’s egotistic asides about the brilliance of his mind. He regards himself consequently above other cats and all dogs whom he regards as “inferior beasts” with their melodrama and uncouthness (106). Michael as the frame narrator who consumes only water during his fasts has become preternaturally aware of insects near the water jug “tiny silverish things hovering in mid-air, threatening to steal all the oxygen, leaving [him] weak and breathless” (87). Now with Clinton K in the room he notices the plight of a butterfy in the jug and its slow progression from struggling, to drowning. That Clinton K sees but dismisses the “small and insignifcant” insect with “a sense of detachment” (103) attests to his heartlessness and selfshness and to the fact that his compassion for the living is species-bound, limited to the feline with a glanced acknowledgment of snakes. CONCLUSION No other cats feature in recent South African fction (as far as I am aware) besides the three we have discussed above. In an older short story by Eskia Mphalele, “Mrs Plum,” published initially in 1967, a cat appears briefy. As the three-legged cat sits on the fence between neighbours’ yards, Karabo, the

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exploited domestic worker, and the cat gaze at each other for a long time. She thinks, “‘Why don’t you go and look at your grandmother like that?” (247) and senses that the cat is “[j]ust like someone who feels pity for you” (247). Unlike Mrs. Plum’s two lapdogs who are trapped in pethood without identities of their own, the unnamed cat initiates and responds to human gaze with sympathy. What is remarkable about the more recent fctions is that in each narrative a cat companion queers heteropatriarchal performativities of African masculinities whether traditional or modern. For Niq Mhlongo in “Curiosity killed the cat” Mohapi Phalas’s negotiation of modernity is undermined by his succumbing to traditional beliefs which are depicted as mere superstition. His obsessive reaction to the death of the cat and its uncanny signifcance distracts him from his fatherly role of protecting the rights of his family—in post-transitional but still racist South Africa. In Black Diamond Zakes Mda foregrounds the perfect Snowy in Don Mateza’s assertion of an unprecedented masculinity. Through his attachment to Snowy, Don claims his right to embody, variously, a struggle hero, an ethical black diamond, and a Himalayan cat lover. The narcissistic Clinton K in Nthikeng Mohlele’s Rusty Bell may be the quintessential animal-subaltern but he speaks. That the fasting Michael Buthelezi can hear him confrms, for his psychiatrist and for his father, his psychological vulnerability, as does his sexual “deflement” by his future wife. Men, it seems, are not able to function as real men when they are following after a cat. To what extent each cat approximates a companion for a human character varies in these texts. The companionship that Snowy proffers is the most dramatized, yet she has no rounded subjectivity. Human companionship in relation to Bonaparte is ridiculed by both narrator and the main characters. Michael Buthelezi’s temporary companionship is pathologized by patriarchal fgures. All three cats embody putative companions calling attention to gendered and raced difference. Through these cats Mhlongo, Mda, and Mohlele, respectively, suggest that post-transitional but hardly decolonized South Africa is still mired in the apartheid past with taxonomies of race and species that persist and are uneven and unpredictable. Cats in these stories slip through the narratives, drown, lack agency, or speak, but in their symbolical import they serve as markers of difference—of race and gender in a complicated, post-transitional South Africa.

REFERENCES Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. Creed, Country Colour, Class, Culture. Profle Books, 2018.

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Cixous, Helene. “A Refugee.” The Animal Question in Deconstruction, edited by Lynn Turner, 2013, pp. 9–12. Derrida, Jacques. “And Say the Animal Responded?” The Animal That Therefore I Am, edited by Marie Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, edited by John D. Caputo. Fordham University Press, 2008, pp. 119–40. Feuerstein, Anna, and Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo. “Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Childhood and Pethood.” Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture: New Perspectives in Childhood Studies and Animal Studies, edited by Anna Feuerstein and Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo. Routledge, 2017, pp. 1–20. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Posthumanities, Volume 3, edited by Cary Wolfe. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffn. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. Routledge, 2010. Hutton, Vicki. A Reason to Live: HIV and Animal Companions. Purdue University Press, 2019. Kabbo. “The First /Xam Man Brings Home a Young Lion.” Stories that Float from Afar: Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa, edited by J. D. LewisWilliams. David Philip, 2015, pp. 174–205. Kim, Claire Jean. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Mda, Zakes. Black Diamond. Penguin, 2009. Mhlongo, Niq. “Curiosity Killed the Cat.” Soweto Under the Apricot Tree: Short Stories. Kwela, 2018, pp. 26–48. Mohlele, Nthikeng. Rusty Bell. University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2014. Mpahlele, Es’kia. “Mrs Plum.” The Unbroken Song: Selected Writings. Ravan, 1981 [1967], pp. 216–61. Mutwa, Credo. Isilwane the Animal: Tales and Fables of Africa. Struik, 1996. Potts, Annie, editor. Meat Culture. Human-Animal Studies Series editor Kenneth Shapiro. Brill, 2016. Woodward, Wendy. “Human Masks? Animal Narrators in Patrice Nganang’s Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle and Alain Mabanckou’s Memoirs of a Porcupine.” The Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms, edited by Fiona Fatima Moolla. Wits University Press, 2016, pp. 235–56.

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Chapter 13

The Paradoxical World of Animal Representation in the Brazilian Novel As Horas Nuas in Light of Greek Philosophy

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Zélia M. Bora

Very few novels in Brazilian literature portray the dilemmas of representation between humans and non-humans as well as the novel As Horas Nuas by the acclaimed writer Lygia Fagundes Telles. Written in the 1980s, the novel moves away in terms of narrative voice from the author’s earlier novels. The presence of a cat, as a character and the narrator, becomes a curious fctional artifact capable of raising several questions related to the status of contemporary animal representation and its ontological implications. In my discussion, I will examine some contemporary views of the relationship between fctional and ontological dimensions of animal representation, and the theme of the animal companion in the aforementioned novel. The notion of agency and the exercise of “giving voice” to the animal in literature are common concerns of students of animal literature. However, the modern representation of animals in literature was shaken by contemporary philosophical debates about human and non-human agency mainly infuenced by posthumous publications of Jacques Derrida. By suggesting the incompatibilities between literary and ontological representations of non-humans, Derrida poses the dilemma that philosophy in reality fails to demonstrate human injustices toward non-humans (Derrida, 2008, 106). Thus, the deconstruction of humanism implies that literary representation of animals needs to be re-conceptualized. Describing the moment in which the human gaze meets the gaze of an actual animal, Derrida exemplifes the dilemma of representation both in ontological and literary terms. Aware of the problem, animal literary critics may agree that an “ideal” literary representation of non-humans would be the one in which literary, philosophical, 219

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historical, and cultural prerogatives meet. As an artistic artifact, literature needs to lead humans to refect upon the existential condition of animals in society. As a result, narratives that describe the problem have to be the ones that can symbolically dismantle the machinery of power by which “other” humans are “animalized,” a displacement constituting the sine qua non of exclusively collectives founded upon boundaries of blood, soil or language; and second, and of equal importance, in order to put a halt to the exploitation, torture, and extermination of non-human animals by their human kin. (Iveson, 2011)

From the philosophical to the historical, cultural, and literary dimensions, the animal question needs also to take into consideration studies of Darwinian criticism of human privilege with regard to species. Although I will not emphasize in this present discussion the importance of Darwinism, I begin by stressing the classical debate between philosophy and poetry, reality and fction, to fnally suggest the inseparable discursive signifcance of literature and philosophy in critical literary animal studies. Together, literature and philosophy are essential discourses able to infuence the construction of animal subjectivity denied by Western humanism.

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THE CLASSICAL PROBLEM OF REALITY AND CONTEMPORARY ANIMAL REPRESENTATION The classical discussion about reality and non-reality in Western literatures was introduced by Plato in The Republic. Plato’s notorious statement against the poets and his argument for their expulsion from the philosophical republic is an indication of the separation between the disciplines of literature and philosophy and the autonomy of philosophy. Unlike literature, the founding project of philosophy was devoted to the formation of the noble values and the goodness of society. Philosophers and not poets were supposed to have direct participation in the moral formation of society. For Plato, literature represented the irrational activity of the poet. Therefore, literature became a suspicious means not only to attain social realities but also a representation of the poet’s failure to comprehend natural creatures and the reality of good and evil. Unlike Plato, Aristotle emphasized the conception of different realities and established differences between the poetical construction of reality and history. In chapter 23 of Poetics, Aristotle distinguishes between a narrative poem, tragedy, and history. Tragedy to Aristotle “will differ in structure from historical compositions which of necessity present no single action, but a single period, and all that happens within that period to one person or too many,

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little connected together as the events may be” (Krieger, 1974, 314). Later, Aristotle underlined the bases of literary discourse regarding the transformation of the empirical world into art (314). His assumptions deepened even more the differences between literary and philosophical discourses regarding the problem of reality. While the different notions of reality the distinctions between literature and philosophy, philosophy, in general, was defned by a particular logic that included humans alone as subjects. This prerogative not only infuenced the state of things as they actually exist but also defned poetic realities and the creation of narrative genres such as fables to represent animals according to human perspectives. By considering literature as a minor form of art in the face of reality, the speculations regarding the animal question were formulated by philosophers. The plea for animals was associated with a small group of philosophers who believed that animals should be treated with compassion regardless of their differences from humans. Plutarch’s discussions (anticipated by Pythagoras) infuenced the poets Ovid and Hesiod in turn, who associated the eating of meat with the culture of violence. To them, the advent of a golden age in society would be associated with vegetarian practices (Steiner, 2005, 95). In the opening section of On the Cleverness of Animals, Plutarch’s father (Autobulus) conducts a discussion in which the consumption of meat is categorically considered savagery. Basic assumptions in the works On Beast Are Rational and On the Eating of Flesh were associated with specifc examples of intelligence and emotions in animals, and with defense of the claim that animals can “exhibit many of the virtues that many people tend to associate exclusively with human beings, such as bravery, ingenuity, and sociability.” Plutarch as well as his father introduced a debate against the Stoic account of animal capacity following the same line of philosophical argumentation (Steiner 96). Despite the recognition of different degrees or levels associated to animal intelligence, Autobulus also emphasized in contrast humans’ disregard for trees and vegetables. In response to the Stoics, he considered the fact that animals differ from human beings, “not in kind, with regard to the range of capacities requisite for moral consideration” (97). Porphyry, a student of Plotinus, advances two main lines of argumentation in defense of animals, as debated by Plutarch and Autobulus. He suggested that purity of soul was associated to the recognition of the intrinsic values of the animals (103). Plutarch, Autobulus, and Porphyry believe animals are both rational and emotional creatures. On the basis of all these considerations, it can be stated that the philosophical discussions infuenced literary representations (Kahn, 2001, 150). The debate on animal capacity was not considered a priority by most philosophers and it seems that the gap in addressing this issue in Greek society lasted two centuries until Porphyry picked up the thread of Plutarch’s

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arguments on behalf of animals and incorporated them into his text On Abstinence from Killing Animals, where he considered the eating of animal fesh as incomprehensible barbarism (95).

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QUESTIONING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL REALITIES AND ANIMAL REPRESENTATION Contemporary literature in Western societies cannot deny in our days the animal question as a social problem. Modern discussions and inclusion of animals as subjects were also problematized in the twentieth century by the sociological thinkers of the Frankfurt School. Recent studies on the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse1 not only pointed out their ideas on the problem but demonstrated how they viewed the relationship between humans and non-humans as paradoxical and troublesome. In doing so, the Frankfurt School established the grounds for understanding human irrationality in contemporary society. In spite of the social changes and different times experienced by the critics, the social realities of their times were not too different from ours in this millennium. The relevance of their conceptualizations lies not only in their compassion toward animals but in demonstrating that non-human subjectivity is deeply associated with the dynamics of social realities and the domination imposed on animals and marginalized human beings. The basic argument introduced by them is that “humanity’s attempt to dominate non-human nature is ‘reproduced’ in society.” Like Adorno, Marcuse’s approach to the relationship between society and animals was infuenced by Freudian and Marxist thinkers. He also states that the suffering imposed on animals was a “structural manifestation of sadism.” (Guderson 287). Moved by cruelty, sadism, and utilization of the death instinct, humans are in the service of Eros; thus, “the aggressive impulses provide energy for the continuous alteration, mastery and exploitation of nature to the advantage of mankind. In attacking, splitting, changing, pulverizing things and animals (and, periodically, also men), man extends his domination over the world and advances to ever richer stages of civilization” (Marcuse 47). Perhaps more tragic to non-humans than to humans, the death impulse of society in our day has reached a scale of unprecedented destruction of the planet, while in the case of non-humans the destruction is mostly ignored. In general, animals are victims of skinning, mistreatment, systematic violence, displacement, excessive terror, and brutalization. Aware of the exposed facts, there is an urgent need to discuss the animal question in society and arts. Literature is one of the best felds for representing these realities. As I emphasized above, the classical concept of reality and its association with literature was at frst disregarded

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as inadequate grounds for discussion. Plutarch and others used the fable genre as they attempted to associate fctional with non-fctional elements to portray the animal condition. But what seems to be solved in literature (the problem of reality) poses a problem for animal representation. Frequently introduced in the fabulist narratives as fantastic beings or as a way of representing human beings metaphorically, it remains necessary to consider the subjectivity of actual animals in the real world. Earlier discussions on realism and literature by George Lukacs still seem to be the prevailing starting point to discuss the status of animals in society, as represented in literature. When we read literature, we are always aware that it is not reality but simply a special form for representing reality. Lukacs develops the argument that literature is immersed in the social fabric and therefore incorporates the dilemmas of society and its subjects. Society as refected in literature has been a long-term intellectual project for understanding social processes. As integral parts of society, the silenced history of animals needs to be recovered and transformed by society. There aren’t too many differences between the status animals occupied in society in the past and the situation today. Today their status is often similar to what they were in the past: slaves and property. As explained by Lucyna Kostuch, the Greeks made different uses of animals in society. Animals represented all the things that did not belong to civil society as a community. They were equivalent to slaves, women, and foreign peoples (barbaroi). The animal world was ethically diversifed. The Greeks used terms such as “hellenic animals” and “barbaric animals” to designate animals belonging to the native cultures and foreign cultures. As a result, the human world was imagined as a world of common borders, “familiar” and “unfamiliar.” These elements were important to distinguish humans from non-humans. Animals were also classifed as domestic and wild, useful to humans and useless, helpful and harmful, aquatic and terrestrial, and indigenous or non-natives. Animals were considered the spoils of war when captured (70). Classical conceptions of animal identities would place them in a sort of social category between human and non-human. Sometimes, they were treated like non-humans, and sometimes they were treated as humans. The status was arbitrary and ambivalent. Any “animal could be condemned by a court for committing a crime, which meant they either would have been expelled beyond the country’s borders, or their bodies would have been abandoned there.” In the epics, animals were used as metaphors to depict people (70). Homer was the frst to “introduce the basis for the science of correlations between animal physiognomy and habitat” (77). Greek geographical territory was limited; therefore, their knowledge about animals’ differences and domestication came from other cultures that they considered barbarians (75).

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Analogies between animals’ language and barbarians’ languages were discussed by the Greeks (73). They suggest that, like foreigners, animals were characterized by their otherness. The frst attempts in Greek stories to bond humans and animals were possibly an attempt to call human attention to the violent treatment of non-humans. Identifed as outsiders in the service of human necessities, animals underwent domestication, slavery, displacement, and even extinction. The insertion of animals in Greek social life and cultures was complex and, like today, it incorporated a variety of interconnections. For centuries, literature has legitimized and mediated humans’ conduct toward other species.

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LITERATURE AND ANIMAL LIFE As I have tried to emphasize, both literature and philosophy failed to bring about reconciliation between human and non-human necessities. Contemporary discussions of literature’s truthfulness and philosophy’s “absence” of truth are two important challenges to animal writing. Truthfulness and reality are still indispensable qualities of literary expression.2 Regarding animal writing, both literature and philosophy fail to represent adequately life outside the human subject. To Witold Gombrowicz and Gilles Deleuze, “writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived” (Deleuze 225). The theme of shame is a recurrent “motif” used to justify contemporary writing and animate philosophical discussions. These themes run through the refections of Derrida and Deleuze as well. For Derrida, “As for the other type of discourse, that other position of knowledge regarding the animal, Derrida imagines it belongs to the poets and the prophets, men and women who have taken upon themselves the animal address” (Sliwinsky). Writing about human narcissism is not of much value when separated from writing about the predicament of non-human lives. Writers are compelled to undertake this diffcult task, imagining lives beyond the life of the author, as a moral act. In the process, language must devote itself to reach, according to Deleuze, “these feminine, animal, molecular detours.” In the process, “Syntax is the set of necessary detours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things” (Deleuze 226–27). It has to be a language that portrays the writer as a hearer and seer of people and other beings. A “healthy” literature consists in inventing a people, a human condition, that does not yet exist (228). In this sense, it includes and also enlarges the human to include the non-human.

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THE ANIMAL QUESTION AND THE NOVEL AS HORAS NUAS (THE NAKED HOURS) The various human perceptions and defnitions of animals are extensively revealed in literary texts. Regarding the representation of animals in literature, animal characters were a defning feature of ancient fables. In general, fables are moral narratives refecting the human condition. Fables also “picture social relationships and interactions between diverse species in an unnatural realm—the animal kingdom—which mirrors the human world, as well as its social structures and hierarchies” (Korhonen 2). Presented in an allegorical way, fables, in general, fail to present non-humans as sentient beings. Despite the efforts of philosophers such as Plutarch, Porphyry, and Autobulus, classical fables continued to represent human condition, vices, and expectations. Occasionally, classical fables such as “The Donkey, The Raven and the Passing Wolf” introduced sympathetic attitudes toward animal suffering (5). In contemporary literature, fables may acquire different perspectives and lead us to think about the relationship between humans and non-humans in different terms than ancient narratives. While animals have been present in literature throughout history, as Eugenio Bolangaro argues, the study of animal literature is a relatively recent phenomenon: “Indeed, it is perhaps this ubiquity and familiarity that is responsible for the dearth of scholarship on the representation of animals in literature” (Bolongaro 105). By critiquing traditional literary representations and exploring alternative approaches, the feld of literary animal studies proposes to recover animal agency. However, an actual representation of animal experience in their own terms, can never be fully represented. Their experience can only be represented by humans through the “mediation of cultural encoding, which inevitably involves a reshaping according to our own intentions, attitudes and preconceptions” (Armstrong 3). It is also important to emphasize how different cultures perceive and represent human and non-human relationships—views of animals, in other words, are culturally determined and not monolithic. In this chapter, I will offer a Brazilian perspective that emphasizes the formative role played by human and non-human voices in Lydia Fagundes Telles’s novel As Horas Nuas (1989). Written at the end of the 1980s, the frst edition of this novel begins with two signifcant epigraphs. The frst is a biblical passage from Matthew 13:35, in which Jesus introduces his teaching through parables. The second makes reference to the act of telling these parables. Together, they provide frameworks for interpreting the novel. But contrary to traditional fables, the novel portrays a cat in fesh and blood who is able to “tell” the story of his relationship with humans. Taking into consideration this suggestion, the novel can also be read as a contemporary parable on animal domestication. The association of the

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cat with different themes in the narrative leads contemporary critics to consider animal agency through different perspectives but usually ignoring the complexities of animal representation. I would like especially to emphasize the point that this work demonstrates different and complementary notions of reality. On one level, the novel directs the reader to the social realism that characterizes human experience, and on the other, it guides the reader to neofantastic realism. The second level distinguishes the cat’s mnemonic discourses from his keeper and long-term life companion Rosa Ambrósio (Santana). The exercise of giving voice to the cat allows the reader to know what the cat “thinks” about humans. In the narrative, human voices are intermingled with the “voice” of Rahul, the cat. His “voice” not only challenges the voice speaking for the animal but also suggests new modes for considering contemporary parables in which animals are protagonists. The most important fact here is not exactly how the imaginative exercise of the writer benefts “the cat” but the moral value of his representation. Although Rahul’s present life is maintained by Rosa Ambrósio, a retired actress, the narrative includes traces of the history of oppressive treatment of animals in the margins of the text. Together, the cat, Ambrósio’s voice, and a third-person narrator reveal human narcissism, dependence, cruelty, and loneliness. Although Telles’s narrative choices pose various dilemmas and complications for readers, even as they seek to solve problems of literary animal agency, the search for animal subjectivity remains signifcant in the novel. Taking into consideration some guidelines related to animal studies and their relationship to literary critique, I would say that the conceptualization of agency in the novel goes beyond the common representation of Rahul as a property and introduces him as a subject circumscribed within the limits of literary techniques. The novel consists of eighteen chapters, six of them presented as Rahul’s mnemonic speeches. As a privileged voice in the narrative, Rahul is a stray cat who had his mother killed by humans and was rescued thanks to the maternal instincts of Rosa Ambrósio. Alone, cold, and starving, the kitten survived the dangers of human brutality. By placing Rahul as one of the protagonists, the novel raises questions about human relationships with non-humans. As a domesticated animal, Rahul’s social environment is circumscribed by Ambrósio’s apartment. Nonetheless Rahul’s powerful vision compensates for his limited modus vivendi and precarious adaptation to human world. Different from humans, animals’ innate instincts, in many ways, guarantee their environmental adaptation and may assure species’ survival. A cat’s nocturnal vision is certainly the most fascinating of his senses. More than a natural sense, Rahul’s eyes have several meanings in the novel. It is revealed to the reader that Rahul not only sees the material world but also another world inhabited by

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ghosts. Besides these possible meanings suggested in the text, I would like to emphasize another signifcance of vision and its association to the self/ other dialectic. Contemporary discussions on this subject are associated with Sartre’s, Foucault’s, and Derrida’s perspectives. Recent discussions on the subject were formulated by Martin Jay. Regardless of the several suggestions that the discussion can take, I believe that Rahul’s gaze in the novel is a central assumption. Symbolically, it elevates non-human senses, pushing back against humans’ centrism that defnes humans as a superior species able to develop and amplify the potential given to them by nature. According to the narrative, only Rahul has developed vision that enables him to see different levels of reality. Memory and language are also signifcant factors in the narrative. By letting the reader know Rahul’s thoughts, the novel symbolically constructs animal language obstructed by the logos. Although it is a work of fction, the novel refects the actual tensions between human and non-human animals. Like many displaced animals, Rahul the cat was castrated and will spend the rest of his life depending on humans for his survival. To human eyes, Rahul is only a cat. But to the readers, a secret knowledge of his gaze will always reveal the perpetual remembrance of the hidden story of non-human oppression. The revelation about Rahul’s previous human existence poses a problem. It cannot be fully explained by the realm of the fantastic but by the classical doctrine of the transmigration of souls, a tenet of ancient groups in Egypt, Greece, and India. In Greece, the idea that the soul of a dead man can pass into an animal was introduced by Pythagoras. In Telles’s novel, the idea is not fantastic but a plausible reality according to ancient religious knowledge and contemporary beliefs related to reincarnation. Based on these facts, Rahul is a domestic cat representing thousands of invisible animals that cross the streets of the city but also, a transcendental soul caught in the body of a cat. Both are complementary truths in the novel that not only explains the ambiguous nature of the cat but also sends a message to humans’ cultural misconceptions. To each human perception, Rahul responds with a gaze (19). Among innumerous passages in which Ambrósio notifes his interest, Rahul thinks: “She blinks at me through the mirror—Are you firting with me Rahul? I can’t, sweetheart, I was fxed, I answered”; “She examined my neck in a sudden movement, looking for fies. I did not have them. She faced the mirror with arrogance” (19).2 In these passages and others, Rahul always has a critical outlook. In spite of the revelation related to Rahul’s previous existence, his present life goes on and, together with Rosa Ambrósio and Dionisia (the black maid), he experiences old age. As a modern parable on human and animal conditions, old age marks proximity to death that fnally puts an end to all existence. Socially, Rahul’s and Dionisia’s lives are invisible. As a human

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privilege, Ambrósio’s confessions initiate the narrative. Her long digressions of memory are nothing else but the ramblings of an old drunk woman. Her narcissism, social prejudices, and racism identify her as socially irresponsible. She represents the self-indulgence of a social model sustained by the exploitation of the underprivileged represented by the cat Rahul and Dionisia as well. They are witnesses of a social tragedy that they do not have the power to modify. Silent and dependent on Ambrósio to survive, both come to an end together as subjects of time, represented by the naked hours that fow regardless of human and non-human wishes. Yet defning the problem of animal gaze, Derrida defnes cats’ way of viewing as frequently disturbing—an experience he encounters every day through the eyes of his female cat. The meeting frequently provokes an uncomfortable feeling of guilt in the philosopher, especially if caught face to face and the cat observes him frontally naked. In response to animal presence and subjectivity, the philosopher declares his shame for never considering the history of animal oppression. He also describes human shame as a continuous act of denial. This unconcerned gesture represented by the philosopher’s experience has been perpetuated till today in philosophy, other felds of knowledge, and real life as well. Most philosophers who were supposed to infuence society in pursuit of happiness failed to acknowledge the experience of animal suffering. According to Derrida, philosophers such as Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas never saw the animal gaze—each failed to draw signifcance from those moments when an animal “looks at me” (62). If philosophy fails, Derrida suggests that maybe poets, who have another “position of knowledge” regarding animal, prophets, men, and women who have taken upon themselves the animal address, or someone who has the power to denude, can rescue non-human dignity. Maybe a poet is a “theoretical, philosophical, or juridical subject capable of drawing signifcance from the gaze” (63). As I tried to demonstrate, the novel As Horas Nuas connects the representational form and material conditions of a non-human species. Much has been written recently to reconceptualize animals as active participants in fctional narratives without abdicating their own subjectivity. The classical defnitions of literature state that literature does not necessarily tell the truth but lends verisimilitude to a narrative. In the present novel, the ties between an old actress and her long-term companion cat produce within the reader an awareness of animal melancholy and evoke pity for the oppressed “soul pet.” The imaginary ways in which the cat’s keeper treats him are somehow more poignant than traditional anthropomorphization imposed by ancient fables. Thus, Rahul’s subjectivity lies apart from human embodiment. Like a cat, he jumps, hides behind places of no interest to humans, and gazes in silence at his human companions and thinks critically about them. His identity is

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constructed upon mutual reciprocation and difference. Although Rahul’s domestication is historically tied to absolute human domination, it seems in the present social context to be the only possible way small felines can survive. In general, the literary representation of animals has been criticized for distorting and marginalizing animal subjectivity. Different from other disciplines, animal literary studies have an important task not only to intervene but to infuence new ways to consider the non-human by transforming hearts and human minds through compassion for the Other.

NOTES 1. See Ryan Guderson’s article, “The First-Generation Frankfurt School on the Animal Question: Foundations for a Normative Sociological Animal Studies.” 2. By absence of truth I want to point out the disregard of philosophy in the sense discussed by Jacques Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am.

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REFERENCES Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. Routledge, 2008. Bolongaro, Eugenio. “Calvino’s Encounter with the Animal: Anthropomorphism, Cognition and Ethics in Palomar,” Quaderni d’italianistica, vol. XXX, no. 2, 2009, pp. 105–28. Borges, J. S. Kelio. “A estéticaneofantástica do Romance As Horas Nuas,” Raído, Dourados, vol. 12, no. 29, Jan./June 2018. Deleuze, Gilles. “Literature and Life,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, Winter 1997. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Fordham University Press, 2008. Guderson, Ryan. “The First-Generation Frankfurt School on the Animal Question: Foundations for a Normative Sociological Animal Studies,” Sociological Perspectives, vol. 57, no. 3, 2014, pp. 285–300. Iveson, Richard. “What Is Zoogenesis? Derrida and Benjamin, Introducing Animal Studies,” Zoogenesis Thinking Animals, Encounter and Other Stuff. Zoogenesis Word Press, 2011. Kahn, Charles H. Pythagoras and Pythagoreans: A Brief History. Hackett, 2001. Korhonem, Tua. “A Question of Life and Death: The Aesopic Animal Fables on Why Not to Kill,” Humanities, vol. 6, no. 29, 2017. Kostuch, Lucyna. “Do Animals Have a Homeland? Ancient Greeks on the Cultural Identity of Animals,” Humanimalia, vol. 9, no. 1, Fall 2017. Krieger, Murray. “History and Empirical Reality,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 2, December 1974, pp. 33–330. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Beacon Press, 1995.

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Plutarch. Moralia, vol. 12, translated by Harold Cherniss and William C. Helmbold. Harvard University Press, 1995. Sliwinsky, Sharon. “The Gaze Called Animal Notes for a Study on Thinking,” The New Centennial Review, vol. 11, no. 2, 2012, pp. 61–82. Steiner, Gary. Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Telles, Lygia Fagundes. As Horas Nuas. Ed. Circulo do Livro, 1989.

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Chapter 14

Canine Initiation into Ecowisdom1 Athane Adrahane

To Egon, Étrange, and Ramsès To their humanimal pack

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Thetys’s dreams

The dogs I have shared my life with come back in my dreams as elders from long ago. They speak in that language from the mountains, an ancient language, anchored in the tales of the lands of fossils, which are specifc to mountain pine trees, holm oaks, deer, wolves, and orchids. Their language, made of marl and clay, has the accents of the Bourboulet and the Toulourenc, those watercourses that have drawn the playgrounds of their bodies. I caress their muscles sculpted over the course of the dialogue with that land of clay, over the course of their bouncing across the steep slopes, such beautiful wrinkles, remnants of the foods that have shaped the face of that mountain that raised me to an ecological awareness. Touching their bodies enables me to hear the song of the Devonian and Thetys’s spells. Étrange, Egon, Ramsès come back and run in my dreams to instill the impulse of that earth’s energy into me, to remind me of my roots, the DNA that the city and its everexpanding concrete strive to make me forget. Yes, like that small mountain, I am a child of the ocean. My ancestors come back in my dreams and lick my face. Their tongues awaken a geopoetics of the Mediterranean Garrigues in me. Their unfurling waves of drool irrigate my body when it falls prey to the desertifcation of its fauna and fora imaginary. They straighten up my landscape and I wake up right in the middle of the city suffused with the precious memory of the water and of dawning life. Being in touch with them, I resume the practice of the literature of instincts, I make myself sentient to the sentences of the wind allied to the vocabulary of trees. Feeling again solidarity with the animal presences, I become a practical user of the “black 231

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paths.”2 It is more than fve years since the last of them passed off on the other shore. And yet their prose created in partnership with the mountain, birds, trees, and chamois keeps writing the routes of my existence, initiating me into ecowisdom.

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ANIMAL COMPASS My feld of research is philosophy, which is no hegemonic practice. There are as many philosophies as philosophers able to defend the ways they establish links (philo) with wisdom (sophia), striking a friendship with knowledge. If philosophy is discourse, the production of verbal argumentations (what is an animal?), it is also an existential engagement, a way of living. Those two facets of philosophy go on dialoguing with more or less intensity. Soils, skies, stars, earthquakes, and wounds which everyone encounters, have a say, in one way or another, in the production of knowledge. My philosophical practice follows in the steps of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom thinking derives from contact with forces embracing thought, as well as the affects and the bodily powers taking hold of it: “Thinking depends on certain coordinates. We have the truths we deserve according to the place where we conduct our existence, the hour of our watchfulness, the element which absorbs us” (Deleuze 1962, 125, translation by Françoise Besson and Jonathan Pollock). To every philosopher, as Deleuze and Guattari say, there corresponds a vital anecdote (Deleuze and Guattari 1991, 71). Such small life narratives depicting the relationships of a philosopher with animals, plants, and rocks testify to those alliances making him/her become other, as well as to the way the non-philosophy is going to affect his/her feld of study. Having been viscerally bitten by canine thought, philosophizing on the links woven by the canids’ tribe with a corpus of narratives will be only achieved if I sprinkle my writing proposal with a knowledge situated at the core of the concrete experience of twenty years spent among a tribe called Dogues de Bordeaux. The nature of cities and mountains will tell how fourlegged creatures have led the author of these lines to practice the scales of an ecowisdom consisting of some attention to the polyphony of worlds. A dog is more than a dog. Every being is a cartography, an arrangement, as is said by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Every creature is a universe, a polyphony. Henceforth, writing on the links that dogs create with literature and narratives, on how dogs are the subjects of narratives, cannot be done without our prose becoming a prey to stories and events which our canid companions are in contact with: their pact with thunderstorms on wolf nights, their becoming foxes, trees, mountains, and also humans. Henceforth

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let the reader not be surprised when, in keeping with canine thought, our own thought should deviate, digress, and bounce. It is also in the company of creatures belonging to fctional, ecological, and philosophical literature that our refection will wander in order to throw light on the way the animal compass, and more particularly the canids’, from the moment it starts guiding our footsteps, opens original paths of thought. Those literary creatures, though they do not have the same ontological status as an animal of fesh and blood, are yet endowed with a sentient existence able to have an impact on our lives on another psychic level. In some respects, my epistemological approach is also rather on a par with that of the dog in Kafka’s short story entitled “Investigations of a Dog.” Exactly like the protagonist of this story, my own research proceeds from vital anecdotes in which I found myself coping with a central core of uncommunicable sentience stemming from strange canine polyphony. In fact, what triggered the research career of Kafka’s narrator-dog was his encounter with seven musician-dogs. During one of their concerts, our youthful narrator is confronted with unconceivable sentience, something too great for him. The mysterious energy causing such a stir in his whole being is that of some music of the inaudible, some infra or supra music. Indeed, though the four-legged spectator can hear a great commotion coming from the septet, no audible sound visibly seems to be produced by the musiciandogs. As he relates it, “they were not talking, they were not singing, they kept silent almost all the time with some kind of awesome obstinacy; but out of nothingness they had the music miraculously gush out. It was all music: the way they raised and put down their paws, some of their head-movements, the way they ran and came to a standstill, or placed themselves relative to one another [. . .].”3 What he can also hear in the musician-dogs’ music is a cue to the discreet signs of mutual help and, eventually, a powerful melody in a harsh, clear tone gushing out straight from the remotest worlds. Such was the “vital anecdote” which transformed the narrator’s life and made him devote himself to research. Though focusing frst on the conditions of food appearance, his research will then be reconnected to musical knowledge in its canine peculiarity—earthly nourishment and musical nourishment sciences being not that far from each other. To him, not only is incantation the condition for any nourishing godsend to appear, but during a fasting regimen which was supposed to bring him some answers to his investigations, his encounter with a hunting dog will make him perceive again this mysterious infra music, the sublime voice, the mouthpiece of the forests’ profound silence or prodigious music. The thesis of Kafka’s dog is therefore in line with my thesis in this chapter: every being is the core of some unheard-of polyphony.

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ROBINSON’S LESSON OR THE PRESENT OF A RECOVERED SMILE The second literary movement we shall draw upon is taken from Michel Tournier’s book Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifque (Friday, or the Other Island). The novel tells the story of Robinson, the “sole” survivor from La Virginie’s shipwreck on the Pacifc coasts. To Robinson, there is no other way to think: there is only one society, the human Western society. Only that society is able to bring happiness to him. In keeping with its values, he reinvents a world and a way of life on the island, where he assumes the role of the sole master and owner of Nature. But one day when Robinson worries about the disappeance from his face of any affect of vitality, an animal smiles back to him. But who, by the simple power of a smile, would ever melt the ice that froze his countenance? He looked down at Tenn, who was seated on the ground at his side, gazing up at him. Was he dreaming? Tenn was smiling at his master. The black, fnely serrated lip was curled back on one side of his mouth, disclosing a double row of fangs, while his head was comically inclined to one side and his nut-brown eyes seemed to be wrinkled in laughter. Robinson took the shaggy head between his hands, while his own eyes grew misty with tenderness. (Tournier 1997, 87)

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Convinced that only a human creature could offer him the present of such “emotional tunings,” the discovery that the dog Tenn, another remnant from La Virginie, so far deemed to be an inferior creature, can offer him the present of such a joyful bonfre is for Robinson a true revolution.4 Thereafter it was like a game between them. Robinson would abruptly stop whatever he was doing—or even light a torch in the middle of the night—and, with a face now only half dead, gaze at Tenn in particular fashion. And Tenn would smile at him with his head on one side, and his dog’s smile would be refected ever more clearly on the face of the man, his master. (Tournier 1997, 87–88)

What sparks up in Robinson’s conscience through his new faciality is the idea that society is composed of beings other than humans, and that those other beings can participate in the creation of societies, which are holders of well-being. A completely animal geography redefnes Robinson’s variable faces. We can witness the defeat of a concrete face and the blossoming of an ecosentient face, able to let itself be sculpted by the wind and colored by the emotions aroused by the world around.

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A forgotten warmth tinged his cheeks, and he felt an unfamiliar tremor at the corners of his mouth—as when, on the banks of the Ouse, the frst breath of March had heralded the approaching stir of spring. Tenn was still smiling, and Robinson peered intently at him, seeking to recover that sweetest of human faculties. (Tournier 1997, 87)

A smile is a “yes” to life, some thankfulness for being alive in the present.‟I celebrate the presence of your story in my story,” so seems to say the merry and radiant opening up of the face. The dog Tenn’s smile is a booster bite: “death has not frozen your features, we might have failed to meet again but, through we don’t know which mysterious magic, it happens that our bodies can mutually feel joy when they are brought together.” Through that body language, the dog manages to summon the power of the “here and now,” to activate an utmost attention as far as meeting events are concerned. The dog is an expert in the art of celebration. “There is nothing more important than our coming together,” he says to his companion after every separation. What the dog Tenn instills into Robinson is a dawn of reconciliation with his own face and his own fesh. Through that experience of mediation and animal otherness, Robinson seems to fnd the ingredients of an antidote to the poison of the war he wages against himself and which he exports into the island. So Robinson gnaws at the ropes of a vicious circle that I would describe thus: by waging war to his circle, he triggers off the fght against what feeds the intimate life of his body (what allows him to eat, to sleep, to regenerate his cells) and thus of his own ecosystem. By practicing an animallike smile to face his human existence, he starts learning patience, demanding love for his gestures. Then he gradually breaks with the actions feeling his disgust of himself. He reinforces the gestures that make the merry celebration of the living bloom. Spinoza made love the essential concept of his philosophy. According to Spinoza, love is joy. This emotion increases our power to act. As this joy has an external cause, we strive to foster links with that cause in order to make it grow. Conversely, we tend to cut ourselves off from what would make it shrink. To Deleuze, who has read Spinoza, our buoyant affects are those that increase our joy and our power to act. Reaching such lightness, such a power of vital buoyancy, means, according to him, connecting with our center(s) of gravity. Reaching “the heart of wisdom,” “what is deepest in wisdom,” requires identifying and localizing those centers of gravity.5 Though such a sounding is not without the risk of imbalance, it is only at this cost, according to Deleuze, that we can increase our agility and sense of non-heaviness. To be able to enter a non-toxic love, full of joy and of lightness for the island welcoming him, Robinson must exprience philia with the depths of his body, with the center of his interior island. Before Tenn’s presence, Robinson dared

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to express himself thus: “If it were I who had been beheaded I would certainly not have gone running after that unsightly object whose red hair and freckles were the bane of my life!” (Tournier 1997, 88). From then on, he wishes again to reattach his head to his body, to rewire his brain to his heartbeats. Tenn is that little master who, taking Robinson by a smile, gradually teaches him how to come closer to his human–animal history, to remember where he comes from. So this frst canine lesson puts us on the tracks of a love for the living, whether it is it intimate or extimate, human or non-human.

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THE GIFT OF AN ANCESTOR It is to the dog’s ancestor that we owe the second lesson of wisdom. It comes from ecologist and forester Aldo Leopold’s book A Sand County Almanac. This is the kind of yarns that are spun around a woodfre. So let me borrow the techniques of oral tradition, unavoidably deviating sometimes from, and taking some liberties with, the original text (Leopold 2000, 168). For the young Aldo Leopold, then a hunter, there are no other ways of thinking: fewer wolves mean more deer, hence a hunter’s paradise. But at the moment of the killing of a female wolf by the young man and his companions, it is also that obviousness of thought that will come to an end in the young man’s mind. At the instant when she is about to die, the she-wolf’s vital wind mingles with the tales of the mountain that has seen her living strength spread out. During an ultimate eye-to-eye contact between the man and the animal, the mountain’s vigor is expressed for a last time through the she-wolf’s eyes. The green coloring they take reminds the author that the trees and the water of torrents have shaped the mountain’s identity. To Earth’s little one, the young Aldo Leopold, the mountain says: “The she-wolf has her place, as much as you, the human animal. For, over time, I have been able to enrich the morphology of my being thanks to lots of beings, who are as many points of life and points of view that have fashioned my health.” The mountain also said this: “The joyful power you feel because of your hunting feat is therefore not necessarily mine.”6 Aldo Leopold realizes then that the mountain, that Elder, thinks differently from him. Its millenary thought is inscribed in a long time, a time taking into consideration innumerable times: forest-time, torrent-time, butterfy-time, wolf-time. It also takes a keen interest in the interaction between those various temporalities. The female wolf, as a mountain advocate and mouthpiece, offers Aldo Leopold the precious gift of the feeling that his animal existence is a component part of a world where everything is linked. There is therefore reason to learn how to think beyond the private experience, in a global manner. The female wolf also offers him the gift of that sensation of short time

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and of the ephemeral. There is therefore reason to learn to think in a local manner, taking into account the inscription of the body and of thought in the matter of the present time. This is not without reminding us of the track of some “wisdom of all wisdom” where our pinpointing our own gravity centers would allow us to expand the spreading of some air-borne perception. The female wolf with forest-colored eyes, by transmitting to Leopold the famous formula “Thinking Like a Mountain,” thereby opens up for him the door to a perception through which the links between heterogeneous worlds become visible. That event leads perception on the paths of a polyphonic environmental awareness. The practice of a polyphonic attention requires making our thought responsive to the various voices composing the music of the world around, but also becoming aware of the tessitura of one’s own voice, in its impact force as much as in its precariousness. Am I not then an animal, too? What is the nature of my predation? Which arangements do I promote to fnd food and shelter? Am I not also the prey of a hunter, of a mechanism, of a system that might cause my death? As the she-wolf has so long been wandering in the mountain, curling up within its very folds, and intimately knowing the variations of its sounds, weather spells, and odors, the mountain has also folded itself inside the she-wolf. This folding-back movement of an ecosystem within the body of a creature that has an intimate relationship with it is forcefully shown in the Robinson Crusoe version by flmmaker Luis Bunuel. In this flm, when he is about to leave the island, once the opportunity to do so has been given to him, Robinson casts a nostalgic glance back at his shack where he has spent so much time, but no glance at all is given to the island which has allowed so many metamorphoses in Robinson. However, the flmmaker is not going to conclude by hushing the voice of the island. As Robinson is canoeing away, a sound picture focuses on the muffed voice of his dog, who died on the island after having been Robinson’s companion for many years there. This dog’s voice seems to be emerging from the whole island. At this point, it is to be assumed that this barking with an island face will haunt, in the strong sense of inhabit, each and every gesture of Robinson’s, and that whenever Robinson tries to isolate the past experience from his new life, there will be a death-bite (a death-bid)7 in his soul. The dog’s voice reminds Robinson that wherever he fnds himself, he has been intimately bitten by wildlife, by the sharp awareness of his belonging to the species homo natura. How will he make such ecowisdom alive within a civilization that has been constructed out of the destruction of the gracefulness of animal, plant, and ocean? So we again fnd the idea that Speranza, the isle, is folded up within Tenn, the dog, but also within Robinson. In the two narratives conjured up so far, the dog and the female wolf are go-betweens to and from the human world and the non-human world. These two beings let us feel that Nature is not only an

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exterior decor, but it also dwells in the deepest part of us. They facilitate that invagination of the outside into the inside and of the inside into the outside. To better understand that magic trick, let me also tell you the way I have been initiated into this ecowisdom by one of my dogs.

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THE DOG WHO WAS METAMORPHOSED INTO A TREE There was a time when I could not breathe easily in urban people’s world. My dog, who had been ill-treated by the human world, helped me to fnd the trick for us to escape asphyxia. Being very keen on trees, he wished to live mostly among them. Three times a day, he took me to the country of trees. That country was situated within a park which once belonged to a great forest: Soignes Forest (secretely named the Healing forest—Soignes being the French for “heal”). No, my dog Ramses de l’Aube Rouge did not budge from that universe of peace located at the heart of the city of Brussels. He found there what was necessary for him to heal his wounds. Thanks to his passion, I rediscovered then those leafy beings that had been the confdants and the witnesses of my childhood dreams and wounds. As a little girl, I would have given everything so that they could tell what was unutterable within me. But alas, people do not listen more to what trees say than to what little girls say, I said to myself then. When we grow up, we unlearn tree-talk. But if we stay close to them long enough, it quickly comes back, and trees start again fueling our thoughts, dispersing seeds into our dreams, making our body breathe. If we are attentive, the growth that takes place in the tree and that makes it so strong and stable, is communicated to our being. That pushing growth is extended from the middle of the body. There is from the belly, from this center, an upward and downward impulse. No, it is not rare that near a tree, we might start quietly singing in tune. We straighten up then, we regain dignity. Yes, that’s it; quite strong in our roots, frmly aware of our gravity centers. Branches and wings wide open, ready to embrace the world and to become a bird! That is how trees taught my dog and me how to breathe. But in spite of that, we could not manage to curb, in our bodies, the asphyxiating expansion of the big city bustle. We entrusted that worry to our tree-friend. The latter answered that he understood our turmoil, that itself resisted and struggled so as not to be killed! It advised us to climb up toward the Southern sun, and at the top of a mountain there was a community of brother-trees and this community would pursue the teaching of the how to breathe they had initiated. Then we climbed up and we reached a place where everywhere tree language was spoken. There, little by little, was amplifed the awareness of the air we breathe in, of the soil and water which make this polyphonic choir of the

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living grow together. There, little by little, was amplifed some awareness of the poisonings and injuries of the earth. And then we had to take care of the planet’s breathings. All this would rise in me like fever, but also like some springtime seeking its song. My dog grew old and it was time for him to go. He then entered the mountain body. And then, little by little, he changed himself into a small forest of lilliputian trees, thyme bushes, and herbs healing respiratory troubles. When the body of a being disappears, sometimes it just takes on new dimensions and, thanks to the alliances it has made, then it goes on pulsating through trees, fowers, butterfies, mountains, and male and female humans. When my dog made one with the mountain, the month of June was displaying its magic in the very blossoms of the old lime-tree and the fowers of brooms. The celebration of bees and butterfies was in full swing. The song of the torrent vigourously irrigated the throats of foxes, chamois, and wild boars. It was the time of the red twilight, the time to harvest the lime tree blossoms, the instant of their maturity, of their highest healing power. I understood that honouring Ramsès’s life meant staying as close as possible to those pulsations where the animal, vegetal, and mineral worlds intermingle. Today my dog is not dead, each cup of lime blossom tea makes him present to my heart, to my loins, and to my lungs. Grandfather Linden is 200 years old. He has seen the dreams and thwarted hopes of his dwellers. He has seen the twentieth-century wars and old Anna carrying the bundles of hay up on the hilltop. He has seen the snowstorm blow down his brother, the great mulberry tree. He has heard tears turn into piano notes and the notes thus produced, once mingled with the wind, burst into peals of laughter in front of small human tragedies. He has welcomed the mad animal weddings, withstood storms, snowy episodes and droughts. He has celebrated rain, which was thought to have been captured by an evil spirit. Today, because the death of my dog coincided with grandfather Linden’s celebration, I am responsive to these trees’ points of view, made of so many stories. Thanks to a lime blossom or thyme tea, Ramsès comes back and lives in my dreams as if to remind me to tell this tale in which so many ways of inhabiting the earth are intermingled. Yes, here is my heritage: even far from my dog’s and grandfather Linden’s home, I fnd a soothing strength near the leafy community. Ramsès has expanded my life to the sylvan worlds. In the urban life I am having today, there is always a tree to remind me to breathe, to revive the idea that death has not blown me down yet, that I must honor my verticality—the dialogue of subterranean worlds with the world of the canopies, sky, sun, and roots. Yes, there is always a tree to remind me to sing and to teach me other ways to solve the problems I come across, to invent unheard of solutions by breaking off with, or transforming my ancient lineages. There is always a forest, were it a Lilliputian one, to tell me about birds, the climate, and all that makes them break into a chant or be disenchanted.8

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Athane Adrahane

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WORLD GO-BETWEENS This consciousness, expanded to the other ways of inhabiting the earth, this increased attention to what this biodiversity has to teach us, seems to awaken in situations of secession, when the items of our usual knowledge waver, or else in the presence of love and attachment stories that go beyond the patterns of classical liaisons. Situating oneself on the fne line between life and death, learning how to leave (to forsake a certain way of life), how to let go (waving goodbye to a way of life to which we are used) are questions of philosophy but also of ecology. They are therefore questions of ecophilosophy. The current ecological situation confronts humans with the extinction of many breaths. Some narratives, some thoughts belonging to non-modern ontologies teach us that “dead can dance.”9 If we listen to Squamish Chief Seattle, we learn that “there is no death. Only a change of worlds” (coll. 122). Thus for death ceremonies, music and chant very often accompany the shift from one state to the other. Music instruments are already the result from a transformation that brings back life into the inanimate. The drum, which brings life into bodies, is composed of the wood of a dead tree and of the skin of a deceased animal. Chant confronts the body of the person who indulges in this practice with the ceaseless movement of extinction and appearance of breath. In departure ceremonies, the function of the recital words, whether they are chanted, spoken, or danced, is to make some dimensions that have vanished out of sight alive, here and now, and to retrieve the signifcant events of a lifetime. If, during such ceremonies, the aim is to honor the being who is leaving this world, to make what will never die present, the aim is also to embrace thankfulness for what is still here within heart’s and breathing’s reach. By confronting us with what is going extinct, the current ecological situation makes the human species face the responsibility of being attentive to what is most valuable, and without which we lose our human quality. It urges us to sustain the links with the present of those others inhabiting the earth and with each and every element and individual that renews its breath. We owe a distant cousin of dogs the revelation of the mechanisms involving the passage from the inanimate to the animate, from absence to presence, and from extinction to revitalization. He is also going to put us on the track of understanding what passing away, departing, grieving the loss of some dimensions, and celebrating what cannot die mean. This canid is one of the wise characters dwelling in the philosophical tale The Little Prince. WISDOM OF BONDS: LEARNING TO LOVE At this point, we must redefne the context in which the disclosure of this knowledge occurs. On his trip to visit Earth’s people, the little prince feels

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an urgency to be connected with those others who inhabit the Earth and with whom he wants to be acquainted as soon as possible, without wasting a drop of time. But an encounter with the animal kingdom is going to thwart this impatience. The fox hushed and peered at the little prince for a long time.

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“Please, . . . tame me!” He said. “Yes, I will,” the little prince answered, “but I haven’t got much time. I have friends to discover and many things to get to know.” “We only get to know what we tame” the fox said. “Men no longer have the time to know anything. They buy ready-made items from merchants. But as friend-sellers do not exist, men no longer have any friends. If you want a friend, then tame me!” “What must be done?” The little prince said. ‘You must be very patient,” the fox answered. “You will frst sit down, fairly away from me, like this, on the grass. I’ll watch you from the corner of my eye and you won’t say anything. Language is at the root of misunderstandings. But day by day, you’ll be allowed to sit a little closer.” (Saint-Exupéry 69, translation by Marie-Christine Noailles-Pizzolato and Françoise Besson)10

The fox does not yield to the emergency pressure and to the laws of a hurried world. His philosophy of relationship is quite different. To him, it is in the art of slow eros that lies a viable solution to the devastating shock of civilization. Love is this subtle balance consisting in respecting/ recognizing the world that makes us different from the other and also in activating his narrative at the heart of ours. So there is some likelihood that an anomalous space, of the humanimal type, may emerge.11 I am somewhat human and you somewhat fox. If “all” is linked together, this “all” keeps on varying and transforming itself according to the events and the encounters taking place in it. Any encounter is poetizing/creating an environment in the making. Thanks to the fox, the little prince eventually learns to “slow down.” He learns the demands and constraints that are involved in the practice of a relation to the other which wants to be characterized by engagement. For the fox, taming means “creating links,” which I understand as working on a practice of attachment that should be a work of art. The need for the other is not indicative of any dependency, for the other is enhancement of the being. That kind of ecological “rendezvous” does not mean relinquishment, capitulation of our being for the beneft of some other, but an interaction that increases the autonomy of each and every party involved in the relationship. It is a “conaissance”12 where, on every side of the alliance, each party increases our power of metamorphosis. The fox’s narrative makes us understand that there

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is no link that cannot be created, and that this demands some taming, requires time, and that there is no strong and living relationship without “creating” a time to meet the other or without an art of the approach, lookout, and watchfulness, with its rules, its discipline, and its rites. Every hurried gesture, every too rapid step, but also every missed rendezvous may fragilize the artwork, break the link that will have to be woven again patiently with the other. Once tamed, the other becomes something more than just a noise amid noises. This other gives birth to a new music, feast days for which your heart is dressed up, as the fox says. Then, you become responsible for what you have tamed, and which, thereby, becomes unique in the world. Such love cannot have a territory; it cannot shut off its fux into the other. It is a dynamic process, like a fountain of energy which encourages each and everyone’s fight, the processes of self-empowerment rather than the subjugations or addictions. If the fox does not fear to let the little prince go, or to dwell in the land of tears, it is because he fnds himself larger than before his meeting with the little prince; his capacity to radiate when in contact with his environment has been magnifed. The wheat felds, which meant nothing to him before, will from now on conjure up the little prince’s golden mane, and it will be through the very golden wheat that the winds of the whole universe will sing in his heart. Thus wheat will become sacred. Before saying farewell to the little prince, the fox offers him a present:

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“Goodbye,” the fox said. “Here is my secret. It is very simple: it is with the heart only that we can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eyes. It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important. Men have forgotten this truth,” the fox said. “But you mustn’t forget it. You shall forever become responsible for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose [. . .].” (Saint-Exupéry, 72–74, translation by Marie-Christine Noailles-Pizzolato and Françoise Besson)13

The idea that “what is essential is invisible to the eyes,” or that “it is with the heart only that we can see clearly,” may be accounted for by the fact that “looking at” has become a habit, a mere gesture of recognition, the working application of an organ limited to its shape, to the outlines of things, and ignoring the forces at work in what constitutes the visible. But “seeing,” in the strong meaning of the word, partakes of some clairvoyance engaging in dialogue with the dance of these living forces. “Seeing” can go together with a perception involving all the body, in its totality. It then becomes a “heart” affair, as it is a question of having the blood circulate, bringing it everywhere inside the body. Perceiving with all our body, in holistic fashion, to the

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rhythm of the vital pulse, means paying attention to the fact that, through our gestures, even the smallest, the most trifing ones, there is good cause to make the sap indispensable to life circulate. Seeing, knowing exactly where we are in an environment, opening up a path with our heart, all this means using our loyal and faithful allegiances as a compass. The little prince will take great care of the fox’s present and will have it make its way to us. First he tells the aviator about it. As they are on the brink to die of thirst, and as the urgency to fnd a well is greatly worrying the aviator who has not repaired his plane yet, the little prince makes him be aware of the whole dimension of what is essential.

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“Having had a friend is fne, even if we’re going to die. I, for one, am very happy I’ve had a fox-friend.” (Saint-Exupéry 77, translation by Marie-Christine Noailles-Pizzolato and Françoise Besson)14 “Stars are beautiful, because of a fower that can’t be seen. . .” “I answered “of course” and I looked, speechless, at the sand folds in the moonlight.” “The desert is beautiful,” he added. “And this was true. I have always loved the desert. You sit down on a sand dune. You can see nothing. You can hear nothing. And yet something radiates in silence. . .” ‘What makes the desert beautiful,” the little prince said, “is that a well is hidden somewhere in it.” (Saint-Exupéry 78, translation by Marie-Christine Noailles-Pizzolato and Françoise Besson)15

From the moment when the aviator connects himself to the essential, he sees, when awakening, the well in the desert, a well that was only waiting for its own awakening, a well singing the past life of a community, of a village now vanished. Another point of view has opened up in the aviator. The desert is beautiful because the essential is invisible. The desert is beautiful from the moment we humbly accept that, even if we are going to die, we have had a friend by our side, we have received gifts from life, and life as a whole is a gift. Even death (our own death) is a gift, a present vibrating with echoes and music, if we welcome it, as Rilke invites us to do, as if it were a fruit that we cultivate and make grow in us all along our life.16 From the moment when, in the aviator, there settles this new world assembling hub where the patient path to tread and the urgency to fnd something to drink are managed, he stops going in circles like some frantic compass and, steered by the vital heartbeat, he fnds himself endowed with the sight of a water diviner. He can then sense, as in a dream, the existence of a well. But the higher ordeal of this initiation to the episteme of the sacred taught by the fox will consist in

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making the tearful song caused by the little prince’s departure some food, a vital resource, namely the writing of this story. “Ah! Little guy, little guy, I like hearing this laughter!” “Precisely so, this will be my present . . . it will be as for the water . . .” “When you are looking at the sky at night, since I’ll be living in one of [the stars], since I’ll be laughing in one of them, then it will be for you as if all the stars were laughing. You, for one, will have stars that can laugh.” (Saint-Exupéry 87–88, translation by Marie-Chistine Noailles-Pizzolato and Françoise Besson)17

This conjuring trick where the golden-haired little boy transforms himself into a wheat feld in the fox’s eyes, then into a laughing star in the aviator’s eyes, echoes this moment when, to my mind, the Dogue de Bordeaux transforms himself into a tree and when canine love will be transformed into sylvan love. The likelihood that these magic tricks may be achieved lies, to be sure, in an activation of the energy of love. If there are different ethics in magic, the ethics we conjure up are based upon the ethics of love as bonding energy making the life-fow circulate more than containing it. Love as a “fountain of energy” fowing through different environments and connecting them, reminds us of the defnition that Aldo Leopold gave of the Earth:

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Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy fowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return ut to the soil. The circuit is not closed. (Leopold 1970, 253)

This energy of the land, like all the energy of love, circulates, gets transformed, and holds worlds together. If this energizing entity fows through environments, within us and outside us in an invisible way, we can feel and experiment what it makes of us and the way it achieves transformations. There is therefore good reason to keep paying attention to its passing through, to make that awareness grow and to learn, not to take hold of this energizing entity for our own sake, but to promote the transmission from world to world. A CARTOGRAPHY OF ÉTRANGE The story I would like to tell you about is taken from a dog’s life collection which has helped me to go deeper into the art of Loving like a land or like a mountain,18 the art of loving taking into consideration the whole of a world, but also its local and located connections.

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When we frst met, Étrange, a great grandnephew of my dog Ramsès, already bore on his thigh the tattoo of an impressive bite in the shape of a fash of lightning. His breeders told me that this wound had been caused by his mother. Yet about the circumstances of it, I did not learn much. Here is one of the versions. Étrange, a “red-masked” among the “black-masked,” was the smallest in a litter of thirteen puppies. Because of his thin build, he no doubt found it hard to reach his mother’s teats. Obtaining the vital beverage could only cause stress and therefore clumsy sucking. His dogue-mum must have forcefully responded to indelicate nibbling. Étrange then struck up a friendship with Egon, another “red-masked” puppy from the same litter. Massive little Egon then endorsed the mission to protect his little brother. To do so, he turned himself into a daunting sentinel and created a security border around Étrange so that the latter could feed himself without being jostled about by the clan of little “black-masked” dogs. Egon long stuck to this habit of protecting Étrange’s meals. Indeed, when my life companions and I welcomed the two brothers at the heart of our mountain life, Egon kept on making patrols around Étrange in order to protect him against any being (including those who were in charge of the food distribution), running the risk of preventing him from gulping down his dogfood. When entrusting the dog to me, my friend the breeder warned me that his taming would not be easy. Indeed, as he had been obliged very early to struggle for life, Étrange was that rebel rejecting any control over his being. As quick as lightning, as fery as fre, with his brain promptly wiring all connections, he wished he would display his poetry of existence as he pleased, with his nose up in the wind, earth clots in his hairs, and snowfakes in his eyes. When he was four months old, he came across his master: the thunderstorm. At dusk, Master Thunderstorm marked its arrival with a particularly intense calligraphy. I called Étrange so that he could fnd shelter, but drunk with pure air, he preferred to go out and, as if uplifted by the sky, bounce in the lavender felds. Then the thunderstorm spoke. And Étrange then vanished out of sight. I looked for him in the felds and, failing to fnd him, I came back home to alert my friend. I then saw an Étrange who was shaking all over, as if hunted down by the sky, running back toward me. He sought refuge against my bosom and fell asleep there. He woke up and he was again shaken by earth shocks. Then his own earth calmed down again and he fell back to sleep in my arms. This cycle of alternating shocks and great calm recurred twice. Like any earth after a thunderstorm, Étrange’s own earth woke up feeling quite reinvigorated, and he was ready to launch himself into new adventures. I described and mimed that story to many persons. “Strange! Weird!” were their answers! Life resumed its usual course. It became a legend that Étrange’s crazy spells came from the fact that he had been struck by lightning. Feeling surrounded and secured by the unfailing love of his kin, Guillaume, Théa, and I watched over by Egon, his

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brother, Étrange displayed his poetry that was up to his crazy love for the living. Over his zigzagging sprees, electrifed by his eagerness to meet the world, his laughter burst and blossomed out everywhere he went. However, an increased responsiveness to thunderstorms remained in him. Their approach was signaled to his pack by his intense body shakes which occurred well before the offcial arrival of fashes of lightning in the sky. This power to perceive climatic and atmospheric changes applied to other levels. He was an expert in the art of tracking down the inner storms that would originate in human bodies, and in the art of checking their devastating aftermath. His healing technique consisted in immobilizing the person that was in the grip of it all, by literally grasping them between his paws so that they could let themselves be fooded with his watery kisses. The effect was immediate; any destructive outburst would turn into a joyful outburst of love. Though Étrange was a fre spirit, it was the water spirit that had endowed him with the power of this soothing medicine. As he had one day challenged the water spirit, the latter had shown him the depths of its power. He then became its diligent pupil, spending hours beholding it so as to integrate its calm into the dynamism of his own moves. On a summer afternoon, after his brother’s death, the mountain atmosphere was heavy with something somewhat different. Following numerous spells of stormy weather, peacefulness had settled back again in the mountain. As during the thunderstorm episode nine years earlier, I saw Étrange rush into my writing room, seek peace in my arms and eventually fall asleep. I went out and questioned the mountain. I then caught sight of European bee-eaters. I followed the songs of those migratory birds. They led my paws to the place where his brother Egon lies. There I could see a chamois. Bulk and color being the same, I thought I was seeing Egon. I realized that Étrange had been equally mistaken. I came back near Étrange. We took a few steps in the mountain and he fell stone dead on his fank. I thought my friend was bidding farewell to this world, in other words that he was dying. He had no breath. I felt for his heart. It was still beating. While connecting myself to his pulse, I stroked his earth, sang to him a song composed during our walks alongside the water. Running alongside his bones, my hand engaged in a dialogue with some regions in his body. It strangely seemed to know the healing spots. He was shaken with earth shocks. Little by little, he calmed down and became the ocean calm after the tempest. Watching around me, while going on singing and massaging him, I saw the mountain as I had never seen it before. I saw it as if it were a fuid world where everything was connected. I saw the earth like “the fountain of energy” Aldo Leopold tells about. I sensed the sap of life circulating from trees to fowers, from insects to grass snakes. I could grasp the movements of the mountain through its different ages, in its infancy, when it was rocked by

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the ocean lullabies. I saw Étrange playing hide-and-seek in the orchard with his brother, his geopolitical negotiations with adders, foxes, and wild boars. I saw my human companions, their loving gestures with the plum trees and hazel trees, and the time they would spend caring for our stone home. I saw the conjoined dance of our successes and failures, tears and sad moods, shades and lights. An intense life was overfowing in me. Had my viewpoint, the place where my perception builds itself, moved out into Étrange’s body? Was I experiencing the mountain through his spirit? By connecting myself to the vital disturbances of his ecosystem as well as to his pulsing, I was activating that thought of the heart, that philosophy of relationships in which the concerns relevant to human and non-human activities interweave. I saw, with a wholly animal intelligence, the importance of the healing power of those alliances. Watching the flm of his life in the world surrounding us, I understood that he was at one with the ecosystem of the mountain that had seen him grow up and nourish his own strength. I saw the place where he situated his love, namely in each and every participation of his kin in the life of that ecosystem. We made up a whole. The gratefulness he felt for this earth was mine. I stroked Étrange’s little earth and it guided my breath. The terrain of my song going crescendo and decrescendo was evocative of our mountain walks, of our resting spots, of power, of healing. My voice and my song were the instruments of tales in which there intermingled the words of the Devonian, the words of rocks, rivers, butterfies, fowers, dogues, and humans, men and women alike. At that very moment, it was impossible to tell who the author of this song was. Everything and all partook of it. The polyphony of the living. Étrange’s heartbeats brought me back to the usual passing of time. Though that episode lasted only a few minutes, we had actually journeyed through millions of years. His breath came back to life. The wind of his little planet was blowing noisily and pantingly. His body slowly returned to normal. And, as if nothing had happened, he stood up. I believed it was a miracle. He took me to the place where Egon was lying and where he had caught sight of the chamois; he then took me into the little house where Egon used to live with his woman companion and, eventually, to the very place where Egon had taken his last breath. Paying attention to each and every movement of his, I understood that he was telling me about the last visible moments of his brother’s life, as a mime would do. Contrary to what Nancy Huston thinks, storytelling is not the privilege of humans.19 Animals too can tell stories. Yet Étrange’s storytelling did not stop at his brother’s last visible lair, he started to give voice to ways that only animals know of. So, we ended up near the fox’s lair. And so, I started to wonder about the presence of holes and habitats that my eyesight had so far ignored. A scientifc explanation of the event was given by the veterinarian. It represents another version of the story that has been previously told. According to

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the version of Western medicine, this seismic shock was called an epileptic ft. I had never been confronted with such signs in a body, but it all looked like what had happened during Étrange’s encounter with the thunderstorm. His epilepsy had then been dormant for nine years. The shock he suffered when mistaking the chamois for his brother might have been the cause of this seismic seizure. Thereafter, whenever he came across an animal with the colors of Egon, a new electrical shock ran through Étrange. During Étrange’s disappearances into the “Egon” fault zone, my four-legged companion took me more than once onto the very paths where droppings made me think that we were following the trail of foxes and chamois. By taking me on these paths, Étrange was trying to trigger off stories dealing with the ways he and Egon used to engage in geopolitical negotiations with the other inhabitants of the mountain. I also came to understand how diffcult it was for Étrange to cope with some territory stories without his teammate. Étrange’s request to reinforce by his side the writing of this territory—by having such or such a connection imported, by lingering near such or such a tree, by suddenly changing our itinerary to support another—invited me to transform even the way I would physically plod along in the mountain. Indeed, some paths were so steep or so deeply sunk into the scrubland that I had to opt for the fourlegged technique. It was my whole body that then began to come to terms with the point of view of a dog who himself would sneak into other points of view than a strictly canine one. Beyond achieving another cartography of the mountain, I literally discovered another mountain.20 Much later on, on the day after the death of Étrange, my friend, in order to honor his life, I went to the very place where he and I liked to stop so as to sing in unison with the torrent or, failing that, to conjure up the rain when dry weather painted the valley. There, at the foot of my favorite rock, I found a fossil stone embedded within the frosty clay. It was a big ammonite dating back to the time when the ocean covered the mountain. The search for ammonites was most popular with geologists, for the mountain which welcomed us had sunk under the combined effect of the Mont Ventoux’s hard bedrock and of the Alps’ moving plate, thus visibly exposing strata dating back to the dinosaurs’ time, which are normally to be found several hundred meters deep. Finding out a fossil stone was a magic event as it testifed to the existence of a vanished animal life. This stone had been there since the dawn of our visits to that place. It had watched us go passing by and singing like the torrent. On that day, watching the world through Étrange’s love, every mountain recess had become endowed with a new dimension. On that day, Étrange being physically no more by my side, I had endowed myself with new eyesight, I could see with my heart, with my whole body. In the same way as the aviator had seen the water spring in the desert, to me too the invisible was becoming visible. Some old magic was at work. Étrange, who had patiently meditated in

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front of the water to quench his lightning, conjured up the vision of a marine animal that may have been 75 million years old. On another day when I sadly felt in my body the physical absence of my dog, while singing our mountain melodies I was patting the earth at a place where it seemed to me he drew his powers as a sower of joy. Indeed, in that place, he and his brother were seized by an energy that could revive their bodies with joyful spiral-like dances. I patted the earth and hummed and patted the earth as a mother lovingly and gently pats her child. The mountain became like a huge animal body. I could no longer tell who was touching whom. I loved that place and felt it loved me in return. And at that moment, under my hands running alongside the earth there appeared a geological stratum peopled with a pack of fossil little beings. Sharing some crazy love with Mother Earth, I was seeing with my heart’s eyes what had never stopped being visible. I made joyous leaps that transformed themselves into that spiral-like dance Egon and Étrange used to perform, a spiral reproducing the shape of the ammonite. Étrange had played another conjuring trick on me. He had changed my heavy sadness into a leaping joy that was full of gratitude for the bountiful surroundings. He had revived in me some magic consciousness by letting me see the ocean where the earth was cracking with drought, by drawing my attention to emerging worlds when my research was focusing on extinct or vanishing animal species. Whether they were crawling, croaking, or chirping ones, many other life spheres were still extant there all around me. In order to catch sight of them I only had to keep up with the present time.21 At the beginning of this chapter I wrote that Étrange had opened me up to the art of loving like a mountain. As we have seen it through the she-wolf and Aldo Leopold’s story, thinking like a mountain consists of taking into account the diversity of time-scales within a world, and in stimulating the attention paid to the interactions of the different ethos shaping an ecosystem. Loving like a mountain requires cultivating a love that is not based on appropriation but on attention paid to the exchanges of vital fux which make up a being’s little planet. Étrange is an arrangement of narratives, a network of relationships: stories of the Ancient Mountain and of ocean Thetys, stories of storms and of Touroulenc river, of the wind and of a Grandfather Linden, stories of Egon, of foxes, of wild boars, of chamois, and of his little human tribe of men and women. Étrange is a polyphony, his music supersedes the sum of his voices. And each of his voices does not stop with its music, but goes on in the connecting, rubbing, and encountering adventures. Loving Étrange, loving in Étrange’s fashion, consists of honoring the dance of his tales, of his bonding connectedness. My loyalty to that love makes me see the world through a dog’s eyes. Let’s make it clear: seeing the world through Étrange’s eyes means seeing the world through the eyes of the mountain and, therefore, through the eyes of an ecological situation in which human and non-human

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narratives interlock. How can we be worthy of this heritage, how can we extend these connections? How can we take good care of this ecowisdom and make a compass of it in order to steer our way among humans? How can the faithful attachment to a place, to a local setting, make sense in other places, for example, in an urban setting? Here can be found again the questions raised by the presence of the dog-Isle within the Robinson-being on his return to civilization.

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PHILOSOPHIZING LIKE A DOG In her Companion Species Manifesto, Donna Haraway writes that sharing your life with canids commits you to experimenting with “signifcant otherness,” that is to say some meaningful otherness insofar as it becomes a “partner” otherness, a conniving and complementary otherness. Once in the company of those others, we become some “other,” we acknowledge the fact that what we are is the result of a meticulous interweaving of human and nonhuman existences (Haraway 2019, 29). One of the ethical and political stakes of Haraway’s book, and of the stories selected in this chapter, consists of making the learning of canine otherness a valuable resource whose aims are an initiation into a philosophy of relationships characterized by the full presence of each for the other, active attention paid to the other’s needs, relevant response to the requirements of this bonding connectedness, and respectful interlocking of each other’s territories and becomings. Such learning fashions compasses that can help in the creation of love stories transcending relational stereotypes. To conclude this chapter, like Kafka who, in one of his short stories, entrusted his writing to a dog, I’ll let those dog-musicians who co-composed my vital polyphony have their say.22 Yes, we will come back and run in your dreams to remind you of your mountain-body, the one that is not anchored to the strictly human identity. This body which, being an expert in the art of perspectives, has taught you to approach the world from the eagle’s point of view, with its penetrating and all-embracing vision, and has also endowed you with the point of view of the snake mastering caution as well as the fne sentience of vibrations and the searing response of lightning. We will bring you back to this watchfulness, patient, tense, and ready to bounce or to escape being. This multi-perspectivism that the mountain has generated in you also lies in the humility of the torrent running inside your veins and making you perceive the world through the eyes of that fltering, namely that everything, including you, is only change and fux. Mmmmm, have a taste of this sun, yes, just like this, with your tongue hanging out and your body being massaged by

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the earth! Come on, we’ll invite you to recover a taste for this body which is not afraid of taking side-tracks with their brambles, freezing winds, as well as odors and unexpected treats. Don’t forget that you are intimate with fowers, familiar with mountain peaks and valley shallows. As the offspring of these majestic and ruthless lands, you‘ve learnt with us to growl and bare your fangs when a trespasser came onto your territory, or when some reckless creature jeopardized the vital breath of your pack. With us you’ve learnt to seek guidance not from rumors fueled by fear, but from the patterns drawn by fashes of lightning and from the singing trees. Owing to our nocturnal wanderings, you’ve learnt not to fear the night anymore, but to make yourself attentive to its polyphony. With the fox, you’ve learnt how to vanish out of sight, to hide away and indulge in mystery. With the bats, you’ve learnt to make your art a sonar. We bark in your dreams to wake you up so that you can acknowledge that all that urban contrivance which pretends it can do without animal wisdom is but an assemblage that could be different. There is another city within the city. You have experienced all its possibilities when we were moving through parks and forests. It’s up to you to conjure up literature for those hairy and feathered peoples. We were leading you on to these other ways of inhabiting the world, Can you remember your fascination for our little mountain spiders, those relentless weavers sitting in the middle of their webs? You would slow down our strolls to take snapshots of them! Be those brave embroiderers’ sister who, putting her abdomen into her work, will be co-weaving this web with loving kindness as its bonding thread. Even where concrete reigns supreme, ancient magic is at work, the magic of bountiful earth within each being. Feel your heart radiate away to the full dimension of this earth which we have chosen to inhabit! Feel its anomalous tribe by your side. Live your love to the power of a whole mountain! Such love has the power to make the sap circulate within neglected earths that may readily recover and reemerge. And above all, smile, because life today is your country! Let our strolls go on and on.23 NOTES 1. This article has been translated from the French by Marie-Christine NoaillesPizzolato and Françoise Besson. 2. The phrase is borrowed from Sylvain Tesson. The black paths are tracks, trails, interstices escaping the standartisation device of life routes. 3. Franz Kafka, La muraille de Chine et autres récits [1936, 1937], translated from German into French by Jean Carrive and Alexandre Vialatte, Gallimard, coll. “Folio” 1950, 228. Translated from the French by Marie-Chrstine Noailles-Pizzolato and Françoise Besson.

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4. We borrow the phrase, “accordage affectif” translated into English as “emotional runings” from Daniel N. Stern. See Le monde interpersonnel du nourrisson, translated by Alain Lazartigues and Dominique Pérard, Presses Universitaires de France, coll. “Le fl rouge”, 1989 [1985], 185. 5. Gilles Deleuze, “Cinéma cours 49 du 13/12/83”, transcription par Daniel Rayburn, .​ 6. A free adaptation of Aldo Leopold’s text by the author of this essay. 7. The original French plays on the homophony between “mort sûre” (certain death) and “morsure” (bite). 8. This narrative is extracted from “Histoires de vibration. Quand racontent nos tremblements de corps” [“Vibration Stories. When our Body Shiverings Tell Stories”], a spectacle under development, by the author of this text. 9. The phrase Dead can dance, comes from the mythical Anglo-Australian music group formed by Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry in the 1980s. The name “Dead can dance” was chosen by the artists in reference to an Aboriginal death mask to convey the idea of the passing from the inanimate to the animate and vice versa. 10. “Le renard se tut et regarda longtemps le petit prince : - S'il te plaît... apprivoise-moi ! dit-il. / - Je veux bien, répondit le petit prince, mais je n'ai pas beaucoup de temps. J'ai des amis à découvrir et beaucoup de choses à connaître. / - On ne connaît que les choses que l'on apprivoise, dit le renard. Les hommes n'ont plus le temps de rien connaître. Ils achètent des choses toutes faites chez les marchands. Mais comme il n'existe point de marchands d'amis, les hommes n'ont plus d'amis. Si tu veux un ami, apprivoise-moi ! / - Que faut-il faire ? dit le petit prince. / - Il faut être très patient, répondit le renard. Tu t'assoiras d'abord un peu loin de moi, comme ça, dans l'herbe. Je te regarderai du coin de l’œil et tu ne diras rien. Le langage est source de malentendus. Mais, chaque jour, tu pourras t'asseoir un peu plus près...” 11. See the way in which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari work with the word anomal [deviating] in Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Mille plateaux, Les Éditions de Minuit, coll. “Critique”, 1980, 305. 12. Co-birth as knowledge (from a pun on the French words ‘co-naissance’, that is “birth with,” and “connaissance,” that is knowledge. 13. “Adieu, dit le renard. Voici mon secret. Il est très simple : on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. / C'est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante. / Les hommes ont oublié cette vérité, dit le renard. Mais tu ne dois pas l'oublier. Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé. Tu es responsable de ta rose ...” 14. “C'est bien d'avoir eu un ami, même si l'on va mourir. Moi, je suis bien content d'avoir eu un ami renard...” 15. “- Les étoiles sont belles, à cause d'une feur que l'on ne voit pas.../ Je répondis"bien sûr"et je regardai, sans parler, les plis du sable sous la lune. / - Le désert est beau, ajouta-t-il. / Et c'était vrai. J’ai toujours aimé le désert. On s'assoit sur une dune de sable. On ne voit rien. On n'entend rien. Et cependant quelque chose rayonne en silence.../ - Ce qui embellit le désert, dit le petit prince, c'est qu'il cache un puits quelque part...” 

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16. See Rainer Maria Rilke, Le livre de la pauvreté et de la mort, translated from German into French by Arthur Adamov, Actes Sud,1982 [1940], 20. 17. “- Ah! Petit bonhomme, petit bonhomme, j'aime entendre ce rire ! / - Justement ce sera mon cadeau... ce sera comme pour l'eau... [. . .] / - Quand tu regarderas le ciel, la nuit, puisque j'habiterai dans l'une d'elles, puisque je rirai dans l'une d'elles, alors ce sera pour toi comme si riaient toutes les étoiles. Tu auras, toi, des étoiles qui savent rire.” 18. Here I take up, in a transformed way, Aldo Leopold’s phrase “To think like a mountain.” 19. See Nancy Huston, L’espèce fabulatrice, Acte Sud, coll. “Babel”, 2008. 20. This idea echoes Nietzsche’s perspectivism as developed by Gilles Deleuze. (Deleuze 1969, 203). 21. Also see the poem to Étrange, entiitled “Immortel present” [“Immortal Preesent”] in Trémor, Éditions Chloé des Lys, Barry, 2016. 22. See Franz Kafka’s short story, entitled “Recherches d’un chien” [“Investigations of a Dog”]. Already mentioned in this chapter. 23. All our thanks to our two translators, Françoise Besson and Marie-Christine Noailles-Pizzolato, for their generous and remarkable involvement in this text. Special thanks to Françoise Besson for her accompaniment as Midwife-She-Wolf in the delivery of the unutterable.

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REFERENCES Adrahane, Athane. Trémor. Éditions Chloé des Lys, Barry, 2016. Collectif. Paroles de Sages. Photographies de Edward S. Curtis. 1993. Jeu d’Aujourd’hui, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Nietzsche et la philosophie. Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1962. ———. Logique du sens. Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969. ———. Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Mille plateau. Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980. ———. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991. ———. “Cinéma cours 49 du 13/12/83,” transcription by Daniel Rayburn, La voix de Gilles Deleuze en ligne, http:​/​/www​​2​.uni​​v​-par​​is8​.f​​r​/del​​euze/​​artic​​le​.ph​​p3​?id​​​_arti​​cle​ =2​​73, accessed on 3 April 2020. Haraway, Donna J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signifcant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ———. Manifeste des espèces compagnes. 2003. Chiens, humains et autres partenaires. Translated by Jérôme Hansen. Édition Climats, 2019. Huston, Nancy. L’espèce fabulatrice. Acte Sud, 2008. Kafka, Franz. La muraille de Chine et autres récits. 1936. Translated by Jean Carrive and Alexandre Vialatte. Gallimard, 1950. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. 1949. Ballantine Books, 1970.

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———. Almanach d'un comté des sables. Translated from the English by Anna Gibson. Flammarion, 2000. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Le livre de la pauvreté et de la mort. 1940. Translated from the German by Arthur Adamov. Actes Sud, 1982. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. Le Petit Prince. 1946. Gallimard, 1999. Stern, Daniel N. Le monde interpersonnel du nourrisson. 1985. Translated by Alain Lazartigues and Dominique Pérard. Presses Universitaires de France, 1989. Tesson, Sylvain. Les chemins noirs. Gallimard, 2016. Tournier, Michel. Vendredi ou les limbes du pacifque. Gallimard, 1967. ———. Friday, or, the Other Island. 1967. Translated by Norman Denny. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

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Epilogue A Quadriptych

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COMPANION ANIMALS AS MY BREATHING AND MY GUIDES Françoise Besson I  cannot live without animals. They are as necessary to me as the air I breathe. They teach us to love—as Lamartine said—to help and to fght, and to see life as a wonder. My frst two meetings with animals in literature were the reading of Countess de Ségur’s Les mémoires d’un âne, offered by my mother, a story told from a donkey’s viewpoint; and Lucien Biart’s Les Aventures d’un jeune naturaliste, one of my father’s childhood favorite books. A donkey in a French village in one case, wild animals in Mexican jungle, and the dog Gringalet accompanying the father and his son in a naturalistic expedition in the other: the two books introduced me to imagination through animals and nature and human relationships with them. Yet they did not introduce me to animals as I had already discovered them with my family who showed me the tiniest insect or fower—a glow-worm and a star on a same night—as soon as I could walk; but these literary animals were at the origin of my passion for reading and my professional life. I was introduced to real animals on the frst day of my life: my father arrived in the clinic to make acquaintance with me, accompanied with a hen accidentally caught on the road, and so, being one day old, I discovered a winged hitch-hiker fying above my cradle. It was my frst animal meeting. Then animals accompanied me at each step of my life. Dogs, cats, and other animals lived with us, most of them wounded or abandoned stray animals. Some chose freedom, most of them were our companions for long years, all remained free. In the countryside, I met farm animals; when I was three, my frst friend was a white gander. Among all the animals accompanying me, I 255

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“Bruno” by Françoise Besson.

will tell the stories of three of them, which might remind us how animals are a force of love and a force of life whose examples could help us to change the world. The frst one is a dog’s story. Noirot was a black dog, seeming old when he decided to adopt us one morning after being abandoned. He was extraordinarily intelligent, could do nearly everything (mountain climbing, jumping, swimming, newspaper delivering, and even acting as one day he proved his talent as a comedian when pretending to limp after having received a kick the day before and before running merrily once his kicking guest had left. One day Noirot was knocked down by a car in the Pyrenees; my grandmother found him unconscious along the ditch. The vet said that he had to be euthanized. My grandmother refused. She decided to place warm water compresses

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on his side. Patiently she changed the compresses several times a day. Noirot was lying motionless but she went on, sure he would wake up, as if she had read in him a will to live, stronger than coming death. She went on one day, two days, three days. On the third day, while my grandparents and I were having lunch, we saw Noirot arriving, quiet and merry, just seeming to say, “I am hungry.” From the beginning, my grandmother had just listened to our companion’s breath. She had heard in his breath an indomitable will of living. Noirot’s life force and my grandmother’s trust both taught me the force of life and the necessity to listen to the least breath of life in an animal. Pomponette, a tortoiseshell female cat, had arrived at the age of ffteen days. One summer day, I heard the rosemary mewing. Finding that strange, I looked down and saw a kitten smaller than my hand, who looked up at me, frmly mewing like someone having no doubt that she had found her home and place in life. As she was not weaned yet my mother and I fed her, my father quickly built a mobile bed for her, and Pomponette grew up as a loving, independent, and intelligent cat. When she was old, she became a doctor. She could read my body better than me. I realized it when one day, having a violent pain, I lay down and she rushed and massaged me on the painful spot. Five minutes later, I was perfectly well. This recurred several times. More surprisingly, one day I had an awful headache. She rushed to me, but instead of massaging the painful spot, she massaged me under my left arm and after ten minutes my headache vanished. I spoke about that to a bioenergetics practitioner. After a few tests, he said which organ my headache came from. I told him about what the cat had done. He checked which meridian ran under the arm. It was the one corresponding to the organ indicated by the tests. He exclaimed: “The cat found it before me!” Pomponette’s capacity to heal me with precise gestures showed, together with a total empathy, a sense of connection. She was connected to me and to the world and, very concentrated, she activated her sense of connection to heal me. She was a discrete loving doctor, always doing what she knew would heal her human companion. Most cats know when I am physically or mentally unwell. In that case, their presence is still closer. Bruno is a mysterious companion and rescuer. He arrived one day as a kitten, disappeared one year, and reappeared as a young adult, before my mother’s death, as if he had come to accompany my parents and to show us the sense of life and joy beyond death. He accompanied them throughout their ultimate diseases—as he accompanied some of his cat companions, as Pimprenelle and her children also did when her children’s father was living his last weeks. After my parents’ death, Bruno expressed joy. Rejecting the objects smelling of death, he wanted to stay with my mother and then my father and purred, with joy in his eyes. It was as if he felt that his human companions were alive, as if he felt their invisible presence.

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Bruno accompanies me, helps me, comforts me. He watches over me. One day, I was in the kitchen, holding a knife to cook, looking at it, my mind empty—at least it seemed to me. Bruno could not see me. Suddenly I saw him arrive, mewing loudly, even shouting at me, with a great anxiety in his eyes, shouting until I realized that I was holding this knife, which I quickly put back into the drawer and he stopped mewing. I had no dark intentions but otherwise, he would have saved my life. Maybe he had felt something that I was not even aware of. He had read in me something I could not even read myself. And he did what was necessary to save his human companion. At the very moment when I understood Bruno’s act, I smiled with love and thankfulness to that extraordinary companion, doing everything to remind me that I am not alone. Cats decide of their role in the community: Pomponette healed me. Futé had computer skills, Minoir took care of young males, tenderly embracing them, among whom, Milou, the hermit and wisteria climber. Caramel, the “dog-cat” of the community, follows me everywhere, and forbids the entrance to any newcomer except if he is old or ill, in which case, all cats welcome the newcomer in need of care. Jelly, yet absent-minded, is an empathetic nurse, accompanying her ill companions until the end. Mounia, the traveler, was found near the station after a two-year escape. Plumeau, when he was young, separated fghting cats with so much determination that I called him “Blue Beret.” Lilou, his sister, acts as the alarm-cat, and Uriage, called Princess, together with her rank of princess, is the gatekeeper of the group, always calling me when a cat is waiting at the door. Looki, with a grey heart drawn on her white fur, is the eternal child, bringing smiles into all hearts. Bruno, together with his mysterious gifts, is my special work assistant, watching me while I write e-mails and even sometimes writing his own messages. Animal love goes together with the desire of improving animals’ conditions of life, and my parents and I have always been militants in animal protection. After the death of Riquette, a German Shepherd who loved us passionately but hated cats, stray cats, realizing that there was no longer any danger, came, even while Riquette’s dog companion, Pastou, was there. Pastou, a ginger dog found at Toulouse-Le Mirail University, by my mother on a rainy day, was a free dog, loving to escape, kind to everybody, including cats; and he even fell in love with Minouche, a facetious white and grey cat, whom her mother had introduced to my parents one morning, entrusting her to them before vanishing. We had two cats at frst and then up to twentyseven, whom we adopted—or rather they adopted us, as most of them came to us—neutered and vaccinated. Our garden and house became a shelter for stray cats as it was a shelter for birds. This is how our love for companion animals became animal protection with the help of our vets. And everybody, cats, birds, insects, a bat, and hedgehogs live in harmony there.

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A scene in the garden made me think—or dream—that the Earth might be that shelter. I saw something looking like Isaiah’s biblical scene (Isaiah, 11:6). On a sunny day, cats were sleeping in the sunshine, birds singing above them. Nearby, Asian hornets were eating cats’ food, while just beside bees foraged in blue asters, ignoring their enemies, also ignored by them. That day, I thought Isaiah’s scene was no utopia. The only condition for everybody to live in peace is that everybody had enough to eat. Sharing. Those four animal groups showed the solution to conficts and violence, due to misery, due to the confscation of lands and resources. The animals in the garden had given me a lesson of philosophy and geopolitics. This is what my life with animals is: a story of love, awareness, connections, and responsibility told by animals sharing our lives for some time and accompanying us forever. STRAY ANIMALS AND COVID19: A BRAZILIAN OUTLOOK

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Zelia M. Bora At  the moment we’re fnishing Reading Cats and Dogs, none of us could ever have imagined we would be witnessing an event of such apocalyptic

“Tito, Sophia, Lito, and Nenen” by Zélia M. Bora.

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proportions as the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the huge number of human losses, nature in general seems to have been restored to some extent without human’s intervention. Regarding animals, specifcally, many of us have seen on the Internet remarkable scenes of wild animals wandering through deserted cities during the lockdown.1 In the absence of humans, non-human animals are reclaiming territory that once belonged to them. Apart from this distant utopia, reality is set up in different terms. Although meat industry suffered a momentary set back,2 animal suffering around the world continues to be treated as insignifcant relative to human life. Despite the fact that COVID19 is considered a zoonosis,3 to the distress of the activists for Animal Rights around the world, China goes on with its dog-eating festival.4 Nonetheless the consumption of meat is not much different in the West. In fact, East and West are motivated by the same sadistic inclination to take no notice of animal suffering, minimizing their fear, pain, daily torture, and death. Their ignoble death every minute takes places in the open markets of China as well as inside slaughterhouses in all the countries of the West. A similarly desperate form of suffering occurs through the abandonment of domestic animals in urban areas. In Brazil, according to international animal survey in 2019, there are 30 million abandoned animals,5 mostly cats and dogs. A recent article on stray animals during the outbreak of COVID-19 states that not only cats and dogs are silent victims but also rabbits and horses6 (in fact horses are left wandering on the roads when old or incapacitated). In my hometown (João Pessoa, Brazil), anonymous rescuers are doing what they can to help abandoned animals. My son and I notice cats and dogs, wandering the streets hungrily after bars and restaurants have closed. Not even leftover food is left for them. Since the beginning of the lockdown, my son and other surreptitious people have been going around their own neighborhoods distributing food to these animals. Even colleagues on the university campus have been helping stray animals. But our efforts are minimal in the vast universe of animal suffering. As I have known the extent of human cruelty, I see more clearly the unspeakable pain of non-humans. Thinking about the human condition obliges us to think about the condition of non-humans, and especially the harm that we have caused them. At this moment nobody can predict for sure how society will be after the virus crisis is over. I believe that human nature will not change because societies are formed by different levels of consciousness. However, those who believe that compassion can be taught must join the efforts to teach it if it is possible. Compassion emerges when the self gives up selfshness. Diffcult to defne, compassion according to Krishnamurti, “comes into being only when man comes to an end at its very root.”7 Complex to defne, it presupposes that to be compassionate requires a radical change within ourselves. Many others, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, have addressed the same topic.

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Contemporary philosophers like Matthieu Ricard8 emphasize the exercise of compassion to change the systematic violence of humans against humans and humans against animals. Although the word “compassion,” in the present context we are living in, is a word of small value, it may be the key word to help us fulfll human desire for change when all the political and religious systems have failed. In contemporary societies, violence and political deception prevail while humans sink into an ocean of brutality that buries the less powerful into despair leading to the destruction of their bodies and spirits. These tragic consequences are extended to non-humans as well. In the light of these facts, compassion toward animals and nature may lead humans to selfreconciliation and reconciliation with other human beings regardless their differences. Maybe then we will leave a better world for future generations. MY STRAY CATS IN BEIRUT

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Marianne Marroum My  story with the stray cats of Beirut is an old one. I do not recall when it exactly started and how it started. It must have been during my childhood, perhaps before or around the beginning of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, when a big grey and white cat came to me while I was waiting for the school bus. He purred and gazed at me, as if to tell me that he wanted me to take care

“Lebanese Street Cats” by Marianne Marroum.

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of him, to give him food and love. I recall that I took out from my schoolbag the carefully wrapped sandwich that mother had prepared and shared it with him. Upon my return from school, he was waiting for me at the same spot. After a few days, he climbed up the stairs with me, stopping at each step, inquiring whether I would allow him to go into the apartment. I let him in and fed him. He took a short nap in the living room. He let me pet him just for a few seconds and then was startled; perhaps he remembered that humans could not be trusted. Then he went to the door to let me know that he needed to go back to the street, to his home. This became our daily routine. I do not remember how long it lasted, but I know how it ended. After the absence of three days, I found him dead in a ditch with marks of wheels on his body. I was in tears. Some passersby commented sarcastically: “How silly of you to cry when so many people are dying and have become homeless because of the civil war.” Such a comment did not weaken my resolution to care for any needy animal that crossed my path, even with the limited means I had as a teenager. Until now, I never go out without carrying in my purse some dry cat food in case I encounter a hungry cat on the way. I fnd it unacceptable to ignore animal suffering just because humans are victims of war, poverty, and social injustice. I fnd it unacceptable to become immune to suffering, be it that of humans or non-humans. Throughout the years and until now, I have been caring for the stray cats of my neighborhood. Some are semi-feral, while others are abandoned house cats. It is diffcult for them to survive in a crowded city like Beirut. They struggle to fnd shelter and food and to avoid being hit by cars and motorcycles. They struggle to stay away from mean-spirited individuals who intentionally harm them for a number of cultural and psychological reasons, such as superstition and phobias triggered by parents who used to threaten them as infants to bring forth cats as a punishing tool for any kind of misbehavior. The strays of my neighborhood wait for me every morning and evening. I have come to know them one by one, to know what they like, to know the character of each one of them, as one knows and loves friends and family. I give no ear to those who criticize me for feeding cats when so many people are hungry. I believe these cats have the same right to live as us humans. Generosity and compassion should be extended to non-humans as well. Some of my feline friends wait for me at the door of my building, while others in an empty lot a few meters away from home. They patiently wait, and when they spot me, you can hear a symphony of meowing and see a spectacle of arching backs. They are all beautiful cats, though some perceive them as disgusting because of fea infestations, tangled fur, dirty coats, and the skin diseases they suffer from, in addition to the common respiratory infections that street cats are prone to catch. Their beauty emanates from their body language. Their beauty emanates from their expression of love and gratitude and of the trust

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they have placed in me, the strange creature that I am: someone who is there to feed them and take them to the vet when they get sick or injured, even on days when it was a great risk to venture out because of the shelling and shooting during the Lebanese civil war. People would disapprove of my actions. In their view, it is not worth risking human life to feed and save a cat. Some complain that the food I give them attracts rats. Others accuse me of soiling the streets of Beirut. They ignore the piles of trash that are often not collected by the garbage companies when the dumps are full. Lebanon does not have a good waste management program. I say the strange creature that I am because once I saw a look of surprise in a young female cat who was standing on the edge of a wall, who refused to eat and kept staring at me surprised that there is someone who believes that her life and that of her feline friends have intrinsic value. On several occasions, I spotted that same look of disbelief in more than one cat. Even nowadays, with the current situation in Lebanon—the economic crisis that the country is undergoing and the devaluation of the Lebanese currency to the dollar—it has become quite diffcult to sustain this daily activity of feeding and caring for my feline friends. The price of cat food has more than tripled, and all the wholesalers of cat food refuse to be paid in Lebanese currency. I have had to resort to various measures. I switched to buying dry and wet dog food, as it was much cheaper. I would also mix the food with rice or bread so that no cat would be left without a meal. I could not abandon them and let them go hungry. The strays in Beirut are increasing in number, as many people have been heartlessly dumping their cats. I often try to fnd valid reasons for this cruel act. I wonder if you can ask people to feed a cat when they cannot provide a decent meal to their families. However, I think that what is at the core of the issue is not money; it is a lack of compassion. I often see some homeless people who share the little food they have with stray cats and dogs. Some abandon their cats because they are in heat. They deem it immoral to have them sterilized, even when science proves that doing so is benefcial healthwise. How can you change such deeply rooted conviction? Ironically, they do not see that it is a greater crime to expose sheltered cats to the various dangers of living in the streets of Beirut. How can they ignore the expression of fear in the eyes of a cat who is uprooted from its home and dumped in the middle of nowhere? How can you change the belief that a cat is nothing but a toy for their children to play with and then can be disposed of when the child gets bored with it and wants a new toy? When people realize that these furry creatures have the right to live with dignity, then a sense of humanity will be instilled in people, one that is much needed for a better world. Many people ask me: “Why do you love animals?” “Why do you spend so much money and time taking care of them?” They mistakenly think that

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animal love is caused by an emotional void. They fail to see that it is an act of love of “the other,” be it human or non-human. I owe my love of animals to my parents. They were true animal lovers. They taught me how to love nature and all its creatures. My father used to tell me about his German Shepherd who accompanied him wherever he went and would ride the motorcycle with him. That same dog used to protect orphaned kittens like a jealous mother. He would also cuddle up to my grandmother when she was alone at home to give her a sense of security. My mother as well had so many stories about cats, especially the story of a cat who gave birth on her bed at her grandmother’s house where mother spent most of her childhood. For mother, such an act of trust was very touching! All the cats we had at home throughout my childhood and adulthood were rescues. My parents wanted to help the homeless ones, give them food, security, and a loving home. Three of the cats we rescued changed our lives and especially my parents’ lives in their old age. One cold night on my way back home, I found three kittens in a box in an abandoned shop. The mother cat had given birth in the basement of one of the shops. The shopkeeper did not want his place to be infested with feas. While the mother was searching for food, he dumped the kittens. The mother cat stubbornly refused to take them back because they were contaminated by human smell. The only choice I had was to take them home. Our mission to save them began. We had to bottle-feed them every two hours, day and night. It was a pleasure to take care of them, though we felt that we were neglecting our older cat Nounou. Unfortunately, one of the kittens died after three days, but the other two survived. We named them Fara and Nassouh. Fara in Arabic is Mouse. Fara was all white, had no fur and was very skinny. She looked like a mouse. The milk would go out from her nostrils when we used to bottle-feed her. Her brother was very fat, Nassouh in Arabic. He would hold the bottle with his four paws and would suck all the milk and then cry for more. The bond we had with Fara and Nassouh was very strong and very special. At the age of eighty-three, my father lost his vision in one eye, and could barely see with the other one. He got very depressed. He could not leave home, could not drive, and could not do what he used to like doing most—reading. As time passed by, he sank into a deeper depression. The only time you would see him smile is when he had Nassouh on his lap. He would pet him and talk to him, saying: “Nice boy, big boy, good boy.” And Nassouh would feel the love, would meow and start purring loudly. Both were ecstatic. When my father passed away, our older cat Nounou, also a rescue, kept looking for him. She used to sleep on his bed beside him. For three consecutive nights, she kept spinning on the bed, searching for him as though she felt

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his presence. She felt that he was petting her but could not see him. Nounou is still alive. She is twenty-one years old. When Nassouh died, my mother’s attachment to Fara grew stronger, and more so after my father’s death. Nassouh died a few years after my father. As my mother’s mobility was impaired due to a failing heart and a broken hip, she would sit for longer hours on her recliner. Fara and all the other rescued cats would fght as they all wanted to be with her. Mother was very happy to have all the cats on her chair and on her lap. She would say: “I love cats. As a child, I always had cats. Cats give you more love than people.” As my mother’s heart was getting weaker day by day, she would spend more time at home, petting the cats, calling them to come to her. She would smile, kiss them, and cover them with a blanket in cold days. She would also hand-feed them cheese very patiently. In her last days at the hospital mother wanted to go home because she missed her cats. She would ask me about each one of them. She would send me home to check on them and feed them, especially Fara, who was like her baby. Fara’s health deteriorated very fast during my mother’s stay at the hospital and more so after her death. Fara was deeply affected by her absence. Fara died six months after mother. I am so grateful to all our cats for the love, solace, and companionship they gave to my parents in the most diffcult time of their lives. They gave my parents the gift of happiness, a kind of happiness they could not get from any other source. One thing I am sure of in a world governed by uncertainties is that I will go on, against all odds, taking care of my feline friends for the rest of my life. FRIEND, MENTOR, GUIDE

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Scott Slovic   Part I Heceta Beach on the Oregon coast is perhaps one of the safest places you could imagine for this experiment: running with eyes closed. Nearly 15 kilometers long, from the cliffs at the north end to the jetty at the South, there is a wide expanse of surf-hardened sand, a 50-meter band of good running surface, then soft sand to the east, a few hundred meters of it, blowing slowly toward the sawgrass-covered dunes. I’ve run for half an hour with my companion, Hanna, a four-year-old, massive German Shepherd, some 50 kilos of muscle, bone, hair (lots of hair), and enormous bat-like ears, a long black nose, and more brain than she knows

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“Scott and Hanna” by Susan Bender.

what to do with. We’ve run side by side to the north, away from Susie, who stands near the surf, practicing tai chi and yoga poses. I had to coax Hanna to move away from Susie initially, so strong is my companion’s instinct to keep the pack together. It’s like stretching a rubberband—with every step away from Susie, I know the drive to rejoin the pack again becomes stronger in Hanna. She turns her head again and again to make certain Susie hasn’t moved until we’re far enough away and Hanna’s attention turns to detect possible threats or things to eat as we progress toward the cliffs at the far end of the beach. Part II Susie and I adopted Hanna in 2010 when she was eight weeks old, just a ball of dark fur with enormous, bat-like ears. Our friends from Mexico City, the writers and environmentalists Homero and Betty Aridjis, had told us to look up Covy-Tucker Hill German Shepherds, north of San Francisco, if we ever thought we were ready to live with this special kind of dog. We didn’t realize what we were getting into at frst, but gradually we adjusted to spending our lives with a dog who was clearly as intelligent as we were, more intelligent and more sensitive in many ways.

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We have spent nearly ten years now not only enjoying Hanna’s company, her routines and antics, but actually studying and learning from her. When I suggested that we name Hanna after my Fulbright mentor Hanno Beck, the distinguished German biographer of Alexander von Humboldt with whom I studied at the University of Bonn back in the 1980s, I didn’t yet understand that Hanna, too, would become a teacher of sorts, helping me to understand many things about sentience and sensitivity, about paying attention. I had published a book called Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing years earlier and continue to be fascinated by human cognitive processes linked to sensitivity and insensitivity. I now think of dogs and nature writers as kindred spirits, hypersensitive beings who guide the rest of us to pay deeper attention to ourselves and the world. For the past decade, I have made a practice of studying Hanna’s Thoreauvian “habit of attention.” Even when she sleeps, I see her ears pivoting like directional radar dishes, following nearby and far-away sounds. If she hears a worrisome sound, especially any sound she associates with another dog, she’ll leap to her feet and rush to the window with a roar, ready to protect our family from the poodle prancing down the road with her startled owner, unaware of Hanna’s vigilance from the inside of our house. In 2016, I developed a lecture titled “Sensory Extensions of Self: The Gift of Dogs,” which I presented at a conference on companion species organized by Wendy Harding and Claire Cazajous at the University of Toulouse. A few years later, Françoise Besson and I, with the help of many colleagues, worked to put together the conference called “L’amour des animaux/Animal Love,” at which I gave the talk “Travels with Hanna: Dogs and/as Teachers,” trying to parallel my years of observing Hanna as she observes the world with John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), a book he wrote when he was approximately my own age. Like Steinbeck, I have found the company of dogs to be infnitely calming and intriguing, teaching me about myself and my own species as well as providing glimpses into another Umwelt. I don’t have space in this brief epilogue to elaborate on the many lessons I have gained from my companionship with Hanna or from my reading of Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (2009) and Donna J. Haraway’s When Species Meet (2007). Horowitz helped me to appreciate the extraordinary worldview of dogs (their sensory abilities that stretch so far beyond our own and the meaning they make of smells and sounds), and Haraway’s research partner, Cayenne, helped me to understand that, in a very real way, Hanna, too, is not my research subject, but a co-investigator of the world. Reading the dog stories of my friends Rick Bass and Richard K. Nelson (discussed in Claire Cazajous-Augé’s chapter in this book) has also helped me to appreciate the idea of dogs as “sensory

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protheses,” as extensions of our own meager capacity to perceive subtle cues from the world. In his 1997 book Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America, Nelson writes that his dogs “add richness” to our experience of the places we inhabit, “giving us clues about a world of the mind and senses that would otherwise completely elude us” (164). My story about running with Hanna, and especially the little experiment I’ll describe in the following section, exemplifes both my fascination with the prosthetic capacity of our animal companions, their ability to enhance our own experience of the world, and my deep faith in the protective, guiding friendship our animal companions demonstrate toward us. The story of our run on Heceta Beach took place back in 2015, when Hanna was still short of her ffth birthday. As I write this epilogue, Hanna is nearly ten years old and is developing a gray chin and a certain creakiness in her gait, as am I. But we still run together nearly every morning, perhaps stopping more frequently to “smell the roses” than in the past. Today as we jogged back from the river, I closed my eyes for a few seconds, allowing Hanna to tug me forward along the bike path, trusting her to guide me safely toward home.

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Part III After half an hour of running, young Hanna and I reach a small creek running toward the crashing Pacifc to our left. A yellow sign announces that dogs are not welcome on the other side of the stream, where endangered shorebirds nest. So we turn to head back toward Susie, and it occurs to me to experiment with Hanna as a guide, pulling me back toward the center of gravity, pulling unwaveringly toward Susie. I have to trust her not to dart toward the waves or toward sea birds prospecting for fotsam on the beach, and I must trust the sand itself to be smooth and hard for my feet. This may sound innocuous enough, but I fnd it’s much more diffcult to run blindly through the world than on a treadmill, which is diffcult enough. We learn to be reliant on our own eyes to guide us safely through the world. To relinquish this faith to another being, especially a powerful and willful companion like Hanna, feels risky—in a few rapid leaps, she could drag me into a driftwood log or a knot of slippery kelp or into the cold ocean waves. I close my eyes and begin to run to the south. Hanna, realizing she is returning toward Susie, moves to the lead and begins to pull the leash—the lead. She is leading me toward Susie, several kilometers away, with a strap of nylon. My running shoes scuff the moist sand, step after step, scuff after scuff. Hanna’s four feet tap the ground—she is light on her feet, despite her

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bulk. I listen to my slower, intermittent scuffs and her rapid paw-taps on the sand. I listen to the gusts of ocean wind, the crashing, shushing sound of the nearby waves, to the squeaking cries of seagulls. I feel the weight of my footfalls on my running legs, concentrate on keeping my body balanced and upright without any visual cues. Even the slightest unevenness of the sand is palpable—the weight on my legs, the pull of the leash, the unpredictable, gusting wind. And the sound of our breathing. When my eyes were open, I heard only my own breath, often not even that. The sun glinting off waves and wet sand to my left—the blue sky straight ahead and bright dunes to my right dominated my attention. Eyes closed, reversing my tracks, I hear the sea to my right, hear my breath and Hanna’s, too—her rapid, steady panting. She is nothing if not intent—intensely focused on whatever catches her interest. More than anything she is now intent on reuniting the pack, making a beeline for Susie. I am determined to trust Hanna, to keep my eyes closed for as long as possible, to keep running. With each breath and each scuffng footstep, I gain more trust in Hanna and also become more nervous. How much longer before she darts to the side, bowling me to the sand in a tangle of limbs? Breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe. Minutes pass. I do not know where I am, how far I’ve traveled. My eyes are closed. Hanna is pulling, breathing, tapping the moist sand with her powerful legs. I can feel her focus, her sense of urgency. Susie, Susie, Susie. She knows I’m safely leashed to her, just as she is tethered to her goal of returning to the other packmate. We run this way for what feels like a very long time—hours, maybe days. I feel disoriented and helpless with my eyes closed, my arms swinging and reaching out for balance, legs lifting and falling. The sound of the surf on my right, the pressure Hanna exerts on the leash, the sound of her steady, rapid panting—the security of my feet hitting level sand and my legs keeping me upright. These sensations are all I know. I give myself over to the physical faith in these few things, my tentative trust in Hanna’s single-minded focus on taking the shortest path back to Susie. I crack open my eyes, still running, heading steadily to the South where Susie awaits us, doing tai chi and photographing our progress. We’re a little too close to the waves for my liking, but there are no dangerous obstacles before us. What have I learned from this modest experiment in sightless running, tugged down a wide, fat beach by a massive, lunging dog? From this fveminute blip in our decade-long relationship? I know Hanna well, spend hours with her every day, yet I know her well enough to realize she has a mind of her own. Her powerful body is matched by her powerful senses, her attention shifting to follow each of the many sounds and smells that drifts her way. Running blindly, tethered to a speeding, distractable juggernaut, I felt both

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fear and awe toward my guide, my friend. Yet I also learned to deepen my trust in her single-minded focus on achieving the goal of reuniting the pack, the family. As we ran together that morning on the beach, I felt myself enter dog mind, Hanna mind—it was a good place to be.

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NOTES 1. See http:​/​/www​​.rf.​​fr​/en​​/inte​​rnati​​onal/​​20200​​330​-w​​ild​-a​​nimal​​s​-wan​​der​-t​​hroug​​h​ -des​​erted​​-citi​​es​-un​​der​-c​​ovid-​​19​-lo​​ckdow​​n​-duc​​ks​-pa​​r​is​-p​​uma​-s​​antia​​go​-ci​​vet​-k​​erala​, accessed 3 July 2020. 2. See Colin Kinniburgh https​:/​/ww​​w​.fra​​nce24​​.com/​​en​/20​​20052​​4​-cov​​id​-19​​-how-​​ the​-m​​eat​-i​​ndust​​ry​-be​​came-​​a​-glo​​​bal​-h​​ealth​​-liab​​ility​, accessed 3 July 2020. 3. See Fritjof Capra, “The Covid 19 Pandemic–A Systemic Analysis” https​:/​/ww​​w​.eth​​icalm​​arket​​s​.com​​/the-​​covid​​-19​-p​​andem​​ic​-a-​​syste​​​mic​-a​​nalys​​is/, accessed 3 July 2020. 4. See Laurie Chen, “China dog meat festival goes ahead despite coronavirus visitor decline” https​:/​/ho​​ngkon​​gfp​.c​​om​/20​​20​/06​​/23​/c​​hina-​​dog​-m​​eat​-f​​estiv​​al​-go​​es​-ah​​ead​ -d​​espit​​e​-cor​​onav​i​​rus​-v​​isito​​r​-dec​​line/​, accessed 3 July 2020. 5. “Brasil tem 30 milhões de animais abandonados” (ANDA Survey). https​:/​/an​​ da​.ju​​sbras​​il​.co​​m​.br/​​notic​​ias​/1​​00681​​698​/b​​rasil​​-tem-​​30​-mi​​lhoes​​-de​-a​​​nimai​​s​-aba​​ndona​​ dos, accessed 3 July 2020. 6. “Abandono de animais se multiplica na pandemia e atinge até cavalos e coelhos.” www​.f​​olha.​​uol​.c​​om​.br​​/coti​​diano​​/2020​​/06​/a​​bando​​no​-de​​-anim​​ais​-s​​e​-mul​​tipli​​ca​ -na​​-pand​​emia-​​e​-ati​​nge​-a​​te​-ca​​valos​​-e​-co​​elhos​​.shtm​​l, accessed 3 July 2020. 7. In one of his lectures in 1958, Krishnamurti states that: “compassion is not a sentiment, it is not woolly sympathy or empathy, compassion is not something which you can cultivate through thought through discipline, control or suppression nor by being kind or polite, gentle, and all the rest of it. Compassion comes into being only when man comes to an end at its very root.” https​:/​/kf​​ounda​​tion.​​org​/ w​​hat​-i​​s​-com​​passi​​on/​?g​​clid=​​Cj0KC​​Qjw6P​​D3BRD​​PARIs​​AN8pH​​uEdkq​​nao1I​​TvBz5​​ 8BpWv​​7​-NUM​​oHEdC​​_ndjx​​b9ZBr​​j6KT​F​​9a3vC​​0Jswa​​Ar​_uE​​ALw​_w​​cB, accessed 3 July 2020. 8. See Matthieu Ricard’s books Altruism and A Plea for the Animals.

REFERENCES Agência de Notícias de Direitos de Animais (ANDA). “Brasil tem 30 milhões de animais abandonado,” Jusbrasil. Accessed 7 June 2020. Capra, Fritjof. “The Covid 19 Pandemic – A Systemic Analysis,” Ethical Markets​ .com​. Accessed 2 July 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.eth​​icalm​​arket​​s​.com​​/the-​​covid​​-19​-p​​ andem​​ic​-a-​​syste​​​mic​-a​​nalys​​is/. Chen, Laurie. “China Dog Meat Festival Goes Ahead Despite Coronavirus Visitor Decline,” Kong Free Press, 23 June 2020. Accessed 3 July 2020. https​:/​/ho​​ngkon​​

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gfp​.c​​om​/20​​20​/06​​/23​/C​​HINA-​​DOG​-M​​EAT​-F​​ESTIV​​AL​-GO​​ES​-AH​​EAD​-D​​ESPIT​​ E​-COR​​ONAVI​​​RUS​-V​​ISITO​​R​-DEC​​LINE/​. Garcia, Diego. “Abandono de animais se multiplica na pandemia e atinge até cavalos e Coelhos,” Folha de São Paulo. Accessed 29 June 2020. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Horowitz, Alexandra. Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. Scribner, 2009. Kinniburgh, Colin. “Covid 19: How the Meat Industry Became a Global Health Liability,” France 24, 24 May 2020. Accessed 3 July 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.fra​​nce24​​ .com/​​en​/20​​20052​​4​-cov​​id​-19​​-how-​​the​-m​​eat​-i​​ndust​​ry​-be​​came-​​a​-glo​​b​al​-h​​ealth​​-liab​​ ility​. Krishnamurti, Jiddu. “What Is Compassion,” Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, no date. Accessed 3 July 2020. https​:/​/kf​​ounda​​tion.​​org​/w​​hat​-i​​s​-com​​​passi​​on/. Martinetti, Isabella. “Wild Animals Wander Through Deserted Cities Under Covid19 Lockdown,” RFI International, 30 March 2010. Accessed 3 July 2020. http:​/​/ www​​.rf.​​fr​/en​​/inte​​rnati​​onal/​​20200​​330​-w​​ild​-a​​nimal​​s​-wan​​der​-t​​hroug​​h​-des​​erted​​-citi​​ es​-un​​der​-c​​ovid-​​19​-lo​​ckdow​​n​-duc​​ks​-pa​​ri​s​-p​​uma​-s​​antia​​go​-ci​​vet​-k​​erala​. Nelson, Richard K. Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America. Vintage, 1997. Ricard, Matthieu. A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion. Shambhala, 2014. ———. Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World. Little Brown, 2015. John, Steinbeck. Travels with Charley in Search of America. Viking, 1962.

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Index

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous, 6 absurdity, 139 Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart, 182 Adorno, Theodor, 222 Adrahane, Athane, 16, 231–54 Aesop, 82, 157 Agamben, Giorgio, 193 Alembong, Nol, 186n24 Ali, Sabahattin, Sirca Kosk, 48 Al-Othman, Laila, 13, 61–77 Alvarez, José Maurício Saldanha, 138–38 Anthropocene, 13, 23–41, 169 anthropomorphism, 35, 79, 90, 133, 169, 172, 180, 184, 185n5, 186n25 See also anthropomorphization anthropomorphization, 7–8, 88, 91, 135, 157, 228 ants, 13, 96, 98–99, 181–82 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 212 Aridjis, Homero and Betty, 266 Aristotle, Poetics, 220–21, 214 Armbruster, Karla, 13, 15, 23–45 Armstrong, Philip, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity, 32, 225 Atwood, Margaret, 10, 100 Aubry, Cécile, Belle et Sebastien, 5 Austen, Jane, 82 Auster, Paul, Timbuktu, 17n5

Australia, 2, 7, 34, 252n9 Autobulus, On the Cleverness of Animals, 221, 225 Aymé, Marcel, 10 Bailly, Jean-Christophe, 151 Balzac, Honoré de, Peine de coeur d’une chatte anglaise, 7 Bardot, Brigitte, 64 Barrie, J. M., Peter Pan, 9 Bashō, Matsuo, 159, 160 Bass, Rick, Brown Dog of the Yaak, Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had, 10, 14, 147–55, 267 Baudelaire, Charles, 10 Beck, Hanno, 267 Belgium, 231–54 Belyaev, Dmitri, 43n5 Bener, Erhan, Kedi ve Ölüm, 49 Berger, John, Why Look at Animals, 199, 200 Besson, Françoise, 1–12, 255–59, 267 Biart, Lucien, Les Aventures d’un jeune naturaliste, 255 Bible, The, 82, 225 Blount, Margaret, Animal Land, 79 Bolangaro, Eugenio, 225 Book of Odes, The, 109, 120n2 Bora, Zélia M., 16, 219–30, 259–61 Borkfelt, Sune, 177

273

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Index

Bowen, James, A Street Cat Named Bob, 4 Brazil, 16, 219–30, 259–61 Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 9 Brown, Michael, Cat Tales for Mariette, 4 buffalo, 179–84 Bulu African Wonder Dog, 4 Bunuel, Luis, 237 Buzzati, Dino, 14, 138–40

Coppinger, Ray and Lorna, Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution, 23, 43n2, 43nn4–5 covid-19, 23, 114–17, 259–60, 270n2, 270n3 crocodile (kabara-goya), 105–6 Cronon, William, 155n5 Cyrulnik, Boris, 2, 4, 10

Cala, My Dog, 193, 199–200 Caldecott, Randolph, 82, 88 Calvino, Italo, 14, 142–43 Cameroon, 15, 169–88 Canada, 96, 103, 105 Capra, Fritjof, 270n3 Carducci, Giosuè, 134 Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1, 82 cats, xi, 1–16, 47–59, 61–77, 96, 100, 107–27, 207–17 Cats and Dogs, 202n2 Cazajous-Augé, Claire, 14–15, 147–55, 267 Çetin, Önder, 13, 47–59 Chekhov, Anton, 17n5 Chen, Hong, 15, 191–205 Chen, Laurie, 270n4 Chen, Yingsong, 194, 198, 201 Cheng, Qianqian, 14, 107–27 Chief Seattle, 240 children’s literature, 7 China, 14, 15, 107–27, 191–205 Christie, Agatha, 7 Cixous, Helene, 208 cobras, 96, 104 Cocteau, Jean, 10 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle, Dialogues de Betes, La Chatte, 7 Colombia, 33 companion animals, ix, 1, 3, 8, 9, 23, 47, 50, 200 Copeland, Marion, Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism, 80

D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 134, 136, 137 Darwinism, 7, 134, 220 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, 10, 32 De la Ramée, Marie Louise, A Dog of Flanders, 166n3 De Lauretis, Teresa, 33–34 Deleuze, Gilles, 224, 232, 235, 252n5, 252n11 DeMello, Margo, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies, 52, 58 Derrida, Jacques, L’animal que donc je suis (The Animal That Therefore I Am), 12, 70, 208, 214, 219, 224, 227, 228, 229n2 Descartes, René, 2 Diamond, Cora, 75 diceng xu shi (subaltern narratives), 191, 197 Dickens, Charles, David Copperfeld, Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, 7 Dickinson, Emily, 10 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 132 Disney, Walt, 7, 202n2 Djombo, Henri, 186n24, 186n26 dogs, defnition of species, x–xii, 1–17, 23–45, 48–49, 69–70, 96–98, 100–103, 131–46, 147–55, 157–67, 170–75, 191–205, 231–54 Dogues de Bordeaux, 232, 244 Doka, 210 domestication, 13, 14, 17n4, 24, 26, 27–29, 30–32, 38, 40, 42, 43n4, 50, 83, 170, 183–84, 226,

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Index

Doré, Gustave, 82 Doyle, Richard, 82 Dugatkin, Lee Alan, 43n5 Duman, Faruk, Kopekler icin Gece Muzigi, 48–49

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Effa, Gaston-Paul, Cheval-Roi, 15, 170, 175, 176, 178–79 Egypt, 61, 227 Eight Below, 202n2 Eliot, George, Adam Bede, 17n5 Eliot, T. S., 10 El-Kaidi, Youssef, 63 Elliot, William I., 158, 159, 166n1 Elroy, James, City of Demons, 17n5 England, ix–xii, 79–93 Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury, 5 ferality, 31–43. See also stray animals Fergus, Jim, A Hunter’s Road, 14, 147–54 Feuerstein, Anna, and Carmen NolteOdhiambo, Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture: New Perspectives in Childhood Studies and Animal Studies, 211 Fielding, Henry, 89 Findley, Timothy, 3 Fitzpatrick, Sir Percy, Jock of the Bushveld, 13, 25, 27–28, 30 Flanagan, John, The Sorcerer in the North, 7 Fontane, Theodor, Eff Briest, 10 Foucault, Michel, 227 France, 7, 10, 11, 175, 176, 185n13, 234–36, 241–44, 282 Fudge, Erica, 200 Gaiman, Neil, 10 Gaius Julius Caesar, 132 Gandhi, Mahatma, 260 Garrard, Greg, 32

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Gates, Barbara, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World, 81 Gauthier, Théophile, La Ménagerie intime, 10 Genette, Gérard, paratext, 50, 54–55, 57 Gerrard, Lisa, and Brendan Perry, 252n9 Gipson, Fred, Old Yeller, 7, 13, 25–28, 30 Gombrowicz, Witold, 224 Greece, 219–24, 227 Guattari, Félix, 232, 252n11 Guderson, Ryan, 222, 229n1 Guerri, Giordano Bruno, 136 Guerzoni, Guido, Pets: Come gli animali domestici hanno invaso le nostre case e i nostri cuori, 144 Gunasekera, Niroshini, 13–14, 95–106 Guo, Peng, 198, 203n5 Hachiko, 202n2 Hachi-kō, 163–64, 166n2 haiku, 158–59 Haraway, Donna, Companion Species Manifesto, The, 4–5, 23, 36, 96, 100, 101, 147, 154n1, 170–72, 175, 183, 184, 250; Staying with the Trouble, 36, 170, 181–83; When Species Meet, 196–97, 214, 267 Harding, Wendy, 267 Harry Potter, 7 Hatooka, Keita, 15, 157–67 Hearne, Vicki, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name, 148 hedgehogs, 82 Heidegger, Martin, 228 Hemingway, Ernest, 7 Hesiod, 221 Highway, Tomson, Fox on the Ice, 5 Hoagland, Edward, 58 Hollindale, Peter, Aesop in the Shadows, 79–80 Homer, The Odyssey, 5, 223

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Homeward Bound, 202n2 Horkheimer, Max, 222 Hornung, Eva, Dog Boy, 13, 26, 34–42 Horowitz, Alexandra, Inside of a Dog, 150, 267 horses, ix–x, 6–9, 170, 175–79 Houston, Dick, 4 Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffn, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, 208 Hugo, Victor, Bug-Jargal, 10, 11 Humboldt, Alexander von, 267 Huot, Marie, Anti-Vivisection League, 74 Husni, Ronak, 61 Huston, Nancy, 247, 253n19

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I Am Legend, 24 Idema, Wilt L., 108, 110 India, 97, 227 Ingold, Tim, 69 Inuit, 26 Invaders, The, 37 Inyang, Ekpe, 186n24, 186n26 Israel, 26 Issa, 60 Italy, 14, 131–46 Iveson, Richard, 220 Japan, 15, 157–67 Jay, Martin, 227 Jia, Zhangke, The Condition of Dogs, 202 Joyce, James, Ulysses, 17n5, 133 Jungle Book, The, 7 Kabbo, 208 Kafka, Franz, “A Dog’s Researches,” 139, 233, 250, 251n3, 253n22 Kant, Immanuel, 228 Karay, Refk Halid, Gurbet Hikayeleri, 48 Kemal, Orhan, Ekmek Kavgasi, 48 Kerasote, Ted, Merle’s Door, 42

Index

Kerslake, Lorraine, 79–93 Kim, Claire Jean, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age, 208–10 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 260 Kingsley, Charles, 82 Kinniburgh, Colin, 270n2 Kipling, Rudyard, 7 Kitagawa, Tōru, 158 Koagne, Osé C., 186n26 Koray, Erkin, 57 Korhonen, Tua, 225 Kostuch, Lycyna, 223 Krieger, Murray, 221, 222 Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 260, 270n7 Kumagai, Tatsuya, 166n3 Kutzer, Daphne, Writing in Code, 80, 89–90 Kuwait, 13, 61–77 Lacan, Jacques, 228 LaCapra, Dominick, 193 Laika the Spacedog, 9–10 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 11, 255 Lane, Margaret, 81–82 Latude, Jean Henry de, 3 Lear, Edward, 10, 82 Lear, Linda, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, 81, 89, 92 Léautaud, Paul, Entretiens avec Robert Mallet, Bestiaire, 10 Lebanon, 61, 261–65 Lee, Peter W. Y., 162 Lento, Takako U., 165 Leopardi, Giacomo, 134 Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac, 236–37, 244, 249, 252n6, 253n18 Lestel, Dominique, 149, 155n3 Levi, Carlo, 14, 137–38 Levinas, Emmanuel, 228 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 3 Lewis-Williams, J. D., 208 Linder, Leslie, 82, 83, 85 Liu, Huan, 111

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Index

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Liu, Ruoyu, Zhuo Zhong zhi, 109 Livy, 132 Locke, John, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 63, 82 London, Jack, The Call of the Wild, x, 13, 25, 29–30; White Fang, 9 Lovecraft, H. P., 10 Lukacs, George, 223 Lurie, Alison, 91 Mabankou, Alain, Memoirs of a Porcupine, 173, 214 Macauley, David, 31, 32 Magical Realism, 95, 98, 101, 104 Malaparte, Curzio, 14, 136–37 Marcuse, Herbert, 222 Marley and Me, 25, 202n2 Marroum, Marianne, 13, 61–77, 261–65 Matignon, Karine Lou, Sans les animaux le monde ne serait pas humain, 12 Maupassant, Guy de, Sur les chats, 10, 11 Maxwell, Gavin, Ring of Bright Water, 12 McElroy, City of Demons, 17n5 McKibben, Bill, Eaarth, 24; The End of Nature, 43n1 McKnight, Natalie, 7 Mda, Zakes, Black Diamond, 15, 207, 211–13, 216 Melson, Gail F., Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children, 63 Mézan-Muxart, Virginie, 10, 11 Mhlongo, Niq, 15, 207–11, 216 mice, 82, 89 Miklósi, Adam, 23, 43n5 Millais, John, 82 Milne, Anne, 32, 33 Mishukov, Ivan, 34 Miyazawa, Teruo, 164 Miyoshi, Tatsuji, 159 Moby Dick, 32 Mohlele, Nthikeng, Rusty Bell, 15, 207–8, 213–16

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Moloney, Brian, 134 Momaday, N. Scott, 5–6, 9 Monet, Claude, 166 Montale, Eugenio, 133 Monte, Laila del, 2 Moolla, F. Fiona, Natures of Africa: Ecocriticism and Animal Studies in Contemporary Cultural Forms, 169, 176 Morris, Desmond, 148, 149 Mortensen, Peter, 180, 186n25 Mother Goose Rhymes, 157 Mphalele, Eskia, 215 Mutwa, Credo, 207 Nchuojie, Augustine, 179, 180 Ndinga, Assitou, 186n24, 186n26 Nelson, Richard K., 14–15, 147–54, 267–68 Newman, Daniel, 61 Nganang, Patrice, Temps de chien, 15, 170, 173, 175, 176, 177, 184; Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle, 214 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 232, 253n20 Nkengasong, John, 186n24, 187n26 Nsah, Kenneth Toah, 15, 169–88 Nsalai, Anthanasius, The Buffalo Hunter, 15, 170, 179, 180, 184 Nussbaum, Martha, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, 172, 173, 175, 178 Ōka, Makoto, 158 Ondaatje, Michael, Running in the Family, 13–14, 95–106; The English Patient, 95 101 Dalmations, 202n2 Ovid, 221 Pearce, Fred, The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature’s Salvation, 32–33 Peng, Guo, 198 Perrault, Charles, 10 Petrarch, 134

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Index

Plato, The Republic, 220 Plumwood, Val, 183 Plutarch, 132, 221, 223, 225 polecats, 96, 99 Porphyry, 221–22, 225 Postman in the Mountains, 200 Potter, Beatrix, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, 1, 79–93 Pu Songlin, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, 108 Pythagoras, 221, 227

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Quill, 202n2 Quintus Fabius Pictor, 132 rabbits, 79–93 Rahmer, Angelika, 61 rats, 96, 99 Ravindranathan, Thangam, and Antoine Traisnel, 147 Re, Anna, 14, 131–46 Reid, Amy, 185 Reynolds, Kev, ix–xii, 8–9, 16 Ricard, Matthieu, 261, 270n8 Rigoni Stern, Mario, 14, 140–42 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 243, 253n16 Robinson Crusoe, 32 Rogers, Pattiann, “Animals and People: The Human Heart in Confict with Itself,” 74 Romulus and Remus, 132 Rosa, Alberto Asor, 14, 143–44 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 82 Rufn, Jean-Christophe, Le collier rouge, 3 Russia, 34–40 Saba, Umberto, 134–36 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, The Little Prince, 68, 240–44 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 227 Scheese, Don, Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America, 154 Schoelcher, Victor, 11

Schultz, Charles M., Peanuts, 157, 160–62 Scott, Walter, 82 Scranton, Roy, 24–25, 41 Seattle, 240 Ségur, Countess de, Les mémoires d’un âne, 255 Séverine, Sac-a-tout, mémoires d’un petit chien, 69 Seawell, Anna, Black Beauty, ix, x, 92n1 Shakespeare, William, Two Gentlemen in Verona, 9, 82 Shindo, Kaneto, 164 Shipman, Pat, The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What Makes Us Human, 64 Shoten, Iwanami, 166n1 Simak, Clifford D., City, 5 Slovic, Scott, 1–12, 147, 155n2, 266–70 Smith, Peggy, 63 Smith, Will, 24 South Africa, 13, 15, 25, 27–28, 207–17 Soyinka, Wole, Death and the King’s Horseman, 6–7, 175 Spinoza, Baruch, 235 Spivak, Gayatri, 199 Sri Lanka, 13, 95–106 Steinbeck, John, Travels with Charley in Search of America, 267 Steiner, Gary, 220 Stern, Daniel N., 252n4 stray animals, 47–59, 97–98, 100–103 surrealism, 139 Survey on Chinese Pet Industry, 202n3 Svevo, Italo, 14, 133–34 Swift, Jonathan, 82 symbolism, 139 Syria, 61 Takeda, Toru, 161 Tanikawa, Shuntarō, 6, 15, 157–67 tanka, 158–59 Telles, Lydia Fagundes, As Horas Nuas, 16, 219–30

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Index

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Ten Promises to My Dog, 202n2 Tesson, Sylvain, 251n2 Tezuka, Osamu, 161 Thurston, Mary Elizabeth, The Lost History of the Canine Race, 26 Tintin, 7 Togawa, Yukio, 164, 166 Tolan, Anna and Steve, 4 Tolkien, J. R. R., The Silmarillion, 17n5 Tolstoy, Leo, 17 Tong, Yufeng, 203n7 Tønnessen, Morten, Kristin Armstrong Oma, and Silvr Rattasepp, Thinking about Animals in the Anthropocene, 170 Torun, Ceyda, Kedi, 13, 48, 50–58, 58n2 Totò (Antonio Griffo Focas Flavio Angelo Ducas Comneno Porfrogenito Gagliardi de Curtis di Bisanzio), 131, 145n1 Tournier, Michel, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifque (Friday, or the Other Island), 234–36 Trut, Lyudmila, 43n5 Tsing, Anna, 25 Tuan, Yi-Fu, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets, 84, 112, 199 Turkey, 13, 47–59 United States, 13–15, 23, 25, 26, 29–30, 147–55 Unti, Bernard, 92n1 Van Cauvelaert, Jules, Le retour de Jules, 7

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Verne, Jules, Autour de la lune, Un capitaine de quinze ans, 9; L’île mystérieuse, 11 Wagner, Richard, 134 Wang, Yu, 203n7 Wang, Zhihe, 201 Warne, Norman, 89, 92.2 Webb, Stephen, On God and Dogs, 23 Wells, Rachel, Alfe the Doorstep Cat, 4 Wenning, Mario, and Nadita Batra, The Human-Animal Boundary: Exploring the Line in Philosophy and Fiction, 169 Werber, Bernard, Demain les chats, 7 white colonialism, 28 Wilcox, Christie, 33 wild boar, 105 Wildlife Trust, 92n3 Wind in the Willows, x Wizard of Oz, The, 7 Wolfe, Cary, 193, 199 women (in patriarchal societies), 61 Woodward, Wendy, 15, 28, 171–74, 185n5, 207–17 Woolf, Leonard, 101 Woolf, Virginia, Flush, 17n5 Wu, Yu, 203n7 Xenophon, On Hunting, 151 Yaoudam, Elizabeth, 177 Yoshimura, Akira, 166n3 Zhang, Wei, 195, 199 Zhangke, Jia, 202 Zola, Emile, 11, 65, 76, Nouveaux contes a Ninon, 10

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About the Contributors

Françoise Besson lives in southwestern France and is emerita professor of Literatures in English at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. Her research focuses on the relationship between landscape, literature and ecology, ecocriticism, and travel and mountain literature. She has written or edited books and articles on Anglophone literature on these topics. She is the author of collections of poems, tales and short stories, and, with Madeleine Besson, her mother, books on regional history. For several years she was the editor of the journal Caliban and the president of the SELVA (Society for the Study of Travel Writing in English). Her most recent book is Ecology and Literatures in English. Writing to Save the Planet. She co-organized a conference on “Animal Love” in 2019, is the author of Histoires d’animaux. Autobiographie animalière, and is co-editing an issue of Caliban and a book on “Animal Love.” She has always lived with animals (companion animals sharing space with garden wild animals). In the wake of her family, she practices animal protection (stray cats) and is a militant for animals. She is basically a dog lover, but all the free cats who decided to join her family’s home (she now lives with twenty-three cats) made her also a cat lover. She is merely an animal lover. Zélia M. Bora received her PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University before returning to Brazil, where she has written several books and articles, including collections of poetry. At present, she contributes to the postgraduate program at the Federal University of Paraíba, directing master’s and doctoral students. She is the founder of the Commission for Animal Welfare at the Federal University of Paraíba, and she regularly speaks as an advocate for animals at the City Council and the Legislative Assembly of the State of Paraíba, seeking to encourage politicians to develop animal protection legislation. She is also the founding president of ASLE Brasil. 281

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About the Contributors

Marianne Marroum is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon. She obtained a Master’s degree in English Literature from the American University of Beirut and a PhD in Comparative literature from Purdue University. Her working languages are English, French, Arabic, Latin, and some Spanish. She has published a number of articles on environmental, comparative and world literature, ancient and modern. Her articles appear in Comparative Literature Studies, The Comparatist: Journal of the Southern Comparative Literature Association, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, and Ecozon@ European Journal of Literature, Culture and the Environment. Her most recent article was published in Caliban: French Journal of English Studies. Her current research focuses on environmental literature written in Arabic. She has eight cats and one dog, all rescues from the streets of Beirut. She is actively engaged in animal protection, mainly the homeless cats of Beirut. She feeds more than sixty stray cats on daily basis.

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Scott Slovic is university distinguished professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho, USA. Author, editor, or co-editor of twenty-seven books, his most recent publications include The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication (2019) and An Island in the Stream: Ecocritical and Literary Responses to Cuban Environmental Culture (2019). He served as founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) from 1992 to 1995, and he edited ASLE’s journal, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment from 1995 to 2020. He currently co-edits the book series Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment and Routledge Environmental Humanities. Many of his recent articles appear on the website www​.ari​thme​tico​fcom​passion​.org. Scott divides his time between Moscow, Idaho, and Sunriver, Oregon, where he spends much of his time hiking and running with his wife Susie and his ten-year-old German Shepherd named Hanna. Athane Adrahane was born in Brussels and is currently living there. A doctor in philosophy and a multidisciplinary artist, she started her career as a philosopher carrying out creation-research projects on the different systems of perception. Her doctoral thesis, conducted at the Free University of Brussels, deals with the manners in which narratives can contribute to a change in ecological conscience. Today she does her research work in an independent way in the felds of environmental humanities, where she explores the dialogues between affective practices and the sciences of living nature. She has published a philosophical essay, La conscience magique (2003) and a collection of poems, Trémor (2016). Having spent a good part of her life in the Mont Ventoux area (France), Athane has learned to live close to, and away from,

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the wild fauna. She has developed a passion for Nature photography (especially animals) and a polyphony of the living conscience. Her dog companions, Ramsès, Egon, and Étrange, have been her research mentors in animal ecosophy and they continue to joyfully accompany her all along her writing routes. Website: www​.athaneadrahane​.be

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Karla Armbruster is a professor in the English Department at Webster University in St. Louis, where she teaches U.S. and environmental literature as well as the course on human–animal transformations in literature in which she covers Dog Boy. Her publications include two co-edited volumes (Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism and The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place) and various ecocritical and animal studies-related essays (including several on dogs in literature). Her frst serious relationship with a dog began at the age of three, when her parents gave her a beagle puppy (whom she named Lassie) to keep her from feeling neglected when her younger sister was born. Since that time, she has always lived with at least one and up to fve dogs, and currently resides in Webster Groves, Missouri, with her husband Pete, daughters Lila and Lulu, dogs Belle and Mr. Miggy, cats Olive, Jacey, and Regan, rats Moze and Amara, and several fsh. She is also very good friends with a retired police horse named Red, who (along with the rest of her herd) has delightfully expanded Karla’s multispecies cultural competence in the past decade or so. Claire Cazajous-Augé lives in Toulouse, France, but she grew up in the Pyrenees. She teaches English at Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès University, France, and she is affliated with the Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes research team. She studies the representation of animals in contemporary American Ecofction, and the manners in which literature may help us change our relationships with the nonhuman world. She has published papers on still-lifes, animal tracks, and animal sanctuaries, as well as interviews with Rick Bass and Barry Lopez. She writes: “Observing my late cat, Pouillou, whose sassy personality always fascinated me, inspired me to think of several research ideas. He showed me that wildness cannot only be found in remote places; it is also present in our own backyards. Writing on companion animals is a way to insist on the urgency to take care of the beings who are the nearest fgures of a nonhuman world we tend to neglect or endanger.” Önder Çetin lives in Izmir, Turkey, with his wife Basak and six-year-old daughter, Mercan. He completed his doctoral studies at the Graduate School of Social Sciences, Ege University and has been affliated as an assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature since September 2013. His dissertation topic earned him a Fulbright Research Grant in 2010 as visiting researcher at the Department of English, University of Nevada, Reno.

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About the Contributors

Some of the titles of his major publications include “Local People or Local Victims? Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest and “Ecological Revival in Contemporary Turkish Literature: Nature, Resistance and Transformation in Faruk Duman’s Köpekler İçin Gece Müziği” and “Finding the Self in the Otherness of Nature: The Sundarbans and Postcolonial Identity in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” His love and interest for companion animals go back to his childhood years as he grew up on the streets playing with stray animals. He recalls taking deserted kittens and puppies back home hoping his parents would let him keep them. However, they never did let him as they lived in an apartment building. Many years later, his wife Basak and he adopted a cairn terrier, Efe, during their time in the States. Both Efe and they enjoyed their life together yet it felt unnatural to keep him in a one-bedroom apartment. They had to leave him at the shelter upon returning to Turkey, which left a great hole in their souls. This experience changed his perspective on the defnition of companion animals and led him to take care of stray animals around him. His contribution to this collection is the accumulation of his experiences with stray animals as our true companions.

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Chen Hong is a professor of English in the Research Center for Comparative Literature and World Literature at Shanghai Normal University, where she specializes in English poetry since the Romantic period. Her research interest also includes contemporary Chinese environmental literature, particularly animal literature. She published in English her PhD thesis on the role of animals in the poetry of Hughes and Lawrence as Bestiality, Animality, and Humanity (2005). She is also the author of three book chapters and a number of journal articles on animal literature of both English and Chinese languages. She had spent more than forty years in Wuhan since her birth before she moved to Shanghai in 2012. Now she lives in the biggest (in terms of population) and richest city in China with her second dog, a fourteen-year-old Chow Chow named Iron Ball. Qianqian Cheng was born in Anhui, China. She now lives in Toulouse, France and travels regularly between Shanghai and Toulouse. She worked as an English lecturer in the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, China from 2017 to 2019 and now teaches Chinese language and culture in the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France. Her research feld concerns the human engagement with nature and Loren Eiseley’s writings. Her current research interests include peoples’ relationships with companion animals (working dogs, stray animals, and pets) in the countryside and the megalopolis in modern China. She has conducted interviews on China’s popular video-sharing social networking service Douyin to investigate attitudes to companion animals. When she was a child, her parents had a female wolf

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dog named “Xiao hui” (little grey) who accompanied her to school and all over the village during her childhood. The dog was killed during the SARS epidemic outbreak in 2003 when people became hostile to free-ranging animals. She hopes that through her writings caring people from other countries will understand better and help promote the welfare of companion animals in China.

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Niroshini Gunasekera lives in Sri Lanka, in Kelaniya to be very precise. Kelaniya is in the north-eastern suburbs of Colombo. She is a professor of French at the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka. She is also a translator of French novels into Sinhala and she has so far translated eight of them which she considers to be her major publications. French and Francophone Literature and Comparative Literature are her areas of research and writing. Her house in Kelaniya is a refuge for abandoned cats: She has twelve of them. Rescuing animals has become an everyday reality to her. During the total lockdown due to Covid-19, she has fed and continues to feed hungry animals in her area. She writes: “I love animals and therefore, it was natural that I was attracted to the topic ‘Companion Animals.’ I love all animals—be it companion or wild and when I read Michael Ondaatje’s novel, Running in the Family, at once, I captured the presence of animals who were not particularly domesticated but are very much present in the lives of the protagonists and it was very important to me that I talked about them.” Keita Hatooka lives in Yokohama with his wife and two children, who all share warm memories of their dog, Sierra. In 2004–2005, he was a visiting researcher at the Graduate Program in Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, and his frst book was a collection of essays derived from his experiences with Sierra in the open space of the American West. He joined the faculty at Meiji University in 2007 after studying at the Keio Graduate School of Letters, from which he received a PhD in literature. As a visiting scholar at Ludwig Maximilians Universität München in 2012– 2014, he traveled around Germany with his family, following the footsteps of the protagonist of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. This research resulted in the publishing of Rocket Noon and Other Essays. Currently, he teaches courses in interdisciplinary art studies in the Graduate School of Science and Technology at Meiji University. He has published nine books in Japanese, including Pynchon’s Menageries, Who Are the Animals? and Why Adaptation Matters to You: From The Great Gatsby to Inherent Vice. Lorraine Kerslake holds a PhD in children’s literature and ecocriticism and teaches at Alicante University, Spain. She has worked as a translator of literary criticism, poetry, and art, and published widely on children’s literature and ecocriticism. Her current research areas of interest include children’s

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About the Contributors

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literature, the representation of animals and nature in literature and art, ecocriticism, and ecofeminism. She is an active member of the Spanish research group on ecocriticism, GIECO, and has participated in different research projects including “Stories for Change” (http:​/​/eco​​human​​idade​​s​.web​​s​.upv​​.es​/ r​​elato​​s​-par​​​a​-el-​​cambi​​o/). Since 2016 she has been managing editor of the journal of ecocriticism Ecozon@ (European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment): http://www​.ecozona​.eu/. Her most recent publications include The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes’s Writing for Children (Routledge, 2018) and “Hughes’s Collaboration with Artists” in Gifford, Terry (ed) Ted Hughes in Context (Cambridge, 2018). She is especially interested in the ethical considerations and the way we represent and imagine animals in literature and art. Animals are inseparable from humans and our more-than-human world cannot be conceived without animal lives. Companion animals are important not only because they keep us company or enrich our lives but because they shape who we are and bring us closer to nature. Anna Re graduated in Foreign Languages and Literature at the International University of Languages and Media IULM, Milan. She obtained a Master’s Degree in English with an Emphasis on Literature and the Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno (USA) and a PhD in Comparative Literature at IULM. She teaches English for the Arts (Arts, Media, Cultural Events Bachelor’s Degree, and Art, valorization and market Master’s Degree), Business English and Cross Cultural English (Hospitality and Tourism Management Master’s Degree) at IULM University. Her research focuses on American environmental literature and the translation and teaching of English language within the Italian milieu. She published Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology (Italica Press, 2004, with Patrick Barron), Americana Verde (Edizioni Ambiente, 2009, a new updated edition was published in 2017), Il futuro di Gaia (Armando, 2008, with Aurelio Angelini), and Parole, simboli e miti della Natura (Qanat, 2012, with Aurelio Angelini). Anna’s husband is an intensive care doctor. They have two dogs, Hoshi and Taiyou, and two cats, Doris and Alex. All the family lives in Milan, but they spend a lot of time in the mountains (Altopiano di Asiago, Veneto) where they have a house in the middle of a wood. The dogs love that place a lot. Kev Reynolds has a passion for Nature in all its forms. He is a travel writer who lives in the English countryside, and since turning freelance in 1986, has written more than ffty books and contributed to many more, most of which are devoted to various mountain regions around the world. His travels have often been enriched by the creatures that inhabit the places he writes about, and include encounters with jackals roaming in packs in the high Himalaya, to mingling in early-morning shadow with the majestic

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bouquetin of the Alps in the rutting season. He has a particular interest in the izard of the Pyrenees and has followed wild goats among the mountains of Morocco. At home in southern England he gains much pleasure from walking a friend’s dreary-eyed Springer spaniel on the cropped turf of the South Downs, and enjoys the companionship of a white-faced Barn owl whose roost is among the branches of an ancient oak tree which he also counts as a friend and companion.

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Kenneth Toah Nsah was born in Anglophone Cameroon and currently lives in Denmark as a PhD Student in Comparative Literature at Aarhus University. His PhD research concentrates on postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental literary activism in the Congo Basin. His chapter in the present book is excerpted from his PhD dissertation in-progress. He has published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on ecocriticism in Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville, marginality in Anglophone Cameroon literature, Anglophone Cameroon migrant/diaspora fction, and scholarly publishing in Cameroon. His research interests include ecocriticism, migrant/diaspora fction, postcolonial literature, minority literature, scholarly publishing, and creative writing. As Nsah Mala, he has published fve collections of poems which partly explore environmental and ecological issues, including animals. He also writes fction and children’s books. He had dogs in the past and his childhood ambition to own a horse never materialized. These partly inspire his commitment to animal studies in literature, especially companion animals. Wendy Woodward lives in Cape Town, not too far from the back ridge of Table Mountain. She is emerita professor in English Literature at the University of the Western Cape where she taught for many years. The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives was published in 2008. She introduced and convened Animal Studies Colloquia at UWC and co-edited, with Erika Lemmer, a Special Issue of Journal of Literary Studies entitled Figuring the Animal in Post-apartheid South Africa (2014). More recently she co-edited Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges and the Arts—Animal Studies in Modern Worlds with Susan McHugh (2017). She has published three collections of poems which are suffused with ecological issues and animal creatures (Séance for the Body; Love, Hades and Other Animals; A Saving Bannister). She has been owned for a number of years by Bella, a black miniature poodle of formidable energy and intelligence, as well as by Galahad, a cross-Boerperd palomino of great beauty and presence.

Reading Cats and Dogs : Companion Animals in World Literature, edited by Zélia M. Bora, et al., Lexington Books, 2020.

Copyright © 2020. Lexington Books. All rights reserved. Reading Cats and Dogs : Companion Animals in World Literature, edited by Zélia M. Bora, et al., Lexington Books, 2020.