The Lives of Animals

John and Norma discuss Elizabeth’s lectures after Elizabeth goes to bed. John does not expect many people will attend the second lecture, which will be in a seminar room in the English Department. Norma disagrees with Elizabeth’s views on reasoning, calling her “shallow” and “naïve.” She argues using science that other animals have narrow worldviews. John questions whether human minds are just as narrow, and Norma is annoyed, citing humans’ vast technological advancements as proof of reason’s superiority.

The next morning, Abraham Stern leaves a note for Elizabeth in John’s mailbox. He was offended by Elizabeth’s comparison of Jewish people to animals. John gets stuck in a long meeting then goes to Elizabeth’s second lecture, which is almost over when he arrives. Elizabeth is taking questions from the audience. She has handed out poems—“The Panther” by Rilke and “The Jaguar” and “Second Glance at a Jaguar” by Hughes—to accompany her lecture. She explains that the perspective presented by Rilke is limited and that Hughes wrote his poems as a response to “The Panther.” While the panther cannot see beyond the bars of its enclosure, Hughes’s jaguar is able to imagine things beyond its surroundings. Hughes focuses on detailing the actual experience of being the captive jaguar, and by doing so he helps the reader imagine themselves as the jaguar. Elizabeth states that animals are left out when humans turn human-animal connections into words, contradicting Hughes’s purpose.

An attendee asks how today’s lecture aligns with the one from the day before, citing the fact that Hughes is a sheep farmer. Elizabeth speculates that Hughes feels a primitive connection with his sheep and compares it to bull fighting. She praises the respect given to the bulls as having ethical value but criticizes bull fighting as “masculinist” and “impractical.” It is impossible to pay such respect to the numbers of animals that are slaughtered to feed the human population. She further states that the Nazis used Chicago stockyards as inspiration in the design of concentration camps (While this fact is contentious and without positive evidence, many aspects of the United States did inspire Nazi Germany, such as Jim Crow-era laws). Turning back to Hughes, she examines how writers impart more knowledge than they intend, such as Hughes’s ability to share the perspective of his jaguar with his readers. Elizabeth criticizes ecological philosophy, which suggests a hierarchy between creatures which only humans can understand. She continues speaking, but John, who assumes he knows what Elizabeth will say, does not pay attention.

Elaine Marx asks about the justification of exploitation by citing Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, questioning whether exploitation is part of human nature. Elizabeth posits that the main character, Gulliver, wants to live with the peaceful, vegetarian Houyhnhnm horses but feels he is a carnivorous Yahoo. Gulliver has a three-part worldview divided as God, humans, and beast, and he attempts to label himself as either beast or human. Elizabeth argues the story is unrealistic, that Gulliver would not travel alone, and that there would have been follow-up missions in which both the Houyhnhnm’s and Yahoo’s would have been killed by humans. She agrees that humans are acting on their nature, but by slaughtering other beings, they have cursed themselves.

John talks with his mother before her final engagement at the college, a debate between Elizabeth and philosophy professor Thomas O’Hearne. He asks is she thinks poetry will save animals and argues that humans like meat and feel contempt for animals because “they don’t fight back” (58). Elizabeth agrees and notes that zookeepers used to protect animals from zoo visitors. She says animals are treated “like prisoners of war” (58), and when John asks if that is what Elizabeth wants to change, Elizabeth says she does not know what she wants but that she does not want to remain silent. She feels other animals will outlast humans.

At the debate, O’Hearne is given three chances to present his opposing positions to which Elizabeth will reply. His first argument is that animal rights is new, Western, and Anglo-Saxon. He criticizes the West for attempting to push Western ideals onto other cultures. As such, the animal rights movement is met with justified resistance. Elizabeth agrees that his concerns are valid but argues that kindness towards animals is not a recent phenomenon. Further, past philosophers, such as Descartes, worked with limited information and did not know of the more intelligent animal species—“The science of Descartes’s day had no acquaintance with the great apes or with higher marine mammals, and thus little cause to question the assumption that animals cannot think” (61). She agrees that the West is culturally arrogant but argues that the West should atone for their industrialization of animal cruelty.

O’Hearne next asks if animals should have a separate legal classification since they cannot comprehend, claim, or enforce rights. Elizabeth responds by noting the anthropocentric bias in experiments on animal intelligence: “[Science] values being able to find your way out of a sterile maze, ignoring the fact that if the researcher who designed the maze were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he or she would be dead of starvation in a week” (62). The experiments are limited rather than animal intelligence being limited. She asserts that animals can speak, citing Albert Camus who helped abolish the use of the guillotine in France. Camus’s activism was partially due to a memory of a hen that cried out as it was killed.

O’Hearne’s final statement centers on the notion that animals do not understand nor care about death, while death causes fear in humans. He further argues that it is not illicit to kill animals but that it is illicit to practice gratuitous cruelty. He supports humane treatment of animals before slaughter. He defines two types of animal-lovers—hunter-types, who value animals for their use, and utopists, who have limited contact with animals and desire a world without any predator behavior. He declares there is no real community between humans and animals. Elizabeth responds that animals fight for life with their entire being and that their being is within their bodies. She urges him and others to read poems about animals and to walk next to an animal who is going down a slaughter chute. She compares O’Hearne’s distinctions between humans and animals to racist distinctions between the value of white and Black lives. Elizabeth feels that a discussion can only be had when the two opponents have common ground, and she does not feel that she shares common ground with O’Hearne. She refuses to continue speaking with him, thus ending the debate. John thinks that he should have been asked before his mother was invited to speak.

Norma and John talk while in bed. Angry, Norma says that Elizabeth’s views are “food-faddism” and that such faddism is a power play. She believes that Elizabeth is trying to manipulate the children and the wider community into changing their diets. John defends his mother, calling her sincere and arguing that Elizabeth’s revulsion toward meat is the same as his revulsion toward eating snails. He urges Norma to view Elizabeth as a “social reformer” rather than an eccentric manipulator. Norma refuses and continues to degrade Elizabeth, and John tells her she is ranting. Norma is upset that Elizabeth has talked to the children about the cruelty of industrial animal agriculture, and Norma doesn’t want the children becoming vegetarians and using their lifestyles to make her feel guilty.

John drives Elizabeth to the airport the next morning. On the way, he apologizes for Norma’s behavior. He says she is stressed and not able to sympathize. He does not understand his mother’s intense feelings toward animal rights. She explains that she feels like people are committing crimes, but she is the only one who can see it:

Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money (69).

To her, people eating animals is akin to people having furniture made from human skin. She tries to calm these thoughts and questions why she cannot accept the way things are. John pulls over to hug his mother and tell her “It will soon be over” (69).