New writing about animals
“The moment I saw the five ghostly presences pass through a storm of snow, I whispered the name, Wolf, as they passed by.” Picture: Unsplash.
Earlier this year, natural philosopher Melanie Challenger published her latest book. In Animal Dignity: Philosophical Reflections on Non-Human Existence, historians, primatologists, philosophers, novelists and artists from across cultures explore the case for applying the concept of dignity to the more-than-human. At once academically rigorous and deeply personal, there is lots to mull over. You might agree, for example, with philosopher Lori Gruen’s view that dressing a bear as a ballerina to perform at a circus undermines his dignity. Or could it be that those whose dignity is compromised are the people who captured, tortured and trained him and who find the sight of a suffering animal in human clothing amusing? As Chickasaw poet and Pulitzer finalist Linda Hogan wrote, “Grace is natural with animals and with some few people.”
Collins Dictionary defines dignity as “qualities of being worthy of esteem” but that is only one of many explored in this bracing, compassionate collection. “The book required making sense of what dignity is and what it can and can't offer as a concept,” says Challenger. “I was concerned to ensure that we signposted how dignity can move forward more formally to do good work for other species - in law, in ethics, in everyday lives.” Last November, alongside nature lawyer Paul Powlesland and head of the Multispecies Justice Project Danielle Celermajer, Challenger discussed just that, in an event entitled ‘Voices of the Living World: Representing nature and other species in decision-making’.
Challenger, also a Vice President of the RSPCA, is one of a cohort of 21st century philosophers and writers trying to change the way humans see animals. Skim the Nature sections of good bookstores and you’ll see a library of titles dedicated, not simply to spectacular wildlife, but specifically to the jagged relationship between humans and more-than-humans. Of course, humans have written about animals for millennia, as objects of research or of comparison with and distinction to humans in philosophical anthropology. But, despite the diversity of approaches, one thing has remained the same: the belief that humans are, in all the ways that matter, superior.
An evolution - a long time coming - has emerged with the rise of the ‘animal turn’, described by Professor of History at MIT Harriet Ritvo as a “recognition by scholars within most humanities and social sciences that their research can, and should, encompass - or even emphasise - non-human animals.” In a short 2020 interview with the Animals & Society Institute, Ritvo links the turn to a wider movement of moral consciousness. “Animals can be seen as the latest beneficiaries of democratising tendencies in academic research. As the labour movement, the civil rights movement, decolonisation and the women’s movement inspired sympathetic scholars, so have in their turn, the advocates of hunted whales, poached tigers, abandoned dogs and overcrowded pigs.”
She goes on: “What the animal turn has done, and what it continues to do is to take respectful account of the omnipresence and the significance of the other animals with whom we share our time and space.”
A bear on a bicycle: the case for animal dignity. Picture: unknown.
Blending natural history, philosophy and science, propelled by the recognition that the relationship between humans and more-than-humans has gone terribly wrong, the turn has released some extraordinary thought. In How to Love Animals in a Human Shaped World, Financial Times’ chief features writer Henry Mance confronts the break head on; in a move difficult but necessary, he spent painful stints working in an abattoir and on a factory farm. “There have been various threads [in writing about animals],” reflects Mance. “One has been a search for scientific understanding of other species. Another has been an attempt to see how species can work for our ends, as if we were the only beings who can feel or who matter. [With How to Love], I thought about what I wished I had learned about other animals as a child, And I thought about my children, who are just building their relationship with other animals.”
Written with warmth and humanity, Mance’s book is a smooth read about a distressing subject. But there is something about the animal turn itself that is turning, to centre the animals themselves and to tell their stories. As Ritvo points out, “The most ambitious proponents have attempted to take things still further, by retrieving the perspectives of the animals they study.” Mance agrees: “More and more, writing about animals is about shared experiences, and about seeing the world from their point of view.”
“We have over-emphasized species and ignored the individual in the living world,” expands Challenger. “Sure, some organisms form superorganisms, but much of life is also made up of individual agents within a complex and dynamic world. The question we should ask - morally, philosophically, and scientifically - is why we always focus on aggregates and ignore individual organisms?” The answer, of course, is that dealing in aggregates makes individuals (both human and more-than-human) easier to dismiss, displace and destroy. “I believe it is the wrong way to look at the living world and has wide-ranging implications, especially for conservation and environmental thinking,” says Challenger, tightly.
The desire to regard individuals en masse is blown out of the water, then, by writing that makes the individual impossible to ignore. In the foreword to Animal Dignity, Jane Goodall describes a moment in which she tried to offer her friend, the chimpanzee David Greybeard, an oil nut palm. “Looking directly into my eyes, he reached out, took the nut, and dropped it. Then he very gently squeezed my fingers - which is how a chimpanzee may reassure a nervous subordinate. In that moment, we communicated using a gesture that may have existed in our common ancestor, some six million years ago. I understood he didn’t want the nut but realised I meant well. Then he lay and closed his eyes - and I sat there quietly amazed by an interaction that I shall never forget.”
Jane Goodall and Mr. David-Greybeard. Picture: ©Jane Goodall Institute.
When author Sy Montgomery describes her friendship with an octopus called Athena, in her essay for the book, she writes: “The moment the lid was off, we reached for each other. Her eight arms boiled up, twisting, slippery, to meet mine. As we gazed into each other’s eyes, Athena encircled my arms with hers.” In Dignity in Their World, Jimmy, a pig rescued from a factory farm by Celermajer, loses his companion Jenny. “The next morning, he began to look for her,” remembers Celermajer. “Everywhere. Down in their woods, up under the trees where they had once taken shade from the afternoon sun. He would turn and look and stand very still - listening for her, perhaps smelling the remnants of her presence.”
Last year, poet and painter Frieda Hughes chronicled her two years with a rescued magpie chick in George: A Magpie Memoir. Despite love and safety she offers, the bird begins to yearn for a more permanent freedom: “George sat on the sofa looking out of the window, his little beak upturned, gazing at the sky above as if with some deep longing, watching it change from clouded blue, to violet-grey, to inky Prussian blue. This, he’d never done before. I felt as if he was pining for something that called to him from very far away.” Soon, the inevitable happens. “George didn’t come back that night, or the night after that. I realised how every day had revolved around him; he had become the pivot of all else that happened in the house.”
In The Radiant Lives of Animals, Hogan folds her own encounters with animals together with Native American stories and spiritual traditions and their eradication through white colonialism. When her companion horse Kelly dies, she buries her on her plot, a former Choctaw allotment, and lays Apache sage in the grave. She returns myth and, yes, dignity, to hunted species. “The day they arrived, I first saw the wolves from the window. They walked so silently into my life that the moment I saw the five ghostly presences pass through a storm of snow, I whispered the name, Wolf, as they passed by.”
Similarly, Esther Woolfson’s Between Light and Storm: Our Lives with Other Species is woven through with the stories that the animals themselves never get to tell. Inevitably, many are distressing. “In my mind forever,” she writes of a commonplace incident in fur farming: “the silver fox grappled from his cage by a metal hook, thrown to the ground and stamped on, his head and neck crushed under a heavy boot, the blood that poured from the creature’s smashed nose and mouth as he died.” Of her rook, Chicken, or her daughters’ rats, she says: “Observation told us that these creatures anticipate, enjoy, consider, grieve, love and hate. It was impossible not to appreciate that their actions were deliberate and their feelings as subtle, perceptible and as real as our own.”
Yet that is what humans do, every minute of every day. From a place of deep concern, Woolfson charts the history of man’s egregious domination of animals and lays bare its contradictions. We care - but not really. We admire a fox’s fur, then beat the animal to death for bag charms. Most of us refuse to acknowledge the connections between the animals in our homes and those on our plates, despite striking similarities in their capacities to love and to learn, to suffer and to mourn. Tending to the individual, then, reminds us of the deep kinship for animals that we have been strenuously cultivated to ignore. And laying that truth alongside the blacker truth of what humans do to animals is when the writing has the most power to galvanise change.
Last year, journalist - and former trapper, rancher and third generation butcher - Laura Jean Schneider published a collection of delicate musings on animals called Maverick. “I wanted to write something that critiqued the idea of consuming animal bodies from my own experience,’ she says. “I couldn’t help but realize how some of the creatures were named and loved, and some went nameless. Two were "wild", but formed relationships on their terms, with me. It was staggering to put a finger on the foundation of my assignation of what animal bodies were worth, in terms of food or fur value. It was learned behaviour.”
“If we’re the gods now, shouldn’t we be better than we are?” Piglets sleep huddled together in a heap at the back of a pen on a large industrial farm. Sub-Saharan Africa, 2022. Picture: Jo-Anne McArthur / Sibanye Trust
Inevitably, the animal turn has revealed the myth of human supremacy and all its coarse suppositions. “If we’re the gods now, shouldn’t we be better than we are?” asks Woolfson, sadly. Again and again, in the mirror that literature offers us, the reflections are not the kindly rulers we think ourselves to be. In our dealings with other species, we are callous and chaotic - and, as the climate and ecological crises so amply demonstrate, we are barrelling ourselves and every other animal on the planet to the edge of extinction.
In a better world, it can no longer be ‘us’ and ‘them’; it can only be ‘us altogether.’ “People often write about non-human animals as if they are distinct from humans,” ponders ethics scholar William Gildea. “For instance, philosophers often call us “persons” - to mark us out. A lot of moral weight is put on being a “person”, but it doesn’t mean “human” and is often left undefined. I’m unsure this ancient category has a rightful place in ethics. Humans and animals aren’t entirely distinct. We are continuous. We overlap in our capacities. We both have conscious, sentient minds that give us a stake in our lives and a place in ethics.”
Writing has a role in the transformation. In The Democracy of Species, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one - with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and with a legal system that recognises the standing of other species. It’s all in the pronouns.”
This is precisely Challenger’s hope for her work: “The most important intervention that the work of animal dignity can achieve is a psychological one,” she says. “I want animal writing to become less observational and more about action,” adds Mance. “Wild animals are disappearing, factory farms are advancing. We can't just count species and marvel at animals' abilities. We have to make changing our behaviour a priority.” Writing may be a reflection of cultural beliefs but, delivered with courage and empathy, it can also be a powerful agitator for change. The polycrises we face will never, now, stop driving interrogation into old systems. "We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words,” says Wall Kimmerer. “Language is our gift and our responsibility.”
