Food for thought

I have recently flirted with the idea of becoming a vegetarian again.  Bat, I have pondered the thanksgiving dilemma for a few days now—I feel you.  But I think I might actually take the easy way out and participate in a hunger strike with other students this week.  I’m just pissed off at the problems our generation faces—from animal cruelty to human genocide.  To be honest, I had not really given animal cruelty much thought before this class.  My little sister, Sophia, on the other hand, volunteered extensively last summer with Austin Pets Alive.  She knew about euthanasia—even at 14.  I was just her ride to and from the their trailers.  I sent her the link to Der Panter (the song) because she’s in Germany and loves animals—what a perfect match for her.  Wrong.  She says, “bianca, this song makes me sad.”  But anyway…

I always admired that Sophia had the ability to connect with animals.  It didn’t matter if they were strays, our pets, or “problem” animals at the shelter.  I used to think she understood them.  (And maybe, at some spiritual level, she did.)  But sometimes I wonder just how much of our “understanding” comes from our own idea of animals—and not necessarily what they think or feel.  This is evidenced par excellence in Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy.”  When he (in ape form) was taught to drink alcohol by humans, he recalls that he “imitated them because [he] was looking for a way out, for no other reason.”  (562)  Several times throughout the “Report,” he repeats:  “I was looking for a way out.” (562)  People who see a trainer with his animal subject might think they share a bond, a connection, a common understanding at a loving level.  This is just not true.  I think Kafka’s way of showing the violence behind the road to understanding and learning is particularly enlightening.  Although he says that teacher was “not angry with me,” he remembers that “well, sometimes he held his burning pipe against my fur in some places or other which I could reach only with difficulty, until it began to burn.” (562)  

Bars.  "The World is Bars."
http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/rilke/rilke1.html

Or like the Panther, who literally is situated in the world to where he is "seeing only bars" (565).  "To him," Rilke says, "The world is bars." (565) And this may seem like the perspective of a panther behind bars.  But what if he doesn't feel as if his "gigantic Will standes stunned and numb." (565) For all we know--as humans--he could be sensitized beyond words to the world around him, being placed in a different environment.  For us humans, this is so very wrong to cage beings--we believe, at least.  But for animals, territoriality and space is defined very differently.  Space is determined by scent and power and tribalism (in the animal sense).  Again, in Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, I am reminded of the “relativism” of our understandings and perceptions when Norma mocks what seems to me like sound logic:  “animals have their own accounts in accordance with the structure if their own minds, to which we don’t have access because we don’t share a language with them.”  I can almost see Norma rolling her eyes, spewing condescension and disapproval from every syllable.  “It’s naïve,” she says; “it’s the kind of easy, shallow relativism that impresses freshman.” (91)  Well I am a freshman, and I am not so much impressed with “relativism” as I am in awe of Costello’s convection.  Yes, dwelling on the nuances and complexities of human and animal perspectives may be trying, but our world is simply not black or white.  The gray scale is infinite.  Norma says this kind of talk just “leads to intellectual paralysis” but I think it leads to sophisticated and higher thinking.  One more commentary, while Norma and John argue about his mother’s perspectives on animals, Norma confirms that yes, “animals are just biological automata”—“broadly speaking.”(92) The implications of the following syllogism leave me wondering: Humans are animals. “Animals are just biological automata.” Ergo… (The idea is that we need get off our human cloud and realize that we’re not light years away from apes, whales, or even squirrels.)

Maybe this isn't what the squirrel is thinking at all.  In the words of Alfred Prufrock,
"that is not it, at all."
http://outdoors.webshots.com/photo/1206670024013743898RgaMai

I mentioned in class that I disagreed with my previous DB on the holocaust and animal slaughter.  I am starting to sort out what I truly think of this parallel.  Abraham Stern’s letter to Elizabeth Costello made much sense to me but failed to address another key component of the holocaust.  Nobody is denying that both the holocaust and meat packaging industries slaughter beings.  The difference is the why.  We kill animals out of what we think is necessity—for sustenance.  Nazis killing Jews was an ideological slaughter.  It’s not so much that you belittle a race or species, saying “they’re only animals” (570).  I don’t like that Coetzee is comparing the Holocaust to animal slaughter in such a way that almost diminishes the horror of the former.  He says that “we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end….” (571)  I don’t think it is right to say that what we are doing to animals “dwarfs” what Nazis did to Jews.  And I’m sure Jewish people would not appreciate this either.  This highlights the key differences between, in anthropological terms, genocide and genocidal acts.  (There is, actually, a subtle difference.)