The Lives of Animals

short-term wants and anticipations. I bet pigs can too. So we are doing them a wrong by ending their lives, and we don’t make up for it when we bring another pig or dog into existence.”

Peter smiles triumphantly: “Ah, but now you are conceding my point. We are disagreeing only about the facts of porcine and canine life. And maybe I don’t really even disagree with you about that. Suppose I grant that pigs and dogs are self-aware to some degree, and do have thoughts about things in the future. That would provide some reason for thinking it intrinsically wrong to kill them—not absolutely wrong, but perhaps quite a serious wrong. Still, there are other animals—chickens maybe, or fish— who can feel pain but don’t have any self- awareness or capacity for thinking about the future. For those animals, you haven’t given me any reason why painless killing would be wrong, if other animals take their place and lead an equally good life.”

Naomi has finished her breakfast, pushed Max away from her feet, and is lacing up her nonleather Doc Martens. Talking to her father about philosophy always ends up with his switching into lecture mode. Soon she’ll be able to get away. But she doesn’t want to be rude, so she asks, “And Coetzee doesn’t agree with that?”

“Costello doesn’t, anyway. She talks about bat-being and human-being both being full of being, and seems to say that their fullness of being is more important than whether it is bat-being or human-being.”

“I can see what she’s getting at. When you kill a bat, you take away everything that the bat has, its entire existence. Killing a human being can’t do more than that.”

“Yes, it can. If I pour the rest of this soymilk down the sink, I’ve emptied the container; and if I do the same to that bottle of Kahlua you and your friends are fond of drinking when we are out, I’d empty it too. But you’d care more about the loss of the Kahlua. The value that is lost when something is emptied depends on what was there when it was full, and there is more to human existence than there is to bat existence.”

Naomi says quietly: “Oh. I didn’t think you’d noticed the Kahlua.” But her father has picked up the paper again and is flipping through the pages. “That’s not the worst argument, either. Listen to this. Costello is talking about a book she has written in which she thinks herself into the character of Joyce’s Marion Bloom, and then she says,

If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.”

Naomi is glad to leave the topic of Kahlua: “You don’t have to be a philosopher to see what is wrong with that. The fact that a character doesn’t exist isn’t something that makes it hard to imagine yourself as that character. You can imagine someone very like yourself, or like someone else you know. Then it is easy to think your way into the existence of that being. But a bat, or an oyster? Who knows? If that’s the best argument Coetzee can put up for his radical egalitarianism, you won’t have any trouble showing how weak it is.”

“But are they Coetzee’s arguments? That’s just the point— that’s why I don’t know how to go about responding to this so-called lecture. They are Costello’s arguments. Coetzee’s fictional device enables him to distance himself from them. And he has this character, Norma, Costello’s daughter-in-law, who makes all the obvious objections to what Costello is saying. It’s a marvelous device, really. Costello can blithely criticize the use of reason, or the need to have any clear principles or proscriptions, without Coetzee really committing himself to these claims. Maybe he really shares Norma’s very proper doubts about them. Coetzee doesn’t even have to worry too much about getting the structure of the lecture right. When he notices that it is starting to ramble, he just has Norma say that Costello is rambling!”

“Pretty tricky. Not an easy thing to reply to. But why don’t you try the same trick in response?”

“Me? When have I ever written fiction?”

Wendy Doniger ¦

IT SEEMS somehow reductionistic to respond to these deeply moving readings as if they had been dry academic arguments. But all I can do is offer some texts from the other traditions that I know, in support of what I take to be the ideas implicit in J. M. Coetzee’s Tanner Lectures—namely, an argument for the inevitable, if unfalsifiable, links between communion with animals, compassion for animals, and the refusal to torment, if not necessarily the refusal to kill and/or eat, animals. Let me begin, as he does, with the eating.

COMPASSION TOWARD ANIMALS,

AND VEGETARIANISM

Thomas O’Hearne, one of Elizabeth Costello’s critics in the second Tanner Lecture, argues that to treat animals compassionately is “very recent, very Western, and even very Anglo-Saxon,” and that we delude ourselves when we think that we can impose this idea on other traditions who are “blind” to it. Elizabeth challenges him too weakly (people keep pets, and children love animals, all over the world). I would make a stronger case for the non-Western religions, though not so strong as most animal-lovers generally assume.

After about the sixth century B.C.E., most Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains did indeed feel that people should not eat animals, in part, as is generally argued, because they themselves might be reborn as animals, but more because they feared that animals might retaliate in the afterworld. A Vedic text from 900 B.C.E. tells of a boy who went to “the world beyond” (that is, the world to which one goes after death—the theory of rebirth is not yet reflected in this text) and saw a man cut another man to pieces and eat him, and another man “eating a man who was screaming,” and another man “eating a man who was soundlessly screaming.” When he returned to earth, his father explained that the first man represented people who, when they had been in this world, had cut down trees and burnt them, the second people who had cooked for themselves animals that cry out, and the third people who had cooked for themselves rice and barley, which scream soundlessly.{Jaiminiya Brahmana 1.42–44; Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence: Folklore, Sacrifice, and Danger in the Jaiminiya Brahmana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 32–35.}

Now, we might regard this as an extreme ecological program—to ban not only the eating of animals, but the burning of fuel and the consumption of vegetables (there was one Hindu, in the twentieth century, who claimed to have recorded the screams of carrots that were strapped down to a table and chopped up). But in fact this is not what this text argues for. When the terrified boy asked his father, “How can one avoid that fate?” his father told him that he could easily avoid it simply by offering oblations to the gods before consuming fuel, animals, and vegetables. This is an example of the rationalization attributed to the Greeks in Elizabeth’s argument with Wunderlich in the first lecture: invent the gods and blame them.

Other parts of this same text do express a kind of submerged guilt at the slaughter of animals, perhaps even compassion, though the ostensible point of the myth is to justify the slaughter: in the beginning, cattle had the skin that humans have now, and humans had the skin that cattle have now. Cattle could not bear the heat, rain, flies, and mosquitoes, and asked humans to change skins with them; in return, they said, “You can eat us and use our skin for your clothing.” And so it was. And the sacrificer puts on the red hide of a cow so that, when he goes to the other world, cattle do not eat him; otherwise, they would eat him.{See the story of “How Men Changed Skins with Animals,” Jaiminiya Brahmana 2.182–83; also in O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence. For a discussion of this genre of prevarication in other religions, see Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” in Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicaog Press, 1982), 53–65.} Another common ploy to assuage guilt—which is to say, to silence compassion—was to assert that the animal willingly sacrificed itself.{See the discussion of the willingness of the sacrificed animal in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, “The Good and Evil Shepherd,” in Gilgul: Essays on Transformation, Revolution, and Permanence in the History of Religions, Dedicated to Zwi Werblowsky, ed. S. Shaked, D. Shulman, and G. G. Stromsa (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 169–91.} On yet other occasions an attempt was made to convince the animal that it was not in fact killed. Thus in the hymn of the horse sacrifice in the Rig Veda, ca. 1000 B.C.E., the priest says to the horse, “You do not really die through this, nor are you harmed. You go on paths pleasant to go on.”{Rig Veda 1.162.21; Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1981), 91.}