The Lives of Animals

One could, though Coetzee and Elizabeth do not, also argue that animals themselves understand the feelings of other animals, that they themselves have compassion. Dogs and horses certainly do, as anyone knows who has seen their deeply troubled reaction to the sight of a wounded animal of their own or a closely related species. Our empathy cannot be limited by our physical, any more than by our mental, capacities.{I once fainted dead away at a circumcision; apparently my foreskin recoiled in horror of the cut; contrariwise, many men have fainted away during their wives’ childbirth pains, and not merely in societies that ritually enshrine the couvade.} Elizabeth could feel what a corpse felt; amputees experience pain in the absent limb, the phantom limb. Surely we, too, can experience pain in our paws, in our tails, in our fetlocks and pasterns, perhaps even, if we are truly talented, in our fins and scales.

COMPASSION FOR ANIMALS AS HAVING LANGUAGE

Wittgenstein would, I think, have been skeptical of the “if I were a horse” approach; he argued that “if a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”{Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3d ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Prentice Hall, 1958), 223.} And language is, I think, the place from which compassion springs. We cannot torment (or eat) the people we speak with. Elaine Scarry made this point, in reverse, when she argued that torture takes away speech,{Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).} and Lewis Carroll made it when the Red Queen, having introduced Alice to the roast (“Alice— mutton: Mutton—Alice”), commanded: “It isn’t etiquette to cut any one you’ve been introduced to. Remove the joint!”{Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, chap. 9, “Queen Alice.”} And this language need not be even the signing of chimps, let alone the whistles of dolphins (or the body language of primates that Barbara Smuts learns to read); it may be no more than the silent language of the eyes. Emmanuel Levinas once said that the face of the other says, Don’t kill me.{Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay in Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 198–99.} This is the language that we must learn to read, and the language that is denied by people who defend the right to treat animals as things, through a self-serving tautology. Elizabeth Costello speaks of animals that refuse to speak, that keep the dignity of the silence. I disagree: they speak, and we refuse to grant them the dignity of listening to them.

Since dolphins are not fish but look like fish, and since they are animals but they talk to us in a way that most other animals cannot, they doubly straddle the boundary between our own categories of mammals and fish and thereby threaten our definition of what it is to be human. This accounts, in part, for some people’s reluctance to call what dolphins do “speech.” And in fact the language that people use to talk to dolphins is neither the language in which dolphins talk to one another nor the language in which we talk to one another—it is a Rosetta stone language, a kind of mammalian Esperanto. Yet it is a language, and it joins us with the fish.

Often, the myth of the human among wild animals does not tell us what the people and animals eat, but it always tells us how they manage to speak to one another, and how they manage not to attack one another (two closely related problems). Gulliver asks the cow, in sign language, for her milk. It is language, not food, that ultimately separates us from the animals, even in myths. Only by speaking their language will we really be able to know how we would think and feel if we were fish or horses.

EPILOGUE

“If Red Peter had any sense, he would not have any children,” says Elizabeth. Do animals think like this? Do they want to be sterile? I once met an animal-rights activist, dined with him, and after a while cheerfully began to make friends with him by telling him about my dogs and my horse, and then asking him what pets he had. He said he didn’t have pets, thought it was cruel to keep them in a city. I began to apologize for myself (“I take them out to the park to run free with other dogs for hours every day, feed them minced steak, etc., etc.”) but had to acknowledge the violence done to them by their restricted freedom, periods of absence from me, and so forth. What would you do? I asked. His answer was simple: neuter all the extant dogs and cats, and in twenty years there would be no more dogs and cats in the world. As with Greek tragic heroes, the ultimate right of all animals—in his view—was never to be born. It seems to me that we can do better than that.

Barbara Smuts ¦

I thank Peter M. Sherman and Steve Lansing for valuable feedback.

IN THE third Tanner Lecture, Coetzee’s protagonist, novelist Elizabeth Costello, debates the issue of animal rights with philosophy professor Thomas O’Hearne. According to O’Hearne,

“Thomas Aquinas says that friendship between human beings and animals is impossible, and I tend to agree. You can be friends neither with a Martian nor with a bat, for the simple reason that you have too little in common with them.” Although Costello challenges many of O’Hearne’s other statements, on this one, so easily refuted, she remains mysteriously silent. Yet the failure of Costello—and of Coetzee’s other characters—to address Aquinas’s claim is not so surprising when we realize that in a story that is, ostensibly,{I say “ostensibly” because Coetzee’s lectures can be interpreted in many ways, as indicated most clearly by Garber’s commentary (this volume). However, to paraphrase Elizabeth Costello (in her reflections on the essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by philosopher Thomas Nagel), when Coetzee writes about animal rights, I take him to be writing, in the first place, about animals and our relations with them.} about our relations with members of other species, none of the characters ever mentions a personal encounter with an animal. The closest we come to the possibility of such encounters is when Costello’s son says to himself, “If she wants to open her heart to animals, why can’t she stay home and open it to her cats?” Thus we discover only secondhand that Elizabeth Costello lives with animals. At no point in her passionate comments on animal rights does she mention the beings who, in all probability (given that she is an old woman who lives alone, far from her son) are the individuals with whom she interacts most often and, perhaps, most intimately.

Why doesn’t Elizabeth Costello mention her relations with her cats as an important source of her knowledge about, and attitudes toward, other animals? Maybe she feels constrained by the still-strong academic taboo against references to personal experience, although this seems unlikely, given her expressed disdain for so many of the other taboos of rationalism. Whatever her (or Coetzee’s) reasons, the lack of reference to real-life relations with animals is a striking gap in the discourse on animal rights contained in Coetzee’s text. Entering territory where, perhaps, Costello (and maybe even Coetzee) feared to tread, I will attempt to close this gap, not through formal scientific discourse, but rather, as Elizabeth Costello urges, by speaking from the heart. The heart, says Costello, is “the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share… the being of another.” For the heart to truly share another’s being, it must be an embodied heart, prepared to encounter directly the embodied heart of another. I have met the “other” in this way, not once or a few times, but over and over during years spent in the company of “persons” like you and me,{The term person is commonly used in two different ways: first, as a synonym for human, and, second, to refer to a type of interaction or relationship of some degree of intimacy involving actors who are individually known to one another, as in “personal relationship,” knowing someone “personally,” or engaging with another “person to person.” Here I use the word in the second sense, to refer to any animal, human or nonhuman, who has the capacity to participate in personal relationships, with one another, with humans, or both. I return to the concept of animal “personhood” later in the essay.} who happen to be nonhuman.

These nonhuman persons include gorillas at home in the perpetually wet, foggy mountaintops of central Africa, chimpanzees carousing in the hot, rugged hills of Western Tanzania, baboons lazily strolling across the golden grass plains of highland Kenya, and dolphins gliding languorously through the green, clear waters of Shark Bay.{Shark Bay is off the coast of Western Australia, the site of a research project on wild bottlenose dolphins.} In each case, I was lucky to be accepted by the animals as a mildly interesting, harmless companion, permitted to travel amongst them, eligible to be touched by hands and fins, although I refrained, most of the time, from touching in turn.

I mingled with these animals under the guise of scientific research, and, indeed, most of my activities while