“No evidence he understands even the kind of basics that people who don’t have dogs still know about dogs.”

Yes! I had noticed this “like a dog” strangeness when reading through the Times Trump Twitter Insult Companion.

Would you eat them?

A hypothetical* question for carnists: Were hybrid dogpigs or catcows to be created, would you eat them? Why or why not?

* And rhetorical, both because I’m closing comments and because I hope people give some thought to their reasons.

The MFA billboard campaign

“[F]armed animals are no less intelligent or capable of feeling pain than the dogs and cats we cherish as companions.”

The Mercy For Animals blog is featuring billboards recently erected in Las Vegas:

The Alaskan Collie Fluffyterrier

I was delighted to read this story last month about Costa Rica’s plan to close its zoos. Since I was lazy posting about it and then Mano Singham scooped me :), I decided to wait* for an occasion to include it with some related news.

That occasion has already arrived, with this charming story about a Costa Rican dog shelter:



***UPDATE: THE CUTE!!!***

*In the meantime, I also came across a response to one of Singham’s questions:

I do not like zoos or circuses for many reasons but one is the way that animals are kept in captivity. At least with some of the better public zoos where the animals are given lots of room and are treated well, some sort of case can be made for their existence, that they increase awareness in the public of the need to preserve wildlife and their habitats. I do not know though if a causal relationship has been established between visiting zoos and increased support for wildlife .

I mentioned Lori Marino in a recent post, and while getting a link to some more information about her work I noticed a link to her critique of a study about the educational and conservation value of zoos and aquaria. (There’s a link to the full text on the page at the red “This is to announce a new publication in Society & Animals.”)What I love about it is that she rigorously picks apart the methodology of this research exactly as she did the methods of woo/PR studies about “Dolphin-Assisted Therapy.” These critical pieces would be useful for teaching about research methods in the social sciences.

(Of course, even if zoos did serve an educational/conservation purpose, this wouldn’t necessarily be sufficient justification for treating other animals in this way. Nor would it necessarily mean that better alternatives don’t exist.)

I laughed so hard I cried

...and then noticed a cat looking at me with disdain.

The Brown Dog affair

[Source]

I came across a post recently that described the Brown Dog Affair in London in the early twentieth century. I was surprised I hadn’t learned of it before. Even the drier Wikipedia account is fascinating. Here’s a synopsis of a short book about the episode:

THE BROWN DOG AFFAIR by Peter Mason

At the centre of the Latchmere Recreation Ground in the south London borough of Battersea, not far from the Latchmere pub, there is a small hump on the tarmac pavement that cuts through to Battersea Park Road. Its contours are barely discernible from the general surrounds, but they are significant nonetheless, for they are all that remain of one of the most controversial statues ever erected in Britain.

The brown dog memorial was an unprepossessing bronze drinking fountain erected in memory of an anonymous London mongrel, but it became a national cause célèbre in Edwardian Britain and a focus for alternative politicians of the era. It spent most of its short life under a 24-hour police guard.

Unveiled in 1906 to commemorate a dog killed by animal experimenters at the University of London, it was loathed by the establishment not just for its bold-faced anti-vivisectionist inscription, but also for its capacity to act as a rallying point for political activists from a whole host of disparate movements. Suffragettes, trade unionists, socialists, marxists, liberals, leading figures in the temperance movement and all kinds of mavericks flocked to its defence. Many local people in Battersea adopted it as their own.

Members of the medical establishment in particular grew to hate this provocative bronze dog for the scorn it poured over their profession. When orthodox attempts to remove the memorial came to nothing, medical students and their supporters tried to smash the dog under the cover of darkness. Later they took violently to the streets in what became known as the ‘brown dog riots’. Newspapers gorged themselves on the controversy, there were endless public meetings to discuss the memorial’s legitimacy, and questions were asked in Parliament.

In the end, however, the brown dog’s fate rested not with national politicians but with the local council – which eventually pulled the monument down in the dead of night. The anti vivisectionists were enraged, but they could do nothing to save the memorial. Today, only the hump remains. Next to it, there is a sign on an iron fence. It reads ‘No Dogs’.

A major point here, and in the article I read, is the surprisingly diverse coalition of leftwing groups that rallied around this statue. It’s vitally important that we recover the history of interchange (including tensions and strains) amongst these people and movements, as Adam Hochschild did in his recent book. This is not to say that every cause or act of protest – including this one - has been unassailable; far from it. But at a time in which there are well-funded campaigns to drive wedges between social justice movements, remembering can be an act of resistance.

Interlude - From The Book of Embraces

Another:

CONSUMER CIVILIZATION

Sometimes, at the end of the summer when the tourists left Calella, you could hear howls coming from the forest. They were the cries of dogs tethered to the trees.

The tourists used the dogs to relieve their loneliness during their vacation, and then, when the time came to leave, tied them up deep in the woods to keep them from following.

You know who else liked animals?

Hitler.

I've been reading and posting a bit lately about our relationships with other animals, but I've come across few arguments as powerful as this one, from the ironically surnamed Daniel Lapin:

Look, it’s not an accident that some of the most brutal and cruel, demonic tyrants of history loved animals. It’s not an accident. It’s not an accident that Adolf Hitler was almost never seen without his dog, who he was petting constantly. Loved his dog! Well, what we understand is that there is a potential, it’s not going to happen to everybody, but there is a potential within a large society that if we obliterate the distinction between people and animals it’s not that people will start treating animals better, they’ll start treating people worse…

(an interesting essay on the Bible and the treatment of animals)

The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination, Mark Payne

One interesting and disturbing aspect of Holly Tucker’s Blood Work was the 17th-century research that used animals extensively, often in experiments that caused them great suffering and led to their agonizing deaths.


[Source: from Elsholtz, Clysmatica nova (1667), Wikimedia Commons]

Tucker notes the distress of some of the men who carried out or observed these experiments, and some of the arguments they used to justify them. I don’t know if there’s a history of scientists’ personal responses to the cruelty involved and how they experienced this in light of their philosophical and religious ideas, but I would love to read it….

I had the subject in mind lately as I was thinking about Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal, and had just read Mark Payne’s The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination:



I would recommend The Animal Part to those with a serious interest in the topic and a high tolerance for academese (a characteristic phrase: “abandoned the early modernist fetishization of the inorganic for a Hipponactean biopoetics of abjection,” KL 583-4) and Derrida references. I’m at something of a disadvantage in critically reading his arguments about poetry as I’m little familiar with several of the specific works he analyzes,* but I found the general discussion of poetic human/animal encounters very interesting. I especially liked the discussion of Melville, and the book was my introduction to David Foster Wallace’s 2004 essay “Consider the Lobster.”

Much of the work seems to deal with the sympathetic imagination of and identification with other living things – its opposition to an “inorganicist” and destructive vision, the ways in which it’s accomplished, and the role poetry has played in its development. At one moment he expresses his wish to move beyond the superficial crisis-driven “appreciation” of endangered species, “to consider instances of such perceptual change that are not provoked by the prospect of total annihilation of the objects of perception in order to consider how everyday appreciation of the lives of other animals might reduce the need for such emergency thinking” (KL 789-790). “Under what circumstances,” he asks at another, “does interrupted identification with self-image produce sympathetic attentiveness to what interrupts it instead of narcissistic destructivism?” (KL 781-782).

These are important questions, but it seems to me that in answering them Payne makes unfounded implicit comparisons between the capacities of science and poetry in the achievement of the sympathetic imagination. I realize the subject is the poetic imagination,* and can hardly fault an author for not writing the book I personally would prefer. At the same time, I was intrigued by the brief mentions of science, and disappointed when they weren’t carried through or science seemed to be misrepresented.

At moments, as when Payne recognizes Rachel Carson as “one writer who has given careful thought to the special difficulties involved in imagining nonmammalian marine animals" (KL 235), he appears to acknowledge science and scientific writing as potentially contributing or overlapping with poetic literature (it’s also possible that he simply categorizes Carson as the latter rather than the former). Elsewhere he suggests that destructivism “would seem to be a good counter-term to what E. O. Wilson has called biophilia” (KL 757-8), thus drawing a connection between Wilson’s concept and the sympathetic imagination.

Many of the conditions and actions he talks about as conducive to sympathetic imagination formation - solitude, observation, interaction, understanding nonhuman histories and forms of communication and sociality - are characteristically scientific, and he refers several times to Aristotle’s History of Animals. But Aristotle’s is left as the sole ‘scientific’ voice – on animal communication, for example [!] – and science generally appears to be linked in his view not to the sympathetic imagination the references to Carson and Wilson would seem to suggest but to “existential homelessness, biocidal destructiveness” (KL 703-4), and the construction of an ultimately inhumane - because based on ignorance of other organisms - world through the ruin of other life.**

In presenting poetry’s virtues in this context, Payne turns to Heidegger:

In "What Are Poets For?" Heidegger glosses this movement from first person observation to poetic reflection as a progress from "the work of the eyes" to "the work of the heart.” Because poetry eschews the "covetous vision of things" that is present in technological understanding, and "does not solicit anything to be produced" in its encounters with other living things, it enables humankind to apprehend itself as one kind of being among others, and so offers it an adumbration of Being that philosophy labors in its own way to articulate. (KL 907-910)

Payne’s reference to Heidegger here appears as a defense of poetry that identifies science with narcissistic and destructive “technological civilization” and imputes to it the limitations of philosophy. What about scientific reflection?

This sense of science’s limitations and unfavorable contrast with poetry is even stronger when he brings up Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish,

"a journey into the 3.5-billion year history of the human body," that promises to teach its readers how "our hands actually resemble fish fins, and major parts of our genome look, and function, like those of worms and bacteria." On the cover, Oliver Sacks explains that the book "will change forever how you understand what it means to be human," and a full-color flap entitled "Your Body as You've Never Seen It Before" that appears between the cover and first page proclaims the joys of evolutionary knowledge: "learn to LOVE your body for what it really is: a jury-rigged fish," says Discover magazine…

Can one experience one's body in a way that is cognizant of its deep historical continuity with the physiology of fish, and, if so, would such knowledge take the form of love? (KL 1639-44)

I don’t know, but I certainly think it's possible (whatever "love" might mean here). An understanding of our evolutionary kinship with all other living things, gaining scientific knowledge of nonhuman histories, relationships, and communication, can lead to profound perceptual changes characteristic of the sympathetic imagination he seems to have in mind and very much in contrast to “biocidal destructiveness.” And poetic writing can only do this to the extent that it’s grounded in real knowledge and not pure imagination or projection.

I just don’t understand what appears to me to be a false opposition between science and the poetic imagination or the notion that science is incapable of bringing about deep change in our emotions and consciousness. It’s a difficult read and, as I said, I lack some knowledge which may be crucial for evaluating his arguments, but this is my preliminary reading. I’d appreciate any insights.

*(some of the work, like “The Sparrow,” quite beautiful)

**The insinuation is also present in the implicit contrast with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ explicitly religious ecological vision: “Humanity finds itself in a vicious circle: the more of the earth it ruins, the less understanding it has of the heartfelt care it ought to show for Creation, and the less understanding it has of this care, the more of the earth it ruins.” (KL 830-832)

Dogs Decoded

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On PBS now!

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