copyrighted matrial 978 1 137 37315 1 · mutual respect as delusional or wishful thinking. it is...

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–37315–1


© Amy Ratelle 2015

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ISBN 978–1–137–37315–1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ratelle, Amy.Animality and Children’s Literature and Film / Amy Ratelle.

pages cm.—(Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature)

ISBN 978–1–137–37315–1 (hardback)

1. Children’s literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Animals in literature. 3. Children in literature. 4. Animals in motion pictures. 5. Children in motion pictures. 6. Human-animal relationships in literature. 7. Anthropomorphism in literature. I. Title. PN1009.A1R37 2014809'.89282—dc23 2014021124

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

vii

Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction 1

1 Animal Virtues, Values and Rights 18

2 Contact Zones, Becoming and the Wild Animal Body 41

3 Ethics and Edibility 65

4 Science, Species and Subjectivity 90

5 Performance and Personhood in Free Willy and Dolphin Tale 117

Conclusion 139

Notes 144

Works Cited 151

Index 163



1

Introduction

Biologist Donna Haraway’s work is guided by a central question, “whom do I touch when I touch my dog?” (2008, p. 3, emphasis mine). She foregrounds her canine’s individuality in order to propose a model of interaction that does not reinforce traditionally accepted boundaries between humans and other animals. This book has simi-larly been largely inspired and guided by a remarkable dog – Sam the husky, whose presence in my life has only ever served to enrich and enhance it. I didn’t know, and could never have foreseen, the impact of embarking with Sam in what Haraway calls a “companion species” relationship (p. 15), maintained by mutual respect and affection. Underwritten by love and interspersed with many long walks, my work is, at its core, about my dog. Sam, for his part, seems to have always thought that he is a person and I have always been inclined to agree with him. Observing first-hand the easy fluidity of interspecies affection and identification in my own home made me keenly aware of how Western philosophy, historically, has worked to deny subject-hood to animals, to configure this relationship situated in love and mutual respect as delusional or wishful thinking. It is possible, how-ever, that the act of anthropomorphizing an animal is not necessarily rooted in what we, as humans, wish to ascribe onto the animal to suit our own cultural or symbolic requirements, but instead expresses something we receive from the animal, when we are situated together in mutual understanding.

In this formulation, current posthumanist scholarship works to de-prioritize the conception of an exclusively human subjectivity. Cary Wolfe traces the first appearances of the term “posthumanism”



2 Animality and Children’s Literature and Film

to critical discourse in the social sciences and humanities during the mid-1990s, but notes further that “its roots go back, in one geneal-ogy, to at least the 1960s,” most notably to Foucault’s prediction at the end of The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences of the imminent demise of traditional notions of human subjectivity (Wolfe 2010, p. xii). In his text, Foucault (1971) implies that “man,” or the human subject, is “an invention of recent date. And one per-haps nearing its end” (p. 387). Foucault’s posthumanist prognostica-tion is historically congruent with the emergence of cybernetics and systems theory over the course of the 1950s. The Macy conferences on cybernetics, an annual gathering of distinguished researchers working in biology, computer science, engineering and communi-cations, ran from 1946 to 1953. Their initial goal was to develop theories of communication that would apply equally to humans, animals and machines, ultimately positioning the human brain itself as a type of thinking machine, functioning largely as a closed-loop feedback system. As such, the system can rewrite itself based on the information it receives from its environment. Within this system, how the brain works is prioritized over what it might be thinking. Human beings, according to N. Katherine Hayles (1999), began to be seen “primarily as information processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines” (p. 7, emphasis in original). If, how-ever, humans could be likened to machines, these auto-correcting and proto-intelligent systems developed by the Macy researchers could similarly be classified as subjects, undermining notions of an exclusively human subjectivity.

Similarly working to undermine the concept of the liberal human-ist subject, some developments in contemporary posthumanism have veered away from its previous technological focus to revisit the cultural assumptions underpinning our lived relationships with animals. Wolfe in particular has recently worked to criticize liberal humanism and find ways to push cultural analysis beyond its inherent anthropocentrism in order to combat “the institution of speciesism” (2003, p. 2, emphasis in original), which continues to prioritize human beings, thereby excusing the exploitation or extermination of other species. To accomplish this goal, he gathers writings on animals found across different and often disparate disciplines in order to subvert the concept of a human/animal divide. According to Wolfe, however,



Introduction 3

the study of human-animal relationships can in fact continue to promote a worldview inconsistent with the larger goals of post-humanism. He contends, for example, that even if scholars study nonhuman animals “with the aim of exposing how they have been misunderstood and exploited, that does not mean we are not contin-uing to be humanist – and therefore, by definition, anthropocentric” (2010, p. 99). Wolfe questions whether calling attention to the plight of abused or oppressed animals is enough to challenge conventional boundaries between the human and the animal.

The assumption of human authority over other species is histori-cally situated in René Descartes’s conceptualization of human thought and speech acts as tangible evidence of the cogito; for him, human thought proves human existence. As such, the cogito constitutes the dividing line between the human and the non-human animal. Speech – as concrete evidence of thought, reason and language – changes the way in which people perceive animals. Human identity, then, can be defined only when explicitly positioned against the animal body. Since Descartes, Western philosophy has largely been invested in upholding this boundary. Jacques Derrida, however, has recently questioned not only the relevance of speech or speech acts in forming the division, but also whether or not people even have the right to demarcate and enforce it. According to Derrida (2008), it is

less a matter of asking whether one has the right to refuse the ani-mal such and such a power (speech, reason, experience of death, mourning, culture, institution, technics, clothing, lie, pretense of pretense, covering of tracks, gift, laughter, tears, respect, and so on – the list is necessarily without limit, and the most powerful philo-sophical tradition within which we live has refused the “animal” all of those things) than of asking whether what calls itself human has the right to rigorously attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses to the animal, and whether he can ever possess the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution. (p. 137, emphasis in original)

Although Derrida ultimately comes to reinforce a division between human and animal, he nevertheless undermines the centuries of




cultural assumptions about animals that arose both prior to and after Descartes. Derrida’s queries are exemplary of posthumanist scholar-ship, which has proven a useful means by which to deprioritize the human as the yardstick against which all other life forms are measured. What has been notably overlooked in posthumanism’s challenge to anthropocentric human liberalism, however, is how the human is encultured through literature geared specifically towards a child audience.

By examining culturally significant and widely popular works of children’s culture through a posthumanist, or animality studies lens, I will argue in my subsequent chapters that Western philosophy’s objective to establish a notion of an exclusively human subjectivity is continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work to configure human identity. Literature geared toward a child audience reflects and contributes to the cultural tensions created by the oscil-lation between upholding and undermining the divisions between the human and the animal. My work focuses on the ways in which these works present the boundary between humans and animals as, at best, permeable and in a state of continual flux.

The conflation of animals and children in literature for the young

The configuration of childhood as separate from and subordinate to adulthood is, much like the distinctions between the human and the animal, predicated on maintaining the illusion of a clear boundary between two constructed states of being. According to Philippe Ariès (1962), childhood, as we contemporarily understand it, did not exist prior to the Middle Ages. At this early stage of its formation, it was seen as a brief period of developmental dependency that was passed through with little fanfare and considered to be of minimal impor-tance. Infant mortality was high, contributing to a lack of sentimen-tality towards young people. Ariès contends that the first notions of children as special or different from adults were positioned in terms of innocence, or of infants being removed or protected from the cares and worries of the adult world. He observes that cultivating and maintaining this innocence “resulted in two kinds of attitudes and behavior towards childhood: firstly, safeguarding it against pollution by life […] and secondly, strengthening it by developing character



Introduction 5

and reason” (p. 119). This rhetorical stance presumes that children, like animals, stand outside society, and yet, unlike animals, will ultimately (when they become adults) be responsible for the continu-ance of that same society.

As Gillian Adams (1998) argues, however, Ariès’ methodology is not without its faults, and began to be discredited in the late 1970s by medievalists conversant with the multiple forms of religious, instructional or educational writings produced in the Middle Ages and intended for children. Linda Pollock (1983) in particular con-tends that Ariès’ claims are mistaken, particularly his assertion that there was little notable parental affection towards children prior to the seventeenth century, when infant mortality rates began to fall. Engaging in a systematic study of diaries and other primary source material focusing on the everyday and intimate relationships between parents and their offspring, Pollock saw little evidence of the emotional distance Ariès alleged to be the norm. Moreover, Alan Macfarlane’s (1986) longitudinal study on marriage and family structures in England from the 1300s to the mid-1800s bypasses the question of whether or not medieval families loved their children, observing that economics, more than sentiment, began to dictate the number of children a household could, or was willing to sup-port, particularly in the light of falling birth rates in the nineteenth century.1 Hugh Cunningham (1995) addresses the oversight of many scholars examining childhood throughout history by carrying his analysis through to the twentieth century, which he argues has seen more rapid changes in the conceptualization of childhood and chil-dren’s rights (pp. 202–203). According to Cunningham, the first half of the twentieth century saw a previously unprecedented emphasis on legal rights and legislative policies for children, including emp-loyment regulations against early entry into the labour market, long hours and unsafe work environments, protection from cruelty and abuse, and access to proper schooling. Policies of this nature were designed particularly to protect lower or working-class children and provide them with the kind of idyllic childhood characterized by the notions of innocence historically situated in Romanticism and popularized by the emergent middle class.

Our contemporary conception of childhood as a state of innocence worthy of protections has its origins in the Romantic idealization of nature and reaction against the Enlightenment’s valorization




of reason, as well as the middle-class impetus for education and self-improvement. As Andrew O’Malley (2003) observes in The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century, the emergence of the middle class corresponds with the conception of children as a separate literary audience, to whom literature could be marketed. In this formulation, animals play “a critical role in the shaping of personal identity and social consciousness […] in the passage to adulthood” (Shepard 1996, p. 3). In other words, this literature written specifically for middle-class children makes use of anthropomorphized animal characters ostensi-bly to impart middle-class values to the young. According to Harvey Darton (1982), literature marketed specifically towards the middle-class child audience did not become a “clear but subordinate branch of English literature until the middle of the eighteenth century” (p. 1). Inspired by the writings of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, publisher John Newbery began in 1744 printing illustrated books for children that were not only entertaining to read but, more impor-tantly for middle-class purposes, provided instructions for living a life of virtue and financial success. Newbery revolutionized publish-ing primarily by capitalizing on the middle class’s disposable income, which they were more than willing to invest in shaping and securing their children’s future (and Newbery’s own financial success).

Perhaps more than any other philosopher, Locke had an incredible (and still-enduring) impact on education and, by corollary, middle-class conceptions of childhood. His accessible prose and celebration of self-improvement led adult members of the emerging middle class to educate their children as a way of shaping not only their moral but also their financial values. Samuel Pickering (1981) character-izes Locke as “a popularizer,” in that he synthesized prevailing ideas on children and education into a glorious tale of self-improvement (p. 6). Equally importantly, Locke convincingly proposed that this potential for improvement was available to all citizens, not merely the sons of the aristocracy as had previously been the case. According to him, dutiful parents should instil in their children – along with abstract concepts of virtue – concrete and achievable “good habits,” such as obedience, grace and politeness. Further, children are pre-disposed to such instruction, he postulates, because they are a “yet Empty Cabinet” (1690, p. 23), or “white paper, or wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases” (1693, p. 179). The role of the parents



Introduction 7

then becomes crucial because, for their moral character, children rely wholly on observation, experience, sensation and proper instruction.

As Locke’s ideas became increasingly influential on the eighteenth-century middle-class consciousness, it was the often explicit egali-tarianism of his writing that particularly appealed to parents. As O’Malley notes, in Locke’s vision, starting from

a position of equality, unhindered by obstacles to their devel-opment, and, by the same token, unaided by unfair hereditary privilege and hierarchy, the children who would naturally succeed would be those who had received the best education and who, by dint of industrious application, had acquired the most useful skills and knowledge. (p. 5)

Proper education, it was believed, provides the key to transcending the place in the social hierarchy to which one happened to be born.

Among the virtues and positive habits he espoused, Locke placed a notably heavy emphasis on kindness to animals. He observes that, if left otherwise uninstructed, children will “often torment and treat very roughly young birds, butterflies, and other poor animals which fall into their hands, and that with a seeming kind of pleasure” (1693, p. 91). In light of such inclinations, children need to be closely observed by their parents, who should seize every opportunity to instruct their offspring in kindness. Like Aristotle, Locke contends that unchecked cruelty towards animals will lead to further cruelty towards fellow humans. Building on this observation, eighteenth-century writers who saw children as their audience often used animals as didactic tools for encouraging benevolence and sympathy to both the working poor and animals themselves (Pickering 1981, p. 12).

Among the first to use animal characters in explicitly pedagogical literature geared for the middle-class child, Sarah Trimmer’s work serves as a clear early example of this transference of Lockean ethics to children’s literature.2 Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting Their Treatment of Animals (1786) outlines how two families – one human, one avian – learn to live in harmony. The life lessons imparted by both species to their offspring are, not surprisingly, consistent with Locke’s writings. Locke articu-lated a chain of warnings to parents – “childish cruelty must not be tolerated, not to insects, not to birds, not to small animals, not to




pets, not to each other” (Perkins 2003, p. 20) – and Trimmer’s text offers a repeated affirmation of this chain.

The Bensons are an upper-class, though untitled, country family with a large estate, occupying a transitional niche between the mid-dle class and the aristocracy. As landed gentry, the family is usefully suited to purvey virtues and values; above the middle class in station, they effectively depict a way of life to which middle-class readers could readily aspire. Their closest neighbours happen to be a family of robins nesting in the garden wall. Trimmer depicts both the human and avian parents encouraging their young to live virtuously and with moral rectitude, the bourgeois values becoming naturalized through their anthropomorphic displacement onto a nonhuman species.

Despite the fact that members of the new middle class generally saw themselves as transcending the working class, they tellingly retained a vested interest in maintaining a social hierarchy in which, they felt, the poor really ought to keep to their place.3 In accord with this com-mon perspective, the Benson family in Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories emphasizes a respect for hierarchy and one’s place in it, as well as the virtues of hard work and universal benevolence to all lesser creatures, including the human poor.

It is significant that the Benson children are raised with a sense of obligation to those in lower income brackets. Their acts of benevo-lence are not simply altruistic but function to reinforce the middle class’s perceptions of its own moral superiority, a transposition of the noblesse oblige otherwise recognized as the exclusive privilege of the upper class. In Trimmer’s text, human gestures of kindness to both animals and the poor afford the middle-class child with access to what Marian Scholtmeijer (1993) refers to as “that condescension which the wealthy could exercise in wider fields” (p. 21). This depend-ency of the needy on the middle and upper classes for supplementary income, moreover, underscores the attitude that the lower classes are either content to be, or are destined to remain poor; otherwise they would, as Locke explains, succeed in their middle-class aspirations. Trimmer’s text thus stands as an early example of children’s literature functioning as “one of the crucial mechanisms for disseminating and consolidating middle-class ideology” (O’Malley 2003, p. 11). The influence of Trimmer and other early writers for children is keenly felt over 200 years later, with a significant portion of contemporary children’s publishing consisting of guides designed to assist parents



Introduction 9

in making “worthy” textual choices on behalf of their children, with titles such as Books That Build Character: A Guide to Teaching Your Child Moral Values Through Stories, 100 Best Books for Children: A Parent’s Guide to Making the Right Choices for Your Young Reader, Toddler to Preteen and The New York Times Parent’s Guide to the Best Books for Children, a title currently in its third edition.

Rousseau’s influence mitigated somewhat the explicitly didactic influence of writers such as Trimmer, who were content to let animals in children’s literature serve as mere instructional devices. According to Cunningham, Rousseau is particularly radical for espousing the position that children should “grow up in accordance with nature, and without the imposition upon them of moral rules and learning” (p. 67). Moreover, where Locke focuses on kindness to animals as a performance of virtue and proper behaviour befitting a future gentle-man, Rousseau postulates in Emile (1762) that children’s kindness to animals stems from a natural sympathy for them. In Emile, Rousseau works to articulate an educational model that would allow the “natu-ral” virtues of the human individual to persist despite the negative influence of modern civilization. According to Rousseau, the young are predisposed to recognize their similarity to nonhuman animals. He notes that, in order to develop pity and sensitivity, a child needs to become aware that “he has fellow-creatures who suffer as he has suffered, who feel the pains he has felt, and others which he can form some idea of, being capable of feeling them himself” (p. 254). “Indeed, how can we be stirred by pity,” Rousseau goes on to argue, “unless we go beyond ourselves, and identify ourselves with the suffering animal, by leaving, so to speak, our own nature and taking his” (p. 254). This demand for identification with the animal is an echo of other claims regarding animal rights and freedom from suffering, and gets revisited in literature of the era through the many animals’ accounts of their interactions with humans. This technique proves especially common within children’s literature, questioning the arrogant assumption that animals are naturally subordinate to humans.

David Perkins (2003) recounts how, as part of encouraging a reconception of the relationship of individual humans to their natural surroundings (and the animals recognized as a part of those surroundings), Romantic poets such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley were emotionally distressed by the thought of cruelty to animals, insects and fish. As is well known,




both Shelley and Byron espoused vegetarian diets, and Shelley went so far as to purchase crayfish at a market so that he could return them to the Thames. The Romantic celebration of nature as a sublime force beyond human understanding was coupled with a more clearly politicized problematization of humans’ assumptions regarding their relation to other species. Members of the middle class, moreover, constituted the majority of people engaged in the early animal-rights movement. The cause allowed them to highlight their restraint and virtue in comparison to the disregard of the upper and lower classes. Animal rights activists of the time found that emphasizing the proximity of humans’ and animals’ lives proved especially effective for developing a culture of animal sympathy. Within literature, the animal’s-eye view compels the human reader into a close emotional bond with the animal as it relates the story of its difficult life. As I will argue, however, there are many slippages and ruptures when using animals in the formation of an exclusively human identity for the child, ones that in fact result in a popular form of literature that, often inadvertently, problematizes notions of species segregation.

The reliance on animals in children’s literature over the past two centuries has become a key means by which the civilizing process that children go through has been mediated by the animal body. Children are asked both implicitly and explicitly to identify with animals, but then to position themselves as distinctly human through the mode of their interactions with both lived animals and those depicted in literature and film. This core question of identity formation – child/adult, human/animal – forms the foundation of my research, which investigates the overlapping, double-sided rhetorics addressing chil-dren, childhood and animals. My study is organized into five areas of interest that pose complementary questions regarding the way in which relationships between animals and children inform and underscore adults’ lived relationships with both of them. While my chapters do provide historical background, my intent is not to construct a chronological account, but rather to foreground the multi-perspectival character of children’s literature itself.

An overview of the chapters

My Chapter 1 examines some of the surprisingly inter-related roots of the animal rights movement and the children’s rights movement



Introduction 11

during the nineteenth century, particularly when mapped onto the equine body. Children’s rights in fact arose as a development of ani-mal rights and, as I argue, this co-reliance reflects the way in which the cultural conflation of children and non-human animals fulfilled certain demands that the industrializing adult placed on both. Thus, children are encouraged to empathize with animals in order to reaf-firm their humanity. This empathy is expanded upon in the animal autobiography genre, written from the animal’s point of view. There are startling similarities between, for example, the early Dick, the Little Poney (Anonymous 1799) and the later Black Beauty (Sewell 1877), which is arguably the most famous animal autobiography. Both central characters move from their idyllic pastoral birthplaces to the confusion and cruelty of an urban setting. During this time period in Britain, an increasing number of livestock were no longer confined to farms, instead populating cities as transportation, physical labour, and produce. Sewell especially is nostalgic for the countryside and agrarian lifestyle, writing at a time when industrial manufacturing was becoming increasingly important to British economic success. Similarly, National Velvet (1935) presents a particular challenge to this notion of horses as economically necessary. As horses began to be replaced by automobiles on city streets, they began to be con-sidered luxury items, akin to oversized pets. Enid Bagnold’s novel, written just as this transition was beginning, reframes the service of horses as largely emotional labour. As such, Haraway (2008) proposes a model of human-animal relations which attempts to circumvent prevailing discourses that position humans as inherently superior to animals. Her conception of a “companion species” (p. 16) model of interaction is characterized by mutual respect, equality and a sense of interdependence between species. Her model is intended to subvert the traditional Western view of humans as an exceptional species, separate from and superior to all other animals. In this framework of mutual respect, there arises a particular duty on the part of the mid-dle class to improve labour conditions for both livestock and classes of subordinated humans (e.g. women, minorities, the poor, etc.). Early animal rights advocacy and legislation was focused on improv-ing the lot of livestock and other species aligned with economic or imperialist progress. Much children’s literature of the period is simi-larly intended to evoke sympathy for the labouring animal. As Coral Lansbury (1985) notes, “if people were asked for the most obvious




instance of cruelty towards animals, then this spectacle of a beaten and exhausted horse would have answered” (p. 63). As Lansbury suggests, equine bodies become burdened with human anxieties sur-rounding the swift and overwhelming changes accompanying the Industrial Revolution, resulting in the priority placement of horses as the face of the nascent animal rights movement.

My Chapter 2 addresses more specifically the way in which the animal body has been used to signify human values. One recognizes, for example, the nobility of horses, the loyalty of dogs, and the paci-ficity of cattle. This adaptation of the animal body became common and unquestioned in children’s works, but the implications of such attributions for adult conceptions of species’ relations has yet to be thoroughly addressed, especially when it comes to the wild animal, parti-cularly in texts that conflate concepts of wild and domestic into one animal body, such as Buck in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903) and its multiple twenty-first century film adaptations (2000, 2003, 2009). Similarly, Hiyao Miyazaki’s 1997 film Princess Mononoke suggests that “the relationships between animals are bound up with the rela-tions between man and animal, man and woman, man and child, man and the elements, man and the physical and microphysical universe” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 235). In questioning the perceived boundaries between human and non-human animals, scholars such as Michael Lundblad (2009) aim to undermine the humanist privileg-ing of the human over the animal. As I argue in Chapter 1, Haraway’s intention is to challenge the discursive structures underwriting human-ist exploits of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, situated in the “deep divide” (Haraway 1991, p. 10) between nature and culture. In Haraway’s formulation, nature and culture are interdependent concepts, with constructed boundaries that falter when examined in a companion species framework. Haraway (2008) calls the site of this boundary collapse a “natureculture” (p. 8), to discuss the confluences between traditionally-accepted binaries between nature and culture. In doing so, Haraway opens up a space in which the engagement with the non-human animal no longer assumes human superiority, or the sub-jugation of the natural world. When these boundaries are no longer an effective means by which to prioritize the human over the animal, other boundaries become equally destabilized.

Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), similarly chal-lenge the fixed nature of boundaries between human and animal,



Introduction 13

describing “becoming animal” (p. 27) as a key means by which such limits can be undermined. A becoming, they argue, is not an actual transformation from human to animal, nor is it merely an imitation of animal behavior. To become animal is to enter “the zone of prox-imity to the animal molecule” (p. 275). In other worlds, becoming animal is dependent on both proximity to and intimacy with the animal. This relational state is analogous to what Haraway (2008) refers to as a “contact zone” (p. 4), wherein the lived existence and bodies of humans and animals touch on one another and, through this con-tact (both actual and metaphorical), become inexorably altered. As an extension of Haraway’s conception of the contact zone as a place of interchange, Deleuze and Guattari propose instead that the human and animal entities imbricated in this framework of exchange are, in fact, not predetermined. More simply, the act of change, or becoming, is the principal state of existence, not a singular instance of transi-tion between two fixed states or identities – between, for example, horse and girl, or wolf and dog. Furthering Deleuze and Guattari’s assertions, Haraway (2008) foregrounds the contact zone as a site at which the human and the animal “become with” (p. 16), in a loop of perpetual change and intersubjective fluidity. Thus, for Haraway, the contact zone becomes crucial to understanding the mutual reliance of humans and animals – canines, in particular – through the process of domestication.

While a companion species relationship often prioritizes canines over other animals with whom we may not live so closely, there remains the possibility to become with all animals. In my next chapter, I turn my attention to the farm animal, with particular consideration of E.B. White’s espousal of a model of subjecthood inconsistent with the paradigm of meat consumption in Western culture. To extend a notion of animal subjectivity and cross-species identification to the edible animal, my Chapter 3 examines the ten-sions arising from the rhetorically sympathetic fusion of children to both other animals and the natural environment. My analysis reveals a higher degree of ambivalence underwriting the discourses around the consumption of animals. Accounting for the animal, in texts such as E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1948) and the films Babe (1995) and Chicken Run (2000), as actual non-human animals implicated in rhetorics shaping our notions of edibility, and not, for example, as stand-ins for human characters or symbolism, calls into question




what Derrida (1991) calls “the noncriminal putting to death of the animal” (p. 112). Disguising the act of killing an animal to consume its meat naturalizes this activity, enabling animal consumption by humans on a mass scale. Accounting for the ethical implications involved in acknowledging the subjectivity of the meat animal by necessity must implicate not just exceptional individual animals, but entire species. As I will argue, these texts brush against, but ultimately retreat from unravelling the logic of what Derrida (1991) refers to as a “carnophallogocentric” paradigm (p. 113).

In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida (2008) questions lan-guage as having been, historically, a point of differentiation between the human and non-human animal, as advanced by Western phi-losophers from Descartes to Martin Heidegger. Descartes is particu-larly insistent that animal life is akin to that of automata, in that they can react to stimuli, but are incapable of responding with a speech act, as a human would do. Derrida, however, questions the post-Cartesian line of thought that positions human mastery over the animal as stemming from the denial of reason and language to the animal, asking whether we as humans can define or even under-stand what “respond” means, and how, or even if, “response” can be meaningfully distinguished from “reaction” (2008, p. 8). As such, my Chapter 4 delves more fully into the “logos” component of Jacques Derrida’s concept of carnophallogocentrism. What Derrida wishes to problematize is the unquestioned assumption that, as part of a car-nophallogocentric paradigm, animals are lacking in logos, the divine speech act. According to Akira Mizuta Lippit (2000), Derrida’s own philosophical objective has been to “uncover the traces of animality” (p. 15) embedded in language and used to uphold species and bound-ary distinctions between human and animal.

As an extension of my argument in the previous chapter, this chapter builds on Derrida’s carnophallogocentric paradigm to problematize the assumption that animals are lacking in logos. I build on my discussion in the previous chapter on industrial farming, which addresses ani-mal subjectivity in the context of edibility. In this chapter, I examine animal politics within the context of technological posthumanism, as presented in Robert C. O’Brien’s novel, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971), its filmic adaptation The Secret of NIMH (1982), and William Kotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat (1976). Situating my analysis in the historical context of the debates about animal experimentation, I reveal a larger



Introduction 15

cultural ambivalence regarding the centrality of technological progress in Western notions of value.

In these laboratory-based texts, the borders between human and animal are permeable and, moreover, are in continual flux, as we con-tinue to use animals as experimental subjects. Building on Derrida’s argument, I investigate the disturbances arising within the laboratory context, and how this experience is addressed in children’s culture. In this formulation, the use of animals as experimental subjects brings forward the fact that the borders between human and animal are permeable and far from stable. In my analysis, I aim to push the boundaries of what “subjectivity” itself means in science fiction geared towards a younger audience, as well as in the framework of Western culture more generally. Emphasizing the notion of the col-lective in identity-formation, the novel in particular can be seen as addressing the way in which children’s texts over the past 200 years often sacrifice the subjectivity of an entire species in their efforts to establish the individualism of a singular animal with which the young reader can identify.

In my own interactions with Sam, the notion of what constitutes “family” has frequently come to my mind, and this same topic can be seen to weave through my entire book. For Haraway, bonding with the animal in this fashion, or what she calls “significant other-ness,” is the result of a companion species relationship; it is what happens when one becomes with the animal. Haraway contends that she and her own dog are companion species, making “each other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. This love is a historical aberration and a naturcultural legacy” (2008, p. 16). The cross-species contact zone is forged and maintained by mutual affection, resulting in a state of significant otherness. I have therefore chosen to conclude my study with a chapter that brings the issue of familial affection and love to the foreground.

Chapter 5 focuses on texts promoting legal personhood rights for marine mammals. My analysis of Free Willy (1993) and Dolphin Tale (2011) focuses on the cetacean rights movement’s proposal of a fun-damental subjectivity and freedom from exploitation for all whales. The two films are predicated on the fresh assessment of child/marine mammal affections and identification. Situating the topic of child/animal relations against the backdrop of the larger movement for




legal personhood for animals, this chapter uses the overlaps between the films and the actual lives of their animal stars to argue for a conception of non-human identity that, rather than being defined as purely animal, must be recognized as existing outside such binary logic, a gesture that does not simply humanize animals but disturbs the notion of the human itself.

In my final chapter, I wish to consider the impact of contemporary, mainstream representations of animal individualism when it is the animals – in this case, whales and dolphins – that are constructed as the very texts of entertainment themselves. Each film also, in different ways, addresses the issue of captivity in the context of cetacean identity-formation in order to call attention to the need for legal acknowledgement of animal personhood. My previous chapter addresses animal subjectivity in the context of the aptitude for human language. This chapter builds on that argument, inves-tigating more fully the centrality of language in self-identification, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s use of zoe and bios as a site of conflict between constructs of nature and culture. According to Agamben, zoe, or “bare life” (p. 4) refers to the basic biological state of being alive. Bios, on the other hand, refers to cultural constructs and structures, such as laws, developed by humans to establish tangible evidence of subjectivity and civilization. The ability to create these civilizing structures is then used to establish and maintain a rigid boundary between zoe and bios, between human and non-human animal (1998, p. 5). Agamben, then, positions “man” as “the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion” (p. 8). More simply, the bare life of animals is acknowledged in the law solely to be excluded from an exclusively human notion of subjectivity.

As I argue in Chapter 4, these laws have become so entrenched in human culture and philosophy that the zoe of humans has been denied completely. As such, the relatively recent idea of granting legal personhood rights to pets, apes, whales and other animals is, by defi-nition, situated in a construct of anthropocentrism and speciesism, in which rights are positioned as something humans only have the authority to grant (Wolfe 2003, p. 34). Yet, as the multifaceted and intimate relationships portrayed in these two films suggest, discus-sions around shaping animal rights and legal personhood – and,



Introduction 17

more importantly, the protections they entail – provide an entry point into breaking down speciesist assumptions that uphold the distinctions between zoe and bios, which only serve to reduce all non-human animals to “bare life.”

Children are influenced by the literature and cinema they consume and an outstanding proportion of this material relies on representa-tions of non-human animals for its mediation of values and ethics. For the past two centuries, therefore, this material has done no less than establish the framework of understanding for the people behind the animal rights movement in the West. Moreover, it continues to do so. In my research, I have worked to survey this set of ideological connections. Of particular importance to me has been the work of the advocates and scholars who have, over the years, demonstrated the validity of legal personhood for all animals, and who have challenged the notion of one species being superior to, or having the right to steward any other.



163

Index

abattoirs, see slaughterhousesaboriginal peoples, 44–45, 119, 125Adams, Carol, 68, 80, 82Adams, Gillian, 5affection, see love and affectionAgamben, Giorgio, 16, 107, 119,

126, 140Agosta, Lucien, 80, 82animal autobiography, 9, 10, 11, 22,

25–35, 47, 114–16 animal experimentation, 14–15,

90–101, 103, 113, 114–16animal rights/animal rights

movement, 9, 10, 18–25, 70–1, 77, 94–9, 102, 113–14, 139, 140–1, 146n7

as anthropocentric, 127as predominantly middle class,

10, 11, 19, 22–4, 28, 97–8for cetaceans, 15–17, 118–19,

123–9, 134, 138for horses, 11–12, 18–19, 23–4,

32–5, 67, 141links to other rights movements,

10–11, 28, 32–5, 39, 97, 109, 114, 127–8

animalsas automata/machines, 14, 20, 66,

72, 93, 96, 102, 107as literary symbols, 18, 41–42, 44,

52, 63, 65as objects, 31, 81, 82–83as persons, see legal personhoodas pets, 1, 11, 30, 36, 76, 80, 123,

141as servants/slaves, 26–34, 39,

117–18, 128–34, 150n7rebellion against humans, 26, 29,

31–2, 34–5, 114–16, 120, 122, 129, 130, 132

anthropomorphism, 1, 6, 8, 20, 42, 44–45, 48–49, 83, 106, 109, 111, 124, 128

anti-slavery movement, 23, 27–28, 33–34, 39; see also civil rights movement

antivivisection movement, 94–95, 96–99, 113

Ariès, Philippe, 4–5Aristotle, 7, 91–92, 93Aspin, Les, 113Audubon, John James, 45

Babe, 13, 66, 84–87, 142Bagnold, Enid, 11, 19, 36–39Balsamo, Anne, 113Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 94–95, 98bare life, see zoeBarnett, Samuel Anthony, 100“Bâtard” (London), 41, 147–148n14battery farms, 73–74, 88bear baiting, 23, 71bearing rein, critiqued by Sewell,

34, 36becoming (Deleuze and Guattari),

13, 53–56, 59–60, 64becoming with (Haraway)

and food animals, 64, 68, 79domestication as, 15, 53, 54,

57possible with all animals, 13,

64Bentham, Jeremy, 20–21, 24, 27, 74,

94, 148n7bios (Agamben), 16–17, 107, 109,

119, 126Black Beauty (Sewell), 11, 19, 25,

32–5, 41, 49, 60, 141Blake, William, 19–20Bluth, Don, 103, 110–12



164 Index

body (and embodiment), 71, 106, 114, 121

“flesh and love” in companion species interactions, 15, 58–60, 136–8

kinship between female and animal bodies, 36–39, 62–63

zoe as “embodied condition of existence” (Agamben), 107, 126

see also contact zone; sex and sexuality

Book Buddies programme, 139, 143boys’ adventure stories, 46, 48British Pig Association, 66Bryld, Mette, 123bull baiting, 23Burgess, Anthony, 101butchery, see killing and slaughterByron, George Gordon, Lord, 9–10

CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), 73

Calhoun, John B., 100–101Call of the Wild, The (London), 12,

41–43, 48–56, 57, 58, 60–61, 63, 135, 136, 138, 141

film adaptations, 55–56, 60–61captivity

as respectful of cetacean subjectivity, 136–38

as violation of cetacean subjectivity, 118, 129–35

see also prisonsCaras, Roger, 66carnophallogocentrism (Derrida),

14, 66, 77–78, 79, 82, 85, 89, 91, 103

Cartesianism, see Descartes, Renécats, as Book Buddies, 139, 143Cavalieri, Paola, 126–7, 128cetaceans, see whales and dolphinsCharlotte’s Web (White), 13, 65–66,

73, 74, 76, 78–83, 84, 85, 89, 100, 104, 105, 116

Chassagnol, Anne, 99Chaudhuri, Shohini, 62

Chicken Run, 13, 66, 84, 87–89, 142chickens, 73–74, 87–89children, 4–10

and Descartes’ cogito, 20, 96cruelty of, 7, 28exposure to animal death, 72, 79kinship with animals, 1, 5, 9, 11,

29–32, 36–39, 75–76, 79–81, 118, 129–38

rebelliousness of, 31–32, 130–1moral education of, 4–5, 6–9, 17,

19, 28, 31–32children’s literature, 15, 19, 34, 39, 46

conflation of children and animals in, 4–10, 31–32

links to animal rights movement, 17, 22, 32–35, 94–95, 98, 141

see also animal autobiography; boys’ adventure stories; fairy tales; wild animal tales

children’s rights, 5, 10–11Chopra, Sudhir, 126, 127–8civil rights movement, 113; see also

anti-slavery movementcivilization, 18, 66–67, 146n5

and bios (Agamben), 16, 107, 109, 126

created by animals, 102–3, 104, 107, 108, 116

see also wild/civilized divideclass status and social hierarchy, 29,

32, 44, 100–1, 111analogous to species, 21–2, 49–50,

97and pedigree, 26, 28lower classes compared to

animals, 7–8, 22, 23, 100–1middle-class treatment of

children, 5–8middle classes and animal rights,

10, 11, 19, 22–4, 28, 97–8Coats, Karen, 65, 79cogito, 3, 20–21, 94, 95, 96, 121Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 9collaboration between species,

36–39, 85–87, 105–6, 109



Index 165

communicationnonverbal, and natural

horsemanship, 36–38, 141nonverbal, validity of, 98between humans and animals,

125–6, 143between nonhuman species,

85–87, 115telepathic, 126via cybernetic network, 2, 115via whale song, 126

community and family, 15, 69denied to meat animals, 68, 83trans-species, 79, 80–81, 104–6,

109, 112, 115–16, 123–4see also civilization, of animals

companion species relationship (Haraway)

and mutual subjectivity, 68, 75and natureculture, 12, 51based in mutual respect,

interdependence, consent and affection, 1, 11, 12, 29, 30, 56, 58, 128, 141

between girls and horses, 36–39between humans and dogs, 1, 15,

55–60, 64, 133rejected by O’Brien’s rats, 104requiring physical contact, 58,

60, 136Connolly, Paula T., 102, 112contact zone (Haraway), 1, 13, 15,

53, 55, 57crittercams, 137Cromwell, James, 84Cruel and Improper Treatment of

Cattle Act, see Martin’s ActCunningham, Hugh, 5, 9cybernetics, 2, 90, 104, 112, 114cyborgs, 90, 113, 114; see also

hybridization

D’Amato, Anthony, 126, 127–8Darton, Harvey, 6Darwin, Charles, 50, 98–99, 101, 103,

113; see also social Darwinism

Davis, Susan, 117Day, David, 122death, see extinction/genocide; killing

and slaughter; slaughterhouses“Death of a Pig” (White), 76–77, 78Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari,

12–13, 53, 59, 60, 61, 63, 95Derrida, Jacques, 3–4, 14, 15, 66,

77–78, 85, 102–3, 109, 114, 127Descartes, René

and the cogito, 3, 20, 94, 95, 96, 114, 121

views animals as automata, 14, 20–21, 66, 93–94, 102–3, 107

views speech as uniquely human, 22, 111, 114

desensitization to animal suffering, 68, 72, 115

Desmond, Jane, 117, 133Desmond, John, 78Dick, the Little Poney (1799), 11, 19,

25–32, 33, 34, 37, 39, 116, 129, 141Dingley, Robert, 18, 33Doctor Rat (Kotzwinkle), 14, 91,

113–16, 142dogs, 48–61, 64, 139

and domestication myths, 52–53, 55–56

as companion species, 1, 15, 57–60, 67

as experimental subjects, 113, 115as sheep-herders, 85–87kinship with wolves, 13, 41, 49,

52–58, 60in bull and bear baiting, 23in fox hunting, 44

Dolphin Tale, 15, 118, 135–8dolphins, see whales and dolphinsDonner, Richard, 150n5Dorré, Gina, 35Dracula (Stoker), 32

edibility, 65–89; see also meat-eating and meat industry

embodiment, see body (and embodiment)



166 Index

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 45empathy and identification with

animalsand early animal rights

movement, 18–20, 94–95, 139and natural horsemanship, 36–39and pity (Rousseau), 9, 22emotional toll on pig-killers,

69–70encouraged by marine parks, 117,

128, 130encouraged in young readers, 7,

9–11, 83, 105, 116natural to children, 1, 9

environmentalism, 102, 114, 118, 123–5

Erskine, Sir Thomas, 23evolution, 57, 102, 107; see also

Darwin, Charlesextinction/genocide, 116, 118, 126,

127, 142

Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting Their Treatment of Animals (Trimmer), 7–8, 21–22

factory farms, 84–85fairy tales, 43–44, 47family, see community and familyfarms, 66–69, 73–74, 76, 77, 84–88Flipper (film), 123“Fly, The” (Blake), 19–20Foucault, Michel, 2, 71fox-hunting, 23, 44, 124Frankenstein (Shelley), 95–96Free Willy (film), 15, 118, 128,

129–34French, Richard D., 97, 113Frontier Thesis (Turner), 46–47

Galen of Pergamon, 92, 93gelding and neutering, 26, 33Gompertz, Lewis, 96–97, 140Goodall, Jane, 96Grahame, Kenneth, 111Grandin, Temple, 74, 147n13

Griffin, Emma, 43Griffith, John, 81, 82Guattari, Félix, see Deleuze, Gilles

Halberstam, Judith, 32, 62Haraway, Donna, 1, 11, 12–13, 15,

29, 30, 31, 36, 39, 42, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 68, 75, 77, 79, 90, 113, 128, 133, 134, 136, 137, 141

Hardy, Thomas, 69–70Harvey, William, 92–93Hayles, N. Katherine, 2, 114Hedgepeth, William, 66Heidegger, Martin, 14, 102, 106, 115Helbig, Alethea, 105, 109Heumann, Joseph, 102Hilton, Leon, 37Horowitz, Roger, 73horses, 18–39, 67

and early animal rights movement, 11–12, 18–19, 22–25, 32–35, 67

as pets, 11, 30, 36as servants/slaves, 21–22, 26–34,

39breaking and training, 27–8,

34–35, 36–37, 141and women, 34–9

humansakin to animals, 47, 75, 108,

113–14; see also naturecultureas machines, 2, 93; see also

cyborgsas superior to animals, see

language, as marking human/animal divide; subjectivity

denied to animals in Western philosophy

hunting, 23, 43–44, 45, 55–56, 124; see also whaling

“Husky – The Wolf Dog of the North” (London), 41, 49

hybridization, 13, 64and cyborgs, 90, 114and Frankenstein’s monster, 96



Index 167

between girl and horse, 13, 37–39between girl and wolf, 62–63between dog and wolf, 13, 49, 57,

61, 64in The Water Babies, 98–99

identification with animals, see empathy and identification with animals

imperialism, 40, 46–7, 50, 51, 56, 60industrialization, 11–12, 70–74,

84–85, 88insects, 19–20, 39, 81

Johnson, Samuel, 67Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 69–70Jungle Book, The (Kipling), 49, 50

Kalland, Arne, 124, 125Kean, Hilda, 23, 24Keiko the killer whale, 118, 134–5,

143, 150n5killing and slaughter, 22, 68–74,

76–80, 119–23, 125as “noncriminal putting to death”

(Derrida), 14, 66, 78, 79, 82, 88, 89

merciful, 69–70, 74, 81, 123see also death; extinction/

genocide; meat-eating and meat industry; slaughterhouses

Kingsley, Charles, 98–99, 101, 106Kipling, Rudyard, 48, 49Knellwolf, Christa, 96Kotzwinkle, William, 14, 91, 114–16,

142

Labor, Earl, 42, 52laboratory animals, see animal

experimentationlanguage

and animal advocacy, 22, 25, 123, 139

and euphemism for animal slaughter, 14, 80, 82; see also carnophallogocentrism

as marking human/animal divide, 3, 14, 16, 20, 81–82, 91, 93–94, 96, 102–12, 114, 115, 126, 128

inarticulacy in grief, 30whale-song as, 126see also animal autobiography;

carnophallogocentrism; communication; literacy; logos

Lansbury, Coral, 11–12, 34, 35, 37“Law of Club and Fang” (London),

50, 51, 58, 60, 141, 147n11“Law of the Jungle” (Kipling), 50legal personhood, 15–17, 125–8,

134, 135, 138, 141Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 44Levinas, Emmanuel, 81Lilly, John, 125–6Lippit, Akira Mizuta, 102Little Red Riding Hood, 43–44, 47“Lobo, King of Currumpaw” (Seton),

47Locke, John, 6–7logos, 14, 85, 91, 103, 111; see

also carnophallogocentrism; language

London, Jack, 12, 40, 41–43, 44, 47, 48–61, 63, 136, 141

Lord, Peter, 88love and affection, 1, 15, 29–31,

53–54and physical contact, 15, 58, 60,

136–8between humans and dogs, 1,

53–60, 67between humans and horses,

29–31, 35between humans and pigs, 67,

69between humans and marine

mammals, 15, 124, 130?, 131, 135?–8

between parents and children, 5zoophilia, 143, 150n8see also sex and sexuality

Lundblad, Michael, 12, 41, 51, 142Lykke, Nina, 123



168 Index

Macfarlane, Alan, 5Malcolmson, Robert, 67manifest destiny, 45, 46–47marine mammals, see whales and

dolphinsmarine parks, 117, 123, 128, 129–34Marineland, see marine parksMartin, Richard, 24Martin’s Act (1822), 19, 24–25, 31, 99Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, 54, 58,

67, 68, 74, 131Mastoris, Stephanos, 67McCance, Dawne, 92, 94McCarthy, Susan, 131McHugh, Susan, 36, 37, 86McVay, Scott, 126meat-eating and meat industry,

13–14, 38–39, 68, 72–73, 77–82, 84–85, 88, 142

Melville, Herman, 120–2, 123, 124, 130

Memoirs of Dick, the Little Poney, Supposed to Be Written by Himself (1799), see Dick, the Little Poney

Meynell, Hugo, 44mice, 76, 94–95

Mrs. Frisby (character), 104–5, 109–10

Milne, A.A., 111Miyazaki, Hayao, 12, 43, 61–64, 142Moby-Dick (Melville), 120–1, 130monstrosity, 32, 62“Mouse’s Petition, The” (Barbauld),

95–96Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

(O’Brien), 14, 91, 94, 101–113, 142Secret of NIMH, The (film

adaptation), 14, 91, 110–112multiplicity (Deleuze), 55, 56, 59,

104–5murder, see killing and slaughterMurray, Robin, 102

Napier, Susan, 62National Institute of Mental Health,

see NIMH

National Velvet (1935), 11, 19, 35–39, 137

natural history, 95 natural horsemanship, 36–39, 141nature/culture division, 9, 12, 45,

52, 53, 56, 60, 61, 75, 76and zoe/bios (Agamben), 16–17,

119natureculture (Haraway), 12, 15, 51,

60, 77, 134–5network, as posthuman social

model, 90, 104–6, 114–16Neumeyer, Peter, 65Newbury, John, 6NIMH (National Institute of Mental

Health), 100–101Nodelman, Perry, 65

O’Brien, Robert C., 14, 91, 94, 101–112, 114, 115, 142

O’Malley, Andrew, 6, 7Opo the dolphin, 123, 135orcas, see whalesOrlean, Susan, 135Orwell, George, 148n1, 148n9“Other Animals, The” (London), 48Otter, Chris, 72

Park, Nick, 88performers, animal, 117–18, 128–34Perkins, David, 9, 20personhood, see legal personhoodpets, 1, 11, 30, 36, 76, 80, 123,

141petting, see love and affection, and

physical contactPickering, Samuel, 6, 26pigs

as meat animals/non–companion species, 65–70, 73, 76–87, 142

human qualities of, 67–8reputed filthiness and laziness of,

67, 73, 83pig-killers, 69–70; see also killing and

slaughter“Pigs and Spiders” (White), 77



Index 169

play activities, 68, 123, 134as child’s mastery of the animal, 133as flirtation, 137

Plumwood, Val, 85, 87Pollock, Linda, 5ponies, see horsespornography, and horse-riding, 37posthumanism, 2–4, 114prehistoric man, 52–53, 55–56Priestley, Joseph, 94–95Princess Mononoke (film), 12, 43,

61–64prisons

abattoirs as, 71and caged animals, 95, 115factory farms as, 84, 87–89, 133, 135see also captivity

Procyk, Katie, 139Pulteney, Sir William, 23, 71

race and racism, 32–34, 39, 45, 146n9; see also anti-slavery movement; civil rights movement

Rahn, Suzanne, 46 rats

as experimental animals, 99, 100–16

emblematic of urban squalor, 99–101

reason, see subjectivity release of captive animals, 94–95,

118, 123, 129, 133, 134–5respect, 47, 67, 69, 86

as key to companion species relationship (Haraway), 1, 11, 29, 30, 31, 35, 39, 42, 54, 57, 138, 141

Richards, Jeffrey, 46Ritvo, Harriet, 95robins, as symbols of the poor, 7–8,

26, 32Robisch, S.K., 48, 52, 60rodents, see mice; ratsRomanticism, 5, 9–10, 18, 19–20,

45–46, 96

Roosevelt, Theodore, 47–49Rose, Jacqueline, 47Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6, 9, 22,

24, 45RSPCA (Royal Society for the

Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), 24, 96, 99

Rushdy, Ashraf, 65Ryder, Richard, 113

Sam the husky, 1, 15, 139, 143Scholtmeijer, Marian, 8, 18Schuller, Kyla, 121science fiction, 90, 101, 114Scully, Matthew, 149n10Sea World, see marine parksSecret of NIMH, The (film), 14, 91,

110–112segregation of animals, 67, 77

as denial of community, 68–69, 71–73, 80–81

Seiter, Richard, 101–2Seton, Ernest Thompson, 47,

48, 75Sewell, Anna, 11, 19, 32–34, 49sex and sexuality, 37, 62–63, 136–8,

143, 150n8; see also love and affection

Shapiro, Kenneth, 36Shelley, Mary, 95–96Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 9–10significant otherness (Haraway), 15,

30, 31, 57, 128, 133Silverberg, Robert, 101Sims, Michael, 74Sinclair, Upton, 148n4Singer, Peter, 113, 143, 148n1,

148n6, 150n8slaughter, see killing and slaughterslaughterhouses, 69–73, 96slavery, 23, 27–28, 30–34, 39, 128,

150n7social Darwinism, 42, 52, 146n9Society for the Prevention of Cruelty

to Animals, see RSPCA SPCA, see RSPCA



170 Index

species hierarchy, 50, 67, 85–86analogous to class hierarchy, 7–8,

21–23, 39and hunting, 44based on similarity to humans, 21 critique of, in Mrs. Frisby and the

Rats of NIMH, 106–9reinforcement of, in The Secret of

NIMH, 111–12species interdependence, see

community and family; natureculture

speciesism, 2, 16–17, 113, 138, 140, 143

speech, see languageSpencer, Sanders, 66spiders, as carnivores, 81Stevenson, Robert Louis, 18–19, 46Stoker, Bram, 32Stoneley, Peter, 33Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 33subjectivity

denied to animals in Western philosophy, 1, 3–4, 14, 94, 103, 106–7, 127; see also carnophallogocentrism; zoe (bare life); Descartes, René

of all animals, 16, 66, 74, 105, 109, 112, 140, 142

of an entire species, 15–16, 104–5, 117–19, 121–2, 123–8, 134, 142

of individual animals, privileged over species subjectivity, 15, 72, 74, 77, 78–79, 82–83, 89, 105, 110, 112, 116

of virile adult male, privileged in Western culture, 78, 103, 114

mutual, as part of companion species relationship, 1, 68, 75, 133, 137–8

suffering of animals, 9, 18–22, 24, 35, 60, 71–74, 90, 92, 94–9, 115

and Bentham, 20–21, 24, 74, 94sympathy, see empathy and

identification with animalssystems theory, see cybernetics

Tavernier-Courbin, Jacqueline, 41–42technology, 2, 90–91, 93, 102

as prosthetic, 114–16, 137technology of animality, 32–5, 39, 62Thierman, Stephen, 71, 87Thoreau, Henry David, 76training

of Keiko, in preparation for release, 134

of horses, 27–8, 34–35, 36–37, 141of marine mammals, 117–18,

128–31Transcendentalism, 45–46Trimmer, Sarah, 7–9, 21, 22, 26, 28,

31, 32, 139Tuan, Yi-Fu, 133Turner, Frederick Jackson, 46–47Twain, Mark, 46Tyler, Lisa, 38

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 33

veganism, 68vegetarianism, 10, 74, 84, 88Verne, Jules, 46Vesalius, Andreas, 92Vint, Sherryl, 115vivisection, 92–9, 113voyeurism, 137–8

Walden (Thoreau), 76Wake, Lynn Overholt, 74Water Babies, The (Kingsley), 98–99,

106Wells, Paul, 88whales and dolphins, 15–16, 117–38

affectionate relations with humans, 123–4, 129, 131, 135–8

and legal personhood, 15–17, 125–8, 134, 135, 138

enslaved as performers, 117–18, 128–34, 150n7

intelligence of, 117, 120, 121–2, 123–6, 128

resistance to human beings, 120, 122, 129, 130, 132–3



Index 171

whaling, 118, 119–25involving physical intimacy, 121

White, E.B., 13, 65–66, 70, 73, 74–83, 89, 105, 142

White Fang, 41, 42, 48, 56–61, 135, 136, 138, 141–2

Wild Animals I Have Known (Seton), 47, 75

wild animal tales, 47–48, 49, 75wild/civilized divide, 12, 41, 42–61,

64, 129, 134–5, 143; see also civilization; nature/culture divide

Williams, Garth, 80–81, 82Winter the dolphin, 135–8Wintle, Sarah, 18, 21Wolfe, Cary, 2–3, 21wolves

and natureculture, 51and social hierarchy in Kipling, 50

as embodiment of wildness, 41, 43–45, 47

domestication of, 52–53huskies as wolf-dogs, 49, 51–61packs as “wolf-multiplicity”

(Deleuze), 54–5, 56similarities to humans, 58

womenand eating disorders, 37–9and sexuality, 37, 62–3as subjugated/embodied Other,

32–9, 97, 109kinship to horses, 32–9

women’s literature, 34women’s rights movement, 11, 97,

113, 127, 145n9, 149n1

zoe (bare life: Agamben), 16–17, 107, 109, 119, 126–7, 128, 138, 140

zoophilia, 143, 150n8



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