Animal stories are metonymic. Esther is perhaps the most famous pig in the world as I type this, and the accounts of her adventures, beautifully and humorously reported by her caregivers Steve Jenkins and Derek Walter, belie the idea of pigs as mindless automata. They give her a voice, they tell her story.1 She is a personality, complete with an emotional range and a capacity for pleasure and pain. She is mischievous, and able to bond with humans and other nonhumans. Though anthropomorphism and sentimentalism invite the ridicule and censure of some, such stories, fictional and nonfictional, are persistently popular and effective tools for promoting kindness to animals. Jenkins and Walter persuade their readers to see more than meat the next time a livestock truck passes on the highway. The nameless pigs on that truck are just like Esther. They too have personalities. They too have a capacity for pleasure and pain.
Though it took me many years to realize the potential of literature to further the efforts of animal compassion agendasââthe long-neglected copy of Black Beauty mentioned in the Preface left closed and unheededââother readers and writers long before and since Anna Sewell credit stories for awakening an affection for nature and the desire to care for it. Jane Goodall, for one, identifies fiction as a formative influence:
As she puts it elsewhere, âI learned from nature. ⊠I also learned from the books that my mother found for me about animals. I read and read about animals. Doctor Dolittle and Tarzan and Mowgli.â3As a child I was not at all keen on going to school. I dreamed about nature, animals, and the magic of far-off wild and remote places. Our house was filled with bookshelves and the books spilled out onto the floor. When it was wet and cold, I would curl up in a chair by the fire and lose myself in other worlds. My very favourite books at the time were The Story of Dr. Dolittle, The Jungle Book, and the marvelous Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books.2
This book approaches storytelling as a form of animal advocacy and considers the contributions of literature toward a widened circle of care. With Jane Goodall, I include Hugh Loftingâs Doctor Dolittle novels among my favorites in the category and refer to them throughout. There are a few reasons for this. Not only does the central character model kindness to animals and confront forms of cruelty, but the stories also illustrate a useful way to approach conversations about welfare. Many find the objectives of advocates to be extreme, unrealistic, and divorced from all that is familiar. Meals without meat? Clothes without leather? Science without laboratory rats? Circuses without elephants? Impossible. This is the way we live and the way itâs always been. In many contexts, to suggest we do without such uses of animals is to shut down the conversation even before it begins. But literature often succeeds where communication in other forums breaks down. When couched in a compelling story, we tend to be more amenable to new ideas.
Consider Loftingâs opposition to fox hunting . Allyson Mayâs study of this English pastime observes how soldiers returning from the Great War viewed it in different ways. For some, their experiences on the battlefield provoked ânostalgia, affection for the pre-War, comparatively innocent world of the hunting field,â but for others, Lofting among them, the War resulted in âa heightened compassion for the suffering of animals as well as men.â Fox hunting was no longer an innocent distraction. Indeed, it was during Loftingâs time as a soldier in Flanders and France that his Dolittle stories first appeared.4 According to Gary D. Schmidt, âNone of the novels can ever be read outside the context of ⊠the trenches of the First World War, where horses, unprotected against the green billows of gas that belched across the fields and cascaded into the trenches, died screaming out of burning lungs.â5 This is where Loftingâs longing for a kinder relationship with nature begins:
The Dolittle stories, Lofting explains, began life as letters home to his children during the War, and the idea of a medical person caring for animals has direct connection to what he saw:While he could somehow avoid despair and place the war in the context of a reasonable explanationââthese were apparently rational creatures who had consciously decided to commit atrocityââhe could not accept the destruction of horses. While the troops could protect themselves against the green gas that poured into the trenches and coated the landscape, the horses could not. It sprang into their lungs, blistered their tissues, and led to agonizing death.6
There is even evidence his tenderness toward animals extended beyond the battlefield. The usually placid Lofting once attacked three men, one armed with a knife, who had hobbled some wild horses. Having dispatched the three, he cut loose the horses, emptied the rifles, and, wiping the blood from his cheek, sauntered back to his camp, unruffled, to read a story to his son.8One thing ⊠that kept forcing itself more and more on my attention was the very considerable part the animals were playing in the World War and that as time went on they, too, seemed to become Fatalists. They took their chances with the rest of us. But their fate was far different from the menâs. However seriously a soldier was wounded, his life was not despaired of; all the resources of a surgery highly developed by the war were brought to his aid. A seriously wounded horse was put out by a timely bullet.7
The result of those wartime experiences was a fictional world depicting an alternative vision of human-animal relations, with deep criticisms of many entrenched attitudes and activities, fox hunting among them: ââWhat a childish sport!â [Doctor John Dolittle] murmured. âI canât understand what they see in it. Really, I canât. Grown men rushing about the landscape on horseback, caterwauling and blowing tin hornsââall after one poor little wild animal! Perfectly childish!ââ9 But his response involves more than ridicule and disdain. Dolittle inevitably comes to the aid of animals in distress in all the stories. On one occasion during his travels, he meets a mother fox named Nightshade, and she asks him to look at one of her pups who has something wrong with his paw. While attending to the cub, they suddenly hear the approach of hunters.10 The account of the vixenâs terrorââthe despair of a mother helpless to protect her childrenââhighlights the brutality of the sport. The same pack and the same hunters killed Nightshadeâs sister the week before.11 Dolittle hides the mother and babies in his pockets before the dogs arrive, and once they do, tells them to lead the horse-riding men in another direction.12
Having addressed the immediate threat, Dolittle then listens to Nightshade as she relates at length another occasion when fox hunters threatened her life. The first-person, point-of-view description is unsettling.
Nightshade, the vixen, paused in her story a moment, her ears laid back, her dainty mouth slightly open, her eyes staring fixedly. She looked as though she saw that drea...