50 pages • 1 hour read
The Lives of Animals
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Background
Literary Context: Red Peter
Part 1, “The Animals and the Philosophers,” relies heavily on a fictional short story, “A Report to an Academy,” written by Franz Kafka.
“A Report” follows a lecture given by an ape named Red Peter, although Red Peter has not felt like an ape for five years and feels he can never return to his life as an ape. Red Peter recounts his journey from the wilds to human society. He was brought to the human world when he was shot and captured by hunters, after which he was named Red Peter for the red scar left on his cheek from a bullet. He was shipped in a cramped cage, a representation of the fear wild animals experience in cages. He could barely move and became extremely stressed, which drives him into exhibiting repetitive behaviors. Red Peter says he wanted a “way out” rather than freedom, but there was no way out for him. He started imitating humans in search of a way out. He was burned when he refused to drink schnapps, then he drank an entire bottle during a celebration then called out “Hallo!” revealing his ability to speak. He was sent to a trainer, and worked to learn human habitudes in the hopes of escaping. He learned to talk and behave like a human. He was given a half-trained chimpanzee as a companion, but she disturbed him. He ends his lecture by saying he is not looking for judgement and is only passing information to the members of the Academy.
Elizabeth uses Red Peter as a symbol of her own misalignment with her colleagues, audience, and community. The use of Red Peter also serves as a passive aggressive response to Norma’s current work project of teaching language to primates.
Literary Context: Rainer Maria Rilke and Ted Hughes
The second part of The Lives of Animals includes a discussion of real-world poems “The Jaguar” and “Second Glance at a Jaguar” by Ted Hughes, along with “The Panther” by Rainer Maria Rilke. “The Panther” is a three-stanza poem that depicts a panther in captivity. The panther paces and focuses on the bars that contain him, but when he is not being watched he has short-lived mental images of freedom. “The Jaguar” shows a zoo in which most of the animals are boring, but a crowd has collected outside the jaguar’s enclosure. The jaguar appears enraged, pacing and attacking the cage in a fight for his freedom. In “Second Glance at a Jaguar,” the jaguar is obsessively pacing in his cage. The cage is so small that he must turn with each step. All three poems use vivid imagery to help the reader envision the perspective of the caged cats. Elizabeth uses the poems to support her argument that humans can imagine what life is like for other animals through their realistic depictions of the behavior of caged animals from their own perspectives. Costello’s use of these poems furthers the Science Versus Literature debate by tacitly arguing that art, not science, is the only way to understand the perspectives of other animals.
Philosophical Context: The Science Wars
The Lives of Animals was first published in 1999 during the height of the science wars. The science wars unfolded as a series of discussions about the impact of culture on science. The culture-wide debate garnered its title from the stark polarization of the two sides. One side declared that science is, by its nature, fundamentally objective and free of human cultural biases. The other side argued that science is subjective and beholden to cultural factors and biases surrounding scientists, including economics and politics. Those working in or studying Humanities or “soft sciences”—social sciences such as sociology and psychology—often argued that science is beholden to cultural biases. Those involved with the “hard sciences”—natural sciences such as physics, geology, and chemistry—supported science as an objective process. Although the science wars climaxed in the 1990s, the matter has yet to be resolved. Contemporary consensus tends to favor the idea that where science interacts with culture—such as in the “soft sciences”—cultural biases often play a sizeable role in shaping science, and “hard sciences” continue to be impacted by cultural issues such as misogyny, which keeps STEM fields largely male-dominated. The extent of this impact is still a matter of debate and questioning.
Many of the concepts within The Lives of Animals reflect the science wars. Norma and O’Hearne claim science is objective. While O’Hearne takes a more polite method to counter Elizabeth’s arguments on the public stage, Norma is harsher in her private criticisms, which reflects the public tension between the real-world debaters. Elizabeth believes science is subjective. She directly addresses the biases within scientific experiments designed to test animal intelligence, and she draws attention to the biased assumption that reason-based thinking is superior. Today, many tests that nominally measure animal intelligence are being rethought or radically restructured due to anthropocentric biases that have caused factors in intelligence to be overlooked or overestimated in the era of the science wars. For example, animals like fish that otherwise lack “intelligence” can identify themselves in mirrors, while animals considered intelligent, like crows, cannot. The mirror test previously served as definitive proof as to whether a species had self-awareness because human infants learn to recognize themselves in mirrors. Given that scholars have yet to reach a consensus on whether science is objective or not, this element of the text remains relevant to contemporary society.
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