Jenny Diski
Being interested in animals is by no means a prerequisite for enjoying What I Don't Know About Animals. However, being interested in its author definitely helps. As the title of this book by British novelist and essayist Jenny Diski indicates, this is a personal – indeed sometimes self-involved – journey into her engagement with non-humans, as well as observations on what others have observed.
On her safari, Diski encounters species familiar to readers of philosophical treatises on animal minds, such as Nagel's bat, Derrida's cat and Wittgenstein's lion. She also visits the ethological preserves of Konrad Lorenz, Desmond Morris, Franz de Waal and others, then nods, if only in passing, to outré forms of human-animal interaction like hoarding and bestiality. Along the way, she pulls over for occasional rest-stops on the Internet – including the website of a pest-control company as well as www.icanhascheezburger.com, from which she reproduces a lengthy swatch of Lolcat-speak for no particularly good reason.
At its best, this eclectic jaunt is energetic and amusing; at its worst, it feels a mile wide and an inch deep. On the "best" side of the ledger falls the author's vivid reportorial style, which enlivens her accounts of being an eco-volunteer in Kenya, her efforts to conquer her fear of spiders, her stay on a sheep farm at lambing time and numerous other adventures.
But when Diski puzzles through questions that previous writers have engaged more deeply, she sometimes comes to conclusions that seem fresh to her – and perhaps to others who are new to this material – but which may feel déjà pensés to someone who's already passed this way. At times, I longed to expand her reading-list of authors who've looked searchingly into subjects she merely mulls, such as representations of animals in children's toys, books and TV programs of the past. (In fact, in her exhaustive personal recollections, she misremembers Bugs Bunny's classic catch-phrase as "What's up, folks?" and cites among animals on TV "Silver, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and Tonto.")
Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Diski's genuine admiration for animals leads her to moral questions concerning their consumption and commodification. Which leads in turn, perhaps just as inevitably, to humane-slaughter expert Temple Grandin, who now seems to have become the go-to person for anyone seeking assurance that a " short, happy life" for livestock, culminating in a quick, non-traumatic death, can absolve animal lovers of guilt about eating them.
Like Grandin (as well as Michael Pollan, though his work is curiously absent from her meditations on meat-eating), Diski concludes there is little percentage in contemplating an end to animal agriculture. Even if societies had the will to go vegan, or vegetarian, there would be no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. "We cannot undo what humans have done, unbreed the bred, wild the tame, uneat the eaten."
Besides, she argues, "the result of mass vegetarianism is that the animals which vegetarians seek to protect would be exterminated." She does not go as far as Pollan, Grandin and others who reason that since consumption is what domestic species of livestock and poultry were created for, ending that consumption would deprive them of their raison d'être. Indeed, by that logic, continuing to kill and eat livestock is the best way to insure their future.
Diski strikes me as too smart to take that further step in reasoning. However, she does insist on the unlikelihood of humanity's changing its ways where exploitation of non-human resources is concerned. While I don't disagree with that, I wish her book had something to say about the persistency of the will of animal advocates and environmentalists to try to change them, regardless of experience to date.
Likewise, Diski's further conclusion that "the killing of animals should never be comfortable or clear-cut, never straightforward" is legitimate, as far as it goes. Yet she stops short of examining why, after millennia, our species still is so often uncomfortable with animal slaughter and consumption.
Jenny Diski's wide-ranging exploration of what she doesn't know about animals makes for a lively and intermittently satisfying read. However, delving further into what we all don't know about the sources of our unresolved conflicts about animals would have, to my mind, made for a book worth reading twice.
Erika Ritter's most recent book is The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath: Some Paradoxes of Human-Animal Relationships. She is currently at work on a trio of novels about humans, animals and hybrids.