Lives of Animals
For our presentations, I chose to focus on the subject of animals, and to look at J.M Coetzee’s Lives of Animals, as I thought it had some interesting discussion points.
“Though I have no reason to believe that you have at the forefront of your minds what is being done to animals at the moment in production facilities” - pg 19
What’s interesting about Coetzee is that his protagonist Costello mirrors him in his authorship, but also allows Coetzee to express his strong opinions and feelings on animal cruelty through the medium of fiction. Instead of telling a story about humans and using animals as metaphors or anthropomorphising them in order for a story to be told about humans, he directly speaks on behalf of the animals.
In one section, Costello does compare animal cruelty to the Holocaust which is essentially a metaphor, but not to emphasise a human tragedy, but an attempt to highlight the cruelty that many animals have suffered and still suffer. Understandably this can cause incredible discussion, which we had in class, which leads me to question whether humans and animals can ever be equal, as it seems there will always be people who disagree.
In previous posts I have spoken about speciesism, anthropomorphism and eco criticism, but it is still relevant here. Why are humans so fearful in giving animals an equal status?
Is it that humans as a collective fear that they are not the most intelligent species? Is it possible for evolution to still be taking place, and one day, could future animals become equal to humanity?
They’re all interesting questions that arose as a discussion from Coetzee’s novel, making it an interesting read and an even more interesting discussion topic.











