Who are you?

“‘We must sometimes be cruel to be kind…’” (119).

Click to play: Cruel to be Kind by Nick Lowe

And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariners’ hollo!

‘God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus!
Why look’st though so?’—‘With my cross-bow
I shot the albatross.

And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work ‘em woe;
For all averred I had killed thebird
That made the breeze to blow.

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

When Coetzee introduces the albatrosses in chapter two, he does so in a way that reminds me of Coleridge’s albatross, “There is an albatross colony on the hillside, they are advised; they are welcome to photograph the birds, but should not approach too closely, should not alarm them” (55). The mariner of Coleridge’s story makes the mistake of disrupting the albatross—killing the albatross. By doing this, he disrupts the course of nature. The wind no longer blows, and the ship is lost in the Antarctic. Blaming the mariner for the bad luck, the crew forces him to wear the dead albatross as punishment:

Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the albatross
About my neck was hung

The albatross is given a supernatural, powerful role in the poem. He signifies the force of nature, the well being of the crew, and a shining hope. There is no motivation for the mariner’s actions—no reason for him to shoot the albatross from the sky. He does so on a lark, which results in the death of the crew members and a fate worse than death for himself.

Coetzee, too, gives the albatross this supernatural feeling, “’An albatross,’ she remarks to the woman, speaking softly. ‘That is the English word. I don’t know what they call themselves.’ The woman nods. The great bird regards them calmly, no more afraid of two than of one” (56). These birds, after Coleridge’s poem, are believed to carry the souls of lost sailors. To kill one would be considered an omen of bad luck. By killing one, you lose your way.

Recently I’ve read Neuromancer for my Rhetoric in Cyberculture class. Neuromancer is an AI. The “left-hemisphere” of an AI that has been split in two—Wintermute and Neuromancer. Wintermute is the brains, the planning the data, where as Neuromancer is the personality. Neuromancer is the answer to immortality. A person’s memory is stored as either ROM or RAM. Neuromancer “is the dead, and their land” (244). When Neuromancer (Necro+romancer) says this, “He [Neuromancer] laughed. A gull cried” (244). The only other noise in this land of the dead is the cry of a gull—an albatross.

What has fascinated me about the book is the role of animals—they are virtually nonexistent. When one character—very cat-like in her own description—sees that her companion has not finished his meal, she yells, “’Jesus, gimme that. You know what this costs?’ She took his plate. ‘They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn’t vat stuff.’ She forked a mouthful up and chewed” (Chapter 11). Yet that same character is always wearing black leather—black Paris leather. The author makes it a point time and time again to describe how hot her body looks in the black Paris leather. Why, then, are the people unable to identify a horse or commonly eat animals, but they wear black leather jeans and use calfskin bags? The book is extremely inconsistent with its rarity and sacramental status of animals.

Which brings me to zoos. What is the purpose of zoos? Are they to preserve rare animals, to display their importance in the ecosystem, to put them on show? Hughes’s poem reminded me of my trip to the San Antonio zoo in January 2008. There, I saw Lucky the elephant. I stood there watching Lucky for a good ten minutes (much longer than the usual glance and walk by that most animals receive). I was concerned about what she was doing—picking up a stick with her trunk, raising her front foot, raising her back foot, dropping the stick. Over and over and over again. Some parents told their child the elephant was dancing, but like the jaguar, “[her] body is just the engine shoving it forward,/ Lifting the air up and shoving on under” (331).

Later I went online to research Lucky, and found out she had been abused during circus training. I signed a petition to relocate her to an elephant sanctuary—but that seems like such little effort now. Animals in zoos, in what I have experienced, is treating them like, “they are a part of the furniture, part of the alarm system. They do us the honour of treating us like gods, and we respond by treating them like things” (335).  Further more, I disagree that animals have, “already been through it.  Born with foreknowledge…They don’t have to be told what steel is for…They are born prepared” (337-338).  Perhaps not all zoos are like this, but they don’t have a private life, as Coetzee explains:

‘Don’t animals deserve a private life as much as we do?’

‘Not if they are in a zoo,’ she says. ‘Not if they re on show. Once you are on show, you have no private life. Anyway, do you ask permission from the stars before you peek at them through your telescope? What about the private lives of the stars?’ (33)

For a brief moment, I misread this passage. I read “stars” as people. As celebrities. We give celebrities just as much a private life as we do animals in a zoo. Even less, if it were possible. So my mind splits here—do we treat animals any differently than humans, really?

Today on Speedway, they had a picture from Josephine’s blog. A picture of a monkey about to be electrocuted. On the picture they had, “If this is wrong, then how is this right?” and beneath it was a picture of aborted fetuses. Do we need to face human rights before animal rights, take them simultaneously, or give a preferred order of animals over humans? The sign suggested corporal punishment and animal abuse were on the same level of fetus abortion—is it?

I read the assignment as Coetzee ONE, meaning Coetzee, lesson 1.  My apologies for the inconvenience, but my blog is about Realism, not “The Philosophers and the Animals”.

“Is the comparison of human beings to animals venal?  Patronizing?  A mode of false consciousness?  A blasphemy?  A necessary mediation?” (Garber 297).

Throughout Coetzee’s Lesson One: Realism, he characterizes humans as animals, ranging from goldfish, cats, lions, mice, dogs, ducks, and insects.  One particular line I enjoyed was, “Flecks of gold circling the dying whale, waiting their chance to dart in and take a quick mouthful” (Coetzee 6).  The comparison to animals gave the person their personality–their identification.  Here, Costello is describing the media.  Rather than portraying them as the cliche vultures pecking on dead flesh, she demonstrates how little actions, if done in mass quantities, can bring  down the strongest and largest of animals.  The media can tear anyone apart.  “‘There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were,’” but that time is now past, and Coetzee uses animals to identify ourselves (19).

But animals are not the only thing that Coetzee relates to humans.  At one point, Costello’s books come alive.  She describes them as abused, homeless pets almost.  Or perhaps orphaned children, “What lay behind my concern about deposit copies was the wish that, even if I myself should be knocked over by a bus the next day, this first-born of mine would have a home where it could snooze…and no one would come poking with a stick to see if it was still alive” (17).

So I can’t agree with Garber.  The way Coetzee compares humans to naimals and gives literature a humanized place in Costello’s life gives me much more inspiration and sympathy towards animals than Garber’s use of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Holocaust.  I can’t relate to those events–I wasn’t a part of them.  And they’re given so vivid and understood an image that if one were to go against that feeling, they would be an outcast of society.  If Earthlings had not used the Holocaust as it’s fundamental comparison to animal cruelty, would the class have reacted with such a strong hatred towards animal cruelty?  You’re supposed to hate the actions of the Holocaust, so if animal cruelty is connected to the Holocaust, it creates the idea that animal cruelty should be treated as the Holocaust.  The problem with this is the automatic dispassion and alienation it creates with no analytical or intellectual backup.  It is all based on emotions and correlation.

All of my nicknames are centered on animals–Cat, Kitty Cat, Tiger.  I like it when I’m told I’m graceful like a dear, fast as a mongoose, sly as a fox.  But of course there are the bad ones: blind as a bat, slow as a turtle, big as an elephant.  Further more, the inversion can be made with humans and books.  Such as, your face is an open book, etc.

“‘If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews.  The inversion insults the memory of the dead’” (297).  This seems completely arbitrary.  Any argument could be written this way.  The validity of this argument is just as bad as the Holocaust comparison in Earthlings.  Why use an overused analogy that automatically disconnects the reader from the subject?  This, in my opinion, is much worse than the disnification effect (if such an effect even exists).  This creates dispassion and alienation through morals and ethics rather than childishness/immaturity.

Introduction

“Anthropomorphic animal narratives are generally denigrated as ‘childish’, thereby associating a dispassionate, even alienated perspective with maturity. Disnification exacerbates this existing association…to describe something as trivial or worthless”[1]

This quote infuriated me. I argued with the text that most of the class’s earliest relationship with animals was through cartoons or stuffed animals. How could the “disnification” create dispassion or alienation with animals when it stood as the foundation for so many people’s bond to animals? Yet, I do not want to use the term disnification. The personifying of animals was created long before Disney was around. What is being done is the humanizing of animals in such a way that we forget that they are animals.

This is what happens in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865). Lewis Carroll was once quoted saying:

And when that day shall come…what potent spell have you in store to win exemption from the common doom? Will you represent to that grim spectre, as he gloats over you, scalpel in hand, the inalienable rights of man? He will tell you that this is merely a question of relative expediency, —that, with so feeble a physique as yours, you have only to be thankful that natural selection has spared you so long. Will you reproach him with the needless torture he proposes to inflict upon you? He will smilingly assure you that the hyperæsthesia, which he hopes to induce, is in itself a most interesting phenomenon, deserving much patient study. Will you then, gathering up all your strength for one last desperate appeal, plead with him as with a fellow-man, and with an agonized cry for ‘Mercy!’ [2]

He puts the reader in the place of the animal; a terrifying thought of being sprawled on the table, a giant of a man hovering over you with sharp scalpels and knives, waiting to slice you open. What is so natural about torturing an innocent victim—the reader feels terror, anxiety, sorrow, and pity for the creature’s plight. These are all traits that young Alice lacks in her story. She is completely unsympathetic towards the creatures she meets on her journey.

Part 1: The Mouse’s Tale

Alice is aware that the animals are animals, but she is unable to cope with the differences. She must treat them as humans. Upon meeting her first animal in Wonderland, she assumes he has the ability to speak in a world that is nothing like her own, yet she does not know how to go about introducing herself. Yelling, “’A mouse—of a mouse—to a mouse—a mouse—O mouse!” over and over again, he ignores her. She thinks this ridiculous way of addressing him, “must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she had never done such a thing before…”[3] But the Mouse does not respond, and she asks, “Où est ma chatte?”[4] The simple question, “Where is my cat?” reveals Alice’s inability to identify with the Mouse. She is unable to recognize and care for the animal’s feelings. She says that she forgot mice do not like cats, but did she not mean, “I quite forgot you were a mouse”? Yet when the mouse expresses his discontent, Alice continues the conversation about her cat Dinah. Her insensitivity towards the Mouse is once again revealed, “…she’s such a capital one for catching mice…”[5] Even so, after the Mouse has asked her to stop speaking of such things, Alice begins talking about a dog that kills all the rats, “Its [the Mouse’s] face was quite pale (with passion, Alice thought), and it said, in a low trembling voice, ‘Let us get to the shore, and then I’ll tell you my history, and you’ll understand why it is I hate cats and dogs.’”[6]

But even after the Mouse’s tale, Alice does not understand why he is so offended. Rather, she understands his reaction, but is unable to stop herself. She tells the audience more about her cat Dinah, an audience filled with birds. And Alice continues to tell how her cat would be good at fetching the Mouse back, and how quickly she can catch a bird.

What is interesting about Alice’s speeches about Dinah is that she constantly refers to the cat as “her”, where as she refers to every other creature in the novel as “it”. Even though they are able to communicate in a way that Dinah cannot, Alice keeps distant with the animals of Wonderland.

Part 2: The Walrus and The Carpenter

The story of “The Walrus & The Carpenter” is well known, yet its moral message is always open for interpretation.[7] As the duchess says in Alice in Wonderland, “Every thing’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”[8]

For readers unfamiliar with the original poem, here is a link: The Walrus & The Carpenter

Immediately after Tweedledum and Tweedledee finish their poem, Alice sympathizes with both the Walrus and the Carpenter for different reasons. First, she likes the Walrus best, “because he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.”[9] But Tweedledee rightly explains to Alice that the Walrus only appeared sad in order to hide how many oysters he ate:

“’I weep for you,’ the Walrus said:
‘I deeply sympathize.’
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.[10]

So her sympathy shifts towards the Carpenter, because he didn’t eat as many oysters as the Walrus. But Alice is corrected by Tweedledum that the Carpenter would have eaten more if he could. The dilemma, as Gardner explains in the note, is “the traditional ethical dilemma of having to choose between judging a person in terms of acts or in terms of intentions.”[11]

The dilemma is not: should they have eaten the oysters or not? The dilemma is: who is at fault? The book barely touches on this subject, for as every situation in Wonderland, Alice is quickly distracted by something else. For Alice to pick a favorite of the two, she completely ignores the tragedy of the oysters’ deaths.

In both Carroll’s and Disney’s stories, the oysters are personified as young children with their coats, tiny shoes, and shell-like hats. The instant where the oysters are actually eaten is skimmed over—one minute, the oysters are seen alive, the next, their shells are lying empty. How did the oysters react when they learned they were to be eaten? Did they scream, yell, plea? Did they call out for the older oyster that stayed in the sea? Were they crying, scared, worried? Only the story of the consumers is given, not the victim. What if Carroll had told the poem through the eyes of the victims, as he did in his essay against vivisection?

Part 3: Pig and Pepper

One of the lesser known Alice stories is that of the Duchess and her child (mainly because it was not in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland). The story deals with the behavior and treatment of people. Alice enters the Duchess’s kitchen, where the air is filled with pepper that causes the baby to sneeze. Everyone is arguing—and at one point, the cook throws a frying pan at the Duchess’s head. The Duchess recites a lullaby that is less than sympathetic towards her baby, who seems to be the cause of all the trouble:

Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.

I speak severely to my boy,
I beat him when he sneezes;
For he can thoroughly enjoy
The pepper when he pleases![12]

The treatment of the baby and the words of the Duchess’s lullaby are the only things that seem to stir sympathy from Alice. She takes it upon herself to save the boy, “’If I don’t take this child away with me,’ thought Alice, ‘they’re sure to kill it in a day or two. Wouldn’t it be murder to leave it behind?’”[13] She feels responsible for another human’s life—responsible enough to protect him from harm. But the baby stops sneezing, and instead starts grunting. The nose turns up, the eyes become beady—the baby turns into a pig. Any feelings Alice once had towards the baby have vanished, “’If you’re going to turn into a pig, my dear,’ said Alice, seriously, ‘I’ll have nothing more to do with you.’”[14] She decides to return the pig to the dangerous environment.

Had Alice seen the pig being treated with such cruelty, would she have felt the impulse to save him from that environment? If the baby had stayed human, what would she have done with him? The conclusion, based on her attitude towards the baby the instant he turned into a pig, is that she would have left the pig there to die. The harsh words and the abundant pepper in the air were cruel to humans in Alice’s eyes, but not to animals. Alice’s behavior stays constant throughout Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass—a withdrawal from animals’ feelings and a sympathy only for humans.

Conclusion

Carroll’s excerpt from “Some Popular Fallacies About Vivisection” and his Alice books show completely different sides of the author’s views of cruelty to animals. One, he sympathizes with the animal; the other, his heroine lacks any sensitivity towards animals. If there is a moral in this, as the Duchess suggests there must be, what is the outcome? Are Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass a look on the disnification of animals—an alienation towards the sympathy of animals because they have been personified? What type of message is Alice sending readers?

Although many instances of animal cruelty with Alice have been ignored or overlooked by generations of audiences, this suggests something more about the reader and their culture rather than the author himself. Through the adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, the different reader responses to the Alice stories can be seen, but there is one constant: the censorship of animal cruelty. If it is mentioned, it is glossed over without notice.

Something I would like to further look into is the use of the flamingo in the croquet game. It crossed my mind that in The Flintstones, all appliances are animals. Perhaps a study of animal use in the long-running cartoon show would find similarities to the use of animals in Alice in Wonderland. Another element of the stories I would like to look at is the use of pronouns. What is an “it”, as the Mouse suggests. Why does Alice say “it” in some cases, but “he” or “she” in others?

WC: 1401
Quotes WC: 426
Total WC: 1827

(the symbols between the paragraphs are how I’ve drawn the noises)

We are the beatbox masters.

Drosphila disjunctalays down a simple beat.  A steady yet spastic rhythm to start off.  His way of disjointing the beats creates surprise and a fresh reaction for the audience.  The pulse is quiet, but steady.

—–.—–.—–.—–.—–.—–.

Drosophila neuperkinsi really pumps the beat up a knotch.  Starting normal and steady like disjuncta, but going into a long tune.  He goes into a completely irradict routine of high and low pitched, broken up sounds.

|—|—|—|————————-’,',’,',

Drosophila silverstris starts out with a groovy bango sound.  But he ends with a funnel like noise, going low to high pitch for a dramatic ending:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa……….

I am in Frankenstein’s laboratory.

All of us are kept sealed in clear jars filled with some type of smelly goo.  We’re all labeled–I am the Lophiodes reticulatus.  My body is bleached white from the years of preservation, my eyes milky blue and filmed over.  All my fellow fish friends look like me.  Sphyrna lewini to my right is too long for his far.  His body curled up around his head.  I imagine that’s extremely painful.  Trichiurus lepturus below me is always upside down, viewing the world from a different view.

Above us is the skin of an armadillo.  The only part of his skeleton left is his skull.  I wonder what they did with the rest of his body…skin…organs.

I feel as if at any moment, the witches of Macbeth will come to collect their ingredients: eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, tongue of dog…

Why do they put me in this room?  The first thing you see when you walk in is the giant flying dinosaur.  All eyes are focused upward as people make their way into the room.  By this time, I’ve been passed by without any notice.  Me, a dilapidated pair of boring brown bison horns.  Anyone who does notice me mistakenly calls me Bevo.

As if the “wows” for the dinosaur aren’t enough.  Everything around me glitters.  There are the beetles, arranged together in a sort of choreographed dance.  At first people yell “yuck!’ to their spikey legs and long pincers, but then the beauty of their shiny wings makes them say, “They are beautiful, though.”  No one thinks of me as beautiful.  I’m only a dead cow with a broken horn.  I hate the rainbow wheel of colorful beetles.  They look exotic with their zebra like stripes and cheetah like spots.  Even girls like the disgusting bugs because their wings shimmer metallic blues, golds, purples, greens.

And then there are the moths and the butterflies.  I want their wings so I can fly away.

The rocks.  That’s what the are–only rocks!  But their crystals bloom like flowers in different shades of captivating colors.  I wish I were colorful.  I wish I were special.  I wish people would look at me and think, “Oh, how beautiful!  How amazing!  How unique!”  But instead, I look like the steer’s skull that’s a decorative piece in the Texas front yard.

Every day, I read the sign directly in front of my display case.  “What makes something a treasure?”  I’m not worth a great deal of money, I’m not of any sentimental value, I’m not a wonder of the earth… Why am I here?

“As you explore the gallery, think about something that you consider a tresure and why it is important to you.  Then, consider why each object exhibited here is a true treasure of the Texas Memorial Museum.”

The Tooth

A single tooth in a cluster of unidentified fossils.  Unattached to any jaw, not the part of any group.  Completely ostracized from any form of identification.  There seem to be arms, legs, skulls, vertebrates, fingers, claws, knees… do I matter?  Was I once a part of the same creature as the squiggly hardened piece next to me?  At least I know what I am–a tooth.  I can’t say as much for the guy next to me.

What type of animal was I a part of?  We a part of?  How old are we?  I imagine a time where I was once in a jungle–green and the air filled with clean mist.  Did I chew meat or plants?  I dream cold water is rushing over me.  The cold water we’re drinking.  I imagine the hum of the air conditioner is the rush of a waterfall.

Mostly all I see now is the glare from the ceiling’s lights and the many smudge marks and fingerprints on the glass.  The time where a large, moist tongue would lick me clean is long gone now.  Only a faint memory I can hardly imagine.

The Shell

I am a large tortoise shell, lying on my back.  The turtle next to me is right side up.  Someone in the desert saw me lying on my back.  I wonder how they felt, seeing me squirm and struggle to turn over–I couldn’t see their face.  Only the bright, clear sky and the pulsating sun.

Why didn’t they turn me over?  Did they enjoy my suffering?  Did they notice me?  I caught a glimpse of their feet.  Dusty from the tan sand.  They moved closer.  Were they laughing at me?  Crying?

I feet began to walk away.  I kicked my own feet harder in the air.  They left me there, and I died on my back.

I was found on my back.  All that remains of me is my shell.  Now I’m in a museum, permanently on my back.  And people look and walk away.

Click to play: Paranoid Android by Radiohead

“The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples on the creature’s torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by—or despite—its outcry.

‘I think,’ Phil Resch said, ‘that this is how an andy must feel.’” (Dick 130).

This feeling is not isolated to only an android. On the contrary, I believe that is how Resch was feeling at the very moment he declared not to feel. His mind was struggling with the idea that he might be an android. Everything in his life an artificial memory, the idea that his existence had been a lie. How could he not have felt the internal, seemingly never ceasing scream? I have felt this way. I often feel like this, as if my emotions and thoughts are trapped inside my head, and I’m silently screaming. There are breaks to this constant struggle, but the screaming eventually returns. But unlike Clarice from Silence of the Lambs, I don’t feel that “The screaming inside her head must be stopped” (“Animals” 282). I constantly feel as if I’m living in a gray area—life isn’t neatly separated into black and white in my mind. When I feel one way about a moral or ethical problem, but also feel a contradicting obligation, the screaming ensues. I should feel this way, but I actually feel that way. Or why can’t I feel both ways? Would that make me a hypocrite, indecisive?

The alternative to the screaming in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a penetrating silence. For Isidore, it is not the screaming that affects him when he finds himself alone, but completely and tangibly silent:

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power… It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen…it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TVG set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! (Dick 20)

The silence begins when he is no longer in the presence of someone else—whether it is on television or the company of the androids. Yet he makes a clear distinction, or doesn’t realize the importance of the company the television provides:

“The silence, all at once penetrated…You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all… I mean, before they came here I could stand it, being alone in the building…You can’t go from people to nonpeople. In panic he thought, I’m dependent on them.” (Dick 204)

But he couldn’t stand it. Not really. Before the company of the andoirds, he was dependent on Buster Friendly to fill the void (very similar to the “walls” from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451). For me, the feelings of both internal screaming and silence, the feeling of desperation and unhappiness and loneliness, is a reminder that everything in life is only for now. Impermanence is an important belief in my life, yet I find myself clinging to things just as Isidore does.

But I don’t want to spend my entire blog focusing on the screaming that seems to tear you apart and the silence that creates paranoia of isolation. These, I feel, are not concrete enough to create a clear boundary between animals and humans and technology. Of course, what I personally believe here is arbitrary, but I’d like to leave this more as an open-air topic. Strictly keeping to my own feelings, not even comparing to the feelings of other humans… because, I cannot speak even for them.

One topic in “Animals” that I thought a interesting, and even a little controversial, was the use of cartoons in relation to animals, “Anthropomorphic animal narratives are generally denigrated as ‘childish’, thereby associating a dispassionate, even alienated perspective with maturity” (“Animals” 279-280). Call me childish, but last year (for Project 2 in Dr. Bump’s class), I considered writing about the use of Disney characters in comparison to books such as Alice in Wonderland, Black Beauty, and The Jungle Book to bring about awareness of animals. From a young age, these stories create a sense of compassion and sympathy for animals by personifying them. As many people in the class presented in their road maps, some of their earliest relationships with animals was through story telling. I have always been a proponent for children’s literature, seeing it as a genre within itself rather than disregarding it altogether. The messages are important, but written in such a way that they are aimed towards a younger audience.

Baker says, “non-disnified images of animals might be promoted” (“Animals” 280). Does this mean, then, that The Jungle Book might hold some significance in relation to understanding animals simply because the animals are not given “large eyes” and “big heads”?:

“Look at me,” said Bagheera; and Mowgli looked at him steadily between the eyes. The big panther turned his head away in half a minute.
“That is why,” he said, shifting his paw on the leaves. “Not even I can look thee between the eyes, and I was born among men, and I love thee, Little Brother. The others they hate thee because their eyes cannot meet thine; because thou art wise; because thou hast pulled out thorns from their feet—because thou art a man.” (The Jungle Book 30)

But with the creation of Disney’s The Jungle Book, is the message lost? Is it impossible for a new message to be created, or even a message to exist in such a cartoonish medium? This, I completely disagree with. And I use the evidence of the class—their ideas of animals, their empathy towards animals, stemmed from an early age of reading and watching children stories.

Berger brings up the issue, “When we look at animals, they return our gaze, and in that moment we are aware of both likeness and difference” (“Animals” 278). This conflicts with Kipling’s The Jungle Book. But first, what is the thrust of The Jungle Book? Is it to further strengthen the border between animals and humans, by illustrating that man must live with man, and animals with animals? (I think the stories are morals more about communities rather than the separation of species.)

As an ending note, here’s a video of the world’s first soccer match between man and machine–a clear intention of blurring the boundaries: