Animals in film, however, is a big topic. The way they are anthropomorphized, even when they are live-action “subjects” versus a live-action protagonist. The two films Free Willy vs Life of pi begs the question of what we expect out of animals and the way we ignore their true nature. Of course, training animals to behave in a way that “cajoles” the audience into believing that a killer whale would behave the way that the fictional whale behaves in the film is dependent on what has progressively been considered an inhumane (and dangerous) practice.  This all ties together, so I think if you combine your research with basic concepts of narrative structure and audience expectations of characters (even if they are non-speaking animals) could give you the focus that you need to fully develop an argument.  As indicated in my example above, it would likely make sense to focus on one or two films to prove your point, especially if you can get detailed information on how the animals were trained for the film.*Combine research with basic concepts of narrative structure and audience expectation of characteristics
For instance in the “life of pi”

*Part of the aforementioned Hollywood Reporter investigation into Hollywood animal abuse focused on troubling incidents from the set of the Oscar-winning movie “Life of Pi.” The film’s co-star is a Bengal tiger and the real-life animal used in the movie was reportedly treated poorly on set — and his mistreatment was allegedly covered up by the American Humane Association. King, the real-life tiger used in the movie, nearly drowned during the shoot, according to people on set.

-A 12-page essay -times new roman  -scholarly review articles

Marla V. Anderson1 and Antonia J. Z. Henderson

Pernicious Portrayals: The Impact of Children’s
Attachment to Animals of Fiction on
Animals of Fact

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the lack of distinction between human and
nonhuman animals in the fantastic world of children’s literature
and film results in distorted representations of intelligence, capa-
bilities, and morality of nonhuman animals. From the perspective
of attachment theory, the paper shows how humans internalize
and sustain misrepresentations throughout adulthood and how
these misrepresentations influence relationships with real animals.
An ongoing search for the ideal “Walt Disney dog” of childhood
jeopardizes relationships to companion animals. Trying to recreate
the fantasy dog by genetic manipulation of a real animal’s char-
acteristics results in needless distress for companion animals.
Because the companion does not meet expectations engendered
by childhood stories, normal dog behaviour—chewing, digging,
and barking—may result in relinquishing the dog for adoption and
subsequent euthanasia. Shifting to the scientific realm, the paper
discusses the on-going debate on the study of animals’ human-
like abilities, most salient in ape language programs. In closing, the
paper discusses the disservice done to real animals as illusions of
childhood and subsequent misunderstandings leave them judged
by impossible, anthrocentric standards—which they rarely can
fulfill.

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Two interrelated issues—nonhuman animals’ similarity to humans and their
moral status—often form the basis of a debate on controversial social prac-
tices involving animals. This paper argues that expectations engendered
by childhood stories are one reason these issues play a key role in determining
what social practices are acceptable. Within the magic of children’s stories, a
peculiar transformation emerges: The human-animal distinction dissolves,
and resulting distorted representations are not benign. These internal rep-
resentations shape the human role, responsibility, and culpability in the human-
animal dynamic. Childhood attachment to animal characters and stories
unconsciously may influence adult behavior toward animals. Children love
stories and their characters. Through narrative, children begin to understand
the world and give meaning to otherwise frightening or challenging events.
When the animal characters to whom children become attached are highly
romanticized, internal representations form, engendering impossible ex-
pectations for actual animals. This discussion illustrates how children
internalize these pervasive misrepresentations. The paper looks at conse-
quences—the impact for companion animals, the effect on the scientific ques-
tions posed, and the subsequent formulation of the science used to answer
them.

As our primary information source, the media plays a major role in shaping
the way we think about nonhuman animals (Liska, 1999), our attitudes, and
even our public policies (Jones, 1997). A 1994 graphic campaign outlining
images of rodeo cruelty led to a California legislature bill banning horse trip-
ping. Kidd and Kidd (1990) found that children’s experiences with compan-
ion animals, movies, television, books, and school affected children’s attitudes
toward pets. Below, we highlight just a few examples, among thousands, of
cherished and misrepresented animal characters.

Children’s stories misrepresent animals predominantly through fantastic
anthropomorphism, evidenced in how animals communicate, think, and act
as moral agents. The contemporary, scientific view supports a tentative con-
sensus that although animals do not have reflective consciousness—they are
not aware that they are aware—they do have phenomenal consciousness—
they are aware of their environment—(Dawkins, 2001; O’Connell, 2000;
Pepperberg & Lynn, 2000). This is very different from the animals of children

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stories who often are more aware, and definitely more astute, than their
human counterparts.

In the 1995 Disney film by the same name, Balto is the ideal hero. A wolf-
dog cross, he is a prime example of a Disney character who does not lack
any moral virtues. Balto is more interested in saving the life of a little girl
than running with the gorgeous husky who “owns” her. Balto, evidently based
very loosely on a true story, is a sentimental account of how a dog not only
risks the perils of a winter blizzard to bring back life-saving medicine but
also comes to terms with the fact that he is a “mixed breed.”

Another distorted canine, Buck, plays the lead character in the classic Call of
the Wild (London, 1903). Buck is ultra-strong, independent, loyal, courageous,
and intelligent. He is an inspiring role model, often persevering through sheer
strength of will. Super Buck with his super strength manages to pull 1000
lbs to win much needed money for the destitute John Thornton. Yet, he is
sensitive. Buck, as the ultimate idealized animal character, is capable of falling
in love. Notably, it is the human, John, with whom Buck falls in love.

A poignant example of another distorted canine comes from Twain (1904).
In this tragic story, the dog’s reward for saving a human infant is to be beaten
mercilessly when the heroic deed is mistaken for canine aggression. When
human ignorance then brings about the death of one of the dog’s puppies,
the mother lies down by the grave, thinking “I saw he was going to plant
the puppy, and I was glad, because it would grow and come up a fine hand-
some dog” (p. 31). As the weeks pass and no puppy springs from the earth,
we learn that “a fright has been stealing upon” the canine mother, and that
she will soon die of starvation and heartbreak (p. 31).

Although dogs perhaps are one of the most prominent examples of distorted
animals, several species have been misrepresented: the lions and the hyenas
in the Lion King, the bears in Brother Bear, and the sea creatures of The Little
Mermaid. In the more recent film, Ice Age, a sneaky saber-tooth lion, a sweet
sloth, and their cantankerous leader, a wooly mammoth, teach a lesson in the
value of family, loyalty, and forgiveness. They lay shame to the human hunters
who are responsible for killing the mammoth’s “wife” and “child” by under-
taking an arduous journey to return an infant to the baby’s human family.
The characters in Ice Age represent a new phase of anthropomorphism. They

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are the ultimate portrayal of human character in animal form: They, too, have
flaws. The sloth is awkward and slow, the mammoth often apathetic, and the
saber-tooth lion plays a key role in the separation of the infant from his
family.

Non-animated children’s films also highlight the escapades of amazing ani-
mals. The Air Bud series stars the golden retriever, Bud, a canine version of
Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, who foils criminal plans, understands
English, and can tell time. Andre the Seal is another example of embellishing
a human-animal bond with an emotional, human-centered perspective. The
case of Andre’s unwavering attachment to his caretakers is made more salient
when many of the heart-warming actions of the seal are based in reality. Even
when he was old and blind, Andre swam 200 miles each spring to return to
his adopted family. Other equally plausible explanations of this behavior (a
ready food source, migration, or simply habit) are ignored in favor of a sen-
timentalized version of Andre’s enduring love.

It is easy to see why children love the animals found in children’s narratives.
These animals represent the archetypal characters—the despicable villains,
the great heroines, and heroes. They are the characters that capture hearts.
Balto, like countless canine heroes, is a paradigm of admirable qualities. He
infuses the phrase, “man’s best friend” with new meaning by becoming the
very best friend imaginable. In short, these stories create impossible characters—
characters with whom children strongly identify, engage in imaginary rela-
tionships, and include in their autobiographical narratives. The profound
emotional response to these characters may compromise our critical ability
to explore our own biases about how they are represented. The massive
“Global Disney Project” found that while most participants denied that Disney
had exerted a major influence in their lives (Phillips, 2001), their memories
of Disney were so positive that investigating the entertainment giant was
considered taboo (Wasko & Meehan, 2001). This defensiveness illustrates the
extent to which childhood narratives are held sacred. In the following sec-
tion, we explore how these sacred representations are maintained through-
out the lifespan.

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Misrepresentations Internalized: Attachment Relationships with
Animal Characters

The emotional response to children’s narrative is strikingly enduring. Images
of animal characters can stay with individuals for many years, and special
books often are revisited throughout their lives (Alexander, Miller, & Hengst,
2001). Bowlby’s (1979) attachment theory provides a theoretical basis as to
why this may be so. Bowlby introduced the “internal working model” to
explain the strong, “affectional” bonds that infants develop with caregivers.
Childhood attachment experiences with caregivers result in the development
of internal representations or working models that serve to shape, modify,
and maintain images of self, others, and self/other dynamics throughout the
lifespan. A central tenant of internal working models is that indeed they are
working models. That is, they are shaped by experience. As Crowell and col-
leagues note, attachment representations remain open to revision in light of
real experience (Crowell, Treboux & Waters, 2002). However, internal work-
ing models, though malleable, do not shift easily, and this relative persistence
may affect later relationships and functioning. In Bowlby’s own words:

whatever representational models of attachment figures and of self an indi-

vidual builds during his childhood and adolescence, tend to persist rela-

tively unchanged into and throughout adult life (p. 141) . . . and often continue

to do so despite repeated evidence that the model is inappropriate. . . . Such

biased perceptions and expectations lead to various misconceived beliefs . . .

false expectations . . . [and] inappropriate actions (p. 142).

A large body of research supports the tenacity of internal working models
(Burks, Dodge, Price, & Laird, 1999; Carlson, Sroufe, & Egeland, 2004). These
enduring models influence belief systems, shape attachment behaviors, and
determine future actions. However, because working models operate both
consciously and unconsciously, individuals often are unaware that early child-
hood representations may be replicated in our adult relationships and exert
a powerful and ubiquitous influence on our adult behavior.

Bowlby’s (1979) work has precipitated an enormous body of research, and
attachment theory has been used to explain a host of psychological phe-
nomena. Of particular interest to this discussion is the manner in which chil-
dren become attached to narratives. Story attachment is defined by Alexander

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et al. (2001) as “a strong and sustained emotional involvement with a par-
ticular story” (p. 374). Focusing on the emotional aspect of development,
Alexander’s team found that fundamental attachment behaviors arise in chil-
dren’s relationships to stories, often to the point of obsession. Children com-
monly requested the same stories several times a day, slept with favorite
books, and became inconsolable when prohibited from watching a favorite
movie. Further, these researchers found that children as young as two devel-
oped strong emotional attachments to stories and note that only a minimal
level of cognition is needed for story attachment.

Research shows that children’s ability to differentiate between fantasy and
reality develops slowly. Children as young as three can distinguish a verbal
truth from a verbal lie, and six-year-olds consistently are able to recognize
verbal deception (Lee, Cameron, Doucette, & Talwar, 2002). However, it takes
up to nine years for children reliably to understand non-verbal deception. In
addition, Harris (1991, cited in Lee et al., 2002) argues. “Despite their ability
to distinguish sharply between fantasy and reality, young children might still
remain unsure of the rules that govern transformation between those two
realms” (p. 122). Moreover, children’s ability to differentiate the real from the
fantastic may be compromised unintentionally because—even as adults—we
tend to normalize the humanness of animal characters.

In a 2003 study of Disney’s depiction of familial relationships, Tanner, Haddock,
Zimmerman, & Lund (2003) argued that Disney’s prevailing message was
the inevitability of romance whenever a man and woman met. They illustrated
this with the Disney characters Vixey and Todd from The Fox and the Hound.
However, Vixey and Todd are not a man and a woman at all, but two foxes
(Tanner et al.). Creators of children’s narrative also may use special effects
that blur the fantasy/reality distinction even further. The animated film Balto
begins and ends with a non-animated visit of a little girl and her grandmother
to Balto’s statue in New York’s Central Park, serving at once to highlight the
heroism of Balto’s deeds and to reinforce the reality of the tale.

Alexander et al.’s (2001) work suggests that the line between fantasy and
reality further erodes as children weave new stories about their own experi-
ences and include story characters to whom they have become attached.
Ultimately, however, what is important is not whether children perceive ani-
mal characters as real but rather their attachment response to these characters.

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As Davies (1997) puts it, “Knowing that something is imaginary thus does
not seem to lessen its perceived power” (p. 13). Alexander’s team reported
that two of the children cried urgently each time they watched Bambi’s mother
die. Put another way, although children may recognize that cartoons, espe-
cially, are not real, they still may be reluctant to let go of fantasy. Harris (1991,
cited in Davies, 1997) found,

Children up to the age of 7 or 8 were quite capable of understanding the

concept of a fantasy, or imaginary animal, and they were able to test for

themselves that imaginary creatures were not inside a box. However, they

still showed reluctance to put their fingers into the box, in case their fingers

were bitten by the animal. (p. 13)

Perhaps it is this reluctance that explains why attachment to distorted ani-
mal representations is able to gain such an enduring hold.

Consequences for the Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationship

Misrepresented animal characters have the capacity to inspire social practices
that serve the best interests of their actual counterparts. Blount (1974, p. 251),
reports that Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty had “enormous influence for good in
the treatment of horses and helped to abolish the bearing rein”—a leather
strap on the carriage horse’s harness designed to hold the horse’s head in an
unnaturally and uncomfortably high position. The elevated carriage, fash-
ionable at the time, was thought to enhance a look of equine regality and
stature. Black Beauty, elevated to a human psyche, “bore a troubled life with
great courage and patience” (p. 250). As a result, Blount argues, “it is impos-
sible to read about the horse’s sufferings without being affected—no less so
because a human voice is talking” (p. 251). Similarly, the Disney film Free
Willy, the tale of a boy and an orca, inspired a public call for the killer whale,
Keiko, to be returned to the wild.

Simons (2002) argues that instances of “strong” anthropomorphism have the
ability to challenge the way that we think about the human-animal dynamic
(p. 120). He argues that the film Babe (1995), the story of a piglet who believes
he is a sheep dog, is an instance of strong anthropomorphism in that several
of the strategies used in the film serve either to highlight the sufferings of

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the animals living in a human world or to question the differences between
animal and human. Simons considers much of the anthropomorphism found
in children’s literature “trivial” (p. 119). However, because these tales do not
teach morals regarding the animal experience or the actual relationship between
human and animal, he suggests that these anthropomorphic representations
may serve a positive function by inspiring people to treat animals with greater
decency. It is possible, and even likely, that these misrepresentations can trans-
form attitudes and behaviors toward animals globally in a positive fashion.
However, if we consider that groups characterized by their positive attitudes
and behaviors toward animal—such as moral vegetarians and animal rights
activists—presently exist on the fringe of mainstream society, it seems that
the lessons learned in the name of entertainment more often are corrupt than
compassionate.

The realization that animals are not like the characters from the stories to
which we are attached bears consequences. Many of our current animal hus-
bandry practices are justified by evaluating the extent to which a given species
is similar to humans. When expectations engendered by misguided repre-
sentations are not met, the way we relate to real animals—in all contexts—
is affected. Either we attempt to shape the object to meet our expectations or
we abrogate the source of disappointment.

Recreating the Disney Dog: The Impact for Companion Animals

In contemporary Western culture, the bond between companion animal and
caretaker all too often is tenuous at best. Kogan and Viney (1998) employed
an attachment perspective to examine the bonds that develop between humans
and their pets. Their study revealed that when a dog matched the caretaker’s
internal representation of what a dog should be, the bonds were relatively
stable. In contrast, unrealistic expectations and behavior problems were the
two main reasons bonds fail. Donaldson (1996) argues that unrealistic expec-
tations of animal behavior result in the erroneous conclusion that otherwise
normal or appropriate behavior is bad. Practically, this means that although
a canine companion may not be deserving of moral admiration for saving
the life of a drowning child, neither would the canine companion deserve
moral condemnation for chewing up a pair of shoes. As Donaldson puts it:

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As soon as you bestow intelligence and morality, you bestow the responsi-

bility that goes along with them. In other words, if the dog knows it’s

wrong to destroy furniture yet deliberately and maliciously does it, remem-

bers the wrong he did and feels guilt, it feels like he merits a punish-

ment, doesn’t it? Well, that’s just what dogs have been getting—a lot of

punishment. (p. 13)

That many of us seem firmly attached to the Walt Disney dog and, therefore,
attribute human intentions to canine actions often leads to drastic conse-
quences (Donaldson). Researchers estimate that animals who have been
dropped at a shelter and subsequently euthanized account for as many as
1/3 of canine deaths in the United States (Marston and Bennet, 2003).

That human-animal bonds do fail—at least on the human side of the rela-
tionship—is made more poignant because some animals also become attached
to their caretakers (Topal, Miklosi, Csanyi, & Doka, 1998). Dogs are unique
in that—as a result of domestication—they are capable of developing closer
attachments to human companions than to members of their own species
(Topal et al.). Research has found that dogs, given the opportunity, would
prefer to associate with humans than to associate with other canines (Marston
& Bennett, 2003, citing Tuber et al., 1996). Therefore, when caretakers neglect,
abandon, or relinquish their pets to a shelter, the animal must bear the brunt
of the broken bond.

The desire for our canine companions to meet our expectations also has lead
to breeding practices that favor anthropomorphic selection (Serpell, 2003).
Practices designed to produce characteristics more desirable to humans are
widely accepted in Western culture: (a) animals dressed in designer clothes;
(b) physical mutilation such as tail docking and ear cropping; and (c) com-
plete modification of genetic make up. These modifications often result in
adult dogs who have the proportions and the appeal of human infants, cre-
ating animals who may serve as surrogate children (Lawrence, 1986). They
also create varying degrees of suffering. English Bulldogs have been modified
genetically into a creature who endures numerous physical deformities. These
dogs suffer from sleep apnea, excessively labored breathing, and premature
death as a result of chronic oxygen deprivation. In addition, because of the
fashion of bulldogs with abnormally large heads and proportionately small

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hips, most must be born by Cesarean section. Serpell has described the Bulldog
as “the canine equivalent of a train wreck” (p. 93).

Our genetic manipulation does not rest with physical characteristics alone.
Serpell (2003) argues that characteristics such as “loyalty” and “fidelity” also
are the result of carefully planned breeding. Ironically, these breeding prac-
tices have lead to many behavioral problems: (a) separation-related problems
in dogs bred to be devoted exclusively to one person; (b) aggression prob-
lems in dogs bred to protect us; and (c) obsessive compulsive disorders in
dogs bred for high energy and activity—an activity level seldom compatible
with the modern caretaker’s life style (Mugford, 1995).

Therefore, in trying to create the ideal dog—our very own Buck or Balto—it
seems, we have failed and failed at the expense of our canine companions.
Moreover, companion animals are not alone in facing the bleak consequences
of our expectations. The shift from the domestic to the scientific realm reveals
that our paradoxical relationship with animals again has done them an egre-
gious disservice.

Scientific Questions and Anthropomorphic Answers: Still Looking for the

Human Element

In recent decades, animal rights advocates, inspired by Peter Singer, have
challenged scientific practices that lead to the suffering and death of some 50
million animals in the laboratory in the United States each year (Shapiro,
1998). Psychological research in particular has been the focus of compelling
criticism. Singer (1990) asks if animals are so similar to human beings that
research on animals is justified, then how can we justify painful research on
animals that ethically is not permitted on human beings? Some medical
researchers argue that the use of animal research subjects is justified because
animal lives do not have the same value as healthy, adult humans due to
their lack of moral status (Fox, 1986). Moral status as an ethical criterion
speaks to the claim that, at least in this one important way, animals are not
like us. When animals do not meet the expectations engendered from child-
hood stories, our judgments about real animals, in all contexts, is jeopardized.
In the scientific realm, the repercussions are most evident in the on-going
debate over the anthropomorphic study of animals’ human-like abilities.

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The classic example is evinced with the infamous 1904 equine phenomenon
“Clever Hans,” who created a furor of excitement over his apparent mathe-
matical abilities and verbal understanding (Pfungst, 1965). The Clever Hans
story epitomizes the scientific goose chase precipitated by the inherent myopia
of the scientific method and human bias about animal capabilities. Rather
than extolling Hans’ remarkable natural abilities, the researchers, mired in
their methodology, sought only to fail to reject the null hypothesis that Hans
could not perform typically human actions. Naturally, it was discovered that
Hans was not performing the cognitive functions of arithmetic or language.
Rather, he was picking up the questioners’ body language—body language
that was imperceptible to the questioners and to the entire Berlin team of 14
learned doctors, scientists, and professors sent to investigate this unlikely
phenomenon. In the end, the academy gave little credence to the real
intelligence Clever Hans demonstrated. Feral horses communicate, not by
numbers or language, but almost exclusively by reading the subtlest body
cues of their herd mates to establish pecking order, find food and water, and
communicate danger (Budiansky, 1997; Houpt, 1998). Indeed, Clever Hans’
communication strategies exceeded those of his human examiners, such that
he fooled quite a number of very clever people for an extended period.

The so-called “Clever Hans phenomenon” (when researchers attribute human
abilities to animals) is still very much alive in contemporary primate language
programs. In recanting his original findings about the language prowess of
Nim Chimsky, Herbert Terrace, one of the first persons involved in an ape
language program, demonstrates how easy it is to misinterpret animal behavior
as human behavior (cited in Budiansky, 1998, p. 152). Budiansky argues that
one of the reasons misinterpretations may plague ape language projects is
due to the “degree of wishful thinking . . . apparent in some of these pro-
jects” (p. 152). Terrace admits, “I really wanted to communicate with a chim-
panzee and find out what the world looks like from a chimpanzee’s point of
view” (cited in Budiansky, p. 153). Perhaps the greatest challenges facing
primate language researchers are their own intense feelings and expectations,
potentially leading to false reporting and/or interpretations (Umiker-Sebeok
& Sebeok, 1980).

An ironic example of this wishful thinking is found in a popular children’s
book written by one of Terrace’s volunteer teachers. In this version, the twist

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ending (that Terrace recanted his prior scientific conclusions with regards to
Nim Chimsky’s speaking ability) is omitted. This story’s happy ending is that
Nim was indeed taught to communicate (Budiansky, 1998).

Umiker-Sebeok and Sebeok (1980) report a nearly “palpable” emotional com-
mitment from the scientists involved in primate language projects (p. 7), exac-
erbated by the paralleled enthusiasm from the public at large (Budiansky,
1998). Consider Fouts (2004) and his so-called “magical” relationship with
the chimpanzee Washoe:

Washoe has taught me that . . . personhood is something we share, and that

personhood goes beyond species classifications. She has taught me that

human arrogance is very lethal to our fellow beings on this planet, espe-

cially when it is combined with human ignorance . . . She has taught me

that compassion is one of our dearest traits, and that we should value it

above all others, including intelligence.

Magic, it seems, is not bound by the world of Disney. Miller (1978) claims,
“there is a magical or fantasy-like aspect to the idea that one’s expectancies . . .
can become true . . .” (cited in Umiker-Sebeok & Sebeok, 1980, p. 55). Magic
is reported in the relationship between Fouts and Washoe. Further, Savage-
Rumbaugh and Lewin (1994), who have been working on primate language
projects for the last several decades, report,

The first two years of an ape’s life are something of a magical time . . . If

they watch television, they come to see the patterns on the screen as rep-

resentations of other people and other apes in different places, rather than

just flickering images. A sense of imagination and narrative begins to emerge,

so that they become as interested in TV stories to which they can relate as

are human children. (p. xii)

Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin’s claim that Kanzi sees the flickering images
on the screen as representations draws our attention to an important point:
Animals are not the sole victims when it comes to misrepresentations in chil-
dren’s narratives. Disney films’ portrayal of the family often is too simplis-
tically positive, presenting unrealistic “happily ever after” endings (Tanner
et al., 2003), while their negative portrayal of mental illness also may result
in an “unrealistic and stereotypic view” (Lawson & Fouts, 2004, p. 312).

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The enforcement of stereotypical gender roles also is a common practice in
children’s narratives. The portrayal of bereavement in children’s literature
tends to reinforce gender roles of the stoic male and the crying female (Moore
& Mae, 1987). Children also are often misrepresented. In the 2001 film Spy
Kids, the children can be described aptly as super children, easily able to con-
quer their adult foes.

We are not calling on the authors of children’s narratives to strip their sto-
ries of all the super characters—animal or human—and limit their portray-
als to realistic representations. Nor do we mean to suggest that all
misrepresentations are negative. We do mean to draw attention to how un-
realistic portrayals of animals affect us and, perhaps, suggest that a more
balanced approach to animals in children’s narratives may be appropriate.
Much in the same way that awareness regarding the effects of misrepresent-
ing human characters have lead to new narratives—such as the recent deci-
sion of teen magazines to portray girls of all sizes and colors—celebrating
the typical traits of animals in children’s stories should not put an end to the
magic but serve to enhance it.

Finally, it is debatable whether Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin’s (1994) claim
that Kanzi comes to see television images as representations could be sub-
stantiated. Although primates do seem to make representations, it is unclear
as to what representations they are making (Suddendorf & Whiten, 2001).
It may be fair to say, however, that if apes are capable of internalizing the
representations of humans portrayed by the media, it is unlikely that their
disappointed expectations would affect humans negatively in a similarly
far-reaching fashion.

Conclusion: Conflating Consequences and Causes

Clearly, a multitude of factors affect an individual decision to give up a dog
for adoption, become an outspoken advocate against animal testing, or devote
one’s scientific practice to the search for human-like capabilities in animals.
That said, internal representations based on beloved characters in children’s
stories result in severely distorted expectations of what constitutes appro-
priate animal behavior. Imagine if children’s stories were to bridge the gap
between the ideal and the actual, where dogs who behaved like dogs were

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not deviant and animal amorality was not a license to condone animal
suffering.

Unfortunately, focusing on a given animal’s natural proficiencies is easier
said than done. What will happen to the magic of the story if the animals
are not able to talk and sing? This is a fair and troublesome question, which
makes ever more salient the problem with anthropomorphizing in science.
If we do not understand animals from our own perspective, how can we
understand them at all?

In examining cultural images, Baker (1993) argues that animals do not rep-
resent themselves to us; rather, we define and represent them. Consequently,
animal representations are founded on human interests and cannot, in any
sense, claim to be true. Consider Gowdy’s (1998) concept of an elephant’s
perspective, not as we would represent the elephants but as elephants rep-
resent themselves—as they see themselves in relation to their world, rather
than ours. When readers see that the supreme beings, the “She-Ones” (ele-
phants), have a world that has nothing to do with human reality or values,
they are forced to face our typically invisible anthrocentricity. In fact, “hind-
leggers” (humans) are significant only because of the threat posed by their
brutality. However, despite Gowdy’s attempt to show us an animal world
through an animal lens it remains the case that none of us, including Gowdy,
can ever know what elephants actually are experiencing.

Apart from our inability to represent accurately the animal experience, Baker
(1993) also points to the extensive and paradoxical manner in which we use
animals as symbols. This allows a more sinister interpretation of children’s
stories to take shape. Perhaps children’s stories are a consequence, not a cause,
of our ambivalent and negative social practices involving animals. In our
everyday lives, we exploit animals for our own purposes—to work for us,
entertain us, and feed us. Using animals to tell human stories similarly serves
our own ends as it simplifies, and makes more appealing, complex human
issues and emotions—emotions that animals may not even experience.

Common opinion seems to hold that maturity eventually will temper the
emotional attachment children feel toward these characters. We would sug-
gest that childhood emotional attachments—more often than not—are imper-
vious to the process of maturity. Research illustrates that attachment
representations are remarkably stable across the life span, and there is no

310 • Marla V. Anderson and Antonia J. Z. Henderson

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correlation between attachment security and age (Scharfe & Bartholomew,
1994). Far from being insignificant, these characters have a considerable impact
on the way children’s internal representations develop. Consequently, mis-
guided representations greatly influence the way adults interact with animals.
Adults may hope they will discover the animals of their memories and dreams
or they may resent ever having believed those dreams. The fact remains: The
animals in children’s stories are illusions. These illusions place the worth of
animals in human terms that animals can never fulfill. So, in the way we
treat our pets, practice our science, and formulate our answers, animals suffer.

* Marla V. Anderson and Antonia J. Z. Henderson, Simon Fraser University

Note

1 Correspondence should be sent to Antonia J. Z. Henderson, 12 N. Delta Ave.,

Burnaby, BC. V5B-1E6, Canada. E-mail: zamoyska@shaw.ca.

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Aga

i

nst the Image:
Herzog and the Troubling Politics
of the Screen Animal

Paul Sheehan

Late in 1968, while students in the European capitals were still
dreaming of revolution, another version of it was being enacted several
thousand miles away. The instigator was West German filmmaker
Werner Herzog, directing his second full-length feature on the island of
Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands. Entitled Even Dwarfs Started Small, the
film describes the discontent brewing among a community of dwarves
in an institution on the island, and the insurrection they launch against
their keepers. The revolt is by turns, farcical, incompetent and destructive
– setting fire to various objects, smashing windows and crockery, and
killing a pig. In the grotesque climax to the film, a monkey is tied to a
cross and symbolically “crucified,” then paraded about in a nightmarish
caricature of a victory march.

It is not hard to detect here a response to the événements of the previous
spring. The student radicals are intellectual midgets, Herzog seems to be
saying, mounting an ill-considered charade whose pretensions mask
the sheer futility of the exercise. As Thomas Elsaesser notes: “The film
issued a challenge to the German Left about what Herzog saw as the
impossibility of combining political revolution with radical subjectivity”
(1989:157). But even though Herzog denies that the film was specifically
alluding to May 68 and its aftermath, he admits that he was unmoved
by that particular historical moment. “I knew the revolution would not
succeed,” he says, “because it was rooted in such an inadequate analysis
of what was really going on, so I did not participate” (2002: 56). Years
later, when Herzog is making Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian jungle, stories of
exploitation and maltreatment appear in the German press, and a
makeshift “tribunal” is set up to try him in absentia. Again, the filmmaker
is dismissive of his critics. The tribunal, he says, was just a “group of
doctrinaire left-wing ideologues, another sad leftover of 1968” (184).

Following Fitzcarraldo, Herzog’s international stock dwindled, as he
concentrated more and more on documentary filmmaking. His return to
public attention came in 2005 with Grizzly Man, a portrait of the self-

© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2008 117

Substance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008

118 PaulSheehan

styled “kind warrior” Timothy Treadwell. Herzog’s method was to
provide a context and commentary for Treadwell’s footage of the thirteen
summers he spent in the Alaskan wilds—living in the proximity of bears,
as their supposed “protector,” and subsequently perishing at the claws
of a particularly savage grizzly, in 2003. As the film’s title—and indeed, !
its ostensive message—indicate, Treadwell’s fate is a cautionary tale of |
human-animal relations: respect the boundary between the two, it tells I
us, or suffer the consequences.^ Yet Herzog is just as critical of Treadwell’s
attempted “activism,” his claims to be siding with nature against
poachers and federal authorities. The real boundary, implies Herzog, is
not only the unbridgeable gap between human beings and animals, but i
also the disparity between Treadwell’s political posturing on behalf of i
the grizzlies, and any objective benefit presumed to derive from it.

Herzog’s antipathy to overt political discourse is well documented. ¡
“[B]ecause I have never been into using the medium of film as a political
tool,” he says, “my attitude really put me apart from most other
filmmakers” (2002: 56). The position Herzog has consistently adopted
since he started making films has been that of the counter-revolutionary. ;
His concern is not so much with systems of injustice or oppression as ¡
with the suffering, isolated individual, whose alienation is existential ¡
rather than political, and for whom the only “cure” is ecstatic release or
visionary excess rather than a reconfiguring of social relations. Too
pessimistic for genuine social critique, Herzog’s films depict situations in
which myth displaces pohtics, and the irrational takes precedence over ^
the analytical. Elsaesser sums this up as Herzog’s “mystical romanticism,” ¡
and suggests that it manifests itself through “his unusual visual style, i
his unconventional narratives, his outsiders, recluses, madmen and!
outcasts, his love of excess, exhaustion and extremes” (1989: 292).

Yet despite his disavowal of direct political involvement, Herzog’s
obsession with marginal figures lines up with his abiding interest in
animals; and this, in turn, leads him into the terrain of politics. For !
Herzog’s animals are, in a real sense, politicized. The ways they are used ;
in his films have implications for the cinema as a medium, and for the |
changes that it is currently undergoing—changes that threaten toj
eliminate the uniquely unsettling qualities conveyed by the
cinematographic animal. In the discussion that follows, I seek to show
how Herzog’s deanthropomorphized screen animals exemplify a
pressing, acute politics of animal being, one that both reveals and puts i
into question the cardinal tenets of a medium that is founded on thej
metaphysical privileging of human beings over animals.

Substance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008

Herzog and the Screen Animal

Troubling Animals: Between Documentary and Dreams

The cinema is born with the movement of animals—a horse jumping,
a seagull in flight, some fish swimming in a tank, a cat licking its paws
and drinking from a bowl. The acknowledged pioneer in the field is
Eadweard Muybridge, and the animal studies he began in the early 1870s.
To capture the movement of a galloping horse, Muybridge set twenty-
four cameras up side-by-side along a track, attached threads to the
shutters, and stretched the threads across the field crossed by the horse.
The threads thus acted as trip-wires, activating the shutters in split-
second succession. The images were then developed, copied by hand
onto glass cylinders, and loaded into Muybridge’s “zoopraxiscope,” a
kind of prototype movie projector. Though technically the images were
painterly rather than cinematic, film critic and theorist André Bazin
nevertheless deems the galloping horse experiment to be “the first series
of cinematographic images” (2004:18).

Around the same time as Muybridge’s “photographic investigation,”
the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey published a book entitled La
Machine animale {Animal Mechanism [1873]). Following Muybridge’s
example—his photographs were published in 1879—Marey developed a
technique of animated photography known as “chronophotography,” a
contribution to animal studies that involved recording a whole series of
movements on one photographic plate (including, most famously, a dozen
images of a seagull in flight [see Braun 66]). In addition to birds, Marey
took chronophotographic images of dogs, horses, elephants, fish and
various insects.^

As these examples indicate, by the time Auguste and Louis Lumière
were recording their actualities—non-fiction films that document an
event, or place, or thing, and are not incorporated into a larger work—
there was a tradition of using animals to demonstrate cinematographic
technology. Continuing the tradition, the Lumières’ first catalogue of
actualities includes the works La Voltige (also known as Horse Trick Riders),
Aquarium, and Le Déjeuner du chat (See Fieschi et al. 14-17).

Why should animals be so important for early filmmakers? Although
the movies exist primarily to show movement of all kinds, those aspirant
cinematographers Muybridge and Marey hit upon ways of arresting
motion. Thanks to both their efforts, the mysterious dynamism of animal
locomotion—in which movement is conceived of as a form of inscription,
or “automatic writing,” carried out by nature—could first of all be fixed,
and then deciphered. François Dagognet (1992) refers to this kind of
movement as a “trace,” and sees Marey’s achievement as lying in making

Substance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008

120 PaulSheehan!

it visible, in revealing to the naked eye what otherwise lies beneath the
threshold of h u m a n perception. So just as Muybridge proved;
incontrovertibly that a galloping horse does, indeed, have all four hooves
on the ground at a particular point in its stride, Marey solved the mystery !
as to how a cat, when dropped from any height, long or short, always !
lands on its feet. j

The kinetic animal, then, is an entirely fitting subject for nascent!
cinematography. Kineticism is associated with life – the vitality of i
animate, sentient life. Exploring this association, Akira Lippit proposes a ‘
congenital link between animals and film technology: “Cinema is an
animal, animality a form of technology, technology an aspect of life. A life
forged in the radical reanimation of the conditions of vitality as such”
(2002: 20). This evocative, compressed formulation is supported,
paradoxically, by the fact that early cinema was also concerned with
documenting animal death—as Thomas Edison’s notorious 1903 actuality, !
Electrocuting an Elephant, amply demonstrates. I

From the early 1880s, Edison had been waging a marketing war !
against his rival, George Westinghouse, over electric power distribution.
Edison’s innovation was DC (direct current), which he argued was safer
and more efficient than Westinghouse’s AC (alternating current). To
further his interests, he mounted a propaganda crusade highlighting the
dangers of AC, in the hope it would be outlawed by government
regulation. Theory or statistics alone could not win public support, so i
Edison opted instead for high-profile public demonstrations, using AC
to electrocute stray cats and dogs.^ Electrocuting an Elephant could be seen
as the coup de grâce oí his campaign, arresting proof that even a five-ton
sentient mass cannot resist the lethal effects of Westinghouse’s electrical
system.

Edison’s sixty-second film shows the elephant moving into the
foreground of the shot and shuffling its feet, which then begin to smoke,
as the electrical current is switched on. In quick succession the animal
falls, briefly quivers, and is still. The no-longer-kinetic animal has
undergone a grim, perturbing change. For to say that it is “no more,” and
that the film merely documents its death throes, is not quite true. As
Lippit notes, an uncanny transference has taken place, through the
recording of the actuality, which has illuminated a “spectral metaphysic
of technology.” The film recording, as it were, “transfers the anima of the
animal, its life, into a phantom archive […] The animal survives its death
as a film, as another form of animal, captured by the technologies of
animation” (2002:18,19). The congenital link between animals and cinema
persists, even in the face of on-screen expiration.^

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Herzog and the Screen Animal 121

But the prevalence of screen animals nevertheless undergoes a
downturn once these early-cinema actualities are overtaken by the
industrial might of the feature-film industry.^ The emphasis shifts from
documentation to dreams, from recording the world in its actuality to
probing the dream-life that lies beneath or beyond that world—whether
it be the idealized products of Hollywood’s “dream factory” or more
unsettling oneiric explorations that are the provenance of art cinema.
The shift is formalized in a well-known adage: “Never work with
children or animals.” Though attributed to the actor W. C. Fields, famous
for his misanthropic temper, the maxim has since become the slogan for
a certain economic logic.

As the costliest of the arts, film is also the riskiest, requiring stricter
controls over its production outlay than any other medium. The quest to
control and make purposive everything that is put into the frame, to
eliminate as much as possible the aleatory and unplanned, renders
children and animals potential rogue elements in an economically
rationalist operation. This imperative also conditions our relationship
with the screen, issuing in an unspoken axiom: if film is the most planned
of the arts, then every aspect of a mise-en-scène must be the outcome of
conscious deliberation.

The stringency of this axiom, however, is alleviated to some extent
by the tension underpinning the filmic image. Because “reality” is the
material for filmmaking, the received belief that everything is deliberate
and purposive is accompanied by a resolute, but less insistent disbelief,
an incredulity that this might not always be the case; i.e., that spontaneous
elements (imported by, say, children or animals) might escape the
director’s controlling hand and show up on the screen. So although feature
filmmaking seems to be founded on the expulsion of chance, accident and
error from the image, there is always an incipient breach where such
contingencies might appear. Animals, I want to suggest, are one of the
chief vehicles for this appearance, in the challenges they pose to the formal
and financial controls exerted by the medium. If they are “anti-cinema,”
it is because they thwart the techniques of manipulation and control
that are the chief operating principles of feature-film production.

Tied in with this is the phenomenology of performance that has
developed through the dominant acting tradition of the West. The theatre
revolution inaugurated by Henrik Ibsen, and inherited by the cinema, is
one in which, as Peter Szondi puts it, “truth is that of interiority” (16),
and its locus is the vital, imperishable core of the self. When an actor
performs on screen, we do not just see a human being reciting lines and
playing out actions. We impute to these things a history of behavior and

Substance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008

122 Paul Sheehan

experience, of which the scene or shot before us is but a cross-section in
time, i.e., to use the language of phenomenology, we “intend” these things.
The actor thus implicitly carries within himself or herself a rich inner
life, conveyed as motivation, purpose, intention. This means that when
we witness a “performance,” we read it as an expression of psychological
concentration projecting beyond itself.

A generation after Ibsen, Konstantin Stanislavsky declared the
“spiritual” or “inner” life to be the actor’s supreme goal. All great actors
achieved distinction, writes Stanislavsky, by labouring mightily to show
that “[t]heir bodies were at the call and beck of the inner demands of
their wills” (1962: 463). Philip Auslander affirms the force and reach of
this overdetermined connection:

Theorists as diverse as Stanislavsky, Brecht and Grotowski all
implicitly designate the actor’s self as the logos of performance; all
assume that the actor’s self precedes and grounds her performance
and that it is the presence of this self in performance that provides the
audience with access to human truths. (2002: 54)

By these lights, the onus is placed on the performer to manifest more than
just the performance, to extend beyond the visible and into the inferential
realm of subjectivity and the implication of a complex inner world.

“Animals are ‘anti-cinema'”: this statement does not just mean that
animals confound the notion of cinema as control and manipulation of
the image. It also means that they are anti-performance, at odds with the
metaphysics of identity implicit in the screen logic that separates human
actors from animal “performers.” Screen animals do not possess histories,
as such, and can only “perform” in the sense of being trained (or perhaps
rather compelled) to carry out certain tasks for the camera. Unlike with
human performances, the repetition of these tasks does not connote the
visible outline of an interior activity. Screen animals are, to borrow
Heidegger’s expression, “poor in world,” if by “world” we mean the
inner life projected by human actors. But because animals cannot occupy
this purposive world, they bring a kind of indeterminate otherness into
the frame, the otherness of the non-manipulable. Animals in feature films
are thus always to some degree “troubling,” as they break through the
falsely protective aura of the image, the aura that rules out the accidental
and the unintentional.

The alterity of animal being is something that feature filmmakers
have, since the dawn of the sound era, tried to suppress. The traditional
means of doing this is through the repertoire of anthropomorphic
techniques. Patrick Tort succinctly sums up this repertoire, which
consists of:

Substance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008

Herzog and the Screen Animal 123

anthropomorphism of description (and its reverse effect, the
reduction of the human to the animal), finality of explanation,
projection of conscious intentionality on behavior that is instinctive,
appreciating the “miraculous” process of adaptation, generalization
of technological metaphors, accentuation of “similarities” between
animal and human, and, above all, between communitarian forms of
animal existence and characteristics of human society. (Fieschi et al.
33; my translation)

Though far from complete, this catalogue nevertheless makes clear
the compulsory inner life that screen animals are required to bear, along
with their screen human counterparts—a process that takes place on
both sides of the screen. Animals are trained to appear comprehensible
in human terms, to give their actions meaning and substance; and when
this falls short of the mark audiences, for their part, are “trained” to read
human characteristics into the most recondite behaviour. Yet the
combined work of both dispositions cannot bring the process to full
fruition.

Jonathan Burt notes, in his study oí Animals in Film, that “the animal
image is a form of rupture in the field of representation” (2000:11). Because
animal imagery is susceptible to a wide variety of metaphorical uses,
ambiguities proliferate, making such representations impervious to
definitive analysis. Akira Lippit makes a similar claim when he says
that “the figure of the animal disturbs the rhetorical structures of film
language. In particular, animals resist metaphorization” (2002: 13). The
kinds of rupture and disturbance animals provoke on screen make any
succession of feats, no matter how accomplished, something less than a
performance. The recalcitrant actuality of animal being inevitably stymies
all attempts at complete anthropomorphosis.

Screen Animal Ontology: Bazin, Godard, Bresson
The broad claims made above about the alterity of the

cinematographic animal are covertly supported by André Bazin, whose
writings inspired the New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s. As a theorist
of the “real,” Bazin sees the cinema as fundamentally dealing in objectivity,
in revealed reality (hence his criticisms of montage theory, pioneered by
Sergei Eisenstein, which tries to manipulate reality through editing). In
his most important theoretical work, “The Ontology of the Photographic
Image” (1952), Bazin argues that film is more than just a medium of
correspondence, striving to be equal to some predetermined state of affairs
in the world. Film, rather, manifests a more fundamental reality that is
consubstantial with that state of affairs. He writes:

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124 PaulSheehan

No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking
in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the
very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is
the reproduction. It is the model. […] Viewed in this perspective, the
cinema is objectivity in time. (2004: 14)

The difference between documentary and fiction is then dissolved,
because all film is documentary, in the sense that to switch on a camera
is, inevitably, to document something. As a theorist of the “real”—as’
opposed to conventional “realism”—Bazin is a proponent of the non-
manipulable. His claims are paralleled by the assertions I have been
making about animals on the screen: putting an animal in a feature film:
means documenting that animal, in a direct and fundamental way. i

In terms of the metaphysics of performance—the process wherebyl
actors make visible on screen the contours of subjectivity—Bazin’s theory;
provides ballast for attempts to disrupt or bypass that logic. Perhaps nô
filmmaker has striven more to achieve this than Jean-Luc Godard. In his
recent study of the director, Colin MacCabe describes Bazin’s theory oí
the image as “the ‘axiom’ from which all of Godard’s theorems derive”!
(62). The most notable of these theorems is the belief that film and reality
are co-extensive of each other. In Godard’s conception of cinema, filrri
does not represent reality, as such; rather, it becomes part of the reality;
itself. In MacCabe’s words: “For Godard there is no cinematic language
which can represent reality. This would suggest two separate registers
of being. What cinema, or the camera, does is to allow the possibility of
representing reality, of seizing it in a language which is continuously
variable” (79). I

Originally a critic, Godard put theory into practice when he made À
Bout de souffle {Breathless) in 1960; and then put practice back into theory
when he described the finished film as a documentary about Jean-Paul
Belmondo and Jean Seberg, the two lead actors. It is not too fanciful, then]
to see Godard as an (anti-conventional) “realist” filmmaker, in the
Bazinian sense: someone for whom film exists primarily to capture the
real. A key technique for achieving this is his way with actors. In a ver}?
early (1962) interview, he said: “I always use a written script, though it
may often be written only two or three minutes before shooting.” In his
view, the less time his actors have to prepare, the better. “I like to snealc
up on an actor from behind, leaving him to fend for himself, following his
groping movements in the part, trying to seize on the sudden, unexpected;
good moment which crops up spontaneously” (1998: 7).

Insofar as Godard’s cinema involves “subjectivity,” then, it has
nothing to do with actors. It originates, rather, on the other side of the

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Herzog and the Screen Animal 125

screen—in the point of view imposed by the camera. MacCabe writes:
“The spectator of a Godard film … is always aware of a shot as a shot, as
a particular angle on reality, and of the characters as characters, that is
to say as patterns of behavior w^hich cannot be unified under some notion
of a subjective psychology” (155). Godard himself expresses this in his
belief that “[t]he one who describes is part of the description” (1998:
192), from which he derives his reflexive working method, which could
be summed up as “to show and to show myself showing.” To film animals
then is always, applying the Godardian yardstick, to film the performer
rather than the performance, to present a refractory screen appearance
rather than a relay for implied subjectivity. An animal on screen
documents the real world in a direct way, capturing the movement of a
creature that is what it is: a creature devoid of simulated interiority.

Godard shows how Bazin’s theory plays out on the screen, and how
the compulsion for subjectivity can be countermanded. Before Godard,
Robert Bresson, too, was dedicated to the “real” —to the non-manipulable,
the accidental, the unknown. In Bresson’s cinema, even human beings
are deanthropomorphized. He insisted on his actors performing with
mechanical delivery of lines and gesture, to inhibit them from “acting,”
from presenting the kind of histrionic display that, he believed, originated
in the theatre and had been carried over to film, with disastrous
consequences. Early on in his career he dispensed with professional actors
altogether, preferring to work with non-actors, or what he referred to as
“models.” Consistent with this belief, Bresson never used the same non-
actors twice, lest they “learn” from their roles and start performing like
professionals. His unbending commitment to the real meant the rejection
of psychology, symbolism and spectacle; what remained, when all these
had been cleared away, was what he called “the bewitched real” (1977:
33).

Towards the end of his career, Bresson produced a compact book of
epigrams, entitled Notes on Cinematography, containing (in fragments) his
theory of cinema. The title refers to the sharp distinction Bresson draws
between what he calls “cinema films,” i.e. filmed theatre, and
“cinematography films,” a more creative kind of filmmaking composed
of, he says, “Images and sounds in a state of waiting and reserve” (1977:
33). Bressonian “cinematography” is an art that shuns the artifice of
drama, that avoids analysis and explanation, the kind of art that
“recomposes” (3). Gentral to Bresson’s method of “recomposure” is
capturing the unknown; as he states, “I require from a shot something I
am not fully conscious of when photographing” (59).

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126 Paul Sheehan

Where actors in “cinema films” can only convey seeming, Bresson’à
models strive for being; only they are “capable of eluding their own
vigilance, capable of being divinely ‘themselves'” (36). In confronting
the problem of the implied inner life that is the essence of “performance,”
his solution is to suppress “intentions” in his models (8), “The thing that
matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and,
above all, what they do not suspect is in them” (2), Bresson wants, as it were,
to hollow out that “richness of world” the actor is trained to bring to à
role, and to a film. But in making his actors “poor in world,” he does not
turn them into surrogate animals as such; rather, he uses them to explore
a more enigmatic kind of film presence,’^ As Keith Reader puts it’:
“Psychology, for Bresson, intrudes between surface and soul, between
matter and spirit, seeking to explain what can only be shown” (199():
140), Bresson thus thwarts the imperious demands of selfhood in order
to open pathways to the spiritual, to something larger and more
mysterious than subjective being. In a mystical more than religious
register, this objective could be seen as the starting-point for the cinema
of Werner Herzog and its strivings for the sublime, !

Herzog’s Bestiary: The Politics of “Pure Seeing” and Control i
In his reflections on the world of perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty

uses the term “animal life” to connote at least four categories of being:
animals, children, so-called “primitive peoples” and madmen. All
creatures of nature, Merleau-Ponty calls them “extreme or aberrant formis
of life and consciousness” (2004: 70), “Animal life,” in this four-fold sense
of the term, defines Herzog’s cinema since its inception. His career could
be seen as an ongoing attempt to dramatize ethnography, to show the
violence and poetry of human incursions into the natural world. The
place allotted to animals in this schema is thus a considerable one, and it
provides a nexus of sorts for Herzog’s most urgent concerns,

“Please do not ask me to explain,” said Herzog in 2001, when queried
about the ubiquity of animals in his works, •

Sure, I liice to use animals in the films, and I find it interesting to work |
with them, ,,, But the last thing I have is an abstract concept to explain I
how a particular animal signifies this or that, I just know they have an
enormous weight in my films, (2002: 98)

As a starting-point for establishing what those unstated reasons
might be, I suggest that animals help to shield Herzog’s work from those
who profit most from “abstract concept” explanations. For the director’s
antipathy to political dogma is matched by his distaste for academic
analysis (“Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates,” claims Herzog

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Herzog and the Screen Animal 127

[Greenberg 1976: 174]). Michael Peterson proffers an explanation as to
why animals have, until recently, been inimical to such forms of analysis.
He writes: “Animals often function in Western performance as bearers of
fluid, ambivalent, or reversible cultural capital. The presence of animals
in performance can signal its ‘low’ or popular appeal. … Intuitively,
animals would seem to move cultural products down-market” (2007:
40). From his own comments, “down-market” is precisely where Herzog
imagines his ideal audience to reside.

But what does his actual audience receive, for its attentiveness?
Thomas Elsaesser defines it through a telling distinction. On the one
hand, he says, there are politically engagé filmmakers whose films target
women or working-class audiences, and who believe that cinema can be
used to boost “militant self-awareness and self confirmation.” On the
other hand, there are those cinéastes (like Herzog) for whom film exists to
provide a “refuge from self-consciousness and self-awareness, [and] the
search for a kind of post-ideological space, attracting spectators to an
experience of ‘pure being as pure seeing'” (1989:5). That such an experience
may not be attainable need not concern us here; Elsaesser’s remark
addresses an aspiration, not an outcome.

Seeking a hallowed state of “pure being” does not, however, mean
the avoidance of all artifice and contrivance. To the contrary, Herzog
introduces what he calls “stylizations” into his films, both fictional and
documentary. As he remarks, “since my very earliest days as a filmmaker
I have to a certain degree worked in a similar way by transforming
things that are physically there into more intensified, elevated and
stylized images” (2002: 259). Such methods, normally out of bounds to
documentary filmmaking, include showing a subject’s “dreams,”
coaching him or her in what to say, and attaching imaginary epigraphs
to a film (“My films,” he admits, “are about as anthropological as the
music of Gesualdo and the images of Caspar David Friedrich.” [213])
Animals, however, resist such stylization, and I suggest that this
resistance is crucial to the singular effect Herzog seeks with his films.

The basis of this effect lies in Herzog’s beliefs about the image. For
him, an image is an occult thing, possessed of a numinous, quasi-mystical
power. We ignore this at our peril, he implies, in a 1977 interview: “For
such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are
adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory” (Kent
1977: 19). His use of the word “adequate” here is philosophically
suggestive. It invokes a definition of truth known by its Latin tag, Adequatio
intellectus et rei (adequacy or correspondence between mind and reality.

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128 Paul Sheehan

perception and object). This so-called “correspondence theory of truth”
goes back to the thirteenth-century writings of Thomas Aquinas, and
Quaestiones disputatae de veritatem {Disputed Questions on Truth). Herzog is,
then, adhering to a tradition of truth whose roots lie in mediaeval theology,
a connection he maintains by identifying with the anonymous artisans
and “master craftsmen” of that era, (See Herzog 2002:139-40) ¡

How does “adequacy” work in the context of the cinematographic
animal? The question is a fraught one because animal images per se aré
often seen as a kind of mendacity. Jonathan Burt, for example, writes:
“Even notions of authenticity are problematized because of the sense
that the naturalness of the animal is always going to be corrupted in the
process of becoming an image. … [A]ny form of representation will be
either a fiction or in some way falsely motivated” (2002:166), Herzog, by
contrast, believes—and wants his audience to join him in this—that the
image has a privileged relationship to reality, that it can convey moré
than just a second-hand gathering of signs by “outwitting,” as it were,
the diktats of representation. Pivotal to the experience of “pure seeing,]’
animals work to counteract what Herzog calls the “accountant’s truth” —
rational, logical, technocratic—which, as we saw earlier, is subtended
by the ideology of control, both formal and fiscal, j

And yet, in loosening himself from that ideology, Herzog has not so
much escaped it as introjected it. Richard Eder indicates the lengths to
which he goes in obtaining his images: “[Herzog] uses camera and
laboratory w^ork, an extraordinary eye and a more extraordinary
patience, waiting days for the proper quality of fog” (1977: 26), His
direction of actors, too, is no less exacting. Seen in this light, Herzog’s
assault on the metaphysics of performance situates him closer to Bresson
than to Godard, In Heart of Glass (1976), however, he goes further thari
Bresson—who often wore down his “models” until they were incapablje
of mustering any technique—by putting his cast under hypnosis, tp
obtain an even more intense display of other-worldly distraction, Herzog
is equivocal about this aspect of his reputation. “I like to direct landscapes
just as I like to direct actors and animals” (2002: 81), he says, addressing
the myth that he alternately fuels and disdains. I

When a reputation such as this (“megalomania” is the epithet of
choice for Herzog’s detractors) is coupled with an aversion to direct
political engagement, and a quasi-medieval belief in the power and truth
of images, one could easily conclude, as Eric Rentschler does, that the
“virulent fatalism” of the films betrays a deeply “undialectical view Of
things” (1982: 30). Its polar opposite might be seen in the critical urgency

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Herzog and the Screen Animal 129

of a Godard film, where almost every cut is a form of intervention, forcing
the viewer to confront the exigencies of his or her position in relation to
the flow of images and sounds. In obtaining the kinds of images that he
deems “adequate for our civilization,” Herzog does not provide a space
for counter-argument, or for any kind of reflexive spectatorship.” The
only fitting responses to the “pure seeing” experience are awe, disquiet
and abandonment. (Herzog, not surprisingly, dismisses Godard as
“intellectual counterfeit money” [2002: 138].)

However, I suggest that there is a dialectical moment in Herzog’s
filmmaking praxis, and that it turns on the wider historical shift alluded
to above, from documentation to dreams. In broad terms, Herzog’s
ambitious poetic quest—to uncover the “ecstatic truth” of existence
through the stylized heightening of intractable reality—demands the
kind of technically precise disciplinarian methods that he practices. But
it is the documentary elements, the irreducible actualities embedded in
each mise-en-scène, that divest the resulting transfixing aura of its severity
and inflexibility. Crucial to this effect is the artless presence of animals,
evading the directives of the controlling hand, inassimilable to its
purposive procedures. As indicators of the stubbornly materialistic
background world upon which Herzog mounts his visionary quests,
animals delineate the boundaries of his dreaming and temper its
rhetorical excesses.*

When Herzog’s animals interact with human beings in his films—
as, for example, when they behave as “witnesses” to human affairs—
there is a principle of exchange at work, along the border of human-
animal difference. The principle is best summed up in Jacques Derrida’s
famous “working hypotheses” on animal alterity:

The animal … can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also—
something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this
calculated forgetting itself—it can look at me. It has its point of view
regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing
will have ever done more to make me think through this absolute
alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself seen
naked under the gaze of a cat. (2002: 380)

A threshold is formed through the relationship between nakedness
(nudity) and non/knowledge. To be “naked without knowing it” (373), as
animals are, is not to be naked at all; in contrast to this is specular, self-
knowing nudity, which issues in a “reflected shame, the mirror of a shame
ashamed of itself” (373). The unclothed philosopher thus both is and is
not “reduced” to his animal being, when confronted by (and returning)
his cat’s gaze.

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!
130 PaulSheehan

This threshold moment of intimacy and exposure is paralleled by
those encounters of violence and death in Herzog’s films that demonstrate
similarly aporetic— impossible, yet nonetheless real—vacillations along
the axis of the human-animal threshold. In Heart of Glass, for example]
two peasant characters are shown assaulting each other in a bout of
escalating violence; they next appear in an unconscious heap on the floor
of a barn. But before one of the servant-girls catches sight of the corpse-
like bodies they are “discovered” by a cat, tentatively scrutinizing the
scene, showing curiosity and caution, and then v^thdrawing. The cat’s
gaze here, and its “absolutely other” point of view, as in the philosopher’s
bathroom, quickens the index of animality, creating a rent in the scene.
The belligerent peasants, though not beasts of the field, nevertheless end
up on a bed of straw; their possibly fatal brawl was not a fight for
survival, but the outcome of a prophecy. The self-evident “explanation”;
of the situation—that the two are simply victims of their aggressive
animal instincts—is complicated by the cat’s enquiring gaze. As a
principle of exchange, it is central to Herzog’s animal vision, through
which different forms of resistance are manifested. The scenes discussed
below, all from the 1970s films that secured Herzog’s international
reputation, exemplify some of these forms of resistance. !

Against anthropomorphosis. The simplest and most self-evident form of
animal containment-through-imagery is turned against itself in thé
fairground scene in Woyzeck (1979). The ringmaster reveals to the audience
a “mathematical” horse, which either nods or stamps a hoof in response
to the kind of question—yes/no or numerical—that is put to it. Yet the
horse is anything but a compliant beast, bridling when its reins are
pulled, visibly resisting the preposterous routines to which it is being
subjected. The horse’s forcibly exhibited “anthropic” qualities are thus’
belied by its stubborn animality, which cuts through one layer of illusion!
(the fairground performance) and disturbs another (the film in which
the first is embedded). :

Against anthropocentrism. In another scene, Woyzeck himself is called^
upon to participate in a demonstration: catching hold of a cat that has
been thrown from a window. The demonstrator is a doctor, who tries to
show a group of medical students how the cat’s “centre of gravity” relates
to its “instinct” (animal motion as such, à la Muybridge and Marey, is
merely the means, not the object of the enquiry). After Woyzeck catches;
the cat, it promptly urinates on him —a reflexive response to its
unexpected plunge, which nevertheless causes the doctor to declare:
“Gentlemen, this animal has no scientific instinct.” However, the real,
subject is not the defenestrated cat but the soldier who catches him.¡

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Herzog and the Screen Animal 131

Woyzeck has been participating in the doctor’s scientific experiments,
subsisting on a diet of peas for three months (“You can feel his irregular
pulse,” the doctor tells his students). He is, then, an ill-fated scapegoat for
(among other things) the medical establishment, suffering the burden of
a pitiless ideology in which the desire for knowledge takes precedence
over the sanctity of life. The other side of the mildly pernicious illusionism
of the circus huckster is the virulent technocracy of the doctor’s pseudo-
science. What each figure shares is a commitment to enforcing traversais
of the human-animal threshold, and a violent disregard for the species
compelled to participate in these crossings.

Against metaphorization. Woyzeck the scapegoat is complemented by
Stroszek the underdog, who suffers the travails of the modern age {Stroszek,
1976). Though the title character is (barely) able to scratch out an existence
in the shadows of the Berlin underground, when he travels with his two
companions to the backwoods of America, the brutalizing glare of
capitalist usury eventually defeats him. The film’s closing scene features
the infamous “dancing chicken”—a creature confined to a cage in a slot
machine, in which the floor is electrified, and a coin activates the current.
Since Stroszek’s last act is to short out the fuse-box, the current cannot be
switched off. The chicken’s fate is somehow more horrific than the
electrocuted elephant’s, whose corporeal end and ghostly transference
at least describe a clear-cut temporal schema. The dancing chicken is an
electric animal of a more disturbing variety, compelled to “perform” in
eternal stasis, unable either to desist or die.

Yet despite the scene’s (apparently) allusive, symbolic quality, it
cannot “stand in” for Stroszek’s fate. The substitutive logic that would
permit him to be construed as a helpless animal, compelled to perform
for cruel brokers, is missing. The scene’s relevance to what has gone
before lies in its oblique condemnation of a system in which money can
buy pain, through the intercession of technology—a system whose
disregard for every kind of difference is so comprehensive as to cross the
species barrier. Though Stroszek is not the dancing chicken, suffering on
demand, by the rationale of late capitalism he may as well be.

Against choreographed order. Blows are dealt to the aesthetics of animal
movement in two key instances. The first is Aguirre’s histrionic last stand,
in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972). The Spanish conquistador leads an
expedition across the Andes to find El Dorado in the late sixteenth century.
By the film’s end his followers are nearly all dead, yet Aguirre does not
give up his dreams of conquest, nor his desire to “produce history as
others produce plays.” The remnant of his makeshift “kingdom”— a
broken raft, adrift in stagnant waters—is abruptly besieged by monkeys.

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132 Paul Sheehari

crawling frenziedly into every nook and crevice. The finite space of thé
raft is thus rendered unstable and precarious, giving the sense that ar\
implosion is at har\d. Aguirre then directs his climactic monologue (“I
am the wrath of God. Who is with me?”) to a monkey he holds in his
hand, a gesture that is both knowingly theatrical (Hamlet’s “address” to
Yorick’s skull) and steeped in Darwinian irony—the self-deluded
commander, “caught in the deathly circles of the camera and his own
madness” (Koepnick 135), gazes at his distant ancestor, even as he still
sees himself as an incomparable Übermensch. ‘

Another terminal scenario, and another instance of agitated, unruly
animal motion, is staged in Nosferatu (1979). Bleaker than either the F. W.
Murnau silent film on which it is directly based, or the more distant
Bram Stoker source novel, Herzog’s rendering ends with a vision oif
apocalyptic excess. The northern European town of Wismar, where thé
vampire’s coffin has been transported, is inundated by 10,000 grey rats,
in the filmmaker’s most elaborate use of animals. The locals respond tcj)
this threat with a plunge into decadence and dissipation. Open-air tables
laden with food and wine are overrun by the rats, though thé
townspeople barely notice, lost in a kind of delirium of denial. But
Wismar’s unfortunate collapse does not just indicate the end of this
particular narrative; the end-of-the-world scenario suggests the
interruption of narrative itself and, implicitly, the breakdown of every
kind of order. As with Aguirre’s monkeys, animals thus figure as the
undoing of all attempts at control, indicators of a dialectical counter-
thrust to Herzog’s directorial mandates.

As I have argued, the cinematographic animal is crucial to thé
experience of otherness on the screen—the otherness of the non-
manipulable, which breaks with the aggrandizement of subjectivity that
is the dominant mode of narrative cinema. But recent developments iii
the film medium have begun to change this. In the shift from the camera
to the computer, from optics to code, all irregularities are, in principle,
removable. No concession need be made to the uncertain or unknowri
when inadvertent elements can easily be expelled in post-production’.
Unlike real animals, computer-generated creatures can be fully
manipulated, controlled and anthropomorphized. As Jean-André Fieschi
writes: “La cyberbête accomplit le mythe de cinéma total” (30). i

One of the ironies of the “cyberbeast” is that even the most
sophisticated CGI manipulation must in some sense mimic the
breakthroughs made in the nineteenth century. With Jurassic Park (1992),
for example, Steven Spielberg decreed that the dinosaurs must be made

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Herzog and the Screen Animal 133

to look more animalistic and less monstrous. To fulfil this edict, his special
effects team conducted intensive, frame-by-frame studies of the
movements of birds, giraffes, rhinos and elephants. The object was not,
however, to decipher the mysterious “trace” inscribed by animal motion,
but to replicate it in the form of a computer-generated dinosaur—
recoding into artifice, then, rather than decoding from nature (see Baird
1998: 92).

With this new development, the tension in the filmic image, which
has hitherto conditioned all cinematic experience, is dispelled. The digital
era—the age of technological reason—has thus precipitated a crisis of
otherness. The cinematographic animal, as opposed to the electronic
animal, is one of the last frontiers in safeguarding the screen from the
kind of ‘boundaryless” horizon predicted by acolytes of the new
technology. Herzog resists this development, describing himself as a “man
of celluloid” and averring that film “has its own depths and force which
you do not easily achieve when you work with digital technology” (2002:
277).’ The screen animal, it is clear, is crucial to the realization of these
“depths” and “force.” Through its “documentary” incarnation, it signifies
a node of resistance to the technological goal of complete image control.

Gilles Deleuze concludes his two-volume study of cinema with a
meditation on the digital image. The seeds of the future, he argues, can be
found in the recent past—in Godard’s cinema, where “the shot itself is
less like an eye than an overloaded brain endlessly absorbing
information” (1989:267); and in the deportment of Bresson’s “model” (“a
modern psychological automaton” [266]). But since both filmmakers
were dedicated to aesthetics rather than informatics, Deleuze is hopeful that
the cinema of the future might be effectively recast as a digital medium.
Godard has, however, stood firm against the pressure to “go digital.” As
demonstrated in his recent film Éloge de l’amour (2001), he prefers to
modulate the video image by filming it off a monitor, rather than embrace
computer-editing technology. And Bresson voiced the desire for an art
“washed clean of art” (1977: 34), which for him meant shooting as many
as fifty takes of a scene, until he had reduced it to its bare essentials and
eliminated the “virtual” from the performance. As with Herzog’s resistant
bestiary, these examples now seem like quaint forms of protest, remnants
of a soon-to-be-forgotten way of intervening in—and transforming—
the relationship between world and image. Animals on film are the most
elemental of these interventions, and an enduring testament to the lost
real that is slowly vanishing before our eyes.

Macquarie University, Australia

Substance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008

134 PaulSheehan

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Kent, Leticia (1977), “Werner Herzog: Film Is Not the Art of Scholars but of Illiterates”!

in The New York Times, Section 2, 11 September: 19, 30. 1
Koepnick, Lutz P. (1993), “Colonial Forestry: Sylvan Politics in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre,

and Fitzearraldo” in New German Critique 60, Autumn: 133-59. |
Lippit, Akira Mizuta (2000), Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis^

University of Minnesota Press.
(2002), “The Death of an Animal” in Film Quarterly 56 (1), Autumn: 9-22. ‘,

MacCabe, Colin (2003), Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70. London: Bloomsbury
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2004), The World of Perception. Trans. Oliver Davis. Abingdon:

Routledge. 1

Substance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008

Herzog and the Screen Animal 135

Peterson, Michael (2007), “The Animal Apparatus: From a Theory of Animal Acting to
an Ethics of Animal Acts” in TDK; The Drama Review 51 (1), Spring: 33-48.

Reader, Keith (1990), “The Sacrament of Writing: Robert Bresson’s Le journal d’un curé de
campagne (1951)” in Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film:
Texts and Contexts. London and New York: Routledge.

Rentschler, Eric (1982), “American Friends and New German Cinema: Patterns of Recep-
tion,” in New German Critique 24/25, Autumn: 7-35.

(1988), “The Politics of Vision: Herzog’s Heart of Glass” in Timothy Corrigan
(ed.). The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History. London: Methuen.
Pp.159-181.

Rony, Fatimah Tobing (1996), The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Singer, Alan (1988), “Comprehending Appearances: Werner Herzog’s Ironic Sublime”
in Timothy Corrigan (ed.). The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History.
London: Methuen. Pp.183-205.

Stanislavsky, Konstantin (1962), My Life in Art. Trans. ]. J. Robbins. London: Geoffrey
Bles.

Szondi, Peter (1987), Theory of the Modern Drama. Ed. and trans. Michael Hays. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Filmography
Bresson, Robert, dir. (1966), Au hasard, Balthazar. Argos Films.
Edison, Thomas, prod. (1903), Electrocuting an Elephant. Edison Manufacturing Com-

pany
Godard, Jean-Luc, dir. (1960), À Bout de souffle. Les Productions Georges de Beauregard.

, dir. (2001), Éloge de l’amour. Les Films Alain Sarde.
Herzog, Werner, dir. (1970), Even Dwarfs Started Small. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

, dir. (1972), Aguirre, Wrath of God. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.
, dir. (1976), Heart of Glass. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.
, dir. (1976), Stroszek. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.
, dir. (1979), Nosferatu the Vampyre. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.
, dir. (1979), Woyzeck. Werner Herzog Fihnproduktion.
, dir. (1982), Fitzcarraldo. Filmverlag der Autoren.
, dir. (2001), Invincible. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.
, dir. (2005), Grizzly Man. Discovery Does.

Spielberg, Steven, dir. (1993), Jurassic Park. Universal Pictures.

Notes
1. For an arresting recent examination of human-animal crossings-over in the cinema,

see Rony 1996. In chapter 6, she uses King Kong as an archetype to trawl film history
for traces of ethnographic monstrosity, miscegenation and hybridity (157-91).

2. Mary Anne Doane makes a compelling case for Marey’s primary interest as lying not
so much in movement as in “tjie desire to perfect a representation of time” (1996:
332). However, it is not clear why the pursuit of one project should necessarily have
been to the detriment of the other.

3. Following Edison’s lead was the “electrical consultant” Harold Brown, another staunch
opponent of AC. Brown demonstrated incontrovertibly that whereas 1,000 volts of
DC could only torture a dog, albeit cruelly and violently, a mere 330 volts of AC ivas
enough to finish the creature off altogether. (See Jonnes 172-74) Brown’s subsequent
“experiments,” as successful as the dog demonstration, involved two calves and a
horse (176).

Substance #117, Vol. 37, no. 3, 2008

136 Paul Sheehan;

4, In Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000), Lippit shows that the fate of thé
animal in modernity is bound up with its representation as a filmic image, and with thé
ocularcentric ideology precipitated by the cinema, ¡

5, Scott Curtis notes that after the abundance of non-fiction “animal pictures” in earljj
cinema, animals were mainly used for “spicing up a story,” Animal protagonists, as
such, only returned in anthropomorphized form, once the studio system was estabj
lished (2005: 25-6), J

6, In his 1966 film Au hasard, Balthazar, Bresson takes the unusual step of conveying this
spiritual dimension by means of an animal, Balthazar is a donkey, whom we follovv
from birth to death, and see pass from one owner to the next. As human beings use
(and abuse) the animal, Bresson is scrupulous in not getting us “inside” the donkey,
not suggesting that his inner world is in any way accessible, Balthazar remainè
inscrutable and, in this sense, is the ultimate Bressonian “model,” See Godard and
Merleau-Ponty’s dialogical, meditative “testament” to/through the animal of the title,
produced when the film vvas first released. See also Deleuze 1986: 114-16, I

7, This question led to some fervent debates, in the period following Herzog’s initial
reception, Russell A, Berman, for example, makes the following critique: “The viewer-
is produced as the passive observer of images, not as an active reader of communi-
cative symbols „, A non-comprehending fixation on the image is set as a privileged
mode of experience, allegedly providing access to a more authentic perception than
could a rational-discursive penetration” (1982: 504), A mini-debate on the subject is
conducted in the pages of The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History
(1988), Eric Rentschler prosecutes Herzog for being a mystical reactionary, while
Alan Singer defends him on the grounds of what he calls the “ironic sublime,” See
Corrigan 1988, i

8, It is the fundamentally incompatible nature of the two elements that makes their juxtapo|-
sition so productive, countering John E, Davidson’s criticism that “[t]he ‘documen-
tary’ aspect of Herzog’s work transcends mere objectivity into a higher level qf
vision” (1993: 115),

9, For Fitzearraldo, Herzog famously chose to transport a steamboat over the Andes,
rather than use models or special effects. In four decades of filmmaking, he claims to
have filmed only one blue-screen shot—for a scene in his 2001 film Invincible, which
demanded an explicitly illusionist effect (Herzog 2002: 104), ¡

Substance #117, VoL 37, no, 3, 20¿8

i

1

The National Humane Education Society

Mission and History …………………………

2

Message from the President

…………………

3

Humane Education & Advocacy……………. 4-11

The Briggs Animal Adoption Center ………. 11-14

Peace Plantation Animal Sanctuary………….. 15-1

7

Spay Today

………………………………… 17-19

Volunteers ………………………………….. 20, 21

Planned Giving & Financial Information …… 22, 23

Board of Directors

James D. Taylor
President

Cynthia L. Taylor
Vice President

Christina B. Fernandez
Secretary

Virginia A. Dungan
Treasurer

Margaret C. Janes, DVM
Director

Anne Small,
Director

2

Mission and History

Whenever we, as a society, allow an animal to die from starvation or abuse, or whenever a euthanizing
agent enters the bloodstream of a healthy animal, we wound humanity.

Anna C. Briggs, Founder

In 1948, in response to our Nation’s constant killing of stray and
abandoned companion animals, Mrs. Anna C. Briggs founded The
National Humane Education Society (NHES) as a private, nonprofit
animal welfare organization with a central mission “to foster a
sentiment of kindness to animals in children and adults . . . .” This
mission stemmed from Mrs. Briggs’ philosophical belief system that
“Animals have intrinsic value in and of themselves and are deserving
of our protection.”

Kindness in Action – Anna C Briggs
1957 Washington, D.C.

Then, in 1963, Alice Morgan Wright, NHES board member and benefactress, wrote 12 Guiding
Principles to serve as a simple blueprint for the creation of a more humane world:

1. To oppose cruelty in all its forms.
2. To strive for an end to bullfighting, rodeo and all cruel sports

whenever performed and wherever represented as art or as
entertainment.

3. To strive to abolish cruel trapping.
4. To discourage hunting, especially as a sport.
5. To oppose all poisoning of wildlife.
6. To protect and conserve wildlife for its own sake and not as a

resource for Man’s exploitation.
7. To aid or initiate programs for slaughter reform. Alice M. Wright, Benefactress
8. To teach humane handling and care of work animals and food animals.
9. To advance programs in the humane sterilization of cats and dogs in order to reduce their

overpopulation.
10. To provide for the rescue, housing and feeding of lost, stray or abandoned animals until

suitable homes are found.
11. To urge that when it is necessary to put any tame animal to death, unless some better

method of euthanasia is available, it be so arranged that the animal be held in the arms of
some human friend while it is being given a painless preliminary anesthetic, to be stroked
and comforted with reassuring words until it loses consciousness after which the lethal
agent should be quickly administered.

12. To recognize in animals their capacity for friendship and their need for friends. To
befriend all Earth’s creatures of the land, the sea and the air—to defend them against
ravages by mankind, and to inspire in human beings compassion for all.

Now, more than sixty years after its founding, without financial assistance from local, state, or
federal governments, NHES continues to grow and to decrease animal suffering through its
humane education & advocacy and animal care programs. Today, with nearly 400,000 supporters,
NHES is still guided by Mrs. Briggs’ philosophical belief system, and is committed to the
implementation of Alice Morgan Wright’s 12 Guiding Principles as a blueprint for the creation of
a more humane world.

3

Message from the President

I am pleased to share The National Humane Education Society (NHES) Annual Report for Fiscal Year
2012 with you—our friends and supporters—who make our meaningful work on behalf of animals
possible. With your help this year, we once again made measurable progress towards creating a more
humane world in which all animals will one day come to know kindness and compassion. As you read
this report, we hope that you will share our sense of pride because you are part of NHES and equally
responsible for its accomplishments.

This year, our humane educators reached tens of thousands of children and adults with our humane
message to foster a sentiment of kindness towards animals, and our educational materials were distributed
across the country and around the globe. We positively impacted the lives of thousands of animals
through our hands-on animal care programs provided by The Briggs Animal Adoption Center and Peace
Plantation Animal Sanctuary. Further, we prevented the unnecessary birth and ensuing suffering of
hundreds of thousands of puppies and kittens through the reduced-cost spay/neuter services provided by
our Spay Today program.

On behalf of the Board of Directors, I want to convey our sincere appreciation for your dedication and
support of NHES. We remain steadfastly committed to the creation of a more humane world through
substantive expansion of NHES’s humane education and advocacy activities and hands-on animal care
programs. To these ends, with your help, we will continue our humane work far into the future.

With heartfelt thanks,

Jim Taylor
President

4

Program Services

I. The Humane Education & Advocacy Program serves to educate children and adults about proper
animal stewardship through (1) creating and providing humane education presentations and programs; (2)
providing informational services to supporters and the general public; (3) networking with other humane
organizations; (4) creating and distributing humane education materials, both nationally and
internationally; (5) creating, maintaining, and disseminating relevant information on the NHES website,
social networking sites, and e-mail newsletters; and (6) advocating for animals by encouraging a
multitude of private companies, law enforcement, regulatory agencies, and lawmakers—nationally and
internationally—to adopt policies and laws that encompass the humane treatment of animals.

In 1954, Alice Morgan Wright, NHES board member and benefactress, wrote of NHES, “In 1948 we
incorporated, a small group of us, to carry on what we think is one of the urgent needs of our time,
Humane Education.” Today, the urgent need for humane education is still with us, and the NHES
Humane Education & Advocacy Program is doing its part to meet this need—to provide humane
education and create a more humane world.

Speaking to elementary students about animal care.

Educational Programs

Every year, our humane educators directly reach thousands of children and adults through educational
programs. Whether we set up in school auditoriums, church basements, community centers, classrooms or
our own facilities, our programs can be tailored to any group, large or small, younger or older. Lesson
plans range greatly in complexity. Our simplest lesson plans may focus almost entirely on safely petting
cats and dogs. More mature groups may discuss their own prejudices toward different groups of animals,

5

what they mean, and how to leave them behind. We also cover dog bite prevention, reporting animal
cruelty, the importance of neutering, and much more.

Humane educators visited myriad venues to reach a varied audience with a message of kindness to
animals. Highlights include visits to:

Several groups of agriculture students. We love having access to children considering a career
with animals. While covering general topics such as kindness, reporting cruelty, and the
importance of neutering, we always include lessons on the living conditions on factory farms.

Students classified as emotionally disturbed and/or cognitively disabled. With these special
groups, we paid great attention to gentleness, empathy, and (mostly for the emotionally disturbed
children) reporting animal cruelty

Multiple school career days. We focused on fields that directly help animals such as veterinarians,
groomers, or animal control officers, but we also covered general topics such as adoption, animal
needs, and reporting cruelty.

Boys and Girls Clubs in urban areas.
Because many of these children were afraid of dogs,
we gave them a positive experience with an
ambassador dog, and lessons on dog bite prevention,
recognizing dog body language, and reporting
animal cruelty

Many school-wide assembly-style
presentations. Depending on age, these focused on
animal care, reporting animal cruelty, dog bite
prevention, adoption, and more.

Children on a tour of BAAC, making treats for the animals.

Educators conducted many behind-the-scenes tours of The Briggs Animal Adoption Center (BAAC)

for local groups. The participants learned about animal care at a no-kill rescue. After each tour, we
included a brief humane education lesson. Many times the lesson included a hands-on project for the
animals. Highlights include visits from

Many children who visited as part of a birthday celebration. These generous young people were
happier to give than receive gifts on their special days. With their friends and families in tow, we
showed them how their contributions help the animals day to day.

Autistic adults learning life skills. These individuals were preparing for a independent or semi-
independent lifestyle that may include a companion animal. We wanted to ensure that they knew
what a dog or cat would need and where to find one (at BAAC or another shelter, of course!).

6

A local Chamber of Commerce curious about the non-profits operating in their areas. We were
able to educate many influential adults on the importance of adoption, proper animal care, and
neutering.

Many scouting groups. These young people are eager to find ways to give back to their
community, so we educated them on the many ways to help animals such as raising money and
items for local rescues, ensuring their own animals were cared for, and spreading the word to their
classmates and families.

Through these programs, both onsite and offsite, we reached thousands of children and adults during
fiscal year 2012.

A Humane Educator’s Experience
“Working on the grassroots level, we are able to get to know the locations and people that we
visit. Generally, we seek out economically depressed areas—rural places where outside dogs
are the norm and cats are too often considered more pest than pet; or urban areas where
dogs are used for intimidation and cats breed in alleys. These are the places where we feel
the biggest difference is made. At the end of our presentation, when it is time for the
students to meet our friendly dog, some of these children receive their first positive
experience with a dog. Few things warm the heart like watching a young child hesitantly
reach out his or her hand to be sniffed, then quickly be drawn in by a warm, fuzzy body
wiggling with anticipation. Our canine ambassadors can make these children smile and help
them feel the love that only an animal can offer—a love that some of these children didn’t
even know existed. These are the children that can break the chain. They can urge the family
to spay or neuter their pets. They can try to make the family’s chained dog feel more like a
family member. They can report a peer’s abusive behavior toward neighborhood animals.
These are the young minds that are so important. Reaching these children is how changes
are made, how the future is made brighter. Sometimes in the program a hand will shoot up,
‘We got rid of our cat because she kept running around making noise at night.’ Or, ‘Mom says
shelter dogs are there because they bit someone.’ While we might disagree with the things
we see and hear, we cannot alienate or condemn these families. Instead, we just make
friends, show them a different, kinder way, and know that we changed a few hearts that
day.”

—Megan Moore, Humane Educator

The Best Part Is Hearing What You Have to Say

“Thank you for coming in and telling us what you do and where you work. I love dogs and
other animals, too. I want to work in an animal shelter when I get older.” -Hailey, student

“Thank you for helping animals. I would like to be a vet when I grow up. I love dogs so
much!” -Emily, student

“Thank you for taking time to speak to my classes about responsible pet ownership. We
always enjoy your presentation and hope to have you back!” -Ms. Ritenour, counselor

“Thank you so much for the tours you gave to us! We enjoyed learning about both Briggs
Animal Adoption Center, but also about animal care. Thank you for all of the information you
gave us and we enjoyed meeting the cats and dogs!” -Ms. Jones, teacher

7

Educational Materials

Our humane message reaches countless numbers of individuals throughout the country through our
brochures, posters, and humane education guides. We distribute these materials to humane societies,
service agencies, grassroots animal rescue organizations, schools, and individuals who then disseminate
the information throughout their communities. These resources cover a vast array of topics such as
neutering, adoption, seasonal care, vegetarianism, hunting, and more. Over the fiscal year, we distributed:

Over 43,000 brochures. Each of these brochures can make its way into at least one family’s hands,
changing hearts and practices.

Over 1,600 posters. These posters, placed in strategic locations, can impact thousands of passing
individuals.

Over 60 humane guides packed full of discussion topics and lesson plans for humane educators
getting their start in grassroots advocacy. In the right hands, the tools provided in these guides can
help an educator reach thousands more.

This map shows most of the destinations of our materials throughout this year.

These materials reach across the nation. Following is a sampling of some of the organizations and
individuals that utilize our materials:

Spay/Neuter Assistance for Pets of Vonore, Tennessee
Friendswood Animal Control, Texas
South Lake Animal League, Florida
Better Days Animal League, Pennsylvania
Cape Fear Rescue League, North Carolina
Varren River Animal Welfare Association, Kentucky
ARK Animal Sanctuary, Maine
Indiana Sate University, Indiana
Voice For The Animals Foundation, California
The Claermont County Humane Society, Ohio
West Milford Animal Shelter Society, New Jersey
Animal Advocates of West Virginia, West Virginia

8

Eielson Youth Center, Alaska
Lakes Charles Pit Bull Rescue, Louisiana
Tailwaggers, Arkansas
Friends of Mesquite Animal Shelter, Nevada

Two children at Cool to Care Camp interact with a cat.

Cool to Care Camp

This year, humane educators conducted the Tenth Annual Cool to Care Summer Camp. The camps are
held for three weeks in the summer at The Briggs Animal Adoption Center and are made available to
children from 1st through 9th grades. This year, camp was held in our brand new

Humane Education

Center, an air-conditioned classroom on our campus.

Who is Using These Materials?

Bonnie with Madison Couty Pet Shelter in Arizona:
“[My visits to the county schools] went very well—enjoyed by students and teachers alike.
I’ve heard since of many comments/connections that have been made by the students
regarding the program.”

Joanne with Friends of Mesquite Animal Shelter in Nevada:
“Thank you for your help in getting the literature to me so quickly. We have 2 events that
I will be taking the literature to hand out. One Sunday with 200-250 people and next
Saturday to a huge event in Las Vegas where they are expecting 15,000 plus people to
attend the all day Pet-a-palooza.”

9

Our new Humane Education & Training Center

With weeks full of activities, children learn about many aspects of animal protection. Some of the exciting
lessons include:

Role-playing and theater. Students explored different roles through acting and dress-up to understand
the plight of companion animals and how they are at the mercy of the humans around them.

Small groups were given a “beginning” in which an animal is being treated poorly. Together, they
brainstormed a “middle” and “end” in which the person involved in the scenario learns better
animal stewardship. At the end of the camp week, the groups acted out their completed skits to the
delight of parents and friends.

Visual arts. Through posters and paintings, children connected with the animals they learned about.
Children created adoption advertisements for cats and dogs at BAAC, learning about the
personalities and needs of individual animals and guessed what might attract an adopter to that
animal.

Hands-on crafts. Children created various items with real-world uses while learning valuable lessons
about the animals around them.

Children followed a recipe for dog treats, then baked their creations in a hot car on a summer day.
Throughout the day, they recorded temperatures and watched the treats bake. While it created a
fun treat for the BAAC dogs, children also learned about the real danger of leaving animals in hot
cars.

Kinesthetic learning. Many children learn best when they are physically engaged. Many activities
encouraged children to get up and move around.

To learn about migrations, children hopped from square to square along a short path. As
environmental changes make migrations harder for wild animals, we slowly took away squares
until it became very difficult for the children to complete their “migration.” Paired with a bird
feeder or bird house craft, this lesson gives children great insight into how we can help wild
animals.

Technology. In our new Humane Education Center, we also added some key pieces of technology
including a projector and two iPads.

Children used iPads to film scenes at BAAC, created an infomercial for the center. In the making
of this infomercial, the children had to conduct interviews of employees and volunteers, share key
pieces of information about the center, and feature dogs and cats waiting for adoption.

Community speakers. We were thankful to have many visitors come to speak to the children about a
variety of issues.

10

Blue Ridge Wildlife introduced children to rehabilitated and unreleasable wild animals in the area.
PIGS Sanctuary talked about animals on farms with age appropriate visuals and comments on
farming.

Jefferson County WV K9 Units introduced children to police dogs and the amazing things they
can do.

Loudoun County VA Fire Marshal
demonstrated a dog’s amazing smelling
power with a certified accelerant
detection canine, Jimmy.

A community member brought in
rescued small animals such as rats,
chinchillas, and lizards to talk about
their special needs.

A community member demonstrated
dental care on her dog and talked
about the importance of brushing
cats’ and dogs’ teeth.

A community member brought in pet
snakes and talked about how these
animals are valuable members of our Children at Cool to Care Camp learn with K9 Arson Dog, Jimmy
ecosystem, to be respected and not vilified.

Letters

Despite all of the new technology, our humane educators know that writing and mailing letters still makes
a big difference. In fiscal year 2012, we wrote letters to hundreds of public officials on the federal, state,
and county level as well as international leaders, private corporations, and other private entities
advocating for animals and encouraging recipients to support humane treatment of animals when
considering specific policies and legislation. Among the many issues we addressed were:

Contacting multiple universities and medical centers advocating for the use of new technologies that
would eliminate the need for invasive procedures done on live animals.

Urging federal and state officials to protect the lives and habitat of various endangered and threatened
species in wilderness, rural, and urban environments.

Thanked various public and private persons and entities for making decisions or considerations that
resulted in positive outcomes for animals regarding specific issues.

Writing to various state officials condemning government-sanctioned wildlife culls including for
burros, coyotes, and wild pigs, and recommending alternative policies.

Urging state officials to repeal proposed ag-gag laws that would stifle animal-cruelty investigations
within factory farms.

Writing Spanish provinces and various Latin-American countries congratulating bans on bullfighting
or urging officials to enact such bans in their own localities.

Thanking various private companies and CEOs for decisions to close and ban stores selling pets, and
urging other companies to follow that example.

Writing public officials to oppose the construction of structures dangerous to wildlife and animal
habitats, such as oil pipelines in the United States and Canada.

11

Advocating against marine exhibits for entertainment and urging against the transport of wild marine
animals to unnatural marine parks.

(To learn more about the Humane Education & Advocacy Program, arrange for an education program in
your area, or request resource material, please call 304-725-0506, or visit our website at www.nhes.org.)

II. The Briggs Animal Adoption Center (BAAC), located 64 miles west of Washington, DC, near
Charles Town, West Virginia, is NHES’s premiere adoption program and is one of the finest animal care
facilities in the country. It became operational in October 2000 and provides Comprehensive Adoption
Services for cats and dogs, which consist of animal rescue, veterinary medical care—including mandatory
spay and neuter before adoption, socialization/rehabilitation, canine obedience training, and delivery of all
dogs to their new homes.

Briggs Animal Adoption Center

Since becoming operational, the BAAC has been a safe refuge for thousands of companion animals until
being placed in their Forever Homes. For
example, one of the hundreds of animals that
were placed this past fiscal year was
Bloomery (Blu):

Bloomery, who was found on the top of a
mountain, came to us from one of our partner
organizations, Potomac Highlands Animal
Rescue. He was adopted shortly after he came
to us in June 2011 but was returned for
escaping from the yard. After his return, he
became lethargic, not eating, vomiting, and
panting. He was diagnosed with pneumonia.
He continued to have some bouts of coughing
but started to mend and was adopted into his
Forever Home in April 2012.

Cindy with (right to left) Blue, Dixie, HollyJo & Spencer
waiting for their ice cream treat.

http://www.nhes.org/�

12

His new owner, Cindy, adopted her first dog from us in the mid 1990’s. She’s an avid hiker and Blu is
enjoying long walks with Cindy and new doggie sister Dixie, neighboring dogs Holly Jo (another Briggs’
alum) and Spencer.

During fiscal year 2012, the BAAC activities and accomplishments included:

Welcoming nearly 10,000 adults and children and striving to educate each of them about proper
animal stewardship, including the absolute need to spay and neuter one’s companion animals, and
the role that each of us can play in creating a more humane world.

Hosting our annual Adoption Alumni Gathering with hundreds of our furry friends and their
human companions in attendance. Alumni come from MD, VA, WV, Washington, D.C., and
beyond.

Briggs Adoption Alumni Event, October 13, 2012

Conducting off-site adoption events in Virginia and West Virginia, to promote the adoption of
animals, reduced-cost spay/neuter services and humane education.

Briggs’ Volunteers with dogs at local offsite event

13

Providing educational television and radio interviews on stations 92.5 WINC-FM in Winchester,
VA, and WUSA TV Channel 9 in Washington, DC, to promote the adoption of animals.

Expanding our FUN RUN/WALKS to the Virginia State Arboretum “Blandy Farm,” to include
Footin’ for Animals in the Fall and Tails On Trails in the Spring.

Tails on Trails Walk

Continuing to welcome Friendship House and St. John’s Community Services who participate in
our volunteer program to help socialize and rehabilitate the cats and dogs. They are located in
Leesburg, VA.

Assisting the NHES Humane Education & Advocacy Program by providing animal-handling
demonstrations in conjunction with educational presentations to a wide variety of children’s
groups.

Dog Handling Demonstration

Working collaboratively with animal shelters and rescue groups in the region by accepting some
of their dogs and cats into our program.

Hosting another successful Pedal for Pooches bike ride to raise funds for the animals.

14

Pedal for Pooches Take Off

Distributing food and supplies to those in need. We collect thousands of pounds of food and litter
from community donors and retailers clearing stock (because of broken bags or out-of-style
packaging graphics). This year, we delivered this food and litter to food banks and animal rescues
in WV, VA, and NC. We hope to expand this program in the future.

A truck of dog food is loaded for a nearby animal rescue

(To learn more about the BAAC, please visit our website at www.baacs.org).

http://www.baacs.org/�

15

III. Peace Plantation Animal Sanctuary (Peace Plantation), located 153 miles west of New York City,
near Walton, New York, continues to serve as NHES’s flagship animal care facility and is one of a select
few animal sanctuaries in the country that has withstood the test of time. Today, Peace Plantation works
to decrease animal suffering and reaffirm the intrinsic value of animal life by providing lifelong sanctuary
care for homeless animals.

Peace Plantation Animal Sanctuary, Walton, NY

From the Desk of Michel Reed, Director of Facilities, Peace Plantation:

It has been yet another pastoral year here at Peace Plantation. Do not think though that nothing is going
on; rather, it has been a peace-filled year in the forever home of 300 plus or minus cats, four lucky dogs,
two miniature horses, a sheep who thinks he’s a dog, and three geese who think they own the place. It was
a year filled with security for these animals who had their needs met in every way, including food dishes
that always were re-filled, blankets and bedding that were washed every day and then given back to them,
cool fresh water that comes out of a beautiful mountainside well, and a caring staff that does everything in
our power to make them feel better if they are sick, lonely, or frightened. Our standards of care don’t sink
like an overloaded boat; they stand firm like a lighthouse anchored to a cliff for those castaway animals
that now call Peace Plantation “Home.”

I think all of my employees have their favorites who, for whatever
reason, tug at their hearts; I’d like to introduce you to a few of mine.

Arnold has a place in my top favorite critters at work. We all
remember Hurricane Katrina and the lives that storm disrupted.
Peace Plantation staff headed down after the storm and brought
back 49 cats (we intended on 50, but one cat found his owner at the
last minute) who were either owner surrendered or found walking
the streets after the water receded enough to get around. Arnold was
one of our rescues. He’s a big grey boy with a bobtail and squinty
eyes, the result of two surgeries to correct a case of entropion,
which makes the eyelids inflamed and irritated. As if having his
whole life turned upside down because of one storm wasn’t enough,
Arnold tested positive for FIV. Arnold continues to thrive in our
FIV positive colony. He was between 3 and 5 years old (they
estimated) when we picked him up, which makes him our “Arnold”

16

10- 12-year-old ambassador from the French Quarter (I could picture Arnold playing sax at a funky
jazz bar; he’s just that kind of cat). Peace Plantation has always prided itself on caring for a limited
number of FIV or Felv cats, considering their lives to be just as important as that of any other cat.
Arnold will never have to worry about a hurricane turning his world upside down ever again. He’s
content lounging on the deck, hanging out with some of his feline friends, and takin’ a cat nap
whenever he feels like it. He’s truly one cool cat!

For those of you that have never really had the time to meet and greet a sheep, you’d be in for a treat,
if you came to meet my sheep. Sherlock, the sheep, came to us in a roundabout way. Our farrier,
Robert, who has been trimming the hooves of every horse that has ever lived here at

Peace Plantation

for the past 20 years, acquired Doby in a roundabout way. Robert lives on a horse farm where his
daughter teaches riding lessons. Doby was found in an old stone quarry on top of the hill that borders
Roberts’ land. After checking with all the neighboring farmers and landowners that said they were
not, in fact, missing a sheep, it was surmised that Doby had probably run away from some farm
somewhere (because of his livestock tags still intact in each ear) and ended up being found by Robert,
and becoming a boarding stable mascot with a fetish for nibbling on horses tails. On a couple of
occasions, Robert asked me if Peace Plantation would like a sheep in need of a new good home (he
really was perfectly fine living with Robert, except for the horse tail nibbling). In November 2011,
while Robert was trimming our horses’ hooves, the topic of sheep came up again. It had been many
years since we had had sheep, so I gave in and said “sure” to the sheep named Doby. The following

week, Robert brought our new sheep to Peace Plantation. The
minute he jumped out of the truck, he became Sherlock the
sheep to me. He just looked like a Sherlock, wise and
inquisitive, and just the right amount of spark to him. Just as
in the FBI witness protection program, I gave our new sheep a
new name, a new job (to become friends with and not eat the
tails of our two miniature horses), and a new safe place to live
without any fear of going back to whatever farm he originated
from or to be a production animal of any sort. Sherlock has
settled in more than perfectly. He thinks he’s a big dog and
acts like it too. He no longer nibbles on horse tails and loves
to have his head and big ol’ Roman nose scratched every
morning. Truly one of my favorites!

“Sherlock the Sheep”

Next on my list of animals that I admire would have to be
our dog Biscuit, a sheltie mix who looks like he’s wearing a
little bandit mask. Biscuit came to us in the spring of 2006
from our sister organization, the Briggs Animal Adoption
Center in Charles Town, WV, as a 1 ½ year-old pup in need
of lifetime sanctuary. No one knows for sure how it
happened, a possible tail docking job gone bad or a tragic
birth defect, but little Biscuit has no bowel or bladder control
and is in daily need of two baths (morning and afternoon)
and a steady supply of soothing cream. I believe even most
devoted dog lovers would have second thoughts about caring
for Biscuit’s needs on a daily basis. Upon arriving at Peace
Plantation, I took Biscuit to Cornell Veterinary Hospital for a Biscuit with his toy
surgical evaluation in hopes of possibly correcting his

17

misfortune. MRI’s, X-ray’s, CAT scans, and even the neurology department said the same thing, “Way
too close to the spinal cord to even attempt to fix.” No one can say we haven’t tried; but on a daily basis,
Biscuit plays with his buddy Fritz, goes for walks around our pond, eats good food and snacks, shreds
several blankets and toys a week (yes, he is a shredder), and has been able to live longer than most
bookies would have bet. Sadly, Biscuit is the most adoptable dog we have (as far as friendly and trained),
who we know will spend his life and final days with his family here at Peace Plantation.

Biscuit is a testament of all that we believe in when it comes to providing sanctuary to those animals who
would otherwise have a slim chance at finding a secure home of their own.

I fully realize that the stories I’m sharing are of things that have happened in the past, which makes them
even more important in the present, because all of the critters I’ve introduced to you today are
still very much alive and living their lives out to the fullest here at Peace Plantation. We don’t give up on
animals even when their needs seem too great; there is no time limit that is imposed on them should they
never get adopted. Euthanasia is only a last option, after exploring every reasonable treatment available to
us, and is used only to add dignity and comfort to a dying member of our Peace Plantation family.

“Family” is a nice word to describe how we feel about all the animals that call Peace Plantation home.
And there’s no place like “Home.” Stop by and visit our family; you’ll be happy you did!

(To learn more about Peace Plantation, please visit www.nhes.org, go to “Programs,” and click on “Peace
Plantation Animal Sanctuary.” Also, be sure to read “A Visitor’s View of Peace Plantation.” In addition,
call us at 607-865-5759 to arrange for a visit.)

IV. Spay Today, located in Charles Town, West Virginia, became a program of NHES in 2001 and
serves as a tangible example of NHES’s commitment to reduce the number of homeless companion

animals. Spaying and neutering is a major part of the
humane solution to ending the overpopulation and
ensuing euthanasia of healthy cats and dogs in this
country.

In its 11-year history with NHES, Spay Today has
arranged for the spaying and neutering of 38,068 cats,
dogs, rabbits, and other animals. But, as always, it is
each individual animal whose story tells why spaying
and neutering is so critical.

Spay Today worked with Briggs Animal Adoption
Center (BAAC) counselor Kristi Curtis to schedule a
male pit bull for surgery. The owner originally intended
to surrender the dog; however, she agreed to keep him if
he was neutered. Linda Millard called in for assistance
with her Jack Russell, Sugar. She rescued Sugar from
being taken to the pound, but could not afford the cost

of the spay surgery. Linda was delighted that we could help her so she could keep her dog.

Becky Stanley of Williamsport, MD, was able to provide a safe, caring home for a stray kitty she found at
the Burger King in Spring Mills, WV, thanks to help from Spay Today. Nancy and Chas DeBord from

18

Capon Bridge, WV, brought a dog to BAAC to surrender, but then decided they could keep the dog with
Spay Today’s help to cover the neuter and vaccines the dog so desperately needed. Betty Merriman of
Brunswick, MD, was thankful she could keep her beloved pit bull thanks to Spay Today’s help with the
neuter. Chester Sturm of Harpers Ferry, WV, is working to trap-neuter-release the feral cats in his
community. Spay Today has provided financial assistance and advice on how to trap the cats.

During fiscal year 2012, Spay Today’s activities/accomplishments included:

Spaying and neutering 4,928 cats, dogs, rabbits, and other animals.

Through their generous time and undying commitment to spay and neuter, our volunteers continue to
spread the word far and wide from Cumberland, MD, to Cacapon, WV, to Woodstock, VA, and all
points in between and even beyond. Our volunteers have distributed brochures and fliers about Spay
Today and the advantages of spaying and neutering companion animals to well over 26 libraries and a
number of government offices along with stores, Laundromats, churches, gas stations, shopping
centers, and other similar venues where the public can learn about the Spay Today program. Spay
Today volunteer Fran Barker submits public service announcements to radio stations, submits ads to
newspapers, uses electronic media, and distributes fliers across the Spay Today service area on a
monthly basis.

The Anne Small Spay and Neuter Fund, which is named in honor of Spay Today’s founder Anne
Small, is available to individuals who understand the need to have their animals spayed and neutered
but who are economically challenged to do so. Donations for the fund come from the President’s Ride
at Pedal for Pooches, recycling aluminum cans, and donations from the public. Spay Today sold
aluminum cans to Zuckerman’s Recycling in Winchester, VA, for a total of $420.55 to contribute to
Anne’s Fund. Through this fund, Spay Today has given assistance to 275 animals—134 female cats,
69 male cats, 34 female dogs, and 38 male dogs.

Total animals spayed or neutered by species and gender

Month (F) Cats
(M)
Cats

(F)
Dogs

(M)
Dogs

(F) Small
Animals

(M) Small
Animals

Totals

July 140 72 71 71 1 1 356
August 194 120 87 81 1 1 484
September 160 113 66 75 1 0 415
October 176 129 68 53 0 0 426
November 152 120 87 61 1 1 422
December 122 98 70 62 0 1 353
January 175 131 78 70 0 2 456
February 174 104 84 104 0 0 466
March 207 89 127 105 3 1 532
April 97 67 72 62 1 2 301
May 134 77 95 89 0 3 398
June 119 64 71 61 1 3 319
FY Totals
2012

1850 1184 976 894 9 15 4928

19

Adding Culpeper Animal Hospital and Heritage Animal Hospital in Virginia and South Branch
Animal Hospital in West Virginia to our Spay Today list of veterinary practitioners, bringing the
number of veterinary offices and clinics to 22 that participate in Spay Today.

Assisting individuals in six states—North Carolina, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, and
Pennsylvania—to find local spay and neuter programs or spay and neuter information.

Meeting with Jefferson County Animal Control (JCAC) to discuss ways for Spay Today and JCAC to
work together more efficiently. Continue working with JCAC so that every unsterilized animal
adopted from animal control goes through the Spay Today program.

Providing humane traps to the public who wish to engage in trap-neuter-release programs in their
community.

Continuing to work with the Charles Town Horseman’s Benevolent & Protective Association (HBPA)
to schedule approved spay and neuter appointments for individuals who care for homeless cats at the
local racetrack and billing the HBPA at a later date. The HBPA has published information about Spay
Today working with the homeless cats at the racetrack. As a result, the HBPA has received many calls
from members happy about the collaboration and the results they are seeing at the racetrack.

Working with 24 humane organizations and rescue groups to schedule appointments or accept
coupons for spay and neuter surgeries. Helped the Mosby Group in Staunton, VA, and assisted a
family in Hedgesville, WV, to spay/neuter six pit bulls.

Updating the design for vet office listings online, including pre-surgery information and pictures of
the vet offices, to better serve our customers.

Coordinating with Moorefield Animal Hospital to schedule a Saturday Tom-a-thon, neutering male
cats at a reduced cost.

Donating a coyote trap to Blue Ridge Wildlife Center in Clarke County, VA. They were very happy to
have it, as they previously had only small traps.

(To learn more about Spay Today, please visit www.nhes.org, go to “About Us,” “Programs,” “Spay
Today.”)

http://www.nhes.org/�

20

V. Volunteers are the backbone of many nonprofit organizations. At NHES, volunteers have served each
of its programs, The Humane Education & Advocacy Program, Peace Plantation Animal Sanctuary, The
Briggs Animal Adoption Center, and Spay Today. Their dedication to serving NHES’s mission is
unwavering.

Many of the volunteers came on a regular basis this
year to help socialize dogs who had been taken from
hoarding situations. These dogs often have had little
human contact, experience walking on grass, or
sleeping on soft bedding. These dogs are terrified of
everything. Our volunteers work one-on-one with
them to help them become happy and content canine
citizens. It’s amazing to finally see, after much hard
work, their efforts rewarded when one of these dogs
is adopted into a loving home. This wouldn’t be
possible without the time and dedication these
wonderful volunteers have put forth to help these
dogs.

Jessica and Bridget with timid dogs Nicky & Webber

Our volunteers not only help with the animals but also help support the mission of NHES by financially
supporting the organization and even becoming employees, carrying out the mission on a daily basis.

In fiscal 2012, volunteers logged 3,244 hours of support.

Some volunteers work on a special-project basis; others help on a routine basis. The following is a list of
some of the activities volunteers engaged in this fiscal year:

Students from Faith Christian Academy spent a day volunteering at the BAAC for their annual Labor
of Love day.

Volunteers came to us through the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources
program that requires individuals to volunteer a specific number of hours a month. They help with
cleaning and yard work as well as socializing the animals.

Many volunteers actively engaged in fund raising activities, such as Pedal for Pooches, Footin’ for
Animals, and Tails on Trails.

Volunteers came to us through the Jefferson County Work Exploration Program, a program that works
with mentally challenged adults.

Volunteers assisted staff at adoption days at PetSmart and Petco and transported cats for adoption at
Posh Pets in Winchester, VA.

Volunteers were involved at events at Wal-mart and Street Fest, Shepherdstown, WV.

21

Centra Bank ran a promotion giving away pet blankets with each new account. We sent
representatives with dogs to their banks in Inwood and Martinsburg, WV.

A Jefferson County High School student completed her required volunteer service hours helping at
BAAC.

The Loudoun County (VA) Adaptive Recreation Specialist group came to BAAC for a visit.

Petvalu opened a new store in Ashburn, VA, and asked BAAC to bring dogs to the grand opening.

NW Works of Virginia is a nonprofit organization that works with adults with disabilities. They
brought two small groups for 2 hours each to volunteer and were very appreciative for the opportunity
to help.

Volunteers assisted staff with administrative work, gave tours of BAAC, and groomed our animals.

(To learn more about becoming a volunteer, please visit our website at www.nhes.org under “Support.”)

22

Financial Information
The National Humane Education Society and Affiliates Consolidated Statements of Activities (Accrual)

Years Ended June 30, 2012 and 2011

Unrestricted Net Assets 2012 2011

Revenues and Gains:

Contributions $2,673,2/82 $2,717,588

Estates and bequests 1,189,718 803,428

Foundations and trusts 46,369 47,404

Mailing list rental income 92,122 92,330

Interest and dividends 30,429 17,263

(Gain) on Sale of Assets (4,310) –

Merchandise sales (net of cost of goods) 8,024 6,117

Net realized and unrealized gains (loss) on

Long-term investments 41,829 62,789

Change in value of split interest agreement (6,887) 301,325

Other 6,636 37,509

Special Events (net) 49,182 26,661

Service fees 568,147 456,045

Net assets released from restrictions – 1,019,815

Total unrestricted revenues and gains 4,698,269 5,588,274

Expenses and Losses:

Program services 3,702,207 3,452,934

Management and general 544,166 577,771

Fundraising/membership acquisition 500,704 353,680

Total expenses 4,747,077 4,384,385

Change in unrestricted net assets before
extraordinary item (48,808) 1,203,889

Temporarily Restricted Net Assets

Temporarily restricted contribution – 3,085

Net assets released from restriction – (1,019,815)

Change in temporarily restricted net assets – (1,016,730)

Change in net assets (48,808) 187,159

Net Assets at Beginning of Year 3,396,724 3,209,565

Net Assets at End of Year $3,347,916 $3,396,724

23

Financial Information

34%

0%

32%
13%

6%
15%

PROGRAM SERVICES

Humane Education

Alliance Partnership

Briggs Animal Adoption Center
Peace Plantation

Membership Services

Spay Today

78%

11%
11%

EXPENSES

Program Services

Management & General

Fundraising/Membership Acquisition

34%
0%
32%
13%

6% 15%

PROGRAM SERVICES
Humane Education
Alliance Partnership
Briggs Animal Adoption Center
Peace Plantation
Membership Services
Spay Today

Message from the President
Program Services

A NI

M

AL WELFARE

Free Willy?
Dolphin drama
riles aquaria
Proposal to remove captive
dolphins draws fire

W a r h e a d s f r o m r e t i r e d P e a c e k e e p e r m is s ile s in s t o r a g e a t F. E. W a r r e n A ir F o rc e B a s e in C h e y e n n e , W y o m in g . A

n e w v e r if ic a t io n t e c h n iq u e c o u ld p a v e t h e w a y f o r c u t s in n u c le a r s to c k p ile s .

of the weapon itself. Scanning a warhead
repeatedly with different preloads or test­
ing multiple warheads in parallel should
make verification ironclad. “The inherent
simplicity of the principle is enormously
pleasing,” says John Finney, a condensed
matter physicist at University College Lon­
don, who was not involved in the work.

Glaser’s group devised a proof of prin­
ciple with the British Test Object (BTO), a
disk used for radiographic testing in un­
classified research. The BTO has a ring of
tungsten, which gives a good approxima­
tion of fission induced when high-energy
neutrons slam into plutonium or ura­
nium-235. (The verification test doesn’t
increase a radioactive m aterial’s natural
fission enough to affect a warhead.) For
experimental tests, the team plans to blast
the BTO with neutrons from a deuterium-
tritium generator and align the resulting
radiograph with the radiographic negative.
The team anticipates th at it will be able to
reliably spot mismatches and discern the
true BTO from a fraudulent one.

If a future accord were to mandate elim­
ination of excess warheads, a state might
be tempted to cheat by trying to pass off

g a fake as an authentic warhead slated for
1 dismantlement, “allowing the real thing
m to be diverted to a clandestine stash,”
| Acton notes. The zero-knowledge approach
| would readily unmask common real-world
£ frauds, the researchers say. For example,

if a nuclear power tried to get credit for
decommissioning a harmless warhead
loaded with nonfissile uranium-238 or
reactor-grade plutonium, a skewed fission
rate would reveal th at the device wasn’t,
bomb-ready.

In March, Glaser’s group invited seven
nuclear jocks to Princeton to “poke holes in
our idea,” Glaser says. “If there was a flaw,
we needed to find out before it was too late.”
Garwin saw some chinks, including the po­
tential for a host nation to rig the system to
fake a scan. Adding a second set of detectors
tuned to a different neutron generator—for
instance, beryllium shorn of neutrons by a
gamma ray source—would make the system
more robust, Garwin says. “Fission neutrons
detected in the side detectors will then be
sure evidence of fissile material.”

Before nuclear powers embrace the tech­
nology, they will have to jointly iron out
any more kinks th at might undermine trust
in a verification system, says Raymond
Jeanloz, a nuclear weapons policy expert
at the University of California, Berkeley,
who also visited Princeton in March for the
review. “It’s a great idea, and I’m cheering
them on,” Jeanloz says. But to implement
this, “the devil is in the details.”

He and others note th at a nonprolifera­
tion payoff may be years off. Even if nuclear
powers agree on a foolproof verification
system, they must still negotiate how many
stored nukes to eliminate. ■

By David Grimm, in Baltimore, M aryland

J
ohn Racanelli gazes at his eight bottle-
nose dolphins as if he might be look­
ing at them for the last time. The CEO
of the National Aquarium here, he
sits on bleachers in a circular amphi­
theater as the animals glide around
a giant concrete tank, some grasping small

orange basketballs in their mouths, others
blowing bubbles. One peeks his head out of
the water and stares back at the CEO. “He’s
spying on us,” Racanelli laughs.

Last month, the aquarium announced
that it is considering moving these animals
to a marine sanctuary, citing concerns that
it is cruel to keep such cognitively advanced
creatures in captivity. The move has deep­
ened a schism in the research community
that studies dolphins and whales, collec­
tively known as cetaceans. Scientist-turned-
animal-advocate Lori Marino calls the
aquarium’s announcement “a giant step for­
ward” and predicts the National Aquarium’s
reputation will put pressure on other facili­
ties to reconsider captivity. But this week, the
Dolphin Research Center (DRC) in Grassy
Key, Florida, sent a letter to the National
Aquarium denouncing the potential plan as
bad for both science and public engagement.
“It’s misguided in a number of ways,” says
DRC Research Director Kelly Jaakkola.

Cetacean researchers have wrestled for
years with the ethics of confining whales
and dolphins; about 600 of the animals
are kept in 34 facilities in North America
today In 2010, Marino, then a biopsycholo­
gist at Emory University in Atlanta, helped
draft a “Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans:
Whales and Dolphins,” which argued that
captivity spells cruelty for these intelligent
animals, because no facility can reproduce
the cognitive and social environment of the
open ocean. She hoped her work on dolphin
cognition—showing, for example, that the
animals are self-aware enough to recognize
themselves in mirrors—would convince col­
leagues that cetaceans should be studied
only in the wild. Instead, many fired back

S C IE N C E sciencem ag.org 27 JUNE 2014 • VOL 344 ISSUE 6191 1437

N E W S | I N D E P T H

with a series of papers arguing that captive
cetacean research remained crucial (Science,
29 April 2011, p. 526).

Then came Blackfish. The popular 2013
documentary, in which Marino appears, cast
a pall on captivity by focusing on the travails
of a SeaWorld orca named Tilikum, which
was implicated in the deaths of three peo­
ple. Racanelli says public opinion fed into
the National Aquarium’s announcement,
but he also has personal reasons. He began
interacting with dolphins 40 years ago as a
tank cleaner at Marine World in San Fran­
cisco, and says premature deaths of captive
dolphins shaped his views. Shortly after he
arrived at the National Aquarium in 2011, he
stopped the facility’s dolphin shows (Science,
30 May, p. 951). Today, visitors can view the
animals, but they won’t see them perform
tricks. “No music, no monitors,” Racanelli
says. “They just get to goof around.”

Still, he’s not satisfied with the current
setup. The dolphin tank is small, chemically
treated, and bereft of other marine life. “This
is still a stadium,” he says, glancing around
the amphitheater. “It does not feel like a dol­
phin habitat.”

Last fall, Racanelli gathered a group of ma­
rine biologists, veterinarians, and structural
engineers to map out a new mission for the
National Aquarium, including deciding the
fate of its eight dolphins. If the animals do
move, they won’t go to the open ocean, an
environment most have never encountered.
Instead, the group is con­
sidering the feasibility
of a dolphin sanctuary,
perhaps a large, fenced-
off area of the sea. The
animals would continue
to get regular medi­
cal care, but otherwise
would have almost no in­
teraction with humans.
No such sanctuary exists
today, so the team would
start from scratch.

The working group,
known as BLUEprint,
hopes to make a prelimi­
nary decision about the dolphins by April of
next year, Racanelli says. A sanctuary would
take anywhere from another 3 to 10 years to
become reality, and no cost estimates have
been given.

Such a plan would face stiff opposition
from other cetacean facilities such as the
DRC, a nonprofit funded with admissions
and public donations that houses dolphins
in sea pens and has conducted studies of
dolphin behavior and cognition. In its let­
ter to the National Aquarium this week, the
DRC states that it and other facilities adhere
to “extremely high standards of animal care

and training” and that Racanelli is advancing
“opinions that are either factually inaccurate
and/or that do a great disservice … to the
very animals themselves.”

Jaakkola, the center’s scientific director,
worries that if dolphins are out of the pub­
lic’s sight, they’ll also be out of mind and
support for protecting them will drop. “Be­
fore aquariums, humans didn’t know or care
about these animals,” she says. “Now people
care about them because they can get up
close and personal with them. That’s why we

have things like dolphin-
safe tuna.”

Others fret that our
understanding of ceta­
ceans will stall without
access to captive animals.
Shawn Noren, a physiolo­
gist at the University of
California, Santa Cruz,
who has studied whales
and dolphins for nearly
20 years, testified in April
against a California bill
that would have banned
orca shows in the state
and phased out captivity.

Her studies on dolphins kept in natural la­
goons (where they also perform shows and
swim with the public) has involved attaching
heart rate monitors to the animals, for ex­
ample, to determine why they are susceptible
to decompression sickness when startled by
Navy sonar; this study was funded by the Of­
fice of Naval Research, which has not taken
a public position on the issue of captive ce­
taceans. “None of this work could have been
done in the wild,” she says.

Sanctuaries are not viable, Noren says,
because dolphins that have spent most or all
of their lives in sterile environments would

face pollution and disease. Plus, she says,
“these animals are used to human stimula­
tion and interaction. They’d be bored out
of their minds.” Jaakkola adds, “Sanctuaries
are not necessarily a Disney type of place.”

Nevertheless, Noren says, the die may
have already been cast. Even though the Cal­
ifornia bill she fought didn’t pass, the press
coverage of it placed aquariums on the spot,
and the National Aquarium’s plan, if it goes
forward, “would put even more pressure on
them.” There are other signs of changing
attitudes. A biannual marine mammal re­
search conference in New Zealand last year
hosted a panel discussion on the ethics of
captivity, the first such forum at this meet­
ing that researchers can remember. Marino
left Emory this year to head the Kimmela
Center for Animal Advocacy, which aims to
inject more science into the animal advocacy
movement. She’s also advising the Nonhu­
man Rights Project, which last year filed a
series of lawsuits in an attempt to free four
New York chimpanzees from captivity (Sci­
ence, 6 December 2013, p. 1154) and may set
its sights on cetaceans.

If chimpanzee research is any parallel,
those who support studying captive ceta­
ceans have reason to worry: Similar concerns
spurred the National Institutes of Health to
phase out most of its captive chimp stud­
ies and move the animals to sanctuaries
{Science, 5 July 2013, p. 17).

Back at the National Aquarium, one lit­
tle girl has toddled into the amphitheater
and stares, mouth agape, at the dolphins.
“Whoa!” she says. Racanelli looks over at her.
“I worry about losing that,” he says. “But at
the end of the day we have to figure out if
these dolphins are part of our true mission:
changing the way humanity views and cares
for the ocean.” ■

Captive cetaceans

607
Whales and dolphins are kept
in captivity in North A merica*

506 76 25
Dolphins Beluga Killer whales

‘ NUMBERS EXCLUDE THOSE HELD BY THE U.S.NAVY.
WHICH DOES NOT RELEASE SUCH DATA

Source: CETA-BASE

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Copyright 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science. All rights reserved.

Animals in Sport and Entertainment

Helen Stoddart

SUMMARY. The publications presented in this chapter cover a variety
of animal sports (dog racing, bull fighting, rodeos, horse shows and horse
racing) and entertainment (theatre, film, television, circuses, zoos and
aquariums). These texts represent a wide view of current research, opin-
ion and debate on the use of animals in these areas. [Article copies avail-
able for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH.
E-mail address: Website:  2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Circuses, dog and horse racing, animals in film, rodeos,
zoos

Some of the most impassioned and politicised debates on animal is-
sues have been over the use of animals in sports and entertainment.
Many opponents of animals in entertainment have posted their ideas on
web sites, rather than books. I have listed the most significant of these
web sites in this chapter. One reason that protesters prefer the electronic

Helen Stoddart is a lecturer in literature and film at Keele University, United King-
dom. She is the author of Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (Man-
chester University Press) and is currently working on a follow-up to this volume
focusing on representations of the body in circus fictions.

Address correspondence to: Helen Stoddart, 2, Hyndland Avenue, Flat 2/R, Glas-
gow, G11 5BW, United Kingdom.

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “Animals in Sport and Entertainment.” Stoddart, Helen. Co-published
simultaneously in The Reference Librarian (The Haworth Information Press, an imprint of The Haworth
Press, Inc.) No. 86, 2004, pp. 25-36; and: Animals Are the Issue: Library Resources on Animal Issues (ed:
John M. Kistler) The Haworth Information Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2004, pp. 25-36. Sin-
gle or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service
[1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: docdelivery@haworthpress.com].

http://www.haworthpress.com/web/REF
 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

Digital Object Identifier: 10.1300/J120v41n86_03 25

http://www

http://www.haworthpress.com/web/REF

media is that this form of communication is easy to update and is acces-
sible in much of the world.

Since World War II there has been a widespread shift in Western
opinion on the rights of animals. This is evident in the recent writings,
as shown in this chapter.

Broadly speaking, there are three strands of approach to the subject.
First, there are many publications that could be characterized as catering
to enthusiasts or ‘aficionados’ (a term that is specifically derived from
its application to bullfighting devotees) literature. Such works are fre-
quently written either by dedicated fans or by former participants in the
sport or entertainment. They are often richly-illustrated productions that
seek to champion the glory and tradition of a practice, stressing the no-
bility and bravery of its human and animal participants. This enthusi-
asm is underscored both by nostalgia and by the subtext, spoken or
unspoken, that the practice (whether it is bullfighting, rodeo or circus) is
perceived to be threatened, or at least eroded, by reform in the modern
world.

The second category of published work is the less celebratory and
more pragmatic history of various kinds of animal exhibition or sports
that ignore the ethical and political issues. These tend to focus on key
events, meetings and developments. Though these books may prove to
be an excellent resource for certain researchers interested in raw infor-
mation, the absence of discourse may lead to frustration amongst others.

Finally, there is an increasing and highly engaging body of work be-
ing produced both by academics and activists that analyses the changing
status of animals within post-war Western society and the effects that
these shifts may have on the exhibition and performance of animals in
the public domain. This type of writing tries to acknowledge how man-
kind’s control, ownership and display of animals have seemed to fulfil
our desired mastery over the natural world. Writing on zoos, circuses
and menageries has also emphasised how these entertainments have
showcased colonial expansion, wherein the conquered nations have
been indirectly represented through animals that are once decorously
exotic but, at the same time, in need of control and containment. De-
pending on the position and commitment of the writer, these works of-
ten go on to press for reforms, new practices, or even revolutionary
changes such as the abolition of whole sports (bull-fighting, zoos and
animal circuses have been the most common targets).

Probably the most important and vibrant area for this sort of debate
has been the zoo, about which there have been a large number of excel-
lent publications in the last five years. The debate hinges on the issue of

26 ANIMALS ARE THE ISSUE: LIBRARY RESOURCES ON ANIMAL ISSUES

whether zoos may be reformed for the benefit of animals, by serving as
centres for education and awareness, as well as seeking to preserve en-
dangered species. The species is maintained in captivity with a view to
reintroducing them into the wild, when the cause of the creature’s
threatened extinction has been remedied. Those who oppose zoos alto-
gether, however, argue that this is a limited and uncertain practice that
may result in inbreeding and mutations (producing a weakened species
that is even less likely to survive in the wild) along with breeding diffi-
culties, or problems in reintroduction of animals into their habitats.
These books provide valuable insights about animals in entertainment
because the question of zoos is central to the debate.

CIRCUS

*Jay, Ricky. Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women. New York: Farrar,
Straus, Giroux, 1998. 356 pp., (0374525706), $25.00. This is an enter-
taining, painstakingly researched and beautifully presented book on the
history of some of the more bizarre and talented side show entertain-
ments in the United States and Europe. There are a few interesting sec-
tions on performing animals, along with other aspects of popular culture
(vaudeville, menageries, fair-ground attractions and the midway). Very
few, if any, people have the resources and the passion for their subject
possessed by Jay (more famous as an actor, magician and card trickster)
which makes this an essential purchase in this field.

*Kiley-Worthington, Marthe. Animals in Circuses and Zoos: Chiron’s
World. Harlow, UK: Little Eco-Farms Publishers, 1990. 240 pp.,
(1872904025), £12.95. This piece of research by the British academic
veterinarian, Kiley-Worthington, represents a crucial contribution to
the increasingly impassioned debate on the use of animals in the circus.
Interestingly, although she was commissioned to write this report by the
Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) which
has long targeted circuses as suspected places of animal abuse, the or-
ganisation was not entirely comfortable that Kiley-Worthington con-
cluded that “There was no evidence for cruelty or prolonged pain and
suffering during the training of the animals I witnessed.” These contro-
versial findings make an interesting counterpoint to Johnson’s (below)
and are essential reading for anyone with an interest in the ethical treat-
ment of animals in entertainment.

*Johnson, William. The Rose-Tinted Menagerie. London: Heretic
Books, 1994. 335 pp., (0946097283), $16.95. This is a polemical and

Helen Stoddart 27

committed contribution to the debate on the treatment of animals in
zoos and circuses. Johnson spent five years working undercover in a va-
riety of zoo, circuses, safari parks and aquariums, and this book-length
study details his grim findings. He argues that the maltreatment that he
uncovered is a symptom of a broader human insecurity that fuels a de-
sire for mastery over the animal and natural world–an essential refer-
ence point for anyone with an interest in animal welfare debates.

There is also a great deal of related material on animal welfare and
rights in entertainment on some key web sites, the best of which are:

http://www.animal-rights.com/arsec9q.htm
http://www.narn.org/entertainment.shtml
http://www.lionden.com/faqs.htm
http://www.iridescent-publishing.com/rtmcont.htm
http://www.cfhs.ca/GeneralInfo/AboutCFHS/Philosophy/

entertainment.htm
http://www.zoocheck.com/programs/entertain/
http://www.petatv.com/circ.html
http://www.circuses.com/
http://www.naiaonline.org/body/articles/archives/policy_

animent.htm
http://www.spca.bc.ca/community/cc_AnimalsEntertainment.htm

THEATRE, TELEVISION AND FILM

Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. 248 pp., (0719033772),
$19.95. By examining the representation of animals in the media, and
especially popular culture (cartoons, films and television) and politics,
Baker argues that Anglo-American culture has persistently undermined
the status of animals in relation to humans. He claims that this has also
legitimised their misuse (in science, entertainment and so on). This
book has powerful implications for those involved in issues of animal
rights.

*Beck, Ken and Clark, Jim. The Encyclopaedia of TV Pets: A Com-
plete History of Television’s Greatest Animal Stars. Nashville, TN:
Rutledge Hill Press, 2002. 384 pp., (15585-39816), $19.99. This is the
most comprehensive, up-to-date and detailed guide to this subject and
would be of invaluable assistance to researchers at any level interested
in this subject. Although it focuses on television, the animals (and their

28 ANIMALS ARE THE ISSUE: LIBRARY RESOURCES ON ANIMAL ISSUES

http://www.animal-rights.com/arsec9q.htm

http://www.narn.org/entertainment.shtml

http://www.lionden.com/faqs.htm

http://www.iridescent-publishing.com/rtmcont.htm

http://www.cfhs.ca/GeneralInfo/AboutCFHS/Philosophy/

http://www.zoocheck.com/programs/entertain/

http://www.petatv.com/circ.html

http://www.circuses.com/

http://www.naiaonline.org/body/articles/archives/policy_

http://www.spca.bc.ca/community/cc_AnimalsEntertainment.htm

trainers) represented cover most types of domestic and wild animals.
Most of the television programs represented are North American pro-
ductions. The range of information provided is very broad and includes
production facts, personal recollections, interviews, and plot summa-
ries. It is nicely illustrated (200 pictures).

Mitman, Greg. Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film.
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 320 pp., (0674715713),
$31.50.

*Paietta, Ann C. and Kauppila, Jean L. Animals on Screen and Radio.
Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994. 397 pp., (0810829398), $14.95.
This is an excellent reference book for researchers at all levels. It con-
tains 1,515 entries covering animal performers in a variety of media
(television, film and radio). Each entry contains full details for each per-
formance (producer, country of production, date, length, personnel).
The availability lists are a little out of date by now, but may be of use to
librarians wishing to extend their collections in this area. Although
there are some international entries, the majority of programs and films
featured are North American in origin.

Wear, Terri A. The Horse’s Name Was . . . : A Dictionary of Famous
Horses from History, Literature, Mythology, Television and Movies.
Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993. 217 pp., (0810825996), $25.00.
A reference book containing 1,307 entries listing and commenting on
famous equine performances, together with the significant human agents
with whom they performed. Contains a helpful index, but no illustra-
tions.

ZOOS AND AQUARIUMS

O’Barry, Richard. Behind the Dolphin Smile. Los Angeles, CA: Renais-
sance Books, 2000, 288 pp., (1580631010), $15.95. Although O’Barry
had a career training dolphins for entertainment (including Flipper the
TV dolphin), he now no longer believes that dolphins should be trained
and held captive in this way. Persuasive and useful text.

*Baratay, Eric et al. Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the
West. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. 400 pp., (1861891113), $40.00.
For those with a cultural and historical (rather than specifically scien-
tific) interest in the purposes and possibilities for zoos, this book is ab-
solutely essential. Not only is the production value extremely high, it is
also beautifully and liberally illustrated. Five separate sections offer ac-

Helen Stoddart 29

counts of key periods in the development of zoos, and consider issues of
aesthetics and ethics.

Eaton, Randall, L. The Orca Project: A Meeting of Nations. Enter-
prise, OR: Sacred Press, 1999. 228 pp., (0996369600), $19.99. An en-
gaging account of Orca behavior that mixes studied observation with
personal reflection. Written through discursive form, fiction and poetry.

*Ellis, James and Kisling, Vernon. Zoo and Aquarium History: An-
cient Animal Collections to Zoological Gardens. Boca Raton, FL: CRC
Press, 2000. 440 pp., (084932100x), $79.95. Very few other books rep-
resent such coverage and detail (historical and geographical) on this
subject. Kisling is a respected authority on the subject since he has been
a longstanding member of the History Task Force for the American As-
sociation of Zoos and Aquariums and also represents North America to
the Bartlett Society (an international zoo history group). Beginning with
the travelling menageries of the eighteenth century, the authors show
the significant developments in the structure of zoos and aquariums.
They also consider the changes in cultural attitudes to these institutions
and the way that these have helped to shape change. Essential purchase
for any academic library with interests in this field.

Hancocks, David. A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of
Zoos and Their Uncertain Future. Berkeley, CA: University of Califor-
nia Press, 2001. 301 pp., (0520218795), $35.00. Hancocks outlines his
vision for zoos of the future in which the previously dominant agenda of
entertainment is replaced by a new emphasis on education and preserva-
tion. Contains very interesting consideration of the relative merits of a
number of zoos in the United States and Europe.

*Hanson, Elizabeth. Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in Amer-
ican Zoos. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. 256 pp.,
(0691059926), $29.95. This book is significant because it is the first ac-
ademic study of the meaning and purposes of zoos. The questions it asks
are primarily cultural (what do zoos reveal about the wider North Amer-
ican culture: its sense of its own space, natural environment and human
identity?) rather than ecological, ethical or scientific and, for this rea-
son, it will be of especial interest to cultural studies and cultural history
investigators.

Jaschinski, Britta. Zoo. Boston, MA: Phaidon Press Inc., 1996. 112 pp.,
(07148-34726), $19.95. A powerful black and white photography col-
lection. Although there is no accompanying text, the pictures strongly ar-
ticulate a view of the various animals depicted as ‘entrapped’ rather
than ‘housed’ in their zoo environment. The lighting, together with the

30 ANIMALS ARE THE ISSUE: LIBRARY RESOURCES ON ANIMAL ISSUES

fore-grounding of cages in many photographs, means that the pictures
are both beautiful and highly emotive.

Koebner, Linda. Zoo Book: The Evolution of Wildlife Conservation
Centers. New York: Forge, 1994. 192 pp., (031286322x), $10.95. This
book is a colorful advertisement for the modern and reformed North
American zoo that attempts to give an overview of the current practices
and ethos that have informed their revised function. A very good,
well-informed, first port of call for anyone interested in the subject.

Livingston, Bernard. Zoo: Animals, People, Places. IUniverse.com,
2000. 344 pp., (0595146236), $18.95. Quite a lightweight social history
of zoos with a lively style and some interesting historical material for
the more casual investigator.

Myers, Douglas G. and Stephenson, Lynda Rutledge. Mister Zoo:
The Life and Legacy of Dr. Charles Shroeder. Berkeley, CA: Zoologi-
cal Society of San Francisco, 1999. 271 pp., (0911461159), $28.00.
Lively biography of a key figure in the development of the American
zoo. Also includes important and interesting veterinarian information
about the keeping of wild animals in zoos, and a good deal of historical
narrative about the early years of the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal
Park.

Nyhuis, Allen W. The Zoo Book. Berkeley, CA: Carousel Press, 1994.
277 pp., (0917120132), $14.95. A useful and well-illustrated reference
book that contains detailed listings on the various facilities to be found
in the United States’ major zoos, together with some significant zoos in
other continents.

Rothfels, Nigel. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo
(Animals, History and Culture Series). Baltimore: John Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 2002. 304 pp., (0801869102), $34.95. The role of Carl
Hagenbeck in changing animal exhibitions from iron-barred menager-
ies to the naturally-landscaped zoos of the modern era.

*Schmidt, Michael. Jumbo Ghosts: The Dangerous Life of Elephants in
the Zoo. Philadelphia: Xlibris Corporation, 2002. 240 pp., (1401012566),
$21.99. This book combines historical perspectives on the capture and
treatment of elephants with well-substantiated arguments about the
dangers implicit in contemporary practice in zoos. Schmidt also offers a
treatise on the possibilities for future practices that would not be so
damaging to the animals and to the humans who take risks in looking af-
ter them. The author remains committed to the reformation rather than
the dissolution of zoos that keep elephants. As a former veterinarian at
the elephant breeding section at a Portland, Oregon zoo, he writes from

Helen Stoddart 31

a perspective of great knowledge and experience. Written from the in-
side, as it were, this is a very important intervention into the debate
about the future of zoos.

*Shepherdson, David J. et al., ed. Second Nature: Environmental En-
richment for Captive Animals. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institu-
tion Press, 1999. 332 pp., (1560983973), $19.95. The term ‘zoo’ no
longer seems appropriate for the kind of centers used for the captive
breeding of endangered species, that are analyzed in this book. It marks,
however, a continuity between the caging of animals for the purposes of
display and entertainment to a more contemporary concern for species
preservation, temporary confinement followed by release, animal wel-
fare, and public education. Originally based on a set of papers given at
the First Conference on Environmental Enrichment in 1993 in Oregon,
the book provides a wide variety of perspectives on the care of animals,
including training, behavior, animal husbandry, caging techniques and
welfare. This is an important text for anyone with interests in animal
welfare and husbandry, zoos, ecology and natural history. See also, Norton,
Bryan et al., Ethics of the Ark: Zoos, Animal Welfare, and Wildlife
Conservation (Zoo and Aquarium Biology and Conservation). Wash-
ington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. 330 pp., (15609-85151),
$15.95.

*Tudge, Colin. Last Animals at the Zoo: How Mass Extinction Can Be
Stopped. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1992. 266 pp., (1559631589),
$30.00. Tudge, a zoologist, says that human intervention is necessary to
preserve certain endangered animal species and he promotes captive
breeding programs that replicate aspects of their natural environments.
The goal is to release the animals back into the wild when their survival
in it can be guaranteed. The initial section on the politics of conserva-
tion is useful and well-argued and the book as a whole constitutes a
valuable contribution to the ongoing debates about the captive breeding
and conservation of wild animals.

Here are some useful web sites on the subject:

www.aza.org/ (American Zoo and Aquarium Association)
www.caza.org/ (California Association of Zoos and Aquariums)
www.ammpa.org/ (The Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and

Aquariums)
www.eaza.net/ (European Association of Zoos)
www.captiveanimals.org/ (Captive Animals Protection Society)

32 ANIMALS ARE THE ISSUE: LIBRARY RESOURCES ON ANIMAL ISSUES

DOG RACING

*Branigan, Cynthia A. Adopting the Racing Greyhound, 227 pp.,
(0764540866), $15.99. The most popular and comprehensive book on
this subject. Racing dogs are no longer routinely killed when their rac-
ing lives are over (at a very young age); they are put up for adoption.

O’Donoghue, Brian Patrick. My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian: Mushing
Across Alaska in the Iditarod–The World’s Most Gruelling Race. New
York: Vintage Books, 1996. 198 pp., (0679764119), $13.00. Highly
entertaining personal account of an inexperienced dog racer who suc-
cessfully completed the Iditarod in 1991. See also, Paulsen, Gary.
Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod. Fort Wash-
ington, PA: Harvest Books, 1995. 256 pp., (0156001454), $15.00.

Mattson, Sue, ed. The Iditarod Fact Book: A Complete Guide to the Last
Great Race. Fairbanks, AL: Epicenter Press, 2001. 128 pp., (094539795x),
$12.95. Whereas most of the books on this subject are personal ac-
counts of experience of the race (see two of the best above), this book at-
tempts to offer an informative perspective on the race by including
material on the history of the race as well as its rules and parameters.

Star, Nora, ed. Greyhound Tales: True Stories of Rescue, Compassion
and Love. Fort Bragg, CA: Lost Coast Press, 1997. 116 pp., (1882897188),
$15.95. Information, advice and narrative on the increasingly popular
practice of adopting retired greyhounds but containing a strong critique
of the sport and its treatment of the dogs.

Thompson, Laura. The Dogs: A Personal History of Greyhound Rac-
ing. New York: Random House, 1994. 254 pp., (0099448718), $6.99. A
moving but highly detailed personal account.

Here are some useful websites on the subject:

www.helpsleddogs.org (campaign against the race)
groups.yahoo.com/group/alaskanwinds/messages/ (discussion group)
www.dogsled.com (official website)
www.iditarod.com (official website)
www.gra-america.org/ (Greyhound Racing Association of America)
www.greyhoundracingsucks.com/ (Campaign against greyhound

racing)
www.greyhounds.org/ (Greyhound Protection League)
www.grey2kusa.org/ (Nationwide Effort To End Greyhound Racing)
www.countryroadskennel.com/ (Advice on Greyhound Racing and

Greyhound Adoption)

Helen Stoddart 33

RODEO

Campion, Lynn H. Rodeo. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2002.
224 pp., (1585746657), $29.95. Very much an enthusiastic insider’s ac-
count of the sport, though it is well illustrated with photographs and in-
terviews and has details of some useful listings.

Serpa, Louise L, and McMurty, Larry. Rodeo. Aperture, 1994. 86 pp.,
(08938-15853), $15.00. Impressive and revealing set of black and white
photographs combined with a text by McMurty. The written text serves
to counter the potentially celebratory energy of the pictures with a defla-
tionary critique of the myths of the American West that, it argues, rodeo
has helped to promulgate. A provocative combination.

*Shepperson, Wilbur S. Rodeo Cowboys in the North American Imag-
ination. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998. 248 pp., (0874173159),
$29.95. Interesting and well-researched historical study of the cultural
significance of the rodeo cowboy in United States culture.

Wooden, Wayne. Rodeo in America: Wranglers, Roughstock, and
Paydirt. Manhattan, KS: Kansas University Press, 1999. 298 pp.,
(0700609652), $16.95. Mainly celebratory appraisal of rodeo’s role in
the culture of the United States but also includes detailed accounts of the
different varieties of rodeo and the financial and institutional structures
that constitute it.

Here are several useful web sites on the subject:

www.prorodeo.com (professional rodeo promotion)
www.wpra.com/ (women’s rodeo)
www.friendsofrodeo.com/
www.igra.com (gay rodeo)
www.iprarodeo.com/ (professional Rodeo Association)
www.alv.org.au/issues/circusrodeo/ (against rodeo)

BULLFIGHTING

*Douglass, Carrie B. Bulls, Bullfighting, and Spanish Identities. Tuc-
son: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1999. 245 pp., (0816516529), $18.95.
Very interesting study of Spanish identity. It uses the national preoccu-
pation with this sport as a metaphor for Spain’s internal divisions be-
tween country and city, and past and present, but also as a way of
describing its sense of its own identity in relation to the rest of Europe.
Of great interest to those interested in Spanish history and culture.

34 ANIMALS ARE THE ISSUE: LIBRARY RESOURCES ON ANIMAL ISSUES

Sherwood, Lyn A and Conrad, Barnaby. Yankees in the Afternoon:
An Illustrated History of American Bullfighting. Jefferson, NC: McFarland
and Company, 2001. 288 pp., (0786409312), $45.00. A valuable ac-
count of the presence of bullfighting in certain Central and South Amer-
ican countries, mainly articulated through the medium of photography,
though some text is included. Interesting sections on both famous bull-
fighters and on its representation in the cinema.

Kennedy, A. L. On Bullfighting. London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2000.
180 pp., (0224060996), $9.95. Highly personal account of this young
Scottish novelist’s research in Spain on the ‘Corrida.’ Rather than tak-
ing a particular ethical position on the subject, the author has chosen to
reflect both on the position of bullfighting in Spanish culture and on its
broader psychological and symbolic significance. Fascinating analysis.

*McCormick, John. Bullfighting: Art, Technique, and Spanish Soci-
ety. Somerset, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998. 282 pp., (1560003456),
$24.95. An important book because it combines an analysis of the his-
tory of bullfighting with a look at the myths, legends and literature that
have grown up around it. Portraits of notable bullfighters are combined
with an attempt to throw some light on the Romantic symbolism and
stereotypes that have been perpetuated by writers like Hemingway. Es-
sential reading for anyone interested in this subject.

Mitchell, Timothy. Blood Sport: A Social History of Spanish Bull-
fighting. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
244 pp., (0812231295), $42.50. A vivid account of bullfighting and of
Spanish culture by an enthusiast from the United States, although his
support for the sport is qualified.

Pink, Sarah. Women and Bullfighting: Gender, Sex and the Con-
sumption of Tradition. New York: Berg Publishing, 1997. 210 pp.,
(185973961X), $19.50. This book uses the example of one female bull-
fighter, Cristina Sanchez, as a means of exploring both the history and
significance of bullfighting in general and to look at the way the Spanish
media in particular promotes and sells Sanchez’s star image as a woman
within bull-fighting.

HORSE SHOWS AND RACING

Conley, Kevin. Stud: Adventures in Breeding. London: Bloomsbury,
2002. 288 pp., (1582341842), $24.95. Although this is partly the narra-
tive of a personal journey, it is one that is highly revelatory, not just in
terms of the history of horse exporting and breeding, but of the cultures

Helen Stoddart 35

(class, ethnic and racial) that have informed and shaped this business. It
would therefore be of interest to anthropologists and sociologists as
well as those with a specific interest in the field.

Hillenbrand, Laura. Seabiscuit: An American Legend. New York:
Random House, 2001, 399 pp., (0375502912), $24.95. An authoritative
and well-written account of this very famous horse.

McKay-Smith, Alexander and von Stade, John. Speed and the Thor-
oughbred. Lanham, MD: Derrydale, 2000. 221 pp., (1586670409),
$40.00. Comprehensive, well-produced, illustrated and researched book
on the history of the thoroughbred. Essential purchase for any library
with an extensive equine collection.

Simon, Mary and Simon, Mark. Racing Through the Century: The
Story of Thoroughbred Racing in America. Mission Viejo, CA: Bowtie
Press, 2002. 304 pp., (1889540927), $49.95. A richly illustrated and
very full history of this sport in the United States. The book is divided
into ten chapters, each of which focuses on a decade’s worth of events
and figures. Written by a former Thoroughbred Times journalist, it is
very much an (enthusiastic) insider’s view of the sport, but one which
would make a useful addition to any library with extensive equine inter-
ests.

Squires, Jim. Horse of a Different Color: A Tale of Breeding Ge-
niuses, Dominant Females, and the Fastest Derby Winner Since Secre-
tariat. Public Affairs, 2002. 320 pp., (1586481177), $26.00. (Also
available on audiocassette). Lively account of the business from a man
who traded journalism for horse breeding. Informative and entertaining
for a general and specialized readership.

36 ANIMALS ARE THE ISSUE: LIBRARY RESOURCES ON ANIMAL ISSUES

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ANIMAL ACTION
Author: Susan Orlean
Date: Nov. 17, 2003
From: The New Yorker(Vol. 79, Issue 35)
Publisher: Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
Document Type: Article
Length: 3,849 words

Full Text:
According to the American Humane guidelines, no animal actor should have to work like a dog. For instance, if an ape is on set for
more than three consecutive days the production must provide a play area or a private park where the ape can exercise and relax.
When a bear is working on a film, anything that produces smells that might bother the bear–cheap perfume, strong liquor, jelly
doughnuts–must be removed from the location. Only cats that like dogs should be cast in cat-and-dog movies. No individual fish can
do more than three takes in a day. Also, under no circumstances can a nonhuman cast member be squished. This rule applies to all
nonhuman things, including cockroaches. Karen Rosa, the director of American Humane’s Film and Television Unit, was discussing
this particular guideline one day last summer. “If you show up on set with twenty-five thousand cockroaches, you better leave with
twenty-five thousand cockroaches,” she said. I wondered if she extended the same welcome to cockroaches at home. “A cockroach
in my kitchen is one thing,” Rosa said. “A cockroach in a movie is an actor. Like any other actor, it deserves to go home at the end of
the day.”

The Film and Television Unit headquarters are in Sherman Oaks, about twenty minutes from Hollywood, in a squat concrete building
shaded by a highway overpass and a stand of gnarled banyan trees. The place is as homely as an orthodontist’s office, although it is
decorated with movie posters and a nice photograph of Francis the Mule. A wirehaired, baby-faced mutt named Lulu has the run of
the office, and staff members wander in and out between visits to soundstages and locations. There are thirty full-time and part-time
field representatives of the Film and Television Unit, which is the official monitor of animals in all Screen Actors Guild productions.
Keeping an eye on animal actors is a mighty undertaking. In the past twelve months, more than fourteen hundred sag scripts included
some kind of animal action, ranging from ants in a television picnic scene to movies featuring hundreds of horses. During the week I
spent with Film and Television Unit staff, there were tigers doing insert shots for “The Last Samurai”; owls, cats, rats, and dogs
working on “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”; a miniature horse doing a guest appearanceon “That ’70s Show”; full-sized
horses at work in “Around the World in 80 Days,” “On the One,” and “Deadwood”; a frog shooting scenes for “Cinderella”; some deer
working on “Thumbsucker”; cats and dogs rehearsing for the sequel to “The Truth About Cats and Dogs”; and spiders auditioning for
“Constantine.” The Film and Television Unit keeps track of all of these. Even fake animals and dead animals are the unit’s
responsibility. If animals used in a movie are frozen or stuffed or shown as a food product–say, a haunch of beef–the unit requires
proof that they showed up on set that way.

Most of the people who work for the Film and Television Unit are former veterinary technicians or zookeepers or horse trainers; many
are graduates of the Moorpark College Exotic Animal Training and Management Program, in Moorpark, California, which bills itself as
“America’s Teaching Zoo.” Even though the Film and Television reps spend their days reading scripts and visiting locations, they
think of themselves as being in the animal business rather than in the movie business, much the way that barbers in the Navy
probably think of themselves as being in the hair business rather than in the boat business. The truth is actually somewhere in
between: being part of the Hollywood animal world is a slightly bizarre confection that affords you such insights as the fact that
Cameron Diaz is really good with monkeys and that Wilma the alligator, after a long career in medium-budget films, is now a
taxidermied entryway ornament in Brockett’s Film Fauna, in Thousand Oaks. One morning, I asked a field rep who supervises movies
featuring horses if she liked having a job where she got to know a lot of movie stars. She thought about it for a moment and then said,
“You know, it’s been great, because I feel really attached to some of them. There’s Rusty, who is one of my favorites, and there’s
Johnny, and one I really, really like named Pumpkin.”

Animals used to have a rotten time in Hollywood. The few animals who were stars did get deluxe treatment–Rin Tin Tin, for instance,
had his own valet and chauffeur, and Jackie the Lion, who appeared in silent films with Mae West, Mack Sennett, and Gloria
Swanson, lived on a diet of prime beef and vanilla ice cream. But background animals were considered cheap, accommodating,
disposable props rather than living things. Horses got the roughest treatment: they were tripped, shocked, raced into open trenches,
run ragged. To make a horse fall on cue, wires were strung around its ankles or threaded through holes drilled in its hooves so that
the rider could just yank the wires and pull the horse up short. In 1924, six horses were killed during the filming of “Ben-Hur”; in 1935,
a hundred and twenty-five horses were wire-tripped in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and twenty-five of them were killed or had
to be euthanized. Four years later, in the Henry Fonda movie “Jesse James,” a blindfolded horse was ridden onto a greased chute

teetering on a high cliff above Lake of the Ozarks and then pushed out of the chute in order to get a shot of a cowboy on horseback
jumping into the lake. The horse broke his back and had to be destroyed. Only the first frames of the shot were used in the film, but
the entire sequence of the animal–hunched, helpless, stiff-legged–plunging toward the water is nightmarish. American Humane,
which had been founded in the late nineteenth century as an animal- and child-welfare organization, reviewed the footage and
circulated a report reproaching the movie industry for its practices. The next year, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of
America (which later changed its name to the Motion Picture Association of America) added a section to its production code
prohibiting the use of tilt chutes and trip wires, and American Humane opened a Hollywood office to enforce the new standards.
Besides supervising the care of animals on sets, it also promoted animal actors: in 1951, it instituted the Performing Animal Top Star
of the Year award–Francis the Mule was the first patsy winner–and, in 1973, it created the Animal Actor’s Hall of Fame, whose first
inductee was Lassie.

In retrospect, provisions for animal care on movie sets was a strange fit with the production code, which concerned itself with the
content of films rather than with the process of filmmaking by laying out restrictions on nudity, kiss duration, and the use of risque
words like “hell” and “tomcat” onscreen. In the nineteen-fifties, a series of Supreme Court rulings challenged the constitutionality of
the production code on First Amendment grounds, and this led to the dissolution of the Hays Office, the censorship arm of the
M.P.A.A., which administered the code. It also had the unintended consequence of ending American Humane’s authority to supervise
animal care on film sets. After the closing of the Hays Office, a few productions still allowed American Humane representatives on
set, but most did not. There were still hundreds of movies and television shows being made that featured animals–in fact, it was a
boom period for Westerns–and, according to Rosa, standards of animal safety were even lower than in the years before the M.P.A.A.
code was established. “Missouri Breaks,” “Heaven’s Gate,” and “Apocalypse Now,” for instance, all had incidents in which animals
were killed; “Heaven’s Gate” featured real cockfights, and chickens were decaptiated for the use of their blood.

In the late seventies, actors and crew members began agitating to have standards reinstated. “Hollywood, once cruel to its animal
actors, has learned the far-reaching value of a lump of sugar and a pat on the nose. . . . My pet palomino, Trigger . . . the most
perfectly trained equine in films today, has not been subjected to cruelty,” Roy Rogers wrote in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles
Examiner in support of monitoring the film industry. “He has been handled with kindness, intelligence and patience. . . . After Trigger
and I complete a scene I always have a chat with him. And I think he knows what I say. Gene Autry’s horse, Champion, Tex Ritter’s
horse, Flash, and Bill Elliott’s horse, Thunder, also probably know what Gene and Tex and Bill have said to them. These horses don’t
know cruelty.” The agitation finally had results: in 1980, the Screen Actors Guild / Producer’s Agreement was amended to include
rules requiring the proper treatment of animals, and American Humane was once again authorized to oversee animal actors in film,
television, commercials, and music videos, and to issue, or withhold, the trademarked end credit “No animals were harmed in the
making of this film.”

A lot of people think that American Humane oversees the content of movies instead of just the way they’re made. “We get tons of
calls and e-mails complaining about what’s in movies,” Karen Rosa said. “People don’t understand that we’re not telling producers
what the movie should be about. We’re just watching to see how it gets done.” After a mouse was stomped to death in “The Green
Mile,” the Film and Television Unit received dozens of calls, although its Web site detailed the use of stuffed and computer-generated
mice in the stomping scene. Sometimes, though, even the Film and Television Unit staff are fooled. After supervising the production
of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” Rosa and her staff watched a final cut of the movie and were horrified to see a scene of a cow
being hit by a truck. When she called the producers to object, they were delighted, because, as they explained to Rosa, the scene
was computer-generated, and they figured that if they’d fooled the Film and Television Unit they had done a good job. The movie got
an “Acceptable” rating from American Humane; the review on the Web site goes to great lengths to explain the scene: “One of the
cows appears to be hit by the car and falls down. This sequence was accomplished by attaching a cable to the car so that no contact
was ever made with the animals. In fact, the car is never less than 25 feet away from the cows. When the cable is pulled, the car
comes to a hard stop, creating the effect of hitting an object. The cow was actually computer generated in post production.”

American Humane’s authority extends only to sag productions; independent and foreign films are outside its reach. Even though
following its guidelines can be very expensive, producers want the “No animals were harmed” end credit and a positive review on its
Web site, which is seen by almost half a million people a month. Before releasing Pedro Almodovar’s “Talk to Her” in this country,
Sony asked American Humane to review it even though the studio knew that it would not get an end credit, because the movie
includes actual bullfighting scenes. It was an unusual circumstance: the bullfighting scenes were “documentary”–that is, they were
shot at the graduation ceremony at a bullfighting school in Spain that was taking place regardless of the filmmaking, and not a fight
that was staged for the purposes of the film. Also, bullfighting is not considered animal cruelty in Spain. Still, there was no doubt that
animals were harmed in the film: the bulls shown are real, and they did die. “We gave it a ‘Questionable’ rating,” Rosa said. “There
wasn’t really anything else we could do.”

The Film and Television Unit has an annual budget of just $1.5 million, which used to be raised through grants and donations. Since
1991, all the funding has come from the Screen Actors Guild, which counts directors and producers among its members. This means
that the reps are subsidized by the very people they are monitoring and sometimes forcing to spend money they probably don’t want
to spend. Proper care for worms on a set, as dictated by American Humane guidelines, can be thousands of dollars a day, while
using them in a shot and then tossing them out costs nothing. Several reps told me of incidents in which a producer growled at them
about the money that their safeguards were costing. Rosa waves off the question of conflict. “The industry should support us,” she
said. “They have lots of money and we don’t. We shouldn’t have to compete for grant money that should be going to neutering
programs and shelters.” The budget is skin-tight, and the number of productions that the Film and Television Unit oversees has
grown every year, particularly since the expansion of cable, satellite television, and independent films.

In the past, local humane associations subcontracted with American Humane to cover movies shot outside the country. One of these,
a family film called “Running Free,” was shot in 1999 in South Africa under the supervision of the Animal Anti-Cruelty League of
Johannesburg. The group vouched for the animals’ treatment, but it also reported that four horses had died during the film’s
production and that shock collars were used to control others. American Humane gave the movie a “Believed Acceptable” rating–one

notch below the usual “Acceptable,” but the review on its Web site makes no mention of the deaths or the shock collars.

Partly as a result of “Running Free,” the Film and Television Unit now uses only field reps it has trained. It sends reps around the
world to cover locations and has employees on call in Australia and England. Rosa hopes eventually to add reps in Africa and
Europe. “We have to keep up,” she said. “This is very high-profile. It sets a standard. And we have to keep current on new
information. Right now, I’m looking into the new science that’s coming out on whether fish feel pain in their lips. It’s always been
assumed that they don’t, so we’ve permitted the use of barbless hooks in fishing scenes. If it turns out that they do actually feel pain,
we’ll have a lot of people in the industry pissed off when we tell them they no longer can put a real fish on a hook.”

Overseeing a film like “Soccer Dog: European Cup” is a pretty soft assignment for a Film and Television Unit rep. The movie involved
no snakes being milked (not allowed by American Humane guidelines); no chickens stacked in containers that permitted the birds to
defecate on one another (not allowed); no six-horse hitches in front of cannon fire; no arachnids having their physical characteristics
permanently altered; and no apes being asked to perform near an animatronic object or a costumed person such as a clown to which
the apes had not been first allowed to become accustomed (all forbidden). Unlike movies such as “Far and Away,” which had a
thousand horses in a single shot that took three weeks to set up, or “The Horse Whisperer,” which had such difficult horse scenes
that the Film and Television Unit field rep spent a year consulting with the producer before shooting even started, “Soccer Dog:
European Cup,” the sequel to “Soccer Dog,” is a low-key family film with what the reps call “moderate action,” requiring nothing more
demanding than having the leading dog bounce a ball on its nose. The precautions necessary for the dogs would be considerably
less expensive and complicated than those for, say, flies or maggots, which have to be accounted for after each shot.

The person assigned to the movie was Netta Bank, a graduate of the Moorpark program, who has been with American Humane for
twelve years. Bank is small and trim and has dark pixie-cut hair. She lives in Simi Valley with a parrot and five dogs, four of whom are
decommissioned actors (one had a role in “As Good as It Gets”), but in fact Bank is more of a monkey person. Her major at Moorpark
was sheep, parrots, baboons, and pigtail macaques. She once was a contestant on “To Tell the Truth,” impersonating her hero, the
orangutan specialist Birute Galdikas. “If there’s a chimp job, they think of me first,” Bank likes to say. She has worked on dozens of
movies, some chimp and some not, and carries around an alphabetical list of them which starts with “Anger Management” and ends
with “What Lies Beneath,” “Wild Bill,” and “Wolf.”

This particular day was the fourth of the “Soccer Dog” shoot, and we were on an elementary-school playing field in the Los Angeles
suburb of Rancho Palos Verdes, which for the purposes of the movie was standing in for a small town in Scotland. After driving to the
set, Bank put her folding director’s chair, her shade umbrella, and her snacks in a grassy area near the animal trainer’s truck, and
then she started filling out American Humane paperwork, which requires a scene-by-scene accounting of what the animals did, how
they were induced to do it, and what safety precautions were in place. Another field rep, Ed Lish, had dropped by to watch some of
the filming; he was on his way home from checking on Johnny, a horse starring in “Deadwood.” Lish is an American Humane officer
as well as a Film and Television Unit rep, so he was dressed in a khaki uniform and was carrying a badge. Lish grew up on a ranch in
Idaho and likes working with horses. “I hate doing the chimp jobs,” Lish said. “They scream too damn much. Dogs are fine, too,
although the worst job I ever did was that musher movie ‘Iron Will.’ Have you ever been around sled dogs? Those dogs are the
goddam fightingest dogs I’ve ever seen.”

The stars of “Soccer Dog,” however, were a couple of pacifists. The lead was played by a mongrel with searching green eyes named
Chip; a nervous cairn terrier named Ernie played the bad guy. Roger Schumacher, their owner and trainer, had worked with American
Humane on a batch of other movies, including “The Grinch,” “Annie,” “The Hulk,” “Benji,” “S.W.A.T,” and “Kill Bill.” Schumacher has
been part of the Hollywood animal world his entire life: his father was an animal trainer, and he started working professionally with
dogs in 1972. Like most of the people who procure animals for movies and television, Schumacher owns almost all the animals he
uses. He has a kennel of twenty-five dogs; most of them, including Chip, are rescues from the shelters. Schumacher worked on the
first “Soccer Dog” movie and had helped the producer select Chip for the sequel.

Usually, producers hire a trainer first and the animal second, which is the equivalent of hiring an agent and acting coach first and the
actor second. When it comes to casting, producers sometimes let the trainer choose the animal; other times, they have a request so
precise and improbable that it sounds like a punch line. One trainer told me recently that he had been asked to find a longhaired
dachshund that knew how to run on a treadmill. “It was so frustrating,” the trainer said. “I already had a Jack Russell who knew how
to do it! But the producer was stuck on the idea of a longhaired dachshund. What could I do?” If the trainer doesn’t already own the
kind of animal the producer wants, he or she will sometimes swap with another trainer. Earlier in the week, I had been talking to
someone in the Hollywood animal business who was working on a movie that needed pigeons. He specialized in primates, so he
borrowed pigeons from a colleague who was big in birds. He said it had worked out nicely, because a few weeks later the bird guy
needed to borrow some of his baboons.

When we arrived on the “Soccer Dog” set, Chip was getting ready for a scene that required him to walk up a ramp and open the door
of a Port-a-Potty, look to make sure there weren’t any bad guys inside, and then step in, letting the door slam behind him. Netta Bank
examined the Port-a-Potty and the ramp and determined that they were both safe for Chip. Schumacher ran through the scene with
the dog and then told the director that they were ready to go. On the first take, Chip went up the ramp too quickly–a tendency that
Schumacher had told me was Chip’s greatest limitation as an actor. The second take didn’t work, because the door caught a breeze
and swung open rather than shutting behind him. Then the director realized that the camera was catching Chip at an unflattering
angle. “We’re going to have to reset a little,” he said to the cinematographer, pointing to Chip’s tail. “Can we avoid making this too
much of an anus shot, please?” On the third take, Chip nudged the door open, paused as if he were really considering whether to go
in or not, and then stepped inside. The door flapped shut behind him. “Perfect,” the director called out. “Nice work, Chip.”

While the next shot was being set up, Schumacher came over to talk to Netta Bank. He was leading a fat yellow Labrador retriever
that he was training for the upcoming James Brooks movie “Spanglish.” Unlike Chip, who was the backup in “The Grinch” and “Annie,
” or Ernie, who had a long-running role on “George Lopez,” the Labrador retriever was not a professional actor. He was on loan from

a private owner, an arrangement that animal trainers do not favor, but he was the only dog Schumacher could find with the right kind
of sweet, goofy face that Brooks was looking for.

“Be sure to write down that I beat my dogs, Netta,” Schumacher said.

“You know I will,” Bank answered. “I’m writing an incident report on you, Roger.”

The fat Lab burped. “Let’s go,” Schumacher said to the dog. He said he needed to teach the dog to walk backward, so he wanted to
start working on it while the crew was moving equipment for the next shot. Ernie was resting in a crate in Schumacher’s truck, and
Chip was playing nearby with Schumacher’s daughter. He is actually a white dog with tan patches, but for the movie he had been
dyed blond. He is a small, fluffy animal with a Teddy-bear face, long legs, and ears that fold over at the tips, like little paper airplanes.
Suddenly, one of the extras ran over and put her arms around him. Bank jumped to her feet.

“Don’t handle the dog,” she said in a loud voice.

“But I’m a professional masseuse,” the woman said. “I just wanted to give him a massage.”

“Do not handle the dog,” Bank repeated. “He’s working.”

“I think he knows I’m a masseuse,” the woman said, looking crestfallen.

“Maybe so,” Bank said. “But he’s working.”

SUSAN ORLEAN

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast
Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Orlean, Susan. “ANIMAL ACTION.” The New Yorker, vol. 79, no. 35, 17 Nov. 2003, p. 092. Gale General OneFile, https://link-gale-

com.db25.linccweb.org/apps/doc/A110273484/ITOF?u=lincclin_sfcc&sid=ITOF&xid=75622fe5. Accessed 29 Mar. 2020.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A110273484

http://www.newyorker.com/

 

 

Vol.6(4), pp. 67-75, April, 2015
DOI: 10.5897/IJEL2014.0675
Article Number: 8C2600552081
ISSN 2141-2626
Copyright © 2015
Author(s) retain the copyright of this article
http://www.academicjournals.org/IJEL

International Journal of English and Literature

Review

Life of Pi: Into the Divine, the Hard Way, or: Why the
Tiger Didn’t Bite

David Pendery

National Taipei University of Business, Taiwan, Province of China.

Received 7 October, 2014; Accepted 17 March, 2015

This analysis of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi examines extraordinary elements of this famed novel; it
examines it as an avant-garde montage, a new fable, A tableau of the weird and fantastic—in other
words, a book outside the realm of normal novelistic portrayal and exposition. In one important sense,
this novel is a combination of the fictional and the factual, which can be understood as transacting
modes in a single paradigm, with fictional and non-fictional assets overlapping onto each other. But
there is much more in this work, for the book is as well an essentially unfinished, enigmatic, and deeply
spiritual exploration of the godhead and what this means for human existence. It is all a “theology of
introspection and experience, beyond human capacity,” as discussed in this analysis. In these ways,
this book is much more than simply a fiction, an ordinary novel, and it becomes a new kind of spiritual
reading experience. Readers should note that this is an independent philosophical and technical
analysis, and the writer makes little effort to cite from and regurgitate other works. This work is a new
examination of reality, spirituality and fiction. This is then a sovereign investigation, and unlike typical
literary analysis, it will only minimally refer to other writers, theorists and analysts.

Key words: Life of Pi, spirituality, the Godhead, religion, love, the divine.

INTRODUCTION

Reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is not a typical novel
reading experience in any normal sense. In fact, it is
hardly a novelistic reading experience at all, and
becomes something of an avant-garde montage, a new
fable for human existence, or a Hieronymus Bosch-ian
tableau of the weird and fantastic, fraught with terrors not
dissimilar to Bosch’s. All the normal contours you might
expect to encounter in a novel—realistic narrative
contours, dialogic interaction, standard exposition,
rational action, character interface and development, and
even the conception of plot as plot, with related,

sequential elements, recognizable cause and effect, and
a move from point A to point B as it were—are either not
present in Life of Pi, or their instantiations are so
anomalous as to be cryptic congregations of the
unexperiencable, the “essentially unfathomable,” (Ma), a
surreal not-living and to be sure not-real magical realism,
all which leaves readers scratching their heads in
wonder.

From the first pages of Life of Pi, we are taken into a
simultaneous fictional and “factual” world in which the
seemingly genuine author—Yann Martel—tells what is

E-mail: q028jc@gmail.com

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Attribution License 4.0 International License

68 Int. J. English Lit.

presumably a “true” story of the author’s prior experience
with failed publishing efforts, and then his launching of a
new project, which takes him to India (Martel, 2012).
There he learns of an interesting tale “that will make you
believe in God,” which piques his interest. He goes on to
learn about Piscine Molitor Patel (Pi) and his experience
of being lost at sea, onboard a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger
and other animals, for 227 days, his rehabilitation in
Mexico, and then his subsequent life in Canada, where
he can be contacted. This the author does, thereby
associating an actual author with a fictional character (in
one sense not odd, given that authors of novels do
indeed encounter and essentially live with their fictional
creations; but normally this is done at arms distance, with
the one always “real” and the other always “unreal” – that
is, fictional; in Life of Pi they instead interact on the same
plane, in the same world, but more on this incongruity just
below; in this book this is a reverse of a common
adoption of fictional methodologies in actual historical
narrative, a theoretical subject that has been covered in
detail for many years; see Hayden White’s Metahistory:
The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe). During this interface, the author (again,
presumably real) goes on to thank certain fictional people
(as far as we can ascertain, they are fictional), as well as
some factual people (such as Moacyr Scliar, [1937-2011],
a Brazilian writer and physician who wrote a book with a
similar theme as Life of Pi), as well as real institutions
(the Canada Council for the Arts) that aided him in his
writing. And so with this seemingly factual-but-in-fact-
fictional opening (in the Author’s Note, at the beginning of
the book, Martel senses the oncoming intersection of the
factual and the fictional, and writes of “the spark that
brings to life a real story, regardless of whether the
history…is right [xi, emphasis added]), we are taken into
this narrative, and from there we are always on the edge
of our seats wondering exactly where truth ends and
fiction begins. In these ways, any assignation of “truth”
and/or “fiction” is always inconclusive, with the two forms
of storytelling having something of an equal weight, and
the ultimate claim of which is “actually” being conveyed in
the book in doubt. In a word, both fiction and history are
narratives, and “anyone who writes a narrative is
fictionalising,” as Keith Jenkins has written (cited in
Southgate 32). This combination of fictionality and
factuality—a “hybrid of two genres” as one analyst has
stated (de Piérola 152)—and be understood as
transacting modes in a single paradigm, a paradigm that
takes in a continuum of properties, with fictional and non-
fictional assets mapping onto each other, and touches of
the imagined, constructed and simply “composed” nego-
tiating with the remembered, experienced and witnessed.
Writers engaging in this paradigm (and there is quite a
variety, writing in both fictional and factual modes) are
“presented with different but overlapping opportunities,”
as William Styron (1925-2006) once wrote of simulta-

neously looking at that which is real and that which is
not (445). In a similar vein, Professor Hayden White has
written that “‘the fictions of factual representation’ is the
extent to which the discourse of the historian and that of
the imaginative writer overlap, resemble, or correspond
with each other” (“The Fictions of Factual Representa-
tion” 121; needless to say Yann Martel is not a historian,
proper, but as I have examined he does introduce a
given historical factuality to his fictional narrative).

The binary paradigm sketched above is something of
an aside in this analysis, though a useful one enabling
understanding of the chronological contours of Life of Pi.
I will turn in the remainder of this analysis to the
substantive inquiry—the montage, fable and tableau
referred to above. In these respects, as we proceed we
will find that as the tale unfolds readers are treated to a
narrative thrill ride across a bizarre and fantastical
terrain (mostly oceanic terrain, a “surface” I suppose we
would call it), with wild twists of plot, seemingly-realistic
(but not quite) disquisitional contrivances, and uncanny
turns of being and existence, all leading less to any
expected “conclusion,” and more to an essentially
incomplete, wholly unfathomable, wondrous and deeply
spiritual exploration (though a lofty claim, this novel may
indeed lead you toward belief in God). It is all a kind of
theology of introspection, psyche and experience,
virtually beyond human capacity, and we will find that
this is one of the joys of this novel. Well, we readers
might say as we catch our breath, “You must take life the
way it comes at you and make the best of it” (122), and
indeed, we must take what comes our way in this book
and turn it to our best cognitive, experiential and
ultimately divine advantage.

Part 1: Toronto and Pondicherry

In Part One of the book when we enter Pi’s life and learn
of his “strange religious practices” (3), and that he is
simultaneously a Christian, a Muslim, and Hindu, we
know that we are in for no average story line (“Jesus,
Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu” Pi is fond of saying; any
anyway, did someone not once say that religions are like
several hikers trekking up the same mountain all at
different points along the way, but all leading toward the
same summit?). Three more divergent belief systems
could hardly be imagined (though admittedly there are
connected philosophical elements, characterization and
reportage among them; this might lead us in a new
analytical direction, as we realize that Pi is not in fact as
extraordinary and unconventional as he initially seems,
and that he simply has a unique way of combining what
seems discordant into a greater whole that points to a
harmonious outcome (that same walk up that mountain);
he does after all tell us that in spite of some of the horrors
we are on the verge of witnessing, Pi is “a person who

believes in form, in the harmony of order” [383]). When Pi
is a youth and he and his parents meet a priest, an imam,
and a pandit (a Hindu scholar), they are also puzzled
about Pi’s beliefs, and can only be allayed when Pi tells
them that, as Gandhi said, “‘All religions are true,’” and
that, “I just want to love god,” which is seconded by his
normally irreligious father. And indeed, in this way Piscine
Molitor Patel’s religious life is veritably bursting at the
seams, “the finite within the infinite, the infinite within the
finite” (65) exactly as his ongoing story approaches an
infinity (within a given finite bound of finite, “actual”
experience), which will erupt in the end beyond the
bounds of telling and comprehension.

“Toronto and Pondicherry” first examines Pi’s life
around a zoo (which his father owned) which is no doubt
a key to this whole book—as Pi not only grew up in zoos,
he will end up living in something of a zoo on the life boat
on which he survives for 227 days at sea. But just as
important is the zoo’s connection to religion, with “Certain
illusions about freedom plagu[ing] them both” (25). Pi, an
expert with animals, observes that they are never “free” in
the true sense, unrestricted and unrestrained, but are in
fact forever controlled by “compulsion and necessity”
(20), the severe environments in which they live, and rigid
animal hierarchies (even when they live in zoos). In turn,
we may assume that the religious man or woman is also
ensconced within an environment and hierarchy with God
at the highest, and all below that enchained in require-
ments of worship and devotion, enjoined in a spiritual
struggle and defense of what is best in “the small clearing
of each heart” (95). This struggle that marks animals in
the territory they inhabit in zoos, and humans in the
spiritual territory of their hearts and minds, will be played
out in the lifeboat that Pi inhabits with his animal
companions after the shipwreck of the freighter Tsintsum
on July 2, 1977.

We thus encounter a very rough balance between zoos
and religion in the first 124 pages of Life of Pi. And this
introduces the next main phase of the story, with life in
the “zoo” on the lifeboat after the sinking of the Tsintsum,
and Pi’s quest for spiritual fulfillment, playing hand in
hand (note that this oceanic zoo will include a wounded
zebra, a diabolical spotted hyena, an orangutan, and the
famed Bengal tiger, Richard Parker).

In spite of the struggle described thus far, we see in
this world a paradox, for the restricted nature of life for
both animals and humans; notwithstanding, ours (and
theirs) is in fact the best of all possible worlds, and at the
highest level, “Life is so beautiful” (6-7). At another time,
even in the midst of the suffering he is confronting at sea,
he notes that “With the very first rays of light it came alive
in me: hope. As things emerged in outline and filled with
colour, hope increased until it was like a song in my
heart. Oh, what it was to bask in it!” (158). Such plaudits
and exultation are elemental to Pi’s personality. For
example, in his youth he was in constant wonder with the

Pendery 69

animals in his father’s zoo, and their stunning beauty,
their amazing skills and their near-mystical insight and
understanding of the world around them—the “highly
mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our
planet” (19) and that “stupefy the senses” (19). So
extraordinary they are, that it is “Better to picture [animal
beauty and dexterity] in your head if you want to feel it”
(19). There is an overall irony running beneath this
description of life and its beauty, however, as it becomes
connected with death and its gruesome manifestations—
“The zebra’s broken leg was missing. The hyena had
bitten if off and dragged to the stern…A flap of skin hung
limply over the raw stump. Blood was still dripping” (158-
159), and “A massive paw landed on its shoulders.
Richard Parker’s jaws closed on the side of the hyena’s
neck. Its glazed eyes widened. There was a noise of
organic crunching as windpipe and spinal cord were
crushed.” This is all something of a “nightmare tinged
with love” (7), which is an example of the “strangeness of
the human heart” (7) as it witnesses the horrid and the
awesome—a strangeness we will encounter again and
again in Life of Pi.
As noted, the “narrative structure” of this book proceeds
in an odd way, with the author, Yann Martel, early
encountering the main character Pi, in his home in
Canada (again a “true” author is conversing with a
fictional character). This part of the book continues for a
hundred pages or so, with occasional descriptions of Pi
and his current life, returning to the telling of the story of
his youth, before disappearing completely about page
124, when we become totally involved in the fictional
story of survival on the life boat. Part one of the book tells
the knitted story outlined above. Within this narrative, we
learn of the weird appearance of Pi’s name(s), from his
given name Piscine Molitor Patel, which came from a
Parisian swimming pool (the Piscine Molitor, an actual
swimming pool in Paris, a dash of truth, again linking the
fictional and the non-fictional, with this light touch of truth,
as noted above, adding to the believability of the fiction).
He had adopted “Pi” because his cruel classmates had
referred to him as “Pissing” Patel, which reduces him in
his ever-religious passion to walk into his classes
“wearing my crown of thorns” (White, 1975: 27). He
knows that he must make a change, and he begins to
plan his escape from his pained existence with a new
name, which will be “the beginning of a new time for me”
(28). Later, when he adopts the shortened Pi for Piscine
he tells his classmates that it is indeed the same name as
the mathematical abstraction describing the ratio of a
circle’s circumference to its diameter, and he ponders
how this name represents a veritable “rebirth” (31) for
him, and that he has become something of an irrational
number himself in the world. His later experiences will
only reinforce such an absurd value in his life.

“This story has a happy ending” (124) we are told at the
end of Part One, and in spite of the death and destruction

70 Int. J. English Lit.

that awaits us, and to be sure a fairly long reach to find
out exactly what was “happy” about the conclusion of this
tale (it seems instead incomplete to me, and with a strong
touch of discontent), we nonetheless hope to discover
exactly this as we turn to Part Two, “The Pacific Ocean.”

Part 2: The Pacific Ocean

If we need any more evidence that Pi Patel has entered a
bizarre and disordered existence, an unbelievable nether-
world of fantastically dangerous experience, we need turn
no further than the first pages of Part Two of the book.
Here, during and after the hull of the ship carrying his
family is breached and it capsizes (killing his entire
family), he finds himself in a world of hurtling rain and
pounding waves, the water “like a riotous crowd, raging,
frothing and boiling” (135-136), with wild animals from his
father’s zoo pounding the decks berserkly around him,
others careering through the air and landing with
thunderous thuds on the lifeboat below, and some
swimming madly toward him in the lifeboat, threatening
his life. Above all of this wild activity is “the collective
scream of humans and animals” roars, “protesting their
oncoming death” (136). The first animal to make its way
into his lifeboat is the zebra that plunged from the ship
into it, smashing its leg in the fall, and then Richard
Parker, the huge, utterly formidable Bengal tiger. Soon a
mangy, evil-looking, violence-obsessed hyena will appear
in the raft, and later an orangutan will float toward it on its
own raft of bananas, which is crawling hellishly with
hundreds of black spiders. As “This nightmare” (128)
unfolds around him, he tells Richard Parker, “We’re in
hell” (129), and he feels he is “vowed to death” (165).
One “broken down” (163) night for Pi consists of
“weeping and sadness and spiritual pain” (164), and he
laments that when darkness comes, “Everything
disappeared” (156) and he finds himself “floating in a
pure, abstract blackness” (156). Soon more violence
descends into Pi’s life, and the hyena depravedly devours
the zebra alive in the lifeboat, “pulling out coils of
intestines and other viscera” (166) such that “blood
poured out like a river” (165), eating the animal from
inside out. Strangely though, Pi finds beauty in this chaos
(no person is better at finding beauty in madness than Pi
Patel), and he notes that, before, the wounded zebra in
his boat had been a “lovely animal. Its wet markings
glowed brightly white and intensely black,” and “the
queer, clean, artistic boldness of its design and the
fineness of its head struck me” (143-144). Another day,
he views the sea, always a danger, but also “so
immense, so breathtakingly immense…settling into a
smooth and steady motion, with the waves at heel; the
wind was softening to a tuneful breeze; fluffy, radiantly
white clouds were beginning to light up in a vast
fathomless dome of delicate pale blue. It was the dawn of

a beautiful day in the Pacific Ocean” (146). And one
glorious sunset is described as “a placid explosion of
orange and red, a great chromatic symphony, a colour
canvas of supernatural proportions” (164). All of this
beauty is ostensibly “wasted on me” (164), but we will
find in fact that the opposite is true, and beauty and the
beautiful accumulate in Pi during his journey, and he
transforms this aesthetic wonder into spiritual solace.

Amidst this commotion, the always ambivalent Pi
reflects how animals can evince human qualities (called
zoomorphism). He has already spoken directly to Richard
Parker, and later the dying zebra “appeal[s] to heaven,”
while the battling orangutan’s eyes express “fear in such
a humanlike way” (173) (but Pi will never see humanity in
the fiendish hyena). Richard Parker, sleek, huge, with
incredible, razor-sharp weapons at his disposal, makes
not a move to harm the others on the raft, a trait we will
see that marks him during this entire journey (though he
kills and eats the hated hyena). Indeed, early on Pi finds
that “the great beast was not behaving like a great beast”
(181). This puzzling behavior will become a central theme
in the book, the greatest enigma in this book of enigmas.
Pi’s ultimate survival, with a ferocious man-eater living by
his side, will become an encompassing moral lesson in
Life of Pi, indicating how life is not automatically and
ultimately fatal, which is in fact exactly what Pi is faced
with on a daily basis. At one point Pi comments how the
smallest details can “become lifesavers” (187) but in the
end it is not so much these details—the well-placed lid of
a survival box, an oarlock here, a small cleat there—that
save him, but Richard Parker himself. Pi comments on
this, thinking “It is the irony of this story that the one who
scared me witless to start with was the very same who
brought me peace, purpose. I dare say even wholeness”
(216). And again he thinks “A part of me did not want
Richard Parker to die at all, because if he died I would be
left alone with despair…If I still had the will to live it was
because of Richard Parker…I am grateful. It’s the plain
truth: without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to
tell you my story” (219). Yes, this attachment, this love,
this commitment is the essence of the purpose that
infuses Pi’s life and tale, a purpose that extends from the
basically animalistic (if I may view Richard Parker, who in
all ways performs in a virtuous, veritably regal way),
through the human, upward to the godhead. Pi’s early
plans to eliminate Parker are quickly discarded, and
ultimately he crafts his Plan Number Seven: Keep Him
Alive (221). And note here that to be sure Richard Parker
never lays a paw on Pi, outside of one brisk blow with his
paw when he appears annoyed that Pi is protecting
himself with a turtle shell, perhaps offending Parker, who
has not tried to harm him. Yes, Parker and Pi on the
whole get along famously throughout their voyage. Once
Pi even notes the tiger emitting “prusten,” a kind of cat’s
purring indicating contentment, and ultimately Pi finds
himself expressing love for the feline titan: “Truly I do. I

love you Richard Parker” (317). This is a story that will
“make you believe in God” indeed, and we see here how
its fantastical, mystical and of course God-fearing
elements lead us toward just such a rendezvous with the
eternal.

In spite of what is said above, Pi realizes he must
establish a firm relationship with Parker based on
respect, an alpha-omega association in which, strangely
enough, Pi will be at the apex. He engages in this by
leaving his own markings around the lifeboat, sniffing
Parker’s droppings, maintaining rigid boundaries above
and below the tarpaulin that stretches across the top of
the boat, and blowing piercing TREEEEEs on a whistle.
Though Pi establishes a rough status boundary between
himself and Parker in this way, readers always have the
feeling that in fact the tiger is simply biding his time, and
though he may play the game of submission to Pi in the
boat, in fact he is always his natural self, a dominant
creature with virtually no enemies, and certainly not
threatened by a skinny, weak, emaciated boy (who is a
vegetarian to boot).

In addition to the cordial relationship I have sketched
here, and in addition to the small miracles that Pi says
saved his life on numerous occasions, one element of his
life at sea seems to genuinely encourage Pi and gives
him a measure of joy—this is the natural beauty that
surrounds him. And oh what breathtaking beauty it is. We
have already noted some flashes of magnificence that Pi
observed, and he continues to note the beauty of animal
life, with sharks graced with rich ultramarine backs and
snow-white stomachs, others that “sparkled with
surprising brilliance” (293) and others of an indigo blue
that “shimmered beautifully in the sun” (294). When Pi
kills a dorado fish, he watches as it “began to flash all
kinds of colours in rapid succession. Blue, green, red,
gold and violet flickered and shimmered neon-like on its
surface as it struggled” (248).

But no doubt, as we have seen, it is the sky and sea
that are the zenith of beauty in Pi’s life. Fortunately for
him in its way, Pi’s suffering “was taking place in a grand
setting” (237), he finds that “There were many skies” and
“many seas” (289), and “there were all the nights and all
the moons” (290). Pi views “a number of starry nights,
where with just two colours and the simplest of styles
nature draws the grandest of pictures, and I felt the
feelings of wonder and smallness that we all feel, and got
a clear sense of direction from the spectacle, most
definitely, but I mean that in a spiritual sense” (259).
Another time Pi views a stunning blast of lightning striking
the sea, and “a white splinter came crashing down from
the sky, puncturing the water…The water was shot
through with what looked like white roots, briefly, a great
celestial tree stood in the ocean…The flash of light was
incredibly vivid” (312-313). With this, Pi finds himself
reveling in “a state of exalted wonder,” and he wonders
whether “This is an outbreak of divinity” (314). Pi even

Pendery 71

creates his own sort of artificial wonderment and
visionary experience, when he cancels the passage of
time in his mind, drapes a sea-water dipped piece of cloth
over his face (a “dream rag” he calls it [318]), and lies
back languorously, to be visited by “the most extra-
ordinary dreams, trances, visions, thoughts, sensations,
remembrances” (318). His ultimate aim, in the midst of
what is mostly a dreary and endlessly monotonous
voyage, is to find “the feeling that things were different,
that the present moment was different from the previous
present moment” (318).

More of the almost cryptic but bracing sorts of
experiential indeterminacies that are found in Pi’s new life
are, as we have seen, his shifts from dark gloom and
grim grief to heights of ecstasy and wonderment, often
counterpoised in startling combinations—“You reach a
point where you are at the bottom of hell, yet you have
your arm crossed and a smile on your face and you feel
you’re the luckiest person on earth” (292), he says. It is
these contrasting elements that begin to take up the
second half of the book (though as well much of this
second half is almost tedious, with long accounts of the
small details of baiting hooks, setting out lines and sea
anchors, his various daily rituals, his encounter with a
floating pile of trash in the sea, the disintegration of his
clothing and most everything else on the raft, the
gathering of water with a variety of tools, his tinkering
with the raft, various aches and pains he feels, lists of
locker contents, survival tips, animal advice, etc.). Pi has
lost his entire family, and danger lurks everywhere.
Loneliness and desolation are a constant threat: “Despair
was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a
hell beyond expression” (281), and fear “is life’s only true
opponent. Only fear can defeat life” (214). “I have so
many bad nights to choose from” Pi says, “that I’ve made
none the champion” (163). But he finds also that gifts
from heaven seem to be common, and his continuing
effort is to reduce the one and discover the other. Three
days after he finds himself on the lifeboat, he is near
death from starvation and thirst, but then he discovers a
goldmine of nourishment in the lifeboat’s emergency
rations locker (which also provides him with many other
life-saving materials, even containing “1 God,” though we
may assume this was Pi’s imagination). After downing
two liters of cherished water found in cans in the locker,
“Everything in me, right down to the pores of my skin,
was expressing joy” (190). His first taste of emergency
ration, a dry baked-wheat biscuit is just as good: “They
were savoury and delicate to the palate…They broke up
under the teeth with a delightful crunching sound…Mixed
with saliva, they made a granular paste that was
enchantment to the tongue and mouth…And when I
swallowed, my stomach had only one thing to say:

Hallelujah!” (191-192) (and this in spite of his concern

72 Int. J. English Lit.

that, as a vegetarian, the biscuit contained animal fat).1 Pi
finds many more such joys (“Now I will turn miracle into
routine” he says [197]), though they are always
interspersed with despairing low points, and horrific life-
threatening situations. Indeed, in spite of his luck with the
emergency rations, and with fishing and gathering water,
which for the most part keeps him and Richard Parker
healthy, at another point he notes that,
The storm came on slowly one afternoon. The clouds
looked as if they were stumbling along before the wind,
frightened. The sea took its cue. It started rising and
falling in a manner that made my heart sink.

Soon, the ocean swells on this day were “truly
mountains,” and there were “thousands of tons of water
hovering above us” (304). And then, “the boat was
swamped” and “I felt death was upon us” (304). “For the
rest of that day and into the night, we went up and down,
up and down, up and down, until terror became
monotonous and was replaced by numbness and a
complete giving-up” (306). Experience like this is surely
not for the faint of heart, though lucky for Pi the worst
moments and storms are always followed by peaceful
seas, and he finds his hope returning, as often as not to
be expressed in his religious devotion and love of god.
He practices religious rituals multiple times every day (not
surprising, given his triple commitment), and no less than
includes the dead zebra and a flying fish he killed in his
prayers (to this day!). In one despairing moment when he
feels he may lose his faith, he reaches to the highest high
in his dedication and proclaims:

At such moments I tried to elevate myself. I would touch
the turban I had made with the remnants of my shirt and
would say aloud, “THIS IS GOD’S HAT!”

I would put my pat my pants and say aloud, “THIS IS
GOD’S ATTIRE!”
I would point to the lifeboat and say aloud, “THIS IS
GOD’S ARK!”
I would spread my hands wide and say aloud, “THIS ARE
GOD’S WIDE ACRES!”
I would point at the sky and say aloud, “THIS IS GOD’S
EAR!” (281).

As the middle section of the book draws on, and we are
engaged in all of the wonder, despair and danger
described above, Pi finds ominously at one time that

1 And indeed, this observation about his vegetarianism, and the death of several
fish that Pi eats, points to a theme that is important in Life of Pi: the
protagonist’s requirement to abandon his lifelong and deeply-committed
vegetarianism in order to survive. Pi will find that “It is simple and brutal: a
person can get used to anything, even to killing” (248), a realization utterly
impossible in his prior life. Readers can probably see how just this would have
been necessary in a situation like this, but the psychological pressure exerted
on Pi is enormous.

“Everything suffered,” and “We perished away” (320-
321). One morning he indeed feels that he is on the
verge of perishing, and when he loses his sight, and finds
himself clinging to life, his body wasting away, he
abandons all hope. In a final grasp at salvation, he
envisions first Richard Parker (never one to follow
ordinary prescriptions, Pi): “Goodbye Richard Parker. I’m
sorry for having failed you,” (326) and then his lost family:
“Dear Father, dear Mother, dear Ravi [his brother],
greetings. Your loving son and brother is coming to meet
you” (326). In a final deliverance, he thanks God—and
then something astonishing—and as always in Live of Pi,
a typical and unanticipated—happens to Pi, and in “the
blackness of [his] dying mind” (326)—he meets a ghost—
“Is someone there?” it asks. Or does he? For first he
imagines the voice he speaks with is none other than
Richard Parker—he guesses as much when the voice
talks of his enjoyment of eating bleeding meat dishes of
every kind. Following this, the voice fades in and out,
shrieks and cries, and transforms into another vision of a
“brother” (apparently not his actual brother) adrift in
another boat, who continues to converse with him about
food, until the vision again transforms into a combination
of another person and Richard Parker, who Richard
Parker himself ultimately kills, and “something in [Pi] died
then that has never come back to life” (342). Pi finds
some dead fish on his “brother’s” nearby boat, regains his
vision, and then sees the man’s remains, consumed by
Parker, at the bottom of his own boat. He is even reduced
to ingesting some of the body, such that, as always with
Pi, he will be forced to “pray for his soul every day” (343).
Later, Pi will indeed clean up the remains of this dead
body, but this does not change the fact that it all appears
to have been a hallucination.

A miraculous interlude we have here—but we never
know whether this vision actually happened or not, just as
we can ascertain little for certain in all of this
phantasmagorical book. And more phantasmagoria are
right around the corner, for it is then that Pi comes across
an island—“Richard Parker! Land! Land! We are saved!”
he cries—but this is no ordinary island, and though he
initially cheers the discovery, Pi’s overall reaction is
rather blasé. He finds this island a bit hard to believe, in
fact “deluded” (344), with weird trees with pale bark and
brilliant emerald leaves that emerge not from soil or even
water, but from a thick vegetative undergrowth. An island
with no soil? Well this could only be a “chimera, a play of
the mind” (344), an “illusion” (345), with this island
appearing to be not an island at all, but a dense mass of
floating algae (which is at least delicious to eat) and
twisted vegetation; with a weird reverse process in which
waves seem to move away from the island (364); and a
generalized and mysterious increasing and loosening of
the island’s topography, with varying height and density
(362-363). As well, the island appears wholly desolate,
with almost no animate life forms on it—except for,

strangest of all, the millions of meerkats Pi encounters—
this normally a small rodent found in the deserts of South
Africa (where Pi is definitely not). Indeed, these very
meerkats appear to be a strangely-evolved sub-species,
very likely not an animal of this earth at all. These
animals, which in the wild rarely encounter water, are
fond of swimming in the island’s freshwater ponds, and
no less than capturing large, already deceased saltwater
fish from the depths of the ponds. And there is more to
this, for we find that these very ponds become no less
than carnivorous, attracting the saltwater fish into their
depths below the island and asphyxiating them one by
one, so that they float to the surface in masses ever
night, and then becoming acidic so as to digest the fish,
which disappear each night; as well, Pi will discover that
at certain times, apparently because of this acidity, the
island veritably attacks anyone that sets foot on it—which
we learn more of, when, after many weeks on the island,
Pi discovers a mystery of mysteries, and its terrifying
outcome. One day he climbs a tree in which he had
espied some large round fruits hanging in nests of
branches. “And oh how I wish that moment had never
been!” he will later exclaim to the author to whom he is
telling his story. For Pi peels this “fruit,” and in the center
of each he finds…a human tooth. Pi surmises that the
teeth were taken from a prior castaway on the island,
who had lived there for some time, but was ultimately
murdered by the island, and then digested until only his
or her teeth remained, encased in some of the island’s
homicidal algae. With this discovery Pi’s way is clear: He
must cast off from this island, this bizarre fever-dream,
and leave its evil environs behind forever. And so he
does, moving from one uncanny and hostile world to the
next, and all along the way experiencing the
unexperiencable.

And then? Soon thereafter Pi finds himself ashore on
Mexico, saved at last. His story is at an end. Or is it? No,
for in this unending story that runs along everlasting lines
like Pi’s own name, Pi’s story can never quite end. For
even here in Mexico, he experiences the ultimate
disaffection and lack of ending for him—he loses his best
friend Richard Parker without so much as a good-bye.
Parker leaps to the shore and dashes off for the jungle’s
edge. There he pauses, but without even a glance back
at Pi, he “disappeared forever from my life” (383) into the
dense foliage. And this virtually breaks Pi’s heart, to say
nothing of violating his deep sense of order in the
universe. First, he weeps “because Richard Parker had
left me so unceremoniously” (383). “That bungled good-
bye haunts me to this day” continues Pi (384), and then
he adds, I wish so much that I’d had one last look at him
in the lifeboat….I wish I had said “Richard Parker, it’s
over. We have survived. Can you believe it? I owe you
more gratitude then I can express. I couldn’t have done it
without you. I would like to say it formally Richard Parker,
thank you. (384) Then Pi turns to his love of perfect order

Pendery 73

(a reflection of his name; is anything more perfect than
the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter?),
and his commitment to constancy and stability in life—
stories with beginnings, middles and ends. “Where we
can, we must give things a meaningful shape” (383) he
says, “Its important in life to conclude things properly”
(384). But in fact that is exactly what this story does not
do. For at the “end” of the story, we find…that it has not
ended at all, and will in fact start all over again, in what
appear to be endless revolutions that take us right back
to the beginning of the book—where the story had
ostensibly “started,” but which was in fact more of a
retelling of a retelling. Pi’s story goes on forever, in
infinitude of at once hopeless despair and enlightening
gratitude and love of life. There can be no “end” to this
story, it must be lived again and again and again, to
teach and tell us what life can be, and what we must
make of it. The final result, Pi hopes, is that we will be
made to believe in God, the best and most important
story of all.

Yes, as Pi is taken to a hospital in Mexico and cared for
by generous and kind people, his story starts all over
again—this time twice told, with yet more impossible
occurrence and outcome. His story is told to two men
from the Japanese Ministry of Transport (actual?
fictional? All I can say is that Japan has a Ministry of
Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism), who are
examining the loss of Pi’s Tsintsum vessel in the Pacific,
with all on board killed.

A first “story” is told to the two investigators, word for
word as it had been presented in the first 385 pages of
the book. But they don’t believe that an orangutan could
have floated on a ton of bananas, that there is anything
like an algae island floating in the Pacific, and not least
that Pi could have survived at sea over 200 days with a
Bengal tiger only yards from him. Then, something
strange follows, and we learn that that story may not
have been “the” story at all. For then Pi tells a second
story, doctored to meet the investigators’ expectations—a
story “That won’t make you see higher or farther or
differently…a flat story. An immobile story” (406).
Although no doubt this is exactly what Pi would never
want, having lived the greatest story of all, his
interlocutors do in fact find that they like this story more
than the first (not realizing that choosing to doubt Pi as
they do, “is akin to choosing immobility as a means of
transportation” [38]).

And if we have any trouble believing either of Pi’s
stories, we should probably note that we will always find
that life is not at all what we think it is, that no story will
ever fit our expectations and be quite what we think it is,
and that all stories have two (or many more) sides to
them. To illustrate this, Pi tells us that right now a
veritable zoo of wild animals is living in close proximity to
people in virtually any city in the world. Do you doubt
this? Pi tells us:

74 Int. J. English Lit.

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down
and shook it, you’d be amazed at all the animals that
would fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors Komodo
dragons, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras [a
large South American rodent], wild boars, leopards,
manatees, ruminants in untold numbers (399).

It is just this strange contiguity of the wild and the
domestic that marks all life, and in a sense marks the
“life” in this novel. And yet again this is religiosity, for it is
such an at-once closeness and also distance that marks
man’s relation with God. Overall, in these ways, “If you
stumble at mere believability, what are you living for?”
(399). Pi has already questioned the very existence of
reason (hence in a sense his name), which is “excellent
for getting food” (400) and other such pragmatic aims, but
within such excessive rationality, “you risk throwing out
the universe with the bathwater” (400). And in this sense,
and leading to the second of his tales, “Isn’t telling about
something—using words…already something of an
invention? Isn’t just looking upon this world already
something of an invention?” (405; Pi is either commenting
toward Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, or voicing
narrative theory not dissimilar to Hayden White’s) As the
story unfolds with Pi’s retellings, he is introducing a dose
of doubt into the life he has lived, a transformation and
reimagining, which is for him the essence of the life lived
in God’s presence (even Jesus doubted on the cross).
And from here, his doubt, his reimagining, his invention,
will take flight into a new world and new life—one that
readers will never truly know whether it was “actually” (or
in turn fictionally) lived or not. It’s Piscine (Pi) Molitor
Patel all over again. And thus he sets out on the second
of his stories: “Here’s another story” he tells the
investigators (406). And what a story it is. Instead of
animals swimming toward and boarding the lifeboat at the
sinking of the Tsintsum, a group of four people does: Pi,
a villainous cook, Pi’s mother, and another sailor, who
broke his leg in the accident. From there the hated cook
makes nothing but trouble for all on board the lifeboat,
finally amputating the sailor’s leg and leaving him to die.
He then kills Pi’s mother, and ultimately Pi kills him. At
this point the two investigators note parallels in the two
stories: the cook as hyena, the sailor as zebra, Pi’s
mother as orangutan, and Pi himself as Richard Parker,
who had killed the hyena. At their growing doubt, Pi asks
them “since it makes no factual difference to you and you
can’t prove the question either way, which story do you
prefer?” (424). When they make their selection (the
second story) then, simply enough for Pi, “…so it goes
with God” (424). After a few more incidental (true,
fictional) details from the investigator’s report, Life of Pi
ends.

Conclusion

I’ve read Dickens. I’ve read Hemingway. I’ve read

Faulkner. I’ve read Tolstoy. I’ve read McEwan. I have
learned much from these authors, I have been moved, I
have been amazed. But none that I know ever quite
made me “believe in God.” And as no less than Barack
Obama wrote of such a possibility in a letter to Yann
Martel, Life of Pi is no less than “an elegant proof of God”
(Ma). It is in just this way that Life of Pi is different from
other novels. We may indeed in this novel, discover “the
meaning of man” (Ma)—for the book is indeed a
kaleidoscopic look into the interior of human
consciousness and spirit. But Life of Pi is much more.
Though the final passages of Life of Pi convey quite a lot
of what seems like straightforward factual detail about the
sinking of a large transport ship, and the forthright
interaction between Pi and the two investigators (the
factual side of the fictional enterprise), this is in fact less a
realistic narrative proper than a philosophical and spiritual
opus, an Aesop’s fables—complete with animals, writ
large, on an abstract canvas—Picasso’s Jouer de Flute
et Gazelle or Mes Dessins D’Antibes (both which portray
human-animal interaction)come to mind—or as noted, a
Bosch-ian crusade of death and bizarre, threatening
incidence. Or could the lifeboat, with animals and
humans aboard, be a kind of ark, with saviors of all life
aboard? Perhaps a stretch of the imagination, though we
could say that indeed Pi’s aim was to save humanity, and
to reintroduce God into human life. We have witnessed
the most abject misery in this book—terrors, hunger,
illness, decay and peril. And yet, something more has
been at work, for “High calls low and low calls high….The
lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar”
(381), and here we see a glimpse of that inherent
happiness that Pi feels throughout all of his life. In these
ways, as Moses Ma has it, the book is “about how you
can find spirituality and the meaning of life in the throes of
all that is horrible and terrible in the world.”The next step
is probably obvious to readers, and “It was natural that,
bereft and desperate as I was, in the throes of
unremitting suffering, I should turn to God” (Ma, 2012:
381). It is obvious that Pi hopes his readers will also do
exactly this. In Pi’s reach upward to greatest passion and
deity, this is a story of love, though as always,
unorthodox love. This is a love across oppositions, a
linking of variance and contradiction, a combining of the
anthropoid and the bestial, an amalgamation of the
factual and the fictional. All of these essentials are in their
way ideational, as portrayed in this book non represen-
tational, and at the highest level nearly subversive in their
push toward that which is unknown and unexperiencable
in life. But as well it is very, very ebullient, very, very vital
and very, very purposeful—forever that feral zoo at large
in our seemingly sheltered existence, a living God head
inhabiting what we thought was nothing more than our
routine lives of “dry, yeastless factuality” (406). “You want
a story that won’t surprise you That will confirm what you
already know. That won’t make you see higher or further

or differently” (406). That will confirm what you already
know. That won’t make you see higher or further or
differently,” says Pi at one point in the narrative, but oh
far he took us from that possibility.

In the very finest sense, one moving passage in the
book sums up all Pi has learned (even more than his
simple moving claim that “I turned to God. I survived”
[417]). Long after his trip his over, he finds that he feels
“a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as
more important than an intellectual understanding of
things; an alignment in the universe along moral lines, not
intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle
of existence is what we call love, which works itself out
sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately,
nonetheless ineluctably” (85). Ah Pi, a teacher you are, of
the highest order. And though you are lonely,
heartbroken, abandoned by friends, subject to most
grievous harm and hurt—wondrous, devout and hopeful
you are as well. For providing guidance as you have
provided, after crossing a topography of suffering which
most of us would have simply given up hope on, we offer
our heartfelt thanks. Andin light of the love you have
constantly expressed through thick and thin in this
narrative, we love you too, Pi.

Pendery 75

REFERENCES

De Piérola, José (2008). “At the Edge of History: Notes for a Theory for

the Historical Novel in Latin America.”Romance Studies 26.2: 151-62.
Ma M (2012). Psychology Today. Post published by Moses Ma on Nov

26, 2012 in The Tao of Innovation. Accessed online March 2015 at
Psychology Todayhttps://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-tao-
innovation/201211/meaning-faith-and-the-life-pi

Martel Y (2012). Life of Pi. Cannongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh.
Styron W (1993). The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Vintage

International, Vintage Books.
White H (1975). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-

Century Europe. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP.

ANIMALS ON FILM 1

ANIMALS ON FILM:
THE ETHICS OF

THE HUMAN GAZE

RANDY MALAMUD

Randy Malamud, Professor of English at Georgia State University, is the editor of
A Cultural History of Animals in the Modern Age (Berg, 2007) and the author of Reading
Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (Macmillan and New York University Press,
1998) and Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). He is a Fellow
of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and a Patron of the Captive Animals’ Protection
Society.

“No animals were harmed in the making of this essay.”

T
hat may seem like a trivial claim. It’s probably not even true,
considering the habitat damage caused by emissions from the
electricity plant whose engines power the computer I used to

compile these ideas. But if I can have the benefit of the doubt, I’d like
to suggest that simply writing about other animals may engage them
in a way that leaves them none the worse off for the encounter. And
this harm-neutral encounter is an improvement over the usual state of
affairs. Our imperious presence, our industrial infrastructure, our social
networks, and our cultural activities encroach upon the safety and
integrity of other species.1

People imprison and torture animals in factory farms and research
laboratories. We displace them as our cities and suburbs expand. We
poison them as we dump toxins into their food-ways (and then, with
ecological tunnel-vision, we overfish these poisoned waters for fetishized

2 RANDY MALAMUD

aquatic delicacies). We commodify them in the “pet” industry. But even
when we take a break from such active physical assaults, we are prone
to engage with animals in ways that hurt their spirits and impinge upon
their welfare. The consequence of most human-animal encounters is
the expression of harm via pathways of power.

Nonetheless, for decades, the American movie industry has taken
the initiative to assert and verify the converse: that is, many films carry
a disclaimer in the credits stating, “No animals were harmed in the
making of this movie.” It’s a pleasant thought, so common that we
may not even notice it or think about how and why animals might
have been harmed in the making of a film. (And given the extent to
which our culture is virtually built upon animals’ lives and deaths, this
claim of “no harm” seems more than a little ironic.) The certification
comes from the American Humane Association’s (AHA) Film and
Television Unit, which sponsors animal safety monitors on film sets to
ensure adherence to its guidelines for the treatment of animal actors.2

The AHA3 began monitoring the safety of animals after the 1939
film Jesse James provoked an outcry when a horse was forced to leap to
his or her death from the top of a cliff.4 The AHA now reviews scripts
during pre-production and enjoys unlimited access to a movie set
during filming that involves animals. The phrase “No animals were
harmed in the making of this movie,” first used in Paul Newman’s Fat
Boy and Little Man (1989), has since become a registered trademark.5

Why care about the film industry when relatively speaking the
numbers of animals directly involved seem negligible relative to the
vast numbers consumed through the meat, dairy, and other industries?
Two reasons: one, the well-being of every animal counts. The fact that
animals are so commonly generalized, even by the term “animals” when
its use reifies the ontology of animals solely as to how they relate to
humans, compels attention to every individual. Second, film and other
electronic image media project the human psyche: they hold and
promulgate modern human values, agendas, and norms. Films are
dream and reality–makers.

Some films, not many, are deemed questionable or unacceptable,
having failed to meet AHA standards. Here are a few examples of what
a film might do to get an unacceptable rating: In Cannibal Holocaust
(1979), a documentary team journeys to a South American jungle to
search for cannibals. During the making of this film, an opossum was

ANIMALS ON FILM 3

slit with a knife; the shell was ripped off a turtle; and a monkey was
scalped.6 Apocalypse Now (1979) was found unacceptable because a
water buffalo was hacked to pieces. In Vampire’s Kiss (1989), star Nicolas
Cage admitted in print that he ate two live cockroaches during the
filming, earning that movie an unacceptable rating.7 There are no legal
or film industry consequences of an unacceptable rating, though the
AHA does publicize its negative findings in the hopes of inspiring an
audience boycott.

AHA acknowledges that its seal of approval may appear in movies
with scenes that seem to convey an attitude that “cruelty to animals is
okay.” Their purpose, they explain, is

to safeguard animals on-set, regardless of whether the scene being
portrayed conveys an animal-friendly message. The objective of
our monitoring work is the welfare of the live animals used in
film production, and to that end, we refrain from commenting
on content. If we refused to monitor a film because we did not
agree with its message, we would risk there being no protection
at all for the animals involved.8

Indeed, some approved movies contain extremely violent scenes
with animals. The Humane Association website explains: “Filming
techniques, controlled stunts, special effects and post-production
editing can make complicated battle scenes appear realistic without
injuring animals or human performers. . . . Animals used in filmed
entertainment are well-trained to perform specific stunts (such as falling
down on cue), and the rest of the illusion is created by the filmmakers.”9

So even AHA assurance that no animals were harmed does not protect
against a rhetoric of violence and cannot guarantee an ethically ideal
expression of visual media relationships between humans and animals.

Given this campaign to monitor animal welfare in the film
industry, one might reasonably assume that there is a proclivity to harm
animals in the movies, a proclivity for audiences to watch the harming
of animals. But why might filmmakers want to harm animals in the
first place? And, more broadly, what do audiences want to see when
they are looking at animals in films?

4 RANDY MALAMUD

DIFFICULTIES SEEING ANIMALS CLEARLY

Animals in visual culture10 are often disguised in some way—
costumed, or masked, or distorted, or disfigured. Mockery of animals
is another common trope, as is decontextualization: displacing animals
from their natural habitats, contexts, and lives, and reconfiguring them
as players in a purely anthropocentric narrative—from King Kong to
Curious George, from the Beethoven dog films to Seabiscuit, Hollywood
traffics in spectacles of such “fish out of water.”11 Mockery and
decontextualization function as disguises because they prevent us from
seeing the authentic animal beneath the cultural frippery. Animals are
disguised perhaps because the authentic animal would be too
depressing, or too scary, or too boring, for the viewer to endure.

There is a continuum of integrity, or respect, that audiences and
cultural creators accord to animals in visual culture. At the bottom end
of this continuum, there are dancing bears, piano-playing chickens,
rabbits being pulled out of hats, chimps in human clothing on parade,
“stupid pet tricks,”12 elephants with paintbrushes taped to their trunks
in ecotourist camps, and so forth. That is: animals doing silly things
for the audience’s amusement—things they don’t usually do, and have
no reason to do.13 Perhaps viewers are so engrossed in these vaudevillean
farces because they are ashamed to look animals in the eye, ashamed
to confront what we have done to them. We don’t like to think much
about wild, natural animals, because we have just about extinguished
wildness and nature. We prefer our animals framed, domesticated,
dressed up for our spectacles.

Even further down the spectrum at this endpoint of the continuum
are “crush films”: amateur sadistic/fetishistic pseudo-pornographic
footage of erotically-costumed women stepping on insects, mice, cats,
crushing them in stiletto heels. Smush, by Jeff Vilencia (1993), one of
the best-known in the genre, is an eight-minute long film depicting a
woman in high heels and also barefoot crushing dozens of earthworms.14

“Among the many obscure and bizarre sects of fetishism,” writes Jeremy
Biles in “I, Insect, or Bataille and the Crush Freaks,”

few remain so perplexing or so underexamined as that of the
“crush freaks.” At the cutting edge of the edgy world of sexual
fetishistic practices, the crush freaks are notorious for their
enthusiasm for witnessing the crushing death of insects and other,

ANIMALS ON FILM 5

usually invertebrate, animals, such as arachnids, crustaceans, and
worms. More specifically, crush freaks are sexually aroused by
the sight of an insect exploded beneath the pressure of a human
foot–usually, but not necessarily, a relatively large and beautiful
female foot. . . . The crush freak typically fantasizes identification
with the insect as he or she masturbates, and savors the sense of
sudden, explosive mutilation attendant upon the sight of the
pedal extrusions. Jeff “The Bug” Vilencia, the foremost
spokesperson for crush enthusiasts, describes his ecstasy thus: “At
the point of orgasm, in my mind all of my guts are being squished
out. My eyeballs are popping out, my brain comes shooting out
the top of my head, all my blood squirts everywhere . . . What a
release, that imagery really gets me off! Seeing that foot coming
down on me, coming into my stomach and pressing all that
weight on to me till I burst! Wow!”15

At the extreme, a crush film represents one possibility, one
disturbing example of how some people look at and perceive animals
in visual culture. The capacity for extreme violence toward animals lurks
even in our media appetites and fantasies, and perhaps the literal harm
enacted upon animals in crush films is not so fundamentally different
from the figurative harm visited upon so many other animals in visual
culture as they are “crushed” by being rendered inauthentic.

Most harm meted out to animals in movies is not this obvious.
The fact that so many animals are denatured, enmeshed, and victimized
in so many diverse media—while at the same time we are facing mass
extinction of species around the globe—raises deep psychological and
ethical concerns. Is this obsession with having animals demeaned in
film and television and youtube a type of compensation for all the
animals that aren’t there any more in reality? A filmclip of an animal,
a drawing of an animal, a parody of an animal, a meme of an animal,
seems to be more important than the real living animal: the actual
creature is displaced by a caricatured and objectified entity.

Visual culture increasingly blocks out the world beyond-people:
the world outside, the world of forests and fields and water and fish
and squirrels. Billboards get bigger and brighter, more profuse, more
electronic and dynamic, obfuscating more of the landscape. Cyberspace
becomes more addictive, more compulsory, luring our gaze away from
nature. Computers and HDTVs and iPods and digital cameras and
DVRs and GPSs and cell phones, with their little green and red lights

6 RANDY MALAMUD

and chimes and vibrations that are always on, consume more and more
energy, generating more of the toxic garbage that endangers habitats
and decimates animal communities.

All these beeping, blinking, omnipresent media supplant a simple,
direct, meaningful engagement with the natural world and its creatures.
In a textbook example of hegemony, the dominant media reinforce their
own power at the expense of our connection to the world beyond the
screens. A panoply of monitors (as the screens are called, with a darkly
accidental Foucauldian/Orwellian irony) fill our homes and offices,
monitoring our attention to the infinite realms of digital content
accessible via these portals, and screening out the corresponding
diminution outside: undigitized creatures haplessly holding on for dear
life at the margins of this brave new world. The simulacrum-animals—
that is, the animals on parade, animals in disguise, animals in visual
culture—proliferate ad infinitum, ad absurdum; and in doing so, they
usurp much of the space we might have allocated in our minds to the
consciousness of real, living animals.

THE HUMAN GAZE

In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Laura Mulvey
defines what she called the male gaze. She argues that the viewer at
the movies is in a masculine position (and quite possibly a voyeur or a
fetishist as well), deriving visual pleasure from a dominant, sadistic
perspective. The object on the screen is the object of desire—
paradigmatically, the objectified woman. Viewers are encouraged to
identify with the protagonist, who is usually male; and female characters
are there simply “to-be-looked-at.” She writes: “The determining male
gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled
accordingly.”16

The gaze directed at animals in visual culture keenly parallels
Mulvey’s formulation of the male gaze. Call it, instead of the male gaze,
the human gaze; and replace woman with “animal.” Carol Adams
associates the oppression/consumption/disembodiment of women and
that of animals.17 She and other ecofeminists have shown how the
exploitation of women and the exploitation of animals occur along
similar pathways. It’s a smooth extrapolation to reconfigure Mulvey’s
male gaze (upon the filmed female object) as a human gaze (upon the

ANIMALS ON FILM 7

filmed animal object). Mulvey describes “The image of woman as
(passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man,”18 and I simply
transpose this to characterize the image of the animal as passive raw
material for the active gaze of the human.

The phenomenon of looking at animals in visual culture is
predicated upon the assumption that the viewer is human and the
object is animal. (This is perhaps not a particularly profound
observation in and of itself, but, thanks to Mulvey’s work, we realize
the political import of this construction.) The practice of consuming
visual culture embodies an unbridled omniscient lust ensuring the
visual object’s absolute subalternity. The animal is rendered vulnerable,
free for the taking, in whatever way the human viewer chooses: the
process metaphorically reiterates what is enacted literally in the culture
of carnivorous agribusiness.

Feminist critiques showed how women, under the male gaze, were
profusely objectified, essentialized: two-dimensionally caricatured into
a good girl/bad girl dichotomy (angel/whore).19 Nonhuman animals,
too, are cast in this mode. In the movies the angels (the good animals)
are pets and helpers, adulating their human keepers: Lassie; Flipper;
Old Yeller; Sounder; Elsa; Rin Tin Tin; Francis the Talking Mule.20

The whores are monstrous others, animals who earn our scorn (but
still serve a purpose, calling out to our basest drives and allowing us to
satiate these drives by hating, or destroying these creatures). Think of
King Kong; the shark in Jaws; Ben the rat in Willard; Orca, the killer
whale; Alfred Hitchcock’s birds.

This kind of objectification is dangerous, not only because it is
outmoded from a scientific and social perspective, but more
fundamentally because it is reductionist. It circumscribes animals’
existence in relation to the human gaze, appraising them only in terms
of their usefulness or threat (to us). Such a perspective confounds an
ecologically ethical ideology, in which all members of an ecosystem
are interdependent and no single species is inherently privileged above
any other.

The animals we gaze upon in film, on the internet, in
advertisements, are prized for their “cuteness”—in a way that is
feminized, and derogatorily so: cute animals are like dumb blondes
(note the parallelism between the male gaze and the human gaze).
Animals are celebrated for their subservience, their entertainment value,

8 RANDY MALAMUD

and the extent to which they affirm an anthropocentric ethos (the
unassailable conviction that it’s all about us). House cats, dogs,
pleasantly furry sheep, and symbolic creatures like the American Bald
Eagle rank highly in this cultural economy; pigeons, carp, cockroaches,
starlings, and feral cats do less well. The human gazer prizes exoticism
in visual cultural representations of other animals, but in a mode (as
zoos and aquariums have trained audiences to expect) of profound
displacement from their habitat.

While we may pay lip service to the independence and rights of
animals in visual culture (as in films like Born Free and Free Willy),21

this is all bounded by our own desires and emotions. The point of their
freedom is our vicarious experience of our own sense of freedom, which
we celebrate by bestowing (on our own terms) a modicum of freedom
upon them. Audiences may try to tap into and connect with animal
otherness, as in the old Tarzan movies, and more recently, in films like
Whale Rider, Horse Whisperer, Dances with Wolves, and Grizzly Man,
though still we’re much more interested in ourselves than in them;
such interaction is really just another way of harvesting something from
the animal object.

Note the titles of all these movies: all purport to offer (and in some
ways do offer) intricate portrayals of human sensitivity to animals. They
all, at first impression, seem to highlight animals. And while there are
indeed animals in them all, in each case what might have first seemed
like an animal reference actually turns out to be a human being:
Timothy Treadwell is the Grizzly Man in Werner Herzog’s odd
documentary; Kevin Costner’s character is given the name “Dances with
Wolves” as he becomes enchanted with animals and Native American
culture; a 12-year-old Maori girl is the whale rider.22 These characters
develop alongside animals, but they are still ultimately very much
human identities. The human beings trump actors of other species,
who are merely supporting cast, swimming or galloping in the
background. When people look at animals, what we see most clearly
with the human gaze, is, unsurprisingly, ourselves. Laura Mulvey makes
a similar point about the objectified woman: “What counts is what
the heroine provokes,” she writes. “In herself the woman has not the
slightest importance.”23

ANIMALS ON FILM 9

VISUAL COLONIZATION IS NOT LIMITED TO FILM

In visual advertising, the human gaze reveals an explicit
commodification of the animal, but it’s really just a more blatant
iteration of all the other animals we look at. Morris the Cat, Charlie
the Tuna, Joe Camel, the MGM Lion, Toucan Sam, the Energizer
Bunny, the Budweiser Clydesdales—all these animal images are
designed to advance consumer culture, to co-opt a perverse sense of
biophilia (our connection to nature; our need for nature)24 in order to
encourage us to do things that don’t really help animals in any way, or
help us understand animals, or help us understand our relation to them.
The animals are merely props, and as we pimp them in the discourse
of advertising, they are hoist with their own petard. . . . victims of their
own animality. Charlie adorns the outside of the StarKist tuna fish can,
eagerly inviting you to eat him; smiling pigs on the sides of barbeque
joints pose happily, without a touch of resentment, for customers about
to order up a plate of ribs. These animals are figuratively devoured by
the human gaze as an anticipation of their subsequent literal
consumption.

Indeed, we are deluged with images of animals in visual culture
that do not call out to our higher ecological consciousness. Instead,
these images affirm received ideas: animals are ubiquitous, interesting
and engaging under the right circumstances (and we must coordinate
these circumstances ourselves, as we do in all these movies and ads).
Animals would not naturally serve our purposes; left to their own
devices, they would not pose a very strong claim on the human gaze.

This human gaze has been trained on animals in visual culture for
a very long time: in 1877, Eadweard Muybridge produced a
photograph for California Governor and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford
showing his racehorse in the midst of a gallop. Stanford had wanted to
know if all four of a horse’s hooves left the ground during a gallop, and
commissioned Muybridge to find the answer.25 Using a series of 24
stereoscopic cameras, Muybridge photographed a horse in fast motion,
taking pictures at one thousandth of a second and producing a
locomotion sequence known as “The Horse in Motion.” Muybridge
did this sort of thing with many other animals, too: his subjects
included a buffalo, a lion, an ostrich, an elephant, and people as well. Many
of the animals he photographed came from the Philadelphia Zoo.

1 0 RANDY MALAMUD

Muybridge invented the “zoopraxiscope,” a lantern that projected
images in rapid succession onto a screen from photographs printed on
a rotating glass disc, producing the illusion of moving pictures. It was
the germ of modern cinematography. Muybridge was, in my opinion,
the first modern artist who actualized our obsession with the movement
of animals, but, I think, he did even more than this: he represented
not just their physical animation, but also the metaphysical life, the
spirit of the animal. He imported all this—their movement, their spirit,
their lives—from nature, into our world: into culture. To satisfy our
questions about animals and satiate our appetites for watching their
speed, their grace, their power; to answer our idle queries (do all four
hooves leave the ground at once?26) as well as our more profound
wonderment, Muybridge’s work set us on the path of looking at animals,
creating new technologies to “capture” their animality, and then
reproducing and projecting this.

Muybridge created the ability and fanned the desire for people to
look at animals in visual culture. Post-Muybridge, audiences came to
think of animals differently than they did pre-Muybridge: animals were
now animated, “alive,” moving, in visual cultural representations, rather
than static. Their movement could be observed (and enjoyed) without
the necessary proximity of the actual animal; thus, it could be enjoyed
more conveniently, and in greater numbers. The Muybridge-animal
might outlast the literal animal: indeed, in many ways, one might come
to regard such images of animals as more potent and more fascinating
than the mere animals themselves. Muybridge serves as a keen example
of how culture shapes and influences people’s perception of other
animals: the understanding of animals, certainly, but also, I would
cynically suggest, the misunderstanding of animals. As we capture their
motion on film, that somehow supplants the reality of their motion,
and so while we “have” it, I think we also lose it, to some extent. Before
Muybridge, people had to look at the actual animal to see it move, to
see it alive: afterwards, not. That is on some level a loss of our
understanding and appreciation of an animal. And, I must note,
Muybridge would have not qualified for the Humane Association’s seal
of approval: animals were harmed in the making of his visual displays.
Derek Bousé in Wildlife Films describes how Muybridge arranged for
a Philadelphia zoo tiger to be set loose on an old buffalo so that the
photographer could record one of his motion studies of an actual killing;

ANIMALS ON FILM 11

Bousé calls this the beginning of a tradition in wildlife films of “kill
scenes” that serve as a “guarantor of authenticity.”27

More than 130 years after Muybridge’s zoopraxiscopic technology,
we are lately looking at more and more animals—as there is more porn
on the web, there is more animal porn; as YouTube proliferates, there
are more amateur videos of animals; as branding increases, so do branded
animals; as cable television expands, we get more channels such as the
Discovery Channel and Animal Planet (with shows like “When Animals
Attack”; “The Pet Psychic”; “Animal Cops”; “World’s Ugliest Dog”; and
“Crocodile Hunter.”)28 Animal Planet claims, perversely and
oxymoronically, to be programming “reality tv” about animals. But
“reality” and “television” are contradictions in terms. Animal Planet
facilitates and expands our consumption of animals (culturally and
otherwise), but it does not bring the people who look at animals any
closer to the reality of these animals. Traditionally, watching animals
on film is considered to be good, wholesome family fun: highbrow
entertainment and/or education; I wish to problematize that.

I concede that it is possible for visual media to teach us about
animals—a documentarian, or even a mainstream feature filmmaker,
may spend years gathering footage that insightfully depicts, with
ecological accuracy and sensitivity, the lives of animals. Such films (some
examples of which I discuss below) go to where the animals live and
look at them in their own habitats, which is much preferable to chimps
on parade and painting elephants.

But these nature films often impose a human narrative, a human
cultural aesthetic, upon animals. The films may be flat-out faked: there’s
a rich tradition of nature-film fakery. But even when there’s no explicit
attempt to deceive, still, they may mislead or miseducate viewers by
making animals seem too accessible, too easily present, which distorts
the reality that most animals live away from us, hidden from us. Their
reclusiveness is self-protective, and our intrusion, even via the mediation
of a documentary film crew, may breach an important barrier between
ourselves and many other animals. For example, Luc Jacquet’s March
of the Penguins (2005), about the Emperor penguins’ annual journey
to their breeding ground, and Jacques Perrin’s Winged Migration
(2001), a stunning account of birds’ global journeys, are two beautiful
and eloquent films about the lives of animals who live far from the world
that most of us inhabit. As captivating as I found both these films for

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the detailed and richly ecological education they offered as they
immersed viewers in the extreme Antarctic/atmospheric habitats that
are all but inaccessible to people, still, I wonder if it is right for us to
see such lives: if somehow, the human gaze, in any form, however
carefully exercised, may be fated to impose our power over the animals,
leaving them, thus, powerless.

Millions of people have seen these films, crossover blockbuster hits.
Does this testify to our increasing interest and concern for other animals,
or does it mean that we’ve dragged these creatures down to the level of
mass entertainment, which is inherently anti-ecological and anti-animal
because of the hegemonies of consumption culture in Western industrial
society?

In Green Cultural Studies, Jhan Hochman warns that a nature film
may render viewers “separate and superior to film-nature even as it
brings them into proximity. Nature becomes, then, prop(erty) and
commodity.”29 As physics teaches us, the act of observation changes
the phenomenon being observed. (The “observer effect” holds that
instruments, by their nature, alter the state of what they measure. The
psychological concept of “reactivity,” similarly, suggests that subjects
change their behavior when they are aware of being observed.) And as
Foucault theorized, vision facilitates a power that the seer exercises over
the seen. We call these films “Luc Jacquet’s March of the Penguins” and
“Jacques Perrin’s Winged Migration” – the fact of human ownership and
control over these animal images is completely inescapable. To restate
the obvious, people make these films (and, people make money from
making these films); people watch these films. Where, in this nexus,
does the animal come in? Do the animals profit in any way from this
interaction, from the human gaze? Can they? Should they? Even if no
animals were harmed in the making of these movies, is that the best
we can hope for? Were any animals helped in the making of these movies?

In Watching Wildlife, Cynthia Chris writes, “The wildlife film and
television genre comprises not only a body of knowledges but also an
institution for their containment and display, similar to those
institutions that Michel Foucault described as heterotopias, which
through their collection of normally unrelated objects, life forms, or
representations expose visitors to worlds beyond their own reach.”
Heterotopias are real places, places that do exist—in contrast to utopias,
which are idealized and unreal. A heterotopia might be a botanical

ANIMALS ON FILM 13

garden, for example, or a zoo, or a theatre, or cinema. But “the
knowledge within the heterotopia,” Chris writes, is “selected, framed,
edited, and interpreted, according to an array of social forces and
cultural contests over meaning”—and these places are “absolutely
different from all the sites they reflect and speak about.”30 Turning on
the television any day,

one might flit from views of sharks off the coast of southern Africa
to polar bears in Manitoba, rattlesnakes in Florida, crocodiles in
Queensland, and pandas . . . in Sichuan Province. The images of
animals and their habitats, natural or artificial, found through
television, are representations of real places and the creatures that
live there, but they are “absolutely different” from those real sites
and their inhabitants, constructed as they are by conventions of
representation . . . the economics of the film and television
industries, and geopolitical conditions concerning the state of
the environment.31

Anyone who has watched the wide array of nature films, television
shows, and documentaries knows how many different styles and
ideologies may be invoked to depict the animals that are framed within
by human technology and human cultural prejudices. In Reel Wildlife:
America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film, Gregg Mitman characterizes
a range of representations and misrepresentations of filmed animals.
Disney’s “True-Life Adventures” from the late 1940s was a prominent
series that established many of the conventions for decades to come,
which he calls, “a genre of sugar-coated educational nature films.”32

And even today, in our supposedly more enlightened and more
ecologically-attuned times, still, the Wild Discovery series, from the
Discovery Channel—has a “penchant for tacking happy endings onto
tales of ecological disaster” (xiv).

Along the lines of how Cynthia Chris invokes Foucauldian
heterotopias, Mitman explains that in many nature films, “fabrication
made the line separating artifice from authenticity difficult to discern.”
He detects an inherent tension, a contradiction embodied in nature
films: they “reveal much about the yearnings of Americans to be both
close to nature and yet distinctly apart.”33 This gets at the crux of the
problem, which I would identify as an ethical aporia: the problem of
perspective, of positioning, of self-awareness. We don’t know where we
are in relation to other animals; we don’t really know where we want

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to be, where we should be, in this relationship, which results in a
fundamental inability even to formulate, much less resolve, the ethical
dilemmas concerning our coexistence with other animals. Many other
anthrozoologists have expressed variations on this key contradiction,
this conundrum, that Mitman explains so succinctly here. We want
to be in two mutually exclusive kinds of relationships at the same time
(close to nature, and apart from it); how, then, can we hope to act
ethically, if ethical reasoning is predicated upon knowing the precise
actual truth, the single accurate reality, of where we are, who we are,
at the moment we conduct our ethical deliberations?

Deep within the bowels of capitalism, Hollywood productions look
at animals in ways that are inflected by the economics of the mainstream
film industry. In Green Screen, which examines nature in Hollywood
films, David Ingram argues that the kinds of realism and
environmentalist aesthetics that might best convey the stories of animals
authentically and informatively are at odds with the genres and
aesthetics we should expect from Hollywood.

Ingram identifies many pervasive Hollywood tropes that a
mainstream animal movie will be likely to embrace—such as the circle
of life, the cult of pristine nature, man’s domination over nature, the
action plot (which may resist a perceived sense of passivity in nature),
ecological Indians and the myth of primal purity, the imperial narrative,
profoundly anthropomorphized animals, the therapeutic tendency
toward environmental concerns—offering numerous examples of how
animal images are transmogrified to fit the Hollywood mold.

For example, in Michael Apted’s Gorillas in the Mist (1998), the
biopic about Dian Fossey’s work with mountain gorillas in East Africa,
Ingram compares the gorillas as Fossey describes them in her book—
practicing “infanticide, masturbation, incest, fellatio and cannibalism”
—to the animals in the movie who are “idealized figures possessing
the redemptive innocence typical of the Hollywood wild animal
movies.”34 The portrait of the human being (played by Sigourney
Weaver), too, is “highly selective of the biographical and historical
evidence available on Fossey’s life and work.”35

In the Hollywood film industry, Ingram writes, “environmental
sensibilities are always likely to be moderated by its vested interest in
promoting commodity consumption as a social good”;36 these films

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avoid questioning the central place that consumerism enjoys in
American society.

AVATAR: A CURRENT CASE STUDY IN ANIMAL IMAGES

The recent blockbuster hit Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) has
raised anew the question of how audiences view animals on film, and
especially how changing technologies might inflect the cinematographic
animal. The issue came to the forefront in January, 2010, when People
for the Ethical Treatment for Animals (PETA) honored Avatar with a
Proggy (signifying “progress” in the animal rights cause) Award for
Outstanding Feature Film. PETA cited the film’s “inspiring message. . .
which stresses the interconnectedness of nature and the importance of
treating all living beings, no matter how ‘strange’ or ‘alien,’ with respect
and dignity.” The organization highlighted “the movie’s stunning
special effects, which beautifully illustrate how unnecessary it is to
subject animals to the stress of a film production”; PETA Senior Vice
President Lisa Lange stated, “We hope viewers will come away from
Avatar with a new way of looking at the world around them and the
way we treat our fellow earthlings.”37

In response, the AHA issued a statement of demurral in a press
release titled: “Think “No Animals Were Harmed”® in the Making of
Avatar? You’re Right. Think No Animals Were Used in the Making of
Avatar? You’re Wrong.” They dispelled the presumption that computer-
generated imagery (CGI) meant that actual animals were not involved
in the filming. In fact, for the depiction of the six-legged horse-like
creatures featured in the film, “motion capture technology” demanded
the use of horses. People, too, were animated with the assistance of
captures: actors wore body suits that enabled computerized motion
sensors to provide a template for gestures, movement, and expressions.

But animals need to be “captured” differently because of their
body shapes, fur and other characteristics. To prepare the animals
for having their motion data recorded, trainers shaved small areas
of fur or hair where the movements would be recorded, such as
near joints and on the face. Velcro pads were attached to the
shaved spots with a nontoxic, nonirritating silicone adhesive.
White light-reflective balls were placed onto the Velcro to capture
the motion data onto the computer. . . .Throughout the film,
horses are seen outdoors standing or being ridden at a walk, canter

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or gallop. We also see people mounting, dismounting and falling
off horses. These scenes were all filmed inside the capture studio.
Horses were given ample room to start and stop running. . . . For
scenes in which horses appear to be near fire, trainers cued them
to “dance” or act skittish or afraid—the horses were not actually
agitated nor were they ever near fire.38

While AHA monitored these activities, still, they felt compelled
to announce that real animals, if not harmed, were nevertheless used
in the film production. Although it might be nice to imagine that CGI
potentially obviates the demand for animals in films, this is not the
case; it merely induces audiences—and even PETA—to presume,
erroneously, that the industry can transcend their historical record of
animal use (and sometimes abuse).

The message of Avatar has received mixed responses from animal-
concerned audiences. On a very basic level, such viewers are inclined
to applaud its moral that all nature is connected and people should
not destroy habitats for profit. But the PETA blog also recorded some
more critical resistance. Several commentators objected to what they
judged as the hypocrisy that while the film’s protagonists, the Na’vi
humanoids, conveyed an ecological sensitivity toward habitat
preservation, at the same time they engaged in the domination and
consumption of animals, aggressively controlling the will of flying
creatures and killing other animals for food in a brutal hunting scene.
As one blogger wrote,

Jake’s avatar and Neytiri shoot an arrow through an animal’s
larynx, finishing him off with a knife to the throat.(Just because
they say “it was a clean death,” add some mumbo jumbo prayers
right after, acting as if they did it out of “respect to animals,”
doesn’t make it any less cruel and unnecessary.) The Na’vi do not
mentally “become one” with the creatures they plug their organic
USB in, they literally brainwash them. I say this because if there
were actually some kind of symbiosis involved the animal would
have its say. And it doesn’t. It just blindly follows everything “the
rider” tells it to do.39

And Stephanie Ernst, writing on an animal rights website,
convincingly argues that the film suggests “humans have the right and
the duty to dominate, ‘tame,’ and make use of animals—that nonhuman
animals are resources and tools.”40 Ernst is especially offended by Jake’s

ANIMALS ON FILM 17

interaction with the pterodactyl-like animals, which she finds
“chillingly reminiscent of a rape scene.” The Na’vi protagonist Neytiri,
tells Jake that to become a complete warrior in her culture (as he aspires
to do) he must choose one of these “ikran” as his own.

He will know the ikran he is meant to bond with on sight—
and he will know that the ikran chooses him too if the ikran
fights back and tries to kill him (“no means yes” and “she’ll fight
you, but you know she really wants it,” anyone?). It is Jake’s
duty, while the animal fights him off, to “bond” with the animal
by overpowering him, tying him up, climbing on top of him,
and inserting a part of his body into the body of the animal while
his victim desperately fights him off. Once he has done that,
once he has successfully dominated the animal and physically
inserted himself into his conquest, the ikran is defeated; the ikran
goes still and quiet, and Jake wins. “That’s right—you’re mine!”
Jake boasts. The animal has been successfully dominated, his
will and spirit broken—and the defeated being now belongs
to Jake. . . . This was not a scenario in which each party sought
out the other, for mutual benefit. The being in power
dominated/raped the “lesser” being while the victim fought him
off—and that we (and Jake) were essentially told, “if your victim
fights you off, it means he wants it” was beyond sickening for
me. It far too closely parallels the “you know you want it”
mindset and words of real-world rapists.41

Ernst’s response suggests that the human gaze, and the male gaze
that lies beneath it, retain an enduring and haunting resonance,
however much filmmakers try to transcend it (or, perhaps, simply
pretend to attempt such a transcendence). In Avatar, as in all films,
the presence of other animals—even in treatments that might seem
ecologically enlightened on the surface—invites a critical and skeptical
analysis as to whether the filmmaking industry and its audiences are
truly becoming more concerned about ecosystemic speciesist
inequities, or are merely reiterating the same old anthropocentric
prejudices under the cover of a flashy new veneer.

Audiences should be cautious about assuming that the extravagant
technological novelties embodied in the film’s computer animation
and visual three-dimensionality accompany a comparable advance in
its ethical dimensionality. If ecologically and independently

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sophisticated representation of animal presence may be metaphorically
envisioned as the third dimension, then Avatar remains mired in the
same old flat, two-dimensional rut that has afflicted animals in visual
culture. Ever since Muybridge and his zoopraxiscope began the
tradition of creating and diffusing novel ways of looking at animals,
the human gaze(r) has become more and more voracious, more and
more pleased at its own omnipowerful intrusion into the world of
animals (“the wilderness,” or “nature,” or “the jungle”: however we
construe what is ultimately just a backdrop, a set, a tableau, for the
dazzling human action that takes place in the foreground). And we
need to be more careful than ever before, as we appraise the
ramifications of our citizenship in this brave new world of visual
culture, when a feel-good eco-parable that has become the world’s
most profitable film ever masks, at its heart, the ideology of the rapist.

KINDER WAYS OF LOOKING AT ANIMALS

Why are we looking at animals? What sort of contact zones
(between human and other animals) do visual media create? How are
we seeing these creatures we have “captured” on film? (The implications
of this “capture” are not just metaphorical.) What are the consequences
of the ways people look at and think about animals in visual culture?
How aren’t we looking at animals in visual culture? How might we look
at them more intelligently, more fairly?

Is it unrealistic to hope that visual culture might help us more
accurately locate and situate ourselves in relation to other animals
(rendering a truer vision of our place, and their place, and our actual
conditions of coexistence)? What should we do with these animals
once we’ve gotten them in our clear, accurate, ethical sight-lines? Or,
if “what should we do with them?” sounds too paternalistic, then
instead, how shall we behave towards them? I won’t answer that
question in much depth here, though certainly many others have done
so eloquently. For now, I simply suggest that what we should do is
treat animals better than we have done, and our visual cultural
representations of animals significantly affect, positively or negatively,
people’s propensity either to revise and improve our patterns of
behavior, or, on the other hand, to continue along the path of the
status quo with our piercing human gaze of speciesism, encroachment,
and imperial dominance.

ANIMALS ON FILM 19

Why look at animals? This enduring question was, of course, raised
in John Berger’s famous 1977 essay. It’s a good question . . . an
important question, a simple, basic question, and though Berger
launched into fascinating rambles about all the dysfunctional and
improper ways in which people looked at animals, I don’t think he
ever resolved his basic initial query. He concludes by noting that because
of increasing urban/industrial development and the disappearance of
animals from people’s lives, any meaningful gaze that there might once
have been between people and other animals “has been extinguished,”
and we as a species have “at last been isolated.”42 So now we’re not
looking at animals, he posits; but that does not negate the relevance of
nonetheless pursuing the question (even if it is “only philosophical”):
why look at animals?

It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with, or perhaps dancing around,
throughout this essay. I believe it is definitely a question we should be
asking, but perhaps (as Berger seems to have found) it’s a question we
can’t answer. Indeed, there is a tradition of unanswered and
unanswerable questions people ask about animals. From Thomas Nagel:
“What is it like to be a bat?” From Jeremy Bentham: “Can they suffer?”
From Jacques Derrida: “And say the animal responded?” From Michel
de Montaigne: “When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is
not amusing herself with me more than I with her?” From the comic
pages: “Why did the chicken cross the road?” And to carry this
meditation a step further, if indeed we cannot answer the question “why
look at animals in visual culture?” does that imply, on some ethical
level, that we should therefore stop looking at them in visual culture?
If we cannot clearly explain and defend our gaze, does it then behoove
us to stop looking at other animals? I don’t know—that’s another
unanswerable question.

Let me put forth a related but not identical question: Why look at
animals in nature? Here I’m talking about real animals, in real, actual,
spatial proximity (as opposed to looking at animals through the
mediation of visual culture). The naturalist Richard Conniff describes
the pleasures and importance of watching real animals. In “The
Consolation of Animals” he writes that looking at animals is what “makes
me almost sane. These encounters with the lords of life . . . pull me up
out of the pettiness and stupidity of my workaday life. . . . Watching

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animals fills some larger . . . appetite in much the way that reading
poetry does, or listening to music.”43

This may be no more than a subjective matter of taste and
temperament, but I believe that what Conniff describes here embodies
an admirable sensibility that involves meaningful and equitable
interaction with other species. Though of course this is an
overgeneralization, I’d suggest that a visual cultural experience of animals
is prone to be lazier and more voyeuristic than what Conniff describes.
The difference, the deficiency in looking at animals in visual culture
as compared to really looking at real animals, stems from the basic fact
that the viewers at the movies or surfing the net are not in real proximity
to the animal, not out in animal habitats, but rather, comfortably
ensconced, isolated, in their own world. And animals don’t fit well into
this world.

I believe that our perceptions of animals in visual culture, as
mediated by the artifices of our culture, cannot be as accurate, as
authentic, as precise as when we’re looking at real animals. In visual
culture, animals are edited, framed, commodified, and somehow
reduced. As Akira Lippit writes in Electric Animal, “Technology and . . .
cinema came to determine a vast mausoleum for animal being.”44

On the other hand, though, remember my contention that when
a person and another animal come into contact, the other animal almost
always ends up the worse for this encounter; perhaps that argues against
looking at real animals and in favor of cultural mediation—the
protective distancing (from the animal’s perspective) of the human
viewer.

I would like to consider, briefly, two recent independent animal
documentaries that eschew the cinematic mainstream: The Lord God
Bird (George Butler, 2008) and Silent Roar: Searching for the Snow
Leopard (Hugh Miles and Mitchell Kelly, 2007). These films elucidate
an interestingly unconventional relationship between the human
viewer and the animal subject. Both these films explicitly recount how
hard it is to find the animals they seek. Butler’s film is about the ivory-
billed woodpecker, colloquially known as the Lord God Bird because
according to legend those who see it spontaneously cry out, “Lord God!
What was that?” The bird may or may not be extinct: reliable, confirmed
sightings have not been made for decades, though some people featured
in this film believe they have seen the elusive bird more recently.

ANIMALS ON FILM 21

The Lord God Bird wonderfully frustrates its viewers, because it’s
about an animal that we may not be able to see, that we have quite
likely eradicated from the earth (if not completely, then pretty nearly).
We wait hopefully to see it throughout the film, and perhaps we do,
in a brief blurry and disputed clip, but we certainly don’t get a good,
clear, satisfying look at it. This teaches us a lesson that I find vital: we
are not omnipotent emperors who can look at any animal whenever
we choose. Despite the absence of the animal in its title, this film
intensely conveys a sense of the bird: its history and ecology, its
legendary resonance. Butler shows that we can think richly about an
animal without necessitating its literal appearance in our line of sight.
The “human gaze” as a trope is troubled, subverted, in this film.

Silent Roar, too, is about an animal that’s very difficult to see, the
large Himalayan cat that inhabits the mountains just below the peak
of Mount Everest. The cinematographers strenuously try to capture
the snow leopards on film—and finally, with stealthy remote sensor-
activated cameras, they get a few short and fuzzy shots of the leopards.
But mostly, in this film as in The Lord God Bird, we don’t see the animals
we have come to see, and once again, we’re tempted to affirm the ethical
proposition that we are not meant to see this animal. Its world is
mutually exclusive with our own. Snow leopards live too far away from
us, too high; their habitats are too remote; the journey that the film
takes to approach them reinforces their distance from us.

And though this may annoy audiences of animal-lookers who have
come to expect that they can see any animal they want to, still, the
film lets us down easily. Silent Roar—the title itself is a nice paradox:
we expect to hear a “roar,” but it’s withdrawn from us, silenced, at the
same time it’s offered. Silent Roar depicts people trying as hard as they
can to see snow leopards, with all the possible technology available,
and the keenest sense of adventure, but still, as they fail, we may come
to terms with the insight that perhaps we simply can’t see everything
that’s out there in the world. And Silent Roar still leaves audiences with
a very beautiful and memorable film about the region, the place,
through which snow leopards sometimes move (just not when most of
us can see).

I endorse encounters like these in visual media: experiences that
don’t flatter our omnivisual fantasies, but instead suggest what we are
not meant to see, and explain why. In the world of art, a growing canon

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of painting, sculpture, photography, and other performative works
reinforce this retreat from the anthropocentric omniscience that has
traditionally characterized the human gaze. In the vanguard of this
(counter-)movement are artists like Britta Jaschinski, Sue Coe, Olly &
Suzi, Mark Dion, and Joseph Beuys all of whom Steve Baker discusses
in The Postmodern Animal. These artists resist a traditional
sentimentality toward other animals, in favor of a more nuanced
engagement with them, a more ecologically informed and reasoned
interaction. As Baker puts it, they are forging “new models of the
human and the animal”45 in the service of “an imaginative reassessment
of the role of animals in human thought,”46 which includes a
postmodern skepticism about “culture’s means of constructing and
classifying the animal in order to make it meaningful to the human.”47

These artists aspire to a holistic ecological sensibility that rejects the
conventional Cartesian dualism we have constructed to define our
relationship with the animal. They realize that the future of the human
“is so intimately and creatively bound up with that of the animal” that
“the classic dualism of human and animal is not so much erased as
rendered uninteresting as a way of thinking about being in the world.”48

We may call these visual cultural texts postmodern, or posthuman,
to indicate a transcendence over the hubristic ethos that humanity has
indulged in for so many centuries. That unsustainable ethos, however,
will not carry us forward for many more generations. We cannot rely
upon the profusion of new media technology to generate what we need
to see when we look at the world around us, and at the other species
who share this world with us. We need to seek out new, less harmful,
ways of looking at animals.

NOTES

1. The first-person plural pronoun here denotes humanity as a
whole, and more specifically, the populations of the world’s
overdeveloped consumer cultures. And of course, it includes me as well.

2. http://www.americanhumane.org/protecting-animals/programs/
no-animals-were-harmed/ accessed on January 25, 2010.

3. The AHA is separate from the Humane Society of the United
States (HSUS). See http://www.hsus.org/about_us/accomplishments/
t h e _ p e o p l e _ w h o _ h a v e _ s h a p e d _ t h e _ h s u s /

ANIMALS ON FILM 23

fred_myers_cofounder_of_the_hsus.html (accessed January 25, 2010)
for an account of how the HSUS split off from the AHA in 1954, after
a bitter dispute about what the HSUS faction considered insufficient
activism on the part of the AHA.

4 . h t t p : / / w w w. a a r p . o r g / a a r p / b r o a d c a s t / a a r p _ r a d i o /
movies_for_grownups_pastshows/articles/animal_actors.html accessed
on January 29, 2010.

5. http://www.americanhumane.org/protecting-animals/programs/
no-animals-were-harmed/ accessed on October 5, 2009. The citation
of Newman’s film (about the development of the atomic bombs in the
Manhattan Project) as the first one to receive this rating is discussed at
http://findarticles.com/p/news-articles/charleston-daily-mail/
m i _ 8 0 4 4 / i s _ 2 0 0 6 0 3 2 0 / a n i m a l – r i g h t s – g r o u p s – p u s h i n g – r e a l /
ai_n46262135/ accessed January 25, 2010.

6. http://www.ahafilm.info/movies/moviereviews.phtml?fid=7193
accessed on January 25, 2010.

7. http://www.americanhumane.org/protecting-animals/programs/
no-animals-were-harmed/movie-rating-system-old.html accessed on
October 5, 2009.

8. http://www.americanhumane.org/faqs.html accessed on
October 5, 2009.

9. http://www.americanhumane.org/faqs.html accessed on
October 5, 2009.

10. The field of “visual culture” is an increasingly prominent
academic focus that draws upon anthropology, cultural studies, art
history, and various other cognate fields. It addresses the range of visual
imagery (film, television, graphics, comics, new media, high and
popular/public art, and so forth) that is becoming ever more ubiquitous
as our cultural experiences become more resplendently illustrated.
While some fear that visual culture threatens to overwrite textual
culture, others (including myself ) believe the two realms of media can
coexist.

11. King Kong (Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, 1933; Peter
Jackson, 2005); Curious George (Matthew O’Callahan, 2006); Beethoven
(Brian Levant, 1992; five sequels); Seabiscuit (Gary Ross, 2003).

12. A long-running regular feature on CBS’s Late Show with David
Letterman; Google the term to see a plethora of illustrations.

2 4 RANDY MALAMUD

13. I discuss such odd encounters with animals in more detail in
an essay with the self-explanatory title, “Americans Do Weird Things
With Animals,” Animal Encounters, eds. Manuela Rossini and Tom
Tyler (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 73-96.

14. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0136536/ accessed on
January 29, 2010.

15. Jeremy Biles, “I, Insect, or Bataille and the Crush Freaks,” Janus
Head (7.1, 115-131), 116-17.

16. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen
(16.3, 6-18), 11.

17. Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian
Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990), 39-62; G.A. Bradshaw,
B. Smuts, D. Durham, in press. “Open Door Policy: The necessary
relinquishment of humanity’s “right to sight”,” in R. Acampora, ed.
Metamorphoses of the Zoo: Animal Encounter After Noah (Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers).

18. Mulvey, p. 17.
19. See, e.g., Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in

the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

20. Lassie Come Home (MGM, 1943) was followed by six other
feature MGM films through 1951, and a CBS television series, Lassie,
from 1954-73, starring a collie. Flipper (NBC, 1964-67) starred a series
of bottlenose dolphins, trained by Richard O’Barry (who recently
starred in the documentary The Cove, 2009, in which he explains that
he sees his activist campaign against dolphin slaughters as a kind of
atonement for his work on the television series). Robert Stevenson’s
1957 film Old Yeller is about a mixed-breed dog, based on Fred Gipson’s
1956 novel. Sounder, a 1970 novel by William H. Armstrong adapted
into a 1972 film by Martin Ritt, features a mixed-breed dog as the
title character. Elsa is a lion cub who stars in Born Free, a 1966 film by
James Hill (with two sequels) based on the books by Joy Adamson.
Rin Tin Tin was the name given to several German Shepherds who
starred in a series of Warner Brothers movies (often credited with saving
the studio from bankruptcy) in the 1920s and 1930s. Francis the
Talking Mule starred in the film Francis (1950) and six sequels through
that decade.

ANIMALS ON FILM 25

21. Free Willy (Simon Wincer, 1993) tells of a boy’s attempts to
free an orca whale from captivity in a theme park.

22. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005); Dances with Wolves (Kevin
Costner, 1990); Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002).

23. Mulvey (quoting Budd Boetticher), p. 11.
24. E. O. Wilson explains this term that he coined in Biophilia

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984): “we are human in good
part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms.
They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is
permanently rooted,” p. 139.

25. Mitchell Leslie, “The Man Who Stopped Time,” Stanford
Magazine (May/June 2001), accessed online January 25 2010 at http:/
/www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2001/mayjun/features/
muybridge.html.

26. In fact, they do.
27. Derek Bousé, Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 42-3.
28. See schedules and programming notes at http://

animal.discovery.com/ (accessed 29 January 2010).
29. Jhan Hochman, Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel,

and Theory (Moscow, Id.: University of Idaho Press, 1998), p. 3.
30. Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2006), p. xi.
31. Chris, p. xii.
32. Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife

on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 3.
33. Mitman, p. 4.
34. David Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood

Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2004), pp. 135-6.
35. Ingram, p. 132.
36. Ingram, p. 181.
3 7 . h t t p : / / i n m o v i e s . c a / H o m e /

ContentPosting?newsitemid=dishinformation.ca%2F2010%2F01%2F21%2Fpeta-
awards-avatar%2F&feedname=DISHMOVIE_NEWS&show=False
&number=0&showbyline=False&subtitle=&detect=&abc=abc&date=False
accessed Feb. 17, 2010.

38. http://www.americanhumane.org/about-us/newsroom/news-
releases/10-avatar-animals.html accessed Feb. 17, 2010.

2 6 RANDY MALAMUD

39. Posted by Sebastian Verdikt, January 22, 2010. http://
blog.peta.org/archives/2010/01/james_cameron_avatar.php accessed
Feb. 17, 2010.

40. Stephanie Ernst, “Domination and Rape in Avatar: This Is
“Respect” for Animals?” On “Animal Rights and AntiOppression”
website, http://challengeoppression.com/2010/02/16/domination-
and-rape-in-avatar-this-is-respect-for-animals/ accessed Feb. 20, 2010.

41. http://challengeoppression.com/2010/02/16/domination-
and-rape-in-avatar-this-is-respect-for-animals/ accessed Feb. 20, 2010.

42. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”, in About Looking (New
York, Pantheon, 1980), p. 28.

43. Richard Conniff, “The Consolation of Animals,” http://
happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/the-consolation-of-
animals/ accessed on October 5, 2009.

44. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of
Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 187.

45. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books,
2000),p. 165.

46. Baker, inside cover.
47. Baker, p. 9.
48. Baker, p. 17.