And, given that our own superior species is murdering all the fellow species of the planet, and taking their lands for our own insatiable needs, it isn’t hard to note the philosophical parallels between the literature of colonisation and the literature of animal narratives.Īnd yet novels are empathy machines. Just listen to John Paul Sartre’s claim that ‘The European of 1945 can… redo in himself the project of the Chinese, of the Indian or the African… there is always some way of understanding an idiot, a child, a primitive man or a foreigner if one has sufficient information ’, to hear how off it seems to us today. Imagining the non-lived experience of others from a position of superiority is not an ethical act. We write other animals by regressing our own evolutionary journey in our imaginations, from a position of superiority. There is an unbreachable gap between our experience and that of another species, and we write animal experiences from our place at the apex of the concept of evolution. We cannot know the life of a bat, or an otter, or even an animal as close to us as a horse or a dog. These can be memorable, insightful, important texts… but, as Thomas Nagel points out, they are inaccurate.
We have the rabbits of Watership Down and we have Tarka, Varjak Paw, Ratty and Mole… and of course Piers Torday’s chorus of wild things, of which he wrote in our recent blog post. We have Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Buck in Jack London’s Call of the Wild. Some writers, and most notably writers for children, have tried to set this right. So it seems grossly unfair how many acres of print have been given over to the examination of the human experience and how little to the oyster experience – or indeed to the experience of any other species.
The life of man, as David Hume pointed out, is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.
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