(Animal Soup. Google Images)
While going through this chapter I pretty much could pull out a quote from every page, but I will not do that and I will choose a quote and talk more about it. When I read over this quote the first thing I thought of was myself. Here Elizabeth and her son are fighting and talking about how people and animals are different and their feelings toward it, "[People] like eating meat. There is something atavistically satisfying about it. That's the brutal truth. Just as it's a brutal truth that, in a sense, animals deserve what they get. Why waste your time trying to help them when they won't help themselves? Let them stew in their own juice. If I were asked what the general attitude is towards the animals we eat, I would say: contempt. We treat them badly because we despise them; we despise them because they don't fight back" (Coetzee, 104). This is a very powerful statement that her son makes. He is trying to find some sort of reason for what we do to animals. Now I don't believe we have contempt for them because they don't fight back, but I believe we take advantage of them because they can't fight back. I mean seriously, why kill and eat something if it could possibly kill you first. I believe do the things we do because we like to take control of the situation and it is easy to take control of animals because they have no way of thinking outside the box and taking us down like we have the power to.
(Animals used as images to convey feelings. Off of Google Images)The next thing I would like to talk about is the way we use animals as images of things. I would like to point out that I used I am the Walrus by The Beatles to show that even in songs we use animals as images. Elizbeth talks about certain poems and the authors use animals as images to represent humans. In Greek and Roman times animals were sacred and sacrificed for gods and Odyssesus did get introuble for killing animals and all these feelings for animals came to me. Why do we use parallels between animals and humans? "[W]riters teach us more than they are aware of. By bodying forth the jaguar, Hughes shows us that we too can embody animals - by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no one has explained and no one ever will" (Coetzee, 97-98). I love it when writers write in a way where we draw this sense that we are what they are talking about and it makes us have this emotional sense with the character. But I guess I was always confused why we use animals as characters such as... lions as courage, mice as scared, eagles and brave and patriotism.... Why do we use animals in this imagery?
Now onto Peter Singer. Now to start off I want to let the readers know that I do not like this guy. He is contradictory at best. He is so hardcore animal activist, but does not give a damn about humans at all. Just to let you know... he believes that we should kill every baby that is born with a disability. He believes in infanticide and I can not believe that a human being that is so dedicated to animal rights that he does not believe in disabled rights and thinks that they should be killed. So, as you can see I am kind of judgmental towards Singer, especially when he says, "Pain is pain, no matter what the species of the being that feels it" (Singer, 300). I pretty much just dropped my jaw and notice what he writes and feel like its so opposite of what I know of him. I am in a Communications and Disabilities class and we have learned to "hate" Singer, so again my views of him are very poor. Singer makes plenty of good points in the writing about animals and how we would decide between saving an animal or our child. It would be a hard decision, but we would of course go with the obvious one. Though his daughter would question how could he, but thats because she is not really making the choice. Between our own species and another...think we'd choose our own (well some more then others... SINGER!!)
(Reincarnation off of Google Images)
Now the one thing I loved about Wendy Doniger's Compassion Toward Animals, and Vegetarianism, is this quote "most Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains did indeed feel that people should not eat animals, in part, as in generally argued, because they themselves might be reborn as animals, but more because they feared that animals might retaliate in the afterworld" (Doinger, 303). It was nuts when I read this because I use to believe this. I was raised with parents of Jewish and Christian backgrounds and my mother (christian) decided she stopped believing in god and believed in Karma and believed in reincarnation. I use to believe for a long time that we could possibly come back as an animal and after this class.... how terrible would that be? If all of a sudden we die and we become the very being we kill and abuse. That gives me the frights just thinking about it. I certainly hope that it doesnt happen like that.
