I detect in Ross’s story of the coyote entering her life echoes of Anzuldúa’s transformative poetry. And I learn from the words of queer artists such as Ross and Anzaldúa that animals can work their way into our imaginations and bodies, helping us to see the world in ways that may empower us to change it. As Ross insists, other creatures are always more than metaphors for human existence and dreams. Similarly to Baker’s call for animal representations that offer alternatives to the violent, anthropocentric images of animals that saturate Western society, Ross’s coyote metaphor reminds us that the use of animal symbolism need not be reductive and oppressive for human beings or animals. At different points in this book I consider how we might use animal imagery, as well our everyday encounters with animals, to learn more about the lives and experiences of other creatures, in the process thinking about how we might construct new, less oppressive relationships to them.
The history of the use of animal metaphors and comparisons between people and animals shows that these can sometimes be transformative. But they can also be dangerous, for people and animals alike. Making comparisons between different forms of oppression and violence can be a useful way of prompting people to examine more carefully the gaps in our thinking and compassion, to draw attention to our inconsistencies and our hypocrisies. But in order to do that effectively, comparisons need to be done in ways that recognise differences as much as similarities. This includes, crucially, the fact that comparisons of different kinds of past atrocities will have very different meanings for different people. If the aim of veganism is to encourage people to end the exploitation of all animals, including humans, we need to be careful and conscious about the kinds of comparisons we use, and how. And we need to be honest about whether certain metaphors and comparisons are likely to promote change, or whether they carry the risk of injuring others while keeping the hierarchical status quo firmly in place.
September 2017Alicante, Spain
Ideas that have been swimming around my mind for some time — less a school than an anarchic assembly of finned creatures — are starting to sway to the rhythm of my peculiar temporary office space. The location is a rather rustic sailboat, moored in a Mediterranean marina, bobbing up and down, rocking me and filling my ears with the assorted sounds of flapping sails, lapping water and, most insistent and persistent, the scrape of the hull against the wooden dock. Between rushes of rapid jotting on my laptop I become aware of the movement and soundtrack outside, amplified at times by flashes of heat from inside and outside my body.
This morning a different kind of bodily sensation disrupted and then coloured my thinking: during my dawn dip in the sea I was stung by a jellyfish. It was quick as lightening — brief confusion followed by the shock of realisation, then panic as I kicked the innocent offender away and swam quickly back to shore. The calf and knee of my left leg swelled rapidly under the hot red stripes left by the tentacles I had managed to tear away. After a do-it-yourself treatment — dosing the injured leg in vinegar, followed by a hot shower — the sting subdued to a dull ache as I continued to write. The body of this particular animal — whom I had glanced but briefly, a faint swirl of cloud dispersing underwater — stayed with me.
Later, walking to lunch under the scorching sun, I reflected on my irritation with this small beast of the sea. After all, it was I who had trespassed in her home. Though I had escaped with minor pain and discomfort, I didn’t know what had become of her. Do jellyfish have a sex? Do they live after they sting? A quick tour through Google taught me that most jellyfish are male or female and sting to defend themselves and catch their prey, so do not normally die after striking out. I seem to have come off lightly — no tentacles stuck in my flesh. Yet as the swelling died down I felt blessed to carry a light trace on my skin of this encounter with a real-life medusa.
Being prey and being predators
My brush with the jellyfish in the warm waters of the Mediterranean brought to mind a tale of a much more dramatic — and infinitely more dangerous — underwater encounter with a predator. In a brief narrative written in the mid 1990s, the late ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood recounts the story of her near-death experience with a saltwater crocodile during a solo canoe trip in Australia’s Kakadu National Park.1 Plumwood’s description of how she escaped — just — three consecutive crocodile death rolls is also an account of how, while she fought for her life, her sense of self was shattered. This is no heroic tale of human survival in the face of the unpredictable brutality of “nature,” no reaffirmation of what it means to be human in the face of adversity. Instead, Plumwood’s crocodile tale is a humble reflection on herself as prey. It is also the occasion for asking about how we as people categorise different species, deciding what counts as food and what does not — questions with important ethical and political implications for vegans, vegetarians and omnivores alike.
An experienced canoeist and bush traveller, Plumwood had ventured out alone into the lagoon on a wet day in search of an Aboriginal rock art site. As the rains got heavier she and her canoe were pulled out of the backwaters into the main river channel that the camp ranger had warned her to stay away from: ‘“The current’s too swift, and if you get into trouble, there are the crocodiles. Lots of them along the river!”’ As she looked cautiously towards the banks — “Edges are one of the crocodile’s favourite food-capturing places” — Plumwood realised the seriousness of her situation: “As a solitary specimen of a major prey species of the saltwater crocodile, I was standing in one of the most dangerous places on earth.” Guiding the canoe steadily and carefully to avoid the shore, Plumwood saw with alarm that what she had thought was a stick ahead of her was actually a crocodile lurking at the surface of the water. In retrospect, Plumwood imbues her story with an element of fate: “Although I was paddling to miss the crocodile, our paths were strangely convergent.” Before she could change tack, the crocodile began to strike at her small vessel. “For the first time,” Plumwood writes, “it came to me fully that I was prey.” Just as she was steering the canoe to shore to get out onto dry land “the crocodile rushed up alongside the canoe, and its beautiful, flecked golden eyes looked straight into mine.” In the next instant the animal had Plumwood in a tight grip, dragging her underwater.
Plumwood attempts, with hindsight, to make meaning of her thoughts during the three death rolls that followed:
In its final, frantic attempts to protect itself from the knowledge that threatens the narrative framework, the mind can instantaneously fabricate terminal doubt of extravagant proportions: This is not really happening. This is a nightmare from which I will soon awake. This desperate delusion split apart as I hit the water. In that flash, I glimpsed the world for the first time “from the outside,” as a world no longer my own, an unrecognizable bleak landscape composed of raw necessity, indifferent to my life or death.
Against the odds Plumwood remained conscious through these short bursts of terror (“The crocodile’s breathing and heart metabolism are not suited to prolonged struggle,” she explains, “so the roll is an intense burst of power designed to overcome the victim’s resistance quickly”) and managed to come back for air after each roll. Following the third, she scrambled her mangled body up the shore, away from the river and crocodile. But she was far from her trailer and had sustained serious wounds. In the goriest segment of the story, but also one of the most telling, Plumwood stops to inspect the extent of her physical injuries: “The left thigh hung open, with bits of fat, tendon, and muscle showing, and a sick, numb feeling suffused my entire body.” In this moment of relief mixed with fear and pain, Plumwood sees part of her own body as raw meat.
Yet the experience of being torn physically and existentially proved to Plumwood that she was something more than meat: