It’s not just that I am post-domestic, I’m also completely lacking in the experience which even many contemporary urban women have had with animals – an adolescent love affair with horses. Once, when I was about eleven, I stayed with a school friend during the holidays on her farm and actually got on a pony (smaller? different breed? I don’t know). I didn’t like it very much up there. I’d previously only ridden people down on all fours pretending to be horses, neighing improbably, and the odd depressed donkey on the sands: this real version was far too high off the ground, and did not necessarily have my interests at heart or someone leading it around. When it did what it always did in the riding field with someone of my sort of size on its back and jumped over the tiniest jump imaginable, I decided there and then that I had no interest in this life in putting on a show of bravery to save face, and wailed to be let off. I was never going to be a horsewoman. I didn’t want to be a horsewoman, any more than I want to be a Sami.
In my late teens I was staying in a cottage on Dartmoor and did a pony trek across the moor. It was wonderful – visually: the mist mingling with the horses’ breath, Victorian-romantic, dark rolling moor, fast-running streams and bracken, rock-scattered tors and wind-twisted trees. I got the point of riding through the countryside seeing everything from the perfect height and speed. When there was speed. My pony, chosen for a complete novice, knew the kind of incompetent that was on its back, and stopped (sometimes on heart-arresting inclines) to munch at something tasty, or perhaps not, perhaps he just stopped – to show me who was in charge. So I began to suspect, as we dawdled humiliatingly behind. I had not the slightest interest in arguing. But I needed to keep up, not knowing how to ride or my way around the moor, and I suspected that a horse or whatever it was called that stopped at will, might also trot or god-helpme gallop at will, so I tried to do what they told me with the reins and my knees, clicking and clucking encouragement, but if ever a horse laughed it was this one. I didn’t care much. It was very pretty, and I had no desire to keep up with the adepts, aside from ensuring my safety. Eventually, having got quite a lot behind, the beast decided itself to catch up and started to run – trot, gallop, canter, whatever it did. I held on tight with every part of my body and knew that I was going to die. I didn’t, but that was it for the relationship between horses and me. Since then I have never done more than watch them graze contentedly in fields as I pass by sitting in a car or on the train.
However, as much as I have been unwilling to accept – very well, talked myself out of – the necessity for visiting an abattoir throughout the planning and writing of this book, I began to think that I really ought (ought? Rules and duties lurk in even the most contrarian of minds) to have a little more one-to-one experience of dealing with animals than just my life with cats, or a week down on the farm for lambing. Not in principle: I prefer to take as my writing model the traveller and surrealist, Raymond Roussel,* whose book Impressions of Africa was informed by his journey across the continent in a specially constructed motorised caravan in which he remained throughout with the shutters closed. I like the idea of thinking rather than doing, and I’m not entirely sure that doing doesn’t sometimes substitute for thinking. Still, and even so, an inconvenient nudge started to work in me, which I recognised, albeit unwillingly, because it’s true that, Roussel notwithstanding, I do occasionally find myself going out into the garden or a field in order to write, though not always, I suspect, with more success than if I’d stayed home with the blinds down. The nudge turned into a thought and it struck me in a way I had no desire to be struck that, even at sixty-one, it might be possible to get on a horse, and, as I unthinkingly thought of it, learn to ride.
I explained myself on the phone to Michael, the owner of the local riding school. I was a writer doing a book about animals and thought I’d better sit on a horse and see what happened when a person learned to ride. Although since I was over sixty and not at all fit or experienced in the ways of horses, I’d quite understand if he said I was an unsuitable novice rider.
‘Oh no, our oldest rider is in her seventies.’
So no way out.
At the first lesson, I was given a hard hat and introduced to Alex, to whom I said hello politely from somewhere behind his left ear.
‘Don’t approach him from behind, stand in front of him so he can see you and put your hand out for him to get your scent.’
I withdrew it hastily as the lips curled back and he seemed about to take a nibble. I am afraid of animals (and some people) who are much larger than me and with whom I can’t have a reassuring conversation. I am horribly committed to language. Once I’d pulled back my hand, Alex showed no further interest in me in any way that I could fathom, not even when I hauled up on his back. I felt, under the eyes of a professional horseman, that the horse lost interest in me since I’d shown no great willingness to relate to him. He was held on a leash at all times by Michael, who as far as I was concerned was the priest who mediated between me and the unknown being I was risking my life on. I spoke to the human, as he led the horse at a very slow walk to the indoor practice arena. Alex was a very calm horse, excellent for novices, and no, he wasn’t very big actually as horses go. I asked about how Michael got into horses and started the stables, which had some forty animals, most of them his and some liveried for their local owners. I was aware that I was trying not to notice that I was on top of a horse. We chatted as if we were wandering up the lane and I was conducting an interview. I was also aware of feeling somewhat ill mannered towards Alex, sitting on him and ignoring him, more as if he were a bicycle than a living creature. Not that I was actually ignoring him. The natural sway of his body from side to side as he walked transferred upwards to me through my legs and torso, and I felt the swing as if I were in a force-nine gale on top deck. A bicycle – for all the decades I haven’t ridden one – would have made me much happier. If this was slowly walking under control, did I really want to learn to ride? Which meant, I understood, going faster and less sedately than we were presently proceeding. It was much more in my nature to walk along and talk about animals, or sit and read about them, than actually to interact with them, let alone entrust my life to one. So I didn’t, as far as it was possible; I tried to keep my balance and chatted to Michael, as if I were sitting on a bus and he was the conductor. You can’t really be rude to a bus, but I think it was rude of me to blank Alex as I did.
The first lesson did not challenge me with anything more than walking and trying to get my posture right. Straight, strong core, legs bent at right angles, heels under the knees, elbows lifted slightly, reins wound just so between the fingers. All fine. Just like getting a dance or Pilates posture right. Concentrating on making the right shapes of my body. I managed entirely to ignore the beast beneath my legs, for all that I was still very disconcerted by what I thought of as its wobbling, which Michael told me enabled me to judge his movement and pace. Slightly tense one rein to turn right, the other to turn left, lift a little to stop, squeeze Alex’s sides very gently with my knees when I wanted him to move off. Try and sense the animal’s response, look at his ears and the way he holds his head. Just like learning to drive, I thought. Steering wheel, accelerator and gauges. At any rate, I survived the first lesson and Michael led us back towards the stables while I asked him questions about his own riding. It was why he had the stables, which only had public lessons in the afternoon, he told me, so that he could fund his riding and keep horses. Every morning he worked his own horse, sometimes with an Austrian-trained dressage teacher. He had lived in London as a child but near some stables and, not able to afford lessons himself, he used to hang over the fence and watch young girls riding. He became besotted with horses, working at the stables in return for the chance to ride and eventually found a way to make horses his living.
As we talked, we were following another rider who was a few metres in front, also returning to the stables after her lesson. The woman was a little younger than me, in her fifties, her horse being led by one of the young women instructors. The woman on the horse ahead had only recently started to learn, Michael said in a reassuring way. To our right was a field where a couple of loose horses watched our stately, clopping progress. One of them, greeting or teasing, suddenly shook its head and whinnied loudly at us, and several things instantly resulted. The horse in front jerked sharply in response, the rider on it toppled off sideways; my horse, Alex, jumped sideways in surprise at the horse jumping, while the horse ahead of us abruptly took off at full speed, not quite riderless, because the woman had caught her heel in the stirrup, and was being dragged on her back along the cobbles as her horse bolted for the stables. I didn’t fall off Alex partly because I was already so tense at merely being on him that I was clinging on tight anyway, and also because Michael saw what was happening very fast and got Alex under control immediately. Michael held Alex still and I watched horrified while the young woman in charge of the galloping horse in front tried to catch the reins and halt it, and the rider bounced behind on the ground, helplessly attached, like a scene in a Western but much more disturbing because it was real and unstoppable. It took a long moment before the instructor had the horse by the bridle and brought it to a halt. We waited for a second to see what condition the woman was in. It took a moment because she wasn’t sure herself, and was presumably in shock. Michael, trying to contain the drama to just the one fallen rider, kept hold of Alex. The instructor, having somewhat calmed the horse, reached around to release the woman from the stirrup, and she sat up, very white and in pain somewhere around her upper back. She was, it seemed, only bruised, though nastily so, I imagine. She sat on a bench and was clearly distressed, but also embarrassed, as you would be, trying to make less of it than she felt. Michael asked some pertinent questions about mobility and after helping me to dismount, got an accident form for her to fill in. She need to go home, shaken and not wanting to be seen to be too upset. Michael spoke to her kindly, but his manner suggested, given his experience of people falling of horses, he was sure there was no real damage apart from her confidence: he said that she should see an osteopath but come back as soon as possible to ride again, otherwise she might find it difficult. She still looked upset and said she would, though I doubted that she’d be back.
When we got into the stable to take Alex’s saddle off, the horse involved in the drama had been tied to a wall and was being groomed by the young woman who had been in charge of the ride.
‘Poor Henry,’ she said to Michael, with a slight smile. ‘He’s feeling very sorry for himself.’
‘Poor old thing, look at you,’ said Michael, much more sympathetically to Henry than he had been when comforting Henry’s rider.
I asked questions. Why was Henry sorry for himself when he’d just tossed his rider? And how did they know that was what Henry was feeling? He looked to me just like a quiet, large, horse being groomed.
Michael explained that Henry had been confused by the rider falling off him just because he jumped slightly at the horse in the field whinnying, and that was why he bolted.
‘You mean it was her fault?’
‘Well, yes, really,’ he said. Henry, like any trained horse, expected riders who weren’t complete novices to be able to ride and not fall off with so slight a reason. He was startled by his rider having so little control. It gave him an awful fright, and that was why he bolted: to get to the safety and security of his stall, and then her getting her foot stuck in the stirrup when he ran upset him even more. Now, he was feeling upset and embarrassed about the whole incident and needed reassurance. He was a lovely horse, good temperament, no trouble at all. And the woman, I wondered, what of her fright? Well, she’d had enough lessons to be expected to keep her seat. She was all right, not badly hurt, and falling off is something that happens when you learn to ride. It seemed a little harsh to me, but then I was a novice rider, and Michael and the other instructor were seeing it as they could, apparently, and I couldn’t, from the horse’s point of view. It hadn’t really struck me, before that moment, that horses had a point of view. Certainly not in the matter of people falling off. Maybe, Michael said, looking a little worried, that wasn’t the best thing for you to see on your first lesson. But it was, of course.
Even more interestingly, how could they tell that Henry was upset and in particular ‘sorry for himself’? Did they mean it, or was it just a way horsey people talk to each other?
‘Absolutely not. Look at him. Can’t you see he’s upset? And he’s got that shamefaced look.’
I gazed hard at Henry, although unsure which bit of him I should be looking at. He was a white horse, much bigger than Alex, quite handsome, and standing quietly with his head towards the wall where he was tied, munching on some hay and being brushed by the young woman. He looked like a horse. He wasn’t sweating or shivering.
‘Look at his face.’
It was a horse’s face, that is to say without any expression that I could make out. Huge protuberant eyes, thick eyelashes, large nostrils, mouth closed. One of the things that makes cats so enigmatic (or annoying) is that they have no expression on their faces, they don’t have the facial muscles to show their emotions with their eyes or mouth. Unlike primates, which use their features to show their fellows what they are feeling, cats, and, as far as I could tell, horses, always look the same. You need to look at a cat’s body, arched, fur up, tail still or going like a windscreen wiper, or listen to the purring or yowling or mewing. Look into a cat’s face and you might as well wonder what a rock is thinking or feeling. Even the eyes, those windows, apparently, on the soul, only tell you what you think you see in them.
‘He looks like a horse. What’s upset about his face?’
There were clearly signals that I hadn’t learned. The ears are up or down to varying degrees, the head is held differently, but they were also looking at his eyes, at his expression, though I couldn’t see it, and he was deemed to be ‘feeling sorry for himself’. Like a child who has been confused by something he assumed and didn’t understand about the world. People (grown-ups) who sat on your back were expected to be competent to do so. He was let down, like watching a father lose at the school sack race. Henry would never have reacted to the whinny of the horse in the field if he’d had a complete novice – like me – on him, or a child, or one of the disabled children I’d seen riding in a circle in a small field when I first arrived. All this could be read by looking at his expression.
‘The animals know when they need to be calm. The disabled kids come once a week and some of them make sudden movements, or shout and scream all the time, but the horses never react because they know the kids are vulnerable and they have to take care of them. They have a sense of responsibility.’
‘But Alex jumped, too,’ I said. ‘And I’ve never ridden before.’
‘Well, he knew I was in control.’
‘Are you serious about all this?’
‘More or less.’
Michael was neither naive nor sentimental. He was involved with horses in a way I could only imagine, and more emotionally involved with them than with his human pupils whom he knew far less well. He and the others working at the stable had a language for what they did, and a way of characterising the mechanics of the relationship between themselves as humans and the horses they worked with. The language he was using to me was about trust. He trained the horses and then trusted them. They, having been trained by Michael and his co-workers, trusted them, and by analogy they trusted others who rode them. When people like me, or the disabled kids, merely sat on them, rather than rode them, the horses transferred their trust to the person leading them. But sometimes, at some midway stage between being a novice and a real rider the horses just plain took advantage if they could. They gave you a chance, but if they decided you were hopeless, you’d had it. They took over. It was a form of contempt, Michael suggested.
At my second lesson, nothing more dramatic happened than that the left flank of my horse shuddered under my knee after I gently pressed against her side to get her moving (Maddy, this time, a little smaller to my relief: my vertigo kicks in even up on a horse, the ground seems alarmingly far away if I’m not actually standing on it). I didn’t notice, or rather, when Michael asked me if I’d noticed that shudder on her left flank, I realised I had felt the slight ripple against my leg, but had paid no attention. It was a living animal, it had slightly shuddered, in much the same way that it raised it head or snorted from time to time. What of it? But the shudder was important, Michael said. It meant that Maddy was telling me I had squeezed too hard when I instructed her to move forward. Not very hard, but harder than necessary to get her to understand what was wanted of her. We were supposed to have a relationship. Maddy knew this and was explaining it to me: I am not a machine that you knee as if you were putting me into gear, I am a responsive creature that you have a dialogue with. The pressing of the knee is the language you use. I was, it seems, raising my voice unnecessarily.
It could have been a turning point. It was a new idea, one of those moments when you suddenly ‘get it’. That’s what you’re doing. It was, after all, the reason why I had reluctantly decided to have riding lessons. And at that point I might have decided to learn to become a rider, which is to say, learn how to be in a relationship with a horse, how to speak and listen to it so that I could work together with the immensely powerful creature who might be persuaded to accept instruction from me. This, though, was the big problem. I had no desire at all to give this or any animal instructions. I didn’t want to be in charge of a horse, to dominate it, even in the most benign way. If the horse needs to know it can trust you to be in control, to be a senior partner in its life, I am not the right person to be a rider. I had no taste for being a ‘master’. It was why I have never had a dog. My cat and I lead parallel lives, although clearly I am in charge – I take her to the vet when she needs it, whether she likes it or not (she doesn’t), and put flea stuff on her. I am in control of what she eats (healthy dried food, not delicious dubious meaty chunks from a tin), and I get decidedly cross when she considers it too wet to go outside and pees delicately on the coir doormat. It’s obviously an ‘as if’ game Bunty and I play. Equals up to a point. Nevertheless, having a cat is an expression of wanting a more equal relationship than with another kind of animal that can and wants to be trained by its owner. I was troubled by the idea of training a horse to do what I wanted, whether it was to trot or to perform the intricate exercises of dressage. Why should it? Spending even a little time at the stables, it was clear that the horses lived the lives their human owners devised for them for their own, human purposes. They get fed and kept warmish, but they are essentially slaves. On my first visit, Michael had taken me to a stall in which lived a regally tall and incredibly beautiful pure white stallion. It was a Lipizzaner, he told me, a horse like those the Austrians trained for dressage. He was being liveried there for a woman who had bought him, having fallen in love with him. His mane was plaited, and he stood with his head held high, looking very superior, allowing me, it seemed, to feast my eyes on him. The funny thing was, Michael said, she doesn’t ride him much, but she often comes and just stands and looks at him. Michael rode him when he had time. The Lipizzaner was like a handsome prince locked up in his small stall, without even a flowing mane to let down to allow a princess to climb up and rescue him. A love object that got not enough exercise.
‘Would you like to be a horse?’ I asked Michael.
‘Certainly not,’ he said unhesitatingly. ‘It would be a terrible life being told what to do all the time.’
‘What kind of life would most please a horse, do you think?’
‘They want to be loose in the field all day, grazing and being with their pals. They’re perfectly happy like that.’
I remembered the wild ponies in the Quantocks that lived in groups on the common land until rounded up from time to time by the local farmers. Unlike, say, cows or sheep, horses, even though selectively bred, could probably get on very well without human masters. I confessed that I didn’t think I was interested in getting a horse to do what I wanted it to do. I could see it was a skill, but not one I wanted. I was uneasy about such a relationship with an animal. I was happy to drive an inanimate car, but not inveigle a horse into trusting me. Michael was more understanding of the temperamental divide between us than I expected.
‘I had a friend at university who rode all the time,’ he told me, nodding. ‘She loved riding, being on a horse, with a horse, and she was brilliant at it, but she gave it up eventually because she couldn’t reconcile herself to the need to dominate the horse. She knew that she had to, and she could but she thought it just wasn’t right to control animals for her pleasure. There’s a clear choice, either you are in charge or you don’t ride. She made the choice not to ride and never did again, as far as I know.’
Of course, we’re in control of all animals really, but you can choose not to increase the underlying control by riding or farming or eating meat or whatever. Michael didn’t have a problem with it. Except, as he said, if he’d been the horse. But then horses have been bred up to a point to want to be dominated, or to accept it. And they seem, some of them, to like being ridden. Then again, who wouldn’t, standing in a stall all day?
I’d learned about the stables from Patrick, who is my hairdresser. He’s been riding for three years and is keen enough to be thinking about getting his own horse and keeping it at Michael’s stables. His friends are puzzled that he still talks about going to riding lessons. Surely you’ve learned to ride by now, they began to say after a year or so. What he has learned is that riding is learning all the time. It’s not a limited subject where you can get qualifications and then consider yourself an expert. The better he gets, the more he discovers he has to learn (this is also true for most things worth learning). One day he told me that he’d had a bad session the previous week. Patrick was learning some dressage moves. He realised later that he was tense and being erratic in the handling of his horse, his mind not on the animal, really. His horse, he said, lost patience with him and went out of control, refusing to follow his instructions, firmly heading off in the wrong direction and jumping about all over the place. He stopped paying attention to his rider just as his rider had stopped paying attention to him. As soon as Michael got on the horse he was calm and obedient. Patrick is hooked on the idea of riding as one might be on learning to meditate. Instead of grappling with a wilful mind with a mind of its own, he is learning to make another kind of animal (also with a mind of its own) understand and work with him. He’s watched videos of great riders doing dressage and tells me how you can’t see that the rider doing anything at all, just sitting there, straight, and yet the horse obeys some minute adjustment of tension or posture and does exactly what is required. The relationship and movements between human and animal can become so subtle as to be invisible to the onlooker. To be in control of a horse, it’s necessary to be able to communicate with it, and to enable it to communicate with you. I can see the fascination of that, but I still don’t want to be in control.
I also don’t want to be out of control. On the third lesson, Michael suggested I get the horse to trot. I clicked and gently pressed against its sides. It trotted. I’d rather have ridden a whirlwind. Just trotting, and I had not the slightest sense of control, nor wanted any. I’ve been on a ship in a storm through the Bay of Biscay and felt more in control. I only wanted it to stop. ‘I hate this,’ I wailed at Michael, while I held on for dear life and completely failed to rise and fall or do anything else in the prescribed manner. ‘I don’t ever want to do that again.’ I had also discovered that being bounced up and down was incredibly bad for my spondylitis, a condition of my neck vertebrae for which I take anti-inflammatories. The jarring of my spine just sitting on a walking horse caused me enough pain the next day to have to double the medication. Trotting was far too painful – doubtless because I was doing it wrong. So with great relief (probably not only mine) after four sessions I had an excellent excuse to stop riding, well before my instructor suggested that a bit of a canter might be a good idea. I’m not sure that Michael believed me, but I was perfectly happy to be a failure at riding, and I’ve never minded people knowing that I’m a coward or that I’m not one for physical pursuits. I had discovered something at least of what I wanted to know: that Henry could feel sorry for himself, that those who worked with him could know how he felt, and that in order to have a working relationship with animals you had to be prepared not just to learn to communicate with them, but also to dominate them and overcome their resistance to their loss of independence by imposing your authority.
But I wonder why I didn’t empathise with Henry as I had with that anonymous dog vomiting at the side of the road in Valencia. Of course, I was not involved with the dog – it’s so much easier to feel strongly about something you are just passing by. And linked to that, I think perhaps I judged that horses had in some way accepted the deal with humans that they should be dominated by those who showed a willingness and aptness to do so. In a probably idiotic way, I felt horses were less innocent than the anonymous dog, who was so much more neotenised and bred by and for humans. If horses were so clever and subtle, why did they put up with their condition? Just because they don’t have opposable thumbs and walk on their hind legs? A similar train of thought might have gone through Jonathan Swift’s mind when he wrote about Lemuel Gulliver’s visit to the Houyhnhnms. Were I less innately negative, I should perhaps on the contrary have appreciated their grace and generosity at permitting coarse human beings to exercise control over them.
What actually precipitated the decision to find a local riding school was a book called Adam’s Task1 by Vicki Hearne, the animal trainer, philosopher and poet who I’ve mentioned earlier. I read her book with increasingly mixed feelings. There seems to be very little I think or read about animals that doesn’t cause my feelings to be mixed, but Hearne’s book was positively alarming, for all that her work is admired by philosophers I admire such as Stanley Cavell. She was* an animal trainer first and a philosopher contingent on that, as well as a poet self-consciously in the line of Thoreau and the Transcendentals – all her concerns were primarily on the subject of animal being and its relation with human being. Her view was that of someone with a special, privileged relationship, who knew animals in a way that pet owners and other animal keepers rarely did. This was why I, as someone with no relationship very much with animals, was interested in reading her in the first place. She liked animals more than she liked most people, as I do, but probably for quite different reasons, and she would have found my moral equivocation (and my sentimental response to the dog in Valencia) as loathsome as I find her moral conviction. She trained horses and dogs, and wrote in particular about the ones she retrained after they had been driven ‘psychotic’ by the contemptible, well-meaning (not a term of approval) kindness and lack of comprehension of their owners. Well-meaning kindness ruined the good, innate character of animals as sugar eats away the structure of teeth. She successfully trained the most incorrigible dogs and horses using her version of the Koehler Method, which, when the animal displays an inclination to do something other than what is required of it, necessitates ‘correction’ – a purposefully painful pinching of the ear or a sharp knee in the groin, a swift hard jerk on the training leash that momentarily strangles and topples the trainee to a halt. This is the only proper method for making an animal understand its place in and responsibility to the world, according to Hearne. If the animal tries to go the wrong way, it encounters pain, if it goes the right way, life is good. According to Hearne and others, an animal discovers in this way that it wants to do what its master wants it to do, and then a mutually respectful and somewhat reciprocal relationship can emerge. The animal becomes itself by being firmly trained to be its true self, by humans who know that that is better than the unruly puppy or the over-indulged adult animal. She despises the friendliness and kindness of those who offer their animals rewards for doing what they are told, or who give them treats and pander to them. It belittles them (the animals – she has no concern for the owners), and denies them their full rights as beings-as-they-are. She knows the various breeds of dogs and what characteristics they have had built into them over the generations. One of her delinquent dogs, Belle, a pit bull (a breed of dogs she defends as cruelly misunderstood – bad owners not bad dogs) has what she calls ‘gameness’, which would fit her to be an (illegal) fighting dog of the kind that fights to the death. She says that she isn’t ready to put Belle in such a situation because it would make her a dog that would fight rather than mate with any other dog Hearne owned, but she’s not sure that dog fighting, with ‘game’ dogs is really cruel:
The emblem … of two dogs who would rather fight than mate, is … not so clearly an emblem of something exceptionally out of order. We do live east of Eden where such an emblem may even be a noble one of caring for what is sacred, what matters, in the way the emblem of two ballet dancers enduring deprivation and pain in order to dance … is an emblem of something that keeps mattering to human beings.
For fighting-dog people, at least some of them, especially the old-timers, the combination of traits called deep gameness, which leads to the possibility of dogs who would choose fighting over mating, is in fact emblematic of glory, nobility, discipline in the old sense. In their vision, gameness includes the capacity to choose, and to choose knowingly, nobility and triumph over mere survival – death before dishonour. For me the question, then, is complicated by the fact that there is reason to honour this – it is philosophically much more accurate than the notion of these dogs as mere fighting machines.2
To me, everything is wrong with this. In the first place the repeated use of the word emblem. She is talking about dogs that are bred and trained by humans, but chooses to call their resulting characteristics and behaviour mythic and emblematic. Pit dogs fighting to the death are not emblems, they are flesh-and-blood realities, bred for aggression. You can use an emblem to persuade people into bloody realities (waving a flag on the battlefield), but it is not a straightforward description of what they will be doing. The ‘nobility and triumph over survival’ is a Nietzschean wonderland, emblematic in America of a species of macho survivalism in the face of a society believed to have gone soft (no discipline, state interference). But the idea that a dog bred for aggression, set to fight in a pit against a similar dog, has the ‘capacity to choose knowingly’ simply fails to be intellectually honest. Ballet dancers and fighting dogs are not comparable and have no relation to each other. While the ‘east of Eden’ reference suggests an acceptance that we are fallen (says who? from what?) and therefore must engage with death and violence to achieve nobility. We do indeed engage with death and violence, but there is no necessary nobility in it. There is no question that Hearne knew how to train animals and was immensely successful, but the slide into philosophy from ‘what works’, and the assumption that ‘what works’ is therefore the right and only way to proceed, disturbs me greatly.
I’m not alone in my alarmed response to her book. Adam’s Task was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, when it came out, by Yi-Fu Tuan, a Chinese-American geographer, writer on pet keeping and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He wrote that Hearne went ‘out of her way to test her reader’s credulity’ and quoted her describing Belle as being ‘capable of sizing people up “not as bite prospects, but as problems in moral philosophy and metaphysics”’. He continued:
I, a person who seldom can size up another metaphysically, begin to feel so inferior that I find myself retaliating by refusing to grant even the management of a ‘happy grin’ (as distinct from a happy smile?) to a puppy.
And Stephen Jay Gould, reviewing Adam’s Task, responds to her thoughts much as I did. He refers to a passage she writes about fighting pit bulls and then takes issue:
So it is possible for me to contemplate the possibility that allowing the right pit bulls, in the hands of the right people, to fight can be called kind because it answers to some energy essential to the creature, and I think of energy, when I think of certain horses, as the need for heroism.
How can anyone defend such misplaced Platonism more than a hundred years after Darwin? How can we speak of an essence so deep, so pure, so inexorable, so special, so immutably part of the creature’s definition that we must follow it whatever the consequences – even to death in agony? How can we defend such a general idea in a world of change and variety, where we can only define a species by its range of momentary variability, not by any permanent essential nature? And how can we dare to suggest, in this particular case, that a drive to fight to the death defines a Ding-an-sich, before which we can only bow in ultimate respect – when it is we humans who have bred this trait into pit bulls for our own cruel delectation? Essential nature, fiddlesticks.3
Clearly, Hearne did have a special way with animals, but she extrapolates too far and far too sentimentally in my opinion, although sentiment is what she would accuse me of. Still, I can understand how a fine trainer committed to animals could get to this point. It follows on from the, possibly or sometimes, imagined cross-species special relationship we often feel we have. Sometimes even I have the feeling I know what an animal is thinking, that it and I have a momentary understanding. I used to stand in front of the female orang-utan’s cage in the London Zoo (before they were sent away to France, and I wrote a novel with an orang-utan heroine called Jenny) and gaze at her gazing steadily back at me with those empty but utterly meaningful eyes, and I’d find myself nodding at something she wasn’t saying but I was hearing and seeing about the human/ orang condition. Or else the opposite: our mutual gaze was completely devoid of meaning and represented only my awareness of the impossibility of communicating with another species, however much I seemed to read intent (or despair) into the blank but orangutan-not-human eyes. Blankness can mean everything or nothing, after all. She was inside, behind glass, I was outside and at liberty to move on, look at something else, go home and talk to others about what I’d seen, write about it. There was a world (a language) of difference between her and me that could never really be breached except by my dominating her enough to train her to my wishes. If sometimes I feel a kind of romantic despair about not being able to reach out to another species, and want it so much more than I want to communicate with other people, it is only the reverse of Vicki Hearne’s conviction that she understood the nature of the other species, and admired it so much more for its apparent purity of being than she did her fellow fallen human beings.
In an article for Harper’s Magazine,4 Hearne wrote about the animal rights movement. She rejects the idea that animal rights should be defined by their capacity to suffer. From Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian ‘can they suffer?’ to Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s twentieth-century version, this has been the core argument for demanding animal rights. There is, of course, a problem. Who decides what suffering means? Who measures it and how much of it is to be allowed? And do all animals actually suffer? Singer acknowledges a scale of suffering – based on consciousness, in turn based on brain capacity, so that degrees of consciousness and fitness for rights equate to nearness to the human capacity to suffer. Another chain of being. Primates suffer nearly as much as we do, while ants and amoeba really don’t suffer at all. Who else can define suffering but humans? It’s our word, and if we want to justify fishing we can decide that fish really don’t suffer as we do. Which is to say, they don’t suffer. We feel more warmly towards big-brained koala bears. Size, furriness and brain development often go together, found on those we call mammals, and closer to us than insects or fish. Is it pain that a fish or a koala bear feels? Pain as we know it? Which is the only kind of pain we really know, and even then defining the quality of human pain is one of the hardest things to do medically. How long must you feel pain for? When does it become suffering? A flash of pain might not constitute much suffering, and if we assume very little short-term memory, none at all once forgotten. Don’t we even speak ourselves of how we forget the pain of childbirth, or else we’d never do it again? We say of people who die suddenly that they didn’t suffer. Nevertheless, let’s assume we can define pain, and where it is that an animal might process the experience, or be unable to. The capacity to suffer can’t really be the arbiter of rights. There are brain-damaged people, babies with massive congenital disorders of the central nervous system, who perhaps can’t be said to experience pain in the way that ‘normal’ people do. They are nonetheless accorded full human rights. We give human rights to all humans (or at least we do in international law, if not always in fact) because they are human, not because they do or don’t suffer or feel pain or distress. And there are all sorts of equivocation when we stop and think about various ‘interests’: many people are prepared to consider that the giving of pain to other human beings by torture might be justified in a ‘greater’ cause. We have trouble allowing people who would choose to die rather than suffer intense distress to have assistance in fulfilling their wishes, no matter how close ‘natural’ death might be. The right to choose death over suffering remains a difficult legal and ethical problem for use.
This confusion between rights and welfare is handy for those who want to continue to benefit financially and in other ways from controlling and exploiting animals. This brings us back to Professor Broom and his work on welfare at Cambridge University, which, he claims, unlike an entitlement to rights, is something scientists have discovered they can measure. If Professor Broom is right, that animals with the least developed brains may suffer more from inappropriate treatments because they are less able to adapt and cope, then ants and fishes ought perhaps to be higher on our caring agenda than those chimps and orangs who seem to be so much more like us, since they can behaviourally and physiologically assess their condition and either come to terms with it or find ways of improving it. This must certainly give those who use suffering as a basis for allocating rights something to stop and think about. The point of Broom’s work is to be able to measure the welfare of animals, rather than to look at a sheep and suppose it must be miserable because if it were you, it would be. Quality of life is a standard that scientists claim they can now assess with accuracy – at least in animals. Broom rejects the idea that we can judge how content an animal is simply by putting ourselves in its place.
The work in Cambridge is being done in order to assess the welfare requirements of domestic farm animals such as sheep and cattle. There has to be a balance, Professor Broom explains, between cost-benefit and ethical approaches. There will be no animal welfare in the field if the sheep are so expensive to keep content that no farmer can afford to keep them at all. Welfare is a very practical study, and has nothing very much to do with rights, except possibly to find a biochemical response to those animal rights activists who want to disrupt the exploitation of animals on the grounds of cruelty. Professor Broom states again that people who deplore the use of animals always have to explain what will happen to the millions of domesticated beasts that we kill for our own benefit, which nevertheless depend on human attention for what life they have and could not be sustained on a vegan, animal-liberated planet, at least not one that is anything like our present world. If humans had to compete for resources with sheep and cattle, it is unlikely the animals would win. Is it better to kill them all rather than have them our slaves? Is some life (with good-enough welfare) better than no life at all? Or is the pain of the kind that Elizabeth Costello feels at her knowledge of the existence of the hidden slaughterhouses and her ‘emotional’ assumption of the concealed suffering of millions, more important than the mere existence of animals? If you sit inside Elizabeth Costello’s head for any length of time (no matter how unpleasantly self-righteous you might find her) the world does begin to feel intolerably cruel, in spite of improvements in welfare measurements. But what then? For some, improving the conditions of animals that we are going to eat or wear, because it is better for them or for our souls, just isn’t the issue: perhaps we have no right to use animals at all.
In the spring of 2009 I went to visit Professor Steven Rose in his laboratory. He is a friend of mine. Steven is an old lefty, and will have no objection to my describing him in that way, any more than I would object to such a description. We have a humanist, more-than-liberal view of the world in common, and rage happily together when we meet at the destruction wrought by New Labour on the back of the devastation left by Thatcher. He used to be heard regularly on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, doing battle against reactionary responses to human dilemmas. Apart from many scientific papers, he has written extensively for general readers about the nature of memory and against the behaviourist and materialist tendency in science, arguing from his own researches for the limitations of pure biochemistry and determinism, and the vital role of experience and culture in understanding and improving the lives of human beings. I like and admire him, and I knew that for decades he has been working intensively on the biochemistry of memory, and that he has reason to hope his research will culminate in a remedy for the intractable and shocking problem of Alzheimer’s disease. He is on the side of life in a dry and humorous way.
In 1993 Steven Rose wrote a book called The Making of Memory, in which he described not only his research and the nature of memory but integrated himself into the narrative. He works with day-old chicks, from eggs which are bought in, hatched in his laboratory and then trained and tested the following day. Early on in the book, he described what happens after he has trained them. ‘I have to look inside my chicks’ heads,’ he writes. ‘Be warned, this bit is not for the squeamish.’ I issue the warning, too, for the faint-stomached, before I continue the quote.
An hour after I have tested them, I am back with the chicks again. Reza [his colleague in the lab] joins me once more. On the bench in front of us is a tray of ice. Mounted above it is a dissecting microscope – fitted with two eyepieces and looking more like a pair of binoculars. To the side, a row of 48 tiny plastic tubes in a rack. I pick up the first bird in my left hand, body in the palm, head between my fingers, and with a large pair of scissors quickly cut head from body, which I drop into a small plastic bucket. If I do it fast enough, there will be virtually no blood.5
This is my humane and very honest friend, Steven. He goes on to describe in detail how he exposes and opens the skull, lifts out the brain and then dissects it, finding, preparing and freezing the relevant regions for analysis the following day. By writing this as baldly as he does, Rose is not just confronting the reader with the realities of animal research, he is also facing full-on the nature of what he is doing.
This killing business though. It is not easy or pleasant to reduce a bundle of yellow fluff to brain and body … I have destroyed life.6
He considers the arguments against the absolutist animal rights position: the eggs he has ordered and hatched would otherwise have gone to a farm, very likely a battery-chicken factory and after twelve weeks of dreadful life have been killed for human consumption; in the lab he abides by stringent British Home Office laws in providing decent conditions and as painless and fearless a death as possible for the chicks. At one point he said to me that, after all, animals kill each other constantly and with much more suffering than he inflicts. ‘Oh, come on, Steven,’ I said. ‘With much less choice, too.’ ‘Yes, OK,’ he said, withdrawing the point. As I said, an honest man. But he recognises that these arguments are not the point, and I would agree, as he supposes an animal-rights person would argue, that ‘two offences – science rather than profit – against animals don’t cancel out’. With all the humanity I know him to have, and as a result of that humanity, Steven Rose justifies his act of snipping the heads off his chicks:
If I – we – society – use any pronoun you choose – want this sort of knowledge, there is no other way at present of obtaining it than to work on animals … I strongly oppose many things that are done to animals in farming, in hunting, in rearing animals as pets, and indeed in some forms of animal experimentation – nor would I ever accept the Cartesian view that non-human animals can be regarded as pain-free machines, so that one can do what one likes with them without it mattering. If they were, my research would probably be meaningless.7
He believes that the discussion of rights has to begin with human rights. Humans, he says, certainly have duties towards animals, but when it is a question of alleviating human suffering (and even animal suffering) and the choice is between experimenting with animals or not finding solutions, then Steven is clear that it is necessary to experiment on animals. Unless, of course, we are going to say that we can only experiment on humans. Not something society is likely to want to sanction. We can accord animals equal rights to ourselves and never find a cure for AIDS, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease, or we use animals as decently as possible (though not necessarily without pain and suffering) to explore mechanisms and find solutions to the pain and suffering humans (and indeed animals) experience. There is no way of testing what he is testing without using animals. Steven Rose is absolutely clear that all ‘duties to non-human animals are limited by an overriding duty to other humans’.8 He is a humanist.
So, in the spring of 2009, I went to visit Steven in his laboratory. I have already mentioned my failure to visit an abattoir for this book, along with maggot farms, battery farms and other abyssal hot spots. It might be said that I started out braver in my attempt to watch Steven work with his chicks. My first email, asking if I could visit, I find says:
About your chicks … are you still snipping their heads off? Do you remember that we discussed me coming to watch you at work with them (live and dead). Are you still doing it? Is it possible to come and visit?
When he asked what exactly I wanted to see, I replied:
The way the chicks are trained, killed, used.
I could claim that I intended to see the whole process, including the killing of the chicks. When I arrived on the date and time agreed (the visit having been put off once because I was ill), Steven explained what he was doing and I observed him training and testing the chicks, but it so happened, he said, that he wasn’t killing them that day. Now, Steven is a gentleman, and I suspected he was giving me a way out of what he knew I didn’t much want to see. However, even if that were the case, nothing prevented me from asking him if I could come another day when he was cutting the heads off his chicks, and I’m sure if I had made it clear that it was important to my project he would have allowed me to watch. I didn’t ask to go again to see the chicks being killed, of course. Certainly, because I don’t have the slightest desire to watch bundles of yellow fluff being reduced to body and brain, but also because I really do wonder whether or not one should watch, in the sense of witness at a safe distance, instead of either imagining and insisting on knowing without the element of voyeurism, or being prepared to perform the act yourself. Looking away is not a good thing. But perhaps looking away is not the same as not looking on. I’m inclined to turn my head away from road accidents when I pass them, not only for squeamishness, but for privacy of those involved – what is more private than death? If I really want to confront the death of animals, shouldn’t I kill them myself? Just watching Steven, or someone earning a living in an abattoir is what journalists do, but even journalists have a choice to stand and watch, or to participate.
Whatever my ethical reservations, it was also at least equally my faint-heartedness that didn’t ask if I could return to watch the chicks being killed. As a result, one of the things I don’t know about animals is how they die in the service of human needs because I’ve chosen not actually to be in that place and look, or to do it myself. Apart from having my cats die in and haunt my arms, and although I think about it far too much of the time, I am not any good at all at confronting death in anything other than my head.*
The chicks were in pairs in ten open-fronted aluminium boxes each with a red light above, lined up on a workbench. They had hatched twenty-four hours earlier from the incubator full of eggs, some of which were beginning to crack open, in another room. Their first day of life was spent in a brooder, and then they were taken to the testing room. Steven explained what he was going to do and why. He wanted to understand the biochemical activity that resulted from learning in the chicks. He offered the new chicks two beads on a stick. Chicks innately peck at anything in front of them to see if it’s good to eat, just as children instinctively put things into their mouths to find out what they are. One bead is bright and has a bitter substance on it and is offered to the experimental chick. The other is offered to the control chick and is flavoured with simple water. The experimental chicks taste the bitter bead and don’t like it. When tested again, the chicks who have learned don’t peck at a bright bead when offered, though they do peck at a regular coloured bead. When the chicks are killed and their brains analysed, a change is found in a particular chemical which, it can be assumed, is involved in the formation of memory. This can then be tested in a separate experiment with other chicks by blocking that chemical with an injection and then testing the chicks to discover whether the learning is undone and they will peck at the bright bead a second time. If the injection is delayed for an hour after learning, the chick remembers not to peck at the bitter substance. By discovering how short-term memory is turned off and on in chicks, it is possible to understand something about the biochemistry of short-term memory loss in humans. Other experiments have used rats and mice, but Steven uses chicks now because they have a particularly quick learning response.
In the testing room the chicks stood, as yellow and fluffy as Easter, in their bare boxes. Some of the pairs huddled for extra warmth or comfort, but mostly they just stood, and some cheeped a little. First there was pre-training, checking that they would peck at a neutral stick, before presenting them with the beads. Steven moved from box to box, offering the chicks the sticks, waggling them to get their attention and murmuring at the sleepier, less interested ones, ‘Come on, Gorgeous, pay attention.’ I watched as they were pre-trained, trained and then tested. What I recollect most clearly was Steven’s cooing at the chicks to get them interested, and their unbearably sweet, infantile, neotenous, wide-eyed cuteness in their barren tin boxes. They were tiny newborn living creatures recast as experimental subjects, and Steven spoke to them as we all speak to babies and pets, though we know they don’t understand the words we say. It might be partly intentional, to create a calming sound, but it is also an irresistibly human act to speak softly and encouragingly to small living creatures, even if you are going to cut their heads off the following day. While he interacted with them Steven included them in his world as conscious beings, not as mechanical objects. I tried a bit of stick-waggling, but found myself much more reluctant to personalise them. Steven treated them gently and caused them to fear as little as possible what was happening, but none of the chicks experienced a normal first-and-last day of life, and all of them were evolutionarily programmed infants, intent on finding comfort, food and interest in order to develop and live adult chicken lives. That would have been vital for their natural existence, and it was what made them good for the experiment. Though there are very few places where they might have led a natural chicken existence. Those who did not peck at the bead during the pre-training, who had weaker curiosity than the others, were put aside, not suitable to be experimented on.
‘Why don’t you let those ones live?’ I asked.
Steven told me that the assistants used to take them home to grow on for eggs or the pot, something quite like a decent existence, but that was stopped by the authorities. It wasn’t permitted, on safety grounds, for any living non-human creature to be taken out of the laboratory. As it was, in order to enter the actual laboratories we all had not only to put on clean white coats, but also to pass through a two-minute air shower, like an air lock in a space ship, which blasted air fiercely at you much more powerfully than a regular shower rains down water. We had to go through the same procedure when we left and deposit our lab coats in the bin for laundering.
The results of these experiments may well matter enormously to all of us as humans with a chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Even if that wasn’t the case, research into memory is still in a relatively early stage, and the knowledge of what happens to the chicks’ brains enhances our understanding of how we work and how things go wrong. But that, in the context of this book, isn’t entirely the point. The fact was that I watched the chicks being tested, and offered them beads to peck at, knowing their fate, as they didn’t. Indeed, they didn’t know anything, not even if the life they were temporarily leading (not that they knew anything temporal) was normal for beings of their kind, or, I suppose, what their kind of being was. Again, there was no possibility of understanding what I was seeing from their point of view, only from my own, big-brained, language-owning point of view. And to me it seemed grim. For them, and that we were doing it for our benefit. Anthropomorphically (as how can I not be?), I was deceiving these creatures, who would have chosen, I’d be inclined to believe, to grow up and be chickens, or whatever they thought they were. At any rate, not chosen to live for just two days and then die in order that we might find a cure for Alzheimer’s. When PETA talked about betrayal in their letter to the sheep-farming primary school, I thought it was sentimental and essentially dishonest, but now, faced with the chicks, I was quite gripped by the awfulness of their existence-for-us.
But at the same time, and without it seeming any less grim, I wouldn’t have legislated against it had I the power because I could imagine, not just the chicks, as innocent as a dog in Valencia, having their heads and brief lives cut off, but also the devastation of a human being having Alzheimer’s: the devastation both medical and social, for the sufferers, their families and friends. And I recalled my old cat, Darcy, and what I was told was his cat version of Alzheimer’s disease, and the awful confusion, his yowling, wanting to come in to the house but not knowing why, wanting to approach to be stroked but being too fearful of me, remembered and not remembered as I was. Chickens don’t live long enough (even if they are left to lead a normal life) to get Alzheimer’s disease, so it is unreasonable, if looked at from something like their point of view, that they should live such distorted, brief lives (can you really call it a life?) in the service of humans and cats. But in none of this can I do anything more than imagine myself into the experiences of others, humans, cats, chicks or experimenters. Being none of them, when the imagining is done, when the watching is over, I have no more certainty about how humans should use non-human animals than I had before. Which in this case was with respect, without cruelty and as little fear as possible.
Steven Rose might be accused of arguing as a scientist who simply wants to get on with what he is set on doing. Donna Haraway, though, is not an experimental scientist, but a dog owner and philosopher. She writes
… I will defend animal killing for reasons and in detailed material-semiotic conditions that I judge tolerable because of a greater good calculation. And no, that is never enough. I refuse the choice of ‘inviolable animal rights’ versus ‘human good is more important’. Both of these proceed as if calculation solved the dilemma, and all I or we have to do is choose … The practice of holding nonhuman animals at the center of attention is necessary but not sufficient, not just because other moral and ontological goods compete in that kind of cost-benefit frame, but more important because companion-species worldliness works otherwise.9
The discussion of animal rights and welfare needs, she says, to be situated in the real world, not in order to reduce the force of the question, but to locate it ‘on earth, in real places, where judgement and action are at stake’.10 This can’t answer someone who want to abolish all experiments on animals, and the killing of them for our food and comfort, but nothing can, precisely, answer that in the real world. Exploitation is how the real world goes about its business. This might be an unbearable truth, but I haven’t come across any successful alternative in practice. Then again, the real-world argument is always put forward to prevent what people call ‘dangerous idealism’ from being taken seriously, and I feel increasingly strongly that sometimes the dangerous idealism is not dangerous, but an essential position to keep alive, that needs to be stated and restated even if it is never achieved because it speaks of a moral consideration to be taken into account by moral beings. The point which Haraway makes, along with anyone else concerned with animals, rather than sadistic or greedy mistreaters of animals, is that the use, our use of animals (is there another kind?), or the killing of animals should never be comfortable or clear-cut, never straightforward. Our existence on this planet is a problem, but it isn’t a problem to be solved.
For many people, I suppose, it is when the heads come off the day-old chicks that they take a stand and commit themselves to a radical position. They declare that they will never eat meat again, that they’ll fight against any use of animals in medical and scientific research, work to liberate animals from all forms of captivity and accept that all animals are their moral equals and should be accorded the same legal rights that humans given themselves. I couldn’t get there. In fact, it was at that point that I decided to call the book I was writing about animals, What I Don’t Know About Animals.