01.09.2010

From the Clever Bee to the Vexatious Rat —

The Finlay Lloyd Book About Animals by various writers

DO FISH feel pain? Can bees see colour? Such questions are explored in Finlay Lloyd’s 17 essays, a comic and a poem, about animals. At the heart of this slim volume is an examination of the gulf between what we think we know about animals and what we actually know. As the number of endangered species ratchets up, this is a timely reminder, in the editor’s words, of “the pain and the extinction we cause”.

The contributors range from Jay Davies, a primary school pupil, to Dr Judith Reinhard, a neuroethologist investigating animal behaviour, and Clive Marks, the director of Nocturnal Wildlife Research.

Such a cross-section of writers means each subject is covered in an idiosyncratic way, with diverse views on animals as pets, workers and experimental tools.

Judith Reinhard and Mandyam V. Srinivasan write convincingly in Bees: Beyond The Honey about how clever these insects with brains “the size of a sesame seed” can be. If insects can think, can they feel? Bidda Jones is sure fish can.

In If Fish Could Scream, Jones musters a persuasive argument against the American academic James Rose, who shares no such fuzzy feelings.

In the case of dogs, Paul McGreevy points out in Training The Opportunist And The Comfort-Seeker that our canine companions have been around humans for “perhaps as long as 150,000 years”. This might explain why humans are so prone to anthropomorphise their dogs, projecting all their own neuroses onto their faithful companion.

Chris Danta picks up this theme in his moving essay on how animals “trust unconditionally in human beings”. In The Animal Substitutes he brilliantly describes the anguish of euthanising his dog, Onyx, even though the dog was “sore-boned and incontinent”.

Marks raises the controversial question of how we have one rule for one set of animals and another for so-called pests. In Empathy For The Enemy, Marks asks us to spare a thought for “the malevolent fox and vexatious rat” which “give us licence to indulge ourselves in a notion that the animals we introduced are somehow deserving of their fate”. The capacity to suffer is “a heritage we share with pests and endangered species alike”.

This ability to feel for a four-legged friend is something that Ray Wrightson explores in Damage Control. Adapting from city life to living on the land required Wrightson to learn to shoot and he writes candidly on how he became addicted to the thrill of the kill: “It was mystifying and almost mystical, this sudden power over life and death.” But with reflection he questions the notion of moral balance and where humans draw the line when acting as God.

Among these weightier essays is the irreverent ode to the tuna by Jed Stone in Tunny: 8 Points, lamenting how the tunny’s definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is reduced to “large oceanic scombroid fish used as food”. Lisa Griffiths writes a wry, endearing tale about Ivashko, her cat. When Griffiths and her partner, who owns a cat called What?, separate, the break-up causes untold anguish to the two feline friends. Griffiths ends up wondering whether the problem with her and relationships might not be because she hasn’t found “the right human” but perhaps she’s “just met the right cat”.

On the subject of endings, some of the essays are thought-provoking but others feel slightly trite – or at least the endings do. I remember hearing Tim Winton talk about how important it is to get the ending just right. To use an analogy, he said that a story doesn’t need to explain how we get off the plane, walk down the steps and into the terminal – it doesn’t need to spell everything out or even have a resolution. And some of these illuminating short stories are weakened by that last critical paragraph. But for all that, the arguments and revelations stayed with me for days afterwards and have a quiet, creeping power.