Excerpts from an Animals Interview

Snigdha Sunith, a doctoral student at India’s Bharathiar University, was recently in touch to ask me a number of questions about Animals, which will apparently be the focus of a good part of Sunith’s dissertation on “Vegetarianism in the Anthropocene.” I’ll share some of what I wrote in my written response.

On the background to my writing the novel:

Around 1991 a friend lent me her copy of Animal Liberation. To that point I had never given much thought to what I ate, or, indeed, to eating generally—to farm animals, to factory farming, to fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides, any of it. I was rivetted and appalled by Singer’s descriptions of the horrific realities of factory farming. I write in the “Afterword” to Animals that I was “persuaded … largely through reading Singer’s book” to start to change my eating habits. What I don’t say is that there was a long lag between the reading and the start of the change. For several years after reading Animal Liberation, I don’t think I made any change whatsoever in my diet. I guess I found ways of pushing to the back of my consciousness what I had read about (and seen—the photos in Singer’s book were very powerful too). Eventually I did start to allow my new knowledge of “farming” to start to shape my eating habits, and then incremental change just kept coming (as I touch on the “Afterword”).

But I did not think of trying to do anything to try to influence others to change their dietary habits until one Sunday morning in 2004 or 2005. As I was doing my exercises that morning, I listened to a CBC radio feature on how horrific things had become in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. I had spent three years in the early 1980s doing volunteer work as a teacher in a rural school in Zimbabwe, and at that time the country’s future had seemed bright. I guess I thought of those volunteer years as a time in my life when (much more than at other points in my life) I really had done something, however modest, to try to help make the world a better place. And now all the work that all of us—dedicated Zimbabweans far more so than we expatriates—had done to try to build something good and lasting in that country was being destroyed by the Mugabe regime, a group of once-proud freedom fighters who had become oppressors and plunderers.

“What might I do today that might do some good?” was the question I found myself asking. Spending another few years volunteering at that point in my life was out of the question—I had started a book publishing company that I couldn’t abandon, and I had two young children. “But I could write,” was my next thought. The only novel I had at that point written was an embarrassingly bad political adventure tale that had never been published (and that I hope never will be—it really was terrible!). But I had done a good deal of other writing, and I had learned a good deal about people—as most of us do by the time we’re fifty. It stuck me that there are many ways of influencing people through the written word; a powerful recitation of facts and marshalling of arguments in a work of non-fiction such as Singer’s Animal Liberation is one, but perhaps some sort of imaginative presentation might be another effective way. And then, in something like 30 seconds, the basic story of Animals came to me—none of the details in that length of time, of course, but the outline of all three parts of the story.

On Naomi’s questioning her parents about the ethics of eating meat:

I don’t know what to say about Naomi. I gave her the name of my daughter, although at the time I wrote the book I didn’t think my daughter was very similar to the character of Naomi in the book. Quite a few people who know both, though, have told me I’m wrong about that, and that real-life Naomi is in fact quite a lot like the character.

I do think many children are wiser than their parents on these issues; parents tend much too easily to laugh off as childish naivete children’s frequently expressed reservations about (or outright opposition to) the killing and eating of other creatures.

Adults tend to dismiss the arguments of children on the grounds that children have a less developed capacity for reasoning than do adults. And too many humans, of course, feel that we're justified in killing and eating other creatures who have a less developed capacity for reasoning than we do. But there isn't any good reason to treat other creatures cruelly on the grounds that they have less reasoning capacity than we do. Humans would see this point more clearly if a civilization of alien invaders a lot brighter than we are decided to treat us cruelly on the grounds that they were justified in doing so because our reasoning capacities were less developed than theirs.

On the impact I hoped at the time Animals would have on readers, and the impact it has had on readers:

As I say in the “Afterword,” I was at the time conscious mainly of aiming to help to shift attitudes regarding factory farming in particular. But as a number of readers pointed out to me soon after publication, the novel can easily be read as an argument against eating animal food of any sort (meat, but also eggs, cow’s or goat’s milk, cheese, and so on*)—an argument for adopting an entirely plant-based diet. Looking back on it, I think the experience of writing the novel did a lot to lead me in that direction (my partner and I have been vegan since 2011). The moral here is perhaps that I should have left it up to readers to decide for themselves how the novel should be read!

There have been many people over the years who have said or written that the experience of reading Animals had a real effect on them—and, in particular, had a real effect on their eating habits. No one has said that they suddenly went vegan after reading the book—nothing so dramatic. But lots by way of small changes. I gave a presentation last week in San Diego to a large group of first-year students, and spoke afterwards with the professor who teaches the course; he has been assigning Animals now for many years, and he told me that roughly 20% of his students have reported to him that reading (and discussing) the novel has led to at least some change in their attitudes and behavior. In 2016 my partner (Maureen Okun) and I did a small study of the effect of the novel; the results can be found here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3758567

On my other works of fiction:

My third novel, Lucy and Bonbon, which was published last year, deals with some of the same themes as Animals. My next book of fiction (tentatively titled Leaving Pittsburgh), will be a collection of linked short stories about various sorts of human interaction, with nothing in it about human and non-human animals.

I seem to be alternating between works of fiction focused on human/non-human animal themes, and works of fiction in which those themes are entirely absent. My second novel, Rising Stories, was a book about childhood and the imagination and Chicago, and was in no way concerned with human and non-human animal themes. My fifth work of fiction will I think turn largely on an investigation of a factory farm near Columbus, Ohio.

*In terms of cruelty, the dairy industry may well be the worst of all. One has to start with the fundamental fact at the heart of it—we take the babies from their mothers so that we can steal the milk meant for the babies. And then we kill the babies (or at least the male ones) while they are still very young, and call it veal. Nowadays, the cruelty goes far beyond that, of course; whereas dairy cows once really did graze in fields and eat grass, now they almost always live their lives on concrete floors, chained in place.