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.

Reading Animals and Eating Animals:A Micro-Study of the Capacity of Literature to Spark Change

Many thanks to those who responded to the questionnaire posted on this blog a few months ago. The results are reported in the paper below (the full version of which, including footnotes and appendices, has been posted on SSRN as well).

Reading Animals and Eating Animals:A Micro-Study of the Capacity of Literature to Spark Change (Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, Hartford, March 18, 2016)

Don LePan, with Maureen Okun, (Vancouver Island University)

To what degree is the experience of reading literature capable of affecting humans in ways that have ethical implications? A very substantial body of research in this area (by both literary scholars and psychologists) has focused on empathy; does reading a work of fiction tend to enhance our ability to relate emotionally to the lives of others? Some studies suggest it may well do so in certain circumstances—but some studies have also suggested that any such effect may be transient.

But what of literature’s capacity to bring about social change? To what extent can fiction change hearts and minds about real world issues? And can the effects be long-lasting? It has often been said that novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle caused significant changes in many readers’ attitudes—and in many readers’ behavior. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that this is so. There can be no doubt that such works helped to bring change, but studies of their impact sometimes suggest that they did so not so much by directly changing attitudes as by providing encouragement to the already committed, and by heightening the level of controversy.

One recent novel written with the explicit purpose of helping to bring about social change is my own Animals: A Novel (Véhicule Press edition 2009, Soft Skull/Counterpoint edition 2010); that book aims to engage readers imaginatively over the issue of cruelty in factory farming. In the seven years since the book was published, dozens of people have reported in conversation that they found the experience of reading the book quite powerful; several have reported in writing that the experience helped to change their attitudes, their behavior, or both.

The present study seeks to broaden the range of respondents, and also to go beyond the anecdotal. I contacted as many readers of Animals as possible, and asked them to complete a survey concerning the effect the experience of reading the book has had on their behavior, and on their attitudes. All responses were provided anonymously. The hope was that the survey results would quantify in a somewhat more scientific fashion than the anecdotal responses had done the degree to which the experience of reading this literary work has contributed to specific changes in attitudes (and/or behavior) on the part of readers—and also the extent to which any changes have been lasting.

Let me turn first to what the respondents say on the question of attitudes—the eighth and last question on the survey. Here the results seem unequivocal: 65% of those answering this question (and 59% of all respondents) indicated that the experience of reading the book had contributed either “to a considerable degree” (35%) or “at least to some slight degree” (30%) to an increase in their level of concern for the welfare of non-human animals.

Attitudes are one thing; behavior is quite another. One may come more and more strongly in one’s belief system to be in favor, for example, of ending slavery while still—until the day that happens—remaining a slave-owner oneself. And one may be in favor of ending the cruelties of factory farming while continuing to consume the products of that cruelty every day. But it would seem from the answers to questions 5 and 6 that the experience of reading Animals had just as much of an effect on behavior as on attitudes: 70% of those answering Question 5 (and 64% of all respondents) indicated that the experience of reading the book had contributed either “to a considerable degree” (15%) or “to at least some degree” (55%) to this change. Moreover, 65% of those answering Question 6 (and 59 % of all respondents) indicated that the experience of reading the book had contributed to a lasting effect on their behavior.

“Lasting for how long?” one may fairly ask. Here too the survey results provide a fairly clear answer. The vast majority of respondents were people who had read the novel at least three years before responding; fully 90% of respondents read the book either when it first appeared in 2009-2010 (73%) or in the years 2011-2012 (18%). The survey is thus able to provide useful information as to how lasting the effect may have been—as would not have been the case if, for example, 90% of respondents had read the novel less than six months before responding.

Questions 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7 are designed to explore with more precision first, the question of how long lasting any effect on behavior may be; and second, the question of the degree to which respondents’ behavior has actually changed. Questions 2, 3, and 4 ask the same set of questions for different times: before reading the novel, six months to a year after reading the novel, and today (which, for 90% of respondents, is at least three years after reading the novel).

What is perhaps most striking in the answers to these questions, given the high percentages of respondents who reported changed behavior, is how little actual change in behavior is reported. Particularly given that the sample responding to the survey is almost certainly skewed towards readers who were strongly influenced by the book, one might have expected there to be a more dramatic shift. The shifts indicated here are relatively modest. In percentage terms, the reduction in those describing themselves as in one of the two categories least concerned about animal welfare may be striking—the number drops in half—but when the absolute numbers are from 6 respondents to 3 respondents, it’s hard to portray the change as earth-shattering. Nor is the change at the other end particularly dramatic—the number reporting themselves to be either vegetarian or vegan increasing from 7 to 9, or from 31.82 to 40.91 per cent of the total. Those in the middle—omnivores who “to a considerable degree” limit their consumption of animal products “for reasons relating to the treatment of non-human animals” continue to constitute the largest block. The composition of that block has presumably shifted over time, with some of those who have moved out of the lowest two groups entering this larger middle group, as those who become vegetarians or vegans leave it. But there is also, of course, a good deal of space for movement within the large, middle group. One may move from eating free-range meat frequently to eating meat only if it is free range (and from a farmer one trusts to treat the animals well before they are killed), and still stay within that broad, middle category. One may move from very occasionally choosing dairy products that one knows are from organic farms where the cows are treated well to consuming dairy products only if those conditions are met—and again, stay entirely in that broad middle category. One respondent emailed me after she had completed the survey to comment on this sort of nuanced point:

The survey is lacking some possibilities, as you probably know. For instance, I experimented with vegan products, but I couldn't develop a taste for some of them. Nevertheless, I try to make more vegan choices in my diet, and buy only organic products (particularly milk) approved by Natural Grocers. … [I]t was not solely reading your book that caused these changes, though it is very powerful.

The answers to Questions 2, 3, and 4, then, are consistent with the responses given to Question 7. The reported changes in behavior are not always large, and the degree to which the experience of reading Animals contributed to those changes is not always great. But for most respondents there was a change, and for most respondents the experience of reading the novel did contribute to that change.

That is to put everything in the past tense. We should look too at the responses to Question 7: might the experience of reading Animals contribute to some future change in behavior for readers? Very interestingly, 6 people—some 30% of the total number of respondents—thought it quite possible that the experience of reading Animals would contribute to some future change in their behavior—and a further 7 did not rule out the possibility entirely. In total, then, some 65% of respondents did not rule out the possibility that the experience of reading a book could influence their behavior in the future. If we recall here the results of Question 1, we realize that of those 13 respondents, at least 11must have read the book in 2012 or earlier—at least three years before completing this survey. And a number of those people had clearly been altering their behavior already, in part at least as a result of the experience of reading this text. Even three, four, or five years after reading a book, in other words, many think it still possible for the experience of reading a novel to exert a further effect on their behavior.

This may seem implausible—I would have thought it implausible myself many years ago. But in fact it accords entirely with my own experience—with both fiction and non-fiction. It was I think in 1991 that I read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. This was my introduction to the atrocities of factory farming; I was shocked, and I am sure deeply influenced. But to what extent did I change my behavior? At first, not at all. And when changes in my behavior did come, they were very gradual; beginning in the late 1990s, I began to eat free-range meat and free-range eggs when I could, and dairy milk from cows who I believed to have been relatively well treated. In the early years of this century I became more and more passionate about the evils of factory farming. In 2005 the outline of a story that could dramatize those evils came to me, and I began working on Animals. When the novel was published in 2009 I still believed that the novel’s essential argument was against factory farming—not against eating animal products. A number of readers suggested that in fact the afterword I had written went against the grain of the story—that Animals constituted an argument not just against the evils of factory farming, but against the human practice of consuming other animals. Over the years since then, I have come to agree with them. (When the next edition of Animals is published, it will carry a very different afterword—or no afterword at all.) Both with my experience of reading Animal Liberation, then, and with my experience of writing Animals, I found that experiencing a book could continue to affect my behavior many years afterwards. * * * For most of the past two centuries the tide in literary criticism and theory—indeed, in literary circles of all sorts—has run heavily against didacticism. Interestingly, even those who have endorsed the notion that all literature is political have been carried with the tide; if a book is described as a powerful political statement, that may safely be taken to mean simply that the book embraces a world view broadly critical of establishment values—not that the book aims to prompt us quite specifically to change our behavior (to devote more time and money than we have been to helping the homeless, for example, or the poor in the developing world, or young women who are being denied an education, or gays and lesbians who in so much of the world are still denied any rights whatsoever).

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, on the other hand, or Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, or Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, are political in a very different sense; like Animals, they were written with the intention of changing readers’ attitudes–and behavior—in quite specific ways. They are examples of literature that is not just political, but didactic. There are some signs that the tide in literary circles is beginning to turn. Black Beauty and The Jungle now appear frequently on university courses—as works of aesthetic as well as historical interest. And some of the leading lights of literary criticism and theory have begun to openly acknowledge the possibility that didactic literature can also be good literature. Here, for example, is Terry Eagleton, writing in 2012:

That even a touch of didacticism is distasteful is as received a judgement for the literary establishment as is the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote some pretty impressive stuff. But it is surely not the case [that didacticism should be regarded as inherently distasteful]. “Didactic” simply means a matter of teaching and there is no reason why all teaching should be hectoring or doctrinaire. Brecht’s Lehrstücke, Lancelot Andrewe’s sermons, and William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell are didactic works which are also potent pieces of art. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not an embarrassingly second-rate novel because it has a specific moral purpose—so does Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” Tolstoy’s Resurrection, and Orwell’s Animal Farm—but because of the way it executes it. (The Event of Literature, 68-69)

Yet Uncle Tom’s Cabin is widely assumed to have succeeded in its didactic purpose at least as well as did any of these other works. Is Eagleton wrong about Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Is it, as some others have suggested in recent years, a far better novel aesthetically than the twentieth century took it to be? Or, if Eagleton is right, does bad literature work best when it comes to doing good? Those are some of the larger questions that seem to me to be worthy of discussion. But to do so in an informed way, it seems to me that we should try to find out more about what literature can actually do by way of changing human attitudes—and human behavior. This paper represents a very small step in that direction.

Reading Animals and Eating Animals

Can literature change hearts and minds about real world issues? And can such effects be long-lasting? It is often assumed that novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed readers’ attitudes. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that this was so—and some have suggested that such novels may have facilitated change less by changing attitudes as by providing encouragement to the committed.

As part of a session at the NEMLA (Northeast MLA) conference in March 2016 (organized by Laura Struve and Ursula McTaggart and entitled "Literature that Sparks Social Change"), I'll be giving a paper that focuses on the degree to which the experience of reading Animals may have contributed to changes in attitudes and behavior for some readers. I'm hoping you may be willing to help.

I've now posted a short questionnaire on this topic that my partner, Maureen Okun, helped me put together. Responding should take no more than a couple of minutes; I'd be very grateful indeed if you may be willing to answer the 8 multiple choice questions. The questionnaire has been posted through Survey Monkey, and they will tabulate the responses. All answers are anonymous; neither nor anyone else will be able to see how you responded.

Here's the survey; I do hope you'll check it out!

Create your own user feedback survey

P.K. Page and Rising Stories

The initial idea for Rising Stories came to me in December of 2009 as Maureen and I were reading a letter to the Globe and Mail about the sorts of imaginary worlds that children discover when they go through doors in magical closets or down magical rabbit holes. What sort of world would we imagine for ourselves if we were writing such a story? The thought came to me of a child pressing the buttons of one of the elevators in a skyscraper; rows of additional numbers suddenly appear—and magically, those additional stories turn out to be real.

But what or who would be up there?

I’m not entirely sure how or why I came to think within a few months of someone like P.K. Page inhabiting this magical world—but if I put my mind into analytic rather than imaginative mode I can think of a few possibilities. The rising stories of the skyscraper are from one angle a metaphor for growing up, and that growing up in which physical growth mirrors mental growth is followed (if we’re lucky) by growth of a different and purely invisible sort—the growth of mind, of feeling, of wisdom. From this angle it makes a certain sort of sense for the child to travel up to find a very old person in a space that you can't at first see.

In the case of K.P. in Rising Stories, there is a further wrinkle, quite aside from the question of whether or not the story on which she lives is real: it is not at all clear that she is real. Robin remembers at one point that she has died: is the person Robin meets in her apartment on the 86th story a ghost? Or some other sort of magical figure? Or simply a figment of Robin’s imagination, and Robin’s memory?

(As an aside here, I might mention that, at about Robin's age, I had a similar experience involving the death of an aunt. I think I had felt guilty for not having sent her a thank-you note or some such thing; when I was told that she had died I pushed the information from my mind, preferring to think of her as still alive; I did not "remember" that she was in fact dead for many months.)

P.K. Page died on January 14, 2010. You would not think that the death of someone in her 94th year would inspire shock and a tremendous sense of loss. If you make it to your 93rd birthday still able to get around a little and with your wits more or less about you, (as P.K. certainly had most of hers), and you die a death that does not entail prolonged and horrendous physical pain, we generally think it has to be counted good news—a good end to a good life. The fact that I (and I’m sure many others) nevertheless did feel a very powerful pull in the heart on the news of her death, a feeling of pained shock as well as deep sadness, attests to the extraordinary warmth of feeling P.K. inspired—and also, I suppose, to her having come to seem almost ageless. Of course she looked old in her last few years, but far less old than she was. And she retained an extraordinary vitality, as well as real elegance—an elegance not at all the product of fancy clothes or jewelry or makeup. “In the strangest of ways, she was beautiful” is what Robin thinks when the door opens.

P.K. was a well-known painter as well as an acclaimed poet, and I wanted the story of a painter to be part of Rising Stories.

As well, I may have thought of P.K. in part because she represented to me bookends of my own experience. She had known my family in the 1950s in Ottawa, when both her husband and my father worked in the Department of External Affairs, and I was a very small child—too young to remember her. Roughly fifty years later, as a book publisher, I contacted P.K. about her inclusion in an anthology and she encouraged me to be in touch if I ever came to Victoria. I did exactly that, and between 2005 and 2009 paid her visits on several occasions when I was in the city. She would always welcome me with a strong gin and tonic, but take vodka herself; she explained that she would prefer gin but that, for some medical reason, vodka had come to agree with her more in her old age. (Those who have read Rising Stories may at this point be reminded that, although Robin never sees K.P. eating anything, the child does comment on the “colorless liquid” that she drinks.) And she would always provide wonderful conversation—about aging and about love, about the oddities of the human spirit, and of course about writing books—mostly the many books she was still writing, for children as well as for adults, but also my own Animals, which she was kind enough to read in manuscript, and which (as she later wrote) led her to give up eating meat.

The character of K.P. in Rising Stories is inspired by P.K., not based on her. The story of collapsing skyscrapers in Brazil is lifted from P.K.'s Brazilian Journal, and P.K. did say (as K.P. does) that she felt she had aged more in her 91st year than all the other 90 put together. But I don’t believe P.K. was particularly interested in skyscrapers—and she had no more lived in one than I ever have. She was a painter of a very different sort than is K.P. And K.P.’s voice is not that of P.K., either, though I do think there are echoes of the one in the other. I hope to always hear those echoes.