When I was a kid, I methodically read every novel in my middle school library that had anything to do with animals. Many of them, I read more than once. Some of them I learned later were classics, others I haven’t thought or heard of in years, until tonight, when I Googled them. The White Panther, by Theodore Waldeck. All the John and Jean George books. A bunch of collie books by Albert Payson Terhune. Jack London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang. All of Jim Kjelgaard’s Irish setter novels. Bambi, of course, which depressed me, not because of the mother dying thing, but because it seemed so awful when Bambi, in the closing chapter of the book, chose survival over love. Moby Dick, which also puzzled me, as it seemed to have precious little to do with a whale. “This is an ANIMAL story?â€
In fact, in retrospect, I didn’t really “get†a lot of what I was reading at the time. I know now, for example, that at least some of them were more animal rights tracts than novels. Black Beauty isn’t really about a horse, but about how people treat horses. And Terhune wasn’t above some serious preaching in his books, like Lad, A Dog, and for that matter, neither was Jack London.
It wasn’t only my naiveté as a reader that made me oblivious to this messaging, although that was part of it. But mostly it was because I was in complete agreement. Of course, we should be kind to animals.
Nowadays, of course, a lot of the practices that these novels cried out against are illegal. But not all of them, and even making them illegal doesn’t always stop them. Which makes you wonder, sometimes, whether other people are living in a kind of ethical past—they haven’t been through the Black Beauty stage yet. Or maybe it’s something even darker than that.
Fortunately I don’t have to deal with it much, in my job. But I do, sometimes. And it’s never very easy . . .
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