The belief that animals are like us in some essential way is the source of the enduring and widespread myth of a magic time or place or person that erases the boundary between humans and animals. The place is like the Looking-Glass forest where things have no names, where Alice could walk with her arms around the neck of a fawn. The list of people who live at peace among animals would include Enkidu in the epic of Gilgamesh and the many mythical children who are raised as cubs by a pack of animals, like Romulus and Remus, Mowgli, and Tarzan, like Pecos Bill (suckled by a puma) and Davy Crockett (raised among mountain lions). T. H. White, translator of a medieval bestiary, imagined the young King Arthur’s education by Merlin the magician as taking place among ants and geese and owls and badgers.{T. H. White, The Once and Future King (London: Fontana Books, 1962); pt. 1, “The Sword in the Stone.” The culmination of the animal education comes in chap. 23.}
This myth is very different from the mythologies of bestiality, which imagine a very different sort of intimacy (though the two intersect uncomfortably in the image of “lying down with” animals, literally sleeping with animals).{Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, “The Mythology of Masquerading Animals, or, Bestiality” (in In the Company of Animals, ed. Arien Mack, Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences 62, no. 3 [Fall 1995]: 751–72).} Our myths generally do not define animals as those with whom we do not have sex (though the president’s elegant wife, Olivia Garrard, favors this distinction).
The ideal state of humans among animals is not one in which wild animals become tame (like Elsa the Lionness in Born Free, or the Lone Ranger’s horse Silver). It is a state in which a human becomes one of the animals. Or rather, more precisely, a human becomes part of the society of the animals but remains a human, like Barbara Smuts among the nonhuman primates; the adopted child in the myth must eventually return to the human world. In contrast with the rituals of cultural transformation, in which we cease to eat flesh by becoming quintessentially cultural and eating bread or milk instead, these are myths of natural transformation, in which we become quintessentially natural and eat what animals eat (food that may in fact include other animals).
Hinduism assumes that animals have transmigrating souls and a consciousness like our own, and that, though they do not have human language, they can communicate with us in other ways that reveal the presence of a mind and a soul. This does not, of course, mean that they think and/or feel precisely as we do; merely that they, too, think and feel. Descartes’s assumption that thinking is what makes us what we are is all wrong, as Elizabeth demonstrates.{The reductio ad absurdum of the Cartesian assumption is expressed by the joke about Descartes ordering a cup of coffee, to go, in a Dunkin’ Donut shop; when the waitress asked him, “Do you want cream and sugar in that, Mr. Descartes?” he replied, “I think not,” and vanished.}
Elizabeth gives a fine answer to the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s provocative question, “What is it like to be a bat?” Long before Nagel, an equine metaphor was used to express the problems that we have in imagining minds of animals. Xenophanes, an ancient Greek philosopher, said, “If cattle and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their feet, horses would draw the forms of god like horses.”{Xenophanes, frag. 15, in Die Fragmente, ed. Ernst Heitsch (Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1983).} The anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown, in conversation with his colleague Max Gluckman, had nicknamed Sir James George Frazer’s mode of reasoning (in The Golden Bough) the “if I were a horse” argument, from the story of the farmer in the Middle West whose horse had strayed from its paddock. The farmer went into the paddock, chewed some grass, and ruminated, “Now if I were a horse, which way would I go?”{Cited by R. Angus Downie, Frazer and the Golden Bough (London: Gollancz, 1970), 42.}
The British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, in criticizing the introspectionist psychologies of Spencer and Tylor, warned that it was futile to try to imagine how it would feel “if I were a horse.”{E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 24, 43.} Whatever its merits as a caveat for anthropologists, I would regard the “if I were a horse” fantasy as quite a useful way of dealing with horses (like Elizabeth Costello, I am literal-minded). For it is the pious belief of many horsemen (and horsewomen) that they can think like horses.{See, for example, R. H. Smythe, The Mind of the Horse (London: Country Life, 1965); Moyra Williams, Horse Psychology (London: Methuen, 1956); and, most recently, Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Knopf, 1986).} And maybe they can. If the farmer, after chewing grass, lopes off to a field where the grass is much better than the field where he had been keeping his horse, and finds his horse there, perhaps he has thought like a horse. On the other hand, he does not have to eat the grass himself when he gets there; he does not have to feel like a horse. It is useful to distinguish between ontological relativism and moral relativism; one need not adopt the morals, or the diet, of a horse to understand a horse. Perhaps Nagel changed the horse to a bat to make the point of noncommunication more dramatic, because we don’t love bats; but that is precisely my point: we can understand horses because we love them (and, tautologically, we love them because we understand them).
Though we can never know, for certain, if we or anyone else has really understood how horses think, many people have tried and have persuaded us that they have succeeded. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (sometimes dubbed “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the horse”) (1877), Rudyard Kipling’s “The Maltese Cat” (1898—the Cat is actually a polo pony) and Leo Tolstoi’s “Strider [Xolstomer]” (1894) are narrated by horses (the latter so vividly that it led Maxim Gorky to exclaim to Tolstoi, “You must have been a horse in a previous incarnation”). This line of argument may or may not be good anthropology, but it is good ecology. It argues for the empathic leap of faith, the Kantian belief that what hurts me hurts you—and hurts horses. The poetry, if not the comparative neurology, persuades me that Coetzee has in fact entered the head of Sultan to discover the better questions that the captive ape might have thought about (“What is wrong with him, what misconception does he have of me, that makes him believe it is easier for me to reach a banana hanging from a wire than to pick up a banana from the floor?” “WHERE IS HOME? HOW DO I GET HOME?”), questions that are so much better (if so much less falsifiable) than “How can I get this banana?”
I have followed Coetzee in shifting the ground from the thoughts of animals to their feelings. There is a justly famous Taoist parable to this effect:
Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu had strolled on to the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed, “See how the minnows are darting about! That is the pleasure of fishes.” “You not being a fish yourself,” said Hui Tzu, “how can you possibly know in what consists the pleasure of fishes?” “And you not being I,” retorted Chuang Tzu, “how can you know that I do not know?” “If I, not being you, cannot know what you know,” urged Hui Tzu, “it follows that you, not being a fish, cannot know in what consists the pleasure of fishes.” “Let us go back,” said Chuang Tzu, “to your original question. You asked me how I knew in what consists the pleasure of fishes. Your very question shows that you knew I knew. I knew it from my own feelings on the bridge.”{Chuang Chou, Chuang-tzu, bk. 17, par. 13, “Chuang-tzu and Hui-tzu dispute on their understanding of the enjoyment of fishes.” Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer, trans. Herbert A. Giles (London: B. Quaritch, 1926), 218–19.}