Ideas - Of Dogs and Derrida: Understanding the dogs’ point of view

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Dogs are lauded as 'man's best friend.' But PhD student Molly Labenski argues that, in America, the real picture is of a dysfunctional, toxic 'friendship' between the human and canine species. She points to a revealing source of cultural attitudes — the use of fictional dogs by authors of 20th-century literature. *This episode originally aired on April 5, 2022.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed.

Good boy. Can I have a kiss? Thank you. Can I have a kiss? Thank you. Molly Labenski is one of about a million Canadians who became pet owners during the pandemic. That's enough. Thank you. That's plenty. That's plenty of kisses. Thank you. Duncan is a rescue dog, a two-year-old Australian shepherd.

Bless you. Bless you. Bless you. Oh, that was a big one. While caring for her new friend, Molly is finishing her Ph.D. in English at Queen's University. For her dissertation, she's examining the portrayal of dogs in American fiction. I'm interested in how dogs are symbolic in literature because I

also think they're symbolic in life. Molly argues there's a major disconnect between how North Americans imagine the human-canine relationship and the reality of our treatment of animals more generally. I'm trying to poke holes in the relationship that is seemingly the most symbiotic in hopes that it will also inspire a reflection on how we interact with animals elsewhere. Molly uses fiction to expose a truth, a cultural contradiction we still struggle to see. I knew I had to shoot my big yeller dog. Once I knew for sure I had to do it, I don't think I really felt anything. Molly Lubinsky is the latest student to be featured in our series,

Ideas from the Trenches, where we showcase intriguing PhD research underway across the country. The series is produced by Tom Howell and Nikola Lukšić. Molly Lubensky's approach to literature is unusual. It involves trying to read stories from the point of view of the animals in them. I think that they're as important in literature as human characters are, so we often look to literature and art as a way of reflecting on cultural values in society. And the dog is really often ignored as an individual in itself in literature.

So they're always used as symbols for the often male protagonist in a coming-of-age story. This way of reading stories makes clear what would otherwise be easy to overlook. Broadly speaking, dogs in novels get used. They're essentially tools. And Molly sees the same attitude in real life. I think we've really, over the last few decades, developed a bit more of an entitlement when it comes to our relationship with dogs. I think we don't really consider why we want them in our lives enough

and what we get out of them, what they get out of the relationship. I think pet keeping has become largely a selfish pursuit. We get dogs specifically for personal reasons that don't really benefit the dog. So whether it's to assuage our own loneliness, if you want to get more exercise in, you think getting a dog is the way to make that happen. Couples often get dogs to sort of test the waters before they have children. And now it's at the point where we've got designer dogs, we're customizing them so they can come in any color, any pattern, any size. They can have white socks on their feet if that's what you think is cute. And why is this a problem? I think it's a

problem because so many dogs are worthy companions that are ultimately euthanized in shelters based on our entitlement to have dogs that cater to our own preferences. In the 1990s through to the early 2000s, up to 2 million shelter dogs were euthanized across North America in a given year. But since then, the numbers have been on a steady decline, and over the past decade or so, about 300,000 to 400,000 shelter dogs were euthanized each year. The fact that we're still treating dogs as useful or useless tools should bother us more than it does.

At least that's Molly's contention. If we really loved dogs, we would be trying to help ones that already exist rather than creating ones to our sort of weirdly specific needs. The demand for these designer dogs has seen puppy prices soar. Top 10 designer dogs. He's a Boridor, which is a Labrador border collie mix. Maltipoo, Maltese plus miniature poodle. Some breeders charging up to $15,000. They're one of the lucky couples able to purchase a highly sought after Groodle. Snoodle, poodle plus schnauzer. People are asking over $15,000 for a Groodle puppy. Picking out a designer dog based on a trend ignores the countless animals languishing in shelters.

You're breeding these sorts of dogs that are having orthopedic and respiratory problems. The word design is perfect. You can design a dog in a way that really reduces them to more of a commodity than it does a companion. than it does a companion. Molly argues that instead of seeking out perfect breeds, we should attend to the thousands of dogs that already exist, but who are abandoned to shelters. Take a golden doodle called Snoopy, for example. All right, Snoopy.

Okay. It's gonna be nice. They're talking about you. Yeah, you're super cute, Snoopy. Okay. Isn't he nice? He's talking about you. Yeah, he's super cute, Snoopy. So he's barking, but he looks happy. No, he's not happy. Oh no? So there's a few different types of tail wag.

Snoopy ended up being surrendered by his owner in what's probably the Shangri-La of dog rescues, a private animal shelter called Dog Tales. My name's Cassandra Ferrante, and I'm one of the dog trainers here at Dog Tales Rescue. It's been insane, the amount of surrenders that we get. We can't even keep up with the surrenders, so we try our best. We offer free training for people to keep their dogs. Maybe it's just a misunderstanding

of behaviors and we try to educate them first. I would say it's tripled since I started working here, the amount of surrender requests that we get. Depending on the day, I would say about five to ten surrender applications a day. The shelter is on a 50-acre farm just north of Toronto, an idyllic setting with expansive rolling hills. They can shelter up to 120 dogs. And in the larger, renovated barn, which is now a spacious kennel, each dog has its own separate little room with repurposed Victorian-style furniture. Roughly 50 employees care for them and take them on regular walks. Snoopy is one of their recent surrenders.

Snoopy was actually a Kijiji dog. Some guy just bought Snoopy off Kijiji, brought him home for a day, and realized that something's wrong with Snoopy. He's not your average puppy that is happy. He was very sad, very shut down, terrified. Um, when the guy had purchased Snoopy, he's the breeder, the backyard breeder, they weren't registered or anything said that Snoopy was about four months old. Um, that was far from the truth. So the guy realized something's wrong and he wasn't equipped to deal

with the training that Snoopy needed. So after one day of having him, he brought him to us and asked for help, um, which was actually the right thing to do because Snoopy does have some challenges and needs the proper home. Um, so he came to us, we evaluated him more. He's actually about eight or nine months, maybe even a year our vet said so we're thinking that the breeder just couldn't sell him or something and just kind of gave him to whoever would buy him Snoopy had a lot of trauma that he went through was probably crated for a long time had no exposure so he's very scared of people it's hard to house train him because he's so used to peeing and pooping in a crate and just sitting in it. And also with

dogs, he's not so friendly with dogs. And that's most likely because he was in a crate surrounded by puppies and whoever knows what was in that backyard breeder's house. Snoopy's situation fits into the broader picture of high demand for cute looking dogs, backyard breeders creating the supply to meet the demand, and then some dogs, like Snoopy, get treated like expendable commodities in the shuffle and end up surrendered at shelter. It's the least favourite part of my job, I would say,

just because I can't relate to people that are surrendering their dogs. When we have adoptions or the happy things, we can relate to people that are surrendering their dogs. Like when we have adoptions or like the happy things, we can relate to people and it's a nice conversation. But with surrenders, most of the time I can't relate to people and I can't understand how someone can just dispose of their dog, no matter how hard it is or if you're moving or whatever. So that's definitely, it's the most draining part of all of our jobs because the people surrendering, they're not, most of the time,

they're not doing it for the dog's best interest. It's just what's convenient, right? They could just drop their dog off at DogTales where it's cute and beautiful and the dog will be okay sort of thing. dog will be okay sort of thing. The Dogtales shelter is able to find satisfactory homes for about 350 dogs per year. Any that don't get placed remain at the shelter for the rest of their natural lives. As for Snoopy... We finally found a family that he's actually getting adopted in a few days. There's been a really nice gentleman that's coming to visit with him, has seen all of Snoopy's kind of characteristics

and he loves him and he's going to put in a lot of work and we're going to work together the next little bit with training. All right. Yeah. With all these languishing real dogs out there, it might seem a bit unnecessary to worry also about how the fictional ones are getting along. But Molly begs to differ. The dog is really often ignored as an individual in itself in literature.

often ignored as an individual in itself in literature. She argues that dogs in literature are often used as convenient plot devices. Take, for example, all the classic boy-meets-dog stories in American literature. It's usually a male coming-of-age story of boyhood growing up, and as you become an adult, your dog dies, and that's sort of your first encounter with death that primes you for the realities of adulthood. So that's a really common trope. We see that with Old Yeller, My Dog Skip,

even The Art of Racing in the Rain, lots of contemporary ones. It's a lot of male protagonist dog must die in the end sort of stories. I know, Mama. He was my dog. I'll do it. Quickly, I left Mama and went to stand in the light of the burning mare grass. I reloaded my gun and called Old Yeller back from the house. I stuck the muzzle of the gun against his head

and pulled the trigger. Molly's not only looking at stories centered on a human-dog relationship, she's actually more interested in novels where dogs are just bit players, as these can be more revealing. There he is. My favourite example to use is To Kill a Mockingbird, because even in Canada that book is still just consistently read in Grade 9 English, and has been for 50 years it seems,

and without much reference to the scene with the dog. Stay inside, son, said Atticus. Mr. Tate handed the rifle to Atticus. Gem and I nearly fainted. The character Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird is a lawyer, and in his kids' eyes, not exactly a manly man. There's a chapter where it opens with Scout and Jem kind of questioning their father's masculinity and his manliness. Coincidentally, shoot that well, you know it. I haven't shot a gun in years. Well, I'd feel mighty comfortable if you did now.

Coincidentally, in that chapter, a supposedly mad dog is roaming the streets, and it becomes Atticus's job to save the neighborhood by killing the dog. In a fog, Gem and I watched our father take the gun and walk out into the middle of the street. He walked quickly, but I thought he moved like an underwater swimmer. Time had slowed to a nauseating crawl. The dog leaped, flopped over, and crumbled on the sidewalk in a brown and white heat. He didn't know what hit him. What's the matter, boy? Can't you talk?

Didn't you know your daddy's the best shot in this county? Oh, hush, heck. The dog symbolically becomes the means by which Atticus can achieve masculine standing in the eyes of his children. So there's no mourning for the loss of the dog whatsoever. eyes of his children. So there's no mourning for the loss of the dog whatsoever. It's almost sickeningly celebratory the way Scout and Jem react to their father killing the dog. They're very proud of him. They think that's something to brag about. As Molly got deeper into her research, she discovered there is quite a lot of incidental dog killing in Great American novels. Slaughterhouse-Five, Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, there's a dog that probably dies in there.

And so the author is choosing to take this sort of unexplored avenue and kill a dog there and then return back to the original plot as if the dog, they're not really essential to the plot in any way, but we're killing them in the literature anyways. And I think the way that that has been overlooked in books that we read so much and that we revisit so much sort of mirrors the way we overlook the harm we cause animals in real life. If you say something happens like, he was treated like a dog, it's become sort of an idiom in our language. He died like a dog, he died like a coward.

Tell us, we will die like dogs. You will die like dogs. No, we will not die like dogs. We will die like dogs. No, we will not die like dogs. We will fight like lions. It's bad to treat a person the way you would treat a dog, but in our heads we would think, well, we treat dogs well, but that saying and the way we rely on it regularly seems to state otherwise. It almost states that we're comfortable mistreating dogs. Deconstruction is an approach to reading and listening, which rather than trying to uncover an author's essential argument or underlying intention, attends instead to the shifting and contradictory patterns that play on the surface of a text.

Deconstruction is an ugly and difficult word. Mali builds her critique with help from literary theorists, including the Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida. I'll try to speak in a jargon-free language, as they say in the United States. Jargon-free or cholesterol-free or sugar-free. So jargon-free, jargon-free language. Derrida was famous for interrogating the common uses of words, pointing out assumptions and ideological biases

that he saw as built in to the way we speak. The question of the animal is in all of my works, but recently I avoid speaking generally of the animal. When one speaks of the animal, one already fails to understand. You can't really talk about animals without including Derrida at some point, and specifically his lecture series called The Animal That Therefore I Am. At the beginning, I would like to confide in words that, if possible, are nude. The animal that therefore I am is a 10-hour lecture that Jacques Derrida delivered in 1997.

He split it over 10 days so it wasn't all one marathon. He begins by really zeroing in on the idea of an animal's point of view in a strikingly intimate way. When caught naked, in silence by the gaze of an animal, for example the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a difficult time overcoming my embarrassment. He paints this philosophical image of him standing naked before his pet cat, like he gets out of the shower and his cat just kind of gazes upon him. The cat's eyes looking at me, as it were, from head to toe,

just to see, not hesitating to concentrate its vision in the direction of my genitals. To see without going to see, without touching yet, and without biting, although that threat remains on its lips or on the tip of the tongue. It's hard to simplify Derrida, but he talks about how, like, the idea of being naked means to be without clothes, but animals are always without clothes, yet they are never naked. And so I think in my attempt to sort of condense that lecture, I would say one of his main points is that clothes are part of that sort

of social construct that lends itself to humans thinking we're superior to other animals. And he talks about how we talk about the human versus the animal as if they're these different things, and as if we're not animals ourselves, and as if all other animals can sort of be lumped together. He calls it into like an undifferentiated mass. And so his lecture series is kind of calling on more individual treatment of different species of animals and within those species of individual animals as individuals themselves, I guess. I kind of like to think that I'm taking upon his call in the avenue of the dog. What does it really mean to take an animal's point of view? I think what it means to take the animal's point of view is to disregard the human gaze,

because we do always filter animal existence and animal embodiment through the human perspective. And I think it's almost impossible to completely disregard that even in our attempts to occupy the animal's standpoint. But I do still think that there are sometimes benefits to doing so if it's to create a sympathetic portrait of the animal and inspire criticism or reflection of our relationships with them. And you mentioned this classic genre of dog meets boy stories. And then, of course, even in To Kill a Mockingbird, it's, you know, Atticus has this masculinity test with the dog. How does gender analysis play into your approach? Does it have a role? Yeah, definitely. So my second chapter,

where I discuss To Kill a Mockingbird, the focus of that chapter is how dogs figure in girlhood coming of age stories. So I look at Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, and I look at Pecola in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. And their interactions with dogs are alarmingly different from the male interactions with dogs that I look at in my first chapter. So they're not really actively participating or actively seeking out the relationship with dogs the way that the sort of cliche male coming of age story requires them to do. of cliche male coming of age story requires them to do. And so I do kind of argue that the privilege of a certain gender might allow for a different relationship with animals. And it seems to be a bit more, what's the word I'm thinking of? It's a bit more socially normalized for like men and animals to be together than it is for women and animals to be together. And even indirectly, my second chapter,

where it's about female coming of age stories, and how dogs figure in those, almost indirectly supports that same notion, because they're not, in both of these texts, it's not a positive interaction with the young girl and the dog, it leads to the dog's death in both cases. the young girl and the dog, it leads to the dog's death in both cases. Interesting. And I wonder if it's about the sort of male mastery over the animal, which allows for that friendship to blossom. And maybe it's, maybe I'm overanalyzing here, but traditionally speaking, women are not seen to be masters of much. Maybe that's factoring into it. Yeah, you definitely can't overanalyze literature. That's what all English majors are here for. But yeah, I would agree with that. And I think the dog's almost an interesting

analogy as well, because I think that sort of mastery over nature, mastery over animals lends itself to the sort of public sphere that men are historically expected to inhabit, whereas women are supposed to inhabit the domestic space. So the dog is this kind of fluid being at this point in culture where we've domesticated them so thoroughly that they are inhabiting the domestic space as regularly as women were expected to historically. So there's an interesting tension there that I'd like to tease out a bit more in my research as well. So who are some contemporary theorists whose work you find useful for helping you analyze what's going on in the fiction? Definitely Josephine Donovan is someone who I find useful because she's who introduced me

to animal standpoint criticism. The overall point of this is to change the dominant cultural attitude toward animals. She wrote a great article called Aestheticizing Animal Cruelty, and she talks about how the problem with aestheticizing it and the problem almost with analyzing it too thoroughly is that we're able to find meaning in animal cruelty. So if animals are being harmed for the sake of literature and for the sake of symbolism or for the sake of the development of the character, our ability to decipher that meaning is almost a negative practice because it allows us to find an answer and something that should not have an answer. There shouldn't be a reason or an answer for why we are being cruel to animals. But if we practice

searching for that meaning and searching for almost a reason to justify it, then that lends itself to what we do in real life and how we can justify continued cruelty to animals and so many other spaces. Fascinating and bamboozling. Thanks for helping us direct our chase. We will see you at the end of the program. Great. Thank you. Okay. See you soon. You're listening to Of Dogs and Derrida on Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

You can also hear Ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds.

By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. In this episode, we're featuring the work of Queen's University PhD student, Molly Labensky. Her focus is on the representation of dogs in American literature, and she argues that authors should consider the animal's vantage point when writing their fiction. Her approach to literary analysis is influenced by a strain of thought called animal standpoint theory. Well, animal standpoint theory derives from standpoint theory, which was originated to apply by Marxist theorists to the proletariat

on the theory that the proletariat has a standpoint that is more truthful and more accurate on its oppression than the oppressors who have a self-serving, rationalizing view of the oppression. That's Josephine Donovan, Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Maine. She's the author of The Aesthetics of Care on the Literary Treatment of Animals, and she's one of the founding figures of animal standpoint theory. Feminists have applied that idea to women and the theory that women have a truthful view of their oppression. And I've applied it to animals, arguing that animals have a standpoint

about the way that they're being treated and that humans should pay attention to that standpoint. And why is it important for literary authors to attempt to consider the standpoint of animals in their stories? Well, I think insofar as literature is part of the general culture, it helps to establish that animals are subjects, that they're not objects, which is the way that they're considered in the major official discourses of today, such as the law and commerce. They're considered commodities. In the law, they're considered property. And in science, they're considered objects for laboratory experimentation. So, to the extent that literature can destabilize this objectification of animals,

that's what animal standpoint criticism is encouraging. And can a human author, obviously authors are human, can a human author ever claim to truly understand an animal's point of view? Well, you can, of course, ask that question about humans too. I mean, can we ever completely understand another person's point of view? But animals communicate through various signs, communicative signs, so that we can readily read. I don't think there's any question that humans can understand these communications. And of course, an author can also use those communications to to try to imagine what the standpoint of the animal is. I mean, literature is a phenomenon of the imagination,

and an author imagines human characters. I see no reason why they couldn't and can't, in fact, do sometimes successfully imagine animal characters. And what are some of the best strategies, would you say, for an author to achieve that? Well, I think Leo Tolstoy is a good example of an author who manages to incorporate the animal's point of view almost in passing. I mean, he doesn't make a big deal out of it, but even a novel like Anna Karenina, which hardly anyone would think has much to do with animals, there's a wonderful lengthy scene actually about a dog named Laska who belongs to one of the main characters, Levin. And the dog's point of view is very clearly laid

out. And the dog often disagrees with Levin. Tolstoy implies that sometimes the dog is more knowledgeable about the particular issue than the human character. So I think it's very possible to do it. It has been done successfully, but unfortunately, most authors resort to time-honored literary devices that sort of minimize or deny or ignore the standpoint of the animal as a living creature. And does it matter ultimately that the author's attempt to represent the animal standpoint is accurate, or is it sort of the thought that counts? I think the main point is that animals should not just be used as literary devices. I mean, so often they're just used as symbols or metaphors or in some way to comment on the state of mind of the human character.

And the animal herself is discarded and basically ignored. And so many narratives do this. It's just almost a commonplace. In fact, it would disrupt the traditional narrative, I think, to give the animals more voice. And I think that's what animal standpoint criticism is calling for. I can see that if the author's goal is to show us this human character, they might sort of defend using the animal. I mean, the animal is not as important to that author, I suppose, as their human character. And so it's part of their aesthetic work in the novel to have that scene of cruelty. From the individual author's point of view, what is the problem of making this scene for

their aesthetic purposes out of cruelty like that? It just reinforces the human belief that animals are disposable and that they can be used however one wishes for human purposes. That is, the animals themselves as living creatures are simply ignored. And as I say, the overall point of this is to help change the dominant cultural attitude toward animals, to get away from this notion of them as inert objects. And so to the extent that authors are feeding into that narrative, they're vulnerable, I think, to animal standpoint criticism. Josephine Donovan, thank you so much for your insights.

Well, thank you. Josephine Donovan is Professor Emeritor at the University of Maine, and she has a new book coming out called Animals, Mind and Matter. Josephine Donovan says we need to treat animals as subjects, not objects. And she extends that plea to authors when writing about fictional animals too. So we decide to run this idea past one of Canada's biggest fans of dog-related fiction. Come here, dog. Come here. All right. Come on up and say hello.

Richard Teleke is the editor of the Exile Book of Canadian Dog Stories. He's also the author of a collection of short essays called A Dog on the Bed. And he is the housemate of a small dog named Toby. There he is. Aww. He is a King Charles Spaniel. Cutie patootie. What beautiful wavy ears he has. He has beautiful coloring.

Okay, you can get down. He's very quiet, too. He's not a barky dog? No, he's used to coming with me everywhere, so he's learned not to bark. And when you say everywhere, do you take him to school? Oh, when I taught, he came to classes. He sat in on PhD orals. He was the department mascot.

Are you a dog lover? Oh, yes. I've always had dogs in my life. You heard Professor Donovan. What's your take on her commentary, just overall? It's a complicated one because on the surface of what she's saying, I pretty much agree. It's important to treat a dog or any animal or any human being as a subject rather than an object. And when you work from that, you understand how fragile the relationship is because we can't really understand

dogs since we're not dogs. And they can't understand us because they're not people. So we're always negotiating how we can have a relationship and not project things onto each other. Is there anything you would ask authors to do differently when they put dogs in their stories? I would say don't use gratuitous violence around animals to appeal to your reader. In the same way that when you see a movie that has dogs in it, you'll often, if you stay through the end, see a credit that says no live animals were harmed or sacrificed or brutalized in the making of this film.

And you will see violent scenes with animals, but they're careful to let you know, if they're telling the truth, that they weren't harming the animal. Well, I think writers are obliged to not use animals for cheap effects, neither to sentimentalize them or use them as occasions of brutality to simply catch up your reader's attention. So far, so agreeable. But Josephine Donovan did go a bit further than that in her criticisms of literary authors.

The main point is that animals should not just be used as literary devices. I mean, so often they're just used as symbols or metaphors or in some way to comment on the state of mind of the human character. On this point, Richard Teleke is not so sure. I'm genuinely puzzled about her attitude towards the imagination. She's very concerned about dogs being used as literary symbols and as metaphors. And if you are too judgmental about the way writers in the past have used animals, you do a disservice both to the writer and to the past.

There's a tendency in modern criticism, basically since about 1990, for academics and critics to look at the text in front of them as something that they can, in fact, interrogate. And that's the word they use. They want to interrogate texts. Well, that's a term that you would use if you're a torturer. And when you're interrogating a text, you're establishing yourself as superior to the text. If you're really going to be contemporary in your judgments about that, you're going to wipe out much of Western literature.

So I think there's the potential in what she said for a careless thinker or a careless reader to be a bit Stalin-esque or like the Red Guard and say, this is not good because they didn't understand that and we understand it better. No, we may not understand it better because, of course, down the road, 50 years from now, there's going to be another generation or two judging us and saying, gosh, they really weren't very enlightened after all. They thought they were,

but they weren't. And looking back at the trends in literature over a longer period, can you point out any big differences between the way dogs were written about, say, back in the Middle Ages. We're talking about something that has been engineered for our purposes. Gradually, as the country, Canada and the United States, shifted from an agrarian country to a more citified industrial country, animals had a different role in our lives, and especially dogs. So dogs that were written about around, let's say, 1900 were often the subject of adventure stories. Jack London's Call of the Wild would be a great one. Dogs weren't yet a part of the family. They weren't living not necessarily in the kitchen. They weren't even living in the living room.

They were out in the backyard or on the porch. As we brought dogs into our houses, into our living rooms to sit next to us while we were watching TV, our attitude shifted, and then the attitude of writers shifted. So we wrote about dogs differently. We wrote about them as either subjects of the family, or for contemporary writing, because they've addressed violence more and more in every facet of their writing, subjects of violence, mystery, death, symbols of things we can't understand. Richard, this has been so interesting. Thank you so much for your time. Oh, it's been my pleasure.

Richard Teleki is the author of A Dog on the Bed, and before he retired, he was a professor in the humanities department at York University. So Richard favours writing about dogs in a way that respects their status as subjects rather than objects. But he's skeptical of animal standpoint theory when it criticizes authors for using animals as symbols and metaphors. It's certainly a provocative idea to put to a literary author. Hello, my name is Jan Martel. I'm a writer. I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Jan Martel is probably best known for his Booker Prize-winning novel, Life of Pi. All of his major novels rely heavily on animal characters, serving in highly symbolic or metaphorical roles.

And Jan also lives with a pet dog, a Havanese named Bamboo. a Havanese named Bamboo. But unlike the other guests we've heard from, Jan comes across as a bit less doting towards him or her. I'm totally indifferent to it, to be honest. It's very much at the bottom of my list of priorities, but the children like it. And I'm actually fairly indifferent to domesticated animals. I find them less interesting because they're in this permanent state of infantilization. Do you consider yourself then an animal lover? Is that a phrase you would use ever to describe yourself?

Well, only in the broadest sense of I'm a citizen of this world and we don't live on it alone. We cannot live on it alone. So we need to care about animals. So in that sense, yes, in terms of, you know, having little stuffies of animals in my room and loving other people's pets. No, not particularly. As I said, domesticated animals in particular. I used to have a parrot, and they are particularly fascinating creatures because they're highly, highly social animals, very complex in their relationship, and their intelligence is very lively, and they're very communicative animals. So I found the parrot very interesting. Cats and dogs I find slightly boring. I find they have dull personalities. Dogs are endlessly happy.

Cats are sort of reticent. So I find them kind of limited in their personality. Fish are beautiful, but they're a hassle to upkeep. And when you're writing about animals, what is it that you find fascinating about considering the animal's point of view? The usefulness of animals is precisely that they can serve as a tool for us to see who we are and what we need to do. So the usefulness of animals for me is precisely that they're very rich as metaphors. We tend to be very cynical about our own species. We tend not to be cynical

about animals, especially wild animals. We imbue animals with a sense of wonder, of marvel, and that's very useful for a storyteller because then I can take an animal character and right away get beyond your natural cynicism. Jan says one great thing about fictional animals is how easy they are to portray quickly and simply, in ways that conform to readers' expectations. For instance, a cat can instantly come across as sly and clever, a hyena as cowardly, a chimpanzee as just like us. Now, of course, it doesn't fully represent what those animals are.

But to me, that's a secondary thing. If you want to look at how animals actually are, then you're no longer talking about literature, you're talking about ethology. And ethology, you know, which is the study of animal behavior, is very useful, but it's kind of a niche product. You know, how slugs behave is reasonably useful if you want to save the slug, but it's not terribly interesting unless you're particularly interested in slugs. Whereas a story that features a slug, and for example, I remember when I went to England a few years ago, there was a whole campaign to reduce people's intake of salt, how it was bad for the heart, for blood pressure. And the featured animal for this was Sid the slug.

Slugs don't like salt either, right? You pour salt on a slug, it shrivels up and it dies. So the animal to speak about the importance of reducing your salt pour salt on a slug, it shrivels up and it dies. So the animal to speak about the importance of reducing your salt intake was Sid the slug. And it was quite amusing and very effective. So, you know, we characterize the slug just by its dislike of salt and it spoke to people. You know, this idea of you're ignoring the animal's point of view. You know, stories are only useful for us. Animals don't have stories. So to tell the story of a slug from the slug's point of view serves no purpose for the slug. And it'll be quite dull for us because a slug has a very limited intellect. Getting its sensibility is kind of,

it doesn't serve a purpose. Earlier, our PhD student mentioned a scene from To Kill a Mockingbird where Atticus proves he's a man by shooting a supposedly rabid dog. But Jan Martell reads that scene differently. Is this a kind of literary cruelty to animals? No, I would say, because the very killing of the animal would outrage a number of readers. You know, a number of children reading that book would be. Unless there was, you know, it depends on to what degree they read the madness of the dog.

If it truly is, you know, if a child reading that really feels that it's a dangerous, rabid dog that's about to bite people, then they would see that, yes, first of all, if it's rabid, the dog does need to die because it's a horrible way to die, rabies. And if it's not seen as genuinely mad, then, and that's precisely the strength of the scene, is that you feel, my God, this is unseemly. This is somehow cruel. It stirs up our emotions. And you know, it's very funny for someone to say that, that they object to the way this dog is portrayed, who then an hour later has a hamburger for lunch. If you're really going to pursue this point of view, you have to be vegan. Of course, our PhD student, Molly Labensky, is vegan. So that particular line of challenge might not pose any problems for her.

But Jan also makes a provocative argument in favor of animal cruelty in fiction. The point of portraying cruelty to animals is that it outrages us. It makes us feel something. And therefore, because we feel something, we presumably learn from it and therefore don't perform cruelty either to animals or to humans. You know, listen, there's a very interesting correlation. The height of cruelty to animals in zoos was in the 19th century, when any number of people would go to zoos in London and in Europe and, you know, beat the animals, spit at them, poke at them. There's an interesting correlation between the rise of human rights and the diminishing of cruelty to animals, because your average working

class man would go to the zoo in London and says, my master beats me, and so I will beat this animal. It's only once that working class man realized, wait a second, in post-war, you know, England, when the right, you know, the class system started to fall apart, and your average person said, you know what, I'm a worthy person. I'm worthy of respect. My master cannot beat me. In fact, my master is not my master. We are equal citizens. Then animal cruelty started to go down. So there's a usefulness to animal cruelty in fiction because it is only in fiction. It is imagined. You know, it is like saying, arguing, let's not have violence on television. Well, you know, egregious violence is kind of pointless, but we are violent in our imagination so that we are not violent in reality.

And everyone knows the real difference between fictional violence and real violence. I can watch any number of violent movies, but the one, the very, very, very rare times I've come close to human violence, once a drunk man coming out of a bar when I was at university, I could see was on the edge of hitting me. And that was shocking to me. And once I remember a fellow student actually hit me in the face, and I remember being shocked by that, because I'm like, oh, this is not fictional, this is real. We know the difference. And same thing in fiction.

We do violence to animals and humans in fiction to increase their sensibility to not do it in real life. Even when an author does have a cruel or careless attitude towards animals, Jan argues it doesn't make the story less valuable as literature. I think there's no hard and fast rules. It depends how well it's done. There's also a wonderful story by, I've got to remember, I should check this out. There's a wonderful story by Flaubert.

What's it called again? Anyway, I remember reading it and I couldn't believe the number of animals that are murdered by this hunter. So, of course, their animal suffering is like the big thing. And they die in their hundreds and hundreds, stags. I can't remember what the animals are called. Anyway, there... Legend of St. Gillian, is that it? Yes, there we go.

That's it. It's amazing the number of animals that are murdered. And because of that, as a late 20th century reader, I thought, my God, this is terrible. Now, did Flaubert care about them? No, he didn't care at all about them. He'd be the perfect example that your Professor Donovan would object to. But she's missing the point that it depends on the sensitivity of which we read a story that will get something out of it. So you read that story, The Legend of St. Julian, and you feel for those animals. And you get to the Christ analogy, too. You get to human suffering, too. We don't like that either. But you're astonished at the

level of animal suffering represented in that story that Flaubert didn't care about. You very quickly go beyond the author's intent to what you can get out of it. And what a late 20th century, early 22nd century reader will get out of that story, The Legend of St. Julian, is, my God, what a disregard for animal life. Jan Martel, this has been so great speaking with you. Thank you so much. My pleasure. We'll have to do it again.

Jan Martel's books include The High Mountains of Portugal, Beatrice and Virgil, and Life of Pi. He lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And Molly Labensky has joined us again to wrap up the show. Hi, Molly. Hi there. How's it going? Very well. And we'll jump right into it. What is your response to Jan Martel's idea that we readers are free to read animal cruelty any way we like, so it's not necessarily a problem if authors aren't presenting an animal point of view? Yeah, I definitely disagree with what he's saying about how animals don't have stories, but I do admire his admitted neutrality towards certain types of animals. I think there is this strange pressure, as Tom pointed out, to identify as an animal lover.

And then once you do that, you're in pretty tricky territory because many of your actions may not line up with that. So I think it's important to be able to admit whether or not you actually care about certain things and not having to live up with the pressures that come with caring about those things. I can see the potential in animal violence in literature in regard to bringing around change and highlighting the areas where we are potentially cruel to animals, which is essentially what I am trying to do. I'm trying to highlight areas where we think we have this great relationship with animals, but the reality of the fiction shows otherwise. I don't think it's necessarily great to overdo it. So I think of shows like Cops and things like that,

where they're designed to sort of desensitize us to police brutality and ultimately normalize it. So I think the more we read about dogs specifically and the purpose of dogs being to die in our lives ultimately, the more we readily accept it without question and the further away we move from a more harmonious and symbiotic relationship with them. And getting to the point about animals not having stories, you disagree with that. I do, yeah. I believe every animal is an individual and I know that

the ones in literature are created and fictional, but as are the human characters and as are every element of the fictional realm. So I think it's important to cater to those different beings and those different features of literature on an even playing field. I think when he said animals don't have stories, I don't think he meant there aren't stories to their lives that we could tell, but that animals themselves don't tell stories. Does that change it? Yeah, I would agree that they maybe don't tell their own stories. But if we also don't make any effort to tell them at all, then I think that contributes to the objectification of animals or the sort of dismissiveness of animals that Josephine Donovan and myself would be concerned with. And what's your own take on what Josephine Donovan is really saying about animal symbols and metaphors? Because that seemed to be a tripping up point for the two authors we spoke to. Yeah, there'll always be a bit of a discrepancy between the opinions of literary

critics and authors. I really admired Josephine Donovan's opinion that if we reduce them to symbols only and we limit them to that, that it inhibits our ability to really ever understand their standpoint. So I think maybe the exercise of trying to understand their standpoint more will be the result of not just reducing them to symbols and not only treating them that way. What is your ultimate mission with your PhD work? It's definitely altered my perspective on dogs. I also grew up wanting a specific type of dog and thinking there's no problem with that. Like I wanted a white German shepherd and or I got like I understood why people wanted dogs that didn't shed and things like that. I understood why people wanted dogs that didn't shed and things like that. So I try to remain sympathetic to the fact that I went through that transition as well and needed to be made aware of the potential problems of that type of thinking and how many worthy companions are being still euthanized in shelters to cater to those sort of preferences. So I would really like for people to just be aware because I genuinely think a lot of the time it's just not considered. A lot of people that I've talked to have said, oh, I never even thought of that. So I'm hoping that it's more just about raising awareness about alternative ways and potentially more harmonious and symbiotic ways that we can continue having

dogs in our lives because we do love them and they do add a lot of value. And where is Duncan right now? Your pup? He's lying down behind me, leaning against the couch, sleeping away. Lovely. Well, Molly, it's been such a pleasure learning about your work. And yes, it opened my eyes. So thank you so much for taking the time with us. Thank you for having me. It's been really fun bye molly you were listening to of dogs and derrida part of our ongoing series ideas from the trenches where we showcase phd research going on across the country. The producers are Nikola Lukšić and Tom Howell. Thanks to Dog Tales Sanctuary in King City, Ontario, and to all of our

guests. Well, hello, everyone. I'm Richard Teleki. My name is Cassandra Ferrante. I'm Josephine Donovan. Hello, my name is Jan Martel. Hi, I'm Molly Lubensky. I'm a fifth-year PhD candidate at Queen's University in the English department. You can go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, for more information about their books, dogs and other projects. Thanks as well to Claire Miller and Mitchell Goldenthal for their readings of To Kill a Mockingbird and Old Yeller. And to Derek Webster for reading the translations of Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am.

Technical production, Danielle Duval. Web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.