Animality

Can we do without animality as a concept? This is the question I'll be trying to answer in this chapter. So far, we have seen animality manifest in various guises: as a way to organize various ontologies into a heirarchy (black, white, dog, disabled and so on); as everything unwanted and undesirable in man, representative of his base instincts; and, as if in direct contradiction to this second rule, those instincts which we cannot do without, which ironically could be said to make us human. And interspersed throughout have been as many kinds of animalities as there are animals: from Old Ben's defiant playfulness in the face of yearly death; from a green turtle's uncanny and instinctive capacity to travel thousands of miles to the island of its origin; and to rats, sheep, racoons and rattlesnakes, species with pack mentalities which we uncharacteristically can dismiss as not suiting our definition of the acceptable animal.

It is that last category that I shall return to for my last chapter, but in an entirely different capacity. So far, we have found that there are a few constants in our three narratives: almost always, the human characters seem to be able to establish, almost against their wishes, some form of relationship with the animal other. This, despite the animal being companion species or not. Animality in at least one sense becomes a function of relationality: to what extent we are capable of imaginatively empathizing with the animal other is dependent on our openness to animal agency, our comportment towards the animal other. But what if there were no opportunity for individuated relationships to form? What if our experience of the animal was one of one species witnessing the resurgence of another?