Admiration and Exploitation of Animals: An Economic and Ecocritical Reading of Ken Smith’s “Duke at Haldon Ponds”

This paper sets out to do an economic and ecocritical reading of Ken Smith’s poem “Duck at Haldon Ponds” using natural and utilitarian animal rights theories and ecocriticism. Our argument is that human-animal relationship is always dominated by the conflict of admiration /friendship and exploitation with the latter always the winner of the former. At the end of the study, it was found out that human exploitation of animals dominates human admiration and friendship of them with man always the winning or gaining partner in this animal-human relationship, paradoxically at the same time being the admirer of animals and their friends and at the same time their killer. Ken Smith in his poem “Duck at Haldon Ponds” is unmistakably and overly an animal rights despoiler, a true and prototype anti-protectionist/liberationist, with his unpretentious slaughtering of animals as seen in this Haldon Pond duck.