Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare

Encounters with actual animals can certainly change our perception of them, but so, too, can those we have with fictional ones. Stories, indeed, have the power to change us. The narrative imagination, "an essential preparation for moral interaction" according to Martha C. Nussbaum (1997, p. 90), allows readers to experience vicariously the inner world of fictional characters, leading to the cultivation of a sympathetic responsiveness to the needs of others. In the preface to Creative Compassion, Literature and Animal Welfare (2020), Michael J. Gilmour shares with readers his transformative experience of reading Black Beauty, the autobiography of a fictional horse, years after receiving it as a gift from his grandmother. This, along with other encounters with real-life animals challenged his "then habitual indifference to animals as neighbours deserving moral consideration" (Gilmour, 2020, p. x). In this book, he explores the potential of literature to promote empathy and compassion toward animals and inspire readers to become engaged in animal welfare efforts.Each of the eight chapters comprising Creative Compassion opens with a personal account from activists, artists, educators, and scholars involved in the wide field of critical animal studies bearing witness to the transformative power of storytelling. Gilmour's book considers how works of the imagination contribute to shaping our understanding of animals and our relationships with them, while also examining their contribution to the animal ethics debate. However, not every animal narrative is a valid example for this type of exploration; Gilmour's chosen texts meet three requirements, which I shall label as "the triple E" of animal welfare literature: they educate readers by exposing the suffering they experience at the hands of humans, they empathize with the animals' plight and invite readers to do the same, and they envision new scenarios of relationships among human and other-than-human animals.Gilmour examines the areas in which animals are most frequently instrumentalized for human purposes—such as food, scientific research, hunting, and entertainment—by using narratives that take readers behind the scenes to show them the horrors of these practices. Although these issues are scattered throughout the entire text, he devotes separate chapters to some of them for closer examination. Chapter 3, for instance, invites us to delve into the inner lives of animals destined for food, Chapter 4 focuses on those used for scientific research, and Chapter 7 explores animals that are hunted. In addition to the above-mentioned "triple E" approach, Gilmour finds that compassion-inclined authors usually portray individual animals, some of whom become the first-person narrators of their story. These animals constitute textual representations of what actual animals experience outside of the text, rather than being mere transcripts of human behavior and attitudes. Additionally, many of these authors employ religious or spiritual language and imagery, either because they take religion as a source of moral authority to condemn cruel practices and promote kindness toward animals or in order to illustrate the meaningful existence of any sentient being. In fact, the imagined scenarios for healthier human–animal relationships, which are magnificently explored in Chapters 5 and 6, have strong religious overtones. For instance, the plant-eating nature of the island of No Man's Land in Hugh Loftin's Doctor Doolittle's Post Office (1923) recalls the first biblical creation story and the prophet Isaiah's vision of a peaceful kingdom for humans and animals, while the renewed Eden that is the "Big House" in Robert Lawson's Rabbit Hill (1944) is presided over by a statue of St. Francis, whom the animals recognize as "their" saint.I find Gilmour's special attention to the third E particularly valuable, as he elaborates on those alternative scenarios for human-animal relationships in Creative Compassion. Even if some of them are far-fetched, Gilmour (2020) underscores the ethical impulse behind the human capacity to envisage alternative worlds, arguing that "the ability to imagine safe places where animals flourish is an evidence of sorts that humans can do some things to ameliorate conditions for some animals" (p. 194).Loftin's Doctor Doolittle stories, E. B. White's Charlotte's Web (1952), and Katherine Applegate's The One and Only Ivan (2012) are some of the titles that appear repeatedly throughout the book, providing as they do ample material for the variety of topics Gilmour explores. The issue of anthropomorphism and its implications for the perception of actual animals is bound to arise whenever fictional animals communicate with humans and other animals using human speech, as is the case in these three books. While Rosi Braidotti (2012) argues that anthropomorphism not only confirms the human/nonhuman binary, but it also "denies the specificity of animals altogether" (p. 79), critical anthropomorphism, as presented by Gordon Burghardt (2007) can be a successful tool for eliciting empathy without denying the distinctiveness of a particular animal. This, with a few exceptions, is the type of anthropocentrism most frequently found in the texts Gilmour focuses on and the kind that Richard Adams openly embraces in Watership Down (1972). In his preface to the 2005 edition, Adams affirms that, even if his rabbits could think and talk, he "never made them do anything physical that real rabbits could not do" (quoted in Gilmour, 2020, p. 60).From my point of view, the ecofeminist tinges present in some of Gilmour's analyses, combined with his use of Anat Pick's (2011) idea of creaturely poetics and its emphasis on the logic of the flesh and its vulnerability, effectively shift the question of anthropomorphism to the background, dispelling any issue of hierarchy at the level of shared vulnerability. Ecofeminism reveals the interconnectedness of all forms of oppression, while a creaturely ethics, in its recognition of the materiality and vulnerability of all living bodies, reveals the interconnectedness of all forms of violence. "Literature," affirms Gilmour (2020), "reminds us of our connectedness to the world and awakens moral considerations" (p. 240) regarding the fact that other-than-human animals experience physical and psychological distress as humans do. In their acknowledgment of the continuity between humans and other-than-humans in our shared vulnerability, the stories analyzed by Gilmour provide a clear perspective on the ways in which compassion-inclined stories can be used to promote change by encouraging readers to think critically about the ethical implications of the way they understand and relate to animals. In this regard, Creative Compassion, Literature and Welfare constitutes a magnificent example of academic activism.