A few days ago I emailed Marc Bekoff. I had cited him in my essay on animals and had just heard him interviewed. I really liked what he had to say and was wondering if he'd done any work on lab animals - as I will be very busy this week with the dreaded as well as paid work in the evenings, I figured I needed to make a head start on my presentation.
Anyway, he sent me some links and said that he'd referenced lab animals in some of his books. So I bought Animal Agenda and also Wild Justice, which is on Audible.
As I was listening to the later, the text mentioned two novels written from the point of animals. One is called The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy and is about an elephant matriarch. I'm waiting for that to be delivered. The other is White as the Waves by Alison Baird, which is a retelling of Moby Dick from the perspective of the whale. It's a good read so far - not great literature - but interesting and emotionally compelling.
According to the ethologist named in Wild Justice, who brought up the fact that these two books were both published in 1999, White as the Waves, like The White Bone, is rich in accurate details of the lives of these animals.
When I was younger, I loved books written from the perspective of the animals - the amazing Silver Brumby novels, Watership Down, even the Duncton Wood books. Oh yes, and there was one about a group of animals who escaped from a research faciliy... what was that? Ah yes, that too was by Richard Adams: The Plague Dogs. I'm sure there were more. In Fluke a man's consciousness is reborn in a dog. In one of the Narnia books there's a horse that talks, Bree.
I read a lot of other books about people and animals... one by Alice Hoffman with Heaven in the title about a horse called Tarot. Jane Smiley's huge book Horse Heaven, I think. Miss Chance, I think it was called, about a horse and a man who owns her. There's one by Jojo Miles. Oh and there was a writer I loved who wrote Zara and January something. The Black Stallion novels. The Yearling, My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead, Black Beauty. White Fang and the other Jack London one. Cormac McCarthy has horses and wolves in the Border Trilogy. There's a wolf one by... a popular writer... I can't recall... her father was a wolf expert... and another one by Sarah Hall which was very good. The Wolf Border. That was excellent. D. H. Lawrence wrote a novella 'St Mawr' about a horse.
Then the poetry! Ted Hughes and Lawrence too and Gerard Manley Hopkins and so many others.
But you must be wondering why I chose that photo - doesn't the piece of tree stump, smoothed by hundreds of people climbing over it, look rather like the eye of a whale? Or an elephant? The animals are everywhere.
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