Defending the Defenseless

By Brian Khaneyan

When I was in fourth grade I was assigned math problems to complete with my calculator. I was young, and learning how to use the calculator. The technology was incredibly cool to me. It would make things much easier in my life. I was going about my calculator problems, and I finished the assignment and turned it in. My teacher told me that I had gotten a problem wrong. I was unsure of how this could be, so I tried the problem again. The calculator gave me the same, supposedly incorrect answer. My teacher told me to go back and do it again. I kept on doing it, I double-checked and triple checked the calculator. Still, the answer was wrong.

I got frustrated, and told my teacher that there was something wrong with the calculator, it keeps on giving me the wrong answer. She told me that the calculator will never make a mistake. It will always do as it’s told, the calculator can never be wrong. They are completely helpless to the situation, the calculator will always do what it is instructed to do. I realized that I’d actually been inputting the wrong equation every time. This was the first time I really understood what the difference between living and non-living really was. More than that though, it allowed me to understand that some things are simply a result of their environment. Much like the calculator, animals can’t help but act the way they are programmed to act. A horse will move faster when whipped. Humans have taken advantage of this, and we are essentially using animals as tools, much like the calculator. However, the difference between the animals and the machine is that the animals are living. They have feeling and many of the emotions we have, but they simply cannot express this.

The reason that our taking advantage of the animals is so deplorable is due to the majesty and timelessness of animals. They have existed before us, and will exist after us. We are a just a blip on their timelines, they have been here forever – yet we are already destroying their environments. The major theme of all the sources for this week each fixate on the majesty and importance of animals, and show examples of  how humans are shamefully destroying their world.

“Deify The Wolf.” The title of Linda Hogan’s essay in-and-of-itself states that the wolf is incredibly important. It is much more important than humans, we should bow down to this wolf. We should be subservient to the wolf – but we are not. Hogan writes, “The North Country is a place desolate and ransacked by those who have tried to survive here. The land cries out the thefts that have taken place.” This statement is personifying the land. Humans have taken something from it. This entire essay obsesses over portraying both the land and animals as something that is higher than humans. Yet nobody understands this. They keep trying to overrun the land and take advantage of the animals. One of the most interesting points Hogan makes is towards the end: “One man photographs the other holding the dead wolf on its legs, as if it is still alive. This picture is something for the man to keep… He, like the others, wants to touch a lost piece of the wild earth.” Even when the intentions are good, the outcome is the same. The dichotomy between the dead wolf and the human fulfilling his needs serves to show how destructive humans really are. It is almost as if he killed the wolf just so he would be safe so he could take the picture. These two things clearly cannot compare, and highlight the trampled majesty of the wolf.

“Am I Blue?” by Alice Walker focuses on a slightly different issue in the same context. This essay continuously personifies the horse, with Walker stating: “It was a look so piercing, so full of grief, a look so human…” However this simply isn’t powerful enough. Telling the reader that the horse seemed human doesn’t do much, being human isn’t relatable, everyone’s human. So Walker writes, “There was a different look in his eyes. A look of independence, of self-possession, of inalienable horseness.” These qualities are something that everyone can relate to. Everyone has some level of independence, or self-possession. Walker uses this so that the reader can truly feel for the horse, and the crimes being committed against it. Lastly the use of the term horseness helps anchor the reader back to reality and affirm the horse’s vulnerable state. Of course the horse has human emotions, but it is still a horse after all, and that horse has no way to express these emotions or desires.

“Meeting Wolf” by Mary Oliver also fixates on the timelessness and majesty of the animal, in this case the wolf. Here are a few terms used in the poem: “golden eyes, speechless but faithful trees.” These phrases once again serve to personify and show the majesty of both the animals and the land. Once again the trees are speechless and there are “no words” inside the wolf’s mouth. They cannot do anything about the situation. Oliver then states: “I have given him intrusion, he has given me a glimpse into a better but now broken world. Not his doing, but ours.” She is intruding on the wolf. Similar to the title “Deify the Wolf,” the author is putting the wolf in a higher position than human. This interruption is also a metaphor for not only this wolf, but all of animals. Humans have intruded on their land, and made it a worse place to live.

“The Cove,” directed by Louie Psihoyos further expresses this exploitation of animals. The film uses underwater cameras interwoven with scenes with the actors and experts. It was shot in a very dramatic style, highlighting the vast injustice that has been performed to the dolphins. This includes a scene in which they show the clips of dolphin hunting to the Japanese people. This adds to the shock value of the movie, which strives to highlight the depth of our exploitation on these innocent animals.

Similar to dolphin hunting, fur harvesting is also an incredible injustice. An article published in The Huffington Post, “Fur is Simply Bad Design”, by Joshua Katcher highlights this. This article uses the same techniques as The Cove. It uses pictures backed up by facts for shock-value. Of note is a picture of a rabbit that is horribly injured and deranged-looking. These photos are backed up by facts to inform the reader of this injustice, and to inspire change.

The last source I reviewed this week is the film “How I Became an Elephant.” One of the most poignant scenes in this movie was the image of a little girl wearing an elephant hat watching the elephant perform: The elephants on the outside look like they are happy. They are programmed this way. They are forced to show behavior that makes the viewer think that the elephant is having a great time. There is a sense of pure innocence that is evoked through this image. The child has no idea what the elephant actually goes through, she is just happily watching it perform – it looks like it’s happy, it looks like it’s having fun. This is a metaphor for the great amount of inaction and uninformed attitude that we, as a society have about animal rights. Humans are literally murdering these animals one by one, but no one seems to care. The elephant is just as vulnerable as that little girl. The child cannot protect herself, it is the role of her parents, teachers, and other people who care about her well-being to protect her and guide her through her early years so that she can make decisions on her own. Who is doing this for the elephants? No one.

Unfortunately animals are only a result of their environment. One of the big ways that affects how we treat animals is shown in Table 7.2 in chapter 7 of Julia Corbett’s “Communicating Nature.” This table shows that dogs and horses have a likeability rating of ~1.7 while rats and cockroaches are above 6, on a 7 point-scale. Lower ratings mean that the animal is more likeable, so the dogs are favored greatly over the cockroaches. This further emphasizes the importance that we have on animals. Higher up in the list are animals that humans tend to like because they are nice to us, because they don’t bother us, and perhaps because we see something human inside of them. This has been the theme of each source, to humanize the animals. Even though the wolf scored around a 4, which is quite low, we must understand that each animal should be treated equally since they all are equally vulnerable and equally important.