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Coetzee opens the debate on the need to show children how animals suffer and die

2022-01-22T03:20:52.064Z


Writers and editors review the literary tradition of animal rights, intensive-extensive farming and respond to the proposal of the South African Nobel Prize winner


From Pythagoras to the books and conferences of an animal rights activist such as the Nobel Prize winner for Literature JM Coetzee, passing through Upton Sinclair and his exploration of the conditions of the Chicago slaughterhouses in

The Jungle

(1905), there is a broad tradition that has opened a debate throughout the history of literature. They are authors who consider that the planet does not belong only to human beings and that they should fight for the harmony of the ecosystem and not mistreat or cruelly sacrifice animals. A latent issue that, at the beginning of January, the Spanish Minister of Consumption, Alberto Garzón, reopened by denouncing the system of macro-farms in the country. To ensure a change in mentality, sensitivity and habits regarding the way in which human beings should relate to animals, Coetzee makes a proposal in EL PAÍS:

“It is important that children are not shielded from knowing how animals live and die.

There are many movies about the processing plants where their lives end.

A child, even a young child, is capable of making a moral decision about participating, yes or no, in the shameful way we treat our cousins ​​on this earth.”

Precisely his novel

Misfortune

(1999) is one of the works that has had the greatest impact on what moral consideration human beings should have with animals, explains Pablo de Lora, professor of Philosophy of Law at the Autonomous University of Madrid, author of titles such as

Justice for Animals: Ethics Beyond Humanity

and

Bioethics

.

Principles, challenges and debates

(both in Alianza).

John Maxwell Coetzee, at a literary festival in Buenos Aires in 2013. Ricardo Ceppi (Getty Images)

On a more philosophical plane, the professor has two references:

Animal Liberation

, by Peter Singer (Taurus, 1975), a great referent of antispeciesism, and

In

defense of the rights of animals

, by Tom Regan (FCE, 2016), which contributed to the current claim movement.

In literature in Spanish, he recommends

Sufre, then import

a (Plaza y Valdés), by Francisco Lara and Olga Campos, and adds that “one of the most intelligent critics of animalist positions is that of Jesús Zamora Bonilla in

Contra Apocalyptic.

Ecologism, animalism, posthumanism

(Shackleton Books)”.

Given Coetzee's reflection, the authors consulted by EL PAÍS agree, although with nuances. De Lora believes that “we must make minors aware of this reality in a way appropriate to their maturation and age. They must also know, at the time and with a similar adequacy, the moral dilemmas posed by abortion, and this should not imply that we exhibit with all its crudeness the result of the voluntary interruption of pregnancy.

Rubén Hernández, editor of Errata Naturae, argues: "We must avoid generalizations, it is essential to bear in mind that boys or girls of the same age may have very different degrees of maturity and sensitivity spectrums."

And he adds: "I don't think that children can or should be isolated from the brutal contradictions of the system, but they should be the ones who set their own pace when it comes to awakening their critical conscience."

Among those consulted, the one closest to Coetzee is the writer Gabi Martínez: "I have never protected my children from reality because that is how you protect them."

It proposes to muffle some information, but not to hide it.

He is in favor of "children should know how soon everything and the only thing that has to happen is that you accompany them so that they assume it calmly and they decide".

the power of literature

The book, the author or the moment that has made these people aware of the respect and right to animals varies. Gabi Martínez has been exploring different parts of the world for more than a decade for both environmental and animal issues. In

a real change. A return to the origin in the land of shepherds

(Seix Barral) narrates his life as an apprentice shepherd in the Siberia of Extremadura. He always reads “from the rights of animals, from people who have approached them and have expressed the wonder of relating to them”. An example is

A Season in Tinker Creed,

by Annie Dillard (Errata Naturae), which puts the focus on animals in the absolute margin, “but they are essential for everything else to work”.

A work that marked him was

Eating Animals

(Seix Barral), by Jonathan Safran Foer. It made him more aware of the ecological, health and ethical costs of feeding animals. He conditioned it in a direct way and now, for example, there is much less chicken in his diet: “That is an important nuance. This minister is not telling you not to eat, but to be more aware of what we eat”. And recommends

Ecoanimal

.

A multisensory, environmentalist and animalist aesthetic

, by Marta Tafalla (Plaza y Valdés), to contextualize the current moment of thought on this issue. A decisive work for the Spanish imaginary, recalls Martínez, is

The animated forest

, by Wenceslao Fernández (Ediciones 98), with a film version, where the harmony of the creatures of nature, humans, other animals and plants, the first inhabitants of the planet, can be appreciated.

A glass slaughterhouse

Munir Hachemi Guerrero is the author of

Living Things

(Peripheral) where he describes the journey of four friends to the south of France to work on animal farms. Haschemi believes in the power of literature to bring people closer to other realities. His reference is Coetzee: “Everything related to animal euthanasia in

Disgrace

, and the way he weaves it into the racial question is brilliant. You also have to read the reflections of Elizabeth Costello [ the Nobel's

alter ego

and defender of animals], because there Coetzee presents us with a theory in motion that confronts others and its own contradictions, and not a solid and definitive corpus”.

Minister Garzón, explains Hashemi, raises the issue “more in terms of environmentalism, and I find it difficult to understand in what sense it is 'animal welfare' to keep a sentient being to kill it at the time we consider appropriate.

I fail to see a big difference between this and bullfighting.

The end of the macro farms would prevent a great deal of suffering, whatever it is done for”.

Animal protest in the center of Madrid last December. SOPA Images (SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett)

This is a tradition of thought and literature that began 25 centuries ago with Pythagoras and Plutarch, Rubén Hernández recalls. After the philosophers of classical Greece, Hernández makes a leap to Schopenhauer and Adorno, passing through Montaigne, Víctor Hugo, Zola, Voltaire, Tolstói... Already closer, for the publisher the books of Singer or Tom Regan have been "capital , and

Zoopolis

, by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka. Also lesser-known texts such as one by Bertrand Russell,

If Animals Could Talk

, an essay by Martha Nussbaum on justice among non-human animals, Claude Lévi-Strauss's devastating article

The Wisdom Lesson of Mad Cows

(1996) to account of the relationship between meat diets and cannibalism...”.

Among the most recent literature, Hernández opts for

Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era

, by Sarat Colling, “because it dislodges all paternalism and anthropocentrism and writes a story about the resistance and refusal of the animals themselves in the context of capitalist exploitation and of domestication”.

In all this controversy, Gabi Martínez misses a mature debate on the polarization around hunting: "It is necessary to do it to really get into the subject and know how we are and how we relate to our environment." For him, knowing how to hunt brings something infinitely better than what the macro-farms give: "They are two demonized concepts, but it will depend on how it is practiced." To embrace the entire ecosystem and analyze the human being, Martínez recommends

The Fire of the End of the World

, by Wendell Berry (Errata Naturae).

In 2016, JM Coetzee expressed his position at a conference at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid when he read one of the stories starring Elizabeth Costello when she talks with her son about the idea of ​​creating a glass slaughterhouse in the middle of the city center. city, and says: “I have thought that people tolerate animal sacrifice because they don't get to see it.

to hear it

To smell it”.

Source: elparis

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