Review of the Jenny Diski's book What I Don't Know About Animals:
What I Don't Know About Animals is a socio-philosophical investigation of immense skill, erudition and subtlety, charmingly disguised as a travel book. Diski walks into an idea like no one else and here is journeying into the dark continent of our relationship with animals.
She begins with childhood, teddies and Mickey Mouse. Richard Louv, the American journalist awarded the Audubon Medal for describing "nature deficit disorder" in children who have no physical contact with nature, might well identify this syndrome in Diski's city childhood. But Diski's point is that our relationship with animals goes way beyond physical contact: it is mental, emotional, cultural and moral. Hers is rooted in late 20th-century urban Britain. In nursery rhymes, cartoons, telly, and a sense of Us and Them that takes for granted our surveillance of them in laboratories or on safari. Also in fear, hate and love, which may have pathological expressions such as arachnophobia (Diski's is cured by London Zoo), animal hoarding, or the internet fad for "lolcats": cat photos whose ungrammatical text (we get Genesis chapter one in "lolcat") resembles the dog-speak that Kipling nauseatingly sustains throughout "Thy Servant a Dog".
But everyone's journey into animals is different. "There's no way out of anthropocentrism," says Diski, but conservationists might disagree, arguing that respecting the otherness of a wild animal means we should protect (against ourselves and our short-term interests) the habitat in which that otherness evolved and on which it depends. Greenpeace's case against drilling for Shetland oil is that it puts protected species at risk. In Bunty and her ilk, birdwatchers will see the domestic predator estimated to kill 55 million of the UK's declining songbirds every year.
What I Don't Know About Animals is a socio-philosophical investigation of immense skill, erudition and subtlety, charmingly disguised as a travel book. Diski walks into an idea like no one else and here is journeying into the dark continent of our relationship with animals.
She begins with childhood, teddies and Mickey Mouse. Richard Louv, the American journalist awarded the Audubon Medal for describing "nature deficit disorder" in children who have no physical contact with nature, might well identify this syndrome in Diski's city childhood. But Diski's point is that our relationship with animals goes way beyond physical contact: it is mental, emotional, cultural and moral. Hers is rooted in late 20th-century urban Britain. In nursery rhymes, cartoons, telly, and a sense of Us and Them that takes for granted our surveillance of them in laboratories or on safari. Also in fear, hate and love, which may have pathological expressions such as arachnophobia (Diski's is cured by London Zoo), animal hoarding, or the internet fad for "lolcats": cat photos whose ungrammatical text (we get Genesis chapter one in "lolcat") resembles the dog-speak that Kipling nauseatingly sustains throughout "Thy Servant a Dog".
But everyone's journey into animals is different. "There's no way out of anthropocentrism," says Diski, but conservationists might disagree, arguing that respecting the otherness of a wild animal means we should protect (against ourselves and our short-term interests) the habitat in which that otherness evolved and on which it depends. Greenpeace's case against drilling for Shetland oil is that it puts protected species at risk. In Bunty and her ilk, birdwatchers will see the domestic predator estimated to kill 55 million of the UK's declining songbirds every year.
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