Candice Allmark-Kent. Literature, Science, and Animal Advocacy in Canada: Practical Zoocriticism. Palgrave Macmillan Cham, November 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40556-3.
In 1907 the President of the United States of America used his valuable time to write an article criticizing the accuracy of animal behaviours in short stories. President Theodore Roosevelt had joined the renowned American naturalist, John Burroughs, in condemning writers who had been accused of “nature faking.” Between 1903 and 1907, the Nature Fakers controversy was a dispute between writers and naturalists about whether nonhuman beings were capable of certain activities described in realistic animal stories.
Between 1903 and 1907, the Nature Fakers controversy was a dispute between writers and naturalists about whether nonhuman beings were capable of certain activities described in realistic animal stories.
At the heart of the controversy were two Canadian writers, Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G. D. Roberts. Their innovation had been to combine science and storytelling to advocate for animals. Most unusually, they had attempted to write realistic biographies of individual wild animals. Some were based on first-hand observations, others were built on multiple anecdotes, and some may have been pure imagination. Claims that their stories were true or based on real individuals drew the ire of Burroughs and Roosevelt during the controversy. Making matters worse, perhaps, Seton and Roberts sometimes asserted that their stories were contributing to the new science of animal psychology. Almost seventy years after the Nature Fakers controversy, writer James Polk (1972) referred to the work of Seton and Roberts as a “scarcely respectable” branch of Canadian literature (51). Today, their stories are still seen as something of an embarrassment.
When reading these stories, however, what struck me was that the behaviours described were not too distant from those being identified in twenty-first century animal cognition research. Some activities, such as animal teaching, that had been so ridiculed by Burroughs and Roosevelt during the controversy were now becoming respectable topics in the sciences. Moreover, some scientists were beginning to express a new interest in stories and literary techniques as tools for research.
A century after the Nature Fakers controversy began, Canadian whale biologist Hal Whitehead (2003) identified two “remarkable novels” written by fellow Canadians (370). These were Alison Baird’s White as the Waves (1999) and Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone (1998). Both novels combined scientific information with fictional narratives to advocate for wildlife protection. At their core, these works maintained the characteristics of Seton’s and Roberts’s original animal stories, albeit without the claims of realism or accuracy. Whitehead states:
A reductionist might class these portraits with Winnie-the-Pooh as fantasies on the lives of animals. But for me they ring true, and may well come closer to the natures of these animals than the coarse numerical abstractions that come from my own scientific observations. […] I think the communication should be reciprocal. We need to take these constructions, note the large parts that are consistent with what we now know, and use them as hypotheses to guide our work. (371).
This staggering contrast in the reception of four Canadian animal writers illuminates the necessity of understanding the scientific history involved.
As I continued my research, another discovery underscored the need to include the history of animal protection in my work. In the same year as Polk’s article, Margaret Atwood (1972) had described the realistic animal story as “distinctively Canadian” (73). Her claim was that Canadians “as a whole” were uniquely sympathetic towards suffering animals (79). Yet, as I began to dig into historical government policies, the surprising limitations in Canada’s anti-cruelty laws presented a stark contrast to Atwood’s claims. Why was animal abuse classified as “property damage” in the Criminal Code? What had prevented the establishment of more comprehensive animal protection laws?
Between the Nature Fakers controversy and the legal status of animals as “property” in anti-cruelty legislation, my curiosity was consumed by these fascinating juxtapositions in the history of animal fiction, science, and law in Canada.
Between the Nature Fakers controversy and the legal status of animals as “property” in anti-cruelty legislation, my curiosity was consumed by these fascinating juxtapositions in the history of animal fiction, science, and law in Canada. My book Literature, Science, and Animal Advocacy in Canada grew out of my PhD research. As I filled in the historical gaps left from my thesis, a compelling story began to emerge. Across the eight chapters of my book, I could see the ways in which our ideas about other species change over time. Writers, scientists, advocates, conservationists, and policymakers were impacting each other in unexpected ways. Patterns in attitudes towards animals rippled throughout the chapters and the same questions would reoccur across the decades.
Literature, Science, and Animal Advocacy in Canada charts an interdisciplinary history from 1860 to 2010. To help tell this story, I organized the book chronologically and divided it into four parts. Each part covers a period of a few decades and contains a pair of chapters: one “Contexts” history chapter and one “Texts” chapter of literary analysis. Topics addressed in the “Contexts” chapters include histories of comparative psychology, ethology, and the study of animal minds; the cognitive revolution; developments in government wildlife conservation; changes to the anti-cruelty sections of the Canadian Criminal Code; and the animal rights movement. Alongside Seton and Roberts, the “Texts” chapters address a long list of other Canadian animal fiction writers, including Roderick Haig-Brown, Fred Bodsworth, Frederick Philip Grove, Marian Engel, Timothy Findley, Andy Russell, R. D. Lawrence, Barbara Gowdy, Yann Martel, and Margaret Atwood. Most of the writers on this list were also involved in conservation, animal advocacy, nature writing, and natural history. Through this historical perspective, my book also offers a model for understanding different approaches to animal representation in Canadian fiction.
Our ability to speak well on behalf of other species seems a crucial problem to solve for both science and animal protection.
When I began my PhD research over a decade ago, I was curious about the question of realistic animal representation. Attempting to write from a nonhuman perspective can be both captivating and contentious. In traditional literary studies, the sheer impossibility of the task would invite ridicule. Yet, our ability to speak well on behalf of other species seems a crucial problem to solve for both science and animal protection. Even though scientists, conservationists, and animal advocates need to find ways to speak about the experiences of other animals, the relationship between literature, science, and animal advocacy had not been researched. To me, it seemed inevitable that changes in the language we use to discuss nonhuman beings would impact these fields and, in turn, that they would impact each other. Literature, Science, and Animal Advocacy in Canada uncovers the history of these interactions with the hope that we can all work towards more effective communication for the benefit of other species.
Feature Image: Mountain Sheep / Chèvre de montagne. Albert Van, 1927. Credit: Albert Van / Library and Archives Canada / PA-
References
Atwood, Margaret. 1972. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi.
Polk, James. 1972. Lives of the Hunted. Canadian Literature. 53: 51-59.
Roosevelt, Theodore. 1907. Nature Fakers. Everybody’s Magazine. 17 (3 September): 427-430.
Whitehead, Hal. 2003. Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean. Chicago: University of Chicago
Candice Allmark-Kent