Wild About Writing

A sharp controversy has been running in Toronto about the management policies of the local Humane Society. In British Columbia there is alarm and fear over the increasing number of attacks on humans by cougars and bears.

Both represent aspects of our conflicted relations with animals. In Toronto, it’s said the management is autocratic and refuses to employ euthanasia when it’s in the best interest of ill animals to do so. In B.C., the incursion of humans into wilderness areas — as in the case of mountain-side housing that’s been caught in forest fires around Kelowna — is blamed for driving hungry animals to attack people.

These issues came home to me while listening to Erika Ritter discuss her new book, The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath (Key Porter) at the Leacock Summer Festival this past weekend.

Ritter, a well-known CBC broadcaster who is the author of a novel, The Hidden Life of Humans that’s written from the perspective of both a woman and a dog, offers a wide-ranging and almost exhausting array of anecdotes, insights and observations in what she calls “some paradoxes of human-animal relationships.”

Her appearance at Leacock was part of a fun morning billed as a Dog’s Breakfast, to which people were invited to bring their pooches. Deborah and I brought our Wheaten terrior, Morag. Here she is, with me on the left. Erika is third from right.

Ritter uses the legend of the dog and the serpent, a fable widely recounted in medieval societies, to get us into her book. It’s the story of a faithful dog left to guard the infant in the absence of the master.

On the master’s return, he finds the cradle overturned and the dog happily welcoming him with blood on his paws. He assumes it’s attacked the baby. But it hasn’t. It’s killed a serpent that was slithering into the cradle. Too late, he discovers the child unharmed. By then, he’s killed the dog in a frenzy of anger.

The fable is a reminder that our image of the Dog we love can turn suddenly into that of the Beast we fear.

Ritter goes on to discuss the use of animals in medical research, visits a home for “retired” medical primates in Quebec, and interviews an autistic academic at Colorado State University who has developed more humane procedures for slaughtering livestock. A Stairway to Heaven, she calls the ramp up which animals are led, quietly and orderly, to their ultimate dispatch, all the while shielded from foreknowledge of their fate.

Ritter as a human being and as a writer and an animal lover is very much in this book. She tells of the sad outcome of a friendly mutt that insisted on following her to school. She recalls the effect that reading The Yearing had on her as a child.

She also investigates the role of animals in religious sacrifice, and tells us how elephants, caught in the Roman Circus Maximus where they faced death at the hands of men armed with javelins, aroused the sympathy of a blood-thirsty crowd by their howls and lamentations.

As Ritter spoke, it became clear that her book is no mere emotional testament to the humanity of animals, or an endorsement of radical animal rights activism. Reading it last night, I found it a hard-headed and dispassionate assessment of our inability to behave very much differently than we always have toward non-human species, be they wild beasts, domesticated livestock, or companion animals.

Ritter says we’ve corrected unjust policies stemming from slavery, launched a women’s liberation movement, and made “grudging gestures” toward indigenous peoples.

There’s been “less uptick,” she writes, in “broadening the rights (of animals), assuming we could figure out how to do it.”

But we’ll treasure the dedication she put on Deborah’s copy of her book:

“For Morag – thanks for your respectful attendance and interest.”