World Without Animals

World Without Animals

by Teresa Barnett

Techo, the robotic puppy, Wikipedia

My brother Rob doesn’t believe in pets. “Unconscionable” is what he calls it, confining living beings within the walls of our human homes. I am busy doling out the medications that keep my two elderly cats alive, the ones for overactive thyroid and arthritis and blood pressure. For liver function and bowel inflammation and nausea. I nod absentmindedly, trying to remember which pills go in which compartment and whether the vitamin B shot is this week or next. Still, Rob’s words make me glance guiltily around my little apartment. We apartment owners are particularly culpable in this matter, we who offer our pets only a few small rooms and no regular access to the out of doors.

         As Rob talks, I think, too, of the parade of small creatures that passed through my childhood—the hamster confined to its treadmill; the palm-sized turtle stranded on a plastic island rimmed with seldom-changed tap water; the parakeet, all alone in its cage, not chirping once after we brought it home, living without sunshine or flight or companionship, and then, eventually, months later, suddenly and quietly dying. It was the sixties, and starter pets—turtles and parakeets and goldfish—were available in huge tanks and bins in Woolworth and Sprouse-Reitz. Parents scooped them up on a Saturday shopping spree like novelties for a Christmas stocking, took them home because the kids clamored for them, because to unleash childhood’s heedless energies on a living thing was somehow a way of teaching responsibility.

         And meanwhile I am planting my legs around the bulk of my twenty-pound cat, Jasper, to hold him fast while I pop his upper jaw open and toss two big pills far back in his throat. His eyes flare wide, looking helplessly into mine, but he doesn’t struggle as I hold his muzzle shut to make sure he gags the medicine down. “But I take good care of my pets,” I say, releasing Jasper.

         And Rob shrugs, “Good care? How is it that you’re the one who gets to decide what good care means for another species? Those cats didn’t ask to move in here. They didn’t sign on for all those pills.”
                                                                

                                                                

But for now, my caring is through, and I plunk myself down in the rocking chair. And my older cat, Spice, who has been pacing restlessly, waiting for a warm lap to appear, promptly jumps on up. She nudges her head against my hand until I begin to rake my fingers back and forth under her chin. “You make it sound so . . .” I search for the right word, and it bursts out with more intensity than I had intended: “Exploitative. But you’re ignoring the relationship between animals and human beings.”

        And at this Rob laughs outright. “Relationship,” he says. “You and I have a relationship. Beings who speak the same language, have a common culture, beings who are on an equal footing, they have a relationship. Owner and chattel, what basis for a relationship is that?” He notices my face, and his voice softens. “I mean, really now, from what I’ve seen, what a pet owner wants from a pet is pretty basic. Cover it in soft, strokable fur, add a purr, wouldn’t one of those robotic pets do just as well? No, better—it wouldn’t pee outside the litter box or shred the couch.” He nods significantly in the direction of my living room furniture with the tufts of stuffing poking through the fabric. “You could program it to greet you at the door. To rub against your leg,” he adds. Which is a low blow, since I have confided to him that rubbing up against a leg—that quintessential cat behavior, that undeniable sign of feline affection toward a human—is something that neither of my cats ever does.

         I think of the portable pet fad of the 1990s: those digital “pets” on a black and white screen that you could carry around on your keychain. Of AIBO, the robotic dog manufactured by SONY that could fetch balls, beg for treats, and learn new voice commands, recycling its owners’ attentions into all the signs of a human/animal bond. (“AIBO loves me. I love AIBO,” one child tells researcher Sherry Turkle in her interviews on people’s interactions with their electronic pets.) I think too about Philip K. Dick’s science fiction classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In that novel, animals—the whole churning, buzzing lot of them—have been extinguished in a nuclear war. And the human characters are so acutely conscious of the loss that they have all resorted to owning meticulously fashioned mechanical replicas. Which, when I read the book, I had taken to mean not that we want our pets to be robots, but that our desire to surround ourselves with living beings is so compelling that even a simulated animal is preferable to no animal at all.

         “A mechanical cat!” I say, trying to lighten the mood. “Where do I sign up? And what will I do with all my new free time?” And briefly I think about how a robotic Jasper could be programmed not to howl outside the neighboring cat’s door every time he is let out into the apartment courtyard. How an automated Spice, who the vet says has developed dementia, would not be prone to peeing on the comforter. Which only reminds me that the comforter is down in the wash for the third time this week and that I’d best fetch it up before bedtime if I don’t want my own blankets drenched in the night.

         And still, even as I make a mental note of that comforter, I think—I can’t help it—of the sociologist Leslie Irvine’s definition of a pet. The pet, she writes, is a “minimal animal—never aggressive or sexual, always cheerful, quiet, playful and happy.” The pet, in other words, would be better played by an assemblage of electronic circuitry than by any creature of flesh and blood.
                                                                

                                                                

Still, Rob’s assurance sticks in my craw. I know I don’t want to live in Philip Dick’s animal-less world. I know I don’t want AIBO. And on this one I am fighting back. “Oh, come on,” I say, “you’re missing the point. The whole idea of having a pet is that it’s alive.”

         But to my surprise, my brother now nods in emphatic agreement. “Exactly,” he says, slapping his hand on the table with a crack that sends Spice scurrying out of my lap and under a chair. “We need them to be alive. Because the point of a pet is that it looks back. We want the recognition in their eyes, the gaze of a living being directed at us. But we don’t want to be accountable to that aliveness. We don’t want to acknowledge them as beings in their own right.”

         But by now I am past listening to Rob’s words. I am thinking of the tenderness I feel for my little cats. For their alien, whiskered visages. For their shapely skulls with the soft, pliable fur that works back and forth when you massage their heads. I think of how Jasper’s long, slightly cross-eyed face, appears so gravely attentive when he looks up at me. How every day I awake to the feathery touch of Spice’s whiskers on my face, her fetid animal breath mingling with mine.
                                                                

                                                                

After Rob leaves, I let Jasper out to roam the courtyard, as he has been demanding to do for the past half an hour. But when, yet again, he launches into that long, lonesome wailing, I go running out to fetch him in. And when he sees me coming, Jasper stops mid-howl, turns, and scampers up the stairs and back inside. It pains me to see how instantaneously he recognizes my intentions, how quickly he gallops up those stairs. Testament, if testament were needed, to how often I have put an end to his outings this way, to how much he dislikes being scooped up and lugged inside. “I’m sorry, Jazzy,” I say as I follow him up the stairs, offering my airy human syllables as compensation for whatever it is a cat desires. “You know it’s too late to be disturbing the neighbors that way.” But Jasper pays me no mind, just wanders from room to room, emitting desultory, deep-throated yowls.

         The bioethicist Jessica Pierce proposes a thought experiment: Open all the cages in the pet store, she says, and see which animals would cast their lot with humans and which would simply walk away. Dogs, she guesses, would pretty certainly stay on. They’ve been domesticated for millennia; their behaviors and biology have developed in tandem with ours. But parakeets, iguanas, turtles, goldfish, guinea pigs, all of them, Pierce says, would head right on out the door. Those animals, she says, may have been taken captive by us, but they do not live with us in any mutual way. They do not take pleasure in their contact with human beings. And cats? The jury, she says, is out on cats. Cats might see us as something other than captors; they might, she surmises, find interactions with humans advantageous enough to hang around.

         Mentally I try to insert myself into that pet store, to weigh the options through the mind of a cat: On the one hand, the assets of domesticity—protection from the elements, food ready at hand, and catnip and oat grass on demand. And on the other, the overwhelming dangers, the shortened life and injuries and diseases, but also sunlight and air, the chance to form relationships with one’s own species, the ability to roam at will. What is it that an animal wants? And what answer can you come up with that is not just stubborn human wishfulness through and through?
                                                                

                                                                

These thoughts about what a creature requires take me right back to one particular moment in Do Androids Dream. It is the scene in which, having ventured into the post-nuclear wasteland, the protagonist, Rick Deckard, stumbles upon an actual living, breathing animal. A desert toad. “An animal, he said to himself. And his heart lugged under the excessive load, the shock of recognition. I know what it is, he realized; I’ve never seen one before but I know it from the old nature films they show on Government TV.” So, full of wonder, of expectation, he hauls the toad home. And there his wife—savvier to the possibilities for the miraculous than he—flips it over and reveals, hidden in its soft underbelly, the little panel that controls its mechanical parts.

         It is a scene that, as the passage says, “lugs” at my heart. The moment when the animal, a sentient other, appears. The moment when it is hollowed out, reduced to a human contrivance. The unspeakable absence of the living being there at the heart of the man-made machine.

         Still, however wrenching the revelation, Deckard also finds himself on familiar ground. His wife proceeds to order up sand and a puddle of water for their toad to live in; she buys buzzing electronic flies for it to eat. Efficiently, unceremoniously, they set about making it into a pet. What you really wanted, after all, was just a little movement, a little breathing, so to speak, in a box comfortably near at hand. Something that will not jump too far, will not bite, will maybe eventually even submit to letting you stroke its rough and incommodious head.
                                                                

                                                                

So here we are, my nonmechanical cats and I. Jasper comes bounding up to me and sets to slurping and gobbling at my fingers—who knows why or what it means to him. Spice settles into the couch pillow next to me, offering only the back of her tight-furred little head. They are alive. It is what is so tantalizing about them. They are alive. It is why we have fashioned the category of pet. They are alive. Unfathomable beings, existences on the planet like my own. They are alive. I do not know what to do with that inconvenient fact. Here we are, human and cats, in our incommensurate lives. They are alive, they are alive, they are alive.