Speaking For The Unspoken

Squire Gordon, Mrs. Gordon, James Howard, John Manly, Blomefield Children, Joe Green, Earshire Park Mistress, Mr. York, Lady Anne, Reuben Smith, Mr. Barry, Jerry Barker, Polly, Harry Dolly, Governor Grant, Jakes Nicholas Skinner, Farmer Thoroughgood, Ellen and Lavinaia Blomefield and many groomers are all humans that are pebbled throughout Beauty’s life as  an owner, a caretaker, or simply a player in the ups and downs of his life. The way that beauty is tossed around from place to place with little to no regard for his feelings, could be compared to a car being traded between dealers, a sandwich being traded at lunch or stocks being exchanged in New York, but I find that the most direct and equivalent correlation of the trafficking of Black Beauty in this novel is to a foster child being passed around to different homes throughout their lives. 

A foster child is taken away from their parents either because they are unable to care for them or because circumstances force the child to be taken from their original home and placed under the care of a guardian.  The child, like Beauty as no choice as to which foster home they are sent to, nor do they have any say of how they are treated in those homes. Each of the humans listed above were involved in Beauty’s life for a small amount of her life and impacted her emotions. He became afraid of bearing reins because her mistress at Earlshall insisted that he wear them while Jerry Barker allowed him to see the depths of a loving family and long for that love for himself. Similar to many foster parents, there were some humans in Beauty’s journey that were loving and desired for him to be happy.  Ginger and Sir Oliver are the equivalents of foster siblings to Beauty. 

They each have their scars and marks from their previous owners. Sir Oliver had his tail chopped off simply because his owner thought it was stylish while Ginger has a bad temper because she was abused by her previous owners. Beauty also had good influence from her ‘foster parents’, such as Mr. Barker. Mr. Barker protected the interests of Beauty because he took ownership of his feelings. Because Beauty could not speak, Mr. Barker took special interest in the desires of Beauty, as the sole being that could be a voice for those with no verbal voice. “Well, Polly, you may say that my cab will be otherwise engaged; I should not like to have it pasted over with their great bills, and as to make Jack and Captain race about to the public-houses to bring up half-drunken voters, why I think ‘twould be an insult to the horses. No, I shan’t do it’” (42). When humans such as Mr. Barker are involved in an aninmal, such as Beauty’s, life, they set the standards for how all animals should be treated. Animals are essentially a prisoner within themselves in a world based upon the spoken language. When humans are not attentive to the animals needs or desires, they will be blind to them. “I am ashamed to see how men go on that ought to know better. An election is a very serious thing ; at least it ought to be, and every man ought to vote according to his conscience and let his neighbour do the same” (42).  Each person ought to consider the lives of all beings around themselves. Just like a child, an animal is ruled by those of authority to them. Sewell used the powerful tactic of voice to annunciate the importance of humbleness in authority and care for others. Simply because an individual is comfortable in their place, each is not to their own. Animals are born without voice and I agree with Sewell in that it is time to take the initiative for the animals and speak for them.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Bearingrein.jpg
http://www.jewel-images.com/blog/?p=643

Ignorant

According to the official website, Cirque Du Soleil is a flashy, “dramatic mix of circus arts and street entertainment” while a circus itself publically entails cotton candy, clowns and nothing other than fun. It is what goes on behind the scenes of these ostentatious performances that is atrociously and conspicuously hidden behind the curtains and the smiling face-painted clowns. Circuses make their profits from the customer’s satisfaction in the show. A customer’s satisfaction comes from seeing the unusual, witnessing the seemingly impossible and making believe what they never thought they would.  Flexible humans, trapeze artists and performing animals are usually the highlights. The humans in the shows choose to use their own talents to earn themselves their livelihood, while the animals are forced to act in specific ways with absolutely no benefit to themselves except for the possibility of not getting abused for tor disobeying. As we saw in Earthlings, human elephant trainers in the circus clan are emotionally and physically abusive to their students. They yell and hit the elephants simply because they can and they feel superior over them, which is an interesting concept to me because the elephant is so much larger physically than the human. Animals that are taken on the road with circuses are treated with little to no regard to their health by their caretakers. 

These animals are meant to be living in the wild and when they are held in small cargo trains for weeks at a time, they develop captivity-induced health problems that are linked to lack of proper exercise and prolonged chaining around their necks and ankles (according to http://www.animalrightsflorida.org/Circus.htm). In Sewell’s Black Beauty, Beauty is taken from her world of natural kindness and thrown into a new world with complete and utter ignorange and carelessness of his sufferings and pains all alone, with “No other creature…” besides the misogynistic human (27).

. Beauty is referred to as a steam engine and is not assigned a single attribute of a living species. “…if you don’t want to lame your horse, you must look sharp and get them out quickly. This foot is very much bruised…if I might advise, sir, you had better drive him gently for a while; the foot is a good deal hurt, and the lameness will not go off directly. ‘…When he was gone, my driver began to flop the reins about, and whip the harness, by which  I understood that I was to go on, which of course I did, glad that the stone was gone, but still in a good deal of pain. This was the sort of experience we job-horses often came in for”(28). Although beauty got a rock stuck in her shoe and was clearly injured, her driver continued to push him, disregarding any pain that he may have because the driver simply desires to press forward. Animals that are under the control of ignorant humans forces them to shape their own mindset in order to handle their awful circumstances. “There was a great deal of bargaining; of running up and beating down , and if a horse may speak his mind so far as he understands, I should say there were more lies told, and more trickery at the horse fair, than a clever man could give an account of” (32). Sewell portrays Beauty as having superior intelligence to the abusive humans. Animals like Beauty are put through outrageous pain and sorrow because their masters are selfish and boorish to the idea that animals have physical and mental capacities equal to or superior to many individuals of the human race.

 http://www.animalrightsflorida.org/Circus.htm

http://allianceforanimalrights.webs.com/elephant-ent-13.jpg

http://www.mpimages.net/mp/compressed/promotional/young_black_beauty1.jpg

Running Potential

   While delving into a book, it is not usually expected to be reading from the perspective of something other than a human, yet that exactly what we get  in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. Sewell presents animal cruelty from the point of view of the mistreated rather than like most other author’s who speak from an objective view, or from the view of the abuser themselves. When animal cruelty is spoken about through the lips of an animal rights human, although they side with the animal, they are still of the same species as the ones imparting the injustice and therefore lose a little of their credibility as an animal advocate. There is no way that a human could fully understand the same feelings or emotions that an animal may have during cruel actions. It is the fact that animals are subjugated to horrific acts that makes it so difficult for humans to use a sympathetic imagination towards the animal’s feelings. “…[W]ith cruelty and oppression it is everybody’s business to interfere when they see it…” but what about for the millions of humans who never see it (20)? In this novel,  Sewell does as best as any human could do to put herself in the hooves of a horse who is subjected to abuse by the human species. Sewell does an excellent job of getting to the soul of the humans and animals alike by allowing Black Beauty to have animal and human friends as well as animal and human enemies. Sewell not only used this novel to put herself in the place of the horses, but also to let each of her readers get a small taste of what animal cruelty can look and feel like. 

Sewell gave each horse in her novel a voice and a place. Each horse was a character in its own with a personality, characteristics and vices. The horses are given human traits to make it easier for the human readers to relate. “Merrylegs could not be resisted, so we broke off our long conversation, and got up our spirits by munching some very sweet apples which lay scattered on the grass” (10). According to the average human, animals cannot speak or feel, much less carry on a conversation and have relationships. The difference that many humans place between themselves and animals is that they can perceive themselves in a place and that they can feel passion and  build bonds with others of their kind or even interspecies. In Black Beauty these horses passionately feel and emotionally act on their ideas and emotions.

   Humans do not understand the ways of animals, how they think and how they act are so foreign to us because we do not have the same form of communication. “[Ginger] did bite James once pretty sharp, but John said, ‘Try her with kindness,’ and instead of punishing me as I expected, James came to me with his arm bound up, and brought me a bran mash and stroked me; and I have never snapped at him since, and I won’t either” (8). This novel encourages acts of kindness towards animals and discourages the instinctual acts of superiority such as using bearing reigns. Sewell embraces the relationship between human and animal as something with so much room to grow and succeeds in making her readers aware of this relationship potential. Animal instinct is to love and embrace, what is human's instinct?

Jainism vs. Christianity

What was the deciding factor of the differences between humans and animals? Do humans think they are superior over animals because we walk on two legs rather than four or because we speak with articulate words while they speak with signals or sounds? According to Jainism and Ecology, “religion distinguishes the human species from all others, just as human presence on earth distinguishes the ecology of our planet fro other places in the unknown universe. Religious life and the earth’s ecology are inextricably linked, organically related” (810). 

Many humans, specifically westerners, believe that we, as a species, have reign over the animal species because we were given this right by God himself. “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things” (Genesis 9:3, 809). God may have blessed humans with animals as their companions, but He also told his sons “…the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth…”(Genesis 9:2, 809). I believe that we were given animals as a gift, yet as a species we have completely taken this gift for granted and taken advantages of the seeming superiority that we have with our brain capacities and exponential technological advances. The “task…of revaluing nature so as to prevent its destruction marks a significant new phase in religious thought”. Religion is not a single decision made on a whim by a single person. All religions are traditional waves that have been shaped and twisted from some original idea to what is practices in today’s society. Expanding the religious realm of human-animal relations will  take more than simply a few advocates speaking out on the animals’ behalves. Religion is one of the most immovable, stubborn theologies on the planet. In order for a movement to happen involving religion would take a radical movement with explicatory action. Jainsim is “an ancient religion of India, also now found in other countries around the world, that prescribes a path of peace and non-violence towards all living beings” (Wikipedia Jainism). A part of Jainsim called Ahimsa is a “non injury, of course, [and] implies non-killing. But, non-injury is not merely non-killing. In its comprehensive meaning, Ahimsa or non-injury means entire abstinence from causing any pain or harm whatsoever to any living creature either by thought, word or deed. Non-injury requires a harmless mind, mouth, and hand” (815).

 The crisis and cause of many major wars has its source at the bounds of religion. The difference between the non-kill ideas of Jainism and the non-killing ideas of Christianity are vast. While non-kill means not killing any living thing to Jainists, non-kill to Christians means not killing another human being. Killing animals is okay for Christians because God has given them animals as a means to nurture themselves and survive while Jainists find other means of nutrition as this is what is required to avoid killing or hurting any living thing, emotionally or physically. How can two religions that are so different come together on such a contradictory idea? According to the Neo-Confucian Manifesto, “such crises have their origin in man’s inability to control his cultural products and inventions…it is clear that the formation of a world civilization is contingent upon co-operation on a high plane among the various cultures of the world” 832). I agree with this notion that in order to make a difference in the world and in order to collide two very different religions, people must cooperate or else no progress would be made. Christian and Jainist ideas on eating animals is contingent on their respective religious leaders and this is likely not to change unless eyes are opened to the reality of the others’ thought origins. For these two separate worlds to converge and even align, there must be major cooperation and sympathetic imagination must be utilized in order to fully understand one another.

http://www.pluralism.org/resources/statistics/jainism_distribution.gif

http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/churchbodies.gif

http://www.mumbaikar.com/en/media/get/20090825_mahavir.gif 

Differences Nearly Never Converging

Figure 1: Human and animal brains are more similar than the average human knows.

Humans walk on two legs while animals walk on four. Humans have hair while animals have fur. Humans have the capacity to think and acknowledge that they are thinking while animals have the capacity to think and to immediately act on what they are thinking. “Animals are born, are sentient and are mortal. In these things they resemble man. In their superficial anatomy – less in their deep anatomy – in their habits, in their time in they physical capacities, they differ from man. They are both alike and unlike” (795). There are so many ways in which the man can be seen as advantageous over the animal. The man has technology and higher level thinking but the animal has instinct that man has lost most sensitivity to due to these same recent technological advancements that give them the false sense of superiority. As I watch to myself type this paper, I can’t help but notice my lack of commitment to either species. I refer to animal and human with the same term, “them”. I am obviously a human, but what makes a human so human besides physical and mental traits? “Between two men the two abysses are, in principle, bridged by language…language allows men to reckon with each other as with themselves…whereas in animals feat is a response to signal, in men it is endemic” (795). Through extremely in depth studies, experiments and analyses, it has been found that there are many biological similarities between humans and animals. From the eyes of a child, it seems that this strict line separating humans and animals disappears into the realm of invisibility. I would assume that every person found a childhood friend in a dog, cat or fish. It is not until these children grow up and are immersed into the cultural pull so society that they are swayed into believing that the differences that humans and animals do not share separate them into inferior and superior beings. “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species”(796). Like children, animals do not differential humans as a species of particular danger or dislike. They understand that we are different, not constituting different with any negative connotation, just as different.

Figure 2: Animals were used by royalty as symbols are higher class. 

   Just as a college roommate shares a space with us, animals share a space with us on this planet. It is a shame that animals are merely seen as a source of food, entertainment or trouble, rather than the beautiful beings that they were created to be. In the early centuries of the world, “…admirers valued these exotic menageries as marvels, not because of any fondness for their inmates…but [most] served mainly as toys or badges of rank, and whatever affection befell on them neither extended to other animals nor was mimicked by the lower orders of society” (801). Since the beginning of time, humans have found themselves to prevail over animals simply because they had the tools to do so. “presumption is our natural and original disease…’Tis by the same vanity of imagination that he equals himself to God, attributes to himself divine qualities, withdraws and separates himself from the crowd of other creatures, cuts out the shares of the animals, his fellows and companions, and distributes to them portions of faculties and force” (835). As humans, we act as if we completely understand the differences between man and animal, that we can fathom the lack of feeling that they have and their lack of intelligence. We will never be able to comprehend the thoughts of animals or appreciate their levels of thinking because on a level of reality, we can never sincerely empathize with them because we are different than them. We are not animals just as they are not humans. There are similarities, of course, but there are also differences that make them distinct from us and visa versa. “Just because of this distinctness, however, an animal’s life =, never to be confused with a man’s can be seen to run parallel to his. Only in death do the two parallel lines converge” and only then might we have the total capacity to understand and empathize with each others differences (796).  

https://files.nyu.edu/ahk291/public/Standard%20Poodles%20%20Famous%20Poodles.html

http://www.solarnavigator.net/human_brain.htm