Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Only the Animals, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Interconnectedness of Humans and Animals
Animals and War
Human Cruelty
Kindness and Compassion
Summary
Analysis
The dolphin begins her letter to Sylvia Plath by saying she’d like to get the story of her death out of the way. The Navy trained her to act and then deal with it—though she died because she couldn’t deal with it. The other animals in the collection don’t have such a ridiculous history of communicating with humans. It gets more ridiculous every time dolphins perform tricks for fish, or scientists try to make dolphins into serious subjects. So when the dolphin was asked to tell her story, she refused. She only agreed when someone suggested she center her story around a human writer and what that person’s writing means to her. Initially, she agreed to participate if she could write in the third person, but “I” is irresistible.
While all the animal narrators in Only the Animals are dead—they are all retelling their life stories, which end in their deaths—the dolphin is the first to admit that upfront in her narration. She implies that although humans have been interacting with dolphins for a long time, people still tend to misinterpret what dolphins have to say. This is why the dolphin initially didn’t want to talk; she didn’t want readers to misconstrue her words. With this, the dolphin suggests that people are at fault for not listening to animals when they try to communicate with them.
Themes
The dolphin began by reading Ted Hughes’s work. He’s Plath’s ex-husband, and the dolphin thought he might inspire her. As the dolphin reads Hughes’s animal poems, though, she realizes she interpreted them incorrectly when she read them the first time. While she once thought he was trying to understand humans through writing about animals, she now knows he was trying to “justify the animal in the human.” He was the sort to say that it’s perfectly fine to spend one’s days fishing and having sex—they’re all animals, after all.
This passage revisits the idea from the very first section of the book that animals make humans look worse by comparison. But Hughes uses animals to justify behavior one might consider uncultured for humans but normal for animals.
Themes
Hughes justified hunting by noting that, according to Jung, therapy entails putting humans back in touch with their primitive animal origins. In the dolphin’s opinion, that’s just an excuse for humans to behave poorly. She doesn’t have anything against bad behavior, but she finds that males, both humans and dolphins, go to great lengths to justify their bad behavior. This drives the dolphin nuts—females behave badly too, but they die of guilt because they don’t have the ego needed to justify their behavior.
The dolphin makes it clear that there’s not much separating humans from dolphins. The differences between the sexes, in fact, are more meaningful than those between species.
Themes
The dolphin turns to the animal poems Hughes wrote for kids. He believed they’d make money—but all of them are inappropriate for children, except for “Moon-Whales.” The dolphin thought she’d tell her story from the point of view of Hughes’s moon-whale, but it didn’t seem right. When the dolphin turned to Plath’s poems and journals to get a feminine perspective, she then figured out what she resented about Hughes: human women don’t need to be reminded they’re animals, so why do men keep shouting that they’re animals like they’ve just discovered alchemy? Men think they’re “special” animals because they ask whether they’re human or animal. The dolphin wants to ask if they can use echolocation to map the ocean floor, or scan beings to know who’s pregnant or what they ate for lunch.
The dolphin affirms that humans and dolphins are different in many ways (humans can’t, for instance, use echolocation the way dolphins can), but she stresses that just because the species are different doesn’t mean one is superior to the other. But human men, the dolphin explains, tend to think they’re “special” compared to other animals. It’s worth noting that though the dolphin breaks her argument down along gender lines, the collection on the whole suggests that human women are just as capable of men as acting superior to animals (Evelyn from “Red Peter” in particular).
Themes
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The dolphin thinks human men shouldn’t be questioning whether they’re human or animal and should instead ask different questions: why do they treat people as humans and sometimes as animals, and why do they treat animals like animals and sometimes like people? The dolphin floated this with her new friend, the soul of Elizabeth Costello, and Costello insisted that it’s too easy to mock Hughes for being so masculine. Writers, Costello suggested, teach readers lots of things, and suggested the dolphin focus on what she wants to say to Plath. Costello also pointed out that the dolphin is avoiding talking about her death.
Elizabeth Costello is a fictional character created by J. M. Coetzee. In Coetzee’s book The Lives of Animals, Costello attends a literary conference and speaks about animal rights—and specifically mentions the Nazis’ push for animal rights, like in the “Hundstage” section of Only the Animals. She also discusses the idea that humans can understand animals by writing about them. With this, the collection situates itself again in a much larger body of literature in which authors consider how animals experience the world and are treated—and through doing so, create empathy in their readers.
Themes
The dolphin is finding her death a hard subject—she wants to write to Plath not because of how they both died, but because of their connection as mothers. She loves the parts of Plath’s journals and poems when she talks about mothering, and how it enriched her identity as a writer. Plath didn’t commit suicide because the mundane overtook her—indeed, she once described her priorities as “Books & Babies & Beef Stew.” She vowed to write until she got in touch with her deep self, then have babies, and then speak more deeply. Plath’s “deep self” connected with animal truths that Hughes could only dream of.
In making it clear that she isn’t interested in Plath because of how they both died, the dolphin implies that like Plath, she died by suicide. But the dolphin suggests that it does Plath a disservice to diminish her to just her cause of death. Rather, it’s important to celebrate Plath’s entire life, which includes her role as a mother.
Themes
Plath, the dolphin says, didn’t need to use symbols to describe her experience as a female animal. Hughes often seemed jealous of animals’ energy—but women have that animal energy when they’re mothers. Maybe if Hughes had watched Plath more instead of looking for symbolic animals, he might’ve noticed that and been a better husband. The dolphin apologizes for getting irritated instead of saying what she’s supposed to say. Now, she’ll explain how she lived and died.
The dolphin proposes that women and female animals aren’t all that different in part because they go through similar changes and processes when they become mothers. Her irritation with Hughes suggests that it’s frustrating when people like Hughes ignore what seem like obvious facts. To the dolphin, it’s clear Plath is an animal—so it’s offensive that Hughes has to go to such lengths to look for animal traits in people instead of paying attention to his wife.
Themes
The dolphin is born into captivity in 1973. Her mother was one of the first dolphins in the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program and encouraged the dolphin to be proud of her role. When her mother was first recruited, the officers had just realized dolphins could fetch objects and return to their handlers. A dolphin named Tuffy was the first to carry a message to aquanauts living underwater for 30 days. The dolphin’s mother hated how the Navy named their dolphins; it seems stupid to name such smart animals things like Tuffy. She believed that the Navy thought the silly names would make it seem like the dolphins aren’t real combatants to the public, even though the program was classified during the Cold War. So the dolphins could’ve had proper combat names—but instead, the dolphin was called Sprout, and her mother was Blinky.
Though these officers discover in the 1970s that dolphins can fetch objects, dolphins have been working with people for centuries in various capacities. On another note, the dolphin suggests that giving dolphins such silly names is a way for humans to exert control over the animals. The dolphin finds her name offensive, but she has no way to push back against her naming.
Themes
Blinky’s cohort trained to protect assets by alerting their handlers to enemy divers. In 1970, she and four others worked in Vietnam and like most military parents, she never told Sprout anything about her tour. She did speak about the worst part, which was being transported. Sprout’s daughter always laughed at this—by now, 10 years after Sprout’s death, Sprout is sure her daughter moves around the world in a fancy carrier. The technologies develop faster than humans know what to do with them and eventually “outstrip men morally,” and then they make other animals go along with it.
Sprout’s aside about technology points back to Plautus’s story, where the Soviets and the Americans sent various animals to space as “proxy astronauts,” and most of the animals died. The animals had no choice but to participate, and likewise it seemed the human scientists felt they had no choice but to keep pressing on with their work.
Themes
When Blinky returns from Vietnam, she’s allowed her choice of mate and gives birth to Sprout. Blinky and the other female dolphins raise Sprout, along with their human trainer, Officer Bloomington. Sprout loves him deeply; Blinky is jealous of their bond. The men who trained Blinky’s generation were so worried about rumors concerning the Soviets’ trained animals that they treated the dolphins as subordinates. Officer Bloomington is different. He starts working with Sprout in the late 1970s, when he’s only 21. One of his college professors worked in John C. Lilly’s Caribbean lab that conducted research on dolphin-human communication.
In talking about the Soviet dolphins, Sprout suggests that people are sometimes motivated to be cruel to animals because they fear other people. They may have thought that cruelty was the only way to get the animals to obey, something that Bloomington proves isn’t true. In real life, Lilly is best known for his work studying psychedelic drugs and the nature of consciousness, though he did study dolphins.
Themes
Bloomington thinks Lilly is outlandish and a bit creepy, but he often reads Lilly’s books to Sprout to further her education. He once organizes a screening of The Day of the Dolphin for the trainee dolphins (they think it’s hilarious; the dolphin actors say rude things about the human actors). Later, when The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is published, Officer Bloomington regularly reads Chapter 23 to Sprout. It’s a short chapter about how dolphins are intelligent enough to know that the Earth is ending. Officer Bloomington always laughs at the dolphins’ final message before they leave the planet: “So long and thanks for all the fish,” which they convey by jumping through a hoop whistling the “Star Spangled Banner.”
The Day of the Dolphin was based on John C. Lilly’s life. And though it’s a serious movie, Sprout makes it clear that with a different perspective, it’s funny. After all, they understand what the dolphins are saying. With the mention of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Sprout’s story shows again that communication between people and animals is complicated. People, Sprout and these other works suggest, are comically bad at listening to their animal companions. Only the Animals seeks to remedy this by portraying animals who are able to use human speech and therefore, appear more sympathetic and relatable.
Themes
Every morning, Officer Bloomington takes Sprout to the training area. She learns to wiggle overboard and then back onto a boat, to fetch a Frisbee, and then to identify things on the sea floor like mines or dropped equipment. Bloomington knows that Sprout understands a lot about what’s going on around her—and he wants to earn the “moral right” to give her commands by treating her like a conscious being. It’s a partnership, and Bloomington often says that they have an “I/thou relationship.” Sprout thinks that in another life, he would’ve used his skills to be a researcher rather than a trainer. He figures out how the dolphins communicate with clicks—and even identifies each dolphin’s signature whistle, which is how they name themselves.
Bloomington’s behavior shows that in rare circumstances, people do understand how animals communicate and know how to respond. Through his actions, he models how people should treat animals the way the collection as a whole does: as sentient, feeling beings with thoughts and desires of their own. Bloomington shows the dolphins respect by learning their naming whistles. However, this isn’t something Sprout can relay to readers in book format, so readers can’t honor her in the same way.
Themes
By the time Sprout completes her training, the Navy has five marine mammal teams. They put her on a dolphin-only team that finds and tags mines on the ocean floor. Several of the other teams include sea lions and beluga whales, but Sprout sees little of them. The humans seem to prefer it this way—the animals might come up with plans or tricks.
Sprout proposes that inherent to the human-animal relationship is the idea that people seldom trust the animals fully. While Bloomington does because he spends his days with the dolphins, those who don’t see them as full beings instead treat them with suspicion.
Themes
Sprout is deployed first to the Persian Gulf in 1987 to fight in the Iran-Iraq war. She’s thrilled to be part of a mission, and she feels closer to Bloomington than she ever has. She happily alerts him when she discovers mines. The team loses two dolphins on that mission when Iranians turn their machine guns on them. The Iranians also kill several wild dolphins, which devastates Bloomington. He tries to record their deaths officially, but his superiors block him. They worry about a public outcry.
Bloomington is devastated with the Iranians kill the wild dolphins, which highlights his deep compassion for the animals. The dolphins’ deaths stress that no animal can escape a human conflict—even wild animals suffer in wartime. Bloomington’s superiors seem to recognize this and understand that a lot of people will be upset if they learn of the dolphins’ deaths. But with this, the book implicitly poses a moral question: why are people not upset that dolphins serve in the war at all and only get upset when wild ones get caught in the crossfire?
Themes
After the mission, the dolphins return to San Diego. The Navy allows Sprout to breed. Unlike her own mother, Sprout constantly apologizes to her daughter for birthing her into captivity. But it turns out that Sprout’s daughter has a choice in this regard. When she’s born in 1993, the dolphin program is being downsized. Unwilling to see the dolphins sold to aquariums or languish for years until they can get the permits to release them into the wild, Bloomington releases a group of dolphins into San Francisco Bay. He levels with them and tells them exactly what’s going on. Blinky and a few other dolphins choose to stay in the wild—the only dolphins ever to not return to their handlers. But Sprout and her daughter, Officer, return.
Here, Bloomington again demonstrates his compassion for the dolphins. He treats them like equals who should have agency over their own lives. This is potentially risky for Bloomington—by turning the dolphins loose, he prioritizes their wellbeing over the Navy’s, since they’d presumably make some money from selling the dolphins.
Themes
Soon after, the Navy decides to purchase a dolphin from the Soviets, and his handler is going to come too. Kostya arrives with Officer Mishin to be the lead dolphin/handler pair in a classified training program. To Sprout’s surprise, Bloomington becomes tongue-tied around Mishin. Though he receives instructions to learn Mishin’s training techniques, he soon discovers that she trains dolphins as gently as he does. Mishin teases him for believing the silly rumors about the Soviets, and Sprout observes Bloomington’s shy, fearful smile with pity. She can tell that Mishin doesn’t care for him, and the dolphins don’t want to share him.
Here, Bloomington and Mishin discover that despite being on opposite sides of a major conflict, their lives and methods aren’t all that different. For Bloomington, this gives him the impetus to fall in love. For Sprout, though, this has a clear drawback, as it would mean that the dolphins are no longer the center of his world.
Themes
Kostya remains in isolation for a while before the sale. He spends a while with the bachelor dolphins because he’s moody and aggressive, but he soon joins the females. To their disappointment, he also confirms that he hasn’t participated in frightening missions. But the Navy superiors believe that Kostya is trained to set sea mines, blow up enemy submarines, or that he knows how to tag enemy divers with a lethal device. Mishin denies this and insists dolphins won’t hurt or kill people—they’d refuse to obey those commands. Bloomington backs her up, but the superiors aren’t convinced.
Both Bloomington and Mishin—who spend their days with dolphins and know them intimately—insist that it’s not in a dolphin’s nature to kill people. But since the Navy superiors don’t have such close contact with the dolphins, they’re suspicious of them and frame them as unthinking, programmable machines as opposed to living beings.
Themes
The higher-ups decide that it’s time for Sprout’s unit to learn to detect enemy swimmers. In the past dolphins just alerted handlers to an enemy diver’s presence, but now those in charge decide to train a special dolphin team to tag divers with a locating device. Bloomington and Mishin refuse to participate at first, but they give in when they realize the Navy will go ahead with it anyway. The superiors insist that the dolphins won’t ever use these skills in conflict; it’s just about learning new skills. Both Sprout and Kostya are selected for the program, so they travel to a Navy research base on San Clemente Island.
Bloomington and Mishin are put in a difficult place here. They seem afraid, as Sprout noted earlier, that the Navy will put this training to use despite the ethical concerns. This training also seems like the first step in training dolphins to kill divers with lethal devices. With this, Sprout shows that the slide to immorality and cruelty can be a slow process, one that people don’t always recognize when it’s happening.
Themes
The island changes Bloomington and Mishin’s relationship over the months that they’re there. Mishin starts to return Bloomington’s affections. Bloomington is unaware and Mishin never voices her feelings, but Kostya and Sprout know from their scans—and they’re extremely jealous. They each adore their handler and don’t want to share, even though they know it’s normal for people to fall in love. They try to fall in love with each other, but it doesn’t work. This is also the first time that Sprout is away from Officer for such a long time, and she thinks of her constantly.
As Kostya and Sprout are overcome by jealousy while watching their handlers fall in love, and Sprout so deeply misses her daughter, the book again underscores that humans and animals share many of the same experiences and emotions.
Themes
On their days off, Bloomington and Mishin hike the island, looking for a feral goat. Bloomington tells Sprout that sailors brought the goats to the island in the 19th century, but they soon became pests. The Navy attempted to eliminate the goats a century later, and eventually there was only one family of goats left. When the Navy caught one female goat, they fitted her with a radio collar and she led the shooters to her family. Mishin and Bloomington never find a goat, but they do confess their feelings. By the time the training mission ends in 1999, Sprout can attach a clamp to a human diver and Bloomington is engaged. Kostya and Sprout are both unimpressed.
The story about the goats shows again how people create situations that gradually turn cruel. The original sailors who released the goats probably didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. But Sprout’s narration stresses that the final goats suffered a needlessly cruel fate. Even though the goats were feral, they were still at people’s mercy.
Themes
Officer Bloomington has been afraid for a long time that if the elite unit performs well, the Navy will put them to work in a real conflict. His fears come true in 2000 after the terror attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen. The unit also participates in NATO exercises—and then, 9/11 happens. But for dolphins, something else significant happens in 2001: a scientist shows that dolphins pass the “mark test,” which means that they can identify their own reflections and know when their appearance changes if someone draws on them. It confirms that dolphins have a sophisticated sense of self, just like humans.
This paper is significant for Sprout and the other Navy dolphins because it confirms what they’ve known all along: that they’re not much different from people and, as Sprout said in introducing her story, they think of themselves as an “I.” But alongside this happy discovery, Bloomington has to contend with the possibility that his beloved dolphins won’t be able to perform comparatively less dangerous work for much longer.
Themes
This experiment reminds Sprout of when she overheard Bloomington and Mishin discussing how most people have a persecution complex. It makes Sprout wonder why humans feel persecuted by other animals like dolphins. They fear being teased without consent and are afraid of recognizing themselves in dolphins. Dolphins might expose humans “for what [they] truly are”—but what good is a sense of self if people always feel like they’re constantly under attack?
Here, Sprout suggests that the Navy superiors probably didn’t want the different animal units talking to each other because they feared the animals would mock them. And in this, Sprout suggests that it’s a uniquely human affliction to feel mocked by other beings.
Themes
The shock of 9/11 leads Bloomington and Mishin to set a date for their wedding. The ceremony takes place beside the pens where Sprout, Officer, and Kostya live. Bloomington reads a paragraph from the mark test paper and thanks the dolphins for putting up with humans for so long. Mishin gives Bloomington a mirror as a wedding present and promises to perform the mark test on Kostya with her own lipstick. The guests laugh, and Kostya blushes happily.
Given how Sprout speaks and describes herself, the idea of performing the mark test on Kostya seems almost silly. The dolphins know everything their handlers are saying, so of course he’s going to know what he’s supposed to do. Animals, this suggests, are far more perceptive and understand more than people give them credit for.
Themes
In 2003, Sprout and her team are deployed to the Persian Gulf. As usual, they’ll find underwater mines and mark them, but halfway through the journey, Mishin and Bloomington receive special orders: the specially trained dolphins will be authorized to tag enemy divers. The officers resist, but they eventually dedicate themselves to preparing the dolphins to perform their tasks safely. They choose Sprout to go first.
Mishin and Bloomington know that tagging enemy divers will be dangerous for the dolphins, even though the dolphins know what they’re supposed to do. In this way, the dolphins don’t differ much from people in the military—but Mishin and Bloomington don’t think they can ask animals to put themselves in danger like this. Because of the power dynamic, the dolphins can’t say no.
Themes
During the journey, Sprout and Officer commune in their side-by-side travel pods. Officer isn’t concerned about Sprout’s safety, though she’s mostly just excited to be deployed for the first time. She looks forward to outperforming the unmanned underwater vehicles the higher-ups insisted on including, since nothing can rival dolphin echolocation. Only dolphins can distinguish between mines, debris, and rocks.
Officer’s desire to prove herself is another instance where the dolphins don’t seem that different from people. It’s not usually until a parent is old that children consider their parent’s mortality, so it makes sense that Officer isn’t frightened here. She also trusts Bloomington that he’ll keep her mother safe.
Themes
The night before Sprout’s release, Bloomington takes his time with her health inspection. Almost all their days together have stared with an inspection like this, and now Sprout looks forward to Bloomington checking her heart rate. He always listens attentively. Tonight, once he records her heart rate, he keeps the stethoscope in place and listens as though he’s trying to memorize the thuds. He releases Sprout just before dawn with orders to affix the titanium clamp to an enemy diver and get away quick if she finds anyone. She believes the clamp is just a tracker—and she has to believe that Bloomington also believes this.
The fact that Bloomington takes so long with Sprout’s health inspection suggests that he fears he might lose Sprout on this mission and thus wants to soak up a little extra time with her. It’s unclear whether or not Bloomington believes the device is just a tracker. But given how much Sprout loves him, she has to believe that he thinks it’s just a tracker. The alternative would mean that Bloomington chose to betray his dolphins’ trust.
Themes
Sometimes, Sprout wonders if the man she killed felt euphoric, as some human survivors of animal attacks report feeling. Hughes was fascinated by the idea that people experience relief or joy when they surrender to the “ancient cycle” of predator and prey. Now, Sprout finds the thought reassuring. She wonders if the man she killed felt like his death was a gift or a return to his origins.
Finally, Sprout reveals that the device wasn’t just a tracker—it was a lethal device, and so she’s responsible for a man’s death. Even though Sprout has leveraged criticism at Hughes throughout her narration, here she finds his perspective reassuring.
Themes
Sprout insists that men commit suicide to consolidate their reputations, while women commit suicide to get a reputation. By committing suicide herself, Sprout may have fueled skeptics who don’t think the Navy should train female dolphins for the same reason they don’t want human women in the armed forces. Supposedly females are too sentimental and susceptible to feeling guilt. But Scout knows that if Kostya had been the first one out, he also would’ve killed himself—because he’s a dolphin.
Here, Sprout insists it’s not actually being female that makes some people more sentimental or causes them to experience guilt. Rather, it’s being an animal. With this, Sprout offers the clearest indicator that humans are unique in the animal kingdom because of their ability to behave cruelly. The animals, she suggests, are far kinder and compassionate.
Themes
Dolphins, she explains, are “conscious breathers.” She isn’t the first dolphin to kill herself and won’t be the last. Killing a human is as taboo for dolphins as killing their own babies. Ancient people used to recognize the sacredness in dolphins, and dolphins recognize the same in humans. This is why humans honored dolphins with the constellation Delphinus. In return, dolphins help drowning humans, protect them from sharks, and swim gently with children. She warns readers to not forget what their ancestors used to know.
Sprout shows that people have known for millennia that dolphins are their intellectual equals. And in return for this recognition, dolphins have willingly been humans’ partners over the years. It’s essential, she warns readers, to remember that people used to revere dolphins.
Themes
Sprout is done talking about death—she wants to end her story talking about life. Right before she was released on her final mission, she scanned Officer Mishin and discovered she was pregnant with a baby girl. Addressing Sylvia Plath, Sprout says she hasn’t found her out here yet. She wants to know if Plath still loved Hughes’s poems after he left her. She knows that Plath believed in Hughes’s genius all through their marriage—and believed in it so much that Sprout decided to return to Hughes’s children’s poems. On this reading, she realized that somehow, his writing makes her brain tingle, which feels like a sort of reverse scanning. It happens the most when she reads about the moon-whale. Sprout wishes she’d read the poem to Officer, and imagines Plath reading it to her own daughter.
By returning to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes’s relationship, Sprout seems to be examining her own relationship with Bloomington. When she asks if Plath believed in Hughes’s genius after he left her, she seems to be working through her own quest to decide if she still believes in Bloomington’s goodness. But Sprout suggests that even these relationships pale in comparison to those that mothers share with their children. By ending her story talking about reading poems to children, Sprout again shows that she’s not at all different from human readers.
Themes
