Only the Animals consists of short stories narrated by animals in the midst of human conflicts. One of the questions that plagues many of the animals in the book is the question of what, exactly, separates human beings from animals. Some of the book’s animal narrators, like the dolphin Sprout, snidely insist that people and dolphins, at least, aren’t all that different, while the chimp Red Peter believes he’s actually transcended his monkey nature and become human. Other narrators, like the elephant and the camel, suggest that being human means having power, while being an animal means being at the mercy of humanity’s power. All the narrators, though, agree on one thing: what defines humans, and what separates them from their animal counterparts, is their ability to behave cruelly, greedily, and selfishly.
First, Only the Animals suggests that it’s not in an animal’s nature (at least the species featured in the stories) to be cruel. Sprout explains why dolphins consider killing both other dolphins and people to be murder: it goes against their nature to murder beings they believe to be on their same intellectual level. People, however, don’t always share this moral code—for instance, the enemy soldiers in Sprout’s story gun down innocent wild dolphins. This, Sprout laments, is the worst possible outcome: the wild dolphins are not only on the soldiers’ level intellectually; they’re also not even involved in the military conflict at hand. They’re innocent bystanders, in every sense of the term. The German Shepherd dog in “Hundstage,” whose owner is Heinrich Himmler (one of the most powerful leaders of Germany’s Nazi Party), similarly suggests that he’s incapable of being as territorial and cruel as Himmler would like him to be. The Germans, he explains, want dogs who are unwaveringly loyal to their masters and who will attack anyone else—and so the dog is exiled into the woods when he “betrays” Himmler by allowing a veterinarian to show him affection. The dog, this suggests, isn’t just fundamentally good-natured—he’s even incapable of learning cruelty and aggression.
Indeed, the book suggests that cruelty is a human invention—one that causes animals in particular to suffer. The stories in the collection are peppered with encounters in which people behave cruelly to animals. Kiki the cat endures violent threats from her mistress’s husband. The tortoise Plautus talks about the practice of carving designs into pet tortoises’ shells and even setting stones in them—something that is painful and dangerous for the tortoise. These instances show that people are willing to behave cruelly if it stands to benefit them—even if the benefit is simply having a supposedly more attractive pet. And by anthropomorphizing the animals (ascribing human-like characteristics or behaviors to them), the book is able to show how much animals suffer as a result of human cruelty. The dog in “Hundstage,” for instance, wanders in the woods for months after his banishment, pining for Himmler and believing that he’s bad for “betraying” his master. In this case, Himmler’s treatment of his dog makes the animal believe that he’s less worthy because of who and what he is. This suggests that, especially for domesticated animals like dogs, people’s cruelty can negatively impact animals’ thought and behavior.
Some of the human characters’ cruelty to animals stems from the fact that they’re far more powerful than many of the book’s animals. Both domestic animals and those in captivity depend on their human caregivers for everything, which puts people in a powerful position. Thus, when people want or need to abuse their station, it’s easy to do so. In the story “I, the Elephant, Wrote this,” young elephants living in Mozambique learn how some of their ancestors died during the Franco-Prussian War in Europe. Their ancestors, zoo elephants, were eventually butchered to feed rich people who refused to go without eating meat, even during wartime—these elephants went from being beloved members of the community to being food, as people’s priorities changed from caring for their animals to using them to support lavish habits. Similarly, the parrot Barnes’s owner abandons him outside a pet shop as she flees the bombs falling in Beirut. An American expat, the parrot’s owner believes she has to leave the country in order to find safety. And though she loves Barnes, her love isn’t enough for her to justify the effort it would take to get a parrot back to the U.S. with her. It’s possible, this suggests, for an animal’s fate to change in an instant, depending on their owner’s circumstances.
Underlying the animals’ stories, though, is the understanding that human cruelty doesn’t just affect animals—it affects people, too. The prevalence of war in each story stresses the human consequences of war, which the book suggests is nothing but cruel and senseless. Soldiers go hungry, some because there’s simply not enough food and others because they choose to share what little food they have with their animal companions. The mussel Sel, meanwhile, dies alongside American soldiers during the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Though his death in the almost boiling ocean takes center stage, he dies alongside soldiers’ disembodied limbs and heads—making it impossible to avoid the consequences of human cruelty on everyone, human and animal alike. While Only the Animals presents human cruelty as a fact and offers no remedies for doing away with it, the book nevertheless encourages readers to at least acknowledge the damage that human cruelty has done to the world. Recognizing the damage—and through doing so, trying not to replicate it in the future—is all that people can do.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Human Cruelty ThemeTracker
Human Cruelty Quotes in Only the Animals
I suffocated him, squashed his head between my leg and body, though there were no females around to compete over and we should instead have become friends. Zeriph never let me forget my stupidity, killing that bull. He felt sorry for the other handler, who grieved over his dead camel as if for a child.
Zeriph had been proud of me, carrying the first piano into the core of our new country. [...]
But for what? I carried that thing of beauty all that way on my back, with the ropes cutting into my bones, so that somebody could tinkle on the keys for the midday drinks at the pub in Alice. That’s what broke Zeriph’s heart, that the piano’s music could mean nothing without the false prophetry of drink.
But this late autumn at the front is unlike any I have witnessed. Without the changing palette of the trees to signal the shift towards winter (the leaves have been exploded off), and the songbirds mostly gone quiet, it becomes difficult to know where I am, in what season, in which century.
I looked more closely at the man driving the mules. He was far too old to fight. The mules showed none of their usual inclination to misbehave and were following him peaceably. “They love him,” I said.
“And he them. I’ve seen a driver refuse to leave his team of battery mules when they became entangled in barbed wire. He died with them.”
“Why are so many of them missing their tails?” I asked.
“When they’re starving, they eat each other’s tails.”
They—the humans, that is—seem to think that what sets them apart from other animals is their ability to love, grieve, feel guilt, think abstractly, et cetera. They are misguided. What sets them apart is their talent for masochism. Therein lies their power. To take pleasure in pain, to derive strength from deprivation, is to be human.
I fell in love with you the first moment I saw you, before I was fully human, and from across that gulf of understanding and experience, somehow, miraculously, you felt something for me in return. You alone inspired me to become human, not your husband’s relentless mazes and sorting tasks and word repetitions, not his tantrums when I didn’t do what he wanted, not the whipping, not the sweet fruit he dangled just out of my reach. I wanted to be human so that I might reach out across that chasm and touch you, be touched by you.
Frau Oberndorff gave me a pet cricket. The cricket lives in a walnut shell. If you hold him up and look at him directly, he looks fierce. The man who brought the cricket to the zoo said he would win battles against other crickets if we first chop up a fly and feed it to him to make him violent.
I was starving. My Master had recently begun to follow a vegetarian diet and decided that I should give up all meat too, in keeping with his beliefs [...] Not only that, he was concerned about my karma. He had promised me that if I did as he said, ate no meat, resisted my urge to hunt foxes, and tried to meditate once a day, I might be reincarnated as a human being in my next life. A human being! The thought was intoxicating.
“A wise friend once told me that kindness, like cruelty, can be an expression of domination,” the pig said.
“That makes no sense,” I said scornfully.
The Soviets were sending animals into space like there was no tomorrow (which, for the animals, there mostly wasn’t), desperate to finalise their research on the viability of manned space flight and the effects on living creatures of prolonged weightlessness and radiation from the Van Allen belts, and get a man on the moon before the Americans. They’d heard rumors that the Americans had sent a bunch of black mice into space and the cosmic rays had turned them grey; this would be undesirable in humans.
But there is mechanical trouble while he’s up there and instead of getting sips of water or tablets, he starts getting zapped by the electric pads wired to the soles of his feet. He gets back to earth, gets out of the capsule and the NASA guys are smiling, holding his hands, but Enos is fucking mad. This used to make me laugh. But up in space, I just had to think about this, about Enos getting buzzed on his feet for doing the right thing—the right thing! what he’s been trained to do!—and I wanted to bite somebody’s face off.
“A zoo,” she said to them, “is a very dangerous place for an animal in wartime, for it can mean the difference between life and death for the human inhabitants of a city. But it was not the poor who ate the zoo animals in Paris.”
As we were dying, our foreheads pressed together, one of the humans stepped forward and placed a single orange in the gap between our trunks. It was an act of kindness, I think, a way to thank us for our sacrificed flesh. I was already too far from the appetites of life to eat it, but the smell made me briefly happy—we were children again, two sisters playing beside the fence separating us from a fragrant orchard of oranges, longing to die gloriously and have our souls pointed out to the youngest in the herd on warm evenings: see, there are the stars which form their trunks, and there are the stars of their tails.
“I’m waiting for her to die so I can eat her.” He chewed at the bread.
“Why wait?” asked the witch.
“People would stop risking their lives, dodging sniper bullets to bring me bread, if they thought I had no heart, eating her while she’s still half alive,” the bear said.
“But you must see what sort of position this would put us in. Smuggling two bears out of Sarajevo in a food-relief convoy—what does that say to the people left behind? Why bears, not babies? I mean, a busload of children trying to get out of the city was fired on, and we’re spending time worrying about these wild animals? We can’t allow it, I’m afraid.” He was the only one who had not brought stale bread in his pockets for the bears.
Perhaps you should be asking yourselves different questions. Why do you sometimes treat other people as humans and sometimes as animals? And why do you sometimes treat creatures as animals and sometimes as humans?
Some native wild dolphins were also killed this way, though we’d tried to keep them away from the area by acting territorially. Officer Bloomington took this especially hard. He hadn’t anticipated it as a consequence and blamed himself for their deaths. He felt that the skilled Navy dolphins at least had a chance of defending themselves, but the native dolphins had been put directly in harm’s way. He tried to record their deaths officially so that this could be prevented on future missions, but his superiors blocked him, worried about a public outcry.
