The 10 stories in Only the Animals are filled with anecdotes of times when animals experience cruelty at human hands—but amidst all this cruelty, the animal narrators also highlight the times when humans are surprisingly or unexpectedly kind to them. These moments of kindness shine through stories that are otherwise tragic, suggesting that acts of kindness have the power to improve even the worst situations. Indeed, Only the Animals suggests that kindness and compassion can help both the person performing the kind act and the person receiving it—and in some cases, it can even motivate beings to escape bad situations.
Only the Animals shows first that kindness can provide solace in the midst of great suffering. The camel who narrates “The Bones,” for instance, reminisces throughout the story about his deceased caretaker, Zeriph. Zeriph was the only person who treated the camel like a living, feeling being—and in light of the cruelty the camel has experienced since Zeriph’s death years ago, the camel decides that the only thing to do is run away and join the herds of wild camels now inhabiting central Australia. Essentially, he proposes that it’s not worth staying in a relationship without kindness. And the cat Kiki offers her perspective on another aspect of this idea. She’s distraught when her owner, the French writer Colette, unknowingly abandons Kiki in the trenches of World War I. Kiki and Colette’s bond was so strong, thanks to Colette prioritizing Kiki above anyone else—human or animal—that Kiki decides to embark on a journey across France to reunite with her owner. Kiki essentially suggests that it’s worthwhile to do anything to hang onto relationships filled with kindness or compassion.
Kindness, the book suggests, can be as beneficial to the person behaving kindly as it can be to the one receiving it. In the book’s various war zones, soldiers regularly offer food to animals living nearby. The bears in the zoo in Sarajevo survive on offerings of bread crusts from soldiers and a few civilians, and the black bear in particular understands the importance of acting grateful for the meager offerings. Although this isn’t enough to truly sustain the bears, the bread certainly helps—and giving the bears bread boosts the soldiers’ morale by giving them a cause to rally around. Likewise, though Kiki initially turns up her nose when the young soldier she adopts in the trenches offers her some of his condensed milk, she eventually realizes that it gives him comfort and pleasure to see her eat. Indeed, the tomcat who shares Kiki’s trench insists that it’s their duty to accept the soldiers’ food offerings—nurturing the cats might be the only thing that helps the soldiers maintain their will to live. With this, the story shows that it’s not just kind to give to others. It’s also kind to accept someone’s generosity, even if that generosity seems unwise or misguided.
While Only the Animals overwhelmingly portrays these acts of kindness in a positive light, it also suggests that kindness can be a double-edged sword. In “Hundstage,” the soul of a deceased pig says to the dog narrator, “A wise friend once told me that kindness, like cruelty, can be an expression of domination.” With this, the pig suggests that one shouldn’t always take kindness at face value. Indeed, the pig says this to the dog in response to the dog’s attempt to explain that his Master—the Nazi official Heinrich Himmler, an architect of the Holocaust—is wholly kind and compassionate because he passed laws mandating that seafood should be killed humanely. In this case, it’s ironic that the dog holds up Himmler as a paragon of virtue. It makes it clear that the dog doesn’t understand that there’s more to Himmler’s character than his interest in humane butchering techniques or his love for his pet dog might suggest—in fact, he’s widely considered to be one of the cruelest people of the 20th century. Similarly, though the chimp Red Peter believes at first that his human lover, Evelyn, is being kind when she offers him some marmalade through the bars of his cage, he soon discovers that she’s not trying to feed him to keep him alive. Rather, she plans to fatten him up so she and her children can eat him to keep themselves alive. Feeding Red Peter is a way for Evelyn to exert her power over him and remind him that, as an animal, he’s at the mercy of human whims.
But despite the instances where kindness becomes a way to make oneself look better or make the recipient of kindness feel obliged, Only the Animals nevertheless holds kindness up as one of the things that makes life worth living. When someone exhibits genuine kindness, the act can be beneficial for everyone involved—and in difficult times, it can be the only thing capable of improving an otherwise impossibly difficult situation.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Kindness and Compassion ThemeTracker
Kindness and Compassion 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.
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.”
“Don’t eat any of it,” I said.
The tomcat looked offended at my suggesting he would take the food. “I have my own adopted soldier. But you should eat what he’s offering even if you’re not hungry. You might be the only thing keeping him alive until he’s rotated out of the front line and can get some rest.”
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.
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.
And with a glance at me—a kind of tribute, I’d like to think—she would read out my favorite paragraph of the whole book, a moment that does justice to both the poet Elizabeth and her dog Flush by showing them as equals in their inability to ever fully understand each other: not so different then, from a biographer trying to get into the skin of her subject.
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.
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.
It was dark in the zoo by now, darker than it had ever been before the siege started, for the city of Sarajevo no longer relied on electricity. It had become medieval, lightless, its citizens forced to fetch water from underground springs and to wash by candlelight. And the zoo was no longer a modern thoroughfare for the ogling masses. Now the few who dared visit brought sacred offerings of food. The two last remaining animals had become central to the city’s very survival, to the idea of the city’s survival.
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.
We take killing a human very hard. It is as taboo for us as killing our own babies. We recognise in you what your ancients used to recognise in us and understood as sacred a long time ago, when killing a dolphin was punishable by death. You used to think of us as being closer to the divine than any other animal on earth, as being messengers and mediators between you and your gods. You honoured us with Delphinus, our own constellation in the northern sky.
What a delight to be needed so acutely! Her ex-husband had tolerated her neediness but not cultivated it in himself; her daughter had been determined to establish her independence from the moment she learned to walk. But there I was with my feathers scattering the light to create an illusion of brilliant green, my fat tongue, my perfect toes. I, Barnes, who would—if she cared for me attentively—grow to love and depend on her as my parent, partner, mate.
