Finding right place for animals in our life Sense of optimism for animal rights

Some Paradoxes of Human-Animal Relationships

By Erika Ritter

Key Porter, 358 pages, $28

With this wonderful book, her fourth foray into non-fiction and her second into the topic of human-animal relationships, Toronto's Erika Ritter confirms her reputation as a talented wordsmith and gifted cultural sage.

Combining all of her abilities as a playwright, novelist, essayist and CBC Radio host into this "study of paradoxes," Ritter stages a lively exploration of what it might mean for us humans to change our treatment of the animals over whom we've declared dominion.

Ritter's book is structured as a two-part quest, one that moves between her literal travels into different countries and her figurative travels into literature and myth.

As she journeys across the U.S., Canada and Europe to interview some very fascinating animal-welfare people, she sets out with this philosophical quandary: that animals demand both everything and nothing from us.

In the end, she discovers no clear answer to the violence this quandary produces, concluding that we have "barely begun to address the implications of relinquishing our vast sense of entitlement" to the Earth and its inhabitants.

Yet, despite the sorrow echoing in this statement, Ritter sustains such an illuminating sense of optimism, warm humour and thoughtfulness, that her quest creates a path, however small, toward something better for the animals.

This path often finds itself brightly lit by the work of the people she meets along the way. Whether it's Temple Grandin, famous for committing herself to the humane improvement of slaughterhouses, or Keith Mann, who has done hard time for acts of animal-rights "terrorism," Ritter's interview subjects all share their thoughts about balancing idealism with practical actions, both from within the system or from without.

These interviews make for rich page-turners because each successive figure is as fascinating as the one before.

In her engaging style of writing, Ritter reveals all of these people to be thoroughly hopeful and committed to their causes, even if they are often difficult to figure out or filled with contradictory motives.

For example, she quietly puzzles, but finally leaves alone, the fact that Grandin can see what she sees in those slaughterhouses and still continue to eat meat.

At the centre of her quest to understand something about the darkness that surrounds human interactions with animals, Ritter places an ancient tale of a dog and serpent, the two figures in the book's title, and the strangeness that frames its plot.

In each of her chapters, she repeatedly returns to the tale's different elements, as if creating a refrain to a mysterious song. There is something important in this old story, told to centuries of children, about a master who returns home to find blood on his dog, assumes it's his child's, and kills the dog in retaliation.

Ritter asks if we are supposed to wonder why serpents crawled near babies' cradles or why dogs were left in charge. Or, perhaps we are asked to imagine what the innocent dog thinks as his master's sword falls upon his neck.

At each exploration of these questions, which she weaves around her interviews, Ritter explores richer and richer mysteries, not only in the tale itself but also in what it implies about the human capacity for remorse and the animal's capacity for forgiveness.

Dana Medoro is a professor in the department of English, film and theatre at the University of Manitoba and a member of the animal-welfare committee with the Winnipeg Humane Society.

Erika Ritter will speak at 12:30 p.m., March 17, in Room 24 of University College, presented by the University of Manitoba's's Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 8, 2009 B8