Standing Up For Animals

Throughout his novels, J. M. Coetzee has been and still is an advocate for proper and fair human rights. Coetzee has dedicated his writing to portray the numerous qualities, both positive and negative, of human beings. Coetzee uses his protagonists to bear witness to the elements of Apartheid and the brutality of whites towards non-white human beings. To describe the rash conditions and the wrongdoings of many South Africans, Coetzee uses animals to show the relation of animal rights to human rights. Whether they glide, slither, crawl, walk, jump, fly, or swim, all living creatures on this earth deserve respect. Coetzee discreetly portrays the rights that encompass humanity and at the same time portraying a need for animal rights through the use of Elizabeth Costello who is for animal rights, the “Others” who are treated as animals, protagonists who are complicit, and protagonists who imagine animal consciousness through suffering and death.

Why is critical animal studies so important? In literature, critical animal studies is a way to discuss how the lives of human beings and the lives of animals are not so different. In fact the lives of human beings and the lives of animals are connected in many ways. Using literature to express this connection allows animals to have a voice in order to show critics that animals are just as important as human beings. This voice that literature gives to animals is a metaphor to show how animals need to be taken into consideration just as much as human beings do. Animals cannot communicate with the same language as human beings. If authors never write about animals, readers will never see the struggle animals are going through that is caused by human beings. In a way, by speaking for animals can be argued that this is just another way to control animals. Animal rights advocates would argue that by speaking for animals, animals can be saved. Coetzee uses instances of animals as metaphors, to compare human activities and experiences, and to show that if it is wrong to treat the others as animals then it is wrong to treat animals differently than human beings. The use of animals in postcolonial literature is sometimes associated with racism. Clearly Coetzee portrays this with his use of other and animal comparisons to be discussed later. According to Terry Tempest Williams in Finding Beauty in a Broken World, critical animal studies is important because:


most people are not comfortable making a connection between racism and
specism or the ill treatment of human beings and the mistreatment of
animals. We want to keep our boundaries clean and separate. But isn’t that
the point, to separate, isolate, and discriminate? We create hierarchies,
viewing life from the top down, top being, of course, God, then a ranking of
human races, and so our judgments move down ‘the Great chain of Being’ until
we touch rocks. This is the attitude of power, and it hinges on who is in
control. Who has power over whom? (Williams 90).


Williams explains that human beings are treating animals in ways that are related to how human beings treat other human beings of a different race. For instance, during the Apartheid, the black South Africans were forced to be separated from the white South Africans. Human beings need to be aware of this in order for all creatures to live humanely. No matter what they look like or what their economic status is, no one creature should be treated differently than another. Hierarchal status should not be an excuse to treat an animal or another human being with disrespect.

Do to his clever ways of introducing and discussing many controversial topics, many critics have taken an interest into J. M. Coetzee’s works. In the article, “‘Like a dog… like a lamb:’ Becoming Sacrificial Animal in Kafka and Coetzee,” Chris Danta explains, “my aim in following Costello’s often attenuated musings on the lives of animals is thus to clarify how the writer is able to identify him or herself as humanity’s scapegoat” (Danta 726). Basically, Danta is saying that Coetzee is implying that when things go wrong, animals are the scapegoat, the ones to blame because they are the easy target. Danta believes Coetzee writes Elizabeth Costello in The Lives of Animals and David Lurie in Disgrace to identify with animals because they are older and have become wounded as animals are wounded. The critic poses an interesting argument in favor of the scapegoat. In rebuttal, a scapegoat is the one that bears the blame for others. It is clear as to how in writing the animals are the scapegoats for the problems facing the colonizers or the oppressors. In The Lives of Animals, Costello argues that according to meat eaters, we eat animals because we need to survive. Eating animals is wrong in Costello’s eyes but carnivores make it right and use animals as their scapegoat for survival. In reality, the colonizers have been the problem for the others. When Coetzee writes from a white colonizer’s perspective, it is best to keep the domination alive by saying animals and the non-whites are the problems.

In the article, “Sympathy with Animals and Salvation of the Soul,” Jonathan Lamb quotes Locke’s idea of personal identity: “for when we attribute identity, in an improper sense, to variable or interrupted objects, our mistake is not confined to the expression, but is commonly attended with a fiction” (Lamb 76). Lamb is using Locke to express how difficult it is to identify with an animal because they are not on the same hierarchal status as human beings are; they are at the bottom of the food chain. Just because the barbarians and the Hottentots are at a lower status and considered as “others,” it does not make it right to treat them as animals. Lamb is one of the many critics who view Coetzee’s work as pieces of fiction and non-fiction combined to show the unethical treatment of animals.

Many critics ponder and discuss the reasoning behind Coetzee’s themes. Some critics appear to be completely amazed at the way Coetzee structures his arguments. Other critics believe the author has posed some thought provoking cultural experiences. One critic, for example, is David H. Lynn who studies Coetzee’s works as a whole and discusses how the novels are allegorical. In the article, “Love and Death, and Animals Too,” David H. Lynn describes, “Coetzee’s art. Vivid, moving, disturbing, hard to put down, hard to bear. To what degree are we complicit in the evil depicted so dramatically here? Are we changed by it, improved by it – how could that be? – or perhaps titillated? Why do we read it? You see, Coetzee’s ideas and his dramas don’t simply matter. They are dangerous” (Lynn 133). This passage absolutely sums up all of Coetzee’s work. Coetzee has very much so cleverly written about the ways in which human beings horribly treat other human beings and animals. Although they could be read for leisure and pleasure, the novels can also be read at a deeper level. Lynn says the ideas in the novels are “dangerous” dangerous because throughout his entire collection, Coetzee has embarked upon a never ending journey for justice. Along the way, this journey has parodied the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, showed the point of view of the oppressors, showed that the white oppressors are now the victims, and the others are seen as evil. By portraying these ideas, that appear to be absurd from the outside, Coetzee has truly shown how the concept of humanity needs to change. Humanity needs to change because human beings cannot treat other human beings and animals with brutality. Hopefully readers are changed for the better. One of Coetzee’s goals is to spread awareness of human and animal rights. It is more likely that a person will pick up a novel than read a history book. By depicting the truth through literature, Coetzee can show more and more people that things need to start changing.

Elizabeth Costello

Coetzee’s use of the character of Elizabeth Costello is quite intriguing. This mysterious, bazaar, and strong willed woman first appears in Coetzee’s Tanner Lecture, The Lives of Animals at Princeton University. During this lecture, Coetzee spoke about the way in which human beings have treated and are treating animals. The author accomplishes this lecture by telling a story about a son, John, and his mother, Elizabeth Costello. In this text within a text, Elizabeth Costello is also giving a speech about animal rights. Only her speech is one that compares the Holocaust to slaughter houses. Elizabeth Costello raises many interesting points on reason, self-consciousness, and soul saving.

The big question: why does Coetzee use Elizabeth Costello as a voice to promote animal rights awareness? In “Elizabeth Costello, Embodiment, and the Limits of Rights,” one critic, Elizabeth Susan Anker writes:


those qualities that set humans apart from animals, and her [Elizabeth Costello] reflections on ‘humanity’ open up contradictions that equally infect her account of ethics. Namely, she asserts that an embodied consciousness is induced by encounters with animals and that it prefigures an ethical comportment toward life; however, at the same time, such ethical acts testify to a condition of ‘humanity’ that is unavailable to animals (Anker 181).


Anker is completely correct in her observation. Elizabeth Costello says she is a wounded animal. She has witnessed the horrid events that are taking place in slaughterhouses. She has witnessed the cruelty and abuse done to animals who are breed for human being consumption. She has witnessed the way in which human beings are not affected by the treatment of the animals before they were processed as raw meat. All of these experiences have scared Elizabeth Costello for life. Mainly, she is concerned for the animals because they are not protected under human rights and humanity. The laws that govern humanity need to include the treatment and protection of animals. Even with this description on Elizabeth Costello’s point of view, this still does not answer the question as to why Coetzee uses Elizabeth Costello as a voice to promote animal rights awareness. Maybe Coetzee did not want to be judged or criticized for standing up for what he truly believes in. Maybe Coetzee was simply being clever, as a way to spark a conversation on his lecture. Maybe Coetzee thought readers and listeners would relate or understand an elderly woman’s voice much better than a man’s. Whatever the case may be, this is a question that may forever go unanswered because Coetzee never explains himself. What really matters is the fact that Coetzee has taken a stand. He has firmly stepped foot through an unopened door and has expressed a need for diverse humanity rights.

Elizabeth Costello argues that reason cannot be a just cause to treat animals poorly. In the article, “Situating Ecology in Recent South African Fiction: J. M. Coetzee’s ‘The Lives of Animals’ and Zakes Mda’s ‘The Heart of Redness,’” Anthony Vital explains, “the words she [Elizabeth Costello] speaks from her ‘opened heart,’ from her identification with what is animal, convey awareness of what the text suggests is a fundamental and arbitrary transitional moment in which we as humans distinguish ourselves from and elevate ourselves above animals” (Vital 304). Basically, Vital is suggesting the fact that human beings are above animals because human beings believe they have the capacity to reason, while animals do not. On a side note, one can argue that human beings do not know what animals think. For all we know, animals can reason and suffer just as human beings can. Just because human beings think animals do not reason or suffer, Coetzee and Vital are expressing the fact that using slaughterhouses to kill animals is right.

Human beings have reasoned that they need meat and protein to survive. In order to survive, human beings have to slaughter animals. One side of this debate is similar to Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest. In the wild, lions hunt gazelle and sharks hunt seals. If these predators do not eat, they will starve to death. In the colonized lands of the world, cows and pigs are being breed and dying on factory farms. Using reason, human beings are able to kill innocent animals as Elizabeth Costello says, “the question to ask should not be: Do we have something in common – reason, self-consciousness, a soul – with other animals? (With the corollary that, if we do not, then we are entitle to treat them as we like, imprisoning them, killing them, dishonoring their corpses.)” (Coetzee 34). Since human beings and animals have nothing in common it is completely acceptable to kill them and eat them. Since animals do not have a self-consciousness it is completely acceptable to kill them. If human beings can reason this then slaughtering animals is not wrong.

The other side of the debate argues that lions and sharks have to hunt and kill for their food in order to survive. But human beings have many options for nourishment. Unlike lions and sharks, human beings will not starve to death if they stop slaughtering cows and pigs in slaughterhouses. Right after Elizabeth Costello discuses why it is assumed appropriate to slaughter animals, she explains, “I return to the death camps… The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims” (Coetzee 34). Elizabeth Costello believes that reason should not be the acceptable excuse as to why slaughtering animals is good for human beings. Human beings need to reason the fact that animals are living, breathing, creatures, just like they are as well. Comparing slaughterhouses to the death camps during the Holocaust is very radical but Coetzee, or really Elizabeth Costello, opens the eyes of the listeners and readers. This comparison gets the much needed attention towards animal rights. Elizabeth Costello believes that human beings need to think themselves into the lives of animals. They need to sympathize and empathize with animals in order to realize that breeding and killing them in inhumane ways is torture, cruel, and unacceptable. The image slideshow below shows the horrible conditions of slaughterhouses that Costello and animal advocates want to stop.




Elizabeth Costello really brings the argument home when she describes why she is a vegetarian. She says, “you ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death-wounds” (Coetzee 38). Readers and listeners were astonished after Elizabeth Costello says this is the reason why she does not eat meat. Human beings probably do not even think about this when they are eating chicken, fish, or steak for dinner. In reality, Elizabeth Costello makes a valid point. When humans eat animals, they are eating flesh. Human beings are made of flesh and bones. There is also a saying some parents say to their children: “you are my flesh and blood.” If humans are made of flesh and animals are made of flesh, and if humans are animals, does that mean when humans eat meat, they are eating themselves? On the surface, it appears as if Elizabeth Costello is making this correlation. But beneath the surface, it also appears as if she is expressing the point that human beings have killed animals in slaughterhouses and factory farms. Then they have “cleaned” the animal, chopped it up into pieces, thrown away the pieces that are cannot be eaten or used, packaged the pieces of animal up, and shipped them to markets around the world. At the markets, in the refrigerated compartments, hundreds of packages of chopped up animal body parts await to be purchased by human beings. Once purchased, the human being sometimes chops up the “meat” even further in order to grill, barbeque, bake, cook, boil, fry, and eat. By this point, human beings do not even realize their meal was once a living and breathing, animal. Thus, human beings are eating the flesh of a fellow animal.

This everlasting debate sparks a series of new question: Why does Coetzee use a female to voice a concern for animal rights? What would be the difference if the character of Elizabeth Costello had been male instead of female? Do readers and listeners relate better to a female? Would readers and listeners think a male would just be utilizing and taking advantage of his hierarchal status and power that would make the readers and listeners automatically agree? Does Coetzee want the readers and listeners to debate the topic of animal rights and form their own opinions? Or is Coetzee just playing around with the readers and listeners in order to spark these questions?

Unfortunately there is not a single answer to one of these questions. Readers and critics can only speculate as to why Coetzee uses Elizabeth Costello instead of a male. It is possible that Coetzee wants to show the relationship between how human beings treat animals and how human beings treat other human beings, in this case, a woman. It is a well known fact that for hundreds of years, women are dominated by men. The word “human” has the word “man” in it. Does that make women non-human? Well only if they were of a different race, but in most cases it does not mean women are non-human. Then this also means that animals are of a different species. Maybe Coetzee wanted to show that it does not matter who is speaking, everyone (women, men, others, and animals), deserves to be treated with respect.

The “Others”

Coetzee’s use of the others (the non-whites, the oppressed, and the colonized) has proven that the rights of humanity need to incorporate the rights of all animals and all human beings regardless of race or what they look like. The Disney movie, Pocahontas, portrays how white settlers have come to America to try to take over the land. When they arrive, the colonizers meet the Native Americans. The Native Americans are the others and are considered savages. The video clip below is a song, “Colors of the Wind,” from the film. This song speaks about how the ways in which the colonizers think of the others is wrong.

This clip relates to critical animal studies because it shows that human beings and animals are equal. In order to protect all human beings and all animals under the rights of humanity, Coetzee wants the readers to think themselves into the lives of the others in relation to the lives of animals, since all human beings are just animals. In regards to the Apartheid in South Africa, Coetzee portrays the barbarians and the Hottentots, who are the others, the colonized, and the oppressed non white human beings, as animals.

In Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate takes in, cares for, uses for his own pleasure, all before finally falling in love with a barbarian girl. The barbarian girl has been tortured so badly to the point where her body is stained with scars. After spending so much time cleaning her body, the Magistrate wonders what happened to the barbarian girl. He wants to know who tortured her and who left her wounded. Unfortunately, the Magistrate will never know the truth. He now realizes it is wrong but he has been complicit for too long. When he finally stands up for what is right, the Magistrate is tortured himself. Once in a prestigious position in his community, now the Magistrate is considered an “other.”

The barbarian others in Waiting for the Barbarians are treated as if they are animals. Coetzee writes them in this manner because he wants to show that it is wrong to treat any human being differently than another human being based on what they look like. Taking this concept a step further, one can argue that it is wrong to treat an animal differently than a human being. Animals deserve just as much respect as the others and the others deserve just as much respect as the colonizers. Coetzee describes how the colonizers view the barbarians when he explains:


the barbarians come out at night. Before darkness falls the last goat must be brought in, the gates barred, a watch set in every lookout to call the hours. All night, it is said, the barbarians prowl about bent on murder and rapine… Clothing disappears from washing- lines, food from larders, however tightly locked. The barbarians have dug a tunnel under the walls, people say; they come and go as they please, take what they like; no one is safe any longer. The farmers still till the fields, but they go out in bands, never singly. They work without heart: the barbarians are only waiting for the crops to be established, they say, before they flood the fields again (Coetzee 142).


This is proof that the barbarians are thought of as animals. What really is interesting is the fact that this is all a form of gossip. Rumors like this always begin with one person and spread rapidly like a wildfire. Soon enough the entire town believes the barbarians are not human beings. If they are human beings, the barbarians would never steal anything, and they would not only come out at night. This story is one that has many qualities of the wolf who sneaks around at night and steals sheep. Just as people are afraid of wild animals, people are frightened of the barbarians. This story has portrayed the barbarians to be completely evil, with nothing positive about them. Even though they may be afraid of what they know from this story, it still does not make it right to treat the barbarians with disrespect.

In “On the Backs of Animals: The Valorization of Reason in Contemporary Animal Ethics,” Cathryn Bailey mentions, “almost wherever one locates racial stereotype one finds the assumption lurking that people of color are somehow more bodily, more emotional, further away from the reason that is said to distinguish ‘man’ from animal” (Bailey 3). In other words, outside of the novels, when an individual is stereotyping another individual, it is a sense of a self/other binary opposition. The self, in the case of the novels, are the oppressors and the colonizers. The others are the non-white, oppressed, and colonized groups of human beings. Bailey is implying the fact that Coetzee portrays how the others are so far away from the colonizers that there is no reasoning whatsoever to infer the others are human. This is true in Waiting for the Barbarians by Coetzee’s explanation of the torture scene when the entire town gathers to watch the barbarians get whipped and beaten for no reason other than simple stories they heard around town. This would not be the punishment for the colonizers by the colonizers. In order to identify and sympathize with the others, the colonizers need to see all animals and people as equal creatures on this earth.

Coetzee’s novels are truly stepping stones to major critical ideas and theories. For instance, in regards to the field of anthropology, Waiting for the Barbarians can be read to depict ways to classify species. The Magistrate classifies the barbarian girl as a wild animal when he compares her and the fox living in his house. In the journal article, “Mirrors and Windows: Sociocultural Studies of Human-Animal Relationships,” Molly H. Mullin discusses, “distinctions between human and animal, Coetzee makes clear, are closely related to other distinctions, including male and female, civilized and primitive. Like the Magistrate, anthropologists have been involved in observing and classifying peoples with very different uses for animals and with different ways of relating to them and the environment” (Mullin 203). Mullin is comparing Coetzee to an anthropologist. An anthropologist classifies animals for scientific reasons. Coetzee is classifying the barbarian girl as an animal not for scientific reasons, but for reasons of superiority. The Magistrate does not go around and classify other colonizers. He does not say, for instance, all the men with brown hair are in a group because they are intelligent, all the men who are less than six feet tall are in one group, and so on. The Magistrate only classifies the barbarians because he views them as animals. As to what Mullin is expressing, readers can classify the oppressors and the colonizers into a group that has no need for other human being animals, or in other words, the barbarians. The point is that since human beings can be classified as animals are classified, it makes them animals. Plus, looking at the theory of evolution, human beings have evolved from apes. Thus, the others are not the problem. The problem is that during the Apartheid, the white colonizers completely viewed the black colonized as nonhuman. Coetzee wanted to express this problem and his concern for the truth of what happened to the others because the umbrella of the laws and human rights did not protect and cover the others.

Another group of “others” are the Hottentot natives. The Hottentots are depicted in “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,” the second novella in Dusklands. The Hottentots are seen as wild animals who are lazy and want to copy everything the white colonizers are doing as they live their lives. When the protagonist, Jacobus Coetzee sets out to hunt an elephant with his group of Hottentots, Dikkop, a Hottentot, began to cause too much trouble. Jacobus Coetzee told Dikkop he would be paid in the morning but then he would have to leave. When morning came around Dikkop had taken a horse, brandy, and a gun and left. Jacobus Coetzee and Klawer, the foreman of labor went searching for Dikkop. When they found him, Jacobus Coetzee explained, “I tied his hands to my saddle and ran him back to the camp. There I let the Hottentots have a go at him with the sjambok. Then I untied him and left him, this was in the Khamiesberg where there is plenty of water. I am sure he lived. He cost us a whole day” (Coetzee 62-63). Regardless of why Dikkop was causing trouble, the way Jacobus Coetzee treated him is very similar to that of a horse and a calf.  When a calf takes off, a cowboy will wrangle the calf and tie it up behind the horse until they reach their destination. Jacobus Coetzee treated Dikkop exactly like a calf.

Jacobus Coetzee believes the Hottentots are savages. After spending much time with the Namaqua Hottentots and realizing they were unfamiliar with treachery and did not kill him, Jacobus Coetzee explains, “savagery was a way of life based on disdain for the value of human life and sensual delight in the pain of others” (Coetzee 97). Jacobus, who is a true hunter and master to many Hottentots, cannot understand or comprehend why these specific Hottentots did nothing to him. That is when Jacobus Coetzee realized that Hottentots are not savages. In “The Labyrinth of My History:” J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Dusklands,’” David Attwell adds an interesting perspective on the character of Jacobus Coetzee well when he writes, “if the Hottentots had been ‘true savages,’ he might have had a more satisfying encounter with them” (Attwell 24). David Attwell truly brings to the surface a valid point. J. M. Coetzee might have been trying to portray how the white colonizer was able to take over and control the natives. When Jacobus Coetzee discovers that the Hottentots were not killers, but instead the complete opposite, caregivers, Jacobus Coetzee is in a sense let down. He was not satisfied because he wanted to continue to dominate and control the Hottentots. But how can he when they have been nothing but helpful to him? The Hottentots do not deserve to be treated with disrespect just because they live their lives a little bit differently than the colonizers live their lives. Treating the Hottentots as if they are animals, torturing them, and killing them should not have been acceptable at any time. Allegorical for the Apartheid and the way black South Africans were treated by white South Africans, Dusklands has shown that what has happened in South Africa should not happen again.

Complicit Protagonists

David Lurie and the Magistrate are complicit to the domination, degrading, torturous, and controlling events that are taking place in their societies. Meet David Lurie from Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. Once a professor, who had an affair with a student, now David Lurie is a dog undertaker. As a precautionary side note, this novel has many prominent and important themes that readers should become familiar with. David Lurie’s daughter, Lucy, was raped by three men who were once considered as the others. Although she does not want to report the rape to the police, Lucy’s father tries desperately to understand her reasoning behind her decision. Lucy does not report the rape because, looking at the bigger, allegorical picture, she represents a radical reversal where white people are now where the black people used to be and vice versa. Now, as a parody of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Lucy, a white person, has to give up power to Petrus, a black person. While David Lurie figures this out, he begins to volunteer at a local animal welfare shelter. There, David Lurie helps with the process of euthanizing dogs.

Coming into the animal shelter, in which Bev Shaw runs, with little fondness of animals, David Lurie grows to accept and love the dogs. David Lurie even:


thought he would get used to it. But that is not what happens. The more killings he assists in, the jittery he gets. One Sunday evening, driving home in Lucy’s kombi, he actually has to stop at the roadside to recover himself. Tears flow down his face that he cannot stop; his hands shake… He assumes that people from whom cruelty is demanded in the line of duty, people who work in slaughterhouses, for instance, grow carapaces over their souls (Coetzee 143).


David Lurie never gets used to euthanizing the dogs. The entire process makes him love the dogs even more. David Lurie is different. He realizes that the dogs have feelings. They know something is going to happen when they first arrive into the operating room. But David Lurie tries his best to keep a positive atmosphere and even let the dogs lick his hand. Still staying positive and being nice to the dogs does not make euthanizing them acceptable. David is evidence that his self-consciousness cannot mentally and emotionally handle the fact that innocent dogs are being killed because nobody wants them.

In the case of Disgrace, David Lurie is complicit. He is complicit because even though he knows it is wrong, David Lurie still allows the dogs to be killed. Coetzee is using David Lurie’s complicity as an example to show how animals do not have the same rights as human beings. Yes, there is not one person who is willing to adopt an abandoned dog. But that does not make it right to kill an abandoned dog. Yes, there is not enough money or space to keep the abandoned dogs at the animal welfare shelter. That does not make it right to kill the abandoned dogs. For example, Lucy has every right to choose whether or not she reports the rape to the police. It is absolutely and completely her choice to have her intruders prosecuted for the crime they have committed. The dogs do not have a choice. They are going to be euthanized unless David Lurie or Bev Shaw puts a stop to the process. For an interesting reversal, the dogs do not have a choice to have their “intruders,” or really their murderers, prosecuted for the crime they have committed. Human rights protects human beings. Now human beings need to act in humane ways. Human beings need to have sympathy and compassion towards animals. Maybe instead of human rights, there needs to be creature rights or animal rights. Human beings are animals; Elizabeth Costello has said so herself. Just as humans need their rights, so do animals just the same. They cannot stand up for themselves. Human beings, ironically, need to protect the rights of animals to make sure all creatures, who live on the same planet, are protected from wrongdoing, suffering, and pain.

The dogs can be seen as David Lurie’s awareness of animal rights. The dogs are a prominent feature in the novel to show how David Lurie is complicit. Coetzee accomplishes this at the end of the novel when David Lurie chooses not to save the dog. It can be said that the dogs are, in a sense, symbolic of the meat that human beings eat. Only human beings do not eat the dogs, they actually just kill the unwanted dogs by euthanizing them. Elizabeth Costello claims that human beings slaughter animals because they cannot reason with them or that we reason that they are lower than human beings, making it acceptable to kill and eat them. Bev Shaw and David Lurie are killing the dogs because they are reasoning that since nobody wants to adopt the dogs and that there is not enough money or space to keep them, it is acceptable to kill them. Coetzee continues to run this theme throughout his novels to depict the truth about humanity.

The Magistrate from Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, is a colonizer who holds a very prestigious title in his community. When he falls in love with the Barbarian girl, the Magistrate realizes that he has been just as guilty as the rest of the colonizers who have tortured his newfound love. Although he does not want her to leave him, the Magistrate takes the barbarian girl back to her home. When he is arrested for meeting with the barbarians, the Magistrate begins to take a stand against his group of people after they have tortured him in prison. Waiting for the Barbarians is an allegorical novel. Coetzee has written the Magistrate as complicit to show that during the Apartheid, so many South Africans knew it was wrong, but they did nothing to stop it.

The Magistrate knows he is complicit. After getting to see what the effect of colonization has done to the barbarian girl, the Magistrate decides to do something. When the barbarians are getting tortured in front of the entire crowd of people in the town, the Magistrate interrupts and shouts “No!” (Coetzee 122).


Later, when he talks to Cornel Joll, the Magistrate says:


do not misunderstand me, I am not blaming you or accusing you, I am long past that. Remember I too have devoted my life to the law, I know its processes, I know that the workings of justice are often obscure. I am only trying to understand. I am trying to understand the zone in which you live. I am trying to imagine how you breathe and eat and live from day to day. But I cannot! (Coetzee 145-146).


The Magistrate wants to know how Cornel Joll can live his life after he tortures another human being. The Magistrate’s actions here may be commendable because he is not holding his feelings in. He is letting the Cornel know that he believes it is wrong.

Protagonists Imagine Animal Consciousness Through Suffering and Death

Throughout his catalog of novels, one of J. M. Coetzee’s themes is the thought process behind the deaths of humans and animals. The thought process behind the deaths of human beings and animals basically means the way in which an individual human being believes through death the individual will experience a sense of suffering as if they were an animal. For example, one critic, Louis Tremaine, in the article, “The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J. M. Coetzee,” explains:

Coetzee’s personal interest in and respect for the conscious lives of animals are quite genuine, but the insight these passages hold for a reader of Coetzee’s novels bears more importantly on human experience, on the human condition of ‘embodiedness.’ For the human beings of Coetzee’s fiction, as for his (other) animals, to live in a body is to live with suffering, either actual or potential… But the problem over which Coetzee agonizes is not simply that we can be made to suffer and that we die, but that we know this, in the way that his animals know that the knife is descending and can do nothing about it. To know that, as a condition of our embodiedness, of our animal being, we are helpless in the face of suffering (Tremaine 598).


Tremaine’s explanation allows readers and other critics alike to realize that Coetzee is using animals to represent human beings and the ways in which human beings treat “other” human beings and animals. The “other” human beings and animals only know suffering and pain because the colonizers have marched into their lives and taken control. According to Tremaine, Coetzee’s main argument or point is that human beings know that one day, hopefully in a very long time down the road, they are all going to suffer and die. This is inevitable; it is going to happen and human beings cannot do anything to stop this from happening. Just like the dogs, in Disgrace. They dogs know something bad is going to happen in the operating room but they cannot run away from the fear. Human beings are on a metaphorical dog leash. Again, human beings are seen as animals. Coetzee has written about this theme in his novels to show that human beings and animals are all the same through life and death. With this knowledge, why treat another human being or an innocent animal with violence. Why should another human being or animal suffer any more than the colonizers?

Most of the protagonists in Coetzee’s novels experience some sort of loss. Jacobus Coetzee, the Magistrate, Elizabeth Costello, and David Lurie experience loss but they also experience loss through an animal consciousness. An animal consciousness is thinking in terms of an animal and how an animal might feel when they suffer. For example, Jacobus Coetzee feels a sense of animal consciousness after his team gets revenge. Jacobus Coetzee describes:


the thin red necks of such birds [the wounded birds he was taught to dispose of] always awoke compassion and distaste in me. I revolted from repeating the snap, and untidier modes of annihilation like stamping the head flat sent rills down my spine. So I would stand there cuddling the expiring creature in my hands, venting upon it the tears of my pity for all tiny helpless suffering things, until it passed away (Coetzee 105).


Jacobus Coetzee remembers this when he is comforting Plaatje. Yes he is killing the birds who are wounded, but Jacobus Coetzee has this animal consciousness. He is feeling sorry for the bird that he is helping through death. He may be feeling sorry for Plaatje or he may just be resorting back to when he was younger.

In addition, the Magistrate also feels a sense of animal consciousness when he is in the prison. The Magistrate describes, “in my suffering there is nothing ennobling. Little of what I call suffering is even pain. What I am made to undergo is subjection to the most rudimentary needs of my body: to drink, to relieve itself, to find the posture in which it is least sore” (Coetzee 132). Even later he mentions, “I sleep in the corner of the barracks yard; I creep around in my filthy smock; when a fist is raised against me I cower. I live like a starved beast at the back door, kept alive perhaps only as evidence of the animal that skulks within every barbarian-lover” (Coetzee 143). The Magistrate has completely described a dog while he is locked up in prison for meeting with the barbarians. While in prison, the Magistrate is treated like an animal. Although he is not dying, the Magistrate is still suffering as an animal suffers.

Growing older in age, Elizabeth Costello feels that she relates to animals. Her animal consciousness comes from her surroundings when she exclaims, “it is possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money” (Coetzee 69). Elizabeth Costello suffers because the animals are suffering. She is conflicted because the people around her eat animals and use products that were created from animal skins. Yet, she has leather shoes and a leather purse. Deep down she knows it is wrong, but everyone else around her cannot see the negative aspects of eating animals. Through her suffering, Elizabeth Costello taps into her animal consciousness by allowing herself to be the voice for animals because they cannot communicate with human beings.

When David Lurie assists Bev Shaw in the process of euthanizing dogs, he feels a sense of animal consciousness. For instance, David Lurie becomes the dog’s undertaker when he figures, “it would be simpler to cart the bags to the incinerator immediately after the session and leave them there for the incinerator crew to dispose of. But that would mean leaving them on the dump with the rest of the weekend’s scourings… He is not prepared to inflict such dishonor upon them” (Coetzee 144). At the end of the novel, when his dog that he has grown fond of is next to be euthanized, the narrator explains, “he [David Lurie] opens the cage door. ‘Come,’ he says, bends, opens his arms. The dog wags its crippled rear, sniffs his face, licks his cheeks, his lips, his ears. He does nothing to stop it” (Coetzee 220). David Lurie’s animal consciousness allows him to see that animals deserve respect just as much as human beings do. David Lurie did kill the unwanted dogs in the animal welfare shelter. But he also was respectful of them before and after they passed away. The dog who likes the banjo has taught David Lurie a valuable lesson in humanity. This lesson is that all living creatures are going to suffer and eventually die. Although this cannot be stopped, it would be best if human beings were respectful to all creatures. If this happened, hopefully animals and human beings will not suffer due to the actions of human beings.

Putting the Pieces Together: Animal Rights in Today’s Society

In today’s society PETA, the Humane Society, the ASPCA, and many other animal advocacy organizations are established to help abused, unwanted, sick, injured, endangered, domesticated, and wild animals. If these organizations were not up and running, human beings would continue to brutalize animals. With a mixture of animal advocate organizations and literature, such as Coetzee’s novels, human beings can begin to comprehend the consequences of their actions.

Thus, as seen in Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, The Lives of Animals, and Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee has portrayed four characters who stand for humanity and animal rights. Jacobus Coetzee, the Magistrate, Elizabeth Costello, and David Lurie each represent a human being who has either aided in oppression, witnessed animals and human beings being tortured or killed, or felt treated differently themselves. J. M. Coetzee wrote these four protagonists as voices for animals and oppressed human beings. The author’s novels are allegorical for Apartheid South Africa and the oppression towards others and animals. Coetzee’s use of animals to show the relation of animal rights to human rights has sparked the field of critical animal studies. Without this field, animals will continue to be mistreated as racism as one group mistreats other groups. Coetzee has truly portrayed the rights that encompass humanity while at the same time portraying animal rights through the use of Elizabeth Costello who is for animal rights, the “Others” who are treated as animals, complicit protagonists, and protagonists who imagine animal consciousness through suffering and death. If Coetzee had not written on these themes and we did not have critical animal studies, human beings would not be aware of the inhumane treating of animals and other human beings.