Animal Magic

Griffith Review #82

by Carody Culver (Editor), Amanda Niehaus (Contributor), Fred Hill (Contributor)

Whether it’s man’s best friend or the king of the jungle, animals occupy a central place in our social, emotional and cultural lives. We’re happy as clams or pigs in mud; we hold our horses or take a lion’s share of what we want; we avoid the elephant in the room or try not to open a can of worms.Animal Magic visits habitats near and far, wild and domestic — the backyard and the dog park, the jungle and the desert, the field and the farm — to examine our complex interactions with creatures furry or scaled, four-legged or eight-limbed, winged or feathered.How has the human-animal bond evolved over the centuries? Is it ethical to have a pet? Why are so many of us averse to insects when their extinction would spell the end of life on Earth? And what truly separates us from the creatures we share the planet with?Griffith Review 82: Animal Magic lets the cat out of the bag to explore all these questions and more.

208 pages, Paperback

Published November 7, 2023

About the author

Carody Culver is the editor of Griffith Review.

She was a contributing editor for Peppermint magazine and has written for publications including Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow and Books+Publishing.

Her chapbook, The Morgue I Think the Deader It Gets, was published by Cordite in 2022, and she’s been a featured Australian poet on the Best American Poetry blog.

Reviews

[Ian Laird · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some interesting contributions in issue 82 of this unstuffy literary review from Australia’s Griffith University. The theme is ‘animal magic’.

As befits an older member of the community I am enthusiastic about compost. Sam Vincent countenances allowing humans, we are animals after all, to be composted after they die. I can nominate some people who could be composted before they expire, but that is for another time. To my astonishment I found that terranation (the term) is already legal in seven US states (now 12) including Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, California and New York and Nevada.

Composting humans is not yet legal in Australia, but state and local governments encourage composting short of terranation, issuing free bins (I have three), and collecting organic scraps to go to big composting plants. Vincent posits the question what is compost, or more accurately what isn’t it. On the farm growing up, his dad threw old socks and scoopings from the pool on to the pile. Animals that died were left to return their nutrients to the soil. As a student Vincent even collected leaves in nearby Canberra to take back to the farm in his hatchback.

More soberly he also tackles the relationship between us and other animals which are no longer used or much less used in manufacturing; hides for shoes and jackets for example, substituted by synthetics, rather than allowing the animal products to return to the earth as they once did.

Are you a cat person or a dog person? For me its beagles; Linus and Lucy, Coco and now Spot, all rescues, so we inherited some of the names, each of them with a different personality. Amanda Niehaus is a dog person who writes lovingly of her dogs Lupa, a Jack Russell, fox terrier cross and Tuku, a Chihuahua, a long way from their wolf ancestors, but who still love being part of a pack, humans included. Melanie Saward tells of screaming birds (Australia has the world's noisiest birds), especially cockatoos and Normie the murderous galah who had to be released to live on a farm.

There are pieces on fossils, sharks, bulls, insects and Hinduism, beware of a cat crossing your path, and by Geraldine Brooks, about horses. Engrossed in her riding lessons, she then wrote Horse, a story based on the racehorse Lexington

Altogether a marvellous collection of varied animal tales.

[ariana · Rating 4 out of 5]

animals ARE magic 💟