Pets

The Art of Living (Routledge)

by Erica Fudge

'When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?' - Michel de Montaigne. Why do we live with pets? Is there something more to our relationship with them than simply companionship? What is it we look for in our pets and what does this say about us as human beings? In this fascinating book, Erica Fudge explores the nature of this most complex of relationships and the difficulties of knowing what it is that one is living with when one chooses to share a home with an animal. Fudge argues that our capacity for compassion and ability to live alongside others is evident in our relationships with our pets, those paradoxical creatures who give us a sense of comfort and security while simultaneously troubling the categories human and animal. For what is a pet if it isn't a fully-fledged member of the human family? This book proposes that by crossing over these boundaries pets help construct who it is we think we are. Drawing on the works of modern writers, such as J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and Jacques Derrida, Fudge shows how pets have been used to think with and to undermine our easy conceptions of human, animal and home. Indeed, "Pets" shows our obsession with domestic animals that reveals many of the paradoxes, contra - dictions and ambiguities of life. Living with pets provides thought-provoking perspectives on our notions of possession and mastery, mutuality and cohabitation, love and dominance. We might think of pets as simply happy, loved additions to human homes but as this captivating book reveals perhaps it is the pets that make the home and without pets perhaps we might not be the humans we think we are. For anyone who has ever wondered, like Montaigne, what their cat is thinking, it will be illuminating reading.

Genres: Animals, Nonfiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published August 21, 2008

About the author

Erica Fudge is Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. She is also Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University, London. Fudge was Director of Research for English, Creative Writing and Journalism there from 2011 to 2014. Her academic research focusses on historical human animal relations, with particular interest in the early modern period, and has written on the place and representation of animals in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; on philosophical debates about animal reason and concepts of animal interiority in the period; on animal things; and, on human livestock relations. She has also published on the implications of bringing animals in to historical research. As well as this academic work, Erica has written about human animal relations in historical and contemporary culture for a wider public in her books Animal and Pets, and in the magazine History Today. She is the Director of the British Animal Studies Network, the leading network for those inside and beyond academia who are working on, and with, animals which meets twice a year and is based at the University of Strathclyde.

Reviews

[Karl Steel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm of two minds with my review. Fudge's Pets, like her Animal, is a good introduction to posthuman thinking about animals. It may be faint praise, but anything that leads general readers towards Derrida, Haraway, and Wolfe on animals has done the world a small service. On the other hand, I've been reading critical animal theory for years now, and have read several pieces by Fudge (here, here, and here,) and have to say that there's not much new in Pets, either for critical animal theory or from Fudge. I can't blame her, really, for recycling work, since Pets, like Animals, is for a series meant to introduce general readers to topics rather than to engage in original research. It's commercial, not scholarly, work. That said, I wish Fudge had written less about Lassie Come-Home (already treated by her elsewhere), and more on Flush and especially more on Hélène Cixous's short story "The Cat's Arrival," which surely deserves more than the throwaway sentence or two she allows it.

I've warnings even for those encountering Fudge for the first time. First, this book is yet another posthuman treatment of animals in the modern world that limits itself to the West, and, even more specifically, to the American/European Anglophone world. She writes, "It is through thinking about the function of pets that we might get a clearer sense of what this being called the human is in the industrialized West" (32). There's no explanation for why, say, the Industrialized East (or Mideast, for that matter) is excluded. The obvious answer is ignorance. I can't blame Fudge for this: she's trained as an Early Modernist (as I'm trained as a medievalist), so she's not really qualified to talk about the rest of the world. Yet there's no excuse for her silence on her own silence on the rest of the world. Given that she's now working outside the Early Modern, she might well have, for example, compared pet culture in modern England (which must be, anyway, heterogeneous) to modern Japan. How about, for example, sparing a few paragraphs for blue dogs? I could productively compare her silence on this point to what she says about John Berger's silences:

Thus, for example, even as Berger reminds us how significant the concept of home is to our sense of self he, like so many others, remains silent about the presence and role of pets in that home, and this silence, I think, is significant. Silence, the excluding of animals from discussions, does not mean that there is nothing to be said about animals. Rather,we might regard the silence itself as an object of analysis. Studies of the human home have been written, and I imagine will continue to be written, that do not acknowledge or explore the presence of animals. This might sound like poor scholarship--disregarding the evidence in order to construct an argument--but in fact this exclusion has been naturalized, has been made to feel like a sensible response, because it helps us to establish who it is that we imagine we are. (14)

Most shocking, however, is her silence on Cary Wolfe's "logic of the pet" (see Animal Rites ), a logic, as Wolfe describes it, which singles out a beloved one among the animals as “the sole exception, the individual who is exempted from the slaughter in order to vindicate, with exquisite bad faith, a sacrificial structure” (104). She's read Wolfe; she quotes him elsewhere in the book; yet Wolfe's specific attention to pets never gets the slightest nod. There's no excuse for Fudge not to attend to exclusions by which the human marks itself as human, as a "grievable life" (see Precarious Life ), and how the pet is included in these exclusive structures. To be sure, at the end, she follows Coetzee's use of "we are too menny" (see [Book:Jude the Obscure]) to treat euthanasia, but this attention is virtually all that violence gets, except for, via this, attention to the structures of domination between pets and their masters. Readers of Fudge's earlier work on stoicism and violence might see an opening here ....

Without a systematic confrontation of the human mastery over the lives of pets, Fudge, I think, avoids confronting the most difficult, most troubling aspect of pet ownership, namely, who has the right to kill. The omission doesn't kill the book; it's still worth reading for initiates; and, more generously, it demands another book be written; but, at the same time, readers should be warned in advance that their complacency and good conscience will be, sadly, left intact.

[Noebonaerense90 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Empecé a leer este libro el viernes anterior al fin de semana de Navidad, con cientos de compromisos. No podía dejarlo, es fascinante. Como “dueña” de mascotas desde el nacimiento, tenía mucho miedo que este enfoque filosófico y vacío de anécdotas me molestara o doliera. Nada más lejos de la verdad. Fascinante exploración de las preguntas éticas sobre tener animales de compañía y cómo influye en nuestro “ser humano”

[Eduardo Leal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es una linda reflexión de lo que significa convivir, compartir y acompañarse de una mascota. En algunos puntos algo dificil de seguir a los que no tenemos formación filosófica, pero me deja una linda sensación de todas las reflexiones que el libro te invita a pensar.

[Jazmin Pavetti · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quiso abarcar demasiado.

[Harjanti Kertokarijo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ik had nog niet eerder iets gelezen over critical animal studies. Dit is een goede intro die prikkelt tot nieuw nadenken over leven met dieren. Leuk.

[Oscar G. Miranda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Abarca demasiados argumentos e hipótesis que finalmente no concretiza. Pareciera que hubiera sacado a su perro a pasear con una correa tan suelta que eventualmente se le escapó.