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Reviewed by:
  • Necessary Deaths
  • Jack Smith (bio)
Geoffrey Clark . Necessary Deaths. Red Hen Press.

This theme-based collection on animals, Geoffrey Clark's fifth story collection, raises a number of provocative ethical questions. What is our relationship to animals? Do we owe them anything in terms of protecting them from harm, or of doing no harm to them? May we treat them in any fashion we want; is might right? Are we superior in status to them, so that morally they don't count?

This collection is certainly not an animal-rights soapbox treatise. It is first and foremost a stunning literary work, yet one cannot help but see how strongly animal rights (or animal liberation) issues dominate this work. Clark clearly rejects the Western tradition inherited from Descartes of viewing animals as the inferior part of the mind/matter dyad. Whether or not animals are blessed with the cogito as much as humans, they at least have sentience; after reading this collection, one simply cannot view them in Descartes's mechanistic terms. They also have a clear moral standing, conferred on them by the sympathy of the narrative point of view, or at least by the authorial vision that permeates each story. Clark's world is certainly anthropocentric if one considers the philosophical views of Dave Foreman and other deep ecologists, who entirely reject the homocentric, hierarchical order of the classic Western Great Chain of Being—situating animals, and creatures in general, on the same moral footing as humans: all of them, viruses included, blessed with intrinsic, sacramental value. At the other end of the philosophical spectrum, though, and diametrically opposed to Clark's own vision, is the ethical position of Kant with his Kingdom of Ends, from which animals are absolutely excluded since they lack rationality; the only reason not to harm animals, for Kant, is the negative effect this harm might bring to the rational individual person engaging in this harm.

The apparent vision of this collection of animal stories is clearly on the political left, animal rights–wise, and many would surely brand it extreme as they pick up on some of its implications for their own lives. Clark's vision is somewhat akin to the moral position of Peter Singer, who argues, like his utilitarian forebear Jeremy Bentham, that if animals can suffer (which they clearly do), that ability to suffer is enough to make them members of our moral universe; and to the ethical position of Tom Regan, a Kantian with a new twist, who argues that to be a "subject of a life" is alone sufficient for inclusion in our moral community. Clearly animals in Necessary Deaths do both: they suffer, and they make us realize just how profoundly they are a subject of a life. If this collection seems grim at times, it is hopeful in the ways it portrays the importance of animals as creatures with unquestioned moral worth.

It would be a mistake, however, to read Clark's collection as focusing on the lot of animals alone. It consistently moves from deeply disturbing moral issues connected to animals to larger questions regarding our very [End Page 194] humanity. What does our relationship to animals tell us about ourselves, others, and our place in the universe? What part do they play in our complex lives? Is the way we treat animals a gauge of our humanity in some way? Do our relations with animals relate in some metaphorical way to our relations to humans?

The ethical principle "First, do no harm," or primum non nocere, is central to "Ears" but for Clark, whose moral vision is consistently complex, this dictum is problematic when applied to real-life circumstances. The plot itself is quite simple. Welles Stringer's hapless Great Pyrenees, Snow, must undergo a rigorous treatment for ear mites. Larry Carstairs, the narrator, and his best friend, Welles, try to follow the regimen prescribed by Dr. Annaldo. This means utterly brutalizing Snow: "What we have to do," says Welles, "is more or less what Annaldo and his assistants did: muzzle him, knock his feet out from under him, and no matter how he groans and whines and tries to snarl and...

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