Human thinks about (thinking about) nonhuman species

The moths have taken over—dozens from the desert seeking shelter in the relative moistness of our window crevices. They come out at night, and we smash them with old sneakers or unread hardcover novels any chance we get. The news calls them harmless, but still we kill them.

David G. Brooks will be relieved to know my copy of The Grass Library, his new nonfiction book on life with (nonhuman) animals, is a paperback. Its being unfit for use as an instrument of destruction, I decide instead to read it. While thankfully the seasonal change prompts the moths to leave on their own accord, the essays within make a compelling case for nonlethal eviction. Twenty-three short pieces follow life at a small New South Wales farm with the dog and four sheep to whom the book is dedicated, as well as a revolving cast of cicadas, ducks, rats, and others. While the book progresses chronologically and carries some through-lines (e.g., Charlie the dog's dusk-time anxiety; the sheep's breaching of human fences), the chapters are mostly self-contained narratives that meander and digress into Derridean philosophy that pushes humans to rethink our relationships with other species and to question our hypocrisies and engrained perceptions of superiority.

In the penultimate essay, "Masters of Go," Brooks narrates his struggle to remove a rat peacefully from his home, comparing it to the championship game of Go documented in Yasunari Kawabata's novel The Master of Go. Like the Master with the Challenger in their famous match, Brooks engages the rat in a game of wits, setting (humane) traps and building barricades to force the rat where he wants him to, well, go. The rat, though, like Kawabata's Challenger, finds clever tricks to outwit Brooks and evade what feels like certain death. If we extend the metaphor, Brooks seems to be questioning his own drive when he mentions that the Master may have "made [a] false move deliberately, as a means of throwing the match, to get out of what might seem to him a kind of moral dilemma" (187). That rat might be better off elsewhere, but who is Brooks to make that decision?

To many readers, the preceding may sound like no dilemma at all. True, I myself have been slaughtering moths indiscriminately. Brooks once would have agreed. He notes his conversion to veganism and the evolution of his activism in the opening chapter to allow his past self to serve as surrogate for skeptical readers. He is very direct, though: "this book isn't about veganism, or guilt [over humankind's harm]" (2).

This book is about dogs. It is about sheep, about the pain of castration and the ways humans justify its infliction, about finding a way to nurse a motherless sheep without resorting to using another animal's lactose compound. "Sure, it's helping some animals, but it's exploiting others in order to do so," he says (121). It is about how even humankind's best intentions can harm others when almond milk turns out to be poisonous for sheep—and about all such ethical quandaries, which Brooks makes clear can never be simple. Otherwise, they would not be quandaries.

As much as anything, The Grass Library is a book about the challenges of writing about nonhuman animals. Speciesism, Brooks argues, is cooked into our clichés. What elephant? "There is always a Human in the room," he tells us (16). While he posits that other animals may have "languages" of their own that we cannot comprehend, words seem to exist as a uniquely human phenomenon, and they matter: "wild or tame, feral or domesticated, native or exotic, rare or common, endangered or of least concern, pet or pest, live-stock or otherwise" (64). Our diction dictates the value we assign to a thing.

The writer's mind is ever spinning at work, though. Even pet, a word ostensibly connoting as positive over pest, carries implications of ownership. "An animal...