In The Lives of Animals Coetzee, through his fictional character Elizabeth Costello, poses an idea he references throughout a majority of novels, the problem and question of good and evil, of human nature and right vs wrong. In ways that complicate the feeling so human nature Coetzee brings to light our own understands of right versus wrong. Through the topic of animal treatment (at the hands of humanity) Costello’s speeches illustrate the problems of humanity and our inabilities to “humanize” our victims.
The text of the novel is dedicated to two lectures Elizabeth Costello makes at Appleton College on the themes of animal rights and treatment. Throughout her lectures Costello references how humans mistreat the ‘lives’ of animals, effectively suggesting that human beings should treat animals as creatures with souls and beings, just as they (humans) would treat other beings. What Costello/Coetzee is suggesting beyond the theme of animal/human treatment is the problem of good and evil and the very core of human nature. Coetzee/Costello suggests that we should not eat animals because they are beings, like us. This claim is appealing a sense of pathos– feeling– within each of us. Costello is claiming that humans know, and act, with a moral sense of what is right and wrong, what is good and what is evil. She asserts that the question should not be: “Do we have something in common– reason, self-consciousness, a soul–with other animals…{instead we should see} The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else” (34). Thus in the controversial analogy to the Holocaust, an earlier claim made by Coetzee/Costello that humans killing animals was similar to the Nazi’s treatment of Jews (see pages 20-21), Costello is suggesting that the horrors of evil are the inabilities of the perpetrators to see themselves in the place of their victims. Thus the perpetrators are creating a place for their victims that is sub-human, essentially dehumanizing the victim in order to create evil. As Costello states in her speech “The Philosophers and Animals”: “Denunciation of the camps reverberates so fully with the language of the stockyard and slaughterhouse that is barely necessary for me to prepare the ground for comparison I am about to make. The crime of the Third Reich, says the voice of accusation, was to treat people animals” (20). Thus Costello envisions that the world of Nazi Germany (and the treatment of Europe’s Jews) is similar to our present day treatment of animals. Like the fictional Professor Stern however, who writes that he did not attend Elizabeth’s lecture (theoretically) because of her analogy, I find the analogy hard to believe. I understand the analogy, that being said, comparing the genocide of the Jewish people to inhumane animal treatment seems to be almost too much; as Stern concludes (49)”The Jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews, you say. That is a trick with words which I will not accept…If Jews were treated like cattle, it does not follow that cattle are treated like Jews” (49-50). As Marjorie Garber concludes “The Holocaust is one profound challenge to the use of analogy” (82), emphasizing once again, the complex push of Coetzee’s language, perhaps questioning how far language, example, human nature can be pushed. As Primo Levi once concluded he was a human “who happened to be a Jew, but that he was human (he participated “for himself” in the universal function of humanity)…” (qtd in “Tolerance as an Ideological Category”) as Stern concludes in The Lives of Animals to say that humans (Jews) were treated like cattle, does not follow that cattle were treated like Jews, similarly to say one’s identity is linked to their ethnicity/heritage is not to say an animals identities are profoundly linked to their sense of being (for as many people question Elizabeth Costello in her audience, do animals have the same complex senses of being and identities that humans have?)
None of this response is meant to make light of the theme of The Lives of Animals, that is, the inhumane treatment of animals at the hands of humanity. However, maybe there is a deeper “problem” here beyond discussing animal cruelty, the inhumane treatment of humanity at large, a theme evident in other works by Coetzee (consider the torturing in Waiting For the Barbarians, Magda’s violence in In the Heart of The Country, Michael’s violence in Michael K. just to name a few) both to fellow humans and animals. As Barbara Smuts references “For the heart to truly share another’s being, it must be an embodied hear, prepared to encounter directly the embodied heart of another” (103). As Smuts references the idea of empathy is evident throughout the lectures by Elizabeth Costello, alongside it the want for love and humanity. However, I believe the problem of good and evil, however cynical it may be, is that love and empathy are rarely here. And maybe this is Costello/Coetzee’s point, the problem with our treatment of animals is a larger problem with society at a large– the fact that we don’t see our treatment of OTHERS as a problem at all.
Works Cited:
Zizek, Slavoj. “Tolerance as an Ideological Category” Critical Inquiry 2007. http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html.
(L)Imitations of Freedom 
Jessica, I think that the analogy between the treatment of animals and the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust is, regardless of its validity, a usefully provocative one. For ultimately, I think part of what Costello is urging, is the extension of empathy to animals. Is not the ability for cruelty – to humans or otherwise – based in a refusal to empathize for the other? The ideology of the Nazis in WWII, of the European colonialists and slave traders, of the Americans in Vietnam and Iraq, of the Japanese in colonized Asia – does that ideology not allow us as humans to block off empathy toward a particular other? And whether or not animals have the same value as humans, is it not a blocking off of our empathy toward animals and certain groups of humans alike that allows us to treat them “like animals”? To treat them with cruelty? To burn worms on the hot pavement or slaughter thousands upon thousands upon thousands of chickens, pigs, and cows? Is not all cruelty an act that requires us to refuse our empathy? Even cruelty toward the self is in effect an act of refusing to empathize with ourselves.
I think the analogy is useful insomuch as it illustrates the shocking ability of humanity to engage in cruelty on epic proportions. The Holocaust – or genocide in general – is “unique” in its illustrative quality because it disallows excuse and justification. Unlike war or crime generally, genocide is an act of such magnitude, such undeniable evil, that we cannot deny the darkness lurking in our hearts.