Reviews and Comments

Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia takes place entirely in a slaughterhouse and neighbouring factories dedicated to meat. The smell of blood suffocates from the first page to the last, and as a reader I felt more and more hemmed in, like the cattle that only wish for an escape. The protagonist is a cow killer with a conscience who is almost robotically methodical in his work, and his ethic is complex and nuanced. He feels that killing must be done, yet seems to deplore it.

Questions of autonomy and agency abound throughout this story, both for the humans (only men work here) and the animals. Neither seems free, and both are trapped by a larger system that hems them in on all sides. The possibility of agency eventually falls to the cows, who seem to gain a taste for freedom from one another after a mixed-up delivery of animals from warring states leads to some uncanny animal behaviours. Maia's storytelling and presentation of complex metaphor is immense and deep, creating a world that is both broad and intensely narrow, and trapping the reader in a chamber where the world's entanglement with systems of death seems very small. The result is an amazing book, perfectly written and chillingly prescient.

I adore Despret, and have built much of my recent artistic career off her wonderful writing, so this review is written bearing in mind that I have come with foreknowledge. Despret's philosophy uses our attitudes toward animals and birds as a way to analyse human behaviours. Throughout her career, she has shown how unconscious bias and cultural prejudice influence what we think are objective views on nonhuman behaviours.

This monograph charts the beginning of her process, and shows how she followed the work of an ethologist named Zahavi who observed bird behaviours over a long career. Despret, as a young researcher, travelled with Zahavi and his colleagues in Israel, looking to disassemble why his views on the Arabian Babbler caused such consternation in the scientific community, even among his own colleagues. Much of this was due to Zahavi giving space for the babblers to be unique, conscious individuals with complex personalities and mottivations. Despret documents this as monograph and theory, in a wonderful book that is thoughtful and considerate, and would be a nice introduction to anyone who would like to explore her writing further.

Myth, magic, analogy and history entangle in this fascinating Thai story. The telling is relentless, never pausing for the end of a chapter, as all the stories amalgamate into one. Central to this is a Buddhist monk, a story-spinner who lived to be 101 years old. For the first half of the book, many stories interweave, all about characters in the monk's home village, somehow giving context to a century where farming practices and enclosure were normalised in Thailand. The second half is hyper-focussed on a short couple of years where the monk's life was changed irrevocably.

Animals are central to this story, particularly the tiger who is protagonist, antagonist, powerful and helpless. Shape-shifting myths, considerations of wildness and attitudes toward violence all interweave into a narrative that is heartbreaking and beautiful. So much happens in this book it is hard to believe you have not just entered a world, and in the end nothing is revealed. The story, like the tiger, has many stripes and many beings, and hides in plain sight.