This section of
Only the Animals contains several layers of stories, all of them about the close relationships between humans and bears, and many of them framed as fairytales. With this, the book implies that there’s a reason that bears so often show up in folklore: they can behave in ways that are shockingly humanlike. (The section opens with the story of the brown bear and black bear in the zoo, then the brown bear tells the story of the bear prince, and then within that story, the bear prince hears Irena’s story about the cursed bear princess.) On another note, the idea that men will fall in love with animals and then destroy them encapsulates one of the book’s central ideas: that people do love animals, but often lead those animals to death and destruction. This points back to Peter the chimpanzee’s section: he and Evelyn (a human) had a romantic relationship, but it ended with Evelyn, on the brink of starvation, killing and eating Peter.