Only the Animals consists of 10 short stories, each narrated by a different animal who is telling their story from beyond the grave. Each animal was killed as a result of human conflict, such as World War I, the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, or the 2006 Israeli bomb strikes on Beirut. Throughout the stories, the animals consider their relationships with the people around them—and the history of human-animal relationships more generally, going back millennia. Only the Animals proposes that as much as people might like to think of themselves as fundamentally different from and superior to their animal counterparts, animals and people nevertheless inhabit the same planet, are affected by the same conflicts, and in this sense are fundamentally connected. And though the connections and friendships between people and animals can be some of the strongest bonds possible, Only the Animals also warns that these bonds can become liabilities when people choose to abuse animals’ trust.
Only the Animals shows how essential animals have been to human events throughout history. Animals are, depending on the story, companion animals, beasts of burden, partners in war, or a food source for people. Put simply, the stories show that it’s impossible to ignore animals’ roles in the course of human history. Sprout, the dolphin who narrates “A Letter to Sylvia Plath,” is a highly trained dolphin in the U.S. Navy. She performs essential functions, like tagging mines on the ocean floor, during the Cold War, the Gulf War, and the war in Iraq until her death in 2003. The camel narrator of “The Bones,” on the other hand, notes that it was camels that made it possible for colonizers to settle Australia. Camels, he explains, carried building supplies and luxury items into Australia’s interior—something that only camels could do, given their ability to survive in desert environments without water for long periods of time. Sprout and the camel’s stories make it clear that people aren’t the only ones that deserve credit for major events in history. Animals have contributed to that history in numerous ways, though many accounts omit their contributions.
The stories also suggest that the bonds between people and animals can be some of the strongest and most powerful in the world. Kiki the cat, for instance, has a tender relationship with her owner, the French writer Colette. Much of Kiki’s story is set in the trenches of World War I, where she is accidentally stranded after accompanying Colette to visit her military husband, Henri. Abandoned in the trenches, Kiki pines for Colette—and ultimately decides to plan a trip all the way across France so she and Colette can be reunited. A sniper shoots Kiki before she can carry out her plan, but her desire to risk everything to return to her owner speaks to the strength of her bond with Colette. And Kiki isn’t the only animal to express deep, unwavering love for an owner—the Briand dog in Kiki’s story returns to his master and his sheep as soon as he’s done his job at the front, while the camel speaks longingly about his deceased first handler, Zeriph. Their bonds with their owners are such that the animals, at least, feel unmoored and incomplete once their owners are gone. “A Letter to Sylvia Plath” suggests that in many cases, the feelings are mutual. In it, Sprout tells readers of her relationship with Officer Bloomington, a naval officer put in charge of the Navy’s dolphin-training program. Unlike his predecessors, whose training methods made it clear that they saw dolphins as inferiors, Bloomington treats the dolphins as equals. What results is a bond so strong that when Bloomington falls in love with another trainer, Sprout is extremely jealous—though Bloomington includes Sprout in his wedding ceremony to honor her role in his life. These are only a few of the many strong relationships between human and animal characters in the book, and the bonds show that animals have just as much to offer people in the way of friendship as other people do. Being of a different species, the stories suggest, doesn’t prevent people and animals from forming meaningful relationships; rather, a relationship with an animal can be just as fulfilling.
However, Only the Animals also shows that the interconnectedness between people and animals doesn’t always work in the animals’ favor—sometimes, people abuse their relationships with animals to everyone’s detriment. It’s easy, the book shows, for people to abuse their trusting relationships with animals—especially in situations where people rely on animals to perform difficult or dangerous tasks. Sprout, for instance, shares that over the course of human-dolphin history, dolphins have developed a moral code that makes it unthinkable to kill a person. Thus, when she realizes after the fact that she killed an enemy diver with a dart, she commits suicide. Sprout doesn’t know who in the Navy orchestrated the attack, or if Bloomington even knew that the tag she was supposed to affix to an enemy diver was in fact a deadly dart. But no matter who’s responsible, Sprout feels that the Navy abused her trust in her human handlers. And because she unknowingly killed a person as a result of this abuse, Sprout feels she has no choice but to take her own life. With this, the Navy loses a highly trained dolphin service member, and Bloomington loses one of his best friends. Other examples of human-animal relationships gone awry include the anti-tank dogs in World War II, whom the Allies used as suicide bombers, as well as the various animals who died in the course of the early tests to see if living creatures could survive space travel. As a whole, Only the Animals shows how easily people can abuse their trusting relationships with animals—and indeed, it suggests that this abuse is impossible to ignore when considering human-animal relationships. For all the relationships that are mutually beneficial or that move history forward, many more ignore the suffering that animals endure as a result of their relationships to humans.
The Interconnectedness of Humans and Animals ThemeTracker
The Interconnectedness of Humans and Animals Quotes in Only the Animals
Zeriph had been proud of me, carrying the first piano into the core of our new country. [...]
But for what? I carried that thing of beauty all that way on my back, with the ropes cutting into my bones, so that somebody could tinkle on the keys for the midday drinks at the pub in Alice. That’s what broke Zeriph’s heart, that the piano’s music could mean nothing without the false prophetry of drink.
I looked more closely at the man driving the mules. He was far too old to fight. The mules showed none of their usual inclination to misbehave and were following him peaceably. “They love him,” I said.
“And he them. I’ve seen a driver refuse to leave his team of battery mules when they became entangled in barbed wire. He died with them.”
“Why are so many of them missing their tails?” I asked.
“When they’re starving, they eat each other’s tails.”
“Don’t eat any of it,” I said.
The tomcat looked offended at my suggesting he would take the food. “I have my own adopted soldier. But you should eat what he’s offering even if you’re not hungry. You might be the only thing keeping him alive until he’s rotated out of the front line and can get some rest.”
They—the humans, that is—seem to think that what sets them apart from other animals is their ability to love, grieve, feel guilt, think abstractly, et cetera. They are misguided. What sets them apart is their talent for masochism. Therein lies their power. To take pleasure in pain, to derive strength from deprivation, is to be human.
I fell in love with you the first moment I saw you, before I was fully human, and from across that gulf of understanding and experience, somehow, miraculously, you felt something for me in return. You alone inspired me to become human, not your husband’s relentless mazes and sorting tasks and word repetitions, not his tantrums when I didn’t do what he wanted, not the whipping, not the sweet fruit he dangled just out of my reach. I wanted to be human so that I might reach out across that chasm and touch you, be touched by you.
I was starving. My Master had recently begun to follow a vegetarian diet and decided that I should give up all meat too, in keeping with his beliefs [...] Not only that, he was concerned about my karma. He had promised me that if I did as he said, ate no meat, resisted my urge to hunt foxes, and tried to meditate once a day, I might be reincarnated as a human being in my next life. A human being! The thought was intoxicating.
Muss said [the zebra mussels] were halfway to covering the whole bottom of the lakes too, that there was not a single native mussel left to tell us stories.
And with a glance at me—a kind of tribute, I’d like to think—she would read out my favorite paragraph of the whole book, a moment that does justice to both the poet Elizabeth and her dog Flush by showing them as equals in their inability to ever fully understand each other: not so different then, from a biographer trying to get into the skin of her subject.
The Soviets were sending animals into space like there was no tomorrow (which, for the animals, there mostly wasn’t), desperate to finalise their research on the viability of manned space flight and the effects on living creatures of prolonged weightlessness and radiation from the Van Allen belts, and get a man on the moon before the Americans. They’d heard rumors that the Americans had sent a bunch of black mice into space and the cosmic rays had turned them grey; this would be undesirable in humans.
But there is mechanical trouble while he’s up there and instead of getting sips of water or tablets, he starts getting zapped by the electric pads wired to the soles of his feet. He gets back to earth, gets out of the capsule and the NASA guys are smiling, holding his hands, but Enos is fucking mad. This used to make me laugh. But up in space, I just had to think about this, about Enos getting buzzed on his feet for doing the right thing—the right thing! what he’s been trained to do!—and I wanted to bite somebody’s face off.
“Death is not something to worship now that you are adults,” the matriarch warned. “It is the province only of the very young to want things to work out badly. The souls in the sky live only as long as we remember their stories. Beyond that there is nothing, not for them nor for us.”
As we were dying, our foreheads pressed together, one of the humans stepped forward and placed a single orange in the gap between our trunks. It was an act of kindness, I think, a way to thank us for our sacrificed flesh. I was already too far from the appetites of life to eat it, but the smell made me briefly happy—we were children again, two sisters playing beside the fence separating us from a fragrant orchard of oranges, longing to die gloriously and have our souls pointed out to the youngest in the herd on warm evenings: see, there are the stars which form their trunks, and there are the stars of their tails.
“I’m waiting for her to die so I can eat her.” He chewed at the bread.
“Why wait?” asked the witch.
“People would stop risking their lives, dodging sniper bullets to bring me bread, if they thought I had no heart, eating her while she’s still half alive,” the bear said.
We take killing a human very hard. It is as taboo for us as killing our own babies. We recognise in you what your ancients used to recognise in us and understood as sacred a long time ago, when killing a dolphin was punishable by death. You used to think of us as being closer to the divine than any other animal on earth, as being messengers and mediators between you and your gods. You honoured us with Delphinus, our own constellation in the northern sky.
What a delight to be needed so acutely! Her ex-husband had tolerated her neediness but not cultivated it in himself; her daughter had been determined to establish her independence from the moment she learned to walk. But there I was with my feathers scattering the light to create an illusion of brilliant green, my fat tongue, my perfect toes. I, Barnes, who would—if she cared for me attentively—grow to love and depend on her as my parent, partner, mate.