Are Animals are Capable of Reasoning Essay - 1592 Words

In his lectures about the way humans treat animals offered at Princeton University, John Coetzee chose to tell his audience a short fictional story about Elizabeth Costello, an aging female novelist. Costello is invited to give a lecture at Appleton College in any topic she wants, which turns out to be about animals. At first, using a story in a lecture seemed to be interesting, but a story about a novelist delivering a lecture should not be more interesting than Coetzee himself giving a lecture. Considering the controversy that usually results from a discussion about animals’ rights, it is also likely that Coetzee chose Costello to be the speaker instead of him because he wanted to detach himself from the discussion of such topic and be†¦show more content†¦Her son, John Bernard, realizes not only that his mother is talking about her death but also that she is going to connect it to the deaths of animals. He also â€Å"has a strong sense that [the] audience— which consists, after all, mainly of young people—wants death-talk even less† (Coetzee 19). Costello also notices the difference between her and the audience’s interest when she says â€Å"†¦I have no reason to believe that you have at the forefront of your minds what is being done to animals at this moment in production facilities†, and avoid talking about the deaths of animals explicitly (Coetzee 19). However, since the purpose of her lectures is to question the way humans treat animals, it is inevitable that she uses â€Å"rhetorical power to evoke these horrors† of animals’ deaths (Coetzee 19). Thus, she cannot ignore a huge gap between her and her audience. The difference between Costello and her audience is parallel to the gap that humans create between them and animals. The other reason that alienates Costello from Appleton community is that she is a female novelist. Most of the people who criticize Costello’s argument are male. One of them is a â€Å"tall, bearded man† who asks Costello to clarify the points she tries to make in her first lecture, and he is not satisfied when Costello cannot give him a single solid answer (Coetzee 36). Here we notice theShow MoreRelated Animals Deserve Rights Essay802 Words   |  4 PagesAnimals Deserve Rights It is the notion of our time that non-human animals exist for the advancement of the human species. In whatever field -- cookery, fashion, blood-sports -- it is held that we can only be concerned with animals as far as human interests exist. 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While humans are blessed with the ability to perceive