My Goodreads and Amazon review of On Animals by Susan Orlean (Rated 5) – Fair Game. In the words of author Susan Orlean, On Animals is about “the subject of animals — living with them, loving them, hoarding them, using them, and how our relationship to animals says something about who and what we are.” I like animals, but with a few exceptions (cats, for sure, and well-behaved dogs), I’m not a fan of them as pets. However, I am a huge fan of Susan Orlean, whatever her topic, and she is enamored of animals, both domesticated and wild, so I had no doubt I would be drawn to her book of essays. I was not disappointed. Among my favorites are “Show Dog,” about Biff the boxer, who is nothing like the stereotypical pampered prize winner depicted in most media; “Riding High,” about the centuries-long dependability of mules for agricultural and military transport; and “The Lion Whisperer,” about a man with an uncanny ability to co-exist peacefully with the king of (vicious) beasts. I also enjoyed learning about the place-loyalty of homing pigeons, animal actors’s rights, re-wilding captive whales, and matching teams of oxen. In short, all animals and their encounters with humans are fair game for this curious and entertaining author. The last set of essays are as much about Orlean the “farmer” as about the animals who live with her in rural upstate New York: fowl (chickens, turkeys, ducks, guinea fowl), cattle, cats, and a dog. Orlean’s relationships with her domestics is affectionate but respectful; she doesn’t baby or anthropomorphize them. She is particularly fond of her chickens. When she and her husband temporarily relocate to L.A., and she must leave the chickens behind, Orlean laments, “Our backyard in California is small. Moreover, there are zillions of coyotes and bobcats hanging out in the neighborhood, and they are not the scrawny East Coast models: like everyone in Los Angeles, the coyotes I’ve seen there look like they work out a lot with personal trainers.” Eventually forced to permanently move from NY to CA, a tearful Orlean observes, “I had reveled in the animals’ friendship and their strangeness; the way they are so obvious and still so mysterious.” We might apply the same paradox to people, if we attended to them with the same dedication Orlean devotes to her menagerie. As a fiction writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I can make that claim about the (un)knowability of the characters I create. I read On Animals soon after completing my novel Elephant Angel (out January 2028), during which I too collected interesting information about human-animal relationships. Orlean’s book was a fascinating complement to what I’d learned and spurs me to discover more about the animal kingdom as experienced by us and, as we can best infer, what they in turn make of us and themselves.
A menagerie between the covers of a book
Why writers read: “Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.” – Daniel Pinkwater
