Animal Rhetoric

Abstract

Animal Rhetoric Caitlin Kindervatter-Clark (bio) I. Thesis The week before Graham Bryant killed his girlfriend, he turned in a paper to my first-year composition course, Animals and Society, arguing that dogs should have the same rights as human beings. The first paragraph reads: It is agreed there are basic rights that everybody shares. This is supported by the U.S. Declaration of Independence (Wikipedia). For periods in history, some people like slaves and women were denied basic rights, but now they are guaranteed to every human being. But why are rights limited to Homo Sapiens alone? Some people have argued this is Speciesism and say Great Apes should also be given rights because their genes are 96% identical to us. In this paper, I will show that dogs should also be given basic rights because there are important qualities that we share. I gave the paper an A-minus. It was better than Graham’s last paper, in which he tried to argue that dogs make the best pets, although I’d warned against meaningless superlatives of this kind. The new paper was an improvement. I wanted to see Graham’s face when I gave it back to him. But I didn’t get to give it back to him. By the time I’d finished grading it, he was in jail. The name he’d belatedly scrawled across the paper’s top right corner was now propelled from brief mentions in the college sports section to mug shots in the national news. He wore a jumpsuit printed with black-and-white stripes, like a prisoner in a children’s story. His picture always ran beside the same one of his dead girlfriend, Taylor Pray, beaming before an ocean backdrop. I held onto the paper, not sure what else to do. I wondered if it could be considered evidence. Graham had even titled it like a piece of evidence, calling it simply Paper #2. [End Page 175] TITLE? I’d written above in light-handed pencil. But the law didn’t come for the paper. I wasn’t surprised. The press might have liked to see it, but I had no plans to share it with them. I could predict phrases from their stories before I read them: Bucolic setting. Privileged upbringing. Asking why. It was bad writing, and my job was to make bad writing go away. II. Logos What are the human qualities in dogs? Graham’s paper is rich in factual support: Eye tracking technology shows both dogs and humans use a left gaze bias when looking at people. The right half of the human face shows emotion more than the left half so humans look more to the left at each other’s faces. Dogs do the same unlike any other animals. Dogs are also very sensitive to the direction we are looking. If you look up, a dog will also look up to see why you are looking up. The bit about the left-gaze bias actually came from a documentary I showed in class. While Graham should have cited it, this kind of regurgitation is acceptable in “empty content” courses like Composition 1500. My job was to introduce students to controversies, which they could use to patch together arguments. It wasn’t hard for me to settle on the topic of animals and society. I figured animals would provoke argument, and I was right. My classroom often erupted in shouting. I took it as a sign of a job well done. To follow a gaze, we have to be able to imagine ourselves in the mind of another, understand that something has captured that mind, and want to see what that something is. A lot of animals only do this with members of their own species, but dogs are particularly attuned to the human gaze. Graham explains: Dogs were the first animals humans domesticated. They are actually domesticated wolves. But a wolf skull is long and narrow with a flat top, and a canine skull is shorter and rounder. This makes a dog’s skull look more like a human skull. Because dogs and people lived together so long, they started to...