Human Minds and Animal Stories: How Narratives Make Us Care About Other Species

Abstract

Long before I was a student of Victorian literature and culture, I was a girl reading and re-reading the classic book Black Beauty. Even now, I can recall key events in that fictional horse's life, including his fellow horse workers and the various owners they served, and the abuse they encountered at various points in the novel. It was decades before I learned to see the book as a commentary on the class system in England, and it was only in reading the opening of Human Minds and Animal Stories that I learned how much of an impact that book had made when published, stirring waves of animal rights advocates to action that resulted in new animal welfare programs and legal protections. It is not surprising, given that impact, that the authors of the present book see Black Beauty as “a perfect historical example of the power of narratives to shape the way we think about animals” (p. 1). The same impact, however, also raises the central paradox that inspired this book, that years after these actions, the abuse of animals at the hands of humans continues on a wide scale.The relationship between humans and animals, or more precisely human attitudes toward animals, is, for the authors of this interesting and multi-faceted book, a mystery, one that requires good detective work to resolve. Wojciech Małecki, a specialist in literary theory and environmental humanities (among other things), Piotr Sorokowski, a much published scholar of evolutionary, cultural, and social psychology, Bogusław Pawłowski, also much published in the areas of human behavior and preferences in relationship to body morphology and physiology, and Marcin Cieński, professor of literary history and comparative literature, crafted a unique expansive study, applying the tools of social science to the field of environmental humanities to produce what they see as a “happy marriage” of these different disciplines (p. 13). The authors anticipate that the majority of their readers will be environmental humanists, but with their interest in practical application of their finding, they have written to appeal to a non-academic audience, such as animal activists, as well. They have minimized the use of jargon and present the details of their methodology in ways an ordinary academic monograph would not, providing substantive discussion of how they thought through their experiments, defining terms that might be unfamiliar to the non-specialist reader, such as the nature and value of blind testing, or the definition of first-person narrative. In their quest to provide a blueprint for others, the authors offer an unusually transparent detailing of the whole of the process, including the disappointments, unexpected outcomes, turns in thinking, and ethical considerations. Each part of the book is presented with this multi-faceted audience in mind.The opening chapters of the book set the foundation by placing the interest in narrative with the so-called “narrative turn” across the academy, tracing the use of narratives by animal activists, and homing in on the motivations for their study and the rationale for how it proceeded. A lengthy discussion of the complications of experimenting with literature follows, showing the multiple factors that can skew the results. These discussions appear particularly helpful to the non-academics who wish to develop their own research projects.The second chapter details their indebtedness to the Polish author Marek Krajewski, who aided their project not only by encouraging people to participate in their experiments but took their suggestions for making up a story about an animal, in this case a monkey, who endures abuse through various human owners but also experiences some happy times—similar to the Black Beauty tale. Krajewski, himself an animal lover, wrote it, added it into a novel, and publicized it. This widespread distribution of the story gave the research “ecological validity,” because the reading and response occurred in real life as well as in lab conditions. Inspired by Krajewski's specialty, the book follows the motif of a detective story, where the narratives of the plight of animals are the “suspect,” the researchers and audience are the detectives seeking to determine the guilt or innocence of the “suspect,” and the “crime” is making humans care more about animals.The chapters at the heart of the book follow a sequence of research questions: Does it matter if the story is fictional? Does it matter if it's first person or third person narration? Does it matter what language is used, or who it is about (i.e., what species)? How does it work, and how long will it work? The authors test a series of hypotheses and provide a running commentary on the design of their experiments, the challenges of each, and the results they obtained. Each chapter, like the first two, provides extensive citation and contains discussion of literary elements with a range of popular examples alongside theoretical frames that informed the experiment, The discussion of the different theories provides the academic grounding, while the many cultural references, from Sherlock Holmes to Pokemon to Breaking Bad to Harry Potter, provide numerous opportunities for the reading audience to connect to the thoughts and goals of the authors. There are also gut-wrenching excerpts detailing horrific abuse, but these are used sparingly. The experiments detailed in these chapters led the authors to conclude, with empirical support, that narratives do influence human attitudes toward animals, and to identify which elements of narrative were most likely to have the desired impact.The reader of Human Minds and Animal Stories need not be an animal activist to appreciate the book, because at heart it is a study of the power of narrative to shape human thought, but being a reader, one who enjoys reading, will increase the enjoyment this narrative journey provides. So will the reader with an interest in the use of language and the impact of word choice. In chapter six, the authors discuss the work of Melanie Green and Timothy Brock and their work on “transportation into text,” the quality that allows the reader to be absorbed by the story, to “get lost” in it (p. 129). Readers who have enjoyed this experience might also recognize their claim that one is unlikely, if not unable, to critically scrutinize a text while in this mode (p. 131). So too the discussion of language—the word choice in describing an event or situation—provides an appeal beyond its application to animal stories.Małecki, Sorokowski, Pawłowski, and Cieński set out to investigate the mystery of human attitudes toward animals. Like the under-appreciated part of a detective story, they wanted to do more than just “catch the suspect,” they wanted to understand it. More than that, they wanted a practical application to address real-world concerns (p. 129). Each carefully composed experiment opened new questions, ultimately leading to the book's conclusions, that narratives about the plight of animals do indeed improve human attitudes toward animals, and that the effect of such stories lingers, at least for a week. They feel confident, in the end, of advising those interested in animal advocacy to use narrative, to use it often, and to make the cruelty explicit. In constructing their book as a narrative of investigation, of broad research, thoughtful consideration of conditions and factors affecting experimentation, and supporting anecdotal evidence with empirical analysis, they have also provided a blue-print for interdisciplinary research, cross-disciplinary tool application, and humanizing data-driven experiments.