Jack London’s Poetic Animality and the Problem of Domestication

Abstract

Is there such a thing as animal imagination? If so, how might it differ across wild and domesticated environments? Jack London suggests an answer to these questions in his imaginative forays into the inner world of dogs. Writing alongside female advocates for the humane treatment of animals, who believed in the reality of animal emotion and reason, London extends the Darwinian tenet that animals differ from humans in degree and not in kind in Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). Attributing cognitive and emotional complexity to animals, he speculates about the impact human domestication practices might have on the quality of their lived experiences.