Dignity+and+Treatment+of+Animals

//“A blow catches [Lurie] on the crown of the head. He has time to think, If I am still conscious then I am all right, before his limbs to water and he crumples. He is aware of being dragged across the kitchen floor…He is in the lavatory, the lavatory of Lucy’s house. Dizzily he gets to his feet. The door is locked, the key is gone…So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it…The door opens, knocking him off balance…‘The keys,’ says the man…The man raises the bottle. His face is placid, without trace of anger. It is merely a job he is doing: getting someone to hand over an article. If it entails hitting him with a bottle, he will hit him, hit him as many times as is necessary…[Lurie] speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa…Mission work: what has it left behind…Nothing that he can see…Now the tall man appears from around the front, carrying the rifle. With practiced ease he brings a cartridge up into the breech, thrusts the muzzle into the dogs’ cage…There is a heavy report; blood and brains splatter the cage.”// The dogs are slaughtered.

Lucy’s final point is made again and again in the book; animals suffer here at the hands of men of all colors. Goats are slaughtered for parties, sheep are staked and starved before their deaths, dogs suffer from the lottery of their own fecundity.

In moving passages about Lurie’s volunteer job--his unconscious admission that he does need to do penance in the world--putting them to sleep in a shelter, we see the only true moments of growth that ever come to him: “He has learned…to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty calling by its proper name: love.”

The thoughtless slavery of animals is quietly documented on page after page of "Disgrace," and sometimes not so quietly as when the gentle woman charged with the destruction of the cast-off dogs says to Lurie, “‘Yes we eat up a lot of animals in this country…It doesn’t seem to do us much good. I’m not sure how we will justify it to them.’”

It’s in this that Coetzee reaches beyond, showing that what equalizes and nullifies questions of history and race is the unity of man in its abuse of animals.

D’Souza, Tony. "In Retrospect: "Disgrace," Coetzee's Masterpiece ." __Critical Mass__. 5 Apr 2008 <[|http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/03/in-retrospect-disgrace-coetzees.html>.]

//By: Natalie Tayim IB 1.//