The Lives of Animals

On reading J.M. Coetzee's "The Lives of Animals", the central idea I take away is that there is an extent to which people have to be willing to admit that rationality itself is imperfect if significant change in the treatment of animals is to occur.  Several times in the "story" people use the example of babies or the mentally challenged as human analogues to animal consciousness, and thus as representatives (in that we treat them as equals) of the argument for the better treatment of animals.  By the end of the "story" though, we see Elizabeth herself essentially admit to having relinquished reason, as she says she often feels she "must be mad", and that she doesn't understand why she can't come to terms with the world like everyone else does.  At this point, rather than react to her as he would towards a dog on account of her operating outside of rationality, John reacts the way most people would at seeing their mother in distress, with compassion.

This serves as a rather telling example of the fact that a great deal of human behavior, babies and the handicapped aside, is not rationally motivated, including the feeling of empathy for the suffering of others.  John in fact sets aside his own rationality at this point as well, as he first asks himself what his mother wants, ventures a question as an answer to his own question, then pulls over to hug her in light of his inability to generate satisfying answers.  Elizabeth's own revelation as to her motivations in supporting animal rights also exposes rationality itself as being a kind of afterthought, a construction implemented as a kind of band-aid in order for consciousness to have a means of explaining its own unconscious drives, which the conscious being must account for out of fear of the very unconscious, alien nature of these drives.

By thus undermining the central argument of his own story, Coetzee seems to be implying that the rationality behind any argument is on some level irrationally motivated.  In this case, he seems to ask if it even matters whether or not its rational to treat animals more respectfully.  He and those who share his views are being vocal about an issue that causes them suffering, rational or not, and we, like John, can either respond with compassion or not.  He rather obviously urges his audience towards compassion, as he suggests it as a primal response to the breakdown of reason and the suffering this can cause.  Ultimately I feel this is the purpose of having John rather cynically tell his mother "it will be over soon," as this immediately invokes our own compassion towards Elizabeth, given her son's rather fatalistic mindset in comforting her.  In this way it seems like Coetzee delivers a challenge to the audience, to first feel compassion for a fictional character (Elizabeth), and then to do better than John's intellectually empty (though poignant) pity for her by understanding the irrational nature of that compassion,  and then realizing that this very irrationality must motivate us to sustain this irrational compassion for the irrational in reality as well.