He, in turn, was abused by another relative - until Akhtar herself found the courage to put a stop to it. A dog named Sylvester helped her survive. As a child, Akhtar was regularly molested by a relative. All have experiences with animals that shaped them as people.
She meets, among others, an industrial animal farmer, a Marine dealing with PTSD, and, most disturbingly, a serial murderer known as “the Happy Face Killer.” Akhtar gets closer to him than prudence would suggest.
That journey takes her down some strange paths. Specifically, how does our empathy for animals - and lack of it - affect our health in the deepest sense of the word?” She writes: “This book is a journey to understand the very nature of health and how it is influenced by the lives of animals. That recognition, she implies, will make us better people. They are another resource to be exploited.Īysha Akhtar, in her new book, Our Symphony with Animals, shows she does not believe this and that she has the scientific chops to make a strong case for animals as our co-equals, worthy of compassion and respect. But it is indicative of a mindset that believes non-human animals are inferior to humans and so we are justified in doing with them whatever we want. Granted, a lot of this has to do with philosophical debates about theology, the existence of other minds, and our inability to read another’s thoughts. His more famous fellow rationalist René Descartes seemed to think of animals as being like those cute Japanese robot dogs that move and bark but, unlike him, cannot figure out Cartesian coordinates and do not think or feel in any meaningful senses of the words.Īnyone who has had a dog or a cat as a true companion is likely to respond, "Dudes, are you paying any attention?!" Or maybe they are followers of the 17th-century thinker Nicolas Malebranche, who wrote in his The Search After Truth that animals “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.” One guess is they have never been with an animal for very long.
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