I stole a dog, a few years ago.
A small and skinny dog, amidst the mud and the violent November rain.
Prisoner of a small corral, he jumped towards me wagging its tail.
His only fault was to have a pedigree.
I climbed over the wall, he let me pick him up and I went away, threatening his owner.
I shivered for a while, overwhelmed with emotion.
He shivered for a while, because of the cold and starvation.
We were together just for three years, his bones were made of glass, that corral had caused him lots of invisible pains.
“You don’t belong to me, One Eye. You don’t belong to me and I was wrong to ever treat you like you do. You belong to the inveigling hills, to the fields and ditches untrammelled, to the holes in the forest, the horizon line, the badgers.”
(Sara Baume, Spill simmer falter wither, Cornerstone 2015)
We take someone else’s life and decide its course for a price, we ceaselessly generate new creatures just to kill them, and the rare times they rise up against us, we feel outraged, shouting and calling them ‘murderers’.
What have we become?
10 SUGGESTED READINGS
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Sarat Colling, Piraeus Books 2012
BEYOND WORDS
Carl Safina, Picador USA 2016
THE GENIUS OF BIRDS
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THE HIDDEN LIFE OF DEER
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, HarperCollins 2011
MY LIFE WITH THE CHIMPANZEES
Jane Goodall, Simon & Schuster 1996
THE LIVES OF ANIMALS
J.M. Coetzee, Princeton University Press 2016
ANIMALI IN GIALLO
A.A.V.V., Einaudi 2015
RÈGNE ANIMAL
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PET SEMATARY
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SPILL SIMMER FALTER WITHER
Sara Baume, Cornerstone 2015