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The average rating for Western Animal Heroes: An Anthology of Stories by Ernest Thompson Seton based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.
Review # 1 was written on 2019-01-12 00:00:00![]() Men are so cruel. The way they break animals is deplorable; they use them, exploit them and abuse them all in the name of sport, entertainment and human convenience. Men are cruel. They try to conquer rather than living in a world of mutual respect; it's man who has lost his nature, and he imposes such a thing on everything he comes across, but the animals will fight back: "With a roar that was almost lion like in its ferocity, he again hurled himself at the man" Buck is kidnapped (dognapped is probably more appropriate) and forced into submission by a brutal overseer. He is forced to be a sledge dog, a life of servitude he initially enjoys. The dogs enjoy the sense of purpose and quickly form their own pack. However, like trade goods, the animals are sold off to a new owner, one who is foolish and inexperienced when it comes to animal care. He pushes the dogs too far; they start to die, and he pushes the remainder even further. He cares not for the fallen, and leaves them discarded in the snow without as much as a second thought: they are nothing to him. It's this kind of attitude that is almost the death of Buck, but he comes back. For all man's wickedness, he also has the capability for good. Buck experiences human kindness for the first time, forming the deep bond that dog can have with man. He relishes in the friendship. It's the only affection he has received in a long, long, time. He doesn't want to lose it; he become possessive and violent in regards to his master's attention: he becomes a pet. He fights other dogs for the right to sit by his human's side. But such a thing is unnatural to him, and what starts to form is an internal war within his mind. He wants to find his true self again. "There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive." Indeed, the importance of this work resides in the title. The real issue isn't a debate of ethics associated with animal treatment, but the act of being separated from one's true self. Buck's innate drive calls for only one thing, to be with his own kind. That's what human kind has deprived him of. His natural instincts are at war with the obedient behaviour that has been bred into his psyche after domestication. He wants freedom, he longs for it, and the wild calls him home. Facebook| Twitter| Insta| Academia |
Review # 2 was written on 2014-02-13 00:00:00![]() I guess it's important to remember that this isn't just a socialist fable: it's also a book about a dog. That's certainly all I thought, when I was ten and I read and re-read this for the first several times. I just really liked dogs, and we couldn't have one, so I read a lot of books about them. Here's a book about Buck the Yukon sled dog. His bond with his human is so strong that they'll perform miracles for each other. That scene with the thousand pound sled is like the Rudy-sacks-the-quarterback of dog stories. Now, as a grown up, I finally get to have my own dog, and he likes to point his ass right at my face. He's between us in bed at this very moment, his head buried down in the blankets, ass up. It's my wife, then my dog's butt, then me. But socialism. After being about a dog, it's - actually the second thing is it's dark, holy shit. People are like here, kid, here's a book about a dog, kids love dogs, and ten-year-old me cracks it and it's all "He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang. He sniffed the bodies curiously. They had died so easily." When they're not hunting the most dangerous game, dogs keep getting slashed open to the bone or starving piteously to death. Jack London spent some time grubbing for gold in the Yukon wilderness himself - and he was awful at it, so he knows from hardship. Jack London So the third thing is that London also happened to be a socialist, and as an adult it's hard not to read Call of the Wild as an allegory. You could hardly find a better socialist allegory than a team of sled dogs, right? Everyone harnessed together, running together to pull a mighty load. They grow to love it so much that when one dog gets sick he pulls a Boxer. Buck starts the book as a pampered bourgeois and finishes it as a pack animal. Here's Blair Braverman, the face of modern dogsledding and quite a good tweeter. London also brings in a healthy dose of naturalism, the then-fashionable (now obvious) idea that the environment shapes character. And there's a great deal of somewhat confused Darwinism: London, like lots of other people, has confused evolution for memory, so Buck keeps having dreams about Neanderthals. There's some yikesy stuff about women and minorities, not definitely offensive but you get the idea that if you got him going it'd be definite eventually. (I've heard that it was indeed.) So you see why sometimes you have to remind yourself that this is a book about a dog. It's about a brave dog running in the wilderness. I remember how wild and romantic it seemed to me, when I read it as a child. Now I read it to my dog. Does it awaken, for him too, some wild and romantic memory? Does he hear the faint echoing of that primordial call? He sighs deeply, from under the covers, and farts. |
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