“A Series of Opinionated Animals ,” by Michelle Lerner
I share my son’s love of animals. But I pleaded no más a decade ago after he’d stuffed our condo with pets: a dog, two cats, a gecko, a frog, a goldfish and, briefly, a praying mantis. Then I read an essay by bioethicist Jessica Pierce, who scalded my conscience with the news that even the humble goldfish is a social creature, capable of suffering. I drove to the pet store and invested in a larger tank and several fish companions for Azetiki.
So it didn’t surprise me that the many animals in the life of Harvard Law graduate Michelle Lerner have been as smart and personable as some humans I’ve known. I do mean “many”: At times, the critters that Lerner and her partner Gray accumulated might have triggered an investigation for animal hoarding by the shelter where I volunteered as a young man.
Lerner was one of animal law’s earliest practitioners. (Her application essay to Harvard in 1994 was about her beloved, disabled horse Shire, even though Harvard didn’t teach animal law then. She later drafted a successful ordinance for her New Jersey town that mandated more humane control of its feral cat population.) “A Series of Opinionated Animals” is charmingly candid about the times her compassion overrode her wisdom in underestimating the care her rescues would need. Fans of “All Creatures Great and Small” should relish her memories about the animals in her life, four-legged and two-legged. The two legs belonged to a chicken, not humans, who don’t always advertise our species positively in the book.
I found myself wishing for more big-picture reflection on how we mistreat animals and how we might build sturdier humanitarian protections.
In fairness, that’s not what Lerner set out to write. She once took a summer law course from the late Steven Wise, a pioneering animal rights lawyer who wrote books supporting legal personhood and rights for the most advanced species (great apes and elephants, for example). You met his client animals in those books, but you also got more scientific information about animal cognition, as well as provocative ideas, such as that personhood proposal, than Lerner offers.My early lesson in animal cognition underscores the barbarity of factory farming and its legalized animal torture of far more advanced species. She documents the complex emotional lives of pets, the love they give us, and the love we’re inspired to give back. The industrial-scale cruelty we tolerate to put food on our plates, and its conflict with how we treat Rover and Fluffy, would have been an apt meditation, especially for an animal rights attorney.
To persuade you that animals deserve better at our hands, she relies instead on stories, some admittedly beguiling. She befriended that chicken, Stephanie, while working on a New Jersey farm out of college. An aggressive creature, Stephanie chased and terrorized most people. But not Lerner, whose chicken whisperer patience enabled her to bond with the bird. During her biweekly visits after leaving her farm job, “Young new farmhands would stare at me slack jawed as I walked up to the killer chicken without fear and lifted her to my face for a kiss. Stephanie buried her head in my neck and cooed.”
Other memorable characters include Monster, a neurologically impaired squirrel with an appreciation for love songs; Finn, a rabbit who amiably complied with Monster’s demand that he sit on the squirrel; numerous dogs and five immunocompromised cats; and Shire the horse, “my greatest love.”
While her storytelling sometimes taxed my patience, the best of her anecdotes will remind readers of their own pets (companion animals, in activists’ vernacular). Stephanie’s intelligence conjured my childhood parakeet, a Houdini smart enough to figure out how to open his cage door and escape.
Nubi, one of several dogs Lerner and Gray adopted, differed from other shelter residents who jumped and barked in their kennels, begging to be taken home. Nubi huddled in the back of her kennel “with a thoroughly depressed affect,” bringing me back to when my family adopted Natalie, a golden mix from Tennessee who evidently had been mistreated. Like Nubi, she kept to the rear of her kennel; we had to sit with her quietly, petting her and talking soothingly, to get her comfortable with us.
When Lerner was diagnosed with tick- and mold-related infections that for five years had her often bedridden, she wanted to adopt a cat because “they’ll hold the bed down with you all day while everyone else goes about their lives.” She’s right: Our cat Snowball cuddled by my concussed head for two weeks after I was hit by a pickup truck and required naps to clear my fuzziness and fatigue.
Memories of Snowball also flooded my brain while reading the searing scene of Shire’s euthanasia. Lerner couldn’t bear to be present for it. “I will always love you,” she sobbed to her horse. “You will not be alone. Half of me is going to go with you.” She walked away in tears. She’s not sure she made the right decision by leaving. That’s not for us to judge.
I stayed when Snowball had to be euthanized at an animal hospital, not wanting him to be with strangers at the end. I also bawled. I can affirm the wisdom of a friend of Lerner’s, who, after Shire’s death, summed up the interspecies bond that grieves those who’ve lost companion animals: “We love another soul. The vessel doesn’t matter.”
Lerner will discuss “A Series of Opinionated Animals” at 7 p.m. Friday at Porter Square Books.
A stronger
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