pElAgUS' 

When I come home late from banquets, from scientific societies, or from social gatherings in someone’s home, a small half-trained female chimpanzee is waiting for me, and I take my pleasure with her the way apes do. During the day I don’t want to see her. For she has in her gaze the madness of a bewildered trained animal. I’m the only one who recognizes that, and I cannot bear it.

I wrote earlier about a novel on a similar subject, a story that had similarly horrible consequences for our aspiring human's mate. (See Lovelock: Speciesism from a Monkey's POV.) The fact that Kafka thought of such a feminist angle to throw in at the end of his story speaks well of him; it certainly gives the narrative an extra kick of misery and foreboding.

What does it mean when a non-human animal gives up their non-humanness? While these cases are fiction, and fantastical, animals give up their animalness for us all the time -- think of small dogs sweating in handbags and humping human legs, parrots who talk to humans but pull all their feathers out, elephants forced to perform in circuses until they snap, big cats pacing insanely in zoos when they should be running for miles and miles a day.

And what is humanness, anyway? Kafka's ape narrator spells it out simply: We spit, we drink, we smoke, we laugh, we don't show our asses in public. (Most of the time.) Even humans don't seem to take much better to human culture than animals do, sometimes. Why else are so many people struggling just to survive in this system we've set up for ourselves?

I know there's a lot more to humanness. Wonderful things like ethics. Maybe if we used them a bit more our ape narrators (and the compassionate, human artists that speak through them) wouldn't have such bones to pick.

Incidentally, Kafka was vegetarian, and I like to think he'd have been vegan if he'd been born a little later. He once said while watching fishes swim, "Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more."