The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath: Some Paradoxes of Human-Animal Relationships

Séan Fleming is the Adult Non-Fiction Collections Librarian at the Kitchener Public Library.

As in her previously penned, The Hidden Life of Humans (1997), Erika Ritter's new book continues her enquiry into the complex, often contradictory relationship human beings have with their animal brethren. The story of The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath has been told in many forms by many societies throughout time. In each version of the tale, an absent master returns home to find a scene of carnage: a crib overturned and a dog covered in blood. This leads the master, in a fit of rage, to murder his Canis familiaris, thinking the animal has killed the child. Only after slaying the dog is the truth revealed. The master discovers the child safely hid beneath the crib and the corpse of a gorged snake flung in a corner. To his horror, the master realizes his canine companion was faithful to the end, killing the snake to protect the master's child, only to be repaid by the master with violent death.

Ritter weaves this tale of the dog betrayed throughout her book as she endeavours to unravel the paradoxes that allow humans both to brutalize and to idealize animals. Ritter treads well-travelled intellectual ground (James Frazer, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marvin Harris) in seeking to understand how we as humans rationalize our exploitation of the animal world. However, Ritter breathes fresh insight into this philosophical space through her use of personal narrative intertwined with investigative journalism and set against the backdrop of the dog/serpent tale to provide a provocative perspective on the animals we love, those we love to eat, and those we love to hate.

Ritter refrains from moralizing. Instead she invites the reader to reflect upon our moral, emotional, practical, ethical, and spiritual relationships with animals. While Ritter's treatment meanders at times, her topical entry is a worthwhile journey that can be placed alongside other contemporary titles, such as Second Nature by Jonathan Balcombe and Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows by Melanie Joy.