- Title
- Elephants, compassion, and the largesse of literature
- Creator
- Wylie, Dan
- Date Issued
- 2011
- Date
- 2011
- Type
- Text
- Identifier
- vital:582
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1018924
- Description
- [From the text] Why is it that we do not raise a monument, a mausoleum, nor even a humble gravestone, to mark the death of every elephant? We habitually, even compulsively, do this for other humans, occasionally for treasured pets. Yet we do not do it for the most charismatic, gigantic, culturally resonant land animal we will ever encounter. Why not? Some possible answers. One: too much work. Another: we regard other animals as less conscious than ourselves; we are the only creatures who deserve to have our deaths so commemorated. A third: wild animals are part of wild ecosystems; it is ‘natural’ for them to die and to be reabsorbed namelessly back into those ecosystems. We humans, on the other hand, consider ourselves somehow separate from those ecosystems: we shield ourselves from ‘Nature’ with bricks and literatures while we live, with marble and epitaphs after we die.
- Format
- 18 pages
- Format
- Publisher
- Rhodes University
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Wylie, Dan (2011) Elephants, Compassion, and the Largesse of Literature. Inaugural lecture delivered at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 17 May 2011
- Rights
- Rhodes University
- Rights
- CC BY-NC-SA : Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
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Collections
RU Inaugural Lectures
Wylie, Dan (Emeritus Prof)
RU Department of Literary Studies in English
SDG 15. Life On Land
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