Elizabeth Costello And Animal Cruelty

The main point of Mrs. Costello’s argument is that humans deny that animals have a concept of life and death, thus, humans are needlessly cruel to animals and show no sign of ending the cruelty due to the fact that crimes toward animals remain unpunished. Poets, like herself, are able to have “‘ a feel for’ an animal’s experience. That leads them to recognize the crime of killing any animal that can experience the sensation of being alive to the world” (Introduction, 5). After the speech at the university, Elizabeth Costello argues with colleagues that “unlike some animals, human beings do not need to eat meat” (Introduction, 4). Mrs. Costello is a vegetarian herself and does not wish to see humans eat “the corpse of a dead animal” (38) at the same table as her, including her son and grandchildren. Elizabeth is “astonished that [other guests] do not find it nasty to chew the hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death-wounds” (38). …show more content…
They died like animals” (20), she compares the cruelty of killing animals, to the Holocaust, where humans were treated as animals in concentration camps. Mrs. Costello is an activist against the mistreatment of animals in labs and factory farms where animals are raised “for the purpose of killing them” (21). This proves that she is against speciesism, which can be defined as prejudice against other species by exploiting them in favor of one’s own interest.
Elizabeth Costello is an environmentalist due to the fact that she considers the environment to have a primary influence on the development of a group. She demonstrates this further by stating that the only question in the minds of animals “trapped in the hell of the laboratory or the zoo is: Where is home and how do I get there?” (30). This quote supports that Costello believes that animals thrive in their natural environment rather than being a subject to tests or breeding in a confined human-made