Tag Archives: happy the elephant

This Extended Version of “Captivating Animals” with Thalia Field includes a discussion of Émile Zola and his attempt to recreate in fiction the scientific methodology of the Positivists and Claude Bernard; a reading of a medical journal article on the “insanity” of antivivisectionists; the tragedy of Charles Darwin’s “support” for vivisection. Radio Version of Captivating Fictions RELATED Personhood (New Directions website) …

Our guest today, Thalia Field, is an acclaimed experimental novelist, essayist and poet, modes of writing she often combines in one text. It’s also likely that historical figures, philosophers, or dog trainers, will walk onto the page to be the connective tissue between multiple distinct texts that span decades. In what follows, we’ll hear Field talk about one piece of …

We begin with some “Happy” news…last week the New York Court of Appeals—one of the most influential state courts in the United States—agreed to hear the habeas corpus case Happy the elephant – an autonomous and cognitively complex nonhuman animal who has been imprisoned at the Bronx Zoo for over four decades. This marks the first time in history that …