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Originally Posted by gmw
Ah. I actually wrote my variation on this problem, I just haven't tried to publish it. It's probably the hardest I've ever worked on a short story (14k words). It's one of those stories that sort of insisted I finish it. It took months, but I couldn't concentrate on anything else until I got this one out of the way - and I did try. It's a psychological horror of sorts (or that's how I see it) and not at all what I normally write, although there is a theme to it not unlike some of other writing. Being horror it's possible I would get away with the animal cruelty ... or not. Not sure if I will ever publish it, but at least I got it out of my system; it was quite a relief when it was finally done.
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Mine was a mystery, but it required this one bit, to sort of set up everything else, and I just...never got it written. Wrangled with it too much.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Not sure I'm fully convinced by the "dependent" argument. It's part of it, sure, but I don't think it's the full story because the prejudice appears to extend even to those animals that don't depend on us. (Although Twilight did get away with killing bears and cougars - but I certainly wasn't happy about it.) It might just be that it seems such an unfair match between human and animal, but then many of the murders of people aren't fair either.
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Well, I do think that there's still a difference, in the mind of most readers, between slaying of domestic pets as a device (the intrepid heroine comes home to her almost-ubiquitous dead cat, rather than a dead dog), versus a pioneer killing a deer to feed his family. They're obviously not the same, in any way, to the reader's mind.
I'm not big on killing animals, mostly because like Dancing with Wolves, it's a cheap gratuitous plot device, to evoke a response. It wasn't necessary to drive home the "white people bad, Indians good" theme, at all. It was there just to elicit the "ooooooooooh noooooooo!" response. I don't respect that at all, whether it's Lions, Tigers or Bears, or puddy tats.
Hitch