by Vanessa Galligan
vanessagalligan@sbcglobal.net

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Amy Hempel is a wonderful writer. She writes short stories, not novels. But so did Chekhov, de Maupassant, and Raymond Carver. Those three guys never wrote novels either, but that didn’t stop them from being great writers. Hempel is almost in their class, whatever that means.

Her stories are told simply and casually, and yet they’re surrounded by an understated melancholy that puts every little action slightly on edge. And she has a deep, passionate sensitivity and a savvy understanding of dogs that is very touching and not at all sentimental.

Her Collected Stories are always on my reading table. I go to them time and time again, whenever I’m between other books or whenever I need to refresh myself in her clear, nuanced prose.

In her story, “At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom,” Hempel creates a character -- a kind, gentle older woman named Mrs. Carlin -- who straddles the border between simple, everyday happiness and an inner world haunted by uncontrollable thoughts about the atrocities committed against animals.

These thoughts are based on news she’s heard or reports she’s read. The facts are all true. They all tell of real-life acts inflicted on real-life animals. They’re not delusions. They’re more like bullets to the brain. Explosions of instant sadness and dread. They follow her like assassins of her spirit. They plague her. They show up out of the blue while she’s busy doing something else. They jolt her into instant agony.

They’re like visions of hell she can’t shake. Not so much her hell, but the hell of the poor animals who are tortured and slaughtered.

She’s like a spiritual keeper of animals -- a gatekeeper to a universal animal kingdom -- who is forced to confront inside her mind, over and over again, the terrible things that are done to the animals she feels the compelling but impossible need to protect.

An inner voice tells her, “In Alaska, wild gray wolves are flushed from hiding and shot with rifles from low-flying planes.”

And later, the voice says, “A veal calf cramped in a pen in Montana is forced to sleep on its feet.”

And later, “In a research lab in eastern Pennsylvania, a hole is drilled in the head of a young macaque . . .”

And later, “Knives are drawn, and cleave through to the spinal cord. The whales thrash once more; in a sea of blood, they snap their own necks.”

And later, “At an animal shelter in Oklahoma, an attendant did not clean the feces off the bowl that he used to scoop dog food from a sack.”

And later, “An infant gorilla, orphaned in Zimbabwe, makes a sound in the night like ‘Woooo, Woooo.’ ”

And finally, after Mrs. Carlin collapses in an aquarium from a stroke, the voice tells her, “In Belize, the eyes of a fallen jaguar reflect the green of leaves.”

I know a little about how Mrs. Carlin feels, because I, too, am reminded daily of the awful things that are done to animals. And like Mrs. Carlin, those thoughts haunt me.

I give thousands of dollars each year to groups that rescue as many of those tortured animals as they can: elephants, horses, donkeys, pigs, sheep, dogs, cats, whales, wolves, birds -- the whole animal kingdom is under constant attack by humans.

People do terrible things to animals -- all kinds of animals. People abuse them, torture them, slaughter them, imprison them, kill them by the millions, by the tens of millions, by the billions.

In Korea, a family will go on a picnic with their dog. They will build a small fire under a tree. They will put a rope around their dog’s neck and string him up over a tree limb above the fire. The dog will dangle there over the fire, slowly choking to death, while its flesh burns. The Koreans believe that kind of treatment tenderizes the flesh. Such a meal is considered a delicacy.

In U.S. laboratories, rabbits eyes are purposely infected with chemicals, often leading to blindness, to test for a new perfume or detergent.

Cats’ eyes are sewn shut and electrodes implanted in the cats’ brains for laboratory experiments.

And on and on it goes. A pet store is fined for failing to clean the animals’ cages or take its sick dogs and cats to a veterinarian. A man has his horses take away because they’re sick, undernourished and crippled.

And, of course, the whole meat industry is the ultimate in mass killing and torture. People insist on eating the flesh of animals who arrive on their dinner plates after lifetimes of horror.

The same people who are repulsed by the slow, choking death of the Korean dog will think nothing of eating a piece of steak or a hamburger produced from tortured, terrified, and ultimately slaughtered cows.

And then this morning, I read on the front page of the New York Times about a horrible new American fad in which dog owners have the vocal cords of their dogs cut, in order to keep the dogs from barking.

The procedure is called “debarking.”

It’s hideous. Honest to god, it drives me crazy. I’m like poor Mrs. Carlin, plagued by these horror stories that just won’t stop. Every day, there’s some new cruelty committed to innocent animals.

These assholes in New York -- some of whom are themselves veterinarians -- are cutting their dog’s vocal cords so the dog’s barking won’t disturb the neighbors. The dog is left with a soft, rasping, pathetic little sound to express his feelings.

No more announcing himself with his bark. No more declaring his feeling with a good, clear robust sound. No more communicating with other dogs on their own barking level.

I can’t stand it. It’s too much.

The way humans treat animals is so evil, so cruel, so perverse, so egotistical, so demented, so selfish that I’ve given up on our species. We do far more harm to this world and the creatures on it, than we do good.

It’s time for Nature to declare the human experiment a failure of evolution and to sweep the Earth clean of our bloody and cruel presence.

Where the hell is that asteroid that’s supposed to blast the Earth into smithereens?

What’s taking it so long to get here?