Atwood's poem "The Animals in
That Country" is among her works where she tried to reveal the impact of
the New World (after the settlement of colonizers) on the Old World (the
ingenious people and their values). Atwood's literature pieces are outstanding
because she always used fictional characters or animals to personify the
natural world and its problems. The same technique was applied to this poem,
where the animals personify humans in one way or another.
"That
country" in the poem refers to those who came here as explorers and
settled. We can also observe that the poem is written from a native's
perspective, i.e., the speaker refers to themselves as 'this country' and the
outsiders who came as 'that country. Another compelling reason that can be
understood from comparing animals to humans is that Atwood wants to express how
humans are as ruthless as animals and how they want to be selfish regarding
survival. The settlers tended to destroy Canada's rich culture and imposed
their own onto them.
The poem begins with a very triggering line "In that country, the animals have the faces of people." This way, it would be easy to give animals human traits to understand the poem. Moreover, animals using human faces to hide their natural savagery symbolizes hypocrisy. The subsequent couplets mention some cats who are moving in a strutting manner. They are moving with brashness in their behavior and consider themselves majestic. So, we can tell that these cats are referred to as the settlers who do not care about anyone but themselves.
Moving on, the
text is again in a very unnatural setting where foxes are roaming around
despite the hunters' presence, but oddly the hunters are not hunting them.
Instead, they respect the boundaries between them. Neither the hunters are
doing any harm to them, nor are the fox being vicious in any way. Moreover, we
also know that foxes are considered clever, so comparing them with the
settlers, the poet wants to emphasize how they just entered Canada and settled
down so smoothly.
In the next stanza, the poet again underlines the point of everything being out of order. A bull is the next animal on the poet's list. The first thing that comes to mind after hearing about this animal is violence. Bullfighting or running of bulls is one of the famous entertaining sports for people, mainly in Spain. The poet is satirical here in that the bull is rewarded and honored for all the bloodshed it did.
As the bull is a symbolic representation of the colonizer, they are honored for this forced settlement by putting down the natives to achieve
their purpose. The bull died honorably with a sword in his heart while
determined to achieve his aim. Then at the end of this stanza, the bull is
revealed to be an actual human, showing that humans did all this to gain
power.
The poet talks about
wolves in the last part of The Animals in That Country. Wolves are considered
ruthless and barbarous animals who tend to destroy everything ferociously. The
poet discusses the conversations between these wolves in the forests where they
planned their next prey. Referring to the colonizers again, the poet talks
about their plans to gain power in different regions and leave them dependent
on them.
Moving toward the end of the poem, the poet only used a single stanza to tell us about the situation of the animals of this country, referring to the native Canadians. The poet says in a very sorrowful and sympathetic way that animals that humans killed by passing through the roads, the headlights flashing into their eyes, reflecting their fear at that time.
Animals with no human intellect are killed, and their
death is so horrible that they are unrecognizable. Canadian people being
tortured and staying under imposed power are very similar to such animals. They
have lost their identity amidst all this going on in their nation.
Some animals get scared
at the sight of a human and tend to move away from them. This country's animals
are similar to theirs. Others always overpower some animals; the same is true
with humans. These indigenous people were the ones with fear in their eyes and
were overpowered by animals with human faces known to be colonizers.
