En Fuite

“Beyond this literal forgetting of animals by eating them, animal bodies were, for Kafka, burdened with the forgetting of all those parts of ourselves we want to forget. If we wish to disavow a part of our nature, we call it our ‘animal nature.’ We then repress or conceal the nature, and yet, as Kafka knew better than most, we sometimes wake up and find ourselves, still, only animals. And this seems right. We do not, so to speak, blush with shame before fish. We can recognize parts of ourselves in fish - spines, nociceptors (pain receptors), endorphins (that relieve pain), all of the familiar pain responses - but then deny that these animal similarities matter, and thus equally deny important parts of our humanity. What we forget about animals we begin to forget about ourselves.”

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals