64POEMS OF THE ANIMALexamples of “that country.” In Europe the wolves have mostly been
slaughtered as demons, bulls are ceremoniously tortured as expressions
of masculinity and martial skill, and foxes are hunted by toffs in tux-
edos. So while New World culture (not including indigenous cultures)
has not had time to develop deeply anthropomorphic conceptions of
animals, this shallow history allows animals to be animals, not to have
elaborate rituals of cruelty enacted upon them. The implication here is
that in a country where there are still lots of wild animals, we have not
had an opportunity to fetishize them. There is also the suggestion that
we take them for granted—that they are simply a part of the back-
ground. It is hard to read “they have the faces of / no one” as something
positive, except perhaps in the sense that the animals have remained
incognito and so may have escaped our deliberate attempts to execute
them. Yet it is also hard to imagine how this generalization about ani-
mals in “this country” is true, since sport hunting has always been pop-
ular in the New World and by now is in fact more popular in North
America than Europe; game animals may now be said to have the face of
trophies.^21
Atwood’s complex poem presents a paradox about categorizing ani-
mals: claiming knowledge about animals diminishes them by enslaving
them to human use and meaning, while refusing to acknowledge that
the animal seizes our imagination also allows us to ignore actual ani-
mals. Bringing animals into culture and art always means anthropo-
morphizing them to some degree and allows us to project our ignorance
about them. Indeed, as Atwood suggests, making animals into a fetish
or ceremony allows us to ignore acts of cruelty and to treat animals as
purely subservient and empty—tools for making meaning of our own
lives. In European culture the elaborate rituals of killing are a way we
appear to conquer death, to assert our mastery, while road kill in this
country is a constant reminder of both our own mortality and our gen-
eral indifference to animals. But letting animals fade completely into the
background also allows us to ignore them. Until very recently, we have
blithely destroyed critical animal habitats without any real sense that
other animals might have a right to continued existence beyond our
own needs for them.^22