Don LePan’s novel Animals, presents a horrific vision of the future. Factory farming has wrought unthinkable destruction on planet earth, and prevalent disease, combined with overuse and consequent weakening of antibiotics, have brought on mass extinctions in the animal population. As a result, humans have turned to a new food source.
In LePan’s dystopia, the intellectually and physically disadvantaged are set apart from society as “mongrels,” a sub-stratum of individual who are denied human status, raised for slaughter in factory farms. The novel is narrated by Sam, an abandoned mongrel boy who has been taken in by a human family, and Broderick, a mongrel-rights activist.
Prominent bioethicist Peter Singer has praised the book for asking “deep and challenging questions,” and Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee has called the book “a powerful piece of writing, and a disturbing call to conscience.”
