In short
The episode explores why humans “cling” to animal stories and relationships—how animals in culture (and online) help us process grief, violence, love, and empathy, while also revealing how humans treat the natural world.
Guests (hosts)
Vincent Cunningham, Alex Schwartz, Nomi Fry (all from The New Yorker’s Critics at Large). They share personal reading/viewing histories and real-life animal encounters.
Key claims
Animal narratives let people feel vulnerable safely; animals both mirror human bonds and remain fundamentally “strange.” Online “cute” animal attention can distort care and mask abuse. Real-world responsibility requires love plus respect, not entitlement.
Notable examples
Odysseus’s dog Argos; Stone Fox; Charlotte’s Web; Stuart Little (including Margalo and Harriet Ames); Bambi and The Lion King; Tom and Jerry; Aesop’s “Ants and the Grasshopper” vs Leo Lionni’s Frederick; The Sheep Detectives (Hugh Jackman’s shepherd George murdered; sheep solve it like Agatha Christie); Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare (Velvet and a horse); Eve the Junebug Squirrel (bite/ER); “Punch” the macaque; Tiger King/Chimp Crazy; Marie Antoinette’s lapdogs; dog strollers; IamBunny button-speaking dog.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOListener Question on Humans and Animals
2:19 to 3:48
Exploring a listener's question about cultural connections between humans and animals.
“Okay, dear listeners, you might have heard last week's episode.”
The Role of Animals in Stories
3:56 to 6:44
Discussion on various texts that depict the bond between humans and animals, exploring emotional impacts.
“But the one time that this ever happened to me was in 10th grade, the first time I read The Odyssey.”
Cultural Significance of Animals
6:46 to 14:00
Exploring how animals reflect human emotions and societal changes through narrative.
“But at the same time, we treat our animals more like humans than we ever have.”
Exploring Animal Vulnerability and Human Emotion
14:00 to 20:20
Learn how stories about animals help us process our own vulnerabilities and emotions.
“worries that we have about death either as children or even as adults.”
Discussion on 'The Sheep Detectives'
20:20 to 28:00
Dive into the insights and themes presented in the film 'The Sheep Detectives'.
“We've been talking about favorite texts.”
Bonding with Animals: Velvet and Fugly Girl
28:00 to 29:08
Explore the profound bond between Velvet and a challenging horse named Fugly Girl.
“and Velvet starts volunteering at this local staples where she meets a horse whose name is Fugly Girl because this horse is brutal and no one can really get her to be ridden and all of the rest of it.”
Identifying Each Other as Animals
29:08 to 30:30
Host interactions where they playfully identify each other as different animals.
“Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.”
Real World Animal Relationships
30:30 to 33:13
Discussion about their personal connections with animals in everyday life.
“I mean, whether online is real world or not, I guess we mean kind of like not in, you know, fictional texts, right?”
The Spectacle of Animals Online
33:13 to 36:22
Analysis of how social media influences our perceptions and treatment of animals.
“I think we're just – we've lost our compass in a way about how to interact with animal life.”
The Dark Side of Animal Love
36:22 to 39:25
Exploration of the potential abuse behind our fascination with certain animals.
“He is – I think he's a 10-months at this point.”
Show all 14 chapters
The Complexity of Animal Affection
39:25 to 42:01
Reflection on how our affection for animals intersects with societal issues.
“It's so good to give love to other humans.”
Understanding the Animal-Human Connection
42:01 to 44:28
Explore the complexities and joys of human-animal relationships.
“But sometimes it's a difficult thing because it's difficult to deal with another person.”
Parting Thoughts on Pet Ownership
44:29 to 46:44
Reflect on the responsibilities and rewards of adopting animals.
“Okay, you guys, we're reaching the end of our time together.”
Lessons in Love and Respect for Animals
46:46 to 48:15
Learn about the importance of love and respect in our interactions with animals.
“Love to experience a kind of caring for a creature because that's really what it is.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Naomi Fry:This summer, Prime Video takes you back before Legally Blonde, before law school, and into the world of Elle Woods in high school. Set in 1995, this Gemini vegetarian knows exactly who she is, until her family moves from Bel Air to Seattle. Packed with iconic fashion, 90s nostalgia, and a throwback soundtrack, Elle proves one thing. Law school was hard. High school was harder. From the world of Legally Blonde, watch Elle, a new original series only on Prime Video. Watch now. Before we start the episode today, we want to talk a little bit about a project we're working on. And Vincent, I would like to throw this to you because you're the one who came up with the idea.
0:42Alexandra Schwartz:Well, July 4th is on the way, as I'm sure all of our listeners know. 250 years of our country, America. And I've been wanting to develop a playlist made up of songs about America. I guess really songs about our feelings about America, whatever that means right now.
1:01Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, and we want this to be a joint project. We three are each going to pick some songs to share. And listeners, we really want you to help us pick some songs too. And we'll work all of our picks into a whole episode built around this idea of America seen through music.
1:16Naomi Fry:Yeah, and the song that you pick could reflect something you love about America. It could be like a song about, you know, the hopes you have for America or the fears you have for America or the things you hate right now about America. And get specific. Tell us about the lines that speak to you, the lyrics that speak to you. Yeah.
1:38Vinson Cunningham:Give us a range. Contemporary, old, in between, whatever you got. We're here for it.
1:43Naomi Fry:This is actually so fun. This is such a fun thing. I'm so excited for this. And so I want you guys to pick up your phones, record a voice memo, and tell us what song reflects your feelings about America today. And send these voicemails that you record to us at themailatnewyorker.com.
2:11Alexandra Schwartz:This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham.
2:16Naomi Fry:I'm Alex Schwartz. And I'm Nomi Fry. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hey. Hi, guys. What's up? Hello, everyone. Okay, dear listeners, you might have heard last week's episode. It was once again an edition of I Need a Critic. But there was one voicemail that we didn't get to because we thought that it deserved its very own episode. and I'm going to play it for us right now.
2:50Alexandra Schwartz:Hi, critics. This is Katerina speaking. I do have a question and that is, do you have some cultural recommendations that touch on the special bond between humans and animals? I would love to delve deeper into that but don't really know where to start. All I can think of is Lassie. Thanks very much. Bye.
3:12Naomi Fry:Okay, when I heard this, I was like, Like, what, we're not going to get to this on I Need a Critic because I immediately had so many thoughts. I am a friend of the animal kingdom. I have many thoughts about animals, both kind of in my life, the actual pets I have, which we'll get to, but also culturally. There's really so much to say, like, way beyond Lassie, and I was so excited to help this listener. And so I'm actually so psyched that we're going to be talking about this more broadly, like over the course of like 45 minutes. You guys, what are some of your favorites that come to mind when you hear this question from our listener?
3:55Alexandra Schwartz:I don't often, you know, I'm not the kind of person who sort of like cries at stories about animals. But the one time that this ever happened to me was in 10th grade, the first time I read The Odyssey. And Odysseus has a dog named Argos who, after all of his questing to get back home, all of the struggles and vicissitudes, the sirens, etc., finally he gets back home and he sees his trusty dog, Argos, who has been left behind all these 20 years. And at the sight of his master, we get the sense that he's been holding out for this. Argos finally drops dead. And it's the sweetest and most tender moment in the Odyssey.
4:39Alexandra Schwartz:I remember just like, wow, this is so beautiful. That's where it starts for me, the animal narrative.
4:45Vinson Cunningham:That's almost too much for me to bear thinking about. I know. I'm like crying right now. I'm crying already. Yeah. Unlike you, Vincent, the animal kingdom and especially work about the animal kingdom really moves me to a degree where I often avoid it because I feel too vulnerable. Just to think about the book Stone Fox, the children's novella by John Reynolds Gardner that I read as a second grader involving a sled race and a dog who also drops dead. Here's a theme. The heartache I feel just thinking about this book that I haven't read since I want to say 1995 could break me right now. I have so many works that I'm looking forward to discussing in this genre.
5:31Vinson Cunningham:One of them that I hope we can talk about a little more is a novel for adults. It's called The Mare by Mary Gates Gill, one of my favorite writers from 2015 about a girl's relationship with a horse. And also, and I think this is, of course, another theme in these works, the girl's relationship with other people because we often in art use animals as a way to explore human bonds too.
5:53Naomi Fry:Let us also remember that animals in culture are a source for great levity. Let us talk Garfield. Oh, yeah. One of my favorites. And, you know, much can be said about animals and comics. You know, Snoopy, my God. I mean, Peanuts. So much to say. So much to think about. I'm so excited. We're going to go all the way back to Aesop's fables. We're going to be talking about our favorite animal stories from the past, from the present. And we're also going to be talking about a very recent example that's been getting, I think, a huge response from audiences. and that is the new movie The Sheep Detectives about some clever, crafty sheeps who help solve a murder.
6:33Naomi Fry:And I think just in general, what we want to be kind of thinking about is the role animals play in our lives more broadly right now. In a lot of ways, we are more distant from the natural world than we've ever been. But at the same time, we treat our animals more like humans than we ever have. My question for us today is, what does the way we think about animals say about us humans? So that's today on Critics at Large, our favorite animals.
7:16Naomi Fry:Okay, you guys, we are entering the animal kingdom. We already started touching on some of the texts that have been meaningful to us early on. What do you recall? Alex, we already heard about the death of the dog in your second grade book, which I've actually never heard of, the book you— Stone Fox.
7:37Vinson Cunningham:Stone Fox. Stone Fox. I put it in a locked room in my heart and shut it away. So painful was the scene. So painful was it to me.
7:45Naomi Fry:So this is like a therapy moment, really.
7:47Vinson Cunningham:It's a lot coming up, but that's okay because there are other happy examples such as the E.B. White books, Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and the kind of lesser known one in this trilogy, but one I also love, The Trumpet of the Swan. Stuart Little in particular really wrecked me. I mean, I know, guys, we're going to get happier, but this tiny mouse, this little mouse going off to meet his fate as all creatures must do.
8:12Naomi Fry:Yeah. Were those big for you too? Yeah. Yeah. Stuart Little was an odd one because he is an animal, right? He's a mouse, but he's born from a woman. Nobody really explains how that happens, right? But we just accept it. We just accept it. He has his older brother, George, who's like a boy. They live uptown, and Stuart is born to, you know, Mr. and Mrs. Little. But then he has this, you know, it's quite tragic, I think you're right, Alex, because he has that pull between his human family and the animal kingdom. He falls in love with a bird, with Margolo, and she leaves and he goes searching for her.
9:03Naomi Fry:And then there is that very odd moment when he is traveling, trying to find his bird love with his little car. And he is set up on a date with a tiny woman. Do you remember that?
9:20Alexandra Schwartz:I do not remember that. Let me be honest.
9:23Naomi Fry:It's vaguely coming back to me. Yeah, she's the daughter of the richest family in a town he stops by on the way. The name of the heiress, the tiny heiress, was Harriet Ames. And he got set up with her. Have you read this recently? And she, no.
9:42Alexandra Schwartz:It's just in there, man.
9:45Naomi Fry:This was the right topic for the right people. Oh, my God. All of which is to say this question of, like, the role animals play more generally sometimes in these texts, it's this sort of, like, in-between role, right? The kind of, like, anthropomorphic impulse to imbue an animal character with human characteristics, feelings, thoughts, you know, abilities. But on the other hand, they're, like, furry all over. You know, they're not people. Right. Vincent, what about you? Do you recall like a childhood text?
10:28Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, there are a couple sort of there are a couple of small ones. Of course, the Disney movies of my childhood are loom large Bambi. The death of Bambi's mother is a classic sort of childhood trauma. The Lion King, that sort of interpolation of Hamlet. But, and, you know, to be honest, The Lion King meant a lot to me when I was a kid. It was like shortly, I don't know, I remember what year it came out in, 1994 I'm seeing. But it became very important to me. In 1995, my father died. So, like, the whole, like, Simba and his father thing and, like, a young man, sort of young man, a young cub coming into his own or whatever.
11:10Alexandra Schwartz:It was an interesting way through this, again, this sort of mediation that animals can, animals in narrative, I guess, can effectuate. They belong to one kingdom, but they can also sort of ferry things over into ours. A big one early in my life and through my life has been the animalia of the Chronicles of Narnia, where there's this really complex hierarchy of being. The children in that story, spoiler alert, especially in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, are sort of meant to rule the land, Narnia. But they do so in this sort of like super Edenic way in which there are these talking animals.
11:56Alexandra Schwartz:And the talking animals, I'm thinking of the brave mouse reaper sheep, a fawn named Tumnus looms large. Their ability to relate to human beings is the mark of their sort of their dignity and their encounter with the god of this realm, Aslan, the lion. So that was a really big one. But all this talk of mice, all this talk of Stuart Little reminded me of like maybe the biggest influence on me, which I hopefully relate to my older daughter. and I'm going to try to do it again with my younger one, which is my absolute fanatical love of the cartoon Tom and Jerry.
12:37Naomi Fry:Oh, that's so interesting.
12:40Alexandra Schwartz:To me, it's the funniest thing. I laugh at Tom and Jerry like I laugh at Eddie Murphy. It makes me cry. And the reason is they're just trying to kill each other.
12:54Alexandra Schwartz:It's another thing, because when we bring them into narrative, all of a sudden we can deal also with the brutality and violence of life and sort of make it comedic or almost like inescapable. There's an inevitability to the violence that's happening. Not only are there like mallets and all these Rube Goldberg devices that Tom tries to get to kill Jerry and Jerry always ending up like, you know, burning off Tom's tail. It's like horrific violence, but done in this totally comic way that I don't, there's some sort of cathartic relief. that we can sort of encounter the chaos and enmity and competition that exists in the world.
13:31Alexandra Schwartz:But by putting it on animals, we can see it in a different way.
13:36Naomi Fry:Right.
13:37Alexandra Schwartz:So yeah, Tom and Jerry, man, that is my favorite.
13:38Naomi Fry:That's so funny thinking about it. And I think that really clarifies a conundrum for me, which is violence. We kind of enjoy this violence or we kind of, yeah, as you said, it's cathartic perhaps to see it played out in a kind of cartoonish way between animals. But then, of course, as you both noted early on, the kind of like the death of the dog, right, or the death of animals at least helps us work out maybe some traumatic feelings or some like, you know, fears and worries that we have about death either as children or even as adults. You know, why does the dog always have to die, you guys?
14:18Vinson Cunningham:Well, I don't know. I just don't know. I mean, yeah, I think it does help us work out these feelings. It also, I don't know, does it help us work them out? I just want to say I will not engage with old yeller. I will not engage with where the red fern grows. I know. It's like, take me behind the barn and shoot me. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, me. That's how I feel too. And, well, I think there's this idea that these animals, of course, stand in for people. And so they help us work through more complicated and more significant losses maybe. But I actually think they stand for their own thing too. Like animals and pets and farm animals, whatever, are creatures who are supposed to be cared for by human beings.
15:02Vinson Cunningham:I mean perhaps I'm expressing a kind of theology in saying that. But, you know, it goes back to Genesis where Adam is given the care of all creatures and given the task of naming them and caring for them. A job that I don't think human beings are doing that well in 2026. but there's something about the vulnerability of animals themselves that reflects our vulnerability as people but also very much as its own thing. Yeah. And I think reckoning with that, with their similarity to us but also their total strangeness from us, their inability to share the human experience and our inability to share animals' experience, that's where works about animals really get me and touch me, not just as a direct transfer onto the human experience but as this other thing that really does enrich our lives to be in contact with species that are not our own.
15:49Alexandra Schwartz:You mentioned in the intro Aesop's Fables. I used to read, religiously, this was my sort of like version of bedtime stories for my older daughter, was we read Aesop's Fables together.
15:59Naomi Fry:Oh, really? And yeah, well, because they have so many, they teach all of these very folksy lessons.
Read the full transcript
16:08Alexandra Schwartz:Yes. And it helps you talk about other things. Here's one. Can I give you one?
16:14Naomi Fry:Yes, of course.
16:15Alexandra Schwartz:The Ants and the Grasshopper.
16:16Naomi Fry:Oh, my God. That is the one that I want to talk about because I have some— Is it really? Yes, yes. I mean, there are several, but—
16:23Alexandra Schwartz:I'll read it and you talk about it. You want me to just—I'll just read it and I'll throw the ball straight to you.
16:27Naomi Fry:Yeah, yeah. Okay.
16:28Alexandra Schwartz:The Ants and the Grasshopper. The ants were spending a fine winter's day drying grain collected in the summertime. A grasshopper, perishing with famine, passed by and earnestly begged for a little food. The ants inquired of him, why did you not treasure up food during the summer? He replied, I had not leisure enough. I passed the days in singing. They then said in derision, if you were foolish enough to sing all summer, you must dance supperless to bed in the winter. Jesus Christ. First of all, cold-blooded. Again, the starkness and unforgivingness of animal life somehow has its lessons to transport themselves into the human world.
17:12Naomi Fry:Yeah.
17:13Alexandra Schwartz:And so I'd be like, so this is what this is about, you know?
17:15Naomi Fry:No, of course. I think I was really haunted by this, I have to say. Really? Yes. I was haunted by this. And it's so stark. You know, obviously it's a fable, so it's very black and white. But I was like, but what about is it bad to have fun? You know? Like, there is something punishable about that these animals are teaching us about enjoying yourself. Like, he sang. He was singing. He wanted to, like, party. And the ants were saying, oh, okay, you partied. Now you deserve to starve. Can I offer you some repair? Yes, please.
17:54Vinson Cunningham:Can I offer you a little bit of repair that could be helpful? Tikkun. Yeah. Tikkun, yeah. So here's the repair that I want to offer. Okay, yes. There's a children's book called Frederick by the great children's book writer Leo Leone. And I've been reading Frederick to my son. Wait, is it the mouse? Yes. Is Frederick the mouse? He's a gray mouse, right? Yes, he's a mouse. I remember him. Yes, he's a mouse. And the thing about Frederick is he's a poet mouse. And so while all the other mice are preparing for the winter, busily gathering grain, Frederick just sits on his butt and gazes at the sunset.
18:31Vinson Cunningham:Like he does stuff like that. And all the other mice think that Frederick is a really big nuisance, that they're all working and getting ready for the winter and he's doing absolutely nothing. And then winter comes and they all go inside and they eat through all their food. And then they're just kind of hungry and despairing, frankly. And then Frederick, boom, spotlight on Frederick. Frederick at that point says, well, here's what I have for you. And he starts reciting poems for them about the other seasons. and their lives are enriched. That's what the grasshopper is doing. That's what Frederick the mouse is doing.
19:07Vinson Cunningham:That's what the artist is doing. This totally Puritan, finger-shaking, only the ant is doing the right thing, excuse me, the ant was probably hopping along to the grasshopper's music this whole time and now is hypocritically saying you've contributed nothing. And that's just not true, as Frederick shows us. Oh, I love this.
19:27Alexandra Schwartz:And that's why these tables are good for children because in the best ones, you do this with the child. You're like, well, what do you think the grasshopper was thinking? What's his defense against this, you know, indictment about supperless to bed? Why would you—don't you sometimes like to not do— So it gives you all of these, like, I don't know, points of view into a situation that you might not otherwise encounter.
19:54Naomi Fry:In a minute, we talk about one recent text featuring beloved animal characters, the sheep detectives. That's in a minute on Critics at Large from The New Yorker.
20:18Naomi Fry:We've been talking about animals. We've been talking about favorite texts. We've been talking about what we can learn from the depiction of animals, you know, over the course of our lives. But now I want us to turn to a much more recent example. The Sheep Detectives. What have you guys been seeing or hearing about this movie, like, before you actually went to the theater and saw it?
20:42Vinson Cunningham:The people were saying, see the sheep. Go see the sheep. And I was hearing this. I really was. And I was hearing it from people with grown children, without children, whatever, and was aware that people were enjoying filming themselves weeping after having seen the sheep. So, yeah, I knew people were loving the sheep.
20:59Naomi Fry:Okay. So, yeah, just to recap, this movie came out last month. It was directed by Kyle Balda, who's known for the Minions movies, which are, you know, surprisingly delightful, I have to say. It was written by Craig Mazin, one of the creators of The Last of Us, and Chernobyl. Okay. This time, he's going full sheep. What did you guys think of The Sheep Detectives? Was it a satisfying animal text for you? I very much enjoyed The Sheep Detectives.
21:31Vinson Cunningham:I had a great time sitting alone at 11 a.m. viewing of the sheep detectives as people watch with their kids and in some cases their spouses or their parents, their older parents. And it was just me, the sheep, and them.
21:43Naomi Fry:Do you want to synopsize the sheep detectives for us just briefly so we're all on the same sheep page?
21:50Vinson Cunningham:So we're in a beautiful bucolic English countryside where Hugh Jackman, George, lives in a very cute little trailer and tends to his sheep. He is a shepherd, of course. Life is a mystery. But if there's one answer to all the great riddles of the universe, one secret to happiness, I propose it would be simply this. Sheep. The sheep love George. George loves the sheep. One day, sadly, George is murdered. And fortunately, the sheep know just what to do because George has enjoyed reading murder mysteries in the Agatha Christie vein to them every night. And the sheep, who, by the way, can speak amongst themselves, think that they're up to the task of solving this problem.
22:33Vinson Cunningham:And indeed they are. What are you up to? It may be nothing, but I can't stop thinking about George's hat and raincoat. What hat and raincoat? Exactly. He came out in a storm. Why didn't he put them on? Unless. Boost me up. So the sheep go off to help the hapless policeman in town who's played by Cousin Greg from...
22:58Alexandra Schwartz:Nicholas. Nicholas Braun.
22:59Vinson Cunningham:Nicholas Braun. Nicholas Braun. There you go. With a great kind of wavering, definitely not English, but like trying to be English accent, which kind of just really works for the movie, the whole theatricality of it.
23:09Alexandra Schwartz:It's a very sweet movie. It's very well, the voice acting is great. the sort of the chief sheep, Lily, who's known to be the smartest of the sheep.
23:20Naomi Fry:Smartest sheep in the world.
23:22Alexandra Schwartz:The smartest sheep in the world. I believe, yeah. Played by, at least voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She was great. It's sweet, but it's also a kind of funny twist on the, and we've talked a lot on this show about the sort of re-achieved hegemony of the whodunit. This is another twist on that. Yeah. So I thought that was kind of funny, the genre aspects I was into. It's cute.
23:46Vinson Cunningham:It does make sense to me that people are so into this movie. I think, first of all, Talking Animals never has and never will go out of style. But a lot of the Talking Animals we've seen recently are slick, animated, very contemporary. I'm thinking of the Zootopia franchise, for instance. kind of like there's like a sarcasm and I don't mean edginess. These animals are they're not Lenny Bruce. Let's be real. But but there's there's a kind of shooting up in the bathroom. There's just a kind of there's a kind of fast paced slickness about a lot of the contemporary animal fare that gets fed to us. And that's been the joke.
24:31Vinson Cunningham:The joke has been animals. They're just like us. And we move faster than ever. We talk faster than ever. And this one's a little annoying and that one's a little bit serious and this one's grumpy and blah, blah, blah. You know, and it's—
24:40Alexandra Schwartz:The movie Madagascar is just like this.
24:41Vinson Cunningham:The movie Madagascar is just like this. It's crack for your children and do not engage with it. This is my strong recommendation. I think that the slowness of it and to get to something that we talked about a few weeks ago in our episode on earnestness, the earnestness of it, I think, has really appealed to people. It's an invitation to be moved and to be moved in an intergenerational kind of way. It also really reminded me of the movie Babe. Yes. Just a huge smash hit from my own childhood. Yeah. And was everywhere. And I went and rewatched parts of Babe. It is so weird. Like, you were just saying that Craig Mazin did Chernobyl and all that stuff.
25:19Vinson Cunningham:You know who wrote Babe? Co-wrote Babe? George Miller of Mad Max. Like, the apocalypse. Yes. The apocalypse and talking animals, guys. These are part and parcel.
25:32Naomi Fry:Yes. The comparison to Babe is apt, though I have to say I think Babe is an infinitely better movie. I don't know if infinitely, but it's certainly a better movie. I liked Sheep Detectives. I thought it was a cute movie. I think for me the thing that was less satisfying, and I don't know if you might agree or not, is I wasn't really interested in the humans, and there was a lot of humans in this movie. I just wasn't that interested or convinced by the human part of it, but I did really like the sheep, and I liked the relationships between the sheep, which I think, you know, which is why I did ultimately enjoy it.
26:12Naomi Fry:But I don't know. I think Babe was just, Babe is like one of my favorite movies. There is just something so pure about it. You guys look stupid, Mom. Not as stupid as sheep, mind you, but pigs are definitely stupid. Excuse me. No, we're not. Good heavens. Who are you?
26:31Alexandra Schwartz:I'm a large white.
26:33Naomi Fry:Yes, that's your breed, dear. What's your name?
26:35Alexandra Schwartz:I don't know.
26:37Naomi Fry:Well, what did your mother call you to tell you apart from your brothers and sisters? Our mom called us all the same.
26:43Alexandra Schwartz:And what was that, dear?
26:45Naomi Fry:She called us all babe.
26:47Alexandra Schwartz:Perhaps we shouldn't talk too much about it.
26:49Naomi Fry:Babe is mostly about the animals, you know, and it is mostly about the relationship between the animals, which are, of course, symbolic of relationships between humans. But I don't know. There was just too much of the people plot in this movie for me to completely love it as an animal text. Are there texts that are specifically adult directed about animals that you guys can recall being affected by? Yeah.
27:18Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. I think Mary Gateskill, who's a novelist, a short story writer, and an essayist, has a very profound insight into the beautiful and painful parts of being human. Like, I truly cannot say enough about how important her works are to me. And in 2015, she wrote a book called The Mayor. There are many different stories that are interwoven through the book, but the main one is that a woman named Ginger, who's a white woman in her late 40s, who is very fragile, has had experience with addiction, now lives in upstate New York with her husband, has no children, welcomes into her home this girl from Brooklyn, from kind of the inner city in New York, a Dominican girl named Velvet, as part of a fresh air front experience one summer when Velvet is like a tween.
28:06Vinson Cunningham:and Velvet starts volunteering at this local staples where she meets a horse whose name is Fugly Girl because this horse is brutal and no one can really get her to be ridden and all of the rest of it. And Velvet and this horse form an amazing bond that enriches and complicates Velvet's life and Ginger's life. The way that the animal-human bond is portrayed and the kind of completion of Velvet when she's riding the horse she renames Fiery Girl. And her attempt to understand or intuit what someone, something that can't speak but can communicate needs. And their struggles and breakthroughs in communication and mutual understanding is really one of the most beautiful things I've read.
29:01Naomi Fry:In a minute, we're leaving the culture behind to talk about our real-life relationship to the animal world. Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.
29:25What animal do you see me as?
29:29Naomi Fry:And then I'll tell you what animal I see you as. I mean, it's basic, but you're a cat.
29:36Vinson Cunningham:I'm a cat? Yeah, of course.
29:38Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.
29:39Vinson Cunningham:Really? Of course. Yeah. I think you can be extremely cuddly. You can also get your claws out. I'm a bit of a hater, as we know. You're a bit of a hater, but when treated with love and care, you melt and you purr. That's you. And Vincent's an owl.
29:56Alexandra Schwartz:I'm an owl. Oh, my God.
29:57Vinson Cunningham:Vincent, yes, you are an owl. Vincent's a wise owl. Alex. And Vincent also enjoys staying up late.
30:04Alexandra Schwartz:I do. That's very true. He's my owl. It's true. Bad habit.
30:08Naomi Fry:Alex, I see you as a kind of like wise, I mean, you're also wise. Like, you know what? I see you as a bit of like a sheep wearing glasses. Okay. A little lily vibe? A little lily vibe. A little lily vibe. You're like the smartest sheep in the world. Thank you. I kind of see that. How touching. You guys, let's move on and talk, start talking a little bit about what our relationships look like with animals in the real world. I mean, whether online is real world or not, I guess we mean kind of like not in, you know, fictional texts, right? Obviously, our feeds are full to the brim of animals that we love to love.
31:01Naomi Fry:Do you have some favorite animal celebrity friends that you like to cozy up to on your phones? I am not much of a animal follower on Instagram. Oh, God.
31:18Alexandra Schwartz:The animals that I see the most of and that I care the most for are, especially this time of year, the whales that get sort of end up beached. Oh. and the attempts of various human communities to get them back into the sea. Are we talking about Timmy? Recently, I think, is Timmy the most recent one who, like, multiple times came back, and they kept trying to push him back? Timmy survived, though. Timmy went back, right? Who wants to tell him? I might have the wrong Timmy.
31:49Vinson Cunningham:Who's going to tell him?
31:50Alexandra Schwartz:Oh, no. Not Timmy.
31:52Vinson Cunningham:Timmy, just to fill people in, was a 40-foot humpback whale. He got stranded off of Germany's Baltic coast. A couple of German millionaires privately funded an operation to get Timmy back. It seemed like things were going well. He got into this water-filled barge. He was towed out of the Baltic Sea, released into the North Sea. And then about a month ago, his tracking device went silent and his carcass was discovered.
32:21Naomi Fry:Yeah, I'm sorry, Vincent. But it's just a fact—
32:24Alexandra Schwartz:I might have been thinking about a different— In any case, I don't know.
32:27Vinson Cunningham:Vincent's whale is a living whale.
32:29Alexandra Schwartz:Anyway, yeah. So these are my encounters with animals. Usually it's that. I like whales.
32:33Vinson Cunningham:Just the fact that to me the whale becomes this huge media sensation says, I think it says a lot about how animals fit into our lives now as this kind of spectacle. It's almost like we, through social media and through, frankly, just the regular news media, we're kind of eternally at the zoo looking in the pen. You know, I find it a bit troubling. And Nomi, of course, I know you're going to come to us with a ton of recommendations for animals to follow, and I want them all. But I will just say, you know, our relationship with the natural world and with animals is already so denuded. We don't have experience, most of us, dealing with animals outside of the pet world.
33:12Vinson Cunningham:So this kind of like hubbub and furor over animals online, I can't totally tell if I find it heartening, sickening, somewhere in between. Yeah. I think we're just – we've lost our compass in a way about how to interact with animal life. Okay. Nomi, take us back. Tell us about the cute animals you follow. Well, okay.
33:32Naomi Fry:Let me tell you a story about losing one's compass because of online and its depiction of, you know, cute animals. There was a squirrel I followed on Instagram, Eve the Junebug Squirrel. And I believe, I'm not sure what the origin story was. I think she might have fallen out of a tree or something, maybe got hurt as a baby squirrel. and was rescued and lives with humans now. You know, she's being, like, brushed with, like, an old toothbrush, and she's being, you know, she's eating, like, the soft petals of a flower, and she's snuggling and, you know, being, like, petted and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
34:20Naomi Fry:It's very, very cute. I'm not saying anything bad about Eve the June bug squirrel, okay? But I was following, and I received a certain impression of the squirrel. And one morning, I came downstairs in our house, and we have a CAD door. I was washing dishes when I heard kind of like a scrabbling, scratching sound. I see that there's a terrified squirrel. And so I, because I was following Eve the Junebug squirrel, yes, and I am a friend to all animals, I begin to pet the squirrel. Oh, no. Because I'm a fucking idiot. And the squirrel lets me, and I am encouraged. And so I say to myself, it's just like really one step away from the door.
35:15Naomi Fry:What if I pick up the squirrel and I just kind of toss him outside, right? Like, I didn't mean to, like, cuddle him, right? I'm not, like, a complete idiot, but I am an idiot because I was like, I'm going to pick him up, okay? And so I attempt to pick him up. It lashes out, and it bites me, right? Oh, no, no me. Had to go to the ER. Every, like, doctor or nurse I told why I'm there started to chuckle. I was like the comic relief on ER or something, you know? I was like, but all of which is to say, all I want is to cuddle a sweet, soft animal. I need this comfort. And yet that animal did not want to be cuddled by me.
35:57I know.
35:58Vinson Cunningham:Well, Naomi, here's the truth about us three. We're all very domesticated humans. We have pets, but we're not used to living a rugged life out in the wilderness. And increasingly, few humans are. So in a way, our species has – I really think our species has become unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with many animal species. And there is a risk, as you say, of over-cutifying wild creatures. Definitely. I'm thinking of punch. Okay. Let's talk punch. Let's talk about punch for one second. Punch is a macaque. He is – I think he's a 10-months at this point. He's a 10-month-old macaque. He's in a small Japanese zoo, and Punch's mom abandoned Punch, which is very sad.
36:46Vinson Cunningham:It's very sad. Punch's mom abandoned Punch. I'm led to understand because she had a difficult labor during a heat wave.
36:52Alexandra Schwartz:Sometimes the baby has bad vibes. Yes.
36:54Vinson Cunningham:She got the ick. She got the ick from her baby Punch and moved on. She moved on, but Punch has become a kind of global hero, and so many people are showing up at the zoo and just loving on Punch, and Punch has this IKEA stuffed monkey that he loves. He has two. The zoo washes one every day. Those IKEA stuffed monkeys are sold out. You just get the feeling that Tiny Punch is carrying the bedraggled human spirit on his small little monkey shoulders. We're just at this interesting stage where what is wild, what is not, all I mean is there's a lot at stake for us humans and our treatment of these animals.
37:37Vinson Cunningham:And I just think it's very unequally distributed. Am I a bit of an animal Marxist? I might be. It's some animals like punch are getting all our love. Most animals are being totally abandoned by us and we're eating up their habitats and destroying their environments. And on we go. So we like need our totems like punch to keep our relationship to the animal world. This is not good. This is not healthy. I'm not the only person to think this.
38:04Alexandra Schwartz:No, yeah, I was just going to say that, like, you know, there are often a love of animals and to your point, like a hoarding of animal attention can mask lots of forms of abuse. I'm thinking of two documentaries, both by the same director, I believe, Tiger King and Chimp Crazy, which I wrote about, I guess, two years ago now. People keeping exotic animals usually for eventually for profit for making these small time zoos usually illegally. And then the documentaries take you behind the scenes of those things. And there are inevitably all kinds of abuses of the animals. Sometimes our interest in animals can have this sort of prurient and abusive ambit.
38:50Alexandra Schwartz:But famously, there was a tiger named Ming that was found living in an apartment in Harlem and grew to 425 pounds and ate like 20 chicken thighs a day. And I think the tiger piss finally made its way downstairs and there was a report made. And so, I mean, there is a kind of mania that can accompany our more innocent interests.
39:15Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I just think it's – animals are such – and our relationship to animals is such an interesting bellwether for the health or the lack of health in our relationship to other people and to the world at large. And it can really cut both ways. It's so good to give love to something. It's so good to give love to other humans. And it's so good to give love to non-humans. It's so good for us. It's good for them. It's good for us. And then we all know examples when things just get totally out of whack. Like when I think about the kind of an extreme on the spectrum of where we are with our relationship to animals, I'm just going to call her out.
39:58Vinson Cunningham:Marie Antoinette. I must think of Marie Antoinette and her lapdogs. I must think of Mops, the pug. Oh, Mops. Marie Antoinette's pug. And if any of our listeners want to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can see an absolutely exquisite kind of Tiffany blue velvet gilded doghouse that was made for Marie Antoinette. Mops might have peed in this thing, guys. Like this is a beautiful little house while people were hungry on the streets. So in our own world, we have a similar kind of out of whack thing. Dog strollers became aware of them in Greenpoint 10 years ago. Now they're everywhere. Couldn't believe what I was seeing.
40:37Vinson Cunningham:Couldn't believe what little faces I was looking at when I expected to see a human child in there. Just a great shock. So it's— So fuzzy. I don't want to accuse anyone of going too far with their love of an animal, but I think these needs to project onto animals the kind of care that we should be giving to other people but aren't is— it's just fascinating and telling.
41:03Naomi Fry:Yeah. No, it's true. You know what I think about it? Like sometimes I think, oh, if only they could talk. You know what I mean? Like if only, you know, I look into my cat's eyes and I say, I love you. Like I love you so much.
41:20Alexandra Schwartz:So beautiful.
41:22Naomi Fry:And, you know, I imagine one of them answering and saying, I love you too, mother, or something, right? And I kind of like fantasize like how amazing would it be if we could fully relate, right? Like, you know, if language was theirs and we could have these moments where reciprocity could be articulated fully, right, as it is with a human. However. However. One of the things that makes it so special and so relieving in some ways is that it can't talk back. I have a human child who talks back. And this is like almost always a most wonderful thing. But sometimes it's a difficult thing because it's difficult to deal with another person.
42:11Naomi Fry:And the relief of an animal is that, you know, their fuzzy, chunky body that you hold in your arms is mute, you know, except for the meows or the barks as the case may be.
42:26Vinson Cunningham:I don't know, Nomi, if you're aware of what I consider to be a supremely troubling TikTok account called IamBunny. I find this unholy. What's going on? I'm pretty freaked out by IamBunny. Iambunny is a dog whose owner has given – she's a sheepadoodle. And her owner has given her a set of buttons that can say words in automated voices. And it is by pressing these buttons that Bunny is purported to speak. So here's an example. There's a Bunny video in which Bunny, this black and white dog, it has a longstanding feud with Tenrec, another dog in her household. And Bunny is standing on buttons to say Big Ugg.
43:15Big, Big Ugg.
43:16Naomi Fry:Night feel Big Ugg? Yesterday night, you did feel big Ugg because Tenrec was above your crate.
43:28Naomi Fry:But today, Tenrec and Bunny did walk. Tenrec is friend now. And what I find so disturbing about Bunny is, of course, her owner, who kind of uses the techniques of modern gentle parenting to explore Bunny's feelings with her.
43:47Vinson Cunningham:like affirming her feelings in this sort of sing-songy verbal way. What's happening here? And there's something like, Nomi, you say, and I totally get this, like you wish that sometimes that the cats could talk. Don't you think that the animals just wish— And say, I love you, mother. Right, exactly. Or they're probably just going to say, feed me. Feed me. I want to kill you. And they make their wills so known through all these. I just think, like, again, on the plus side and the beautiful side of this human-animal relationship is being taught by animals and being taught to learn a kind of communication that isn't verbal and having to change your own way of speaking and communicating.
44:29Naomi Fry:Because these relationships are mutual. They really are. Okay, you guys, we're reaching the end of our time together. What would you want to give us as a kind of like parting idea about like our relationship to animals in the world? Words of wisdom? Parting thoughts? It's funny.
44:50Alexandra Schwartz:As a new-ish pet custodian, I've noticed, I mean, there's a big narrative, especially in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where I live in Brooklyn, about sort of animals become these really interesting symbols of space and how people inhabit them. And it's sort of adjunct to the ongoing conversation about gentrification. How do pet owners and their sort of, how they interpret their own prerogatives in terms of taking up space on the sidewalk or in public parks, et cetera. And so I just want to say to the pet owners of the world that your animal, while beautiful, is not an excuse. to treat people poorly. You know, other people have a part to play too.
45:35Alexandra Schwartz:So while you develop your sense for your animal, also keep working on that other people thing.
45:41Naomi Fry:Yeah, that is very wise.
45:43Vinson Cunningham:Naomi, how about you?
45:44Naomi Fry:I would just say, like, if you can afford to, I think it's really great to adopt a rescue animal. It takes a certain amount of, like, work and funds and so on. But if you can and you're on the fence, I would really recommend it. It helps the animals, and I think it really gives way more than it takes. And I often say that, like, adopting a cat, like, I don't know, whatever, when I had my first cat, like, 18 years ago, I guess, it really prepared me to become a mother of a human person. Like, that was kind of like my first inkling that I would maybe be able to care for someone that was helpless.
46:34Alexandra Schwartz:That's beautiful.
46:35Naomi Fry:So, yeah, no, for real. Like, I feel like she taught me how to love Trixie, RIP, a small senior black and white cat. Yeah. Alex?
46:45Vinson Cunningham:I guess I would say that the two important qualities of relationship to animals that just keep coming up for me are love and respect. Love to experience a kind of caring for a creature because that's really what it is. You take on a creature to care for knowing that essentially if things go well, it will die in your care. And you get a very pure experience of caring. And then what I mean about respect is just a much bigger and frankly more basic idea about a shared planet, which increasingly feels less and less shared and more gobbled up by us. But we are a shared planet. I went on a nature walk in Prospect Park with my son a couple of weekends ago.
47:33Vinson Cunningham:It was just a delight to observe, to try to stop and observe and understand little things, like why turtles sit in the sunlight through the eyes of a kid and also through my own eyes. There were swans there who had an experience where one of them had to be taken away to be cared for. I think she'd eaten something that was bad, and she wasn't able to sit on her eggs as long as she should have. And the male swan tried to step up, and long story short is that the eggs were lost. And apparently the swan mourned. You know, you don't have to anthropomorphize an animal to understand that there is a shared experience of being on planet Earth, which I do believe is the best planet to be on.
48:15Naomi Fry:This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kutchman and we had engineering help today from Pran Bandy with music by Alexis Quadrado. You can listen to all of our episodes anytime at newyorker.com slash critics.
From the publisher
Since the days of Aesop, stories about animals have been used to explore distinctly human values, virtues, and vices. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz consider such childhood classics as E. B. White’s “Stuart Little” and C. S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” series, as well as “The Sheep Detectives,” a recent entry in this canon that centers on a flock who learn poignant lessons about life and loss. Works of adult literature, too, have explored the animal-human bond. Our tendency to project onto animals translates to the real world in strange ways, with figures like Timmy the Whale and Punch the Monkey going viral on our social feeds even as our day-to-day lives are more detached from the natural world than ever before. But the distance between us can be instructive, too. “Reckoning with their similarity to us and also their total strangeness to us . . . that’s where works about animals really get me,” Schwartz says. “Not just as a direct transfer onto the human experience but also this other thing that really does enrich our lives: to be in contact with species that are not our own.”
Read, watch, and listen with the critics:
Homer’s Odyssey“Stone Fox,” by John Reynolds Gardiner“The Mare,” by Mary Gaitskill“The Sheep Detectives” (2026)“Stuart Little,” by E. B. White “Bambi” (1942)“The Lion King” (1994) C. S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” Series“Tom and Jerry” (1940-67)Aesop’s Fables“Frederick,” by Leo Lionni“ ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ and the Whodunnit Renaissance” (The New Yorker)“Zootopia” (2016) “Why Earnestness Is Everywhere” (The New Yorker)“Babe” (1995)“Tiger King” (2020-21)“Monkey Business in ‘Chimp Crazy,’ ” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)I am Bunny on TikTok
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