Finished reading Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy over the weekend. This is an intriguing story of a scientist, Professor Darrelhyde, who befriends an ape, Percy, in the London Zoo. Darrelhyde discovers Percy is to be shot into space. The yarn takes off with the professor’s efforts to save the ape. Along the way Brophy weaves quietly ironic observations about our relationship with animals. Published in 1953, Brophy went on to write “The Rights of Animals” for The Sunday Times in 1965.
To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own oppression of animals.
The Grumpy Vegan had the good fortune to meet and hear Brophy speak on several occasions. She exuded sophistication (black nail varnish!) with a political radicalness that made you want to have her as your eccentric Aunt Brigid. What fun that would have been.
