Nature & Animals Quote by J. M. Coetzee

Coetzee is doing a familiar Coetzee move: taking the warm, seemingly benevolent act of “writing about animals” and showing the moral trapdoor underneath it. The opening clause is careful, lawyerly even - “indeed impossible - or at least very difficult” - a hedge that reads less like uncertainty than a refusal to grant humans easy authority. He won’t let us declare, with confidence, what an animal “really” feels, because that confidence is already a kind of domination.

The key word is “temptation.” Anthropomorphism isn’t framed as a harmless literary device but as a lure: it flatters the writer and the reader by making the animal legible, relatable, narratively useful. The subtext is uncomfortable: when we give animals our thoughts and feelings, we may not be expanding empathy so much as colonizing another being’s opacity. We turn animal consciousness into a mirror, not a meeting.

Context matters. Coetzee’s work (especially The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello) circles the ethical limits of representation: what art can do to suffering, and what it excuses. This line sits in that larger argument as a warning to the humane imagination. Feeling “for” animals can become a substitute for seeing the structures - farming, lab research, pet ownership - that keep animals powerless. Coetzee isn’t banning imaginative identification; he’s insisting it be undertaken with suspicion. The best animal writing, by this measure, leaves some strangeness intact and forces the human narrator to account for the projection, not disappear inside it.