WOLVOGS, PIGOONS AND CRAKERS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 170

to build a species more amenable than humans to a sustainable planet. Crake has
built his own death into the plan, and he projects that once Jimmy dies, having
helped the Crakers settle into the posthuman environment, the new species will
prosper. He has not, however, factored in herds of pigoons and packs of wolvogs;
the unintended consequences of genetic engineering by others severely threaten
his scheme.
The Crakers, then, from Crake's perspective, are the solution to the invasion of
humans, whom he believes have ruined the planet. The Age of the Anthropocene,
in this reading, is dangerously destructive to the planet as a whole, and must be
terminated. And this in part distinguishes the benevolent Crakers from the wolvogs
and pigoons, for the latter two creations are surviving manifestations of the earlier
western philosophy that used the planet merely as a resource to fulfil human desires.
It is this world that Crake and Snowman, as Glenn and Jimmy, grow up in, and
get to know intimately through their parents, who work in various biological
engineering communities financed by corporations. The pigoons and wolvogs
represent aspects of what is, initially, a commercially successful enterprise geared
towards providing the well-to-do inhabitants with endless supplies of food, while
mollifying their fear of death with a vast and increasingly perverse array of life-
extending or age-retarding treatments. Jimmy's father had been 'one of the
foremost architects of the pigoon project', the goal of which
was to grow an assortment of foolproof human tissue organs in a transgenic
knockout pig host—organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid
rejection, but would be able to fend off attacks by opportunistic microbes and
viruses . . . A rapid-maturity gene was spliced in so the pigoon kidneys and
livers and hearts would be ready sooner, and now they were perfecting a
pigoon that could grow five or six kidneys at a time. Such a host could be
reaped for its extra kidneys; then, rather than being destroyed, it could be kept
living and grow more organs.
(ibid.: 27-28)
Atwood in interviews repeatedly emphasises that much of Oryx and Crake was based
on technology already available in 2004 when the topic was published, and on
experiments already being carried out. Certainly, arguments about the morality
of such work had been well established before her novel, as in Donald and
Ann Bruce's Engineering Genesis: The Ethics of Genetic Engineering in Non-Human
Species (1998), which contains Ian Wilmut's case study, 'Xenotransplantation:
Organ Transplants from Genetically Modified Pigs' (Bruce and Bruce, 1998:
63-66). And larger questions about the status of animals relative to humans go back
centuries, the most influential modern text being Peter Singer's ground-breaking
Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (1976), where Singer
argues against what he calls 'speciesism', discrimination on the basis of species. In
Atwood's novel, speciesism abounds, other animals being merely raw material for
human experimentation. As Traci Warkentin notes, Oryx and Crake provides 'a