WOLVOGS, PIGOONS AND CRAKERS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 172

Wells's projection, Moreau carries out experiments on animals, so that, Atwood
argues, '[b]oundaries between the normal levels of life dissolve: vegetable becomes
animal, animal becomes quasi-human, human reverts to animal' (Atwood, 2005:
xix). This breakdown has an impact on the species themselves and upon the
accepted concepts and definitions of those who view the effects of these experi-
ments. In The Island of Doctor Moreau , the narrator, Prendick, having escaped the
hellish island and returned to 'civilisation', finds, Atwood plausibly argues, that
[h]e lives in a state of queasy fear, inspired by his continued experience of
dissolving boundaries: as the beasts of the island have at times appeared human,
the human beings he encounters in England appear bestial.
(ibid.: xxvi)
In her own novel something similar applies, for instance Jimmy's uneasy sense
that the manufactured pigoons might be closer on a sliding scale to humans than
are other animals, something that makes eating pigoons worryingly akin to
cannibalism. Later, though, as Snowman, he faces a dangerous recalibration of
power: with other humans dead, and the boundaries that had once contained the
pigoons now broken, they treat him as food, and his waking hours are a constant
battle to outsmart them and so survive a ghastly death.
The ability to outsmart pigoons is all the harder because of another piece of
biogenetics in which Jimmy's father plays a leading role. Now working at NooSkins,
he comes home drunk one night carrying a bottle of champagne to celebrate the
success of 'the neuro-regeneration project. We now have genuine human cortex
growing in a pigoon. Finally, after all those duds!' (ibid.: 66) For Jimmy's father, the
project creates 'possibilities, for stroke victims, and . . .', but while he strives to find
other positives, Jimmy's mother, herself once a committed microbiologist, but now
disgruntled and 'harried', launches an attack against the 'moral cesspool' created by
such work, and about its commercial basis—that the results will be sold
at NooSkins prices . . . You hype your wares and take all their money and
then they run out of cash, and it's no more treatment for them . . . Don't you
remember about the way we used to talk, everything we wanted to do?
Making life better for people . . . What you're doing—this pig brain thing.
You're interfering with the building blocks of life. It's immoral. It's . . .
sacrilegious.
(ibid.: 67)
Whether or not we see the experiments on pigoons as sacrilegious, they do
constitute a form of function creep, whereby the rationale and employment of a
technology develop significantly beyond that for which it is originally created,
leading to situations and problems undreamt of in its initial phase. As Jimmy's
mother makes plain, the work on pigoons prompts major ethical questions. But
years in the future, in the degraded world Snowman inhabits, the situation is