Stanley Elkin’s The Dick Gibson Show and Searches and Seizures present two human encounters with the animal – the former a dodo, the latter a bear. One encounter is violent, the other sexual, but both provide an interpretation of interspecies encounters that exposes the masks humans use to ignore the violence practiced on nonhuman animals. Most interpretations of Elkin’s animal encounters read the dodo or the bear as lenses through which to judge either the human protagonist or the human condition in general, but an anthrozoological reading of the texts gives weight to the experiences of the animals and finds an argument for equivalency across species.
