A Donkey’s Diary: Animal Farm Reloaded

By Conny Jansky

Seventy-five years after the publication of Orwell’s satirical fable, it’s story time again! So, welcome to the Free World where everyone will live happily ever after... right?

SYNOPSIS

A team of future scientists is determined to find out what caused a previous mass extinction of species when they discover evidence of mysterious creatures that may provide an answer to what caused the event. The ancient finds include several scriptures, among them a story called ‘Animal Farm’ which tells the tale of a farm on which animals decide to overthrow their evil human master but soon after doing so, the farm’s pigs take over and turn malignant, too. This story is continued in another scripture titled ‘Animal Farming’ which is told from the perspective of the donkey Benjamin, who escapes the farm in fear of persecution by the pigs. At first, Benjamin is impressed by the high living standards on his new host farm but soon starts developing ethical concerns when a huge hen cage is installed.

Benjamin meets a series of characters representing renowned Western philosophers who have shaped the basis of today’s moral justification for intensive animal farming methods. From Aristotle to Kant, they all try their best to convince Benjamin of its legitimacy – and not without success! It is only after a personal tragedy that Benjamin realises he should have listened to his gut feeling.

Besides challenging the popular reasoning in favour of intensive farming methods, ‘A Donkey’s Diary’ explores arguments concerning animal welfare, animal rights, and environmental protection in the context of the ongoing climate crisis and mass extinction event. In a sarcastic tone, the story questions the popular assumption that humans are not to be considered animals due to their allegedly superior intellect. In doing so, the donkey Benjamin reveals what truly lies beneath their apparent need for eternal growth despite its fatal consequences that currently threaten to destroy their own livelihoods.

Similar to its prequel, ‘A Donkey’s Diary’ is a satirical fable about humans and other animals. The story represents how food production – and with it the human-animal relationship – has changed over the course of the past three Industrial Revolutions and highlights which ancient arguments were (and still are) used to justify intensive farming practices. It invites the reader to ponder animals, food, money, work, intelligence and much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Conny Jansky
• Release date: Apr 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781370180509

Conny Jansky

Conny Jansky was born in Austria where she studied International Development Studies as well as Business Informatics. After living and working in several countries, she moved to Madrid, Spain, where she has been living since 2009.Arriving at one of the hotspots of financial turmoil, she was inspired to write her first novel 'Two Cats and a Chicken Shop Mystery' which was published in 2012. The story recounts real events from the peak of ‘la crisis’ and fuses them with fictional references to Spanish history and contemporary mythology that were inspired by research on sociology of miracles. The Spanish translation of the novel, 'Dos gatos y el misterio del Mercado de la Cebada', was published in 2014.Her latest work takes up George Orwell’s famous 'Animal Farm' (1945) and continues its plot as a historical review of modern industrial societies with a sarcastic interpretation of the myth of perpetual growth in the context of the ongoing climate crisis and mass extinction of species. 'A Donkey’s Diary' was written in free-range conditions and published during the coronavirus quarantine in spring 2020 from where the author is developing her next story on social change during times of historic transformation.

Book preview

CHAPTER I

Grete brushed out the remaining sand from the eye sockets of the freshly excavated skull which was attached to a backbone only slightly shorter than hers. The burning sun now fully illuminated the two holes she had just cleaned. She paused for a moment and stared deeply into them, wondering. It must have been a fascinating creature… But what exactly was it?

The freezing wind kept whipping Taylor’s face as the massive drill barrel on the South Pole science station was about to reach the required depth in the ice. He just needed to hold on a little longer to be able to extract the ice core he needed for analysis. Taylor was convinced that their theory must be wrong, and it was his conviction that helped him forget the bitter cold he had to withstand to prove it.

M’ling rushed into the lab as soon as she could and switched on the most powerful microscope the research headquarters could offer. She carefully refocused its lens and was suddenly overwhelmed by the magnificence of colours and shapes that unfolded in front of her. To the naked eye, the powder she had spread on the glass slide seemed like dust but she had already had a hunch that the sample Grete had sent was something far more than a mere rock…

The rest of the body parts Grete was examining had already been laid bare and she was certain that this was the most complete skeleton of the mysterious creature that they had ever found. Her gaze went over the vast excavation site where the other palaeontologists were working on the hundreds of bones they had found in this area. Could they really be what they said they were?

Before entering the refrigerated storehouse to begin his analysis, Taylor had a warming cup of hot cider which tasted like magic after having spent the entire day on ice. He started off with the electricity test, which he hoped would bring the expected results. But it was a disappointment: no signs of any major volcanic activity and no meteorite either. Just as they had predicted. It was time for the debubbler which would allow him to analyse the air bubbles that had been trapped in the ice a very long time ago.

The powder M’ling was looking at was fossilized pollen grains that were washed into the sea millions of years ago. She was able to use them to reconstruct the vegetation from the past. While examining all the different pollen from Grete’s rock, M’ling couldn’t believe her eyes when she spotted them. They were there, too! For over a year now, she had been studying pollen fossils from the same strata but different places all over the world, and there were usually four to five specific types of pollen grains, notably all cereals that kept reappearing over the entire planet. Not only did that not make any sense, but it was biologically impossible. Unless of course…

Taylor kept staring at the results of his analysis and was flabbergasted. The chemical composition of the air that had been trapped in the ice was enigmatic. The levels of carbon dioxide and methane were extremely high – in fact, the highest he had ever seen trapped in ice. Without any evidence of major volcanic activity, there was no logical explanation for this. Could it really be true?

CHAPTER II

The reason for focusing their research on that particular geological period was that palaeobiologists had identified a mass extinction event that had occurred back then. Consequently, it also marked the end of that period, approximately a hundred million years ago. On the one hand, it remained entirely unclear what had caused this event, and on the other, they knew that their ancestors must have been among the few survivors who had risen from the ashes of the remains.

According to the experts, in an extinction event, more species died off than new ones were able to evolve, resulting in a rapid decrease in biodiversity. They spoke of a mass extinction if at least three-quarters of all multi-cellular organisms on Earth were lost within a geologically short period. Inevitably, such a gigantic eradication of species caused a fatal disruption of the entire biosphere – the self-regulating system connecting all life on Earth.

There was a scientific consensus that the world must have looked extremely different from today: exotic creatures, great and small, wandering on outlandish vegetation that covered continents with little resemblance to today’s world. There was, however, less agreement on how exactly the world looked a hundred million years ago which is why paleoethological finds were the most precious evidence for reconstructing the past.

As they knew, all species had a more or less stable extinction rate in line with the planet’s natural evolution, but they had also discovered that, generally speaking, a mass extinction was not that unusual as such events had occurred at least six times since the beginning of life on Earth.

The recovery processes after each of these mass extinction events ranged between one and five million years during which the Earth’s biosphere was able to return to its previous levels of biodiversity. In that sense, the Earth’s most recent recovery not only lay well on average, from a geological perspective, it could even be considered a quick one of ‘only’ two million years.

However, there was something very strange about this last extinction which the experts had simply started calling the Sixth Mass Extinction. Its peculiarity stemmed from the fact that the scientists couldn’t find any evidence of so-called ‘natural causes’ for that extinction. All usual suspects had an alibi: the geological stratum in question showed no signs of extreme volcanic activity, and there hadn’t been any major meteor strike since the one that had killed off the dinosaurs in the previous mass extinction. Hence, alternative theories had been developing, though they remained pure speculation due to lack of evidence.

It was Grete herself who discovered the first pieces of bones of the mysterious creature. The radiometric dating showed that the bones were from a time just before the Sixth Mass Extinction which must have carried it off, too – at least, that was what it seemed like at first. But there were two things very peculiar about the creature.

After the first find of