The Animals In That Country - Analysis

Two countries, two ways of seeing

The poem’s central claim is stark: how a culture imagines animals reveals how it imagines itself. Atwood sets up a comparison between that country, where animals are dressed in human meaning, and this country, where animals are reduced to brief, disposable flashes. The repeated opening lines, first In that country and later In this country, work like a moral hinge: we’re asked to notice not just different animals, but different kinds of attention—ceremonial attention versus indifferent attention.

The tone in the first half is coolly fascinated, even ironic, as if the speaker is touring a museum of customs. In the second half the voice becomes blunt and bleak, stripping away ornament until there’s almost nothing left but disappearance.

Ceremonial animals: manners as a kind of violence

That country is full of pageantry. The ceremonial cats possessing the streets suggest a place where animals are given roles, almost offices—public, visible, sanctioned. Even predation is translated into etiquette: the fox runs politely to earth while huntsmen stand fixed inside a tapestry of manners. That image of tapestry matters: the scene is already art, already framed, already made safe for the conscience. The hunt becomes a ritual the people can admire, as if cruelty becomes acceptable once it is stylized.

Atwood’s tension here is that humanizing animals does not automatically mean treating them well. In fact, giving the fox and the cats a place in a cultural performance can become a way to keep violence unquestioned—beautiful, inherited, and therefore hard to argue with.

The bull’s mask slips: the human inside the spectacle

The bullfight passage pushes the poem into its most unsettling recognition. The bull is embroidered with blood and handed an elegant death, complete with trumpets and a heraldic brand—a whole language of honor stamped onto suffering. But then the poem breaks open with the parenthesis: the bull rolls on the sand with a sword in his heart, and suddenly the teeth are human. The parenthetical aside feels like the speaker’s involuntary truth-telling, a moment when the costume can’t hold.

When Atwood concludes he is really a man, she isn’t offering comfort. She’s exposing a contradiction: the culture can only bear the animal’s death by secretly turning the animal into a human. The ritual claims to honor the bull, but the poem implies it’s really honoring the human drama—human heroism, human artistry, human dominance—projected onto an animal body.

Legendary wolves versus headlight eyes

Even the wolves in that country are granted a kind of dignity: they hold resonant conversations in forests thickened with legend. That phrase makes the wild feel saturated with story, as if nature has a voice people are trained to hear. Then the poem turns: in this country the animals have the faces of animals, and the description narrows to a single quick image—eyes that flash once in car headlights and are gone. The modern encounter is not a scene but a near-accident, a momentary reflection on the road.

This is the poem’s bleakest paradox: the place with less myth may also have less relationship. In rejecting the old ceremonies (and their hypocrisies), this country has not arrived at a cleaner ethics; instead it has arrived at anonymity.

No-one’s face: the cost of refusing to imagine

The ending is mercilessly plain: Their deaths are not elegant. No trumpets, no tapestry, no legend—only the fact of dying, unobserved or unmarked. The final line, They have the faces of no-one, is the poem’s hardest verdict. It suggests that in this country animals aren’t even granted the status of a counterpart; they are not characters in anyone’s moral story. If that country commits the sin of turning animals into symbolic humans, this country commits the opposite sin: turning animals into nothing that can call for response.

Challenging question: if a culture stops making myths about animals because myths can excuse cruelty, what replaces the myth—attention, responsibility, restraint—or just the headlight flash and the disappearance?