Fortunately, a new role model soon came along, although the improvement was somewhat questionable. This was in the form of an animated television series from Hanna Barbera called Huckleberry Hound, in which there occurred a character named Yogi Bear. Everyone noticed the resemblance right away, and not just in terms of physical appearance but attitude and mannerisms as well. Big and awkward, amiable and carefree, his blithe unrufflable manner an eternal torment to authority figures, and always sure he is a bloody lot smarter than he really is, Yogi Bear was my perfect anthropomorphic self. I’ve been haunted by bear names all my life, but none was ever to cuttingly precise as the indolent and insensitive Yogi. There really was no place to hide.

`I am the Sayer of the Law. Here come all that be new, to learn the Law. I sit in the darkness and say the Law.’
‘Evil are the punishments of those who break the Law. None escape.’
‘Not to run on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’
‘Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’
‘Not to eat Flesh or Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men?’
    The art of having animals speak as people—anthropomorphism—goes all the way back to Aesop, but it all took a vicious and gruesome turn when H. G. Wells wrote The Island of Dr Moreau. The mad doctor—bad enough when he was a respectable vivisector—takes to trying to drag various animals through a few million years of evolution and make humans of them. He gets them halfway, Beast Men—wolves, pumas, dogs, oxen capable of walking and talking and thinking like humans—but unable to completely escape their bestial selves.
    This brilliant and deceptively simple premise offers far more than expected in Wells’ hands, such that that when our wimpy, pompous Victorian narrator—after a few terrifying unexplained encounters—gets the drift of Moreau’s experiments, he gets it the wrong way around. He thinks Moreau is doing these dreadful things to humans, and somehow it is far more horrifying when it is released that in fact they are being done to helpless animals. The Animal Liberation cause was never so strongly argued—not even the Nazis were able to be so cruel.
    The concept has tempted many film-makers and has defeated all of them. The use of outstanding actors as Moreau (Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster) proved unable to get these movies to work as wonderfully as does the book. Such actors could capture the madness, the technical people could convey the horror and make use of convincing special effects, but always they failed. For what they could never get right was the compassion. It is those tragic scenes—as the Beast Men realise that Moreau’s transformations are only temporary, and that, having tasted the exquisite joys of being human, they are now slipping backwards into the void of the bestial abyss—that are amongst the most wounding moments ever written.
    Even Wells probably thought that he was writing a book about the superiority of men over beasts—in fact he achieved the reverse and in doing so propelled this nasty little book into greatness.