The Lives of Animals │BOOKS
Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy, 1917
"A Report to an Academy" is a short story by Franz Kafka, written and published in 1917. In the story, an ape named Red Peter, who has learned to behave like a human, presents to an academy the story of how he effected his transformation.
In J.M. Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello, the title character gives a central place to "A Report to an Academy" in her speech about vegetarianism and animal rights. She also suggests that Kafka may have been influenced by German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler's The Mentality of Apes, also published in 1917.
“Red Peter was not an investigator of primate behavior but a branded, marked, wounded animal presenting himself as speaking testimony to a gathering of scholars. I am not a philosopher of mind but an animal exhibiting yet not exhibiting, to a gathering of scholars, a wound, which I cover up under my clothes but touch on in every word I speak."
― J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals