Ted Hughes’s “The Jaguar” and Animal Ethics

Abstract In the twenty-first century, particularly post-2019, we are compelled to reexamine the ethical and philosophical grounds of human-centered thinking and to ponder earnestly about the moral dimensions of engaging with nonhuman animals. This essay explicates Ted Hughes’s “The Jaguar” as presenting a double-vision of human perspectives and animal perspectives in its portrayal of a jaguar in a zoo cage. On the one hand, the jaguar is depicted as a visionary, whose spiritual freedom is unconstrained by its physical captivity. On the other hand, the feline is shown to be a captive animal displaying signs of distress. The poetic ambiguity of “The Jaguar” prompts the reader to imagine what might be the jaguar’s state of “flourishing,” in light of Martha Nussbaum’s theory of capabilities approach to animal welfare. By revealing the complexity of what it means to think through animal perspectives, Hughes’s “The Jaguar” urges us to develop metacognition about how we see and understand nonhuman animals.