The Message
OK, so it looks like I'm doing this. I hope you like tofu kid, but also drink your milk because I want that brain to grow.
“This is the memorial lying on the tomb of an excellent man,
Pythion from Megara, who slew seven men and broke off
seven spears in their bodies: he chose virtue and brought
honour to his father among the people.
This man, who saved three tribes of Athenians, bringing them from Pegae through Boeotia to Athens, brought
honour to Andocides with two thousand captives (or slaves?).
He harmed none of the men on earth, and went down to
Hades blessed for all to see.
These are the tribes: Pandionis, Cecropis, Antiochis.” - Tombstone of Pythion of Megara 446 BC, (emphasis mine)“Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation.” Rapist and Indicted One-Term President Donald Trump, December 2023
“The only thing we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.” -Governor Greg Abbott January 2024
The running theme first few books have been returning to repeatedly is “what is worth fighting for?” And this book will be no different. I am going to spin this essay in a bit of an Effective Altruism direction and ask the question of how do we expand our circle of moral concern?
In the first book, we have concern for the immediate family. Jake is concerned directly for his brother. He finds this a compelling enough end to fight the unspeakable evil of the Yeerks and win his brother’s freedom. In the second book, Rachel sees Melissa’s pain and imagines suffering of little girls everywhere around the world losing the experience of loving parents as they become controllers that can act out how their hosts might act but devoid of any care, concern, or love. In a word, Rachel expands her scope of moral concern to suffering of those beyond her friends. Cassie takes this one step further when she learns the Yeerks will plan to simplify the biosphere of life on earth in this installment. She expands the moral concern to all life on earth that isn’t human.
The Message begins with Cassie in the barn where sick animals are kept by her parents, morphing a squirrel to see if she can lure a fox who has been sneaking in to kill sick birds. This girl really will go the extra mile to help the animals. Tobias happens to come by while she is in morph. Since he is now a carnivorous predator that hunts to survive, he nearly murders his friend, unaware she has morphed a rat.
This is one of the little bits of nightmare fuel in the books that goes mostly uncommented on.
<Tobias! Help!> I yelled in thought-speak.
<What the … Is that you, Cassie?>
I dodged left. The fox dodged after me.
He was faster than me and almost as agile.
Unless I could find a place to climb up and away, I was done for!
<Yes, it’s me!>
<Well, why didn’t you tell me?!> he said, sounding grumpy in my head. <I was considering eating you.>
Personally, I find the idea of Tobias being described as grumpy to be funny. Like, how dare you almost let me eat you Cassie is the kind of twisted logic of someone who is very cranky. I imagine he’s a bit hangry at this point. After that kerfuffle, Cassie mentions that she probably should have stayed in bed even with the weird dreams she has been having. This triggers the main story; it turns out Tobias has also been having weird dreams. Both are having dreams about The Message1 from the sea.
The team meets up, decides to investigate because it also turned-out the news has been broadcasting weird stuff showing up on the beach and Jake recognized an alphabet from the Andalite ship. The Animorphs conclude that maybe there is an Andalite calling for help from the sea. To everyone's surprise, Marco is not reluctant for this mission.
Marco just grinned. “I really hate to do this. I really hate to disappoint you all.” Then he grew serious. “But I was there at the construction site, same as all of you. I was there when Visser Three —” Suddenly his voice choked. “What I mean is, if there’s an Andalite who needs anything, I’m there.”
The first time at the beach, they end up running into Controllers and get shot at while running away. They plan on searching again with freshwater sea creatures, dolphins. Cassie begins to have some internal conflicts. She is worried about being the cause of a mission that might be dangerous and making decisions that could lead people to get hurt. She is also feeling conflicted about morphing mammals with intelligence closer to that of humans, questioning whether using means of some amount of questionable ethics similar to the Yeerks, controlling brains of other creatures, makes them different.
These inner conflicts are quick and not dwelt on, this is a children’s book after all.
Rachel looked surprised. “Yeerks take over humans,” she said. “Besides, they don’t morph, they infest. We don’t take over the actual animal, we just copy his DNA pattern, create a totally new animal, and then —”
“And then control the new animal,” I said.
“It’s not the same,” Rachel insisted. But she looked troubled.
“It’s something I’ll have to think about,” I said. “It’s kind of been bothering me.”
And the dolphin morph ends up paying off. They end up encountering a whale while in dolphin morph that communicates where the Andalite is in the ocean. After a long trek out to sea involving flight, stowing away on a ship, and a dolphin morph, the team finally meets what will become the sixth member of their team.
Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, or Ax for short2. He’ll get his own book and stories soon to develop his character but suffice it to say Ax is also a child. He is a cadet of the Andalites and the younger brother of Elfangor who gave the team the morphing powers. Ax saw the Andalite forces killed in a battle on with the Yeerks above earth as he was detached from the main ship with a living dome that is a replica of his home world.
<Yes. I am alone. When the Blade ship appeared unexpectedly, they caught us off guard. I saw the main section burn. Dracon beams damaged the orbital stabilization of this dome. It fell. It splashed into the ocean and sank to the bottom. I have been here for these many weeks, hoping that my cousins would come for me. Hoping that some survived. Finally I risked sending out a mirrorwave call. It works by …> He stopped, and looked embarrassed. <I am not supposed to explain Andalite technology3. My brother will … He would have been angry with me.>
Then the important message for Cassie, why she is narrating, as Ax reveals what happens when Yeerks have conquered a planet.
<Yes. We take our home with us into space. It angers the Yeerks,> he added grimly.
“Why do they care what you take into space?” Marco asked.
<It is a part of everything they hate and would destroy if they could. The Yeerks would take our world and make it as barren as their own. As they will to your planet unless they are stopped.>
I grabbed Ax’s arm. “What … what are you saying? What do you mean about making the planet barren?”
He turned his big eyes on me. <The usual Yeerk pattern. Once a planet is under their control, they alter it to suit their own desires. They will leave enough plant and animal species to keep the host bodies fed — humans in the case of Earth—and the rest they eliminates.>
Cassie is stunned. This is a new kind of evil she hasn’t been ready for, and Ax being confused and angry that Cassie hadn’t figured out who she’s dealing with feels equally understandable. As a reader, this is probably a part of the story that feels a bit hokey and preachy.
The Yeerks are already a cartoonishly evil villain to be fighting at this point in the story. A parasitic species bent on universal domination of species that has come to enslave the human race. A leader that bullies his underlings relentlessly, taunts his foes, and whose first action is a showboating murder of the friendly alien the protagonists of the book just met. So now we are learning they also want to kill almost every other species and leave the earth a barren wasteland. Why does this matter? It just seems like overkill. I as the reader don’t need another reason to hate the Yeerks or see them as evil. That message has been received loud and clear.
But placing Cassie as the protagonist of this book can change your mind. Cassie is most likely to reflect on her own culpability, opening the door for an uncomfortable prism to view this narrative. The Yeerks think they are far superior to humans; they have better technology and superior understanding and control of their world. They may even have a culture that they view as superior. Other species are viewed as not merely Other but less than. For good or bad, we don’t even need to look outside of our species for cases of us treating populations of persons as less than. The quotes at the top of this give a couple easy examples of this. But again, Yeerks are a fundamentally different species than humans looking to subjugate species that they see as less than.
And of course, not only are there examples of this, but almost all of us do this too. While we certainly don’t subjugate the entire world, we do subjugate a surprisingly staggering amount of it. We have grown livestock into a well-oiled machine. Plants and bacteria make up 95% of the earth's biomass. Animals are actually only a fraction of a percent and of them, insects making up the lion's share. Yet humans have come to quickly dominate mammals, birds, and fish over the last 100 years. The biomass of livestock outnumbers mammals and birds by a factor of ten. Fish make up a far larger share of animal biomass, but here we are also starting to farm over 120 million tons of fish per year, and as countries grow rich, they tend to consume more and more per human such that this number may only grow.
There are currently 8 billion odd humans living on planet earth. The number of fish killed each year is estimated on the order of a trillion or 1000 billion. Fish in fisheries may be living lives of horrible suffering as they suffocate from close quarters and lack of oxygen. Humans are my own species, I value my family more than others of my fellow man4, and humans more than animals. But as I look at my dog who I care for, who brings me joy, whose eventual death hopefully from old age will likely leave me an emotional wreck for a few weeks, and who has grown close to my new daughter, I have to ask the uncomfortable question. Do I value human life and well-being a hundred or thousand-fold greater?
I don’t know is my honest answer to this question. My answer used to be that I thought human life was basically worth infinitely more than any animal life or suffering. My spouse was a vegetarian when we met. This wasn’t a thing we talked about a whole lot at the time, and it was something she wasn’t planning on necessarily strictly continuing beyond a year, it is surprisingly difficult to go to gatherings and always avoid all meat.
Before we even got married, I started eating a lot more of a plant-based diet. Meatless Fridays during Lent, or even not during Lent, are a super Catholic coded thing that nobody even batted an eye when I routinely gave up all meat for Lent over a few years. My reasonings were primarily about climate change. The environmental impact of food is concentrated in meat eating, and especially beef. Outside of Lent, I would find myself just generally not wanting to eat meat that much anyways, and when I did eat meat, I tended toward poultry or fish which do generally have a lower carbon footprint. After a while, not eating meat5 does cause you to get sick the next time you have it6.
The second most important reason for not eating meat was a concern over pandemic incubation and antibiotic resistance. Nearly three fourths of antimicrobials are used on livestock. Some of this is for good reason, we have increased the number of birds we are manufacturing every year to be able to feed all of the humans on the earth. Antibiotics serve a dual purpose; they both help chickens grow larger in a shorter amount of time and help them stay alive if they get sick in close quarters before being slaughtered for food. Oh, and that keeping chickens in close quarters? That might help viruses and bacteria in animals mutate a bit more quickly that might eventually find a way to jump to us humans. As I learned about pandemics in college, I started to become much more aware that some sort of global pandemic of a novel respiratory virus wasn’t just possible in my lifetime but likely.
Now, I know what you might be thinking. You might be thinking, hey, we just had one of those novel respiratory viruses. Didn’t that most likely originate from wet markets? And wasn’t that a sort of once in a hundred-year sort of virus? I’d say, sure, maybe we won’t see another virus like that for another hundred years. Maybe that it is even unlikely that we see another global health disaster of that scale let alone that it comes from factory farming. But the question is, the way things have been going, do you feel lucky?
At the beginning of last year, I went through the number of chickens, fish, and other species farmed and killed each year. The sheer scale started to become more persuasive to me as I had the number of humans alive today in my head to compare. Just as these books expand the circle of concern from the individual family member to all life on earth I started to become more concerned with suffering animal life. More and more, I toyed in my head the idea of giving up most meat for good while generally eating a more plant-based diet. Then I also started to have more and more gut issues. I’ve always had acid reflux occasionally, and generally avoid deep fried food because it can cause long bouts of pain. One night, I had cheese and crackers and a glass of chocolate milk and realized after doing some googling while in pain - people are most likely to develop lactose intolerance at just around my age. That was the last night I had any dairy that wasn’t a small ingredient. Now I am starting this year vegan7, and if it ends up being a sustainable transition8 my daughter will never know a time when her dad wasn’t vegan.
I don’t have any illusions that this will change the trajectory of the climate, stave off a pandemic, or decrease animal suffering in much of a meaningful way. My personal impact, however measurable it is, is much less impactful than even small policy changes by governments or even companies. But as a practical matter it forces me to be mindful of every grocery shopping trip of my impact on the world around it and the little ways that I can9 opt out of systems that impact the world in a negative way. Cooked dinners and prepared lunches become not mere practicality but imbued with ritual and sacrifice. Gatherings with friends and family are a constant reminder of what I am leaving behind as I try to place value on life and suffering that I can’t see.
Yeerks put no value on animal or human life and suffering. Cassie is in a family that rehabilitates wild animals, spending much of her time nursing creatures back to health. Perhaps she is the only one of the Animorphs for whom this climatic evil can be clear. The Yeerks are using human hosts for pleasure, power, and control. They have nothing to derive from destroying life they can’t control, yet now Cassie is learning they do destroy that life as well. This evil is worth using extraordinary means against.
Escaping with Ax, the Animorphs are chased by Visser 3 in an alien morph that slowly gains on them and seems ready to kill. In the end, the whale who gave them directions appears with other creatures of the sea. Earth fights back against this evil. The Animorphs escape, now six children strong.
Hey, that’s the name of the book!
And so that I don’t have to copy and paste that name every time I want to mention him
Huh, I wonder if that will come back around.
And while I don’t personally differentiate between my fellow citizens and non-citizens, as a practical matter the way I live my life puts more value within the US than outside of it.
Ok, I just have to mention Jordan Peterson here too who tried the all-beef diet, which is not healthy don’t do that. But the story is hilariously funny how he f’s around and finds out. The podcast Maintenance Phase has a two-part series on Peterson’s journey into the all-beef diet.
There were a couple particularly unpleasant experiences I had with this. One involved eating Korean BBQ, which ends up being a lot of meat. The other involved eating steak at a wedding. Let me save you the details and just recommend: if you’ve not eaten beef in a long time do not eat that steak and definitely don’t also finish your wife’s steak because she can’t eat it. Just deal with the hunger. Don’t eat that steak.
I don’t love using the term vegan. I still eat food with honey in it, I’m not going to try to avoid sugar bleached through bone char, gummy vitamins are the only ones I don’t throw up at the moment so my multivitamin isn’t even vegetarian. Basically there is a lot of extremes plenty of vegans go through and I don’t feel super comfortable with the label. It feels like a purity that I’m not necessarily aiming for. I say vegan when summarizing dietary restrictions to any omnivore for simplicity. No one can really have a “significant” impact alone anyways.
Yeah, I have health problems already. No, they weren’t caused by my diet change.
If the reader considers a change of diet at all, choosing a day of the week to go meatless is a great way to start, Mondays and Fridays tend to be easier just because there are some cultural “meatless mondays” or “meatless fridays”. Vegetarian diets with cheese and egg are generally healthy for most people especially if you make sure to have cereal with even a bit of fortified iron. Vegan does take more planning, and the easiest is to get cereal as fortified as possible, some replacement milk that includes B12 fortification, and of course eat a variety of foods being mindful of making sure you have protein and fat in your diet. Personally tofu stirfry and bread and nut butters are my…well, bread and butter. Obviously talk to your doctor as well none of this is medical advice.