This is how I understood the main theme of the book “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk, on which Agnieszka Holland based her film.
For us, raised in Christian culture and on Old Testament models, the idea expressed in Spoor—that a human being is only and also an animal—may be unappealing. It fascinated me, stayed with me, and I feel it as a kind of ethical discomfort. I am not a vegetarian, and according to what Spoor says, I live by eating my brothers and sisters. I live while accepting the death camps organized for my sisters and brothers.
It is difficult to think well of oneself when we are deprived of that Old Testament superiority over animals, that permission to treat them as objects. In the Book of Genesis, God commands people to “rule over the fish of the sea and the flying creatures of the heavens, and every living creature that moves on the earth,” and also allows them to kill animals for food: “Every moving creature that is alive may serve as food for you.” Of course, the faithful are commanded to treat animals properly, but as those placed above them, not as their equals. The heroine created by Olga Tokarczuk opposes this supremacy of humans over animals.
Janina Duszejko is portrayed in the novel and the film as a madwoman, a contemporary Don Quixote fighting the windmills of beliefs that when an animal dies, there is no need to make a tragedy of it. Because it is only an animal—that is, a thing, not someone. The old woman, misunderstood by the community of a small, run-down town, nevertheless has her followers. And although it is difficult for me to accept her way of understanding the world, I am closer to her views than to those of the Old Testament.