While technically sportive and sometimes successfully lyrical, William Kotzwinkle's novel about man's inhumanity to rats, dogs, snakes, lions, elephants, bears, whales, turtles, etc. is so recklessly sentimental in its argument as to be food fit for Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme and other such fauna children. "Doctor Rat" did not quite make me want to go out and shoot dachshunds; but it did not persuade me, as it seems to have meant to, that laboratory research, using animals, into the causes of cancer is the equivalent of Dr. Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz….
The novel drips with gruesome experiments committed by humans on animals…. Kotzwinkle acknowledges that snakes are dangerous to rats, and badgers to elephants, but there is not a mention in his book of snakes biting people, or dogs biting people, or lions eating people. There is, for "balance," a bunch of musicians on board a ship playing lovingly to whales and then musically warning them of a harpooning expedition. But the heaved burden of the novel, so irritatingly easy to dodge, is that animals are beautiful (not dumb; they all talk or think here, talk or think like people) and humans hideous with lip-smacking sadism….
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