some thoughts about a painting

 in 1889, William Strutt painted 'A Warm Response'

It's a lil dog getting snip-snippered by a big ol' lobster. 

What do we think about this painting? What is the narrative we can concoct from it?

Maybe we think- Aw that poor lil dog. He's howling in pain :( That big mean scary alien ocean bug is hurting him :( I hate you dumb bug

That'd be valid. No one wants to see a dog be hurt. They don't deserve that. Also, of the two subjects, most people are going to relate to a dog way more than a scary lobster. I personally think all lobsters are scary and if I saw one outside of a controlled environment I would be scared. 

If we look in the background though we see a lobster turned over on its back and I'm no lobster expert but I think that means it's dead. And on the table we see a bunch of lobster shells and I'm no lobster expert but I think that means they're dead. And so this is not a house where lobsters go to thrive. This a place make those lobsters go graveyard dead.

The dog has emotions that we can see and is obviously in pain because of the lobster--the lobster whose emotions we can't discern. But we know from the scene that the lobster is in a hostile environment. What else could the lobster possibly be expected to do? 

Full disclosure: based on the cheeky title, I don't think ol' William Strutt was trying to get too deep with this one but I do think it's worth thinking about how our biases towards things that are familiar to us can obscure the larger context that events take place in.

I feel bad for the lobster. The lobster is doing the only thing it can do in the environment that it's been placed in. Through no wrongdoing of its own the lobster has been put in a situation where it's going to die and the only action it can take causes a scene and makes the lobster look monstrous. 

Anyway one time when I was in high school this kid I was friends with got mad at this other kid who was harassing him and stabbed him in the arm with a pencil and I remember this younger teacher or substitute or something came over to my lunch table and said something like, "Man did you guys hear about that stabbing? Pretty crazy huh." Which is an insane thing for an adult to say. The kid who got stabbed was fine and is currently a high school football coach. My friend, upon graduating college, moved to the desert and vowed to never return and as far as I know has made good on that promise.