I love animals and I also love eating them and that's a problem -- especially for the animals. For them it's a matter of life or death, while for me it's merely an ethical dilemma I can usually avoid pondering -- a way of coping with moral contradictions that works well for me (and legions of others), not so well for the animals. Besides, there is a longstanding, well-reasoned hierarchy on Earth ("might is right" being its ideological basis) and we humans, being the most reasoning of creatures, sit atop it and are therefore due a degree of deference (and sustenance) from the other beasts, aren't we? Absolutely not, says Elizabeth Costello.

Costello is the central character in "The Lives of Animals," J.M. Coetzee's new novella, and a novelist herself. She has been asked to take part in the Tanner Lectures, sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, where her son, John, is a physics professor. But instead of discussing her fiction, she chooses to lecture (and I do mean lecture) on human cruelty to animals and the ethical issues surrounding the production and consumption of meat, somewhat to John's discomfort and with the unbridled contempt of his wife, Norma, who has no use for Elizabeth or what she sees as her mother-in-law's fluffy thinking.

To complicate matters, as novelists like to do, the novella is published with an introduction and a series of commentaries by various real-life scholars; and Coetzee first presented this story by reading it last year at Princeton, when he was invited to deliver the Tanner Lectures. The introduction is by political philosopher Amy Gutman, and the responsive essays that accompany the novella are by religion scholar Wendy Doniger, psychologist and anthropologist Barbara Smuts, literary theorist Marjorie Garber and moral philosopher Peter Singer, author of "Animal Liberation." Frankly, there are going to be some who say this is the sort of exercise that gives intellectual discourse a bad name, and while I'm sympathetic to the cause, I'll have to agree with them -- with the glowing exception of Smuts' essay, this is arid, didactic stuff.

Coetzee's novella, and Costello's cause, are not helped by the fact that the minor figure, Norma, tends to be the most appealing, if not on the ethical issues, then certainly in her view of Elizabeth, who comes off as something of a pill, a piece of work, a monopolizer of oxygen and presumably no treat as a mother-in-law. But "The Lives of Animals" is a fable -- moral instruction -- and these are iconic characters, employed as vehicles for differing perspectives, rather than as personalities whose subtle interactions generate drama, emotion, transcendence. Coetzee puts his characters into a lecture hall, and later around a dinner table, and lets them have at each other "Nightline"-style.

Calling on Descartes, Kant and Swift among others, Costello lays out her case, setting herself up by drawing the oft used (and sure to provoke) parallel between the Holocaust and the meat industry. Meanwhile, her opposite, Thomas O'Hearne, a professor of philosophy who boycotts her first lecture, later challenges her in a debate. "Thomas Aquinas says that friendship between human beings and animals is impossible, and I tend to agree," says O'Hearne. "You can be friends neither with a Martian nor with a bat, for the simple reason that you have too little in common with them."

Here, as Smuts points out in her essay, Costello drops the ball. "The failure of Costello -- and of Coetzee's other characters -- to address Aquinas' claim is not so surprising when we realize that in a story that is, ostensibly, about our relations with members of other species, none of the characters ever mentions a personal encounter with an animal," Smuts writes. "The lack of reference to real-life relations with animals is a striking gap in the discourse on animal rights contained in Coetzee's text."

Yet it's a shortcoming that's almost made up for by Barbara Smuts herself. Her 14-page commentary is considerably more compelling, engaging and convincing than Coetzee's entire brittle novella. Smuts, who has done extensive field work with baboons, does a better job of getting Costello's point across than Coetzee does, and she does it lying down: "Once I fell asleep surrounded by 100 munching baboons only to awaken half an hour later, alone, except for an adolescent male who had chosen to nap by my side. We blinked at one another in the light of the noonday sun and then casually sauntered several miles back to the rest of the troop, with him leading the way." A cozy, inter-species sunlit nap and a meandering stroll home is a friendly gesture indeed, and not a slight thing to have in common. And if it happened to you, and if it was a calf, say, instead of a baboon, would you dine on veal scaloppine that night? Perhaps you'd go with the grilled vegetables instead.

It's a shame that Coetzee's story doesn't have much juice because it's a worthy, uncomfortable issue for many of us. The way animals, both wild and domestic, are treated is often dreadful, yet we successfully cast it from our consciousness. Nor do we care to give much time to the strident few who harp on this awkward subject. Indeed, those who suggest that the ironic, urban sophisticate may not be the highest form of life on the planet tend to be patronized as party poopers, scolds, killjoys. Of course, it's largely their own fault: They're a fairly humorless bunch (he scolded). Animal rights activists and their flora-loving counterparts -- "tree huggers" -- desperately need a likable soul on their side (Jane Goodall can't be everywhere at once), someone who can get the word out while being both trenchant and gut funny; who can save them from their habitual preaching to the choir. J.M. Coetzee, however, is not that person and neither is his earnest literary invention, Elizabeth Costello.

That doesn't make "The Lives of Animals" bad -- Booker Prize-winning Coetzee has no trouble turning a phrase or crisply encapsulating an idea -- but it does make it unlikely that it's going to find much of an audience beyond the converted, or those paid to write reviews. Maybe the best hope for the animal rights folks is drafting the current equivalent of Richard Pryor or Dick Gregory, if such a being exists and is also sympathetic to the plight of the world's beasts. In the early- to mid-'60s, Gregory's brilliant, biting stand-up was intensely focused on racial issues, yet it managed to indict, enlighten and be fall-out funny all at once. One of his bits had him seated at a roadside diner in the deep South about to cut into a roast chicken when a local Klan member walked over, stood behind him and said, "Boy, I'mna do to you whatever you do to that chicken." At which point the black man picked up his entree and kissed it.

Unfortunately, in the world of animal rights, such sharp, multi-coded parables are as rare as they are thought-inducing.