The Boundaries of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal from Plato to Haraway 9780231550963

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THE BOUNDARIES OF H UMAN NATURE

THE BOU N DA R IES OF H U M A N NAT UR E THE PHILOSOPHICAL ANIMAL F RO M P L ATO TO H A R AWAY

MAT THEW CALARCO

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-19472-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-231-19473-0 (paper) ISBN 978-0-231-55096-3 (electronic)

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Elliott S. Cairns Cover image: KAMONRAT/Shutterstock.com

CONTENTS

Introduction

vii

1 Plato’s Pigs

1

2 Aristotle’s Wonderful Animals 12 3 Cynicism’s Dogs 4 Jainism’s Birds 5 Plutarch’s Grunter

26 42 51

6 Descartes’s Beast-Machine

59

7 Kant’s Elephants 70 8 Bentham’s Suffering Animal

79

9 Nietzsche’s Overhuman Animal 10 Derrida’s Cat

89

99

11 Adams’s Absent Referent

111

12 Plumwood’s Crocodile 124 13 Haraway’s Companion Species Notes 145 Index

161

131

INTRODUCTION

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e are living through a simultaneously thrilling and fraught era with regard to animals. On one hand, our knowledge of animals is more extensive and expanding more rapidly than perhaps in any other age in human history. Living animals are subjects of detailed ethological studies that lead daily to remarkable discoveries concerning their cognitive abilities and social lives. In addition, archaeology and evolutionary science have helped to reconstruct the rich history of animal life on earth at a level of detail that was unthinkable even fifty years ago. On the other hand, animals are today suffering from unprecedented rates of extinction and unthinkable forms of violence. If current trends continue, the earth could lose 30 percent of its animal species in the coming decades and rates of animal slaughter could double by 2050.1 Given the increasing appreciation many people have for the richness and wonders of animal life, there has been a corresponding desire to find a way collectively to change course and build a more promising future with our planetary kin. Although increased scientific knowledge of animals is certainly crucial to such a project, one of the main claims of this book is that acquiring this knowledge is insufficient for

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generating the change of heart and transformation in values and practices required to address these problems. I argue that philosophy figures prominently in any project of reorienting our individual and collective lives. As I hope to show, philosophical discourse and practice contain essential resources for helping us to reimagine not only who human beings are (one of its traditional concerns) but who animals are as well. It can also help us think through how human-animal relationships might be reconfigured in a more respectful and joyful manner. In brief, philosophy provides us with important tools for helping bring about an ontological2 and ethical revolution in our way of life. I do not wish to claim that philosophy alone suffices for transforming the current situation regarding animals; a wide variety of discourses and perspectives are required for such a massive task. Consequently, here I try to demonstrate how philosophy can be supplemented by other approaches and perspectives. Likewise, I do not suggest that the philosophical tradition has been uniformly helpful for thinking about human-animal relations in a more respectful manner. Philosophers have served, on more than one occasion, as the ideological support for dogmatic forms of human-centeredness as well as problematic acts of violence against animals. Rather than providing a simple endorsement or rejection of philosophy, I argue for an acknowledgment of the mixed heritage that philosophy bequeaths to us and a sense of responsibility for working through that heritage in view of both its critical promises and its limitations. The philosophers I analyze here belong primarily but not exclusively to the Western tradition. The decision to include nonWestern traditions and perspectives has not been made solely with an eye toward addressing the ethnocentricity of the philosophical canon (which is undoubtedly a critical limitation) but also with the recognition that novel and insightful approaches

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and ideas can be garnered from other heritages.3 Furthermore, I suggest that additional, crucial resources for rethinking animal life and relations in contemporary critical theories and bodies of knowledge circulate on the edges of mainstream philosophy.4 In taking this broad approach to theory, I join a whole host of practitioners in the field of animal studies who have been making the case for the past two decades that doing justice to the richness and complexity of the more-than-human world requires development of a correspondingly rich and complex set of theoretical frameworks and perspectives.5 Although I am not able to touch on all the fields that might be used to supplement and challenge traditional philosophies, I hope to introduce you to some of the more influential perspectives in this regard. Another overarching aim is to suggest, echoing Jacques Derrida (whose work is discussed in chapter 10), that the animal question is one of the central axes that organizes philosophical reflection.6 To be sure, such centrality is not often explicitly affirmed, even by philosophers who spend a significant amount of time reflecting on animals. But I aim to help make the case that several of the central areas of philosophical inquiry—from ethics and politics to epistemology and ontology—are grounded on claims about human and animal natures and their relative value and importance. In brief, it should be evident throughout the text that even in their most abstract speculations philosophers never stray far from animals. I cannot hope to offer a comprehensive treatment of the place of animals in philosophy in this brief book, so the tour is necessarily selective.7 Ultimately, my aim is to help you think with, through, and against certain key philosophers who have important and influential ideas to offer in the ongoing development of animal philosophy. This approach is guided by certain normative commitments, central among them being that

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we are today called to develop a more thoughtful understanding of animal life and better, more joyful relations with our animal kin. It is also informed by the conviction that the contemporary breakdown of the traditional human-animal distinction and the blurring of the boundaries of human nature is something to be affirmed. Indeed, I believe this ongoing conceptual and institutional transformation creates the conditions for fundamentally rethinking the nature of human and animal existence and for reconsidering what might constitute meaningful, worthwhile lives for ourselves and our planetary kin.

CHAP TER OVERVIEWS This journey begins with a consideration of what the ancient Greek philosopher Plato might have to offer us concerning human-animal relations in an age of massive meat consumption and ecological destruction (chapter 1). I then examine Aristotle’s rather mixed discourse on animals, which encourages us to study animals with reverence and wonder on one hand while justifying the violent use and killing of animals on the other (chapter 2). The Cynics (chapter 3) and the Jains (chapter 4) are noteworthy for placing animal life at the very center of philosophical reflection. In these chapters, I attempt to bring these traditions into dialogue with contemporary concerns about the well-being of animals and to examine the importance of personal change in transforming human-animal relations. Among classical philosophers, Plutarch (chapter 5) is perhaps the most radical and progressive in his outlook on animals, and I focus on his playful dialogue “Gryllus,” in which he employs the character of a pig with the capacity for human language to make the case that animals are not just the equals of human beings but are, in many respects, our superiors.

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After this survey of classical philosophy, I leap to the modern philosophical tradition, which was founded in large part by René Descartes (chapter 6). With Descartes, I examine the question of whether animals have language and rationality by studying his famous thought experiments to this end. I then turn to a consideration of Immanuel Kant’s ideas about the distinction between human beings and animals and the ethical dimensions and implications of the manner in which he draws this division (chapter 7). In contrast to Descartes and Kant, Jeremy Bentham (chapter 8) shifts the focus of the philosophical discussion away from human-animal differences to the shared dimensions of human and animal existence, especially our shared suffering. Friedrich Nietzsche (chapter 9) deepens our thinking about human and animal similarities by having us reflect on how human flourishing ultimately requires an affirmation of our animal and earthly natures. With Jacques Derrida (chapter 10), the contemporary scene of animal philosophy and the recently established field of animal studies is examined. The path opened up by Bentham and Nietzsche, an approach that emphasizes the shared animality and embodiment of human beings, is decisive for Derrida. But Derrida also suggests that this shared form of existence does not take away the otherness and difference of animals themselves. They still remain unique centers of individual life with their own perspectives and interiority. The work of Carol Adams (chapter 11) brings the issue of the relations between gender-based interhuman injustice and injustice toward animals to the fore by exploring long-standing links between these two forms of exploitation in the dominant culture. The intersection of violence against animals and against other marginalized groups of human beings is also examined in this chapter from the perspectives of disability, race, and settler colonialism. Val Plumwood

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(chapter 12) offers us a unique perspective from which to think about animals, namely, from the perspective of someone who has been violently attacked by an animal (in her case, a crocodile) and survived. For Plumwood, the attack led, somewhat paradoxically, to a deepening of her commitment to vegetarianism and ethical respect for animals. Finally, Donna Haraway (chapter 13) develops a deeply relational vision of human and animal coexistence with her notion of “companion species.” The chapter concludes by contrasting the practical implications of Haraway’s work with the classical animal rights approach developed by Tom Regan. I also consider the promises and challenges of developing better human-animal relations in the context of the contemporary global pandemic.

THE BOUNDARIES OF H UMAN NATURE

1 PLATO’S PIGS

THE WORLD IS ON FIRE As I write these words, the Amazon rain forest is experiencing some of its worst fires in recent memory. The fires have been so massive this year that they have garnered widespread attention from activists and celebrities on social media, with troubling images of the effects of the fires going viral on the internet. As with many viral social media events, the discussion has quickly turned back on itself. Some individuals have pointed out that the viral images of the fires are several years old and suggested they have been used to whip up unfounded outrage. Other individuals have insisted that the fires are, in fact, very real and that social media users should be careful to circulate only up-to-date images and continue to press for curbing the damage the fires are doing to the rain forest. Lost in this social media fracas is any sustained account of why the rain forest is on fire in the first place. Are such fires typical in a rain forest? And what gave rise to these particular fires? If one peruses mainstream social media and news sources, it is nearly impossible to gain a clear picture of the situation in the Amazon. Most of the time, readers and viewers are told about international pressure being placed on Brazil’s government to do

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more to fight the fires, but the cause of the fires is rarely discussed. Hardly any source mentions the fact that these fires are no accident. They have been deliberately set and, in many cases, are deliberately being allowed to burn and spread. Fires like these in the Amazon rain forest are, contrary to popular misconception, common. There is nothing especially unprecedented about the fires that occurred in 2019 beyond the fact that the quantity and intensity of these fires haven’t been seen since 2010.1 But the Amazon rain forest has thousands of fires every year, and the vast majority are intentionally set to convert rain forest acreage to land suitable for ranching and farming. More specifically, the rain forest is being burned to make room for grazing cattle and growing soybeans. The bulk of the soybeans are exported to countries that use those soybeans as feed for livestock, and the cattle are eaten regionally and exported elsewhere for consumption. Over the past several years, Brazil has emerged as the world’s leading exporter of beef, holding some 230 million head of cattle (the second largest herd in the world), most of whom feed on grass.2 Similarly, Brazil is now the world’s second largest producer and the single largest exporter of soybeans.3 The fires don’t stem from the actions of landowners who wish to burn the rain forest at random. Landowners and ranchers are setting the Amazon on fire (with both implicit and explicit governmental support) in response to rapidly increasing regional and global demand for meat.4

A CIT Y FIT FOR PIGS What could Plato (427–347 bce), a philosopher who lived and wrote nearly 2,500 years ago, have to say that is germane to these contemporary problems? As it turns out, quite a bit.

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If you have read anything by Plato in your exposure to philosophy, you have likely encountered material from his most famous work, Republic. (The well-known image of prisoners chained face-forward in a cave and restricted to looking at shadows projected on the wall in front of them is from book 7 of this work.) Although the Republic is worth reading in its entirety and repays careful study, a particular portion of the book is of direct interest here.5 It concerns the scene in which Socrates and his dialogue partners discuss the founding of an ideal polis, or citystate (the Greek title used for Plato’s treatise is Politeia, which roughly translates as the form of life practiced in a given citystate). As you shall see, in Socrates’s ideal city-state there is no place for meat because of the problems involved in its production and consumption. The Republic arrives at this discussion about the formation of the ideal city-state in a roundabout manner, beginning with a discussion of the relative merits and demerits of living a just life. Throughout the opening book of the dialogue, Socrates entertains conceptions of justice offered by several individuals, from the aged and wealthy Cephalus and his son Polemarchus to the aggressive and animated sophist Thrasymachus. Despite differences in their relative definitions, the interlocutors are all ultimately focused on a notion of justice that serves to secure personal financial gain and political power, thereby paying scant attention to the negative effects this way of life might have on one’s subjectivity. In the ensuing conversation, Socrates succeeds in uncovering certain contradictions in his interlocutors’ conceptions of justice, but he fails to develop anything like a positive vision of justice or the good life. Among those in the audience who are listening to Socrates, two individuals in particular, Glaucon and Adeimantus (who happen to be Plato’s brothers and budding philosophers themselves),

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desire to hear more from Socrates than just a refutation of incoherent ideas about the good life. They long for an affirmative vision of justice that will impassion them to take up the same philosophical way of life that Socrates himself leads. With his customary humility, Socrates confides that he is uncertain whether he can deliver on these demands. That said, he suggests that the nature and merits of a just life might be seen more easily if they can be portrayed in a magnified form, shifting from the microcosmic level of the just individual to the macrocosmic level of the just polis. Thus begins the Republic’s famous discussion of what constitutes a maximally just, ideal city-state. Socrates suggests that city-states first take form because individuals are not selfsufficient and need the assistance of others in meeting their needs for things such as food, clothing, and shelter. Upon realizing that different people have different skill sets and abilities, a division of labor ensues wherein people undertake the particular tasks that best suit their abilities. The city-state that Socrates initially describes is rather minimal in terms of size, but it makes room for a wide variety of crafts and products and engages in basic trade with its immediate neighbors when necessary. Socrates describes the way of life in this city-state as including ample and adequate clothing and shelter, joyful sexual relations and well-planned families, and abundant but simple foods. However, upon hearing this initial description of the wellordered community, Glaucon appears rather unimpressed. He questions Socrates about whether “relishes”—which is to say, delicacies and other savory foods—will be present in this ideal city-state or whether the cuisine must remain so austere. Socrates is sensitive to this request and notes that standard fare

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will include everything from olives and cheese to figs and beans to supplement the bread and cakes that form the core of their basic diet. This sort of well-rounded vegetarian diet, Socrates suggests, will enable residents to “live in peace and good health” (372d1), and they will be able to pass on their way of life to their children. Glaucon remains unsatisfied with these minimal accoutrements and suggests that the simple way of life and vegetarian diet Socrates is describing is fit only for pigs. Surely, Glaucon objects, human beings will be unhappy with the minimalist citystate that Socrates has described and will demand many things beyond the basic necessities of existence. In particular, they will demand meat and a number of other luxuries. Socrates is well known for meeting his interlocutors wherever he finds them. Glaucon is young and a relative newcomer to the philosophical way of life; he is seeking assurance that philosophy will deliver the same kind of happiness that an egoistic life will provide. It will do no good, then, for Socrates to dismiss Glaucon’s request to examine the formation of a city that provides meat, delicacies, and the other sorts of luxuries to which he and his fellow citizens have become accustomed. So he obliges Glaucon and pursues the discussion in this direction. In so doing, Socrates makes a distinction between the “true” and “healthy” city he has just described (which is effectively vegetarian) and the “feverish” and “luxurious” city that Glaucon believes is more befitting for human beings. In the feverish city, Socrates observes that the luxuries and delicacies citizens desire to obtain will often not be native to the land. Thus, the city will have to be enlarged considerably, and all kinds of domesticated animals and farmers will need to be introduced to meet the dietary demands of citizens. He anticipates

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that meeting the demands for meat, in particular, will lead to rather grave consequences: Socrates: And the land, I take it, that used to be adequate to feed the population we had then will now be small and inadequate. Or don’t you agree? Glaucon: I do. Socrates: Won’t we have to seize some of our neighbors’ land, then, if we are to have enough for pasture and plowing? And won’t our neighbors want to seize part of ours in turn, if they too have abandoned themselves to the endless acquisition of money and overstepped the limit of their necessary desires? Glaucon: Yes, that is quite inevitable, Socrates. Socrates: And the next step will be war, Glaucon, don’t you agree? Glaucon: I do.

(373d3–e3)

In short, Socrates is suggesting that to have adequate supplies of meat and other luxuries it will be necessary for the feverish city to go to war and steal from its neighbors—for the territory on which a well-ordered city-state resides could never supply the resources needed to maintain a primarily carnivorous and avaricious way of life. If we fast-forward 2,500 years to the present, it is evident that we are now fully immersed in this imperialist and colonialist project of traversing the world, initiating wars, and grabbing land from others to meet the demands of our feverish cities and appetites.6 The landowners, cattle ranchers, and farmers in Brazil who are currently setting the Amazon ablaze, and displacing Indigenous peoples and native animals to make room for cattle and crops, are not doing so merely to meet their own dietary demands or those of local residents; instead, they are

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responding to the demands of consumers and transnational animal industries that have sought to reconfigure enormous portions of the planet in a form that is more amenable to animal agriculture. To satisfy the growing global demand for meat, it has become necessary to continuously seek out new places to graze cattle and grow crops for fattening livestock. Our global neighbors—both human and more-than-human—who live largely on the margins of this project and who do not share our feverish way of life, are becoming increasingly displaced by the industries and consumers who have moved meat to the center of their plates.

CARE FOR THE SOUL Given the terrible forms of ecological and social destruction currently plaguing the planet, perhaps we might be prepared to revisit Socrates’s vision of the true city and think more carefully about what is implied in its structure. By meeting basic needs and providing for a simple but joyful life, the healthy city avoids creating the kind of ecological, animal, and social destruction characteristic of advanced industrialized societies. But not only would the true—which is to say, the healthy, minimalist, and vegetarian—city be far more sustainable over the long term, it would also play a crucial role in the formation of well-ordered souls. Recall that the discussion of the ideal polis in the Republic was ultimately intended to illuminate at a magnified level what justice might look like at the reduced level of the individual soul. Socrates goes along with Glaucon’s desire to sketch out a way of life befitting a more luxurious city, and the Republic never circles back to examine what the true and healthy individual soul might

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look like in the context of a true and healthy city. Fortunately, Plato touches on these themes elsewhere in his writings on Socrates, especially in the Apology, where the focus is on the relation between the practice of philosophy and care for the soul.7 The Apology finds Socrates in court facing charges that his philosophical way of life is fundamentally at odds with the way of life defended by the ruling elite—in short, he is charged with not believing in the traditional gods, introducing new spiritual ideas, and corrupting the youth. Socrates believes his fate is already sealed and that, no matter what defense he offers, he will be put to death based on these trumped-up charges. Thus, he takes the opportunity in speaking before the court to offer a bold and impassioned defense of the importance of philosophy, even if his unvarnished speech effectively guarantees his death. The practice of philosophy, as Socrates presents it in the Apology, is first and foremost a way of life dedicated to care for the soul. Despite his bad reputation among the ruling elite, Socrates insists he has never tried to corrupt the youth or anyone else. Rather, much as a gadfly buzzes around and interrupts the slumbering of a horse, Socrates says he has spent his entire life trying to wake his fellow citizens from their unreflective daily lives so that they might attend to a matter of ultimate importance, namely, living well: “I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul” (30b1–2). As the philosopher Sandra Peterson notes, what Socrates refers to here as the “soul” denotes not some immortal essence but rather the source of one’s actions. Care for the soul is thus “care about how best to conduct your life. . . . [It] is a very practical matter of figuring out how you will conduct your life day to day. It is care for your dispositions and beliefs, your mental

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and emotional equipment out of which you act every day.”8 One could say, then, that care for the soul entails being properly disposed and oriented. For Socrates, this amounts to turning one’s attention away from the dominant culture’s empty obsession with the sorts of luxuries Glaucon believes are essential for living well and turning it instead toward the pursuit of a genuinely worthwhile way of life. The task of philosophy, as Socrates conceives it, is to articulate a vision of what it looks like to live such a life and to develop the specific practices needed to ensure that one remains committed to this transformational project. Thus, one might see the true city described in the Republic as being both a reflection and an outgrowth of the properly disposed individual souls who inhabit it. Like these individuals, the city as a whole is directed toward a life that is meaningful and worthwhile and is turned away from the pursuit of luxuries and the sorts of supplements that entail establishing hostile relations with neighbors. Care for the soul is not the vain form of selfperfection that the modern self-improvement industry peddles to today’s consumers. Rather, it is aimed at ensuring that one is attentively and thoughtfully disposed toward oneself, toward others, and toward the planet and the cosmos as a whole. Ultimately, Socrates’s vision of care for the soul is about building individual and collective ways of life in which we—both human and more-than-human beings—can all flourish.

ANIMALS IN THE CIT Y The vision of a well-ordered soul and polis sketched here might give the impression that the Socratic good life is largely a matter of harsh asceticism and austerity. Such a life of denial, though, hardly seems indicative of what the ancient Greeks thought was

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the entire point of doing philosophy—namely, achieving eudaimonia, or a joyful, flourishing mode of existence. If the only way to sustain ourselves and avoid widespread ecological degradation, wars, land grabbing, and other such phenomena is to avoid eating excessive meat, shunning luxuries, and so on, then what— we might ask—is the point of life? Where is the joy? Where is the genuine happiness and flourishing that a philosophical way of life promises? In response to such concerns, it should be noted that a philosophically lived life as envisioned by Socrates is assuredly not the life of a sad ascetic. To be sure, a philosophical life involves what the ancient Greeks called askēsis (which means exercise, formation, and discipline), but the transformational practices associated with philosophy are meant to introduce us to a way of life that is ultimately far more joyful and worthwhile than the one offered to us by the dominant social order. This is the point that Socrates ultimately hopes to get across to Glaucon and his other interlocutors. Philosophy is not intended to be an alternative, more effective means of achieving our egoistic desires; rather, it involves a radical conversion of our sense of self and our relations with others that redirects our vision and passions toward more universal and more worthwhile ends. Socrates’s approach to philosophy seems to be suggesting that, if we turn our attention away from concerns for personal wealth, unnecessary luxuries, and unsustainable diets, we will then have the time and energy to devote ourselves to flourishing in a more profound manner. The practice of philosophy is not aimed simply at extinguishing the fires in our souls that lead us toward relishes and luxuries, nor is it aimed merely at establishing an ecologically sustainable way of life that will allow us finally to extinguish the fires currently ravaging the most vulnerable beings and lands on our planet. Philosophy is aimed primarily and affirmatively

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at cultivating a different set of passions, at rekindling our latent desire to live well, and at bringing this joyful and affirmative disposition into the foreground of our lives. If we were to adopt such a way of life and learn to keep our material needs to a minimal level—a level that Glaucon is inclined to believe is befitting of pigs rather than human beings—we might come to recognize that the animal existence many of us have been fleeing is not impoverished in the way we thought it would be. In fact, if Socrates’s philosophical wager is correct, it is only by inhabiting a city fit for pigs and by affirming our animality that we have the opportunity to flourish and live in a worthwhile manner. Once we turn our individual and collective interests away from accumulating an excess and overabundance of material goods, we then can turn our attention sideways to one another and begin experiments in living well together. Such experiments, as you shall see in the chapters that follow, can also include a reconsideration of what it means to live well with and alongside our fellow more-than-human animals. Indeed, if we risk the philosophical project of building and inhabiting a city fit for pigs and other animals, we might be surprised at how quickly the fires currently plaguing the Amazon would cease and how rapidly our declining, all-too-human polis would be transformed into a lively, flourishing, multispecies zoo-polis.

2 ARISTOTLE’S WONDERF UL ANIMALS

In wonder, what is most usual itself becomes the most unusual. —Martin Heidegger

THERE ARE GODS HERE TOO Like Plato before him and the bulk of the tradition after him, Aristotle maintains that philosophy begins in wonder.1 However, philosophical wonder is more than mere curiosity or puzzlement; it is something closer to a feeling of astonishment, akin to encountering a miracle in the religious sense. But there is nothing supernatural nor exotic about the circumstances that bring about philosophical wonder. As the epigraph from Martin Heidegger suggests, philosophical wonder arises in the context of the mundane affairs of daily life. In adopting a philosophical posture, the most usual, most common things serve to provoke wonder and astonishment. Although philosophers do ponder the significance of grand and noble matters, they also try to help us attend to the wonder of everyday events happening right under our noses.

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To illustrate this philosophical sense of wonder, Aristotle recounts an anecdote about Heraclitus, who is one of the earliest and most renowned philosophers of antiquity. (You might be familiar with Heraclitus’s famous aphorism, “You can never step twice into the same river.”2 He was notorious for these kinds of memorable and enigmatic phrases, earning him the nickname, Heraclitus the Obscure.) In Aristotle’s retelling of the anecdote, visitors come to see Heraclitus but pause upon their approach when they see the great philosopher warming himself at an oven. Heraclitus, sensing their hesitation, beckons them to come in and not to worry. In Aristotle’s words: “Heraclitus is said to have spoken to the visitors, who were wanting to meet him but stopped as they were approaching when they saw him warming himself at the oven—he kept telling them to come in and not worry, ‘for there are gods here too.’ ”3 In many ways, Aristotle’s account is just as enigmatic as Heraclitus’s own sayings. Why would the visitors pause when they see Heraclitus warming himself at an oven? And why would Heraclitus suggest that gods can be found in or near an oven? Scholars argue over the precise significance of this anecdote, but the details need not concern us here. What is of interest for us is that Heraclitus finds the divine—in other words, that which provokes wonder—right where he is, sitting humbly in front of the oven warming himself. Whereas the visitors seem to think wonder is to be found elsewhere—perhaps in a grander place or through a more spectacular experience—Heraclitus locates it in the mundane places and practices of ordinary existence. Although philosophers often repeat this anecdote and interpret it in a variety of imaginative ways, it is less often noted that Aristotle’s own use of this story is made squarely in the context of a plea to take seriously the philosophical and biological study of animals. Keenly aware that his philosophical readers will have

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been primed to direct their hearts and minds toward the heavens and eternal verities, Aristotle knows that he has to make a special case for the importance of turning our attention to animals because the study of animals requires us to cast our focus back toward the earth—and to the mundane, often messy realities of animal life.

CREATURES OF HABIT This Aristotle—the one who speaks glowingly of wonder and who encourages his readers to study animal life with the utmost care and detail—is probably very different from the Aristotle you have encountered in your studies. When Aristotle is read today, his Nicomachean Ethics tends to take center stage. In this work, the primary focus is on uncovering the so-called function or task (ergon) inherent to human beings and then determining what form happiness or flourishing (eudaimonia) takes given that function. Aristotle famously argues that our function as human beings is to think and act rationally and that human flourishing obtains when our rationality is lived out in a virtuous or excellent manner. One of the reasons Aristotle’s ethics are of interest to so many people today is because he represents a tradition that is profoundly sensitive to the manner in which human flourishing cannot be taken for granted but must be deliberately cultivated, both in individuals and in society as a whole. In other words, for Aristotle, genuine excellence and flourishing is not something we simply fall into by accident; it takes a sustained process of formation to produce subjects who live virtuous, excellent, and worthwhile lives. The process of forming such individuals, according to Aristotle, starts at a very young age with the

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adoption of habits and routines that help direct us toward excellence. By repeatedly acting in a virtuous manner, and by consistently observing and learning from exemplars who regularly live excellent lives, we can eventually take on their virtues in the form of stable and reliable dispositions. Although Aristotle’s thoughts on human flourishing and human excellence might seem far removed from the discussion of wonder and animal life with which I began this chapter, they are in fact closely related in a couple of important ways. First, it is important to notice that Aristotle’s approach to ethical life is premised on the idea that human beings are to be classified among animals. As you shall soon see, Aristotle does insist that human beings are different from nonhuman animals in essential ways, but he acknowledges that we are also fundamentally animal beings who can be formed and shaped to various ends. The overarching aim of the Nicomachean Ethics is to explore how human animals can be formed toward better or worse ends, which is to say, toward virtue or vice. In undergoing these formative processes, we very much resemble other animals who are shaped and formed by training methods and practices. This moldable, “plastic” aspect of our shared animality is important to bear in mind for thinking more carefully about how we might be reformed away from our current dispositions in order to live with animals in a more joyful and respectful manner. Aristotle’s ethical framework is not directed solely at ensuring that we act well in our personal, interpersonal, and political lives; it is also directed at helping us to see well. Although the Nicomachean Ethics places a great deal of emphasis on character formation and practical wisdom, the highest form of excellence promoted by Aristotle is, in fact, learning to see how all things hang together. The Greeks called this form of seeing theōria, which is often translated as contemplation but is perhaps better

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understood as catching sight of the deep structures of reality. Theōria in this sense of the term constitutes the kind of seeing and knowing that is appropriate to the questions and passions characteristic of philosophical wonder. Aristotle and most other Greek and Hellenistic thinkers generally agree that the most sublime forms of theōria are aimed at the heavens and other beings that have a persisting, eternal nature. By contemplating these lofty matters and attuning our souls to their structure, their reasoning goes, we get as close to divinity as is possible for finite, earth-bound human beings. Aristotle never suggests that theōria entails turning our backs on terrestrial affairs or on the changing, messy nature of the earthly existence we share with animals (those beings who “grow beside us” and who are “closer to us and belong more to our nature,” to use Aristotle’s words).4 The anecdote about Heraclitus that Aristotle relates is, in fact, intended to bring us from the heavens down to earth and to challenge us to set aside any revulsion we might feel in studying such comparatively mundane things as animals. If we learn to study animals with a view to how they fit into the larger fabric of earthly and cosmic being, Aristotle is confident such inquiry will bring “immeasurable pleasures.” Thus, he cautions us to avoid any “childish distaste” we might have for examining the natural world in favor of loftier matters, “for in all natural things there is something wonderful.” We should study all animals “without aversion, knowing that in all of them there is something natural and beautiful.” Here, Aristotle is playing the role of Heraclitus to those of us who have come to visit him as he goes about studying animals. “Don’t turn back,” Aristotle is encouraging us: “Come, have a closer look; for there are gods here too.” Unlike some philosophers who pay lip service to the importance of studying animals in a careful manner, Aristotle backs up

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these sentiments with an extraordinary amount of writing dedicated explicitly and directly to animal life—more than perhaps any other major philosopher in the Western canon. As Stephen Newmyer notes, one-quarter of Aristotle’s extant writings are dedicated to zoological observations and questions.5 In these works, we encounter an Aristotle who is a remarkably observant biologist, interested in everything from the ways in which elephants fight to how animal dispositions can be changed through kind treatment to the varied forms of sexual intercourse in which animals engage. Throughout these writings, Aristotle helps us notice the beauty and wonder of the deep structures and patterns inherent in animal life as well as the remarkable nature of animals themselves.

ANTHROPOCENTRISM Lest this thumbnail sketch of Aristotle’s animal writings lead you to believe he was an animal rights advocate avant la lettre, Aristotle’s more notorious remarks about the distinction between human beings and animals and how he uses this distinction to justify the violent treatment of animals should be noted. In Politics, Aristotle develops one of the foundational distinctions of Western political thought when he argues that human beings are essentially different from animals in having the capacity for speech (logos) and in being able to understand and transmit values.6 It is precisely these abilities, Aristotle maintains, that make it possible for us to live together in city-states and govern ourselves with shared values, laws, and complex social institutions. Existing outside the realm of articulate speech and norms, animals are limited to merely emitting instinctual expressions and sounds (phonai). Although Aristotle acknowledges that animals

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are social creatures and frequently live in groups, he insists that they are effectively unable to construct norm-governed polities and thus remain outside the realm of politics proper.7 Although these kinds of blanket statements about the (in) abilities of animals might strike us today (with the benefit of some 2,500 years of scientific research at our backs) as rather crude and overly general, there is nothing particularly pernicious about them. Such sentiments—let us call them essentialist inasmuch as they posit an essential difference between human beings and animals—become more problematic, however, when they are coupled with a value framework that uses these distinctions to justify unequal or violent treatment. And, unfortunately, Aristotle engages in precisely this sort of normative gesture when he uses purported differences in the rational, linguistic, and normative capacities of animals to justify the violent use of those animals as means for human ends. Within Aristotle’s political writings, the natural world is portrayed as functioning in a purposeful, well-organized, and hierarchically structured manner, with plants being created “for the sake of animals, and . . . the other animals . . . for the sake of human beings.”8 According to this view, animals (whether domesticated or wild) have been made by nature for our use and provision, to furnish us with labor, food, clothing, and so on.9 In a gesture that is disturbing but not altogether surprising, Aristotle also applies a similar logic of differentiation to justify the naturalness of slavery and sexual inequality among human beings. He maintains that differences in rational and deliberative capacities among certain human beings and females is a product of nature and thereby organically and justifiably lead to slaves and women being ruled by fully rational men.10 Iterations of this essentialist and hierarchical pattern or “logic” recur throughout the following chapters. The pattern

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is formed through a series of linked claims, starting with the assumption that there are 1.

essential differences between human beings and animals, as well as

2.

essential subdivisions within humanity itself (for example, slaves/nonslaves; males/females) with respect to rationality and related abilities.

These two claims about essential distinctions are then joined to 3.

a value hierarchy that justifies the subordination of those who are deemed to be nonhuman and subhuman by those who consider themselves to be fully human.

We can refer to this pattern using the term anthropocentrism, inasmuch as those beings who are understood to be full or paradigm instances of “man” or “the human” (anthrōpos) occupy center stage and are given privileged status. Anthropocentrism in this sense functions as a kind of conceptual and institutional logic—a governing ideology and a set of practices—that structures our everyday ways of thinking and living. This pattern can be difficult to detect, both in society at large and in our own lives. However, if we hope to change our relations with animals and with each other for the better, it is essential that we learn to discern anthropocentric logic, understand its pitfalls, and develop alternatives to it.

ANIMAL AESTHETICS So, what to do with these two Aristotles: on one hand, the thinker of wonderful animals, and on the other, the philosopher

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who insists on human uniqueness and superiority? Perhaps we could learn to do two things at once with this mixed Aristotelian heritage. First, we could learn to put ourselves on guard for the questionable anthropocentric tendencies in Aristotle’s thought as well as subsequent philosophers who reinforce these tendencies (I will be demonstrating this kind of critical disposition at various points throughout the book). At the same time, we could try to deepen and expand the more affirmative approach to animals toward which Aristotle gestures. The well-known Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, provides an insightful clue regarding this latter task. While reflecting on the mundane details of animal life and the natural world, Marcus notes that pleasure and beauty are to be found in the most unexpected places: There is something pleasant and attractive about even the incidental by-products of natural phenomena.  .  .  . With the lion’s wrinkled forehead; with the foam spuming forth from the mouth of wild pigs, and many other such things: if we look at them in isolation they are far from being beautiful. Nevertheless, because they are incidental by-products of natural processes, they add to the beauty of these processes and have an attractive effect on us. Thus, as long as one has a feeling for, and a deep understanding of Nature’s processes, there is scarcely any of the things that occur as incidental by-products which will not present itself to one as pleasant. Such a person . . . will look upon the actual gaping jaws of wild beasts with no less pleasure than upon all the imitations that sculptors and painters offer us.11

In commenting on this passage, the scholar of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot underscores the close connection between the sentiments here in Marcus’s text and Aristotle’s similar remarks

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on the wonders of animals and nature, which were examined at the beginning of the chapter. Hadot goes on to suggest that a revolution is quietly taking place in these passages from Aristotle and Marcus, a revolution that is less political in nature and more aesthetic. At stake is a transformation in what constitutes the beautiful, a concept that has traditionally been thought to be isomorphic with rationality, ideal function, proportion, and form (Hadot calls this traditional approach to the beautiful an idealistic aesthetics). Aristotle and Marcus demonstrate a very different approach to the beautiful, which Hadot labels a realistic aesthetics. Although cognizant of the deep structures and organization of nature, a realistic aesthetics “finds beauty in things just the way they are, in everything that lives and exists.”12 Following in the footsteps of Aristotle’s and Marcus’s aesthetic revolution, this kind of “realistic” beauty and its attendant joy and wonder could be placed at the very heart of our animal philosophies. Such an approach would not be opposed to rationality or organization per se, but it would ask us to rethink the primacy usually granted to these things by philosophers. For example, rather than situating rationality at the ground of philosophy, that capacity might be seen as but one of the means whereby we learn to respond and do justice to the “realistic” beauties and wonders of the world. Furthermore, in taking up this aesthetic revolution for ourselves, we might in the process become something more or other than what we have traditionally taken ourselves to be. We have long prided ourselves on primarily being rational animals, but in habitually practicing a realistic aesthetics premised on attending to the beauty and wonder of things just as they are, we can gradually become different kinds of animals: wonderful animals, that is, animals whose chief characteristic is to be filled with and captured by wonder.

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DO ANIMALS WONDER? There is no sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. It is a very blurred line, and differences are of degree rather than kind. —Jane Goodall

We might ask, though, do animals wonder? Inasmuch as we acknowledge that we ourselves are animals, most of us would readily answer in the affirmative. Surely, though, nonhuman animals are not themselves capable of wonder. Or are they? If it were possible to go back in time and ask Aristotle whether there is such a thing as nonhuman animal wonder, I am inclined to think he would answer negatively. For all his insistence on biophysical continuity among human beings and animals, Aristotle’s thought is thoroughly saturated wtih the anthropocentric drive to unearth distinctive human traits and to see nature as divided into distinct, natural kinds. For Aristotle, the capacity for wonder often serves as just this sort of marker of human uniqueness. But Aristotle never spent decades of his life living with chimpanzees. Had he done so, as the primatologist Jane Goodall has done with chimpanzees in Gombe, he might have seen what appears to be something like the manifestation of the act of wonder in other-than-human animals. Goodall relates the following anecdote concerning what she calls “primate spirituality” among the chimpanzees in Gombe: Deep in the forest are some spectacular waterfalls. Sometimes as a chimpanzee—most often an adult male—approaches one of these falls his hair bristles slightly, a sign of heightened arousal.

Aristotle’s Wonderful Animals Z 23 As he gets closer, and the roar of falling water gets louder, his pace quickens, his hair becomes fully erect, and upon reaching the stream he may perform a magnificent display close to the foot of the falls. Standing upright, he sways rhythmically from foot to foot, stamping in the shallow, rushing water, picking up and hurling great rocks. Sometimes he climbs up the slender vines that hang down from the trees high above and swings out into the spray of the falling water. This “waterfall dance” may last for ten or fifteen minutes.13

Goodall recalls watching chimpanzees undertake similar dances at the onset of heavy storms as they made noises and hurled rocks. Reflecting on these actions, Goodall inquires: “Is it not possible that these performances are stimulated by feelings akin to wonder and awe?”14 Goodall is a careful enough scientist not to provide pat answers to such complex questions about the inner lives of animals, but she does not shy away from making us pause and think twice about our own uniqueness, whether it is with regard to the capacity for wonder or any other behavior.15 One of Goodall’s colleagues, the psychologist Barbara Smuts, has also spent significant time embedded with primates in Gombe, in this case with a troop of baboons. Whereas Goodall witnessed what seemed to be acts of wonder among chimpanzees, Smuts saw what she understood to be a collective act of awe-filled, reverent contemplation, a sort of primate theōria (here described as Buddhist sangha) among the troop. She describes this “especially treasured” experience as follows: The Gombe baboons were travelling to their sleeping trees late in the day, moving slowly down a stream with many small, still

24 Y Aristotle’s Wonderful Animals pools, a route they often traversed. Without any signal perceptible to me, each baboon sat at the edge of a pool on one of the many smooth rocks that lined the edges of the stream. They sat alone or in small clusters, completely quiet, gazing at the water. Even the perpetually noisy juveniles fell into silent contemplation. I joined them. Half an hour later, again with no perceptible signal, they resumed their journey in what felt like an almost sacramental procession. I was stunned by this mysterious expression of what I have come to think of as baboon sangha. Although I’ve spent years with baboons, I witnessed this only twice, both times at Gombe. I have never heard another primatologist recount such an experience. I sometimes wonder if, on those two occasions, I was granted a glimpse of a dimension of baboon life they do not normally expose to people. These moments reminded me how little we really know about the “more-than-human world.”16

Here, once again, we are confronted with the possibility that what we take to be uniquely human capacities might also exist among our animal kin. The wonder we sometimes experience in the face of the world, as well as our attempts to make sense of and appreciate this wondrous world, might be something that binds us with other animals rather than what distinguishes us from them. Goodall’s and Smuts’s remarkable encounters are the sorts of experiences that occur only under conditions where human beings have established deep connections with animals, relations based on a sense of mutual respect and a willingness to allow animals to live on their own terms. Based on such anecdotes alone, we cannot of course determine with scientific certainty whether animals engage in their own practices of wonder or theōria, but we can learn to be cautious about blanket claims to

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the contrary. We might also learn to follow Goodall and Smuts, with insights from Marcus and Aristotle in hand, in taking up a kind of realistic, patient, and wonder-based aesthetic with regard to our fellow animals. If we learn to live well with and alongside our fellow animals, who knows what sorts of things we ourselves might experience in the process?

3 CYNICISM’S DOGS

FIGHTING CIVILIZ ATION ITSELF Timothy Treadwell, an animal advocate, spent thirteen summers living side by side with untamed grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness. He filmed a significant number of his interactions with the bears, some of which have been edited and shaped into a quasi documentary about Treadwell by the renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog. The film, titled Grizzly Man, is far from a neutral overview of Treadwell’s life; rather, it is a carefully constructed work of art by an extraordinary filmmaker who uses Treadwell’s life with the grizzly bears to pose a series of profound questions about the human condition and human-animal relations. From the film, we learn that Treadwell has an explicit mission in life: to protect wild bears (who he said were being poached and hence needed protectors) and to educate the public about the precarious long-term fate of the bears due to premature death, habitat loss, and other threats. It is immediately evident upon watching the film that Treadwell has an unusual personality: at times he is quirky, arrogant, and deeply reckless; at other times he is profoundly humble, eloquent, and cautious. He curses frequently and often with flair, and his moods range from what appear to be the ecstasies of a religious mystic to an “almost

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incandescent” (to borrow Herzog’s words) rage. Treadwell is manifestly head over heels in love with the grizzly bears with whom he lives. He identifies many of them by name and has a refined understanding of the unique personalities of several individual bears. Throughout the footage that Herzog uses, we see Treadwell expressing repeatedly that he loves the bears, will protect them at all costs, and will even risk death for them. As a filmmaker, Herzog is drawn to these kinds of complex personalities because they offer a rare opportunity to see human passions and behaviors in all their richness and contradiction. One of the most intriguing aspects of Treadwell’s story concerns how he came to adopt his way of life among the bears. Although Treadwell was interested in animals (and bears specifically) from a young age, for most of his life he had very little to do with animal advocacy. Instead, he lived a tumultuous and rather troubled existence, engaging in heavy drug use and excessive drinking that almost killed him. During one of his darkest periods, Treadwell came to the realization that he needed to make a radical change in his life and get away from the circles in which he traveled. At the suggestion of a friend, Treadwell made several visits to the Alaskan wilderness to distance himself from the life he was leading and to see in person the bears he had been interested in as a child.1 These trips had a transformative effect. After several close encounters with grizzlies and becoming educated about the bears’ precarious situation in Alaska, Treadwell felt called to change his life entirely. He gave up drugs and alcohol and started his life anew, this time around as a caretaker of the bears. In Grizzly Man, Treadwell describes his conversion experience this way: Nothing, nothing . . . could get me . . . to stop drinking. Nothing! I went to programs. I tried quitting myself. . . . And it was killing me until I discovered this land of bears and realized that they were

28 Y Cynicism’s Dogs in such great danger that they needed a caretaker, they needed someone to look after them. But not a drunk person. Not a person messed up. So I promised the bears that if I would look over them, would they please help me be a better person; and they’ve become so inspirational, and living with the foxes too, that I did, I gave up the drinking. It was a miracle. It was an absolute miracle. And the miracle was animals. The miracle was animals.2

Even though the language Treadwell uses in describing his conversion is religious and might suggest an otherworldly intervention, the source of his transformation is entirely of this world. It is the animals themselves that inspire him to change his life, and it is in view of the well-being of these same animals that he comes to a new mode of existence. For Treadwell, animals are the source of the kind of “realistic” aesthetic beauty and wonder that is described in chapter 2. It is not just the animals as picturesque individuals that Treadwell finds beautiful; he is enamored of such minor aspects of the bears as their breath, their teeth, and even their scat. Moreover, the bears’ very way of being in the world serves as an ideal of how to live well. Treadwell aims to do more than simply live near the bears as if just being in their vicinity and watching their daily lives unfold is the pinnacle of happiness. Rather, living well requires him to take on something of the bear’s way of life for himself, to have it become part of his existential constitution. What he hopes to achieve is the same kind of “happiness and contentment” he sees radiating from the faces of the bears.3 The joy and beatitude exemplified by the bears stand in stark contrast to what Treadwell finds predominant in “the people’s world.” Throughout Herzog’s documentary and Treadwell’s own memoirs and diaries are recurrent references to this other, predominantly human world—the world that brings him so much

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pain and discontent and that puts the bears’ way of life at risk. In one particularly striking scene in Grizzly Man, Treadwell rails against the National Park Service for placing restrictions on him and his activity within the park. Treadwell sees himself as the bears’ sole protector, and he views the Park Service as a representative of the interests of the people’s world and as largely complicit in the bears being poached and harassed. As Treadwell curses out the Park Service and names specific employees on screen, Herzog cuts the sound on Treadwell’s voice and offers his own account of what is really getting under Treadwell’s skin. Herzog believes Treadwell’s rage is aimed less at the Park Service per se and more at “the people’s world”: “It is clear to me that the Park Service is not Treadwell’s real enemy. There’s a larger, more implacable adversary out there: the people’s world and civilization. . . . He only has mockery and contempt for it. He’s fighting civilization itself.”4

SOCRATES GONE MAD Although Treadwell did not consider himself a philosopher, his worldview and way of life overlapped in profound ways with one of the most scandalous philosophical traditions in the history of the West: Cynicism. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, both of whom figure prominently in pretty much any work on the history of Western philosophy, the Cynics (the earliest of whom were contemporaries with Socrates and Plato in ancient Athens) are rarely discussed by mainstream philosophers, so it is not entirely surprising if you have never heard of them. In most surveys of Western philosophy, the Cynics are either passed over in silence or dismissed as unimportant. There are understandable reasons for their treatment in this manner. First, the ancient Cynics

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maintained that philosophy was primarily a practice and a way of life; such a heavy emphasis on practice at the expense of rigorous argumentation and elaborate discursive analyses runs against the grain of the mainstream philosophical tradition. Second, the way of life the Cynics practiced was deliberately intended to be at odds with almost everything the dominant culture holds dear; it is little wonder, then, that many people who closely identify with the dominant culture have tried to downplay or marginalize the importance of Cynical ideas. If, however, we wish to think more carefully about the relation between animals and philosophy, few philosophical traditions are more important. The central idea animating Cynic philosophy was that the happy life, the life most worth living, was a life lived according to nature (kata physin). The Cynics set this ideal in opposition to the way of life adopted by most people who lived in city-states, a way of life governed by custom, convention, and dominant cultural norms (kata nomon). For the Cynics, this latter form of existence represented a perilous deviation from the path leading to genuine happiness; hence, they argued that typical cultural practices should be held at bay and actively resisted. In effect, the Cynics were, like Treadwell, fighting against civilization itself—or at least against many of the central norms and practices associated with civilization. As eccentric as such a project might seem at first blush, you have already been partially prepared for it by my analysis of the ideal city-state as envisioned by Socrates (see chapter 1). Like many philosophical schools in the Western tradition, the Cynics were fond of linking themselves to Socrates and his legacy. Although this connection is contested by some post-Socratic thinkers, the relation is fairly easy to discern. The radically minimalistic way of life Socrates himself lived, as well as the life he advocates as being the “true” and “healthy” one in the Republic,

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are not far removed from the Cynic ideal. Socrates’s goal was to establish a just way of living that downplays the desire to accumulate luxuries and regularly consume meat and focuses instead on care for one’s soul and care for the souls of others. This Socratic vision is, in many ways, at the very heart of the Cynic project. The Cynics, however, take this basic Socratic disposition— namely, turning our hearts and minds away from luxuries and delicacies and toward things of enduring value—to extremes that Socrates himself perhaps did not envision. If shunning luxuries, wealth, and other cultural trappings is an essential precondition to living a philosophical life, then why take half measures in this regard? Why not remove all such things from one’s purview? After all, there is no need to buy new clothing if I can procure simple, free clothing that lasts a long time and keeps me warm. There is no need to pay for haute cuisine if I can freely scavenge food that grows naturally or that has been thrown away but is still edible. There is no need to have a cupboard filled with glasses and cups if using a single cup or even my hands will accomplish the same end of drinking. There is no need to work my entire life to afford a large home if I can find adequate shelter for free. There is no need to seek a high-paying career if I can be just as happy or perhaps even happier while living in poverty. In short, if none of the things that cultural life promises me have any real bearing on the condition of my soul or on my happiness, why not simply refuse these cultural trappings altogether? The most influential ancient Cynic philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope, effectively lived in just this way. He wore an unassuming cloak that doubled as bedding, ate simple foods that were readily available, slept in a cast-off wine barrel when he needed shelter, lived in voluntary poverty, and openly thumbed his nose at the way of life practiced by the majority of citizens in Athens.

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What is more, Diogenes was particularly shameless concerning bodily matters. He masturbated and defecated in public and carried out a variety of traditionally private matters in full view. Such shamelessness is what gave rise to Diogenes’s nickname “the dog” (dog in Greek is kyon, which is one of the sources of the term Cynic), a name that was no more of a compliment in ancient Greece than it is in most cultures today. Despite his outrageous counter- and anticultural behavior, Diogenes saw himself as belonging squarely to the philosophical enterprise. Like most philosophical traditions in ancient Greece, Diogenes and his fellow Cynics were concerned with living the good life and trying to discover the virtues that enable genuine human flourishing. But the particular virtues and way of life the Cynics practiced were an embarrassment to many philosophers, especially those who wished to make philosophy appear more respectable in view of its public reputation. Plato, who was also a self-styled follower of Socrates and a keen defender of philosophy, saw Diogenes as someone who had strayed too far from the sober and rational philosophical vision preached by Socrates, referring to Diogenes disparagingly as a “Socrates gone mad.”5

THIRD NATURE We ought not, however, let Plato’s dismissive jab at Diogenes lead us to reject Cynicism too quickly. What looks at first blush like sheer madness in the practices of Diogenes and his fellow Cynics might in fact contain a deeper rationale. After all, the Cynics were not alone in claiming a life lived according to nature as their ideal; the ancient Stoics, who still retain a largely favorable reputation today, shared the same goal. The Stoics took living according to nature to involve discerning the deep patterns

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and structures of the world—its nature or logos—and bringing one’s will into accord with those patterns. In so doing, the Stoics believed one would establish a sort of harmony between self and world and eliminate any discord that might produce unhappiness. The Cynics undertook a similar project, but nature carried a slightly different sense in their philosophy. For the Cynics, nature often signified something closer to the rhythms and abundance of the nonhuman world; and the goal of the Cynics was to bring one’s life into alignment with those patterns of living exhibited by animals and other-than-human beings who flourish under earthly conditions. For the Cynics, nonhuman animals serve as examples of what it is like to live according to the rhythms of the natural world and to find sustenance and happiness in what the natural world readily provides. Civilized human beings, in contrast, are rarely content with the natural world as it is and seek constantly to transform it so that it can provide a reliable supply of creature comforts, amusements, and luxuries—none of which, according to the Cynics, ultimately provide genuine happiness. An anecdote about Diogenes’s encounter with a mouse illustrates this Cynical ideal of animal simplicity and contentment that is to be found outside of the trappings of culture: Diogenes was bereft of all company and left all alone. He neither received anyone, because he was so poor, nor did other people invite him into their houses, because he put them off by his accusatory manner and the way in which he disapproved of all that they said and did. So, Diogenes was thoroughly dejected and was eating barley-bread and leaf-tips, this being all that he had at hand. A mouse came along and fed on the crumbs that dropped from his hand; and as Diogenes watched it busy at work, he smiled and became more cheerful and contented, saying, “This

34 Y Cynicism’s Dogs mouse has no need of any of the luxuries of the Athenians, and yet you, Diogenes, are downcast because you are not dining with the Athenians.” And so he achieved contentment of mind when it was most needed.6

It is important to underscore that the kind of simple animal existence Diogenes glimpses in his encounter with the mouse is something that human beings who have already been civilized must strive to attain. As many of us know from experience, once we have become accustomed to living according to the dictates and comforts of culture, attaining such simplicity of living in practice can prove elusive. If we are born with a first nature (what today we would call the inherited biological makeup and psychological dispositions with which one enters the world) and then acquire a second nature by being immersed in the habits and rhythms of the dominant culture, to assume the Cynic/animal way of life requires the acquisition of a new, third nature. Thus, contrary to common accounts, the Cynics do not simply recommend returning to or trying to recover our first nature, for this nature is all too amenable to the temptations offered by culture (after all, civilization is not imposed on human beings by an alien force; it emerges naturalistically, in history, and answers to desires inherent in our first nature). Rather, the Cynics believe it is necessary for those of us who are tempted by and have become habituated to the ease of cultural life to undergo a joint process of dehabituation (losing our old habits and dispositions learned from the dominant culture) and rehabituation (gaining new, better habits and dispositions that can resist the temptations of culture). This double-sided transformation is what enables us to become new persons—that is, to develop a different kind of subjectivity and a new way of being in the world. Ancient Greek Cynics referred to this complex process of transformation as askēsis, which meant training, exercise,

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discipline, and formation. The Cynics were notorious for their training techniques, both because of their severity and their visibly visceral form. To live according to nature and to inhabit the rhythms of a more animal-like existence, the Cynics believed it was necessary for cultured human beings to actively train themselves to lose interest in creature comforts. Specifically, they believed it was essential to develop the ability to absorb and affirm the difficulties of earthly existence. This meant not just enduring life’s challenges (although the Cynics believed developing endurance was essential) but learning to find ways to flourish in and through such difficulties.7 To this end, numerous ancient anecdotes comment on the harsh training regimens of the Cynics, which included everything from rolling in hot sand and hugging icy statues to become immune to extreme changes in temperature to maintaining an extremely minimal, raw vegetarian diet and drinking nothing but water.8 In undertaking these practices, the Cynics were patterning themselves after animals who can withstand the vicissitudes of the changing seasons with remarkable endurance, as well as exceptional human beings like Socrates (who, we are told in Plato’s Symposium, could remain standing on the battlefield in miserable weather conditions considerably longer than any of his fellow soldiers) and Heracles (whose twelve labors are often cited by Cynic authors as an example of overcoming and flourishing in the face of life’s challenges).9 Although Treadwell was not, to my knowledge, aware of the Cynic philosophical tradition and way of life, he ended up adopting a similar approach to retraining himself when he entered the Alaskan wilderness to live with bears. As the footage in Grizzly Man makes clear, Katmai National Park—although exceedingly beautiful—is a difficult place for human beings to live, even under ideal conditions. To be able to follow the bears in their round of daily activities and in their migrations to different areas

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for food and shelter, Treadwell had to use the bears themselves as exemplars. He adopted many of their rhythms and patterns of mobility, and he learned to adapt to often harsh weather and challenging living conditions. On his first expedition, Treadwell describes having to follow one of his newfound bear friends, Booble, across an ice-cold river: Booble stood up and strolled a few paces upriver. Then, without hesitation, the lovely creature gracefully descended into the current. It began dog-paddling with powerful, smooth strokes, a look of determination on its face. . . . In a flash, I realized, that I was going to have to swim across. Nervously, I walked up to the exact spot where the beautiful animal had plunged in, and without a second thought I followed it. . . . My arms and legs burned, then went numb. . . . The ice-cold water was taking the fight out of me, and for a moment I thought I might drown. Just as I was about to give up, I remembered Booble’s determined face. . . . “I am Grizzly, I am Grizzly,” I thought, and the power returned to my limbs. I paddled just like Booble, forcing my way across.10

FEATHERLESS BIPEDS Adapting to harsh environmental conditions, eating simple foods, changing one’s habits and dispositions to resonate with one’s animal kin and the natural environment—all of these practices, initially difficult and uncomfortable, are adopted by the Cynics because they allow them to meet the basic demands of life in as straightforward a manner as possible. In so doing, the Cynics aimed to achieve what they referred to as self-sufficiency (autarkeia). In a libertarian age such as ours, we might

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be tempted to think the Cynics were valorizing independence and egoism as their ultimate ideals by promoting self-sufficiency. But that would be to misread what was at stake in the Cynic way of life. It is true that the Cynics promoted independence in relation to life’s necessities (which are, typically, quite minimal and easy to meet), but the point of achieving this state is not to withdraw into oneself and pursue one’s egoistic desires. The point is to inhabit the world with a clearer perspective and more authentic intentions, with one’s vision no longer clouded by the concerns of utility and hence free to focus more intentionally on living well. It is only once we go beyond the utilitarian demands of everyday life and achieve simple contentedness that we have adequate energy and attentiveness to exist in the present in all of its richness—to catch sight of the beauty of the world, to explore the innumerable relations within which we find ourselves, and to immerse ourselves in the sheer joy of existence. Such a state and vision emerges only once we set aside our all-too-human daily habits, routines, and desires and learn to become something other than conventionally human. It is perhaps this last point that makes Cynic philosophy so unsettling. The Cynics suggest that the common, all-too-human form of existence to which we have become accustomed is contingent and that we, consequently, can become something other than human—which is to say, something other than the image of ourselves with which we are most familiar. Many of us take a certain comfort in that image, secure in the belief that we are fundamentally different from and more valuable than animals and the rest of the more-than-human world. If we are essentially different from and more important than other beings, the thinking goes, perhaps with enough support from the apparatuses and institutions of culture we can avoid the fate (suffering, death, vulnerability, and so on) that plagues the nonhuman world. To

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strip us of our distinctly human cultural identity and way of life would, from this perspective, be tantamount to throwing ourselves to the wolves, so to speak. The Cynics, however, refused to have any truck with such anthropocentrism or its cultural and intellectual supports. They were trenchant critics of any philosophy or lifestyle that sought to separate human beings from animals in an absolute manner. From a Cynic perspective, not only are such distinctions arrogant (they are usually drawn with a view toward some trait that human beings have and that animals supposedly lack) but they are also dangerous. If we radically separate human beings from animals and the realm of animality, we simultaneously cut ourselves off from the earthly sources of our flourishing and from exemplars who demonstrate how to live well. Perhaps the most famous story about Diogenes concerns precisely this Cynic critique of the separation of humanity from animality. The historian Diogenes Laertius recounts a tale of Plato giving a lecture at his academy on human nature in which he defines human beings as featherless bipeds. Diogenes interrupts the lecture by running into the academy with a plucked chicken in hand and announcing, “Here is Plato’s human!”11 The moral of the anecdote is clear: for the Cynics, our pretension to uniqueness is delusional. Furthermore, and more important, the Cynics suggest that our narcissism ultimately leads to an impoverished mode of living. Our most profound happiness, they insist, is to be found not by separating ourselves from animals but in learning to live like them.

GUARD DOGS Despite the rather charitable analysis of Treadwell and the Cynics I have tried to provide thus far, their approach might still

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appear as little more than mere misanthropy to some readers. They seem to be individuals who simply dislike human beings and human culture and prefer life among animals and wild nature. We might think we are already familiar with these kinds of disaffected people; we have seen them, for example, among the Romantics, the hermits, and the off-gridders. If living a wild life among animals is what they prefer, then let us leave them to their ways, we might say. They have nothing of relevance to offer those of us who live embedded in cities, towns, and other forms of human community. What I wish to suggest here is that Treadwell and the Cynics are not misanthropic in any straightforward sense. To be sure, they issue harsh criticisms of human behavior and the dominant culture, but they do so from within the orbit of that culture itself. One of the reasons the Cynics embraced being called dogs is because dogs often play the role of guardians to human beings. Dogs warn us of dangers, help to protect us from harm, and lift our spirits when we are melancholy. They are situated within our homes, lives, and towns even as part of them refuses to be fully domesticated and reminds us that there is an outside to human culture. The Cynics were dogs in precisely this sense. They lived on the margins of human cities but remained visible within them. They believed that their way of life and their worldview led to genuine human flourishing, and they hoped to share that worldview and way of life with their fellow human beings. They didn’t cloister themselves in seclusion outside the city but instead, like Socrates, insisted on conversing, arguing, debating with—even berating—human beings who were not caring for their own souls or for the souls of others. If you have had the chance to view Grizzly Man, you will know that Treadwell’s experiment in living with the bears met a tragic end, resulting in his own death, the death of his girlfriend,

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and two of the bears thought responsible for attacking him and his girlfriend. Given this horrible ending to Treadwell’s life and his human and bear companions, it would be all too easy to dismiss Treadwell as an “animal lover gone mad” (much as Plato sought to dismiss Diogenes). Treadwell should have known, we might insist, that human beings belong in culture and bears belong in wild nature. As Herzog and many of the interviewees in the film repeatedly emphasize, Treadwell seems to have crossed a line separating human from bear. They suggest that denying the immutable truth of human-bear difference is what led to his demise. It might seem, then, that hatred of the people’s world and the desire to live like an animal set Treadwell on a path toward certain death. But if you watched the film closely, you will have noticed that, like the Cynics, Treadwell never abandoned human civilization— he always returned to the people’s world after every expedition. He was intent on reforming the dominant culture, just as he had reformed himself. He sought to protect bears and educate the public about their remarkable lives on the assumption that human beings and human culture could take another form. Treadwell hoped to show that other modes of human-animal coexistence are possible and that both our well-being and animal well-being depend on us discovering those alternative ways of life. The Cynics, too, tried to show us that human flourishing lies not in removing ourselves from animality and the natural world but in newly aligning ourselves with it. Rather than dismissing the Cynics and Treadwell as misanthropic misfits, we could instead see their extreme ways of life as issuing a challenge to us: How might we, too, learn to affirm animality in our own lives? And what is the best way to live with and among the animals with whom we share the planet? In an increasingly crowded world, and with ever-shifting cultural-natural

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boundaries due to widespread ecological changes, we are no longer able to believe in the illusion that human and animal worlds can be kept rigidly separate. If the experiments carried out by Treadwell and the Cynics set the pitch a bit too high, what would it look like for us to hit the right note?12

4 JAINISM’S BIRDS

RITUAL ANIMALS Most of my writings, this one included, have been produced as part of a daily ritual. Each day I wake before sunrise, get dressed, and walk out the front door. I bring a cup of water with me to give to the neighborhood birds to drink. Then I walk 1 minute to the resident gym and do some basic exercises. After that I find a place to sit and read a small passage from a philosophical text to provoke my thinking. With my body fully awake and my mind active and clear, I sit down to write. The most important part of that morning ritual for me is the moment when I pour the water in the bowl. As I do this, I visualize the birds visiting to get a drink, and I try to remind myself to be more attentive to the animal relationships around me. I first encountered the idea of feeding birds as a morning ritual when I was in my teens and studying world religions and philosophies. I was reading a book on Jainism, and it described how some lay Jains (sometimes called “householders”) would put out grain and water for birds each morning and perform a number of related rituals intended to help orient themselves toward a mindset of love and nonviolence for all sentient beings.

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That vision of people carrying out daily rituals and living so deliberately and thoughtfully intrigued me. I was too young at the time to appreciate the full significance of such rituals, and I lacked the philosophical tools to understand what was at stake in adopting these kinds of daily practices. I had, after all, grown up in a culture (the United States of the 1980s and 1990s) that downplayed ritual behavior and prized spontaneity above all else. But as I began to gain a fuller sense of how the exploitation of animals was subtly woven into the rhythms of my daily life and the patterns of the larger culture and economy, I gained a newfound appreciation for rituals and other habitual practices. I eventually came to understand that changing human-animal relationships requires more than being spontaneous or relying on “good” natural impulses; it requires deliberate, intentional effort to transform our individual and collective habits and ways of life. Jainism is among one of the very few long-standing traditions that offers us guidance for this task. Most people are exposed to Jainism through images of Jain monks and nuns who engage in a variety of demanding ascetic practices, such as sweeping the path in front of them as they walk or plucking out the hairs on their head after initiation. But Jainism comprises much more than these striking practices. It is grounded in an intricate philosophical worldview and has given rise to a distinctive way of life that places vegetarianism and animal welfare at its very center. Jains trace their philosophy and way of life to a series of ancient exemplars, or pathfinders (tirthankaras), the last of which is Mahavira (whose birth was in the fifth or sixth century bce). Most scholars date the origins of Jainism as a distinct philosophy to this period when Mahavira consolidated its core teachings, making it a tradition that is either contemporary with or slightly older than Buddhism. Although emerging in dialogue

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with key themes in the Indian philosophical and religious traditions, Jainism has its own distinctive worldview and cosmology. In Jain cosmology, the world is constituted of two distinct substances, jiva and ajiva, which roughly translate to conscious soul and nonconscious forms of reality that include motion, rest, space, matter, and time. According to Jain philosophy, when a soul comes to inhere in a material body, karma attaches to it in various ways; and one of the central aims of the Jain way of life is to free the soul from its karmic limitations and to achieve moksha, a mode of existence in which the soul enjoys its full potential for bliss. Jains believe that human beings are not the only ensouled creatures; a variety of embodied beings have sentience and the capacity for perception. These aspects of awareness come in varying degrees depending on the entity, from the simplest form of one-sensed creatures such as vegetables (which are minimally sentient) to beings with a fivefold range of sensory capacities and awareness (such as certain animals and human beings). Karma is accumulated from, among other things, doing violence to ensouled creatures; thus, Jains aim to live in such a way that they avoid causing harm to other sentient beings. Given that violence is inherent to living, Jains have developed a way of life that is premised on minimizing violence and harm as much as possible. This ideal of nonviolence (ahimsa) forms the central principle or vow of the Jain way of life. It is helpfully summarized in the Jain scriptures in the following terms: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture or kill any creature or living being.”1 The vow of ahimsa is but one of several vows that both Jain renouncers and householders undertake. Flowing from the ideal of nonviolence are a series of other vows—including truthfulness, refraining from stealing, chastity, and avoiding

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possessiveness—that form the core of the full-orbed Jain way of being in the world. Although all practicing Jains seek to adhere to these vows, there is a degree of difference in the way in which they are lived in daily life by renouncers and householders. It is assumed that householders, who live within typical human cultures and social settings, will not be able to observe these vows with strictness, whereas renouncers aim to live them out with a high degree of exactness, thereby serving as exemplars for householders.

AHIMSA AND ANIMALS A common practice among both Jain householders and renouncers is vegetarianism. According to Jain scriptures, all sentient beings are “fond of life, like pleasure, hate pain, shun destruction, . . . long to live.”2 A vegetarian diet is one of the primary ways in which to respect this basic truth. Jains recognize that ahimsa is not perfectly observable in daily life because violence is inherent to living. There are, however, better and worse ways to live and be caught up in that web of violence. Vegetarianism represents a way of eating and living that causes the least amount of violence to the fewest sentient beings (that is, to one-sensed beings, such as vegetables).3 As Jain scholar Natubhai Shah notes, vegetarianism is merely the most visible, daily practice of ahimsa toward animals for Jains; Jains are also known for engaging in a whole host of additional welfare measures and efforts aimed at reducing violence toward animals.4 Practitioners generally refuse to participate in sport hunting or other forms of animal entertainment that cause suffering and death. They sometimes avoid pet ownership as well insofar as it tends to limit animal autonomy (however, Jainism

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teaches that pets and all other animals should be treated with care). Jains are also well known for funding and running animal shelters that take in old, vulnerable, and unwanted animals and allow them the time and space to live and die unmolested.5 These efforts are combined with fund-raising for animal caretaking during times of crisis as well as the sorts of daily rituals mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, such as feeding birds. In these and other ways, the daily practices of traditional Jainism embody some of the central pro-animal principles that animate the contemporary animal welfare and animal liberation movements. Pro-animal activists and scholars have in recent years begun to call attention to many other practices and institutions that cause inordinate harm to animals but that are rarely subjected to critical scrutiny. Consider, for example, the practice of driving an automobile and the amount of roadkill it causes. It has been estimated that in the United States alone some one million animals per day are struck and killed by cars.6 This is a number that rivals the number of animals killed by hunting or by experimentation, practices that are given a great deal of critical attention by activists and theorists. Roadkill has received scant attention, perhaps because it poses profound questions about so much of the basic fabric and infrastructure of mobility that underpins our daily lives. If we care about the fate of road-killed animals, might it be the case that we would have to drive less and perhaps stop driving, flying, or taking trains altogether? As with most animal welfare issues, Jainism has a longstanding tradition of reflection and practice that can be brought to bear on this problem. For householders, it is not possible to entirely opt out of dominant systems of mobility; however, as with one’s diet, there are less violent ways to travel and move around. A householder Jain might, for instance, consider walking

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or cycling instead of driving when taking short trips and commit generally to traveling as infrequently and respectfully as possible. For renouncers, though, the issue of how to move oneself must be undertaken with the same strictness and thoughtfulness as all other actions. Renouncers typically forgo flying and driving entirely to avoid the harm caused by these modes of travel. Instead, they travel by walking, most often barefoot and sweeping the path in front of them to ensure that they avoid stepping on living beings. Through a strict vegetarian diet and related practices such as mindful, car-less travel, renouncers aim to bring the daily practices of eating and moving through the world as close to the ideal of nonviolence as is humanly possible. Such rigorous observances of the vow of ahimsa can appear almost inhuman and often provoke suspicion among outsiders to the Jain tradition. Do Jains truly care about the well-being of animals and sentient creatures, or do these elaborate methods for avoiding harming others arise primarily out of an egoistic concern for one’s own liberation? Unlike religions and philosophies based solely on radical altruism, Jainism does not draw a strict line between self-interest and concern for others. Instead, it teaches that through repeated observation of the vow of nonviolence the two dispositions come into deep alignment, and the practicing Jain learns to enact ahimsa not just in surface actions but also in thought and heartfelt intention. In the daily and repeated practice of ahimsa, that which appears to be a solely negative ethical precept (that is, do no violence) gradually gives rise to a positive ethical and ontological vision in which human individuals see themselves as belonging to and loving a larger set of sentient, ensouled entities. To be sure, Jains do posit differences among sentient entities according to their varied abilities to perceive and sense the world around them, but these are differences that exist on a continuum along which all sentient

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beings have a place and wherein they all seek to work out their karma. Thus, the Jain way of life is not simply a matter of uncritically observing a series of rituals and principles to remove karma from one’s own soul and to ensure personal salvation; it is also an attempt to enact a different world in which the quality and quantity of violence is reduced and in which sentient entities might come to live together in a way that reflects the fullness and beauty of their ethical and ontological unity.

BĀH UBALI AND THE ANIMALS The deeper significance of the Jain way of life can be further illumined by considering a narrative about one of the most wellknown Jain exemplars, Bāhubali. You might be familiar with the Jain celebration of Bāhubali, which is held every twelve years and includes anointing a massive statue of Bāhubali standing in meditation to the joyful cheering of Diagambra Jains. Bāhubali’s story revolves around his contentious relationship with his older brother, Bharata, a powerful and ambitious king who sought to expand his empire by including the kingdoms of his many brothers.7 Of all the brothers, Bāhubali was the only one who refused to cede his kingdom to Bharata, thereby bringing the brothers into direct conflict. Rather than engaging in all-out war, which would lead to the deaths of many soldiers within their respective kingdoms, the brothers agreed to a contest to test their strengths. In the standard retelling of this story, Bāhubali emerged victorious from the contest but was ultimately ashamed of his victory and his pride. He came to realize that he was fighting to maintain his grasp on base things, namely, wealth and power. He apologized to his brother and suggested that they renounce such vain pursuits and become monks. Once he became a monk,

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Bāhubali’s remarkable strength of body and mind enabled him to undertake great austerities and achieve omniscience. Upon becoming a renunciate, Bāhubali fasted and meditated for a year in the same standing position (the position replicated in the massive statue in Karnataka) such that he became one with the earth and vines grew up around his body. He radiated healing power to the sick who visited him, and people from all walks of life came to worship him. Bāhubali’s spiritual energy even had a positive effect on animal life. All animals, even those who were enemies with each other, became “extremely gentle in his presence.”8 Species that were naturally hostile to one another became hospitable. Predators gave freely of their milk to prey they would have otherwise killed and eaten. The elephants cleansed the ground near Bāhubali by making cups out of lotus leaves and using them to carry and distribute water around his feet. Snakes peacefully wrapped themselves around Bāhubali’s feet and legs and allowed peacocks (who normally fear snakes) to dance freely around him. In short, Bāhubali’s meditiative presence and disposition not only transformed his own subjectivity but had a transformative effect on all sentient life that came into contact with him as well: “As that forest abode became tranquil through the power of his asceticism, no harm of any kind befell any creature. Even the wild beasts had the darkness in their hearts removed by the great power that was born of his asceticism, and they became freed from any feelings of aggression or hostility.”9 If we reflect carefully on this narrative, we can see that the Jain ideal as exemplified by Bāhubali amounts to more than an individual selfishly pursuing personal salvation and release from the cycle of rebirth. Ultimately, the Jain way of life brings one bit by bit into a more caring, less violent way of being in the world, both with respect to oneself and in relation to others. As with the ancient Greek philosophers examined in previous

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chapters, Jainism offers a vision of a philosophical way of life as an attempt to care for one’s soul as well as for the souls of others. Most important for our purposes, Jainism places the well-being of both human and more-than-human beings at the very center of that project. Brianne Donaldson, a Jain scholar and a leading theorist in animal studies, suggests that we might understand the Jain commitment to nonviolence as a series of practices of freedom (a term she borrows from the French theorist Michel Foucault). Beyond naïve sentiments for the complete and immediate liberation of all sentient beings, practices of freedom are sober and humble attempts to create the conditions for other ways of living as well as efforts to enact less violent possibilities already available. If, following Donaldson, we understand practices of ahimsa as a series of provocative experiments “in expanded perception and attentive living,”10 then the sorts of daily rituals mentioned at the beginning of this chapter take on a new significance. As with the Jain householders who carry out the daily ritual of spreading grain for the birds, in adopting similar rituals we might come to see ourselves as demonstrating in a concrete fashion that other, less violent relations among sentient beings are possible here and now. At the same time, we would be refashioning ourselves into different kinds of subjects, individuals who are becoming gradually less violent, more perceptive, and more attentive. Like sailors who have to rebuild their ship while out at sea, such daily rituals serve to help us rebuild ourselves one plank at a time, in the very place in which we find ourselves, in order to make ourselves worthy of the larger cultural revolution that such actions are calling into existence.

5 PLU TARCH’S GRUNTER

BECOMING-PIG Homer’s Odyssey contains what is perhaps the most influential story of human-animal metamorphosis in all of Western literature. The episode occurs in book 10, when Odysseus and his men encounter the goddess Circe on their return journey to Ithaca. The men have just narrowly escaped the harrowing fate some of their comrades have suffered of being eaten alive by the Laestrygonians (human-eating giants); they then flee by ship and come temporarily to shore at the island of Aeaea where Circe resides. Too exhausted to explore their environs, Odysseus allows his men to rest. Odysseus himself does some initial reconnaissance of the island and kills a huge antlered stag on his way back to the ship to provide sustenance for his crew. In framing the encounter with Circe with these two scenes of flesh consumption, Homer provides a thought-provoking contrast between the tremendous fear Odysseus and his men have of being killed and eaten by the giants and their own unreflective killing and eating of the stag. Throughout the Homeric epics, one of the most common worries the human characters express is that their dead bodies will be left unburied and unmourned,

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exposed to the elements and left to be consumed by wild animals and other creatures. This anxiety is voiced even as the men kill animals by the thousands for consumption and for sacrificial rites with scarcely a scruple. Rarely, it seems, do the men think from the viewpoint of the animals they kill and eat or dare to imagine what it is like actually to be an animal. It is this latter lacuna in the perspective of Odysseus and his men that makes their encounter with Circe so disconcerting for them. For Circe does not wish to kill and eat Odysseus and his men—she wants to transform them into animals and leave them permanently in an animal state. To return to Homer’s narrative, when Odysseus’s well-rested and well-fed men finally arrive at Circe’s house, they encounter mountain lions and wolves who are not vicious or attacking but are strangely standing on their hind legs and fawning over them. Circe cordially invites the men in for a drink. After they have unwittingly consumed a drugged potion she has concocted, Circe strikes the men with a wand and transforms them into pigs. Recognizing their fate, the men “squeal with dismay,”1 whereupon Circe unceremoniously throws them some acorns— food fit for “mere” pigs. One of Odysseus’s men, Eurylochus, suspects a trap from the outset of the encounter with Circe and stays outside her house, witnessing the entire scene without being seen. Upon the men’s transformation into pigs, Eurylochus runs back to the ship to tell Odysseus and the other men what has transpired. Eurylochus is so traumatized by what he has seen that initially he is unable to speak and is limited simply to sobbing. Once he emerges from his state of shock and regains his speech, Eurylochus relates the events to Odysseus, which prompts the hero to seek out his men and demand their reconversion. Armed with a special herb given to him by Hermes that counteracts Circe’s potion, Odysseus

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arrives at Circe’s house. He is able eventually to persuade Circe to turn the pigs back into men. She smears the pigs with a drug that makes their bristles fall away and brings them back to a human state, in a form taller, younger, and more beautiful than before their transformation into animals. Upon their restoration, the house rings with the men’s “passionate sobbing” (423), and even Circe is “moved to pity” (424) in seeing their emotional response. When the remainder of Odysseus’s men arrive at Circe’s house to see the men restored to human form, they too weep openly in relief at the transformation. After the reconversion, Odysseus and his men stay on as guests at Circe’s house for a year, feasting (once again) on “abundant meat” and wine before continuing their journey to Ithaca. In reading this story, we are perhaps inclined to share the men’s horror over their transformation into animals and take their subsequent cries of relief at being restored for granted. After all, what could be more horrifying than being permanently transformed into an animal (and a pig, at that)? Such anxieties over being reduced to an animal state are the familiar stuff of ancient epic literature and contemporary horror films. The narrative arc of these stories almost always revolves around the protagonists’ struggle to return to their familiar human form after the horror of having taken shape in a lower, pathetic animal form.

CAN WE TALK? Plutarch of Chaeronea (45 CE–120 CE), an influential Platonist philosopher, boldly risks reversing this dominant approach to human-animal metamorphoses by rewriting the OdysseusCirce encounter. In the process, Plutarch challenges many of the

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assumptions we tend to make about both human beings and animals and the relative worth of each mode of existence. Plutarch’s charming little dialogue is often referred to as “Gryllus,” which means something like “Oinker” or “Grunter”—the “inarticulate” noise pigs make.2 In Plutarch’s retelling of Homer’s narrative, we find Odysseus inquiring with Circe whether she has other animalized human beings in her home whom she would be willing to restore to their original form. At stake for Odysseus, as he notes, is garnering more “splendid glory” (985e) for himself, the ultimate concern of the quintessential Homeric hero. Odysseus’s assumption is that, if he is successful in having additional Greek men removed from the “piteous and shameful” (985e) state of an animal existence, his reputation might grow even greater. In Plutarch’s narrative, however, Circe does not immediately grant Odysseus’s request. Instead, she insists that he must first ask the pigs if they truly desire to be converted back into human beings. Thus, Plutarch’s Circe openly questions whether human existence is superior to the life of a pig. Converting the pigs back into men might in fact, she suggests, lead to their ruin. Incredulous at this notion, Odysseus asks Circe how it is possible to determine the matter when the animals are unable to speak. Circe grants one of the pigs the ability to speak and names him “Gryllus.” As it turns out, and in line with Circe’s suspicion, Gryllus has no interest in being restored to human form. He speaks strongly in defense of a pig’s way of life and defiantly challenges Odysseus to a debate over the relative merits of human and animal existence. Gryllus is well aware that Odysseus and his fellow Greeks give higher value to human life because, in its ideal form, human existence is thought to manifest the cardinal virtues: courage, moderation, justice, and wisdom. Gryllus argues, though, that humans are far from virtuous and that animals are often

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far better exemplars when it comes to embodying these virtues. Take courage, for instance. Gryllus makes the case that animals are generally far more courageous than human beings. They fight openly, without deceit, bravely, and to the point of death. The same is true, Gryllus maintains, regarding moderation. Human beings praise themselves for their superior capacity for self-control and faithfulness in relationships, but it is evident that many animals show greater restraint and fidelity in all kinds of matters. Odysseus’s and Penelope’s fidelity for each other while separated by wars, distance, and decades is universally lauded and set to verse; but, Gryllus insists, we find deeper fidelity more regularly in relationships among common crows. When it comes to avarice in relation to wealth and luxuries, animals feel not even the slightest temptation, whereas human beings are in a constant struggle to avoid the corruption of their souls by material possessions. What is more, animals are able to secure happiness and pleasure by extraordinarily simple means. As a pig, Gryllus notes that he can achieve genuine happiness just by sinking down in some deep, soft mud. Gryllus maintains that the lack of moderation among human beings is even more evident when considering what they eat. Humans are gluttons in the sense that they both frequently overeat and eat foods unnecessary for their survival, such as meat. Even though the earth provides an abundance of fruits, plants, and grains, human desires for delicacies and luxuries push them to elaborate and extraordinarily cruel lengths to secure meat. No living animal, Gryllus argues, is able to escape the tables laid by civilization. What all of this suggests is that human beings are far from the paragons of virtue they take themselves to be. Furthermore, the richness and complexity of animal behavior demonstrates that animal existence is worth far more than Odysseus and his men believe. Not only are animals virtuous, but they also

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have a share in rationality and manifest the ability to think and act in creative and responsive ways. They heal themselves when sick, learn to deal with novel challenges in their environments, and pass along what they learn to their offspring. Plutarch’s dialogue cuts off here, just as Odysseus raises the question of whether animals have knowledge of God. Scholars are divided on whether the abrupt ending is intentional on Plutarch’s part or if there is another portion of the text that is missing. For our purposes, Plutarch’s Gryllus has given us sufficient food for thought at this point in our journey. The first thing we should attend to is how Plutarch’s text does something that even the most animal-friendly philosophers in antiquity rarely attempt, namely, reverse the perspective and locus of the one who is speaking. How often do we try to think from an animal’s perspective or simply acknowledge that animals might have one? And even if we grant that most animals cannot speak articulately in human language (a topic to which I return in chapter 6), is there not something to be gained from imagining what they might say were they able to do so? Plutarch’s dialogue asks us to go much further than just this thought experiment in granting animals a subjective perspective and articulable thoughts. He also encourages us to entertain the idea that animals are, in many ways, better and more excellent creatures than human beings. This is perhaps the most provocative idea in the dialogue. For even among those of us who care about the fate of animals, there remains a deep-seated tendency to see concern for the welfare of animals as something that belongs solely to human beings and that demonstrates our higher, distinctly moral nature (after all, we do not hesitate to call such concern for animals on our part being humane). We are the virtuous ones, and it is the sign of our unique moral sensibilities to be able to extend ethical concern to beings beyond

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our own species—or so the standard pro-animal thinking tends to go. Plutarch’s Gryllus, however, makes the case that, when it comes to displaying the virtues, we might need to descend from the pedestal upon which we have placed ourselves and consider looking toward animal existence for clues on what earthly flourishing might look like. Despite its relative brevity, Plutarch’s dialogue contains reflections on every major theme we have discussed thus far. Like Plato and Socrates, Gryllus argues that the chief challenge for human beings in becoming virtuous is our disposition to pursue wealth and luxuries; in this matter, nonhuman animals appear to have no struggle. In line with Aristotle, Gryllus urges us to reconsider our haughty attitude toward studying animals and the natural world; wonders abound there, Gryllus suggests, if only we can remain humble enough to discern them. Following the Cynics, Gryllus insists that animals are not just creatures who display traces of the virtues but are the very beings who should serve as models of a life well lived; animals live according to the rhythms of nature and find happiness in the abundance of nature’s gifts, a way of life that human beings would do well to mimic. And although Plutarch’s vegetarianism has its proximate roots in the Greek tradition of Pythagorean and Platonic philosophies, in “Gryllus” the arguments against eating meat share overlapping concerns with those encountered in our examination of Jainism; both traditions stress the fundamental violence of carnivorism and encourage us to reflect on how meat-eating deforms our own subjectivity and limits the potentialities of sentient life. Although I will not take up a full study of Plutarch’s works here, it is worth noting that his other writings on vegetarianism and animal existence contain in nuce nearly every major

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pro-animal argument found among contemporary animal liberation and animal rights philosophers. What is more, Plutarch provides stinging rebukes of the anthropocentrism of the philosophers who preceded him, insisting (as in “Gryllus”) that animals share in rationality along with human beings and that animals have inherent value and should not be seen as mere beings to be used and consumed at human will. In making these arguments, Plutarch comes strikingly close to the sorts of contemporary sensibilities found in the closing chapters of this book.3 However, between Plutarch and today are two thousand years of traditional thinking about animals, and much of it has taught us to disparage animals rather than to admire and respect them. If we hope to develop a more pro-animal disposition, it behooves us to consider some key moments in the history of anti-animal attitudes and see whether we are better prepared today to challenge and move beyond such sentiments.

6 DESCARTES’S BEAST-MACHINE

“SURELY DESCARTES NEVER SAW AN APE” 1 Koko the gorilla (1971–2018) was the subject of one of the most famous animal language experiments in recent history.2 Born in captivity and separated from her birth family at an early age, Koko was raised largely by human beings in various enculturated settings. The primary human influence throughout Koko’s life was Francine Patterson, a psychologist who taught Koko how to use American Sign Language (ASL) from a young age and continued to work with her throughout her life. In the decades prior to Koko’s birth, there had been a number of language experiments done with chimpanzees and other primates, but the limitations of their vocal tracts in producing human-languagelike sounds made it difficult to determine whether these animals could acquire language. By teaching Koko and other primates ASL, these limitations could be overcome, and scientists would be able to ascertain whether genuine interspecies communication is possible. Koko’s linguistic abilities were impressive. She was able to learn and use one thousand signs in appropriate ways and

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understand roughly two thousand spoken words. Koko was also seen engaging in unrehearsed ASL exchanges with other primates who had been taught to sign. As reports of Koko’s linguistic accomplishments circulated, her fame grew; she was the subject of numerous academic scientific studies as well as popular documentaries. In addition to Koko’s linguistic aptitude, she developed lasting interpersonal relationships with several other human beings and animals. Koko’s noteworthy linguistic and emotional capacities pose profound questions about traditional ways of dividing human beings from animals and bring to the fore the question of whether animal communication rises to the level of human language. René Descartes (1596–1650), the founder of the modern philosophical tradition in the West, had (and still has) a notorious reputation for his reductive vision of animal existence. He resolutely denied the sorts of ideas suggested by Plutarch, whose pig-man Gryllus argued that animals are creatures with the capacity for expressing their internal thoughts and who manifest ways of being in the world that demand respect from human beings. Closer to Descartes’s own era, the influential essayist Michel de Montaigne defended a pro-animal perspective very similar to Plutarch’s in his Apology for Raymond Sebond, arguing that animals appear to have the capacity for language, exhibit deep forms of sociality, and engage in acts that are clearly rational. When Descartes’s thoughts turned to the nature of animal existence, he undoubtedly had on his mind this pro-animal tradition and its contemporary iteration in Montaigne and related animal-friendly thinkers. Descartes sought to dispel once and for all what he considered to be unfounded beliefs about animals’ cognitive and linguistic capacities and to demonstrate that an uncrossable boundary separates human beings from animals.

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BEAST-MACHINES If, by some historical quirk, Descartes had had the opportunity to meet and interact with Koko, would he have changed his mind about these aims? Would Koko’s cognitive abilities have been sophisticated enough to make Descartes rethink his reductionistic and dismissive attitude toward animal life? Let’s delve into his writings on animals in more detail and see. Descartes was not entirely unwilling to recognize many similarities among animals and human beings. At the level of automatic bodily functions (for example, the flow of blood throughout the body), Descartes makes an extended case in Discourse on Method that both human and animal bodies operate according to the same mechanical laws.3 On this point, Descartes departs from the Aristotelian framework dominant in his time that held that all living beings—whether human, animal, or plant—are animated by souls of differing sorts. For Descartes, there is no need to have recourse to a soul to explain the behavior of plant or animal bodies; animals and other nonhuman beings are, he argues, governed entirely by mechanical laws and impulses—as are many of the functions carried out by human bodies. Animal behavior is so deeply automated, in fact, that Descartes believes a machine could (at least in principle) be constructed such that its behavior would be entirely indistinguishable from that of a natural animal. It is at this level of trying to replicate natural bodies in the form of machines that the difference between human beings and animals becomes visible. Descartes believes that there are certain quintessentially human actions that even the most cleverly and intricately designed machines would be unable to perform—in particular, they would be unable to speak and reason like natural human beings do.

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Thus, there could be no human-machine that is effectively and functionally identical to a natural human being. What this suggests from a Cartesian perspective is that, unlike human beings, animals are simply automated machines; hence, Descartes will sometimes refer to animals as automata and employ words such as bête (beast) and brutus (brute) to refer to them rather than animal (which contains the root anima and implies the presence of an animating soul). Descartes initially illustrates and explains his beast-machine concept with the idea of a monkey-machine (one “having the organs and outward shape of a monkey”4), for even if he never saw a primate in person, he certainly knew how similar primates are to human beings. But given the deep similarities between human beings and primates, we might wonder why Descartes was so dismissive of the latter’s cognitive and linguistic capacities. We should not be too critical of Descartes on this point because he lived prior to the time in which rigorous scientific experiments on language acquisition in primates and other animals had been established. Even today, with several decades of research behind us, the scientific community is far from unified in its estimation of whether primates and other animals can use language in a meaningful way. So let’s examine carefully and with an open mind how Descartes understands language use and consider whether living primates like Koko would, in fact, be able to pass his test. Descartes’s conception of language use entails more than being able to emit sounds that resemble human words. He believes machines could, in principle, be built that make humanlike sounds in a repetitive and mechanical manner. What such machines cannot do, he maintains, is use language in novel and appropriate ways in a wide variety of contexts; the same is true, in his analysis, of animals. So universal is this capacity

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for creative language use among human beings that Descartes attributes it to those humans who are otherwise entirely “dim” or “deaf and dumb,” insisting that not even the most perfect animal of any species can use language in this minimal manner.5 For Descartes, the utter inability of animals to employ language to varied ends indicates an insuperable division between them and human beings—one that tracks closely with the distinction Aristotle draws between humans with rational discourse and animals who employ mere unconscious, nonrational codes and instinctual utterances. On this point, Descartes joins the dominant anthropocentric approach that runs throughout the Western intellectual and philosophical tradition, which measures animals according to the paradigm of the speaking, rational, human subject and finds animals lacking. So how might Koko fare if she were subjected to Descartes’s beast-machine test? Did Koko express herself using genuine language, or was she limited to emitting instinctual and mechanical utterances? Given the anthropocentric bias of Descartes’s work, we have reason to suspect that he would remain skeptical of the notion that Koko somehow crossed over the language barrier and became a genuine language user. Although Koko knew a fair number of signs and was able to communicate them in spontaneous, appropriate, and somewhat novel ways depending on the context, her linguistic ability does not seem to rise to the standard that Descartes sets. After all, it is an easily observable and verifiable fact that the vast majority of human beings have the ability to use language in ways that far exceed Koko’s capacity. Nevertheless, Koko’s ability to learn human language in the minimal sense she did cannot be fully explained using the sorts of reductive mechanical models Descartes employed. Koko’s cognitive and emotional capacities make it clear to even the most demanding skeptic that she is a responsive, thoughtful,

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and rational individual. There is, thus, little reason to think there is some uncrossable abyss that separates us from Koko, even if we can acknowledge profound differences at the level of language use. Perhaps we have examined the wrong species of animal to answer the question of whether animals have language in the Cartesian sense. Although primates are most closely related to human beings in terms of evolutionary descent and would seem to make ideal candidates for language experiments, other animal species have shown what appear to be fairly advanced linguistic abilities. Descartes himself notes that some avian species (he mentions magpies and parrots in particular) can mimic the sounds of human language in precise ways that would seem to suggest that they have the capacity for speech. He insists, however, that these birds cannot arrange their words in novel ways or convey their thoughts through language. Experiments with an African grey parrot named Alex (1976–2007) and his trainer Irene Pepperberg would, however, seem to suggest otherwise.6 According to Pepperberg, Alex learned to vocalize one-hundred different words, categorized objects according to a variety of rubrics, discerned subtle phonological distinctions, offered appropriate responses to a variety of inquiries, and communicated (albeit in limited ways) his inner states and desires. Despite having small brains and being only very distantly related to human beings in evolutionary terms, parrots like Alex do appear to have some (again, limited) ability for acquiring language, even in the most rigorous and demanding senses of the term. One suspects, however, that Descartes would join with contemporary skeptics who dismiss such research as demonstrating that animals are far from capable of learning “normal” or “adult” human speech on their own and that language acquisition among animals only occurs in enculturated settings with sustained assistance from human trainers.

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THE ETHOLOGICAL TURN Although I hold a very generous view of the cognitive and linguistic capacities of animals, I confess that I share the general consensus among scientists that these sorts of laboratory experiments prove very little about animal language. The environments in which experimental animals learn language are generally artificial, and the linguistic exchanges are far from organic. The handful of words and signs that laboratory animals learn often end up being far less valuable for understanding the animals’ behaviors or inner states than simply studying the bodily gestures and other forms of communication they naturally and spontaneously adopt. So, instead of trying to question Descartes and other skeptics of animal language using research from artificial laboratory settings, it might make better sense to study the ways in which animals communicate among themselves on their own terms and see if those modes of communication rise to the level of language. This is what many ethologists (scientists who study animal behavior, usually in natural settings) have been doing for the past few decades with several different species, and the findings have been nothing less than astonishing. For example, it has been observed that vervet monkeys make distinct calls for different kinds of predators and that these calls generate distinct, correlated responses from their troop (if a call for an eagle is given, they look to the sky; if a call for a snake is given, they look down to the ground, and so on).7 Extensive study of Gunnison’s prairie dogs by the biologist Con Slobodchikoff and his colleagues has shown similar capacities among this species for making distinct calls for different predators. Furthermore, Slobodchikoff ’s research has found that prairie dogs invent new words, have their own regional dialects, and are able to communicate such

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fine-grained details as the speed and size of approaching predators.8 In another remarkable study, Stephanie King and colleagues demonstrated that bottlenose dolphins naturally develop distinct individual “signature whistles” that function to distinguish one individual from another. This ability to name and differentiate individuals within a group is thought to be especially important for animals like dolphins who live in complex social environments.9 The examples could be multiplied.10 None of this ethological research provides a definitive answer to the challenge posed by Descartes’s beast-machine test, but I would suggest that the ethological approach entirely reframes the question concerning animal language. When studying how animals communicate on their own terms, we are no longer primarily examining them to see whether and to what extent they are “like us.” Instead, these ethological studies begin from the premise that animals have their own specific, contextualized, and evolutionary-based ways of communicating that are fitted and relevant to their forms of life. When studied in this manner, animals display the basic aspects of nearly everything associated with human language but in modes that are specific to their needs and lives. Whether animals can learn human language or whether a given animal species’ mode of communication contains every conceivable component of human language are rather uninteresting questions from this perspective. Of more interest is the general conclusion drawn from this research by Nathan Lents, an ethologist who argues that recent work on animal communication demonstrates that the central building blocks of human and animal forms of communication are widely shared.11 This conclusion implies, in turn, that the differences among human beings and animals with regard to language use and acquisition take the form of differences of degree rather than differences in kind.12

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INDULGING THE H UMAN Descartes offers another criterion for differentiating human beings from beast-machines, namely, rational action. Regarding this criterion, Descartes acknowledges that animals carry out certain actions very well, sometimes even better than human beings do; but he maintains that the overall range of possible actions for animals is strictly limited. In other words, according to Descartes, animals are unable to respond creatively to novel situations and always react in the same mechanical manner to whatever stimuli or problems they encounter, whereas human beings can use their reasoning faculties to solve problems and respond to stimuli in a variety of ways. Few animal scientists, whether laboratory-based biologists or field ethologists, would care to defend Descartes’s stance on this issue today. Dozens of experiments in both laboratory and natural settings have demonstrated that several animal species have remarkable problem-solving abilities and that they use a variety of approaches to negotiate their environments.13 Here, too, we find no reason to assume that the differences between human beings and animals are absolute. Instead, what we find is that many animals are capable of responding in rational, creative, and novel ways to their environment and that the central components of rationality are not exclusively human in origin but are shared widely and in varying degrees among different animal species. Despite his reputation as a staunch defender of the hypothesis that animals are mere automata, there are good reasons to think Descartes does not truly believe that animals are simply equivalent to machines, reacting mechanically and unconsciously to stimuli. When pushed by interlocutors to defend

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his controversial ideas about animals, Descartes does insist that animals lack language and higher-order rationality, but he also acknowledges that animals are living beings who have sensations.14 This admission implies (although Descartes himself never explicitly draws this implication) that real, living animals—unlike his imaginary beast-machines—do have some relational capacities, some opening onto the world and to others around them. To acknowledge this point opens the door to the notion that we share with animals some of the basic structures of responsivity that underpin language, rationality, and the ability to feel pain, joy, and a whole range of other affects. It is precisely the opening to this shared emotional and cognitive space that Descartes seeks persistently to close off—and not simply for reasons having to do with truth. As Descartes fully appreciates, if we do acknowledge fundamental similarities between human beings and animals in terms of shared subjectivity, then we are faced with difficult questions about our practices and way of life. The violent treatment of animals was woven into the very fabric of daily life in Descartes’s era (and in ours as well, of course), and in a letter to one of his philosophical correspondents, Descartes defends his reductive view of animal existence by suggesting that his views should ultimately be adopted not simply because they are true but because they also help to defend and protect an anthropocentric way of life.15 In other words, if animals are understood to be entirely lacking in language, rationality, and subjectivity, then we are entitled, Descartes suggests, to kill and eat such soulless brutes with impunity. When Descartes argues in the Discourse that animal bodies are regulated by mechanical functions and that the basic workings of the human body can be explained using the same mechanico-physical principles, it is worth noting that he recommends we have a dissected animal heart in front of us to study

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while reading his analysis. In other words, the violent, practical split between human and animal that Descartes ultimately hopes to defend is already present in his text before he begins his analysis of the beast-machine—because Descartes would not, of course, suggest deliberately killing and dissecting a human being for such purposes. The beast-machine hypothesis might be seen then less as a neutral, scientific observation about the mechanics of animal bodies and the lack of animal minds and more as an ad hoc, ideological justification for an entire way of life in which Descartes finds himself—a way of life in which eating animals regularly nourishes and sustains human bodies and where the living, sentient bodies of animals serve as the material upon which the Frankenstein-ish desires of modernity to disclose the hidden laws of nature are unleashed. It is becoming increasingly clear today, however, that the animals we consume, dissect, and use for our own ends are entities with far richer lives and relations than Descartes and his followers wished to admit. If we are to do justice to what science and other forms of observing animals are demonstrating today, we need to do more than simply revise our ideas about animals— we also have to reconsider the scope and nature of our practical responsibilities to our animal kin. It is to this latter question that I turn in the next chapter.

7 KANT ’S ELEPHANTS

H UMAN REASON, ANIMAL SKIN In a brief essay titled “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) provides a creative reading of the biblical book of Genesis to illustrate the various evolutionary stages of human beings from their initial animal state into a mature and distinctly human mode of existence. Reading the text from a historical-developmental perspective, Kant argues that the decisive factor in the emergence of the human being proper was when reason began to stir and come into conflict with native instinctual dispositions. Once reason came onto the scene, human beings were gradually guided less and less by the instinctual “voice of God” they shared with animals, a voice that had up to that point allowed human beings reliably to survive in their natural environment.1 As human beings came to rely more exclusively on reason for guidance, they recognized that they were not bound to a single way of life as animals were but could exercise their discretion in choosing among a variety of modes of existence. Kant describes this initial stage of the recognition of the freedom of human existence as being accompanied by a kind of anxiety and insecurity:

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the human being “stood, as it were, on the brink of an abyss; for instead of the single objects of his desire to which instinct had up to now directed him, there opened up an infinity of them, and he did not know how to relate to the choice between them.” But despite the anxiety that accompanied this transition to rational living, once the human being had a taste for freedom of choice, “it was nevertheless wholly impossible for him to turn back again to [a life] of servitude (under the dominion of instinct).”2 Kant goes on to suggest that reason played other essential roles in the constitution of human existence. In addition to sublimating libidinal impulses and establishing relations of sexual propriety, reason assisted human beings in planning for and accomplishing ends and projects beyond the present moment. But the most definitive step that reason took in the establishment of human existence was bringing human beings to the recognition that they were the “genuine end of nature.” In this regard, Kant states, “nothing that lives on earth can supply a competitor” to human beings. Reason thus aided us in recognizing that we are the only beings who are ends in ourselves and that nature has designed matters so as to place the nonhuman world at our service: The first time [the human being] said to the sheep: Nature has given you the skin you wear not for you but for me, then took it off the sheep and put it on himself (Genesis 3:21), he became aware of a prerogative that he had by his nature over all animals, which he now no longer regarded as his fellow creatures, but rather as means and instruments given over to his will for the attainment of his discretionary aims.3

This positive injunction to freely use animals and nature as a means to our ends—as tools and instruments to help us

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accomplish our aims and projects—is also heard by reason as a negative prohibition on the instrumental use of one’s fellow human beings. Regarding the governance of individual human lives, reason urges that we are all potentially in the position of legislator and hence equal and deserving of respect.

UNENLIGHTENED ANIMALS As this narrative indicates, the rational capacities of human beings represent less a pre-established human essence and more a vocation and a destiny. Human beings must learn to live according to reason, both at the level of the individual and at the level of the collective. It is to this possibility that we as human beings are uniquely called, and our development toward that end is still ongoing according to Kant. The formative process whereby we become full and genuine human beings is what Kant calls enlightenment.4 Kant thus contrasts enlightenment not simply to superstition or ignorance but to our self-imposed immaturity, our unwillingness to assume our calling as human beings, and our tendency to avoid governing our own lives and thought by reason. Achieving our full humanity takes a certain amount of determined practice and courage. Kant’s influential conception of human enlightenment carries with it, however, some unthought limits. In particular, Kant’s ideal of the human individual living according to a mature rationality is articulated over and against certain groups of beings who have been forcibly trained to remain docile and immature—the primary instances in his work of such entities being women and animals. Let us consider women first. Although there is evidence that the deeper logic of Kant’s anthropology is consistent with women being in principle capable of rational

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self-governance and achieving maturity, he often has recourse to sexist stereotypes about the immaturity of women’s rationality and their inability to live autonomously. Furthermore, Kant was largely uninterested in addressing the specific cultural and structural challenges that blocked the path toward women’s liberation and enlightenment.5 It would be up to women philosophers of that era such as Mary Wollstonecraft to argue for the importance of allowing women the space to become mature, autonomous individuals and for the need to contest the specific traditions and institutions that prevented women from achieving their full potential.6 In terms of sexual difference, Kant’s seemingly progressive and apparently universal commitment to human enlightenment remains strikingly and troublingly partial and apolitical. With regard to the immaturity and docility of animals, Kant’s position is even harsher. His framework is built on the assumption that animals are incapable of achieving anything like maturity and autonomy. This is based on the notion that animals lack the sort of moral agency and rationality that human beings use to guide their lives and projects. It is precisely this inability to be autonomous that places animals in the category of things to be used for human ends. Thus, the Kantian vision of human enlightenment is premised both on an ontological division of human existence from animal being as well as a practical division that labels animals as instruments to be used toward human ends. On this point, Kant is very much the inheritor of the Cartesian discourse examined in chapter 6. But there are important complications in Kant’s approach to animal life that make it necessary to hold Descartes’s and Kant’s positions apart to some extent. As you will see, Kant unwittingly helps identify some of the conditions for overcoming the logic of anthropocentrism that tends to limit his thought.

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In Lectures on Ethics, Kant explicitly considers the scope and nature of our duties to animals and—based on the division of human existence and animal being just articulated—makes the case that humans have only indirect duties to nonhuman animals.7 We have direct duties to our fellow human beings, Kant argues, because each individual human being is a person—by which he means a conscious moral subject capable of being moved to action by reason. Persons have the autonomy to determine their life projects. Animals (according to Kant) lack the ability for conscious moral deliberation and determination and are thus outside the scope of personhood and fall into the realm of mere things or instruments to be used for human ends. This distinction between persons who are deserving of dignity and respect and things that are to be used as mere instruments would seem, at first glance, to license the indiscriminate abuse of animals and all other nonhuman beings that fall into this latter class. Kant insists, however, that we are obligated to consider our interactions with animals with great care insofar as animals are in some ways an analogue of humanity. When animals serve us faithfully, or when there is no strict necessity for harming them, Kant suggests that we should be gentle with them and attend to the ways in which their lives and behaviors overlap with our own better natures. In this way, Kant believes we become more sensitive to humanity, in both its physiological and moral registers. His concern here is that becoming insensitive to the harming and killing of animals leads by degrees to our becoming insensitive to the harming and killing of human persons. Yet no matter the degree of similarity between human persons and animals in such matters, Kant strongly insists that in doing our duties with regard to animals we have no direct duties to those animals themselves, for they are not the sorts of beings who belong to the moral community. They can be killed, eaten, and used for

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experimental purposes as long as such actions are done out of necessity and not for sport or for pleasure.

ANIMAL AGENCY Accounts of Kant’s animal philosophy typically end here, often with an admission that his division between persons and things fails to do justice to the complex relations and differences among and between human beings and animals. However, recent research by Peter Kain and others has emphasized that Kant’s thinking on animals involves more than this reductive distinction and reveals a sustained interest in the animal science of his day.8 Freshly transcribed lectures by Kant on physical geography show him reflecting on contemporary research about the rich and diverse nature of animal existence and on the comparative abilities and dispositions of various animals. For example, Kant sees monkeys as being analogues of human rationality in their remarkable ability to deploy their manual dexterity to various ends (catching food, using implements, and so on). He finds a similar analogue among dogs in their faithful service to human beings and their ability to learn tricks and outwit other animals. Although Kant makes similar remarks about animals in other places in his corpus, they are presented in these lectures with a kind of detail and engagement with the animal science of his day that is not evident in most of his other writings. Despite Kant’s rather progressive attitude toward animals at certain points in these lectures, he still seems largely unwilling to consider animals as being analogues of human morality. Even as he grants (as Descartes does not) something like traces of rationality to animals, he seems particularly intent upon denying them moral rationality or agency of any sort. In the case of

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elephants, however, Kant appears to make an exception. As Kain notes, Kant reserves a certain sense of wonder for elephants, both in terms of their proto-rational and proto-moral capacities.9 Kant (echoing Plutarch’s Gryllus) believes elephants are worthy of admiration because of their strength and dexterity. He notes that they use their trunks in delicate and sensitive ways and toward multiple ends, which demonstrates that something approaching rationality is present in these animals. Kant also seems to believe that elephants are capable of improvement and can be disciplined, a term he almost always reserves for human beings and their capacity for maturation and perfection. Finally, the characteristic gentleness of elephants leads Kant to suggest that they appear to be “an analogue of morality” in this regard— which is to say, elephants act in ways that recall us not just to the physiological and cognitive similarities animals have with human beings but also to a shared moral sensibility and relationality. As Kain indicates, we have little context for making full sense of these remarks about elephants by Kant, but they point toward a countertrend in his work that emphasizes our shared mental and ethical characteristics rather than dividing human beings from animals.10 We might wonder what Kant would make of more recent evidence and research concerning the moral agency of animals and of elephants in particular. The ethologist Nathan Lents relates an amazing event involving elephants that would seem to demonstrate their having rather profound rational and moral capacities: In 2003 in South Africa, a group of antelope was rounded up and captured by a private game-hunting company. The antelope were not to be killed but relocated for a special breeding program. Late one night, the workers were alarmed by the approach of a herd

K ant’s Elephants Z 77 of eleven elephants. The herd circled the enclosure slowly and in a coordinated manner. After the brief inspection, the matriarch explored the gate of the enclosure pen and found the latches. She quickly undid all of the latches and swung open the gate. She signaled to the others in her herd, and they all retreated from the opened gate, so as to leave a free path and not frighten the antelope. The elephants stood back and watched motionlessly as the antelope cautiously approached the open gate and then sprinted through to freedom. The elephants trudged off, slowly disappearing into the night.11

The levels of empathy and coordinated agency on display here, coupled with the fact that these behaviors and affects have crossed the species barrier, provide us with compelling reasons to believe that elephants offer more than just an analogue of morality. These actions strongly indicate that elephants are themselves moral agents to some degree. If so, should these actions render them worthy of respect and dignity in the Kantian sense? And what would be the implications for our instrumental use of elephants in zoos, circuses, tourism, and other such industries if we were to adopt such a view? Examples of cross-species empathy, agency, and justice are not limited to elephants. Lents offers an extensive catalog of animal acts that would seem to indicate the presence of high levels of ethical agency and a sense of fairness and justice among a number of species, including rats and rhesus monkeys.12 Marc Bekoff, an ethologist who is one of the world’s leading researchers on animal agency, provides a similarly impressive compendium of empathic and ethical acts among species as diverse as lions, dolphins, and snakes.13 So common and extensive are examples of animal moral agency that many ethologists and even some philosophers now take it for granted that key elements of moral

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behavior and sensibility are simply part of the evolutionary heritage of many species.14 Whether elephants or other animals are capable of the precise kind of practical reason that Kant considers genuinely moral is perhaps beside the point. As with the discussion of animal communication in chapter 6, the scientific and ethological evidence that has accumulated in recent years helps us to reframe what is at stake when considering the nature of morality. The capacity for moral agency and moral rationality is not an all-ornothing affair, with human beings on the “all” side of the divide and animals on the “nothing” side. Rather, our best evidence suggests that we should view human moral capacities as belonging to a larger set of moral tendencies and relations that pervade the more-than-human world in varying modes and degrees. From this perspective, the moral agency, consciousness, and rationality that Kant believes exclusively characterize human moral life (with the important exceptions noted above) are far from representing a radical break from animal life and the natural world; they are instead an outgrowth of the shared ethical building blocks and capacities present in many animals and more-thanhuman others of all sorts. Rather than severing us from our animal condition, our moral sensibilities and agency might instead be seen as a way to recall us to the complex, interwoven moral world we share with our animal kin.

8 BENTHAM’S SUFFERING ANIMAL

BEYOND LANGUAGE AND REASON The renowned utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748– 1832) is often credited with establishing the philosophical foundation for modern animal ethics. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham makes an impassioned case for extending full ethical consideration to animals, arguing that only irrational prejudice prevents us from doing so. Bentham’s views on animals belong to his larger project of articulating the basic constituents of a utilitarian ethical philosophy in which producing the greatest amount of happiness is the ultimate end. Bentham is not alone among philosophers in positing happiness as the goal of ethical life, but he is one among only a very few modern philosophers who maintain that animals are also the kinds of beings who desire happiness and should thus be taken into account when considering the effects of one’s actions. Bentham openly laments the general withholding of basic consideration from animals and links this shortcoming to a similar tendency to overlook the sufferings and joys of enslaved human beings of his era: The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination

80 Y Bentham’s Suffering Animal of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the question is not, Can they reason nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?1

Bentham takes direct issue here with the approaches of Descartes and Kant that were examined in chapters 6 and 7. For Descartes, one of the key criteria for determining the difference between human beings and animals is articulate speech. He maintains that animals are incapable of genuine speech, which leads Descartes in turn to suggest that animals lack any kind of soul or inner life. This absence of a soul in animals serves to justify the common practices of eating and experimenting on animals, allowing us to harm and kill animals with impunity. In a related vein, Kant argues that the key characteristic demarcating the human from the animal is rationality; he makes the case that animals cannot govern themselves autonomously and are by nature the kinds of beings to be used as instruments toward human ends. Although we saw that Kant does not believe any

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and every sort of violence against animals is acceptable, in the final analysis he argues for constraining such violence primarily in view of its potential impact on interhuman relations. In focusing our attention on suffering instead of language or reason, Bentham seeks to overturn traditional ways of thinking about animals that dominated in Western philosophy from ancient Greece and Rome up through the medieval period and into his own era. The standard “logic” operative here, which I have referred to as anthropocentrism, is one in which human beings are sharply differentiated from animals based on the presence of some trait or a cluster of traits purportedly absent in animals (such as speech or rationality). This supposed binary difference is then used to justify a hierarchical value ranking in which human beings have either higher or exclusive ethical value, thereby justifying various sorts of violent actions aimed at animals and other nonhuman beings. I have also noted that this binary and hierarchical anthropocentric logic frequently rebounds on human beings and subdivides them from within, placing certain groups of marginalized human beings in a liminal space alongside animals and other nonhuman beings. I have marked at various points exclusions in relation to slaves, women, and individuals with cognitive disabilities, exclusions that are discussed at more length when contemporary trends in animal studies are examined in later chapters. Bentham’s remarkably progressive attitude toward enslaved human beings and animals anticipates in many ways these contemporary approaches and has served as a reference point for many pro-animal philosophers in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. What is perhaps most important about Bentham for our purposes is the postanthropocentric logic he introduces into animal philosophy. Bentham encourages us to see the human and animal condition as shared, as a mode of

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being in the world in which our common embodiment should lead us to acknowledge and affirm our joint susceptibility to pleasure and pain. Although not all philosophers find Bentham’s particular articulation of utilitarian philosophy persuasive, his broader postanthropocentric approach to thinking about shared embodiment marks a significant challenge to the dominant anthropocentrism of the Western philosophical tradition.

ANIMAL LIBERATION Among the many contemporary animal philosophers who have been influenced by Bentham’s approach, the most prominent perhaps is Peter Singer (1946–). In 1975 Singer published his landmark book, Animal Liberation, which aims to expand and update the utilitarian framework in view of the contemporary socioeconomic context of human-animal relations.2 Singer frames his version of animal liberation as an extension not just of utilitarianism but also of the progressive political liberation projects of the 1960s and 1970s. For Singer, animal liberation should be understood as the latest in a long line of liberation movements (such as Black, gay, and women’s liberation) that were finally gaining some traction and support among the general public at that time. Although struggles against racism, homophobia, and sexism typically include only human beings within their scope, Singer argues that recognizing the biological humanity of people who suffer unjust discrimination is not what is truly at issue in these social justice movements. Rather, what is at stake is recognizing that racism, sexism, homophobia, and other such forms of discrimination are problematic because they override the interests and preferences of individuals from these marginalized groups

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without good reason for doing so. Thus, the effort to link human and animal liberation is not as far-fetched as it might seem. To make this connection, Singer does not aim to demonstrate that animals are like human beings in every conceivable way; he only tries to demonstrate that both animals and human beings from these marginalized groups have had their interests overridden without sufficient justification. Although we may not be able to discern every interest or preference a given animal might have, it is evident, Singer argues, that animals do have interests. They resist being slaughtered, undergoing painful experimentation, and having their movements restricted and their labor controlled; and they clearly prefer freedom of movement, association with kin, and having adequate food and drink. In view of these obvious interests and preferences among animals, Singer’s version of animal liberation asks us to grant—as human liberation movements do—full and equal consideration to such interests.

KILLING ANIMALS In line with the utilitarianism of Bentham, Singer does not believe extending full and equal consideration to animals necessarily entails abolishing all forms of doing harm or violence to animals. There are instances when we might be able rationally to justify killing and eating an animal or experimenting on it, especially if our actions lead to maximizing overall utility.3 Consider the hypothetical example of a cow who is raised on a family farm under suitable conditions by a loving family and is slaughtered as quickly and painlessly as possible. If one were to consume the flesh of such a cow, would it be unethical to do so? From the sort of utilitarian perspective developed by Bentham and Singer, the answer would most likely be no. If, in fact, the cow lives a

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happy life, if the actual killing of the cow does not cause the cow inordinate pain, and if the people consuming the flesh are made happy by eating it, then “utility” or overall happiness and preference satisfaction has been increased—which is the overarching aim of utilitarian ethics. In this instance, killing and eating the cow can even be seen as the ethical thing to do from a utilitarian perspective. But what about the cow itself, you might ask? Does its ongoing life not count for the cow itself ? Does its death not count? Despite Bentham’s explicit arguments for extending ethical consideration to animals, he rules out the need to be concerned with the actual death of animals. He maintains that animals are not generally aware of death and “have none of those long-protracted anticipations of future misery which we have.” He further notes that death by slaughter is often “speedier . . . and . . . less painful” than a natural death.4 Thus, according to Bentham, the actual killing of animals raises no serious ethical issues and might, if done quickly and painlessly, be ethically preferable. In short, killing is not so much the issue when it comes to ethical concern for animals—suffering is. Modern slaughter methods in factory farms do not always result in animals being killed in the manner described by Bentham; modern slaughter can be inefficient and often fails to produce a quick and painless death. These realities of modern slaughterhouses, coupled with the horrifically painful conditions under which most animals are raised on contemporary factory farms (conditions that Bentham could have barely envisioned), lead modernday utilitarians such as Singer to argue for the general abolition of mass-produced meat. There is simply no way to produce factoryfarmed flesh in mass amounts for billions of consumers without causing inordinate suffering. But the utilitarian argument for abolition here is contextual and not absolute. For most utilitarian

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philosophers, it remains the case that the mass killing of animals is not the real ethical dilemma because it is assumed that animals have no genuine relation to their own deaths.5

ANIMAL DEATH AND GRIEF These sorts of sentiments about animal death are not exclusive to utilitarian philosophers; they are common in much of the Western philosophical and intellectual tradition. It has commonly been assumed that human beings are the only entities who know that they will die, and that living and continued existence matter only to us. It follows from these assumptions that if animals have no understanding of death, and if we raise them respectfully and kill them relatively painlessly, then we have committed no ethical injustice. But has our self-interest in being allowed to kill animals with impunity led us to underestimate their sophistication and sensitivity regarding death? What would be the implications for our ideas about the killing of animals if they do, in fact, have some relation to their own deaths and the death of their kin? As a means of beginning to think through these questions, consider American crows. These birds have been observed by both laypersons and scientists to be engaging in what appear to be funerals for their conspecifics. When a dead crow is spotted and a call is issued, sometimes dozens and even hundreds of crows gather around—sometimes on the ground beside the body, sometimes perched at viewing distance in nearby trees—to observe the dead bird. Often the gathering begins with a considerable amount of loud squawking but typically ends in a slow, silent departure as the crows fly away. Scientists who study this phenomenon aren’t entirely sure what’s happening. Are the crows grieving? Are they

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reflecting on the dangers that led to the death of that particular bird? Whatever the point of the funeral ritual might be, it’s clear that the birds are highly sensitive to the death of their fellow crows and feel the need to mark it in some significant way.6 Crows are not the only species of animals that exhibit an acute sensitivity to death. Elephants provide some of the bestknown and best-documented examples of grieving, manifesting evident behavioral distress at the death of members of their herd. Elephants have been observed covering dead herd members with branches and other materials, and in some cases herds return to the site (sometimes for multiple days) of the skeletal remains of dead relatives to mourn and rub them. Grieving behaviors have been observed and studied in a number of other species, including dolphins, primates, and giraffes, with grieving behaviors ranging from individual isolation and depression to refusing food and mothers carrying around the remains of their young for days at a time. Although many animals do seem to be aware of death and mark it through various forms of grieving, not every species demonstrates these kinds of behaviors, and not every individual member of a given species behaves in an identical way. As is the case with human beings, relationships to death and grieving among animals are varied and complex. But it can be said with certainty that awareness of death or the marking of death through various rituals and behaviors is not exclusive to human beings. As with language and reason, the awareness of death no longer stands as a boundary that neatly divides human beings from animals. Barbara J. King, an anthropologist who is one of the world’s leading experts on grieving among animals, suggests that recognizing how sensitive many animals are to their own deaths and the deaths of others should give us pause regarding our current ways of killing and doing violence to animals. She encourages

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us to go beyond the classical utilitarian focus on the suffering of living animals to consider how animals are forced to face and undergo death (both their own and as well as their conspecifics). She argues that recognition of the depth of many animals’ relation to death not only changes how we see ourselves (leading us to downplay our supposed uniqueness in this matter) but also opens us up to new responsibilities with regard to animals. We are rapidly learning more about how many animals grieve, and King suggests that we ought to begin to think more carefully about the cows on factory farms who are forcibly and repeatedly separated from their calves, some of those calves taken to slaughter; about the whales and dolphins captured for consumption or entertainment theme parks, either slaughtered in sight of their families or separated from those families; about elephants or lions killed by poachers in East Africa or made to perform in American circuses; and about apes and monkeys kept in U.S. laboratories and forced to undergo invasive biomedical procedures or maternal-deprivation experiments, sometimes ending in death. The rippling effects of these traumas are extensive and may involve grief reactions in numerous animals even beyond the suffering of those individuals most directly targeted.7

Recognizing the extent and sources of animal grief need not, however, lead only to a sense of negative obligations regarding animals. Although avoiding killing animals is an essential step in developing more respectful relations, appreciating the ways in which animals grieve might also serve as a point of affirmative contact with our animal kin. Opening our minds to the love and grief experienced by other animals may become a source of comfort in our own lives.  .  .  .

88 Y Bentham’s Suffering Animal [This awareness] may become action when, on a local scale, we help our grieving animal companions and when, on a global scale, we work to reduce anthropogenic acts that bring grief to other animals in captivity and in the wild.8

The thinkers discussed in the following chapters provide some of the theoretical and practical tools necessary to undertake these kinds of individual and collective transformations—transformations that not only limit our violent treatment of animals but that affirmatively engender more respectful relations with them.

9 NIETZSCHE’S OVERHUMAN ANIMAL

THE DEATH OF THE H UMAN The greatest recent event in the West, Friedrich Nietzsche proclaims, is the death of God.1 With the phrase death of God Nietzsche refers to the loss of a specific notion of God, namely, the God associated with Western Christianity. This God, according to Nietzsche, has traditionally served as the secure foundation for human knowledge and values and provided human beings with an orientation in relation to the planet and cosmos. The death of God marks a shift in the plausibility conditions for believing in this conception of a deity. In Nietzsche’s words, in contemporary Western culture, “belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable”—which is to say, it is no longer tenable to subscribe to and live by the Judeo-Christian conception of God in an intellectually honest manner.2 The foundations for such beliefs have been undermined not just by advances in knowledge, science, and industry but also by the Christian values of honesty and truthfulness being turned back against the historical claims of the Christian narrative itself. At first glance, Nietzsche’s declaration about the death of God might appear to be yet another iteration of an atheist

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apologetics. But a more careful analysis reveals that Nietzsche has little interest in disproving false ideas about the existence of a supreme being and is far more interested in exploring the role that the notion of God has traditionally played in Western culture. Examining the notion of “God” from this more functional perspective, God refers to a way of determining who we are as human beings and how we fit into the larger scheme of things. This God ultimately provides us with guidance on how to be human—that is, guidance on what it means to live according to our unique human essence and how to find the broader purpose and meaning of our lives. If we understand God and religion as notions and institutions that fulfill this functional role, then the death of God does not refer so much to the death of a supreme being (according to Nietzsche, we now know there never was such a being) as to the death of the human. And if we can no longer believe human beings have a secure place, purpose, and calling within a divinely ordered cosmos and planet specially tailored to human habitation, then we might wonder, Who are we? Here the suspicion begins to arise that human beings are fundamentally no different from other earth-bound animals, and Quoholet’s ancient wisdom strikes us with a new force: “For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.”3 Nietzsche believes that individuals who appreciate the full stakes and significance of the death of God and the death of the human are prone to share this sensibility that “all is vanity”— which is to say, that life is meaningless and pointless—and hence will tend to become both nihilistic and pessimistic. Nietzsche understands nihilism to be the condition under which those

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things that were once thought to be of ultimate value lose their value. Pessimism is the concomitant notion that because life is stripped of the value and meaning we thought it contained, existence is ultimately pointless. Thus, when the myriad difficulties of existence (pain, suffering, death, and so on) arise as they inevitably do, the pessimist draws the conclusion that existence as such is not worth it, that the best thing is “never to have been born,” and the next best is to “go back as quickly as possible” to nonexistence (as the Chorus in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus would have it).4 Nietzsche accepts the basic premise of nihilism—the idea that traditional values have lost their value—but he sees such nihilism as a transitional stage that need not necessarily lead to or remain mired in pessimism.5 One could, for example, accept that our previous stories about the value of life are no longer tenable without giving up altogether on the project of seeking meaning and value in life. In fact, the bulk of Nietzsche’s writings are dedicated to conceiving and articulating the rudiments of an alternative postnihilistic and antipessimistic way of thinking and living. It is precisely at this juncture that we should place Nietzsche’s various reflections on the Übermensch (Overhuman), animals, and the earth. These themes form the core elements of Nietzsche’s attempt to articulate a new set of values and a new vision for human life in the face of the challenges posed by the nihilism and pessimism associated with the death of the human.

OVERCOMING OURSELVES One of the first steps necessary for accomplishing these aims is to reassess the human-animal distinction that has structured so much of Western intellectual and practical life. According to

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Nietzsche, the Western tradition’s tendency to posit an absolute break between the human being and the animal at the ontological level is a delusional gesture.6 Nietzsche insists on an entirely naturalistic account of human existence and maintains a broadly Darwinian stance on human origins (despite his differences from Darwin on finer matters of philosophical import). For Nietzsche, human beings are but one species among numerous animal species, all belonging on the same level of perfection.7 At the same time, Nietzsche is not content with the biologistic gesture of reducing human beings to their animal origins. He believes it is also necessary to invert the traditional binary and hierarchy that grants human beings rank, a move that allows him to portray human beings as different from other animals in being the weakest, most vulnerable, and most endangered of earthly creatures. For Nietzsche, we must learn to see what we take to be our superlative distinctions (language, reason, morality, and so on) as in fact being symptomatic of our weakness and vulnerability, as defensive weapons we have developed to ensure our herd survival in a world that we experience as hostile to our existence.8 It is only by undergoing this sort of humiliating inversion in relation to animals at the level of ontology and value that we can then try to work our way toward a genuinely lifeaffirming and pro-nature set of values. Although Nietzsche often writes about these issues in universal terms, as if he is addressing all of humanity, it becomes evident on closer analysis that his remarks are highly contextualized and directed specifically toward those human beings who have been formed and educated in the context of late Western cultures. It is primarily we (that is, those of us who belong to this heritage and tradition) who must come to grips with our anti-animal and anti-nature tendencies, with the habits and

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institutions that have encouraged us to denigrate the earth and our planetary kin—for not all human cultural traditions share this heritage. According to Nietzsche, we “good Europeans” are the heirs of millennia of formative practices that have shaped us to become certain kinds of human beings; and it is we who have to dig our way out of the dangerous dead end toward which we are heading (that dead end being a culture dominated by anti-nature, anti-animal, and pessimistic sentiments). There is no way for us simply to walk away from our current modes of individual and collective subjectivity; we cannot return or flee to some extracultural reality and recover a pure, uncontaminated animality or natural existence. Instead, we must rebuild and retrain ourselves, individually and collectively, with the means at our disposal. In so doing, we will be working simultaneously with and against our inheritance in order ultimately to overcome who we are—we who are “all-too-human” (to borrow a phrase from one of Nietzsche’s books). It is in view of this task of overcoming our traditional image of what it means to be human that Nietzsche speaks of the Übermensch, or Overhuman. To become Overhuman is effectively to overcome the limitations and life-denying tendencies of our traditional notions of humanity; it is to become something simultaneously other-than-human and more-than-human. It entails a fundamental transformation in how we conceive of ourselves and our relationship with and to the world. Nietzsche does not, of course, believe that in becoming Overhuman it is necessary literally to change species. From a strictly biological perspective, the Overhuman is a plain member of Homo sapiens; but in developing and adopting a new ideal for human and planetary life, these rare, übermenschlich individuals and groups enable human beings as a whole to become something that was previously beyond their horizon.

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RENATURALIZING H UMANIT Y To accomplish this Overhuman and posthuman shift in thinking and living, Nietzsche argues that it is necessary to undertake a joint de-deification of nature and naturalization of humanity. With the de-deification of nature, Nietzsche has in mind the task of developing an understanding of the natural world as devoid of the kind of providential organization and oversight that our religious tradition has encouraged us to find there. In contrast to this kind of deified and anthropomorphized nature, Nietzsche develops a vision of the world as being “in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.”9 Nietzsche’s vision of nature goes beyond the reductive, mechanistic physics of modernity to affirm nature in all of its excess, strangeness, richness, and monstrosity. When Nietzsche call for the naturalization of humanity, he aims to reintegrate human beings into this vision of a chaotic, monstrous nature. By fully integrating human beings into a monstrous nature, Nietzsche is able to challenge the notion that human beings are instantiations of some sort of distinct, different substance with special attributes (linguistic, rational, and so on), cut off from other animals and the natural world. Instead, Nietzsche argues there is but one monstrous nature, and human beings belong wholly and entirely to and within it.10 Intellectual recognition of the profound overlap between human, animal, and more-than-human beings at the ontological level is, however, but one component of what Nietzsche believes is necessary for overcoming nihilism and pessimism. We must also strive to put these ideas into practice, to transform our individual and collective subjectivities into a joyful affirmation of our newfound belonging to monstrous nature. In other words, for

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human beings to flourish (and not simply to survive or endure), Nietzsche believes we must find ways to joyfully and passionately engage with the inhuman and more-than-human energies that pervade nature and culture. Following the insights of the ancient Cynics (see chapter 3), Nietzsche suggests that we must undergo an askēsis, a training or discipline that helps us to rebuild ourselves starting from where we currently find ourselves; and we must do so in such a way that we come to desire above all else the possibility of experimenting with the energies, forces, and relationships that engender mutual flourishing.11 In view of animals specifically, we might wonder: What would it be like to study the animal world with this aim in mind—that is, with the aim of engaging, experimenting, and creating with and alongside the animal world in such a way that both human and animal life flourish? What would it be like to put into practice the kind of “gay science,” or joyful learning, to which Nietzsche’s work calls us?

GAY ANIMAL SCIENCE I wish to propose a rather unorthodox candidate for a “gay scientist” of animals who works in a Nietzschean vein, the contemporary ethologist Joe Hutto. Hutto is not a disciple of Nietzsche in any straightforward sense (his heritage being more directly traceable to animal scientists such as Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Konrad Lorenz), but his ethological projects are animated by precisely the kind of passions and affects that Nietzsche believes are essential for flourishing and living a worthwhile life.12 One of Hutto’s more remarkable projects is his seven-year experiment in living with a herd of wild mule deer. If you have never had the opportunity to see Touching the Wild, Hutto’s documentary

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account of this long-term experiment in building community with deer, I urge you to do so.13 In this film, some interactions between Hutto and the herd are utterly astonishing. Some of the deer feed directly from his hand, others visit him for company and affection, and they all generally share their daily lives, joys, and sufferings with him. Hutto is successful in building community with the deer due in large part to his training as an ethologist. Rather than studying and interacting with caged animals in lab settings (as many animal scientists do), Hutto tries to meet and observe the deer on their own terms and on their own terrain. Furthermore, he studies the deer not to master them and use them toward his own ends but to explore what else he and they might become in establishing a respectful, long-term relationship. This kind of deep ethological disposition, based on joyful learning and a desire for experimentation with the more-than-human world, is profoundly Nietzschean in spirit.14 In line with the kind of transformative askēsis Nietzsche envisions, Hutto’s ethological project leads to a profound transformation at the levels of his sense of self, his conception of the social bond, and his relationship to nature. As his everyday habits and rhythms come increasingly into alignment with the herd, his sense of self dramatically changes, shifting from the alltoo-human concerns around which most of us are oriented and toward more deer-relevant concerns. He learns to attend to the sorts of things that occupy the deer: the terrain, predators, the weather, the seasonal changes that orient the deer’s lives, and so on.15 As he spends more time embedded in the herd, his sense of who his kin and neighbors are starts to shift. Both Hutto and the deer come bit by bit to see him as a full member of the herd, and they learn to rely upon each other and negotiate the world in common. In this vein, Hutto (who is himself a hunter)

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comes to question the practice of deer hunting, shifting perspective from the side of the human hunter to the side of the deer, and considers how the effects of the death of a single deer ripple through the collective herd. As Hutto watches the herd struggle to survive in a landscape fragmented by roads, urban development, and climatic changes, he clearly sees that the fate of the deer is inextricably linked with the fate of the land. To maintain relations with the deer, Hutto must also learn to maintain more thoughtful relations with the land and encourage others to do so as well. In brief, Hutto realizes that the flourishing of both deer and human beings entails remaining true and “faithful to the earth,” to echo the words that Nietzsche places in his fictional character Zarathustra’s mouth.16 Hutto’s deep ethological project with the deer does not conclude in the kind of facile, happy ending we have come to expect from contemporary popular films and literature. Sharing the daily difficulties of the deer’s existence (disease, predation, being killed by hunters, and so on) ends up overwhelming Hutto. For his own psychic integrity, he ultimately decides he must distance himself from the herd to some extent. Many of us who have developed relationships with wild animals in the context of widespread ecological degradation and mass extinction characteristic of the contemporary world might share with Hutto the same sense of being overwhelmed by animal suffering. Indeed, such fraught relationships might lead to a sort of “animal” nihilism and pessimism similar to the sort of postreligious nihilism and pessimism Nietzsche diagnosed in his own age. It is in this context of learning to live, grieve, and die with animals in our increasingly crowded world that Nietzsche’s philosophy might gain newfound relevance. The task of philosophy, as Nietzsche understands it, is to help us work with and through the difficulties of existence in order to flourish and build

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a worthwhile way of life. As Nietzsche knew, such flourishing is no mean feat. Hutto’s experiment with the deer highlights the fact that there will undoubtedly be times when, in the process of rebuilding relations with the animal world, we will be forced for various reasons to withdraw from those relations. Furthermore, given the negative consequences of many human interactions with wildlife, we will have to recognize at the outset of such experiments that not all forms of relation and contact with animals are worth preserving. But as we take up the task of reconstituting relations with animals in a more respectful and sustainable manner, we might follow Hutto’s lead and learn to see experiments in mutual flourishing as an instantiation of the kind of good life so many philosophers have sought—that is, we might come to see that reconstituting relations with our animal kin is a deeply worthwhile way of life, a way of discovering meaning and value anew in a world where traditional anthropocentric attempts to do so have floundered and ultimately failed to deliver. To be sure, such experiments in living well will not eliminate the difficulties of existence, but dealing with those difficulties in view of seeking to promote our mutual flourishing might well be a significant part of the remedy for our contemporary pessimism and nihilism.

10 DERRIDA’S CAT

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t is a rare occurrence for an internationally renowned philosopher to give a public talk on the topic of being seen naked. It is even rarer for such a philosopher to talk about being seen naked by an animal. Nevertheless, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) did just that at the height of his philosophical powers and at a scholarly conference dedicated to his work. In an epic, sprawling, ten-hour session, Derrida delivered a paper that has come to serve as the focus for a significant amount of work done in contemporary animal philosophy and animal studies. At the heart of this piece, which he titled (in a play on Descartes’s famous statement “I think therefore I am”) The Animal That Therefore I Am, lies Derrida’s famous “cat encounter” in which his cat catches him off guard and sees him naked. To understand why such a seemingly mundane interaction would generate an entire book-length essay on Derrida’s part and countless responses to his text, we need to examine the encounter in more detail.

NUDIT Y AND SHAME Derrida explains that the face-to-face encounter with his cat happens frequently when he goes to take a shower. He walks

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into the bathroom, and the cat follows him. But she wants to leave the bathroom again as soon as she sees him naked: “It is a scene that is repeated every morning. The pussycat follows me when I wake up, into the bathroom, asking for her breakfast, but she demands to leave that said bathroom as soon as it (or she) sees me naked, ready for everything and resolved to make her wait.”1 Caught naked by the gaze of the cat, Derrida says he initially feels a blush of shame and wants to cover up. But then he wonders: Why should I feel shame? Do cats even recognize nudity? Why is this encounter loaded with such significance for Derrida? For starters, the scenario is important because Derrida sees himself being seen (and seen naked, no less) by another animal. This implies that the cat is there “first,” prior to his gaze, catching him off guard; it also means that this animal has its own point of view. Encounters with animals who have their own perspectives have, according to Derrida, rarely been remarked upon in the history of philosophy. It is much more common that animals have been approached as objects of knowledge, either as “marvelous” animals (as with Aristotle in chapter 2) or as “machines” deprived of subjectivity (as with Descartes in chapter 6). In insisting on the animal’s gaze being there before his own, Derrida is trying to contest a long history of philosophical reflection that fails to respect (a term that carries the etymological sense of “looking back at” another who is already looking at you) animal others.2 He is careful not to claim that he knows “what it is like to be a cat,”3 but he does insist that the cat has something of its own unique perspective: “It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever given me more food for thinking through this absolute alterity [that is, otherness] . . . than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.”4

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If we follow this line of thought and conceive of this cat as a unique, singular being with its own point of view, then “she” cannot ultimately be reduced to any general categories.5 It is futile to try to reduce this unique Other to such categories as “cat” or “animal” because these categories function to bring singular beings within the confines of a common group or species. In brief, if our thinking were to begin from respect for the singular point of view of the “animal” Other facing us, we would need to rethink who this particular animal is, and more broadly who and what animals are, and ultimately how what we call “human beings” and “animals” relate. Also important for Derrida is how his cat’s seeming recognition of nudity disrupts traditional ideas about what separates human beings from animals. One of the classical dividing lines between human beings and animals is our supposedly unique recognition of nudity (hence, our need to clothe ourselves, and our sense of shame over being naked—an affect that no other animal is thought to share, or so the story goes). But if his cat does, in fact, sense the difference between being clothed and being naked (which, again, seems to be the case, although Derrida can never be entirely sure what his cat is thinking or seeing), then we are forced to ask ourselves whether the dividing line between human beings and animals is as assured as we often take it to be. Nudity is, of course, but one criterion that has been used to attempt definitively to separate human life from animal life. As seen in previous chapters, philosophers have suggested other criteria, ranging from language to reason to moral agency to an awareness of death. Whatever specific criterion is used, the goal of these approaches is almost always to establish a binary opposition between human and animal that allows us to rest assured about our uniqueness. One of the main goals of Derrida’s writings on animals is to call into question these kinds of binary

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accounts of human uniqueness and to help us rethink humananimal differences in a more complex and subtle manner.

DECONSTRUCTING THE H UMAN-ANIMAL BINARY Derrida’s work is perhaps best known for its “deconstruction” of binary oppositions (such as male/female, speech/writing, presence/absence, human/animal), a project that is sometimes thought to entail the complete dissolution of binary thinking. But Derrida’s approach is far more subtle than such a caricature would lead us to believe, and deconstruction should never be confused with the negative project of demolition or dissolution. The point of critically working through binary oppositions for Derrida is to show that they carve up reality in ways that cover over subtle but important differences and that reinforce questionable value schemas. In terms of the human-animal binary, Derrida would have us note first that to speak in terms of humans as constituting a single set (“The Human”) and as animals constituting another, completely different set (“The Animal”) is overly reductive. When we essentialize (or think in terms of things sharing a common essence) in this manner, we tend to downplay the differences within a given group. Rather than attending to the wide variety of singular, unique individuals and ways of life we find among human beings, we are instead on the lookout only for a common human nature. And rather than noticing the bewildering and innumerable species of animals and individual animals that populate the planet, under the influence of an essentializing lens we try to reduce those rich differences down to a common “animality.” Such reductive, binary thinking also tends to make

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us think that the difference between human beings and animals can be found along a single, sharp line. We find ourselves inquiring after the single criterion or single set of differences that can definitively distinguish human from animal. Derrida’s approach to thinking about human beings and animals encourages us to reject this kind of oppositional ontological framework. Furthermore, it is clear that the opposition between human and animal is hardly a neutral, uninterested description of reality—it is deeply value-laden. As Derrida repeatedly underscores, binary oppositions are often coupled with a hierarchical value schema in which one side of an opposition is given greater value than the opposing side. With regard to the human-animal distinction, animals are often given lower ethical status or sometimes no ethical standing at all (a gesture we have seen played out in different ways by Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant). Derrida’s work also sets out to question this kind of hierarchical value schema—and rightly so. Even if one could determine a sharp difference between human beings and animals, it is not at all clear that any such difference justifies the preferential treatment of human beings over animals or the exclusions of animals from ethical consideration.

SINGULAR-PLURAL ANIMALS Derrida’s work provides crucial insights into the ways in which binary and hierarchical thinking have been operative in Western culture, and it is this perspective that is in large part responsible for his work being an important reference in contemporary animal studies and animal philosophy. If we accept Derrida’s point that the traditional human-animal distinction and its associated value schemas are inadequate, we are immediately confronted

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with the question of what other view(s) we might adopt. It is one thing to critique the prevailing view; it is quite another to construct a viable alternative. Here, too, Derrida’s work provides us with an interesting path to pursue; by traveling this path, we can make good on the claim that Derrida’s deconstruction is not simply a critical, dismantling project but is also an affirmative way of thinking, one that seeks to provide us with tools for experiments in thinking and living differently. Derrida suggests abandoning the traditional project of trying to delimit a single difference between human beings and animals and admitting that traditional markers of human uniqueness do not hold in the way we might once have believed. But does this mean we should disregard all differences between humans and animals and simply collapse human beings and animals into a single set? Derrida answers this question in forcefully negative terms. He is particularly concerned to reject any such homogenizing gesture, which he tends to associate with reductive evolutionary-biological paradigms. Ultimately, Derrida is less interested in uncovering a shared identity between human beings and all animals (say, in terms of the capacity for language, culture, consciousness, and so on) and more interested in noting the proliferation and multiplication of differences we find on both sides of the traditional human-animal opposition. This is consistent with his attention to singularity and his taste for plurality. Ultimately, Derrida is suggesting we place a moratorium on such essentializing concepts as “The Animal” and move instead toward thinking about animals in their irreducible plurality and singularity. We have to envisage the existence of “living creatures,” whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity. . . . The confusion of

Derrida’s Cat Z 105 all nonhuman living creatures within the general and common category of the animal is not simply a sin against rigorous thinking, vigilance, lucidity, or empirical authority, it is also a crime. Not a crime against animality, precisely, but a crime of the first order . . . against animals. Do we consent to presume that every murder, every transgression of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” concerns only man . . . and that, in sum, there are crimes only “against humanity”?6

RETHINKING ANIMAL “SUFFERING” What might be the ethical implications of adopting this way of understanding the human-animal distinction? Chiefly, we would come to see our ethical responsibilities as grounded in relationships with singular, unique animals rather than with abstract groups. Following the logic of Derrida’s cat encounter, ethics would be seen as arising in a face-to-face encounter between two singularities who retain something of their own interiority—that is, something of their own inner subjective lives, lives that remain inaccessible to others. For Derrida, the fact that I don’t have full and transparent access to the Other (or my own self, for that matter) is key to understanding the ethical imperative of respect. My responsibility to the Other can never be enacted with full assurance or confidence precisely because I can never fully understand the Other’s perspective. Therefore, responsibility will always be a matter of discerning as best as one is able how to respond to Others, but such discernment proceeds from full cognizance of one’s finitude and limitations in this regard. Refining this notion of finitude, we arrive at another key idea from Derrida’s work on human-animal relations. To be finite is

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to be the kind of being with limits, both in terms of how long one lives (finite beings are mortal) and in terms of capacities (finite beings are limited in their powers). To be finite entails not being fully in control of what comes one’s way: one undergoes, one “suffers” both the difficulties and the wonders of existence. It is with this sense of suffering in mind that Derrida reads Bentham’s famous question concerning animals: “Can they suffer?” (see chapter 8). For Derrida, Bentham’s question points us back behind the kind of pains and sufferings we can see and quantify to the more basic fact of embodied, finite existence. This state of embodied finitude is something we share with animals, not in the terms of a shared capacity or ability but as an incapacity or inability fully to guard or fully to control what comes our way. Finitude does not render us—all human beings and all animals—the same, despite its being shared among us. Paradoxically, this shared condition is what makes each of us irreducibly singular and unique. My finite opening onto the world is not yours, and yours is not mine; similarly, any given animal’s opening onto the world is not fully within my purview and vice versa. Given this shared condition of finitude, human beings know something of what it’s like to be subjected to the sort of useless suffering many animals regularly encounter.7 This is the kind of suffering that cannot be yoked to a meaningful project or to some larger goal; it is suffering that has no apparent sense and cannot be redeemed. It is precisely this kind of suffering that animal rights activists are calling to our attention with regard to factory-farmed animals and animals who undergo painful, invasive experiments. These activists try to arouse our sense of pity for animal suffering and call on us to intervene where we are able in order to stop it. Derrida sees such acts of pity as a kind of compassion, a suffering with animals

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that forms the very heart of animal ethics. Even though Derrida raises issues with some of the contradictions at work among animal rights activists—such as the fact that animal rights discourse makes use of a concept (namely, rights) that has been linked to the very human exceptionalism it seeks to challenge—he is generally sympathetic to their cause and places himself on the side of those who wish to extend pity and compassion to animals against those who try to deny we have such responsibilities. Derrida goes so far as to say that this struggle or “war” concerning pity is one of the central issues of our present age.8 We are all called, he says, to decide where we stand in this war. Will we join forces with those who seek to increase and extend pity and compassion to our animal fellows, or will we side with the status quo that tries to deny our obligations to, and defend violence against, animals? Whatever side we choose, it is no longer possible for us to remain neutral in this clash of forces. Our actions and inactions feed into the lives and deaths of animals in countless ways, and we can no longer shirk the responsibility to figure out where we stand in this regard. We need not be naïve about the uneven nature of the war concerning pity. Derrida himself acknowledges that the side on which he finds himself (namely, the side of those who seek to extend more compassion to animals) is presently weaker and less powerful than the status quo forces that impose violence on animals. But despite this political inequality, the forces for increased compassion do not lose every battle they wage. Indeed, in recent years animal rights and animal liberation movements have had some astonishing successes. Let’s look at one highprofile battle in this war: the battle over using killer whales for entertainment purposes at marine parks as explored in the film Blackfish.

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BL ACKFISH , OR MAXIMUM RESPECT FOR ANIMAL OTHERS When you look into [a killer whale’s] eyes, you know somebody is home, somebody is looking back. —Former Sea World trainer, Jeffrey Ventre

Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s film Blackfish tells the heart-wrenching story of the life of Tilikum and the death of Dawn Brancheau. Tilikum was a male killer whale who was captured in the wild and sent to work at Sealand in British Columbia before being purchased by and transferred to Sea World Orlando. Brancheau was one of Tilikum’s trainers at Sea World whom Tilikum eventually killed. The film is ostensibly about Sea World’s legal responsibility for the death of Brancheau, but it raises profound questions about the nature of keeping animals captive for human entertainment. The film takes viewers on an emotional journey behind the scenes of Sea World’s killer whale shows to explore the questionable practices that make such shows possible. We see how calves (baby whales) are captured in the wild and how longstanding family relations are disrupted in the process; the recurrent fights and tensions that whales in captivity have with one another; the limited areas in which the whales live and the psychological frustration this causes them; and animals treated like instruments for breeding, with their semen and reproductive organs viewed solely as commodities. Most of all, we see how the many psychological and physical traumas associated with using killer whales for entertainment are downplayed or simply covered over by those who have a vested financial interest in making animal entertainment appear to be a wholesome and worthwhile institution.

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As one of the former whale trainers in the film notes, the biggest concern with such parks is that they “normalize” this kind of commodified and objectified relationship with killer whales— animals who are particularly ill-suited to be entertainment animals and who suffer horribly when fulfilling that role. Killer whales are obviously huge (and hugely lucrative) attractions for these parks, but we should pause to consider why this is so. For many of us, killer whales are astonishing creatures, in terms of both their sheer size and their impressive physical and cognitive abilities. Seeing these animals is, for many people, a deeply spiritual experience, a reminder that the world contains riches that we can never fully comprehend. It is perhaps understandable to want to capture that richness so that we can see it and encounter it on demand; but to do so is to deprive the whales of an essential part of what makes them so remarkable—namely, their ability to surprise us, to be more than we expect them to be or train them to be. Seeing these animals living life in the wild, open ocean reminds us that they belong to worlds that exceed our purview. We will never know fully what it is like to be a whale, and that inaccessibility is something we might, following Derrida, learn to respect and even cherish. As whale trainer Jeffrey Ventre notes, “When you look into [a whale’s] eyes, you know somebody is home, somebody is looking back.” This is precisely the point that Derrida’s cat encounter is trying to drive home to us: animals are there before us, with their own perspectives, their own worlds, and their own relations. To respect the singularity of these animals, to respect the singularity of the killer whale we call Tilikum, would mean not viewing these individuals as instruments to be trained for our pleasure but as beings toward and with whom we might share compassion. In an interview given toward the end of his life, Derrida talked about the ethical obligation of moving toward “maximum

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respect” for animals.9 Such respect, he suggests, is the ultimate legal and political aim of advocates and activists who have pity and compassion for animals. Blackfish asks the viewer to consider whether keeping killer whales captive for the purposes of entertainment is something that we as a society ought to continue. Is this the most compassionate, most respectful way of treating these animals? And if our goal is to increase concern for animal welfare (as many of the defenders of marine parks maintain is the reason for the existence of such parks), is keeping whales captive really the best way to accomplish that goal? For the moment, the battle over using whales for entertainment at Sea World seems to have been won (at least partially) by those pushing for increased compassion and maximum respect. Sea World received considerable public pushback over its killer whale shows due in large part to responses to Blackfish. The park has pledged to stop breeding killer whales in the future and plans to develop different ways to educate the public about whales and their welfare. Such changes are, to be sure, a long way away from showing genuine respect for killer whales (the whales Sea World currently has are still being held captive), but they do signal that the kind of ethical transformation Derrida believed was underway is in fact occurring to some extent. Whether we continue in the direction of maximal respect for killer whales and other animals depends on the ongoing efforts of activists and the sentiments of the broader public.

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ANIMALS AND WOMEN In her provocatively titled book, The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams (1951–) argues that violence against animals is not a stand-alone issue but is closely connected to the violent treatment of women.1 In previous chapters, I have laid the groundwork to some extent to appreciate the force of this claim. In particular, I have discussed how the traditional division drawn between human and animal has often coincided with the marginalization of certain groups of human beings. But unlike many other animal philosophers and theorists who are content merely to note such connections, Adams places them in the foreground of her analysis, especially with relation to gender and sexual difference. Adams examines the connections between violence against animals and women through the concept of the absent referent. This term is intended to highlight the structures and processes that deprive individual beings (referents) of their unique subjectivity (living presence). Consider first how animals are subjected to these machinations. According to Adams, animals become absent referents in an exemplary way in the production of meat for human consumption. By the time most consumers

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encounter animal flesh in the grocery store or on their plates at mealtime, the individual animal who gave its life for that meat has been rendered effectively absent. Thus, instead of interacting with living, present animals who have unique personalities and subjectivities, industrial processes of meat production and consumption offer consumers already butchered, dismembered chunks of flesh, now renamed as “steak,” “hamburger,” “veal,” “pork chop,” and so on. Adams argues that this dual process of butchering and renaming is at the heart of turning living animals into absent referents, and it forms the core of the structural and practical means whereby animals are removed from ethical and political consideration in advanced industrial societies. Once we fail to see animals as integrated subjects and instead reduce them to merely consumable parts, the path is cleared for killing and consuming them unreflectively and with impunity. Adams maintains that the concept of the absent referent illuminates similar processes of desingularization in interhuman relations—especially in the domain of gender and sexual relations. Along these lines, she suggests that women and animals should be understood as overlapping absent referents in contemporary patriarchal-industrial cultures. The key point here is that women, too, are often deprived of their uniqueness, singularity, and subjectivity by the dominant culture and thus suffer similar (but not identical) forms of violence. Through ideological means (media, pornography, marketing, and so on), women’s bodies are often fragmented and objectified, focusing the viewer on women’s body parts as objects to be visually consumed rather than on the integrated, individual woman. Adams notes that such processes of objectifying and fragmenting women frequently borrow from language and imagery used to describe and denigrate animals. Women’s sexualized body parts are described using animal terms, and women are

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sometimes classified as being closer in nature to animals. Adams describes how these processes form a kind of feedback loop that rebounds on animals, leading to animals being sexualized and feminized. In marketing and advertising animal flesh and byproducts, animals are sometimes portrayed as desiring their consumption or seducing the consumer to eat them. She captures this point by suggesting that “in a patriarchal, meat-eating world, animals are feminized and sexualized; women are animalized.”2 The concept of the absent referent also implies, conversely, that some beings are allowed to maintain their “presence,” their individuality and integrity. In patriarchal, meat-eating societies, the quintessential example of such a subject is the human male. Human males are typically seen as full subjects who interact with various kinds of objects that fall short of the status of being full persons.3 If it is the case that both animals and women are often thought to belong to this class of beings who are denied full subjectivity, then there are good reasons for considering and contesting their oppression jointly rather than separately. Thus, for Adams, feminists who are concerned with injustices surrounding gender and sexual difference should be informed about and supportive of arguments in defense of animals. Similarly, pro-animal advocates should be interested in and in solidarity with feminist politics and feminist analyses of oppression. The two struggles, although not identical, are contesting logics and power structures that overlap, interlock, and mutually reinforce each other.

INTERSECTIONALIT Y The links posited by Adams between the oppression of women and animals are not meant to indicate some deep, essential bond between femininity and animality, as if women are somehow

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closer to animals by nature. Rather, the overlapping nature of the oppression of women and animals is a contingent, historical observation about the nature of exploitation in contemporary, patriarchal, meat-eating societies. The concept of the absent referent is not intended to denote a timeless and universal fact about human cultures but rather aims to uncover a certain historical logic of oppression that subhumanizes animals and dehumanizes women (and other marginalized groups) in relatively distinct but importantly interconnected ways. Contemporary social justice activists and theorists use the term intersectional to describe these sorts of overlapping injustices and discriminatory practices. Kimberlé Crenshaw is often credited with popularizing the notion of intersectionality, which she and other womanist theorists and activists first used to indicate the interconnected forms of violence and oppression that typically characterize the lives of impoverished women of color.4 More recently, activists from a number of fields have borrowed the notion of intersectionality to explore additional, interrelated axes of oppression and violence. Adams’s work is an early example of this kind of broadened intersectional approach insofar as it seeks to demonstrate how power and violence circulate and interconnect through and across human and more-than-human registers. Adams focuses primarily on animals and gender/sexual difference; however, recent trends in animal philosophy and animal studies have led to the exploration of a wide variety of additional intersections. Next I consider a handful of the more important and influential trends along these lines.5

TAYLOR’S LOBSTER (ON DISABILIT Y ) One particularly instructive and important site for understanding how the logic of anthropocentrism intersects among animals

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and marginalized human beings is in the domain of disability. Sunaura Taylor, a writer and activist with arthrogryposis, has spent much of her life reflecting on how the dominant culture aligns animals and people with disabilities in order to denigrate both groups. Taylor’s arthrogryposis causes severe contractions in her joints and weakens her muscles, which in turn has curved her limbs and affected her posture. Due to her condition, she has been called (usually out of cruelty) various animals names and compared to many animals, ranging from monkeys and dogs to chickens and penguins.6 In her writings and paintings, she explores these troubled connections and reflects on the deeper significance of the similarities between human and animal bodies. In one striking piece of art, Lobster Girl, Taylor employs a triptych of images illustrating the effects of hemimelia in the hand (a condition that causes the hand and fingers to split), placing a sketch and an X-ray of the condition in a human hand alongside a crying girl who has lobster claws for hands. The artwork has the effect of both highlighting the points of overlap between the affected hand and lobster claws and illustrating the pain caused by treating people with disabilities as “deviants” and “freaks.”7 Although animal comparisons and names have often been used by others to mock Taylor’s appearance, she does not automatically reject being aligned with animals. She is aware that our initial impulse might be to assume that all such comparisons between human beings and animals are inherently degrading and, hence, should be categorically refused. She suggests, instead, that rejecting resemblances between human beings (disabled or not) and animals (disabled or not) at the visual or ontological levels is not an adequate response to the problems involved in making such comparisons. Emphasizing human and animal similarities can only be taken to be inherently insulting, she suggests, if we accept the logic of anthropocentrism and assume that

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animals are in fact radically different from and have lower worth than so-called “normal” human beings. Taylor maintains that it does little good to seek respect for marginalized human beings by insisting on a complete separation of humans from animals that leaves traditional attitudes toward animals unchanged. Such a gesture only deepens anthropocentrism, which in turn creates the conditions for further exploitation of animals and other marginalized groups of human beings. What, then, should be the response to such comparisons? Taylor believes that human beings (even people with disabilities) must risk openly affirming and embracing their animality. She is, of course, cognizant that in recommending this course of action for people with disabilities she is defending a difficult and seemingly paradoxical position. Animalization and dehumanization have unquestionably issued in painful practices of marginalization and terrible acts of violence directed at people with disabilities; thus, we can surely understand why some disability advocates wish to insist on the properly human dignity of people with disabilities as a means to prevent further instances of such violence. While appreciative of the force of this objection, Taylor maintains that the risk of affirming human animality needs to be assumed for at least two reasons. On one hand, as a pro-animal activist, Taylor refuses the notion that the extension of ethical respect is a zero-sum game in which human beings receive ethical consideration only if animals are excluded from consideration. Given that the lives of billions of animals are at stake on this terrain, it does not suffice simply to adopt a strategy that ensures the ethical standing of people with disabilities at the continuing expense of animals.8 On the other hand, Taylor believes something ethically important is lost when human beings refuse to see themselves as animals. Part of the reason animal insults

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are used to denigrate people with disabilities is because animals are often associated with being vulnerable to and dependent on others. To be human is, by contrast, often tacitly associated with thick notions of independence and autonomy. The condition of being disabled in some instances points toward a kind of animal vulnerability and dependence among human beings that many of us wish to disavow.9 Taylor would have us ask: What sort of ethics might emerge if we were to affirm and embrace our vulnerability and interdependence as being basic to the human condition and not just as a contingent side effect of disability? Such an ethics need not entirely deny the importance of the ideals of autonomy and independence, but it would stress that any such individual achievements are premised on our persisting, embodied vulnerability—a condition we share with and that inextricably ties us to our animal kin.

BOISSERON’S AFRO-DOG (ON RACE) The intersection between animals and race has also become an important issue in animal studies and animal philosophy. This is a particularly fraught topic to broach, especially with regard to the connections between the enslavement of Blacks and the abuse of animals. In one of the foundational texts of modern animal ethics, Jeremy Bentham compares the fate of animals in his day with that of slaves (see chapter 8). Just as slaves were beginning to achieve liberation in certain countries at that time, Bentham looked forward to the day when animals might also be granted the status of free beings. Following the widespread abolition of legal slavery across much of the globe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pro-animal advocates have, following Bentham, frequently employed struggles against

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slavery as a model for animal liberation. In the process, these advocates have sometimes made comparisons of the techniques and violence jointly employed against Black slaves and animals (such as forced labor, forced breeding, and violent means of confinement and punishment). “Dreaded comparisons” of this sort are often then invoked to make the argument that just as the violent enslavement of Blacks constitutes a clear moral offense the same is true of the enslavement and mistreatment of animals.10 Such comparisons and analogies between animals and Blacks have received considerable pushback from many Black studies and social justice scholars and activists. Even figures from these fields who consider themselves pro-animal advocates have chafed at the ways in which these comparisons have sometimes been used by philosophers and activist groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Bénédicte Boisseron, a critical race and animal studies theorist, makes the important point that analyses of the intersection between racial injustice suffered by Blacks on one hand and anti-animal violence on the other can be made in more or less thoughtful and respectful ways.11 For instance, animal advocates who demonstrate a sustained, long-term interest in and commitment to eradicating racial injustice will likely be taken more seriously when raising the issue of intersections between racism and animal violence than those who use such connections simply to illustrate a point. Furthermore, pro-animal advocates who are well informed about racism would tend to avoid the presumption (common in some mainstream animal advocacy campaigns) that slavery and racial injustice are largely a thing of the past or maintain that discrimination against animals is the last remaining form of socially acceptable prejudice. People of color generally, and Blacks in particular, continue to suffer from horrible forms of

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individual and structural racism (especially where I live in the United States). It is particularly egregious for animal advocates to act as if Blacks can be written into some kind of progressive liberation narrative that treats racial injustice as something that belongs to a distant past. What is needed in our contemporary context, Boisseron suggests, is a more subtle and refined analysis of the relationships between race and animals that acknowledges the uneven effects of anthropocentrism. Consider, for instance, the paradoxical ways in which raced bodies are rendered not merely metaphorical but literal and edible absent referents in the use of dogs in policing. In tracking runaway slaves, suppressing violent resistance, and policing minority populations, dogs have been and continue to be used by the white ruling class to control Black bodies; and such control is enacted by reducing Black bodies to the class of entities who can be wounded and consumed with impunity by police dogs. Boisseron develops the concept of Afro-dog to highlight these complex overlappings, becomings, and relations between Black bodies and canines. In this vein, she notes that Blacks are often seen and treated like dogs in order to dehumanize and subhumanize them and to justify their being harmed and killed by actual dogs. To render a body edible, to reduce it to “mere” flesh, serves in effect to animalize that body and to place it alongside other animals who are seen as “mere” meat to be consumed or dispensed of as one sees fit.12 That dogs themselves have been trained to play a pivotal role in these processes of dehumanization and animalization provides a glimpse into how complicated it will be to heal these psychological and bodily wounds and to establish practices that do justice both to the animals implicated in these processes and the Black individuals and communities who have been recurrently subject to such violence.

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ROBINSON’S FROGS (ON SET TLER COLONIALISM) Recently, an important discourse has emerged around the connections between settler colonialism and animal issues.13 Many Indigenous scholars and activists who work at this intersection have suggested that violence against animals is linked in significant ways with colonialism in both the past and the present. These same scholars have suggested that prioritizing Indigenous ideas about and practices concerning animals is an important means of addressing many of the problems associated with anthropocentrism.14 Among the most incisive theorists addressing these issues is Margaret Robinson, a Mi’kmaq scholar who uncovers important points of overlap between pro-animal advocacy and her Indigenous culture and traditions (and, by implication, other Indigenous cultures and traditions that share similar values).15 Robinson acknowledges that, at first glance, there do seem to be some barriers preventing a harmonious union of these two traditions. Consider the adoption of a vegan diet, which is one of the central practices advocated by many proanimal philosophers. In popular culture, veganism is typically portrayed as a privileged way of eating that is possible only for wealthy (and usually white) individuals. For Indigenous peoples who often live in impoverished areas and food deserts or who participate in traditional foodways that involve hunting animals, it might seem that a vegan way of life is both an impractical and an inauthentic option. Robinson does not deny that traditional Mi’kmaq diets included meat, but she argues that past dietary practices ought not strictly determine present and future practices. For Robinson, being Mi’kmaq goes beyond simply imitating older cultural traditions; it involves inhabiting an ongoing, dynamic set

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of relations with the human and more-than-human world in such a way that justice is done to the values of love and respect that have traditionally grounded those relations. The daily rituals and foodways adopted at any given time are, from this perspective, attempts to offer respectful responses to relations with one’s fellow human beings, animals, and the land more generally. The values persist, but the specific practices might change in response to changing conditions. Now, if we consider the modern animal food industry, with its highly mechanized and excessively violent methods of production, we can hardly make the case that eating food produced in this way aligns with values of respect and love for animals in any meaningful way. These cruel and disrespectful methods of killing and eating animals are, in fact, profoundly colonial in nature, reflecting the values of a settler colonial culture that reduces animals to absent referents and sees the more-than-human world as reducible to a set of commodities to be sold and consumed. But what of traditional hunting methods used by Indigenous peoples? Don’t these methods demonstrate that it is possible to kill and eat animals in a manner that is respectful and consistent with Indigenous values? Perhaps they do. But Robinson suggests that a careful reading of the traditional narratives of her people indicate that killing and eating animals is not always an acceptable practice. Robinson provides an ecofeminist exegesis of traditional Mi’kmaq narratives in order to reconsider human-animal relations in the context of contemporary settler colonialism.16 The overarching picture of animal ontology that emerges from these narratives is rather different from the oppositional perspective developed by Descartes and Kant, both of whom employ essential differences between humans and animals to justify the subordinate status of animals. On Robinson’s reading, Mi’kmaq

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narratives underscore the idea that human beings and animals belong on the same ontological continuum and emphasize the variety of debts human beings have to their animal kin. When these narratives do involve the killing of animals, they tend to see such killing as something that must be done with respect and only with the animals’ explicit consent. What is more, certain narratives express deep regret over the killing of animals and even suggest that animals have the agency to withdraw their consent from being killed under certain circumstances. Robinson’s exegesis is intended to bring Mi’kmaq narratives into the present moment and bring them to bear on the question of what respectful human-animal interactions might look like in the contemporary world. She argues that the ontological vision of human-animal relations offered by these narratives, coupled with the ethics of respect that they promote, should lead to a reconsideration of the legitimacy of killing and eating animals in the present context. After all, if killing and eating animals is a regrettable act and something to be done only when necessary, shouldn’t these practices be discontinued in contexts where they are no longer necessary? Isn’t it equally legitimate not to ask animals to sacrifice themselves when conditions permit? The overarching point of Robinson’s approach is not simply to advocate a vegan diet for all Mi’kmaq people, all Indigenous peoples, or for humanity in general, no matter the circumstances. Rather, her aim is to have us consider how Indigenous traditions offer a way to reframe what is at stake in our current relationships with animals, both in view of eating and other modalities of encounter. The central ideal that emerges from Robinson’s discussion is one of respect for “all my relations” (M’sit No’kmaq), by which is meant the development of a way of life that is dedicated to maintaining respectful relations with both the human and the more-than-human worlds. She marks out veganism as a possible

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example of this kind of practice, a daily ritual reminder to enact respectful relations with our animal kin. In this approach, veganism amounts to something more than a diet and a set of negative injunctions to avoid the killing and eating of animals. Rather, it is adopted as a means of affirming our own love and respect for our animal relations. Robinson suggests that the daily ritual of practicing veganism might, if practiced intentionally, help to counteract the egoism and individualism of everyday life in the dominant culture and reestablish connections that have been cut off by ongoing colonization. In one of her presentations, Robinson offers her own narrative to illustrate how animals might be seen differently if they are encountered not as a separate class of distinct entities but as kin, as beings who belong on a continuum with other human beings and as forming a core part of “all my relations.” She explains that she grew up by a lake near a wooded area and developed a particular fondness for frogs. Robinson recalls her father rushing into the house one day after a powerful rainstorm asking her and her siblings for help. A frog had laid its eggs in a puddle, and the puddle was drying out, putting the eggs at risk of dying. Her father told the children they needed to get the eggs into the pond as soon as possible to make sure they did not die: For the next two hours, in the hot sun, we moved these gelatinous frog eggs and these squirmy little tadpoles from a shrinking puddle into the pond, from the puddle to the pond, from the puddle to the pond, again and again. And as we did so, I realized that, to my dad, the fragility of these animals mattered in the same way that our own fragility mattered. For me that was concrete experience of what “all my relations” actually means. It means let me not forget our mutual vulnerability, and let the way that we treat one another reflect the kinship ties that bind us all.17

12 PLUMWOOD’S CROCODILE

THE AT TACK Val Plumwood’s (1939–2008) “Being Prey” is one of the most compelling pieces of animal philosophy I have ever read.1 In this brief, nail-biting essay, she recounts her tale of two consecutive day trips in February of 1985 to the Kakadu National Park wetlands in northern Australia, the second of which ends in catastrophe. Her first trip takes place in a rented canoe on the placid backwaters of the park, and she immerses herself in the quiet, colorful display of water lilies and bird life in the area. On the advice of a park ranger, she steers clear of the main river channel where, he warns her, there are several crocodiles that might attack park-goers. Floating around in the backwaters, free from any danger, she is given the opportunity simply to sit back and get her fill of the park’s natural beauty. Inspired by this experience, Plumwood resolves to return to the park the following day to do some additional exploration and examine some of the Indigenous rock art in the park. On the second visit, her canoeing is interrupted by foul weather and her inability to find the rock art site she had hoped to visit. Plumwood pauses briefly for a bite to eat but feels herself being

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watched. Despite her sense of unease and the inclement weather, she continues along in her canoe looking for the rock art site. Suddenly she notices that her chosen path has brought her perilously close to the East Alligator River, the main river channel she had prudently steered clear of the previous day to avoid a possible crocodile attack. The sight of a strange rock formation grabs her attention and shakes her consciousness, and she comes back to herself and realizes the seriousness of her situation: “As a solitary specimen of a major prey species of the saltwater crocodile, I was standing in one of the most dangerous places on earth” (57). Paddling out of the area, Plumwood glimpses a single crocodile in her path ahead. She paddles onto a different path to avoid the crocodile, not particularly afraid of an attack in this instance. But while trying to steer around the crocodile, the unthinkable happens, and the crocodile attacks the canoe violently. Its repeated attacks threaten to capsize the vessel, forcing Plumwood to make a leap toward the riverbank to escape. As she leaps out of the canoe, the crocodile bursts out of the water, grabs her leg with its jaws, and whirls her into the “suffocating wet darkness” (57). Plumwood is then subjected to a series of repeated death rolls by the crocodile. She survives one roll after another just long enough to try to escape again up the riverbank, only to be recaptured in the jaws of the crocodile and dragged back underwater. During the death rolls and repeated attacks, Plumwood struggles mightily against the crocodile, trying to jam her hands into its eyes and grabbing at branches and anything else that might help her escape. By digging her hands deep into the mud on the side of the riverbank to gain more traction, Plumwood is able finally to escape from the crocodile when it releases her from one of its death rolls. Badly injured, she is nevertheless able to navigate her way back to safety and is eventually rescued by a search team.

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A SHOCKING REDUCTION Plumwood’s sensational story of attack and survival was immediately picked up by the mass media in Australia. She notes that news reports exaggerated the crocodile’s size, insinuated the Australian bush was no place for a woman (despite Plumwood’s significant bush experience and her fierce resistance to the attack), and sexualized the attack by framing it as the sadistic rape of a helpless woman by a vicious crocodile. In a similar fashion, Plumwood notes that during her transport to the hospital her male rescuers had already framed the attack in terms of a “masculinist monster myth” (59), suggesting that they (the rescuers) should go back to the river the next day and shoot a random crocodile as an act of revenge. It took Plumwood ten years to find the space to share her experience on her own terms. She wanted to tell a very different story from the one based on the masculinist monster narrative; instead, she wanted to explain the “shocking reduction” (61) she underwent, one in which she moved from being a unified human subject to being a piece of meat for another animal. This was an experience that the dominant news outlets simply could not convey. And she wanted to relate how this reduction allowed her to understand herself and her place within and among animals and nature differently. Plumwood herself describes the attack as a moment in which a deep split in her subjectivity occurs. Prior to the attack, she tended uncritically to live and see the world “from the inside”— that is, from within the all-too-human perspective of a self that maintains mastery over itself and its place in the world, a self that maintains a strong consistency and sense of identity across time. Under attack and on the brink of death, she notices this all-toohuman self trying desperately to hold onto its consistency and

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identity through delusional and impotent protestations: “This is not really happening. This is a nightmare from which I will soon awake” (58). Caught within the jaws of a crocodile and thrown into repeated death rolls, this self has no choice but to give up its delusions and make way for another self, one that links up with and opens onto the world from the other direction, “from the outside.” As Plumwood’s perspective slides from inside herself and over to the outside, it is revealed to her that she is, in fact, meat: In that flash, I glimpsed the world for the first time “from the outside,” as a world no longer my own, an unrecognizable, bleak landscape composed of raw necessity, indifferent to my life or death. (58) . . . I glimpsed a shockingly indifferent world in which I had no more significance than any other edible being. The thought, “This can’t be happening to me, I’m a human being. I am more than just food!” was one component of my terminal incredulity. It was a shocking reduction, from a complex human being to a mere piece of meat. (61)

Remarkably, Plumwood’s account of the attack doesn’t bear even the slightest trace of resentment toward her crocodile attacker or toward the “indifferent” world of nature in which she finds herself once she starts to view things “from the outside.” In fact, Plumwood’s experience of being attacked by the crocodile appears to have led her to view life even more affirmatively than before the attack. She explains: “The wonder of being alive after being held quite literally in the jaws of death has never entirely left me.  .  .  . The gift of gratitude came from the searing flash of near-death knowledge, a glimpse “from the outside” of the alien, incomprehensible world in which the narrative of self has ended” (59).

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Similar to Nietzsche’s articulation of a postnihilistic, affirmative approach to life (see chapter 9), Plumwood’s postattack perspective is informed by a joyful, grateful embrace of a world that lacks traditional human meaning and value—but that does not lack meaning and value altogether. To find oneself alive, within, and immanent to this seemingly alien world is for Plumwood a gift for which we should be grateful rather than an unwelcome disappointment. Once accustomed to the shift, the world as seen from the outside no longer appears as a meaningless and inhuman world; instead, it becomes a site for experimenting in the cocreation of meaning with our planetary kin.

MORE THAN MEAT At the time of her attack, Plumwood was already an established environmental philosopher who practiced vegetarianism and dedicated her life to fighting for animal and ecological justice. One might think that undergoing such an attack would lead her to question many of those commitments, especially her vegetarianism. Instead, Plumwood relates that the encounter only served to reaffirm and deepen her vegetarianism and love for animals. As she explains, being reduced to prey allowed her to see the question of eating animals from a different perspective, from a place where human bodies and animal bodies exist in a shared zone of vulnerability and edibility. For Plumwood, viewing the matter from this perspective meant affirming that she is, in principle and as a permanent virtual possibility, meat for other beings. In the process of literally becoming prey for another animal, she also realized that being meat for other animals was not her exclusive mode of existence. During the attack, she also made a claim to being more than meat through her resistance and through her desire for survival.

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For Plumwood, a vegetarianism that takes the shared edibility of human beings and animals seriously, and that takes challenging anthropocentrism seriously, begins from the idea that both humans and animals are simultaneously meat and more than meat. The dominant culture, she suggests, encourages us to eat animals without a second thought for this “more”—which is to say, for the wide range of potentials and possibilities inherent in animal life. At the same time, it seeks to block from our awareness the possibility that we, too, might end up as meat for other beings. As Plumwood notes: Animals can be our food, but we can never be their food. . . . We may daily consume other animals by the billions, but we ourselves cannot be food for worms and certainly not meat for crocodiles. This is one reason why we now treat so inhumanely the animals we make our food, for we cannot imagine ourselves similarly positioned as food. We act as if we live in a separate realm of culture in which we are never food, while other animals inhabit a different world of nature in which they are no more than food, and their lives can be utterly distorted in the service of this end. (60)

Plumwood’s essay challenges us to simultaneously acknowledge and affirm two notions: (1) that embodied beings (whether human or animal) are irreducibly subject to being eaten, and (2) that animals and other such beings are something potentially other and much more than mere meat for human consumption. Thus, in trying to limit the consumption of animals, Plumwood’s version of vegetarianism is an effort to open a space that allows animals to explore other possibilities and potentials in their lives. Of course, the ethico-political practice of making room for other possibilities for animals does not mean trying to remove them or ourselves entirely from the realm of predation and being meat.

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Rather, it should be seen as an attempt to immerse ourselves ever deeper into the zone of vulnerable embodiment that we share with animals and to see what else we and they might become if we acknowledge that we are—all of us—both meat and something more than just meat. On this issue, Plumwood deserves the last word: Reflection has persuaded me that not just humans but any creature can make the same claim to be more than just food. We are edible, but we are also much more than edible. Respectful, ecological eating must recognize both of these things. I was a vegetarian at the time of my encounter with the crocodile, and remain one today. This is not because I think predation itself is demonic and impure, but because I object to the reduction of animal lives in factory farming systems that treat them as living meat. (61)

13 HARAWAY ’S COMPANION SPECIES

FROM CYBORGS TO COMPANIONS Donna Haraway has emerged in recent years as one of the most influential and controversial figures in animal studies. Haraway’s influence is due in large part to her rich and productive writings, which teem with novel concepts and insightful critiques of traditional thinking about human beings and animals. The controversies surrounding her work tend to stem from her challenging and often contentious positions on how we should reform our relationships with animals, positions that often run against the grain of those defended by many contemporary pro-animal philosophers. As a means of taking up a thoughtful dialogue with Haraway’s work, let us examine one of her central conceptual creations: companion species. Although this concept figures prominently in Haraway’s book, The Companion Species Manifesto, it should be it should be read in view of key theoretical and ethico-political themes in her earlier and widely read essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.”1 In that work, Haraway sought to develop a notion of human subjectivity as constituted by numerous relations and influences that were traditionally thought to reside in a domain

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distinct from human existence. She argues there that the distinctions between human and animal, human and machine, and physical and nonphysical have now been thoroughly breached; consequently, human beings should be viewed as assemblages, coconstituted with and by animals, machines, and a wide variety of physical and nonphysical relations and forces. This messy, complex notion of human subjectivity requires that we discard the traditional conception of the human individual as a distinct and sharply delimited organism and replace it with the image of the cyborg—that is, a hybrid creature that has emerged in and through various human and more-than-human beings and influences. In the writings that followed this essay, Haraway turned her attention increasingly to the human-animal interface and to further dismantling the human-animal distinction. For Haraway, human and animal species do not constitute two utterly distinct sets of beings but rather form complex relations that undercut any sense of purity in either grouping. Thus, human beings and animals are best understood as companion species, beings who share existence and who coconstitute one another in innumerable ways. In The Companion Species Manifesto and her follow-up volume, When Species Meet, Haraway develops a robust notion of companion species that enriches and complicates traditional understandings of both of these terms: companion and species.2 In using the term companion, Haraway has in mind something different from what are typically called “companion animals,” that is, pet animals who are seen as accessories for human enjoyment or “little people in fur coats” (as the saying goes) intended to charm and entertain us. Rather, she wants to articulate a sense of companionship that is more profound and more challenging. For Haraway, companionship is a fundamental ontological category. Behind companion relations there are not

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atomistic, isolated individuals awaiting interactions; instead, what we typically identify as stand-alone individuals emerge out of a series of relationships and companionships. Companionship is, for Haraway, the most fundamental unit of existence. Our companions—whether human or more-than-human—consort and break bread with us. (Haraway often plays on the etymology of companion [L. com + panis, “with bread”] to underscore that a companion is a fellow with whom one shares food and a table.) Together, companion species build meaningful worlds, lives, and societies. Sharing life with others, however, also entails sharing death with them. Relationships and companionships are built among beings who are finite (beings who are born into a world not of their own making) and mortal (beings who will die and decompose). For example, my own life is sustained thanks to the lives and deaths of innumerable others; and when I die, I will decompose and be returned to the earth, eventually becoming reconstituted by and among various organic and inorganic beings and relations.3 To be a genuine companion, a true comrade, is to care about these life and death relations and to learn how better to inhabit them. For Haraway, one of our chief political tasks is to give deeper thought and attention to how our social practices and institutions often ignore the breadth of such companionships and instead frame only certain kinds of relations and beings as mattering and having value (a topic to which I return in the next section). Although best known as a feminist theorist, Haraway is also a trained biologist, and her use of the term species is meant to recall readers to the frameworks of biology and evolutionary theory. Against common discourse that portrays species as fixed, static, or natural kinds, Haraway insists that species are dynamic and deeply relational in nature. In her account, species are defined as

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groupings that emerge under specific historical and evolutionary pressures and, as such, are contingent. (The groupings could have been otherwise had they evolved under different conditions, and they will of necessity become something else over time as relations and selective pressures change.) So a species is itself a “multispecies crowd,”4 internally differentiated and externally related to numerous other species at micro and macro levels. This conception of radical difference and relationality is essential to Haraway’s notion of companion species, and it is intended to undercut not just the common idea of species as fixed natural kinds but also the notion of human exceptionalism. The human species, too, is a multispecies crowd, coconstituted by numerous species and relations operating at micro and macro levels, from gut microbes to large-scale ecosystems. As with the varied meanings of “companion,” Haraway emphasizes the rich etymological senses of the word “species,” which range from wealth and filth to beholding and looking. This latter register of terms, having to do with the act of looking (L. specere), is especially important for Haraway because they point toward the ethical dimension of companion species. To inhabit multispecies relations in a way that does justice to them and understands them as an instantiation of “the good” is to look back at and look carefully at—that is, to hold in regard and respect (L. re + specere)— those relations.5

RELATIONS VERSUS RIGHTS Haraway’s vision of the ontological and normative aspects of human-animal relations has been rightly lauded as a key innovation in contemporary animal studies. Her focus on companionship and interspecies relationships corrects a long-standing

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individualistic bias among analytic animal ethicists who have tended to characterize animals as atomistic individuals abstracted from the complex ecological and intersubjective contexts in which they live. Similarly, Haraway’s resolute efforts to think about human existence without recourse to human exceptionalism has inspired a variety of nonanthropocentric research paradigms in fields across the humanities and social sciences.6 Despite (or perhaps because of ) the rich and productive nature of Haraway’s approach, her work has not been free from controversy. The possible implications of a companion species approach to thinking about human-animal relations are myriad. No single set of practices fall out from her conception of companion species. The task of living out our companionships with animals in a more respectful and worthwhile manner can be assumed in any number of ways. What has disturbed some critics of Haraway’s work are her own attempts to delineate what respectful relationships might look like, particularly with regard to practices surrounding domestic, experimental, and food animals. Consider the popular practice of dog agility training, of which Haraway is herself an avid participant and vocal defender. On Haraway’s analysis, this sport is an instance of a companion species relation in which the dog and human trainer work in tandem to create an outcome that would be impossible if the two were entirely independent units. Dog agility training (at least when done well and successfully) is not a simple act of a human being exerting power and dominion over a particular dog. Successful training requires careful and thoughtful negotiation on the part of human beings with the heritage of a given dog species, as well as the development of a set of practices that foster play, joy, and creativity on the part of both dog and human trainer. Absent this kind of responsive companionship, dogs will not enjoy agility training or undertake it with gusto. Ultimately, Haraway

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suggests, training of this sort allows sporting dogs the maximal freedom that is possible within contemporary human societies— which is to say, “the freedom to live safely in multispecies, urban and sub-urban environments with very little physical restraint and no corporal punishment while getting to play a demanding sport with every evidence of self-actualizing motivation.”7 Despite Haraway’s imaginative defense of the benefits of dog training, critics have suggested that her approach fails to ask deeper questions about the nature and implications of animal domestication.8 It is undoubtedly true that domestication has historically been a two-way relationship between human beings and animals, but there are good reasons for asking whether practices involving domesticated animals such as agility training are worth preserving. What kind of people do we become when we think of ourselves as animal “trainers”? What vision of animals and of our place in the world inheres in such a stance? Furthermore, are there not other ways of life that would allow domesticated animals the possibility to live rich and rewarding lives beyond such rigid training regimens and outside the strict confines of contemporary urban life? If our aim is to live justly with and alongside animals, might it be preferable to work toward transforming urban environments to maximize the range of animal potentials rather than taking those environments for granted? And might it not be best simply to abolish many of the practices associated with domesticated animals and instead transform the way of life that renders ongoing domestication necessary? In much of her work, Haraway tends to overlook these more radical possibilities and instead assumes that many of our traditional human-animal interactions are largely fixed and worth preserving. She adopts a similar inevitabilist and reformist stance on the issues of eating animals and using animals as

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experimental subjects, maintaining that the adoption of veganism and eliminating experimentation is unnecessary. Rather, she believes these kinds of practices have emerged and coevolved with animals over long historical periods, are not inherently objectionable, and can be reinhabited in ways that are more respectful of animal lives and deaths. It is instructive to compare Haraway’s approach to humananimal relations with the more traditional animal rights framework associated with Tom Regan. Regan’s animal philosophy advocates radical changes in several practices involving animals, including animal agriculture, hunting, and experimentation. His approach is grounded on the idea that an individual animal is, like an individual human being, a subject-of-a-life, by which he means, a conscious creature having an individual welfare that has importance to us whatever our usefulness to others. We want and prefer things, believe and feel things, recall and expect things. And all these dimensions of our life, including our pleasure and pain, our enjoyment and suffering, our satisfaction and frustration, our continued existence or our untimely death—all make a difference to the quality of our life as lived, as experienced, by us as individuals.9

Just as we generally believe it is wrong to hunt, kill, consume, and perform invasive experiments on our fellow human beings who are subjects-of-a-life, Regan argues we ought to avoid doing the same things to animals who exhibit such subjectivity. In practice, then, the animal rights position leads to the total abolition of all practices that violently exploit animals and a general stance of noninterference in the lives of animals. Haraway’s ethico-political stance is, in contrast, far less revisionist. Rather than eliminating these sorts of human-animal

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interactions tout court, she generally tries to find ways to reform them and make them more respectful. For Haraway, the basic problem regarding animals is not that we exploit or kill them. These sorts of violent interactions are, from her perspective, part of our evolutionary heritage and inherent to earthly existence as such. The problem, she argues, is that we often reduce animals to the status of being merely killable, as mere instruments to be used and disposed of as we wish. When animals are rendered killable in this way, they are placed outside the scope of the community and can be violated with impunity. By insisting on our irreducibly shared, communal existence with animals and other planetary kin, Haraway hopes to place limits on mass killings and indiscriminate violence directed at more-than-human others. Even if one grants the importance of Haraway’s point about the consequence of rendering beings killable, her normative commitments and practical recommendations here are open to the same objection noted concerning her stance on dog agility training. Just because certain interactions are part of a shared evolutionary heritage does not mean they are necessarily worth preserving and reforming. Furthermore, to abolish the practice of something like eating meat does not mean that the animals traditionally raised for meat will become extinct or become mere museum pieces (as Haraway often suggests).10 Most animals, like human beings, are capable of a variety of possible modes of existence. To do away with manifestly unjust practices for which certain animals have been bred need not doom those animals to a joyless, meaningless existence; acquiescing to that conclusion can only stem from a failure of imagination and from a lack of belief in the potential of animal life and human-animal relations to assume other forms. Despite the problems I have identified in Haraway’s work, there are good reasons not to abandon her approach entirely.

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Even if we conclude that certain human-animal interactions ought to be largely abolished, basing animal philosophy exclusively on abolition and noninterference tells us little about what alternative, affirmative relations with animals might look like. It is one thing to abolish unjust institutions; it is quite another to risk experiments in developing another way of life. In an evermore-crowded world, it will not suffice simply to limit our violent interactions with animals and aim for an ideal of noninterference. We must, following Haraway’s lead, consider more carefully what it looks like to be more respectful and more loving companions with regard to our animal kin.

RETHINKING RELATIONS IN A PANDEMIC I began this book by examining the wildfires that were ravaging the Amazon during the summer of 2019. As I write these final words in the spring of 2020, the globe has been further transformed by the novel coronavirus pandemic. The two events are not unrelated; both stem directly from problematic human-animal interactions. In the first instance, the bulk of the wildfires are being set to clear forest for grazing animals who will be killed and consumed for their meat. The rapid destruction of forests in the Amazon is in large part being driven by an ever-expanding global demand for animal flesh. In the second instance, the novel coronavirus is a zoonotic disease, that is, a disease that originates in animals and spreads to human beings. Zoonotic diseases are becoming more important factors in human societies as the growing human population comes increasingly into contact with new species of animals. The precise source of the outbreak of the coronavirus is, at present, undetermined; researchers concur, however, that the

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virus is likely bat-borne.11 Whether this particular pandemic is ultimately traced to human-animal interactions in so-called wet markets, some other source of consumed animal flesh, or exotic animal trading, the global medical, social, and economic upheaval that has followed in the wake of the pandemic should provide us with the impetus to take up the task of reconsidering human-animal relations in all of their ontological, ethical, and political significance. One thing is certain. The path we are currently charting with our animal kin is manifestly catastrophic and unsustainable. The long-standing notion that we can somehow subject animals and the earth to our mastery and transform and use them to meet our ends is no longer tenable. Our interactions with animals and other earthly beings and systems produce consequences beyond our control, and full recognition of that point requires us to rethink many of those relations from a newfound perspective of humility and vulnerability. From where I write, in the United States, there has been enormous pressure to end the lifestyle restrictions associated with the pandemic and to return to “normal” (that is, to resume our previous patterns of social and economic life). Given the severe economic suffering many people have endured in the past several months, such a desire is entirely understandable. There is growing recognition, however, that the “normal” lives we were pursuing are the source of the very crises currently unfolding. Despite the hardships the pandemic has produced, it has also given us the rare opportunity to pause some of our everyday rhythms and routines and ask deeper questions about the problems inherent in the dominant way of life. Disruptions to everyday practices and routines—such as significant reductions in driving, flying, and working—have led to

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several urban areas seeing a massively reduced human presence. In some cases, this has encouraged a remarkable reemergence of wild and domesticated animals into those spaces. Such accidental experiments in “rewilding” have been a source of genuine wonder and joy for many people and have received widespread media attention.12 They have also forced us to recognize, in a tangible and undeniable way, that the flourishing of many animal species depends on us limiting our presence in certain spaces to allow animals greater habitat and range of mobility.13 The pandemic has also cast a new spotlight on the factory farming system. Some of the worst clusters of coronavirus infections have arisen among factory farm workers who are forced to do horrific work in crowded conditions. These workers are typically people of color and quite poor; they also tend to have limited access to health care, exacerbating the effects of getting ill. The reduced supply of animal flesh and forced slowdowns in the meat industry during the pandemic might be seen as “wins” for animal welfare, but in most cases the slowdowns have simply led to job losses for already poor workers and the mass killing of animals by farmers who cannot sell their animals for slaughter. Furthermore, animal industry lobbyists have placed intense pressure on government officials to mandate that meat industries resume normal operations as much as possible and to provide economic subsidies to support a return to business as usual. Despite these measures, animal industries have been hobbled to some extent by the pandemic, and their economic and institutional future is unclear (especially in view of rising competition from plant-based meat substitutes, which have become more popular in recent years). Whatever form factory farming might take going forward, it can no longer be denied that our standard methods of rearing and slaughtering animals, besides being cruel, pose clear health dangers to human beings and indicate

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the pressing need for fundamentally transformed, less animalcentric foodways. The pandemic has led to temporary closures of laboratories at several universities and private corporations, allowing a reprieve in testing for experimental animals. Yet this break in testing has not generally led to a reconsideration in the public sphere of this problematic and widespread practice. Instead, unused experimental animals have been killed by the thousands while the breeding of new animals continues largely apace. Moreover, as scientists across the globe seek to develop a vaccine for the virus, animals continue to be viewed uncritically as sacrificial subjects to be used in whatever ways scientists deem fit, both in the testing of the virus and in the production of testing materials. In the domain of animal testing, we are still a long way from seeing animals as our kin and treating them with any measure of respect. We can find a more affirmative and positive development in the reconsideration of social bonds. Social distancing and contraction of inter- and intrahuman relations have encouraged many people to rethink and expand their relationships with the animals and more-than-human world around them. Examples abound of people learning to appreciate anew the animals and ecology in their neighborhoods; in addition, people are spending significantly more time with companion animals and finding new forms of joy in these relations. In a paradoxical way, social distancing among human beings has led many people to rethink the nature and scope of the social sphere and how animals and the more-than-human world might come to be included in that domain. These experiments in new social relations are for many of us the first step in undertaking the much-needed ethological transformations described in chapter 9. Our felt joy and desire for new possibilities for human-animal relations and for the renewed presence and flourishing of animals

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themselves indicates that even highly urbanized human beings are not utterly alienated from earthly life or their animal kin. But enacting better relations with the more-than-human world requires us to consider carefully the question of whether intensifying or withdrawing from relations (or some mixture of the two) might best engender coflourishing. Contrary to contemporary discourses that stress the intensification of human-animal relations and the ubiquitous presence of human beings in the socalled Anthropocene era, it is essential to realize that there are innumerable species with which we did not coevolve in close relation. To be a respectful companion in Haraway’s sense of the term entails that we attend to and respect these evolutionary-historical differences and consider whether love and care might mean, in some cases, avoiding intimate relations with others who could be harmed or exterminated by excessive contact or influence. Negotiating this tension of intensifying and withdrawing from relationships with the more-than-human world is perhaps the most challenging task that faces us today. If, however, these negotiations are to lead to a genuine transformation in our way of life, then they must be guided by the humble recognition that we are not masters of the planet nor radically separate from animals but are deeply intertwined with them at all levels. Moreover, if we wish to make such transformations persist, they must be animated and sustained by subjects with a more philosophical disposition, which is to say, by subjects who desire above all else to form new ways of life, new relations, and new practices. The joint flourishing of the human and more-than-human worlds requires nothing less than this impassioned commitment.

NOTES

Introduction 1. For more on projected animal extinction numbers, see IPBES, Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, ed. E. S. Brondizio, J. Settele, S. Diaz, and H. T. Ngo (Bonn, Germany: IPBES Secretariat, 2019); projections regarding rates of animal slaughter are discussed at length in Nikos Alexandratos and Jelle Bruinsma, World Agriculture Towards 2030/2050: The 2012 Revision, ESA Working Paper no. 12-03 (Rome: FAO, 2012). 2. The term ontological is used frequently in this book. Ontology is the field of philosophy that deals with the most fundamental aspects of reality. Here I am most concerned with the fundamental nature of human and animal existence. Do human beings and animals constitute sharply different sets of beings? Are human beings and animals fundamentally identical? Are there better ways of understanding human and animal existence beyond claims of strict difference or simple identity? These are some of the questions I address when considering the ontological dimensions of human and animal existence. 3. See, for example, the discussion of Jainism in chapter 4 and the discussion of Indigenous philosophies in chapter 11. 4. Thus, I have included chapters on Carol Adams (chapter 11) and Donna Haraway (chapter 13), neither of whom is a philosopher by training or profession but nevertheless offer important philosophical contributions to current discussions about animals.

146 Y Introduction 5. Animal studies is a relatively new field of academic and activist work that has roots in animal philosophy but is thoroughly interdisciplinary in orientation. For a helpful introduction to the history and aims of animal studies, see Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021). This book makes ample use of research in animal studies and related fields (critical animal studies, anthrozoology, and others). 6. See Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow: A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 62–63. 7. For reasons of space, I have unfortunately been unable to include any serious discussion of Christian philosophy and theology, a tradition that is of manifest importance for understanding both anti- and pro-animal perspectives. For an anthology of essential sources from this tradition, see Andrew Linzey and Tom Regan, eds., Animals and Christianity: A Book of Readings (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1990). Although I do discuss the influential animal philosophies of Peter Singer (chapter 8) and Tom Regan (chapter 13), I devote relatively less space to their work than might be expected to make room for less dominant figures and more recent trends in the field (see especially chapters 11 through 13, which focus on the contributions of women philosophers and issues related to gender, disability, race, colonialism, and ecology). For readers looking for a more detailed overview of Singer’s and Regan’s respective approaches, I recommend Angus Taylor, Animals & Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate, 3rd ed. (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2009).

1. Plato’s Pigs 1. Herton Escobar reports: “Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research counted more than 41,000 ‘fire spots’ between 1 January and 24 August, compared with 22,000 in the same period last year. . . . The numbers are the highest since 2010, when the Amazon experienced a severe drought triggered by El Niño and a warming of the North Atlantic Ocean. This time, climatic anomalies can’t explain the uptick, scientists say.” Herton Escobar, “Amazon Fires Clearly Linked to Deforestation, Scientists Say,” Science, August 30, 2019, 853, https://doi.org/10.1126/science .365.6456.853.

2. Aristotle’s Wonderful Animals Z 147 2. Mustafa Zia, James Hansen, Kim Hjort, and Constanza Valdes, “Brazil Once Again Becomes the World’s Largest Beef Exporter,” USDA Economic Research Service, July 1, 2019, https://www.ers.usda .gov/amber-waves/2019/july/brazil-once-again-becomes-the-world -s-largest-beef-exporter/. 3. Mendelson Lima, Carlos Antonio da Silva Junior, Lisa Rausch, Holly K. Gibbs, and Jerry Adriani Johann, “Demystifying Sustainable Soy in Brazil,” Land Use Policy 82 (2019): 349–352. 4. “Increased beef demand worldwide has stimulated increased production and productivity gains.” Zia, Hansen, Hjort, and Valdes, “Brazil Once Again Becomes the World’s Largest Beef Exporter.” 5. The material I am discussing here is found in book 2 of Plato, Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004). As is common practice, I will cite in parentheses the standardized marginal numbers (the “Stephanus” numbers) to Plato’s writings rather than the book page numbers. 6. See the discussion of Margaret Robinson’s work in chapter 11 for a fuller consideration of the relations between violence toward animals and (settler) colonialism. 7. Plato, “Apology,” in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997). 8. Sandra Peterson, Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 40.

2. Aristotle’s Wonderful Animals 1. “Human beings began to do philosophy, even as they do now, because of wonder, at first because they wondered about the strange things right in front of them, and later, advancing little by little, because they came to find greater things puzzling.” Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 982b12. For Plato’s statement about the relation between philosophy and wonder, see the remarks he places in Socrates’s mouth: “For this is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else.” Plato, “Theaetetus,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 155d.

148 Y 2. Aristotle’s Wonderful Animals 2. An extensive collection of Heraclitus’s fragments with helpful commentary can be found in G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, eds., The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 181–213. See p. 195 for an examination of Heraclitus’s aphorism about never stepping in the same river twice. 3. Aristotle, “Parts of Animals,” in A New Aristotle Reader, ed. J. L. Ackrill, trans. D. M. Balme (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 645a. 4. All of the following quotations are from Aristotle, “Parts of Animals,” 644b–645a. 5. Stephen T. Newmyer, “Being the One and Becoming the Other: Animals in Ancient Philosophical Schools,” in The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life, ed. Gordon Lindsay Campbell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 517. 6. Aristotle, Politics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), 1253a. 7. Aristotle, Politics. 8. Aristotle, Politics, 1256b. 9. “If then nature makes nothing incomplete or pointless, it must have made all of them for the sake of human beings.” Aristotle, Politics. 10. Aristotle, Politics, 1260a. The issues of slavery and sexual difference are examined at more length in subsequent chapters, especially chapters 8 and 11. 11. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, as cited in Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 189–90. 12. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 190. 13. Jane Goodall, “Primate Spirituality,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor (New York: Continuum, 2005), 1303–6, 1304. 14. Goodall, “Primate Spirituality.” 15. Goodall generally suggests that the capacities for language and higherorder cognition could perhaps be used as a means of distinguishing human beings from animals, but she is careful to note that such differences are far from absolute. In her discussion of primate spirituality, for example, Goodall notes: “We are unique, but we are not as different as we used to think. The main difference is, perhaps, our extraordinarily

3. Cynicism’s Dogs Z 149 complex intellect, and our ability to communicate ideas by means of a sophisticated spoken language, by the use of words.” Goodall, “Primate Spirituality,” 1303. She immediately goes on to qualify this statement by noting that some apes actually do demonstrate such capacities for language to a lesser degree. I return to the issue of animal language in chapter 6. 16. Barbara Smuts, “Encounters with Animal Minds,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001): 293–309, 300–301.

3. Cynicism’s Dogs 1. Treadwell recounts this portion of his life in Timothy Treadwell and Jewel Palovak, Among Grizzlies: Living with Wild Bears in Alaska (New York: Ballantine, 1997), chap.1. 2. Grizzly Man, directed by Werner Herzog (Santa Monica, CA: Lions Gate Home Entertainment, 2005), DVD. 3. Treadwell and Palovak, Among Grizzlies, 33. 4. Grizzly Man. 5. Diogenes the Cynic, Sayings and Anecdotes with Other Popular Moralists, trans. Robin Hard (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 35. This anecdote about Plato is related by both Aelian and Diogenes Laertius. 6. Diogenes the Cynic, Sayings and Anecdotes with Other Popular Moralists, 9. This passage is attributed to Aelian. 7. A variation on this theme of dealing with the difficulties of existence is found in the work of Nietzsche (see chapter 9). 8. The Cynics adopted a largely vegetarian diet not primarily for the ideological reasons associated with modern ethical vegetarianism but because vegetarian foods were simple and readily available in their local environs. 9. Those who wish to examine how these themes are taken up in contemporary philosophy will find Foucault’s engagement with the Cynics of interest. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth. The Government of Self and Others II: Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 10. Treadwell and Palovak, Among Grizzlies, 22. 11. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. Pamela Mensch (New York: Oxford University Press), 279 (6.40).

150 Y 3. Cynicism’s Dogs 12. Diogenes “used to say he was imitating the chorus trainers; for they would set their pitch a little sharp so that everyone else would hit the right note.” Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 276 (6.35).

4. Jainism’s Birds 1. L. M. Singhvi, “The Jain Declaration on Nature,” in Jainism and Ecology: Non-violence in the Web of Life, ed. Christopher Key Chapple (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2006), 217–24, 218. 2. Acaranga Sutra, 1.2.3.4, cited in Kristi, L. Wiley, “The Nature of Nature: Jain Perspectives on the Natural World,” in Jainism and Ecology: Nonviolence in the Web of Life, ed. Christopher Key Chapple (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2006), 35–62, 44. 3. Traditional Jains are not strict vegans; they consume milk and milk products. However, as available dairy foods tend more and more to derive from contemporary farming methods, some Jains are now turning toward veganism to avoid the violence of modern methods of dairy production. 4. The examples in this paragraph are drawn from Natubhai Shah, Jainism: The World of Conquerors, vol. 1 (Dehli: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998), chap. 6. 5. Ethical questions about Jain shelters, which generally disallow euthanasia (in line with Jain views about karma) even in cases of severe suffering and certain death, have been raised by animal studies scholars and activists. 6. Precise numbers are difficult to establish here. For a helpful discussion, see Andreas Seiler and J.-O. Helldin, “Mortality in Wildlife Due to Transportation,” in The Ecology of Transportation: Managing Mobility for the Environment, ed. John Davenport and Julia L. Davenport (New York: Springer, 2006), 165–89. 7. My account is based on the retelling of the story in Adam Hardy and Phyllis Granoff, eds., The Clever Adulteress and Other Stories: A Treasury of Jain Literature (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1990), 208–42. 8. Hardy and Granoff, Clever Adulteress and Other Stories, 241. 9. Hardy and Granoff. 10. Brianne Donaldson, Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015), 82.

6. Descartes’s Beast-Machine Z 151

5. Plutarch’s Grunter 1. Homer, Odyssey, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), bk. 10, line 259; henceforth cited by line number in parentheses. 2. Plutarch, “Beasts Are Rational,” in Moralia, vol. 12, trans. Harold Cherniss and William C. Hembold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 489–533; henceforth cited by line number in parentheses. 3. For a remarkable study of Plutarch’s animal writings in view of both ancient and contemporary contexts, see Stephen T. Newmyer, Animals, Rights, and Reason in Plutarch and Modern Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2006).

6. Descartes’s Beast-Machine 1. This sardonic quip, attributed to Carolus Linnaeus, is an uncited epigraph in chap. 7 of Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Despite extensive searching, I have been unable to locate the original source Agamben cites. Whether or not the citation is genuine, it is indicative of the attitude that some scientists at the time (such as Linnaeus) had toward Descartes’s misplaced confidence in a sharp division between human and animal. 2. For a superb overview of Koko’s accomplishments and a compelling narrative of what it was like to witness Koko communicate in person, see William A. Hillix and Duane A. Rumbaugh, Animal Bodies, Human Minds: Ape, Dolphin, and Parrot Language Skills (New York: Kluwer, 2004), 99–112. 3. René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, trans. Ian Maclean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 4. Descartes, Discourse on the Method, 46. 5. Descartes’s comparison between animals and human beings with disabilities is a common one in the history of Western philosophy, and it raises the complex and thorny issue of how to think about the relation between disability and animality. I return to this important question in chapter 11.

152 Y 6. Descartes’s Beast-Machine 6. For an overview of Alex’s linguistic and cognitive abilities similar to those of Koko’s, see Hillix and Rumbaugh, Animal Bodies, Human Minds, 237–54. See also Pepperberg’s nontechnical overview of her research and life with Alex. Irene Pepperberg, Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence—and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process (New York: Harper, 2009). 7. Robert M. Seyfarth, Dorothy L. Cheney, and Peter Marler, “Vervet Monkey Alarm Calls: Semantic Communication in a Free-Ranging Primate,” Animal Behaviour 28 (1980): 1070–94. 8. Con N. Slobodchikoff, Bianca S. Perla, and Jennifer L. Verdolin, Prairie Dogs: Communication and Community in an Animal Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 9. Stephanie L. King, Laela S. Sayigh, Randall S. Wells, Wendi Fellner, and Vincent M. Janik, “Vocal Copying of Individually Distinctive Signature Whistles in Bottlenose Dolphins,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280 (2013): 2–9. 10. For a popular account of animal language and further analysis of this issue from a perspective consonant with the one developed here, see Con N. Slobodchikoff, Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Language of Animals (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012). 11. Nathan Lents, Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), chap. 10. 12. For a fuller exploration of the questions surrounding animal languages, see Eva Meijer, When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 2019). 13. For a helpful overview of the current state of the research on this topic, see Crickette M. Sanz, Josep Call, and Christophe Boesch, eds., Tool Use in Animals: Cognition and Ecology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 14. René Descartes, “Letter to Henry More,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3:366. 15. Descartes goes so far as to say that his scientific philosophy is driven by an obligation to procure “the general good of all mankind” and that knowledge ought to be pursued toward the end of human beings becoming “masters and possessors of nature.” Descartes, Discourse on the Method, 51.

7. K ant’s Elephants Z 153

7. Kant’s Elephants 1. Immanuel Kant, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” trans. Allen W. Wood, in Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 160–75. 2. Kant, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” 166. I have left the gender of the subject in the masculine, but I will return to the question of sexual difference in Kant’s work later in the chapter. 3. Kant, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” 167. 4. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press), 11–22. 5. For a thorough discussion of these themes, see Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 82–87. 6. For an argument in favor of equal educational opportunities for women as a means of achieving their full maturity and humanity, see Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and a Vindication of the Rights of Men, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Although I do not discuss the topic here, Kant’s ideas about the relationship between race and human enlightenment display a similar ambiguity regarding non-European peoples. For an important critical analysis of Kant on this issue, see Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology,” in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, ed. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 103–40. For an account of how Kant’s views on race develop across time, see Pauline Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 92–117. Here, once again, we see how the split between human beings and animals often rebounds back on “the human” and fractures humanity from within along lines of race, gender, and related registers, an issue treated at more length in chapter 11. 7. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 212–13.

154 Y 7. K ant’s Elephants 8. See Patrick Kain, “Kant on Animals,” in Animals: A History, ed. Peter Adamson and G. Fay Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 211–32. 9. Kain, “Kant on Animals,” 217. 10. Kain, 218. 11. Nathan Lents, Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 77. 12. Lents, Not So Different, chap. 3. 13. Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy and Why They Matter (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007). 14. Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (New York: Harmony, 2009); Mark Rowlands, Can Animals Be Moral? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

8. Bentham’s Suffering Animal 1. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (London: T. Payne and Son, 1789), 308–9n1. 2. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: New York Review, 1975). 3. See the discussion of Tom Regan in chapter 13 for an abolitionist perspective. 4. Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 308n1. 5. Singer’s position on animal death is complex and contains several caveats that I do not have space to examine here. For a recent statement of his views, see Peter Singer, afterword in The Ethics of Killing Animals, ed. Tatjana Višak and Robert Garner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 229–37. For a fuller discussion of utilitarianism and animal death that distinguishes between different kinds of utilitarianism and their respective implications, see Tatjana Višak, Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 6. For a fuller discussion of crows and the significance of their relationship to death, see John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell, In the Company of Crows and Ravens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). For a hypothesis about the gathering behavior of crows, see Kaeli N. Swift

9. Nietzsche’s Overhuman Animal Z 155 and John M. Marzluff, “Wild American Crows Gather Around Their Dead to Learn About Danger,” Animal Behaviour 109 (2015): 187–97. For readers interested in considering the grieving behavior of crows in the context of the extinction crisis and related forms of ecological and social breakdown, see the moving work of Thom van Dooren, The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 7. Barbara J. King, “Animal Mourning: Précis of How Animals Grieve (King 2013),” Animal Sentience 4 (2016): 1–6, at 6. This brief essay is an overview of the main argument of this insightful book: Barbara J. King, How Animals Grieve (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 8. King, “Animal Mourning,” 6.

9. Nietzsche’s Overhuman Animal 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 279. 2. Nietzsche, Gay Science. 3. Ecclesiates 3:19–20, The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 4. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, lines 1224–29. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 11. 6. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 174. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Antichrist,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), 580. 8. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 297. 9. Nietzsche, 167. 10. Nietzsche, 550. 11. Nietzsche, 232. 12. Joe Hutto is aware of Nietzsche’s work and cites it on occasion. 13. Joe Hutto, Touching the Wild: Living with the Mule Deer of Deadman Gulch, dir. David Allen (Alexandria, VA: PBS Home Video, 2014), DVD. For an extended set of written reflections on this project, see Joe Hutto, Touching the Wild: Living with the Mule Deer of Deadman Gulch (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2014). Despite my obvious admiration

156 Y 9. Nietzsche’s Overhuman Animal for his work, I should state I do not wish to lionize Hutto or his ethological projects uncritically. There are genuine dangers in the kinds of projects he undertakes; in a fuller study of his work, such issues would need to be marked and discussed. 14. I borrow the term “deep ethology” from Marc Bekoff, whose work on this topic informs my own approach here. See Marc Bekoff, “Deep Ethology, Animal Rights, and the Great Ape/Animal Project: Resisting Speciesism and Expanding the Community of Equals,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 10 (1998): 269–96. Some animal philosophers have recently begun to speak of doing “field philosophy” in ways that are consonant with this notion of deep ethology. See, for example, Brett Buchanan, “The Surprise of Field Philosophy: Philosophical Encounters with Animal Worlds,” Parallax 24 (2018): 392–405. 15. Hutto’s work here intersects in important ways with the theme of the transformation of selfhood discussed in chapters 3 and 4. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6.

10. Derrida’s Cat 1. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 13. 2. I return to the notion of respect for animals in chapter 13 on Donna Haraway. 3. Here I am referring to the famous article by Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435–50. 4. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 11. 5. Here we might wonder whether gender categories function to accentuate singularity or ultimately serve to conceal it. Issues concerning gender and sexual difference are raised at more length in chapter 11 on Carol Adams. 6. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 47–48. 7. This is a concept I borrow from Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 156–67. Although Derrida does not explicitly employ the phrase “useless suffering,” it

11. Adams’s Absent Referent Z 157 resonates deeply with his concerns here insofar as much of the suffering animals are subjected to in modern industrialized societies is largely unnecessary. 8. Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 29. 9. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow  .  .  . A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 73.

11. Adams’s Absent Referent 1. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990; repr. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 2. Carol J. Adams, The Carol J. Adams Reader: Writings and Conversations, 1995–2015 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 165. 3. Adams’s arguments here have interesting parallels with (and divergences from) the writings of Jacques Derrida (chapter 10). For an extended discussion, see Carol J. Adams and Matthew Calarco, “Derrida and The Sexual Politics of Meat,” in Meat Culture, ed. Annie Potts (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 31–53. 4. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139–67. 5. Adams herself noted the importance of race in her earliest work, and her subsequent writings have taken up a whole series of additional themes from both social justice and environmentalist contexts. For a representative sampling of this work, see Carol J. Adams, The Pornography of Meat (New York: Continuum, 2004); and Adams, The Carol J. Adams Reader. 6. Sunaura Taylor, “Beasts of Burden: Disability Studies and Animal Rights,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19 (2011): 191– 222, at 204. 7. For further analysis of these terms in the context of animal rights discourse and activism, see Sunaura Taylor, “Vegans, Freaks, and Animals: Toward a New Table Fellowship,” American Quarterly 65 (2013): 757–64. 8. Taylor, “Beasts of Burden,” 196. 9. Taylor, 198–99.

158 Y 11. Adams’s Absent Referent 10. The phrase “dreaded comparisons” is often employed in pro-animal literature and is derived from Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1988). 11. Bénédicte Boisseron, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 12. This issue is discussed at greater length in chapter 12 on Val Plumwood. 13. For a discussion of the difference between colonialism and settler colonialism, see Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 14. There is a growing body of literature on these themes. Some of the more helpful resources include Virginia D. Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought,” Societies 5 (2014): 1–11; Kim TallBear, “Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints,” Fieldsights—Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, November 18, 2011, http://culanth .org/fieldsights/260-why-interspecies-thinking-needs-indigenous -standpoints; Craig Womack, “There Is No Respectful Way to Kill an Animal,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 25 (2013): 11–27. 15. Margaret Robinson, “Veganism and Mi’kmaq Legends,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 33 (2013): 189–96. 16. Ecofeminism is a strand of feminism that explores a number of intersections between the status of nature and that of women. In my analysis of Robinson’s work, I avoid giving specific details about Mi’kmaq stories as a sign of respect for their sacred nature. I urge readers to examine Robinson’s own retelling of the stories. See Robinson, “Veganism and Mi’kmaq Legends,” 191–93. 17. Margaret Robinson, “Dr. Margaret Robinson at the AR Academy,” YouTube Video, 37:03, February 22, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =8t2mK92H63E.

12. Plumwood’s Crocodile 1. Val Plumwood, “Being Prey,” Utne Reader ( July–August 2000): 56–61; henceforth cited parenthetically in the text.

13. Har away ’s Companion Species Z 159

13. Haraway’s Companion Species 1. Donna J. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 15 (1985): 65–107; Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). 2. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2008). 3. This point is also emphasized by Val Plumwood (see chapter 12). 4. Haraway, When Species Meet, 165. 5. See also chapter 10 for Derrida’s related ideas about respect for animals. 6. For a sampling of such work, see Eben Kirksey, ed. The Multispecies Salon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 7. Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 46. 8. See, for example, Zipporah Weisberg, “The Broken Promises of Monsters: Haraway, Animals, and the Humanist Legacy,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 7 (2009): 21–61. 9. Tom Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” in Animal Rights and Human Obligations, ed. Tom Regan and Peter Singer (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), 105–14, at 112. 10. See Haraway’s remarks along these lines in her interview: Jeffrey J. Williams, “Science Stories: An Interview with Donna J. Haraway,” The Minnesota Review 73–74 (2009): 133–163, esp. 160–162. 11. Peng Zhou et al., “A Pneumonia Outbreak Associated with a New Coronavirus of Probable Bat Origin,” Nature 579 (2020): 270–73. 12. Several fake and doctored videos and images of such animal reoccupations have also been circulating on social media, but one could argue that even those fabricated images speak to a desire among the general public to see animals reoccupy public spaces. 13. I am not endorsing standard rewilding paradigms because I believe they are based on a fundamentally flawed ontological vision of human beings and animals and a questionable ethico-political foundation. For a useful reflection on some of the problems associated with current rewilding efforts, see Jamie Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation After Nature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). For an alternative vision of rewilding (or what I would

160 Y 13. Har away ’s Companion Species prefer to call “alterwilding”) that is more consonant with the ideas developed here, see Marc Bekoff, Rewilding Our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2014).

INDEX

absent referents, 111–114, 119, 121 Adams, Carol J., xi, 145n4, 157n5; on animals and women, 111–114; intersectionality and, 114; The Sexual Politics of Meat by, 111 Adeimantus, 3–4 aesthetics: animal, 19–21, 24–25, 28; idealistic, 21; realistic, 21, 28; wonder-based, 24–25 Afro-dog, 119 ahimsa (nonviolence), 42, 44–48, 50 Alex (parrot), 64 Amazon rain forest, wildfires in, 1–2, 6–7, 11, 139, 146n1 American Sign Language (ASL), 59–60, 63 animal aesthetics, 19–21, 24–25, 28 animal agency, 75–78 animal ethics, 79, 84, 105–107, 117, 134–135 animality, xi, 15, 38, 40, 102, 116 animalization, 116, 119 animal kin, ix–x, 24, 36, 69, 78, 98; companions to, 139; embodied

vulnerability and, 117; grieving and, 87–88; human debts to, 121–122; unsustainable interactions with, 140; urbanized humans and, 142–143; veganism, as ritual of respectful relations with, 122–123 animal liberation, 46, 57–58, 82–83, 107, 117–118 Animal Liberation (Singer), 82 animal life, vii, ix; Aristotle on, 14, 16–17; Bāhubali and, 49; Cynics and Jains on, x; Descartes and Kant on, 73; Marcus Aurelius on, 20–21 animal nature, ix, xi animal philosophy, xi, 120; animal studies and, 99, 103, 114, 117, 146n5; of Bentham, 81–82; of Derrida, 99, 103; of Kant, 75; of Plumwood, 124; of Regan, 137 animal rights, xii, 57–58, 107 animals: as absent referents, 111–112; ahimsa and, 45–48; as analogue

162 Y Index animals (continued ) of humanity, 74; Aristotle on, x, 13–18, 100; attacks on humans by, xi–xii; as automata, Descartes on, 62, 67; Bāhubali and, 48–50; Bentham on slaves and, 79–81, 117–118; in captivity, for human entertainment, 108–110; commodification and objectification of, 108–109; communication, 60, 66, 78; Cynics on, 33–35; deaths of, 84–88, 96–97, 107, 137, 154n5; domesticated, 5, 39, 136, 141; eating, 69, 74–75, 83–84, 121–123, 136–137; experimenting on, 83, 136–137, 142; extinction rates of, vii; feminists on, 113; gaze of, 100; in Genesis, 71; grief of, 85–88; human, 15, 21; in ideal city, of Socrates, 9–11; injustice toward, gender-based interhuman injustice and, xi; Jainism on, 45–50; killing, x, 46–47, 51–52, 74–75, 80, 83–86, 121–123, 138, 141–142; language and, xi, 56, 59–60, 62–68, 80, 148n15; machines and, 61–62, 67, 100; mass killing of, 84–85, 138, 141; maximum respect for, 108–110; morality of, 75–78; more-thanhuman, 11; nonhuman, 15, 22, 33, 57, 74; in Odyssey, 51–53; ontology of, 121; as Others, 100–101, 105; philosophy and, viii–ix, 30; practical responsibilities to, 69; problem-solving abilities, 67; race

and, 118–119; rationality, language and, xi, 63–64, 67–68; rationality of, 55–56, 63–64, 67–68, 75–77; ritual, 42–45; scientific knowledge of, vii–viii; senses of fairness and justice, 77; settler colonialism and, 120; singular-plural, 103–105; souls and, 61–62; subjectivities of, 56, 100, 105, 112, 137; as subjectsof-a-life, 137; suffering of, 79–81, 84, 86–87, 97, 105–107, 156n7; Treadwell on, 28; virtues of, 54–57; well-being of, x; women and, 111–114; wonder of, 19–24. See also Descartes, René, on animals; humans, animals and; Kant, Immanuel, on animals; meat animals, violence against, vii– viii, x–xii, 107; Aristotle on, 17–18; Descartes on, 68–69, 80; enslaved humans and, 118; Haraway on, 138; Jains on, 44–46, 48–50, 57; Kant on, 80–81; Plutarch on, 57; racism and, 118; settler colonialism and, 120; Singer on, 83; violence against women and, 111 animal science, 67, 75, 95–98 animal studies, xi, 118; animal philosophy and, 99, 103, 114, 117, 146n5 Animal That Therefore I Am, The (Derrida), 99 animal welfare, Jainism on, 43, 45–46 Anthropocene, 143 anthropocentrism: of Aristotle, 19–20; Cynics against, 38; of

Index Z 163 Descartes, 63, 68; disability and, 114–116; human-animal distinctions and, 81; of Kant, 73; Plutarch on, 58; race and, 119 anthropomorphism, 94 Apology (Plato), 8 Apology for Raymond Sebond (Montaigne), 60 Aristotle: on animal life, 14, 16–17; on animals, x, 13–18, 100; anthropocentrism of, 19–20; Gryllus and, 57; on habits and excellence, 14–15; on Heraclitus, 13, 16; on human-animal distinctions, x, 17–19, 63; Marcus Aurelius and, 20–21, 24–25; Nicomachean Ethics by, 14–15; Plato and, 12; Politics by, 17; on theōria, 15–16; on violence against animals, 17–18; on wonder, in philosophy, 12, 14, 16–17, 147n1 asceticism, 9–10, 43, 49 askēsis, 10, 34–35, 95 ASL. See American Sign Language autarkeia (self-sufficiency), 36–37 automata, animals and, 62, 67 baboons, 23–24 Bāhubali, 48–50 bats, 139–140 beast-machines, Descartes on, 62–63, 66–69 beauty, 21, 28 “Being Prey” (Plumwood), 124–127, 129–130 Bekoff, Marc, 77, 156n14

Bentham, Jeremy, xi; on animal deaths, 84; on animal ethics, 79, 84, 117; on animals and humans, 79–82, 117–118; on animal suffering, 79–81, 84; Derrida and, 106; An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation by, 79; Singer and, 82–83; on slavery, 79–81, 117–118 birds, 64, 85–86 Black bodies, 119 Blackfish, 107–110 Black people, 117–119 Boisseron, Bénédicte, 118–119 bottlenose dolphins, 66 Brancheau, Dawn, 108 Brazil, Amazon rain forest wildfires in, 1–2, 6–7, 139, 146n1 Buddhism, 43 care for the soul, 7–9, 31, 39 cats, 99–101, 105, 109 cattle, 2, 6–7 Cephalus, 3 chimpanzees, 22–23, 59 Christianity, 89, 146n7 Circe, 51–54 city-state (polis), 3–7, 9–11, 30 civilization: Cynics on, 30, 33–34; meat and, 55; Treadwell on, 28–29, 40 colonialism, 6; settler, xi, 120–121 colonization, 121 companion species, xii, 131–135, 143 Companion Species Manifesto, The (Haraway), 131–132 “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” (Kant), 70

164 Y Index coronavirus pandemic, 139–142 Cowperthwaite, Gabriela, 108 cows, 83–84, 87 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 114 critical race theory, 118 crocodiles, 125–128 crows, 85–86 cyborgs, 132 Cynics, x; on all-too-human habits and existence, 37; on animality, 38, 40; on animals, 33–35; on animals and humans, 33–34, 37–41; against anthropocentrism, 38; on askēsis, 34–35, 95; on autarkeia, 36–37; against civilization, 30, 33–34; Diogenes of Sinope, 31–32; dogs and, 39; on kata physin and kata nomon, 30, 34–35; on nature, 30, 33–34, 40; Nietzsche and, 95; Plato and, 29, 32, 38, 40; Socrates and, 29–32, 35, 39; Stoics and, 32–33; on third nature, 34; Treadwell and, 35, 38–41; on vegetarianism, 35, 149n8 Darwin, Charles, 92 death: of animals, 84–88, 96–97, 107, 137, 154n5; of companion species, 133; of God, 89–90; grieving and, 85–88 deconstruction, 102–104 deep ethology, 96–97, 156n14 deer, 95–98 dehumanization, 114, 116, 119 Derrida, Jacques, ix; on animals, as singular and plural, 103–105; on

animals, maximum respect for, 109–110; on animals and humans, xi, 99–106; on animal suffering, 105–107, 156n7; The Animal That Therefore I Am by, 99; on “cat encounter,” 99–101, 105, 109; on deconstruction, 102–104; on human-animal binary, 101–103 Descartes, René: anthropocentrism of, 63, 68; Derrida and, 99; Discourse on Method by, 61, 68–69, 152n15; Kant and, 73, 80, 121; on rational action, 67 Descartes, René, on animals: as automata, 62, 67; as beastmachines, 62–63, 66–69; humans and, 60–63, 67–69, 121, 151n5; language and, xi, 60, 62–65, 67–68, 80; as machines, 61–62, 67, 100; rational action and, 67; violence against, 68–69, 80 Diagambra Jains, 48 Diogenes Laertius, 38 Diogenes of Sinope, 31–34, 150n12 direct and indirect duties, 74 disability and people with disabilities, xi, 114–117, 151n5 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 61, 68–69, 152n15 dog agility training, 135–136, 138 dogs, 39, 119, 135–136, 138 domesticated animals, 5, 39, 136, 141 Donaldson, Brianne, 50 ecofeminism, 121, 158n16 elephants, 75–78, 86 enlightenment, 72–73, 153n6

Index Z 165 Escobar, Herton, 146n1 essentialism, 18–19 ethologists and ethological approach, vii, 65–67, 76–78, 95–97, 142, 155nn13–14, 156n14 eudaimonia, 9–10, 14 euthanasia, 150n5 factory farms, 84, 87, 141–142 feminists, on animals, 113 Fossey, Dian, 95 Foucault, Michel, 50, 149n9 freedom, of human existence, 70–71 frogs, 123 gay science, 95 gender and sexual differences, 111–114 gender-based interhuman injustice, animals and, xi Genesis, 70–71 Glaucon, 3–8, 10–11 Goodall, Jane, 22–25, 95, 148n15 grief, 85–88 grizzly bears, 26–29, 35–36, 39–40 Grizzly Man, 26–29, 39–40 “Gryllus” (Plutarch), x, 54–58, 60, 76 Gunnison’s prairie dogs, 65–66 Hadot, Pierre, 20–21 Haraway, Donna, 145n4; on companion species, xii, 131–135, 143; on cyborgs, 132; on humans and animals, 131–132, 134–139; “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” by, 131–132; Regan and, 137; on

violence against animals, 138; When Species Meet by, 132 Heidegger, Martin, 12 Heracles, 35 Heraclitus, 13, 16, 148n2 Hermes, 52–53 Herzog, Werner, 26–29, 40 Homer, 51–54 homophobia, 82–83 householders, 42, 45–47 human-animal binary, 101–103 human-animal distinctions, xi, 22; anthropocentrism and, 81; Aristotle on, x, 17–19, 63; Cynics on, 37–38; Derrida on, 101–105; Descartes on, 60–62, 67–69, 121; essentialist, 18–19; Haraway on, 132; Kant on, 73, 121; nudity in, 101 human animality, 116 human-animal relations, viii, 142–143; coronavirus pandemic and, 140; Derrida on, 105–106; in global pandemic, xii; of Goodall and Smuts, 24–25; Haraway on, 134–135, 137–138; Plato and, x; rituals in, 43; Singer on, 82; Treadwell on, 26 human animals, 15, 21 human excellence, 14–16 human exceptionalism, 107, 134–135 human flourishing: animal nature and, xi; Cynics on, 39–40; human excellence and, 15; Nietzsche on, 97–98; rationality and, 14 human freedom, 70–71 human morality, 75

166 Y Index human nature, ix–x humans: direct and indirect duties of, 74; dogs and, 39; as edible, 126–130; enslaved, 79–81, 117–118; God and, 90; machines and, 132; marginalized, 81–83, 111, 114–116; more-than-human beings and, 9, 50, 94–96, 132; nature and, 71, 94–97; Nietzsche on naturalization of, 94–95; nonhuman animals and, 15; primates and, 62; reason of, 70–72; social distancing among, 142; speech and values, 17 humans, animals and: Aristotle on, 15, 22; Bentham on, 79–82, 117–118; companion species, xii; coronavirus pandemic, 139–142; Cynics on, 33–34, 37–41; death and grieving, 85–86; Derrida on, xi, 99–106; Descartes on, 60–63, 67–69, 121, 151n5; disability and, 114–117, 151n5; edibility of, 128–130; evolution of, 70; as finite, 105–106; Haraway on, 131–132, 134–139; harming and killing, 74; indirect duties, 74; justice and, 75; Kant on, xi, 71–75, 78, 121; Koko and, 59–60; language, 60, 62–63, 66, 148n15; liberation movements, 82–83; machines and, 132; in Mi’kmaq culture and narratives, 120–122; morality of, 75–76; Nietzsche on, 91–94; ontology of, 73, 91–92, 94, 103, 115, 121–122, 140, 145n2, 159n13; Plutarch on, 53–58; rational action, 67; shared suffering of, xi;

slavery and, 79–82, 117–118; speech and speaking, 54, 56, 64, 80; subjectivity of, 68; Treadwell on, 26, 40–41; violence against, xi hunting, 46, 96–97 Hutto, Joe, 95–98, 155n13 idealistic aesthetics, 21 imperialism, 6 Indigenous peoples and traditions, 120–122 indirect duties, to nonhuman animals, 74 individual and collective subjectivities, 93–94 individual soul, 7–9 intersectionality, 113–114 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, An (Bentham), 79 Jainism and Jains, x; on animals, 45–50; on animal welfare, 43, 45–46; Bāhubali and, 48–50; euthanasia in shelters of, 150n5; householders in, 42, 45–47; on jiva and ajiva, 44; Mahavira in, 43; on nonviolence, 42, 44–48, 50; Plutarch and, 57; renouncers in, 44–45, 47, 49; rituals of, 43, 46–48, 50; on sentient beings, 44–45, 47–50; on souls, 44, 47–48; on veganism, 150n3; on vegetarianism, 43, 45, 47; on violence against animals and sentient beings, 44–46, 48–50, 57 jiva and ajiva, 44

Index Z 167 justice: animal sense of, 77; humans, animals and, 75; in Republic, 3–4, 7 Kain, Peter, 75–76 Kakadu National Park, 124–125 Kant, Immanuel: anthropocentrism of, 73; “Conjectural Beginning of Human History” by, 70; Descartes and, 73, 80, 121; on direct and indirect duties, 74; on enlightenment, 72–73, 153n6; on freedom, of human experience, 70–71; on Genesis, 70–71; on human reason, 70–72; on humans and nature, 71; Lectures on Ethics by, 74; on persons versus things, 74–75; on rationality, 72–73, 75; on women, 72–73 Kant, Immanuel, on animals: agency of, 75–78; as analogue of humanity, 74; elephants, 75–76, 78; humans and, xi, 71–75, 78, 121; humans and, morality of, 75–76; violence against, 80–81 karma, 44, 47–48, 150n5 kata nomon (living in accordance to cultural norms), 30, 34–35 kata physin (living in accordance to nature), 30, 34–35 killer whales, 107–110 King, Barbara J., 86–88 King, Stephanie, 66 Koko, 59–64 language: animals and, xi, 56, 59–60, 62–68, 80, 148n15; ASL, 59–60,

63; birds and, 64; primates and, 59–60, 62, 64; speech and, 17, 54, 56, 64, 80 Lectures on Ethics (Kant), 74 Lents, Nathan, 66, 76–77 liberation movements, 82–83 Linnaeus, Carolus, 151n1 living in accordance to cultural norms (kata nomon), 30, 34–35 living in accordance to nature (kata physin), 30, 34–35 Lorenz, Konrad, 95 luxuries, 5–7, 9–10, 31, 33–35, 55, 57 machines: animals and, 61–62, 67, 100; beast-machines, 62–63, 66–69; humans and, 132 Mahavira, 43 “Manifesto for Cyborgs, A” (Haraway), 131–132 Marcus Aurelius, 20–21, 24–25 meat: animals as absent referents and, 111–113; global demand for, Amazon forest fires and, 2, 6–7; humans, civilization and, 55; ideal city-state and, 3, 5–6; industry, coronavirus pandemic and, 141; massproduced, abolition of, 84; in Mi’kmaq diets, 120; in Odyssey, 51–53; patriarchal societies and, 112–114; Plumwood on humans and, 126–130; Plutarch on, 57; production, modern, 111–112, 121; Socrates on, 5–6, 31; subjectivity and, 126 Mi’kmaq, 120–122, 158n16

168 Y Index misanthropy, 38–40 moksha, 44 monkeys, 75 Montaigne, Michel de, 60 morality, of animals, 75–78 moral rationality, 75, 78 more-than-human animals, 11 more-than-human beings, 9, 50, 94–96, 132 more-than-human world, ix, 37, 78, 120–122, 142–143 mule deer, 95–96 multispecies crowd, 134 National Park Service, 29 natural world, Marcus Aurelius on animal life and, 20–21 nature: Cynics on, 30, 33–34, 40; de-deification of, 94; humans and, 71, 94–97 Newmyer, Stephen, 17 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 14–15 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xi; Cynics and, 95; on death of God, 89–90; on gay science, 95; on human flourishing, 97–98; on humans, death of God and, 89–90; on humans and animals, 91–94; on humans and more-than-human beings, 94–96; Hutto and, 96–98; on naturalization of humanity, 94–95; on nihilism and pessimism, 90–91, 93–94, 97–98, 128; Thus Spoke Zarathustra by, 97; on Übermensch, 91, 93–94 nihilism, 90–91, 94, 97–98, 128

nonhuman animals: Cynics on, 33; Gryllus on, 57; human beings and, 15; indirect duties to, 74; wonder of, 22 nonhuman world, 33, 37, 71 nonviolence (ahimsa), 42, 44–48, 50 nudity, shame and, 99–102 Odysseus, 51–56 Odyssey (Homer), 51–54 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles), 91 ontological and ethical vision, in Jainism, 47–48 ontological category, companionship as, 132–134 ontology, viii–ix; animal, 121; of humans and animals, 73, 91–92, 94, 103, 115, 121–122, 140, 145n2, 159n13 Overhuman (Übermensch), 91, 93–94 parrots, 64 patriarchal, meat-eating societies, 112–114 Patterson, Francine, 59–60 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, 118 Pepperberg, Irene, 64 persons versus things, 74–75 pessimism, 90–91, 93–94, 97–98 Peterson, Sandra, 8–9 pet ownership, Jains on, 45–46 philosophers, Western and nonWestern, viii–ix philosophy: animals and, viii–ix, 30; in eudaimonia, 9–10; in good life and living well, 9–11; Nietzsche

Index Z 169 on task of, 97–98; as practice, Cynics on, 29–30; Socrates versus Diogenes of Sinope on, 32; wonder and, 12, 14, 16–17, 147n1. See also animal philosophy pigs, 5, 11, 52–55 Plato, 2; Apology by, 8; Aristotle and, 12; Cynics and, 29, 32, 38, 40; Gryllus and, 57; human-animal relations and, x; Republic by, 3–9, 30–31; Symposium by, 35; on wonder, in philosophy, 147n1 Plumwood, Val, xi–xii; “Being Prey” by, 124–127, 129–130; on crocodile attack, 125–128; on human and animal edibility, 128–130; on vegetarianism, 128–129 Plutarch: on animals, virtues of, 54–57; on anthropocentrism, 58; “Gryllus” by, x, 54–58, 60, 76; on humans and animals, 53–58; Montaigne and, 60; on Odysseus, 53–56; vegetarianism of, 57–58; on violence against animals, 57 Polemarchus, 3 polis (city-state), 3–7, 9–11, 30 Politics (Aristotle), 17 posthuman, 94 practices of freedom, 50 primates, 59–60, 62, 64 primate spirituality, 22, 148n15 Quoholet, 90 race, xi, 118–119, 153n6, 157n5 racism, 82–83, 118–119

rational action, 67 rational animals, humans as, 21 rationality: of animals, 55–56, 63–64, 67–68, 75–77; human flourishing and, 14; language, animals and, xi, 63–64, 67–68; of monkeys, Kant on, 75; moral, 75, 78; realistic aesthetics and, 21; of women, Kant on, 72–73 realistic aesthetics, 21, 28 reason, of humans, 70–72 Regan, Tom, xii, 137, 146n7 Republic (Plato), 3–9, 30–31 rewilding, 141, 159nn12–13 rituals: of animals, 42–45; in human-animal relationships, 43; of Jainism, 43, 46–48, 50; nonviolence and, 42, 47; in US culture, 43; veganism and, 122–123 roadkill, 46 Robinson, Margaret, 120–123, 158n16 sangha, 23–24 Sea World, 108–110 self-sufficiency (autarkeia), 36–37 sentient beings, Jainism on, 44–45, 47–50 settler colonialism, xi, 120–121 sexism, 72–73, 82–83, 126 Sexual Politics of Meat, The (Adams), 111 Shah, Natubhai, 45 Singer, Peter, 82–84, 146n7, 154n5 slavery and slaves, 18, 79–82, 117–118 Slobodchikoff, Con, 65–66 Smuts, Barbara, 23–25 social media, 1

170 Y Index Socrates, 147n1; in Apology, 8; on care for the soul, 7–9, 31; Cynics and, 29–32, 35, 39; Gryllus, 57; on ideal city-state, 3–7, 9–11, 30; on luxuries, 5–7, 9–10, 31; on meat, 5–6, 31; in Republic, 3–9, 30–31; in Symposium, 35 Sophocles, 91 souls: animals and, 61–62; care for, 7–9, 31, 39; Descartes on, 61; individual, 7–9; Jainism on, 44, 47–48; moksha of, 44; Socrates on care for, 7–9, 31 speech and speaking, 17, 54, 56, 64, 80 Stoics, 32–33 subjectivity, 3, 34, 57; of animals, 56, 100, 105, 112, 137; of animals and humans, 68; of Bāhubali, 49; of human males, 113; individual and collective, 93–94; meat and, 126; of women, 112–113 subjects-of-a-life, animals as, 137 Symposium (Plato), 35 Taylor, Sunaura, 115–117 theōria, 15–16, 23 third nature, Cynics on, 34 Thrasymachus, 3 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 97 Tilikum, 108–109 Touching the Wild, 95–96 Treadwell, Timothy, 30; on animals and humans, 26, 40–41; on

civilization, 28–29, 40; Cynics and, 35, 38–41; grizzly bears and, 26–29, 35–36, 39–40 Übermensch (Overhuman), 91, 93–94 utilitarianism, 79, 82–87, 154n5 value hierarchy, 19 veganism, 120, 122–123, 136–137, 150n3 vegetarianism, xii, 5; Cynics on, 35, 149n8; Jainism on, 43, 45, 47; Plumwood on, 128–129; of Plutarch, 57–58; Socrates on, 5, 7 Ventre, Jeffrey, 108–109 violence: against Black people, 118–119; against enslaved Black people, 118; nonviolence and, 42, 44–48, 50; against people with disabilities, 116; against women, 111–112, 114. See also animals, violence against When Species Meet (Haraway), 132 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 73 women: animals and, 111–114; bodies of, objectifying and fragmenting, 112–113; of color, violence against, 114; inequality of, 18; Kant on, 72–73; subjectivity of, 112–113; violence against, 111–112, 114 wonder, 12, 14, 16–17, 19–25, 147n1 wonderful animals, 19–21 zoonotic disease, 139