The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies 9780199927142, 9780199927159, 0199927146

Citation preview

 

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

A N I M A L S T U DI E S

 

 

The Oxford Handbook of

ANIMAL STUDIES Edited by

LINDA KALOF

1

 

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Kalof, Linda, editor. Title: The Oxford handbook of animal studies / [edited by] Linda Kalof. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2017. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016032707 (print) | LCCN 2016051797 (ebook) | ISBN 9780199927142 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780199927159 (Updf) Subjects: LCSH: Human-animal relationships. | Animals—Social aspects. | Human-animal relationships—Moral and ethical aspects. | Animals (Philosophy) | Animals and civilization. Classification: LCC QL85 .O84 2017 (print) | LCC QL85 (ebook) | DDC 590—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032707 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

 

Contents

Preface  List of Contributors  Introduction  Linda Kalof

ix xi 1

PA RT I   A N I M A L S I N T H E L A N D S C A P E OF L AW, P OL I T IC S , A N D P U B L IC  P OL IC Y 1. Animal Rights  Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton

25

2. Animals in Political Theory  Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka

43

3. Animals as Living Property  David Favre

65

4. The Human-​Animal Bond  James A. Serpell

81

5. Animal Sheltering  Leslie Irvine

98

6. Roaming Dogs  Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema

113

7. Misothery: Contempt for Animals and Nature, Its Origins, Purposes, and Repercussions  James B. Mason 8. Continental Approaches to Animals and Animality  Ralph R. Acampora

135 152

 

vi   Contents

9. Animals as Legal Subjects  Paul Waldau

167

10. The Struggle for Compassion and Justice through Critical Animal Studies  Carol Gigliotti

189

11. Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics: The Feminist Care Perspective  Josephine Donovan

208

PA RT I I   A N I M A L I N T E N T IONA L I T Y, AG E N C Y, AND REFLEXIVE THINKING 12. Cetacean Cognition  Lori Marino

227

13. History and Animal Agencies  Chris Pearson

240

14. What Was It Like to Be a Cow? History and Animal Studies  Erica Fudge

258

15. Animals as Sentient Commodities  Rhoda Wilkie

279

16. Animal Work  Jocelyne Porcher

302

17. Animals as Reflexive Thinkers: The Aponoian Paradigm  Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó

319

PA RT I I I   A N I M A L S A S OB J E C T S I N S C I E N C E , F O OD, SP E C TAC L E , A N D  SP ORT 18. The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice  Bernard E. Rollin

345

19. The Ethics of Food Animal Production  Paul B. Thompson

364

 

Contents   vii

20. Animals as Scientific Objects  Mike Michael

380

21. The Problem with Zoos  Randy Malamud

397

22. Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control  John Vucetich and Michael Paul Nelson

411

PA RT I V   A N I M A L S I N C U LT U R A L R E P R E SE N TAT ION S 23. Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art  Joe Zammit-​Lucia

433

24. Animals in Folklore  Boria Sax

456

PA RT V   A N I M A L S I N E C O SYS T E M S 25. Archaeozoology  Juliet Clutton-​Brock

475

26. Animals and Ecological Science  Anita Guerrini

489

27. Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”  Jane C. Desmond

506

28. Commensal Species  Terry O’Connor

525

29. Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems  Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch

542

30. Animals in Religion  Stephen R. L. Clark

571

Index

591

 

 

Preface

I am very grateful to Angela Chnapko, editor at Oxford University Press, for contacting me about editing The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies. I was thrilled at the prospect of undertaking the project—​not because of the huge editorial task ahead but because of the validation of animal studies as a major topic of scholarly research, worthy of coverage by the prestigious Oxford Handbook series. This volume would not have been possible without Angela’s attentive, generous and gentle guidance at every stage of the project, from the proposal peer review process to the final details of production. I also thank Princess Ikatekit at OUP and Aimee Swenson at MSU for their assistance in research and production, and Thomas Dietz for his unwavering enthusiasm and support for my tendency to take on large, multiple-​year projects. I am of course deeply indebted to the volume contributors for their expertise, hard work, and patience over the six years (!) it has taken for the chapters to appear online, after which the book could finally see the light of day. Finally, it is with great sadness that we acknowledge the passing of one of our contributors, Juliet Clutton-​Brock, on September 21, 2015, at age 82. Juliet was a lifelong animal advocate and a friend to and collaborator with a number of us involved in this volume. She is sorely missed.

 

 

List of Contributors

Ralph R. Acampora  is associate professor of philosophy at Hofstra University and teaches in the areas of applied ethics and history of philosophy. Arnold Arluke  is professor of sociology and anthropology at Northeastern University, vice president for research at Forensic Veterinary Investigations, and senior scholar at the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy. Kate Nattrass Atema  is the director of the Global Companion Animals Program at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, chairperson of the International Companion Animal Management (ICAM) Coalition, Faculty Fellow at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, and a contributing lecturer on animal welfare for Edinburgh University’s online animal welfare and ethics course. Anna E. Charlton  is adjunct professor of law at Rutgers School of Law–​Newark, and former director of Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic. Stephen R. L. Clark  is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Liverpool, and an honorary research fellow in the Department of Theology at the University of Bristol. Juliet Clutton-​Brock  was an eminent zooarchaeologist and curator in the Department of Zoology at the Natural History Museum in London and managing editor of the Journal of Zoology. Jane C. Desmond  is a professor of anthropology and of gender/​women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–​Champaign, where she also directs the International Forum for U.S. Studies: A Center for the Transnational Study of the United States. Sue Donaldson  is coauthor (with Will Kymlicka) of Zoopolis:  A  Political Theory of Animal Rights, and a cofounder of the Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics research initiative at Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. Josephine Donovan  is professor emerita of English at the University of Maine whose fields of specialization include animal ethics, feminist criticism and theory, American women’s literature, and early modern women’s literature. David Favre teaches property, international environmental law, and animal law at Michigan State University, and has been a national and international scholar of animal law since his first law review article on wildlife rights appeared back in 1981.

 

xii   List of Contributors Gary L. Francione  is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Law and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University School of Law–​Newark. Erica Fudge  is professor of English studies at the University of Strathclyde, and director of the British Animal Studies Network. Carol Gigliotti  is a writer and scholar whose work challenges the current assumptions of creativity and offers a more comprehensive understanding of creativity through recognizing animal cognition, consciousness, and agency. Anita Guerrini  is Horning Professor in the Humanities and professor of history at Oregon State University, where she teaches the history of science and medicine. Leslie Irvine  is professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder whose work has included selfhood among animals, animal sheltering, animals in disasters, human-​animal play, and the feminization of veterinary medicine. Linda Kalof  is a professor of sociology, environmental science, and policy and community sustainability, and the director of the interdisciplinary graduate specialization in animal studies at Michigan State University. Will Kymlicka is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and coauthor, with Sue Donaldson, of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Randy Malamud  is Regents’ Professor of English at Georgia State University, as well as a patron of the Captive Animals Protection Society and a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. Lori Marino  is founder and executive director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy and was formerly a senior lecturer at Emory University and a faculty affiliate at the Emory Center for Ethics. James B. Mason  is an attorney and the author of An Unnatural Order: Roots of Our Destruction of Nature. Mike Michael is a sociologist of science and technology, and a professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. Susana Monsó  is affiliated with the Department of Logic, History, and Philosophy of Science at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, as well as the Unit of Ethics and Human-​Animal Studies at Messerli Research Institute, Vienna. Michael Paul Nelson  holds the Ruth H. Spaniol Chair in Renewable Resources and is a professor of environmental ethics and philosophy at Oregon State University.

 

List of Contributors    xiii Terry O’Connor  is an emeritus professor of archaeological science at the University of York, United Kingdom, with particular interests in human-​animal relations and the taphonomy of bone assemblages. Marcus Owens  is a PhD candidate in landscape architecture and environmental planning at the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley. Chris Pearson  is a senior lecturer in twentieth-​century history at the University of Liverpool. Jocelyne Porcher  is director of research at INRA (National Institute for Agricultural Research). Her first topic of research, about which she has published several books, is the working relationship between humans and animals. Bernard E. Rollin  is distinguished professor of philosophy, biomedical sciences, and animal sciences at Colorado State University. Mark J. Rowlands  is professor of philosophy at the University of Miami. Boria Sax  is the author of fifteen books, including Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human. James A. Serpell  is the Marie A. Moore Professor of Animal Ethics and Welfare at the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Paul B. Thompson is the W.  K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food, and Community Ethics at Michigan State University. John Vucetich is associate professor of wildlife ecology in the School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science at Michigan Technological University and codirector of the Isle Royale Wolf-​Moose Study. Paul Waldau  is a professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, where he is the director of the master of science graduate program in anthrozoology. Rhoda Wilkie  is senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Aberdeen, a founding member and convenor of the British Sociological Association Animal/​Human Studies Group, and a member of the editorial board of the journal Society and Animals. Jennifer Wolch  is dean of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. Joe Zammit-​Lucia  is an author, commentator, and photographic artist whose work has included examining the role of artistic expression in human-​animal relationships.

 

 

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

A N I M A L S T U DI E S

 

 

I n t rodu ction Linda Kalof

The publication of an Oxford Handbook marks a watershed moment in the current thinking and research on a major scholarly topic, and we celebrate the inclusion of The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies in that hallowed archive. This is a critical turning point in time, when the “animal question” has assumed a priority position in the discourse of politics, ethics, public policy, and law, changing the relationship humans have with other animals in ways that will never again be the same as they were before. Intellectual struggles with the animal question began in earnest in the 1970s, and in the last few decades, animal studies has flourished, becoming an established area of inquiry in a staggering array of academic disciplines. Thematic sections on the relationship between humans and other animals are now part of academic professional societies, and numerous undergraduate programs offer both majors and minors in animal studies, and master’s and doctoral students can specialize in animal studies at Michigan State University, in what is the first but surely not the last animal studies graduate program at a research university. The remarkable flourishing of animal studies is due to the widespread recognition of (1) the commodification of animals in a wide variety of human contexts such as the use of animals as food, labor, and the objects of spectacle and science; (2) the degradation of the natural world, a staggering loss of animal habitat, and species extinction, and (3) our increasing need to coexist with other animals in urban, rural, and natural contexts. These themes are mapped into five major categories that structure this handbook into five parts: “Animals in the Landscape of Law, Politics, and Public Policy”; “Animal Intentionality, Agency, and Reflexive Thinking”; “Animals as Objects in Science, Food, Spectacle, and Sport”; “Animals in Cultural Representations”; and “Animals in Ecosystems.” Each category is explicated in chapters written by international scholars from diverse backgrounds, including philosophy, law, history, English, art, sociology, geography, archaeology, environmental studies, cultural studies, and animal advocacy. While some chapters fit well into one category, others resisted easy classification, representing the fluid, multifaceted nature of animal studies work. With that caveat in

 

2   Linda Kalof mind, the five categories and their constitutive chapters are a good overview of the most authoritative and up-​to-​date surveys of animal studies scholarship.

Part I  Animals in the Landscape of Law, Politics, and Public Policy Part 1 covers some of the fundamental issues that shape the field of animal studies: animals as subjects of law, politics, and public policy. Ethics has an enduring role in this section, as it does in many of the other sections of the volume, but for detailed ethical considerations of the human-​animal relationship, readers are encouraged to secure the recently published Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics. The issues discussed here are generated by questions that have been debated since antiquity and continue to structure the contemporary discourse on animal studies. What are our obligations to other animals? How do concepts such as morality, ethics, and justice figure into those obligations, particularly in terms of the exploitation of animals as resources? What roles do public policy and law have in shaping the relationship we have with other animals—​shall we remove the stigma of regarding animals as legal property or provide political inclusion for them? And how shall we make decisions about the care of animals who are homeless? The answers to these questions swirl around such contentious proposals as discontinuing domesticated species and all animal use, providing animals with citizenship rights, changing the legal status of animals, prohibiting the killing of shelter animals, considering stray animals as part of rather than separate from the human community, and understanding the animals’ standpoint by listening to their voices. The arguments for these proposals are compelling, as you will see in the following chapters. We begin with Gary Francione and Anna Charlton’s chapter, “Animal Rights,” which provides an overview of the history and key concepts of animal rights and animal ethics. They note that because the history of animal rights is filled with contradictions, misuses, and inconsistent developments, an abolitionist approach to animal rights that rejects all animal use is necessary. They argue that animals matter morally and therefore cannot be used as resources and that even domesticated species should not be brought into existence for human use, no matter how humanely the animals are treated. The abolitionist approach also rejects animal welfare reform and “single-​issue” campaigns to prohibit particular animal uses, such as for fur or foie gras. Finally, they explain why veganism is considered the moral baseline for the abolitionist approach and is the only rational response to the notion that animals have moral value. The sole cognitive characteristic that is important in the abolitionist approach is sentience, or subjective awareness; sentient animals are beings with interests (preferences, wants, and desires). In “Animals in Political Theory,” Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka argue that situating animal rights in a political theory of democracy, citizenship, and sovereignty provides a unique model of justice in the relationship between humans and other animals.

 

Introduction   3 Donaldson and Kymlicka critique both animal welfarist and animal rights positions for trying to strengthen the moral status of animals without considering their political status. Indeed, it is this lack of political inclusion that explains the general failure of animal advocacy movements based only on morality. They make three key points about the limitation of traditional animal rights theory and the promise of a political theory of animal rights: (1) animals not only have intrinsic moral status but also morally significant relationships and memberships that generate distinctive rights and obligations; (2) we cannot avoid the exercise of power by ending the domination of domesticated animals or leaving free-​living animals alone, and we need to acknowledge the inevitability of asymmetric power and hold that power accountable; and (3) justice requires not only reducing suffering but also recognizing animals as intentional beings who have the ability to communicate their own desires. David Favre also advocates giving domestic animals more visibility in the political and social arena. In his chapter, “Animals as Living Property,” Favre proposes changing the legal status of domestic animals from “personal property” to a new legal category, “living property.” He argues that the legal system lags behind the public in its attitudes toward animals, as in the case of divorce, when companion animals are legally categorized as personal property, and the fact of ownership determines who is awarded custody of the animal. Classifying animals as “living property” acknowledges that animals have their own interests and rights and that ownership is not as important as the animal’s best interests, which is consistent with public sentiment that companion animals have the right to be placed with a caring human. Living property status provides animals with the legal rights (1) not to be held for or put to legally prohibited uses, (2) not to be unnecessarily harmed, (3) to be given adequate support for physical and mental well-​being, (4) to have adequate living space, and (5) to be properly owned. Ultimately, what constitutes acceptable use of an animal who is living property is a political decision, and the legal system must inevitably address issues by species or public sentiment. The allocation of legal rights to domestic animals not only allows issues of animal rights and legal personhood to be directly addressed but also has the potential to shape new human-​animal relationships. In “The Human-​Animal Bond,” James Serpell provides background on the importance of domestic animals to humans, bolstering the arguments that legal rights for animals could form new relationships for them in the human community. Evidence of the human attachment to other animals dates to the late Paleolithic and early Neolithic eras, when humans were buried with a variety of small mammals with whom they appeared to have had a special relationship in life. The human-​companion animal relationship is “mutualistic,” conferring adaptive benefits on both humans and other animals. It has been documented that living with companion animals benefits humans’ physical and mental health (and reduces expenditures on health care) and stimulates positive social interactions and relationships with others. Serpell notes that human-​animal relationships sometimes have a negative impact on society: dog bites, for example, are a public-​health problem (most bites are from known dogs who bite children); companion animals can transmit zoonotic diseases to humans; cat predation on wild bird species has depleted avian biodiversity;

 

4   Linda Kalof animal waste pollutes parks and natural areas; and feeding the seventy-​five million companion dogs in the United States is a significant environmental burden. Failed human-​ animal bonds produce millions of animals who are abused, abandoned, relinquished to shelters, and prematurely euthanized. Purebred dogs often develop debilitating health and physical problems, and the exotic animal trade creates widespread suffering and death among wild animal populations. Serpell concludes that the failed human-​animal bond is an ethical issue that needs to be taken into account when weighing the benefits and costs of our relations with companion animals. Leslie Irvine addresses one of the major outcomes of the failed human-​animal bond in her chapter, “Animal Sheltering,” a history of the social and cultural significance of sheltering that reveals how the presence of animals in society shapes public policy, laws, and institutions. The first animal shelters emerged in response to the social problem of free-​roaming animals, particularly dogs, in urban areas. A bounty system made catching and killing dogs appealing to “unsavory characters” and created an incentive to steal pets to increase earnings. The brutality of methods used to dispose of surplus animals gave rise to a humanitarian movement that had no problem with killing animals and was only concerned with the means of killing. Today, the practice of killing healthy animals is the most important issue in animal sheltering. A conservative estimate of the number of animals who die in shelters annually is just under three million, making shelters the leading cause of death for US companion animals and giving rise to the no-​kill shelter movement, which has reconfigured the practices of sheltering. The first no-​kill sanctuary for animals opened in 1984, and ten years later, the nonprofit Maddie’s Fund was established to create a no-​kill nation. The social transition from the mass killing of strays to rehabilitation and rehoming in shelters is reflective of changing beliefs about the emotional value of dogs and cats, who are now widely believed to deserve ethical consideration. Irvine concludes that “the institution of sheltering highlights the position of animals in the intricate relationship between public policy and private morality.” Homeless animals are also the focus of Arnold Arluke and Kate Atema’s chapter, “Roaming Dogs.” They illustrate that the stigma attached to free-​roaming dogs is a social issue that throughout history has incited negativity and a projection of unsafe, unkempt spaces. Arluke and Atema describe the global efforts among disadvantaged communities to resolve the problem of roaming and unhealthy dogs. Historically, relations with roaming dogs have been limited to strategies meant to curtail populations and improve the aesthetics of human-​dominated spaces, often through killing and disposal. Roaming dogs are widely considered pariahs in the human community; they are unaccepted creatures, undeserving of compassion, recipients of brutality, and instigators of social conflict over such issues as waste management and property divisions. These conflicts can involve politicians, animal-​welfare advocates, city administrators, and citizens who take sides on a contentious issue, with dogs often killed as a result of polarized positions. The variability in community relationships between humans and roaming dogs can be influenced by humane interventions into dog-​related problems, including vaccination, sterilization, parasite control, helping sick or injured animals, and public outreach. The authors conclude that changing the perception that roaming dogs are problematic pests

 

Introduction   5 can revitalize a community, bringing an increase in friendly interactions and stronger connections between humans and roaming dogs, such as including the dogs as part of rather than separate from the human community. How is it that some animals are so poorly regarded by humans? In a leap back into prehistory, Jim Mason’s chapter explicates the history of the human disrespect for animals and nature. In “Misothery: Contempt for Animals and Nature, Its Origins, Purposes, and Repercussions,” Mason argues that before domestication reduced animals to slaves and commodities, humans regarded them with a sense of kinship and continuity with the living world. With the advent of domestication, misothery became a “cultural device” shaped by art, myth, ritual, and religion that provided humans with a sense of “supremacy and a license to exploit animals and nature.” Evidence of the transition from totemic (animal-​and nature-​affirming) culture to domestic culture (misothery) is found in the epic poem Gilgamesh and on Mesopotamian cylinder seals that depict conflict between humans (culture) and animals (nature). In contemporary culture, humans detach themselves from domestic animals through concealment or distancing, such as making invisible slaughterhouses, feedlots, and animal confinement facilities. Mason concludes that the human contempt for our own animality is at the root of all alienation from animals and nature and that our exploitation of animals and nature is destroying the living world. Perhaps what is needed to regain an appreciation of other animals is an acknowledgment of our corporeal similarity to them. In “Continental Approaches to Animals and Animality,” Ralph Acampora also argues that the human rejection of our own animality is problematic. In an overview of theoretical contributions to animal studies from Continental European philosophy, he offers insight into how phenomenological, hermeneutic, existentialist, and poststructural approaches inform the contextualization of the field. Using a phenomenological approach, Acampora argues that moral compassion for other animals could be achieved by acknowledging our corporeal commonality with them. He proposes that moral compassion and political activity for other animals be engaged with the “posthumanist task of re-​appreciating bodily animacy (and) recognizing our own vital status as animate zoomorphs.” Acampora concludes that the contributions of existentialist, phenomenological, and hermeneutic approaches to animal studies are better understood if we consider animal ethics to be a form of meta-​ethics or moral psychology instead of normative ethics, and what we glean from such a perspective is the importance of interspecies morality. In “Animals as Legal Subjects,” Paul Waldau also laments the human-​animal dualism that removes humans from the scientific category of “animal.” He argues that an enriched awareness of animals as legal subjects would challenge human exceptionalism and the view that humans are to dominate over all that is nonhuman, a perspective that legal systems permit and encourage through use of the concept of property. While Favre retained the use of the word “property” in his categorization of animals as “living property,” Waldau argues that it is the very designation of “property” that is most problematic as a human-​centered, potent, and influential concept. Expanding the understanding of animals as legal subjects would be consistent with the realization that nonhuman animals have their own subjectivities, interests, emotions, and intelligence.

 

6   Linda Kalof We are reminded that the future is ours to shape: we can recognize or deny that humans can be earth-​centered and caring about fellow animals, and the choice will make a difference in the future of both humans and nonhumans. Promoting an earth-​centered world is also the goal of Carol Gigliotti’s chapter, “The Struggle for Compassion and Justice through Critical Animal Studies.” Gigliotti views critical animal studies (CAS) as a way to achieve global justice for animals, humans, and the earth. She argues that as a “decidedly different approach” to animal studies, CAS is openly committed to veganism, animal rights, and the understanding that “the pursuit of animal liberation and human liberation are one and the same.” Adopting a vegan position is an acknowledgement that animals are fellow beings with agency and should not be objects for human use. She argues that CAS reveals the intersections of the global problems of political, economic, and social inequality and poverty; the animal industrial complex; and environmental and climate degradation. Meat consumption is at the center of the CAS critique of global injustice; it causes environmental damage from intensive animal industries, diverts grains to feed animals instead of people, and subjects animals and employees to the dangerous, unhealthy, and unjust working conditions in slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants. Finally, genetic technology has reframed and repurposed animals as objects solely for human use. Gigliotti concludes that compassion and justice are necessary to end the misery of others, and we must acknowledge that social justice includes all species. Part I  ends with Josephine Donovan’s chapter, “Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics: The Feminist Care Perspective,” an exemplary segue to Part II on animal agency. Donovan focuses on the need to understand the standpoint of animals and their communications, which is necessary to any theory about their treatment. She argues that humans do animals a great disservice by ignoring their voices, and feminist care theory contends that we are ethically obligated not only to listen to what animals are telling us but also to act accordingly. Care theory advocates three ways to understand animal communications and language:  sympathy, empathy, and attentiveness. Donovan makes the important point that the values and practices associated with a feminist care ethic should be part of official discourses and institutions, and not limited to women and personal domestic relationships and devalued as sentimentalist. Learning how to listen to animals through interspecies dialogue has the potential to transform the human treatment of animals. As a political theory, feminist care theory provides a foundation for animal ethics through interspecies dialogue and the development of an understanding of animals’ wishes.

Part II  Animal Agency, Intentionality, and Reflexive Thinking In this section, the authors address in detail the critical points made in Part I that animals are sentient beings with interests, intentions and desires. The assumption that

 

Introduction   7 animals have agency and intentionality and are capable of reflexive thinking is a key component of the philosophical and ethical arguments that support protecting animals from human exploitation. In animal studies, the notion that animals are mere unthinking machines has been thoroughly debunked (although alas much scientific work is still guided by Cartesian thinking; see, for example, Bernard Rollin’s discussion of the problem of scientific ideology in the use of animals in research in Part III). Scholars have documented a vast array of animal behaviors that validate their cognitive and emotional capacities, including hope, love, joy, grief, sadness, and disappointment. Studies have also found that animals extend empathy, cooperation, and forgiveness to each other. It is important to note that research on nonhuman primates in captive environments has found that animals possess a theory of mind, or the ability to attribute mental states such as beliefs and desires to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one’s own. Finally, the hallmark of human exceptionalism, the possession of culture and the ability to transmit cultural learning to conspecifics, has been documented in an impressive range of wild animal communities, including fish, insects, meerkats, birds, monkeys, lions, apes, and, as noted below, cetaceans. In “Cetacean Cognition,” Lori Marino provides an overview of the key elements of reflexive thinking in dolphins (language, pointing and reference, self-​awareness, innovation and imitation, body image, self-​recognition, self-​imitation, and metacognition). Dolphins are cognitively sophisticated as reflexive, self-​aware, and introspective animals. They can understand pointing as a reference to an object, perform well on tasks that require self-​awareness and engage in actions that demonstrate that they know who they are, understand the concept of imitation, mimic arbitrary sounds and human behaviors, remember prior behaviors to produce a new behavior, learn to move or use specified body parts in specified ways, and recognize themselves in a mirror. In the social setting, dolphins have unique capacities and propensities (social complexity, networking, and culture) that illustrate “their cognitive functions provide scaffolding for their complex social capacities” and that they can only thrive as reflexive thinkers in a natural social group. In captivity, dolphins suffer psychological disturbances and abnormalities, poor health, and high mortality rates. Because dolphins have a “communal sense of self,” they must live in social groups that provide opportunities for role-​taking and fluid, multilevel interactions, including planning for the future and transmitting culturally learned behaviors, such as the use of tools and the learning of dialects. Chris Pearson discusses animal intentions in “History and Animal Agencies,” although his focus is on domestic animals (primarily horses and dogs), not wildlife, and thus his examination of animal agency is necessarily linked with human action. Pearson begins with an overview of rationality as the foundation of the difference between humans and other animals, and describes the hybrid, boundary-​blurring work of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway that challenges the human-​animal divide and provides the opportunity to examine animal agency. Animals shape society and history as agents who can enable or stop activities, although intentionality and consciousness are not prerequisites of agency. For example, notes Pearson, horses unintentionally shaped society

 

8   Linda Kalof and history by powering industrial, commercial, and agricultural life in the nineteenth century and in warfare. The role of technology is evident in the horses’ “agential mix” in the presence of saddles, harnesses, and carts; thus animal agency was an intermingling of human and nonhuman agents and technology. Intentionality-​based agency—​that is, the ability to engage in self-​directed and purposeful action in their environments and in relationships with other agents—​is a continuum of characteristics that all animals (humans, dogs, apes, horses, cats) have in varying degrees. Documenting animal agency is problematic for historians who work with verbal, written, and visual sources, and Pearson doubts that an animal’s perspective, motivation, and experience can be understood from sources produced by humans. However, it is possible to record animals as purposeful and capable agents from such sources. Further, it is doubtful that animal agency can be “resistance behavior” because they do not have language; “animals may individually challenge the particular circumstances in which they find themselves … but this is not resistance in the political sense.” Animals, he argues, are not political. Pearson concludes that even with the limitations on what we can know about animal agency, historians should continue to uncover animal influence and abilities to challenge the paradigm of human exceptionalism. The potential for historians to document animal agency is also discussed in Erica Fudge’s chapter, “What Was It Like to Be a Cow? History and Animal Studies.” Fudge argues that the animal’s point of view can be understood historically using the findings of animal welfare science and ethology. For example, an animal history of agriculture recognizes animals as actors and helps us to understand how livestock shaped their environments and how humans and other animals coexisted in emotional and economic relationships. Fudge emphasizes that animal agency does not require self-​reflexive intentionality and says that animals “are to be negotiated with.” Animal agency must be understood in the historical context, with historical worldviews kept central in the analysis. The point of view of wild animals is particularly difficult for the historian to assess, as tigers and sharks for example appear “in the archive only when they attack.” However, some scholars have been successful in understanding how wild animals make their own histories. A good illustration is the coexistence of humans and the lions of India’s Gir Forest. The lions live in close proximity to humans, and that shared landscape is made possible because of the lions’ capacity to learn from experience and to transmit those lessons to the next generation, avoiding lethal conflict with humans. Another problem for the historian is recording animal agency in groups; what is their existence as “intraspecific social beings,” as members of the herd, pack, or flock? While there may be little direct evidence of animals’ experiences, agricultural history records the connection between herd size and individual animal behavior. Fudge agrees with Pearson that it is impossible to set aside the human perspective, but she believes a “hybrid history,” which acknowledges humans and animals as co-​constituents in shaping history, is possible and perhaps the best that historians can do: “an imperfect history is better than no history at all.” She proposes “itstory” as a way to (1) give subjectivity to animals, who are usually objectified in discourse as “it” or “that” (rather than “her” or “who”), and (2) remind us that history is made by both humans and animals and that understanding is based on

 

Introduction   9 companionship. She emphasizes the work of Vinciane Despret (What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? 2016) who argues that research questions should focus on what animals do, what they think about, and what they want. Fudge concludes by returning to the question of what it is like to be a cow, but she acknowledges that all she can know is the animal’s experience of being with humans. That experience, along with the animal’s experience of being with other animals and the human’s experience of being with the animal, constitutes a history that engages all participants in a story. In “Animals as Sentient Commodities,” Rhoda Wilkie tackles the problem of the contradictory status of livestock, who are regarded both as property and as sentient beings, and the resulting perceptual dilemma for the human workers who care for them. The mix of economic considerations and an affinity for livestock relations creates tension in the animal production context that has conceptual, emotional, ethical, and practical contradictions. For example, the stockperson faces contradictory roles as an economic producer, on the one hand, and a steward of livestock, on the other, and must grapple with the dilemma of “the cultivation of animal health for the purpose of death.” Understanding both the productive and nonproductive aspects of the stockperson’s role deepens the appreciation of the challenges, paradoxes, and ambivalence he or she faces in working with animals who are sentient commodities. Finally, the discrepancy between the legal and perceived status of animals and the concept of “sentient commodities” provides a more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship humans have with other animals. In “Animal Work,” Jocelyn Porcher elaborates on the argument made by Wilkie that working with animals is a complex human-​animal relationship. Work is the primary tie that binds humans and other animals, and Porcher laments an agriculture without livestock, or a human world without any domestic animals. In the abolitionist perspective, work relations between humans and animals are “reduced to their most basic expression, that of the production of meat.” Echoing Jim Mason’s concern in “Misothery” and Ralph Acampora’s phenomenological “corporeal commonality,” Porcher notes that humanity was shaped by powerful ties with animals but is now “evolving toward a self-​ constructed human model in which we reject the part of us that is animal.” But while Mason views domestication as the process that separated humans from animals, and Francione and Charlton argue for the abolishment of domestication, Porcher considers domestication central to our relationship with other animals. For example, there are intersubjective relations between humans and animals at work. The subjective involvement of animals in work includes education by both humans and conspecifics, inter-​and intraspecies communication, affection and friendship, obedience to (and the power to negotiate) work rules, and the capacity to take initiative. Animals are actors in the work they perform, and they have a need to be recognized for doing effective work. Porcher concludes that in the face of arguments supporting the elimination of all domesticated animals, it is critical that we understand work as an essential component of the human-​ animal bond. In “Animals as Reflexive Thinkers: The Aponoian Paradigm,” Mark Rowlands and Susana Monsó address animal agency by challenging the notion that reflexive thought

 

10   Linda Kalof requires a complex suite of cognitive abilities and psychological states. They recommend an “aponoian” framework (leaving intelligence and thought aside) to question the importance of the capacity for reflexive thought, which is believed to be necessary for many other psychological abilities in animals. The authors do not argue that animals lack intelligence, but rather that “seemingly complex psychological abilities are often not as complex as they seem.” Animals are thought to lack cognitive abilities (such as consciousness, beliefs, emotions, empathy, and moral judgment) because of the “implausibly (over)intellectualist account” of what those abilities consist of. For example, the argument that animals cannot have beliefs depends on two errors made in the process of overintellectualization: premature meta-​articulation and the making/​tracking confusion. In the assumption that animals do not have beliefs, premature meta-​articulation is the blurring of awareness of the content of a belief (what the belief is about) with awareness of a belief (a state of affairs or the way the world is). The making/​tracking confusion is the assumption that attributing beliefs to an animal can be legitimate only when the animal is capable of entertaining a given claim or making a given judgment. However, making sense of an animal’s behavior does not require the animal make a judgment; all that is required for attribution of a belief to be explanatory is that “there is an appropriate relation of tracking … between the thought the animal actually thinks and the thought we attribute to her.” The authors conclude that philosophers and scientists should avoid overcomplicating animal cognitive abilities.

Part III  Animals as Objects in Science, Food, Spectacle, and Sport Perhaps the most hotly debated use of animals in contemporary culture is their exploitation as commodity objects in science, food, spectacle, and sport. One who is objectified is denied autonomy and agency, reduced to body parts, silenced, and used as a tool for another’s purposes. While the notion of objectification has its roots in feminist theory, the concept is applicable to any being who has an intrinsic worth or dignity, and in our view animals are to be included in that special sphere (pace Kant). We begin this section with an examination of the objectification of animals in scientific research. Animal experimentation has been central to scientific endeavors throughout human history, and even though some gains have been made in prohibiting the research use of primates in some countries, hundreds of millions of animals continue to be used as research objects in laboratories all over the world. This section also discusses the objectification of animals in agricultural contexts, for sport, and in spectacles for human entertainment. There are important ethical arguments in each of these objectifying scenarios, and cost-​benefit analysis is particularly relevant in scientific and agricultural contexts. Simply put, animals continue to be used in research because it is believed that their use produces benefits for humans and other animals that outweigh the harm done to the

 

Introduction   11 animal victim. In the agricultural context, the importance of improving animal welfare pales in comparison to the importance of making a profit. Institutions that use captive wildlife to attract human audiences, such as zoos, aquariums, and circuses, also objectify animals, although some zoos such as the Detroit Zoo focus primarily on animal welfare and rescue. We have a long tradition of displaying wild animals for human entertainment, and the infamous Roman arena hunts combined the use of exotic animals as both spectacle and sport. Some contemporary animal sports closely resemble those of the ancients, such as the hunting of trophy animals in enclosed areas and bullfighting. Even when animals are “free-​roaming,” hunting them as objects of nature is morally questionable. As Matt Cartmill argues, humans are also animals and it is inappropriate for them to seek out and kill animals of other species. The first chapter in Part III addresses scientific research on animals. In “The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice,” Bernard Rollin argues that there are two components of scientific ideology that have dismissed ethics as meaningful in scientific research that uses animals: logical positivism, or the belief that proper science rests on verifiable claims based on empirical evidence, and skepticism about the ability to study the existence of consciousness. Mental states, such as animal thoughts and feelings, cannot be scientifically studied because they are not “intersubjectively observable,” and therefore they are not of concern to scientists. There are, however, moral issues in the use of animals in science; both invasive and noninvasive research cause pain and suffering. Although there is no morally relevant difference between intellectually disabled humans and some animals, research on challenged humans takes place only after the informed consent of either the individual or the guardian has been obtained; but no informed consent is required from animals. The most defensible argument for the use of animals in research is that it produces benefits for humans and other animals, a utilitarian perspective that renders both invasive and noninvasive animal research morally acceptable. Rollin notes that this exception gives rise to another moral issue: why do we continue to conduct animal research that produces more costs than benefits? The ethical arguments against animal research have resulted in the passage of legislation in the United States that “bespeaks a society in transition … society does not wish to see innocent animals suffer, [but] it is also not yet prepared to risk losing the benefits of animal research.” Although animal use in science continues, many countries have adopted laws and policies to address an increased social concern for the welfare of laboratory animals. For example, in the United States, the Animal Care and Use Committee is charged with approving scientific projects involving animals. Its review of research proposals includes consideration of the mental states of the animal, including pain, suffering, distress, and control of stress, in addition to the cost and benefit to the animals. Recently, there has been a decrease in some unnecessary research, such as cosmetic testing, brutal laboratory exercises in medical and veterinary schools have declined, and new surgical techniques using cadavers and models have increased. The new laws and policies on animal research (1) emphasize that society views invasive animal research as a moral issue, (2) thwart the scientific ideology that precludes scientific engagement with ethics, and (3) lead to the understanding that animals suffer and that suffering needs to be controlled.

 

12   Linda Kalof Animals in the agricultural setting is the focus of Paul Thompson’s chapter, “The Ethics of Food Animal Production.” He summarizes two traditions in the ethics of food animal production: the “dietetic” approach, which critiques the consumption of animals, and the “productionist” approach, which addresses the food animal production system and animal health and well-​being. Thompson focuses primarily on the productionist approach and contemporary livestock production, describing the pros and cons of husbandry systems that confine animals who are raised for meat or produce products for human consumption, such as egg-​laying hens and dairy cows. The welfare of the animals in food production systems is the focus of the Brambell Committee’s Five Freedoms: food animals are to be guaranteed freedom from hunger and thirst; freedom from discomfort; freedom from pain, injury or disease; freedom to express normal behavior; and freedom from fear and distress. The Five Freedoms are benchmarks or gradients for animal well-​being, not absolute criteria. In assessing how animal welfare can be improved, a “consensus approach” framework organizes the five freedoms into three broad categories: animal minds (affective states), animal bodies (veterinary health), and animal natures (ability to engage in species-​typical behaviors). The bodies-​minds-​natures framework can be used to compare livestock production systems, but there are tradeoffs so that some systems do well on one parameter but poorly on another (for example, concentrated animal feeding operations [CAFOs] score well on bodies but fail on minds and natures). Cost efficiency makes alternatives to the contemporary confinement systems difficult to achieve—​as Thompson argues, “livestock producers do not keep their animals as a charity project,” and the cost of the care they give to the animals must be recovered from the market. Further, increased prices for meat, milk, and eggs fall unfairly on the poor who spend the greatest portion of their income on food. Thompson concludes that while changes in the productionist approach could impact the conditions of animals in food production systems, the approach is “inherently vulnerable” to the profit motives of the food industry and animal producers. In “Animals as Scientific Objects,” Mike Michael turns on its head the notion that the experimental animal is a “passive, inert, discrete substance” external to social processes. In his view, the animal object becomes emergent with capacities and properties that arise from the experimental event, suggesting the possibility of a new ethical relation to the animal. Michael emphasizes that the scientific animal object is enacted in a variety of ways both inside the laboratory (self-​selection of scientists, distribution of care for laboratory animals across personnel) and outside the laboratory (production of standardized animal bodies, enactment of animal models that attract public, clinical, and scientific supporters). While animals become scientific objects through the process of their production and their circulation as commodities and models, the animal is also enacted as an object of ethical calculation in the form of cost-​benefit analysis, which is the dominant mode of ethical assessment and the default measure of the value of scientific interventions. Those who cannot do cost-​benefit analysis lack “bioethical maturity.” However, both animals and scientists are enacted in the scientific endeavor, and because animals are living creatures they have the capacity for a kind of resistance, or shrewdness, or “undisciplined corporeality” that can evoke a reaction in the scientist

 

Introduction   13 that de-​objectifies the animal. Experiencing the animal as shrewd could result in treating animal models more holistically, opening new meanings of science and possibilities for a co-​becoming for scientists and animals. Randy Malamud bemoans the objectification of animals as spectacle in “The Problem with Zoos.” He argues that while zoos claim that they inspire people to be respectful of animals and to conserve the natural world, in reality they are “prisons for kidnapped, alienated, tortured specimens.” Animals are kept in unsuitable compounds, captive breeding programs provide only a few more generations of endangered species because of the lack of sufficient gene pools, and there is no evidence that the ecological education provided by zoos has an influence on zoogoers. Malamud believes that it is impossible for any zoo (whether derelict or designed to be a natural habitat for animals) to be good—​ethically, ecologically or intellectually. Although some interventions for distressed animal species are useful, such as sanctuaries and preservation projects, the zoo as an institution is about “commerce and spectatorship, captivity and constraint, so it cannot facilitate better understanding of or care for animals.” Zoos encourage the belief in human exceptionalism and that humans control and are situated above the ecosystem in which they live. Zoos function to make animals visible, always available to us, and on our terms. The early years of zoos included the display of “captive spectacles” meant to devalue and ridicule both human and nonhuman others. While the human displays are now unacceptable both politically and ethically, animals continue to be exploited as zoo spectacles. Malamud closes on a hopeful note about the influential documentary Blackfish, which exposed the plight of captive orca whales at SeaWorld and gave rise to a wellspring of public opposition to animal captivity. In “Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control,” John Vucetich and Michael P. Nelson apply a basic tool in scholarly ethics, argument analysis, to examine the appropriateness of hunting wolves. Following Mason’s “misothery” argument, the authors note that the extermination of wolves in the mid-​twentieth century was fueled by hatred and contempt for wolves, in particular, a hostility toward wolf predation on foods for which humans compete (livestock, deer, elk, and moose). Wolves have now begun to repopulate in parts of the United States, and numerous states have introduced proposals to allow wolf hunting; these have been controversial, pitting wolf-​hunting advocates against wolf-​hunting opponents. Vucetich and Nelson claim that hunting comes under moral consideration because it is wrong to kill a sentient creature without an adequate reason, and just because we can hunt wolves (even while maintaining the health of ecosystems), this does not imply that we ought to hunt them. While appropriate hunting methods emphasize the fair chase and clean kill of a sentient creature who will be eaten, wolves are not eaten, so other justifications are offered for hunting them. For example, advocates of wolf hunting claim that wolves reduce the abundance of the ungulates humans want to hunt. Applying argument analysis, Vucetich and Nelson claim that the ungulate-​abundance justification is wrong. They note that elk populations have increased in some areas along with the increase in wolf abundance. Another argument for hunting wolves is that it would enhance wolf conservation. The authors argue that killing wolves does not promote tolerance for them, poaching is not a threat

 

14   Linda Kalof to wolf populations, attitudes are more negative when legal lethal control is allowed than when wolf protections are in place, and hunting an animal does not promote respect for that animal. The “recreation and tradition argument” is also found inadequate as a reason for hunting wolves. Wolf hunting is not a tradition in the United States and hunting wolves as trophies is not to kill for sustenance but to kill for fun or to celebrate violence. Other arguments for wolf hunting include reducing the threat to human safety (almost universally false), reducing the threat to livestock (wolf predation on livestock is trivial, and non-​lethal methods of predation intervention are effective), and concern that wolf populations will grow out of control (humans should resist their obsession to control nature). Vucetich and Nelson encourage the application of argument analysis to controversial issues in the public discourse and note that the incapacity to use valid, sound reasoning is a failure of academia and administrators. It is important to create a citizenry capable of making decisions based on logical rigor, particularly when making judgments about our relationship with the natural world.

Part IV  Animals in Cultural Representations Representing animals in visual art, song, and written text is a human endeavor that makes salient the value of animals in human culture. The relationship we have with other animals has always been conveyed in cultural representations, and nowhere is the importance of animals to humans more compelling than as depicted in art throughout human history. The first human art forms were of animals, and hundreds of animal figurative wall paintings and portable art from the Paleolithic era stand as testament to human awe and reverence for other animals. The oldest figurative depiction of an animal is a pig-​deer, called a “babirusa,” dated at 35,400 years CE, from the Leang Timpuseng cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. However, most of the animal art that has been discovered thus far was created by Paleolithic Europeans. The dating of parietal art is a contested issue, but many experts believe that the oldest drawings in Europe are found in the Chauvet cave in southern France, where the wall art has been radiocarbon dated at 32,000 CE. The Chauvet cave walls are filled with complex scenes—​confronting rhinoceroses, snarling lions, groups of animals drawn as if in rapid motion—​420 animal figures in all and only six human images. There is even evidence of the “mass production” of some popular cultural items in the Paleolithic, such as the ibex spearthrower of Le Mas d’Azil (16,000 CE); fragments from ten figures of the same image have been found, suggesting that hundreds of the design were made. In antiquity, domestic animals were often represented in scenes of routine of country life, walking across the threshing floor or grazing under trees; but visual art from the Roman period illustrated the popularity of the institutionalized violence against animals in the Roman games, depicting scenes of blood, panic, and death in the arena. Animal imagery was used in the Middle Ages to

 

Introduction   15 send moral messages and teach religious principles, as in the bestiaries, and, occasionally, to record daily activities, as in the margins of the Luttrell Psalter, an illustrated devotional book from the mid-​1300s. During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci’s animal fables described country life from the animals’ perspectives, with animals given both voice and a point of view in the stories. While some contemporary cultural representations of animals continue the tradition of sending moral messages and giving voice and subjectivity to animals, other depictions of animals have taken on a decidedly different tone, as noted below. In “Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art,” Joe Zammit-​ Lucia critiques the degradation of animals as “mere artistic material” that objectifies them and regards them without compassion. He argues that the moral considerability of the animal is compromised by the “dehumanization, sensationalism, and the provision of moral cover by powerful art institutions.” Some of the current practices in the use of animals in art include the display of dead or taxidermied animal bodies, the torture and killing of live animals, and the creation of modified animals, such as Eduardo Kac’s fluorescent rabbit. The author addresses the ethical questions that arise from these uses, the motivations of the artists, and the contentious relationship of the art world with animal welfare proponents. Artists’ motivations can range from a commitment to respect the creation of life (as in the fluorescent rabbit), the desire to illustrate the power we have over animals and other humans (as in an installation of goldfish in blenders that visitors could turn on if they wished), and to provide evidence of the number of animals and humans who live in undignified conditions (as in the gallery display of a sick and emaciated street dog in Nicaragua). There are two moral imperatives in the use of animals in art: freedom of artistic expression and the limits of acceptable moral behavior. Zammit-​ Lucia finds the absolutist position of opposing all censorship untenable because censoring one type of artistic endeavor automatically leads to the censorship of all others; each situation must be evaluated individually and on its own merits. Sensationalism allows animal abuse in contemporary art—​animal abuse in art is a way for artists to achieve notoriety and be “guaranteed immortality—​destined to live on in the pages of articles and books like this one” and discussed at conferences as a topic on ethics and freedom of expression. Animal abuse in contemporary art is also upheld by the provision of moral cover. The reframing by powerful individuals and organizations of potentially unethical behavior as harmless behavior absolves the artist of moral responsibility and positions the work in defense of freedom of expression, “a worthy cause.” Zammit-​Lucia proposes that moral considerability can be given to animals in contemporary art when (1) the art world catches up with social changes emphasizing values and ethics; (2)  individuals from inside the art world come forward to engage in thoughtful criticism of art that uses animals; and (3) institutions can establish policies and processes to ensure the protection of animals in the arts. Boria Sax’s chapter, “Animals in Folklore,” is a survey of the symbolic representation of animals in legends, fables, and myths. Folklore has not been troubled by anthropocentrism; rather, it addresses a longing for intimacy among humans, animals, and the natural world. Many of the well-​known stories and myths come from animal divination and

 

16   Linda Kalof Sumero-​Akkadian contest literature that promoted animal stereotypes that continue today, such as the “clever fox” and the lion as the “king of beasts.” The beast fable originated in Greco-​Roman times, and the “Aesop fable” was a generic term for an anecdote involving animals who teach moral lessons. Sax describes the movement of the beast fable tradition from the contest literature of the seventh century BCE to the European tale of “Reynard the Fox.” Aesopian fables thrive because of their adaptability: they have been used to illustrate Christian morals, Jewish morals, the need to preserve pagan culture, and life in a feudal court; they have also been referenced in political rhetoric and scientific writing. Fables are similar to fairy tales in that both are nonanthropocentric, consist of talking animals and inanimate objects such as trees and streams, and are attributed to writers from marginalized groups (fables were thought to be written by slaves, fairy tales by peasants who were mostly women). Sax argues that fairy tales represented a “perspective that was opposed to highly systematized varieties of paganism, Christianity, and deism” with local or household characters such as Scotland brownies and Scandinavian trolls. The tales of the Brothers Grimm have clear boundaries (between evil and good, nature and culture, animals and people, women and men, and commoners and royalty), creating a need for characters to shape-​shift between human and animal identities. Contemporary folklore includes Aesopian fables retold as urban legends, such as the deer who is shot but revives and runs away with the rifle stuck in his antlers; the ape-​like creature called Bigfoot; a wolf-​like (or sometimes lizard-​like) monster called Chupacabra who sucks the blood of his victims; and the Loch Ness monster. Sax concludes with a discussion of four paradigms: animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism. As the naturalistic paradigm, with its focus on anthropocentrism, recedes in importance, the other paradigms come in from the margins. Folklore can embrace cultural alternatives to anthropocentrism and provide models for balanced human-​animal relations.

Part V  Animals in Ecosystems Our last category places animals in relationship with communities of other organisms and the physical and cultural environment. It is widely acknowledged that we live in the epoch of the Anthropocene—​a time when human activity has impacted every niche of the planet; there are no truly wild spaces left; the oceans are filled with garbage; the land has been cut, cleared, and consigned for human use; and the atmosphere is filled with human-​produced gases that exacerbate global warming. A staggering number of animal species have gone and are going extinct because of the human presence on the planet. We live in an ecological community of living beings; all of us depend on the oceans, land, and atmosphere to survive, and the ability to coexist is an essential component of survival for the entire biophysical world. The chapters in this section cast a wide net on the topic of animals (human and others) in ecosystems, including animal presence in past ecosystems, rewilding and the rehabilitation of landscapes, human encounters

 

Introduction   17 with wildlife in natural ecosystems, animals in human-​modified environments, and the potential of a world ecosystem in which all beings live in harmony. In “Archaeozoology,” Juliet Clutton-​Brock provides an overview of the development of the field of archaeozoology (the study of animals in past human societies and ecosystems) and its contribution to our knowledge about the history of the domestication of animals and the environments in which they lived. In early archaeological excavations, animal remains were only “troublesome by-​product(s)” of ancient structural remains; however, by the 1970s, the identification of animal remains from archaeological sites was an established science. A critical scientific component of archaeozoology (along with radiocarbon dating, isotope analysis, molecular biology, and archaeogenetics) is comparative osteology, the comparison of the skeletal remains of known species with animal remains from archaeological sites. Clutton-​Brock describes examples of archaeozoological investigations of mammals, including pigs from the Swiss Neolithic lake dwellings, dogs of Ice Age Europe, dingoes of Australia, European wild aurochs, and the Sanga cattle of Africa. The excavation of pig remains reveals important aspects of their domestication in the prehistoric era, including the effects of climate on successful pig husbandry. The presence of pig remains, for example, is dependent on the amount of rainfall in an area, with no pig remains found in dry, arid regions unless there was evidence of irrigation at the site. In addition, prohibitions against eating pork among the Middle East ruling elite (who farmed large herds of cattle, sheep, and goats) were likely the result of the fact that pig farming was done by the lower class, so that elites and lawgivers viewed pigs as unclean. Excavations have also revealed important information about the domestication of dogs, who were long thought to be 14,000 years old; whereas, now it is argued that the first dogs are as old as 26,000 years. The ancestry of the Polynesian domestic dog, the Australian dingo, and the New Guinea singing dog is traced through mtDNA analysis to South China, with a migration route through mainland Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Archaeozoology also benefits the contemporary management of domesticates, such as the conservation of ancient, native livestock breeds who have evolved in adaptation to specific environments. Archaeozoological studies have also verified hypotheses about human-​animal settlement patterns, including the theory that nomadic pastoralism always develops after settled farming depletes resources and the land can no longer sustain crops or animals. Finally, archaeozoology has recently been linked with ethology for a better understanding of the biology and behavior of the wild progenitors of living species and to promote improvements and standards in animal welfare. Anita Guerrini’s chapter, “Animals and Ecological Science,” focuses on the scientific study of animals in ecosystems with an emphasis on populations rather than individuals. Guerrini provides an extensive overview of the transition of natural history to ecology, and she describes work with wild wolves and fish to illustrate the domain of modern ecological science. Noting that much ecological science is carried out in laboratories (which can be as invasive as other types of animal research) and with computer models, it is distinctively oriented toward field research. The cultural history of the wolf is a good example of the policy and politics surrounding the value of wildlife and how field studies help us understand wolves as a species connected to a “unified system of integrally

 

18   Linda Kalof related parts”—​the ecosystem. Largely extirpated as vermin in the United States by the 1930s, wolves were reintroduced successfully to the Yellowstone ecosystem in the mid-​ 1990s. Their role as keystone predators who preyed on herbivores was demonstrated in the increase in biodiversity in the Yellowstone ecosystem, including an increase not only in vegetation but in other animal species as well, such as beavers and songbirds. In a move away from a focus on populations, Guerrini recounts the story of OR-​7, a radio-​ collared lone wolf from Oregon who traveled more than a thousand miles in search of a mate. OR-​7’s journey created international interest and excitement; nonetheless, ecological study of the wolf as an individual is rare, reflecting the emphasis on communities in ecological research on animals. Fish are rarely considered individuals in ecosystems. Ecological research in both the laboratory and the field acknowledges that fish populations are important indicators of climate change and ocean pollution, and fish are a critical food source. Lake-​stocking research shows the interconnectedness of the riparian ecosystem, but relatively little is known about oceanic wildlife. Guerrini closes with a discussion of rewilding and de-​extinction, contemporary proposals to rehabilitate landscapes and reintroduce extinct species that illustrate how the ecological study of animals is a practice “entangled in policy and politics … (and) embedded in broader ideas about the value and future of wild nature.” Jane Desmond’s chapter, “Staging Privilege, Proximity, and ‘Extreme Animal Tourism,’” describes “hyperprivileged tourism” as a way humans can gain some proximity to wildlife while ensuring the protection of the animal’s natural environment and ecosystem. For those who can afford to travel to exotic places to encounter wildlife, relative closeness to wild animals can be achieved without interfering with them. These “Edenic” encounters are different from both mass tourism (such as zoo visits or whale watching) and supplementary animal tourism (tours to geographic locales that peripherally engage animals, such as camel rides by the Nile). The main focus of extreme animal tourism is to experience wild animals in their natural habitats. Since tourism is one of the largest industries in the world, Desmond argues that the role animals play in the global economy is an important subject of study for animal studies scholars. While it is likely that all living beings are influenced somehow by the human presence on the planet, extreme animal tourism depends on an authentic wildness, and part of the lure of the extreme encounter is the “fulfillment of the fantasy” that wild animals live their lives outside the influence of humans. Desmond describes two examples of extreme animal tourism: encounters with wildlife in the Galapagos Islands and in Antarctica. In the Galapagos, wildlife is abundant and includes giant tortoises, Sally Lightfoot crabs, sea iguanas, land iguanas, and blue-​footed boobies; visiting humans have the perception of “being immersed in the animals’ world.” The Galapagos tourist experience is controlled by Ecuadorians, who closely monitor tourists’ behavior to be sure they do not feed the animals, scare them with loud noises or aggressive movements, or get within six feet of them. Wildlife is also abundant in Antarctica’s uninhabited landscape, which supports whales, flying squas, seals, and huge groups of animals. These groups are so large that one’s experience of wildlife is a walk through a colony of 10,000 penguins—​the scale of animal habitation in Antarctica “literally dwarf(s) any human presence.” Some animals,

 

Introduction   19 the penguins for example, are aware of the tourists but are not bothered by their presence because, according to the guides, they have not recently experienced humans as a threat or danger—​there are a thousand penguins to one human, and the humans are in the penguins’ world. Extreme animal tourism is “the perfect meeting ground for human fantasies of animal life to take place” and an important dimension of the commodification and political effects of the relationship between humans and other animals. Terry O’Connor’s chapter, “Commensal Species,” focuses on animals who benefit from their proximity to people by using the modified or constructed human environment for food and living space. Species who are successful at adapting to human habitations are labeled “commensal” because they are animals who share our table and eat with us. There are three forms of commensal adaptation: by exploiting human food stores, scavenging food waste, and taking advantage of food opportunities that attract primary feeders who then become prey for opportunistic predators (such as peregrine falcons who feed on the pigeons who gather to exploit garbage and food handouts). There is a behavioral coevolution between humans and commensal animals. Our “cultural decisions”—​whether to put garbage in bins, incinerators, or landfills, and whether to build in brick or wood and to roof in tile or thatch—​condition the behavioral responses of animals in taking advantage of food and space opportunities. O’Connor notes that the research on commensal species is important because of their proximity to human spaces, encouraging study by both professional scientists and citizen scientists. Citizen science can generate large quantities of valuable data on animal neighbors, such as the Big Garden Birdwatch in the United Kingdom, which has been recording species frequencies in January for thirty-​four consecutive years and collects records from over 500,000 observers every year. Commensal animals are also important indicators of ecosystem health, adding to our understanding of human environmental impact. For example, a recent decline in UK sparrow populations has been linked to reduced breeding success, which in turn was caused by a shortage of invertebrate prey in the United Kingdom. Insects are in decline because of habitat disruption and climate change. O’Connor discusses familiar commensal animals, including rats, mice, foxes, and pigeons who are found in most human settlements all over the world. Humans have varied reactions to commensal species; some regard them as friendly neighbors, others as freeloading pests. In addition to the use of technological innovation to encourage the presence of commensals, such as the squirrel-​proof bird feeder, humans have developed ways to discourage and displace unwanted commensals, such as the spiked ledges on buildings that deny pigeons a secure perching ledge. However, O’Connor emphasizes that commensal animals show how coexistence between humans and other animal species can be achieved. We have lived with commensal animals for 10,000 to 30,000 years, and their successful adaptation can be bolstered by modifying human settlements to allow more species to adapt and sustain populations alongside us. Such modification should be an important policy priority because of the dense human population in urban or other anthropic environments. Further, contact with animals is considered to be beneficial to humans, particularly to children, who learn to respect and care for animals through direct experience with them. Commensal animals give humans experience

 

20   Linda Kalof with wildlife, something different from our more common interactions with domestic animals. In “Lively Cities:  People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems,” Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch elaborate on O’Connor’s work on commensal species and argue that a consideration of nonhuman animals is vital to a robust urban theory. In an overview of interspecies interactions in the urban context, the authors discuss animals who work in cities, the problem of abandoned and stray animals, the relationship between urbanization and meat consumption, and backyard animal husbandry. The authors describe theories of the more-​than-​human urban ecosystem and note that a posthuman approach to cities and spatial ethics is needed to understand human interactions with animal others who share urban spaces and “deserve explicit consideration in urban development, design, and planning decisions.” After a discussion of animals in nineteenth-​century US cities, Owens and Wolch turn to the design and planning of ecological frameworks and “metabolic” concepts of urban landscapes, such as the pig city and agropark projects in the Netherlands and the ARC Wildlife Overpass Competition in Vail, Colorado. Urban spaces are also modified to encourage nonhuman use without excluding human uses, including multispecies design ethnography, which addresses how animals inhabit architectural spaces. Urban wild animals are subject to stressors, including predation by domestic dogs and cats; changes in diurnal cycles to avoid human activity, which may impact food availability; and anthropogenic noise and light disturbances. Wildlife benefit from restoration ecology and protected landscapes, such as the rewilding projects in urban zones, including the Oostvaarderplassan in the Netherlands and the Schöneberger Südgelände in Berlin. Owens and Wolch conclude with a discussion of cites and urbanization as “major motors of change” and the four dynamics that may determine the future of urban animal ecology: climate change; efforts to help urban areas adapt to environmental change such as green infrastructure strategies; human migration, economic inequality, and geopolitical conflicts that intervene in human-​ animal relations; and increased ethical consideration for urban animals and a search for ways to include them in decision-​making processes—​animals should have rights to the city, and the city in turn should provide “them shelter, sustenance, and safe passage.” We close with Stephen R. L. Clark’s chapter, “Animals in Religion,” which is an appeal for morality and altruistic coexistence for all beings in earth’s ecosystem. Clark considers “animals” to belong to the category “eukaryotes,” which comprises all living organisms except bacteria—​“ ‘we’ are all eukaryotes together, all living things together, momentary expressions of an ongoing, branching lineage, the Life of Planet Earth.” Clark argues that treating “others as you would wish to be treated if you were they” can be imagined but is not actually possible if beings cannot transform into an Other. Altruistic concern then is an attempt to live a dream, as is all “religion,” in Clark’s view, including atheistical humanism. Thus, “ ‘being religious’ is trying to ‘live the dream,’ acting out and reinforcing the imagination of a world where all is done for the best.” There are four ways of “dreaming animals,” or showing altruistic concern for them: triumphalist humanism, traditional good husbandry, transformation/​metempsychosis, and an awakening to the real presence of others. In triumphalist humanism, humans alone are

 

Introduction   21 of interest; all other animate things are seen in light of human purpose and are treated as having no lives of their own. Good husbandry is the requirement that humans care for nonhumans but within the limits set by human interests. Metempsychosis is the transformation of a being from one corporeal existence to another, a condition of constantly shifting human and nonhuman states, as in reincarnation. Awakening to the presence of others is the process of rejecting the anthropocentric world in favor of a world where all beings—​our friends, our enemies, animals, and the inanimate—​are revered.

 

Pa rt I

ANIMALS IN THE L A N D S C A P E OF L AW, P OL I T IC S , A N D P U B L IC P OL IC Y

 

 

Chapter 1

Anim al Ri g h ts Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton

The term “animal rights” is used by animal advocates, institutional exploiters, and the media to refer to any position that is thought to be favorable to animal interests. So, if an animal advocacy organization promotes more “humane” slaughter, it will likely be characterized by media as an “animal rights” campaign. In talking about making veal production more “humane,” Randy Strauss, the president and chief executive officer of Strauss Veal and Lamb International, states, “Animal rights are important.”1 Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation,2 is often described as “the father of the animal rights movement,”3 even though he is a utilitarian who rejects the notion of moral rights. Some animal advocates maintain that “animal rights” is properly applied only to a position that promotes the abolition of all animal use, however supposedly “humane.” So the concept of “rights” is used in discussions of animal ethics to refer to different, and often conflicting, positions. This chapter focuses on seven topics:  (1)  the pre-​nineteenth-​century view of animals as things and the emergence of the animal welfare position; (2) the work of Lewis Gompertz and Henry Salt; (3) the Vegan Society, the Oxford Group, and Peter Singer’s theory of animal liberation; (4) Tom Regan’s theory of animal rights; (5) the abolitionist theory of animal rights; (6) animal rights and the law; and (7) animal rights as a social movement. As a preliminary matter, a “right,” as used herein, is simply a way of protecting an interest. An “interest” is something we prefer or desire or want. Humans have interests in that there are all sorts of things we prefer, desire, or want. Some of those interests are idiosyncratic, such as an interest in playing golf or an interest in a particular sort of music. But some are shared and considered very important as a social, cultural, and, perhaps, even spiritual matter. For example, interest in freedom or liberty, free speech and thought, education, health care, basic nutrition, and so on, matter to most people and the way we protect those interests goes to our very understanding of personhood. There are two basic ways that we can protect these important interests.

 

26    Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton First, we can protect them to the extent that they promote consequences that we like. For example, we can say that we will protect the interest in free expression depending on how we feel about the content of speech; that is, as long as most of us agree with the content of speech or, at least, do not disagree too much with the content, we will protect speech. Alternatively, we could say that we should protect the human interest in free expression even if we disagree with the content. The latter sort of protection is what we are talking about when we talk about rights.4 Although the topic of rights can become complicated and involve all sorts of twists and turns through philosophy, law, jurisprudence, and political theory, for the purposes of this chapter, protecting an interest with a right involves the idea that the interest is important and should be protected even if the consequences militate against protecting it. For example, we talk about the right of free speech, which is another way of saying that we protect the interest in self-​expression and in contributing to the marketplace of ideas, even if there would be considerable benefits if we did not protect it. This is not to say that the right is absolute; we do not protect defamation or yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theater when there is no fire. It is only to say that we cannot generally limit speech for consequential reasons alone. Some people, including some prominent “animal rights” advocates, reject the idea of moral rights altogether. For example, utilitarians maintain that what is right or wrong is dependent on consequences and that no interests are protected by moral rights.

The Emergence of the Animal Welfare Position Before the nineteenth century, at least as far as Western thinking was concerned, animals were excluded from the moral and legal community and were considered as things that were morally and legally largely indistinguishable from inanimate objects. There were, of course, individuals who argued in favor of including animals in the moral community,5 but, for the most part, and as a matter of social practice and law, it was thought that humans could use animals as they saw fit and could impose pain, suffering, and death on them without violating any moral or legal obligation that they owed directly to the animals. There could be a legal obligation not to injure another’s cow, but that was an obligation to the owner of the cow not to damage that person’s property.6 To the limited degree that cruelty to animals was thought morally wrong, it was because humans were thought to have moral obligations of kindness to other humans and cruelty to animals would make it more probable that they would not satisfy those obligations. So, again, the obligation concerned animals, but was not owed to animals. There was a sense in which animals were thought to be things in the literal sense of being indistinguishable from inanimate objects. René Descartes (1596–​1650) is conventionally thought to have denied that nonhuman animals were sentient—​that is,

 

Animal Rights   27 subjectively aware—​ and instead thought that they were “automatons, or moving 7 machines” that God created and that were not really different from inanimate objects. That is, Descartes did not regard nonhuman animals as being conscious and having subjective or perceptual awareness, including the ability to experience pain and suffering. If Descartes was correct as an empirical matter, then animals could have no interests; that is, there is nothing that they could prefer, desire, or want, and we could not adversely affect their interests because they would have none to affect. It would, therefore, make no sense to talk about moral or legal obligations that humans owe to nonhumans. We could, as Immanuel Kant and Thomas Aquinas did, talk about obligations to be kind to animals because not doing so would lead us to be unkind to other humans, but those obligations would merely concern, and not be owed, to animals. Some scholars dispute whether Descartes really believed that animals were not sentient. But if he did believe it, then he was unusual in Western thinking because, for the most part, people have believed that animals are sentient and have interests. They have instead argued that we can treat animals as if they are things, and ignore their interests, because they are inferiors whose interests simply do not count as a moral matter. This inferiority involved spiritual inferiority, or the notion that nonhuman animals were not, like humans, made in the image of God and were not endowed with souls, and that animals were created by God for humans to use, or cognitive inferiority, the notion that animals lacked rationality, abstract thought, symbolic communication, self-​awareness, or the ability to make or respond to moral claims. In many cases, these inferiorities were combined. For example, John Locke (1632–​1704) maintained that animals were inferior beings created by God for our use and that they were incapable of using abstract concepts. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a paradigm shift occurred. Although there were others producing interesting work on animal ethics in this time period,8 two particularly influential architects of this shift were the utilitarians Jeremy Bentham (1748–​1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–​1873). As utilitarians, Bentham and Mill believed that we ought to act so as to maximize the pleasure or happiness for all affected and that, in assessing consequences, we must be impartial and not favor interests based on irrelevant criteria, including race and sex. They included species as an irrelevant criterion and argued that relying on the sorts of cognitive differences that had been used to exclude animals from the moral community was no different from relying on race to justify slavery. For example, Bentham, in a passage that was actually in a footnote in his 1781 book, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, but is probably one of the most frequently quoted passages in animal ethics, stated that “the question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”9 Bentham and Mill agreed that there were significant differences between the minds of humans and the minds of nonhumans, but maintained that nonhumans can, like humans, suffer, and that we cannot ignore animal suffering based simply on species. This did not mean that they saw these cognitive differences as irrelevant. On the contrary, they believed that those differences were extremely important in at least two respects. First, although Bentham objected to the use of animals for amusement or entertainment, he argued that animals are not self-​aware and, therefore, it was perfectly fine for

 

28    Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton us to kill and eat them as long as we minimized their suffering, as they live in a sort of eternal present and are not aware of what they lose when we take their lives. If we use animals for food, “we are the better for it, and they are never the worse. They have none of those long-​protracted anticipations of future misery which we have.”10 Bentham also maintained that we actually do animals a favor by killing them, as long as we do so in a relatively painless manner: “The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier, and by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature… . [W]‌e should be the worse for their living, and they are never the worse for being dead.”11 If, as Bentham apparently maintained, animals do not as a factual matter have an interest in continuing to live, and death is not a harm for them, then our killing of animals would not per se raise a moral problem as long as we treated and killed them “humanely.” Second, Mill pointed out that in balancing human and animal interests, it was important to keep in mind that humans had supposedly superior mental faculties, so that they had a higher quality of pleasure and happiness; human interests had a greater weight in any balancing. For example, he maintained that in calculating pleasure and pain as part of any weighing process, we must take into account that humans “have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites,” and he expressed agreement with ethical views that assign “to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation.”12 According to Mill, “A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and is certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence.”13 Animals lack a “sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other.”14 Moreover, humans have “a more developed intelligence, which gives a wider range to the whole of their sentiments, whether self-​regarding or sympathetic.”15 As a result, “[i]‌t is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.”16 The utilitarians rejected moral rights for humans and nonhumans; instead, they embraced impartiality or equal consideration—​treating similar cases similarly. But in accepting that humans could morally justify continued animal use, it may be the case that the framework for animals they sought to establish structurally prevents the equal consideration of animal interests. Although Bentham was what we now think of as an “act utilitarian” who rejected rules in favor of appealing to the principle of utility on a case-​by-​case basis, he opposed human slavery.17 He recognized that although particular slave owners might treat their slaves well, slavery threatened to reduce humans to economic commodities “abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor.”18 He arguably recognized that if each human were to count for one and none for more than one, then human slavery presented a structural problem: the interests of slaves, who were chattel property, were unlikely ever to be perceived as counting for as much as the interests of the owners of slaves. To put the matter simply, because slaves were chattel property, they would always count for less than one because their interests would always

 

Animal Rights   29 be accorded less weight than would those of their owners. How could their interests be evaluated impartially when it was those who owned the slaves who did this evaluation? This provides a plausible explanation as to why Bentham, a utilitarian, rejected natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts”19 but, nevertheless, talked about the moral right not to be a slave; without that right, humans could not be beneficiaries of the principle of equal consideration. This reflects the idea that utilitarians have to accept at least one right: the right to equal consideration. They needed to have the moral right not to be slaves in order to be beneficiaries of the principle of impartiality or equal consideration in the first place. Animals are, like slaves, chattel property—​things that are owned. Although Bentham claimed to reject the idea of animals as things, he did not challenge the status of animals as property because he did not believe that animals had an interest in not being used as human resources but only had an interest in being used in a way that minimized their suffering. But it is no more possible for the interests of animals who are property to be treated impartially, or accorded equal consideration, than it is for slaves to be accorded equal consideration or to have their interests evaluated impartially. The property status of animals acts to prevent us from seeing animal interests as similar to human interests in the first place, and always serves as a good reason to ignore or devalue any interest that may be perceived as similar. So, although the nineteenth century saw a paradigm shift away from the historically dominant view that animals were things that had no moral value, that shift was limited by the fact that that the emerging framework did not reject the use of animals as human resources, and regarded animals as having qualitatively inferior sentient experiences that deserved less weight than human interests. This substantially ensured that animals would never benefit from the principle of impartiality or equal consideration. Bentham and Mill favored legislation that prohibited certain sorts of animal use for entertainment or sport and sought to minimize the “cruel” treatment of animals, and the anticruelty laws and other animal welfare laws that presently exist in the United States, Great Britain, and most other Western countries can be traced directly to the utilitarian thinkers of early nineteenth-​century Britain. As will be explained in section VI, because animals are chattel property, animal welfare laws cannot be said to provide anything more than a right not to be subjected to gratuitous suffering.

Lewis Gompertz and Henry Salt The moral shift in ethical thinking that sought to include animals in the moral community and as holders of legal rights was dominated by the utilitarians, who focused more on supposedly “humane” animal treatment, and not on abolishing animal use altogether. There were, however, two other nineteenth-​century authors who deserve mention.

 

30    Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton The first was Lewis Gompertz, who was born in 1783/​4 in England and who, in 1824, wrote a book, Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes,20 which remains one of the most progressive and radical books on animal ethics ever written, yet is virtually unknown. Gompertz believed that the feelings of animals were morally equal to the feelings of humans. He was a vegan who rejected the use of animals for any purpose that was not in the animal’s interest. He refused to ride in carriages drawn by horses. Gompertz believed that it was morally acceptable to eat or skin animals who died a natural death, but that we could not justify deliberate killing. Although he did not consume meat, dairy, or eggs, he did wear clothing obtained from animals because of the (then) lack of suitable alternatives. But he acknowledged the immorality of any animal use that involved deliberate killing. Gompertz was concerned about human rights issues, including class differences and social inequality, and the treatment of women and prisoners. He was an inventor, and he made significant improvements on the bicycle as a way of avoiding the use of horses for carriage. In many ways, Gompertz was a remarkably progressive person. Interestingly, Gompertz was a founding member of the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA; later to become the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) in 1824. His views on human and nonhuman equality, and his abjuring of all animal foods, caused the SPCA governing committee, which included hunters and meat eaters, to pass a resolution limiting membership to Christians. Gompertz was a Jew and had to resign. He subsequently formed the Animals’ Friends Society with Quakers and others, including William Wilberforce, who left the SPCA with him. The second exception was Henry Stephens Salt, born in 1851, who wrote Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress, which was published in 1892.21 Salt was a social reformer and conservationist, and was among the first writers to talk about “animal rights”22 as a matter of both morality and law. Salt believed that animal welfare laws reflected notions of moral rights and would confer legal rights. He opposed the use of animals for most purposes. Although it is said that he was a vegan, he focused on meat and was not openly critical of dairy and eggs. Gandhi acknowledged that Salt had influenced him, and Salt’s circle of acquaintances included some of the most important intellectuals of the day, such as George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, and Leo Tolstoy.

The Vegan Society, Oxford Group, and Peter Singer Although the modern “animal rights” movement is usually linked to the publication in 1975 of Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, this widely shared view ignores two very important developments that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. The first was the emergence of the Vegan Society in Britain in 1944, the inaugural newsletter of which stated: “We can see quite plainly that our present civilisation is built

 

Animal Rights   31 on the exploitation of animals, just as past civilisations were built on the exploitation of slaves, and we believe the spiritual destiny of man is such that in time he will view with abhorrence the idea that men once fed on the products of animals’ bodies.”23 Donald Watson, a founding member of the Society, proposed veganism not only in order to respect the moral value of animals, but also because it offered a solution to the crisis of greed and violence that affected and afflicted humankind and threatened ecological disaster. In many ways, Watson and the early Vegan Society were reminiscent of the views of Lewis Gompertz.24 The second, often-​ignored, development was the important work that was done in the late 1960s by what has been called the Oxford Group. Oxford University postgraduates Roslind and Stanley Godlovitch, inspired by an essay written by writer and feminist campaigner Brigid Brophy in the Sunday Times in 1965, formed a group to discuss animal ethics. A collection of essays edited by Rosalind and Stanley Godlovitch, and John Harris, and entitled Animals, Men and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-​ Humans,25 was published in 1971 and included essays by the editors as well as Brophy, Ruth Harrison, Richard Ryder, Maureen Duffy, David Wood, and others. Although Singer was at Oxford at the time and was acquainted with members of this group, he was not a part of it and did not contribute to the book. Nevertheless, the credit for inaugurating the modern animal rights movement is given almost exclusively to Singer. Singer, like Bentham, is an act utilitarian and maintains that the morally correct action is that which will maximize the satisfaction of preferences (as distinguished from happiness or pleasure) of those affected, including nonhuman animals. Like Bentham, Singer rejects moral rights. His position is better described as involving “animal liberation” although, as mentioned earlier, Singer is often referred to as “the father of the animal rights movement.” Like Bentham and Mill, Singer very clearly regards animal life as having less value than human life. For instance, he maintains that “[i]‌t is not arbitrary to hold that the life of a self-​aware being, capable of abstract thought, of planning for the future, of complex acts of communication, and so on, is more valuable than the life of a being without these capacities.”26 He states that “in the absence of some form of mental continuity it is not easy to explain why the loss to the animal killed is not, from an impartial point of view, made good by the creation of a new animal who will lead an equally pleasant life.”27 That is, Singer, like Bentham, argues that because animals do not know what it is they lose when we kill them, they do not have any interest in continuing to live and, therefore, death is not a harm to them. They do not care that we use and kill them for our purposes. They care only about not suffering as a result of our using and killing them. Singer does not object to animal use per se and, indeed, describes himself as a “flexible vegan” who will eat animal products when he travels, visits the home of others, or is in the company of people who would find his insistence on not eating animal products to be annoying or disconcerting.28 Singer maintains that similar human and nonhuman interests in not suffering ought to be treated in a similar fashion, as required by the principle of impartiality or equal consideration. He claims that because humans have “superior mental powers,”29 they will in some cases suffer more than animals and in some cases suffer less, but he acknowledges

 

32    Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton that making interspecies comparisons is difficult, at best, and perhaps even impossible. That is, although Singer does not adopt Mill’s more categorical position that the pleasures of the human intellect are almost always to be given greater weight, Singer’s view about the relationship between “superior” human cognition and assessments of suffering comes very close to that and undercuts the ability to make impartial assessments of competing interests, virtually guaranteeing that human interests will always prevail. Moreover, as a utilitarian, Singer is committed to permitting animal use at least in some circumstances. For example, if humans derive great satisfaction from eating animal products, and if we are able to produce these products with a minimal amount of pain and suffering, then, other things being equal, he would be committed to the position that the institution of animal use would be morally acceptable, particularly if a relatively painless death is not a harm for animals. Indeed, given that utilitarians regard happiness, pleasure, the satisfaction of interests, and so on, as good, and given that humans obviously enjoy animal use, it would seem that if we could provide a reasonably pleasant life and a relatively painless death for animals, we would arguably be obligated to bring animals into existence and then kill them, bring more into existence and then kill them, and so on, so that we could maximize the total amount of happiness, pleasure, or preference satisfaction in the world. In any event, like Bentham and Mill, Singer does not object to the use per se of animals, he does not advocate the abolition of the property status of animals, and he is a strong supporter of campaigns that purport to reform and improve animal welfare through laws and voluntary modifications of industry practices. Singer’s view that nonhuman animals do not have an interest in their lives because they are not self-​aware leads him to distinguish among species of nonhumans and to treat as special or privileged those animals who are closer to humans because they are, at least arguably, self-​aware in a way relevantly similar to humans. Singer co-​edited The Great Ape Project: Equality beyond Humanity, which proposed that the nonhuman great apes “have mental capacities and an emotional life sufficient to justify inclusion within the community of equals.”30 Singer argues that because these nonhuman animals are genetically and cognitively similar to human animals, they deserve greater legal protection than other nonhumans, who he, along with Bentham and others, believes live in “a kind of eternal present.”31 The life of a self-​aware human has, for Singer, greater moral value than the life of a human who is mentally disabled and not self-​aware or an animal who is not self-​aware. Singer recognizes a sort of presumption against using “normal” humans as replaceable resources because the life of a self-​aware human is unique and cannot easily be replaced by another life. Singer has recently acknowledged that, in addition to nonhuman great apes, elephants, dolphins, and some birds appear to have mental continuity and other species may as well, but, at least with respect to animals other than nonhuman great apes, he has thus far failed to recognize that this should establish a presumption against all use and killing that is similar to the presumption he has against using “normal” humans as the replaceable resources of others. The likely explanation for this failure is that Singer regards normal humans as a group to have a relevantly similar level of mental continuity that would provide a direct reason not to use them as replaceable resources.

 

Animal Rights   33 The strength of the reason not to kill self-​aware nonhuman animals “will vary with the degree to which the animal is capable of having desires for the future,”32 and even if the animals we usually eat are self-​aware, “they are still not self-​aware to anything like the extent that humans normally are.”33 Therefore, a category-​type presumption against animal use would not fit with his analysis. Accordingly, Singer defends the notion that it is morally defensible to eat animals so long as they are provided a reasonably pleasant life and a relatively painless death, and he supports the advocacy efforts of large organizations that promote “humane” animal use. In 2005, he made a public statement, joined by almost all of the large animal protection organizations in the United States, expressing “appreciation and support” for the “pioneering” efforts by a large supermarket chain, Whole Foods Market, to develop supposedly more “humane” standards for farm animals.34 In short, Singer promotes the notion that the primary problem with animal exploitation is not that we use them but how we use them. Singer maintains that it is possible to apply the principle of equal consideration—​that we should treat similar interests similarly—​to nonhuman interests in suffering, and that it is not necessary to abolish the property status of nonhumans in order to accord them equal consideration.

Tom Regan’s Rights Theory Although Singer’s work has had greater influence, Tom Regan’s 1983 book, The Case for Animal Rights,35 was, unlike Singer’s work, a deontological analysis and should be considered to be the book that really inaugurated the modern animal rights movement, if we use “rights” in the way described earlier—​the protection of interests irrespective of consequences. Regan very explicitly rejects utilitarianism for a number of reasons, including his view that it is wrong to regard individuals as receptacles for that which is of inherent value but as lacking any inherent value themselves, and that individuals should not be viewed solely as means to the end of maximizing what the utilitarian regards as morally valuable (happiness, pleasure, preference satisfaction, and so on). Regan maintains that all moral agents have equal inherent value because the alternative is some version of a “perfectionist” theory of justice according to which what individuals are due depends on the extent and degree to which they possess “special” characteristics, such as intellect, creativity, heroic character, and the like. The attribution of equal inherent value to at least some moral patients, including normal mammals aged one year or more, is required because both agents and certain patients are, to use Regan’s term, “subjects-​of-​ a-​life,” which means that they possess complex awareness and preference autonomy. Both agents and patients have a “welfare” in that things can go better or worse for them. Regan argues that there is no nonarbitrary way of distinguishing the moral worth of agents and patients, or human moral patients from nonhuman moral patients. Regan argues that the respect principle requires that we treat those who have inherent value in ways that respect that value. In the case of subjects-​of-​a-​life, respecting that

 

34    Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton value requires that we not treat them solely as means to ends in order to maximize desirable consequences. This is similar to the Kantian notion that we must treat other persons as ends in themselves and not merely as means to ends, but, unlike Kant, it requires us to include moral patients, including nonhuman animals, in the moral community. The respect principle allows us to derive the harm principle, which says that, as a prima facie matter, we disrespect the inherent value of a subject-​of-​a-​life by harming her or him. Regan distinguishes between basic and acquired moral rights, the former being universal (if any being has a basic moral right then any other being who is relevantly similar has the right) and equal (any being who has a basic right has it to the same degree as any other being who has it). Acquired rights depend on voluntary acts and social institutions for their existence. Regan maintains that all subjects-​of-​a-​life have the basic right not to be treated exclusively as means to ends and that recognition of this right requires that institutionalized exploitation be abolished, and not merely regulated. Regan’s theory encounters serious difficulty, however, when he considers the issue of how to resolve “exceptional cases” presenting the issue of whether to override the rights of the few or those of the many.36 Regan says that if harm suffered by morally innocent beings is roughly comparable, it is better to override the rights of the few as opposed to the rights of the many. If, however, some beings will suffer a greater harm in a particular situation, then, absent special considerations, it is better to override the rights of the many if the harm suffered by the few will make them worse off than any of the many. This leads Regan to say that if we are in the proverbial lifeboat with a dog and a human and have to decide whether to throw out the dog or a large number of dogs or the human, the harm suffered by the human will be worse than that of any of the dogs because a human has more “opportunities for satisfaction” than a dog does, so death is a greater harm for the human. The problem is that even if, as Regan maintains, such exceptional circumstances exclude institutionalized exploitation—​that is, the conflict is between right holders and not between humans who are right holders and animals who do not have the basic right not to be treated exclusively as means to the ends of humans—​if animals are qualitatively different from humans in that humans have greater opportunities for satisfaction, then there is a nonarbitrary way of differentiating humans from nonhumans, and that would allow for institutionalized exploitation at least in some exceptional circumstances.

The Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights The abolitionist approach to animal rights rejects Singer’s approach and incorporates a deontological element that is characteristic of rights views, such as that of Tom Regan, but has several distinct elements and emphases.37 The abolitionist approach rejects all animal use. The doctrinal basis for this rejection is that all humans, irrespective of their particular characteristics, have a fundamental,

 

Animal Rights   35 pre-​legal moral right not to be treated exclusively as the resources of others. It is this right that rules out the chattel slavery of humans. To have moral worth entails the rejection of the status of chattel property that allows the life and fundamental interests of a human to be valued at zero by the slave owner. We cannot justify failing to extend this one right to nonhumans unless we arbitrarily declare that animals have no moral value whatsoever, a position that most people already reject. Therefore, if animals matter morally, we cannot treat them exclusively as resources, and recognizing the right not to be property would rule out all institutionalized exploitation of animals. Abolitionists (as the term is used herein) reject domestication and maintain that nonhumans ought not to be brought into existence for human use, however “humanely” we treat them. There is a sense in which we can arrive at largely the same conclusion without invoking the notion of rights.38 We share a moral intuition that we should not impose “unnecessary” suffering and death on sentient beings; that other things being equal, the fact that an act causes or results directly in the suffering of a sentient being is something that counts against that act as a moral matter. There is, of course, a great deal of disagreement when it comes to what satisfies the necessity element here; but we generally agree that we cannot characterize pleasure, amusement, or convenience alone as involving any necessity or compulsion. The abolitionist perspective is that the overwhelming amount of animal use involves only pleasure, amusement, or convenience. The most significant animal use in terms of both numbers of animals involved and cultural importance is the use of animals for food. We kill an estimated 60 billion land animals and an estimated trillion aquatic animals annually for food. Eating animal foods has generally been justified, at least in part, on grounds of human health and sound nutrition. Those grounds have, however, largely been discredited, and it is now recognized that a vegan diet is sufficient for health. Indeed, an increasing number of mainstream health-​care professionals are claiming that animal foods are detrimental to human health. And there can no longer be any serious question about whether animal agriculture is an ecological disaster. The best justification for the staggering amount of suffering and death involved in the use of animals for food is that animal foods taste good, we are used to eating them, and they are convenient. Therefore, there is no morally coherent justification for consuming animal products. Indeed, 99 percent of our animal use—​including the use of animals for clothing, entertainment, and sport—​is transparently frivolous and contravenes a fundamental moral principle that we claim to accept. Our only use of animals that is not transparently frivolous, and analysis of which requires rights language, involves the use of animals to cure serious human illnesses. Putting aside that there are serious issues about the benefits for human health that are supposedly obtained from vivisection, and that there is increasing consensus that many human illnesses are related to the consumption of animal products, we cannot justify using animals in experiments for which we would not be able to justify using similarly situated humans. We regard humans as having a fundamental right not to be used exclusively as resources. We cannot justify failing to extend this right to nonhumans.

 

36    Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton Second, a corollary of the rejection of animal use is that abolitionists do not support campaigns for the reform of animal use. That is, abolitionists do not support campaigns for more “humane” treatment of animals as a supposed incremental step on the road to eventual abolition. The abolitionist approach rejects regulatory campaigns for both theoretical and practical reasons. As a theoretical matter, if animal exploitation cannot be justified morally, then we should not be promoting campaigns to (supposedly) make such exploitation more “humane.” If animal use is morally wrong, promoting “humane” use ignores the injustice of the institution of animal use just as promoting “humane” human slavery ignores the injustice of that institution. As a practical matter, animal welfare reform does not work, largely as a consequence of the status of animals as chattel property. It costs money to protect animal interests, and we generally only protect their interests when there is a resulting benefit, which is almost always economic. The property status of animals has the effect of limiting in a structural way the benefits that may be provided to animals. Most reforms do little more than modify practices in ways that may, for example, increase housing costs but lower veterinary costs and have the overall effect of improving production efficiency for institutional users. Even in situations in which production costs are increased, the increase rarely exceeds the elasticities of demand, so the market for animal products is not adversely affected. Welfare reform, therefore, does nothing to eradicate the property status of animals and, at best, creates niche markets for supposedly higher-​welfare animal products. There is no historical evidence that regulation leads to abolition; indeed, given the present extent and character of animal use, it would seem that the contrary is the case—​animal welfare measures make the public feel better about animal exploitation, and this encourages continued animal use. Moreover, if the animal movement promoted an abolitionist perspective and did not campaign for welfare reform that necessarily portrays the supposedly reformed process of production as normatively desirable, institutional users would respond by making precisely the same sorts of minor, largely cost-​effective welfare improvements for which many animal organizations presently campaign in an effort to convince the public to reject the abolitionist perspective. However, animal organizations would no longer be complicit in promoting these welfare reforms and the resulting supposedly more “humane” animal products as normatively desirable, which actually reassures the public that consuming these products is morally acceptable or that the consumption of these products suffices to discharge our moral obligation to animals. The abolitionist approach to animal rights, in addition to rejecting animal welfare reform campaigns, rejects single-​issue campaigns that seek to prohibit particular animal uses. For example, abolitionists generally do not promote campaigns against fur or foie gras. Such campaigns convey the idea that certain forms of exploitation are worse than other forms and, in a culture in which animal use is morally acceptable as a general matter, uses that are not targeted are implicitly represented as morally acceptable. Third, the abolitionist approach sees abolition as the goal of animal ethics and sees creative, nonviolent vegan advocacy—​not welfare reform—​as the means to that end.

 

Animal Rights   37 The abolitionist approach regards veganism as the moral baseline and maintains that we cannot draw a morally coherent distinction between flesh and other animal products, such as dairy or eggs, or between animal foods and the use of animals for clothing or other products. If animals matter morally at all, we cannot justify eating, wearing, or using them. If individuals regard themselves as abolitionists, they cannot consume any animal products anymore than an abolitionist with respect to human chattel slavery could own slaves. The abolitionist approach sees veganism as the only rational response to the idea that animals have moral value. That is, if animals have moral value and are not things that exist exclusively as resources for humans, as means to human ends, then we cannot justify eating, wearing, or using them. Fourth, the abolitionist approach links the moral status of nonhumans with sentience alone and not with any other cognitive characteristic. Sentience is subjective awareness; there is a someone who perceives and experiences the world. A sentient being has interests—​that is, preferences, wants, or desires. If a being is sentient, then that is necessary and sufficient for the being to have the right not to be used as a means to human ends, which, correlatively, imposes on humans the moral obligation not to use that being as a resource. It is not a matter of “humanely” using that animal. Although less suffering is better than more suffering, no use can be morally justified. Although Singer maintains that sentience is necessary and sufficient for moral consideration, he does not think that sentience alone is sufficient to support a presumption against use as a replaceable resource that he accords to all “normal” humans and that would require veganism at least as a prima facie matter. That is, because humans are self-​ aware and forward looking, it is a tragedy when they are killed, and Singer’s presumption acts in a similar way to a “right to life.” As mentioned above, although Singer thinks that nonhuman great apes, dolphins, and elephants are similar to humans in this regard in terms of having a humanlike awareness of self, there is doubt as to other animals, and this leads Singer to reject the notion that veganism is any sort of moral baseline. Regan’s subject-​of-​a-​life concept links moral value with preference autonomy The abolitionist approach rejects these positions and maintains that any being who is sentient is self-​aware for the purpose of saying that such a being has a prima facie objective interest in continuing to live, regardless of what that being thinks about that interest. Humans have an obligation not to treat such a being exclusively as a resource, irrespective of the degree of “humane” treatment. Fifth, the abolitionist approach to animal rights rejects speciesism because, like racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism, it uses a morally irrelevant criterion (species) to discount and devalue the interests of sentient beings. But any opposition to speciesism makes sense only as part of a general opposition to all forms of discrimination. That is, we cannot oppose speciesism but claim that animal rights advocates do not have a position on these other forms of discrimination. Opposition to speciesism requires that we oppose all discrimination. Sixth, the abolitionist approach incorporates the principle of nonviolence and rejects violence as a means to achieve justice for animals. The abolitionist approach views the problem of animal exploitation as one of violence and does not view more violence as a

 

38    Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton solution to the problem. Moreover, the abolitionist approach recognizes that any advocacy of violence against institutional animal exploiters would inevitably be arbitrary given that those who consume animal products are not relevantly distinguishable from a moral standpoint. There have been a number of responses to the abolitionist approach. Political philosopher Will Kymlicka and his coauthor Sue Donaldson have criticized the abolitionist position for involving only a negative right of non-​use and for not accommodating or providing for positive human-​nonhuman relationships that are not based on exploitation or property status.39 Political theorists Robert Garner40 and Alasdair Cochrane have argued that the property status is not inconsistent with according animals appropriate moral and legal consideration.41

Animal Rights and the Law “Animal rights” also refers to the laws that concern animals.42 Although there had been some efforts to pass laws that provided for the welfare of animals before the nineteenth century, such as a seventeenth-​century Massachusetts Bay Colony law that prohibited “any Tirranny or Crueltie towards any bruite Creature which are usuallie kept for man’s use,”43 it was not until the nineteenth century that animal interests started being protected by law as a reflection of the widespread shift in moral thinking introduced by the utilitarians. Although there were some early anti-​cruelty statutes, the first significant legislative effort occurred in 1822 with what was known informally as Martin’s Act, named after its sponsor, Richard Martin, and formally as An Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle, which imposed a fine (and imprisonment if the fine was not paid) on those who wantonly or cruelly beat, abused, or ill-​treated any horse, mare, gelding, mule, ass, ox, cow, heifer, steer, sheep, or other cattle, Martin’s Act triggered more legislation aimed at dealing with animal cruelty, and animal welfare laws are now ubiquitous throughout the world. There are two sorts of laws and regulations that apply to animals. There are general laws, such as anti-​cruelty laws, that apply generally to animals and that require “humane” treatment and prohibit the infliction of “unnecessary” or “unjustified” suffering. There are also specific laws that may apply only to particular species, such as a law that protects wild horses, or only to particular uses, such as laws that regulate the use of animals in biomedical experiments or testing, or that pertain only to certain sorts of treatment, such as how slaughter is to be performed. These laws reflect the utilitarian thinking that gave rise to the welfarist position in the first place. That is, the assumption that underlies them is that animals do not have a morally significant interest in continuing to live. They are properly thought of as resources for our use. But animals do have morally significant interests in not suffering and animal welfare laws prohibit the imposition of unnecessary suffering. So although these laws forbid causing unnecessary suffering in animals, “necessity” is not understood in terms

 

Animal Rights   39 of whether the particular use itself is necessary, but only whether some aspect of treatment is necessary. This means that the prohibition on unnecessary suffering is applied to uses that are not themselves necessary. This is nowhere more evident than in the use of animals for food, which, as discussed previously, cannot be characterized as “necessary” in any meaningful sense. To the extent that anti-​cruelty laws even apply to the use of animals for food (many laws explicitly exempt this use altogether), the only question is whether particular treatment is necessary given that the use is not necessary. Therefore, the focus is on whether there is unnecessary unnecessary suffering. This is also the case in other contexts, including the use of animals for clothing, and entertainment, including sport hunting. Given that the uses are themselves transparently frivolous, all the suffering imposed incidental to them is unnecessary and the only thing that is prohibited is unnecessary suffering that is not necessary. And that translates into a prohibition on gratuitous suffering. As a matter of law, animals are chattel property. Animals are, like other property, bought and sold. They have no intrinsic or inherent value and have only extrinsic or external value. It costs money to protect animal interests, and the law generally requires protection only in situations in which there is a benefit—​usually economic—​that results. For example, the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958, a United States law that requires that large animals be stunned and rendered unconscious before being slaughtered, explicitly recognized that animals who were not stunned incurred more carcass damage and caused more injuries to workers. When the law intervenes in matters involving animals, it is usually to correct some economic inefficiency and to facilitate efficient animal exploitation. “Necessary” suffering is linked to what is required to facilitate efficient use. Not surprisingly, the standard for “humane” treatment is largely determined by what is regarded as customary in the particular industry. The law assumes that rational property owners will not generally have any incentive to harm their animal property gratuitously. To talk about animals having a “right” not to be harmed gratuitously is problematic. On one hand, all sentient beings have an interest in not being harmed, whether gratuitously or not. So a law that provides that the interest must be protected may be said to involve a right. On the other hand, such laws are going to exclude only a miniscule fraction of the suffering that humans impose on animals and allow the vast majority of suffering that is considered as facilitating efficient animal exploitation, and have nothing to do with respecting the inherent value of animals but only with ensuring the rational use of property.

Animal Rights as  a Social Movement The “animal rights movement” is dominated by two sorts of organizations.44 The first sort promotes the traditional welfarist position that it is acceptable for humans to use nonhumans as resources, but that humans have an obligation to minimize animal suffering. Examples of organizations in this first group include the Humane Society of the

 

40    Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton United States and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the United Kingdom. These organizations may campaign against particular forms of animal exploitation, such as badger culls, cosmetics testing using animals, or large-​scale commercial dog ​breeding (“puppy mills”), and some are involved with animal shelters. As far as their position on animal use is concerned, these organizations do not oppose animal use per se, but promote various welfare reforms, such as larger cages and supposedly less painful ways of slaughter intended to make animal use more “humane,” or single-​issue campaigns against particular products, such as foie gras. Classical welfarist organizations often have formal relationships with institutional animal users, such as programs promoting “humane sustainable farming.” The second sort of organization usually (although not always) characterizes itself as an “animal rights” group and promotes some version of the idea that animal use is not morally justifiable and should be abolished or, at least, substantially reduced. The primary example of a group in this category is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which uses the slogan, “Animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way,” a sentiment that would never be expressed by one of the traditional welfarist organizations. But despite taking what is supposedly a position that is ideologically different from the traditional welfarist organizations, PETA and groups like it still promote welfare reform campaigns that are often indistinguishable from what traditional welfarist groups promote. Some groups like PETA maintain that they support welfare reform only as a means to the end of abolishing or significantly reducing animal use. This position, which has been characterized as new welfarism by critics45 and as animal protectionism or animal regulationism by proponents, is controversial. The new welfarist/​regulationist position is rejected by those who embrace the abolitionist approach to animal rights. There are many animal advocates who pursue their advocacy apart from involvement in any organization. The abolitionist movement is largely a grassroots effort. In conclusion, “animal rights” is a concept that has multiple meanings. Some maintain that as a strength; some see it as impeding any progress in the quest for justice for nonhumans.

Notes 1. Bryan Salvage, “Revolutionizing the Veal Industry,” Meat Processing, December 2006, 15. 2. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, rev. ed. (New York: Avon, 1990). 3. See, e.g., Greg Neale, “Peter Singer: Monkey Business,” Independent, December 3, 2006, accessed June 9, 2015, http://​www.independent.co.uk/​news/​people/​profiles/​peter-​singer-​ monkey-​business-​426768.html 4. For a further discussion of the concept of rights, both generally and in the context of animal rights, see Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000), xxvi–​xxxi. 5. For an excellent discussion of the moral status of nonhuman animals in the Western philosophical tradition, see Gary Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents:  The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy (Pittsburgh, PA:  University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).

 

Animal Rights   41 6. See, generally, Gary L. Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995), 121–​133. 7. John Cottingham, et  al. trans., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 139. 8. See, e.g., John Lawrence, A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on Horses, and on the Moral Duties of Man Towards the Brute Creation (London: T. Longman, 1796); Joseph Ritson, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as a Moral Duty (London: Richard Phillips, 1802); Thomas Young, An Essay on Humanity to Animals (London: T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, 1798). The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley included an extended footnote in his 1813 poem Queen Mab concerning not consuming animal foods that became a free-​standing pamphlet titled A Vindication of Natural Diet. 9. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1781; New York: Hafner, 1948), 310–​311n1. 10. Bentham, Introduction to the Principles. 11. Bentham, Introduction to the Principles. 12. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1879), 11. 13. Mill, Utilitarianism, 13. 14. Mill, Utilitarianism, 13. 15. Mill, Utilitarianism, 77. 16. Mill, Utilitarianism, 14. 17. Mill, on the other hand, was what we would now refer to as a “rule utilitarian” who argued in favor of rules that were justified by the principle of utility even if following those rules would not maximize utility in a particular case. 18. Bentham, Introduction to the Principles. 19. Bentham used this expression in “Anarchical Fallacies:  Being An Examination of the Declarations of Rights Issued During the French Revolution,” in, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 2, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), 501. Even if Bentham did not believe in the natural right not to be a slave, he was at least what we would now call a “rule utilitarian” with respect to slavery (see note 17). 20. (London:  Westley and Parrish, 1824). The Edwin Mellen Press republished the book in 1997. 21. (London: George Bell & Sons, 1892). The Society for Animal Rights republished the book in 1980. 22. For example, Edward Nicolson used the notion of “rights” in his book, The Rights of An Animal: A New Essay in Ethics (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co. 1879). 23. The inaugural issue of the newsletter of the Vegan Society and an interview with founder Donald Watson can be found at http://​www.abolitionistapproach.com/​source-​materials-​ on-​donald-​watson/​#.VARvQKP_​naE. 24. See Gary L. Francione’s entry on Donald Watson in Cultural Encyclopedia of Vegetarianism, ed. Margaret Puskar-​Pasewicz (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010), 261–​262. It should be noted that the authors of this chapter have been sharply critical of the Vegan Society precisely because of the authors’ view that the Vegan Society has abandoned Watson’s position that veganism is a moral imperative and has, instead, embraced a “flexitarian” approach. See, e.g., “A Moment of Silence for Donald Watson, Founder of the Vegan Society,” http://​www.abolitionistapproach.com/​moment-​silence-​donald-​watson-​ founder-​vegan-​society/​#.VANGDKP_​naE. 25. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971). 26. Singer, Animal Liberation, 20.

 

42    Gary L. Francione and Anna E. Charlton 27. Singer, Animal Liberation, 229. 28. See Dave Gilson, “Chew the Right Thing,” Mother Jones (May 3, 2006), accessed June 9, 2015 http://​www.motherjones.com/​politics/​2006/​05/​chew-​right-​thing; “Singer Says,” Satya (October 2006), accessed June 9, 2015 http://​www.satyamag.com/​oct06/​singer.html 29. Singer, Animal Liberation, 16. 30. Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, (eds.), The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (London: Fourth Estate, 1993), 5. 31. Rosamund Raha, “Animal Liberation:  An Interview with Professor Peter Singer,” The Vegan (Autumn, 2006), 19. 32. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 119. 33. Singer, Practical Ethics, 122. 34. The letter may be viewed here:  http://​www.abolitionistapproach.com/​wp-​content/​ uploads/​2014/​06/​support1.jpg 35. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). 36. For a discussion of this matter, see Gary L. Francione, Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 210–​229. 37. For a selection of essays that discuss the abolitionist approach to animal rights, see Francione, Animals as Persons. See also Gary L. Francione’s essay, “The Abolition of Animal Exploitation,” in Gary L. Francione and Robert Garner, The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 1–​102; Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights; Animal Rights:  The Abolitionist Approach website, http://​www. AbolitionistApproach.com; Gary Steiner, Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 38. See Gary L. Francione and Anna Charlton, Eat Like You Care:  An Examination of the Morality of Eating Animals. (Newark, NJ: Exempla Press, 2013). 39. Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis:  A  Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011). See also Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s chapter in this volume, “Animals in Political Theory.” 40. See Robert Garner’s essay, “A Defense of a Broad Animal Protectionism,” in The Animal Rights Debate, 103–​174. See also Robert Garner, Animals, Politics and Morality, 2nd ed. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004). 41. Alasdair Cochrane, Animal Rights Without Liberation:  Applied Ethics and Human Obligations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 42. For a discussion of animals and the law, see, generally, Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law; Francione, Animals as Persons, 67–​128. 43. See William H. Whitmore, A Bibliographical Sketch of Laws of the Massachusetts Colony from 1630 to 1686 (Boston: Rockwell and Churchill, 1890) (reprinting The Body of Liberties of 1641), 53. 44. For a discussion of the modern animal rights movement, see Gary L. Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Philadelphia, PA: 1996); Francione, Animals as Persons, 67–​128. See also the essays on various animal organizations on the Animal Rights:  The Abolitionist Approach website, http://​www. AbolitionistApproach.com. 45. See Francione, Rain Without Thunder.

 

Chapter 2

Anim al s i n P olitical T h e ory Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka

Political philosophy has been largely silent on the animal question, viewing it as an issue for ethicists but irrelevant to the core topics of political philosophy, such as theories of political community, democracy, boundaries, citizenship, the public good, civil society, sovereignty, and constitutionalism. Virtually all of the work done in contemporary political philosophy continues to assume that we can theorize these issues without taking animals into account. And, to be fair, this indifference is largely reciprocated. The vast bulk of the work done in animal ethics, whether based on animal welfare or animal rights, has not considered it necessary or helpful to connect animal ethics to the core concepts of political philosophy. In one sense, this is surprising, since politics is often defined as the study of the exercise of coercive power. Political theory has been concerned, above all, with determining when the exercise of power is legitimate, and with distinguishing legitimate authority from tyranny. Political theorists ask, when is it legitimate for some to exercise power over others? and how can relations of power be held accountable to norms of justice? As Augustine famously put it, both a legitimate state and a band of robbers exercise coercion; what distinguishes a legitimate state is that it aspires to justice and governs in the interests of the governed. Viewed this way, one might think that governing animals would be a paradigmatic focus for political theory. Consider domesticated animals. They are comprehensively controlled by modern states. Every aspect of their lives—​their physical confinement and transportation, their sex and reproduction, their ownership and sale, their diet and health, their killing—​is minutely governed by state regulations. Indeed, the expansion and consolidation of modern states was in many ways driven by the expansion of control over domesticated animals.1 Yet virtually none of this exercise of state power over animals is in the interests of the animals being governed. Rather, state power operates to authorize the use and harm of animals for human benefit.2 Insofar as political theory seeks to replace tyranny with legitimate authority—​and to replace the naked exercise of

 

44    Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka power with justice—​then the governance of domesticated animals seems like an obvious and pressing issue for political theory. Why, then, has political theory ignored the animal question? One reason is that politics has been defined, not only as the exercise of coercive power, but also as the exercise of a uniquely human capacity to deliberate collectively about the goals and purposes of government. When Aristotle famously defined humans as a “political animal,” he explained: Now that man is more of a political animal than bees or other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal who she has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.3

For Aristotle, only those with “the power of speech” to “set forth the just and unjust” can be party to a political relationship or members of a political community. Other animals may have “the perception of pleasure and pain,” but they are incapable of articulating and deliberating their interests and claims in propositional form and are therefore disqualified from being “political” animals. As Steiner notes, this idea that the capacity for “linguistic agency” is a precondition for membership in a political association runs deep in the Western tradition, from the ancient Greeks to today, and has been invoked as grounds for excluding animals from theories of politics.4 So, while the goal of political theory is to replace tyranny with legitimate authority, the scope of this requirement is restricted to linguistic agents. Indeed, the absence of linguistic agency has been invoked, not just to exclude animals from political theory, but to justify tyrannical rule over them, and to justify using and harming them for human benefit. Here again is Aristotle: When there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals … the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master … [I]‌ndeed, the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life.5

As this passage indicates, the historical exclusion of animals from politics has often gone hand-​in-​hand with the exclusion of humans perceived as deficient in linguistic agency. We will return to this point later. But the equation of politics with linguistic agency is pervasive, and this helps to explain why political theorists have ignored the animal question.

 

Animals in Political Theory    45 Contemporary animal ethicists and animal advocates have had to confront this Aristotelean legacy, but it is interesting to note how they accept parts of that legacy even as they challenge other parts. Aristotle in effect makes two claims about animals: (1) that their lack of linguistic agency excludes them membership in a polis; (2) that their lack of linguistic agency makes them by nature slaves, to be used for the needs of others. Contemporary animal advocates typically challenge the second claim but leave the first untouched. Indeed, animal advocates have often gone out of their way to deny that a commitment to animal rights requires challenging the first claim.6 Against the background of a Western tradition that ties politics to linguistic agency, to say that animal rights includes political rights or that it involves seeing animals as our co-​citizens, is seen as a reductio ad absurdum of the animal rights cause. In Brian Barry’s words, “[N]‌obody—​from the most fervent animal liberationist to the most unrepentant carnivore” believes that animals are “fitted by nature to enjoy civil and political rights.”7 The aim of most animal advocacy, therefore, is not to include animals in the polis, but rather to sever political status from moral status. Aristotle may be right that animals are ineligible for political status owing to their lack of linguistic agency, but he is wrong to infer that humans are therefore morally entitled to enslave animals. Animals have moral rights that are independent of political status. On this view, the animals who live among us will always be aliens and subjects rather than citizens politically speaking, since they lack linguistic agency. Nevertheless, in virtue of their intrinsic moral status, they should not be seen merely as resources for human societies to use, but as beings with their own moral worth that sets limits on how we may use and harm them. These moral limits may take the form of “welfarist” proposals for more humane treatment or the more radical “rights” proposal to abolish all forms of human use of animals; but in either case, the goal is to strengthen the moral status of animals without challenging their lack of political status. This strategy seeks to protect animals while leaving untouched the traditional Western view that politics is an exclusively human activity based on linguistic agency. This helps explain why the animal question has been debated extensively in ethics, with its richly elaborated theories of moral status and moral rights, but remains largely invisible in political philosophy, with its theories of citizenship, governance and popular sovereignty. In short, the assumption that “animals cannot be citizens”8 is widely shared both in traditional political theory and in the contemporary animal advocacy movement. Recently, however, various authors have challenged the exclusion of animals from political theory, arguing that animals must be situated in our theories of citizenship, democracy and sovereignty.9 According to these authors, we need to challenge the Aristotelian legacy at a deeper level, questioning his initial premise that only humans qualify as political animals. Human-​animal relations can be understood as forms of political association, and the basic concepts and categories of political theory can illuminate normative issues of human-​animal relations, helping us to identify the relevant forms of injustice and the appropriate remedies.

 

46    Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka In this chapter, we explore this new development, and consider what political theory might offer to animal ethics and animal studies more generally. As we will see, viewing human-​animal relations through the lens of political theory opens up new vistas that draw on, and may also help inform, other fields of animal studies, including geography, sociology, ecology and animal ethics.10

The Need for a Political Theory of Animal Rights As noted earlier, the idea that animals should be seen as having claims to political inclusion is counterintuitive. Indeed, the idea that animals might be our co-​citizens is incomprehensible to many people, a testament to how deeply the Western tradition ties politics to linguistic agency. How, then, can we explain the political theory turn in animal ethics? Part of the explanation is the recognition that animal advocacy based on appeals to moral status without political inclusion has largely failed. The discouraging fact is that more animals today are confined, harmed, and killed for human benefit than 50 years ago when the current animal rights movement emerged, and this despite the fact that we have ever-​more sophisticated moral arguments and empirical evidence for the claim that animals possess morally salient capacities. If progress is to be made, it seems that new strategies and new visions may be required. And since ideas of citizenship and sovereignty have galvanized powerful social justice movements around the globe, it is natural to ask whether these ideas can be deployed in defense of animals. But in addition to this strategic argument, the turn to political theory reflects a growing awareness of the intellectual limitations of traditional animal rights theory. Animal ethics has been preoccupied with a surprisingly narrow set of issues, to the neglect of other important demands and dilemmas in human-​animal interactions. We will mention three such limitations that have helped spur the interest in political theories of animal rights.

Intrinsic Moral Status Until recently, many philosophers working on animal ethics have focused on one central question—​namely, what is the intrinsic moral status of animals (typically grounded in the possession of sentience), and what moral claims flow from this intrinsic status? Proponents of animal welfare and of animal rights disagree about how to characterize these moral claims, and in particular about whether animals have the sort of moral status that makes it illegitimate for us to harm them for our benefit. But they generally agree that the answer to this question is determined by a theory of intrinsic moral status.

 

Animals in Political Theory    47 The moral significance of intrinsic capacities is important, but so, too, are issues arising from the different types of relationships humans have with different animals. For example, domesticated dogs evolved from wild wolves and possess similar forms of sentience. If this were all that mattered ethically, we would have the same obligations to dogs as to wolves. But our relationship to dogs is historically very different, and we have specific obligations to them in virtue of the ways in which we have brought them into our society and bred them to be dependent on us. Dogs, we might say, are members of a shared human-​animal society in a way that wolves are not, and they therefore should have membership rights, as well as the rights owed to all sentient beings. We need a theory of membership, as well as a theory of intrinsic status. This is a familiar point in the human case. We owe certain things to all human beings in virtue of their intrinsic moral status: these obligations are typically framed in the language of universal human rights. But we also have distinct obligations to those people who are members of our society: obligations that are typically framed in the language of citizenship rights. Indeed, it is these latter obligations—​the rights of citizenship rather than universal human rights—​that have been the main focus of Western political theory. By contrast, in the animal case, we have richly elaborated theories of universal animal rights based on intrinsic moral status, but no comparable theories of membership rights. We have good theories about what we owe to both wolves and dogs in virtue of their intrinsic capacities, but few theories about what we owe specifically to dogs in virtue of the way they have been incorporated into our societies. Describing domesticated animals as members of a shared society may seem naïve given that they have been brought into human societies as a caste group to serve us. The history of relations between humans and domesticated animals is one of domination and exploitation, and the goal of animal advocacy must be to end the subordination and sacrifice of nonhuman animals to serve human purposes. And here we face an important choice. Do we end subordination by fully recognizing the membership rights of domesticated animals or by severing our connections with them?

The “Laissez-​Faire Intuition” For many theorists, particularly “abolitionists,” the way to end domination is to stop exercising power over animals. We should empty the cages, liberate captive animals (through re-​wilding or gradual extinction), and cease ownership and exploitation.11 As for free-​ living animals, we should “let them be.”12 The goal is not to exercise power more responsibly or more justly but to renounce power entirely. Palmer calls this the “laissez-​faire intuition” in animal rights theory.13 This approach is prevalent because many animal rights theorists doubt that power can ever be exercised justly. Given animals’ vulnerability, dependence, and lack of linguistic agency, and also given the profound self-​interest humans have in using animals for our own ends, relationships with them will inevitably degenerate into tyranny. Justice, on this view, requires severing all relationships with animals in what Acampora calls “species apartheid”:  humans living among humans;

 

48    Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka animals living among animals.14 This view, implicitly or explicitly, dominated much of animal ethics in the late twentieth century.15 But this laissez-​faire intuition, with its vision of species apartheid, is untenable. It fails even a minimal test of empirical feasibility. There is no possible world in which animals are not constantly affected (for better or worse) by us. Humans will inevitably be making decisions that affect animals’ environments, their mobility (on land, sea, and air), their food and water sources, and the risks they face. Any plausible theory of animal rights, therefore, must consider how the exercise of power can be rendered just, and how it can be responsive to the good of those who are subject to that power. Species apartheid is also morally untenable. It ignores the fact that we have acquired moral responsibilities toward particular groups of animals due to our own past actions, including responsibilities to attend to needs arising through domestication or through human-​induced changes to habitat. Our previous actions have made some animals vulnerable to new types of harm and risk. To simply “let them be” at this point in history is to wash our hands of moral responsibilities we have inherited. The challenge, then, is to think about how ongoing relations can be rendered more just, which is to say, more responsive to the interests of the animals involved. If it is neither empirically feasible nor morally acceptable to sever our relations with animals, we need to ask how these ongoing relations can be reconstructed so that they are as responsive to the will and interests of animals as to our own will and interests. And this in turn requires thinking about animals in a different way, as agents and co-​creators of our shared world.

The Focus on Passive Suffering Unfortunately, animal advocacy has been dominated by a focus on animals as passive victims of human domination, and on the suffering this involves, rather than on their agency and potential as co-​creators of a shared world. This is quite explicit in Peter Singer’s claim that his “focus has always been on animals’ capacity to suffer, from the time I started thinking seriously about the ethics of how we treat them.”16 Elsewhere, Singer states that we “do enough if we eliminate our own unnecessary killing and cruelty towards other animals.”17 Inspired by this focus on suffering, the goal of advocacy has been to highlight (1) that animals are sentient beings who suffer terribly in factory farms or animal laboratories (for example); (2) that this suffering is unnecessary, since humans can flourish without using animals; and (3) that imposing this unnecessary suffering violates the intrinsic moral worth of animals, as well as our duty to minimize harm. This is a powerful and important set of claims, but it provides no clear basis for thinking about how to reconstruct our relations with animals. Certainly, we should stop “unnecessary killing and cruelty,” but what then? A focus on suffering by itself may not rule out many forms of captivity or animal exploitation. Indeed, the focus on suffering can even be used to justify maintaining animals in zoos or enclosed in factory farms on the grounds that they are thereby protected from the hazards of predation, exposure, or starvation.18

 

Animals in Political Theory    49 If we want to truly restructure our relations with animals, we need to explore how to empower animals to define the terms of their relationships with us. We need to recognize animals as intentional beings, able to express their own good, to communicate it, and to competently pursue activities and relationships that are meaningful to them. As Jonathan Balcombe notes, ever since Bentham insisted that the question is, “can they suffer?” animals have been characterized primarily as “pain-​avoiders” rather than “pleasure-​seekers”19—​or, we might add, knowledge-​seekers or experience-​seekers or relationship-​seekers. Any plausible account of justice in human-​animal relations needs to consider how to enable animals to seek out positive goods that are meaningful to them, and to restructure our relations with them in the light of this animal agency. In short, we need to ask what kind of relationships they want to have with us (if any), and create the circumstances for them to explore different options, express preferences, and exert’ meaningful control over their lives. At a strategic level, the focus on reducing suffering seems understandable given the enormous pain and suffering we needlessly inflict on animals. But justice requires supplementing this focus on passive suffering with a commitment to enable animal agency, including the ability to coauthor the terms of their relationship with us. In short, it is increasingly recognized (1) that animals not only have intrinsic moral status but also morally significant relationships and memberships that generate distinctive rights and obligations; (2) that we cannot avoid the exercise of power by “letting them be,” but need to acknowledge the inevitability of asymmetric power and hold that power accountable; and (3) that justice requires not only reducing suffering but also supporting animal agency. Taken together, these three insights push us in the direction of a distinctly political theory of animal rights. To be sure, versions of these points are also recognized in other recent approaches to animal ethics, such as care ethics,20 ecofeminism,21 capability ethics,22 virtue ethics,23 or posthumanist ethics.24 These all start from the premise that continued relations between humans and animals are inevitable, and that the central challenge is to reform these relationships in light of our ethical duties toward animals in ways that are responsive to animals’ agency. These approaches do not, however, envisage according a new political status to animals. While they have broadened the focus beyond intrinsic moral status to also include relational moral obligations, they nonetheless maintain the traditional view that animals cannot be citizens, and that animals have moral claims without being members of the polis. In the end, like Singer and Regan, they implicitly accept Aristotle’s claim that linguistic agency is a precondition for political status, even as they reject Aristotle’s views about the moral status of those who lack linguistic agency. It would take us too far afield to canvass all of these relational alternatives to political theories of animal rights. Some are potentially compatible with, and supplementary to, rights-​based political theories.25 Many others, however, have borne out the fears of abolitionists that relational theories that permit and valorize ongoing human-​animal relations are dangerous for animals when framed as alternatives to rights. The rhetoric of care, partnership, stewardship, and even love is invoked by theorists who defend the

 

50    Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka raising and killing of animals for food or medical research, or who deny that animals have basic interests in freedom, self-​determination, or even continued life.26 Whatever their intent, by failing to guarantee basic rights, these approaches open the door to continued exploitation of animals as a caste group serving human interests. A clear example is the work of Martha Nussbaum.27 Nussbaum emphasizes the importance of animals pursuing their species-​specific capabilities, including capabilities for pleasure and play and social relationships, hence, the duty of human caregivers is to enable such actions. But Nussbaum also thinks that humans are morally entitled to kill animals for food or for scientific research. As Schinkel notes, while Nussbaum states that “one of the central entitlements of animals is the entitlement to a healthy life,” what she really means is that animals have “the entitlement to a healthy life until we eat them.”28 Like other theories that fail to guarantee basic rights to animals, her theory ends up as a rationalization for animal exploitation. We would not claim that this is the inevitable outcome of any relational approach that seeks to recognize animals’ moral status without also seeking political inclusion, but it is a recurrent pattern, and as we will discuss, there are reasons to think that political inclusion and moral rights work best together. In short, traditional abolitionist animal rights theory endorses firm protection of basic rights to life and liberty for animals, but it is attached to a fantasy of species apartheid in which humans can sever relationships with, and renounce power over, animals. Many welfarist, care, virtue, posthumanist, and capability alternatives to animal rights theory accept the inevitability and desirability of ongoing human and animal relations, but do not guarantee animals basic rights. In effect, we are offered a choice of rights without relationships, or relationships without rights. This is the gap that a political theory of animal rights seeks to fill.

A Political Theory of Animal Rights A distinctly political theory of animal rights starts by locating animals squarely within the fundamental principles of the constitutional order. Different political theories have different conceptions of what this constitutional order is or should be, and it would be interesting to speculate about how animals might fit within, say, a communist, anarchist or theocratic political order.29 But today, as for the past 200 years, the most influential conception of political order is that of the territorial nation-​state, and so this is the starting point for most of the current work on political theories of animal rights. This prevailing political order is defined by territorially bounded states, each of which derives its legitimacy from ideas of popular sovereignty or national self-​determination. According to this conception, the world is composed of “peoples” who inhabit different territories. They have the right to govern themselves and their territory, and the nation-​state is the vehicle by which peoples enact these rights of self-​government.

 

Animals in Political Theory    51 This conception of the nation-​state emerged first in Europe, but with decolonization has replicated itself around the world. How can we locate animals within this conception of political order? We have elsewhere argued that animals, like humans, occupy three distinct statuses:30 A. Some animals should be recognized as members of “the people” in whose name our nation-​states govern, and hence as our co-​citizens. We argue that this is true of domesticated animals. B. Other animals should be recognized as having the right to live autonomously in their own territories, and hence as exercising their own sovereignty. We argue that this is true of many free-​living animals in the (relative) wilderness. C. Yet other animals occupy an in-​between status, living among us but not as members of a shared society, and hence as “denizens” rather than citizens. We argue that this true of the nondomesticated free-​living animals residing in urban and suburban regions. We will briefly say a word about each of these categories.

Domesticated Animals Domesticated animals have been brought into human societies through confinement and selective breeding. We’ve made them dependent on our care, foreclosing any (immediate) option of a more independent existence. We have coerced their participation in our schemes of social cooperation, exploiting them for food and labor. They are members of our shared society, but as a subordinated class intended to serve us. Every dimension of their lives is governed and regulated by a human political order,31 a political order designed to be responsive to human interests, not animal interests. They are tyrannized, in short. How do we transform caste hierarchy into relations of justice? As in human cases of caste hierarchy, justice requires recognizing the full and equal membership of subordinated groups, and citizenship is the tool we use to convert relations of caste hierarchy into relations of equal membership. Domesticated animals should be recognized as full members and co-​citizens of society, sharing in the same rights as human citizens to protection (basic rights to life and liberty), provision (social rights), and participation (the right to have a say in how society is structured). Under these conditions, the exercise of power entailed in governing a shared human-​animal society can be legitimate, not tyrannical, because society is dedicated to the flourishing of all of its members. Enabling domesticated animals to “have a say” and to exercise control over their lives is a challenge, given their lack of linguistic agency. But it’s important to emphasize that this challenge does not arise solely in relation to domesticated animals. As noted earlier, one consequence of the Aristotelian legacy that ties politics to linguistic agency is

 

52    Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka that many humans, such as young children or people with atypical cognitive abilities, have been excluded from the polis for most of history. This political exclusion persisted even in times when society purported to respect the moral standing of these groups. In this respect, their position historically was structurally similar to that proposed by many contemporary animal advocates:  young children and others outside the adult neurotypical “norm” were seen as having a moral status but were ineligible for political participation. Today, however, we recognize that this approach is inadequate and unfair. Justice requires political inclusion of all members of society, regardless of their linguistic/​ rational capacities. This is explicit in the provisions of recent UN conventions regarding the rights of the child and the rights of people with disabilities.32 In both cases, it is assumed that children (even very young children) and those with disabilities (even severe intellectual disabilities) are not just vulnerable individuals who have needs for protection and provision, but are also members of society, involved in dense webs of trust, communication, and cooperation with others, and as such have rights of participation, which include being socialized into and helping to shape social norms, practices, and environments. Participation means sharing in power, not just being subjected to it. This is the so-​called 3P model—​protection, provision, and participation—​which has revolutionized thinking about the rights of children and people with cognitive disabilities over the past 30 years.33 This model is a decisive repudiation, even reversal, of the Aristotelian vision of politics and citizenship. For Aristotle, individuals deserved to be recognized as members of a political association because they possessed the capacity to participate through linguistic agency. But this is backward. Individuals have the right to participate because they are members of society: membership is the morally primary notion, and enabling participation (insofar as possible) is one of the duties we owe to all those who are members of a shared social world.34 Citizenship is not a prize awarded to those who pass some test of cognitive “normalcy” or linguistic agency, but is a political status owed to all those who are members of society and who therefore have a right to shape its future. Of course, precisely how we enable participation will depend on the capacities of the individuals involved and their social context. Where individuals possess linguistic agency, enabling participation may be more straightforward (or familiar), involving traditional forms of political activity such as voting and writing petitions. Where members of society lack linguistic agency, implementing their rights and responsibilities of membership requires developing new ways of engaging the subjectivity of these co-​citizens, focusing less on the ability to articulate or understand propositions, and more on attending to their “varied modes of doing, saying and being.”35 We must look beyond classical forms of political activity to think more broadly about what it means to have a say in how decisions affecting one’s life are made. As children’s rights advocates say, we need to take decision-​making to the spaces and places that are meaningful for children—​we need “child-​sized spaces” of citizenship—​that hold to account the exercise of power in those spaces and places. Some examples, in the case of young children, are decisions about health interventions, schooling, recreational opportunities, or custody decisions.

 

Animals in Political Theory    53 While young children or people with cognitive disabilities may not be capable of giving “informed consent” as defined in the law, they are certainly capable of expressing preferences and making decisions in a variety of ways. Their input, even their “assent,” is often now legally required. So we are already committed as a society to building new models and relations of citizenship that are inclusive of the full range of human diversity, beyond linguistic agency, and there is no conceptual obstacle to extending this commitment to our animal co-​citizens as well. Models of trusteeship, interpretation, “dependent agency,” and supported decision-​making are being developed to promote this vision of citizenship for domesticated animals,36 drawing in part on comparable experiences with promoting citizenship for humans who lack linguistic agency. While not capable of propositional speech, it is important not to underestimate domesticated animals’ capacities for communication, cooperation, and agency. Domestication is only possible for animals capable of entering into relations of trust, reflexive communication, and norm sensitivity with humans. We cannot have this sort of shared sociability with many of the animals on the planet, but we can with domesticated animals. Indeed, some of the most interesting work in animal studies in recent years has focused on this intricate web of interspecies sociability that links humans and domesticated animals.37 Thus, domestication not only makes the extension of co-​citizenship morally necessary, but also possible. In sum, we argue that (1) humans and domesticated animals will be involved in ongoing relationships and forms of society; (2) as long as domesticated animals are members with us of a shared community, they need the rights of citizens; and (3) participation is fundamental to citizenship, and so our obligation to domesticated animals is not only to protect them and to provide for species-​typical behaviors, but also to find ways for them to participate in shaping the norms and activities of the mixed human-​animal societies we share. Citizenship in this sense, combining membership rights and participation rights, is the crucial step needed to convert existing caste relations into relations of justice.

Wilderness Animals Most animal species on the planet are not domesticated, and a model of co-​citizenship based on the capacity for interspecies communication, cooperation, and sociability is not possible or appropriate with most nondomesticated animals. This does not mean, however, that human relations with nondomesticated animals cannot be seen as having a political dimension. In our view, it is useful to distinguish two broad categories of nondomesticated animals: those whom we might call truly wild or wilderness animals, who are tied to specific territories or ecological niches and who try to live independently of humans; and those whom we can call “liminal” animals because they adapt to live among us in urban or suburban spaces. We will discuss each in turn. Wilderness animals live on their own territory, typically avoiding human contact as much as possible. These are the animals for whom the “laissez-​faire intuition” is most

 

54    Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka appropriate. As a general rule of thumb, we do best by simply “letting them be.” But the reality is that this rule of thumb has proven incomplete and ineffective in countering the injustices humans inflict on wilderness animals. Even when they are not directly harmed by being hunted or captured or subject to wildlife management regimes, their territory is regularly subject to human invasion, colonization, displacement, and habitat destruction. Historically, human societies have treated wild animal lands as terra nullius that we can pollute, denude, degrade, and occupy without justification.38 How can we prevent this injustice? In intrahuman politics, we attempt to block this kind of aggression by recognizing the rights of “peoples” to their own territory and to autonomy within that territory. These rights are the key components of the principle of sovereignty that regulates relations among different peoples or states; they accord bounded political communities the right to maintain themselves as viable, self-​governing societies in traditional territories or homelands. Sovereignty protects them from outsiders who would expel them, steal their land and resources, turn them into client states, or impose unfair burdens on them (such as cross-​border pollution). Sovereignty also provides a secure basis from which to negotiate fair terms of cooperation (e.g., trade and mobility rights) and forms of assistance or intervention that do not undermine autonomy. We argue that the same principles should apply to wilderness animals. Wild animal communities should be seen as having a sovereign “right to place” that blocks human aggression, and our relations with these communities should be governed, not by brute force, but by norms of international justice—​a true “law of peoples” between human and animal communities. Just as many people find it incoherent to think of domesticated animals as “citizens,” so, too, many find it baffling to think of wilderness animals as “sovereign.” For just as the Western tradition of political theory says that only linguistic agents can be citizens, so, too, the tradition says that only certain kinds of societies can be sovereign—​in particular, those with formal institutions of self-​rule and codified law. Societies—​human or animal—​that lack such formal institutions are seen as ineligible for the protections of sovereignty. This indeed was the pretext under which European colonizers asserted imperial rule over many indigenous peoples, who were said to lack the formal legal institutions required to claim sovereignty. But here again, we have already moved well beyond this traditional account of the preconditions of sovereignty. Consider the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It accords rights of self-​determination to all indigenous peoples, whether or not they have formal state structures. They are owed sovereignty because they have fundamental interests in the rights to territory and autonomy, and in being protected against forms of colonization, displacement, and environmental destruction, regardless of the presence or absence of particular forms of codified law. Sovereignty is not a prize awarded to those societies that pass some test of institutional completeness or structural complexity; it is a shield accorded to those who have interests in territory and autonomy.

 

Animals in Political Theory    55 Of course, precisely how we uphold these rights of sovereignty will depend on the diverse ways in which human and animal societies organize themselves. Where formal state structures exist, it may be relatively straightforward to use existing institutions of international law to develop and enforce sovereignty rights. In the case of indigenous peoples who do not possess their own internationally recognized state, new structures are being developed. And so, too, we need to be innovative in designing new frameworks to uphold the sovereignty of wilderness animals. While some wilderness animals live in discrete habitats, others migrate over extensive areas of land, water, or air. But various models of partial, overlapping, interstitial, and substate sovereignty rights have been developed in the human case, along with ideas of mobility corridors and international commons that can address these complexities in ways that uphold underlying rights to territory and autonomy. Recent work has begun to extend these ideas to animals, in terms of both the protections of territorial-​based self-​determination39 and the limits of these protections.40

Liminal Animals Not all animals can be neatly categorized as either our co-​citizens (full members of a shared cooperative scheme) or as members of some other sovereign society (other nations occupying distinct territories). Countless animals (rats, mice, squirrels, sparrows, raccoons, coyotes, and many others) live among us, but not as part of a shared cooperative scheme as with domesticated animals. Currently, these liminal animals have no protection from human violence. They are often treated as pests, invaders, and aliens, and are ruthlessly killed or expelled. In this respect, they share similar vulnerabilities to groups of liminal humans, who live among us without participating in a common citizenship, including migrant workers, foreign visitors, or isolationist religious groups, such as the Amish. Such “denizens”—​that is, those who are resident without being citizens—​are all vulnerable to being stigmatized and exploited. One way to limit this vulnerability is to ensure that denizens have the option of becoming citizens. However, many denizens do not wish to become citizens, but prefer a looser relationship of tolerant coexistence involving fewer mutual obligations. Consider the Amish:  they have consistently sought to be exempted from both the rights and responsibilities of American citizenship in order to maintain a traditional religious way of life that requires distance from the larger American society. They want to be residents of the United States without being active members of a shared cooperative scheme with other American citizens, and the US Supreme Court has affirmed that this is a legitimate and constitutionally protected interest. We argue that this kind of arrangement makes sense for many liminal animals. They, too, have a way of life that involves physical proximity to human society but social distance from it. It is doubtful that they would benefit from (or be capable of) being incorporated into the kinds of cooperative citizenship relations we can have with

 

56    Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka domesticated animals. Co-​citizenship provides robust rights of provision, protection, and participation, but it also imposes robust obligations to adhere to citizenship norms of cooperation and reciprocity. To incorporate liminal animals into these civic norms would require massive coercion and interference in their ways of life. What nondomesticated animals living among us need is secure denizenship: they need to be protected from our violence, our negligence of their interests, and our refusal to recognize their secure rights of residency. They need tolerant co-​existence or conviviality rather than intimate cooperation. Recent work in multispecies ethnography and animal geography illuminates these relationships in ways that can ground a political theory of animal denizenship.41

Future Directions We have provided just a sketch of how one might apply the categories and concepts of political theory to the issue of animal rights, but hopefully it gives an indication of the potential richness of this new terrain. Political theory offers many ways of conceptualizing forms of political association and political inclusion—​multiple ways of defining the demos, each with its forms of membership and autonomy—​each of which has been theorized in diverse theoretical traditions, including liberalism, civic republicanism, Marxism, conservatism, and postcolonialism. We have barely begun to scratch the surface of how we might apply these ideas to theorize diverse patterns of human-​animal relations. In our view, there is great potential here, in the first instance to overcome an impasse in animal ethics. For the past 40 years, animal ethics has often wavered between two extremes. In its pessimistic Foucauldian moments, the relation between humans and domesticated animals is seen as inherently and always already oppressive and dominating (disciplining and policing), with no potential for fundamental change. Interspecies relations are fundamentally locked into a framework of violence, with humans asserting a right to dominate animals as a continuing spoil of interspecies war.42 Against this background, the extinction of domesticated animals (and a commitment to leave wild animals alone) may appear as the only hope for ending the carnage. In more naïve (or self-​serving) moments, animal ethicists search for and celebrate minor enhancements of animals’ welfare or freedom, reflected in the rise of free-​range-​ chicken farms, cooperative horse training methods, or “enrichment” for zoo and lab animals—​all of which are taken as evidence of “partnership,” “cooperation,” and even “love.”43 Yet these reforms and perspectives leave untouched, and indeed are complicit in, the systematic exploitation of animals to serve human interests, in large part because they take as given that the purposes of human-​animal relations are always already fixed by humans. What has been largely absent is any serious attempt to explore the vast territory between these two extremes, a territory in which animals would be seen as coauthors of

 

Animals in Political Theory    57 their relations with humans, whether as co-​members of a shared society, in which cooperative activities would be as responsive to their interests and purposes as to ours, or as members of separate societies working out the terms of peaceful coexistence with us. And it is here, above all, that political theory is valuable. Political theory is committed to the model of a society that belongs to all its members, whose ground rules are jointly shaped by those members, and that thus provides a vital resource for reimagining our relations within and between interspecies communities. The promise of political theory is evident in the children’s rights and disability rights movements. As noted earlier, discussion of these groups also wavered between pessimistic declarations of Foucauldian domination and optimistic celebrations of minor paternalistic reforms. What was needed, and what has emerged, was a reframing of children’s rights and disability rights as an issue of citizenship, not just paternalistic welfare reform, and this, in turn, was made possible by a reframing of citizenship as a matter of membership and participation in place of the Aristotelian model that ties citizenship to linguistic agency. Similarly, the fate of indigenous peoples, long trapped between the forces of colonial dispossession and paternalistic welfare reform, has been reframed as an issue of self-​ determination, a shift that was itself made possible by a reframing of self-​determination as a matter of territory and autonomy. It is perhaps not surprising that animal rights theory has lagged behind children, disability, and indigenous studies in theorizing these terrains. In the case of animals, it is still possible—​however implausibly—​to deny that some animals count as members of our shared society and that others form separate societies with interests in self-​ determination. But when this recognition happens, political theory will offer a rich set of concepts and practices for thinking about their membership, participation and coexistence rights. There are many challenges facing this political theory turn in animal ethics, and it is too early to tell how successfully they can be addressed. We will conclude by simply flagging some likely areas of future debate. We will start with challenges raised by critics of animal rights, and then consider some challenges that arise from the animal rights camp.

Capacities As with any theory of animal ethics, skeptics will ask whether animals really possess the capacities that the theory presupposes. As noted earlier, a political theory of animal rights is a two-​level theory combining a baseline commitment to certain universal basic rights for all sentient animals with group-​differentiated citizenship rights for domesticated animals, sovereignty rights for wilderness animals, and denizenship rights for liminal animals. As a result, the capacity question arises at different levels. At the baseline level of defending universal rights, we need to defend both the existence of and the moral significance of animal sentience or consciousness. But, of course, this is a challenge facing all animal ethics; it is not unique to the political theory approach.

 

58    Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka The more distinctive challenge concerns group-​differentiated rights, and it requires a more complex story about capacities. Consider domesticated animals. Even if we reframe citizenship as a matter of membership and participation rather than linguistic agency, it still presupposes certain capacities beyond sentience. In particular, it presupposes the capacity for interspecies sociability, which in turn requires the capacity to be socialized into and sensitive to shared norms. Some critics are skeptical about this, and worry that domesticated animals are too “unruly” to be accepted as members of a political community.44 Our view is that evidence from animal-​welfare and human-​animal studies, as well as everyday experience with domesticated animals, confirm these capacities.45 A similar issue arises with respect to sovereignty rights for wilderness animals. Even if sovereignty is reframed as a matter of interests in territory and autonomy rather than formal law-​making, it still presupposes certain capacities beyond sentience. In particular, it presupposes that wilderness animals are competent to address the challenges they face, including socializing their young to be able to manage risks of predation and securing food and shelter, as theories in evolutionary biology and ethology would tend to predict. Here too, however, some critics are skeptical about this competence, and wonder whether wilderness animals should not instead be seen as living in the equivalent of failed states, a permanent humanitarian catastrophe calling for extensive intervention.46 Addressing these capacity questions will require linking animal ethics to wider debates in animal-​welfare science, ethology, and human-​animal studies. But a political theory perspective might also lead us to ask different questions than those that currently dominate in these broader fields. On the one hand, as noted earlier, traditional animal ethics has focused primarily on the capacity to suffer. Animal ethicists have therefore carefully attended to scientific findings about animals’ capacity to suffer, which is seen as sufficient to establish their intrinsic moral standing and therefore sufficient to condemn existing uses of animals by farmers, researchers, and hunters. They have avoided speculating about other capacities, such as the capacity for interspecies sociability, communication, and agency; for mutual relationships with humans; or for coauthorship or self-​determination, since this risks the charge of sentimentality and anthropomorphism for no strategic gain. In this sense, traditional animal ethics has been quite parsimonious, both with respect to science (it makes no assumptions about animals’ capacity to be agents in their relations to humans and to coauthor these relations) and with respect to ethics (it makes no assumptions about animals’ interests beyond avoiding suffering). The net result, however, has been to render invisible the potential for a more genuinely just relationship between humans and animals based on ideas of shared membership and participation or coexistence. Of course, other disciplines, including animal-​welfare science and cognitive ethology, have been interested in animal capacities beyond the question of suffering. But they, too, have had on intellectual blinders. Too often, the focus of research in these fields has been on cognitive skills, often used as a basis for assessing the comparable mental age of animals (i.e., if an animal can remember certain words or use certain tools, then she has the mental development of a four-​or six-​year-​old human child). Even if we set aside the

 

Animals in Political Theory    59 problem that many of these studies are unethical, since they require separating animals from their families and confining them in labs, they are of little benefit in sorting out how we should relate to animals. What matters, morally and politically, is not their comparative intelligence or mental age, but their capacities for participating in and negotiating interspecies social life (if domesticated) or for living autonomously (if wild). So a political theory of animal rights makes distinctive assumptions about animal capacities that are in some respects speculative, since they have not been the focus of much existing research. As noted earlier, a political theory of animal rights asks, above all, what sorts of relationships animals want to have with us, and how we can elicit and respond to their preferences in this regard. It is a sad comment on the state of research that so few people, whether in animal ethics or animal welfare, have taken this as their guiding question.

Anthropomorphism If critics of animal rights doubt that animals have the required capacities, defenders of animal rights often have a different concern about the political theory turn—​namely, that the very concepts of a political theory, such as citizenship, sovereignty, and denizenship are fundamentally and inescapably “human” in origin and in functioning, and that we therefore do symbolic violence to animals when we attempt to subsume them under our categories. Are we not denying their authentic otherness when we think of domesticated animals as our co-​citizens, or wilderness animals as sovereigns? Like the question of sentience, the issue of applying human categories and concepts to animals is one that confronts all versions of animal ethics. One hears related criticism about using any words that situate animals as agents in a shared social world, such as worker, teacher, friend, parent, soldier, colleague, ally, rebel, leader, or, more simply, person. And so, too, for concepts describing the virtues and vices of citizens and persons (love, hatred, generosity, empathy, greed, self-​restraint, tolerance, loyalty, treachery, courage). The claim seems to be that these words and concepts, in their archetypal form, and at their conceptual core, are human based—​originating in human relations, learned first through application to human others. Only later do we analogize, or extend these concepts to animals, doing violence in the process both to the concepts and to animal being. It would take a separate chapter to address this concern; we would just note that this criticism rests on a double misunderstanding. On the one hand, it is simply not true that these concepts emerged in an exclusively human context. They emerged in contexts that were always already interspecies, and are often learned and illustrated in relation to human-​animal relations. Children often learn what friendship, family, trust, cooperation, and loyalty are by reference to their relations with animals, and it is only later, as a result of ideological indoctrination into human supremacist doctrines, that children learn to exclude animals from the scope of these terms.47 It is this moment of ideological exclusion, not the original inclusion, that does violence both to the terms and to animals. It is puzzling to make this anthropomorphism charge in relation to citizenship and sovereignty, since the essential feature of these concepts is precisely that they hold

 

60    Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka political relationships accountable to those who are defined as citizens and sovereigns. If our goal is to ensure that our relations with animals are in response to their subjective good, then we need concepts and categories that compel us to attend to their subjective good. And that is precisely what the concepts of citizenship and sovereignty do.

Cosmopolitics Finally, skeptics might object to applying political theory to animals because they are skeptical of the benefits of political theory concepts even in the human case. We noted earlier that one motivation for the political theory turn in animal ethics is the perception that ideas of citizenship and sovereignty have served as powerful tools in the struggle for justice by various human groups. But there are those who argue that these concepts are obsolete even in the human case, and that we need a new “cosmopolitics” for both humans and animals. As noted earlier, the starting point of modern political theory is the division of the world into distinct “peoples” who inhabit different territories, and who have the right to govern themselves and their territory through the institution of the nation-​state. Struggles for social justice have typically taken the form of citizenship struggles (for full membership in a territorial nation-​state) or national liberation struggles (for decolonization and territorial self-​rule) and have been inspired and guided by concepts of citizenship and sovereignty. But a growing number of critics argue that this Westphalian conception of the world order is obsolete, and indeed repressive, in an era of globalization. It is said to lead to violent conflicts among states over territory, and to oppressive exclusions within states, as immigrants, refugees, and other individuals deemed alien are denied citizenship. A better world, it is argued, is one where we abandon ideas of territorial sovereignty and bounded citizenship and instead think of a cosmopolitan world without boundaries, and without insiders or outsiders. From this perspective, it seems perverse to extend to animals a set of political concepts that may be crumbling in the human case. Rather than treat citizenship and sovereignty as somehow the default categories for thinking about social life, we should instead view the animal question as an opportunity to explore fundamental alternatives, whether of a more anarchist or cosmopolitan variety. Rather than ask which animals are our co-​citizens and which are sovereigns or denizens, we should instead seek a world in which these distinctions are not used in relation to either humans or animals.48 We expect this cosmo-​political critique to be an exciting area of future work in the field. It is too early to tell precisely what this cosmopolitan alternative would look like, and how it would address issues of mobility, membership, and democracy. We would only note that many animals may have important interests in the recognition of boundaries. Humans have proven able to roam freely across the globe and to survive in a remarkable diversity of environments. Many animals, however, are tied to specific ecological niches, and therefore need a secure “right to place”; or, they are tied to specific humans who love and care for them and therefore need stable community structures. We might find, paradoxically, that while humans outgrow their attachment to bounded

 

Animals in Political Theory    61 political communities, the ideas of rights to place, to membership, and to interdependent autonomy are crucial for our fellow creatures.

Notes 1. Kim Smith, Governing Animals:  Animal Welfare and the Liberal State (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012). 2. There are animal-​welfare laws whose ostensible purpose is to curb the worst excesses of exploitation that, in reality, do not give animals legal protection from harm, but rather give legal protection and ideological cover to the corporations and scientists who harm animals. See Gary Francione, Animals as Persons:  Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 3. Aristotle, Politics, The Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Robert Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica), 446. On the foundational significance of this view for the Western philosophical tradition, see Julian Franklin, “Animal Rights and Political Theory,” in Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, ed. George Klosko (Oxford University Press, 2011); Gary Steiner, Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Dinesh Wadiwel, The War against Animals (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2015). 4. Steiner, Animals, 196. “Linguistic agency” should not be confused with broader notions (shared across many species), such as the ability to communicate or to engage in prudential reasoning. Linguistic agency refers to a very specific capacity to articulate and deliberate reasons in propositional form. 5. Aristotle, Politics, 448. 6. E.g., Steiner, Animals; Ted Benton, Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights, and Social Justice (London: Verso, 1993). 7. Barry, “Equality,” in Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2nd ed., ed. Lawrence Becker and Charlotte Becker (London: Routledge, 2001), 481. 8. Benton, Natural Relations, 191. 9. Recent books that inform this political theory turn include Smith, Governing Animals; Robert Garner’s The Political Theory of Animal Rights (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2005); and A Theory of Justice for Animals: Animal Rights in a Nonideal World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Alasdair Cochrane’s An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory (New  York:  Palgrave, 2010) and Animal Rights without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011); Siobhan O’Sullivan, Animals, Equality and Democracy (New  York:  Palgrave, 2011); and Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). For a collection of essays on this political turn in animal ethics, see Marcel Wissenburg and David Schlosberg, eds., Political Animals and Animal Politics (London: Palgrave, 2014). 10. Needless to say, animal advocacy has always been intensely political. Most authors who demand greater protection for animals insist that it requires legal reform, even if such reform does not take the form of including animals as members of political association. And this struggle for legal reform inevitably generates what we can call “animal

 

62    Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka politics”—​for example, we can study the political alliances that promote or resist recognition of animals’ moral rights (e.g., Garner, Political Theory, 2005) or the effectiveness of different political campaigns to promote recognition of animals’ moral rights (e.g., Nick Cooney, Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us about Spreading Social Change, Brooklyn, NY:  Lantern Books, 2010), or the role of animal advocacy in intersectional analyses and politics (e.g., Carol Adams and Lori Gruen, eds., Ecofeminism:  Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). We can even talk about “animals in political theory,” in the sense of asking whether the regnant political ideologies are able to endorse the recognition of the intrinsic moral rights of animals. For example, we can ask whether it might be easier for liberals than for Marxists to recognize the intrinsic moral status of animals (Garner, Political Theory; Cochrane, An Introduction), or whether animals can be included in a Rawlsian social contract (Mark Rowlands, Animal Rights: Moral Theory and Practice, London: Palgrave, 2009). These literatures link animals and politics, but do so in a way that accepts that the goal of animal advocacy is recognition of intrinsic moral status or as moral “patients” but not their inclusion in our conceptions of political community and citizenship. In this chapter, by contrast, we focus on a more specific and novel way in which animals and political theory can be linked—​namely, by viewing human-​animal relations as themselves forms of political association and therefore using the concepts of political theory to identify what justice requires. This means evaluating human-​animal relations not solely according to metrics of intrinsic moral worth, but also according to political theory criteria, such as political membership, citizenship, social cooperation, democratic inclusion, or accountability. 11. E.g., Francione, Animals as Persons. 12. E.g., Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Peter Singer, Animal liberation (New York: Random House, 1975). 13. Clare Palmer, Animal Ethics in Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 14. Ralph Acampora, “Oikos and Domus:  On Constructive Co-​ Habitation with Other Creatures,” Philosophy and Geography 7 (2005): 219–​235. 15. For an early critique of the “hands off ” approach, and the need to develop a theory of positive interspecies relationships, see Susan Isen, “Beyond Abolition: Ethical Exchanges with Animals in Agriculture,” Between the Species (1985): 17–​24. 16. Singer quoted in Jonathan Balcombe, “Animal Pleasure and Its Moral Significance,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 188 (2009): 208–​216. 17. Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd ed. (London: Cape, 1990), 227. 18. Balcombe, “Animal Pleasure,” 214. 19. Balcombe, “Animal Pleasure,” 213–​214. 20. J. Donovan and Carol Adams, eds., The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). See also Donovan’s chapter in this volume, “Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics: The Feminist Care Perspective.” 21. E.g., Adams and Gruen, Ecofeminism. 22. E.g., Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice. 23. E.g., Rosalind Hursthouse, “Applying Virtue Ethics to Our Treatment of the Other Animals,” in The Practice of Virtue: Classic and Contemporary Readings in Virtue Ethics, ed. Jennifer Welchman (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006), 136–​154. 24. E.g., Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

 

Animals in Political Theory    63 25. E.g., some contributions to Donovan and Adams, Feminist Care Tradition; Adams and Gruen, Ecofeminism. 26. See, for example, Haraway, When Species Meet; Kathy Rudy, Loving Animals: Toward a New Animal Advocacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Sandra Laugier, ed., Tous Vulnerables? Le “care,” les animaux et l’environement (Paris: Payot & Rivage, 2012). 27. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice. 28. Anders Schinkel, “Martha Nussbaum on Animal Rights.” Ethics and the Environment 13, no. 1 (2008): 53. 29. Pers Svärd, “Animal National Liberation?” Journal of Animal Ethics 3 (2013): 201–​213. 30. Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis. 31. Smith, Governing Animals; O’Sullivan, Animals, Equality and Democracy. 32. Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006). 33. The addition of the third P (participation) to contemporary children’s rights and disability rights movements reflects a conscious reorientation of these movements around “citizenship as the central organizing principle and benchmark.” See Michael Prince, Absent Citizens: Disability Politics and Policy in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009, 3). 34. For defense of this membership-​ based model of citizenship, see Joseph Carens, “Membership and Morality:  Admission to Citizenship in Liberal Democratic States,” in Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America, ed. Rogers Brubaker (Lanham: University Press of America, 1989); Monique Lanoix, “The Citizen in Question,” Hypatia 22, no. 4 (2007): 113–​129. 35. Bren Neale, “Introduction:  Young Children’s Citizenship,” in Young Children’s Citizenship:  Ideas into Practice, ed. Bren Neale (York:  Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2004), 15. 36. Eva Meijer, “Political Communication with Animals,” Humanimalia 5, no. 1 (2013): 28–​52; Anne Marie Matarrese, “The Boundaries of Democracy and the Case of Non-​Humans,” In-​Spire Journal of Law, Politics and Societies 5 (2010):  55–​7 1; Laura Valentini, “Canine Justice:  An Associative Account,” Political Studies 62, no.  1 (2014):  37–​52; Clemens Driessen, “Animal Deliberation”, in Wissenburg and Schlosberg, Political Animals and Animal Politics; and our “Rethinking Membership and Participation in an Inclusive Democracy: Cognitive Disability, Children, Animals,” in Disability and Political Theory, ed. Barbara Arneil and Nancy Hirschmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), forthcoming. 37. E.g., Julie Urbanik and Mary Morgan, “A Tale of Tails: The Place of Dog Parks in the Urban Imaginary,” Geoforum 44 (2013): 292–​302. See also Leslie Irvine, “Animals and Sociology,” Sociology Compass 2, no. 6 (2008): 1954–​1971. 38. Jennifer Wolch, “Anima Urbis,” Progress in Human Geography 26, no. 6 (2002): 721–​742. 39. Robert Goodin, Carole Pateman, and Roy Pateman, “Simian Sovereignty,” Political Theory 25, no. 6 (1997): 821–​849; John Hadley, “Nonhuman Animal Property: Reconciling Environmentalism and Animal Rights,” Journal of Social Philosophy 36 (2005): 305–​315. 40. Oscar Horta, “Zoopolis, Intervention, and the State of Nature,” Law, Ethics and Philosophy 1 (2013): 113–​125; Eleni Panagiotarakou, “Right to Place: A Political Theory of Animal Rights in Harmony with Environmental and Ecological Principles,” The Ethics Forum 9, no. 3 (2014): 114–​139.

 

64    Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka 41. E.g., Wolch, “Anima Urbis”; Agustin Fuentes, “Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 600–​624; Erin Luther, “Tales of Cruelty and Belonging: In Search of an Ethic for Urban Human-​ Wildlife Relations,” Animal Studies Journal 2, no. 1 (2013): 35–​54. 42. E.g., Wadiwel, War against Animals. 43. E.g., Rudy, Loving Animals; Haraway, When Species Meet. 44. Emma Planinc, “Democracy, Despots and Wolves: On the Dangers of Zoopolis’s Animal Citizen,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 47, no. 1 (2014): 1–​21. See also our response in the same issue. 45. See also Jocelyne Porcher’s chapter in this volume, “Animal Work,” which notes that domesticated animals are capable not just of prescribed forms of “coordination” with humans, but also of “cooperation,” which reflects mutually negotiated rules. 46. Horta, “Zoopolis, Intervention.” 47. Nicole Pallotta, “Origin of Adult Animal Rights Lifestyle in Childhood Responsiveness to Animal Suffering,” Society and Animals 16 (2008):  149–​170. Gail Melson, Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 48. E.g., Alasdair Cochrane, “Cosmozoopolis:  The Case against Group-​ Differentiated Animal Rights,” Law, Ethics and Philosophy 1, no.  1 (2013):  127–​ 141; Steve Cooke, “Perpetual Strangers:  Animals and the Cosmopolitan Right,” Political Studies 62, no.  4 (2014): 930–​944.

 

Chapter 3

Animals as Living Prope rt y David Favre

Introduction Since the beginning of recorded history, the lives of individual humans have been intertwined with those of animals. Animals have been and still are a source of food, a source of work support, a source of wonder about the world, and a source of companionship. Over most of history, food and working animals received the most social concern and, therefore, visibility within the legal system. These animals came to have economic value and were quickly folded into the realm of property law. A fundamental distinction was made about those considered domestic animals and those categorized as wild animals. Initially, the law had very little to say about wild animals, as they were not owned by anyone. Indeed. the focus of the law was on how to obtain title to a wild animal, not the status of the animal in its natural state. Domestic animals were “things” possessed by individuals that had commercial value to individuals and thus were placed in the category of personal property (as opposed to real property/​land). Companion animals had almost no visibility in the legal system, as the noneconomic values of companionship were not of importance to society at the time. Today, there has been almost a reversal of the social focus on domestic animals. Most humans never see the animals they eat, so the commercial value of animals is important only to the large corporations that control our food chain. In developed countries very few animals provide labor for human work needs, so, again, the general public has no experience with these animals. However, the companion animal has become visible and important in the lives of millions of humans. The value of the companionship is difficult to translate into economic numbers but is nevertheless real to many humans. However, the laws that relate to the human use of animals have changed only a little, not yet fully reflecting the social change.

 

66   David Favre Beyond the value of animals to humans, there is more acceptance of the idea that animals have intrinsic value as beings independent of any human ownership and that they deserve more visibility and protection within the legal system. Perhaps they should not be property at all, but independent beings with their own legal visibility. The consequences of the elimination of the property status would be profound for both humans and animals. This chapter will consider what it means for an animal to be property and propose a middle ground between the old view of animals as personal property and the suggested new status of not being property at all. It is possible and useful to conceptualize domestic animals as a new category of property: “living property.” Within the conceptual space created by this new category, their legal status may be considered on a clean slate. The primary attribute in this new status that would be different is forthright acknowledgment of a duty toward the well-​being of domestic animals by humans. Generally, with personal property, the owner has no duty toward the property itself. Law does not stand independent of the human society of which it is a part. As social attitudes change the law can and will change as well. Social attitudes toward animals, as documented within this book, have already changed. It is time for the law of property to evolve as well. One point of clarification before proceeding further concerns the phrase “legal rights.” It is a loaded phrase, with very different meanings depending upon who speaks the term and what tones and emotions they use when speaking it. Often, it really means: in my world animals have ethical status. Or perhaps it means: I want better welfare outcomes for animals. Still others mean: animals should be freed from the slavery of property law and have all the appropriate legal rights, just as a child might. Indeed, several writers assert that as property, animals cannot have any personality within the law. These individuals cluster under the title of abolitionist and seek a future in which all animals have full legal personality, which will occur only when they are removed from the legal status of being personal property.1 In this chapter, the term animal rights will refer to something more than better welfare outcome and denote some level of legal personality, legal visibility in the legal system. By the end of this chapter, some legal rights for animals will have been suggested, but not equal status with humans. The critical focus before considering which rights might be acknowledged is supporting the underlying premise that animals can be the holders of any legal rights at all. While the United States is the source of legal concepts and materials, the ideas of this chapter apply in any common law country, such as Canada or Australia. The common law countries are those that have rooted their legal system in the British legal system. Concepts of real and personal property for the common law evolved beginning with the Norman Conquest of 1066, and include the Magna Carta (1215), the statute Quia Emptores (1267) and the Statute of Uses under King Henry VIII (1536).2 While the civil law system has many of the same concepts, there is no attempt here to distinguish how the civil law system would look at these concepts.

 

Animals as Living Property    67

A Transition from Welfare Concerns to Legal Rights: The Ethics Consider the example of an individual who owns a car; it is personal property of significant value and possesses significant risk to other humans. Therefore, the owner has property rights and legal responsibilities for the car. The car has no presence in the legal system except as the owner’s property. The car will never be the plaintiff in a law suit against its human owner for failure to repair or properly feed or for the unnecessary infliction of pain and suffering. The law imposes no duty on the owner of the car as to the well-​being of the car. The owner is limited in what it can do with the car only when the activity may cause harm to other humans or their property (cars). The car is not like a daughter. A car is not alive and has no independent life in the eyes of the law, or in the laws of biology. A cat is also personal property, but a cat does have a life independent of the owner. The cat is actually closer to a daughter than to a car in many (but not all) attributes, such as having a capacity for affection and to feel pain and to suffer. Notwithstanding the differences between a car and a cat, the law begins the legal discussion by saying that they are both personal property. All thinking humans understand the fundamental difference between a car and a daughter; the daughter is alive, and there is a duty of respect and responsibility owed to child by the parents. This duty is acknowledged in moral philosophy and religion as well as the law. It is the ethical (and religious) beliefs that shape the law. While the parents have extensive control over the lives of their children, the law does draw lines and will step in to protect children from parents who are abusive or significantly neglectful toward them. When the interests of a child, as understood by broader society, is at conflict with those of their parents, the law has the capacity to appoint guardian ad litems who have the duty to represent the child’s best interest before a court or administrative hearing. The court will consider or even be directed by the interests of the child over those of the parent. No such process exists for cars. The car has no interest independent of the human owner. The car has no legal personality, but the child does. So there are these two categories: personal property, in which cars exist, and legal persons, in which the daughter exists. The cat is a mixture of the two but, at present, as the legal system currently exists, must be forced into one or the other category. Is the cat more like the car or the daughter? In the realm of personal ethics, millions of humans have adopted the position that companion animals are more like the daughter than the car. As a result of this belief, they accept responsibilities and obligations toward the companion animals. The legal system is hedging its bets, keeping them as personal property, yet imposing legal duties of care under the anti-​cruelty criminal laws of all the states within the United States and other Common Law countries that are not required

 

68   David Favre of other types of personal property. Of course, humans are also hedging their ethical bets, since they give this enhanced ethical status to companion animals but not to food or working animals. But that is another story line. Let us consider several awkward positions in which animals exist in our legal world as they straddle the legal categories of personal property and legal personality. The longest standing example is that of our anti-​cruelty laws. Beginning with the New York law of 1867, animals have been protected against the unnecessary infliction of pain and suffering (including overloading, torture, animal fighting, and abandonment). These laws are not concerned with the human owners, but on the quality of life of individual animals.3 As stated by one judge in an 1877 case, This statute is for the benefit of animals, as creatures capable of feeling and suffering, and it was intended to protect them from cruelty, without reference to their being property, or to the damages which might thereby be occasioned to their owners.4

Indeed, in the vast majority of states the criminal limitation on human abuse of animals is not limited to domestic animals but includes wild animals (but most often today, the statutes protect only vertebrate animals). The duties of the laws specifically apply to the owners of animals, not just to prevent harm but also to provide adequate care for animals. This duty is imposed on owners of a particular subset of personal property; it does not apply to all personal property. There is no law making it a crime to hit your car or to fail to get an oil change when needed. This acknowledgement of the living status of animals is of modest consequence in this context when it is realized that these protections arise in our criminal law system. The primary problem with this is that only a prosecutor of state and local (and a bit of federal) governments may choose to seek enforcement of the legal right given to each animal. This is a discretionary right of prosecutors and, therefore, if in a specific case of harm to a specific animal the prosecutor decides to not file criminal charges, there is no alternative legal course available for the animal. Of course, the criminal law system will just punish the guilty human; it will do nothing for a harmed animal. However, in some states when the human is found guilty of an animal crime, the court has the power to remove the animal from the home of the wrongdoer. Another context of conceptual difficulty within the legal system is in the awarding of private damages for inflicting harm on an animal. If a troubled teenager strikes a six-​ year-​old human, there are possible criminal charges that might lead to jail time and civil cases with monetary awards for the harmed child. The teenager can be sued for the injury to the human child by the child and perhaps the parents of the child. But if the troubled teenager strikes a poodle with the same force and effect, there may be criminal charges, but the poodle does not have the capacity to file a suit for her personal pain and suffering. Therefore, at present there is no legally provided mechanism for the animal’s pain and suffering. This problem exists because animals are not yet legal persons for this purpose. The legal system does allow the owner of the poodle to recover damages for the harm inflicted on the animal. But the “value” with which this calculation is made is

 

Animals as Living Property    69 primarily the economic value of the animal. So, if the teenager tortured the poodle and this is not seen by her owner, the owner would most often be able to recover only the fair market value of the poodle.5 Not only is the animal’s pain and suffering not acknowledged in the legal system, but the owners of companion animals usually receive no compensation for their very valuable loss of relationship with their animals. While a number of lower court opinions have allowed damages beyond the traditional measures of the common law, in the past decade every state supreme court that has considered the issue has refused to change the common law rules,6 always with the caveat that if change is sought, it must be taken by the legislature, not the courts. As a final example of the disconnection of the law from social expectations is the awarding of property during human divorces in which companion animals are entwined. In most courts, because animals are categorized as personal property, when the property of a couple is split up, it is on the basis of ownership, not on the basis of what would be in the best interests of the animal. It makes no difference to the law in this context if the legal owner of the animal is not the caregiver and has little interest in the animal and may provide poor living conditions for the animal. Most people would support the idea that companion animals are more like children than are cars and that the courts should take into account the interests and needs of an animal in deciding who gets possession of the animal in a divorce decree. The legal system lags behind the evolving attitudes of the public.

Legal Evolution Progress for animals within the law will not come from revolution, but by evolution. There are centuries of experience that show how this can work, both for the issue of who should hold legal rights and which legal rights they might expect. While property law is often slow to change, it does change over time as the moral and ethical perspectives of society change. At any stage in human history the prevailing institution of property is chiefly an inheritance from the past. This inheritance, however, is subject to constant change. These changes represent efforts to workout adaptations to the new problems presented by new ingredients in the political, economic, and philosophical atmosphere of the moment. The fact of change is an ever-​present phenomenon in society. 7

There are two key points to be briefly made here. The first is that society can change who is a legal person, and the second is that different categories of legal persons often have different or more limited categories of rights. Indeed, legal rights often arrive in a piecemeal fashion, as lawmakers see fit. The most obvious example of the first point is the transformation of African Americans from the nonperson status of slave to freedom

 

70   David Favre and legal personhood. The legal realization of the status change is reflected in the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. As an example of the second point, consider the legal status of women relative to property ownership several hundred years ago in the laws of the United States. When a woman married a man, the common law view at that time was that the woman’s property interests were merged into those of the man, and the man had the full power of disposition of property that had previously been under the control of the unmarried woman.8 This began to change in the 1840s, with the adoption of Married Women Acts. The social order upon which the concept of legal unity between husband and wife was predicated no longer exists. During the nineteenth century, Married Women’s Emancipation Acts were passed in all American jurisdictions. These were designed to confer upon married women a separate legal personality and to give them a separate legal estate in their own property. They conferred upon a wife the capacity to sue or be sued without joining the husband and, generally, as far as third persons were concerned, made the wife separately responsible for her own torts. From an early date it was recognized that a primary purpose of these statutes was to free the wife’s property from the control of her husband.9

Significant change occurred with the changing view of equality of women in society. But it was, indeed, a slow process of change in the law over decades of small steps forward.10 An even starker difference reflecting the different status of men and women deals with the legal right to have a voice in the political process, the right to vote. The moral and political battle by which women obtained the right to vote has been well covered by other writers of legal history.11 Two points follow from this long battle. First, clearly, women were always legal persons, but they were not treated equally with men. Thus, the legal system is capable of handling legal persons with different sets of rights. Second, the legal system is capable of piecemeal change in deciding which legal rights should be allocated to which legal persons.

A New Category While the prior material shows that the slow process of evolution in social attitudes is underway on behalf of animals, there is the need for a more dramatic break, to make clear we are moving into new conceptual territory. To state the obvious, the key distinction between animals and other physical objects with the category of personal property is that animals are alive. They have DNA-​driven existence that endows them with self-​interests and a desire for continued life and the reproduction of their species’ next generation of life. Obviously, there are many categories of life in the world of biology. For the purposes of this chapter, the focus shall be limited to just a few categories of animals: mammals, birds, reptiles, and lizards. Insects can be put off until another time. The selection of these

 

Animals as Living Property    71 categories of animals who shall be within the new property category reflects the present legal system’s definition of animal when drafting new, felony-​based criminal laws. The line is drawn at vertebrates primarily because there is strong neurological information supporting the concept that all these animals experience pain in roughly the same way that humans experience pain. Therefore, there is reason to think this limitation of the definition of animals as living property would have greater political acceptability. The critical social/​political question is whether or not the law should intervene when humans do not adequately accommodate the needs and interests of their companion animal. The anti-​cruelty laws stand as a testament to the social judgment that some duties are owed to all animals (e.g., prohibitions on torture), and additional duties owed if you are the owner or keeper of an animal (e.g., the duty to provide food and water). As suggested previously, a number of people find these duties insufficient and ineffective in providing the care that many animals need and, therefore, seek expanded options for the protection of animals through the legal system. If we keep the criminal law as the sole method of protection for animal interests, then retaining animals in the category of personal property is acceptable. But, if new avenues are sought to support animals, then remaining in the legal status of personal property is a significant barrier. Animals need a separate status. As the chrysalis must leave its cocoon to be the butterfly, so animals must leave the category of personal property to move into their next stage within the legal systems of the world. This should be done by creating the suggested fourth category of property: living property. The key advantage and fear of this new category is that the characteristics, relationships, and duties are not yet decided, and much fear may exist because of the risk of the unknown in taking this path. It most likely will result in limitations on human actions that did not previously exist. On the other hand, there is great exhilaration in thinking about all the different public p ​ olicy issues and the balancing of human and animal interests that will challenge us as we move forward; the thrill of successfully meeting the unknown. It is an intellectual and social challenge of the highest level. It is opening the door to change: who will step through, and who will seek to close the door? Let us push on a bit further, as perhaps some details will persuade those at the door that the fear of the unknown should not stop them from stepping though. First is a consideration of the methods of changing the legal system. Next, the issue why the law should be changed will be touched upon, and finally, what the new laws might look like.

Constitutional Change The highest level of law is the constitution of a country. Constitutions are built upon existing social beliefs and concepts. The US and the state constitutions presuppose the existence of real and personal property as understood within the Common Law of England before the creation of the United States. Indeed, the categories of real and personal property are present as far back as ancient Roman law. As an example, the ever important Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution (and Art. 10 § 2 of Michigan

 

72   David Favre Constitution) limits the government’s power to take title to property without defining the term property. Courts have made it clear that the term in this constitutional context does include animals. It necessarily follows that Immi (dog) was property protected by the Fourth Amendment and that Officer Eberly’s destruction of her constituted a Fourth Amendment seizure under the Fourth Amendment.12

The category of intellectual property also arises in the US Constitution, Article I, Section 8(8). Thus, the US Constitution could be amended to acknowledge a new status for animals. This is unlikely in the foreseeable future because of other political factors and is not necessary as a first step, given that the fifty states are fully capable of addressing the issue.

Legislative Change Governments that possess the full power of sovereignty in common law countries have the power to make changes in the legal system, so long as these do not conflict with the constitution of the sovereign. In the United States, this power over property exists at the state level, and not the federal level. For example, the state of North Carolina has adopted a statute that allows private individuals and organizations to have the power to sue an animal owner who is violating the state criminal cruelty laws and to remove the animal from the owner for failure to comply.13 Additionally, states have adopted trust laws that allow some categories of animal to be beneficiaries of a trust, giving these animals legal personhood in this one circumstance.

Court Opinion In 2013, the US organization PETA sought to change the property status of killer whales under the US Constitution, but the case failed to do so.14 At the end of 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed three lawsuits in the State of New York asserting that chimpanzees could not be held in limiting conditions because they are legal persons.15 While the case was not successful at the trial court level, appeals of the lawsuit are presently underway.

Some Consequences of Creating the Category As the category of personal property is no longer a proper fit for domestic animals, the new category of living property allows for a new conceptual space in which to make

 

Animals as Living Property    73 judgments about how the law should address “animal issues.” Having acknowledged that animals have self-​interests of their own, and that some individuals nevertheless do not acknowledge or respect these interests, the law needs to directly address the issue of which uses of animals are unacceptable, which are acceptable with government regulation, and which do not rise to the level of social concern requiring any legal intervention. Ultimately, what is an acceptable use of an animal, of living property, is a political decision that balances any number of factors during the legislative process or court determination. As a result, prohibitions will arrive sporadically, as the legislature deals with issues by species, for example, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940, or by public issues such as the prohibition of slaughtering downer cows. The majority of Americans have already decided, over the objection of some individual citizens, that dogs cannot be used for dog fighting ventures. No state seeks to control or regulate the conditions of dogs used in fighting or the fighting process itself; their use in fighting is entirely banned. This use is so disfavored that in many states, to use a dog in this manner is a felony, with the possibility of years of jail time for violations. Likewise, our society, but not others, has decided that killing dogs for the use of their fur is unacceptable. But it apparently remains acceptable in the United States to raise and kill mink and other animals solely for their fur. Society can decide that the use of primates in scientific research is not justified without reaching the question of whether the use of rats is justified. As in New Zealand, a law can be adopted that implements a ban on the research use of primates in laboratories.16 Likewise, it is possible to judge that the keeping of primates as pets should not be allowed without a decision about the keeping of parakeets. A key characteristic that distinguishes living property from other forms of property is that there can be a legal duty toward living property that will be enforced by courts. While some duties of noninterference will be imposed upon nonowners, this is more in the realm of tort and criminal law, and is therefore not to be considered in this chapter. In the world of property law, the duty toward the animal by the owner is of both a positive and negative nature. As already suggested by some of the comprehensive state anti-​ cruelty laws, it is both a duty of not imposing harm as well as a duty of providing care. This chapter does not propose what the full extent of the owner’s duty might be; rather, it seeks to establish that there is a duty, and that this duty is owed to the animal. The reader can envision more of the colors and contours of this new paradigm if a duty toward an animal is viewed in the light of the legal duty of parents to their child. This is particularly easy when the animal is a pet, as many pets are treated as a child in a family. Good parents understand and provide for the needs of the child, even though the child does not assert these needs or may even assert needs that are in fact counter to their long-​term best interests. (For example, the child wants unlimited computer time, the dog wants unlimited treats, and both want to play in the street.) The judgment of the parents has to be accepted as presumptively lawful, but there are limits after which the government will seek to intervene to protect the interests of the child. The government, or private individuals authorized by the state, can be allowed to intervene to protect the interests of animals outside the criminal law system.17

 

74   David Favre It might be noted that there is not a heading in this chapter about the duties of animals toward humans. This arises, in part, out of the practical perspective that animals may have difficulty in understanding human interests. Just as the law imposes no duty upon human infants who do not yet understand external obligations or consequences of choices of action, it would also be inappropriate to require of animals actions that they cannot understand. One clear exception to the general statement arises in the case of dangerous dogs. Under many dangerous-​dog laws, after some semblance of due process, dogs can and are sentenced to death for violations of the statute obligations imposed upon them not to harm humans.18 For all practical purposes, the dog could well be considered the defendant in the proceeding, since it is the dog’s very life that can be at risk.

Animal Rights A primary reason for the creation of the new category living property is that within this space it will be possible to consider legal rights for those living beings within the category. No one would suggest legal rights for cars or chairs. While animals remain personal property it is difficult to have a discussion about rights for some personal property and not others. It is true that as the category of living property was defined earlier, not all living things may be within the new category. There may be ethical duties owned to excluded animals, such as jellyfish and beetles, but that is not the focus of this chapter, which is limited to domestic vertebrate animals. At a primary level, this chapter asserts the legal principle that living property has the capacity to hold legal rights. There are two key attributes of a rights holder in the legal system. First, to some degree, the interests of the rights holder have to be part of the legal consideration of any conflict of which they are a part. Second, remedies for breaches of rights have to flow directly to the rights holder who was harmed. Because many of the most important potential legal rights for animals will deal with living conditions, the availability of injunctive relief to prohibit certain conditions and the right to have ownership transferred will be more important to their rights than money awards; however, financial awards may well be appropriate in certain circumstances. If a puppy is to have the full legal right to not be tortured by humans, then a civil suit must be allowed in which the pain and suffering of the puppy are the focus of the inquiry and the relief in question, perhaps the award of all veterinary costs plus $1,000 in emotional damages will flow to the benefit of the puppy. While these two steps suggest that a rights holder is present, the ultimate characteristic of a legal rights holder is that the legal right may be asserted directly by the holder of the right within the legal system. This gives legal personality to the rights holder and assures that the first two characteristics are realized. It is possible to also allow such a suit to proceed with human plaintiffs, but those seeking legal rights for animals prefer that the action be in the name of the puppy. This chapter does not suggest that there should be a magical point in time at which all animals (as defined earlier) will receive all the legal rights suggested in the next section,

 

Animals as Living Property    75 “A Few Legal Rights.” Rather, this section suggests a broad frame of reference by which to understand and organize present and future legal rights. This chapter is like the picture on the front of the jigsaw puzzle box. Seeing the picture does not predict when, if ever, all the pieces inside will come together, but having the picture will aid in the process. Particular legal rights will arrive by the legislature or by court opinions, as pieces of the puzzle. The puzzle itself will remain unfinished for quite some period, but it is time to begin the assembly enterprise.

A Few Legal Rights Within the living property status, animals have the legal right,

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Not to be held for or put to legally prohibited uses Not to be unnecessarily harmed To be given adequate support for physical and mental well-​being To have adequate living space To be properly owned

This list has been derived from the pondering of the author. It is not the definitive list for all time, but a starting list to initiate further discussion. A prior effort on behalf of agricultural animals resulted in a list referred to as the “five freedoms.”19 While many of the concerns within those five freedoms are also found in the preceding list, the proposed list is not a derivation of that list and is meant to have much broader application. An example of each of the above should help demonstrate the possible scope of each right. 1. Not to be held for or put to legally prohibited uses. The list of prohibited uses will become longer as society becomes more protective of animal interests. An initial list might include dogs on the race track, horsemeat for human consumption, great apes for research, pigeons for target practice, elephants in zoos, or constrictor snakes as pets.     The list of prohibited uses can be developed by using the general principle that a use should not constitute a significant interference with the well-​being of the animals involved. For example, a fair case can be made that the use of greyhound dogs at the race track is detrimental to almost all the dogs within the industry, without any significant advantage to humans. Nearly 30,000 young greyhounds are killed in North America every year when they are no longer able to win or place. Approximately 5000 to 7000 farm puppies are culled annually, and more simply “go missing” without being registered to an owner.20 The human interest in gambling, which seems to be the primary motivation for such races, can be satisfied hundreds of other ways; there is no need for thousands of dogs to suffer for the

 

76   David Favre realization of that human interest. Therefore, legislative prohibitions on the racing of dogs could easily be, and have been, adopted in several states. On the other hand, the keeping of dogs for breed shows might be judged as not to interfere with the significant interests of the dogs. But perhaps a full study of dogs in breed shows and of all the dogs bred with the hope of entering breed shows should be done with an eye toward the overall quality of life for the broader set of dogs, not just the winners. 2. Not to be unnecessarily harmed. The right not to be harmed, not to experience pain and suffering, is the oldest and most obvious of legal rights for some animals. The original New York law made it a crime for any person to “torture, torment, deprive of necessary sustenance, or unnecessarily or cruelly beat, or needlessly mutilate or kill … any living creature.”21 Torture, by definition, is unacceptable infliction of pain and suffering; often, the use of poison is also a flat prohibition.22 Notice that the prohibitions against pain, suffering, and death are usually qualified by the terms such as unjustified or unnecessary. This means that the legislature has recognized that a balancing of the interests of the animals against the interests of the humans will have to be judged by the jury or judge to determine what is acceptable within their society. For example, in one case the defendant was found guilty of charges stemming from a videotaped incident wherein defendant cut off the heads of three live, conscious iguanas and allegedly cooked and consumed the animals. The tape of the incident was broadcast by Manhattan Neighborhood Network in a show entitled “Sick and Wrong.” While eating the iguanas might have been a justified reason for their death, making a tape for showing the public was not.23 3. To be given adequate support for physical and mental well-​being. There are many state and some federal laws dealing with the issue of care. The providing of water and food is obvious, and was part of the New York 1867 law.24 Today’s duty of care laws can be much more expansive. In the state of Michigan, duty of care is defined as “the provision of sufficient food, water, shelter, sanitary conditions, exercise, and veterinary medical attention in order to maintain an animal in a state of good health.”25 The laws presently do not address the social needs of many animals. Herd animals like sheep and cows clearly prefer being with others of the same species and having a friendly human owner is not a substitute for a companion of the same species; yet, requirements of companionship are not presently part of the law. At a broader level, we have not yet had a discussion about a duty to provide for the mental well-​being of animals. For example, if an infant animal has a supporting mother, for how long should the infant stay with the mother? The well-​being of the infant animal, not profit maximization for the owner, should be the dominant factor in such a decision.     A key component of psychological well-​being is the opportunity to utilize the capabilities that each animal inherently possesses. It does not matter if science can show that a sow in confinement facilities, living on concrete for her entire life, is not in pain or that stress hormones are absent. If a sow has never been able to put her snout into the dirt, then she has never been able to fully experience what it means to be a pig. Cows should eat grass and chickens should search and scratch.

 

Animals as Living Property    77 It is unethical for humans to use animals unless the method of use allows the animal to experience the critical components of life for that animal, and the law should reflect this duty. 4. To have adequate living space. This right is very important to focus on because it is the substitute for the human right of personal liberty. As living property, animals will be within the possession and control of owners. As such, they cannot have the personal liberty that wild animals have. But an owner has the duty to provide adequate space for any living property who is possessed. While some laws presently address the need for shelter as part of the duty to provide care, in criminal provisions, shelter is only part of the issue. While this can be tied to mental well-​being, it deserves consideration by itself. If we are to respect and consider the interests of animals, the space provided for the exercise of their inherent capabilities is critical. For example, a number of years ago the Detroit Zoo moved its chimpanzees out of their prison-​cell-​sized rooms in the primate house, which were clearly unacceptable, to a four-​acre exhibit that can be judged as acceptable.26 Now the chimpanzees have the opportunity for complex group interaction and can opt to be in private or public spaces.     As an extreme example, consider the 2003 case in which an individual was found to have a 350-​pound Bengal–​Siberian tiger, an alligator, another tiger with cubs, rabbits, and a tarantula in his apartment. The owner said his “interest” was in trying to create a Garden of Eden.27 Authorities removed the animals, but the news article did not say under which law. Hopefully, everyone can agree that an apartment is an inadequate space for such species regardless of the goal of the human. Many states have outlawed the personal possession of animals such as tigers and lions, believing that regardless of the interests or motivations of individual humans, neither the animals nor human neighbors should assume the risk of such arrangements. In the state of Connecticut it is illegal to possess any member of a number of animal families, including “felidae [large cats],” “canidae [wolves],” and “ursidae [bears]”.28 5. To be properly owned. While violation of the first four rights may be remedied without removing an animal from his or her owner, there is a point at which adverse effects on an animal cause the capacity of the owner to come into question. While it is possible to conceive of removal of ownership simply as a remedy for a violation of the listed animal rights, acceptance of responsibility toward living property is so fundamental to this new paradigm as to require it be stated as a stand-​alone right. Any owned animal has the right to expect his or her owner to have the capability and willingness to provide the level of care and space that the particular animal needs. This issue can arise in either the civil law or criminal law context. While the law should continue to presume that humans can own animals, upon a showing of a particular human not being able to do so, the law should not hesitate to step in and transfer ownership away from the incapable to the capable, and enjoin future ownership of animals. This will be done without compensation to the owner, with noncompensation being in

 

78   David Favre effect a civil fine for failure to provide the necessary living conditions. An extreme fact pattern that raises this issue is seen in the cases of animal hoarding. The North Carolina statutory language is one example of what is possible: [I]‌f the court finds by a preponderance of the evidence that even if a permanent injunction were issued there would exist a substantial risk that the animal would be subjected to further cruelty if returned to the possession of the defendant, the court may terminate the defendant’s ownership and right of possession of the animal and transfer ownership and right of possession to the plaintiff or other appropriate successor owner. For good cause shown, the court may also enjoin the defendant from acquiring new animals for a specified period of time or limit the number of animals the defendant may own or possess during a specified period of time.29

A specific context in which the issue of who is an appropriate owner of an animal arises is that of a divorce proceeding in which the husband and wife have a dispute as to who should have title and possession of the pet. In this case, prior ownership is not as important as is the right of the animal to have a caring owner. Thus, when a court makes a decision about a pet, the primary factor should be: what is in the best interest of the animal?30

Conclusion It is an exciting time of change within the legal system. Animals are of growing importance to millions of individuals. The old molds of thought are inadequate to consider the enhanced social status that many now give to at least some animals. Rather than stretching the existing concepts beyond their natural shapes, it will be most useful to create a new space in which to consider these pressing public issues. The concept of living property is an umbrella large enough to allow considerable development of new ideas about the relationships between domestic animals and humans, whether the focus is animal welfare or animal rights.

Notes 1. Gary L. Francione, “Animals, Property, and Personhood,” in People, Property, or Pets? ed. Marc D. Hauser, Fiery Cushman, and Matthew Kamen (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006), 77. 2. William B. Stoebuck and Dale Whitman, The Law of Property, 3rd ed. (St. Paul, MN: West Group, 2000). 3. David Favre and Vivien Tsang, “The Development of Anti-​Cruelty Laws during the 1800s,” Detroit College Law Rev 1993 (1993): 1. 4. Stephens v. State, 3 So. 458–​459 (Miss. 1887).

 

Animals as Living Property    79 5. David Favre, “Damages for Harm to Pets,” Animal Law:  Welfare, Interest, and Rights, (New York: Wolters Kluwer, 2011), ch. 4. 6. Goodby v. Vetpharm, Inc., 974 A.2d 1269, 1273–​74 (Vt. 2009); Kondaurov v. Kerdasha, 629 S.E.2d 181, 187 (Va. 2006); Strickland v. Medlen, 397 S.W.3d 184 (Tex. 2013). 7. Richard R. Powell, The Law of Real Property, vol. 1 (Michael Allan Wolf ed., 2009), §2.06. Powell on Real Property § 2.06 (Michael Allan Wolf ed., LexisNexis Matthew Bender, digital book available through LexisNexis). 8. Joshua Williams, Principles of the Law of Real Property, 5th ed. (Philadelphia, PA: T. & J. W. Johnson & Co., 1879), 223. 9. “Husband and Wife,” American Jurisprudence, vol. 41, 2nd ed. (St. Paul, MN: West Group, 2005), § 3. 10. Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law:  Women, Marriage and Property in Nineteenth-​ Century New  York (Ithaca, NY:  Cornell University Press, 1982); Kathleen S. Sullivan, Constitutional Context:  Women and Rights Discourse in Nineteenth-​Century America (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2007). 11. Doris Weatherford, A History of the American Suffragist Movement (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-​CLIO, 1998). 12. Brown v. Muhlenberg Township, 269 F. 3d 205 (3rd Cir. 2001). 13. North Carolina General Statute Anno, § 19A-​4. 14. Tilikum ex rel. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Inc. v. Sea World Parks & Entm’t, 842 F. Supp. 2d 1259 (S.D. Cal. 2012); Joanna Zelman, “PETA’s SeaWorld Slavery Case Dismissed by Judge,” Huffington Post, February 9, 2012, http://​www.huffingtonpost. com/​2012/​02/​09/​peta-​seaworld-​slavery-​_​n_​1265014.html (accessed July 22, 2014). 15. Charles Siebert, “Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner?” New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2014, http://​www.nytimes.com/​2014/​04/​27/​magazine/​the-​rights-​of-​man-​and-​ beast.html?ref=magazine (accessed July 22, 2014). Also see, http://​www.nonhumanrightsproject.org/​category/​courtfilings/​ (accessed July 22, 2014). 16. Peter Sankoff, “Five Years of the ‘New’ Animal Welfare Regime: Lessons Learned from New Zealand’s Decision to Modernize Its Animal Welfare Legislation,” Animal Law Review 11 (2005): 7–​9. 17. William A. Reppy Jr., “Citizen Standing to Enforce Anti-​Cruelty Laws by Obtaining Injunctions: The North Carolina Experience,” Animal Law Review 11 (2005): 39. 18. David Favre, “Dangerous Dogs,” Animal Law:  Welfare, Interest, and Rights, (New York: Wolters Kluwer, 2011), ch. 5, 170−177. 19. David Favre, “The Five Freedoms,” Animal Law:  Welfare, Interest, and Rights, (New York: Wolters Kluwer, 2011), ch. 8, 280−283; Farm Animal Welfare Council, “Five Freedoms,” http://​www.fawc.org.uk/​freedoms.htm (accessed July 22, 2014). 20. Michael Atkinson and Kevin Young, “Greyhound Racing and Sports-​Related Violence,” in Between the Species: Readings in Human-​Animal Relations, ed. Arnold Arluke and Clinton Sanders, (Boston: Pearson Education, Inc., 2009), 213-​224. 21. Act of Apr. 12, 1867, ch. 375, § 1, 1867 New York Laws 86 (current version at N.Y. Agric. & Mkts. § 353). 22. Michigan Compiled Laws Anno, § 750.50b(2). 23. People v. Voelker, 658 N.Y.S.2d 180, 181 (N.Y. Crim. Ct. 1997). 24. Act of Apr. 12, 1867, ch. 375, § 1, 1867 New York Laws 86 (current version at N.Y. Agric. & Mkts. § 353). 25. Michigan Compiled Laws Anno, § 750.50(1)(a).

 

80   David Favre 26. Tom Hundley, “New Zoo Display Lets Chimps Be Themselves,” Chicago Tribune. December 13, 1989, 6. 27. Alan Feuer and Jason George. “Police Subdue Tiger in Harlem Apartment”, New  York Times, October 5, 2003, 35. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2003/​10/​05/​nyregion/​police-​subdue-​ tiger-​in-​harlem-​apartment.html? (accessed July 22, 2014). 28. Connecticut General Statute Anno, § 26-​40a. 29. North Carolina General Statute Anno, § 19A-​4. 30. Lauren Magnotti, “Note, Pawing Open the Courthouse Door:  Why Animals’ Interests Should Matter When Courts Grant Standing,” St. John’s Law Review 80 (2006): 455.

Further Reading Favre, David. “Equitable Self-​Ownership for Animals.” Duke Law Journal 50 (2000): 473–​502. Favre, David. “Living Property: A New Status for Animals within the Legal System.” Marquette Law Review 93 (2010): 1021–​1071. Grimm, David. Citizen Canine. New York: Public Affairs, 2014. Grandin, Temple, and Catherine Johnson. Animals Make Us Human. Boston and New York: Houghton Miffin/​Harcourt, 2009. Satz, Ani B. “Animals as Vulnerable Subjects: Beyond Interest-​Convergence, Hierarchy, and Property.” Animal Law 16 (2009): 65–​122. Susstein, Cass R., and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds.). Animal Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

 

Chapter 4

T he Hum an-​A n i ma l  B ond James A. Serpell

Introduction Human-​animal bond is a popular umbrella term applied to the kinds of social attachments that typically develop between people and their pets (or companion animals). Humans can, of course, form this bond with other categories of animals, such as working dogs and horses, or even laboratory rodents or dairy goats,1 but those attachments tend to be more distant and may be actively avoided, perhaps because they tend to interfere both psychologically and morally with our ability to exploit such animals for nonbenign purposes.2 Human-​pet attachments are exceedingly widespread and popular. Estimates vary, but Americans appear to keep roughly 75 million pet dogs and 80 million pet cats, not to mention many million pet birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. According to a 2012 survey, about 63 percent of US households contain at least one pet, and 45 percent keep more than one.3 In the European Union, the numbers are also impressive: 60 million dogs, 80 million cats, and so on.4 Pet numbers are also increasing rapidly in a number of developing nations, such as Brazil, Thailand, and Turkey, according to the 2014 Euromonitor International. Although pet keeping is probably more popular nowadays than at any time in the past, it is clear that this intriguing human behavior is neither modern in origin nor confined to more affluent, “westernized” societies.

Historical and Cultural Perspectives Archaeological evidence suggests that human emotional attachments for animals may be of considerable antiquity. Excavations at a pre-​Natufian cemetery in Jordan have found intriguing evidence of a human buried together with the remains of a “pet” fox some 14 to 17 thousand years ago.5 Somewhat more recently (12–​14 thousand years ago)

 

82   James A. Serpell a number of dog-​human burials have been identified at sites in Germany and Israel, and a cat-​human burial dating from about 9.5 thousand years ago has been discovered on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.6 Clearly, the motives behind these early burials are subject to various interpretations, but it seems reasonable to speculate that the decision to bury the animal with the person implies awareness of a special relationship between these individuals during their lives. The idea that late Paleolithic and early Neolithic hunter-​gatherers may have kept tamed wild animals as pets is entirely consistent with the observed behavior of more recent hunting and foraging peoples. According to numerous reports by explorers and anthropologists, pet keeping among hunter-​gatherers and subsistence horticulturalists is (or was) the norm rather than the exception. These pets are typically captured as young animals by hunters, and then adopted and cared for, especially by women and children. Often, the animals are the objects of intense emotional attachments; they are well cared for during life, and sometimes mourned and buried formally when they die. Strong moral taboos against killing or eating pets also exist, even when the animal belongs to a species that is hunted routinely for meat.7 Indeed, pet keeping is so ubiquitous among preagricultural societies that several authors have proposed that these early human-​animal bonds were the precursors to animal domestication.8 If this turned out to be the case, pet keeping would need to be credited with initiating one of the most far-​ reaching ecological and cultural revolutions in the history of our species. The prevalence of pet keeping in the post-​Neolithic and early archaic periods is difficult to assess because of a scarcity of documentary evidence. However, available written and artistic depictions suggest that the practice has been maintained throughout human history, although its popularity may have waxed and waned somewhat unpredictably over time and from place to place. Many prominent ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans evidently kept pets of various types ranging from dogs and cats to cage birds, and even fish. Pet dogs and cats were also frequent occupants of the imperial households of both China and Japan. In Europe and colonial North America, pet keeping did not become widely respectable until the eighteenth century. Medieval and Renaissance moralists and theologians appear to have regarded most kinds of physical intimacy between people and animals as morally suspect, and typically condemned the practice of keeping animals exclusively for companionship.9 In extreme cases, indulging in human-​animal bonds could even attract accusations of witchcraft. In Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was widely believed that witches made use of “familiar spirits” as personal agents of malefice. These “familiars” depended on the witch for protection and nourishment and were commonly thought to take the form of small animals, such as cats, dogs, mice, or toads. Any person already suspected of witchcraft could attract far greater suspicion by displaying affection for a pet, and it is clear from the court records of the period that evidence of pet ownership was commonly cited during witch trials.10 Perhaps because of such prejudices, pet keeping remained chiefly the province of the upper classes and ruling élite until the early modern period when the emergence of Enlightenment attitudes and an urban middle class saw the gradual spread of pets into most sectors of Western society.11 This change in animal-​related attitudes and behavior can be partly attributed to the steady movement of Europeans and Americans out of

 

The Human-Animal Bond   83 rural areas and into towns and cities at this time. This urban migration tended to distance growing sectors of the population from direct involvement in the consumptive exploitation of animals, thereby eliminating the need for value systems designed to segregate humans and nonhumans into separate moral domains.12 The potential therapeutic or socializing influence of the human-​animal bond was also first recognized during this period. The English philosopher John Locke (1632–​1704), for example, advocated the keeping of pets to encourage children to develop empathy and a sense of responsibility for others. The York Retreat, the first mental institution to employ pet animals as a therapeutic medium, was founded in England during the eighteenth century, and by the Victorian era, pet animals were a relatively established feature of British mental institutions.13

The Value of the Bond From an evolutionary perspective, the human-​animal bond—​or at least the practice of keeping animals primarily as social companions—​is somewhat paradoxical.14 Our relationships with most domestic animals are fundamentally utilitarian. We may invest time, effort, and resources in caring for them, but in return we expect to obtain tangible material or economic benefits in the form of food, fiber, labor, or other practical services that outweigh, or at least balance, the costs. But with pets, the balance of costs and benefits appears, at least superficially, distorted. The average lifetime monetary costs of keeping a pet dog in America have been estimated recently at anywhere from $17,500 to $93,500 depending on the animal’s size, longevity, and use of expensive items such as daycare, dog walkers, or veterinary care, while the average pet cat will set its owner back by about $17,000 over his or her lifetime.15 Overall, Americans spend approximately $50 billion annually providing for their pets’ health and welfare, and yet it is sometimes difficult to identify or measure any obvious quid pro quo. It could be argued, of course, that people in wealthy, industrialized nations spend abundant time and resources engaging in any number of activities that appear to convey no obvious benefits other than personal enjoyment: watching movies or sporting events, gambling in casinos, or buying and wearing designer-​label clothing, to name just a few. And it may be that keeping animals as pets is just another of these superficially pointless things that humans do for fun when they can afford it. If that were the case, however, one would predict that pet keeping would be absent or at least rare among less affluent societies or groups that lack the resources to squander on luxuries. In reality, and as previously outlined, human-​pet attachments appear to be widespread, regardless of whether our focus is on nonaffluent subsistence hunter-​gatherers16 or homeless people living impoverished lives on urban streets.17 This apparent lack of utility associated with pet keeping poses an interesting explanatory challenge to evolutionary biologists and psychologists, since Darwin’s theory posits that natural selection should only favor the maintenance and spread of human behavior that contributes either directly to individual survival and reproductive success or to the

 

84   James A. Serpell “fitness” of close genetic kin.18 In response to this challenge, a number of different ideas have been proposed to account for the enduring popularity of the human-​animal bond.

Bonds or Bondage? One obvious solution to the evolutionary problem posed by “the bond” is to argue that pets are in fact simply living at their owners’ expense and that people derive no benefits—​and probably some harm—​from engaging in these relationships. Proponents of this view depict dogs, cats and other companion animals as social parasites that exploit the “hard-​wired” aspects of human parental behavior—​such as our propensity to be protective and nurturing toward infants—​in order to obtain, as it were, a free ride. They also point to the small size, neotenic or pedomorphic facial features, and infantilized behavior of many dog breeds as evidence of selection for phenotypic traits that enhance these animals’ ability to trigger human parental responses.19 While difficult to refute, the social parasitism hypothesis assumes that people who keep pets must either be at an adaptive disadvantage compared with non-​owners, or that the fitness costs of keeping pets are relatively trivial compared with the potential risks of being too discriminating with regard to potential objects of parental care.20 However, no compelling evidence exists that people’s survival or lifetime reproductive success is adversely affected by pet ownership, and the relative costs of keeping pets, at least for some individuals, seem to be far from trivial. This suggests that either the theory is wrong or that it needs to be modified. It may be more appropriate, for example, to characterize pet keeping as a case of mutualism rather than parasitism: in other words, as a relationship in which both partners derive mutual benefits from their association. One example of a naturally occurring mutualistic relationship is that between various coral reef fish and the diminutive cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus. Pairs of wrasse stake out territories on coral reefs where they are visited by other fish for periodic “cleaning”—​that is, the removal of ectoparasites and dead tissue from their mouths and gills. During the process, the larger fish, some of whom are highly predatory, remain passive and allow the wrasse to do their work unmolested.21 Human-​pet relationships may belong in a similar category. However, if this is the case, it is important to be clear about the kinds of mutual benefits that are being exchanged. The advantages to the pets may seem obvious, but we also need to ask what humans obtain from the company of pets that might potentially offset the costs of caring for them.

The Benefits of “the Bond” In the late 1970s, the findings of a doctoral dissertation from the University of Maryland triggered a sudden burst of scientific interest in the possible health benefits

 

The Human-Animal Bond   85 of the human-​animal bond. Briefly summarized, a study by Erika Friedmann used baseline and follow-​up interviews to investigate the influence of social and lifestyle factors on the survival of 92 recent victims of heart attacks. With surprising foresight, Friedmann included questions about pet ownership in her surveys and discovered that the pet owners in her study were more likely to survive for one year after a heart attack than the non-​owners.22 While the impact of pets on survival was not huge, it was highly significant statistically, and quite sufficient to stimulate a spate of subsequent studies that attempted to understand the extent and overall significance of these effects. Some of these studies focused specifically on the short-​term influence of interactions with pets on people’s physiological responses, including heart rate, blood pressure, and circulating levels of hormones, such as cortisol and the so-​called bonding hormone oxytocin. The majority of these experiments have found that when people interact with their pets, their levels of autonomic arousal tend to decrease to resting levels or slightly below, and that circulating oxytocin levels tend to increase. Other studies that have examined risk factors for cardiovascular disease, such as serum triglycerides and cholesterol, in large population samples have found significantly lower risks in pet owners compared with non-​owners.23 In prospective studies, the acquisition of a new pet has been found to be associated with improvements in owners’ mental and physical health, and with sustained reductions in their tendency to overreact to stressful situations and stimuli.24 Pet owners also appear to be more resilient in the face of stressful life events, resulting in fewer health problems and fewer visits to doctors for treatment.25 Significantly, pet owners who report being very attached to their pets tend to benefit more from pet ownership than those who are less attached, and dog owners tend to do better than cat owners, perhaps because the attachment for dogs, on average, seems to be stronger.26 Because of their need for regular exercise, dogs can also serve as a stimulus for physical activity. Several studies have demonstrated higher levels of walking and overall physical activity in dog owners compared with non-​dog owners, and some have found significant associations between dog walking and lower body weight and reduced risks of diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and depression.27 Human-​animal bonds may also benefit people indirectly by stimulating positive social interactions and relationships with others. For instance, numerous experimental studies have demonstrated that people of all ages, including those with physical disabilities, enjoy more frequent and more positive interactions with strangers when accompanied in public by a dog than when unaccompanied.28 Community-​based surveys have also determined that pet ownership is positively associated with social interaction among neighbors and with perceptions of neighborhood friendliness. After adjusting for demographic factors, pet owners also tend to score higher on measures of “social capital” and civic engagement than non-​owners.29 Finally, as well as being good for individual pet owners, human-​animal bonds may have a positive economic impact on society as a whole. In one study that explored these effects, a random, stratified sample of 1011 Australians was surveyed

 

86   James A. Serpell by telephone for information about pet ownership and their use of healthcare services. It was found that pet owners, on average, made 12 percent fewer doctor visits annually than non-​owners. Using an extrapolated estimate of the total number of Australian pet owners, and “number of doctor visits” as a proxy for overall health system usage, the study’s author calculated that pet ownership was associated with a potential saving of $988  million/​year, or 2.7  percent of Australia’s total national health expenditure.30 A later study by the same author used similar data from two large, representative national surveys—​the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP) and the Australian International Social Science Survey (ISSS-​A)—​to calculate the hypothetical increase in healthcare expenditure if pet ownership were to be abolished in both countries. In Germany, with relatively low rates of pet ownership (37.7%) but high healthcare costs, the study projected a 2.56 percent increase in doctor visits if pets were banned, resulting in a €5.59 billion increase in national health expenditure. In Australia, with higher rates of pet ownership (64.3%) but lower health costs, the equivalent analysis projected a 7.19 percent increase, equivalent to a $3.86 billion increase in costs.31 Both studies were correlational and therefore unable to determine if the apparent relationship between pet ownership and better health was a causal one. However, a subsequent analysis used longitudinal data from the same two surveys to demonstrate apparent causal relationships between pet ownership and improved health. In both countries, the data consisted of self-​reported pet ownership and self-​reported health (number of doctor visits in the preceding year) collected from the same individuals in 1996 and 2001, respectively. The results from Germany suggested that pet owners averaged 7.5 percent fewer doctor visits in 2001 than non-​owners, even if they had the same standard of health in 1996. They also showed that people who “always” had a pet (in both 1996 and 2001) made significantly fewer doctor visits than people who had ceased to have a pet or had “never” had one during the same five-​ year period. When the pet owning and non-​owning samples from Germany were matched to adjust for demographic differences, the pet owners averaged 24 percent fewer doctor visits compared to the non-​owners. The results from Australia, though less robust, indicated that pet owners made 11 percent fewer doctor visits than non-​ owners, and confirmed that those who owned pets in both 1996 and 2001 were significantly healthier than those who either ceased to own a pet during the period or never owned one.32 Further confirmation of a causal link between pet ownership and health savings comes from a survey of 3031 younger women in China, where private ownership of dogs was effectively banned until 1992, creating a unique natural experiment on the potential health impact of the human-​animal bond. The results indicated that the women who acquired dogs after 1992 reported fewer doctor visits, took significantly more exercise, considered themselves fitter and healthier, and slept better than the non-​dog owners. Furthermore, these health outcomes were positively correlated with dog owners’ self-​ reported attachments to their dogs.33

 

The Human-Animal Bond   87

“The Bond” as Therapeutic Intervention The modern use of animals, particularly dogs, as therapeutic adjuncts in the treatment of psychological and physical disabilities originated in the 1960s and 1970s with the pioneering work of the American child psychotherapist, Boris Levinson. Levinson’s most important contribution was to recognize that many of his more withdrawn and uncommunicative patients became more relaxed and forthcoming whenever his own dog, Jingles, was present during therapy. This led him to propose the use of companion animals as “co-​therapists” to help “break the ice” and build trust between clients and their therapists.34 Samuel Corson and Elizabeth Corson, a husband and wife team of psychiatrists at Ohio State University, were the first researchers to test Levinson’s ideas empirically. In the 1970s they set up what they called a “pet-​facilitated psychotherapy” (PFP) program within the psychiatric unit where they worked, and selected 47 withdrawn and uncommunicative patients, most of whom had failed to respond favorably to more conventional treatment methods. Each patient was then encouraged to help with the daily care and exercise of a colony of laboratory dogs who lived adjacent to the hospital. At the end of the study, the Corsons reported “some improvement” in all of the patients, although they published details of only five subjects, all of whom had improved markedly. Their assessment of the value of the PFP program was, however, unambiguously positive. Animal-​assisted interventions (AAIs), they argued, helped patients to develop self-​respect, independence, and self-​confidence and transformed them from, “irresponsible, dependent psychological invalids into self-​respecting, responsible individuals.” As Levinson had predicted, the dogs acted as social catalysts, forging positive links between the subject and other patients and staff on the ward, and thus creating a “widening circle of warmth and approval.” The dogs were able to induce such changes, according to the Corsons, by providing patients with a special kind of nonthreatening, nonjudgmental affection that “helped to break the vicious cycle of loneliness, helplessness and social withdrawal.”35 The Corson study initiated a wave of research in Europe and North America during the late seventies and eighties that sought to identify and quantify the benefits of AAIs across a wide variety of patient groups and therapeutic settings. Regrettably, many of these early studies suffered from a variety of design flaws. In 1984, a thorough review of the available literature on AAIs found only six controlled experimental trials of the therapeutic value of animals, all of which focused on adult or elderly populations. The authors concluded that the studies showed that pets had either “no impact or produced relatively small therapeutic gains.” They also noted that none of the studies revealed dramatic therapeutic results similar to those noted in isolated case reports.36 Nineteen years later, in 2003, a meta-​analysis of 112 relevant studies was still able to identify only

 

88   James A. Serpell nine (six involving control groups and three pre-​/​posttreatment designs) that reported sufficient statistical information to enable the calculation of effect sizes. All nine studies were published after the original 1984 review and, as before, all were conducted with adult and/​or elderly populations. However, in contrast to the previous assessment that these interventions had only minor therapeutic value, the meta-​analysis found an average effect size of 0.76, which would generally be considered large.37 A second meta-​analysis of AAI research published in 2007 identified 49 studies that met the eligibility requirements for this type of study. Four distinct outcome groups were identified for analysis, involving: studies that applied AAIs to children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs); those that focused on medical outcomes, such as heart rate, blood pressure, motor skills, or coordination; those that examined various emotional well-​being indicators, such as anxiety, depression, or fear; and those that looked for effects of AAI on observable behaviors, such as aggression, violence, compliance with rules, or verbal resistance. For the symptoms of ASDs, the analysis found treatment effect sizes in the high range (Cohen’s d = 0.72), in the low to moderate range for various emotional well-​being indicators (d = 0.39), and in the moderate range for medical effects and observable behaviors (d = 0.51). Use of dogs in AAIs was consistently associated with moderately high effect sizes, compared with the effects of other therapy animals such as horses, aquariums, and dolphins, but the nature of the presenting problem (e.g., medical, behavioral, mental health) did not seem to influence outcomes. Also, in the four studies that compared AAIs with other, more conventional treatments, effect sizes for AAIs were either similar or superior to those of the other interventions.38 The possible mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of AAIs are the subject of ongoing investigation, although the social-​bonding hormone oxytocin has again been implicated in the process.39 Future research will continue to refine our understanding of these mechanisms, as well as the particular ways in which they influence different subject (patient) populations in different therapeutic contexts.

Human-​Animal Bonds as Nonhuman Social Support The apparent links between pet keeping and human health are consistent with the idea of pets serving as sources of nonhuman social support.40 Social support is a theoretical construct that expresses the degree to which individuals are socially embedded and have a sense of belonging, obligation, and intimacy with others.41 A growing body of evidence has confirmed a strong positive link between social support and enhanced health and survival in humans.42 For example, social support factors have been shown to protect against cardiovascular disease and stroke, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, nephritis, pneumonia, and most forms of cancer, as well as depression, schizophrenia, and suicide.43 The mechanisms underlying these effects are the subject of ongoing

 

The Human-Animal Bond   89 research, but at least some of the benefits appear to arise from the phenomenon of social buffering: that is, the capacity of supportive social relationships to buffer or ameliorate the deleterious health consequences of psychosocial stress. It is well established that prolonged psychosocial stress results in chronically elevated levels of circulating glucocorticoid (stress) hormones, and that these in turn can have a damaging impact on both the immune and cardiovascular systems.44 Again, some of these positive effects of social support appear to be mediated by the neuropeptide hormones oxytocin and argenine-​ vasopressin, which also play critical roles in the modulation of attachment behavior and social bonding in mammals.45 Furthermore, the release of oxytocin associated with pleasurable social interactions has a down-​regulating effect on the hypothalamo-​ pituitary-​adrenal (HPA) axis that regulates the stress response.46 The mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects of human-​animal bonds may be similar to those thought to be responsible for the social-​buffering effect in human relationships. At least four published studies have demonstrated significant increases in plasma oxytocin levels in human subjects during and following interactions with their own (but not with unfamiliar) dogs,47 and in one, both the owners’ and the dogs’ oxytocin levels were positively correlated, and associated with the owners’ subjective assessments of the quality of the relationship.48 Another study detected significantly elevated levels of oxytocin metabolites in the urine of dog owners who received greater amounts of visual attention (gaze) from their dogs in an experimental trial. When questioned, these owners also professed stronger attachments to their more attentive dogs.49 The social-​buffering idea may also go some way toward explaining the relatively recent and continuing explosion in the popularity of pets among industrialized nations in the last 40 to 50 years. In the United States, for instance, the results of a variety of social and public-​health surveys have documented the gradual collapse or fragmentation of traditional social support systems, particularly since the 1960s. Such trends have been marked by a substantial rise in the number of people living alone, especially in urban areas; escalating divorce rates and an increase in the number of couples choosing to have fewer children or none at all; people spending less and less time socializing with their friends, or getting involved in their local communities; and families dispersing geographically so that fewer close relatives now live within easy reach.50 It seems plausible to argue in light of these trends that the rising popularity of human-​animal bonds at least partly reflects people’s attempts to augment their traditional support systems using nonhuman animals. Why humans should apparently be so dependent on the support of others to maintain their health and well-​being in the face of psychosocial stress remains an important evolutionary question in itself. Recent field studies of nonhuman primates, such as baboons (Papio ursinus), have demonstrated that females with stronger social bonds with other females are longer lived, and their infants are more likely to survive to adulthood, than those who lack such strong attachments. While such findings clearly imply that the tendency among group-​living primates to develop and maintain social support networks is a product of natural selection, it raises serious questions regarding why this trait, which effectively renders humans (and other social animals) vulnerable to the deleterious

 

90   James A. Serpell effects of social isolation, evolved in the first place. Perhaps the survival and reproductive advantages of being part of a supportive social network has selected for individuals who experience psychological distress when social isolated and are therefore highly motivated to seek out and maintain social attachments.51

Ethics and the Human-​Animal Bond Under ideal circumstances, people’s relationships with their pets are mutually sustaining and beneficial. As with marriages, however, not all human-​animal bonds are made in heaven. Sometimes these relationships have a negative impact on society, the natural environment, or the welfare of the animals involved. Dog bites, for instance, are a significant public-​health problem resulting in human injuries and occasional deaths. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 4.5 million Americans are bitten by dogs each year and, of those, approximately 885,000 require medical attention.52 Children receive a disproportionate number of bites, and severe injuries occur much more frequently in those less than 10 years of age. The majority of bites are inflicted by pets rather than strays, and in most cases the dog is known to the victim.53 Because dogs, cats, and other companion animal species are capable of transmitting zoonotic diseases to humans, owners who fail to vaccinate their pets or treat them for worms and other parasitic infections may also create a significant public-​ health risk.54 The very large numbers of pets who now coexist with humans can also have a damaging impact on the environment. The depletion of wildlife resources to supply the exotic pet trade, the impact of free-​roaming cat predation on wild bird species, and the pollution of parks and natural areas with animal waste are all obvious examples.55 Even supplying the dietary needs of pets may impose a significant environmental burden. According to one calculation, a medium-​size family dog eats about 360 pounds of meat and 210 pounds of cereal annually, while another estimate suggests that America’s 75 million pet dogs may consume as many calories as roughly 35 million people. Producing this much food would require the equivalent of approximately 20 thousand square miles of farmland.56 While species such as dogs and cats have undoubtedly benefited numerically from their association with humans, many individual animals pay a significant price in terms of compromised health and welfare. Failed human-​animal bonds result in millions of pets being abandoned, relinquished to shelters, and/​or euthanized prematurely each year, and many thousands are abused, neglected, or mistreated by their owners for various reasons, ranging from ignorance to deliberate cruelty.57 Many purebred dog breeds are afflicted with painful and debilitating health problems either due to inbreeding or line breeding or selection for extreme standards of physical conformation.58 Commercial pet “farming” is on the rise as the demand for some pets exceeds the supply, while the exotic pet trade causes widespread suffering and death among wild animals

 

The Human-Animal Bond   91 during capture, transport, and subsequent acquisition by owners with little knowledge of proper husbandry and care.59 Even the most affectionate and caring human-​animal bonds may cause unnecessary animal suffering when, for example, an overly attached owner insists on futile veterinary interventions to keep his or her terminally ill pet alive at all costs.60 All of these negative aspects of the human-​animal bond raise important ethical dimensions that need to be considered when weighing the benefits of our relations with companion animals against the perceived costs.

Notes 1. Hank Davis and Dianne Balfour, The Inevitable Bond:  Examining Scientist-​ Animal Interactions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 2. James A. Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human Animal Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3. “Surveys Yield Conflicting Trends in US Pet Ownership,” VIN News Service, accessed September 14, 2014, http://​news.vin.com/​VINNews.aspx?articleId=31369. 4. “Facts and Figures 2012,” FEDIAF (European Pet Food Federation), accessed June 19, 2014, http://​www.fediaf.org/​facts-​figures/​. 5. Lisa A. Maher, J. T. Stock, S. Finney, J. J.  N. Heywood, et  al., “A Unique Human-​Fox Burial from a Pre-​Natufian Cemetery in the Levant (Jordan),” PLoS One 6 (2011): e15815. doi:10.1371/​journal.pone.0015815. 6. J.-​D. Vigne, J. Guilaine, K. Debue, L. Haye et al., “Early Taming of the Cat in Cyprus,” Science 304 (2004): 259; Darcy F. Morey, “Burying Key Evidence: The Social Bond between Dogs and People,” Journal of Archaeological Science 33 (2006): 158–​175; Simon J. M. Davis and F. Valla, “Evidence for Domestication of the Dog 12,000 Years Ago in the Natufian of Israel,” Nature 276 (1978): 608–​610. 7. Philippe Erikson, “The Social Significance of Pet-​Keeping among Amazonian Indians,” in Companion Animals and Us: Exploring the Relationships between People and Pets, ed. Anthony L. Podberscek, Elizabeth Paul, and James A. Serpell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 7–​27; James A. Serpell, “Pet Keeping and Animal Domestication: A Reappraisal,” in The Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism and Predation, ed. Juliet Clutton-​ Brock (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 10–​21; Frederick J. Simoons and James A. Baldwin, “Breast-​ Feeding of Animals by Women:  Its Socio-​ Cultural Context and Geographic Occurrence,” Anthropos 77 (1982): 421–​448. 8. Francis Galton, Enquiry into Human Faculty and Its Development (London, Macmillan, 1883); Carl Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1952); Serpell, “Pet Keeping and Animal Domestication,” 10–​21. 9. Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within:  Animals in the Middle Ages (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); Serpell, “In the Company of Animals,” 43–​59; James Serpell, “Animals and Religion: Towards a Unifying Theory,” in The Human-​Animal Relationship, ed. Francine de Jong and Ruud van den Bos (Assen, Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum, 2005), 9–​22. 10. James A. Serpell, “Guardian Spirits or Demonic Pets: The Concept of the Witch’s Familiar in Early Modern England, 1530–​1712,” in The Animal/​Human Boundary, ed. Angela N. Creager and William Chester Jordan (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2002), 157–​190.

 

92   James A. Serpell 11. Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Harriet Ritvo, “The Emergence of Modern Pet-​ Keeping,” in Animals and People Sharing the World, ed. Andrew N. Rowan (Hanover, NH:  University Press of New England, 1986); Salisbury, Beast Within; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-​1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983). 12. James A. Serpell and Elizabeth Paul, “Pets and the Development of Positive Attitudes to Animals,” in Animals and Human Society: Changing Perspectives, ed. Aubrey Manning and James A. Serpell (London: Routledge, 1994), 127–​144. 13. James A. Serpell, “Historical and Cultural Perspectives on Human-​Animal Interaction,” in Animal in Our Lives: Human-​Animal Interaction in Family, Community and Therapeutic Settings, ed. Peggy McCardle, Sandra McCune, James Griffin, Layla Esposito, and Lisa Freund (Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing, 2011), 11–​22. 14. James A. Serpell and Elizabeth Paul, “Pets in the Family: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Family Psychology, ed. Catherine Salmon and Todd K. Shackelford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 297–​309. 15. “The True Costs of Owning a Pet,” Forbes Magazine, accessed May, 2014, http://​www. forbes.com/​2011/​05/​24/​true-​costs-​owning-​pet_​slide_​2.html. 16. Erikson, “Social Significance of Pet-​keeping,” 7–​27; Serpell, “Pet Keeping and Animal Domestication,” 10–​21. 17. Lynn Rew, “Friends and Pets as Companions: Strategies for Coping with Loneliness among Homeless Youth,” Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, 13 (2000): 125–​132; Heidi Taylor, Pauline Williams, and Paul Gray, “Homelessness and Dog Ownership: An Investigation into Animal Empathy, Attachment, Crime, Drug Use, Health and Public Opinion,” Anthrozoös 17 (2004): 353–​368. 18. William D. Hamilton, “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964): 1–​32; George C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Current Evolutionary Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). 19. John Archer, “Why Do People Love Their Pets?” Evolution and Human Behaviour 18 (1997): 237–​259. 20. Serpell and Paul, “Pets in the Family,” 297–​309. 21. E. A. Herre, N. Knowlton, U. G. Mueller, and S. A. Rehner, “The Evolution of Mutualisms: Exploring the Paths between Conflict and Cooperation,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 14 (1999):  49–​ 53; Rufus A. Johnstone and Redouan Bshary, “From Parasitism to Mutualism: Partner Control in Asymmetric Interactions, Ecology Letters 5 (2002): 634–​639. 22. Erika Friedmann, A. H. Katcher, J. J. Lynch, and S. A. Thomas, “Animal Companions and One-​Year Survival of Patients after Discharge from a Coronary Care Unit,” Public Health Reports 95 (1980): 307–​312. 23. Karen M. Allen, J. Blascovich, J. Tomaka, and R. M. Kelsey, “Presence of Human Friends and Pet Dogs as Moderators of Autonomic Responses to Stress in Women,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61 (1991): 582–​589; Warwick P. Anderson, C. M. Reid, and G. L. Jennings, “Pet Ownership and Risk Factors for Cardiovascular Disease.” Medical Journal of Australia 157 (1996): 298–​301; Erika Friedmann, S. A. Thomas, and T. J. Eddy, “Companion Animals and Human Health:  Physical and Cardiovascular Influences,” in Companion Animals and Us, ed. Anthony L. Podberscek, Elizabeth Paul, and James A. Serpell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 125–​142; Deborah L. Wells,

 

The Human-Animal Bond   93 “The Effects of Animals on Human Health and Well-​Being,” Journal of Social Issues 65 (2009): 523–​543. 24. Karen M. Allen, Barbara E. Skykoff, and Joseph L. Izzo, Jr., “Pet Ownership, but Not ACE Inhibitor Therapy, Blunts Home Blood Pressure Responses to Mental Stress,” Hypertension 38 (2001): 815–​820; James A. Serpell, “Beneficial Effects of Pet Ownership on Some Aspects of Human Health and Behaviour,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 84 (1991): 717–​720. 25. Judith M. Siegel, “Stressful Life Events and Use of Physician Services among the Elderly:  The Moderating Role of Pet Ownership,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58 (1990): 1081–​1086. 26. E. Friedmann and S. A.Thomas, “Pet Ownership, Social Support, and One-​Year Survival after Acute Myocardial Infarction in the Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial (CAST),” American Journal of Cardiology 76 (1995):  1213–​1217; Marcia M. Ory and Elizabeth L. Goldberg, “Pet Possession and Life Satisfaction in Elderly Women,” in New Perspectives on Our Lives with Companion Animals, ed. Aaron H. Katcher and Alan M. Beck (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 303–​317; Serpell, “Beneficial Effects of Pet Ownership,” 717–​720. 27. Karen J. Coleman, D. E. Rosenberg, T. L. Conway, J. F. Sallis et  al., “Physical Activity, Weight Status, and Neighborhood Characteristics of Dog Walkers,” Preventive Medicine 47 (2008): 309–​312; H. Cutt, B. Giles-​Corti, M. Knuiman, V. Burke et al., “Dog Ownership, Health and Physical Activity:  A  Critical Review of the Literature,” Health and Place 13 (2007): 261–​272; Katherine D. Hoerster, J. A. Mayer, J. F. Sallis, S. Talley et al., “Dog Walking: Its Association with Physical Activity Guideline Adherence and Its Correlates,” Preventive Medicine 52 (2011): 33–​38; Cindy Lentino, A. J. Visek, K. McDonnell, L. DiPietro et al., “Dog Walking Is Associated with a Favorable Risk Profile Independent of a Moderate to High Volume of Physical Activity,” Journal of Physical Activity and Health 9 (2012):  414–​420; Serpell, “Beneficial Effects of Pet Ownership,” 717–​720. 28. N. Guéguen and S. Ciccotti, “Domestic Dogs as Facilitators in Social Interaction:  An Evaluation of Helping and Courtship Behaviours,” Anthrozoös 21 (2008):  339–​ 349; Bonnie Mader, L. A. Hart, B. Bergin et  al., “Social Acknowledgements for Children with Disabilities: Effects of Service Dogs,” Child Development 60 (1989): 1529–​1534; June McNicholas and Glyn M. Collis, “Dogs as Catalysts for Social Interactions: Robustness of the Effect,” British Journal of Psychology. 91 (2000): 61–​70; Deborah Wells, “The Facilitation of Social Interactions by Domestic Dogs,” Anthrozoös 17 (2004): 340–​352. 29. Lisa Wood, B. Giles-​Corti, M. Bulsara, “The Pet Connection: Pets as a Conduit for Social Capital,” Social Science and Medicine 61 (2005): 1159–​1173. 30. Bruce Headey, “Health Benefits and Health Cost Savings Due to Pets:  Preliminary Estimates from an Australian National Survey,” Social Indicators Research 47 (1999): 233–​243. 31. Bruce Headey, M. Grabka, J. Kelley, P. Reddy et  al., “Pet Ownership Is Good for Your Health and Saves Public Expenditure Too:  Australian and German Longitudinal Evidence.” Australian Social Monitor 5 (2002): 93–​99. 32. Bruce Headey and Markus Grabka, “Pets and Human Health in Germany and Australia: National Longitudinal Results,” Social Indicators Research 80 (2007): 297–​311. 33. Bruce Headey, Fu Na, and Richard Zheng, “Pet Dogs Benefit Owners’ Health: A ‘Natural Experiment’ in China,” Social Indicators Research 87 (2008): 481–​493.

 

94   James A. Serpell 34. Boris M. Levinson, Pet-​ Oriented Child Psychotherapy (Springfield, IL:  Charles C. Thomas, 1969). 35. Samuel A. Corson and Elizabeth O’Leary Corson, “Pet Animals as Nonverbal Communication Mediators in Psychotherapy in Hospital Settings,” in Ethology and Nonverbal Communication in Mental Health, ed. Samuel A. Corson and Elizabeth O’Leary Corson (New York: Pergamon; 1980), 83–​110. 36. Alan M. Beck and Aaron H. Katcher, “A New Look at Pet-​Facilitated Therapy,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 184 (1984): 414–​421. 37. K. R. LaJoie, “An Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Using Animals in Therapy” (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Spalding University, Louisville, KY, University Microfilms no. 3077675, 2003). 38. J. Nimer and B. Lundahl, “Animal-​Assisted Therapy:  A  Meta-​Analysis,” Anthrozoös 20 (2007): 225–​238. 39. Katherine A. Kruger and James A. Serpell, “Animal-​Assisted Interventions in Mental Health,” in Handbook on Animal-​Assisted Therapy: Theoretical Foundations and Guidelines for Practice, 2nd ed., ed. Aubrey H. Fine (New York: Academic Press, 2006), 21–​38; Kerstin Uvnäs-​Moberg, Linda Handlin, Maria Petersson, Peggy McCardle et  al., “Promises and Pitfalls of Hormone Research in Human-​Animal Interaction,” in How Animals Affect Us: Examining the Influence of Human-​Animal Interaction on Child Development and Human Health, ed. Peggy McCardle, Sandra McCune, James Griffin, and Valerie Maholmes (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2011), 53–​81. 40. Glyn M. Collis and June McNicholas, “A Theoretical Basis for Health Benefits of Pet Ownership,” in Companion Animals in Human Health, ed. Cindy C. Wilson and Dennis C. Turner (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 105–​122; Thomas Garrity and Lauren Stallones, “Effects of Pet Contact on Human Well-​Being: Review of Recent Research,” in Companion Animals in Human Health, ed. Cindy C. Wilson and Dennis C. Turner (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 3–​22; J. Virués-​Ortega and G. Buela-​Casal, “Psychophysiological Effects of Human-​Animal Interaction:  Theoretical Issues and Long-​Term Interaction Effects,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 194 (2006): 52–​57. 41. W. Eriksen, “The Role of Social Support in the Pathogenesis of Coronary Heart Disease:  A  Literature Review,” Family Practice 11 (1994):  201–​ 209; Ralf Schwarzer and Nina Knoll, “Functional Roles of Social Support within the Stress and Coping Process: A Theoretical and Empirical Overview,” International Journal of Psychology 42 (2007): 243–​252. 42. J. S. House, K. R. Landis, and D. Umbersen, “Social Relationships and Health,” Science 241 (1988): 540–​545; Janice Kiecolt-​Glaser and T. L. Newton, “Marriage and Health: His and Hers.” Psychology Bulletin 127 (2001): 472–​503; M. M. Lim and L. J. Young, “Neuropeptide Regulation of Affiliative Behavior and Social Bonding in Animals,” Hormones and Behavior 50 (2006): 506–​517; Julianne Holt-​Lunstad, T. B. Smith, J. Bradley Layton et al., “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-​Analytic Review,” PLoS One 7: e1000316, doi:10.1371/​journal.pmed.1000316. 43. Eriksen, “Role of Social Support,” 201–​209; B. A. Esterling, J. K. Kiecolt-​Glaser, J. C. Bodnar, and R. Glaser, “Chronic Stress, Social Support, and Persistent Alterations in the Natural Killer Cell Response to Cytokines in Older Adults,” Health Psychology 13 (1994): 291–​298; Takefumi Kikusui, J. T. Winslow, and Yuji Mori, “Social Buffering:  Relief from Stress and Anxiety,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 361 (2006):  2215–​2228; C. D. Sherbourne, L. S. Meredith, W. Rogers, and J. E. Ware, Jr., “Social Support and

 

The Human-Animal Bond   95 Stressful Life Events: Age Differences in Their Effects on Health-​related Quality of Life among the Chronically Ill,” Quality of Life Research 1 (1992): 235–​246; Bert N. Uchino, “Social Support and Health: A Review of Physiological Processes Potentially Underlying Links to Disease Outcome,” Journal of Behavioral Medicine 29 (2006): 377–​387. 44. R. L. Ader, N. Cohen, and D. Felen, “Psychoneuroimmunology: Interactions between the Nervous System and the Immune System,” The Lancet 345 (1995): 99–​103; Kikusui, “Social Buffering,” 2215–​2228; Uchino, “Social Support and Health,” 377–​387. 45. Zoe R. Donaldson and Larry J. Young, “Oxytocin, Vasopressin, and the Neurogenetics of Sociality,” Science 322 (2008): 900–​904; Lim, “Neuropeptide Regulation of Affiliative Behavior,” 506–​517. 46. M. Heinrichs, T. Baumgartner, C. Kirschbaum, U. Ehlert et  al., “Social Support and Oxytocin Interact to Suppress Cortisol and Subjective Responses to Stress,” Biological Psychiatry 54 (2003): 1389–​1398; Kikusui, “Social Buffering,” 2215–​2228. 47. Johannes Odendaal and R. Meintjes, “Neurophysiological Correlates of Affiliative Behaviour between Humans and Dogs,” Veterinary Journal 165 (2003): 296–​301; Suzanne C. Miller, C. Kennedy, D. DeVoe, and M. Hickey, “An Examination of Changes in Oxytocin Levels before and after Interactions with a Bonded Dog,” Anthrozoös 22 (2009): 31–​42; Linda Handlin, Eva Hydbring-​Sandberg, Anne Nilsson, Mikael Ejdebäck et al., “Short-​ Term Interaction between Dogs and Their Owners: Effects on Oxytocin, Cortisol, Insulin and Heart Rate:  An Exploratory Study,” Anthrozoös 24 (2011):  301–​315; Linda Handlin, Anne Nilsson, Mikael Ejdebäck, Eva Hydbring-​Sandberg et al., “Associations between the Psychological Characteristics of the Human-​Dog Relationship and Oxytocin and Cortisol Levels,” Anthrozoös 25 (2012): 215–​228. 48. Handlin et al., “Associations,” 215–​228. 49. Miho Nagasawa, T. Kikusui, T. Onaka, and M. Ohta, “Dog’s Gaze at Its Owner Increases Owner’s Urinary Oxytocin during Social Interaction,” Hormones and:  Behavior 55 (2009): 434–​441. 50. S. P. Morgan and M. G. Taylor, “Low Fertility at the Turn of the Twenty-​First Century,” Annual Review of Sociology 32 (2006):  375–​399; Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 51. Joan B. Silk, J. C. Beehner, T. J. Bergman, C. Crockford et  al., “The Benefits of Social Capital:  Close Social Bonds among Female Baboons Enhance Offspring Survival,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 276 (2009): 3099e3104, doi:10.1098/​rspb.2009.0681; Joan B. Silk, J. C. Beehner, T. J. Bergman, C. Crockford et al., “Strong and Consistent Social Bonds Enhance the Longevity of Female Baboons,” Current Biology 20 (2010): 1359e1361, doi:10.1016/​j.cub.2010.05.067. 52. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dog Bites, http://​www.cdc.gov/​homeandrecreationalsafety/​dog-​bites/​index.html, accessed August 18, 2014. 53. A.E. Kaye, J. M. Belz, R. E. Kirschner, “Pediatric Dog Bite Injuries: A 5-​year Review of the Experience at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia,” Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 124 (2009):  551–​558; Ilana Reisner, Frances S. Shofer, and Michael L. Nance, “Behavioral Assessment of Child-​ Directed Canine Aggression,” Injury Prevention 13 (2007):  348–​351; H. B. Weiss, D. I. Friedman, and J. H. Coben, “Incidence of Dog Bite Injuries Treated in Emergency Departments,” Journal of the American Medical Association 279 (1998): 51–​53. 54. Bruno Chomel and Ben Sun, “Zoonoses in the Bedroom,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 17 (2011): 167–​172.

 

96   James A. Serpell 55. Emma Bush, Sandra E. Baker, and David W. Macdonald, “Global Trade in Exotic Pets 2006-​2012,” Conservation Biology 28 (2014):  663–​676; Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger, Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and: Evolution (New  York:  Scribner, 2001), 235; Gail Rosen and Katherine Smith, “Summarizing the Evidence on the International Trade in Illegal Wildlife,” EcoHealth 7 (2010):  24–​32; Scott Loss, Tom Will, and Peter P. Marra, “The Impact of Free-​Ranging Domestic Cats on Wildlife of the United States,” Nature Communications 4 (2012):  1396, doi:10.1038/​ ncomms2380. 56. Coppinger and Coppinger, Dogs, 233–​235; Brenda Vale and Robert Vale, Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009). 57. Arnold Arluke, Just a Dog: Understanding Animal Cruelty and Ourselves (Philadelphia, PA:  Temple University Press, 2006); Elizabeth A. Clancy and Andrew N. Rowan, “Companion Animal Demographics in the United States:  A  Historical Perspective,” in The State of the Animals 2003, ed. Deborah Salem and Andrew Rowan (Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, 2003), 9–​26. 58. Lucy Asher, Gillian Diesel, Jennifer F. Summers, Paul D. McGreevy et  al., “Inherited Defects in Pedigree Dogs. Part  1:  Disorders Related to Breed Standards,” Veterinary Journal 182 (2009): 402–​411; Jennifer Summers, G. Diesel, L. Asher, P. D. McGreevy et al., “Inherited Defects in Pedigree Dogs. Part  2:  Disorders That Are Not Related to Breed Standards,” Veterinary Journal 183 (2010): 39–​45. 59. Staci McClennan, Keeping of Exotic Animals: Welfare Concerns (Brussels: Eurogroup for Animal Welfare, 2012). 60. Alan M. Beck and Aaron H. Katcher, Between Pets and People: The Importance of Animal Companionship (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 195–​208.

Further Reading Arluke, Arnold, and Clinton Sanders, Regarding Animals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996. Beetz, Julius A., Kurt Kotrschal, Dennis C. Turner, and Kerstin Uvnäs-​Moberg. Attachment to Pets: An Integrative View of Human-​Animal Relationships with Implications for Therapeutic Practice. Göttingen and Cambridge, MA: Hogrefe, 2013. Fine, A. H. Animal-​Assisted Therapy:  Theoretical Foundations and Guidelines for Practice. New York: Academic Press, 2006. Herzog, Harold. Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight about Animals. New York: Harper Collins, 2006. Katcher, Aaron H., and Alan M. Beck. New Perspectives on Our Lives with Companion Animals. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Manning, Aubrey, and James A. Serpell. Animals and Human Society: Changing Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. McCardle, Peggy, Sandra McCune, James A. Griffin and Valerie Malholmes. How Animals Affect Us: Examining the Influence of Human-​Animal Interaction on Child Development and Human Health. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2011. McCardle, Peggy, Sandra McCune, James A. Griffin, Layla Esposito, and Lisa Freund. Animals in Our Lives: Human-​Animal Interaction in Family, Community and Therapeutic Settings. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing, 2011.

 

The Human-Animal Bond   97 Podberscek, Anthony L., Elizabeth S. Paul, and James A. Serpell. Companion Animals and Us: Exploring the Relationships between People and Pets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Rowan, Andrew N. Animals and People Sharing the World. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988. Wilson, Cindy C., and Dennis C. Turner. Companion Animals in Human Health. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998.

 

Chapter 5

A nimal Sh e lt e ri ng Leslie Irvine

In the long arc of human-​animal relationships, concern about the status of homeless cats and dogs constitutes a recent development. Animal shelters have existed in the United States for only about 150 years. Although the terms shelter and pound are often used synonymously today, they originated in differing missions and values. More precisely, they reflected the changing status of companion animals and of attitudes toward their appropriate treatment. This chapter examines the social and cultural significance of animal sheltering. From this perspective, sheltering reveals how the presence of animals shapes many aspects of human experience, including our institutions, laws, and policies. Moreover, the institution of sheltering highlights the position of animals in the intricate relationship between public policy and private morality. Throughout this chapter, I  use the term shelter, except when pound is historically accurate. Today, when it comes to the treatment of animals, the name of the facility matters little compared to the attitudes of the people who run it and of those who live in the surrounding community. Animals can receive harsh or humane treatment in either place. In general, pounds come under the auspices of municipal governments, but to complicate matters further, a city or town might call its animal control facility a shelter. Alternatively, a city or town might not operate a dedicated animal control facility but, through a contractual arrangement, might house animals at a privately run shelter. The options hint at the various means whereby communities respond to problems involving stray, injured, or aggressive animals. Some have departments or agencies dedicated to animal control. Others provide animal-​related services through a police department or another arm of government. In most cases, the funding for government-​operated facilities comes largely, although not exclusively, from fees for dog licensing, the redemption or adoption of animals, and fines for animal control violations.1 A humane society, or a group dedicated to the prevention of animal cruelty, might also operate a shelter. Some organizations, such as the Humane Society of the United States and the American Humane Association, do not run shelters but focus on animal advocacy. Often established as nonprofit organizations, animal shelters might exist solely through donations, or they might receive partial funding from a local government in exchange for providing

 

Animal Sheltering   99 shelter services. In large cities, one might find a municipally run facility as well as a shelter operated by a local humane society. Because the approximately five thousand animal shelters currently operating in the United States function independently, generalizable research presents a challenge.2 Regional studies, as well as studies of individual facilities, have examined several issues salient for sheltering, overall. One primary concern involves understanding intake, or how animals enter the shelter system. Consequently, a large body of research has analyzed the reasons owners give for relinquishing their pets.3 Because adoption rates represent another important issue, studies have also analyzed people’s decisions to adopt shelter animals and the factors that make an adoption successful.4 Another major concern has to do with the health and welfare of animals housed in shelters. The practice of veterinary medicine has yielded extensive research on topics relating to infectious disease management, animal abuse, and sterilization programs.5 Additional research examines the organizational culture of sheltering. For example, studies have investigated how organizational discourse shapes the provision of services6 and the selection of cases for use in campaigns to raise public awareness and funds.7 Other studies analyze how shelter workers understand animal welfare8 and how they interact with the public9 and with the animal residents.10 Moreover, the nonprofit status and limited budgets of many shelters highlights the need to understand the motivation, recruitment, and retention of volunteers.11 Without question, the practice of killing healthy animals constitutes the most important issue in animal sheltering today, and the rise of no-​kill shelters represents “one of the most profound,” if controversial, responses.12 Because shelters use the term euthanasia, which means intentionally ending a life to alleviate suffering, I also employ it here. However, most of the animals who die in shelters do not require euthanasia in the true sense. Although no definitive statistics enumerate the total number of animals killed annually, conservative estimates put it at just under three million, making shelters the leading cause of death for companion animals in the United States.13 Research on the topic has investigated how shelter workers negotiate the incongruity of what Arluke14 aptly calls the “caring-​killing paradox” of their jobs.15 Other studies have evaluated shelters’ efforts to minimize or eliminate the killing of animals.16 The discussion that follows examines how the issue of killing animals engendered the first shelters and continues to shape shelter policies today.

Animals as Social Problems The practice of sheltering stray animals originated in the livestock “impounds” of colonial American towns.17 At the time, owners commonly turned their livestock out to graze, thereby feeding them at no cost. The animals quite naturally wandered. When residents’ cattle, horses, hogs, or other animals roamed freely, they often left damage in their wake. The first American animal control regulation, passed in New Amsterdam

 

100   Leslie Irvine in 1648, required the confinement of hogs to keep them from damaging the streets by rooting. Subsequent complaints about damage to orchards, gardens, and other property suggest that the law was poorly enforced.18 In response, Governor Stuyvesant requested that officials issue an order to shoot any at-​large hogs because their rooting was once again damaging the streets. Officials refused to comply, and instead ruled that owners put rings through the noses of their hogs to prevent them from rooting. As Duffy points out, this “in effect gave tacit permission to owners to let their animals roam at large.”19 A subsequent measure required the capture and impoundment of free-​roaming livestock in a walled-​or fenced-​in corral. Owners could identify and reclaim their animals for a fee, which provided an income for the poundmaster, and he could keep unclaimed livestock to sell or for personal use. So, the first efforts at animal control and sheltering targeted livestock, not companion animals. A dog might have occasionally caused sufficient public nuisance to end up in the impound, but no cats would have landed there. Before the 1800s, neither dogs nor cats had the value as purely companions that they have attained today. This is not to say that people felt no affection toward animals; history offers numerous examples of close relationships.20 Rather, it means that animals played primarily instrumental roles. They contributed to the economies of human communities by working in households, farms, and stables. They hunted, herded, and kept watch. They roamed freely and usually lived outdoors, or with minimal shelter. They also bred freely, which meant that anyone wishing to have a dog or a cat could easily acquire one. An owner might reclaim a valued hunting dog or watchdog from the pound, but because animals had no economic value, poundmasters would simply kill the unclaimed ones “in the most convenient fashion.”21 This usually meant death by drowning, clubbing, or strangling. Gradually, people’s attitudes toward this means of solving the problem of unwanted animals changed. The modern animal shelter would emerge in response.

Animals in Cities Urbanization, which concentrated people in spaces designated exclusively for human activity, made animals into new social problems. Through the turn of the twentieth century, animals of all kinds roamed the streets of most American cities.22 Horses and mules played visible and valuable roles in the urban economy by hauling and providing transportation. People kept chickens, hogs, and dairy cows in whatever space they could find, even in densely populated areas, so that families had milk, meat, and eggs. Many dairies stabled their cows within city limits until the 1920s. Hogs continued to roam freely until they were confined to a stockyard. When Charles Dickens wrote about New York in American Notes, he famously referred to these abundant “city scavengers.”23 Adding to the mix, cattle and sheep raised in the West and Midwest passed through urban stockyards before going to slaughter. Animals had no place in the clean, efficient, safe, modern cities envisioned by turn-​ of-​the-​century politicians, however. Reforms centralized meatpacking and moved livestock to less-​populated areas. Cars and trucks gradually replaced urban horses and

 

Animal Sheltering   101 mules. But not all animals could be so easily legislated out of cities. Packs of dogs ran free and colonies of cats abounded. They reached the streets as strays or because their owners, accustomed to allowing them to roam, had turned them loose to scavenge for food. Although some urban business owners appreciated the rodent control provided by cats,24 dogs often posed a nuisance by barking, howling, fighting, getting into garbage, dashing in front of vehicles, and frightening or biting citizens. Some cities attempted to minimize risk by requiring the muzzling of free-​roaming dogs. New York had established such a law by the 1830s, but because of poor compliance and lack of enforcement, it “failed to stop a rising tide of unmuzzled dogs.”25 Fear of rabies eventually prompted many city governments to authorize the capture of roaming dogs. Most people lacked a clear understanding of the disease, and so popular mythology held that rabies generated spontaneously. Louis Pasteur would develop a post-exposure rabies vaccine for human victims of animal bites in the fall of 1885, but until then, eliminating stray animals constituted the sole preventive measure. City governments authorized the killing of dogs on the street and paid a bounty for the carcasses. As one scholar noted, “Not surprisingly, paying people to kill dogs was a misguided idea.”26 The bounty system made dog catching appealing to urban street youths and “unsavory characters.”27 It also provided those who engaged in dog catching with an incentive to steal pets to add to their earnings. Some cities established pounds to move the brutality out of sight. They began authorizing constables or employing “dog catchers” to capture and take stray dogs to the pound. One early account described the New York City dog pound as “a place of horror”28 and the image of the brutal dogcatcher speaks to the demonization of the agents of animal control, which continues today.29 The New York pound had “two sections—​one divided into individual compartments for ‘the better class of dogs’ and the other, a large pen for ‘curs of low degree.’ Owners had 48 hours to rescue their dogs and pay a $3 fine.”30 Because anyone could easily obtain a dog or cat from the street, few people searched for missing animals, and no adoption programs existed to rehome those left unclaimed.31 In New York, dogs met their fate by being loaded “up to 100 at a time … in a large iron cage and lowered into the East River by a derrick.”32 Workers hoisted the cage up after six minutes. According to an 1877 article in the New York Times, dogcatchers drowned over 700 dogs on just one July day.33 The pounds also sold unclaimed dogs in quantity to vivisectors for research. Pounds often paid a bounty for each dog, especially during the summer months when, as popular belief had it, rabies posed its highest risk.34 The pounds would then inform owners that their dogs would be killed if not redeemed. Dogs were often stolen for the bounty and redeemed by their owners, only to be stolen again. Consequently, many city pounds owed their existence to corruption, drawing revenues from the theft and ransom of pet dogs.

The Humane Movement The commonplace brutality inflicted on animals in full view of the public influenced the establishment of animal welfare organizations and the adoption of anticruelty laws.

 

102   Leslie Irvine Many of the protections commonly afforded to domestic animals, as well as to children, originated in a movement that emerged in eighteenth-​century England and flowered during the Victorian era.35 Although I cannot do justice to the genealogy of this trend, its influences include natural history, which decreased the perceived distance between humans and other species, the liberal Protestant mandate of sympathy for those less fortunate, abolitionism, and an increased awareness of and aversion to pain.36 The British led the way by founding the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, but Americans soon embraced their own “domestic ethic of kindness to animals.”37 Indeed, the United States had passed the first animal protection legislation in 1821, in Maine, a year before the British Parliament enacted Martin’s Act. Because it generated no organization charged with enforcement or with changing public behavior, the law “marked the initiation of concern, but not the birth of a social movement.”38 The movement began in 1866, when Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) and spearheaded the first anticruelty legislation in New York state.39 Organizations modeled after the ASPCA but independent of it appeared in Buffalo in 1867, and soon after, in Boston, San Francisco, and other cities. These societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals (SPCAs) focused on animal cruelty, but they did not establish shelters or carry out municipal animal control, at least initially. They primarily addressed the treatment of the overworked horses that were so essential to the economy and the considerable suffering inflicted on livestock during transport to slaughter. Bergh did not want to divert the legislative resources of the ASPCA into animal control.40 Moreover, despite his status as a champion of animal protection, Bergh did not intervene against the violent methods used in the municipal pounds, claiming that “the miserable life of the stray constituted the real cruelty.”41 Others saw matters differently. In 1858, two Philadelphia women, Elizabeth Morris and Annie Waln, began catching and sheltering stray animals to spare them the brutality of the city pound.42 They found homes for many animals and, at first, avoided killing those in good health. They soon had more animals than they could rehome, however, and they began to kill the unwanted ones using a lethal dose of chloroform, considered a humane alternative to the methods used in the pound. In 1888, they incorporated their organization as the Morris Refuge Association for Homeless and Suffering Animals. Meanwhile, the noted Philadelphian Caroline Earle White objected to the city pound’s role in supplying animals for vivisection.43 White had helped to form the Pennsylvania SPCA, but gender discrimination prohibited her from holding an office in the organization. She then formed a “Women’s Branch” of the Pennsylvania SPCA. With support from Morris and Waln, the members of the Women’s Branch established a “refuge for lost and homeless dogs, where they could be kept until homes could be found for them, or they [could] be otherwise disposed of.”44 Initially putting dogs to death using chloroform, they later developed a “carbonous oxide” gas chamber. They also built the first facility referred to as an animal shelter.45 Moreover, the Women’s Branch initiated the first contract with a city government to house strays and to humanely kill unclaimed animals. The City of Philadelphia paid $2500 toward the costs. This constitutes “the first attempt on the part of any society in the United States to handle the problem of

 

Animal Sheltering   103 caring for surplus or unwanted small animals and, as far as it can be ascertained, the first appropriation ever made by a municipality for humane work.”46 Much later, in 1894, the ASPCA assumed responsibility for animal control and sheltering in New York City, with funding coming from the revenues from new dog licensing laws. It would perform these services for the next one hundred years. Other cities soon followed. For example, the San Francisco SPCA, founded in 1890, took responsibility for animal control in 1905. The first animal shelters thus emerged in response to a series of social and cultural changes. Urbanization had made free-​roaming pets and strays, particularly dogs, a social problem. The violent solution to that problem conflicted with middle-​class sensibilities about the appropriate treatment of animals. The humanitarians objected to the brutal methods used to kill the animals, not to the killing itself. The sheltering community would not question the practice of killing animals until over a century later.

Reducing the Numbers The records of the ASPCA suggest that when humane organizations began to assume responsibility for animal control and sheltering, the number of animals killed actually rose.47 In New York, for example, replacing the bounty system with animal control officers meant that all the animals brought to the pound truly were strays, rather than pets, whose owners would reclaim them. Moreover, animal control efforts began to target free-​roaming cats, too, adding to the numbers. The need to kill the surplus, albeit humanely, was taken for granted as an effective and necessary aspect of animal control. But gradual change in the status of animals challenged this assumption, and in doing so, reshaped the institution of sheltering. Veterinarian Bruce Fogle characterized the change well, “In the simplest sense, dogs and cats moved indoors. Dogs moved first.”48 Animals lost their utilitarian roles, at least in the United States and other industrialized countries. The pet population in the United States increased dramatically following World War II. According to surveys by the American Veterinary Medical Association, there were an estimated twelve million dogs in the United States in 1946; within ten years, the number had more than doubled.49 Several factors contributed to the increase. The growth of suburbs, which meant houses with backyards, offered more families the opportunity to have pet dogs, in particular. Advances in veterinary medicine helped animals live longer lives, thus increasing their opportunities to reproduce. Commercial breeding, particularly of dogs, and retail sales increased.50 The large-​scale breeders known today as “puppy mills” began when the US Department of Agriculture proposed that farmers breed dogs to supplement income or replace lost crops. Struggling farmers, many having no knowledge of canine genetics or husbandry, replaced the chickens in their coops and rabbits in their hutches with dogs. The new “crop” met a growing demand, especially for purebred dogs. But not all these animals turned out to match the hopes of their owners, and shelters struggled to cope with the new problem they defined as “pet overpopulation.”51

 

104   Leslie Irvine The growing biomedical research community had a solution. Researchers had always experimented on stray animals, and they turned to the overflowing pounds and shelters to meet the increasing demand for animal subjects. Arguing that euthanasia wasted animals who had value in research, the National Society for Medical Research successfully lobbied for the enactment of laws, known to as pound seizure laws, requiring that municipal pounds release their unclaimed animals to research facilities. The requirement to relinquish dogs and cats, many of whom had been pets, for use in research first went into effect in Minnesota in 1949.52 Initially, widespread public support for medical research meant that pound seizure faced little opposition. When animal welfare advocates gained access to laboratories, however, and exposed the appalling conditions the animals endured, the practice of using former or potential pets in research became controversial.53 Once again, objections targeted the means by which the animals were killed. Death in a laboratory represented a cruel betrayal. However, shelters, perceived as places that protected animals, also killed former or potential pets. A 1973 survey estimated that shelters killed 13.5 million dogs and cats annually.54 Sterilization offered another way to reduce the population. Shelters and humane organizations had begun to educate the public about the need to spay or neuter their animals in the 1950s, when affordable surgery became available to the public. They redoubled their efforts in the 1970s.55 They collaborated with veterinarians to offer high-​volume, low-​cost spay and neuter clinics. Some states began to require the sterilization of adoptable animals in shelters so that no dogs or cats who left a shelter could contribute to the problem that had led them there in the first place. By 1982, a follow-​up survey of shelters estimated that annual euthanasia numbers had decreased to between 7.6 and 10 million animals.56 Although the discourse of sheltering had long portrayed a humane death as preferable to lingering in a shelter or living as a stray, some animal welfare professionals eventually began to condemn the practice of euthanasia altogether. The precise influences on this current of thought remain unclear, but the 1975 publication of Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, and the subsequent growth of the animal rights movement, unquestionably ranks among them.57 Although shelters are not animal rights organizations, and Singer’s argument focused on animals used for food, the challenge he posed to long-​standing justifications that excluded animals from ethical consideration had wide implications. In 1984, the Best Friends Animal Society opened a sanctuary in Utah with the aim of ending the killing of animals in shelters. In a 1989 essay, animal advocate Ed Duvin took the institution of sheltering to task for “the prevailing mentality regarding the unconscionable death toll.”58 He described sheltering as “as an assembly line of slaughter.”59 The same year, the San Francisco SPCA gave up its contract to provide the city’s animal control services, which had involved killing unclaimed animals. The organization subsequently took steps to end the euthanasia of healthy, adoptable animals. In 1994, the nonprofit Maddie’s Fund was created with the goal of creating a “no-​kill nation.” By the end of the decade, the no-​kill movement had established itself on the social landscape.

 

Animal Sheltering   105

Conflict and Convergence Whereas animal sheltering had long consisted of a variety of facilities run as public or private concerns, or as a combination, and all performed euthanasia as more or less a necessary evil, the no-​kill movement added another dimension to the mix. Some organizations object to the term no-​kill because it vilifies other organizations as “pro-​kill.” In practice, no-​kill facilities euthanize animals with untreatable illnesses or injuries or non-​rehabilitatable behavioral issues, and even in facilities that continue to euthanize animals, “the why, the how, and the circumstances of euthanasia vary considerably.”60 Serious, untreatable health problems or unmanageable behavioral issues can justify euthanasia. Organizations striving to reduce euthanasia rates have thus had to reconsider what constitutes an “adoptable” animal. The specialty field of shelter medicine emerged to provide veterinary care for homeless animals.61 By treating an increasing array of injuries, illnesses, and conditions, as well as by spaying and neutering, shelter veterinarians have contributed to the reduction in euthanasia rates. Some facilities implemented foster-​care programs, through which volunteers provide temporary housing for very young, injured, or ill animals who would otherwise be killed. Because facilities taking a no-​kill approach must provide lifetime homes for animals, becoming sanctuaries in practice if not in name, some have developed criteria to limit admission. Others accept every animal, regardless of age or condition, prompting the designation “open admission.” Arluke explains that although “everyone in the [no-​kill] debate shares a passionate concern for the welfare of animals, a rift over this issue divides the shelter community.”62 To try resolve it, a group of animal welfare professionals and shelter administrators met in 2004 “for the purpose of building bridges across varying philosophies, developing relationships and creating goals focused on significantly reducing the euthanasia of healthy and treatable companion animals in the United States.”63 They created the Asilomar Accords, named for the California conference center at which the meeting took place. The accords established principles, definitions, and metrics aimed at providing a common ground on which organizations could reduce, if not end, the practice of shelter killing. This statement appears in the guidelines: We acknowledge that the euthanasia of healthy and treatable animals is the sad responsibility of some animal welfare organizations that neither desired nor sought this task. We believe that the euthanasia of healthy and treatable animals is a community-​wide problem requiring community-​based solutions. We also recognize that animal welfare organizations can be leaders in bringing about a change in social and other factors that result in the euthanasia of healthy and treatable animals, including the compounding problems of some pet owners’/​guardians’ failure to spay and neuter; properly socialize and train; be tolerant of; provide veterinary care to; or take responsibility for companion animals.64

Some no-​kill advocates have criticized the participating organizations as “architects of the status quo.”65 But working toward the “change in social and other factors” mentioned

 

106   Leslie Irvine in the accords has dramatically reshaped animal sheltering. For example, recognizing that returning stray animals to their homes can reduce euthanasia rates, many facilities engage in “proactive redemption” by trying to locate the owners rather than wait passively for the owners to search for their lost dog or cat. Facilities also promote, and often provide, animal identification measures such as implanted microchips.66 In addition, facilities have stopped “waiting patiently for customers to come to them and instead develop more aggressive adoption strategies.”67 This has meant improving public-​ relations efforts, making adoptable animals more visible through print and social media, and bringing them to the people at community events, rather than waiting for people to visit the shelter. In some cases, increasing adoptions has meant implementing open adoption policies, which subject potential guardians to far less scrutiny than do traditional policies that involve probing into guardians’ abilities to care for animals.68 The goal of increasing adoptions has also meant making shelters appealing places for people to visit, rather than death chambers or warehouses. The most progressive facilities incorporate such features as natural light, air exchange, and radiant-​heat flooring, which assist in disease and odor control.69 Finally, the implementation of animal transfer programs attempt to match the distribution of animals with potential adopters. In these programs, shelters in communities with high sterilization rates, and thus lower numbers of animals coming from the local area, accept animals from shelters that might euthanize for lack of space or resources. The “destination” shelters typically have high adoption rates, in contrast to the sending or “source” shelters, which often have little demand for adoptable animals and euthanasia rates as high as 50 percent.70

Conclusion The efforts to reduce or end the killing of animals in shelters are succeeding. To be sure, the success is uneven, but an increasing number of facilities save 90 percent or more of the animals taken in. In this and other aspects, twenty-​first-​century animal shelters differ dramatically from the pounds of the nineteenth century. Stopping or reducing the killing has reshaped goals and priorities of the institution of sheltering. Shelters now perform legal and social functions that incorporate them into the infrastructure of the surrounding community. Along with housing and rehoming lost or unwanted animals, many have full or partial responsibility for municipal animal control operations. Many shelters enforce state and local laws by housing the animal victims in abuse cases until the court proceeding and by providing dog and cat licensing. In addition, some offer citizens who have been displaced because of a disaster temporary housing for their pets. Some employ animal behaviorists and trainers who offer consultations and classes to pet owners. Undoubtedly, demographic factors, such as the socioeconomic status and education level of a region influence the kind of facility found within a given community. Many organizations lack the resources to offer much beyond housing lost and unwanted animals. Overall, however, the no-​kill ethic has profoundly reshaped sheltering as an

 

Animal Sheltering   107 institution. The evolution from the mass killing of strays in pounds to their rehabilitation and rehoming in humane shelters parallels changing beliefs about the value and appropriate treatment of animals. It reflects the social change through which dogs and cats gained emotional value and became deserving of ethical consideration. In addition, developments within sheltering reveal both the shifting status of animals as subjects of law and public policy and the roles animals have played in the creation of those laws and policies. For instance, the presence of free-​roaming dogs, in particular, influenced the development of regulatory systems to ensure order and safeguard public health. As urbanization increasingly made dogs problematic, they became both the reasons for new efforts at animal control and subjects of those efforts. In the bounty system, whereby city governments paid for the capture of dogs, the role of animals in negotiations over rights becomes apparent. The bounty system represents the wielding of public authority by one group of private citizens against another. It pitted dog owners, who had assumed a right to allow their animals to wander, against those whose livelihood depended on the killing of free-​roaming dogs. In the criticism of the corruption of the pounds and the criminality of the bounty system, the role of animals in negotiations over public morality becomes apparent. Reform efforts, such as formally constituted governmental departments staffed by uniformed animal control officers, reveal both the era’s reverence for expertise and the ways that animals have influenced bureaucratic authority. Contractual arrangements between shelters and municipal governments for the provision of animal control further indicate how the presence of animals has shaped forms of governance that bridge the public and private spheres. Pound seizure laws reveal the status of animals as subjects of state power. Opposition to the laws, and their repeal or amendment in many states, represents the redefining of that status and the reassertion of the mission of animal shelters as places of protection. In these, and many other ways, examining the social and cultural significance of animal sheltering not only sheds light on changing animal welfare practices; it also reveals the far-​reaching influence that animals have had on our social institutions.

Notes 1. See Stephen Zawistowski and Julie Morris, “The Evolving Animal Shelter,” in Shelter Medicine for Veterinarians and Staff, ed. L. Miller and S. Zawistowski (Ames, IA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 3–​9. 2. From 1994 to 1997, the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy collected data on shelters and “organizations believed to be sheltering” more than 100 dogs or cats in the Unites States. The number totaled 5400. See http://​www.petpopulation.org/​statsurvey.html (accessed 6/​22/​14). The figure more commonly reported is 4700. See Stephen Zawistowski, Julie Morris, M. D. Salman, and Rebecca Ruch-​Gallie, “Population Dynamics, Overpopulation, and the Welfare of Companion Animals: New Insights on Old and New Data,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 1 (1998): 193–​206. 3. Phillip S. Arkow and Shelby Dow, “The Ties That Do Not Bind: A Study of the Human-​ Animal Bonds That Fail,” in The Pet Connection: Its Influence on Our Health and Quality

 

108   Leslie Irvine of Life, ed. R. Anderson, B. Hart and L. Hart (Minneapolis, MN: Center to Study Human-​ Animal Relationships and Environments, 1984), 348–​354; Natalie DiGiacomo, Arnold Arluke, and Gary Patronek, “Surrendering Pets to Shelters: The Relinquisher’s Perspective,” Anthrozoös 11 (1998): 41–​51; Philip H. Kass, John C. New Jr., Janet M. Scarlett, and Mo D. Salman, “Understanding Animal Companion Surplus in the United States: Relinquishment of Nonadoptables to Animal Shelters for Euthanasia,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 4 (2001): 237–​248; Deborah D. Miller, Sara R. Staats, Christie Partlo, and Kelly Rada, “Factors Associated with the Decision to Surrender a Pet to an Animal Shelter,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 209 (1996): 738–​742; John G. New Jr., Mo D. Salman, Janet M. Scarlett, Philip H. Kass, Jayne A. Vaughn, Stacy Scherr, and William J. Kelch. “Moving: Characteristics of Dogs and Cats and Those Relinquishing Them to 12 U.S. Animal Shelters,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 2 (1999): 83–​96; Gary J. Patronek, Lawrence T. Glickman, Alan M. Beck, George P. McCabe, and Carol Ecker, “Risk Factors for Relinquishment of Cats to an Animal Shelter,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 209 (1996): 582–​588; Gary J. Patronek, Lawrence T. Glickman, Alan M. Beck, George P. McCabe, and Carol Ecker, “Risk Factors for Relinquishment of Dogs to an Animal Shelter,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 209 (1996): 572–​581; M. D. Salman, John C. New Jr., Janet M. Scarlett, Philip H. Kass, Rebecca Ruch-​Gallie, and Suzanne Hetts, “Human and Animal Factors Related to the Relinquishment of Dogs and Cats in 12 Selected Animal Shelters in the United States,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 1 (1998):  207–​226; Mo D. Salman, Jennifer Hutchinson, Rebecca Ruch-​Gallie, Lori Kogan, John C. New Jr., Philip H. Kass, Janet M. Scarlett, “Behavioral Reasons for Relinquishment of Dogs and Cats to 12 Shelters,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 3 (2000): 93–​106; Janet M. Scarlett, Mo D. Salman, John G. New, Jr., and Philip H. Kass, “Reasons for Relinquishment of Companion Animals in U.S. Animal Shelters:  Selected Health and Personal Issues,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 2 (1999): 41–​57; Elsie R. Shore, “Returning a Recently Adopted Companion Animal: Adopters’ Reasons for and Reactions to the Failed Adoption Experience,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 8 (2005): 187–​198; Elsie R. Shore, and Kathrine Girrens, “Characteristics of Animals Entering an Animal Control or Humane Society Shelter in a Midwestern City,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 4 (2001): 105–​115; Elsie R. Shore, Connie L. Petersen, and Deanna K. Douglas, “Moving as a Reason for Pet Relinquishment: A Closer Look,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 6 (2003): 39–​52. 4. Leslie Irvine, If You Tame Me: Understanding our Connection with Animals (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004); Aline H. Kidd, Robert M. Kidd, and Carol C. George, “Successful and Unsuccessful Pet Adoptions,” Psychological Reports 70 (1992):  547–​561; Linda C. Marston, Pauleen C. Bennett, and Grahame J. Coleman, “Adopting Shelter Dogs: Owner Experiences of the First Month Post-​Adoption.” Anthrozoös 18 (2005): 358–​378; Laura Neidhart and Renee Boyd, “Companion Animal Adoption Study,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 5 (2002): 175–​192; Emily Weiss, Katherine Miller, Heather Mohan-​ Gibbons, and Carla Vela, “Why Did You Choose This Pet? Adopters and Pet Selection Preferences in Five Animal Shelters in the United States,” Animals 2 (2012): 144–​159. 5. Lila Miller and Kate Hurley, eds., Infectious Disease Management in Animal Shelters (Ames, IA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009); Lila Miller and Stephen Zawistowski, eds., Shelter Medicine for Veterinarians and Staff (Ames, IA: Blackwell Publishing, 2012). 6. Leslie Irvine, “The Problem of Unwanted Pets: A Case Study in How Institutions ‘Think’ about Clients’ Needs,” Social Problems 50 (2003): 550–​566.

 

Animal Sheltering   109 7. Arnold Arluke, Just a Dog: Understanding Animal Cruelty and Ourselves (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006). 8. Nicola Taylor, “In It for the Nonhuman Animals: Animal Welfare, Moral Certainty, and Disagreements,” Society & Animals 12 (2004): 317–​339. 9. Sarah Balcom and Arnold Arluke, “A Comparison of Open versus Traditional Shelter Approaches,” Anthrozoös 14 (2001):  135–​150; Leslie Irvine, “Animal Problems/​People Skills: Emotional and Interactional Strategies in Humane Education,” Society & Animals 10 (2002): 63–​91. 10. Janet Alger and Steven F. Alger, “Cat Culture, Human Culture: An Ethnographic Study of a Cat Shelter.” Society & Animals 7 (1999): 199–​218; Janet Alger and Steven F. Alger, Cat Culture:  The Social World of a Cat Shelter (Philadelphia, PA:  Temple University Press, 2003); Deborah L. Wells and Peter G. Hepper, “The Behavior of Visitors towards Dogs Housed in an Animal Rescue Shelter,” Anthrozoös 14 (2001): 12–​18. 11. Sandra L. Neumann, “Animal Welfare Volunteers: Who Are They and Why Do They Do What They Do?” Anthrozoös 23 (2010): 351–​364. 12. Lila Miller, “Animal Sheltering in the United States:  Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” Veterinary Medicine 102 (2007): 656–​663. 13. Merritt Clifton, “The Animal People 2013 Shelter Killing Report,” 2013, http://​www. yavapaihumane.org/​assets/​yavapaihumane/​files/​$cms$/​100/​1781.pdf (accessed 7/​20/​14). 14. Arnold Arluke, “Managing Emotions in an Animal Shelter,” in Animals and Human Society, ed. J. Serpell (New York: Routledge, 1994), 145–​165. 15. Arnold Arluke, “Coping with Euthanasia:  A  Case Study of Shelter Culture,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 198 (1991):  1176–​1180; Arnold Arluke and Clinton R. Sanders. 1996. Regarding Animals (Philadelphia, PA:  Temple University Press, 1996); Stephanie S. Frommer and Arnold Arluke, “Loving Them to Death: Blame-​ Displacing Strategies of Animal Shelter Workers and Surrenderers,” Society & Animals 7 (1999): 1–​16; Charlie L. Reeve, Steven G. Rogelberg, Christiane Spitzmüller, and Natalie DiGiacomo, “The Caring-​Killing Paradox:  Euthanasia-​Related Strain among Animal-​ Shelter Workers,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 35 (2005): 119–​143; Charlie L. Reeve, Christiane Spitzmüller, Steven G. Rogelberg, Alan Walker, Lisa Schultz, and Olga Clark, “Employee Reactions and Adjustment to Euthanasia-​Related Work: Identifying Turning-​ Point Events through Retrospective Narratives,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 7 (2004): 1–​25. 16. Joshua Frank, “An Interactive Model of Human and Companion Animal Dynamics: The Ecology and Economics of Dog Overpopulation and the Human Costs of Addressing the Problem,” Human Ecology 32 (2004): 107–​130; Joshua Frank and Pamela Carlisle-​Frank, “Companion Animal Overpopulation: Trends and Results of Major Efforts to Reach a ‘No-​ Kill’ Nation” (presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA, 2003); Francis E. Hamilton, “Leading and Organizing Social Change for Companion Animals,” Anthrozoös 23 (2010): 277–​292. 17. Zawistowski and Morris, “Evolving Animal Shelter”; Stephen Zawistowski, Companion Animals in Society (Clifton Park, NY: Thompson, 2008). 18. John Duffy, History of Public Health in New York City, 1625-​1866, vol. 1 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1968); Jessica Wang, “Dogs and the Making of the American State: Voluntary Association, State Power, and the Politics of Animal Control in New York City, 1850–​1920,” Journal of American History 98 (4) (2012): 998–​1024. 19. Duffy, History of Public Health, p. 11.

 

110   Leslie Irvine 20. See James Serpell, In the Company of Animals (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 21. Zawistowski, Companion Animals, p. 72. 22. See Enrique Alonso and Ana Recarte Vicente-​Arche, with Claudia Alonso, “Pigs in New York City: A Study on 19th Century Urban ‘Sanitation,’” Madrid: Instituto Franklin, 2008, http://​www.institutofranklin.net/​sites/​default/​files/​fckeditor/​CS%20Pigs%20in%20 New%20York.pdf (accessed 4/​19/​14); Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Review 4 (1985): 899–​935; Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Wang, “Dogs and the Making.” 23. Dickens, Charles, American Notes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1898), 101. 24. Grier, Pets in America, 215–​216. 25. Benjamin Brady, “The Politics of the Pound:  Controlling Loose Dogs in Nineteenth-​ Century New York City,” Jefferson Journal of Science and Culture 2 (2012): 9–​25, at p. 10. 26. Brady, “Politics of the Pound,” p. 10. 27. Wang, “Dogs and the Making,” 100. 28. Roswell Cheney McRae, The Humane Movement: A Descriptive Survey, Prepared on the Henry Bergh Foundation for the Promotion of Humane Education in Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press, 1910), 87. 29. See Arnold Arluke, Brute Force: Animal Police and the Challenge of Cruelty (West Lafayette IN: Purdue University Press, 2004); C. Eddie Palmer, “Dog Catchers: A Descriptive Study,” Qualitative Sociology 1 (1978): 79–​107. 30. Cynthia Crossen, “Dogs’ Role in Society Evolved; Their Catcher Never Won Our Hearts,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 5, 2007, B1. 31. Martha C. Armstrong, Susan Tomasello, and Christyna Hunter, “From Pets to Companion Animals,” in The State of the Animals, ed. D. Salem and A. Rowan (Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, 2001), 71–​85. 32. Crossen, “Dogs’ Role in Society”; see also Diane L. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights (Athens, OH: Swallow Press /​Ohio University Press, 2006); Zawistowski, Companion Animals. 33. See http://​nyti.ms/​1lq8Tip (accessed 6/​25/​14). 34. Phil Arkow, “Animal Control Laws and Enforcement,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 198 (1991): 1164–​1171; Brady 2012; Crossen, “Dogs’ Role in Society”; Wang “Dogs and the Making.” 35. See James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 36. See Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-​ American Culture,” American Historical Review 100 (1995):  303–​334; Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless:  Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2011); Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World:  Changing Attitudes in England 1500-​1800. London:  Allen Lane, 1983); Bernard Oreste Unti, “The Quality of Mercy: Organized Animal Protection in the United States 1866–​1930” (PhD diss., American University, 2002). 37. Grier, Pets in America, 127–​181.

 

Animal Sheltering   111 38. David Favre and Vivien Tsang, “The Development of Anti-​Cruelty Laws during the 1800s,” Detroit College of Law Review 1 (1993): 1–​35, at p. 9. 39. Stephen Zawistowski, “The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA),” in Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, vol. 1, 2nd ed., ed. M. Bekoff (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2010), 13–​16. 40. Marion S. Lane and Stephen L. Zawistowski, Heritage of Care: The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Westport CT: Praeger, 2008). 41. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty, 73. 42. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty; Sidney H. Coleman, Humane Society Leaders in America (Albany: American Humane Association, 1924). 43. Coleman, Humane Society Leaders. White also founded the American Anti-​Vivisection Society in 1883. 44. Unti, “Quality of Mercy,” 167–​168. 45. Bernard Oreste Unti, “Caroline Earle White,” in Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare, ed. M. Bekoff and C. Meaney (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 362. 46. Coleman, Humane Society Leaders, 181; see also Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty; and Craig Brestrup, Disposable Animals:  Ending the Tragedy of Throwaway Pets (Leander, TX: Camino Bay Books, 1997). 47. Zawistowski et al., “Population Dynamics.” 48. Bruce Fogle, “The Changing Roles of Animals in Western Society: Influences upon and from the Veterinary Profession,” Anthrozoös 12 (1999): 234–​239, at p. 234. 49. Joe R. Held, Ernest S. Tierkel, and James H. Steele, “Rabies in Man and Animals in the United States, 1946-​65,” Public Health Reports 82 (1967): 1009–​1018. 50. Grier, Pets in America. 51. See Armstrong, Tomasello, and Hunter, “From Pets to Companion Animals”; but see also Nathan J. Winograd, Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No-​Kill Revolution in America (Los Angeles: Almaden Books, 2007). 52. Cecile C. Edwards, “The Pound Seizure Controversy: A Suggested Compromise in the Use of Impounded Animals for Research and Education,” Journal of Energy, Natural Resources & Environmental Law 11 (1990):  241–​264; Juli Danielle Gilliam, “Fido Goes to the Lab: Amending the Animal Welfare Act to Require Animal Rescue Facilities to Disclose Pound Seizure Practices to Pet Owners,” Journal of Animal Law 5 (2009): 103–​128; Allie Phillips, How Shelter Pets Are Brokered for Experimentation: Understanding Pound Seizure (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); Andrew N. Rowan, Of Mice, Models, and Men: A Critical Evaluation of Animal Research (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), ch. 10. 53. The event that changed public opinion on the use of animals in laboratory research involved the theft, and subsequent death, of a dog named Pepper in 1965. The owner saw her picture in a magazine article on dog dealers. The family went to retrieve her from the dealer’s “farm,” but was turned away. They contacted US Representative Joseph Resnick, who was also denied entrance. Pepper died in an experimental procedure at Montefiore Hospital in New York. Resnick subsequently introduced a bill that required the licensing of dog dealers and their oversight by the US Department of Agriculture. Many states have since repealed or amended pound seizure laws. Nineteen states ban the practice of pound seizure altogether, and others leave the decision up to counties or municipalities. Currently, only Oklahoma still requires the release of animals to research facilities.

112

Leslie Irvine

54. Andrew N. Rowan and Jeff Williams, “The Success of Companion Animal Management Programs: A Review,” Anthrozoös 1 (1987): 110–122. 55. Elizabeth A. Clancy and Andrew N. Rowan, “Companion Animal Demographics in the United States: A Historical Perspective,” in The State of the Animals II, ed. D. Salem and A. Rowan (Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, 2003), 9–26. 56. Rowan and Williams, “Success of Companion.” 57. Bernard Unti and Andrew N. Rowan, “A Social History of Postwar Animal Protection,” in The State of the Animals, ed. D. Salem and A. Rowan (Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, 2001), 21–37. 58. Edward S. Duvin, “In the Name of Mercy,” animalines 4 (1989): 11, at p. 3. 59. Duvin, “In the Name of Mercy,” p. 3. 60. Arnold Arluke, “The No-Kill Controversy: Manifest and Latent Sources of Tension,” in The State of the Animals II, ed. D. Salem and A. Rowan (Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, 2003), 67–83, at p. 68. 61. See Miller and Hurley, Infectious Disease Management; Miller and Zawistowski, Shelter Medicine. 62. Arluke, “No-Kill Controversy,” 67. 63. See http://www.asilomaraccords.org/ (accessed 7/5/14). 64. http://www.asilomaraccords.org/guiding_principles.html (accessed 7/5/14). 65. http://www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=2641 (accessed 7/20/14). 66. See Linda K. Lord, Thomas E. Wittum, Amy K. Ferketich, Julie A. Funk, and Päivi J. Rajala-Schultz, “Search and Identification Methods That Owners Use to Find a Lost Dog,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 230 (2007): 211–216; and Linda K. Lord, Walter Ingwersen, Janet L. Gray, and David J. Wintz, “Characterization of Animals with Microchips Entering Animal Shelters,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 235 (2009): 160–167. 67. Brestrup, Disposable Animals, 64. 68. Balcom and Arluke, “Animal Adoption as Negotiated Order.” 69. Lucinda Schlaffer and Paul Bonacci, “Shelter Design,” in Shelter Medicine for Veterinarians and Staff, 2nd ed., ed. L. Miller and S. Zawistowski (Ames, IA:  Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 21–35. 70. See http://www.petsmartcharities.org/sites/default/files/PetSmart-Charities-Rescue-WagginProgram-FAQs_0.pdf (accessed 6/15/14).

Further Reading Harbolt, Tami. Bridging the Bond: The Cultural Construction of the Shelter Pet. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2003. Leigh, Diane, and Marilee Geyer. One at a Time: A Week in an American Animal Shelter. Santa Cruz, CA: No Voice Unheard, 2003.

 

Chapter 6

Roaming  D o g s Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema

A substantial but unknown proportion of the roughly estimated 500 million domestic dogs worldwide are free-​roaming or poorly supervised.1 While efforts in modern Western countries to dramatically reduce the numbers of roaming dogs have been largely successful (except in some dense urban or very rural environments),2 these dog populations are common in many underdeveloped or developing nations3 because of the traditional culture, a lack of emphasis on dog population control, and rapid urbanization.4 As is often the case, these dogs occupy a liminal position; they are considered out of place and to not be in their prescribed role in society.5 Roaming dogs are perceived as neither domestic nor wild6 and as quite separate from and foreign to the human community, occupying a status that defines them as problematic, outcast, sometimes illegal,7 whom residents should avoid,8 control, or regulate,9 and perhaps even kill, because they are seen as disorderly, dirty, dangerous, and not part of a fixed social relationship.10 There are numerous historical instances of roaming dogs being viewed as pariahs in the human community. They may be treated with indifference, scorn, and sometimes brutality, as has happened to other species for shorter durations, such as the “great” French cat massacre in the 1730s,11 the American sparrow “war” in the 1870s,12 and the nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century extermination of wolves in the American plains states.13 For example, in some communities in India, the view of street dogs as separate from and unwanted in the human community is embedded in the country’s political and legal history. Roaming dogs have long been considered outcasts in some communities to such an extent that residents are often intolerant of them. In some regions of India, roaming dogs have been given caste names that label them pariahs,14 a view that some say almost led to a dog “genocide” by the Bangalore Municipal Corporation.15 This view of dogs stems from postcolonial British rule that radically changed many aspects of life in India, including human-​animal relations.16 Since early colonial times, the word pariah, derived from paraiyar, a low-​caste group found in the southernmost part of India, denoted any person or animal who was widely despised or avoided. However, for

 

114    Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema British colonial rulers, the word pariah applied to India’s lowest castes, human outcasts in general, and also perhaps to India’s street dogs. Although roaming dogs have been present in many societies for centuries, only recently have researchers turned their attention to studying their welfare and impact on people. Four decades ago, Beck’s seminal Ecology of Stray Dogs17 opened the door for researchers to study the behavior and health of these animals, the kinds of public health and economic problems they cause, and the ability of veterinary interventions to manage their numbers and physical condition. Despite the significance of this groundbreaking work and the research that followed it, basic questions remain to be explored that would allow us to fully understand not just the roaming dogs themselves, but their impact on human society as well. This chapter takes an original approach to understanding worldwide efforts to deal with roaming and unhealthy dogs in economically disadvantaged areas. Rather than focus on the ways these efforts impact dogs, as is typical in veterinary or epidemiological research, or on how these efforts might curtail the public-​health and medical risks the dogs pose,18 we explore how the dogs affect the social psychological and economic stability of communities. More specifically, we review the adverse effects that roaming or unhealthy dog populations can have on the human community, including negative or indifferent human-​ canine relationships; weakened or conflicted social ties; decreased quality of life because of dog nuisances, lack of safety; encounters with injured, dead, or suffering dogs; and economic losses from reduced tourism; livestock predation; and disease management. Lastly, we review how dog population management can improve human community welfare in ways that are as yet not well researched.

Interactions with Dogs When dogs are seen as a social problem, attitudes toward them can vary widely; human–​ roaming dog relationships can fall on a continuum from strong disregard to strong regard from one community to another or even within communities that are divided in their view of dogs. Thus, dog-​related problems do not exist in a social vacuum, but are perceived and reacted to by local residents along a continuum of lesser or greater tolerance that will affect, and be affected by, the efficacy of humane interventions. At one extreme, reports suggest that people sometimes strongly dislike roaming dogs, seeing them as objects to be avoided or destroyed. For example, 26 percent of Samoans questioned in one study said they believed that the “harming or killing of dogs was good for Samoan society.”19 Support for these reports also comes from the passage of governmental laws that legally define dogs as unwanted pests that should be destroyed. In Romania, a recently enacted eradication program, also known as the “slaughter law,” legalized the mass euthanasia of dogs to reduce the size of a dog population seen by many, but certainly not all, citizens as a blight in need of elimination.20

 

Roaming Dogs   115 Those who are intolerant of dogs on the street are often disinterested in them or treat them roughly; this can create a self-​fulfilling prophecy by making the dogs less sociable or frightened of humans, which, in turn, can result in threatening behavior toward humans. This antisocial behavior then reinforces the aversion or hatred that already exists toward these dogs, preventing people from seeing them as capable of acting in friendly and solicitous ways, and further justifying their disregard and mistreatment. It is unsurprising, therefore, that in communities with more tolerant or caretaking individuals, more sociable free-​roaming dog populations are common, while in less tolerant communities, less-​sociable dog populations are common. Some communities can have conflicting or even contradictory attitudes toward dogs. For example, in Colombo City, Sri Lanka, Hasler and colleagues21 found that before humane interventions, about 40 percent of respondents said they “liked dogs very much,” that dogs are “valuable possessions,” and that “dogs add happiness to people’s lives”; whereas more than 50 percent said that they “don’t like having street dogs around on their street,” and that “street dogs pose a danger to people.” And in Samoa, while 77 percent of respondents said they “liked” roaming dogs, few said they cared for dogs who were not theirs.22 This contradiction in caring behaviors is also expressed in cultures in which people will keep dogs when they are puppies but abandon them when they are more mature, an act that is rarely punished by law.23 More caring relationships with roaming dogs can occur in communities in which people form loose affiliations with dogs at the neighborhood level, rather than their being strongly connected to one family. This practice, which is widespread, is referred to as community dog-​keeping.24 With weaker human-​canine affiliations, there is tolerance or benign coexistence between residents and dogs on the streets, or even affection, as people may feed the dogs and perhaps name or play with them but do not assume further responsibility for their care. Community dog-​keeping practices and tolerance for the animals may vary by social class. For example, in the Bahamas, the term “potcake” is used to describe local mixed-​breed dogs on the streets who are looked down on—​maligned as mongrels and seen as lower-​class by wealthier people who own purebred dogs and who blame the potcakes, and the impoverished owners who care for them, for the nuisance the roaming dogs cause.25 And yet, other residents may feel a stronger individual connection to the dogs and assume ownership and responsibility for their care, even if this care is sometimes different from what many North Americans and Europeans would expect. When families allow their dogs to roam freely, there may be less personal contact with the family dogs, and potentially a less ​close relationship, as the dogs receive most of their social attention from conspecifics as opposed to their human family.26 In parts of rural Mexico, between 60 percent and 85 percent of households claiming to own dogs allow them to roam, but also view them as a source of “protection” and companionship. However, anecdotal and survey data suggest that in some locations, where roaming dogs appear to be at least partially owned, many residents do not admit to allowing their dogs to roam, for example, in Ethiopia,27 Bosnia,28 Taiwan,29 and in the Bahamas,30 where 70 percent of owners deny that their dogs have access to the street, perhaps because they fear fines or punishment.

 

116    Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema While most people deny letting their own dogs roam, many residents believe that other people have abandoned or released dogs.31 This suggests that residents tend to underreport their own dog abandonment and to blame others for creating the roaming dog population. Alternatively, other people suggest the converse when it comes to locating responsibility for roaming dogs—​namely, that there is a state of collective ignorance among residents, who come to believe, often incorrectly, that most street dogs are unowned and truly feral, except for those they take care of, when, in fact, their neighbors are thinking and doing the same thing.32 Although the responsibility and care of dogs in these situations differ from many modern Western pet-​keeping patterns, in which dogs are typically confined and their movements controlled by their owners, this does not prevent owners from being sufficiently attached to their dogs to suffer both the emotional highs and lows associated with close human-​animal relationships. The fact that these dogs roam means their owners will frequently lose their pets and experience the trauma associated with these untoward experiences. For example, in Taiwan, where a significant number of dog owners either keep their dogs outside their homes or allow them to wander off and become lost, more than one-​third of dog owners studied reported having lost a dog or having had one escape. In parts of Kenya, dog-​keeping is common, but residents cannot meet the animals’ basic needs33; owners are forced to allow their dogs to forage for food since they cannot feed them properly at home.34 In addition, the more dogs are allowed to wander the streets, the more likely it is that they will be lost, injured, killed in traffic or by another dog, poisoned, abused, caught by animal control authorities, or mistakenly “rescued” by concerned tourists who think the dogs are truly unowned. On the opposite end of the scale are dogs who are owned and kept close to home, but for whom adequate care may not be available. One major barrier to providing adequate guardianship can be poverty or lack of access to resources (especially veterinary resources),35 though poverty does not necessarily lead to dogs’ roaming, nor do the dogs of poor people always roam. For example, in Dominica, many “passive” owners cannot afford to take their pets for veterinary care when they are sick, let alone for preventive care, which almost no one can afford or even consider.36 Poverty may also prevent people from reclaiming missing dogs from animal-​control centers, which may be located in difficult-​to-​reach locations and require payment of unaffordable fines. Gender also influences how people take responsibility for dogs they consider to be theirs, so that interest in and responsibility for dogs can vary within one family. In some societies, it is common that one person—​for instance, the male head of household—​feels some connection to the dog, but others in the family do not because of the gendered nature of human–​street dog relationships,.37 For example, in the Bahamas38 or Samoa, almost three-​quarters of dog owners are male.39 As Serpell40 observes, women in undeveloped or developing nations may have more negative views of dogs because they and their children face disproportionate danger from roaming dogs.41 On the other hand, gender expectations can make owners resist humane interventions, such as men who reject the idea of neutering male dogs,42 although some studies provide contrary findings.43

 

Roaming Dogs   117

Quality of Life At a basic level, roaming dogs or those whose owners are inadequate guardians can adversely affect residents’ quality of life. For example, respondents in southern Sri Lanka described stray-​dog problems as the second most common source of neighborhood stress in their community.44 In Cambodia, nearly 63 percent of respondents said that ownerless street dogs caused them problems.45 Even in developed nations, roaming dogs can be perceived as a serious community problem. In one Italian study, 93 percent of respondents said they considered roaming dogs to be a problem because of personal safety, animal-​welfare, public-​health, and environmental sanitation issues,46 while American mayors list complaints about roaming and stray dogs as their most common problem.47 Of course, the perception of dogs as a social problem should be put into a broader context by comparing it to other community problems, though few studies do this. Those that do typically show that residents are sometimes more concerned about other issues. For example, in Oaxaca, Mexico, one study’s respondents considered drug trafficking, drug addiction, unemployment, and bad drainage to be their main problems; none considered dog-​related problems to be major, though when asked, most villagers acknowledged that dogs were a problem, especially because of their large numbers and possible aggression.48 Nevertheless, even when there is greater concern for other issues, dog-​related problems can still be a significant if not formidable social, public-​health, and veterinary issue for the residents of many communities.

Feeling Insecure and Unsafe Dog bites can make residents feel unsafe or insecure because they fear attacks, mauling, disease transmission, or even death, despite the fact that the vast majority of roaming dogs are friendly or submissive to humans and pose no threat.49 For example, in Guatemala, more than 80 percent of respondents claimed their families were afraid of dogs because of the potential risk of physical harm and possible disease transmission.50 When certain areas of cities are deemed to be aesthetically unappealing or unsafe, residents will view them as hotspots to avoid.51 Avoidance of these hotspots, in turn, degrades residents’ quality of life by creating psychological and physical barriers to a healthy lifestyle: there is reduced “walkability” in villages or towns or in the extent to which residents feel that it is easy, pleasant, and safe to walk to goods, services, and recreation52; use businesses and other city services; informally meet in public places and social forums53; and bike or jog.54 Roaming dogs have been found to be one of several urban deterrents to walkability, along with the physical incivilities of graffiti, garbage, litter, and the like,55 that might inhibit some residents from walking or biking on certain streets, using particular parks,

 

118    Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema or taking their own dogs for walks. For example, though the information is not often cited in his Sri Lankan study, Dayaratne says that roaming and sometimes domestic dogs deter pedestrians, especially children, the elderly, and the weak.56 Similarly, in a distressed section of Houston, roaming dogs were viewed as an environmental threat to public safety that reduced walkability in that area of the city57; and in Sparks, Texas, 81  percent of sampled residents claimed that dogs sometimes prevented them from walking outdoors.58 There are also reports of people in cities populated with roaming dogs, such as Bangkok, Thailand, being warned to not walk down certain streets.59 Children, in particular, can feel threatened around dogs, according to anecdotal and research reports. In an Arizona community, children feared being attacked by dogs as they walked to school because of packs of up to fifteen Chihuahuas that have allegedly chased children there.60 Indeed, studies report that urban children in general fear roaming dogs, even in the absence of rabies concerns.61 Fear of being bitten or mauled is even greater when there is concern about rabies transmission.62 This is especially true when there has been an outbreak of rabies, rather than a generalized long-​standing concern, or when neighbors or relatives die from rabies or have to seek treatment for it.63 Conversely, rabies vaccination has been shown to mitigate this fear.64 Fear of a rabies outbreak can swell into collective panic about roaming dogs, leading to violent and deadly attacks by residents against large numbers of dogs whether rabid or not. For example, in 2008 a deadly epidemic of rabies in Bali sent local residents to the hospital and placed a death warrant on the heads of the rest of the canine population. Dogs were shot, beaten, and poisoned indiscriminately daily.65 And in 2010, panic continued in Bali as the rabies death toll climbed and up to 300 residents a day were allegedly bitten and injected with anti-​rabies vaccine, leading to the formation of a 25-​man team that indiscriminately used strychnine darts to kill dogs suspected of having the disease.66 Bites or threats of attack allegedly occur, with some frequency, in communities with roaming dogs. For example, in Guatemala, 17 percent of residents studied reported having experienced at least one dog bite in the previous two years;67 in India, some towns estimate an incidence of as many as 20,000 nonfatal dog bites a year; in Cambodia, 28 percent of respondents recalled being bitten within the previous five years;68 in the Bahamas, about a third of residents said they had been physically threatened by dogs in the last five years;69 and in American Samoa, dog bites are the most frequently reported injury.70 However, in communities where bites occur with some frequency, residents do not always consider biting to be a major problem, suggesting that people can accommodate to this risk over time. For example, in Oaxaca, Mexico, even though more than one-​ third of villagers had been bitten during their lifetimes, fear of being bitten by roaming dogs was not viewed as a major community problem.71 One reason for this apparent anomaly is suggested by Subasinghe and colleagues, whose study in Sri Lanka found that most dog bites involved drunken and disorderly men who had provoked the dog or involved children hitting a dog with sticks. Therefore, most of the residents did not fear dogs.72 Hence, the actions of a few people might trigger the vast majority of dog bites,

 

Roaming Dogs   119 such that most local residents feel safe around dogs on the street because they do not behave this way with dogs. When residents do consider biting to be a major problem, concern over attacks by roaming dogs is sometimes out of proportion to actual risk because of fear generated by high-​publicity media reports, though experts might argue that rabies bites are underreported. Reports of street dogs killing people are rare and often unverified, making them unreliable. For example, three fatal dog attacks have allegedly occurred in New Providence, the Bahamas, since 1991, and all of them involved breeds appearing to be pit bulls or pit bull mixes. Following a considerable outcry after the death of a young girl, officials spoke of implementing an amended dog-​license act, but no new laws have yet been passed.73 Moreover, when someone does die from a dog attack, local residents recall and generalize that single horrific and grisly experience as evidence that roaming dogs pose a continuing threat of deadly bite attacks, even though only routine dog bites have occurred in the interim.

Experiencing Nuisances and Irritations Nuisance and irritation caused by roaming dogs can also diminish a community’s quality of life. Research suggests that perceived disorder and daily hassles in general are a significant cause of distress in some neighborhoods.74 Other studies report a link between depressive symptoms and the perception of one’s neighborhood as disorderly.75 In many of these studies, neighborhood disorder includes not only predictable urban features unrelated to animals, such as graffiti or being caught in a traffic jam, but also other features that could easily extend to roaming dogs, such as being aggressed in public places or encountering homeless/​marginalized people or beggars, and even specific animal disorders such as “stray animals and their mess.”76 Large and uncontrolled roaming dog populations probably contribute to residents’ perceptions of their cities as messy and decaying due to omnipresent sanitation problems, continuous or episodic barking especially at night, harassment and stalking of pedestrians and bikers, messiness from spreading rubbish or knocking over trash bins, causing traffic accidents, unsightliness and, as noted above, disease transmission and biting. In Samoa, almost 80 percent of respondents cited street dogs as a nuisance.77 In the Bahamas, Fielding observed substantial residential irritation with barking, especially at night, which was the most commonly reported nuisance on a list of 29 human and animal annoyances (daytime barking was seventeenth on the list), followed closely by dogs roaming on property.78 Many residents also cited garbage spilled by roaming dogs to be a common nuisance. At least one of the three dog nuisances (i.e., barking, roaming on property, and spilled garbage) was bothersome to 83.4 percent of the respondents.79 Other kinds of public aesthetic and safety nuisances attributed to roaming dogs include scavenging for food, causing road accidents, and fouling public places with feces.80

 

120    Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema Doing something about perceived dog nuisances often means throwing stones at or even poisoning dogs, as in the Bahamas,81 as well as complaining to the neighbor presumed to own the offending dog. The public will also complain to local authorities, but not much happens until there is a dog attack or an incident of rabies is sensationalized in the media, which in turn can spark government-​sanctioned culling of dogs through mass shootings, as in Israel,82 or lead citizens to take matters into their own hands by poisoning or shooting dogs themselves. These inhumane efforts by municipal agencies or citizens, over the objections of NGOs and animal-​welfare organizations, typically fail to ameliorate the public’s concern, such as when culling fails to manage a rabies epidemic.83 However, there are significant cross-​cultural differences in the extent to which residents see roaming dogs as a nuisance, and some communities appear to largely tolerate or ignore the problems. For example, in Samoa, only a small percentage of the study respondents agreed that roaming dogs are sick, poorly behaved, and aggressive, or that they bite and spread disease, while an even smaller percentage agreed that roaming dogs were noisy, too numerous, interfered with traffic, and stalked people.84

Witnessing Abuse and Suffering A third way that roaming dogs diminish a community’s quality of life comes from the anger, sadness, and frustration people experience when they witness dogs’ suffering and from the subsequent desensitization, or “numbing,” to such distress they experience. Some of the distress being witnessed is passive if no one has intentionally inflicted harm on the dogs but the observer cannot afford to care for them; for example, roaming dogs can have a protruding ribcage suggestive of starvation; severe, extensive skin disease; or a physical injury or disability, though certainly not all of them appear this way. Some animals might also seem miserable because they were intentionally harmed at some prior time; in these cases, no human abuser is present, but the dog who was targeted for mistreatment experiences protracted suffering in full view of passersby, including children, who, for example, see poisoned dogs writhing in pain and dying horribly.85 Other suffering is more directly observed when residents witness the rough handling, intentional abuse, or destruction of roaming dogs rather than just the aftermath of abuse. About a third of the study respondents in Samoa said that during their lifetime they were aware of people who had harmed or killed dogs, most commonly because the dogs were too aggressive, sick, or considered a nuisance.86 If such suffering is fairly common, people might become indifferent to it after seeing sick and dying dogs or witnessing the abuse. Of course, the degree to which residents become indifferent to suffering because of what happens to dogs may be diminished when there is extensive human suffering in the same community. Nevertheless, it is conceivable that at least some residents who witness suffering in dogs might experience mental distress associated with lowered quality of life.87

 

Roaming Dogs   121

Social Ties Conflicted social ties are a common problem in communities with unmanaged dog populations. Strife, division, or tension in certain neighborhoods around the roaming dog issue can discourage the formation of social bonds and bridges, as well as a sense of community. The source of this friction ranges from fleeting differences of opinion to long-​standing disagreements over how roaming dogs should be treated,simmering anger in nuisance cases that leads, for example, to the poisoning of a neighbor’s dog,and discord among neighbors when roaming dogs kill livestock because of the latter’s monetary value. A similar economically rooted tension occurs in some cultures when an owned dog with rabies bites a neighbor, as in Tanzania.88 In these cases, the killing of the rabid dog is rarely problematic, since most residents view it as the best solution. But owners often do not want to admit that their dog was rabid because they are expected to pay for treatment if the dog bites a person or another dog. Paying for the medical care of bite victims can be very expensive, given that average income is less than $1.50 a day; if, for example, 20 people need to be treated at $100 a course, this represents almost four years’ income. Hampson89 claims that these situations can become quite contentious. She has traced human rabies deaths where owners lied about their dogs to avoid having to pay for treatment (e.g., one showed doctors vaccination certificates from other dogs in the household as evidence that the sick dog had been vaccinated). She has also observed a few court cases in which a bite victim sought police support to force a neighbor to pay for treatment. Typically, these situations translate into strained relationships and bad reputations. In extreme cases, social conflict over roaming dogs can become an emotional flash point in the community, involving politicians, animal-​welfare advocates and their opponents, bureaucrats, city administrators, and everyday citizens who bitterly take one side of the issue, and dogs often end up being killed as a result of these heated and polarized exchanges. Ethnographic and journalistic reports from Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean describe situations in which tension over roaming dogs approximates the moral panic often reported in highly publicized contemporary cases of killing other animals, such as cats,90 or the historical cases of the massacre of rats, cats, and dogs due to fear of disease contagion,91 including rabies, even though the threat was more symbolic than actual.92 These emotionally laden actions occur when people are motivated by fear of widely exaggerated or nonexistent threats.93 For example, in one Northern Canadian community, panic ensued when people, especially children, were purportedly “mauled” to death by “packs” of dogs.94 Fearful residents in the affected towns then feel an urgent need to eradicate dogs, whatever the method and regardless of the efficacy of their approach. Scores of dogs may be shot and killed even if they are not dangerous to residents, while others die slow and torturous deaths from severe wounds.

 

122    Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema Roaming dog issues can also aggravate preexisting tensions among groups of people in a community, further deterring the formation of community social ties and bonds. For example, tourists are often disturbed by the apparent animal-​welfare problems of roaming dogs, when local residents are not.95 Like tourists, expatriates living in towns plagued with roaming dogs often have a different perspective and sensitivity to the issue that further separates them from local residents, as one study in Mexico reports.96 And finally, packs of unhealthy and threatening roaming dogs can prevent the formation of social ties and lessen residents’ sense of community by reducing foot traffic or making people avoid certain areas and therefore missing the possibility to interact with other residents and close neighbors. For example, residents in a New Zealand community said that negative features of neighborhoods, such as problems with dogs, could reduce social well-​being by acting as barriers to establishing relationships with their neighbors97; and in a low-​income community in Chicago, unleashed neighborhood dogs were reported to be a barrier to the physical activities and interactions of children.98

The Economy Roaming dogs also create financial problems for some communities. For example, their presence can cause a decline in the number of tourists visiting a country or in their use of tourist businesses or services once there, and can increase marketing costs to compensate for adverse publicity. There can be a drop in tourist revenue if tourists become emotionally upset when they see roaming dogs who appear to be in wretched and unacceptable condition because they are underfed, have a missing eye or limb or are otherwise physically disabled, or suffer from an unsightly skin condition. For example, in Oaxaca, Mexico, about half the tourists were concerned about dog welfare99 and in the Bahamas, over 80 percent “felt sorry” for street animals perceived to be in “not good” condition, and almost half said they “felt sad.”100 In another study, 34 percent of 1200 tourists, when asked about their experience seeing roaming dogs at different destinations, gave “upset” as their first answer.101 Potential or actual dog attacks, zoonotic infections, and irritations further add to a tourist destination’s negative image. In the Bahamas, almost a quarter of tourists said they were “frightened or concerned” for their safety,102 a concern also observed by Dolnicar.103 A study of tourists visiting Bhutan found that roaming dogs often marred their travel experience because at night the animals formed aggressive packs, resulting in fear among tourists and sleep deprivation due to the constant loud barking.104 Tourists in Oaxaca, Mexico, also reported problems with street dogs; one-​half were concerned about feces on the streets and beaches; one-​third were concerned about zoonotic diseases and annoyed when dogs begged for food at restaurants; and a few said they had been chased or bitten by dogs.105 When a government agency issues an official warning about rabies, potential tourists might think twice about visiting that country, reducing

 

Roaming Dogs   123 the influx of tourist dollars, as happened when the Centers for Disease Control urged travelers to Bali “to be on guard against rabies,” noting that two people had already died from the disease and that about 100 people had reported being bitten by dogs each day there.106 There is a risk that negative experiences with roaming dogs will deter tourists from using local businesses if people decide to avoid certain areas of towns. For example, in Samoa, roaming dogs allegedly cost millions in local currency because tourists are kept awake at night, annoyed, and frightened by them, so they do not use services, such as renting for example, they will not bikes for fear they will be attacked and bitten when stopped at traffic lights.107 There is also a risk they will not return to that destination and will share their unpleasant experiences with their friends and family at home or post their bad stories online for others to consider when planning a trip, possibly deterring future tourism and the income it generates for the host countries.108 Roaming dogs can have a detrimental economic impact on communities in yet other ways. There can be economic losses from livestock killed by dogs109 or rabies infection,110 as well as losses from wildlife killed by dogs,111 although the latter’s economic value is difficult to assess. Roaming dogs do not usually kill for food, but their attacks can indiscriminately mutilate livestock and can, especially when done in packs, cause extensive damage to vulnerable herds, such as sheep and goats, or even caged animals, such as poultry or rabbits, who trample and suffocate each other while trying to escape.112 There also is the increased medical expense of managing zoonotic illnesses, such as hydatid disease and rabies in particular.113 These costs stem from vaccination or treatment, work lost because of disability or mortality from these diseases, and/​or paying for a neighbor’s rabies treatment. For example, with the latter, as noted above, local custom expects owners of rabid dogs to pay for a neighbor’s treatment if bitten.114

Dog Population Management Interventions undertaken by communities or animal-​welfare organizations to address either concerns about public-​health, nuisance, or animal-​welfare concerns may take a variety of forms. According to the International Companion Animal Management Coalition (ICAM, 2014), such interventions should be comprehensive, and include multiple components, which may include sterilization, vaccination and parasite control, education and public outreach, legislation, sheltering and rehoming, registration and identification, euthanasia, and controlling access to resources. Programs that measure the success of these interventions may measure outcomes related to dog welfare, the care provided to dogs, public health, dog population density or turnover, impacts on livestock or wildlife, and rehoming, and some may also seek to influence how residents in the targeted communities regard dogs.115 However, no interventions we have studied to date have sought to systematically assess, beyond these measures, the social and/​or psychological impact of the interventions on the human communities. A discussion of how

 

124    Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema communities and organizations ultimately organize their interventions is beyond the scope of this chapter, but we can discuss interventions that include, at minimum, vaccination or parasite control, sterilization of owned or roaming dogs; public outreach, and some level of intervention for sick or injured animals. We found that shifts resulting from interventions in such areas as the visible health of owned or roaming dogs, the presence of puppies in the street (turnover/​breeding), reduced nuisance behaviors, and perception of reduced disease risk may improve the quality of life of human residents. When animals begin to appear healthier and no longer pose a major disease threat, tolerance for their presence has been shown to increase in the human community, and some experts have witnessed community members feeling freer to form close bonds with individual animals. These shifting attitudes may, in turn, lead to even closer relationships, benefiting people who have not previously experienced such relationships. One way that veterinary interventions can change community members’ attitudes to dogs is to make street dogs more appealing as co-​interactants. While vaccinating against rabies should allay the public’s fear of dog bites,116 sterilizing dogs may reduce the number of dog bites that are due to maternal protective behavior. For example, in Jaipur, India, a roaming dog sterilization program led to a significant decline in the number of animal bites after 2003.117 Veterinary interventions may also shift human behaviors by resulting in healthier-​ looking dog populations that residents no longer actively avoid. Before such interventions, dogs perceived as “ugly” and sick-​looking are avoided, animals described by Savvides as “beset with skin conditions including mange and ringworm, malnourished and often coated in a layer of solid filth, are semi-​furred, semi-​naked, dusty and dirty with skin like cracked cement,” while others constantly scratch from fleas and worms, limp around on burned paw pads, or have hip fractures, dislocations, and other mobility problems.118 Owners’ connection and commitment to their owned dogs might become stronger once the dogs appear healthier, and perhaps become more sociable as a result of more tolerant humans, improved care by owners, and/​or fewer distractions due to breeding behaviors or underlying parasites and illness. The willingness to touch dogs and to bring them closer to homes is postulated to increase as residents use antiparasite-​ control methods more widely. Interventions, especially those targeting owned dogs, may also increase longevity and reduce turnover of dog populations, increasing the time the humans with whom they interact have to develop stronger bonds with them. That such interventions can lengthen the lives of street dogs has been reported by Plumridge and colleagues,119 who found that neutered roaming dogs in the Bahamas had a higher average age than intact dogs, allowing for deeper human-​animal bonds to form, since dogs who survive longer perhaps become less aggressive and more healthy.120 According to ICAM,121 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, sterilized and vaccinated dogs showed increased body mass, and some became quite obese, because of increased feeding by people who perceived them as “safe.” That such interventions can foster more positive perceptions of roaming dogs, and presumably more humane interaction with them, is supported by the research in

 

Roaming Dogs   125 Sri Lanka, where conducting a mass rabies vaccination program improved perception of roaming dogs by non-​dog-​owning respondents, such that they reported to “like” them more.122 Some dog population management efforts also improve the welfare of roaming dogs by organizing, guiding, and empowering residents at the grassroots level to take responsibility for dog-​related problems, gain access to needed resources, and pressure local authorities to grapple with these issues. This community organization and motivation is often necessary, since in many locations plagued with roaming dogs, residents feel disempowered and unmotivated to deal with the problems, even when the problems are viewed as a community crisis. Weak or absent social ties, along with a lack of needed resources, among residents, stakeholders, and local authorities means that attempts to manage roaming dog problems can be ineffective if not inhumane because these groups have not arrived at a mutually agreed on understanding of what actually causes the problems. For example, Fielding123 argues that this lack of empowerment partly explains the failure of Bahamians to rid their communities of various kinds of nuisances, including those from roaming dogs, who were officially declared to be a nuisance in 1841.124 A majority of respondents in his study did nothing about these nuisances, even though some, such as noise, were covered by the country’s penal code. Instead, only a few respondents said they would contact the police about a dog; in fact, dog-​related nuisances, compared to other kinds of nuisances, were the least likely to be reported to the police.125 Educational interventions, such as role modeling more humane and compassionate behaviors, may also change how residents think about and behave with roaming dogs. Anecdotal reports illustrate how educational interventions can help people to interact more appropriately with dogs who had been seen as “scary” or unfriendly. For example, in India, Bhutan, and the Philippines, dog population management programs that primarily vaccinate and sterilize dogs are also attempting to give street dogs a better life by increasing the community’s tolerance of them.126 These interventions engage local residents by modelling humane interactions with dogs in public settings, personally introducing residents to dogs, and encouraging residents to observe the positive dog behavior that results from gentle handling. A different kind of educational intervention—​the introduction and diffusion of new ideas or ways to behave—​happens at the level of organizations interacting respectfully with their surrounding communities, such that the mere presence of humane organizations in communities may influence local residents to think about and treat roaming dogs in more tolerant and caring ways. Individuals who were reluctant to care for these dogs for fear of criticism may feel supported in doing so in a supportive atmosphere created by humane organizations. For example, in Sri Lanka, Obeyesekere anecdotally supports the notion that humane interventions can increase residents’ active concern for roaming dogs by serving as a “lifeline.”127 She reports that after their programs become known and accepted by community members, requests for assistance for a sick or injured dog on the street out of concern for his welfare increases. In her words, “Even if they can’t afford it, they’ll ask ‘Can someone pay for it? I’ll bring the dog to you.’ There is

 

126    Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema more concern and looking after of street dogs, probably because we got involved there.” Anecdotal reports such as these suggest that humane organizational involvement in the community can create a halo or positive chilling effect by letting residents know that veterinary care is available and allowing residents to act in naturally caring ways. One expert reported that among First Nations people of Northern Canada, humane interventions reinforce residents’ compassion, caring, and pride in their dogs by “validating” those feelings when people bring their dogs to the veterinarian. “People shine,” she reports, “when you remember their dog and you remember them, you can see there is pride.”

Discussion When viewed collectively, the negative impacts of unmanaged dogs can be understood as a symptom of a larger social problem or as a social problem by itself. Whether people have become accustomed to these impacts or view them as a source of community concern, if not fear and dread, they can come to represent the undesired, if not dangerous. As a result, these dogs are often distanced from and blend into the urban landscape as one more feature of disorder and decay. From this perspective, the negative impacts of roaming dogs are signals of urban decline and danger, much like the concept of “broken windows,” a term originally coined by criminologists Wilson and Kelling,128 who described a breakdown of neighborhood social order129 and the incivility that follows graffiti, gangs, garbage, abandoned cars, empty lots, and broken windows and are associated with alienation (i.e., numbing), less physical activity,130 and other poor health outcomes,131 as well as a general downward spiral of urban decay. These features tell people that a place is less safe, has a poor sense of community, and has residents who are indifferent to what goes on in the neighborhood. Research suggests that reversing or ameliorating incivility and public disorder can reverse social disorganization and its resulting problems, such as reducing the fear of assault when walking the streets and increasing sociability among neighbors. For example, converting vacant lots, which attract crime and intimidate residents, to community gardens 132 and reducing gang presence have been shown to benefit communities by lowering neighborhood fear levels.133 Alleviating this type of disorder not only forces residents to abandon their previously held norm of living with the disorder of dogs, but also encourages residents to rethink the propriety of other norms supporting public disorder in general, whether that is crime, graffiti, noise, or littering. When these cues are reduced, people perceive their community to be a safer, more compassionate, vibrant, connected, and nicer place to live. Changing the relationships of humans and roaming dogs can also serve as a community-​revitalization strategy. Less toxic, enhanced human-​dog relationships might well serve as an asset that strengthens the social fiber of communities. This starts by altering the perception of roaming dogs as pests or as objectified “clutter” on the streets, so that

 

Roaming Dogs   127 more people interact with them as friends, develop stronger connections to them, and bring them into the human community.134

Notes 1. Yuying Hsu, Lucia Severinghaus, and James Serpell, “Dog Keeping in Taiwan:  Its Contributions to the Problem of Free-​Roaming Dogs,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 6 (2003): 1–​23. 2. Rather than refer to these dogs as “stray” or “street,” we prefer the term roaming because the former implies that they are truly homeless, without any human interest in or assumption of responsibility for them. Anecdotal and survey data suggest otherwise for many of these animals. 3. Jennifer Jackman and Andrew Rowan, “Free-​Roaming Dogs in Developing Countries: The Benefits of Capture, Neuter, and Return Programs,” in The State of the Animals IV, ed. Deborah Salem and Andrew Rowan (Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, 2007), 55–​78. 4. Minna Hsu, “Taiwan and Companion Animals,” in Encyclopedia of Human-​Animal Relationships, vol. 2, ed. Marc Bekoff (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 613–​615. 5. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, eds., Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-​Animal Relations (New York: Routledge, 2000). 6. See the chapter by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, “Animals in Political Theory,” in this volume. 7. Margo DeMello, Animals and Society:  An Introduction to Human-​ Animal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 8. Krithika Srinivasan and Vuay Nagaraj, “Deconstructing the Human Gaze:  Stray Dogs, Indifferent Governance and Prejudiced Reactions,” Economic and Political Weekly 42 (2007): 1085–​1086. 9. For a discussion of the impact of urbanization on the development of laws to regulate roaming dogs in nineteenth-​century America, see Leslie Irvine’s chapter, “Animal Sheltering” in this volume. 10. Mark Jenner, “The Great Dog Massacre,” in Fear in the Early Modern Society, ed. William Naphy and Penny Roberts (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997), 43–​61; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World:  Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-​1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 11. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage, 1984). 12. Gary Alan Fine and Lazaros Christoforides, “Dirty Birds, Filthy Immigrants, and the English Sparrow War: Metaphorical Linkage in Constructing Social Problems,” Symbolic Interaction 14, no. 4 (1991): 375–​393. 13. Arnold Arluke and Robert Bogdan, Beauty and the Beast (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010). 14. Govindasamy Agoramoorthy, “Avoid Using Caste Names for India’s Beasts,” Down to Earth, January 31, 2007. 15. Srinivasan and Nagaraj, “Deconstructing the Human Gaze.” 16. Vanja Hamzic, “The (Un)Conscious Pariah: Canine and Gender Outcasts of the British Raj” (unpublished paper, Centre for the Study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law, University of London, September, 2013).

 

128    Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema 17. Alan Beck, The Ecology of Stray Dogs: A Study of Free-​Ranging Urban Dogs (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1973). 18. For a review of these public-​health and medical problems, see Hans Matter and Thomas Daniels, “Dog Ecology and Population Biology,” in Dogs, Zoonoses, and Public Health, ed. Calum Macpherson, Francois Meslin, and Alexander Wandeler (New  York:  CABI Publishing, 2000), 17–​62; Jack Reece, “Dogs and Dog Control in Developing Countries,” in State of the Animals III, ed. Deborah Salem and Andrew Rowan (Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, 2005), 55–​64. 19. M. Farnworth, K. Blaszak, E. Hiby, and N. Waran, “Incidence of Dog Bites and Public Attitudes toward Dog Care and Management in Samoa,” Animal Welfare 20 (2012): 477–​486. 20. Christian Cotroneo, “Romania Stray Dog Slaughter Approved Amid Protests from Animal Activists,” The Huffington Post Canada, September 12, 2013. 21. Barbara Hasler, Gregory Neville, Houda Bennani, Joshua Onono, and Jonathan Rushton, Evaluation of Rabies Control in Colombo City, Sri Lanka (London:  Royal Veterinary College, 2011). 22. Farnworth et al., “Incidence of Dog Bites.” 23. Minna Hsu, “Taiwan:  Animal Welfare Law,” in Encyclopedia of Human-​ Animal Relationships, vol. 3, ed. Marc Bekoff (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 1015–​1016. 24. Nikki Savvides, “Living with Dogs: Alternative Animal Practices in Bangkok, Thailand,” Animal Studies Journal 2 (2013): 28–​50. 25. William Fielding, interview with author, January 10, 2014. 26. Of course, more Westernized forms of pet-​keeping can occur in less developed nations among upper-​class residents who own pedigree dogs as status symbols. Savvides, “Living with Dogs.” 27. A. Ortolani, H. Vernooij, and R. Coppinger, “Ethiopian Village Dogs:  Behavioural Responses to a Stranger’s Approach,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 119 (2009): 210–​218. 28. Elzemina Bojicic, interview with the author, February 28, 2014. 29. Hsu, Severinghaus, and Serpell, “Dog Keeping in Taiwan.” 30. Fielding, interview. 31. Hsu, Severinghaus, and Serpell., “Dog Keeping in Taiwan”; Michelle Morters, interview with the author, June 10, 2014. 32. Fielding, interview. 33. P. Kitala, J. McDermott, M. Kyule, J. Gathuma et  al., “Dog Ecology and Demography Information to Support the Planning of Rabies Control in Machakos District, Kenya,” Acta Tropica 78 (2001): 217–​230. 34. Gary Patronek, Alan Beck, and L. Glickman, “Dynamics of Dog and Cat Population in a Community,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 210, no. 5 (1997): 637–​642. 35. Peter Omemo, “Responsible Dog Ownership Options,” in Dog Population Management (report of the FAO/​WSPA/​ICT expert meeting, Banna, Italy, March 14–​19, 2011), 139–​143. 36. Kelvin Alie, David Witkind, William Fielding, J. Maldonado, and Francisco Galindo, “Attitudes toward Dogs and Other ‘Pets’ in Roseau, Dominica,” Anthrozoös 20 (2007): 143–​154. 37. Ghenaim Al-​ Fayez, Abdelwahid Awadalla, Donald Templer, and Hiroko Arikawa, “Companion Animal Attitude and Its Family Pattern in Kuwait,” Society & Animals 11

 

Roaming Dogs   129 (2003): 17–​28; Hsu, Severinghaus, and Serpell, “Dog Keeping in Taiwan”; Darryn Knobel, K. M. Laurenson, R. R, Kazwala, L. I. Boden, and S. Cleaveland, “A Cross-​Sectional Study of Factors Associated with Dog Ownership in Tanzania,” BMC Veterinary Research 4 (2008): 5; B. Morris, The Power of Animals: An Ethnography (Oxford: Berg, 1998). 38. Fielding, interview. 39. Farnworth et al., “Incidence of Dog Bites.” 40. James Serpell, “Human-​Dog Relationships Worldwide,” in Dog Population Management, report of the FAO/​WSPA/​ICT expert meeting, Banna, Italy, March 14–​19, 2011, pp. 74–​79. 41. C. M. Boyd, B. Fotheringham, C. Litchfield, I. McBryde, J. C. Metzer, P. Scanlon, R. Somers, and A. Winefield, “Fear of Dogs in a Community Sample: Effects of Age, Gender, and Prior Experience of Canine Aggression,” Anthrozoös 17 (2004): 146–​166; Karla George and Abiodun Adesiyun, “An Investigation into the Prevalence of Dog Bites to Primary School Children in Trinidad,” BMC Public Health 8 (2008): 85; J. F. Reece and S. K. Chawla, “Control of Rabies in Jaipur, India, by the Sterilization and Vaccination of Neighbourhood Dogs,” Veterinary Record 159 (2006): 379–​383. 42. Roxana Cocia and Alina Rusu, “Attitudes of Romanian Pet Caretakers towards Sterilization of Their Animals: Gender Conflict over Male, but Not Female, Companion Animals,” Anthrozoös 23 (2010): 185–​191. 43. J. K. Blackshaw and C. Day, “Attitudes of Dog Owners to Neutering Pets: Demographic Data and Effects of Owner Attitudes,” Australian Veterinary Journal 71 (1994):  113–​116; William Fielding, D. Samuels, and Jane Mather, “Attitudes and Actions of West Indian Dog Owners towards Neutering Their Animals:  A  Gender Issue?” Anthrozoös 15 (2002): 206–​226. 44. Perara et al., “Neighborhood Environment.” 45. Meg Lunney, Sonia Fevre, Enid Stiles, Sowath Ly et  al., “Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices of Rabies Prevention and Dog Bite Injuries in Urban and Peri-​Urban Provinces in Cambodia, 2009,” International Health 4 (2012): 4–​9. 46. Margaret Slater, Antonio Di Nardo, Villa Pediconi, Dalla Ombretta, et al. “Free-​Roaming Dogs and Cats in Central Italy: Public Perceptions of the Problem,” Preventive Veterinary Medicine 84 (2008): 27–​47. 47. Deena Case, “Dog Ownership: A Complex Web?” Psychological Reports 60 (1987): 247–​257. 48. Ruiz-​Izaguirre and Eilers, “Perceptions of Village Dogs.” 49. Sreejani Majumder, Ankita Chatterjee, and Anindita Bhadra, “A Dog’s Day with Humans:  Time Activity Budget of Free-​Ranging Dogs in India,” Current Science 106 (2014): 874–​878. 50. Meg Lunney, Andria Jones, Enid Stiles, and David Toews, “Assessing Human-​Dog Conflicts in Todos Santos, Guatemala: Bite Incidences and Public Perception,” Preventive Veterinary Medicine 102 (2011): 315–​320. 51. Sarah Foster and Billie Giles-​Corti, “The Built Environment, Neighborhood Crime and Constrained Physical Activity:  An Exploration of Inconsistent Findings,” Preventive Medicine 47 (2008): 241–​251; Burak Pak and Johan Verbeke, “Walkability as a Performance Indicator for Urban Spaces:  Strategies and Tools for the Social Construction of Experiences,” Crowdsourcing and Sensing, vol. 1. Computation and Performance eCAADe 31/​ 423–​ 432, 2013; Delfien Van Dyck, Greet Cardon, Benedicte Deforche, and Lise Bourdeauhuij, “Do Adults Like Living in High-​Walkable Neighborhoods? Associations of Walkability Parameters with Neighborhood Satisfaction and Possible Mediators,” Health & Place 17 (2011): 971–​977.

 

130    Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema 52. M. Southworth, “Designing the Walkable City,” Journal of Urban Planning and Development 131 (2005): 246–​257 53. J. Gehl, Cities for People (London: Island Press, 2010). 54. Don Vargo, John DePasquale, and Agnes Vargo, “Incidence of Dog Bite Injuries in American Samoa and Their Impact on Society,” Hawai’I Journal of Medicine & Public Health 71 (2012): 6–​12. 55. See, for example, Kathryn Kneckerman, Gina Lovasi, Stephen Davies, Marnie Purciel et al., “Disparities in Urban Neighborhood Conditions: Evidence from GIS Measures and Field Observation in New York City,” Journal of Public Health Policy 30 (2009): 264–​285; Ellen Seeley, “Comparing Walkability of Ethnically Diverse, Low-​income Neighborhoods” (unpublished dissertation, University of California, Davis, 2010). 56. Ranjith Dayaratne, “Towards Transforming Colombo to a ‘Walkable’ City: Policies and Strategies,” Built-​Environment Sri Lanka 9/​10 (2011): 2–​13. 57. Laura Solitaire, Lauri Andress, Carol Lewis, David Crossley et  al., “A Health Impact Assessment of Transit-​Oriented Development at the Quitman Light Rail Station in Houston, Texas” (unpublished study, Pew Charitable Trust, 2012_​. 58. Jane Poss and Julia Bader, “Attitudes toward Companion Animals among Hispanic Residents of a Texas Border Community,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 10 (2007): 243–​253. 59. Nikki Savvides, telephone interview by author, June 5, 2014. 60. Frank Elaridi, “Chihuahuas Rampage in Arizona,” ABC news, February 18, 2014. http://​ abcnews.go.com/​blogs/​headlines/​2014/​02/​chihuahuas-​rampage-​in-​arizona/​. 61. Olga Nikitina-​Den Besten, “Cars, Dogs and Mean People:  Environmental Fears and Dislikes of Children in Berlin and Paris,” in Urban Trends in Berlin and Amsterdam, ed. K. Adelhof, B. Glock, J. Lossau, and M. Schulz (Berliner Geographische Arbeiten, 2008), 116–​125. 62. Kaisen Bhanganada, Henry Wilde, Piyasakol Sakolsataydorn et al., “Dog Bite Injuries at a Bangkok Teaching Hospital,” Acta Tropica 55 (1993): 249–​255; Songsri Kasempimolporn, Sutthictai Jitapunkul, and Visith Sitprija. “Moving towards the Elimination of Rabies in Thailand,” Journal of the Medical Association of Thailand 91 (2008): 433–​437; Joy Leney and Jenny Remfry, “Dog Population Management,” in Dogs, Zoonoses and Public Health, ed. Calum Macpherson, Francois Meslin, and Alexander Wandeler (New  York:  CABI Publishing, 2000), 299–​332; Krithika Srinivasan, “The Biopolitics of Animal Being and Welfare:  Dog Control and Care in the UK and India,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38 (2013):  106–​119; Srinivasan and Nagaraj, “Deconstructing the Human Gaze.” 63. Kevin Bardosh, Maganga Sambo, Lwitiko Sikana, Katie Hampson et  al., “Eliminating Rabies in Tanzania? Local Understandings and Responses to Mass Dog Vaccination in Kilmbero and Ulanga Districts,” PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases 8 (2014): e2935. 64. Sarah Cleaveland, Magai Kaare, Darryn Knobel, and M. Laurenson, “Canine Vaccination-​Providing Broader Benefits for Disease Control,” Veterinary Microbiology 117 (2006): 43–​50. 65. nomadajourneys.com. 66. Roger Maynard, “Bali Targets Stray Dogs as 65 People Die from Rabies,” The Independent, July 4, 2010. 67. Lunney et al., “Assessing Human-​Dog Conflicts.” 68. Lunney et al., “Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices.”

 

Roaming Dogs   131 69. William Fielding, “Knowledge of the Welfare of Nonhuman Animals and Prevalence of Dog Care Practices in New Providence, The Bahamas,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 10 (2007): 153–​168. 70. Vargo, DePasquale, and Vargo, “Incidence of Dog Bite Injuries,” 6–​12. 71. Ruiz-​Izaguirre and Eilers, “Perceptions of Village Dogs.” 72. Dynatra Subasinghe, C. Samarasinghe, N. Obeyesekere, Y. DeSilva et  al., “Welfare of Roaming Dogs:  Human Attitude Change after Capture Neuter Vaccination Release (CNVR) Program in Two Socio-​Economic Groups in Colombo Sri Lanka,” (Paper presented at the WSAVA conference, 2014). 73. Kristen Burrows, Cindy Adams, and Jude Spiers, “Sentinels of Safety:  Service Dogs Ensure Safety and Enhance Freedom and Well-​Being for Families with Autistic Children,” Qualitative Health Research 18 (2008): 1642–​1649. 74. Avshalom Caspi, Niall Bolger, and John Eckenrode. “Linking Person and Context in the Daily Stress Process,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52, no. 1(1987): 184–​195; James Garbarino and Deborah Sherman, “High-​Risk Neighborhoods and High-​Risk Families: The Human Ecology of Child Maltreatment,” Child Development 51, no.  1 (1980):  188–​198; Catherine Ross and John Mirowsky, “Disorder and Decay: The Concept and Measurement of Perceived Neighborhood Disorder,” Urban Affairs Review 34 (1999): 412–​432. 75. Carl Latkin and Aaron Curry, “Stressful Neighborhoods and Depression: A Prospective Study of the Impact of Neighborhood Disorder,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 44 (2003): 34–​44. 76. E.g., Nuzrat Khan, Naghmana Ghafoor, Rabia Iftikhar and Maria Malik, “Urban Annoyances and Mental Health in the City of Lahore, Pakistan,” Journal of Urban Affairs 34 (2011): 297–​315. 77. Farnworth et al., “Incidence of Dog Bites.” 78. William Fielding, “Dogs: A Continuing and Common Neighborhood Nuisance of New Providence, The Bahamas,” Society & Animals 16 (2008): 61–​73. 79. William Fielding, “Perceptions of Owned and Unowned Animals: A Case Study from New Providence,” Bahamas Journal of Science 6 (1999): 17–​22. 80. Leney and Remfry, “Dog Population Management”; Srinivasan, “Biopolitics of Animal Being.” 81. William Fielding, Jane Mather, and M. Isaacs. Potcakes: Dog Ownership in New Providence, The Bahamas (West Lafayette: IN: Purdue University Press, 2005). 82. Deborah Court, “Unity and Conflict in an Israeli Village,” Contemporary Jewry 22 (2001): 1–​17. 83. Merritt Clifton, “How Not to Fight a Rabies Epidemic:  A  History of Bali,” Asian Biomedicine 4 (2010): 663–​670. 84. Farnworth et al., “Incidence of Dog Bites.” 85. Elly Hiby, “Bali Dog Cull Appeal,” YouTube, March 11, 2010. 86. Farnworth et al., “Incidence of Dog Bites.” 87. Mesfin Araya, Jayanti Chotai, Ivan Komproe, and T. Joop, “Effect of Trauma on Quality of Life as Mediated by Mental Distress and Moderated by Coping and Social Support among Postconflict Displaced Ethiopians.” Quality of Life Research 16, no. 6 (2007): 915–​927. 88. Sarah Cleaveland, interview with author, June 26, 2014 89. Katie Hampson, pers. comm., June 26, 2014. 90. Gregor Bulc, “Kill the Cat Killers: Moral Panic and Juvenile Crime in Slovenia,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 26 (2002): 300–​325.

 

132    Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema 91. Mark Jenner, “Great Dog Massacre.” 92. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 93. Erich Goode and Ben-​Yehuda Nachman, Moral Panics:  The Social Construction of Deviance (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2010). 94. “Stray Dog Solution Sought after Manitoba Girl Fatally Mauled,” CTV News, April 18, 2014, http://​www.ctvnews.ca/​canada/​stray-​dog-​solution-​sought-​after-​manitoba-​girl-​fatally-​ mauled-​1.1781791. 95. Eleanor Grennan and William J. Fielding, “Tourists’ Reactions to Non-​ human Animals:  Implications for Tourist-​Animal Research in the Caribbean” (report to the Pegasus Foundation, Concord, New Hampshire, April, 2008). 96. Ruiz-​Izaguirre and Eilers, “Perceptions of Village Dogs.” 97. Erin Hill, Daniel Shepherd, David Welch, Kim Dirks et al., “Perceptions of Neighborhood Problems and Health-​Related Quality of Life,” Journal of Community Psychology 40 (2012): 814–​827. 98. Robin Jarrett, Douglas Williams, and Tolulope Olorode, “Neighborhood Influences on the Physical Activity of Low-​income African American Children:  A  Qualitative Perspective” (unpublished study, University of Illinois at Urbana-​ Champaign, Champaign, IL, www.liveablecities.org) 99. Ruiz-​Izaguiree and Ellers, “Perceptions of Village Dogs.” 100. Grennan and Fielding, “Tourists’ Reactions.” 101. Diana Webster, “The Economic Impact of Stray Cats and Dogs at Tourist Destinations on the Tourism Industry,” Ridgewood, NJ: Cats and Dogs International (CANDi), 2013. 102. Grennan and Fielding, “Tourists’ Reactions.” 103. Sara Dolnicar, “Crises That Scare Tourists:  Investigating Tourists’ Travel-​ Related Concerns,” in Crisis Management in Tourism, ed. B. Prideaux, E. Laws, and K. Chon (Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing, 2007), 98–​109. 104. Paul Strickland, “The Roaming Dogs of Bhutan. Friend or Foe?” In CAUTHE 2013:  Tourism and Global Change:  On the Edge of Something Big, ed. J. Fountain and K. Moore (Christchurch, NZ: Lincoln University, 2013), 780–​783. 105. Ruiz-​Izaguiree and Eilers, “Perceptions of Village Dogs.” 106. “CDC Cautions of Rabies Risk in Bali, Indonesia,” Focus Taiwan, January 11, 2014, http://​ focustaiwan.tw/​news/​asoc/​201401110012.aspx. 107. “Stray Dogs Costing Tourism Millions,” Samoa Observer, June 12, 2013. 108. Leney and Remfry, “Dog Population Management”; Srinivasan, “Biopolitics of Animal Being”; Webster, “Economic Impact.” 109. P. Fleming and T. Korn, “Predation of Livestock by Wild Dogs in Eastern New South Wales,” Australian Rangeland Journal 11 (1989): 61–​66. 110. T. Lembo, K. Hampson, M. Kaare, E. Ernest et  al., “The Feasibility of Canine Rabies Elimination in Africa: Dispelling Doubts with Data,” PloS Neglected Tropical Disease 4, no. 2 (2010): e626. 111. Julie Young, Kirk Olson, Richard Reading, Sukh Amgalanbaatar et  al., “Is Wildlife Going to the Dogs? Impacts of Feral and Free-​Roaming Dogs on Wildlife Populations,” BioScience 61 (2011): 125–​132. 112. Trotman, “Regional Realities: Impact of Stray Dogs and Cats on the Community, Impact on Economy, Including Tourism, Impact on Livestock, Wildlife and the Environment.”

 

Roaming Dogs   133 113. Darryn Knobel, Sarah Cleaveland, Paul Coleman, Eric Fevre et al, “Re-​evaluating the Burden of Rabies in Africa and Asia,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 83 (2005):  360–​368; Kinley Wangdi and Michael Ward, “Human and Animal Rabies Prevention and Control Cost in Bhutan, 2001-​2008:  The Cost-​Benefit of Dog Rabies Elimination,” Vaccine 31 (2012): 260–​270. 114. Cleaveland, interview. 115. ICAM Indicators Guidance, unpublished manuscript, 2014. 116. Cleaveland et al., “Canine Vaccination.” 117. J. F. Reece, S. K. Chawia, and A. R. Hiby, “Decline in Human Dog-​Bite Cases during a Street Dog Sterilization Programme in Jaipur, India,” Veterinary Record 172 (2013): 473. 118. Nikki Savvides, “Speaking for Dogs: The Role of Dog Biographies in Improving Canine Welfare in Bangkok, Thailand,” in Speaking for Animals:  Animal Autobiographical Writing, ed. Margot DeMello (New York: Routledge), 232. 119. Susan Plumridge, William Fielding, and Peter Bizzell, “A Description of the Clients (Humans and Animals) of a ‘Free’ Neutering Programme in New Providence, The Bahamas” (unpublished study, 2007). 120. However, some Bahamian caregivers believe that neutering dogs changes their personalities (Fielding, Mather, and Isaacs. Potcakes), so it is unclear whether residents will deepen their attachments to longer-​lived street dogs if these dogs are perceived as having different and undesirable personality changes. 121. ICAM, Coalition Indicators Project, unpublished manuscript, January, 2014. 122. Carole Sankey, Barbara Hasler, and Elly Hiby, “Change in Public Perception of Roaming Dogs in Colombo City” (paper presented at 1st International Conference on Dog Population Management, York, England, September 5, 2012). 123. William Fielding, “Attitudes and Actions of Pet Caregivers in New Providence, The Bahamas, in the Context of Those of Their American Counterparts,” Anthrozoös 21 (2008): 351–​361. 124. William Fielding, “Potcake Mongrels in the Bahamas,” in Encyclopedia of Human-​Animal Relationships, vol. 2, ed. Marc Bekoff (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 572–​576. 125. Fielding, “Dogs.” 126. Joy Lee. “Jamshedpur Communities Dog Population and Rabies Management Project” (unpublished manuscript, July 31, 2013; Lee, telephone interview with author, January 17, 2014. 127. N. Obeyesekere, telephone interview with the author, 2014. 128. J. Wilson and G. Kelling, “Broken Window,” Atlantic Monthly 211 (1982): 29–​38. 129. L. Airey, “‘Nae as Nice a Scheme as It Used to Be’:  Lay Accounts of Neighbourhood Incivilities and Wellbeing,” Health Place 9 (2003): 129–​137. 130. R. Brownson, E. Baker, R. Housemann, L. Brenna et  al., “Environmental and Policy Determinants of Physical Activity in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health 91 (2001): 1995–​2003. 131. Catherine Ross and John Mirowsky, “Disorder and Decay:  The Concept and Measurement of Perceived Neighborhood Disorder,” Urban Affairs Review 34 (1999): 412–​432. 132. Ruth Landman, Creating Community in the City: Cooperatives and Community Gardens in Washington, D.C. (Westport, CT:  Praeger, 1993); Jane Schukoske, “Community

 

134    Arnold Arluke and Kate Nattrass Atema Development through Gardening: State and Local Policies Transforming Urban Open Space,” New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy 3 (2000): 35:351–​392. 133. Ronald Vogel and Sam Torres, “An Evaluation of Operation Roundup: An Experiment in the Control of Gangs to Reduce Crime, Fear of Crime and Improve Police Community Relations,” Policing:  An International Journal of Police Strategies and Management 21 (1998): 38–​53. 134. Donaldson and Kymlicka, “Animals in Political Theory” (this volume).

 

Chapter 7

Misoth e ry Contempt for Animals and Nature, Its Origins, Purposes, and Repercussions JAMES B. Mason

The basic theriophobic stance is one of disgust at “brutish,” “bestial,” or “animalistic” traits that are suspiciously more frequently predicted of men than of beasts. ​(John Rodman, “The Dolphin Papers”1) I do not think [the cruelty of wolf killing] comes from some base, atavistic urge, though that may be a part of it. I think it is that we simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it. (​Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves and Men,2)

As Paul Shepard explained it in his 1978 book, Thinking Animals,3 animals empower our speech. Consider these descriptors: Jackass, bitch, worm, weasel, dog, pig, rat, turkey, chicken, snake, horse’s ass, leech, shrimp, shark, toad, bird brain—​nouns used to insult. Mousy, horsey, fishy, crabby, batty, catty, lousy, goosey, mulish, brutish, bestial, sheepish—​adjectives for undesirable traits and situations. To hog, to dog, to crow, to skunk, to badger, to duck, to bug, to hound, to flounder, to parrot, to grouse—​verbs for undesirable behavior. Joseph Clark lists some 5000 such expressions in Beastly Folklore.4 John Rodman, Barry Lopez, and many writers have noted how often we use animals in speech meant to

 

136   James B. Mason demean and disparage.5 In Man and the Natural World, Keith Thomas notes many ways in which animals have been associated with baseness and evil. Satan is depicted with horns and tail—​a mixture of beast and man; non-​Europeans were “brutish savages” and “filthy animals”; and the poor, the insane, criminals, one’s enemies—​all were “beastlike.”6 This raises at least a couple of questions, why are animals so powerful in speech? and why so much negativity about animals? Another good question is, is this a problem? We shall see. A number of writers have noted that our views of animals are the same as our views of nature, or, as I prefer to call it, the living world.7 Animals have always helped us understand the living world because their bodies and behaviors give us a handy way to “see” the vague, formless, chaotic rest of nature. “The terrain, the weather, the land forms, the sky are distressingly continuous and blended.”8 Throughout our evolution as humans, animals have given form, shape, and personality to nature, and, as such, they symbolize nature. True, other things in the world impressed us: dark forests, violent storms, mountains, waterfalls, caves, and other spectacular terrain features. But animals stirred emotions in ways that the rest of the world could not. Anthropologist Pat Shipman writes that we are “more emotionally involved with animals” than plants because we have many things in common.9 Because animals mean the world to us and because they stir such strong feelings, their reduction through domestication and enslavement by the beginner farmers of the ancient Middle East (the Near East to anthropologists) has cut a deep wound in the human psyche and in the Western culture they founded. I emphasize that, for the human mind, not all of nature is out there; there is human nature and nature within as well. We tend to see our wilder passions, such as sexual lust, anger—​what Plato called “the wild beast within us”—​and our various bodily functions as animalistic, that is, of an animal nature.10 Our vague, shadowy ideas about nature—​whether outer or inner—​get embodied as animals. Animals give us a way to keep them tangible. As such, animals still are, in Shepard’s words, “a handle for abstractions.”11 Negativity about animals, then, spreads negativity all around—​in our worldview, in our views of ourselves.

Origins Our distant ancestors spent a half a million years admiring the fine points of the old aurochs, the cow’s wild ancestors… . When we took the aurochs into our homes and cow sheds, we deprived the animal of its otherness and double-​crossed ourselves. (​Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals12)

It is virtually common knowledge now that the transition from forager to farmer that began 10,000 years ago brought about the greatest psychic and cultural upheaval in the 200,000-​year history of our species. It was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race,” wrote popular science writer and University of California, Los Angeles

 

Misothery   137 professor of geography Jared Diamond in his now famous article of the same title in the May 1987 issue of Discover magazine.13 Others believe that the animal side of the agricultural revolution was the much greater force in that upheaval.14 As Shipman puts it, “[T]‌he process of domesticating an animal is much more intimate, personal, and psychologically powerful than the process of domesticating a plant.”15 Let’s see why. Consider the world of our distant ancestors, particularly their immediate environments, some tens, even hundreds of thousands of years ago as our brains and minds were developing. They lived out in nature—​not separated from the elements and the living world as we are today. They lived on the move, seeking food and avoiding danger, which gave them extensive knowledge of the plants and animals in their territory. Although we call Homo sapiens “modern humans,” they were nevertheless an extension of a longer, older line of hominids—​H. erectus, H. habilis, and so on,—​who had many more hundreds of thousands of years of essentially the same way of living in and among the other plant and animal life around them. These very old life-​ways were already there when Homo evolved, or mutated, into sapiens—​people like us having brains and minds with a greater capacity for wondering, dreaming, thinking, and speech. Early humans would have been intrigued by the animals around them—​by the sounds, movements, body shapes, and behaviors strikingly similar to their own. They watched animals walk, run, eat, hide, climb, have sex, fight, play, sleep, urinate, defecate, give birth, care for their young, and die. They saw that animals had eyes, ears, hair, blood, teeth, and other organs, just like theirs. And they noted that some animals had impressive size, speed, strength, and appearance and engaged in behaviors that humans did not. For early modern humans—​I call them primal peoples—​animals were the most fascinating and awesome things in the world. They were wonderful for the flowering human mind and culture. It is no wonder, however, that the earliest art, painted 32,000 years ago on cave walls, is mostly animal figures. “Being like us and yet different,” writes biologist Paul Shepard, these animal images “manifest that invisible otherness” that so intrigued primal humans.16 This, the longest part of our evolution, the era of the development of the human mind and culture before agriculture, was when animals were First Beings in their primal people’s creation stories, when they regarded animals as totems, tribal ancestors, Animal Masters, and souls. This long era was “the way of the animal powers,” in the words of mythologist Joseph Campbell.17 The Middle East was the epicenter of the domestication of large herd animals—​sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and camels. Their domesticators grew into societies that extended—​ not often kindly—​their influence far and wide.18 As Alfred Crosby says in Ecological Imperialism, “The most important contrast between the Sumerians and their heirs, on the one hand, and the rest of humanity, on the other, involves the matter of livestock.”19 The species and their variations are few, “but they are enormous from the sociological point of view,” according to German sociologist and zoologist Richard Lewinsohn.20 The herder societies—​pastoralists to anthropologists—​have some traits in common. They were obsessed with their animals, for the herd was the source of their livelihood and of their pride, tribal identity, and wealth. The herders’ ideologies and values serve to build

 

138   James B. Mason up and maintain the herd (wealth). Paul Shepard lists these characteristics: “[a]‌ggressive hostility to outsiders, the armed family, feuding and raiding in a male-​centered hierarchical organization, the substitution of war for hunting, elaborate arts of sacrifice, monomaniacal pride and suspicion.”21 Sociologists Jean Lenski and Gerhard Lenski list a few more: “marked social inequality … hereditary slavery … raiding and warfare … [and] military advantage over their less mobile agrarian neighbors.”22 But these are the characteristics of fully developed herder societies into the historical period. One has only to read about the empires of Alexander the Great, the Romans, and Genghis Khan to understand how the tactics and ruthlessness of horse-​mounted, herd-​ driving warriors enabled them to control so much territory, and, it should be emphasized, to shape so much of world history. Our task is to examine how they came to be this way. When hunters and foragers came to control herds of animals, their movements, breeding, and food supply, they needed some way to resolve their very old views of animals as awesome First Beings and souls of the world. They needed to move from the worldview of The Way of the Animal Powers to the new realities of an agrarian way of life based on exploiting animals—​one in which people would come to control every aspect of animals’ lives. In the Middle East, where exploitation of domestic animals was key to wealth building, agrarian societies invented new ideologies to reconfigure views of animals. In these, the essential message was to reduce and debase animals and nature and to elevate human beings over them. The effect, spiritually speaking, was to turn the world upside down. Before domestication, the powerful, mythic beings, the supernaturals, were animals, and primal people held them in awe; after domestication, the supernaturals, the gods, became more human-​like, and people held animals in contempt. The agrarians’ god might be a living Sumerian or Assyrian king, or it might be Zeus, Jupiter, Aphrodite, Venus, Artemis, Diana, or any of the other human-​shaped gods of Greek and Roman polytheism, or it might be the superman Yahweh, God, or Allah of Middle Eastern monotheism. At any rate, animal-​using agrarians stripped animals of their souls and power and put them in what they perceived to be their proper place: in the service of humankind. The reconfiguring of animals to lower status was done through art, myth, ritual, and, of course, religion. As the Old Testament tells us, the Hebrews were hostile to idol-​worship and its “heathen” festivals. As the sociologists Jean and Gerhard Lenski have shown, the Hebrew herders of cattle, sheep, and goats, like other pastoralists, worshipped a new, all-​powerful god, that is, God—​a sort of superman, set up a new order of life, a hierarchy of being with God and men at the top. By giving human beings dominion over all of his creation, God gave a humans broader license to exploit, kill, and eat animals. The Western creation story in Genesis shows how God (actually the Hebrew writers) wrestled a couple of times with the violent aspect of dominion over animals before he made the license to eat meat explicit to Noah after the Great Flood. Even then, the license came with a great many restrictions—​the dietary laws spelled out in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Restrictions notwithstanding, the grant of

 

Misothery   139 dominion made animal slaughter and meat more accessible to growing populations of people settled in villages and cities. The length and complexity of the dietary rules point to the emotional and psychic turmoil stirred up by this ideological shift. Because the stripping away of the remains of the very old animal powers and souls was deeply unsettling, it had to be done with the trappings of religion. Through these dietary rules, the Hebrews, to their credit, carried out their license to kill with ritual reminders of the gravity of their dominion over nature. The borrowers of their theology were a bit more cavalier about slaughtering and meat eating. They adopted dominion but without the inconvenient dietary laws. After this point, animals were meat on the hoof—​agricultural commodities along with the other products of the harvest. This agrarian view of animals as soulless, lowly beings helped the growing commerce in wool, hides, and meat to expand in direct proportion to the growth of cities, trade, and specialization in the labor force. It enabled animal husbandry—​the deliberate control of animal breeding—​to produce more useful breeds and traits. It paved the way for herd-​keeping to become the industry arguably the most vital to the success of early Middle Eastern—​eventually Western—​civilization. There was a great need to reduce animals from spirit powers to slave commodities, and it took a lot to pull it off: It required the formulation of a great many negative ideas about animals and nature into ideologies that make up the foundations of Western culture. Unfortunately, these ideologies poison our worldview—​that is, both our view of ourselves and our relationship to the living world.

Misothery On a Saturday afternoon in Texas a few years ago, three men on horseback rode down a female red wolf and threw a lasso over her neck. When she gripped the rope with her teeth to keep the noose from closing, they dragged her around the prairie until they’d broken her teeth out. Then while two of them stretched the animal between their horses with ropes, the third man beat her to death with a pair of fence pliers. The wolf was taken around to a few bars in a pickup and finally thrown in a roadside ditch. (​Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves and Men23)

I have coined the word misothery (miz OTH uh ree; rhymes with misogyny) to name a body of ideas that we need to discuss. It comes from two Greek words, one meaning “hatred” or “contempt,” the other meaning “animal.” Literally, then, the word means hatred and contempt for animals. And, since views of animals determine views of nature in general, it can mean hatred and contempt for nature—​especially its animal-​like aspects.

 

140   James B. Mason I decided to create the word misothery because I could find no word in the English language that adequately expressed the full range of hate, contempt, loathing, disgust, fear, and all the other negative views and feelings that humans have about other animals. There is only theriophobia, as discussed in John Rodman’s “The Dolphin Papers” and quoted earlier.24 Theriophobia seems inadequate because it literally means “fear of animals,” as in arachnophobia, fear of spiders, or acrophobia, fear of heights, or agoraphobia, fear of public spaces. There is much more negativity about animals and nature than simple fear. I thought of the word misogyny, a reasonably common word for an attitude of hatred and contempt toward women. The similarity of the two words reflects the similarity of the two sets of attitudes and ideas. In both cases, the ideas reduce the power, status, and dignity of an Other. Misogyny reduces female power/​status/​dignity, thus supporting male supremacy and control of women in the system we call patriarchy. Misothery reduces the power/​status/​dignity of animals and nature thus supporting human supremacy and control over animals and the living world in a system we might call dominion. Just as agrarian society invented beliefs to reduce women, it also invented beliefs or ideologies about animals that reduced them in their worldview. These beliefs served to replace the awe and respect humans had for animals with contempt and loathing. To understand how misothery might have taken shape centuries ago in the Middle East, let us consider recent societies in transition from foraging to farming. The Thai, the Nuer, and the Balinese cultures are intermediate between totemic and domestic: the Thai keep their domesticated buffalo and oxen under them—​literally—​in pens under their houses built on stilts. For them, the dog, a food scavenger and a nonworker, is held in very low, or negative, regard. To the Thai, the dog is a “low-​life.” They regard monkeys as degenerate human beings; and, according to Shepard, “the most feared and awful are the creatures of the remotest forest and wildest places.”25 The Thai show two characteristic elements of misothery: contempt for animals under human control, and fear or hatred of those beyond their control. The Nuer are African herders of cattle for whom life is all about access to grazing land and water and the power to keep that access. “Their society is a denatured totemic clanship in which that parallel of the animal and man has ceased to be a key to human order and is instead an echo.”26 There is no detachment about cattle, their chosen creatures, with whom they are very nearly obsessed. Cattle are the means of life, the source of song and affection. And, in the classification of cattle horns and colorings, there is a schematic ordering of humans and nature. For the Nuer, the rest of the world exists apart, “physically separated by the space necessary to keep hoofed animals.”27 As cattle-​ keeping forces them to live in opposition to predators and other wild animals, they have little regard for the rest of nature. “The wild is external, accidental, inessential,” says Shepard, while cattle are everything. The opposition of wild and domestic brings about a jarring alteration in worldview. Wild nature comes to represent everything “outside”—​ including other peoples and other animals. As a result, Shepard says, the Nuer are “truculent, aloof, isolationist and aggressive.”28

 

Misothery   141 The Balinese are another society in transition from totemic to domestic culture. Here the animal domesticated is small—​the red jungle fowl, from whom our breeds of chickens are derived. Yet the fowl’s reduction by domestication brings sharp changes in a people’s view of animals and nature. The Balinese obsession is with cockfighting, which probably began as a ritual to resolve the animal powers left over from totemism. In the jungles, wild male birds fought to maintain turf, families, and flocks; but in the villages today, their domesticated descendants fight to provide entertainment for gamblers and onlookers. The Balinese case shows us how a society, in undoing the older way of the animal powers, can replace it with some negative ideas about humanity as well as animals and nature. The cockfight began as a ritual, became a tradition, and evolved into a game or sport. Today, the Balinese use the cockfight to stand in for aggression and competition among villages.29 Scholars have uncovered numerous links between cockfighting and a male world of aggression and violence.30 The human owner whose cock loses a cockfight, Shepard says, “literally tears his bird to pieces and gives it to the owner of the winning bird, who eats it.”31 Animals, even small ones, fighting to the death over and over for public wagering and “sport” may appear to provide a “civilized” outlet for social conflicts, but this also provides a negative model for nature, both wild and human. Shepard notes that the Balinese “see animality as that which is reprehensible in man,” and, predictably, Balinese demons have animal shapes.32 For them, the cockfight acknowledges the dark side of humanity and, less consciously, of nature. The cockfight may keep Balinese villagers from warring with each other, but it feeds negativity about animals and the living world. We can see misothery in the making by looking at some of the mythologies of ancient Middle Eastern societies in the struggles to resolve the old animal powers into an agrarian worldview. One of the most revealing is from Mesopotamia—​the Gilgamesh epic, the national epic of the Babylonian Semites, which was written down in about 2000 BCE. Gilgamesh was a god/​king of the first dynasty in Uruk, Sumeria, and a great cultural hero to the Babylonians. Since the written form of the epic is the end product of a very old tale handed down orally, it reveals how some of the myths from the “old days” were modified to construct the agrarian worldview. Gilgamesh is described as a strong ruler through a personal history of acts of war and rape: he is “a hero of unbridled aggression and sexual appetite (he leaves ‘no son to his father’, ‘no virgin to her lover’).”33 Outraged by his tyranny, the gods create a wild beast/​ man named Enkidu to bring the terrible king under control. Enkidu is hairy like an animal, his hair “sprouts like grain” and looks like a woman’s. He “eats grass with the gazelles,” drinks with them … and delights in his heart with them. He lives in open country. He is the scourge of hunters, filling their pits, foiling their traps, and in general protecting all animals from the harmful intentions of Gilgamesh’s people.34

Enkidu represents the older, totemic order in which humans lived in harmony with animals and nature. Gilgamesh represents the new order, based on aggression and control

 

142   James B. Mason of women, animals, and nature. The transition from old to new is symbolized in Enkidu himself, who leaves his animality behind and becomes a hero, a god/​man, and a friend of Gilgamesh. In this part of the legend, misogyny is so thoroughly interwoven with misothery that it is hard to tell one from the other. It does illustrate, though, how wild nature is symbolized by both animals and women: A hunter persuades a temple prostitute to take Enkidu away from his animal life in nature and over to civilization. Enkidu lies with the woman for six days, and “she treated him, the savage, to a woman’s task.”35 Afterward, Enkidu finds that his wild animal friends are afraid of him, for “he now has wisdom, broader understanding.”36 The prostitute takes Enkidu, now civilized through sex, to Gilgamesh and the two men become friends. Together they raid and rule, challenging and putting down the goddesses and their temples and destroying their sacred forest—​nature. We should note the woman’s role in taming nature, which is symbolized by the wild beast/​man Enkidu. The story seems to credit women, subtly and indirectly, with the invention of agriculture. Did women domesticate nature and bring civilization? Perhaps Enkidu symbolizes that very old, very persistent idea. But here that idea is twisted with the misogynist notion that sex is “a woman’s task” and that whether by rape, deceit, seduction, or hire, it tames a man. The misothery here is subtle, but we see it in Enkidu’s taming and becoming a civilized man. We are given the idea that he is made better by this conversion. The implication is that animal life and nature, although depicted as peaceful here, are beneath human civilization. The implication is that Enkidu, the animal, is improved by a woman so that he will be useful in Gilgamesh’s agrarian civilization. In some ancient Middle Eastern art, we can see graphic evidence of animal reduction and misothery in the making. In Mesopotamian art, there are scenes of animal processions, animals fighting, and of men fighting animals in temples, murals, pottery, and sculpture. These scenes show up in great numbers on the famous Mesopotamian cylinder seals. In the days before writing, these small, carved, stone cylinders were rolled over pieces of clay for use as a kind of trademark to seal containers of wine or grain. Thousands of these cylinder seals exist and, according to Klingender, they “provide a continuous record of the changing fashions in Mesopotamian art for almost three thousand years, from the middle of the fourth millennium to the collapse of the Persian Empire in the fourth century b.c.”37 After writing appeared in about 3200 bce, the cylinders continued to be used as signatures on writers’ clay tablets. In the earliest protoliterate stage, known as the Uruk period, the prevailing themes, according to Francis Klingender, were “serenely pastoral, in marked contrast to the later subjects of Mesopotamian art.”38 Here the main theme was the sacred temple herd kept by the king or priests, and it shows that the animals—​though domesticated—​were still regarded with remnants of the older, pre-​agrarian sense of the animal powers. The animals, cattle or sheep, are depicted in peaceful processions, usually in natural settings. These are docile domestic animals, moving in single file to the fields. These “animal file” scenes evoke bucolic feelings of the calm and order of an early-​stage agrarian city-​state, when animals were perhaps not yet fully private property to be traded or coveted as

 

Misothery   143 spoils of war. In later times, a second major grouping of scenes appears on the cylinder seals. In these “beast-​hero” scenes, the animals are reared up, usually in confrontation, as on heraldic coats of arms. On some, a pair of heroes—​possibly Gilgamesh and Enkidu—​ grapple with bulls or other beasts. On others, “a hero may grapple simultaneously with a beast on either side, thus forming a triad representing a kind of fighting antithesis to the tree-​of-​life,”39 and then a third major theme appears, this one “consists of a continuous frieze of fighting creatures, usually lions and other beasts of prey attacking cattle, with herdsmen defending their flocks.”40 These themes, Klingender says, continue in the heraldic art of the Middle Ages in Europe. The whole feeling is one of dangerous animals, of violence, of conflict with animals and nature, and man’s drive to conquer nature in the mature agrarian nation-​state. The cylinder seals illustrate Mesopotamia’s changing view of animals and nature. In the process, “detachment was achieved” when the lifelike, naturalistic animals of the early period are shown distorted and stylized in later periods.41 “This probably reflects the taste of the barbarians who invaded Mesopotamia,” according to Klingender.42 These “barbarians” would have been horse-​mounted, herding tribes—​the Kurgans, Aryans, or their equivalents—​who sprang from the pastoral peoples of Central Asia and the northern Middle East. In the third and fourth millennia bce, they raided to the south in waves, leaving their mark on Mesopotamia, its art, and, apparently, its view of nature.43 Klingender describes the emerging view of animals and nature after the introduction of horse warfare and cattle breeding, when Sumeria was wealthy and powerful, “To emphasize his victory the hero may hold the beast [at once a real predator and a symbol of wild nature] upside down… . Intersecting rampant animals, twin bodies joined to one head, human torsos mounted on lions instead of legs, and other hold devices served to introduce further variety into the entanglements of fighting heroes, beasts and monsters, presented upon tightly packed friezes.”44 Gradually, a theme emerged “more appropriate to the idea of embattled force,” he says. By about 2300 bce, the period of the first all-​Mesopotamian empire founded by Sargon of Akkad, “the animals themselves finally assumed those attitudes of force and violence frozen into immobility, which have served ever since, through later Mesopotamian and Assyrian art down to medieval heraldry, to symbolize military virtues of strength and aggression.45 These expressions in art reflected a deeper psychic/​cultural process: the reduction of animals from animated, ensouled, kindred beings in nature to frozen symbols of human power over nature. Once they were believed to embody the spirits and powers of the living world; hereafter, they would be mere sign carriers for the human spirit and its power over that world. In Mesopotamia, says Lord Kenneth Clark, “the sense of kinship with animals has been superseded by an overawed recognition of their strength, which can be used to symbolize the terrible power of the king.”46 And in these scenes, the king, we should note, symbolized the wealth and power of agrarian society and its complete mastery over plants, animals, and the land—​all of living nature. According to Klingender, the animal art of later civilizations in Western Asia shows the influence of Mesopotamian themes. He notes that figures of rampant, fighting beasts appear on a gigantic scale in Hittite palaces and temples. More of the same

 

144   James B. Mason are at Assyrian sites and later still, at Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon and in the palaces of Persian kings at Suza and Persepolis. “Their influence on the other great styles is no less remarkable: they contributed decisive elements to the arts of early Greece, the later Roman empire, Sassanid Persia, Byzantium, the Muslim world and medieval Europe.”47 We know that art reflects a society’s deepest ideas about the world, so the widespread popularity of these styles also tells us something about the spread of Middle Eastern agrarian culture. Obviously, its ideas about the order of humans, animals, and nature had appeal far and wide wherever domestication had begun. And the Mesopotamians, with some help from the hordes of horse-​warriors to the north, furnished the graphics—​one might say the propaganda—​that conveyed this new order.

Purposes Animals whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal. (​Charles Darwin48) [Belief in human superiority] is prominent in western Judeo-​Christian philosophies, and we use it to justify exploiting other species for our own benefit. (​Donald R. Griffin, The Question of Animal Awareness49)

Agrarian society invented some cultural devices to assist in the demotion of animals from powers and kindred beings to lowly beings and slaves. While hunters knew a great deal about animal character and behavior, they didn’t interact with an individual animal closely enough or long enough to become emotionally attached. Only at the moment of killing did the hunter exercise control over an animal. Until then, the animal remained an independent, respected being with a life of his own. The domestic animal, on the other hand, lived a life of dependence on her farmer. Day after day, the farmer fed her, led her to water, milked her, and steered the plow behind her. Without emotional barriers, the farmer would become personally attached to his cow, and working, driving, whipping, and slaughtering her would amount to a gross betrayal of trust, causing feelings of guilt and remorse. Farmers, according to University of Pennsylvania professor James Serpell, “learned to cope with this dilemma using a variety of essentially dishonest techniques.”50 It is indicative of domestication’s impact on our worldview that these extend to wild animals and the entire living world. Serpell identifies four devices: detachment, concealment, misrepresentation, and shifting the blame. Konrad Lorenz illustrates detachment in his book Man Meets Dog. “Today for breakfast I ate some fried bread and sausage. Both the sausage and the lard that the bread was fried in came from a pig that I used to know as a dear little piglet. Once that stage was over, to save my conscience from conflict, I  meticulously avoided any further

 

Misothery   145 acquaintance with that pig.”51 Rather than give up pork and lard, Lorenz chose to give up closeness to pigs. Multiply this emotional transaction thousands of times over thousands of years and we can understand why agrarian culture views animals impersonally and indifferently. Detachment is complete in today’s corporate factory farms, where the day-​to-​day care of animals is left to machines controlled by electronic sensors. Concealment aids detachment by hiding stockyards, slaughterhouses, dog pounds, and the other places where the uses of animals turn ugly. There is concealment in numbers. With thousands in crowded mechanized buildings, there is no opportunity for familiarity with any particular animal. There is concealment in language used to ease humanity’s conscience: beef, steak, pork, ham and veal have for centuries concealed the dismemberment of animals for their muscle tissue. The flesh from chickens, ducks, or geese merits no euphemism (poultry refers to a class of birds not a kind of meat) because these animals are small and, as birds, more remote in degree of kinship, size, and similarity. Misrepresentation distorts the facts about animals so that their sufferings and deaths seem necessary or deserved. Most of it is unconscious, residing in the negative, hateful ideas about animals that we have inherited. We grow up on these in art, literature, and film, and they thoroughly color our attitudes about animals and nature. If animals inspire fear and loathing, it becomes morally easier to control, use, and kill them. Indeed, these become moral imperatives. And the nearer an animal comes to be perceived as posing an actual threat to human welfare, as are rats and wolves, the more intense the misrepresentation. In our literature, these animals in particular are misrepresented as bloodthirsty, ravenous beasts snarling at the gates of civilization, cruelly intent on bursting through to ravage innocent humanity. This idea of animal evil is a very handy tool for agrarian society—​so much so that it is kept sharpened and accessible through Western folklore.52 The most obvious example is the legend of the werewolf, which fed generations of Europeans with a morally righteous hatred for the “beast of waste and desolation,” the wolf. Bloodthirsty, vicious, cruel, oversexed, and lover of evil, our stereotypes of wolves misrepresented real wolf behavior. Such views have motivated centuries of cattle and sheep herders to exterminate wolves in both Europe and North America, and they have very nearly succeeded (Figure 7.1). Blame shifting is a leftover from the old rituals of hunting and animal sacrifice, which shifted blame for the killing to ancestors or the gods. As part of the ritual animal sacrifice in ancient Babylonia, the priests actually bent down to the ear of the slaughter victim to whisper, “[T]‌his deed was done by all the gods; I did not do it.”53 Holy men did the dirty work, and ever since, the division of labor has helped shift, or diffuse, the blame. For centuries, agrarian society has relegated the bloody work and the moral and emotional burdens of killing animals to butchers and slaughterhouse workers who have been regarded as “odious, merciless, pitiless, cruel, rude, grim, stern, bloody, and greasy.”54 We debase them to make the killing seem somehow inevitable or natural because they are the sort of persons who, by their very nature, are killers. This device allows the meat eater to think, the killings will go on in spite of me, so I am not responsible. Today responsibility for the killing of animals for food is completely diffused by the corporate bureaucracies that have taken over animal agriculture. One firm, or a division

 

146   James B. Mason

Fig.  7.1  Wolves killed by Minnesota Department of Conservation game wardens (now called Minnesota Department of Natural Resources conservation officers) for predator control in the 1940s. (Source: © (2014) State of Minnesota, Department of Natural Resources, Reprinted with Permission.)

of it, may specialize in breeding animals, another in caring for young animals, and another in feeding them to market weight. Other business entities transport them to stockyards and auctions, where still others buy them and take them to the slaughterhouse. And dozens of others—​packers, processors, and supermarket chains—​reduce the carcasses to bloodless, shrink-​wrapped packages that offer the consumer no clue as to their animal origins. The buck is passed around so many times—​or so far down the vertically integrated corporate chain—​that no individual or firm feels any responsibility for the reduction of a living being to packaged flesh. These distancing devices are essential elements of misothery in keeping animal exploitation from being emotionally and morally disturbing. They aided agrarian society in constructing a worldview that abolished the old sense of kinship and placed a vast gulf between humans and the rest of the living world. In the process, we have, Serpell writes, erected “a defensive screen of lies, myths, distortions, and evasions, the sole purpose of which has been to reconcile or nullify the conflict between economic self-​ interest, on the one hand, and sympathy and affection on the other.”55

 

Misothery   147

Repercussions From the Hun and Scythian horsemen, Mediterranean goat-​and ass-​ keepers, Semitic cattle-​breeders, Persian shepherds, and Arabian camel-​ lovers, from them and other animal-​keepers the Western world obtained its premises of a world view. (​Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals56) A kind of madness arises from the prevailing nature-​conquering, nature-​ hating and self-​and world-​denial. (​Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley, The Subversive Science57)

The greatest harm caused by misothery, I emphasize, is the immense, ongoing toll in animal suffering and death. But as the inheritors of agrarian culture’s misothery and beliefs in human supremacy and human exceptionalism, people need to be shown how this harms the human species as well. The harm is a worldview in which we despise too much of the living world—​including our animality and ourselves. Misothery makes us comfortable with intensive animal exploitation, but it maintains ruthlessness and detachment in our culture. What could be a more loving, whole human spirit is maimed; what could be a greater sense of kinship, of belonging in the world, is cut off. Consequently, our feeling for the living world is numbed, or worse, entirely negative. We feel disenchanted, dispirited, disillusioned. Our deepest feeling for this life is malaise, so we long for the next. Our deepest feeling for the living world is horror, so we strive to destroy it. The agrarian culture makes us despise and try to control the animal within us. By this I mean our animality, which is several things. One is the simple, biological fact that we are animals—​primates, to be precise. If this causes amusement or discomfort, then I have made my point: We don’t like to think of ourselves as animals or even as closely related to animals. Our animality also includes the body, its natural cycles and functions. These tend to remind us of our closeness to animals, so we control, hide, and deny them. In European society, Keith Thomas says, morals, religion, polite education, “civility,” and refinement were all “intended to raise men above animals.”58 An influential textbook on civility by Erasmus, says Thomas, “made differentiation from animals the very essence of good table manners, more so even than differentiation from ‘rustics.’ ”59 Because all of the bodily functions had undesirable animal associations, “some commentators thought that it was physical modesty, even more than reason, which distinguished men from beasts.”60 Thomas tells of Cotton Mather, the New England puritan preacher who wrote in his diary about an incident in which he was urinating (“emptying the cistern of nature”) at a wall. At the same moment, a dog came along, hoisted his leg and peed near him. Mather wrote, “What mean and vile things are the children of men … . How much do our natural necessities abase us, and place us … on the same level with the very dogs!”61 Mather wrote that, from then on, whenever nature called to “debase me into the condition of the beast,”62 he would “make it an opportunity of

 

148   James B. Mason shaping in my mind some holy, noble, divine thought” and to practice “thoughts of piety wherein I may differ from the brutes.”63 Thomas gives many examples of European society’s negativity about human animality. All bodily impulses were regarded “as ‘animal’ ones, needing to be subdued,” and “lust in particular, was synonymous with the animal condition.”64 Words like “brute,” “bestial,” and “beastly” had much stronger sexual connotations than they do today. In bestiaries and emblem books, the moral textbooks of the Middle Ages, animals mostly symbolize lasciviousness or sexual infidelity. Besides lust, European society saw many other reminders of human animality. John Stuart Mill stressed cleanliness because its opposite, “more than anything else, renders man bestial.”65 Nakedness, too, was bestial. Men who had unduly long hair were considered bestial. It was bestial, Thomas noted, to work at night because that is the time when, as one period writer said, “beasts run about seeking their prey.”66 It was bestial even to go swimming because it was a form of movement more natural to animals than to humans. And moralists frowned upon people dressing up in animal disguises, for that flirted with crossing the boundaries. Most despised of all, however, was bestiality, the crime of having sex with an animal, which was a capital offense in some New England colonies and was a felony crime in most states until recently.67 In the Middle Ages, both the human and the animal were executed. It is telling of society’s low regard for animals that the great offense was not the rape of the animal. “The sin,” Thomas says, “was the sin of confusion; it was immoral to mix the categories.”68 As one Stuart-​era moralist put it, “[I]‌t turns man into a very beast, makes a man a member of a brute creature.”69 But try as hard as we might, we are still conscious, albeit at the lower levels, of our own animality. We don’t dwell on it, but we know that some aspects of human nature, our behavior, and body are animal-​like. The misothery in our culture, then, produces a schizoid view of ourselves: It exalts some of ourselves while it debases the rest of ourselves. Misothery sets us up for inner conflict. For if human beings are exalted and animals and nature are base, then anything we have in common with other animals is base and something to be despised, controlled, hidden, and denied, such as sexuality. Misothery in our agrarian culture has straitjacketed human sexuality, shrouding it in shame and self-​hatred. Human sexual life is for procreation only. Elaine Pagels traces this ethic to old herd-​keeping traditions. For over a millennium before rabbis wrote Genesis, she says, “Jews had taught that the purpose of marriage, and therefore of sexuality, was procreation. Jewish communities had inherited their sexual customs from nomadic [herder] ancestors whose very survival depended upon reproduction, both among their herds of animals and among themselves.”70 The early Christian patriarchs advanced the notion that sex was so generally evil (Satan borrowed the practice “from the irrational animals” to tempt Adam and Eve) that it is best avoided altogether. St. Paul, for example, declared, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.”71 Clement warned married couples, “Not even at night, although in darkness, is it fitting to carry on immodestly or indecently, but with modesty, so that

 

Misothery   149 whatever happens, happens in the light of reason … for even that union which is legitimate is still dangerous, except in so far as it is engaged in procreation of children.”72 For Augustine, Adam and Eve’s intercourse “permanently corrupted human nature as well as nature in general.”73 This fits with the larger idea that human original sin corrupted the world. “Nature,” Augustine wrote, “which the first human being harmed, is miserable.”74

Conclusion Our evolution of mind and culture—​our views of the world—​were made of animals. The worldview of primal societies saw kinship and continuity with other beings. Domestication and agrarian societies changed all that and brought animals and nature down to inferior things for human exploitation. To do so, they invented a set of ideas—​ which I have termed misothery—​literally hatred of and contempt for animals, animality, and nature. While this attitude toward the living world has raised human status and made industrial-​scale exploitation of animals and nature somewhat emotionally comfortable, it has brought unfortunate side effects. We are ashamed of our own animality. Our exploitation, our ever-​expanding human numbers and material demands, are causing an unsustainable impact on the living world, and we may be too alienated by misothery to reverse it. To come to terms with nature, to find our place in the living world, we need to come to terms with animals, for animals are fundamental to it all.

Notes 1. John Rodman, “The Dolphin Papers,” in North American Review 2 (Spring 1974): 20. 2. Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), 196. 3. Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals:  Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence (New York: Viking Press, 1978). 4. Joseph Clark, Beastly Folklore (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1968). 5. Rodman, “Dolphin Papers”; Lopez, Wolves; Mary Midgeley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Beasts: What Animals Can Teach Us about Human Nature (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). The most thorough exploration of the use of animals to disparage is in Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). 6. Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 42, and, generally, 36–​47. 7. Shepard, Thinking Animals; Yi-​Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection:  The Making of Pets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Thomas, Man/​Natural World. 8. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 44. 9. Pat Shipman, The Animal Connection:  A  New Perspective on What Makes Us Human (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 196.

 

150   James B. Mason 10. Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 36. 11. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 117. 12. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 93. 13. Jared Diamond, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” Discover, May 1987. 14. Shipman, Animal Connection; David A. Nibert, Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism and Global Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism:  The Biological Expansion of Europe 900-​1900 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1986); Shepard, Thinking Animals. See also Jim Mason, An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature (New York: Lantern Books, 2005), for more information about the role of animal domestication, herding, and husbandry in shaping the Western worldview. 15. Shipman, Animal Connection, 197. 16. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 31. 17. Joseph Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythology, vol. 1, The Way of the Animal Powers, part 1, Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers (New York: Harper & Row/​Perennial, 1988). 18. See, generally, Mason, Unnatural Order; Nibert, Animal Oppression. 19. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 23. 20. Richard Lewinsohn, Animals, Men and Myths (New York: Harper and Bros., 1954), 68. 21. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 154. 22. Gerhard Lenski and Jean Lenski, Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1982), 224. 23. Lopez, Wolves, 152. 24. Rodman, “Dolphin Papers.” 25. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 151. 26. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 152. 27. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 152. 28. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 153. 29. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 412–​453. 30. Linda Kalof, “Animal Blood Sport: A Ritual Display of Masculinity and Sexual Virility,” Sociology of Sport Journal 31 (2014): 438–​454. 31. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 155. 32. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 155. 33. Quoted in Andree Collard and Joyce Contrucci, Rape of the Wild: Man’s Violence against Animals and the Earth (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1989), 20. For the Gilgamesh epic with commentary, see Stephen Mitchell, Gilgamesh: A New English Version (New York: Simon and Schuster /​Free Press, 2004). 34. Collard and Contrucci, Rape, 20. 35. Quoted in Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 132. 36. Lerner, Patriarchy, 132. 37. Frances Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the Middle Ages (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 41. 38. Klingender, Animals in Art, 40.

 

Misothery   151 Klingender, Animals in Art, 45. Klingender, Animals in Art, 45. Klingender, Animals in Art, 46. Klingender, Animals in Art, 46. Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987); Shepard, Thinking Animals; Nibert, Animal Oppression. 44. Klingender, Animals in Art, 47. 45. Klingender, Animals in Art, 47. 46. Kenneth Clark, Animals and Men:  Their Relationship as Reflected in Western Art from Prehistory to the Present Day (New York: Morrow, 1977), 16. 47. Klingender, Animals in Art, 48–​49. 48. Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 36. 49. Donald R. Griffin, The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of Mental Experience (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1981), 88. 50. James Serpell, In the Company of Animals:  A  Study of Human-​Animal Relationships (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 151. 51. Konrad Lorenz, Man Meets Dog (London, Methuen, 1954), vii. 52. For a review of the representation of animals in folklore, see Boria Sax’s chapter, “Animals in Folklore,” in this volume. 53. Serpell, Company of Animals, 168. 54. Serpell, Company of Animals, 165. 55. Serpell, Company of Animals, 168. 56. Shepard, Thinking Animals, 154. 57. Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley, eds. The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 8. 58. Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 37. 59. Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 37. 60. Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 37. 61. Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 38. 62. Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 38. 63. Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 38. 64. Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 38. 65. Quoted in Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 38. 66. Quoted in Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 39. 67. John M. Scheb II, Criminal Law, 7th ed. (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2014). 68. Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 39. 69. Thomas, Man/​Natural World, 39. 70. Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent:  Sex and Politics in Early Christianity (New York: Random House, 1988), 11. 71. Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence:  Culture’s Revenge against Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 15. 72. Pagels, Adam, Eve, 29. 73. Pagels, Adam, Eve, 133. 74. Pagels, Adam, Eve, 133. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

 

Chapter 8

C ontinental A pproac h e s to Animal s a nd Anima l i t y Ralph R. Acampora

Existential Phenomenology Although much animal philosophy was, in its first and second generations, dominated by analytic and feminist approaches, by the 1990s, reflections on animality also turned to (or emerged from) Continental European traditions of philosophy, including phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics.1 The present author was deeply involved in this “Continental turn” and contributed to its development by taking up the posthumanist project of re-​appreciating bodily animacy as such in order to expand the range of caring regard in recognizing our status as animate zoomorphs. I undertook that task by engaging a bio-​existential hermeneutic of body, in view of Edith Wyschogrod’s observation that “classical phenomenology’s account of the body subject [can be] recontextualized so as to highlight the body’s receptive capacities, its vulnerabilities, its patience; it is thus replete with ethical significations.”2 Interpreting embodiment phenomenologically along these lines, I claimed that we could enter a mode of philosophizing that would be fruitful for interspecies ethics—​because the live body of experience is the primary locus of existential commonality between human animals and other organisms, and because the appreciation of commonality undergirding differentiation enables the growth of moral relationships. I suggested that we might ground moral compassion for other animals in the sensation of sharing carnal vulnerability (rather than, say, various mental abilities). This overview could stand some elaboration. On a somatic level, then, it seems to me that we are aware of our own physical vulnerability—​susceptibility to injury, illness, and infirmity—​just in virtue of being entities aware of their animate flesh. We might share this sort of somatic sensitivity with another (kind of) organism in the minimal

 

Continental Approaches to Animals and Animality    153 sense of becoming conscious that our susceptibility to suffer harm is like that of the other organism. My claim on this construal is that such minimal mutuality of common carnal nature suffices phenomenologically to establish compassionate concern for the other—​in the mode of his being the proper object or patient of ethical consideration. In another, stronger sense of sharing, the second party might also become aware that our vulnerability is similar to her own; this richer form of reciprocity is requisite, it appears to me, for interspecific compassion to take on the facet of respect—​whereby both parties appropriately regard each other as moral subjects, agents, or actors.3 Some of our relationships with other primates (particularly apes), with cetaceans (such as dolphins), and most especially, with domesticated companion or work animals (such as dogs and horses) feature reciprocally cognizant compassion grown into moral respect. Now, typically, ethicists who champion compassion tend to assume or stress a mentalistic account of empathetic concern (via projective imagination, for example). Diverging from this sort of moral psychology, I have contended that (especially cross-​ species) moral life is primarily rooted—​as a matter of phenomenal fact—​in corporal “symphysis” rather than in entirely mental maneuvers directed toward sympathy. As I have used it, symphysis is meant to designate the felt sense of sharing with somebody else a live nexus as experienced in a somatic setting of direct or systemic (inter)relationship.4 (Some human examples may help illustrate the sort of phenomena to which I refer: they range from negative feelings of sympathy-​pain to positive feelings of sexual intimacy; pregnancy and nursing are particularly thick instances, physical collaboration or teamwork is an intermediate illustration, and sensing tools or enclosures as extensions of one’s body are relatively thinner examples.) I believe that speaking of symphysis is the best way to describe the proto-​ethical feeling that assures us of another animal being’s moral considerability. Inferential reasoning by analogy may rationally justify that assurance, and appealing to psychological theory of imagination may scientifically explain it via empathic projection, but only somatologies, as it were, of genus-​being and of alien specificity can properly articulate the actual experience of conviviality that is at stake.5 From this last perspective, then, an ethos sculpted somatically by symphysical encounters would inform a character or culture that is morally sensitive to the being-​ in-​the-​world (or existential element) of flesh, including that carnal vulnerability shared with any live body as such. Such sensitivity is made appreciative and appreciable by our own bodily participation as animals ourselves in the corporal life-​world.6 Continental approaches to animal ethics do not necessarily emphasize the embodiment of interspecific encounter. Some recent efforts have concentrated instead on personal, soulful, quasi-​spiritual, or otherwise primarily mental phenomena of interaction. A common theme in these accounts is the attempt to articulate an existential phenomenology or an existential hermeneutic of ethical address as such, showing that the latter’s scope can encompass other-​than-​human beings. Such an inquiry promises to describe or interpret the moral psychology of intersubjective or social categories, such as neighbor or community. Take the former category first. It bespeaks the second-​person voice of ethical address, as in the locution, “it is to you, my neighbor, that I  am obliged.” Stereotypically, by

 

154   Ralph R. Acampora anthropocentric default, it is assumed by many that a neighbor in this sense must be human. However, it has been suggested lately by some that there are or can be “nonhuman neighbors” in the sense of that term developed by the twentieth-​century French philosopher and rabbi Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the face as such is a primordial marker of moral importunity. Indeed, for Levinas, the ego does not preexist encounter with the other’s face—​“I” exist only as recognition of the other’s claim on me arrives, as a potential agent of responsibility to someone else emerges, through facial mediation. The question then arises, in the context of animal ethics, could the face of my neighbor be that of a nonhuman creature? It certainly seems that Levinas countenances this possibility when he refers to a particularly convivial dog outside his WWII prison camp as “the last Kantian in Nazi Germany” (because the canine bore witness to the dignity of the prisoners).7 In fact, he explicitly encourages biocentric readings of morality when he admits, “It is clear that… . the ethical extends to all living beings.”8 Something similar is afoot—​on the level of first-​person plural address—​when James Hart interprets Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology so that “human beings can say ‘we’ of the ‘biotic community’ and, even more so, of nonhuman animal persons in ways analogous to how human beings say ‘we’ in reference to one another.”9 This sort of talk may sound nonsensical, especially to ears trained by and into humanist discourse, but it is justified when “there is awareness that the good of each is bound up with the good of all and that humans willy-​nilly act in such a way that the well-​being of the other members of the biotic community is affected.”10 Moreover, the communal significance of saying “we” thickens when the others so collected under that mode of address are themselves plausibly considered subjects of intentional consciousness. “For example, with my cats and dogs,” Hart illustrates, “I have confidence that I know their intentions from observing their behavior in the third-​person as well as from our mutual efforts at communication.”11 The approaches just sketched are not without their shortcomings, and these flaws are acknowledged by the propounding thinkers themselves. The chief problem is that approaches rooted in mentalistic personhood have a built-​in bias, placing mature humans at the head of a moral hierarchy (unless we rate cetacean subjectivity above our own or include suprahuman, say, extraterrestrial or divine, entities into our picture of ethics). So, for Levinas, though “one cannot entirely refuse the face of an animal… . yet the priority here is not found in the animal, but in the human face”—​indeed, “the human face is completely different, and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal.”12 And Hart’s attempt at a Husserlian animal phenomenology continually appeals to analogies from the so-​called marginal cases of humanity, for example, infants and the mentally handicapped, positioning mature humans in the parental role as species stewards or guardian demigods over the interests of other animals.13 Such a scenario, it has been charged, constitutes benign patronage at best or backhanded degradation at worst. “The parent is aware of and responsible for the interests of the [infantile or retarded] child in a way the child is not aware of them,” Hart remarks.14 If one substitutes human for parent and animal for child here, the distasteful flavor of the analogical situation can be registered.

 

Continental Approaches to Animals and Animality    155

Poststructural Hermeneutics and Deconstruction It is worth noting, at this juncture, that animal ethics is currently undergoing transformation into a comparatively more comprehensive field, one that goes beyond an earlier preoccupation with the right and wrong of this or that action, practice, or policy affecting nonhumans and now also takes up matters concerning the ontology of animality. This is not surprising, as much moral philosophy has shown a historical tendency to beg the more metaphysical questions germane to the original region of ethical interest—​it helps, in other words, to know what we are ultimately confronted with if we want to reflect on how we ought to deal with it. So animal philosophy has come to encompass more than animal ethics; it also includes what can be referred to as philosophical zoology (resemblant to, though more capacious than and not necessarily modeled after, the field of thought known as philosophical anthropology). Indeed, current projects of inquiry are attracting greater notice and bearing greater influence than ever before. With respect to recent Continental treatments in this area, there is a trend to take inspiration from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This pair of thinkers challenged the very premise of (most prior) animal ontology—​namely, that different kinds of organisms have substantial essences or existential structures that are the proper objects of such study, so that there is or are animal being(s). What Deleuze and Guattari proposed is to concentrate rather on historically contingent and profluently variable processes of animal becoming, or in their parlance, “becoming­-animal.” The notion of becoming-​animal was part of a larger program of theirs to destabilize certain concepts of reality that they believed yoke us into psycho-​politically oppressive modes of thinking and living. Chief among these concepts are the twin ideas that true reality (the “really real” of classical philosophy) is or should be characterized by identity and stasis, and that the phenomena of diversity or change that must be admitted are best understood according to an “arborescent” paradigm of dualistic branching.15 As one commentator puts it, “Flux, change, and relation are, for them, more real than permanence, stability, and identity.”16 The model for such an outlook is not the sturdy, dualizing tree trunk but, instead, the amorphous, self-​differential rhizome—​which image also connotes meanings of radicalism fully endorsed by Deleuze and Guattari. How does all this rather abstract, somewhat flighty musing redound upon animality? It is sometimes said of the late Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy of organismic cosmology that it resembles dialectical metaphysics minus any Hegelian absolutism; one could say of rhizomatic proliferation that it resembles Whiteheadian ontology minus the organicism. Applied to animality, this means that “Deleuze and Guattari seek to establish the derivative ontological status… . of the classificatory systems and theoretical concepts of the biological sciences insofar as these rest upon notions such as organism, species identification, evolutionary filiation, teleology, etc.”17 Standard conceptions of organicity portray life-​forms as coherent systems of functional parts that

 

156   Ralph R. Acampora subserve the dictates of overarching totalities (organisms). Deleuzo-​Guattarian becomings-​animal, by contrast, are never finished or determinate entities—​rather, they are more like radically incomplete pulsions of force moving in between plateaus of impermanent conditions.18 Lest one think this leaves us adrift in a purely anarchic chaos, it should be noted that Deleuze and Guattari did sketch a threefold typology according to which we can distinguish Oedipal, state, and demonic animalities. These states, respectively, track domesticated, taxonomized or mythologized, and pack or ferine forms of becoming-​animal. The last pattern is valorized because it is felt to release and multiply energies of creativity kept at bay by Oedipal discipline or statist regimes.19 Some scholars put great stock in the Deleuzo-Guattarian rhizomatics of becoming-​animal.20 I am not so sure that a heavy investment is warranted, however, because at the meso-​level we inhabit during our everyday life with other animals there is a good deal more stability (of being or essence) than some queer states of affairs at the microscopic and cosmic levels might suggest to the partisans of unlimited flux.21 In addition to Deleuze and Guattari, and perhaps making an even bigger splash, the late Jacques Derrida also contributed to animal philosophy by deconstructing our discourse of animal being (or what he calls the animot). In lectures in the latter 1990s, he questioned the term “animality” used in reference to “an immense group, a single and fundamentally homogeneous set that one has [presumed] the right, the theoretical or philosophical right, to distinguish and mark as opposite” to humanity.22 Nor, for Derrida, has this usage been limited to abstruse corners of science or philosophy—​ indeed, challenge was converted to condemnation when he excoriated the concept at stake thusly: “This agreement concerning philosophical sense and common sense that allows one to speak blithely of the Animal in the general singular is perhaps one of the greatest and most symptomatic idiocies of those who call themselves human.”23 Can we develop alternative discourses about or conceptions of animals? According to Derrida, “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”; stated again in another lecture, “that means refraining from reducing [life-​forms’] differentiated and multiple difference in a similarly massive and homogenizing manner.”24 Whereas most Anglophonic philosophy regarding other animals has tended to concern itself with interspecies ethics, Derrida does stake out a transpecific ethical position, but he also accounts for the primordial ethos that motivates it, and mounts a deconstruction of humanism as well. Broadly speaking, the ethico-​juridical stance taken by Derrida is critical of violence, particularly that visited on the relatively powerless by comparatively powerful perpetrators. Diagnostically, he notes various parallels and discontinuities between human exploitation and animal abuse.25 Therapeutically, he endorses a kind of protectionism that does not trade in rights-​talk—​because the discourse of rights is beholden to the search for criteria determinative of who can bear rights, which is too essentialist a project for him to countenance. Practically speaking, for Derrida, no program of nonviolence is ever perfectible; thus he eschews moral purity and disavows the comfort/​complacency of good conscience. A concrete example of this is his vexed attitude

 

Continental Approaches to Animals and Animality    157 with respect to veg(etari)anism: we cannot rest easy, ethically, just because we don’t eat meat—​because all agriculture involves sacrificing field animals, messing with natural ecosystems, and exploiting human labor (e.g., migrant workers). Beyond—​or, better, behind—​his moral position-​taking, Derrida lays out a proto-​ ethical understanding of human-​animal relations. Basically, he sees encounter rather than argument at the root of interspecies ethics—​certain experiences of or with other animals pierce through our sedimented dispositions and expose us to new insights/​ values. For example, the recognition of sharing bodily susceptibility to disease, damage, and death engenders empathic sensitivity to suffering.26 Moreover, we come to realize that sentience is not only a common capacity to feel our way through the lifeworld:  Derrida suggests that it also, for other creatures, marks an inability to avoid feelings. This is significant because it means that, unlike (most) humans, (most) nonhumans can be enveloped in distress without recourse to imaginative means of mollifying their negative passions. It is often held that human suffering is worse than its animal counterparts, because the former includes a dimension of mental anguish lacking in the latter varieties; however, Derrida forces us to recognize the flip side of this point—​ namely, that other animals’ pain may well be more excruciatingly sheer because they do not generally have the higher mental faculties that humans can and do use to alleviate their own discomfort (i.e., complex mentation has the potential not only to add to but also to subtract from, somatic stress). Vulnerability is not the only kind of exposure to which other animals subject us humans. Derrida also highlights the shame and embarrassment that can arise in cross-​species contact: in “Animal I Am” he recounts his discomfiture, in a now-​notorious encounter, at being seen in the nude by a curious catling (a small cat, not a kitten). That this feline is obviously capable of regarding him, and naked no less, produces an eclipse of the species solipsism we humans are prone to indulge in our exercises of self-​consciousness and—​ esteem. Moving beyond his mentor Levinas, for whom it was typically human(oid) faces only that figured in self-​constitution, and echoing Montaigne from centuries ago, Derrida pushes egology into a social(izing) space of animal alterity. “‘I am inasmuch as I am after the animal.’” he avers, “‘I am inasmuch as I am alongside the animal.”27 It should come as no surprise, thus, that Derrida disavows any liberatory logic based on analogical argumentation (which presupposes that its analogues can be defined apart from each other, and then compared for similarity). In other words, for him, standard moral theories and juridico-​political practices of animal liberation are rooted in expanding reformism, and are hence beholden to humanism’s exclusionary hierarchy—​ woe to those creatures not approximating anthropic exemplars! Take, for instance, Tom Regan’s view of animal rights—​therein, individuality is of crucial importance, and it is enshrined in that view’s criterion of moral standing or considerability—​namely, being the “subject-​of-​a-​life” (a[n auto]biographical entity whose life can be storied intelligibly beyond a simply factual registry of its biological features). Derrida critiques the ontology of subjectivity that is essential to this view by challenging the “metaphysics of presence” implicit in its “carnophallogocentrism.” What does this mean? At least this much: that when we meat-​eating, masculinist, rationalizing humans go looking for other subjects

 

158   Ralph R. Acampora (individuals with ethical status), we are wont to demand that they should present themselves in our venatic/​male/​discursive image—​or else become objects in the shadow of, and/​or things to be consumed by, our own precious subjectivity; thus our quest for otherness generates, not a gesture of moral magnanimity, but rather a site of figuratively and literally sacrificial and marginalizing power (i.e., incorporation or neglect).28 The upshot of these reflections is to reject humanimal continuism: “I believe that there is a radical discontinuity between what one calls animals” and humanity [or “man”].29 Gone is any talk of, or allusion to, some homogeneous essence putatively forming the core of a generic animality. Instead, Derrida makes reference to animot—​a neologism that in French reads like “anima(l)-​word” and sounds like “animal(itie)s,” it bespeaks plural singularities of becoming; the Derridean discourse of zoology or, better, zoography,30 thus trades in difference and relationships rather than in being and identity. Consistent with this approach, Derrida rejects analyses of humanity’s unique essence in terms of “what is proper” to (hu)mankind, and he prefers to speak of various life forms’ shared “infrastructures” (e.g., supplementarity, tracing/​tracking, differentiation). How, then, are we to evaluate the Derridean contribution to animal studies—​to what extent is Derrida right on target or wrongheaded? Here, I would first flag his success in stirring up the lazy ideology that riddles some precincts of animal ethics, the utopian purism of hardcore animal rights advocacy, for example. On the other hand, he appears not to be above trafficking in fallacious discourse: Derrida exhibits a tendency, for instance, to let his dramatic rhetoric get carried away into constructing straw men for critique (hyperbolizing a position in order to all-​too-​easily knock it down). One case of this problem occurs whenever he makes critical reference to the “exclusionary hierarchy” of his opposition (e.g., the humanist legacy allegedly lurking in extensionist ethics)—​which sounds as if something avoidably bad has been outed. However, moral extensionism is not necessarily an evil nor is ranking always avoidable: any axiology, as such, must prioritize or esteem some things over others (attempting the alternative, equally valuing everything, in effect values nothing in particular and thus renders itself idle, if not incoherent); all inclusions imply exclusions, and they are not undesirable or unjustifiable on that account alone. There are times, in other words, when Derrida essentializes alleged essentialists, unfairly stereotyping his enemies in a negative light. The meliorism that mobilizes much animal welfarism, for example, might very well be defensible contra Derridean charges—​prima facie, it seeks to better things for animal others without appeal to utopian ideology, purist cant, or noxious prejudice.

Context and Import of European Treatments There has been a tendency in the wider field of animal ethics to ignore or dismiss phenomenological, hermeneutic, existentialist, and poststructural interventions.31 Partly, this can be put down to residual animus against Continental thinking in the (sometimes

 

Continental Approaches to Animals and Animality    159 hidebound) analytic mainstream of Anglophonic philosophy. Yet—​bearing in mind recent currents of rapprochement between the camps—​that cannot be the whole story, and probably, it is not even the main explanation. A different account is worth proffering here: European approaches to animal ethics have gotten such short shrift in the English-​ speaking academy because the professors and scholars therein largely have mistaken the kind or branch of ethics that Continental thought has most informed and to which it is best suited; more specifically, it can be said that reflection on interspecies morality conducted in Continental registers is much less about normative ethics as such than it is about what Anglophones would call moral psychology (most appropriately) or metaethics (more generically).32 Confusion about what Continental moral philosophy has been up to when it treads the domain of animal ethics would explain the prevalence of a dismissive attitude about the former’s seemingly thin contribution to the latter. For, if one is expecting normative ethics and consequently looking for moral principles and practical prescriptions to be on offer, one will indeed become disappointed by most of the fare served up in existentialist, phenomenological, and hermeneutic reflections on interspecies morality. These angles are, by their very nature, inclined to deliver insight into the behavioral and cogitative presuppositions of ethical schemas, as well as the attitudinal dispositions implied by or consequent upon such.33 There have been a number of Continental contributions to what might be called “trans-​human” morality (not to be confused with the futuristic movement of transhumanism). Early on, H.  Peter Steeves applied Husserlian phenomenology to ecologically inflected communitarianism34; over the past generation, David Abram has done something similar with Merleau-​Ponty’s thought,35 and Elizabeth Behnke developed an interspecies ethos of peace that is likewise rooted in the works of the canonical figures of phenomenology.36 More recently, various theorists have sought to cross-​fertilize the interspecies and ethical insights of existential, hermeneutic, and postmodern thinkers, such as Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, and Irigaray (among others).37 I myself have proposed that animal ethicists shed anthropocentric hierarchy altogether—​even (the risk of) its appearance—​and place their moral thought and political activity behind the truly posthumanist task of re-​appreciating bodily animacy as such. Thus, we may extend the range of caring regard in the very gesture of recognizing our own vital status as animate zoomorphs. Here and elsewhere, I have suggested that we may ground moral compassion for other animals in the sensation of sharing carnal vulnerability (rather than in the typical humanist gesture at mortality under the aspect of mental phenomena). Certain features of Continental interventions in animal ethics are salient—​ namely:  attention of moral vision is trained upon affection or receptivity of moral agency, vulnerability or exposure of moral patients, and compassion or empathy as the element of solidarity between the two. Besides these shared aspects of content, European treatments of interspecies morality display common methodological inclinations as well—​and these latter show a tendency to reconfigure our understanding of moral psychology, just as the substantive resemblances diverge from received models of

 

160   Ralph R. Acampora animal ethics based on rational rights or calculable utility schemes. Standard conceptions of moral psychology manifest two tendencies: with respect to morals, they usually focus on deontological, utilitarian, and sometimes contract or virtue theories of ethics; with respect to psychology, they most often rely on some disciplinary mix of cognitive-​ behavioral and/​or biomedical paradigms in the field.38 What I am identifying here as Continental European practices of moral psychology differ on both counts: they tend to mobilize or assume heterodox ethical views, such as care or sentiment approaches; they also tend to invoke or depend on schools of psychological thought outside the disciplinary mainstream, such as humanistic-​existential, phenomenological-​hermeneutic, and neo-​/​post-​Freudian outlooks. My own project has worked with a Husserlian take on live-​body consciousness—​denominated somatology, it lies somewhere between traditional forms of psychology and physiology, and it undertakes what might be called the “felt physics” of animate organism; therefrom I have endeavored to chart the psychosomatic texture of interspecies morality.39 Panning out now and widening our scope to include a vantage on animal studies at large, let us consider some impending changes across the field as a whole and then I will link these to the developments in animal ethics just discussed. At the outset, we need to recall some of the major currents flowing through animal studies since its formation in the 1990s, namely that the field took shape around certain positions staked on issues of ontology that were embedded in the multiple ambiguity of references to anything “animal.” That term could be used in external reference to all or only other (non-​human) species or specimens, or it could refer internally to some (biological or emotional) aspect of our or one’s (usually human) constitution. In half-​Hegelian fashion, exercising analytical dynamics of self-​othering while refusing synthetic totalities, animal scholars have been at pains to demonstrate the diremptive or dispersive profligacy of the abstract categories or ideas of both humanity and external animality. Over the past couple decades many thinkers—​from ecologist Paul Shepard40 and anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose41 to philosopher Kelly Oliver42 and literary theorist Cary Wolfe,43 among a host of others—​have subjected human identity and definition to deconstructive analysis. The cumulative effect of their work has been to demonstrate how pervasively and profoundly human constitution is mediated by abjected aspects of its others, often “animalistic” elements (not only instincts or drives, but also attitudes and cognitions) that are incorporated into and indeed help construct what is called too simply humanity. Likewise, another set of early moves in animal studies undertook to diversify the abstract notion of animality as externally conceived. Think of similarly generic, now discredited terminology in application to racial, ethnic, or demographic categories—​ “Negroes,” “the Jew,” “Orient(al)”; such cultural misconstructions came under withering critique by a great number of social science and humanities scholars, who were concerned to expose the erasure of difference that these lazy and myopic terms helped constitute and perpetuate. Building upon biologists’ and zoologists’ attention to animal specificity (e.g., in the works of founding figures from Darwin to Hediger),44 animal scholarship has cumulatively eroded conceptual stereotypy in the field. Arguably, this development came to a head in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of animot in his Cerisy

 

Continental Approaches to Animals and Animality    161 lectures of the late 1990s—​often-​cited work that performed much the same function for animal studies that Edward Said’s Orientalism did for cultural studies a generation ago.45 The upshot here has been to refocus attention on the specificity (and sometimes individuality) of animal beings and becomings—​for example (this or that particular) horse, raven, or octopus—​rather than gesturing at “the animal” as such or “animals” in general (terms that invite ideological abuse because they have at best only abstract or indeterminate reference, and at worst none at all). Up to this point, then, animal studies has shown up the “play of difference” that cuts through humankind’s self-​constitution and across the animal kingdom. The next horizon, only most recently coming into view, takes the form of directing deconstructive analysis upon any internal sense or essence of animality itself. Already suggested by some of Wolfe’s later work and several articles or essays appearing lately in various journals,46 this frontier of inquiry demonstrates a maturation of the field to a point where it is prepared to confront and self-​dissect its own central concept. Ideas as well as experiences of animality overlap or intersect zones or axes of alterity, such that what is called animal can be thought and felt to harbor traces or even forces of its others—​ somewhat as humanity has been shown to be(come) a site of differences. Take, for exemplary instance, the key feature of animacy itself: it is arguably at the core of animality, and yet is already prefigured in the growth patterns of plants or microbes and echoed in the auto-​motion of machines or codes. Exhibiting vitality as vegetal or plasmic proliferation, botanical and bacterial beings belie the presumption that animation must be a molar characteristic only of fauna moving on spatio-​temporal scales akin to our own;47 likewise, developments in biorobotics and experiments with artificial life or intelligence cast doubt on the assumption that properties of animacy or vitality must issue always only from the organic. Conversely, and most salient for our present discussion, when we juxtapose the heliophilia of flowers, trees, turtles, lizards, and human beachgoers, or when we take note of microbial symbionts, helices of DNA or RNA, and cyborgian chimeras,48 we are confronted by and must recognize our own incorporation into the diverse alterity of animality. Where Aristotle once saw a biological field built out of tidy delineations of ensoulment culminating in humanity, which already constituted an ontological hierarchy and was arranged by his Christian followers into a theocentric “great chain of being,” the posthumanist theorist Rosi Braidotti posits an amorphously profuse dynamism: “Bios/​ zoe as generative vitality is a major transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated domains” of life; “Zoe refers to the endless vitality of life as continuous becoming.”49 Neither a chain, nor beings here—​rather a fluxing interpenetration of animate zones, the axes of which are constantly subject to shifting reorientations.50 Likewise, Timothy Morton’s ecocriticism has become of late a paean to hybridity: “All organisms are monsters insofar as they are chimeras, made from the pieces of other creatures.”51 Marvelously “strange strangers,” life-​forms morph into each other—​“That’s the disturbing thing about animals,” prods Morton, “at bottom [in their algorithmic biochemistry] they are vegetables.”52 Indeed, this penchant of vital processes for recursive iteration connects animacy with inorganic elements; in other words, and to gesture at

 

162   Ralph R. Acampora the origin of genetics, “the movement that commences ‘life’ is to be found within matter itself.”53 Thus, according to these voices on the horizon of animal studies, the dance of identity and alterity moves all the way through and across animality and its others.54 We are now in position to recapitulate some of this entry’s main points, tie them together, and reveal an important implication of their linkage. Regarding animal ethics, I have argued that contributions of a later generation from the quarters of continental European philosophy are better understood as forms of meta-​ethics or moral psychology than as normative ethics per se—​and that what we discover or highlight from such a perspective is the salience for inter-​species morality of emotive and/​or embodied exposure (i.e. affect, the somatic, and vulnerability as registered in actual experience). This represents a divergence from first-​generation, Anglo-​American analyses of animal ethics, which were wont to emphasize sapient or sentient subjectivity, rational rule-​making or calculation, and/​or abstract argumentation. That analytic mode of doing animal ethics has had a tendency to take (explicitly or implicitly) “the human mind” as a paradigm of ethically significant capacity, therefrom to focus on mentality per se as the keystone for establishing moral standing, and consequently to become vested heavily in neuroscientific and cognitive-​studies searches for evidence of truly anthropomorphic mental features of nonhuman animals. These endeavors are indeed helpful in undermining one aspect of what primatologist Frans de Waal has called “anthropodenial.”55 Yet anthropodenial has a flip side—​namely, the refusal to see zoomorphic characteristics in ourselves—​and the subversion of this facet requires a different vantage, one more like the perspective we get from Continental European (and feminist care approaches) to animal ethics. Because these later-​ generation, relatively heterodox frames of reference start from an immersive awareness of bodily and affective experience, they concentrate on the marvel of the diverse capacities and liabilities manifest throughout the field of life (rather than being fascinated by our own species’ worthy splendor and questing for others’ approximation thereto). This outlook’s openness to diversity invites the attention of animal studies to the (inter)relations, overlaps, and crisscrosses just surveyed. In other words, then, the diversification of inquiry in animal ethics and in animal studies at large can be seen to braid together—​in such a way as to alter and enrich our conceptions of both morality and animality. The alternative and changing approaches that I have tracked here may be described as mounting a more thoroughgoing transcendence of anthropocentrism than hitherto has been accomplished, one that at first glance mobilizes epistemological and ethical polycentrism. I say “at first glance” because in actual operation the multiplicity of viewpoints at stake dissolves the very notion of center(ing) itself, and so what we have in fact is perhaps better denominated “a-​centrism.”56 Yet this last remark of mine does not mean that we are left only or simply with an endless or entropic play of difference—​rather, attention to embodied/​affective exposure ethically and to striations of alterity implicates us ontologically in the tension between similarity and variety.57 Fascination with and appreciation of this tension seems to me, and seems to be, precisely what is so attractive and compelling to us about other animals: from such a perspective various creatures become for us instances neither of deviant similitude

 

Continental Approaches to Animals and Animality    163 (à la anthropocentrism) nor of absolute alterity (à la poststructuralism) but rather of related otherness (as per duly existential/​hermeneutic phenomenology).

Postscript It is impossible, within tolerable scope, to represent all the relevant Continental European figures. What I have striven for is not to exhaust the field but rather to exemplify it, so as to highlight or illustrate its content sufficiently to give readers a working sense of the main themes treated and moves made. Even with that said, some will find the absence of this or that author—​Michel Foucault or Giorgio Agamben, say—​entirely regrettable. I  share this disappointment myself, yet hasten to point out that most of those not covered (including the two just mentioned) did not themselves make animal others a focus of their thought—​rather they had more to say about the human animal specifically or its interface with alter-​animality, and it was left to followers or commentators to make explicit the ramifications of their thinking for our understanding of other organisms.58

Acknowledgments The appreciative author is grateful to Linda Kalof for her accommodating and patient editorship. I would also like to thank Hofstra University for release time to work on this project and the Humane Society of the United States for a special place to pursue it (a writing cabin on their wildland trust property in northern Maine).

Notes 1. Portions of this first section are revised from my “Animal Philosophy:  Bioethics and Zoontology,” chap. 6, in A Cultural History of Animals in the Modern Age, ed. R. Malamud (Oxford: Berg, 2007/​2011), 149–​152, 156–​57, 159–​60. 2. Edith Wyschogrod, “Does Continental Ethics Have a Future?” in Ethics and Danger, ed. A. Dallery, C. Scott, and P. Roberts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 236. 3. Mental factors (e.g., second-​order consciousness of each other’s mutual recognition) must also come into play for respect in this sense to emerge fully as a moral phenomenon. 4. David Seamon used symphysis in his “Different Worlds Coming Together,” in Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). As he noted there (at p. 230), the word had originated in medical usage and meant in ancient Greek “the state of growing together” (as in, e.g., the fusion of bones). 5. European philosophy from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx evolved a tradition of philosophic anthropology on the premise of studying strictly the human animal’s species being; the posthumanist task before us late moderns is to go beyond that tradition’s homo-​exclusive

 

164   Ralph R. Acampora bounds into the ontology of both generic animality (if there be such) and nonhuman speciations (to whatever extent accessible). 6. Compare Sue Cataldi’s Emotion, Depth, and Flesh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) and the neo-​Confucian ideal of “forming One Body” with all other corporeal beings, as per Wang Yang-​ming, in Tu Weiming’s “The Ecological Turn in New Confucian Humanism,” Tasan Lect. #1, S.  Korea, 11/​ 2001, http://​smedia.vermotion.com/​media/​ 12002/​resources/​TuEcology.pdf (accessed June 1, 2007). 7. E. Levinas, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Animal Philosophy:  Essential Readings in Continental Thought, ed. Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton (London: Continuum, 2004). 8. E. Levinas, “Interview,” in Animal Philosophy, Calarco and Atterton, 50. 9. James Hart, “Transcendental Phenomenology and the Eco-​Community,” in Animal Others, ed. H. P. Steeves (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 187. 10. Hart, “Transcendental Phenomenology,” in Animal Others, Steeves, 192. 11. Hart, “Transcendental Phenomenology,” in Animal Others, Steeves, 190. 12. Levinas, “Name of a Dog,” in Animal Philosophy, Calarco and Atterton, 49. 13. Hart, at pp. 190–​192. on “Transcendental Phenomenology,” in Animal Others, Steeves, for example. 14. Hart, “Transcendental Phenomenology,” in Animal Others, Steeves, 191. 15. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 16. James Urpeth, “Animal Becomings,” in Animal Philosophy, Calarco and Atterton, 102. 17. Urpeth, “Animal Becomings,” Animal Philosophy, Calarco and Atterton, 104. 18. For an illustration of such animality, see the discourse on rats that runs through Nick Land’s “Spirit and Teeth,” in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, ed. D. Wood (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993). 19. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 240–​243. 20. See, e.g., Keith Ansell-​Pearson’s postmodern variant of Bergsonism in Germinal Life (London: Routledge, 1999). 21. Compare Xavier Vitamvor’s “Unbecoming Animal Studies,” Minnesota Review 73/​74 (2010): 183–​187. 22. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” trans. D. Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 408. 23. Derrida, “The Animal I Am,” 409. 24. Derrida, “The Animal I Am,” 415; the second part of the quotation is from J. Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded?” trans. D. Wills, in Zoontologies, ed. C. Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 128. 25. Derrida, “The Animal I Am,” 395. 26. Compare Ralph Acampora, Corporal Compassion: Animal Ethics and Philosophy of Body (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). 27. Derrida, “The Animal I Am,” 379. 28. It is noteworthy that the result here is either erasure or debilitation—​i.e., emphatically not the critical leverage mustered by the analysis of the in/​famous “argument from marginal cases” (wherein animal others are rendered comparable to infants, the senile, or mentally handicapped humans). 29. Jacques Derrida, with Elisabeth Roudinesco, “Violence and Animals,” in For What Tomorrow… .: A Dialogue, trans. J. Fort (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 73. 30. See, e.g., Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), esp. chap. 4.

 

Continental Approaches to Animals and Animality    165 31. Portions of this section are revised from my “Diversification of Inquiry in Animal Ethics and Animal Studies,” presented at New York University (10/​2011) and the University of Utrecht (7/​2012); a French version of that talk has appeared as “La diversification de la recherche en éthique animale et en études animales,” trans.Frédéric Baitinger, PhaenEx: revue de théorie et culture existentialistes et phénoménologiques 8, no 2 (2013): 28–​46, http://​www.phaenex. uwindsor.ca/​ojs/​leddy/​index.php/​phaenex/​article/​view/​4086/​3156 (accessed 1/​2/​14). 32. About the terminology:  in contemporary philosophy “metaethics” refers to highly abstract or foundational inquiry of a second-​order nature relative to moral codes or theories per se (e.g., at issue is not what one ought to do, but rather what “ought” even means; at stake is not whether this or that is good/​right or bad/​evil, but instead whether there even objectively is such a thing as rectitude or turpitude in the first place); “moral psychology” (sometimes seen as a subdivision of metaethics, sometimes as an interdisciplinary area of its own) refers to a constellation of studies about what it constitutionally takes or involves to behave (im)morally and/​or to think (un)ethically. 33. For examples, see two research compendia of related scholarship: Calarco and Atterton, Animal Philosophy, and Steeves, Animal Others. 34. H. P. Steeves, “The Boundaries of the Phenomenological Community,” in Becoming Persons, ed. R. Fisher (Oxford: Applied Theology Press, 1995), 777–​797; Steeves, Founding Community (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998). 35. David Abram, The Spell of Sensuous (New York: Random House/​Vintage, 1996/​1997) and Becoming Animal (New York: Random House/​Vintage, 2010/​2011). 36. See E. Behnke, “From Merleau-​Ponty’s Concept of Nature to an Interspecies Practice of Peace,” in Animal Others, Steeves, 93–​116. 37. See, e.g., the contributions in Animal Philosophy, Calarco and Atterton. 38. See, e.g., Walter Sinnott-​Armstrong, (ed.), Moral Psychology, vols. 1–​4 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007–​2014). 39. Acampora, Corporal Compassion, see esp. chap. 4. 40. P. Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, DC, and Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1997). 41. Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 42. Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons:  How They Teach Us to Be Human (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2009). 43. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2003); Cary Wolfe, (ed.), Zoontologies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 44. See, e.g., Charles Darwin’s “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties,” presented to the Linnean Society (London: July 1, 1858), and Heini Hediger’s Wild Animals in Captivity, trans. G. Sircom (London: Butterworth, 1950). 45. See J. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I  Am, ed. M. -​ L. Mallet, trans. D. Wills (New  York:  Fordham University Press, 2008); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House/​Vintage, 1978/​1979). 46. For the former, see C. Wolfe, What Is Post-​Humanism? (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2010); for the latter, see, e.g., Antennae 17 (Summer 2011), “Why Look at Plants?” (a gloss on John Berger’s seminal text, “Why Look at Animals?”, from his 1980 book, About Looking), accessible via http://​www.antennae.org.uk/​; and Interspecies, a special issue of SocialText 106 (2011). 47. Compare Michael Marder’s deconstructively hermeneutic Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2013) and Craig Holdrege’s

 

166   Ralph R. Acampora existential phenomenology, Thinking like a Plant:  A  Living Science for Life (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2013). Consider, too, the Australian species of mangrove that actually locomotes, however slowly by our lights. This remarkable tree literally transplants its own roots in reaction to changes of water depths or salinity levels! 48. See, e.g., Donna Haraway’s Modest_​Witness@Second_​Millennium.FemaleMan_​Meets_​ OncoMouse (New  York:  Routledge, 1997) for the germination of such observations; for their cultivation, e.g., compare Glen Mazis’s Humans, Animals, Machines:  Blurring Boundaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 49. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006), 99 and 41, respectively. 50. There are neo-​Nietzschean echoes in such pronouncements. Compare “This world:  a monster of energy, without beginning, without end… . that does not expend itself but only transforms itself… . as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many… . a sea of forces flowing and rushing together” (sec. 1067), from Neitzsche, The Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 550. 51. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge. MA:  Harvard University Press, 2010), 66. 52. Morton, Ecological Thought, 68. 53. Morton, Ecological Thought, 67. 54. Compare Hwa Yol Jung’s “A Prolegomenon to Transversal Geophilosophy,” Environmental Philosophy 10, no.1 (Spring 2013): 83–​112. 55. Frans de Waal, “Are We in Anthropodenial?,” Discover 18, no. 7 (1997): 50–​53. 56. Compare Anthony Weston’s “Multicentrism:  A  Manifesto,” Environmental Ethics 26 (Spring 2004): 25–​40. 57. Compare Elisa Aaltola’s “ ‘Other Animal Ethics’ and the Demand for Difference,” Environmental Values 11 (2002): 193–​209. 58. Good places to expand the breadth (and depth) of one’s survey of Continental animalia would be the compendia Calarco and Atterton, Animal Philosophy, as well as the memoir by Oliver, Animal Lessons.

 

Chapter 9

Animals as L e g a l Subjec ts Paul Waldau

To illuminate what is at issue when someone uses the phrase “animals as legal subjects,” this chapter contrasts the dominant sense of the phrase with two other senses that, though used less, are today catalyzing different ways of thinking about nonhuman animals in contemporary legal systems. The dominant sense of “animals as legal subjects” is rooted in the use of the term “legal subject” as a synonym for the term “legal person.” In modern legal systems, humans are the paradigmatic legal subjects and thus comprise the entire universe of legal persons. A by-​product of this form of thinking is the exclusion of any and all nonhuman animals from the important circle of beings who benefit from the most fundamental and effective legal protections available. The exclusion of nonhuman animals means that the most common manner in which legal systems deal with living beings outside our own species is to relegate them to a category separate from and below the category used solely for humans. Nonhuman animals are thus members of the category “legal things” and can be owned as property by any “legal person.” The status of legal things relative to that of legal person is so shorn of legal protections that nonhuman animals are often described as mere legal things. An important feature of modern legal systems, however, is that, conceptually, the notion “legal persons” is broader than the notion “humans.” In other words, there is nothing inherent in the concept of “legal persons” that requires it to be used for humans alone. In the simplest conceptual terms, “a legal person” is a living being or artificial entity, such as a legally formed corporation, that contemporary legal systems protect by according it legal protections, such as specific legal rights or other law-​based shields against certain obvious harms. Further, while the paradigm of legal protections is granting a legal right to an individual, there is no consensus on a single, precise definition of the tool we call “legal rights.” Here the term is used to mean specific protections and privileges recognized in legal systems that are made effective because the legal system

 

168   Paul Waldau also offers any holder of such a right access to courts or other decision-​makers that can prompt enforcement of those protections and privileges or remedy violations of them. Such legal protections can be anchored in various aspects of a legal system, such as a constitution, specific legislation, a long-​recognized tradition, or judicial decisions that outline what such protections mean for a particular individual or group. Despite its conceptual breadth and potential inclusiveness, the notion of “legal person” has for historical and political reasons remained radically human-​centered, thereby giving the phrase “animals as legal subjects” an odd ring—​as “legal things,” nonhuman animals (which is how the word “animals” in the phrase “animals as legal subjects” is usually understood) are the very opposites of “subjects” entitled to determine their own fate. One of the most significant consequences flowing from legal systems’ framing of the world in terms of legal persons versus legal things is a radical human-​centeredness, and there is no symbol of this dualism more potent or influential than the property concept. Further, whatever form ownership takes (individually based, or collectively framed), it is far more than a mere legal relationship—​it is also a central psychological, social, economic, religious, intellectual, cultural, political, and environmental reality for today’s humans. This complex mix, which comprises the inheritance of citizens in modern economies, explains why control and domination of valued nonhuman animals by certain humans and extermination of unwanted “pests” have been central historical facts in modern industrialized societies organized around the pivotal legal concepts of legal persons’ ownership of legal things in the tradition of what lawyers call “personal property” (as distinct from land, which is “real property”). The most common manner in which legal systems deal with any and all nonhuman animals, then, is to relegate them to a category separate from and below the category used solely for humans and, sometimes, various human-​created enterprises. The result has been that modern societies have failed to notice other animals or take them seriously. For a variety of reasons, this problem is today being challenged in a variety of ways that create opportunities to use phrases such as “animals as legal subjects” in new and provocative ways.

A First Catalyst: Other Animals as Subjects “Animals as legal subjects” has at least two other significant meanings that challenge the harsh exclusion of any and all nonhuman animals from inclusion in the circle where the most fundamental and effective legal protections are found. One of these alternative meanings is rooted in use of the word “subject” to signify biological individuals who have subjectivity of some kind. If read this way, the phrase “animals as legal subjects” clearly calls to mind many dogs, cats, horses, other familiar mammals, and even birds,

 

Animals as Legal Subjects    169 all of whom modern legal systems impact greatly and purport from time to time to protect with low-​level protections. Expansion of “animals as legal subjects” to the notion “nonhuman animals as individual subjectivities” draws some plausibility from the common assumption that legal systems can, if we wish them to do so, protect valued nonhuman animals, such as the companion animals so treasured by many humans today that they are widely considered to be family members. These valued subjects or subjectivities, then, can easily be thought of as “legal subjects.” The universe of candidates is, it turns out, large, for many cultures across place and time have deemed it a matter of common sense that significant numbers of nonhuman animals have their own points of view and thus distinctive subjectivities. This important historical and cultural fact, however, is often not appreciated in the Western cultural tradition that birthed many of the most prominent modern legal systems. The effect of so many mainline institutions in the Western cultural tradition dismissing any and all nonhuman living beings is a distinct, self-​inflicted, culturally pervasive lack of awareness of other animals that now sustains contemporary legal systems’ continuing denial that some other animals have complexities like “consciousness,” “intelligence,” “moral worth,” and thus “personhood.” This indifference is also typical of other mainline cultural institutions, such as education and influential wings of long-​ standing religious traditions. There is a certain irony in the legal system’s refusal to engage other animals’ subjectivity, of course, since many individual citizens who are heirs of Western culture structure their lives in ways that reveal they deem compassion for nonhuman animals to be morally important—​an example of such caring is the widespread tendency to protect certain nonhumans from cruelty and other harms. In a similar vein, the Western literary tradition has featured much creative writing written from a nonhuman point of view. This approach has exploded since Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty was published in 1877. One of the best-​selling books of all time (more than 50 million copies sold), this classic spawned many other fiction and nonfiction creations that raise the issue of other animals’ points of view. The common-​sense notion that some nonhuman animals have a point of view and thus their own subjectivity is richly supported by science today, an example of which is Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, published in 2009. Many other animals have benefited from a flowering of interest in studies focused on specific nonhuman animals that seek to confirm extraordinary complexities such as personality differences, emotions, cognitive skills, rich communication patterns, intelligence of many kinds, and even social regulatory schemes that are precursors, perhaps even kindred, to humans’ own remarkable moral abilities—​a recent science-​focused book that describes a wide range of such findings is Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates, published in 2013. The widely shared view that a significant number of nonhuman animals have their own subjectivities, interests, emotions, intelligence, and communities has created pressure inside modern legal systems to expand protections beyond the species line.

 

170   Paul Waldau

A Second Catalyst: Animals as a Topic of Concern Another sense of animals as legal subjects is far more prosaic—​nonhuman animals have long been a subject in the sense of a topic dealt with in legal practice circles and law education. How “(nonhuman) animals as legal topics” have been handled was well represented by John Ingham in 1900, in his treatise The Law of Animals, the first systematic, book-​length work on the human treatment of nonhuman animals in common law legal systems.1 The subtitle of the book—​“A Treatise on Property in Animals Wild and Domestic and the Rights and Responsibilities Arising Therefrom”—​reveals that the subject of animals (or, if one chooses to employ scientifically correct terminology, of nonhuman animals) is, as a legal topic, dominated by another feature of the legal system. Even the most cursory review of Ingham’s approach reveals that property concepts are the organizing principle of the book, and the rights mentioned are always those of humans. Note, for example, how the notion of property is the organizing concept in each of the book’s seven divisions or “titles”:

Title I, Property in Animals • Chapter I, Wild Animals • Chapter II, Domestic Animals Title II, Transfer of Property • Chapter I, Sale and Mortgage • Chapter II, Estrays Title III, Rights of Owners of Animals • Chapter I, Injuring and Killing of Animals • Chapter II, Theft and Removal of Animals • Chapter III, Injuries to Animals on Highways Title IV, Liabilities of Owners of Animals • Chapter I, Animals Trespassing and Running at Large • Chapter II, Impounding. Injuries on Highways. Diseased Animals. Nuisances. Racing • Chapter III, Vicious and Ferocious Animals Title V, Bailment and Carriage • Chapter I, Bailment • Chapter II, Carriers of Animals Title VI, Cruelty—​Game Laws • Chapter I, Cruelty and Malicious Mischief • Chapter II, Game Laws Title VII, Injuries to Animals by Railways • Chapter I, Liability Irrespective of Fencing Laws • Chapter II, Liability under the Statutes Regulating Fences

 

Animals as Legal Subjects    171 While Ingham’s book was groundbreaking, it contains almost nothing about the various ways in which legal systems can be used to protect nonhuman animals as valuable beings (or subjects) in and of themselves (the one exception is Title VI, which raises the issue of cruelty but then turns quickly to game laws). Exactly a century later, however, dramatic evolution within the American legal system was evident when the first edition of the casebook Animal Law was published.2 The dominant textbook used in American animal law courses offered by law schools today (the fifth edition was published in 2014), it cited some of the same laws that Ingham had cited because the basic principles of property law as they apply to nonhuman animals have not changed essentially in the intervening century. But there is no mistaking that the editors of this new casebook employed a radically different approach to the general topic. For example, there is much more focus on the ways in which the American legal system’s underlying principles and other features, such as enforcement realities, impact the living beings around us. The editors of the casebook included discussions of the historical considerations by which nonhuman animals became property; they also included wide-​ranging materials on both legal and moral rights for other animals and the link between violence against humans and violence against the living beings outside the human species. Interested in creating a teaching tool, the editors also included many questions that strongly suggest that they were, unlike Ingham, committed to changing the legal system to make it more responsive to nonhuman animals’ interests. In addition, the editors’ approach features both language and concepts developed in the animal protection movement that had been reinvigorated decades earlier by Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975). This aspect of the 2000 casebook is revealed in the editors’ observations about the both the strengths and weaknesses of the legal reasoning evident in precedents, as well as the conceptual and political possibilities of various kinds of new protections for nonhuman animals (usually, though not always, the animals to be protected are in the category of other animals now referred to as “companion animals”). The editors’ questions and concerns reflect the great diversity that characterized late twentieth-​century discussion about nonhuman animals as not only a legal topic, but as subjects and subjectivities worthy of consideration by morally inclined human beings. The editors’ concerns reflect many other factors as well, such as the inevitability of humans’ interactions with other animals because we share ecosystems with many other living beings who are, in a variety of senses, ubiquitous (they live throughout our communities, occupy every ecological niche on Earth, and in microscopic forms are on and within each of us in staggering numbers that total in the hundreds of billions). Another factor fostering a broad understanding of “animals as legal subjects” is the role played by student demand in the emergence of animal law courses in curricula of modern law schools.3 While the first animal law course in the United States was taught in 1977 at Seton Hall Law School, this approach in legal education grew modestly for the next two decades as almost a dozen such courses emerged at American law schools. In the year 2000, as a direct result of petitions for an animal law course signed year after year by scores of students, Harvard Law School offered its first animal law course under the name “Animal Rights,” taught by a leading proponent of specific legal rights

 

172   Paul Waldau for certain nonhuman animals.4 Because of Harvard Law School’s reputation, the law school establishment around the world took notice, as did worldwide media. Courses in animal law then multiplied so rapidly that the number of such courses offered around the world increased more than tenfold in the following decade. Such increases in education are noteworthy for any number of reasons, but perhaps most revealing is that the demand for new courses was driven primarily by students. Further, legal education in many modern countries offers well-​established traditions of open discussion owing to use of the Socratic method, an approach developed in law schools because training advocates requires they be afforded the freedom to make and discuss arguments solely in terms of their legal merits and effectiveness with decision-​makers. All these developments fostered open discussion of the alternatives available in modern, industrialized societies regarding the present treatment of and future possibilities with nonhuman animals. Of particular interest to students in these courses has been consideration of changes that can nurture more compassion and less harm. A harbinger of changes to come in the way “animals as legal subjects” will be construed is that each year several thousand law students around the world take animal law courses. Future policy discussions about nonhuman animals as legal subjects are likely to be very lively given lawyers’ influence in public-​policy circles (compared, especially, to that of other professionals concerned with nonhuman animals, such as veterinarians or science-​based researchers, whose education does not confer on them expertise in public-​policy matters or discussion). In addition, the deep commitment within legal education to the suite of critical-​thinking skills that are part of the Socratic method models forms of free inquiry that can be copied in other segments of modern education that have begun to engage other-​than-​ human animals in a variety of ways. Such interdisciplinary efforts seeking more careful reflection about our fellow animals carries the prospect of deepening human awareness of these beings as subjects/​subjectivities. Further, the combination of law students’ personal interest in other animals with the tradition of critical thinking found in legal education also suggests that future handling of “animals as legal subjects” will expand in both depth and breadth. As new and expanding fields, such as animal law and animal studies, grow and cross-​fertilize, each becomes more sophisticated, moving from a phase that can be thought of as “first-​wave” animal law or animal studies to richer, more interdisciplinary and scientifically literate “second waves.” In turn, these more developed forms of studying our fellow living beings can assist yet more forms of modern education that, like animal law and animal studies, are emerging in the modern education environment. The implications of an expanded notion of animals as legal subjects are significant, even to the point of some nonhuman animals becoming candidates for legal personhood. This particular topic, as well as many other protection-​focused issues, is already being debated vigorously in and beyond the field of legal education. The upshot is that approaches invoking the relevance of other animals’ actual realities (that is, the features of their special forms of subjectivity) in discussions of the question of their candidacy for legal personhood, as well as approaches advocating other legal protections for certain nonhuman animals, catalyze awareness as they compete for attention with the

 

Animals as Legal Subjects    173 established human-​centered approaches in today’s legal systems. Beyond strictly legal precincts, however, the growing engagement with the topic of nonhuman animals in many other circles also creates a significant background against which consideration of animals as legal subjects goes forward. Such multifaceted discussions have the prospect of helping legal systems and their host societies take full responsibility for their role in how humans in the past have thought about and treated nonhuman animals, what they are now doing, and what they might in the future choose to do in terms of the human-​ nonhuman intersection. This new and altogether deeper awareness of the legal, moral, sociocultural and personal dimensions of our inevitable interactions with other animals is, in fact, already a new heartbeat in modern humans’ relations with other animals (comparable or even greater awareness about other living beings in many small-​scale societies has long been the norm and, often, a cultural mainstay). Deepening awareness today has been such a success in legal education (due to student demand) that both legislative and court-​based activities have increased greatly as well. The result is more awareness that some nonhuman animals might themselves be candidates for a truly rich sense of animals as legal subjects, that is, as candidates for effective, fundamental protections safeguarded by the legal system’s core commitments.

A Critique of the Dominant Paradigm: Nonhuman Animal Subjects as Legal Things Even in the face of the dramatic growth in both scientific awareness of other animals as subjects and education-​based awareness of the relevance of animal law and animal studies to humans’ private and public lives, the continuing subordination of any and all nonhuman animals to human purposes has kept in place the one-​dimensional and human-​centered practices and privileges that cause many people to still prefer a narrow sense of the phrase “animals as legal subjects.” The wellspring of this impoverished approach that has long dominated legal notions and practices in modern industrialized countries is described by these lines from the Animal Law casebook. Animals are property. These three words—​and their legal implications and practical ramifications—​are at the core of the most significant doctrines and cases in this book, and a telling reality for current practitioners of animal law.5

The property concept has, in fact, held center stage in the most familiar legal systems for millennia. While it has had certain social benefits for some segments of the human societies governed by these legal systems, the property concept has also held back other human groups—​the nineteenth-​century theorist Proudhon even suggested, with regard to humans alone, “property is theft.”6 While this contention can be debated with respect

 

174   Paul Waldau to human affairs, it is clearly relevant to the question of humans dominating nonhuman animals, as well as to whether we treat other living beings as legal objects or subjects. The question of human domination being cruel, unfair, or even “theft” is particularly pertinent to the astonishingly diverse group of nonhumans animals who are, investigation shows, like humans in having intelligence, emotions, and community connections (these include, for example, many of our fellow mammals, at least some birds, and even other species). It is these potential legal subjects, in particular, we obscure with such dismissive, antiscientific phrases as “humans and animals” that make it easy to relegate any and all nonhumans to the legal things category. The deep historical roots of the property tradition account for the fact that many humans think their ownership of other living beings is the order of nature and thus a natural right. Traditionally, the early systems of law that gave birth to the best-​known modern legal systems treated animals outside our species as either actual or potential property of humans. Humans’ earliest law codes, such as the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, dating back to about 1750 bce, prominently designated a number of domesticated animals as valuable property. The Code of Justinian, the influential systematization of Roman law from the sixth century ce, provided that “[w]‌ild beasts, birds, fish and all animals, which live either in the sea, the air, or the earth, so soon as they are taken by anyone, immediately become by the law of nations the property of the captor.” These ancient precedents explain why the English adjective “pecuniary,” a synonym for “monetary,” derives from the Latin word pecu (cattle or flock). Relatedly, the English legal term “chattel” (used in law to designate movable property as opposed to land, or real property) took its meaning from the word “cattle.”7 Contemporary legal notions, including our property law, are in thrall to these early conceptions that dominated Roman law, which the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in his 1881 book The Common Law observed, influence “every [law] book which has been written for the last five hundred years.”8 This explains in part why so many American law students encounter the fox that was the subject of the dispute in Pierson v. Post9 as representative of wild animals generally—​catch a wild animal and he or she is legally your property and not some else’s. Students who learn these legal principles are trained to ignore the nonhuman animals themselves, for the interests of the hunted fox in Pierson v. Post are not in any way addressed. Such erasures of nonhuman animals’ interests, let alone their point of view, are common today. A large political entity, such as a state or province, is deemed the legal owner of all the “wild” nonhumans within its borders. These animals are truly, in law, mere legal things. Thereby, not only does the property concept in modern legal systems focus attention overwhelmingly on humans alone, but this way of dividing the world into the human and the other-​than-​human has implications and consequences that go beyond the merely legal to the central human realities that we describe using adjectives like “psychological,” “social,” “economic,” “religious,” “intellectual,” “cultural,” and “political.” Our understanding of our place in the world is shaped dramatically by our domination over the more-​than-​human world that legal systems not only permit but, in fact, encourage through use of the property concept.

 

Animals as Legal Subjects    175 The tradition of holding other sentient beings as one’s own property to be treated, sold or killed according to one’s own interests rather than those of the sentient subject has shaped modern humans’ awareness and our group morals. In such shaping, one can easily see why one legal philosopher suggested that “[l]‌aw is the projection of an imagined future upon reality.”10 Through modern legal systems, citizens in the early twenty-​first century now project a human-​centered future not only on the nonhuman animals they own, but also on all reality, even that beyond our human communities. The consequences of projecting a thoroughly human-​centered “imagined reality” are all too real for those owned nonhuman animals who happen also to be “subjects” in the sense of possessing subjectivity and having a personality. For the vast majority of owned animals (which in the modern world are food animals, who annually number 50 billion or more), relegation to the status of property under a human legal system means a life that from birth to death is characterized day after day by domination, coercion, suffering, and isolation. Even benignly framed captivity, such as the tradition of zoos exhibiting nonhuman animals for humans’ education and entertainment, involves domination of a high order, as is evident in this comment by a respected zoo analyst: “Traditional zoos, no matter how advanced, are founded on captivity and coercion.”11 It is even possible to argue that domination of this kind imprisons more than nonhuman animals, since promoting, or perhaps even merely tolerating, such captivity also risks imprisoning the human spirit.12 A complicated version of this same problem exists in the important but nonetheless ethically charged area of companion animals. Domination problems fostered by the property status of companion animals can exist because any owner can, if the owner chooses, at any time and without any reasonable cause terminate their dog’s or cat’s or horse’s life using a veterinarian licensed by law. To do so is completely legal even if the animal is healthy and young, and even if others are willing to adopt the animal, because this convenience-​motivated euthanasia is, legally, a disposition of one’s owned property. Further, killing of this kind is not deemed a moral issue even by major veterinary associations, such as the American Veterinary Medical Association.13 This kind of human-​focused privilege is, as noted above, a central feature of modern economies because modern policymakers, educators, and even religious community leaders, with little or no reflection, hold domination over any and all nonhuman animals to be the unassailable prerogative of humans. Such an unreflective position is based on something more virulent than simple human-​centeredness—​it is based on an exclusion best thought of as human exceptionalism, which is the claim that humans are, merely by virtue of their species membership, so qualitatively different from any and all other forms of life that humans rightfully enjoy privileges over all of the earth’s other life forms. Such exceptionalist claims are well described … as “the basic idea” that “human life is regarded as sacred, or at least as having a special importance” such that “non-​human life” not only does not deserve “the same degree of moral protection” as humans, but has “no moral standing at all” whenever human privilege is at stake.14

 

176   Paul Waldau Challenging human exceptionalism in no way requires condemning all forms of human-​centeredness. As is evident in everyday life, humans can, with great generosity, focus on our own species in healthy and productive ways. But there are forms of human-​centeredness that exclude and damage, and the human exceptionalism just described has, in particular, promoted the destruction of many individuals’ and cultures’ relationship with the more-​than-​human world. Problematic, often virulent forms of human-​centeredness create obvious harms to nonhuman individuals and communities, but there are also hidden features: these hidden problems do not impact only those nonhuman communities that humans render invisible by simply failing to notice them and take them seriously. As noted earlier, human exceptionalism has a range of negative impacts, including significant harms to our communities, selves, and children. With regard to nonhuman animals, of course, human exceptionalism promotes a virulent mix of self-​inflicted ignorance and failure to notice or care about the harms we create for nonhuman animals. The upshot of human exceptionalism dominating us (through its role as the cornerstone of modern legal systems, education, and institutional life) is that many modern humans’ identity is narrowly focused on humans alone, with the consequence that our institutions, including the law, perpetuate a lack of awareness of the more-​than-​human world—​many humans have come to expect, and thus demand, complete power over nonhuman animals as a corollary of being human. One by-​product of the long-​standing approach of the reduction of nonhuman animals to mere legal things is that exceptionalism is now a key feature of public policy and political rhetoric as well. Such is the legacy of those who insist there are no moral problems whatsoever with property ownership or the disposition of nonhuman animals solely in the service of humans’ interests. Of course, as a practical matter, many nonhuman lives fit very poorly into the paradigm of personal property—​think, for example, of the common notion of a “pest” or of the valued animal who will, if given the chance, escape from human domination. Even more significantly from a morals and compassion point of view, there are a surprising number of nonhuman lives who fit no better into the paradigm of personal property than do the lives of humans. It is the harms to these animals in particular that are mentioned by those who challenge the complete domination legal systems confer on humans alone as legal persons entitled to dominate any and all legal things, including even the most complicated living beings outside our own species.

Unmasking the Ideology of Exceptionalism There are multiple reasons to challenge a range of problems integrally connected to human exceptionalism. These reasons include the important fact that legal systems are by no means universal in their coverage of humans. The examples that follow focus first

 

Animals as Legal Subjects    177 on problems solely within the human community, and then on the realm of nonhuman animals, and, finally, on the entire Earth community. Much discussion about law and legal systems today features the important claim that all humans matter. This substantive claim, despite its evident appeal to humans, has often been characterized as mere rhetoric or even hypocrisy, for the claim that all humans matter can be a masking ideology cloaking harms to both humans and nonhumans. Here, the term “ideology” is used in a narrow sense to refer to a frame of mind or an assertion that is ostensibly universal and encompassing but that is, in reality, far less than inclusive and encompassing—​examples of this are the all-​too-​common claims made by lawmakers and policymakers whose real goal is to protect only some humans, and not others. Such shortcomings have often been challenged from the vantage point of disadvantaged humans—​an angry indictment of legal systems was stated by the American populist orator Mary Ellen Lease at an 1890 political convention in her home state of Kansas: “Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags.”15 The risk of a shortfall between an inclusivist ideal and the prevalence of exclusivist political realities has often been epitomized by the tension between the assertion in America’s Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” proclaimed in spite of the well-​known and continuing reality of slavery, racism, and sexism that dominated American political rights and realities in succeeding decades. Social movements, such as those abolishing slavery, expanding voting rights, or seeking to remedy lack of enforcement of existing “civil rights” for excluded humans, have experimented with a wide variety of methods for developing protection for marginalized humans as legal subjects. At times remarkably successful, such social movements have produced both robust critiques of existing law and techniques for fostering change. Underscoring the human-​on-​human problems that lawmaking can create sets the stage for seeing key features of law generally. It goes without saying in an environment dominated by human exceptionalism that legal systems capable of subordinating some humans will, in the matter of noticing and taking nonhuman animals seriously, be more cruel and insensitive by magnitudes of ten. Collectively, these shortcomings unmask legal systems as human constructions that serve only a subset of humans. Nonetheless, the development within the legal system of techniques honed by civil rights advocates working solely for marginalized humans has had the salutary effect of providing tools that help one to see a wider range of problems occasioned by the radical subordination of nonhuman animals as mere legal things. These sophisticated social-​change techniques have enabled animal protectionists interested in developing a robust notion of animals as legal subjects to open up minds and hearts. Some of these robust notions reveal the potential of our modern legal systems, if we so choose, to foster community, connection, and environmental awareness by preventing harms to living beings and communities that happen not to be human. Notice that under this vision, the phrase “animals as legal subjects” begins to mean something remarkable that can be profitably contrasted to its present status as a mere afterthought. This is one reason that the radical subordination of any and all nonhuman animals in

 

178   Paul Waldau modern legal systems, which has been subjected to only a few challenges in the past, is today openly challenged by a diverse range of arguments.

The Persistence of Law’s Stark Dualism Given that many scientists today still use the nonscientific dualism “humans and animals,” one can see how psychologically anchored the dualism is, even though scientists pride themselves on their commitment to scientific descriptions of the world. Beyond the science argument that any denial, explicit or implicit, of humans’ animality is a serious error (indeed, the human-​animal dualism is in effect antiscientific in its implications), there are many other arguments suggesting that openness to nonhuman animal subjects is in order. For example, arguments anchored in humans’ rich ethical or moral abilities sound a great variety of ideas and claims suggesting that at least some of the living beings outside our own species deserve fairness, justice, compassion, connection, and other hallmark human concerns. The antiscientific humans-​animals dualism also persists because twentieth-​century education at the primary, secondary, and higher levels repeatedly trained most humans in the industrialized world to remove humans from their natural membership in the scientific category “animal.” Education thereby erected no barriers to the unreflective belief that human privileges over other animals are natural when, in fact, they are merely human custom and greed masquerading as the order of nature. Ironically, education, including the manner in which law schools previously handled the topic of animals, had features of self-​inflicted ignorance because such “education” was guided not by facts but, instead, by a self-​serving and remarkably pervasive arrogance about humans’ privileged place in a world community that is well described by the phrase “more than human.” It is little wonder, then, that even the most educated citizens in modern societies remain willing to support claims that all nonhumans are rightfully categorized as being below humans. Neither is it surprising that modern societies continue to feature resistance to the science-​based or ethics-​based argument that some nonhuman animals might, as legal subjects, be considered for the highest level of legal protections as legal persons that we now accord to humans alone. The present climate in which alternative senses of the phrase “animals as legal subjects” can be proposed is, then, a one of tension. Matched against the impressive rise of animal law and animal studies is the fact that a significant percentage of citizens in the industrialized world believe it to be immoral, irrational, and disrespectful for humans to suggest that some nonhuman animals should be moved out of the category of legal things and considered instead legal subjects who are candidates for fundamental, effective legal protections along the lines of legal personhood. Clearly, one consequence of a legal system’s holding that some nonhuman animals should no longer be categorized as legal things would be to challenge the linchpin of human privilege—​namely, humans’ right to subordinate nonhuman animals.

 

Animals as Legal Subjects    179 Given that human exceptionalism is the very basis of modern law (just as it is a foundational value of the closely allied subjects of economics, modern education, and the the practice of scientific research and medicine), it follows that law is not serving us well because exceptionalism fosters both harms and lack of awareness. There is an irony in this conclusion, because law is often held to be a respected, even privileged way of speaking and thinking. For this reason, the strident form of human exceptionalism that dominates contemporary legal systems fosters in other disciplines a continued use of human exceptionalism. Other disciplines fail to even notice either their own peculiar form of human exceptionalism or the harms done by the prevalence of such a narrow way of thinking in such elegant human endeavors as philosophy, history, comparative religion studies, literature, sociology, archeology, and so many other fields in modern higher education. Further, even when obvious facts about certain nonhuman animals are noticed (like the existence of personality, emotions, intelligence, and so on), they are not taken seriously in the law or other traditions dominated by exceptionalist values. In short, evidence of the rich lives of other animals can be buried because the human exceptionalism is congenial to such denials. To dislodge our well-​entrenched privileges, what is needed is more than a new notion of “animals as legal subjects.” Needed both within and outside the law are people, educators, decision-​makers, institutions, laws, social morality, and personal ethics committed at their core to notice such facts and take them seriously—​that is, to attend carefully to the biological, individual, and social realities of our other-​than-​human neighbors.

Key Challenges and Contemporary Opportunities Animal law already has, via its open-​minded willingness to invest the notion “nonhuman animals as legal subjects” with positive possibilities, pushed a variety of challenges to the exclusions and human exceptionalism found in contemporary legal systems. There are clearly benefits that flow from such challenges, including opening up legal thinking to awareness of its history of constricted, myopic thinking about humans’ true community. Such thinking makes it possible to recognize that human exceptionalism, both scientifically and ethically, exemplifies the fallacy of misplaced community that produced racism, sexism, nationalism, and other harsh human-​to-​human exclusions that have dominated our species’ story to this point in our history. Some of challenges to various shortcomings of law and its allied disciplines, such as philosophy of law, rely on more openly engaging science-​based findings, inclusivist ethical theories, and cultural studies and other fields that document forms of humans’ inevitable connection to other animals that readily confirm our ability to live in harmony with nonhuman communities. While there have in fact been many cultures that have

 

180   Paul Waldau recognized humans as members of a larger, more-​than-​human community, many of these have been the small-​scale or indigenous communities that modern industrialized societies have derided, conquered, and destroyed because they were not deemed “civilized” or “advanced” by the metric of the industrialized world. Studying a wide range of human cultures creates familiarity with the views of a range of human cultures, and this can illuminate the benefits that flow when a human group chooses to protect a variety of animals other than humans. One benefit is the emergence of opportunities to prompt young and old alike to attend carefully to the animals themselves. Such an approach may or may not lead a society to enact legal rules whereby other animals become legal subjects, but this sort of approach surely creates the kinds of conditions in which, in appropriate circumstances, a modern society might choose to be kind to certain nonhuman animals, to protect free, living communities of nonhuman animals and then, eventually, to consider openly and dispassionately the benefits of designating certain nonhuman animals to the status of legal personhood. Another benefit of open inquiry is conceptual, and it comes from attending to verbal habits that dominate contemporary legal systems. As some modern philosophers and other analysts of human values have discovered, focusing in a fine-​grained way on the manner in which language choices can help or prevent humans from seeing the world better is one way to see the exclusions and other harms caused by unacknowledged biases, prejudices, and wishful thinking. Legal and other academic and professional efforts take great pride in the ability to think critically about human groups’ use and abuse of language. Yet, despite much attention having been given to language issues, these academic fields have remained surprisingly naïve about their own language choices. The exceptionalist tradition’s commitment to separating humans from other living beings has masked both negligent and intentional mean-​spirited refusals to examine the coarse-​grained distinctions used in law regarding the diverse group of nonhuman animals with whom we share Earth. Such refusals do not thrive only in legal systems and the education establishment, of course; they exist widely in business circles (such as the agribusiness/​factory farming community) and in government agencies that promote destruction of certain wildlife as “pests” or “vermin” in “advanced” modern societies. Such refusals to notice animals outside the human species can obscure the relevance of scientific findings about the complexities evident in the lives of many other animals to those who take the time to look. The complexities found among, for example, many large-​brained social mammals include distinguishable personalities, intriguing forms of communal life and communication, and various kinds of intelligence—​the very existence of these traits begs questions about how a nation might, through its legal system or otherwise, choose to treat such animal subjects. Tragically, the dysfunctions of human exceptionalism exclude ab initio concerns for such matters. Education is, thereby, shorn of inquiries about not only the world around us, but also the consequences of human actions. The damage done by exclusion is profound, going far beyond harms to individual animals. Accumulating harms, because they are ignored, can become ecological, impacting large aggregations, such as whole

 

Animals as Legal Subjects    181 communities, entire species, whole ecosystems and now, through climate disruption, the whole Earth community and its human and nonhuman citizens alike. Some of the harms that flow from human exceptionalism apply even to human individuals and groups deemed privileged. Humans, children and marginalized human groups especially, suffer personal, cognitive, and moral harms whenever “education … equip(s) people merely to be more effective vandals of the earth.”16 Children suffer additionally as well. Richard Louv in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods used a subtitle that was hopeful but also revealing of the risks we create by removing humans psychologically and physically from the natural world: “Saving Our Children from Nature-​Deficit Disorder.” Louv’s work is a clarion call about the multiple risks we create for children who live in the impoverished “built environments” of a merely human community—​these risks include impaired development of children’s rich cognitive potential, as well as truncation of ethical sensibilities. Such impoverishment has led activists from diverse social movements, including child protection, environmental protection, and animal protection, to exhort individual and corporate citizens alike to contemplate the value of including nonhuman “others” within our moral circle, which of course includes the development of legal systems that allow human and nonhuman communities to coexist in ways that allow all to thrive. Such exhortations plead for parents, educators, policymakers, professionals of all types, business-​ focused citizens, and law enforcement personnel to see holistically and anticipate the harms caused by living in a world that is inevitably impoverished by exceptionalist rhetoric. One can, thus, challenge the legal system’s human exceptionalism in a variety of ways—​one can help others to see how, in one field after another, an impoverished set of concepts and language prevails. One can point out the consequences of an all-​too-​ narrow notion of community. Alternatively, one can underscore the moral issues raised by impacts on the living beings outside our species, or point out the impacts within our own species, especially on vulnerable children and marginalized groups. Collectively, such challenges have the potential to produce more than animal protections that will lead to a robust sense of animals as legal subjects, or even to legal personhood for some. These challenges can also generate views that amount to a win-​win-​win approach, rather than a loss-​loss-​loss approach, favoring each member of the trio of nonhumans, habitats shared by humans with other animals, and the human community itself. As suggested in the conclusion, challenging human exceptionalism can thereby be at once Earth-​centered and promotive of justice, ethics, education of surpassing excellence, cultural respect, and more. It will seem counterintuitive to some that challenging blanket assertions of human superiority and privileges can provide individual humans and their local communities with educational advantages, moral character development, cognitive enrichment, and even spiritual openings. But this is not too surprising, for countering human exceptionalism permits humans to recognize that they are members of nested communities that run from their families, local communities and neighborhoods to nations and species and thus our membership in the larger, Earth-​inclusive community.

 

182   Paul Waldau One approach relevant to the notion of animals as legal subjects, of course, is to challenge the specific consequences to specific animals that flow from the unambiguous dualism of legal persons versus legal things. A noteworthy example of this approach is Steven Wise’s 2000 book Rattling the Cage, which suggests that law already has in place commitments to dignity, equal treatment, and justice that are so fundamental that they now support specific legal rights for bonobos and chimpanzees. In one sense, then, Wise’s argument has features that conserve the foundations of the modern version of the common law legal system within which he works. While Wise’s approach relies upon many insights drawn from science-​based work, it is directed primarily at judges, who draw on the core values of the legal system to make decisions in the cases over which they preside. Notice as well that although Wise’s analysis honors some of the traditional core values in the common law, the implications of his arguments for human exceptionalism are radical, as is the implication that bonobos and chimpanzees qualify now as legal subjects who should be legal persons as well. Beyond it being possible to use the prestige and power of science to challenge the exclusion of specific animals (such as the cognitive superstars among cetaceans, elephants, African gray parrots, and our cousin great apes), it is also possible to use science to challenge the very dualism that is the heartbeat of modern legal systems. Science already supports the argument that some animals are now legal persons, since all humans are, by long-​standing scientific consensus, also great apes, primates, mammals, vertebrates, and the like, all of which are animal categories. Since humans are, plainly and simply, animals, the inescapable conclusion is that some animals are already legal persons. Therefore, science stands for the proposition that the key question is not whether law should protect some animals, as it already clearly does (namely, human animals); the key question becomes the more scientifically accurate, to which animals should the law offer fundamental protections? Through such reasoning, the two notions “legal persons” and “animals as legal subjects” can be closely linked, with the inquiry thus becoming, which animal subjects besides humans might fairly and practically be added into the circle of legal persons that is now comprised solely of humans?

Trends within Law Today The developments in animal law mentioned here have been accomplished through emphases on many kinds of litigation and legislation at the local, regional, national, and international levels. The greatest amount of this has been focused on companion animals, although the protections sought tend to be for owned animals rather than all members of these species. There has also been significant attention given to the most cognitively complex animals outside the human species—​in particular, the nonhuman great apes, many cetaceans, and elephants.17 The choice of these animals is in one way obvious, since there is both much scientific and cross-​cultural support for recognizing and caring about the complexities of these animals’ lives. Finally, the category “wildlife,”

 

Animals as Legal Subjects    183 defined variously in legislative systems but essentially including animals living free of direct human control, has also received much attention. The focus on companion animals will seem common sense to many because a significant number of the citizens in industrialized societies share their home with nonhuman family members (since the early 1990s, it has been reported that a number of industrialized countries have more households that include nonhuman companion animals than they have households with children).18 While these demographics are significant for developing test cases, fundraising, and bringing political pressure to bear on legislative bodies, they also increase the likelihood that the judges who hear the challenges will be dog or cat or horse owners sympathetic to this particular dimension of humans’ contemporary interactions with nonhuman animals. There is, as already hinted, a decidedly human element in modern societies’ preoccupation with owned companion animals—​ the humans who own and control them quite naturally want to protect their nonhuman family members. But there is also an element of their own interests being protected as well. Whatever one makes of the present heavy emphasis on companion animals, challenges seeking greater protections for owned companion animals form a leading edge of efforts to prompt legal systems to get beyond human exceptionalism. The focus on cognitive superstars also seems to many a matter of common sense, but here, too, there is a hint of the values that drive human exceptionalism. Because we humans have long nominated ourselves as the pinnacle of cognitive sophistication, concern for other cognitively sophisticated living beings comes uncomfortably close to being an affirmation of our own superiority. Research into chimpanzees’ and other great apes’ tool making proceeded rapidly because researchers wanted to explore the origins of human intelligence, culture, and distinctiveness. But, in all fairness, there are many additional reasons to be fascinated with cognitively sophisticated nonhumans. Claims about elephants’ and cetaceans’ remarkable abilities reach back millennia, and thus it is not surprising that these animals provide an opportunity for those who wish to explore nonhuman abilities that rival or exceed humans’ special abilities. Similarly, for those who wish to confer legal personhood on some animals other than humans, cognitively sophisticated nonhuman animals play to the biases of the present legal system grounded in humans’ obvious cognitive complexities. Wildlife-​focused concerns within law have also been significant, although this has been accomplished in ways that are more diverse than the ways in which law has focused on companion animals or cognitively sophisticated nonhumans. The category “wildlife” is, of course, very broad, including the countless free-living animals who are not now under humans’ direct control. There is, importantly, very heavy indirect control of wildlife with human-​centered features, which often has led to heavy declines in the numbers and health of these free-​living communities.19 Challenges thus abound. Some, in fact, come out of good news, such as that included in a 2002 report entitled “Legal Trends in Wildlife Management”: “In recent decades, many countries have thoroughly revised their own existing legislation—​some have adopted entirely new legal frameworks aimed at protecting or more intelligently and compassionately managing wildlife.”20 The authors of the 2002 edition of Wildlife

 

184   Paul Waldau Law: Cases and Materials also reported positive developments, on the opening page of their preface: In recent decades, natural resources law, environmental law, and land-​use planning have all come to address fundamental questions about how people draw sustenance from the larger community of life. Each of these fields is now infused with concerns about ecological interconnection, sustainability, and the dependence of human life and human enterprise on healthy natural systems.21

Goble and Freyfogle also noted that “particular resource-​use rights, once defined with an eye toward efficiency and fairness” are at times now framed with “equal attention to the effects of extraction and harvesting on water, soil, and other life forms.” Similarly, “environmental law, once focused on direct threats to human health” has taken onboard concerns for “assaults on non-​human life and disruptions of ecological processes.” The key property-​ based concern for “land-​use planning” has moved out beyond urban and suburban areas “spread[ing] across the landscape, focusing on places of critical ecological concern.”22 In significant ways, however, the background against which these specific changes move as foreground was, and remains, decidedly human-​centered, for wildlife law continues to be controlled by law and principles that were developed centuries ago. At the base of wildlife law are fundamental principles dealing with the private and public interests in animals, including the state ownership doctrine, the rule of capture, the complex links between wildlife and private land, and the rules governing the nature and duration of private rights after capture.23

A robust future may be possible, for the authors of this 2002 publication added, “[T]‌he central core of the field, we sense, is shifting significantly.” They envisioned “a much different focus: on wildlife as the central, nonhuman element in the ecological communities where humans live and that they help compose.” The authors then add an altogether optimistic note: “Wildlife is becoming a dominant strand—​in many settings, the dominant strand—​of large-​scale land-​use planning… . one of the two pillars of modern environmental law. Most disputes over public-​lands management now deal with the impacts of human activities on wild species.”24 While there have been, then, some hopeful openings that lead to a win-​win approach, there remains, however, much counterbalancing bad news, for a decade later problems continue to worsen—​annual trade in wildlife, for example, remained in 2014 in the tens of billions of US dollars.25 In such challenging times, however, our connections to other animals—​as community members, as subjectivities, as possible legal subjects—​survives. It remains true, for example, that “[t]‌o conserve biodiversity is to maintain landscapes where people, too, can thrive.”26 Thomas Berry hinted at why and how hope survives, and why many humans remain transfixed by free-​living wildlife: Even with all our technological accomplishments and urban sophistication we consider ourselves blessed, healed in some manner, forgiven and for a moment

 

Animals as Legal Subjects    185 transported into some other world, when we catch a passing glimpse of an animal in the wild: a deer in some woodland, a fox crossing a field, a butterfly in its dancing flight southward to its wintering region, a hawk soaring in the distant sky, a hummingbird come into our garden, fireflies signaling to each other in the evening. So we might describe the thousandfold moments when we experience our meetings with the animals in their unrestrained and undomesticated status.27

In particular, the field of animal law, by virtue of developments regarding nonhumans ranging from companion animals to cognitively sophisticated individuals to free-​living communities of wildlife, can be identified as a continuing force in the maturation of today’s worldwide animal protection movement. As a leading edge of increasing awareness regarding the other-​than-​human animals who share Earth with us, the rising star of animal law sits in a constellation composed of a variety of other stars that include non-​law academic efforts, on-​the-​ground work of nonprofit corporations, an increasing engagement of religious traditions with animal protection questions, and environmental concerns of great variety. While some features of contemporary animal law feature elements that remain decidedly human-​centered, other aspects of the larger, worldwide animal protection movement increasingly exert a powerful gravity that bends the light of the animal law star toward a multidisciplinary approach to humanity’s relationship with Earth’s other living beings.

Trends Outside Law that Fuel Challenges Like all law, animal law is influenced by elements in the societies that birth, nurture, enforce, and periodically revamp the provisions of legal systems. Powerful forces ranging from personal connections to scientific findings shape what is possible in animal law, and thus what meanings may or may not be given to notions such as “animals as legal subjects.” Environmental factors increasingly influence everyone in the industrialized world, and our cultural, communal, ethical, spiritual, and educational heritage continues to influence our choices about present and future practices. A 2014 book about how to optimize human health exhorts humans to be aware of the negative effects of modern practices and to return to more natural ways of living and eating—​the authors introduce this perspective by observing, “We are wild animals.”28 The notion of “wild animals” is more than a rhetorical ploy—​it is a plea to recognize that we are animals who have natural parameters that we violate at our own peril. In a profoundly important way, this is the problem with human exceptionalism—​we are animals through and through, and we cannot ignore our larger community without destroying parts of the integrated world that we need for our own health. We are, plain and simple, citizens in a more-​than-​human world, which is why the pioneering environmentalist Aldo Leopold exhorted us to move “from conqueror of the land-​community to a plain member and citizen of it.”29

 

186   Paul Waldau

The Future of Animals as Legal Subjects An intriguing question not only for today’s animal law students around the world, but also for our society as a whole is, what will the future of laws regarding nonhuman animals be? There are many factors that make this question—​indeed, any question about the future—​hard to answer. Perhaps most obviously, difficulties arise because we do not know how to interpret the dramatic changes on animal protection issues that have taken place within the last century. Further, the pace of change is, if anything, increasing. Yet another difficulty lies in the fact that we, as humans, are not well equipped to know with certainty the abilities of other living beings, especially those who are not our near evolutionary cousins and thus possess different abilities than we do (philosophers have long pointed out that we are also limited when it comes to absolute certainty about what our fellow human animals experience). However we respond to these difficulties, an eminently human reality awaits us—​we have choices about the future. It will be our choice if we leave the legal system’s human exceptionalism intact. It will be our choice if we seek to modify or eliminate it, investing our laws with realism about what kind of animals we are and how often in our history members of our own species have harmed other lives (human and nonhuman alike). We can invest our laws with ecological sophistication, or ignore the alarming problems we face. We can choose to invest the notion of “animals as legal subjects” with ethical depth and breadth, or with species-​level selfishness and shortsightedness. Thus, choices for or against human exceptionalism will be made—​in fact, they are already being made. Many different human societies are in dramatic ferment over what the possible futures are, and what a fair, ethical and human-​honoring approach to nonhuman animals might be, for we too are animals who have the capacity to take responsibility as citizens in any future world that we shape. Will we recognize “our larger community”? Education, despite the failure of our present institutions on this important matter, surely has an important role to play, for present scholarship suggests that in the past many citizens of modern societies were not at all familiar with their own heritage that includes traditions of compassion alongside harsh treatment and broad dismissals of other animals. Without detailed knowledge of, in particular, our very complex past harms to animals (whether they be human or nonhuman), it will remain challenging to guess at what is possible in the near term and more distant future. As meaning makers, human animals can choose whatever meaning we wish to give the intriguing notion “animals as legal subjects.” We are free to recognize or deny that our species is more than capable of being at one and the same time Earth-​centered, promotive of justice for humans, ethically wide-​ranging, deeply caring and informed about our fellow animals, producers of education of surpassing excellence, respectful of cultural diversity, and responsible and nurturing citizens of our larger community in our shared obviously-​more-​than-​human world. Above all, we need to recognize that

 

Animals as Legal Subjects    187 whatever versions of the phrase “animals as legal subjects” and its important partner “animals as legal persons” are allowed to prevail, the choice will project an imagined future onto future humans and nonhumans alike.

Notes 1. John Ingham, The Law of Animals: A Treatise on Property in Animals Wild and Domestic and the Rights and Responsibilities Arising Therefrom (Philadelphia, PA: T. & J. E. Johnson & Co., 1900), iii. 2. Pamela D. Frasch, Sonia S. Waisman, Bruce A. Wagman, Scott Beckstead, eds., Animal Law (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2000). 3. Joyce Tischler, “The History of Animal Law, Part I (1972–​1987),” Stanford Journal of Animal Law & Policy 1 (2008): 1–​49. 4. Additional details on this development can be found in Paul Waldau, Animal Studies: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 114–​115; and Tischler, “History of Animal Law.” 5. Bruce A. Wagman, Sonia Waisman, and Pamela D. Frasch, Animal Law:  Cases and Materials, 4th ed. (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2010), 51. Virtually identical statements open the discussion of the chapter on property in the first, second, and third editions as well. 6. The French is La propriété, c’est le vol!, which appears in Proudhon’s What Is Property? (1840). 7. See, for example, J. Tannenbaum, “Animals and the Law:  Property, Cruelty, Rights,” Humans and Other Animals, ed. Arien Mack (Columbus:  Ohio State University Press, 1995), 125–​193. 8. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (Boston: Little, Brown, 1881), 18. 9. Pierson v. Post, 3 Cai. R. 175 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1805). 10. Robert M. Cover, “Violence and the Word,” Yale Law Journal 95 (1986): 1601, 1604. 11. Jon Coe, “Design and Architecture:  Third Generation Conservation, Post-​Immersion and Beyond,” (paper presented at the Future of Zoos Symposium, February 10–​11, 2012, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY), http://​www.zoolex.org/​publication/​coe/​ design+architecture2012.pdf, at 8. 12. For the imprisonment argument, see Paul Waldau, “In the Case of Education, Captivity Imprisons Us,” in The Apes: Challenges for the 21st Century (Chicago: Chicago Zoological Society, 2001), 282–​285. 13. The only provision in section 11 of “The Principles of Veterinary Medical Ethics of the AVMA” has long provided, and still provides today, that convenience euthanasia is acceptable—​Section 11 in its entirety reads, “Humane euthanasia of animals is an ethical veterinary procedure.” 14. Philosopher James Rachels, quoted in Waldau, Animal Studies, 8. 15. Cited in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States 1492-​Present (1980; repr. New York: Perennial Classics/​Harper Collins, 2003), 288. 16. David Orr, Earth in Mind:  On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1994), 5. 17. See, for example, Thomas I. White, In Defense of Dolphins:  The New Moral Frontier (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).

 

188   Paul Waldau 18. See, for example, Elizabeth McKey and Karen Payne, “APPMA Study:  Pet Ownership Soars,” Pet Business 18 (1992): 22. 19. See, for example, J. A. Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981). 20. M. T. Cirelli, “Legal Trends in Wildlife Management,” FAO Legislative Studies 74, 2002, fao.org/​docrep/​006/​y5063e/​y5063e07.htm. 21. Dale D. Goble and Eric Freyfogle, Wildlife Law: Cases and Materials (New York: Foundation, 2002), v. 22. Goble and Freyfogle, Wildlife Law (italics added). 23. Goble and Freyfogle, Wildlife Law, vi. 24. Goble and Freyfogle Wildlife Law, vii. 25. Jody Rosen, “Animal Traffic,” New  York Times, September 5, 2014, tmagazine.blogs. nytimes.com/​2014/​09/​05/​. 26. Rosen, “Animal Traffic.” 27. Berry, Thomas, “Loneliness and Presence,” in A Communion of Subjects:  Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 5–​10, 7–​8. 28. J. J. Ratey, Richard Manning, and David Perlmutter, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization (New York: Little, Brown, 2014), 5. 29. Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” in A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (1948, repr., New York: Ballantine, 1991), 240, (italics added). See also Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s chapter in this volume, “Animals in Political Theory.”

 

Chapter 10

The Stru gg l e for C ompassion a nd J u st i c e t hrough C ri t i c a l Anim al St u di e s Carol Gigliotti

Introduction The black and white calf, lying in a curled heap on the bottom of the narrow wooden stall stained with blood and feces, is almost dead. The only sign of life is the slow blinking of his one visible and sunken eye. He was taken forcefully from his mother, a dairy cow, on the same day he was born twelve weeks ago, auctioned off, and put on a transport truck to a veal “farm,” where we find him 300 miles away. Here, he is fed milk replacers, including cattle blood, so that humans can have the milk from his mother that was really meant for him. Here, the stall in which he spends all his time chained by the neck is 30 inches by 72 inches, too small for him to turn around in. One of his hooves is caught in the slats at the bottom of the stall, so that standing is almost impossible. He has been beaten, kicked, and had his head shoved so far down into the pail of milk substitute he almost drowned. But, he is still alive on his twelve-​week birthday. He is so weak and crippled that he is hardly able to move in the small crate. His diet has been devised deliberately to make him sickly and anemic, barely able to walk, and so he will be electrically prodded and beaten out of his crate, only to be put on another truck for the trip to the slaughterhouse.1 This horrific, and by now, familiar scenario is repeated for calves in the neighborhood of 2,800,000 times a year, at least in the four largest veal-​producing countries in the world, the Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.2 The fact that many other animals used for food throughout the world meet a similarly brutal fate hardly needs mentioning. But if one ponders even briefly the sheer (conservative)

 

190   Carol Gigliotti number of land and sea animals slaughtered annually worldwide by the meat, fish, egg, and dairy industries—​150 billion3—​merely mentioning it seems too meager a response. The depth of suffering in each instance of the slaughter of animals, within industry or not, coupled with the overwhelming number of large-​scale and linked repercussions of the industrial production of meat, dairy, eggs, and fish, demands a vigorous and persuasive response. While many animal activists worldwide have been accomplishing positive change for animals, most scholars, until relatively recently, have steered clear of animal issues. With notable and crucial exceptions in academic disciplines, including philosophy, ethology, anthropology, and some visionary voices in the arts who have positively influenced a shift in the way we view animals, it has been activists working within and outside NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) who have achieved actual changes for animals. The last three decades have seen a growing number of voices in multiple academic disciplines, well represented in this volume, focusing on what is now called both human-​animal studies and animal studies, and this has helped to put “the animal question” on the academic table. The growth of critical animal studies (CAS), as a decidedly different approach to the study of the human-​animal relationship, has ballooned in the last 12 years. Much of this has been the result of the forceful and hardworking online Institute for Critical Animal Studies, which has gathered many like-​minded scholars and activists worldwide into what is now, if not a cohesive grouping, certainly a locus for a particular vision of a very different world from the one in which we now live.

The Need for Critical Animal Studies Critical animal studies (CAS), at its center, is the struggle for compassion and justice. This statement may seem simplistic to some and misguided to others, but allow me to explain why I believe it to be true. Many scholars now associated with CAS have brought to the field of human-​animal studies a passionate concern for shifting our dominant and overwhelmingly abusive relationship with animals and for an understanding that the pursuit of animal liberation and human liberation are one and the same. For those who viewed their academic research as a contribution to this goal, the drive that originally inspired the investigation of the origins, causes, and meanings of animal suffering often became lost in the assumptions and practices of academic research, publishing, and, of course, the requirements of tenure. Despite abundant activist, feminist, radical, and postmodern critiques of objectivity and ethical neutrality, scholars’ work focusing on the goals of animal rights or animal liberation was often resisted. Openly identifying one’s ethical commitment to veganism, animal rights, or animal liberation, while at the same time helping to unravel the overwhelming complexity of both human and animal oppression, was often met with chagrin or advice to stay within the academic framework of objectivity, ethical neutrality, and the limited knowledge of one’s discipline,

 

The Struggle for Compassion and Justice    191 even though doing so would obscure the original goals—​to stop individual suffering and defend a global justice. And yet, what other response is valid when one is faced with the realities of what daily life is like for the majority of animals, both nonhuman and human, around the globe. It is imperative that we understand the precariousness of a future in which any study of the present might turn out to be futile. Rather than submit to that futility, however, we must seek a path forward, knowing that it rests on admitting that we are destroying daily much of what allows life on this planet to continue. Climate change, species extinction, and the escalating slaughter and exploitation of animals are at present the three major crisis points needing to be faced in any discussion concerning the relationships between humans and animals. A critical approach explicitly committed to a global justice for both animals and humans must first take into account the deluginous amount of scientific research documenting the Sixth Great Extinction4 occurring today. In 2010, Ahmed Djoghlaf, then secretary-​general of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, said unequivocally, What we are seeing today is a total disaster… . We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. If current levels [of destruction] go on we will reach a tipping point very soon. The future of the planet now depends on governments taking action in the next few years.5

He added—​and the point is important:  “Climate change cannot be solved without action on biodiversity, and vice versa.” 6 The rate of extinction at that point was thought to be 1000 times the background rate—​in other words, 1000 times the rate thought typical throughout history. That historically typical rate is specified as 1–​10 species a year. A recent study7 by a team of scientists has expanded on this rate and, based on documentation and discussion of rampant species extinction since the early 1980s, has placed the present rate of extinction possibly as high as 10,000 times the background rate. The scientists responsible for the study concurred: Future rates depend on many factors and are poised to increase. Although there has been rapid progress in developing protected areas, such efforts are not ecologically representative, nor do they optimally protect biodiversity.8

There is general agreement that the soaring extinction rates over the last few hundred years are the result of “accelerated habitat destruction following European colonialism and the subsequent global expansion of the human population during the twentieth century.”9 Globally, agriculture is now the biggest cause of the habitat destruction of many species. Including degradation and deforestation, it is the biggest contributor to forcing many species into small and geographically concentrated ranges that are unable to support the biodiversity encouraged by the protection of large amounts of land and sea. Other contributors are overexploitation, including hunting and fishing; the exotic pet

 

192   Carol Gigliotti trade; invasive species; and, of course, climate change. According to conservation biologist William F. Laurance, recent decades have seen the drivers of environmental deterioration fundamentally change in that “habitat loss, especially in the tropics, is now substantially driven by globalization promoting intensive agriculture and other industrial activities.”10 He cites globalized financial markets and a worldwide commodity boom as the impetus for large-​scale agriculture of livestock, crops, and tree plantations as the biggest direct cause of tropical deforestation.11 The number of cattle in Brazil alone in 2013 was 253,000,000,12 more than the number of Brazil’s human population, which was estimated at 200,600,000 in 2013.13 India has now surpassed Brazil as the biggest beef exporter in the world, with a 50 percent increase over the last five years.14 Humans are literally eating their way to death. Not a metaphor but a reality, this is based on predictions by a number of respected scientists. Fueling this “instant planetary emergency”15 is methane, a greenhouse gas emission (GHG) that, on a relatively short-​ time scale, due to feedback loops emerging from methane from the melting Arctic ice, is far more destructive than carbon dioxide (CO2). Agricultural methane emissions are emissions from animals, animal waste, rice production, agricultural waste burning (nonenergy, on-​site), and savannah burning. The most recent analysis (2009) from the World Watch Institute on livestock production and its byproducts place its impact at 51 percent of GHGs,16 the major cause of Arctic melting. Peter Wadhams, a leading Arctic expert at Cambridge University, and a member of the Arctic Methane Emergency Group estimates, “The fall-​off in ice volume is so fast it is going to bring us to zero very quickly.”17 Based on the current data, he estimates the Arctic will have completely ice-​free summers by 2018. And in case one thinks this is only a hysterical prediction, the US Navy researchers on the Regional Arctic System Model (RASM) anticipated an ice-​free summer Arctic by 2016.18 The US Navy can be counted on not to be hysterical. Concurrent with worldwide extirpation of species and a quickly disintegrating climate is a different kind of scientific research, much of it from cognitive ethologists, pointing to qualities once believed to be unique to humans that have been found in animals. The idea that humans are radically different and distinct from or better than the rest of nature and other animals—​known as anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism—​has been turned on its head by constant revelations of animal consciousness, cognition, rationality, language, culture, tool use, and morality, among many other qualities. While the documentation of these qualities in animals has helped us to understand how similar to humans animals are in various ways, just as much research has been focused on how animals are unique. As anthropologist Barbara Noske points out in her seminal Beyond Boundaries, Animals see smell, feel, taste or hear the world against the background of their own frame of reference; they like us, distinguish and select among sense impressions distinctions which we do not even know are there. To have a concept of self, animals do not have to see or recognize themselves visually, their self-​concept may consist of self-​scent or self-​sound rather than self-​vision.19

 

The Struggle for Compassion and Justice    193 But she concludes that although it may be difficult for humans to know a member of another species, this difficulty in knowing another also arises among our own species, even between intimates. The goal is to acknowledge the existence of other meanings and views of the world “even if we may be severely limited in our understandings of them.”20 These findings expand upon previous and current philosophical work on the ethics of eating animals or using them in any way that disregards their intrinsic value21 and the idea that they are ends in themselves, not objects for human use. CAS assumes a vegan position as part of the understanding that animals, including fish and invertebrates, are sentient, are at the very least able to feel pain, and deserve to be treated as fellow beings with agency, whose lives matter. These overarching conditions inform the need for the exigent approaches demonstrated in CAS. The clearly alarming rapidity at which the extinctions of all forms of species are progressing, and the effects both on and from climate change, require us to not only rethink our relationship with nature, but also to act upon those thoughts. Simply put, the possibility that the planet may lose 20 percent of all plant and animal species by 2030 does not allow for inaction. In addition, the environmental impacts of our unethical use of animals and other humans are leading us to a precipice from which we may not be able to return. With these circumstances in mind and as an argument that CAS is a central rather than marginal approach to the study of human-​animal relationships, I would like to outline the historical sources, core ideas, and commitments of what I consider to be a critical global studies of living beings on this planet and the calamitous circumstances in which we, both human and nonhuman animals, find ourselves at this time.

Sources of CAS An alternative view of the human-​animal relationship to the one that has precipitated our current situation has existed in the diverse history of ethical vegetarianism dating at least as far back as Pythagoras (c. 580 bce–​500 bce) in the West, and in Hinduism (c. 6500 bce), Jainism (c. 7 bce), Taoism (c. 6 bce), and Buddhism (c. 6 bce) in the East.22 Thinkers in these religious practices spoke out against two of the most visible forms of animal suffering during these ancient times—​meat eating and religious sacrifice. Harmony with nature and respect and compassion for all life forms were tenants of these geographically separated, but spiritually connected, movements and helped to shape facets of ethical and philosophical thought. The construction of the good life of Hellenic and Roman societies, however, was “proto-​capitalistic.”23 From Aristotle on, both the idea of privilege and the oppression of animals and of those seen as lesser humans were defended as inherent to the continuation and growth of the particular culture at hand. Those who sought to build a political state reinforcing these classifications, one that would benefit politically and economically from the use of these lesser beings,

 

194   Carol Gigliotti viewed this pyramidal organization of society as a natural state.24 This can be seen quite clearly in the following passage from Politics: Plants exist for the sake of animals, and brute beasts for the sake of man—​domestic animals for his use and food, wild ones (or at any rate most of them) for food, and other accessories of life, such as clothing and various tools. Since nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain, it is undeniably true that she has made all animals for the sake of man.25

This from the man who said, “a woman is perhaps an inferior being.”26 As for those lesser humans, about both men and women who were thought to be inferior to the superior man, Aristotle says: When there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals … the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master… . indeed the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both with their bodies minister to the needs of life.27

As Dinesh Wadiwel explains, for Aristotle “the slave is the human animal who has failed to demonstrate that he is human, and thus is at base, a mere animal.”28 Over the centuries since then, many activists, philosophers, and others have diligently worked against that assumption. And over the last 50 years a growing number, most notably the American philosopher Tom Regan and the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, have vehemently disputed the view that any being is worthless, including animals, thereby making the negative comparison to animals unviable. While many sources have contributed to the development of CAS, the critical or leftist tradition in social and political thought and feminism have provided a basis for many of the linked thematic considerations and political commitments found in today’s CAS scholarship and activism. The Institute for Social Research was founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt by Felix Weil as an antidote to the conservatism of the social democratic German state. Critical of both capitalism and Soviet socialism, the Institute’s purpose was to investigate how social institutions and ideologies perpetuate systems of social hierarchy and authority. Drawing on Marx and Freud, theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, an enormously influential thinker, began to define a critical or “dialectical” theoretical approach sufficient to match the structural and psychological negative constraints of political and social systems such as capitalism and fascism. The fascist Nazi regime coming to power in 1933 in Germany forced members of the Frankfurt School to flee, relocating first to Austria and then to the United States, where their influence continued to expand. The goal of critical theory, as Max Horkheimer, the director of the Institute and Professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt from 1930 to 1933, and again from 1949 to 1958, succinctly tells us, is “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”29 For Horkheimer and others of the Frankfurt School, and those influenced by them, the real world is able to be apprehended as itself, but the

 

The Struggle for Compassion and Justice    195 social, political, cultural, economic, ethnic, and gender-​based forces that have solidified over time into social structures and understood as natural or unchangeable continue to prevent us from seeing all of nature, human and nonhuman alike, as it is. Critical theorists insist that these forces can be changed. Rejecting the divide between objective “truth” and subjective feelings or beliefs allows critical theorists to reveal more clearly how this divide works to justify the privileges gained by the powerful in respecting only objective “facts”—​understood as free from any kind of normative value. In other words, the normative values cannot be separated from how particular people with a particular agenda have decided those “facts” are immutable. Critical theory starts from the understanding that it, too, has a normative stance, one that is seen as a positive value, and then works not only to critique what prevents this positive value from flourishing, but also to shift what is preventing that from happening. The practice of change is inherent in the practice of critical theory. CAS takes some of its power from these core insights of the Frankfurt School. As well, several of the most influential theorists of this school, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and their younger colleague Herbert Marcuse, saw the connection between the oppression of humans and animals.30 Influenced by Schopenhauer’s insights on compassion and the importance of recognizing communion with animals (and aside from Schopenhauer’s other negative attitudes, toward woman, for example), Horkheimer explains: The human being, in the process of his emancipation, shares the fate of the rest of his world. Domination of nature involves domination of man. Each subject not only has to take part in the subjugation of external nature, human and nonhuman, but in order to do so must subjugate nature in himself.31

Along with theorists of the Frankfurt School, today’s critical theorists continue to focus on the critique of capitalist society. For those practicing CAS, and, I would add, animal liberation and animal rights, the critique of speciesism is fundamental to understanding any critical approach to the myriad methodologies of power, and the only effective route to unhinging those systems while at the same time providing a clearer vision of how we might value all members of the planet. As John Sanbonmatsu observes, Like the Frankfurt School critics, then, animal liberationists implicate by their critique not merely one aspect of the existing order, but the entirety of human history and culture. To take the claims and concerns of the animal liberationist critique seriously means to question existing economic arrangements, social norms, science and technology, cultural expression, and the foundational terms of social and political thought.32

One of the founders of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, Steve Best, elaborating on a phrase of Barbara Noske’s, puts it this way: The animal standpoint seeks to illuminate the origins and development of dominator cultures, to preserve the wisdom and heritage of egalitarian values and social relations, and to discern what moral and social progress means in a far deeper sense than

 

196   Carol Gigliotti what is discernible through humanist historiography, anthropology, social theory, and philosophy.33

Feminism, too, is a strong source of CAS, such as Carol Adams’s groundbreaking, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-​Vegetarian Critical Theory, among others, as is ecofeminism. But, as Lisa Kemmerer points out in her anthology Sister Species, it is crucial to recognize interlinked oppressions, even though specialization is necessary to be effective. But activists must not work against one another in their single-​minded dedication to one specific cause [emphasis in original]. Those fighting to protect horses must not eat cattle. We do well to specialize, we do not so well if we specialize without knowledge of interlocking oppressions–​or without the application of that knowledge.34

Similarly, as Joi Marie Probus tell us, By viewing animals, as with cultures or “races” of people, as less than, it is impossible to emphasize with their pain and suffering. This lack of empathy’s a pathway to the atrocities committed against the oppressed, and in most instances is a justification of the perpetrators. Cruelty and exploitation enrage when applied to people, but why not nonhuman animals?35

This empathy does not stop at any perceived cultural barrier. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in the letter he wrote while in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, there for what was then seen as extremism: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”36 There are many routes to a view that coincides with that of a critical animal studies. Some practitioners arrive by way of their own experience with oppression; others arrive as they become more aware of the misery and brutality that most animals experience every day while, at the same time, becoming increasingly aware of the personhood of individual animals. Some who are involved are activists rather than scholars, and some have decided to be both. But all see the intersections between the myriad forms of oppression legitimized today by the demands of the global market, which perpetuate forms of prejudice, hate, or intolerance, such as racism, speciesism, homophobia, ableism, ethnocentrism, chauvinism, and so on. All see animal liberation as integral to environmental activism. All see the absolute necessity of critiquing global capitalism and its formidable social and political structures in order for other transformations to occur. Becoming vegan is seen not as an ending point, but a starting point.37

Practicing CAS I would like to return to industrial animal agriculture, specifically factory farms, as an example of how a CAS approach might be used to reveal the complex intersections of: political, economic, and social inequalities and poverty; global capital and “progress”;

 

The Struggle for Compassion and Justice    197 environmental and climate degradation; and the animal industrial complex.38 In doing so I want to return to the calf described above. He lies at the center of a vortex of ramifications from using him as food. From the widest reaching spirals at the top, where the implications for the planet itself exist, to the smaller rings of misery for individuals who find themselves at the receiving end of aftermath of the industrialization of animal production, he reminds us that eating animals cannot be defended ethically, compassionately, or politically. Taking the animal standpoint, we are able to see the waste of his life as part of a larger system of global blindness and greed that literally would be shattered without his small crippled body at its the center. Let us start at the largest and widest of the powerful spirals surrounding him, as they twist vertically, suctioning in layer upon layer of destruction and deprivation on this planet, its climate, and its inhabitants. Species biodiversity is central to the continuation of life on earth as we know it. And yet, only recently has ecological research on intensive agriculture come to the forefront of discussions on the causes of biodiversity loss and damage. Conservation biologists and environmental scientists of all kinds are now focusing on the impact of intensive agriculture on both land use and fish harvesting. Plainly put: “the future of biodiversity hinges on the future of agriculture.”39 Determining diversity at large scales rests on the degree to which sites differ in their species composition. When looking at the relative impact of agricultural intensification on diversity, spatial scale plays an important role. A recent study documented for the first time that high-​intensity agriculture, including animals and the crops to feed them, acts as an ecological filter. Using the functional diversity of bird communities to understand differences between high-​intensity agriculture and low-​intensity agriculture on forest habitat, and those impacts on small and large scales, Daniel Karp and his fellow scientists found that, rapid rates of agricultural expansion and intensification threaten diversity not only locally, but also at larger spatial scales. Community dissimilarity was strongly related to distance in forest and low-​intensity agriculture; therefore, as agriculture expands, low-​intensity agricultural practices across regions will be essential to maintain regional diversity. Otherwise, biotic homogenization at large scales may accelerate species loss beyond even current dire predictions.40

Habitat destruction is considered the most important driver of species extinction worldwide,41 and, as outlined above, agriculture is the biggest cause of habitat destruction. Not surprisingly, global capital is a major driver of extensive agricultural commercial operations replacing native habitats and smallholder farms. Tropical forests, containing high species diversity, are being lost at an unnerving rate, and it is large-​scale agriculture—​ crops, livestock, and tree plantations—​owned by corporations and wealthy landowners that is increasingly emerging as the biggest direct cause of tropical deforestation.42 The demand for soy and corn to feed cattle that is driven by the rising standards of living in developing countries, in addition to the global thirst for biofuels and edible oils, has also increased this trend. These threats to biodiversity from intensive industrial agriculture

 

198   Carol Gigliotti are linked to other heavy and widespread tolls on the very foundations on which agriculture rests. These threats include damage caused by soil erosion and salinization; the overdraft of water and the reduction of its long-​term supply; GHG emissions causing climate change; and the continued dependence on fossil and biofuels to underpin all these activities. As outlined early in this chapter, the effects of global warming and climate change are already evident and, together with species extinction, are producing the largest and most dangerously irreversible transformations. Globally, over 64 billion land animals annually are reared and slaughtered for human consumption.43 That number is expected to double by 2050 due to the increase in the demand for meat in growing middle classes in India and China,44 and there are, at present, ten global corporations making the most of the money to be had in dead animals.45 High levels of efficiency are essential benchmarks by which the success of any capitalist enterprise is evaluated. Increased levels of productivity due to the brutal demands of efficiency placed upon human workers, animals, and plants are part of the now global normative goal of raising the gross domestic product (GDP), the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country’s borders on an annual basis. Yet, even though the creator of GDP, Simon Kuznets, the young economist tasked by the US Congress with measuring the output of a depression-​era economy, did not feel this metric was a useful measure of the welfare of a nation,46 the GDP is still used as a fundamental indicator to economic growth in both developed and developing countries. While Europe and the United Kingdom have begun to shift away from this framework, the realities of the welfare of the poorest members of any nation, as well as of the animals within its borders, are still far from being counted as meaningful. Despite copious amounts of research and statistics documenting the wide-​ranging and egregious repercussions of intensive animal industry, including, either directly or indirectly, the degradation of climate, water, soil, ocean habitat, and species, the governmental political will to decrease or end this practice does not exist, or does but just barely. In the United States, for instance, the cozy relationships between the Department of Agriculture, land grant colleges, and large animal industrial players have been responsible for either the repression of critical research on concentrated livestock operations impacts’ on the environment, rural communities, animal welfare, and human health or have been responsible for pressure on university researchers to publish only positive findings.47 In addition, the rural poor have had to bear the brunt of socioeconomic, environmental, and health-​related effects of living within range of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and slaughterhouses. Studies in the United States suggest that hazards are disproportionately sited in regions where minorities and impoverished people live.48 The possibility of a concentrated pushback from poor communities is seen as low by corporations, and so many CAFOs and slaughterhouses are located in these communities. As described above, land grabs by multinational corporations or by governments that see large animal agribusiness as a boon to a developing country’s economy have been

 

The Struggle for Compassion and Justice    199 cited as contributing to conflict, hunger, and disease in places like Darfur and other areas of Sudan. The United Nations Environment Programme connected both land degradation and desertification in Sudan to “an explosive growth in livestock numbers, from 28.6 million in 1961 to 134.6 million in 2004.”49 As stated above, by 2050 the global production of meat will double. But it is important to note that the trend, at present, is strongest in the developing world.50 This does not mean that more hungry people will be fed, but fewer. As of 2013, the estimated number of hungry people in the world was 842 million. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, “One in eight people in the world, were estimated to be suffering from chronic hunger, regularly not getting enough food to conduct an active life.”51 Globally, food prices have risen over the last 30 years and are expected to remain there. Both Nobel Laureate in economics Paul Krugman and World Bank president Robert Zoellick attest that while a number of factors have come together to spike global food prices, the reasons that seem to be on everyone’s list include the global rise in meat eating, the diversion of grains to feed livestock instead of people, and the subsidies paid by wealthy governments to agricultural sectors for these activities. Also listed are structural changes in agricultural production and markets by large multinational corporations.52 Gail Eisnitz’s 1997 book, Slaughterhouse, documented the atrocities committed hourly against animals killed for food in slaughterhouses across the United States. As well, the book gave a voice to workers in “the most dangerous industry in the US.”53 She also tackled the unsafe quality of meat coming from slaughterhouses due to the presence of slaughtered animals’ fecal matter, which can contaminate meat with high levels of bacteria, such as E. Coli, and other food contaminants, such as Salmonella and Campylobacter. Despite the passage of the Humane Slaughter Act following the publication of her book, the shockingly hideous treatment of both animals and the workers who are hired to kill them continues, as does the danger of illnesses due to unsanitary conditions in these places of misery. The workers in global industrialized slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants are seen as just as disposable as the animals they kill, cut up into parts, and then pack to be sold to the meat-​eating public. As the major international meat corporations take over meat production in various parts of the world, dangerous, unhealthy and unjust working conditions come with them. The International Labor Organization (ILO), a specialized agency of the UN, includes, on the long list of possible injuries or health impacts for workers in these situations, everything from amputation, electrocution, repetitive strain injury, loss of hearing, exposure to toxic chemicals, infectious disease, heat stroke, and, of course, death.54 In the United States, a significant percentage of the workforce has been poor people of color born in the United States. Today, partially due to active recruiting by corporations, approximately 38  percent of slaughterhouse and meat-​ processing workers were born outside the United States.55 Corporations have a great deal of control over these workers who are in the United States illegally, threatening them with deportation or loss of their jobs if they complain about working conditions. Also, it is much easier to stop the formation of unions if a large proportion of the workforce is illegal. Unions have finally gained some quarter in

 

200   Carol Gigliotti US CAFOs and slaughterhouses, but have had to come up against aggressive and illegal tactics by the corporations involved, including the use of “special police agencies” that enabled company security officers to act as policeman against the workers who were trying to unionize. There is still worker abuse56 and, of course, still horrendous treatment of animals before they are killed. Membership in unions has generally flagged in the United States, and membership in the United Food and Commercial Workers Union has declined since 2011 as the number of foreign workers, both documented and undocumented, has risen in the United States. As well, joblessness, a larger gap between rich and poor, and economic insecurity are still a reality for roughly 80 percent of the US population.57 Due to the small number of unions in slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants in the United States, the exploitation of workers continues, such as the use of underage undocumented workers in a famous 2008 case at a kosher meat plant in Pottsville, Iowa. Even though 57 minors, aged 14 to 17, were employed in the slaughterhouse under working conditions with rampant health and safety violations, including the physical and sexual abuse of workers by supervisors, it was the 389 undocumented adult workers who were arrested for immigration fraud, and most were deported.58 When the owner of the plant was finally sentenced, it was for financial fraud, not for child labor charges, overtly demonstrating what gets prioritized in the United States and elsewhere when it comes to business: money. Slavery is far from gone in the world. In certain countries, cattle farms and meat plants are home to rampant exploitation of the poorest citizens of a country, though hidden from view. Leonardo Sakamoto, director of the Brazilian NGO Repórter Brasil, insists that cattle farms are the number one reason for slavery in Brazil.59 And he is backed up by the ILO’s estimation that in 2003, 25,000 Brazilians were working on cattle farms in conditions it described as slavery. Luis Machado, head of the ILO’s unit to combat forced labor, says the number is probably larger now. “Over 40,000 workers have been rescued since 1995,” he said. “But not one single person in the history of Brazil has been jailed for this crime. These men feel untouchable. They feel they are risking nothing by doing this.”60 In a similar way in the United States, the “ag-​gag” laws, some of which have only recently passed into law in several states and some of which have been on the books since 1990, criminalize whistle-​blowing on farms in those states. These laws prohibit video and audio recording of farm conditions and outlaw undercover newsgathering at agricultural production facilities. Animal activists and organizations are not the only groups who are fighting these laws, which are explicitly designed to hide information from the public. In the most recent case, the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho, along with environmental, animal rights, and workers’ rights organizations, filed a constitutional challenge to the law. As Lauren Carasik, a clinical professor of law and the director of the international human rights clinic at the Western New England University School of Law, concludes, As the sweeping Idaho law makes clear, agribusiness would prefer not to defend against haunting videos of cruelty and suffering, but to prevent their production and dissemination. Laws that protect industrial practices by chilling investigations and discourse about gruesome practices that affect animals, workers and the nation’s health are unconstitutional.61

 

The Struggle for Compassion and Justice    201 The governments of both Brazil and the United States, both democracies, appear to be behind in eradicating both human and animal slavery but say they are making progress. The continuing accounts of slavery, however, in Brazil’s rural areas and more recently in urban areas, some of it in preparation for Brazil’s hosting of the 2014 World Cup and the 2015 Olympics,62 offer a different version of the political will behind this “progress.” In the United States, the recent enactment of ag-​gag laws in various states and the newer Federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act passed in 2006, in force today, indicate clearly where priorities lie. These laws make speaking out for animals even with activities covered by the First Amendment, “such as picketing, boycotts and undercover investigations if they ‘interfere’ with an animal enterprise by causing a loss of profits,” a felony and liable for extended prison sentences and large fines.63 In these countries, poor, uneducated workers and food animals are viewed inherently as contributors to the GNP by their invisible exploitation. As if the brutality of CAFOs and slaughterhouses were not enough to destroy any agency that farm animals might be left with, the manipulation of animal genes in order to breed a better piece of meat, a better egg, or a better glass of calf milk is fast approaching full annihilation of animals as sentient individual beings. Their place in today’s world is almost complete as merely food products. This particular manifestation of the commodification of living beings is expertly researched, described, and critically deconstructed by Richard Twine, among others in CAS.64 Utilizing Barbara Noske’s concept of the “animal-​industrial complex” (AI-​C), Twine tells us, In a sense the vast majority of people are actors in the A-​IC by virtue of being consumers of animal products; the practices and relations of the A-​IC are socially ubiquitous even if the average consumer is unlikely to reflect upon their own everyday practices as being part of a wider complex.65

He maps out a virtual research methodology, not only for scholars in CAS, but also for scholarly research on environmental issues concerning the increased consumption of animals this “livestock genetic revolution” is geared to produce. Scholars of the many disciplines involved with comprehending the global dimensions of food and agriculture’s impacts on the environment will find this often overlooked but increasingly important and powerful area an unfortunately rich trove of new manipulations of the natural world. Having been involved with technology for the last 25 years, as an artist using high-​ end proprietary software, a scholar, and a teacher of interactive digital media, I wrote the following quote in my introduction to the edited book Leonardo’s Choice: Genetic Technologies and Animals from a deep familiarity with the ways in which technology reframes and repurposes whatever it is given. And in the case of today’s genetic technologies, animals have been reframed entirely as objects for human use: While researchers in comparative ethology, the study of animals in the field, are contributing to comprehension of the cognitive and emotional lives of other beings, much of the work in genetic technologies is reinforcing an understanding of animals as suited to act as a material language, a symbolic technique, without concern for

 

202   Carol Gigliotti their intrinsic value as beings with whom we share this planet. Animals have been conscripted into these technologies to further an agenda of controlling the creation of all life through the manipulation of various manifestations of code. In today’s biotechnologies, animals have become code.66

They have become, as Martin Heidegger67 so presciently explained, a “standing reserve” from which humans can take at will, having developed a technology that can change the very essence of living beings to fit our will. But, more importantly, Heidegger tells us that this approach to the development of technology precedes technology itself. What Heidegger calls “enframing,” the precise, controllable knowledge of the natural world, is an outgrowth of our desire to order, to categorize. It does not exist in technology, but has always existed in ourselves. But before the modern technology of Heidegger’s day, the natural world was still able to choose to “reveal” itself to our use. In other words, we may have used the wind, the trees, the shale, the animals, but we did not make them. We had no hand in their creation, and therein, at least according to Heidegger and before the advent of biotechnology, we had two choices. We could continue on this route of ordering and controlling all of nature according to our needs and desires, or we could veer off this course of self-​destruction.68 For it is, as Heidegger so rightly points out, a path of self-​destruction. At this point in time, either we can realize that we must recast our relationship with the other members of this planet and allow them the ability to be who they are for themselves or we will share their fate. We will consider, we are now considering, other humans—​for, of course, we are always blind to our own incorporation into systems of power—​as objects of use as well. At the center of all of this, lies the calf. He will be slaughtered and eaten. The central question is, why? My answer is this: as a species we have not progressed morally or intellectually enough to see that eating other animals is not only unnecessary, but also is an indication of our lack of both compassion and justice. Both are essential if we are to progress as a species, and I use the term “progress” advisedly. I do not mean the kind of progress that has allowed us to engineer nature to our advantage. The progress I am considering is one that values the ability to not only feel compassion for all our fellows, human and nonhuman, but also to act accordingly. It is not enough to see the calf as a mirror of all the misery I have or will have in my lifetime and feel sympathy for his plight. Compassion is more than both empathy and sympathy. Compassion does not see, it feels, it becomes. Compassion breaks down the assumed barriers between him and me. I become him and he me. I feel the loss of his life, his joys and sorrows, not as if they were my own, but as my own. His loss is my loss, the destruction of his life is my destruction. But that still is not enough. Only working toward the end of his and all others’ miseries, as impossible as that may seem, can begin to be enough. Only working toward a social justice that includes all species can begin to be enough. Animal liberation and the profound global changes it encompasses is an idea whose time has come. Critical animal studies is a good starting point.

 

The Struggle for Compassion and Justice    203

Notes 1. This narrative was inspired by Humane Farming Association. “HFA’s National Veal Boycott Campaign Decimating Sales.” http://​www.hfa.org/​vealBoycott.html; Malarek, Victor. “Abuse of Veal Calves Unveiled by Hidden Camera,” Toronto Star, April 19, 2014, published electronically in Investigations. http://​www.thestar.com/​news/​investigations/​ 2014/​04/​19/​abuse_​of_​veal_​calves_​unveiled_​by_​hidden_​camera.html; Humane Society of the United States. “More Video of Abused Calves at Vermont Slaughter Plant,” http://​ www.humanesociety.org/​news/​news/​2009/​11/​veal_​investigation_​110209.html. 2. 1.4 million a year from the Van Drie Group in the Netherlands, world’s largest veal producer, 2008; 700,000 veal calves annually, US, 2103; 450,000, UK, 2013; 235,037, Canada, 2012. See Swinkles, Henry. “World’s Largest Veal Producer to Implement ISO 22000 at All Its Facilities,” Special Report, ISO Management Systems, no. May-​June 2008 ), 20–​22. http://​ www.vandriegroup.com/​f ileadmin/​D ownloads/​In_​de_​media/​VanDrie_​Ims_​32008. pdf; United States Department of Agriculture: Foreign Agricultural Service, “Livestock and Poultry: World Markets and Trade,” April 2014, 1–​27. http://​www.fas.usda.gov/​data/​ livestock-​and-​poultry-​world-​markets-​and-​trade. 3. The Animal Kill Counter ADAPTT, “The Animal Kill Counter,” http://​www.adaptt.org/​ killcounter.html. 4. Edward O. Wilson, “Biodiversity: Challenge, Science, Opportunity,” American Zoologist 34, no. 1 (1994): 5–​11. 5. John Vidal, “Protect Nature for World Economic Security, Warns UN Biodiversity Chief,” The Guardian, August 16, 2010, http://​www.theguardian.com/​environment/​2010/​aug/​16/​ nature-​economic-​security. 6. Vidal, “Protect Nature.” 7. S. L. Pimm, C. N. Jenkins, R. Abell, et.al. “The Biodiversity of Species and Their Rates of Extinction, Distribution, and Protection,” Science 30, no. 6187 (2014): 987. 8. Pimm et al., “Biodiversity of Species.” 9. Navjot S. Sodhi, Barry W. Brook, Navjot S. Sodhi, and Corey J. A. Bradshaw, “Causes and Consequences of Species Extinctions,” in The Princeton Guide to Ecology, ed. S. A. Levin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 514. 10. William F. Laurance, “Habitat Destruction: Death by a Thousand Cuts,” in Conservation Biology for All, ed. Navjot S. Sodhi and Paul R. Ehrlich (Oxford University Press, 2010), 73. 11. Laurance, “Habitat Destruction,” 75. 12. United States Department of Agriculture: Foreign Agricultural Service, “Livestock and Poultry: World Markets and Trade,” April 2014, http://​www.fas.usda.gov/​data/​livestock-​ and-​poultry-​world-​markets-​and-​trade: 7 (accessed June 20, 2014). 13. World Population Review, “Brazil Population 2014,” World Population Review online, http://​worldpopulationreview.com/​countries/​brazil-​population/​ (accessed June 20, 2014). 14. Cithara Paul, “UPA’s Pink Revolution Makes India World’s Biggest Beef Exporter,” New Indian Express, February 9, 2014, http://​www.newindianexpress.com/​business/​news/​ UPAs-​ Pink-​ R evolution-​ Makes-​ India-​ Worlds-​ Biggest-​ B eef-​ E xporter/​ 2 014/​ 02/​ 0 9/​ article2045869.ece. 15. Artic Methane Emergency Group, “Arctic Sea Ice—​ Methane Release—​ Planetary Emergency Urgent Message to Governments from the Arctic Methane

 

204   Carol Gigliotti Emergency Group,” 2012, http://​ameg.me/​index.php/​2-​ameg/​53-​urgent-​message​to-​governments-​from-​the-​arctic-​methane-​emergency-​group-​ameg. 16. Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, “Livestock and Climate Change,” World Watch Magazine 22, no. 6 (2009): 11, http://​www.worldwatch.org/​files/​pdf/​Livestock%20and%20 Climate%20Change.pdf. 17. Nick Collins, “Arctic Sea Ice ‘to Melt by 2015.’” The Telegraph, Global Warming, Monday, September 8, 2014, http://​www.telegraph.co.uk/​earth/​environment/​globalwarming/​ 8877491/​Arctic-​sea-​ice-​to-​melt-​by-​2015.html. 18. David Schmalz, “NPS Researchers Predict Summer Arctic Ice Might Disappear by 2016, 84 Years Ahead of Schedule,” Monterey County Weekly, November 27, 2013, http://​ www.montereycountyweekly.com/​news/​local_​news/​article_​f0d1fc46-​56dc-​11e3-​9766-​ 001a4bcf6878.html. 19. Barbara Noske, Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animal (Montreal, Quebec: Black Rose Books, 1997), 159–​160. 20. Noske, Beyond Boundaries, 160. 21. Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press,1983). 22. Sherri Lucas, “A Defense of the Feminist-​Vegetarian Connection,” Hypatia 20, no.  1 (2005): 160. 23. John Bintliff, “The Hellenistic to Roman Mediterranean: A Proto-​Capitalist Revolution?”, in Economic Archaeology:  from Structure to Performance in European Archaeology, ed. T. Kerig and A Zimmermann (Bonn: Rudolph Habelt, 2013). 24. María Luisa Femenías, “Women and Natural Hierarchy in Aristotle,” Hypatia 9, no.  1 (1994): 164–​172. 25. Aristotle, Poetics, book 1, part 8 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Classics), http://​classics.mit.edu/​ Aristotle/​politics.1.one.html. 26. Aristotle, Poetics, 15, 1454a21, 23-​ 24, quoted in Cynthia Freeland, “Nourishing Speculation: A Feminist Reading of Aristotelian Science,” in Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle ed. Bat-​Ami Bar On (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1994): 145–​146. 27. Aristotle, “Politics,” in The Works of Aristotle, ed. Robert E. Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 448. 28. Dinesh Wadiwel, “Three Fragments from a Biopolitical History of Animals: Questions of Body, Soul, and the Body Politic in Homer, Plato, and Aristotle,” Jounal of Critical Animal Studies 6, no. 1 (2008): 26. 29. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York: Seabury Press, 1982), 244. 30. Gunderson, Ryan, “The First-​ Generation Frankfurt School on the Animal Question:  Foundations for a Normative Sociological Animal Studies.” Sociological Perspectives 57, no. 3 (2014): 285–​300. 31. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London: Continuum, 1974), 64. 32. John Sanbonmatsu, introduction to Critical Theory and Animal Liberation (Nature’s Meaning), ed. John Sanbonmatsut (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 6. 33. Steven Best, “The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: Putting Theory into Action and Animal Liberation into Higher Education,” Journal of Critical Animal Studies 7, no. 1 (2009): 17. 34. Lisa Kemmerer, introduction to Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice, ed. Lisa Kemmerer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 27.

 

The Struggle for Compassion and Justice    205 35. Joi Marie Probus, “Young, Black, and Vegan,” in Sistah Vegan: Food, Identity, Health, and Society:  Black Female Vegans Speak, ed. A. Breeze Harper (Herden.VA:  Lantern Press, 2010), 56. 36. Martin Luther King Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” African Studies Center of the University of Pennsylvania, http://​www.blackpast.org/​primary/​ 1963-​martin-​luther-​king-​jr-​letter-​birmingham-​jail. 37. See http://​www.criticalanimalstudies.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2009/​09/​Introducing-​Critical-​ Animal-​Studies-​2007.pdf for the original ten principles of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies. 38. Noske, Beyond Boundaries, 22–​39; Richard Twine, “Revealing the ‘Animal Industrial Complex’: A Concept and Method for Critical Animal Studies?” Journal of Critical Animal Studies 10, no. 1 (2012): 12–​39. 39. Daniel Karp et  al., “Intensive Agriculture Erodes B-​Diversity at Large Scales,” Ecology Letters 15 (2012): 963. 40. Karp, “Intensive Agriculture,” 969. 41. S. L. Pimm, “The Biodiversity of Species and Their Rates of Extinction, Distribution, and Protection,” 843–​845. 42. Rhett A. Butler and William F. Laurance, “New Strategies for Conserving Tropical Forests,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 23 (2008): 469–​472. 43. FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), “FAOSTAT,” 2104, http://​faostat.fao.org (accessed June 29 2014). 44. Gowri Koneswaran and Danielle Nierenberg, “Global Farm Animal Production and Global Warming:  Impacting and Mitigating Climate Change,” Environmental Health Perspectives 116, no. 5 (2008), published online Jan 31, 2008, doi: 10.1289/​ehp.11034. 45. The top ten global meat producers are JBS of Brazil, Tyson Foods, Cargill, BRF, Vion, Nippon Meat Packers, Smithfield Foods, Marfrig, Danish Crown, and Homel. See Heinrich Böll Foundation and Friends of the Earth Europe, “Meat Atlas” (Berlin, Germany: Heinrich Böll Foundation and Brussels, Belgium: Friends of the Earth Europe, 2014), 13, https://​www.foeeurope.org/​sites/​default/​files/​publications/​foee_​hbf_​meatatlas_​jan2014.pdf. 46. Ben Beachy and Justin Zorn, “Counting What Counts GDP Redefined,” Kennedy School Review 12 (2012): 14. 47. David Kirby, Animal Factory (New York: St. Martin’s, 2010). 262–​267; and see Henning Steinfeld, “Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options.” Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2006. 48. Paul Mohai, David Pellow, and J. Timmons Roberts, “Environmental Justice,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 34 (2009):  405–​430; Robert J. Brulle and David N. Pellow. “Environmental Justice:  Human Health and Environmental Inequalities.” Annual Review of Public Health 27 (2006):  103–​124, doi:10.1146/​annurev. publhealth.27.021405.102124. 49. United Nations Environment Programme, Sudan Post-​ Conflict Environmental Assessment, (Narobi, Kenya: UNEP, 2007), 10, http://​postconflict.unep.ch/​publications/​ UNEP_​Sudan.pdf. 50. Henning Steinfeld and Pius Chilonda, “Old Players, New Players,” Agriculture and Consumer Protection, Livestock Report 2006 (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2006), 3.

 

206   Carol Gigliotti 51. Food and Agriculture Organization, “The State of Food Insecurity in the World,” Executive Summary 2103, 1, http://​www.fao.org/​docrep/​018/​i3458e/​i3458e.pdf. 52. Bruce Friedrich to the Huffington Post, January 29, 2009, http://​www.huffingtonpost. com/​bruce-​friedrich/​solving-​the-​global-​food-​c_​b_​162031.html; Sandy Ross, “Food Security and International Relations,” Ethos 19, no. 2 (2011). 53. Gail Eisnetz, Slaughterhouse:  The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry, 2nd ed. (New York: Prometheus Books, 2007), 271. 54. Deborah E. Berkowitz and Michael J. Fagel, “Meatpacking/​Processing in Food Processing Sectors,” Encyclopedia of Occupational Health and Safety, 2011, http://​www.ilo.org/​oshenc/​part-​x/​food-​industry/​food-​processing-​sectors/​item/​860-​meatpacking/​processing (accessed June 31, 2014). 55. William F. Engdahl, “Bird Flu and Chicken Factory Farms:  Profit Bonanza for US Agribusiness,” Global Research online, November 27, 2005, http://​www.globalresearch.ca/​ index.php?context=va&aid=1333. 56. Human Rights Watch, “Abuses against Workers Taint U.S. Meat and Poultry,” News, January 24, 2005, http://​www.hrw.org/​news/​2005/​01/​24/​abuses-​against-​workers​taint-​us-​meat-​and-​poultry. 57. Mark R. Rank and Thomas A. Hirschl, “Economic Security and the American Dream,” in Working and Living in the Shadow of Economic Fragility, ed. Marion Crain and Michael Sherraden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 148. 58. National Consumers League, “Slaughterhouse in Iowa Takes Advantage of Child Labor,” 2009, 2014, http://​www.nclnet.org/​slaughterhouse_​in_​iowa_​takes_​advantage_​of_​child_​ labor (accessed July 4). 59. Ida Dalgaard Steffensen, “Special Report:  Revealed:  How Our Shoes Are Linked to Deforestation and Slavery in the Amazon,” Ecologist online, October 26, 2012, http://​www. theecologist.org/​News/​news_​analysis/​1651376/​revealed_​how_​our_​shoes_​are_​linked_​to_​ deforestation_​and_​slavery_​in_​the_​amazon.html (accessed July 10, 2014). 60. Vincent Bevins, “Brazil Workers Exploited as Modern-​Day Amazon Slaves,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2012, http://​articles.latimes.com/​2012/​jun/​07/​world/​la-​fg-​brazil-​slave-​ labor-​20120607 (accessed July 10, 2014). 61. Lauren Carasik, “Idaho Gag Law Hides Horrors of Ag Industry,” Aljazeera America May 30, 2014, http://​america.aljazeera.com/​opinions/​2014/​5/​idaho-​ag-​gag-​lawagribusinessfreespeech. html (accessed July 10, 2014). 62. John Zirin, Brazil’s Dance with the Devil (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013). 63. Center for Constitutional Rights, “The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) Factsheet,” 2014 http://​ccrjustice.org/​learn-​more/​faqs/​factsheet%3A-​animal-​enterprise-​ terrorism-​act-​(aeta) (accessed July 21, 2014). 64. Carol Gigliotti, ed. Leonardo’s Choice:  Genetic Technologies and Animals (Dorchedt:  Springer, 2009); David Nibert, “Origins and Consequences of the Animal Industrial Complex,” in The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination, ed. Steven Best, et al. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 197–​210; Best, introduction to Best et al. Global Industrial Complex, ix–​xxiv. 65. Twine, Revealing, 26. 66. Gigliotti, introduction to Leonardo’s Choice, xvii. 67. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technologies and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 3–​35. 68. See Heidegger 1977.

 

The Struggle for Compassion and Justice    207

Further Reading Bekoff, Marc. The Animal Manifesto:  Six Reasons for Expanding Our Compassion Footprint Novato, CA: New World Library, 2010. Bekoff, Marc, and Jessica Pierce. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Best, Steve. The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Nibert, David A. Animal Oppression and Human Violence:  Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Nocella, Anthony J., II, John Sorenson, Kim Socha, and Atsuko Matsuoka, eds. Defining Critical Animal Studies:  An Intersectional Social Justice Approach for Liberation Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education, Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education, bk 448. New York: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2013. Kemmerer, Lisa, and Anthony J. Nocella II. eds. Call to Compassion: Religious Perspectives on Animal Advocacy from a Range of Religious Perspectives. Herdon, VA: Lantern Books, 2011. Best, Steven, and Anthony J. Nocella II. Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006. Potter, Will. Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement under Siege. San Francisco: City Lights, 2011. Potts, Annie. Chicken. London: Reakton Books, 2012. McArthur, Jo-​Ann. We Animals. Herndon, VA: Lantern Books. 2013. Taylor, Nik, and Richard Twine, eds. The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre. Routledge Advances in Sociology. New York: Routledge, 2014.

 

Chapter 11

Interspecie s Dia l o g u e a nd Anima l  Et h i c s The Feminist Care Perspective Josephine Donovan

Something is missing in contemporary animal ethics:  the animals’ own expressed opinions. The major contemporary theories about animals are rooted in humanist philosophical traditions, such as natural rights theory or utilitarianism. But missing in humanist approaches is information transmitted from the animals themselves about how they wish to be treated. Feminist care theorists in animal ethics have attempted to address this deficiency by refocusing attention on the ethical communication we humans receive from animals through interspecies dialogue; to wit, that they do not wish to be slaughtered, eaten, tortured, exploited, or otherwise harmfully interfered with. This is ethically authoritative and compelling information that should form the basis for any human theorizing about animal treatment. As G. A. Bradshaw enjoins, “the minds and hearts of other animals must be understood from their own points of view, not from an enforced anthropocentric standard.”1 The feminist care tradition holds, in short, as I once stated, that “we should not kill, eat, torture, and exploit animals because they do not wish to be so treated, and we know that.”2 Understanding what animals are communicating is not difficult; to maintain otherwise is to ignore millennia of interspecies interaction, to defy common experience, and to obfuscate attendant ethical obligation. That animals can and do communicate their preferences and wishes through various signs and signals would seem to be incontrovertible. Catharine A. MacKinnon pertinently observes that animals often express their “dissent from human hegemony” in readable ways: “They vote with their feet by running away, they bite back, scream in alarm, withhold affection, approach warily, fly and swim off.”3 Eminent authorities on animal behavior from Charles Darwin and Jakob von Uexküll to Donald R.  Griffin and contemporary cognitive ethologists have provided reams of evidence supporting the claim that animals are conscious subjects who readily

 

Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics    209 communicate their wishes, should humans take the trouble to hear them. (I survey some of these contributions below.) Nevertheless, a contrary and, until recently, a deeply entrenched theory, which views animals as mechanical automatons who lack subjectivity and feelings and whose communicative signs are merely biochemical reflexes, has long predominated in the animal sciences. As recently as 2012, a researcher noted that in behaviorist animal ethology words like “think, feel, intend… . consciousness, or mind” are taboo. Animal communication is largely seen as “stimulus and response” and viewed “through the lens of genetic probability, game theory, and predictive statistics”4—​in other words, through the lens of mathematics, which reduces animals to mechanical objects known through quantifiable extensive properties. Rooted in classical Cartesian-​Newtonian science, which treats animals as soulless objects, this behaviorist view has legitimized animals’ treatment as experimental material in laboratories, as commodities in animal husbandry and industrialized agriculture, and as property under common law. In his famously dualistic ontology, which divided reality into res cogitans (thinking thing) and res extensa (material object extended in space), Descartes relegated animals to the latter category, seeing them as thoughtless mechanisms. “It is more reasonable,” he wrote in 1649, “to make earthworms, flies, caterpillars, and the rest of animals, move as machines do, than to endow them with immortal souls.”5 Such a view—​reinforced by other ideological conditioning (see below)—​has enabled humans to dismiss, ignore, and override communications from animals about how they wish to be treated. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno noted in their critique of modern Cartesian science, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1988), “In the impartiality of scientific language that which is powerless has wholly lost any means of expression,” for “everything—​even the human individual, not to speak of the animal—​is converted into repeatable, replaceable process, into a mere example for the conceptual models of the system.”6 In her feminist critique of modern science, Sandra Harding likewise observed, “The objects of inquiry ‘speak’ only in response to what scientists ask them.”7 Animals’ own communications—​those that are not recognized in anthropocentric paradigms—​are simply not heard or are ignored, being deemed insignificant. Descartes’s views were rejected almost immediately by many contemporaneous theorists, perhaps most forcefully by several women philosophers of the seventeenth century, notably, the Englishwomen Anne Finch, Lady Conway, and Margaret Newcastle, the Duchess of Newcastle. Terming a “great error” the “Cartesian philosophy… . that body is merely dead mass, which lacks life and perception of any kind,” Conway proposed instead an “anti-​Cartesianism.” For truly in nature there are many operations, which are far more than merely mechanical. Nature is not… . like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body, which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or mechanical motion.8

Margaret Cavendish, who corresponded with Descartes and met him on at least one occasion, similarly rejected his materialist view of nature and living creatures: “Nature

 

210   Josephine Donovan hath infinite more ways to express knowledg [sic] than man can imagine. …  Nature is neither blind nor dumb.”9 Cavendish held that all living creatures had knowledges of their own that humans often fail to understand. “If a Man hath Different Knowledge from Fish, yet the Fish may be as knowing as Man, but Man hath not a Fishe’s Knowledge, nor a Fish a Man’s Knowledge.”10 For who knows whether Fish do not know more the nature of water… . or whether Birds… . of the nature and degrees of Air… . or whether Worms… . of Earth… . than Men?… . For, though they have not the speech of Man, yet thence doth not follow that they have no Intelligence at all. But the ignorance of Man concerning other Creatures is the cause of despising other Creatures, imagining themselves as petty Gods in nature.11

Nevertheless, these women’s critiques were largely ignored, and they themselves were silenced as the Cartesian model came to dominate. The feminist care view in animal ethics would restore these early critiques, contending that it behooves humans to learn to understand animals’ knowledges, languages, and communications, seeing that as an ethical imperative. Care theory, which derives largely from Carol Gilligan’s landmark study In a Different Voice (1982), is at base a dialogical ethic that entails listening to “different voices” than the dominant. Gilligan was concerned to validate the “different voice” of adolescent girls, whose contextual, embodied, and relational mode of moral reasoning she captured in a series of interviews with them. Gilligan contrasted their situationist ethic to the more abstract rule-​based reasoning endorsed as a superior mode by theorist Lawrence Kohlberg. She found the girls’ moral reasoning was more “concerned with the activity of care… . responsibility and relationships” than the dominant masculine model, which was more focused on “rights and rules,” often making ethical decisions seem like “a math problem with humans.”12 In a recent essay (2010), which appeared as the introduction to a French analysis of her work, Gilligan emphasized that she viewed the girls’ different voices as subversive to the dominant patriarchal model. Before their voices were silenced by the ideological indoctrination that accompanies emergence into adult womanhood, these “young women,” she notes, “were speaking truth to power… . [expressing] resistance… . to the norms and values of patriarchy.”13 Gilligan’s feminist purpose was to retrieve and record these subversive voices, bringing them out of the oblivion of suppressed silence. The girls’ voices were thus heard by Gilligan, deemed worthy of attention, and recognized as morally significant. Feminist care theorists in animal ethics have applied the Gilligan approach to animals, seeing listening to their voices as an ethical imperative, making their views the basis for ethical treatment of them. For when oppressed and dominated groups’ views are heard, their views are found inevitably to be subversive of the ideological system that would render them silent—​sexism in the case of women and girls; speciesism in the case of animals. In this respect, care theory recapitulates in feminist guise Marxist standpoint theory in its original articulation by twentieth-​century theorist Georg Lukács, who posited that

 

Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics    211 industrial workers (the proletariat) have suppressed voices that (were they to be heard) necessarily expressed a critical view of the capitalist system responsible for their oppression. Collectively, these voices formed a “standpoint” or critical perspective on the system, just as Gilligan’s adolescent girls expressed a subversive view of patriarchy, and as animals’ viewpoints, when heard, may be seen as inherently critical of the systems oppressing them—​namely, industrialized agriculture,“factory farms”—​modern laboratory science, and other institutions that are abusive and exploitative and which reduce them to feeling-​less objects, like the proletariat but cogs in the machine.14 Let us, for example, consider the viewpoint of a cow slated for slaughter being coerced up a slaughterhouse ramp by an electric cattle prod or forced to parade around before prospective buyers in a cattle market corral. Such an animal jumps in alarm at the electric shock and often displays fright and confusion, expressing a clear desire to get away from the painful disturbance. Moreover, even if such frightening practices are minimized, as Temple Grandin has advocated,15 we know that the cow, if she knew what was in store for her, would not proceed down the ramp voluntarily. Her wishes are thus overridden by the human controller who is governed by anthropocentric ideologies of speciesism, human carnivorism, and capitalism. To wit: speciesism, the belief that humans are superior to animals and therefore have the right to use them for their own purposes; human carnivorism, the belief that humans may kill animals and eat their bodies or use them to make products of use to humans, such as fur coats or leather jackets and boots; and capitalism, the belief that as animals are but objects of no ethical significance, their bodies may be commodified as property and sold as commercial objects. Thus, we have animal bodies sold as stock on financial markets, which feature “cattle futures,” for example, or (until recently) “pork bellies” as trading entities. Did anyone ask the pig how he felt about having his belly eviscerated and sold for profit? Or the cow, how she felt to have her slaughtered body used as a medium for market betting games in cattle futures? Of course, there are those who will raise the question of how we humans can know what the animal really thinks or wishes. Aren’t we just projecting our own imagined wishes on the animal? There are, to be sure, risks involved in attempting to read animals’ wishes, to decipher animals’ communications. One cannot ever, as Thomas Nagel famously observed, know exactly what it feels like to be a bat.16 Yet, it is quite possible to understand a bat’s wishes, as I know from several personal experiences with bats. On one occasion, for example, I found a bat in my bedroom hanging on a book on the nightstand next to my bed. After a few moments of silent interspecies dialogue, I determined that the bat wished to be outside. I gingerly lifted the book, carried it to an open window, held it outside, whereupon the bat let go and gracefully flew off into night air. (Interestingly, the book she was hanging on was Sisters of the Earth, a collection of ecofeminist articles.) Remarkably, the bat, while keeping an eye on me (she was, of course, head-​side down), did not move or shy away from me as I  moved her and the book toward the window. She seemed to understand by my gentle movements that my benign nonviolent intent was to help her. (Bats navigate by echolocation while flying, but their eyes are functional.)

 

212   Josephine Donovan The problems inherent in interspecies communication are not unlike those of interpersonal communication among humans. It is also not possible to get inside the skin of another human and know exactly what it feels like to be him or her. Nevertheless, we don’t therefore abjure the possibility of understanding the communications of our fellow and sister human beings. Nor should we, then, disavow the possibility of understanding nonhuman animals. True, humans communicate in part by means of symbolic forms—​that is, language, but a surprising amount of human communication is nonverbal. Infants do not communicate in language; yet we do not for that reason assume that they are mindless, lack subjectivity or consciousness, or do not communicate their wishes in ways we can readily understand. Facial expression, gestures, voice tone, body movements, touch: all of these transmit essential information between humans, and similar practices are available to and used by non-​humans to convey their meanings. Moreover, as Cavendish and other early modern theorists suggest, animals do have languages. Indeed, one of the critical points of debate between the “ancients” and the “moderns” in the early modern era was over the question of animal language. The moderns, following Descartes, rejected the notion “that animals have a language… . [as] merely [reflecting] ‘Romances of Antiquity’”17 (in other words, as a silly fantasy); whereas those who followed “ancient treatises on animal intelligence: Plutarch’s Moralia, Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism, and… . Porphyry’s vegetarian tract On Abstinence” maintained that animals did have languages of their own.18 These latter included Michel de Montaigne, who in “In Defense of Raymond Sebond” (“Apologie de Raimond Sebond,” 1580) argued, “What is it but speech, this faculty which we see them possess of complaining, rejoicing, calling to each other for help, inviting one another to love, as they do by use of their voice?”19 Others in this tradition included Pierre Gassendi, Pierre Charon, Marin Cureau de la Chambre; all maintained that “there is no reason… . why the natural language of animals should not count as speech just as much as the conventional language of humans.”20 These theorists therefore held that it is not a matter of whether animals have language; it is rather that humans have not as yet learned those languages or paid sufficient attention to be able to decipher them. American writer Sarah Orne Jewett asked the essential question over a century ago. Who is going to be the linguist who learns the first word of an old crow’s warning to his mate… .? [H]‌ow long we shall have to go to school when people are expected to talk to the trees, and birds, and beasts in their own language!21

Seventeenth-​ century Italian physician Hieronymus Fabricus ab Aquapendante in effect answered Jewett’s question in On the Language of Brutes (De brutorum loquela, 1603). Humans, he wrote, can learn to understand animals in this way: “We should put ourselves into the animal’s place, and imagine the passion we would feel in the same situation”22—​ anticipating Simone Weil’s twentieth-​ century inferential theory of “attentive love” (see further discussion of the concept later in this chapter). Fabricus proposed that animals express themselves in the following ways, which are not difficult for humans to read—​facial expression, gesture, sound, voice, and language—​thus

 

Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics    213 anticipating Darwin’s nineteenth-​century treatise on the subject (discussed further later in this chapter). These early modern theorists likely reflected the intimacy with which people lived with animals in premodern times and in rural areas with traditional cultures.23 Chickens, for example, with whom many humans were then familiar, were often used to exemplify theories about animal communication. Girolamo Cardano noted in 1557, for example, When a mother hen calls her chicks she clucks loudly; when she wants them to flee from a bird or prey, she raises and draws out her utterances; when caught, she cries out anxiously and repetitively, like hiccups; when laying eggs, she exults; when leading her chicks she uses a harsher, heavier and more sparing utterance than when she calls them to her; and when roosting she uses a low voice, different from all the others.24

The persuasiveness of these examples notwithstanding, the idea that animals have languages—​along with the languages themselves—​was suppressed for centuries in official discourses (though not in popular culture), as the speciesist ideologies of modernity took hold. Just, one may say, as the “different voices” of Gilligan’s adolescent girls were suppressed because they were at odds with the dominant sexist ideology, so were the voices of animals and their advocates silenced by the ideological formations of the modern era. In recent years, however, the concept of animal language has been revived. Patrick Murphy, for example, proposed in 1991 that animals do speak in languages—​dialects of their own that humans need to learn. “Nonhuman others can be constituted as speaking subjects rather than merely objects of our speaking.” What is needed, he maintained, is an “ecofeminist dialogics.”25 Recent advances in cognitive ethology have identified animal languages in numerous species—​even dialects specific to “social group membership.”26 Biologist Con Slobodchikoff, for example, has identified a prairie dog language. “We now know that the alarm calls of prairie dogs are part of a sophisticated animal language,” he concluded. For “prairie dog vocalizations contain… . [the] basic design elements of a language”—​ namely, “semantics and syntax.”27 Moreover, prairie dogs “assign individual names to specific predators whom they encounter more than once,” and dogs in different colonies have pronunciation of common terms (for example, “human”) that are specific to that colony, suggesting dialectical inflection.28 Knowledge of animals’ languages and communications—​ their wishes and intentions—​cannot be achieved through the objectifying methodology of Cartesian science. Rather, the modes advocated in care theory—​ sympathy, empathy, and attentiveness—​are the ways in which animals’ communications can be read, their languages learned, and their wishes understood. Primatologist Barbara Smuts has exemplified this approach in her work with baboons. Speaking from the experience of twenty-​five years of studying these animals in Africa,

 

214   Josephine Donovan Smuts explains how it was “creative and caring intersubjectivity”29 that enabled her to develop “a feeling for what it means to be a baboon”30 and to learn how to behave in a way that the baboons understood and accepted. By “attend[ing] to what they did and notic[ing] how they responded,” she “learn[ed] to be more of an animal.”31 Eventually, she developed the ability “to ‘speak’ baboon” sufficiently fluently that the animals could understand her despite her “outrageous human accent.”32 I was learning a whole new way of being in the world—​the way of the baboon. …  I  was responding to the cues that baboons use to indicate their emotions, motivations, and intentions to one another, and I was gradually learning to send such signals back to them. As a result, instead of avoiding me when I got too close, they started giving me very deliberate dirty looks, which made me move away.33

Here we have a clear example of the dynamics of interspecies dialogue, an interactive communication wherein the human learns to read signals from the animal, who has learned how to communicate with the human. From these animal signs, here, “dirty looks,” the human modifies her behavior in accordance with the animals’ wishes. Smuts believes that the “capacity to feel our way into the being of another” is an “ancient,” “inherited” skill that comes to life in one’s attempts to communicate with animals.34 Such abilities were necessary to survival in Paleolithic times, Smuts argues, when “our ancestors… . depended on exquisite sensitivity to the subtle movements and nuanced communication of… . animals whose keener senses of vision, smell, or hearing enhanced human apprehension of the world.”35 But this intensive sensitivity to other beings and their communications has been muted, if not lost, in the modern world.36 It was by reawakening this capacity that Smuts was able to learn “what it means to be a baboon.”37 Care epistemology, as exemplified by Smuts, thus involves complex multifaceted operations; emotional comprehension and inference based on one’s own responses in similar situations (as proposed by Fabricus) are important components, as well as attentive alertness to the signs being communicated, learning others’ languages, hearing their voices. The underlying interspecies interrogative is that famously posed by Simone Weil with respect to suffering humans: “What are you going through?”38 Comprehending the answer requires empathetic understanding and identification. “How would I feel in this situation? What would my wishes be?” In the case of my encounter with the bat, for example, I asked myself, “what does this bat want?” “If I were a bat in this situation, what would I want?” The answer that readily came to me was “I would want to be safe and back in my own natural environment where I can find food and live unharmed.” In other words, I would want to be outdoors. (Of course, in this situation my own wishes were also in play; I, too, wished to have the bat back in her own environment and out of mine.) Weil’s question entails, she specifies, “a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category ‘unfortunate’ ”—​in other words, not as a bit of data identified through scientific models, but as an individual.39 Care theory thus focuses on the particular individual and on personal encounter,

 

Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics    215 requiring a personal knowledge of that individual’s history, when possible, and his characteristic behavior, known through repeated experiences with that individual. Such knowledge comes, as Weil proposed, from attentive observation, “It is indispensable to know how to look at him in a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive.”40 Martin Buber once described this kind of attentiveness in a moving meditation on a tree. I contemplate a tree I can accept it as a picture. … . I can feel it as a movement. … . I can assign it to a species. … . But it can also happen, if grace and will are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceased to be an It.… . Does the tree have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. … . What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.41

Paul Taylor, an environmental ethicist, similarly urges that attentive focus on an individual organism be the basis for human knowledge of nonhuman life forms. Such attentiveness can lead to perception of that individual’s “standpoint.” As one becomes more and more familiar with the organism being observed, one acquires a sharpened awareness of the particular way it is living its life. One may become fascinated by it and even get to be involved in its good and bad fortunes. The organism comes to mean something to one as a unique, irreplaceable individual.… . This progressive development from objective, detached knowledge to the recognition of individuality… . to a full awareness of an organism’s standpoint, is a process of heightening our consciousness of what it means to be an individual living thing.42

The rapidly growing field of cognitive ethology relies in part on this kind of practice—​ attentive, detailed observation of specific individuals, located in specific natural habitats, who are deemed subjects capable of emotive and other expression. As defined by the modern founder of the field, Donald R. Griffin, cognitive ethology is “the study of the mental experience of animals as they behave in their natural environment in the course of their normal lives.”43 While cognitive ethology has blossomed in the past couple of decades, its progenitor was no less an authority than Charles Darwin, called the “patron saint” of the field by Konrad Lorenz.44 In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin catalogued and analyzed the various forms of emotional expression found in animals (including human). His purpose was to show that humans and nonhumans share an innate ability to express emotion, which provides proof that all are linked on an evolutionary tree. “The community of certain expressions in distinct though allied species, as in the movements of the same facial muscles during laughter by man and by various monkeys, is rendered somewhat more intelligible, if we believe in their descent from a common progenitor.”45

 

216   Josephine Donovan He who will look at a dog preparing to attack another dog or a man, and at the same animal when caressing his master, or will watch the countenance of a monkey when insulted, and when fondled by his keeper, will be forced to admit that the movements of their features and their gestures are almost as expressive as those of man.46

Darwin notes that emotion is expressed through changes in body position, gestures, touch, and sound—​all nonverbal modes—​and he provides a wealth of examples from dogs, horses, and monkeys to bees and other insects. Here is an example of Darwin’s own interspecies dialogue with his dog–​an experience those of us who have lived with dogs will readily recognize: When my terrier bites my hand in play, often snarling at the same time, if he bites too hard and I say gently, gently, he goes on biting, but answers me by a few wags of the tail, while seems to say “Never mind, it’s all in fun.”47

When riding his horse, Darwin observes that he is frightened by an object from the following signs: He raised his head so high, that his neck became almost perpendicular. … His eyes and ears were directed intently forwards; and I could feel through the saddle the palpitations of his heart. With red dilated nostrils he snorted violently.48

Easily understandable are the expressions of an animal in pain. “An agony of pain is expressed by dogs in nearly the same way as by many other animals, namely, by howling, writhing, and contortions of the whole body.”49 “Great pain urges all animals, and has urged them during countless generations to make the most violent and diversified efforts to escape from the cause of suffering.”50 Animals often express grief 51 and joy,52 Darwin maintains, as well as emotional connection to one another—​love. Animals which live in society often call to each other when separated, and evidently feel much joy at meeting; as we see with a horse on the return of his companion, for whom he had been neighing. … . When a flock of sheep is scattered, the ewes bleat incessantly for their lambs, and their mutual pleasure at coming together is manifest.53

Moreover, since our sensory receptors (in contemporary terminology, “neural correlates”), are similar to those found in many other creatures, we can appreciate their message by the tone of their voices. When male animals utter sounds in order to please the females, they… . naturally employ those which are sweet to the ears of the species; and it appears that the same sounds are often pleasing to widely different animals. Owing to the similarity of their

 

Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics    217 nervous systems, as we ourselves perceive in the singing of birds and even in the chirping of certain tree-​frogs giving us pleasure.54

Some animals express emotion through noises emitted other than vocally; thus may bees, for example, express anger. Many insects stridulate by rubbing together specially modified parts of their hard integuments. This stridulation generally serves as a sexual charm or call; but it is likewise used to express different emotions. Every one who has attended to bees knows that their humming changes when they are angry; and this serves as a warning that there is a danger of being stung.55

“Insects,” he concludes, “express anger, terror, jealousy, and love by their stridulation.”56 In addition to Darwin, an early anticipator, if not progenitor, of cognitive ethology was Jakob von Uexküll, an Estonian who was affiliated with various German universities from the 1920s to the 1940s. Von Uexküll may properly be placed in the phenomenological tradition, which includes Max Scheler, who was perhaps the first to lay out the phenomenological case for interspecies dialogue (see further discussion below). Like others in this tradition, von Uexküll rejected the Cartesian view of animals as machines, insisting that animals be viewed “not merely as objects but also as subjects.”57 He held that every animal lives in his or her own “dwelling-​world”58 or Umwelt and must be understood in terms of his or her relationship to other subjects in that world. Those entities are themselves subjectified in terms of the meaning they have for other subjects. “The question as to meaning must therefore have priority in all living beings”59 for “meaning bridges the gap between physical and nonphysical processes.”60 Von Uexküll thus conceives of the natural world in terms of panpsychism—​a position arrived at by numerous poets—​ Wordsworth, for example—​and contemporary theorists, such as Charles Hartshorne.61 “[E]‌ach and every subject,” von Uexküll concludes, “lives in a world in which there are only subjective realities and that environments themselves represent only subjective realities.”62 To communicate with other living creatures it is therefore necessary to understand their Umwelt and how they construe meaning within that world. Like Darwin, von Uexküll supports his theory with numerous examples of specific animals in specific locales, based on close attentive observation of their behavior. The kind of “attentive love” (Weil) practiced by Darwin and von Uexküll and theorized as ethically essential by Simone Weil requires a sympathetic openness to animal expression and communication. Sympathy has been seen as a critical ethical mode by numerous philosophers, including Hume, Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, and Rousseau, as well as contemporary feminist care theorists.63 Perhaps the most pertinent originary discussion occurs in Scheler’s Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, translated as The Nature of Sympathy (published first in 1913 and in a revised third edition in 1926). Scheler elevates sympathy into a form of knowledge (Verstehen, or “understanding”), which he proposes as an epistemological alternative to the objectification of the Cartesian scientific

 

218   Josephine Donovan mode. Scheler indeed was a founder of the phenomenological school in the social sciences, which relies upon a method of “psychological sympathy” in which the researcher attempts to imaginatively construct the reality of the subject, rather than objectify him or her as data to fit mathematical paradigms. Scheler proposed his method not just for the social sciences, however, and not just for humans. Rather, he contended, “understanding and fellow-​feeling [Mitgefühl] are able to range throughout the entire animal universe. … . The mortal terror of a bird, its sprightly or dispirited moods, are intelligible to us and awaken our fellow-​feeling.”64 Mitgefühl literally means “feeling-​with,” in other words, “sympathy,” which derives etymologically from the Greek syn (with) pathos (feeling). Scheler argues that humans need to develop (or re-​develop) their sympathetic intellectual capacities in order to decode the symbolic language of nature. Humans have to learn to read this language in order to truly understand natural life, including animals. “[W]‌e can understand the experience of animals,” he notes, by attending to their behavioral and expressive signs: these have as their referent the animal’s emotional and psychological state. “[F]or instance when a dog expresses its joy by barking and wagging its tail… . we have here… . a universal grammar valid for all languages of expression.”65 Similarly, other forms of natural life have a “grammar of expression” that humans can learn to understand; and this understanding is both intellectual and emotional. “[T]‌he fullness of Nature in its phenomenological aspect still presents a vast number of fields in which the life of the cosmos may find expression; fields wherein all appearances have an intelligible coherence which is other and more than mechanical, and which, once disclosed by means of the universal mime, pantomime and grammar of expression is found to mirror the stirrings of universal life within.”66 Scheler is proposing, in other words, that animals and other natural forms have a “language” that is accessible if humans attend to it, one that is elided by the mathematizing pretensions of modern science. Thus, Scheler endorses an epistemological mode of sympathetic understanding as a valid tool of knowledge, which will reveal realities that are not seen or understood by the Cartesian mathematizing mode of science. St. Francis of Assisi is presented as exemplary; in his “emotional relationship to Nature… . natural objects and processes take on an expressive significance of their own, without any parabolic reference to… . human relationships.”67 Humans must develop this kind of sympathetic understanding (Verstehen) as a cognitive mode to decipher nature’s own language, to see organic life as it is, not as translated into manipulable objects for human use. While contemporary cognitive ethologists share with antecedent theorists, such as Darwin and von Uexküll, and phenomenologists, such as Scheler, a belief that animals are conscious communicative subjects and that detailed observation is an important critical mode of understanding, as scientists schooled in quantitative evaluation, they tend to focus more on seeking the “neural correlates” of emotion rather than ethically registering the emotion itself. Developed largely in reaction against behaviorism,68 cognitive ethology aimed to reconstitute the mental activity of animals as a proper subject of scientific studies. However, as Donald Griffin acknowledges, “consciousness is essentially a subjective attribute, as we know from personal experience”; hence the difficulty

 

Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics    219 in approaching the subject through the traditional modes of science: “objectively identifiable and observable properties.”69 Thus, attempts to understand animal communication through statistical evaluation, for example, while of value in establishing generic patterns, can in the end offer but a limited understanding of the meaning of the communication. That can come only through the personal, subjective, intuitive, empathetic, and inferential modes of emotional understanding, as advocated by feminist care theorists and as practiced by, inter alia, Barbara Smuts, who like Griffin notes how “resistant to investigation by scientific methods” are these knowledges, which are based on encounters between subjects.70 As von Uexküll pointed out, the crucial question—​the link between object (“neural correlate”) and subject (mind/​thought/​feeling)—​is meaning. You can’t divine meaning from a neural correlate (for example, the size of the hippocampus) but you can from facial expressions and the other signs identified by Darwin and others.71 The feminist care tradition in animal ethics is an outgrowth of second-​wave cultural feminist theory. Cultural feminism holds that women may be seen as a separate cultural group—​transnationally—​where a separate value system obtains. That value system, which likely evolved through maternal practices and attitudes, is one that encourages protective nurturing, nonviolence, and attentive loving care as theorized by Sara Ruddick in Maternal Thinking.72 Care theory, Marti Kheel explains, is rooted in “women’s subcultures of care, which foregrounds the moral importance of direct empathic ties to individual beings.”73 Unfortunately, those attitudes associated with care have been devalued and derogated as impractically “feminine” or “sentimentalist” in official public spheres, such as politics, science, and the law, and relegated to the private domestic space of women and the home. A gendered division of emotional labor persists worldwide with caring labor still generally assigned to women. Cultural feminists argue that the values and practices associated with care should not be limited to women and personal domestic relationships but rather should inform public space—​that is, public, official discourses and institutions. The feminist care theorists in animal ethics thus propose that these values should be adopted in institutions and discourses that concern animals. At the heart of “maternal thinking” is the dialogical question posed by Simone Weil: “what are you going through?” Heeding the answer and learning how to hear it through interspecies dialogue will radically transform human treatment of animals, care theorists maintain. As a political theory, feminist care theory recognizes that powerful political and economic interests control the governing ideological formations of the day. We have seen where earlier assertions of animal subjectivity and language were suppressed and overridden in the early modern era by the advent of speciesist ideologies, which continue to this day. Similarly, the phenomenological approach of the early twentieth century seen in von Uexküll and Scheler was largely suppressed by the advent of behaviorism. Brian Luke has persuasively demonstrated how powerful interests today deploy massive ideological indoctrination to override sympathetic caring attitudes towards animals and to legitimize their treatment as objects—​whether in labs, slaughterhouses, or on financial markets. “Both the animal farming and the animal vivisection industries

 

220   Josephine Donovan (as well as other animal exploitation industries… .) attempt to minimize awareness of the animal suffering behind their products.”74 Laboratories, for example, sites of industrial agriculture (“factory farms”), and slaughterhouses are generally closed to the public. Recently, so-​called ag-​gag laws have been proliferating, reflecting the powerful influence of animal industries on governmental bodies; this legislation is designed to prevent videos of horrific animal suffering, taken secretly in animal industry sites, from reaching the public. Euphemisms are routinely used to screen what actually happens to animals in the slaughter process; they are not killed or butchered; they are “processed” or “packed” or “dressed.”75 “Similarly, vivisectors do not kill their animal subjects, they only ‘dispatch,’ ‘terminate,’ or ‘sacrifice’ them, while hunters are only ‘harvesting,’ ‘bagging’ or ‘taking’ the animals they shoot to death.”76 Speciesist ideological rationalizations, such as “eating meat is necessary to human health”; “animals are not like us, they don’t feel pain” (an argument commonly applied to African Americans in the past to justify slavery); and “progress in science and medicine depends on animal experimentation” operate to legitimize animal cruelty and abuse. All of these statements are demonstrably false and serve to override sympathetic concern about the animal suffering involved. Sympathetic concern is further—​and perhaps most grievously—​muted by characterizing it as a weak-​kneed feminine response. “In the vivisection industry,” which, as Luke notes, was “founded by men and still male-​dominated, compassion for animals has been simultaneously feminized and derogated.”77 Luke cites as an example a male graduate student in psychology who was doing an experiment on rats. When the experiment was over, the student asked the professor what he should do with the rats. The professor said, “sacrifice them.” He then demonstrated by taking a rat and slamming her head against the workbench breaking her neck. The student was horrified, but the professor chided him, calling him “soft” and questioning whether he had it in him to be a scientist. In the sciences, as in other public official environments, “softness,” as Luke observes, “is not allowed, so men who would be scientists must establish their hard callousness, and women who would be scientists must be like men.”78 To summarize: much, if not all, cruelty to and abuse of animals is committed because humans override or dismiss communications they receive from animals saying they do not wish to be so treated. In most cases, that dismissal is legitimized by ideologies that objectify animals, maintaining that they are not conscious subjects but feeling-​ less objects, and thus not deserving of moral status and humane treatment.79 The most extreme of these views was that promulgated by Enlightenment theorist Descartes who claimed that animals were merely robotic machines. To counter this view it is imperative to establish that animals are subjects with whom humans can communicate. The numerous recent studies in interspecies communication are helping to make the case. The more people become persuaded that animals are moral subjects, the harder it will be, I believe, for them to override the communications they receive from animals—​that is, that they do not want to be killed, eaten, tortured, or otherwise abused. The animals’ wishes must thus be included in any determination

 

Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics    221 of what constitutes proper ethical treatment of them. In addition, the emotional modes of understanding (Scheler’s Verstehen), which involve caring attentiveness—​listening to the other—​must no longer be despised and rejected as “feminine” and therefore inferior. Instead, they must be the praxis for the interspecies dialogue through which we humans learn animals’ wishes, providing the foundational basis for animal ethics. For, in summary, we have ethical obligations to all creatures with whom we can communicate, and we are ethically obliged to heed those communications.

Notes 1. G. A. Bradshaw, “You See Me, but Do You Hear Me? The Science and Sensibility of Trans-​ Species Dialogue,” Feminism and Psychology 20, no. 3 (2010): 407–​419, at 416. See also G. A. Bradshaw, “An Ape among Many: Animal Co-​Authorship and Trans-​species Epistemic Authority,” Configurations 18, no. 1/​2 (Winter 2010):15–​30. 2. Josephine Donovan, “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,” Signs 15, no.  2 (1990):  375, emphasis added. On feminist care theory applied to animals, see Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams (eds.), The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 3. Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Of Mice and Men: A Fragment on Animal Rights,” in Feminist Care Tradition, Donovan and Adams, 324. 4. Holly Menino, Calls beyond Our Hearing:  Unlocking the Secrets of Animal Voices (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 71. 5. René Descartes to Henry More, in Descartes Selections, ed. Ralph M. Eaton (New York: Scribners, 1927), 358. 6. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New  York: Continuum, 1988), 23. 7. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 124. 8. Anne Conway, “The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy,” in Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period, ed. Margaret Atherton (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 66. 9. [Margaret Cavendish] The Marchioness of Newcastle, Philosophical Letters (London: n.p., 1664), 151. 10. [Margaret Cavendish] The Marchioness of Newcastle, Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London: William Watson, 1663), 114. 11. [Cavendish], Philosophical Letters, 40–​41. 12. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice:  Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 19, 28. 13. Carol Gilligan, “Une voix différente:  un regard prospectif à partir du passé,” in Carol Gilligan et l’éthique du “care,” ed. Vanessa Nurock (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010), 33. My translation from the French. See also Josephine Donovan, “The Voice of Animals: A Response to Recent French Care Theory in Animal Ethics,” Journal of Critical Animal Studies 11, no. 1 (2013): 8–​23. 14. On standpoint theory as applied to animals, see Josephine Donovan, “Feminism and the Treatment of Animals: From Care to Dialogue,” Signs 31, no. 2 (2006): 305–​329.

 

222   Josephine Donovan 15. Temple Grandin, “Welfare of Cattle during Slaughter and Prevention of Nonambulatory (Downer) Cattle,” Journal of the Veterinary Association 219, no. 10 (2001): 1377–​1382. 16. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–​450. On the question of knowing the inner life of animals, see also Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Hidden Life of Deer (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Gary Kowalski, The Souls of Animals (Walpole, NH: Stillpoint, 1991). 17. R. W. Serjeantson, “The Passions and Animal Language, 1540-​1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 3 (July 2001): 442. 18. Serjeantson, “Passions,” 436. 19. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, ed. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1958), 335. 20. Serjeantson, “Passions,” 438. 21. Sarah Orne Jewett, “River Driftwood,” in Country By-​Ways (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1881), 4–​5. 22. Serjeantson, “Passions,” 440. 23. See Josephine Donovan, “Provincial Life with Animals,” Society & and Animals 21, no. 1 (2013):17–​33. 24. De rerum verietate (1557) in Opera omnia, ed. C. Sponius (9 vols.) (Lyon, France: 1663), vol. 3, 297-​298, quoted in Serjeantson, “Passions,” 434. 25. Patrick Murphy, “Prolegomenon for an Ecofeminist Dialogics,” in Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, ed. Dale M. Bauer and Susan Jaret McKinstry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 50. 26. Carolyn A. Ristau, “Cognitive Ethology,” WIREs Cognitive Science 4 (Sept.–​Oct. 2013): 498. 27. Con Slobodchikoff, “The Language of Prairie Dogs,” quoted in Norm Phelps, “Rhyme, Reason, and Animal Rights,” Journal of Critical Animal Studies 6, no. 1 (2008): 5. 28. Slobodchikoff, “Language of Prairie Dogs,” in Phelps, Rhyme, Reason, 5, 6.  See also, for example, Keri Brandt, “A Language of Their Own,” Society & Animals 12, no.  4 (2004): 299–​316. 29. Barbara Smuts, “Encounters with Animal Minds,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8, nos. 5–​7 (2001): 308. See also Barbara Smuts, “Between Species: Science and Subjectivity,” Configurations 14, nos. 1–​2 (2006): 115–​126. 30. Smuts, “Encounters,” 293. 31. Smuts, “Encounters,” 199. 32. Smuts, “Encounters,” 307. 33. Smuts, “Encounters,” 295. 34. Smuts, “Encounters,” 295. 35. Smuts, “Encounters,” 294. 36. Smuts, “Encounters,” 295. 37. Smuts, “Encounters,” 293. 38. Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: McKay, 1977), 51. 39. Weil, “Reflections,” in Simone Weil Reader, 77. 40. Weil, “Reflections,” in Simone Weil Reader, 51. 41. Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Scribners, 1970), 57–​59. 42. Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature:  A  Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 120–​121, emphasis added. 43. Ristau, “Cognitive Ethology,” 493.

 

Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics    223 44. Konrad Lorenz, preface to The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), xi. 45. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 12. 46. Darwin, Expression., 144. 47. Darwin, Expression, 63. 48. Darwin, Expression, 129. 49. Darwin, Expression, 121. 50. Darwin, Expression, 172 51. Darwin, Expression, 134. 52. Darwin, Expression, 76. 53. Darwin, Expression, 85. 54. Darwin, Expression, 91. 55. Darwin, Expression, 84. 56. Darwin, Expression, 349. 57. Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 42. 58. von Uexküll, Foray., 139. 59. von Uexküll, Foray, 151. 60. von Uexküll, Foray, 157. 61. See Josephine Donovan, “Participatory Epistemology, Sympathy, and Animal Ethics,” in Ecofeminism: Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, ed. Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 75–​90. 62. Uexküll, Foray, 126. 63. See Josephine Donovan, “Attention to Suffering: Sympathy as a Basis for Ethical Treatment of Animals,” in Feminist Care Tradition, Donovan and Adams, 174–​197. 64. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1970), 48. 65. Scheler, Nature of Sympathy, 11. 66. Scheler, Nature of Sympathy, 104. 67. Scheler, Nature of Sympathy, 87. 68. See Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1992), 19–​23. Likely prompted by recent developments in cognitive ethology, twenty-​five leading neuroscientists, at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, England, on July 7, 2012, issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-​Human Animals,” which concludes that animals “possess… . the neurological substrates that generate consciousness” (accessible at http://​fcmconference.org). 69. Griffin, Animal Minds, 13. 70. Smuts, “Encounters,” 294. 71. Work on neural correlates can, however, provide useful corroboration for knowledge we already have from personal experience; for example, mapping brain activity with MRI scans on the caudate nucleus in dogs indicates that “many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate,” suggesting the existence of “canine emotions.” Gregory Berns, the author of the study, concludes, “by using the M.R.I. to push away the limitations of behaviorism, we can no longer hide from the evidence. Dogs, and probably many other animals… . seem to have emotions just like us. And this means we must reconsider their treatment

 

224   Josephine Donovan as property.” (“Dogs Are People, Too,” New  York Times, October 6, 2013, 5). See also Gregory S. Berns et al. “Functional M.R.I. in Awake Unrestrained Dogs,” PloS/​One 7, no. 5 (2012):1–​7, published online May 11, 2012 (doi: 10.1371/​journal.pone.0038027) While I laud Professor Berns’s project, it is a sign of the tenacious hold scientific objectivism has on the contemporary mind that MRI scans are required to prove what is patently obvious and knowable through direct personal communication with dogs and other animals, such as seen in the examples given by Darwin and others, that they have thoughts, emotions, and opinions that are readily understandable by humans. 72. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon, 1989). 73. Marti Kheel, Nature Ethics:  An Ecofeminist Perspective (Lanham, MD:  Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 5. 74. Brian Luke, “Taming Ourselves or Going Feral,” in Animals and Women:  Feminist Theoretical Explorations, ed. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 304. 75. Luke, “Taming Ourselves,” in Animals and Women, Adams and Donovan, 306. 76. Brian Luke, “Justice, Caring, and Animal Liberation,” in Feminist Care Tradition, Donovan and Adams, 141. 77. Luke, “Taming Ourselves,” in Animals and Women, Adams and Donovan, 146. 78. Luke, “Taming Ourselves,” in Animals and Women, Adams and Donovan, 147. 79. Such objectification enables the characterization of animals as property under US common law. For attempts to apply feminist care theory concerning animals to the law, see Karina L. Schrengohst, “Animal Law–​Cultivating Compassionate Law,” Western New England Law Review 33, no. 3 (2011): 854–​900; Thomas Kelch, “Towards a Non-​Property Status for Animals,” and “The Role of the Rational and the Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights,” in Feminist Care Tradition, Donovan and Adams, 229–​249; 259–​300, respectively.

 

Pa rt I I

ANIMAL I N T E N T IONA L I T Y, AG E N C Y, A N D REFLEXIVE THINKING

 

 

Chapter 12

Cetacean C o g ni t i on Lori Marino

Introduction Reflexivity is a hallmark of complex intelligence, self-​awareness, and social complexity. In the last three decades there has been a revolution in our understanding and ability to probe reflexive thinking in other animals. At this time there is little doubt that many other animals are reflexive thinkers, and the task before us is to uncover the ways in which reflexive thinking manifests itself in different species, including cetaceans. Cetaceans (dolphins and whales) have lit the imagination of our species for thousands of years and have been the subject of both mythological attributions and, more recently, scientific examination. There exist about 90 living species of cetaceans, representing a range of behaviors, capacities, lifestyles, and morphologies. But, at the same time, there are basic shared characteristics across all these species identifying cetaceans as reflexive thinkers—​highly intelligent, socially complex, autonomous individuals possessing large, elaborated brains. Cetaceans stand as a uniquely informative comparison with humans and other primates because they possess a startling combination of similarities and differences with our species and, in particular, the other great apes. More than any other comparison, the study of cetaceans and primates exposes the intricate “dance” of evolution that generates convergence and divergence of species all at the same time. In order to understand who cetaceans are (and who primates are), it is necessary to think about their shared psychological characteristics and their differences simultaneously. Cetaceans and primates, as are all species, are versions of a common theme that has been “tweaked” by adaptations over millions of years. Only by viewing them in this complex way can we really understand how we can relate to cetaceans and they to us.

 

228   Lori Marino

Cetacean Brains It is difficult to fully appreciate how cetaceans think without exploring their brains. Comparisons of cetacean and primate brains reveal the way brain structure-​function relationships can follow a complicated pattern of evolutionary divergence and convergence. This pattern forms the basis for the psychological and behavioral similarities and differences among cetaceans and primates. As a group, cetaceans possess the neurobiological underpinnings of complex intelligence, which they demonstrate in their prodigious cognitive capacities, both individually and socially. Three very broad aspects of cetacean brains form the bases for their keen intelligence. First, they are highly encephalized; that is, their brains are large relative to their body size. Second, they possess a highly expanded neocortex. Third, the cellular architecture of their neocortex is well differentiated, which forms the foundation for complex reflexive thinking. Modern cetacean brains are among the largest of all mammals in both absolute and relative mass. The largest brain on earth is that of the sperm whale. With an average adult weight of 8000 g,1 the sperm whale brain is about 60% larger than the elephant brain and six times larger than the human brain. Absolute brain size is related to some aspects of intelligence, but because there is a positive correlation between brain and body size (large animals have large brains and large everything else!), it is relative brain size that is thought to account for more of the variance in intelligence across species. Relative brain size is typically expressed as an encephalization quotient,2 or EQ, which is a value that represents how large or small the brain of a given species is compared with other species of the same average body weight. Species with EQs of 1.0—​for example, domestic cats—​ have average brain sizes; if EQ is greater than 1.0, brains are larger than expected; and if less than 1.0—​for example, opossums—​brains are smaller than expected. How large are cetacean brains relative to their body sizes? To put this issue into perspective, our EQ is 7.0. Our brain is seven times the size one would expect for an animal of our body mass. With EQs ranging from 1.8 to 5.0 (five times the expected brain size), the cetacean suborder Odontoceti, and, in particular, the superfamily Delphinoidea (which includes all porpoises, oceanic dolphins, and toothed whales), is the most highly encephalized nonhuman taxonomic group to have ever evolved on the planet,3 and many dolphin species surpass great apes in EQ as well. The exceptional expansion of cetacean brains occurred throughout their brain but is most notable in the neocortex, the evolutionarily newest part of the brain. The vanguard of evolutionary expansion in mammalian brains is the neocortex, the wrinkled layered covering of the cerebral hemispheres which serves as the neural basis of many of the most complex psychological functions, including self-​awareness, innovation, planning, flexibility in problem-​solving, and sensory-​perceptual integration—​ all characteristics of reflexive thinkers. One measure of the “level of expansion” of the neocortex is in the degree of convolutedness it exhibits, as more elaborated neocortices

 

Cetacean Cognition   229 tend to be more wrinkled (evincing more surface area) than smoother ones. Here, too, cetaceans excel. The distinction of possessing the most convoluted neocortex on the planet goes to the killer whale, or orca.4 In general, many dolphin and whale brains are at least, or more, convoluted than those of humans and other primates. But there is a twist. Cetacean neocortices are thinner than those of primates because they have only five layers of cells, rather than the six found in primates and most other mammals (they are lacking Layer 4). This thinness allows the cetacean neocortex to be more sinuous than the thick primate neocortex and provides a way for the cetacean brain to compensate for the lack of Layer 4 with increased folding and, thus, surface area. The unusual surface area and other features of the cetacean neocortex are just the tip of the iceberg, as they are accompanied by deeper differences in cell types and arrangements between cetaceans and primates. Notably, Layer 4, the part of the primate neocortex that receives sensory input and integrates that input within the rest of the neocortex, is absent in cetaceans. Thus, the connections in and out, as well as within, the neocortex are entirely different in cetaceans and primates. The similarities in level of expansion and complexity against the backdrop of differences in architecture and morphology between cetacean and primate brains are an exquisite example of divergence in structure and convergence in function, a pattern that is reflected in psychology, behavior, and even culture.

Cetacean Cognition at Two Levels For any social species cognition should be understood on both the individual level and as it emerges in the group. Never is this more relevant than for cetaceans, who, arguably, cannot be fully appreciated for who they are without the social context. Cetacean cognition at the level of the individual is complex and highly sophisticated and shares a number of characteristics with human and other great ape cognitive features. At the same time, in the social setting, capacities and propensities appear to emerge which are unique to cetaceans. We will explore cetacean cognition at both the level of the individual and the social group.

Individual Cognition: Information Processing, Problem-​S olving, Concept Formation, and Mental Representation Despite the strong social propensities of dolphins and many other cetaceans, even in the barren artificial conditions of captivity, dolphins exhibit prodigious cognitive talents

 

230   Lori Marino when engaged in human-​devised tasks. A long list of published findings indicate that dolphins and other cetaceans perform at least as, or more, competently in memory and cognition tasks similar to those used to study great apes. They are able to learn a variety of rules for solving abstract problems, such as whether pairs of objects are “same” or “different”5 and can master the semantic and syntactic features of an artificial gestural and acoustic language.6 They understand quantitative concepts such as “less”7 and can move easily from visual and acoustic mental representations using echolocation to identify very complex three-​dimensional objects.8 This is just a small sampling of the cognitive competencies dolphins demonstrate in standard cognition and memory tasks in captivity.

Language Much has been said about the relationship between language and cognitive ability in other animals. Language, as opposed to a communication system, can be defined as a symbolic referential system with generative properties that derive from syntax and grammar. Clearly, these characteristics define much of human communication. Moreover, there are still those, epitomized by linguist Noam Chomsky and his followers, who hypothesize that nonhuman species do not have this kind of symbolic natural language system and are therefore limited in cognitive ability—​in reflexivity. Whether dolphins and other cetaceans possess a symbolic referential and syntactic natural language is unknown. Certainly, there are many aspects of cetacean natural communication that are complex and flexible,9 but we have yet to decipher the rules of communication from their point of view. More to the point, it does not appear to be necessary to possess a human-​like language to have a sophisticated communication system that is based on complex cognitive capacities. In the case of cetaceans, regardless of whether they possess a natural language or not, dolphins can learn to understand a symbolic language-​ like system (a species-​level foreign language, if you will) comprising both semantic and syntactic features. The level of flexibility showed by the dolphins in these language studies speaks to the kind of reflexive mind they possess. As Herman points out, “Flexibility is demonstrated … by the animal’s ability to go beyond the boundaries of its naturally occurring behaviors or the context of its natural world.”10 Human language gains its versatility and communicative power not through the word only, but through the sentence. Even with a limited vocabulary of words, it is possible to create a large number of unique sentences by combining words in various ways and in various sentence lengths according to syntactic rules. In human language, there are an infinite number of possibilities. In the landmark dolphin language-​ comprehension studies conducted by Lou Herman and his colleagues throughout the 1980s and 1990s, two captive dolphins demonstrated the ability to comprehend an artificial symbolic language. Thousands of unique sentences were constructed according to simple syntactic rules based on a 40-​ item vocabulary. The symbolic language-​like system learned by the dolphins conveyed

 

Cetacean Cognition   231 instructions, many of which were novel, to carry out named actions with named objects or required the dolphins to construct relationships between pairs of objects, such as placing one named object next to or on top of another named object. Symbols were presented to the dolphins as either electronically generated sounds broadcast underwater or gestures of a trainer’s arms and hands. In their responses, the dolphins took account of both the semantic component (the referents of the symbols, i.e., the object, action, or relationship that the symbol represented) and the syntactic component (how symbol—​ i.e., “word”—​order affected the meaning of the instruction). For instance, they understood that the sentence (glossed in English) “take the ball to the hoop” is different from the sentence “take the hoop to the ball.” These studies demonstrate that dolphins have the cognitive plasticity to operate competently within an entirely artificial symbolic referential system.11

Pointing and Reference Some of the more complex and abstract cognitive abilities dolphins possess are an understanding of pointing as a reference to an object and the use of pointing to refer to an object. Pointing may seem like a simple gesture, but it requires a sophisticated understanding of attention and reference, not only to oneself but to others. When one points, one is referring to something and calling attention to it. This capacity relies on the ability to understand that there is a way to indicate an object to someone else, and vice versa. This kind of referential and indicative behavior is not common in the animal kingdom. But dolphins understand the human pointing gesture as a reference to a remote object and as an attempt to share attention with them.12 They understand not only the direction in which a human is pointing (where) but also what is being pointed at. Moreover, they can interpret the head position and eye gaze of humans as a reference to a remote object.13 Additionally, dolphins can spontaneously produce pointing (using rostrum and body alignment) to communicate desired objects to a human observer,14 and appear to understand that the human observer must be present and attending to the pointing dolphin for the communication to be effective.15 The ability to understand a referential gesture and joint attentional demands suggests that dolphins have the kind of perceptual and cognitive capabilities required to understand relations among themselves and others—​an important hallmark of reflexive thinking.

Self-​Awareness No other domain of inquiry about dolphins touches on the question of reflexivity more compellingly than self-​awareness. Self-​awareness may be conceptualized as a sense of personal identity—​that is, the subjective I. At the bodily level, it is typically called self-​recognition, the ability to become the object of one’s own attention in the physical realm. At a more abstract level, self-​awareness involves the ability to access one’s own

 

232   Lori Marino thoughts and to possess a robust psychological continuity over time (knowing that it was you yesterday, is you today, and will be you tomorrow!). Self-​awareness is a component of phenomenal consciousness, the subjective, experiential, or phenomenological aspects of conscious experience. (Phenomenal consciousness might be considered the basic minimum for more complex forms of self-​awareness.) What makes the evidence for self-​awareness in dolphins and whales so strong is that it is robust and demonstrable under a variety of conditions. Not only can dolphins perform well on tasks that require self-​awareness, but they can engage in actions that essentially demonstrate or “declare” that they know who they are.

Innovation and Imitation Dolphins are one of the few species in the world that can understand the concept of “imitate” and can mimic arbitrary sounds.16 For example, they can imitate electronically generated sounds of a variety of waveforms, and they can mimic the motor behaviors of another dolphin or a human demonstrator, even when viewing them on a television screen. They have demonstrated rapid and spontaneous vocal imitation and are one of the few vocal learners in the animal kingdom.17 Dolphins can also imitate human behaviors, which requires the dolphin to create analogies between her body parts and human body parts. For instance, a dolphin can spontaneously imitate a human raising her leg in the air by raising the tail flukes instead.18 This kind of behavior requires a complex understanding of one’s body and how it relates to someone else’s as well as of the concept of analogy. One of the more compelling ways the dolphin’s imitative abilities have revealed themselves is seen in the groundbreaking “innovation” studies. In these studies, captive dolphins were taught the concept of “innovation,” that is, doing something you’ve never done before. In order to do this the dolphins must access their memory of behaviors they have done before and produce a new behavior. Retrieval of that memory requires conscious access to one’s memory, known as metamemory, and volitional control over one’s behavior based on that memory, showing clear parallels with human capacities. Moreover, as demonstrated in the innovation studies, dolphins are able to access their own memory in order to produce a novel behavior as well. Moreover, when the dolphins were paired, one of the dolphins could be asked to innovate while the other could be asked to create the same novel behavior in close synchrony.19 For example, if one dolphin did a novel kind of flip in the air, the other dolphin would, almost simultaneously, do the same flip. These remarkable findings show that dolphins not only understand complex abstract concepts like “innovation” and “imitation” but can also copy each other’s behaviors almost instantaneously, that is, perform the novel behavior synchronously. Explanations for how they are able to accomplish this feat include hypotheses that the dolphins “talk it over” and agree upon a novel behavior prior to performing the task to appeal to their synchronous group behaviors in the wild. While this is not a complete explanation of the mechanism behind these abilities, shown in captivity these

 

Cetacean Cognition   233 abilities clearly have something to do with the fact that, in the natural setting, dolphins use synchronous behaviors in a range of social situations. The kinds of innovative and imitative behaviors demonstrated by dolphins are part of a continuum of cognitive complexity within the realm of self-​awareness.

Body Image Numerous studies show that dolphins do indeed have a body image. Herman and colleagues showed that dolphins can learn instructions to move or to use specified body parts in specified ways.20 For instance, in one study the researchers assigned unique symbolic gestures to each of nine different body parts (rostrum, mouth, melon, dorsal fin, side, belly, pectoral fin, genitals, and tail) of a young female dolphin by associating a unique gesture with each body part. After she had learned the associations, she was tested for her understanding of references to those body parts in the context of complex sequences of symbolic gestural instructions asking her to use those body parts in specific ways—​either to show the named body part (display it out of water), or shake it, or use it to touch a named object or toss a named object. The dolphin was highly competent in these tests, responding correctly in 68%–​90% of all requests, depending on the kind of request it was. As an example, when asked to touch a frisbee with her dorsal fin, given as a rapid sequence of three symbolic gestures (frisbee–​dorsal fin–​touch), she swam to the floating frisbee (one of several available objects), turned her body to be lateral to it, and then carefully rotated her body so that her dorsal fin gently touched the top of the frisbee. She was correct in 85% of 194 trials of this kind. These studies demonstrate that dolphins not only can associate different body parts with different symbolic labels, but can also use the same body part in different ways, and different body parts in the same way, displaying tremendous cognitive flexibility in their body image. And, as discussed earlier, dolphins can form analogies between parts of their own body and those of another species, for example, humans.21 These findings demonstrate that dolphins have a robust conception of their own body and how it relates to other bodies and objects in their world, and that parts of their body can be understood within a semantic and referential framework. This ability to objectify one’s body is thought to be uncommon in the animal kingdom and, as we will see, is related to other tests of self-​awareness, such as self-​recognition.

Self-​Recognition The ability to recognize oneself in a mirror or video or photograph not only requires having a sense of self to begin with but it also taps into the ability to objectify one’s body in a way that allows one to refer to oneself or become the object of one’s own attention. Mirrors have an advantage over playback videos or static photographs because they offer immediate direct and dynamic visual feedback.

 

234   Lori Marino The standard protocol for demonstrating mirror self-​recognition in nonhuman animals and very young human children requires that the subject use the mirror to investigate him-​or herself. Thus, it requires a motivational state that drives an active self-​investigation using the mirror. The first experimental test of self-​awareness in another species was conducted by comparative psychologist Gordon Gallup, who presented evidence for mirror self-​recognition in chimpanzees in 1970.22 Gallup adapted the preexisting mirror test for children to the chimpanzees. The basic paradigm involves exposing mirror-​naive individuals to a mirror to determine if they show self-​directed behavior at the mirror. The formal test comes when the individual is non-​tactily marked somewhere on his or her body that he can only see with the mirror, to determine if he uses the mirror to investigate marked areas of the body. Reiss and Marino provided the first definitive evidence of mirror self-​recognition in two captive bottlenose dolphins at the New York Aquarium and, in doing so, provided what was, at the time, the first evidence of this ability outside the primate lineage.23 Both dolphins displayed self-​ investigatory behaviors at the mirror and, in the formal tests, used the mirror to investigate the marked part of their bodies (by posing in front of the mirror to display the mark in the reflective surface). Mirror self-​recognition demonstrates that one conceives of the self as subject and the image as the object representing, but separate from, the subject. Mirror self-​ recognition is not an isolated capacity. It is part of a set of psychological capacities that develop over time. The self-​concept, as indexed by mirror self-​recognition, is one that only develops in a social setting in humans24 and, one can imagine, other highly social beings, such as dolphins and whales. The presence of mirror self-​recognition in dolphins is firmly entrenched in a body of evidence for capacities related to self-​ awareness and consistent with other abilities that are based on a sense of self and a self-​concept.25

Self-​Imitation Dolphins not only recognize themselves in mirrors and have a body image and sense of how it relates to others, but they are also agents and owners of their own actions. We know this from several studies in which dolphins were taught the gesture for “repeat” and then asked to perform a behavior and either repeat that behavior or not.26 To succeed in these tasks, the dolphins had to be able to access the representation of their last behavior and selectively construct the next behavior to be either different or the same, in effect, choosing to self-​imitate or not. Not knowing in advance which actions were to be followed by a repeat gesture, the dolphins in these studies had to maintain a representation of the action just performed in working memory until further instructed, thus demonstrating metamemory once again. Metamemory is one facet of metacognition, the more general capacity to access one’s own thoughts, feelings, and knowledge.

 

Cetacean Cognition   235

Metacognition Metacognition (cognition about cognition) requires self-​awareness in the subjective realm because it involves the ability to think about one’s own thoughts, memories, and feelings, accessing them intentionally. Metacognition is similar to autonoetic consciousness, the capacity to recursively introspect on one’s own subjective experience through time, that is, to perceive the continuity in one’s identity from the past to the present and on into the future. One way to ask whether another animal is metacognitive is to experimentally assess whether that animal can indicate his or her subjective sense of certainty about information he or she needs in order to perform a task. This kind of question was experimentally posed by David Smith and his colleagues a few years ago, with startling results.27 They gave bottlenose dolphins an auditory discrimination task (and gave humans and rhesus monkeys a similar visual task) in trials ranging from easy to difficult. The subjects could optimize rewards by sometimes choosing a bail-​out option, called an “uncertain response,” on each trial that presented very difficult material. Humans were able to respond optimally because they were able to introspect on their certainty or confidence about any given trial and opt out of those trials that were deemed too difficult to complete successfully. The dolphins (and monkeys) showed the same response patterns as the humans. These results showed that dolphins know what they do and do not know and are able to access this self-​knowledge appropriately. These findings, along with those on mirror self-​recognition, imitation, body-​image processing, and other capacities, reveal dolphins and whales to be reflexive, self-​aware, and introspective beings.

Social Life Although it is abundantly clear that individual dolphins are self-​aware, autonomous beings, there is reason to take seriously the idea that dolphin self-​awareness may, at another level, be intimately tied in with the social group in a way that our species cannot fully experience or comprehend. It has been suggested that echolocation allows individual dolphins to share perceptions of reality by eavesdropping on one another’s echoes and that this may create a sense of “communal cognition,” with deep implications for their sense of self.28 One phenomenon that poignantly illustrates the communal sense of self that dolphins possess is mass stranding. Mass strandings occur all over the world, and in many different cetacean species. These events typically involve one dying individual who is followed into the shallows by the rest of his or her social group, resulting in the entire group stranding and in danger of perishing. When humans intervene and “re-​float” individuals into open water, they often come back and re-​strand themselves. It is very difficult to convince members of the social group to swim away from the danger, abandoning the

 

236   Lori Marino others. Indeed, this tendency to stay together no matter the consequence is exploited in many activities in which dolphins are captured and killed (e.g., Taiji dolphin slaughters, captures of wild dolphins by dolphinaria, entanglement in fishing nets) and suggests a level of social cohesiveness and empathy that is unfamiliar even to our own species. Interestingly, the single-​minded focus of individuals involved in a mass stranding is only broken by an equally strong social stimulus. In one particularly illustrative instance, a group of 100 pantropical spotted dolphins off the coast of Australia were intentionally moving toward the beach, in an impending mass stranding. Desperate rescuers caught one of the group’s juveniles and transported the youngster by boat to deeper waters. Once there, this young dolphin started to produce distress calls that were able to compete with the group’s motivation to strand and caused the rest of the group to head back out to sea to rescue the little one.29 The “spell” of the mass stranding was broken by the desire to come to the aid of a youngster, and the quick thinking of the human rescuers prevented a mass stranding. Therefore, in order to understand the full range of reflexive thinking that dolphins are capable of, it is vital to examine how their intelligence and sense of self plays out in the social arena. There we see how their cognitive functions provide scaffolding for their complex social capacities.

Social Complexity and Networking Herman was the first person to suggest that social complexity might underlie the expansion of the large dolphin brain and thus dolphin intelligence.30 Researchers who focus on fieldwork with dolphins (behaving dolphins in a natural setting) have for years been prolific in increasing the evidence for social complexity in dolphins and other cetaceans. These kinds of studies are not possible in a captive setting. Dolphin social networks are enormously complex, and there is strong evidence of individual role-​taking to facilitate cooperation31 and decision-​making processes.32 The most complex relationships described to date are found among bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia. Males in this population form two and possibly three levels of nested alliances within a social network numbering in the hundreds.33 Males cooperate in groups of 2 to 3 to form consortships with individual estrus females.34 Males also hold membership in larger groups of 4 to 14 individuals that cooperate in competition with other groups over estrus females. The alliance bonds between males, both within the pairs and trios and among males in the larger groups, are maintained by affiliative behavior, such as petting and contact swimming (swimming together while in physical contact)35 and synchronous behavior.36 Synchronous behavior in the wild is likely to be “underwritten” by the same kinds of imitative capacities found in captive dolphins. Another way to say this is that the findings with captive dolphins are clarified and brought to light by observing the behavior in a natural setting. Some of the complexities typical of within-​group primate alliances, such as individuals switching sides in different social contexts, are also seen among the Shark Bay

 

Cetacean Cognition   237 males.37 Such “alliances of alliances” are rare outside our own species, even among old world monkeys and apes. And very recent work on bottlenose dolphins in the Indian River Lagoon in Florida shows that there is a good deal of dynamic interaction within a complex of different communities there as well.38 The kinds of fluid, multilevel interactions observed in dolphin groups can only be based upon reflexive cognitive abilities. They require “online” processing of social situations, keeping track of alliances and other interactions, planning for the future and role-​ taking in terms of cooperative hunting strategies, and, more generally, a sense of oneself within the matrix of one’s society.

Culture Dolphin social complexity provides the substrate for cultural transmission of learned traditions. Field studies have documented impressive cultural learning of dialects, foraging sites, feeding strategies, tool use, and other behavioral practices.39 Culture, the transmission of learned behavior, is one of the attributes of cetaceans that most sets them apart from the majority of other nonhuman species and is yet another level of psychological and behavioral complexity underwritten by reflexive thinking.

Discussion and Implications Given all the evidence, it is not a stretch to suggest that dolphins can only thrive as reflexive thinkers in a natural social group. We know this from the direct evidence for a lack of thriving in situations in which they are held alone or in very small or artificial social groups in dolphinaria. A growing corpus of scientific data continues to strengthen this conclusion, as dolphins in captivity often suffer from psychological disturbances and abnormalities, poor health, and, ultimately, high mortality rates.40 Most of the harm comes from the fact that dolphins are adapted to live in complex social groups with an array of social roles and interactions to engage in. Because these aspects of life are inherently absent from a marine park environment, their psychological welfare on an individual level suffers as much as their social lives.

Notes 1. L. Marino, “Brain Size Evolution,” in Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals, ed. William F Perrin, Bernd Wursig, and Hans Thewissen (San Diego, CA:  Academic Press, 2002), 158–​162. 2. H. J. Jerison. Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence (New  York:  Academic Press, 1973); H. J. Jerison, “The Perceptual World of Dolphins,” in Dolphin Cognition and Behaviour: A Comparative Approach, ed. R. J. Schusterman, J. A. Thomas, and F. G. Wood (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986), 141–​166.

 

238   Lori Marino 3. L. Marino, “A Comparison of Encephalization between Odontocete Cetaceans and Anthropoid Primates,” Brain, Behaviour and Evolution 51 (1998): 230–​238. 4. Sam H. Ridgway and R. H. Brownson, “Relative Brain Sizes and Cortical Surface Areas in Odontocetes,” Acta Zoologica Fennica 172 (1984): 149–​152. 5. L. M. Herman, A. A. Pack, and A. M. Wood, “Bottlenosed Dolphins Can Generalize Rules and Develop Abstract Concepts,” Marine Mammal Science 10 (1994): 70–​80. 6. L. M. Herman, S. A. Kuczaj II, and M. D. Holder, “Responses to Anomalous Gestural Sequences by a Language-​Trained Dolphin: Evidence for Processing of Semantic Relations and Syntactic Information,” Journal of Experimental Psychology:  General 122 (1993):  184–​194; L. M. Herman, A. A. Pack, and P. Morrel-​Samuels, “Representational and Conceptual Skills of Dolphins,” in Language and Communication:  Comparative Perspectives, ed. H. R. Roitblat, L. M. Herman, and P. Nachtigall (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993), 273–​298. 7. K. Jaakkola, W. Fellner, L. Erb, M. Rodriguez, and E. Guarino, “Understanding of the Concept of Numerically ‘Less’ by Bottlenosed Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus),” Journal of Comparative Psychology 119 (2005): 296–​303. 8. A. A. Pack and L. M. Herman, “Sensory Integration in the Bottlenosed Dolphin: Immediate Recognition of Complex Shapes across the Senses of Echolocation and Vision,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 98 (1995): 722–​733. 9. D. L. Herzing, “Acoustic and Social Behaviour of Wild Dolphins:  Implications for a Sound Society,” in Hearing by Whales and Dolphins, ed. W. L. A. N. Popper and R. R. Fay (New York: Springer-​Verlag, 2000), 225–​272. 10. L. M. Herman, “Exploring the Cognitive World of the Bottlenose Dolphin,” in The Cognitive Animal:  Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. M. Bekoff, C. Allen, and G. M. Burghardt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 275–​283, at 280. 11. For a review of this literature, see Herman, “Cognitive World of the Bottlenose Dolphin.” 12. A. A. Pack and L. M. Herman, “Dolphin Social Cognition and Joint Attention:  Our Current Understanding,” Aquatic Mammals 32 (2006): 443–​460. 13. A. A. Pack and L. M. Herman, “The Dolphin’s (Tursiops truncatus) Understanding of Human Gaze and Pointing:  Knowing What and Where,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 121 (2007): 34–​45. 14. M. J. Xitco Jr., J. D. Gory, and S. A. Kuczaj II, “Spontaneous Pointing by Bottlenosed Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus),” Animal Cognition 4 (2001): 115–​123. 15. J. J. Xitco Jr., J. D. Gory, and S. A. Kuczaj II, “Dolphin Pointing Is Linked to the Attentional Behaviour of a Receiver,” Animal Cognition 7 (2004): 231–​238. 16. L. M. Herman, “Vocal, Social and Self-​Imitation by Bottlenosed Dolphins,” in Imitation in Animals and Artifacts, ed. C. Nehaniv and K. Dautenhahn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 63–​108. 17. D. Reiss and B. McCowan, “Spontaneous Vocal Mimicry and Production by Bottlenosed Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus):  Evidence for Vocal Learning,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 107 (1993): 301–​312. 18. Herman, “Vocal, Social and Self-​Imitation.” 19. For a review, see L. M. Herman, “Intelligence and Rational Behaviour in the Bottlenosed Dolphin,” in Rational Animals, ed. S. Hurley and M. Nudds, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 439–​467. 20. L. M. Herman, D. S. Matus, E. Y. Herman, M. Ivancic, and A. A. Pack. “The Bottlenosed Dolphin’s (Tursiops truncatus) Understanding of Gestures as Symbolic Representations of Its Body Parts,” Learning and Behavior 29 (2001): 250–​264.

 

Cetacean Cognition   239 21. Herman, “Vocal, Social and Self-​Imitation.” 22. G. G. Gallup Jr., “Chimpanzees: Self-​Recognition,” Science 167, no. 3914 (1970): 86–​87. 23. D. Reiss and L. Marino. “Self-​Recognition in the Bottlenose Dolphin: A Case of Cognitive Convergence,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 98 (2001): 5937–​5942. 24. M. Lewis, “The Origins and Uses of Self-​Awareness or the Mental Representation of Me,” Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2011): 120–​129. 25. L. M. Herman, “Body and Self in Dolphins,” Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2012): 526–​545. 26. For a review, see Herman, “Body and Self in Dolphins.” 27. J. D. Smith, J. Schull, J. Strote, K. McGee, R. Egnor, and L. Erb, “The Uncertain Response in the Bottlenosed Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus),” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 124, no. 4 (1995): 391–​408. 28. Jerison, “Perceptual World of Dolphins,” 141–​166. 29. D. Kirby, “Could Kidnapping a Baby Dolphin End the Slaughter at the Cove?” takepart.com, February 5, 2013. http://​www.takepart.com/​article/​2013/​02/​05/​ ending-​the-​cove-​dolphin-​slaughter. 30. L. M. Herman, “Cognitive Characteristics of Dolphins,” in Cetacean Behaviour: Mechanisms and Functions, ed. L. M. Herman (New York: Wiley Interscience, 1980), 363–​429. 31. S. K. Gazda, R. C. Connor, R. K. Edgar, and F. Cox, “A Division of Labor with Role Specialization in Group-​Hunting Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) off Cedar Key, Florida,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 272 (2005): 135–​140. 32. D. Lusseau, “Evidence for Social Role in a Dolphin Social Network,” Evolutionary Ecology 21 (2007): 357–​366. 33. R. C. Connor, “Complex Alliance Relationships in Bottlenose Dolphins and a Consideration of Selective Environments for Extreme Brain Size Evolution in Mammals,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences 362 (2007): 587–​602. 34. R. C. Connor, R. A. Smolker, and A. F. Richards, “Two Levels of Alliance Formation among Male Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops sp.),” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 89 (1992): 987–​990. 35. R. Connor, J. Mann, and J. Watson-​Capps. “A Sex-​Specific Affiliative Contact Behavior in Indian Ocean Bottlenose Dolphins, Tursiops sp.,” Ethology 112 (2006): 631–​638. 36. D. L. Herzing, “Synchronous and Rhythmic Vocalizations and Correlated Underwater Behavior of Free-​Ranging Atlantic Spotted Dolphins (Stenella frontalis) and Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in the Bahamas,” Animal Behavior and Cognition 2, no. 1 (2015): 14–​29. 37. Connor, Smolker, and Richards, “Two Levels of Alliance Formation.” 38. E. Murdoch Titcomb, G. O’Corry Crowe, E. F. Hartel, and M.S. Mazzoil, “Social Communities and Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Association Patterns in Estuarine Bottlenose Dolphins,” Marine Mammal Science 31, no.  4 (2015):  1314–​1337. doi:10.1111/​ mms.12222. 39. L. E. Rendell and H. Whitehead, “Culture in Whales and Dolphins,” Behavioural and Brain Sciences 24 (2001): 309–​324; H. Whitehead and L. Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 40. For reviews of this literature, see L. Marino and T. Frohoff, “Towards a New Paradigm of Non-​Captive Research on Cetacean Cognition,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 9 (2011):  e24121. doi:10.1371/​journal.pone.0024121; and N. A. Rose, E. C. M. Parsons, and R. Farinato, “The Case against Marine Mammals in Captivity” (Washington, DC: Humane Society of the United States, 2009).

 

Chapter 13

H istory and A ni ma l Agenc i e s Chris Pearson

Throughout the nineteenth century, Paris’s police force sought to eliminate stray dogs from the city’s streets in the name of public hygiene and security. By the early twentieth century, the city had installed a Cynoctone lethal chamber in the municipal pound and introduced new methods of impoundment, including horse-​drawn (1904) and motorized (1912) vehicles for collecting captured strays from the capital’s police posts. Le Matin, a popular Parisian newspaper, reported that these vehicles turned stray dogs into “four-​legged prisoners.” Yet some of these captured strays tried to escape, and Le Matin observed that policemen successfully overcame this canine “resistance.”1 The use of the term “resistance” to describe the dogs’ actions raises questions about whether or not animals possess agency and their ability to resist human intentions. This chapter explores the varied ways in which animals display agency. Numerous scholars now argue that animals are agents. Attributing agency to animals forms part of a wider intellectual project that reconsiders the power and role of nonhuman forces in the past and present. From mosquitoes to earthquakes, scholars have outlined the impact of animal and environmental factors on politics, economics, culture, and health. Their research has decentered humans as the driving force and center of history, thereby challenging “human exceptionalism” and suggesting that we live in a “posthuman” or “more-​than-​human” world.2 However, according agency to nonhumans raises important methodological and theoretical issues. It also exposes scholars who assert that animals have agency to charges of trying to turn them into us: creatures who possess intentionality, subjectivity, and world-​shaping powers. This chapter offers a typology of the varied ways in which scholars have attributed agency to animals. After considering how animals have historically been denied agency, it explores how animals are agents imbued with a degree of intentionality. It then investigates how animal agents have physically shaped past and present societies and the animal-​as-​resister model of nonhuman agency. This critical overview is intended to show that animals possess agency, but that claims of animal agency need to be made

 

History and Animal Agencies    241 carefully and that some of the approaches to animal agency are more persuasive and fruitful than others. Although the chapter considers how scholars have identified agency in a range of animals, its main focus is on horses and dogs. Choosing these highly domesticated species is intended to reinforce one of the chapter’s key points: that animal agency is often entangled with human agency in reciprocal and hybrid ways. Human beings are, and have always been, enmeshed with other animals. We have been partially shaped by this fact, just as we have shaped other species.3 Focusing on horses and dogs skews my analysis toward domesticated animals, thereby overlooking the agency of wild creatures.4 But the chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of animal agency, and I hope that the examples I discuss will provoke reflection on other animal agents and their role as active, significant, and sometimes purposeful creatures worthy of sustained analytical attention.

Denying Animal Agency Historian of slavery Walter Johnson labels agency—​“self-​directed action,” the ability to think and act independently and to follow free will—​as the “master trope” of the new social history.5 The ability to reason is central to the human-​centered concept of agency because it allows the individual to break free, to some extent, of instincts, emotions, political circumstances, and social background.6 This model of agency assumes that only humans possess the requisite levels of rationality and reason to be agents, as only they can make informed choices about their actions based on an awareness of the political, social, and cultural structures in which they live. They can plan their actions accordingly, influencing the world around them and their place within it. Knowing and changing the world through thinking is frequently held up as a hallmark of humanity and proof of an unbridgeable rupture between humans and animals.7 Yet the idea that nature and culture are separate is not a given. Instead, as anthropologist Philippe Descola argues, the nature-​culture split has emerged through “historical contingency” and is unique to Western thought.8 The belief in a rupture between humans and animals is geographically situated. Anthropologists, such as Nurit Bird-​ David, have shown that in many non-​Western indigenous societies, the sense of a nature-​culture divide does not exist in the same way as it does in the West. Bird-​David argues that many indigenous communities share a sense of interconnectedness and kinship with animals, with whom they believe communication is possible. According to this worldview, relatedness, rather than dominion or separation, defines the relationship between humans and other creatures.9 Descola likewise outlines how indigenous peoples in the Amazon region attribute souls to animals and ascribe intentionality to nonhuman beings. Relations between humans and nonhumans are envisaged on a continuum of communication rather than a radical split between nature and culture.10 When did the idea of a human-​animal divide emerge in the West? Descola traces it back to Aristolean classifications of nature.11 Joyce E. Salisbury, meanwhile, suggests that

 

242   Chris Pearson early Christian thinkers (ce 400–​1400) believed that humans and animals were separated by the latter’s lack of reason and an immortal soul.12 Gísli Pálsson, meanwhile, argues that the nature-​culture split did not exist until the Renaissance period.13 The story is undoubtedly more complicated than that. But a broad consensus locates the emergence of the idea of an unbridgeable human-​nature split during the Renaissance, which Enlightenment science further reinforced by transforming nature, including animals, into a mechanistic force, open to human dominance and exploitation.14 The development of social science in nineteenth-​century Europe was then established, according to Timothy Mitchell, “upon a categorical distinction between the ideality of human intentions and purposes and the object world upon which these work.”15 The notion that reason fundamentally separates humans from other beings is therefore historically situated and contingent. It is worth dwelling briefly on the Renaissance, the period in which this idea crystalized in relation to real and imagined animals. According to Erica Fudge, early modern thinkers used animals to generate and consolidate the idea that only humans possessed reason (defined as the ability to assess passions and instincts through thought and then decide whether or not to act on them). They created the rational human in opposition to the supposedly irrational animal. Yet their approach was problematic. The rational soul, the foundation of human-​animal difference, was invisible and so impossible to detect. Other questions caused anxiety: Were humans born with reason, or did they need to be educated to obtain it? Could humans, by giving in to their vices, became bestial and irrational and, therefore, inhuman? More disturbingly, did animals experience similar feelings to human feelings, and were they even superior creatures, given that they knew no vice? These were troubling questions because they undermined the supposedly clear divisions between humans and animals. According to Fudge, it was René Descartes’s philosophical method that quelled such anxieties.16 Descartes argued that the soul, or the thinking, rational self, transcended the body and nature. All humans, unlike animals, innately possessed the ability to reason. As he states in Discourse on Method, “Reason … is the only thing which makes us men [sic] and distinguishes us from animals.”17 Humans could still act irrationally, but this did not undermine their status as intrinsically rational beings for they were merely choosing not to act rationally. Furthermore, Descartes asserted that animals were machines, and, in this sense, there was little to differentiate the monkey from the oyster. Animals had no self-​awareness, so while they could experience pain, they could not feel it. Animals were “automata.”18 In Fudge’s account, Descartes and his ideas are given an enormous amount of power, even if she recognizes that his ideas were not universally accepted.19 Yet she is not alone in arguing that Descartes’s notion of the rational human soul fundamentally changed the way in which Western societies thought about themselves and the rest of the world.20 It is unfair to position Descartes as the poster—​or whipping—​boy of the human-​ animal divide, as the story is far more complex and nuanced.21 Even in the West, there has long been debate, confusion, and anxiety about the boundary between humans and other animals. From animal legal trials in the late medieval period to Darwin’s

 

History and Animal Agencies    243 evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century, scientists and others have debated vehemently the extent of human-​animal kinship. A  particular source of fascination and disquiet has been the similarities between humans and other apes.22 Yet despite these doubts, it is nonetheless striking that rationality is often identified as a defining feature of historical agents. Why has the idea of the nature-​culture split remained so pervasive in modern Western thought and society? Bruno Latour provides one possible answer. He argues in We Have Never Been Modern (1993) that being and becoming modern were founded on the claim that nature is separate from culture. The nature-​culture separation narrative served to highlight modernity’s progress and liberation from natural forces and tradition. Yet modernity simultaneously intensified the proliferation of hybrid forms through science and technology.23 For Latour, nature and society are not givens. Instead, they are created, and to be explained, by the circulating hybrid collective of quasi-​objects and quasi-​subjects. Moderns then simplified, divided, and labeled these nonhuman/​human networks as “society” and “nature.” Perhaps the most powerful idea in We Have Never Been Modern is that “nature and society are not two distinct poles, but one and the same production of successive states of societies, natures, of collectives.”24 Others have joined Latour in challenging the divisions made between humans and nonhumans. Donna Haraway’s “cyborg manifesto” tries to capture boundary-​blurring hybridity and the “joint kinship” between people, animals, and machines.25 Haraway takes her analysis of cross-​species entanglements further in When Species Meet (2008), in which she argues, through an exploration of human-​dog relationships, that human and animal species only exist in relation to one another. Companion species are created in a “dance of relating” in which humans are not the only species with a “face.” It is the reciprocal interminglings that create the partners. Accepting that species co-​shape each other means recognizing that dogs, and other animals, are “actors and not just recipients of action.”26 To give a concrete example, some accounts of animal domestication now recognize that animals played a role in their domestication. Early human societies did not simply coerce wolves into becoming domesticated dogs, or act as “master breeders” who intentionality set out to create the dogs we know today. Instead, the domestication of dogs was a process marked by “unconscious selection” as “both people and wolves took actions for their own short-​term gain” (wolves, particularly calmer ones, followed human camps to scavenge food).27 The domestication of dogs, which played a major role in the development of human societies, was therefore the result of cross-​species entanglements in which animals and humans played a part. Latour’s and Haraway’s attempts to challenge the nature-​culture divide have met with criticism. Bob Carter and Nickie Charles critique the broad conceptionalization of agency in Actor Network Theory’s (ANT), which, they argue, merely shows that “everything affects everything else in some way or another.”28 Noel Castree is similarly troubled by ANT’s leveling out of power relations between human and nonhuman actors.29 His point is a valid one, even though Haraway stresses that cross-​species relating is asymmetrical and that the actors possess different and unequal agencies, and Latour recognizes the importance of human responsibility in transforming the environment.30

 

244   Chris Pearson It is therefore possible to recognize the importance of human agency, and the responsibilities this confers upon our species, within ANT’s and posthumanism’s heterogeneous and dispersed conception of agency. Latour’s and Haraway’s challenging of the human-​nonhuman divide is a necessary move because it opens up intellectual space in which to explore the varied kinds of animal agency and how agency emerges as a property shared among diverse creatures, which the following sections explore.

Animals as History-​Shaping Agents Latour proposes a reconceptualization of agency that moves beyond the prerequisite of self-​reflexivity and intentionality to include all nonhumans: “any thing” that makes a difference to other actors (intentionally or not) can be considered an agent. Things, which might include microbes, machines, or animals, do not in themselves determine outcomes, nor do they act merely as a backdrop for human action.31 Nonhumans engage in transmitting ideas, forms, and possibilities, as well as changing—​or “translating”—​ what they carry. According to Latour, as soon as we allow nonhumans “to enter the collective in the form of new entities with uncertain boundaries, entities that hesitate, quake, and induce perplexity, it is not hard to see that we can grant them the designation of actors.”32 Following Latour, animals become agents when they enable or thwart activities, thereby shaping society and history. The awareness that intentionality and consciousness are not prerequisites of agency has enabled animal historians to position animals as agents. Specific examples include Virginia Anderson’s exploration of the imaginative and physical interactions among livestock, colonists, and Native Americans in shaping the environment and society of early colonial America, and Jonathan Burt’s account of the role of animal bodies in the creation of cinematic techniques.33 As Fudge argues, “Animals may not be aware of the changes they are creating, but those changes are no less real for that.” In other words, there is a distinction “between what might be termed a sense of self-​in-​the-​world, and a capacity to shape that world.”34 Horses provide an excellent example of animals unintentionally shaping the past. Horses (and other animals) have played major economic roles throughout history.35 For instance, horses powered industrial and commercial life in the nineteenth century, by providing an essential way of moving people and goods around urban areas, until the rise of fossil-​fuel-​powered public transportation systems. Fire engines, streetcars, carts, omnibuses, carriages, street sweepers, ambulances, and delivery vehicles all relied on horsepower, as did numerous occupations, such as cabman and farrier. Cities in the United States consequently had high densities of horses: in 1900 (the peak of urban horse populations) northeastern cities had on average 396 horses per square mile; and Midwestern ones, 541. The crucial role of horses in urban economic life was evident to the citizens of Philadelphia when the Great Epizootic, the outbreak of equine influenza that was spreading throughout northeastern cities, hit the city’s horses in autumn 1872,

 

History and Animal Agencies    245 bringing urban life to a virtual standstill. The Philadelphia Inquirer observed that “our business houses have been made to feel the important part played by the horse in the daily routine of business life.” Beyond the cities, horses sustained agriculture by pulling the ploughing, reaping, mowing, and harvesting machines, while horse treadmills powered the vital activities of threshing, baling, and grinding.36 Horses were agents because they made a difference to, and sustained, the nineteenth-​century American economy. Horses have also powered modern warfare. During the First World War, nations on both sides of the Western Front drafted in horses, donkeys, and mules to transport supplies up to the front lines and to pull artillery guns through the mud.37 Despite developments in automobile technology during the war, by the time of the signing of the Armistice, equines still pulled 80 percent of the artillery pieces in the French army.38 Allied and Axis forces then deployed hundreds of thousands of horses, between 1939 and 1945. Among its horse-​borne units, France had three Spahi brigades and five light cavalry divisions, and two-​thirds of its artillery units were drawn by horsepower.39 The majority of German infantry units, meanwhile, relied on horses for their transportation needs: this supposedly modern army ran, in no small part, on horses.40 In contrast to images of fast, efficient, and heavily mechanized Blitzkrieg tactics, animal agency once again supported twentieth-​century “industrialized” warfare between 1939 and 1945. The roles of horses in nineteenth-​century economies and twentieth-​century warfare provide compelling examples of animals shaping histories and societies. Horses were agents in the Latourian sense because they unintentionally made a difference and were recognized as essential by contemporaries: one British commentator on the Western Front observed that “the motor-​mad mechanic may think that his chance has come, but generals who have to lead an army over water-​logged plains … will demand horses.”41 Horses were also memorialized on some war memorials, such as the one at Thiaucourt in the Meurthe-​et-​Moselle department of Northeastern France (Figure 13.1), in recognition of the roles they played between 1914 and 1918. The representation of militarized horses on this memorial is illuminating because it underscores that the agency of horses during the war was thoroughly hybrid and emerged in an unequal relationship with human agents. Humans chose to requisition, train, and deploy the horses on the Western Front and were therefore responsible for bringing horses to the battlefield, where many were wounded or killed. The memorial’s imagery is significant in other ways. Although cavalry charges had largely become obsolete between 1914 and 1918, the horses on this memorial are shown being ridden by humans, suggesting that the ability of horses to sustain warfare relied on human guidance and control. The presence of saddles, harnesses, and carts also indicates that technology was part of the agential mix. Wartime horse agency was not “pure” animal agency. Instead, it was the result of historically specific interminglings between human and nonhuman agents and technology. The same is true for horses in nineteenth-​ century cities. In ANT terminology, horses are part of changing and hybrid networks that might also be referred to as “assemblages” (or, in plainer English, “associations” or “gatherings”).42 David Gary Shaw labels such assemblages “unities,” with a unity constituting “a

 

246   Chris Pearson

Fig.  13.1 Detail from the First World War memorial at Thiaucourt (Meurthe-​et-​Moselle), France. (Photo courtesy of the author.)

temporary but socially significant fusion of sensible things” in which human and nonhuman agents understand each other, thereby acting effectively together. Shaw identifies a horse/​human unity that existed a century before those depicted on the Thiaucourt memorial, between the Duke of Wellington and his horse Copenhagen on the Waterloo battlefield. Through practice, training, and time they learned to become a “unity” that was “united by common training, by common experience, by habituation, all made much deeper by the constant physical contact and the sense that the quality of that contact and communication might make a difference to the ability of man and horse to work with saber and saddle to do the business.”43 The horses and men on the Thiaucourt memorial are anonymous, unlike Wellington and Copenhagen, but they nonetheless depict the unities that were formed between militarized humans and horses during the First World War through cross-​species communication, training and physical contact.44 Finally, First World War horses were agents in that they mediated or changed the unities they co-​constituted by demanding “new modes of action from other actors.”45 Effectively deploying horses meant developing new supply, feeding, and care structures, while the sight of suffering horses affected some soldiers emotionally. Moreover, the ability of horses (and donkeys and mules) to move across the Western Front opened up new possibilities for militaries on both sides of the Western Front, which, in turn,

 

History and Animal Agencies    247 required a response from their opponents. Horses changed, as well as sustained, life on the Western Front. The horses on the Thiaucourt memorial are a small reminder of the significance and hybridity of animal agents. Drawing inspiration from ANT, this section has shown how animals become agents by making a difference and affecting other agents. This model of animal agency decouples agency and intentionality, since anything can become an agent in its relationship to other agents, thereby challenging one of the pillars of human exceptionalism: the Cartesian model of the thinking and calculating human agent. However, the downplaying of intentionality within ANT obscures how animals can be agents when they act in purposeful and capable ways. Exploring how some animals are agents imbued with a degree of intentionality offers an alternative way of questioning human exceptionalism.

Animal Agency and Intentionality Do agents require intentionality? Must they have the ability to reason, calculate, and plan? Some scholars answer yes to these questions. William Sewell, for instance, argues that nonhumans cannot be agents because agents must possess the ability to act with “consciousness, intention, and judgement.”46 For Sewell, agency and intentionality are synonyms. Working within the constraints of structures, the active human agent acts intentionally to manipulate and give meaning to the passive material world.47 Similarly, Ralf Stoecker argues that the linguistic environment in which humans are raised from an early age means that we hold our own and others’ actions to account through “public practical deliberation” or language-​based reasoning; “we make agents responsible for what they do, quite literally, we ask them for arguments that speak in favour of their deeds, and sanction bad or missing answers.” For Stoecker, animals do not perform this social act and so cannot be classed as agents.48 According to such views, thought and language precede action. Humans are able to assess a situation, calculate what action is required, and act accordingly. Furthermore, their thoughts and actions are legible to others, who can hold them to account. Agency thereby becomes legible and open to critical scrutiny by contemporary actors and historians. As philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood argues, the human is “the only animal who thinks, or thinks enough, and clearly enough, to render his [sic] actions the expressions of his [sic] thoughts.” This is why “historians habitually identify history with the history of human affairs.”49 The specter of the Cartesian animal-​machine hovers over such arguments. However, the proposition that only humans can be agents because only they possess rationality and intentionality is beginning to look increasingly shaky. Firstly, Timothy Mitchell, Linda Nash, and others have shown how human intentions, plans, and actions do not take place in an environmental vacuum. Animals, alongside other nonhuman entities, have shaped human ideas and activities, from notions of human health and plans for agricultural development in California to capitalist infrastructure schemes

 

248   Chris Pearson and anti-​malaria campaigns in twentieth-​century Egypt. As Mitchell argues, “ideas and technology” are not “pure forms of thought brought to bear upon the messy world of reality.”50 Human intentionality emerges in relationship with nonhuman agents. Furthermore, humans are less rational and intentional than we might like to think. For over a century, Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytically informed commentators have argued that humans are driven by irrational and unconscious forces, which have sometimes been described as animalistic. As Freud argued in 1909, “we ought not to go so far as to fully neglect the original animal part of our nature.”51 Yet even if we accept that human beings are capable of acting rationally, it is only one characteristic of our species and, as Tim Ingold points out, it is not something that we can do all of the time. In the majority of cases, conscious thought does not precede action.52 While humans are starting to look less intentional and rational, animals are starting to look more so. Ethologists and other scientists now make persuasive claims about animal rationality, consciousness, and language that threaten previously held convictions about human exceptionalism. Recent research, Sandra Mitchell reports, suggests that chimps are “cogitating organisms … They may just not do it the way we do.”53 Researchers on canine psychology, meanwhile, have found that although dogs may lack a theory of mind, they are capable of some degree of intentional action, are able to form mental maps of their environment, learn from others, problem-​solve, communicate with humans and other dogs through body language and vocalization, understand categories (such as “owner”).54 Although this research is hardly flawless, it does seem increasingly likely that certain animals possess some cognitive abilities and can act accordingly, which is a far cry from Descartes’s conceptualization of animals as automata or machines. In this vein, philosopher Helen Steward argues that some animals’ ability to act in nondeterministic ways provides evidence of their agency. As animate beings they have control over their bodily movements in a moment-​to-​moment way and have a degree of choice about how they meet their instinctual needs and wants.55 A hungry domestic cat, for instance, possesses a range of choices about how to secure food and “settle” (in Steward’s terms) her needs: jumping up onto a kitchen table to scavenge titbits, hunting mice and birds in the garden, or pestering her owners. Steward proposes a model of agency that includes animals as agents who have some degree of intentionality. In her view, an agent is a being who can move part or all of her body, possesses “some form of subjectivity,” has “at least some rudimentary types of intentional state,” and is a “settler of matters” in that she is not purely governed by instinct.56 Intentionality, then, is not an exclusive human characteristic, even if humans have a higher capacity for cognitive and rational thought than other animals. Furthermore, animals do not need to speak a language that is comprehensible to humans to be considered skillful agents.57 Intentionality-​based agency is perhaps best treated as a continuum shared by humans and nonhumans of differing abilities. Dogs, apes, cats, and other animals are capable of varying degrees of self-​directed and purposeful action: they become agents in the sense that they are capable of a degree of intentional and self-​ directed action in the environments in which they live and in their relationships with other human and nonhuman agents.

 

History and Animal Agencies    249 However, treating some animals as skilled and purposeful agents presents a significant problem for historians and others working with the methodologies traditionally associated with the humanities and the social sciences, which often rely on analyzing verbal, written, or visual sources. Historians work mainly with human-​generated sources—​archival documents, memoirs, oral histories, films, literary sources, photographs—​and rely on the interpretation of these linguistic and visual traces of the past to formulate their narratives. Animals, even ones with some degree of purpose and intentionality, do not communicate visually or linguistically in ways that historians can understand and interpret. They do not leave behind explanations of their motives, attitudes, and feelings in memoirs, diaries, and newspaper articles, as human agents do. Despite these methodological concerns, some historians suggest that it is possible to access animal agents’ perception of the world. Through a creative reading of primary sources, combined with insights drawn from ethology and other animal sciences, they attempt to explore animals’ sensory experience of the world and their subjectivity, consciousness, and motivation.58 I, however, have serious doubts about historians’ abilities to access the motivations, experiences, and subjectivities of animals and to write history from the animals’ point of view. That does not mean that animals necessarily lack subjectivity or consciousness, but it is unclear to me how we can meaningfully understand the past from animals’ perspectives using the methodological tools of the historian.59 However, subjectivity and consciousness are not analogous to agency.60 It is therefore possible to treat certain animals as purposeful and capable creatures without having to access their subjective experience of the world or write history from their point of view. For instance, Shaw showed how Wellington’s horse Copenhagen was a skilled actor on the Waterloo battlefield without attempting to write the history of that battle from his equine perspective.61 Training manuals and other accounts of dogs on the Western Front can also be read to uncover accounts of them acting in self-​directed ways, albeit mediated through human representations of them. Take, for instance, British War Dogs (1920) by prominent dog breeder and trainer Lt. Col. Edwin Richardson. Richardson selected and reproduced British army reports that suggest that messenger dogs were able to travel independently over relatively large areas and successfully deliver messages in exacting and unfamiliar terrain.62 There is also some indication that messenger dogs were able to learn from each other and to make decisions. For instance, Richardson describes the actions of a group of dogs who he claims were unaware of his presence: They are going back with their messages and are keeping up a steady lop, generally led by the best dog. Suddenly, something will attract one of them, and they may even all stop for a minute. The dog that knows its work best, however, will not tolerate delay, and it soon trots off, and now sets the pace at a fast gallop, which the others are bound to follow.63

Richardson attributed the dogs’ return to their task as the result of their sense of duty and responsibility. We cannot be sure why the dogs did this; they acted in ways that are beyond our precise understanding. But it appears that they were capable of making

 

250   Chris Pearson some kind of decision over what to do in that situation and to learn from each other. It would be easy to dismiss the training manuals as mere cultural representations of dogs that are peppered with anthropomorphic statements concerning dogs’ sense of duty and responsibility. But training manuals do give at least some sense of dogs’ skilled agency. They provide glimpses, however slight and imperfect, of how dogs were capable agents, whose attributes dog trainers had to work with and engage to create army dogs.64 It is possible, therefore, to treat certain animals as purposeful, capable, and intentional agents and to use primary sources to explore how they interacted with other human and nonhuman agents.

Animal Agency as “Resistance” Militarized dogs in World War I did not always act in accordance with their human handler’s wishes. Richardson reported that he “occasionally [found] ‘conscientious objector[s]‌’ amongst his canine recruits.”65 Did these dogs consciously resist Richardson’s control? Can animal agents, especially those capable of some degree of intentional action, be classed as resisters? Many animal studies scholars label noncompliant animal behavior as resistance, inspired by the “new social history” and Michel de Certeau’s analysis of the practice of everyday life. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, for instance, argue that animals display agency when they “destabilize, transgress, or even resist our human orderings.”66 In this vein, Traci Warkentin argues that when dolphins held in captivity at Sea World Orlando in Florida “transgress” the rules of the theme park, such as those about avoiding human touch and stealing food trays, they display agency.67 Similarly, and drawing on James C. Scott’s notion of “weapons of the weak,” Sandra Swart has argued that horses have “resisted” human intentions, plans, and activities throughout modern South African history.68 Shelly R. Scott also identifies acts of improvisation and “resistance” in racehorses when they refuse to follow their jockey’s lead. Shelly employs de Certeau’s analysis of acts of resistance in everyday life to argue that animal agency is “exercised in ways similar to that of colonized peoples, as it must be exerted within domains that do not belong to them. Both oppressed animals and oppressed people deal with limitations imposed on their capacity for agency by rebelliously or subversively exerting their own wills.”69 Jason Hribal pushes the nonhuman-​as-​resister argument furthest when he suggests that animal laborers in capitalist systems, such as urban draft horses, have displayed the “conscious ability” to resist their exploitation.70 Hribal has extended his analysis to circus and zoo animals, who, he argues, “have used their intelligence, ingenuity, and tenacity to overcome the situations and obstacles put before them. Their actions have had intent and purpose … They are choosing to fight back.” However, it is unclear how we can know this. For instance, how can we know that Jumbo, an elephant kept at London zoo, “did not see himself as a machine. Resistance was his new thought”?71 Claiming an insight into how animals experienced and understood their oppression emotionally,

 

History and Animal Agencies    251 physically, and mentally, Hribal turns them into four-​legged agitators to file alongside human radicals and revolutionaries. The desire to show that animals are more than mere victims of human exploitation undoubtedly informs such portrayals of rebellious animals. However, describing animal behavior as resistance is problematic. It risks projecting human motivations onto animals, thereby humanizing them. The “nonhuman-​ as-​resister model perhaps says more about humans’ desires for animal liberation and developments in critical inquiry over the last few decades, such as the interest in resistance as an analytical focus, than it does about the animals themselves. Furthermore, turning animals into resisters downplays the specificity of human resistance and politics, in particular the ability of humans to collectively assess current conditions and to imagine and plan for alternatives. According to Carter and Charles, animals do not display this kind of agency, which involves [a]‌ shared … imagining of other futures. A precondition of this is an evaluation of current circumstances; a possible consequence of it is a collective effort to transform or modify those circumstances. In other words, the recognition of shared life chances, an assessment of their possible causes, and judgements about possible political remedies all require the mobilisation of political, cultural and linguistic resources rather than individual “resistance”; they require an imaging of alternatives. Non-​human animals are not able to accomplish any of these things.72

Although animals share forms of sociability with humans, have forms of language, and can shape the social order, they are not “resisters” because they are unable to use language to deliberate over resources in a symbolic and meaning-​laden way or to articulate visions of alternative futures.73 In other words, they are not political animals and therefore their actions cannot constitute resistance as it is laid out by Scott, de Certeau, and others. So, animals may individually challenge the particular circumstances in which they find themselves in (a horse might throw off an unskilled rider) but this is not resistance in the political sense. In addition, when animals collectively undermine human intentions and projects—​such as when mosquitoes threatened US military operations in the Pacific during World War II—​it is more accurate to describe the behavior in less politically loaded terms than “resistance,” such as “thwarting” or “blocking.” Carter and Charles’s critique of animal agency as resistance, however, does not mean that we should ignore the power relations in which animals are enmeshed. Quite the opposite: for animals’ agency is shaped by their “location within a definite network of social relations,” which allows or constrains the possibilities available to animal agents and the effectiveness of their actions.74 As well as being conceptually problematic, resistance may not always be the most likely explanation for animal behavior. Take the early twentieth-​century history of river rescue dogs on the Seine River in Paris. The Parisian police introduced a team of Newfoundland dogs to prevent drownings. However, their introduction was not a success; the dogs responded indifferently to training and showed a marked reluctance to

 

252   Chris Pearson dive into the river to rescue individuals from the water. This became a matter of public humiliation for the police when Le Matin tested the dogs’ abilities by staging a drowning, during which the dogs refused to jump into the river to affect a rescue. In the months following this debacle, some of the dogs fell ill, and some attacked their owners, leading to the disbandment of the river-​rescue-​dog program. But resistance does not offer an adequate explanation for this failure: poor training techniques, which the police themselves recognized were a problem, are the most likely explanation: deficiencies in the human-​animal training relationship at that time and in that place seemingly led to the dogs’ inability to act effectively.75 In Shaw’s terms, the police and the rescue dogs had not formed an effective “unity.”76 Other instances of animals not acting in the ways their human handlers expect them to, such as horses kicking their owners and refusing to travel along certain routes during World War I, might be better explained as conditioned responses to the battlefield environment, rather than resistance.77 Furthermore, the nonhuman-​as-​resister model of nonhuman agency defines and values the nonhuman world solely for its ability to impede human intentions. It sets up a false dichotomy between “humans” and “animals” by treating them as two opposing factions. It therefore privileges nonhumans’ resistance to human activities at the expense of other cross-​species interactions, such as the ways in which animals’ agency sustains human activities, including the equids who sustained supply and transportation networks on the Western Front. Questioning nonhuman resistance, however, does not mean that we should ignore episodes when animals, individually or in groups, act in ways that disrupt human plans, intentions, and activities. Nor does it mean that scholars should overlook how human actors have transformed real animals into symbols of resistance: antimilitary protesters’ mobilization of sheep to challenge the French military’s expansion of the Larzac army base in South Western France between 1971 and 1981 is a striking example of how humans imbue animals with resistance qualities.78 But the questioning of nonhuman resistance does mean searching for other explanations of breakdowns in human-​nonhuman unities and deploying less anthropomorphic and politicized terminology.

Conclusion Drawing on the work of Latour, Haraway, and others, I have argued that animals display a diverse range of agencies. Depending on their species, relationships to other agents (human and nonhuman), and the circumstances in which they live, animals display agency by making a difference through allowing or blocking historical processes or by acting with a degree of intentionality. This agency is always relational, emerging or disintegrating in relationship to other agencies. As Edwin Sayes argues, “Nonhumans do not have agency by themselves, if only because they are never by themselves.”79 Care is needed, however, when analyzing nonhuman agency. In particular, uncovering

 

History and Animal Agencies    253 instances of intentional nonhuman agency is fraught with methodological difficulties, and labeling nonhuman agency as “resistance” is deeply problematic. But, although there are clear limits to what we can know about animal agencies, it does not mean that historians should abandon attempts to uncover animals’ influence and abilities so as to better understand the hybrid world in which we live and to challenge human exceptionalism.

Notes 1. “Panier à salade pour chiens,” Le Matin, January 29, 1904. 2. Sarah Whatmore, “Humanism’s Excess: Some Thoughts on the ‘Post-​human/​ist’ Agenda,” Environment and Planning A 36 (2004):  1360–​ 1363; Sarah Whatmore, “Materialist Returns: Practising Cultural Geography in and for a More-​Than-​Human World,” Cultural Geographies 13 (2006): 600–​609. 3. On cross-​species shaping, see Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History:  Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Dominique Lestel, L’animalité (Paris:  L’Herne, 2007), 91–​92; and Felipe Fernández-​ Armesto, So You Think You’re Human? A Brief History of Humankind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 4. Wild animals do possess agency. As Jennifer Adams Martin argues, “By avoiding people in the water, sharks also may show agency-​in-​the-​world as these animals navigate their own life histories beyond human detection or expectations.” See “When Sharks (Don’t) Attack: Wild Animal Agency in Historical Narratives,” Environmental History 16 (2011): 454. 5. Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 113. See also Julia Adams, “1-​800-​How-​Am-​I-​Driving? Agency in Social Science History,” Social Science History 35 (2011): 1–​17. 6. William H. Sewell, “A Theory of Structure:  Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (1992): 19. 7. Jean-​Marie Schaeffer, La fin de l’exception humaine (Paris:  Gallimard, 2007), 26–​27; Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (Abington: Routledge, 2000), 15. 8. Philippe Descola, Par-​delà Nature et Culture (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2005), 13. 9. Nurit Bird-​ David, “‘Animism’ Revised:  Personhood, Environment and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology 40 (1999): S67–​S91. See also Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 15. 10. Descola, Par-​delà Nature et Culture, 26. 11. Descola, Par-​delà Nature et Culture, 99–​102. 12. Joyce. E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1994), 8–​9. 13. Gísli Pálsson, “Human-​ Environmental Relations:  Orientalism, Paternalism and Communalism,” in Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson (London: Routledge, 1996), 65–​66. 14. Noel Castree, Nature (Abington:  Routledge, 2005), 226; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature:  Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco:  Harper and Row, 1980).

 

254   Chris Pearson 15. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-​Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002), 29. See also Helen Steward, A Metaphysics for Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 73. 16. Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning:  Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 39–​146. 17. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (London: Penguin, 1968), 27. 18. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 73. 19. Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 174. 20. According to Schaeffer, Descartes is the modern founder of human exceptionalism. Schaeffer, Fin de l’exception humaine, 68. For Geneviève Lloyd, he succeeded in equating human nature with rationality, thereby placing the nonrational in the material world. See The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen & Co., 1984), 45–​47. See also Linda Kalof, Looking at Animals in Human History (London:  Reaktion, 2007), 97–​98. On the impact and influence of Descartes’s ideas, see Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment:  Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (1650-​1750) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Roger Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences (London:  Fontana, 1997), 127–​145; and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World:  Changing Attitudes in England 1500-​1800 (London:  Penguin, 1983), 32–​35. 21. For a defense of Descartes’s attitudes toward animals see Peter Harrison, “Descartes on Animals,” Philosophical Quarterly 42 (1992): 219–​227. 22. Salisbury, Beast Within, 39; Harriet Ritvo, “Border Trouble:  Shifting the Line between People and Other Animals,” Social Research 62 (1995):  481–​500; Gregory Radick, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 23. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Linda Nash helpfully sums up Latour’s conceptualization of modernity as “a story we have told ourselves about the separation of human beings from nature.” Inescapable Ecologies:  A  History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 209. 24. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 139. 25. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–​181. 26. Haraway, When Species Meet, 134. 27. Russell, Evolutionary History, 58–​60. For an overview of theories of dog domestication, see Ádám Miklósi, Dog Behaviour, Evolution and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chap. 5. 28. Bob Carter and Nickie Charles, “Animals, Agency and Resistance,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43 (2013): 322–​340. 29. See Noel Castree, “False Antitheses? Marxism, Nature, and Actor-​Networks,” Antipode 34 (2002): 134–​135. See also Colin Barron, ed., “A Strong Distinction between Humans and Non-​Humans Is No Longer Required for Research Purposes: A Debate between Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller,” History of the Human Sciences 16 (2003): 77–​99. For a defense of ANT, see Edwin Sayes, “Actor-​Network Theory and Methodology: Just What Does It Mean to Say That Nonhumans Have Agency?” Social Studies of Science 44 (2014): 134–​149.

 

History and Animal Agencies    255 30. Haraway, When Species Meet, 262–​263; Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45 (2014): 1–​18. 31. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social:  An Introduction to Actor-​ Network-​ Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005), 71. 32. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 76. See also Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 33. Virginia de John Anderson, Creatures of Empire:  How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion, 2002). Literary scholars are also trying to accord animals a more active role in the texts. See Philip Armstrong, “What Animals Mean, in Moby-​Dick, for Example,” Textual Practice 19 (2005): 93–​111. 34. Erica Fudge, “The History of Animals,” H-​ Animal Discussion Network online, Ruminations 1, May 25, 2006, p. 2, http://​h-​net.org/​~animal/​ruminations_​fudge.html. See also Reassembling the Social, in which Latour argues that “action is not done under the full control of consciousness” (44). 35. For an illuminating exposition of animals’ economic role, see Alan Mikhail, “Unleashing the Beast:  Animals, Energy, and the Economy of Labor in Ottoman Egypt,” American Historical Review 118 (2013): 318. 36. Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 166–​177, 191–​194. See also Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 37. In the first twelve days of the war, the UK mobilized 165,000 horses. Numbers reached a peak in August 1917, when the British army had 368,000 horses and 82,000 mules on the Western Front. Sidney Galtrey, The Horse and the War (London: Country Life and George Newnes, 1918), 16; John Singleton, “Britain’s Military Use of Horses, 1914-​1918,” Past and Present 139 (1993):  190. The German cavalry mobilized 715,000 horses when war broke out, while the French army requisitioned 700,000 equines. Dorothee Brantz, “Environments of Death: Trench Warfare on the Western Front, 1914–​1918,” in War and the Environment: Military Destruction in the Modern Age, ed. Charles E. Closmann (College Station: Texas A&M University, 2009), 85; Damien Baldin, “Les animaux en guerre: animaux soldats et bestiaire de guerre (1914–​1918),” in La guerre des animaux, 1914-​1918, ed. Damien Baldin (Peronne: Historial de la Grande Guerre, 2007), 17. 38. Baldin, “Animaux en guerre,”18. 39. Jean Doise and Maurice Vaïse, Diplomatie et outil militaire, 1871–​1991: politique étrangère de la France (1987; Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992), 723. 40. R. L. DiNardo, Mechanized Juggernaut or Military Anachronism? Horses and the German Army of World War II (1991; Mechanicsberg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2008). 41. Albert J. Frost, The Shire Horse in Peace and War (London: Vinton & Company, 1915), 121–​122. 42. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 2; Sayes, “Actor-​Network Theory,” 140. 43. David Gary Shaw, “The Torturer’s Horse: Agency and Animals in History,” History and Theory 52, no. 4 (2013): 161, 163. 44. On the bonds between militarized horses and humans, see Gervase Philips, “Writing Horses into American Civil War History,” War in History 20 (2013): 165–​169.

 

256   Chris Pearson 45. Sayes, “Actor-​Network Theory,” 138. 46. William H. Sewell, “Nature, Agency, and Anthropocentrism,” “Steinberg:  History Forums,” American Historical Review, July 2, 2002, accessed at www.historycooperative. org/​phorum/​read.php?13,271,271. 47. For a critique of this view, see Iordanis Marcoulatos, “Rethinking Intentionality: A Bourdieuian Perspective,” in How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition, ed. Yrjö Haila and Chuck Dyke (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 127–​149. 48. Ralf Stoecker, “Why Animals Can’t Act,” Inquiry 52 (2009): 266, 269. 49. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 213. 50. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 52; and Nash, Inescapable Ecologies. Similar arguments can be made about how “things” shape human ideas and plans. Ewa Domanska, “The Material Presence of the Past,” History and Theory 45 (2006):  337–​348; Carl Knappett, Thinking Through Material Culture:  An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 51. Sigmund Freud, “About Psychoanalysis:  Five Lectures Given at the 20th Anniversary Celebration of the Founding of Clark University in Worcester, Mass.,” September 1909, accessed at www.rasch.org/​over.htm, February 9, 2011. 52. Tim Ingold, “The Animal in the Study of Humanity,” in What Is an Animal?, ed. Tim Ingold (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 95. 53. Sandra D. Mitchell, “Anthropomorphism and Cross-​Species Modeling,” in Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, ed. Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (New York: Colombia University Press, 2005), 104. For an overview of philosophical and scientific research into animal rationality, see Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds, eds. Rational Animals? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Fernández-​Armesto, So You Think You’re Human?, 9–​36. 54. Ikuma Adachi, Hiroko Kuwahata, and Kazuo Fujita, “Dogs Recall Their Owner’s Face upon Hearing the Owner’s Voice,” Animal Cognition 10 (2007):  17–​21; Nicole Chapuis and Christian Varlet, “Short Cuts by Dogs in Natural Surroundings,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 39B (1987): 49–​64; Alexandra Horowitz, “Attention to Attention in Domestic Dog (Canis familiaris) Dyadic Play,” Animal Cognition 12 (2009): 107–​118; Friederike Range, Zsófia Viranyi, and Ludwig Huber, “Selective Imitation in Domestic Dogs,” Current Biology 17 (2007): 868–​872. 55. Helen Steward, “Animal Agency,” Inquiry 52 (2009): 226. 56. Steward, “Animal Agency,” 226. 57. Ingold, “Introduction,” in What Is an Animal?, ed. Ingold, 10; Mark Okrent, Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); Lestel, Animalité, 69; Shaw, “Torturer’s Horse,” 156. 58. For a thoughtful discussion of the possibilities and problems of taking animals’ perspectives into account, see Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts,” History and Theory 52 (2013): 13–​28. See also Eric Baratay, Le point de vue animal: une autre version de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 2012); Philips, “Writing Horses”; Sandra Swart, Riding High: Horses, Humans, and History in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010); Jukka Nyyssönon and Anna-​Kaisa Salmi, “Towards a Multitangled Study of Reindeer Agency, Overlapping Environments, and Human-​Animal Relationships,” Arctic Anthropology 50 (2013): 40–​51; Brett L. Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). For a useful analysis of the history of human attempts to understand the motivations

 

History and Animal Agencies    257 and consciousness of nonhumans, see Lorraine Daston, “Intelligences: Angelic, Animal, Human,” in Daston and Mitman, Thinking with Animals, 37–​58. 59. In taking this approach, I side with Thomas Nagel in his famous essay “What Is It like to Be a Bat?” in which he argues that although it may be impossible for humans to experience and describe what it is like to be a bat, that does not mean that bats (or other creatures) lack consciousness and subjective experiences. Nagel’s 1974 essay, originally published in Philosophical Review, is reproduced in Philosophy: Basic Reading, ed. Nigel Warburton (London: Routledge, 2005), 422–​433. 60. Steward, “Animal Agency,” 72. 61. Shaw, “Torturer’s Horse.” 62. Edwin H. Richardson, British War Dogs:  Their Training and Psychology (London: Skeffington & Son, 1920), 56, 82–​90. 63. Richardson, British War Dogs, 90. 64. I explore these issues more fully in Chris Pearson, “Dogs, History and Agency,” History and Theory 52 (2013): 128–​145. 65. Richardson, British War Dogs, 61. 66. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, “Animal Spaces, Beastly Places,” in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-​Animal Relations, ed. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (London: Routledge, 2000), 5. 67. Warkentin, “Whale Agency: Affordances and Acts of Resistance in Captive Environments,” in Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, ed. Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 32–​35. 68. Swart, Riding High, 198–​202. 69. Shelly R. Scott, “The Racehorse as Protagonist: Agency, Independence, and Improvisation,” in McFarland and Hediger, Animals and Agency, 47. 70. Jason Hribal, “Animals, Agency, and Class: Writing the History of Animals from Below,” Human Ecology Review 14 (2007): 101–​112. 71. Jason Hribal, Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance (Petrolia, CA: CounterPunch, 2010), 33, 151. 72. Carter and Charles, “Animals, Agency and Resistance,” 333. 73. Carter and Charles, “Animals, Agency and Resistance,” 333–​335. 74. Carter and Charles, “Animals, Agency and Resistance,” 336. 75. Chris Pearson, “Beyond Resistance:  Nonhuman Agency for a ‘More-​ Than-​ Human’ World,” European Review of History/​Revue européenne d’histoire 22:5 (2015): 709–​725. 76. Shaw, “Torturer’s Horse.” 77. Pearson, “Beyond Resistance.” 78. Chris Pearson, “Remembering Resistance: Exploring the ‘More-​than-​Human’ Memorial Landscapes at Larzac and the Vercors, France,” Cultural History 2 (2013): 199–​212. 79. Sayes, “Actor-​Network Theory,” 144; emphasis in the original.

 

Chapter 14

What Was I t L i ke to Be a  C ow? History and Animal Studies Erica Fudge

In The Utility and Liability of History (1874), Friedrich Nietzsche presents animals in seemingly contradictory relationships with history. In the first paragraph of the first section of the work, he advises his reader: Observe the herd as it grazes past you: it cannot distinguish yesterday from today, leaps about, eats, sleeps, digests, leaps some more, and carries on like this from morning to night and from day to day, tethered by the short leash of its pleasures and displeasures to the stake of the moment, and thus it is neither melancholy nor bored. It is hard on the human being to observe this, because he boasts about the superiority of his humanity over animals and yet looks enviously upon their happiness—​for the one and only thing that he desires is to live like an animal, neither bored nor in pain, and yet he desires this in vain, because he does not desire it in the same way as does the animal. The human being might ask the animal: “Why do you just look at me like that instead of telling me about your happiness?” The animal wanted to answer, “Because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say”—​but it had already forgotten this answer and hence said nothing, so that the human being was left to wonder.1

“Thus the animal,” Nietzsche writes in the next paragraph, “lives ahistorically, for it disappears entirely into the present, like a number that leaves no remainder.” This ahistorical existence, he argues, is the nature of animals, a nature that the human “envies”: for the latter, forgetfulness is a state to be desired, as the past “weighs him down or bends him over.”2 Later in the text Nietzsche uses animals again in two images to explain what he regards as the destructive potential of history. History, he writes in the first, is dissection:3 “all living things… . cease to live when they have been totally dissected, and they

 

What Was It Like to Be a Cow?    259 live a pained and sickly life as soon as we begin to practice historical dissection on them.” He illustrates the outcome of such dissection by turning to the belief in the “healing power of German music among the Germans.” This, he writes, is destroyed when “men such as Mozart and Beethoven… . are forced by the torture system of historical criticism to answer a thousand impertinent questions.” The questions and the “trivialities” that emerge from biographical research do away with “those vital effects [which] are by no means exhausted” by physical being: in short, the “historical sensibility… . robs existing things of that atmosphere in which alone they are able to live.”4 The historian, in this image, is a kind of vivisector: in order to understand life, he (and he is male) cuts it up using a method that is deathly. If we follow through the logic of the image here, animals are figured as passive victims of human experimentation and inquiry. Already as if dead even before they are cut up, they play no active role in the making of knowledge. The second image, which follows fast on the heels of the previous one, moves in a very different direction. Writing of the “sober, pragmatic lust for the new” of “modern biographers,” Nietzsche argues that they render “every ghostly actio in distans [distanced action] impossible,” leaving only objective fact. He then adds an analogy for emphasis: the biographer destroys the transcendent “just as the most wretched animal can prevent the mightiest oak tree from coming into existence by eating the acorn from which it should sprout.”5 Here the animal is no longer the figure of the victim of historical inquiry, but of the historian. And while the actions of the historian and the animal might exist on different planes—​historical work can take away “the mysterious cloud of vapor” which “all living things” need, while eating an acorn ends a potential tree—​what the analogy is premised on is the power to impact the world possessed by both. No longer living an ahistorical life, or in the position of a passive victim, even “the most wretched animal” here is a small but powerful force.6 There are, of course, great differences between Nietzsche’s ideas and the mainstream of contemporary historiography: for one, while current historians of animals are trying to argue for animals’ historicity, their ahistorical life is a positive mode of being for Nietzsche;7 for another, few historians would think of themselves as performing a task analogous to a vivisector—​quite the contrary: they might, rather, think of themselves as attempting to give life to the dead rather than destroying it with their work.8 But Nietzsche’s text touches on issues that remain current in historiography, particularly as it engages with animals. First, the idea that the historical sense is linked to the possession of reason is an often unexplored assumption in history: we continue, too often, to believe that historical-​ness is equated with human-​ness, and fail to think of animals as also living historical existences, and about the implications of that.9 Second, even while representing animals as living ahistorical lives, Nietzsche notes that we humans long to be able to communicate with them (to understand their “happiness”), and that our failure to do this leaves us wondering. Maybe this wonder is what animal historians are acting on? And third, even while noting their inability to remember (an orthodox point with a classical heritage10), Nietzsche recognizes that animals have had, and will continue to have, an impact on the world around them. This, again, is an issue that has been taken up by contemporary historians.

 

260   Erica Fudge Nietzsche’s ideas can, then, be read as elucidating some motivations for and foci of current work in the history of animals. This is a field that is rapidly expanding: there has certainly been a seismic shift from how things were in 1992 when Malcolm Chase could note “the rather lonely eminence” of Keith Thomas’s book Man and the Natural World.11 Since that time that loneliness has ceased, and historians of animals find themselves in good and varied company. Indeed, so varied is the company that some of those whose work I will be discussing here would not think of themselves as historians of animals. This is because one of the impacts of the emergence of animal studies over the past twenty-​five years has been that more and more historians, from a range of the discipline’s subfields, are acknowledging the need to take animals seriously. Or, to put it another way, as equine historian Sandra Swart has written, historians are coming to recognize and address two interrelated things: that “history was made with horse power; and equally the horses were shaped by human history.”12 These animals are not Nietzsche’s passive victims of dissection but are active, world-​producing beings. In what follows I will attempt to outline where the history of animals is now, and where it might go. None of the issues I focus on is found only in historical work: questions of representation, agency, point of view, and the nature of primary sources can be encountered in other disciplines’ engagements with animals. But thinking about these issues within the frame of historiography not only opens up new ways of thinking about how, and why, we might want to write the history of animals, it also offers new ways of addressing some key concerns in animal studies generally. The point of departure for this essay was an apparently simple question: what was it like to be a cow?13 This was what I asked when, following the philosopher’s advice, I observed the herd and wondered. The response I got when I asked my question was very different from the silence experienced by Nietzsche’s human.

History, Representation, Ethology A central concern of much work in the history of animals over the past fifteen years has been to what extent we humans can ever come to know, or understand, the animals of the past when the documents we have access to, and from which we build our histories, were written by humans. That is: whether we like it or not, do our sources remain at a distance from the real animals they represent, telling only human stories, in human terms?14 If this is the case one might ask: what is the point of the history of animals? Is it simply another kind of human history, or another manifestation of humanism in disguise?15 Dipesh Chakrabarty defines “humanist histories” as “histories that produce meaning through an appeal to our capacity not only to reconstruct but… . to reenact in our own minds the experience of the past.”16 In such an understanding humans are inevitably central, and the fact that those humans lived, worked, thought with, and ate animals, makes the history of animals an important addition to but, ultimately, just another way of doing human—​humanist—​history.

 

What Was It Like to Be a Cow?    261 But the inevitable centrality of humans in the histories that they write does not completely close down the possibility of thinking about animals. Histories of animals that rely on human representations can still broaden our understanding of the past to include animals as animals, rather than only as human tools or ideas, and so can give us glimpses of life that would otherwise remain invisible. Thus, while the “essentially economistic” field of agricultural history tends to focus on animals only insofar as they offer a way of understanding particular farming practices, or changes in patterns of consumption,17 an animal history of agriculture—​that is, a history that presents animals as being more than backdrops to, and props in, human affairs—​can enable us to think about how livestock animals changed the environments and the cultures they lived within;18 or how humans and animals lived together in emotional as well as economic relationships.19 Such readings offer revised visions of the past that bring the presence of animals to the fore. To extend the earlier theatrical metaphor: such work recognizes animals as actors. Many important studies have appeared that have used such human representations to construct pictures of worlds that have previously been ignored or marginalized. So when Diana Donald begins her analysis of the visual representation of animals in the period 1750–​1850 with the sentence, “This is a book about a single animal species: the human race,” she is not closing down discussion about non-​human animals.20 Rather, from her study of human ideas a sense of the contradictory nature of the perceptions and representations of animals in the period emerges that brings to the fore the experience, not just the depiction, of those animals.21 Brett Mizelle pushes the point a little further in his study of “Grizzly” Adams. He, like Donald, recognizes that “we have, of course, no direct access to the animals’ perspective,” but from the “human-​generated sources about Adams and his bears,” we can, he suggests, “begin to escape the human perspective and foreground the animal side of human-​animal relationships in history.”22 Likewise, Hilda Kean uses the diary kept by the late eighteenth-​and early nineteenth-​ century navigator Matthew Flinders, which details the life of his cat Trim on board ship, to argue for the possibility of getting beyond representation in our histories of animals. She writes: “Although we know about Trim because of the written account by Flinders, I would suggest that we also know about Trim because his own behavior was distinctive: he was not simply a construct of the naval commander.”23 Such a statement is not, of course, without difficulties. It could be argued that what is regarded as “distinctive” in the sources the historian relies on is a human and not a feline idea. Or it could be proposed that Flinders might be telling tall tales about Trim—​ exaggerating, and thus leaving the real cat beyond the reach of the record. Such suggestions can be addressed in three ways that all remind us that, while animals might throw up particular problems for the historian, many of those problems are actually problems of history in general and not specifically of the history of animals. First, any document is always written from a particular perspective, restricting or biasing the view of human as well as animal subjects.24 Second, having faith in one’s documentary sources—​believing that, within reason, they tell what was thought to have happened—​is a necessary (albeit not unproblematic) part of all historical work.25 And third, even when humans rather than animals are the historian’s focus, there is an important leap to be made from

 

262   Erica Fudge a particular document to a more comprehensive understanding and narration of the logic of behavior, let alone interior motivation. Thus the difficulties in narrating animal behavior and its motivation may not be so different from narrating human behavior and its motivation in history26—​although differences do, of course, remain (I return to these). Indeed, in his book The Animal in Ottoman Europe, Alan Mikhail notes that the problem facing animal historians as they attempt to “enter the dog world… . in many ways points to the basic task of any historian—​understanding how historical subjects experienced the past.”27 Such a recognition begins to unmake the boundary that appears to separate human from animal studies; that, for Nietzsche (as for many in the humanities), places the human on one side of the fence and the herd on the other. To assist in this reclaiming of glimpses of the real animal from historical representations more and more historians are turning to animal welfare science, and to the work of ethologists: “though they are mediated by people,” Aaron Skabelund notes, “the very behaviors of animal species… . can be used as sources.”28 Thus, in his history of wolves in Japan, Brett L. Walker proposes that “the expression of animal emotions, expression that might be recorded by the discerning eye of the naturalist, can be read by the historian as a kind of ‘text’ with which to give animals greater agency in historical narrative.”29 Similarly, in her history of performing elephants in America, Susan Nance writes that “as historians we can take elephants as elephants without needing to know definitively what a given elephant’s intentions or internal experience was at every moment.” To do this she proposes using “recent ethological and animal welfare science research… . as a theoretical base for the interpretation of historical elephants.”30 But this use of ideas from animal welfare science “does require some caution,” she advises, as “different environments or communities of captivity will produce different kinds of animals and people, and humans use those processes to produce human cultures and identities.”31 Science, we must remember, is itself historically and culturally constructed for a particular reason; it is not a source of objective “truth.” With that caveat, however, the findings of the work of animal welfare scientists and ethologists can be used as a way of adding to the interpretation of historical evidence—​the legal documents, newspaper stories, photographs, and so on—​and may be a means whereby glimpses of animals in the past can be extended into more detailed observation.32 This shift away from the idea that historical animals are only available as human representations to a reading that recognizes the potential to see something of real animals has other implications. One is in relation to animal agency, which becomes more important as animal behavior is recognized as meaningful. This is not, automatically, to assume that agency equates to individuality—​the humanization of animals is not the only possible outcome here. One could counter such a suggestion by, for example, pointing to Thing Theory, which underlines the agency of even the insentient objects we encounter, or to Actor Network Theory which emphasizes the networks of humans, animals, buildings, clothing, trees, and so on, by which and in which identity is formed.33 The history of animals has in the main, however, followed the direction already taken by history more generally:34 it assumes, as Mikhail puts it succinctly, that “self-​reflexive intentionality is not a prerequisite to historical agency.”35 This sets the discussion about

 

What Was It Like to Be a Cow?    263 individuality to one side, but what is crucial in this conception is that it allows that animals—​wittingly or otherwise—​played a role in constructing the past.36

Agency, Archives, and the Worlds of Animals To say that animals are agents, when agency is understood as not automatically requiring “self-​reflexive intentionality,” is to recognize what has been known by anyone who has ever worked with or lived with an animal: they are not simply objects to be shunted around and counted, but subjects to be negotiated with. Thus, the diary of the seventeenth-​century English clergyman Ralph Josselin is full of references to the facility horses provided for travel and to the—​inseparable—​dangers of undertaking a journey that reveal the active and sometimes, perhaps, recalcitrant nature of animals. The very powerful presence of horses is made clear from less than three weeks of diary entries in 1644, when Josselin records the following: September: 23: I heard that Major Cletheroe, September: 21. coming homewards at Redgewell his Horse stumbled and fell downe upon him, and brake his bowells, he was taken up and spake but he dyed about 4 or 5 houres after… . [September 26]… . my uncle shepheard had a fall from his Horse… . October. I:… . god good to mee in keeping mee safe from stumbling and falling, and from hurt at Gosfeild gate, where my Horse rushd my foote upon the gatepost. [October  3] God good to mee in my jorney to Colchester homewards and outwards: in Colchester I saw a child beate downe with the packe of an horse and the horse passed by without doing it any hurt… . Oct: 7:… . I found god had gratiously kept my daughter Mary who was strucke with a Horse her apron rent of with his nayles. and her handcherchiefe rent and yett shee had no hurt, many thought shee had been spoyled… . 11: Went to my Lady Honywoods… . my Lady had a man that broke his shoulder with a fall from his horse, my loving neighbour goodman Burton escaped a great danger his mare kickt him backwards upon his belly. it begun to swell, oh gods protection and providence to be adored… .37

As the last phrase about God’s providence underlines, Josselin did not list the dangers of horses because of an obsession with the perils of travel, or a private hippophobia (both of which might have been well-​founded given the apparently hazardous nature of road travel in the early modern period). Rather, his and others’ encounters with horses are included in his spiritual diary because they are reminders to him of the powerful impact of the Fall on human life and so, by extension, are evidence of God’s power and his goodness: people encounter “great danger” but can escape; and even death is a work of a providential

 

264   Erica Fudge design. Thus, the horses are agents of God (they reveal His presence and grace) and of humans (who use them to travel over longer distances than is possible on foot), and they are agents as horses (who can carry and trot, but also stumble, fall, strike, and kick). For Josselin these three distinct realms—​divine, human, and natural—​are inseparable and inevitable, and this is how he makes sense of his (or rather God’s) universe. But even while doing this, what Josselin’s diary shows us, if we look, is not only his perception of the power of the Almighty and of the dangers humans encountered in the more-​than-​human world, but also the situations into which horses were put and their responses to those situations. We see agency, in short, as being possessed by all the parties. The spiritualization of nature we find in Josselin’s diary is, of course, less common in present-​day historiography;38 and his reading of the place of humans in the natural world is at odds with current ideas that emphasize humanity’s embeddedness in nature, rather than distinction from it.39 In this way, Josselin’s diary reminds us that the concept of agency, like animal welfare science and ethology, is historically constructed. In a vision of the universe dominated by his Protestant faith, Josselin understands his place in nature, and the actions of animals, as ordained by God; much current theory is rather different—​emphasizing networks rather than a single pivot, for example. To avoid the dangers of anachronism in our application of theoretical concepts, therefore, all models of animal agency must be understood as historically specific and contingent: we must keep the historical worldviews we encounter to the fore in our analyses, even as we acknowledge the nature of the worldviews we are using to help us to interpret them. But thinking about how we read does not only require care over the use of contemporary theoretical ideas to interpret the past; it can also be about the position we take in relation to our sources in broader terms. Terry Eagleton’s interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s call for a history that rubs “against the grain” offers useful insight into how this might work not only for human liberation, but also for the history of animals:40 [Benjamin’s] One-​Way Street contrasts the aerial view of a terrain, in which “the passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape,” with the same prospect seen on foot: the view from on foot brushes the smooth continuity of the aerial view against the grain, so to speak, opening up irregular perspectives and sudden clearings concealed from the deceptively homogeneous vantage-​point of the flier.41

Eagleton’s description of reading “against the grain” is fortunate for historians of animals, as it brings together historiography and the natural world in a particular way. The aerial view—​omniscient, God-​like—​is replaced by the view from ground level, which might be translated as the perspective taken from a position alongside animals.42 We are looking, perhaps—​to return to Josselin—​at the difference between a divine reading (aerial and omniscient) and a more-​than-​human one (on the ground, stumbling along beside the horses). This new position might allow us to read some of the documents of the past as revealing more than might appear: it might open up “irregular perspectives and sudden clearings,” as Eagleton put it. Thus, for example, early modern English legal documents

 

What Was It Like to Be a Cow?    265 include animals as objects: as property that can be given a value, inherited, sold, stolen, and so on. And the law of “deodand” proposes that, even when an animal causes the death of or injury to a person, it is does not have the status of legal subject but is, rather, an owned object, with the onus placed on the human owner to control his or her possession. Such assumptions would seem to reflect a “smooth continuity” in a mindset premised on human distinction: from an aerial perspective, it posits that we are subject, they are object. However, a different reading—​a reading “against the grain”—​brings the irregularities into focus. The naming of a cow in an early modern, for example, or the careful bequeathing of an aged animal, offer glimpses of relationships that appear to go beyond that of simply owning subject and owned object and thus disrupt that too-​ straightforward opposition. Not only is the testator revealing his or her close, personal engagement with an animal: what’s to say that, in such a context, bequeathing livestock isn’t about caring for the animal as much as it is about caring for the human recipient of the bequest? And in the trial of a vicious dog, it is represented as an object that should have been controlled by its owner, a legal provision based on the belief that the owner is liable because he or she should know their animal’s character. But the idea that an animal possesses a character would seem to exceed its status as an object.43 Thus, legal documents appear to restrict the possibility of animal agency through their objectification of them; but, at the same time, these same documents contain glimpses of something else. Walking alongside rather than taking an omniscient aerial view—​in this instance, thinking with the people who live with the animals rather than only with those who theorize them—​might give us more opportunity to see this other picture. Living alongside animals is not, of course, always a domestic encounter, and wild, rather than domesticated, animals, present particular difficulties for the historian. In his study of human-​tiger interactions in the early modern and modern Malay world, for example, Peter Boomgaard notes that the archive skews the picture, making some aspects of these animals’ lives very difficult to trace: One has to look hard at the voluminous literature on tigers in order to find indications that tigers were not always and not everywhere looked upon as deadly enemies. On theoretical grounds it could be argued that the literature at our disposal is biased against such information, and that peaceful coexistence between humans and tigers is therefore underreported.44

Jennifer Adams Martin likewise notes how sharks are frequently chronicled only in their violent encounters with humans, and that the lives they lead when they do not encounter them, or when they steer clear of them, go unnoticed and unrecorded: “these animals navigate their own life histories beyond human detection or expectations.” And even when they are viewed in “their own worlds” via the modern technique of observation from the safety of a shark cage, Martin writes, a respectful silence (a refusal to attempt to represent the “ineffable, impenetrable, implacable”) itself conveys animal passivity: the human response denies “the historicity, diversity, and agency of wild animals” by emphasizing “the impossibility of mutual comprehension.”45

 

266   Erica Fudge Martin’s final point is crucial: a belief in the inability to communicate with animals—​even if intended in a respectful way—​closes down possibilities for understanding, and animals can be, as a result, relegated to the “ineffable,” a transcendent category that is denied as much as it denies interpretation. This is a Nietzschean view, in which “the herd” can act as an individual (“it is neither melancholy nor bored”), and with which no interspecific conversation is possible.46 From this perspective, the encounters that take place between actual animals and humans disappear, emerging from the darkness—​like the shark—​only at moments of violence. But this does not reflect the reality of life for many humans and wild animals who live in close proximity. The environmental historian Mahesh Rangarajan, for example, has written not of the impossibility of comprehending wild animals, but of the necessary adaptation of both animals and humans to each other. Taking the lion and human populations of the Gir Forest in Gujarat as his example, he proposes that such adaptations allow us to recognize not just that humans’ and animals’ lives are entangled, but also that “these lions exhibit a capacity (which humans had liked to think was theirs alone) of perhaps remembering and analyzing events and then passing on that knowledge to younger members of the prides.”47 Boomgaard likewise argues that “tigers learn from experience and…. the lessons learned are transmitted from one generation to the other.”48 In this context it can be said, Rangarajan proposes, that “Animals too make their histories, not as they will it, but via interaction with humans who share their landscapes.”49 This might appear to relegate animals to passive roles, but the silent invocation of Marx offers another perspective. Marx wrote: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.”50 Rangarajan’s echoing of this famous quotation thus serves not to separate animals from humans, but to move them closer together. History is not freely constructed by any species; it is made within the limitations of circumstances—​economic, geographical, social, and so on. Animals are, in this, just like the humans, who are also adapting to circumstances, some of which are the actions of other species. Utilizing the ideas of another nineteenth-​century thinker, Brett L. Walker comes to a similar conclusion about animals’ engagement with the past: “As I see them, the implications of Darwin’s work are that advanced social animals such as wolves also experience historical lives.”51 Far from confirming Nietzsche’s conception of animals as ahistorical, works such as these reinforce the sense that it is possible to think in terms of animals possessing their own history, culture, and even tradition, which, in turn, is a reminder that animals, like humans, are actively constructing their worlds as well as being constructed in them. But how can one represent or reconstruct the agency of a creature who leaves little or no documentary trace, or whose trace is apparently incomprehensible? Perhaps, to return to the earlier discussion, by carefully utilizing data from animal welfare science and ethology gaps might be, if not filled, then, at the very least, recognized. Not being able to say anything while recognizing that there is something to say is very different from assuming that nothing needs to be said.

 

What Was It Like to Be a Cow?    267 But the problems don’t end there. In addition to the (aerial) limits of reading itself, and the paucity of documents recording what exists in the more-​than-​human world, another problem for historians exists. Animals are often encountered as groups—​herds, packs, flocks; and so how they existed as intraspecific social beings, and not just individual animals in relation to human culture, is also important. Answering my question, what was it like to be a cow? must also include addressing what it was like to be a cow among cows (and on a smallholding. the analysis of a cow’s social world might need to stretch to include interspecific engagements with, say, pigs, horses, chickens, and geese). What, for example, was the impact on the cows of the increase in herd sizes in England in the mid-​seventeenth century? Economic and agricultural historians have noted its impact on the economy and agricultural practices,52 but the archive may once again limit historians of animals here by offering little direct evidence of animals’ experiences. I know that I can never answer the questions, what was it like to be a cow or to be a cow among other cows? But that does not stop me from asking. If nothing else, the findings of animal welfare science and ethology might help me to recognize the validity of my question—​might begin to show, for example, that herd size does impact an individual animal’s behavior.53 Indeed, an understanding of pack behavior, as gained from working alongside biologists and ranchers in Yellowstone National Park, for example, has a place in Brett Walker’s history of the disappearance of Japan’s wolves.54 But, there is yet another difficulty: even when documents do exist they do not record the animal’s distinct experience of the world, and understanding an animal’s sensory capacities is vital when thinking about what it was like to be that animal. As with other problems facing the historian of animals, this is not only an issue in historical work: it is felt even in direct engagements with living animals. Writing of the canine ability to track, for example, dog trainer and poet Vicki Hearne notes: “‘Scent’ for us can be only a theoretical, technical expression that we use because our grammar requires that we have a noun to go in the sentences we are prompted to utter about tracking. We don’t have a ‘sense’ of scent.” This is not just a problem of language; it is a problem of comprehending other modes of being in the world. Hearne writes: “For dogs, scenting is believing. Dogs’ noses are to ours as a map of the surface of our brains is to a map of the surface of an egg.”55 Some historians of animals have tried to address this problem. Aiming to explore the “overlapping and mutually constitutive histories and geographies” of humans and dogs in Paris in the nineteenth century, for example, Chris Pearson began his research with a walk with a dog in Bristol, proposing the need to understand something of a dog’s experience now in order to begin to glimpse a dog’s experience then. Using Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet as a guide, Pearson acknowledged that while “some cross-​ species communication and understanding is possible,” many of the ways by which dogs engage with the world are lost to us: “It becomes apparent that dogs mainly know and experience the city through smell… . There must be uncountable canine messages and traces left all over urban spaces that human city dwellers are largely oblivious to.” How to address this gap in our understanding? Pearson notes the impossibility of setting aside his own human perspective, but proposes that a “necessarily hybrid history” is

 

268   Erica Fudge still possible, that an account that recognizes the distinct engagements with and experiences of the city of its (human and animal) populations might be written.56 Sandra Swart likewise notes that “cultural and biological differences between the species would shape very different kinds of stories about the pasts” in her history of South African horses. As evidence, she notes that “The human horological obsession provides no template for how horses structure time;” that “horses’ nasal acuity allows them a broader temporal understanding than humans possess;” and that “our worlds look and feel different, and so, concomitantly, would our historiographies.”57 But this shouldn’t stop a historian’s attempt: “it was necessary for humans to think like a horse—​to a certain extent—​in domesticating them, training them, riding them,” Swart notes, and perhaps this mode of engagement might be taken into the writing of animal history where an exercise of “historical empathy” might allow for the writing of a “hippocentric history.”58 Acknowledging the persistence of the human perspective, having an understanding, however limited, of the animals’ engagement with the world, and from that position continuing to write animal history, as Pearson and Swart propose, may seem like the best that we can do: after all, an imperfect history is better than no history at all. But perhaps the best way of including animals in historical work and of therefore writing fuller histories, might be to contest some of the assumptions that underpin the discipline itself, and it is with this possibility that I will conclude.

Itstory: A Conclusion If “herstory” was a second-​wave feminist response to history (his-​story), then perhaps we might want to think about how to write “itstory.” This might sound like a flippant suggestion—​in some ways, of course, it is; but I hope it might lead beyond that to interesting possibilities. The reduction of animals to the status of “it” (with the associated “that” rather than “who” being used) has played a role in situating them as ahistorical, passive, and mechanical rather than responsive beings.59 Simply on the basis of word choice, an animal’s status can change: “the cow that enters the enclosure will lose sight of its conspecifics” seems very different from “the cow who enters the enclosure will lose sight of her fellows.” Agency is not only constructed in what is visible, it is also constructed in how things are made visible.60 The word “it” is a powerful tool of humanism, and itstory is, thus, a history written in an attempt to identify the limits that our own discourses and our own capacities place on our ability to recognize animals as agents with particular modes of engagement with the world, and particular priorities that may not resemble our own, and to include those animals in our work. Pearson, Swart and others have begun to outline the limits of our own capacities,61 and the limits of the discourse of history itself need also to be recognized. Indeed, the suggestion that itstory might have some value is also an attempt to think about how far the professional requirements of writing the past—​what gets published, leads to tenure, and so on—​place barriers in the way of including animals. As John Law has

 

What Was It Like to Be a Cow?    269 noted of the making of knowledge in the social sciences, “methods, their rules, and even more methods’ practices, not only describe but also help to produce the reality that they understand.”62 Reality is not, to be clear, completely made by methods—​there is a reality that exists beyond attempts to describe it. What Law suggests is that how we come to describe and therefore to conceptualize reality is prescribed by the intellectual rules that are applied in the building of that thing called knowledge, and that this itself structures a large part of what we see. Quite simply, the kinds of questions we ask produce the answers we get, and those answers might not be the only ones that could have been given. In her provocatively titled essay “Sheep Do Have Opinions,” the Belgian ethologist and philosopher Vinciane Despret takes this view into animal studies. She notes that analyses of sheep have left them as “victims of what [the primatologist Thelma] Rowell calls ‘a hierarchical scandal’ in ethology”: where apes are asked interesting questions which allow them to reveal themselves to be “endowed with elaborate social and cognitive competencies… . questions about the other [animals] still primarily concern what they eat.” A key reason for this difference lies in the history of ethology: Despret writes that primatology has “gradually adopted the methods and questions of anthropology,” whereas “Classical ethology” remains focused on how “animals organize themselves around resources.”63 This has led to sheep becoming “victims of questions of little relevance compared to their ability to organize themselves socially.” Rowell argues that the ethological focus on eating misses something crucial: “What is much more important to the animals is much rarer, and it is predation.”64 This lack of interest in predation, Despret writes, “makes it impossible to translate behaviors that are meaningful in relation to it.” The right question, however, can produce thought-​provoking results. If “your [research] proposition is articulated to [the animals’] interests… . your research [will afford] you the opportunity to say things about them.”65 Asking different—​ better—​questions of our objects of inquiry will allow them (and us) to have more to say. Nietzsche’s man might have learned much from Despret. This is not, it should be noted, a question of trying to find a way of experiencing the animals’ experiences—​of applying the ideas of humanist history to the more-​than-​ human world. There may, of course, be some value in an attempt to bring animals and humans closer in their entangled histories,66 but anthropomorphism is not without its problems: it ignores, for example, the distinctive engagement with the world of a particular species; and it—​perhaps—​prioritizes human experience.67 And even the attempt to experience empathy with an animal is, for Despret, too limited in its focus: Certainly, empathy transforms the subject (the one who feels empathy) but this transformation is a very local one as long as it does not really give [the empathizer’s] object the chance to be activated as subject, the subject feeling empathy remaining the subject of the whole thing.68

Even as it attempts to bridge the gap between species, empathy holds on to, indeed requires, difference. It places the empathizer (i.e. the human) in a separate sphere from

 

270   Erica Fudge the empathizee. Despret goes on—​challenging the nature of the question that motivated me: “Empathy allows us to talk about what it is to be (like) the other, but does not raise the question ‘what it is to be “with” the other’.”69 And it is the conception of “being with” that she suggests we should think with and through: “One doesn’t substitute one point of view for another; on the contrary, everything is done by the addition of points of view.”70 The world to be analyzed here is a social world, and sociality is taking place between as well as within species. This has implications for a concept of agency, since the focus, she proposes, should not be on autonomy but on “the multiple ways one given creature depends on other beings”: “Agenting” (as well as “acting”) is a relational verb that connects and articulates narratives… ., beings of different species, things, and contexts. There is no agency that is not interagency. There is no agency without agencement, a rapport of forces.71

Such a concept of agency, or “agenting” as Despret terms it (the noun becoming a verb—​ this is not static, but constantly dynamic), proposes not so much a vision of a world made by tracking the records of special individuals, as a world in which emphasis is placed on interactions for understanding the forces that make for change and for stability. Nietzsche’s focus on genius has no place here, and the potential for animal history is clear. Despret’s work proposes another way of thinking about human-​animal relations that requires the inclusion of animals not simply as props or backdrops. For her, human-​ animal relations are entanglements that are meaningful to and produced by all parties; thus, asserting the importance of animal agency is not simply a way of remembering and inserting into history the fact that horses carry, stumble, fall, strike, and kick; it is a way of opening up a question of being with animals in the past—​of the intraspecific as well as interspecific social worlds of humans and animals.72 Taking up these two perspectives, then—​undermining human specialness, and re-​ orienting our conception of animal capacity—​itstory might serve to remind us that the past is made by all its inhabitants—​human and animal, and that understanding is always based on companionship, a term I use following Donna Haraway: “Companion comes from the Latin cum panis, ‘with bread.’ Mess-​mates at table are companions.”73 Walking beside, eating with (not of), animals: if we change our position in relation to them perhaps we change our understanding of our shared realities. In their study of modern human-​cow relations, Jocelyne Porcher and Tiphaine Schmitt ask a good question that might further illustrate the potential for Despret’s ideas for the history of animals. “What does it mean to work?” they ask. “Specifically, what does it mean for a cow?” Just as tigers and sharks appear in the archive only when they attack, so, Porcher and Schmitt note, “animals’ collaboration at work is visible when it is not obtained. Ordinarily, their work is invisible.” They continue, recognizing that this invisibility has implications: “the fact that we do not know what it means to an animal ‘to work’ prevents us from seeing their competences and imagining what they could do with us, apart from what they already do.”74 Asking questions articulated to the animals’ interests, as Despret put it, Porcher and Schmitt’s research reveals cows who

 

What Was It Like to Be a Cow?    271 were “familiar with [the farmer’s] implicit rules, but… . sometimes tried to get around them;” cows who “learn[ed] very quickly”; and cows who used courtesy in order to successfully coexist with other cows. These animals, Porcher and Schmitt hypothesize, “collaborate in work not simply because they are conditioned to do so but because they engage themselves subjectively in the work.”75 But what is often seen when animals are observed in the workplace is something different, something that reveals more about the observer’s methods than about the animals themselves. What is seen reduces the sense of the animals’ participation in processes of agenting because their collaboration can be mistaken for “mere” instinct—​for mechanical reaction rather than engaged participation. As Despret notes, the collaborative willingness of animals has broad and destructive implications: “what we call mechanistic thought, ironically, could be partially due to the good will of the animals themselves.”76 Because they agree and obey, we assume mindlessness, and so what might be the most interesting aspect of human-​animal relations—​collaboration—​is dismissed as being without meaning (and I mean that in two senses: that the animal’s actions are believed to be without meaning; and that the animal is discarded as a being without meaning). This is not a reading only available for domestic animals. A wild animal’s avoidance of human settlement might also evidence a kind of collaboration: it could be that animal’s acknowledgment of human boundaries. In this context, therefore, noting the historicity of animals’ behavior is not only challenging the notion that animals live ahistorical lives; it is also recognizing their subjective engagement with their world. Relegating this engagement to animals’ ineffability is thus, once again, making their actions meaningless. This gap in our understanding—​the fact that we see animal collaboration as a mechanical reaction or as the expression of the incomprehensible—​is caused by a lack of good questions rather than good answers. It is more a failure of human reason than of animal capacity. As Thelma Rowell did with the sheep, Porcher and Schmitt are beginning to find ways to ask cows better questions by watching, by identifying in their behavior courtesy, understanding, and collaboration. They are walking alongside the cows, you might say, not staring like omniscient gods from above and finding enacted the order they had always foreknown. But how might historians ask good questions of historical records that might themselves fail to recognize the animals as more than machines? How can such documents be used to glimpse animals as active, collaborative participants in worlds that should only be understood as interspecific? As with the records of animals’ role in the workplace, historical documents tend to present collaboration only when it breaks down: when a cow kicks over a milk pail, when a pig runs away,77 or when a tiger attacks. But maybe reading documents from the past with a better understanding of animals’ capacities might allow us to ask those documents better questions; might help us to read against the grain, which might, in turn, make possible a fuller picture of the shared worlds of humans and animals. If I approach an early modern will with the idea of the intraspecific courtesy of cows, that might impact on what it means to see a small herd being separated into different bequests; and having a notion of cows’ willingness to “engage themselves subjectively” in the work of a farm might affect how I understand the stresses on all parties of the purchase of a new animal.

 

272   Erica Fudge I return to my original question, what was it like to be a cow?, but this time I use the phrase “like to be” recognizing its limits. I no longer only want to know (or to try to know) what the experience of an animal was, although I do still hold that as a desire—​ impossible as it will be to fulfill. I also want to know (or to try to know) what the animals’ experience of being with humans might have been, what the animals’ experience of being with other animals was, and what the humans’ experience of being with animals was. Careful use of work from the fields of animal welfare science and ethology might offer me pointers from which I can get closer to asking better questions and constructing a history that attempts to take all participants seriously. The historian of animals might, in fact, interrupt Nietzsche’s human’s failed conversation with the animal and answer his question—​“Why do you just look at me like that instead of telling me about your happiness?”—​by pointing out that perhaps the animals in the herd are telling him something, but in a language he cannot yet understand. In this scenario, it is not only the animals who must be domesticated: the humans need to be domesticated too: they also need to learn to live responsively in this community. And some of those humans are historians. The possibility is, of course, that if Nietzsche’s human did come to understand bovine communication, he might discover that the cow is telling him that she is not happy at all.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Hilda Kean, Brett Mizelle, Amy Nelson and Nigel Rothfels for their willingness to respond to e-​mail inquiries, to Diana Donald, who read and commented on a draft of this chapter, to Sandra Swart who did both, and to colleagues at the History and Theory conference at Wesleyan University in April 2013. The discussions there and in the subsequent theme issue of History and Theory, Does History Need Animals? 52, no. 4 (2013)—​have been central to the writing of this chapter. The School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde supported a research leave in spring 2014, which gave me the time to research and write the chapter.

Notes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Utility and Liability of History, in Unfashionable Observations: The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 2, ed. Richard T. Gray (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1874/​1995), 87. 2. Nietzsche, Utility and Liability, 87–​88. 3. The original German is seziert rather than viviseziert, but the implication is that beings with life are cut up. 4. Nietzsche, Utility and Ability, 133,131. 5. Nietzsche, Utility and Ability, 133. The translation of the Latin is from this edition.

 

What Was It Like to Be a Cow?    273 6. Nietzsche, Utility and Ability, 133–​134. Thomas H. Brobjer has noted, this early work by Nietzsche does not reflect the views he held of history and historical writing in his later writing: Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s View of the Value of Historical Studies and Methods,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65, no. 2 (2004): 301–​322. 7. See Vanessa Lemm, “The Overhuman Animal,” in A Nietzschean Bestiary:  Becoming Animal beyond Docile and Brutal, ed. Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 220–​239. 8. Although, even giving life to a subject might be invasive: n The Life of an Unknown, Alain Corbin writes of himself posing “as a minor miracle-​worker pretending to restore life to a person who might not wish to be disturbed.” Corbin, The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-​Century France (1998), trans. by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), x. 9. Of course, individual animals have been singled out for historical analysis, but species of animals, or groups, have not often been regarded as having histories. I come back to this later. On individual animals in history, see, for example, David Gary Shaw, “The Torturer’s Horse:  Agency and Animals in History,” History and Theory 52, no.  4 (2013), 146–​167; Helena Pycior, “The Public and Private Lives of ‘First Dogs’: Warren G. Harding’s Laddie Boy and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fala,” in Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, ed. Dorothee Brantz, (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 176–​203. 10. See, Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 24–​26. 11. Malcolm Chase, “Can History be Green? A Prognosis,” Rural History 3, no. 2 (1992): 244, referring to Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes to Nature 1500-​ 1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983). 12. Sandra Swart, Riding High:  Horses, Humans and History in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2010), 37. 13. The question, of course, deliberately echoes that asked by Thomas Nagel in his important article, “What is it like to be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83 (October 1974): 435–​450. 14. This is a view I  outlined in “A Left-​Handed Blow:  Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2002), 3–​18. 15. To avoid confusion with the meaning of “humanism” in Renaissance studies, in this context the term refers to the assumption of human centrality and separation from animals, what Cary Wolfe has called “taking it for granted that the subject is always already human.” Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1. 16. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History:  Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no.  2 (2009): 220. 17. Chase, “Can History be Green?” 248. 18. See, for example, Richard C. Foltz, “Does Nature Have Historical Agency? World History, Environmental History, and How Historians Can Help Save the Planet,” History Teacher 37, no. 1 (2003): 9–​28. In this article, as an example, Foltz places horses at the center of the development of the Silk Road (14-​15). Bruce M. S. Campbell’s “Nature as Historical Protagonist: Environment and Society in Pre-​Industrial England,” Economic History Review 63, no. 2 (2010): 281–​314, focuses on the central role of the environment in historical change, but he tracks the 1319 arrival of cattle plague in England to show

 

274   Erica Fudge how historical explanations for change (here, an agricultural crisis) must consider non-​ human factors. Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004) offers an exemplary reading of the central role of animals in cultural and social change: here, how cows and pigs impacted on relations between early English settlers and native peoples in the New World. 19. See, for example, Johan Koppenol, “Noah’s Ark Disembarked in Holland:  Animals in Dutch Poetry, 1550-​1700,” in Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts, vol. 2, ed. Karl A. E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 451–​528, which traces a history of literary representations of relations with cows. Erica Fudge, “The Animal Face of Early Modern England,” Theory, Culture and Society 30, no. 7/​8 (2013): 177–​198, emphasizes the closeness—​emotional, corporeal—​of humans and their livestock animals in the early modern period. 20. Diana Donald, Picturing Animals in Britain 1750-​1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 1. 21. The same might be said of the work of Peter Edwards, and Clay McShaneand Joel A. Tarr on horses and industrialization. See, for example, Edwards, “Nature Bridled: The Treatment of Horses in Early Modern England,” 155–​175, and McShane and Tarr, “The Horse in the Nineteenth-​Century American City,” 227–​245, both in Beastly Natures, Brantz. It is, perhaps, accidentally true of Arthur MacGregor’s Animal Encounters: Human and Animal Interaction in Britain from the Norman Conquest to World War One (London: Reaktion, 2012), which focuses on the material history of human-​animal interactions (by listing the means by which foxes, badgers, deer, hare, duck, and other species were hunted, for example), and in doing so, reminds us of the variety and astonishing creativity with which humans have “engaged” (i.e., destroyed) animals in the past. 22. Brett Mizelle, “‘A Man Quite as Much of a Show as his Beasts’:  James Capen ‘Grizzly’ Adams and the Making of Grizzly Bears,” Werkstattgeschichte 56 (2010): 44. 23. Hilda Kean, “Challenges for Historians Writing Animal-​Human History: What Is Really Enough?” Anthrozoös 25, supplement (2012): 61. 24. See, for example, Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (1954), trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 42. 25. John H. Arnold offers a useful overview of some of the problems and uses of bias in documentary sources: Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 66–​68. 26. In Dead Certainties, Simon Schama, for example, draws attention to the difficulty of the historian who has to “take the broken, mutilated remains of something or someone from the ‘enemy lines’ of the documented past and restore it to life or give it a decent interment in our own time and place.” To do this, he experimented with literary techniques such as free indirect speech to enter the minds of the protagonists. Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (London: Granta Books, 1991). 27. Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 11. 28. Aaron Skabelund, “Animals and Imperialism: Recent Historiographical Trends,” History Compass 11, no.10 (2013): 804. 29. Brett L. Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan (Seattle:  University of Washington Press, 2005), 13. 30. Susan Nance, Entertaining Elephants:  Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 10, 11.

 

What Was It Like to Be a Cow?    275 31. Nance, Entertaining Elephants, 12–​13. On different ethological perspectives, see Vinciane Despret, “Domesticating Practices: The Case of Arabian Babblers,” in Routledge Handbook of Human-​ Animal Studies, ed. Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh (Abingdon and New  York:  Routledge, 2014), 23–​38. For an introduction to the emergence of the field, see Donald M. Broom, “A History of Animal Welfare Science,” Acta Biotheoretica 59 (2011): 121–​137. 32. One way to address the issue of the anachronism of applying findings from animal welfare science to past animal behavior is, obviously, to ensure that the animal welfare science fits the historical evidence: that it may, in fact, not be wholly anachronistic. See, for example, Erica Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts,” History and Theory 52, no. 4 (2013): 23–​25. 33. See, for example, Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–​22; Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology: Or What It’s like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social:  An Introduction to Actor-​Network-​Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); John Law, “Notes on the Theory of the Actor-​Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity,” Systems Practice 5 (1992):  379–​393; and Erica Fudge, “Renaissance Animal Things,” New Formations 76 (2012): 86–​100. 34. An overview of some of the debates is in Chris Pearson, “Dogs, History, and Agency,” History and Theory 52, no. 4 (2013): esp. 133–​136. 35. Mikhail, Animal in Ottoman Egypt, 12. 36. Anderson, for example, writes of the livestock of early America as “unwitting participants in [the] unfolding drama.” Anderson, Cattle of Empire, 210. 37. Ralph Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616-​1683, ed., Alan Macfarlane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 21–​24. 38. There is, perhaps, something of the spiritual to the concluding sentences of Brett L. Walker’s “Animals and the Intimacy of History,” History and Theory 52, no. 4 (2013): 67. “They [animals] are not separate from humanity, but rather an intimate partner in our species’ biological and historical transcendence. This is the principal lesson of writings on animals in environmental history.” 39. See, for example, Tim Ingold, “Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment,” in Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 40–​60. 40. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed., Hannah Arendt ed., trans. Harry Zohn (1940/​1973, reprinted London: Fontana, 1992), 248. I used this idea slightly differently in Fudge, “Left-​Handed Blow,” 11–​12. 41. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin: Or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: NLB, 1981), 49. He is citing Walter Benjamin, “One-​Way Street”, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1928/​1978), 66. 42. Taking a view from alongside rather than from above animals is also proposed in Erica Fudge, “The Human Face of Early Modern England,” Angelaki 16, no. 1 (2011): 107; and Swart, Riding High, 213. A bird’s eye view would, of course, present a different perspective:  aerial, but avian. The specific sensory engagements of particular animals and its impact on history is something I return to. 43. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals:  Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 123–​125. 44. Peter Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600–​1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 59.

 

276   Erica Fudge 45. Jennifer Adams Martin, “When Sharks (don’t) Attack: Wild Animal Agency in Historical Narratives,” Environmental History 16 (2011): 454. The wild animal is also a focus of the contemporary use of tracking devices which offer new insight into the lives of individual creatures otherwise almost invisible to humans. However, such devices are modern inventions and so offer means to enhance interpretation of the past, but cannot (yet) offer evidence of past animal existences. Etienne Benson recognizes this tracking as potentially becoming part of the archive for a future history: Benson, “Animal Writes: Historiography, Disciplinarity, and the Animal Trace,” in Making Animal Meaning, ed. Linda Kalof and Georgina M. Montgomery (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011), 11–​13. 46. I am reminded of Roger Scruton’s defense of hunting, which represents the hunting of the fox as a kind of transhistorical enactment of human nature: “The hunted animal is hunted as an individual. But the hunted species is elevated to divine status as the totem, and a kind of mystical union of the tribe with its totem seals the pact between them for ever… .the universal species becomes a sacred object, to which the particular quarry is a sacrifice.” Scruton, On Hunting (London: Yellow Jersey Press, 1999), 73, 75. 47. Mahesh Rangarajan, “Animals with Rich Histories: The Case of the Lions of Gir Forest, Gujarat, India,” History and Theory 52, no. 4 (2013): 126. 48. Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear, 235. 49. Rangarajan, “Animals with Rich Histories,” 125, 127. It is noticeable that the animals historians read as potentially possessing a historical sense are frequently wild animals whose lives butt up against human communities. It is the shifting behaviors of these animals (and, as Rangarajan notes, of the humans too) that marks their historicalness. Perhaps another kind of historical sense can be traced in Anderson’s history of the English cattle who maintained their customary behavior in the New World, causing disruption and becoming unwitting “agents of empire” in the process. Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 211. 50. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1852/​1977), 300. 51. Walker, Lost Wolves, 13. Walker’s caveat that he is writing about “advanced social animals” speaks to the likelihood that, if natural science continues to impact on the writing of the history of animals, differences will develop between histories of different animal species. Future historical studies of fish might, for example, look very different from histories of dogs, and not simply because of the distinct (human) social and cultural places of the animals but because of the different kinds of sentience possessed by different species. 52. See Bruce M. S. Campbell and Mark Overton, “A New Perspective on Medieval and Early Modern Agriculture: Six Centuries of Norfolk Farming c.1250–​c.1850,” Past and Present 141 (1993): 84. 53. See, for example, John Webster, Understanding the Dairy Cow (Oxford: BSP Professional Books, 1987), 106–​111. For a view from a different perspective, see Rosamund Young, The Secret Life of Cows (Preston, UK: Farming Books, 2003). 54. Walker, Lost Wolves, 200–​201. 55. Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task:  Calling Animals by Name (originally published in 1982; reprinted by Pleasantville, NY: Akadine Press, 2000), 80, 79. 56. Chris Pearson, “A Walk in the Park with Timmy:  History and the Possibilities of Companion Species Research,” Wild 1 (2009): 93, 92; Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 57. Sandra Swart, ‘“The World the Horses Made’:  A  South African Case Study of Writing Animals into Social History,” International Review of Social History 55 (2010): 256.

 

What Was It Like to Be a Cow?    277 58. Swart, “World the Horses Made,” 256, 263. 59. See Françoise Wemelsfelder, “A Science of Friendly Pigs… . Carving Out a Conceptual Space for Addressing Animals as Sentient Beings,” in Crossing Boundaries: Investigating Human-​Animal Relationships, ed. Lynda Birke and Jo Hockenhull (Leiden:  Brill, 2012), 226. 60. Vinciane Despret notes that ‘Jane Goodall’s first paper dealing with her research on the behaviour of chimpanzees was returned by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences because she named rather than numbered, the chimpanzees she watched. This journal also wanted her to refer to the chimpanzees using “it” or “which” rather than “he” or “she.” She refused; the paper was, however, published.’ Despret, “Responding Bodies and Partial Affinities in Human-​Animal Worlds,” Theory, Culture and Society 30, no. 7/​8 (2013): 22. 61. See also Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts.” 62. John Law, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (London: Routledge, 2004), 5. 63. Vinciane Despret, “Sheep Do Have Opinions,” in Making Things Public: Atmosphere of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 361. 64. Thelma Rowell, quoted in Despret, “Sheep Do Have Opinions,” 362. 65. Despret, “Sheep Do Have Opinions,” 362, 363. 66. Thus, when Jason Hribal asks us to view animals’ experiences as emotionally recognizable, it is a deliberate attempt to draw attention to the impact of human cultural and economic change on cows as well as humans. With some poetic licence as to the reality of pre-​enclosure farming practices, for example, Hribal writes of the enclosure movement: “Gone were the days of cows roaming autonomously about the open-​pastures for weeks to months at a time, socializing with their fellow creatures. Gone were the days of being able to choose one’s sexual partner… .” Hribal, “ ‘Animals are Part of the Working Class’: A Challenge to Labor History,” Labor History 44, no. 4 (2003): 441. 67. There is not space in this chapter to look in detail at the debates surrounding anthropomorphism, but a useful overview can be found in Tom Tyler, “If a Horse had Hands… .,” in Animal Encounters, ed. Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 13–​26. 68. Vinciane Despret, “The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-​zoo-​genesis,” Body and Society 10, no. 2–​3 (2004): 128. 69. Despret, “Body We Care For,” 128. In her analysis of ethologist Amotz Zahavi’s studies of babblers in which he “takes into account the opinion babblers may have about the questions scientists address to them,” Despret writes, “This of course might also be suspected of heavy anthropomorphism: instead of putting himself in the babblers’ shoes, Zahavi would actually be asking the birds to wear human shoes. The perspective would not be the babblers’, but would only reflect a human-​situated standpoint.” Despret, “Domesticating Practices,” 35. 70. Vinciane Despret, “The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds,” Subjectivity 23 (2008): 134. Despret outlines an alternative conception of empathy that she terms “embodied empathy,” which can “create connections and affinities,” in a 2013 article. See Despret, “Responding Bodies,” 51–​76, quotation from 71–​72. 71. Vinciane Despret, “From Secret Agents to Interagency,” History and Theory 54, no.  4 (2013): 44. 72. On intraspecific and interspecific social worlds, see Despret, “Domesticating Practices,” 30–​31. 73. Haraway, When Species Meet, 17. 74. Jocelyne Porcher and Tiphaine Schmitt, “Dairy Cows: Workers in the Shadows?” Society and Animals 20, no. 1 (2012): 43. See also Porcher’s chapter in this collection, Animal Work.

 

278   Erica Fudge 75. Porcher and Schmitt, “Dairy Cows,” 47, 51, 55. 76. Despret, “From Secret Agents,” 43. 77. See Fudge, “Animal Face,” 186, 188.

Further Reading Burt, Jonathan. Animals In Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Costlow, Jane, and Nelson Amy, eds. Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Creager, Angela N.  H., and Jordan, William Chester, eds. The Animal/​Human Boundary. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002. Curth, Louise Hill. The Care of Brute Beasts: A Social and Cultural Study of Veterinary Medicine in Early Modern England. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Few, Martha and Tortorici, Zeb, eds. Centering Animals in Latin American History. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2013. Fudge, Erica, ed. Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Kalof, Linda, and Resl, Brigitte, eds. A Cultural History of Animals. 6 vols. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007. Kean, Hilda. Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800. London: Reaktion Books, 1998. Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-​Century Paris. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Lansbury, Coral. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Melville, Elinor G.  K. A Plague of Sheep:  Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pemberton, Neil, and Michael Worboys. Mad Dogs and Englishman: Rabies in Britain, 1830–​2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate:  The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Rothfels, Nigel. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Salisbury, Joyce E. The Beast Within:  Animals in the Middle Ages. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Sorabji, Richard. Animal Minds and Human Morals:  The Origin of the Western Debate. London: Duckworth, 1993.

 

Chapter 15

Animals as Se nt i e nt C om modi t i e s Rhoda Wilkie

Animals breathe the same air as we do. They’re there for a purpose, but to me, they’re more than just bits of beef walking about.1

Ambiguous Commodities: Changing Perceptions and Status of Food Animals The term livestock “implies that we view both food of animal origin and the animals that provide that food as a commodi[ty].”2 The objectification of animals is not new and can be traced back more than 10,000 years. At this time, humans intervened in, and started to exercise control over, the lives of animals to use them for food. Although scholars debate3 the extent to which animal domestication was the outcome of intentional, unintentional, or co-​evolutionary processes, the emergence of “walking larders”4 fundamentally altered how people viewed and treated animals.5 As Salisbury notes, “Human ownership of animals was established when people first domesticated and bred dogs to help them in their hunting… . By turning animals into property, then, humans transformed the animals from wild co-​inhabitors of the world to subordinates, essentially shaping the animals as if they were clay.”6 Since owning animals and controlling nature were synonymous with social progress and intellectual refinement, agricultural practices not only “civilized” nature; they also became a key hallmark of Western culture.7 The inverse was also the case. As Anderson explains, “[T]‌he activity of domestication seems to have been taken as a fundamental criterion for ranking groups of people called

 

280   Rhoda Wilkie ‘races.’ ”8 On this basis, more nomadic peoples were deemed uncivilized as they “stood at the beginning of social time, ‘unevolved’ through having themselves remained undomesticated.”9 On the other hand, because more settled peoples demonstrated their civilized credentials by cultivating the natural world, this activity distinguished them from other animals and distanced them from their own animality.10 This depiction of domestication not only engendered instrumental attitudes toward other species, which expedited their objectification in Western societies, it also bolstered the view that “human beings, as social persons, can own; animals, as natural objects, are ownable.”11 That said, the characteristics of animals can also have a bearing on whether some species are more or less likely to be domesticated than others. Zeuner, for example, suggests, “Domestication presupposes a ‘social medium’ … . As a rule the social evolution of a species must have reached a certain level before domestication becomes possible.”12 Bovine animals adhere to a “dominant-​submission system” in which one becomes the overall boss within a herd, which tends to establish a social pecking order among the rest.13 The presence of a social hierarchy may partly explain why herd-​type animals, such as cattle, have been successfully domesticated. On the other hand, it cannot be assumed that all socially organized species can be domesticated; exceptions include species such as hyenas, antelopes, and gazelles. According to Bökönyi, such exceptions possibly highlight a behavioral barrier to domesticating animals.14 In the main, if an animal is a nonterritorial species who “lives in large, wide-​ranging herds of mixed sexes, organized in hierarchies, has a wide tolerance of different food plants, a short flight distance, and a relatively slow response to danger,” then this favors the domestication of such animals.15 Other favorable attributes include the “lack of aggression towards humans, a strong gregarious instinct and willingness to ‘follow the leader’, … the ability to breed in captivity, relatively short birth intervals, large litter size, rapid growth rate and a herbivore diet that can easily be supplied by humans”16 When applied to species such as cattle, sheep, and pigs they largely comply with many of the aforementioned features. In comparison, the “social behavior” of gazelles is characterized by the males and females splitting into two distinct herds, except when mating, and the male animals tend to be extremely defensive of their territories and will flee at the first hint of danger.17 The description of a domesticated animal as “one that has been bred in captivity for purposes of economic profit to a human community that maintains complete mastery over its breeding, organization of territory, and food supply” has fostered the assumption that people initiated and thus intended to domesticate animals.18 It is noteworthy, however, that there is some dispute over the human-​directed emphasis of domestication. For Zeuner, it was only once the unintended benefits of domestication were realized that people then incorporated animals, such as cattle, into their economies.19 Moreover, Stephen Budiansky depicts a more interspecies understanding of domestication by allowing for the animal’s needs too. For him, “domestication was an evolutionary strategy not only for humans, but also for particular species of animals.”20 The argument that two species can evolve in concert through cooperation, as opposed to competition, rests on what Budiansky calls the “biological opportunity” that brought humans and animals together “to [allow] evolution to act on the biological motives of food and protection.”21

 

Animals as Sentient Commodities    281 This “more-​than-​human”22 account not only counterbalances well-​rehearsed narratives that largely prioritize the central role of people’s intervention in this process, it also contributes to the idea that “domesticated animals chose us as much as we chose them.”23 Nonetheless, the ownership of animals is a significant legacy of domestication because it underscores their property status. Being mostly “regarded as things that were indistinguishable from inanimate objects” would, until the nineteenth century, exclude animals from any direct moral or serious legal consideration.24 Long-​standing Judeo-​ Christian teachings and philosophical perspectives also played a key part in reinforcing the subordinate and thing-​like status of animals. For example, when humans were granted “dominion” in the book of Genesis, this was largely understood to mean “God authorized the domination of nonhumans by humans.”25 Moreover, René Descartes’s mechanistic view of animals in the seventeenth century basically “denied the existence of animal consciousness and in so doing set the way in which animals would be seen for centuries to come.”26 That said, when their sentient natures were acknowledged, it was generally claimed people were “morally justified in ignoring animal interests and treating animals as if they were inanimate objects because animals were inferior to humans.”27 Clearly, human exceptionalist mindsets have largely contributed to counteranthropomorphizing animals since their domestication.28 Even so, it is important to note that more animal-​orientated perspectives existed alongside, and increasingly questioned the legitimacy of, such deep-​seated anthropocentric attitudes. For example, the Judeo-​ Christian notion of stewardship injected an ethical dimension into human-​animal relations by setting limits on how God’s creatures ought to be treated. Thus, despite having dominion over animals, people also had a duty of care toward them. Although stewardship has been criticized for perpetuating the utilization of other animals, it provided a moral basis for regulating the conditions of their use.29 As modern thinkers and social reformers increasingly acknowledged the continuities between humans and other species, it diluted the potency of the Cartesian view of animals. Emphasizing the capacity of animals to feel and avoid pain would enable philosophers like Jeremy Bentham to play a major role in elevating the moral status of some animals. This shift of attention toward animal sentience also fed into and significantly fueled emerging concerns about animal cruelty, which contributed to the passing of the Martin’s Act in Britain in 1822. This act thus afforded working animals a modicum of protection from human maltreatment: [I]‌f any Person or Persons shall wantonly and cruelly beat, abuse, or ill-​treat any Horse, Mare, Gelding, Mule, Ass, Ox, Cow, Heifer, Steer, Sheep, or other Cattle … he, she, or they so convicted shall forfeit and pay any Sum not exceeding Five Pounds, nor less than Ten Shillings, to His Majesty, His Heirs and Successors.30

This legal development effectively criminalized the mistreatment of animals and is one of the early anti-​cruelty laws that formally regulated the ownership and treatment of domesticated animals.31 According to Francione, since these statutes acknowledged the “legal obligations that we owed directly to animals” it demonstrated “[that] animals

 

282   Rhoda Wilkie were seen not merely as things but as partial members of the moral community who were inherently deserving of some legal protection.”32 Early debates about the moral and legal status of food animals have continued to resonate and have in fact intensified in contemporary societies. A key factor contributing to their present-​day amplification has been the pursuit since 1945 of productivist policies by industrialized countries such as Britain and the United States. This agricultural agenda largely instigated the intensification of farm animal production, signaled by the increasing transition from animal husbandry to animal industry,33 and ushered in the era of factory farming.34 The practical and ethical implications of this new farming approach, however, did not go unnoticed in Britain. With the publication of Animal Machines in 1964, Ruth Harrison sparked much public interest in, and disquiet over, the well-​being of animals being farmed in such conditions. Her stark portrayal of farmer-​ livestock relations in the “factory farm” was vividly captured in the opening page of her seminal book: [F]‌arm animals are being taken off the fields and the old lichen covered barns are being replaced by gawky, industrial type buildings into which the animals are put, immobilised through density of stocking and often automatically fed and watered. Mechanical cleaning reduces still further the time the stockman has to spend with them, and the sense of unity with his stock which characterises the traditional farmer is condemned as being uneconomic and sentimental. Life in the factory farm revolves entirely round profits, and animals are assessed purely for their ability to convert food into flesh, or “saleable products.”35

The level of public concern generated by Animal Machines also, in 1964, prompted the British Government to set up the Brambell Committee. Its primary remit was “[t]‌o examine the conditions in which livestock are kept under systems of intensive husbandry and to advise whether standards ought to be set in the interests of their welfare, and if so what they should be.”36 When the committee published its findings in 1965, it “was the first formal recognition by an official body that intensive animal agriculture raised animal welfare problems.”37 The phraseology of the report is also significant, because the term “welfare” had made its debut appearance in animal-​related British legislation, albeit its meaning still had to be “explicitly defined in law.”38 All in all, the Brambell Committee’s report marked a significant watershed in the public perception of farmer-​livestock relations. Up until this point, the husbandry skills and practices of small-​scale farmers had gone largely unquestioned, because if the needs of individual animals were not attended to, it was presumed to undermine their productivity.39 The inverse was also the case. As Rollin explains, the epitome of the “social contract” was succinctly captured in the adage, “the animals’ interests were the producers’ interests.”40 As the productivist agenda compelled more farmers to mass-​produce livestock on an industrial scale, this heralded the “McDonaldization” of many food animal productive contexts and the application of more Fordist and Taylorist principles therein.41 This more commercialized, industrialized, and intensified model of livestock

 

Animals as Sentient Commodities    283 farming not only deviated from the bucolic image associated with “Old MacDonald’s Farm,” it also violated the so-​called social contract. It is noteworthy that these structural changes in the livestock sector occurred at a time when public attitudes toward, and knowledge about, food animals were also in transition. As Garner notes, “The fact that growing awareness of animal capabilities has coincided with the introduction and intensification of more severe ways of treating animals provides a juxtaposition of factors which, by itself, goes a long way towards explaining the increasing concern about animals.”42 Unsurprisingly, this potent mix of circumstances significantly revitalized the animal protection movements during the 1970s. Given that animal welfare/​rights groups drew sustained and unsolicited attention to the management of intensively farmed animals, including veal calves, battery-​caged hens, and pregnant pigs, such campaigns played a key role in raising critical awareness of and public concern for the interests of food animals living in such conditions.43 The proliferation of food-​related risks during the 1980s and 1990s, such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), Salmonella, and E. coli, also stirred many consumers, especially in Britain, to (re)connect with the processes and practices that transformed “animals-​ into-​meat.”44 The proliferation of such apprehensions in late modernity not only indicate that “anthropocentric instrumental” attitudes are giving way to, and coexist with, more “zoocentric empathic” attitudes,45 but also facilitate the translation of people’s “private troubles” about food animals into highly conspicuous “public issues.”46 This brief overview illuminates that “[t]‌he status of commodified domestic animals such as cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens, once excluded from spheres of moral concern and legal protections, is being [increasingly] re-​evaluated.”47 Additional evidence of this state of affairs is the reclassification of livestock as “sentient beings” in Article 38 of the Treaty of Rome, which is the basis of European law.48 Until 1996, the status of farm animals was the same as that of other agricultural foodstuffs, such as potatoes. However, following the Amsterdam Summit, and the eventual ratification of the Protocol on Animal Welfare in 1999, Camm and Bowles explain that for the first time “there are explicit legal obligations to consider animal welfare within the EC Treaty,” as this Protocol “contains the first reference in EC law to animals as ‘sentient beings,’ changing their status from mere goods or agricultural products. Member states are now undeniably obliged to protect animals for reasons of morality rather than commerce.”49 This landmark amendment technically undercuts the thing-​like status of livestock by acknowledging their animate natures. That said, because their property status has not been rescinded, Francione maintains that this “renders meaningless our claim that we reject the status of animals as things.”50 From this perspective, there is no halfway position. Francione’s point is well taken, as it reminds us that domesticated animals are technically property, irrespective of how people might refer to or treat them. For example, even if the increasingly preferred term “guardian” is used instead of “owner” to indicate a more respectful and animal-​centric attitude toward nonhuman animal companions, guardians may still exercise their legal right to sell or kill their “pet” animal(s).51 As Grandin notes, if people “can buy, modify, sell, give away or destroy items that … [they]

 

284   Rhoda Wilkie own,” this legally distinguishes property from nonproperty.52 Although the commodity status of family “pets” is typically less explicit than that of food animals, it remains latent and can become manifest should the situation arise. Therein lies the Achilles heel of such legal reasoning. Although all domesticated animals are someone’s property by law, this does not dictate how people perceive their animals. What’s more, to disregard the discrepancy between perceived status and legal status because it does not technically alter the animal’s commodity status is to overlook the experiences of those faced with this inconsistency in everyday life. As previously argued, because legalistic and philosophical approaches tend to “bracket off the empirical, attitudinal, and affective elements of interspecies interactions [this] not only … underestimate[s]‌the socio-​affective significance of people’s experiences, … [it] also provide[s] a somewhat partial and skewed understanding of human-​livestock relations.”53 This truncated perspective of human-​livestock relations is progressively evident and further perpetuated at the lay level. Given that fewer than 2 percent of people in well-​established industrialized countries, such as Britain and America, are currently employed in agricultural occupations, fewer people have the first-​hand experience of working with livestock.54 As Ellis notes, “The privilege of being unfamiliar with beef production is characteristic of an urbanized modern culture where animal-​based commodities are detached from the physical bodies they come from.”55 In other words, urban citizens are increasingly disconnected from working animals (such as cattle), the productive processes and practices that transform cattle into beef, and the farmers and slaughterers who do that “dirty work” for them.56 Because consumers are so distanced from the barnyard, they are also more reliant on secondary sources of information about farm animal productive issues; this knowledge gap is being increasingly filled by campaign literature and exposé-​type reports produced by animal welfare/​rights groups. Given that European consumers have become especially critical of their governing bodies and official organizations, members of the public are now more inclined to trust consumer and animal welfare organizations when it comes to issues pertaining to animal-​welfare standards.57 Such unofficial groups have clearly benefited from this cynical climate, as it has opened up this influential civil space to an attentive lay audience. Having harnessed the new public platform to full effect, the animal-​protection movement has become one of the livestock sector’s most ardent and vociferous critics. It is noteworthy that many of its proponents have minimal, if any, experience of working with farm animals.58 Instead, they are typically keepers of nonproductive domesticated animals,59 likely to reside in urban backgrounds60 and predominantly female.61 Although animal welfare/​rights groups have quite rightly drawn public attention to the darker side of the industry’s productive and husbandry practices, and successfully lobbied governments to enhance the moral status of food animals, they have given less recognition to elements of “good stockmanship” and more proficient animal handling within the sector.62 Directing campaign resources into critiquing intensively produced livestock, though understandable, does not exemplify the full range of contexts in which food animals are produced or of the human-​livestock relations that occur therein. Given this, “[w]‌e need to be alert to the possibility that our contemporary understanding of …

 

Animals as Sentient Commodities    285 food animal productive contexts is being perceived primarily through a factory farming lens.”63 If the largely homogenized lay perception is accepted uncritically, it may give rise to overly simplified statements about and one-​dimensional understandings of human-​ livestock interactions and contexts, typified by common sayings, such as “intensive bad, extensive good.”64 Although such aphorisms are useful as they generate a recognizable parlance, the extent to which they suitably inform public and media discussions about the issues is questionable. As Fraser explains, there has been a tendency “to treat animal agriculture as an aggregate and draw conclusions that are unwarranted because they are unduly general.”65 A more even-​handed appraisal would recognize that different types and scales of intensive and extensive productive settings and their related husbandry/​ industry practices all impact negatively and positively on the well-​being of different animal species farmed within them.66 By implication, off-​the-​cuff statements, such as “intensive bad, extensive good,” would become more difficult to make; food animals and the people who work with them are not all the same, nor are the productive settings and conditions in which both species work. A further way to counterbalance broad brushstroked depictions of animal productive settings is to pay more heed to the experiences of those who work in those settings. Given this, it is perplexing that, to date, so little attention has been given to stockpeople, both inside and outside of the industry. Given that so few work in agricultural occupations nowadays, contributions of “byre-​face”67 workers are surely even more relevant, timely, and pivotal. Although there has been a surge of scientific research since the 1970s into how the temperaments and practices of stockpeople impact the welfare and productivity of farm animals,68 livestock workers have largely been the “forgotten pillar” in the productive process.69 Despite the increased attentiveness to the pragmatic nature of human-​livestock relations, largely driven by the sector’s maximization of any financial premiums and marketing benefits to be derived from “good stockmanship,” this line of academic inquiry gave scant consideration to the nonproductive aspects associated with this role. The pursuit of a productivist-​oriented research agenda bracketed off once again, albeit for different reasons, the emotional and perceptual experiences of those carrying out this interspecies role in practice. As English and colleagues have noted, The existence and influence of empathy between stockperson and farm animal is generally, although not universally, appreciated in agriculture. Some authorities in trying to define “good stockmanship” consider that it consists solely of using technically correct methods in handling and managing farm livestock. The impact of the emotional relationship between stockperson and animal is therefore largely discounted in such definitions.70

Overall, contemporary stockpeople are in the unusual, perhaps even unenviable, position of working in countries where the moral status of and instrumental attitudes toward food animals are both publicly contested and under review. While those divorced from the byre-​face largely contemplate the philosophical, legal, and socio-​ethical

 

286   Rhoda Wilkie ramifications of these long-​standing debates, those at the byre-​face typically encounter and have to negotiate the pragmatic, paradoxical, and multifaceted challenges associated with these more speculative debates. If those framing public debates are more distanced from the byre-​face, this may partly explain why they make more polemic statements about animal productive settings than are made by those working in them. As there is a dearth of knowledge surrounding the everyday realities of such contexts, we may wish to (re)engage with front-​line farm-​animal workers to address this gap. Attending to the pragmatic experiences of byre-​face workers will not only (re)contextualize our understanding of human-​livestock interactions, it will also further inform and thus nuance our current debates about such issues.

Practitioner Perceptions: Pragmatic Insights from the Byre-​Face Since practitioners are preoccupied with the tasks in hand they tend to be more focused on the “here and now,” unless the “world starts to run counter to [their] expectations.”71 As Heritage notes, “Each actor comes upon the domain of objects with different practical purposes in hand and knows that, ‘motivationally speaking’ they may be viewing the domain of objects in differently ‘interested ways.’ ”72 This point is important because the extent to which commercial and hobby stockpeople may perceive all or some of the animals they work with as commodities or sentient beings is contextually contingent, oscillates, and is riddled with inconsistency. This in turn depends on a range of other factors, such as the type, scale, and species of animal production, the productive stages within it, the career path of the animal within it (e.g., breeding or fattening) and where the handler and animal are positioned within that system.73 Factoring in such caveats highlights how more decontextualized accounts might fail to adequately convey the relatively messy and fluid nature of stockpeople’s attitudes to, feelings for, and perceptions of the commodified sentient beings they routinely work with. Given that the perceived status of animals is unstable in practice, this can disrupt the mutually exclusive categorizations of domesticated animals as either “livestock” or “pets.” Such classificatory labels not only delimit the species’ primary function but also culturally convey how such animals should, ideally, be perceived and behaved toward.74 For example, as domesticated species have been tamed and trained to fulfill valuable roles in human society, they are typically perceived as “good animals” and enjoy an elevated status in the “sociozoologic scale.”75 While dogs and cats usually benefit from their more individuated and personified pet status, cattle, sheep, and pigs, as “tools” of the food trade, are “deanthropomorphized.” By deanimating their animate nature, it is easier to perceive livestock as “lesser beings or objects that think few thoughts, feel only the most primitive emotions, and experience little pain.”76

 

Animals as Sentient Commodities    287 In practice, however, the categorical boundary between livestock and “pets” is less well defined, as evidenced by commercial and hobby stockpeople who perceive some of the animals they work with, albeit temporarily, as “pets, friends or even work colleagues.”77 Thus, as others have also noted, “[h]‌umans working closely with farm animals develop relationships with their animals often not dissimilar from those that develop between humans and companion animals.”78 This is an important point. As William I. Thomas once remarked, “If men [sic] define … situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”79 One way of understanding the unstable status of commodified animals in everyday life is to think about commoditization as an open-​ended process as opposed to a fixed state. As Kopytoff explains: The production of commodities is also … a cultural and cognitive process: commodities must be not only produced materially as things, but also culturally marked as being a certain kind of thing… . Moreover, the same thing may be treated as a commodity at one time and not at another. And finally, the same thing may, at the same time, be seen as a commodity by one person and as something else by another. Such shifts and differences in whether and when a thing is a commodity reveal a moral economy that stands behind the objective economy of visible transactions.80

When applied to human-​livestock relations, Kopytoff ’s work not only captures the dynamic nature of commoditization but also, more importantly, provides a language to convey the movement of food animals in and out of their perceived commodified status.81 In other words, commodified sentient beings can be “decommodified” and “recommodified.” That said, as different stages of commercial-​and hobby-​animal production (e.g., breeding and finishing) are associated with a range of routine and unanticipated opportunities to interact with, and disengage from, the animals people work with, it can limit the type and duration of the interactions that may occur at each stage.82 For example, with reference to commercial cattle production, [a]‌s long as breeding animals continue to be productive they remain on the same farm for years; these particular human-​animal relationships endure. In contrast, store animals can change hands a few times before they are slaughtered… . There is [thus] little opportunity or need to practice empathetic stockmanship because beef cattle have a short life, are transient, and require minimal handling after the calf stage. Unless they digress from the normal process of production, slaughter animals are fairly anonymous and will be processed as part of a de-​individualized and commodified group.83

Animals at the breeding stage of the production process are, it figures, more readily decommodified than store animals being fattened up (or finished) for slaughter. The sentient nature of food animals is also most evident at the breeding stage because it is associated with newly born animals. Fukuda also found that livestock farmers “like looking after animals” and that “[t]‌he most commonly mentioned pleasure of livestock farming is that of reproducing lives.”84 Since the reproductive stage affords more

 

288   Rhoda Wilkie opportunities to engage in good stockmanship skills, it conjures up all that is practically and emotionally positive about producing livestock.85 As one commercial cattle farmer explains, “There is nothing more satisfying than spotting a cow calving, watching that calving progress to the point of realizing that she’s in trouble, getting the cow inside and helping the calf [to be] born alive. It just never leaves you the excitement of getting a living, healthy born calf.”86 In contrast, the “finishing side, well I mean they just eat grass and then every month the fat man comes round and picks out fat ones and that’s that, end of story.”87 As another cattle farmer88 put it, I suppose, with the cows you actually make friends with them, you actually go out and [do] some sort of bonding, some sort of relationship gets set up. You recognize characteristics, you recognize the fact that they’re different, you recognize their uniqueness. With the young [store] stock you don’t do that actively, you do it passively. If something is thrown up in front of you, … but you don’t actually seek it.89

By implication, store and prime animals in commercial productive contexts are easier to reify or perceive as commodities than are breeding animals. In comparison, even though recreational farmers try to de-​individuate store animals, too, this is trickier in practice because they have so few animals. As one hobbyist explains, “I try never to get to know the ones that are going to be slaughtered as individual animals because I don’t like the idea that they’re eaten.” Having said this, she went on to acknowledge that keeping her distance from “commercial” animals was easier said than done. For instance, she has a big black lamb called Bruno that “is so friendly” that “he’ll probably never go [for slaughter].”90 Since hobby farmers are often new entrants to farming, they have minimal, if any, experience of putting animals for slaughter and are not socialized into the more instrumental norms associated with commercialized farming contexts.91 This lack of exposure to such norms can also accentuate the emotional intensity of recommodifying decommodified animals.92 For instance, a hobby farmer recounts the emotional angst of transporting two lambs for slaughter that were so pet-​ like they followed her into the trailer. On reflection, she felt this was the most painful and regrettable thing she had ever done to sheep: “I knew they had to be killed but it was the way that they trusted; I led them into their death. I found that very difficult to live with. I still find it quite difficult, it hurts still, to think of it, because …, really, I betrayed the sheep by leading them into the box.”93 Since many hobbyists perceive their animals as outdoor pets, this highlights a less conventional set of farmer-​livestock interactions and “feeling rules.”94 These rules “describe societal norms about the appropriate type and amount of feeling that should be experienced in a particular situation.”95 By routinely ascribing “human-​like ‘feelings,’ perceptions, sensitivities and even ‘thoughts’ ” to their animals, hobbyists more readily draw on what Lynch calls the “naturalistic animal” than commercial farmers, which refers to common-​sense perceptions of animals in everyday life.96 This more humanized perception of food animals clearly deviates from the de-​anthropomorphized tool-​like depiction of livestock described in the sociozoologic scale.

 

Animals as Sentient Commodities    289 Nevertheless, commercial farmers also experience the emotional unease of, and hidden labor associated with, recommodifying favored and more humanized livestock. As one cattle farmer’s wife explains, “[W]‌hat I find most disturbing actually is not killing the animals that are designed for slaughter, it’s having to slaughter old breeding animals that have been with us for years and years, and they’ve fallen ill or something, … I find that very hard sending these old girls down the road. That’s much, much harder for me, than the young animals that were designed for slaughtering.”97 Although, on paper, the fluid status of food animals appears to be quite straightforward, the emotional transition associated with recommodifying decommodified animals is less immediate and more complicated in practice. Clearly, “getting to know” livestock can disrupt more instrumental-​type attitudes to the extent that some of them may cease being viewed, albeit fleetingly, as commodified animals. Byre-​face workers “get to know” some of the animals they work with, as they are typically in regular physical proximity to them. However, food animals are also “lively commodities,” who can cause serious bodily harm, perhaps even fatal harm, to those who do or do not know them.98 Cattle, for instance, are hefty, unpredictable animals who demand respect. As one worker explains, she had to toughen up when she started working in the livestock auction market: “I came in here … with the idea that … I was going to be nice to the animals … I wasn’t going to hit them with a stick … I was never going to yell at them… . [W]‌ithin a couple of weeks I realized that if I didn’t harden up … if I didn’t suddenly treat them with a bit more respect and stop trying to pet them, then I was going to get killed.”99 The word “respect” was her way of saying she had to step back from the cattle so that they could “have their own space,” as opposed to approaching them to pet them. This is a significant reminder that livestock animals are more than the social categories people ascribe to them; they have significant agential capacities that can seriously disrupt how people might want to see or classify them. Even though food animals are technically deanimated tools of the trade, there are limits to any counteranthropomorphizing strategy in practice. As Arluke notes, “[A]nimate nature can never be defeated totally; it still has a will.”100 To further contextualize this point, the extent to which livestock animals are likely to be regarded as deanimated tools or “lively commodities” partly depends on the species of farm animal, and the productive contexts these animals are being produced within. Researchers in France, for example, identified three main ways that livestock breeders and farm advisers perceived the animals they work with: “the animal as machine,” the “communicating animal,” and the “affective animal.”101 Although everyone in the study emphasized the productive role of livestock, some accentuated the technical side of producing animals, while others attended to the emotional needs of animals by actively engaging with them. Although these interspecies interactions did not foster emotional attachments to individual animals, some experienced a “real affection for their animals and practice[d]‌a kind of empathy with them.”102 Those most interested in the technical side of animal production held more mechanistic views of livestock and tended to produce pigs and poultry on an intensive scale. Those who bred cattle, pigs, or calves for quality-​assurance schemes were more likely to view their animals as sentient beings and

 

290   Rhoda Wilkie emphasized the importance of communicating with them. Finally, farmers who related emotionally to their livestock tended to breed cattle, although some also produced pigs in outdoor production systems. Another European study found that farmers feel more affinity toward cows than pigs or poultry, and are more likely to perceive cows “as more likeable animals.” To that extent, of all farmed animal species, cows were most likely to be seen as “friends” or “family members.”103 A common implication to be derived from these examples is that byre-​face workers can perceive some or even all of the animals they routinely work with, albeit temporarily, as more than just meat-​on-​the-​hoof or “tools of the trade.”104 Livestock are thus simultaneously functional objects and sentient beings. How practitioners draw the perceptual and emotional line between these two fluctuating statuses is an ongoing process and an underacknowledged aspect of stockpeople’s work. This challenge brings to the fore the “constant paradox” that plagues all human-​animal relations, especially in practice.105 As Arluke and Sanders note, “Ambiguous perceptions and ambivalent emotions are central to the forms of relationships between humans and nonhuman animals.”106 The notion of “sentient commodity”107 augments these recurring themes in human-animal studies by attending to the contradictory, contextual, and changeable nature of the perceived status of commodified sentient beings in food animal productive contexts, and how stockpeople experience and manage this perceptual paradox in practice. Since food animals cannot be reduced to, or totally defined by, their productive role(s), the purely instrumental views of and attitudes toward livestock, especially cattle, can be unstable and messier in practice. Moreover, if any animal deviates from the productive routine, such as an ill animal, who requires more handling, or a particularly friendly or temperamental animal, that animal may acquire a more individuated status, albeit fleetingly, to become more than “just an animal” to those working with them. This means that commodified animals can be located and relocated along a status continuum that ranges from commodity to pet, whereby the same animal might, at times, be perceived by the same or even different workers, as being a tool of the trade, a work colleague, a friend, or even a pet. This continuum also reflects the full range of people’s dominant and affectionate relationships to animals.108 Food animal production is clearly a complex mix of economic viability coupled with an affinity for working with livestock.109 This fundamental tension means that commercial and hobby animal productive contexts are variously shot through with an array of conceptual, emotional, ethical, and practical contradictions. Those located at the pragmatic hub of these intersecting contradictions also have to negotiate the precarious and ambiguous morass of human-​livestock relations. As an economic producer and a carer of livestock, the stockperson’s role is inherently contradictory. Those practicing dominion-​stewardship can therefore experience structural ambivalence, “not because of their idiosyncratic history or their distinctive personality[,]‌but because the ambivalence is inherent in the social positions [roles] they occupy.”110 Given that stockpeople generally enjoy working with farm animals and are instrumental in preparing them for slaughter, this also highlights the caring/​killing paradox that underpins meat animal productive contexts; that is, the cultivation of animal health for the purpose of death.111

 

Animals as Sentient Commodities    291 The division of labor within the industry is built on byre-​face workers breeding and fattening healthy animals, and slaughter workers killing those healthy animals for food. In fact, finished cattle have to be in their prime to be killed for human consumption. Slaughter is an integral part of the meat-​animal productive process, but this does not mean that stockpeople are unperturbed by it. For example, although prime animals are destined for slaughter, an experienced farm stock manager explains,112 “[I]‌t’s the part I don’t like. You canna [cannot] afford tae [to] think about it too much.” His way of managing this tension was to avoid thinking about it: “When they go away in a lorry that’s them going away. And there’s another lot coming on and I’m doing my job.” “Going away” was his term for going to the slaughterhouse. He also claimed that he would “rather sweep the streets or empty dustbins than see animals getting shot and skinned and everything.” He appeared to loathe those who worked “in places like that [slaughterhouses]” and referred to them as “empty heads” that headed for a drink as soon as they finished their day’s work. Similarly, an animal drover at the livestock auction perceived slaughtering as “a dirtier job than working wi [with] animals doon [down] in the byre.” He elaborated, “well the like o [of] working wi [with] an animal’s insides or that … I know somebody that works in taking out the intestines an that in a killing hoose [house]. And I just couldn’t do that job.” Although his friend had “the stomach” to do the job, he said, “I think it wid [would] take a bit o [of] getting used to; I don’t think I could manage.”113 The experienced farm stock manager just mentioned also thought that “nobody likes to see death; nobody likes to see animals dying.” He speculated that although slaughterers have little interaction with livestock, this would not prevent them from appreciating “really good animals, and for them just to be going in and getting a bullet … no I cudna [could not] cope wi [with] it.” Finally, a commercial farmer explains, I’ve got four [cattle] going away tomorrow morning from the field here behind the house. So I’ve been feeding them in the mornings and I know them all; I can stroke some of them, keep them nice and quiet and I’ll take them in, put them in a pen. I’ll wail out the four that I need, load them up, take them up to the killing house and put them in the lairage there. But I don’t want to see them going down the chute and actually having the bullet put in their face, don’t want to see that, hear that, or know about that. As far as I’m concerned they left me healthy and I’m looking for that cheque the next day. But I could not see them being shot, that’s not my job.114

Witnessing the slaughtering process was a difficult experience too: “I didn’t want to see a fit healthy animal walking up that ramp and being shot. I didn’t want to see that, no, I turned away I remember that.” 115 Since stockpeople work with an ongoing supply of live animals this may partly facilitate their ability to cognitively and emotionally deal with the caring/​killing paradox associated with their role. This point also helps explain why the widespread culling of cattle in the United Kingdom during the foot and mouth disease outbreak in 2001 was so traumatic for some farmers; they not only witnessed their entire herd being killed, they were also unable to buy new animals to fill the void.116

 

292   Rhoda Wilkie On this occasion, there were no livestock, only deadstock. As Convery and colleagues astutely put it: “Death was in the wrong place (the farm rather than the abattoir), but it was also at the wrong time (in relation to the farm calendar) and on the wrong scale (such large-​scale slaughter seldom occurs at the same time.”117 In other words, killing is not their job. Farmers are producers and their purpose in life, according to a senior vet, “is to try and keep the maximum number of their livestock alive.” Although producers and slaughterers are pragmatically codependent, this occupational interdependence does not necessarily extend to byre-​face workers being especially positive toward or supportive of their slaughtering colleagues. This is an interesting insight from the byre-​face. It is generally assumed that those located outside of the livestock sector, such as vegetarians, vegans, and animal-​protection groups, are the main sources of criticism. There is some evidence to suggest slaughter workers have critics within the system too. This finding begins to undermine any polarized debates between “us” and “them” since stockpeople also grapple with the process of killing commodified sentient beings; it seems that “In the backdrop of death there are signs of life.”118 By carving out a “socio-​ethical domain” or “moral haven” within the sector, stockpeople can gain some distance from the most tainted part of the production process.119 This not only ameliorates their spoiled work identity, it also enables them to “hold on to the belief that they have the animals’ best interests at heart, despite sending them to slaughter at the end of their productive lives.”120

Conclusion When the intensification of food animal production undermined the so-​called social contract between farmers and their animals, it ushered in more critical perceptions of human-​livestock interactions in late-​modern societies. Since the emergence of factory farming has also contributed to the (mis)representation of farm animal workers as an uncaring homogenous cohort that views and treats livestock as a standardized commodity to be exploited for profit, “the commercialization and industrialization of the livestock industry has [seemingly] created a class of animal producers wholly insensitive to animal needs.”121 This “new perception” of animal agriculture was further perpetuated by animal welfare and animal rights groups, which in turn shaped contemporary public debates around food-​animal-​related issues.122 The largely reproachful position adopted by these groups, albeit explicable, also contributed to many byre-​face workers, especially within the commercial sector, becoming rather defensive in their dealings with those outside the industry. Although members of the public and official groups have every right to be fully informed about the darker side of food animal productive contexts and processes, including poor stockmanship practices, those working with livestock also have every right not to be routinely and unthinkingly vilified in the process. As Birke and colleagues note, “Some forms of work are now stigmatized that once had merited greater prestige. People in these occupations might now find themselves

 

Animals as Sentient Commodities    293 the target of moral crusades by groups seeking to change public opinion about whatever they find offensive … Lurking behind such moral criticism are often implicit charges that these workers must be unprincipled or shameless to do what they do.”123 The revised moral-​legal status of food animals in recent years, as evidenced by the reclassification of livestock in European law from “agricultural goods” to “sentient beings,” has undoubtedly fueled the growing public perception that farmers are engaged in morally dubious interspecies work. In addition, although the property or thing-​like status of livestock is not rescinded by such legislative changes, it is being eroded. If, as Franklin124 also suggests, we are witnessing a human-​animal attitudinal shift, exemplified by “anthropocentric instrumental” attitudes being diluted by more “zoocentric empathetic” ones, then such legal-​sociocultural changes may further hasten the view that farm animals are becoming “contested commodities.”125 Just as the commodification and sale of human organs, babies, and sexual services currently generates much personal and social conflict, the extent to which this angst is also extended to commodified sentient nonhuman beings remains to be seen. Public debates about, and concerns for, the welfare and status of farm animals are nonetheless gathering pace. This moral quickening has clearly shone a much-​needed critical light onto once taken-​for-​granted livestock productive contexts and practices. Byre-​face workers are not only aware of this moral shift; they are more or less socialized into these contradictory attitudes and changing cultural values. While most of us can contemplate the ramifications of these conflicting attitudes and moral debates while one-​step removed from the ambiguous realities of the byre-​face, front-​line farm animal workers have to negotiate, albeit it to varying degrees, the pragmatic, paradoxical, and multifaceted challenges raised by such issues in their everyday work lives. Given the significance of these ongoing debates, and that so few people work with livestock nowadays, it is even more important to consult those with experience of these interspecies work contexts. Ascertaining the experiences of farm animal workers is a necessary counterbalance to the predominance of nonpragmatic discourses and decontextualized accounts that depict a rather static and oversimplified description of human-​livestock interactions. Attending to the productive and nonproductive facets of the stockperson’s role will also afford a more fulsome appreciation of the emotional challenges, hidden labor, productive paradoxes, and structural ambivalence faced by those working with (de)commodified and recommodified animals throughout the productive process—​aspects that are typically overshadowed by more productivist-​oriented interests and concerns. Re-​engaging with those at the pragmatic hub of food animal productive contexts is not only long overdue, it is imperative if we are going to (re)nuance and (re)contextualize our understanding of, and debates about, a long-​standing and increasingly contentious “zoological connection” that many of us have become distanced from.126 As with any issue of concern, greater proximity to an issue can make it more difficult to make categorical statements about it. Although non-​byre-​face workers and groups can choose whether they reconnect with or disconnect from the messy and tainted realities of producing animals for food, byre-​face workers have to variously interact with the

 

294   Rhoda Wilkie commodified sentient beings at the very heart of these thorny issues and “dirty work” contexts. In this case, food animals are a source and embodiment of ambiguity: they are “lively commodities” who are bred to die. They are simultaneously functional objects and sentient beings. Insights from the byre-​face have shown that the perceived status of commodified animals, especially cattle, is unstable in practice. How practitioners draw the perceptual and emotional line between these two fluctuating statuses is an ongoing process and an underappreciated aspect of stockpeople’s work. This is the “constant paradox” that potentially plagues all human-​animal relations, especially in practice. Given that “[a]‌mbiguous perceptions and ambivalent emotions are central to the forms of relationships between humans and nonhuman animals,”127 this takes us to the crux of this chapter. To understand livestock as a sentient commodity is to attend to, and (re)contextualize, the contradictory and changeable nature of the perceived status of commodified animals in food animal productive contexts, and how stockpeople experience and manage this perceptual paradox in practice. Bringing to the fore this relatively mundane aspect of people’s interactions with farm animals not only upsets the commonly held assumption that productive animals are nothing more than mere commodities; it also puts center stage the empirical, attitudinal, and affective elements of stockmanship that have typically been bracketed off in the past. If the pragmatic discrepancy between the perceived and legal status of animals opens up underexplored vistas of human-​animal relations, then the notion of sentient commodity also holds the promise of further nuancing our contemporary understanding of people’s rather complex, contested, and contradictory relationships with other species of animals.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professor Linda Kalof for inviting me to contribute to the Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies. Additionally, I  would like to thank Lesley Murray and Alastair Matthewson for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

Notes 1. Commercial stockman, quoted in Rhoda Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock. Working with Farm Animals from Birth to Slaughter (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010), 131. 2. John Webster, Animal Welfare:  A  Cool Eye towards Eden (Oxford:  Blackwell Science, 1994), 128. 3. For scholarly debates about domestication, see, e.g., Juliet Clutton-​Brock, “Introduction to Domestication,” in The Walking Larder:  Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism, and Predation, ed. Juliet Clutton-​ Brock (London:  Unwin Hyman, 1989); Juliet Clutton-​ Brock, “The Unnatural World:  Behavioural Aspects of Humans and Animals in the

 

Animals as Sentient Commodities    295 Process of Domestication,” in Animals and Human Society:  Changing Perspectives, ed. Aubrey Manning and James Serpell (London: Routledge, 1994), 23–​35; Sándor Bökönyi, “Definitions of Animal Domestication,” in Clutton-​ Brock, Walking Larder; Pierre Ducos, “Defining Domestication:  A  Clarification,” in Clutton-​Brock, Walking Larder, 28–​30; Stephen Budiansky, The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication (New  York:  William Morrow, 1992); Howard Hecker, “Domestication Revisited:  Its Implications for Faunal Analysis,” Journal of Field Archaeology 9, no. 2 (1982): 217–​236; Frederick Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals (London: Hutchinson of London, 1963); Richard Meadow, “Osteological Evidence for the Process of Animal Domestication,” in Clutton-​Brock, Walking Larder, 80–​90; Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin, eds., Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered (Oxford: Berg, 2007); Juliet Clutton-​ Brock, Animals as Domesticates: A World View through History (East Lansing: Michagan State University Press, 2012). 4. Juliet Clutton-​Brock, The Walking Larder:  Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism, and Predation (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 5. For an alternative discussion of domestication, see Tim Ingold, “From Trust to Domination:  An Alternative History of Human-​ Animal Relations,” in Animals and Human Society:  Changing Perspectives, ed. Aubrey Manning and James Serpell (London: Routledge, 1994), 1–​22. 6. Joyce Salisbury, The Beast Within:  Animals in the Middle Ages (New  York:  Routledge, 1994), 13, 16. 7. See, e.g., Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-​ 1800 (London:  Penguin, 1983); Kay Anderson, “Animal Domestication in Geographic Perspective,” Society and Animals 6, no. 2 (1998): 119–​135; Virginia Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 8. Kay Anderson, “A Walk on the Wild Side:  A  Critical Geography of Domestication,” Progress in Human Geography 21, no. 4 (1997): 468. 9. Anderson, “Walk on the Wild Side,” 474 (emphasis in original). 10. See also Ryan Gunderson, “The First-​Generation Frankfurt School on the Animal Question:  Foundations for a Normative Sociological Animal Studies,” Sociological Perspectives 57, no. 3 (2014): 285–​300. 11. Ingold, “From Trust to Domination,” 6. 12. Frederick Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals (London: Hutchinson of London, 1963), 9. For Zeuner, domestication is a “biological phenomenon” because other species, such as insects, do it too. 13. Laurie Carlson, Cattle: An Informal Social History (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 30. 14. Sándor Bökönyi, “Definitions of Animal Domestication,” in Clutton-​Brock, Walking Larder), 24. 15. Juliet Clutton-​ Brock, “The Unnatural World:  Behavioural Aspects of Humans and Animals in the Process of Domestication,” in Manning and Serpell, Animals and Human Society, 28; Flight distance describes the point at which an animal flees from a person that approaches them. See Paul Hemsworth and Grahame Coleman, Human-​Livestock Interactions:  The Stockperson and the Productivity and Welfare of Intensively Farmed Animals (Oxon, UK: Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux International, 1998), 41. 16. International Livestock Research Institute, Safeguarding Livestock Diversity: The Time Is Now (Nairobi: Regal Press, 2007), 27.

 

296   Rhoda Wilkie 17. Clutton-​ Brock, “Unnatural World,” in Manning and Serpell, Animals and Human Society, 28. 18. Clutton-​Brock, “Introduction to Domestication,” in Walking Larder, 7. 19. Frederick Zeuner, “The History of the Domestication of Cattle,” in Man and Cattle: Proceedings of a Symposium on Domestication at the Royal Anthropological Institute, ed. Frederick Zeuner and Arthur Mourant (London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 1963), 9–​19. 20. Joanna Swabe, Animals, Disease and Human Society: Human-​Animal Relations and the Rise of Veterinary Medicine (London: Routledge, 1999), 37. 21. Stephen Budiansky, The Covenant of the Wild:  Why Animals Chose Domestication (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 52, 62. 22. Sarah Whatmore, “Materialist Returns: Practising Cultural Geography in and for a More-​ Than-​Human World,” Cultural Geographies 13, no. 4 (2006): 604. 23. Stephen Budiansky, The Covenant of the Wild:  Why Animals Chose Domestication (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 24. 24. Gary L. Francione, Animals as Persons. Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 2 (emphasis in original). 25. Francione, Animals as Persons, 30 (emphasis in original). 26. Nik Taylor, Humans, Animals, and Society:  An Introduction to Human-​Animal Studies (New York: Lantern Books, 2013), 142. 27. Francione, Animals as Persons, 3 (emphasis in original). 28. Counteranthropomorphism is the “attribution of inanimate qualities to living things.” Arnold Arluke, “Sacrificial Symbolism in Animal Experimentation: Object or Pet?”, in Animals and Society. Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, vol. 3, ed. Rhoda Wilkie and David Inglis (1988; repr., London: Routledge, 2007), 285. 29. Francione, Animals as Persons, 2008), 5–​7. 30. Great Britain, An Act to Prevent the Cruel Improper Treatment of Cattle (Martin’s Act) (London: George Eyre and Andrew Strachan, 1822), 2–​3. 31. Mike Radford, Animal Welfare Law in Britain:  Regulation and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 102. See also Thomas Wentworth, “Act against Plowing by the Tayle, and Pulling the Wooll Off Living Sheep, 1635,” in The Statutes at Large, Passed in the Parliaments Held in Ireland (Dublin: George Grierson, 1786), ix; Nathaniel Ward, “‘Off the Bruite Creature,’ Liberty 92 and 93 of the Body of Liberties of 1641,” in A Bibliographical Sketch of the Laws of the Massachusetts Colony from 1630 to 1686, ed. William H. Whitmore (1856; repr., Boston, 1890). 32. Francione, Animals as Persons, 7. 33. Bernard Rollin, Farm Animal Welfare: Social Bioethical, and Research Issues (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1995), 137. 34. See, e.g., Chul-​Kyoo Kim and James Curry, “Fordism, Flexible Specialization and Agri-​ Industrial Restructuring: The Case of the U.S Broiler Industry,” Sociologia Ruralis 33, no. 1 (1993): 61–​80; Bill Winders and David Nibert, “Consuming the Surplus: Expanding ‘Meat’ Consumption and Animal Oppression,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 24, no. 9 (2004): 76–​96; Adrian Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-​Animal Relations in Modernity (London: Sage, 1999). 35. Ruth Harrison, Animal Machines (London: Stuart, 1964), 1. 36. F. W. Rogers Brambell, Report of the Technical Committee to Enquire into the Welfare of Animals Kept under Intensive Livestock Husbandry Systems (London:  Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1965), 1.

 

Animals as Sentient Commodities    297 37. Robert Garner, “The Politics of Farm Animal Welfare in Britain,” in Political Animals: Animal Protection Politics in Britain and the United States, ed. Robert Garner (Hampshire, UK: Macmillan, 1998), 152. 38. Mike Radford, Animal Welfare Law in Britain:  Regulation and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 264. 39. Since animals can continue to thrive despite suffering indicates that the rate of growth and level of productivity are unreliable measures of animal suffering, because “growth, on occasion, can be a pathological symptom,” Brambell, Report of the Technical Committee, 10–​11. 40. Rollin, Farm Animal Welfare, 6. For a critique of the “social contract,” see, e.g., Clutton-​ Brock, “Unnatural World,” in Manning and Serpell, Animals and Human, 23–​35; Clare Palmer, “The Idea of the Domesticated Animal Contract,” Environmental Values 6, no. 4 (1997):  411–​425; Ryan Gunderson, “From Cattle to Capital:  Exchange Value, Animal Commodification, and Barbarism,” Critical Sociology 39, no. 2 (2011): 259–​275. 41. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (London: Sage, 2008); Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures, chaps. 7 and 8. For a less descriptive account of the industrialization of livestock production, see Gunderson, “From Cattle to Capital,” 259–​275. 42. Robert Garner, Animals, Politics and Morality (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993), 65. 43. See, e.g., Clare Druce and Philip Lymbery, “Outlawed in Europe,” in In Defense of Animals:  The Second Wave, ed. Peter Singer (Malden, MA:  Blackwell, 2006), 123–​131; Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-​Food World (London: Bloomsbury, 2006); Jacky Turner and Joyce DeSilva, Animals, Ethics and Trade: The Challenge of Animal Sentience (London: Earthscan, 2006). 44. Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures, 164; Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food, Farming and Food: A Sustainable Future (London: Cabinet Office, 2002). 45. Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures, 175; For a critique of Franklin, see Erika Cudworth, Social Lives with Other Animals:  Tales of Sex, Death and Love (Hampshire:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 46. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 8; Ted Benton and Simon Redfearn, “The Politics of Animal Rights: Where Is the Left?” New Left Review 215 (1996):  43–​58; Anna Williams, “Disciplining Animals:  Sentience, Production, and Critique,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 24 no. 9 (2004): 45–​57. 47. Jody Emel and Jennifer Wolch, “Witnessing the Animal Moment,” in Animal Geographies. Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-​Culture Borderlands, ed. Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (London: Verso 1998), 14. 48. Peter Stevenson, A Far Cry from Noah: The Live Export Trade in Calves, Sheep and Pigs (London: Merlin Press, 1994), 116; Tara Camm and David Bowles, “Animal Welfare and the Treaty of Rome:  A  Legal Analysis of the Protocol on Animal Welfare and Welfare Standards in the European Union,” Journal of Environmental Law 12, no. 2 (2000): 197–​205. See also David Favre’s chapter in this volume, “Animals as Living Property.” 49. “EC” refers to the European Community. Camm and Bowles, “Animal Welfare and the Treaty of Rome,” 204. 50. Gary Francione, “Animals, Property, and Personhood,” in People Property or Pets? ed. Marc Hauser, Fiery Cushman, and Matthew Kamen (West Lafayette, IN:  Purdue University Press, 2006), 83.

 

298   Rhoda Wilkie 51. The use of the term guardian as opposed to owner, and companion animal as opposed to pet, was adopted during the 1990s to convey a more animal-​centric attitude. As Leslie Irvine explains, this attitude acknowledged that animals “possess a level of consciousness that make them similar to humans in many ways.” See If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection with Animals (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004), 60–​61. 52. Temple Grandin, “Animals Are Not Things,” in Hauser, Cushman, and Kamen, People Property or Pets?, 207–​208. 53. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, 123. 54. Central Intelligence Agency, The World Fact Book, https://​www.cia.gov/​library/​publications/​the-​world-​factbook/​fields/​2048.html (accessed August 14, 2014). 55. Colter Ellis, “Boundary Labor and the Production of Emotionless Commodities: The Case of Beef Production,” Sociological Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2014): 92. 56. “Dirty work,” refers to work that is “physically disgusting … a symbol of degradation, [and/​or] something that wounds one’s dignity.” See Everett C. Hughes, The Sociological Eye: Selected Papers (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1971), 343. “Dirty work [also] involves contacting ‘polluting’ substances; engaging in unpleasant tasks; and dealing with disvalued people, beings, or other objects.” See Clinton Sanders, “Working Outback: The Veterinary Technician and ‘Dirty Work.’” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 39, no. 3 (2010): 105. 57. European Commission, Farm Animal Welfare:  Current Research and Future Directions (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2002), 18. 58. John Webster, Animal Welfare: Limping towards Eden (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). 59. Wesley Jamison and William Lunch, “Rights of Animals, Perceptions of Science, and Political Activism: Profile of American Animal Rights Activists,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 17, no. 4 (1992): 438–​458. 60. Holli Kendall, Linda Lobao, and Jeff Sharp, “Public Concern with Well-​Being: Place, Social Structural Location, and Individual Experience,” Rural Sociology 71, no. 3 (2006): 399–​428. 61. Emily Gaarder, Women and the Animal Rights Movement (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). 62. Peter English, Gethyn Burgess, Ricardo Segundo, and John Dunne, Stockmanship: Improving the Care of the Pig and Other Livestock (Ipswich, UK: Farming Press, 1992), 35. 63. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, 12. 64. John Webster, Animal Welfare: Limping towards Eden (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 98–​99. 65. David Fraser, “The ‘New Perception’ of Animal Agriculture:  Legless Cows, Featherless Chickens, and a Need for Genuine Analysis,” Journal of Animal Science 79, no. 3 (2001): 638. 66. Webster, Animal Welfare: Limping, 98–​99. 67. “Byre” is a Doric word for cowshed. Doric is the vernacular of rural communities in Northeast Scotland. The phrase “byre-​face” is being used to denote people who work with livestock. It is similar to the notion of “chalk face,” i.e., schoolteachers who work with pupils in the classroom. 68. See, e.g., N. M. Benyon, “Pig-​Primate Interface: Analysis of Stockmanship,” Pig Veterinary Journal 26 (1991):  67–​77; English et  al., Stockmanship; Martin Seabrook, “The Effect of Production Systems on the Behaviour and Attitudes of Stockpersons,” in Biological Basis of Sustainable Animal Production, ed. E. Huisman, J. Osse, D. van der Heide, et al. (Wageningen, Netherlands: Wageningen Pers, 1994); Hemsworth and Coleman, Human-​ Livestock Interactions; Alain Boissy and Isabelle Veissier, “The Relationship between Farmer’s Attitude and Bahaviour towards Calves, and Productivity of Veal Units,” Annales

 

Animals as Sentient Commodities    299 de Zootechnie 49, no. 4 (2000): 313–​327; Xavier Boivin, Joop Lensink, Céline Tallet, and Isabelle Veissier, “Stockmanship and Farm Animal Welfare,” Animal Welfare 12, no.  4 (2003): 479–​492; Susanne Waiblinger, Xavier Boivin, Vivi Pederson, et al, “Assessing the Human-​Animal Relationship in Farmed Species:  A  Critical Review,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 101, no. 3–​4 (2006): 185–​242. 69. English et al., Stockmanship, no page number. 70. English et al., Stockmanship, 35. 71. John Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (Cambridge:  Polity Press, 1984), 52. The insights in this section draw on ethnographic research conducted in 1998–​1999 in Scotland. Interview data are used for illustrative purposes. For a more detailed discussion of methods and findings, see Rhoda Wilkie, “Sentient Commodities and Productive Paradoxes: The Ambiguous Nature of Human-​Livestock Relations in Northeast Scotland,” Journal of Rural Studies 21, no. 2 (2005): 213–​230; Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock. 72. Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, 55. 73. See, e.g., A. C. Dockès and F. Kling-​Eveillard, “Farmers’ and Advisers’: Representations of Animals and Animal Welfare,” Livestock Science 103, no. 3 (2006): 243–​249; Bettina Bock, M. Van Huik, Madeleine Prutzer, et al, “Farmers’ Relationship with Different Animals: The Importance of Getting Close to the Animals. Case Studies of French, Swedish and Dutch Cattle, Pig and Poultry Farmers,” International Journal of Sociology of Food and Agriculture 15, no. 3 (2007): 108–​125; Catherine Bertenshaw and Peter Rowlinson, “Exploring Stock Managers’ Perceptions of the Human-​Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and in Association with Milk Production,” Anthrozoös 22, no. 1 (2009): 59–​69. Wilkie, “Sentient Commodities,” 213–​230; Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock. 74. See also Anthony Podberscek, “Good to Pet and Eat: The Keeping and Consuming of Dogs and Cats in South Korea,” Journal of Social Issues 65, no. 3 (2009): 615–​632. 75. Arnold Arluke and Clinton Sanders, Regarding Animals (Philadelphia, PA:  Temple University Press, 1996), 170–​174. 76. Arluke and Sanders, Regarding Animals, 173. 77. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, 3. 78. Paul Hemsworth and Grahame Coleman, Human-​Livestock Interactions:  The Stockperson and the Productivity and Welfare of Intensively Farmed Animals (Oxon, UK: Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux International, 1998): 20. 79. Morris Janowitz, ed., “The Relation of Research to the Social Process,” in W. I. Thomas on Social Organization and Social Personality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966): 301. 80. Igor Koppytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things:  Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things:  Commodities in Cultural Perspective ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986): 64. 81. See Katherine Dashper, “Tools of the Trade or Part of the Family? Horses in Competitive Equestrian Sport,” Society and Animals 22, no. 4 (2014): 352–​371, for a discussion of how this might apply to competitive equestrian sport contexts. 82. The nature of farmers’ relationships with their animals can also be influenced by the species being produced, the way the animals are housed, stock density, life-​span of the animal on the farm, and generational links to the farming family through livestock bloodlines and breeding. See Bock et al., “Farmers’ Relationship with Different Animals,” 108–​125. 83. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, 145–​146. 84. Kaoru Fukuda, The Place of Animals in British Moral Discourse: A Field Study from the Scottish Borders (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1996), 119.

 

300   Rhoda Wilkie 85. See, e.g., Farm Animal Welfare Council, FAWC Report on Stockmanship and Farm Animal Welfare (London:  Farm Animal Welfare Council, 2007); Peter English and Owen McPherson, “Improving Stockmanship in Pig Production and the Role of the EU Leonardo Initiatives (1998),” www.gov.on.ca/​OMAFRA/​english/​livestock/​swine/​facts/​ article1.htm (accessed April 8, 2002). 86. This cattle female farmer had 250 breeding cows and finished off her store animals too. 87. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, 138; Fukuda, “Place of Animals.” 88. This cattle farmer looked after a smaller herd of 30–​90 animals. 89. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, 141. 90. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, 143–​144. 91. See also Colter Ellis and Leslie Irvine, “Reproducing Dominion:  Emotional Apprenticeship in the 4H Youth Livestock Program,” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Boston, July 31 2008). 92. To indicate differences of scale, my hobby farming contacts kept up to 12 cattle, while my commercial contacts ranged from 90–​1,000 cattle. For more information, see Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, chap. 3. 93. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, 150. 94. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1983). 95. Amy S. Wharton, “The Sociology of Emotional Labor,” Annual Review of Sociology 35 (2009):148–​149. 96. Michael Lynch, “Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object: Laboratory Culture and Ritual Practice in the Neurosciences,” Social Studies of Science 18, no. 2 (1988): 267. 97. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, 141. 98. Rosemary-​Claire Collard, “ Putting Animals Back Together, Taking Commodities Apart,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104, no. 1 (2014): 153. 99. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, 127. When working with sheep or poultry, there may be less need “to harden up,” as these species are perceived as less intimidating and safer to handle than cattle. 100. Arluke, “Sacrificial Symbolism,” in Wilkie and Inglis, Animals and Society, 106. 101. Dockès and Kling-​Eveillard. “Farmers’ and Advisers,’” 243. 102. Dockès and Kling-​Eveillard. “Farmers’ and Advisers,’” 248. 103. Bettina Bock, M. Van Huik, Madeleine Prutzer, et  al, “Farmers’ Relationship with Different Animals:  The Importance of Getting Close to the Animals. Case Studies of French, Swedish and Dutch Cattle, Pig and Poultry Farmers,” International Journal of Sociology of Food and Agriculture 15, no. 3 (2007): 118. See also Catherine Bertenshaw and Peter Rowlinson, “Exploring Stock Managers’ Perceptions of the Human-​Animal Relationship on Dairy Farms and an Association with Milk Production,” Anthrozoös 22, no. 1 (2009): 59–​69. 104. This may vary by species and type and scale of production. 105. Harold Herzog, “Human Morality and Animal Research: Confessions and Quandries,” Animal Scholar 62 (1993): 337–​349; Andrew Rowan (1984) Of Mice, Models, and Men. A Critical Evaluation of Animal Research. 106. Arnold Arluke and Clinton Sanders, eds., Between the Species:  Readings in Human-​ Animal Relations (Boston: Pearson, 2009), xviii. 107. See Wilkie, “Sentient Commodities,” 213–​230; Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock.

 

Animals as Sentient Commodities    301 108. Yi-​fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection:  The Making of Pets (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1984). 109. See also Jocelyne Porcher, “Well-​Being and Suffering in Livestock Farming:  Living Conditions at Work for People and Animals,” Sociologie du Travail 48 Supplement 1 (2006): 56–​70. See also Jocelyne Porcher’s chapter in this volume, “Animal Work.” 110. Robert Merton, Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays (New York: Free Press, 1976). 111. Arluke and Sanders, Regarding Animals, 85–​86. 112. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock. 113. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock. 114. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock. 115. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock. 116. See, e.g., Abigail Woods “Why Slaughter? The Cultural Dimensions of Britain’s Foot and Mouth Disease Control Policy, 1892-​2001,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 17, no. 4–​5 (2004): 341–​362; Ian Convery, Cathy Bailey, Maggie Mort, and Josephine Baxter, “Death in the Wrong Place? Emotional Geographies of the UK 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease Epidemic,” Journal of Rural Studies 21, no. 1 (2005): 99–​109; Mick Smith, “The ‘Ethical’ Space of the Abattoir: On the (In)humane Slaughter of Other Animals,” Human Ecology Review 9, no. 2 (2002): 49–​58. 117. Convery et al., “Death in the Wrong Place?’, 104. 118. There is some evidence to suggest that slaughter workers can grapple with this aspect too. See Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, chap. 8; Wilkie, “Sentient Commodities,” 1–​40. 119. Lynda Birke, Arnold Arluke, and Mike Michael. The Sacrifice. How Scientific Experiments Transform Animals and People (West Lafayette, IN:  Purdue University Press, 2007), 116–​117. 120. Wilkie, Livestock/​Deadstock, 170. 121. Paul Thompson, “Getting Pragmatic about Farm Animal Welfare,” in Animal Pragmatism. Re-​ Thinking Human-​ Nonhuman Relationships, ed. Erin Mckenna and Andrew Light (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 149. 122. David Fraser “The ‘New Perception’ of Animal Agriculture: Legless Cows, Featherless Chickens, and a Need for Genuine Analysis,” Journal of Animal Science 79, no.  3 (2001): 634. 123. Birke et al., Sacrifice, 154. 124. Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures. 125. Margaret Jane Radin, Contested Commodities. The Trouble with Trade in Sex, Children, Body Parts, and Other Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), xi. 126. Clifton Bryant, “The Zoological Connection: Animal-​Related Human Behaviour,” Social Forces 58, no. 2 (1979): 399–​421. 127. Arluke and Sanders, Between the Species, xviii.

 

Chapter 16

Anim al  Work Jocelyne Porcher

Introduction Domestic animals, both in industrialized and in developing countries, are everywhere. They are in the countryside and in the towns. They are on farms, in fields; at riding centers; in circuses, zoos, and amusement parks; in police services, military bases, hospitals, retirement homes, and schools. They are in your home and in mine. For two-​and-​a-​half-​ million years, or since Homo habilis first manufactured tools that allowed him to cut the meat of the beasts he had hunted and to eat it, human beings have had relations with animals;1 first, relations of predator and prey and then, for the past 10,000 years, relations of domestication.2 Relations have been based on the food chain, but, above all, relations are based on affect. For thousands of years, we have watched animals and they have watched us. We have talked to them and they have talked to us. We have learned to communicate with many animal species, and we have incorporated them into our human world, no matter where. We have included animals in this human world and evidently, more specifically, in the world of work. As they have been so close to us for such a long time, we feel that their presence is natural and clear. However, it seems ever more obvious that our communal life is no longer either natural or clear. It also seems that the days of our lives spent with companion species, as described by Donna Haraway,3 are numbered. Considered from the perspective of food, animals are in the process of being replaced by ersatz vegetable protein or in-​vitro meat. From a relational perspective, we ourselves are about to replace them with robots. The rupture foreshadowed between us and domestic animals shows how little value we place on the position that they hold in our society, and in particular, in work. Work is, however, the primary medium of our ties and the place where animals are most evident and have the closest proximity to us. For a long time we have used animals to feed and clothe us, and more, to help us pull ploughs, make war, and haul coal from mines.4 Today the number of animals involved in working at our side is growing, and new, sometimes

 

Animal Work   303 nondomestic species have been engaged, including rats who detect landmines, vultures who find bodies on mountains, and cetaceans who help in climate studies. Animals are in work with us, but do they work themselves? The question is important as it has important consequences, and simply taking it seriously causes a paradigm shift in the social sciences. It has consequences because the answers it can yield suggest new ways of living and working with animals. At minimum, animals who do—​or do not—​work have an undeniable place in work that it is necessary to highlight and conceptualize. Do animals work? Is the concept of work pertinent when describing animal activities in the field of work? What does work mean for an animal? We have sought to answer these questions through pragmatic and critical sociological research. Since 2007, we have been carrying out surveys among professionals and their animals, and we have been observing the animals. We have been observing what the animals do—​or do not do—​from the starting hypothesis that they are actors of work. As domestic animals have been part of the human world—​and not only part of their own world—​for a long time, their behavior is not reducible to “natural behavior.” It is not natural for a cow to use a milking robot, or for a dog to jump with a parachute. We are therefore more interested in their demeanor than animal behavior. The term “demeanor,” unlike “behavior,” implies in the first place that animals’ actions are not determined by genes or by conditioning, rather, they are actors in what they do. In the second place, it implies that what they do is complex. Work is much more than the sum of the tasks that we can break it down into. If the demeanor of animals who work is not solely determined by nature, neither are their needs. If animals work effectively, they have a need that is not at all considered in the organization of work, or by issues surrounding “animal welfare”: the need for recognition. Our results show that an animal working exists, working being used here—​as a substantive—​to describe the subjective involvement of animals in work. For animals too, work matters. This animal working, which we can observe and describe, allows us to formulate propositions that conceptualize animal work, presenting similarities to, as well as differences from, human work.

A Scheduled Break For at least ten millennia, we have lived and worked with animals. It is because they feed, clothe, protect, help, love, and console us that we have become what we are.5 We owe an immeasurable debt to domestic animals that we do not seem to have any intention of honoring.6 For, in the name of animal ethics, and led by the well-​understood interests of industry and biotechnology, we want to break with domestic animals. This rupture is in the process of happening through the collusion of actors with apparently contradictory interests: on one side, the defenders of animal abolitionists, who agitate for a world without animal death, and, on the other, the biotechnical industry, which claims to be

 

304   Jocelyne Porcher on track to produce food of a higher moral and environmental quality than that produced by agrifood enterprises or farmers. These two types of actors argue for agriculture without livestock, and therefore, in the medium term, for a human world without any domestic animals. Central to the arguments of abolitionists is the question of animal slaughter and meat-​ based food theorized as “carnism.”7 In this theory, which characterizes meat-​based food as an ideology founded on speciesism, work relations between farmers and animals are reduced to their most basic expression, that of the production of meat. The industrialization of farming over the past two centuries has transformed animal husbandry in industrial animal production. It has reduced animals to the status of things or machines, and has transformed farmers into producers of animal matter.8 Animal production has absorbed animal husbandry to such an extent that farming itself, as a ratio of traditional and dynamic work with animals, is no longer recognizable. Animal husbandry and production are included in the same group of things that supposedly bring suffering to animals, destroy the environment, and damage the health of consumers. This is why abolitionists want to do away with animal husbandry, as well as animal production and meat. It is also the intention of biotech start-​ups and investment funds, which follow Joshua Tetrick, the director of Hampton Creek Food, an enterprise supported by the Bill Gates Foundation, who considers that the world of food no longer functions. It is no longer sustainable, it is unhealthy and dangerous. The objective is to create a new model that will make the old one obsolete.9 The new model aims to produce animal products without animals, vegetable-​based (eggs without eggs, chicken without chicken) in-​vitro meat.10 This represents a colossal financial challenge, which is why important investment funds support these projects.11 However, this model also implies the disappearance of domestic animals, and not only of livestock tied to meat production. The criticism of farming, applied to the appropriation of animals by the process of domestication, equally effects our relations with horses, cats, and dogs. From the point of view of abolitionists, who consider domestication a framework for our domination of animals, we exploit these animals equally, and we should equally liberate them. We are therefore in a paradoxical situation where ordinary people manifest a great attachment to animals and engage them more and more markedly in work and in their lives, but where, at the same time, other people work to detach us from animals, and to promote a human world in which they are absent. That this is in the process of happening is therefore a major anthropological evolution. Our humanity, constructed through powerful ties with animals, is evolving toward a self-​constructed human model in which we reject the part of us that is animal. It is our belief that between animal production and “animal liberation,”12 there is place for a peaceful and intelligent mode of relations with animals. Our hypothesis is that work is the medium for these relations. It is work that creates the domestic relationship between us and animals, a relationship in which we serve animals, and animals serve us. It is work that creates our “natureculture.”13 For 10,000 years a gift relationship has existed between us and animals, in which interest and disinterestedness, attachment

 

Animal Work   305 and detachment, negotiation and violence has been articulated.14 Work is the principal conduit of this gift relationship, and it is this that allows us to live together.15 However, to live together reasonably and sustainably, it is necessary to understand the place of animals in work, and to take this place into consideration. Because (and all professionals who work with animals know this very well) if an animal does not want to work, she does not work. Therefore, without their engagement in work, the work cannot be done. We do not, however, know what working means to an animal, and that is what we have been seeking to understand.

Animal Work: A Forgotten Question Why has this question of animal work been so little studied? The most fundamental reason, it seems to me, is that there is plenty of evidence of animal work in the majority of human societies, and we satisfy ourselves with simple answers. Domestication, described as a process of the appropriation and domination of animals, has appeared to be sufficient explanation for the insertion of animals in work and their willingness to participate there. One other reason is that this question lies, on first analysis, at the interface of the social and natural sciences: in the natural sciences, animals; in the social sciences, the question of work. This split prevents the consideration of work from the point of view of animals. In addition, the status of animals in the social sciences, as tools and as representations, is based on a very strong opposition between nature and culture. Even if today this opposition has been largely called into question,16 it remains very difficult to get beyond it when considering work, because, for many, work remains in the human sphere. It should be further noted that even in the field of animal studies or human-​animal studies, the question of animal work is not studied as such. Either the question of animal work is omitted,17 even if it is hinted at in arguments, or, though they reflect on animals at work, the authors do not give a definition of animal work.18 Although Donna Haraway19 stresses the collaboration of animals in experimental work, empirical research on the subject does not exist. The largely ethnographic research contributions on the place of animals in work help to illuminate how humans think and act with animals in the field of work (working with animals),20 but they do not facilitate an understanding of the subjective relations animals have with work. It is recognized that a co-​constructed identity forged by relations between animals and humans exists, however, it is important to place this co-​construction in the field of work, because this co-​constructed identity is precisely one of the first objectives of work. This is why we have based our research on some hypotheses and on a theory of work, and, along the way we have diverged—​or not—​from this theory. We think that hypothetical-​deductive research initially, and inductive research secondly, will enable us to respond to our questions better than can be done using a uniquely ethnographic approach. Considering, nonetheless, that all approaches are complementary and

 

306   Jocelyne Porcher collectively enabling, each one with its theoretical means and its questions, as Taylor and Signal (2011) demonstrate, it is necessary to propose theories and concepts to develop the huge field of research in animal studies.21

Animal Work: A Social Question The anthropologist Richard Tapper,22 along with sociologist Peter Dickens23 and, more recently, the sociologist Mary Murray,24 highlight how much the relations that we maintain with livestock animals are tied to the production relations that we have with them, and how many of these relations resemble production relations between humans. They therefore propose thinking of the evolution of relations between humans and animals using Marx’s model: in a hunter society, animals are part of the same world as human beings; nature is not exterior to human society; and community relations between humans and animals prevail. The first domestications, which saw animals introduced into the human domicile, resembled slavery; pastoralism fostered a relationship of a feudal type. With industrial systems, we have entered into a capitalist relationship with animals. To propose that animals, since domestication, have moved from slavery to the capitalist factory, and that therefore we must liberate them, is to fail to take into account the work relations they have with humans. Considering the question of our ties from the starting point of work necessitates considering animals as something other than victims and natural and cultural idiots, whom we must liberate despite themselves. If animals collaborate at work, as we contest, then things are a lot more complicated than these analyses suggest. They overlook that, before the insertion of farming into the capitalist world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, peasants’ work relations with their animals were not pastoral but were marked by strong proximity, and by the integration of animals into the family. For Marx, unlike the bee who is not an architect and only follows a program that is preconstructed by nature, humans invent, anticipate, and imagine, and in transforming nature, they transform themselves. For Ingold,25 who argued against Marx on this question, constructing honeycomb cells in their head before actually building them is not a prerequisite of work. What is important is that animals have a conscious, intentional activity. This conscious activity, according to Ingold, is constructed by social relations that give the activity sense. For Ingold, production by human beings and animals is part of their relations with the world, and not distinct from the entirety of their lives. Can we, however, claim that in spite of this, a beaver works when he builds a dam, as put forward in Ingold’s theory? Based on the interpretation that we give to work the answer is no, for work is a human concept. Domestic animals, because they have lived with us for millennia, have appropriated and interiorized human work rationalities, and the first of these is relational. Work allows us to produce, but there are other

 

Animal Work   307 rationalities besides production, such as living together, the construction of self, co-​ constructing each other and having moral behavior. Productive rationality without a doubt concerns animals least, particularly farm animals. Cows do not produce milk. They do not measure their performances. Nevertheless, they are implicated in a task, and they know it.26 On the other hand, we do not know what idea beavers have of their building activity. Does it have the same types of rationalities as human work? It is more likely that the rationalities that animate beavers belong to the world of beavers. However, we do not think that beavers only manifest behaviors and are driven by their genes. We can hypothesize that they have intentional, collective activities of production. However, contrary to what Ingold proposes, this is not sufficient to say that beavers work, for work is far more than production. This is why, contrary to what Marx advanced, but based on the same way that Marx envisaged work, we think that domestic animals work—​and perhaps therefore so do bees—​but not beavers, unless beaver production activity, just like that of humans or dogs, aims to transform the world and make it more habitable27 for beavers and for human beings, and this is intentional on their part. Without this relation between humans and animals and a shared objective of living together, describing animal activity as work is of little interest and doesn’t bring much to beavers.

Hypothesis, Theoretical Framework, and Methodology Our hypothesis is therefore that domestic animals work. That is to say, on the one hand, that animal working exists; in other words, there is a subjective involvement of animals in work. And, on the other hand, there is animal work, or trans-​species invariants and characteristics of certain species, which defines what can be called work for an animal—​ a dog, a cow, or a horse. Our hypothesis is that invariants are more numerous than variants between species. The theoretical frameworks that we use as a base to test these hypotheses are the psychology of work and, more particularly, the clinical approach to work. There is an important distinction between the two. The clinical approach to work does not concern animals. The references that we make here concerning what drives animals are propositions constructed in 2007 concerning the subjective relationship of cows to work.28 We have chosen this particular theoretical framework because subjectivity is central to it. Our results were sufficiently pertinent for us to pursue this path, with all the constraints imposed by the clinical approach, to knowing the psychological processes in play in work and their consequences on health. Using this theoretical framework necessarily limits the subject. However, we are just at the beginning of our research, and we will increase the complexity as the research advances.

 

308   Jocelyne Porcher In the clinical approach to work, work is an essential means by which individuals thrive and stay healthy. The benefits of work come via a mutation, from initial suffering in the relationship into working for pleasure. This mutation is reached when recognition of finished work is given by the hierarchy (usefulness judgment) and by peers (beauty judgment).29 Through a production system, work can keep its promises, in particular, our being happy thanks to work, or not keep the promises and instead bring great suffering. Work can safeguard health, or it can generate disease and even death. Work has been given numerous definitions, most of which center on the productive end result of an activity and on its constraining character. It concerns attaining fixed objectives within the framework of an organization or a contractual relationship. But opinions vary as to what work is and what it is not. This is why it is more effective to be concerned with work itself, rather than with the result of work. From the clinical angle, to work is to mobilize your body, your intelligence, and yourself for a use-​value production.30 Work mobilizes a subject because there is no work without someone who works. What interests us is that someone, and their relationship with work. Starting with the theoretical framework concerning human work that constitutes the background to our research, we conducted sociological observations with professionals31 and animals. The objective of the surveys and of participant observation of the professionals was to understand how they perceive this question of animal work, how they do—​or do not—​mobilize it, in what ways they define the place of animals at work, and with what consequences for themselves, and for the animals. When considering animal behavior, we observed what animals did in the context of productive activities (direct observation or videos): what they did individually, collectively, and in their relations with humans. Sociology, when it studies animals or humans, is concerned with what individuals do, as well as what they say/​express they think or do.32 The summary of the initial results presented here refers to the survey research and the observations we made ourselves, and by graduate masters’ students, as part of a collective project.33 The areas that we studied were: a herd of dairy cows in an intensive system (Tiphaine Schmitt, in 2007) a free-​range pig farm (Aurore Chartier, in 2008); a falconry in an animal park (Déborah Mousset, in 2009), a wild boar attraction in an animal park (Pauline Olivere, 2010); sheep dogs (Justine Vallée, in 2013); assistance dogs (Emilie Fournier, in 2013); animals assisting in therapy (Benoît Vallas, in 2013); military dogs (Gaelle Mainix, in 2013); animals in films (Julie Douine, in 2013); a circus elephant (Justine Check, in 2013); pack donkeys in Burkina Faso (Thomas Bouasria, in 2013); and equestrian horses (Sophie Nicod, in 2013). Researchers in all these areas34 sought to answer, directly or indirectly, the same question, do animals work? The engagement of animals in work is relevant to two big sectors:  food production (farm animals), and service production. The number of animals involved in food

 

Animal Work   309 production is the more significant, but it is in the service sector that animal activities are the most diverse. With farm animals, the question of work is difficult to grasp. In the interviews with farmers, it clearly appeared that farm animals have an important place in work and collaborate with the work. Some farmers think that their animals do effectively work, other farmers think not, reserving real work for equine and bovine draught animals, for example. This perception of animal work also depends on the place of the animal in the production system. For example, a farmer is more inclined to think that a cow works, but that a calf does not. Generally, what farmers say concerning their work relations with animals leads one to assume that they do think that their animals work—​the words “work” or “job” are frequently employed. However, if we pose the question directly, the answer is frequently no. It depends on the definition that a given person gives to work. Most frequently, a fairly shared notion of work is demonstrated, grounded in constraint, suffering, and dependence—​a vision anchored in the monotheisms (“we must earn our bread by the sweat of our brow”), more than in a scientific or political definition of work. Thus, if a farmer uses an implicit definition of work based on constraint, and if he considers that animals’ relationship to work is not constructed on constraint and suffering, he therefore responds that animals do not work (because they do not suffer). However, if we start again with a different definition of work based on what the farmer said concerning his animals’ relationship with work, the farmer often changes his response. Nevertheless, the place of death in work with farm animals makes animal work more difficult to think about in farming than in other sectors and with other animal species. This is why the place of death in our relations with animals is an essential question35 and must be asked in concert with the need to give consideration to the issue of animal work. It is therefore indispensable, when conducting interviews on animal work, to take into account the negative definition of work that is a widely shared way of thinking. Theories concerning animal work also raise the question of the definition of work. This performative aim is important, as it reminds us of the emancipative role work has in our lives and raises that question in the lives of animals. For professionals in service animal work (assistance, performance), the idea of whether or not animals work depends in equal measure on the implicit definition that these people give to work, on the context of the realization of work, on the intensity of the work relations between humans and animals, and on the challenges of the work. For a trainer of assistance dogs or a member of the military, the dog can work or not, depending on to whom the question is asked and the representations that person has of the work done with the dog. For example, if the theory of conditioning is the theoretic base of education for that person, the question of work doesn’t seem to be relevant. If the dog is conditioned, mechanized, he is an object of human work, much more than an actor in his own training. Whether the professionals think that their animals work or not, they all share a very great interest in this question and the connections that can be made between animal work and the conditions for animals at work.

 

310   Jocelyne Porcher

Structuring Elements for Animal Working The results reported here give evidence of the essential components of work in which the intelligence, affectivity, and animals’ investment in their work are manifested, and this we call animal working. That is to say, the proof that there is one person in the animal at work, a subjectivity, and thus an intersubjective relation between humans and animals. This working is based on a range of structural elements that reflect human work and demonstrate that animals are implicated in work. However, they do not only do this, they also show us how they understand the work according to what the context of production allows, their resistance, and their propositions.

Education, Training, and Evaluation In all fields of study, education, which is sometimes described by professionals as taming,36 occupies a prominent place. Education is given by humans, but also by co-​species (for example, a young sheep dog is educated by an older dog, or female calves are taught the procedures by more experienced cows). Educating animals at work can be very constraining (army dogs, assistance dogs), or driven by the predisposition of the animal to spontaneously do what he does (display falcons, animals in films). For military dogs, assistance dogs, and animals assisting in therapy, the training follows a curriculum of graduated apprenticeship, often called or described as a “school.” They must achieve one level of training before they can advance to another. The military personnel or the trainers of assistant dogs often make an analogy with human training courses that grant diplomas. To enter into work, the animal must pass the different evaluations to which he is submitted at each level. After this, he will direct in practice his own competences and the possibilities they encounter. For example, a dog trained to work with someone who is physically disabled could end up working with a child with autism if in the course of his training he shows that his personality and competences are better suited to that type of relationship with a human, that is to say, more orientated toward affective care based on his presence and the quality of his presence, rather than on his practical competences (opening doors, carrying objects). In the same way, a military dog trained to patrol may perhaps end up carrying out missions that require a greater spirit of initiative. Each animal, whatever the species, has a way of learning and working. Animals who have gone through the same training will not respond to it in the same way. It is therefore up to the humans who work with them to adapt.

 

Animal Work   311

Communication The capacity animals and humans have to communicate is a key point of work. The animal must understand what the human says, and the human must understand what the animal says. In dangerous professions, this mutual comprehension is vital. Interspecies communication is part of the education and training of the animal. Animals learn a range of oral and gestural commands relating to their tasks, but these equally provide them, sometimes unbeknownst to the humans, with linguistic equipment that helps them understand the context of the realization of work. As demonstrated by Pereira,37 there is a semiotic between human beings and animals that it is necessary to decode in order to work together as well as possible. Work communication between humans and animals rests on a mutual capacity to comprehend the language of the other—​the humans, but sometimes other animals. Ewes, for example, understand the language of the shepherd, but also that of the dogs: their language, character, and way of working. When a shepherd gives an order to his dogs, the ewe understands the order at the same time as the dog. and she knows which dog has been sent by the shepherd. Depending on whether the dog is gentle or brutal, she reacts with more or less speed.38 Work communication between humans and animals is very visual and auditory, and in a way that is more difficult to prove, strongly supported by affects.

Attachment and Affectivity Our results demonstrate that the place of affects in animal working is very important. This affective proximity is transversally applicable to all fields, including friendship, symbiosis, and affection. In farming, the affects invested in working with animals are divided into the two big areas of friendship and power, and these are not mutually exclusive.39 The place of death in farm work means that the farm animal is almost a friend. Sometimes, despite the farmer, the animal becomes a real friend, and that is why some farmers cannot bring themselves to send certain animals to the abattoir, and prefer to keep them to finish their days at home, even if this choice is expensive from an economic point of view. In the majority of professions, friendship between humans and animals, as in farming, is managed between too much and not enough. Thus, a trainer can become attached to a dog, and this feeling can be reciprocated, so that the training is interesting and fulfilling, but not too much as the trainer knows he has to part with the dog when he goes to the person that he must assist. In other professions, the duration of the relationship is set by the procedures and the work achieved, in the military, for example. Being too attached exposes one to suffering. Even when friendship is possible, and long-​lasting,

 

312   Jocelyne Porcher such as in a circus between an elephant handler and his elephant, throughout their experiences and their shared lives, the relationship must be managed, because the elephant is potentially dangerous because of her size and weight. Although in the context of human work relations, affection between colleagues is not indispensable to their working together, it seems that in the context of working with animals, affection—​humans for animals and animals for humans—​is a necessary condition for sustainable and secure work relations.

Coordination, Cooperation, Rules of Work As the psychology of work has demonstrated for a long time, there is a gap between work prescribed by an organization (procedures) and real work performed by individuals at work. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between coordination and cooperation. Coordination is dictated by work procedures. It is prescribed work. Cooperation, on the on the other hand, comes from the individual will and from individuals’ common desire to work together. Work procedures are imposed on Victor the assistance dog, who must obey his owner and do what his training has taught him to do (open the post, bring the TV remote control.) However, not everything that fills the day for an owner and his assistance dog is laid down by procedures. There is not only work coordination between owner and dog, and upstream, dog trainers—​there is also cooperation. The dog adapts himself to the needs of his owner and does things that are not learned or that his owner has not asked him to do. He cooperates. This is the case with the majority of working animals, and this cooperation is indispensable in the face of the unpredicted, for example, the work of a guide dog for the blind who must be able to act in the face of unplanned situations. To cooperate with someone, it is necessary to have confidence in them. Confidence is built from a base of work rules, negotiated between individuals. Here, work rules in a work collective (or even in a partnership) do not refer to labor laws but to recognized methods, in the work collective, of doing the work. For humans, as for animals, there are ways of doing things that are acceptable, and others that are not. Violence, for example, is not acceptable for humans or for animals. For humans, the rule to respond when being called is an important one that the animal accepts, but this does not mean that animals come each time they are called. It is precisely because they are in a cooperative relationship with their masters that there is room to maneuver, such as disobeying orders and slowing down work. This explains the cow who makes a pretence of going toward a milking robot and then changes direction as soon as the farmer’s back is turned, or a military dog who pretends to limp in order to be given a break, or the elephant who finishes his performance sooner than usual. Professionals can recount many anecdotes that demonstrate not only cooperation by animals at work, but also their ruses to escape

 

Animal Work   313 work from time to time. The possibility of cheating shows that animals have sufficient confidence in their masters to make some infringements on the cooperative arrangement. This is also reciprocal, and animals can only tolerate bad faith or bad temper from their masters up to a certain point. Can work rules really be negotiated by animals? An animal’s margins to maneuver in modifying the rules or suggesting new ones depend on the context of the work. For military dogs and assistance dogs, there is a range of rules that are not open to discussion as they can make the difference between life and death. For a vulture in an animal park, a donkey, or a sheep dog, the concerns are less vital, and a rule that is initially incontrovertible to work relations with humans can very well be overturned by the animal. Animals’ obedience to work rules, and the power they have to override them and to propose rules more favorable to the successful realization of the work demonstrates their responsibility and therefore the moral component for them in work. This knowledge of work rules, and the possibility of introducing elements of negotiation to them, often goes hand in hand with animals’ capacity to take the initiative and humans’ capacity to let them do so. Thus an elephant in a circus can, during the show, introduce a new, unrehearsed element. If the elephant handler understands the animal’s intentions, he joins the game and follows along with the elephant’s proposition. This can equally be the case in film publicity work, where the initiative to do something can be left to the animals. It seems that an animal showing initiative is initially discouraged by humans but is accepted in the end. For example, a sheep dog who takes the initiative can find himself reprimanded the first time, and then praised if he shows that he was right and his initiative was justified. The possibility of a margin for taking initiative in work is important for animals as this also makes the work interesting and pushes animals to express their capacities and their potentialities, often going well beyond what human beings imagined possible.

Work and Play Many professionals describe working with their animals as a game, yet work is not play. Although there are rules for a game, just as there are in work, the essential difference is that we can stop playing when we want. This is not the case with work. In the work of certain animals, for example, animals in films, work fluctuates between spontaneity and effort. Their task is to pretend, and pretending resembles play. Thus, a bear can pretend to be fierce, but his handler is working with dangerous emotions that cannot overstep the work; that is to say, the bear must not forget that he is pretending and that this is the specific objective of the activity, as there are cameras around him. It is equally the case with a military dog who can be aggressive on demand. This aggression on command must not be mistaken for a game but must really be seen as work that the handler must channel so that the animal is not overtaken by his emotions.

 

314   Jocelyne Porcher

Work and Off-​Work This difference between work and play can be observed when the animal has a break, or when the working day is finished. For the game emerges behind the scenes of work. Our results demonstrate that animals differentiate well between on-​work and off-​work. Nonworking hours are understood by the animal himself, through context (change of location) or the behavior of their handler/​owner and their instructions. The animal is released from any equipment—​the harness of an assistance dog is removed, for example. Animal behavior off-​work is free. The animal can therefore do what she is forbidden to do during work: jump, run, lie down, chase a fellow animal, cuddle up with her owner—​there are no longer any rules to follow.

Recognition One of the reasons for animal good will proposed by professionals is the desire animals have to give pleasure to their owners or handlers. We think that giving pleasure is part of the dynamic of the recognition of work. As we have seen above, the benefits of work for individuals comes from the recognition of work accomplished, via judgments. To judgments of beauty and usefulness defined by the clinical approach to work, I am adding a judgment specific to the relationship between humans and animals, a judgment of connection.40 It is this that the human gives the animal, but it is also what the animal gives the human regarding work. According to professionals, animals also have a judgment about work, and they are capable of expressing it. If the animal wants to give pleasure to her owner or handler, it is because she has a positive evaluation of their relationship, and this is reciprocal. If animals are recognized by their owners, or by those that they work for, they are far less recognized by society at large. With the exception of soldier dogs who are rewarded for their bravery, animals’ work is largely overlooked. For many professionals, this is a moral void that it is necessary to fill, and to my mind, this takes the form of reflecting on the status of work animals and taking into account their cognitive and affective investment in work.

Rest and Retirement Animals work, and there comes a time when they leave work. This retirement or discharge can prove to be very difficult if the conditions for looking after retired animals are not possible (farm animals) or not planned. Too often, discharge is synonymous with slaughter or euthanasia (a dog who cannot be placed with a foster family, for example). The most frequent reasons for discharge are age, health problems or a decline in performance in the case of farm animals.

 

Animal Work   315 An improvement in the care of retired animals comes about through a recognition of their involvement in work and the attribution of a specific status.

An Animal Work? We could advance the notion, from this decoding of animal working, that there is an animal work that has many similarities with human work but that also has important differences. Our results have shown that the structural elements of animal working described here relate to all animal species. Whether it concerns an elephant, a dog, a horse, or a bear, the relationship with work is built on education, rules, communication, cooperation, and affection. Observing animals at work reveals that animals invest in their work and very often give the best of themselves for the joy or satisfaction of their handlers or owners. Animal work is therefore, above all, work—​with two notable differences, the place of affection and the place of death in work. Unlike humans, animals, particularly in partnerships, seem to need to love their owner/​handler and to be loved in return, in order to work better. This affection or this love seems to be the bedrock of work relations. Further, unlike work relations between humans, slaughter and euthanasia are management options that do not exist between humans, unless redundancy or dismissal is considered to be a symbolic death. Beyond these differences between animal work and human work, there are also many elements of work with animals that we still completely ignore. In the clinical approach to work, work has essential psychological challenges, and it is by these means that it effects identity, subjectivity, and sexuality. This work on the psyche is through the unconscious. If we propose the theory that animal work exists, through the demonstrable existence of an animal work, what of this psychological side of work? We could propose that if work effects the unconscious in a human being, it can similarly effect an animal. Animals dream. Who knows what an assistance dog41 dreams about? Can you dream without an unconscious? We know that animals can fall ill because of difficult relations with their masters, revolt against injustice at work, and die following the death of their master. Furthermore, what about the effects of work on animal health? What of its effects on the cognitive potentials of animals? Does work make animals more intelligent?

What Needs to Change to Take Animal Work into Consideration? It is not one of our intentions to idealize the collaboration of animals at work, or to forget that there can be differences in relations to work between a chicken and an elephant. No matter what species of animal, the consent of animals at work has a cost—​the repression of their spontaneous behavior, constraint, and dependence. Work for a zoo animal,

 

316   Jocelyne Porcher an assistance dog or a “pet” dog necessitates passing an enormous part of their time repressing their impulses. It is a job which, just like that of a night watchman, consists of doing nothing and is difficult to understand as a job. Taking animal work into consideration would allow us to change the way we look at the status we give to animals and to change the categorization. So the categorization of pets versus farm animals, that is to say, implicitly exploited versus not exploited, makes little sense. These two types of animals work, but in different sectors. In the same way, the categorization of meat animals, lab animals, working animals (dogs, cattle, horses), and pets doesn’t make sense either. A cow is at work in the same way, perhaps, as a lab rat, a pet dog, a pack donkey in Africa and a horse in an equestrian center. The category “working animals” can be enlarged to include all the animals with whom we work, including animals from nondomestic species such as zoo animals. For work does not concern species, but individuals. Changing categorization and taking into consideration animal work would allow us to see that between the owner of a pet dog and a cattle farmer, the differences are more to do with the number of animals and the type of production than with the relationship itself. The owner of only one dog in a town can abstain from killing his animal, but this is not the case with the cattle farmer as the possibilities of looking after the animals are limited and his income depends on the sale of milk and his calves. But if the owner of only one dog becomes the breeder of many dogs, he will also have to manage births and deaths. Animal work, just like our work, depends on organizations and institutions. It is the result of a balance of power. Perhaps animals are workers almost like others. Taking animal work into consideration will show that human freedom is not only in our hands, but also in the paws of animals. Our freedom and theirs are tied, and are built in the world of work. Because work is definitely the real hyphen in this incredible term: human-​animal.

Notes 1. Pat Shipman, The Animal Connection. A  New Perspective on What Makes Us Human (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). 2. Stephen Budiansky, The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); James Serpell, In the Company of Animals (Oxford, Eng.:  Basil Blackwell, 1986); Jean-​Pierre Digard, L’homme et les animaux domestiques (Paris: Fayard, 1990). 3. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 4. If the place of animals in work is underestimated today, it was recognized, as labor, historically in the case of certain animals. For example, in 1936, mine horses, at the same time as French workers, won the right to a week’s holiday (a week at pasture), and the right to retire. Just as peasant farmers with their working horses, miners saw their mine horses as work colleagues. 5. Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, DC: Island Press/​ Shearwater, 1996).

 

Animal Work   317 6. Jocelyne Porcher, L’esprit du don, archaïsme ou modernité de l’élevage:  éléments pour une réflexion sur la place des animaux d’élevage dans le lien social. Revue du Mauss n°20 (2002): 245–​262, http://​www.cairn.info/​revue-​du-​mauss-​2002-​2-​page-​245.htm. 7. Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows:  Introduction to Carnism (San Francisco, CA: Conari Press,2010). For a description of the abolitionist perspective, see Gary Francione and Anna Charlton’s chapter in this volume, Animal Rights. 8. Jocelyne Porcher, Eleveurs et animaux, réinventer le lien (Presses Universitaires de France, Prix Le Monde de la recherche Universitaire, 2002); Rhoda M. Wilkie, Livestock/​ Deadstock: Working with Farm Animals from Birth to Slaughter (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010). See also Rhoda Wilkie’s chapter in this volume, “Animals as Sentient Commodities.” 9. Hampton Creek is a food technology company headquartered in San Francisco focused on finding new ways of utilizing plants in food products. See http://​www.hamptoncreek. com/​. 10. See for example the start-​ups Modern Meadow and Beyond Meat who pretend to propose alternatives to meat. See http://​modernmeadow.com and http://​beyondmeat.com/​. 11. See for example Khosla Ventures, http://​www.khoslaventures.com/​ and Founders Fund, http://​www.foundersfund.com/​. 12. To put it clearly, the fact that we liberate ourselves from the animals. 13. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, Posthumanities (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 14. Jocelyne Porche, L’esprit du don, archaïsme ou modernité de l’élevage: éléments pour une réflexion sur la place des animaux d’élevage dans le lien social. “About Gift Theory: Jacques Godbout and Alain Caillé.” The World of the Gift (Montréal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 1998). 15. Note that when a domestic species is excluded from work, they tend to disappear, as has been the case with donkeys in France, who were threatened by mechanization. Their presence close to us was safeguarded when they were given new jobs (tourist donkey rides, for example). This is equally the case with horses, which, as well as their riding activities, work in new jobs (taking children to school, collecting rubbish bins). 16. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-​ Network-​ Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and culture. University of Chicago Press (2013); Erica Fudge, Milking Other Men’s Beasts. History and Theory. Theme issue 52 (December 2013), 13–​28; Haraway, When Species Meet. 17. Kay Peggs, Animals and Sociology (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 18. Nick Taylor and Tania Signal, Theorizing Animals: Re-​Thinking Humannimal Relations. (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011); Lindsay Hamilton and Nick Taylor, Animals at Work. Identity, Politics and Culture in Work with Animals. (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013). 19. Haraway, When Species Meet. 20. Arnold Arluke and Clinton R. Sanders. Regarding Animals. Animals, Culture and Society (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996). 21. Margo DeMello, Animals and Society. An Introduction to Human-​Animal Studies (New York: Colombia University Press. 2012). 22. Richard L. Tapper, “Animality, Humanity, Morality, Society,” in T. Ingold (ed.), What Is an Animal? (London: Routledge, 1994), 47–​62. 23. Peter Dickens, Reconstructing Nature. Alienation, Emancipation and the Division of Labour (London: Routledge, 1996).

 

318   Jocelyne Porcher 24. Mary Murray, “The Underdog in History: Serfdom, Slavery and Species in the Creation and Development of Capitalism,“ in N. Taylor and T. Signal (ed.), Theorizing Animals: Re-​ thinking Humanimal Relations (Leiden; Brill, 2011), 85–​106. 25. Tim Ingold, “The Architect and the Bees: Reflections on the Work of Animals and Men.” Man 18 (1983): 15, n. 1. 26. Jocelyne Porcher and Tiphaine Schmitt, “Dairy Cows, Workers of the Shadow,” Society and Animals 20, no. 1 (2012): 39–​60. 27. Christophe Dejours, “Subjectivity, Work and Action,” in Recognition, Work,Politics. New Directions in French Critical Theory, ed. J. P. Deranty, D. Petherbridge, J. Rundell, and R. Sinnerbrink (Brill, 2007), 71–​88. 28. Porcher and Schmitt, “Dairy Cows.” 29. Christophe Dejours and Jean-​Phillippe Deranty, “The Centrality of Work,” Critical Horizons 11, no. 2 (2010): 167–​180. 30. Christophe Dejours. “From the Psychopathology to the Psychodynamics of Work,” in New Philosophies of Labour–​Work and the Social Bond, vol. 13, ed. Nicholas H. Smith and Jean-​ Philippe Deranty, Social and Critical Theory, 209–​250 (Brill Academic Publishers, 2011). 31. The term “professional” here concerns humans, but certain animals also have a status at work that implies that they are professional. Jurisprudence has an example in Norway for police dogs. They have in effect the status of police employees, just as the humans with whom they work do. 32. Latour, Re-​assembling the Social. 33. See the organization’s site, ANR COW, at http://​www1.montpellier.inra.fr/​anr-​cow/​index. php/​en/​. 34. Specific articles on studies in each field conducted in 2013 are in the process of being written. 35. Jocelyne Porcher, La mort n’est pas notre métier. Editions de l’Aube (2003); Jocelyne Porcher et  al, Manifeste pour une mort digne des animaux. Editions du Palais, 2014); Wilkie, Deadstock/​livestock. 36. Taming has the idea of moving from one state to another—​the taming of a wild animal, for example, which the taming makes docile. Education does not have this idea, and does not seek to make docile, but to acquire competences, realize potential and allow individuals to bloom, or in a less positive way, to make a base for performance. 37. Carlos Pereira, Parler aux chevaux autrement. Approche sémiotique de l’équitation. (Editions Amphora 2009). 38. Jocelyne Porcher, Elisabeth Lécrivain, “Bergers, chiens, brebis: un collectif de travail naturel?” Etudes Rurales n°189. Dossier « Sociabilité animales », 121–​138 (2012). 39. Jocelyne Porcher, Florence Cousson-​Gélie, and Robert Dantzer, “Affective Components of the Human-​Animal Relationship in Animal Husbandry: Development and Validation of a Questionnaire.” Psychological Reports 95 (2004): 275–​290. 40. Jocelyne Porcher, Cochons d’or. L’industrie porcine en questions. Editions Quae, 2010. 41. My hypotheses is that with dogs involved in a profession, because they have lived and worked with us for thousands of years, work has a psychological effect. Therefore dogs dream about their work, and the work also creates an unconscious in them. Not all dogs move their paws in their dreams because they are running after rabbits! A guide dog in a city more likely dreams of the metro and the risks it involves for her human. I can well imagine that psychoanalysts will not follow me in this hypothesis!

 

Chapter 17

An imals as Re fl e x i v e Think e rs The Aponoian Paradigm Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó

It’s Complicated Reflexive thought is thought about thought, or thought about other mental states more generally. As such, the ability to engage in reflexive thought is generally regarded as a complex intellectual achievement: one that is beyond the capacities of most animals—​ indeed, of perhaps all animals except humans. A denial of this ability can be made on a variety of grounds. First, many argue, one cannot think a thought about any given mental state without having the concept of that mental state. And so, it is claimed, attributing the capacity for reflexive thought to nonhuman animals (henceforth “animals”) would entail attributing to them an implausibly sophisticated conceptual repertoire. In addition to the issue of burgeoning conceptual repertoire is another—​quasi-​empirical—​objection. If a creature has the ability to engage in reflexive thought, then he must have the ability to attribute mental states both to himself and others. It is argued that there is no empirical evidence for this ability in any nonhuman animals. Any apparent evidence in favor of this ability can always, it is argued, be explained in more parsimonious terms: for example, in ways that involve an ability for behavioral abstraction (i.e., to form generalizations about behavior and its likely consequences) but not the ability to think thoughts about what is going on in the mind of another.1 Assessing these arguments against the possibility of reflexive thought in animals is a huge undertaking—​ both empirically and conceptually—​one that has already generated countless books and journal articles, with no sign of resolution on the horizon. We shall not address this question directly. Instead, our approach will question the importance usually attached to the issue of whether animals are reflexive thinkers. This importance derives from the belief that the capacity for reflexive thought is built into,

 

320    Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó or required for, many other capacities. If animals lack the capacity for reflexive thought, they, therefore, must also lack these other capacities. This is the idea that we shall resist. At the heart of this, we shall argue, is a pervasive tendency, shared by philosopher and scientist alike, toward overcomplication. Suppose there is a property—​let us call it P—​that, common sense decrees, is widely distributed in nature, being possessed not only by normal adult human beings but also by children and at least some animals. While property P is, on some level, mundane and familiar—​this is the basis of confidence in the widespread distribution of this property—​the precise theoretical articulation of P is controversial. There is a range of theoretical options that might be used to capture this property P, running from the simple to the complex. On some of the more complex options, it turns out that the distribution of P will not be as wide as common sense supposes: for example, the possession of P by children and other animals will be rendered problematic, unlikely, or impossible. Thus, there is a clash between common sense (“P is widely distributed through the human and animal world”) and theory (“P is probably/​definitely restricted to normal adult humans”). We think it is fair to say that, in this sort of case, there has been a persistent historical tendency, in both philosophical and scientific treatments of animals, to favor the restrictive theory over the more liberal common sense. Indeed, in philosophy, a few dissenting voices aside, this tendency is endemic and almost definitive of the attitude that, historically speaking, the discipline has taken toward animals. It is unclear why this should be. Philosophers are, perhaps, complicated people, and have a natural proclivity to favor the complex over the simple. But this tendency is not restricted to (professional) philosophers. There is, we think, a lot of truth in Wittgenstein’s (implicit) claim that we are all philosophers.2 Scientists also frequently find themselves in the grip of philosophical assumptions and confusions, and the scientists who study animals are no exception. The approach we are going to defend, we shall refer to as aponoian. Aponoia comes from the Greek, apó, which means “away from,” “separate,” “without,” and noûs, which means “intelligence,” “thought.” An aponoian approach to psychological abilities is, accordingly, one that aims to leave intelligence and thought aside.3 This does not mean—​and we can’t really emphasize this enough—​that animals are lacking in intelligence. Aponoia is something that applies to humans and other animals equally. The idea we mean to convey is this: seemingly complex psychological abilities are often not as complex as they seem. Intelligence is, in this sense, often not as intelligent as it seems.

Two Mistakes This chapter will inveigh against the philosophical art of (over)complication. The endemic overcomplication in question can take a variety of forms, but two, in particular, stand out.

 

Animals as Reflexive Thinkers    321 Suppose there is a property P, which might, in different contexts, stand for any number of psychological traits or abilities, including consciousness, emotions, empathy, beliefs (and other propositional attitudes), action and agency (including moral agency). One type of complication, then, consists in a rather unseemly rush to go meta: to assume that articulation of a given psychological phenomenon, P, requires appeal to a meta-​level phenomenon of some sort: awareness of P, thoughts about P, the ability to scrutinize P, concepts of P, and so on. We shall refer to this baleful rush to the meta-​ level—​in contexts where it is neither necessary nor fruitful—​as a tendency toward premature meta-​articulation. Obviously, this tendency is directly related to the issue of the importance of reflexive thought in animals. To appeal to the meta-​level in explanation of a given mental phenomenon—​consciousness, emotions, beliefs, empathy, and so on—​is to suppose that it is not possible for a creature to possess or exhibit that phenomenon unless she is capable of engaging in reflexive thought of some sort. Conversely, if possession of these things does not require a meta-​level explanation, then the lack of the ability to engage in reflexive thought does not preclude possession of these phenomena. Second, there is another tendency that, unfortunately, stubbornly resists our attempts to provide it with a catchy appellation. This tendency is best introduced by example. Suppose we are tempted to say, on the basis of his behavior, that one animal is the subject of a given emotion, say fear. The little dog, let us suppose, fears the big dog. Given an array of behavioral, evolutionary, and neurobiological evidence, our attribution of fear to the dog does not seem to be an unreasonable one. However, suppose the “philosopher in us,” as Wittgenstein put it, urges caution: to fear the big dog, the little dog would have to understand that the big dog is worthy of fear—​that he is the sort of thing that should or ought to be feared. But now we seem to be attributing to the little dog the concept of ought or should—​the concept of warrant, as we might say. And this does seem to be an overly sophisticated concept. Therefore, we might find the philosopher in us urging us to abandon the idea that the dog can possess the emotion of fear. This, we shall argue, would be an example of confusing the ability to make a certain judgment and the ability to track a certain judgment. Accordingly, we shall refer to it—​ and we note, once again, that if there is a catchier appellation for this confusion, it is beyond the abilities of the authors to devise—​as the making/​tracking confusion. The little dog, we shall argue, does not need to make the judgment that the big dog ought to be feared, or that he warrants fear. Rather, a far weaker condition is all that is required: if the dog’s emotion is not, as we shall say, misguided (a technical term to be explained later), then the claim that the big dog ought to be feared must be true. In such circumstances, we shall say, the dog’s emotion tracks the truth of the claim. The little dog does not need to judge that the big dog ought to be feared, as long as his or her emotion tracks the truth of the claim.4 The making/​tracking confusion is important in its own right. In this paper, however, given that our primary concern is the issue of reflexive thought in animals, we shall tend to focus on the way it has been used to support the error of premature meta-​articulation.

 

322    Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó

Consciousness Descartes claimed, notoriously, that animals lack minds, and most have interpreted this claim as a denial that animals are conscious.5 This encouraged generations of Port-​Royal scientists to nail living, conscious animals to boards and dissect them. The screams and screeches, they assured themselves and others, were just the rubbing together of various mechanisms, and should not be taken to indicate anything about the mental life of the animal—​for there was no such mental life. Equally notoriously, Descartes had no convincing arguments for this dismissal of the mental lives of animals. When pushed, he resorted to the observation that if animals had minds they would have immortal souls, and they could not be reasonably credited with these.6 One might think that, today, we have shaken off this postmedieval nonsense, but the claim that animals lack consciousness has, in fact, been defended in recent philosophical discourse. This defense turns on what is known as the higher-​order thought (HOT) model of consciousness. We discuss this not because the view is widespread—​ even among philosophers, few today are willing to bite the bullet and deny consciousness to animals—​but because it is a glaring, and so for our purposes useful, example of the pitfalls of assuming a phenomenon must be explained by appeal to the meta-​level. The sense of consciousness in question is phenomenal: the way it seems or feels when one has or undergoes an experience. The overwhelming preponderance of the scientific evidence suggests that this sort of consciousness is possessed by most, perhaps all, vertebrates and some invertebrates and so, at a conservative estimate, probably made its first appearance (on this planet at least) 300 to 500 million years ago. However, some proponents of HOT have contested this claim.7 In order to understand the HOT model of consciousness, two distinctions are required. The first is between creature consciousness and state consciousness. Consciousness can be ascribed to both creatures and mental states. A creature can be conscious in the sense that she is awake as opposed to asleep. But a mental state—​a desire, for example—​can also be conscious or unconscious. The second distinction is between transitive consciousness and intransitive consciousness. Transitive consciousness is consciousness of something. If I (consciously) think that the cat is on the mat, then I am transitively conscious of this state of affairs. Creatures are transitively conscious of things; mental states are not. My thought that the cat is on the mat is not conscious of anything. I am conscious of the cat being on the mat in virtue of having that thought. My thought that the cat is on the mat, on the other hand, is intransitively conscious when I am (consciously) thinking it. Based on these distinctions, we can express the guiding idea behind HOT accounts as follows: intransitive state consciousness is to be explained in terms of transitive creature consciousness. According to the HOT model of consciousness, for a given mental state of mine—​ say pain—​to be conscious, it is necessary that I form (or, in some versions, be able

 

Animals as Reflexive Thinkers    323 to form) a thought about this pain—​a thought to the effect that I am in pain. This thought confers consciousness on my pain. Until I form the thought—​or unless I possess the ability to form the thought—​my pain is nonconscious.8 The thought makes me transitively conscious of my pain, and in doing so makes my pain intransitively conscious. The HOT model is implausible. In particular, it seems to fall foul of a dilemma. Is the higher-​order thought (intransitively) conscious? If it is, then HOT does not explain consciousness but presupposes it. If it is not, then it is utterly mysterious how the thought is supposed to make me transitively conscious of my pain. Intransitively unconscious thoughts do not make their subjects transitively conscious of their objects—​that is precisely what it is for them to be intransitively unconscious. Suppose, for example, I think unconsciously—​perhaps due to various mechanisms of repression—​that someone very close to me is seriously ill. What would this mean? We might explain it in terms of various unexplained feelings of melancholy that assail me when I am talking to them, or a vague sense of foreboding that I can’t quite pin down. However, what the thought cannot do, in its unconscious form, is make me aware of the fact that the person is seriously ill. Because as soon as it does that, it becomes, by definition, a conscious thought. To become aware of the fact that my friend is seriously ill is to consciously think that my friend is seriously ill. That is, the thought has become intransitively conscious. That a thought does not make me aware of what it is about is precisely what it means for the thought to be intransitively unconscious. Conversely, as soon as it does make me aware of what it is about, it becomes a conscious thought—​ because making me aware of what it is about is precisely what it is for the thought to be conscious.9 The appeal to a higher-​order thought to explain consciousness does not work. This is an example of premature meta-​articulation. In this case, the premature meta-​ articulation is apparently based on the attribution of seemingly miraculous powers to the meta-​level; i.e. the idea that the meta-​level can somehow magically bestow on a range of phenomena a feature that is intrinsically lacking in the phenomena themselves. This form of premature meta-​articulation, therefore, is grounded in what we might call the miracle of the meta.10 This is the general form of the miracle: 1. First-​order phenomena a, b, c, etc., are intrinsically lacking in some property P. (In this case, P = phenomenal consciousness). 2. Higher-​order phenomena x, y, z take a, b, c, as their objects, and in so doing confer P on a, b, c. The problem—​the reason why this schema is miraculous—​lies in this dilemma: 3. Do x, y, z possess P? 4. If so, then we have not explained P but simply presupposed it. 5. If not, then it is mysterious how x, y z can confer P on a, b, c.

 

324    Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó In other words, the appeal to the meta-​level cannot do the work it is supposed to do, and is therefore fruitless.11 While many prominent forms of premature meta-​articulation are grounded in the miracle of the meta, as we shall see, this is not true for all cases. Therefore, we shall treat premature meta-​articulation and the miracle of the meta as distinct fallacies, with the latter being a category of the former. The usefulness of the HOT account as an example of premature meta-​articulation is limited because the account has not achieved widespread acceptance. We use it because it provides an exceptionally clear example of premature meta-​articulation. As we shall see, there are other examples of premature meta-​articulation that many find more plausible. Plausible or not, we shall argue that they suffer from the same deficits.

Belief I:  Premature Meta-​Articulation Some have argued that animals cannot have beliefs. In this and the following section, we shall argue that their case invariably depends either on premature meta-​articulation or the making/​tracking confusion. This section deals with premature meta-​articulation about belief. Donald Davidson argues that “dumb” animals (i.e., animals incapable of engaging in linguistic communication) are incapable of having beliefs, “First, I argue that in order to have a belief, it is necessary to have the concept of belief. Secondly, I argue that in order to have the concept of belief one must have language.”12 The requirement that one possess the concept of belief in order to possess a belief may seem, prima facie, unduly intellectualistic. Davidson thinks otherwise: Here I  turn for help to the phenomenon of surprise, since I  think that surprise requires the concept of a belief. Suppose I believe there is a coin in my pocket. I empty my pocket and find no coin. I am surprised. Clearly enough I could not be surprised (though I could be startled) if I did not have beliefs in the first place. And perhaps it is equally clear that having a belief, at least one of the sort I have taken for my example, entails the possibility of surprise. If I believe I have a coin in my pocket, something might happen that would change my mind. But surprise involves a further step. It is not enough that I first believe there is a coin in my pocket, and after emptying my pocket I no longer have this belief. Surprise requires that I be aware of a contrast between what I did believe and what I come to believe. Such awareness, however, is a belief about a belief: if I am surprised, then among other things I come to believe my original belief was false.13

To be surprised, one must be able to have a belief about a belief. However, one cannot have a belief about a belief unless one has the concept of belief. But to have the concept of belief requires the concept of objective truth, says Davidson, “Much of the point of the

 

Animals as Reflexive Thinkers    325 concept of belief is that it is the concept of a state of an organism which can be true or false, correct or incorrect. To have the concept of belief is therefore to have the concept of objective truth.”14 But the concept of objective truth, Davidson argues, for reasons deriving from his semantic theory, is not possible for creatures lacking in language. There is much about this argument that can be questioned.15 However, we shall simply focus on stopping the argument before it starts. Davidson’s conception of surprise is a metacognitive one. To be surprised requires (i) being aware of two distinct beliefs, and, in virtue of this, (ii) being aware of the contrast between them. The claim that animals cannot be surprised is, of course, itself a rather surprising one in that it contradicts a wealth of evidence, scientific and anecdotal, suggesting that surprise is rather widespread in the animal kingdom. Let us take a case of apparent surprise. Hugo, a dog, requests to be let out of the back door for his nightly constitutional. It has been raining, and a rather large American bullfrog sits outside, a few feet away. Hugo exits in his usual way, but upon noticing the frog, freezes for around thirty seconds, staring intently. It would be implausible to claim that nowhere in this little tableau is there any element of surprise. It would also be implausible to attribute to Hugo an awareness of the contrast between his initial and subsequent beliefs about the state of the patio vis-​à-​vis large American bullfrogs. However, to explain Hugo’s surprise, it is possible to take an aponoian approach in which there is no need to attribute to him any such thing. Within this approach, all that is required to explain surprise is the postulation of a first-​order mechanism that records a discrepancy between the content of a belief and the way the world is.16 Suppose we grant that Hugo has a dispositional belief about the patio of roughly this form: when I go out the door, things will be more or less the same as they usually are. The postulated mechanism works by detecting a discrepancy between this belief and the way the world, in fact, is. Hugo is, as a result of this discrepancy, surprised. Or, better, surprise is the experiential form the detection of this discrepancy takes. Surprise, therefore, does not need to be explained metacognitively. The mistake Davidson has made, in effect, is to confuse awareness of the contents of beliefs with awareness of beliefs. The content of a belief is what the belief is about. What the belief is about will be, roughly, a state of affairs: an arrangement of objects and properties in the world. To have a dispositional belief is to be disposed to entertain content—​to believe that a certain state of affairs is the case—​under certain eliciting conditions. The content of Hugo’s belief, we have supposed, is that the patio is more or less the way it usually is: no surprises there. This belief, presumably, exists in dispositional form: Hugo does not need to be consciously thinking this to himself. There is, however, a surprise there, as Hugo quickly perceives. Hugo, thus, becomes aware of the new content: thing, there! And so the surprise-​detecting mechanism kicks in to detect the difference between the content of his perception and the content of his dispositional belief. In no part of this account do we need to postulate metacognitive abilities or arrangements, such as beliefs about beliefs. Davidson’s position is, then, an example of unnecessary premature meta-​articulation.

 

326    Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó

Belief II:  The Making/​Tracking Confusion Davidson, along with Stephen Stich and others, has another argument against the possibility that animals can believe. In this section we shall try to show this argument falls victim to the making/​tracking confusion. Consider the following scenario17: a dog chases a squirrel up a tree. The squirrel jumps from one tree to the next and eventually disappears. The dog does not see this, and sits at the foot of the tree barking. It is natural to explain the dog’s behavior in terms of his belief that the squirrel is in the tree (conjoined with, perhaps, his desire to catch the squirrel, or his frustration at not being able to do so, and so on). He cannot, after all, see that the squirrel is in the tree—​the squirrel is no longer there. Davidson18 and Stich19 disagree with this interpretation of the situation. Davidson puts his argument as follows: Can the dog believe of an object that it is a tree? This would seem impossible unless we suppose that the dog has many general beliefs about trees: that they are growing things, that they need soil and water, that they have leaves or needles, that they burn. There is no fixed list of things someone with the concept of a tree must believe, but without many general beliefs there would be no reason to identify a belief as a belief about a tree, much less an oak tree. Similar considerations apply to the dog’s supposed thinking about the cat.20

The more general moral of these considerations is, We identify thoughts, distinguish between them, describe them for what they are, only as they can be located within a dense network of related beliefs. If we really can intelligibly ascribe single beliefs to a dog, we must be able to imagine how we would decide whether the dog has many other beliefs of the kind necessary for making sense of the first.21

Davidson focuses on the tree. We’ll focus on the squirrel. Does the dog—​let us call him Hugo again—​believe that the squirrel is a mammal, that he is warm-​blooded, that he has a skeleton, and so on? All these beliefs, Davidson claims, are part of our concept of a squirrel, and so without them Hugo cannot share our concept. Therefore, the attribution to Hugo of the belief that there is a squirrel in the tree is problematic. The attribution of a belief about the squirrel to Hugo depends on his possession of the concept of squirrel. However, possession of a concept depends on possession of a network of related beliefs. Therefore, attribution of beliefs (and other propositional attitudes) is a holistic enterprise. Roughly, attribution holism: the attribution of a single belief or other propositional attitude to an individual requires, and only makes sense in terms of, the attribution of a network of related beliefs.

 

Animals as Reflexive Thinkers    327 This attribution holism precludes attribution of beliefs to individuals who do not share our belief network. Hugo, along with all other animals, is such an individual. We might call this the “anchoring” argument. The content of any concept is anchored to a network of related beliefs. The human concept of squirrel is anchored to the network of related beliefs shared by humans. We have to suppose that Hugo does not possess this concept. But, therefore, we cannot attribute beliefs about squirrels to Hugo, for when we do so we employ a concept (“our” concept of squirrel) that he does not possess. More generally, the attribution of individual beliefs to individuals is constrained by the networks of beliefs they hold. If this network is not shared with us, we cannot attribute beliefs to them, for such attribution would be predicated on concepts they do not possess. The anchoring argument is unconvincing. At the heart of it lies an equivocation between the issue of (i) whether animals have beliefs at all and (ii) which beliefs they have. At most, the argument shows that we may not be able to attribute beliefs to animals because of a divergence in the content their beliefs would possess and the concepts we would employ in ascribing those beliefs. The argument does not show that animals do not possess beliefs, merely that we cannot specify the content of their beliefs, and so cannot ascribe beliefs to them. But if that is the problem, then there is a well-​known apparatus for getting around it. Here is a famous philosophical thought experiment. It sometimes gives philosophers a bad name, because it seems so far-​fetched, but, in fact, it is just a way of making a simple point graphic. There is a planet—​Twin Earth, which exactly duplicates Earth in every respect bar one: there is no water on Twin Earth. Instead, there is a substance that looks, tastes, and feels exactly like water and that fills the oceans and rivers and emerges from the faucets of Twin Earth. A molecule-​for-​molecule twin of someone on Earth speaks twin English, and so has beliefs that he or she would express with sentences of the form, “Water is wet,” for example. However, the Twin can have no water-​beliefs. There is no water on his or her planet. He or she has only ever been in contact with this other substance. We can call it retaw, for ease of identification: the Twin only has retaw-​beliefs (though speaking Twin English, he or she would express these beliefs using the term “water.” He/​she calls retaw “water”). The point of the thought experiment is this: a person’s beliefs can vary even though everything in his or her head—​they are molecule-​for-​ molecule duplicates—​remains the same. But that doesn’t matter for our purposes. Suppose we accept the conclusion of this thought experiment. Then, if we explain the Twin’s retaw-​drinking behavior through postulating a desire to quench his/​her thirst and a belief that water will quench it, our explanation would be false. Nevertheless, there is surely something about it that is right. It is not as if we tried to explain his/​her behavior by way of the desire to quench his/​her thirst and the belief that water is poisonous, or the belief that colorless green ideas sleep furiously. The explanation may not be strictly correct, but it is not far off the truth. The crux is how to explain the idea of being not far off the truth, and there is a way of doing this. The truth of the claim (or proposition) that water is wet guarantees the truth of the claim that retaw is wet. If the former proposition is true, then the latter must be true also. More than this, the guaranteeing of truth derives from the fact that there is a

 

328    Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó reliable connection between the properties of water and the properties of retaw: if water is wet, colorless, odorless, transparent, thirst quenching, and so on, then retaw must be these things too. This reliable connection between properties is simply a feature of the way the thought experiment is set up. We can apply this general idea to Hugo the dog. Suppose Hugo represents the squirrel in, for example, affordance-​based terms. That is, the dog represents the squirrel as a chase-​able thing. This is, of course, an empirical matter, but suppose, for the sake of argument, it is correct. Corresponding to the proposition that we entertain—​namely, that the squirrel is in the tree, Hugo thinks a thought along the following lines: the chase-​ able thing is up there. Can we still legitimately use our proposition to explain Hugo’s behavior? The answer, we suspect, is that we can, and while we won’t be strictly correct, what we say is close enough to the truth to be useful and enlightening. More precisely, what we say will be useful and enlightening if the following two conditions—​designed to parallel the Twin Earth case—​hold. First, the truth of the (anchored to us) claim that there is a squirrel in the tree guarantees the truth of the (anchored to Hugo) claim that the chase-​able thing is up there. If the former is true, then the latter is true also. Secondly, this guaranteeing of truth holds because there is a reliable connection between the properties of squirrels and chase-​able things: squirrels, for Hugo, are reliably chase-​able (and things in trees are reliably up there). Consider the first condition. If the (anchored to us) claim that the squirrel is in the tree is true, then the (anchored to Hugo) claim that the chase-​able thing is up there must also be true. The truth of the first anchored claim guarantees the truth of the second one. Moreover, and this is the second condition, the reason the first anchored claim guarantees the truth of the second is because of a reliable connection between the property of being a squirrel and the property of being a chase-​able thing. For Hugo, squirrels are reliably chase-​able: that is, for any x, if x is a squirrel, then x, for Hugo, is chase-​able. When these first and second conditions are met, we can say that the (anchored to us) claim that the squirrel is in the tree tracks the (anchored to Hugo) claim that the chase-​ able thing is up there. There is a truth-​guaranteeing relation between the two claims, where this is grounded in a reliable connection between the properties of the thing (the squirrel) the claims are about.22 Note, once this apparatus is accepted, we don’t even need to know what beliefs Hugo has vis-​à-​vis squirrels. He may represent them as chase-​able things or by way of some other categories entirely. All that is required for the attribution of the belief that the squirrel is in the tree to be useful and enlightening (if not strictly true) is that the (anchored to us) proposition that the squirrel is in the tree track whatever proposition it is that can truly be employed in attributing the belief to Hugo. Davidson’s argument against attributing beliefs to animals, therefore, is a version of the making/​tracking confusion. It assumes that attributions of beliefs and other propositional attitudes to an animal can be legitimate only when the animal is capable of entertaining a given claim or proposition—​that is, capable of making a given judgment. We have argued that this is too strong. There are various ways in which an attribution of belief to an animal can be legitimate. One of these ways is that the attribution be useful

 

Animals as Reflexive Thinkers    329 or enlightening—​that it allows us to make sense of the animal’s behavior. But this condition, we have argued, does not require that the animals be able to make the judgment, or entertain the proposition, implicated in the belief that we attribute to the animals. Rather, all that is required for the belief-​attribution to be enlightening—​that is, to have explanatory value—​is that there is an appropriate relation of tracking, in the sense explained above, between the thought the animal actually thinks (which is an empirical matter) and the thought we attribute to him.

Emotion A Capuchin monkey sees his fellow being rewarded with (highly prized) grapes for completing a given task. Upon completing the same task, this monkey is given a (not at all highly prized) piece of cucumber. After several repetitions, the seemingly enraged monkey hurls his cucumber out of the cage at the researcher.23 If the players in this scene were human, it would be natural to describe their behavior by appeal to the emotion of indignation. Jaak Panksepp has argued, on neurobiological grounds, that basic emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust extend beyond the human realm, encompassing all mammals, in all likelihood birds, and possibly reptiles.24 This is not a minority view in affective neuroscience. Panksepp’s view—​with the possible exception of reptiles—​also coincides quite closely with common sense. Arrayed against common sense and affective neuroscience, however, we find philosophers who regard the attribution of any emotions to animals as deeply problematic—​and the attribution of a fairly complex emotion such as indignation especially so. There is a tendency to think that emotions are somehow more primitive than cognitive states, such as belief. It is unclear from where this idea derives, but its legitimacy is very questionable. Emotions are, at least conceptually, more complex than cognitive states. An emotion contains everything a belief contains and more. Emotions are distinct from moods. Like beliefs and other cognitive states, emotions have intentional content. Fear is fear of something or that something will happen. Anger is directed at someone because that person did something. This means that emotions have intentional content. Indeed, they are individuated by this content. If the monkey were indeed indignant, the content of his indignation would be that he is being offered a cucumber (when his fellow Capuchin is being offered a grape). This is what individuates the emotion—​distinguishes it from other cases of indignation. That he is being offered a cucumber is what we might regard as the factual content of the Capuchin’s emotion. In their possession of factual content, emotions are akin to beliefs. Emotions are different from beliefs, however, in that there is more to their content than the factual. Implicit in the monkey’s indignation would be the evaluative content that his being offered the grape is wrong. The content of the emotion is composed of the factual judgment (“I am being given a cucumber, again”), and the moral judgment

 

330    Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó (“This is wrong!” or “I am being wronged!”). This seems to be a moral judgment. Not all emotions involve specifically moral judgments. But all involve evaluative judgments of some sort. If the little dog does, indeed, fear the big dog, then implicit in this, it seems, is the judgment that the big dog is worthy of fear—​that he should be feared. Because emotions have both factual and evaluative content, philosophers skeptical of the idea that animals can have emotions have two different options for developing their case. They might contest the claim that animals can entertain factual content. We have already discussed this idea in the previous two sections. The other version of the case turns on hostility to the idea that animals can make the moral or other evaluative judgments required for the possession of emotions. This is the avenue of hostility we shall examine in this section. We shall argue that this idea is an example of the making/​ tracking confusion. To make a moral judgment seems to require the possession of the moral concepts of right and wrong. And it is not unreasonable to suppose that Capuchin monkeys do not possess these concepts. Underlying this thought is the distinction between concept possession, on the one hand, and the ability to discriminate, on the other. If an ant is sprayed with oleic acid, his fellow ants will remove him from the colony—​oleic acid is given off when an ant dies. Ants can discriminate, with a reasonable level of precision, which of their fellows are dead from which of them are not. But it would be implausible to suppose that they possess the concept of death. Similarly, it might be argued, animals might be trained to discriminate things that are good from things that are bad without possessing the concept of good and bad. To possess that concept, one would need to know not merely which things are good and bad but in what their goodness or badness consists. If we accept this, then it seems that (1) if emotions such as indignation involve moral judgments, and (2) moral judgments require moral concepts, then (3) Capuchin monkeys, it would seem, cannot possess emotions of this sort. The account of emotions assumed here is a cognitivist one: emotions are seen as requiring (on some implausibly strong versions, reducing to) judgments. One option for the defender of emotions in animals, therefore, is to attack the cognitivist account of emotions. We shall not pursue this strategy, largely because we think cognitivism about emotions is correct. Instead, we shall argue that even if one assumes cognitivism about emotions, and so sees emotions as bound up with evaluative, and sometimes moral, judgments, this is compatible with animals possessing emotions. The key to the argument we shall develop is the difference between making moral judgments and tracking moral judgments. Making moral judgments is not required for possession of emotions such as indignation. All that is required is that the emotion, in a sense to be made clear, track moral judgments—​judgments that the animal need not be able to make. Smith is indignant that Jones snubbed him. There are two ways in which this emotion might, let us say, misfire—​roughly, the analogue of what it is for a belief to be false. The category of a misfire is a conjunctive one. An emotion misfires when it is either misplaced or misguided. Smith is indignant because he believes Jones snubbed him, but Smith is, in fact, mistaken. Jones didn’t snub him at all. Smith was being his usual

 

Animals as Reflexive Thinkers    331 hypersensitive self, imagining slights where there are none. Let us say that, in this case, Smith’s indignation is misplaced. An emotion is misplaced when it depends on a factual assertion’s being true when that assertion is, in fact, false. The other source of failure would occur if Jones has every right to snub Smith—​say, because of Smith’s boorish behavior on their most recent encounter. Smith, as we might say, deserved no better from Jones in this case. Let us say that Smith’s indignation is, in this case, misguided. An emotion such as this is misguided when it depends on a claim of entitlement where there is, in fact, no such entitlement. More generally, an emotion is misguided when (i) it requires the truth of a given evaluative claim, and (ii) this evaluative claim is not, in fact, true. The Capuchin’s indignation—​which we have supposed, for the sake of argument, he possesses—​can misfire in the same ways. It might be misplaced: for example, his fellow Capuchin has not been offered a grape at all, merely a cucumber. In such a case, the Capuchin might be angry that the researcher has nothing better to offer. But he cannot be indignant at the unfair way he is being treated in comparison with his fellow Capuchin. Or it might be misguided: for example, the monkey has not performed the task for which the grape is the reward, and therefore the implicit evaluative judgment that he deserves better treatment is not, in fact, true. The idea of an emotion being misguided allows us to understand the location in logical space of the evaluative component of the emotion. If an emotion, E, is not to be misguided, then a certain evaluative proposition, p, must be true. The truth of this proposition, as we might say, makes sense of the emotion. We need not think of emotions as reducible to evaluations. Rather, for any emotion, there is a certain evaluative proposition that must be true in order for the emotion to not be misguided. In this sense, possession of an emotion tracks a true evaluative proposition. If an emotion is not misguided, then there exists a certain evaluative claim, p, and p must be true. More precisely, there exists one and only one evaluative claim whose truth is guaranteed by the nonmisguided status of the emotion: the indexical proposition that “in being offered a cucumber rather than a grape, I have been wronged.” The nonmisguided status of an emotion, therefore, guarantees the truth of a given evaluative proposition. When we have emotions that are not misguided, these emotions track true evaluative propositions. To track a proposition does not require that one entertain, or even be capable of entertaining, it—​that one be able to make the moral judgment that is tracked. Thus, this aponoian account of emotions avoids the charge of over-​intellectualization, and explains how they can be spread as widely through the animal domain as both science and common sense take them to be. The fallacy embodied in the argument that animals cannot have emotions is, therefore, the making/​tracking confusion. An emotional state that is thought to require that animals make, or be capable of making, a given judgment in fact requires no such thing. It is sufficient for possession of the state that a given judgment or proposition be tracked in the sense that, if the emotion does not misfire (i.e. is not misguided or misplaced or both), there is a certain proposition that must be true (or two propositions—​one factual one evaluative).

 

332    Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó

Empathy and Moral Motivation The combined effects of both premature meta-​articulation and the making/​tracking confusion are nowhere more evident than in many treatments of empathy and moral motivation. The Capuchin monkey’s indignation is a self-​directed emotion in that it concerns his own well-​being. An important category of other-​directed emotion—​an emotion that concerns the welfare of another—​is empathy. Other-​directed moral emotions are based on a concern—​which can take either positive or negative form—​about the well-​being of another individual. The term “empathy” is notoriously ambiguous. In particular, it is used, as a proposed explanans, in two quite different theoretical contexts. Sometimes empathy is understood as a mechanism involved in social cognition. For instance, in some versions of the simulation theory of mind, empathy is understood as an ability that enables the attribution of mental states to others. By empathizing with someone, we place ourselves in her mental shoes and come to understand what she thinks and feels. In this theoretical context, the motivational or emotive connotations of the concept of empathy are usually bracketed.25 We shall not discuss this sense of empathy. Our concern, rather, will be with the concept of empathy as it is employed in moral contexts, specifically in contexts of moral motivation. Here, the concept is strikingly variegated: at one end of the spectrum, empathy requires breathtakingly complicated cognitive and conceptual abilities; at the other, it is little more than a brute physiological reaction. Leslie Jamison, in her wonderful book The Empathy Exams, veers about as far as one can in the direction of complexity: Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see… Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries … you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?26

Empathy, in this sense, requires mind-​reading—​the ability to attribute mental states both to others and to oneself, which is a form of reflexive thought, and much more besides (perspective taking, imaginative reconstruction, and so on). We shall assume, with more than a little confidence, that animals are incapable of empathy in Jamison’s sense. Not all cases of empathy need be this complex, of course. Nevertheless, one can detect a pronounced tendency to suppose that empathy involves mind-​reading abilities: the ability to understand the minds of another by way of the attribution of mental states to them. Thus, de Vignemont and Jacob write,

 

Animals as Reflexive Thinkers    333 The motivational role of empathetic pain for moral and prosocial behavior … has often been stressed… . In order to react appropriately to another’s pain, one needs to understand the fact (or to believe) that she is in pain. Hence, prosocial behavior requires third-​person mind reading.27

A similar idea can be found in Batson: Feeling for another person who is suffering … is the form of empathy most often invoked to explain what leads one person to respond with sensitive care to the suffering of another… . To feel for another, one must think one knows the other’s internal state … because feeling for is based on a perception of the other’s welfare28

The idea here is that, without the ability to attribute mental states to others, an empathically motivated helping reaction simply cannot occur. If a creature cannot understand the pain and suffering of the individual whose misfortune she is witnessing, then she has no reason to help her. These are all examples of fairly complex models of empathy.29 Consider, now, the other end of the spectrum. The most basic form of empathy, so basic that one might legitimately question whether it is indeed empathy, is emotional contagion: an involuntary affective resonance that occurs in presence of another individual who is undergoing a certain emotion. It requires no understanding of what initiated the reaction and yields a form of personal distress that is either nonintentional or directed at one’s own well-​being. There is no reason to suppose that this sort of reaction has a moral character, for neither the emotional reaction nor the behavior triggered by it are directed toward the other individual; so it is not an expression of other-​directed concern. If these two sorts of cases were exhaustive, the prospects for empathy occurring in animals, as a specifically moral motivational state, would be bleak. The more complex forms of empathy might be moral, but animals cannot possess them. The simpler forms of empathy animals can possess but have no moral import. In accordance with our aponoian paradigm, we shall argue for the existence of intermediate forms of empathy that are both moral and can plausibly be thought to be possessed by at least some animals. We shall designate the least cognitively demanding of these forms as minimal moral empathy. What makes a version of empathy complex—​nonminimal in our sense—​is that it essentially involves judgment. In order to be empathically motivated, in this complex sense, a creature must have the ability to make certain pertinent moral judgments. This is a common assumption. For example, as Dixon puts it, [W]‌hat matters to empathy understood as a moral concept is that the subject perceives what is morally salient about another’s situation. Even this additional requirement doesn’t quite capture what needs to be added to cognitive empathy to make it a morally significant concept, and that is its relation to sympathy or compassion. These states are genuine moral emotions in the case where they motivate a subject to help or to alleviate need, distress, or suffering when this is judged to be “serious” and

 

334    Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó undeserved. The moral significance of the emotional states of sympathy and compassion is explained by the presence of evaluative judgments as well as the motivations to act on these evaluations or appraisals.30

Empathy, therefore, cannot be a moral emotion unless it is accompanied by explicit evaluative judgments by means of which one reflects upon the morally salient features of a situation (judgments of seriousness, deservedness, and so on). Hauser seems to have something similar in mind: At present, we have no convincing evidence that animals attribute beliefs and desires to others. … Similarly, we also lack evidence that animals have access to their own beliefs, reflect on them, and contemplate how particular events in the future might change what they believe. If this lack of evidence correctly reveals a lack of capacity, then animals can certainly cooperate, beat each other to a pulp, and make up after a war. But they can’t evaluate whether an act of reciprocation is fair, whether killing someone is wrong, and whether an act of kindness should be rewarded because it was the right thing to do [italics are Hauser’s].31

A creature’s empathic reaction to the plight of another would not be a moral emotion unless the creature is able to view this reaction in, as Hauser puts it, “a context of right and wrong.” But to view it in such a context seems to require that the animal be able to locate her reaction in a network of judgments about right and wrong.32 If this is the case against animals possessing empathy as a moral motivation, then we have already outlined an apparatus that can be used to undermine this case: the distinction between making a judgment and tracking a judgment. To see how this works in the case of empathy, consider the (notoriously immoral) experiment performed by Masserman and colleagues.33 Monkeys would refuse to pull a chain that delivered food to them when they found out that, by pulling said chain, a conspecific situated within their sight received an electric shock. One of these monkeys—​let us call him M—​ famously refrained from eating for twelve days in a row. Suppose M’s refusal to pull the chain was the result of a feeling of distress. This feeling is not simply caused by the suffering of his fellow; it is also intentionally directed toward that suffering. That is, M is distressed that the other is suffering. Even though this distress motivates M to take steps to mitigate his fellow’s suffering, this would not, according to Hauser and Dixon, qualify as a moral motivation. To do so, M would need to be able to make judgments concerning the moral status of his motivations and/​or resulting behavior. This idea, however, is grounded in the making/​tracking confusion. M’s empathic motivation, like emotions in general, can be misplaced or misguided. It is misplaced if it is based on a factual assertion that is not true: let us suppose his fellow monkey is not suffering. M is mistaken. It is misguided if it is based on a morally evaluative judgment that is false. This could arguably be the case if his fellow monkey, due to some extraordinarily improbable circumstances, somehow deserved to suffer, or if the electric shock was being delivered to him for his own good. Thus, if we assume that M’s

 

Animals as Reflexive Thinkers    335 emotional response is not misguided, then there exists a moral proposition that must be true—​namely, the proposition that the monkey’s suffering is wrong or bad. This does not require that M be able to make this judgment. All that is required is that he possesses an empathic motivational state that tracks this judgment, in the sense that the non-​ misguided status of M’s motivation guarantees the truth of the relevant moral proposition. Even if M’s emotional reaction is a form of contagion triggered by watching his conspecific suffer, this does not preclude its status as a moral motivation. This idea of a truth preserving or truth guaranteeing relation between the emotion and a given moral judgment lies at the heart of the concept of minimal moral empathy. The key to understanding minimal moral empathy lies in the idea of a reliable emotional response to morally relevant features of a situation. Let us suppose, a supposition that seems entirely reasonable, that the suffering of M’s fellow monkey is a bad thing. This suffering is, therefore, a morally relevant feature of the situation: it is what we might call a bad-​making feature of this local situation. M’s response to this morally relevant, bad-​making feature is an emotional one: it takes the form of distress, built into which is an urge to mitigate the situation. Thus, M refuses to pull the chain. Let us make one further assumption: M’s response is not a random or arbitrary one. Rather, he responds to situations such as this in a reasonably reliable way. When monkeys are tortured with electric shocks, M reliably feels distress and an urge to mitigate the suffering. This, we might suppose, is the result of some mechanism that reliably produces emotional responses to at least some morally salient features of situations. In these circumstances, all that is required for M’s emotional response to be a moral one is this: if M’s emotional response is not misguided, then the moral claim “the suffering of this monkey is bad” must be true. M does not need to be able to make this moral judgment, or entertain this moral proposition. To suppose that he does is to fall victim to the making/​tracking confusion. It is enough that M’s emotional response tracks the moral proposition in the sense just explained. If it does, M’s response is an example of minimal moral empathy. We chose the example of Masserman’s monkeys for a reason. It is commonly thought that their behavior is open to another interpretation. As Hauser puts it, What is most remarkable about these experiments is the observation that some rhesus monkeys refrained from eating in order to avoid injuring another individual. Perhaps the actors empathized, feeling what it would be like to be shocked, what it would be like to be the other monkey in pain. Alternatively, perhaps seeing someone shocked is unpleasant, and rhesus will do whatever they can to avoid unpleasant conditions. Although this has the superficial appearance of an empathic or sympathetic response, it may actually be selfish.34

This claim is, if our arguments are correct, based on a false opposition. First, minimal moral empathy does not require the ability to imaginatively feel “what it would be like to be shocked.” Some cases of empathy are undoubtedly like this, but minimal moral empathy requires no such ability. Second, the supposition that, if M is motivated by the unpleasant nature of his or her emotion, this automatically disqualifies it from being

 

336    Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó moral is a supposition that is also unwarranted. M no doubt would find the shrieks of his fellow distressing. But this experiential unpleasantness may be precisely the form M’s concern for the other monkey takes. Compare: one would find the shrieks of distress of one’s children distressing and would take immediate steps to try and stop them. Does this mean one is merely engaging in a selfish attempt to stop this unpleasant noise? This claim would be ridiculous. Of course one finds the shrieks of distress of one’s children unpleasant. This is precisely the experiential form one’s concern for them takes. The debate over whether the motivation of M is moral has, thus, been based on a false dichotomy between a moral motivation and an aversive stimulus. The assumption has, typically, been that if an emotion is the result of vicarious aversive arousal, this precludes its qualifying as a moral emotion.35 If the idea of minimal moral empathy is correct, this assumption is unwarranted. The actual motivation of the monkey is an empirical matter, on which we do not take a stand here. Our point is this: even if his emotional response is a case of vicarious aversive arousal, this is perfectly compatible with its being a moral emotion—​a case of what we call minimal moral empathy. In addition to the making/​tracking confusion, the issue of moral motivation in animals is also clouded by an unfortunate tendency toward premature meta-​articulation. This emerges, in particular, in connection with the common idea that animals cannot act morally because they lack control over their motivations and actions. Here is a way of thinking about motivation in general, and moral motivation in particular, a way made admirably clear by Christine Korsgaard. In her response to de Waal’s Tanner lectures that were published as Primates and Philosophers, Korsgaard comments on the status of the lower animals—​a spider crawling toward a moth who is caught in the middle of her web: Here we begin to be tempted to use the language of action, and it is clear enough why: when an animal’s movements are guided by her perceptions, they are under the control of her mind, and when they are under the control of her mind, we are tempted to say they are under the animal’s own control. And this, after all, is what makes the difference between an action and a mere movement—​that an action can be attributed to the agent, that it is done under the agent’s own control.36

As the animal in question becomes more complex, the degree of control she is capable of exerting over her movements becomes correspondingly greater: Even if there is a gradual continuum, it seems right to say that an animal that can entertain his purposes before his mind, and perhaps even entertain thoughts about how to achieve those purposes, is exerting a greater degree of conscious control over his movements than, say, the spider, and is therefore in a deeper sense an agent.37

This is the first appeal to the meta-​level: an animal who can think about her purposes, perhaps even her thoughts, is more in control of her movements than an animal who cannot do this. With humans, however, Korsgaard believes there is a qualitative leap.

 

Animals as Reflexive Thinkers    337 The reason is that we can choose our ends, and not merely choose how to achieve ends antecedently given to us by our nature and the demands of our environment: “For we exert a deeper level of control over [our] own movements when we choose our ends as well as the means to them than that exhibited by an animal that pursues ends that are given to her by her affective states.”38 As Korsgaard notes, this ability to choose ends—​to assess and adopt them rather than merely have them—​is what Kant called “autonomy.” And it is only when we have autonomy, Korsgaard claims, that specifically moral agency emerges.39 The reason this is a qualitative leap, Korsgaard claims, is because it requires a specific form of self-​consciousness that only humans, in fact, have. What I mean is this: a nonhuman agent may be conscious of the object of his fear or desire, and conscious of it as fearful or desirable, and so as something to be avoided or sought. That is the ground of his action. But a rational animal is, in addition, conscious that she fears or desires the object, and that she is inclined to act in a certain way as a result … Once you are aware that you are being moved in a certain way, you have a certain reflective distance from the motive, and you are in a position to ask yourself, ”but should I be moved in that way?” Wanting that end inclines me to do that act, but it does it really give me a reason to do that act? You are now in a position to raise a normative question about what you ought to do [italics are Korsgaard’s].40

The centrality of the concept of control is very evident in Korsgaard’s argument. The greater the degree of control an individual has over his actions, the greater the warrant there is for regarding that individual as an agent. In the case of humans, we have a type of control over our motivations (“ends”) that no other creature has: we can choose our ends. This is grounded in a uniquely human form of self-​consciousness that provides us with “reflective distance” between us and our motives, thereby allowing us to scrutinize those motives and ask ourselves whether they are ones we should endorse or reject. This is what makes moral action possible. In short, we have a form of control over our motives that no other creature has; and it is this control that allows us to act morally. It is easy to feel the intuitive pull of this idea. It is tempting to suppose that in the absence of the relevant metacognitive abilities—​ the ability to form higher-​ order thoughts about our motivations and purposes—​we are at their “mercy.” They push us this way and that. Unable to critically scrutinize these motivations, we have no control over what they cause us to do. Metacognitive abilities, however, would transform us. Armed with these abilities, we can sit above the motivational fray: observing, judging, and evaluating our motivations, coolly deciding the extent to which we will allow them to determine our decisions and actions. This gives us a control over our motivations that we would otherwise lack. Nevertheless, despite its intuitive appeal, it is doubtful that this picture of control can work. Indeed, the problems here precisely parallel those faced by the HOT model of consciousness. Specifically, there is a recalcitrant property—​the property

 

338    Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó of being under the control of the agent—​that first-​order states (motivations, purposes, etc.) lack. We introduce higher-​order states—​thoughts about those motivations and purposes—​to supply this control. But then the same issue of control will, logically, arise at this higher-​order too. Metacognition was supposed to allow us to sit above the motivational fray, and calmly pass judgment on our motivations, thus providing us with control over them. However, there is no reason to suppose that metacognition is above this motivational fray. If first-​order motivations can pull us this us this way and that, then second-​order evaluations of those motivations can do exactly the same. The appeal to metacognition to imbue us with control over our motivations, thus, faces a dilemma: essentially the same dilemma we discovered with the HOT model of consciousness. Do we have control over our metacognitive assessments of our purposes and motivations? If so, then we have not explained the notion of control, but simply assumed it. But if not, then it is difficult to see how these metacognitive assessments could supply us with control over our motivations and purposes. The appeal to the meta-​level as a way of explaining control over motivations, therefore, gets us nowhere. It is another example of premature meta-​articulation (specifically, in its miracle-​of-​the-​meta form). This is a well-​known problem with the idea that we can explain autonomy by the appeal to meta-​level phenomena. It is common to respond to this problem through the addition of further factors concerning the conditions under which this metacognition takes place. For example, a common response is to insist that the reflection must take place under conditions free of distorting factors, or must reflect an adequate causal history, and so on. These are perfectly reasonable ways of trying to safeguard the idea of autonomy. But, if they work, it is only by divorcing the concept of autonomy from that of control. Whether or not one’s metacognizing takes place under conditions free of distorting factors or reflects an adequate causal history is not something that is under the agent’s control—​indeed, these are things that may remain unknown, perhaps even unknowable, to the agent. The appeal to the meta-​level to explain control is not only fruitless; it is also, in the eyes of many, unnecessary. We can explain autonomy without venturing outside the first order. On the contrary, all that is required is postulation of a choice mechanism that translates beliefs about our alternatives, coupled with our desires, into plans of action that are designed to realize those desires. This alternative strategy is a, broadly, compatibilist one. For the compatibilist, being produced in this way by the appropriate choice mechanism—​a mechanism that is “responsive to reasons”—​is precisely what it is to be an autonomous subject. There is, as yet, no reason to suppose that animals cannot possess such mechanisms. Discussions of empathy and moral motivation, thus, habitually fall victim to both premature meta-​articulation and the making/​tracking confusion. To understand the extent to which animals are capable of empathic and even moral behavior, these confusions must be expunged from the debate.

 

Animals as Reflexive Thinkers    339

Conclusion There is a pronounced tendency in empirical studies and theoretical treatments of animals to underestimate their abilities not because some distinctive lack or aporia has been discovered in them, but because of implausibly intellectualist accounts of the abilities they are supposed to lack. If animals are thought to lack consciousness, for example, this will stem not from anything we have discovered about animals themselves, but from an implausibly (over)intellectualist account of what consciousness is. The same is true of their purported lack of beliefs, emotions, empathy, and the ability to act morally. In all these cases, the alleged deficiency of animals derives not from our discovery of some deficiency in them but, rather, from an unreasonably over-​intellectualized conception of these phenomena. At the heart of this intellectualization, we have identified two errors: the tendency toward premature meta-​articulation and the making/​tracking confusion. As an antidote toward this sort of over-​intellectualization, and resulting underestimation of animals, we recommend adoption of the aponoian paradigm. Intellect is rarely as intellectual as we think it is.

Acknowledgments Mark Rowlands would like to thank the Provost’s Research Awards scheme at the University of Miami for partially funding this research. This research was also partially funded by an FPI scholarship awarded to Susana Monsó by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (research project FFI2011-​23267).

Notes 1. D. J. Povinelli and J. Vonk, “Chimpanzee Minds:  Suspiciously Human?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 4 (2003): 157–​160; D. J. Povinelli and J. Vonk, “We Don’t Need a Microscope to Explore the Chimpanzee’s Mind,” Mind and Language 19, no. 1 (2004): 1–​28; D. C. Penn and D. J. Povinelli, “On the Lack of Evidence That Non-​Human Animals Possess Anything Remotely Resembling a ‘Theory of Mind,’” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 362, no. 1480 (2007): 731–​744, doi:10.1098/​ rstb.2006.2023; D. C. Penn and D. J. Povinelli, “The Comparative Delusion:  The ‘Behavioristic’/​ ‘Mentalistic’ Dichotomy in Comparative Theory of Mind Research,” in Agency and Joint Attention, edited by H. A. Terrace and J. Metcalfe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Philosophy Is a Tool Useful Only against Philosophers and the Philosopher in Us.” MS 219 (emphasis is ours). 3. We would like to thank Luis Gil for this term.

 

340    Mark J. Rowlands and Susana Monsó 4. This idea is developed in more detail in Mark Rowlands, Can Animals Be Moral? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), chap. 2. 5. Interpretations of Descartes diverge. Some claim that while he was committed to denying animals thought or reason, Descartes did allow that animals were sentient, or could feel. See J. Cottingham, “A Brute to the Brutes? Descartes’ Treatment of Animals,” Philosophy 53, no. 206 (1978): 551–​559. This animal-​friendlier interpretation of Descartes has been disputed by S. Sztybel in his unpublished manuscript “Did Descartes Believe That Non-​ Human Animals Cannot Feel Pain?” (available at http://​sztybel.tripod.com/​animal_​feelings.html –​accessed August 26, 2014), and in the opinion of at least one of the authors is dubiously compatible with many of the things Descartes asserts in “On the Automatism of Brutes,” in Descartes Selections, ed., R. Eaton (New  York:  Scribner and Sons, 1927). However, Descartes scholarship is not our business here, and so we shall simply note that the denial of any sort of mentality—​thought and feeling—​to animals is a common interpretation of Descartes. 6. Descartes, “Automatism of Brutes,” 357. 7. Notably, Peter Carruthers, “Brute Experience,” Journal of Philosophy 86, no.  5 (1989):  258–​269. Not all defenders of HOT, by any means, will endorse this conclusion. Indeed, most regard such an implication as a reductio of the HOT account, and so seek to distance themselves from this implausible conclusion by trying to find ways to show why HOT does not entail it. See, for example, David Rosenthal, “Varieties of Higher-​Order Theory,” in Higher-​Order Theories of Consciousness, ed. R. Gennaro (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004). 8. HOT accounts come in two forms—​actualist and dispositionalist. According to actualist versions, for my pain to be conscious, I must actually think that I am in pain. According to dispositionalist versions, I need only be able to form the thought. The differences between these two versions of the HOT account are not important for our purposes. 9. See Mark Rowlands, “Consciousness and Higher-​ Order Thoughts,” Mind and Language 16, no.  3 (2001):  290–​ 310; Mark Rowlands, The Nature of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chap. 5. 10. We understand the relation between premature meta-​articulation and the miracle of the meta as one of genus to species. All cases of the miracle of the meta are cases of premature meta-​articulation, but not the other way around. 11. Rowlands, Can Animals Be Moral?, chap. 6. 12. D. Davidson, “Rational Animals,” in Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. E. LePore and B. McLaughlin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 476. This idea is also defended in D. Davidson, “Thought and Talk,” in Mind and Language, ed. S. Guttenplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 13. Davidson, “Rational Animals,” 478 (emphasis is ours). 14. Davidson, “Rational Animals,” 478. 15. Indeed, Davidson often puts the term “argument” here in scare quotes, recognizing that the argument is far from compelling. 16. This point has been made by Peter Carruthers, “Meta-​Cognition in Animals: A Sceptical Look,” Mind and Language 23, no. 1 (2008): 58–​89. 17. Scenario based on N. Malcolm, “Thoughtless Brutes,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 46 (September 1973): 5–​20. 18. Davidson, “Thought and Talk”; Davidson, “Rational Animals.” 19. S. Stich, “Do Animals Have Beliefs,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 57, no.  1 (1979): 15–​28.

 

Animals as Reflexive Thinkers    341 20. Davidson, “Rational Animals,” 474. 21. Davidson, “Rational Animals,” 475. 22. See Rowlands, Can Animals Be Moral?, chap. 2, for an elaboration of this argument. 23. Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay,” Nature 425 (Sept. 18, 2003): 297–​299. 24. J. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience:  The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Panksepp questions whether surprise and disgust should be classified as genuine emotions rather than simpler types of motivational state. 25. See, for example, A. I. Goldman, Simulating Minds:  The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 17: “mindreading is an extended form of empathy (where this term’s emotive and caring connotation is bracketed).” 26. L. Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014), 5. 27. F. de Vignemont and P. Jacob. “What Is It like to Feel Another’s Pain?” Philosophy of Science 79, no. 2 (2012): 295–​316, doi:10.1086/​664742, p. 310. 28. C. D. Batson, “These Things Called Empathy: Eight Related but Distinct Phenomena,” in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, ed. J. Decety and W. Ickes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 3–​15, at 9–​10. 29. In our view, the assumption that empathy always requires mind-​reading abilities is an example of premature meta-​articulation. We do not deny, of course, that mind-​reading abilities are implicated in some cases of empathy. 30. B. A. Dixon, Animals, Emotion and Morality:  Marking the Boundary (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008), 140 (emphasis is ours). 31. M. Hauser, Wild Minds:  What Animals Really Think (New  York:  Holt Paperbacks, 2001), 312. 32. In this passage, we can also scent, in the requirement of being able to attribute beliefs to oneself and others, the pungent aroma of premature meta-​articulation. 33. J. Masserman, S. Wechkin, and W. Terris, “‘Altruistic’ Behaviour in Rhesus Monkeys,” American Journal of Psychiatry 121, no. 6 (1964): 584–​585. 34. Hauser, Wild Minds, 276. 35. See also, for example, F. B. M. de Waal, “Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy,” Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008):  279–​300, doi:10.1146/​ annurev.psych.59.103006.093625, p. 283: “Perhaps the most compelling evidence for emotional contagion came from Wechkin et al. (1964) and Masserman et al. (1964), who found that monkeys refuse to pull a chain that delivers food to them if doing so delivers an electric shock to and triggers pain reactions in a companion. Whether their sacrifice reflects concern for the other … remains unclear, however, as it might also be explained as avoidance of aversive vicarious arousal.” See S. Wechkin, J. Masserman, and W. Terris, “Shock to a Conspecific as an Aversive Stimulus,” Psychonomic Science 1 (1964): 17–​18. 36. C. M. Korsgaard, “Morality and the Distinctiveness of Human Action,” in Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, ed. S. Macedo and J. Ober (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 108 (emphasis is ours). 37. Korsgaard, Primates and Philosophers, 109 (emphasis is ours). 38. Korsgaard, Primates and Philosophers, 112. 39. Korsgaard, Primates and Philosophers, 112. 40. Korsgaard, Primates and Philosophers, 113.

 

 

Pa rt I I I

A N I M A L S A S  OB J E C T S I N  S C I E N C E , F O OD, SP E C TAC L E , A N D  SP ORT

 

 

Chapter 18

The Ethics of A ni ma l Researc h​ Theory and Practice Bernard E. Rollin

Introduction As societal concern for animal treatment began to quicken in the 1970s to eventuate in what I have called “the new social ethic for animals,” this concern focused far more extensively on animal research than on animal agriculture. This may seem at first blush odd, as the number of animals used in research was, according to the most extravagant estimates, well under 100 million; whereas the number of animals produced in agriculture numbers in the billions—​9 billion broiler chickens alone. Furthermore, most experts on animal welfare would probably rank the suffering of farm animals, particularly poultry and swine, as far in excess of that of research animals. The attention to laboratory animals is probably the resultant of a variety of forces—​the public misconception that animal agriculture was still “Old McDonald’s farm,” rather than the severe confinement represented by industrialized agriculture; public ignorance of how animal research is conducted, leading to an image that animals are tortured; and good old-​ fashioned American anti-​intellectualism of the sort classically chronicled by Richard Hofstadter in his Anti-​Intellectualism in American Life,1 as today is manifested in belief in Creationism. (A 2008 US presidential candidate publicly affirmed his belief that the world was 10,000 years old.) Given the public suspicion of science, and the degree to which science funding depended on public support, one would have expected the research community to pay a great deal of attention to a reasoned ethical defense of animal research. In fact, this was far from what actually transpired. Historically, at least in the United States, animal research was not perceived as an ethical issue by the research community. Indeed, anyone raising questions about animal

 

346   Bernard E. Rollin research tended to be stigmatized as an antivivisectionist, a misanthrope preferring animals to people, an ingrate not valuing the contributions of biomedical science to human health and well-​being. In fact, I personally received a full barrage of such charges when I was working to draft and promote through Congress what in 1985 became a US Federal law protecting laboratory animals. In a 1982 New England Journal of Medicine review of my book arguing for elevating the moral status of animals and codifying that status into law for laboratory animals, I was compared to a “Nazi” and a “lab trasher.”2 My own experience of being vilified as “anti-​science” when supporting these laws was reflected in societal debate on animal research. (For the record, I am far from anti-​ science and in fact, hold academic appointments in two university science departments.) As the animal research abolitionists were arguing that the research produced “no benefits” for humans, the research community was adopting an equally extreme posture. The Foundation for Biomedical Research, for example, produced a film entitled Will I Be All Right, Doctor? This question, uttered by a frightened child before undergoing surgery, is answered, in essence, by the physician as “yes, you will be all right if these anti-​vivisectionist extremists leave us alone to do what we need to do with our animals.” So outrageously extreme was this film that at its premiere before a putatively friendly audience of laboratory animal veterinarians (which I attended), the only comment came from a veterinarian who affirmed that “I am ashamed to be associated with something pitched lower than the worst anti-​vivisectionist propaganda.” In all fairness, the antivivisectionists were not very much more conceptually or morally sophisticated. Literally one day after I received the New England Journal of Medicine review, my book was reviewed by abolitionists, who castigated me for “accepting the reality of science” and scolded me for proposing regulations that would result in short-​term improvements for animals, thereby retarding the extinction of animal research! The failure of the research community to engage animal research as a rational ethical issue prior to the passage of our laws in 1985 was manifest. Between 1975 and 1985, I fruitlessly searched scientific journals for reasoned discussions defending invasive research on animals and found none. What I did find were variations on the theme orchestrated in the Foundation for Biomedical Research film. To what can we attribute this blind spot in what is an otherwise sophisticated and informed community?

Scientific Ideology In a number of publications, I have described what I call scientific ideology, the set of basic, uncriticized assumptions presuppositional to twentieth-​century science.3 Ideologies operate in many different areas—​religious, political, social, economic, ethnic. It is therefore not surprising that an ideology would emerge with regard to science, which after all, has been the dominant way of knowing about the world in Western societies since the Renaissance.

 

The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice    347 The ideology underlying modern (i.e., post-​medieval) science has grown and evolved along with science itself. And a major—​perhaps the major—​component of that ideology is a strong positivistic tendency, still regnant today, to believe that real science must be based in—​and only in—​experience, since the tribunal of experience is the objective, universal judge of what is really happening in the world. If one asked most working scientists what separates science from religion, speculative metaphysics, or shamanistic worldviews, they would unhesitatingly reply that it is an emphasis on validating all claims through sense experience, observation, or experimental manipulation. This component of scientific ideology can be traced directly back to Newton. The insistence on experience as the bedrock of science continues from Newton to the twentieth century, where it reached its most philosophical articulation in the reductive movement known as logical positivism, a movement that was designed to excise the unverifiable from science. Although logical positivism took many subtly different and variegated forms, the message, as it was received by working scientists and passed on to students (including myself), was that proper science ought not allow unverifiable statements. This was no doubt potentiated by the fact that one British philosopher, a logical positivist named A. J. Ayer, wrote a book that was relatively readable, vastly popular (for a philosophy book), and aggressively polemical, in which he defended logical positivism, entitled Language, Truth, and Logic )4; it first appeared in 1936 and has remained in print ever since. Easy to read, highly critical of wool-​gathering, speculative metaphysics and other “soft” and ungrounded ways of knowing, the book was long used in introductory philosophy courses and, in many cases, represented the only contact with philosophy that aspiring young scientists—​or even senior scientists—​enjoyed. Through positivism, one could clearly, in good conscience, dismiss religious claims, metaphysical claims, or other speculative assertions as, not merely false and irrelevant to science, but meaningless. Only what could be verified (or falsified) empirically was meaningful. This, in turn, rendered ethics scientifically meaningless, and the denial of the relevance of ethics to science was taught both explicitly and implicitly. One could find it explicitly stated in science textbooks. We have argued that the logical positivism that informed scientific ideology’s rejection of the legitimacy of ethics dismissed moral discussion as empirically meaningless. That is not, however, the whole story. Positivist thinkers felt compelled to explain why intelligent people continued to make moral judgments and continued to argue about them. They explained the former by saying that when people make assertions, such as “killing is wrong,” which seem to be statements about reality, they are in fact describing nothing. Rather, they are “emoting,” expressing their own revulsion at killing. “Killing is wrong” really expresses “Killing, yuk!” rather than describes some state of affairs. It is therefore not surprising that when scientists were drawn into social discussions of ethical issues, they were every bit as emotional as their untutored opponents A second component of scientific ideology strongly buttressed the denial of ethics in science. It involved agnosticism about the ability of science to study or even know the existence of consciousness in humans or animals. The logic of this position can be

 

348   Bernard E. Rollin reconstructed as follows: one should allow into science only what is intersubjectively observable. Mental states are not intersubjectively observable. Therefore mental states are not able to be scientifically studied. Therefore mental states are not scientifically real. Therefore mental states are not of concern to scientists. Felt pain in animals (as opposed to the physiological substratum or machinery of pain) is a mental state. Therefore felt pain in animals is neither scientifically real nor of concern to scientists. Scientists were thus doubly insulated from the moral issue of animal pain and suffering in research and thence from seeing animal research as a moral issue at all by the two components of scientific ideology: first, by virtue of the denial of the relevance of moral issues to science, and second, by the denial of the scientific reality of animal thought and feeling. Scientists were able to see animal use not as a moral issue but as a scientific necessity, and the moral objections to animal use expressed in society, as matters of emotion, not as rational moral concerns.

The Moral Critique of Research on Animals Both Plato and Hegel argued that at least part of a moral philosopher’s job is to help draw out and articulate nascent and inchoate thought patterns in individuals and in society. In keeping with this notion, several philosophers, beginning in the 1970s, made explicit a number of moral reservations about human uses of animals, including invasive animal use in research and testing, and thereby helped to draw out the moral queasiness at such use that had gradually developed in society in general. Although different philosophers have approached the issue from different philosophical traditions and viewpoints, it is possible to find a common thread in their arguments questioning the moral acceptability of invasive animal use. Drawing succor from society’s tendency over the past fifty years to question the exclusion of disenfranchised humans, such as women and minorities, from the scope of moral concern and the correlative lack of full protection of their interests, these philosophers applied a similar logic to the treatment of animals. In the first place, there appears to be no morally relevant difference between humans and, at least, vertebrate animals that allows us to include all humans within the full scope of moral concern and yet deny the same moral status to the animals. A morally relevant difference between two beings is a difference that rationally justifies treating them differently in some way that bears moral weight. If two of my students have the same grades on exams and papers, and have identical attendance and class participation, I am morally obliged to give them the same final grade. That one is blue-​eyed and the other is brown-​eyed may be a difference between them, but it is not morally relevant to grading them differently. Philosophers have shown that the standard reasons offered to exclude animals from the moral circle, and to justify not assessing our treatment of them by the same moral

 

The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice    349 categories and machinery we use for assessing the treatment of humans, do not meet the test of moral relevance. Such historically sanctified reasons as “animals lack a soul,” “animals do not reason,” “humans are more powerful than animals,” “animals do not have language,” and “God said we could do as we wish to animals” have been demonstrated to provide no rational basis for failing to reckon with animal interests in our moral deliberations. For one thing, while these statements may mark differences between humans and animals, they do not mark morally relevant differences that justify harming animals when we would not similarly harm people. For example, if we justify harming animals on the grounds that we are more powerful than they are, we are essentially affirming “might makes right,” a principle that morality is in large measure created to overcome! By the same token, if we are permitted to harm animals for our benefit because they lack reason, there are no grounds for not extending the same logic to nonrational humans, as we shall shortly see. And while animals may not have the same interests as people, it is evident to common sense that they certainly do have interests, the fulfillment and thwarting of which matter to them. The interests of animals that are violated by research are patent. Invasive research, such as surgical research, toxicological research, and disease research certainly harm the animals and cause pain and suffering. But even noninvasive research on captive animals leads to pain, suffering, and deprivation arising out of the manner in which research animals are kept. Social animals are often kept in isolation; burrowing animals are kept in stainless steel or polycarbonate cages; and in general, animals’ normal repertoire of powers and coping abilities—​what I have elsewhere called their teloi, or natures5—​are thwarted. The common moral machinery society has developed for adjudicating and assessing our treatment of people does not allow people to be used in invasive research without their informed consent, even if great benefit were to accrue to the remainder of society from such use. This is the case even if the people being used are intellectually deficient—​infants, the insane, the senile, the retarded, the comatose, and the like. A grasp of this component of our ethic has led many philosophers to argue that one should not subject an animal to any experimental protocol that society would not be morally prepared to accept if performed on a retarded or otherwise intellectually disabled human. There appears, in fact, to be no morally relevant difference between intellectually disabled humans and many animals—​in both cases, what we do to the being in question matters to them, because they are capable of experiencing pain, suffering, and distress. Indeed, a normal, conscious, adult non-​human mammal would seem to have a far greater range of interests than a comatose or severely retarded human or even than a human infant. While we do indeed perform some research on intellectually deficient humans, we do not do so without as far as possible garnering their consent and, if they are incapable of giving consent, obtaining such consent from guardians specifically mandated with protecting their basic interests. Applying such a policy to animals would forestall the vast majority of current research on captive animals, even if the bulk of such research is

 

350   Bernard E. Rollin noninvasive, given the considerations concerning the violations of animals’ basic interests as a consequence of how we keep them. The foregoing argument, extrapolated from ordinary moral consciousness, applies even more strongly to the case of animals used in psychological research, in which one uses animals as a model to study noxious psychological or psychophysical states that appear in humans—​pain, fear, anxiety, addiction, aggression, and so on. For here one can generate what has been called the psychologist’s dilemma: if the relevant state being produced in the animal is analogous to the same state in humans, why are we morally entitled to produce that state in animals when we would not be so entitled to produce it in humans? And if the animal state is not analogous to the human state, then why create it in the animal?

The Uses of Animals in Research Before examining the response of the animal-​using research community to the moral critique presented, it is worth pausing to examine the various ways in which animals are used in research. The different usages are fairly well accounted for by the following seven categories: 1. Basic biological, behavioral, or psychological research, that is, the formulation and testing of hypotheses about fundamental theoretical questions, such as the nature of DNA replication, mitochondrial activity, brain functions, or learning, with little concern for the practical effect of that research. 2. Applied basic biomedical and psychological research—​the formulation and testing of hypotheses about diseases, dysfunctions, genetic defects, and so on—which, while not necessarily having immediate consequences for treatment of disease, is at least seen as directly related to such consequences. Included in this category is the testing of new therapies: surgical, gene therapy, radiation treatment, burn treatment, and so on. Clearly, the distinction between category 1 and this category will constitute a spectrum, rather than a clear-​cut cleavage. 3. The development of drugs and therapeutic chemicals. This differs from the earlier categories, again in degree (especially category 2) but is primarily distinguished by what might be called a “shotgun” approach; that is, the research is guided not so much by well-​formulated theories that suggest that a certain compound might have a certain effect, but is rather a hit-​and-​miss, exploratory, inductive “shooting in the dark” process. The primary difference between this category and the others is that here, one is aiming at discovering specific substances for specific purposes, rather than knowledge per se. 4. Food and fiber research, aimed at increasing the productivity and efficiency of agricultural animals. This includes feed trials, metabolism studies, some

 

The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice    351 reproductive work, and the development of agents like bovine somatotropin (BST) to increase milk production. 5. The testing of various consumer goods for safety, toxicity, irritation, and degree of toxicity. Such testing includes the testing of cosmetics, food additives, herbicides, pesticides, industrial chemicals, and so forth, as well as the testing of drugs for toxicity, carcinogenesis (production of cancer), mutagenesis (production of mutations in living bodies) and teratogenesis (production of monsters and abnormalities in embryo development). To some extent, obviously, this category overlaps with category 3, but it should be distinguished in virtue of the fact that category 3 refers to the discovery of new drugs; and category 4, to their testing relative to human (and, in the case of veterinary drugs, animal) safety. 6. The use of animals in educational institutions and elsewhere for demonstration, dissection, surgery practice, induction of disease for demonstrative purposes, high-​school science projects, and so on. 7. The use of animals for the extraction of drugs and biological products—​vaccines, blood, serum, monoclonal antibodies, tissue plasminogen activator (TPA) from animals genetically engineered to produce it in their milk, and so on.

Arguments Defending Animal Research It is probably for the set of reasons detailed earlier that there are fewer works defending the use of animals in research than criticizing it. One book, The Case for Animal Experimentation by Michael A. Fox,6 which did attempt to provide a systematic justification for animal use in research, was repudiated by its author within months of publication. Nonetheless, there are certain arguments that are frequently deployed by defenders of animal research.

The Argument from Benefits Research on animals has been intimately connected with new understanding of disease, new drugs, new operative procedures, all of which have produced significant benefits for humans and for animals. These significant results and their attendant benefits would have been unobtainable without animal use. Therefore animal research is justified. Critics of animal research might (and do) attack the argument above in two ways. First of all, one may question the link between premises and conclusion. Even if significant benefits have been garnered from invasive animal use, and even if these benefits could not have been achieved in other ways, it does not follow that such use is justified. Suppose that Nazi research on unwilling humans produced considerable benefits,

 

352   Bernard E. Rollin for example, as some have argued was the case in the areas of hypothermia and high-​ altitude medicine. It does not follow that we would consider this use of human subjects morally justifiable. In fact, of course, we do not. Indeed, there are significant numbers of people in the research community who argue that the data from such experiments should never be used, or even cited, regardless of how much benefit flows from its use. The only way for defenders of animal research to defeat this counterargument is to find a morally relevant difference between humans and animals that stops our extending our consensus ethic’s moral concern for human individuals to animals. Second, one can attack the argument from benefits in its second premise—​namely, that the benefits in question could not have been achieved in other ways. This is extremely difficult to prove one way or the other, for the same reasons that it is difficult to conjecture what the world would have been like if the Nazis had won World War II. We do know that as social concern regarding the morality of animal research mounts, other ways are being found to achieve many of the ends listed in our discussion of the uses of animals in research.

The Argument that Moral Concerns of the Sort Required to Question Animal Research Apply Only to Humans This approach is, in essence, an attempt to provide what we indicated was necessary to buttress the argument from benefits. Such an attempt was made by Carl Cohen in 1986 in a New England Journal of Medicine article7 generally considered by the research community to be the best articulation of its position. One of Cohen’s chief arguments can be reconstructed as follows (the argument is specifically directed against those who would base condemnation of animal research on the claim that animals have rights, but it can be viewed as applying to our earlier version of the general argument against invasive animal use). Only beings who have rights can be said to have sufficient moral status to be protected from invasive use in research. Animals cannot reason, respond to moral claims, and the like, necessary conditions for being rights bearers. Therefore, they cannot morally be said to be protected from invasive use. The problems with this argument are multiple. In the first place, even if the concept of a right (or of sufficient moral status to protect one from being used cavalierly for others’ benefit) arises only among rational beings, it does not follow that its use is limited to such beings. Consider an analogy. Chess may have been invented solely for the purpose of being played by Persian royalty. But given that the rules have a life of their own, anyone can play it, regardless of the intention of those who created the rules. Similarly, rights may have arisen in a circle of rational beings. But it doesn’t follow that such rational beings cannot reasonably extend the concept to beings with other morally relevant features. In fact, that is precisely what has occurred in the extension of rights to deficient humans.

 

The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice    353 To this, Cohen replies that this extension is legitimate, since deficient humans belong to a kind that is rational; whereas an extension to animals is not legitimate. The obvious response to this, however, is that, by his own argument, it is being rational that is relevant, not belonging to a certain kind. Further, if Cohen’s argument is viable, and one can cavalierly ignore what is by hypothesis the morally relevant feature, one can turn it around on him. One could argue in the same vein that since humans are animals, albeit rational ones, and other animals are animals, albeit nonrational ones, we can ignore rationality merely because both humans and animals belong to the same kind (i.e., animal). In short, his making an exception for nonrational humans fails the test of moral relevance and makes arbitrary inclusion of animals as rights-​bearers as reasonable as arbitrary inclusion of nonrational humans. Another attempt to provide a morally relevant difference to undercut the argument against invasive animal use is made by those who argue that scientific ideology is correct and that animals are incapable of pain, suffering, and other morally relevant mental states. Such a neo-​Cartesian stance has recently been revived by Peter Carruthers8 and Peter Harrison,9 and in essence, it questions the claim that what we do to animals matters to them. A detailed exposition of and response to such a strategy is impossible to undertake here. However, the following points can be sketched. First, a heavy burden of proof exists for those who would convince common sense and common morality that animals are merely machines. Even the anticruelty ethic took animal pain for granted. Second, such a position would make the appearance of pain and other modes of awareness in humans an evolutionary miracle. Third, the neurophysiological, neurochemical and behavior evidence militates in favor of numerous similar morally relevant mental states, such as pain, in humans and animals. Fourth, if animals are truly just machines, devoid of awareness, much scientific research would be vitiated, for example, pain research conducted on animals and extrapolated to people. One possible way to exclude animals from direct moral status and thereby justify invasive research on them is a philosophically sophisticated exposition of the claim we discussed by Cohen that morality applies only to rational beings. This position, which has its modern roots in Hobbes, was in fact articulated even in antiquity. It has been directly applied to the question of animals’ moral status by Peter Carruthers, who, as mentioned earlier, advanced the neo-​Cartesian argument in his book The Animals Issue.10 Interestingly enough, Carruthers’s contractual argument is independent of his denial of consciousness to animals. Carruthers believes that even if animals are conscious and feel pain, the contractual basis for morality excludes animals from the moral status necessary to question the moral legitimacy of experimentation on them. According to Carruthers, morality is a set of rules derived from what rational beings would rationally choose to govern their interactions with one another in a social environment, if given a chance to do so. Only rational beings can be governed by such rules, and they adjust their behaviors toward one another according to them. Thus, only rational beings, of which humans are the only example, can “play the game of morality,”

 

354   Bernard E. Rollin so only they are protected by morality. Animals thus fall outside the scope of moral concern. There are a variety of responses to Carruthers. In the first place, even if one concedes the notion that morality arises by hypothetical contract among rational beings, it is by no means clear that the only choices of rules such beings would make would be to cover only rational beings. They might also decide that any rule should cover any being capable of having negative or positive experiences, whether or not that being is rational. Second, even if rational beings intend the rules to cover only rational beings, it does not follow that the rules do not have a logic and life of their own that lead to adding other beings to the circle of moral concern, as indeed seems to be happening in social morality today. Third, Carruthers seems to assume that according moral status to animals entails that their status be equal to that of humans, “yet,” he says, “we find it intuitively abhorrent that the lives and suffering of animals should be weighed against the lives or suffering of human beings.”11 But it is not at all clear that contractualism, even if true, could not accord animals sufficient moral status to prohibit experimenting on them, yet not say they are of equal moral value to normal humans. Further, as Sapontzis12 has pointed out, Carruthers’ argument is circular. He justifies such uses as research on animals by appeal to contractualism, and justifies contractualism on the grounds that it renders morally permissible such uses as research on animals.

The Argument from Experimenting on Deficient Humans The final defense of research on animals that we shall consider is the utilitarian one advanced by R. G. Frey.13 Unlike the previous arguments, it is a tentative one, offered up in a spirit of uneasiness. Frey’s argument essentially rests upon standing the argument from deficient humans on its head. Recall that this argument says that animals are analogous to such deficient humans as the retarded, the comatose, the senile, the insane, etc. Since we find experimenting on such humans morally repugnant, we should find experimentation on animals equally repugnant. Frey’s argument reaffirms the analogy, but points out that, in actual fact, many normal animals have richer and more complex lives, and thus have higher quality lives, than many deficient humans do. The logic of justifying research on animals for human benefit (which assumes that humans have more complex lives than animals, and thus more valuable lives) would surely justify doing such research on deficient humans who both have lower qualities of life than some animals do and who are more similar physiologically to normal humans, and are thus better research “models.” If we are willing to perform such research on deficient humans, we are closer to justifying similar research on animals. Obviously, the force of Frey’s argument as a defence of research depends upon our willingness relentlessly to pursue the logic by which we (implicitly) justify animal research and apply the same justification to using humans not different from those

 

The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice    355 animals in any morally relevant way. As Frey himself affirms, there are considerations relevant to such humans that would work against such a decision. He cites the emotional (rather than rationally based) uproar and outrage that would arise (because people have not worked through the logic of the issue), and presumably such other responses as the knee-​jerk fear of a slippery slope leading to research on normal humans. But, in the end, such psychological rather than moral/​logical revulsion could conceivably be overcome by education in and explanation of the underlying moral logic. I believe that Frey’s argument fails as a defense of research and ends up serving those who originally adduced the argument from defective humans as a reductio against research on animals. If people do see clearly and truly believe that doing research on animals is (theology aside) exactly morally analogous to doing research on defective humans, they are, in our current state of moral evolution, likelier to question the former than accept the latter. In fact, Frey’s argument very likely serves to awaken a primordial component in human moral psychology—​revulsion at exploitation of the innocent and the helpless—​animals and deficient humans being paradigm cases of both. In a society that increasingly and self-​consciously attempts to overcome such exploitation, experimentation on deficient humans, in fact often practiced in the past, along with experimentation on powerless humans, is not a living option. In sum then, the force of Frey’s argument is not to justify research on animals, but rather to underscore its morally problematic dimension. Thus, the only argument in defense of animal research that seems at all cogent is the argument from benefit discussed above. A  utilitarian thinker might argue that with regard to animal subjects or human subjects utilized in research, even invasive research, such research is justified if the benefits to sentient beings, humans or animals, outweighs the cost to the subjects. Our societal ethic, embedded in our laws, does not of course accept such an argument from benefits, and checks a purely utilitarian ethic by use of the deontological notion of rights, protecting individual humans from having their basic interests infringed upon even for the sake of the general welfare. Hence, as we said earlier, society roundly condemned Nazi research that was scientifically and medically valuable, such as hypothermia and high altitude medical research along with the patently useless research performed by Josef Mengele. For the sake of argument, in order to illustrate another moral problem in animal research, let us assume that invasive animal research is justified only by the benefit produced. It would then seem to follow that the only morally justifiable research would be research that benefits humans (and/​or animals). But there is in fact a vast amount of research that does not demonstrably benefit humans or animals. Much behavioral research, weapons research, toxicity testing as a legal requirement, are obvious examples, as are much of basic research which is invasive but has no clear benefit. Obviously a certain amount of research meets that test, but a great deal does not. Someone might respond that “we never know what benefits might emerge in the future,” and appeal to serendipity or unknowns. But if that were a legitimate point, we could not discriminate in funding between research likely to produce benefit and that unlikely; yet we do. If we appeal to unknown but possible benefits, we are literally forced to fund everything,

 

356   Bernard E. Rollin which we do not! We do in fact weight cost versus benefit in human research and in animal research—​why not weight cost to the animal subject as a relevant parameter? Thus we find a second major moral issue in animal research.14 To recapitulate: The first issue arises from the suggestion that any invasive research on an object of moral concern is morally problematic. In response, researchers invoke the benefits of research. Even assuming this is a good argument, it gives rise to another moral issue: Why do we not do only animal research that clearly produces more benefit than cost to the animals? So even if we disregard the general point about the morality of invasive animal research, we are still left with the fact that much of animal research does not fit researchers’ own moral justification for it! I have referred in other writings to this moral claim about justifying invasive research by appeal to benefits as the Utilitarian Principle15—​if one accepts the benefit argument, we are left with the conclusion that the only justifiable animal research is that which produces results yielding more benefit than harm (however this is measured).

The Failure to Provide Proper Animal Care Thus, even if we retreat to the utilitarian argument in moral defense of invasive animal research, we find that a good deal of such research fails to meet that criterion. But this is not all; yet another ethical issue arises. For even if we ignore the last argument, yet another moral problem arises. Suppose we ignore the cost-​benefit criteria discussion, as well as the first argument questioning the morality of all invasive animal research. This is of course what we do in actual practice. Would it not then at least be morally required that we treat the animals in the best possible manner commensurate with their use in research? To put the question another way, are research animals given the best possible treatment they could get while being used in research? Regrettably, the answer is “no,” as one can easily demonstrate, both historically and in the present. The demand that if we do use animals in invasive research, we at least do our best to meet their interest and needs, minimize their suffering as much as possible, and respect their telos seems to be a requirement of common decency, particularly if we are using them in a way that ignores the moral problems recounted thus far. Sadly, this is not the case! Historically, in the US at least, basic animal care was a very low priority in animal research, ironically harming the science by failing to control pain, stress, and other variables, and very much failing to meet the ideal set forth in the third set of moral issues just enumerated. As a person who both helped draft and defended before Congress the 1985 US laws for laboratory animals16 it was my business to know about the deficiencies in animal care if I was to be able to prove to Congress the need for legislation strongly opposed by much of the research community, who claimed that it would be obstructive

 

The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice    357 of research and prohibitively expensive. What I found could easily be chronicled in a book, but we will restrict ourselves to two paradigmatic examples: pain control and housing. Ordinary common sense would dictate that one of the worst things one can do to a research animal is to cause unrelieved pain to him. Since animals do not understand sources of pain, particularly the sort of pain inflicted in experiments, they cannot rationalize “that this will end soon,” but rather cannot anticipate its cessation, so their whole life becomes the pain. This insight has led veterinary pain specialist Ralph Kitchell17 to surmise that animal pain may be worse than human pain; as I put it, humans have hope. Further, pain is a stressor, and can skew the results of experiments in numerous ways. Thus, for both moral and scientific reasons, one would expect pain control to be a major emphasis when scientists undertook painful experiments. If someone were conducting fracture research, for example, one would thus expect liberal use of pre-​emptive and post-​surgical or post-​traumatic analgesia since the pain is not the point of the experiment, and unmitigated pain actually retards healing. A central component of the 1985 federal legislation we authored was to mandate control of pain in research animals. Though I knew anecdotally that pain control was essentially non-​existent in research, Congress demanded that I prove it, as the vocal portion of the research community opposing the legislation proclaimed that pain was already being controlled, and they were a powerful political lobby. As proof, I did a literature research, and was able to find only two papers on animal analgesia, and none on laboratory animal analgesia. Of the two papers I did find, one said, in essence, that there ought to be papers, while the other said, in one page, we know very little, but here is what we do know. Fortunately, this convinced Congress to mandate control of pain and distress, and this in fact became law in 1985. As I expected, a legislative mandate galvanized the research community, and if one were to do a literature search today, one would find thousands of such articles—​over 11,000, I checked. In the same vein, many veterinarians to this day, typically veterinarians trained before the mid 1980s, still equate anesthesia with “chemical restraint“ or “sedation” and use these words synonymously. The first textbooks of veterinary anesthesia, published in 1964 and 1972,18 do not even mention pain control as a reason for anesthesia (as opposed to keeping the animal still to prevent injury to the researcher and the animal), and do not mention analgesia. Some of the neglect of felt pain in animals goes back to veterinary medicine’s historical roots as ancillary to agriculture, and thus it was concerned only with the animal’s economic/​productive role, as opposed to its comfort. Thus Merillat, in a 1906 textbook of veterinary surgery, bemoans the failure of veterinarians even to use anesthesia for surgery, with the episodic exception of the canine practitioner, whose clients presumably valued their animals enough in non-​economic terms to demand anesthesia.19 In the end, the counter-​intuitive denial of pain can again be traced back to what we have called scientific ideology. The same logic that barred talking about ethics because of the unverifiability of ethical statements similarly forbade talk of mental states. This

 

358   Bernard E. Rollin was potentiated by the advent of Behaviorism in the early 20th century, which affirmed that, for psychology to become a real science, it needed to eschew talk about or study of mental states in humans or animals and study only overt behavior. This did not significantly affect moral treatment of humans, but certainly reinforced ignoring pain in animals. (In actual fact, pain has been ignored in human medicine as well, as discussed in my Science and Ethics.)20 As we discussed, the two components of scientific ideology—​denial of ethics in science and denial of the knowability of consciousness—​worked synergistically to the detriment of laboratory animals, creating a formidable barrier against awareness of the ethical issues inherent in animal research, and against recognition of the pain and distress sometimes created in the research process. As important as the infliction of pain and suffering, which only sometimes arises in research, is the fact that 100% of the animals utilized in research have the basic needs and interests flowing from the biological and psychological needs constituting their natures thwarted by how we keep them. It is for this reason that the initial drafts of the legislation we worked out mandated housing and husbandry for all research animals that met their natures. Unfortunately this did not pass, but nonetheless ramified in an awareness of “environmental enrichment” that can only benefit the animals.

Practical Moral Progress—​L aboratory Animal Law and Regulation Whatever the ultimate social-​ethical resolution to the question of the moral legitimacy of research on animals turns out to be, it is clear that the arguments against such use have captured a significant moment in social thought, and have helped accelerate the development of an ethic in society that goes well beyond concern about cruelty to concern about all animal suffering, regardless of source. This has in turn resulted in the passage of major legislation in the United States, Britain and elsewhere regulating animal research. In my view, law is, in Plato’s phrase, social ethics “writ large.” While Britain has had a hundred-​year history of such regulation, the passage of the US laws in 1985 is especially significant, both because research has essentially hitherto enjoyed a laissez-​faire status and because the legislation was vigorously opposed by the research community, who threatened significant danger to human health if it were passed. The passage of laws in the United States bespeaks a society in transition. While society does not wish to see innocent animals suffer, it is also not yet prepared to risk losing the benefits of animal research. As a result, it has stressed the control of pain and suffering of research animals, enriching living environments and generally assuring proper care. Most importantly, the laws were meant to undercut scientific ideology. As we know from discussions of religion or politics we all had as young people, one cannot be argued

 

The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice    359 out of ideology. I have in fact attempted to do so with scientists for many years. The response is typically “good points” but no one abandoned scientific ideology as a result of these “good points,” any more than anyone abandons belief in the benevolence and omnipotence of the Deity when confronted with the Problem of Evil (i.e. how can an all powerful and benevolent God allow the suffering of innocents). This persistence of ideology was the main reason we chose to write laws. We believed that, through the vehicle of animal care and use committees legally mandated and created to discuss in ethical terms, proposed research and teaching uses of animals, people would start thinking of these issues in ethical terms. Similarly, we believed that through legally mandating control of pain and distress—​ i.e. legally forcing the acknowledgment of their existence—​scientists would again abandon ideology and start to think in ordinary commonsensical terms. Ordinary common sense takes for granted the existence of thought and feelings in animals, sometimes indeed errs in attributing too much similarity to human thought, as when someone says “my dog knows his birthday is coming.” Indeed the continuity of thought and feeling along the phylogenetic scale, along with physical traits, is presuppositional to the Darwinian basis of biology. To assure such thinking, the laws affirmed that if a research procedure is going to hurt a person, it should be presumed to hurt animals as well. The attempt implicit in the laws and the Animal Care and Use Committee (ACUC) system which is their operational arm can be characterized as forcing the “reappropriation of ordinary common sense” and overthrowing the “compartmentalization” that occurs when one is trained as a scientist. Thus the ACUC system was devised to force thought into channels involving animal thought and feelings and the ethics of animal research. Every prospective review of any research proposal entails discussion of pain, suffering, distress, cost and benefit to the animals (though not in fact legally mandated), proper surgical procedure, control of stress, etc. Plato points out that, in dealing with ethics and adults, one cannot teach, but only “remind.” (Martin Luther King successfully reminded America of a moral commitment to equality. Prohibition on the other hand—​as an attempt to teach—​failed abysmally!) Our idea therefore was to remind scientists of what they as ordinary citizens must adhere to in the treatment of animals—​very likely an idea that they accept when not wearing their lab coats (almost 90% of the general public and 90% of the twenty five thousand or so Western ranchers I have addressed believe that animals have rights). Laws, to paraphrase Plato, are social ethics “writ large.” So if the law states that animals suffer and that such suffering must count and be dealt with in scientific deliberations, and that animal-​care committees must work on the playing field of these assumptions, scientific ideology or common sense is suppressed in favor of ordinary common sense and consensus social morality. If federal law states that animals feel pain and suffer, scientific ideology cannot respond with agnosticism about animal consciousness. If federal law states that it is morally wrong to ignore animal suffering, scientific ideology cannot say that science is morally neutral and value free.

 

360   Bernard E. Rollin In 1985, Congress passed two laws based on the model we proposed. One was an amendment to the Animal Welfare Act (PL99-​198), whose major provisions were: 1. Establishment of an institutional animal care committee to review prospective research proposals, monitor animal care and use and to inspect facilities. Members must include a veterinarian and a person not affiliated with the research facility. 2. Standards for exercise of dogs are to be promulgated by the Secretary of Agriculture. 3. Standards for a physical environment, which promotes “the psychological well-​ being of primates,” are to be promulgated. Exercise for dogs is also required. 4. Standards for adequate veterinary care, including use of anesthetics, analgesics, and tranquilizers, are to be promulgated. The control and minimization of pain and suffering is emphasized. 5. No paralytics are to be used without anesthetics. (Amazingly, physiological psychologists, who denied consciousness in animals, historically did stereotaxic brain surgery on nonhuman primates restrained by paralytic drugs alone, so that the animals would be conscious!) 6. Alternatives to painful procedures must be considered by the investigator. 7. Multiple surgery is prohibited except for “scientific necessity.” 8. The Animal Care Committee must inspect all facilities semiannually, review practices involving pain, review the conditions of animals, and file an inspection report detailing violations and deficiencies. Minority reports must also be filed. 9. The Secretary of Agriculture is directed to establish an information service at the National Agricultural Library, which provides information aimed at eliminating duplication of animal experiments, reducing or replacing animal use, minimizing animal pain and suffering, and aiding in training animal users. 10. The facility must provide for training for all animal users and caretakers on humane practice and experimentation, research methods that limit pain, use of the information service of the National Agricultural Library, and methods of reporting deficiencies in animal care and treatment. 11. A significant penalty is established for any animal care committee member who reveals trade secrets discovered in the course of research protocol review. 12. The secretary is directed to consult with the Department of Health and Human Services (under which falls biomedical research funding responsibility through the National Institutes of Health) in establishing the standards described. 13. New civil penalties are provided for violation of the act. The second bill passed was called the NIH Reauthorization Act or the Health Research Extension Act, and basically made NIH Guidelines, hitherto cavalierly ignored, into law. This law, which complemented the Animal Welfare Act amendment, covered all vertebrate animals, while the former exempted rats, mice, and birds from coverage. Violation

 

The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice    361 of the second law can result in seizure of all federal research funding to an institution, and was thus the major sanction for these new policies. New laws and policies have been forthcoming in numerous other countries based on the increased societal concern for the treatment of laboratory animals. Many are variations on the Animal Care and Use Committee protocol review concept—​such laws obtain in Australia and New Zealand. Canada has not legislated, but adherence to such principles in presuppositional to government research funding. Twenty European Countries also utilize the ethical review system—​Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland (Smith et. al, 2007).21 The UK also deploys institutional review, but it is a recent superimposition upon a complex system of licensure and inspectors that goes back to 1876 and was considerably revised in 1986. In addition to generating law, the emerging ethic has led to the abandonment of some frivolous research animal use, for example, some of the uses of animals in cosmetic testing; the elimination of many invasive and brutalizing laboratory exercises in undergraduate, graduate, medical and veterinary curricula; and the development of new ways to teach surgery, for example, by way of spay-​neuter clinics, cadavers and models for teaching manual skills. Increasing numbers of scientific journals are refusing to publish manuscripts detailing research where severe pain and suffering were involved. And there is far more serious effort than ever before across the scientific community to consider alternatives to animal use, be these a reduction of numbers of animals, refinement of painful procedures (e.g., substituting a terminal procedure for a painful one) and replacement of animals by various modalities (e.g., cell culture, tissue culture, epidemiology). In my view, there is a new and serious moral issue associated with animal research that has not received sufficient attention. This arises from the advent of genetic engineering technology. By use of this technology one can create animal “models” for the thousands of gruesome human genetic diseases hitherto not able to be studied in animals. Since many of these diseases involve symptoms of great severity, yet the research community is embracing the creation of such models, a new and significant source of chronic animal suffering is developing. The issue is worsened by virtue of the fact that few modalities exist for controlling chronic pain and suffering. Unfortunately, this issue has hitherto occasioned little discussion. The new laws and, more importantly, the growing societal concern for animals that drove their passage, have had salubrious consequences for the moral status of animals in research. For one thing, they vividly underscore the fact that society sees invasive animal research as a significant moral issue. For another, they explode the scientific ideology which we have seen precludes ethical engagement by animal research scientists with the issues their activities engender. Finally, they have led to what I call the “reappropriation of common sense” with regard to the reality and knowability of animal suffering and the need for its control. One can be guardedly optimistic that animal research will evolve into what it should have been all along—​a moral science.

 

362   Bernard E. Rollin

Notes 1. Richard H. Hofstadter, Anti-​ Intellectualism in American Life (New  York:  Vintage Books, 1962). 2. M. B. Visscher, review of Animal Rights and Human Morality, by B.E. Rollin,” New England Journal of Medicine 306 (1982): 1303–​1304. 3. B. E. Rollin, Science and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 4. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: V. Gollancz, 1946). 5. B. E. Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality, 3rd ed. (Buffalo, NY:  Prometheus Books, 2006). 6. M. A. Fox, The Case for Animal Experimentation (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1986). 7. C. Cohen, “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research,” New England Journal of Medicine 315 (1986): 865–​869. 8. P. Carruthers, The Animals Issue:  Moral Theory in Practice (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1992). 9. P. Harrison, “Theodicy and Animal Pain,” Philosophy 64 (January 1989): 79–​92. 10. Carruthers, Animals Issue. 11. Carruthers, Animals Issue, 195. 12. S. Sapontzis, review of The Animals Issue, by B. E. Rollin, Canadian Philosophical Reviews 13, no. 4 (1993): 40–​42. 13. R. G. Frey “Vivisection, Morals and Medicine,” Journal of Medical Ethics 9 (1983): 94–​97. 14. B. E Rollin, “Animal Research:  A  Moral Science,” EMBO Reports 8, no. 6 (2007):  1–​5; B. E. Rollin, “The Moral Status of Invasive Animal Research,” in Animal Research Ethics: A Hastings Center Special Report, Hastings Center, 2013., Hastings on Hudson, N. Y. 15. Rollin, Animal Rights. 16. Rollin, Science and Ethics; Rollin, Animal Rights. 17. R. Kitchell and M. Guinan, “The Nature of Pain in Animals,” in The Experimental Animal in Biomedical Research, vol. I, ed. B. E. Rollin and M. L. Kesel (Boca Raton, FL:  CRC Press,1989), 85–​205. 18. W. Lumb, Small Animal Anesthesia (Philadelphia PA: Lea and Febiger, 1963); W. Lumb and E. W. Jones, Veterinary Anesthesia (Philadelphia, PA: Lea and Febiger, 1973). 19. A. Merillat, Principles of Veterinary Surgery (Chicago: Alexander Eger, 1906). 20. Rollin, Science and Ethics. 21. J. A. Smith, F. A. R. van den Broek, and J. Cantó Martorell, et al., “Principles and Practice in Ethical Review of Animal Experiments across Europe: Summary of the Report of a FEIASA Working Group on Ethical Evaluations of Animal Experiments,” Laboratory Animals 41 (2007), 143–​160.

Further Reading Arkow, P. (1994). Child abuse, animal abuse, and the veterinarian. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 204, 1004–​6. Baird, R. M. and Rosenbaum, S. E. (eds.) (1991). Animal Experimentation: the Moral Issues. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

 

The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice    363 Fox, M. A. (1986). The Case for Animal Experimentation. Berkeley:  University of California Press. Knight, A. (2011). The Costs and Benefits of Animal Experiments. London: Palgrave Macmillan Pluhar, E. B. (1995). Beyond Prejudice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Regan, T. (1983). The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rollin, B.E. (1985). The moral status of research animals in psychology. American Psychologist, August, 920–​6. Rollin, B.E. (1989). The Unheeded Cry:  Animal consciousness, Animal pain and Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rollin, B.E. (1990). Ethics and research animals—​theory and practice. In B. E. Rollin and M. L. Kesel (eds.), The Experimental Animal in Biomedical Research. Vol. I.  Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 19–​37. Rollin, B.E. (1995). Laws relevant to animal research in the United States. In A. A. Tuffery (ed.), Laboratory Animals, 2nd edn. London: John Wiley, 67–​87. Rollin, B.E. (1995). The Frankenstein Syndrome:  Ethical and Social Issues in the Genetic Engineering of Animals. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rollin, B.E. (2006). The regulation of animal research and the emergence of animal ethics: a conceptual history. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics Vol. 27 #4 pp 285–​304. Rollin, B.E. (2007). Overcoming Ideology. ILAR Journal. Volume 48 (1), 2007 pp 47–​53. Rollin, B.E. (2008). The moral status of animals and their use as experimental subjects, in P. Rowan, A. N. (1984). Of Mice, Models, and Men. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Russell, W. M.  S. and Burch, R. L. (1959). Principles of Humane Experimental Technique. London: Methuen. Sapontzis, S. (1987). Morals, Reason and Animals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sapontzis, S. (1990). The case against invasive research with animals. In B. E. Rollin and M. L. Kesel (eds.), The Experimental Animal in Biomedical Research, Vol. I.  Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 3–​19. Singer and H. Kuhse (eds.) (2001). A Companion to Bioethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd ed., 1st ed. Singer, P. (1975). Animal Liberation. New York: New York Review of Books. Smyth, D. H. (1978). Alternatives to Animal Experiments. London: Scholar Press.

 

Chapter 19

The Ethics of Fo od Animal Produ c t i on Paul B. Thompson

The appropriate focus for this chapter is strangely vexed in contemporary animal studies. On the one hand, many authors would frame the topic in terms of whether food animal production can be ethically justified, and if so, under what circumstances and constraints. This approach leads immediately into ethical vegetarianism and ethical veganism, the view that the nonconsumption of meat or, for vegans, of all animal products (including milk, butter, and cheese, which do not require an animal’s death) is morally obligatory. A second line of inquiry concerns whether contemporary forms of livestock production create a de facto obligation to adopt a vegetarian diet, even if there might be circumstances in which meat consumption would be morally permissible. Both lines of questioning emphasize ethical questions about the consumption of animal based foods, and I will refer to this as a dietetic approach to the ethics of food animal production. On the other hand, it is equally possible to approach the topic as an inquiry into the ethics of producing food animals. Here, one might begin with an empirical survey of the husbandry in use for various food animal species, and then move to an ethical evaluation of these production systems. This approach might encompass the health and working conditions for human workers in food animal production systems, as well as the environmental impact of animal production, but a central focus will be on the health and well-​being of the animals themselves. And as will become clear below, the regulation and socioeconomic constraints on animal producers will also be a critical component of the ethics of food animal production. Because these questions arise in the context of examining food animal production systems in their details, I will refer to this as a productionist approach to the ethics of food animal production. There are, to be sure, points of contact and overlap between the questions that arise in each approach. Nevertheless, a reader of the literature on food animal production

 

The Ethics of Food Animal Production    365 will notice that these perspectives create relatively distinct schools of thought in animal studies, and that practitioners of one school generally find little reason or opportunity for interaction with the other. Those who take the dietetics approach generally have little interest in questions about how to improve the conditions of food animals (especially in industrial production settings) because they are already committed to the view that no amount of improvement could ever make industrial food animal production ethically justifiable. For their part, those who focus on the condition of animals in contemporary farm settings take little interest in the case for vegetarianism (even though they might themselves be vegetarian) because they presume that these production systems will continue to exist, irrespective of their justifiability, and the focus of productionist scholars is on the conditions that animals actually experience within them. Both of these trends in animal studies refer to methods of livestock or food animal production, hence it is appropriate to begin with a very brief survey of contemporary husbandry. The balance of this chapter begins with brief overviews of key ideas and sources that are representative of each approach. Many of the ideas and sources for the dietetics approach overlap with Part I in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies. Although dietetic topics far outweigh productionist themes in the literature, detailed discussion of these ideas would be redundant, and their applicability to arguments for vegetarianism is relatively obvious. As such, the chapter places more emphasis on the productionist approach with a more extended overview of present-​day livestock production systems in both industrial and industrializing areas of the world. The chapter continues with a discussion of the interdisciplinary scholarship typical of the productionist approach, and concludes by reviewing the literature on regulatory policy and the socioeconomic constraints on alterations of food animal production that would be pursued in support of improving food animal welfare. A few caveats are in order at the outset. Agricultural species are kept for an enormous variety of human purposes. Although food production is certainly the most obvious and most economically valuable, it is important to bear in mind that wool and leather are also products of animal husbandry. For example, Sarah Franklin’s highly cited book Dolly Mixtures contains an extended discussion of the development of the Australian sheep industry, a production system oriented primarily to fiber and only secondarily toward food.1 By-​products are extracted from the carcasses of food animals and used extensively in the production of pharmaceuticals, glues, resins, and other industrial substances. In less industrialized countries, agricultural species such as cattle, donkeys, and buffalo continue to be used as draft animals or as sources of power, often to the exclusion of their use as food.2 Scholars in animal studies have also noted that keeping livestock may have symbolic or cultural significance for human beings that has relatively little to do with their use for food,3 a practice exemplified by the Texas aphorism, “he’s all hat and no cattle.” Although this chapter will indeed focus on food production, it is important for readers to bear in mind that livestock production is a considerably broader category, albeit with many of the same issues.

 

366   Paul B. Thompson

Contemporary Animal Production No description of present animal husbandry can be either complete or value neutral. The practices used in keeping farmed animals are staggeringly diverse, especially when considered on a global scale. Even the most determined attempt to describe these practices in a neutral way will thus inevitably reflect judgments of relevance and relative importance. Considering these qualifications, it may be helpful to draw a broad distinction between forms of food animal production that are utilized in relatively more industrialized regions and to contrast them with more traditional methods that continue to be widely practiced in many places. Pigs, sheep, cattle, and goats are the primary mammalian animal species raised for food, while avian species include chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese. Other food animals are hunted or wild caught, though aquaculture methods are being developed for a lengthening list of fish species. Food use for equine, canine, and feline species is confined to a few cultural groups. As James Serpell has argued, the matter of which animals are viewed as food is a key topic for animal studies.4 Prior to the development of industrially manufactured systems for animal production in the twentieth century, the breeding and husbandry of animals intended for food was improvised on a trial-​and-​error basis. The circumstances in which animals were kept varied tremendously from one household to the next, and some animals were kept in conditions that make modern industrial facilities look capacious and extraordinarily humane. Food animals in traditional systems were confined in order to protect them from taking by predators, including other humans. Animals were frequently transported and slaughtered under crowded conditions, without access to water, even as rail transport and production-​line abattoirs were introduced in the latter half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, those traditional systems in which animals were uncaged and out of doors afforded farmed animals an opportunity to engage in their full behavioral repertoires.5 This variation continues to characterize food animal production in many places today. As discussed at more length later, interest in the ethics of food animal production tends to focus on manufactured husbandry systems that utilize purpose-​built structures and mechanized feed and water delivery and that confine animals in cages, pens or stalls. These systems are marketed by farm-​supply companies, and each involves significant standardization, though important details may vary from one manufacturer to another. Housing sows on concrete or slatted floors in narrow stalls that prevent them from turning around is one particularly noteworthy example. Such systems are used for producing piglets who will themselves typically be group-​raised in indoor pens while they grow to slaughter weight. These gestation crates should not be confused with even more widely used farrowing crates, despite their similar appearance. The purpose of confining sows during farrowing is to prevent newborn piglets from being inadvertently crushed. Alternative systems of pork production utilize group housing both for

 

The Ethics of Food Animal Production    367 gestating sows and sow and piglet family groups. Groups of pigs are still generally raised indoors in these systems, with controlled delivery of feed. Besides gestation stalls, the most controversial types of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) are used in egg production. The “battery cage” system confines relatively small groups of birds (3 to 10) in ranks of cages extending from the floor to the ceiling of large metal buildings. Feed and water is delivered, eggs are collected and manure is removed using mechanized systems, and light, temperature, and air movement throughout the building are also monitored mechanically. One key welfare consideration is stocking density—​the total amount of space per bird—​which may range from as little as 48 square inches to as much as 118 square inches, depending on the husbandry standards that a producer has agreed to follow for marketing purposes. Such caged systems have been banned in Europe, where a mix of systems (also used for so-​ called cage-​free production elsewhere) take their place. In floor-​based systems, the entire flock (sometimes exceeding 100,000 birds) is raised on litter composed of straw, sawdust, or composite material. In floor systems, hens are enticed to lay in designated nest boxes. Floor systems are relatively inexpensive (indeed, they are less costly than battery cages) but entail operating costs tied to the collecting of eggs and maintaining sanitation, as well as to losses due to pecking and aggression. As a result, aviary systems are increasingly popular among producers. Aviaries look very much like battery cages without doors. Birds lay eggs in the open cage facility, allowing for mechanized collection, but are free to leave the cages and thus can perform a number of behaviors (wing-​ flapping, scratching, dust bathing) that are constrained in battery cages. However, like the floor systems, aviary systems experience episodes of pecking. As such the enhanced or furnished colony system, in which larger groups of birds are kept in what amounts to large cages equipped with facilities for perching, scratching, or nesting may be emerging as the favored housing system for egg producers. Meat chickens—​or broilers—​are entirely different breeds raised in large metal buildings that resemble floor systems for egg production, save that they do not include nesting facilities. Aside from breeding companies that supply both the meat and egg industries, in the industrialized world, the broilers and layers constitute entirely separate industries using totally distinct breeds of chicken. Broilers have been bred to grow exceptionally quickly to achieve efficiencies in feed utilization and fixed capital. The distinct genetics of broiler birds curtail issues with aggression that continue to plague layers. For broilers, the key welfare issue has been skeletal problems stemming from their rapid growth. Changes in breeding and feed for broilers have significantly reduced bone breakage and skeletal deformity since these problems began to be understood within the broiler industry. However, adult broiler hens used for producing broiler chicks (brood hens) must be prevented from growing too large. The method currently in use is to restrict their feed, a practice that some commentators on animal welfare have described as cruel.6 Sheep, goats, and cattle continue to be raised in pens, pastures, and paddocks where there is relatively little restriction of their movement, though some dairy cattle spend much of their lives tethered in tie-​stall dairy barns. These ruminant species are capable of eating grasses; hence, the economic advantages associated with concentrated

 

368   Paul B. Thompson feed delivery are less than for pigs and poultry. However, beef, especially, may be fed on grain to achieve a desired flavor and texture. Such feeding may take place under relatively crowded or barren “feedlot” conditions where welfare can be compromised. Key issues in both dairy and beef production concern feeding and breeding practices that (as with broiler chickens) are intended to increase the production efficiency and may lead to production disease (a term for animal health problems that result from husbandry or breeding practices). Additionally, producers in the traditional and industrial systems alike may engage in “tail-​docking” (surgical shortening of the tail) for both cows and sheep or mulesing (the removal of skin folds) on lambs. These painful procedures are still frequently performed without anesthetic. Slaughter and transport are also key practices in food animal production. Owing primarily to the work of Temple Grandin, dramatic changes in slaughter practices for large mammals have been introduced over the last three decades.7 Slaughter and transport in less industrialized parts of the world, however, continue to be sources animal suffering that is preventable, at least in principle.8

Dietetic Animal Ethics Consumption of animal flesh requires the death of the animal. While many animal species scavenge the flesh of other deceased animal species, carnivorous human beings are typically predators, hunting and killing in order to obtain meat. Rather than hunt wild animals, human beings have kept a few species in confined paddocks, pens, or cages and slaughtered them at prescribed times. Historians of meat consumption speculate that such animals were initially kept primarily for nonfood purposes including religious rituals, and that the practice of raising livestock for food emerged gradually, as different cultural groups incorporated more and more animal protein into their dietary regimes.9 Although patterns of livestock domestication and slaughter for food are widespread, an ethical proscription of eating animals can be also found in many human cultures. Meat consumption was a significant subject of debates among the ancient Greek philosophers and by subsequent schools of Western philosophy. From ancient times to the present, these debates turn upon contrasting perspectives on the moral standing of nonhumans, a question that (as discussed in Ralph Acompora’s contribution in this volume, “Continental Approaches to Animals and Animality”) takes up the rationality, self-​awareness, and capacity for suffering of animal species consumed for food. If one believes that nonhumans lack a conscious mental life (that is, that they are more like machines than like people), then the question of whether nonhuman animals deserve moral respect can easily be answered in the negative. A long line of philosophers from René Descartes (1596–​1650) to Donald Davidson (1917–​2003) have associated the peculiar nature of human consciousness with the ability to use language, and have thus defended a radical separation between human beings and other creatures in the animal kingdom. However, if some nonhuman animals do have some kind of a mental life

 

The Ethics of Food Animal Production    369 (which seems beyond dispute to this author), the philosophical game is on. Once one concedes that animals of the species humans use for food are sentient—​that they register subjective feelings of both pain and well-​being—​it is impossible to deny that vegetarianism is a topic for food ethics. Meat-​eating and other food practices that entail breeding, slaughter and keeping animals on farms for their entire lives are inextricably tied to harm. The legitimacy of eating animal flesh is a question that has sparked philosophical thinking since the times of Pythagoras (570–​495 bce) and Porphyry (234–​305 ce).10 According to Tristram Stuart’s history of Western vegetarianism, ethical objections to meat consumption began to appear among European cultures in response to the discovery that the entire subcontinent of India was filled with Hindus who ate vegetarian diets. Before this, Europeans had expressed the view that eliminating meat consumption was physiologically impossible. Afterward, abstinence from meat consumption began to be advocated on a mixture of ethical, religious, and health-​related grounds. By the nineteenth century, advocacy had coalesced around the idea that vegetarianism should be practiced for the sake of the animals who would be saved from the pain, suffering, and loss of life associated with slaughter.11 Henry S. Salt published A Plea for Vegetarianism in 1886. Salt was also an antivivisectionist, and his argument for vegetarianism was, like that of many contemporary authors, a consequence of his more comprehensive views on the moral status of animals. In short, if you have to kill an animal in order to eat meat, there are no ordinary circumstances under which carnivorous diets can be sanctioned morally. Notably, exceptional circumstances might also apply to the consumption of human flesh. This basic pattern describes the logic of most ethical arguments for vegetarianism. It is not literally the eating of meat but the treatment of animals intended to become meat that is the problem. This could be extended to the attitude or moral stance that one takes toward a given animal as meat. The latter theme was an especially prominent component of Carol Adams’s argument in The Sexual Politics of Meat. The ethical problem goes considerably beyond the violence done to animal bodies in the process of slaughter; it extends to a denial of their subjectivity through a stance or disposition that takes the object as an object or “mere thing.” Contrarily, individuals in all vertebrate species (at least) should be regarded as “subjects-of-a-life” in Tom Regan’s phrase. They have an internal subjective experience that is characterized by interests and by caring about both other beings and their own future. If this is the case, practices that require one to regard animals as “mere things” are ethically unacceptable. This philosophical stance is generally thought to rule out most forms of animal research and hunting and fishing practices that involve the confinement or capture of animals and, certainly, practices of slaughter for the purpose of obtaining human food. A less ethically onerous form of ethical vegetarianism issues from the view that while modern forms of livestock production are cruel and inhumane, slaughter itself can be practiced humanely. Hence, if farmed animals live decent or pleasurable lives, the consumption of meat, milk, or eggs derived from their confinement is ethically acceptable. This view requires an implicit distinction between the moral standing of human beings and those species typically used for food production. Nevertheless, many who make

 

370   Paul B. Thompson such a distinction hold that ethical vegetarianism is required precisely because the conditions in modern industrial livestock farms are not humane and do, in fact, involve considerable animal suffering. Peter Singer, generally viewed as the most influential philosopher of the animal liberation movement, has advocated such a view at various junctures throughout his career. Singer advocates vegetarianism as a form of protest against the treatment animals receive in CAFOs or so-​called factory farms.12 Singer’s views evolved in response to critiques that were primarily intended to initiate reforms in animal production. If ethical vegetarianism is a refusal based on the conditions that exist in CAFOs, the door is open to a different kind of dietetic ethics that advocates abstinence from industrially produced animal products, and endorses the consumption of meat, milk, and eggs from farms where animals are treated humanely and compassionately. This type of strategy has indeed been endorsed on ethical grounds.13 It has been described sardonically as a “happy meat” ethic by those who continue to endorse a stricter and more comprehensive form of ethical vegetarianism.14 The key philosophical point under dispute in the happy-​meat debate is, in fact, the more comprehensive question of whether the confinement and killing of nonhuman animals can ever be justified by the benefits that human beings derive from these consumptive uses. Again, it is less the fact that animals are being eaten at all that drives the debate as the fact that eating animal flesh presupposes their captivity, their instrumental use, and in many cases (milk and eggs are possible exceptions) their death by slaughter. Although the literature on ethical vegetarianism in animal studies is voluminous15 the reliance on a dietetic ethical response is notable from another perspective. Virtually no one who advocates for vegetarianism also thinks that vegetarianism is, in itself, likely to have much impact on the conditions in which farmed animals are kept or the methods by which they are slaughtered. The emphasis of a dietetic ethic is thus to remove a practicing vegetarian from a situation in which he or she can assume personal responsibility for the harms and insults farmed animals endure in contemporary animal production facilities. This logical standpoint assuages moral guilt, but it is questionable as to whether it really does much good for food animals, whether they are kept in CAFOs and slaughtered on highly automated lines or, alternatively, raised in the putatively more humane conditions of traditional livestock production. There is accordingly a parallel tradition for thinking about the ethics of food animal production that addresses the condition of farmed animals, while giving relatively little consideration to the question of whether human beings should eat other animals in the first place.

Productivist Animal Ethics This parallel tradition in ethics arguably begins with the publication, in 1964, of Ruth Harrison’s book Animal Machines: The New Factory Farming Industry. The book was especially influential in the United Kingdom, where it provoked a formal review of the

 

The Ethics of Food Animal Production    371 condition of animals being raised in CAFOs. Conducted by an interdisciplinary committee under the direction of embryologist F. W. Rogers Brambell, the report issued in December 1965 found much to agree with in Harrison’s critique. In the 1970s, Britain’s Farm Animal Welfare Council (a successor to the Brambell Committee) stipulated that all food animals should be guaranteed five freedoms: 1. Freedom from Hunger and Thirst—​by ready access to fresh water and a diet to maintain full health and vigor. 2. Freedom from Discomfort—​by providing an appropriate environment including shelter and a comfortable resting area. 3. Freedom from Pain, Injury or Disease—​by prevention or rapid diagnosis and treatment. 4. Freedom to Express Normal Behavior—​by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind. 5. Freedom from Fear and Distress—​by ensuring conditions and treatment which avoid mental suffering.16 Harrison’s book and the Brambell Committee’s report sparked new scientific and philosophical discussions on the moral status of nonhuman animals at Oxford University, and lead to a collection of essays on the topic in 1972.17 Peter Singer’s review of this volume, published in the New York Review of Books in 1973 under the title “Animal Liberation,” is what really brought the new era of animal ethics to widespread attention. Singer stressed sentience—​the ability to experience feelings of satisfaction or pain—​ as the key to ethics, and the first edition of his book Animal Liberation suggested that vivisectionists and livestock producers alike (like Descartes) denied the existence of animal pain. However, Bernard Rollin has argued that whatever philosophers may have thought, livestock producers themselves have never doubted that the animals under their care are capable of experiencing pain, fear, and other forms of mental distress. Indeed, their ability to both control and to care for their animals depends wholly on this assumption. Rollin argues that there has never really been any question that farmed animals deserve moral consideration, at least among those who have some experience in animal agriculture.18 Yet very few people who are professionally involved in producing food animals infer a duty to be a vegetarian from their moral status as sentient creatures, so it is empirically evident that simply conceding the basic points about animal consciousness hardly settles the question. Precisely because the arguments for and against ethical vegetarianism are so well represented in the existing work of philosophers, it may be more relevant to devote the balance of the chapter to some questions that have been less widely studied. The Brambell Committee’s Five Freedoms were a framework for evaluating whether animal production is morally acceptable, but they also function as a framework for considering how animal welfare can be improved. Consider freedom from pain, injury, and disease. While the word freedom connotes the total absence of the unwanted condition from the animal’s life, this is not a reasonable interpretation of the Five Freedoms.

 

372   Paul B. Thompson What freedom from pain, injury, and disease means in the context of livestock production is that animals should not be kept under husbandry conditions where pain is a persistent element of the animal’s experience, or where injury and disease are unrelieved by proper veterinary care. Similarly, the freedom from fear and distress calls for “conditions and treatment that avoid mental suffering.” This is often interpreted in terms of stress, but all animals (including humans) experience short periods of physiological stress during peak moments, such as sexual orgasm. This is not a kind of stress that we want to eliminate from an animal’s life. The freedom from fear and distress is thus not an absolute condition, but a gradient that suggests relative levels of well-​ being. Even a straightforward criterion, such as “ready access to food and water” can be translated into an indicator for improving husbandry along a gradient: How many feet or inches should an animal need to travel between the drinking spout and the feed trough? It is also important to notice that there are possible trade-​offs among the Five Freedoms. Collectively, they stipulate a framework in which relative states of well-​ being can be evaluated; but these freedoms do not imply absolute criteria that any livestock producer can meet fully and unambiguously in every instance. For example, “normal behavior,” requires the company of the animal’s own kind, but other animals of one’s own kind can also be a source of fear, distress, and mental suffering. Individual animals engage in pecking, biting, and butting in order to establish dominance relations. While aggressive behavior often subsides once a dominance order is established, there are individuals in all species who engage in what we might call obsessive or compulsive persistence in these destructive and harmful forms of natural behavior. In fact, specifying what is normatively normal becomes a significant problem for farmed animal ethics. During the two decades following the Brambell Committee recommendations, specialists in animal behavior and veterinary medicine conducted a debate over the criteria for animal welfare that was worthy of the most arcane and pedantic debates in twentieth-​century analytic philosophy. Animal welfare is about feelings, some would claim; it is about the animal’s conscious life. Does that mean that an animal has no welfare when it is asleep, others would counter. As the twentieth century drew to a close, the scientists working in the field came to recognize that a farm animal’s well-​being was a complex blend of indicators identified by the Five Freedoms, as well as others that are not made particularly obvious by the Five-​Freedoms approach. Ordinary elements of veterinary health are left rather implicit in the freedom from pain, injury and disease, for example. In addition, animal-​welfare science came to acknowledge that there was a role for ethics in combining and prioritizing these multiple elements of well-​being.19 The term consensus approach summarizes the diverse elements of an animal’s well-​ being in terms of three broad categories. First, it is recognized that biological indicators of health are a major component of welfare. Animals of any species suffering from morbidity and mortality as a result of disease, injury, or the conditions in which

 

The Ethics of Food Animal Production    373 they live have a compromised welfare. Other biological indicators of individual welfare include growth, respiratory function, and other types of biophysical functions that can be normalized for the species. Calculating these statistical norms can be tricky with farm animals because many of the animals used in agriculture have been bred to possess traits that are far from typical of their wild or “unimproved” conspecific relatives. This problem notwithstanding, the category of biomedical or veterinary health measures represents a relatively obvious domain of welfare for all animals. It is furthermore noncontroversial in that it is a domain that all livestock producers would recognize as valid. Second, there are dimensions of welfare that derive from the way an animal feels. Affective states, such as pain and pleasure, on the one hand, or more complex emotionally charged experiences, such as fear or sexual orgasm, on the other hand, are almost certainly widespread across the animal world, and there is little reason to doubt that farm animals are capable of having such feelings. We might characterize the domain of affective or experiential states as referring to animal minds, which suggests that the veterinary health indicators refer to animal bodies.20 Animal-​welfare scientists include a third category beyond that of animal bodies and animal minds. They observe that under some forms of husbandry, animals are unable to perform some behaviors that are regarded as typical for the species. For example, the wild jungle fowl from whom domestic chickens have been bred engage in frequent perching on sticks, branches, or rocks, which are available in their natural habitat. Domestic chickens given an opportunity to sit on a perch will also exhibit this behavior, but quite obviously, chickens who live in production environments where no perching places are to be had do not. Ever since the original Brambell Committee, research on animal welfare has recognized that the ability to perform species-​typical behaviors is a component of animal welfare. In work pioneered by David Fraser and other behavior experts, a third domain of welfare is specified to acknowledge that the ability to engage in such behavior is important. The scientist and animal activist Mike Appleby has referred to this category as animal natures.21 Although the Five Freedoms continue to be discussed, the bodies-​minds-​natures rubric has advantages as a tool for considering how the lives of farm animals might be improved. First, nothing from the Five Freedoms is eliminated. Freedom from hunger and thirst are simply combined with freedom from disease and injury to make up the bodies category, and pain and distress are combined in the minds category. In fact, the emphasis on cognition or feelings arguably clarifies what is ethically intended by “distress.” Second, the three domains more clearly indicate that there are positive dimensions to welfare, things that need to be done on an animal’s behalf. This is, perhaps, most relevant in the domain of feelings, where the importance of providing for satisfying cognitive experiences may be a significant expansion beyond mere avoidance of pain, fear, or distress. Finally, the three domains provide a useful framework in which to highlight the ways dimensions of welfare may conflict with one another, helping us to think of welfare as a balancing act, rather than just a matter of not restricting an animal’s freedom.

 

374   Paul B. Thompson

The Ethics of Farm Animal Welfare The bodies-​minds-​natures framework can be used as a rubric for comparatively evaluating livestock production systems. Not surprisingly, due to the inherent trade-​offs built into such a framework, it is quite possible for systems that do well on one parameter to do very poorly on another. In fact, CAFOs generally do much better than most traditional farming systems in the domain of animal bodies. Intensive confinement and the careful administration of feed and medicine is very capable of keeping animals alive, and in maintaining the physiological functions for growth and development. Animals kept outdoors and given the freedom to roam are exposed to risk from viral and microbial disease agents; and smaller food animals, including hens, calves, piglets, and baby goats, are vulnerable to predation from hawks, coyotes, and other natural predators. They are also at risk for heat stress and from the elements: freezing cold and the discomforts of wind and rain. Perhaps most critically, there are physical calamities that derive from the mistakes, incompetence, inattention, accidents, and occasional maliciousness of their human caretakers. This has proven to be an important source of poor welfare as inexperienced former urbanites take up backyard egg production or other types of animal farming. All such insults can be visited on animals in CAFOs, to be sure, and when something in a CAFO goes badly, many more animals suffer as a result. But it is largely in the trade-​ off between animal bodies and animal minds that traditional production systems can be presumed to score well. Farms with pastures, paddocks, coops, or pens allow animals to move about, congregate, and socialize. As noted already, aggressiveness associated with dominance orders can trouble these environments, so it is essential that group sizes be kept small enough for the pecking order to be maintained with a minimum of this violence. There are, however, problems where the appropriate ethic for evaluating trade-​offs is somewhat unclear. For example, hens kept in traditional environments naturally stop laying eggs on a cycle that conforms to the normal onset of cold weather. Even if they are not in a cold climate, they will shed feathers (e.g., molt) in anticipation of spring, when they will grow new feathers and resume laying eggs. Hens in CAFOs are in a temperature-​controlled environment, but they stop laying eggs after 8 to 10 months, nonetheless. They can be induced to molt when producers sharply limiting feed rations to simulate the scarcity of food the onset of winter would bring. However, the hunger hens experience during feed restriction is clearly stressful from a cognitive standpoint (it is also contrary to the Five Freedoms); therefore the practice of inducing a molt through feed restriction has now been abandoned. Instead, producers simply “depopulate” the house (e.g., they remove the birds and kill them) at the point when it is no longer profitable to feed them. If the birds were to endure a molt, they would return to a higher rate of lay and would subsequently have up to an extra year of life. There is thus a trade-​off between cognitive well-​being (the subjective experience of hunger) and the animal-​bodies goal of extending life.

 

The Ethics of Food Animal Production    375 If it is not obvious that eliminating the feed-​restricted molt improves the hens’ welfare, there are still other cases that are even more difficult. Intensive swine production has evolved systems in which breeding sows are kept in narrow pens called gestation stalls during pregnancy and moved to only slightly larger farrowing stalls once their piglets are born. The narrow stalls do not allow pigs to turn around (contrary to the Five Freedoms), and some do not even permit the pig to lie down in a comfortable position. Although these production systems are the target of vehement opposition by animal-​protection groups, they do accomplish a number of things that are beneficial to pigs: (1) farrowing stalls prevent the crushing of piglets; (2) each individual pig gets precisely the right amount and type of food needed at every stage during pregnancy; and (3) the stalls prevent the pigs from fighting with one another over access to food. Since these pigs are large and can be very aggressive, limiting fighting also limits injuries. Although a few individuals in these stalls will develop a stereotypy (an obsessive, repetitive pattern of behavior), the vast majority of pigs kept in these facilities display neither behavioral nor physiological signs of distress (e.g., persistently elevated cortisol levels). Pigs are highly intelligent animals capable of complex social relationships, and many ethologists believe that they would be much better off in a facility where their social and problem-​solving capabilities could be expressed. But it has proved difficult to design cost-​effective systems featuring these improvements in the quality of life that do not compromise the three benefits of confinement noted earlier.

The Ethics of the Cost Constraint The swine production example makes explicit reference to the elephant in the room: cost efficiency. It would probably not be possible to define optimal well-​being for any livestock species (note that we certainly can’t do that for humans). Nevertheless, if one were simply trying to improve the lot of livestock animals in contemporary food systems, it would not be difficult to describe alternatives that would be better than the status quo in every area of livestock farming. But livestock producers do not keep their animals as a charity project. The cost of any care that they extend to them must be recovered in what they receive from the market. Put another way, reforms in livestock production increase the cost of meat, milk, and eggs for consumers. There is thus a different set of trade-​offs to consider. Keeping the cost of food relatively low is thought to be good for two ethically significant reasons. First, people need to eat something, and if they choose to eat animal products (contra the dietetic argument) then, all things equal, it is better that these products be as inexpensive as possible. Lowering the cost of one thing in a consumer’s budget allows more consumption of something else, and this is what the utilitarian maxim to do the thing that yields the greatest good for the greatest number recommends. What is more, a rights-​oriented, egalitarian ethic says that we should take special pains with respect to the effect of our actions on poor or marginalized groups. But these

 

376   Paul B. Thompson are precisely the groups who spend the greatest percentage of their income on food. Therefore, anything that lowers the price of food (rather than of other consumption goods) has the added effect of skewing the overall distribution of wealth in a direction that favors the poor. There is, thus, a presumptive argument for thinking that keeping the price of food as low as possible would be recommended both by egalitarian and by more classically utilitarian social ethics.22 The benefits to humans are not trivial and should be taken seriously. Those who have taken the dietetics approach to farm animal ethics have tended to discount the relevance of benefits to humans, thinking that they are confined to the kind of pleasure (or putatively nutritional benefits) that meat eaters enjoy. In fact, the economic benefits to poor people are quite real, even if they are benefiting from a practice that is in itself not morally justifiable. It is a bit like arguing that we should simply ignore petty theft by poor people, because the combination of direct utilitarian and redistributive benefits outweighs any harm that accrues from the act of stealing. One may not agree with this judgment, but, hopefully, everyone can appreciate why it is a plausible claim to make from a moral perspective. Nevertheless, economists Bailey Norwood and Jayson Lusk present a battery of evidence suggesting that, on the whole, Americans (their particular study group) would be willing to pay more for production systems that improve animal welfare.23 Only a small minority (a little more than 10%) do not support any policies for improving farmed animal welfare that also increase the cost of food. However, Norwood and Lusk’s work suggests that there is a deep divide among consumers about the particular types of improvements they would be willing to support. Roughly, equal numbers support reforms that improve parameters such as comfort or reduce pain, on the one hand, and reforms that allow a greater range of natural behavior, on the other. Respondents in the latter group would rather see animals unconfined even if it also means that they are exposed to the elements and victimized by predators, for example. They do not see a lack of creature comforts as deeply contrary to animal well-​being because, Norwood and Lusk theorize, they presume that animals in nature lack creature comforts, too. In short, there is a deep split in the public mind between prioritizing animal minds or bodies, on the one hand, and animal natures, on the other. The Welfare Quality® Project in the European Union represented a large-​scale coordinated effort to combine social science and studies of animal behavior to achieve improvements in the welfare of food animals. The project included both extensive attempts to gauge attitudes among the European lay public as well as collaboration among animal-​behavior specialists to identify a new approach for addressing the ethics of farm animal welfare in Europe. The project developed a methodology for the on-​farm scoring of welfare for food animals. This was an important departure from previous approaches that simply specified permitted production practices, but made no attempt to directly assess the welfare of individual animals receiving husbandry on an operating farm. In the end, Welfare Quality® drew upon approximately 50 different measures of welfare, which were articulated in terms of 12 key criteria for assessing a given farm situation. The criteria are summarized in terms of four principles: good feeding, good housing, good health, and appropriate behavior.24

 

The Ethics of Food Animal Production    377 The implementation of Welfare Quality® procedures is continuing and will certainly be a subject of interest for animal studies scholars for the foreseeable future. However, a number of ethically significant findings can already be highlighted. A (perhaps) oversimplified characterization would be that they cluster along the expert–​lay public axis. First, there is a tendency for animal-​behavior experts to place ethical emphasis on the health and cognitive well-​being of farmed animals—​the animal bodies and animal minds categories. Three of the four principles cluster in this category, for example. However, research on the European public illustrates a strong tendency to interpret welfare in terms of key behaviors judged “appropriate” and evaluating individual animal’s well-​being in light of the opportunity to engage in these behaviors.25 Interestingly, a study of the US public by Norwood and Lusk also indicated a preference for “animal natures” among a plurality of American consumers.26 There is also a gap between experts’ interpretation of the difficulty and trade-​offs that are inherent in welfare assessments and the broader public’s expectations with respect to animal welfare. There is, for example, significant demand for relatively simple information on the welfare of farmed animals among the European public, yet experts in animal behavior note a series of problems in reducing even the 12 criteria down to a judgment of good, or even acceptable welfare. It is, for example, difficult to know whether welfare should be “averaged” over an entire farm. Doing so can conceal significant welfare problems for a few individuals. Experts and farmers alike prefer an approach that encourages farmers to make improvements in welfare, however well they perform with respect to any of the main criteria (not to mention the much larger class of independent measures).27

Conclusion Animal studies scholars will almost certainly continue to produce scholarship in both the dietetic and productionist modes. The survey here has emphasized the latter approach in large part because it has been relatively underemphasized among scholars taking an explicitly ethical orientation to animal studies. The productionist approach is at least logically more attentive to changes in policy and practice that could have a short-​ term practical impact on the conditions in which food animals currently live. At the same time, this approach is also inherently vulnerable to the critique that productionist concerns capitulate to the profit-​seeking motives of the food industry, and of animal producers in particular.

Notes 1. Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures:  The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2007).

 

378   Paul B. Thompson 2. Robert E. McDowell, “The Need to Know about Animals,” in World Food Issues. Center for the Analysis of World Food Issues, Program in International Agriculture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1984). 3. Ian Livingstone, “Economic Irrationality among Pastoral Peoples:  Myth or Reality?”, Development and Change 8, no. 2 (1977): 209–​230. 4. James A. Serpell, “Having Our Dogs and Eating Them Too: Why Animals Are a Social Issue,” Journal of Social Issues 65, no. 3 (2009): 633–​644. 5. William Boyd, “Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production,” Technology and Culture 42, no. 4 (2001): 631–​664; Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology and Transformation. (Baltimore, MD: John’s Hopkins University Press, 2005). 6. F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk. Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 7. Temple Grandin, “Factors That Impede Animal Movement at Slaughter Plants,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 209, no. 4 (1996): 757–​759; Temple Grandin, “Progress and Challenges in Animal Handling and Slaughter in the US,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 100, no. 1 (2006): 129–​139. 8. David Fraser, “Toward a Global Perspective on Farm Animal Welfare,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 113, no. 4 (2008): 330–​339. 9. Richard W. Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human-​ Animal Relationships (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 10. Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 11. Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York: W. W Norton, 2006). 12. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation:  A  New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: New York Review and Random House, 1975); Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 13. Catherine Friend, The Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint and Still Eat Meat (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2009). 14. Vasile Stanescu, “Why ‘Loving’ Animals Is Not Enough:  A  Response to Kathy Rudy, Locavorism, and the Marketing of ‘Humane’ Meat,” Journal of American Culture 36, no. 2 (2013): 100–​110; Gary L. Francione, “Animal Welfare, Happy Meat and Veganism as the Moral Baseline,” Philosophy of Food 39 (2012): 169. 15. See Steve F. Sapontzis, ed., Food for Thought:  The Debate over Eating Meat (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2004) for a sampling of key positions. 16. This statement of the five freedoms is quoted from a now removed 2013 webpage of the Farm Animal Welfare Committee (FAWC), which operates under the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The FAWC is a successor to the Farm Animal Welfare Council, which was “nondepartmental public body” that was itself a successor to the Brambell Committee, operating until 2011. A similar statement can be found in a 2009 report “Farm Animal Welfare in Great Britain: Its Past, Present and Future,” (London: Farm Animal Welfare Council, October 2009). The report can be downloaded at https://​www.gov.uk/​government/​publications/​fawc-​report-​on-​farm-​animal-​welfare-​in-​ great-​britain-​past-​present-​and-​future, accessed May 6, 2015.

 

The Ethics of Food Animal Production    379 17. Stanley Godlovitch, Roslind Godlovitch, and John Harris, eds., Animals, Men, and Morals:  An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-​ Humans (New  York:  Taplinger Publishing Company, 1972). 18. Bernard E. Rollin, Farm Animal Welfare: Social, Bioethical and Research Issues (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1995). 19. David Fraser, Dan M. Weary, Edward A. Pajor, and Barry N. Milligan. “A Scientific Conception of Animal Welfare That Reflects Ethical Concerns,” Animal Welfare 6 (1997): 187–​205; David Fraser, “Animal Ethics and Animal Welfare Science: Bridging the Two Cultures,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 65, no. 3 (1999): 171–​189. 20. Michael C. Appleby, What Should We Do about Animal Welfare? (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Science, 1999). 21. Appleby, What Should We Do? 22. F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson Lusk, Compassion by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 23. Norwood and Lusk, Compassion. See also R. Bennett and P. Thompson, “Economics,” in Animal Welfare, 2nd ed., ed. M. C. Appleby, J. A. Mench, I. A. S. Olsson, and B. O. Hughes (Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK: CAB International, 2011), 279–​290, which discusses similar evidence for European consumers. 24. R. Botreau, I. Veissier, and P. Perny, “Overall Assessment of Animal Welfare:  Strategy Adopted in Welfare Quality,” Animal Welfare 18, no. 4 (2009): 363–​370. 25. I. Veissier, Karsten Klint Jensen, R. Botrea, and Peter Sandøe, “Highlighting Ethical Decisions Underlying the Scoring of Animal Welfare in the Welfare Quality® Scheme.” Animal Welfare 20, no. 1 (2011): 89. 26. F. Bailey Norwood, Jayson L. Lusk, and Robert W. Prickett. “Consumer Preferences for Farm Animal Welfare: Results of a Nationwide Telephone Survey,” working paper, August 17. 2007, Oklahoma State University, Department of Agricultural Economics, Stillwater, OK. http://​ asp.okstate.edu/​baileynorwood/​Bailey/​Research/​InitialReporttoAFB.pdf, accessed Oct. 5,  2014. 27. Vessier et al., “Highlighting Ethical Decisions.”

 

Chapter 20

Anim als as S c i e nt i fi c Obje c ts Mike Michael

Introduction In this chapter, I will examine what it means to think of experimental animals as scientific objects. However, as we shall see, each of these terms attracts numerous denotations and many connotations. We shall have reason to interrogate the idea of experimental if what is usually connoted by the term is the production of robust knowledge about nature through the controlled manipulation of systematic preparations of nature under specified conditions. What exactly is the knowledge that is produced, and how robust is it if we assume that this knowledge is meant, in one way or another, to be of benefit? Further, to speak of a science as if it were a singular enterprise requires very considerable rhetorical effort. Not only might different disciplines and subdisciplines function with divergent “epistemic cultures,”1 but also even at the level of individual laboratories within the same research field we find differences in their epistemic capacities—​in what they are practically capable of showing empirically.2 More importantly, to “do” laboratory science is simultaneously to engage in a heterogeneous set of activities that straddles, at minimum, the political, the ethical, the financial, the institutional, and the social.3 How is science rendered singular—​or how is such multiplicity practiced and represented, staged, and managed? How do the models, apparatuses, theories, data that emerge at different sites under different circumstances become transferable, comparable, and even combinable? It is not unusual to note that animals is a term whose meanings proliferate in many directions. Within the academic literature addressed herein, laboratory animals can thus be understood variously as victim or hero, unique individual or model organism, naturalistic or analytic. When we move to popular culture, over and above the polarized representations of those directly engaged in the animal experimentation controversy, we encounter a range of narratives, some of which serve as critical commentaries on scientific hubris.4 Thus, in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, white

 

Animals as Scientific Objects    381 lab mice, rather than being the mere objects of experimentation, turn out to be multidimensional beings who ironically experiment upon their scientists. Warner Brothers’ television cartoon series about two laboratory mice, Pinky and the Brain, ironizes science as both brilliant and stupid. In both cases, science is undermined by either the cleverness or the stupidity, the complexity or the simplicity, of its animal object of study. How are these many meanings practically dealt with within the laboratory and its associated, diverse settings? Finally, to talk of an object is itself fraught with complication. To be an object can mean many things: a commodity, the opposite of a subject, a source of data, a lack of agency or self-​determination, the absence of sentience, the presence of an essence. What sort of objects do experimental animals become? How does the animal become a particular sort of entity, or array of entities, through the processes and procedures of science (which, as has already been hinted, are themselves multiple, heterogeneous, and distributed)? These are big questions, and it will not be possible to address them all as fully as they individually deserve. In part this is simply a practical matter. Animals are used in science in many different ways—​for testing, as bioreactors, as sources of tissues, for experiments.5 It’s simply not possible to cover all of these here, and the main focus will be in biomedical experimentation. Further, animals are objectified in numerous ways. As we widen our analytic gaze on science, we find that objectification encompasses, for instance, divisions of labor within laboratories, ethics in relation to personal values, regulatory regimes and animal rights politics, translational research and the imperative for collaborations with clinicians, the pursuit of funding, and the mobilization of expectations. Again, it will be possible to address only a few of these aspects of doing science in any detail. At a conceptual level, given the rich variety of analytic treatments of the object, it will be necessary to draw on a small selection of these. In the main, this choice is shaped not only by the need to use versions of the object that address how animals are reduced but also, in part because these processes of reductionism, are at once complexified and serve to complexify what can be understood by science and its products. In what follows, then, I begin with a review of some of the theorizations of the object before outlining the version—​one that emphasizes heterogeneity, multiplicity, and emergence—​used here. I will go on to examine a number of the heterogeneous practices that constitute doing science—​that is, I will dip into the ecology of practices (to adapt Isabelle Stengers’s phrase) through which animal experimentation is enacted to trace the range of ways animals are rendered scientific objects.6 I will end by briefly reflecting on the broader implications of this analytic framing for thinking about the ways animal experimentation might be reevaluated.

On the Object A standard Western view of objects is that they stand outside of the human: they are there to be manipulated, used, or exchanged; they are generally mute, passive, insensible, lacking the liveliness that is associated with those entities that are deemed to be

 

382   Mike Michael alive.7 In the case of experimental animals, they must be turned into objects that yield particular types of data. In Lynch’s famous terms, there is a transformation from the naturalistic into the analytic animal.8 We shall have much to say about (the ironies of) the process of this transformation. For present purposes it is important to note that relatively recent treatments of the object present a more nuanced picture. Rather than standing outside of, and in contrast to, the social, it has been argued that objects are central to the production and reproduction of social bonds. Social relations always—​ constitutively—​entail objects that act as quasi-​subjects impacting materially and semiotically on human actors and shaping human affairs in myriad ways.9 Needless to say, scholars have developed a range of (often contrasting) terms to address the complexity of objects as they interact with humans. For instance, it has been argued that technological objects entail “scripts” that pre-​and proscribe particular actions,10 that certain contemporary objects draw people into a relation of “sociality” with them,11 and that objects entail specific “propensities” that enable or disable particular social practices.12 The point here is that objects are not the passive entities that stand external to the social processes as is routinely assumed. However, we need to clarify what an object is still further. Again, a standard Western view is that the object has an essence or underlying substance: it is what it is in the sense of having ontological stability, a uniformity, and consistency of being. By contrast, more process-​oriented perspectives take all entities to be emergent, immanent, and heterogeneously constituted.13 Accordingly, what an object is depends on the event in which it is embroiled (and this applies equally to the subject that Whitehead, to signal its nonfoundational status, prefers to call a super-​ject). Every event involves a specific combination (in Whitehead’s terminology, a concrescence) of specific social and material elements (prehensions). On this perspective, objects cannot possess a substance that preexists their qualities: there is no abstracted or essential television that is retro, or overcomplicated, or broken. There is only this retro television, this overcomplicated television, and this broken television. Similarly, there is no abstracted “animal model” that is promising, controversial, or productive. There is this controversial animal model, this promising animal model, that productive animal model. And just as the abstracted television is in actuality rendered in its specificity, in a particular event of abstraction by this or that engineer, designer, or consumer, so this animal model is abstracted by this scientist, regulator, funder, ethicist, or rights (animal or patient) advocate. There are three issues to draw out from this formulation with its emphasis on the eventuation of the object. First, the object is constituted out of multiple, heterogeneous entities. This suggests that when we look at experimental animals as scientific objects, we need to take a broad view of what counts as an experimental event. For example, these might include not only the experimental system and the various scientists involved in the experiment itself but also animal technicians, caging provision, expectations attached to the individual experiment, local laboratory conditions, promises associated with the research program within which the individual experiment is embedded, and, more broadly, cultural articulations of the status and utility of experimental animals. To be sure we cannot hope to be exhaustive in accounting

 

Animals as Scientific Objects    383 for all the elements—​both here and elsewhere, as Stengers14 puts it—​that make up the event of an experiment in which the animal object emerges, but we can at least begin to trace some of the complexities entailed in it. Second, the object is emergent; its capacities and properties unfold through the complex and heterogeneous relations that are formed in the conduct of the specific experimental event. In the midst of such complexity, it is not always possible to know precisely how and what an animal object is becoming. Of course, this uncertainty is, on one level, the whole point of an experiment: the systematic manipulation of objects to generate the unknown. To paraphrase Rheinberger,15 the stable technical objects, including experimental animals, when brought together in an experimental system generate epistemic things that are the focus of scientific study (e.g., biological functions) that are characteristically and irreducibly vague embodying what is as yet unknown. In light of the extended version of the experiment previously outlined, it follows that the generative potential of the animal object in its experimental setting is not simply epistemic; it can be ethical, social, institutional, and political.16 As a corollary, in the event of the experiment (so reformulated)—​and this is the third implication—​it is not simply the object that becomes through the event; it co-​becomes with, mutually changes, or intra-​acts17 with other elements that are involved in the experimental event.18 That is, as animal objects emerge, so do these other components of the extended experimental event, and that includes experimenters themselves. We have moved a long way from the idea of an object and the experimental animal object as passive, inert, discrete substance. This view of the object as eventuated suggests that a rather different stance on the experimental animal object can be developed—​ indeed, one in which a new sort of ethical relation to the animal might emerge.19 However, before we get to this point, it is necessary to consider how an animal is indeed objectified—​that is, performed or enacted20 as objectifiable, a substance, something on which experimentation can be conducted and that can yield robust scientific findings. As we shall see, this process of enactment is multiple and heterogeneous.

Enacting the Scientific Animal Object In the previous section, an attempt was made at opening up the experiment so that it encompasses other sorts of dimensions: the experiment thus comes to be seen as part of a research lab, a research program, a research tradition. But, to state the obvious, experiments are also made up of specific personnel, people with their different contingent interests, roles, and capacities. To study the animal as scientific object is to engage with a multiplicity of ways animals are rendered objectifiable. Such multiplicity ranges from the self-​selection of scientists, to the systemic production of laboratory animals and on to the role of animals in health policy that emphasizes translational research (the accelerated movement of scientific knowledge from bench to bedside, that is, from experimental finding to clinical intervention). These are inevitably interwoven, but for the

 

384   Mike Michael purposes of exposition an albeit highly porous divide will be drawn between the inside and outside of the laboratory.21

Inside the Laboratory Let us begin with scientists themselves. Students entering into biological sciences will make choices over whether they will continue to work on animals. Some drop out; others pursue careers in which they will do experimental work on animals and animal tissues. Already there is a self-​selection of those who can enter into particular sorts of laboratories to enact animals as scientific objects. This is further complicated insofar as qualified scientists might choose to work on specific species. Thus, as Birke, Arluke, and Michael document, scientists might be happy to work with mice or rats but not cats or dogs.22 Here, fine distinctions are drawn between the affects different species evoke: scientists acknowledge that their sense of empathy for or identification with animals varies across species. On this score, they are no different from members of the public, who in judging the value of an experiment will consider the species (e.g., severity of procedure, likely benefit, and likely benefit for whom): the greater the empathy they feel toward a species (dogs are particularly potent in this respect), the less likely they are willing to approve.23 Conversely, scientists who work with particular species can also identify with those species. Though this can be as much concerned with scientific expertise and professional differentiation as with empathy,24 scientists routinely situate their work with their species of choice as ethically responsible. The transformation of animals from naturalistic (the familiar animal of common sense, marked by liveliness and difference) to analytic (the animal object which as part of an experimental system yields data) is couched in terms of an ethics that spans several dimensions. First, there is the ethics of treating the animal respectfully and with care. In part this is about animal welfare: the animal “deserves” good treatment. However, it also concerns the standardization of the animal—​animals who are stressed do not make good experimental objects. Thus, good handling, as Holmberg25 notes, addresses both an ethics of animal welfare and established scientific principles (though this picture is rather more complicated because inconsistent handling across scientists seems unavoidable, despite common training26). The same argument applies to the housing of animals: the more animals can be enabled to pursue species-​specific social and individual behaviors, the less stressed they are; the fewer the uncontrolled variables, such as hormonal and immune fluctuations, that will be present; and the more uniform the sample of animals.27 Though this focus on “handling” might appear instrumental rather than ethical, it can also be attached to another ethical principle: that of doing effective science that yields urgently needed medical benefits. This opens up the possibility of complex ethical stances: instrumentalist objectification and ethical treatment of animals certainly need not be contradictory. This ethical consonance finds particular expression in the animal experimentalist who is a vegetarian and condemns meat consumption because, unlike animal experimentation, it is

 

Animals as Scientific Objects    385 not needed.28 Relatedly, some scientists draw a contrast between the conditions under which animals are reared in the meat industry and the far superior treatment animals receive in the laboratory.29 Now, this care for the experimental animal is not one based simply on training—​it is also, according to some scientists’ accounts, born of a profound interest in and understanding of animals, one grounded both in long-​term relations with companion animals and extended scholarly knowledge about animals.30 As such, scientists can claim for themselves a particular personal and natural historical view that best places them for the appropriate humane treatment of experimental animals (which can also be extended to knowing how to “kill animals well”).31 Brown and Michael32 suggest that in such accounts UK scientists represent themselves as superior members of the public. That is, they embody commonsense public values better than the public itself, a public that can be regarded as relatively lacking in “deeper” knowledge about animals and thus prone to more “sentimental” values as opposed to the more “realistic” values of science. In this dual process of differentiation and identification with the public, we have an example of the ways scientists privilege their practices with regard to animal experimentation. Through a series of contrasts with various disreputable others, they establish their ethical (as well as epistemic) superiority.33 We have seen this in relation to meat production and consumption, but an even more obvious, and highly referenced, other is the animal testing of products for the cosmetics industry. Other others include the prehistory of animal experimentation (things were much worse in the past), scientists from countries where a tradition of animal welfare is not evidenced (they do not demonstrate the same or appropriate levels of practical care toward experimental animals), even the veterinarians who inspect laboratory facilities (they do not have an intimate enough knowledge of the experimental animals and thus make judgments that are on occasion ill-​advised). If these scientists’ discourses serve to enact the objectification of experimental animals as ethically justifiable, ironically similar critical (othering) arguments can be directed to the scientists themselves, even within the context of laboratory facilities. (Obviously this is not an uncommon accusation from some animal rights activists.) Animal experimentation is marked by a division of labor in which it is animal technicians who have the greatest contact with animals and are primarily responsible for their health and upkeep as well as for culling in cases of overstocking.34 Arluke35 describes the complex and close relationships technicians develop with animals (including keeping some as “pets” often on the basis of some small physical oddity). At base, technicians see themselves as the buffer between the scientists and the animals: it is they who are best placed to detect when an animal is in pain or distress, and in their view it is scientists who are divorced from the animals. This begs the question of how care for animals is distributed across and policed by the personnel in laboratories. In this section, we have ranged over a number of instances in which the objectification of animals within the laboratory is enacted, an enactment that is bound up with numerous ethical, cultural, and epistemic arguments. However, the laboratory is necessarily a networked space through which flow many entities: for example, animals, equipment,

 

386   Mike Michael people, texts, funds, regulations, reagents. In the next section, we will consider some of the trajectories that link the laboratory to other settings, trajectories that contribute to the objectification of the experimental animal.

Outside the Laboratory As mentioned already, scientific experiments are embedded within a complex nexus of relations: most obviously, they are a part of individual careers, laboratory projects and perspectives, research programs and research traditions. This complexity can be approached through the idea of the animal model. In essence, this refers to a human condition that can be studied through the use of an animal (or parts of an animal) that stand as proxies for human bodies or biological systems. There is an enormous range of these models, such as physiological, behavioral, genetic, psychological, oncological, immunological, and reproductive,36 so what follows is necessarily selective. A key observation is that animals who are exemplars of a model need to be standardized if results are to be generalizable. Karen Rader documents the complex history of the standardization of the mouse (especially for cancer research), which touches on the biology of mice and economic constraints and institutional politics.37 The upshot is that through standardization mice (and rats) became central to much biomedical research (together they make up around 80 percent of all animals used in European Union countries).38 This is also in part because on one hand they breed quickly and relatively easily and on the other hand their traditional status as “vermin” means that they do not invite the same public scrutiny as other species.39 In any case, as Birke40 points out, this centrality of mice and rats has resulted in less laboratory animal diversity for modeling human conditions: consequently, rats and mice have to be reengineered as models, or genetically modified so that they can express the required (human) biological “system.” Here, we see the systemic objectification of the animal: even before he reaches the laboratory, he is already preconstituted as an analytic object. This is reinforced by the processes by which animals are marketed and ordered. In suppliers’ marketing catalogs, strains are set out with the genotype (e.g., what genes have been knocked out or introduced) and the phenotype (e.g., what conditions are expressed). However, strains are also characterized in terms of the sorts of experimental systems to which they are best suited. To put this another way, animals are subject to technoscientific bespoking: they are genetically designed for particular scientific purposes and then made available “off the rack.”41 So it would seem that the animals are enacted as just another a commodity, a component that can be slotted into this or that experimental system, a tool that can be ordered just like any other piece of equipment. This is doubly reinforced in that many of these strains can be patented—​they cannot be interbred to produce more of the same.42 Thus the specific principle of experimental animals as well as their bodies are considered property: it is this principle, as much as their bodies, that renders them technically unique and scientifically useful.43

 

Animals as Scientific Objects    387 However, this rendering of the animal model is not unproblematic—​it can lead to disastrous outcomes (the thalidomide controversy is a tragic benchmark in the critique of animal models). This chapter will illustrate how specific animal models are rendered applicable to humans, but first we need to examine the generic arguments that aim to establish the general value of animal models. On one level, one might argue that such an argument in reality “is a display of human identity based in assumptions of natural hierarchical differences established in distinctions entrenched in human/​nonhuman animal power relations.”44 We have seen already that scientists’ own accounts are rather more complicated. Nevertheless, the commitment to animal experimentation is arguably underpinned by a common and entrenched belief that animal models can generate substantially more benefits than costs. Knight45 attempts to test the extent to which the claims for the general biomedical utility of animal models are warranted. He summarizes, “In only 2 of 20 systematic reviews located in a comprehensive search of the biomedical literature did the animal models clearly appear useful in the development of human clinical interventions, or substantially consistent with human clinical outcomes.”46 Moreover, when he focuses on chimpanzee models because, by virtue of their similarities with humans, they were more likely to yield benefits of direct clinical application, he finds: Around half of these published chimpanzee experiments were never cited by any subsequent publication. Given that many experiments remain unpublished, this indicates that the majority of invasive chimpanzee studies generate data of questionable value which make little obvious contribution to the advancement of biomedical knowledge. Only around 15 per cent of all invasive chimpanzee studies were cited by papers describing well-​developed diagnostic, therapeutic, and/​or prophylactic methods for combating human diseases. However, examination of these medical papers revealed that none of the cited chimpanzee studies demonstrated an essential contribution, or in most cases a significant contribution of any kind, to the development of the clinical method described.47

Now, claims about the human clinical relevance of animal models and animal experiments in general are used to defend animal experimentation per se (and this is apparent not only in the discourses of scientific spokespersons but also those of patient advocacy groups). Further, making claims about the potential medical utility of individual animal experiments or experimental programs is something that is part and parcel of the doing of biomedical science. It is woven into the institutional fabric of funding application and ethical analysis. To obtain the financial backing from the key funding bodies of biomedical research (state research councils, biomedical charities, venture capital) and ethical agreement (from these same bodies, but also more or less local ethics committees), it is necessary to offset the costs to animals against what benefits might accrue in the future.48 In particular, applicants need to craft expectations about the eventual human benefits of their specific research and to draft promissory notes about the likely clinical usefulness of the findings that an animal model and a program of research will

 

388   Mike Michael generate.49 They must demonstrate that these benefits outweigh the expected levels of animal distress and pain or numbers of animal deaths (and also, on occasion, show that there are no alternative research methodologies that do not involve animals). Increasingly, this is framed in terms of (the imperative for) translational research wherein laboratory-​based findings are translated into clinically useful interventions. Animals become translational objects that mediate the collaborations between experimental and clinical scientists. However, this is not an unproblematic process. Michael et al. (in a study of human embryonic stem cell research, but their analysis applies no less to animal experimentation) show how scientists and clinicians differ in a number of ways that can render collaboration fraught (e.g., in terms of their views about the nature and value of evidence—​crudely, scientists tend to emphasize the rigor of experiments and caution, clinicians tend to stress rapid application to patients in urgent need of treatment).50 In some cases, the specific model might itself complexify the translational process. Gail Davies51 considers the case of humanized mice, which have been genetically altered to “hold open a space” (albeit in a limited way) for the introduction of components of the human immunological system. However, “the complexities of immunology, and the role of microbial agencies in shaping the immune system, prevent a simple exchange of insights between animals in the laboratory and humans in the clinic.”52 Having noted this, she suggests that the humanized mouse, in part because of this “opening up of a space” within it is becoming widely circulated, serving as a “collaborative thing” whose very “pliability” allows for this model to be recruited into “high-​profile and well-​funded research agendas around stem cell science, infectious diseases and pre-​clinical trials.”53 At the same time, the humanized mouse is disruptive of such collaborations. The space that is opened up is occupied by the immunological components, not of some generic human but of a specific individual. Ironically, while the mouse model is itself standardized, what is standardized is a personalized human immune system whose generalizability to the population is by no means assured. This disrupts not only the presumed value of collaboration but also raises all sorts of ethical dilemmas (e.g., should a treatment developed on a specific humanized mouse be tested on other humans?). With Davies’s analysis we see how the value of particular animal models is promoted—​ in her case study, this is partly grounded in the openness of the humanized mouse (and the energetic promotional efforts of the mouse’s producer, the Jackson Laboratory). As she shows, the process of establishing the generality of a particular animal model—​that it can illuminate biological processes of humans (and indeed other species) is indeed a complex one. Friese and Clarke54 similarly trace how the generality of animal models in the reproductive sciences (specifically, the study of reproductive systems in the twentieth century and the development of interspecies nuclear transfer technologies for safeguarding endangered species in the twenty-​first) were enacted in complex ways. In being proclaimed as possessing generality these models could “forge connections between different sites of practice such as the laboratory, the clinic and farm, as well as the biotechnology company and zoo.”55 The irony is that the utility of these models rests less in their standardization and proclaimed generality (which as hinted at already

 

Animals as Scientific Objects    389 are idealizations) than in their instability, which “delimited new sets of questions … As such, models may be mobilized in the reproductive sciences through generality and standardization, but they are used in very local ways that defy standardization.”56 The point is that the idealization of the animal model and its specific recalcitrance and uncertainty—​its conjoint reduction and complexification—​enable its sometimes troubled movement across different fields of research.57 To summarize: the work that goes into enacting animal models takes a number of forms, ranging from generic claims about the biomedical value of models per se to the idealization of specific models (which can enable their mobility across different scientific locations) and on to the practical uncertainty, contingency, and contestability of those models (which can mediate their local utility). In these enactments, the animal is a scientific object to which are attached promises and expectations that are chronically controverted both to dismiss and better utilize those objects. To put this in terms of eventuation, the animal model emerges in diverse ways across scientific events that variously draw in public, clinical, and scientific constituencies: as we shall see in the next section, this complexity and fluidity has important implications for how we think about animals as scientific objects. However, before that, we need to return to the matter of ethics. We have seen how animals are enacted as scientific objects through their process of production and circulation as commodities and models, but they are also enacted as objects in relation to ethics. To be sure, in considering the ethics of an animal experiment or experimental program (using a particular animal model), the naturalistic animal has to be taken into account—​the severity of the impact on the animal as a sentient being is assessed against the likely benefits. However, the issue to be raised here concerns the practices of ethics through which the animal is objectified as an object of ethical calculation. As mentioned already, for biomedical scientists to conduct experiments on animals, they are usually obliged by the relevant regulatory bodies to make an ethical case and seek ethical approval. While the precise institutional machinery might vary across territories,58 the general process of ethically assessing animal experimentation requires a calculation of the costs and benefits (as well as other factors, such as the possibility of alternative methods). Scientists themselves seem to have an ambivalent view of their regulatory obligations. On one hand, they see these as a burden, increasing the amount of paperwork they must complete before getting to the stage of actually doing science; on the other, they see these regulations as a protection against criticisms of their activities—​to follow the regulations is to comport oneself ethically in accordance with a democratic policy process and a condensation of the public will. Inevitably, things are more complicated as scientists will often also express skepticism about these ethical processes. We have already seen this in relation to the veterinarians who police laboratory practice. With regard to ethical assessment, scientists note that neither human benefits nor animal suffering can be transparently quantified. In other words, as objects of ethical calculation, animal bodies as sources of benefit and bearers of pain are chronically indeterminate.59

 

390   Mike Michael As a form of cost-​benefit analysis, ethical assessment is an example of what seems to be the default mechanism by which the value of all manner of interventions (e.g., environmental, economic, engineering) is “rationally” calculated.60 The scientists’ skepticism is a version of one of numerous issues raised about the value of this form of valuation, namely, that the identification of costs and benefits is unavoidably negotiable. Other critical issues that have been documented include the following: costs and benefits have a tendency to proliferate wildly; costs and benefits are based in tacit cultural assumptions; and costs and benefits incorporate implicit relations of trust. The upshot is that cost-​benefit analysis is a process that is not simply calculative and rational, but grounded in cultural presuppositions, affective relations, and attributions of trustworthiness. Despite these shortcomings (i.e., shortcomings within the supposedly disinterested frame of reference of cost-​benefit analysis), cost-​benefit analysis remains the predominant mode of assessment. Those who cannot do cost-​benefit analysis (e.g., because they are too emotionally attached to the rights of animals or patients) must be marginalized from the ethical process.61 Conversely, those who can—​for example, members of the clergy or the judiciary—​should be celebrated and invited. Indeed, Macer et al.62 even suggest that cost-​benefit thinking should be considered a universal sign of bioethical maturity. Writing about the attitudes of the Japanese public toward using animals for xenotransplantation (crudely, the transplantation of animal organs and tissues into humans), they say: “if we consider bioethical maturity as a ratio of those who consider both benefits and risks, then the (Japanese) public could be argued to be mature in this sense.”63 Another irony here is that it is now people who are objectified—​ reduced to those who cannot control their emotions or, contrastingly, those who can act as disinterested calculators of ethical value. But there are even further ironies here. The scientists who advocate such disinterested calculation believe themselves to be objectified by those who are all too interested. These are dangerous publics—​notably, some radical animal right groups—​who are not averse from verbally abusing and physically attacking scientists. One result is that scientists feel themselves under constant risk of attack to the extent that they need to avoid social situations where they might reveal their involvement in animal experimentation, let alone openly advocate animal experimentation.64 Yet it also seems that these worries, very real as they are, are partly grounded in a reification of the animal movement—​evidenced in, for instance, a conflation of animal rights and animal welfare groups whose perspectives on experimental animals can take markedly divergent forms.65 In all this, there seems to be a circuit of objectification in operation where, in the struggle over what it means to objectify animals in science, scientists and publics are caught up in a fragmented process of mutual objectification. In summary, in the foregoing, we have reviewed a number of ways animals are enacted as scientific objects when we take biomedical science to be embedded in a complex network of associations that include animal suppliers, interdisciplinary collaborators, and regulatory bodies, ethics committees, animal campaigners, and publics. We have also seen how various humans are also objectified in this process. Throughout, and in keeping with our analysis of scientists’ practices within the laboratory, we have also tried to remain alert to the ways that in this process of enactment as scientific objects,

 

Animals as Scientific Objects    391 animals, recursively, shape humans. Animals’ corporeal recalcitrance—​their slippage into something other than the discrete object of desire utilized by scientists and others (e.g., as a stable, commodifiable model of specific utility, as a determinable object of ethical calculation)—​opens up possibilities for human and animal becoming. It is to this complex issue that we now turn with a view to rethinking the implications of the animal as scientific object.

Concluding Remarks This essay has been premised on the idea that the animal as scientific object has to be made or accomplished: he emerges in various guises through a fractured nexus of practices, discourses and relations that extends well beyond the confines of the laboratory, reflecting the multiplicity that comprises science in action and straddling the diverse practices of the scientist as “heterogeneous engineer” who is engaged in many activities across many domains.66 Along the way, scientists are also enacted—​enact themselves—​ in particular ways: as cost-​benefit analysts, as buffers, as natural historians, as human companions, as collaborators, as critics of numerous others, as promoters of models, and so on. Yet both animals and people exceed these enactments. For instance, the pliability of animal models prompt unexpected uses, and scientists find themselves sceptical about cost-​benefit calculations. What are the impacts of this “excess”? How might it afford the prospect of a rethinking of what it means to do science on animals? Bischur argues that the naturalistic animal cannot be totally effaced by the techniques and technologies of biomedicine: “Animals’ being alive, their being living creatures and their being recognized by the researchers and technicians as animated bodies … impose a change in the relevance system of the researchers … this kind of (animal) resistance may be called ‘shrewdness.’”67 We have seen how this is managed by researchers, how their “relevance system” (the frame of reference which constructs animals as analytic) is reasserted. However, we have also noted that this is partial and that the relevance system of researchers is polyvalent—​there are many dimensions both inside and outside the laboratory that both sensitize and desensitize researchers to animals’ shrewdness.68 In Despret’s terms,69 the animal can be rendered docile and the scientist act as judge, but the animal can also be experienced as shrewd and the scientist may take on the persona of caretaker. As Davies notes, this can mean treating animal models altogether more holistically—​studying them under naturalistic conditions, or seeking out alternative experimental systems, for example.70 But it can also mean attending to the nature of objectification within the broader scope of doing science. Davies traces the philosophical arguments that depict animals as captivated by their environment.71 Accordingly, they are so corporeally immersed in their particular environment that they cannot do what humans can, namely, separate themselves from it; indeed, humans unlike animals can become bored by their environment. Davies argues that the stereotypical behaviors of animals in laboratory and zoo cages suggest otherwise. But she also suggests that scientists themselves might well be

 

392   Mike Michael so immersed in a sociomaterial research environment that is perhaps no less captivating. Locked into an audited “treadmill” of research, grant application, and publication, scientists might well not have the luxury of boredom.72 In this chapter, the animal as scientific object has been portrayed as an accomplishment—​enacted through a variety of practices, discourses, and relations that straddle the inside and outside of the laboratory. In attending to this objectification of the animal, the chapter has also paid some attention to the varieties of objectification of human actors. Over and above this, it has also been suggested that animals exceed this objectification; they display a certain shrewdness, an undisciplined corporeality that can trigger a reaction in the experimental scientist that, to some extent, deobjectifies the animal and in the process brings out a different way of being in the scientist. Arguably, though, to attribute such an ethical reorientation to the shrewdness of the animal might reflect a certain, for want of a better term, meta-​objectification of the animal–​human relation wherein something intrinsic to the animal is invoked. For example, the animal’s natural liveness evokes the liveness of the human handler, creating a medium of empathy or identification. Moreover, perhaps it places too much weight on animal shoulders. As various authors have noted, such shifts in local relationalities between humans and animals take place within wider networks that are not easy to unravel, networks that place certain conditions on what human–​animal relations might emerge in the laboratory (most obviously research shaped by the demands of commercial funding structures).73 By contrast, we can propose that such an emergent sensibility might be better situated in relation to a distributed, circulatory, and diverse shrewdness that traverses the many and disparate practices that comprise animal experimentation. Put another way, we can look at the various forms of excess that contingently accompany the numerous processes of objectification. Let us recapitulate a few instances of these other forms of shrewdness and excess: the continuing, ambivalent encounter with regulatory requirements to identify, quantify, and balance costs and benefits; the frustrations of translational research where the medical utility of animal experimentation is called into question by clinical colleagues; the accumulated arguments over the usefulness of animal experimentation per se; the division of labor within laboratories where animal technicians display their sensitivities to animal shrewdness; and the negotiated limitations of scientists’ willingness to experiment on different species. Faced with this plethora of excess and shrewdness, there is perhaps the possibility of gaining a distance on the ongoing practices that structure the scientific life. Put another way, there is a chance that the meaning of biomedical science can be opened up in creative ways, and with that come emergent prospects for what scientist and animal can co-​become.

Notes 1. Karin Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 2. Harry M. Collins, Changing Order (London: SAGE, 1985). 3. Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987).

 

Animals as Scientific Objects    393 4. Elizabeth S. Paul, “Us and Them: Scientists’ and Animal Rights Campaigners’ Views of the Animal Experimentation Debate,” Society and Animals 3 (1995): 1–​21. 5. For a recent survey, see Andrew Knight, The Costs and Benefits of Animal Experiments (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2011). 6. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 7. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 8. Michael Lynch, “Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object: Laboratory Culture and Ritual Practice in the Neurosciences,” Social Studies of Science 18 (1988): 265–​289. 9. For foundational accounts of this perspective in Science and Technology Studies, see Michel Serres, Hermes:  Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Bruno Latour, “Technology Is Society Made Durable,” in A Sociology of Monsters, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1991), 103–​131; Bruno Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses? A Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/​Building Society, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 225–​258. 10. See especially Madeleine Akrich, “The De-​scription of Technical Objects,” in Bijker and Law, Shaping Technology/​Building Society, 205–​224; Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour, “A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies,” in Bijker and Law, Shaping Technology/​Building Society, 259–​263. 11. Karen Knorr Cetina, “Sociality with Objects: Social Relations in Postsocial Knowledge Societies,” Theory, Culture and Society 14 (1997): 1–​30. 12. Daniel Miller, “Introduction,” in Clothing as Material Culture, ed. Susanne Küchler and Daniel Miller (Oxford; Berg, 2005), 1–​19. 13. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay In Cosmology (New York: Free Press, 1929). 14. Stengers, Cosmopolitics I. 15. Hans-​Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 16. Mike Michael, Steven Wainwright, and Clare Williams, “Temporality and Prudence: On Stem Cells as ‘Phronesic Things,’” Configurations 13 (2005): 373–​394. 17. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 18. Mariam Fraser, “Facts, Ethics and Event,” in Deleuzian Intersections in Science, Technology and Anthropology, ed. Casper Bruun Jensen and Kjetil Rödje, (New York: Berghahn Press, 2010), 57–​82. 19. Mike Michael, “Toward an Idiotic Methodology:  De-​signing the Object of Sociology,” Sociological Review, 60, no. S1 (2012): 166–​183. 20. Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple. Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 21. For a different interpretation of the differences between the inside and outside of science see Pru Hobson-​West, “Ethical Boundary-​Work in the Animal Research Laboratory,” Sociology 46 (2012): 649–​663. 22. Lynda Birke, Arnold Arluke, and Mike Michael, The Sacrifice: How Scientific Experiments Transform Animals and People (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007). 23. Harold Herzog, Andrew Rowan, and Daniel Kossow, “Social Attitudes and Animals,” in The State of the Animals, ed. Deborah Salem and Andrew Rowan (Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, 2001), 55–​69. 24. Birke et al., The Sacrifice; Hobson-​West, “Ethical Boundary-​Work.”

 

394   Mike Michael 25. Tora Holmberg, “A Feeling for the Animal: On Becoming an Experimentalist,” Society and Animals 16 (2008): 316–​335. 26. See Elissa J. Chesler, Sonia G. Wilson, William R. Lariviere, Sandra L. Rodriguez-​Zas, and Jeffrey S. Mogil, “Influence of Laboratory Environment on Behavior,” Nature Neuroscience 5 (2002): 1101–​1102. 27. Lynda Birke, “Animal Bodies in the Production of Scientific Knowledge:  Modelling Medicine,” Body & Society 18 (2012): 156–​178. 28. Hobson-​West, “Ethical Boundary-​Work.” 29. Mike Michael and Lynda Birke, “Accounting for Animal Experiments:  Credibility and Disreputable ‘Others,’” Science, Technology and Human Values, 19 (1994): 189–​204. 30. Michael and Birke, “Accounting for Animal Experiments”; Hobson-​ West, “Ethical Boundary-​Work.” 31. Tora Holmberg, “Mortal Love:  Care Practices in Animal Experimentation,” Feminist Theory 12 (2011): 147–​163. 32. Nik Brown and Mike Michael, “Switching between Science and Culture in Transpecies Transplantation,” Science, Technology and Human Values 26 (2001): 3–​22. 33. Michael and Birke, “Accounting for Animal Experiments.” 34. Arnold Arluke, “Sacrificial Symbolism in Animal Experimentation:  Object or Pet?” Anthrozoos 2 (1988): 98–​117. 35. Arluke, “Sacrificial Symbolism”; also see Arnold Arluke, “Moral Elevation in Medical Research,” Advances in Medical Sociology 1 (1990): 189–​204. 36. For a recent survey, see A. Knight, The Costs and Benefits of Animal Experiments (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave). 37. Karen Rader, Making Mice:  Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900–​1955 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 38. See Knight, Costs and Benefits of Animal Experiments. 39. Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 2004). 40. Birke, “Animal Bodies.” 41. Mike Michael, “Technoscientific Bespoking:  Animals, Publics and The New Genetics,” New Genetics and Society 20 (2001): 205–​224. 42. Birke et al., Sacrifice, 50. 43. For a classic statement of this aspect of animal genetic modification, see Donna Haraway, Modest_​Witness@Second_​Millenium.FemaleMan.Meets_​OncoMouse: Feminism and Techno­­ science (London: Routledge, 1997). 44. Kay Pegg, “A Hostile World for Nonhuman Animals:  Human Identification and the Oppression of Nonhuman Animals for Human Good 1,” Sociology 43 (2009):  85–​102, especially 98. 45. Knight, Costs and Benefits of Animal Experiments. 46. Ibid., 58. 47. Ibid. 48. Nik Brown, “Organizing/​Disorganizing the Breakthrough Motif: Dolly the Cloned Ewe Meets Astrid the Hybrid Pig,” in Contested Futures: A Sociology of Prospective Science and Technology, ed. Nik Brown, Brian Rappert, and Andrew Webster (Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2000), 78–​110. 49. Kristin Asdal, “Subjected to Parliament: The Laboratory of Experimental Medicine and the Animal Body,” Social Studies of Science 38 (2008): 899–​917. 50. Michael et al., “Temporality and Prudence.”

 

Animals as Scientific Objects    395 51. Gail Davies, “What Is a Humanized Mouse? Remaking the Species and the Spaces of Translational Medicine,” Body and Society 18 (2012): 126–​155. 52. Davies, “What Is a Humanized Mouse?” 140. 53. Davies, “What Is a Humanized Mouse?” 142. 54. Carrie Friese and Adele E. Clarke, “Transposing Bodies of Knowledge and Technique: Animal Models at Work in Reproductive Sciences,” Social Studies of Science 42 (2011): 31–​52. 55. Friese and Clarke, “Transposing Bodies,” 46. 56. Friese and Clarke, “Transposing Bodies,” 46. 57. For a parallel argument in relation to animal behavior genetics that emphasizes the role of the diversity of understandings in the utility of an animal model, see Nicole Nelson, “Modeling Mouse, Humans and Discipline:  Epistemic Scaffolds in Animal Behavior Genetics,” Social Studies of Science 43 (2012): 3–​29. 58. See Birke et al., Sacrifice; Knight, Costs and Benefits of Animal Experiments. 59. Mike Michael and Lynda Birke, “Animal Experimentation:  Enrolling the Core Set,” Social Studies of Science 24 (1994): 81–​95; for a contemporary affirmation of this point, see Hobson-​West, “Ethical Boundary-​Work.” 60. See, e.g., John Foster, (ed.), Valuing Nature? Ethics, Economics and Environment (London: Routledge, 1997). 61. Michael and Birke, “Animal Experimentation.” 62. Darryl Macer, Masakazu Inaba, Fumi Maekawa, et  al., “Japanese Attitudes toward Xenotransplantation,” Public Understanding of Science 11 (2002): 347–​362. See also Peter Aldhous, Andy Coghlan, and Jon Copley, “Let the People Speak,” New Scientist 163 (1999): 26–​31. 63. Macer et al., “Japanese Attitudes toward Xenotransplantation.” 64. Arnold Arluke, “Going into the Closet with Science: Information Control among Animal Experimenters,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 20 (1991):  306–​ 30. See also Tora Holmberg and Malin Ideland, “Secrets and Lies:  ‘Selective Openness’ in Animal Experimentation,” Public Understanding of Science 21 (2012): 354–​368. 65. See Birke et al., Sacrifice. 66. John Law, “Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering:  The Case of Portugese Expansion,” in Social Construction of Technological Systems, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 111–​134. 67. Daniel Bischur, “Animated Bodies in Immunological Practices: Craftsmanship, Embodied Knowledge, Emotions and Attitudes toward Animals,” Human Studies 34 (2011): 407–​429, especially 423. 68. Also see Ralph R. Acampora, Corporal Compassion (Pittsburgh:  University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); Beth Greenhough and Emma Roe, “Ethics, Space, and Somatic Sensibilities: Comparing Relationships between Scientific Researchers and Their Human and Animal Experimental Subjects,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 47–​66. 69. Vinciane Despret, “The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-​Zoo-​Genesis,” Body & Society 10 (2004): 111–​134; also see Vinciane Despret, “The Becoming of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds,” Subjectivity 23 (2008): 123–​129. 70. Gail Davies, “Captivating Behavior:  Mouse Models, Experimental Genetics and Reductionist Returns in the Neurosciences,” Sociological Review 48 (2010): 53–​72. 71. Davies, “Captivating Behavior”; Davies, “What Is a Humanized Mouse?”

 

396   Mike Michael 72. Marylin Strathern, Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (London: Routledge, 2000). 73. See Greenhough and Roe, “Ethics, Space, and Somatic Sensibilities.”

Further Reading Arluke, Arnold, and Clinton R. Sanders. Regarding Animals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Birke, Lynda. Feminism, Animals, and Science: The Naming of the Shrew. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1994. Brown, Nik. “Xenotransplantation: Normalizing Disgust.” Science as Culture 8 (1999): 327–​355. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hobson-​West, Pru. “Beasts and Boundaries: An Introduction to Animals in Sociology, Science and Society.” Qualitative Sociology Review 3 (2007): 2–​41. Hobson-​West, Pru. “The Role of ‘Public Opinion’ in the UK Animal Research Debate.” Journal of Medical Ethics 36 (2010): 46–​49. Jasper, James M., and Dorothy Nelkin. Animal Rights Crusade. New York: Free Press, 1991. Lynch, Michael, and Harry M. Collins. “Introduction: Humans, Animals, Machines.” Science, Technology and Human Values 23 (1998): 371–​383. MacNaghten, Phil. “Animals in their Nature: A Case Study on Public Attitudes to Animals, Genetic Modification and ‘Nature.’” Sociology 38 (2004): 533–​551. Pivetti, Monica. “Natural and Unnatural: Activists’ Representations of Animal Biotechnology.” New Genetics and Society 26 (2007): 137–​157. Schuppli, Cathy A., and Dan M. Weary. “Attitudes Towards the Use of Genetically Modified Animals in Research.” Public Understanding of Science 19 (2010): 686–​697. Twine, Richard. “Animal Genomics and Ambivalence.” Genomics, Society and Policy 3: 99–​117 (2007). Twine, Richard. Animals as Biotechnology—​Ethics, Sustainability and Critical Animal Studies. London: Earthscan, 2010.

 

Chapter 21

The Problem w i t h  Z o o s Randy Malamud

Introduction Thesis: Zoos and aquariums are august, longstanding civic institutions that save animals from the immediate perils of a besieged wilderness and—​in the widest perspective—​from extinction. Zookeepers literally rescue the hundreds of individual animals whom they accommodate in their zoos. To extrapolate to a metaphysical level, zoos benefit all creatures by inculcating in people a keen, intimate sense of how special and valuable other animals are. Zoos thus inspire us to work to make our planet a place that is more respectful of all living beings and to mitigate the hazards that a thoughtless (non-​zoogoing) public wreaks on our fragile ecosystem. Antithesis: Zoos and aquariums are prisons for kidnapped, alienated, tortured specimens who are forced to live their lives in vastly unsuitable compounds for the titillation of ignorant crowds brought in by marketing and advertising campaigns that promise highbrow ecological experiences but actually pander to audiences’ less noble cravings for amusement parks, or even freakshows. Zoos’ efforts to provide ecological education fail because their patrons show no inclination to improve their records as plunderers of natural resources, or to embrace the logic of sustainability in their exploitation of energy, food, land, and natural resources that displaces other animals. Although hundreds of millions of people visit zoos and aquariums each year, there is no tangible evidence that these masses are reducing their devastating impact on the natural world (resulting from their habits of eating, driving, living, buying, polluting, wasting, overconsuming, and overpopulating). More to the point, there has been no improvement in animals’ habitats—​on the contrary, there is ever-​worsening degradation. Zoos are merely palliatives, giving the public the macabre opportunity to see the last surviving specimens, whose public display titillates audiences aware that these specimens will soon be gone. Zoogoing is laced with schadenfreude: spectators take perverse pleasure in the pain of others, selfishly grateful that they, the paying customers, are the ones whose power allows them to stroll outside the cages rather than fester inside them. Captive breeding

 

398   Randy Malamud programs are pointless because of insufficiently broad gene pools; they are a short-​term fix that serves the interests of the zoo industry for a few decades—​ensuring a few more generations of endangered species for audiences to enjoy—​but not the long-​term imperatives of ecological survival. The problem of the destroyed natural habitats that has led to the animals’ endangerment is too complicated and too expensive to fix, and there are virtually no examples of endangered species being successfully reintroduced into nature. If the zoo is an “ark,” to use the analogy commonly invoked by zoo advocates, it is one that never releases its wards to return to their normal lives, because the dangers that necessitated their protection never abate. Synthesis: Perhaps the truth about zoos lies somewhere between these two poles. Some zoo scholarship finds such a happy medium:  Elizabeth Hanson’s Animal Attractions:  Nature on Display in American Zoos, for example, offers mixed praise and critique of the institutions, as do New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (edited by Robert Hoage and William Deiss), and Eric Baratay’s Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West, and Ethics on the Ark (edited by Bryan Norton et al.).1 Other works are more radically critical: see, for example, Ralph Acampora’s edited collection Metamorphoses of the Zoo: Animal Encounter after Noah; Beyond the Bars:  The Zoo Dilemma, edited by Virginia McKenna; Britta Jaschinski’s wordless but hauntingly eloquent book of photography, Zoo; and my own Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity.2 Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s 2013 documentary film Blackfish examines SeaWorld, an institution which may seem peripheral to the mainstream realm of zoos and aquariums, but which is actually accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (regarded as the industry’s ultimate authority); many reviewers of the film echoed Mike D’Angelo’s contention that “the same argument” Blackfish makes—​a detailed exposé of the pain visited on captive animals and the pervasive deceptions perpetuated by those who profit from putting animals on display—​“would apply to any animal in any zoo anywhere in the world.”3 My own belief, and my contention here, is that the argument I  characterize as the “antithesis” fully and accurately conveys the realities of zoos. Unarguably, there have been many bad zoos that the public would unilaterally condemn: zoos that are derelict, badly designed, and underfunded, where the human audiences gape lethargically and the other animals suffer and die. One British organization, the Captive Animals’ Protection Society (CAPS), rigorously documents such abusive institutions. They have recounted such transgressions as zoos’ breeding lion cubs and selling them to circuses; a hippo dying after eating a tennis ball thrown into her enclosure; animals in zoos with insufficient security and protection being stolen and killed by vandals; and birds mutilated (pinioned) to keep them from flying.4 I believe that it is inherently impossible for a zoo to be good—​ethically good, ecologically good, and intellectually good. Or, to put it another way, I believe that all zoos are bad zoos. It is certainly possible for people to conduct interventions of various sorts with members of other species who are in distress—​for example, sanctuaries and ecologically

 

The Problem with Zoos    399 undergirded preservation projects—​but as an institution, the zoo is primarily about commerce and spectatorship, captivity and constraint, so it cannot facilitate better understanding of or care for animals. Instead, zoos dangerously promote our belief that we are entitled to see everything and have the power to control everything as well as our anthropocentric (and anti-​ecological) fantasy of human exceptionalism: that is, the conceit that we are somehow above the ecosystems in which we live. The problem of endangered animals is vast in scale and is integrally interwoven with our practices as a species: ecologically unwise and unsustainable development. The solution would require profound changes on the part of human societies: effective measures for population control, extensive dietary changes, abandonment of the gospel of economic growth (and especially the mission to convert countries that have not yet reached American and European levels of production and consumption to rise—​or more properly, to sink—​to our level). People would have to trade cars for bikes, keep their homes (which would need to be smaller and closer to their workplaces) warmer in summer and colder in winter, and stop creating so much garbage. These are problems that zoos do not address, and cannot fix. On a more fundamental level, successfully operating a zoo or aquarium is an enormously expensive proposition, rarely supported by adequate public funding, and is therefore dependent on the praxes and dynamics of commerce. The ideologies of capitalist commerce and those of ecology are starkly in opposition to each other. Capitalism urges citizens to buy more and use more to ensure growth. Profits are king, incentivizing the cheapest possible programs for waste treatment and habitat preservation. Markets are keenly focused on short-​term results, and pay little attention to the longer-​range issues of sustainability and stewardship that are fundamental to ecological discourse. The rallying call of capitalism (with apologies to Woody Allen) might be “Take the Money and Run.” Ecology, on the other hand, might counter with the closing lines of Philip Larkin’s poem “The Mower”: “we should be careful /​Of each other, we should be kind /​While there is still time.”5 Or, perhaps, Barry Commoner’s Fourth Law of Ecology: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”6 As a word, as a concept, as a perspective, “ecology” is demanding and unforgiving. One cannot trick ecology, bargain with it, suspend it, legislate against it or avoid its piercing glance hoping that some other ideology will override it. Ecology and capitalism are more than odd bedfellows, they are impossible bedfellows. The motivations and incentives of capitalism are carried out at the direct cost of ecological stability, and vice versa. Capitalism tells us we must drive farther and faster in ever-​larger cars equipped with ever-​increasing numbers of gadgets. Ecology tells us we must drive slower and less, and, actually, we should really be taking the bus, riding a bike, or walking. The ethos of each perspective is mutually exclusive, which confirms the folly of thinking that a zoo could ever function as a happy blend of both. A zoo may look ecological—​and this is most easily and most convincingly accomplished by hiring consultants and designers to “greenwash” the compound. Indeed, for centuries, zoos have been remarkably adept at looking like what they perceive their audiences want them to look like. The ecological reforms that our world needs are difficult measures, and they are unlikely to be implemented on any significant scale. A  quicker fix for our

 

400   Randy Malamud ecological guilt and cognitive dissonance is to engage with other animals on a much smaller scale: smaller, that is, than “all of them,” reduced (as on the ark) to a handful, a token number, and not even (as on the ark) representatives of every species but mostly just the cute ones: a few who are very tall or very fat, who have interesting spots and patterns, make weird noises, or crawl or hop around in funny ways—​a “diverse” array. Not ecologically diverse, really: bugs, the most prominent and in many ways the most important element of our ecosystem, are almost invisible in zoos; rather, diverse in terms of our entertainment, our attention spans: “charismatic megafauna,” as the zoo industry refers to them; marquee attractions who will keep the paying customers coming back (at $25 a shot!). The zoo fundamentally inscribes the looked-​at animals inside their cages—​or their “cageless enclosures” that don’t look like cages (to us)—​as subaltern. We, the people, the spectators, are free; they are trapped. We are in our natural habitats (San Diego or Hamburg or London), and they are not. We stay in the zoo for as long as it amuses us to be there, and they stay in there forever. We can move on to the next cage, the gift shop, the cafeteria, and they cannot. We can escape, leave, go to places we would rather be; we can find privacy away from prying eyes; they cannot. We are powerful, and they are fundamentally, quintessentially disempowered. Perhaps we put these animals (and ourselves) in this situation, this position of power/​ powerlessness, because we are jealous of their wildness, their power, their strength, their speed, their life force. Caging them deprives them of these energies, and perhaps we fantasize that we have thereby abrogated those traits and are, by implication, ourselves powerful, fierce, strong, and swift, having subdued the other animals who thought they were. Perhaps we like to look at other animals in zoos, need to look at them in zoos, to affirm to ourselves that there will always be zebras, and tigers, and platypi. This is probably a false affirmation, a false assumption; nevertheless, we like to believe, and we are inclined to believe, that any element of nature that we have mastered, harvested, framed, and integrated into our own cultural infrastructure is thereby “protected.” In any case, the predominant effect of zoos is to make animals easily and conveniently available to us, visible to us easily and on our own terms. With our typically self-​serving and sloppy ecological logic, we presume that this ease of access implies their prosperity, their endurance. We hear whispers that animals are in trouble, that we are destroying their world (which, of course, is also our world), that extinction rates are skyrocketing, and we don’t want to believe it, so we create a tableau vivant that disguises the reality. We tell our children, and ourselves, that we are building better relationships with other animals—​more empathetic, more aware of their specialness, of their delicately beautiful existence—​by keeping them in a compound and dropping in on them once a month to look them in the eye and achieve a meaningful connection, and that this experience remediates our ecological sloth because we now have a real “appreciation” for who they are. (Somehow, though, despite two centuries of zoogoing, this appreciation

 

The Problem with Zoos    401 has failed to stem the tide of our destruction of their habitats, which instead increases, without any sign of slowing.) And here is the thing, the truth—​the animals’ truth—​that undergirds the entire enterprise of zoos and aquariums and gives the lie to the possibility of positive ecological karma emanating from this institution: the animals don’t want to be there. And the people don’t care. Under such conditions, it is impossible to argue that zoogoers are learning important ecological lessons, learning about our proper place (in the web of life, not at the top of a Great Chain of Being) in the ecosystem. Instead, the zoo confirms our sense of primacy, of control. This is ironic, as our so-​called control of the ecosystem is in fact hurtling out of control, with global warming and rampantly increasing toxicities degrading our air, water, and earth. But we prefer to create the illusion of control, and zoos facilitate this delusion, this deception. If we can see the animals right there in front of our faces, we would like to think, they must be ok. But they aren’t. Many scholars and activists who write about zoos—​taking their cue from John Berger’s highly influential 1977 essay, “Why Look at Animals?”7—​predicate their work on the imperative to explore the ethics and the praxes of looking. “Zoo professionals strongly believe that by seeing zoo animals … in a naturalistic setting, zoogoers will alter not only their beliefs about the importance of nature but also their everyday consumer choices,” writes Irus Braverman in Zooland: The Institution of Captivity. “They believe that through looking at animals, the human public will be taught to care about these animals and, by extension, about the animals’ body doubles in the wild and therefore about nature at large.”8 But if zookeepers really do believe this, they are being overly optimistic (if not naïve). Zoo audiences are conditioned to experience their spectatorship as a Foucauldian manifestation of power,9 privilege, isolation, and difference from the rest of nature. Unsurprisingly, the historical roots of zoos corroborate that they are in every way an outgrowth of the imperial enterprise, the imperial consciousness, of nineteenth-​century Europe. Sir Stamford Raffles founded the Zoological Society of London in 1826 to be a home for the animals he had collected in Southeastern Asia while working as a trader for the East India Company. He plundered exotic commercial goods in his professional employment, and plundered the animal world as a hobby. When the London Zoo opened in 1828, it was not the first collection of captive wild animals; private displays of exotic, ostentatious power had existed for centuries in the menageries of the rich and powerful. Raffles’s innovation was to give the populous at large the opportunity to share in the spoils of imperialism thus reaffirming the values and ethics of that enterprise. Giving the masses access to these spectacular creatures showed how the public benefited from imperial exploration and conquest: zoo displays featured visible tokens of imported alien booty, marvelous and colorful and strange. Like spices and gold, silk and tea, the animals were commodities taken from “there” and brought home for display in a rarified setting, an imperial stage, and the suggestion was

 

402   Randy Malamud that they were really better off here than there: “we” appreciated them more, by caging and displaying them, than the “natives” who allowed them simply to run wild. The zoos and the animals thus became part of the discourse that reinforced the hegemonies of imperialism. Zoos also provided a fitting canvas upon which to depict the prejudices of racial supremacy that undergirded imperialism. As Oliver Hochadel writes in “Darwin in the Monkey Cage,” zoos became a stage for ethnographic displays that resembled freakshows. “Humans staged as strange and exotic were exhibited alongside lions and monkeys. This was a racist narrative, which suggested—​argumentatively underpinned by contemporary zoology and anthropology—​that humans from Africa and Asia were closer to animals.”10 In the late nineteenth-​century, a few generations after zoos had come into existence in all the great European imperial cities, the German exotic animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck came up with the innovation to expand the range of attractions: a friend had suggested that “it would certainly excite significant interest if the reindeer [that several zoos had ordered] were accompanied by a family of Laplanders, who naturally would also bring their tents, weapons, sleds, and complete households along.”11 The show was popular across Germany, and Hagenbeck next asked his Sudanese animal traders to include some natives along with the camels they provided. Subsequent human displays included Greenland Eskimos along with sled dogs and Sri Lankans (what Hagenbeck called the “Ceylon Caravan”) along with elephants. Later shows included natives of North America, South America, India, Mongolia, Burma, Russia, and Africa. In America, a popular and infamous parallel to Hagenbeck’s human shows was the display of the Congolese pygmy Ota Benga in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo, where director William Hornaday placed him in a cage that also contained an orangutan. (Benga was released later that year after vociferous protests from New York’s African American community; he wished to return to the Congo, but was never able to do so, and in 1916 he committed suicide.)12 “Shows of people had appeared fairly regularly in the major cities of Europe for centuries” before Hagenbeck, Nigel Rothfels notes, citing Roman displays of conquered people and Columbus’s display in Spain of Arawak Indians he had brought back to Europe.13 While there was some cultural and institutional attempt, both in those earlier displays and in Hagenbeck’s transposition of them to zoos, to characterize these spectacles as scientific ethnographic expositions of intellectual merit, they were in fact closer to freakshows and slave markets, where people came to lord themselves over the “other,” the savage. It is crucially significant that the formative years of zoos included this dovetailed practice of both human and nonhuman voyeuristic exploitation: both people and other animals were taken from their homes and brought to Europe as captive spectacles. “These shows consistently appealed to the most basic expectations of the general audience,” Rothfels writes, and “crude stereotypes meant to degrade or at least mock the shows’ participants seem to have been at the very center of the programs.”14 Over time, human display became politically and ethically untenable; it was on the wane in the early twentieth century, though it persisted into mid-​century, and finally

 

The Problem with Zoos    403 faded away. But the animal exploitation that had accompanied human display endured, associatively if no longer explicitly invoking the imperialist bravado that had accompanied the subjugation. Braverman’s Zooland elucidates the contrast between the zoo’s public face and its private workings:  the difference between care for animals and power over animals, between what you see and what you don’t see, and between what zoos want you to see and what I want you to see. Both the zoo and the zoo critic paint a picture, a context, for the scenario that plays out in these compounds. My context is historically contingent: I believe that zoos have always been exploitative places that reiterate the human praxes of dominance, imperialism, and anthropocentrism; whereas zookeepers will tell you that zoos were bad in the bad old days but are lately much improved. Zoos will focus on the resources they divert to important ecological research, although they are very unforthcoming (I have asked) about exactly how much money goes into conservation programs, which in any case are usually inspired more by the popularity of certain charismatic megafauna rather than sound ecosystemic considerations. (Panda bears, for example, as cuddly as they undeniably are, receive an exceedingly disproportionate chunk of research funding given their ecological significance.) “Only a very limited part of available space in most organized zoos is dedicated to threatened species,” writes Koen Margodt,15 and what conservation efforts do exist are heavily focused on large animals in disregard of ecological priority. “Zoos are typically about elephants, giraffes, lions, tigers, dolphins, bears, and gorillas,” he writes. “The motivation for this is not ecological, but rather anthropocentric—​species selection by zoos is driven largely by economic interests, perceived visitor preferences, and aesthetic appraisals.”16 Margodt quotes zookeeper Tom Foose explaining that zoos “tend, if only for their own economic survival, to focus on creatures that the public finds most fascinating—​ animals with whatever charisma it takes to propel those visitors through the turnstiles,”17 and concludes that zoos’ interest in species preservation is “ecological camouflage to cloud the fundamentally self-​serving motivation of zoos: Zoo conservation is in the first place about conserving zoos, not about conserving threatened species.”18 Zoos claim that providing ecological education is an important part of their mission, though there are few data to support that claim. A 2007 study conducted by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association claimed to offer the first direct evidence that visits to zoos and aquariums produce long-​term positive effects on people’s attitudes toward other animals. The study reported that zoo visits “prompt individuals to reconsider their role in environmental problems and conservation action, and to see themselves as part of the solution” and that visitors “believe zoos and aquariums play an important role in conservation education and animal care” and also that “they experience a stronger connection to nature as a result of their visit.”19 But a rebuttal found that the study was rife with methodological flaws and merely proferred fantasies that zoo officials would like to believe are true: “there is no compelling or even particularly suggestive evidence for the claim that zoos and aquariums promote attitude change, education, and interest in conservation in visitors.”20

 

404   Randy Malamud Zookeepers themselves acknowledge that the messages of serious ecological education are difficult and uncomfortable: people do not like to hear that our ecological situation is dire, and that our cultural habits and practices are largely responsible. Such messages may be at odds with the pleasant, rewarding experiences that zoos and aquariums try to provide so that their audiences will feel the admission cost is justified and want to return. “Many managers are fearful of alienating visitors—​and denting ticket sales—​with tours or wall labels that dwell bleakly on damaged coral reefs, melting ice caps or dying trees,” reports Leslie Kaufman in a New York Times article entitled, “Intriguing Habitats, and Careful Discussions of Climate Change,” in which she quotes many zoo professionals. “You don’t want them walking away saying, ʻI paid to get in, I bought my kid a hot dog, I just want to show my kid a fish—​and you are making me feel bad about climate change,’” said Paul Boyle, the senior vice president for conservation and education at the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.”21 Kaufman also interviewed Brian Davis, the vice president for education and training at Atlanta’s Georgia Aquarium, reporting that “his institution ensures its guests will not hear the term global warming. Visitors are ‘very conservative,’ he said. ‘When they hear certain terms, our guests shut down. We’ve seen it happen.’”22 Zoo and aquarium visitors are often simply not in the mood to learn when they visit; rather, they are primed for entertainment, for spectacular exoticism; “the zoo animals are so entrancing that a climate-​related message may fall on deaf ears,” Kaufman writes.23 Zoos will tell you that the animals are happy to be in the zoo, and critics will counter that they are not. I do not think that either faction can “prove” its case without speaking to the animals themselves, which is impossible. But we can observe rampant stereotypies (purposeless trance-​like repetitive movements) in captive animals—​walking or swimming in circles, self-​mutilation, swaying back and forth, grooming themselves to baldness, excessive sleeping—​that strongly suggest they suffer psychologically from being held in such small spaces, in climates that are unnatural to them, alienated from their native landscapes and the other species alongside whom they naturally live, with people streaming by every day staring at them. “Stereotypical behavior is generally associated with poor welfare, monotonous environments, lack of autonomy, frustration, stress and/​or boredom,”24 writes Margodt. And Stephen Spotte agrees that that zoos’ claims to be scientific institutions are belied by “projecting captive animals as pets or errant children… . Often the viewpoint is one of paternalistic oversight in the interest of Nature.”25 This strain of paternalism, or imperialism, or anthropocentrism arises ubiquitously to negate the ecosystemic consciousness of cohabitation, interconnection amid the web of life, that must undergird any truly ecological program. “Animals held captive in these facilities,” Spotte writes, “have relinquished their ontological status as part of the natural world.”26 Zoos are “not what they claim to be—​loci of conservation, science, and education—​but rather isolated islands of simulacrums and confusing semiotic signs”; ultimately, they are “simple spectacle … destinations of amusement.”27

 

The Problem with Zoos    405 Clifford Warwick offers a cautionary observation that happens to be about captive reptiles but applies equally to most if not all zoo and aquarium animals on display: “captive conditions typically replace many features of the natural world with artificial and frequently poorly matched alternatives that deprive animals of known normal behaviour and associated biological needs, such as hunting, spatial range, and macro-​habitat investigation.” As examples of stress-​provoked stereotypy among reptiles, Warwick lists “hyperactivity, hypoactivity, anorexia, head-​hiding, inflation of the body, hissing, panting, pigment change and other abnormal patterns of behavior and physiological responses.”28 Every species suffers its own particular pain in zoos. Captive elephants, for example, usually languish in zoo climates that are too cold and wet, lacking natural grazing (leaving them prone to malnutrition); their handlers employ a system called “traditional free contact” to dominate them by psychological means, physical restriction, and punishment; captive breeding rates are about 10 times slower than in the wild; circulatory problems, foot problems, arthritis, tuberculosis, and herpes are especially common among captive elephants; and they are significantly heavier than wild elephants (due to improper diets and lack of exercise).29 The captivity of animals is predicated upon the (false) presupposition that they don’t mind captivity, that they aren’t very sentient, that they don’t have hopes and dreams and fears. If audiences resisted this presumption, the cognitive dissonance would be too great. In earlier times, people embraced the same rationalizations about the human subjects of imperial exploitation: “they” don’t feel the pain of subjugation as keenly as “we” would, if they feel it at all. But illustrations of the depths of animal consciousness are profuse. “On what seems like a monthly basis,” writes John Jeremiah Sullivan, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—​or at least object manipulation—​the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-​Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”30

 

406   Randy Malamud This appreciation of other animals’ consciousness refutes the antiquated (but persistent) Cartesian presumption that other animals were automata who lacked reason or the capacity for meaningful self-​awareness. It is, consequently, now intellectually and ethically impossible to treat other species with the selfishly heedless brutality people manifested in the past. Still, strange things continue to happen in zoos: witness the following headline on a news story in the Washington Post: “National Zoo orangutans use iPads to amuse themselves.”31

Fundamentally, zoos are the same institutions they have always been. On the surface, they adapt to reflect their audiences’ changing tastes. They want to seem new and au courant, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. Zoos are keenly aware of the problems of the past, the discomfort modern audiences feel with the mechanics and pathways of taking, caging, and exhibiting animals, so they work to make the cages prettier, less obviously cage-​like; they claim to give the animals access to all the latest worldly pleasures. The National Zoo’s iPad program provides a case study in how zoos depict and package themselves, how they function as culturally savvy (but not zoologically or ecologically savvy) institutions. The program has a catchy, appealing name, “Apps for Apes.” As zookeeper Becky Malinsky explains, the gimmick “fits perfectly in this new era of zoo keeping. It’s about changing up the day-​to-​day lives of our animals. We already vary their food, toys and social interactions every day, but the iPad offers another way to engage their sight, touch and hearing.” The apps include cognitive games, drawing programs, and virtual musical instruments. The tableau strikes me as surreal, ludicrous, and profane. Apes do not need apps; they do not want apps; but they are given apps, courtesy of the zoo. Part of the subtextual message is, aren’t these apes lucky?! Luckier than their app-​less cousins in the wild. Apes would naturally want and enjoy everything that we want and enjoy: how could one better honor another animal than by giving her human accessories? The logic is contorted and anthropocentric; in the zoo, as in so much of our ecologically destabilized world, man is the measure of all things. Richard Zimmerman, who heads an organization called Orangutan Outreach that has provided tablets for apes in twelve other zoos, says, “Primarily, we want the Apps for Apes program to help people understand why we need to protect wild orangutans from extinction. We do that when we show zoo visitors how similar humans and apes are, be it through observation, talking with wildlife experts or seeing the apes use the same technology we use every day.” This is a non sequitur. Yes, people should be helped to understand that wild orangutans (and millions of other species) should be protected from extinction. But it is intellectually, ecologically, and ethically dishonest to claim that the best way to do that is by putting iPads in their hands. Instead of learning to appreciate orangutans on their own terms, zoos frame them in falsely human terms, and this falsity makes any ensuing environmental “education” similarly false and inaccurate. The idea that we can understand animals only when they come into our world—​which is the foundational myth of

 

The Problem with Zoos    407 zoos—​runs counter to the ecological imperative that we have to learn to leave these animals alone: to leave them where they are, to stop kidnapping them and destroying their habitats, and to begin to appreciate and integrate the message that our cultural habits are dangerous to them. The iPad scheme deludes us with just the opposite message: human culture is good for animals. Imprisoned animals used to be bored in zoos (in the bad old zoos, in the bad old days), but now we can give them iPads. Aren’t we enlightened? If we like to waste our own days playing with iPads, we reason, why wouldn’t they? Let’s drag them down to our level of time-​wasting. It is interesting to step back from this story (and countless other propagandistic guilt-​ assuaging fairy tales about things we “give” animals in zoos and how zoos make animals happier and healthier), which, we pretend, justifies the lack of freedom and the pain we impose on them by relegating them to zoos. The photograph accompanying the story shows a tableau that strikes me as painfully tragic: it shows an orangutan inside his cage sticking his hand through one small square between the bars, tapping on the tablet that a human, outside the cage, holds. Because of the way the image is lighted and cropped, we can’t see anything of the person besides his hand and arm, nor can we see the ape’s face: just the outline of his body. The focus of the photograph, the only discernible details, are the human hand, the ape hand, the iPad, and the cage’s wires. The apes, presumably, can’t hold the iPads themselves (they are such animals! They certainly wouldn’t treat this amazing device with the care it merits), so we hold it up to the cage and watch while they tap on it—​so proud of them, we pretend, but really, so proud of ourselves. The photograph is supposed to be cute, surprising. Those who patronize zoos are blind to the sadism being enacted here, and to the ludicrous misdirection of our efforts to live equitably, sanely, and sustainably with other creatures. Zoos, unfortunately, perpetuate misinformation, and delude us into believing that other animals fit into our world in ways that are convenient and local and that we are managing well. They tell us that we are interacting thoughtfully and responsibly with animals. When we see the animals in the zoo, they appear to be ever-​present and not endangered, so we are cajoled not to worry—​when what we should be doing is worrying a great deal. Opposition to animal captivity, once widely perceived as a fringe issue, has become increasingly mainstream. Blackfish, about SeaWorld’s profound abuse of Orca whales, played to large, enormously sympathetic audiences, and garnered many responses like Nicholas Kristof ’s on the New York Times op-​ed page: Orcas, also known as killer whales, are sophisticated mammals whose brains may be more complex than our own. They belong in the open sea and seem to suffer severe physical and mental distress when forced to live in tanks. Maybe that is why they sometimes go berserk and attack trainers. You or I might also go nuts if we were forced to live our lives locked up in a closet to entertain orcas. SeaWorld denies the claims, which isn’t surprising since it earns millions from orcas. Two centuries ago, slave owners argued that slaves enjoyed slavery … Some day, will our descendants be mystified by how good and decent people in the early 21st century—​that’s us—​could have been so oblivious to the unethical treatment of animals?32

 

408   Randy Malamud

Notes 1. Elizabeth Hanson, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2004); Robert J. Hoage and William A. Deiss, (eds.), New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Eric Baratay, Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (London: Reaktion, 2004); Bryan G. Norton, Ethics on the Ark:  Zoos, Animal Welfare, and Wildlife Conservation (Washington, DC:  Smithsonian Books, 1996). 2. Ralph R. Acampora, (ed.), Metamorphoses of the Zoo: Animal Encounter after Noah (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010); Virginia McKenna, Will Travers, and Jonathan Wray, (eds.), Beyond the Bars: The Zoo Dilemma (Wellingborough, Northhamptonshire: Thorsons, 1987); Britta Jaschinski, Zoo (London: Phaidon, 1996); Randy Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 3. http://​www.avclub.com/​articles/​blackfish,100234/​ (accessed August 20, 2013). 4. http://​www.captiveanimals.org/​news/​2013/​07/​zoo-​industry-​divided-​on-​cruel-​practice-​ of-​bird-​mutilation and http://​www.captiveanimals.org/​news/​2013/​01/​2713 (accessed July 12, 2013). 5. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 214. 6. Peter Dreier, “Remembering Barry Commoner,” Nation, October 1, 2012, http://​www.thenation.com/​article/​170251/​remembering-​barry-​commoner# (accessed October 3, 2013). 7. This essay is reprinted in Berger’s collection About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980). 8. Irus Braverman, Zooland:  The Institution of Captivity (Palo Alto:  Stanford University Press, 2012), 8. 9. In Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New  York:  Vintage, 1995), 99. Foucault associates Bentham’s penitentiary panopticon design with the spatial arrangement of zoos, where the voyeur is similarly in the omnipowerful position of all-​seeing master. 10. Oliver Hochadel, “Darwin in the Monkey Cage: The Zoological Garden as a Medium of Evolutionary Theory,” in Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, ed. Dorothee Brantz (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 81–​107. 11. Quoted in Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 82. 12. Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, Ota Benga:  The Pygmy in the Zoo (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 1992. 13. Rothfels, Savages and Beasts, 86. 14. Rothfels, Savages and Beasts, 126. 15. Koen Margodt, “Zoos as Welfare Arks? Reflections on an Ethical Course for Zoos,” in Metamorphoses of the Zoo:  Animal Encounters after Noah, ed. Ralph R. Acampora (New York: Lexington, 2010), 13. 16. Margodt, “Zoos as Welfare Arks?”, 16. 17. Margodt, “Zoos as Welfare Arks?”, 16. 18. Margodt, “Zoos as Welfare Arks?”, 17. 19. J. H. Falk, E. M. Reinhard, C. L.Vernon et al., “Why Zoos and Aquariums Matter: Assessing the Impact of a Visit to a Zoo or Aquarium” (Silver Spring, MD: Association of Zoos &

 

The Problem with Zoos    409 Aquariums, 2007), 3.  http://​www.aza.org/​uploadedFiles/​Education/​why_​zoos_​matter. pdf (accessed July 17, 2013). 20. Lori Marino, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Randy Malamud et  al., “Do Zoos and Aquariums Promote Attitude Change in Visitors? A  Critical Evaluation of the American Zoo and Aquarium Study,” Society & Animals 18, no. 2 (2010): 137. See also a response to this rebuttal in, John H. Falk, Joe E. Heimlich, Cynthia L. Vernon et al., “Critique of a Critique: Do Zoos and Aquariums Promote Attitude Change in Visitors?” Society & Animals 18, no. 4 (2010), 415–​419; and a final word: Lori Marino, Scott O. Lilienfeld, Randy Malamud et al., “Strong Claims, Feeble Evidence: A Rejoinder to Falk et al.,” Society & Animals 19, no. 3 (2011), 291–​293. 21. Leslie Kaufman, “Intriguing Habitats, and Careful Discussions of Climate Change,” New  York Times, August 26, 2012, http://​www.nytimes.com/​2012/​08/​27/​science/​earth/​ zoos- ​ a nd- ​ a quariums- ​ s truggle- ​ w ith- ​ w ays- ​ t o-​ d iscuss-​ c limate-​ c hange.html?_​ r =1 (accessed July 17, 2013). 22. Kaufman, “Intriguing Habitats, and Careful Discussions of Climate Change.” 23. Kaufman, “Intriguing Habitats, and Careful Discussions of Climate Change.” 24. Margodt, “Zoos as Welfare Arks?”, 24. 25. Stephen Spotte, Zoos in Postmodernism:  Signs and Simulation (Madison, NJ:  Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 153. 26. Spotte, Zoos in Postmodernism, 17. 27. Spotte, Zoos in Postmodernism, 21. 28. Clifford Warwick, Phillip Arena, Samantha Lindley et al., “Assessing Reptile Welfare Using Behavioural Criteria,” In Practice 35 (March 2013), 123–​131, http://​inpractice.bmj.com/​content/​35/​3/​123.full.pdf+html (accessed July 17, 2013). 29. “Live Hard, Die Young: How Elephants Suffer in Zoos,” Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Horsham, West Sussex, http://​www.idausa.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​ 2013/​05/​Satellite-​1.pdf (accessed July 17, 2013). 30. John Jeremiah Sullivan, “One of Us,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2013, http://​www. laphamsquarterly.org/​essays/​one-​of-​us.php?page=all (accessed July 17, 2013). 31. http://​www.washingtonpost.com/​national/​health-​science/​national-​zoo-​orangutans-​use-​ ipads-​to-​amuse-​themselves/​2013/​01/​28/​0d440118-​6583-​11e2-​b84d-​21c7b65985ee_​story. html (accessed July 17, 2013). 32. Nicholas D. Kristof, “Can We See Our Hypocrisy to Animals?” New York Times, July 27, 2013, http://​www.nytimes.com/​2013/​07/​28/​opinion/​sunday/​can-​we-​see-​our-​hypocrisy-​ to-​animals.html (accessed July 28, 2013).

Further Reading Arluke, Arnold, and Clinton R. Saunders. Regarding Animals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Blanchard, Pascal, ed. Human Zoos:  Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. Hancocks, David. A Different Nature:  The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

 

410   Randy Malamud Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate:  The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Malamud, Randy. An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture. New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Scully, Matthew. Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003.

 

Chapter 22

Wolf Huntin g a nd t h e Ethics of Pre dator C on t rol John Vucetich and Michael Paul Nelson

Introduction The ethics of hunting are complicated. Even ardent supporters of hunting disagree among themselves, for example, over the appropriateness of hunting methods that maximize the possibility of a clean kill (to minimize suffering) and the appropriateness of methods that emphasize fair chase.1 A more basic ethical concern is, Under what conditions is hunting appropriate? That question rests, in turn, on an even more basic question, What counts as an adequate reason to kill a sentient creature? Some thoughtful people believe that hunting is generally wrong for the same reasons eating meat is wrong. Other thoughtful people believe that hunting is morally acceptable, even virtuous, for anyone who can reasonably conclude that eating meat is morally acceptable.2 These perspectives offer a sense of the issues concerning the ethics of hunting such species as deer and elk when the hunter, her family, and her friends will eat the animal being hunted.3 In this chapter, we focus on the desire of some humans to hunt a variety of predators whose flesh humans do not eat—​species such as coyotes, cougars, lynx, tigers, lions, cormorants, seals, and wolves.4 The considerations that arise in addressing such concerns vary greatly with context, and include the particular species of predator to be hunted and the reasons for wanting to do so. As such, we focus our assessment on the desire to hunt wolves in the conterminous United States. Without such a focus, an assessment of the ethics of hunting predators is limited to generalities that overlook critical specificities that play a large role in understanding the appropriateness of hunting a predator.

 

412    John Vucetich and Michael Paul Nelson Nevertheless, from a detailed and focused assessment such as that offered here, one can readily anticipate the assessment of other specific cases. We approach this assessment from the perspective of applied ethics as an academic discipline. The aim of applied ethics is, in large part, to understand the reasons we ought to behave one way or another. A particularly powerful tool for such understanding involves the analyzing of ethical arguments. An ethical argument is one whose conclusion can be expressed in the forms We should … or We should not … . An ethical argument, like any kind of argument, is sound and valid when all its premises are true or appropriate and when it contains no mistaken inferences.5 We therefore describe and assess arguments that are commonly invoked in discussions about wolf hunting.

Wolves Prior to the arrival of Europeans, wolves lived throughout most of what is now the conterminous United States. That population of wolves likely comprised approximately a half million individuals.6 But by the mid-​twentieth century, wolves in the conterminous United States had been exterminated, except for a few dozen who lived in northern Minnesota. Wolves were exterminated because too many humans hated them. This hatred was related to wolves’ killing of livestock and competing with humans for deer, elk, and moose and was fueled by exaggerated claims about wolves’ capacity for killing and false beliefs about the threat they pose to humans. Beginning in 1973, wolves came under the protection of the Endangered Species Act. By 2012, approximately 5000 wolves inhabited the conterminous United States, a remarkable improvement compared to their numbers in 1950, but also hardly worth noting compared to their numbers before humans began their attempted genocide of wolves. Today, most wolves live in two populations, one in the western Great Lakes area (northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and Upper Michigan) and the other in the Northern Rocky Mountain area (western Montana, western Wyoming, and northern Idaho). But in 2012, wolves were removed from the list of US endangered species, except for the Mexican wolf subspecies (Canis lupus baileyi), represented in the wild by a population of fewer than 60 wolves living in the desert southwest. By 2013, all six states with established wolf populations had begun to allow wolf hunting. The delisting and subsequent hunting of wolves has been controversial. Humans have a tendency, for better or worse, to symbolize elements of the world in which they live. To some, wolves are a symbol of much of what we love about nature; whereas to others wolves are a symbol of our adversarial relationship with nature. As powerful symbols of nature, our treatment of wolves is a critical indicator of our relationship with the rest of nature.

 

Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control    413

Can and Ought A number of wolf biologists believe, without qualification, that we have the technical ability to hunt wolves without compromising the health of their populations or the ecosystem functions they provide. A wolf hunt without those negative impacts could be accomplished by hunting only a small percentage of the population each year. Nevertheless, other qualified wolf biologists do not believe that we can do this reliably, and they can cite examples to support that belief. The governments of five of the six states that allow wolf hunting (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Minnesota, Wisconsin) have begun to implement hunting plans that aim for considerable reductions in wolf abundance. Such reductions are unlikely to threaten the short-​term risk of extinction for these populations. They are, however, likely to impair genetic processes and the ecosystem functions that wolves provide, and lead to social disruptions in the wolf population. These effects are certainly detrimental to population health and ecosystem health. While we have the technical ability to implement a harvest that does not cause those harms, we appear not to have an interest to do so. Notwithstanding those critical shortcomings, there is value in at least momentarily granting the ability and willingness to hunt wolves without harming wolf populations or the ecosystems they inhabit. Doing so raises a very basic principle in making moral judgments. That is, can does not imply ought. Having the ability to do something is not evidence that we ought to. This principle has been a cornerstone of thinking in Western jurisprudence and ethics for 2500 years. That Icarus possessed the ability to fly toward the sun did not mean that he should have done so, and neither should the Babylonians have built a tower just because they could. A second basic and relevant principle is that killing a sentient creature is a serious matter because sentient creatures deserve at least some direct moral consideration. To use simpler language, it is wrong to kill a sentient creature without an adequate reason. This principle is supported by robust rational considerations that have been articulated by every scholarly and traditional perspective in environmental ethics, including animal liberation,7 animal rights,8 biocentrism,9 extended individualism,10 universal consideration,11 deep ecology12 and ecocentrism.13 Sociological research also suggests that most (at least nonsociopathic) humans attribute direct moral standing to sentient creatures.14 This belief is also held by the hunting community itself, some of whose members have provided convincing and beautiful expressions about the seriousness of killing a living organism.15 These two principles (Do not kill without an adequate reason and Can does not imply ought) lead to the conclusion that one should refrain from wolf hunting until adequate reason has been provided for doing so. With that inescapable burden of proof, advocates of wolf hunting have moral obligations to provide adequate reasons for their interest and to refrain from wolf hunting unless adequate reasons have been provided. While hunting advocates have certainly offered reasons to hunt wolves, the question is which,

 

414    John Vucetich and Michael Paul Nelson if any, are adequate reasons. To date, no one has detailed or analyzed the most important arguments for why we should hunt wolves.

Argument Analysis Before analyzing the arguments for wolf hunting, it will be valuable to review the two basic steps of argument analysis.16 The first is converting a reason into a formal argument, which requires discovering and stating all the premises that would have to be true for the argument to have a valid logical form. The second is evaluating the truth or appropriateness of each premise. This second step is important because an argument is unsound if just one premise is false or inappropriate. That an argument is unsound or invalid is not definitive proof that a conclusion is wrong, but it does mean that the given argument fails to justify the conclusion.

Wolves-​Kill-​Ungulates Argument A common reason offered for why we should allow wolf hunting is that wolves reduce the abundance of the ungulates that humans like to hunt.17 For the sake of pedagogy, we transform this reason into a formal argument in several steps, with the intention of conveying a sense of the thought process associated with converting a reason into a formal argument. The first step in transforming this reason is to identify the conclusion (C) and the key premise(s) (P) that characterize this reason: P1. Wolves reduce ungulate abundance. C. Wolves should be hunted. The conclusion (C) does not logically follow from premise P1 alone. Additional premises are required. In particular: P1. Wolves reduce ungulate abundance. P2. Wolf hunting reduces wolf abundance. P3. Reducing wolf abundance increases ungulate abundance. P4. Increased ungulate abundance leads to increased hunter success. C. We should be allowed to hunt wolves. Premises 1 through 4 trace the sequence of specific ecological processes that have to be true if the conclusion is to be supported. While these premises are necessary, they are not enough. Ethical arguments (whose conclusion can be expressed as We should …)

 

Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control    415 require more than premises that describe the condition of the world. Ethical arguments must contain at least one descriptive premise (describing how the world is) and at least one ethical premise (prescribing the basic moral obligations that pertain to the conclusion). An ethical argument without an ethical premise is assuredly an invalid argument. For this argument, the relevant ethical premises are: P5. It is wrong to kill a living creature without an adequate reason. P6. Increasing hunter returns is an adequate reason to kill wolves. The argument is likely still incomplete. If we take for granted laws that require maintaining the population viability of wolves and a basic concern for ecosystem health,18 then premises P2 and P3 should be revised: P2. Wolf hunting reduces wolf abundance without compromising the health of the wolf population or the ecosystem to which they belong. P3. Reducing wolf abundance increases ungulate abundance without compromising the health of the wolf population or the ecosystem to which they belong. The completeness of an argument is always provisional and contingent. In principle, a missing premise could be discovered at any point in time. Judging an argument to be valid (i.e., having no missing premises) depends largely on the humans with an interest in the issue surrounding the argument. Let us suppose this argument is sufficiently complete and that we can begin evaluating the truth and appropriateness of each premise. Sometimes a missing premise is discovered during the process of evaluating the truth of premises. But bear in mind that the conclusion of an argument is as reliable as its weakest premise. To be “very confident” about the appropriateness of a conclusion, we have to be “very confident” about the truth or appropriateness of each premise. Premise 1. Asking an ecologist how predation affects prey abundance is not unlike asking a physicist how gravity works. Predation is complicated and has been a focus of ecologists’ attention for a century. While much is known, much remains unknown. Because ecological phenomena, in general, are the complicated result of many interacting causes, isolating the effect of a single cause in real ecosystems is notoriously difficult. With those limitations, the best available science indicates that P1 is sometime true and sometimes not true.19 Ecologists are also unable to reliably predict when or under what circumstances P1 would be true.20 Ecologists cannot even always agree on whether wolves caused an ungulate population to decline, even after the decline has occurred and the circumstances surrounding it have been well-​documented.21 Finally, trends in ungulate abundance suggest that P1 is wrong. For example, across the Northern Rockies, some elk populations have increased and others have declined. That kind of variation is normal and occurs regardless of wolves. Notwithstanding those variations, elk numbers across the region appear to have increased by about 16 percent

 

416    John Vucetich and Michael Paul Nelson during the period 1994–​2012, which is when most of the increase in wolf abundance occurred.22 In Wisconsin, deer abundance tended to increase throughout the past two decades23 and remains greater than target levels established by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, which measures the detrimental impact of deer overabundance.24 In Upper Michigan, deer abundance tended to decline in the first decade of the twenty-​first century. However, that trend appears to be the result of a pattern that has existed for at least the past 50 years, whereby each year’s deer abundance is largely influenced by the intensity of logging during that year.25 Premise 2. The effect of hunting on wolf abundance depends on the rate of hunting (i.e., proportion of wolves hunted each year). Low rates are unlikely to reduce abundance, and high rates are likely to do so. The effect of intermediate rates on abundance is very uncertain.26 If reducing abundance were the only concern of P2, then one could be reasonably confident about the truth of that premise by revising it: “High rates of hunting will reduce wolf abundance.” However, the concern is that P2 requires satisfying three requirements: reduce abundance and, at the same time, maintain population health and maintain ecosystem health. A low rate of hunting would maintain population health and ecosystem health, but would not reduce abundance; a high rate would reduce abundance, but risk population health and ecosystem health, depending on how the terms “population health” and “ecosystem health” are defined. If population health includes such elements as social structure and dispersal, then rates of hunting that reduce abundance would likely harm population health. If population health entails only the legal requirement to avoid relisting wolves under the Endangered Species Act, then moderately high rates of harvest for some period of time are unlikely to harm population health.27 Wolves contribute to ecosystem health by affecting the abundance of prey; age structure of prey populations; evolutionary pressures on prey populations; and behaviors of prey, such as when, where, and how they feed on vegetation. The most plausible assumption is that wolves fulfill their ecosystem functions when wolf abundance is determined primarily by the abundance and condition of prey, and not by rates of hunting by humans. Ultimately, the truth of P2 is contingent on the meaning of population viability and ecosystem health. While the truth of P2 is far from certain for reasonable or widely agreed upon definitions of population health and ecosystem health, P2 is likely true with respect to each state’s legal obligations to maintain population health and ecosystem health. Premise 3. If P3 were simply, “Reducing wolf abundance increases ungulate abundance,” then P3’s truth would be doubtful for the same reason that P1 is doubtful. Further doubts arise from the stipulation in P3 that ungulate abundance increases without harming ecosystem health. Maintaining ecosystem health generally requires that ungulate abundance be controlled by predation.28 In some cases, ungulate abundance can be limited by human hunting,29 but often there are too few hunters to have that effect.30

 

Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control    417 Premise 4. P4 is particularly important because it speaks directly to the ultimate concern of this argument. Hunter success can be measured in a variety of ways. The two most important measures are the proportion of successful hunters and the total number of successful hunters. However success is measured, the truth of P4 is doubtful. For example, the number of successful elk hunters and the percentage of elk hunters who were successful in the Northern Rockies did not decline during the period 1994–​2008, which is the time when wolf abundance increased the most.31 While it is appropriate to expect reductions in hunter success in the presence of a wolf population,32 this appears not to have been the circumstance. More generally, hunter success is affected by not only ungulate abundance but also ungulate behavior and the skill and behavior of hunters. The presence of relatively few wolves on the landscape may result in behavioral changes that affect hunters’ success.33 As such, maintaining hunters’ success (or hunters’ perceptions of success) through reductions in wolf abundance could easily require reducing wolf abundance to levels that are precluded by federal policy.34 P4 also raises concerns about how high hunter success ought to be, and about the responsibility hunters have for changing behaviors and improving their skills to maintain their chances of success. We address these concerns below. Premises 5 and 6. The appropriateness of P5 is neither doubtful nor controversial (see the section “Can and Ought,” above). One approach in evaluating P6 is to begin by recalling that all the ecological premises (P1 through P4) are doubtful. As such, hunting wolves involves incurring an ethical cost (killing wolves) with considerable risk of not realizing the intended outcome of that killing (increased hunter success). To do so is to kill without good reason and to violate one’s ethical commitment to P5.35 Additionally, one could grant the truth of P1 through P4 and consider the appropriateness of P6 directly. To do so, suppose, at least momentarily, that the welfare of a human is more important than the welfare of a non-​human mammal. And also recognize that eating wild ungulates is a vital need for wolves and a non-​vital interest for humans who hunt ungulates in the conterminous United States. Given those considerations, judging the appropriateness of P6 depends on judging whether the vital need of a non-​human outweighs the non-​vital interest of a human. In some cases, that judgment could be difficult. Passing judgment in this case, however, seems straightforward after the following are recognized: (1) no one is asking hunters to give up hunting; they are only being asked to share ungulates with wolves; and (2) today’s wolf population comprises only approximately 2 percent of the wolves who would have inhabited the conterminous United States at the time when humans began their attempted genocide against wolves. Aside from those perspectives, there might be occasion for entertaining spirited debate over the appropriateness of P6 if all the other premises of the argument were certainly true. But this is not the case. Moreover, because P6 is an ethical premise, not a sociological premise, its appropriateness does not depend simply on majority opinion. Majority views are sometimes indicative of that which is moral, and other times not.36 While wolf hunting is an ethical concern, it is no minor insight to recognize that the greatest weaknesses of this argument are not its ethical premises but its scientific

 

418    John Vucetich and Michael Paul Nelson premises. This circumstance is likely more common than is generally appreciated and is certainly characteristic of other interests to kill predators, such as cormorants and seals.37

The Hunt-​’em-​to-​Conserve-​’em Argument Another important reason offered for allowing wolf hunting is that hunting them would promote wolf conservation. The formal argument associated with this reason is: P1. Wolf conservation requires that a critical minimum number of citizens have positive attitudes about and behaviors toward wolves. P2. Wolf hunting would positively affect attitudes and behaviors of many who hate wolves. P3. We ought to promote wolf conservation. C. Therefore, we ought to hunt wolves. This general argument represents two distinct, but related, arguments. One version is particular to citizens’ attitudes, and the other version is particular to behaviors. The behavioral version of the argument is: P1. Wolf conservation requires that a critical minimum number of citizens behave favorably toward wolves, especially by not killing them. P2. To allow wolf hunting would prevent an otherwise inevitable public backlash against wolves that would result in higher rates of poaching and loss of political support that would threaten the viability of wolf populations. P3. We ought to promote wolf conservation. P4. It is wrong to kill a living creature without an adequate reason. P5. Conserving wolf populations is an adequate reason to kill individual wolves. C. Therefore, we ought to allow wolf hunting. In this behavioral argument, P1, P3, and P4 are appropriate and uncontroversial. Moreover, poaching is a potentially serious concern and should be guarded against, but there is no evidence to suggest that poaching has prevented wolf populations from expanding in the western Great Lakes or Northern Rockies. If poaching were not an actual threat, then the need for hunting, as supposed by this argument, would seem absent. Moreover, the best available science suggests that provisions for killing wolves do not tend to promote tolerance for wolves. In particular, a recent review found no evidence for the claim that allowing higher quotas of legal harvest resulted in reduced rates of poaching.38 Also, attitudes tended to be more negative during a period of time when

 

Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control    419 legal lethal control had been allowed than when wolves had been fully protected.39 Moreover, preliminary results from a study commissioned by the US Fish and Wildlife Service fails to support this contention.40 Deep-​rooted social identity is likely the most important determinant of attitudes about wolves,41 not allowances for killing them. In addition to those empirical problems, this argument is also ethically deficient. Poaching is a wrong, not only because of its potential to threaten population viability, but also because it can be a wrong against the individual who was killed. Many instances of wolf poaching, in particular, are wrong because they are primarily motivated by a hatred of wolves. These instances of poaching qualify as wrongful deaths, if not hate crimes. To legalize such killing does not make them any less wrong. Moreover, people who threaten to poach wolves unless wolf killing is legalized42 are engaging in a kind of ecological blackmail by threatening harm against individual organisms and ecosystems unless their demands to kill are met. People who advocate for this argument, even without an interest in killing wolves themselves, unwittingly abet this blackmail. If poaching is wrong because it represents an adequate reason to kill, then it is not made right simply by legalizing the killing of wolves. That would be analogous to solving the problem of illegal payments for sex by legalizing prostitution. The attitudinal version of the hunt-​’em-​to-​conserve-​’em argument is: P1. Wolf conservation requires a critical mass of people who respect wolves. P2. There is a risk of losing that critical mass. P3. Many people who do not respect wolves desire to hunt them. P4. Hunting an animal generates respect for that animal. C1. Allowing people to hunt wolves is necessary for wolf conservation. P5. We ought to promote wolf conservation. P6. It is wrong to kill a living creature without an adequate reason. P7. Conserving wolf populations is an adequate reason to kill individual wolves. C2. We ought to allow wolf hunting. In this argument, C1 is a conclusion rising from P1 through P4. C1 then serves as the first premise in an argument that also includes P5, P6, P7, and C2. P4 is a perverse misinterpretation of the relationship between respect and hunting. Hunting reinforces or deepens respect for the deer because the hunter knows the deer sacrificed his life for the sustenance of the hunter. In this relationship, respect exists before the hunting; the hunting did not generate respect ex nihilo. In other words, the hunter respects the deer in spite of killing him, not because she killed him. The wolf-​ hater’s a priori attitude, by contrast, is hatred, not respect. Her killing the wolf is thus an exercise of hatred—​she would likely celebrate the killing. Without moral concern for the wolf, the wolf ’s sacrifice cannot be recognized. For hunters, recognition of sacrifice is necessary for the realization of respect. Moreover, there have been episodes in conservation history during which hunting (or fishing) was important for promoting

 

420    John Vucetich and Michael Paul Nelson conservation involved species of waterfowl, white-​tailed deer, wild turkeys, sand hill cranes, and brook trout who were respected, not hated. For a hater, P4 could possibly be true in rare and particular circumstances. That is, hatred is sometimes dissolved when the hater becomes familiar with his victim, and hunting provides an opportunity to become familiar with the victim. However, if P4 were commonly true, killing would be a commonly prescribed therapy for unjustified hatred. It is not. Finally, sociological evidence also suggests that P4 is false.43 Another concern with this argument is that the truth of P2 is impossible to evaluate. No one knows how many people represent a critical mass or how the critical mass is affected by the intensity of hatred among wolf haters. Nevertheless, concern for the truth of P2 cannot be completely dismissed. For example, the proportion of people reporting negative attitudes about wolves has increased in at least one area.44 However, attitudes are a notoriously poor predictor of how people will behave, especially when the behavior in question, that is poaching requires nontrivial effort and is accompanied by the risk of considerable punishment. There is also reason to think that the truth of P2 is unlikely. In particular, if intolerance is judged by the act of poaching, rather than by attitudes that are verbally expressed in surveys,45 then there are reasons to believe intolerance will decline. This intolerance is caused by the risk that some perceive in wolves. Considerable evidence suggests that perceived risk tends to decline as humans become increasingly familiar with the source of the perceived risk.46 Also, wolf intolerance is likely not distinct from other irrational intolerances (such as racism or sexism). That is, no one expects individual wolf haters to change their attitudes. Instead, over time their behaviors become less tolerated, and their attitudes become less common as the people holding them pass away. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, the long arc of history bends toward justice. The strength of this argument might be difficult to evaluate if P2 were the only weakness. It is not. P2 only adds to the argument’s weakness. Finally, P7 is worth highlighting. Its truth should not be taken for granted. This premise represents an increasingly important and unresolved conflict between two of the greatest ethical developments of the twentieth century, conservation ethics and animal welfare ethics. Some ardent advocates of wolf hunting tend to be hostile to justified concerns for animal welfare.47 Other advocates of wolf hunting are sensitive to the value of conservation. The conservation tradition and its profession tends not to be very sensitive to or adept at handling this conflict.48 Feeling comfortable with this argument would require that someone explain the appropriateness of P7. That explanation has not yet been made.

The Recreation and Tradition Argument Another important reason offered for why wolf hunting should be allowed is: P1. Wolf hunting is valuable as a tradition and form of recreation. P2. Wolf hunting can be managed without threatening population viability or ecosystem health.

 

Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control    421 P3. It is wrong to kill a living creature without an adequate reason. P4. Tradition and recreation are adequate reasons to hunt wolves. C. We ought to allow wolf hunting. If the honorable tradition of hunting is different from attempted genocide, then wolf hunting is not a tradition in the conterminous United States. No one alive today has ever spoken to a person who has hunted a wolf in the conterminous United States, except as part of a nearly successful program to exterminate wolves. Even if wolf hunting were a tradition, so also were slavery, child labor, and denying women the right to vote. Defending the morality of a behavior on grounds that it is tradition is so widely known to be fallacious that logicians have memorialized this particular kind of logical fallacy by naming it argumentum ad antiquitatem. If wolf hunting is not traditional, could it be an acceptable form of recreation? Recreation has a common meaning (i.e., “refreshment of one’s mind or body after work through activity that amuses or stimulates”49) and a deeper meaning reflected by the etymology of the word (re-​create). The re-​creative value of deer hunting does not lie in killing the deer. Its re-​creative value lies in the hunter’s appreciation of the sacrifice the deer made so that the hunter could sustain him or herself. When sustenance is not the central reason for hunting, its distinctive value is simply an act of killing, or worse, an opportunity to manifest hatred.50 To consider such an activity recreation is grotesque. A related version of this argument would replace P1 with: P1. Wolf hunting is valuable because the wolf pelt that comes with killing a wolf has value as a trophy or an economic commodity. A trophy is a kind of prize, memento, or symbol of some kind of success. To kill a sentient creature for the purpose of using his body or part of it as a trophy is essentially killing for fun or as a celebration of violence. And, although there was once a time when trapping wolves for their pelts might have been a respectable means of making a living because wolf pelts were then a reasonable way to make warm clothing, we no longer live in that time.

Other Arguments for Wolf Hunting Some argue that we should allow wolf hunting because reducing the wolf population will reduce the threat to human safety. Arguments to this effect depend on a premise like “wolves threaten human safety.” These arguments crumble because such premises are almost universally false. Many who do not like wolves grossly exaggerate the threat that wolves represent to human safety. In the very rare instances when human safety is threatened, that problem needs to be dealt with immediately, thoroughly, and precisely. Wolf hunting has none of those properties. For example, if a particular wolf threatens human safety in say, July, the problem cannot wait until the upcoming hunting season

 

422    John Vucetich and Michael Paul Nelson in the hope that some hunter will have the “good fortune” to kill the offending wolf. The inappropriateness of the argument underlying this reason has been discussed in detail elsewhere.51 Some assert that we should allow wolf hunting because reducing the wolf population will reduce the threat that wolves pose to livestock. The challenges of raising livestock should be of concern to anyone who eats meat. Nevertheless, several considerations suggest that protection of livestock is a poor reason to hunt wolves. First, the loss of livestock to wolves is absolutely trivial from an industry-​wide perspective.52 Where losses occur, non-​lethal methods are feasible and in many cases effective in reducing or eliminating livestock losses.53 From the perspective of an individual owner, livestock losses and the cost of non-​lethal control can be non-​trivial. Nevertheless, as a wealthy nation, we are more than capable of meeting those costs in a fair manner. Finally, the prevention of livestock losses requires addressing the particular wolf associated with the problem and addressing that wolf at the particular location and time of those problems. A general recreational hunt is not an appropriate tool for dealing with such a specific problem and could even exacerbate it.54 There are sensible ways to deal with livestock losses, but wolf hunting is not one of them.55 Finally, some assert that we should allow wolf hunting because hunting them is necessary to prevent wolves from growing “out of control.” “Out of control” is sometimes a euphemism for the idea that wolves can create challenges for some humans who live in areas also inhabited by wolves (e.g., killing livestock). “Out of control” is also sometimes a euphemism for an obsession with “controlling” nature, not to achieve any other objective, but as an end in itself. That obsession represents a pathological relationship with nature; it lies at the core of many conservation problems, and it should be resisted.56 Satisfying that obsession incurs an ethical cost in addition to the ethical cost of killing a sentient creature. Each of these three reasons for hunting wolves deserve more attention than we are able to provide here. There would be value in building and analyzing the arguments associated with each reason. While space limitations preclude our providing such a treatment here, we have nevertheless contributed the basic elements that would go into building those arguments.

Conclusion The details associated with killing predators vary considerably with the species of predator, reasons for wanting to kill, and sociological and ecological contexts surrounding any particular interest to kill. The analysis presented here required careful attention to those details as they pertain to hunting wolves in the conterminous United States. Despite the importance of details, the basic themes associated with hunting any predator would be similar to those presented here. Because wolves (and other predators) are living creatures, the morality of killing wolves (and other predators) depends on being able to provide a good reason to do so.

 

Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control    423 The analyses presented here and elsewhere57 suggest that good reasons have not been offered. The results of argument analyses are like the results that emerge from the scientific process; they are never definitive. They are always provisional in the sense that it may be conceivable that someone, at some time in the future, will provide a good reason to hunt wolves. Until that time, however, one would be logically bound to the conclusion that wolf hunting in the conterminous United States is wrong.58 This conclusion may raise the question, Who gets to judge what counts as a good reason? That question is misplaced. In a free society, every citizen is free to judge what counts as a good reason. The critical question is not who gets to judge, but rather, By what rules and standards is one obligated in judging what counts as a good reason? The rule and standard is that reasoning be sound and valid; that is, a conclusion must be supported by an argument with no mistaken premises or missing premises (i.e., without gaps in logic). This standard emerges directly from basic principles of justice. Justice is widely understood to depend on an idea that can be expressed as a thought experiment whereby the members of a society are required to agree on the principles of governance and social interactions before anyone knows their position in society (i.e., their wealth, abilities, aesthetic preferences, etc.).59 One of the required principles to emerge from such a process would certainly be that social decision-​making should be based on sound and valid reasoning. Sound and valid reasoning is not a silver bullet. Argument analysis can be manipulated by those more concerned with winning political disputes than understanding what is good or right. Some premises are difficult to discover, and others are difficult to evaluate. Sound and valid reasoning does not completely clear all the fog associated with judging the appropriateness of normative premises. A number of controversies are genuinely pernicious and not easily solved (though, as we show here, hunting wolves is not one of them). Consequently, argument analysis is not sufficient, but it is an absolutely necessary feature of a just democracy. Some may react with concern, thinking that the majority of citizens are not capable of engaging in argument analysis. Almost certainly, this is true. Nevertheless, one should at least expect government technocrats working on such problems in the interests of citizens to have this capacity. Sadly, a large portion of these technocrats does not possess this capacity. What exactly is the capacity of which we speak? In this analysis, we have only applied some basic facts60 to some basic principles covered in every critical-​thinking textbook that has ever been published.61 Anyone graduating with a bachelor’s degree should be expected to have a rudimentary capacity for sound and valid reasoning. However, the nature of the public discourse about wolf hunting, predator control, and dozens of other controversial issues clearly indicates that we do not have this capacity. This incapacity may be the greatest failure of university professors and administrators. Although a citizenry can become capable of sound and valid reasoning at a rudimentary level, this kind of reasoning is nevertheless genuinely challenging. Consequently, most of us are content with our intuitions about what is right and wrong for many particular cases, and we live according to such intuitions. Intuitive moral reasoning is fine

 

424    John Vucetich and Michael Paul Nelson and normal, so long as one bears in mind that one’s confidence about such intuitions as they apply to complicated issues should correspond to the degree to which one has studied that judgment with the rigors of sound and valid reasoning.

Notes 1. The conflict between those two principles, for example, underlies concerns about the appropriateness of bow hunting and hunting over bait piles. 2. Reasons for being vegetarian or vegan are varied. Moreover, a person might conclude that eating meat is appropriate in some circumstances but not others. For example, a person might think eating meat is wrong in general but acceptable for Native Alaskan Inuits, whose welfare would seem to depend on eating animal flesh. While that kind of complexity is important, it does not obviate the central point, which is a demand to confront the question, What counts as an adequate reason to kill a sentient creature? The hunting community has long recognized the value of this question for understanding the conditions under which various kinds of hunting is appropriate. See also Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance (New York: Pegasus, 2012); Lily R. McCaulou, Call of the Mild: Learning to Hunt My Own Dinner (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012). 3. For a more detailed accounts of these issues, see David Peterson, (ed.), A Hunter’s Heart:  Honest Essays on Blood Sport (New  York:  Holt, 1997); Jim Posewitz, Beyond Fair Chase:  The Ethics and Tradition of Hunting (Helena, MT:  Falcon, 2002); Jose Ortega y Gassett, Meditations on Hunting (Belgrade, MT:  Wilderness Adventures Press, 2007); Nathan Kowalsky, Hunting—​Philosophy for Everyone: In Search of the Wild Life. (Oxford, UK: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2010); Allen Jones, A Quiet Place of Violence: Hunting and Ethics in the Missouri River Breaks (Bozeman, MT: Bangtail, 2012). 4. “Hunting” is not the best term to describe the relationship between humans and some of these creatures. For example, the relationship with seals in the North Atlantic is better described as “predator control,” because the primary purpose of killing seals is to reduce their abundance in order to increase the abundance of their prey, which are fish that humans harvest. The relationship with wolves in the conterminous United States between 1850 and 1950 might be best described as “attempted genocide,” since the goal had been complete extermination. Moreover, in many cases, predators are killed by trapping, rather than by shooting. While the above-​mentioned distinctions are critically important, our main interest is in the basic question, What counts as a good reason to kill a sentient creature? So, despite its shortcomings, we use the term “hunting” to refer to all of these relationships. 5. Irving M. Copi, Carl Cohen, and Kenneth McMahon, Introduction to Logic, 14th edition (New York: Pearson, 2010). 6. J. A. Leonard, C. Vila, and R. K. Wayne, “Legacy Lost: Genetic Variability and Population Size of Extirpated US Grey Wolves (Canis Lupus),” Molecular Ecology 14 (2005): 9–​17. 7. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd edition, Modern Classics (New  York:  Harper Perennial, 1990). 8. Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 9. P. W. Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

 

Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control    425 10. Lawrence. E Johnson, A Morally Deep World:  An Essay on Moral Significance and Environmental Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 11. T. H. Birch, “Moral Considerability and Universal Consideration,” Environmental Ethics 15 (1993): 313–​332. 12. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 13. J. Baird Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic:  Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); J. Baird Callicott, Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Holmes Rolston, Conserving Natural Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 14. For example, S. Kellert, “The Biological Basis for Human Values of Nature,” in The Biophilia Hypothesis, ed. S. R. Kellert and E. O. Wilson (Washington, DC:  Island Press, 1993), 42–​ 69; R. E. Manning, “Social Climate Change:  A  Sociology of Environmental Philosophy,” in Reconstructing Conservation: Finding Common Ground, ed. B. A. Minteer and R. E. Manning (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003), 207–​222. 15. For example, Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (New  York: Scribners, 1973); David Peterson, (ed.), A Hunter’s Heart: Honest Essays on Blood Sport (New York: Holt, 1997); Gassett, Meditations on Hunting. 16. John A. Vucetich and Michael P. Nelson, A Handbook of Conservation and Sustainability Ethics. CEG Occasional Paper Series, issue 1, 2012, www.conservationethics.org (accessed July 15, 2013). This document also provides an accessible overview of the application of argument analysis to conservation. See also Michael P. Nelson and John Vucetich, “Environmental Ethics for Wildlife Management,” in Human Dimensions of Wildlife Management, ed., D. J. Decker, Shawn J. Riley, William Siemer et al. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 223–​237. 17. “Ungulate” is a general term that includes species like deer, elk, moose, caribou, and bison. 18. In some cases, a concern may be that a law or policy is unjust and immoral. If so, then it would be inappropriate to take such laws or policies for granted. Instead, there may be a need to develop an argument to assess whether the law or policy is appropriate. Whether such issues should be taken for granted or demonstrated depends largely on the judgment of the humans with an interest in the issue surrounding the argument. 19. For example, C. C. Wilmers, E. Post, R. O. Peterson et al., “Predator Disease Out-​break Modulates Top-​ down, Bottom-​ up and Climatic Effects on Herbivore Population Dynamics,” Ecology Letters 9 (2006): 383–​389. 20. Oswald J. Schmitz, Resolving Ecosystem Complexity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 21. Compare J. A. Vucetich, D. W. Smith, and D. R. Stahler, “Influence of Harvest, Climate and Wolf Predation on Yellowstone Elk, 1961–​2004,” Oikos 111 (2005): 259–​270, with P. J. White and R. A. Garrott, “Yellowstone’s Ungulates after Wolves: Expectations, Realizations, and Predictions,” Biological Conservation 125 (2005): 141–​152, and R. Garrott, P. J. White, and J. Rotella, “The Madison Headwaters Elk Herd: Transitioning from Bottom Up Regulation to Top Down Limitation,” in The Ecology of Large Mammals in Central Yellowstone, ed. R Garrott, P. J. White, and F. G. R. Watson (San Diego, CA: Elsevier, 2009), 489–​517. 22. Anonymous, “Wolves by the Numbers,” Bugle, Sept./​Oct. 2009, p. 84, http://​switchboard. nrdc.org/​blogs/​mskoglund/​elk%20numbers.pdf (accessed July 7, 2013).

 

426    John Vucetich and Michael Paul Nelson 23. 1990–​2012, the period of time when wolf abundance increased from approximately 30 wolves to approximately 800 wolves. 24. Deer Population Goals, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, 2013, http://​dnr. wi.gov/​topic/​hunt/​popgoal.html (accessed July 15, 2013). 25. R. Doepker, Michigan Department of Natural Resources, unpublished data. After trees are logged and removed, the treetops are left behind on the forest floor. The twigs on those treetops are an important source of winter food. Between 1957 and 2005, the number of cords of pulpwood harvested in Upper Michigan explained 67 percent of the variation in an index of deer abundance (i.e., the mean density of pellet groups [fecal material] counted on transects across Upper Michigan). 26. John A. Vucetich, “The Influence of Anthropogenic Mortality on Wolf Population Dynamics with Special Reference to Creel And Rotella (2010) and Gude et al. (2011),” in “Final Peer Review of Four Documents Amending and Clarifying the Wyoming Gray Wolf Management Plan,” United States Fish and Wildlife Service, 2012, pp. 78–​95, http://​ www.fws.gov/​mountain-​prairie/​species/​mammals/​wolf/​WY_​Wolf_​Peer_​Review_​of_​ Revised_​Statutes_​and_​Plan_​Addendumt2012_​0508.pdf (accessed July 15, 2013). http://​ www.fws.gov/​mountain-​prairie/​species/​mammals/​wolf/​. 27. Each state government is legally required, under policies set in accordance with the US Endangered Species Act (1973), to maintain a minimum number of wolves. For example, Wisconsin has approximately 800 wolves but may be legally obligated to have only on the order of 100 wolves. The state of Wisconsin has for some time said that it will aim to have 350 wolves. “Wisconsin Wolf Management Plan,” Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources., 1999, http://​dnr.wi.gov/​files/​PDF/​pubs/​ER/​ER0099.pdf) (accessed July 15, 2013). 28. See, for example, B. Miller, B. Dugelby, D. Foreman et  al., “The Importance of Large Carnivores to Healthy Ecosystems, Endangered Species UPDATE 18 (2001): 202–​210; R. L. Beschta and W. J. Ripple, “Large Predators and Trophic Cascades in Terrestrial Ecosystems of the Western United States,” Biological Conservation 142 (2009): 2401–​2414; J. A. Estes, J. Terborgh, J. S. Brashares et  al., “Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth,” Science 333 (2011): 301–​306. 29. J. Vucetich, D. W. Smith, and D. R. Stahler, “Influence of Harvest, Climate, and Wolf Predation on Yellowstone Elk, 1961–​2004,” Oikos 111 (2005): 259–​270. 30. B. G. Giles and C. S. Findlay, “Effectiveness of a Selective Harvest System in Regulating Deer Populations in Ontario,” Journal Of Wildlife Management 68 (2004): 266–​277. 31. Anonymous, “Wolves by the Numbers,”. Bugle, Sept/​Oct. 2009, p. 83, http://​switchboard. nrdc.org/​blogs/​mskoglund/​elk%20numbers.pdf (accessed July 7, 2013). See also Steven Hazen, “The Impact of Wolves on Elk Hunting in Montana” (MS thesis, Montana State University, 2012). 32. E. B. Nilsen, T. Pettersen, H. Gundersen et  al., “Moose Harvesting Strategies,” in “The Presence of Wolves,” Journal of Applied Ecology 42 (2005): 389–​399. 33. J. A. Winnie, “Predation Risk, Elk, and Aspen: Tests of a Behaviorally Mediated Trophic Cascade in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,” Ecology 93 (2012): 2600–​2614. 34. Failure to recognize these principles is a particularly weak aspect of the rationale for hunting wolves as stated in Vucetich, “Influence of Anthropogenic Mortality,’ 2012. 35. This circumstance (i.e., killing with little or no chance of realizing the intended outcome of that killing) characterizes many efforts to restore ecosystems that have been affected by exotic and invasive species; see, for example, J. H. Myers, D. Simberloff, A. M. Kuris et al., “Eradication Revisited: Dealing with Exotic Species,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution

 

Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control    427 15 (2000): 316–​320; J. Vucetich and M. P. Nelson, “What Are 60 Warblers Worth? Killing in the Name of Conservation,” Oikos 116 (2007): 1267–​1278; D. K. Rosenberg, D. G. Vesely, and J. A. Gervais, “Maximizing Endangered Species Research,” Science 337 (2012): 799. 36. When the majority do not believe what can reasonably be shown to be ethical, there is a problem. But that problem is not so much an ethical problem (in the sense of not knowing how we ought to behave) but is instead a behavioral problem, whereby the challenge is to behave as we know we ought to. This perspective does not address the more complicated concern of who has the privilege of judging what counts as a “reasonable” explanation. Although standards exist for making such judgments, discussion of those standards is beyond the scope of this chapter. See, for example, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA:  Belknap Press, 1971); Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 37. P. Yodzis, “Culling Predators to Protect Fisheries: A Case of Accumulating Uncertainties,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 16 (2001): 282–​283; J. S. Diana, S. Maruca, and B. Low, “Do Increasing Cormorant Populations Threaten Sportfishes in the Great Lakes? A Case Atudy in Lake Huron,” Journal of Great Lakes Research 32 (2006): 306–​320; R. J. King, “To Kill a Cormorant,” Natural History, March 2009, http://​www.naturalhistorymag.com/​0309/​ 0309_​feature.html (accessed July 15, 2013). 38. H. Andrén, J. D.  C. Linnell, O. Liberg et  al., “Survival Rates and Causes of Mortality in Eurasian Lynx (Lynx lynx) in Multi-​use Landscapes,” Biological Conservation 131 (2006): 23–​32; A. Treves, “Hunting for Large Carnivore Conservation,” Journal of Applied Ecology 46 (2009): 1350–​1356. 39. A. Treves, L. Naughton-​Treves, and V. Shelley, “Longitudinal Analysis of Attitudes Toward Wolves,” Conservation Biology 27 (2013): 315–​323. 40. C. Browne-​Nunez, A. Treves, D. MacFarland, and Z. Voyles, “The Influence of Official Lethal Control on Illegal Take, Social Tolerance, and Subsequent Depredations? The Case of Wisconsin Gray Wolves (Canis lupus),” http://​faculty.nelson.wisc.edu/​treves/​wolves/​ wolfhuman.php (accessed March 7th 2014). 41. L. Naughton-​Treves, R. Grossberg, and A. Treves, “Paying for Tolerance: Rural Citizens’ Attitudes toward Wolf Depredation and Compensation,” Conservation Biology 17 (2003): 1500–​1511. 42. For example, in 2005, “a federal judge struck down a Bush administration rule that lowered Endangered Species Act (ESA) protection for wolves that are migrating out of strongholds in the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes into neighboring states … Sharon Beck, an Eastern Oregon rancher and former president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association, said the ruling leaves ranchers little recourse but to break the law—​known around the West as ʻshoot, shovel and shut upʼ—​when wolves move into their areas.” See J. Barnard, “Ruling Halts Downgraded Wolf Protections,” Associated Press, February 9, 2005, www. propertyrightsresearch.org/​2005/​articles02/​ruling_​halts_​downgraded_​wolf_​pro.htm (accessed July 15, 2013). 43. A. Treves and K. A. Martin, “Hunters as Stewards of Wolves in Wisconsin and the Northern Rocky Mountains, USA,” Society and Natural Resources 24 (2011): 984–​994. 44. Treves et al., “Longitudinal Analysis,” 315–​323. 45. Such as the survey described in Treves et al., “Longitudinal Analysis,” 315–​323. 46. L. Sjoberg, “Factors in Risk Perception,” Risk Analysis 20 (2000): 1–​11; P. Slovic, “Perception of Risk:  Reflections on the Psychometric Paradigm,” in Social Theories of Risk, ed. S. Krimsky and D. Golding (New York: Praeger, 1992), 117–​152.

 

428    John Vucetich and Michael Paul Nelson 47. Michigan United Conservation Clubs, “Out-​of-​State Animal Rights Extremists at It Again,” July 2, 2013, http://​www.mucc.org/​2013/​07/​mucc-​statement-​on-​anti-​hunting-​ initiative-​regarding-​wolf-​management/​ (accessed 15 July 2013). 48. Vucetich, “What Are 60 Warblers Worth?” 1267–​1278; J. Vucetich and M. P. Nelson, “The Infirm Ethical Foundations of Conservation,” in Ignoring Nature No More:  The Case for Compassionate Conservation, ed. Marc Bekoff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 9–​26; C. Draper and M. Bekoff, “Animal Welfare and the Importance of Compassionate Conservation:  A  Comment on Mcmahon et  al. (2012),” Biological Conservation 158 (2013): 422–​423. 49. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000). 50. Hunting has other incidental values, such as providing an opportunity to spend time outdoors and better understand nature. Not only are these values incidental, they can also be accomplished without killing. 51. J. Vucetich and R. O. Peterson. “Using Basic Principles of Wildlife Management to Evaluate the Prospects for a Public Wolf Harvest in Michigan” (written testimony to the Michigan Natural Resources Commission, May 1, 2013). 52. Wolves account for 0.2% of all causes of premature death in cattle. The most common causes are various kinds of health issues, many of which could be mitigated by better husbandry. About twice as many cattle are stolen each year than are killed by wolves. Even among mammalian carnivores, wolves only account for 2% of kills (domestic dogs account for 12%). See “Cattle Death Losses” (report by the United States Department of Agriculture, May 12, 2011), http://​usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/​usda/​current/​CattDeath/​ (accessed July 15, 2013). CattDeath-​05-​12-​2011.pdf. 53. E. Bangs, M. Jimenez, C. Niemeyer et al., “Non-​lethal and Lethal Tools to Manage Wolf-​ Livestock Conflict in the Northwestern United States,” in Proceedings of the 22nd Vertebrate Pest Conference, ed. R.M. Timm and J.M. O’Brien (Davis: University of California Davis, 2006), 7–​16, also available at www.aphis.usda.gov/​wildlife_​damage/​nwrc/​publications/​ 06pubs/​shivik067.pdf. 54. For details, see Vucetich, “Using Basic Principles.” Moreover, harvesting could exacerbate losses to livestock. This concern rises, in part, from the likely effect that a harvest will increase the number of dispersing wolves in areas where livestock are raised. Dispersing wolves that have not been acculturated to living in areas with livestock may be more likely to kill livestock. See E. E. Bangs and J. Shivik, “Managing Wolf Conflict with Livestock in the Northwestern United States,” Carnivore Damage Prevention News 3 (2001):  2–​5; A. Treves and L. Naughton-​Treves, “Evaluating Lethal Control in the Management of Human-​Wildlife Conflict,” in People and Wildlife: Conflict or Coexistence? ed. R. Woodroffe, S. Thirgood, and A. Rabinowitz (London: Cambridge University, 2005), 86–​106. 55. In some cases, lethal control is the most effective way to stop livestock losses. Lethal control is different from hunting and refers to the targeted killing a particular wolf at the particular time and place associated with a problem. Evaluating the appropriateness of lethal control requires the analysis of different arguments. Important questions in evaluating lethal control include, Have alterative methods for solving the problem been tried and shown to have failed? Is the problem being caused serious enough to merit the use of lethal control? 56. Freya Matthews, The Ecological Self (London: Routledge, 1991).

 

Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control    429 57. For example, Vucetich, “Using Basic Principles.” 58. To reiterate, we are not saying that lethal control of wolves is never appropriate. See footnote 18. 59. Various expressions of this idea exist, including the “veil of ignorance”; see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971) and “the impartial spectator” (Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Empire, 1759/​2011). Impartiality was also central to Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. For an accessible treatment of these ideas, see Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 60. None of the premises in the preceding arguments are overly complicated or particularly difficult to evaluate. 61. See, for example, Irving M. Copi, Carl Cohen, and Kenneth McMahon, Introduction to Logic, 14th edition (New York: Pearson, 2010).

Further Reading For an accessible overview of the importance of top carnivores to ecosystem health, Cristina Eisenberg, The Wolf ’s Tooth:  Keystone Predators, Trophic Cascades, and Biodiversity (Washington, DC:  Island Press, 2011). For an overview of wolf ecology, L. D. Mech and L. Boitani, (eds.), Wolves:  Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2007). For an overview of wolf conservation in the United States, Martin A. Nie, Beyond Wolves: The Politics of Wolf Recovery and Management (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2003). For a broad and accessible overview of argument analysis, Peg Tittle, Critical Thinking: An Appeal to Reason (New York: Routledge, 2011). For an overview of basic themes in environmental ethics, Paul Pojman and Louis Pojman, (eds), Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application (Andover, MA: Cengage Learning, 2011).

 

Pa rt I V

ANIMALS I N  C U LT U R A L R E P R E SE N TAT ION S

 

 

Chapter 23

Pr actice and Et h i c s of the Use of Ani ma l s i n C ontem p or a ry A rt Joe Zammit-​L ucia

Introduction Who more aggressive than the artist when he shatters our habits of eye and ear as a means to violate our minds? (​Jacques Barzun1)

In 2001, Canadian student Jesse Powers and two classmates captured a stray cat, tortured the cat, skinned him alive, and decapitated him—​all activities captured on a film presented to the students’ art class at the Ontario College for Art and Design in Toronto. The stated artistic purpose was to call attention to hypocrisy and greed in the general public.2 This episode is one of the most graphic illustrations of the state (and status) of the animal in contemporary art. Over the ages, the animal in artistic expression has transitioned from creature of fascination and fear to deity to curiosity to decorative object to primary subject and, in its contemporary incarnation, to a final degradation as no more than artistic material. This final degradation is well captured in the inclusion of the animal as one of the materials that Richard Serra uses with disdain: I was using paint with a certain disdain, with the attitude that any material was as good as any other material. And once you find that you’re not using paint for its illusionistic capabilities or its color refraction but as a material that happens to be “red,” you can use any material as equally relevant. I started using a whole load of materials. I was living in Fiesole outside of Florence at the time and I started using everything that was in the parameters of my surroundings; sticks and stones and hides. I did a whole show of 22 live and stuffed animals.3

 

434   Joe Zammit-Lucia As Serra so eloquently puts it, animals—​dead or alive—​have become material in the hands of contemporary artists. The use of the animal in this way is ubiquitous and most often passes unremarked. Even when mounted in the context of animal-​centric conferences or events, exhibits of “animal art” routinely display works consisting of animal parts or taxidermied animals—​most of which can be viewed while people are eating their politically correct vegan lunch. In this chapter I review some of the current practices in the use of the animal in contemporary art and the controversies raised about the practice. I use a selection of examples to provide an overall picture of the range of forms and content for which contemporary artists utilize animals. I then briefly address the ethical questions that such practices raise. Is it ethical to imprison or kill for art? Can such a question even be reasonably addressed, let alone answered? More importantly, I examine what drives artists to engage in such practices and the interplay between the art world and those concerned with animal welfare. I propose suggestions for how the issues raised might reasonably start to be addressed. Throughout this chapter, I am concerned only with the use of the physical animal—​dead or alive. I will not address questions related to animal representation except where directly related to the use of the physical animal or to the ethical arguments being raised.

The Dead Animal The animal has long been used as exhibit and display. Taxidermy has probably been practiced since the eleventh century, and avian taxidermy is referred to in texts written before 1248.4 Over the centuries, the display of taxidermied animals has been rendered both “serious” and culturally acceptable by its widespread use by science and its display in various forms in natural history museums and other scientific settings.5 In science, the taxidermied animal indulges the human desire to study, classify, and generally tame nature through knowledge and understanding—​albeit understanding of a very limited form. Natural history and the other biological sciences reduce the taxidermied animal to a mere specimen, an object of study. Elaborate dioramas mounted in museums of natural history blur the line between art and science. These are objets d’art intended to fascinate and entertain while hiding under the mantle of science education. More explicitly, decorative and artistic are hunting trophies that both glorify the hunt as a human victory over the beast and indulge our propensity to collect and display. The use of taxidermied animals more explicitly as art that belongs in the gallery and in the mainstream art world is a recent phenomenon. Aloi traces the first appearance of taxidermy in the gallery space to a Robert Rauschenberg exhibit in 1955–​1959.6 Since then, the use of taxidermy as a purely artistic form (what one might call high art) has grown, with the taxidermied animal presented no longer as subject but rather as the artistic material through which a wider commentary is being made. Artists using

 

Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art    435 taxidermied specimens are too numerous to list comprehensively in this chapter. A few examples will serve to show the breadth of artistic approaches and illustrate how these artworks engage with societal questions. In nanoq: flat out and bluesome, Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson brought together the taxidermied specimens of 34 polar bears and combined these with images and documentation to construct a cultural history of these specimens. Their commentary on the complex and evolving place of these animals in our culture—​from hunting trophy to symbol of climate change—​brings into sharp relief the fact that, in cultural terms, the life of these animals only started with their death, which is the point at which the animal was transformed into cultural specimen. In using taxidermy to produce hybrid animals, Thomas Grünfeld continues a long artistic tradition of constructing fantastical, surreal creatures—​an approach also used in some of the taxidermy-​based sculptures of Korean artist Myeongbeom Kim. Our emotional reaction to these contemporary chimeras differs significantly from how we might react to the wide variety of hybrid and unreal creatures produced by many cultures in previous centuries. This may be a result of our changing sensibility to the animal and our contemporary obsession with the scientifically factual over the imagined and the fantastic—​an attitude that easily slips into a moral righteousness over some supposedly correct or faithful way that we should be representing animals today—​whether in the visual arts, in film, in literature, or in any other form of artistic expression. Some artists use taxidermied specimens not as sculptures in their own right but rather as props to construct tableaux vivants—​cinematographic scenes that are then photographed to produce the final artwork. Karen Knorr photographs taxidermied animals placed in opulent human surroundings that make us realize, through jarring juxtaposition, just how separate our own world has become from that of the animal. On the other hand, Amy Stein, in her series Domesticated, uses taxidermied animals to construct scenes of human interaction with the animals. Images are so realistic that many viewers fail to realize the nature of the artifice. In Howl, “A coyote howls helplessly at an overbearingly bright street lamp. The coyote looks incongruous and powerless. His howls ineffectual in terrain that has been appropriated and ‘domesticated’ by humans—​ two pathetic trees, planted and tied down, the only nod towards the natural landscape that was once here”7 (Figure 23.1). Damien Hirst produced what must be the most notorious—​and most spectacular—​ sculptures using preserved animals. Larger than life, drowned in formaldehyde, mounted in huge glass cases, and sometimes embellished with gold and other references to our culture of consumption—​be it consumption of entertainment, of knowledge, of consumer and luxury goods—​Hirst’s work shows his ability to shock, mesmerize, and provoke. Hirst shows his mastery at using the animal to create spectacle, provocation, and commercial success with pieces that range from his monumental shark titled The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living to the bisected bodies of cow and calf in Mother and Daughter to The Golden Calf—​a piece that sold for $18.6 million in his final auction in 2008, the same week that Lehman Brothers collapsed and with it the global financial system.8

 

436   Joe Zammit-Lucia

Fig. 23.1  “Howl” from the series “Domesticated” by Amy Stein. (Image courtesy of the artist.)

Some artists have embarked on what might be called fake taxidermy. Chinese artist Cai Guo-​Ciang’s Head On consists of a spectacular production of a pack of 99 wolves flying through the air in an arc before colliding with a glass wall. The “wolves” themselves do not, however, contain any wolf parts. They are life-​size replicas constructed in Quanzhou and made out of resin, sheepskin, hay, and metal wire. It may be somewhat ironic to be converting sheep into wolves though that particular irony is not, it seems, part of the artwork.

The Live Animal Contemporary artists routinely use live animals as part of their artwork. Sometimes the animal stays alive. Sometimes the death of the animal is part of the work itself. Live animals are now routine parts of artistic installations or participants in artistic performance. Joseph Beuys’s 1974 I Like America and America Likes Me is possibly a seminal example in view of its date and the stature of the artist. In this performance, Beuys spent seven days and nights in a room with a coyote, the two developing a means of wordless coexistence.9 Every day the coyote would urinate on two piles of torn-​up Wall Street Journal newspapers. The performance was full of potential meanings. One interpretation was that it was intended to show the artist’s preference for America’s tradition and

 

Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art    437 heritage as symbolized by the coyote—​an animal sacred to Native Americans—​over contemporary American values.10 Most installations that use live animals keep them in a state of captivity for the purpose of the artwork. This, it could be argued, is no different from keeping animals captive in zoos for the purpose of entertainment and, some claim, education. However, the death of the animal can be an integral part of the artwork—​whether as an accidental and unintended consequence, as a known possible, though not certain, outcome of the artwork, or as a direct intent of the artwork. In 2007, Guillermo “Habacuc” Vargas tied up a sick and emaciated street dog as part of a work titled Exposición No.1 at a gallery in Nicaragua. On an adjacent wall the words Eres lo que lees (“you are what you read”) were spelled out in dry dog food. This artwork soon became the subject of international outrage. Rumors abounded about the state of the dog and whether she had been allowed to starve to death—​and the artist reportedly confirmed that the dog did die in the course of the work. When asked in the same piece whether he thought that those who criticized him were hypocrites, Vargas responded that proof of that were the number of beings, whether animals or people, who live daily in conditions of indignity.11 In Helena, the work of Marco Evaristti (2000), the death of the animal is a possible, though not certain, outcome. Evaristti’s installation consisted of 10 water-​filled blenders, in each of which swam a goldfish. Visitors to the exhibit had the opportunity to turn on the blender and liquidize the fish if they so wished. The confrontation between the law, animal welfare, and freedom of artistic expression is well described as follows: Two of the fish were blended to death by an anonymous visitor to the museum, and the museum director was fined €269 because he had left the blenders plugged into electrical outlets despite being warned not to do so. A technician from the blender company testified in court that it takes less than one second for the blender knife to reach between 14,000 and 15,000 rounds per minute from the time the button is pressed, killing the fish “instantly and humanely,” so the fine was dropped. During the controversy, the director of the museum said that the work was a comment on human beings often making themselves masters of (controlling) life and death, for instance through abortions and respirators. In court, he refused to pay the fine, noting that artistic licence allows for the creation of works that defy the concept of right and wrong.12

Is Evaristti’s work an example of art’s cynical manipulation of animals, or is the “instantaneous and humane” killing of fish a reasonable way to raise and stimulate debate on the power we do have over animals—​and over each other?13 In some cases, the death of the animal is an integral part of the artwork, as in the case of Powers described at the start of this chapter. In December 1989, Canadian artist Rick Gibson announced his intention to execute a piece of “performance art” involving Sniffy the Rat (Figure 23.2). The intention was to crush the rat between two canvases by dropping a heavy concrete weight on top of him and thereby creating a diptych of

 

438   Joe Zammit-Lucia

Fig. 23.2  Rick Gibson with his performance contraption for crushing Sniffy the Rat, 1989. (Image courtesy of the artist.)

two imprints of the rat. The performance was scheduled for January 1990 but did not take place because Gibson’s execution device had been stolen by animal rights activists. However, when Gibson arrived to announce the cancellation, he was chased by an angry mob of animal lovers and media representatives. Everyone involved in that scene was participating in his performance art piece, which TV broadcast around the world. Gibson’s artistic concept for the intended killing of Sniffy was his interest in exploring the discrepancy between popular morality and the law—​an interest that had previously led him to the creation of A Cannibal in Vancouver, in which he ate a legally obtained human testicle.14 Finally, in some artworks animals are not killed; rather, they are created. In 2000, artist Eduardo Kac created an artwork titled GFP Bunny. This transgenic work involved the transfer of a green fluorescent protein into a rabbit to create Alba, a unique, transgenic, albino rabbit who glows in the dark. Kac describes the artwork as including “the creation of a green fluorescent rabbit, the public dialogue generated by the project, and

 

Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art    439 the social integration of the rabbit.”15 Here the artwork involves the biological manipulation of an animal and the creation of a unique being with the intent of stimulating the socio-​scientific debate about the complex issues that such an act involves. Kac has always been careful to stress that Alba suffered no pain or discomfort and that there was always “a commitment to respect, nurture, and love the life thus created” (see previous endnote).

The Ethics of Animal Use As can be seen from the variety of even the small number of examples previously described, artists live up to their professional calling by being creative in exploring many different ways of incorporating live, dead, or dying animals into their works of art. The ethical issues that all these creations raise are similarly complex and prone to generating strong feelings on all sides of the debate. In the rest of this chapter, I attempt to provide a framework for the ethics of the use of the animal in art and provide some suggestions for ways the difficult issues raised might usefully be examined in the future. The debate about the use of the animal in art boils down to a conflict between two moral imperatives: freedom of artistic expression versus the limits of acceptable moral behavior. This conflict is the subject of an ongoing if time-​worn and hoary debate that some may consider insoluble based as it is on different values among different groups of society. One interesting characteristic of this debate is that, unlike many other discussions with a moral or ethical dimension, both sides of the animals-​in-​art debate would consider their position to be liberal or progressive. This is not a debate that can conveniently be bracketed as progressive versus conservative. Rather, this is a civil war between those who consider themselves progressive (or liberal). In some respects this makes the debate even more challenging as it is difficult to adopt the usual tactic of simply dismissing your opponents as not being worthy of serious consideration because they are either Neanderthal or degenerate—​depending on which side you happen to be sitting. Nevertheless, even in this civil war the actors are as predictable as the acts each will play out. The broad thrust of the debate can be encapsulated in two short extracts from a special issue of the Art Journal. Though these extracts refer to the publication of images that some found offensive rather than the use of animals in art, they are representative of the same debate. In response to the publication of the now infamous work of Robert Mapplethorpe, one editor quotes a typical response from some readers: How dare you distribute aestheticized pornographic materials to me through the mails, under the guise of a scholarly journal! … Barging into the sanctity of many fine homes and institutions to disseminate such materials violates the trust … that your readers have placed upon you.16

 

440   Joe Zammit-Lucia The second editor responds as follows: Finally, let us reiterate the essential proposition—​inscribed in the First Amendment and its protection of a freedom of expression that transcends personal taste—​that we have the right and, in current context, the obligation to publish images and words that people may consider objectionable.17

Over the years little seems to have been added to these two polarized positions. Neither side has been willing to concede that the other perspective may have some legitimacy. Opponents of art they find offensive fail to acknowledge either that part of the value of art lies in its ability to be transgressive and challenge social norms or that perceived offensiveness may be a matter of personal interpretation. Conversely, the modern liberal tradition dismisses all too easily the question of what can be called common decency and people’s reasonable expectation not to be gratuitously offended. Further, in our cyber-​connected, media-​dominated world, neither is the comment that “if it offends you, you don’t need to view it” particularly convincing. The unsustainability of adopting fixed positions like those aforementioned is illustrated by the fact that individuals and groups are almost always inconsistent in their expressed positions. For instance, a scholarly journal such as the Art Journal may well show indignation at any suggestion of censorship. Yet the same journal as well as books such as this one find it perfectly acceptable to censor my right to express my views of “man’s view of morality” and suggest that the “human” view of morality may be a more appropriate phrasing to fit in with the editors’ particular view of political correctness. This reflects the reality of what most people truly feel about censorship: my kind of censorship is acceptable but yours is not.

Are Animals Different? As outlined already, the debate about censorship has largely been conducted in the context of the use and dissemination of imagery that some find offensive. The ethics of the use of animals in art have received considerably less attention in the mainstream art world. Are the ethical considerations around the use of animals in artistic expression any different from those around any other form of censorship? If so, how can we think about these considerations, and how can we explore ways of moving forward without getting stuck in polarized positions that are as predictable as they are unhelpful? Some argue that the use of the live or dead animal as an actual component of a work of art involves the use, exploitation, and imposition of harm and suffering on other living beings. Such harm is real and immediate and must be avoided. “A theatrical depiction of suffering may be art; real suffering is not.”18 This was one comment in the universal outrage caused when composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was mis(?)-​represented as having

 

Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art    441 described the 9/​11 terrorist attacks as a great work of art. Causing actual harm calls for a different set of considerations from its representation. Yet others would argue that, in opposing offensive imagery, they are also opposing real harm—​the harm that such imagery does to those who view it. We are then left with arguing whether one harm is worse than the other and that therefore one should be subject to censorship and the other not. Although difficult, these are, in fact, exactly the sorts of judgments that our societies make all the time in balancing social benefits of certain activities against potential harm. We should therefore not be seduced by the absolutist position that no censorship is acceptable because censoring one type of artistic endeavor automatically opens the door to the widespread censorship of everything else. Each situation deserves to be, and indeed must be, evaluated on its own merits.

The Complex Moral Issues of Animals in Art Is it reasonable, or maybe even an obligation, to censor art that involves the use of animals or subjects them to pain and suffering? I will start by taking a statement issued by the College Arts Association (CAA) in response to a debate and eventual Supreme Court judgment19 relating to the use of dog-​fighting imagery as a work of art. The stated position was that CAA “does not condone cruelty to animals or any other sort of unlawful conduct, [but] CAA has long and firmly opposed artistic and scholarly censorship of all kinds.”20 At first glance, this may seem to be a reasonable position, yet closer examination suggests that it fails to tackle the more difficult issues. The statement could be construed as trying to play both sides by opposing cruelty to animals while being absolutist in opposing any form of censorship. It declares itself opposed to animal cruelty but fails to explain the basis on which such cruelty will be defined. It opposes unlawful conduct but fails to tackle the difficult issue of animal harm that is real but may be lawful in many jurisdictions. Maybe recognizing the difficulty to be encountered in these gray areas, the statement does not explicitly define lawfulness as its metric for behaviors it opposes (though it may be doing so indirectly), yet neither is any other metric defined. Let us consider Gibson and Evaristti as practical examples. How would CAA’s statement have helped us in these cases? Both artists would argue that theirs was legitimate art making a social point. They would also maintain that the animals would die instantaneously—​probably suffering less pain than the millions of farm animals executed daily—​and that the work did not therefore qualify as cruelty under the law. In Evaristti’s case, such a legal position was in fact tested and upheld in the courts,21 though that the judgment made headlines suggests that it may well go against many people’s intuitive moral judgment. In this situation, the CAA statement is unhelpful as a case can

 

442   Joe Zammit-Lucia certainly be made for harm and maybe cruelty (even if not in the strictly legal sense) as well as for opposing any form of censorship for an artist operating within the law. One could come up with a number of similar situations—​and construct an endless number of hypothetical others—​where more clarity is needed than the CAA statement provides. Many difficulties arise when trying to establish general principles to define the boundaries of the use of animals in art. The questions become more indefinable still when, as some argue it should, the debate is taken beyond just issues of cruelty and harm to encompass the ethics of the whole idea of the instrumental use of animals for the purpose of artistic expression. Gigliotti, for instance, argues that, even in the absence of obvious pain and suffering, the use of live, nonhuman animals in art rests on a worldview that “sees all of nature as available for human intervention”22 and should therefore be discouraged. While all of these positions have merit as part of the debate, it is questionable whether they move us any further toward establishing boundaries beyond which artists should not stray. Of course for some the answers may seem perfectly clear. For the animal rights activist living in a world that is black and white, “causing an animal to suffer or die in the name of art is always unjustifiable.”23 On the other side of the discussion there will no doubt be those who will argue that, provided their behavior falls within the law, there is no justification for curtailing artists’ freedom of expression in any way and that any such attempts would be unconstitutional. These are irreconcilable positions that simply lead to polarization rather than further enlightenment.

The Value of Art It is not possible to address the ethics of using animals in art without raising the fundamental question of the value of art in our society. Much as though abolitionists would like it not to be so, animals are an integral part of our society and are widely instrumentalized by humans. From companion animals to farm animals or working animals, from objects of scientific study to laboratory animals, from food to works of art, animals are brought to life, live, and die in the service of human beings. Except for those who believe that all instrumental use of the animal should be abolished, the question therefore is not whether animals should be used in art but rather whether the use of animals in this way provides social benefits that outweigh the harm done to the animal. For some, art is trivia and does not provide sufficient social benefit to justify either offence or harm. For others, art may be considered of a higher level of importance such that they declare themselves “perilously close to arguing that artists should be allowed certain freedoms that scientists should not be allowed!”24 Once again, this is likely to be a sterile discussion more concerned with one’s personal worldview than with yielding useful practical guidance.

 

Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art    443

Is Censorship a Reasonable Approach? Whatever one’s overall position, there seems little doubt that some art involving the use of animals is offensive to many. Even in the art world, many find some such works to be items of “undoubted shock, even disgust”25 while accepting them as part of the artwork. However, the question remains as to whether some form of censorship of such art is a justifiable approach. My answer to this question is no and yes. Since the discussion on the value of art relative to other human activities is unproductive, I suggest that as a starting point we adopt the position that artists should not be considered special cases one way or the other. Artists should have the freedoms that are afforded to all other members of society. With freedoms come responsibilities, and there is no reason that artists should, in any way, be considered individuals afforded special privileges that are denied to others. However, this is not much different from the declared CAA position and, in practice, does not get us very far at all.

The Law and Its Limits The first issue to get out of the way is that, as Gibson’s artwork so colorfully showed, the law should not be our only guide to thinking about what constitutes ethical behavior. Social norms, moral intuitions, and moral emotions—​our intuitive, affective sense of what should and what should not be considered acceptable—​are important components of what makes society function even when they do not have the force of law. “Moral emotions are evolved mechanisms that function in part to optimize social relationships.”26 Many activities are perfectly legal but still offend our moral intuitions. Conversely, many laws still on the books, laws against sodomy being one example, are routinely ignored as they no longer represent the prevailing moral standards. Legislation tends to follow rather than lead evolving social norms, and often with some considerable lag. Some consider animal protection legislation as one area where legislation remains weak, lagging behind current social norms and moral intuitions and with penalties that, when they kick in at all, do not necessarily serve as deterrent. We should not therefore allow those who believe that current legal interpretations favor their position to use the law as a tool to cut short reasonable discussion and open exploration. Whether something is legal is not beyond discussion of whether it is ethical.

Developing a Nuanced Debate That said, the issues to be addressed are complex and unclear. Attempting to develop rules requires us to define standards of behavior and impose controls that have wide and generic applicability to different forms of artistic expression, many of them as yet

 

444   Joe Zammit-Lucia unimagined. It is likely to be a fruitless task. Rather, we need to find approaches that can cope with uncertainty and ambiguity, the reconciliation of differing and multiplying worldviews, the melding of cultural attitudes in a globalizing world, and the resulting numerous shades of gray that will emerge. To move forward, I suggest that our starting point should not be to focus on methods of control but rather first to understand why some artists behave the way they do. In large part, such behavior reflects human attitudes to the animal—​a function of economic imperatives as well as the social and political environment.27 For artists, the architecture of that socioeconomic-​political environment is determined by the culture of the art world itself. Are there elements of the culture of the art world that allow or maybe even facilitate the misuse of animals as forms of artistic expression? Are there practical ways issues related to such misuse can be approached, ways that address some of the main drivers of these behaviors without rapidly sinking into polarized positions, legal battles and lack of progress—​either practical or intellectual? These are the questions I address next.

Animal Misuse as Symptom Marx, Lacan, Žižek, and others have explored the notion of aesthetic artifacts as symptoms of the culture in which they were produced.28 It is reasonable to consider the use of animals in art today as no more than a reflection of the culture of the various components of the art world. Attempts at improving, or at least changing, the way that animals are used by artists should therefore start with self-​reflection—​an examination of the culture of the art world, a discussion as to whether that culture has evolved in ways that are exclusively positive or whether there is room for some further examination, debate and, maybe, some change. I would like to address the question of art as symptom from three perspectives: the direction that art has taken; the self-​perception of the artist in today’s art culture; and the interaction of the complementary forces that shape what art is today—​art education, art criticism, and the commercial art market.

The Dehumanization of Art When we seek to ascertain the most general and most characteristic feature of modern artistic production we come upon the tendency to dehumanize art.29 Ortega y Gasset talks about the dehumanization of modern art along many dimensions that go far beyond the mere abandonment of realism. One of the dimensions he develops is the “conversion of the subjective attitude to the objective” (p. 28). In this he describes a process of the extirpation of emotional content from art that was to be considered modern. For instance, he writes that Debussy made it “possible to listen to music serenely, without swoons and tears” (p. 27) and how the poetry of Mallarmé “need not be ‘felt’” (p. 29). This progression of artistic expression away from the emotional on to the intellectual,

 

Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art    445 away from the centrality of “beauty” to the negation of aesthetic content has culminated in the contemporary artistic manifestations often grouped under the moniker of conceptual art. Conceptual art places the conceptual process ahead of the aesthetic—​and even ahead of the production of a physical artwork of any form.30 In contemporary art, many view this dehumanization not as an option but rather as a requirement. The self-​consciously serious artist today eschews any art that can be interpreted as sentimental or that has significant emotional content fearing that this may contaminate and undermine the perceived seriousness of an art based on rationality.31 For the last 100 years or so, artists have been captured within modern notions of the primacy of rationality over feeling and emotion—​including those whose art purports to challenge logical positivism. This does not, of course, apply to all of the art that we see today. But I suggest that they provide a reasonable description of the broad trajectory of the contemporary art world. In addition, many contemporary artists are interested in creating art that appeals to the art world elite rather than the general public. What are the implications of these attitudes for animals in art? The first is that artists are determinedly unsentimental not only about their art but also about the animals in their art. Baker reports that artists like Emily Mayer who works with taxidermy and Olly and Suzy who work with animals in the wild are quick to point out that they feel no sentimentality (undefined) toward the animals with whom they work. The animal in art is converted into an object to be regarded dispassionately or as material necessary to fulfill the artist’s intent. It is much like a scientific specimen where the value of the animal as a living creature is subordinated to his value as a source of knowledge. As in industrial farming and animal experimentation, the manipulation, exploitation, and killing of animals are accepted norms. A distance from the animal is created lest one is seen to be emotionally invested and therefore no longer rational, business-​like, objective, and therefore serious. In this culture it is no surprise that misuse of animals has the opportunity to flourish and that there is not only unwillingness but also determined opposition to allow concerns that can be dismissed as mere sentimentality to draw any lines that might constrain artistic freedom. The favoring of the intellectual and the analytical over the emotional is accentuated in an artistic culture in which many artists see their work as a research-​based exercise. Some describe themselves using terms like “visual researcher”32 or describe their practice as having “a strong research grounding.”33 Studios are transformed into laboratories for investigation and inquiry34 from where it is but a step to the morphing of the animal in art into the equivalent of laboratory rat or dissection specimen. These attitudes are symptomatic of the relatively recent inclination for the humanities and the softer sciences to develop physics envy. Rationality and objectivity are celebrated and sentiment is frowned upon as we are almost required to view (or at least pretend to view) the world “with willed stoicism, forcing [ourselves] not to empathize.”35 This inverse relationship between the analytical and the empathic may be biologically based. Recent neuroimaging studies have shown that the activation of those neural networks associated with analytical reasoning leads to the actual suppression of brain activity associated with social, emotional, and moral cognitive processes.36 These findings are supported by

 

446   Joe Zammit-Lucia behavioral data and by further imaging data showing that dehumanization is associated with switching out of the empathic brain network into the analytical network.37 This increasingly rational and analytical artistic culture does not, of course, inevitably lead to animal misuse, and many artists involved with animals care deeply about them. When Lucy Kimbell abandoned her idea of a Rat Evaluated Artwork (REA) because of her personal discomfort with her proposed use of the rats, her self-​ censorship did not lead to limitations on her freedom of expression but rather to the evolution of a different artwork, and maybe a richer, more meaningful form of expression involving rat lovers and a celebration of the rat.38 However, today such choices remain firmly with the individual artist. There is neither an institutional framework nor an accepted set of values and norms to guide artists’ actions. A resolution issued by CAA in 2011 following a survey of its members on the use of animals in art once more combines an objection to animal cruelty with the defense of freedom of artistic expression.39 It makes clear that freedoms come with responsibilities and suggests that artists ask themselves a set of questions before embarking on the use of animals in art. They are the same type of questions that led Kimbell to reevaluate her REA. However, once more judgment is left to the individual artist who is not provided with clear institutional guidelines. In summary, the artistic culture of dehumanization is an enabler, making it easier for animal misuse to take root and possibly even thrive. In today’s artistic culture, it is as well to recognize that anti-​aesthetic–​rationality–​dehumanization–​detachment–​abuse lie on a continuum: one that is different and that encourages a different set of values from the beauty–​emotion–​empathy–​kinship–​care continuum that modernism has displaced.

Art as Sensationalism If dehumanization is one leg of the contemporary art culture on which animal abuse can stand, then sensationalism is the second. Here we see the interaction between artists and their art, the world of art criticism and the commercial art market. Sensationalism pays. The traveling exhibit Sensation was a huge commercial success and launched the career of many of the participating artists. Damien Hirst’s dead shark was one of the centerpieces. In his commentary on Sensation Arthur Danto described Hirst’s shark as follows: The first work you will encounter, dominating the first gallery of the show, is a real shark in an immense tank. The child will gasp at the majesty and beauty of a work it would have been difficult to anticipate from photographs of it or from descriptions or representations on the Internet … Putting a huge fish in a large tank of formaldehyde sounds easy enough for even a city official to do. But imagining doing it requires a degree of artistic intuition of a very rare order, since one would have to anticipate what it would look like and what effect it would have on the viewer. The work in fact has the power, sobriety and majesty of a cathedral, some of which, of

 

Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art    447 course, must be credited to the shark itself. It does not look preserved but as if it rests in its fluid medium ready to strike.40

Danto goes on to talk about the title of the art piece in the context of the difficulty of envisioning one’s own death as laid out in Heidegger’s philosophy of authenticity and Wittgenstein’s view that death is not something we can live through. Danto does not, however, spare a thought for the shark except for the “wow” effect caused by the majestic nature of the creature. The shark is material in the artist’s creation of a sensation. The thought that the shark herself may have interests does not even appear as a passing consideration. Neither does the fact that the artist commissioned the death of several sharks for his artworks merit any comment. Danto reaches into philosophy only to validate and aggrandize the artistic concept, not to address any questions about the moral considerability of the animal. The ethics of such instrumental use of a majestic animal deserve not a mention in a discussion focused on artistic erudition and an admiration of the sensational as spectacle. Clearly, not all critics and commentators find such sensationalism admirable. A number of Royal Academicians resigned in protest at the Sensation exhibit, and many column inches were written in condemnation. However, the effect was achieved, the money rolled in, and the genie could not be put back in the bottle. Misuse of the animal is a relatively easy way artists can be sensationalist and achieve notoriety. Negative reaction from animal rights groups and others can be almost guaranteed and, as with Gibson’s work, becomes part of the artwork. It is possible that an exhibit may be shut down and lawsuits might follow. There may be minimal fines to contend with. All in all, the publicity is literally priceless—​“Evaristti gained notoriety for a museum display entitled ‘Helena.’”41 And the greater the abuse, the greater the outrage, the more likely it is that an army of critics will support the work as being original, as showing an artist who has something to say and whose right to say it must be defended at all costs. All this may help artists take their first steps on the road of the artist as celebrity brand in today’s competitive but potentially lucrative commercial art market. Further, whatever the fate of the artwork at the time, the artist and the work can be guaranteed immortality—​destined to live on in the pages of articles and books such as this one and in conferences where the work will be analyzed and pored over in discussions of ethics and freedom of expression. Some of this sensationalism may result in an overall positive effect. Gibson’s piece with Sniffy the Rat could, maybe, be considered the “ideal” artwork. The performative nature of the threat to the animal resulted in a train of events where the artist made his point very effectively without any actual harm to Sniffy.

Providing Moral Cover Finally, I would like to talk about one last aspect of the art culture—​the third leg on which the potential for animal abuse might rest. “People … engage in a variety of

 

448   Joe Zammit-Lucia psychosocial maneuvers—​often aided by the institutions that organize and direct their actions (Darley, 1992)—​which absolve them from moral responsibility for harmful acts. These include reframing the immoral behavior into a harmless or even worthy one.”42 As I have said already, artists who, while remaining within the law, misuse animals for their artistic purpose can largely be assured of the support of a number of individuals in the art establishment who will fight off any attempt to limit such artists’ freedom of expression. Behavior that may be considered potentially unethical is therefore reframed by powerful individuals and organizations. Not only does this reframing absolve the artist of any moral responsibility, but also the work becomes a totem in the defense of a worthy cause: freedom of expression. Largely influenced by the writings of radical author George Bataille, it has become accepted wisdom that the very transgressive nature of some artwork is what makes it valuable. “The transgressive is the utopian aspect of every artwork, the one that offers us glimpses of an existence unconfined by rules or restraints.”43 Transgression, an integral part of Bataille’s base materialism and self-​described overwhelming lack of respect, seems to have become one route to creating value in works of art—​and the more transgressive, the more valuable such works become. Such art of the transgressive sublime even becomes an act of supreme ethical value. According to Kieran Cashell: “In the period of the aftershock, it will be seen that, through a consummate tragic art, Hirst’s work involving nonhuman animals transforms a specific immoral practice into a meta-​ethical artistic phenomenon that finally, having shocked us to its moral wrongs, causes us reflexively to reevaluate prevailing human attitudes to animals by displaying these wrongs clearly to investigation. Because of its tragic transgressive sublime, I conclude, we are compelled to recognize seriously, even despite ourselves, the ancient importance, the inescapable significance, and, finally, the real shocking ethical value of Hirst’s work.”44

This self-​serving rationalization provides artists with what is, literally, a license to kill. It is a perfect example of Žižek’s interpretation of Hegel’s Cunning of Reason that “makes even the vilest crimes instruments of progress.”45 Using reason, Cashell enjoins us to get past our plebian shock and move on to the aftershock, a higher state of being where the enlightened among us can see the sublime in such artwork. But the rationale he puts forward is analogous to saying that every time I (as an artist, of course) go out and beat up a few elderly people, it brings me so close to the sickening reality of human suffering that it makes me and all those who watch my performance better people. In fact, beating up the elderly becomes an ethical imperative. If we buy into this logic, then we will also support Stockhausen’s previously mentioned suggestion that the terrorist attacks of 9/​ 11 were a great work of art—​or at least all that it might have taken to turn them into the transgressive sublime would have been an assertion by the perpetrators that this was an act not of terrorism but of art. As one philosopher pointed out in a recent conference, this all goes to show the unsustainability (he actually used the word “nonsense”)

 

Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art    449 of purely utilitarian approaches to moral questions.46 Yet this utilitarianism has become omnipresent. Whether something works or not has become the primary discourse even around acts as abhorrent as the torture of human prisoners for intelligence gathering purposes. This leads some to conclude that “our culture has almost lost the ability to have a genuinely moral conversation.”47

Bringing Ethics to the Table I have argued that the cultural framework of today’s art world creates three legs on which the misuse of animals can stand: dehumanization; sensationalism; and the provision of moral cover. If my analysis has any validity at all, it is surprising, or maybe a tribute to humanity after all, that we do not see more misuse of animals in contemporary art than we do. Or is it simply that we have adapted, that the instrumental use of animals is a routine part of our expectations? Maybe more important is to attempt to address the question of whether any possibilities exist for mitigating the incentives that seem to have become built into the culture of art to avoid the potential for animal misuse to become routine. How can we move in this direction without either incurring the wrath of those who will fight anything that vaguely smells of censorship or, conversely, being sucked into the tiresome levels of political correctness that now envelop other parts of our society? How can we encourage artists to thrive and to explore new ideas and new forms boldly and meaningfully while accepting that this should be done within some type of ethical framework regarding the moral considerability of the animal? How can we avoid, or at least minimize, the chances of artists engaging in animal misuse being rewarded for their efforts by celebrity, notoriety, and commercial success? To move in this direction, I have three suggestions: cultural; individual; and institutional. There is mounting evidence that society is recognizing the bankruptcy of modern culture. The supremacy of reason over emotion, the belief in human salvation through science and formal academic knowledge, the “purity” of form for function, the elitism of the modern intellectual, and the belief in the supremacy of “science driven decisions” as well as other aspects of the modern are being superseded. A globalized, decentralized, cyber-​linked world undermines the views propagated as certainties by traditionally modern institutions such as museums, universities, and other repositories of imposed authority. People are reconnecting with values and with the spiritual (if not necessarily the religious) as a counterbalance to the factual, the practical, and the utilitarian. This trajectory seems unstoppable and, when it reaches the fine arts, will undermine the modern dehumanization that I have described. Of course, in the past the arts used to be at the forefront of such change. No longer. The high arts are now themselves trapped within modern institutions that will resist the undermining of their authority. Such resistance will ensure that the road away from the modern will be long and relatively slow, and it may be that, by the time we move forward

 

450   Joe Zammit-Lucia sufficiently, the animal’s place in art will have been further degraded. We therefore need to explore other methods—​ones that may even bring to bear the enduring power of the modern institutions referred to here. Institutions are made of people, and it is at the individual level that the first steps need to be made. In today’s art critical world it remains much easier, and more likely to be well viewed by one’s peers, to step up and support bold, transgressive art that pushes the envelope than to criticize such art on the basis of its misuse of the animal. It is also particularly difficult to embark on such criticism in a way that, when such is deserved, criticism undermines the value of that art rather than creating a platform for increasing its notoriety and sensationalism. If we are to move forward, we need a greater amount of thoughtful criticism of art that uses animals, and we need that criticism to engage with the art world from the inside, broadening the debate beyond the language of art theory to include the languages of ethics, social decency, and the human–​animal relationship in evaluating such artwork. Such engagement from the inside is the only way that thinking can evolve and reasonable positions explored while avoiding the polarization and tedium created by the endless regurgitation of the entrenched positions of ideologues on both sides. Critics who step up to the mark also need to be prepared to challenge the mantra of freedom of artistic expression at any cost, a difficult task for those whose career lies within the art establishment. Finally, it is important that this debate is engaged in the mainstream art world and on the pages of the mainstream art media, not just among the small numbers of people specifically engaged in animal art issues or in the pages of journals targeted at those interested in animal studies. There are hopeful signs of an increasing momentum in this direction. The previously mentioned CAA survey of its membership returned results overwhelmingly in favor of animal protection. A full 92 percent of respondents supported banning cruelty (undefined) to animals in the creation of an artwork, and 81 percent supported the development of institutional guidelines. The CAA board accepted the need to set up a committee to put together such guidelines, though timing remains uncertain.48 My final suggestion is institutional and draws on the power that institutions still hold. I started this chapter by suggesting that artists should be subject to no more restrictions or afforded any greater rights than other members of society. Artists are, in fact, already bound by animal welfare regulations just like anyone else. But these regulations are not fit for purpose. Eventual guidelines drawn up by CAA or any other body would go a long way toward institutionalizing animal protection in the arts. However, such guidelines are, by the nature of these things, likely to be broad, especially as CAA attempts the difficult task of balancing animal protection with its defense of freedom of expression. In the sciences, scientists who wish to embark on experiments that utilize animals almost always require the approval of some type of ethics committee or institutional review board. These multidisciplinary groups evaluate such work on many dimensions including the ethical and include the views of laypeople. Could a similar model be followed for the evaluation of art that utilizes or depicts animals? Could all art schools require students to submit proposals for such a review before they are allowed to utilize

 

Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art    451 animals in their work? Could museums submit their proposals for multidisciplinary review prior to mounting exhibits? Such committees would not need to be given powers of veto. Their aim need not be to pass judgment on difficult issues. Rather, their value would lie in simply asking questions and creating a forum for having a debate that currently does not even exist. Bringing into the debate viewpoints other than those of the art establishment itself leads to an expansion of perspectives. Assuming we can find ways for alternative perspectives to be valued rather than treated with disdain by the art establishment, this might allow the exploration of ways to move forward in an area that is fraught with difficulty. It would be a soft hurdle that ensures that artists did, in fact, question whether they can achieve their aims in ways other than through the misuse of animals while art educators and curators would have a forum to help them explore issues that are laden with complexity and uncertainty. And for those who would object to having such forums—​however soft their functions—​why might it be appropriate for scientists’ work to be discussed in this fashion but not that of artists? Some institutions already have such review mechanisms in place. Others fight the very idea tooth and nail.

Conclusion Artists get noticed in today’s competitive, media-​driven world through sensationalism. Sensationalism pays. When sensationalism is layered onto the dehumanization of modern art and the provision of moral cover by much of the art establishment, the stage is set for the misuse of animals in artistic expression. The animal becomes mere material in the artist’s quest to explore new concepts and new forms. To boldly go! The issues raised by the use and misuse of animals in art are complex and difficult to resolve. Yet the current debate has become sterile and largely unproductive. The art community feels duty-​bound to defend freedom of expression at any cost—​however distasteful and morally offensive artists’ behavior—​and continues to value transgression seemingly without being interested in a debate about whether such transgression should be limitless. Animal welfare groups feel duty-​bound to protest in the most vehement fashion even though their protests are part of the sensation that contributes to the artists’ success. This pantomime has become part of the artwork itself. “Morality is not a body of knowledge that can be learned by rote or codified in general ethical codes or decision procedures.”49 Traditional censorship approaches are crude and unlikely to be either desirable or successful. A change in social culture is under way, and contemporary art will catch up with that change in due course. However, there are opportunities to accelerate the process of giving the moral considerability of animals a seat at the table of contemporary art. Individuals can step up to engage the art critical world in discussions from within, while institutions can establish processes that have already been shown to be valuable in other fields and that can broaden and enrich the debate around the ethic of the use of animals in artistic expression.

 

452   Joe Zammit-Lucia Steve Baker sums up some of the issues in a recent interview: There are no limits to what can be done to an animal by an artist, whether through thoughtlessness or, occasionally, through cruelty. In terms of where artists choose to set their limits, there are some genuinely complex cases where the artist is clearly working with seriousness, awareness, and a sense of integrity, but where I’m personally uncomfortable with some of their decisions and actions. My approach has generally been to report in detail on these works and on the artist’s account of them, and to leave my readers to draw their own conclusions. There is no single “correct” limit.50

While there may, indeed, be no single correct limit, is it time we broke out of the detached observational approach? Is it time we stopped avoiding engagement in a challenging debate by framing the issue as one of personal judgment rather than as an ethical debate where the moral considerability of the animal is becoming part of our social norms? Contested moral considerations, fraught and variable as they are, need not and indeed maybe should not be the primary determinants of artists’ behaviors. But it is hard to continue to argue that they should not even have a seat at the table.

Notes 1. Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1975), 67. 2. Zoe Peled, “Discussing Animal Rights and the Arts,” Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 19 (Winter 2011): 53–​61. 3. Richard Serra, cited in Giovanni Aloi, Art & Animals (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 7. 4. Karl Schulze-​Hagen, Frank Steinheimer, Ragnar Kinzelbach, et  al., “Avian Taxidermy in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance,” Journal für Ornithologie 144, no. 4 (2003): 459–​478. 5. P. A. Morris, A History of Taxidermy. Art, Science and Bad Taste (Ascot:  MPM Publishing, 2011). 6. Aloi, Art & Animals. 7. Joe Zammit-​Lucia, The Third Ray, October 30, 2009, http://​www.thethirdray.com/​photography/​man-​and-​animals-​amy-​steins-​domesticated/​ (accessed November 23, 2012). 8. Carol Vogel, “Bull Market for Hirst in Sotheby’s 2-​Day Sale,” New York Times, September 16, 2008, http://​www.nytimes.com/​2008/​09/​17/​arts/​design/​17auct.html (accessed November 22, 2012). 9. Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys: Coyote (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008). 10. Tate, Joseph Beuys Coyote 1980, http://​www.tate.org.uk/​art/​artworks/​beuys-​coyote-​i-​ ar00695 (accessed November 26, 2012). 11. Diego Guerrero, “Responde artista Habacuc Guillermo Vargas, quien exhibió atado, sin agua ni alimento, a un perro,” El Tiempo, April 26, 2008, http://​www.eltiempo.com/​ archivo/​documento/​CMS-​4125438 (accessed November 22, 2012). 12. Linda Kalof, Looking at Animals in Human History (London:  Reaktion Books, 2007), 162–​163.

 

Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art    453 13. Steve Baker, “Tate Magazine,” September 2001, http://​www.ekac.org/​haunted.html (accessed Neovember 22, 2012). 14. Jon Steeves, “The Snuffing of Sniffy: An interview with Rick Gibson,” Vancouver Review, Spring 1992. http://​www.odlt.org/​interviews/​rick_​gibson_​interview.pdf (accessed November 22, 2012). 15. Eduardo Kac, GFP Bunny, 2000, http://​www.ekac.org/​gfpbunny.html (accessed November 23, 2012). 16. Barbara Hoffman, “Censorship II,” Art Journal 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 14. 17. Richard Storr, “Censorship II,” Art Journal 50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 15. 18. A. Tommasini, “Music; The Devil Made Him Do It,” New  York Times, September 30, 2011, http://​www.nytimes.com/​2001/​09/​30/​arts/​music-​the-​devil-​made-​him-​do-​it.html. (accessed November 22, 2012). 19. Peter Schmidt, “Supreme Court Sides with College Art Association in Dogfighting-​Video Case,” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 20, 2010, http://​chronicle.com/​blogs/​ticker/​ supreme-​court-​sides-​with-​college-​art-​association-​in-​dogfighting-​video-​case/​23297 (accessed November 23, 2012). 20. P. B. Jaskot and L. Downs, “CAA Statement,” CAA News Online, July 28, 2009, http://​ www.collegeart.org/​news/​2009/​07/​28/​caa-​signs-​anticensorship-​amicus-​brief-​for-​us-​v-​ stevens/​(accessed July 17, 2012). 21. BBC, “Liquidising Goldfish ‘Not a Crime,’” BBC News Online, May 19, 2003, http://​news. bbc.co.uk/​2/​hi/​3040891.stm (accessed November 23, 2012). 22. Carol Gigliotti, “Leonardo’s Choice:  The Ethics of Artists Working with Genetic Technologies,” AI & Society 20 (2006): 29. 23. Yvette Watt, “Artists, Animals and Ethics,” Antennae:  The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 19 (Winter 2011): 66 24. Steve Baker and Carol Gigliotti, “We Have Always Been Transgenic,” AI & Society 20 (2006): 37. 25. Nicholas Serota, On Hirst, April 20, 2003, http://​www.guardian.co.uk/​artanddesign/​2003/​ apr/​20/​thesaatchigallery.art7 (accessed November 26, 2012). 26. G. D. Sherman and J. Haidt, “Cuteness and Disgust: The Humanizing and Dehumanizing Effects of Emotion,” Emotion Review 3, no. 3 (July 2011): 245. 27. Richard L. Tapper, “Animality, Humanity, Morality, Society,” in What Is an Animal, ed. Tim Ingold (London: Routledge, 1988), 47–​62. 28. T. Dean, “Art as Symptom: Zizek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism,” Diacritics 32, no. 2 (2002), 21–​41. 29. José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), 19. 30. Alexander Alberro, “Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966–​ 1977,” in Conceptual Art:  A  Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), xvi–​xxxvii. 31. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). 32. Sanna Kannisto, Personal Statement, http://​sannakannisto.com/​index.php?option=com_​ content&view=article&id=185&Itemid=5 (accessed November 26, 2012). 33. Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, snæbjörnsdóttir/​wilson, http://​www.snaebjornsdottirwilson.com/​index.php (accessed November 26, 2012). 34. Robin Held, Genesis: Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics (Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery, 2012).

 

454   Joe Zammit-Lucia 35. Deborah Thompson, “Risking Sentiment,” in An Orange County Almanac and Other Essays, ed. Joe Zammit-​Lucia (New York: WOLFoundation.org), 40. 36. Anthony I. Jack, et al., “fMRI Reveals Reciprocal Inhibition between Social and Physical Cognitive Domains,” NeuroImage 66 (2013): 385–​401. 37. Anthony I. Jack, pers. Comm., February 25, 2013, publications in review. 38. Lucy Kimbell, “An Aesthetic Enquiry into Organizing of Some Rats and Some People,” Tamara—​Journal for Critical Organization Enquiry 9, nos. 3–​4 (2011): 77–​92. 39. Excerpt from CAA Board Resolutions following the report from the Task Force on the Use of Human and Animal Subjects in Art: Artists and other professionals in the visual arts must be allowed the full range of expressive possibilities in order for art to maintain a vital role in human society. With that expression, however, comes responsibility when artists and others use animal subjects in art. CAA does not endorse any work of art that results in cruelty toward animal subjects. Further, given that animals do not have the right of refusal, CAA calls on artists and other professionals in the visual arts to examine with the greatest of care any practices that require the use of animals in art. To perpetuate this ethical standard, professionals in the visual arts should consider the following issues and questions before engaging in any practice using live animals: • No work of art should, in the course of its creation, cause physical or psychological pain, suffering, or distress to an animal. • CAA recommends that any user of animals in art pose these three questions before beginning the work of art: Can you make the same point by replacing the animal? By reducing the number of animals? By refining the use of animals? • Have you explored the institutional standards and guidelines at your home institution, if any, that apply to the use of animal subjects for research? • Are you aware of the national standards and guidelines for the use of animals in research, such as those produced by the National Science Foundation or by other professional organizations to which you belong? • Have you discussed any practices that may result in pain or discomfort for the animal subject? Have you considered alternatives? • Have you done research on the biology of your animal subject to understand aspects of its physiognomy and experience? Full text of the resolutions at http://​www.collegeart.org/​resolutions/​humanandanimalsubjects (accessed March 6, 2013). 40. Arthur C. Danto, “‘Sensation’ in Brooklyn,” Nation, October 14, 1999, http://​www.thenation.com/​article/​sensation-​brooklyn# (accessed November 26, 2012). 41. Anonymous, Marco Evaristti, October 14, 2012, http://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Marco_​ Evaristti (accessed November 26, 2012). 42. Jonathan Haidt and Selin Kesebir, “Morality,” in Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th ed., vol. 2, ed. Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Lindzey Gardner (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), 812. 43. Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2002), 21. 44. Kieran Cashell, Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 199. 45. Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), 116.

 

Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art    455 46. David Wood, pers. comm., November 4, 2012. 47. David P. Gushee, quoted in “‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ through a Theological Lens,” New York Times, February 23, 2013, A12. 48. Linda Downs, executive director, College Arts Association, pers. comm., March 6, 2013. 49. Jonathan Haidt and Selin Kesebir, “Morality,” in Fiske et  al., Handbook of Social Psychology, 798. 50. Steve Baker, “Animals, Artists, and the Question of Ethics: A Dialogue with Steve Baker,” Blog of the University of Minnesota Press, January 30, 2013, http://​www.uminnpressblog. com/​2013/​01/​animals-​artists-​and-​question-​of-​ethics.html (accessed February 2, 2013).

Further Reading Baker, Steve. Artist/Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Haidt, Jonathan. Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New  York: Pantheon, 2012. Wolfe, Cary. “From Dead Meat to Glow in the Dark Bunnies Seeing the Animal Question in Contemporary Art.” Parallax 12, no. 1, (2006): 95–​109.

 

Chapter 24

Anim als in Fol kl ore Boria Sax

The Fables of Aesop Early collectors of folklore and folk literature in the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were enticed, perplexed, and amazed by the way human beings in folktales would interact closely with animals or even with trees and streams. Folklore addresses a longing for intimacy with animals and nature, which runs through contemporary culture. That desire has elsewhere been formulated in very abstract, rhetorical, or indirect ways, but folklore is nearly unique in being able to envision what equality between animals and human beings might actually be like. That is because anthropocentrism, despite its dominance in Western culture, has seldom prevailed in folklore. This can make the subject attractive to participants in movements such as environmentalism and animal rights, who often aspire to a biocentric or zoocentric orientation. Nevertheless, folklore also often presents us with a world where extreme violence is frequently taken for granted and where life, either animal or human, does not necessarily count for much at all. Without human supremacy, there is also little or no sense of human stewardship, and concepts such as the legal protection of animals hardly even come up. Many widely disseminated stories probably come ultimately from animal divination, which was universal throughout the ancient world, especially in Greco-​Roman civilization. Birds were often accorded prophetic significance, since their behavior reflected the seasons and the weather. In Greece, the appearance of the swallow announced the coming of spring and the time for planting, while cranes and storks marked the arrival of autumn. Toward the end of the Iliad, King Priam of Troy, hoping to obtain the body of Hector his son from Achilles, prays to Zeus to send an omen. Immediately a huge black eagle (possibly a raven) appears, and Priam knows his petition will be successful. In the secularized context of fables, the behavior of birds and other creatures remained a source of important lessons.1

 

Animals in Folklore    457 The beast fable is probably the oldest genre of literature that focuses mostly on animals, and it is certainly the most influential. Although we now know the fables of Aesop primarily from books, their dissemination has followed a sort of pattern that we generally associate with oral traditions. They have been passed on informally and have no canonical versions. Individual tellers are entirely free not only to change the wording but also to alter the story or append different morals. The form, social context, and style of Aesopian fables have varied greatly over millennia, but they have never, even temporarily, lost their popularity. Their tradition actually begins not with the Greek Aesop but with Sumero-​Akkadian contest literature and animal proverbs, some of which exist in manuscripts that go back to the early second millennium BCE. The contest literature has given fables the dialectical form, in which two parties such as a hare and a tortoise or a grasshopper and an ant compete for supremacy. The proverbs have given the tradition its linguistic economy. These ancient texts promoted stereotypical concepts of animals that have continued to this day. Already, not long after the start of the second millennium BCE the fox is renowned for cleverness, and the lion is “king of beasts.”2 The beast fable is best known, however, from Greco-​Roman models. Fable of Aesop is a generic term for an anecdote, especially one involving animals, written in antiquity. Aesop himself is a legendary character who, according to an anonymous biography from the first century CE or earlier, lived on the Island of Samos in the seventh century BCE. He was a slave, a stutterer, and a hunchback. When his new master brings Aesop home from the slave market, the mistress of the house is terrified at first, since she takes the new purchase for a monster. Aesop gains his freedom for his skill in telling stories and becomes the most trusted councilor of the king. Eventually, however, he declares the revered Oracle at Delphi to be a fraud, and angry villagers throw him off a mountain to his death.3 In the perspective of Greek culture, which idealized the human form, Aesop would have appeared to be half-​animal and thus qualified as a mediator between the human and bestial worlds. Most fables traditionally attributed to Aesop are either later or earlier than their reputed author, and there is little evidence that the storyteller ever existed; however, the stylistic uniformity of the early Greco-​Roman fables suggests that they may reflect the personality of a single editor. This might, however, have been not Aesop but Demetrius of Phaleron, a governor of Alexandria at the end of the third century BCE, who compiled a collection of fables that has been lost. However that may be, the two most extensive collections of Aesopian fables that have come down to us are one in Latin by Phaedrus, written in the first century CE, and one in Greek by Babrius, written in the second or early third. Remarkably, both of these authors were, like the legendary Aesop, among the extremely few slaves in ancient Greece and Rome who not only attained their freedom but also passed on their names and legacy to posterity. As Phaedrus, especially, makes very clear, the fable was a sort of secret language, with which especially slaves might evade censorship and comment upon the foibles of the mighty.4 In the anthropocentric world of the Greeks and Romans, this authorship also reflected a sense that slaves were close to being animals and, for that reason, were able to interpret bestial behavior.

 

458   Boria Sax We all know some fables of Aesop from childhood, such as “The Tortoise and the Hare,” “The Grasshopper and the Ant,” and “The Boy who Cried Wolf,” so examples of the genre seem almost superfluous. So that we do not take the literary conventions of the fable for granted, however, let us look at one titled “The Lion, the Ass, and the Fox” (in many other editions, “The Lion’s Share”): The lion, the ass, and the fox, having made an agreement together, went off hunting for game. When they had taken plenty of game, the lion asked the ass to divide the spoils between them. The ass divided the food into three equal parts and invited the lion to choose his portion. The lion became enraged, pounced on the ass, and devoured him. Then the lion asked the fox to divide the spoils. The fox took all that they had accumulated and gathered it into one large heap, retaining only the tiniest morsel for himself. Then he invited the lion to choose. The lion then said: “Well, my good fellow, who taught you to divide so well? You are excellent at it.” The fox replied: “I learned this technique from the ass’s misfortune.” Moral: This fable shows that we learn from the misfortunes of others.5

Blumenberg proposes that the animals in Aesop’s fables were a reversion of the anthropomorphic gods (e.g., Athena or Hera) to their original forms as animals, which parodied the frivolity of the deities’ endless leisure and mocked their pretense of heroism.6 The fable quoted seems to allude to the Greek practice of taking most of the meat from sacrifices for human consumption while leaving mostly bone and gristle for the deities, a practice that would be called into question in times of crisis, when the gods seemed to be demanding more. The fable may even satirize a passage in Hesiod’s Theogony, where the cunning Prometheus (represented by the fox) tricks Zeus (the lion) into picking the lesser of two piles from a sacrificed ox, thus bringing a terrible punishment on humankind (the ass).7 Just beneath the placid surface of these tales, we can sense a terrifying and far more primeval world, which is pervaded by extreme violence and magic. They are filled with the sort of animal sages and tricksters that, despite being deprived of their more numinous qualities, resemble those found in zoomorphic mythologies from Africa to the Americas. Much like the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century and Disney Studios in the twentieth, Aesop (whether he was one person or many) imposes a façade of bourgeois order and rationality on preternatural materials. One might even say that Aesop represents an ancient “Disneyfication” of myth.

The Tradition of the Beast Fable The motif of a fox judged by a lion echoes a Mesopotamian tale known as “The Fable of the Fox” in which animal proverbs and contest literature of the sort that gave rise

 

Animals in Folklore    459 to Aesopian tradition were first brought together in a continuous narrative. We know this story only from fragments of a large tablet found in the library of the Assyrian king Assurbanipal at Nineveh and dating from the seventh century BCE. In it, a fox and wolf form an alliance, but then a terrible drought occurs; the wolf accuses the fox of bringing on the catastrophe, and the lion sits in judgment. Much of the narrative has been lost, and we do not know exactly how the trial goes, except that the fox is ultimately vindicated and a downpour of rain begins.8 This tale migrated east to Persia and India where it provides a frame for the Panchatantra, attributed to Vishnu Sharma written down in the second or third century CE, in which two jackals (formerly the wolf and fox) are courtiers to the lion king. One is loyal, while the other is deceitful and stirs up trouble; they use numerous tales to explain their councils to the king, some of which have analogs in the fables of Aesop. In addition, the Panchatantra incorporated tales from a collection of fables originally written in Pali around the fourth century BCE, known as the Jakatas, reportedly told by the Buddha himself about experiences from his previous lives in human and animal forms. The Panchatantra migrated back toward the west and was loosely translated by Abdullah Ibn al-​Muqaffa in the twelfth century CE as Khalila wa Dimna. This work, in turn, was soon loosely translated into Greek, Latin, and several Western languages and evolved into the European cycle of Reynard the Fox.9 Fables in the tradition of Aesop continued to thrive in large part because they could be adapted to a vast number of purposes. In Europe, fables in the Aesopian tradition were given Christian morals by an author known as Physiologus, probably Didymus of Alexandria, in the second century CE, and later in bestiaries of the High Middle Ages. As the Roman Empire became increasingly Christianized, Avianus wrote a collection of animal fables in the fourth century CE to help preserve traditional pagan culture. In the latter twelfth or early thirteenth century, Berechiah ha-​Nakdan used fables to illustrate Jewish moral and religious lessons. At roughly the same time Marie de France and others adapted the fables to tell of life in a feudal court, with its pageantry, power struggles, and amorous ideals. Many Aesopian fables also found their way into works of popular science such as The History of Four-​Footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects, by Topsell and Moffet, published in mid-​seventeenth-​century England.10 In the latter seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, distinguished authors such as Jean de Lafontaine (France), Ivan Krylov (Russia), and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Germany) gave the fable unprecedented prestige. However, with the growing emphasis on individual authorship, it becomes far more a genre of literature than of folklore, so we must look elsewhere for tales of animals that reflect ongoing oral traditions. The fables of Aesop have never been confined to anthologies but regularly entered political rhetoric, scientific writings, and discussions of every conceivable kind. It is possible to view the beast fable not only as a folkloric and literary genre but also as a distinctive perspective on animals and their relationship to human beings. The previously quoted fable, like most, is anthropomorphic in that the characters speak and enter into agreements in the manner of men and women. Illustrators of Aesopian fables generally portray animals, so far as possible, as wearing clothes and walking upright.

 

460   Boria Sax Nevertheless, the anthropomorphism in the tales has distinct limits. Unlike people, the animals in fable are not individuals but simply play roles according to their species. Millennia before Darwin or Herbert Spencer, the fables show the sort of philosophy that we know as social Darwinism. The characters live in a world where the governing rule is, “Eat or be eaten.” The fables may illustrate morals, but they tend to conflate virtue with victory or at least survival. Defeat almost never has anything tragic, heroic, nobly unselfish, or otherwise redeeming about it, as it often does in myths. The same one-​dimensional quality that adapts the characters in beast fables to serve as bearers of intellectual lessons also deprives them of pathos. When the ass is eaten by the lion, we are not likely to spend much time in lamentation. The collection of tales that is probably closest to the spirit of the original beast fables of any since at least the Roman Empire is Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, a collection of tales told by African Americans in Georgia, written down in dialect by Joel Chandler Harris and first published in 1880. As a frame for the stories, Harris has an old black man known as Uncle Remus telling stories to a little white boy. The central character in most of the tales is Brer Rabbit, who constantly matches wits with other animals such as Brer Fox, Bear, Mr. Buzzard, and Terrapin. Uncle Remus is gentle and wise after a fashion, but he becomes stern and dismissive whenever he is asked about more than he is ready to tell. Uncle Remus shares enslavement with such legendary fabulists as Aesop, Babrius, Phaedrus, and Scheherazade, narrator of Arabian Nights Entertainments. In the 1960s through the 1970s, as Black Nationalist movements rose to prominence in the United States, black militants often condemned Uncle Remus as an “Uncle Tom,” a servile Negro who upheld the practices of a racist society. They viewed Brer Rabbit, by contrast, as a black rebel, who had been deprived by the narrator of his proper dignity. The stories, however, are far too farcical and outrageous for such heavy-​handed, political moralizing. Like most other tales of tricksters, they are essentially models of how people should not, though often do, behave. Status as a slave does not necessarily reduce all of life to questions of rebellion or submission. It does, nevertheless, at times provide a vantage point from which one can observe the human zoo as well as the bestial society with special clarity. By far the most famous of the Brer Rabbit tales is known as “The Wonderful Tar Baby Story.” In it, Brer Fox makes a doll out of tar and leaves it by the side of the road where Brer Rabbit will pass. When the doll does not respond to his repeated greetings, Brer Rabbit becomes infuriated and starts to pummel it. With every blow, the rabbit finds himself more firmly enmeshed in bonds of tar. Brer Fox comes along and captures him and then tries to torment his captive by threatening to kill him in all sorts of horrible ways, including roasting, hanging, and drowning. Brer Rabbit pleads with his captor, saying that he is willing to accept any of these fates as long as Brer Fox does not throw him in the briar patch. Brer Fox does just that, and Brer Rabbit, who actually is completely at home in the briar patch, escapes.11 There is a lively debate about the origins of the Brer Rabbit stories. Some scholars believe that Brer Rabbit is primarily a figure brought over with the slave trade, a version

 

Animals in Folklore    461 of a trickster such as Anansi the Spider (West Africa) or Hare (East Africa). Some of the tales are derived from European stories of Reynard the Fox. But, while individual stories may have different points of origin, the major protagonist and the essential inspiration of the series is probably Native American. Brer Rabbit could be a version of Mishaboz or Nanabozho, the trickster hare in many tales of the Algonquin Indians who were at times enslaved and assimilated into African American culture. The story of the tar baby has elsewhere been recorded only among Native Americans where it is known in a few versions.12

The Fairy Tales of Grimm One way to think of the fairy tale is as a partial return of the fable to its pre-​Aesopian, mythical roots. As the fable had been a favorite genre of the European Enlightenment, the fairy tale became the favorite of European Romanticism. While the plots of fables had been reduced to their barest essentials, fairy tales often had long, meandering stories with unexpected turns and digressions. While fables generally ended in morals, fairy tales often eluded every attempt at interpretation. Magical aspects of the fable had been largely confined to conventions such as having animals speak like people and were obscured by a façade of rationality. With their far greater narrative and thematic complexity, fairy tales were unabashedly magical. The resemblance between the two forms is notable as well. Both, as already mentioned, are filled with talking animals and often even grant speech to trees or streams. While their actual origins are far more complex, both forms have usually been attributed largely to marginalized social groups. In the case of fables, the reputed authors were slaves, while fairy tales were ascribed to peasants and, to a very large extent, women.13 But most significantly, both forms, especially the fairy tale, are not anthropocentric, despite having been developed in highly anthropocentric societies. At least since the Brothers Grimm made fairy tales a subject of serious study, readers have found them both extremely beautiful and unaccountably strange. Since they owed very little to either Christianity or science, fairy tales also did not seem to belong to modern civilization. The tales had to be placed in some other realm in which their odd perspective, enjoyed from a distance, could not interfere with duty or reason. In the first edition of their tales, this realm was the archaic myths of Germany where the Grimms believed fairy tales had originated as well as of the peasant farms and villages where they had allegedly been preserved. In later editions, as they adapted the tales to a juvenile public, the realm became the enchanted world of childhood. Two centuries of intense study still have not dissipated this perplexity, and recently Jack Zipes argued that fairy tales were a resurgence of Greco-​Roman religion, in which the old deities had taken other forms.14 But the occasional references to motifs from old mythologies were likely to have been inserted by highly educated storytellers who provided the Grimm brothers with

 

462   Boria Sax tales. More significantly, derivation from old myths cannot explain the zoocentric and animistic nature of these tales. The paganism of the Greeks and Romans was not less anthropocentric than Christianity. Both religions featured deities in human form arranged in a hierarchical bureaucracy. Fairy tales are full of mysterious powers, often associated with animals, but they do not have any pantheon. My view is that fairy tales were in no way anachronistic, but they revealed a facet of European and world culture that was radically at odds with the way that members of the intelligentsia of the time wished to view themselves and their history. Fairy tales represented a contemporary perspective that was opposed to highly systematized varieties of paganism, Christianity, and deism. The magical characters in fairy tales are not so much deities as local and household spirits such as brownies (Scotland), hobs (England), kobolds (Germany), elves (Northern Europe), trolls (Scandinavia), lars (Rome), domovoi (Eastern Europe), kami (Japan), jinni (Arabia), spirit animals (Plains Indians), and many others. Such spirits are able to inspire belief alongside a great many universal religions such as Greco-​Roman paganism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, although, or because, they are seldom very profoundly integrated into a religious context. They are at times conflated with such figures as goddesses, saints, demons, or bodhisattvas, but they generally belong more to folklore than to religion. The prominence of these figures remained one of the defining features of fairy tales. According to Vladimir Propp’s study, The Morphology of the Fairy Tale, the Helper/​ Donor, which so often took on zoomorphic form, is the fourth of seven essential roles in Russian, and perhaps all, fairy tales.15 In the earliest version of “Cinderella,” from the ninth century CE in China, the protagonist is assisted not by a fairy godmother but by a talking fish.16 But the often zoocentric nature of such helpers was hard for members of the European intelligentsia to accept. Animal helpers were demonized by the English and anthropomorphized by the French, while the Germans dealt with their discomfort by displacing the tales, and their origin, into remote and exotic realms. The attribution of fairy tales to people who either lived in ancient times or were low in the social hierarchy was a way to disclaim responsibility for material that, though lyrical and entertaining, seemed irrational and bizarre. Serfdom, a status at least close to slavery, was not abolished in the kingdom of Hesse, the native country of the Grimm Brothers, until 1811, when their collection of fairy tales was already well under way. In viewing their stories as the voice of the peasantry, the brothers were, therefore, placing them in a long tradition of storytelling slaves, which as we have seen now extends from Aesop to Uncle Remus.

The Mother of All Tales In 1811, Jacob Grimm wrote and distributed a call directed to “all friends of German poetry and history,” in which he called on readers to supply sources of fairy tales. The

 

Animals in Folklore    463 one tale that he upheld as a model was “The Juniper Tree,” which would finally be tale #22 in the seventh and final (1857) edition of the Grimms’s collection. The highly accomplished painter Philipp Otto Runge freely recorded the tale in dialect from an oral account by a peasant nursemaid, probably in the vicinity of Hamburg. The tale had been published a few years before Jacob’s flyer in an antiquarian journal and immediately created a sensation among early admirers of folklore.17 “The Juniper Tree” begins about 2,000 years ago, as a beautiful young wife is peeling an apple beside a juniper tree. The blade slips, she cuts her finger, and drops of blood fall in the snow. She wishes for a child as red as blood and as white as snow and then goes inside to her home. Nine months later, she bears a son and dies in childbirth and then is buried at her request under the juniper tree. After a time of mourning, her husband remarries and has a daughter, Marlene, with his second wife. The new mistress of the house hates her husband’s son; one day as the son is reaching for an apple in a chest, she severs his head. She then chops up his body and makes a stew of it that she feeds to her husband, who devours it ecstatically. When he has finished, Marlene (who mistakenly thinks she killed her brother) wraps up the bones in a silk handkerchief and buries them under the juniper tree. The tree begins to stir and a mist rises from it, and then a flame. A bird emerges from the flame and flies into the sky, gloriously singing: My mother, she slew me, My father, he ate me, My sister, Marlene, Gathered my bones, Tied them in silk, For the juniper tree. Tweet, tweet, what a fine bird am I!

A smith gives the bird a gold chain for his song, a shoemaker gives it a pair of red shoes, and millers give it a millstone, all of which the bird carries away in its talons. He flies back to his home, still singing, and gives the shoes to his sister and the gold chain to his father. Finally, he drops the millstone on the head of the wife, killing her. The bird seems to be consumed in flames, but when he vanishes the boy has reappeared. Together with his father and sister, he goes into the house to eat.18 Claudine Farbe-​Vassus in her book The Singular Beast provides an important key to reconstructing the original context of the tale, when she points out that in many traditional European tales, pigs and people, especially young boys, are close to being interchangeable. In the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, these include the famous “Hansel and Gretel” (#15), which much resembles “The Juniper Tree,” where the wicked witch keeps Hansel in a cage and endeavors to fatten him up like a pig for slaughter.19 It also includes “The Children Who Played Butcher,” published in the first edition of their tales but left out of subsequent ones because its violence, was, even for the Grimms, too extreme. In it, a father demonstrates to his children how to slaughter a pig, and they then practice on one another.

 

464   Boria Sax In traditional European peasant culture, domestic pigs were fed scraps from the household table, were allowed to run almost freely, and at times mated with their wild counterparts. They would be cared for primarily by females who might develop a special bond with them. Eventually, however, after all the family members had gathered to pay their last respects, a pig would be ritually slaughtered at the time of the winter solstice or slightly later. The slaughter would be performed carefully by a trained specialist who was highly respected in the village and would perform the work in such a way as both to avoid causing unnecessary pain and to properly prepare the body for dismemberment. This would be followed by a grand feast of “St. Pig” lasting throughout the night, during which the animal would be consumed. The meal was accompanied by games, songs, dances, farces, and wearing of masks. The remains of the pig would then be disposed of according to rituals that varied from place to place. Sometimes a leg would be offered to Saint Anthony, the patron of pigs.20 At least in its original inspiration, “The Juniper Tree” is about the young Marlene, who is the only character in the tale with a name, coming to terms with the slaughter of a pig she has nourished. For the Brothers Grimm, as for almost all pioneers in the collection of folklore, the peasantry belonged to nature and thus was not to be individualized, so they did not much concern themselves with the cultural context in which tales were told. There were aspects of peasant culture that they probably would not have been able to comprehend, at least not without relinquishing their idealization of “the people.” For all their extravagant magic, the tales of Grimm present us with a world that is highly structured and in which different spheres are generally very clearly marked off from one another—​evil from good, nature from culture, animals from people, earth from heaven, women from men, and commoners from royalty. One may move back and forth between these kingdoms, yet the boundaries separating them remain unambiguous. This is why many characters in their fairy tales often shape-​shift between human and animal identities, but hybrid beings such as centaurs or mermaids are very rare. This ambiguity of the pig, poised between the realms of animals and human beings, would have seemed very strange to the Grimms and their colleagues. The rituals surrounding a pig’s slaughter, had they known of these practices, might have seemed barbaric, in rather the way Voodoo and Santeria appear to many people today.

Animals in Contemporary Folklore In the late eighteenth through the mid-​ twentieth centuries, folklorists generally assumed that oral traditions were gradually dying out as society became increasingly more rational and that legends had to be recorded before they disappeared forever. Scholars felt the need to search for those legends and traditions in remote outposts far removed from urban civilization, where folkways were relatively uncontaminated by popular and literary culture. Today, that perspective is becoming difficult to even imagine. With the Internet, there does not seem to be any need to seek out folklore, since it is

 

Animals in Folklore    465 all around us. That ubiquity, however, creates new difficulties, as it is increasingly hard to differentiate folklore from other activities such as literature, popular culture, and science. We no longer consider the “folk” to be nearly unlettered people in exotic places, but simply everyone, academics very much included. An Aesopic tradition continues in urban legends, anecdotes passed on without exact attribution but usually told in such a zestful but earnest tone that listeners seldom think to doubt their veracity. These stories are short and almost plausible, generally have an unexpected twist at the end, and address secret fears. In one, a hunter shoots down a huge deer and then lays his expensive, high-​powered rifle across the antlers to be photographed with the trophy. The deer suddenly gets up, still carrying the rifle, and runs away into the woods with it. Folklorist Jan Brunvand calls this type of tale “the animal’s revenge.”21 The stag is an extremely old symbol of Christ, and this story, for all its modern setting, could almost be a medieval allegory of death, resurrection, and divine retribution. The mythic dimension is more overt in the story of the six to eight ravens kept on the grounds of the Tower of London, ostensibly because of an old legend that “Britain will fall” if they leave. They are said to have lived at the Tower since ancient times but were actually imported only in the 1880s to serve as props for tales of Gothic horror told to tourists. The legend dates from World War II, when the ravens were used to warn the British of approaching bombs and planes, and the experience of shared peril bonded them to the people of London. Like myths and legends of antiquity, this has been displaced from history into the indefinite past, essentially the “Once upon a time …” of fairy tales.22 The rhetoric and methods of science contribute mightily to the dissemination of folklore. Technologically sophisticated devices such as video cameras that operate under water or pick up infrared images constantly show unexplained flickers and outlines, which can suggest the presence of an ape-​man, a mermaid, or a dragon. As people do more tests, these mysteries accumulate, and speculations are quickly spread via the Internet. However, this phenomenon is actually not unprecedented. The rise of early modern science during the Renaissance also produced a big upsurge in sightings of mermaids and other mythological creatures from antiquity. This paradoxical symbiosis of science and folklore is perhaps best exemplified by a recent increase in animal divination. This acquired renewed popularity when Paul the Octopus of the Oberhausen Zoo in Germany became an international celebrity by successfully predicting the outcomes of all seven games of the German team plus the final in the World Cup football (i.e., soccer) games in 2010. The method of prediction was carefully designed according to methods used by scientific researchers to eliminate bias. Before each game, Paul was placed before two jars of mussels, one with the logo for each of the opposing teams, and his selection of a jar was taken as the prediction of an eventual winner. Statisticians calculated that the probability of the correct predictions being due to chance was miniscule. No other animal has since equaled Paul’s success in prophesy, but many people are now experimenting with the use of octopuses, elephants, pythons, cows, otters, goats and other animals to predict the outcomes of sporting events.

 

466   Boria Sax In the United States and Canada, there are now thousands of contemporary reports of sightings of Bigfoot, an ape-​like creature often estimated to be at least eight or nine feet tall, as well as scores, perhaps hundreds, of audio recordings, films, and snapshots that people claim are of the monster. The accounts come from a wide variety of observers including scientists. So why are we studying Bigfoot as a legend rather than as natural history? If Bigfeet existed, it is hardly conceivable that they could have eluded intensive searches over several decades, even centuries. For all the investigations, nobody has ever displayed a live Bigfoot, a dead Bigfoot, or a skeleton of a Bigfoot. Out of all the photographs and videos that supposedly show Bigfeet, there is probably not a single one that is clear, focused, and complete. Until recently, folklorists, apart from a very few articles in the late 1950s and early 1960s, paid hardly any attention to Bigfoot, probably because the specter is of Native American origin. Until recently, Indian stories were usually considered the province of anthropology rather than folklore. It was widely assumed, if not always explicitly stated, that Europeans represented the dominant culture, so the flow of cultural heritage would be from them to less “civilized” people. Researchers were not prepared to seriously consider the possibility that much Native American folklore had been adopted by Europeans and other non-​Native peoples. Legends of Bigfoot originated in tribes of Northern California and can be traced back in oral traditions to about 1850, though the name “Bigfoot” only was used nearly a century later.23 Bigfoot was soon conflated with Sasquatch, a creature in the folklore of Native Americans from the Canadian province of British Columbia,24 and eventually became a blend of several monsters and demons from Indian tribes throughout North America, further combined with Medieval European tales of the wild man. There are also many reports of the Chupacabra, a monster that resembles a wolf in some accounts and a lizard in others and kills goats and other animals by sucking their blood. This monster was probably first reported in Puerto Rico in the 1990s, from where it quickly spread to Mexico, the Southwestern United States, and most of Latin America. The Mokele-​Mbeme, by contrast, has been reported in Central Africa since the nineteenth century. According to descriptions, it closely resembles a dinosaur such as brontosaurus (now called “apatosaurus” by scientists), and rumors of it are still enough to terrify entire villages. Except perhaps for Bigfoot and the Yeti, the most famous folkloric creature is still the Loch Ness monster, but there are similar aquatic creatures reported in many lakes from Scotland to Canada and Australia. Folklore is developing far too quickly for any researcher to keep up with it or for any theorist to sort out its implications.

Conclusion In examining human-animal relations both on an individual and on a societal level, puzzles, paradoxes, and apparent contradictions are very much the norm. Herzog25

 

Animals in Folklore    467 documented many such enigmas: most people who claim to be “vegetarians” eat meat regularly; cockfighting elicits far more indignation than industrial breeding of broiler chickens, even though roosters raised for fighting lead immeasurably better lives; opponents of animals in the laboratory make their case by citing knowledge gained through painful experiments on animals; hoarders keep apartments full of animals under atrocious conditions, convinced that they are providing a service of love; enthusiasts of thoroughbred dogs, in their zeal to improve breeds, create animals who have chronic respiratory problems, are prone to disease, and cannot whelp without human assistance. This list of apparent contradictions seems to go on endlessly and to permeate every sector of society, regardless of gender, class, religion, education, ethnicity, or political affiliation. But Herzog, except in special cases, does not even seriously attempt to address the question posed in the title of his book, “why it’s so hard to think straight about animals.” Is this inability, with the resulting enigmas, an inevitable part of the human condition? Have people always found their behavior toward animals impossible to explain, at least without continuously confronting new conflicts, problems, and ambiguities? From the perspective of history, anthropology, or folklore, the answer is to these questions is no. The sense of helplessness before the endless paradoxes of human–​animal relationships may well be unique to the modern and contemporary West. The difficulty is that prevailing conceptual frameworks do not enable us to think about animals in a coherent way. The anthropologist Philippe Descola offers an explanation for this perplexity. First of all, he distinguishes four basic paradigms used by different cultures to synthesize their experience: animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism. He finds the purest examples of totemism among the aborigines of Australia. Animism tends to predominate among the indigenous people of the Americas, though generally in combination with totemism. Western culture of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance—​as well as, at least until historically recent times, China and most of East Asia—​was primarily that of analogism.26 What we call Western culture today is based, according to Descola, on the paradigm of naturalism. This model divides the cosmos into two realms: culture, a product of human autonomy; and nature, determined by absolute order and necessity. This dualism now pervades not only our science but also our common sense, yet, in the words of Descola, “Viewed from an unprejudiced perspective… .the very existence of nature as an autonomous domain is no more a raw given of experience than are talking animals or kinship ties between men and kangaroos.”27 Because naturalism juxtaposes these two broad realms, creating a long boundary between them, it continually produces hybrids, yet it remains unable to conceptualize these hybrids, and constantly insists on locating them in one realm or another. The boundary between culture and nature has not been constructed in any one consistent or abiding way. Western culture at times perceives women, “savages,” children, early civilizations, and “lower” social classes as living close to this border, although on the “human” side, and occasionally crossing over to the domain of nature. Since we regard

 

468   Boria Sax animals, especially pets, in some contexts as belonging to culture and in others as products of nature, they are a source of continuous perplexity. The inability to conceptualize animals within the framework of naturalism led to their demonization, as soon as that paradigm became dominant in the West. In the early modern period, devils were increasingly depicted with the features of many animals, for example, the wings of bats and the faces of dogs. Since the emerging paradigm of the Early Modern period offered no place for them, intelligent or friendly animals seemed, by their very existence, to be a violation of the cosmic order. Particularly in England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, almost any intimacy with an animal could be accepted as evidence of witchcraft, with the result that fairy tales, which so often feature animal guides and sages, almost died out within English oral traditions.28 In the late twentieth century, the imperative to assign creatures to the domain of either culture or nature has often been carried to nearly unprecedented extremes. Dogs are ever more intimately drawn into the human realm, where they now have their own designer clothes, jewelry, five-​star hotels, psychiatrists, spas, television programs, gourmet restaurants, and hospices, while their owners are increasingly referred to as “pet parents.” Meanwhile, especially since the 1970s, food animals are far more objectified than ever before in industrialized farms. We should remember that the four categories given by Descola—​animism, totemism, analogism, and naturalism—​refer not to societies but rather to ways of synthesizing experience. Naturalism became the most dominant paradigm in Western culture during the late Renaissance, but it was never the only one. Folklore, in general, has retained the analogist paradigm of the European Renaissance, together with animist and totemist elements, within a society largely governed by naturalism. As the dominance of the naturalistic paradigm begins to decline, we are now seeing these, and perhaps other, paradigms further emerge from the margins, and this is why folklore no longer appears to stand out so starkly from the rest of our civilization. The movements for animal rights/​liberation do not truly challenge either the division between nature and culture or the associated belief in human superiority. Instead, they consist mostly of attempts to redraw this division in ways that might appear more rational, more humane, or more stable. Most often, this means displacing a few kinds of animals such as apes or dogs from the domain of nature to that of culture. At times, it may also be a matter of making the separation more of a hierarchic continuum than a relatively abrupt line. All such endeavors, in my opinion, will be rendered futile by the elusive, continually shifting character of the division between nature and culture. Nevertheless, according to Descola, the supremacy of the naturalistic paradigm is being overturned by its very success, as it increasingly absorbs the natural world that once defined it. As scientists explore the most remote corners of the earth, the recesses of the human mind, and the nuances of social interaction, the human realm will effectively encompass, and thus merge with, the natural one. If this analysis is correct, the resulting changes are impossible to foretell in any detail. At some risk of oversimplification, we can predict that human beings will see animals less as either a resource or a protectorate than as an assortment of cultures that are very

 

Animals in Folklore    469 profoundly different from our own. It is hard to envision this, since the change will place in question ideas that are now implicit in our language, including our very concept of humanity and even our notions of life and death. We might be confined to increasingly elusive abstractions, except that folklore can often embody cultural alternatives in ways that are simple, vivid, entertaining, and reassuring enough to be beloved, especially in books of fairy tales, by children.

Notes 1. John Pollard, Birds in Greek Life and Myth (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 14, 116–​29; Homer, The Illiad, trans. Peter Jones, D. C.  H. Rieu, and E. V. Rieu (New York: Penguin, 2003), book 24. 2. For some discussion of Mesopotamian fables, their history, and their relation to the Aesopian tradition, see Gillian Adams, “The First Children’s Literature. The Case for Sumer,” Children’s Literature Quarterly. 14 (1986) 1–​30; E. I. Gordon, “Sumerian Animal Proverbs and Fables: Collection Five,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 12 (1958): 6–​21; Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). 3. Anonymous, “Life of Aesop,” in Aesop’s Fables: With a Life of Aesop (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993/​ca. 1st century CE), 7–​51. 4. For the development of early fables, see Ben Edwin Perry, “Introduction,” in Babrius and Phaedrus, ed. Ben Edwin Perry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), xi–​cii; Niklas Holtzberg, The Ancient Fable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 5. Aesop, The Complete Fables of Aesop, trans. Oliva Temple and Robert Temple (New York: Penguin, 1998), Fable 209. 6. Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 132–​133. 7. Hesiod, Theogony/​Works and Days, trans. M. L. West (New York: Oxford University Press, 750 BCE/​1988), 19–​20. 8. W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford:  Clarendon, 1960), 186–​209, 333–​337. 9. Anonymous, The Jatakas:  Birth Stories of the Bodhisatta, trans. Sarah Shaw (New  York:  Penguin, 2007); Vishnu Sharma, The Pachatantra, trans. Arthus W. Ryder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Patricia Terry, ed., Renard the Fox: Translated from the Old French (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983); Ramsay Wood, Kalila and Dimna: Selected Fables of Bidpai (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980). For a discussion of the routes of diffusion of these tales, see Boria Sax, “Bestial Wisdom and Human Tragedy: The Genesis of the Animal Epic,” Anthrozoos 11, no. 3 (1998), 134–​141. 10. Avianus, The Fables of Avianus, trans. David R. Slavit (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Didymus of Alexandria Physiologus (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979/​150–​200); Berechiah ben Natronai ha-​Nakdan, Fables of a Jewish Aesop, trans. Moses Hadas (Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 2001); Edward 1and Thomas Moffet, The History of Four-​Footed Beasts and Serpents and Insects, 2 vols. (New York: Da Capo, 1658/​1967); Marie de France, Isopet I, Isopet II de Paris, Isopet de Chartres. Fables from the Old French:  Aesop’s Beasts and Bumpkins, trans. Norman R. Shapiro (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982).

 

470   Boria Sax 11. Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (New York: D. Appleton, 1921), chapters II, IV. 12. Jay Hansford C. Vest, “From Bobtail to Brer Rabbit: Native American Influences on Uncle Remus,” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2000): 19–​43. 13. For the contribution of women, see Valerie Paradiž, Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 14. Jack Zipes, The Irresistable Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 82–​84. 15. Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, 2 ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 10. 16. R. D. Jameson, “Cinderella in China,” in Cinderella:  A  Casebook, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 74–​77. 17. Heinz Rölleke, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm:  Eine Einführung (Stuttgart:  Reclam, 2004), 58–​66. 18. Maria Tatar (ed.), The Annotated Brothers Grimm (New  York:  W.W. Norton, 2004), 208–​223. 19. Claudine Farbe-​Vassas, The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig, trans. Carol Volk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 90–​91. 20. Michel Pastoreau, Le Cochon:  Histoire d’un cousin mal aimé (Paris:  Gallimard, 2009), 60–​65. 21. Jan Brunvand, The Mexican Pet:  More “New” Urban Legends and Some Old Favorites (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 24–​25. 22. Boria Sax, City of Ravens: London, Its Tower, and Its Famous Birds (London: Duckworth-​ Overlook, 2011–​2012). 23. Lynwood Carranco, “Three Legends of Northern California,” Western Folklore 22, no. 3 (1963): 183. 24. Joshua Blu Buhs, Bigfoot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 74–​89. 25. Hal Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight about Animals (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). 26. For a detailed explication of this theory, see Philippe Descola, Par-​delá nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). 27. Philippe Descola, “Constructing Natures:  Symboloic Ecology and Social Practice,” in Nature and Society: Anthropological perspectives, ed. Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson (New York: Routledge, 1996), 109. 28. Boria Sax, “The Magic of Animals: European Witch Trials in the Perspective of Folklore,” Anthrozoös 22, no. 4 (2009): 317–​346.

Further Reading An inventory of interesting writings on animals in folklore could be virtually endless. This list is confined to works that are either broad in scope, which might serve as an introduction to the subject, or else focus on specific topics discussed in the preceding chapter. The list also contains only works that have not been cited within the endnotes. Abrahams, Roger D., ed. Afro-​American Folktales:  Stories from Black Traditions in the New World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

 

Animals in Folklore    471 Anonymous. The Arabian Nights Entertainments: Tales of 1001 Nights. Trans. Malcolm C. Lyons. 3 vols. London: Penguin, 2011. Aftandilian, Dave, Marion W. Copeland, and David Scofield Wilson, eds. What Are Animals to Us? Approaches from Science, Religion, Folklore, Literature, and Art. Knoxville: Univeristy of Tennessee Press, 2007. Babrius and Phaedrus. Babrius and Phaedrus. Trans. Edwin Ben Perry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univerity Press, 1990. Bastine, Michael, and Mason Winfield. Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions/​Bear, 2011. Beal, Timothy K. Religion and Its Monsters. New York: Routledge, 2002. Bulliet, Richard W. Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers: The Past and Future of Human–​Animal Relationships. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Boia, Lucian. Entre L’ange Et La Bête: Le Mythe De L’homme Différent De L’antiquité À Nos Jours. Paris: Plon, 1995. Bruchac, Joseph. Native American Animal Stories. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing 1992. Campbell, Joseph. Historical Atlas of World Mythology. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Charbonneau-​Lassay, Louis. The Bestiary of Christ. Trans. D. M. Dooling. New York: Parabola Books, 1991. Delacampagne, Aruabe, and Christian Delacampagne. Here Be Dragons: A Fantastic Bestiary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Gilmore, David D. Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Trans. Jack Zipes. New York: Bantam Books, 1856/​1987. Gubernatis, Angelo de. Zoological Mythology:  Or, the Legends of Animals. 2  vols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, 1872/​2009. Herzog, Harold A., and Shelley L. Calvin. “Animals, Archtypes, and Popular Culture: Tales from the Tabloid Press.” Anthrozoös 5, no. 2 (1992): 77–​92. Marchesini, Roberto, and Karin Anderson. Animal Appeal:  Uno Studio Sul Teriomorfismo. Bologna: Hybris, 2001. Mode, Heinz. Fabulous Beasts and Demons. London: Phaidon, 1975. Nigg, Joseph, ed. The Book of Fabulous Beasts: A Treasury of Writings from Ancient Times to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pastoureau, Michael. Les Animaux Célèbres. Paris: Arléa, 2008. Porter, J. R., and W. M. S Russell. Animals in Folklore. Ipswich, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1978. Ritvo, Harriet. The Platypus and the Mermaid:  And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Salisbury, Joyce E. The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 1994. Sadaune, Samuel. Le Fantastique Au Moyen Âge. Paris: Editions Ouest-​France, 2009. Sax, Boria. The Frog King:  Occidental Fables, Fairy Tales, and Anecdotes of Animals. New York: Pace University Press, 1990. Sax, Boria. The Serpent and the Swan:  Animal Brides in Folkore and Literature. Knoxville: McDonald & Woodward/​University of Tennnessee Press, 1998. Shepard, Paul. The Others:  How Animals Made Us Human. Washington, DC:  Shearwater Books, 1996. South, Malcolm, ed. Mythical and Fabulous Creatures:  A  Sourcebook and Research Guide New York: Peter Bedrick, 1988.

 

472   Boria Sax Tatar, Maria, ed. The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World:  Changing Attitudes in England 1500–​1800. London: Allen Lane, 1983. Trout, Paul A. Deadly Powers:  Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011. Wootton, Anthony. Animal Folklore, Myth and Legend. New York: Blandford Press, 1986. Zell-​Ravenheart, Oberon, and Ash DeKirk. A Wizard’s Bestiary. Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2007. Zipes, Jack David, ed. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2000. Zipes, Jack. Why Fairy Tales Stick:  The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre. London: Routledge, 2006.

 

Pa rt V

ANIMALS I N  E C O SYST E M S

 

 

Chapter 25

A rchaeozo ol o g y Juliet Clutton-​B rock

Introduction From ancient times, people the world over have been interested in their origins. This is reflected today in the myths and legends that have survived from long-​gone societies, ranging from those in the Bible to the writings of Aristotle and Pliny, and across continents to the oral legends of America’s First Nations. However, it is not just the question of how human beings arrived on Earth that fascinates us. The material remains of past human societies as well as fossils of extinct plants and animals have always been collected as mysterious objects that deserve respect and often reverence. Ammonites may be seen as one example of fossils that have intrigued the curious since classical times and probably earlier. It is now well-​known that they are the fossilized remains of many species of marine cephalopods who became extinct with the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous Period, but they are still collected and valued for their strange shapes.1 Another example may be seen in the legend of the land of the Cyclops, the one-​ eyed giants who were believed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to inhabit the Mediterranean islands. The legend is best known from Homer’s Odyssey, written around 800 BCE. However, its origin must have been much earlier as Homer was clearly familiar with the belief, for he took the existence of the Cyclops for granted. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the basis for the legend has often been attributed to the fossil skulls of dwarf elephants who lived on several Mediterranean islands during the Pleistocene Period. The skull of an elephant has a single large round cavity in the frontal bone, the nasal orifice to which the muscles of the trunk are attached, and the skulls of dwarf elephants would have been found in the island caves, which could have spread the legend throughout the ancient world that they were the skulls of one-​eyed giants.2 There have always been scholars who wanted to learn more about the history of past civilizations, and from the middle of the seventeenth century in Europe the desire to know more about the material past of human history slowly grew into the subject of archaeology. In Egypt in 1638, John Greaves, an English professor of geometry, carried

 

476   Juliet Clutton-Brock out measurements of the pyramids and was one of the earliest to publish a detailed description of archaeological fieldwork in English. In Britain this began in 1649 with what may be termed the earliest field archaeology, carried out by John Aubrey who, when out hunting, “stumbled across the stone circles at Avebury” and then made a meticulous examination of the site.3 Many of the early archaeologists, however, were dedicated amateurs who used their private incomes to fund their excavations and whose main aim was the retrieval of valuable antiquities. Then, with the rise of the biological and physical sciences in the nineteenth century and the spread of knowledge about the evolutionary process, the study of paleontology and human evolution became acceptable as research. But the development of the many sciences, including archaeozoology, that are today associated with archaeology was a slow process that lagged behind the excitement of excavation. The animal remains that filled the trenches were considered to be a troublesome by-​product of the antiquities or structural remains, and all but the most complete were usually reburied with the soil. If the bones were collected they were given to another amateur to identify and produce a summary of their numbers. In the nineteenth century, there were exceptions to those who were interested only in antiquities. A notable English naturalist among these was Frank Buckland (1826–​1880), who while excavating Pleistocene deposits in Kirkdale Cavern in Yorkshire found part of a skull, which he believed to be that of a young hyena. Having no comparative material at hand he requested Robert Burchell, the South African explorer and naturalist, to send him a young hyena from the Cape, and in 1821 a baby hyena named Billy arrived by ship. Buckland had intended that the hyena should be killed for his skull. However, he had become such a pet on the journey over on the ship as well as to Buckland that this did not happen, and he was kept alive to contribute to the beginnings of archaeozoology in another way. Buckland observed that Billy’s excreta closely matched the coprolites (fossil droppings) found in the cave, and he was therefore able to prove that the site had been an Ice Age hyena den.4 The commissioning of a live animal to be brought thousands of miles by sea from the Cape to England simply to provide a skull for comparison with a fossil was a remarkable and possibly a unique event, and it emphasizes how crucially the identification of animal remains from archaeological sites depends on comparison with skeletal remains of known species. Today archaeozoology may be defined as the scientific evaluation of faunal materials that are retrieved from archaeological sites. It is a multidisciplinary subject that includes many associated sciences like radiocarbon dating, isotope analysis, and molecular biology. The most important was, and arguably still is, comparative osteology, though, for if a bone cannot be accurately ascribed to its species then all the rest of the information around it is of little value to the archaeozoologist. The years between 1971 and 1976 saw the beginnings of the widespread application of science to the identification of animal remains from archaeological sites, culminating in the founding of the International Council of Archaeozoology (ICAZ),5 which is today a thriving society that holds international conferences every four years and workshops on specialized subjects at intermittent times. One of these subjects on which periodic

 

Archaeozoology   477 workshops are convened is the new science of archaeogenetics, and particularly the analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from bones. This has become an increasingly important tool in revealing finer details in the identification of populations of species, the relationships between domestic species and their wild progenitors, and the spread of varieties of domestic species from their location of origin. Beginning with the random collection of animal remains in the nineteenth century, the following examples of archaeozoological investigations have been selected from publications to demonstrate the development of archaeozoology as a multidisciplinary science. It will be shown how collaboration with scientists in the physical and genetic sciences in research on mammalian assemblages from sites of a diversity of periods, species, and continents can reveal, in extraordinary detail, how people lived and interacted with animals in the past. Of course all other living organisms, particularly birds, fishes, and mollusks, play an equal role in archaeozoology, but this article is restricted to mammals as it is the author’s research field.

Pigs from the Swiss Neolithic Lake Dwellings to the Laws of the Ancient Israelites By the mid-​nineteenth century, fieldwork in archaeology was well established, and naturalists like Buckland were becoming interested in the associated animal remains. In Europe, the remains of lakeside dwellings with an amazing abundance of artifacts and animal remains found on the shores of the Alpine lakes in Switzerland became well-​ known, and almost every museum was requesting objects for their collections and exhibits. The remains of houses, built on wooden piles over the water, range in date from the Neolithic to the Iron Age, and the detritus from the way of life of the inhabitants—​ their pottery, metal tools, and the bone remains from their meals—​have been collected in great numbers and are often exceptionally well preserved. The archaeology of the prehistoric alpine lakes has provided an inestimable source for collectors and for scientific research, and from the nineteenth century until the present day a great many descriptions have been written about the faunal assemblages retrieved from lakeshores. Ludwig Rütimeyer (1825–​1895) was one of the earliest naturalists who collected, identified, and wrote about the animal remains from the Swiss lakes. Although there was no definitive way of dating the finds, his work is still valued for its descriptions and lists of the great variety of wild species of mammals, birds, and fishes that were present in Switzerland in the prehistoric period and that were hunted for food and other resources by the lake village inhabitants.6 During the nineteenth century, the English-​speaking world knew little about the Swiss lake villages and their marvelous accumulations of finds because the reports were written in German. However, a summary of Rütimeyer’s results was included in

 

478   Juliet Clutton-Brock J. E. Lee’s translation of Ferdinand Keller’s book on the archaeology of the lake dwellings of Switzerland, which was published in London in 1878.7 In view of what is now known about the worldwide domestication of the pig, Rütimeyer’s identifications are of historical interest:8 The pig is another domestic animal of which several races were found very early. Yet, as far as I can make out, it did not occur tame in the oldest settlements of the stone age; but, on the contrary, there were two races of wild swine, which might almost be called species—​one the wild boar of the present day, and the other what I have designated as the marsh swine …

This description may be compared with that of the pig remains from the excavation of the site of Yvonand IV (Canton of Vaud, Switzerland) in the 1970s. This site covered two main Neolithic periods, the Horgen (2700–​2500 BCE) and the Lüscherz (2400–​2200 BCE),9 and there were three sizes of pig bones and teeth recovered from the site. The largest were ascribed to wild boar, the smallest to domestic pigs, and a small number of intermediate size that were postulated to have resulted from the interbreeding of wild and domestic pigs.10 The findings of both Rütimeyer and Clutton-​Brock, which were based on the classic archaeozoological technique of measurement of bones and teeth, indicated that local wild boar and domestic pigs from the lake village sites were closely related. Within the first decade of the twenty-​first century, the new technology of analyzing mtDNA has given strong support to the high probability that the Swiss Neolithic pigs were interbred with local wild boar (Sus scrofa), if they were not originally descended from wild boar. The combination of zooarchaeological evidence and mtDNA analysis has shown that the story of European pigs is, however, a lot more complicated than the straightforward domestication of local wild boar. In a series of projects carried out over the past eight years, the collaboration of geneticists and zooarchaeologists has documented the evidence for proving that the early domestication of pigs had occurred in southwest Asia by 8500 BCE. Domestic pigs then spread across the Near and Middle East and westward into Europe alongside the first agriculturalists, thus linking the Neolithization of Europe with Neolithic cultures of western Asia. By tracing the detailed genetic record of the bone remains of pigs, a complex set of interactions and processes has unraveled the spread of early farmers into Europe. Near Eastern pigs reached the Paris Basin by at least the early fourth millennium BCE, but at this time they were also being interbred with European wild boar, who may have been independently domesticated by then. This new race of European domestic pigs gradually replaced the introduced domestic pigs of Near Eastern origin and are represented in the osteological remains of pigs from all later archaeological sites, including those of the Swiss Neolithic lakes.11 Many aspects of the keeping of pigs in the prehistoric period, apart from tracing their early domestication, can be studied. One of these is the effects of climate, and particularly rainfall, on the successful distribution and husbanding of domestic pigs. In a

 

Archaeozoology   479 detailed survey of sites in the Middle East between the fifth and third millennia BCE, Caroline Grigson shows that the presence of pig remains is almost entirely dependent on the amount of rainfall in the area. There were no pigs from sites that were in dry and arid regions unless there was evidence of irrigation, but there were many from areas that were “moist enough to support at least dry farming.”12 Grigson also suggests that the social stratification that developed in later periods in the Middle East led to prohibitions on eating pork by the ruling elite, who farmed large, strictly managed herds of cattle, sheep, and goats. Because pigs remained in the ownership of individuals in the lower orders of society, they came to be considered unclean by the elite and the lawgivers.13 For the ancient Israelites, anything to do with pigs became forbidden by religious laws, as it is for Jews and Muslims today. In the Old Testament, the pig “though he divide the hoof, and be cloven-​footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you. Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase shall ye not touch,”14 and in the Qur’an it is decreed, “That which dieth of itself, and blood, and swine’s flesh … is forbidden you.”15

From the Dogs of Ice Age Europe to the Dingoes of Australia Toward the end of the twentieth century, it appeared that there was little more to learn about the earliest domestic dogs. There was no further discussion about whether dogs were descended from wolves, jackals, or an unknown species of wild canid; it became accepted that the progenitor of all domestic dogs was the grey wolf (Canis lupus). The earliest find of a dog (Canis familiaris) was believed to be the mandible from Oberkassel in Germany, dated to 14,000 years ago, which was 2000 years earlier than the cluster of sites in western Asia that have produced remains of dog.16 However, in recent years it has been argued that the age of the first dogs should be pushed back to 26,000 to 20,000 years ago, just before the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum. In their reexaminations of faunal remains from sites in Europe, the Ukraine, and Siberia, Mietje Germonpré and her colleagues identified more than six skulls, which they claim as Palaeolithic dogs, among large numbers of wolf remains together with the bones of their prey, particularly mammoth.17 The identification of these skulls as dog rather than wolf is based on the osteological characters accepted as distinguishing dog from wolf: reduction in overall size; a shortening of the jaws; and widening of the snout, often without reduction in size of the teeth so that the cheek teeth are compacted. However, as yet there has been no general agreement that these six skulls show definite evidence for domestication, this being that the animals lived in close interaction with humans and were reproductively isolated from wild wolves. From 10,000 years ago the remains of domestic dogs become readily recognizable by their small size and morphology compared with that of wolves, and they have been identified in some numbers from Mesolithic sites in Europe and from Natufian sites of

 

480   Juliet Clutton-Brock comparable date in southwestern Asia. A well-​documented example involves the skulls of a dog and a wolf from the Early Mesolithic site of Star Carr in Yorkshire, England. The site was occupied around a waterlogged lakeside for 350 years from c. 10,700–​10,350 before present during the Preboreal and Boreal climatic periods. The Ice Age had ended, and temperatures were close to those of recent times. However, the sea levels had not risen enough to separate Britain from the Continent. As with the Swiss lake deposits, although Star Carr is much earlier in date, a huge number of organic artifacts had been preserved in the peat, including nearly 200 harpoon points made of red deer antler. The site was first excavated by J. G. D. Clark in 1949–​1951, the faunal remains were studied by Fraser and King,18 and the dog was described in detail by Magnus Degerbøl.19 Still, work has continued on the site and on the artifacts and fauna ever since. In 1985, during excavations at the nearby Mesolithic site of Seamer Carr, the neck vertebrae of a dog were retrieved that match in age and size the skull of the Star Carr dog.20 On testing two samples of bone from the dog vertebrae for their carbon isotopes, they yielded ratios of –​14.67 percent and –​16.97 percent. These ratios reveal that this dog obtained a significant part of his food from marine fish. Clutton-​Brock and Noe-​ Nygaard21 therefore postulated that the site of Seamer Carr, and possibly also Star Carr, were hunting camps visited by people who lived for much of the year nearer to the coast and obtained most of their food by sea fishing. Over the next few thousand years, domestic dogs proliferated and spread over every part of the world inhabited by people. With a combination of natural and artificial selection they were transformed into the 400 or so distinctive breeds that are known today, but in some regions they have remained as commensal carnivores living and breeding in a loose association with human societies. These are the village dogs of Africa and Asia and the pariah dogs of India, who have little human contact and live as truly feral populations. A canid who lives as a completely wild carnivore and is yet descended from domestic dogs is the dingo of Australia. Living dingoes are not so much feral domestic dogs as wild carnivores who over thousands of years in reproductive isolation subject only to natural selection, have developed into a geographical species that should be classified with the Latin binomial Canis dingo. Archaeological evidence indicates that humans first reached Australia more than 50,000 years ago, but there were no dogs on the island continent until after 12,000 years ago. This is known because there are no remains of dogs from archaeological sites on the island of Tasmania, which was joined to mainland Australia until the sea broke through the 150-​mile-​wide Bass Straits at the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago. Although obtained in the 1970s, the earliest radiocarbon date for dog remains from Australia is still 3450 ± 95 years before present.22 However, on cultural grounds it is probable that people took dogs to Australia considerably earlier than this date because the Aborigines never acquired domestic pigs, who, in the later prehistoric period, became widespread over the whole of Southeast Asia, including New Guinea and the Pacific islands.23 In skeletal anatomy, the dingo closely resembles the small wolf of India, Canis lupus pallipes, as well as the pariah dogs of Southeast Asia, and therefore it has been

 

Archaeozoology   481 a reasonable hypothesis to assume that the dingo is a direct descendant of dogs who were originally domesticated from tamed Indian wolves.24 With the advance of molecular biology, however, it has now been possible to establish the genetic relationships of the dingo and thereby his probable origin. The molecular research has been carried out by Peter Savolainen and colleagues who analyzed 211 Australian dingoes and 19 pre-​European archaeological dog samples from Polynesia as well as a large sample of dogs and wolves from worldwide sources. The results showed that a majority of the dingoes had mtDNA type A29, which was found only in dogs from East Asia and Arctic America, whereas 18 of the 19 other types of mtDNA were unique to dingoes. The mean genetic distance to A29 among the dingo mtDNA sequences indicated an origin 5000 years ago. From these results it was deduced that dingoes have an origin from domesticated dogs coming from East Asia. They were introduced from a small number of dogs, possibly at a single occasion.25 In a more recent molecular analysis Oskarsson and colleagues have refined these results.26 Their aim was to investigate the origin and route of introduction of Polynesian domestic dogs and the feral Australian dingoes and closely related but distinctive New Guinea singing dogs (NGSD) to establish how dogs populated this part of the world and which human cultures may have been involved in these migrations. The results showed a clear indication that the ancestry of all three groups of dogs can be traced back to South China and their migration route was through Mainland Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Furthermore, although the earliest archaeological evidence for dingoes in Australia has been dated to 3500 years before present, based on the mtDNA data, the estimated time of arrival of dingoes in Australia is between 18,300 and 4600 years before present. This date is considerably earlier than that suggested by the archaeological evidence and earlier than the arrival of the Neolithic to the surrounding regions.27 However, it fits with the lack of pig remains from any archaeological site of pre-​European date in Australia. In Polynesia, the remains of pigs and dogs occur together with the arrival of the Neolithic Lapita culture, between 3000 and 2000 years ago.

Cattle from the Wild Aurochs to the Sanga Cattle of Africa Two species of wild cattle belonging to the family Bovidae survived the end of the last Ice Age in Eurasia: the aurochs, Bos primigenius, ancestor of all European domestic cattle; and the bison or wisent, Bison bonasus, who has never been domesticated. Rütimeyer identified and recorded both from the Swiss Neolithic lake dwellings:28 [The aurochs] as well as the bison (or wisent) were at first considered as rather rare, but now they are found to have been the most abundant animals in the forests of the stone age; we ought, however, to state that at Concise they entirely disappeared with the introduction of metal weapons. From this time forward in general, all game or

 

482   Juliet Clutton-Brock wild animals which in early ages far preponderated in number over the domestic animals, began to decline in a most marked manner …

Rütimeyer was aware that Bos primigenius was extinct in his day29 but that bison were still to be found wild in European forests. After the First World War European bison were exterminated in the wild and remained only in a few zoos and private parks. Reintroduced European bison are found today in the Bialowieza National Park in Poland and in a few other forests. The only way that Rütimeyer could carry out investigations into faunal remains from archaeological sites was to identify the bones and teeth by comparing them with those of known species, establishing the age at death of the animals, listing the numbers of each species represented, and dating them by their cultural context. And for almost the next 100 years, these remained the only research tools available to archaeozoologists, until in 1949 American scientists Willard Libby and colleagues invented the technique of radiocarbon dating, which is based on carbon-​14, a radioactive isotope of carbon that can be used to date materials up to 50,000 years old. It became possible to establish reliable relative dates for individual specimens, and in the 1970s and 1980s a project was set up that attempted to find the latest dates for the survival of wild species, now extinct, and the earliest dates for their domesticated descendants. One example was a bone, identified as aurochs (Bos primigenius) from a cave site in Britain. The date was 3245 ± 37 bp (c. 1295 BCE),30 which showed that the wild aurochs survived in Britain into the Bronze Age.31 Then came the first analyses of stable isotopes to be published in an archaeological study, by J. C. Vogel and N. van der Merwe in 1977,32 and from this time on isotopes of strontium, carbon (for the Seamer Carr dog), nitrogen, and oxygen have been increasingly used in the analyses of animal bone (collagen and apatite), tooth enamel, hair, and pottery residues. An important and exciting use of strontium isotopes was published in the work of Sarah Viner and colleagues in 2010,33 which revealed how cattle were moved long distances to the Late Neolithic site of Durrington Walls, one of the largest settlements and henge monuments in Britain and two miles from Stonehenge. The site was occupied, according to the latest radiocarbon dates, between 2515 and 2460 cal BCE at 95.4 percent probability. The 87Sr/​86Sr isotopic ratio of 13 molar teeth of cattle was measured from the site. These measurements revealed that two of the teeth came from animals certainly raised under the local conditions of chalk grassland but that the other 11 teeth provided signatures so distinct that the cattle could not have been raised on chalkland. The results indicate that cattle, and therefore also people, traveled considerable distances to reach the site, probably for ceremonial reasons:34 The animals are likely to have been moved to the site while still alive, and probably contributed to the feasting activity that has been identified through zooarchaeological studies. The within-​tooth variation in signatures suggests that individual animals were exposed to different patterns of movement during the period of tooth development. In some cases, the animals clearly began a general movement towards

 

Archaeozoology   483 chalkland areas while the tooth was in growth but, for others, tooth development was complete before movement towards Durrington Walls began. This also indicates that both young and adult animals were driven to the site.

Not only archaeology and knowledge about human prehistory but also the management and economics of modern livestock and other domesticates have benefited from modern archaeozoological studies. For the past 50 years, Britain as well as many European countries and North America have recognized that the ancient, native breeds of all livestock who have evolved in perfect adaptation to their local environments are of great value, and efforts have been made and societies founded for their preservation. For example, the British Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) celebrated its fortieth year in 2013, and no rare breed of livestock or horses has become extinct since its foundation. Another example is the foundation of the Africanis Society for the indigenous village dogs of southern Africa.35 At the same time as breeds of livestock were being conserved in the developed world, great efforts were made by colonialists until very recently to improve the local native breeds of cattle in Africa and to control or outbreed the village dogs. For example, European breeds of cattle such as the Friesian and the Hereford have been imported and crossed with local breeds such as the Boran in Ethiopia who are perfectly adapted to the semi-​desert region of the Sahel in that they need to drink only once every three days. They cannot be improved by introgression from European cattle who have evolved in a totally different environment and climate.36 Although there are many details still to work on, the prehistory of the breeds of cattle throughout Africa has now been traced, and efforts are being made to preserve them. Through a combination of archaeozoological and genetic studies it is now assumed that many breeds have an autochthonous origin from wild Bos primigenius who roamed across the Mediterranean border of North Africa in the early prehistoric period.37 They are humpless and are known as taurine breeds. The earliest finds of domestic cattle in Africa (apart from ancient Egypt) are reputed to come from Grotte Capéletti in Algeria and are dated from the seventh to the sixth millennium BCE.38 If these finds can be verified the cattle could have been direct indigenous descendants of the local wild Bos primigenius. Over the past thousand years, indigenous local breeds of taurine cattle have been crossbred with humped cattle imported across the Indian Ocean from Arabia and further east; they are known as Sanga cattle.39 Humped, or zeboid, cattle are descended from a separate form of wild Indian bovid, Bos namadicus; they are known as zebu and are distinguishable from taurine cattle by a variety of osteological and morphological features,40 but the two forms will readily interbreed and produce fertile offspring. On archaeological sites, zeboid cattle can be distinguished from taurine by the shape of the skull and by the posterior thoracic vertebrae, which have bifurcated neural spines in zebu. In 2012, Olivier Hanotte and colleagues published a detailed review of the genomics of 50 breeds of African cattle that fully supports the archaezoological evidence for the origin and spread of cattle throughout Africa.41 In summary, there is archaeological

 

484   Juliet Clutton-Brock and genetic evidence for the spread of autochthonous taurine cattle south through the Sahara to West Africa, where they are represented today, for example, by the indigenous, dwarf breed, the N’Dama, who has evolved natural immunity to trypanosomiasis, the disease carried by tsetse flies. In East Africa, the remains of cattle are found on archaeological sites from the late third millennium BCE, and, with Iron Age farmers, they spread south along an eastern route to South Africa, arriving in the eastern Cape around 2000 years ago. Along the route and over time these cattle were crossed with imported zeboid cattle to produce the Sanga breeds, represented today, for example, by the Ankole cattle of Uganda and the Afrikander cattle of South Africa.42

Archaeozoology and the Wider Environment Following the end of the Second World War, there was a rapid development of professionalism in all the sciences. The identification of animal remains from archaeological sites became a subject for scientific research in the laboratory as well as on-​site. An even more important development was the realization that the bones represented wild and domestic animals whose lives could be interpreted in great detail, and this could reveal very many aspects of their environment, behavior, and interactions with their humans. Archaeozoology became integral to research into a diversity of past food-​producing economies. Patterns of livestock use and the resources they provided could reveal much about prehistoric societies, and for example the early storage of milk could be identified from isotope analysis of organic residues in potsherds. One line of research, carried out in collaboration with archaeologists as well as with ethnologists, is in the continuing study of pastoralism, the seasonal movement of peoples with their grazing livestock. In 1984, following the translation of Khazanov’s authoritative Nomads and the Outside World,43 there was a general consensus that nomadism develops from a settled way of life when resources have become depleted, forcing people and animals to live as migrating nomads. This is difficult to pick up in the archaeozoological record, but an interesting example was documented in a study of the plant and animal remains from village sites in the northern Deccan. Here Dhavalikar was able to infer that, during the first half of the first millennium BCE, the inhabitants had turned from settled farming to semi-​nomadic pastoralism because the land could no longer sustain their crops and animals.44 This had resulted from a drastic change in climate with much lower rainfall, leading to greatly increased aridity and frequent droughts that made life insupportable in the villages.45 Further archaeozoological research since the 1980s has widened the hypothesis that nomadic pastoralism always develops after depletion of resources around a settlement. In regions of semi-​desert, it appears that nomadism developed very soon after the first

 

Archaeozoology   485 domestication of sheep and goats in western Asia. The earliest radiocarbon dates for the Neolithic in southeast Arabia are older than 8000 BCE. They indicate that these first farmers spread into the Arabian steppes and deserts, which were probably much greener at that time but not green enough for true farming. Here, nomadism first developed as a division of labor: sedentary inhabitants produced cereals while the young men moved with their sheep and goats farther and farther away from their origin into the neighboring steppe and adopted an economy that could be called “herders and gatherers.”46 During the second half of the twentieth century, study of the behavior of living wild animals became formalized as ethology, and it was linked with archaeozoology in ways that may not seem immediately obvious. Ethological studies of the behavior of living wild species, combined with interpretation from their osteological remains of their distribution in the past, provide invaluable information about their domesticated descendants. This has led to the realization that domestic animals are not just the unnatural products of human culture to be treated like animate vegetables—​they retain many of the physical attributes and much of the behavior of their wild progenitors. So knowledge of the biotope and behavior of these wild progenitors can be used to promote improvements and standards in animal welfare of their domesticated descendants. For example, it is now well-​known that wild boar, although widespread in many habitats, prefer the thickets along riverbanks where they can wallow and dig nests for the birth of their young; wild goats are mountain animals inhabiting rocky outcrops with sparse vegetation; wild sheep can inhabit lower mountain areas than wild goats and prefer to browse and graze on the vegetation of semi-​deserts. The wild ass (Equus africanus) is a true desert animal, and the domestic donkey (Equus asinus) has inherited his character and requirements. Hans-​Peter Uerpmann is an archaeozoologist who has led the field in this research, and his monograph The Ancient Distribution of Ungulate Mammals in the Middle East (1987)47 has become a classic work of reference. This work provides a factual basis for all those who are involved with the past, present, or future environment of the region, whether they are archaeozoologists, archaeologists, or conservationists involved with the reintroduction of locally extinct species, such as the Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) in the deserts of western Asia. Furthermore, the ancient distribution of domestic species revealed from their remains on archaeological sites has been an important influence in the foundation of the many societies in different parts of the world for the preservation of endangered indigenous breeds of domesticates.

Acknowledgments My thanks go to Professor Linda Kalof for inviting me to write this chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, of which she is editor. Grateful thanks to Caroline Grigson for telling me the story of Frank Buckland and his hyena and for more than 40 years of friendship and collaboration in archaeozoology.

 

486   Juliet Clutton-Brock

Notes 1. See, e.g., C. M. Nelson, “Ammonites: Ammons Horns into Cephalopods,” Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 5, no. 1 (1968): 1–​18. 2. Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters:  Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 3. J. Broadway, “Ocular Exploration, and Subterraneous Enquiry: Developing Archaeological Fieldwork in the Mid-​Seventeenth Century,” Antiquaries Journal 92 (2012): 353–​369. 4. F. T. Buckland, Curiosities of Natural History, Second Series (London: Richard Bentley, 1890), 86–​92. 5. Link to ICAZ: http://​www.alexandriaarchive.org/​icaz/​. 6. L. Rütimeyer, Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten in der Schweiz, Untersuchungen über die Geschichte der wilden und Haus-​Säugethiere Mitteleuropas (Basel: Verlag von Bahnmaier’s buchhandlung (C. Detloff), 1861). 7. F. Keller, The Lake Dwellings of Switzerland and Other Parts of Europe, Vol. 1, trans. J. E. Lee (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1878). 8. L. Rütimeyer, “Results of the Investigation of Animal Remains from the Lake Dwellings,” in ibid., 539. 9. Uncalibrated radiocarbon dates. 10. J. Clutton-​Brock, “Animal Remains from the Neolithic Lake Village Site of Yvonand IV, Canton de Vaud, Switzerland,” Archives des Sciences, Genève 43, no. 1 (1990): 1–​97. 11. G. Larson, K. Dobney, U. Albarella, et  al., “Worldwide Phylogeography of Wild Boar Reveals Multiple Centres of Pig Domestication,” Science 307 (2005): 1618–​1621; G. Larson, U. Albarella, K. Dobney, et  al., “Ancient DNA, Pig Domestication, and the Spread of the Neolithic into Europe,” Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences 104, no. 39 (2007):  15276–​15281; P. Rowley-​Conwy, U. Albarella, and K. Dobney, “Distinguishing Wild Boar from Domestic Pigs in Prehistory:  A  Review of Approaches and Recent Results,” Journal World Prehistory 25 (2012): 1–​44; C. Ottoni, L. G. Flink, A. Evin, et al., “Pig Domestication and Human-​Mediated Dispersal in Western Eurasia Revealed through Ancient DNA and Geometric Morphometrics,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 30, no. 4 (2013): 824–​832. 12. C. Grigson, “Culture, Ecology, and Pigs from the 5th to the 3rd Millennium BC around the Fertile Crescent,” in Pigs and Humans 10,000 Years of Interaction, ed. U. Albarella, K. Dobney, A. Ervynck, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 83–​108. 13. Ibid. 14. Leviticus 11:7, 8; Deuteronomy 14:8. 15. Qur’an 5:4. 16. J. Clutton-​ Brock, “Origins of the Dog:  Domestication and Early History,” in The Domestic Dog:  Its Evolution, Behaviour, and Interactions with People, ed. James Serpell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7–​20. 17. M. Germonpré, M. V. Sablin, R. E. Stevens, et al., “Fossil Dogs and Wolves from Palaeolithic Sites in Belgium, the Ukraine and Russia: Osteometry, Ancient DNA and Stable Isotopes,” Journal of Archaeological Science 36 (2009):  473–​490; M. Germonpré, M. Láznicková-​ Galetová, V. Mikhail, et al., “Palaeolithic Dog Skulls at the Gravettian Predmostí Site, the Czech Republic,” Journal of Archaeological Science 39 (2012): 184–​202. 18. F. C. Fraser and J. King, “Faunal Remains,” in Excavations at Star Carr an Early Mesolithic Site at Seamer near Scarborough, Yorkshire, ed. J. G.  D. Clark (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1954), 70–​95.

 

Archaeozoology   487 19. M. Degerbøl, “On a Find of a Preboreal Domestic Dog (Canis Familiaris L.) from Star Carr, Yorkshire, with Remarks on Other Mesolithic Dogs,” Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 27 (1961): 35–​55. 20. J. Clutton-​Brock and N. Noe-​Nygaard, “New Osteological and C-​isotope Evidence on Mesolithic Dogs:  Companions to Hunters and Fishers at Star Carr, Seamer Carr and Kongemose,” Journal of Archaeological Science 17 (1990): 643–​653. 21. Ibid. 22. P. Milham and P. Thompson, “Relative Antiquity of Human Occupation and Extinct Fauna at Madura Cave, South-​Eastern Western Australia,” Mankind 10, no. 3 (1976): 175–​180. 23. J. Clutton-​Brock, Animals as Domesticates:  A  World View through History (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 101–​104. 24. L. K. Corbett, “Morphological Comparisons of Australian and Thai Dingoes: A Reappraisal of Dingo Status, Distribution and Ancestry,” Proceedings of the Ecological Society of Australia 13 (1985): 277–​291. 25. P. Savolainen, T. Leitner, A. N. Wilton, E. Matisoo-​ Smith, and J. Lundeberg, “A Detailed Picture of the Origin of the Australian Dingo, Obtained from the Study of the Mitochondrial DNA,” Proceedings National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 33 (2004):  12387–​12390; Clutton-​Brock, Animals as Domesticates, 101–​102. 26. M. C.  R. Oskarsson, C. F.  C. Klütsch, U. Boonyaprakob, A. Wilton, Y. Tanabe, and P. Savolainen, “Mitochondrial DNA Data Indicate an Introduction through Mainland Southeast Asia for Australian Dingoes and Polynesian Domestic Dogs,” Proceedings Royal Society B 279 (2012): 967–​974. 27. Oskarsson et al., “Mitochrondrial DNA.” 28. Rütimeyer, “Results of the Investigation,” 538. 29. The last recorded aurochs, a cow, died in the Jaktorów Forest, Poland, in 1627. 30. Uncalibrated date. 31. R. Burleigh and J. Clutton-​Brock, “A Radiocarbon Date for Bos primigenius from Charterhouse Warren Farm, Mendip,” Proceedings University Bristol Spelaeological Society 14, no. 3 (1977): 255–​257; J. Clutton-​Brock, A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 81–​84. 32. J. C. Vogel and N. J. van der Merwe, “Isotopic Evidence for Early Maize Cultivation in New York State,” American Antiquity 42 (1977): 238–​242. 33. S. Viner, J. Evans, U. Albarella, and M. P. Pearson, “Cattle Mobility in Prehistoric Britain:  Strontium Isotope Analysis of Cattle Teeth from Durrington Walls (Wiltshire, Britain),” Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010): 2812–​2820. 34. Viner et al., “Cattle Mobility,” 2819. 35. J. Gallant, The Story of the African Dog (Pietermaritzburg:  University of Natal Press, 2002). 36. Clutton-​Brock, Animals as Domesticates, 135. 37. C. Grigson, “An African Origin for African Cattle? Some Archaeological Evidence,” African Archaeological Review 9 (1991): 119–​144. 38. C. Roubet, “Une économie pastorale préagricole en Algérie orientale: le Néolithique de tradition Capsienne,” L’Anthropologie 82 (1978): 583–​586; J. Clutton-​Brock, “The Spread of Domestic Animals in Africa,” in The Archaeology of Africa Food, Metals and Towns, ed. T. Shaw, P. Sinclair, B. Andah, and A. Okpok (London: Routledge, 1993), 66. 39. Clutton-​Brock, Animals as Domesticates, 110–​113. 40. C. Grigson, “The Craniology and Relationships of Four Species of Bos. 5. Bos indicus L.,” Journal of Archaeological Science, 7 (1980): 3–​32.

 

488   Juliet Clutton-Brock 41. Oliver Hanotte, Daniel G. Bradley, Joel W. Ochieng, Yasmin Verjee, Emmeline W. Hill, and J. Edward O. Rege, “African Pastoralism: Genetic Imprints of Origins and Migrations,” Science 296 (2012): 336–​339. 42. Clutton-​Brock, Animals as Domesticates, 110–​113; Hanotte et al., “African Pastoralism.” 43. A. M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, trans. J. Crookenden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 44. M. K. Dhavalikar, “From Farming to Pastoralism:  Effects of Climatic Change in the Deccan,” in The Walking Larder Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism and Predation, ed. J. Clutton-​Brock (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 156–​168. 45. Clutton-​Brock, Animals as Domesticates, 85. 46. H.-​P. Uerpmann, D. T. Potts, and M. Uerpmann, “Holocene (Re-​)Occupation of Eastern Arabia,” in The Evolution of Human Populations in Arabia, Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology, ed. M. D. Petraglia and J. I. Rose (Heidelberg: Springer, 2009), 205–​214; H.-​P. Uerpmann and M. Uerpmann, Tübingen University, pers. comm., 2013. 47. H.-​P. Uerpmann, The Ancient Distribution of Ungulate Mammals in the Middle East (Wiesbaden: Dr Reichert, 1987).

Further Reading Davis, S. J. M. The Archaeology of Animals. London: Batsford, 1987. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Eagles. London: Penguin Classics, 1997. Manning, A., and James Serpell, eds. Animals and Human Society:  Changing Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1994. Zeder, Melinda A., Daniel G. Bradley, Eve Emshwiller, and Bruce D. Smith, eds. Documenting Domestication:  New Genetic and Archaeological Paradigms. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2006. Zeuner, F. E. A History of Domesticated Animals. London: Hutchinson, 1963.

 

Chapter 26

Anim als a nd E c ol o gical S c i e nc e Anita Guerrini

Introduction The chapter examines the scientific study of animals in the ecological sciences under three broad headings. Before there was ecological science, there was natural history, while today some believe that the future of ecological science is in what has been called de-​extinction or synthetic biology. Between these two extremes, I look at some current practices in ecological science, with case studies of wolves and fish.

From Natural History to Ecology Although Aristotle (384–​322 bce) was not the first to regard animals as subjects of inquiry rather than as commodities, he was the first Western philosopher to do this systematically. His works on animals, particularly History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals, established a science of natural history that endured until Darwin and in some ways persists today. Historia (Greek ἱστορία) originally meant simply an “inquiry” or an “investigation,” or an account of such an inquiry. It did not imply the passage of time. Aristotle’s History of Animals offered detailed descriptions of all animals known to him. Unlike his mentor Plato, Aristotle was no armchair philosopher, and he took every opportunity to observe every animal he could: wild and domestic, native and exotic, terrestrial and aquatic. He investigated morphology, habitat, behavior, and what he called “manner of life”; what parts were the same and what were different; how they ate and reproduced. He noted natural kinds and attempted various classifications. Broad groupings seemed obvious: birds were different from fish. Some animals had two feet, some four, others none. Some animals were “blooded”; some, like

 

490   Anita Guerrini insects, were not. But when Aristotle began to look at generation, he found categories that cut across others and that seemed to fit a hierarchical system based on degrees of perfection as measured by degrees of natural heat. Thus warm-​blooded viviparous animals were “hotter” and “more perfect” than oviparous animals, and so forth, down to those animals he believed produced larva rather than eggs. This hierarchical system, later known as the “chain of being” or “ladder of nature,” proved to have remarkable staying power in Western thought. The chain of being was not only hierarchical but full, including every animal (and plant) that could be created. It was also unchanging, so that species were fixed in time and space. And it was teleological: nature always worked toward a purpose.1 From the outset, the natural history of animals did not consist merely of passive observation. Aristotle dissected many dead animals and a few living ones. He collected and preserved specimens. These remained essential practices for the science of natural history, as did recording observations in words and pictures. Natural history overlapped with other uses of animals: collections of exotic animals in menageries conferred prestige on their owners but also provided opportunities for naturalists to observe new species, and hunters and fishermen often provided materials for study. The Roman physician Galen (c. 129–​210 ce) used animals in anatomical studies to learn about human function, but at the same time, he also learned about animals. Naturalists from antiquity to the nineteenth century followed Aristotle’s example and collected, dissected, and observed. Christians, Muslims, and Jews adopted Aristotle’s hierarchical concept of nature and scientists still refer to “higher” and “lower” animals. Beginning with the influx of New World animals to Europe in the sixteenth century, however, the chain of being began to fall apart. For example, the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner (1516–​1565) did not quite know what to do with the armadillo, and he strained to fit her into a known niche on the chain of being. As translated by Edward Topsell (1572–​1625) a half century later, the “Tatus or Guinean Beast” (“Guinean” in this era simply meant “foreign”), is brought for the most part out of the new-​found world, and out of Guinia, and may therefore be safely conveyed into these parts, because it is naturally covered with a harde shell, devided and interlined like the fins of fishes, outwardly seeming buckled to the backe like coat-​armor, within which, the beast draweth up his body, as a Hedghog doth within his prickled skin; and therefore I take it to be a Brazilian Hedghog.2

Gessner’s Historiae animalium (1551–​1558) was one of a number of encyclopedic natural histories of the Renaissance that drew on the ancient Roman Pliny (23–​79 ce). Pliny’s very popular Natural History surveyed all that was known about nature, mingling direct observation with a variety of textual sources of varying credibility. Aelian (170–​230 ce) followed this model, as did Christian writers such as Isidore of Seville (560–​636), who included a section on animals in his Etymologia, and Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–​1280), whose De animalibus both summarized Aristotle’s animal works (which

 

Animals and Ecological Science    491 Albertus reintroduced to the West) and displayed his own observations, particularly on the falcon. Gessner and his contemporaries, such as Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–​1605), made no attempt to classify beyond very general categories. The lack of consensus about classification among naturalists is evident in cabinets of curiosities, assembled in this period as physical counterparts to Renaissance natural history texts. Cabinets served as prototypes for natural history museums, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. A cabinet belonged to an individual and reflected that person’s tastes and interests. Usually a single large room, it functioned as a naturalist’s workplace and as a site of display, open or not to spectators. Collectors mingled natural history and antiquities, natural objects and made objects, using surprising juxtapositions to produce particular effects: aesthetic, moral, or philosophical. Unusual specimens and natural anomalies were particularly prized, but cabinets also documented the ordinary course of nature. Illustrated catalogs mapped the collections. For example, the cabinet of Italian apothecary Ferrante Imperato (1550–​1625) featured many preserved animal specimens, with an emphasis on the rare and unusual—​the diarist John Evelyn reported seeing chameleons and “an extraordinary greate Crocodile.”3 Preservation methods included drying and “wet” preparations in jars with some kind of preserving fluid, as well as taxidermy. Late seventeenth-​century works of natural history, such as Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux (1671–​1676) of the Paris Academy of Sciences served as a kind of paper cabinet or paper menagerie, since it consisted of animals from Louis XIV’s menageries.4 The idiosyncratic organization of cabinets and such works as the Mémoires reflected continued debate about the proper criteria for classification. The ideal, a system that displayed the order of nature, seemed increasingly out of reach. Aristotle had attempted and failed to establish such a natural system. The naturalist John Ray (1627–​1705), who edited the comprehensive natural history of birds of Francis Willughby (1635–​1672), attempted at the end of the seventeenth century to outline a natural classification of animals, but it was generally viewed as too complex to be useful. The discovery of the sexuality of plants, which emerged from the work of a number of late seventeenth-​century naturalists, provided a key to the classification of both plants and animals. Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus, 1707–​1778), classified plants according to sexual parts in his Systema naturae (1735), which also presented a scheme for classifying animals, organizing them in six broad classes: quadrupeds, birds, amphibians, fish, insects, and worms. The tenth edition in 1758 established the now standard binomial nomenclature of genus and species. Linnaeus aimed to establish order rather than to reproduce nature’s plan, but he saw that order as a revelation of God’s design.5 Georges-​Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–​1788), compiled the most comprehensive eighteenth-​century work of natural history in the 44-​volume Histoire naturelle (1749–​1788). Buffon viewed himself as a new Pliny who would write a natural history of everything, and as supervisor of the royal botanical garden in Paris and its menagerie, he presided over a worldwide trade in plants and animals.6 With his collaborator Louis-​Jean-​Marie Daubenton (1716–​1800), volumes 3–​15 on quadrupeds established

 

492   Anita Guerrini comparative anatomy as an essential component of natural history. Buffon also took advantage of technical developments in engraving and printmaking over the previous two centuries in his detailed illustrations. Buffon acknowledged in his preface that we cannot pretend to be able to understand all of nature’s complexity and abundance. He dismissed much of the work of earlier naturalists and claimed a method of observation and comparison of numerous individuals derived from the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–​1626), although he also referred to both ancient and more recent works such as the Paris Academy’s Mémoires. Perhaps most importantly, he disregarded any religious framework; although nature revealed a design, it did not come from God. Buffon’s first discovery was, he noted, “perhaps humiliating to humans: it is that we must classify ourselves as animals.”7 He went on to condemn all current classification schemes as being artificial and incomplete, displaying “an error of metaphysics,” what we might call a category mistake. The systems for classifying animals were, he said, even worse than those for plants.8 Buffon sought a natural system based on close observation of all characteristics of an organism. Such a system would not be as complete and complex as that of Linnaeus, but it would, he believed, be truer to nature. In the volumes on quadrupeds (what we would call mammals, following Linnaeus), Buffon and Daubenton organized them first into domestic and wild, then into local and exotic, with further divisions according to teeth and other criteria. But over the 40 years of the Histoire naturelle, Buffon added the critical concept of time to natural history. Acknowledging studies of fossils that had begun with Nicholas Steno (1638–​1676) in the previous century, Buffon came to emphasize contingency and historical process in nature, arguing that present life forms can be explained by their history. In addition, Buffon acknowledged what Steno and others had been reluctant to recognize: the fact of extinction. Not all life forms survived; nature’s plan, whatever it was, included imperfection and dead ends. In Epoques de la nature (1778), Buffon presented a story of natural development over time that greatly extended the traditional Christian time frame based on biblical chronology. Together with Linnaean classification, Buffon laid the groundwork for the development of a secular science of natural history in the nineteenth century. Buffon’s King’s Garden, which the French Revolution re-​created as the Paris Museum of Natural History, became a central site for the development of this new science.9 Museum collections of animals in the nineteenth century, based on voyaging and collecting over the previous 200 years, engendered the professionalized and specialized natural history of animals that in turn gave birth to a number of new sciences, including ecology. Historians have traced the development of evolutionary theory from Georges Cuvier’s studies of fossils at the Paris Museum of Natural History in the 1790s to Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species, a development that was neither smooth nor inevitable. The work of numerous naturalists, artists, collectors, curators, anatomists, and experimenters contributed to Darwin’s theory and its elaboration in the second half of the nineteenth century. Many of the same individuals contributed to the beginnings of the science of ecology, which historian Lynn Nyhart attributes to “taxidermists, zookeepers, school teachers, museum reformers, amateur enthusiasts, and nature protectionists.”10

 

Animals and Ecological Science    493 The science of ecology, defined by Ernst Haeckel (1834–​1919) in 1866 as the relationship of organisms with their environment, is a direct consequence of Darwin’s ideas of animals’ adaptation to differing environments. Unlike early modern naturalists who focused on individuals—​since often they only had knowledge of a single specimen of a particular animal—​Darwin’s evolutionary theory operated at the level of populations. This disappearance of the individual animal would have important implications for the ecological study of animals.

Animals and Ecological Science:  Two Case Studies The modern study of animals that may be included under the umbrella of “ecological science” spans a gamut from broad and highly mathematical population studies to intimate studies of animal behavior. A popular notion of ecological research pictures rugged scientists observing nature in the wild, from a distance. There is some truth to this notion, but ecological research can also be as invasive and manipulative as other types of animal research. Much ecological work is now done in laboratories and with computer models, but it continues to be distinct from other biological sciences in its persistent engagement with field work. Early ecologists tried to capture this distinctiveness in varied titles; around 1900, Frederic Clements called himself an “outdoor physiologist”; in the 1930s Victor Shelford referred to ecology as “scientific natural history.”11 The concept of the ecosystem was first enunciated by British ecologist Arthur Tansley in 1935, but the idea had been around for a while. Whether nature was an organism, as Clements argued; a community, as Charles Elton maintained in his influential book Animal Ecology (1927); or a complex biogeochemical system of feedbacks and nutrient cycling, as G. Evelyn Hutchinson and later Eugene Odum demonstrated, it became increasingly clear that ecological science was one of systems rather than of individuals.12

Wolves Although Romulus and Remus were said to have suckled on a she-​wolf, wolves have more often been feared as predators of humans and symbols of an unknown and uncivilized world. In the Middle Ages, the taming of the wolf of Gubbio by St. Francis reflected this widespread fear of wolves in particular and the wilderness in general. In the eighteenth century, the bête féroce of the Gévaudan—​finally revealed to be a wolf—​terrorized a region in the Massif Central of France for a year.13 Wolves had become extinct in much of Western Europe by the end of the nineteenth century. In the early years of westward expansion in the United States, wolves were obstacles to be extirpated, but by the late twentieth century they had become symbols of lost wilderness and human hubris.

 

494   Anita Guerrini In Eurasia and the United States, modern wolves have a mixed status as both an exotic animal in a zoo and a wild and not necessarily welcome native animal. In the United States, grey wolves were among the first animals to be listed after passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973 (the Bern Convention of 1979 performs a similar function in the European Union). Long considered to be vermin, wolves in the lower 48 states were confined to a small area in northern Minnesota and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula by the 1930s. Although the noted wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold (1886–​1948) had noted the “fierce green fire” die out in the eyes of a wolf he shot in Arizona in 1909 (as he recounted in his 1944 essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain”), he continued to hunt wolves and to advocate their slaughter for the next 20 years.14 Only in the early 1930s, when wolves had been nearly hunted, trapped, and poisoned out of existence, did he begin to recognize the role of predators in ecosystem maintenance. His 1933 book Game Management, for many years the main textbook on the subject, revealed in its title two enduring characteristics of human relationships with, and study of, wild animals: they were “game” for the use and sport of humans, and they required human management.15 The management context remains prominent in research on wild animals. Unlike laboratory animal research, ecological research is often applied research, particularly in the United States, as reflected in funding sources that include the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service (at the federal and state levels), and the Department of Agriculture (which oversees the Forest Service).16 By the 1980s, wolves were on the rebound in the United States and, owing to similar conservation measures, in parts of Europe as well. Wolves trickled across the border into the United States from Canada, and in a controversial measure, Canadian wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and areas of central Idaho in 1994–​1995. The reintroduction of wolves to areas that had not seen them in over half a century continues to raise many issues, both scientific and political, as well as a significant public response. In ecological terms, wolves are known as keystone predators, whose influence on an ecosystem extends far beyond their immediate impact on specific prey. The presence of such keystone species triggers “trophic cascades” of nutrient circulation, affecting a number of species throughout an ecosystem.17 For example, Ripple and Beschta recently demonstrated that the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone diminished elk populations, which in turn allowed aspen and cottonwood trees, beavers, and a number of other species to increase in numbers.18 Idaho wolves soon crossed the border into the states of Oregon and Washington, and in December 2011 an Oregon wolf known as OR-​7 crossed the southern border of Oregon into California. The last known wolf in California had been shot in 1924. Scientists from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife have tracked OR-​7’s travels with a GPS collar he has worn since early 2011. Radio tracking, first used in the 1950s, has been used to acquire data that is then used on a metascale in population studies and modeling, where the individual wolf disappears into the statistical model.19 Ripple and Beschta’s much-​cited work on trophic cascades in Yellowstone did not look directly at

 

Animals and Ecological Science    495 wolves at all, but measured the effects of their reintroduction on other plant and animal species.20 Although tracking allows wolves to be studied at a distance, wolves must be found and trapped in order to attach the collars, and while in captivity they can undergo further manipulation, including measurement and blood sampling. OR-​7’s travels reflect the uneasy balance between individuals and communities in ecological research on animals as well as the particular emotional and political space that wolves occupy. In a well-​known 1980 article, the environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott explored this tension in terms of the philosophical incommensurability between animal liberation and environmental ethics. One focused on individuals, the other on systems and species. The science of ecology, he argued, overturned the idea that nature was a “collection of subjects” in favor of seeing it as “a unified system of integrally related parts.”21 But in the case of the wolf, the individual has not quite been subsumed into the system. Wolves are among the most intensely studied animals in North America. The case is similar in Europe: after being hunted almost to extinction in the 1930s, wolves began to recolonize France in 1992 by crossing over the border from the Italian Alps, and have been subject to intense scientific and political scrutiny. A few years later, Polish wolves crossed the border into Germany, and wolves have been spotted in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium. With their small and scattered populations as well as their status as keystone predators and charismatic megafauna, it remains difficult for either researchers or the public to see wolves solely in terms of anonymous populations.22 OR-​7 has become internationally famous, with his own Wikipedia entry; similarly, researchers know each individual wolf in the Isle Royale pack in northern Michigan, closely studied by Vucetich and Nelson who also have a chapter in Part III of this volume. Behavioral ecologist Marc Bekoff, among others, has examined the social lives of wolves. Beginning in the 1970s, Bekoff compared the play behavior of wolves, coyotes, and dogs. He found that infant coyotes were more aggressive than either wolves or dogs, and that play behaviors had important roles in communication and social relations within the pack.23 In other work, he showed that aggressive behavior among wolves did not necessarily lead to dominance in the pack, and that wolves were more social animals than coyotes, who were much more solitary.24 Other ethologists have further elaborated the social interactions within a wolf pack. David Mech showed that the size of the wolf pack, long thought to be related to the size and availability of prey, was in fact regulated by other factors as well, including kinship relations and social interactions among the wolves.25 Mech and his colleagues examined data from a number of wolf studies in the United States and Canada over a period of more than 40 years. The focused and long-​term ecological study of wolves is echoed in work on other animals, mainly charismatic megafauna, such as elephants, lions, tigers, and great apes. Such attention can be seen as part of a long tradition of symbolic values as well as modern ecological concepts. Other species may play equally important roles in ecosystems but receive less public attention: fish are one example.

 

496   Anita Guerrini

Fish In contrast to the intense individual scrutiny of wolves, it is difficult for most people to see fish as individuals. Far from being charismatic megafauna, fish are nonetheless sentinels of climate change and ocean pollution, a critical food source, and strikingly diverse. They live in oceans and rivers, lakes and streams, in deep and shallow waters. Many species are game animals, and others have been domesticated to the extent of being intensively farmed. Ecological research on fish is correspondingly diverse, and takes place both in the wild and in laboratories. “In the wild” can in turn be broadly interpreted. The Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory near Mammoth Lakes, California is a natural setting that is heavily managed: Convict Creek is divided into channels, and a complex system of artificial streams allows for experimental manipulation of both native and nonnative fish. Research takes place in these streams, in the laboratories, and in the surrounding lakes. Since the mid-​1800s, many lakes in the high Sierra have been stocked with trout for sport fishing, mainly with nonnative varieties, such as brook and brown trout. The California Department of Fish and Game aerially stocks lakes with fingerling trout each spring and summer; many of these lakes would naturally have no fish. This occurs in high-​altitude lakes outside California as well. Researchers since the 1990s have documented the negative impact of fish stocking on native species of fish and on other animals, including the endangered mountain yellow-​legged frog.26 This research includes studies not only of fish, but also of frogs, insects, fungus, birds, and phytoplankton, well illustrating the interconnectedness of this ecosystem. In perhaps the most dramatic demonstration, researchers eradicated all fish from a lake by means of gill-​netting, a less toxic alternative to the usual fish management tool, the pesticide rotenone. The endangered frogs subsequently flourished.27 Nonvalued species, in this case nonnative trout, were therefore sacrificed (a standard term in animal experimentation) for a greater ecosystem good. Such species may be deliberately targeted or may be collateral damage from the collection of other species. Electrofishing is a common method of sampling to assess fish distribution and abundance in streams. The fish are stunned by an electric current, caught in a net, and then measured, sampled, or otherwise examined before being returned unharmed. However, recent studies have noted that electrofishing may not be entirely harmless to the fish, and that repeated electrofishing could cause physical and stress-​related injuries to both targeted and nontargeted species.28 Some researchers have also questioned the utility of lethal sampling, particularly in the case of top oceanic predators, such as sharks, whose populations are already endangered. Hammerschlag and Sulikowski point out that such sampling would be out of the question for large terrestrial carnivores.29 Like wolves, some fish are tracked rather than caught. Tracking migratory fish such as salmon had long been sought to assess survival along the much-​dammed Snake and Columbia Rivers in the US Pacific Northwest. The development of PIT (passive

 

Animals and Ecological Science    497 integrated transponder) tags in the early 1980s made this possible. Tiny electronic tags are injected either intramuscularly or into the body cavity of fish, who are then tracked via a series of antennas that pick up the tags’ electrical signal. Each individual fish is uniquely identified in a database. Millions of fish have been tagged since the 1980s, and their life cycles traced from river to ocean and back to the river.30 As these brief examples show, ecological research on animals ranges widely and encompasses both the field and the laboratory. Particularly in the case of charismatic megafauna such as wolves, research is deeply intertwined with social and political ideas of value and use. As indicators of the health of waterways and oceans, fish are increasingly studied. But mysterious outbreaks, such as sea star wasting syndrome, reveal how much remains to be learned about oceanic wildlife.31

Extinction Is Not Forever? Early modern natural historians grasped the notion of extinction with difficulty. The idea that a specific animal could simply disappear violated a number of common beliefs. Plant extinction seemed even less plausible. Aristotle had argued that species were eternal. The great chain of being would surely collapse if any spaces occurred among its tightly packed rungs, and extinction implied that God, in creating the world, had somehow made a mistake. Yet, quite apart from the evidence of fossils, several animals had become extinct in historical times in Europe, particularly in Britain. Brown bears were extinct in Britain by 1000 ce and had retreated to remote areas of northern and eastern Europe by the seventeenth century. Wolves had become quite rare in Britain by 1500 and had disappeared altogether two centuries later. The European beaver had disappeared from England by 1550 and was found only in isolated pockets in France. The death of the last native European ox or aurochs in Poland in 1627 was widely noted at the time; the breed had been under the protection of the king of Poland for over a century.32 By the nineteenth century, the fact of extinction, if not its scientific or theological implications, had become widely accepted. The discovery at the end of the eighteenth century of the bones of mammoths and of the giant sloth that Cuvier named the megatherium provided convincing evidence of animals who no longer occupied the planet. These animals, unlike some fossils, had no living analogues. Extinction became a key concept for Darwin, who argued that species that could not adapt to changing environmental conditions would become extinct. While Cuvier and Darwin established that extinction was a natural process, most modern extinctions are based on human activity, whether hunting or destruction of habitat. Several scientists and journalists have argued that we are presently at the beginning of a sixth mass extinction. Past mass extinctions caused the loss of half or more genera; during the last mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous era, 66 million years ago, 75 percent of all species disappeared.33

 

498   Anita Guerrini The concept of endangered species—​that is, species in danger of extinction—​emerged in the mid-​twentieth century. Building on work begun in the 1940s, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), founded in 1948, established its Red List in 1964 to document rare and endangered species. Now on the web, it is constantly updated.34 The US Endangered Species Act focused particular concern on habitats, as did the Bern Convention. In addition, the CITES agreement (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), drawn up by IUCN and signed by 80 countries in 1973 (it now has 180 signatories), regulates the international wildlife trade with the aim of conserving endangered species of both plants and animals. It is administered by the United Nations Environment Program. All these programs aim to conserve existing species. But by the early 2000s, other ideas began to emerge surrounding the question of endangered animals and endangered habitats.

Rewilding The idea of rewilding encompasses both the rehabilitation of landscapes and the reintroduction of particular species. While the reintroduction of extant species into places where they have become extinct is a long-​standing practice—​the reintroduction of wolves is one example—​rewilding takes this another step.35 In 2005, ecologist Josh Donlan, then a graduate student, burst onto the scene as the lead author of a short report in Nature entitled “Re-​wilding North America.” Coauthored with a plethora of heavy hitters including Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First, conservation biologist Michael Soulé, and evolutionary biologist Harry W. Greene, among others, “Re-​wilding North America” made a radical proposal: to restore the lost megafauna of North America by bringing large wild vertebrates elsewhere to fill these lost ecological niches. In other words, mammoths, American lions, and cheetahs, and the ancient Camelops, all of whom disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene era some 13,000 years ago, could be replaced with analogous species including elephants, African lions and cheetahs, and camels.36 What one blogger called “bringing sexy animals back”37 created a sensation, with wide attention in the global press. In a more detailed account a year later, Donlan and his coauthors explained their reasoning: “Earth is now nowhere pristine”; therefore, re-​ creating missing ecological functions could be justified, even though it would introduce nonnative species. They suggested that the functional significance of megafauna had been undervalued and that therefore reintroducing them could help to arrest the “ecological chain reactions” that would lead to additional extinctions. One of the animals they cited in support of their argument was the gray wolf, noting that in his absence from the United States, species such as deer and elk had increased the predation of certain plants. In particular, the predation of young trees had led to declines in aspen and other desired trees and to the degradation of riparian areas, leading in turn to impacts

 

Animals and Ecological Science    499 on birds and other animals and plants. Citing the work of Ripple, Beschta, and others on trophic cascades at Yellowstone, Donlan and his coauthors argued, The restoration of functionality from the reintroduction of wolves may even include a buffering of Yellowstone’s biodiversity to climate change…. Similarly complex but now extinct ecological roles for the dozens of lost Pleistocene predators and megaherbivores of North America would seem possible if not likely.38

Presenting this plan as “an optimistic agenda for twenty-​first century conservation,” Donlan and his coauthors argued that “we can no longer accept a hands-​off approach to wilderness preservation as realistic, defensible, or costfree.”39 While the “Pleistocene Park” Donlan envisages has not yet come to pass in North America, rewilding efforts have taken hold in widely varying places. In Siberia, scientist Sergey Zimov has joined native Yakutian horses, moose, and reindeer in a reserve with wisent (European bison) and musk ox, and plans to reintroduce native antelope and Bactrian camels in lieu of the extinct native camel. These herbivores appear to have had some success in recreating the grasslands that once dominated this area. He calls this reserve Pleistocene Park. The missing animal here is the woolly mammoth, who, in this climate, cannot be replaced by an elephant.40 Other parks are in various stages of development in Latvia, New Zealand, and Saudi Arabia.41 But what two ecologists recently called, with vast understatement, the “tricky issue” of species substitution is far from resolved.42 The best-​known and most controversial of these parks is Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. The brainchild of ecologist Frans Vera, the Oostvaardersplassen site dates back to 1968, when its land was reclaimed as a polder. Rather than being developed, it reverted to a wetland, and native birds began to appear. In 1982, the Dutch government decided to route a railway line around the site rather than through it, and the idea for Oostvaardersplassen began to take form. Vera aimed to recreate a Pleistocene landscape of grazing animals that could gradually also include forest; Vera’s much-​debated theory about the Pleistocene landscape is that it consisted of mixed and shifting forest and pasture. In place of extinct wild Tarpans and aurochs, Vera substituted Konik horses from Poland (thought to be descended from Tarpans) and Heck cattle. German Heck cattle, developed by back-​breeding in the 1920s to mimic the extinct aurochs, had been a favorite of Hermann Goering. Red deer, who are more like elk than deer, were added to the site in 1992. Since that time, a number of other wild animals, including graylag geese, white eagles and many other birds, roe deer, foxes and stoats, and a number of small rodent species have migrated to the site. Missing thus far are large predators such as wolves or bears. Wolves have recently been spotted in the Netherlands, and Vera is hopeful that they will make the journey to the reserve. Given the thousand-​mile wanderings of OR-​7, this is not improbable.43 The central problem of Oostvaardersplassen, as many commentators have noted, owes largely to the lack of predators. Because the animals at Oostvaardersplassen have been declared wild, they are not fed or otherwise managed, and only natural processes

 

500   Anita Guerrini operate. Not all the animals survive the winters, and in particularly harsh winters, hundreds have starved to death. Because Oostvaardersplassen is a fenced reserve (of some 6000 hectares, almost 15,000 acres), the animals cannot seek other grazing grounds. The spectacle of starving animals has been quite controversial in the Netherlands, with questions asked in the Dutch parliament, two commissions of inquiry, and finally, an agreement that animals who looked to be unable to survive the winter would be shot, a death deemed more humane than starvation. The numbers of animals fluctuate widely; the numbers of Heck cattle have recently ranged from nearly 4000 in 2011 to under 3000 in 2013.44 If some, like New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert, find Oostvaardersplassen “faintly ridiculous”; others, she admits, find it “inspiring,” and an active Rewilding Europe movement aims to “make Europe a wilder place,” with plans to rewild one million hectares by 2020 and “providing a viable business case for wild nature.”45 Like Donlan, the Rewilding Europe proponents view rewilding as a way to deal with rural depopulation as agriculture becomes more and more industrialized and more people move to cities.

De-​extinction: The Jurassic Ark? Michael Crichton’s 1990 science fiction novel Jurassic Park brought the idea of de-​ extinction to the attention of the public. The human genome project was just beginning, and the first successful mammalian clone, the sheep Dolly, was still several years in the future. Crichton, who prefaced his work with pages of realistic-​looking genetic code, proposed that dinosaur genetic material found in insects preserved in amber could form the basis for re-​creating dinosaurs and, presumably, other extinct animals. Scientists expressed skepticism that dinosaurs could thus be cloned: their DNA, even if preserved in amber, would be too degraded after millions of years to be viable.46 But, particularly after the successful cloning of Dolly in 1996, other more recently extinct animals began to get serious attention. In 2000, scientists in India proposed cloning the extinct Indian cheetah, the last specimen had been shot in 1953.47 At about the same time, Australian scientists began attempts to clone a thylacine or Tasmanian tiger (extinct since 1936), while scientists in Russia began the much more arduous task of cloning a woolly mammoth (extinct for over 10,000 years).48 Only in the past few years have the new genomic technologies known as synthetic biology become sufficiently developed that the prospect of de-​extinction has become more than wishful thinking. Geneticist George Church, in his 2012 book Regenesis, cited the 2003 cloning of the recently extinct Pyrenean ibex or bucardo as evidence that “extinction [is] no longer forever.”49 Church is at the forefront of a group promoting the de-​extinction of a number of species by genetic means. At the top of the list is the passenger pigeon, a species that was once abundant in the United States but became extinct in 1914. Critics point out that the cloned bucardo lived only for seven minutes, succumbing to lung malformations that had also, though less severely, affected Dolly.50

 

Animals and Ecological Science    501 Enough genetic material remains in preserved specimens that the prospect of revival by genomic means is a possibility. Standard cloning techniques involve transferring the nucleus of a somatic cell of the extinct animal into an enucleated host egg cell. But the genetic material from preserved specimens of passenger pigeons and thylacines is incomplete and requires further manipulation and genetic engineering to become viable. DNA deteriorates after death, so the older the specimen, the more difficult the genetic reconstruction would be; cloning a woolly mammoth would be more difficult than the passenger pigeon, but Sergey Zimov is optimistic that it can be accomplished.51 Back-​breeding is a lower-​tech form of such engineering; 90 years ago, the Heck brothers back-​bred cattle to resemble their idea of an aurochs. The Tauros project in Europe is a more sophisticated breeding program with the same goal.52 Geneticists also see possibilities in genetic engineering for improving currently endangered species. Theoretically, genetic manipulation could introduce disease resistance or even diversify small, inbred populations. In such contexts, rewilding takes on a new meaning, and ecosystem scientists, conservation biologists, ethicists, and legal scholars have debated the possible consequences of de-​extinction and the genetic engineering of the environment. Animal welfare has not been at the forefront of this discussion. For example, little has been said about the 57 goats who were implanted with engineered bucardo eggs to yield one birth. Since cloning continues to be a risky and unpredictable procedure, even target species may have less than optimal outcomes. Ecosystem scientists and conservation biologists point out that the environment is constantly changing, and that the niche that passenger pigeons, for example, occupied in the nineteenth century may no longer exist. The chestnut trees they favored are long gone, and other birds may now fulfill their ecological role. Habitat loss has been the major cause of modern extinction, and reintroducing formerly extinct animals will not in itself create habitat. Among many potential risks are the introductions or spread of diseases, unexpected species interactions, and invasiveness.53 Some are optimistic that these risks can be dealt with: Donlan points to successful eradications of invasive species on islands as an example of the increased human ability to manage wild populations. But he notes, “We are currently better at manipulating genomes than at rewilding landscapes.”54 The ethical implications, for animals, humans, and landscapes, are numerous. Some contend that de-​extinction is a form of restorative justice, a way to undo the wrongs of the past. Others believe that de-​extinction is mere hubris, and in the words of environmental activist George Monbiot, “lonely captivity is likely to be the fate” of animals produced by de-​extinction.55 The legal and social implications are even more daunting. Could engineered organisms be patented? How will reintroduction be conducted and regulated? Who will fund such research (which are now largely funded through private foundations)? How will such reintroductions affect current protections of endangered and threatened species? Legal scholars Jacob Sherkow and Henry Greely point out that “current protection of endangered and threatened species owes much to the argument of irreversibility.”56 If extinction is not forever, will protections for existing animals be weakened or even disappear?

 

502   Anita Guerrini Even the most sober commentators acknowledge that the “gee-​whiz” factor in de-​ extinction exerts a powerful pull. How cool would it be to see a mammoth? But venturing into such speculative realms has taken popular perceptions of animal ecology far from its roots in natural history and its concern for systems over individuals. The loss of species and the decline of biodiversity continue. The genetic tools of de-​extinction may at some time in the future help to mitigate some of these losses, but animals still stubbornly resist their reduction to cells and genes, and ecological science still has much to learn about and from animals in the wild.

Conclusion Aristotle would, I think, be intrigued and delighted to learn about modern ecology and its discoveries about animals. Convinced of the fecundity of nature, he would nonetheless find it difficult to abandon the philosophical principles of hierarchy and teleology that formed the basis of the great chain of being. Neither the idea of extinction nor the idea that extinct animals can be brought back would fit his system of values or his idea of science. Modern ecological science has incorporated ideas from natural history into a comprehensive theory of the interactions of living nature. Although ecology has retained its connection with the field, the individual animal often disappears amid statistical models and more recently genetics. But connection with the field, along with a concern with applications, continues to distinguish the ecological sciences from other biological sciences. Entangled in policy and politics, the ecological study of animals will continue to be a practice embedded in broader ideas about the value and future of wild nature.

Notes 1. The classic work on this topic is Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1936). For a broad (and still unsurpassed) overview of premodern ideas of nature, see also Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 2. Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-​Footed Beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607), 705. 3. John Evelyn, Diary, ed. E. S. de Beer, 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 330–​331. 4. On these points, see Anita Guerrini, The Courtiers’ Anatomists (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2015). 5. For further discussion of these points, see Paul Lawrence Farber, Finding Order in Nature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Phillip Sloan, “Natural History, 1670-​1802,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, and M. J. S. Hodge (London: Routledge, 1990), 295–​313. 6. E. C. Spary, Utopia’s Garden:  French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

 

Animals and Ecological Science    503 7. Georges-​Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière: avec la Description du Cabinet du Roy. Tome première (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749), 12; my translation. 8. Buffon, Histoire naturelle, 20. 9. Farber, Finding Order in Nature, 20; Sloan, “Natural History, 1670-​1802,” 304–​306. 10. Lynn Nyhart, Modern Nature:  The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 11. Keith R. Benson, “The Emergence of Ecology from Natural History,” Endeavour 24, no. 2 (2000): 59–​62. The tension between field and lab is explored in Robert Kohler, Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-​Field Border in Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 12. Benson, “Emergence of Ecology.” 13. Jay M. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 14. Aldo Leopold, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” in A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949). On Leopold’s thought, see Susan L. Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 15. Aldo Leopold, Game Management (1933; rpt. Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 16. On the history of the concept of biodiversity, see Robert Kohler, All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850-​1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 17. For a cogent explanation of trophic cascades, see Cristina Eisenberg, The Wolf ’s Tooth (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010). 18. William J. Ripple and Robert L. Beschta, “Trophic Cascades in Yellowstone: The First 15 Years after Wolf Reintroduction,” Biological Conservation 145 (2012): 205–​213. 19. Tim Coulson, Daniel R. McNulty, Daniel R. Stahler, et  al., “Modeling Effects of Environmental Change on Wolf Population Dynamics, Trait Evolution, and Life History,” Science 334 (2011): 1275–​1278. 20. Ripple and Beschta, “Trophic Cascades.” 21. J. Baird Callicott, “Animal Liberation:  A  Triangular Affair,” Environmental Ethics 2 (1980): 311–​338, at 321. 22. Charismatic megafauna are defined as large animals (over 50 kg) who have widespread popular appeal. 23. Marc Bekoff, “Play Signals as Punctuation:  The Structure of Social Play in Canids,” Behaviour 132 (1995): 419–​429. 24. Marc Bekoff, “Mammalian Dispersal and the Ontogeny of Individual Behavioral Phenotypes,” American Naturalist 111 (1977): 715–​732. 25. See L. D. Mech and Luigi Boitani, eds. Wolves:  Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation. (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2003), esp chap.  1, pp.  1–​34; Paul A. Schmidt and L. David Mech, “Wolf Pack Size and Food Acquisition,” American Naturalist 150 (1997): 513–​517. 26. R. A. Knapp, “Non-​Native Trout in Natural Lakes of the Sierra Nevada: An Analysis of Their Distribution and Impacts on Native Aquatic Biota,” in Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project:  Final Report to Congress, vol. III, Assessments, Commissioned Reports, and Background Information, 363–​407 (Davis: University of California, Centers for Water and Wildland Resources, 1996).

 

504   Anita Guerrini 27. R. A. Knapp, P. S. Corn, and D. E. Schindler. “The Introduction of Nonnative Fish into Wilderness Lakes:  Good Intentions, Conflicting Mandates, and Unintended Consequences.” Ecosystems 4 (2001):  275–​278; R. A. Knapp, D. M. Boiano, and V. T. Vredenburg, “Removal of Nonnative Fish Results in Population Expansion of a Declining Amphibian (Mountain Yellow-​Legged Frog, Rana muscosa),” Biological Conservation 135 (2007): 11–​20. 28. Frank M. Panek and Christine L. Densmore, “Electrofishing and the Effects of Depletion Sampling on Fish Health: A Review and Recommendations for Further Study,” in Bridging America and Russia with Shared Perspectives on Aquatic Animal Health, ed. R. C. Cipriano, A. W. Bruckner, and I. S. Shchelkunov (Landover, MD: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, 2011), 299–​308. 29. Neil Hammerschlag and James Sulikowski, “Killing for Conservation:  The Need for Alternatives to Lethal Sampling of Apex Predatory Sharks,” Endangered Species Research, 14 (2011):  135–​140. See also Ben Minteer, James P. Collins, Karen E. Love, Robert Puschendorf, “Avoiding (Re)extinction,” Science 344 (2014): 260–​261. 30. “PIT Tag Information Systems (PTAGIS),” Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission (PSMFC.org), n.d. http://​www.psmfc.org/​program/​pit-​tag-​information-​systems-​ptagis accessed 17 November 2014. 31. Dylan McDowell, “Environmental Drivers May be Adding to Loss of Sea Stars,” Breaking Waves 24 July 2014 http://​blogs.oregonstate.edu/​breakingwaves/​2014/​07/​24/​ environmental-​drivers-​may-​adding-​loss-​sea-​stars/​ accessed 17 November 2014. 32. Wladyslaw Szafer, “The Ure-​ox, Extinct in Europe since the Seventeenth Century:  An Early Attempt at Conservation That Failed,” Biological Conservation 1 (1968): 45–​47. 33. See Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (New York: Henry Holt, 2014). 34. “The IUCN Red List of Endangered Species,” Red List. 2014.3 http://​www.iucnredlist.org/​ accessed 17 November 2014. 35. Dolly Jørgensen, “Reintroduction and De-​extinction,” Bioscience 63 (2013): 719–​720. 36. C. Josh Donlan, Harry W. Greene, Joel Berger, et al., “Re-​wilding North America,” Nature 436 (2005): 913–​914. 37. Neil Chambers, “Josh Donlan on Bringing Sexy Animals Back via ‘Rewilding’,” treehugger. com, 24 December 2008, http://​www.treehugger.com/​clean-​technology/​ecologist-​josh-​ donlan-​on-​bringing-​sexy-​animals-​back-​via-​rewilding.html accessed 17 November 2014. 38. C. Josh Donlan, Joel Berger, Carl E. Bock, et al., “Pleistocene Rewilding: An Optimistic Agenda for Twenty-​ First Century Conservation,” American Naturalist 168 (2006):  660–​681, at 662–​663. 39. Donlan et al., “Pleistocene Rewilding,” 674. 40. Sergey Zimov, “Pleistocene Park:  Return of the Mammoth’s Ecosystem,” Science 308 (2005): 796–​798. 41. Emma Marris, “Reflecting the Past,” Nature 462 (2009): 30–​32. 42. Joshua Tewkesbury and Haldre S. Rogers, “An Animal-​ Rich Future,” Science 345 (2014): 400. 43. Marris, “Reflecting the Past”; “Oostvaardersplassen,” Natuurgebeiden Ontdek Nederland www.staatsbosbeheer.nl/​Natuurgebeiden/​Oostvaardersplassen/​aspx, accessed 17 November 2014. 44. “Oostvaardersplassen,” Nieuws & achtergronden, http://​www.staatsbosbeheer.nl/​ Nieuws%20en%20achtergronden/​Themas/​Oostvaardersplassen.aspx; the Dutch site has

 

Animals and Ecological Science    505 more up-​to-​date information than the English one.: www.staasbosbeheer.nl/​english.aspx accessed 17 November 2014. 45. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Recall of the Wild,” The New  Yorker, December 24, 2012; “Our Mission,” Rewilding Europe: Making Europe a Wilder Place, www.rewildingeurope.com/​ about/​mission, accessed 17 November 2014. 46. “Are Movies Science? Dinosaurs, Movies, and Reality,” DinoBuzz, n.d. http://​www.ucmp. berkeley.edu/​diapsids/​buzz/​popular.html accessed 17 November 2014. 47. “India to Clone Cheetah,” BBC.com, 16 October 2000 http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​2/​hi/​south_​ asia/​974858.stm, accessed 17 November 2014. 48. Stewart Taggart, “Aussies Roaring on DNA Cloning,” Wired.com, 5 May 2000, http://​ archive.wired.com/​science/​discoveries/​news/​2000/​05/​36117, accessed 17 November 2014. 49. Lesley Evans Ogden, “Extinction Is Forever … or Is It?” Bioscience 64 (2014), 469–​475. 50. Ogden, “Extinction Is Forever”. 51. Ogden, “Extinction Is Forever”; see also Nathaniel Rich, “The Mammoth Cometh,” New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2014; Carl Zimmer, “Bringing Them Back to Life,” National Geographic, April 2013. 52. See Rewilding Europe: Making Europe a Wilder Place, www.rewildingeurope.com, accessed 17 November 2014. 53. Jacob Sherkow and Henry Greely, “What if Extinction Is Not Forever?” Science 340 (2013) 32–​33; Carrie Friese and Claire Marris, “Making De-​extinction Mundane?” PLOS Biology 12, no.  3 (March 2014):  1–​3; on the ethical issues, Ben Minteer, “Is It Right to Reverse Extinction?” Nature 509 (2014): 261. 54. C. Josh Donlan, “De-​extinction in a Crisis Discipline,” Frontiers of Biogeography, 6 (2014): 25–​28. 55. George Monbiot, “Resurrecting Woolly Mammoths Is Exciting—​But It’s a Fantasy,” Guardian, August 6, 2013. 56. Sherkow and Greely, “What if Extinction?” 33.

 

Chapter 27

Staging Pri v i l e g e , Proximit y, an d “ E xt re me Animal Tou ri sm” Jane C. Desmond

Walking among 10,000 penguins on icy shores, or slipping past a thousand sun-​ basking iguanas arranged like shingles on a dull grey lava flow… These are examples of what I term “extreme animal tourism.” In this chapter I will describe this phenomena, argue for its utility as a conceptual category in our growing understanding of human relations with nonhuman animals, and suggest that this realm of human cultural endeavor gains its charge, its power, from the fact that human populations (other than elite tourists) are largely banished from the frameworks of encounter. “Extreme animal tourism” offers an analytical end point that is unique, separate from mass tourism experiences of animal encounters, such as in local zoos and even the ubiquitous whale-​watching rides on easily accessible sea shores. It is distinct, too, from what we might term “supplementary animal tourism”—​that is, touristic encounters with animals who supplement forms of ecotourism that are primarily built around the experience of geographic uniqueness—​often termed “nature tourism” (such as trips to Alaska that feature majestic mountain peaks and include opportunities to see moose) or cultural encounters (such as tours for Americans to London or the Pyramids) that only peripherally engage animals, perhaps through feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square or through the proffered camel rides by the Nile. In extreme animal tourism, encounters with “wild” animals are the primary draw. The touristic frame simultaneously invokes several other presumptions. As pioneering scholar of tourism Dean MacCannell put it, “Tourism is not just an aggregate of merely commercial activities; it is also an ideological framing of history, nature, and tradition.”1 And, we would add now, it is a set of cultural, economic, and mobility practices that not only frames but actively produces these very ideas of “history,” “nature,” and “tradition.” As the scholarly literature since the 1970s has shown us, tourism is fundamentally based on the notion of encounter with peoples, places, and practices that are

 

Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”    507 not the stuff of our everyday lives, whomever the “our” refers to. Carefully watching the squirrels in our backyard in, say, the state of Ohio in the United States, does not constitute “animal tourism,” at least not for the residents of Ohio, who see those squirrels every day. However, for these same Ohio residents, watching monkeys in Balinese temples would demand close attention to the primates’ behavior, as they would be deemed “exotic,” even if, for local Indonesians, the monkeys may be seen as a common nuisance.2 Rather, tourism demands a different kind of attention, an attentive perception that is different from our everyday navigation of known environments, and in which an encounter with something or someone explicitly “different,” or not mundane, is both sought and required.3 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to sketch the contours of tourism scholarship over the last four decades, but key issues have included the questions of appropriate frameworks for interpretation.4 Is it “hosts and guests” or “colonized and imperial colonizer?” Is the primary mode of encounter visual—​that is, “the gaze”—​a construct, as John Urry notes, that is a form of attentive looking that discerns similarities and differences from what is already familiar and assigns value5; or, it is necessary to theorize a more fully embodied experience?6 Do tourists seek a specific type of experience? Is “enchantment” or “pilgrimage” a useful trope for interpretation? What role does imagination play?7 These are crucial questions because across the globe the practice of tourism—​as opposed to other types of travel—​constitutes one of the largest industries in the world. As a key component of the global economy, the role animals play in this arena deserves concerted attention in animal studies. Despite this, the role of human-​animal encounters in tourism has yet to be fully explored.8 Recently, however, we are beginning to see more writing on this issue, especially by geographers and environmental anthropologists. Much of this research focuses on human encounters with so called wild animals, such as during safaris. Some focus on more quasi-​domesticated encounters, such as swimming with dolphins, where the status of the animals encountered is ambiguously wild.9 As the category “wild” is germane to this chapter’s discussions, a moment to consider this term is needed. The term wild, like domesticated, or feral, is contextually and historically contingent in its meanings. As anthropologist Rebecca Cassidy succinctly puts it, “The idea that the authentic wild is somehow ‘out there’ occupying space that is untouched by human influence distorts understandings of places that are not out of time, or out of space.”10 Although scholars in environmental science, anthropology, sociology and science studies have been working to “put the social back into the wild”11 as Cassidy notes, public discourse and publics still reverberate with the notion of a place outside human influence. Ecotourism, and especially extreme animal tourism, mobilizes and depends on this ideological framework, and helps to burnish its continuing power and allure. Cassidy’s point applies here: “animals and plants are not born wild or domestic, it is people who designate them as such, according to priorities that are not always obvious, consistent, or permanent.”12 These seemingly antithetical terms of wild and domestic mask a much more complex, interdependent, and mutually constitutive web of relations between humans and other animals and places, which change

 

508   Jane C. Desmond over time. Part of the draw of “extreme animal tourism,” which may feature a trip to see polar bears in Churchill, Canada, for example, is the fulfillment of the fantasy that these animals live their lives outside human spheres of influence. This is hardly ever true, of course, since during the Anthropocene, or that stage of the earth’s time that we live in now, dominated by the actions of humans, it is hard to conceive of any living being not influenced in some way by human presence on the earth, if only through the carbon emissions that play a role in climate change and result in less ice for the polar bears of Churchill to rest on while chasing fish for their sustenance. Nonetheless, the ideological construct of the authentic “wild” is crucial for extreme animal tourism. Extreme animal tourism thus promises a hyperbolic experience—​ exceptional proximity, a hyperprivileged access to remote locales and large numbers of their very charismatic, rarely visited, animal populations—​and thus offers idealized version of eco-​ animal tourism. In this inherently contradictory framework, significant human-​animal interaction may occur (indeed, it may even be promised), but the human presence does (apparently) not disturb the wildlife or alter their mode of being in the (wild) world. Take, for example, a very recent promotional blurb from the World Wildlife Federation, which, in partnership with the Natural Habitats Institute, is promoting gorilla tourism in Uganda, where “multiple treks through Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest offer close-​up encounters with rare and captivating mountain gorillas.” This trip, the Great Uganda Gorilla Safari, provides “a rare opportunity to sit with families of endangered mountain gorillas”: You push aside a tangled rope of vine, pressing through the maze of foliage, when at last you see them. Ten or twelve gorillas sit in a forest clearing, two more up in a tree. They stop munching for a moment to observe you, nonchalant. A few feet away you spy the big silverback. Twice the size of the young females, he sits on massive haunches, stripping leaves from branches. He’s close enough to hold your gaze with his liquid brown eyes. Something primal, inexplicable, connects the two of you in that moment, when the world exists only within this rarest of encounters. On this riveting wildlife expedition meet mountain gorillas at close range and observe a host of other primates too, including chimpanzees.”13

Key tropes emerge in this short passage. The gorillas are “spied upon,” with a drawing back of a jungle curtain. They look back at you (with liquid brown eyes), recognizing you, yet sensing no danger, or perhaps even sensing some sort of comradeship without competition, they hold your gaze. This mutual subjective recognition is among the rarest of rare commodities—​so much so that the blurb promises that “the world exists only within this “moment.” This notion of trans-​species encounter and mutual recognition is, I argue, one of the hallmarks of extreme animal tourism. It assures us of what I term a “glorious indifference” on the part of the animals, who seem to understand that we are not there to harm or compete with them, but just to “be” as co-​constituents. Humans are not seen as a source of danger. A mutually respectful recognition is described in this blurb as “something primal,” and inexplicable, connecting human and nonhuman animal. This is a promised moment of transcendence, where human and nonhuman animals are on the same plane, mutually respectful, mutually self-​recognizing, and thus

 

Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”    509 mutually co-​constituting a special world. This world, I suggest, is one of pre-​Edenic fullness, trust, and mutuality. It is a fantasy of a “peaceable kingdom”14 come to life, a search for an innocent past. This search reaches a promised end in extreme animal tourism whereby a special realm of human-​animal experiences is commodified and sold as desirable, elusive, and exclusive. For most of those who sign up, such trips are a “once in a lifetime” adventure, demanding substantial investments of time, physical energy, and money. By definition, such a highly desirable experience can be available only to a privileged few since its value depends in part on its limited availability, precisely its non-​mass appeal, so necessary is the work of protecting, and constricting access to, this commodified “good.” I offer two brief case studies as examples of this phenomenon: first, tourism to the Galapagos Islands, owned by and located off the coast of the nation of Ecuador; and, second, tourism to Antarctica, a land and ice mass owned by no single nation but subject to a complex division of scientific missions and international agreements. Both areas are heavily managed to protect their renditions of “the wild.” Through an analysis of these sites and what they typify, I will argue that extreme animal tourism represents the most idealized form of human-​animal encounter with “the wild” that is available for elite touristic consumption, and as such sets the bar for other willed encounters between consuming humans and commodified animals. As a shorthand, I call this the “Edenic encounter,” and ask to what extent it is a compelling fantasy, reflecting deeply ingrained ideological formations, and to what extent might it actually be an attainable state of being? What human political and material work is necessary to create the conditions for extreme animal tourism and its goal of providing access to a nonhumanized locale and population of animals? Why does it appear to be so highly valued, at least among those who can afford to experience it? The implications of these case studies lend themselves to further questions, too, for future research: What effects on the animals might it have? What effects might it have on any nearby resident human populations, if there are any? What policy implications might emerge? And, are there wider implications for our study of tourism and of human-​animal relations?

Case Study No. 1: Extreme Animal Tourism in the Galapagos Islands Much of my emphasis in this research is on the embodied co-​presence of humans and animals, so I start with a personal memory of an embodied touristic experience in the Galapagos Islands in May 2013: I floated, snorkeling, in the green sea, cold in my wetsuit and struggling to manage my ungainly newly finned feet, and there, just six feet below me in the clear water, hovered a large sea turtle, his or her broad shell about as big as my table in the breakfast nook at home. Between us was the emerald-​tinged, calm sea, and I could see clearly her beak and head, relaxed out of the shell. As I spread my limbs out like hers,

 

510   Jane C. Desmond we became almost the same size, my torso and her shell, our softly moving limbs now parallel, sleepily undulating in the mild currents. Did she (or he?) know I was there hovering right above her in an imitation of her float? Did he care? Touching prohibited, I stayed in this echo formation with her for a while, several minutes at least, and then finally swam off to the zodiac, a type of swift, inflated rubber boat, hovering nearby. I’d fulfilled one of my fantasies for this trip—​swimming with a Galapagos sea turtle!

Why did I arrive in the islands with that fantasy, and what did it take to bring my fantasy of cross-​species oneness to life? I say “cross-​species oneness” here with some irony, because I have no idea to what extent the sea turtle took note of my presence, desired it, took pleasure in it, or wished I would just go away. Seeing that she could easily swim away but did not, I hope that this temporary sharing of her watery quarters was not an adverse event that cost her extra energy or elevated her stress hormones. But, even so, it is I, and not the turtle, who has expended large amounts of money and energy to enable us to be in the same place at the same time under conditions of tightly controlled limited human access that allow me to swim with her. She becomes, in a sense, an object of my desire for which I am willing to invest significant resources to obtain. This desire echoes what Halloy and Servais call “enchantment” in their discussion of dolphin-​encounter sessions in Egypt and Australia.15 While their focus is different, and I am not seeking a mutually engaged, uncanny “encounter” with the turtle, they, too, capture the intense kinesthetic involvement, and the temporary sense of immersion in another space-​time, here the clear, body-​embracing waters of the Galapagos and the ear-​thrumming pulse of snorkeled breathing in my ears fostering a narrowed focus on the sight and movement shared in our differentially carapaced bodies—​hers, en-​shelled; mine, encased in the rubber tourniquet of a diving wet suit.

Contours of Galapagos Tourism I am not alone in swimming with the turtles, there were a few others on the same zodiac, but neither am I among a crowd of finned and snorkeled masses, whose presence would surely drive the turtles away, destroying the very attraction for which we had all paid. This is the delicate balance, a source of intense political debate, between access and denial of access that must continually be replayed and recalibrated in the realms of extreme animal tourism. The Ecuadorian state has taken a very aggressive role in controlling access to the Galapagos, now a national park and marine reserve, and in assuring that Ecuador and Ecuadorians remain in control of a region that UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) has claimed as part of world patrimony, denoting it a world heritage site.16 The national park website calls it “the best preserved tropical archipelago on Earth.”17 Understanding the infrastructure of this tourist industry is crucial to grasping how the extreme animal tourism phenomenon unfolds in this unique site. The 19 Galapagos

 

Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”    511 Islands, located, approximately 1000 kilometers off the coast of Ecuador, can only be reached by plane or large ships. Overall, tourism has rapidly expanded from an annual estimated total of 12,000 visitors in 1979 to 180,000 in 2012. During that time foreign visitors have consistently outnumbered domestic ones. Today, according to statistics developed by the Galapagos National Park, Ecuadorian citizens comprise just over a third—​an estimated 34 percent—​of all tourists. Fiscal preferences exempt them from the hefty entry fee (US$100) to the national marine park and subsidies help lower air fares to the islands in order to foster domestic tourism there. Members of Mercosur and of the Andes community also qualify for discounted access, but numbers remain relatively low. Argentina, for example, contributes only about 1.6 percent of all visitors.18 In contrast, the United States contributes about 26 percent of all tourists, followed by approximately 5  percent each from the United Kingdom and Germany. Canada, Australia, France, Switzerland and Italy round out another total of 12 percent, bringing the total of US and European visitors to just under half of all visitors, with other countries making up the final 16 percent. No country-​by-​country breakdown on that 16 percent is currently available to determine if they come predominantly from within Latin America, Asia, or other countries. To the extent that my cruise-​ship experience was representative, the ages of the passengers ranged from the teens to late adulthood, but on my ship, at least, middle age was a predominant segment. This life stage certainly can correlate with accrued savings and income—​needed to afford an expensive trip that ran approximately US$5000 for a week. I have not found any statistics on a racial, ethnic, or regional origin or background on the US travelers. To the extent that income in the United States is still skewed along racial lines, we would expect that members of racialized minority groups would be underrepresented. As far as domestic Ecuadorian tourists go, preliminary research, based on conversations with Ecuadorian staff on board and on some published information, indicates that Ecuadorians tend to fly over and then to stay in the small hotels on one of the few islands in the Galapagos archipelago where human settlement is allowed, such as San Cristobal, and they stay for fewer days, and spend less money per day, than the foreign tourists. However, greater percentage of their money stays in the islands.19 The foreign tourists mostly fly in from Quito or Guyaquil, and then board foreign-​owned cruise ships to travel among the islands. They stay on board the ship, not in hotels, taking their meals and evening entertainment on board as well. In this type of arrangement, foreign money flows back primarily to the country of origin of the tour company, although some goes to the islands for permits. In all cases, though, access to the uninhabited islands in the Galapagos chain is controlled by the state, which issues permits to boats to visit certain islands at certain times only; this includes not only the large cruise ships but also the smaller, island-​based boats that take mostly Ecuadorian tourists out for a few hours or a day, but do not dock overnight on those islands.20 This scheduling of access is so tightly controlled that, for example, our snorkeling group was only allowed to be in a spot off a certain island for two hours, between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on a specific date, and we were not to linger, and not to return. While we were there, we saw no other groups of tourists, as the group visits

 

512   Jane C. Desmond were tightly scheduled in a different part of the archipelago. The active production of this absence of others is crucial in supporting the Edenic fantasy of being “alone with untouched nature.”21 Like most foreigners, I flew into Ecuador and then immediately out to the Galapagos, spending a week on board a cruise ship manned by a team of six Ecuadorian naturalists and headed by an Ecuadorian “expedition leader” named Carlos Romero.22 Cruise ships can only operate legally in the archipelago with state-​certified naturalists on board. whose certification depends on passing a series of state-​administered tests of their knowledge of the ecologies of the islands. Only Ecuadorian nationals can apply for certification. This implies that only Ecuadorians can adequately know—​or represent—​ Ecuadorian natural history. Not only are the animals owned by Ecuador, the knowledge about them is owned by Ecuadorians; or, rather, tourists’ on-​site access to knowledge about the islands and their animals can only be obtained through Ecuadorian gatekeepers of that knowledge.23 And the naturalists must live in the Galapagos on one of the few islands where humans are permitted to live.24 The result for the tourist is that no matter what island is visited, wildlife is abundant; the human presence is very limited; visitor perception of the experience is heavily mediated by Ecuadorians, since it is impossible to legally visit without a guide; and touristic behavior is closely monitored by Ecuadorians as well. In fact, guides are required to file reports on all out-​of-​the-​ordinary incidents on any tourist outing, and to report any environmental desecration. Thus, Ecuador and Ecuadorians have successfully instituted numerous gatekeeper functions that help them to keep control over the islands.

Producing Pristine Nature The extensive legal restrictions guarantee the continued existence of the Galapagos as a special site, inhabited by animals found nowhere else and only outside the realm of human habitats. The combination of immersion and lack of human habitation are two twinned markers of extreme animal tourism. In the Galapagos, human habitation has historically been minimal due to the isolated geography and the inhospitable terrain of the islands. Contemporary habitation, which could now be more practical due to improvements in water-​desalination technology and geographic access, is now tightly restricted in terms of which islands people can live on and who can own property and what they can do with it. Only a few of the islands allow residents. Tourists go to the Galapagos to see huge numbers of animals who cannot be seen anywhere else, like the giant tortoises. And they go to see them up close. They do not go to the islands to see animals they can see elsewhere, like goats, pigs, or cats, nor do they arrive expecting to see animal life only through huge telephoto lenses. This up-​close uniqueness is another defining aspect of extreme animal tourism. In the Galapagos, producing this sense of immersion in a unique “natural world” takes a lot of work and a lot of political will, and to be successful, it must be unseen, revealing, of course, the fiction

 

Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”    513 of a “natural world,” but not diminishing its touristic appeal and economic power. In the next section, I analyze the labor of producing the “natural world.” Since the animals are protected, they are not apparently frightened by the presence of humans (at least as far as we can judge from their behaviors and the fact of successful reproduction). Bright-​orange Sally Lightfoot crabs scuttle among rocky crevices; sea iguanas cruise the shoreline waters; seals and frigate birds come close, and hundreds of land iguanas bask in the sun (Figure 27.1) in our presence. The result is that the tourist has the experience of being immersed in the animals’ world. To maintain this access and freedom from fear, the government must monitor how close animal colonies are to human trails, move the trails away from the animals periodically, and enforce the behavioral proscriptions for the humans. Tourists are not supposed to feed the animals, scare them with loud noises or aggressive movements, get within six feet of the animals, and they must move away if any of the animals come closer than that. or if an animal must change her desired path across the terrain. They cannot touch the animals, capture and eat the animals, or take any animals, plants, or rocks home as a souvenir. Vision is the primary mode of consumption, but the physically close co-​presence of tourists and animals enables visitors to use their ears and noses as well as their kinesthetic experience of climbing on the shared volcanic terrain to embody their experience across several senses.

Fig. 27.1  Basking iguanas seen from ten feet away on a tourist path, Galapagos Islands. (Photo by J. Desmond, 2013.)

 

514   Jane C. Desmond A second example of our embodied experience came on Day 2 of our tour and exemplifies many of these hallmarks.

Blue-​Footed Boobies’ Courtship Dance On our second day in the islands, different groups rode in zodiacs from the ship to land on one of the islands for a walk led by one of our knowledgeable naturalist guides. There were 16 in our group (the maximum allowed by law). At carefully timed intervals, other groups of 16 from our ship had preceded and would follow us, so that at no time were tourists allowed to gather in larger groups, or roam on the island at will or step off the designated walking paths, which are changed by the government’s park service over time to preserve vegetation and nesting grounds. We came upon several pairs of iconic blue-​ footed boobies (Figure 27.2), their comic name reflecting something of their cartoonish-​looking bright blue eyes and bright blue feet, and their pointed beaks and ungainly, wide necks. Their courtship display continued as we stood in a sort of semicircle on the walkway to observe. Mating pairs were flirting (they seemed to be saying, “what? who, me?”), courting, and bonding while we watched. Most memorable was the “dance” of courtship, which consisted of the male blue-​footed booby alternately lifting his right foot and his left as if to say “hey, look at these beautiful feet,” while the female looked on. (Apparently, our naturalist said, the density of color of the feet is a desirable marker of sexiness.) Tails straight up on both a male and a female indicated their “interest” in each other. Wide-​spread wings in a chest-​dipping position was a final punctuation in the male display as he walked around the female, showing himself off. This continued for at least ten minutes three feet away from me, far less than the legally required six foot distance, while my group took photos. The next phase was one of offerings, as the male picked up a twig to offer it to the female for nest building. His offer was sometimes accepted; sometimes, rejected and summarily tossed aside by the female. Meanwhile, audio accompanied this visual. The male made a repeated whistling sound while the female squawked, especially when she chose to rebuff such advances. Seemingly, they truly were oblivious to our presence. (But, really, how could we know? Has there been research on the behavior of tourist-​visited bird colonies when the tourists aren’t there? Have scientists hidden secret boobie-​cams in the rocks? Not to my knowledge). To my untrained eye though, the birds seemed to be proceeding as if we were not there, and continued these behaviors for a long time. We eventually walked on, hastened by our guide who had to keep to the schedule, but the birds were still at it when we came back on the return loop of our walk 20 minutes later. I have no idea whether our presence is increasing the presence of stress hormones like corticosteroids or not, and whether our presence is subtly changing the duration or outcome of the courting behavior or the selection of mates and ultimately the ability of the birds’ reproduction to sustain the population. What I do know is that the birds seemed to ignore us, and that that is a key part of the appeal of such animal/​nature tourism … the sort of “you are there” effect without any obvious negative impact on the situation.

 

Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”    515 This opportunity to watch the blue-​footed boobies was terrific not only because their Broadway style choreography with its widely telegraphed intentions was exciting to see, but because it seemed to say, see, this is what I do even when you are not here … you are now seeing “authentic, non-​human-​influenced” behavior! We had every presumption, and were given no reason to doubt, that this behavior would proceed just as it did with us or without us present. That “authenticity,” the pulling aside of the curtain to peer in on another life, is part of what is being sold on this type of extreme animal tourism. However, the preservation of “authenticity” also seems to require extreme killing measures to produce this pristine vision. The unique animal ecology of the Galapagos, the site that stirred Darwin’s theories of natural selection, of change over time, must, apparently, be subject to preservation and protection from what are deemed to be “invasive

Fig. 27.2  Blue-​footed boobies “dancing” near the tourist path, Galapagos Islands. (Photo by J. Desmond, 2013.)

 

516   Jane C. Desmond species.”25 In other words, the unique and famous giant tortoises are welcome, as their ancestors came to the islands centuries ago and they do not exist elsewhere, but more recently arriving feral goats, rats, donkeys, and cats, too late on the historical timeline and too common elsewhere to be valuable, are subject to massive eradication campaigns so that they do not out compete endemic species for natural resources. For example, in a six-​year, six-​million dollar campaign started in 2001, The Ecuadorian government employed local hunters and helicopter sharpshooters brought in from New Zealand to kill 80,000 feral goats on the island of Santiago in the Galapagos. In 2012, the state began a poison-​bait campaign designed to kill 180 million rats, whose ancestors had arrived on the islands on whaling ships in the seventeenth century. The director of conservation for the Galapagos National Park Service, Danny Rueda, “called the raticide the largest ever in South America.”26 Extreme animal tourism requires extreme animal-​management techniques like killing, culling, and poisoning so that the supposedly untouched natural environment can be not so much preserved as recreated as a duplicate of a past moment.

Case Study No. 2: Antarctica, Antarctica, Antarctica! Extreme animal tourism in the Antarctic presents an even more exceptional situation. There are no resident populations on Antarctica, and there never have been. The closest humans have come to colonizing the territory is the establishment of a few sparsely inhabited year-​round scientific stations, each “owned” by a specific national government presumed to have an interest in Antarctica, including Chile, the United States, Britain, and Russia. Most life in Antarctica is not human but animal, and penguins, whales, flying squas, and seals exist on a massive scale. If getting close to a hundred sun-​basking land iguanas in the Galapagos was a unique experience, walking among a colony of ten thousand penguins was even more so. For, while Antarctica, unlike the Galapagos, offers few species who exist nowhere else, what it does offer is a scale of uninhabited landscape and of groups of animals that is nearly unimaginable. Icebergs a mile long float by, and rookeries of thousands of penguins bristle with the squawks of assertive adults watching their chicks (Figure 27.3). Tourism to the Antarctic has expanded steadily since the 1960s when “Lars-​Eric Lindblad started ship-​borne tourism operations in the Antarctic under a strong environmental ethic that is still applied today.”27 In just the last two decades, the number of Antarctic cruise passengers has exploded, from 6000 in 1993 to more than 40,000 in 2012, as reported by IAATO (the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators).28 The very high cost of accessing the Antarctic—​averaging US$10,000 for a twelve-​day trip from the United States, for example—​will, however, continue to set a limit on who can choose to go.

 

Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”    517

Fig. 27.3  Antarctica tourism: Ship, people, and penguins. (Photo by J. Desmond, 2012.)

The “Neo-​Sublime” Antarctica is a realm of the sublime, or what we might better call a twenty-​first century “neo-​sublime.” Like earlier historical invocations of sublimity, this one elicits a sense of awe at its scale, bordering for many on the religious, as tourist blogs reveal.29 Like the Galapagos but even more so, Antarctica places humans in a world dominated by the elements of water and an indescribable scale of animal habitation, which literally dwarf any human presence, and seem to both precede and exceed it. While vision and scale are very important elements of Antarctica’s allure, I would argue that the physical experience of immersion is paramount in eliciting the neo-​ sublime. In Antarctica, this is usually fostered in immersion in animal colonies, although some other kinesthetic experiences, like climbing a steep hill to a heightened viewing point, or sliding down icy slopes like kids on a sled, are not so focused. Yet, even in these cases, the presence of animals is undeniable. It is not that the animals are not aware of us, clearly. They give us the eye, but apparently, having perhaps judged us to be too loudly dressed in our assertive red parkas, deem us not a threat and carry on. Occasionally, we provide a point of entertainment or interest, and a particularly brave or inquisitive penguin will come directly toward us as

 

518   Jane C. Desmond we sit among them, but mostly they simply detour around us as we try not to make large gestures or too much noise, or to block their path. The sense of acceptance is extraordinary, and based, our guides say, on the fact that the penguins have not recently experienced danger from humans. We are clearly in their world, not they in ours, and they outnumber us by a factor of a thousand to one. For me, there was something profoundly peaceful in this experience. My breathing alternately accelerated with excitement and slowed in contemplation. A rush of words at the dinner-​table conversations on board that night attempted to capture the sense of the experience, but failed to render in verbs what was essentially a nonverbal experience. Intense affect, being stunned into non-​or preverbal state, an inability to articulate the feeling or effect of an experience, combined with physical exertion—​clambering in and out of the zodiacs, climbing on ice trails or rocky hills—​come together to provide what for some is a transcendent experience. Animals are the crucial element constructing this experience. Such emotional experiences can be transformative, but they are so within historically constituted matrices of emotional legibility and value. As David Picard notes in his work on affect and tourism, while many anthropologists and psychologists today now believe that some emotions are widely felt across many communities (anger, sadness, joy), we increasingly recognize that the cultural contexts through which those feelings may gain value, become articulated, even become recognized as present is one of culturally specific cultivation.30 British tourism theorist Mike Robinson argues, as Picard puts it, that “the emotions and their expressions are culturally framed and beyond any simple ‘cause and effect’ principle; rather they are intimately bound to ways in which the world is imagined, mediated and communicated and to the ways in which we perform, record, and recall our place in the world.”31 In the case of extreme animal tourism, certain tourist populations—​bound, as Robinson would remind us, to historically constituted imaginaries of how to make meaning of the world and of their variable places in it—​encounter the physical presence of massive numbers of animals replete with a phenomenological glory of smell, sound, motion, and sight. Moreover, these are not just any animals, and this is not just any place. These are species who have accrued, through centuries of historical narratives, a certain character of charisma for those visiting groups. And the destination, similarly, is always already shrouded in narratives of exploration into a magical unknown. This match between cultural and ideological frames, for the predominantly, but not exclusively, European and US American tourists, provides the lynchpin of meaning and the stimulus for a transformative sense of transcendence.

Conclusion I have proposed a new delineation of tourism that we can call “extreme animal tourism.” Costly in terms of time and money, and labor intensive in terms of staffing needs, this

 

Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”    519 type of tourism demands multiple types of supporting expertise, including the scientific expertise of local or imported guides with specialist information, sailors, navigators, and hotel and kitchen staff for the tourists’ travel. Unlike other expensive, elite tourist opportunities that promise urban luxuries or other ecotourism journeys to stunning geographies, these activities are focused around promised, even guaranteed, opportunities for intimate, embodied proximity with nonhuman animal species who have, for specific visitor populations, a high charisma quotient and symbolic value as representatives of specific ecosystems, such as the Galapagos Islands and Antarctica. In addition, they provide access to “nearly pristine” ecosystems, such that the presence of any nearby resident or (in the case of Antarctica) temporary human population is minimized. This access promises a vision of a pre-​Edenic past, a ecosystem undisturbed by ongoing human presence and instead presenting an in situ experience in which the world the tourist enters is the world of the animals, who seemingly conduct their lives in a glorious indifference to the human presence, or, even better, greet that presence unafraid, with mutual recognition, tolerating if not welcoming our temporary intrusion, or, more ideally, our “visit,” to their world. Extreme animal tourism is at once nostalgic and idealized, promising in the present a mutuality that usually exists only in a conception of a prehuman, prehistoric past. If history is a human realm, if not a human invention, then these sites of privileged access promise a glimpse of a world apparently (or wishfully thought to be) not shaped by the narratives of change that history delineates. Dominant European-​derived notions of animals as beings outside history provide, for those tourists steeped implicitly or explicitly in those ideologies, the perfect meeting ground for human fantasies of animal life to take place on the terrain of extreme animal tourism.32 A large part of the appeal of extreme animal tourism lies in its separation from human presence. Local populations, if any, are largely absent from the tourism sites, kept at bay by inhospitable conditions, as in Antarctica, or extensive legal restrictions on residence and activities regarding animals, as in the Galapagos Islands. At a historical moment when even the most isolated human communities, such as some in the Amazon basin, are fighting for their civil rights and to control the economic and political results of engaging with the tourism industry, it appears that tourism focused on nonhuman-​ populated regions like most islands in the Galapagos and on the Antarctic continent can provide the final and ultimate resource for access to an imagined realm of the prehistoric (heretofore dubbed the “primitive” when applied to human communities). Animals cannot demand reparations, produce media to press their legal cases, nor make claims on the income to be generated from “contact.” Their inability to form a political bloc, to use Gramsci’s term, and their ascribed status as avatars of time beyond or outside history, render them extremely valuable and extremely vulnerable as we strive to better understand the varieties, dynamics, and outcomes of contemporary tourism. Are nonhuman animals to be regarded as our (human) prehistory?33 If so, what do we seek in the growing infrastructure that promises unmediated (but carefully supported) access to parts of the world still believed to be inhabited by wild animals. If the concept of the “wild” as that which is not shaped by human hands or desires is set up in

 

520   Jane C. Desmond opposition to the “cultivated,” then do animals ultimately replace the rapidly dwindling supply of communities of humans who were (historically, based on Euro-​derived ideologies) seen as “outside or prior to history.” The notion of an unadulterated past persisting into the co-​present is ever harder to assign to human communities, but still remains possible in terms of assigning that a-​historicity to an animal community. To the extent that encounters with what is perceived or promoted as fundamental “difference” remain a driving force in tourism ideologies, activities, promotions, and posttravel evaluations once tourists return home, we may find that extreme animal tourism is a growth sector in the global tourism industry, ultimately overtaking some sectors of the cultural tourism industry as the latter finds it harder and harder to provide a supposedly politics-​free experience of the “exotic,” or the “primitive” or the “traditional” to those tourists that desire it. Within dominant European-​derived philosophies and imaginaries, nonhuman animals are the ultimate “other” and as such can be framed as representing an a-​historical human past, a past set prior to language, politics, money, and national boundaries, none of which nonhuman animals seem to pay attention to. If this is true, then further study of nonhuman animal tourism will be important not only to grasp evolving dimensions of human-​animal relations and their commodification and political effects, but also to understand how and to what extent animals are intertwined in human-​animal renditions of physical, cultural, and historical difference in the global network of tourism industries.

Notes 1. Dean MacCannell, Empty Meeting Grounds:  The Tourist Papers (New  York:  Routledge, 1992), 1. 2. Augustin Fuentes, “Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010):  600–​610. Part of Fuentes’s point is that the monkeys are tolerated, even valued, by local residents, because of the way they contribute to the tourist economy. 3. John Urry named this mode of attention “the tourist gaze” in his 1992 book of the same title, and since then, scholars have elaborated the concept, emphasizing other modes of attention, the ways looking is learned, the fact that surprising “samenesses” may also be attended to, and the importance of pre-​and posttravel engagements with the tourist destination and experiences. 4. For just a sampling of the key writings that have shaped this field of inquiry, see the foundational books by Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976; repr., New York: Schocken Books, 1989), and his Empty Meeting Grounds (see note 1). Also critical to setting the conversations in scholarship on tourism are John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publishers, 1990) and his Consuming Places (London: Routledge, 1995). Valene Smith’s Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism (originally 1997, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press) and second edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989) ushered in a vigorous discussion of tourism in anthropology circles. An updated version appears as Valene

 

Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”    521 L. Smith and Maryann Brent, eds., Hosts and Guests Revisited: Tourism Issues of the 21st Century (Putnam Valley, NY: Cognizant Communication Corporation, Publishers, 2001). See also Noel Salazar and Nelson Graeburn, eds., Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches (New  York:  Berghahn Books, 2014); and Edward M. Bruner, Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) for important contributions to debates in tourist studies. 5. Jonathan Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (Theory, Culture and Society Series), cited above. For an updated version, see: The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (Published in Association with Theory, Culture and Society), Sage Publications, third Edition, 2011. 6. For example, see the work of Sally Ann Ness, who integrates a study of kinesthesia into tourism analysis in “Tourism in Yosemite Valley: Rethinking ‘Place’ in Terms of Motility,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 12, no.7 (2007): 79–​84. 7. See Jonathan Skinner and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos, eds., Great Expecta­ tions: Imagination and Anticipation in Tourism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011). 8. My use of the term “animal” underlines that emphasis and its importance as a commodifiable good. While animal tourism can also be seen as part of ecotourism or nature tourism more broadly, I suggest that the later terms are more capacious in their focus on mutually influential relations among geography, landscape, place, humans, and animals. In extreme animal tourism, by contrast, although the locale may be stunning and unique, the ultimate focus is on encounters with the special, charismatic animals to be found there. Human populations are not generally resident. 9. See Jane Desmond, Staging Tourism:  Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) for an extended discussion of the relations between “cultural” tourism and “animal” tourism and the role that embodiment plays in both realms. For a sample of some recent work on tourism and wild animals focusing on sites in different parts of the world, see Susanna Curtin, “Nature, Wild Animals and Tourism: An Experiential View,” Journal of Ecotourism 4, no. 1 (2005): 1–​15; John S. Akama, Shem Maingi, and Blanca A. Camargo, “Wildlife Conservation, Safari Tourism and the Role of Tourism Certification in Kenya: A Postcolonial Critique,” Tourism Recreation Research 36, no. 3 (2011): 281–​291; Elisabeth Brandin, “Versions of ‘Wild’ and the Importance of Fences in Swedish Wildlife Tourism Involving Moose,” Current Issues in Tourism 12, no. 5 (2009): 413–​427; Rosaleen Duffy and Lorraine Moore, “Neoliberalizing Nature? Elephant-​ Back Tourism in Thailand and Botswana,” Antipode 42, no. 3 (2010): 742–​766. 10. Rebecca Cassidy “Introduction:  Domestication Reconsidered,” in Where the Wild Things Are Now:  Domestication Reconsidered, ed. Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin (New York: Berg Publishers, 2007,), 1–​25, at 1. 11. Cassidy, “Introduction,” 1. 12. Cassidy, “Introduction,” 17. 13. “The Great Uganda Gorilla Safari,” online brochure, Natural Habitat Adventures, http://​ www.nathab.com/​africa/​the-​great-​african-​primate-​expedition, accessed December 24, 2014. 14. This is a reference to the iconic 1826 painting “The Peaceable Kingdom” by the American painter Edward Hicks, based on a verse in the book of Isaiah in the Christian Bible depicting peaceful coexistence of predator and prey animals in a verdant setting. 15. Arnaud Halloy and Veronique Servais, “Enchanting Gods and Dolphins: A Cross-​Cultural Analysis of Uncanny Encounters,” Ethos 42, no. 4 (2014): 479–​504. The authors compare

 

522   Jane C. Desmond the spirit-​possession experiences of some Afro-​Brazilian individuals with the experiences of tourists swimming with free-​roaming dolphins to identify what they call “technologies of enchantment.” These arrangements provide transformative experiences of ontological uncertainty and depend on immersion in a safe, sensorially organized environment and the activation of culturally prepared expectations. In extreme animal tourism, while face-​to-​face “encounters” may take place, too much of this contravenes the glorious indifference I discussed earlier that frames our perception of the animals as “just being themselves,” as if we weren’t there. 16. Is this aggressive role of the state a defining aspect of areas devoted to extreme animal tourism? Do the national governments always recognize the importance of this touristic resource as a potential money-​maker, based (I think) mostly on the money of non-​ state citizens? What role does a supranational body like UNESCO play in adjudicating access and preservation for a wider population—​the so-​called world heritage—​and how are animals (and, presumably the ecosystems of which they are a part) conceived of in these conceptualizations, as opposed to human-​built structures or historically occupied sites even when no current structures remain? Do animals fall under the conceptual umbrella of “tangible” or “intangible” property, or “heritage?” These are issues for future investigation. 17. See Part  1:  Public use zoning. www.galapagospark.org.nophprg.php?page=desarrolool_​ sustentable. This is Part I of the Visitor Management System, as of June 29, 2009. 18. Visitor Statistics 1979 to 2012, Sangay Touring, http://​www.sangay.com/​2011_​GPS_​ STATS.html (accessed on 3/​24/​14). See also, “Informe Annual De visitants Que ingresaron a Las Areas protegidas de Galapagos 2013” at: www.galapagospark.org/​documentos/​ turismo;pdf. For a similar discussion of national origins of tourists to the Galapagos. 19. Martha Honey, “The Galapagos Islands:  Test Site for Theories of Evolution and Ecotourism,” in Ecotourism and Sustainable Development: Who Owns Paradise? 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2008), 121–​159, esp. 126–​132. 20. I think, too, that the day trips also appeal to younger foreigners traveling in Ecuador who want to come to the Galapagos for a short side trip. The larger foreign cruise ships often are just the opposite—​they host foreign travelers who have come to the Galapagos as their primary destination, who spend many days touring the islands and landing by zodiac by day and sleeping on the ship at night, and then spend little time and money on mainland Ecuador except flying in and out on their Galapagos-​bound trip. Ours was a cohort of 100 passengers, mainly adults, supported by a large crew of 70 people, not counting the professional naturalists. 21. Lindblad, for example, as a key long-​time operator in the area, may well have priority in asking for highly desirable landing sites or times. Our guides explained that the complex choreography of which ship is where, doing what, and for how long is carefully charted in advance. 22. Since I am drawing on my own tourist experience here, and not on Institutional Review Board–​approved interviews, for some of these reflections, I do not refer to naturalists by their full name nor quote them based on my individual conversations with them. Carlos Romero is formally named as Expedition Leader and is photographed in public promotional materials, so I do include his full name here. 23. I  say “implies” because obviously non-​Ecuadorians also hold and produce knowledge about the Galapagos ecosystems, including foreign scientists now and in the past, and tourists also bring with them guidebooks written by non-​nationals that provide additional

 

Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”    523 information. The Darwin connection also looms large and provides an ongoing sense of connection to Europe and European-​derived science. My larger point is about perception and the necessary respect that the naturalist guides command, not only because they amply demonstrate vast stores of knowledge, but also because they represent an authoritative elite presence on board the ships, where a majority of and passengers come from nations with more political and economic power. 24. There are ways around these laws. For example, one of our naturalists maintained an island apartment to satisfy the legal requirements but actually lived in Miami with his wife and child. Our guides told of a recent case of an Ecuadorian trying to smuggle out three protected iguanas in his suitcase through the airport. My impression, however, is that illegal tourism, poaching, or trade in protected species in the islands is not widespread. For Ecuador, extreme animal tourism in the Galapagos is an important source of income and of national pride, and as such is a tightly controlled national resource. These laws are not just on the books; they are enforced by patrolling marine police. 25. The notion of “invasive species” has recently received increasingly nuanced discussion, but in tourist discourse it still has a blunt meaning of “those who belong” and “those who came from elsewhere and don’t belong.” For two extensive considerations, see Yvonne Baskin, ed., A Plague of Rats and Rubber Vines: The Growing Threat of Species Invasions (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002) and, from a more humanities-​based standpoint, Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman, eds., Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities (New  York:  Routledge, 2014). My questions to our naturalist guide about the necessity of killing cats on the islands to prevent their predation of tortoise eggs, was quickly dismissed. Other solutions like trap and re-​release programs to redistribute the cats elsewhere were deemed impractical. 26. Quoted in Gonzalo Solano, “Corrective: Galapagos-​rat Kill Story,” Quito, Ecuador, www. times-​gazette.com/​ap travel/​2012/​11/​16/​corrective-​galapagos, accessed June 14, 2013. 27. Eke Eijgelaar, Carla Thaper, and Paul Peeterset, “Antarctic Cruise Tourism: The Paradoxes of Ambassadorship, ‘Last Chance Tourism,’ and Greenhouse Gas Emission,” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 18, no. 3 (April 2010): 337–​354, at 340. 28. David Picard cites these figures in his article with co-​author Dennis Zuev, “The Tourist Plot: Antarctica and the Modernity of Nature,” in Annals of Tourism Research, 45: 102–​115. Picard and Zuev’s is one of the best of relatively few cultural studies of Antarctic tourism, and he applies a narrative and performative framework to understand how current tourists make sense of what they do and see on the typical Antarctic voyage. 29. Picard takes up the concept of touristic “awe” in “Tourism, Awe and Inner Journeys,” in Emotion in Motion: Tourism, Affect, and Transformation, ed. David Picard and Mike Robinson (London: Ashgate Publishers, 2012), 1–​20. He links it to the European and Euro-​ American legacy of the sublime as a form of moral learning and notes that the experience of specific emotions and their public rendition are informed by social standing, including the category of gender. 30. Picard, “Tourism, Awe and Inner Journeys.” 31. Picard, “Tourism, Awe and Inner Journeys,” 15. 32. Erica Fudge, in her astute overview Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002) makes the point about animals and history. 33. Certainly, some evolutionary biologists and biological anthropologists would position certain animals in this way, and reports of their work seeps into public media regularly

 

524   Jane C. Desmond under the category of science reporting. The ways that contemporary humans might be similar to their evolutionary cousins in prehistory—​for example, in the distribution of sex-​linked roles, or sexual habits—​are prime targets of public discourse and newspaper reportage that debates whether social formations are based on so-​called natural tendencies, such as competition, violence, and sexual difference.

 

Chapter 28

C om mensal Spe c i e s Terry O’Connor

Some of the most widespread and distinctive ecosystems on Earth are those that have developed in the built environment of our towns and cities and in the highly modified environments of agricultural and industrial land, transport corridors, and landfill sites that we develop around and between them. Animals are an intrinsic part of those ecosystems, whether persisting under duress as the environment around them changes in new and challenging ways or adapting successfully to benefit from those changes. Species that are successful adapters to, and adopters of, the anthropic environment gain a range of benefits.1 Living space is one, and reduction of competition by the exclusion of less pragmatic species is certainly another. However, it is the provision of food that most clearly facilitates the adaptation and that gives those synanthropic systems their characteristic trophic webs. We acknowledge the primacy of food supply by categorizing the successful species as commensal, literally as animals who share our table and thus eat with us.2 We might also use the term synanthropic because they live with people. However, this would include animals who persist in urban environments despite human activities, relict populations of species that manage to exist in the interstices of our constructed world.3 Important though they are, those animal populations have a quite different relationship with their human neighbors than do the commensal species that positively gain from their proximity to people. This chapter considers commensalism as an adaptation and discusses the distribution of commensal species in space and time and what commensal species mean to their human neighbours. The latter point is an important one because these are the species that inhabit the backdrop to our daily lives. How we regard them—​as friendly neighbors or pestilential freeloaders, varies widely between cultures and between individuals. Commensal animals force themselves upon our attention, and there is much to be learned about the human species by observing and analyzing our varied reactions to our animal neighbors. The terms commensal and commensalism are commonly used in biology, mostly in the context of the abundant microorganisms that inhabit the human gut and other organs. Although some of our microbial companions are detrimental to our health and

 

526   Terry O’Connor others positively beneficial, many simply find the gut a congenial place to call home, providing a suitable living environment and a supply of nutrients, with no detriment to the human concerned. Commensal relationships are typically of this (+, 0) form, with benefit to one party and neither benefit nor detriment to the other. In that respect, they differ from true mutualism, in which the benefit should be mutual (+, +), or parasitism, in which there is detriment to the host (+, –​).4 These terms are matters of convenience, categories that we apply to aid the study of a deeply complex subject, and the boundaries are somewhat blurred and porous. For the present purpose, we are concerned with animals who live around us, not within us, so it is sufficient to use the term commensal to refer to animal species that utilize the modified or constructed environment of human habitations for food and living space. When we consider how and why some animals share our living space, we again run up against the challenge of imposing categories and precise terminology on adaptations and behaviors that are flexible, situationally expedient, and overlapping. If we focus on anthropic food webs, the disposition of human populations to create concentrations of potential food leads to three forms of commensal adaptation. First, some species adapt to exploiting the food stores that we create for ourselves. These stores constitute loci of extremely high food abundance, often of a single resource that will be part processed, thus reducing both foraging time and handling time for the animals concerned. The loci are likely to be highly predictable as to location, though they may fluctuate in content and composition over time. Exploiting such sources will require an accurate “memory” for the location and means of access, whether on the part of individuals or through some form of cultural transmission within the group, such as adult animals “teaching” their young. For the humans involved, the species that exploit these feeding opportunities tend to be the ones we regard as vermin, or more politely as “pests of stored products.”5 Second, animals will adapt to scavenging the food wastes and other organic garbage that people generate and that, in most cultures, tend to be spatially concentrated. As with stored products, these resources will be locally abundant, often in very predictable locations, and may show quite low seasonal fluctuation. From an ecological perspective, we can include the deliberate feeding of animals by people in this category since the food in question is effectively garbage rather than food intended for subsequent human consumption and the same predictability of location often applies. From the animals’ point of view, the main differences between raiding stored food supplies and scavenging garbage are likely to be accessibility, as people are more likely to protect food than to protect garbage, and diversity, as garbage will usually offer a greater range of foodstuffs at any one location. Local concentrations of food at particular locations may constitute a behavioral challenge to some species by requiring a high degree of tolerance and the suppression of intraspecies antagonism. Third, there is what might be termed secondary commensalism, in which either of the above feeding opportunities attracts primary feeders who then constitute a concentration of prey for an opportunistic predator. Garbage accumulations commonly attract invertebrate scavengers such as flies, who then become an attractive target for

 

Commensal Species   527 insectivorous vertebrates. Traditionally maintained farmyards often have accumulations of herbivore dung and decomposing plant matter that become an attractive feeding and breeding pabulum for flies. Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) benefit from an association with farmyards in two ways: through the use of structures such as barns and stables as sheltered nest sites; and through a local and reliable abundance of prey. A more distinctly urban example is the recent colonization of city centers in Europe and North America by peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus), who exploit the concentrations of pigeons (Columba livia), who in turn exploit garbage and food handouts.6 These three categories are linked by the provision of a substantial energy donation to the concerned food web, an energy input not directly derived from gross primary productivity at the base of that food web but introduced to it from other systems. These donor-​controlled food webs are not restricted by the efficiency with which autotrophic organisms, usually green plants, can generate GPP.7 The abundance of animals at any trophic level within the food web is determined by the scale and reliability of the donation, which will generally be of mixed plant, animal, and fungal origins and thus will allow animals at different trophic levels to benefit directly. Unsurprisingly, omnivorous animals tend to be particularly successful in most such systems. One theoretical consequence is that donor-​controlled food webs are particularly susceptible to perturbation, because the predominance of omnivores and the utilization of the primary energy input by multiple trophic guilds mean that the web shows a high rate of linkage. Perturbation affecting just one node of the web, for example through people attempting the local extirpation of one species, is likely to ramify widely and rapidly through the whole web, sometimes with quite unpredictable results. Although food lies at the heart of commensal adaptations, the physical nature of the anthropic environment offers further opportunities and challenges.8 Most populations of people construct places to live, whether huts, shacks, bungalows, or apartment blocks. The exteriors of these buildings provide vertical surfaces that often mimic cliffs or tree trunks, usually with sheltered niches or ledges and isolated plateaus on the rooftops. In a landscape that is otherwise of low relief and perhaps predominantly farmland, a town or village may be a patch of high structural diversity. Building interiors will vary more than their exteriors but are likely to provide niches and tunnels, spaces inaccessible to larger predators and competitors. Here we see the first hints of a behavioral coevolution between humans and our commensal neighbors. Our cultural decisions—​whether to deposit garbage in bins or middens, whether to incinerate or landfill, to build in brick or wood, to roof in tile or thatch—​condition the opportunities and the behavioral repertoire that will be necessary in order to take advantage of those opportunities. And the adaptations shown by different commensal populations may in turn lead to a cultural adaptation on the part of their human neighbors, such as prohibiting the feeding of urban pigeons or developing the better mousetrap. Before going on to examine some commensal species in more detail, it is worth asking why this guild of animals merits study. They are generally not species of significant conservation value, nor do they underpin our economic systems in the same way as livestock animals. What they do offer is exceptional close-​quarter opportunities to study

 

528   Terry O’Connor adaptability in other species. We need to make little effort to find study populations of commensal animals: they come to us. Furthermore, some of the species that have adapted to living within human settlements have done so worldwide, making it possible to study, for example, pigeons in a wide range of climatic and cultural settings, exemplifying the behavioral and physiological flexibility of a single species and the diversity of our reaction to them. Furthermore, that research need not be restricted to professional scientists. The ubiquity of commensal animals and their everyday familiarity make them an excellent subject area for citizen science, allowing a far wider range of people to be involved in the research and encouraging public engagement with animals in the familiar environment of their parks and streets rather than in zoos or through the medium of TV.9 Apart from that democratization of research, a great strength of citizen science lies in the scale of the data sets that it can generate. The individual data records may sometimes lack the rigor and precision that we would expect from professionals (and will equally often exceed it!), but that is more than compensated by the sheer quantity of data and the long periods of time over which survey data, for example, can be collected. Thus, the annual Big Garden Birdwatch in the United Kingdom has been recording species frequencies on a weekend in January for 34 consecutive years and collates records from over half a million observers every year.10 Commensal animals are a fundamental part of anthropic ecosystems and can be seen as the canary in the coalmine, the first indication that all is not ecologically well. A sharp decline in numbers of house sparrows (Passer domesticus) in the United Kingdom in the early twenty-​first century provoked considerable public concern and discussion.11 In part, that was a simple response to the loss of a very familiar bird of parks and gardens, but there was also concern that whatever had caused the sparrow decline might indicate some more generic problem with other possible consequences. Some research linked the sparrow decline to reduced breeding success because of a shortage of invertebrate prey during the spring months, which opened up investigations and discussion as to why insect numbers generally seem to be in decline in the United Kingdom. For many people, reading about this sparrow story and its many turns in newspapers or other media was an informative introduction to the complexity of ecosystems and of the unexpected consequences that can arise. Understanding the commensal guild and the details of their close association with us and with other species that associate with us adds depth and nuance to our understanding of human environmental impact. It also reminds us that other species are not necessarily the passive recipients of whatever perturbation we hand out but are adaptable and resourceful organisms with their own priorities. Perhaps, too, we can see commensal animals as part of the shared heritage of our species. The guild is present wherever people are present across the world today, regardless of national boundaries, regimes, or religions, though each of those parameters influences our reaction to other species. There can be a sense of time depth, too.12 We are accustomed to the idea that domestic livestock have been with us for millennia, and the term heritage is applied to breeds and strains thought to have a particularly long genealogy.

 

Commensal Species   529 The commensal guild has a deep heritage. The archaeological record shows that some species associated with people just as soon as people settled in one place in sufficient numbers and for long enough to create a patch of modified environment and some altered trophic opportunities. In the archaeology of Upper Palaeolithic Europe, 30,000 to 12,000 years ago, bones of foxes and birds of the crow family (Corvidae) are associated with human residential sites much more often than first-​principles ecology would lead us to expect.13 Although many of those individual animals were probably killed and possibly utilized by their human neighbors, the frequent association itself suggests some degree of adaptation by the foxes and corvids to the human environment. Foxes are commonly associated with hunter-​gatherer and early farming settlements in the Middle East around the Pleistocene/​Holocene transition, and then they seem to become less so later in the Neolithic.14 Rats, house mice, and house sparrow bones also feature in those early farming sites.15 In short, commensal animals have certainly been with us for 10,000 years and quite possibly two or three times as long. Their continued association with us today is a constant reminder of a shared past that is of greater antiquity than most surviving ancient monuments. Looking to the future, the more that we understand the past and present of our commensal neighbors, the more we may be able to facilitate successful adaptation by animal populations that are forced into closer association with people. By studying the successes, we can learn to modify our settlements and their infrastructure in ways that will allow more species to adapt and sustain viable populations alongside us. That modification has to be a policy priority since more than half of humanity lives in cities and most of the rest in heavily modified anthropic environments. Contact with animals is widely recognized to be therapeutically beneficial, and especially children need this contact if they are to respect and care for animals in later life.16 Companion animals and livestock provide some such contact, but very much on humanity’s terms and at our instigation. The commensal animals offer a different experience, that of wild animals who can be experienced within the human environment of their own free will. As Nature becomes more and more remote from most people’s daily experience and increasingly packaged and commoditized and thus put beyond some people’s economic reach, so the animals who live independently among us will assume an ever greater importance in enabling people to have something in their lives beyond our own noisy and disputatious species.17 Some commensal species are of near-​global extent, sharing the human environment almost everywhere that we have set up home. Their widespread presence makes them the fossils of the current geological epoch that some refer to as the Anthropocene.18 It is not difficult to see that anthropic environments offer similar opportunities regardless of geography, but for a species to be widespread in that environment it has to colonize successfully, to translocate in sufficient numbers from one such environment patch to another. With many of the more widespread commensal animals, it is clear that deliberate and accidental transport by people has played a major role, obviously so when mammals successfully colonize oceanic islands. The term ethnophoresy is sometimes applied to transportation of animals by humans from one suitable patch to another. With some

 

530   Terry O’Connor species, some of the time, these events will have been inadvertent, a few individual animals having stowed away in a cargo while in others they will have been deliberate. A full treatment of exactly why some animals have been deliberately translocated by people is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that the reasons are not always absolutely clear even when there is a detailed historical account and that such translocations were going on deep in prehistory.19 The translocated animal may have been believed to have some useful function, perhaps as an emergency food or as a useful scavenger, or may simply have been something familiar taken from home to a new place. Whatever the specifics of an individual case, ethnophoresy has been remarkably effective. Rats (Rattus spp.) provide the outstanding examples of global ethnophoresy, with three species in particular having hitched a ride over most of the world. The ship rat (or black rat, roof rat, Rattus rattus) is probably a South Asian species in origin, though that original range is now quite difficult to discern. The species has spread itself throughout East and Southeast Asia, despite the presence of numerous other rodent competitors, and was establishing itself in Africa comfortably before European colonization of that continent. In the Middle East, the ship rat was one of the first commensal animals to associate with village settlements, at the time of the Natufian culture at the end of the Pleistocene. Its subsequent spread through the Mediterranean region and into Western Europe was rather gradual at first and then was greatly accelerated by the road building and increased cargo transportation of the Roman period.20 The decline in rats seen in parts of Western Europe in the immediate post-​Roman period probably reflects a reduction in the volume of cargo moving by road and ship and thus the extent to which an isolated rat population could recruit new individuals. As trade resurged in medieval Europe, the rats were back in force and accompanied Christopher Columbus into the New World at the end of the fifteenth century.21 Today, there are populations of ship rat in the Aleutian Islands, close to Arctic regions, and on the subantarctic island of South Georgia. The association of ship rats with the Black Death outbreak that slaughtered so many Europeans between 1347 and 1351 has done little for their reputation. Scholarly debate continues over the identity of the Black Death and hence the culpability of rats and their fleas. The weight of evidence points to bubonic plague and thus to a likely role for rats as vectors, though the living conditions of their human neighbors must have been a factor.22 Despite that, looking at the global distribution of the species it is difficult not to admire the success with which ship rats have lived up to their vernacular name. Earlier in this essay, the comment was made that commensal animals are generally not of conservation concern. Somewhat ironically, European populations of ship rat are recognized as being seriously reduced and vulnerable, having virtually disappeared from the United Kingdom within this author’s lifetime.23 In part this has to be a consequence of the deliberate extirpation from docks and warehouses of a species generally perceived to be vermin, but competition for space and resources from the larger and more aggressive common rat (brown rat, Norway rat, Rattus norvegicus) has also been a major factor. This species probably originates in China and Mongolia, where free-​living populations can be found today. The route and timing of its introduction to Western Europe are debatable, with different sources authoritatively asserting different historical details.24

 

Commensal Species   531 A likely candidate is the visit to Copenhagen, Denmark, of the Russian Imperial Fleet in 1716. Given that another rat species was already well-​established in European towns and villages, the rapid spread of common rat indicates successful competition but also some subtle niche partitioning. Norway rats are mentioned by English diarists and nature writers by the end of the 1700s, and the species makes its first appearance in the archaeological record of towns such as York and London in the later part of the eighteenth century. It was inevitable that common rats would cross the Atlantic, which they seem to have done during the second half of the eighteenth century, ousting ship rats from much of the New World despite their 200-​year head start. Both ship rats and common rats have the attributes of a successful commensal animal. They are broad-​spectrum omnivores, common rats in particular being willing to eat almost anything though showing a preference for meat. They breed rapidly in good conditions and do so year-​round, allowing substantial populations to be built up quickly.25 They are also intelligent, behaviorally flexible animals, capable of learning from experience and of transmitting learned behaviors between individuals. That transmission allows rapid adaptation to new circumstances, reducing the vulnerability of a newly translocated group, and allows rapid dissemination of an innovative and beneficial behavior. The third rat who deserves our attention and respect is the kiore (Maori rat, rice rat, Rattus exulans). One of a number of rat species endemic to Southeast Asia, as their vernacular names suggest kiore have been closely linked to the expansion of Polynesian peoples throughout the Pacific region. Introduced populations of kiore have been recorded on 126 Pacific Ocean islands, and in most cases those populations persist.26 Whereas the recent spread of common rat across the Atlantic region and its islands has been associated with European travel and transport, the Pacific spread of kiore substantially predates European exploration of the region. Kiore bones are sometimes the earliest archaeological evidence of human contact with isolated oceanic islands. Furthermore, analysis of the genetic diversity of kiore shows a strong correlation with artifactual and linguistic evidence for the timing and sequence of human colonization of the Pacific region.27 Three mitochondrial DNA haplotypes tell the story. Group I rats are predominantly found in the region that modern humans colonized during the Pleistocene—​Borneo, the Philippines, and Sulawesi. Group II rats seem to represent an early spread into the Western Pacific, mainly occurring on the Philippines, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. Group III rats occur right across the open ocean, with a subdivision between Group IIIa, typical of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa; and Group IIIb, typical of the Polynesian Triangle, the vast area delineated by Rapa Nui, Hawaii, and New Zealand, colonized by our species and our attendant rats only within the last thousand years. When James Cook and his crew first visited Rapa Nui in 1744, he noted the abundance of rats, though he was not to know that they were all of the same mitochondrial haplotype. The case for kiore as highly successful commensal rodents is clear enough, though their sheer ubiquity raises the question of whether the original translocation of them was entirely inadvertent. Their bones are abundant in Polynesian middens, indicating

 

532   Terry O’Connor that they were used for food, and it is possible that at least some offshore populations were deliberately established to seed remote islands with a reliable source of meat, one that could be kept alive on-​board during long ocean crossings. European sailors in the Atlantic region commonly deposited goats on remote islands for much the same reasons. Perhaps the answer in the case of kiore, though not of goats, is that they were successful stowaways, exploiting the cargoes and stores that must have been carried on oceanic voyages. Their adoption as a source of meat may have been little more than a pragmatic adaptation by their Polynesian shipmates to a commensal rodent who was almost unavoidable. The same human disposition to adapt pragmatically to a species that is persistently present on its own terms may underlie our present relationship with cats and with guinea pigs. House mice (Mus musculus, M. domesticus) are another globally distributed, ethnophoretic rodent about whom much the same could be said as for rats. Their association with people dates back to the end of the Pleistocene, to the village sites of the Natufian culture, and by Neolithic times they were sometimes remarkably abundant, as at the Anatolian site of Çatal Hüyük.28 The rapid spread of mice throughout the Eastern Mediterranean accompanied the spread of agriculture, but then little further expansion occurred for several millennia. Within the region, house mice were apparently widespread and abundant, and their presence on the Uluburun shipwreck of southern Turkey confirms some shipboard transportation by about 1300 BCE.29 However, it is only around the middle of the last millennium BCE that we see clear evidence for the spread of house mice into the Western Mediterranean, into Iberia, and thence across Western Europe to reach the British Isles during the Iron Age. Genetic evidence indicates a second route of colonization, from the western Black Sea region along the Danube into Eastern Europe, hence the distribution of Mus domesticus to the West and M. musculus to the East today.30 The apparent delay in colonizing Western Europe from the Mediterranean requires explanation. Given the close association of house mice in the Middle East with dense constructed environments such as Çatal Hüyük, differences in the density and form of settlements between the Eastern and Western parts of the Mediterranean region during, say, the fourth to second millennia BCE may have militated against the establishment of house mouse populations. There may also have been competition. Bones of wood mice (Apodemus spp.) are quite common on prehistoric sites across Western Europe, and these endemic mice may have been better preadapted to the building styles of the region, based more on timber than on brick and tile. In Western Europe, a synanthropic wood mouse population could easily be increased by recruitment from local “wild” populations, whereas house mouse populations would have been more isolated and more vulnerable until the transportation of cargoes was regular enough to serve as an ethnophoretic pathway. Modern wood mouse populations readily adopt structures such as sheds and greenhouses, especially if there is some form of stored food, so house mice in Western Europe may have had to overcome well-​established commensal Apodemus populations to gain a foothold. Having established themselves in Europe, house mice have accompanied people and rats around the world. We lack detailed archaeological or historical evidence for their

 

Commensal Species   533 first arrival in the Americas, though genetic and sparse documentary evidence suggests the late eighteenth century. House mice probably arrived in Australia around the same time, and modern house mouse populations in Australia are predominantly of the Western Europe M. domesticus group. In contrast, the house mice of New Guinea are mostly of Southeast Asian origin, typically of the M.  castaneus group.31 As with the kiore, the genetics of house mice reflects the population movements of the people that they accompanied. European seafaring of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moved house mice around the world, from Iceland to subantarctic Macquarie Island. Whereas rats, especially the common rat, seem to have adapted by utilizing their intelligence and wide behavioral repertoire, house mice have adapted their social structures. Feral populations of house mice tend not to breed during the winter months, whereas commensal populations will breed year-​round. Commensal house mice also show a reduction of the intraspecies antagonism that is seen in feral mice, making it possible for greater numbers to take advantage of localized feeding opportunities. Where food is sparse and unpredictable, it is beneficial to protect and defend that resource. However, if food is present in abundance then the adaptive advantage is lost, and antagonism merely wastes energy and risks injury. Rats and mice have perhaps been the most successful of commensal animals, measuring success in terms of abundance and global ubiquity. The red fox (Vulpes vulpes) has successfully adapted to human settlements around Eurasia and has been partially successful in colonizing Australia. For larger mammals such as foxes, ethnophoresy must be a less effective means of extending their range. They are inherently less likely to be transported unnoticed and likely to be translocated in smaller numbers, so the chances of establishing a new population must therefore be lower than would be the case for rats or mice. That said, foxes have other attributes that predispose them to commensal success. They are markedly omnivorous, taking a wide range of small vertebrates and invertebrates in noncommensal conditions and the full spectrum of human food wastes when living commensally. Foxes are behaviorally adaptable and show playful curiosity, making it likely that they will explore and thus learn to exploit new forms of feeding opportunity. They breed quite rapidly for a mammal of medium body size, producing four to six young at a time and breeding for the first time when barely a year old.32 Urban foxes are now well-​established throughout Europe and are a source of much discussion and disagreement. There is a misperception that foxes are now predominantly urban, when in the United Kingdom, for example, urban foxes make up only about 15 percent of the fox population. It is British people who are mostly urban and therefore urban foxes who are mostly seen. Unlike rats and mice, it seems that this urban habit is of relatively recent origin. If access to edible refuse were all that foxes require, they should have been common in the insalubrious towns of medieval Britain. However, they were not, with only occasional records of fox even from places in which substantial excavations and detailed investigation have given us a rich medieval faunal record.33 Is the urban habit a recent adaptation by foxes? The last thousand years would seem to indicate this, but the longer term archaeological record shows foxes to have associated with people in Europe in the Upper Palaeolithic, 30,000 to 11,500 years ago and in

 

534   Terry O’Connor the Middle East during Natufian times. Prehistoric foxes were as opportunistic as their modern descendants, yet they left medieval towns largely alone. One possibility is that they were excluded by competition from other commensal animals, namely, feral cats. Cats certainly were abundant and widespread in medieval Britain and may have occupied a largely feral, commensal niche, successfully excluding foxes. This is a speculative explanation, but it accounts for the absence of medieval urban foxes despite the presence of a highly suitable habitat. One further species that deserves mention is the street pigeon or rock dove (Columba livia). The appellation “feathered rats,” applied to pigeons since the mid-​twentieth century, reflects both human attitudes to these versatile birds and the success with which they have exploited our urban environments. Like rats, they have accompanied European settlers to the New World and Australia, though probably through human deliberation rather than as stowaways.34 Historical sources and surviving structures show that the keeping of “doves” has a deep antiquity, particularly through the Middle East and the Greco-​Roman world.35 That said, it is presumption rather than hard evidence that associates biblical or classical references to doves with Columba livia. The relationship between people and kept doves almost defies conventional definition. At one extreme, the birds are caged and fed and their breeding is controlled, all attributes of what we regard as domestication. More often, the birds are provided with somewhere convenient to roost and nest and are left to get on with the business of feeding and breeding. In the absence of human control of space, feeding, and breeding, they cannot be described as domesticated, yet they are certainly not wild. One step more and we come to the pigeon populations that inhabit structures such as office blocks and cathedrals that were not built for their use yet serve the purpose very well. Along that spectrum of human association, we can confidently attribute domestication at one end and commensalism at the other but might struggle to place the boundary between them. Pigeons are broadly omnivorous, willing to feed in large aggregations where food is abundant, and they breed precociously, year-​round and with fecundity. They are also quite sedentary, surprisingly so given the reputation of racing and homing pigeons for flying remarkable distances.36 Free-​living rock dove populations tend to favor coastal and montane cliff habitats, and the opportunistic adoption of structural ledges and cavities in large buildings is clearly a behavioral exaptation. The large flocks of street pigeons seen today in cities throughout the world are generally thought to derive from escapes and releases of pigeons kept for sport and as food. The range of color patterns seen in commensal populations indicates that captive-​bred birds have made a significant contribution and would point to the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the time when much of that population recruitment happened. However, there is evidence that pigeons had adopted towns and cities at an appreciably earlier date. There were sufficient pigeons in fourteenth-​century London, for example, for windows at St. Pauls Cathedral to have been broken by people throwing stones to disperse the birds.37 The archaeological record shows a modest but persistent record of Columba livia in medieval towns in England, though the bones alone cannot show whether those were commensal or captive birds. The fact that their remains are found dispersed into urban refuse, rather than

 

Commensal Species   535 concentrated at particular locations, rather suggests the former. It is possible, therefore, that there were preexisting commensal street pigeon populations in medieval England and quite possibly elsewhere in Europe, which were considerably boosted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by escapes and releases at a time when pigeon-​keeping was particularly common. Rats, foxes, and pigeons are familiar commensal animals because they are characteristic of human settlements in so many parts of the world. Other species have adopted the commensal niche either temporarily or locally. Hanuman langur monkeys (Semnopithecus entellus), for example, have successful commensal populations in the Indian city of Jodhpur. Here, the monkeys have adapted to living off handouts from their human neighbors, and this niche buffers their populations against the consequences of climate fluctuations that might otherwise have serious impacts.38 In the Shimla municipality, in contrast, Hanuman langurs are present but only rarely feed from human refuse or solicit handouts. The difference between these two populations may lie in the fact that Shimla has a prolific population of rhesus monkeys Macaca mulatta and Jodphur does not. The Shimla rhesus monkeys are assertively commensal and probably exclude the langurs from that niche by direct competition, possibly an analog for the exclusion of urban foxes by feral cats in medieval England.39 Rats and house mice are not the only rodents to have found our settlements to their liking. In parts of North Africa and the Middle East, the spiny mouse Acomys cahirinus has adapted to an urban, commensal lifestyle while maintaining more substantial free-​ living populations across the region. The urban spiny mice of Cairo, for example, could be seen as a relict population that has adapted as it was overrun by the rapid expansion of that city in the last hundred years. However, the urban spiny mice are phenotypically distinct and show quite a different, and heritable, behavioral repertoire, indicating that the separation of urban and rural forms may be of some time depth.40 In fact, spiny mice are unexpectedly abundant at some Natufian sites, showing that this rodent may have been in the first wave of commensal adopters in the Late Pleistocene, but only intermittently so in more recent times. The spiny mice remind us not to label entire species by the ecology or behavior of specific populations. Just occasionally, commensalism may be adopted by a local population of a species with which that niche is not usually associated. A good example is a population of Australian swamp rats Rattus lutreolus living at a small zoo at Healesville, near Melbourne, Australia, in the 1970s.41 Zoos almost inevitably have populations of freeloading animals attracted by the provision of food and space, and Healesville zoo had well-​established populations of ship and common rats, together with a small number of the local swamp rats. Pest control meant that numbers of the introduced rats fluctuated appreciably, allowing the swamp rats to increase their numbers to the point at which they could compete successfully for the commensal niche. Comparison with free-​living swamp rats in the same region showed that they quickly developed differences. The commensal swamp rats bred throughout more of the year, the young grew more rapidly, the adults were larger, and the rats were more inclined to be active away from vegetation or other cover. Adoption of the commensal niche changed the selection pressures on this population of rats, with

 

536   Terry O’Connor rapid and marked consequences. The swamp rats and the urban spiny mice show that commensal populations may quickly become distinctive not only behaviorally but also morphologically. So far, this consideration of commensal animals has examined their adaptation to us, which is only one side of a complex and probably rather fluid relationship. Human attitudes to commensal animals will obviously be highly culture-​specific, may well be locally contingent, and may not be consistent over periods of decades to centuries. The Anglophone world commonly groups commensal animals such as rodents as pests or vermin. The term pest implies some association with disease, either because of the potential zoonotic disease risk of closely cohabiting with another species or because the animals themselves are seen as a form of disease, a disorder of the domestic realm. It is a sad fact that much of the detailed research literature on, for example, street pigeons has its origins in pest control research, seeking to understand the pigeons to reduce or eradicate them rather than as an object of worthwhile investigation in themselves.42 Pigeons exemplify the way that attitudes may harden over time. The great flocks of them that inhabited central London, most particularly around Trafalgar Square, were formerly regarded as part of the traditional scene, a backdrop against which to take souvenir snapshots. Today the birds are greatly reduced in number, and notices warn the public not to feed the pigeons. Tame hawks are brought to the square to harass and discourage the pigeons, though they are becoming superfluous as increasing numbers of peregrine falcons colonize the designer cliffs of city centers. Looking back through press and other records, it is difficult to see whether an increased understanding of the possible zoonotic disease risk led to a decreased tolerance of pigeons or whether the disease-​risk argument became a means of post hoc justification. It is true that a number of significant diseases may be transmitted from pigeons to people but equally true that such transmission was rare even when urban pigeon populations were at their height.43 Surveys of attitudes to urban foxes show quite mixed results, including appreciable public awareness of the possible transmission of the parasite Echinococcus multilocularis mixed with a desire not to see the foxes eradicated.44 That cognitive dissonance can be seen cross-​culturally. Asked about aggressive rhesus monkeys on their campus, staff and students of Gauhati University in Assam, India, agreed that something should be done, but very few were in favor of killing off the monkeys.45 Regarding pigeons, attitudes in London and New York changed over the second half of the twentieth century, and the acceptance of urban foxes in England has undergone a similar transition over the same period. A few recent introductions to the urban scene offer the opportunity to calibrate the pace of such changes of mind. The rose-​ringed parakeet Psittacula krameri gradually became established in a few cities of the United Kingdom during the 1980s.46 At first he was welcomed, a rather exotic and handsome flash of color on the too-​often dour English urban scene. As numbers increased, concern about the noise made by the larger colonies came to be expressed, and it was increasingly asserted that the parakeets were outcompeting native species for food and nesting space. On the latter point, there has been only a little systematic research, and that seems

 

Commensal Species   537 to show negligible impact.47 Nonetheless, despite the near absence of quality evidence control measures have been proposed, and the legal protection of these lovely birds has been downgraded. That arc, from welcome stranger to vermin, has taken barely 30 years. An intriguing aspect of our relationship with our commensal neighbors is the way that it has driven small-​scale technological changes. Many people derive pleasure from feeding animals who are not obviously domesticated, and many of us put out food for garden birds. At its simplest, this involves leaving food scraps unwanted for human consumption in a place that birds can and will access. Such scraps are likely to be accessible to rodents and foxes, however, so a range of suspended feeding devices has been developed. Over the years, simple suspended nets and cages have diversified into containers for different forms of seeds and nuts. Faced with this challenge, some populations of grey squirrels have adapted their innate foraging behaviors to reach and plunder seed and nut containers. During the summer months, it is possible to watch adult squirrels demonstrating the necessary techniques to their young and impossible not to view that process as one of teaching and learning. This cultural adaptation by the squirrels has forced a technological response by the makers of bird feeders, and the nut and seed containers are now either suspended from long wires that are supposedly proof against squirrel access or encased within a cage that will admit small birds while excluding medium-​ size rodents. Presumably this arms race will go on, and one wonders what the squirrels will do next. The point of this rather trivial example is that one aspect of our association with one group of species (garden birds) has led to a learned behavioral response on the part of another species (squirrels), which in turn has prompted a behavioral and technological response from ourselves. This is a form of cultural coevolution, driven predominantly by the transmission of learned behavior on all sides. Less charitably, our technological capacity has been directed toward discouraging, displacing, and killing commensal animals who have come to be regarded as vermin. Buildings are fitted with netting and antipigeon arrays of spikes, intended to deny the birds a secure ledge or cavity, and the quest for a better mousetrap is a well-​worn metaphor. The wood-​and-​steel snap-​trap has served the purpose for decades, to the point of being traditional in cartoons, and has only quite recently been challenged by devices made in plastic. There has been much less impetus to modify mousetraps than there has with bird feeders simply because mice seem not to have learned how to render the traps ineffective other than by avoidance. And a mouse who does not avoid a snap-​trap does not pass on its experiential knowledge. Our attitude to commensal animals thus includes devices through which to encourage them and devices with which to kill them. We supplement our energy-​rich refuse with handouts of food, including nuts and seeds bought expressly for the purpose. We seem to want to have these animals around us, but on our terms not theirs. If they become too assertive or abundant, our welcome may be withdrawn. It is an oddly ambivalent attitude. It is as if something fundamental to human behavior draws us to associate with animals who will associate with us, yet we need to remain in control of that relationship and to keep it within whatever our respective cultural perceptions regard

 

538   Terry O’Connor as reasonable bounds. Hindu temples in India tolerate high numbers of monkeys who forcefully solicit food, but it is highly unlikely that Anglican churches in England would be so accommodating. Christianity has its own cognitive dissonance in this regard, torn between the all-​embracing biophilia of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas’ teachings that humans have no duty of charity toward animals because they are inferior beings.48 What is the place of commensal animals in an increasingly artificial and urbanized world? Some ecologists have described a process of biotic homogenization by which biotic and habitat diversity on Earth is progressively reduced as a package of synanthropic plants and animals comes to dominate more and more land area.49 Our commensal neighbors are likely to be the winners in this process, as they are the animals who will increasingly oust more diverse endemic faunas. However, that is not an argument for restricting and controlling commensal populations because it is our own activities that most directly and detrimentally impact endemic faunas, with the commensal animals opportunistically taking advantage. To argue for maintaining populations of urban foxes and parakeets is not to argue against conserving “wildlife” but merely for the acceptance that the anthropic environments we construct for ourselves will be inimical to some species and attractive to others. We can moderate that homogenization through understanding the processes involved and mitigating the impact of our towns and their hinterlands. However, with half of the human population living in urban environments and little sign of that proportion doing other than rapidly rising, if most people are to encounter animals other than livestock and companion animals we will need healthy populations of our commensal neighbors. Those encounters are important precisely because the commensal animals are not under our direct control, unlike livestock and companion animals. Children need to learn that animals have their own motivation and their own separate lives if they are to develop the respect and appreciation that will underpin future conservation. Conservation biology would be ill served by a generation whose experience of live animals has been the family Labrador and a few bored sheep at an urban farm. To sum up, commensal animals are an important class of wildlife precisely because they are the medium through which the wild integrates with our own built and modified environments. These are the animals who form the backdrop to our daily lives, and have done so for millennia, and they are the ones who show how an accommodation between humankind and other species may be achieved. They are also the animals whom we are most able to observe and study without needing to manage their lives, and that is, or ought to be, an important source of interest and humility.

Acknowledgments My thanks go to Professor Linda Kalof for inviting me to write this chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, of which she is editor.

 

Commensal Species   539

Notes 1. Michael L. McKinney, “Urbanization as a Major Cause of Biotic Homogenization,” Biological Conservation 127 (2006): 247–​260. 2. Douglas H. Boucher, Sam James, and Kathleen H. Keeler, “The Ecology of Mutualism,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 13 (1982):  315–​347; Christopher Dickman, “Commensal and Mutualistic Interactions among Terrestrial Vertebrates,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 76 (1992): 194–​197. 3. John Marzluff, Eric Schulenberger, Wilfried Endlicher, et  al., eds., Urban Ecology:  An International Perspective on the Interaction between Humans and Nature (New York: Springer Science+Business Media, 2008). 4. Dickman, “Commensal and Mutualistic Interactions.” 5. T. Chris Smout, “The Alien Species in 20th-​Century Britain: Constructing a New Vermin,” Landscape Research 28, no. 1 (2003): 11–​20. 6. Tom Cade, Mark Martell, Patrick Redig, et  al., “Peregrine Falcons in Urban North America,” in Raptors in Human Landscapes:  Adaptations to Built and Cultivated Environments, ed. David Bird, Daniel Varland, and Juan Jose Negro (New York: Academic Press, 1996), 3–​13. 7. Neil Rooney and Kevin McCann, “Integrating Food Web Diversity, Structure and Stability,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 27, no. 1 (2012): 40–​46; Terry O’Connor, “Human Refuse as a Major Ecological Factor in Medieval Urban Vertebrate Communities,” in Human Ecodynamics, ed. Geoff Bailey, Ruth Charles, and Nick Winder (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000), 15–​20. 8. Peter Wilson, “Agriculture or Architecture? The Beginnings of Domestication,” in Where the Wild Things Are Now, ed. Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 101–​ 121; Jean-​ Pierre Savard, Philippe Clergeau, and Gwenaelle Mennechez, “Biodiversity Concepts and Urban Ecosystems,” Landscape and Urban Planning 48, nos. 3–​4 (2000): 131–​142. 9. Jonathan Silvertown, “A New Dawn for Citizen Science,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 24, no.  9 (2009):  467–​471; Jeffrey P. Cohn, “Citizen Science:  Can Volunteers Do Real Research?” BioScience 58, no. 3 (2008): 192–​197. 10. Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. “Big Garden Birdwatch.” Last modified September 25, 2013. http://​www.rspb.org.uk/​birdwatch/​ (accessed May 31, 2013). 11. J. Denis Summers-​Smith, “The Decline of the House Sparrow: A Review,” British Birds 96, no. 9 (2003): 439–​446. 12. Terry O’Connor, Animals as Neighbors (East Lancing:  Michigan State University Press, 2013). 13. O’Connor, Animals as Neighbors, ch. 3. 14. Reuven Yeshurun, Guy Bar-​Oz. and Mina Weinstein-​Evron, “ The Role of Foxes in the Natufian Economy:  A  View from Mount Carmel, Israel,” Before Farming 1, no.  3 (2009): 1–​15. 15. Eitan Tchernov, “Commensal Animals and Human Sedentism in the Middle East,” in Animals and Archaeology: 3. Early Herders and Their Flocks, International Series 202, ed. Juliet Clutton-​Brock and Caroline Grigson (Oxford:  British Archaeological Reports, 1984), 91–​115. 16. Gail F. Melson and L. Gail Melson, Why the Wild Things Are:  Animals in the Lives of Children (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

 

540   Terry O’Connor 17. Susan Clayton and Gene Myers, Conservation Psychology: Understanding and Promoting Human Care for Nature (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009). 18. Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” AMBIO: Journal of the Human Environment 36 (2007): 614–​621. 19. Donald K. Grayson, “The Archaeological Record of Human Impact on Animal Populations,” Journal of World Prehistory 15, no.  1 (2001):  1–​68; Philip J. Seddon, W. Maartin Strauss, and John Innes, “Animal Translocations: What Are They and Why Do We Do Them?” Reintroduction Biology: Integrating Science and Management 9 (2012): 1–​31. 20. Lise Ruffino and Eric Vidal, “Early Colonization of Mediterranean Islands by Rattus Rattus: A Review of Zooarcheological Data,” Biological Invasions 12, no. 8 (2010): 2389–​ 2394; Frédérique Audoin-​Rouzeau and Jean-​Denis Vigne, “La colonisation de l’Europe par le rat noir (Rattus rattus),” Revue de Paleobiologie 13, no. 1 (1994): 125–​145. 21. Philip L. Armitage, “Commensal Rats in the New World, 1492–​ 1992,” Biologist 40 (1993): 174–​178; Philip L. Armitage, “Unwelcome Companions: Ancient Rats Reviewed,” Antiquity 68 (1994): 231–​240. 22. Ole J. Benedictow, What Disease Was Plague? On the Controversy over the Microbiological Identity of Plague Epidemics of the Past (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2010). 23. Pat Morris, A Red Data Book for British Mammals, No. 17 (London:  Mammal Society, 1993); Kevin Rielly, “The Black Rat,” in Extinctions and Invasions: A Social History of British Fauna, ed. Terry O’Connor and Naomi Sykes (Oxford: Windgather Press, 2010), 134–​145. 24. Michael McCormick, “Rats, Communications, and Plague: Toward an Ecological History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34, no. 1 (2003): 1–​25; O’Connor, Animals as Neighbors, ­chapter 5. 25. L. Ruedas, “Rattus Norvegicus.” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, version 2012.2., Rattus norvegicus in Global invasive Species Database, 2012, http://​www.issg.org/​database/​species/​ecology.asp?si=159 (accessed May 31, 2013). 26. John L. Long, Introduced Mammals of the World: Their History, Distribution and Influence (Canberra:  CABI, 2003); Mere Roberts, “Origin, Dispersal Routes, and Geographic Distribution of Rattus Exulans, with Special Reference to New Zealand,” Pacific Science 45, no. 2 (1991): 123–​130. 27. Elizabeth Matisoo-​ Smith, “The Human Colonisation of Polynesia. A  Novel Approach:  Genetic Analyses of the Polynesian Rat (Rattus Exulans),” Journal of the Polynesian Society 103, no. 1 (1994): 75–​87. 28. Thomas Cucchi and Jean-​Denis Vigne, “Origin and Diffusion of the House Mouse in the Mediterranean,” Journal of Human Evolution 21, no. 2 (2006): 95–​106. 29. Thomas Cucchi, “Uluburun Shipwreck Stowaway House Mouse: Molar Shape Analysis and Indirect Clues about the Vessel’s Last Journey,” Journal of Archaeological Science 35 (2008): 2953–​2959. 30. François Bonhomme, Annie Orth, Thomas Cucchi, et al., 2011, “Genetic Differentiation of the House Mouse around the Mediterranean Basin: Matrilineal Footprints of Early and Late Colonization,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 278, no. 1708 (2011): 1034–​1043. 31. Ibnu Maryanto, Darrel J. Kitchener, and Siti N. Prijono, “Morphological Analysis of House Mice, Mus Musculus (Rodentia, Muridae) in Southern and Eastern Indonesia and Western Australia,” Mammal Study 30, no. 1 (2005): 53–​63.

 

Commensal Species   541 32. Don E. Wilson and Russel A. Mittermeier (eds.), Handbook of the Mammals of the World. Vol 1 Carnivores. (Barcelona: Lynx Edicions, 2009), 441–​442. 33. O’Connor, Animals as Neighbors, ch. 4. 34. John L. Long, Introduced Birds of the World (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1981). 35. Ayhan. Bekleyen, “The Dovecotes Of Diyarbakır: The Surviving Examples of a Fading Tradition,” Journal of Architecture 14, no. 4 (2009): 451–​464; Peter Hansell, Dovecotes, vol. 213 (Colchester: Shire, 2008). 36. R. K. Murton, R. J. P. Thearle, and J. Thompson. “Ecological Studies of the Feral Pigeon Columba livia var. I. Population, Breeding Biology and Methods of Control,” Journal of Applied Ecology 9, no. 3 (1972): 835–​874; R. K. Murton, C. F. B. Coombs, and R. J. P. Thearle, “Ecological Studies of the Feral Pigeon Columba livia Var. II. Flock Behaviour and Social Organization,” Journal of Applied Ecology 9, no. 3 (1972): 875–​889. 37. Stefan Buczacki, Fauna Britannica (London: Hamlyn, 2002), 477. 38. Tom Waite, Anil K. Chhangani, Lesley G. Campbell, et al., “Sanctuary in the City: Urban Monkeys Buffered against Catastrophic Die-​ off during ENSO-​ Related Drought,” EcoHealth 4 (2007): 278–​286. 39. Anita Chauhan and R. S. Pirta, “Socio-​Ecology of Two Species of Non-​Human Primates, Rhesus Monkey (Macaca Mulatta) and Hanuman Langur (Semnopithecus Entellus), in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh,” Journal of Human Ecology 30 no. 3 (2010): 171–​177. 40. Marc Novákova, R. Palme, H. Kutalová, et al., “The Effect of Sex, Age and Commensal Way of Life on Levels of Fecal Glucocorticoid Metabolites in Spiny Mice (Acomys Cahirinus),” Physiology and Behaviour 95 (2008): 187–​213. 41. Richard W. Braithwaite, “The Ecology of Rattus Lutreolus III:  The Rise and Fall of a Commensal Population,” Australian Wildlife Research 7 (1980): 199–​215. 42. Lester H. Krebs, “Feral Pigeon Control,” Proceedings of the 6th Vertebrate Pest Conference, University of Nebraska–​Lincoln, 1974, http://​digitalcommonsuni.edu/​vpc6 (accessed May 31, 2013). 43. Daniel Haag-​Wackernagel, “Parasites from Feral Pigeons as a Health Hazard for Humans,” Annals of Applied Biology 147, no. 2 (2005): 203–​210; Daniel Haag-​Wackernagel and Holger Moch, “Health Hazards Posed by Feral Pigeons,” Journal of Infection 48 (2008): 307–​313; Daniel Haag-​Wackernagel, “Human Diseases Caused by Feral Pigeons,” Advances in Vertebrate Pest Management 4 (2006): 31–​58. 44. Andreas König, “Fears, Attitudes and Opinions of Suburban Residents with Regards to Their Urban Foxes,” European Journal of Wildlife Research 54 (2008): 101–​109. 45. Oinam S. Devi and P. K. Saikia, “Human-​Monkey Conflict:  A  Case Study at Gauhati University Campus, Jalukbari, Kamrup, Assam,” ZOOS’ PRINT 23, no. 2 (2008): 15–​18. 46. Josephine A. Pithon and Calvin Dytham, “Distribution and Population Development of Introduced Ring-​Necked Parakeets Psittacula Krameri in Britain between 1983 and 1998: Of the Three Subpopulations, Only the One West of London Was Increasing, with Little Spread,” Bird Study 49, no. 2 (2002): 110–​117. 47. Diederik Strubbe and Erik Matthysen, “Invasive Ring-​ Necked Parakeets Psittacula Krameri in Belgium: Habitat Selection and Impact on Native Birds,” Ecography 30, no. 4 (2007): 578–​588. 48. Adelma M. Hills, “The Motivational Bases Of Attitudes Toward Animals,” Society and Animals 1, no. 2 (1993): 111–​128. 49. McKinney, “Urbanization.”

 

Chapter 29

Lively  C i t i e s People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch

Introduction Sensational images of animals in cities seem to increasingly permeate the media worldwide. Foxes in London, mountain lions in Los Angeles, monkeys in Dehli, wild Boar in Berlin, sea lions in San Diego: these stories seem uncanny because cities are widely understood as places made by and for humans—​places where nonhuman animals, especially “wild” ones, do not belong. But cities are lively places, inhabited by many forms of nonhuman life. Indeed, the boundaries of what may be considered “animal” are contested and culturally bounded. Most of the scholarly literature on urban animals is biased toward birds and mammals, especially those species with long historical connections or utilitarian value to humans. Such animals include companion animals; work animals; livestock; diverse wildlife; and commensal creatures, such as pigeons, squirrels, and rats, who have long lived together with humans in even the most cosmopolitan environments. Indeed, early urban dwellings and streets sheltered not only people and companion animals, but also livestock who variously provided milk, meat, traction, fuel, and warmth, as well as waste disposal services. Even wild animals were largely tolerated and remain so today, although throughout urban history strenuous efforts have also been made to exclude animals via regulation, zoning, and extermination. Nonetheless, although they have not all been subject to scientific study, many animal species remain resident in contemporary cities. Cities are also more complex places than the conventional distinction between urban and rural, or city and wilderness, might suggest. Cities are rarely discretely bounded municipal zones but rather systems nested within larger urban systems, hubs in global networks of spaces and flows, shaped by the spatial logic of capital accumulation. Just as economic systems increased in scale and complexity from mercantilism to industrial capitalism and now to global capitalism, so have contemporary cities. Today’s major cities and conurbations are polycentric and heterogeneous in terms of urban form,

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    543 densities, demographics, and economic activity. They are open systems taking on global flows of capital, people, information, products, and resources, as urban production and consumption of goods and services impact territories around the world. Cities, then, are best conceived as hybrid ecosystems. Which sorts of nonhuman animals, broadly defined as all nonhuman life forms, survive and thrive in such ecosystems and how? These questions cut across multiple domains of study, including the social sciences, philosophy, and the humanities, particularly cultural studies, critical race theory and feminism; the built environment fields of architecture, city planning, and landscape architecture; sciences such as ecology, comparative psychology, ethology, zoology, and various other branches of the physical and biosciences; and urban policy, resource management, and governance. Each field offers a frame for understanding human-​animal relations as they play out in urban places, with specific social and biophysical consequences, and implications for governance and the management of people, animals, and places. We begin this chapter by considering sociocultural aspects of human-​animal relations in the urban context. How are certain human-​animal relations uniquely urban, and what future relations might emerge? The following section is devoted to the built environment and the ways in which animals have been affected by and have entered into urban architecture, landscape design, and city planning. We examine the place of animals within the legacy of industrialization before showing how more contemporary forms of urbanization, shaped by global flows of capital and resources as well as the science of ecology, have reshaped social and cultural sensibilities about the nonhuman world and hence led to new strategies for the design of buildings, neighborhoods, and metropolitan regions. A final section deals with urban animal ecology, and whether animals may be understood as “urbanized.” How do animals adapt (or not) to urban life? What does it mean to be an urban animal in terms of behavior and physiology? We explore the ways in which ecologists have attempted to understand the green and grey spaces that make up urban habitats, building on ideas from urban ecology, restoration ecology, and integrated ecosystem management. We also consider tactics for urban wildlife management and governance. Finally, in closing, we pose four challenges that face lively cities: climate change and its impacts on the distribution of animals, adaptation of the built environment to changing temperature regimes and extreme weather events, human migrations and rising inequalities on a global scale, and the integration of animal voices in urban governance.

Living with Animals: Urban Interspecies Relations How do people and animals relate to each other? How do these relationships play out in urban space? These are complex questions, given the diversity of cities and their populations, and the wide range of animal life that goes on within them. Steven Kellert’s

 

544    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch foundational work on human attitudes toward animals suggests that people may view animals from the perspective of their utility to humans, ethical standing, scientific or ecological value, aesthetic or symbolic qualities, or with fear or distaste.1 Such attitudes condition a suite of behaviors or interspecies interactions that vary by demography and urban/​rural location. In terms of interspecies relations in cities, the increasing focus on human-​animal relationships and their spatial, ecological, or otherwise material ramifications led to the emergence of an urban zoögeography: a reanimated and more vibrant notion of the urban that includes animals and their attitudes and behaviors toward people.2 Drawing from the interdisciplinary field of human-​animal studies or critical animal studies, this emergent literature addresses the relationships and behavioral interactions of humans with certain animals (by species or type) in a wide variety of urban contexts.3

The Animals Next Door Animals occupy diverse roles within the urban scene. The broadest and most traditional distinction between animals is the dichotomy between domesticated and wild, a binary that mirrors the urban/​rural or city/​country binaries that may better be understood as situational, or at least as a question of degree rather than kind.4 For many animal studies scholars, human exceptionalism can only be understood in the context of these relationships.5 Still others take a posthumanist stance, turning the question of domestication on its head to ask what nonhuman interests and agencies may be at play, a perspective that has perhaps received the most attention in the case of wolves and dogs. A majority of people living in cities, however, still categorizes animals as others, typically differentiating between companion animals, livestock, wildlife, and pests. Given their amicable propinquity to humans, companion animals, such as dogs and cats, are for many the quintessential urban animals, and as such they have received considerable scholarly attention.6 For example, Griffith and colleagues provide an animal geography for urban feral cats, while recent work focuses on bilateral agency in shaping the temporality of cat-​human relationships.7 But human relationships with dogs—​ perhaps the animal most imbricated in human culture—​have been the subject of more in-​depth theoretical, historical, and social analysis than perhaps any other companion species.8 Health science research has also focused on relationships between companion dogs and human well-​being. In terms of urbanism, empirical studies have investigated the place of dogs and the associated places, practices, processes of everyday life, such as dog parks, animal shelters, and dog walking, and neighborhood dynamics, such as urban crime and suburban anomie.9 Recently, there has been an increasing focus on the role of dogs in gentrification, and the role of opulent “dog hotels” and other luxury canine care services as mirrors of social stratification, neoliberal governance, and globalization.10 Despite all this attention, a cultural contradiction remains: companion animals are often ill-​treated, abandoned to fend for themselves, and in the United States,

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    545 2.7 million dogs and cats are killed at animal shelters each year, many of whom were relinquished by their humans.11 Less well studied are working animals who occupy a liminal space between companion animal and livestock. Animals work in cities (especially in the global south) hauling goods and people, eating trash, doing police work and military reconnaissance. Historically, working horses were essential to the making of nineteenth-​century cities, while the colonization and urbanization of Australia is indebted to the labor of camels.12 Today, horses continue to serve municipal police forces, and many other species, including dogs, cats, dolphins, monkeys, and pigeons, have been conscripted by police departments and the military to serve in various related capacities, while so-​called entertainment animals perform at racetracks, zoos, aquariums, circuses, and in fighting pits in cities across the world.13 Many service and companion animals and livestock are abandoned or are born into communities of abandoned animals. Depending on the cultural context, these animals may be considered “wild,” “feral,”, “stray,” “street,” or “invasive.” Contemporary ecological research on urban stray animals began with Alan Beck’s work on free-​ranging dogs in Baltimore, and continues in the contemporary work by Srinivasan, who examined the place-​based ethical frameworks implicit in the categories used to define free-​ranging dogs and legitimate their presence in a shelter or on city streets in India.14 That many such stray or feral animals were once pets, farm animals, or work animals—​dogs, cows, camels—​is often overlooked in discourses about ferality and exotic species, about who “belongs” in a particular ecosystem, and about the rise of “novel” ecosystems.15 Feral or otherwise, “out of place” animals have often been persecuted owing to fear of disease, danger, or disorder. Examples include dog extermination episodes in Victorian London; dog confiscation and killing programs in contemporary Chinese cities; the routine elimination of rats, mice, and pigeons; and battles against invasive species that threaten native wildlife. Changing attitudes have ushered in no-​kill shelters that collect stray animals for adoption, and what have come to be called “compassionate conservation and management” protocols are challenging the traditional use of poisoning, trapping, and other lethal tactics for eliminating these animals.16 But such animals, some scorned as “trash animals,” still stand in opposition to high-​value species or animals who may be seen as iconic, imbued with spiritual value, or having ecological value as apex predators or keystone species.17 The extermination of such animals stands in contrast to the protection of more valued or charismatic species, such as cougars and other large cats in the US West, South Florida, and South Asia.18 Moreover, even the most charismatic animals can become urban outcasts, as in the case of Bangkok’s wandering elephants and their equally dispossessed young mahouts.19 Similarly, monkeys in rapidly urbanizing South Asian cities, such as Delhi, are at once sacred and nuisance animals, encountered daily by large numbers of urban residents. Human-​livestock relations in cities, once characterized by interactions around live animal markets, slaughterhouses, rendering plants, and tanning factories—​all of which have been banished from Western cities—​are today overwhelmingly dominated by interactions between people and dead animals or meat.20 Contemporary patterns

 

546    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch of urbanization have accelerated this form of interaction, given the positive relationship between urbanization and meat-​consumption, aided by the rise of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).21 CAFOs and their consequences, including climate change, fit into a larger global network of flows of capital and flesh through which one can understand urbanization in the twenty-​first century. At the same time, a resurgence of interest in urban agriculture, including backyard animal husbandry, raises questions about livestock in the city and about new forms of transspecies relationships.22 In cities of the global south, livestock—​as milk, eggs, meat, and other products—​are part of a subsistence economy supporting impoverished, food-​ insecure migrants to rapidly expanding informal settlements overseen by neoliberal urban governance regimes.23 At times, such immigrants can also become drawn into complex urban politics, as in the case of Cairo’s Coptic Christian Zabaleen garbage collectors and their pigs.24 In the United States and Western Europe demographic and morphological changes in cities have also ushered livestock back to the city. De-​industrialized landscapes present opportunities for urban agriculture to address food security challenges and supplemental income.25 In other types of neighborhoods, trends toward gentrification and pro-​ sumer lifestyle capitalism that fetishize locality, authenticity, and healthy organic living also stimulate artisanal food production.26 Urban agriculture increasingly involves animal husbandry, including the slaughter of animals, such as chickens and goats. Such practices have been framed and contested in different contexts. Although backyard animal urban agriculture in the United States and in parts of Europe can be seen as driven by a desire or need for self-​reliance and resiliency, conflicts may erupt over the practices and institutions of immigrant groups.27 In cases such as live markets in Chinatowns, dog eating among Hmong immigrants in California, or halal traditions among Muslim immigrants in Europe, non-​Western animal practices may be used to racialize or animalize the minority groups in question.28 As cities in the global north are transformed by globalization, urban livestock will intersect in new ways with immigration, gentrification, and uneven development more broadly.29

Theorizing the More-​Than-​Human City Having illustrated this panorama of urban interspecies interactions, we now turn to the ways in which these interactions have been conceptualized. Many empirical social-​ science-​based frameworks for understanding urban human-​animal relations are rooted in Kellert’s attitudinal approach, while cultural studies approaches draw on literary texts, historical archives, and visual materials to investigate human-​animal relations in the urban context.30 A range of other work has drawn inspiration from philosophy and various discourses of rights and ethics, inlcuding environmental ethics, whose focus on the protection of populations or species has historically put ecological ethicists and animal rights advocates at odds.31 More recently, Foucauldian notions of relational

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    547 biopower have shaped ideas about interspecies relations and are also making their way into conservation practice, as decisions must be made about when and for whom to act.32 Finally, reconsidering our relations with nonhuman animals can also inform how we think about cities and urbanism. Other theories of human-​ animal relations build on postcolonial theory, feminism, critical race theory, and posthumanism, focusing on the routine policing of the human-​animal divide and the use of this divide to justify racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Feminists and critical race theorists, such as Angela Harris, point to the legacy of patriarchy and white supremacism, while also highlighting the promise of liberation by eliminating the human-​animal binary altogether and the violence and oppression it engenders.33 Others note that intersectional critiques within feminism and animal studies demand a reworking of implicit white supremacist assumptions in both fields.34 Finally, expanded notions of posthuman and human-​nonhuman assemblages within the realm of feminist theory include the spectrum of technologies and nonliving material artifacts that animate the world around us.35 Such a vibrant view of cities dovetails with emerging research methods such as multispecies ethnography, which seeks to examine the ways in which various nonhuman lives are entangled with that of the human.36 Specifically, in terms of urban geography, a “more-​than-​human” urban landscape, or a hybrid geography of urban wild “things,” corresponds to new political frameworks inspired by Isabelle Stengers’s idea of “cosmopolitics.”37 Similarly, the concept of the zoöpolis proposes both a novel transpecies urban theory that draws on empirical understandings of urban planning and development and attitudes toward animals, building on feminist standpoint theory and ethics of care to articulate a normative ideal of coexistence between people and animals in cities.38 More generally, Ingold’s notion of “dwelling” implies that landscapes, including urban landscapes, evolve out of the mutual relations between people and nonhuman agents, and the struggles for protection, safety, and resources in which all forms of life are engaged.39 Across diverse fields, a contemporary re-​emergence of vitalism, embodied and situated cognition, neo-​animism, and the “hyperobjects” of speculative realism find context in discussions of a decidedly urban “age of the anthropocene” and an acknowledgment that if the nonhuman world does not possess what some might consider agency, it nonetheless cannot be considered a static object in the Cartesian sense.40 These complementary posthuman frameworks, some just beginning to reshape urban theory, diverge from humanist, rights-​based understandings of urban space based on Marxian theories of urbanization, production, and collective consumption promulgated by, among others, David Harvey and Manuel Castells that energized a variety of urban social movements in the second half of the twentieth century.41 Such theoretical frameworks emphasized the role of capital and of urban political elites in shaping urban space and implicated urban power and governance structures for poverty, discrimination, and inequality. Encapsulated in Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 call for a “right to the city,” these ideas highlighted injustice and legitimated the demands of marginalized people for affordable housing, dignified work, and access to public space but were silent on the question of nonhuman nature.42 If a humanist conception of cities and urban space has become

 

548    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch less useful in an age of ecology, as is discussed in the following section, so too, has a singular concept of “the city” as human habitat, standing outside the domain of nature. A posthuman approach to cities and spatial ethics is therefore needed to help navigate our interactions with nonhuman others who share all manner of urban spaces and deserve explicit consideration in urban development, design, and planning decisions.

Parks, Skyscrapers, and Ecoducts: Animals and the Built Environment of Cities How do architects, designers, planners and other spatial practitioners who shape the built environment of cities engage with animals? Do they engage with them at all? Buildings may be seen as places for people, but they typically harbor a multitude of species, and the process of building displaces or kills others. Many buildings also form hazards, especially for resident and migrating birds.43 And curiously, despite the large numbers of companion animals in cities, buildings are rarely designed with companion animals in mind. Beyond the scale of the building, landscape architects influence the urban public realm through parks, gardens, squares and other open spaces that offer habitat for wild animals as well as recreational space for companion animals. Specifically, we focus on the case of US cities in the nineteenth century, in the wake of industrialization, and how architectural strategies and early ecological planning practices of the leading landscape architects shaped ideas about nature in the city. Their practices laid the groundwork and set precedents for the flourishing of nonhuman life in the urban environment, in the process facilitating new forms of interspecies relationships. Finally, late twentieth-​and twenty-first century urban development patterns informed by a more mature, postequilibrium ecological science, advanced green building technologies, and the urban agricultural movement, all being played out in the context of a neoliberal, globalized economy. Future trajectories on the frontiers of intensive and extended urbanization position technologies to open living cells and genomes to the logic of capital, and nonhuman animals are impacted by contestations over control of the atmosphere and ocean.

Animals and the Emerging Metropolis Our notions of the city and urban space are deeply tied to processes of capital accumulation, which reached an industrial scale in the nineteenth century. These social-​ spatial processes also transformed interspecies relations, forcing nonhuman animals to navigate unchecked emissions, polluted waterways, rapid urban development, and

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    549 landscapes of resource extraction. As both a reaction to industrialization and a means to promote it, architects, landscape architects, and planners offered modernizing schemes to improve environmental health for humans, offering benefits for wildlife and other animals as well. Urban planning and regulation also entailed the reduction or even elimination of livestock and other vestiges of country life from the city, which were often used to increase incomes and food security by low income and often immigrant households. Seen as backward and unhygienic, such artisanal animal husbandry was expunged on the grounds of sanitation, while royal menageries, such as the Tiergarten (animal garden) in Berlin, were institutionalized as zoos for public entertainment, to enhance imperial prestige, and as places of scientific study, and new zoos were established to burnish national identities and promote land development.44 Movements advocating for animal welfare and anti-​cruelty laws for animals living, working, and dying in the industrial city arose in parallel, in large part due to their central role in nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century cities. Animal spaces and infrastructures, such as stables, granaries, rendering plants, farriers, hitching posts, watering troughs, and wide streets, were an integral part of the modern metropolis.45 On the architectonic scale of the building, nineteenth-​century industrialization saw the emergence of new forms of construction, such as the cast-​iron and glass buildings epitomized by the 1851 Crystal Palace in London. Later, the glass-​curtain wall and steel-​ beam construction, signature features of modern design that would become key elements in the ubiquitous twentieth-​century International Style, reshaped cities and their skylines, facilitating massive investments of capital and the housing of workers and residents at increasing densities. This glass-​sheathed high-​rise approach to building design and construction is now understood to contribute to as many as one billion avian casualties a year due to collisions in the United States alone.46 On the scale of the landscape, early conservation practices carried out in the context of unprecedented industrial urbanization negotiated a romantic “land ethic” associated with Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and others and a more pragmatic “conservation ethic” associated with Gifford Pinchot.47 The manifestation of these negotiations can be seen in the practice of Frederick Law Olmsted, whose work was formative in the emergence of US landscape architecture. Like other nineteenth-​century planners, such as James Hobrecht in Berlin and the engineers working for Baron Von Hausmann, Olmsted’s plans and advocacy for places such as New York City’s Central Park and Yosemite Valley were directly inspired by romantic notions of picturesque nature and the Victorian reaction to an emerging urbanized working class, while projects such as the Boston Fenns incorporated proto-​ecological principles that addressed public health in tangible ways by improving water quality.48 Later, planners affiliated with the City Beautiful movement in the United States, such as Daniel Burnham in Chicago, and the Garden City movement in the United Kingdom, such as Ebenezer Howard, also sought to use landscape and planning to modernize the city, make it efficient and attractive to development, and cure the physical and social ills of industrial urbanization.49 These strategies created

 

550    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch access to open spaces for a newly proletarianized working class, while naturalistic spaces often mitigated pollution and upgraded habitats for nonhuman animals as well.

Contemporary Cities and Ecological Urbanism Industrialization distanced city and country, as reflected in familiar narratives of modern alienation from nonhuman “nature” such as John Berger’s renowned Why Look at Animals?50 In the second half of the twentieth century, however, advances in the science of ecology and changing urban morphologies associated with globalization blurred the boundaries between rural and urban. As captured by the emergence of the Los Angeles (LA) School of urban scholarship that reflected the rise of polycentric, economically polarized, and socially diverse cities with far-​flung exurbs, urban development has encroached on animal habitats around the world. At the same time, in some metropolitan regions, the dense cores of industrial cities in decline, such as Detroit, were hollowed out and large swaths of land eventually opened to new forms of life and ecologies previously not supported by the spatial logic of an active Fordist economy. In terms of companion animals, studies focusing on postindustrial cities in the global north have shown how dogs became associated with lawn-​oriented mid-​ century suburban living and, more recently, have intersected with struggles around gentrification.51 However, many gaps in the literature on companion animals and urbanization remain to be filled, including the relationship between stray animals in “shrinking cities” such as Detroit, the exploding cities of the global south, and the legacy of agricultural collectivization and models of state socialist housing that excluded companion animals in cities with planned economies, such as Bucharest and Moscow. In the design and planning fields, ideas from ecology were operationalized through the evolution of the mapping sciences, which allowed detailed geospatial analysis across scales and encouraged far-​flung greenfield developments, such as The Woodlands, Texas, to be “designed with nature.” While initially geared toward floodplains, storm water runoff, native plants, and other factors unrelated to animals per se, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approaches have become central to habitat suitability analysis for target species, and the design of metropolitan wildlife corridors and bio-​reserves. Within the design fields, the emergence of landscape urbanism, which combines ideas about polycentric cities, disturbance ecology, complex coupled human-​natural systems theory, and postmodern ideas of nature as a social construct, argues that landscape was the dominant organizing principle of contemporary urbanization.52 One result is the reappearance of interest in urban agriculture within urban design, for example Andrea Branzi’s 1994 “Agronica” in which agricultural and livestock operations are reinserted into the urban fabric, blurring the line between urban and rural and zones of consumption and production.53

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    551 Applying an ecological framework to urban processes invites a metabolic conception of the city and the urban sphere.54 This conception is reflected in projects such as the Dutch design firm MVRDV’s provocative “pig city” project, in which an entire city is designed to provide the Netherlands with pork. In a more applied sense, the explosion of urban agriculture demands a reworking of often centuries-​old codes and ordinances involving the presence of livestock in the city, as well as new typologies and alternatives to factory farming, such as the Dutch “agropark.”55 Here, the urban sphere is a system comprising flows of energy and materials that allow alternative ecologies and that does not discriminate between human and nonhuman. Other animal-​oriented practices resulting from this metabolic approach include architect Jack Munro’s Blood Bricks made from slaughterhouse blood harvested for use in building materials—​an innovation that inherently accepts industrial animal agriculture.56 New design strategies also deploy the lifeways and bodies of nonhuman life forms as tactics in design proposals, such as Scape Landscape Architecture’s Oyster-​tecture plan for New York Harbor or the use of goats for wildfire prevention in Northern California, and carbon-​friendly lawnmowers in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Lastly, several notable architectural competitions, long-​standing forums for ideas and development at the vanguard of design practice, have recently featured nonhumans as a departure point. Examples include the 2010 Buenos Aires Vertical Zoo Competition, the Israeli Habitat for Urban Wildlife Competition, the annual Animal Architecture Awards, and the ARC Wildlife Overpass Competition in Vail, Colorado. In each of these cases, design thinking and expertise are applied to the concerns and needs of animals who must cope with large-​scale urban transportation infrastructure. The case of the ARC wildlife overpass also represents the emergence of a novel infrastructural typology worth further mention. Wildlife crossings or ecoducts are increasingly deployed for diverse sites for a wide range of species, including elephants in sub-​Saharan Africa, panthers in South Florida, the mountain lions crossing Los Angeles freeways, and numerous species in Banff, Alberta and elsewhere. The crossings are not merely structural artifacts but in fact assemblages of technologies, such as camera traps, wireless tracking systems, fencing, and other landscape features, not to mention various social-​cultural components that go into conceiving and executing projects of such scale. Moreover, although many crossings are the work of traffic engineers, they are increasingly sites of engagement for architects and designers, such as Zwarts & Jansma Architects in the Netherlands, home of Natuurbrug Zanderij Crailoo, the world’s largest ecoduct. Metabolic views of urbanism can at times contrast with conventional green or sustainable building-​design culture, which is focused on carbon reduction alone, because wind turbines and energy-​efficient plate-​glass windows and street lighting pose dangers to nonhumans.57 Some notable advances include “bird-​friendly design” as advocated in the American Bird Conservancy’s best practices manual and in city-​specific guidelines, such as those produced by Chicago, Portland, and Toronto.58 These have resulted in built projects such as Jeanie Gang’s Aqua Tower high-​rise in downtown Chicago, and Herzog and DeMeuron’s DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. Architect

 

552    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch and artist Fritz Haeg has built a practice around “animal estates”; the multispecies adventure club of artist and designer Natalie Jeremijenko, and the organization of “multispecies design ethnography” studios by Anne Galloway at the University of Victoria, all look at the way in which nonhuman animals inhabit architectural spaces in the contemporary city. The potential of these sorts of interventions, including various living roofs and walls is a sort of alternative to “wilderness conservation,” part of an “urban reconciliation ecology” in which urban space is modified or appropriated to optimize nonhuman vitality as “species area relationships” without excluding many human social uses.59

Making a Living in the City: Urban Animal Ecologies Given the origins of the conservation movement, especially in the United States, urban areas and the animals who live in them have largely stayed off the radar of mainstream ecological research. The changing patterns of urbanization we discussed earlier, such as extended urban agglomerations and the thinning of the urban fabric and more frequent human-​animal interactions have, however, brought urban wildlife increasingly into view. Meta-​studies of the English-​language urban wildlife management literature between 1971 and 2010 reveal an explosion of research on urban wildlife, beginning in the 1990s with animal behavior as a focus.60 Among phyla, birds were the focus of the largest number of studies in behavior, conservation, and ecology, while mammals were the most widely discussed in terms of wildlife management. Historical studies of the science of urban ecology and urban wildlife management have recently emerged, the latter highlighting early formalizations as a field in Germany, through the study of war-​damage and postindustrial sites using overlay maps that depicted the city as a range of biotopes capable of supporting certain forms of life, and by directly engaging with public use and subjective “nature” experiences.61 In the United States and the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth countries, an intellectual lineage links postwar “Man and the Biosphere” projects to major urban long-​term ecological research (LTER) projects, funded by the US National Science Foundation in Baltimore and Phoenix62 that heralded the arrival of urban ecology.63 With these key projects, a body of research has emerged centered on urban wildlife and the ways in which patterns of urbanization have altered the ecosystems on which they depend. The following section focuses on these trends in urban ecology as they relate to urban animals. We focus on three particular elements: the ecology of animals themselves as they become urbanized through behavioral adaptations, the restoration of urban places and the implications for animals, and the management approaches that are emerging to address the presence of increasingly diverse urban wildlife.

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    553

Becoming an Urban Animal The conventional binary between wild and domestic species has given way to a spectral and situational understanding of relations between humans and other animals. In describing urban wildlife, urban ecologists have coined the terms synanthropic (animals who live alongside people) and synurbic (species that colonize cities). Similar to “commensal species,” as discussed by O’Connor in Chapter 28 of this volume, these terms describe the extent to which specific species are capable of adapting to humans and to urban environments.64 However, although some ecologists have attempted it, clearly differentiating between synanthropy and synurbany is challenging, in part because of the difficulties of clearly defining what is, and is not, urban.65 Nevertheless, specific synurbanic animals can be identified, largely via case studies. Explosive urbanization acts as an “ecological vacuum,” creating novel environments that attract animal species that take up residence in urban areas. For example, New York and Berlin now have the highest concentration of peregrine falcons in the world.66 For many of the browsers, such as deer; the predators, such as raccoon, skunks, snakes, and coyotes; and the variety of bird species who have flourished in urban environments, synanthropic or synurbanic life often means protection from predation and plentiful food. However, these animals are subjected to a variety of other stressors that force behavioral changes.67 Although natural predation may be reduced, companion animals, such as cats and dogs, may pose a risk to wildlife, and vice versa.68 Other responses to urban stressors can take the form of changing diurnal cycles to avoid peak human activity during daylight hours, especially among mid-​and large-​sized carnivores.69 These changes may impact prey availability and therefore diet, as well as mating. Similarly, urban animals’ spatial behaviors may shift when there are ample food supplies in a given locality for foragers, such as raccoons, or when there is a threat from humans to animals perceived as dangerous, such as water snakes.70 These spatial changes may increase population densities and shrink range sizes. Similarly, studies show spatial variations in magpie nesting behavior in response to features in urban environments and perceived threats from humans and other urban animals.71 Landscape fragmentation may impede migration, dispersal, foraging, hunting, mating, and gene transfer. The question of nutrition is not restricted to changes in movement patterns. Synurbanism may lead to change in the entire composition of diets, and foraging behaviors may shift to accommodate a glut of roadkill, human waste, backyard fruit, or food provided specifically for animals by humans. As a result, animals with flexible foraging strategies, such as scrub jays and some bat species, are able to exploit novel food sources.72 Plentiful food has also been associated with increased population densities, but it may affect temporal breeding cycles in scrub jays; and high levels of fat and protein from urban food sources have contributed to elevated cholesterol levels in urban sparrows.73 Anthropogenic noise can have impacts, preventing the efficacy of communication vocalizations necessary for mating, disrupting predator evasion, and interfering

 

554    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch with other life parameters. Some urban birds vocalize more often and emit louder sounds and sounds at a different spectrum to compensate.74 Beyond obvious links to vocalization and hearing, recent work has shown a wide variety of cognitive and behavioral changes resulting from ambient noise, in both humans and urban birds.75 Like aural disturbances, photic disturbances have also been documented for a wide variety of urban animals and ecological communities, including but not limited to sea turtles, bats, and songbirds.76 Here, anthropogenic disturbances can create ecological or evolutionary “traps” as demonstrated by studies of evolutionary dynamics in cardinals living in urban forests and of biodiversity in other human-​dominated landscapes.77 Research on these issues remains limited, however, and our understanding would benefit from further research at the intersection of behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology to uncover the nuances and the relationship between microevolution and behavioral plasticity for different species in dynamic urban environments. It should be noted that other animals who play central roles in urban life—​such as livestock and lab animals—​remain mostly outside discussions of urban animal ecology. This reflects ongoing adherence to urban/​rural and wild/​domestic binaries which urban animal research increasingly interrogates. Conservation biologists have, however, turned attention to the social-​cultural contexts that create stray or feral companion animals who prey on native birds and reptiles.78 For example, understanding the intersections between cat-​human relationships and class and social inclusion is an issue for biodiversity conservation in cities, since outdoor cats are such effective predators.79 Besides house cats, a number of other regional struggles with invasive species also have their origins in abandoned urban pet animals, notably the now-​entrenched Burmese pythons of the Florida Everglades and the lionfish, originating in an urban Florida aquarium and introduced into local waters, who is now wreaking havoc across the Caribbean as the first nonnative fish to become established in the Western Atlantic.80 The dispersion of these pets of Asian origin from the urban conurbation that is South Florida also speaks to the global flows that define twenty-first century urbanism.

Urban Landscapes from Gray to Green One important turning point was the emergence of conservation biology in the 1980s and the studies done by prominent conservation biologists focusing on urbanization impacts on wildlife in Southern California using conventional biodiversity metrics and principles of island biogeography.81 Spatializing wildlife conservation, conservation biology aimed to understand the implications of land-​use change as well as the impacts of endangered-​species protections through spatial analysis of populations and landscapes, also actively advocated for habitat connectivity and wildlife linkage corridors as strategies to maintain genetic viability.82 Expanding the field of road ecology developed by Richard Forman, studies of roadkill and road ecology highlighted the impact of urban transportation networks on urban animal mortality and mobility.83 Recent

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    555 studies of wildlife corridors use remote sensing and geospatial analysis to monitor use and efficacy, computational analysis to optimize corridor placement for multiple species, and a multiple-​methods approach to understand the ways in which corridors and corridor use impact predator-​prey and other intraspecific dynamics.84 Finally, participatory planning and local co-management are also increasingly acknowledged as important in the design and implementation of corridor plans.85 Although many conservation biologists focus on the urban-​wildland interface, the subfield of restoration ecology engages the “gray” spaces within the urban landscape inhabited by urban animals. Restoration ecology aims to remediate and restore landscapes heavily influenced by people.86 Recent studies consider how habitats can rapidly recover from damage as well as how brownfield sites can contribute to urban biodiversity.87 Notably, some restoration practitioners increasingly acknowledge that restored ecosystems may consist of entirely novel or “designed” ecologies, engineered not only according to the ability of various native and nonnative species to persist, but also to human economic and aesthetic preferences.88 At the most extreme is the related but more controversial practice of rewilding. First coined by EarthFirst! founder David Foreman and later appropriated by Soulé and other institutionally established conservationists, scholars, and practitioners, the term rewilding can be deployed to various ends.89 In one sense, rewilding can simply indicate spaces set aside for secondary succession after industrial, agricultural, or other activities have ceased.90 It can also be understood in a more active sense in line with restoration ecology, with a focus on wildlife, especially grazers and large predators.91 While some rewilding practices purposefully imagine emergent futures, a fixation on a past (usually the Pleistocene) recalls the teleological, anti-​urban, anarcho-​ primitivist milieu from which the term emerged.92 It is also true that restoration ecology first emerged prior to what some have termed a “paradigm shift” in ecology related to Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies, where ecosystems were understood as driven by an endpoint rather than by open processes subject to various dynamics and, potentially, to external forces.93 However, many rewilding projects take place in decidedly urban zones. One prominent example is the Oostvaarderplassan, perhaps the rewilding project par excellence, situated in the Randstad urban conurbation in west-​central Netherlands. In contrast, North American rewildling projects are often represented in a way that appeals to anti-​urban, “pristine nature” sensibilities of US environmentalism, such as the Rewilding Institute’s North American Mega Linkages. Other projects are decidedly urban, such as the Schöneberger Südgelände in Berlin and the Emscherpark in the Ruhrgebiete, which enjoy protected status for their successional landscapes.94 While the line between restoration ecology and rewilding can seem blurry if not rhetorical, whether focused on creating novel future ecologies or restoring a perceived “natural state,” restoration and rewilding techniques bring wild animals back into urban zones and contact with people.95 These encounters correspond to aspects of a “non-​equilibrium paradigm” which allows for the inclusion of humans as components of ecosystems studied by ecologists, “urbanizing” conservation biology.96 As a result, cognitive evolution and ethological factors become increasingly important, especially

 

556    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch in regard to pattern formation in the social structure and the evolution of cooperation.97 Other studies from complex systems theory and postequilibrium ecology address the importance of urban wildlife ecology in broader biodiversity conservation, the impact of urbanization on biodiversity, and the transmission of disease as a threat to biodiversity.98 In this way, complexity theory and agent-​based modeling hold the potential to bridge the conceptual gap between studies on individual animals and those on entire species by nesting the complex systems of brains, bodies, and environments.

Urbanizing Wildlife Management A multitude of factors describe an “urbanized” animal management regime: lower species diversity, smaller scales of analysis, artificially abundant populations, and so on.99 However, perhaps the most profound difference between wildlands and urban animal management is the relative importance of various human social and cultural factors. These include diminished funding sources, multiple and fragmented layers of jurisdiction, the heterogeneous attitudes of human residents, a higher demand by the public for inclusion, tighter time frames for project completion, a sharper trend toward privatization and commercialization, and, oftentimes, an emphasis on population reduction rather than conservation.100 Pollution and contamination affect nonhuman animals as well as humans and can be transferred across species boundaries, a problem that manifests itself particularly in poor, ethnic minority, and otherwise marginalized communities.101 Finally, urban wildlife management must deal with a higher potential for zoonotic diseases and parasites.102 These factors are compounded by the relatively limited participation of academia and governmental and non-governmental agencies. This translates to a lack of extensive training in the human dimensions of wildlife management necessary to be effective in negotiating relationships between people and wild animals in urban environments. Evidence shows an increasing focus on human-​wildlife conflict, as shown by an analysis of citations in the Biosis Citation Index, as conservation biologists recognize the importance of addressing the social and cultural dynamics integral to wildlife conservation and of analyzing the human-​wildlife interface in social-​ecological conservation practice.103 This has manifested itself in various state and local public outreach programs, such as “living with coyotes” in many US cities, or instructions on how to act around wild boar in some central European cities. Likewise, these programs may entail “education” for the animals as well, including hazing, food aversion, pheromones and other methods to promote human avoidance, while some animals, often those who become too familiarized with humans, are killed or relocated. Efforts to urbanize wildlife management address issues of connectivity and island biogeography, following principles of conservation biology, utilizing a variety of techniques involving fencing, and over-​and underpasses that engage with urban infrastructures and landscape composition. Zoning modifications have been also deployed as a

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    557 means of averting conflict with large predators, as well as to restrict access to sensitive areas, potentially at specific times, such as during breeding and nesting seasons, in urban parks and green spaces.104 This sort of zoning can also take the form of activity type, such as dog leash areas and the use of off-​road vehicles.105 Similarly, a variety of animal-​ oriented laws and ordinances are increasingly being deployed to address increasingly frequent encounters.106 Whereas traditional methods of dealing with pest or nuisance populations were largely limited to extermination, culling, or relocation, sterilization and immunocontraception may be necessary to deal with elevated urban wildlife populations in light of changing social attitudes toward lethal control and zoonotic disease.107 In regard to sensory disturbances, Slabbekoorn and Ripmeester note that many of the noise-​reduction measures beneficial to birds and other urban animals are also beneficial to humans.108 At the level of urban design and planning, providing “noise canyons,” or areas in which loud sound is permitted, may be more effective than attempting to uniformly lower noise levels across the city. Moreover, in ecologically sensitive areas, both seasonal and diurnal variations in noise levels could be beneficial for breeding and the dawn chorus.109 In terms of light, while so-​called turtle-​friendly lights have been put on the market, physical interventions such as embedded lighting in the street surface may be more effective at reducing the negative biological and ecological impacts of artificial night lighting than filters or other lighting modifications.110 Similarly, ordinances and human behavioral modifications may be the most effective solutions. Ordinances that require dark-​sky fixtures to prevent upward light and minimize over-​lighting beyond may be among the most effective solutions. Despite the increasing attention being given to light pollution, a general shift away from sodium vapor lamps toward energy efficient LEDs and metal halides will increase the pollution within scotopic and melatonin suppression bands by a margin of five times the present levels.111

A Future of Lively Cities? In this chapter, we have explored the terrain of urban animal ecologies, drawing from a wide range of scholarly literature grounded in the ecological sciences, the social and behavioral sciences, and in urbanism and environmental design. These ecologies are shaped by the historical patterns and drivers of urbanization, human cultural beliefs, attitudes, and interactions with animals, as well as the multifaceted ways that the urban built environment affects the suitability of cities as habitat to different types of creatures. At each juncture, we have summarized contemporary thinking and practice around human-​animal relations, environmental design, and urban ecology. Like the scholarship we have reviewed, most of our discussion has focused either on the urban past or the contemporary context. Yet the future is unlikely to reflect the past or the present. Indeed, capitalist globalization, transnational migration, and climate change have produced the so-​called Anthropocene. But within these broad dynamics, cities and urbanization are major motors of change. Urban activities arguably create a

 

558    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch “planetary” urban system in which animals are buffeted by everything from equatorial forest disturbance resulting from speculation in carbon markets and poorly designed carbon off-​set programs, to deep-​sea drilling, sonar and explosive testing for oil extraction, high-​traffic shipping lanes, and increasingly ambitious efforts at geoengineering.112 At the same, at the level of bacteria, virus, and cell, animals are the basis both for global disease and biosecurity threats, as well as for the bioengineered good urban life, through products such as “In Vitro Meat,” chairs and houses. All of this conjures up hacked genomes, garage in-​vitro fertilization, and do-​it-​yourself (DIY) species that could roam tomorrow’s cites. What is this sort of future likely to mean for animals in the city? We highlight four major dynamics, at varying spatial scales, that will radically reshape urban animal ecologies, as well as urban life more generally. We then close by calling for lively cities and an engagement with the ethical considerations for both people and animals that such cities entail. The first and most powerful force affecting the future of urban animal ecology may be climate change itself, which is widely predicted to shift the geography of habitat that supports various types of wildlife. Changing weather patterns, ambient temperatures and temperature gradients; rising heat island effects; and changes in soil moisture and hydrological conditions may all work to alter the attractiveness of cities for specific terrestrial, riparian, and coastal ocean species, affecting species diversity and composition. For example, a variety of birds and, especially, insects (some of them disease vectors) are apt to alter their migration patterns. Adaptation to these shifts may necessitate changes in human understanding and behavior, and in wildlife management practices. Finally, as witnessed with Hurricanes Katrina and Irene, pests, livestock, and other animals are also at risk from catastrophic events, some of which are associated with climate change.113 For this reason, the disaster-​preparedness website Ready (http://​www.ready. gov) has developed guidelines for animal evacuation during natural catastrophes. Second, intensifying efforts to help cities and urban populations adapt to environmental change, and to become more resilient in the face of extreme geophysical events, such as extreme weather, flooding, or earthquakes, are also likely to create more space for animals in the city. Trends in environmental design practice emphasizing green roofs and walls, bioswales, stream and creek restoration, parks designed to be flood basins, constructed wetlands, vegetated superdikes for coastal protection, urban agriculture–​ landscape design, and planning interventions that become infrastructure in much the same way as streets, water, or sanitation systems.114 Projects that address degraded environments, such as working waterfronts, often in low-​income neighborhoods, can trigger ecological or ecogentrification, by which excess capital is first cycled into green infrastructure—​such as New York’s High Line or the revitalization of the Los Angeles River—​and then into real estate.115 In addition to spurring gentrification and displacement, such “green infrastructure” strategies may create habitat and support animal populations, possibly disrupting long-​established ecologies and also leading to shifts in interspecies relations.

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    559 Third, human migration on a vast scale, stimulated by economic dislocation, deepening income inequality, geopolitical conflict, and climate wars, may also dramatically change both human-​animal relations in cities and relations among urban people. Beliefs, attitudes, and behavior toward urban animals of all types are widely divergent, and such differences are thrown into high relief as people make transcontinental moves and find themselves living next door to others whose beliefs are not shared. This may produce cultural tolerance, hybrid practices, new ethics, or escalating conflict over what is wild, what is a pet, and which animals are good to eat. Ultimately, changing human attitudes, belief systems, and ethics will be translated into shifts in practices of wildlife management, pet-​keeping and care, and foodways. Last, the challenges of climate change, urban adaptation, and demographic shifts will play out in a world in which, increasingly, ethical consideration is extended to animals. It may thus be crucial to expand the notion of who constitutes the relevant “public” in decisions that affect urban animals. The central question is representation: whether—​ and how—​to include nonhuman animals in the decision-​making process. Stengers, Bullen, and Whitehead and Donaldson and Kymlicka argue for extending citizen relations to nonhumans based on the idea that human-​animal relations are constitutive, in evolutionary terms, of humanness itself.116 Drawing from Spivak, expanding the realm of citizenship to create a political space for nonhuman subalterns involves “a broader understanding of polis as political community.117 Such approaches echo Latour’s “parliament of things” in which scientists are expected to speak for the nonhuman, though it is the speaking human public who must keep them accountable, aided perhaps by technology, as interspecies relations become increasingly mediated by broadcast media, Web 2.0, robotics, and mobile smartphone tracking technology.118 The vision of a multinatural metropolis—​or zoöpolis—​and what it means for urban governance, brings us full circle to the twentieth-​century animal rights movement’s focus on ethics and citizenship, though defined in posthuman terms. The challenge of the future, then, is to imagine lively and inclusive cities. Hard choices will inevitably need to be made, since not all animals are compatible with individual human safety and public health, the presence of some animal species will be valued more highly than others, and different animal species may compete for the same resources and spaces in the city. Environmental designers and planners as well as ecologists can play major roles in minimizing the potential for human-​animal and animal-​animal conflict, by demonstrating possibilities for coexistence through design practices that recognize social difference in attitudes toward animals. Inclusive cities can be designed for resilience and explicitly built to encourage human-​animal awareness and encounter, even as the climate changes and urban populations of both people and animals shift over time and space. Such cities will call into question traditional notions of urban citizenship and should spur us to develop the means to effectively share power with the nonhuman world in the making of critical physical interventions and natural-​resource decisions. Animals should enjoy rights to the city, and the city, in turn, should, where possible, offer them shelter, sustenance, and safe passage.

 

560    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch

Notes 1. Stephen R. Kellert, The Value of Life: Biological Diversity and Human Society (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997). 2. Jennifer Wolch, “Anima Urbis,” Progress in Human Geography 26, no. 6 (2002): 721–​742. 3. Jennifer R. Wolch and Jody Emel, Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-​Culture Borderlands (New  York:  Verso, 1998); Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, eds., Animal Spaces, Beastly Places:  New Geographies of Human-​ Animal Relations, (New York: Psychology Press, 2000); Julie Urbanik, Placing Animals: An Introduction to the Geography of Human-​Animal Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). 4. Tim Ingold, ed. What Is an Animal? Vol.1 (New York: Psychology Press, 1994.); Nerissa Russell, “The Wild Side of Animal Domestication,” Society & Animals 10, no.  3 (2002): 285–​302. 5. Paul Shepard, The Others:  How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, DC:  Island Press, 1997). 6. Yi-​Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2004); James Serpell, In the Company of Animals (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 7. Huw Griffiths, Ingrid Poulter, and David Sibley, “Feral Cats in the City,” in Philo and Wilbert, Animal Spaces, Beastly Places, 56–​70; Manuela Wedl, Barbara Bauer, Dorothy Gracey, Christine Grabmayer, Elisabeth Spielauer, Jon Day, and Kurt Kotrschal, “Factors Influencing the Temporal Patterns of Dyadic Behaviours and Interactions between Domestic Cats and Their Owners,” Behavioural Processes 86, no. 1 (2011): 58–​67. 8. Michael W. Fox, The Dog:  Its Domestication and Behavior (Garland Publishing, 1978); Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Hidden Life of Dogs (New  York:  Houghton Mifflin /​ Harcourt, 2010); Donna Jeanne Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2007). 9. Rebekah Fox, “Animal Behaviours, Post-​Human Lives:  Everyday Negotiations of the Animal-​Human Divide in Pet-​Keeping,” Social & Cultural Geography 7, no. 4 (2006): 525–​ 537; Jennifer R. Wolch and Stacy Rowe, “On the Streets:  Mobility Paths of the Urban Homeless,” City & Society 6, no. 2 (1992): 115–​140; Arnold Arluke, Regarding Animals (New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2010); Sylvie Tissot, “Of Dogs and Men: The Making of Spatial Boundaries in a Gentrifying Neighborhood,” City & Community 10, no. 3 (2011): 265–​284; Lisa J. Wood, Billie Giles-​Corti, Max K. Bulsara, and Darcy A. Bosch, “More Than a Furry Companion:  The Ripple Effect of Companion Animals on Neighborhood Interactions and Sense of Community,” Society & Animals 15, no. 1 (2007): 43. 10. Heidi J. Nast, “Loving… Whatever:  Alienation, Neoliberalism and Pet-​Love in the Twenty-​First Century,” ACME:  An International E-​Journal for Critical Geographies 5, no.  2 (2006):  300–​327, Online:  http://​www.acme-​journal.org/​volume5-​2.html (accessed November 14, 2014). 11. Humane Society, “Pet Overpopulation,” humanesociety.org Online: http://​www.humanesociety.org/​issues/​pet_​overpopulation/​ (accessed August 11, 2014). See also Chapter 5 in this volume. 12. Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, The Horse in the City:  Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Alexandra Turnbull, “The Horse in Landscape:  Animals, Grooming, Labour and the City in the Seventeenth-​ Century Netherlands,” Queen’s Journal of Visual and Material Culture 3 (2010):  1–​24;

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    561 Sarah L. Crowley, “Camels Out of Place and Time: The Dromedary (Camelus dromedarius) in Australia,” Anthrozoös: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People and Animals 27, no. 2 (2014): 191–​203. 13. Jilly Cooper, Animals in War (New York: Random House, 2000); Ryan Hediger, ed. Animals and War: Studies of Europe and North America, Human-​Animal Studies vol. 15 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2012); Mike Huggins, “Going to the Dogs: Greyhound Racing, Animal Activism, and American Popular Culture,” International Journal of the History of Sport 31, no. 9 (2014): 1206–​1207; Kay Anderson, “Culture and Nature at the Adelaide Zoo: At the Frontiers of ‘Human’ Geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20 no. 3(1995): 275–​294; Chris Philo, “Animals, Geography, and the City: Notes on Inclusions and Exclusions,” Environment and Planning D:  Society and Space 13 (1995):  655–​681; Rhonda D. Evans and Craig J. Forsyth, “Entertainment to Outrage: A Social Historical View of Dogfighting,” International Review of Modern Sociology (1997): 59–​7 1. 14. Alan M. Beck, The Ecology of Stray Dogs: A Study of Free-​Ranging Urban Animals (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1973); Krithika Srinivasan, “The Biopolitics of Animal Being and Welfare: Dog Control and Care in the UK and India,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38, no. 1 (2013): 106–​119. See also Chapter 6 in this volume. 15. Harriet Ritvo, “Review of Animals as Domesticates:  A  World View through History,” (2013); Sarah L. Crowley, “Camels Out of Place and Time:  The Dromedary (Camelus dromedarius) in Australia,” Anthrozoös: A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People and Animals 27, no. 2 (2014): 191–​203; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New  York:  Vintage, 2011); Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology:  Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–​1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 16. Timothy Beatley and Marc Bekoff, “City Planning and Animals: Expanding Our Urban Compassion Footprint,” in Ethics, Design and Planning of the Built Environment (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer Publishers, 2013): 185–​195. See also Chapter 5 in this volume. 17. Kelsi Nagy and Phillip David Johnson, Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 18. Rosemary-​Claire Collard, “Cougar-​Human Entanglements and the Biopolitical Un/​ Making of Safe Space,” Environment and Planning-​Part D 30, no. 1 (2012): 23; David Maehr, The Florida Panther: Life and Death of a Vanishing Carnivore (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997); Vidya Athreya, Morten Odden, John D. C. Linnell, Jagdish Krishnaswamy, and Ullas Karanth, “Big Cats in Our Backyards:  Persistence of Large Carnivores in a Human-​Dominated Landscape in India,” PloS One 8, no. 3 (2013): e57872. 19. Nick Kontogeorgopoulos, “The Role of Tourism in Elephant Welfare in Northern Thailand,” Journal of Tourism 10, no. 2 (2009): 1–​10. 20. Chris Philo and Jennifer Wolch, “Through the Geographical Looking Glass: Space, Place, and Society-​Animal Relations,” Society & Animals 6, no. 2 (1998): 103–​118. 21. Richard York and Marcia Hill Gossard, “Cross-​ National Meat and Fish Consumption: Exploring the Effects of Modernization and Ecological Context,” Ecological Economics 48 (2004): 293–​302. 22. Alice Hovorka, “Transspecies Urban Theory:  Chickens in an African City,” Cultural Geographies 15, no.  1 (2008):  95–​117; Azage Tegegne, “Urban Livestock Production and Gender in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,” Urban Agriculture Magazine no. 12 (May, 2004): 31–​32.

 

562    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch 23. H. Losada., H. Martinez, J. Vieyra, R. Pealing, R. Zavala, and J. Cortés, “Urban Agriculture in the Metropolitan Zone of Mexico City: Changes over Time in Urban, Suburban and Peri-​Urban Areas,” Environment and Urbanization 10, no. 2 (1998): 37–​54; Sabine Guendel and Wyn Richards, “Peri-​Urban and Urban Livestock Keeping in East Africa: A Coping Strategy for the Poor” (Scoping Study Commissioned by Department for International Development (UK). Natural Resources Institute: Aylesford, UK, 2002); Nelly Ishagi, Sarah Ossiya, Lucy Aliguma, and Charles Aisu, “Urban and Peri-​Urban Livestock Keeping among the Poor in Kampala City” (Report by Ibaren Konsultants, Kampala:  Uganda, 2002), 97. 24. Marion Guénard, “Cairo Puts Its Faith in Ragpickers to Manage the City’s Waste Problem,” The Guardian, November 19, 2013, Online: http://​www.theguardian.com/​world/​2013/​nov/​ 19/​cairo-​ragpickers-​zabaleen-​egypt-​recycling (accessed August 11, 2014). 25. Deja Hendrickson, Chery Smith, and Nicole Eikenberry, “Fruit and Vegetable Access in Four Low-​Income Food Deserts Communities in Minnesota,” Agriculture and Human Values 23, no. 3 (2006): 371–​383. 26. Alison Hope Alkon and Christie Grace McCullen, “Whiteness and Farmers Markets:  Performances, Perpetuations… Contestations?” Antipode 43, no.  4 (2011): 937–​959. 27. Glen Elder, Jennifer Wolch, and Jody Emel, “Race, Place, and the Bounds of Humanity,” Society & Animals 6, no. 2 (1998): 183–​202. 28. Claire J. Kim, Dangerous Crossings:  Race, Species and Nature in a Multicultural Age (NY:  Cambridge University Press, 2014); Marcie Griffith, Jennifer Wolch, and Unna Lassiter, “Animal Practices and the Racialization of Filipinas in Los Angeles,” Society & Animals 10, no. 3 (2002); Colin Jerolmack, “Animal Practices, Ethnicity, and Community: The Turkish Pigeon Handlers of Berlin,” American Sociological Review 72, no. 6 (2007): 874–​894. 29. Luc J.  A. Mougeot, “Neglected Issues on Form and Substance of Research on Urban Agriculture,” AGROPOLIS. The Social, Political and Environmental Dimensions of Urban Agriculture (London:  International Development Research Council and Earthscan, 2005): 267–​279; Jennifer Lynn Blecha, Urban Life with Livestock: Performing Alternative Imaginaries through Small-​ Scale Urban Livestock Agriculture in the United States Dissertation, University of Minnesota (ProQuest, 2007) On-​Line: http://​gradworks.umi. com/​32/​73/​3273113.html Accessed November 14, 2014. 30. Kellert, Value of Life; Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Champaign, Il: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Harriet Ritvo, “Border Trouble: Shifting the Line between People and Other Animals,” Social Research (1995):  481–​500; Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Donna Jeanne Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 31. J. Baird Callicott, “Non-​ Anthropocentric Value Theory and Environmental Ethics,” American Philosophical Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1984): 299–​309. 32. Clare Palmer, Animal Ethics in Context (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 2010); Joel P. MacClellan, “What the Wild Things Are: A Critique on Clare Palmer’s ‘What (if Anything) Do We Owe Wild Animals?’” Between the Species 16, no.  1 (2012):  6; Beril İdemen Sözmen, “Harm in the Wild: Facing Non-​Human Suffering in Nature,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16, no. 5 (2013): 1075–​1088; Christian Gamborg, Clare Palmer, and Peter Sandøe, “Ethics of Wildlife Management and Conservation: What Should We

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    563 Try to Protect?” Nature Education Knowledge 3, no. 10 (2012); Daneil Lunney, “Wildlife Management and the Debate on the Ethics of Animal Use. I.  Decisions within a State Wildlife Agency,” Pacific Conservation Biology 18, no. 1 (2012): 5. 33. Angelique C. Harris, “Marginalization by the Marginalized:  Race, Homophobia, Heterosexism, and ‘the Problem of the 21st century’,” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 21, no. 4 (2009): 430–​448. 34. Maneesha Deckha, “Critical Animal Studies and Animal Law,” Animal Law 18 (2011): 207. 35. Myra J. Hird and Celia Roberts, “Feminism Theorises the Nonhuman,” Feminist Theory 12 (2011): 109. 36. S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 545–​576. 37. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Jamie Lorimer, “Multinatural Geographies for the Anthropocene,” Progress in Human Geography 36, no. 5 (2012): 593–​612; Steve Hinchliffe and Sarah Whatmore. “Living Cities: Towards a Politics of Conviviality,” Science as Culture 15, no. 2 (2006): 123–​138. See also Chapter 2 in this volume. 38. Jennifer R. Wolch, “Zoopolis,” in Animal Geographies, ed. Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (New York: Verso 1998). See also Chapter 11 in this volume. 39. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge 2000). 40. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Charles T. Wolfe, “From Spinoza to the Socialist Cortex: Steps toward the Social Brain.” Cognitive Architecture:  From Bio-​politics to Noo-​politics (Rotterdam:  010 Publishers, 2010): 184–​206; Irene Albers and Anselm Franke, Animismus: Revisionen Der Moderne (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2012); Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 41. David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, vol. 1 (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Manuel Castells and Alan Sheridan, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979). 42. Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville Suivi de Espace et Politique (Paris: Éditions Anthropos 1972); Don Mitchell, Right to the City (New York: Guilford Press 2012). 43. Daneil Klem, Jr., “Collisions between Birds and Windows:  Mortality and Prevention,” Journal of Field Ornithology 61, no. 1 (1990): 120–​128. 44. Nigel Rothfels, “Touching Animals: The Search for a ‘Deeper Understanding’ of Animals,” in Beastly Natures:  Animals, Humans, and the Study of History, ed. Dorothee Brantz (Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press, 2010):  38–​58; Kay Anderson, “Animal Domestication in Geographic Perspective,” Society & Animals 6, no. 2 (1998): 119–​135. 45. McSchane and Tarr, Horse in the City; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Dorothee Brantz, Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). 46. Wallace P. Erickson, Gregory D. Johnson, and David P. Young Jr., “A Summary and Comparison of Bird Mortality from Anthropogenic Causes with an Emphasis on Collisions” (USDA Forest Service General Technical Report PSWGTR-​191 2005), 1029–​1042. 47. John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901); Aldo Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949); Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1910).

 

564    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch 48. Klaus Strohmeyer, James Hobrecht (1825-​ 1902) und die Modernisierung der Stadt (Berlin: Verlag für Berlin-​Brandenburg 2000); Antoine Picon, “Nature et Ingénierie: le Parc des Buttes-​Chaumont,” Romantisme 4 (2010): 35–​49. 49. Anne Whiston Spirn, “Constructing Nature:  The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted,” in Uncommon Ground:  Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton 1996), 91–​113; Thomas L. Daniels, “A Trail across Time: American Environmental Planning from City Beautiful to Sustainability,” Journal of the American Planning Association 75, no. 2 (2009): 178–​192; Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-​ morrow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1965). 50. John Berger, About Looking (New York: Random House, 2011). 51. Jennifer R. Wolch and Stacy Rowe, “Companions in the Park: Laurel Canyon Dog Park, Los Angeles,” Landscape 31, no. 3 (1992): 16–​23; Wolch, “Anima Urbis.” 52. Charles Waldheim, The Landscape Urbanism Reader (Princeton, NJ:  Architectural Press, 2006). 53. Charles Waldheim, “Notes Toward a History of Agrarian Urbanism,” Bracket 1:  On Farming ed. Mason White and Maya Przybylski (Barcelona: Actar, 2010). 54. Gareth Doherty and Mohsen Mostafavi, Ecological Urbanism (Zürich:  Lars Müller Publishers 2010). 55. Patricia Norris, Gary Taylor, and Mark Wyckoff, “When Urban Agriculture Meets Michigan’s Right to Farm Act: The Pig’s in the Parlor,” Michigan State Law Review no. 1 (2011): 365–​404; William H. Butler, “Welcoming Animals Back to the City: Navigating Public Health Tensions of Urban Livestock to Achieve Healthy and Resilient Communities,” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 2 (2011): 193–​215; Jaime Bouvier, “Symbolic Garden: An Intersection of the Food Movement and the First Amendment,” Maine Law Review 65 (2013); T. A. P. Metze and S. Van Zuydam, “Pigs in the City: Reflective Deliberations on the Boundary Concept of Agroparks in The Netherlands,” Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning (2013): 1–​18. online: https://​pure. uvt.nl/​portal/​en/​publications/​pigs-​in-​the-​city(e27767fd-​0efc-​455b-​9671-​aa752e13f05b). html (accessed November 14, 2014). 56. Molly Cotter, “Could Bricks Made of Animal Blood Be the Future of Construction?” Inhabitat, October 17, 2012, http://​inhabitat.com/​could-​bricks-​made-​of-​animal-​blood-​ be-​the-​future-​of-​construction (accessed August 11, 2014). 57. Lesley Evans Ogden, “Does Green Building Come Up Short in Considering Biodiversity? Focus on a Growing Concern,” BioScience 64, no. 2 (2014): 83–​89; Ommo Hueppop, Jochen Dierschke, Klaus Michael Exo, Elvira Fredrich, and Reinhold Hill, “Bird Migration Studies and Potential Collision Risk with Offshore Wind Turbines,” Ibis 148, no. 1 (2006): 90–​109; Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, “Ecological Light Pollution,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 2, no. 4 (2004): 191–​198. 58. American Bird Conservancy, American Bird Conservancy’s Best Practices Manual (2011). 59. Michael L. Rosenzweig, “Reconciliation Ecology and the Future of Species Diversity,” Oryx 37, no. 2 (2003): 194–​205; Robert A. Francis and Jamie Lorimer, “Urban Reconciliation Ecology: The Potential of Living Roofs and Walls,” Journal of Environmental Management 92, no. 6 (2011): 1429–​1437. 60. Seth B. Magle, Victoria M. Hunt, Marian Vernon, and Kevin R. Crooks, “Urban Wildlife Research: Past, Present, and Future,” Biological Conservation 155 (2012): 23–​32. 61. Jens Lachmund, Greening Berlin: The Co-​Production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press 2013); Herbert Sukopp, “On the Early History of Urban Ecology in Europe,” Preslia-​Praha 74, no. 4 (2002): 373–​394; Lowell W. Adams, “Urban

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    565 Wildlife Ecology and Conservation: A Brief History of the Discipline,” Urban Ecosystems 8, no. 2 (2005): 139–​156. 62. Steward T.  A. Pickett, Mary L. Cadenasso, J. Morgan Grove, et  al., “Beyond Urban Legends:  An Emerging Framework of Urban Ecology, as Illustrated by the Baltimore Ecosystem Study,” BioScience 58, no. 2 (2008): 139–​150. 63. Libby Robin and Will Steffen, “History for the Anthropocene,” History Compass 5, no. 5 (2007): 1694–​1719. 64. Amanda D. Rodewald and Daniel P. Shustack, “Consumer Resource Matching in Urbanizing Landscapes:  Are Synanthropic Species Over-​Matching?” Ecology 89, no.  2 (2008): 515–​521; Clinton D. Francis, Catherine P. Ortega, and Alexander Cruz, “Different Behavioural Responses to Anthropogenic Noise by Two Closely Related Passerine Birds,” Biology Letters vol. 7, no. 6 (2011); Terry O’Connor Animals as Neighbors: The Past and Present of Commensal Species (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013). 65. Robert A. Francis and Michael A. Chadwick, “What Makes a Species Synurbic?” Applied Geography 32, no. 2 (2012): 514–​521. 66. Maciej Luniak, “Synurbization: Adaptation of Animal Wildlife to Urban Development,” in Proceedings of 4th International Symposium on Urban Wildlife (2004): 50–​55. Online: http:// ​ e xtension.arizona.edu/ ​ s ites/ ​ e xtension.arizona.edu/ ​ f iles/ ​ pubs/ ​ overview.pdf (accessed November 14, 2014). 67. Stephen S. Ditchkoff, Sarah T. Saalfeld, and Charles J. Gibson, “Animal Behavior in Urban Ecosystems:  Modifications Due to Human-​Induced Stress,” Urban Ecosystems 9, no.  1 (2006): 5–​12. 68. Scott R. Loss, Tom Will, and Peter P. Marra, “The Impact of Free-​Ranging Domestic Cats on Wildlife of the United States,” Nature Communications 4 (2013): 1396; Glenn D. Aguilar and Mark J. Farnworth, “Distribution Characteristics of Unmanaged Cat Colonies over a 20-​year Period in Auckland, New Zealand,” Applied Geography 37 (2013): 160–​167. 69. Nathan McClennen, Rachel R. Wigglesworth, Stanley H. Anderson, and Douglas G. Wachob, “The Effect of Suburban and Agricultural Development on the Activity Patterns of Coytoes (Canis latrans),” American Midland Naturalist 146, no.1 (2001): 27–36; Lourraine A. Tigas, Dirk H. Van Vuren, and Raymond M. Sauvajot, “Behavioral Responses of Bobcats and Coyotes to Habitat Fragmentation and Corridors in an Urban Environment,” Biological Conservation 108, no.  3 (2002):  299–​306; Seth P.  D. Riley, Raymond M. Sauvajot, Todd K. Fuller, et al., “Effects of Urbanization and Habitat Fragmentation on Bobcats and Coyotes in Southern California,” Conservation Biology 17, no. 2 (2003): 566–​576. 70. Suzanne Prange, Stanley D. Gehrt, and Ernie P. Wiggers, “Influences of Anthropogenic Resources on Raccoon (Procyon lotor) Movements and Spatial Distribution,” Journal of Mammalogy 85, no.  3 (2004):  483–​490; Abigail Pattishall and David Cundall, “Spatial Biology of Northern Watersnakes (Nerodia sipedon) Living Along an Urban Stream,” Copeia 2008, no. 4 (2008): 752–​762. 71. Yanping Wang, Shuihua Chen, Pingping Jiang, and Ping Ding, “Black-​Billed Magpies (Pica pica) Adjust Nest Characteristics to Adapt to Urbanization in Hangzhou, China,” Canadian Journal of Zoology 86, no. 7 (2008): 676–​684. 72. Arthur L. Fleischer Jr., Reed Bowman, and Glen E. Woolfenden, “Variation in Foraging Behavior, Diet, and Time of Breeding of Florida Scrub Jays in Suburban and Wildland Habitats,” Condor 105, no.  3 (2003):  515–​527; Kirsten Jung and Elisabeth K.  V. Kalko, “Where Forest Meets Urbanization: Foraging Plasticity of Aerial Insectivorous Bats in an Anthropogenically Altered Environment,” Journal of Mammalogy 91, no. 1 (2010): 144–​153.

 

566    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch 73. Ann P. Gavett and James S. Wakeley, “Diets of House Sparrows in Urban and Rural Habitats,” Wilson Bulletin 89, no. 1 (1986): 137–​144. 74. Erwin Nemeth and Henrik Brumm, “Birds and Anthropogenic Noise: Are Urban Songs Adaptive?” American Naturalist 176, no.  4 (2010):  465–​475; Hans Slabbekoorn and Margriet Peet, “Ecology: Birds Sing at a Higher Pitch in Urban Noise,” Nature 424, no. 6946 (2003): 267–​267. 75. Hans Slabbekoorn and Erwin A.  P. Ripmeester, “Birdsong and Anthropogenic Noise:  Implications and Applications for Conservation,” Molecular Ecology 17, no.  1 (2008):  72–​83; Alvin Aaden, Yim-​Hol Chan, and Daniel T. Blumstein, “Attention, Noise, and Implications for Wildlife Conservation and Management,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 131, no. 1 (2011): 1–​7. 76. Travis Longcore and Catherine Rich, Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006); Blair E. Witherington, “Behavioral Responses of Nesting Sea Turtles to Artificial Lighting,” Herpetologica 48, no. 1 (1992): 31–​39; Emma Louise Stone, Gareth Jones, and Stephen Harris, “Street Lighting Disturbs Commuting Bats,” Current Biology 19, no. 13 (2009): 1123–​1127; Bart Kempenaers, Pernilla Borgström, Peter Loës, Emmi Schlicht, and Mihai Valcu, “Artificial Night Lighting Affects Dawn Song, Extra-​Pair Siring Success, and Lay Date in Songbirds,” Current Biology 20, no. 19 (2010): 1735–​1739. 77. Martin A. Schlaepfer, Michael C. Runge, and Paul W. Sherman, “Ecological and Evolutionary Traps,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 17, no. 10 (2002):  474–​480; James Battin, “When Good Animals Love Bad Habitats: Ecological Traps and the Conservation of Animal Populations,” Conservation Biology 18, no. 6 (2004): 1482–​1491; Lionel F. V. Leston and Amanda D. Rodewald, “Are Urban Forests Ecological Traps for Understory Birds? An Examination Using Northern Cardinals,” Biological Conservation 131, no. 4 (2006): 566–​574; Amanda D. Rodewald, Daniel P. Shustack, and Todd M. Jones, “Dynamic Selective Environments and Evolutionary Traps in Human-​ Dominated Landscapes,” Ecology 92, no. 9 (2011): 1781–​1788. 78. Penny L. Bernstein, “The Human-​ Cat Relationship,” in The Welfare of Cats (Dordrecht:  Springer, 2007):  47–​89. Travis Longcore, Catherine Rich, and Lauren M. Sullivan, “Critical Assessment of Claims Regarding Management of Feral Cats by Trap-​ Neuter-​Return,” Conservation Biology 23, no. 4 (2009): 887–​894. 79. Kevin R. Crooks and Michael E. Soulé, “Mesopredator Release and Avifaunal Extinctions in a Fragmented System,” Nature 400, no. 6744 (1999):  563–​566; Chris R. Dickman, Overview of the Impacts of Feral Cats on Australian Native Fauna (Canberra: Australian Nature Conservation Agency, 1996). 80. Robert Brown, “Exotic Pets Invade United States Ecosystems:  Legislative Failure and a Proposed Solution,” Indiana Law Journal No. 81 (2006): 713; R. W. Snow and L. Oberhofer, “Disposable Pets, Unwanted Giants: Pythons in Everglades National Park,” Proceedings from Florida Exotic Plant Council, 21st Annual Symposium (2006); Ricardo Betancur-​R., Andrew Hines, Arturo Acero P., Guillermo Ortí, Ami E. Wilbur, and D. Wilson Freshwater, “Reconstructing the Lionfish Invasion:  Insights into Greater Caribbean Biogeography” Journal of Biogeography 38, no. 7 (2011): 1281–​1293. 81. Michael E. Soulé, “What Is Conservation Biology?” BioScience 35, no. 11 (1985): 727–​734. 82. Michael E. Soulé, “Conservation:  Tactics for a Constant Crisis,” Science 253, no. 5021 (1991): 744–​750; David B. Lindenmayer and Henry A. Nix, “Ecological Principles for the Design of Wildlife Corridors,” Conservation Biology 7, no. 3 (1993): 627–​630.

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    567 83. Richard T.  T. Forman, Road Ecology:  Science and Solutions (Washington, DC:  Island Press, 2003); Alberto González-​Gallina, Griselda Benítez-​Badillo, Octavio R. Rojas-​ Soto, and Mircea G. Hidalgo-​Mihart, “The Small, the Forgotten and the Dead: Highway Impact on Vertebrates and Its Implications for Mitigation Strategies,” Biodiversity and Conservation 22, no. 2 (2013): 325–​342. 84. S. Nandy, S. P. S. Kushwaha, and S. Mukhopadhyay, “Monitoring the Chilla–​Motichur Wildlife Corridor Using Geospatial Tools,” Journal for Nature Conservation 15, no.  4 (2007):  237–​244; Katherine J. Lai, Carla P. Gomes, Michael K. Schwartz, Kevin S. McKelvey, David E. Calkin, and Claire A. Montgomery, “The Steiner Multigraph Problem:  Wildlife Corridor Design for Multiple Species” Proceedings of the Twenty-​ Fifth Association for the Advancement of Artifical Intelligence Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2011):  1357–​1364; Anthony P. Clevenger and Nigel Waltho, “Performance Indices to Identify Attributes of Highway Crossing Structures Facilitating Movement of Large Mammals,” Biological Conservation 121, no. 3 (2005): 453–​464. 85. Hannah Parris, Stuart Whitten, Carina Wyborn, Ro Hill, and David Freudenberger, “An Overview of Key Socio-​Economic Factors, Principles and Guidelines in Wildlife Corridor Planning and Implementation,” A Report for the Australian Government Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (Melbourne: CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences 2011). 86. John D. Aber and William R. Jordan III, “Restoration Ecology:  An Environmental Middle Ground,” BioScience 35, no. 7 (1985): 7482–​7482. 87. Holly Jones and Oswald J. Schmitz, “Rapid Recovery of Damaged Ecosystems,” PLoS One 4, no. 5 (2009); Mira Kattwinkel, Robert Biedermann, and Michael Kleyer, “Temporary Conservation for Urban Biodiversity,” Biological Conservation 144, no. 9 (2011): 2335–​2343. 88. Richard J. Hobbs, Salvatore Arico, James Aronson, et al., “Novel Ecosystems: Theoretical and Management Aspects of the New Ecological World Order,” Global Ecology and Biogeography 15, no. 1 (2006): 1–​7. 89. Dave Foreman, Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004); Caroline Fraser, Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution (London: Macmillan, 2009); Philip J. Seddon, et al, “Reversing Defaunation: Restoring Species in a Changing World,” Science 345, no. 6195 (2014): 406–​412. 90. Matthias Diemer, Martin Held, and Sabine Hofmeister. “Urban Wilderness in Central Europe,” International Journal of Wilderness 9, no. 3 (2003): 7. 91. Josh C. Donlan, Joel Berger, Carl E. Bock, et al., “Pleistocene Rewilding: An Optimistic Agenda for Twenty-​ First Century Conservation,” American Naturalist 168, no. 5 (2006): 660–​681. 92. Jamie Lorimer and Clemens Driessen, “Wild Experiments at the Oostvaardersplassen: Rethinking Environmentalism in the Anthropocene,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39, no. 2 (2014): 169–​181. See also Chapter 26 in this volume. 93. Peggy L. Fiedler, Peter S. White, and Robert A. Leidy, “The Paradigm Shift in Ecology and Its Implications for Conservation,” Ecological Basis of Conservation (New York: Springer US, 1997): 83–​92; Daniel Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-​ First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 94. Diemer et al, “Urban Wilderness.” 95. Luiz G.  R. Oliveira Santos and Fernando A.  S. Fernandez. “Pleistocene Rewilding, Frankenstein Ecosystems, and an Alternative Conservation Agenda,” Conservation Biology 24, no.  1 (2010):  4–​5; Philip J. Seddon, “From Reintroduction to Assisted

 

568    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch Colonization:  Moving Along the Conservation Translocation Spectrum,” Restoration Ecology 18, no. 6 (2010): 796–​802. 96. M. J. McDonnell, “The History of Urban Ecology: An Ecologist’s Perspective,” Urban Ecology: Patterns, Processes, and Applications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 97. Martin A. Nowak, “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation,” Science 314, no. 5805 (2006): 1560–​1563; Stefano Allesina and Jonathan M. Levine, “A Competitive Network Theory of Species Diversity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 14 (2011): 5638–​5642. 98. Soulé, “Conservation”; Adams, “Urban Wildlife Ecology”; Michael L. McKinney, “Effects of Urbanization on Species Richness: A Review of Plants and Animals,” Urban Ecosystems 11, no. 2 (2008): 161–​176; Simon G. Dures and Graeme S. Cumming, “The Confounding Influence of Homogenising Invasive Species an a Globally Endangered and Largely Urban Biome: Does Habitat Quality Dominate Avian Biodiversity?” Biological Conservation 143, no. 3 (2010): 768–​777; Peter Daszak, Andrew A. Cunningham, and Alex D. Hyatt, “Emerging Infectious Diseases of Wildlife: Threats to Biodiversity and Human Health,” Science 287, no. 5452 (2000): 443–​449. 99. Clark E. Adams and Kieran J. Lindsey, “Wildlife Management Education Needs to Go Urban” at University Education in Natural Resources Biennial Conference (2010) Online: http://​digitalcommons.usu.edu/​cuenr/​Sessions/​Courses/​1/​ (accessed November 14, 2014). 100. A. J. Dickman, “Complexities of Conflict: The Importance of Considering Social Factors for Effectively Resolving Human-​Wildlife Conflict,” Animal Conservation 13, no.  5 (2010): 458–​466. 101. Patrick C. West, “Invitation to Poison? Detroit Minorities and Toxic Fish Consumption from the Detroit River,” Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Julie Sze, “Asian American Activism for Environmental Justice,” Peace Review 16, no. 2 (2004): 149–​156. 102. Jonathan A. Patz, Peter Daszak, Gary M. Tabor, et al., “Unhealthy Landscapes: Policy Recommendations on Land Use Change and Infectious Disease Emergence,” Environmental Health Perspectives 112, no.  10 (2004):  1092; Chelsea G. Himsworth, Kirbee L. Parsons, Claire Jardine, and David M. Patrick, “Rats, Cities, People, and Pathogens:  A  Systematic Review and Narrative Synthesis of Literature Regarding the Ecology of Rat-​Associated Zoonoses in Urban Centers,” Vector-​Borne and Zoonotic Diseases 13, no. 6 (2013):  349–​359; M. Nils Peterson, Angela G. Mertig, and Jianguo Liu, “Effects of Zoonotic Disease Attributes on Public Attitudes Towards Wildlife Management,” Journal of Wildlife Management 70, no. 6 (2006): 1746–​1753. 103. Dickman, “Complexities of Conflict”; Terry A. Messmer, “The Emergence of Human-​ Wildlife Conflict Management: Turning Challenges into Opportunities,” International Biodeterioration & Biodegradation 45, no. 3 (2000): 97–​102; Joanna Endter-​Wada, Dale Blahna, Richard Krannich, and Mark Brunson, “A Framework for Understanding Social Science Contributions to Ecosystem Management,” Ecological Applications 8, no.  3 (1998): 891–​904. 104. John D.  C. Linnell, E. B. Nilsen, U. S. Lande, I. Herfindal, J. Odden, K. Skogen, R. Andersen, and U. Breitenmoser, “Zoning as a Means of Mitigating Conflicts with Large Carnivores:  Principles and Reality,” in People and Wildlife:  Conflict or Coexistence?, eds. Rosie Woodroffe, Simon Thirgood, and Alan Rabinowitz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005):  162-​175; R. L. Knight and S. A. Temple, “Origin of Wildlife

 

Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems    569 Responses to Recreationists,” in Wildlife and Recreationists:  Coexistence through Management and Research, ed. R. L. Knight and K. J. Gutzwiller (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1995); R. L. Knight and S. A. Temple, “Wildlife and Recreationists: Coexistence through Management,” in Wildlife and Recreationists: Coexistence through Management and Research, ed. R. L. Knight and K. J. Gutzwiller (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1995); Clive Briffett, “Is Managed Recreational Use Compatible with Effective Habitat and Wildlife Occurrence in Urban Open Space Corridor Systems?” Landscape Research 26, no. 2 (2001): 137–​163. 105. David N. Cole, “Minimizing Conflict between Recreation and Nature Conservation,” in Ecology of Greenways: Design and Function of Linear Conservation Areas, ed. David. S. Smith and Paul Cawood Hellmund (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 105–​122. 106. Mona Seymour, Jason Byrne, Diego Martino, Jennifer Wolch, “Recreationists-​Wildlife Interactions in Urban Parks,” in The Green Visions Plan for 21st Century Southern California (Los Angeles, CA: University of Southern California, 2006). 107. David M. Suckling, Lloyd D. Stringer, Andrea E.  A. Stephens, Bill Woods, David G. Williams, Greg Baker, and Ashraf M. El Sayed, “From Integrated Pest Management to Integrated Pest Eradication:  Technologies and Future Needs,” Pest Management Science 70, no.  2 (2014):  179–​189; Lowell Miller, Brad E. Johns, and Gary J. Killian, “Immunocontraception of White-​Tailed Deer with GnRH Vaccine,” American Journal of Reproductive Immunology 44, no. 5 (2000): 266–​274. 108. Hans Slabbekoorn and Erwin A.  P. Ripmeester. “Birdsong and Anthropogenic Noise:  Implications and Applications For Conservation,” Molecular Ecology 17, no.  1 (2008): 72–​83. 109. Slabbekoorn and Ripmeester, “Birdsong and Anthropogenic Noise.” 110. Michael Salmon, “Protecting Sea Turtles from Artificial Night Lighting at Florida’s Oceanic Beaches,” in Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting eds. Catherine Rich and Travis Longcore (Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2006): 141–​168. 111. Fabio Falchi, Pierantonio Cinzano, Christopher D. Elvidge, David M. Keith, and Abraham Haim, “Limiting the Impact of Light Pollution on Human Health, Environment and Stellar Visibility,” Journal of Environmental Management 92, no. 10 (2011): 2714–​2722. 112. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, “Planetary Urbanization,” Urban Constellations (Berlin: Jovis, 2012): 10–​13. 113. Leslie Irvine, Filling the Ark:  Animal Welfare in Disasters (Philadelphia, PA:  Temple University Press, 2009). 114. Pierre Bélanger, Landscape Infrastructure:  Urbanism beyond Engineering, PhD Dissertation, Wageningen University (2013). 115. Sarah Dooling, “Ecological Gentrification: A Research Agenda Exploring Justice in the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33, no. 3 (2009): 621–​ 639:  David Harvey, “Flexible Accumulation through Urbanization:  Reflections on ‘Post-​Modernism’ in the American City,” Antipode 19, no.  3 (1987):  260–​2 86; Edward Soja, Rebecca Morales, and Goetz Wolff, “Urban Restructuring:  An Analysis of Social and Spatial Change in Los Angeles,” Economic Geography 59, no. 2 (1983): 195–​230. 116. Stengers, Cosmopolitics; Anna Bullen and Mark Whitehead, “Negotiating the Networks of Space, Time and Substance: A Geographical Perspective on the Sustainable Citizen,” Citizenship Studies 9, no. 5 (2005): 499–​516; Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka. Zoopolis:

 

570    Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also Chapter 2 in this volume. 117. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-​Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (New York: Psychology Press, 1990); Matthew Chrulew, “From Zoo to Zoöpolis: Effectively Enacting Eden” (Macquarie University Research Online. 2010) Online: http://​ hdl.handle.net/​1959.14/​118403, Accessed November 14, 2014; Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis; Glen Elder, Jennifer Wolch, and Jody Emel, “Race, Place, and the Bounds of Humanity,” Society & Animals 6, no. 2 (1998): 183–​202. 118. Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik.” Making Things Public:  Atmospheres of Democracy (Karlsruhe:  Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Publications 2005): 14–​44; Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Etienne Benson, Wired Wilderness: Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

 

Chapter 30

Anim als in Re l i g i on Stephen R. L. Clark

Introduction: “Animals” and “Religion” Books or essays on the topic of “Animals in Religion” usually describe how non-​human animals have been viewed and treated in the major global “religions,” with perhaps a summary of “tribal” or “indigenous” custom.1 The Christian tradition mostly fares badly in such stories; the Buddhist (and some indigenous cults), rather better. “Christians” are taught that only human beings are “in the image of God,” and have “dominion” over other creatures—​perhaps even denying them any “rights.” “Buddhists” believe instead that animals, human beings, gods, ghosts, and demons are fellow sufferers, all—​ eventually—​to achieve Nirvana and all deserving respect. More careful summaries note that every great tradition has many strands,2 and also that there are distinctions to be made within the imagined class of “animals”: dogs, cats, pigs, horses, snakes, squids, and bees may have quite different significance in different traditions and at different times. Nor is it easy to identify what counts as “a religion.” Many who think themselves entirely “irreligious” and “unbelieving” have their own taboos and pieties, inexplicable to those of another culture. People who happily eat pigs or cattle will shudder at the thought of eating dogs or horses, even if they are prepared to work such animals to death or use them in painful experiments. Mixing kinds may be as horrid a thought for the most-​ hardheaded scientist as for those who live by Leviticus. Rather than offer up another brief and inevitably misleading summary of distinct beliefs, I shall address a broader range of attitudes.3 To begin at the beginning: what is my topic? “Animals,” according to our modern understanding, constitute one kingdom of the domain of eukaryotes, with a common ancestor more recent than those we share with protists, plants or fungi. Eukaryotes, though they are contrasted with the prokaryotic domains of archaea and bacteria, themselves incorporate and house prokaryotes (as mitochondria or gut bacteria4). Animals are more easily separated into separate “species” (that is, relatively isolated breeding groups) than plants or prokaryotes, but even they can exchange genetic information

 

572   Stephen R. L. Clark laterally, through bacterial and viral infection. Some even manage to incorporate plant symbiotes—​a variety of sea-​slug, Elysia viridis, once it has ingested chloroplasts from algae, no longer needs to eat.5 Obviously, we human beings are also animals: our species is, comparatively, homogeneous, having passed through evolutionary bottlenecks only a few millennia ago, and having lost its many hominid cousins (Homo Neanderthalensis, floresiensis and others).6 But even modern biologists, accepting neo-​Darwinian evolutionary theory, will usually distinguish human beings from “animals,” and lump all such non-​human eukaryotes (from woodlice to chimpanzees) in a single Aristotelian taxon, one defined by their common properties rather than their descent: creatures with sensations and desires, capable of locomotion, but lacking the powers of independent reasoning and judgment that we ascribe entirely to ourselves (and historically have preferred to ascribe only to adult males). How and when the ancestors we don’t share with chimpanzees, or with other extinct hominids, first acquired these powers of judgment we don’t know: it is commonly conceived that it was also when they first acquired language—​ though we have no clear account even of what that amounts to. Only then (the story goes) could they tell lies, imagine different worlds and different futures, and make up gods and demons and then appeal to their imagined presence for assistance. Strangely, later religious and philosophical discipline aims to break us of exactly these new habits: we are not to lie to ourselves or others, or waste our time imagining what might or will be, or make idols of our desires. The ancient traditions of devotion and reflection, of worship and enquiry, have seen themselves as schools. Christianity and Vedantic Hinduism, Judaism and Buddhism and Islam are schools…. whose pedagogy has the twofold purpose—​however differently conceived and executed in the different traditions—​of weaning us from our idolatry and purifying our desire.7

We should live instead “in the present,” and not give our hearts to fictions. Better, perhaps, to live as “animals” than to boast that we are able to do much “more.” Better, perhaps, to do without ideal types as well as clearly divided species. The Darwinian revelation was that our resemblances are owed to common ancestry rather than the presence of any common archetype (as Richard Owen had suggested), and that species are not “natural kinds.”8 The expression “we” need not only mean “we human beings, of the only extant hominid species”: “we” are all eukaryotes together, all living things together, momentary expressions of an ongoing, branching lineage, the Life of Planet Earth, and what “our” future may be “we” don’t know. The other concept in this chapter title is almost as problematic. What do we count as “religion”? Critics often assume that “being religious” is “believing in” a string of propositions read out of one “sacred scripture” or another (usually, about “supernatural” entities), without any “objective evidence” of their “truth.” Continued “belief ” in them—​or continued vehement assertion of them—​can only be because “believers” are too stupid, ill-​informed, or frightened to understand that we no longer need those hypotheses. In this context, any study of how “animals” may feature in the creeds of any particular

 

Animals in Religion    573 “religious” group can only be of sociological interest: some people manage still to “worship” cows or beetles; others are “foolishly sentimental” about cats or dogs. Most moderns, pretending to despise past dogmas, assume that human beings are sacred, and that products of neo-​Darwinian evolution like ourselves are, improbably, equipped to grasp the inmost nature of the world. “Darwin’s theory makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down.”9 “Humanism” is—​the point seems obvious—​a literally superstitious (that is, left over) remnant of older religious sensibilities. If our descendants—​or successors—​do indeed encounter “rational” entities of quite other descent and sympathies, we cannot expect them to share those humanistic notions. They may prefer the company, and value the contribution, of whales, ants, or trees.10

Triumphalism: A Christian Heresy Not all human “religious” traditions have been humanistic, affirming a clear division between the human and the (merely) animal and granting the former an elevated status. On the contrary, European tradition especially is distinguished from many others—​ from well before the rise of the Christian churches—​by exactly that assertion—​and a fierce rejection of its contrary. Egyptian culture seemed especially obnoxious to other Mediterranean peoples. In the Hebraic tradition, the author of the Wisdom of Solomon, while insisting that “God hates nothing that He has made,” suggested that He chose to humiliate and defeat the Egyptians with the aid of “vermin” rather than the noble creatures they had chosen to revere, merely to make a point.11 On the Roman side, Virgil’s epic in praise of Roman power imagined that true Romans fought the multiform monstrosities of the corrupting East:  “every kind of monstrous god and barking Anubis too.”12 Even the first-​century Platonist Plutarch (who himself respected animals) suggested that portraying the gods as animals must lead “the weak and innocent into ‘superstition’ (deisidaimonia), and the cynical and bold into ‘atheistic and bestial reasoning’ (atheos kai theriodes logismos).”13 The theme persists today. Modern humanists worship Humanity, and mock those who pay respect to other “lesser” creatures, despite insisting that “religious” sensibilities are alien to “rational,” “modern” minds. The philosopher Xenophanes observed that “if cows and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their hands and make things as men can, horses would have drawn horse-​like gods, cows cow-​like gods.”14 This is not a rebuke merely to those who picture God or the gods as humans, but to all those who suppose that the principles that govern the cosmos fit into the human mind. “What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?”15 This is not, contrary to Hume’s intention, a rebuke to theism but to anthropomorphic idolatry. The Hebrew prophets were clear that God was utterly unlike any created thing: “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.”16 Modern intellectuals are more anthropomorphic about

 

574   Stephen R. L. Clark the cosmos than our predecessors were, because they believe it humanly intelligible, without knowing why.17 Of course, if moderns are challenged on these points, they deny that they have any “religion,” or at least not that religion. Human beings are not, they will say, the chief end and purpose of the universe: the universe has no end or purpose. Nor can we be confident that our intuitions, even our careful reasonings and expensive experimental apparatus, will deliver Truth. But this is disingenuous, and also—​as just remarked—​to mistake the nature of “religion.” Durkheim grasped the point more clearly. The real function of religion is not to make us think, to enrich our knowledge, nor to add to the conceptions which we owe to science others of another origin and another character, but rather, it is to make us act, to aid us to live. The believer who has communicated with his god is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger. He feels within him more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them. It is as though he were raised above the miseries of the world, because he is raised above his condition as a mere man; he believes that he is saved from evil, under whatever form he may conceive this evil. The first article in every creed is the belief in salvation by faith.18

God and the gods are more often inspirations than explanations—​and modern humanists invoke very similar imaginings. Sometimes they are explicitly devoted to an imagined future humanity. Sometimes this grand narrative is only implicit. They are not wrong to fantasize, but perhaps it is rash to disregard our present, petty lives, whether they imagine a wholly indifferent cosmos or one animated by the triumphant intelligences of the very distant future. Could we really strip away all merely “made-​up” values and descriptions, or seek to see things only in that very distant light, without at the same time stripping off humanity? Don’t you see that that dreadful dry light shed on things must at last wither up the moral mysteries as illusions, respect for age, respect for property, and that the sanctity of life will be a superstition? The men in the street are only organisms, with their organs more or less displayed.19

The gap between the worlds of “science” and “common sense” is as real, in practice, as any gap between the harsh reality of the Roman Empire and the “opium dream” of the Gospel.20 If scientists did not live by the fantasy that they, as human beings, can reach out to “the truth,” and that they deserve to be protected or supported in that quest, they could not ever succeed. Indeed, few of us can easily endure the story that I told before, that “we” are only transient expressions of a eukaryotic genome and that the universe is wholly indifferent to the values of “humanity.” Atheistical humanism may need all the more support precisely because its overt commitment to a strongly atheistical account of the universe is in tension with its humanistic commitments: to resolve the tension such humanists need to believe that our descendants or successors will remake the world, and thereby give it the meaning that it does not have already. They

 

Animals in Religion    575 need to believe that they can discard their merely “animal” nature, and so attain a purer and more disciplined mentality. Belief of this sort, founded in emotional needs rather than any experimental proofs, is not necessarily objectionable.21 There may be many occasions, for example, in both our personal life and our national life, when we need to believe that there will be a happy outcome, that it is really possible to live in peace with our neighbors, that justice can be done, that something like “human” or “humane” life will one day triumph.22 We have no proof of these convictions or proposals—​or none, at any rate, that we could obtain without just carrying on “in faith.” Even if there were good reason to believe the opposite (as there was clearly good reason in 1940, for example, to believe that Hitler would win the war), it may count as virtue that our forefathers did not. Anyone who is liable to acute depression can also reasonably be encouraged by therapists as follows: As best you can, simply trust in your fundamental capacity for learning, growing and healing as we go along through this process—​and engage in the practices as if your life depended on them, which in many ways, literally and metaphorically, it surely does.23

The patient has no proof at that point in time that this, or anything else, will work, but her only hope is to behave as if it will. Where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is ‘the lowest kind of immorality’ into which a thinking being can fall.24

That faith, that energy in believing, is reinforced in moderns by reminiscences of great scientific discoveries and inventions, by great art and music, and by denigrating the lives of other animals—​and other less “developed” human tribes. Modern humanists may even expect or hope that all other creatures, all nonhuman environments, will be erased or wholly dominated. In some far future day, the “opium dream” of their Gospel will be vindicated with the help of genetic engineering, advanced computers, and an accurate General Theory. Humankind—​or its inheritor—​will sit on the throne of the universe and remake the worlds. This thought or fancy may comfort some and gravely alarm others. Less grandiose humanists, more conscious of our fragility, are content merely to use all other creatures for “our” (that is, for human) present gain. They may even prefer not to cause “unnecessary suffering” to “animals” bred for farms and for laboratories, while casually denying that such “animals” can have any serious value. Killing “animals” is a trivial matter, even if deliberately hurting them is at least uncouth (unless, of course, it is “necessary” for a greater good, the survival or the pleasure of our own conspecifics or even—​much more narrowly—​our fellow citizens). Hurting them may even serve to reinforce a deep conviction that we as reasoning beings are in control of merely bestial nature: we despise those whom we injure because we need to believe that they deserve the injury.25

 

576   Stephen R. L. Clark Atheistical humanists prefer to think their creed has developed from some nonreligious (that is, some nontheistic), or at least non-​Abrahamic, thought and cite classical philosophers who were ready to recognize the “humanity” of women, foreigners or slaves (not quite consistently). Such philosophers were more usually concerned to emphasize the superior nature of the wise: the wise could be the equal of the imagined gods, far removed from the slavish nature of ordinary people. It was rather an Hebraic tradition that each human individual (male or female, slave or free, Greek or barbarian) was made “in the image of God,” to be respected as if indeed they were God—​as monarchs erected statues in their kingdoms to be a visible presence of authority. So human beings are each, individually, representatives and—​as it were—​heirs of God: each is sufficient reason for the whole world to exist, according to the Rabbinic gloss. A man stamps many coins with one seal, and they are all identical, but the King of the kings of kings stamped every man with the seal of the first man, and none is identical with his fellow. Therefore it is the duty of every one to say: For my sake the world was created.26

This thought is an answer to despots everywhere, but—​taken out of its context—​seemed also to validate a more familiar religious form, encountered among both Protestant and Catholic Christians (less often among Orthodox or would-​be “Celtic” Christians). Such Christians may not share the grandiose ambitions of atheistical humanists but are as convinced as they that no other creatures matter. Some of those who live in expectation of an imminent parousia have seemed to conclude that, being in the image of God, we are now entitled to do as we please with things. After all, some say, if this-​world-​here is due for demolition, then God Himself must think it not worth saving. But “those who boast of the dignity of their nature and the advantages of their station and thence infer their right of oppression of their inferiors, exhibit their folly as well as their malice.”27 Being “like God”—​in any orthodox sense—​is not compatible with being tyrannical. “Let that mind be in us that was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God did not think to snatch at equality with God.”28 A few of us may manage to make appropriate vows of poverty, chastity, nonviolence, or obedience, and to greet each other as God’s beloveds. Because this is indeed a radical alternative, we usually console ourselves by thinking of it, rather than attempting it. Experimental scientists remind objectors of the medical gains to be made from careful vivisection (and sometimes admit that they would also gain from experiments on “sub-​ normal” conspecifics, were it not that “the public wouldn’t stand for it”). Recreational hunters—​a practice that neither Jews nor Muslims can approve—​insist on their right to kill and eat whatever “animals” they please. Vegetarians are rebuked for disdaining what God has provided, and so (it is supposed) refusing Peter’s Vision: “do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”29 Only humanity is to be respected, under God, and we should make no more divisions either between human tribes (each with their own customs and taboos) or between different sorts of “animal.” That all such animals are “clean,” and that all human tribes are equal, seems a liberating revelation: we are no

 

Animals in Religion    577 longer to think of any “animals” as “vermin,” nor any human animal as someone who is not our neighbor. The humanistic interpretation is less happy: if there are no bars on our eating anything, and purity rules are all relaxed, such believers are free to do anything they please to the creatures God put in our hands, and are being “ungrateful” if they don’t accept the gift. One further feature of the tradition that still influences those who would claim to have abandoned older ways is the long experience of sacrifice. Religion requires us to surrender what is precious to us, whether our livestock or our lives.30 European explorers, themselves acquainted with those historical demands, were confronted—​ in Aztec civilization—​by a horrid parody, as they saw it, of their own beliefs. Human sacrifice was required to keep the sun alive, and wars engineered to ensure a steady supply of captives.31 European civilization had at least abandoned human sacrifice, allowing us to buy our freedom with the blood of cattle. Others, in both European and Aztec practice, were to pay the price in blood, whether to appease the gods or keep the gods alive. It is notable that the same verb, “sacrifice,” is still often used to describe what we do to “animals” in our laboratories: there, too, others pay the price of an imagined future, free (it is supposed) of disease or disability and maybe even death. In a way, this could be considered a good sign: if “animals” were really felt to be no more than toys or tools, it would be easier to dispose of them. The very need to dignify their ends is an indication that we are still conscious of their own lives and being, however absurdly we may—​like the Aztecs—​pretend that our victims are or would be willing.

The Older Covenants Humanism can be viewed as a Christian heresy: one strand pulled from an older tapestry in which it is not so obvious that human beings are final arbiters of whatever they do to others. Neither Hebrew nor Hellenic thought was so neglectful of the creatures with whom we share the world. One influential strand, especially of the Hellenic or, more broadly, the Mediterranean tradition emphasized instead the mutability of all living forms. To that I shall return. But the commoner thought acknowledged an important role for merely human animals, at least in this age of the world. Precisely because “we” are human, we should treat non-​humans fairly. In Islam, man is God’s viceregent on Earth, and he has custodianship and rights over other creatures by virtue of this viceregency and not simply as a result of being a purely earthly creature more clever and cunning than others. Renaissance humanism gave birth to a man who was no longer bound to a Divine Order or sacred hierarchy and who saw no limit upon his right to destroy nature.32

But it was not so in the beginning.

 

578   Stephen R. L. Clark Once upon a time, the human tribe was one of many. But “on that day on which Adam went forth from the Garden…. was closed the mouth of all beasts, and of cattle, and of birds, and of whatever walks, and of whatever moves, so that they could no longer speak: for they had all spoken one with another with one lip and with one tongue.”33 Their mouths were closed, or else our ears. The process of our estrangement may have been slower than the Hebrew story suggests: the memory of Eden may be of a time before the Flood, the Ice or the Eruption. Perhaps it was the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution that brought class hatred, slavery, and war into the world. Once upon a time, not all that long ago, hunter-​gatherers acknowledged that there were other creatures in the world with as much “right” to the fruits of the earth. When we began gardening in earnest, rabbits, deer, insects, and birds became our enemies or our slaves, not just our occasional rivals. At the same time, moralists drew lessons from the habits of “animals,” even if they also denied that the animals they admired themselves knew what they were doing. Even the Hellenes thought some animals, at least, were sacred to one divinity or another. Even the Hebrews acknowledged that we had duties to the creatures in our service. From the very first chapter of Genesis it is affirmed that Being itself is good. “God could not have created a thing had he hated it, as the Wisdom of Solomon says (11.24f) and the mere fact that he keeps it in being is the proof that he loves it.”34 After the flood, God makes a covenant with all the living: there shall never again be a flood to destroy all living creatures.35 Granted that things exist “for their own sake” because God wishes those things to be, then they aren’t simply “for us.” “You bring darkness on, night falls, all the forest animals come out: savage lions roaring for their prey, claiming their food from God.”36 The Noahic covenant permits us to make use of other creatures, in a ruined world, but not to use their blood, which is their life.37 The Mosaic law lays down further explicit principles: we may not, for example, muzzle the oxen that tread out the corn;38 or take mother and young from any nest;39 or take a calf, lamb, or kid from its mother till seven days after its birth;40 or boil a kid in its own mother’s milk;41 or leave a beast trapped in a well on the pretext that today is holy;42 or yoke ox and ass together;43 or plough up all the fields, in every year, and so deprive the wild things of their livelihood.44 Prophets emphasized that violation of the covenant would lead to disaster.45 When Babylon has fallen, “there no Arab shall pitch his tent, no shepherds fold their flocks. There marmots shall have their lairs, and porcupine shall overrun her houses; there desert owls shall dwell, and there he-​goats shall gambol.”46 “The whole world has rest and is at peace; it breaks into cries of joy. The pines themselves and the cedars of Lebanon exult over you: since you have been laid low, they say, no man comes up to fell us.”47 The land shall have the Sabbaths we denied it.48 The natural historian of a future age may be able to point to the particular follies that brought ruin—​chopping down the tropical rain forests, meditating nuclear war, introducing hybrid monocultures, spreading poisons, financing grain-​mountains, and rearing cattle in conditions that clearly breach the spirit of the commandment

 

Animals in Religion    579 not to muzzle the ox that treads out the corn (Deuteronomy 25.4). The historian whose eyes are opened to the acts of God will have no doubt we brought our ruin on ourselves, that it is God’s answer to the arrogant.49

Or as another said some centuries earlier: These were the words of the Lord to me: Prophesy, man, against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them, You shepherds, these are the words of the Lord God: How I hate the shepherds of Israel who care only for themselves! Should not the shepherd care for the sheep? You consume the milk, wear the wool, and slaughter the fat beasts, but you don’t feed the sheep. You have not encouraged the weary, tended the sick, bandaged the hurt, recovered the straggler, or searched for the lost; and even the strong you have driven with ruthless severity.…. I will dismiss those shepherds: they shall care only for themselves no longer; I will rescue my sheep from their jaws, and they shall feed on them no longer.50

Ezekiel, or the Lord, here takes it for granted that true shepherds care for sheep. “A righteous man cares for his beast, but a wicked man is cruel at heart.”51 Literally, of course, shepherds care for sheep so that they may profit from them in the end (as Plato’s Thrasymachus reminds us),52 but perhaps this was not so in the beginning, and need not be wholly so even now. For any man who is just and good loves the brute creatures which serve him, and he takes care of them so that they have food and rest and the other things they need. He does not do this only for his own good but out of a principle of true justice; and if he is so cruel toward them that he requires work from them and nevertheless does not provide the necessary food, then he has surely broken the law which God inscribed in his heart. And if he kills any of his beasts only to satisfy his own pleasure, then he acts unjustly, and the same measure will be measured out to him.53

But here, too, there can be delays and obfuscations. We should care for the weak and helpless, “champion the widow, defend the cause of the fatherless, give to the poor, protect the orphan, clothe the naked.”54 In the world to come, there will be no marriages, no temples, and no courts of law. There, we shall call no man “father.” There, we shall be naked and unashamed. But it does not follow that we can live by exactly those laws here and now. Vegetarians, according to Karl Barth,55 are trying, like conscientious nudists or antinomian anarchists, to anticipate the Kingdom. So even those who adopt some form of “stewardship” as their model are usually content to speak as if they care, but not to make more than minor changes in their ways. As Orwell commented: “We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment,’ demands that the robbery shall continue”56—​so we are satisfied with saying that we wish to stop and, at best, slightly improving the coolies’—​or the animals’—​“welfare.”

 

580   Stephen R. L. Clark

Transformations These warnings about “good husbandry” rest on the conviction that we human beings are called to a higher and more demanding role than just any animal species: because we have the greater power and insight we have the greater responsibility. The “dominion” we are to exercise should not be that of heathen kings, insistent on their own interests and commands: You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.57

We are all adept both in ignoring this suggestion and in turning it round to license much the same oppressions as before: because we are, in imagination, acting for the others’ good we somehow deserve their gratitude when that imagined good disguises the real hardships we impose on them. Slave-​dealers imagine that they are “civilizing” their captives. Those who use and abuse “animals” believe that their victims prosper. The fantasy defeats our perception of the complete reality. By contrast, the “Brethren of Purity,” a tenth-​century Islamic school, wrote clearly and compellingly of the case that “animals” had against humankind, for treating them, absurdly as well as unjustly, as rebellious slaves. Another fantasy is often given greater credit for supporting a real care for animals. The story is told of Pythagoras that he rebuked a man who was beating a dog, saying “That’s a friend of mine—​I knew him by his voice.”58 The story is told to illustrate, maybe to mock, Pythagorean belief in metempsychosis, that souls migrate into new bodies after death. It is a widespread belief, though not every believer thinks that their soul might end up in an animal. There is a simpler interpretation of the remark, more readily accessible to modern sensibilities: Pythagoras acknowledged the dog’s howling as complaint, and so as a communication that placed an obligation on those who heard it. Animals can—​despite assertions to the dogmatic contrary—​be our friends in their own right: consider Odysseus’s old dog, who survives just long enough to recognize his master.59 But take the Pythagorean story at its surface value: Pythagoreans and Platonists in the Mediterranean world, and Hindus and Buddhists in the Indian, supposed—​not quite consistently—​that our souls might move from human to non-​human, as an effect of actions in this life. Buddhists emphasize how rare a human life would be: as if a turtle swimming in the Ocean should chance to put his head up through a yoke floating on the surface.60 So also, according to Herodotus, the Egyptians reckoned that souls could be born human only once in three thousand years (aka “a very long time”).61 These theories, of course, depend on a metaphysical claim, that each of us is essentially a bare subject,

 

Animals in Religion    581 clothed in whatever bodily being is appropriate. “I have been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird, and a dumb fish in the sea,” Empedocles declared.62 If I am instead essentially this particular corporeal person then there is no chance of my ever being anyone else—​and it may be correspondingly difficult to establish the empathetic concern that is the root of much ethical, or even social, behavior. If it is impossible that I (that is, Stephen) will ever be or ever have been, say, Hecuba, or born Japanese, let alone Empedocles’s bush, what can it mean to imagine myself into their predicaments? “Treat others as you would wish to be treated if you were they”—​but apparently that is as absurd as demanding that I bilocate or “travel back in time.” I may think I can imagine such a thing, but must acknowledge that the idea is incoherent. Altruistic concern, in brief, is an attempt to live a dream—​as I have suggested all “religion” is (including atheistical humanism)—​and has the same advantages and problems. But the strictly metaphysical option of conceiving ourselves as “souls,” rather than only living bodies, is still open. If that is our reality, then any of us may be subject to the same treatment as non-​human animals now receive at human hands, and there is at least some reason to establish a robust tradition to protect our future selves. Unfortunately, there may also be reason not to: if our souls pass through different lives, as determined by past actions, then perhaps the victims of oppression really “deserve” their fate. Our sufferings now are often, though not always, just retribution for past crimes. There is no accident in a man’s becoming a slave, nor is he taken prisoner in war by chance, nor is outrage done on his body without due cause, but he was once the doer of that which he now suffers; and a man who made away with his mother will be made away with by a son when he has become a woman, and one who has raped a woman will be a woman in order to be raped.63

So humanitarian interference might be subvert the course of justice. In Hindu thought, Untouchables might be enduring the proper punishment for their own souls’ behavior in an earlier life. Non-​human animals, or “beasts,” deserve their lives because their souls are “beastly.” This thought, too, can be subverted: those who serve as agents of the punishment will themselves someday be punished. The penalty, perhaps, cannot be undone, but it need not be enforced by any mortal will. Nor need it always be true that “being born non-​human” is a penalty: it might instead be progress, or—​as above—​a necessary part of the soul’s experience. Maybe some souls are born as “animals” to bring comfort even to human beings in need.64 There is a further way of conceiving metempsychosis. Empedocles’s own declaration about his past lives may be simply another way of saying that the whole world is changing, that shapes emerge from the action of love and strife upon the elemental states of matter (solid, liquid, gaseous, aflame: expressed more literally as earth, water, air, and fire65). So also in Chinese Daoist speculation: Suppose a master foundryman is casting his metal and the metal leaps up and says, “I must be made into the best sword.” The master foundryman would certainly

 

582   Stephen R. L. Clark consider the metal as evil. And if simply because I possess a body by chance, I were to say “Nothing but a man! Nothing but a man!” the Creator would certainly regard me as evil. If I regard the universe as a great furnace and creation as a master foundryman, why should anywhere I go not be all right?66

Every supposedly “individual,” “separate” organism is only one fragment of the whole, being beaten and re-​beaten into shape. There are no permanent or significant boundary lines in the Heracleitean fire of Nature: “million-​fuelèd, nature’s bonfire burns on.”67 Hopkins recognized that human life might also seem to be swallowed in the fire, but had hopes that “manshape, that shone sheer off, disseveral, a star” might one day be resurrected as immortal diamond. That hope, on the Daoist inflection, is unreal, but may still serve as a vision for us here and now, if we cannot bear the overt implication, that we as “individuals” are only silly putty. Anything can be transformed into anything else, and one day will be: “imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”68 It is of course much easier to conceive and act on this suspicion when dealing with merely “animal” lives and purposes—​our very own lives and purposes, like Hamlet’s, resist deconstruction. From which it follows that those imaginative traditions that emphasize the possibility of metempsychosis, and of our own deep unity with all other living things, may not, in practice, be as thoughtful of all those other lives as some have wished. Lacking any firm sense of our own identity as individual and responsible agents, and lacking any sense of what might be lost in the radical transformation of other creatures, it may be easier simply to “go with the flow,” accepting the chances of this mortal life, on behalf of our victims, as what Nature now requires. On the other hand, if we here and now can stand even a little aside from nature’s bonfire, so as to wonder whether it need burn so harshly, then we need not simply acquiesce. The chance of being born “human” is what creates the possibility of not doing all and only what is generally done: we may be momentarily, at least, released from “nature” so as to be concerned for others still caught up in nature’s fire. In Buddhist tradition the enlightened Bodhisattva may refuse the final extinction of selfhood and desire, until each individual entity, even every blade of grass, is also freed. “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them. Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them. Buddha’s way is unsurpassable, I vow to become it.”69

Waking Up There is a fourth mode in the religious consideration of the non-​human, alongside triumphalism, stewardship, and metempsychosis: namely, to acknowledge other creatures as nations like ourselves,70 fellow voyagers in the odyssey of evolution.71 So, Henry Beston: We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization

 

Animals in Religion    583 surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.72

This is not to say that we are all independent nations. On the contrary, we are all caught up together in that “splendour and travail.” Hopkins’s hope for resurrection emphasized the distinct identity of each individual human—​but as I remarked before, each bodily being, including ours, is composed of many million symbiotes, internal and external. There can be no human body without its cells, its mitochondria, its gut bacteria; nor would our bodies long survive without the ambient air, water, and earth constructed and composed by other living creatures over many million years. Even if the Christian hope is that we be raised as “spiritual” bodies, we cannot easily conceive such entities as closed off from the world. God’s oracle to Isaiah: “the wolf lives with the lamb, the panther lies down with the kid, calf and lion cub feed together with a little boy to lead them. The cow and the bear make friends, their young lie down together. The lion eats straw like the ox. The infant plays over the cobra’s hole; into the viper’s lair the young child puts his hand. They do no hurt, no harm, on all my holy mountain, for the country is filled with the knowledge of Yahweh as the waters swell the sea.”73 So what is the effect of this belief that “from the beginning till now the entire creation…. has been groaning in one great act of giving birth”?74 And what is waiting to be born? Consider again the other “religious” modes available to us. Triumphalists will see all other animals, all other things, in the light of their own purposes, and so will treat them—​practically and symbolically—​as artefacts, having no life of their own. Pigs, according to Chrysippus, should be reckoned locomotive meals, with souls instead of salt to keep them fresh,75 and we have done our best to make that story true. There is a price to be paid for fabricating around us a society which is as artificial and as mechanized as our own; and this is that we can exist in it only on condition that we adapt ourselves to it. This is our punishment.76

But the reality is that pigs, turkeys, and the rest are not artefacts. Nothing is “just a pig”; even of a fish it is blasphemy to say it is only a fish, or of a flower that it is “only a growth like any other.”77 Even “stewards” of the world see only what they wish in other creatures—​unconscious images of human virtues such as loyalty or courage, dependent for their welfare on human care and control, and ready to serve our needs. Even those who see us all caught up in the cycle may easily see destiny in the lives that we oppress. Maybe we should attend to the seemingly “irreligious” message of the later

 

584   Stephen R. L. Clark prophets: maybe all the meanings we read into the lives of others, all the spirits we imagine at work there, all the morals that seem to justify or at least excuse our actions, should be abandoned. We can begin to treat even other human beings better when we acknowledge that they are not identical with the roles and meanings we impute to them: the dangerous outsider, loyal spouse, even the charming child are better seen as themselves, without such attributed meanings. So also other animals, plants, and landscapes: it may seem right to honor these as symbols of some greater beauty—​that at least is better, for us and them, than to despise them as vermin, weeds, or wasteland. But the better liberation is to acknowledge only that they are themselves. Modern environmentalists have blamed the Abrahamic tradition for evacuating “meaning” from the land and landscape, and so—​it is supposed (not quite unjustly)—​making them available for whatever use we please. But it is not obvious that any actual animals ever benefited from the delusion that they were incarnate deities, any more than any actual human being is well served by being considered a Hero, a Good Wife, a Sage. A genuinely “personal” attachment is only possible when we recognize that heroes, wives, and sages have their own names and destinies, apart from ours, and apart from any fantasy we compose about them. True piety may require us to give up “religion.” “I am sick of holocausts of rams and the fat of calves. The blood of bulls and goats revolts me.”78 It is this which gives much moral force to atheistical attacks upon “religion”—​that the gods we have often worshipped and whose imagined words have given us the excuse we wanted to act out fantasies of revenge, are indeed unreal. Merely saying this, however, can never be enough: the fantasies return, as they do in overtly atheistical imaginings of human rights and destinies. Turning aside from the mechanized, anthropocentric world to the world promised by the prophets (even if we cannot get there by ourselves, or swiftly) is an awakening. We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the centre, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence. A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions. It is a transformation analogous to that which takes place in the dusk of evening on a road, where we suddenly discern as a tree what we had at first seen as a stooping man; or where we suddenly recognize as a rustling of leaves what we thought at first was whispering voices. We see the same colours, we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way. To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the centre of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centres and that the true centre is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the centre of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love which is turned towards thinking persons is the love of our neighbour: the face turned towards matter is love of the order of the world, or love of the beauty of the world which is the same thing.79

Weil here draws too rigid, too Cartesian a distinction between thinking persons and matter: there are innumerable grades of being, tradition tells us, “below” and “above”

 

Animals in Religion    585 the thinking person. “The moral consequence of faith in God,” so Niebuhr tells us, “is the universal love of all being in Him…. This is [faith’s] requirement: that all beings, not only our friends, but also our enemies, not only men but also animals and the inanimate, be met with reverence, for all are friends in the friendship of the one to whom we are reconciled in faith.”80 I have allowed that “being religious” is trying to “live the dream,” acting out and reinforcing the imagination of a world where all is done for the best. But it is also possible to turn this doctrine round: true piety—​as Lucretius defined it, “the power to contemplate the universe with a quiet mind”81—​is an answer to idolatry, a rejection of blood sacrifice, and is brought to life in encountering some real Other. The dog or the bird looks back at us, and we are jolted awake from the delirium in which we mostly live.82 They are real individuals with their own dreaming and their own desires. The real world is not the world we imagine to ourselves, the one in which we are the most significant, the most intelligent, the most deserving. Just occasionally we may wake up to realize our consanguinity, our common reliance upon God and Nature.

Notes 1. See, for example, Paul Waldau, “Religion and Animals,” in In Defense of Animals: the Second Wave, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 69–​83. 2. See, for a better example, Paul Waldau, “Religion and Other Animals,” in Teaching the Animal:  Human-​ Animal Studies across the Disciplines, ed. Margo deMello (New York: Lantern Books, 2010), chap. 6. 3. This essay is one of several in which I have recently explored aspects of our troubled relationship with other creatures and with the divine. See “Animals in Classical and Late Antique Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp and R. G. Frey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 35–​60; “The Ethics of Taxonomy: A Neo-​Aristotelian Synthesis,” in Animal Ethics: Past and Present Perspectives, ed. Evangelos D. Protopapadakis (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2012), 38–​58; “Animals,” in Routledge Companion to Theism, ed. Charles Taliaferro, Victoria S. Harrison, and Steward Goetz (London: Routledge, 2012), 528–​540; “Does ‘Made in the Image of God’ Mean Humans Are More Special Than Animals?” in A Faith Embracing All Creatures, ed. Tripp York and Andy Alexis-​Baker (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), 138–​149; “Ask Now the Beasts and They Shall Teach Thee,” in Animals as Religious Subjects, ed. Celia Deane-​Drummond, David L. Clough, and Rebecca Artinian-​Kaiser (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 15–​34; “God, Reason and Extraterrestrials,” in God, Mind and Knowledge, ed. Andrew Moore (London: Ashgate, 2014), 171–​186. 4. See Theodor Rosebury, Life on Man (London: HarperCollins, 1972); Roger M. Knutson, Fearsome Fauna:  A  Field Guide to the Creatures That Live in You (Basingstoke, UK:  W. H. Freeman, 1999). 5. See Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 13. 6. See G. J. Sawyer, Viktor Deak, Esteban Sarmiento, et  al., The Last Human:  A  Guide to Twenty-​Two Species of Extinct Humans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).

 

586   Stephen R. L. Clark 7. Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and the End of “Religion” (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), 21. See also Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, ed. Julius Guttman, trans. Chaim Rabin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1190/​1995), bk. 3, chap.29, p. 178: “The first purpose of the whole law is to remove idolatry and to wipe out its traces and all that belongs to it, even in memory.” 8. See Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin’s Theory: Natural History, Natural Theology, and Natural Selection, 1838-​ 1859 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1981), 146–​169. See my “Is Humanity a Natural Kind?” in What Is an Animal? ed. Tim Ingold (London:  Unwin Hyman, 1988), 17–​34; also The Political Animal:  Biology, Ethics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1999), 40–​58. 9. Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (London: Allen Lane, 2014), 5, 363. Oddly, Tegmark apparently believes that it is indeed true that our “evolved intuition” must break down, but he exempts mathematical reasoning about the ultimate nature of things from the breakdown, despite its obvious, and unchecked, dependence upon “intuition.” 10. See my “God, Reason and Extraterrestrials,” in God, Mind and Knowledge, ed. Andrew Moore (London: Ashgate, 2014), 171–​186. 11. Wisdom of Solomon 11:15–​24. 12. Virgil, Aeneid 8.699. 13. Ingvild Saelid Gilhus, Animals, Gods and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Ideas (London: Routledge, 2006), 98, after Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 379E, in Plutarch, Moralia, vol. 5, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (London: Heinemann, 1936), 165. 14. Xenophanes, 21B15DK, in The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists, ed. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 27. 15. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. A. W. Colver and J. V. Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1777/​1976), 168. 16. Isaiah 55:8. 17. See Eugen Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics 13 (1960): 1–​14. 18. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1915), 416–​417. 19. G. K. Chesterton, The Poet and the Lunatics (London: Darwen Finlayson, 1929/​1962), 70. 20. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” See Karl Marx, introduction to The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ed. Joseph O’ Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1843–​1844/​1970). 21. See my Understanding Faith:  Religious Belief and Its Place in Society (Basingstoke, UK: Imprint Academic, 2009). 22. See Freeman J. Dyson, “Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” in Selected Papers of Freeman Dyson (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1979/​ 1996), 529–​542. 23. Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, et  al., The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness (New York: Guildford, 2007), 8. 24. William James, The Will to Believe (New York: Longmans, Green, 1919), 25. James is rebutting W. K. Clifford’s unrealistic claim in Lectures and Essays, vol. 2, ed. L. Stephen and F. Pollock (London: Macmillan, 1901), 163–​166.

 

Animals in Religion    587 25. Compare Luc Ferry, “Neither Man nor Stone,” in Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity, ed. Peter Atterton and Matthew Calerco (London: Continuum, 2004), 147–​156. See also Chapter 7 in this volume. 26. Mishnah: Sanhedrin 4.5, in The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, by Ephraim E. Urbach, trans. Israel Abrahams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 217; see also Matthew 22:21. 27. Humphrey Primatt, The Duty of Humanity to Inferior Creatures, 2nd ed., ed. A. Broome (Fontwell: Centaur Press, 1831/​1990), 22. 28. Philippians 2:5-​6. 29. Acts 10:9–​23. 30. See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 31. See B. C. Brundage, The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979). 32. S. H. Nasr, Religion and the Order of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 179; The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ed. William C. Chittick (Bloomington, IN:  World Wisdom, 2007), 151. 33. Book of Jubilees (c.120 bc) 3.27. 34. E. Cardenal, Love, trans. D. Livingstone (London: Search Press, 1974), 43. 35. Genesis 9:8-​11. 36. Psalm 104.20-​21; see Job 38:39-​41. 37. Genesis 9:3-​4; see also Leviticus 17:10-​14, Deuteronomy 12:15-​16. 38. Deuteronomy 25:4. 39. Deuteronomy 22:6f; see Leviticus 22:28. 40. Leviticus 22:26-​28. 41. Deuteronomy 14.21; Philo of Alexandria, Works, trans. F. H. Colson, vol. 8 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 250–​251 (De Virtutibus 142–​144): “The person who boils the flesh of lambs or kids or any other young animal in their mother’s milk, shows himself cruelly brutal in character and gelded of compassion.” 42. Deuteronomy 22:4; see Luke 14:5. 43. Deuteronomy 22:10. 44. Leviticus 19:9-​10, 23:22, 25:6-​7. 45. Isaiah 24:5; Jeremiah 4:23, 5:25. 46. Isaiah 13:20-​22. 47. Isaiah 14:7-​8. 48. Leviticus 26:34. 49. Stephen R. L. Clark, Civil Peace and Sacred Order (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 150. 50. Ezekiel 34:1–​4, 9f. 51. Proverbs 12:10; compare 27:23-​27. 52. Plato, Republic 1.343b. 53. Anne Conway, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, ed. A. P. Courdert and T. Corse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1690/​1996), 35. 54. 2 Esdras 2:20-​26; see Isaiah 1:16-​20. 55. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III, pt.4, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936), 350–​2. 56. George Orwell, quoted in Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (London: Rider Books, 1990), 201.

 

588   Stephen R. L. Clark 57. Mark 10:42–​44. 58. According to Xenophanes of Colophon DK21B7, in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 8.36. 59. Odyssey 17:294-​327. See Gary Steiner, Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents:  The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy (Pittsburgh, PA:  University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 42; see also my “Can Animals Be Our Friends?” Philosophy Now 67 (May/​June 2008): 13–​16. 60. Majjhima Nikaya (129 Balapandita Sutta). See Kalu Rinpoche and M. Montenegro, Luminous Mind:  Fundamentals of Spiritual Practice (Somerville, MA:  Wisdom Publications, 1997), 198. 61. Herodotus Histories 2.132 [DK14A1], in First Philosophers, Waterfield: 96 [T6]. 62. Empedocles of Akragas DK31B117, in First Philosophers, Waterfield: 154 [F36]. 63. Ennead III.2 [47].13, 11-​15. 64. See Rupert Isaacson, The Horse Boy:  A  Father’s Miraculous Journey to Heal His Son (London: Penguin, 2009). 65. One further oddity of the modern atheistical and would-​be scientific consensus is how closely it mirrors ancient myths: “Love” and “Strife” now feature in cosmological theory as “dark matter” and “dark energy,” and the universe emerges, as it did for the Egyptians, from Nothing, as the primeval, swiftly unfolding, Atum. 66. Chuang Tzu: “Mystical Way of Chuang Tzu” in Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, ed. and trans. Wing-​tsit Chan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 197-​8. 67. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection, ” in Poems, ed. Robert Bridges (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918), n.48. 68. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 5, scene 1. 69. One version of the “Bodhisattva’s Vow,” as represented in the “Greater Vehicle” of the Buddhist tradition. See Dharma Rain:  Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism, ed. Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 443. 70. Koran 6:38; see also 11:6; see Al-​Hafiz B. A. Masri, Animals in Islam (Corsham: Athene Trust, 1989). Mainstream Muslim opinion on the topic mostly belongs to the stewardship or vice regency model, but there are some signs of this more radical view. 71. Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 109. 72. Henry Beston, The Outermost House:  A  Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod (New York: Owl Books, 1928/​2003), 25. 73. Isaiah 11:6-​9; see 65:17-​25. 74. Romans 8:22; see Isaiah 26:17-​19. 75. Chrysippus, according to Porphyry On Abstinence 3.20.1, in Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1, ed. A. A. Long, and D. Sedley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 329 [54P]. 76. P. Sherrard, The Eclipse of Man and Nature (West Stockbridge, MA:  Lindisfarne Press, 1987), 71–​72. 77. Chesterton, Poet, 54, 58; see also C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Bles, 1943), 12, speaking of “man’s prehistoric piety to ‘our brother the ox,’” and the way in which bad philosophy, masquerading as literary criticism, damaged humane sensibility. 78. Isaiah 1:11. 79. Simone Weil, Notebooks, vol. 1, trans. A. Wills (London:  Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1956), 115. 80. H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 126.

 

Animals in Religion    589 81. Lucretius On the Nature of Things 5.1194–​1203:  see Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry, (London: Routledge, 2000), 32. 82. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.17.1; see my “Moments of Truth:  the Marginal and the Real,” European Legacy 17, no.6 (2012): 769–​778.

Further Reading Clark, Stephen R. L. Animals and Their Moral Standing. London: Routledge, 1997. Deane-​Drummond, Celia, Rebecca Artinian-​Kaiser, and David L. Clough, eds. Animals as Religious Subjects: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Goodman, Lenn E., and Richard McGregor, eds. Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: The Case of the Animals versus Man before the King of the Jinn: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 22. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Kemmerer, Lisa. Animals and World Religions, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Midgley, Mary. The Essential Mary Midgley. Edited by David Midgley. London: Routledge, 2005. Perlo, Katherine Wills. Kinship and Killing: The Animal in World Religions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Preece, Rod. Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb:  A  Chronicle of Sensibility to Animals. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002. Waldau, Paul, and Kimberley Patton. eds. A Communion of Subjects:  Animals in Religion, Science and Ethics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

 

 

Index

Figures are indicated by “f ” following the page numbers. AAIs (animal-​assisted interventions), 87–​88 Abolitionist paradigm on animal research, 346 on animal rights, 2, 34–​38, 66 on carnism, 304 criticism of welfare reform efforts, 3, 36 on domesticated animals, 2, 9, 304 nonviolent nature of, 37–​38 responses to, 38 on sentience, 37 speciesism rejected by, 37 on veganism, 2, 35, 36–​37 on working animals, 9 Abram, David, 159 Abuse. See also Anti-​cruelty laws; Pain and suffering civil suits for, 74 in contemporary art, 15, 446, 447–​448 criminalization of, 281–​282 damages awarded for, 68–​69, 74 exploitation and, 156 legitimization of, 220 of roaming dogs, 120 Acampora, Ralph, 5, 9, 47, 152 Acquired vs. basic rights, 34 Acrophobia, 140 Actor Network Theory (ANT), 243, 244, 245, 247, 262 An Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle. See Martin’s Act of 1822 Actualist higher-​order thought, 340n8 Act utilitarianism, 28, 31 ACUC. See Animal Care and Use Committee Adams, Carol, 196, 369 Adams, Douglas, 380–​381

Adorno, Theodor, 195, 209 Advocacy movements failure of, 3, 46 focus on passive suffering in, 48–​50 grassroots efforts, 40 for humane animal use, 25, 33 nonviolence in, 37–​38 political nature of, 45, 61–​62n10 Aesopian fables, 16, 457–​458, 459 Affection for working animals, 311–​312 Agency, 240–​257. See also Autonomy cognition and, 248 defined, 241 denial of, 241–​244 documentation challenges, 8, 249 of domesticated animals, 243 in groups, 8 history-​shaping influences of, 244–​247, 262–​264, 266, 270 intentionality-​based, 7, 8, 247–​250, 253 overview, 240–​241 reasoning abilities and, 241, 242 in research, 12–​13 as resistance, 240, 250–​252 of wild animals, 253n4 Ag-​gag laws, 200, 201, 220 Agoraphobia, 140 Agriculture. See also Factory farms; Livestock biodiversity and, 197–​198 critical animal studies on, 196–​201 greenhouse gas emissions from, 192, 198 habitat destruction due to, 191, 192, 197 historical animal studies of, 8, 261 objectification of animals in, 10–​11 in urban ecosystems, 550–​551 Agropark project, 20, 551

 

592   Index AI-​C (animal-​industrial complex), 201 Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 491 Aloi, Giovanni, 434 Altruistic concern, 20–​21, 581 American Bird Conservancy, 551 American Civil Liberties Union, 200 American Humane Association, 98 American Notes (Dickens), 100 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), 102, 103 American Veterinary Medical Association, 103, 175, 187n13 Amish groups, 55 Ammonites, 475 Analogism, 467, 468 Anchoring argument of beliefs, 327 The Ancient Distribution of Ungulate Mammals in the Middle East (Uerpmann), 485 Anderson, Kay, 279–​280 Anderson, Virginia, 244 Animal-​assisted interventions (AAIs), 87–​88 Animal Care and Use Committee (ACUC), 11, 359, 360, 361 Animal divination, 15, 456, 465 Animal-​industrial complex (AI-​C), 201 The Animal in Ottoman Europe (Mikhail), 262 Animality deconstruction of, 156, 161 diversification of, 160–​161 human rejection of, 5, 9, 147–​148 ontology of, 155 typologies, 156 Animal law academic courses on, 171–​172 human exceptionalism challenged by, 179 influences on, 185 on research, 358–​361 trends within, 182–​185 Animal Law (Frasch et al.), 171, 173 Animal Liberation (Singer), 25, 30, 104, 171, 371 Animal Machines: The New Factor Farming Industry (Harrison), 282, 370–​371 Animal protectionism, 40 Animal proverbs, 457, 458–​459 Animal research, 345–​363. See also Animal studies; Scientific animal objects

abolitionist paradigm on, 346 agency of subjects, 12–​13 benefits of, 351–​352 categories of, 350–​351 on commensal species, 527–​528 cost-​benefit analysis of, 10–​11, 12, 356, 389–​390 defenses of, 351–​356 in ecological science, 17, 493, 494, 496–​497 ethics in, 11 ethnographic, 305, 547 failure to provide proper care in, 356–​358 historical perceptions of, 345–​346 housing and husbandry considerations in, 349, 357, 358, 384 hypothetical-​deductive, 305 inductive, 305 laws and regulations on, 11, 358–​361 long-​term ecological projects, 552 moral critiques of, 348–​350 objectification in, 10 pain and suffering in, 11, 349, 357–​358 scientific ideologies on, 346–​348, 353, 357–​359 shelter animals used in, 104, 111n53 utilitarianism on, 11, 354, 355, 356 vivisection in, 35, 101, 102, 576 Animal rights, 25–​42. See also Animal welfare abolitionist paradigm on, 2, 34–​38, 66 definitions of, 25, 66 historical development of, 2, 26–​30 legal protections for, 38–​39 limitations of traditional approaches to, 3, 46, 50, 56 modern movement for, 30–​34 overview, 25–​26 political theory of. See Political theory of animal rights as social movement, 39–​40 utilitarian views on, 26, 27–​28, 29, 31–​33 Animals. See also specific animals abuse of. See Abuse advocacy efforts. See Advocacy movements agency of, 240–​257. See also Agency in art, 433–​455. See also Artistic use of animals

 

Index   593 commensal, 525–​541. See also Commensal animals domesticated. See Domesticated animals exploitation of. See Exploitation extinction of. See Extinction in folklore, 456–​472. See also Folklore for food, 364–​379. See also Food animal production hoarding of, 78 humans and, 81–​97. See also Human-​animal relationships inferiorities of, 27 as legal subjects, 167–​188. See also Animals as legal subjects objectification of. See Objectification as property, 65–​80. See also Property status religion and. See Religion and animals rights of, 25–​42. See also Animal rights as scientific objects, 380–​396. See also Scientific animal objects sheltering of, 98–​112. See also Animal shelters as social problems, 99–​103 study of. See Animal research; Animal studies urban, 542–​570. See also Urban ecosystems welfare of. See Animal welfare wild. See Wild animals working, 302–​318. See also Working animals Animals, Men and Morals: An Enquiry into the Maltreatment of Non-​Humans (Godlovitch et al.), 31 Animals as legal subjects, 167–​188. See also Property status challenges and contemporary opportunities, 179–​182 cognitive considerations in, 182, 183 companion animals, 182, 183 critique of dominant paradigm regarding, 173–​176 cultural variations regarding, 169 dualism and, 178–​179, 182 empirical support for, 169 future of, 186–​187 history of, 174

implications of expanded notions of, 172–​173 overview, 5–​6 social-​change techniques for promoting, 177–​178 terminology considerations, 167–​169 as topic of concern in legal practice and law education, 170–​173 trends inside and outside law, 182–​185 wild animals, 183–​185 Animals Ecology (Elton), 493 Animals’ Friends Society, 30 Animal shelters, 98–​112 adoption promotion measures, 106 caring-​killing paradox of, 99 extermination of animals in, 99, 100, 102, 104 funding for, 98–​99 history of, 4, 98, 99–​100, 101–​103 humane movement for, 101–​103 legal functions of, 106 literature review, 99 for livestock, 100 no-​kill, 4, 99, 104–​107, 545 open admission, 105 overpopulation of, 103, 107n2 research subjects from, 104, 111n53 social and cultural significance of, 98, 107 The Animals Issue (Carruthers), 353 Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (Salt), 30 Animal studies. See also Animal research as academic discipline, 1, 171–​172 critical. See Critical animal studies (CAS) diversification of inquiry in, 162 ethics in, 2 factors influencing growth of, 1, 172 historical. See Historical animal studies theoretical contributions to, 5, 160–​161 Animal tourism extreme. See Extreme animal tourism frameworks for interpretation of, 507 hyperprivileged, 18 ideological elements of, 506–​507 mass, 18, 506. See also Aquariums; Zoos supplementary, 18, 506

 

594   Index Animal welfare. See also Animal rights affective indicators of, 373 biological indicators of, 372–​373 bodies-​minds-​natures framework of, 12, 373–​374 criticism of reform efforts, 3, 36, 61n2 emergence of concerns regarding, 26–​29 in factory farms, 282, 370 in food animal production, 12, 283, 284, 293, 371–​375 Animal Welfare Act amendment of 1985, 360 Animal welfare science anacrhonism of applying findings from, 275n32 criticism of, 58 ethics in, 372 in historical animal studies, 8, 262, 266, 267, 272 Animism, 467, 468 Animot, 156, 158, 160–​161 ANT. See Actor Network Theory Antarctica, extreme animal tourism in, 18–​19, 509, 516–​518, 517f Anthropocene epoch, 16, 508, 529, 557 Anthropocentrism. See also Human exceptionalism cultural alternatives to, 16, 281 defined, 192 in ethics, 159 in naturalistic paradigm, 16 transcendence of, 162 in zoo species selection, 403 Anthropodenial, 162 Anthropomorphism, 59–​60, 269, 459–​460, 573–​574 Anti-​cruelty laws duties of care under, 67, 73 history of, 38, 68, 102 influences on adoption of, 101–​102 justice and, 71 Martin’s Act, 38, 102, 281 utilitarian nature of, 29, 38–​39 Anti-​Intellectualism in American Life (Hofstadter), 345 Apartheid of species, 47–​48, 50 Aponoian paradigm, 10, 320, 325, 331, 333, 339 Appleby, Mike, 373 Applied ethics, 412

Aquariums ecological education from, 403, 404 funding for, 399 negative perceptions of, 397 objectification of animals by, 11 positive perceptions of, 397 Arachnophobia, 140 Archaeogenetics, 477 Archaeozoology, 475–​488 cattle studies in, 481–​484 defined, 17, 476 dog studies in, 17, 479–​481 domesticated animals and, 17, 478–​481 ethology and, 17, 485 history of, 475–​476 on human-​animal settlement patterns, 17, 482–​483, 484–​485 as multidisciplinary science, 476, 477, 484 Neolithic lake dwellings in Switzerland and, 477–​479, 481–​482 pig studies in, 17, 478–​479 scientific components of, 17, 476–​477, 481, 482 Arctic melting, 192 ARC Wildlife Overpass Competition, 20, 551 Argument analysis, 13–​14, 414–​422, 423 Aristotle on animals as subjects of inquiry, 489–​490 on chain of being, 161, 490, 497 on citizenship, 52, 57 classifications of nature by, 241, 489–​490, 491 on eternal nature of species, 497 on humans as political animals, 44, 45 on linguistic agency as precondition for political status, 45, 49, 51–​52 on slaves, 194 Arluke, Arnold, 4–​5, 99, 105, 113, 289, 290, 384, 385 Artistic use of animals, 433–​455 abuse and degradation in, 15, 433, 446, 447–​448 censorship of, 15, 440–​442, 443–​444, 451 criticism of, 450 dead animals, 15, 434–​436 dehumanization of art as influence on, 444–446, 449, 451

 

Index   595 ethics of, 15, 439–​442, 451, 452 exploitation in, 440 freedom of expression in, 15, 446, 448, 450, 451 institutional oversight mechanisms for, 450–​451 live animals, 436–​439 in Middle Ages, 14–​15, 143 misothery in, 142–​144 moral issues of, 15, 441–​442 motivation of artists in, 15, 445 objectification in, 15 overview, 433–​434 in Paleolithic era, 14 by primal peoples, 137 in Roman period, 14 sensationalism in, 15, 446–​447, 451 taxidermy, 15, 434–​436 value of, 442 ASDs (autism spectrum disorders), 88 Asilomar Accords, 105–​106 ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), 102, 103 Assistance dogs, 309, 310, 312, 313, 316 Association of Zoos and Aquariums, 398, 403 Atema, Kate, 4–​5, 113 Atheistical humanism, 20, 574, 576 Attentive love, 212, 217 Attribution holism, 326–​327 Aubrey, John, 476 Augustine (saint), 43, 149 Australia animal research protections in, 361 commensal species in, 528, 533, 535 dingoes of, 480–​481 International Social Science Survey in, 86 pet ownership in, 86 sheep industry in, 365 totemism in, 467 working animals in, 545 Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), 88 Autonoetic consciousness, 235 Autonomy. See also Agency denial of, 10 mechanisms of, 338 moral agency and, 337 preference autonomy, 33, 37 sovereignty rights and, 54, 55, 57, 58

Avian species. See Birds Avianus (fabulist), 459 Aviary systems for egg production, 367 Awakening to the presence of others, 21 Ayer, A. J., 347 Baboons, 89, 213–​214 Babrius (fabulist), 457 Back-​breeding, 499, 501 Bahamas gender differences in dog ownership in, 116 neutering in, 124, 133n120 roaming dogs in, 115, 118, 119–​120, 122, 124, 125 Baker, Steve, 445, 452 Balcombe, Jonathan, 49 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940, 73 Bali rabies epidemic in, 118, 123 transition from foraging to farming in, 141 Barry, Brian, 45 Barth, Karl, 579 Barzun, Jacques, 433 Basic vs. acquired rights, 34 Bataille, George, 448 Bats, interspecies dialogue with, 211 Batson, C. D., 333 Battery cages, 283, 367 Beast fables, 16, 457, 458–​461 Beastly Folklore (Clark), 135 Beavers, production activities of, 306, 307 Beck, Alan, 114, 545 Beck, Sharon, 427n42 Bees, production activities of, 306, 307 Behaviorism, 209, 218, 219, 358 Behnke, Elizabeth, 159 Bekoff, Marc, 495 Beliefs anchoring argument of, 327 attribution holism and, 326–​327 comparison with emotion, 329 making/​tracking confusion and, 10, 326–​329 premature meta-​articulation and, 324–​325 social invention of, 140 theory of mind and, 7 Benga, Ota, 402

 

596   Index Benjamin, Walter, 264 Benson, Etienne, 276n45 Bentham, Jeremy, 27–​29, 31, 32, 41n19, 49, 281 Berechiah ha-​Nakdan (fabulist), 459 Berger, John, 401, 550 Bergh, Henry, 102 Bern Convention of 1979, 494, 498 Berns, Gregory, 223–​224n71 Berry, Thomas, 184–​185 Beschta, Robert L., 494–​495, 499 Best, Steve, 195–​196 Best Friends Animal Society, 104 Bestiality, 148 Beston, Henry, 582–​583 Beuys, Joseph, 436–​437 Beyond Boundaries (Noske), 192–​193 Bhutan, roaming dogs in, 122, 125 Bigfoot, 16, 466 Big Garden Birdwatch, 19, 528 Bill Gates Foundation, 304 Biodiversity agriculture and, 197–​198 avian, 3 climate change and, 191 conservation of, 184 in Yellowstone ecosystem, 18 Biomedical research, 350, 386, 387, 389 Biotechnology, 202, 303–​304 Bird-​David, Nurit, 241 Birds biodiversity among, 3 building design considerations for, 549, 551 as companion animals, 81, 82 emotional expressions in, 329 in food animal production, 367, 374 living property status for, 70–​7 1 mental continuity in, 32 prophetic significance of, 456 taxidermy and, 434 in zoos, 398 Birke, Lynda, 292–​293, 384, 386 Bischur, Daniel, 391 Bison, 481, 482 Black Beauty (Sewell), 169 Black Death, 530 Blackfish (documentary), 13, 398, 407 Blame shifting, 145

Blue-​footed boobies, 18, 514–​515, 515f Blumenberg, Hans, 458 Bodies-​minds-​natures framework of animal welfare, 12, 373–​374 Body image, 233 Bökönyi, Sándor, 280 The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates (de Waal), 169 Boomgaard, Peter, 265, 266 Bounty system, 4, 101, 107 Bovine somatotropin (BST), 351 Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), 283 Bowles, David, 283 Boyle, Paul, 404 Bradshaw, G. A., 208 Braidotti, Rosi, 161 Brain size and structure, 228–​229 Brambell, F. W. Rogers, 371 Brambell Committee, 12, 282, 371, 373 Branzi, Andrea, 550 Braverman, Irus, 401, 403 Brazil cattle in, 192 companion animals in, 81 exploitation of workers in, 200, 201 Brer Rabbit (fable character), 460–​461 Britain. See United Kingdom British War Dogs (Richardson), 249 Brobjer, Thomas H., 273n6 Broiler birds, 367 Broken windows concept, 126 Brophy, Brigid, 31 Brown, Nik, 385 Brunvand, Jan, 465 BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), 283 BST (bovine somatotropin), 351 Buber, Martin, 215 Bubonic plague, 530 Buckland, Frank, 476, 477 Buddhism, views of animals in, 571, 580, 582 Budiansky, Stephen, 280 Buffon, Comte de (Georges-​Louis Leclerc), 491–​492 Built environment of urban ecosystems, 543, 548, 549–​550 Bullen, Anna, 559

 

Index   597 Bullfighting, 11 Burchell, Robert, 476 Burials with companion animals, 81–​82 Burnham, Daniel, 549 Burt, Jonathan, 244 Byre-​face workers, 298n67. See also Stockpeople CAA. See College Arts Association CAFOs. See Concentrated animal feeding operations Callicott, J. Baird, 495 Cambodia, roaming dogs in, 117, 118 Camm, Tara, 283 Campbell, Joseph, 137 Canada, animal research protections in, 361 Canines. See Dogs A Cannibal in Vancouver (Gibson), 438 Capability ethics, 49 Capitalism defined, 211 ecology and, 399 in human-​animal relationships, 306 negative constraints of, 194 Captive Animals’ Protection Society (CAPS), 398 Captive breeding programs, 13, 397–​398 Capuchin monkeys, emotional expressions by, 329–​330, 331, 332 Carasik, Lauren, 200 Carbon dioxide emissions, 192 Cardano, Girolamo, 213 Care ethics, 49 Care theory. See Feminist care theory Caring-​killing paradox, 99, 290, 291 Carnism, 304 Carruthers, Peter, 353–​354 Carter, Bob, 243, 251 Cartmill, Matt, 11 CAS. See Critical animal studies The Case for Animal Experimentation (Fox), 351 The Case for Animal Rights (Regan), 33 Cashell, Kieran, 448 Cassidy, Rebecca, 507 Castells, Manuel, 547 Castree, Noel, 243

Cats agency of, 248 costs associated with, 83 emotional value of, 4 encephalization quotient for, 228 impact of human cultural and economic change on, 277n66 predation on wild bird species, 3 prevalence as pets, 81 in urban ecosystems, 544, 545 Cattle archaeozoological studies of, 481–​484 at auctions, 289 commercial production of, 287–​288 domestication of, 137, 280 dominant-​submission system of, 280 global populations of, 192 housing in food animal production, 367–​368 human relationships with, 270–​271, 290 social needs of, 76 tail-​docking of, 368 veal production and, 189, 203n2 viewpoint of cows headed for slaughter, 211 Cavendish, Margaret, 209–​210, 212 Censorship, 15, 440–​442, 443–​444, 451 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 90, 123 Cetacean cognition, 227–​239 body image and, 233 brain structure and, 228–​229 communal sense of self and, 7, 235–​236 cultural transmission of learned traditions and, 237 encephalization quotient and, 228 at group level, 229, 235–​237 at individual level, 229–​235 innovation and imitation, 232–​233, 234 language and, 230–​231 memory and, 232, 234 metacognition, 234, 235 neocortex in, 228–​229 overview, 227 pointing and referencing, 231 reflexive thought and, 7, 227, 231, 237 self-​awareness and, 7, 37, 231–​232 self-​recognition and, 231, 233–​234 social complexity and networking, 236–​237

 

598   Index Chain of being, 161, 490, 497 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 260 Chambre, Marin Cureau de la, 212 Charismatic megafauna, 400, 403, 495, 497, 503n22 Charles, Nickie, 243, 251 Charlton, Anna E., 2, 9, 25 Charon, Pierre, 212 Chase, Malcolm, 260 Chauvet cave, 14 Chickens, communication among, 213 Children dog bites among, 90 human exceptionalism, impact on attitudes toward nature, 181 labor exploitation of, 200 legal duties toward, 67 political rights of, 52–​53, 57, 63n33 roaming dogs as concern for, 118 Chimpanzees cognitive abilities of, 183, 248 legal status of, 72, 182 research involving, 277n60, 387 self-​recognition by, 234 China analogism in, 467 pet ownership in, 86 Chomsky, Noam, 230 Christianity, views of animals in, 571, 573–​577 Chrysippus, 583 Chupacabra, 16, 466 Church, George, 500 Circuses, 11, 312, 313 CITES agreement (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), 498 Cities. See Urban ecosystems Citizen science, 19, 528 Citizenship capacity requirements for, 58 for domesticated animals, 51–​53, 56, 57, 58 obligations in, 56 political theory on, 43, 45, 46, 47, 57 City Beautiful movement, 549 Civil suits for abuse, 74 Clark, J. G. D., 480 Clark, Joseph, 135

Clark, Kenneth, 143 Clark, Stephen R. L., 20–​21, 571 Clarke, Adele E., 388 Clement of Alexandria, 148–​149 Clements, Frederic, 493 Climate change biodiversity and, 191 global warming, 16, 198, 401 habitat destruction due to, 192 husbandry systems impacted by, 17 urban ecosystems impacted by, 558 Clinical approach to work, 307–​308, 314 Cloning, 500–​501 Clutton-​Brock, Juliet, ix, 17, 475, 478, 480 Cochrane, Alasdair, 38 Cockfighting, 141 Code of Hammurabi, 174 Code of Justinian, 174 Cognition. See also Reflexive thought; Sentience agency and, 248 animals as legal subjects and, 182, 183 cetacean. See Cetacean cognition memory and, 232, 234 metacognition, 234, 235, 325, 337, 338 personhood and, 183 theory of mind and, 7, 332 Cognitive ethology criticisms of, 58 defined, 215 interspecies dialogue and, 208, 213, 215–​217 origins of, 405 research topics in, 192, 218 Cognitive inferiority, 27 Cohen, Carl, 352, 353 Collaboration in human-​animal relationships, 270–​271 College Arts Association (CAA), 441–​442, 443, 446, 450, 454n39 Collingwood, R. G., 247 Colony systems for egg production, 367 Commensal animals, 525–​541. See also Urban ecosystems adaptations of, 19, 525, 526–​527 behavioral coevolution between humans and, 19, 527, 537 benefits of, 19–​20, 525, 526

 

Index   599 defined, 19, 525, 526 food sources for, 526–​527 foxes, 19, 529, 533–​534, 535, 536 history of, 529 human relationships with, 19, 529, 537–​538 mice, 19, 529, 532–​533, 535 parakeets, 536–​537 physical environment considerations for, 527 pigeons, 19, 528, 534–​535, 536 rats, 19, 529, 530–​532, 535–​536 research on, 527–​528 technological responses to, 537 translocation of, 529–​531, 532–​533 zoonotic diseases from, 536 in zoos, 535–​536 The Common Law (Holmes), 174 Common law systems, 66, 67–​68, 69, 70 Communication. See also Interspecies dialogue; Language; Speech nonverbal, 212 of pain and suffering, 216 with working animals, 311 Community dog-​keeping, 115 Companion animals. See also specific animals burials with, 81–​82 costs associated with, 83 in divorce, 3, 69, 78 as legal subjects, 182, 183 prevalence of, 4, 81 property status of, 65, 66, 67–​69, 175 relationships with. See Human-​animal relationships terminology considerations, 298n51 therapeutic uses of, 83, 87–​88 in urban ecosystems, 101, 117–​118, 544–​545, 550 wild animals as, 82 Comparative osteology, 17, 476 Concealment strategies, 145 Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) bodies-​minds-​natures framework applied to, 12, 374 in egg production, 367 negative consequences of, 198, 546

protests against, 370 unions in, 200 Conceptual art, 445 Consciousness autonoetic, 235 creature vs. state, 322 evidence for animal consciousness, 405–​406 higher-​order thought model of, 322–​324, 337–​338, 340n8 phenomenal, 232, 322 premature meta-​articulation of, 323–​324 reflexive thought and, 322–​324 skepticism regarding ability to study, 11 transitive vs. intransitive, 322, 323 Consent. See Informed consent Constant paradox of human-​animal relationships, 290, 294 Constitution, US First Amendment, 201 Fourteenth Amendment, 70 Fourth Amendment, 72 property categories under, 71–​72 Consumer testing research, 351 Contest literature, 16, 457, 458–​459 Continental European ethics, 152–​166 context and import of, 158–​163 dismissive attitudes toward, 158–​159 existential phenomenology and, 152–​154, 158, 159 mental phenomena of interaction in, 153–​154, 163n3 poststructural hermeneutics and deconstruction in, 155–​158, 159 on trans-​human morality, 159 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES agreement), 498 Convery, Ian, 292 Cook, James, 531 Cooperation vs. coordination, 312–​313 Coral reef fish, mutualistic relationship with wrasse, 84 Corson, Samuel and Elizabeth, 87 Cortisol, 85 Cosmology, 155, 588n65 Cosmopolitics, 60–​61, 547

 

600   Index Cost-​benefit analysis, 10–​11, 12, 356, 389–​390 Cowperthwaite, Gabriela, 398 Cows. See Cattle Creature consciousness, 322 Crichton, Michael, 500 Critical animal studies (CAS), 189–​207 on agriculture, 196–​201 feminism and, 196 growth of, 190 justice and, 190, 191 need for, 190–​193 practicing, 196–​202 principles of, 6, 190, 193 research methodology for, 201 on sentience, 193 sources of, 193–​196 on veganism, 6, 193, 196 Critical thinking skills, 423 Crosby, Alfred, 137 Cultural encounters, 506 Cultural feminism, 219 Cultural transmission of learned traditions, 237 Curiosity cabinets, 491 Cuvier, Georges, 492, 497 Cyborg manifesto, 243 Cyclops, legend of, 475 Damages awarded for abuse, 68–​69, 74 D’Angelo, Mike, 398 Dangerous-​dog laws, 74 Danto, Arthur, 446–​447 Daoism, 581–​582 Darwin, Charles on animals as slaves, 144 evolutionary theory of, 83–​84, 242–​243, 492–​493, 573 on extinction, 497 implications of work of, 266 on interspecies dialogue, 208–​209, 213, 215–​217, 219 on natural selection, 83–​84 “Darwin in the Monkey Cage” (Hochadel), 402 Daubenton, Louis-​Jean-​Marie, 491–​492 Davidson, Donald, 324–​325, 326, 328, 368

Davies, Gail, 388, 391–​392 Davis, Brian, 404 Dayaratne, Ranjith, 118 Dead Certainties (Schama), 274n26 De animalibus (Albertus Magnus), 490–​491 de Certeau, Michel, 250, 251 Declaration of Independence, US, 177 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations), 54 Deductive research, 305 Deer, 411, 412, 416, 419, 421 De-​extinction, 18, 489, 500–​502 Deforestation, 191, 192, 197 Degerbøl, Magnus, 480 Dehumanization of art, 444–​446, 449, 451 Deleuze, Gilles, 155–​156 Demetrius of Phaleron, 457 Denizens and denizenship, 51, 55–​56, 57 Deodands, law of, 265 Derrida, Jacques, 156–​158, 159, 160–​161 Descartes, René dualistic ontology of, 209 as founder of human exceptionalism, 254n20 on interspecies dialogue, 212, 220 mechanistic view of animals by, 242, 248, 281, 322 on sentience of animals, 26–​27, 340n5 on separation between humans and animals, 368 Descola, Philippe, 241, 467, 468 Desmond, Jane C., 18–​19, 506 Despret, Vinciane, 9, 269–​270, 271, 277n60, 277n70, 391 Detachment strategies, 144–​145, 284 de Vignemont, F., 332–​333 de Waal, Frans, 162, 169, 336 Dhavalikar, M. K., 484 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer & Adorno), 209 Diamond, Jared, 137 Dickens, Charles, 100 Dickens, Peter, 306 Didymus of Alexandria, 459 Dietetic approach to food animal production, 12, 364, 365, 368–​370

 

Index   601 Dingoes, 480–​481 “Dirty work,” 284, 294, 298n56 Disabled persons, political rights of, 52, 53, 57, 63n33 Discordant Harmonies (Botkin), 555 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 242 Diseases. See Zoonotic diseases Dispositionalist higher-​order thought, 340n8 Divorce, companion animals in, 3, 69, 78 Dixon, B. A., 333–​334 Djoghlaf, Ahmed, 191 Dogs agency of, 241, 249–​250, 251–​252 archaeozoological studies of, 17, 479–​481 assistance dogs, 309, 310, 312, 313, 316 bounty system for catching, 4, 101, 107 cognitive abilities of, 248 costs associated with, 83 dangerous-​dog laws, 74 dog bites as public-​health problem, 3, 90, 118–​119 domestication of, 17, 243 emotional expressions by, 216, 218, 223–224n71, 321, 325 evolution from wolves, 47 food consumption by, 90 greyhound racing, 75–​76 incorporation into human society, 47 legislative protections for, 73 mapping brain activity of, 223n71 militarized, 249–​250, 310, 313 prevalence as pets, 4, 81 psychological effect of work on, 318n41 puppy mills, 40, 103 purebred, 4 roaming. See Roaming dogs scenting abilities, 267 training for, 310 in urban ecosystems, 101, 117–​118, 544–​545, 550 Dolly Mixtures (Franklin), 365 Dolnicar, Sara, 122 “The Dolphin Papers” (Rodman), 140 Dolphins. See also Cetacean cognition body image and, 233 communal sense of self in, 7, 235–​236

language-​comprehension studies of, 230–​231 mass strandings and, 235–​236 mental continuity in, 32 psychological welfare in captivity, 237 self-​awareness in, 7, 37, 231–​232 as therapy animals, 88 Domesticated (Stein), 435 Domesticated animals. See also Companion animals; specific animals abolitionist paradigm on, 2, 9, 304 agency of, 243 archaeozoological studies of, 17, 478–​481 attributes of, 280 categorizations influencing perceptions of, 286 citizenship rights for, 51–​53, 56, 57, 58 history of, 136, 137–​138, 279–​280 human-​directed emphasis on, 280–​281 legal classification of, 3, 5 misothery and, 5, 137–​138 Paleolithic representations of, 14 political theory of animal rights for, 51–​53 property status of, 65, 66, 72–​73 Donald, Diana, 261 Donaldson, Sue, 2–​3, 38, 43, 559 Donlan, Josh, 498, 499, 500, 501 Donor-​controlled food webs, 527 Donovan, Josephine, 6, 208 Drug development research, 350 Dualism of legal persons vs. things, 178–​179, 182 Duffy, John, 100 Durkheim, Emile, 574 Durrington Walls site, 482–​483 Duty of care laws, 76–​77 Duvin, Ed, 104 E. Coli, 199, 283 Eagleton, Terry, 264 Echolocation, 211, 230, 235 Ecocriticism, 161 Ecofeminism, 49, 196, 213 Ecological education, 397, 403–​404 Ecological Imperialism (Crosby), 137

 

602   Index Ecological science, 489–​505 de-​extinction and, 18, 489, 500–​502 defined, 493 evolution from natural history, 489–​493 extinction and, 497–​498 fish and, 18, 496–​497 long-​term research projects, 552 research in, 17, 493, 494, 496–​497 restoration ecology, 555 rewilding and, 498–​500, 501, 555 road ecology, 554 urban animal ecology, 20, 543, 552 wolves and, 17–​18, 493–​495 Ecological urbanism, 550–​552 Ecology of Stray Dogs (Beck), 114 Ecosystem health, 19, 413, 415, 416 Ecotourism, 506, 507, 521n8 Educational research, 350 Education and training in animal studies, 1, 171–​172 on critical thinking skills, 423 ecological, 397, 403–​404 on humane research practices, 360 on interspecies dialogue, 311 of working animals, 310 Egg production, 367, 374 Eisnitz, Gail, 199 Electrofishing, 496 Elephants brain size of, 228 in circuses, 312, 313 dwarf elephants, 475 historical studies of, 262 mental continuity in, 32 outcast, 545 resistance behaviors by, 250 self-​awareness in, 37 in zoos, 405 Elk, 13, 411, 412, 415–​416, 417 Ellis, Colter, 284 Elton, Charles, 493 Embodied empathy, 277n70 Emotion cognitivist account of, 330 comparison with beliefs, 329 expressions of, 215–​217, 218, 223–​224n71 making/​tracking confusion and, 330–​331

misplaced or misguided, 330–​331, 334 reflexive thought and, 329–​331 Emotional contagion, 333, 341n35 Empathy defined, 332 embodied, 277n70 feminist care theory on, 213 in historical animal studies, 268, 269–​270 making/​tracking confusion and, 334–​335 mind-​reading abilities and, 332, 333, 341n25, 341n29 minimal moral, 333, 335, 336 misplaced or misguided, 334 reflexive thought and, 332–​338 of stockpeople for livestock, 285, 289 theory of mind and, 332 The Empathy Exams (Jamison), 332 Empedocles, 581 Encephalization quotient (EQ), 228 Endangered Species Act of 1973, 412, 416, 426n27, 427n42, 494, 498 Enframing, 202 English, Peter, 285 Enkidu (mythic figure), 141–​142 Enlightenment, 82, 220, 242, 461 Environmental concerns Arctic melting, 192 climate. See Climate change greenhouse gases, 192, 198 habitats. See Habitat destruction pollution, 4, 90, 556 Epistemic cultures, 380 Epoques de la nature (Leclerc), 492 EQ (encephalization quotient), 228 Equal consideration principle, 28, 29, 31, 33 Equines. See Horses Ethical arguments, 7, 10–​11, 369, 412, 414–​415, 434 Ethical veganism, 364 Ethical vegetarianism, 364, 369–​370 Ethics animal rights. See Animal rights in animal welfare science, 372 anthropocentrism in, 159 applied, 412 of artistic use of animals, 15, 439–​442, 451, 452

 

Index   603 Continental European. See Continental European ethics of cost constraints, 375–​377 of de-​extinction, 501 feminist care theory and, 208, 210, 219 of food animal production, 12, 364–​365 in human-​animal relationships, 4, 90–​91, 157 of hunting, 13, 411, 424n2 interspecies morality, 5 metaethics, 5, 159, 162, 165n32 normative, 5, 159, 162 on pain and suffering, 28, 32 in political theory of animal rights, 49 in research, 11 transformations in, 155 in urban ecosystems, 20, 549 Ethnography, 305, 547 Ethnophoresy, 529–​531, 532–​533 Ethology archaeozoology and, 17, 485 cognitive. See Cognitive ethology comparative, 201 hierarchical scandal in, 269 historical animal studies and, 8, 262, 266, 267, 269, 272 on interspecies dialogue, 209 Etymologia (Isidore of Seville), 490 Eukaryotes, 20, 571–​572 European Union (EU), 81, 376–​377 Euthanasia in animal shelters, 104, 105, 106 as convenience, 175, 187n13 defined, 99 failed human-​animal relationships resulting in, 4, 90 of roaming dogs, 114 of working animals, 314, 315 Evaristti, Marco, 437, 441, 447 Evelyn, John, 491 Evolutionary theory, 83–​84, 242–​243, 492–​493, 573 Exceptionalism. See Human exceptionalism Existential phenomenology, 5, 152–​154, 158, 159 Exotic animal trade, 4, 90–​91, 191–​192 Experimental animals. See Animal research; Scientific animal objects

Exploitation abuse and, 156 in artistic use of animals, 440 consequences of, 5 institutionalized, 34, 35 rationalization of, 50 in zoos, 13, 403 Exposición No. 1 (Vargas), 437 Expression, freedom of, 15, 26, 446, 448, 450, 451 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Darwin), 215–​217 Extinction de-​extinction, 18, 489, 500–​502 habitat destruction and, 191, 197, 501 human role in, 16, 497 mass extinctions, 497 rates of, 191 Sixth Great Extinction, 191, 497 Extreme animal tourism, 506–​524 in Antarctica, 18–​19, 509, 516–​518, 517f elements of, 518–​519 future research directions, 522n16 in Galapagos Islands, 18, 509–​516, 513f, 515f gorilla safaris, 508 growth of, 520 human-​animal relationships in, 508–​509 ideological framework for, 507–​508 objectives of, 18, 506, 521n8 “The Fable of the Fox” (unknown author), 458–​459 Fables, 16, 456–​461 Fabricus, Hieronymus, 212–​213 Factory farms ag-​gag laws and, 220 critical animal studies on, 196–​201 detachment in, 145 suffering in, 48, 211 welfare concerns in, 282, 370 Fairy tales, 16, 461–​463, 464 Farbe-​Vassus, Claudine, 463 Farm Animal Welfare Committee (FAWC), 378n16 Farming. See Agriculture Favre, David, 3, 5, 65 Fear, expression by dogs, 321

 

604   Index Federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006, 201 Feedlots, 5, 368 Felines. See Cats Females. See Women Feminism cultural feminism, 219 ecofeminism, 49, 196, 213 as source of critical animal studies, 196 Feminist care theory epistemology and, 214 ethics and, 208, 210, 219 on interspecies dialogue, 6, 208, 210–​211, 214–​215, 219 origins of, 210, 219 political nature of, 219 Fielding, William, 119, 125 Finch, Anne, 209 First Amendment, 201 Fish as companion animals, 81, 82 ecological study of, 18, 496–​497 in food animal production, 190, 197, 366 in mutualistic relationships, 84 Five Freedoms for food animals, 12, 75, 371–​372, 373 Flexible vegans, 31 Flight distance, 295n15 Flinders, Matthew, 261 Floor systems for egg production, 367 Fogle, Bruce, 103 Folklore, 456–​472 Aesopian fables, 16, 457–​458, 459 animal proverbs and, 457, 458–​459 anthropomorphism in, 459–​460 beast fables, 16, 457, 458–​461 contemporary, 16, 464–​466 contest literature and, 16, 457, 458–​459 as cultural alternative to modern views of animals, 469 decline of, 468 Grimm fairy tales, 16, 461–​463, 464 origins of, 15–​16, 456–​457 science and, 465 urban legends, 16, 465 Food and fiber research, 350–​351

Food animal production, 364–​379. See also Factory farms; Livestock; Meat consumption; Meatpacking plants; Slaughterhouses animal welfare in, 12, 283, 284, 293, 371–​375 annual deaths due to, 35, 190, 198 caring-​killing paradox in, 290, 291 contemporary features of, 366–​368 contradictory nature of, 9, 287, 290, 294 cost constraints in, 375–​377 dietetic approach to, 12, 364, 365, 368–​370 distancing devices in, 145–​146, 284 division of labor within, 291 ethics of, 12, 364–​365 Five Freedoms for food animals, 12, 75, 371–​372, 373 global leaders in meat production, 205n45 health concerns regarding, 199, 283 housing in, 366–​368, 374, 375 McDonaldization of, 282–​283 productivist approach to, 12, 282, 364–​365, 370–​373, 377 Food webs, 526, 527 Foose, Tom, 403 Foot and mouth disease, 291 Foreman, David, 498, 555 Forman, Richard, 554 Foucault, Michel, 159, 408n9 Foundation for Biomedical Research, 346 Fourteenth Amendment, 70 Fourth Amendment, 72 Fox, Michael A., 351 Foxes as commensal species, 19, 529, 533–​534, 535, 536 in folklore, 16, 457, 458–​459, 460 human relationships with, 81 hunting of, 276n46 France militarization of horses in, 245, 255n37 river-​rescue-​dog program in, 251–​252 roaming dogs in, 240 Francione, Gary L., 2, 9, 25, 281–​282, 283 Francis of Assisi (saint), 218, 538 Frankfurt School, 194–​195 Franklin, Adrian, 293 Franklin, Sarah, 365

 

Index   605 Fraser, David, 285, 373 Fraser, F. C., 480 Freedom of expression, 15, 26, 446, 448, 450, 451 Freedom of speech, 26 Freud, Sigmund, 248 Frey, R. G., 354–​355 Freyfogle, Eric, 184 Friedmann, Erika, 85 Friese, Carrie, 388 Fudge, Erica, 8, 242, 244, 258 Fukuda, Kaoru, 287 Funding for animal shelters, 98–​99 Galapagos Islands tourism, 509–​516 contours of, 510–​512 demographic characteristics of visitors, 511 legal restrictions on, 512–​513, 523n24 overview, 509–​510 preservation and protection efforts, 515–​516 wildlife in, 18, 513, 513f, 514–​515, 515f Galen, 490 Galloway, Anne, 552 Gallup, Gordon, 234 Game Management (Leopold), 494 Gandhi, Mahatma, 30 Garner, Robert, 38, 283 Gassendi, Pierre, 212 Gazelles, social behavior of, 280 GDP (gross domestic product), 198 Gender differences. See also Women in dog ownership, 116 in emotional division of labor, 219 Generation of Animals (Aristotle), 489 Genetic engineering, 6, 201–​202, 361, 501 Genomic technologies, 500–​501 Gentrification, 544, 546, 550, 558 Geographic Information Systems (GIS), 550 Germany militarization of horses in, 245, 255n37 pet ownership in, 86 Socioeconomic Panel in, 86 Germonpré, Mietje, 479 Gessner, Conrad, 490, 491 GFP Bunny (Kac), 438 GHGs (greenhouse gases), 192, 198 Gibson, Rick, 437–​438, 438f, 441, 443, 447

Gigliotti, Carol, 6, 189, 442 Gilgamesh (poem), 5, 141–​142 Gilligan, Carol, 210 Gir Forest, lions of, 8, 266 GIS (Geographic Information Systems), 550 Global warming, 16, 198, 401 Goats domestication of, 137 housing in food animal production, 367–​368 roaming dogs as danger to, 123 Goble, Dale D., 184 Godlovitch, Roslind and Stanley, 31 The Golden Calf (Hirst), 435 Gompertz, Lewis, 30 Goodall, Jane, 277n60 Gorilla safaris, 508 Grandin, Temple, 211, 283–​284, 368 The Great Ape Project: Equality beyond Humanity (Cavalieri & Singer), 32 Great Britain. See United Kingdom Great Epizootic (1872), 244–​245 Greaves, John, 475–​476 Greely, Henry, 501 Greene, Harry W., 498 Greenhouse gases (GHGs), 192, 198 Greyhound racing, 75–​76 Griffin, Donald R., 144, 208–​209, 215, 218–​219, 405 Griffiths, Huw, 544 Grigson, Caroline, 479 Grimm fairy tales, 16, 461–​463, 464 Gross domestic product (GDP), 198 Grünfeld, Thomas, 435 Guatemala, dog bites in, 118 Guattari, Félix, 155–​156 Guerrini, Anita, 17–​18, 489 Guo-​Ciang, Cai, 436 Habitat destruction agriculture and, 191, 192, 197 climate change and, 192 extinction and, 191, 197, 501 insects and, 19 wild animals and, 54 Haeckel, Ernst, 493 Haeg, Fritz, 552

 

606   Index Hagenbeck, Carl, 402 Halloy, Arnaud, 510 Hammerschlag, Neil, 496 Hampson, Katie, 121 Hampton Creek Food, 304, 317n9 Hanotte, Olivier, 483 “Happy meat” ethic, 370 Haraway, Donna, 7, 243, 244, 252, 267, 270, 302, 305 Harding, Sandra, 209 Harris, Angela, 547 Harris, Joel Chandler, 460 Harris, John, 31 Harrison, Peter, 353 Harrison, Ruth, 282, 370–​371 Hart, James, 154 Hartshorne, Charles, 217 Harvard Law School, 171–​172 Harvey, David, 547 Hasler, Barbara, 115 Hauser, M., 334, 335 Head On (Guo-​Ciang), 436 Health human-​animal relationships and, 3, 84–​85, 86 stress and, 89 veganism and, 35 Health Research Extension Act of 1985, 360–​361 Hearne, Vicki, 267 Hegel, Georg, 348, 448 Heidegger, Martin, 159, 202, 447 Helena (Evaristti), 437, 447 Heritage, John, 286 Herman, Lou, 230, 233, 236 Hermeneutic approach to ethics, 5, 155–​158, 159 Herzog, Hal, 466–​467 Higher-​order thought (HOT), 322–​324, 337–​338, 340n8 Hirst, Damien, 435, 446 Histoire naturelle (Leclerc & Daubenton), 491–​492 Historiae animalium (Gessner), 490 Historical animal studies, 258–​278 agency in, 262–​264, 266, 270 of agriculture, 8, 261

animal welfare science and, 8, 262, 266, 267, 272, 275n32 archives and, 265, 267 barriers to, 268–​269 contradictory relationships in, 258 cultural and biological differences as influence on, 268, 276n51 documentary sources in, 260, 261–​262, 264–​265, 271 empathy in, 268, 269–​270 ethology and, 8, 262, 266, 267, 269, 272 human representations in, 260–​261 itstory proposal for, 8–​9, 268, 270 motivations for, 260 Nietzsche on destructive potential of, 258–​259 trends in, 259 of wild animals, 265, 276n45, 276n49 History of Animals (Aristotle), 489 The History of Four-​Footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects (Topsell & Moffet), 459 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe (Adams), 380–​381 Hoarding, 78 Hochadel, Oliver, 402 Hofstadter, Richard, 345 Holmberg, Tora, 384 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 174 Homeless animals. See Animal shelters; Roaming dogs Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 582, 583 Horkheimer, Max, 194–​195, 209 Hornaday, William, 402 Horowitz, Alexandra, 169 Horses agency of, 7–​8, 244–​247, 250, 252, 263–​264 domestication of, 137 economic role of, 244–​245 emotional expressions by, 216 militarized, 245, 246–​247, 246f, 255n37 as therapy animals, 88 on Thiaucourt memorial, 245, 246, 246f, 247 as working animals, 316n4, 545 HOT. See Higher-​order thought Housing. See also Animal shelters in animal research, 349, 357, 358, 384

 

Index   607 in food animal production, 366–​368, 374, 375 Howard, Ebenezer, 549 Howl (Stein), 435, 436f Hribal, Jason, 250–​251, 277n66 Human-​animal relationships, 81–​97. See also Animals; Humans alienation and detachment in, 5, 144–​145, 284 capitalism in, 306 collaboration in, 270–​271 commensal species and, 19, 529, 537–​538 constant paradox of, 290, 294 economic benefits of, 85–​86 ethics in, 4, 90–​91, 157 in extreme animal tourism, 508–​509 failures and negative impact of, 3–​4, 90 health benefits of, 3, 84–​85, 86 historical and cultural perspectives on, 81–​83, 274n21 in indigenous communities, 241 justice in, 2, 6 legal rights in, 3 livestock and, 282–​283, 292, 545–​546 mutualism in, 3, 84, 526 overview, 81 prehistoric, 5 scientific animal objects and, 385, 392 settlement patterns and, 17 social parasitism hypothesis and, 84 social support from, 88–​90 therapeutic uses of, 83, 87–​88 in urban ecosystems, 20, 543–​544, 545–​546, 559 value of, 83–​84 Human carnivorism, 211 Humane Slaughter Act of 1958, 39, 199 Humane Society of the United States, 39–​40, 98 Human exceptionalism. See also Anthropocentrism challenges to, 5, 8, 176–​177, 179, 181–​182, 240, 247, 253 defined, 175, 192, 399 features of, 7 founder of, 254n20 ideology of, 176–​178

negative consequences of, 176, 179, 180–​181, 185 in public policy, 176, 179 values as driving force of, 183 zoos as promotion of, 13 Humanism. See also Posthumanism atheistical, 20, 574, 576 deconstruction of, 156 histories in tradition of, 260, 269, 273n15 limitations of, 208 triumphalist, 20, 21, 573–​577, 583 on urban ecosystems, 547–​548 Humans. See also Human-​animal relationships; Human exceptionalism acknowledgment of corporeal similarity to animals, 5 coexistence with animals, 1, 16 comparison with working animals, 315 deficient human experimentation, 349, 354–​355 encephalization quotient for, 228 evolution of attitudes toward nature, 137 rejection of animality in, 5, 9, 147–​148 role in extinction, 16, 497 somatic awareness of, 152–​153 zoo displays of, 402–​403 Hume, David, 217, 573 Hunting conservation argument for, 418–​420 defenses of, 276n46 ethics of, 13, 411, 424n2 factors impacting success in, 417 incidental values of, 428n50 objectification of animals in, 11 as predator control, 145, 146f, 423, 424n4 recreation and tradition argument for, 420–​422 respect for animals in, 419–​420 ungulate populations and, 13, 414, 415–​418 of wolves, 13–​14, 413–​422 Husbandry. See also Livestock advantages and disadvantages of, 12 altruism and, 21 in animal research, 358 climate as impact on, 17 defined, 139 industrialization of, 304, 366 origins of, 139

 

608   Index Husserl, Edmund, 154 Hutchinson, G. Evelyn, 493 Hydatid disease, 123 Hyperprivileged animal tourism, 18 Hypothetical-​deductive research, 305 IAATO (International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators), 516 ICAM (International Companion Animal Management Coalition), 123, 124 ICAZ (International Council of Archaeozoology), 476–​477 Iguanas, 18, 513, 513f Iliad (Homer), 456 I Like America and America Likes Me (Beuys), 436–​437 ILO (International Labor Organization), 199, 200 Imitation behavior, 232–​233, 234 Imperato, Ferrante, 491 The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (Hirst), 435 In a Different Voice (Gilligan), 210 “In Defense of Raymond Sebond” (Montaigne), 212 India cattle in, 192 commensal species in, 535, 538 Gir Forest in, 8, 266 roaming dogs in, 113–​114, 118, 124, 125, 545 Indigenous communities animism in, 467 human-​animal relationships in, 241 political rights of, 54–​55, 57 recognition of more-​than-​human community by, 180 Indignation, expressions of, 329–​331, 332 Inductive research, 305 Informed consent, 11, 53, 349 Ingham, John, 170–​171 Ingold, Tim, 248, 306, 307, 547 Innovation studies, 232–​233 Insects, 19, 216, 217, 500, 528 Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (Horowitz),169 Institute for Critical Animal Studies, 190, 195 Institute for Social Research, 194

Intentionality-​based agency, 7, 8, 247–​250, 253 International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO), 516 International Companion Animal Management Coalition (ICAM), 123, 124 International Council of Archaeozoology (ICAZ), 476–​477 International Labor Organization (ILO), 199, 200 International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), 498 Interspecies dialogue, 208–​224 attentiveness in, 214–​215, 217, 221 cognitive ethology and, 208, 213, 215–​217 dismissive attitudes toward, 209, 220 dynamics of, 214 education and training on, 311 emotional expressions in, 215–​217, 223–​224n71 evidence for, 208–​209, 220 feminist care theory on, 6, 208, 210–​211, 214–​215, 219 languages used by animals in, 212–​213, 218 limitations of, 211–​212 nonverbal, 212 sympathetic openness to, 217–​218 Intransitive consciousness, 322, 323 “Intriguing Habitats, and Careful Discussions of Climate Change” (Kaufman), 404 Intrinsic moral status, 46–​47, 62n10 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Bentham), 27 Intuition, 573, 574, 586n9 Invasive species, 192, 501, 523n25, 554 In-​vitro meat, 302, 304, 558 Irigaray, Luce, 159 Irvine, Leslie, 4, 98, 298n51 Islam, views of animals in, 577, 580, 588n70 Isotope analysis, 17, 476, 482 Italy, roaming dogs in, 117 Itstory, 8–​9, 268, 270 IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources), 498

 

Index   609 Jacob, P., 332–​333 Jakatas (fables), 459 Jamison, Leslie, 332 Japan, xenotransplantation in, 390 Jeremijenko, Natalie, 552 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 212 Johnson, Walter, 241 Josselin, Ralph, 263–​264 “The Juniper Tree” (Runge), 463, 464 Jurassic Park (film), 500 Justice critical animal studies and, 190, 191 in human-​animal relationships, 2, 6 in political theory of animal rights, 2, 3, 47, 52, 60 principles of, 423 Kac, Eduardo, 15, 438–​439 Kalof, Linda, 1 Kant, Immanuel, 27, 34, 337, 429n59 Karp, Daniel, 197 Kaufman, Leslie, 404 Kean, Hilda, 261 Keller, Ferdinand, 478 Kellert, Steven, 543–​544, 546 Kelling, G., 126 Kemmerer, Lisa, 196 Kenya, dog-​keeping practices in, 116 Keystone predators, 494, 495 Khalila wa Dimna (al-​Muqaffa), 459 Khazanov, A. M., 484 Kheel, Marti, 219 Killer (orca) whales, 13, 229, 407 Kim, Myeongbeom, 435 Kimbell, Lucy, 446 King, J., 480 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 196, 359, 420 Kitchell, Ralph, 357 Klingender, Francis, 142, 143–​144 Knight, A., 387 Knorr, Karen, 435 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 210 Kolbert, Elizabeth, 500 Kopytoff, Igor, 287 Korsgaard, Christine, 336–​337 Kristof, Nicholas, 407 Krugman, Paul, 199

Krylov, Ivan, 459 Kuznets, Simon, 198 Kymlicka, Will, 2–​3, 38, 43, 559 Labor unions, 199–​200 Lafontaine, Jean de, 459 Laissez-​faire intuition, 47–​48, 53–​54 Language. See also Speech cetacean cognition and, 230–​231 defined, 230 in interspecies dialogue, 212–​213, 218 negativity toward animals in, 135–​136 Language, Truth, and Logic (Ayer), 347 Last Child in the Woods (Louv), 181 Latour, Bruno, 7, 243, 244, 252, 254n23, 559 Laurance, William F., 192 Law, John, 268–​269 The Law of Animals (Ingham), 170–​171 Leang Timpuseng cave, 14 Lease, Mary Ellen, 177 Leclerc, Georges-​Louis (Comte de Buffon), 491–​492 Lee, J. E., 478 Lefebvre, Henri, 547 Legal persons, defined, 167–​168. See also Animals as legal subjects Lenski, Jean and Gerhard, 138 Leonardo da Vinci, 15 Leonardo’s Choice: Genetic Technologies and Animals (Gigliotti), 201–​202 Leopold, Aldo, 494, 549 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 459 Lethal control measures, 14, 419, 428n55 Levinas, Emmanuel, 154, 157, 159 Levinson, Boris, 87 Lewinsohn, Richard, 137 Libby, Willard, 482 Light pollution, 557 Liminal animals, 51, 53, 55–​57 Lindblad, Lars-​Eric, 516, 522n21 Linguistic agency, 44, 45, 46, 49, 51–​53, 61n4 Linnaeus, Carolus, 491 “The Lion, the Ass, and the Fox” (fable), 458 Lions, 8, 77, 266

 

610   Index Livestock. See also Food animal production; Husbandry; specific animals agency of, 8 animal shelters for, 100 categorizations influencing perceptions of, 286, 293 contradictory status of, 9, 287, 290, 294 factors influencing relationships with, 299n82 genetic engineering of, 6, 201–​202 history of control regulations for, 99–​100 human relationships with, 282–​283, 292, 545–​546 objectification of, 279 sentience of, 9, 283, 287, 294 stockpeople’s perceptions of, 285, 286–​290 in urban ecosystems, 100–​101, 545–​546, 549 wolves as threat to, 422, 428n52, 428n54 Living property status advantages of, 71 capacity of ownership and, 77–​78 categories of animals included in, 70–​7 1 consequences of creating category of, 72–​74 of domesticated animals, 66, 72–​73 duty of care laws and, 76–​77 legal rights provided by, 3, 74–​78 living space requirements and, 77 prohibited uses of animals under, 75–​76 Living space requirements, 77 Lizards, 70–​7 1 Lloyd, Geneviève, 254n20 Loch Ness monster, 16, 466 Locke, John, 27, 83 Logical positivism, 11, 347, 445 London Zoo, 401–​402 Long-​term ecological research (LTER) projects, 552 Lopez, Barry Holstun, 135–​136, 139 Lorenz, Konrad, 144–​145, 215 Louv, Richard, 181 Lucretius, 585 Lukács, Georg, 210–​211 Luke, Brian, 219–​220 Lusk, Jayson, 376, 377 Lynch, Michael, 288, 382

MacCannell, Dean, 506 Macer, Darryl, 390 MacGregor, Arthur, 274n21 Machado, Luis, 200 MacKinnon, Catharine A., 208 Maddie’s Fund, 4, 104 Making/​tracking confusion beliefs and, 10, 326–​329 defined, 10, 321 emotion and, 330–​331 empathy and, 334–​335 Malamud, Randy, 13, 397 Malinsky, Becky, 406 Mammals, living property status for, 70–​7 1. See also specific mammals Man and the Natural World (Thomas), 136, 260 Man Meets Dog (Lorenz), 144–​145 Marcuse, Herbert, 194, 195 Margodt, Koen, 403, 404 Marie de France (fabulist), 459 Marino, Lori, 7, 227, 234 Married Women Acts, 70 Martin, Jennifer Adams, 253n4, 265–​266 Martin’s Act of 1822, 38, 102, 281 Marx, Karl, 266, 306, 307, 444 Mason, James B. (Jim), 5, 9, 135 Mass animal tourism, 18, 506. See also Aquariums; Zoos Masserman, J., 334, 335, 341n35 Mass extinctions, 497 Mass strandings, 235–​236 Maternal Thinking (Ruddick), 219 Mather, Cotton, 147–​148 Mayer, Emily, 445 McDonaldization of food animal production, 282–​283 McKinley, Daniel, 147 Meat consumption growth of, 198 historical debates regarding, 368–​369 negative consequences of, 6 urbanization and, 20, 546 Meatpacking plants, 6, 100, 199–​200 Mech, David, 495 Megafauna, 400, 403, 495, 497, 498, 503n22 Memory, 232, 234 Mengele, Josef, 355

 

Index   611 Mental continuity, 32 Mental well-​being, duty of care laws for, 76–​77 Merillat, A., 357 Mesopotamia, artistic use of animals in, 5, 142–​143, 144 Metacognition, 234, 235, 325, 337, 338 Metaethics, 5, 159, 162, 165n32 Metamemory, 232, 234 Metempsychosis, 21, 580–​582 Methane emissions, 192 Mexico, roaming dogs in, 115, 117, 118, 122 Mice as commensal species, 19, 529, 532–​533, 535 in scientific research, 360, 381, 384, 386 standardization of, 386, 388 Michael, Mike, 12, 380, 384, 385, 388 Middle Ages analogism in, 467 bestiality in, 148 cultural representations of animals in, 14–​15, 143 wolves in, 493 Middle East artistic use of animals in, 142–​143 commensal animals in, 529, 534 domestication of animals in, 136, 137, 138, 478–​479 elite class prohibitions against eating pork in, 17 mythologies of, 141–​142 transition from foraging to farming in, 140 Mikhail, Alan, 262 Mill, John Stuart, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 41n17, 148 Mind-​reading abilities, 332, 333, 341n25, 341n29 Minimal moral empathy, 333, 335, 336 Miracle of the meta, 323–​324, 338, 340n10 Mirror self-​recognition, 233–​234 Misguided emotion/​empathy, 330–​331, 334 Misogyny, 140, 142 Misothery, 135–​151 agrarian view of animals and, 139 in art, 142–​144 cockfighting and, 141 cultural devices to cope with, 5, 144–​146 defined, 139–​140, 149 domesticated animals and, 5, 137–​138 in mythology, 141–​142

origins of, 136–​139 repercussions of, 147–​149 sexuality and, 148–​149 speech expressions, negative associations with animals in, 135–​136 Misplaced emotion/​empathy, 330–​331, 334 Misrepresentation strategies, 145 Mitchell, Sandra, 248 Mitchell, Timothy, 242, 247, 248 Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), 477, 478, 481, 531 Mizelle, Brett, 261 Mokele-​Mbeme, 466 Molecular biology, 17, 476, 481 Monbiot, George, 501 Monsó, Susana, 9–​10, 319 Montaigne, Michel de, 212 Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes (Gompertz), 30 Moral motivation, 332–​338 Moral psychology, 5, 153, 159–​160, 162, 165n32, 355 More-​than-​human urban ecosystems, 20, 546–​548 The Morphology of the Fairy Tale (Propp), 462 Morris, Elizabeth, 102 Morris Refuge Association for Homeless and Suffering Animals, 102 Morton, Timothy, 161 Mother and Daughter (Hirst), 435 mtDNA. See Mitochondrial DNA Muir, John, 549 Mulesing, 368 Multispecies ethnography, 547 Munro, Jack, 551 Murphy, Patrick, 213 Murray, Mary, 306 Mutualism, 3, 84, 526 Nagel, Thomas, 211, 257n59 Nance, Susan, 262 nanoq: flat out and bluesome (Snæbjörnsdóttir & Wilson), 435 Nash, Linda, 247, 254n23 National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy, 107n2 National Society for Medical Research, 104 Nation-​states, conceptualization of, 50–​51

 

612   Index Natural History (Pliny), 490 Natural history, as field of study, 489–​493 Naturalism, 16, 467–​468 Natural selection, 83–​84, 480 Nature-​culture split, 241–​242, 243 The Nature of Sympathy (Scheler), 217–​218 Nature tourism, 506, 521n8 Nelson, Michael P., 13–​14, 411 Neocortex, 228–​229 Neolithic era commensal animals in, 529 companion animals in, 82 human-​animal relationships in, 3 lake dwellings in Switzerland during, 477–479, 481–​482 Neural correlates, 216, 218, 219, 223n71 Neutering, 104, 105, 124, 133n120 Newcastle, Margaret, 209 New Guinea singing dogs (NGSD), 481 Newton, Isaac, 347 New welfarism, 40 New Zealand animal research protections in, 361 roaming dogs in, 122 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 585 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 258–​260, 262, 266, 270, 273n6 NIH Reauthorization Act of 1985, 360–​361 Noe-​Nygaard, N., 480 Noise pollution, 557 No-​kill shelters, 4, 99, 104–​107, 545 Nomadic pastoralism, 17, 484–​485 Nomads and the Outside World (Khazanov), 484 Nondomesticated animals. See Liminal animals; Wild animals Nonverbal communication, 212 Normative ethics, 5, 159, 162 Norwood, Bailey, 376, 377 Noske, Barbara, 192–​193, 201 Nuer society, 140 Nussbaum, Martha, 50 Nyhart, Lynn, 492 Obeyesekere, N., 125 Objectification. See also Property status; Scientific animal objects

in agriculture, 10–​11 in art, 15 defined, 10 history of, 279–​280 ideological legitimization of, 220 of livestock, 279 in research, 10 in spectacles, 11, 13 in sport, 11 of wild animals, 11 in zoos, 11, 13 O’Connor, Terry, 19, 525 Odum, Eugene, 493 Odyssey (Homer), 475 Oliver, Kelly, 160 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 549 On the Language of Brutes (Fabricus), 212 Oostvaardersplassen park, 20, 499–​500, 555 Open admission shelters, 105 OR-​7 wolf, 18, 494–​495 Orangutans, iPad use by, 406–​407 Orca (killer) whales, 13, 229, 407 Ortega y Gasset, José, 444 Orwell, George, 579 Oskarsson, M. C. R., 481 Osteology, comparative, 17 Overintellectualization, 10 Owens, Marcus, 20, 542 Oxford Group, 31 Oxytocin, 85, 88, 89 Pagels, Elaine, 148 Pain and suffering. See also Abuse; Anti-​cruelty laws in animal research, 11, 349, 357–​358 communication of, 216 ethical considerations regarding, 28, 32 in factory farms, 48, 211 legal protections against, 68–​69, 74, 76 measures of, 297n39 methods for controlling, 357, 360 passive, 48–​50 sentience as factor in, 157 Paleolithic era commensal animals in, 529, 533 companion animals in, 82 cultural representations of animals in, 14

 

Index   613 domesticated dogs from, 479 human-​animal relationships in, 3 interspecies dialogue in, 214 Palmer, Clare, 47 Pálsson, Gísli, 242 Panchatantra (Vishnu Sharma), 459 Panksepp, Jaak, 329, 341n24 Panpsychism, 217 Parakeets, as commensal species, 536–​537 Parasitism, 526 Parts of Animals (Aristotle), 489 Passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags, 496–​497 Passive suffering, 48–​50 Pasteur, Louis, 101 Pastoralism, 17, 137–​138, 306, 484–​485 Patriarchy, 140 Paul (saint), 148 Pearson, Chris, 7–​8, 240, 267–​268 Penguins, 18–​19, 516–​518, 517f People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 40, 72 Pereira, Carlos, 311 Personal property status in common law system, 66 of companion animals, 69 of domesticated animals, 3, 65 duties associated with, 66, 67, 68 limitations of, 71 Personhood of animals, 3, 72, 169, 172, 180 cognition and, 183 human interests and protection of, 25 mentalistic, 154 of slaves, 70 PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), 40, 72 Pet-​facilitated psychotherapy (PFP), 87 Pets. See Companion animals Phaedrus (fabulist), 457 Phenomenal consciousness, 232, 322 Phenomenological approach to ethics, 5, 152–154, 158, 159 Philippines, roaming dogs in, 125 Philo, Chris, 250 Philosophical zoology, 155 Physical well-​being, duty of care laws for, 76

Physiologus (fabulist), 459 Picard, David, 518, 523n29 Pierson v. Post (1805), 174 Pig city project, 20, 551 Pig-​deer, 14 Pigeons as commensal species, 19, 528, 534–​535, 536 diseases transmitted from, 536 passenger, 500–​501 Pigs archaeozoological studies of, 17, 478–​479 domestication of, 17, 280, 478–​479 housing in food animal production, 366–​367, 375 in peasant culture, 464 Pinchot, Gifford, 549 Pinky and the Brain (television series), 381 PIT (passive integrated transponder) tags, 496–​497 Plato, 136, 348, 358, 359 Play, with working animals, 313–​314 A Plea for Vegetarianism (Salt), 369 Pleistocene Park, 499 Plumridge, Susan, 124 Plutarch, 573 Poaching, 13–​14, 418–​419, 420 Pointing gestures, 231 Political theory of animal rights, 43–​64. See also Citizenship; Sovereignty anthropomorphism in, 59–​60 capacity considerations in, 57–​59 cosmopolitics and, 60–​61 for domesticated animals, 51–​53 ethics in, 49 future directions for, 56–​61 historical neglect of, 43–​44, 45 intrinsic moral status in, 46–​47, 62n10 justice in, 2, 3, 47, 52, 60 laissez-​faire intuition in, 47–​48, 53–​54 for liminal animals, 51, 55–​56 linguistic agency and, 44, 45, 46, 49, 51–​53 in nation-​states, 50–​51 need for, 46–​50 passive suffering and, 48–​50 for wild animals, 51, 53–​55 Politics (Aristotle), 194 Politics, defined, 44

 

614   Index Pollution, 4, 90, 556, 557 Porcher, Jocelyn, 9, 270–​271, 302 Positivism, 11, 347, 445 Posthumanism agency in, 244 in ethics, 49 objectives of, 163–​164n5 on re-​appreciating bodily animacy, 5, 159 urban ecosystems and, 20, 544, 547–​548 Poststructural approach to ethics, 155–​158, 159 Pounds. See Animal shelters Pound seizure laws, 104, 107, 111n53 Poverty, impact on animal care practices, 116 Powers, Jesse, 433, 437 Prairie dogs, language used by, 213 Predator control, 145, 146f, 423, 424n4 Preference autonomy, 33, 37 Premature meta-​articulation beliefs and, 324–​325 consciousness and, 323–​324 defined, 10, 321 miracle of the meta and, 323–​324, 338, 340n10 moral motivation and, 336–​338 Probus, Joi Marie, 196 Production disease, 368 Productivist approach to food animal production, 12, 282, 364–​365, 370–​373, 377 Property status, 65–​80. See also Animals as legal subjects; Objectification companion animals, 65, 66, 67–​69, 175 constitutional change regarding, 71–​72 court opinion regarding, 72 of domesticated animals, 65, 66, 72–​73 elimination of, 32, 33, 66 impact on animal rights, 29, 36, 175 legal evolution of, 69–​70, 173–​174 legislative change regarding, 72 living. See Living property status moral and legal considerations in, 38, 39 overview, 65–​66 personal. See Personal property status religious influences on, 281 of scientific animal objects, 386 transition from welfare concerns to legal rights, 67–​69 of wild animals, 65, 174

Propp, Vladimir, 462 Proudhon, Pierre-​Joseph, 173 Psychological continuity, 232 Psychological research, 350 Psychological well-​being, duty of care laws for, 76–​77 Psychologist’s dilemma, 350 Psychology of work, 307, 312 Psychosocial stress, 89 Public policy human exceptionalism in, 176, 179 relationship with private morality, 98 status of animals in, 107 Puppy mills, 40, 103 Purebred dogs, 4 Pythagoras, 193, 369, 580 Queen Mab (Shelley), 41n8 Rabbits artistic use of, 15, 438–​439 Brer Rabbit (fable character), 460–​461 roaming dogs as danger to, 123 Rabies, 101, 118, 120, 121, 122–​125 Rader, Karen, 386 Radiocarbon dating, 17, 476, 482 Raffles, Stamford, 401 Rangarajan, Mahesh, 266 Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST), 483 RASM (Regional Arctic System Model), 192 Rats artistic use of, 446 as commensal species, 19, 529, 530–​532, 535–​536 extermination efforts, 121, 516 in scientific research, 73, 220, 360, 384, 386 translocation of, 529–​531, 532 as working animals, 303 Rattling the Cage (Wise), 182 Rauschenberg, Robert, 434 Ray, John, 491 RBST (Rare Breeds Survival Trust), 483 Reasoning abilities, 241, 242, 423–​424 Red List of endangered species, 498 Referential gestures, 231 Reflexive thought, 319–​341

 

Index   615 aponoian framework for, 10, 320, 325, 331, 333, 339 beliefs and, 324–​329 by cetaceans, 7, 227, 231, 237 consciousness and, 322–​324 defined, 319 emotion and, 329–​331 empathy and moral motivation in, 332–​338 making/​tracking confusion and, 10, 321, 326–​329, 330–​331, 334–​335 manifestations of, 227 neocortex in, 228 overcomplication of, 320–​321 premature meta-​articulation and, 10, 321, 323–​325, 336–​338 Regan, Tom, 33–​34, 157, 194, 369 Regenesis (Church), 500 Regional Arctic System Model (RASM), 192 Reiss, D., 234 Religion and animals, 571–​589 altruistic concern and, 20–​21, 581 awakening to real presence of others, 21, 582–​585 in Buddhism, 571, 580, 582 in Christianity, 571, 573–​577 covenants regarding, 577–​579 dietary rules based on, 138–​139, 479 in Islam, 577, 580, 588n70 metempsychosis and, 21, 580–​582 property status and, 281 reconfiguration of animals to lower status, 138 sacrificial animals, 577 terminology considerations, 571–​573 triumphalist humanism and, 20, 21, 573–​577, 583 Renaissance analogism in, 467, 468 cultural representations of animals in, 15 folklore in, 465 human-​animal relationships in, 82, 242 natural history in, 490, 491 Reptiles as companion animals, 81 emotional expressions in, 329 living property status for, 70–​7 1 stereotypy behaviors in zoos, 405

Research. See Animal research Resistance behaviors, 8, 12–​13, 240, 250–​252 Resnick, Joseph, 111n53 Restoration ecology, 555 Retirement of working animals, 314–​315 Rewilding, 498–​500, 501, 555 Rheinberger, Hans-​Jörg, 383 Richardson, Edwin, 249, 250 Rights holders, attributes of, 74 Ripmeester, Erwin A. P., 557 Ripple, William J., 494–​495, 499 Road ecology, 554 Roaming dogs, 113–​134 abuse and suffering of, 120 adverse effects of, 114, 117–​119, 121–​123, 126 attitudes toward, 4–​5, 113–​115, 117, 126–​127 defined, 127n2 economic impact of, 122–​123 euthanasia of, 114 interactions with, 114–​116 liminal position of, 113 management of, 123–​126, 240, 545 nuisance and irritation caused by, 119–​120, 125 prevalence of, 113 quality of life for communities with, 117–​120 rabies from, 101, 118, 120, 121, 122–​123 safety and security considerations, 117–​119 social conflict over, 121–​122 in urban ecosystems, 117–​118 Robinson, Mike, 518 Rodman, John, 135–​136, 140 Rollin, Bernard E., 11, 282, 345, 371 Romania, eradication program for roaming dogs in, 114 Roman period, cultural representations of animals in, 14 Rose, Deborah Bird, 160 Rothfels, Nigel, 402 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques, 217 Rowell, Thelma, 269, 271 Rowlands, Mark, 9–​10, 319 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 30, 40 Ruddick, Sara, 219 Rueda, Danny, 516

 

616   Index Rule utilitarianism, 41n17, 41n19 Runge, Philipp Otto, 463 Rütimeyer, Ludwig, 477–​478, 481–​482 Sakamoto, Leonardo, 200 Salisbury, Joyce E., 241–​242, 279 Salmonella, 199, 283 Salt, Henry Stephens, 30, 369 Samoa gender differences in dog ownership in, 116 roaming dogs in, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 123 Sanbonmatsu, John, 195 Sanders, Clinton, 290 Sapontzis, S., 354 Savolainen, Peter, 481 Savvides, Nikki, 124 Sax, Boria, 15–​16, 456 Sayes, Edwin, 252 Scavengers, 526–​527 Scenting abilities, 267 Schaeffer, Jean-​Marie, 254n20 Schama, Simon, 274n26 Scheler, Max, 217–​218 Schinkel, Anders, 50 Schmitt, Tiphaine, 270–​271 Schöneberger Südgelände, 20 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 195, 217 Scientific animal objects, 380–​396. See also Animal research cost-​benefit analysis and, 12, 389–​390 diversity of, 381 elements of, 381–​383 enactment of, 12, 384–​391 ethical calculation and, 12, 389 handling practices for, 384 human relationships with, 385, 392 inside laboratory, 12, 384–​386 outside laboratory, 12, 386–​391 overview, 380–​381 property status of, 386 standardization of, 386, 388–​389 transformation from naturalistic to analytic, 382, 384 Scott, James C., 250 Scott, Shelly R., 250, 251 Scruton, Roger, 276n46 Seals, predator control efforts involving, 424n4

Seamer Carr site, 480 Seamon, David, 163n4 SeaWorld, 13, 250, 398, 407 Secondary commensalism, 526–​527 Self-​awareness, 7, 37, 231–​232, 235 Self-​concept, 234 Self-​imitation, 234 Self-​inflicted ignorance, 178 Self-​recognition, 231, 233–​234 Sensationalism, 15, 446–​447, 451 Sensation exhibit, 446–​447 Sensory disturbances, 557 Sentience abolitionist paradigm on, 37 critical animal studies on, 193 defined, 2, 26–​27, 37, 369, 371 of livestock, 9, 283, 287, 294 pain and, 157 Serpell, James A., 3–​4, 81, 116, 144, 146, 366 Serra, Richard, 433–​434 Servais, Veronique, 510 Sewell, Anna, 169 Sewell, William, 247 Sexuality, impact of misothery on, 148–​149 The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-​ Vegetarian Critical Theory (Adams), 196, 369 Sharks, agency of, 253n4, 265 Shaw, David Gary, 245–​246, 249, 252 Sheep domestication of, 137, 280 emotional expressions by, 216 housing in food animal production, 367–​368 industrial production of, 365 mobilization for antimilitary protests, 252 roaming dogs as danger to, 123 social needs of, 76 tail-​docking of, 368 “Sheep Do Have Opinions” (Despret), 269 Shelford, Victor, 493 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 41n8 Shelters. See Animal shelters Shepard, Paul, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 147, 160 Sherkow, Jacob, 501 Shipman, Pat, 136, 137

 

Index   617 Signal, Tania, 305–​306 Singer, Peter, 25, 30, 31–​33, 37, 48, 104, 171, 194, 370, 371 The Singular Beast (Farbe-​Vassus), 463 Sister Species (Kemmerer), 196 Sixth Great Extinction, 191, 497 Skabelund, Aaron, 262 Slabbekoorn, Hans, 557 Slaughterhouse (Eisnitz), 199 Slaughterhouses blame shifting to, 145 concealment of, 5, 145 health concerns in, 199 selection of locations for, 198 stockpeople’s perceptions of, 291, 292 working conditions in, 6, 199–​200 Slaves Aristotle on, 194 legal status change of, 69–​70 personhood of, 70 utilitarian views of, 28–​29, 41n19 Slobodchikoff, Con, 213 Smith, Adam, 217 Smith, David, 235 Smuts, Barbara, 213–​214, 219 Snæbjörnsdóttir, Bryndis, 435 Social buffering, 89 Social Darwinism, 460 Social justice. See Justice Social parasitism hypothesis, 84 Societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals (SPCAs), 30, 102, 103, 104 Socratic method, 172 Somatology, 160 Soulé, Michael, 498, 555 Sovereignty capacity requirements for, 58 of indigenous peoples, 54–​55 of nation-​states, 50 of wild animals, 54, 55, 57, 58 Spaying, 104, 105 SPCAs. See Societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals Species apartheid, 47–​48, 50 Speciesism, 37, 195, 210, 211 Spectacles. See Aquariums; Circuses; Zoos Speech. See also Language

freedom of, 26 negativity toward animals in, 135–​136 Sperm whales, 228 Spiritual inferiority, 27 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 559 Sport. See also Hunting cockfighting, 141 greyhound racing, 75–​76 objectification of animals in, 11 Spotte, Stephen, 404 Sri Lanka, roaming dogs in, 115, 117, 118, 124–​125 Srinivasan, Krithika, 545 Star Carr site, 480 State consciousness, 322 Steeves, H. Peter, 159 Stein, Amy, 435 Steiner, Gary, 44 Stengers, Isabelle, 383, 547, 559 Steno, Nicholas, 492 Stereotypy behaviors, 375, 404, 405 Sterilization, 104, 124 Steward, Helen, 248 Stich, Stephen, 326 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 440–​441, 448 Stockpeople moral challenges for, 293–​294 perceptions toward livestock, 285, 286–​290 slaughterhouses as viewed by, 291, 292 Stoecker, Ralf, 247 Strauss, Randy, 25 Stray dogs. See Roaming dogs Stress, impact on health, 89 Stuart, Tristram, 369 Subasinghe, Dynatra, 118 Subject-​of-​a-​life entity, 33–​34, 37, 157, 369 Sudan, animal agribusiness in, 199 Suffering. See Pain and suffering Sulikowski, James, 496 Sullivan, John Jeremiah, 405 Sumero-​Akkadian contest literature, 16, 457 Supplementary animal tourism, 18, 506 Surprise, expression by dogs, 325 Swart, Sandra, 250, 260, 268 Switzerland, Neolithic lake dwellings in, 477–479, 481–​482 Symphysis, 153, 163n4

 

618   Index Synanthropy, 525, 532, 553–​554 Synthetic biology, 489, 500 Synurbany, 553–​554 Systema naturae (Linnaeus), 491 Sztybel, S., 340n5 Tail-​docking, 368 Taiwan, dog-​keeping practices in, 116 Taming, 310, 318n36 Tansley, Arthur, 493 Tanzania, roaming dogs in, 121 Tapper, Richard, 306 Taxidermy, 15, 434–​436, 491 Taylor, Nick, 305–​306 Taylor, Paul, 215 Technologies of enchantment, 522n15 Tetrick, Joshua, 304 Thailand companion animals in, 81 outcast elephants in, 545 transition from foraging to farming in, 140 Theogony (Hesiod), 458 Theory of mind, 7, 332 Therapeutic uses of animals, 83, 87–​88 Theriophobia, 140 Thiaucourt memorial, 245, 246, 246f, 247 Thing Theory, 262 Thinking Animals (Shepard), 135 Thomas, Keith, 136, 147, 148, 260 Thomas, William I., 287 Thomas Aquinas, 27, 538 Thompson, Paul B., 12, 364 Thought. See Cognition; Reflexive thought 3P model, 52 Tigers, human interactions with, 265, 266 Topsell, Edward, 490 Torture, defined, 76. See also Abuse Totemism, 5, 140–​141, 467, 468 Tourism. See Animal tourism Tourist gaze, 520n3 Touristic awe, 517, 523n29 Tracking confusion. See Making/​tracking confusion Tracking devices, 276n45, 494–​495, 496–​497 Traditional free contact system, 405 Training. See Education and training Transcendental phenomenology, 154

Trans-​human morality, 159 Transitive consciousness, 322, 323 Triumphalist humanism, 20, 21, 573–​577, 583 Trophy animals, 11 Tropical deforestation, 192, 197 Trust laws, 72 Trypanosomiasis, 484 Turkey, companion animals in, 81 Twine, Richard, 201 Uerpmann, Hans-​Peter, 485 Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (Harris), 460 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), 510 Ungulate populations, 13, 414, 415–​418, 425n17 Unions, 199–​200 United Food and Commercial Workers Union, 200 United Kingdom animal research protections in, 358, 361 Big Garden Birdwatch in, 19, 528 commensal species in, 528, 533 food animal production in, 282, 370–​371 foot and mouth disease outbreak in, 291 militarization of horses in, 255n37 scientist perceptions of superiority in, 385 zoos in, 401–​402 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 54 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 510 United Nations Environment Program, 199, 498 Urban animal ecology, 20, 543, 552 Urban ecosystems, 542–​570. See also Commensal animals agriculture in, 550–​551 built environment of, 543, 548, 549–​550 challenges for, 543 climate change, impact on, 558 companion animals in, 101, 117–​118, 544–​545, 550 contemporary, 550–​552 design and planning of, 20, 548, 549–​552 ethics in, 20, 549

 

Index   619 future of, 557–​559 gentrification of, 544, 546, 550, 558 human-​animal relationships in, 20, 543–​ 544, 545–​546, 559 landscapes in, 554–​556 livestock in, 100–​101, 545–​546, 549 management practices in, 556–​557 more-​than-​human, 20, 546–​548 overview, 542–​543 posthumanist approach to, 20, 544, 547–​548 rewilding in, 555 sensory disturbances in, 557 synanthropy vs. synurbany in, 553–​554 wild animals in, 20, 551, 555 working animals in, 545 zoning modifications in, 556–​557 zoonotic diseases in, 556 Urban legends, 16, 465 Urban zoögeography, 544 Urry, John, 507, 520n3 Utilitarianism act utilitarianism, 28, 31 on animal research, 11, 354, 355, 356 criticisms of, 449 equal consideration principle and, 28, 29, 31, 33 on rights of animals, 26, 27–​28, 29, 31–​33 rule utilitarianism, 41n17, 41n19 slavery as viewed by, 28–​29, 41n19 The Utility and Liability of History (Nietzsche), 258–​259 van der Merwe, N., 482 Vargas, Guillermo “Habacuc,” 437 Veal production, 189, 203n2 Veganism abolitionist paradigm on, 2, 35, 36–​37 critical animal studies on, 6, 193, 196 Derrida on, 157 ethical, 364 flexibility in, 31 health benefits of, 35 origins of, 31 reasons for engaging in, 424n2 Vegan Society, 30–​31, 41n24 Vegetarianism

ethical, 364, 369–​370 history of, 193, 369 promotion of, 212 reasons for engaging in, 424n2 religious rebuke of, 576 Vera, Frans, 499 A Vindication of Natural Diet (Shelley), 41n8 Viner, Sarah, 482–​483 Violence. See Abuse Virtue ethics, 49 Vivisection, 35, 101, 102, 576 Vogel, J. C., 482 von Uexküll, Jakob, 208–​209, 217, 219 Voting rights, 70 Vucetich, John, 13–​14, 411 Wadhams, Peter, 192 Wadiwel, Dinesh, 194 Waldau, Paul, 5, 167 Walker, Brett L., 262, 266, 267, 276n51 Waln, Annie, 102 Warkentin, Traci, 250 Warwick, Clifford, 405 Waste, pollution from, 4, 90 Watson, Donald, 31, 41n24 Wechkin, S., 341n35 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour), 243 Weil, Felix, 194 Weil, Simone, 212, 214–​215, 217, 219, 584–​585 Welfare Quality® Project, 376–​377 Whales. See also Cetacean cognition orca (killer), 13, 229, 407 self-​awareness in, 232 sperm, 228 What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (Despret), 9 When Species Meet (Haraway), 243, 267 White, Caroline Earle, 102 Whitehead, Alfred North, 155 Whitehead, Mark, 559 Whole Foods Market, humane standards for farm animals developed by, 33 Why Look at Animals (Berger), 401, 550 Wilberforce, William, 30 Wilbert, Chris, 250

 

620   Index Wild animals. See also specific animals agency of, 253n4 characteristics of, 53–​54 as companion animals, 82 habitat destruction and, 54 historical animal studies of, 265, 276n45, 276n49 as ideological construct, 507–​508 land-​use planning and, 184 as legal subjects, 183–​185 objectification of, 11 point of view, difficulty in assessment of, 8 political theory of animal rights for, 51, 53–​55 property status of, 65, 174 sovereignty of, 54, 55, 57, 58 trends in management of, 183–​184 in urban ecosystems, 20, 551, 555 Wildlife Law: Cases and Materials (Goble & Freyfogle), 183–​184 Wilkie, Rhoda, 9, 279 Will I Be All Right, Doctor? (Foundation for Biomedical Research), 346 Wilson, J., 126 Wilson, Mark, 435 Wise, Steven, 182 Witchcraft, 82 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 320, 321, 447 Wolch, Jennifer, 20, 542 Wolfe, Cary, 160, 161, 273n15 Wolves, 411–​429 conservation efforts, 418–​420, 494 ecological study of, 17–​18, 493–​495 ecosystem functions of, 416 evolution of dogs from, 47 extermination efforts, 13, 145, 146f, 412, 424n4 hunting, argument analysis of, 13–​14, 413–​422 as keystone predators, 494, 495 legal requirements for population numbers, 426n27 lethal control measures for, 14, 419, 428n55 misinformation regarding, 421–​422 poaching as threat to, 13–​14, 418–​419, 420

stereotypes regarding, 145, 412 as threat to livestock, 422, 428n52, 428n54 ungulate populations and, 13, 414, 415–​418 Women. See also Feminism; Gender differences as fairy tale authors, 16, 461 legal rights of, 70 misogyny and, 140, 142 “The Wonderful Tar Baby Story” (Harris), 460 Wordsworth, William, 217 Working animals, 302–​318 abolitionist views of, 9 attachment and affectivity with, 311–​312 categorization considerations for, 315–​316 communication with, 311 comparison with working humans, 315 coordination, cooperation, and rules of work, 312–​313 education, training, and evaluation of, 310 in food production, 308 historical recognition of, 316n4 hypothesis and methodology for study of, 303, 307, 308–​309 lack of research regarding, 305–​306 on-​work and off-​work, differentiation between, 314 overview, 302–​303 play and, 313–​314 professional status of, 318n31 recognition given to, 314 replacement of, 302, 303–​304 rest and retirement for, 314–​315 in service production, 308 social considerations, 306–​307 structuring elements for, 310 subjectivity and, 9, 305, 307 theoretical frameworks for, 307–​308 in urban ecosystems, 545 World Watch Institute, 192 Wrasse, mutualistic relationship with coral reef fish, 84 Wyschogrod, Edith, 152 Xenophanes, 573 Xenotransplantation, 390

 

Index   621 Yellowstone National Park, 18, 267, 494–​495, 499 York Retreat, 83 Yvonand IV site, 478 Zahavi, Amotz, 277n69 Zammit-​Lucia, Joe, 15, 433 Zeuner, Frederick, 280 Zimmerman, Richard, 406 Zimov, Sergey, 499, 501 Zipes, Jack, 461 Žižek, Slavoj, 444, 448 Zoellick, Robert, 199 Zoning modifications, 556–​557 Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Braverman), 401, 403 Zoological Society of London, 401 Zoonotic diseases bovine spongiform encephalopathy, 283 from commensal species, 536 E. Coli, 199, 283 equine influenza, 244–​245 foot and mouth disease, 291 hydatid disease, 123

rabies. See Rabies Salmonella, 199, 283 transmission of, 3, 90 trypanosomiasis, 484 in urban ecosystems, 556 Zoöpolis, 547, 559 Zoos, 397–​410 anthropocentrism in, 403, 406 captivity and coercion in, 175, 405, 407 commensal species in, 535–​536 Detroit Zoo animal welfare and rescue, 11 ecological education from, 397, 403–​404 exploitation of animals in, 13, 403 funding for, 399 history and evolution of, 401–​402 human displays in, 402–​403 literature review, 398 negative perceptions of, 397–​398 objectification of animals in, 11, 13 positive perceptions of, 397 selection of species for, 403 spatial arrangement of, 408n9 stereotypy behaviors in, 375, 404, 405 subaltern nature of inhabitants, 400