Understanding

Living with animals

Opening thoughts

being in relation Rather, every organism – like every person – should be understood as the embodiment of a particular way of being alive, of a modus vivendi. Life, if you will, is the creative potential of a dynamic field of relationships in which specific beings emerge and take the forms they do, each in relation to the others. In that sense, life is not so much in organisms as organisms in life (Ingold 1990: 215; 2002: 57).

TIM INGOLD (2004) Beyond biology and culture. The meaning of evolution in a relational world, Social Anthropology, 12(2)

encounters To encounter is to trouble classification. Speciated reason, its categorizations of bodies, has long proceeded through burdened conflations with race. Taxonomies treat taxa as existents, ‘out there,’ to be found, compared, differentiated, grouped independent of the contexts in which they are encountered. Western taxonomies relegate other knowledges and ways of understanding. Classification here is arborescent. Species databases and genomic sequences are modern avatars of trees of life. But “it would be a mistake to assume much about species in advance of encounter.” Encounters point to taxa being occurrents, inseparable from the heterogeneous bodies, technologies and practices through which they are articulated. Multiple modes of knowledge are fused in classificatory schemes, evident when plicated histories of encounters between colonizer and colonized are unraveled. Encounters scramble genealogical trees: introgression and horizontal gene transfer happen across phyla and scales. They herald involutions, organismic filiations based on contagion and symbiosis.

Environmental Humanities, vol. 7, 2015, pp. 265-270 Maan Barua, Encounters

Opening images and questions

The Interrelationship between animals and humans: premises

Truth or belief?

Questions on how we human animals see other animals

Why is it ok for us to eat pigs and not dogs when both feel pain, suckle their young, are intelligent (the pig more so than the dog) and when both want to live?

Why do humans drink the breast milk of another species that in doing so causes terrible suffering for that other species?

Why do we see the category ‘animal’ as inferior to the category ‘human’ and why are some animals more inferior than others (to us)?

Why do we love our ‘pets’ so much that we puts clothes on them for decoration and our amusement?

Why are there so few, if any, wild animals left?

Why can an animal from the Artic be seen on the Gold Coast in a tiny jail?

In sum, how have we come to be positioned in and chosen and choose to see animals in certain ways, for example as, property, source of food and beverages, to be shot for fun, looked at for entertainment and so on. In short to configure human animals to be better than and in charge of non-human animals?

TENTATIVE ANSWERS

Because we can

Because we do not know enough

Because we do not care enough

Because many of us love cats and dogs but approximately 250000 (RSPCA figures) are killed each year in Australia as unwanted living beings while some people pay $4000 for a French Bulldog who cannot breath properly?

Because some of us want cheap and plentiful meat

Why do we simultaneously cage ‘wild’ animals for the good of their own species and simultaneously destroy their habitats?

In Fairness, some animals get to lead a great life ……….. Or do they?

Common terms in human-animal studies

• Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human qualities to non-human entities including animals

• Speciesism gives one species (human) moral superiority over others.

• Anthropocentrism is humanity’s understanding of the lives of others as being inferior to its own, ie, humans are the most important being on the planet.

• Human exceptionalism maintains that humanity is radically different from other life as a result of its capacities to reason, to reflect and to dominate animals and nature.

A very brief history

Different Versions of what animals CAN mean

In the first book of the Bible, alone among all the other creatures, God makes man in His own image, giving him dominion over and charging him to subdue the earth and all its denizens.

In ancient Greek philosophy, man is set apart from nature because he alone among the animals is supposed to be rational.

In the late medieval and early modern periods, thinkers as different from one another as Thomas Aquinas and Rene Descartes synthesized these two strands of thought, the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman. Thus the man/nature dualism in each augmented the other.

And Descartes’ contemporary, Francis Bacon, set the modern agenda for the scientific conquest of nature by man. If we can discover the working principles — the divinely ordained laws — of nature, he presciently pointed out, we can bend it to our will.

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/remaking-nature/2/steps/153860#references

The Elizabethan Period 1558 – 1603

Human-Animal Studies A SURVEY OF THE FIELD

Definition of Human-Animal Studies

‘However, while varied in methods employed, scholars in the field generally share a common approach to the subject matter. The HAS approach keys in on the presence and influence of nonhuman animals (hereafter, animals) as a way of looking at and understanding the world. It is a critical stance that explicates and evaluates how animals figure in our understanding and treatment of them, and their influence on us and on the world. Much as women’s studies and environmental studies rest, respectively, on the value of women and the environment, the critical stance of HAS scholars explicates and evaluates the objects of its study, HAR, in ethical terms—particularly on the value of valuing animals for themselves.’

Shapira, K (2020) ‘Human-Animal Studies: Remembering the Past, Celebrating the Present, Troubling the Future’ Society & Animals 28

‘Interfacing disciplines’ from Shapiro animal law

anthropology

art history

biosemiotics

Communications

conservation

criminology

cultural studies

development studies

education – environmental studies

Geography

history

literary studies

performance studies

philosophy

political theory and science

psychology

religion

semiotics

social zooarchaeology

sociology

urban studies

women’s and gender studies

‘Human-animal studies devoted journals’ Taken from Shapiro’s article above

Animal Law Review

Animal Sentience

Animal Studies

Animalia

Animals

Antennae

Anthrozoös

Between the Species

Human-Animal Interaction Bulletin

Humanimalia –

Journal for Critical Animal Studies

Journal of Animal Law and Policy

Journal of Applied Animal Ethics Research

Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science

Journal of Posthuman Studies

Mid-Atlantic Lyceum

Politics and Animals

Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism –

Sloth

Society & Animals

Trace: Finnish Journal for Human-Animal Studies

Journal of Animal Ethics

Journal of Animal Law

Journal of Animal Law and Ethics

Ways of knowing about humans- animals

Animals-humans understood as being located within different kinds of perspectives or discourses:

Social

Economic

Political

Cultural

Philosophical

Intersectional

Feminist

Post colonial

Post Human

Geographical

Anthropological

Scientific- evolutionary psychology and biology, evolution, zoological

‘Investigative approaches’ From Shapiro actor network theory

archival studies

case study

content analysis

controlled experiment

dialectic method

discourse analysis

ethnography

ethnomethodology

fieldwork

focus groups

grounded theory

interviews

narrative enquiry

participant observation

phenomenology

surface hermeneutics

survey

Places of human-animal encounters

Plate

Back yard

Inside the house

Slaughterhouse

In the wild

In the lab

In the sea

At the office

Everywhere ? scuttling cockroaches at my house, ants in my fence’s post, ………

In language, symbols and representations

Ignorance as a way of living with animals

background

We already and necessarily know animals as part of being human within a certain culture/s.

ZOOPOLIS DEFINED https://www.universityresearch.ca/projects/zoopolis-a-political-theory-of-animal-rights/

‘Zoopolis offers a new agenda for the theory and practice of animal rights. Most animal rights theory focuses on the intrinsic capacities or interests of animals, and the moral status and moral rights that these intrinsic characteristics give rise to. Zoopolis shifts the debate from the realm of moral theory and applied ethics to the realm of political theory, focusing on the relational obligations that arise from the varied ways that animals relate to human societies and institutions. Building on recent developments in the political theory of group-differentiated citizenship, Zoopolis introduces us to the genuine “political animal”. It argues that different types of animals stand in different relationships to human political communities. Domesticated animals should be seen as full members of human-animal mixed communities, participating in the cooperative project of shared citizenship. Wilderness animals, by contrast, form their own sovereign communities entitled to protection against colonization, invasion, domination and other threats to self-determination. “Liminal” animals who are wild but live in the midst of human settlement (such as crows or raccoons) should be seen as “denizens”, resident of our societies, but not fully included in rights and responsibilities of citizenship. To all of these animals we owe respect for their basic inviolable rights. But we inevitably and appropriately have very different relations with them, with different types of obligations. Humans and animals are inextricably bound in a complex web of relationships, and Zoopolis offers an original and profoundly affirmative vision of how to ground this complex web of relations on principles of justice and compassion.’

Epistemology of Ignorance and Human Privilege Ralph Acampora

‘This latter sub-discipline, [the epistemology of ignorance] examines not the truth-claims of a given body of knowledge, but rather the falsehoods and erroneous aspects of a body of myth or ideology. Linda Martin Alcoff surveys three models for the epistemology of ignorance: one in which ‘ignorance follows from the general fact of our situatedness as knowers’, a second which ‘relates ignorance to specific aspects of group identities’, and a third that ‘develops a structural analysis of the ways in which oppressive systems produce ignorance as one of their effects’ (40). It is this third model that holds the key to understanding the ways in which speciesism reduces the conceptual and thus practical prospects of zoopolis. Martin Alcoff paraphrases the structuralist model’s main argument thus

Methe arguments around zoopolis as agent of change is limited through based in specism. So zoopolis sits on specism to make it make sense ie presupposes specieism

‘cognitive norms of assessment’ 1. One of the key features of oppressive societies is that they do not acknowledge themselves as oppressive. Therefore, in any given oppressive society, there is a dominant view about the general nature of the society that represents its particular forms of inequality and exploitation as basically just and fair, or at least the best of all possible worlds.

2. It is very likely, however, that this dominant representation of the unjust society as a just society will have countervailing evidence on a daily basis that is at least potentially visible to everyone in the society.

3. Therefore, cognitive norms of assessment will have to be maintained that allow for this countervailing evidence to be regularly dismissed so that the dominant view can be held stable. (47) Applied to the case before us, the oppressive society is that of human privilege and the dominant view of its injustice is anthropocentrism.

What I shall undertake here, in concert with the emphasis on Frankfurt School critique that Martin Alcoff marshals

(50-56), is to reveal the cognitive norms of assessment that protect anthropocentrism from countervailing evidence in contemporary capitalist society. These norms are embedded in various practices and communications that include or derive from animal agriculture, zoos and circuses, and experimental laboratories

Video: Old MacDonald Had a Farm

Factory farming ‘The reality of factory farming has been knowable for decades, and yet it does not register on the collective psyche of society, because the Old MacDonald story, inculcated in childhood, prevails in tandem with associated imagery in advertising and packaging of animal products. There is a numbing of compassionate response to new realities that goes along with the old narrative, sufficient to overwhelm even the evidence of correlations between meat eating and various diseases. That is the strength of the MacDonald myth: it can outdo even self interest in our own health. As C. David Coats points out, ‘telling the idealized story of traditional farming bliss [brings] … the subtle, unwritten message that animals exist only to serve [hu]man’s needs’. Indeed, ‘this image of jolly service to the benevolent master unintentionally misleads us into the comfortable but false belief that farms are harmless, happy places’’ (28)

They do not live a happy life, they live a life infused with shocking cruelty for the benefit of humans, some of us.

Circuses and Zoos ‘Noah’s Ark If the story of Old MacDonald’s farm is the master narrative for animal agribusiness, then the story of Noah’s Ark is the meta-discourse for circuses and zoos. These latter institutions are illusorily held to be benign venues of salvation. Overall, it is claimed that there is ‘an air of pleasing domesticity’ about the circus (as per William Dean Howells, Davis 24).

Alongside the parable of Noah’s Ark, circuses are also fit into the normalizing discourse of imperial colonialism (Schwalm 80). In addition to dramatizing adventure stories and travel accounts, animal acts ‘embodied human mastery over animals and legitimated the colonization of nature’ by portraying them as natural relations (Schwalm 81ff.). Indeed, such is the power of getting people to accept circus practice as natural and appropriate that, though technically visible, the assorted cages, chains, and constraints used by operators disappear from the audience’s phenomenal experience, which enables continued patronage (Schwalm 89f.)’.

‘instrumental forms of ideological reason’: Conclusion

Conclusion It is now time to take stock of the topics discussed above. I have highlighted a few of the myths, narratives, and images that serve to legitimize in popular consciousness various ab/uses of other animals. The story of Old MacDonald’s farm, the parable of Noah’s ark, and the religious view of science (temple, sacrifice, et cetera) proffer pseudo-justifications, respectively, of factory farming and slaughter, zoos and circuses, and animal experimentation. These are instrumental forms of ideological reason that short-circuit any zoopolitan attempt at constituting citizenship, denizenship, or sovereignty for domestic, feral, or wild animals, respectively.

Human exceptionalism: conclusion

Taken together, they buttress dominionism and dress up human privilege for consumption by the public, allowing capitalist exploitation to grow. Illusion-producing machines, animal ideologies take root where there is a pre-existing lack of knowledge—for example, writing about the human uses of other animals, Orlans et al. admit ‘that at present we have no shared conception of what counts as a justifiable ‘harm’ and a justifiable ‘risk’ of harm for an [other] animal’ (32), and that situation is an invitation for ideology. The bottom line is that we see a reinforcement of human exceptionalism, which aids animal exploitation. Orlans and company put it bluntly at one point: ‘Humans receive the benefits, [other] animals the costs. [Nonhuman a]nimals are subjects or objects of sacrifice, humans are not’ (35). It is only by exposing and scrutinizing animal ideologies that exploitable and exploitative ignorance can be redressed.