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Relations, Power and the Limits of ‘Speciesism’

This chapter considers some of the themes and approaches developed within the emergent transdisciplinary ﬁeld of ‘animal studies’. My purpose here is to map the territory on which a more satisfactory socio logical approach to thinking about Other animals might be grounded. Chapter 3 will discuss why the discipline of sociology has come late to animal studies and will outline a theoretical framework for analysing species as a system of social relations. It will have to sufﬁce at this point, to say that talking about non-human animals and the ultimate Other of species has proven difﬁcult for a discipline whose boundaries were historically constituted around the designation of a sphere, an arena for study – ‘the social’ – which was deﬁned as exclusively human. How ever, as will be apparent in the pages that follow, some sociologists are attending to questions of species difference. There have been attempts to understand human-animal relations in terms of historical change, looking at animal ‘rights’ as a social movement, for example; or exam inations of changes in dominant forms of human-animal relations in modernity. Others have been interested in representations of animals in various cultural forms; or have examined the material contexts (such as industrialized agricultural production, or domesticated companion ship) in which animals are socially constituted.

I will argue here, that an adequate sociology of species must account for both the discursive and material placement of Other animals. It needs to map the institutional contexts and related practices of species relations, and consider the extent to which these change and/or recon stitute themselves over time. Working in a critical tradition of socio logical enquiry, I would add that we must imbue an analysis of species with an understanding of power. Sociology has contributed much to our understanding of the various forms of exclusions and inclusions

E. Cudworth, Social Lives with Other Animals © Erika Cudworth 2011

based on social differences – around ‘race’, ethnicity, region, class, gender, sexuality, age and so on. It has also made strong arguments for relations of oppression and exploitation constituted around these social differences. In animal studies, the concept of ‘speciesism’ has been of great importance in furthering the understanding of human relations with Other animals in terms of power relations based on dif ferences. However, there are limitations in the use of a concept based on a notion of discrimination. Speciesism, I will suggest, is not adequate for capturing the full range of our social relations with non-human animals.

The sections of this chapter focus on key elements I consider neces sary in the development of a sociology of species: social change, ques tions of epistemology and ontology, power relations, discourse and material practice. We begin with a consideration of the question of change in species relations, looking at the different constructions of animals and different social practices of species in relatively recent Western history. The chapter then moves on to a consideration of various epistemologies that are at work when animals are discussed. In the critiques made here I will suggest the need for a generally critical realist approach to understanding both non-human animals and our relations with them. Third, we consider the political question of rights, which importantly introduces an analysis of power into species rela tions. I subject the notion of speciesism to criticism both here, and in the section which follows on the analysis of speciesism in the history of ideas and in cultural texts. The chapter ends with a consideration of more sociological analyses of human relations with non-human animals. I have chosen these speciﬁcally because they relate to the case studies which come later in this book: the use of animals as food and the keep ing of animals as companions. They will hopefully enable me to make my case for a theorization of species which, whilst foregrounding the human domination of Other animals, is sensitive to differences in the kind and degree of human practices, and allows some consideration for agency that is not exclusively human.

Changing relations of species

Our relations with non-human animals are historically situated – they have shifted in terms of the social forms they assume and the pre dominant discourses which abound. Animals have played important roles in the making of human social institutions and practices through time, and as Erica Fudge notes, writing animals into history does not mean writing a history of animals, but ‘writing a more complete history of humanity…and…recognizing a change in humanities status and therefore challenging what “humanity” might mean’ (2008: 5–6). This kind of history also gives us a glimpse of shifting relations of species. There is a speculative pre-historical literature which suggests that homo sapiens did not see themselves as fundamentally different from and superior to other creatures or in a position of domination over them (Ingold, 1994; Noske, 1997). It is often held to be the fundamental transition from a nomadic to a settled form of existence with the develop ment of farming that enabled the systematic subjugation of non-human animals and the development of intimate knowledge about them (Serpell, 1996 [1986]). Social organization has shifted dramatically with new prac tices, technologies and social forms casting different kinds of relations between human and other animals. There is quite a substantial literature documenting the shifting discursive regimes (from those broadly theo logical to those generally scientiﬁc) and material forms of human rela tions with non-human animals in Western modernity, and it is on this more certain terrain that we will focus here in thinking about changing patterns of human-animal relations.

Keith Thomas (1983), analysing changing attitudes towards animals in early modern England from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries, sees some dramatic shifts in both popular perception and in the material treatment of animals. He articulates a common theme in the literature that attitudes to animals changed with the onset of the processes of economic, social and political modernization in the seven teenth century. According to Thomas (1983), in Tudor England most people lived a predominantly rural existence in close proximity to domestic animals with which in winter, they were often compelled to share accommodation. Animals were crucial to human ways of life, providing food, transport and labour power. Human relations towards Other animals were, in Thomas’s view, characterized by both con tingency and ‘anthropocentricity’ as according to Christian orthodoxy, humans had absolute rights to use animals as they saw ﬁt. Despite the immediacy of animals in people’s lives, Thomas paints a picture of complete indifference to the possible sufferings of non-human animals. Practices now often considered cruel, were normative – such as bear and bull baiting, and the stoning of dogs. The emergence of scientiﬁc knowledge undermined the previously theological view of the world and by the nineteenth century, had deﬁned humans as ‘mere’ animals amongst many, albeit at the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder (1983: 166–7). Society grew less dependent on animal power with the advent

f mechanization, and the physical separation of humans from Other animals increased with the spread of urbanization. Thomas also sug- gests animals became increasingly sentimentalized as they decreased in utilitarian signiﬁcance, and in the eighteenth century, the practice
f pet keeping grew in urban areas. The sentimentalization and prox- imity to companion animals encouraged the notion that animals were individuals with personalities, and Thomas sees this as linked to the formation of urban based movements for animal welfare and debates about ‘animal rights’ at the turn of the nineteenth century (1983: 119). Thus for Thomas, dramatic social changes, such as those associated with urbanization, led to the discursive and material restructuring of human relations with animals. This was combined with boundaries placed on anthropocentrism with the development of scientiﬁc knowledge.
- Adrian Franklin (1999) suggests however, that change was also pat-
terned with continuities. For example, animals continued to have util- itarian uses as transportation in urban areas. In addition, it is uncertain that contemporary discourses were homogeneous in the early modern period. As John Passmore (1980) argues, Christian thought is also char- acterized by a ‘stewardship tradition’ which sees non-human nature as a divine creation for which humans take responsibility, albeit that the anthropocentric discourse came to be predominant. In early modern Europe, Erica Fudge (2006) argues that alongside the inﬂuential version
f the ‘Great Chain of Being’ coming from Thomas Aquinas, there are contestationary discourses of compassion for other animals and human
bligations to them, exempliﬁed by Michael de Montaignes famous essay ‘Of cruelty’. Elsewhere, Fudge (2000) details the contradictory placement
f animals in Early Modern England. In English Law, animals were held to be without reason and intent, therefore incapable of committing a crime, whereas in France, animals were tried and, most usually, executed for their ‘crimes’. In England, animals were objects; and only owners of
bjects could be punished. There were ambiguities even in this seemingly clear legal position. Keith Tester (1991: 71) considers that Thomas places excessive emphasis on ‘pet keeping’ in altering sensibilities towards animals. Finally, such a process of sentimentalization has been seen as a peculiarly Western European and North American phenomenon. Pets
f pre-modern times, and non-Western spaces were understood very differently (Tuan, 1984: 112).
- This consideration of cultural speciﬁcity and the spatialized qualities of
formations of human-animal relations is echoed by some ecofeminists who have examined historical links between formations of gender and human relations with animals. Vandana Shiva (1988) argues that in

precolonial India under the inﬂuence of Hindu philosophy, animals were understood as endowed with spirit. It was the colonial spread of scientiﬁc rationalism which deﬁned non-human animals, along with the rest of ‘nature’, as inert objects. In emphasizing the historically intersection alized constitution of the domination of non-human animals and of women, Carolyn Merchant (1980: 3–5) suggests that modern Western scientiﬁc culture established the notion of a hierarchy of species and legit imated human domination over animals. The ‘Great Chain of Being’, she suggests, was not only concerned with the moral compass of species, but with gender also for women were placed closer to animals. The discursive linking of women with animals is telling. As Fudge (2006: 105) also notes, contemporaries of Montaigne in the seventeenth century, dismissed his writings about animals as ‘womanish’. Interesting parallels have also been examined between the European fascination with the scientiﬁc class iﬁcation of classes, types and genealogies, and those of species. Discourses of racism, gender relations and class, as well as the social construction of ‘nature’, permeate scientiﬁc writings and theories about animals, parti cularly primates in the nineteenth century (Haraway, 1989). The class iﬁcation of ‘rare’ species from the Southern Hemisphere was part of the cultural process of colonialism and the constitution of Eurocentric notions of civilized and uncivilized places and spaces, including their human and animal populations (see Gregory, 2001).

Tester (1991) concentrates on the imposition of social relationships through regulation of human relations with other animals. He draws on the work of Norbert Elias in suggesting that the development of anti-cruelty legislation was part of the ‘civilizing process’ to discipline the working class (Tester, 1991: 68–88). The regulation of cruelty to animals was ‘a stick to beat social unruliness and “beastliness”’ of the lower social orders (1991: 88–9). Tester’s account is certainly anthro pocentric, yet it does seem that the nineteenth century discourses of animal rights and protection may have had more of a negative effect in disciplining working class communities than a beneﬁcial effect on animals. For example, the banning of certain practices, such as dogs pulling carts in nineteenth century London, did not lead to a lessening of suffering for those dogs involved – most were killed, being too costly to maintain (Fudge, 2002: 100). Tester argues that nineteenth century debates were fraught with disputes around demands for difference from and ‘similitude’ with non-human animals. The latter, which was an element of both scientiﬁc and political discourse held that many animals were seen as similar to humans in their capacity for happiness and pain, and that humans were themselves animals (Tester, 1991:

121–31). Certainly versions of these discourses percolate through debates in the politics of animal protection and rights, animal studies and the pages of this book.

Franklin (1999) considers that key changes in species relations have taken place very recently. At the end of the twentieth century people spend more time with animals, and do things involving animals more often than they did a century ago. The quality of our relationships with animals has changed signiﬁcantly, as the categorical boundary between human and other animal species has been challenged with ‘postmodernization’. In Franklin’s account, the social causes of such shifts in human-animal relations are ‘ontological insecurity’, risk, and misanthropy. Modernity deﬁned humans as rational, capable of self improvement and potential goodness, and established clear boundaries between humans and ‘other animals’. From the seventeenth to the twentieth century animals were treated primarily as a resource for human improvement, so that meat eating, the use of animals in research and so on, became standard practices. As we move towards postmodernity however, ‘misanthropy’ has become a feature of contemporary social life as we collectively reﬂect on our destruction of the natural world. Animals are also associated with a sense of ‘risk’; which can be seen in food scares, concerns about the preservation of ‘wildlife’, and more generally, growing anxieties about environmental pollution that conceptualize humans and animals as subject to a similar threat. Finally, individuals suffer ‘onto logical insecurity’ due to a depletion of family ties, sense of community and neighbourhood with changes in domestic relations (increased divorce rates and re-marriage) and patterns of employment (with ‘ﬂexible’ labour markets, higher unemployment and less job security). Con sequently, they look to relationships with pets to provide stability and a sense of permanence in their lives (1999: 36). Thus we are developing ‘increasingly empathetic and decentred relationships’ with other species and this can be evidenced across a range of sites of human-animal rela tions – from entertainment to food, pet keeping to hunting (1999: 35). This makes some signiﬁcant and empirically unsubstantiated sociological assumptions however; for example, that certain social changes (such as those in the structure of the family in the family) have led to certain practices (for example, more people keeping pets), and that the reasons people do so is to provide security.

Whilst human relations with animals have altered in Western societies over the last three hundred years, within each historical period there have been different and competing conceptions of how humans can relate to other animals and continuity and change in material practices. A picture of a process of increasing sentimentality ignores the contradictions embedded in our relations with animals and the ways different kinds of relations with different speciﬁc kinds of animals are co-constitutive of our relations with each other, and cross cut by formations of social hierarchy. Species relations alter historically in various ways and to different degrees. Whatever the questions raised by some of these accounts of changes in the discursive and material positioning of Other animals, they all empha size the embedding of species relations in human cultures, and problem atize humanocentrist history. They also attempt to account for ways in which species is cast and recast as a means of social distinction.

Ontologies of Other animals

These accounts above, and indeed all interventions in animal studies, are representative of different ontological and epistemological positions. Despite the obvious inaccuracies of typologies, I consider that broadly, there are three different kinds of accounts of human-animal relations – various kinds of social constructionism, deconstruction and critical realism. These positions are not necessarily tightly bound for individual theorists slip across the categories of any kind of taxonomy through dif ferent kinds of writing at different times. Notwithstanding this proviso however, I will argue here for a position of critical realism with respect to the concept of species, our knowledge of Other animals and our rela tions with them. I consider that this is compatible with, and in some ways similar to, the contingent foundationalism necessitated by com plexity inﬂected analysis, on which I draw in Chapter 3.

Constructing Other animals

For the sociologist Keith Tester (1991) whose historical account of animal rights we have just considered, animals do not have a nature or being in themselves, they only have whatever being we humans decide to give them. So:

A ﬁsh is only a ﬁsh if it is socially classiﬁed as one, and that class iﬁcation is only concerned with ﬁsh to the extent that scaly things living in the sea help society deﬁne itself. After all, the very word ‘ﬁsh’ is a product of the imposition of socially produced categories on nature…animals are…a blank paper which can be ascribed with any message, any symbolic meaning that the social wishes (1991: 46).

In this ontology of animals as symbols, animals only exist in the ways humans imagine them and this is a strong form of social constructionism in which all we can know about animals depends on social interpret ations. As Luke Martell (1994) has pointed out, this is a form of reduc tionism which overemphasizes the power of ‘society’ in determining the world. It is obvious that how we classify animals such as ﬁsh inevitably depends upon what kinds of classiﬁcations we humans have developed, but what we know about animals is also dependent on certain objective properties which pertain to animals. ‘Fish’ are not arbitrarily classiﬁed, but have certain characteristics (such as living in water and having scales) which we use to distinguish them from certain other sorts of creatures. Andrew Collier (1994) suggests that if we accept Tester’s characterization of animals as being whatever we would want them to be, then solving marine pollution would be easy: ‘we could reclassify lumps of untreated sewage as “ﬁsh”’! (Collier, 1994: 89).

For Tester, how we think about animals does not tell us about the ontological condition of animals, but about ourselves. So for example, the ethics of animal rights ‘is not a morality founded on the reality of animals, it is a morality about what it is to be an individual human who lives a social life’ (Tester, 1991: 16). Animal rights has nothing to do with any concern for sufferings humans may inﬂict upon animals, but is about humans making themselves feel ‘good’ as moral agents arguing for those who cannot argue for themselves (1991: 78). Some element of realism therefore seems a necessary foundation for argu ments for animal rights or welfare or for a more compassionate treat ment of Other species, for if animals cannot be seen as independent beings that are able to feel or ﬂourish, they cannot be ill-treated. Tester offers us an account of human-animal relations which is clearly socio logical but highly anthropocentric and of little help in considering the speciﬁcity of human relations with non-human animals; for animals, in this analysis could be replaced with any other marginalized social group.

Donna Haraway is slippery, moving between more and less strongly constructionist approaches both across and, sometimes (rather exasper atingly) within her work. In much of her writing of the 1990s she has a strong constructionist conceptualization of animals. With reference to scientiﬁc studies of primates for example, she contends that studies of animal behaviour tell us little about the animals themselves, but do tell us about the social locations and political opinions of the people who undertook the research (Haraway, 1989). Elsewhere, she adopts the extreme position of Tester and describes animals as ‘blank paper’ for human inscriptions (Haraway, 1991: 6). Famously of course, she contends modern societies are increasingly populated by ‘cyborgs’, resultant from the blurred and permeable boundaries of distinction between humans, nature (other animals and plant life) and machines. She has examined contemporary developments in and the represent ational regimes of corporate biotechnology and suggests for example, that the ‘OncoMouse’, the world’s ﬁrst patented mammal, born for research purposes with cancer-bearing genes, is an ‘interesting’ cyborg obviating a critique of the socially constituted power of species which enables mice to be bred as research tools (Haraway, 1997).

Problems with these strongly constructionist approaches do not mean that social constructionism can be dismissed as an approach; rather, it is crucial to any problematization of the status of non-human animals. Constructionism needs to be deployed critically however and with an acknowledgment of non-human being. As Leslie Irvine makes clear in her own usage: ‘I do not mean to say that individual animals themselves are social constructions…many canine and feline behaviours exist indepen dent of human ideas of them’ (2004: 34). In addition she argues, similarly to Shapiro (1990: 193), we experience individual animals through ‘com plex and sedimented’ layering of socially constituted categories, as well as through our lived histories with non-human animals and our engage ments with them. This more critical usage has been apparent in Haraway’s work since the early 2000s and her abandonment of the cyborg labora tory mouse, for the dog. She now suggests that the relationship between human and non-human animals is best served by the understandings of ‘companion species’. Dogs and humans do not predate their relation ship, in this view for ‘there have to be a least two to make one… I have a dog. My dog has a human’ (2003: 12). Thus, we are co-deﬁned and co constituted – ‘Every species is a multi-species crowd’ and we emerge as subjects, together with the mass of our inter-relationships, without species purity (2008: 165). The key to our relations with dogs, is training, which as Haraway does admit, is ‘committed to near total control in the interests of fulﬁlling human intensions’ (2003: 43–4). She argues however that the positive conversations we have with dogs as companions – games, laughter and jokes – can only be achieved through training because it is this which facilitates and enables the dog in what is, a human world (2003: 50). As such, she refers to the relations of companion species as a process of ‘becoming-with’ another species (Haraway, 2008: 3).

Haraway’s preferred ontology, that of ‘agential realism’ is based on real ities emergent through action in which we are ‘messmates’ and ‘com rades’ with animal companions (2008: 17). What it not acknowledged in this however, is that in the ‘human world’, the agency of species such as companion dogs, is limited compared to that of humans. Meetings between the species very often have most unhappy endings because social relations remain strongly hierarchical, and it is non-human ani mals who, predominantly are unmade by human social institutions and practices. Ultimately, whether talking of OncoMouse or the ‘dogs of her heart’ – Roland Dog and Ms Cayenne Pepper – Haraway’s analysis of the power of social institutions and practices in shaping the lives of animals is tenuous. Haraway is interested in using some complexity inﬂected con cepts in considering the relations between humans and Other animals, but the way in which she uses them is very different from my own, as will be seen in the next chapter. For example, Haraway uses symbio genesis but whilst this may be apposite for the bacteria so beloved of bio logist Lynn Margulis, it does not help much in tracking the social history of some of the species we are co-constituted with, such as farmed ani mals. Haraway hopes, she says, to have ‘met’ Carol Adams in her more recent work, but she still ‘protects the dominance that ontologizes ani mals as edible just as the sheepdogs she celebrates protect the ontologized “livestock”’ (Adams, 2006: 126). Here, animals exercise any agency they have in circumstances most unlikely to be of their own choosing and the different kinds of animal agency enabled by different social forms of species relations is a question to which we must later return.

Some work in animal studies has been very much inﬂuenced by a rather different articulation of the term ‘becoming’, the notion of ‘becoming animal’ from an essay by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This does not suggest that we imitate or identify with animals as such, but that our understandings of the world might be transformed by an encounter, how ever ﬂeeting with non-human perspectives. Deleuze and Guattari identify three types of animals – ‘Oedipal’ animals who are individual, familiar and belong to us, such as companion animals, ‘state animals’ which are understood in taxonomic terms and ‘demonic animals’ which are understood primarily in terms of aesthetic collectivities of ‘wild’ animals. ‘Becomings’ are multiplicities – the dynamic sets of differences which characterize both human and non-human animals. Each animal can be a pack or a multiplicity, an assemblage, as are we, human animals and this enables the possibility of ‘afﬁnity’ in human-animal relationships, parti cularly with ‘exceptional animals’, anomalous members of a species. The project of ‘becoming-animal’ is, not, to my mind, ultimately about embod ied animals (be they human or non-human) very much at all. Rather, it concerns human fantasies of the self as an outsider, and is closer here to the kinds of arguments made by Tester than those of Haraway. While we might forgive Deleuze and Guattari for having little to say about actual animals, or human-animal relations in the world beyond the text, this does not make their work particularly useful in understanding histor ical and contemporary social forms of species relations.

However, where they do make assertions about certain kinds of relations in the world, such as those with ‘pets’, these are highly prob lematic, and for this, they may not be excused. Their scorn for ordinary lives and loving relations is clear:

….individuated animals, family pets, sentimental Oedipal animals each with its own petty history, ‘my cat’, ‘my dog’. These animals invite us to regress… Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 240 original italics).

‘Becoming-animal’, they assert, ‘has nothing to do with a sentimental or domestic relation’ (1987: 244). They deserve Haraway’s venom here for no interpretive or reading strategies of this ambiguous and often contradictory work can avoid the fact that:

The old, female, small, dog- and-cat-loving: these are who and what must be vomited out by those who will become-animal. Despite the keen competition, I am not sure I can ﬁnd in philosophy a clearer display of misogyny, fear of aging, incuriosity about animals, and horror at the ordinariness of ﬂesh, here covered by the alibi of an anti-Oedipal and anti-capitalist project (Haraway, 2008: 30).

In Deleuze and Guattari’s defence, they do allow that we might be sur prised in our encounters with domestic pets, for example, even a cat or dog can ‘be treated in the mode of the pack or swarm’ (1987: 241, my emphasis). Even so, their account is more useful for cultural rather than sociological analysis. Deluzian theorists like art historian Steve Baker ﬁnd it useful because they adopt a strong form of social construc tionism and consider that non-human animals can only be understood as symbols. Baker (2000: 185) is therefore, amused and surprised when Jacques Derrida tries to speak of a ‘real’ animal, his cat, as an indi vidual. But Derrida’s understanding of ‘the animal’ is rather different to that of social constructionism. As we will now see, when it comes to non-human animals, I think Derrida’s deconstruction is also keeping it real – relatively so, of course.

Deconstructing the animal?

For Derrida, the intellectual task at hand is revealing the absurdity of ‘the animal’. This is the key to a re-articulation of human-animal relations and Derrida is interesting in that his writings make clear that the (real) suffering of animals calls for this most urgently. Whilst Derrida decon structs the human/animal binary, ‘animals’ in all their incredible diver sity are no blank paper.

For Derrida, the Western conception of the human as an autonomous, rational being able to make decisions and choices about actions has only developed alongside, and in contradistinction to, the ‘animal’. So when we speak of the human we inevitably also speak of ‘the animal’; and just as constructions of the ‘animal’ have often been fantastic, the ‘human’ is also a ‘fantasy ﬁgure’ (Wolfe, 2003b: 6). Derrida’s project is to prob lematize the classical formulations of the human-animal distinction in Western thought. In particular, there is a need to question the binary assumptions that undergird it, which are anthropocentric, or for Derrida, ‘anthropo-theomorphic’. This involves a decentring of human subject ivity and relatedly, the consideration that the Other we face is not always a human Other. Ultimately, Derrida argues for an abandonment of the concept of ‘the Animal’ (in the singular, with a capital ‘A’) because this is the word:

…that men have given themselves at the origin of humanity and that they have given themselves in order to identify themselves, in order to recognise themselves, with a view to being what they say they are, namely men (2002: 400).

The ‘animal’ is a meaningless generalization – a ‘catch-all concept… this vast encampment of the animal’ (2002: 399). The use of the general plural brings ‘the Animal’ up sharp against its namer – the Human. Here then, in exposing the Animal as a falsity, difference disappears, not only from the multiplicity of non-human animal species, but from the ‘Human’ too. I think however, that we need to expose the constructed politics of the designation ‘animal’ whilst hanging on the concepts of difference amongst humanimalia of various cultures, times and types and embedding these in our theorizations.

Derrida is also interested in the subjection of animals, and sees this as an increasing trend. He writes strongly here and is brave enough to offer a nuanced comparison between human genocide and the treat ment of animals – arguing in fact that not to do so is anthropocentric (Derrida, 2002: 395). He asks us to consider our treatment of particular animals in particular times and spaces and writes about the subjection associated with genetic manipulation, farming and meat production, animal experimentation and so on which have transformed the lives and conditions of possibility for non-human animals (2002: 394). Des pite Derrida’s obvious sympathies with animal rights philosophies and the politics of animal liberation, he suggests that arguing for rational ity and ethical consistency, and focusing on the abilities and sufferings of non-human animals, may not be the most effective way of address ing human exclusivity and animal abuse. Rather, Derrida posits that the vulnerability of other embodied animals, when faced with the con ditions of limitation and pain we impose on them, means that we can not but be affected by animal suffering (2002: 396). In the face of the animal Other, it is compassion and pity which has the power to trans form these relations of subjugation. But how can we know of the vulnerability and suffering of non-human species?

Derrida argues that a key problem is that anthropocentric dogma stands in for the sophisticated understandings of ethology, or even per sonal observation or experience with ‘animals’ (2003: 135). In these observations and relations, Derrida suggests that response is possible and this throws the question back at Lacan and his ‘Cartesian tradition of the animal-machine that exists without language and without the ability to respond’ (2003: 121). Derrida asks how our understandings of the world would be ruptured if we thought animals could communicate in ways similar to those in which humans do. Language is insufﬁcient as a means of response, for humans use all kinds of means – and if language is undone as an exclusive marker of ‘response’ then so is human power. He argues that many non-human animals do have the ability to respond, and that many non-human animals are aware of themselves in the world (Derrida, 2008: 153–60). As ethologists like Marc Bekoff have shown, many other mammals communicate with us ‘in their own ways, and if we make an effort to understand their communications, we can learn much about what they are saying. If Wittgenstein had actually gotten off his couch and watched animals, he might agree’ (2002: 38). Watching, looking at animals and the experience of being watched, is an important element. Derrida writes at length in ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am….’ about his ‘real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the ﬁgure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on the earth…’ (2002: 374, original emphasis) and ponders what the cat is thinking, on seeing him naked. In his discomfort, Derrida suggests the difﬁculty in abandoning human mastery and the self possession of ani mals, of the disjuncture we experience in engaging with ‘the point of view of the absolute other’ (Derrida, 2008: 57–62). Unfortunately, he steps back from the question of his actual relation with this real cat, and shies from a consideration of the speciﬁc qualities of this kind of domestic relationality.

In his ﬁne and generally sympathetic analysis and critique of Derrida’s work on the ‘question of the animal’, Matthew Calarco argues that Derrida ultimately cannot let the human-animal distinction go, but insists on reﬁning and reworking it (Calarco, 2008: 148–9). Calarco argues for the abolition of the ‘guardrails of the human-animal distinction’ and suggests that we invent new modes of living with non-human animals and of thinking about them (2008: 149). This is part of a new politics – one that is postliberal and posthumanist, which leaves the liberal humanist subject behind and embraces all species (2008: 6). I think however, this is a step too far, and that Derrida is right to be more cautious. Out there in the world, in the web of social practices and institutions which non-human animals (particularly those we have ‘domesticated’) are very much caught, species structures material practice. The political difference of species has real effects on the lives and deaths of non-human animals, and we can not lose hold of it. We need the highly problematic human-animal dis tinction as the theoretical basis of a politics that contests the social power of species and does not reduce non-human animals to sets of symbols. They are that, but they are also, more.

Keeping it (relatively) real

Certain lines of thought in animal studies have expended much effort on analysing the social constitution of the animal, or, problematizing categories and revealing our dichotomous simplicities. Another trajec tory has been to focus not only on our ideas and beliefs about animals, but to bring (real) animals back into the picture and talk more con cretely about differences and speciﬁcities of particular species.

An important source of such thinking has been animal ethology (the study of animal behaviour and cognition). The work of the biologist Marc Bekoff is well known, and Bekoff has done much to counter the critique of ‘anthropomorphism’ levied in the natural sciences against those who imagine the thinking’s and feelings of other animal species. He argues that:

If one is a good Darwinian, it is premature to claim that only humans can be empathetic and moral beings. By asking the question ‘What is it like to be another animal?’ we can discover rules of engagement that guide animals in their social encounters. When I study dogs, for exam ple, I try to be ‘dogocentrist’ and practice ‘dogomorphism’…I have suggested that we be ‘biocentrically anthropomorphic’ and that by doing so we do not necessarily lose the animal’s point of view… The way we describe and explain the behaviour of other animals is inﬂu enced and limited by the language we use to talk about things in

general. By engaging in anthropomorphism we make the world of other animals accessible to ourselves and to other human beings (Bekoff, 2007b: 71–3).

Bekoff has studied a range of species insisting on the complexity of animal behaviour and, importantly, the awareness and emotional lives of particular species and individuals considering grief, joy, love, play, depression and rivalry (see also Masson and McCarthy, 1996). He is keen to illustrate the similarities between humans and certain species (for example, the possession of a sense of self by non-human Great Apes and monkeys, future planning and morality in dogs). However, a more important line of inquiry for Bekoff is the particular physical and cognitive skills and capabilities that different species, and cultures within a species, possess; and relationship between individuals and their wider species communities (2002: 91–9; 120–8). For example, there are differ ences in hunting traditions amongst cetaceans and the young animals are socialized into these different traditions (2002: 13). Bekoff’s work showcases a wide variety of species as independent biological beings with their own physiological and psychological needs and their own social lives and relations. There is incredible species difference, but for Bekoff, and in my view, for a sociological account of human relations with Other animals, the question is ‘What difference makes a differ ence’ (2002: 138). Species is a difference, and manifests itself in differ ent kinds, types, behaviours and orientations to the world. Human social relations also shape the biology and sociality of other species in ways in which animals are incorporated into and co-constituted with, social institutions and practices.

The sociologist Ted Benton (1993) has sought to develop a theory of human-animal relations which incorporates certain ecological insights such as the concept of natural limits on resources, ethological work on sociality and culture amongst some non-human animals, alongside socialist and feminist theories of equality and rights. In doing so, Benton effectively draws on a range of biological and anthropological studies of the ‘social life of animals’ in order to argue that many species have over lapping forms of ‘species life’ with humans (also Birke, 1995: 39). Benton argues for a naturalistic understanding of human society in which humans are seen to be both biologically embodied, with certain animal needs (food, sex) and socially and ecologically embedded. He challenges the presumption of human separateness from ‘other’ animals, arguing that we should think about ‘differentiations’ rather than differences between animal species (1993: 45–57).

Differentiations of species, and particular social, economic and eco logical contexts give rise to different categories of human-animal rela tionship. Certain non-human animals may be labourers of various kinds (from guarding, carrying and pulling to sophisticated work such as guid ing visually impaired humans); some species will be food and resources (including for human clothing and shelter needs); a limited number may be companions; and many are ‘wild’ (that is, outside incorporation into human social practices, or in conditions of limited incorporation). In addi tion, Benton categorizes animals as human entertainment (in hunting, shooting, ﬁshing and ﬁghting, for example), as cultural symbols and as human ediﬁcation (for example in ‘wildlife’ documentaries) (Benton, 1993: 2–8). Benton uses these categories in arguing that humans and animals stand in social relationships to each other, that animals are con stitutive of human societies and that these relationships are incredibly varied across time and cultural space. These relationships are fundamental to the structuring of human societies, we are socially interdependent with animals and also ecologically interdependent (1993: 68–9). In arguing that animals are creatures with different constitutions, different species of which are in different social relationships with humans, Benton is advocating a position at odds with the idea that animal relationships are ideological constructions with purely ideological functions. Rather, he emphasizes the material co-dependency of humans and animals, albeit that these co-dependencies are constituted through dramatically iniqui tous relations of power. As we saw in the previous chapter, the relational typology developed by Kate Stewart and Matthew Cole (2009) emphasizes the extent to which the use and categorization of individual animals and collective species are contingent and socially constructed, as evidenced by cultural and historical variability. Mary Phillips has argued that these kinds of categories are enormously powerful in shaping material practices. Her interviews with laboratory scientists revealed that ‘The cat or dog in the lab is perceived by researchers as ontologically different from the pet dog or cat in the home’ (Phillips, 1994: 121, see also Birke, 1994). Thus the social location of species relations enables an understanding of the timealized and spatialized qualities of particular relations with particular species and their socially constituted realities.

Benton’s contribution places notions of animal rights in the context of social justice, and argues that the difﬁculty with the rights discourse is its inability to take account of the prevailing social structures and relations of certain places at certain historical junctures (1993: 210). He asserts that ‘under prevailing patterns of animal use and abuse’ rights are not likely to do much to alleviate animal suffering. Because animals are in and of human societies, ‘co-evolving’ (1993: 211) with them, we need fundamental changes in human social practices before we will see any shift in the treatment of animals. This is a vital point – human social practices constitute the power relations of species, and it is this which is so absent from rights based accounts of human-animal relations. As Benton suggests, for example, whilst the abolition of factory farming is a moral imperative, this will only be achieved through signiﬁcant changes in the economic relations of capitalist agriculture and the social organization of farming. Benton indicates the signiﬁcance of a socio logical contribution here in his understanding of human-animal relations as socially, culturally and spatially located and embedded, and as having species speciﬁc formations. Benton uses Marxist inﬂected sociology in order to focus, in the main, on the question of rights. As we will later see however, others have used such an approach to look in detail, speciﬁcally at the social formations in which certain animals are framed. Whilst therefore, it is essential to consider the social construction of ‘the animal’ in contradistinction to the human, and to trace the pro cesses through which animals are socially constructed, we cannot dis solve other species into their symbolic reference in human cultures. Non-human animals are a ﬁction, as Derrida suggests, but as he also acknowledges, they have their own reality. For many ‘animal’ species, their worlds are co-constituted with our own but they also have their own species being in addition to individual orientations to the world. It is not sufﬁcient however, for sociologists merely to say that animals are co-constitutive of human social arrangements. If the human-animal distinction is socially constituted and maintained over time, and non human animals are cast in relationships in which human interests prevail, then we need a political language to capture this.

Rights talk: power, difference and oppression

Peter Singer has been much feted as the ﬁrst to use the terminology of ‘liberation’, ‘oppression’ and ‘discrimination’ with reference to human relations with animals, and invoking Jeremy Bentham’s well-known utilitarian maxim with respect to animal suffering. The key concept underpinning Singer’s theorization is the concept of ‘speciesism’ (ﬁrst used by Richard Ryder in 1975) to describe a prejudicial attitude, which is parallel to racism or sexism and involves the judgement of an indi vidual or group on the basis of group membership and in terms of the hierarchical ranking of groups. Animals for Singer, are oppressed, exploited and discriminated against in a society that is ‘speciesist’. ‘Speciesism’ (a corollary to racism and sexism) is the belief humans are entitled to treat members of other species in ways in which it would be deemed morally wrong to treat other humans (see Rollin, 1981: 89–90). In short, speciesism is discrimination based upon species membership.

Singer (1990) and rights theorist Tom Regan (1988) base part of their case for a transformation in human relations with Other animals, on material drawn from the study of animal biology, which indicates con scious awareness in non-human animals. They contend animals have rights because they are ‘sentient’ that is, they are capable of experiencing pain, suffering and pleasure and have interests in avoiding pain and suffering. Mary Midgley concurs that we should extend the principle of moral worth from humans to other animals, and treat ‘all sentient beings as inside the moral community’ (1983: 89). Singer, Regan, Midgley and others tend to use an image of moral progress and improvement, thus as Ryder puts it ‘an ever-widening moral circle’ into which new ‘classes of sufferers…are drawn’ (Ryder, 2000: 3; Singer, 1985). Such theorists tackle the anthropocentric assumptions that animals are not entitled to rights because they do not have interests that can be expressed in speech or thought (as articulated for example, by Frey, 1983: 109, also Frey, 1980). Midgley draws on the ‘argument from marginal cases’ here in suggesting that we would also preclude rights to humans if they were babies, or had some form of difﬁculty communicating through speech (1983: 56–60). Gary Francione considers that the overwhelming use of animals by humans is unnecessary and ‘merely further the satisfaction of human pleasure, amusement or convenience’ at the expense of ‘an enormous amount of animal pain, suffering and death’ (Francione, 2000: 9).

However, expanding the ‘circle’ of ethical concern from different groups of suffering humans to non-human animals can be problematic, as it ignores the vast differences across the multivariate animal species (Cooper, 1995: 141). Singer argues that all vertebrate animal groups (that is, mammals, birds, ﬁsh, reptiles and amphibians) are ‘sentient’, and this is a sufﬁcient criterion for moral status. The distinction between sentient and non-sentient animals is an important distinction for Singer. Whilst many of those animals we use and kill (farmed animals, many of those, particularly mammals, used in experimentation) care about how they are used and killed, many other species don’t and thus in itself, animal use is not necessarily problematic. In Francione’s view however, the fact that a being is sentient necessarily means that the being has an interest in continued existence and he rejects the view that animals only have an interest in the speciﬁc ways in which we use them, rather than whether we use them at all.

Given the incredible difference across the range of ‘animal’ species, Regan has developed an even more limited conception of which animals deserve rights than Singer, but unlike Singer, has a broader understanding of what those rights might consist. He argues that in order to have rights, animals must be the ‘subjects of a life’ (1988: 367), and that this only applies to animals (speciﬁcally mammals) with certain similarities to humans. Through this preoccupation with similarities between certain species and human beings, the animal rights philosophy of Regan and Singer remains framed by humanism. Regan in particular, stresses the similarities between humans and mammals, particularly primates, all being ‘subjects of a life’ – conscious creatures with individual welfare needs, beliefs and preferences. Yet whatever the problems with Regan and Singer’s humanocentrism, they are paying attention to the differences within non-human animals that has received insufﬁcient attention. As Mary Midgley contends, arguing for rights for animals is different from arguing for the extension of rights claims from one group of humans for example, white, middle class men, to women of various social locations of class and race. This is because animals ‘are not just animals. They are elephants or amoebae, locusts or ﬁsh or deer’ (1983: 19; also 1992).

For Francione, an emphasis on ‘similar minds’ is too limiting. An enor mous variety of species may be anthropocentrically excluded from this limited extension of rights and it is a problem of our limited epistemo logy that we cannot understand the world from the perspective of so many lesser known and lesser liked species (2000: 99). The drawing and redrawing of lines between species and groups of species on the basis of similarities, is itself a form of speciesism (Bekoff, 2002: 47–50) and under plays both biological continuity and the complex nature of the question of difference. Much time and effort, for example, has been spent on the project of evaluating animal intelligence, but the organization of human power fundamentally shapes such attempts – we measure the extent to which animals do or do not approximate to human capabilities looking at the use of different kinds of human language (such as sign language) or the study of animal behaviours and sociality wherein for example with primatology, a ‘simian orientalism’ shaped much of that which is found (Haraway, 1989: 24). Different standards of evaluating sameness and dif ference are themselves speciesist, failing to understand that, for example, animals are ‘smart’ in their own species speciﬁc ways and have their own ways of life and being in the world – their own cultures (see Whiten et al, 1999: 682). However, it is easy to see why, in humanocentric political systems, arguing a case for redrawing boundaries to include the most ‘human-like’ animals is seen as most viable in practical political terms. I consider that taking proper account, as far and as reﬂexively as we are able, of the particularities of speciﬁc species and species groups is impera tive, and helps undermine the homogeneous category ‘animal’. Whether it is possible to appreciate difference and avoid humanocentric evalua tions is an important and cautionary question, but I think it needs to be attempted and may be less problematic if not articulated alongside claims for ‘rights’ for certain kinds of animals.

The discourse of animal liberation is also humanist in deploying the language of political extension. Singer, for example, continually makes comparisons between speciesism and intra-human forms of discrimination:

Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of their own race…Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of mem bers of other species. The pattern is identical in each case (1990: 9, my emphasis).

He goes on to say that ‘Most human beings are speciesist’, and that by everyday practices, such as meat eating, most of us are complicit in animal abuse. However, as Midgley (1983: 104) argues we cannot tri vialize the differences between animals whereas undermining the dif ferences between human beings has been a crucial move in opposing sexism and racism. To imply discrimination against all animals by all humans does not account for intensity of cruelty inﬂicted, social location or species difference. Regan for example, criticizes the Inuit peoples use of fur because it is a business in addition to a means of sub sistence and cruelties against animals for proﬁt should not be sup ported (1988: 359). For Francione (1995) the deﬁnition of animals as property deﬁnes their status, and the only ‘right’ animals require is not to be deﬁned and treated as property.

The use of this language of rights, interests and discrimination sug gests an extension of the project of liberal humanism to encompass another Other, that of species. Calarco (2008: 7) argues that in deploy ing ‘rights-talk’ to gain a political voice, animal rights discourse is con strained to adopt the ‘language and strategies of identity politics’. There are two difﬁculties which attend this. First, Calarco suggests that identity politics encourages a competition for authenticity and a struggle for hierarchical positioning in a matrix of oppressions. Second, debates remain fundamentally centred on the human by emphasizing similarities between some species and humans in extending rights claims. The sub ject of modernity is a classed, gendered and racialized subject. But, and it is an important but, the experience of feminism for example, has been that it is insufﬁcient to elide the social difference of gender to another kind of categorization, such as class, if gender is to be fully implicated in analysis. I will argue in the next chapter that adopting complex systems theory to explain forms of social domination, including that of non human animals by humans, enables us to avoid both the trap of anthro pocentrism involved in the adoption of political humanism and the constraints of ‘identity politics’ when considering intersectionalized forms of domination.

A further strand of criticism made particularly of Singer and Regan is their gendered rationalism (see Singer, 1990: iii; Regan, 1988: 94). Critics argue that in developing interspecies justice, we need to practise ‘sym pathetic identiﬁcation’ with animals (Johnson, 1996: 166). Josephine Donovan claims that ‘womanish’ sentiment is being criticized in trivializ ing an emotional response to animal abuse (1993: 351). Together with Carol Adams (1996) she has developed an approach to animal rights rooted in the social context of women’s caring traditions. This is based on the notion of concern for sentient creatures rather than identifying ‘rights’ animals might have, rather like Derrida’s advocacy of compassion in our relations with Other animals. Unfortunately, Donovan and Adams do not account for different kinds and levels of treatment and care, con curring with Suzanne Kappeler that approaches establishing differences between species are in themselves ‘discourses of domination’ (1995: 331). Diane Antonio (1995) provides a useful intervention here by suggesting that an approach to human-animal relations rooted in a notion of ‘care’ should be supplemented by a respect for diversity and difference occur ring in the non-human natural world, including the speciﬁc and qual itative differences of species. So, we need to understand diversity and differentiation by species, and when we ‘care’ for animals, must ‘respect’ diversity and tailor our notions of appropriate human treatment to the situation of differing species. This has strong similarities with Bekoff’s notion of ‘minding’ animals (Bekoff, 2002). Ecofeminist writing about animals has also effectively critiqued positions on animals articulated by certain kinds of political ecologism (see Vance, 1995: 173–4). The ‘deep’ ecologist J. Baird Callicott (1980) for example, has described domesticated animals as ‘living artifacts’ of less authenticity than wild animals in ‘wild’ spaces and less in need for concern and certainly incapable of liberation. Yet this shows a profound disregard for the exploitation of domesticates and ignores the evidence that domesticated animals, even in intensive production systems, can revert to a behavioural repertoire consistent with wild animals of the same species (Nichol and Dawkins, cited Davis, 1995: 204). In addition, feminists have critiqued the notion that individual animals might be sacriﬁced to the good of a species and the gendered way in which arguments for the compassionate treatment of domesticates are trivialized (see Davis, 1995; Donovan, 1993).

The continued embededness of animals in human communities is the basis of Benton’s (1993) critique of animal rights politics, and indeed, much of the trajectory of recent work in animal studies, and a corner stone of animal concern within feminism for some time, has been to stress the operationalization of speciesism not as a form of discrimination (as suggested by Singer, Regan and Francione) but as a discourse of power. It is power which is primary and Ryder (1998) argues that the notion of speciesism implies that ‘we exploit other animals because we are more powerful than they are’. For sociologists such as Benton and Tester, anthropocentrism and humanism (respectively) frame political discourses of animal rights. As we saw earlier, Tester abandons the animal and holds fast to humanism – animals are nothing more than what we perceive them to be and anthropocentrism is inevitable. For Benton, this is ethi cally and intellectually impossible – we culturally frame other species and are embedded with them in our social practices. The cases made by Singer, Regan and Francione are important because they suggest that the biological differences of species are cast in terms of relations of domina tory power – the political differences of speciesism. Decades have passed since arguments were made for the sentience of animals and the irra tionality of the ways in which humans treat them. Fundamental changes in human relations with non-human animals have been negligible however. Our social relations may be so impervious to articulations of animal rights because they are constituted through animal rites – the dis course of species which constitutes our culture. It is this to which we now turn and as I will argue further below, the notion of speciesism itself, is again, found wanting.

Cultures of human exclusivity and intersectionalized oppression

For some, the politics of species difference is primarily culturally expressed and constituted. Giorgio Agamben’s work has been concerned with human ism inherent in Western political theorizing in which the animal nature of the human – or ‘bare life’, has been cast as fundamentally separate from political life. The social and the natural have been seen as distinctly constituted in a tradition of political thinking in which ‘man’ has been differentiated from animal by being seen as ‘the articulation and con junction of a body and a soul…of a natural (or animal) element, and a supernatural or social or divine element’ (Agamben, 2004: 16). Agamben uses the notion of the ‘anthropological machine’ to describe the symbolic regimes of anthropocentrism present in various kinds of scientiﬁc and political discourses that both include and exclude and thereby constitute the sets of distinctions which separate the human from the animal (2004: 37). There are two historical forms that the anthropological machine assumes: a premodern form which he tracks from Aristotle’s pol itics to the taxonomy of Linnaeus, and a modern variant which has been constituted post-Darwin. The two forms differ in their modus operandi. In its premodern form, the anthropological machine essentially humanizes animal life when attempting the demarcation between human and animal; whereas the modern form is preoccupied with the difﬁcult task of excluding the animal aspects of humans, from the concept of humanity. For Agamben, none of these kinds of distinction are a matter of neutral ontology:

Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly deﬁned species nor a sub stance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recog nition of the human. In line with the taste of the epoch… It is an optical machine constructed of a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image already deformed in the features of an ape. Homo is a constitutively ‘anthropomorphous’ animal…who must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human (2004: 26–7).

This is political – for the distinction between humans and animals has a function of power that enables the exploitation of non-human animals; and is timealized and spatialized, reconﬁguring itself and reconstituting the difference between human and animal (2004: 75–7). Agamben’s solution is the abandonment – both philosophically and politically – of humanism and democracy and the creation of new understandings, modes and forms of political life. Not only is this utopian, despite itself it is anthropocentric in that Agamben focuses on the effects of the anthro pological machine on human beings and failing to explore the impact on animal life (Calarco, 2008: 102). I would add also that ‘the human’ in Agamben’s thought is not interpolated by gender, or indeed, any other kind of Othering.

More attendant to questions of interlocking oppressive discourse are those writing within cultural studies. The work of Cary Wolfe is an important innovation here. For Wolfe, speciesism is seen as a set of dis courses embedded in a range of texts of popular culture, and occasionally also challenged therein. The discourse of species understood through such texts ‘in turn reproduces the institution of speciesism’ (2003a: 2, ori ginal emphasis). The animal for Wolfe, as for Derrida, is a ‘ﬁgure’ con structed through the (contingent) systems of language and signiﬁcation, which is institutionalized in ‘speciﬁc modes and practices of material ization in the social sphere’ with asymmetrical effects on particular groups. Thus he writes:

Just as the discourse of sexism affects women disproportionately (even though it may be applied to any social other of whatever gender), so the violent effects of the discourse of speciesism fall overwhelmingly in institutional terms, on nonhuman animals (Wolfe 2003a: 6).

Here, Wolfe is making a well placed reference to what we now often speak of as social intersectionality (McCall, 2005). This questioning of the way in which overlapping discourses co-constitute forms of Othering has a long legacy in feminist and (post) colonial theory, and in parti cular in ecofeminist work. Wolfe is referencing a signiﬁcant literature here, and one which is surprisingly often marginalized in other con temporary writings in animal studies.

From the early 1970s ecofeminists suggested that patriarchal discourses carry gender dichotomous normalizations that feminize the environment and animalize women, constructing a dichotomy between women and ‘nature’, including the multifarious species of non-human animal, and male dominated human culture. The arguments presented often also draw on a form of standpoint epistemology: gender roles constituted through such discourses render women in closer material proximity and relation to the environment and Other animals. In early works, Connie Salamone (1982) claimed that women’s social practices of care mean they are more likely than men to oppose practices of harm against non-human animals. Norma Benny made the rather different case that women may empathize with the sufferings of animals as they have some common experiences, for example female domestic animals are most likely to be ‘oppressed’ via control of their sexuality and reproductive powers, involving vary ing degrees of physical violence and emotional deprivation (Benny, 1983: 142). In addition, popular culture is saturated with representational tropes which engender animals and also animalize humans in strongly gendered ways. Joan Dunayer (1995) has examined the speciesism of linguistic prac tices and the links between this and our gendered and racialized use of language; whilst others have looked at the interrelations between gender and the environmental and species impact of colonial practices his torically (Lee Shanchez, 1993; Shantu Riley, 1993). Carol Adams’ (1990, 2003) arguments that social practices such as meat eating are gendered and sexualized, and that popular culture is saturated with interpolations of gendered nature, and natured gender are well known. Thus some fem inists have considered that gendered and natured normalization captures animals and women, in some instances, within the same discursive regime, and may place women in a position of possible contestation. This ecofeminist writing has been incredibly inﬂuential in problem atizing human relations with other animals and alerting us to the inter sectionalized qualities of oppression. However, theoretically, there is often a tendency in this literature to homogenize by deploying an all encompassing systemic understanding of patriarchy as a system of ‘Other ing’. Adams and Donovan (1995: 3) for example, have contended that patriarchy is ‘prototypical for many other forms of abuse’, and Kappeler has asserted that patriarchy is ‘the pivot of all speciesism, racism, ethni cism, and nationalism’ (1995: 348, see also Collard, 1988; Gaard, 1993). These approaches provide a powerful analysis of the ways the social system of gender relations is co-constituted through ideas and practices around ‘nature’ and species relations. However, there is a tendency towards conﬂation in ecofeminist accounts, which can invite criticism for an under theorization of difference. As we will see below, this is even apparent in ecofeminist accounts which attempt so strenuously to avoid it. If we retain some notion of system (which most ecofeminists implicitly rather than explicitly do) but do not consider a multiplicity of systemic relations, what we are left with is a rather loose theory of patriarchy, which is presumed to account for a wide range of repressive relations. In order to embed an analysis of gender in investigations of the arenas of human engagement with Other animals, I will make the case, in Chapter 3, for a complex systems approach to co-constituted relations of domination.

For his part, Wolfe analytically foregrounds the discourse of species which:

When applied to social others of whatever sort, relies on ﬁrst taking for granted the institution of speciesism – that is, on the ethical accept ability of the systematic, institutionalized killing of non-human others… (Wolfe, 2003a: 43).

Wolfe does not suggest that speciesism is a priori, and is attentive to the ways in which the ‘discourse of animality [has] historically served as a crucial strategy in the oppression of humans by other humans’ (Wolfe, 2003b: xx), albeit that the consequences of this discourse fall overwhelmingly on non-human animals. In ﬂeshing out a conception of the discursive constitution of speciesism, Wolfe problematizes the importance of language as a means of distinction. Wolfe (2003c) draws on the complexity science of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1980, 1987) in the area of cognition and the work of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1995) on speciﬁcally social systems. For Luhmann, social systems are systems of complex communication, and Wolfe argues that when social systems are conﬂated with the human use of language, other kinds of communication, including the languages (and thereby the subjectivity) of some species of non-human animals is excluded (Wolfe, 2003c: 39). He rightly suggests that we need to ‘dis articulate’ the categories of language and species (2003c: 38; also Wolfe, 2009: 22–6), but we must go further than this. As I will argue in the next chapter, social systems cannot be conceived of in Luhmannian terms – only in terms of communication. We need to articulate what an analysis of social systems that do include animals might look like, for non-human animals are utterly implicated in our social institutions, practices and processes, both materially and discursively.

As we have seen in Wolfe, the ‘discourse of species’ is intersected by other forms of Othering. This has been the emphasis of some feminist projects theorizing ‘nature’ and animals. Karen Warren considers a logic of domination which accounts for the linked dominations of race, class, gender and nature (1990: 132), whereas Val Plumwood con ceptualizes gender, nature, race, colonialism and class as interfacing in a ‘network’ of oppressive ‘dualisms’ (1993: 2). For Plumwood, these exist as separate (autonomous) entities but are also mutually reinforc ing in a ‘web’ of complex relations (1993: 194). This does not mean dif ferent forms of oppression are indistinguishable; they are relatively autonomous, distinct yet related. Although Plumwood argues oppres sions within the web have ‘distinct foci and strands’ and ‘some inde pendent movement’, she ultimately adopts a conﬂationary approach in arguing forms of domination have ‘a uniﬁed overall mode of opera tion, forming a single system’ with a ‘common structure and ideology’ (1994: 79, my emphasis; 1993: 81). A ‘common centric structure’ places an ‘omnipotent’ subject at the centre and constructs non-subjects as having various negative (often homogenized) qualities, justifying the exclusion of Otherized groups and their instrumental use (1997: 336). Plumwood understands these ‘centrisms’ as systems of dominatory rela tions, but as ideological frameworks. Wolfe has a rather similar position.

He stresses the need to counter ‘this humanist and speciesist structure of subjectivisation’ which enables the exploitation of non-human animals (Wolfe 2003a: 8, original emphasis).

Both Wolfe and Plumwood have an analysis of intersected discourses, but a crucial Foucauldian move is absent. We do not see how these ideas of separation, of human uniqueness and the animal as Other, are articu lated in historically and culturally located practices and inform what soci ologists would understand as structures – sets of relations with effects in the world, that can be seen to operate through social institutions and related practices. This is a gap, but it is not one I am necessarily criticizing Wolf or Plumwood, for failing to ﬁll. Plumwood engages in an extended philosophical reﬂection on the interlinked binaries that constitute the bedrock of Western philosophy. Wolfe’s undertakings are various: a post humanist critique of certain kinds of environmentalist thought and pos itions in animal rights theory, exploring the ways the discourse of species interacts with those around race, colonialism and gender illustrated through examples from popular ﬁlms, novels and art, and to suggest a mode of cultural interpretation ‘beyond’ humanism. It is time for socio logy to step up to the task of outlining the social institutions in which the discourse of species is embedded and to provide an analysis in terms of social relations.

Towards a critical sociology of species

We have already looked at the ways Ted Benton has drawn on Marxist sociology to argue against an understanding of animal rights which is divorced from social justice. Others using a similar (broadly) Marxian sociology have focused on the social structures and relations of species. It is here that I consider sociology has made its most useful contri bution so far in the understanding of human relations with Other animals. These approaches are not without their difﬁculties however, and in critiquing them here, I will also draw together the arguments made so far in outlining the elements for developing a critical sociology of species.

David Nibert (2002) explicitly uses the concept of oppression in rela tion to the historical development of human relations with non-human animals. He argues that the oppression of animals has structural causes that are socially and economically rooted as well as ideologically and cul turally expressed. We are socialized into reproducing the relations of the oppression of animals. Nibert is particularly critical of animal rights theo rists for ignoring the structural roots of animal oppression and failing to understand oppressive systems as operating as a combination of social institutions and belief systems as ‘social structural arrangements’ (2002: 7). He rightly takes the notion of speciesism to task, arguing that the way it has been articulated as a form of prejudice and discrimination, is socio logically wanting in terms of its conceptual individualism (2002: 9–10). Rather, social institutions are foundational for the oppression of animals – not individual attitudes and moral deﬁciencies.

Nibert isolates three elements in his model of the mutually reinforcing mechanisms of other non-human animal oppression. First there is the economic exploitation of the Other. Second, there is iniquitous social power which is politically reﬂected and reproduced by the state. Third, there is ideology which is emergent from and reproduces, economic rela tions. Applying this to animals, Nibert suggests that animals are exploited for human interests and tastes in food, fur and skin, entertainment, com panionship and health (medical experimentation, for example). Animals are deﬁned in law as property and thus open to exploitation with little limitation. Finally, this is legitimated by an ideology which naturalizes the oppression of animals in its many forms – we are immersed in a cul ture that devalues non-human animals and legitimates their exploitation. Surprisingly, Nibert ultimately wants to hang on to the term speciesism, which is ‘actually an ideology [as distinct from a prejudice], a belief system that legitimates and inspires prejudice and discrimination’ (2002: 17). It is here that we come to the difﬁculty with Nibert’s analysis. Deﬁning species ism as ‘an ideology’ that emerges from economic institutions, practices and relations of capitalism reduces and conﬁnes the oppression of non human animals to a set of intra-human oppressive relations. In justifying this, Nibert provides a rather thin account of the exploitative relations of early agricultural societies which he sets up as proto-capitalist (2002: 23–7). Despite the inevitably speculative qualities of such an account, Nibert makes some interesting links between different kinds of intra-human domination and the oppression of animals and the ways in which these are interlinked, but in ways that do not tie in easily to an analysis of capitalist commoditization. Whilst there is compelling evidence that the development of capitalism and the technologies of industrialism radically exacerbated the exploitation and oppression of non-human animals, the domination of the non-human lifeworld cannot be reduced to the systemic imperatives of capitalism.

The social reality of speciesism is constructed through a range of cul tural processes and institutional arenas though which animals are exploited and oppressed – zoos, circuses, baiting and ﬁghting, the breeding and keeping of pets, the breeding and ‘use’ of animals in research, hunting and trapping, farming and slaughter . These are explained in terms of proﬁt creation, corporate interest and the generation and sustaining of false needs. In turn, these relations of oppression are maintained by the central and local state, which is seen as, rightly in my view, incred ibly powerful but is also analysed reductively – in terms of the interests and imperative of capital. Despite this, Nibert sees the capitalist state as an avenue, albeit a difﬁcult and contradictory one, for progressive change in the interests of Other animals (2002: 188). It is without doubt that Nibert performs a vital task for us in understanding the ways the oppression of non-human animals is embedded in and existent through social relations, institutions and practices. However, explaining an ‘ideo logy’ of speciesism and oppressive practices against animals in terms of systemic imperatives of capitalism is insufﬁcient.

Bob Torres (2007) applies Nibert’s model of animal oppression to the case of highly industrialized capital-intensive agriculture in the global north. What starts to look like a socially intersected analysis of the oppression of animals, however, similarly becomes focused on one systemic cause:

If we’re to be successful in ﬁghting oppression – whether based on race, class, species or gender identity – we’re going to need to ﬁght the heart of the economic order that drives these oppressions. We’re going to have to ﬁght capitalism (2007: 11).

Torres allows that the histories of exploitative systems are different and differentiated (2007: 156), and that the oppression of animals can exist before and beyond capitalism. Yet capitalism is the crucial systemic explanation and ‘has deepened, extended and worsened our domination over animals and the natural world’ (2007: 3). Animals are largely under stood as labourers – producing commodities such as milk and eggs and becoming commodities such as meat and leather. Animal labour within capitalism is slave labour. In the commodities of meat, milk and eggs, complex chains and networks of productive forces and relations can be found (2007: 36–8). Animal labour is also alienated labour if we con sider the alienation from the products of labour, of breeder animals separated from their young, for example; and the alienation from pro ductive activity, for example in the dull existences of meat animals whose labour is to eat, in order to become meat. Animals are also alien ated from members of their species in the ways they are contained and separated, and alienated from their ‘species-life’ in being unable to fulﬁl natural behaviours such as foraging, play and nest building.

Relations of exploitation are the linchpin for Torres. Thus he argues strongly against the use of animals in agriculture however high standards of welfare might be for although ‘some forms of dominance are “nicer” than others, exploitation is still exploitation in the end’ (2007: 44). Ani mals are not exploited in the same way as human beings in the labour process however. Torres is concerned about the classed and racialized com position of the labour force in animal agriculture and the meat industry and of the alienated conditions of slaughterhouse labour (see 2007: 45–9). Animals demonstrate a different kind of embodied labour however. Their bodies not only are exploited by working for us in order to produce animal food products, their bodies are themselves commodities, as he puts it: ‘They are superexploited living commodities’ (2007: 58). Animal lives and bodies are a means to proﬁt creation within capitalism. In addition, animals are property, and this relationship of ownership over animal bodies is essen tial for the extraction of proﬁt. Torres analysis here is much inﬂuenced by anarchist writing, in particular the ideas of Proudhon and Kropotkin. The value created by labour and embodied in private property is not fully recognized – and in the case of animals, is not recognized at all. Animals as-property means that, in the case of animal agriculture for example, animals are ‘sensate living machines’ for the production of commodities (2007: 64). But the condition of animals is one of slavery – they can exer cise no choice in their lives and can never leave the place of production, unlike humans in the wage production system of capitalism.

For Torres, capitalism remains the key analytical device throughout. Nibert acknowledges his debt to ecofeminist writers and his under standing of the concept of oppression is very much inﬂuenced by its use in feminist theory (such as that of Iris Marion Young). Nibert appears to endorse a multiple systems model of ‘interlocking’ and ‘interacting’ systems of oppression:

…the oppression of various devalued groups in human societies is not independent and unrelated; rather, the arrangements that lead to various forms of oppression are integrated in such a way that the exploitation of one group frequently augments and compounds the mistreatment of

others (Nibert, 2002: 4, original italics).

Despite this, however, there is surprisingly little gender in Nibert’s analysis. As he puts it ‘The ideological entanglements between humans and other animals are fuelled by, and intertwined with, economic-based oppression – particularly under corporate capitalism’ (Nibert, 2002: xiii, my emphasis). The overriding thesis is that the human oppression of other animals is economically motivated and sustained, and is caused and reproduced by relations of capitalism (2002: 3). As we saw above, the work of those such as Wolfe and Plumwood is idealist – focusing analysis on cultural discourses. It is also however, very attentive to ques tions of interacting difference. Torres and Nibert, on the other hand, provide us with an analysis which is overwhelmingly materialist, but despite some promises of attending to social difference, reduces the oppression of animals to an economic cause, and elides it with the systemic imperatives of capitalism.

The cultural designation of certain species as human food has been the subject of feminist analysis and debate, and the precise nature of reproductive exploitation and denigration of farmed animals has been critiqued as a heavily gendered phenomenon (see Gruen, 1993: 72–4). In addition to gender, the historical sociology of the animal-industrial complex shows that cultures of colonialism and the forging of national identities have profoundly shaped the eating and production of ‘meat’ (Rifkin, 1994; Rogers, 2004). The concentration on social institutions and the use of a Marxist inﬂected sociology of oppressive relations is a forward step in the social theorization of species, but in our analyses of the social institutions and processes which constitute species relations, we need to retain sensitivity to social difference.

What is required is a full analysis of social intersectionality. The theorization of multiple, intersecting social inequalities has become a preoccupation in critical social theory (Walby, 2009). Theorists within feminism, postcolonial studies and Marxism/post-Marxism have been concerned with the impacts and effects of various forms of social inequal ity – from the well established concerns around the intersections of class, race and gender to newer interests in region and locality, nation, religion and ethnicities. In the chapter which follows I will argue that we need an analysis of social difference, inequality and domination in terms of rela tional systems of power. In so doing however, I argue for a reconceptual ization of the notion of system using concepts from ‘complexity theory’ and propose a complex systems analysis of relations of natured power which intersect with other socially constituted systems of race, gender and so on. I see complex systems approaches as enabling an analysis which incorporates both discursive and material aspects of species rela tions. In addition, I will argue that a reworking of systems theory through complexity allows us to integrate discussions of the thorny sociological question of structure and agency in the social relations of species. This is the ﬁnal element in my critique of Nibert and Torres – a lack of consideration of the agency of Other animals. As Chris Wilbert remarks, the understanding of agency in the social sciences has been as a purely human property. Yet around the globe, many people, such as those in rural areas in parts of the developing world, are very conscious of the danger animals pose, from example, from the everyday malarial mos quitoes to poisonous snakes and leopard attacks (Wilbert, 2006: 32). Even the Western media has shown an interest in attacks on Westerners by exoticized animals such as elephants, crocodiles and tigers and also by domesticates, such as dogs. In traditional Marxism, animals are part of the realm of necessity, and ‘are unfree in that their natural history is made for them’ (Noske, 1989: 77–80). In the Marxist inﬂected accounts of Nibert and Torres, animals are seen as subjects, but also primarily as victims of human abuse, trapped in the machinations of capital. For Francione, they are our property and for Regan they are not currently conceptualized as subjects-of-a-life. For Derrida, animals are placed toge ther as those without language and endure intense suffering at the hands of humans as a result. But, says Haraway: ‘…how much more promise is there in the questions, Can animals play? Or work?’ (Haraway, 2008: 22). Haraway sees her own contribution as ‘seeing what else is going on in instrumental human-animal world makings’ in addition to the exploit ation of animals, as outlined in particular, by feminist scholarship (2008: 74). Noting that relations are almost never those of equality, she wants to see what degrees of freedom and what possible non-human agency is exercised in companion species relations speciﬁcally.

Haraway argues that the analogues of instrument, surrogate and slave are ill-ﬁtting for the historical processes through which humans and dogs emerge as companion species, for domestication is a two-way process. Our domestication of non-human animals is constituted through our own domestication. This may even apply to other domesticates in that animals interact with the ‘natural’ world through productive activities and express conscious intentionality in this process (Ingold, 1983). Leslie Irvine argues that some few species, dogs and cats in particular are ‘uniquely suited to living with us’ (2004: 12). The work of Stephen Budiansky (1992) certainly suggests that some animals were agents in their own domestication and that in the case of dogs in particular; they aided the domestication of other species. Juliet Clutton-Brock argues that domes tication ensures that other species are ‘enfolded in the social structure of the human community’ (1995: 15). The physical manipulations of dogs by humans through selective breeding means that the perceptual world of a dog is radically different to that of a coyote, wolf or fox, but this does not necessarily imply an abuse by domination. Peter Messant and James Serpell go so far as to argue that the domestication of the dog was not primarily for the utilitarian consideration of hunting; albeit that this may have cemented and intensiﬁed the relationship (1981: 10). Rather, they suggest that social and biological similarities between humans and canids (such as a long primary socialization period, gregarious tem peraments, similar activity cycles and a preference for social play) were signiﬁcant factors. With cats, a symbiotic relationship (between those needing rodent control and those liking comfort) may explain their domestication, but the less strongly domesticated status of the felidae family many well be explained by their more solitary disposition (Irvine, 2004: 17). In these accounts then, some species have possibly exerted agency in the very process of domestication itself.

In her (rather beautiful) ethnography of an animal shelter and the processes of adopting abandoned companion animals, Irvine argues that we relate to animals as individuals with personalities and are able to share emotional states, and communicate desires and intensions . In the process, our interrelatings both reveal and extend the selves of both human and non-human animals, we develop, as she puts it ‘a sense of self-in-relation’ (2004: 148):

When interaction develops into a relationship, additional dimensions of animal selfhood become available as the animal’s intersubjective capacities become apparent…animals participate in the creation of our identities through many of the same processes that other humans do. They challenge our interactional abilities (2004: 3).

We develop these shared identities at ‘the level of the everyday and unremarkable’ (2004: 165) far away from the extra-ordinary ‘becoming’ of Deleuze and Guattari. Irvine uses a concept of ‘animal capital’ to describe the ‘resources that enable the development of meaningful, nonexploit ative companionship with animals’ (2004: 66). These include knowledge about animal behaviour, nutrition and health and an active interest in animal emotions and cognition, which enables a rapport to be estab lished across species. She suggests the kind of critical anthropomorphism associated with the ethology of those such as Bekoff, ‘aims to do for the understanding of animal life what the Verstehen perspective tries to capture in human life, which is to shed light on the meaningful, sub jective aspects of action’ (2004: 69, original italics). The close attention we pay to animals enables us to interpret behaviour and physical cues and to communicate at some level. In establishing rapport, the active engage ment of animals as subjects with opinions comes through clearly as Irvine details human stories of animal adoption and companion species lives, and records the encounters between animals and would be ‘adopters’ (see for example, 2004: 90–1). Similarly, Janet and Steven Alger’s work on human-feline relations emerging from their ethnography of a cat shelter has shown how cats interfere with human activities in order to make their preferences known, exercise choice (for example in where to eat and sleep) and display a wide range of emotional states (Alger and Alger, 2003).

Relations of inequality are the context of action for non-human animals and humans alike. Ti Fu Tuan (1984: 176) has argued, with particular reference to the ‘pet’, that domestication and intense mani pulation allows humans to manifest power over the ‘natural’ world. Whilst the domination of animals may be cruel, and produce victims, it may also take another form – combined with affection (1984: 2). Here, whilst we have power over animals, this does not necessarily lead to our abuse of other species. Certainly our historical and ecological situation is that we all live through and by the use of the bodies of other animals. In respecting this context, Haraway suggests that we need to develop a ‘multispecies responsibility’, which in essence, means we must learn to kill well. We cannot stand outside animal suffering but rather, need to be open to ‘shared pain and suffering’ (2008: 83). Haraway’s When Species Meet is undoubtedly more critically reﬂective on the nature of human power over non-human animals than, say, her positively light hearted treatment of laboratory mice (Haraway, 1997). Despite her acknowledgement of the ‘hyperexploited labouring bodies’ of animals destined for the table and the ‘terrifying global industry’ of which their lives and bodies are a part (see 2008: 272), the exploitation of animals does not feature analytically. Like Tuan, I consider that our relations with non-human animals are almost always ones of domination, but also that domination does not always mean that the kinds of relations are the same when different social formations of human-animal relationship are concerned. This does not foreclose the possibility of animals’ agency. Irvine is far more careful, and her reﬂections on agency are contextual ized by the understanding that ‘Whilst some species live comfortably in human households, the majority remain exploited and tortured for food, hide, entertainment, sport and research’ (2004: 76). Despite this context, she sees the development of animal capital as a way in which this might be challenged as both experts and non-experts seek to ‘put themselves in the shoes’ of others who are not human. The mindfulness of animals and the ways in which we engage with them, and they engage with us in various kinds of material contexts helps us to argue that dominant dis courses and practices might be otherwise. In addition, it enables us to see how species relations are remade through encounters and struggles which cross species boundaries.

Understanding our relations with non-human species must tackle the questions of the agency of non-human systems and processes, of things, beings that engage with and shape human lives on their own terms. Given the ridiculously homogenizing quality of the concept ‘animal’, the kind of agency ‘animals’ might have is almost impossible to imagine. In sociology, agency has been attributed to beings with desires, intentions and wills. This deﬁnition certainly applies to some non-human species, and certainly to those animals within agricultural complexes and many of those kept as pets in the West. Many species, particularly domesticates, have a sense of selfhood. They can exercise choice and communicate with humans and other species (however much the content may be open to interpretation) as fellow agentic beings. In considering the agency of non-human animals, we cannot only examine agency where it is more obviously present, such as in relations with companions. As Adams and Proctor-Smith note, whilst animals ‘cannot ﬁght collectively against human oppression,…the lack of struggle cannot be taken as absence of resistance or acceptance of domination’ (1993: 309). Species is not only a difference, it is a system of power relations ontologized as natural, and in Haraway’s hybridized ontology of multiplicious connexions, this is lost.

We need an analysis of the social practices and institutions which constitute, reproduce and rearticulate the relations of species. In its attentiveness to questions of historical change, cultural speciﬁcity, the power of ideas and beliefs and the analysis of concrete social practices in addition to the vexing matters of ‘structure and agency’, the dis cipline of sociology has much to offer those who seek to understand our relationships with Other animals. In engaging with the themes and debates in this chapter, I have suggested that a critical sociology of species will attempt to account for species as discursively and mater ially constituted, as a system of power relations which is intersected by forms of intra-human difference and domination. As a system of social relations, species is also dynamic – constantly ordering and re-ordering. In seeking to develop a theory of species relations taking all these ele ments on board, the next chapter will draw on some concepts within ‘complexity theory’ and suggest that a complex systems approach enables us to grasp diversity, change and power, in our relations with Other animals.