Papers by Ariel Tsovel
Dvarim, 2019
Educational enterprises frequently initiate encounters with confined animals: at school zoos, as ... more Educational enterprises frequently initiate encounters with confined animals: at school zoos, as classroom pets, during public zoo visits, and in animal experiments and dissections. This paper presents a critical review of the sources presenting such activities. According to this review, proponents of such activities claim that they teach emotional and cognitive skills, including respect. In this context, "respect" means a willful obligation to promote the existence, welfare, or autonomy of various objects.
Despite the claims made by proponents of educational encounters with captive animals, students are often allowed to behave disrespectfully towards actual animals. As long as an educational project is based on impairing the autonomy and welfare of specific animals, and sometimes also jeopardize their very existence, the confined animals whom the students meet are excluded from the objects of respect. According to this paper, the manifest legitimization of disrespect is rationalized by promising to enhance respect towards distant and unspecific objects, such as animals in general, nature, life and man. Empirical studies held in schools and in zoos claim that this promise is fulfilled. Nevertheless, this paper argues that such studies are deeply biased: they focus on educational benefits without considering educational damage, and without presenting any plausible criteria for success and failure of the educational operation.
In conclusion, enhancing respect towards distant and unspecific objects remains a questionable hypothesis. However, a highly probable result of encountering confined animals is nurturing disrespect towards them.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Respect at the School Zoo: Educational Implications of Students' Encounters with Confined Animals." Dvarim 12 (October 2019): 247-265. (Hebrew)
Maarav, 2018
Entrepreneurs who promote artificial meat (factory-made tissue originated in living organisms) cl... more Entrepreneurs who promote artificial meat (factory-made tissue originated in living organisms) claim that the challenges in manufacturing and marketing artificial meat are making a product that shall be perceived by the senses as real meat (dead animal tissue), while matching the original or surpassing it in nutritional value and affordability. This position ignores additional, crucial considerations in the consumption of real meat and its analogs (meat-like products that are not dead animal tissues).
Meat analogs that more or less withstand the aforementioned challenges have already been marketed for decades, and yet consumers make successful efforts to recognize highly valued differences between any meat analog and real meat, as they will keep on doing when facing minute and unavoidable differences between artificial and real meat. Motivating such differentiation efforts are the profoundly different emotional, symbolic and moral meanings ascribed to real meat in comparison with any alleged substitute. These meanings reflect the fact that producing and consuming real meat are perceived as expressions of physical and social power, whereas meat analogs are not associated with special power.
The paper examines three approaches to the association between meat and power. According to one theory, favored by meat analog marketers, non-coercive products should attract meat eaters since consuming such products exempts consumers from association with power, which have disturbed them in the first place. An opposite, more convincing theory claims that meat analogs cannot succeed precisely because these products lack the forcible meaning pursued by meat eaters. A third theory is the most convincing one, and it claims that when a meticulous division of labor is standard, the meaning of products varies in accordance with arbitrary stories attached to these products, and foreseeing where such stories may lead to is virtually impossible. Hence it may be possible that artificial meat will succeeds in chomping off a large chunk of the real meat industry, yet it is no less reasonable to predict that artificial meat will undermine consumer boycott of real meat, against artificial meat's original purpose.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Meat: Real and Fake, Truth and Fiction." Maarav 24 (Autumn 2018). Available at: http://maarav.org.il/english/2018/12/18/meat-real-fake-truth-fiction-ariel-tsovel/
Animals and Society, 2014
Animal-assisted therapy includes animal-friendly aspects alongside harmful ones, in a combination... more Animal-assisted therapy includes animal-friendly aspects alongside harmful ones, in a combination that calls for a cautious moral assessment. This article examines the profession of animal-assisted therapy according to moral theories that represent the three central approaches to morality in our culture: balancing the harms and benefits that result from our actions; morality based on rights and obligations; and cultivating moral personality or virtue.
None of the three theories reject the notion of deriving healing benefits for humans as a consequence of encounters with animals; however, all three criticize existing habits in the profession in practice, habits that are ingrained in prevailing norms of animal exploitation. This article proposes a framework for assessing specific moral problems, in addition to an overall moral assessment of the profession, while suggesting improvements in line with the above-noted theories.
The suggested improvements include, at the very least, avoiding the use of animals that might be harmed due to their involvement in therapy, avoiding therapy situations that could harm the animals, and significantly increasing investment in studying the interests of the animals and in activity promoting these interests. Such moral assessment may also lead to a demand to change the aims of the profession in order that it may explicitly promote the interests of the animals involved, and to institutionalizing active animal assistance through the profession. The different moral theories may also lead to a more pointed criticism of the profession, as part of an overall criticism of other, more prevalent types of human-animal relations.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Animal-Assisted Therapy: A Moral Assessment." Animals and Society 50 (May 2014): 55-65. (Hebrew)
Flesh and Blood, 2013
A short introduction to problems of representing animals in an agricultural society. Agriculture ... more A short introduction to problems of representing animals in an agricultural society. Agriculture is perceived as an extremely coercive system that interferes with animal representation in general, and special attention is given to direct violence against animals in the visual arts.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Introduction to the Anthology: Flesh and Blood." In Flesh and Blood, edited by Einat Ofir, scientific editor Ariel Tsovel, 292-282 (Jerusalem: Museum on the Seam, February 2013). The exhibition was curated by Raphie Etgar. The Anthology includes 15 fragments from prominent texts in various disciplines: from history and anthropology through undercover investigation reports to ethics; a further section includes reproductions and explanatory texts from the exhibition. The book is bilingual and page numbering is from right to left.
Animals and Society, 2012
The broadest and most intensive connection between human and nonhuman animals occurs within the a... more The broadest and most intensive connection between human and nonhuman animals occurs within the agricultural framework. Each year, tens of millions of animals worldwide are exploited in agriculture, and they are dominated more thoroughly than the victims of any other exploitative relationship.
Following the increase in the number of farmed animals and the worsening crowding conditions, automatic devices have become a significant factor in the interrelationship between farmers and the animals they control. The early automatic devices were intended as substitutes for the distribution of food and water in separate containers or the removal of accumulated manure by a farmhand. During the 20th century, these small devices were united into a single system, functioning simultaneously throughout an entire large facility. These systems became responsible for distributing food and water, clearing away manure, lighting, climate control and other tasks. The introduction of computers into farms has enabled all these functions to become interconnected by means of a single control system, and control of the animals has become more immediate and accurate than ever before. The presence of humans on the farm is remained necessary only for more complex tasks, such as analysing animal behaviour and providing individual treatments, albeit these tasks too are beginning to be transferred to automatic diagnosis and robotic implementation.
The increasing automatization has contributed to further growth of farms, additional crowding of animals, and further distancing of workers from the farm. Surprisingly, the process leading to complete alienation between humans and "farm animals", as well as to their increased exploitation, owes much to technological attempts to solve problems deriving from inadequate treatment of animals in stressful conditions.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Animals under Automatic Management: Past, Present and Future." Animals and Society 47 (December 2012): 55-68. (Hebrew)
Human Beings and Other Animals in Historical Perspective, 2007
The alienation between the overwhelming majority of the human population in the modern world and ... more The alienation between the overwhelming majority of the human population in the modern world and the great majority of animals on earth, and specifically the alienation from billions of agriculturally exploited animals, is rather well recognized. Yet, this phenomenon is often presented a-historically, as if the new alienation is a sort of social vacuum or a lack of connection that suddenly replaced the old, complex and tight interspecific social order of traditional agriculture. The present article describes the gradual transformation that traditional agricultural societies went through during the process of industrialization, and it presents the developing alienation between humans and other animals as a condition rich in practical and mental content. The countries in question are the cradle of the process before spreading into other countries – first Britain, and later the United States. The article separates changes in the agricultural practices, as described explicitly in historical sources, from changes in human attitudes to animals, which are often merely implied in the sources. Each of these two kinds of change is divided into three phases that were closely linked in the beginning of the historical process, yet became more distinct as time went by: the exploitation of animals on farms; their use by consumers; and the increasingly expanding intermediate phase – transportation, pre-slaughter, killing, and processing of the dead bodies.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Alienated Contact: Changes in the Relation to Animals in the UK and the USA from the Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries." In Human Beings and Other Animals in Historical Perspective, edited by Benjamin Arbel, Joseph Terkel, and Sophia Menache, 333-387 (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2007). (Hebrew)
Science in Context, 2006
Empirical knowledge concerning nonhuman animals is essential for any ethical inquiry of interspec... more Empirical knowledge concerning nonhuman animals is essential for any ethical inquiry of interspecific relations: knowledge of the animals' traits, of their experience under human control, and of the characteristics of that control. Yet such knowledge is persistently insufficient in ethical inquiries, as a result of the power gap between nonhuman animals and humans, the exploitation of many animals, and the deep bias that unavoidably marks this reality. Scientific records are the major source of information about most animals, yet science is unsatisfactory as a sole source of morally relevant knowledge, and scientific approaches to nonhuman animals tend to be especially inadequate. Hence seeking knowledge concerning nonhuman animals' interests should be acknowledged as the primary and most important task of any interspecific ethical quest. However, scientific data should be subjected to moral scrutiny, acknowledging the effect of human/nonhuman relations on knowledge, while constantly looking for alternative methods of acquiring knowledge, based on empathic familiarity.
Society & Animals, 2005
Agricultural reports and guides, nonhuman animal welfare studies, and animal rights reports attem... more Agricultural reports and guides, nonhuman animal welfare studies, and animal rights reports attempt to document and convey the condition of nonhuman animals in agriculture. These disciplines tend to resist a prolonged and methodically versatile examination of individual animals. In his pioneer work, Lovenheim (2002), The author produced such a biographical documentation of calves in the dairy and meat industries. He provided an exceptionally prolonged and detailed tracing of their lives as individuals, establishing an emotional attachment in both documenter and reader. Yet, sentiments for the farmers, typical urban conceptions of communication with nonhuman animals, and difficulties in obtaining the relevant information limit Lovenheim's success and imply similar difficulties in other cases.
Thesis Chapters by Ariel Tsovel
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Papers by Ariel Tsovel
Despite the claims made by proponents of educational encounters with captive animals, students are often allowed to behave disrespectfully towards actual animals. As long as an educational project is based on impairing the autonomy and welfare of specific animals, and sometimes also jeopardize their very existence, the confined animals whom the students meet are excluded from the objects of respect. According to this paper, the manifest legitimization of disrespect is rationalized by promising to enhance respect towards distant and unspecific objects, such as animals in general, nature, life and man. Empirical studies held in schools and in zoos claim that this promise is fulfilled. Nevertheless, this paper argues that such studies are deeply biased: they focus on educational benefits without considering educational damage, and without presenting any plausible criteria for success and failure of the educational operation.
In conclusion, enhancing respect towards distant and unspecific objects remains a questionable hypothesis. However, a highly probable result of encountering confined animals is nurturing disrespect towards them.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Respect at the School Zoo: Educational Implications of Students' Encounters with Confined Animals." Dvarim 12 (October 2019): 247-265. (Hebrew)
Meat analogs that more or less withstand the aforementioned challenges have already been marketed for decades, and yet consumers make successful efforts to recognize highly valued differences between any meat analog and real meat, as they will keep on doing when facing minute and unavoidable differences between artificial and real meat. Motivating such differentiation efforts are the profoundly different emotional, symbolic and moral meanings ascribed to real meat in comparison with any alleged substitute. These meanings reflect the fact that producing and consuming real meat are perceived as expressions of physical and social power, whereas meat analogs are not associated with special power.
The paper examines three approaches to the association between meat and power. According to one theory, favored by meat analog marketers, non-coercive products should attract meat eaters since consuming such products exempts consumers from association with power, which have disturbed them in the first place. An opposite, more convincing theory claims that meat analogs cannot succeed precisely because these products lack the forcible meaning pursued by meat eaters. A third theory is the most convincing one, and it claims that when a meticulous division of labor is standard, the meaning of products varies in accordance with arbitrary stories attached to these products, and foreseeing where such stories may lead to is virtually impossible. Hence it may be possible that artificial meat will succeeds in chomping off a large chunk of the real meat industry, yet it is no less reasonable to predict that artificial meat will undermine consumer boycott of real meat, against artificial meat's original purpose.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Meat: Real and Fake, Truth and Fiction." Maarav 24 (Autumn 2018). Available at: http://maarav.org.il/english/2018/12/18/meat-real-fake-truth-fiction-ariel-tsovel/
None of the three theories reject the notion of deriving healing benefits for humans as a consequence of encounters with animals; however, all three criticize existing habits in the profession in practice, habits that are ingrained in prevailing norms of animal exploitation. This article proposes a framework for assessing specific moral problems, in addition to an overall moral assessment of the profession, while suggesting improvements in line with the above-noted theories.
The suggested improvements include, at the very least, avoiding the use of animals that might be harmed due to their involvement in therapy, avoiding therapy situations that could harm the animals, and significantly increasing investment in studying the interests of the animals and in activity promoting these interests. Such moral assessment may also lead to a demand to change the aims of the profession in order that it may explicitly promote the interests of the animals involved, and to institutionalizing active animal assistance through the profession. The different moral theories may also lead to a more pointed criticism of the profession, as part of an overall criticism of other, more prevalent types of human-animal relations.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Animal-Assisted Therapy: A Moral Assessment." Animals and Society 50 (May 2014): 55-65. (Hebrew)
Tsovel, Ariel. "Introduction to the Anthology: Flesh and Blood." In Flesh and Blood, edited by Einat Ofir, scientific editor Ariel Tsovel, 292-282 (Jerusalem: Museum on the Seam, February 2013). The exhibition was curated by Raphie Etgar. The Anthology includes 15 fragments from prominent texts in various disciplines: from history and anthropology through undercover investigation reports to ethics; a further section includes reproductions and explanatory texts from the exhibition. The book is bilingual and page numbering is from right to left.
Following the increase in the number of farmed animals and the worsening crowding conditions, automatic devices have become a significant factor in the interrelationship between farmers and the animals they control. The early automatic devices were intended as substitutes for the distribution of food and water in separate containers or the removal of accumulated manure by a farmhand. During the 20th century, these small devices were united into a single system, functioning simultaneously throughout an entire large facility. These systems became responsible for distributing food and water, clearing away manure, lighting, climate control and other tasks. The introduction of computers into farms has enabled all these functions to become interconnected by means of a single control system, and control of the animals has become more immediate and accurate than ever before. The presence of humans on the farm is remained necessary only for more complex tasks, such as analysing animal behaviour and providing individual treatments, albeit these tasks too are beginning to be transferred to automatic diagnosis and robotic implementation.
The increasing automatization has contributed to further growth of farms, additional crowding of animals, and further distancing of workers from the farm. Surprisingly, the process leading to complete alienation between humans and "farm animals", as well as to their increased exploitation, owes much to technological attempts to solve problems deriving from inadequate treatment of animals in stressful conditions.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Animals under Automatic Management: Past, Present and Future." Animals and Society 47 (December 2012): 55-68. (Hebrew)
Tsovel, Ariel. "Alienated Contact: Changes in the Relation to Animals in the UK and the USA from the Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries." In Human Beings and Other Animals in Historical Perspective, edited by Benjamin Arbel, Joseph Terkel, and Sophia Menache, 333-387 (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2007). (Hebrew)
Thesis Chapters by Ariel Tsovel
Tsovel, Ariel. "The Status of Empirical Knowledge in Interspecific Ethics." PhD diss., Tel-Aviv University, 2012.
Despite the claims made by proponents of educational encounters with captive animals, students are often allowed to behave disrespectfully towards actual animals. As long as an educational project is based on impairing the autonomy and welfare of specific animals, and sometimes also jeopardize their very existence, the confined animals whom the students meet are excluded from the objects of respect. According to this paper, the manifest legitimization of disrespect is rationalized by promising to enhance respect towards distant and unspecific objects, such as animals in general, nature, life and man. Empirical studies held in schools and in zoos claim that this promise is fulfilled. Nevertheless, this paper argues that such studies are deeply biased: they focus on educational benefits without considering educational damage, and without presenting any plausible criteria for success and failure of the educational operation.
In conclusion, enhancing respect towards distant and unspecific objects remains a questionable hypothesis. However, a highly probable result of encountering confined animals is nurturing disrespect towards them.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Respect at the School Zoo: Educational Implications of Students' Encounters with Confined Animals." Dvarim 12 (October 2019): 247-265. (Hebrew)
Meat analogs that more or less withstand the aforementioned challenges have already been marketed for decades, and yet consumers make successful efforts to recognize highly valued differences between any meat analog and real meat, as they will keep on doing when facing minute and unavoidable differences between artificial and real meat. Motivating such differentiation efforts are the profoundly different emotional, symbolic and moral meanings ascribed to real meat in comparison with any alleged substitute. These meanings reflect the fact that producing and consuming real meat are perceived as expressions of physical and social power, whereas meat analogs are not associated with special power.
The paper examines three approaches to the association between meat and power. According to one theory, favored by meat analog marketers, non-coercive products should attract meat eaters since consuming such products exempts consumers from association with power, which have disturbed them in the first place. An opposite, more convincing theory claims that meat analogs cannot succeed precisely because these products lack the forcible meaning pursued by meat eaters. A third theory is the most convincing one, and it claims that when a meticulous division of labor is standard, the meaning of products varies in accordance with arbitrary stories attached to these products, and foreseeing where such stories may lead to is virtually impossible. Hence it may be possible that artificial meat will succeeds in chomping off a large chunk of the real meat industry, yet it is no less reasonable to predict that artificial meat will undermine consumer boycott of real meat, against artificial meat's original purpose.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Meat: Real and Fake, Truth and Fiction." Maarav 24 (Autumn 2018). Available at: http://maarav.org.il/english/2018/12/18/meat-real-fake-truth-fiction-ariel-tsovel/
None of the three theories reject the notion of deriving healing benefits for humans as a consequence of encounters with animals; however, all three criticize existing habits in the profession in practice, habits that are ingrained in prevailing norms of animal exploitation. This article proposes a framework for assessing specific moral problems, in addition to an overall moral assessment of the profession, while suggesting improvements in line with the above-noted theories.
The suggested improvements include, at the very least, avoiding the use of animals that might be harmed due to their involvement in therapy, avoiding therapy situations that could harm the animals, and significantly increasing investment in studying the interests of the animals and in activity promoting these interests. Such moral assessment may also lead to a demand to change the aims of the profession in order that it may explicitly promote the interests of the animals involved, and to institutionalizing active animal assistance through the profession. The different moral theories may also lead to a more pointed criticism of the profession, as part of an overall criticism of other, more prevalent types of human-animal relations.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Animal-Assisted Therapy: A Moral Assessment." Animals and Society 50 (May 2014): 55-65. (Hebrew)
Tsovel, Ariel. "Introduction to the Anthology: Flesh and Blood." In Flesh and Blood, edited by Einat Ofir, scientific editor Ariel Tsovel, 292-282 (Jerusalem: Museum on the Seam, February 2013). The exhibition was curated by Raphie Etgar. The Anthology includes 15 fragments from prominent texts in various disciplines: from history and anthropology through undercover investigation reports to ethics; a further section includes reproductions and explanatory texts from the exhibition. The book is bilingual and page numbering is from right to left.
Following the increase in the number of farmed animals and the worsening crowding conditions, automatic devices have become a significant factor in the interrelationship between farmers and the animals they control. The early automatic devices were intended as substitutes for the distribution of food and water in separate containers or the removal of accumulated manure by a farmhand. During the 20th century, these small devices were united into a single system, functioning simultaneously throughout an entire large facility. These systems became responsible for distributing food and water, clearing away manure, lighting, climate control and other tasks. The introduction of computers into farms has enabled all these functions to become interconnected by means of a single control system, and control of the animals has become more immediate and accurate than ever before. The presence of humans on the farm is remained necessary only for more complex tasks, such as analysing animal behaviour and providing individual treatments, albeit these tasks too are beginning to be transferred to automatic diagnosis and robotic implementation.
The increasing automatization has contributed to further growth of farms, additional crowding of animals, and further distancing of workers from the farm. Surprisingly, the process leading to complete alienation between humans and "farm animals", as well as to their increased exploitation, owes much to technological attempts to solve problems deriving from inadequate treatment of animals in stressful conditions.
Tsovel, Ariel. "Animals under Automatic Management: Past, Present and Future." Animals and Society 47 (December 2012): 55-68. (Hebrew)
Tsovel, Ariel. "Alienated Contact: Changes in the Relation to Animals in the UK and the USA from the Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries." In Human Beings and Other Animals in Historical Perspective, edited by Benjamin Arbel, Joseph Terkel, and Sophia Menache, 333-387 (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2007). (Hebrew)
Tsovel, Ariel. "The Status of Empirical Knowledge in Interspecific Ethics." PhD diss., Tel-Aviv University, 2012.