Defining the Human and the Animal

Annals of Science, 2013

In 2005 a small group of academics gathered at the University of Western Australia for a modest yet highly significant interdisciplinary conference focused on scholarship in the emerging field of human-animal studies. A critical mass of academics from the University of Tasmania attended that first conference and pledged to host a second human-animal studies conference two years later. True to their word a second human-animal studies conference was held in Hobart, Australia, in 2007. The organisers called the second conference "Considering Animals" and the book under review here is a compilation of papers presented at that conference. The first striking feature of the book Considering Animals (hardback version), is the artwork on the dust jacket (Figure 1). While some may not pay a book's dust jacket much heed, I view Considering Animals stunning cover-art as quite a coup. In an age of publishing rationalisation and belt-tightening, I imagine that the editors must have fought hard for permission to display a colour image on the book's cover; and for the inclusion of such a large number of pictures throughout the book. If this is the case, then their persistence paid off. Not only is Yvette Watt's cover-art beautiful and thought provoking in and of itself, it also serves to remind readers that this book is dealing with a highly interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry. Human-animal studies is not only about words. It is about images, representation, art and interpretation. One of the most noteworthy features of the biannual Australian Animal Studies Group, and the Minding Animals, conferences is the extent to which visual and other creative artists contribute to the field. With the use of such powerful cover-art the editors give effect to the contribution made by creative arts to the emerging discipline of human-animal studies. The book opens with a forward by well-known ecologist Marc Becoff and an introduction by two of the book's editors: Carol Freeman and Elizabeth Leane. The remainder of the book consists of 14 papers by (often prominent) academics, all of who presented at the 2007 University of Tasmania "Considering Animals" conference.

Critical reading of the human-animal relation in the moral philosophies of Taylor and MacIntyre

Rethinking the Human–Animal Relation: New Perspectives in Literature and Theory, 2019

Paragraph - Edinburgh University Press Volume 42, Issue 1, March, 2019

Environment and Society: Advances in Research, vol. 4, 2013

In studying the lives and livelihoods of human beings, the social sciences and humanities oft en fi nd their lines of inquiry tugged in the direction of other, nonhuman beings. When Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963) suggested that "thinking with" animals was relevant and fruitful to the study of humankind, scholars began to follow these leads with academic rigor, enthusiasm, and creativity. Propelled into the new millennium by the passion of the environmental movement, compounded by natural and anthropogenic disaster, and now entrenched in the discourse of the Anthropocene, recent scholarship has simultaneously called into question the validity of human exceptionalism and expanded our social and political worlds to include animals and myriad other nonhuman beings. Th is move is paradoxical: as the signifi cance of human action on this planet has increased, the category of the human is continually challenged and redrawn. While contemporary posthumanist critique rethinks the importance of animals and strives to destabilize long-standing ontological exceptions, it does so just as the eff ects of human presence overwhelmingly single out our species as the dominant agents of planetary change (see Chakrabarty 2009; Steff en, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007).

Journal of Animal Ethics, 2021

Since the field of Animal Studies has opened up, the human and social sciences, in North American and in Europe, have developed an almost exclusive interest in the human side of this subject, examining human uses, practices and most particularly human representations of animals, in part because of a certain scholarly infatuation with cultural studies since the 1980s.1 After having used these approaches myself many times, I feel they are now insufficient because they have created and maintained a blind spot at their center: that of animals as feeling, acting, responding beings, who have their own initiatives and reactions. Scholars have had much to say about humans, and very little to say about animals, who remain absent or are transformed into simple pretexts, pure objects on which human representations, knowledge, practices are exercised without consequence. In this sense, the history of animals that has developed over the last thirty years is in reality a human history of animals where these latter have very little place as real beings. Looking at Real Animals We must move away from this approach rooted in a Western cultural worldview that has impoverished the dialectical theme of humans and animals, reducing it to a field with one magnetic pole (humans) and a single directional pull (humans towards animals) thus forgetting or dismissing much of its reality and complexity. We must look more closely at the influence of animals in their relationships with humans, at their role as actual actors, in light of ethology's growing insistence-at least for certain species and an increasing number of them-on the behaviors of each animal as actor, individual, and even person; on the cognitive capacities of animal individuals; and on the sociability and cultures of animal groups-and thus revealing the inadequacies of purely human approaches. Similarly, historical documents show, when this information is not rejected as anecdotal, that humans have seen or foreseen and assessed animal interests and have reacted, acted, and imagined as a result. We must leave the human side, moving to the animal side,2 in order to better understand human/animal relationships but also in order to better know these living actor-beings who deserve to be studied in and of themselves. This means that the definition of history must be broadened, abandoning the too restricted definition of "a science of humans in time,"3 in which many historians have become entrenched. This definition is not inviolable; it has been historically constructed, from Fustel de Coulanges to Bloch, with two events being of particular importance: first, the formation of the human sciences as a means to studying the human independently of the natural sciences that had a certain monopoly on knowledge; and second, the broadening of the human sciences during the 1900s to 1930s to include the study of all aspects of the human and not just those related to the political. It is now time to redefine history as the "science of all living beings in time" and to become interested in these living beings' evolutions, at the very least in those evolutions that have been recorded in diverse historical documents and that could be the object of study for a historian versed in the field. At the same time, we must go beyond the cultural approach-note that I did not say abandon this approach-that tends to reduce the human and social sciences to an exercise in deconstruction and close examination of social discourses, and thus arrive at representations that are considered to be the only observable reality. This work is necessary; but the success of cultural approaches has transformed an essential preliminary step into an ultimate finality. We must once again be searching for realities using the concept of "situated knowledges"4 to validate a building of knowledge that is not ignorant of, nor taken in by, its context of elaboration. We need to apply this to the diverse human actors who have used, become close to, and observed animals, and who have become witnesses to animals in varying degrees using observation and representation. We need to take into account the conditions under which these discourses were produced so that when we bring together, test and critique information that is partial-in the sense of being incomplete and biased-we arrive at some sense of that reality. We must also abandon the culturally constructed Western notion of animals as passive beings and see them instead as feeling, responding, adapting, and suffering. In other words, we need to start with the hypothesis that animals are not only actors that influence humans, but that they are also individuals with their own specific set of characteristics, they are even people with their own behaviors, in short, they are subjects. These ideas are no longer taboo5 and should be tested in the field while leaving room for some flexibility in how the definitions are used. We must refrain from starting with (too-well) defined concepts, whose reality we hope to prove, because then we simply configure these concepts according to the form we know best, that is, the human form, or more precisely the European human form at a given time, and once again we fall into the trap of ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism. We must realize that our concepts are always situated: in time, as historians show us; in space, as ethnologists point out6; and amongst living beings as ethologists are beginning to demonstrate.7 Western culture has defined the subject as thinking, self-conscious, and as having recourse to conscious choices and strategies, all the while forgetting that this definition-that it takes as the definition-is in fact a situated, inferred version of the human. Moreover, this underlying portrait includes a set of philosophical implications that place humanity at the top as absolute reference, just as the Western world placed itself at the top in the past. When one clings to this definition while observing animals, one uses a discourse of domination as a tool of investigation, arriving at the already-drawn conclusion that there are no subjects among animals. It is when more supple definitions are adopted that one can envisage the concept of animals as subjects or come to a conclusion even if not all the parameters are met. We must remember that we have just barely begun to search for these parameters in the animal world; if we find that these parameters lack some consistency, it may be that we need to consider a greater plurality of meanings. Experimenting with key concepts does not mean falling into the trap of anthropomorphism, just as attributing flexibility and suppleness to concepts under investigation does not mean sliding into vague impressionism. What such an approach entails is a form of critical anthropomorphism that watches with curiosity, asks difficult questions, tries out critical concepts, observes without prejudice, and avoids an already conclusive anthropomorphism that foists humanity on animality and thus denies their specificities. It also entails being as open as possible to the potential capabilities of animals, many of whom we still do not know very well. Finally, this approach means seeing the diverse expressions of different faculties in order to adopt wider definitions of them. This is already being done for physical abilities (we know that many species do not see the world as we do but we do not deduce from this that they can not see), but we remain reticent when it comes to doing the same for mental abilities because these are what allow us to value ourselves over animals. This is not a question of mixing up all living beings, but rather it is a question of appreciating the diversity of all and the richness of each one. This means abandoning the shallow, puerile, distorted dualism that opposes humans to animals and in which philosophies and religions have trapped us for the last 2500 years. First, this dualism is shallow because it opposes a concrete species, the human, to a concept, the animal, that does not exist in the fields nor in the streets and that is nothing more than a category masking the reality of a multiplicity of species that are each very different. Second, this dualism is puerile because it poses the question of a difference

Society Register, 2020

Can western human society apply its definition of the term "animal" on itself? Is it possible that a "person" is not only human? In this article, I explore and analyze various and interdisciplinary doctrines and approaches towards nonhuman animals in order to question the current status-quo regarding nonhuman animals. Throughout history, as Man developed self-awareness and the ability to empathize with others, hunters were associated with wolves and began to domesticate them and other animals. With the introduction of different religions and beliefs into human society, Man was given the lead in the food chain, and the status of the nonhuman animals became objectified and subject of the property of human animals. Common modern taxonomy identified and described approximately 1.9 million different species. Some estimate the total number of species on earth in 8.7 million. The Human is just one of 5,416 other species in the Mammal class and shares a place of honour among hundreds of other Primates and Great Apes. It appears to be commonly and scientifically accepted that humans are animals. Humans, as other nonhuman animals, all meet the definitions of the term. However, it seems that there is a wide gap between the human-generated definitions (HGDs) and the human social practice that created a distinct line between humans and "animals". This alienation is best illustrated by the commonly mistaken equivalence between the terms "human" and "person", as at least some nonhuman animals answer to many other HGDs. In this article I try to show that a rational and logical interpretation of these definitions' nonhuman animals (at least some), should be regarded as persons and to suggest an approach to implement in the future.