Constructing Animals: scientific, cultural and philosophical perspectives

1
Constructing Animals scientific, cultural and
philosophical perspectives

• How do we think about animals?
• Attitudes and beliefs are shaped by cultural and
  historical perspective
• We need to dig deep to uncover philosophical
  suppositions that structure scientific theory,
  lay beliefs and popular understanding
• Within society, animals inhabit various, often
  contradictory positions and roles
• The ways in which we think about animals, and the
  meanings we place on them, are heavily structured
  by the sorts of relationships we have with them.

2
How do we categorise animals?

• Animals can be.meat, pets, companions, workers,
  machines, guinea pigs, pests, little humans,
  archetypes, brands.
• Categories are shaped by culture, time, ethics,
  philosophy, need, values
• Our categories are not value-free e.g. wild vs
  tame, good vs bad animals
• Our categories are not fixed but are fuzzy (see
  Lakoff Johnson, 1980). We sometimes refer to
  humans as animals and animals as human-like. Our
  categorisation is often contradictory

3
Self and other

• Distinguishing self from other is one of the
  first distinctions children must learn to make
  (Berman, 1990).
• Animals provide an important means to contrast
  self with different others (or not so different
  others) (see Shepard)
• But our boundaries between ourselves and other
  animals constantly shift and are not necessarily
  rational. For instance, we are obsessed with
  some species of animal (e.g. we construct
  cemeteries for our pets) but fear and dislike
  other species (e.g. animal phobias)

4
Humans are unique, rational, cultural, moral,
powerful
Animals are subhuman, irrational, instinctual
or unconscious, amoral, powerless/dependent

• Utilitarianism animals are resources to be
  consumed
• Hierarchical(ism) animals have less value than
  humans
• Negativism animals are dangerous or unclean
• Dualism reason seen as most important
  characteristic, leading to
• Mechanism non-rational creatures lack thought
  or feeling

5
Humans and animals share basic bodily, mental,
and emotional experiences

• Engagement with scientific questions about
  animal awareness and welfare
• Broader definition of values animals not just
  resources
• Empathic engagement with animal experience and
  emotion
• As boundaries become less fixed, possibly less
  appreciation of differences and inappropriate
  analogising from humans to animals
  (anthropomorphism)

6
Drawing boundary lines what is natural?

• Around 12,000 yrs BCE large change when early
  humans largely replaced or supplemented hunting
  and gathering with agriculture and domestication
  of animals
• By 4000 BCE all the most important plants and
  animals were domesticated
• Studies of hunters/gatherers show an attitude of
  reverence and respect for hunted animals and the
  usage of rituals to engender respect and reduce
  over-exploitation
• Tendency in modern period to see this as
  primitive and anthropomorphic

7
Great chain of being scale of progression
from God to humans to animals (anthropocentric
vision)
Reason (uniquely human) essentially separate from
the body (largely animal)
Modern western view largely dualistic
Cartesian separation of rational humans from
animal automata mechanistic conception of
animals as unable to experience thought, or
feelings
Moral constructions of good and bad animals
most like humans are better than those who are
less humanlike or fit less into human social
structures
8
Implications of the dualistic view

• Scientific difficulty to engage with questions
  about animal mind and experience notion of a
  mental rubicon (e.g. language, tool-use,
  empathy, abstract thought) that separates humans
  and animals
• Contested and ambiguous classifications of
  animals on a scale from most human to least human

9
Implications of mechanistic view of animals

• I shall assume that no one would seriously
  maintain that dogs, cats, sheep, cattle, pigs, or
  chickens consciously think to themselves(p265).
  Similarly then in the case of brutes since their
  experiences, including their pains, are
  nonconscious ones, their pains are of no
  immediate moral concern. (Carruthers, 1989, p268
  in Mitchell, Thompson Miles, 1997, p324)
• The pig breeder aims to produce the largest
  number of weaners per sow per annum, the grower
  seeks to get his pigs to slaughtering weight in
  the shortest possible time, the transporter wants
  the animals loaded and delivered with the minimum
  delays, and the slaughterman is chiefly concerned
  with increasing the rate at which he can kill and
  butcher the pigs that arrive at his abattoir.
  And at the end of the chain stands the spectre of
  the voracious consumer, who is solely interested
  in buying the highest quality meat and bacon for
  the lowest possible price. The fact that this
  principle also ensures that the livestock
  involved are subjected to a lifetime of continual
  deprivation, distress and discomfort seems to be
  largely irrelevant, merely an unfortunate
  by-product of the harsh, economic necessities of
  life. And the minority of people who display
  genuine moral concern for the welfare of farm
  animals often seem to be regarded as either
  stupid, sentimental or just plain crazy.
  (Serpell, 1996

10
An anthrozoological perspective

• Can help us to deconstruct and understand
  accepted cultural categorisations about animals
  and our relationships with them, e.g.
  classifications of good and bad animals
• Can help us to understand how scientific thought
  is structured by philosophical and cultural
  assumptions, e.g. early studies of primate social
  behaviour differed according to whether
  researchers were male or female.

11
Important issues to think about

• Traditional (dualistic) notion of thought as
  being rational, abstract representation of real
  categories out there in the world categories
  may not be so fixed, may be more dependent on
  culture and bodily experience
• Scientific and popular conceptions of animals
  have changed (and continue to change) over time
  and place and are shaped by (often invisible)
  philosophical assumptions
• We can examine conceptions of animals in
  language, images (e.g. advertising), dreams, as
  well as in scientific models and metaphors
• In all our considerations the animal-human
  relationship is the context from which we work
  and shapes, and is shaped by, our constructions
  of animals

12
References

• Arluke, A. Sanders, C. (1996). Regarding
  animals. Philadelphia Temple University Press.
  Chapters 2 and 7 especially
• Berman, M. (1990). Coming to our senses. Bantam.
  Especially chapter 2
• Birke, L. (1994). Feminism, animals and science
  the naming of the shrew. Buckingham OUP.
  Chapters 2 and 3.
• Carruthers, P. (1989). Brute experience. Journal
  of Philosophy, 86, 258-269.
• Dolins, F.L. (Ed.) (1999). Attitudes to animals
  views in animal welfare. Cambridge CUP. Chapter
  1.
• Haraway, D. (1992). Primate visions gender,
  race, and nature in the world of modern science.
  London Verso.
• Lakoff, G. Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we
  live by. Chicago and London University of
  Chicago Press.
• Mitchell, R.W., Thompson, N.S. Miles, H. L.
  (1997). Anthropomorphism, anecdotes, and animals.
  New York State University of New York Press.
• Serpell, J. (1996). In the company of animals a
  study of human-animal relationships. Cambridge
  CUP.
• Shepard, P. (1997). The others how animals made
  us human. Shearwater Books.