Animal Lives and Why They Matter

This book engages with the changing ways in which we, as a society and
culture, look upon and interact with animals, stressing how much animals
differ among themselves. An invitation to appreciate the peculiar role of
animals in telling important if uncomfortable truths about who we are and
where we are heading – namely, towards a world so much poorer in cultural,
moral, and biological diversity – as a result of the ongoing decimation of so
many other species. Drawing on a variety of thought ranging from that of
Midgley, Plumwood, and Murdoch to Levinas, Derrida, and Habermas,
from ecophilosophers to conservation biologists, Animal Lives and Why
They Matter asks how we have come to this, and what an alternative, less
destructive approach to our now precarious coexistence with animals might
look like. Spanning the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, and anthro-
pology, this enquiry into various cross-species relationships and encoun-
ters will appeal to scholars and students across the humanities and social
sciences with interests in philosophy, ethics, human-animal interaction, and
environmental thought.

Arne Johan Vetlesen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo,

Norway. He is the author of A Philosophy of Pain; Evil and Human Agency:
Understanding Collective Evildoing; Perception, Empathy, and Judgment; The
Denial of Nature: Environmental Philosophy in the Era of Global Capitalism,
and Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits
of Posthumanism.
Multispecies Encounters
Series editors:
Samantha Hurn is Associate Professor in Anthropology, Director of the
Exeter Anthrozoology as Symbiotic Ethics (EASE) working group, and
Programme Director for the MA and PhD programmes in Anthrozoology
at the University of Exeter, UK.
Chris Wilbert is Senior Lecturer in Tourism and Geography at the Lord
Ashcroft International Business School at Anglia Ruskin University, UK.

Multispecies Encounters provides an interdisciplinary forum for the dis-

cussion, development and dissemination of research focused on encounters
between members of different species. Re-evaluating our human relation-
ships with other-than-human beings through an interrogation of the ‘myth
of human exceptionalism’ which has structured (and limited) social thought
for so long, the series presents work including multi-species ethnography,
animal geographies and more-than-human approaches to research, in order
not only better to understand the human condition, but also to situate us
holistically, as human animals, within the global ecosystems we share with
countless other living beings.
As such, the series expresses a commitment to the importance of giving
balanced consideration to the experiences of all social actors involved in
any given social interaction, with work advancing our theoretical knowl-
edge and understanding of multi-species encounters and, where possible,
exploring analytical frameworks which include ways or kinds of ‘being’
other than the human.

Titles in the series:

Blogging Wildlife: The Perception of Animals by Hikers on the Appalachian

Trail
Kate Marx

Totemism and Human-Animal Relations in West Africa

Sharon Merz

Animal Lives and Why They Matter

Arne Johan Vetlesen

Cat People: Human-Cat Interrelatedness in the Cat Fancy

Emily Stone

The full list of titles for this series can be found here: https://www.routledge.
com/Multispecies-Encounters/book-series/ASHSER1436
Animal Lives and Why They
Matter

Arne Johan Vetlesen

First published 2023
by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vetlesen, Arne Johan, 1960- author.
Title: Animal lives and why they matter / Arne Johan Vetlesen.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. |
Series: Multispecies encounters | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022018133 (print) | LCCN 2022018134 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032330013 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781032330020 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003317692 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Human-animal relationships--Moral and ethical
aspects. | Animal welfare--Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC QL85 .V45 2023 (print) | LCC QL85 (ebook) |
DDC 591.5--dc23/eng/20220809
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018133
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018134

ISBN: 978-1-032-33001-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-33002-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-31769-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003317692
Typeset in Times New Roman
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents

Prefacevi

Introduction: “There is nothing now but kestrel” 1

1 Animals make us human 15

2 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 64

3 A dog named Bobby: Animals as agents and addressees 109

4 Encounters as experiences of conversion 158

5 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 202

Bibliography 252
Index 260
Preface

In my book The Denial of Nature, I set out to expand the sort of philosophical
agenda my thinking had been committed – or should I say confined – to since
my years as a student of Jürgen Habermas in Frankfurt in the late 1980s. My
growing sense of impatience with the “human beings only” framework for
doing philosophy in general, and ethics in particular, clearly reflected not
only my personal misgivings about the largely self-imposed limitations of
my profession. It also, and much more importantly, reflects the urgency of
topics more-than-human in the wider world, topics such as global warming
and the extinction of species, both largely human-caused.
In the sequel to Denial, entitled Cosmologies of the Anthropocene, I sought
to further expand my initial expansion by incorporating studies in social
anthropology (my first love in academia) so as to address what I have come
to view as two intimately interconnected losses, that of biological diver-
sity and that of cultural diversity. Too often treated separately, due to the
unfortunate inertia of the traditional intellectual division of labour within
the University between the social sciences on the one hand and the natural
sciences on the other, I endeavoured to bring the analysis of the two – twin –
losses together. Doing so landed me in the company of advocates of animism
and panpsychism, unusual bedfellows for a contemporary philosopher.
The present book is the completion of what has turned out to be a trilogy.
As one of the students in my course on environmental philosophy put it to
me a couple of years ago: “It’s time that you write about animals, isn’t it?”
I want to be perfectly clear that I come to the subject of animals, and why
they matter, in these times of species extinction and habitat loss, as the phi-
losopher I will always be despite my forays into other disciplines and lines
of inquiry. I am not an animal studies scholar. Nor do I aspire to reinvent
myself as an expert in animal ethics. Again, I shall approach the work of
fellow philosophers – such as Habermas, but also Emmanuel Levinas and
Jacques Derrida – in a highly critical spirit. Yet at the same time I hope
that my background as “not one of them” will prove fruitful to my discus-
sion of the work of authors writing about animals from truly diverse van-
tage points, ranging from ethnography to ethology, from cultural history to
 Preface vii
psychoanalytic theory. Animals are complex, as are our stances to and rela-
tionships with them, thus demanding a truly multidisciplinary approach.
I am indebted to the persons who took the time to comment on my man-
uscript, either in whole or in part: Per Bjørn Foros, Trond Arnesen, Anne
Sverdrup-Thygeson, Espen Hammer, and Jan-Olav Henriksen.
I am also grateful to the colleagues, from various disciplines, with whom I
have discussed many of the issues treated here, as well as to the students who
have constantly challenged me to raise the hard questions about animals and
humans that I try to illuminate, rather than answer in a definitive manner:
Knut Ivar Bjørlykhaug, Odin Lysaker, Sigurd Hverven, Zemir Popovac,
Freya Mathews, Per Nortvedt, Erik Stänicke, Erling E. Guldbrandsen,
Dag Schmedling Dramer, Maria Guzman-Gallegos, Martin Lee Mueller,
Julianne Grovehagen, Martina Mercellova, and Sindre Brennhagen.
I dedicate this book to my friend, kindred spirit, sorely missed: Keith
Tester.

Horten, Norway
Introduction
“There is nothing now but kestrel”

In his Lectures on Ethics, Immanuel Kant tells us that “so far as animals are
concerned, we have no direct duties. Animals are not self-conscious and are
there merely as a means to an end. That end is man. We can ask, ‘Why do
animals exist?’ But to ask, ‘Why does man exist?’ is a meaningless question”
(1930: 239).
Kant is in no doubt that animals are utterly different from humans, differ-
ent in the morally crucial sense of classifying them as means and humans as
ends. Their usefulness to humans provides the answer to the question why
animals exist. Without humans, then, there would be no point to the existence
of animals on earth. In holding this opinion, Kant takes is for granted that
everything of importance and value about the existence of animals is insep-
arable from their coexistence with humans, inseparable in the strong sense
of being derived from it. Outside the constellation with their “others” – us
humans – their existence holds no philosophical interest for Kant. The fact
that a considerable number of species of animals existed prior to the emer-
gence of homo sapiens on planet Earth is not something that Kant dwells
upon, placing them in a void where they have no way of mattering.
This is not to suggest that animals, precisely in their coexistence with
humans taken for granted by Kant, are not important to him. In fact, their
absence would make for a sort of moral deprivation. Why? Following the
statement cited above, Kant observes that “We can judge the heart of a
man by his treatment of animals”; indeed, humans should endeavor to be
kind to animals, “for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his
dealings with men” (1930: 240). In other words, the presence of animals in
the lives of humans is important in providing individual human persons
with a relationship with a species “other”, a relationship that is conducive
to the cultivation of virtues appropriate in the dealings with fellow human
persons, considered as the only carriers of moral status, of intrinsic worth.
Animals are a means to this end, a go-between for the individuals who are
the only genuine parties to a moral relationship.
In her seminal essay “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts”,
the British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, writing almost 200 years
after Kant’s lectures, shares the following experience with her readers:
DOI: 10.4324/9781003317692-1
2  Introduction
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of
mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some dam-
age done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In
a moment everything is altered, The brooding self with its hurt vanity
has disappeared. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it
seems less important. […] We take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer
alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.
(Murdoch 1970: 84, 85)

Murdoch takes this experience as her starting point for exploring “moral
change”, holding it to be “the most accessible one”, presumably because
the experience is of a kind that will be eminently familiar to her readers. In
speaking about moral change, Murdoch may seem to approach the impor-
tance of animals in the lives of humans in a way similar to Kant’s, highlight-
ing the cultivating role that animals may play for us in our capacity as moral
agents. But this similarity is misleading. Before sharing her experience of
seeing the kestrel, Murdoch submits that “beauty is the convenient and tra-
ditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a
fairly clear sense to the idea of experience and change of consciousness”
(1970: 84). Hers then is not first and foremost a moral interest in the kind of
change that experiencing, say, an animal like a kestrel may bring about, but
an aesthetic one, allowing an access to, and a deep appreciation of, beauty
understood as “something which art and nature share”.
To be sure, Kant is no foreigner to the affinity between art and nature
that Murdoch points to, devoting an important section of his Critique of
Judgment to it under the heading “the sublime”. “Nature is beautiful”,
writes Kant, “because it looks like art, and art can only be called beautiful
if we are conscious of it as art while yet it looks like nature” (1951 [1790]:149).
But individual animals like Murdoch’s kestrel play no vital part in Kant’s
account. And in fact, Murdoch too soon moves to other examples than those
provided by animals. “Good art”, she contends, “reveals what we are usu-
ally too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolute random
detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form”;
it “shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differ-
ently the world looks to an objective vision”. Good art, then, “is something
pre-eminently outside us and resistant to our consciousness. We surrender
ourselves to its authority with a love which is unpossessive and unselfish”
(1970: 86, 88). Being what Murdoch describes as “a kind of goodness by
proxy”, art helps us “transcend selfish and obsessive limitations of person-
ality”, thus enlarging the sensibility of the human subject (87). Attention, or
looking, looking properly and deeply, is absolutely crucial for Murdoch, not
only to grasp beauty but to orient oneself morally, to grasp and do justice to
what really matters: “If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is
the ultimate condition to be aimed at” (40). In this spirit, inspired by Plato,
virtue is “au fond the same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a
 Introduction 3
selfless attention to nature”, showing art and morals to be “two aspects of a
single struggle” rather than in conflict (41).
What became of the “self-forgetful pleasure” that we according to
Murdoch take in “the sheer alien pointless independent existence of ani-
mals, birds, stones and tress”? What happened to the animals?
Before trying to answer that question, notice a big difference between what
Murdoch and Kant say about animals: Murdoch does not hold their not
being self-conscious against them like Kant does, using that alleged deficit
as a justification for viewing animals as merely a means to an end, that is,
the end(s) represented and pursued by humans and humans only. Quite the
contrary, in fact: the kestrel that Murdoch sees hovering when looking out
of her window exemplifies “the sheer alien pointless independent existence”
of animals in general. That the kestrel’s existence is aptly described in these
exact terms is what we are invited to think of as what endows it with the value
Murdoch recognizes in it, as inseparable from it, so that if we don’t see these
features as meriting our admiration, our self-forgetful pleasure in their sheer
existence, Murdoch will urge us to look again, and again, if necessary.
The deeper meaning of the difference between their views is more sub-
tle, though. It is not that Murdoch refuses to go along with Kant in hold-
ing animals’ lack of being self-conscious against them; rather, it is that the
self-consciousness or lack of such of animals does not enter Murdoch’s
experience, and her valuation of that experience, at all. What makes such a
big and morally crucial difference to Kant makes no difference whatsoever
to Murdoch. Does she think that the kestrel she sees is self-conscious? We
don’t know – she doesn’t say. Her not saying means that the possession or
lack of such of this particular property is not part of what is important
about the kestrel. What is important, then? Its sheer alien pointless inde-
pendent existence.
By far, I take the most intriguing part of Murdoch’s description to be
her matter-of-factly remark: “There is nothing now but kestrel.” No fur-
ther explanation is offered; it is as if this “nothing but” is self-explanatory.
Having turned her attention, meaning full-fledged, concentrated attention,
to the kestrel, it commands all Murdoch’s powers of attention: the posses-
sion of that ability is the gift it is endowed with, being the crux of what an
animal like a kestrel can do, can be, once given the chance. And since it has,
in and of itself, what it takes to command attention in this profound fashion,
we may speak about a before and an after: there is Murdoch’s state of mind
before noticing the bird outside her window, and there is her state of mind
afterwards, being an altogether altered one.
Mary Midgley, philosopher and lifelong friend of Murdoch’s, and a
key figure in this book, makes a comment worth mentioning here: “If we
found that we were in Disneyland, with plastic kestrels going up at care-
fully randomized intervals, [Murdoch’s] entire point would be lost” (1995:
346). Evidently, Midgley sees no need to explain, let alone argue her point:
it goes without saying that the distinction between the kestrel observed by
4  Introduction
Murdoch and artificial ones is clear-cut and compelling for everyone and
that real kestrels such as encountered in nature possess an ability to instil
awe and admiration in us that is wholly lacking in kestrels made of plastic.
Philosophically, the distinction in play derives from the venerable one
known to us since Plato and Aristotle, that between the grown and the
made, whereby the grown – say, a bird such as a kestrel – exhibits an inde-
pendence of being vis-à-vis us humans not found in the made, having been
brought into existence by us and in order to serve some human-oriented
purpose, as exemplified in the making of plastic kestrels: their very existence
depends on us. True, we may admire what we have made, whereby works of
art (Murdoch) certainly strike us as more worthy objects than, say, plastic
kestrels. In either case, however, the admiration for such objects entails in
no small measure admiration for their makers: look and appreciate what
humans are capable of creating.
This is the dimension I take Murdoch to throw into sharp relief when
picking the exact words cited above: “the sheer alien pointless independent
existence of animals, birds, stones and trees”. The selected words all under-
score that the things she directs our attention to here are precisely not of our
making – this holds not only for their sheer existence, but – fundamentally
– for the way in which they exist, the how of their distinct being in the world.
True, she adds a thought I haven’t cited yet, namely: “Not how the world is,
but that it is, is the mystical” (85). That may well be, but for my purposes
the how – say, of a bird like the kestrel – is not secondary in importance to
the that.
As for the how of animals, one may question whether the words of descrip-
tion used by Murdoch are as “objective” as her version of Plato-inspired
objectivism aspires to be. Can we really say that the existence of animals is
“alien”? Or “pointless”? Alien and pointless for whom, from whose point
of view? Surely depicting their existence like this presupposes a particular
point of view, particular in a sense giving the lie to the ambition of objectiv-
ity – namely, the point of view peculiar to humans. As for the animals them-
selves – can we say that their existence is alien, is pointless, to them? Shall we
reply that “it depends”, depends on their possession of specific capacities,
such as self-consciousness (Kant), in which case we may be willing to grant
that some animals are able to experience their existence as meaningful (if
that is the alternative to pointless), whereas others are not? And what about
“alien”? If anything, isn’t the existence of non-human animals like birds the
most natural thing there is? If depicted as alien, doesn’t that say something
about us and our particular point of view, and nothing about the birds?
This may sound abstract and academic, but it’s not. The conditions
under which animals live their lives are rapidly and drastically changing.
Philosophers’ predilection for examining their selected entities in a once-
and-for-all manner, sub specie aeternitatis, comes up short in a situation like
the present one, affecting not only how animals live their lives, but increas-
ingly also whether the form of life they represent will go on existing at all.
 Introduction 5
Notwithstanding the many quarrels among philosophers over the correct
description of properties taken to distinguish animals from humans, or one
type of animal from others, the sheer continued presence of animals on
earth is being taken for granted, unanimously. The constellation humans/
animals, empirically and not only analytically understood, has been a con-
stant, allowing for the assessment of alterations among the factors that do
change, such as the geographical and numerical distribution of animals clas-
sified as wild, domestic, and pets. That there will be animals as long as there
are humans, providing us with direct experiential access to our so-called
“others”, has never been in doubt – doubting it would seem so fanciful as to
not be worth the exercise.
These days, it is not our inability to doubt the possible future absence
of animals that deserves attention, but our inability – unwillingness – to
recognize their disappearance even when staring it in the face. Perhaps
this inability is not first and foremost a philosophical phenomenon but
rather a psychological, sociological, or ideological one, suitable to the
sort of inquiries that the disciplines thus alluded to will help us under-
take. If we have difficulties recognizing the novel historical fact that ani-
mals – some types of them more than others, and some more rapidly than
others – are disappearing, denial might be a better term than inability, as
borne out in the title of my previous book The Denial of Nature (2015). Or
perhaps we need to take a more long-term view on how it has come about
that non-human “others” such as animals are seen as acceptable casu-
alties of what we, generally speaking, welcome as progress, making the
losses occurring along the way worth it, if not for the affected animals,
then for us humans – a notion at the heart of the book preceding this one,
Cosmologies of the Anthropocene (2019).
What was Kant thinking when he said that animals “are there merely as a
means to an end” and “that end is man”? Are we now witnessing the utterly
concrete consequences of acting – collectively, as a culture and society –
in accordance with his matter-of-factly sounding assertion, one that drew
little, if any, critical attention at the time? Or would putting it like this, in
terms of a charge involving some portion of responsibility, be to do Kant
an injustice, attributing an importance to his philosophical view about the
relationship between humans and animals that is simply inappropriate,
greatly exaggerating its historical impact? More to the point is perhaps to
observe that he did not, and could not, foresee the situation we’re in, having
for centuries treated most animals as are they merely a means to our human
ends, dispensable at that. While kindness to animals reflects the existence
of a properly social and moral individual, according to Kant, viewing and
treating them in that spirit and for that purpose leaves them without any
proper protection, philosophically as well as practically.
In speaking about the disappearance of animals, showing beyond reason-
able doubt that their future existence can no longer be taken for granted,
what precisely am I referring to?
6  Introduction
No longer is there anything new under the sun about newspaper arti-
cles that inform us that “researchers warned last year that two-thirds of
North American bird species are at risk of extinction”, explaining that
“climate change is disrupting hundreds of bird species” (The Guardian,
Weekly, January 15, 2021: 31). A comprehensive study led by Professor of
Ecology Gerardo Ceballos, using a sample of 27,600 terrestrial vertebrate
species, and a more detailed analysis of 177 mammal species, published in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2017, offers the fol-
lowing summary: “The biological annihilation we now observe will without
doubt have severe ecological, economic, and social consequences. Humanity
will eventually pay an exceptionally high price for the ongoing decimation
of the only habitat we know in the universe. The situation is so critical that
it would be unethical not to use strong words” (Ceballos et al. 2017: 3). The
scientists continue:

Dwindling population sizes and range shrinkages amount to a massive

anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services
essential to civilization. […] The ultimate drivers of the immediate
causes of biotic destruction [are] human overpopulation and overcon-
sumption, especially by the rich. These drivers, all of which trace to the
fiction that perpetual growth can occur on a finite planet, are them-
selves increasing rapidly. All signs point to ever more powerful assaults
on biodiversity in the next two decades, painting a dismal picture of the
future of life, including human life.
(Ceballos et al. 2017: 7, 8)

Thus the disappearance of animals that I spoke about above is part of a

bigger picture: biological annihilation, a novel term marking a novel histori-
cal situation. With regard to animals, this means their ongoing decimation,
eventually extinction. That’s where the scientists tell us we are heading.
Since this is a book written by a philosopher, not a natural scientist, I
shall not concentrate on numbers, knowing full well that some sorts of ani-
mals see a numerical increase (say, livestock), while others are becoming so
few and far between as to be on the brink of extinction – partly because los-
ing their habitat to the ever-expanding areas cleared for livestock. Indeed,
to talk in general fashion about “animals” is hopelessly inaccurate. Not
only do various sorts of animals exhibit an enormous heterogeneity as far as
their capacities and ways of moving and being in the world are concerned.
Different animals also face very different futures, often as a result of how
differently some of them are treated by humans as compared with other
animals. The arbitrariness to which we subject animals as members of what
we hail as a scientifically informed, rationality-oriented society is stagger-
ing – if anything, it is more conspicuous today than in earlier epochs and in
non-Western cultures, not less. Melanie Challenger puts it well: “The golden
retriever that sleeps at the foot of someone’s bed is no more intelligent or
 Introduction 7
special than the pig they may have eaten earlier that day. But the retriever
is in partnership with a human. What the dog and the pig have in common
is that their worth has been arbitrarily given on the basis of the relationship
a human wants with them” (2021: 90). Literally, the way the human party
defines the relationship is nothing less than a life and death issue for the
animal in question: “The dog and the man are friends, and so the dog is
given identity and a mind, of sorts. The pig, just as sentient and sensitive a
creature, can be rendered unconscious, hung from an overhead rail and slit
behind their jowl to sever both jugular and carotid” (ibid.).
But it’s not only that we are notoriously inconsistent in the way we dis-
criminate between animals, maintaining best-friends attachment to the
comparatively less intelligent retriever and having the more intelligent pig
for dinner, making a mockery of the long-standing notion that intelligence
is what counts. At a more basic level, the division that matters most and that
never ceases to cut the deepest, both ways, is the generic and general one:
humans versus animals, us versus them. As Challenger observes in How to
Be Animal, “many people don’t like to be reminded that we are animals,
so much so that we may unconsciously rebel against anything that seems
to place us in this category” (2021: 177). At bottom, then, the differentia-
tion that really matters is not in degree but in kind, thus reversing Darwin’s
famous formula, as we shall see: it is an either/or, being human or being
animal, as were the two mutually exclusive. If progress, the onward march
of civilization, is about overcoming the limits of nature, attaining mastery
over natural forces we previously were at the mercy of, then we will become
increasingly intolerant in the face of conditions to do with the aging, ulti-
mately the death of our bodies, intolerant when faced with the frailty of our
existence as vulnerable and mortal beings, that is, as beings that share these
features with our species others, animals, meaning with what we are so keen
to maintain we are not.
But, we may ask, what is specifically human, if not the ambition to escape
the conditions reserved for all other Earthborn creatures, animals in par-
ticular? Animals are stuck with their natural being, are they not? Stuck with
and forever condemned to their ever-renewed but essentially static live and
let die, to their mortality in particular, to given conditions in a way preclud-
ing any attempt to break free from them. Nourished by an ever-increasing
sense of mastery, of expanding the range of control thanks to advances in
science and technology, we modern humans see less reason than ever to
surrender to natural forces, indeed to surrender anything at all. The result
is that the perceived difference between us and animals – dynamic us, static
them; culture us, nature them – grows bigger and deeper. In this perspec-
tive, the whole point about animals being radically different from us and
everything that we consider most distinctive and most important about us –
intelligence in particular – works normatively and not just descriptively: the
differences made to matter most are always and invariably to the detriment
of the animals.
8  Introduction
Why does it matter whether we look upon animals first and foremost
through the lens of difference from us or through the lens of similarity?
Factually, both approaches will get some things right and overlook others.
If differences appear to outweigh similarities, what follows? Traditionally,
within Western thought and mentality, differences are to our gain qua
humans, showing up what animals lack that we have, advanced cognitive
abilities being the prime example. But why should the fact that birds (all
sorts of them) are less adept than us humans at discussing abstract ideas
and writing novels count as more important than the fact that birds can fly
and we cannot? That they can navigate, down to the exact square meter, and
travel between continents thousands of miles apart? If anything, isn’t the
arbitrariness shown in how we compare various types of animals with our-
selves even more striking than the arbitrariness mentioned above in how we
compare one sort of animal with another, such as the dog we call “man’s best
friend” and the pig we have for dinner? And isn’t the first arbitrariness even
more questionable than the second, in that it seeks to establish a categorical
division between humans and (all sorts of) animals of utmost moral, legal,
and political import, namely in reserving the status “end in in themselves”
(or inherent worth) to humans, denying it to animals, notwithstanding how
they excel in being capable of doing things we cannot?
Of course, in saying this I make a point that has been made over and over
again since Jeremy Bentham’s assertion that “The question is not Can they
reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?” (1948 [1789]: 311), inspir-
ing Peter Singer’s ground-breaking Animal Liberation. Even so, this book
will pursue a different approach than the capacities-oriented one central
to the discussion that Singer’s modern classic has helped define for almost
50 years. Although I agree that if we attempt to assess the moral status of
animals in terms of capacities, suffering is by far a better candidate than
“reason” or speech, my interest in animals lies elsewhere.
To see where this leads, consider again Murdoch’s statement about “the
sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and
trees”. As indicated above, to speak of the existence of animals as “alien”
and “pointless” betrays a peculiarly human point of view, yet one less intu-
itively true about how humans view animals than Murdoch seems to think.
Even if we grant that people in the contemporary Western society Murdoch
takes to be her audience consider the existence of animals “alien” and
“pointless”, their doing so is far from a self-evident fact. Rather, it makes for
a conspicuous break with how animals have been viewed in Western socie-
ties in the past, besides making for an even more striking contrast with how
animals have been, and still are, perceived in non-Western cultures studied
by anthropologists and for the most part ignored by philosophers.
Murdoch shows no interest in how animals view their own existence. How
plausible is it that they will agree with Murdoch’s human, all-too-human depic-
tion of it as something “alien” and “pointless”? Even if it strikes humans (or
some of us) as alien, can it really be held to be so to the animals themselves?
 Introduction 9
Hardly. If anything, the existence of humans, and the ways in which we
conduct ourselves, lacking such an elementary ability as that of flying, will
appear alien to the animals, especially perhaps, by way of comparison, to
birds, the one type of animals mentioned specifically by Murdoch. Speaking
from experience, I am in no doubt that, say, the crow in my garden finds my
existence and ways of behaving alien, full of contradictions and raising lots
of questions about the possession of the kinds of capacities we identify (in
ourselves only) as reason and advanced intelligence; whereas for other sorts
of animals, such as the retriever, our behaviour qua humans will appear as
the most familiar thing in the world, inseparable from their lifeworld qua
dogs.
This is not only a reminder of the massive limits to talking about “ani-
mals” in a general sense. To observe how enormously animals differ
among themselves when it comes to what defines the world(s) they inhabit
is important in its own right, showing the limits to the relative-to humans
perspective that Murdoch exemplifies, understood as the rule not the excep-
tion. Having said this, Murdoch clearly values the existence of animals as
something “alien” and “pointless”, experiencing it as something genuinely
positive – that their existence strikes us like this does not detract from its
splendour, its enriching the world. To the contrary, being – from a human
point of view – pointless may be said to be the whole point about there being
animals in the world.
Why is it that the whole point of the existence of animals is borne out by
their striking us as pointless in Murdoch’s sense? What does pointless mean?
One possible answer is: without purpose. Or to be more precise: without
a purpose accessible to, graspable for, us humans, or (more pragmatically
put) without a purpose that seems useful to us, thus manifesting a limit on
our part and not on that of animals, a limit to what we may hope to under-
stand and to what we recognize as useful. There is, I think, something admi-
rable about this view in that it departs from the culturally entrenched notion
that the possession of a purpose, or the role in helping realize some purpose
(be it one that is more manifest in other entities or creatures), is a require-
ment for having value and for meriting respect for what it – say, a kestrel or
a crow – is in its own right. Indeed, the point can be put more strongly still:
that there be, and continue to exist, creatures in the world that are admira-
ble and valuable in themselves irrespective of and independently from the
means-ends framework to which the notion of purpose is wedded (at least
in modern Western philosophy and cultural mentality) – that is what is truly
important about them, meaning animals in this case.
I think that this is a better answer to Kant’s question “Why do animals
exist?” than the one given by Kant in his lectures on ethics, tied as it is to
the means-end nexus, unable and unwilling to grant animals an importance
other than being means to human ends. What is more, the question Kant
considers meaningless – “Why does man exist?” – is a very good one, not
only from the point of view of the animals treated as mere means by this
10  Introduction
relatively recent species on planet Earth, but also, I will argue, for a growing
number of humans today. Indeed, the question why we exist, understood
not only as a metaphysical one that in a sense must remain speculative, but
also as a question about our moral status, a status very much borne out in
how we act upon a denial to accord that status to any other creatures than
ourselves, is presently assuming a meaning and an urgency Kant could not
anticipate. Let me put it like this: the way we as a society have treated ani-
mals in the recent past compels us to pose anew the question of who we are,
and of what our role as one species among so many others should be, having
seen ourselves as entitled to a set of behaviours that have led to the biologi-
cal annihilation described by Ceballos and his colleagues.
Having commented on Murdoch’s use of the words “alien” and “pointless”
to describe the existence of animals, something must be said about the third
concept she uses, namely “independent”.
For my purposes in this book, the issue of independence is more impor-
tant than the other two, being less metaphysical and more literal. Now if
I say that in my perspective the main thing about animals is their independ-
ence from us humans, the response will probably be that in taking such a
view I greatly, and problematically, restrict the kinds of animals I am talk-
ing about, qualitatively as well as numerically. Well, that is exactly what I
seek to do, in keeping with my critical remarks with regard to approaching
animals as were they all the same as far as the question why they matter is
concerned.
Of course, to point of how much different sorts of animals differ has
become commonplace. And yet the three-partite categorization that seems
so self-evident to us today, exemplified in the types of animals we may
encounter within a single day – namely wild, domestic, and pets – is nothing
of the sort, but itself a product of profound changes within Western society
during the last couple of centuries, changes that provide the sources I rely
upon throughout this book. For fear of putting the major historical trends
in too simplistic a manner, it is essentially a story about how animals that
used to be abundantly wild – in the abundant wild – came to be domes-
ticated, and how (some) domestic animals in their turn have increasingly
become pets. Indeed, in the last chapter we will see that one of the most
striking signs of the trend I sketch here consists in how even the few animals
left in the wild nowadays tend to be turned into pets, if not literally then in
terms of how they are perceived, making them subject to a sentimentality
that I will argue sits uneasily with their nature as wild animals.
Given this situation pertaining to so many animals today, what do I mean
by their “independence”? If the point of their existence is inseparable from
their independence – speaking of some animals, not all, of course – what
about the ecological argument that all creatures play a role in the exist-
ence of (some, not all) others, exhibiting their inter-dependence, cross- and
inter-species at that, and giving the lie to the notion that there is such a thing
as a truly independent creature?
 Introduction 11
I do not deny the ecological argument thus conceived. In fact, it is part
of my own argument, as brought out in my agreement with the holistic
biocentrism worked out by environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston,
demonstrating the continuity between my two previous books – Denial and
Cosmologies – and this one. To get this, it is important not to conflate dif-
ferent perspectives and levels of analysis. In this book, I endorse the eco-
logical argument about the essential inter-dependency and connectedness
between different species, including different sorts of animals. No animal is
an island. Hence I follow Rolston’s holistic biocentrism in holding that, put
formula-like, the morally right and the ecologically required are but two
sides of the same coin, meaning mutually supportive – in the big picture
and in the long run, that is. This does not preclude conflict between the two
in the concrete case, that is to say, a particular place involving particular
animals; in Chapter 5 we will look at several cases in point. Indeed, moral
and ecological dilemmas unknown until recently today impose themselves
as a direct result of the biological annihilation mentioned above, raising
novel questions in a novel situation, questions about “sacrificial logic”,
about deciding that some animals must die in order that others be saved
from extinction; about the validity of the once clear-cut but now blurred
distinction between animals in situ and ex situ, in their original habitat and
in around-the-clock human-controlled artificial environments (zoos, labs);
and about the appropriateness of holding on to a notion of wild animals,
and of wilderness, in times of human-made impacts on the conditions of
animals and the ecologies they are part of virtually everywhere on planet
Earth. Practices of hunting, as still found in a number of indigenous cul-
tures, play a major part in my argument here, challenging the view dom-
inant among animal rights theorists, Singerian or otherwise, that killing
animals is wrong, period. For me, the manner of death is not the primary
issue; the place allowed for the exercise of the full powers of agency of the
animals in question is.
To be sure, then, no animal is an island. But some animals can do with-
out us. They even have a right to do – to live their lives – without us. This
captures what I mean by their independence, and I guess that Murdoch
would agree, her kestrel being just as apt an example as the eagle, the wolf,
and the saltwater crocodile. Speaking of their being independent creatures
like this, independent from us, does not contradict their being ecologically
interdependent and interconnected, with various other species of animals,
as part of a wider ecosystem tied to a particular place, in the sense stressed
in the biocentric outlook I endorse. As for us humans, the problem we may
have with allowing these animals to retain and to flourish in their inde-
pendence vis-à-vis our human ways and activities, expanding everywhere
as they currently do, is in my view tied to our reluctance to recognize that
we are the dependent party, not they. How so? Ultimately we depend on
non-human species and forms of life – including animals – in order to sur-
vive. In saying this, I wish to leave aside the question of whether or not we
12  Introduction
may, if only we decide to, live without killing and eating animals. My point
is a different one, inspired by Murdoch: the human dependence on animals
that interests me the most is to do with quality of life; with how the quality
of life of Murdoch’s kestrel enriches not only that bird’s life but Murdoch’s
as well, whereby the bird’s independence from her, it being different, neither
instructed nor controlled by her, is the precondition as well as the core of
that quality.
I shall move back and forth between a macro- and a micro-perspective to
illuminate what relationships between humans and animals have come to be
like in present-day society, drawing on cultural history and anthropology
to help us appreciate the substantial changes that have occurred – changes
entailing, as their end point, the decimation and ultimately extinction of a
record number of species of animals at record-breaking speed. The biologi-
cal annihilation that Ceballos directs our attention to serves as a backdrop
that conveys a sense of alarm and urgency. But rather than being my main
topic, the ongoing anthropogenic degradation of the natural world that
causes annihilation provides resonance for my overall emphasis on encoun-
ters between humans and a particular animal; encounters that, when dis-
cussed by philosophers, tend to be generalized in ways not justified by their
being just that: encounters with particular animals. Encounter is a better
word than relationship, because the latter carries assumptions about reci-
procity, actual or possible such, in a way that an encounter does not. To the
extent that the encounters I talk about may be placed on a continuum from
human-animal dependence to independence – with, say, a retriever exempli-
fying the one end and a saltwater crocodile the other – I shall have more to
say about the latter cases than the former, not least because of their rarity
and precariousness.
This being my approach, the animals that figure prominently in the
chapters that follow are the following: a group of baboons; a dog named
Bobby; dingoes (Australian wild dogs); a cat looking at a naked and very
famous philosopher; a crocodile perceiving its (his or her) human counter-
part as food; a horse called Blue; and last but not least, Little Penguins
trying to find their home. The fact that they constitute such a diverse sample
is important and in keeping with my ambition to do justice to how richly dif-
ferent animals are, and the limits thus posed to philosophers’ predilection
for generalization.
In discussing Kant, Mary Midgley remarks that when philosophers
announce that they will be talking about animals, they end up talking about
humans. I am well aware that this book is no exception. I happen to be a
philosopher, and I claim no expert knowledge in the field of animal studies,
even though much of the material examined, and the authors whose views
I discuss, belong to that field, especially – and tellingly – to the recently
emerging one called extinction studies. One of the most fascinating things
about writing this book has been to discover just how much a given phi-
losopher’s views on animals reveal about his or her views on the matters
 Introduction 13
that matter most to humans – animals not really being admitted as part of
those matters, but coming in handy to shed light on them nonetheless. For
example, Descartes’ statements about animals inform us just as accurately
about his ethical position as his statements about humans, if not more; the
same may be said, though perhaps more controversially, about Kant. There
is a kind of consistency to this in that the non-human creatures who are
considered to be mere means to human ends, are treated as mere means ana-
lytically no less than in real life: to make a point about humans, not animals;
points to some extent parasitic on our declared “others”, showing who we
are by way of who we are not. Consistency is a virtue, even a trump virtue,
in philosophy, but the price paid by those who are consistently treated as
mere means in practice as well as in theory, is growing unacceptably high –
not only for the animals affected.
Let me offer a brief overview of the separate chapters.
In Chapter 1 I discuss Mary Midgley’s attempt to answer the question
“why animals matter”, leaning heavily on the work of ethologists such as
Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Jane Goodall. The notions of anthro-
pomorphism and of animal mind are central to Midgley’s approach, raising
difficult epistemological questions about how to go about understanding the
world in which animals live, being similar to us in some respects, radically
different in others. How to treat the element of cross-species difference – as
a regrettable limit to how much we may know about animals’ perspective on
the world, or as the major point about who they are? I then go on to examine
the work of the American philosopher Paul Shepard, dedicated to demon-
strating how it is that animals make us human. Such “making” is a process
as crucial as it is precarious, embedded in changing cultural circumstances,
sometimes conducive to how animals as our “Others” in Shepard’s emphatic
sense make us who we are, other times undermining the potential for human
growth and maturity by robbing animals of the otherness that, again, is the
major point, domesticizing them and turning them into pets. And make no
mistake: whereas we do this to our detriment as humans, the wrong it entails
is a wrong done to the animals.
In Chapter 2 I present philosopher Cynthia Willett’s proposal for an
“interspecies ethics”. Using call and response as a model for interplay and
communication across species, Willett’s work highlights the rich potential
she sees for a genuinely moral, and to some extent reciprocal, symmetric,
relationship between humans and various sorts of animals. Although it is
easy to be in sympathy with this approach, and although it contains impor-
tant insights, I point out its blind spots and limitations. I bring some of these
to our attention by looking at philosopher and anthropologist Deborah Bird
Rose’s reflections on the plight of dingoes in Australia. Central to Rose’s
discussion is a practice passed over in silence in Willett, namely hunting.
This of course raises the question of the rightness, or wrongness, of humans’
killing animals, of taking part, across species, in the reality of eating and
being eaten.
14  Introduction
Chapter 3 is devoted to the views on the moral standing of animals
articulated by three giants of late twentieth-century philosophy: Jürgen
Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas. In talking about ani-
mals (his cat in Derrida’s case, the dog Bobby in Levinas’), all three of them
tell us something vital about their overall understanding of what is required
to qualify as a moral agent and as a moral addressee, and how the relation-
ship formed by the parties to it should be considered: in terms of symmetry
or of asymmetry? The question with which Levinas in particular is associ-
ated – “Does the animal have a face?” – will be central to the discussion.
In Chapter 4 I turn to Val Plumwood’s encounter with a crocodile, an
encounter she was lucky to survive, marking a before and after in her
reflections about human-animal relationships. Rarely does it happen that
the prospect of being eaten imposes itself with such existential depth on a
philosopher taking part in the otherwise academic debate over predator
and prey, where the one preyed upon is always an animal, never a human,
let alone oneself. Plumwood’s experience and her reflections on it set the
stage for my discussion of the work of American moral philosopher Gary
Steiner, a work that seeks to provide a principal argument for why killing –
and eating – animals is wrong, period. I offer my objections to Steiner’s
argument before examining how author Alice Walker’s relationship with
a horse named Blue throws up questions of responsibility and loyalty in a
situation of crisis for the horse.
Finally, in Chapter 5, I address the ways in which the danger of going
extinct facing many species of animals today force us to reconsider the eth-
ics as well as the appropriateness of established practices of conservation,
be it in situ or ex situ, if we accept that this distinction still holds – which I
do, as part of my case for upholding the notion of wilderness. I discuss the
concerns of extinction studies, such as the dilemmas involved in the “logic
of sacrifice”: using some animals as means for the survival of others. And I
end by asking the question Judith Butler raised years ago, about whose lives
are considered grievable and whose not. Since the extinction I am concerned
with is that of animals, this question leads to a reflection on ecogrief – or
ecological mourning – as a response to the largely human-caused peril in
which so many animals now find themselves.
1 Animals make us human

I
In the introduction to her first book, Beast and Man, published in 1978,
Mary Midgley writes: “We are not just rather like animals; we are animals.
Our difference from other species may be striking, but comparisons with
them have always been, and must be, crucial to our view of ourselves” (1995
[1978]: xxxiii). Animals, Midgley goes on to point out, “are not machines”.
Indeed, one of her main concerns is “to combat this notion”, stressing that
“actually only machines are machines” (xxxvi). It follows that Descartes
was wrong in holding that animals are “automata”; when he did so, his
premise was the sort of absolute division between humans and animals that
Midgley opposes, suggesting a continuum instead. “Man”, Midgley writes
(whereby she means, true to the tradition she wants to challenge where the
masculine view has prevailed, human beings), “has his own nature, not that
of any other species”. Crucially, man is “more free than other species. But
that extra freedom flows from something natural to him – his special kind of
intelligence and the character traits that go with it” (xxxvii).
The notion that freedom flows from “something natural” in humans is
one that many philosophers have found problematic. Midgley is acutely
aware of this, and – shifting the focus from the historical past to the pres-
ent – she mentions the dispute prompted by the publication of Edward O.
Wilson’s influential book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, where
some of the strongest opposition came from people who believe that “any
notion of inborn active and social tendencies, if extended to man, threatens
human freedom” (xxxvii). To Midgley, the idea that humans can be free
only inasmuch as we are set radically apart from nature and exhibit traits
unique to us among all species is plain wrong. Far from threatening the con-
cept of freedom, then, to hold that we “have a nature” is absolutely essential
to that freedom. “If we were genuinely plastic and indeterminate at birth”,
argues Midgley, “there could be no reason why society should not stamp us
into any shape that might suit it” (ibid.).
The blatant denial that “man” has a nature is found in Existentialism,
particularly in the works of early Sartre, predicated as Midgley sees them to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003317692-2
16  Animals make us human
be on the notion that nature and freedom are mutually exclusive. “There is
no human nature”, she quotes Sartre famously proclaiming in Existentialism
and Humanism, his most popular book, meant for a non-philosophical
audience that proved more than willing to embrace its message in post-
war France in the late 1940s. “Man first of all exists”, Sartre contends, “he
encounters himself, surges up in the world, and defines himself afterwards.
If man as the Existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin
with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be
what he makes himself” (Sartre 1958: 28). In other words, humans become
human, and exhibit their unique capacity for freedom, only by way of being
different from all other creatures. Nature as such is philosophically of no
interest to Sartre; this holds for his major statement Being and Nothingness
(1943) no less than for his non-academic writings, including plays and nov-
els. Everything of importance about the human condition has to do with
that condition being something emphatically cultural and social, not natu-
ral. To take recourse to something putatively “natural” in order to explain a
piece of human behaviour would immediately – it is tempting to say: instinc-
tively – raise suspicion about being in “bad faith”, appealing to the workings
of forces of determinacy such that one cannot be held responsible for what
are truly choices freely made. In Sartre no less than in Kant before him,
then, nature designates the sphere of heteronomy and thus the dimension
human agents need to negate, or transcend, to realize their true humanity.
It goes without saying that there is no need for animals in this outlook; no
need, that is, to acknowledge even the sheer presence on earth of animals in
order to say what essentially needs to be said about how humans come to be
human and epitomize their unique species in each individual case. Processes
of socialization, the stages required to undertake the ontogenetic trajectory
from infant over child and adolescent to the full-grown adult – this can and
indeed should occur without any significant role being played by non-human
creatures in the form of animals. Picking Sartre as the modern-day champion
of this view, while justified, risks overstating the extent to which this view
qualifies as distinctly modern. The truth is that the view goes all the way back
to Socrates and hence to Plato. It was Socrates who declared that in order to
experience anything of genuine interest, and to learn about the things that
truly count, he needed always to stay in the city so as to be able to talk to
the fellow humans he encountered there; straying outside its borders, where
he presumably would come across only animals and the other elements of
nature – nature as separate from and as unaffected by humans – would be
a waste of time, not only philosophically speaking, but also in terms of the
presuppositions for developing into a fully human individual and attaining
the capacities required. As far as the historical record is concerned, it would
not be putting it too strongly to say that this stance on the part of Socrates
is a defining moment in Western history, inaugurating the strict ontological
as well as moral divide between humans and nature, and implicitly: between
humans and animals, that has for so long been its trademark – furnished,
 Animals make us human 17
of course, with a novel explanation and justification by later giants such as
Descartes and Bacon, only thereafter to be challenged by Darwin and the
research done in his wake by twentieth-century scientists such as Konrad
Lorenz.
Lorenz is a key figure in Midgley’s work on humans and animals, and the
reasons why are worth exploring. For a start, what interests Midgley is “to
show how and in what cases comparison between man and other species
makes sense” (1995: 23). Her point of departure is that what she calls “the
Blank Paper view” is wrong, taking, as we just saw, Sartre as one of its most
prominent advocates. What is wrong is the view that “man has no instincts”
in the sense that there simply is no “innate determining element in human
behaviour” (ibid.). Positing instinct as wholly absent in humans and as oper-
ative in all animals (to put the contrast as crudely as it is meant here) is
part of the general tendency for humans to exaggerate our differences from
all other species and, concomitantly, to ground all activities we value in
capacities unshared by the animals. This is a deep-rooted disposition that,
according to Midgley, is closely tied to the problem of evil, understood as
the infliction of pain upon others. “Man”, she observes, “has always been
unwilling to admit his own ferocity”. Unsurprisingly, here as elsewhere, ani-
mals are given a crucial function in maintaining this denial, resulting in
the attempt of humans to deflect attention from our own ferocity (Lorenz
speaks of aggression) by “making animals out to be more ferocious than
they are” (30). This is one of many instances to follow where the irony in
play should not escape us: to make the case that humans are what we are by
not being like animals, references to animals are crucial.
For Midgley, the importance of the ethological studies carried out by
Darwin and, in more recent times, by Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Jane
Goodall, has to do with the observation-based, empirical underpinning
they provide to challenge the long-standing notion of human uniqueness,
based in particular on the claim that rationality and language have no coun-
terpart in other species. While granting that these are capacities exhibited
to a higher degree of sophistication in human beings, Midgley shows how
ethological studies demonstrate their continuity with the mental capacities
of other species. Indeed, being a mammalian species, it should not be sur-
prising, let alone contestable, that we share the general structure of motiva-
tion found in such species. There is a set of basic biological needs having to
do with aggression, sex, parenting, protection of offspring, dominance and
position within the group, and so on; needs that have to be met and nego-
tiated by humans and other mammals alike, though doing so in highly dis-
tinct ways, characteristic of the species in question – whereby the interesting
distinctions are not solely those between, say, humans on the one hand and
chimpanzees and cats on the other, but between the latter two as well, show-
ing up the analytic poverty of foregrounding the crude humans-animals
comparison. Animals of various sorts form communities, enter into rival-
ries in attracting a partner; they tackle internal and external threats and
18  Animals make us human
distribute scarce goods to those most in need just like (or not quite like)
humans do, and the abilities for social interaction in general and for antic-
ipating the next move of a predator (or prey) are often a matter of life and
death, making an intelligent use of social skills an imperative for animals all
across the board. In many cases, the abilities of an animal to, say, flee from
an imminent danger are far superior to that available to a human – flying is
a much better response than running.
According to Midgley, one of Lorenz’ most important points is made in
this passage in his On Aggression:

It is a widely held opinion, shared by some contemporary philosophers,

that all human behavior patterns which serve the welfare of the com-
munity, as opposed to that of the individual, are dictated by specifi-
cally human rational thought. Not only is this opinion erroneous, but
the very opposite is true. If it were not for a rich endowment of social
instincts, man could never have risen above the animal world. All spe-
cifically human faculties, the power of speech, cultural tradition, moral
responsibility, could have evolved only in a being which, before the very
dawn of conceptual thinking, lived in well-organized communities.
Our prehumen ancestor was indubitably as true a friend to his friend
as a chimpanzee or even a dog, as tender and solicitous to the young
of his community and as self-sacrificing in its defense, aeons before he
developed conceptual thought and became aware of the consequences
of his actions.
(Lorenz 1966: 246; see Midgley 1995: 264)

If by aggression is meant the general tendency to attack, Lorenz explains, we

would misconstrue it if we view it as tantamount to a tendency to destroy, as
so often happens. Aggression is best understood as a driving away, a demand
for space, be it on behalf of those belonging to one or of oneself; hence, it
is a piece of behaviour that is not antisocial, but performed for social rea-
sons within a social setting. To speak of the motives of aggression in this
way applies to a number of higher-standing animals (mammals) as well as
humans. The driving away Lorenz refers to is predicated on the higher devel-
opment of feelings, with abilities for social responsiveness, for the interven-
tion or response that is called for in the situation and would be appropriate
to, say, the threat perceived against one of one’s own. Thus understood,
the aggression involved in driving that threat away springs from what may
seem its opposite, namely affection (Lorenz does not use the word love); it
springs from a pro-social basis, that of in-group bonds, giving rise to loyalty
and the obligation to protect the vulnerable, primarily of one’s own kin, but
not always and exclusively. For aggression to serve its purpose, then, basic
social skills and feelings need to be in place so that intelligent discrimi-
nations among the variety of others can be made, enabling a response of
inclusion in the one case and one of hostility in the other, there often being
 Animals make us human 19
a mixture or alternation between the two, not only depending on who the
other is in the particular case, but also – more complexly – towards one
and the same other. The capacity, even need for ambivalence we spot here,
is a deep-seated one, says Lorenz, and it would be profoundly mistaken to
try and root it out. Aggression, therefore, is a central element that humans
share with many animals, one involved, Midgley points out, “in the devel-
opment of many unquestionably valuable parts. Trying to get rid of it is
something like sawing off a hand because it has held a sword” (1995: 78). The
bottom line, then, that Midgley sees as the takeaway from Lorenz here, is
that “like power steering in a modern car, responsible morality derives the
energy which it needs to control human behaviour from the same primal
powers which it was created to keep in rein. Man as a purely rational being,
divested of his animal heritage of instincts, would certainly not be an angel
– quite the opposite” (Lorenz 1966: 247; see Midgley 1995: 271).
Common to humans and other mammals, then, is the crucial role that
social needs, social bonds, and social skills play in their life – ineluctably so,
because there is no other way to survive. The fact that these social qualities
are found across the human-animal distinction is what is basic; the many
differences in how they are acquired and enacted are secondary, though by
no means of modest importance, whereby the differences among animals
are commonly downplayed as compared with those which are taken to set
humans apart from all other animals.
As for the latter: what are these differences? If there is anything truly
unique to the human species, what is it?
We will have plenty occasions to point out how common it has been for
major philosophers within the Western tradition since Plato to answer this
question by way of the via negativa that animals (in the unspecified plural)
have been held to provide, helping bring into sharp relief what we humans
find exhibited in ourselves yet would look for in vain in animals, no matter
what kind.
That said, the most obvious candidate for what we are talking about
here is probably “culture”, taken to include such allegedly uniquely human
capacities as those required for morality (including intentional evildoing,
or wickedness, a topic Midgley is particularly fond of), besides practices
of a sort that requires sophisticated cognitive skills, such as language and
conceptual thinking of the kind involved in, say, doing philosophy. To put
the notion to the test: we wouldn’t be prepared to say of a cat, or a spar-
row, or a trout, that it is “philosophizing”, would we? Just as we wouldn’t
be prepared to say that such an animal, in a given situation, is behaving
irresponsibly?
No, we would not. And if someone would, the charge of anthropomor-
phizing (more on which later) is to be expected. That surely is the stance
we are culturally expected to take over this question, cultural beings that
we are, unable to ask and answer any question whatsoever without the
resources our culture provides for us in doing so, and doing so in the form
20  Animals make us human
of communication with others, at that, fellow human others, not others in a
special-neutral sense.
“Culture is natural”, contends Midgley. “We cannot live without a cul-
ture, but it never quite satisfies us” (1995: 272). Although we humans are
essentially social creatures, as we saw above, we “come half-finished”; man,
Midgley explains, “is innately programmed in such a way that he needs a
culture to complete him” (274), and yet the completion facilitated by culture
is never complete; there is always room for, nay need for, an in-between, an
open space, even friction, between the individual human being and his or
her culture. Culture, according to Midgley, is not an alternative or replace-
ment for instinct, but its “outgrowth and supplement” (ibid.). Culture is
essential, something we cannot live without because of our innate needs.
The key insight, then, is that “man is by nature a being of culture”, to
quote Lorenz, stressing that “man’s whole system of innate activities and
reactions is phylogenetically so constructed, so ‘calculated’ by evolution,
as to need to be complemented by cultural tradition”. Interestingly, Lorenz
goes on to state that “were it possible to rear a human being of normal
genetical constitution under circumstances depriving it of all cultural tra-
dition […] the subject of the cruel experiment would be very far from repre-
senting a reconstruction of a prehumen ancestor, as yet devoid of culture. It
would be a poor cripple” (Lorenz 1966: 264f.; Midgley 1995: 285).
I find Lorenz’ thought experiment interesting because it invites a parallel,
one he does not mention, nor does Midgley: namely, would it be possible to
rear a human being under circumstances depriving it of experiences with
animals? In other words, would socialization be accomplished, would we
deem it complete if present only human others, absent animal ones? I don’t
think this is an open question, one that we are agnostic about. Rather, I pro-
pose, we take it for granted that so-called “significant others”, those crucial
to the development into a distinctly human person, to the acquisition and
performance of the distinctly human abilities and skills, are fellow human
beings – interacting with, communicating with, being-with others of our
species, hating or loving them, is the trajectory for humans becoming fully
human and realizing their potential as such. In short, the whole process, in
terms of whom to relate to, bond with, and respond to, in terms of partici-
pants in any role deemed important, is considered a one-species affair, our
internal one at that.
For all its obviousness once stated, the parallel is not considered by
Midgley. Why?
I suggest that the answer is more complex than we would expect. Not so for
philosophical reasons, but for historical and cultural ones. Two things are
being taken for granted: that humans not animals are the creatures required
for human infants to evolve into fully human adults; and that the world in
which this one-species process occurs, one that is started over again with
each newborn individual, is a world where animals exist alongside humans –
only that animals are not looked upon as crucial to the process.
 Animals make us human 21
But putting it like this is too abstract. The point I want to make is utterly
concrete: not a fancy thought experiment but instead an observation about
a rapidly changing world, one where what used to be an abundance of ani-
mals coexisting with humans is dwindling from one year to the next.
The extinction of species and the reduction of exemplars in those still left,
driven by the shrinking of habitats on all continents, prompting some schol-
ars to say that “there is no more nature, at least not in the sense of wildness”,
are not taken into account in the discussion we have looked at in Midgley
(and in Lorenz) above. Having authored the works cited in the 1980s and
1950s, respectively, taking animals for granted is perhaps not something
they should be faulted for; it is only now that doing so would be out of step
with the facts as we know them.

II
What, then, is the significance of animals? Or more to the point, what would
their disappearance mean?
These are tough questions to answer. For a start, since animals have been
around, in abundant numbers, much longer than humans, there has sim-
ply been no basis in reality for considering the issue, not even as a relevant
hypothesis. That said, the genuinely philosophical dimension should not be
overshadowed by the historical aspect – namely: what would the disappear-
ance of animals mean for whom?
To observe that the question is raised from the point of view of humans is
to state the obvious. How could it be otherwise? It couldn’t. Every question
raised – be it about animals, be it about humans – is raised from the human
point of view. But this does not mean that the extension of the question is
confined to humans. There is something to be said about the significance
for animals of animals being decimated in the contemporary world: they
are the ones directly affected. Even if this is granted, it will immediately be
observed that there is no way of saying what this significance “for animals”
amounts to, since asking such a question is bound up with the human point
of view. The bottom line is pinpointed in Thomas Nagel’s seminal paper
“What’s it like to be a bat?” (1974), which is to say that in order to answer
the question we would need access to the being-in-the world peculiar to
the animal, an access we are prevented from ever getting because of the
species-barrier we are stuck with as humans.
I shall return to the historical dimension of the ongoing decimation of
animals in later chapters. Philosophically speaking, as Midgley argues in
Animals and Why They Matter?, the issue is more complex than just sug-
gested. The so-called “problem of other minds” has engaged several gen-
erations of the presumably most ingenious analytic philosophers, based on
a deep-seated suspicion over inner experience to the effect that there is no
way I can access another’s experience so as to be sure about what it consists
in in a given situation. The best I can do is to make a qualified guess, but
22  Animals make us human
in principle I may always be wrong even when that other is my wife or son.
Now, if I have no foolproof or objective way of knowing what the person
closest to me is experiencing (thinking, feeling), how can I possibly get it
right when that other is an animal? In other words, if the access denied us,
fundamentally and inevitably, concerns our attempts at understanding the
inner experience of fellow humans, it is no wonder that it is denied us in the
case of animals.
It is worthwhile to look closely at Midgley’s account of this issue. The
proponent of the sceptical position just sketched, she writes:

is uneasy because he thinks that, if we say that a dog is alarmed or

that it sees the river, we are claiming to know exactly how it feels. This
would certainly be wild. But then it would also be wild in talking of
human beings. Even when we know most clearly that another person
is alarmed, or has seen the river, we can never share their experience.
The barrier to sharing it is already a complete one with human beings,
so it cannot be made any more complete by adding the species-barrier
to it. We may suspect that the dog’s experience would actually be more
different from ours than another person’s would. But that suspicion is
irrelevant, since an impossibility cannot be made more impossible.
(Midgley 1998: 130)

For Midgley, what she calls full-scale sceptical Behaviourism is a dead-end

in insisting that we can know nothing of each other’s subjective experiences.
To stick to the example, alarm is not only an internal feeling; it has a public
dimension in being expressed in conduct. Indeed, in the normal case inner
perception and observed conduct go together, making for a correspondence
that, though rough, is “good enough to give us our shared public world”
(ibid.). Midgley refers to our practice of constantly checking one against
the other; in trying to interpret the reactions of others – what does he feel
in acting like that – we ask ourselves what our own feeling would be in that
sort of situation. Besides, to invoke a point often made by Hume, owing to
our membership in a community our expressive and sympathetic powers
are well developed, allowing us to mutually adjust and to convey feelings to
each other even though we cannot get inside each other’s heads (see Hume
1969 [1740]; Baier 1991; Wiggins 1987), the point against the sceptical posi-
tion being that there is no necessity that we do so.
On Midgley’s view, then, the problem is not about anthropomorphism –
attributing human qualities to non-human beings – but about Behaviourism
in that it “arises already on the human scene”. The barrier, that is, “does not
fall between us and the dog. It falls between you and me” (1998: 130). But
this, Midgley contends, is simply false: the powers of expression and sympa-
thy we possess qua humans allow us to assess each other’s subjective states,
if not in a foolproof manner with no risk of getting it wrong, then at least,
in the typical instance, in a manner conducive to successful interaction.
 Animals make us human 23
Getting the other’s feelings roughly right is the normal; and when we do get
them wrong, we will often be told as much, pointing to the importance of
mutually checking on each other, which is precisely what we typically do,
showing up the limits of any stance wedded to solipsism to appreciate that
what we are up to in seeking to understand each other’s “inner” experiences
is sui generis something social, inter-subjective not intra-subjective; a prac-
tice we always already are engaged in, rather than a philosophical certainty
(to allude to the shift from early to late Wittgenstein).
So far, so good. Checking on each other, making the experience or feeling
in question a topic of communication, thus converting the assumedly “pri-
vate” into something genuinely public, something to whose character both
parties – the interlocutor as well as the I – contribute, helps drive the final
nail into the coffin of scepticism. Midgley goes on to ask: does this work
with other species? That is to say, “do human beings, in their frequent inter-
actions with other animals, manage to identify their moods and feelings
too?” (1998: 133).
Midgley’s answer is pragmatic. The question, she tells us, can only be
answered “in terms of success, of improved interaction, resting on interpre-
tation and prediction” of the animals’ actions. She adds that this is true on
the human scene as well and that “those who try to understand animals, and
give time and attention to the matter, often come to understand them quite
well. Those who do not, fail, which is also true with human beings” (ibid.).
There are two ways to respond to this. The first one is that Midgley’s
pragmatism is to be welcomed: she brings the philosophical debate over the
species-barrier down to earth by demystifying the alleged radical “other-
ness” of animals, suggesting that, in principle, they are not more difficult to
understand than our fellow humans. The other response is that in putting the
emphasis on how similar the two cases are, she misses the differences and so
dodges the philosophical challenge they pose.
But what precisely does this challenge consist in? Midgley makes it clear
that the burden of proof does not rest with those who believe in subjec-
tive states in animals; it rests with those who deny it. Subjectivity is not
“an extravagant metaphysical hypothesis” (1998: 134); this holds for ani-
mals no less than for humans. All we need to do is to start from the facts
to be explained, like this: “Granted the similarities between nervous sys-
tems, and also between many of the ways in which animals interact and
the ways in which humans do, and granted also that humans often interact
with animals successfully, how wide a difference in their basic social faculties
does it make sense to posit?” (ibid.). In other words, we should not posit a
greater difference between the causes than is needed to suit the differences
in the effects; pragmatism á la Midgley here means simply to be economi-
cal. Again, the argument against scepticism is not theoretical; it is instead
eminently practical, a fact about our own experiences with animals that we
cannot deny: “Every day and all around us, even in our urban and restricted
way of living, people rightly assess the moods of dogs, and dogs of people.
24  Animals make us human
Cats, horses etc. are also doing very nicely. In the Amazonian jungle, where
it really matters, they do better still” (ibid.).
Notice how effortlessly Midgley moves from talking about how humans
understand animals to how they understand us. She evidently sees no more
reason to cast doubt on the fact of the latter than on the former. Much as I
find myself in general agreement with Midgley’s critique of scepticism, it is
one thing to challenge the basis for a “deep divide” between the species, and
quite another to replace it with the sort of symmetry that Midgley seems
to be proposing here, without really arguing the case for it. That cats and
horses are able to assess the moods of humans can be easily granted, I take
it, bearing in mind that the humans in question will be the selected ones
with whom such animals – the cat being a pet, the horse a domestic animal
– interact on a daily basis and often throughout their lives, so that should
they get their people wrong, they will be corrected, and hence enabled to get
it right the next time around, with that particular person. But what justifies
the claim that the animals in the Amazonian jungle – mostly non-domestic
ones – exhibit this capacity “better still”? What one can say is that their
lives depend on getting the humans – say, hunters – right; nothing less than
survival is at stake, and this goes both ways, applying to the humans’ need
to get it right as well. To observe as much is merely to stress what is at stake;
it is not to show what makes it possible.
Midgley reminds her readers of how much has happened since philos-
ophers such as Descartes and Kant wrote about animals; in fact, “the
last half-century has seen a complete revolution in our understanding
of animal motivation, and still more of animal communication” (1998:
136). Traditional knowledge has always existed, yet, in spite of Darwin’s
path-breaking research, it was largely forgotten. Only in the twentieth cen-
tury did zoologists help inaugurate a shift in the understanding of animals,
writes Midgley; ethology was established as the scientific study of animal
behaviour, and Lorenz’s work has been particularly influential. Again,
according to Midgley, this research is to be regarded as in continuity with
the study of humans and not as a radical departure from it. Hence the pio-
neers in ethology “found it entirely natural and necessary to use the regular
vocabulary already employed to describe human motive. This (as I have
suggested) is not surprising, seeing that it had in any case been invented for
use on animals as well as humans” (ibid.). But whereas Lorenz does not hes-
itate to talk about the subjectivity of animals, his colleague Niko Tinbergen
is not quite so sure: “Because subjective phenomena cannot be observed
objectively in animals, it is idle either to claim or deny their existence”
(quoted in Midgley 1998: 137). But if one holds, as does Tinbergen, that
feelings are a sort of phenomenon that can be known only by introspection,
his argument must apply just as much to people as it does to other animals,
which amounts to the solipsist position that Midgley rejects.
On this basis, the notion that anthropomorphizing – understood as the
attribution of experience (or more precisely: of the capacity for experience)
 Animals make us human 25
to other than human beings – is detrimental to science and must be rooted
out, is deeply mistaken according to Midgley. The attribution of emo-
tions to animals, she says, is just as justified as are our beliefs about the
inner states of other people – both versions of this practice of ours have
proved generally successful (see 1998: 142), and no further proof is needed.
Of course, a distinction must be made between holding that animals have
subjectivity, that they have feelings such as fear or joy, taken to be of the
same general kind as those we humans have, on the one hand, and getting
it right about what kind of feeling that animal is expressing in a particular
situation, on the other.
As to the issue of the subjectivity of animals, there is reason to question
the correctness of Midgley’s claim about a strong continuity from Darwin
to ethologists like Lorenz and Tinbergen. As Eileeen Crist shows in her
study Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind, Darwin’s
portraits of particular animals and their behaviour employ anthropomor-
phic vocabulary throughout, non-metaphorically so.
In turning to the works of Lorenz and Tinbergen, readers will be struck
by a striking contrast in that, if at all using mental predicates such as love,
anger, jealousy, grief, pretending, and so forth, these concepts will typically
be in scare quotes, a practice considered as required to come across as giv-
ing a truly scientific account of the animals and so functioning as a marker
of scepticism, as if unqualified and unequivocal commitment to the real-
ity of “animal mind” would violate the requirements of rigorous research.
As Crist demonstrates by way of numerous textual examples, ethologists
depart from their naturalist predecessors in that their accounts of animal
behaviour patterns are generic: they are “accounts of the ‘typical’ case,
not the singular instance”, not a particular episode involving a particular
animal whose differences from others – hence personality – fascinate the
scholar like it did Darwin (Crist 1999: 74). Referring to Tinbergen’s work on
the carnivorous water beetle, Crist lets us see that according to ethological
reasoning “it is not even that animals react to stimuli, but rather that key
stimuli release their reactions”, so that, to quote Tinbergen, “the beetle’s
feeding response is released by chemical and tactile stimuli exclusively; for
instance, a watery meat extract promptly forces it to hunt and to capture
every solid object it touches” (Tinbergen quoted in Crist 1999: 109). The
overarching claim is that the stimuli work as causes of animals’ responses,
advancing a mechanistic picture of the animal and a rigid image of animal
behaviour, portraying animals’ activities as “non-voluntary, as causes act
on or through the animal, bringing about what the animal does as some-
thing that happens to it”, hence casting it as essentially passive not active, as
reacting rather than as initiating action (1999: 122).
To anticipate a point to be elaborated more fully below, the approach of
the ethologists is testimony to the primacy of method over subject matter.
Crist explains what is at issue by way of the contrast invoked above: “The
naturalist goes into the field to record the stream of life as it occurs”; he or
26  Animals make us human
she “seeks to record singular events witnessed in great detail”, and with a
keen and curious eye for the ways in which the distinct subjectivities (person-
alities) of the animals are played out in their actions. By contrast, the etholo-
gist (or sociobiologist) “goes to the field to collect the data that are required
by the hypothesis formulated and the experimental design” (1999: 146).
The result is that in the ethologists’ research, individuals become absolute
incumbents of (theoretical, predesigned) categories, so that “descriptions
of animals’ activities are always generalized, delivered through quantifica-
tion markers such as often, frequently, regularly, rarely, and the like”. As a
systematic consequence, “the idiosyncrasies and particularities of individ-
uals, the ways in which their uniqueness is expressed, are factored into the
analyses only indirectly to the extent that they are pooled into quantitative
operations. In a discourse that is fundamentally statistical in character” – in
keeping with the primacy of method, of experimental design – “individual
variability, as such, is minimally significant” (1999: 147). Again, the use of
scare quotes in depicting what would be the equivalent to human motives, to
emotions, thoughts, and projects in animals and as exhibited in their behav-
iour is considered mandatory for any ethologist that aims to come across as
doing proper science, dismissing as anthropomorphic any vocabulary that
violates the border between human and animal worlds, human and animal
minds – granting that there is such a thing as the latter, which is exactly
what the scepticism Crist demonstrates is dressed up as “hard science” dis-
allows. Whereas the distinction between behaviour and action are largely
interchangeable in ordinary usage, Crist points out how their essentialist
bifurcation as carried out in the ethological research she reviews “guaran-
tees that animal and human affairs remain qualitatively separate”, thereby
calling for and justifying “discrepant frameworks of description and expla-
nation” (1999: 210). Regrettably, Crist does not explore the wider societal
and cultural consequences of the separation she critiques within ethological
research; in fact, only in her study’s final sentence does she point to this
wider dimension, observing that “the hierarchical regime of higher-to-lower
is ready-made and often unquestioned, and, in setting humans apart from
the animals, it has fuelled our self-importance and propped our thoughtless
and destructive relationship with the natural world” (1999: 222).
To be sure, there is reason to question whether the separation between
human and animal minds, to the point of dismissing subjectivity in animals
as “unscientific” and “speculative”, as the product of anthropomorphism
remains as predominant within the scientific community today as it was
some decades ago. Crist acknowledges that her material mainly consists
of the work carried out by Lorenz and Tinbergen in the 1950s and 1960s.
But she argues that Edward O. Wilson’s acclaimed Sociobiology: A New
Synthesis (1975) perpetuates the same sort of approach, philosophically
speaking: “Sociobiology”, she writes, “is conducive to the sort of elision
of mentality referred to as ‘methodological behaviorism’ in philosophical
 Animals make us human 27
terminology. Mental tropes are not explicitly denied…but simply assigned
no work in the production of behavior” (1999: 228, n. 13).
As for Midgley, one looks in vain in her work for a critique of ethology
along the lines carried out by Crist, which is surprising given Midgley’s life-
long interest in issues within the philosophy of science. The variant of sci-
entism that Midgley never tires of attacking, for what it’s worth, is the one
she encounters in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, whereby the problem
she sees is to do with the misrepresentation and distortion of what is specific
to humans, not what is specific to non-human animals (see Midgley 2001,
2010, 2018).

III
Midgley ends Animals and Why They Matter by saying that the book has
been occupied with “a negative”, with “removing barriers which our tra-
dition has erected against concern for animals” (1998: 144). Creatures like
crocodiles and dandelions, she remarks, tend to be rather unpopular with
the human race. But there are three sorts of human beings who beg to differ,
who see the point in their existence and befriend them – namely poets, sci-
entists, and children (145).
To be sure, this is an odd group, comprising what Midgley elsewhere –
most notably in Science and Poetry – argues are two ways of looking at the
world that often have been at loggerheads. As for children and their charac-
teristic openness to animals of different kinds, more below.
Now if Midgley is right that our tradition has erected barriers against
concern for animals, why is that so? And why have those barriers proved so
hard to remove?
Midgley credits Darwin’s theory of evolution with the advance of sci-
ence that connected human beings more firmly than ever with the other
animals. The case was made, by systematic observation in keeping with the
requirements for modern scientific rigor, for a strong continuity between
human nature and the nature of other creatures. Thus, Darwin set about
to raid the full range of psychological concepts that have been developed
for describing human feeling and behaviour; the more varied and richer is
our understanding of these traits in ourselves, the more can we expect to be
able to describe the traits we share with other animals. If there is no barrier
but instead continuity between humans and (other) animals, comparison not
only makes sense but becomes the principal way of getting at significant dif-
ferences as well as similarities between humans and non-humans, whereby
the differences are thought of as gradual and in terms of degree rather than
absolute and static.
In The Myths We Live By, written much later than her two early volumes
on humans and animals, Midgley acknowledges that after Darwin’s death,
“the tide turned against all such thinking” (2004: 140), by which she means
28  Animals make us human
to include – problematically so, given Crist’s above account – the pioneers
of modern ethology, Lorenz and Tinbergen. Why?
On this occasion like on earlier ones, Midgley is quick to point to the
role of Behaviourism: its peculiar psychology did indeed “officially treat
humans and other animals as similar, but it did it in exactly the opposite
way of Darwin, by treating both as insensate machines” (ibid.). While John
Watson’s heirs felt compelled to abandon the view that there was no such
thing as a thinking subject (not even in the case of humans, that is) and
that “consciousness” was merely a superstition, academic psychologists
have nevertheless, writes Midgley, continued to use mechanical models
for the study of humans, alongside “nominal admissions that subjectivity
was present”, and leaving the resulting tension unresolved. As for animal
psychology, “pure mechanism still largely ruled, because it was still held
up as ‘scientific’” (ibid.). Sociologist and anthropologists also did their part
to uphold this situation in continuing to treat human beings as unique,
denying – pre-Darwin-like – that comparisons from other species could be
relevant to the social sciences. Indeed, the presence of inborn behavioural
tendencies in humans was just as anathema to sociologists as to behaviour-
ists, according to Midgley, who cites the professionalization of science as an
important factor in the change from Darwin’s position involved here.
On my view, there is something dated about the pride of place Midgley
accords to Behaviourism. Obviously, Darwin was recognized as a scientific
giant in his own time, following the publication of On the Origin of Species
in 1859 and the wide-ranging reception it was met with, not unanimously
favourable, of course, but unequivocal in that a major paradigm shift was
being inaugurated and widely recognized as such. So my question remains:
why was there a significant step backwards in the wake of Darwin? Why
was the notion of human exceptionalism so stubbornly held on to? Why was
there still a career in academia for the mechanistic view of animals prop-
agated by Descartes’ “mere automata” thesis, predating Darwin by some
200 years? There must be something more fundamental at work here than
the professionalization of science.
More promising than Behaviourism in this respect is the other power-
ful twentieth-century philosophy that Midgley keeps referring to, namely
Existentialism. Of course, Existentialism as worked out by early Sartre, its
main protagonist in Midgley’s narrative, can have no track with Darwin’s
insights into human-animal continuity. There is no such thing as human
nature; for humans, existence precedes essence, much as the made – arte-
facts, culture in general, as the ongoing creation of humans – outshines the
grown – animals and plants, the natural world in general – in terms of impor-
tance for everything of human and philosophical interest alike. The divide
between human and animal, mind and matter, freedom and necessity, is just
as absolute and unbridgeable in Sartre as in Descartes, notwithstanding
the three centuries of immensely influential scientific breakthroughs. The
whole point about the human project, according to Sartre, is to transcend
 Animals make us human 29
nature, understood as the domain of inertia, comprised of entities that sim-
ple are, and will forever remain, what they are, self-identical throughout
time, and as such in stark opposition to humans who are what they are not
and not what they (at any particular point in time) are, owing to their unique
ability to “negate” and project themselves beyond any given state of affairs.
Given this outlook, to think that there is anything that I as a human share,
ontologically, with the natural world and all the mindless, purposeless crea-
tures encountered there, anything at all that would show us up as on the
same footing in some important respect, say, in terms of (inter) depend-
ence, is tantamount to engaging in bad faith and so in self-deception. This, I
suggest, is anthropomorphism in reverse: attributing to oneself qua human a
sort of inertia found in nature, something static and immutable, precluding
dynamics and change, meant to justify that “I had no choice”, this is just
the way I am, and things generally are, thus turning myself into a thing-like
object and renouncing my status as a free subject responsible for everything
I do – this total freedom of mine being the one given condition of my exist-
ence I cannot undo.
It follows that Existentialism á la Sartre is totally and unashamedly anthro-
pocentric, not only descriptively so but normatively as well: only the things
that result from our activities, exhibiting our powers to alter any given state
of affairs, have true merit and satisfy our craving for meaning and purpose,
qualities that the natural world, in part and in whole, is devoid of. In Beast
and Man, Midgley’s critique of this philosophy is nothing less than devas-
tating, pointing out that “the really monstrous thing about Existentialism is
its proceeding as if the world contained only dead matter (things) on the one
hand and fully rational, educated, adult human beings on the other – as if
there were no other life-forms” (1995: 316). We have to do with an expression
of “desertion and abandonment” which, Midgley suggests, is due not to the
removal of God (Nietzsche), but to a “contemptuous dismissal of almost
the whole biosphere – plants, animals, and children” (Evernden 1993: 119).
This harsh criticism recalls that put forward by Hans Jonas, a thinker con-
genial to many of Midgley’s concerns yet nowhere mentioned in her work.
“No philosophy”, writes Jonas, “has ever been less concerned about nature
than Existentialism, for which it has no dignity left” (1966: 232). For Jonas,
the existentialist depreciation of nature that he finds in early Heidegger as
well as in Sartre must be seen as reflecting nature’s “spiritual denudation
at the hands of physical science”. The metaphysical “given” in Sartre, that
only humans care and that nature does not care, that nature is devoid of all
“primary” qualities such as volition and purpose, intelligence and value,
experience and sentience, and as such indifferent, is the true abyss according
to Jonas.
What is less than fully explained in Midgley, however, is why a philosophy
so openly contemptuous of nature could become so popular in post-war
Western society and remain so for many decades. Why did this way of think-
ing about the relationship between humans and the rest of nature resonate
30  Animals make us human
with so many people? And how could a major philosopher like Sartre get
away with championing such a crude – either/or, all or nothing – portrait
of this relationship? Why didn’t he even bother to make distinctions within
that vast domain “nature”, doing justice to the difference between animals,
plants and stones, lumping the organic and inorganic together under one
umbrella and pretending that they are equally devoid of the properties of
intelligence and feeling, purpose and direction, that humans are said to be
the sole bearer of? Why didn’t this outlook strike people as deeply counter-
intuitive and at loggerheads with the way they experience and treat different
creatures in nature?
Perhaps this is more a question for the cultural and social sciences than
for Midgley. And yet, there is more to it, for what is striking once the above
questions are raised is not only that Existentialism of the sort Midgley
attacks seems hopelessly dated but that there is something dated with
Midgley’s own position as well.

IV
I mentioned that Midgley pays special attention to the way in which chil-
dren and animals interact. “It is striking”, she writes, “how domestic ani-
mals will put up with rough treatment from small children, which they
would certainly not tolerate from adults” (1998: 117). She goes on to make a
more general point: “It is not just that most human beings have in fact been
acquainted with other creatures early in life, and have therefore received
some non-human imprinting. It is also that children who are not offered
this experience often actively seek it. Animals, like song and dance, are an
innate taste” (118).
These are not only strong statements of a type never found in Sartre, for
whom children, just like adults, will do perfectly well without animals and
have no need for their presence so as to become fully human. More to the
point, Midgley offers them in a timeless manner, as expressing observations
both evidently true and as borne out in practice in ways familiar and availa-
ble to all. Knowing full well that the relationship between humans and ani-
mals is eminently historical as well as cultural and so subject to major shifts,
Midgley nonetheless is guilty of the philosopher’s predilection for treating
her topic sub specie aeternitatis.
Recent years have witnessed a plethora of novel concepts coined in order
to come to grips with the ways in which the natural world is undergoing
changes never seen before. With regard to Midgley’s work, the most relevant
such concepts are “nature-deficit disorder”, “Solastalgia”, and “extinction
of experience”, coined by Richard Louv, Glenn Albrecht, and Robert Pyle,
respectively. Their common concern is the fact that fewer children connect
with nature in the way of first-person, bodily sensuous experiences of, and
encounters with, animals that are neither pets (cats and dogs) nor domestic
(horses, hens, pigs, and cattle). The less wilderness there is left, the more the
 Animals make us human 31
habitats of these animals shrink and become fragmented, the fewer will be
the arenas where such encounters can occur. That this change is happening,
at increasing pace, tends to go largely unnoticed, by children and philoso-
phers alike. Two academic terms for this phenomenon have been coined,
namely “shifting baseline syndrome” and “environmental generational
amnesia”. Psychologist Peter Kahn explains:

We all take the natural environment we encounter during childhood as

the norm against which we measure environmental degradation later
in our lives. With each ensuing generation, the amount of environ-
mental degradation increases, but each generation in its youth takes
that degraded condition as the nondegraded condition – as the normal
experience.
(Kahn quoted in Peterson 2009: 92)

This means that what is objectively a dynamic situation of decline and deg-
radation in our natural surroundings, even those most familiar to us by
first-hand experience, is for the newcomer to the scene, the child, normality
as such, the only situation known, and with that, nothing to be concerned
with let alone alarmed at. What shifting baseline syndrome amounts to is a
displacement of the interpretive criteria for what is perceived as alarming in
a sense involving changes that might prove dangerous – a displacement that
is objectively effective (affecting people’s understanding of reality) without
being subjectively recognized as displacement (see Lertzman 2015). This is
a subtle psychological phenomenon whose effects are eminently concrete:
children who grow up with little or no snow will not be in a position to miss
the winter-related plays (building a snowman) and activities (sledging, ski-
ing, skating) that their parents took for granted, even when growing up in
the same place. This goes for the perception of animals as well: their gradual
disappearance from the scene, occurring from one generation to the next,
goes largely unnoticed, indeed tends to be totally lost on the youngest gen-
eration. The question is: Can you miss – notice as missing, lament as missing
– something you have never experienced?
I take it that this is a phenomenon that can be noticed in many fami-
lies. The young British writer Lucy Jones relates how she came to realize
that her grandmother, in virtue of the state of the natural world she was
born into, had acquired “an inherent lexicon of that world and how it oper-
ates”. Likewise, Jones goes on, “my parents knew their birds, flowers and
plants; names, timing and behaviors. I knew a bit, maybe 5 to 10 per cent
of what they knew” (2020: 8). No wonder, then, that Jones, upon having her
first child, asks herself if her daughter will be able to name – by which she
means know – anything at all. The increasingly fragile experiential connec-
tion between humans and their natural world that we have started to notice
involves, in the words of the ecologist Robert Pyle, “a cycle of disaffection
and loss that begins with the extinction of hitherto common species, events,
32  Animals make us human
and flavors in our own immediate surrounds; this loss leads to ignorance of
variety and nuance, thence to alienation, apathy, an absence of caring, and
ultimately to further extinction” (Pyle quoted in Jones 2020: 8).
Against this background, we are in a different position than earlier phi-
losophers when it comes to acknowledging the connection between human
experience and the natural world: losses to the point of extinction (of spe-
cies, of habitats) in the latter leads to a shrinking, ultimately extinction, of
the former. As a matter of historical fact, virtually everything that a typical
child growing up in a country like Norway or Britain today will experience
first-hand – be it touch, see, hear, taste or smell – will be artefacts, things
made by humans and to be used by humans. In other words, children will
be relating to something made rather than to something grown; they will
engage with others within the domain of culture rather than with others
within the domain of nature (if that crude distinction can be tolerated here),
hence with fellow humans rather than with non-human such, be it animals
that are not pets. The big picture is that it is only as recently as since 2007
that more than 50 per cent of the world’s population live in cities; by 2050,
68 per cent will live in urban areas. As of 2018, the figures are 82 per cent in
Northern America and 74 per cent in Europe (see Jones 2020: 183).
These are well-known trends often commented on. But their role in effect-
ing a major change in the relationship between humans and animals has
yet to be fully explored. “No animal”, writes Midgley, “is just a simplified
human being, nor do children take them to be so. However friendly they
may be, their life is radically foreign, and it is just that foreignness which
attracts a child. The point about them is that they are different” (1998:
118). Yet holding this does not prevent Midgley from warning against the
“chronic, endemic exaggeration of the differences between our own species
and others” she finds widespread, blaming biologists as well as dogmatism
in the social sciences (2004: 141). Perhaps we should see no tension, let alone
contradiction between the two statements cited: appreciating factual differ-
ence in one-to-one encounters is what we do in practice, exaggerating that
difference so as to maintain a cultural species barrier is what we have long
tended to do in theory. An animal in its otherness from us is what attracts
us spontaneously, as borne out in children’s innate fascination with how
differently from us a given animal will behave, exemplarily exhibited in the
manifoldness of movement and of sound, showing up how many ways there
are, say, to signal attack or to display fear, motives, and feelings common to
us and them, indubitably so in real-life encounters, notwithstanding philos-
ophers who, armchair-style, insist on the fallacy of relying upon what our
senses disclose to us about those others.
As far as a scientific approach is concerned, are animals subjects or
objects? Do they have to be made into objects to qualify for study? “Animal”,
observes the philosopher Neil Evernden in The Natural Alien, “is, by con-
vention, the name of a thing, an object, a clever machine” (1993: 77). It is
because we, as a culture, are not prepared to treat animals as subjects that
 Animals make us human 33
we continue to be offended by comparisons between ourselves and other
animals; animal-like means thing-like, primitive, a mere object, passively
awaiting whatever use we humans intend to put it – yes, it – to, a means to
suit the ends of a subject, a he or she that can only be a human such.
If humans are offended by being compared to an animal (“you behave
like a pig”), what about the insult to the animal in question? A consequence
of the cultural taboo against anthropomorphism that is inseparable from
Galileo’s and Descartes’ definition of scientific method, observes Evernden,
is the encouragement of total ignorance of animals – a practice, he adds,
“religiously followed by many humanists”. If that sounds dated in the pres-
ent era of the Anthropocene, of new materialism and of posthumanism á la
Bruno Latour, Evernden’s principal point is not. “Science”, he continues,
“also helps perpetrate such ignorance, paradoxically, because it gives us a
mechanistic image instead of experience of the animal. So long as we have
limited direct experience of the creatures in question” – and I have argued
above that the arenas for one-to-one encounters are dwindling at record
pace – “it is relatively easy to accept a cultural stereotype in its place, in
this case animal-as-object” (ibid.). The critical point – the viewpoint from
which being critical becomes possible – is personal experience, because
what Evernden calls “a much more difficult substitution” must take place for
what is deemed serious scientific study of animals to take place: “The stu-
dent who enters a biology program with experience of animals as subjects
must ‘unlearn’ his initial understanding before he can proceed to a biol-
ogy of objects” (1993: 78); in particular, such a student needs to unlearn his
“unscientific” propensity to relate to the animals sample in the lab through
empathy, being a faculty out of place here owing to its alleged subjectiv-
ity and so unreliability, revealing how it is that not only the animal object
of study, but the humans carrying it out as well are required to disavow
subjectivity for objectivity’s sake. “How”, asks Evernden, “can we permit
this reversal of the primary and the secondary, our own experience of the
world and an abstraction about it which for most of us really amounts to
second-hand information” (ibid.)? This is the sense in which poets such as
Blake and Wordsworth saw the rise in science as coinciding with, indeed
as demanding, a drastic diminution in human perception, allowing only a
limited range of experience to qualify as “real” and so as compatible with
science, whereby experience qua emphatically that of a particular individ-
ual with a particular history encountering a particular animal was tabooed.
As Alfred North Whitehead contends, the effort made by Descartes
and his successors Locke and Newton to replace nature as “subjectively”
accessed by means of full bodily sensuously experience, taking in the full-
ness of taste, smell, and colour – of life being lived – encountered in the nat-
ural world, say, in that particular owl peeking out from that particular tree,
by “nature as a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; nature as merely
the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly”, has proved to be “an
enormously successful operation”. In fact, Evernden argues, Whiteheads
34  Animals make us human
observation in 1925 still holds: the view that attained prominence in aca-
demia in the seventeenth century, “is still reigning. Every university in the
world organizes itself in accordance with it. No alternative system of organ-
izing the pursuit of scientific truth has been suggested. It is not only reign-
ing, but it is without rival. And yet – it is quite unbelievable. This conception
of the universe is surely framed in terms of high abstractions, and the para-
dox only arises because we have mistaken our abstraction for concrete real-
ities” (Whitehead 1967 [1925]: 54f.; Evernden 1993: 53). We have, that is to
say, become entangled in what Whitehead famously identifies as “the fallacy
of misplaced concreteness”, mistakenly thinking that in order to get at what
is real in the natural world, we need to relinquish subjective experience and
replace it by abstraction, thus looking away from the very qualities that
makes the entity what it is, say, an eagle owl.
No doubt many biologists, zoologists, and botanists would rush to have
their protests registered. It is tempting to say: rightly so. But is it that simple?
Has the rival that Whitehead said was missing when he lectured at Harvard
almost 100 years ago, come to prevail over the largely Cartesian model of
(natural) science?
Of course, this is a question so big and consequential that I cannot even
begin to answer it here – but I shall return to it later. Caroline Merchant has
the following to say in the Epilogue to her seminal study The Death of Nature:
Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, first published in 1980: “The
mechanistic view of nature, developed by the seventeenth-century natural
philosophers and based on a Western mathematical tradition going back
to Plato, is still dominant in science today. This view assumes that nature
can be divided into parts and that the parts can be rearranged to create
other species of being. … Mathematical formalism provides the criterion for
rationality and certainty” (1990: 290). In fact, Merchant repeats her over-
all assessment in her most recent book, Autonomous Nature: “Mechanistic
explanations are still the norm in molecular biology, genetics, neuroscience,
parts of biochemistry, chemistry and physics, and parts of engineering and
biophysics” (2016: 150), adding however that the paradigm is increasingly
challenged by chaos and complexity theories, as well as by quantum theory
(see Barad 2007; Wendt 2015).
In my view, the taboo against anthropomorphism Midgley refers to is
even more important than she realizes, even today, having become so deeply
entrenched in our culture as to part if its second nature, a key component
of a mentality passed on from one generation to the next, be it among lay
people or among scientists. As indicated above, this is to do with the double
banning of subjectivity – comprising both the human and the animal – to
attain and secure objectivity in the sense required for genuine knowledge
about animals and their behaviour. Anthropomorphism, understood as a
deep-seated feature of human subjectivity in its “pre-scientific” state, was
banned from the laboratory, from observations, experiments, and vivisec-
tions of animals because it was seen as incompatible with the new science
 Animals make us human 35
inaugurated in the Renaissance. Only by removing all manifestations of
the human subject’s seemingly innate inclination to project his own felt
aliveness, his state of mind or feeling, onto the physical reality and the data
encountered there, could science proper get to work. What we need to rec-
ognize more clearly than Midgley does is that this amounts to an enormous
restriction – impoverishment – of human perception and experience of the
natural world, one required by institutional design – by way of the social-
ization of new generations of scientists – so as to achieve the compliance
sought; that is to say, a homogenization of the subjects and the capacities
they were allowed to exercise that, in turn, helped constitute what amounts
to an ongoing homogenization of their selected object domain: the same
looking for the same. Following from this operation, only properties allow-
ing for measurement, for comparison, calculation, prediction, and control
within a wholly quantifiable framework qualified as apt for the require-
ments of the “exact” knowledge now attainable. Jonas credits Kepler with
being the first among the moderns to “declare quantity the, at once, essen-
tial and truly knowable aspect of reality” (1966: 67). Accordingly, cognition
consisted in measurement and comparison of measurements within a stand-
ardized setting permitting replicability of observations and repeatability of
the experiments, making sure that there would be no deviance in the results
obtained from one case to the next, the one scientist/observer/experimenter
being eminently interchangeable with the other inasmuch as their distinct
subjectivities were successfully neutralized. In this way, method gained pri-
macy over subject-matter, epistemology over ontology, recalling Crist’s cri-
tique of ethology reviewed above. The formal-mathematical, abstract, and
universally applicable requirement of measurability came to define, indeed
to exhaust, the domain of the knowable, banning the qualitative aspects of
life (Locke’s “primary sense qualities”) in its manifoldness so completely as
to render the lifeless definitional of what could be strictly known, and so as
tantamount to reality as such.
To be sure, this is an old story told many times and with a strong critical
edge, though typically by mavericks such as Whitehead and Jonas. When
I asked above whether the self-understanding of natural science still con-
forms to the philosophical foundations and the requirements of method just
sketched, I observed that the answer will depend on which of the natural
sciences one has in mind. Relevant here is also the rise of ecology as distinct
science in its own right, coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866 as the holistic study
of how organisms interact with each other and with their wider environment,
whereby the flourishing of one organism (or species) depends on that of the
others, thus rejecting the notion of self-sufficiency on the elementary level
of each separate part (entity) that had been the hallmark of atomism and
mechanism á la Hobbes (see Callicott 1989). Put in the parlance associated
with Darwin, collaboration in terms of inter-species inter-dependencies is
the most basic law of life, more basic even than competition – an insight
that Midgley never tires of telling her readers is fully recognized by Darwin
36  Animals make us human
himself, who would be the first to protest his reputation as a champion of
dog-eat-dog competition as what long-term survival requires and selfish-
ness as what morality springs from as well as first and foremost has to con-
tend with (see Midgley 2010).
My question can now be raised in a more specific manner: If we grant,
on the basis of what may appear to be overwhelming evidence, that the
paradigm of mechanism, of nature as dead matter, and of animals as split
from us humans by way of an “ontological” species barrier, is compromised
and has given way to robust alternatives of a wholly different philosophical
persuasion, why does Midgley say the things she does? Why, to return to
my point of departure, does she think it necessary to point out that “ani-
mals are not machines”, that “actually only machines are machines” (1995:
xxxvi)? Who needs to be told? Present-day scientists? Or the non-academic
public? Likewise, consider what she writes in one of her latest books, Are
You an Illusion, published in 2014, where she identifies what she takes to be
“two current strange assumptions”, namely, first, “that we are originally
quite separate from each other”, and, second, “that the direct deliverances
of our own experience are worthless until they have received official scien-
tific authorization” (2014: 54). Why does she expect it to be “surprising” for
her readers to learn that “it is an objective fact in the world that our own
experiences – the subjective sources of thought – are every bit as necessary
for it as the objective ones such as brain cells” (56)? Why, to pick a final
example, is it necessary to observe that “the idea that the world consists
of objects without subjects [understood as creatures with needs, tendencies
and directions of their own] does not really make sense at all” (62)?
Has time really stood as still as Midgley seems to suggest? If she is right
that these are so many “myths we live by”, to this day, why is that so? And
where are we to look for the societal agents, or institutions, most instrumen-
tal in our continuing to live by them as a culture?

V
In Paul Shepard’s book The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, he men-
tions Midgley’s Animals and Why They Matter in a footnote, commending
it as “perhaps the most thoughtful essay on the question of an ecological
ethic”, only to add that “one looks in vain there for the answer to the ques-
tion: Why do they matter?” (1997: 354, fn. 5).
I agree. Midgley identifies and discusses an impressive number of the key
questions to do with animals in the contemporary world, but she fails to
answer the most fundamental one captured in her title.
As signalled by its title, Shepard’s book sets out to appreciate animals as
“Others in a world where otherness of all kinds is in danger, and in which
otherness is essential to the discovery of the true self” (1997: 5). Hence the
concept of ontogeny is the key to our relationships to nature; ontogeny
understood as a kind of “necessary pattern of growth toward maturity in
 Animals make us human 37
which we acquire respect for that which is unbridgeable between ourselves
and the animals” (ibid.). Shepard finds what he is after in primal peoples
and in modern naturalists alike: an attitude of “accepted separateness”, one
that he also sees epitomized in the work of such diverse scholars as Charles
Darwin, Konrad Lorenz, Adolf Portmann, and Edward O. Wilson. What
attracts him, he explains, is a kind of humility that he contrasts sharply with
“civilized kindness”; a humility born of curiosity and instilling a respect for
the power of animals, respect of a sort Shepard views as undermined by the
culturally predominant stance of “mercy” towards animals, which he con-
demns as “dangerous and anemic” (ibid.).
As the reader gathers on page one, Shepard is not a thinker shy of conflict
and antagonism; there is little in the way of British understatement. Shepard
was born in 1926, six years later than Midgley, and he studied wildlife
conservation in Missouri when he came across Aldo Leopold’s soon-to-be-
classic A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, shortly after Leopold
died. That book, Shepard tells his readers at the start of what was to be his
own last work, framed the question that haunted him for the rest of his life.
What question? The contradiction of both loving and killing animals
compels us to ask whether it is one that must be resolved, overcome, or one
that should be held on to, one whose persistence is not only to be tolerated
but recognized as invaluable. To love animals and to kill them, to propagate
a land ethics and to speak, in the same book, about “the joy of seeing the
kicking red legs of a shot duck dying in the morning sun” (ibid.), which is
what Leopold did – this is the tension that for most of recorded history char-
acterizes the human-animal relationship and that Shepard urges should still
do so.
By placing the loving-killing contradiction at the centre of his inquiry,
Shepard’s approach differs conspicuously from Midgley’s. For her, the ques-
tion that has dominated the discourse since Peter Singer published Animal
Liberation in 1976, namely whether it is ever morally permitted to kill ani-
mals, is by no means the most important one – coming to truly understand,
and appreciate, animals in their differences as well as similarities from us,
is. Hers is a project of exploration so as to get the facts right, doing justice to
animals and thereby, hopefully, putting an end to misunderstanding them,
something that is just as important to her as stopping mistreating them,
whereby the two, perception and conduct, are intimately connected. The
way I read her, for Midgley the never-ending intellectual effort to come up
with an unequivocal answer – a yes or a no, once and for all – to the question
of killing animals has been a great misfortune.
To put it like this is to recognize an affinity between the two philosophers’
projects that we would not expect, given their different points of depar-
ture. Common to both is also a keen interest in the wider contexts – cul-
tural, social, and moral – which help frame and negotiate every concrete
human-animal encounter; an attention to the role played by historically
changing settings that is often missing in the contributions of analytic
38  Animals make us human
philosophers. Experience not theorizing is the key that we as humans and
philosophers have to animals and what is important about them being what
they are, not us – and the experienced fact that they are not (like) us does
not detract from their importance, does not spell inferiority on their part.
There is one more thing to note about Shepard by way of introduction,
however, lest we miss his originality: his emphasis on the cosmological signif-
icance of animals for the evolution of human thought and imagination, for
the distinctiveness of the human repertoire as a symbolic being, a repertoire
that, for all its differences from that exhibited by animals, can only become
fully human by virtue of exposure to animals and so precisely not in splendid
isolation from them. Becoming human, then, is not a solely human process
but one relying on coexisting with animals, and not simply as our point origin
in some remote evolutionary past but is a major presence in our present life
in the form of experiencing animals first-hand and relating to them directly,
as so many individuals. The one big idea in Shepard’s work is that without
animals, we would never become human. Conversely, to lose the animals
would be to lose the very condition on which our effort to acquire humanness
depends. To become what we are supposed to be is facilitated by the kinds of
beings that we are not and that for their part resist, and have a right to resist,
being us. To be sure, this echoes Hegel’s thesis about “Anerkennung”, about
“Sich-erkennen-im-Anderssein” (see Hegel 1977 [1807]; Williams 1997), only
now the Other indispensable to that process of becoming what one is meant
to be is an animal other, not a human one.
It is crucial that we appreciate how Shepard’s approach differs from the
ethological one pioneered by the figures Midgley always turns to (Lorenz,
Tinbergen, and Goodall) as well as from the kind of research carried out
today by scholars like Michael Tomasello and discussed by philosophers
like Jürgen Habermas (2012, 2019). This means that communication is not
the major issue for Shepard, understood as the question about how sophisti-
cated capacities for representation we may find in higher-standing mammals
such as chimpanzees or elephants, their demonstrated likeness to humans in
experiencing emotional states such as grief over a lost loved one, their abil-
ity to engage in role-playing with humans, to understand the logic of taking
turns, of counting, of make belief, of humour, etc. All of this is certainly fas-
cinating, but it does not capture why animals matter from Shepard’s point
of view.
So what is this mattering essentially about? Characteristically, Shepard
starts by asking why it is that poetry finds animals irresistible, why there
would perhaps by no such – presumably uniquely human – practice without
them. He gives the following explanation:

The meaning of animals is implicit in what they do: eat, run, leap, crawl,
display, call, fly, mate, fight, sing, swim, hide, slither, climb, and die.
One or another does each of these things with more finesse and more
expertise than people. Their keenness is reflected is the shapes of their
 Animals make us human 39
bodies and the traces they leave. Animate signs and signatures move
through our dreams and imagination, evoke our feelings, portray “us”
in a kind of allegory. The signature of the animal is somehow more
apt than the colossal hieroglyphic of the rocks, the silent autograph of
the plants, or the calligram of the landscape itself. Like amusing, wise,
terrible, curved mirrors, animals prefigure human society. The lion, for
example, shares a primordial ecology with humankind, a long history
of symbolic power linked to our own feelings “in the blood”. Likewise,
the bird is spirit and the snake is the earth of our most elemental self,
our mundane world, and our imagination.
(Shepard 1997: 10)

Distinctive to Shepard’s approach is the way he combines his thesis about

the fundamental significance of animals for humans with an awareness that
historical and cultural change impacts greatly on whether that significance
is sustained or undermined – it being fundamental is no guarantee that it
will be recognized as such and that the conditions necessary for animals to
go on playing this role will prevail. Sometimes cultures change to the effect
that the figures Shepard exemplifies in the passage above gain in complexity.
Or change is such that they lose their immediacy, become distanced from
their origins – say, in first-person encounters with particular animals, con-
veyed for generations to come in the stories told about such encounters – by
the loss of tradition, a loss nowadays typically caused, and speeded up, by
the widespread urbanization mentioned earlier. Despite these strong trends,
Shepard is adamant that as the images and recollections of some animals
become obsolete, others will emerge. “More than monuments to human
imagination”, he writes, “the whole panoply of their mythic, fantastic forms
is based on thousand millennia of watching and studying real, wild animals.
This creative perception of animals is in us still, a perennial satisfaction and
pleasure, one of the oldest human vocations, building on the complexity of
natural history, limitless not only in gathered facts but the feeling that one is
part of a gathering, a new understanding, a deepened participation” (ibid.).
I read these statements as a warning against being misled by Shepard’s
claim about a deep affinity between poetry and animals. Our relationship
to animals, he insists, is not first and foremost poetical or symbolic; not
esoteric or aesthetic, not about abstraction and what feeds our powers of
abstraction. He even goes so far as to dismiss nature writing – if anything,
more popular today than when he made his comment in the 1990s – on the
grounds that it nourishes a view of nature as “esthetic abstraction”, breed-
ing in the writer “the greed for literary reputation, captivating its readers
with a spurious substitute for experience in the natural world” (1997: 11).
The fact is that there is no such substitute. That this is so is the unmis-
takable message of the greatest modern classic of them all, Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring, one that Shepard fears is subject to another type of misread-
ing, namely the managerial and technical one of getting rid of pesticides, of
40  Animals make us human
ensuring that they are replaced by some technological regime in agriculture
that is less toxic for the animals and humans affected. This is no better than
the seemingly obverse danger – or temptation – of aesthetization, turning
the natural world into a beautiful painting on the wall, helping deceive its
admirers into thinking that everything is well, that nature’s beauty is some
kind of timeless sublime object – indeed, art, made for art – of the sort Kant
theorized in his third Critique. Only in an immediate, utterly concrete sense
was Carson’s book a warning against the effects of pesticides; more funda-
mentally, it was a warning against “the deafened self, against emptiness”.
Again, what this is about is resisting being distracted from the one, all-im-
portant issue – namely, what to make of our encounter with the animals,
meaning what to make of it today, when “we ourselves prosper in unseemly
numbers as they vanish”, forgetful of the possibility that “in the end our
prosperity may amount to nothing without them” (ibid.).
So it is not only that there can be, philosophically speaking, no context-free,
sub specie aeternitatis inquiry into why animals matter. To put it more pre-
cisely, while there may indeed be one answer as to their mattering, the con-
ditions for their actually doing so may now be changing so rapidly and to
such an extent that the continued mattering of animals can no longer be taken
for granted. In other words, what Shepard urges that we appreciate without
distractions and surrogates is in a state of being spoiled, of being lost. That
this is so is not primarily about numbers. The fact that we humans become
ever more and the animals ever less is of course a crucial part of the picture,
illustrating the trajectory we seem to be locked into. But the numbers, their
empirical correctness notwithstanding, may themselves distract us, render-
ing what is all-too-real abstract, so many items in a statistic (e.g., the num-
ber of wild animals in the world is halved in the last 40 years) we have no
way of connecting to.
To read about the ongoing extinction of species and loss of biodiversity is
not to understand what these changes in the natural world amount to. Why?
Is there a gulf between what we know and what we understand?
Quite the contrary if we look at it from a historical perspective. As long
as the acquisition of knowledge – say, about particular animals – is directly
dependent on experiencing first-hand the animals in question, the knowl-
edge gained is not detached from its object. Encounters between knower
and known provide the check on the validity of what is assumed to be true
to the reality. That this is so is borne out exemplarily in hunting. Hunting is
a practice that can only succeed if the assumptions of the predator about the
prey at hand are correct. This holds true regardless of the species identity
of the parties: animals who prey need to get it right just as much as humans
do, and, again, this holds regardless of whether the prey is an animal or a
human. In this setting, assumptions are typically about what response to
expect from the prey, whereby the nature of that response needs to be antic-
ipated, and thereupon adapted to, in as exact a manner as possible. And the
basis for that sequence – anticipating the other’s response, and adjusting one’s
 Animals make us human 41
own actions accordingly – is experiential, it is based on the knowledge gained
about the behaviour of that sort of animal in that sort of situation on earlier
(relevantly similar) occasions. Far from infallible and foolproof, the knowl-
edge thus acquired through previous experience is the only basis for action
to rely on. Getting the knowledge and the assumptions-cum-anticipations
about likely response right is a matter of life and death – who knows, per-
haps this is the origin of the saying “getting it dead wrong”?
I will highlight a couple of things about this notion of knowledge before
returning to Shepard’s take on it. First, the context of discovery and the con-
text of application are co-extensive and equiprimordial – both are in situ, that
is to say, a sort of knowledge only to be acquired in the context for which it
is – uniquely – suited and in which it is to be employed, adhering to the logic
of trial and error, at that. To know is to learn how to put that knowledge to
use in the particular case. This learning is a practice – something practiced –
and as such inseparable from the in situ acquisition of the skills required to
act on the knowledge. If we stick to the case of hunting, the skills it takes
to approach the animal, locate its exact movements, and anticipate its most
likely next move, depending on mine and/or that of other animals present
on the scene, are skills to do with movement, with the optimal timing of the
next move, based on the skills it takes to identify the moves and the accom-
panying sounds: a branch being broken high up in that three – what can
it be? Should I wait or should I proceed? When is the time to move slowly,
and when to move quickly? How is that absence of any sound, that sudden
silence to be interpreted – has the monkey fled so that there is nothing to be
heard, or is it staying put, hoping I will be deceived?
In situ knowledge is knowledge concerning something particular, in some
particular place, for some particular subjects and suited to some particu-
lar pragmatic aims, most basically: survival. The coexistence on earth of
animals and humans is fundamentally wedded to the same reality princi-
ple as the coexistence of animals, that of eating and being eaten. For all
the timelessness and universal validity of these options as given conditions
of existence for humans and animals alike, the knowledge they necessitate
is anything but universal in the sense of episteme; knowledge, that is, of a
general and apodictic type, such that 3 + 2 will always yield 5 as its one
valid (true) answer, regardless of the entities making up the content of the
numbers, regardless of who asks the question, in what time and place and
for what practical purposes. This is knowledge of the “each and every time”
kind, abstract and generalizable in that its validity is eminently transposable
from the one instance where 3 + 2 is asked to the next: abstract because con-
text-independent in that strong sense, making its subjects as well as objects
(entities) interchangeable. By contrast, the kind of knowledge at play in
hunting is designated “local knowledge” by anthropologists, depending for
its validity on a fit with its circumstances in the particular case. Knowledge
that has its basis in experience is knowledge that allows for the individuality
of all involved. Two hunters who have shared the same kind of experience
42  Animals make us human
with a particular animal may differ in what they make of that experience
in a future situation. Importantly, this also holds for the animals involved,
being subjects in their own right and thus misconstrued as “objects” devoid
of agency (more on this below). Both humans and animals incorporate new
experiences into past ones, making for biographies that are unique to the
individual. Yes, we may respond to the same situation, the same thing; but
we do so from different points of view and with different baggage.
I shall have more to say about this later. As indicated, Shepard’s take on
this topic is somewhat different from the ethnographically informed one I
have just sketched (see Descola 2013; Kohn 2013; Viveiros de Castro 2015).
Shepard’s perspective is cosmological, highlighting the evolutionary origins
in animals of the supposedly unique capacities of humans for abstraction,
for engaging in symbolism and in thought in Hannah Arendt’s sense of
“making the present absent, and the absent present” (1978), thus transcend-
ing in thought and going beyond in imagination what is bodily and sensu-
ously accessed as the givens of any concrete here-and-now. Whereas we are
physically bodily placed so as to access by way of our senses one particular
portion of the physical world in any given instant, we may be thinking about
something else entirely, something that has nothing to do with what is actu-
ally present, everything to do with something that is absent, say, something
that was but is no longer, or something that has never been but hopefully
one day will be, etc. Thought is free in this sense of transcending the spa-
tio-temporal circumstances of its subject-object constellation.
In speaking of this as something recognizable for us humans, I do
not mean to pronounce on whether thinking as defined here is an exclu-
sively human prerogative – that is another issue. What interests Shepard is
animal-human continuity, not division, in keeping with his main idea that
only animals make us into humans. To appreciate his approach, consider
this passage:

We were latecomers in a well-established process that had gone on for

fifty million years. The four-legged carnivores and their prey had long
since learned that an animal, watched long enough, gradually dissolved
into signs. It left the marks that came to represent it: footprints, urine,
secretions, feces, molted antlers, scratchings and rubbings, gnawed
stems, bones, feathers, beds, diggings, nests, tracks, and bits of fur as
well as an immense range of sounds and smells available to us. Language
and art meant that those signs, as “objects”, could be transported and
therefore shared with those who, for example, had never come upon the
bleached leg bone of an antelope near a water hole, broken by hyenas,
pitched by vultures, and chiseled by mice, but who could hear the story
and see its representations for what it was in the wilderness and what it
might signify as an analogy of a seamless social form. Our human spe-
cialty was to dislodge such signs from a momentary stuckness in place
and time and build a mental world of them that could be played over at
 Animals make us human 43
times of our choosing. As signatures these animal signs were the begin-
ning of abstraction and symbolizing in a drama we primates already
“knew” was social at heart: gestures, expressions, innuendos. In less
than three million years, all these categories of the self and society were
shaped by the traits of animals observed, the dangerous, competitive,
beautiful, tasty, scrounging Others.
(1997: 24)

Shepard’s foregrounding of the role played by animals before humans arrived

on the scene, as well as their persistent role in providing the foundation from
which distinctive human capabilities and practices spring – i.e., the function
of language (first oral, than written) in socialization and integration – is
conspicuously absent in the work of, say, late Habermas. If animals are at
all mentioned, it is to argue a point about what they cannot do as compared
with what humans can do. Animals serve to provide a sharp relief against
which assertions about human exceptionalism can be made. In discussing
the research of Michael Tomasello, Habermas speaks of the equiprimordi-
ality of “the three human monopolies”: the employment of symbols, mutual
adaptation of perspectives and intentional attitude to objects, and seeks to
show how they are drawn upon in the core phenomenon of communication,
defined as the ability of humans to come to agreement with each other about
something in a shared epistemic world, drawing on the resources available
to them from a shared symbolic lifeworld. Animals are mentioned but once
in the course of making this argument: “Chimpanzees lack the kind of com-
munication where a common objective world is accessed by virtue of the
meaning-identical use of symbols within the horizon of an intersubjectively
shared lifeworld” (2012: 65; see 2019: 241).
Let us grant that the use of symbols is unique to humans. It is so because
it involves convention, so that a symbol refers to its object not directly, as do
icons, but indirectly, by virtue of the ways in which they relate systematically
to other symbols, where their doing so is a matter of agreement among those
who use them, and a genuinely social and cultural attainment at that. What
many anthropologists question, however, is the widespread assumption
that all representational phenomena have symbolic properties, an assump-
tion that amounts to a conflation of representation with language, whereby
language is taken as per definition involving symbols and so as involving
capacities and facilitating practices presumably unique to humans. What
we risk ignoring here, as Eduardo Kohn seeks to show in his ethnographic
study How Forests Think, is that non-human beings and the lifeforms they
constitute also represent the world (2013: 8, 40). Animals like the monkey
mentioned above orient themselves by way of signs, be it by making them
or responding to them in their environment. Indeed, the monkey relates to
what Peirce called indices, which, unlike the icon that is a likeness to the
object it represents, point to something else – be it an absence, a signifi-
cant one at that. So the monkey is able to make connections between some
44  Animals make us human
event (a sound made by another animal fleeing upon hearing the sounds
made by hunters approaching) and another potential one that has not yet
occurred – the fleeing animal is interpreted as a sign to the effect that some-
thing – potentially dangerous – is about to happen; to prevent what is a mere
possibility from becoming a reality, response in the form of the monkey’s
decision to flee itself is called for, and hesitation to do so means death.
This may appear to be an aside, but it is not. Even if we grant that symbols
are the one kind of sign – the two others being icons and indices (Peirce) –
found only in humans, the chimpanzees Habermas invokes by way of con-
trast do possess the capacities to direct their attention at something shared,
and interpreted in like manner, in a likewise shared objective world (envi-
ronment) and by drawing on the resources of a shared lifeform. To learn
what something signifies so as to be able to interpret that thing (object,
event) as meaning the same to me and to others, eliciting the same sort of
response, is a sign-employing process that is just as vertical and horizon-
tal in monkeys and chimpanzees as it is in humans, to use Habermas’ own
terms: these animals no less than us humans are simultaneously engaged
in relating to something shared out there (vertically) and – meaning: as –
something shared among themselves (horizontally), in each instance both
presupposing and confirming a sharedness of interpretation and response
that is a social achievement, one that each individual (animal, human) can
be part of as a member of a society of interpreters that by way of example
sets the standard for correct interpretation: “these animals are prey to us,
those are predators”; “that kind of sound, made by that kind of animal,
means danger”, etc. Gestures play a crucial role in stabilizing this entire
practice, and in the socialization into becoming a skilled participant, by
conveying what expressions and what movements mean what, and so help
direct apt response. This is what the infant learns, and can only learn, from
its significant others. In that sense, it is a social phenomenon, the apprecia-
tion of which can be traced back to Darwin’s classic study The Expression
of Emotions in Man and in Animals from 1872.
Against this background, we may turn to the question indicated above:
who may qualify as significant others? Who is indispensable? Members of
the same species only, or members of other species as well? If it takes a vil-
lage to raise a child, does that village only consist of humans?

VI
I propose at two-step approach to these questions. We begin by looking at
the matter from a historical perspective, then move to an ontogenetic one.
We saw above that Shepard holds category making and the emergence of
taxonomies to be based on animals, tracing the evolution of the human mind
and the beginning of language to an origin shaped by the observations of
and encounters with animals. The life-or-death deciding necessity of iden-
tifying all sorts of creatures based on the sounds and moves they make and
 Animals make us human 45
the traces their presence leaves is common to animals and humans, and his-
torically it is a phenomenon that long antedates the existence of humans on
earth. In developing what will become the distinctly human way of engaging
in these practices, then, humans don’t start from scratch; human societies
start by learning the basics of from so many non-human creatures and life-
forms, adding, as we saw, the employment of symbols, the key element in
human language qua oral as well as written.
Shepard’s take on this topic differs from Habermas’ in being utterly con-
crete. He gives pride of place to the question: what sort of entities are being
identified, are being counted, inasmuch as they are the entities encountered
in the world the human agents in question have in common? How compre-
hensive and complex a world are we talking about here? How rich or poor in
terms of diversity along different axes, species diversity being one, biolog-
ical diversity a second, cultural diversity a third? And how to answer such
questions? Yes, by comparison; but diachronic or synchronic?
To be sure, what I am getting at is so much better expressed concretely
than abstractly. “Tribal peoples around the world”, writes Shepard, “know
hundreds of plants and animals by name and natural history. The Nuba of
Africa identify more than forty species of locus (biologists recognize only
ten) and twenty-seven varieties of sorghum which are botanically but three”
(1997: 54; 1998: 202). He quotes an anthropologist who observes that “in the
two preliterate societies in which I have carried out field research, knowl-
edge of the biological world constitutes – I would claim – a greater chunk
than all other types of knowledge combined” (ibid.). He calculates, Shepard
tells us, that primitive tribes have an average of 1,000–1,200 kinds of plants
and animals in their vocabulary, and he makes the point that familiarity
with this great diversity of organisms is not primarily because of their eco-
nomic usefulness. Whence does it spring, then? Shepard suggests that such
knowledge is “good for its own sake”, owing to its inherent merits. The sin-
gle universal characteristic here, says Shepard, is that the organisms are
named, and this naming – perfectly without God’s doing it – makes it pos-
sible to “handle” them cognitively, that is to say (and approaching now, but
only now, Habermasian territory), making them objects of discourse.
But that is not what comes first or is most important. Naming is a delight,
even an end in its own right; if not for animals, then certainly for humans.
Shepard mentions Merrill Moore, a lifelong shell collector who, exploring
his taxonomic frenzy beginning in his childhood, asks himself: “Why do
I like shells?” Bringing home the shells he found on outings, handling and
examining them, seeing his collection grow – all of this provided visual and
tactile delight, “reminding him of places and outings, and opened up the
complex lives of the mollusks themselves who seemed to him separate per-
sonalities, ‘like people’; shells are ‘a world within a world’; if I wish to see
richness in Nature, variety in pattern, and seemingly endless alterations in
colour and line, all I need to do is take them out and look at them” (1997:
56f.). Shepard comments that collecting found objects “disengages things
46  Animals make us human
from their places and their context”; it deprives them of their aura, to use
Walter Benjamin’s term, and yet it bestows on them the status of things to
be valued in their own right, to be admired and enjoyed aesthetically (ibid.).
That said, animals are more central to the fundamentals of identifying
by naming than are shells. For us, Shepard maintains, animals are distinct
but related entities. They are alive like us, yet they exhibit that liveness in
ways so different from us, and – no less importantly – from each other. In
the practice of naming, the first criteria are anatomical; instinctively we
identify animals according to general body form (“duck”), only to specify
further the identity by specific cues (“green-winged teal”). Acquisition of
this knowledge – first general, then more specific – is an eminently concrete
undertaking, having physical encounters with the animals in question as
its context of discovery and verification – here, nothing can replace the pri-
mary access provided by the senses, meaning the full repertoire of them all:
seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching the animal, getting to grips with
its species-specific traits by way of observation of its behaviour in its natural
habitat and with its natural others.
Since time immemorial, animals have played a prominent part in chil-
dren’s games, leading Shepard to ask: Why is there such an apparently uni-
versal need for us humans to see different aspects of ourselves in animals
instead of in other people? Or more to the point, why is the attention to
aspects of ourselves as exhibited in animals so important to our coming to
understand these aspects in ourselves and in other people? Why aren’t ani-
mals instead a detour in this respect?
“Each animal in play”, Shepard writes, “reveals a certain trait or feeling
exhibited in its behavior. Each kind of animal gives concrete representa-
tion to an ephemeral and intangible element of the human self such as
assertion, intimidation, affection, doubt, determination, kindness, anger,
hope, irritation, yearning, wisdom, cunning, anticipation, fear, and initi-
ative. Only when these feelings [and states of mind, AJV] are discovered
outside the self and then performed can such intense but elusive ‘things’ be
made one’s own” (1997: 83). In declaring to be a fox, the child knows very
well that it is merely playing that animal; doing so is not to rehearse an
actual role in its social life but to learn the more fundamental lesson: that
there are roles. In this process, the child is in no illusion about being the
fox; the difference between animals and humans is maintained not glossed
over. Still, animals – and some more than others, depending on the role in
question (foxes as cunning) – are perceived as similar enough to humans
to have this function. Shepard puts the point like this: “The miming of
animals in play does not animalize the child, since it does not teach us to
live in holes, run on all fours, or catch mice in our mouths. Nor does it
humanize the fox, as even the child knows in its heart that the whole mat-
ter is ‘just a story’. It is important as a joint adventure by children, part of
the biology and culture of childhood, in “capturing the Other” in order to
constitute a self” (1997: 84).
 Animals make us human 47
Shepard corroborates his argument by Konrad Lorenz’s observation that
all mammals learn by rote memorizing, whereby imitation – according to
Aristotle the basis from which all learning, all acquisition of knowledge as
well as skills springs – is absolutely instrumental. As we saw when referring to
Eduardo Kohn’s ethnographic work, there are three stages or “modes of rep-
resentation”: enactive, iconic, and symbolic. Children are committed to the
first stage, acting out what they feel, so that to feel something is tantamount
to enacting it. Thus children learn to walk like mice learning to run a maze.
They learn that an object hidden continues to exist even though they cannot
see it. As for manual skills, they are not taught but learned by watching and
imitating. Again, there is no substitute for full-fledged bodily and sensuous
engagement with the world, accessing it by way of the primary senses, the
reliance on which was strictly forbidden by Descartes, who thereby closed the
principal door of humans’ access to other creatures. The practice of watching
and imitating is found in other large mammals too, but the human repertoire,
Shepard writes, is peculiar in that “children imitate not only other people but
other species, a characteristic of our own kind of consciousness” (1997: 87).
Again, being an animal and acting the animal are not the same, and the child
knows the difference. What we need to recognize is that such enactments are
“transformative traits of our humanity”. And we do not, upon becoming
adults, leave them behind; “the skills of categorical thought by means of the
taxonomy of other species is never completely put by; we continue as adults
to extend our knowledge of the nomenclature of plants and animals” (ibid.).
At this juncture, Shepard addresses the notion of anthropomorphism,
understood as attributing human qualities to non-humans by way of projec-
tion. Like Midgley, Shepard is sharply critical of the critique of anthropo-
morphism where it is sought eliminated as a sort of “category mistake” that,
while evidently springing from a deep-seated disposition in us qua species, in
fact prevents us from any objective and scientific understanding of animals.
The mistake made by its critics old and new, argues Shepard, is to suppose
that anthropomorphism is an end in itself; “they judge it without regard to
its function in childhood as a precursor to poetry and other metaphor”. He
goes on to quote from psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim’s classic The Uses of
Enchantment: “If we do not understand what rocks and trees and animals have
to tell us, the reason is that we are not sufficiently attuned to them. A child is
convinced that the animal understands and feels with him, even though it does
not show it openly” (1997: 88; see Bettelheim 1976: 46). Properly understood,
then, anthropomorphism is about gaining a first access, a full-fledged sen-
suous entry into the feelings, states, and responses – the inner life – of an
animal, taking these features to be sufficiently similar to those the child
finds in him – or herself to enable a tentative appreciation of what is suppos-
edly “going on” in that animal in that situation, often by way of its reacting
directly to the child’s action towards it, highlighting the eminently physical
encounter that provides the setting here. Only by acting upon this assump-
tion of sufficient likeness, an assumption unquestioned during childhood, is
48  Animals make us human
the child in a position to develop, gradually, an appreciation of the dissim-
ilarities existing between itself and that animal. The projection involved in
anthropomorphism is not, as Shepard rightly stresses, the end point but the
indispensable point of departure.
What anthropomorphism helps accomplish, then, is something truly pre-
cious: the recognition of continuity between animals’ lives and our own; a
continuity that “reinforces a profound and enduring metonomy, a lifelong
shield against alienation” (1997: 88). At the end of puberty, which marks the
end of innocence, we begin “a lifelong work of differentiating ourselves”
from the animals, a work that could not commence, as we just saw, were it
not for the way it grows from an earlier, unbreakable foundation of conti-
guity” (ibid.). Barring that, to insist on ourselves simply as different from
the animals would deny “the shared underpinnings and destroy a deeper
sense of cohesion that sustains our sanity and keeps our world from disinte-
grating”. Herein lies the fundamental importance of anthropomorphism: it
“binds our continuity with the rest of the natural world” (ibid.). Accordingly,
“failure to nurture childhood enthusiasm for animals produces adults bereft
of diverse living forms as the metaphorical basis of religious conceptions
and values. Such a society fails to honour the underlying unity of diversity
because it lacks experience of it” (1997: 89). Fundamentally, and despite the
modern talk of “humans or animals”, we are “not part of a binary duo or of
a simple juxtaposition” with animals. “However we may define ourselves as
a species”, Shepard maintains, “the final act is to recover our animalhood,
to see all taxonomy for what it is: a means, not an end, to thought” (ibid.).

VII
Above I asked who should qualify as “significant others” in the development
of human individuals.
So far, we have looked at how Shepard approaches this question from
a general perspective, acknowledging the evolutionary role of animals in
providing the basis for the specifically human capacities in such practices
as identifying entities by naming them. Animals, whose existence on planet
earth long predates that of humans, are the prototype of such entities, hold-
ing as we noted an instinctive fascination in simply being alive like us and
thus inviting comparison that is equally open to difference and similarity.
However, ever since their beginnings in the nineteenth century, academic
psychology and sociology Western style have to a large extent ignored the
significance of the human-nature relationship, leading commentators to
speak of the “nature phobia” characteristic of modern social science (see
Benton 2001). I shall have more to say about this bias in later chapters.
In turning now to Shepard’s account of ontogeny as the dimension where
the relationship between the human individual and the wider natural world,
including animals, is played out, a statement Shepard quotes from psycho-
analyst Harold Searles is pertinent: “It seems to me that the highest order
 Animals make us human 49
of maturity is essential to the achievement of relatedness with that which
is most unlike oneself” (Shepard 1982: 14; see 1998: 213). The quote is from
Searles’ study The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and in
Schizophrenia, published to little acclaim in 1960 and only now beginning to
be recognized as a classic. The “world” that matters to human development from
its very beginnings is a non-human one as well as a human one, pointing to
the “total environment” within which socialization and identity formation
take place. “The human being”, writes Searles, “is engaged throughout his
life span in an increasing struggle to differentiate himself increasingly fully,
not only from his human but also from his non-human environment, whole
developing in proportion as he succeeds in this differentiation an increas-
ingly meaningful relatedness to both environment and people” (Searles
quoted in Shepard 1998: 183). The critical thesis that the atypical psychia-
trist Searles shares with Shepard is that the non-human dimension of that
total environment has become so marginalized in contemporary Western
society as to render fellow humans the only creatures vital to human devel-
opment and the relationships it consists of. In that sense, to become human
has everything to do with culture, that is, with other humans and with the
artefacts and products of humans, and nothing to do with the beings making
up the wider natural world.
Many will regard this thesis and the critique it offers as exaggerated and
short of a substantive case. So let us consider the argument, sketched very
generally so far, in more detail. In doing so, we shall turn to the book for
which Shepard is probably most well known, Nature and Madness, aptly
titled so to signal his affinity to Searles’ overriding project: to demonstrate
the link between human sanity and the natural world.
Shepard starts with an evocative depiction of the original scene:

For the infant as person-to-be, the shape of all otherness grows out of
the maternal relationship. Yet, the setting of that relationship was, in
the evolution of humankind, a surround of living plants, rich in texture,
smell, and motion. The unfiltered, unpolluted air, the flicker of wild
birds, real sunshine and rain, mud to be tasted and tree bark to grasp,
the sounds of wind and water, the calls of animals and insects as well as
human voices – all these are not vague and pleasant amenities for the
infant, but the stuff out of which its second grounding, even while in its
mother’s arms, has begun. The outdoors is also in some sense another
inside, a kind of enlivenment of that fetal landscape which is not so
constant as once supposed. The surroundings are also that-which-will-
be-swallowed, internalized, incorporated as the self.
(1982: 7)

It is hard to read this passage without a feeling of nostalgia for a “natural”

setting now gone, one not to be taken for granted in any way, and hardly
anywhere, in today’s world. For many a reader, the label “nostalgia” will be
50  Animals make us human
intended as a criticism, akin to “romanticizing” bygone times and societies,
from which we moderns have little or nothing to learn. But if, as suggested,
the topic at hand is to do with the preconditions for sanity, and thus for psy-
chopathologies and their specific origin in the way we relate to the natural
world, to the total environment of which we are part and by which we are
affected, unconsciously as well as consciously, then dismissing Shepard’s
approach is not only premature but risks robbing us of important insights.
What could they be?
Historically speaking, the transition from a setting pervaded by the abun-
dance of eminently proximate, literally hands-on, seeable, hearable, smella-
ble, touchable non-human creatures of innumerable sorts to the present-day
one of the paradigmatic urban setting is a story in many steps. The transition
from hunters, and hunter-gatherers, to societies organized around agricul-
ture, from the nomadic to the stationary, from the land to the cities, from
low-tech to high tech, from a situation where human groups were few and
far between amidst the endlessness and vastness of seemingly all-powerful,
omnipresent nature (wildness) to a situation where this proportionality is
being rapidly, and globally, reversed – this multilayered transition can only be
invoked as a well-documented historical fact here, not accounted for in detail.
Concentrating on the ontogenetic dimension, Shepard asks what differ-
ence it will make if the first nine years of a child’s life are played out in a fab-
ricated environment as distinct from the nature (outdoors) setting depicted
above. This is what he has to say:

The absence of numerous nonhuman lives, a variegated plant-studded

soil, the nearness of storms, wind, the odors of plants, the fantastic vari-
ety of insect forms, the surprise of springs, the mystery of life hidden
in water, and the round of seasons and migration – how does the lack of
these really hurt the child?
First, life in a made world slowly builds in the child the feeling that
nonlivingness is the normal state of things. Existence is shaped from
the outside or put together. Eventually he will conclude that there is
no intrinsic unfolding, no unique, inner life at all, only substance that,
being manipulated, gives the illusion of spontaneity.
Second, when he goes back into society after adolescence, having
missed the initiation into the world of final mysteries and its poetry, he
will believe either that (a) all life, including people, is, in fact, machines
or (b) the only truly living things are people; this opens the door for
all the dichotomies that separate the human from the nonhuman on
the basis of soul, spirit, mind, history, culture, speech, rights, right to
existence, and so on.
Third, he becomes either a spectator or an exploiter. The world may be
interesting or dull and useless, but it is not one that feels or thinks or
 Animals make us human 51
communicates, that has special messages for him, or that has independ-
ent purposes of its own. The world’s inability to feel is his own mechan-
ical response projected upon it. He is like the infant whose emotions are
crippled because he was suspended too long in an inert world.
(1982: 103; my italics)

In giving this critical account, Shepard is well aware that the explanatory
model he relies on – ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so that each child repeats
in its development the evolutionary history of the human species – is dis-
missed as speculative by many scientists today (see 1997: 6). Whether seen
as depending on that model or not, the idea of a sick society that Shepard
implies here is one that allowed Freud, in his late work Civilization and its
Discontents (1930), to contend that, “under the influence of cultural urges,
some civilizations – or some epochs of civilization – possibly the whole of
mankind – have become neurotic” (Freud quoted in Shepard 1982: 4). Erich
Fromm would later take this proposition as the point of departure for his
widely read book The Sane Society (1955).
More relevant for my purposes is Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization,
published in 1956, a study that covers much of the same territory as the
more famous Dialectic of Enlightenment, authored by Marcuse’s colleagues
within the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
Relying on the contributions of late Freud in a more rigorous manner than
his colleagues, Marcuse explores the paradox that came to define decades
of work within Critical Theory: that the enormous progress made thanks
to the scientific rationality of Western civilization was being paid for by a
series of psychopathologies, revealing the celebrated progress as a prison
as far as the realization of humanity’s potential for happiness and freedom
is concerned. Under the imperative of taking part in the rational transfor-
mation of the human and natural environment, the ego was itself trans-
formed, namely into “an essentially aggressive, offensive subject, whose
thoughts and actions were designed for mastering objects” (Marcuse 1956:
109). To be a human subject was to act as such against a world of objects.
“Nature”, Marcuse contends, “its own as well as the external world, were
“given” to the ego as something that had to be fought, conquered, and
even violated – such was the precondition for self-preservation and self-
development” (1956: 110). The individual is involved in a two-front struggle:
one internal (intrapsychic), aiming at the subjugation of its sensuous and
appetitive faculties, condemned since Plato as the “lower” ones in being
also found in animals, and since Descartes owing to their alleged role in
leading us astray epistemically, in our effort to access external reality in a
reliable, objective, and detached manner, as required in philosophy and in
science alike. The other struggle is the external one, where nature is a priori
experienced by an ego “bent on domination and therefore experienced as
susceptible to mastery and control” (ibid.), a stance that Habermas (as we
will see more closely in Chapter 3) would come to designate as constituting
52  Animals make us human
a “quasi-transcendental cognitive interest”, the one “rational” attitude for
humans as a species towards the so-called objective world, regardless of
its differentiations between animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic,
including animals (see Habermas 1972).
In Marcuse’s terminology, what Freud helps us understand is that in
Western modernity the “performance principle” adopted and internalized
by the ego by way of its two-front struggle is made into the reality principle
as such. But Freud failed to realize that, historically speaking, the oppres-
sive “modification” of the pleasure principle – that of eros, of uninhibited
sexuality and play – by the reality principle in its present form has in fact
become “unnatural” and unnecessary: “Freud’s consistent denial of the pos-
sibility of an essential liberation of the pleasure principle”, argues Marcuse,
“implies the assumption that scarcity is as permanent as domination – an
assumption that seems to beg the question”. Contra Freud, then, “the his-
torical possibility of a gradual decontrolling of the instinctual development
must be taken seriously, perhaps even the historical necessity – if civiliza-
tion is to progress to a higher stage of freedom” (1956: 134).
Despite his criticism, Marcuse credits Freud’s concept of “primary nar-
cissism” with the important idea of “a non-repressive erotic attitude toward
reality”, taken as “an undifferentiated, unified libido prior to the division
into ego and external objects”. Primary narcissism, Marcuse maintains, is
more than autoeroticism; “it engulfs the ‘environment’, integrating the nar-
cissistic ego with the objective world”. He quotes Freud to the effect that
“the ego-feeling we are aware of now is only a shrunken vestige of a far more
extensive feeling – a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an
inseparable connection of the ego with the external world”, i.e., what Freud
termed “oceanic feeling” (Marcuse 1956: 168; Freud 1930: 13ff.). Far from
being an egotistic withdrawal from reality, proof of immaturity or a neu-
rotic symptom, this type of narcissism “denotes a fundamental relatedness
to reality which may generate a comprehensive existential order” (1956:
169). This, and nothing less, is the revolutionary potential Marcuse spots in
Freud’s concept.
There is no denying that, for present-day readers, there is something
dated about Marcuse’s attempt at a synthesis between Marx and Freud,
with his insistence on making a distinction between necessary repression
and “surplus repression”, between repressive and free sublimation, and
on the “possibility of libidinous work relations”, taken as helping attain a
“non-repressive society” where gratification is finally liberated from its con-
straints in the psychic prison created by the imperatives of the hegemonic
reality principle, obsessed with mastery and control in all areas of existence.
Even though Shepard does not mention Marcuse’s work, he helps us see
why it must be considered a missed opportunity. Let me put it like this.
What was left largely unexplored in the work of Freud and Fromm is so also
in Marcuse: a systematic exploration of the way in which the socialization of
the human individual is related to its experience with the non-human. Only
 Animals make us human 53
with the publication of Searles’ study in 1960 would that become a topic in
its own right. It is symptomatic of the limitation I have in mind that not a
single passage in Marcuse’s study is devoted to the role played by animals
in making us human and thus the importance of their decline in account-
ing for how “a sick society produces sick individuals”. While no reader of
Marcuse will be in doubt about his fascination with the natural world as a
site of uninhibited human sexuality, non-material (spiritual) gratification
and a sense of profound joy in being alive, “nature” remains a general and
abstract concept, never broken down into the concreteness of human-animal
encounters that informs every page of Shepard’s books. We are urged to
understand that the attitude of mastery and control is deeply wrong and
deeply stifling to the humans caught up in it, instrumentalizing themselves
in the process of instrumentalizing nature. But the wrongness is never con-
sidered from another point of view than the human-centered one: the ques-
tion about its stifling consequences for the other-than-humans affected is
never raised.
According to Shepard, the child whose socialization takes place in a
human-made, urban environment that allows minimal exposure to other
than human forms of life is, in effect, asked to proceed directly from its sym-
biosis with mother to a mastery of social relations. This means that the child
skips the genetic interlude in this developmental task, in which it indulges
for eight to ten years in nature, going directly as it were to the real job of
life. From the age of four to the age of ten, things found in nature will be
picked up and played with by the child – for example, the broken piece of a
branch on the ground will immediately be turned into a sword. Although
it takes fantasy – imagination – to turn that natural entity into an artifice
(a weapon) to play with, the idea that things encountered in nature are ideal
for this function is instinctive in the child. The natural world is taken as
fully fit for this sort of spontaneity, as – literally – the paramount natural
setting for it. The child’s acted-upon assumption is that nature is not alien
to its human needs and capacities – be they cognitive, be they emotional –
but conducive, even indispensable, to their formation and enactment. Such
immersion in otherness – distinct from alienness – has no substitute in the
array of images and toys that so many children today are exposed to in the
form of the “pictures, zoos and gardens, decorations, Disney films, motifs
and designs” that Shepard describes as “a stew of nature so arbitrarily pre-
sented that the results of the child’s years of trying to fix it in his heart will
only lead to despair” (1982: 105). In this case, there is no other sword than
the one the child receives from the parent who bought it in a shop. It is being
made of plastic instead of wood, its being something received as ready-to-
play-with and with the tag “sword” on it, cheats the child of the chance to
create and to invent, of the experience of finding the item-to-be-made-into-
sword by way of the pretence, the as if, that is the essence of true play. No
wonder, remarks Shepard, that the child of 13 years who has been cheated
of this experience and what it actively requires of him, turns with such keen
54  Animals make us human
interest to machines (ibid.). (Note that Shepard clearly has boys rather than
girls in mind here, without commenting on it.)
Shepard says that he “suspects” that “the substitution of animal toys
and pictures as a kind of appeasement damages the individual’s social rela-
tions, that it convinces him at some deep level that the given state of man is
without pattern or purpose, that men have unlimited capacity to fabricate
things” (1982: 105), and that, we may add, it has always been like that, mean-
ing that a child who grows up in an environment that is completely (or close
to completely) human-made will have no idea as to how recent and indeed
unprecedented this situation is. The tendency to take for granted that rela-
tionships are such as to consist of fellow humans only and that to the extent
that relating to non-human entities does at all figure, they will be artefacts
not animals, made not grown, is exemplified in Habermas’ comment about
a two-year old child who, in its interaction with an adult, finds it amusing
to “use a pencil as if it were a tooth-brush”; the role played by animals, as
opposed to artefacts, is analytically as well as philosophically ignored (see
Habermas 2012: 64). This silencing in theory of non-human others of which
animals are an example both follows from and in turn helps reinforce their
silencing in practice, in empirical reality, rendering the theory in question
uncritical in that it merely mirrors, and portrays as the way things sim-
ply are, what in reality is the result of enormously important historical and
cultural change. This is my way of putting it, not Shepard’s. But I think it
expresses the crux of his project.
Shepard’s admission that his thesis will come across as speculative does
not prevent him from putting it in strong words:

Urban civilization creates the illusion of a shortcut to individual matu-

rity by attempting to omit the eight to ten years of immersion in nonhu-
man nature. Maturity so achieved is spurious because the individual,
though he may become precociously articulate and sensitive to subtle
human interplay, is without a grounding in the given structure that is
nature. His grief and sense of loss seems to him to be a personality prob-
lem, so that, caught in a double bind, he will be encouraged to talk out
his sense of inadequacy as though it were an interpersonal or ideological
matter. Indeed, the real brittleness of modern social relationships has its
roots in that vacuum where a beautiful and awesome otherness should
have been encountered. The multifold otherness-with-similarities of
nonhuman nature is a training ground for that delicate equilibrium
between the play of likeness and difference in all social intercourse and
for affirmation instead of fear of the ambiguities and liveness of the self.
(1982: 108)

In viewing the increasing injury to the planet as a symptom of human

psychopathology, and by implication as a process that will not come to a
halt before the root causes of that pathology are identified and dealt with,
 Animals make us human 55
Shepard points to the self-reinforcing logic at work. If losing the connections
to nature and its multitudes of non-human others leads to a situation where
only fellow humans qualify as significant others and where artefacts replace
animals, and pets replace wild ones, the indoors replace the outdoors, so
that reality in its entirety is domesticized, a world of humans for humans,
then there is also a loss of experiences such as to be able to register that lost
connection to nature. Can we miss what we have never experienced? What
about loss of a kind that antedates our own existence? How to assess the
impact of absence? I shall come back to these questions in later chapters.
Suffice it to say here that the resulting symptom is afflictions such as alien-
ation, lack of meaning and of a sense of belonging; that is to say, the cata-
logue of “social pathologies” theorized by the pioneers of social science, by
it Hegel and Marx, Weber and Durkheim, and not forgetting Freud.
On Shepard’s account, these pathologies cannot be healed as long as their
roots as well as remedies are sought in that one dimension now taken to
define and exhaust the world as relevant to humans: the world consisting
of humans where everything rotates around them. No matter how many
people we are, and how spectacularly we succeed in putting our stamp on
everything that exists, determining its meaning and worth or lack of such
– our problem will not be solved, our pain not removed, insofar as we over-
burden the world qua human, qua social and cultural, with the task of ful-
filling all our needs and enabling the flourishing of all our capacities qua
human. The more one-sidedly obsessively we continue to bark up that one
tree, the human-grown and human-made one, the more we neglect and, in
the process, ruin that other-than-human dimension which, possibly, would
provide what we seek.

VIII
Let us look at how this historical change affects human-animals relation-
ships more specifically.
As we would expect, Shepard is highly critical of pets and the role that
they have come to play in an era of dwindling populations of wild animals.
In The Others, he quotes Walker Perry’s statement that “the autonomous
self feels so alone in the cosmos that it will go to any length to talk to chim-
panzees, dolphins, and humpback whales. Why do people in general want
to believe that chimps and dolphins and whales can speak…to establish
communication with extraterrestrial intelligence?” (1997: 140).
Of course, the animals mentioned here are not pets – they are wild ani-
mals. Or at least they used to be, and to be treated accordingly. The point
Shepard wants to make is that they are no longer so: there is a tendency to
treat more and more animals along the wild-domestic-pet spectre as were
none of them really wild, as were they pets. In light of the claims about
the cultural taboo against anthropomorphism made above, this may seem
surprising. And indeed, we need to explore the hypothesis that this taboo,
56  Animals make us human
in the strict version discussed above, is being lifted in contemporary soci-
ety. In exploring this we will need to distinguish carefully between what-
ever scientific arguments there are for lifting the taboo, on the one hand,
and the sort of emotional (sentimental) needs that underpin lifting it, on
the other.
In discussing pets, Shepard’s backdrop is our crowded yet increasingly
lonely planet, one where the loneliness that existentialist philosophers like
Sartre had posited as a metaphysical given, as defining the human condition
in a timeless manner, has turned into a literal loneliness, namely that of
humans in times of loss of all sorts of non-human others, amounting to a sort
of loneliness that is historically unprecedented and as such as yet scarcely
contemplated by philosophers. On my reading, the dialectic Shepard con-
siders triggered by the factual and utterly concrete decline of animals in the
wild is one of psychological compensation: the fewer animals left, the more
important it becomes for us to make some contact with them, not only in
the sense of acknowledging them as coexisting with us on Earth, but in the
more demanding sense of having the animals acknowledge us, giving us some
sign that they see us and that we are important to them, meaning that there
is – or could be – some reciprocity to this need, that it will play out as a
meeting-halfway between different species, us and them.
Not only is this a tall order; it is fundamentally mistaken. The point is not
that humans are crucial to making animals into animals: we are not. Rather,
and this makes for asymmetry and non-reciprocity, animals are crucial to
making us human, and they are so in virtue of being different from us, not
us and not like us, insists Shepard. Their being different means that they are
indifferent to us; the more indifferent, the better, if I understand Shepard
correctly. This is the whole philosophical point about animals being sui gen-
eris wild in Shepard’s perspective. However, as we shall see in greater detail
in later chapters, only animals that are in a position to maintain their inde-
pendence from humans can be indifferent to us the way Shepard affirms.
Should their difference-making-for-their-indifference be lost as their major
characteristic, a double loss would be involved: the animals would lose their
intrinsic identity and their intrinsic worth, tied as it is to what they are in
themselves and not to what they are to humans; and in doing so, they would
lose their significance for humans – the other-than-anthropocentric loss
would be an anthropocentric loss as well. Note that the first loss is a loss in
its own right and not a loss only to the extent that, and on condition that, it
amounts to the second, human-related loss.
This is my way of putting it, overly theoretical, to be sure, and in need
of making distinctions between different sorts of animals so as to do jus-
tice to the different ways in which animals are important in our becoming
fully human in Shepard’s partly cosmological, partly psychoanalytic sense,
underscoring his work’s originality. Shepard recalls that until the twentieth
century, rabbits, chickens, ducks, and geese were still kept in backyards,
even in the cities; “local fairs and markets had large livestock sections, draft
 Animals make us human 57
animals were still abundant, farmers drove pigs and cattle to market down
the streets, and knackers butchered them in alleys; dogs and cats ran freely
in the streets” (1997: 143). This is an important observation that illuminates
not only the abundance of animals, in numbers and types, that were part
of the everyday lifeworld of, say, children growing up in cities as well as in
a rural environment. It also illuminates how today’s mostly indoor pets,
like dogs and cats, lived more autonomous and less domesticized lives until
factors such as increasing car traffic forbade it. In the course of the histor-
ical shift Shepard talks about, “domestic animals have gradually become
surrogate companions, siblings, lovers, victims, workers, parents, com-
petitors, oracles, enemies, kinfolk, caretaker-watchmen, and so on” (1997:
142), making for a self-reinforcing displacement within the crude category
“animals” so that the wild ones more and more disappear from view and
the domesticated become ever more so as to become pets. As we see, the
sequence is essentially about the ever-growing loss of animals qua wild and
other-than-human.
Shepard depicts the sequence as a drama in five stages. Act I is an outer
circle of wild animal life which was a major focus of human attention;
encounters with such animals as bears and wolves would inspire stories to
be told again and again, with time assuming the status of myths, often tied
to particularly charismatic animals, some of which came to be considered
sacred. As such, Shepard remarks, the animals were seen as “conscious,
unique, and different in spiritual power” (1997: 143). In Act II, certain ani-
mals were taken into captivity and, following the uses to which humans put
them, their biological natures would over time conform to human domi-
nance; taken in as co-members of the human household, they would become
the domestic animals, such as horses and dogs.
For my purposes, Act III is the most interesting one. It begins, says
Shepard, not with animals but with a class of things called “transitional
objects”. These – and an example would be teddy bear – are toted around by
“anxious three-year-old children who are having difficulty becoming inde-
pendent from their mothers and who are comforted by a soft object that is
subjectively intermediate between themselves and the outside world” (ibid.).
However, not all children require the security of such objects, observes
Shepard; the children who do not are “those who are surrounded by abun-
dant other forms of life” – that is to say, what used to be the normal situ-
ation in pre-modern society but is so no longer. The exact reason for the
difference pointed to is not entirely clear. But “apparently animals in their
diversity model a world of likeness and difference which makes the child’s
impending separation less frightening and also resonates with internal, psy-
chic structures which can best be described metaphorically as a fauna. The
stuffed toys [e.g., the teddy bear] are simultaneously huggable, transitional
objects and ‘animals’”, helping to compensate children “for their lonesome
social and ecological situations and preparing them for lifelong pet keep-
ing” (1997: 144).
58  Animals make us human
Act IV is the transfer of this affection from effigies to dogs and cats. And as
the toys had been pets, the pets became toys. Act V completes the sequence
in extending the equivalence of the living domestic pet and the stuffed wild
toy to living nature: “If the domestic forms have all along been substitutes for
the wild and the latter have become unavailable and unknown, it is easy to
fuse the domestic and the wild”, resulting in a situation where “the wild are
simply those potential pets who do not happen to live with us” (ibid.). This
is the background for John Berger’s famous essay on why zoos disappoint.
To be sure, humans get a chance to look at animals in the zoo. But the “look
of animals” has vanished, tragically so even among the animals who were
the wildest of them all – think of lions and tigers – in that they would epito-
mize the being-different-from-humans and so being-indifferent-to-humans that
we saw Shepard consider to be their essential characteristic. The difference
that makes this indifference possible and meaningful, even profound and
challenging, is gone, dependent as it is on the place within the ecologies that
define and energize these animals, leaving only an indifference that makes
no difference to anyone. Animals thus made to be, to exist, out of place are
no more lively than matter out of place.
Why do I find Act III particularly interesting? To begin with, “transi-
tional object” is a technical term made famous in psychoanalyst Donald
W. Winnicott’s classic paper “Transitional Objects and Transitional
Phenomena” (1951). Curiously, this fact is not mentioned by Shepard;
despite his obvious debt to psychoanalytic theory, Winnicott is not men-
tioned in his book.
The intriguing part of Shepard’s use of Winnicott’s concept is to do with
his (Shepard’s) suggestion that the need for a transitional object in the form
of a teddy bear, offering the three-year-old child comfort by being a “soft
object that is subjectively intermediate between themselves and the outside
world”, is not a need felt by all children – there are those who, as we saw, can
do without the security brought by such objects, these being children who
are “surrounded by abundant other forms of life” (1997: 143).
The distinction among children made by Shepard, I suggest, challenges
Winnicott’s own use of the notion of “transitional objects” in the form of
a pet like the teddy bear. Whereas Winnicott considers the need for the
latter to be a “universal” one, Shepard for his part views it as nothing of
the sort, but as a relatively recent historical development and as such – as
yet – not shared by all children. To be sure, there are differences of emphasis
involved between the two thinkers. For example, while Winnicott did focus
on the way in which the teddy bear served to provide comfort in a situa-
tion where the child was experiencing separation anxiety when realizing his
mother was not there for him, Winnicott’s more profound interest was to
explore the conditions for tolerating reality as independent such, including
mother as an independent being, hence facilitating a breach with primary
narcissism necessary for psychological maturity: the “good” object is that
which survives the child’s attempt at destroying it, wishing to do so because
 Animals make us human 59
of the frustration to do with experiencing that the other is independent,
hence not (not always, not exclusively) here-for-the-child. Winnicott’s theo-
retical aim, then, is to demonstrate the connection between aggression and
attempted destruction of the loved object so as to come to accept the reality
principle (Freud) and the independence of others, that is to say, their being
outside the control of the child and having needs, interests, and projects of
their own. Learning how to use transitional objects is a part of this stage of
development.
The interesting thing to note in the present context is that Winnicott has
nothing to say about the role – be it actual and borne out, be it missing – of
animals in the course of human development towards accepting reality and
attaining psychological maturity. In fact, there is no mention of animals in
Winnicott’s most influential work, Playing and Reality. They do not figure as
creatures encountered and explored, as fertile soil (sic) for the creativity and
spontaneity, invention and imagination, of the child, at whatever age at that.
Significant others only show up in the guise of fellow humans; the entities
that may serve the function of transitional objects, crucial to reality-tolerance
and to coping with separation anxiety, likewise are not animals but human-
made toy pets (the exemplary teddy bear). And should an animal be part
of this psychological universe, it would in all likelihood be a pet (a cat or a
dog), not a wild animal.
I realize that pointing out the absence of animals in Winnicott’s account
of what he, to quote another of his book titles, called “the maturational
processes and the facilitating environment”, may not come across as a valid
criticism. It will likely be regarded as external not internal to his project.
Indeed, what did Winnicott miss out on in having nothing to say about
human-animal relationships?
One reply would be: nothing of any importance. Why? Simply because the
animals are largely gone, at least the wild ones; they are gone because the
world in which they were richly present, abundant in types and numbers, is
a world of the past. Today, children grow up in near-complete human-made
and human-comprising environments, like it or not. So why attend to the
role of animals if they are no longer present?
Shepard is only too well aware of this. For the first time in history, he
observes, “animals are almost completely lacking in the child’s experience”
(1997: 143). It is only that, for him, this is the reason for writing about them,
at this time. It is not a reason for passing them over.
The critical point I want to make vis-à-vis Winnicott is that, in portray-
ing as universal a situation where animals have no important role to play
in the psychological world (in a wide sense) of the child, Winnicott can be
seen to exemplify what the “shifting baselines syndrome” I talked about
above amounts to in modern developmental psychology: from a historical
point of view, the lifeworld without animals that Winnicott’s account takes
for granted as the “normal” condition, is in fact a degraded one, a result of
a long process of removing animals from the environment in which new
60  Animals make us human
generations of children grow up and take their bearings, and of turning
those animals that are still left into increasingly domesticated ones treated
as pets conducive to human needs, that is to say, as animals with little or
nothing to show in terms of otherness in Shepard’s sense.
To be fair, Winnicott wrote his major papers in the 1950s and 1960s and
a lot has happened since then. Recent years have seen a return of animals
in some parts of psychology, especially in clinical work and practice. Even
though there is no mention of “animal-facilitated therapy” in Winnicott,
it in fact began two centuries ago among the Quakers at York Retreat,
an insane asylum in England, Shepard tells us. He also recalls Florence
Nightingale’s advocacy of pets for the chronically ill (1997: 147). To illumi-
nate the present-day mindset, Shepard refers to Leo Bustad, a professor of
veterinary medicine who thinks there should be wards in all hospitals where
patients may keep pets, animal refugia from which the terminally ill may
get animals on loan, professional referral systems, visitor animal friends in
nursing homes, and so on. The list is seemingly endless when it comes to the
usefulness of animals for purposes of therapy.
Unsurprisingly, Shepard’s comments on this trend are scathing. To him,
it has all the trademarks of utility: “the animal commodity dressed up as
medical treatment”, creating a situation where “in return for the work of
a well-kept slave the animals in this bond get ‘friendship’, legal protection,
food, and shelter” (1997: 149). The rhetoric of progress notwithstanding,
“bonding” in the sense of an extended custody is not from primal human
ecology; it does not help restore a kind of authentic human-animal relation-
ship now about to go extinct. On the contrary, says Shepard, we “falsify
our relationship to wild animals with our husbandmen’s eye, social worker’s
agenda, veterinary tools, and breeder’s agendas” (ibid.). There is nothing in
the history of inter-species relationships to justify this new trend: “Animals
were present at the center of human life for thousands of centuries before
anyone thought of taking them captive, making them companions, forming
the “friendship loops” of which animal-facilitation therapists and ethicists
speak” (ibid.). The bottom line is that “wild animals are not our friends.
They are uncompromisingly not us nor mindful of us, just as they differ
among themselves” (1997: 151).
To corroborate his criticism of the current trend, Shepard seizes upon
Mary Midgley’s reference to “the ‘human/animal bond’, as if it were an
ancient demonstration and right of amity” (1997: 150). To speak of a bond
in this manner is deeply mistaken, Shepard maintains. Going back to our
primal relationships with animals, we do find “a heritage of wisdom in the
form of an ecological conscience, an attitude of humility toward the natural
world, a sense of human limits and participation from a thousand centu-
ries of the Pleistocene”. However, this has nothing to do with “a display
of entente cordiale nor an affectionate compact of familiarity or helping,
centered on keeping, as if by a shepherd, nor a modern sentiment of gushing
over kittens in a basket” (ibid.).
 Animals make us human 61
Is this a fair criticism of Midgley? I don’t think so. There is no advo-
cacy of human-animal bonding in Animals and Why They Matter, the book
Shepard refers to. One would also look in vain for an argument to this effect
in Beast and Man. That said, the former book does contain statements with
which Shepard would no doubt disagree. Consider, by way of example, the
following: “It is one of the special powers and graces of our species not to
ignore others, but to draw in, domesticate and live with a great variety of
other creatures. No other animal does so on anything like so large scale”
(Midgley 1998: 111).
On Shepard’s view, this “peculiar human talent” (Midgley) is a mixed
blessing, to put it mildly. Humans’ adeptness and ingenuity in “drawing in”
and domesticating animals so as to live with them is a historical fact; and
one can certainly be impressed by the ways in which humans have been able
to find ever more uses for the animals that fall within the concentric circle.
But Shepard’s point is that this process comes with much too high a price –
not only for the animals involved, but for the humans as well.
Along the spectrum from wild animals to pets, the result brought by
ever-increasing domestication is that animals cease to be wild; they are
turned into pets precisely insofar as, at the hands of humans, they have their
wildness robbed. When the beast is tamed, it is a beast no longer. There is
nothing “natural”, in the sense of Aristotelian species-specific flourishing,
to this transformation; pets, Shepard reminds us, are not part of human
evolution or the biological context out of which our ecology comes. Rather,
they are “civilized paraphernalia whose characteristic combination of
accompaniment and accommodation is tangled in an ambiguous tyranny”;
moreover, “the paradox of frenetic emotion and casual dismissal reveals
our deep disappointment in the poet’s ability to do something, to be some-
thing, that we cannot quite identify” (ibid.). When pets become surrogates
for human companionships, or substitutes for the resolution of interper-
sonal social problems, so as to help their human owners cope with whatever
hardships they experience, disappointment is bound to result, presumably
to the frustration of both parties.
To be sure, the inclination to turn to animals as a way of coping with psy-
chological problems such as anxiety, depression, or loneliness is not novel.
What may be distinctly modern, though, is the perception of persons who
turn away from human relationships and concentrate on their attachment
to, say, specific animals, or to a particular place in nature, as exhibiting a
behaviour of “compensation”, that is to say, turning to the second best when
the primary sort of relationship has broken down and as a result is given up
on. The non-human objects are considered as sought out in desperation and
for lack of the real thing, as a means of escape, ultimately a last resort of
psychic survival, rather than as bona fide objects-cum-relationships that are
appreciated as meaningful and valuable in their own right. Erich Fromm’s
statement in The Sane Society is a case in point, talking about the person
who “tries to find security regressing to and identifying himself with nature,
62  Animals make us human
the world of plants and animals” (1955: 47; see Searles 1960: 196f.). As Freya
Mathews observes, the sense of enchantment reported by persons who
identify with non-human others as part of their overarching life experience
and sense of identity and belongingness, refusing to put a premium on rela-
tionships with human others, is seen as “regressive” from the viewpoint of
Western psychoanalysis. But, as Mathews comments, “to adopt this point
of view is, of course, to beg the metaphysical question”. Having grown up
with lots of different animals around her, Mathews speaks about “the recep-
tiveness that my animal familiars created in me, and it filled my whole being
with a sense of being accompanied, of never being alone, a sense of back-
ground love, akin to the background radiation of which physicists speak.
This is a love which has nothing to do with saving us from death and suffer-
ing, or with making us happy” (2016: 49f.).
I think that Shepard would concur with Mathews’ point about (main-
stream) psychoanalysis begging the metaphysical question as part of its fail-
ure to question the framework of human-centeredness. And although he
accepts the criticism of overburdening animals-qua-pets with human expec-
tations and needs they have no way of meeting, and so should be spared
being dragged into in the first place, what he objects to is something more
fundamental, namely the notion of “bonding”. “Bonds”, he argues, evoke
images of babies and their mothers, of fraternal loyalty, whereas “interspe-
cies bonds” implies something felt by both parties, albeit not in the form
of strong reciprocity, where the same commitment is expected in return.
Even so, Shepard maintains, a bond is not only a connection; there is a cer-
tain strength and depth to it, otherwise it doesn’t qualify as a bond. Even
more importantly, “bonds are legal instruments defining rights in terms of
restraints on the freedom of the bonded to be themselves – that is, for ani-
mals, to be wild” (1997: 314). On this basis, Shepard observes that “it is
difficult not to see in this reference to bonding by animal protectors a kind
of barnyard hypocrisy. Am I to feel interspecies bonds to all other species?
Am I bonded to bacteria as well as to horses?” (ibid.)
Notwithstanding the ad absurdum argument alluded to, rock bottom
for Shepard is what he takes for a fact: namely that, “unfortunately for
‘ethics’, the natural community of life is not a bonding between species”.
Therefore, “to propose the tame animal and its owner as a model ‘bond’ for
human/wild animal relationship is nonsense”. Indeed, “it is as though all
the virtuous and well-intentioned sense of obligation toward a few species
of domesticated animals were seen as a guidepost for attitudes toward all
animals everywhere” (ibid.). Shepard mentions the organization “Kids in
Nature’s Defense” (KIND), sponsored by the National Association for the
Advancement of Human Education, whose pledge is “creatures great and
small, we must defend them all”. To him, this way of thinking shows that the
notion of bonding has encouraged a dream where bonding has been taken
into the wilderness “as though all life were kittens abandoned on the street.
The clinical regimen for captives – therapy, care, and consoling – becomes
 Animals make us human 63
the key concept. The world is to be a protected and prophylactic zoo, at once
medical and moral, the object of charity and the anodyne for guilt” (1997:
315). Shepard looks upon this misplaced zeal as a symptom of the fear of
death he considers to be deeply entrenched in modern Western culture. And
as soon as the attitude to death is brought up in the context of humans’ rela-
tionships with animals, that of the killing and eating of animals becomes a
central, if not the central issue for discussion.
I shall postpone this issue, comprehensive and complex as it is, to later
chapters.
As for the criticisms on Shepard’s part that I have mentioned, I think that
they succeed in seizing upon some of the crucial weaknesses in much of
current thinking about “the ethics of animals”. Shepard comes to the topic
of animals and their place in Western culture with a depth of historical, eco-
logical, and psychological knowledge that is rare, not only among his fellow
philosophers. The weaknesses I think he is particularly good as exposing
are not first and foremost of an ethical or normative kind. And to the extent
that they are so, it follows from a failure to take the historical background
as fully into account as Shepard does, allowing him a keen eye for the pro-
found ways in which the human-animal relationship has changed, especially
during the last century.
To conclude, Shepard’s historically informed analysis helps us recognize
how advocates of “interspecies bonding” represent yet another case of tak-
ing a degraded state of affairs as the normal one – taking for granted, that
is, that animals are such creatures (or creatures in such a condition) as to
allow “bonding” with humans to occur. That such a scenario, facilitating
such a kind of relationship, should appear plausible, indeed as the most
plausible one, to a present-day audience, is itself proof of how far down
the historical trajectory from wild, over domesticated to tame animals we
have come – though, again, with scant resources within the account given
to identify and critically assess the changes involved. Again, losing the wild
animal from view may certainly be held to be true to the empirical facts, the
way things are these days – though on pain of showing up the transforma-
tion of animals – what they are, and how they appear to humans – that is the
substantive core of the process.
2 Call and response, or
eating and being eaten

I
In a central passage in her book Interspecies Ethics, the American philoso-
pher Cynthia Willett gives the following quote from anthropologist Barbara
Smuts’ article “Encounters with Animals”:

Until recent times, all humans possessed profound familiarity with

other creatures. Paleolithic hunters learned about the giant bear the
same way the bear learned about them: through the intense concentra-
tion and fully aroused sense of a wild animal whose life hangs in the
balance. Our ancestors’ survival depended on an exquisite sensitivity to
the subtle movements and nuanced communication of predators, prey,
competitors, and all the animals whose keener sense of vision, smell, or
hearing enhanced human apprehension of the world.
(Smuts quoted in Willett 2014: 98)

Readers may be reminded of Shepard’s historical account when Smuts high-

lights the importance of various animals’ contribution to “enhance human
apprehension of the world”. In a manner typical of Willett’s approach, she
comments on Smuts’ statement by raising the question of “how we mod-
ern humans might relearn this older knowledge” (ibid.), clearly holding this
to be both a possibility and something desirable. “Animals, long ago van-
quished from human society and consigned to the status of mute nature”,
writes Willett, “may once again participate as more than innocent objects of
our pity or tropes of return to Edenic life. To varying degrees, they join in a
multispecies social dynamic of call and response” (2014: 99).
We will see that call and response provide the model for Willett’s inter-
species ethics. Before discussing what this means, it is worthwhile dwelling
on Smuts’ work, acknowledged by Willett’s as “a key source for rethinking
traditional modes of ethical development” (2014: 207, fn. 1).
Smuts is doing research on primate social behaviour, concentrating
on baboons living in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Her reflec-
tion on the effect her experiences of the baboons came to have on her
DOI: 10.4324/9781003317692-3
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 65
is philosophically interesting, testifying to what is nothing short of a
conversion:

I felt like I was turning into a baboon. […] I had gone from thinking
about the world analytically to experiencing the world directly and
intuitively. It was then that something long slumbering awoke inside me,
a yearning to be in the world as my ancestors had done, as all creatures
were designed to do by aeons of evolution. Learning to be more of an
animal came easily as I let go of layers of thinking. This shift I expe-
rienced is well described by millennia of mystics but rarely acknowl-
edged by scientists. Increasingly, my subjective consciousness seemed
to merge with the group-mind of the baboons. […] I had relinquished
my separate self and slid into the ancient experience of belonging to a
mobile community of fellow primates.
(Smuts quoted in Willett 2014: 130, 131)

I cannot read this without thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneu-

tics, with its warning against “going native”: to abandon one’s particular
point of view in order to understand the epistemic object at hand (be it a
text, a shaman or a baboon), and so to experience the merging of oneself
with the object/the other, is not to attain the knowledge sought but to under-
mine it (Gadamer 1975). Only by holding on to one’s point of departure as
a ground for reaching out, for experiencing something as different, as rep-
resenting a contrast and so facilitating friction, can the experience that is
part and parcel of new insight be had. Not only does the way in which that
object or other differs from me come into sharp relief that way; this holds for
the discovery and appreciation of similarities as well. Representing different
points of view, even embodying them, is not detrimental to understanding
but the condition of its possibility. And it is only be exposing myself to what
is not-me, to ways of understanding and of being in the world that are not
mine and not those I have come to take for granted, as quasi self-evident
and the only “natural” way, that I may realize that my (or my culture’s)
take on reality is just as selective, just as peculiar, as that of others. If the
contrast that puts the other into sharp relief as not-me is lost, I lose not only
the chance to learn something new about the other but the chance to learn
something new about myself as well.
I shall have more to say about the importance of Gadamer’s insight below.
For her part, Willett is not troubled by the enthusiasm with which Smuts
relates her experience of merging with the group-mind of the baboons. On
the contrary, she concurs with Smuts in viewing it “as an example of the
highest level of friendship attainable across species” (2014: 131), thereby
challenging the proposition championed in “Hegel, Kant, Plato, and several
thousand years of Neolithic metaphysics” that there is an abyss between
human and nonhuman (ibid.). The legacy of this metaphysics, Willett con-
tends, is that it diminishes what ethics could be. As against this, and at
66  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
long last, historically speaking, “extraordinary discoveries from scientists
are recovering a lost wisdom of interspecies friendships and communities”
(ibid.). Smuts’ research on baboons joins company with Jane Goodall’s
research on chimpanzees, Frans de Waal’s on bonbos, and Marc Bekoff’s on
social carnivores to unfold what Willett describes as “a thickening plot of
diverse ethical capacities across species and a renewed vision of the courtesy
and limits required for common life” (2014: 132). Much in the spirit of Mary
Midgley, Willett stresses the pioneering role of Darwin in this research,
in particular his ground-breaking assumption that ethics originates in the
affects, bonds, and meaningful existence of a social life. The exclusive val-
ourization of linguistic and cognitive skills that has been the hallmark of the
ethical theories in the Western canon mentioned above, forming the basis of
their case for human exceptionalism, has come with the cost of losing sight
of “complex biosocial attunements” of the sort that Darwin was able to
identify where they were not supposed to be found – in non-human animals.
Key to the call and response model that Willett outlines is the role of
“affect-laden, but not necessarily irrational or non-cognitive, attunement for
the clusters or communal associations that compose a biosocial network”
(2014: 12). Her claim is that “the unexpected agencies and communicative
powers of creatures who may share overlapping habitats, histories, or com-
munal structures with coevolving other species point beyond generosity
or compassion to a more ordinary dynamic of ‘call and response’” (2014:
13). In making her case, Willett relies on the research on affect attunement
among human infants and adults carried out by the psychologist Daniel
Stern in his pioneering study The Interpersonal World of the Infant. The call-
and-response exchanges that Stern was able to observe in the interaction
between a mother and her baby demonstrate that the mother can tune into
and respond appropriately to the way the infant expresses himself or her-
self even though lacking adult cognition, verbal capacities, and – even – a
preliminary sense of self, showing up the indispensable role of the mother
in helping the baby develop a (proper, separate, distinct) self, facilitating
its emergence by way of projecting its existence, to put it in a Hegelian way
not alluded to by Willett. On Willett’s view, Stern’s research on humans can
help us gain insight into the rhythmic, tonal, or gestural patterns of animal
communication: “the [human] infant-adult exchanges point toward the pos-
sibility for communicative exchange across a significant range of nonhuman
species” (2014: 14).
We should read this statement as programmatic. Willett’s ambition is
to use research on human infant-adult interaction as a basis for arguing
the extension of the dynamics discovered to exchange across non-human
species, and ultimately, to exchange between humans and animals such as
reported by Smuts in her encounter with baboons. Hence, in a passage dis-
cussing Donna Haraway’s work, Willett states that “the aim is to recognize
animal agency and build intimate and political solidarities across species
lines, suggesting an affirmative answer to Haraway’s questions”, these
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 67
being: “Can animals play? Or work? And even, can I learn to play with this
cat?” And further still: “What if work and play … open up the possibility of
a mutual response?” (2014: 95; see Haraway 2008: 22).
I take it that the mutual response referred to is occurring between the cat
and the human person who engages with it in play (work is a more tricky cat-
egory, to be left aside for now). Let’s grant that an animal such as a cat can
play, both with other cats and with a human person; and that in both cases,
mutual response is forthcoming: there is the call and response intrinsic to
the activity of two participants engaged in playing with each other.
But not all animals are cats. Cats behave the way they do, be it towards
other cats or towards human beings, following a long history of domestica-
tion; they are pets whose lives are inseparable from their coexistence with
humans, not wild animals, animals encountered in the wild. Making dis-
tinctions such as this one between animals is important for a number of rea-
sons: philosophical, ethical, and political. Applied to the aim that Willett
identifies in Haraway’s work, approvingly so: it is one thing to “recognize
animal agency”, understood as something traditionally denied them, not
least by philosophers, with serious ethical consequences in terms of human-
caused neglect, exploitation, and suffering. It is quite another – I shall argue
– to proceed from that aim to the next one, that is, “to build intimate and
political solidarities across species lines”.
We need to be clear about what role the animals are thought to have in
building the solidarities with other species – presumably including humans
– spoken of. What capacities, following from the recognition of their agency
that humans now are (or should be) prepared to grant them, would be
required? What if it turns out that the capacities are of a sort found in some
animals, but not in others? Would this be a problem insofar as animals in
general seem to be the category that Willett has in mind?
Part of what I am getting at is that Willett wants animals to be active par-
ticipants, not passive addressees, in the ethical and political arrangement
she advocates as one of solidarity between different species. The scenario
she considers as one of genuine progress would entail the empowerment of
animals, allowing them to exhibit their full range of agency so as to make
them genuine equals to their human counterparts within a “species blind”
political forum, one where animals affected by some decision or policy are
given a voice, one that will count as equally important to that of humans.
Nothing less would be required of a species blind democracy that makes
good on the ambition of cross-species solidarity.
But Willett does not endeavour to outline the sort of political arrange-
ment that it would take to realize her ideas about “inter-species ethics”
in a large-scale as opposed to small-scale setting. She sympathizes with
Haraway’s “feminist anarchic communitarianism” without offering her
own political model. Haraway is credited with foregrounding the agency
of animals: what they are capable of should be regarded as more important
than what they cannot do, defined by way of comparing disfavourably with
68  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
humans. So, even though Bentham’s famous assertion that the question to
ask about animals is not “Can they speak, or can they reason?”, but instead
“Can they suffer?”, appealing to the virtue of pity in the face of animal suf-
fering, represents an improvement over previous approaches, it nonetheless
“misses the affective richness of a light-hearted encounter” (2014: 72). Much
as animals’ now-granted capacity for suffering warrants humans’ pitying
them, admitting animals (some) moral standing despite their being unable
to speak and reason, a lot is still to be desired in terms of recognizing their
full-blown powers of agency, that is to say, the qualities that permit them to
come into their own as precisely agents (subjects), as distinct from objects;
as creatures who do things, and do them their own way, rather than sim-
ply being at the receiving end of the actions of others. In keeping with this
emphasis on agency, writes Willett, “Haraway’s seductive attunement to the
interspecies politics of camaraderie and play offers a delightful glimpse into
an autre-ethics. Animals at play and anarchists at work (or vice versa) gen-
erate a vibe of synergy that can challenge social inequalities and hierarchies
while serving to strengthen social bonds”, pointing the way to “another eth-
ics, one that enjoys glimpses of communion in play”, described by Haraway
as a “utopia of equality and spontaneous nature” (ibid.).
What this amounts to, inspired by Haraway’s When Species Meet,
is a “cosmopolitics of peace” where “polite encounters offer insight into
trans-species politics”. As Willett explains, “with or without what philosophers
call logos, social carnivores such as wolves, humans, and other predators reveal
themselves as capable of suspending aggressive sexual predatory drives to
cultivate friendly relations with creatures who otherwise might have served
as prey. The social dynamic of play provides an opening into what may
well be the most egalitarian origin for ethics” (2014: 73). In the key function
ascribed to it here, play needs to have its locus shifted from the interior
psycho of the (individual, separate) subject to “a social arena that crosses
species barriers” (ibid.). Where are such arenas to be found in our society?
Willett answers by way of telling us that anecdotes of cross-species commun-
ion abound. Revealingly, her examples are taken from zoos, for instance
one in Tokyo where “a rat snake named Aochan befriended a dwarf ham-
ster named Gohan. The hamster was originally offered as a meal; Oachan
refused to eat the animal and seemed to prefer sharing a cage with her; now
Gohan even naps on Aochan’s back” (2014: 74). Willett quotes Marc Bekoff,
a biologist praised by Haraway for exemplifying “science undertaken as a
mode of companionship” as opposed to the traditional impersonal spectator
stance of detached observation: “Such pleasure-driven social capacities that
‘our old Paleolithic brains’ share with other species can reengage humans
in the close inter-relationships with other beings that help us figure out
who we are in the grand scheme of things”. One can take this even further,
Bekoff suggests, “to wonder if, when studying ‘ecological interactions’  –
that is, encounters among different species of animals and interactions
between animals and trees and plants – it makes more sense to concentrate
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 69
on positive ecological interactions rather than on competition and preda-
tions” (ibid.).
I have cited Willett’s example and Bekoff’s statements extensively because
I consider both to raise a number of important issues. To begin with, note
that the cross-species exchange so central to Willett’s project comes in
quite different forms: there is the human-animal one exemplified in Smut’s
encounter with baboons; and there is the animal-animal one between a rat
snake and a hamster. The latter exchange occurs within a zoo, and every
step along the sequence between the two animals testifies to the unsaid in
Willett’s account: the presence of humans – be it in the form of offering the
hamster to the snake as a meal, or in facilitating that the two animals share
a cage with each other. As for Bekoff’s comments, we recall that he practices
science as “a mode of companionship”, permitting him to ask big questions
about how humans can reengage in the close relationships with other beings
– crucially, animals – so as to figure out who we are in the grand scheme of
things.
There are many questions worth asking here, for example: absent humans
and the set-up they provide the two different animals in the Tokyo zoo,
what would an encounter between them be like? In a sense, the question is
moot: we have no way of telling, because no comparison is made between
how their encounter plays out in the zoo, hence as facilitated, observed,
and interpreted by humans and to humans, on the one hand, and their
encounter in a human-free context, one the other. That said, most readers
would probably hasten to add that, albeit factually lacking, the comparison
does not really invite agnosticism: far from simply “not knowing”, there is
a strong assumption that, in the second scenario, the rat snake would have
killed and eaten the hamster. Is it not this very assumption that explains the
fascination expressed by Willett and Bekoff alike – namely that what we are
able to observe between two different animals such as these is about “posi-
tive ecological interactions”, rather than “competition and predation”? The
fascination, that is to say, with what may come to pass across species once
the individuals representing them get the chance to relate to each other in
the form of play?
Let’s take a closer look at Willett’s analysis of play to appreciate what
is at stake here. Like Berkoff, she considers that the enduring insight in
Darwin’s work is nothing to do with the “survival of the fittest” (in its vul-
gar reading) but with his truly revolutionary attentiveness to the emotional
and social life of animals, making us realize that emotions evolved in ani-
mals no less than in humans for the purpose of furthering social bonds. In
his important book Descent of Man, published in 1871, Darwin emphasized
that, among social species, “the fittest” are not necessarily the strongest,
nor the most aggressive, nor the cleverest, but the most sociable: those
“whose temperament most inclines them to friendly cooperation”, to quote
Midgley’s gloss on his position (2010: 49). Darwin’s general conclusion is
that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as
70  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin quoted in Midgley
2010: 81). This conclusion, revolutionary at the time, followed compellingly
from Darwin’s own research, where he had seen that “the senses and intu-
itions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention,
curiosity, imitation, reason etc. of which man boasts, may be found in an
incipient, or even a well-developed condition, in the lower animals” (ibid.).
In this late-Darwinian spirit, Berkoff considers that his studies of play
behaviour in social carnivores show how it provides a training ground for
learning the “Golden rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto
you”; the animals he lists as cases in point are wolves, coyotes, red foxes,
and domestic dogs.
What does Willett make of this? To her, play praxis – with its two key
features, role reversal and self-handicapping (restraint) – contrasts sharply
with “the abstract equality of atomized individuals before modern laws”
in that “friendly play provides a training ground for a concretely situated
reciprocity that binds selves-in-communities”; moreover, “codes of play
protect the vulnerable by enforcing the requirement that the powerful set
aside their power”; these, she says, are “the codes of anarchic communitar-
ianism”, that is, the kind of interspecies politics championed by Haraway
(Willett 2014: 76).
This suffices to make the following point: in her use of the animal studies
pioneered by Darwin and presently carried out by researchers like Bekoff,
Willett passes from the animal behaviour being observed to the polit-
ical arrangements of human societies, including institutions such as law.
Analytically, two things are at work here. First, Willett clearly wants to
invoke the animal studies findings for all they are worth as a weapon to
critique powerful trends in modern society: atomism, dog-eat-dog competi-
tion, suppression of feelings understood as something inferior or irrational,
egoism valourized as more rational and truer to our nature than altruism,
etc. – these are so many prevalent notions about who we humans “are” and
where we come from, in terms of our evolutionary trajectory, that ethologi-
cal research helps reveal as so many prejudices, not only about us, but about
our (allegedly profound) differences from animals. Secondly, the move that
Willett relies on is from one object domain to another: from a context where
animals and their behaviour are being studied, to a context where the agents
whose behaviour matters are humans and humans only: namely contempo-
rary society with its “abstract equality of atomized individuals”, a society
where bonds and solidarity – be they between humans, be they between
humans and animals – are undermined by competitiveness and instrumen-
talization, making others in general either into enemies or mere means.
This is a commonplace critique of modern capitalist society that is not
elucidated as such in Willett’s book. I nevertheless take her to subscribe to
it, if only implicitly, borne out in her critique of “liberal” ethical theories
like Habermas’ discourse ethics, and in her endorsement of the positions
taken by theorists like Haraway and Judith Butler.
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 71
Here is where I see a main problem in Willett’s work, to do with precisely
the way she passes – glides – from one context to another: from observations
concerning animals to a description of modern society, using the former for
the purpose of critiquing the latter. I am not suggesting that “using animals
to critique (human-centered) society” exhausts Willett’s project, but it does
figure as a prominent component of it.
To appreciate what I am getting at, consider this passage:

In playful exchanges, wolves and other carnivores appear to break out

of normal roles and social expectations, allowing creative and sponta-
neous responses to fellow creatures. The carnivore’s rule – what humans
conceptualize as the golden rule – is felt and formative, not formulaic.
Self-handicapping fosters creative encounters where playmates differ
significantly in capacities or desires and thus cannot be treated exactly
like, or strictly analogous to how, one would want to be treated one-
self. Determinate moral laws fails to account for this kind of flexibility
because of their abstract formulation. […] Social play exhibits an egali-
tarian element that goes beyond law’s abstract equality. Participants in
play treat each other as more than abstract equals. Through self-hand-
icapping and role reversal, the dominant participant actually yields
real and symbolic power to the playmate. This yielding of social and
political capital grounds horizontal reciprocity and contrasts with the
charitable giving of resources, which might display the character virtue
of benevolence, but does not alter the social field.
(2014: 76)

If this passage demonstrates how Willett moves from one context to another,
it also attests to her tendency to make the move in both directions, as it were:
not only, as we saw above, from animals to human society, but also from
the latter to the former. There is no attempt to hide this on Willett’s part:
treating each other as “more than abstract equals”, the “yielding of social
and political capital”, etc. – these are clearly behaviours that we commonly
observe and comment upon in humans, taking it for granted that they apply
there and will be meaningful not only to us as observers and commentators
but to the agents whose behaviour we pronounce on as well (in the social
sciences, this is the “double hermeneutics” of which Anthony Giddens
(1984) speaks). Willett, however, departs from this employment of the terms;
she uses them about animals, meaning them to be meaningful and valid as
descriptions of their behaviour, exemplarily in play. The only animals men-
tioned in the passage cited are wolves, prompting the question whether the
analysis is meant to apply to other sorts of animals as well, a question not
raised by Willett.
What we realize, then, is that Willett is moving back and forth between
animals and human society, allowing her to contrast animal behaviour with
the norms, codes, and practices (such as morality and law) prevailing in
72  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
modern society, and to employ concepts derived from the human-to-hu-
man-oriented practices to interpret the behaviour of animals, be it that
they conform to the expectations that go with these concepts, be it that
they deviate from them. And when they do appear to deviate, that deviation
from “us humans” is largely painted as positive, lending the comparison the
critical-subversive edge as against present-day political arrangements that
I mentioned above. What is conveyed as positive in this regard is the way
animals engaged in play are interpreted as expressing attitudes of friendship
and egalitarianism, and a willingness to protect the vulnerable. Again, the
reason why attitudes such as these are deemed positive is that they compare
favourably with the “normal rules of hierarchical societies” (2014: 77); hence
they are considered positive in a normative sense, showing up how animals
can serve as moral models – a term never used by Willett but one I take to
be in tune with her project.
I am not suggesting that what Willett is up to is a simple turning of the
tables – replacing the conventional notion about human superiority over
animals with its reversal. That said, there is no doubt that the assumption
upon which Willett’s interspecies ethics is premised is that we humans have
something important to learn from animals: they teach us crucial lessons
about life, understood as a profoundly inter- and cross-species phenome-
non, not an intra-species one. Historically, however, the potential animals
hold for humans in this respect has been largely suppressed, owing to the
ideology-put-into-practice of human supremacy that has been hegemonic
in the recent history of Western societies. Instead of being given a voice
and the freedom to be what they truly are in their own right and of their
own accord, animals have been put to use in so many ways by humans, and
for humans, silencing their voices and turning their human exploiters deaf,
dumb, and blind to their plight, and thereby to their true potential as com-
panions. Thus animals have been denied the chance to be models of moral
import – the very notion would be regarded as a contradictio in adjecto.
In my view, Willett puts animals to use no less than do the philosophers
she wishes to reject on account of their anthropocentrism and hence –
implicit or explicit – disregard for animals. The all-important difference
would be that the way she uses animals is intended to grant them the full-
blown recognition – moral and otherwise – hitherto denied them.
For all my sympathies with this project, I find that in Willett’s case it is
being carried out in a fashion that I find problematic for three reasons –
methodological, epistemic, and moral – intimately related at that.
On pain of sounding as pedantic as I did when invoking Gadamer’s her-
meneutics to raise questions about Smuts’ “going native” in her experience
of baboons, I am critical of the explanatory role Willett ascribes to obser-
vations made of animals engaged in play, such as the wolves she mentions.
Play is a particular type of interaction, raising questions about how repre-
sentative the findings derived from studying it can be. The problem is that
of wanting to portray as paradigmatic what comes to pass in a setting that
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 73
is in fact highly selective. Midgley, always down to earth, makes a pertinent
observation worth citing here: “Adults among other [than human] advanced
species do indeed sometimes play together, and their doing so is rightly
seen as a sign of intelligence. But they all do it far less than humans” (1998:
119). Secondly, to the extent that Willett’s empirical material is drawn from
what she presents as “playful exchanges of wolves and other carnivores”,
the behaviour observed is inter-species, but not cross-species. To be sure,
we do learn to appreciate the kinds of social bonds, based on and sustaining
social-cum-moral emotions such as concern and sympathy, that such ani-
mals as wolves exhibit in the way they engage in “call and response” with
each other – meaning with their own kin – be it playfully at that. But a more
important feature of the behaviour of wolves is to do with their being – pre-
cisely – carnivores: they are predators that depend on prey, that is to say, on
seeking out other animals for the sake of killing them. Doing so requires a
quite different set of behaviours than that involved in play, raising the ques-
tion of what part of the repertoire to regard as at the core of being a wolf. It
is telling that in the course of Willett’s discussion, there is no mention of the
role that “eating and being eaten” (Shepard), killing in order to stay alive,
plays in the lives of animals like wolves. Indeed, death is conspicuous by
its absence in Willett’s approach, save for in connection with a discussion
of how the main character in John Coetzee’s novel Disgrace experiences a
conversion in his attitude to the (in)human practice of killing animals in the
industrialized fashion currently dominant, this being a very different con-
text for discussing the reality of death than the one I have in mind, i.e., what
animals do to each other as predator and prey.
One thing that Willett does dwell on, however, is the well-known claim
made by Heidegger to the effect that whereas animals simply live, human
persons are unique in their awareness of death; indeed, one person’s “being-
toward-death” (Heidegger) is an individualizing feature, related to as a
generic one only on pain of inauthenticity. To challenge this notion of human
uniqueness with regard to death, Willett asks us to consider Jane Goodall’s
account of “the chimpanzee mother who cannot abandon her dead infant
and who carries the body for days”, prompting her to ask: “Could chimpan-
zees and whales be people too?” (2014: 119).
Why does Willett raise the question like this? Why is it important that
we come to see animals like chimpanzees as people too, or at least as more
similar to humans than we have used to do? Presumably, doing so would be
crucial in admitting such animals a standing more equal to that accorded
to humans. That is why extending, say, the capacity to be aware of one’s own
death, or the capacity to mourn dead loved ones (like the chimpanzee mother
did) to animals, and so depriving these capacities of their long-alleged human
uniqueness, would be welcome from the point of view of doing justice to the
animals as our moral equals. So the formula would be: the more animals
come to be seen as sharing (some of) the capacities we humans have taken
to be unique to us, the more they should be seen as qualified for inclusion
74  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
in the moral universe. In other words: Humans’ discrimination of animals
has been based on assumptions about their differences from us; when these
differences turn out to be non-existent – one after the other, tied to capaci-
ties – the justification for treating them as inferior would fall away.
Before I consider the implications of this reasoning, a closer look at
Willett’s reference to Goodall is in order.
As we saw, Midgley is just as interested in Goodall’s work as Willett. At
one point in Animals and Why They Matter, Midgley mentions Goodall’s
account of the effect of a polio epidemic on the chimpanzees she was stud-
ying. She explains:

One old animal, his legs wholly paralyzed by the disease, was dragging
himself around with his arms. He was suffering from loneliness, since
he, like the other crippled individuals, was shunned and sometimes
attacked by those who were still healthy. In the hope of inducing two
companions who were grooming each other to groom him as well, he
dragged himself up into a three. [Goodall writes:] “With a loud grunt of
pleasure he reached a hand towards them in greeting – but even before
he made contact they both swung quickly away and, without a back-
ward glance, started grooming on the far side of the tree. For a full
two minutes, old Gregor sat motionless, staring after them. And then
he laboriously lowered himself to the ground. As I watched him sitting
there alone, my vision blurred, and when I looked up at the groomers
in the tree I came nearer to hating a chimpanzee than I have ever done
before or since”.
(Midgley 1998: 120f.; see Goodall 1971: 202)

We should note here, as does Midgley, that Goodall knows perfectly well
that it would be “unfair” to hate the chimpanzees on the basis of their
behaviour towards Gregor, “since they are incapable of reacting otherwise”
(Midgley 1998: 121). In fact, Midgley’s interest in the episode is more to do
with what it says about humans than what it says about the animals: what
is demonstrated in Goodall’s reaction (“I came nearer to hating a chimpan-
zee”) is “the wider power of human sympathy” as compared with that found
among animals like chimpanzees. Only occasionally will chimpanzees help
a sick comrade instead of being repelled and retreating, whereas wolves,
elephants, dolphins, and whales are known to do it rather more often. The
point Midgley uses Goodall’s account to make, then, is that human beings
have “a much wider capacity still” for extending sympathy to others not
limited to one’s family group, a capacity which is perfectly able to cross
the species barrier. In other words, the emotional preference for one’s own
species over others seems to be prevalent among animals including higher
mammals, who – for all that, as we see in Goodall’s example – may abandon
rather than care for what they perceive as a sick or dying member of their
own species. By contrast, finds Midgley, humans are quite well equipped
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 75
to notice and respond to the moods and needs of other species – which is
not to contend that human persons will choose to act on this capacity for
sympathy with, say, a sick animal whenever such a situation arises. Rather,
the point is that were the person not to act like that, his or her not doing so
would be met with criticism, since regarded as a sort of moral failure – pre-
cisely the reaction that we saw is not appropriate if directed at animals like
chimpanzees.
I realize that this way of looking at it may come across as perfectly con-
ventional, perhaps disappointingly so. To be sure, the moral dimension
hinted at in speaking of a given response as criticizable, and understood as a
prerogative of humans, is a complex issue in its own right, one I shall come
back to in the next chapter.

II
The episode with chimpanzees Midgley cites from Goodall’s work differs
markedly from the episodes that Willett focuses on. Chimpanzees, evi-
dently, are capable of quite different sorts of behaviour: in one case, there is
the mother who cannot abandon her dead infant and who carries the body
for days, inspiring Willett’s question: “Could chimpanzees and whales be
people too?”, a question that I take Willett to indicate to her readers should
be answered in the affirmative – or, to put it more cautiously, a positive
answer is something we should seriously consider rather than dismiss out of
hand. However, with regard to the episode discussed by Midgley, the ques-
tion seems to invite the opposite answer: that in situations where a response
like sympathy becomes an issue, chimpanzees will act so differently from
humans (or from what humans expect of themselves) that the conventional
view about how they differ from us humans is confirmed.
I find Willett’s presentation of the animals studies she draws upon tenden-
tious in concentrating too one-sidedly on material where what readers are
struck by is the pro-social, even pro-moral, features in animals’ behaviour,
especially as brought out in play. I am not saying that these features do not
exist in the animals in question. What I am suggesting is that they only help
us see half of the picture, ignoring the contexts and situations where very
different behaviours are on display. From a methodological point of view,
the selectivity that we encounter in Willett’s discussion is to a large part
due to the selectivity of play, this being her preferred case, and hardly coin-
cidentally so in that it does seem to offer empirical evidence of a sort that
corroborates her claims about pro-social behaviour among animals, even
towards members of other (animal) species.
However, the methodological problem runs deeper: it is not limited to
the systematic preference of activities like play over activities like hunt-
ing; a selectivity that must be considered especially problematic when the
animals in question are carnivores like wolves – can their distinct way of
being-an-animal really be described when the features they require to kill
76  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
in order to sustain themselves qua wolves is not accounted for? That said,
the deeper problem I see is brought out in examples like the one we looked
at above where “a rat snake named Aochan befriended a dwarf hamster
named Gohan”. I already mentioned that it must be considered significant
that the interaction that occurs here does so between two animals in a zoo.
This prompts the following question: What would the interaction between
these animals be like if it took place not in a zoo, but in their natural habitat?
As I indicated earlier, there is a sense in which Willett’s presentation trades
on this contrast: she implicitly acknowledges that we would expect the rat
snake to attack the hamster, only it turns out in the example given from the
zoo that it does nothing of the sort – instead, the rat snake befriends the
hamster. The surprise Willett takes this to amount to derives from the pre-
sumed expectation that the interaction would be about attack rather than
making friends.
If we grant, for the sake of argument, that an encounter between the
two animals in their natural habitat would exhibit a very different sort of
behaviour than that reported from their encounter in a zoo, which of the
two instances should be regarded as the one most true to the facts? Should
we consider that the one context is “natural” and the other “artificial”,
implying that the observations accessed in the former case are more reli-
able, scientifically speaking, than the latter? Or should we rather say that
the natural/artificial distinction is untenable, that it no longer holds? Why
would that be? Well, because those days are gone when animals who used to
live off limits from contact with humans do so; their environment is becom-
ing impacted by the activities and presence of humans to such an extent
that the notion of a “natural” habitat as a kind of “separate” domain, one
where the “true” nature of the animals in question is on display, is becoming
obsolete; so that for lack of being intact in its original sense, the very notion
should be discarded. Indeed, are we not already, as of today, in a situation
where animals live their whole lives in an arrangement with humans, having
their environment shaped by humans, be it intentionally and by design (i.e.,
in a zoo) or not, so that the behaviour they now exhibit in that normal set-
ting is to be regarded as their “natural” behaviour?
True, these are big questions, pointing beyond Willett’s book and to be
more fully addressed in Chapter 5. One thing to note here, though, with
the example just discussed in mind, is that the way I just used the natural/
artificial distinction is different from being concerned with the ways in
which, say, zoo personnel – or for that matter, Smuts or Goodall – can
be said to impact, by way of their sheer presence, the animal behaviour
being observed. Trying to measure or assess the significance of “human
impact” on what comes to pass is notoriously difficult; nowadays many
scholars would hold that the very exercise of “isolating” or “detracting”
the impact of humans is based on an untenable assumption about a clear-
cut division (demarcation) between the (human) epistemic subject and the
object. Otherwise put, what is at stake is not the impact of humans on the
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 77
microlevel, in one-to-one encounters (episodes) with animals, be it in a zoo
in London or in big national parks such as Serengeti; rather, what is at stake
is the historically unprecedented situation created by (in) the Anthropocene,
where everything that comes to pass does so in a way owing to, shaped by,
the impact of humans, be it directly on the scene or be it in more subtle
and less visual-physical ways difficult to outline and identify, in time and in
space, but decisive nonetheless. It marks a limit to Willett’s discussion that
she does not engage with these larger questions.
To conclude, consider this passage where Willett summarizes her findings:

Extraordinary discoveries from scientists are recovering a lost wis-

dom of interspecies friendships and communities. Smuts’ research on
baboons joins with Jane Goodall’s research on chimpanzees, Frans de
Waals’ on bonobos, and Marc Bekoff’s on social carnivores to unfold
a thickening plot of diverse ethical capacities across species and a
renewed vision of the courtesy and limits required for common life.
(2014: 132)

Let me put it like this: to support her case for an inter-species ethics, the
research Willett draws upon would need to illuminate how animals behave
when interacting with animals from other species than their own. The exam-
ple with the rat snake and the hamster fits this bill, though as we have seen
it raises a number of critical questions in its own right that Willett fails to
address. As for the research listed by Willett in the passage cited, its shared
main focus is on how members of one species (say, chimpanzees) behave
towards each other. But studies of intra-species interactions do not per se
qualify to offer us insight into what goes on in inter-species interactions.
Above I mentioned the problems arising when passing from one context
to another – e.g., from natural habitat to human-made environment, or
from what conservation biologists term in situ and ex situ, respectively. The
problem I call attention to now is a different yet related one, more immanent
to Willett’s project: namely, passing from one species and the behaviours
studied there to how interactions between different species of animals play
out. In this regard, Willett proposes a model for an interspecies ethics that
aims to “tease out layers of ethical engagement within and across animal
societies”. She goes on to speak about “capacities for cross-modal commu-
nication across differences of species and rank”; drawing upon these capac-
ities, “biosocial norms and expectations for reciprocity and distributed
responsibility bind together members of more or less cooperative societies”,
allowing us to recognize how “social rituals such as reconciliation and for-
giveness may also on occasion cross a species barrier, altering the social
climate and revitalizing life” (2014: 132).
What needs scrutiny is the way in which Willett takes the research she
invokes to corroborate her claims about capacities conducive to the eth-
ical engagement she postulates “across animal societies”. To be clear:
78  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
there may be such capacities; if they exist as Willett suggests, they are
vitally important. The problem is that we cannot really know, based on
the research she draws upon and the way she presents its findings. In the
statements I just quoted there is a thoroughgoing ambiguity as to who
Willett has in mind when talking about “cross-modal communication”,
going on to mention phenomena of a social and moral quality that seem to
be successively more demanding in terms of the capacities required: reci-
procity, distributed responsibility, and social rituals such as reconciliation
and forgiveness.
Who is engaged in reciprocity with whom, who assumes responsibility
for whom, who takes part in the rituals of reconciliation and forgiveness,
with whom as their counterparts? Do all sorts of animals take part in these
practices, or only some in some of them? We are not told, not in any of the
instances referred to. The description offered is so general in its aim to say
something that is meant to hold for all animal species, or for a great many
of them, that the result is a complete lack of specification in terms of the
species involved. It is as if they can all be described in like manner, show-
ing up the same (elementary) capacities for affects and bonds, helping bring
about the more demanding, complex, and sophisticated social and moral
phenomena just reviewed.
And yet, in some instances of inter- and cross-species interactions Willett
does tell us who the participants are. Apart from the case of the rat snake
and hamster and a few others like it, we hear about how one party in par-
ticular experiences what comes to pass: the human one. There is Goodall’s
fascination with the chimpanzee mother who carries her dead infant for
days, and Smuts feeling that she was “turning into a baboon”, and the like.
Unfortunately, these experiences on the part of the scholars seem to be
beside the point Willett’s sets out to make. Why? Because we are left in the
dark about how the situation being portrayed from the scholar’s point of
view is experienced by the animals – and it is the animals’ way of life and
of experiencing things – including various others – that we are concerned
with, is it not, rather than how humans look at animals? There is no rea-
son to question the authenticity of the psychological experience that grips
Smuts as she warms to the baboons, made possible – perhaps – by their
warming to her, getting used to her presence. But is the authenticity of the
human person reporting about his or her reactions the appropriate valid-
ity claim here? In that case, my earlier Gadamer-inspired critique of Smuts
will come across as old-fashioned, even positivistic, as wedded to a model
of knowledge-seeking at a distance from its object that would be mistaken
in the study of animals; a model, that is to say, where “scientists working
with animals make considerable effort not to be seen by them”, such that
“good scientists”, in Haraway’s formulation – and she means to critique this
model, not endorse it – “are those who, learning to be in visible themselves,
could see the scene of nature close up, as if through a peep-hole” (2008: 24;
see Despret 2022: 552).
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 79
Regrettably there is no discussion in Willett to inform us about her views
on this matter. That being so, and setting aside for now the irremovable
fact that what can be said about animals will be so from a human point of
view (one way or the other), the animals’ side to the encounter oddly fades
from view. What one is left with is the kind of responses – predominantly
emotional in Willett’s material – that animals’ behaviour, be it directed at
other animals or at the humans present on the scene, or observing it from
the outside – elicit on the part of the humans. Again, what does this tell us
about the animals?
Above I spoke about what I called the formula according to which
humans’ discrimination of animals has been based on assumptions about
their difference from us, the implication being that the more evidence we
come to accept to the effect that these assumptions are wrong, the better. If
animals should turn out to be more similar to us in terms of capacities and
qualities we deem relevant – whereby those we regard as relevant to assess-
ing humans must be admitted as being so in assessing animals as well – then
this dismissal of one “difference” after the other must entail that discrimi-
nation loses its justification: the facts simply don’t vindicate it, but instead
cast it as unwarranted, arbitrary and downright immoral.
To be sure, Willett is correct in holding that Darwin paved the way for the
then-revolutionary insight that ethics originates in affects and bonds that
are not unique to humans but found in animals as well, to put the point sim-
ply and in a fashion alluding to the “moral sentiments” theories dating back
to Hume, Smith, and Hutchinson. A better scientific grasp of various capac-
ities, be they emotional or cognitive, has forced an entire series of long-held
assumptions about human-animal differences to be rejected as simply not
true to the facts as we now know them.
However, as I indicated, there is a catch to this reasoning if what it
amounts to is the following formula: the more the animals appear to be like
us, the better – better taken in a normative sense to do with implications for
moral status. What is the problem?
The problem is that humans serve as the model, approximation to which
on the part of (some) animals will be rewarded by their enhanced status,
rightly so scientifically speaking and deservedly so morally speaking. We
see that there is not one anthropocentrism, but two: one is the position
that humans are unique and that everything that goes to demonstrate how
animals differ from us testifies to (proves) their inferiority. This version of
anthropocentrism was always two-in-one, normative as well as descriptive.
The other version of anthropocentrism is the one I am getting at with my
present argument: the claim about human uniqueness is given up, but it
is so in such a manner that specific animals’ now-acknowledged degree of
similarity with humans serves as the parameter for determining their status
and how they are entitled to be treated: the more intelligent (like we humans
are) and the more capable of sentience (ditto) they appear, the “higher” their
score; they are allowed to ascend the ladder with us humans at placed at the
80  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
top, but the thing is: they are getting closer to us than ever before. Note
that in this perspective there is no standard involved that derives from
what is peculiar about animals (take birds’ capacity for flying, something
humans cannot), peculiar in a sense that would go to show that they (say,
birds) are superior to us (they can fly). Such a shift of ground for making
the comparison is precisely what is not undertaken, not entertained: we
persist as the point of reference and comparison from which we never let
animals escape. Homo mensura remains unchallenged and hence intact in
this foundational sense.
This is an important point in its own right and one that I will develop
further below. As for Willett, I suppose that if the formula I stated above
were put to her to comment on, she would say she disagrees with it – at least
in its most blunt form: the more the animals appear to be like us, the better
as far as their morally relevant standing is concerned. Willett would not
sign up to such a position, owing to its undeniable anthropocentrism. But to
want to distance oneself from the homo mensura framework, is one thing; to
actually show how her proposed model for interspecies ethics breaks with it
and offers a convincing alternative to it, is another – and I don’t see Willett
doing that.

III
The Australia-based anthropologist and philosopher Deborah Bird Rose
begins her book Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction by relating how
one day she was told by a friend that “something awful” had happened:
not far from Canberra she had seen a tree that was strung up with dead
dingoes. When Rose went there to see for herself, the horror reported by
her friend was confirmed: “the dingoes were suspended by their hind legs,
heads down, bodies extended, another ‘strange fruit’ in the annals of cru-
elty” (Rose 2011: 1).
Rose goes on to say that many of her Aboriginal teachers, especially Old
Tim Yilngayarri, had told her wonderful stories about dingoes, typically
ending on the note “you’ve gotta leave him; no more killing”. The context
for speaking like this is a situation where dingoes are regularly poisoned
and shot; indeed, “the shadow of death falls heavily upon their future”.
To be sure, “they are not the first animal to be facing extinction, and they
will not be the last. But they are one of the few whose extinction is actively
being sought by some segments of human society” (ibid.), that is to say,
present-day Australia.
Although Rose covers much of the same territory in her book as Willett
in hers, this opening passage signals that Rose’s tenor is very different from
Willett’s: whereas there is no emphasis on death in Willett’s account, Rose
cannot talk about animals without addressing their extinction, understood
not as a philosophical issue or a possibility in the future, but as the truth
about their present plight. The extinction Rose has in mind, we should note
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 81
from the outset, is one that is not “natural” but is instead caused by humans,
sometimes to the point of being actively pursued.
To address extinction is of course to be concerned with death, though –
yet again – with a death that is not the other side of life, and that has always
and will always be so, but instead with death as brought about by killing
performed by humans, as opposed to hunting performed by them as well as
the death caused by other animals in their natural habitat. There are many
ways to die, also for animals, and the differences between them are vastly
important, especially in terms of what they reveal about the relationship
between killers and killed. In speaking about killing in what follows, I mean
acts done by humans, intentionally at that.
Why would (some) humans want to kill dingoes? Is something amiss when
they do so? How does it reflect on the human-animal relationship, consider-
ing that such killings have become more frequent than in the past?
To get to grips with these questions, we need to know more about the
dingoes. As we saw, Old Tim is Rose’s teacher and guide, born in 1905 and
a resident of Victoria River, one of the great monsoonal rivers of North
Australia. Dingoes are the wild dogs of Australia, and Old Tim had a spe-
cial relationship with them throughout his life. The dingoes figure promi-
nently in the mythology of the Aboriginal people in the region; but unlike
many Indigenous, which tell of specific places and specific people, the dingo
stories told by Old Tim are meant to concern all human beings. The premise
is that animals and humans have a common origin and destiny. In Tim’s
stories, the dingoes are cast as the ancestors of all human beings; “they give
us our faces, our stance, our death, and the return that cycles us through
the bodies of other living creatures. At first there was only one creature – a
dog-human person – and this creature differentiated himself/herself, inau-
gurating both dog-persons and human-persons. Dogs/dingoes are still close
kin because of their shared origins” (Rose 2011: 7). Such a differentiation is
a commonplace in many indigenous cultures and will be familiar to readers
of ethnographic studies from regions in the Americas as well as in Asia and
Oceania (see Descola 2013; Kohn 2013; Viveiros de Castro 2015). Rose goes on
to point at that Old Tim universalized this story about a common origin of
animals and humans: “Dreamers [creators] worked that way for everyone,
White Lady, Aboriginal men, all the same. They walk, they stand up, they’re
finished being dogs now, they’re proper humans, women and men. Mother
and Father Dingo made Aboriginal people. White children come out of a
white dog” (ibid.). Rose urges us to think about it: “to look at the face of
a dog is to see your own ancestor and your contemporary kin. It is to see
mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers” (ibid.).
Evidently, and horrifyingly, this sense of common origin and of being
kin is no longer experienced by the humans who nowadays kill dingoes and
hang their bodies up in trees, as Rose saw for herself. What happened? Has
the experience of kinship, of being brother and sisters and so having the
same parents, simply been lost along the way, as time has moved on and
82  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
there have been major changes in the relationships between animals and
humans? Have the old stories of old people like Tim lost their relevance to
younger generations? Has there been a shift in values, and hence in atti-
tudes, towards animals like the dingoes in recent decades? What does a per-
son who kills a dingo the way Rose describes it think about his (yes, we are
talking about men, not women) doing so? What sort of a statement is such
killing? And how do other people react?
Reading Rose’s book, I had difficulties getting to the bottom of these
killings. We are told about some of the factors that appear relevant to the
phenomenon, but much remains unsaid. Perhaps it’s too painful, so much
so for Rose, that hints must suffice, disappointing the desire for a fuller
explanation.
Even so, death has a strong presence in Rose’s perspective, as a philo-
sophical issue, an ecological one and an ethical one. The dingoes play a
crucial role in enabling Rose to render concrete and particular what would
otherwise be a general discussion about death and extinction, common to
most philosophers’ treatment of both. That life depends on death is a fact,
however uncomfortable. Facing it as such has never been easy, not for any
people or culture that we know of, and yet it seems that contemporary soci-
ety is increasingly uncomfortable with death as the flip-side of life, as that
without which life is not to be had. Historically, the main trend has been
all about the removal of death from sight, obeying the “out of sight, out of
mind” formula; this holds not only for humans but for animals as well –
whereby, as I shall discuss in greater detail below, crucial differences may
be observed between different animals: we handle our deceased cat or dog
over to the veterinarian, or sometimes choose to bury our dead pets in the
garden, but we don’t want to see, hear or know – exactly – about how the
pigs and chicken that we put on our dinner plates have come to die so as to
end up there – have died by being killed by us humans, at that, in industrial-
ized factory fashion in our days, at that. Again, we are reminded that some
deaths are the result of killing, raising questions that we find uncomfortable.
Where should we locate the dingoes in this picture? They do not seem to
fit either of the categories just deployed; they are not pets and part of the
family at home, nor are they stored away for industrial processing (including
highly mechanized killing) in factories whose inside most of us have never
seen and never will. But they are not living in the wild like wolves or grizzly
bears either. “Wild dogs” in Rose’s characterization, they are used to the
party of humans but don’t depend on living with them. Old Tim, we recall,
spent his whole life sustaining a relationship with some of them, allowing
for a sort of bonding with them true to the spirit of the myth of common
origin. Presumably the individuals who these days either shoot the dingoes
as depicted above, or who take part in a systematic – and declaredly legal –
campaign to have them killed by poisoning them, are not recruited among
those who have built one-to-one relationships with them like Tim did.
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 83
If the stories told by Tim and highlighting the myth of a common animal-­
human origin now cease to appear relevant, this is a sign that the cosmol-
ogy lending them meaning and plausibility is in the process of losing its
grip on people’s minds. The cosmology of which Tim is a late embodiment,
explains Rose, is a form of animism, committed to the acted-upon view that
“the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life
is always lived in relationships with others” (2011: 18). In other words, the
world as experienced and negotiated in various practices such as hunting is
a world consisting of subjects not objects: humans always and everywhere
encounter a someone, a who, within a rich and heterogeneous multitude of
such, and not a something, a what; a Thou in some guise or another, not an
It (to use Martin Buber’s distinction). Within this context of what anthro-
pologist Eduardo Kohn (2013) calls an “ecology of selves”, of so many types
of selves sharing the same place, the same territory, each one of them is only
able to thrive and to sustain itself as long as all its others are allowed to
play their roles in the totality everyone relies upon. As we saw, this is not all
about love and care and building bonds, at least not in the modern sense of
an affirmation of life’s positivity to the exclusion of life’s negativity, meaning
death. “In a world of hunting and gathering”, states Rose, “death and con-
tinuity are core aspects of the integrity of life, and are always unavoidably
present in people’s lives and minds” (2011: 18). Here, “an ethical response to
the call of others does not hinge on killing or not killing. It hinges on taking
responsibility for one’s actions. Responsibilities are complexly situated in
time and place; most of all they are up-close; face-to-face in both life and
death” (ibid.).
Call and response, then, are very much at the centre of Rose’s perspective,
as they are in Willett’s. But whereas Willett one-sidedly situates the phe-
nomenon in play and casts it in a joyful and harmonious light foregrounding
the “comradeship” between those involved, Rose is keenly attentive to the
presence – as possibility or actuality – of death in the exchanges that occur,
be they between animals or between humans and animals, exemplarily in
hunting, a practice not discussed in Willett.
To recognize the centrality of death is to show how it is a topic at the heart
both of a cosmology like animism and of ecology, understood as a modern
science. Referencing the influential book What is Life? by Lynn Margulis
and Dorion Sagan, Rose reminds us that life on Earth is only to be had as a
shifting balance that is far from equilibrium and thus precarious. Humans
emerged in dynamic relationships with animals and plants; “with them we
share our dependence on water and air; and we share basic energy and basic
substance”, so that for us humans, understanding how we fit into the com-
munity of life and death that we share with so many different others is not
an optional extra: as Rose’s colleague Thom van Dooren puts it, we are
“interwoven into a system in which we live and die with others, live and die
for others” (2011: 20).
84  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
To sustain connections across species, then, means to be involved in sus-
taining them across death – again, life can only persist that way, with death
as its conditio sine qua non. This is the theoretical and general way of putting
it, in keeping with what ecology as a scientific discipline teaches. Rose’s pro-
ject is more concrete: it is thanks to encounters with persons like Old Tim
and Aboriginal people that she has been able to bring the death narrative
that is key to their (animist) cosmology into ecological domains, as exem-
plified by the current plight of the dingoes. In this context, “country” is the
core concept; it means not only a spatial unit, but also a narrative about how
the Australian continent is crisscrossed with the tracks of the creator beings,
called “Dreamings” in Aboriginal English. Dreamings would perform rit-
uals, they would leave parts or essences of themselves; they would “look
back in sorrow, and then continue traveling, changing languages, changing
songs, changing identity” (2011: 17f.). The latter is particularly important,
pointing to the phenomenon of metamorphosis that is so crucial in many
indigenous cosmologies around the world, that is, how animals may change
into humans, humans into animals, back and forth (see Viveiros de Castro
2015: 220ff.).
Rose’s presentation is worth citing in extenso:

From the perspective of country, a death narrative binds the living

and the dead into an ecological community (not just a historical com-
munity), working with multispecies crossovers as well as generational
crossovers. When death is embedded within a system of multispecies
kinship, animals that die are members of families; they have human kin
as well as kin of their own species. In these Aboriginal families there are
many deaths, not only because this is how life always ends, but because
these people are hunters. Their own lives depend on the food that is the
bodies of other animals, and every hunted animal is someone’s family.
Death is extremely intimate, and all deaths matter.
(2011: 21)

Given this account, we are in a position to realize what is amiss in the cur-
rent situation where dingoes are killed in the ways described above. We
realize that this is just as much about how they are killed as about the fact
that they are killed. They are not killed as part of the practice of hunting,
understood as based on the necessity of humans’ eating animals in order
to survive, forcing the humans involved to recognize their utter depend-
ence on the animals, a recognition that entails attitudes of awe and respect
and feelings of gratitude and humility on the part of the humans, meaning
both the individuals who participate directly, their families, and the whole
community. Rituals see to it that the hunters take care to never take out
more animals than dictated by the need for sustenance and survival; to be
dependent on the animals’ “giving themselves up”, as a gift, means to regard
the animals as the superior party, in that humans need them more than they
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 85
need humans (see Berkes 2008: 103). Hence excessive or careless hunting is
condemned by the community as a violation of the bond between humans
and wild animals, putting into jeopardy the willingness of the animals to
sacrifice themselves in the future, thus backfiring on the humans relying on
hunting in that area.
There is a vast ethnographic literature on hunting that I shall not go into
here, nor does Rose in her book. The points she makes at this stage are
philosophical, highlighting the sharp contrast with our modern Western
tradition that emerges here, a tradition that has been intent on finding ways
to turn our eyes away from the deaths of animals, robbing their death of
the intimacy and meaningfulness granted them in indigenous cosmolo-
gies, reminding humans of their connectedness with and dependence on
the animals. In particular, Rose (using Val Plumwood’s term) mentions the
“hyperseparation” maintained by dualism á la Descartes, positing a cate-
gorical and absolute divide between humans understood as creatures with
minds, intelligence, volition, and feelings, on the one hand, and animals (in
general, taken as one homogeneous category) understood as “mere” nature
(Descartes: “automata”), on the other, with the entire series of binary oppo-
sitions that correspond with it: humans as active, animals as passive; humans
as subjects, animals as objects, etc. And although much of twentieth-­c entury
philosophy has been dedicated to critiquing the Cartesian legacy in a num-
ber of areas, as we saw earlier the sharp divide between humans and animals
with regard to death is reiterated by prominent thinkers like Heidegger: only
humans truly exist and possess the capacity to relate to their own situation,
to their past, present, and future, hence only human death is an event, car-
ries significance, and is of ethical import. By contrast, when animals die it is
a case of “mere death” and as such a “fact of nature” understood as a realm
devoid of meaning and value, agency and subjectivity, intelligence and voli-
tion. Human exceptionalism á la Heidegger, and for that matter Sartre, kills
two birds with one stone, as it were, asserting the superiority of humans by
way of stressing the inferiority of animals, rendering them passive objects
that humans can kill with impunity. In this way, the death of animals is
removed from the ecological as well as symbolic setting of multispecies and
generational crossovers that indigenous cosmologies perceive them – ani-
mals, their life and their death – as inseparable from.
A death that is not indifferent “because” it is that of an animal and not of
a human, is an event that as such is not only, or even primarily, negative. On
the contrary, the death of an animal has its own peculiar beauty; that it does
so means that it is something that calls for the appropriate attitude, that of
wonder and respect, as were it something holy, although it – death – is pre-
cisely diesseits, not jenseits, a part of this world, not a beyond.
In this perspective, Rose does not shy away from describing her own
experience with the death of animals – be it at her own hands – in outright
poetic terms, something that would amount to a category mistake in the
Western philosopher giants just mentioned. This is her depiction:
86  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
The beauty of death lies in its mystery. To see the light of life leave the
eyes of a dying creature is to see briefly into a region that is unknown
and unknowable. […] I learned to see the light disappear from the eyes
of animals when I went hunting. Often an animal would look at us in
the moment before it was shot. We saw it die; sometimes we had to finish
it off with our bare hands. And then there was the distribution. When
you cut into an animal, the thing that is so surprising is the reminder of
how warm mammals are on the inside. You have your hands inside the
animal, and you know without any doubt that the way this animal feels
to your hands is exactly how you would feel if someone were doing this
to you – the same heat, the same textures, the fresh smell, the red blood.
That intimacy of interchangeable interiority forms a special kind of
empathy based on the tactile knowledge of our mammalian kinship and
our shared condition as creatures born to die. This dead animal could be
me, and I myself will one day be a dead animal. […] within these tactile
webs of immediacy, killing is part of life because death is part of life. To
be alive is to know that one’s life is dependent on the deaths of others.
(2011: 26)

We could have found this depiction in Shepard, but we do not find it in Willett.
My impression is that the large majority of Western scholars in the fields of
environmental philosophy and environmental humanities, as well as animal
studies, oppose hunting, condemning it as unethical and as a sort of practice
that belongs to the past and that they themselves would never participate in.
Within this group, many will be vegetarians or vegans, based on a moral con-
viction about the inviolability of animals, seeing it as part and parcel of their
moral status. In this way, being against the sort of killing of animals that
takes place in hunting is to follow through on a principled rejection of human
exceptionalism, casting hunting as anthropocentrism in practice.
In the light of Rose’s perspective, hunting is nothing of the sort: this much
we gather from her experience-based depiction of it. I put it this way because,
surprisingly, Rose does not enter into any discussion with the anti-hunting
standpoint just referred to, a standpoint she surely must have encountered
on countless occasions in her academic career. The fact that Peter Singer
is not mentioned in her book attests to her lack of interest in justifying her
pro-hunting position to its many detractors.
On my view, Rose’s experiences as a participant in hunting are philo-
sophically important in that they challenge key assumptions on the part of
those who today categorically oppose hunting, this being more and more
the default position in recent years, not least following the huge impact that
Peter Singer’s work has enjoyed, not only academically but in the wider pub-
lic. (I shall return to this in Chapter 4.)
To begin with, Rose challenges the assumption that to kill animals is
tantamount to, and indeed depends upon, viewing them as objects, as pas-
sive recipients of whatever we humans choose to do to (against) them, since
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 87
allegedly devoid of the intelligence, volition, and other capacities of agency
that we humans alone exhibit, at least in the required advanced degree. In
other words, to kill animals means to objectify and instrumentalize them,
treating them as mere means to human ends and as commanding no per-
spective in their own right that we have to respect.
Nothing of this is borne out in Rose’s report of what it is like to kill an
animal by way of hunting. The alienation – estrangement – implied in the
above assumptions, separating humans from animals, perceiving and treat-
ing them in a quasi-amoral, detached, disinterested manner, adopting a
stance of indifference in the face of beings (somethings, not someones) of
an indifferent sort and so prompting but indifference on the part of their
human counterparts – everything that goes into this stance is precisely not
what Rose experiences in her encounter with the animal she is about to kill.
Instead, what she describes is a kind of human-animal intimacy and con-
nectedness, a togetherness in life and in death, one not known, not to be
had, in other types of situations where humans and animals interact. The
significance of animals for humans, the kinship that exists between them
and that both partake in, is precisely what is borne out and sustained in
the practice of hunting. More than practically all other practices we can
think of, hunting demonstrates why animals matter to humans: rather than
indifference reigning here, it’s all about coming to full recognition of the
difference that animals make in our lives.
To suggest that the willful killing of animals is the answer to Midgley’s
question about why animals matter, is perhaps a bit over the top – a success
when viewed as a provocation, but with little to show in terms of argument.
I am not saying that it is Rose’s answer, the way she asks to be read. What
is beyond doubt, however, is that by bestowing such eminent visibility on
the act of killing animals, making it a centrepiece of human-animal rela-
tionships, she wants to deny the fact that we humans do continue to kill
animals – protests notwithstanding – the air of remoteness and abstraction
that the delegation of its operation to a handful of professionals never seen,
never heard – just like the animals killed, in the factory facilities never vis-
ited – nowadays amounts to. For all the ethical grounds that people may cite
in their opposition to this practice, holding that killing animals is morally
wrong, period, they most often do so in a situation where that killing has
been subject to a thoroughgoing Versachlichung such that its moral import
is silenced, and indifference reigns as a result. If killing animals should be
looked in the eye as the morally charged phenomenon that it truly is, then
hunting as described by Rose does exactly that – factory-like killing does
not. It takes one-to-one encounters to do justice to what is at stake when
some creatures kill others, to make them aware of what they are doing and
why, experienced here as matters of life and death, as far away from a stance
and a matter of indifference as you – be it the human, be it the animal – can
get. Anthropologist Eduardo Kohn explains the alternative to indifference
like this: “Some notion of the motivation of others is necessary for people
88  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
to get by in a world inhabited by volitional beings. Our lives depend on
our abilities to believe in and act on the provisional guesses we make about
the motivations of other selves” (2013: 118). Hence, “it would be impossible
for people in Avila [i.e., the Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon studied by
Kohn] to hunt or to relate in any way within this ecology of selves without
treating the myriad beings that inhabit the forest as the animate creatures that
they are. Losing this ability would sever the Runa from this web of relations”
(ibid.). Kohn employs Stanley Cavell’s term soul blindness to describe the
various debilitating forms of soul loss that “result in an inability to be aware
of and relate to other soul-possessing selves in this ecology of selves”. Since all
selves have soul in the ecology of selves that the Runa are part of alongside
the myriad of non-human beings that inhabit the forest, soul blindness is
“not just a human problem; it is a cosmic one” (2013: 117).
Rose says that if Old Tim were to formulate a commandment (which he
did not), it would probably be: “Thou shalt not turn thine eyes away from
the deaths of animals”. Considering that Tim and his people are hunter-­
gatherers, such a commandment may strike us as being in tension with the
killing of animals he took part in. What is more, it makes for an intriguing,
and rather unexpected, contrast with the position typically taken on killing
in our societies today: whereas those who like Tim do kill animals urge
humans not to turn their eyes away from the death of animals, those who
would never take part in such killing because wholly against it do so in a
situation where their eyes are indeed turned away from the animals being
killed. We glimpse the oddness of the modern arrangement where there is a
division of space such as to allow killing to go on a greater scale than ever
(its modus operandi having been professionalized, industrialized, market-
ized, the killed animals being commodified and carrying a price tag deter-
mined by supply and demand), yet allowing fewer and fewer humans to have
one-to-one experiences with the killing occurring, with the large majority of
vegans and meat-eaters alike living at a safe and comfortable distance from
the facilities.
What I have in mind, then, is the following contrast, implicit in Rose:
not only is one who kills by way of hunting the one who looks the animals
in the eye; he is also the one who insists that doing so – looking them in the
eye – is what gives access to the moral import of the phenomenon of killing,
the import being not that it is wrongful to kill them but a necessity insepa-
rable from the coexistence on Earth of different species (here: humans and
wild animals). By contrast, the one who finds such killing wrong will typ-
ically not be on the scene, will never look the animals in the eye. Instead,
the moral import of the phenomenon will be decided abstractly, apart from
the context with the encounter-cum-killing takes place, as purely a matter
of principle: killing animals is wrong, period, and there is no need to look
anybody in the eye before deciding the matter.
It is only when a certain stage in the historical trajectory of humans-animals
relationships is reached that it becomes plausible, and with time even
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 89
hegemonic, to settle the moral issue posed by killing animals in a perfectly
principal way and in abstraction from the experiential context where that
practice of hunting takes place. The premise for reaching a conclusion
this way is that the issue can be settled once and for all and without any
need to take the experiential dimension – that of actual encounters and the
inter-species relationships they are part of, understood as an ecology of
selves in Kohn’s sense – into account. Indeed, people who are introduced to
hunting as a meaningful and justified practice owing to their socialization
into say, a hunter-gatherer culture, will be seen as “biased” on the issue,
whereas people without any personal or communal experience of the matter
will be seen (will see themselves) as culturally neutral and uncommitted,
hence as satisfying the requirements for an “impartial” point of view.
Why do I put such emphasis on framing the issue in this way? One rea-
son is the Shepard-inspired one that shifts in ways of looking at animals
are eminently historical in nature, deeply culturally entrenched and as such
passed on through the generations as the natural way of interpreting the
world. This being so, the “view from nowhere” whereby objectivity and
impartiality are held to be secured, is nothing of the sort; it is a point of view
just as much a product of history and culture as the ones it prides itself on
being able to dismiss on grounds of their alleged partiality. To be sure, the
genesis (origin) of a view is one thing, its validity (claim to truth) is another,
and they should not be conflated. Granted. But in the matter under discus-
sion here, the contrast between an experience-based point of departure and
an experience-suspending one that takes abstraction to be the one essential
requirement for deciding the issue is not only particularly striking. It also
impacts on the very identification of the phenomenon at hand: the nature of
a person’s real-life relationship with the animals we are talking about makes
a big difference: concretely, it is the difference between a lifeworld where
these animals are a crucial presence, and one where they are largely absent.
Against this background, we may resume Rose’s account of hunting:

Animal deaths within a kinship system are situated within relationships

of accountability. In the first instance, one is accountable to the human
relations of the animal, for it is they who will take direct action if their
kin are being wronged, by overhunting, for example. More widely, how-
ever, every decision to kill an animal takes place within a wider set of
relations signaled by the term “good country”. The purpose of killing
animals is to nurture humans; it is not to eradicate animals or to wreck
country. Good country is a flourishing set of relationships – interde-
pendent and mutual.
(2011: 26)

Notice how the accountability of humans who hunt animals is intertwined

with the capacity to “take direct action” on the part of the animals, so that
the “wrongness” of overhunting is something the animals will communicate
90  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
to the hunter at fault. The response forthcoming from the animals who are
being wronged and who perceive themselves to be so takes precedence over
the response forthcoming from the hunter’s comrades; or rather, to put it
more precisely, the human (communal) rebuke is such as to follow through
on, and to gain its justification from, the wronged animals. What qualifies
as morally wrong, then, is not settled, is not first and foremost played out,
within the relationships of the humans involved, but within the relationship
between the humans and the animals – the inter- and cross-species context
is not only that of origin (where the transgression took place); it is that of its
determination and its being settled as well, requiring as we see the agency
exerted by the animals no less than that exerted by the humans. Everything
comes to pass in the experience-based, encounter-driven inter-species con-
text where the offence occurs. There is no resort to a sort of abstract (dis-
engaged, neutral, external) point of view either to settle the wrongness or
to respond to it in appropriate manner. The inter-relational embeddedness
and rich contextuality of the points of view (notice the plural) in play here is
the precondition for the moral issue to be settled, not a circumstance that
would undermine the possibility of judgement. The many points of view in
play are those inhabited by those involved, be they humans or animals; that
is to say, points of view of parties that are not interchangeable but instead
indispensable, and who recognize each other as precisely that.

IV
Rose observes that in hunting, “the purpose of killing animals is to nurture
humans” (2011: 2011). But doesn’t this go to show that, when everything is
said and done about hunting exhibiting an animist cosmology, the essence it
boils down to is the otherwise dismissed anthropocentric one, that of meet-
ing a purely human need?
It is tempting to say “yes, indeed”. But it would be to miss out on the
peculiar dependence of humans on the animals hunted, a dependence that
exposes the sort of anthropocentrism that implies human superiority to be
out of step with reality – hubris.
I shall bring Aldo Leopold into the discussion here, author of the still
hugely influential Sand County Almanac. Leopold is an interesting figure
in that, besides being a pioneer ecophilosopher he was also, throughout his
life, a dedicated hunter, and he “never suffered from any guilty conscience on
that account”, as the anthropologist Philippe Descola (2013: 196) remarks.
Running through Leopold’s reminiscences about his experience with hunt-
ing is one fundamental theme: knowing how to hunt is knowing how to find
one’s game and “knowing how to find it is knowing how to adopt the point
of view of the animal that one is seeking, perceiving things as that animal
does and putting oneself in its place”. It thus involves, Descola continues
– and this is his account, not Leopold’s – “abandoning a superior vantage
point in order to seize, from within, upon this tangled web of destinies and
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 91
desires that weaves together the world in motion” (ibid.). Descola goes on to
provide the wider anthropological context, observing that “such an attitude
is reminiscent of the manner in which Amerindian hunting communities
envisage the metamorphoses that mark relations between humans and non-
humans, such as exchanges of viewpoints in the course of which each party,
modifying the observational position imposed by its body, endeavors to slip
into the skin of the other in order to see things from its point of view” (ibid.).
Descola aptly warns against overstating the analogy between a twentieth-­
century American forestry engineer-cum-ecophilosopher going hunting
and a group of Amerindians doing so. He points to the fact that Leopold’s
celebrated land ethic “in no sense calls into question the ontological distri-
butions of naturalism, which it, on the contrary, accepts without a qualm”
(2013: 196). The essence of Leopold’s land ethic is captured in the often-
cited statement that “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity,
stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends oth-
erwise” (Leopold 1949: 224f.). To be sure, writes Descola, there is an educa-
tional need to “think like a mountain”, as Leopold teaches, “the better to
evaluate the balance between wolves, deer, and vegetation to be respected
on its slopes” (ibid.), this being important to the professional forester and
the hobby hunter alike. To Descola, though, it is no more and no less than
“a matter of experiencing salutary thoughts of a kind to give substance and
a live urgency to abstract ecological learning; in no sense does it constitute
a profession of animist faith” (ibid.). Leopold, that is, never “imputes to
nonhumans an interiority analogous to that of humans”, for the awareness
of a future with which he credits them is nothing but a metaphor for the
general teleonomy of nature, which, he believes, reverberates within each
one of them. Above all, he never ascribes to animals or to plants any abil-
ity to lead the existence of a species characterized by cultural conventions,
since, for him, the latter are strictly the prerogative of humans (2013: 196f.).
For all his celebrated “radical” ecological thinking, Leopold remained loyal
to the deeper underpinnings of Western thought about culture and nature,
humans and animals; he never gave up on the tenets of the naturalism
informing his training as a forestry engineer.
The contrast Descola draws between Leopold’s land ethic and an animist
cosmology is instructive. It helps us realize that we misunderstand Rose’s
remark that “the purpose of killing animals is to nurture humans” if we
take it to reveal some kind of closet anthropocentrism on the part of hunt-
er-gatherers like Old Tim. Since humans hunt animals for the purpose of
eating them both within an anthropocentric lifeworld and within an ani-
mist one, this fact in itself is ill-suited to let us realize the deeper differences
between them. We have become so accustomed to the moral issue (killing
or not killing) taking precedence as the truly important issue about the
human-animal relationship that we tend to forget about the epistemic and
ontological dimensions on which the morally “appropriate” one is prem-
ised: the ways in which humans and animals matter to each other and, as
92  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
part of that, perceive each other; in particular, why it matters how animals
see us, not only how we see animals. Eduardo Kohn, Descola’s colleague,
reminds us that “encounters with other kinds of beings force us to recognize
the fact that seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are
not exclusively human affairs”. In other words, “how other kinds of beings see
us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things” (Kohn 2013:
1). For this reason, Descartes would make for an altogether inept hunter
were he to act upon his contention that animals are mere “automata”. In
taking himself qua human as the only agent in every sense of the word –
intelligence, affectivity, volition, intentionality – the animals making up the
game would be but a collection of natural objects, passively there for the
taking. In other words, in acting upon his philosophical views about an
absolute divide between humans and animals, he would approach the ani-
mals as devoid of everything it takes to constitute a point of view in and on
the world and what comes to pass in it in a given situation, denying them the
capacities required to take part in give and take, call and response, in inter-
preting what the other’s calling and responding means and adjusting their
actions accordingly, as exemplified in the life-and death decision-making
about whether to stay put, to attack, or to flee.
To be sure, making the point about the agency exhibited in animals by
way of the sharp relief provided by Descartes’ blatant denial is easy. What
this contrast nevertheless provides is insight into the intimate connection
between perception and action, between how we view something (or some-
one) and how we feel it natural and justified to treat it. Is the other a subject
or an object, active or passive, capable of calling and responding or not?
This is not an epistemic issue in some abstract philosophical sense, to be
settled sub specie aeternitatis. It is not only that it matters who the partici-
pants to the relationship are, in the concrete situation. And the fact that the
human’s “other” is an animal does not suffice, there being so many kinds
of animals, with vast differences of capacities for agency between them: a
worm so different from a salmon, a salmon so different from a jaguar.
Important as these differences both within and between species are, how-
ever, their significance derives not first and foremost from their capacities
(properties) as tied to species in each case, but from every individual’s role
in a wider web of dependencies. To be able to exist, and to persist in doing
so over time, is a matter of dependence-on-others, not self-sufficiency. For
humans, to kill animals for the purpose of eating them is about vulnera-
bility, admitting being at the mercy of animals who, in their role as prey
(though often themselves predators), have a choice over which humans have
no control: whether or not to give themselves up to the humans who need
them. For humans to refuse to admit being at the mercy of the animals, is
tantamount to denying them the respect that is the very prerequisite for the
animals to allow themselves to be taken. This means that there is only so
much the human hunter can do – and all of it reverberates around showing
the appropriate respect. The rest is up to the animals.
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 93
In stressing that how we perceive something (someone) determines how
we treat it, I do not think of perception naively as a first mover. How par-
ticular animals are perceived is itself a product of cultural history (Shepard)
and of the ties of connectivity that the animals are experienced as being part
of, as contributing to in a life-sustaining manner, which is to say a man-
ner that involves many different species, necessarily so. To put it crudely,
either animals are experienced as so many “others” that we humans are tied
to in relations of connectivity, or are they not. Either we see ourselves as
in a moral relationship with animals that commits us to a conduct guided
by respect, humility, and gratitude, or we regard animals as excluded from
such a relationship and its peculiar commitments, turning morality into a
purely human-to-human phenomenon.
One may respond by saying that, ecologically speaking, cross-species
connectivity is a matter of fact, a precondition of life, and as such one that
must be heeded, like it or not. But this fact can be denied, be it culturally
(collectively), be it individually. In present-day society pointing to a kind
of connectivity that exposes human dependence and vulnerability is apt to
trigger feelings of discomfort; the very act of pointing out this connectivity
is perceived as a provocation, probably more so among men than women
(see Gilligan 1982). The implied lack of control is unwelcome, and defence
mechanisms are called upon, including outright denial. As for the role of
animals in this picture, not only do they challenge the notion of human
exceptionalism in terms of capacities of agency. Our dependence on crea-
tures who are like us in many respects, and profoundly different from us in
others, is another blow, the more so the more we realize that this depend-
ence is multidimensional and makes for a historical debt: not only have we
humans in the past had a need for animals to eat for the sake of survival; as
Shepard shows, animals have been crucial in helping us develop our pecu-
liar capacities qua humans, and as we shall see by way of concrete examples
below, animals put us to the test as moral agents, perhaps even more pro-
foundly than do our fellow humans.
A lifeworld of connectivity as understood by Rose is one where “the
well-being of one is enmeshed in the well-being of others” (2011: 27). Since
there is no position outside of connection, there is no such thing as a
self-interest that concerns only the self; and since one’s own well-being is
dependent on what happens to others, meaning other species, everyone has
a stake in the well-being of others – a far cry for the model of mutual indiffer-
ence or disinterest, of calculating whether or not to get involved with others
or to stay outside of webs of commitment advanced in contract theory from
Hobbes onwards. Dependence upon others is not a negative, not a limit on
freedom and flourishing on the part of the individual, but a precondition of
life that exposes the notion of self-sufficiency as a falsehood, a dangerous
fantasy. “Interests are mutual”, says Rose; they exist and are pursued pre-
cisely in the plural, not as the prerogative or property of the individual and
thereby casting “the original situation” as one of conflict with others. And
94  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
while they are not indistinguishable, Rose continues, interests are situated
“within the larger dance of life which involves life and death, self and others,
us and them” (ibid.).
It is noteworthy that in statements like this Rose makes no mention of the
distinction between humans and animals. That is to say: the logic of con-
nectivity and the facts about dependence on (species) others apply to both,
at least on the level intended here, that of conditions of life. But whereas
the facts about such connectivity as an ineluctable, non-optional given, for
humans as well as for other species, can be stated categorically as Rose does
here, she is also acutely aware of the extent to which the acknowledgement
of this connectivity differs between cultures and from one historical period
to the next. That humans and animals alike are situated “within the larger
dance of life which involves life and death, self and other, us and them”,
certainly resonates with Old Tim, as it does with the Achuar in Brazilian
Amazon studied by Descola and the Runa in Ecuador studied by Kohn,
representing three distinct versions of an animist cosmology. But what
about people living in big cities, be it in Australia, Brazil, or Ecuador? Rose
speaks to this when she writes that “in contrast to the tactile immediacy
of killing and eating that brought us into a region of encounter, claim, and
responsibility when we were hunting, our Western contexts do not offer
many opportunities to see most of the deaths on which our lives depend,
either directly or indirectly” (2011: 27). Indeed, “these days hunting is the
exception, not the rule, and it is so regulated by external authorities that it
does not require a foundational understanding of connectivity and a capac-
ity to be self-regulating”. Having never gone hunting ourselves for lack of
need or opportunity, or because opposed to hunting on moral grounds,
most of us buy our food in the supermarket. In doing so, Rose points out,
we are implicated in contemporary animal farming, “the mainstream meth-
ods of which involve an amplification of the monstrosity of animal deaths”
(2011: 28); a monstrosity we, at least to a degree, know about, but most of us
don’t experience it – we don’t need to, and we don’t want to. In this way, “the
industrialized manufacture of corpses for food is sustained at the expense
of hundreds of thousands of other lives”, yet most of us are not disturbed
as long as this “monstrous cruelty” is hidden within organized invisibility:
killing of animals no doubt takes place, in massive numbers as compared
with the hunting practices depicted above, but it does so in the modus oper-
andi of silent killing.

V
What happens when death is hidden from view? Is the endeavour to hide
death an attempt to deny it? Or is the point of hiding it to rob death of its
moral sting?
Not all death is a result of killing, though it is so in the case of hunting.
Death is a fact of life, only sometimes caused by killing. Does it take killing
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 95
to make death a moral issue, making it a matter of the killer’s responsibility?
Is it only when the one causing death by killing is a human person that it
becomes suitable for moral judgement? And what difference does it make if
the one killed is an animal and not another human being?
We have seen that Rose, in pondering these questions, puts great empha-
sis on context and circumstances. For her, humans killing animals is never
morally unproblematic, nor is it ever morally neutral. Not fearful of being
read as romanticizing hunting – something she must know many a reader
will do – Rose clearly thinks that the killing that takes place here is both
more true to the facts (the conditions of life) and more in touch with the
moral issues involved insofar as the killing occurs in a context of physical
encounter. By comparison, the killing of animals that goes on in industrial-
ized fashion behind walls is part of an attempt to take away the moral sting,
to empty what is being done of the moral charge intrinsic to encounters,
to proceed in an atmosphere of indifference and neutrality whereby effi-
ciency is the yardstick that counts. In his important book Modernity and the
Holocaust, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined a word for this transfor-
mation: adiaphorization.
Bauman used the term for what happens when humans are killed in a
well-organized, large-scale manner, not animals. Whereas he was address-
ing genocide (the Holocaust), Rose is addressing extinction. Although many
creatures are affected by extinction, she is mainly interested in animals, so
much so as to define her take on the Anthropocene, that “new era of soli-
tude”, largely self-inflicted at that: “As Earth others depart, never to return,
we face a diminishing and impoverished world, and equally, we face new,
agonizingly, lonely, questions about the meaning of our existence” (2011:
10). This means that for Rose, the imperative of our time is not what it was
for thinkers like Bauman, and Adorno and Jonas before him, namely “never
again Auschwitz”. Instead it is “to recover or discover connectivity”. That
can only be done by recovering “the radical awareness of being at home
that emerges as we embed ourselves ever more complexly into the life of the
world”. And she adds, “the world is suffering, life is dying, and the project of
embedding ourselves exposes us consciously to peril” (ibid.).
There is an urgency to this imperative that is different from the Holocaust-
related one. The urgency is to do with the imperative being not only (exclu-
sively) ethical, but its being ecological too, the one inseparable from the
other, whereby any wish, or attempt, to separate the two would mean to
get it wrong about the situation in which ethics is – from now on, if not
before – embedded.
Rose clearly views the Anthropocene as the age of extinction. True
enough, some entities expand and see growing numbers – humans and
human-made artefacts. The problem is that the expansion of one species
comes with the cost of decimating so many others. Rose puts it like this:
“In a few short centuries, the human species has begun unmaking the bal-
ance on earth between life and death, enabling death to expand and expand,
96  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
tilting life toward a catastrophe that is difficult to imagine, difficult to think,
and yet morally imperative to consider” (2011: 61).
It is as if death is at the same time everywhere and nowhere. It is all over
the place in that species and life forms in record numbers disappear to the
point of going extinct; instead of life being replenished, it is replaced by
death. On the other hand, the ways in which death prevails over life, absence
over presence, are for the most part invisible. Yes, animals disappear, that’s
what the statistics tell but we don’t actually see them doing so. They are
casualties of the ever-growing impact that humankind currently exerts
everywhere on Earth. But for the most part their actual dying is without
witnesses, in stark contrast to animals being killed in hunting or by way
of other sorts of encounters with the human agents who cause their death,
deliberately at that. And insofar as these animals die without encounter,
their deaths lose the quality of being an event, a change occurring in the
world at some particular place and point in time and so marking the shift
from a presence to an absence.
But doesn’t putting it like this smack of anthropocentrism? Well, it is for
us humans that the animal deaths we are speaking about lose their quality
of being an event, not for the animals themselves. Whether or not humans
are on the scene when the last eagle owl departs from its last habitat along
Helgelandskysten in Norway hardly makes a difference to the owl’s experi-
ence: the change from this species’ presence to its absence in the area is an
objective fact regardless of it being noticed subjectively by humans or not.
This may sound trivial, but it is not. For the fact is that the departure of
animals to the point of their disappearance altogether from places they have
used to live for centuries or even longer, would not go unnoticed in previ-
ous times like it does now. It takes familiarity with the animals in question
to notice that their numbers are dwindling, that in places where one could
expect to see them, one no longer does, and so feels lucky for every sighting,
adjusting subjectively to the change happening: from a situation where one
took spotting them for granted to one where doing so has become spectacu-
lar, a rare and true gift, as such to be shared with others (meaning on social
media these days).
So yes, we feel thankful when spotting an animal now increasingly rare.
But wait a minute – should we not be enraged instead, enraged because
of the loss entailed in their ongoing disappearance? Are we lowering our
expectations, learning to live with disappointment? If so, at what cost?
Since when could one no longer take their presence for granted? How to
catch that moment, marking the change? But it’s not a moment we are talk-
ing about, precisely not. Instead it’s something evasive, part of processes
originating and set in motion elsewhere, far away, one cannot even be sure
exactly where, when, and by whom, to the extent that particular agents can
be identified at all. The causes for the disappearance of the eagle owl from
one particular area are diverse, spanning the entire continuum from the
abstract to the concrete. When I read in the papers that this kind of owl
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 97
is now being put on the list of “critically endangered species” in Norway,
no specific causes are mentioned save the general and nowadays ubiquitous
one of “climate change”. This is abstract in the sense I am getting at here,
despite its being true. It is abstract in that the questions about the “where,
when and by whom”, about the causes as particular in time and place and
in terms of agency, are left hanging in the air. At the level of generality, of
being operative “everywhere” and “all of the time”, climate change is an
example of what Timothy Morton (2013) calls “hyper-objects”: something
all-too-real in their effects yet whose exact origins – spatio-temporally and
agentially – elude us, not for being few or sparse, but for existing in excess,
making it difficult to identify anything, anywhere, at any time, that would
today be beyond their reach, making the particular instance of disappear-
ance overdetermined. In the Anthropocene, the privilege of something or
someone existing outside is lost in reality, although it may live on in/as a fan-
tasy, feeding high-tech, Elon Musk-like efforts to flee the Earth and retreat
to Mars or some other hoped-for planetary refuge.

VI
There is a more sinister aspect to the disappearance of dingoes discussed in
Rose’s book, one that merits discussion.
First, we need to understand more precisely what kind of animals din-
goes are. They arrived in Australia from Southeast Asia some 5,000 years
ago. Neither clean-cut wild animals nor ordinary pets, the dingoes have pro-
vided companionship of a unique sort for Aboriginal people, being the first
non-humans to answer back. However, their ambiguity in not quite fitting
into either of the wild/domestic/pets categories has caused some Aboriginal
people to be situated ambivalently between loving and loathing them; some
want to keep them as pets, others to kill them, considering them as ver-
min. Rose mentions the effort of new settlers to eradicate dingoes, based
on viewing them as detrimental to sheep and cattle and thus a nuisance to
be removed. In contrast, and as we would expect, Old Tim was completely
against not only the willful killing of dingoes, but any effort to “control”
them. Tim is able to understand their language, and he can convey their
points of view to others. It is part of his overall outlook that we humans
come from the dingoes (and other animals), that they live on after their
death and that today, owing to the effort to drive them away from the land,
ancestral dingoes give voice to their sense of lost reciprocity, saddened by
the betrayal of humans.
In modern times, dingo-proof fences have been erected to keep dingoes
away from areas were local populations had been annihilated. Starting in
1947, state governments have built a fence which is now 5,400 kilometres
long. In itself, the fence does not eradicate the animals; it is designed to
control their movements (see Netz 2004). Widespread practices today are
shooting and poison. The use of 1080 poison (sodium monofluoracetate)
98  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
that has become commonplace is not only lethal to the dingoes, but to
other animals as well; any animal that eats the remains of an animal that
has been poisoned is at risk; there is no known antidote. The method used
is to drop by plane chunks of dried meat that are laced with 1080. In addi-
tion, land clearing causes dingoes to turn towards sheep and calves. As
a consequence of the various methods employed, remaining dingoes now
“live in a state of perpetual social disorder” (Rose 2011: 69); with their hab-
itats destroyed and their regular prey eradicated, they are forced to turn to
domestic animals.
It makes no difference to the pastoralists who are waging war against
the dingoes that research on their ecological impact shows that dingo pop-
ulations work to “sustain a balance of species that is viable in the long
run”; that there is “a strong correlation between healthy dingo populations
and biodiversity as indicated by the flourishing presence of native species”
(Rose 2011: 67). For example, the dingoes are crucial in controlling foxes
and cats. In short, the more the dingoes are given the chance to thrive in
their natural habitat, the greater the biodiversity. Rose quotes the follow-
ing statement by Adam O’Neill, based on a lifetime of experience with
the dingoes in Australia: “I believe that the dingo is our only chance for
eco-reconciliation” (Rose 2011: 68).
How, then, to explain the killing of dingoes that goes on and on? Why
don’t the many benefits their presence brings carry any weight for the people
who pursue their disappearance? Are there important lessons to be learned
here, pointing beyond the particulars of this place, these animals, and the
people involved?
I certainly think so, but before we get to the bigger picture, where the
ethics of Emmanuel Levinas will take centre stage, we must explore in more
detail what Rose is reporting.
We have looked at death by poison, but we have not discussed the method
where a dingo has been shot and hung over the fence, for all passers-by to
see. Upon realizing that “the dead body had been casually but carefully
draped across the fence”, Rose asks: “Was it a message, and if so, to whom
was it addressed?” (2011: 92). She passes the question onto a friend who
knows the pastoralists better then she does, getting the following answer:
“He does it because he can”. Notice that they both – two women – take it
for granted that the person responsible is a man. As far as I can tell, they
are justified in doing so. Nevertheless, it leaves something unsaid: could a
woman have done it? If not, why?
Rose’s further reflections are worth quoting:

In life, these creatures were despised by the pastoralist, and now the
death is displayed in a narrative of total power. The pastoralist wants to
destroy the animals, and he wants to display his dominance. This dingo,
this outlaw, can be defiled with relative impunity. Social power as well as
interspecies power is on display here. This exhibit offers up trophies in
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 99
the war against the wild and living world. (…) The bodies are trophies,
and thus are mirrors: they give us ourselves. They give us ourselves as
we are when we go out to torture and kill, and are proud of our work.
[…] Dingo trees amplify suffering further. The trophy display seems to
require the victims to state that the harm has been a positive good in
the world, that somehow their suffering and death are something for the
killers to have been proud of. […] Trophies form a “narcissistic mirror”
in which the killers can read their own moral superiority, for it is they
who have made the world a better place.
(2011: 93, 97, 98)

When I taught Rose’s book as part of my ethics course for master students
of philosophy, I showed the class the pictures of the hung-up dingoes.
I also displayed the cover photo of a dingo Rose encountered in outback
Queensland, described by her as “so young and naïve as to be almost heart-
breaking” (2011: 68).
I remember the atmosphere in the classroom when I put the book down
on my desk, not offering any comments on my part and asking if somebody
wanted to say something. Silence.
How to make the connection between the dingo hung-up and killed, and
the dingo “so young and naïve as to be almost heartbreaking”? You may
go back and forth, back and forth, visually and in thought, between the
two pictures, realizing that – in principle of not in practice in this particu-
lar case – it could well be the same individual dingo in both pictures, cor-
responding to life as the “before” and death as the “after”, mirroring the
sequence to which the killer subjected his victim. Call it heartbreaking, call
it unbearable, call it a mystery: how is it possible to willfully kill this animal,
to respond by inflicting death when faced with such an expression of open-
ness, trust, affirmation of life, a welcome to come closer, come in, share, and
reciprocate?
Rose doesn’t put the question like this, but she might well have done so,
not least because she chooses to consult the ethics of Levinas – highlighting
as it does the peculiar authority of the face, of the appeal emanating from
it, a wordless “do not kill!” – to provide a framework for her further reflec-
tions. To anticipate a point I will elaborate in later sections, consider here
the following suggestion: the constellation I just described does not amount
to the flagrant contradiction we intuitively take it be. What does that mean?
It means that the dingo is not killed in spite of the expression of openness
and trust with which it greets the human approaching, be it with a camera
in hand, or a gun; the dingo is killed because of it.
Probably many will respond by saying that, if anything, this makes for
a flagrant contradiction. But as we will see, evildoing often is just that: the
chosen response to goodness. Again, this is my suggestion, not Rose’s. But
I see it as making her own point, only put differently – hers being that what
we have to do with is death as the response to life.
100  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
To appreciate what is at stake here, we need to return to Rose’s question
to her friend: what is the person saying in putting the body of the killed
dingo on display for all to see?
On my view, the person doing this is conveying a message along several
dimensions. First, there is the message to the individual dingo in question: I
am free to kill you, and having killed you I can do with you what I like. I can
do so with impunity, demonstrating that I am sovereign in my relationship
with you – so great is my power that I don’t accept you as my counterpart
at all. In killing you this way, I act upon my belief that you are not worthy
of being in any relationship with me at all. I can do without you; the world
is a better place without you. Having the right to do this to you means that
I have the right to do the same to all of you, your whole kind; there is no
difference between you and other dingoes. All dingoes who see you hung up
like this will know about the death that awaits them; they will know what
to expect from humans. Second, there is the message to members of his own
kin, his own species, be they fellow pastoralists, be they outsiders like Rose,
that this is what people like him are entitled to do whenever encountering
an animal like the dingo. In deciding to put the bodies up like trophies,
the message is sent that rather than this act of killing being something to
hide or be ashamed of, it should be looked upon as an act of goodness on
behalf of the community – protecting humans from animals at the wrong
place doing the wrong things – and so as matter of rightly felt pride, apt to
put on display. Third, in demonstrating the refusal to recognize the animal,
recognition among fellow humans is sought and – in all likelihood – found:
its demonstrated denial to non-humans consolidates its status as a humans-
only affair. As far as dingoes are concerned, excluding them from the moral
universe is a means to the end of sustaining a purely human-centred moral
and social order. In seeing the bodies of dingoes hung up on trees or over
fences, everybody – humans, animals – can consider as confirmed that the
world is set aright, that things are as they should be.
This raises questions about the relationship between life and death,
increasingly precarious and out of joint; questions about extinction and
about whose lives are grievable that I will investigate in depth in later chap-
ters. Before concluding the discussion of Rose’s book, however, we must
examine her commentary on Levinas’ ethics.

VII
Emmanuel Levinas is the philosopher Rose turns to in her search for an
ethics that does justice to the relationship between humans and animals like
the dingoes, helping us to identify what has gone wrong in a case like the
one Rose witnessed.
As it happens, there is an essay by Levinas that seems ideal for the task,
entitled “Name of a Dog”. Born in 1906 and growing up as part of the vibrant
Jewish community in Vilnius in Lithuania, Levinas took up residence in
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 101
Paris, enlisted in the French army, was captured and put to work in a for-
estry commando unit for Jewish prisoners of war in Nazi Germany. The
work group Levinas was part of was for a brief period “adopted by a dog”
(this is Rose’s expression; 2011: 29); they named him Bobby, and he would
enthusiastically greet the men in the morning and bark excitedly as they
returned from work in the evening.
As we would expect, Levinas writes lovingly of Bobby when he revisits
his memories of him in the essay written 30 years later. But fond memo-
ries do not prevent Levinas from stating that “dogs are without ethics and
without logos”, proceeding to proclaim that Bobby was “without the brain
needed to universalize maxims and drives” (Rose 2011: 29f.; see Levinas
1990: 152, 153).
What are we to make of these statements? Rose is shocked. Levinas’
ethics being famously founded on the authority of the face, issuing the
commandment “thou shall not kill!” and so placing the moral subject in a
non-optional, exit-forbidding position of absolute responsibility for whom-
ever is encountered as a face, Rose expected that Bobby would be acknowl-
edged as precisely such a face with such a moral authority to it. And yet
this is the recognition that Levinas seems intent on denying Bobby. Why?
Because Bobby is a dog, not a human person. In being “without the brain
needed to universalize maxims and drives”, Bobby fails to qualify as a face
in Levinas’ sense; to be different from humans in regard to these capacities
is tantamount to exclusion from the moral universe. Face means the face of
a human; no other face, the face of no other, will do.
To Rose, “Levinas’ rejection of Bobby is anguishing because the greatest
twentieth-century philosopher of ethical alterity could not unambiguously
make a place in his ethics for the one living being who approached him and
others with full recognition of their humanity” (2011: 30). In denying Bobby
a face in the sense on which everything ethical depends, and from which
everything to do with being called to respond by way of responsibility flows
according to Levinas’ teaching, he effectively “restores the tyranny of the
abstract over the living reality of the world” (ibid.), reinstalling logos as
what differentiates humans from animals, leaving Bobby powerless to gain
ethical entry, no matter how lovingly and trustfully he greets the humans
he gets to know. Evidently disallowing any dialogue, instead insisting on
the radical and unchangeable non-symmetry and non-reciprocity between
himself and the dog, Levinas leaves his readers with a frightening reminder
of the “close parallels between animals who are killed with impunity and
humans who are killed with impunity” (Rose 2011: 31). How can it be that
Levinas, who dedicated his ethics to the memory of the six million Jews
who perished in the Holocaust, offers what is in essence a “replication of the
structure that underlies the possibility of genocide”?, asks Rose, making no
secret of the depth of her disappointment (ibid.).
Rose ends on this note, citing Luce Irigaray’s statement about the “dev-
astating emptiness” to be found in Levinas’ work, said to hinge on his
102  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
dedication to the abstract, demonstrated in his assertion that “the best way
of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes” (2011:
39). When everything is said and done, and contrary to expectations raised
by foregrounding the ethical significance of “alterity” and “exteriority”, of
the ethical Other subverting the omnipresent logic of “the same”, Levinas
effaces difference. That Bobby fails to qualify ethically, as a face in Levinas’
sense, simply for being a dog rather than a human, proves the point beyond
doubt.
I shall not engage with the many critical commentaries that Levinas’
essay about Bobby has provoked, some of which Rose draws on. Like the
commentators, she directs attention to the places in his text that appear
ambiguous – why, for example, does Levinas himself point to the impunity
that holds for both killing humans and animals? More to the point, why isn’t
he taken aback by the parallel? Why doesn’t he allow it to show up his exclu-
sion of Bobby from the moral universe as just as dangerous, just as morally
wrong, in principle, as the exclusion of the Jews by the Nazis? Why allow,
let alone advocate, difference to work against an entire group of beings, be
they animals, be they humans?
These are my questions, not Rose’s, although I take them to be very much
in her spirit. However, there is one instance of ambiguity that I don’t see
Rose paying sufficient attention to, one I consider crucial to coming to grips
with what Levinas is up to in his essay.
Rose tells us that “Levinas calls Bobby the last Kantian in Nazi Germany”
(2011: 29). Why would he do that?
We need to know: what does a Kantian do – here meaning: what is it that
Bobby does that makes him a Kantian? And what makes him the last one?
My answer – which I find neither in Rose nor in Levinas’ text – is that Bobby
shows himself to be a Kantian when he does to them what the Nazis make a
point of not doing: he treats them as ends in themselves, thereby recognizing
their inherent worth, the Würde that Kant considers the hallmark of their
inviolability in moral terms. As opposed to the relativity and commensura-
bility of an entity’s Wert, allowing for trade-offs and compromises, a being’s
Würde speaks to its unconditional, categorical, and irreducible worth qua
what it is in and of itself. This is Kant. It is what he says about humans, not
animals. But it is Kant nonetheless.
In at least one respect, then, Levinas acknowledged that Bobby was a
Kantian – namely, in the way he greeted (treated) humans such as Levinas
and his workmates, in stark contrast to their being denied being treated
that way by the Nazis. Evidently, then, Bobby didn’t need to have “the brain
needed to universalize maxims and drives” in order to actively recognize
the individuals comprising the group of prisoners – recognize them the way
there are morally entitled to qua ends in themselves, at that. Here, Bobby
passes the test while the Nazis fail it. The dog does better, morally speak-
ing, than this group of humans. If somebody in this inter- and cross-species
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 103
constellation has anything of merit to teach the others by way of example, it
is the dog. Bobby walks the talk without even having to talk.
When Rose quotes Levinas as stating that “dogs are without ethics and
without logos” (Rose 2011: 28), I am not quite sure how to interpret his
meaning. Rose offers no explanation, nor do I see the commentators she
draws on doing so. Let me suggest, for the sake of argument, that we grant
Levinas the claim he makes about dogs not having the brain needed to uni-
versalize maxims and drives, and that Bobby, in that sense, is without logos.
The question is: so what? Pressing on, we need to ask: are dogs “without
ethics” because they are without logos?
If “because” is what Levinas means, why doesn’t he say so? Why does he
say “and” instead? And if “because” is, nonetheless, taken to be what he
means to say, does it qualify as a valid proposition? Does the “without eth-
ics” follow, compellingly, from the “without logos”? Well, only if the posses-
sion of logos is a necessary condition for the possession of ethics, for being
what Alice Crary terms “inside ethics” (2015). I see no argument being made
to this effect in Levinas’ text.
It is easier to understand what is meant by being without logos than what
is meant by being without ethics. The latter is both an unusual and an inexact
formulation. One interpretation would be that Bobby is without ethics insofar
as, and thus because, the humans who encounter him treat him as a someone
not worthy of moral consideration. Though this denial of recognition says a
lot about these humans, it doesn’t say anything about Bobby. He comes up
short for reasons concocted by others, members of a different species, reasons
that are arbitrary and selective in focusing only on what he is deemed to be
lacking, ignoring what (who) he positively, demonstrably, is, what he is capa-
ble of doing – for instance, greeting a group of humans deliberately denied
greeting by another. If anything appears odd here, it is the thinking and the
practice of the humans involved, not that exhibited by Bobby.
Let me arrive at a conclusion. Bobby may be without logos (in Levinas’
philosophical sense, going back to Plato), but that lack did not prevent him
from treating Levinas and his comrades in a way worthy of the last Kantian
in Nazi Germany. If there is criticism involved here, its proper target is
certainly not Bobby, but the Nazis. Bobby was able to do what is morally
expected, even mandatory, for anybody who encounters men like Levinas:
to respect them as beings qualifying as ends in themselves, being no mere
means to others, be it Bobby himself. He could pull this off without pos-
sessing logos, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives;
indeed his chosen action did not have to pass some such (cognitively) sophis-
ticated procedure or test, it was much more simple, elementary even, no
need to equivocate over whether to greet or not. Clearly, then, Bobby’s doing
what he did must count as partaking within ethics, not as being “without
ethics”, somehow outside it: Bobby does his part, even though the humans
(or some of them) fail to do theirs.
104  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
VIII
In holding that what Levinas says about Bobby represents a “moment of
truth” about his proposed “ethics as first philosophy”, devastatingly expos-
ing its blind spots and limits as regards the status of animals, Rose is far
from alone. Luce Irigaray’s harsh criticism was mentioned, contributing to
what I understand is now emerging as the “majority reading” (Rose’s term)
of Levinas’ position on animals.
To be precise, Irigaray’s critical focus is not on animals. When posing
the question “Who is the Other?” to Levinasian ethics, the specification she
adds is “if the other of sexual difference is not recognized or known”; it is
not “if the other is an animal [e.g., a dog] instead of a human being”. The
crux of Irigaray’s critique, then, to quote a formulation of hers not cited by
Rose, is that “Levinas abandons the feminine other, leaves her to sink, in
particular into the darkness of a pseudoanimality, in order to return to his
responsibilities in the world of men-amongst-themselves. […] The feminine
other is left without her own specific face. On this point, his philosophy falls
radically short of ethics” (Irigaray 1991: 112, 113).
Note that to drive home how Levinas “abandons the feminine other”,
Irigaray charges him with leaving her to sink “into the darkness of a pseu-
doanimality”. In using this expression, Irigaray alludes to the association
between women and nature that is a long-standing characteristic of Western
philosophy, routinely opposed to that between men and culture (see Lloyd
1993), and subject to thoroughgoing critique in Simone de Beauvoir’s ground-
breaking The Second Sex (1949), recast there as the dualism between men
as exhibiting transcendence, women as exhibiting immanence – and since
immanence means being confined to the reproduction of life (giving birth),
women’s alleged difference from men is partly (not exclusively) to do with
their similarity with animals: the cycle of reproduction points to the way in
which humans are beings of nature, not beings of culture (see Arendt 1958).
Clearly, then, the question “Who is the Other?” is a complicated one
for Levinas’ ethics, inviting critical scrutiny in terms of gender as well as
the human/animal dichotomy. Having pointed to the tendency to associ-
ate women with nature and so (indirectly or directly) with animals, I now
turn to a more detailed assessment of Levinas’ position on animals. I do so
with an ambition to find in Levinas an insight I consider overlooked in both
Rose’s and Irigaray’s criticisms.
For what it’s worth, I spent a fair portion of the 1990s reading Levinas.
I even went to Paris to do an interview with him in his apartment, in 1993,
two years before he passed away (see Vetlesen & Jodalen 1997: 53ff.). It says a
lot about my interest in his ethics that, even though “the face” and “respon-
sibility” were the central topics, it didn’t occur to me to raise the “animal
question”: to ask Levinas whether he holds that an animal may be “a face”
and so a bona fide ethical Other. The point I want to make in mentioning
this is a general one. My lack of interest in the animal question back then
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 105
is reflected in virtually everything written by commentators – be it approv-
ingly, be it critically – on this thinking in the 1980s and 1990s, the latter
being the decade his ethics shot to academic fame and became an intellec-
tual fashion, in no small part fuelled by the attention Jacques Derrida was
paying to it. For example, in the widely read conversations that Philippe
Nemo had with Levinas, published as Ethics and Infinity in 1985, there is not
a single question that mentions animals. Even more noteworthy, this also
goes for The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, edited by Simon Critchley
and Robert Bernasconi and published in 2002, 12 years after his essay about
Bobby first appeared in English.
Given this “absent animal” background, what is the insight I believe can
be found in Levinas’ thinking, and that I consider important precisely with
regard to animals?
Let me I quote from the aforementioned conversation with Nemo, where
Levinas states:
I understand responsibility as responsibility for the Other, thus a
responsibility for what is not my deed, or for what does not even matter
to me; or which precisely does matter to me, is met by me as face. […]
Since the Other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even
having taken on responsibilities in his regard. […] The proximity of the
Other…is a structure that in nowise resembles the intentional relation
which in knowledge attaches to the object – to no matter what object,
be it a human object. Proximity does not revert to this intentionality;
in particular does not revert to the fact that the Other is known to me.
[…] The face orders and ordains me. The face is exposed, menaced, as
if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what
forbids us to kill. The relation to the face is straightaway ethical. The
face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists
in saying: “thou shalt not kill!”. […] The intersubjective relation is a
non-symmetrical relation. In this sense, I am responsible for the Other
without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his
affair. It is precisely insofar as the relationship between the Other and
me is not reciprocal that I am subjection to the Other; and I am “sub-
ject” essentially in this sense. […] I am I in the sole measure that I am
responsible, a non-interchangeable I. I can substitute myself for every-
one, but no one can substitute himself for me.
(Levinas 1985: 95, 96, 97, 86, 87, 98, 101)

It would require a book, or at least chapter, in its own right to investigate

all the claims Levinas is making in this dense passage. For my present pur-
poses, what I consider most important is this: One does not have to be a moral
agent in order to be a moral addressee. I take this to be the thesis that follows
from the two main assertions we just saw him make: first, that responsi-
bility is imposed on the I by (from) the Other, it is received before being
106  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
thought, intended, willed, before being considered at all. And second, that
the responsibility thus received from the other is unidirectional: it is for the
other, directed at the Other without any regard for the Other’s reciprocating
it or not. Being prior to cognition, to the seeking of knowledge, as well as to
volition and intentionality, responsibility is also prior to freedom – or, more
precisely, it is what institutes freedom by giving it a task, a direction, some-
thing (someone) to be free for – the Other is freedom’s raison d’etre, not what
limits, undermines, or frustrates it (Hobbes, Sartre). In the proximity of the
face-to-face encounter, responsibility becomes individuated, concerned as it
is not with any other, or some anonymous other(s), but that Other over there.
True, responsibility is absolute, unconditional, and so universal, applicable
to all. Yet, in concreto, and this is where we see Levinas’ signature, responsi-
bility comes into being as mine: being non-transferable, responsibility helps
constitute my uniqueness, rendering moot the very notion that someone else
could step in for me as well as the concern about what others would do in my
place. There is only this one place here that matters, the place that I occupy
and that is my springboard for directing my attention, orienting my action:
to the Other addressing me.
How does this exposition of what I take Levinas to mean by his central
concepts – responsibility and “the face” – help us assess Rose’s conclusion
that his ethics represents a “rejection of Bobby”, that it denies the animal(s)
a face and so fails spectacularly when put to the test that the animal ques-
tion subjects it to?
I shall nor repeat my above argument to the effect that in calling Bobby
“the last Kantian in Nazi Germany”, Levinas is paying Bobby a compli-
ment. But what about that other statement, so decisive to Rose’s harsh crit-
icism, that Bobby was “without the brain needed to universalize maxims
and drives” (2011: 30). First, let me repeat my “so what?” Second, I suggest
that Bobby, as portrayed for us by Levinas, was perfectly able to treat his
(human) others with the recognition that matches their ethical standing –
so evidently, based on Bobby’s performance, this can be done without the
sort of brain that engages in operations like universalization. To the extent
that a philosopher like Kant considers the possession of such a brain a nec-
essary condition for recognition, Bobby’s example shows that he is wrong.
Moreover, as we just saw, Levinas locates ethical subjectivity in something
prior to engaging in thoughts like “if I were to act in that way, could my action
be universalized, and would others reasonably assent to it?” To do without
that sort of cognitive deliberations in foro interno on the part of the subject
is precisely what characterizes the Levinasian, as distinct from the Kantian,
ethical subject. Again, Bobby is within Levinasian ethics, not without it or
to be excluded from it. Last but not least, since Levinas is known to mark
out his own position in ethics by way of distancing himself from Kant (and
numerous other representatives of the Western canon), why on earth should
he suddenly, when discussing an animal such as Bobby, change sides as it
were and endorse the application of Kantian criteria of ethical subjectivity?
 Call and response, or eating and being eaten 107
In 1992, before the debate over Levinas’ view of animals got started,
Simon Critchley, one of his most prominent interpreters, stated: “As
Levinas writes, it was a dog, Bobby […] who alone recognized Levinas
and his fellow Jewish prisoners of war as human beings during their time
in the camps in Germany. The ambiguity of ethical selfhood is that it is
only as an animal, as a being that eats and is capable of giving its food to
the Other, that I can be for the Other” (1992: 181). Critchley’s statement is
based on a passage in Levinas’ Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence
where he writes that “the incarnate ego, the ego of flesh and blood, can lose
its signification, affirming itself as an animal in its conatus and its joy”;
interestingly, the example Levinas gives is that of a dog (Levinas 1991b:
81). Critchley could also have cited Levinas’ contention that “Only a sub-
ject that eats can be for-the-other, or can signify. Signification, the one-for-
the-other, has meaning only among beings of flesh and blood” (1991b: 74).
Animals, not just humans, are such beings.
If the points I have made are granted, what do they help to illuminate?
Well, they allow us to appreciate Levinas’ understanding of what it means,
and requires, to be an ethical subject, that is to say, the one among “the
ethical party of two” (Bauman 1993) situated as the party on whom respon-
sibility is imposed, coming from without as it were and pre-cognitively,
pre-intentionally, and unasked-for at that (as explained above). In other
words, what we have been looking at is whether Bobby can be said to be a
subject in Levinas’ sense, and the answer is yes.
In a way I would expect to be crucial to Rose, however, the discussion
has been an exercise in the wrong direction, and so beside the point. Why?
Because the thrust of her own interrogation is to do what that other party,
that is to say, the question of who is to count as moral addressee, as distinct
from subject (agent). The shock she tells us about stems from what Levinas,
on her reading (shared by so many others), says about Bobby – and so, writ
large, animals in general – as a moral addressee. It is in that respect that
Rose finds Levinas’ position so utterly disappointing.
As I stated above, in my view one of the strengths of Levinas’ ethics is that
it advocates the thesis that one does not have to be a moral agent (subject)
to be a moral addressee. What does that mean? It means that the subject is
responsible for the other (addressee) regardless of reciprocity; responsibility
is prior to whether the other “pays back” in some form or other or not. This
makes for the non-symmetry mentioned above, being of a sort that is truly
radical: the weaker – more destitute, naked, alone – the Other, the greater
the subject’s responsibility. If anything, it is precisely the Other’s lack of
power in the form of resourcefulness that lends authority – peculiar moral
authority – to the call directed at the subject: thou shalt not kill – knowing
full well, both of them, that there is nothing to prevent the agent from doing
exactly that, nothing else than the said authority.
Where does this leave us? I have argued that Bobby is to be regarded as a
moral subject in accordance with Levinas’ ethics – not, I need to emphasize,
108  Call and response, or eating and being eaten
in the full sense of being such subject, insofar as that requires capacities for
responsibility (and hence for such things as blameworthiness) that Bobby
lacks, but in the weaker sense that is so wonderfully at display in Levinas’
portrait, showing how a dog such as Bobby is able to act (yes, act) in such
a way as make a difference for others, in this case the group of prisoners
Levinas was part of. That being said, I have also argued that, to Levinas,
one does not have to be a moral subject to be a moral addressee. So, if
Bobby’s being a subject (as just qualified) is not what grounds his status as
an addressee, what is?
It’s his vulnerability, the vulnerability he shares with humans such as the
Jews and the Nazis whose company he keeps, making no moral distinction –
discrimination – between them, although perhaps he would, should the one
group start treating him so badly as the Nazis treat the Jews. But discrimi-
nation among the humans is not the issue here. “Only a subject that eats”, we
saw Levinas asserting, “can be for-the-other”; to be so “has meaning only
among beings of flesh and blood”. To which I should add, as does Levinas:
“Sensibility can be a vulnerability, an exposedness to the other or a saying
only because it is an enjoyment” (1991b: 74). Nobody can seriously dispute
that such sensibility, such enjoyment, is just as real in the dog Bobby, and
in other animals, as in humans. That Bobby cannot reciprocate, or will not
reciprocate, the action that follows from a subject (agent) who acts out of
responsibility for him and his plight, has no bearing on the ethical issue we
are discussing; what he cannot or will not do is precisely what we have seen
Levinas hold to be the salient defining mark of moral addresses in general.
Thus there is no Levinas-internal reason to include as such addressees only
humans, and to exclude animals such as Bobby. That reciprocity is uncalled
for and that responsibility is a one-way affair is Levinas’ central thesis,
the signature of his ethics, and the reason he rightly regards it as strongly
opposed to its philosophical rivals, be it Kantian deontology, Bentham-
inspired utilitarianism, or contract theory from Locke to Rawls.
3 A dog named Bobby
Animals as agents and addressees

I
In Justification and Application, Jürgen Habermas takes up the challenge
that ecological ethics poses for the Kant-inspired position he defends in
his proposed “discourse ethics”. His starting point is that, owing to their
“anthropocentric profile”, moral theories of the Kantian type seem to be
“blind to questions of the moral responsibility of human beings for their
nonhuman environment” (1993: 105). More specifically, this blindness can
be traced to the assumption that “moral problems arise only within the cir-
cle of subjects capable of speech and action” (ibid.); they arise, that is, only
between beings who share the same capacities for speech and action – and
only humans are held to be such beings. The question is: Should our moral
feelings, judgement, and actions be directed exclusively to subjects capa-
ble of speech and action? Or should they, in a morally compelling way, be
directed to animals as well? Is there a moral obligation to protect animals?
I bracket for now the distinction that Habermas makes between humans
as beings capable of speech and action, on the one hand, and animals as
lacking these capacities, on the other. We simply note that this is the dis-
tinction he is committed to, as is his colleague Günther Patzig, whose work
Habermas discusses in order to clarify his own position. Patzig is credited
with articulating the moral intuitions that “speak an unambiguous lan-
guage” in this matter – intuitions to the effect that “the avoidance of cruelty
toward all creatures capable of suffering is a moral duty” and that animals
confront us as “vulnerable creatures whose physical integrity we must pro-
tect for its own sake” (ibid.). Contra Kant, this means that we have duties
towards animals, not merely in relation to them for reasons stemming from
our duties to ourselves qua moral agents.
So much for the intuitions highlighted by Patzig. For Habermas, the
question is: How to square them with an anthropocentric approach in which
“duties in the strict sense can only follow from rules that rational beings
impose upon themselves through insight”? (ibid.). According to the model
upheld in Habermas’ discourse ethics, only those norms qualify as valid
that get, and truly deserve, the recognition of all affected parties. However,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003317692-4
110  A dog named Bobby
as Patzig points out, since animals are not creatures of a kind that “could
enter into a relation of principled reciprocity with us”, what becomes the
status of duties towards animals? Patzig declares himself ready to dispense
with the symmetry between duties and rights that is conventionally (follow-
ing Kant) wed to the reciprocal recognition between free and equal subjects,
meaning human such. Accordingly, he (re)defines duties towards animals
in an asymmetrical manner: “Animals do not have duties toward humans,
but humans have duties toward animals” (1993: 107); hence, the greater the
sensitivity to pain of animals, the more onerous duties should be. Habermas
observes that this would amount to a transformation of the concept of duty
as coined by Kant; “it is no longer a question of duties in the deontological
sense but of the relative preferability of goods” (ibid.).
In his attempt to do justice to the intuitions he lists – crucially, that we
should not neglect animals callously, let alone torment them – Patzig tries
to connect the injunction to protect animals, inspired by Bentham’s “can
they suffer?”, to the deontological theory. Patzig’s argument goes like this:
“It would be irrational to make a radical distinction between human and
non-human creatures where the latter behave in such a way that we are com-
pelled to assume that they are capable of experiencing pain and suffering.
Thus the prohibition on arbitrarily inflicting suffering and callous neglect
is extended beyond the human domain to include non-human creatures”
(1993: 108). Habermas’ comment on this statement is worth quoting in full:

Regrettably, the “thus” here masks a non-sequitur, for the principle of

generalization does not entail that the norm of refraining from inflict-
ing pain on others should be extended to encompass all creatures sensi-
tive to pain, so long as this principle demands only equal consideration
of the interest of all those we may assume are capable of adopting the
perspective of all others. Apart from their potential “yes” or “no”
responses it cannot be determined whether such a norm could meet
with the agreement of all and hence is valid. Animals, as Patzig cor-
rectly emphasizes, simply do not belong to the parties to the contractual
reciprocity that underlies human morality.
(1993: 108)

This is a remarkable passage. In essence, it says that Habermas sees no way

in which the principle of generalization would allow, let alone demand, the
norm of refraining from inflicting pain on others to encompass all crea-
tures sensitive to pain. Why? Because the principle demands that only
(exclusively) those we may assume are capable of adopting the perspective
of all others be given consideration in the form of having their interests pro-
tected and respected. Indeed, the principle of generalization as Habermas
understands it demands this – it demands, as he himself points out so as to
refute Patzig’s argument, that the moral domain be limited to “those we
may assume are capable of adopting the perspective of all others”. But to
 A dog named Bobby 111
insist that the principle entails this limitation with regard to who should be
included within the domain of those worthy of moral consideration, is to
beg the question. It simply presupposes that this principle, understood this
way, is the appropriate and valid principle in the matter. No alternatives are
considered.
If anything, what Habermas shows is the burden of proof that comes
with the decision to take this principle, and the requirements for its proper
generalization, for granted. Note what is happening here: Patzig gives his
argument for refining duties towards animals in an asymmetrical man-
ner. Habermas dismisses the argument by pointing out that it cannot be
squared with the requirements of a moral theory where ascription of moral
status depends on symmetry in the form of reciprocity between agents and
addressees. This is precisely the type of theory – the position – Patzig is
out to challenge, wanting to show up its blindness towards animals. How
can Habermas reject the case for an asymmetric, non-reciprocity-requiring
moral theory by saying that it does not conform to the symmetric and reci-
procity-requiring one?
Why should only those creatures be granted moral consideration whom
we humans assume are capable of adopting the perspective of all others?
What does the capacity for doing this have to do with moral considerabil-
ity? What is the argument to show that the former be a condition for the
latter? Why is this capacity the morally salient one among all sorts of capac-
ities? And to move to the next stage in Habermas’ argument, why does there
have to be a “yes” or “no” response forthcoming from all those affected by
a norm in order to assess its validity? That for lack of linguistic capacities
such a “yes” or “no” will not be articulated, say, by the animals affected
by some action, is trivial. But why grant such moral importance to the fact
of the lack of this capacity? And does it appear plausible to proceed from
this, as does Habermas, to the suggestion that “it cannot be determined”
whether such a norm as “refrain from inflicting pain” would be accepted by
the animals affected by it? Is it so that for lack of linguistic feedback from
animals subject to the infliction of pain, we humans are simply agnostic
about whether they want protection from it or not? Would it be paternalism
on the part of us to decide, on behalf of the animals, that such pain is wrong
and should be avoided? If so, is such paternalism more problematic than
the attempt it entails to prevent what is seen as wrongdoing against animals
who cannot “speak for themselves” the way we humans – backed by a moral
theory some of us are committed to – demand?
Habermas goes on to point out how constitutive for sociocultural forms
of life are “social interaction mediated by the use of language oriented to
mutual understanding”; the person can develop an inner life and achieve a
stable identity only to the extent that “he also externalizes himself in com-
municatively generated interpersonal relations and implicates himself in an
ever denser and more differentiated network of reciprocal vulnerabilities”
(1993: 109). The upshot is that “nobody can preserve his integrity by himself
112  A dog named Bobby
alone”; such individual integrity “requires the stabilization of a network of
symmetrical relations of recognition”, showing up morality as “aimed at
the chronic susceptibility of personal integrity implicit in the structure of
linguistically mediated interactions” (ibid.).
Let us grant here that this is a valid description of how human persons,
in their individual vulnerability, depend on membership in a community
with others where they are recognized; only in a social setting allowing for
symmetrical relationships can each and every person become a truly indi-
vidual such and be protected in his or her integrity. That these are genuinely
social tasks and accomplishments that no individual can attain or preserve
by him- or herself alone is an invaluable insight that goes back to Aristotle.
The question is what happens when this model, conceived for humans-
among-humans, serves as the standard for non-humans such as animals.
Habermas argues that in the case of humans, the personal integrity
“implicit in the structure of linguistically mediated interactions…is more
deep-seated than the tangible vulnerability of bodily integrity, though con-
nected with it” (1993: 109. Why is this important? Because this difference
between personal and bodily integrity “disappears in the animal world”; it
does so “because we do not attribute personality to creatures with whom
we cannot speak and cannot come to an understanding about something in
the world” (ibid.). But again, why should we need to be able to speak with
an animal in Habermas’ linguistic sense in order to attribute personality to
it? And why does recognition of the difference between personal and bodily
integrity depend on our sharing the gift of spoken language with the animal
in question? Can’t we get at what is individual, about a particular animal
without the mediation, or access, of spoken language? As Habermas him-
self maintains, these are capacities, and (social-linguistic) practices char-
acteristic of and indispensable to humans. If the specific, capacities-based
standard that applies to us does not fit the case of animals, so what? Doesn’t
what characterizes us, uniquely at that, according to the argument made,
also show up an evolutionary selectivity about us, demonstrating not only
what we are and can do, but also – by the same token – what we are not and
cannot do? If we cannot access and understand animals the way we can
other humans, isn’t that a specificity and a limitation that help define us, not
the animals?
Habermas acknowledges that we do in fact communicate with animals in
a different way from that just described “once we involve them in our social
interactions, in however asymmetrical a fashion” (1993: 109). He mentions
our association with domestic animals as a case where our conscience is
particularly insistent; it is so “concerning species with which we can com-
municate with particular ease”, he quotes Panzig maintaining (ibid.). But
again, isn’t this to allow the way animals are treated to be determined
by features to do with us, not features to do with the animals? Granting
that some non-human creatures participate in our social interactions, we
“encounter them in the role of an alter ego as an other in need of protection;
 A dog named Bobby 113
this grounds the expectation that we will assume a fiduciary responsibility
for their claims” (ibid.). This is as far as Habermas is willing to go: “There
exists a quasi-moral responsibility toward animals that we encounter in the
role (if not completely filled) of a second person, one whom we look upon as
if it were an alter ego. We can adopt a performative [as distinct from objecti-
fying] attitude toward many animals, though not toward plants” (1993: 110).
Within the interactions between us and the domestic animals Habermas
has in mind, we must be able to “ascribe characteristics of agents” to them,
among others “the ability to initiate utterances and to address them to us”.
In this situation, “we have duties that are analogous to our moral duties,
because like the latter they are rooted in the presuppositions of communi-
cate action. Of course, they are analogous to moral duties only to the extent
that the asymmetries in the interactions admit comparison with relations of
recognition between persons” (ibid.). The bottom line is that, to the extent
that animals can enjoy moral protection from us, they may do so “only
within the intersubjective horizon of our modes of interaction. Human
beings always find themselves already within this horizon and as persons
can never leave it, whereas animals belong to other species and other forms
of life and are integrated into our forms of life only through participation in
our interactions” (1993: 111).
In discussing the moral status of animals, we must be careful not to con-
flate what I maintain are two separate issues (as argued earlier): one has to
do with what it takes to enact responsibility, and in this sense to qualify as a
full-fledged moral agent. Here Habermas, as we have seen, holds the partak-
ing in linguistically mediated interactions to be the decisive criterion: moral
agents are agents possessing communicative competence, meaning agents
capable of raising and responding adequately (i.e., rationally, by way of cit-
ing reasons) to validity-claims. The other issue has to do with what it takes
to be a moral addressee – that is to say, at the receiving end of responsibility
as exercised by moral agents. To not acknowledge that there is this distinc-
tion would mean (in the version I shall consider here, relevant to Habermas)
to collapse the issue of what agency requires into the issue of what being an
addressee requires, thus making the former the condition for the latter.
On the basis of the account of Habermas’ discussion of animals above,
where does he stand on this issue?
There are several things to take into consideration in arriving at an
answer.
First, notice where Habermas from the very start places the burden of
argument: namely with anyone who, like Patzig, advocates that the moral
domain be extended from including only humans to comprising animals as
well. In placing the burden one-sidedly on those who dissent from an anthro-
pocentric framework, this framework is taken for granted as the point of
departure, and the point of reference, for the discussion; hence there is no
burden of argument in the other direction, for limiting the moral domain to
humans only in the first place.
114  A dog named Bobby
Second, to take the anthropocentric framework as a given in the sense of
not questioning it, only the challenge to it, means that the discussion centres
on the extent to which “new” candidates (such as animals) for inclusion in
the moral domain possess the same, or relevantly similar, capacities to those
already included, so that the more they do so, the better their chances of
being admitted. In this way, as Levinas would say, otherness is reduced to
the same; genuine otherness – from humans taken as the standard – counts
against inclusion and operates as a reason why they must be excluded.
Third, the formalism of the approach taken by Habermas, unmistakably
Kantian at that, presents it as a context-free, universal stance, enabling us to
settle the issue of moral status sub specie aeternitatis, by reference to capaci-
ties-related criteria such as linguistic competence. This masks the historicity
of this stance, the fact that “the denial of thought, feeling and consciousness
to nonhuman animals” that Habermas subscribes to (albeit not in the crude
version of Cartesian animals as “mere automata”) is a historically recent
phenomenon, culturally specific to the West. B.E. Rollin, in his aptly titled
article “How the animals lost their minds. Animal mentation and scientific
ideology” (1990), shows that before the turn of the twentieth century there
was a strong belief in in both animal cognition and emotion by scientists
and lay people alike. As we saw in Chapter 1, Darwin highlighted an evo-
lutionary continuity with animals and humans for both emotions and cog-
nition; differences are differences in degree, not in kind. Rollin holds that
the ontological shift away from this knowledge was due to a reductionist
trend in society in general, with a new “emphasis on sweeping away frills,
excesses, superfluities” (quoted in Kessler 2019: 242). As Caroline Merchant
demonstrates in The Death of Nature, the Enlightenment joined forces with
the scientific as well as industrial revolution from the seventeenth century
onward to embark on a course that would advance the desire to take from
more-than-human nature whatever was wanted, doing so with impunity and
for the sake of “progress” and without obligation to the countless non-hu-
man species exploited for human needs and ends (see Kessler 2019: 243).
More specifically, Habermas’ neglect of historical change and of how the
contexts for humans’ experience of animals differ, both between cultures
and from one epoch to the next, is betrayed in his statement that “we can
adopt a performative attitude toward many [i.e., domestic] animals, though
not toward plants” (1993: 110). Who is this we? Hardly a universal and time-
less one. While we would have to go way back in pre-modern time in the
Western society Habermas probably alludes to find a performative attitude
to plans, such an attitude is an important part of everyday life among many
indigenous peoples in the world today, though under enormous pressure to
abandon such practices (dismissed as based on superstition) and replace
them with the modern scientific world view theorized by Max Weber and of
which Habermas is a contemporary champion. (I have discussed the persis-
tence of the Cartesian view of nature in Habermas’ overall theory of moder-
nity in Vetlesen 2019.)
 A dog named Bobby 115
Fourth, while many would agree that linguistic communication is a
crucial part of the interaction instrumental to the development as well as
protection of human identity and integrity, Habermas simply presumes,
rather than argues, that such communication is to be regarded as relevant
to relationships between humans and animals – only to turn his not finding
it there against the animals, as proof of something humans have that they
lack. Why should that be important, for whom, and with what sort of impli-
cations for the issue under discussion, the moral status of animals? Reading
Habermas’ reply to Patzig, it is striking that virtually everything that is said
about animals concerns what they (presumably) can’t do, when compared
to what humans can do, that is. Little is said about what animals can do, and
nothing at all about what (some) animals can do that humans can’t. As part
of this, there is a certain nonchalance in making very general claims about
animals without distinguishing between wild, domestic, and pets; and in
particular, in not bothering to consult the research carried out in animals’
studies before stating, matter-of-factly, that “an animal does not experience
its pain reflexively like a human being, who in suffering is cognizant of the
fact that he is in pain” (1993: 110). Does this really hold for, say, a wolf, a cat,
and a pig in pain, to pick an example from each of the three categories men-
tioned? Besides being problematic as a descriptive characterization of how
“an animal” falls short of experiencing pain in the complex ways humans
do, the statement seems to encourage the normative conclusion that, for this
reason, the animal’s pain is less worthy of moral consideration.
Fifth, consider the way that Habermas makes claims for moral considera-
tion dependent on being capable of “adopting the perspective of all others”.
Even if we grant that this is a crucial ability in morally relevant interac-
tions between humans, there is little in terms of attempting to adopt the
perspective of animals (or some particular such) in Habermas’ text. And
whereas “adopting the perspective of all others” is certainly a tall order in
most human communities, the prerogative of the tiny minority that ascends
to the post-conventional stage of the Kohlbergian model Habermas’ relies
on in his discourse ethics (see 1990), and as such presumably not present at
all in animals, including mammals like chimpanzees. Studies carried out in,
say, South America are fraught with accounts of how adept various species
of animals are in adopting the perspective of their counterparts, not only
other animals at that – their ability to put themselves in the shoe of the
humans hunting them and anticipate their next move is the stuff of which
their daily life is made. In existential terms, and given the increasing phys-
ical proximity imposed by humans on the animals (as exemplified in the
corona pandemic), they are no less dependent on the ability to read and
adjust to their species others than are humans – perhaps more so.
Sixth, there is Habermas’ choice to focus on animals that participate
in our interactions, observing that they can “enjoy moral protection only
within the intersubjective horizon of our modes of interaction” (1993: 110).
Given this focus, the animals Habermas has in mind are domestic ones,
116  A dog named Bobby
such as cats or dogs; this is as concrete as he gets. To be sure, it seems
reasonable to hold that animals that we have chosen to possess and that
form part of our “expanded” family are entitled to our protection, more
so than are animals we have never encountered, let alone developed a close
and long-lasting relationship with. In other words, we need to differentiate
between animals that are “integrated into our forms of life…through partic-
ipation in our interactions” (1993: 111), and all the animals that do not and
never will. Recall that in saying this, Habermas comments: “The limits of
our quasi-moral responsibility toward animals are reached once humans,
in their role as members of one species, confronts animals as exemplars of
another” (ibid.). Why does he say this? The way I read it, his claim is that in
the moment we humans confront animals as our “species other”, our qua-
si-moral responsibility towards them ceases.
This is highly problematic. As it stands, the claim entails that moral
responsibility as incumbent on humans is confined in its reach to species
kin: other human beings. Membership of another species is tantamount to
being, and having to remain, on the outside of the moral domain.
But I doubt that Habermas means it as categorically as that. Preceding
his comment, as we saw, is the attention he pays to animals as “inte-
grated into our forms of life…through participation in our interactions”.
Species membership does not per se determine the matter, in the form
of limiting the reach of responsibility to fellow humans only. There is
a gradualism involved in that, insofar as some animals participate and
others do not, those that do are entitled to a moral consideration that the
others are not.
Of course, I have already said as much. But only now can we appreciate
the full context. What I find highly problematic is the way Habermas here
appears to give moral weight to a factor that is wholly contingent – namely,
whether or not an animal participates in interactions with us. Why should
that be a morally salient factor? One could respond that animals we form
relationships with are animals we come to love, precisely in their individual
particularity (Habermas hesitates to use the word “personality”); and from
this emotionally charged closeness springs a type of moral responsibility
on our part that is “naturally” reserved for this particular animal, as such
denied all others.
But such a closeness-oriented ethics, giving pride of place to the emo-
tional impact of forming a relationship with a particular “other”, does not
at all square with Habermas’ own moral theory, being post-Kantian and
deontological; in fact, it sits much better with one of its main rivals, the
Carol Gilligan-inspired “ethics of care” (1982). Impartiality as conceived
and endorsed by Habermas demands that the contingency of knowing or
not knowing, loving or not loving the other, be abstracted from when adopt-
ing the proper moral point of view. Habermas offers no argument to justify
why the contingency he denies moral import among humans should make a
moral difference with regard to animals.
 A dog named Bobby 117
However, and seventh, there is another aspect to this, more subtle and
important. Let me put it like this: Habermas’ discussion with Patzig is an
exemplary exercise in methodological and moral individualism. In taking as
his framework from start to finish the relationships with humans that an
animal may be part of, Habermas restricts his analysis to that of one-to-
one encounters. Though admittedly pedagogically attractive, it is striking
that Habermas (like Kant before him, with his predilection for horse and
dog examples) chooses to concentrate on the issue of the individual moral
agent’s responsibility for individual animals. Why is this important? In
advancing his argument within that setting, Habermas misses out on the
pivotal issue at the core of holistic theories concerned with the conditions
under which animals currently live – namely, how to make sure that they
thrive and persist as the other-than-human life forms they are, rather than
being exploited to the point of decimation and extinction. An ecologically
informed holistic approach to the animal question has to acknowledge that
when the whole (the ecosystem and biosphere of which animals are a part,
taking the form of habitats and biotopes in the concrete, local case) is under
threat, each individual is. In nature the individual animal can only survive
provided its ongoing interaction with other individuals, with members of
other species (predator-prey), and with its total environment is thriving;
and these inter- and cross-species interactions can only be intact provided
the whole (the ecosystem, say, the forest) they help make up, and within
which each species occupies an indispensable role, is and remains intact. To
be sure, we may want to argue, in keeping with methodological and moral
individualism, that the individual tiger has intrinsic value for what it is in
itself (per analogy, if you will, with Kant’s position on the inviolability of
the human person). But once removed from the jungle, this intrinsic value,
conceived as independent of the tiger’s wider environment, its reliance on so
many “others”, would collapse. Therefore, the moral questions – of agency,
of status, of responsibility, obligations, and rights – must address the hab-
itat that every single exemplar is dependent upon: if you want to save the
tiger, you need to save the jungle. There is no way that methodological indi-
vidualism can be permitted to translate into moral individualism here, so
that the individual would trump community, the exemplar the (eco) system,
in the sense of the former being self-sufficient in its possession of intrin-
sic value vis-à-vis the latter. Indeed, the juxtaposition in such a version is
entirely misguided within an ecological framework, meaning factually false:
no thriving and value-able whole, no thriving and value-able individual.
The conditions of existence ecologically understood are paramount; any
moral theory that concerns itself with creatures – be they humans, be they
animals – whose lives depend on nature needs to take these conditions as its
point of departure.
To be sure, this is a way of framing the issue of the moral status of animals
that must appear totally foreign to the approach pursued by Habermas – yet
it is a commonplace in environmental ethics as elaborated by prominent
118  A dog named Bobby
figures such as Paul Taylor, J. Baird Callicott, and Holmes Rolston during
the last four decades. My point here is not simply that Habermas discusses
the animal question in a way that omits ecology; perhaps he thinks that
doing so is part of an intellectual division of labour, allowing for an assess-
ment of the moral status of animals that can be carried out abstractly, con-
centrating on procedures and on the validity of norms, as Kant-inspired
ethics is wont to do.
But such a separation between environmental and animal ethics will not
do. The moral questions to do with animals must address the habitat that
the physical existence of every single individual, regardless of particular
species, depends upon; neglecting this cross-species dependence is a non-
starter in theory no less than in real life. Try, and the consequences are but a
lesson in how to self-destruct. To acknowledge this is to realize that there is
something reductionist, verging on atomistic, in the way Habermas removes
(abstracts) animals from their generic form of existence in a complex inter-
play with a large number of other species in nature; removes them, that is,
from the whole of which they are parts (participants) and outside of which
they cannot live, only to let them – one by one – become a topic for ethics
and a concern of practical moral import the moment they come into contact
with specifically human forms of life, as not-so-fully-capable partners in our
networks of interaction.
Yet it is not only from an ecological point of view that Habermas’ failure
to situate animals within their proper life-context in their natural habitats
is problematic. Removing them by way of abstraction from their natural
environment, whether it be the forest, the lake or the sea, amounts to impos-
ing a veritable limitation: in making animals’ entry into “our networks of
communication” the criterion for discussing them, Habermas leaves out of
consideration all animals that are not met upon by humans within those
networks. In other words, animals are effectively restricted to domestic
such, exemplarily to pets like cats and dogs. For lack of partaking of rela-
tionships with humans, non-domestic animals of all sorts are delegated to
a kind of analytical no mans’ land, with the consequence that the question
of these animals’ moral status, as bearing on their right to protection, is
simply not addressed. This is a high price to pay for restricting the frame-
work for discussion, and so the entities to be considered, the way Habermas
does. Clearly the types of animals with which we do not interact the way
we do with dogs or horses put the issues of environmental and animal eth-
ics alike into much sharper focus than do domestic animals. It is precisely
the element of otherness exhibited in, say, a tiger or an eagle owl that com-
mands our attention, an otherness tied to these animals’ absence from our
networks of interaction, and one that crucially depends on the tiger’s or
eagle owl’s non-assimilation to our current life form, increasingly urban-
ized and remote – mentally as well as geographically – from what remains
of their original, natural habitat. This being so, a major issue in an ethics
concerned with animals today is to do with the importance of ensuring that
 A dog named Bobby 119
wild animals, animals in the wild, will have a viable future, since it can no
longer be taken for granted that they will. It will require concerted efforts to
secure the future existence of wild animals, relying as it does on successful
efforts to protect the natural habitats from which their lives are inseparate,
habitats that today are being fragmented, spoiled, and destroyed by human
activities, causing the animals to be decimated or even to go extinct not as a
consequence of one-on-one encounters with humans (Habermas’ favoured
framework) but as unheard, unseen casualties of the modus operandi of
silent killing.
The historicity and selectivity witnessed in Habermas’ approach to ani-
mals justify seeing it as a case of shifting baseline syndrome: Habermas
takes for granted the condition of animals, and the nature of their relations
with humans, as they both appear at a particular moment in history. It thus
becomes “natural” to concentrate on some animals rather than others. One
of the many ways in which anthropocentrism is taken for granted as both
point of departure and framework is that animals of the kinds that humans
nowadays meet upon within their lifeworld, are the animals considered
as candidates for moral consideration. That some animals are within this
human-centred lifeword, others outside it, is the result of a long historical
development, in the course of which animals – generally speaking – have
become decreasingly wild, increasingly domestic, rendering the sheer future
existence of those still wild, or living in what is still wilderness, precarious
in a way that is truly unprecedented. The impact on humans-animals rela-
tions as well as on the plight of animals involved in the historical changes we
are talking about is wholly neglected in Habermas’ discussion with Patzig.
Before concluding, however, there is another discussion to take into
account, where Habermas addresses at least one of the issues I just faulted
him for neglecting. In his reply to another colleague, Henning Ottmann, he
considers extending ethics “beyond the domain of interpersonal relations to
our relationship with creatures that cannot fulfil the conditions for respon-
sible action” (1982: 247). This sounds promising. Significantly, however,
Habermas goes on to frame the issue within what he calls “the ecological
problematic”, observing that “with the heightening of our technical power
of disposing over nature, there also comes increased responsibility for the
natural processes set in motion by our interventions”. He then goes on to
say: “This problematic can be dealt with satisfactorily within the anthropo-
centric framework of a discourse ethic” (ibid.). Well, can it? What justifies
Habermas’ confidence?
Habermas considers the ethics of animal protection that advocates the
extension of “one’s neighbors” to “all affected living creatures with whose
suffering we can empathise”, the intuition being that “all those creatures
rescued by Noah’s Ark should enjoy the protection of subjects with whom
we interact on the level of equals” (1982: 248). He comments that attempts to
open up “a moral access to nature-in-itself are by no means absurd”; none-
theless, he warns that we should not “permit ourselves to be cajoled by such
120  A dog named Bobby
intuitions into ignoring the difficulties we encounter here, just as with the
analogous attempts to gain theoretical access to nature-in-itself” (ibid.).
It is not clear why Habermas moves the way he does from “affected living
creatures”, animals included, to the question of gaining access to “nature-
in-itself”. If not a case of changing the subject, the move has the effect of
casting the question in the manner of Kantian metaphysics and Kantian
epistemology: the in-itself attributed to nature here abstracts from the living
creatures whose suffering is plain to see (experience, relate to) in keeping
with the intuition mentioned above; nature-in-itself mystifies the suffering
of the animals as experienced – without doubt or epistemic qualifications
– by us. This is the very phenomenon that gives rise to the intuition behind
the sort of ethics Habermas purports to consider. Shifting the issue from its
original context onto a Kantian inventory where matters of method (access)
have primacy over subject matter is of little gain as far as doing justice to it
qua moral issue is concerned.
But Habermas also offers a more specific argument: “An ethic that gets
rid of its ‘anthropocentrism’ extends the circle of addressees lower in the
scale of nature; but again, the limits of empathy into alien life remain blurry.
And is it not the case that the precepts of sympathetic solidarity soon come
to a halt – namely already with plant life – if they are not to come into con-
flict with the firmer imperatives of the self-preservation of the human race?”
(1982: 248).
As Habermas must know, this is a question, not an argument. Yet we
need be in no doubt about where Habermas stands. The case for solidar-
ity with non-human species and life forms comes up against a limit once
it comes into conflict with “the firmer imperatives of the self-preservation
of the human race” (ibid.). To be sure, Habermas is perfectly right in mak-
ing explicit that this is what anthropocentrism in ethics in fact implies. But
what we want to know is not simply what this position entails with regard
to the status of animals, or plants. We want to know whether the position
is convincing.
Rather than providing a separate argument, Habermas states that “the
basic philosophical question” here is to do with how an ethic of animal pro-
tection (or generally, a non-anthropocentric ethic) “could be grounded at the
level of learning attained in the modern understanding of the world” (ibid.).
What is he referring to? Well, it is the kind of world view that Habermas, fol-
lowing Max Weber, terms modern and scientific, replacing the “mythical”
world views of which, say, an animist cosmology like the one discussed by
Rose in the previous chapter would be an example. The “disenchantment”
of the world Weber spoke of entails that nature in toto is denuded, is rid of
so-called occult forces of all kinds, that is to say, everything psychic and
mental, everything exhibiting interiority and subjectivity, feelings and intel-
ligence, purpose and value; in the form of a sharp ontological divide, if not
an abyss, the latter are regarded as qualities the sole possessors of which are
human beings.
 A dog named Bobby 121
There is no need to go further into Habermas’ debt to Weber’s distinc-
tion between mythical and modern world views (see Habermas 1984, 1987;
Vetlesen 2015). What matters here is that in subscribing to Weber’s notion
of disenchantment of “external” (i.e., non-human) nature, Habermas main-
tains that for this domain of reality there is “only one theoretically fruitful
attitude, namely the objectivating attitude of the natural-scientific, exper-
imental observer” (1982: 243f.), facilitating the interchangeability of the
(human) observer (scientist), the repeatability of the experiments/observa-
tions carried out in a controlled setting (exemplarily: the lab), and the rep-
licability of the results obtained. In other words, everything to do with the
particularity of the human participants, and with the particularity of what
can be encountered “in nature” given the specifics of the spatio-temporal
setting – that is to say, everything that goes to make up the local knowledge
characteristic of indigenous cultures’ “mythical” world views – is abstracted
from in the model that Habermas takes over from Weber and from Bacon
and Descartes before him. The conditions of instrumental action of a sort
requiring an objectifying attitude, enabled by adopting a detached, neutral/
impartial stance to it, Habermas maintains, “bind our knowledge of nature
to the interest of possible technical control over natural processes”; labour,
understood as Marx did in Capital as the behavioural system of instrumen-
tal action, is the “invariant relation of the [human] species to its natural
environment” (1972: 36, 309). This being so, attempts to “use the experi-
mental potential gathered in non-objectifying dealings with external nature
for purposes of knowledge” would, Habermas contends, “lead back to met-
aphysics, and thus behind the levels of learning reached in the modern age
into a re-enchanted world” (1982: 245).
Thus Habermas repeats his warning against falling behind “the level of
learning” attained in a Western modernity based on disenchantment. There
seems to be, for him, something sacrosanct about this learning. While it
would be foolish to deny that the science-based world view he espouses has
brought genuine progress in many areas of life, it would be disingenuous to
deny its complicity in the exploitation of the natural world that is the “dark
side” of the progress reached, a side that Habermas is conspicuously less
interested in investigating than were his predecessors in Critical Theory,
Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Fromm, and Marcuse.
To end this section, consider Habermas’ aforementioned statement that
“the precepts of sympathetic solidarity soon come to a halt – namely already
with plant life – if they are not to come into conflict with the firmer imper-
atives of the self-preservation of the human race” (1982: 248). Why is there
this conflict? Why should a stance of solidarity with non-human species – be
it plants, be it animals – need to conflict with the preservation of humans?
What kind of society has the better historical record when it comes to pre-
serving, as opposed to overexploiting and destroying, the natural world on
which the preservation of human life depends? Why indeed is conceiving of,
and acting upon, the nature-humans relationship as one of conflict superior
122  A dog named Bobby
to its historically enacted alternative, that of the interplay between and
across species within what animists term – and experience as – a compre-
hensive ecology of selves, so many different selves? Does Habermas’ notion
of conflict acknowledge the fundamental ecological insight that species are
inter-dependent and that each one of them – humankind not excluded – can
only thrive if others do?
Habermas does not seem willing to recognize this insight and its impli-
cations. Indeed, the fact that humans remain just as dependent on nature in
the present era where the “scientific” world view reigns as in the pre-modern
era, is not heeded in his theory. Ultimately, the possibility of a non-instru-
mental and non-exploitative relationship with non-human creatures such
as animals championed by Benjamin and Adorno is ruled out for concep-
tual reasons in Habermas’ oeuvre from start to finish. Why? Because on his
view the modern type of mastery over nature is “a product of the human
species as a whole, and not of an individual epoch’, a specific class or a
surpassable situation”; thus the “transcendental necessity” of instrumental
action aimed at technical control over nature, making for what he considers
the “invariant” relationship between humans and nature (1971: 88). This
being so, Habermas’ concern with falling behind insights already attained
can be turned against him: that the human species in its self-ascribed role
and entitlement as nature’s master is itself dependent on nature is a semi-
nal insight in his predecessors’ work Dialectic of Enlightenment: the science
and technology driven attempt at all-out mastery over nature may well turn
against the aggressor. In the words of Henning Ottmann: “If it is true that
progressive mastery over nature possibly results in the destruction of nature
as the foundation for survival, one can very well claim that nature itself
is the subject’s master whose ‘imperatives’ the subject had better ‘obey’”
(Ottmann 1982: 92). A nature that transcends the attempt to master it, such
as to resist the “interest in technical control” postulated by Habermas on
the level of the human species, is a nature of a sort simply not conceptual-
ized in his theory: external nature as he conceives it simply is the realm of
lifeless matter that can be manipulated without limit. Thus there is a perfect
fit between technical control, instrumental action, and objectifying stance
on the one hand, and nature as the object domain that in toto corresponds to
them, on the other. As becomes increasingly evident, to continue to act on
the basis on this assumption is a recipe for ecological disaster.

II
That humans’ capacity for autonomy as understood by Kant has both set
us apart from the rest of nature and helped justify our dominance over it is
something that has never attracted Habermas’ critical attention like it did
Adorno’s.
In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida seizes upon this
aspect of Adorno’s thinking, reminding us that according to Adorno the
 A dog named Bobby 123
capacity is “directed against animals” (2008: 100). The autonomy-based
sense of entitlement in seeking mastery over nature by means of science and
technique contains a considerable element of aggression, albeit one that is
typically not admitted as such but hidden behind the rhetoric of histori-
cal progress. The brutal truth that Derrida credits Adorno with insisting
upon is that the mastery sought is nothing short of “an act of war and a
gesture of hate, an animosity, as though Kant were raising the stakes in
a bid to add venom to a Cartesian project that, for its part, would remain
essentially neutral and indifferent, fundamentally different to the animal
machine” (2008: 100f.). Derrida goes on to add that he for one thinks that
“Cartesianism belongs, beneath its mechanist indifference, to the Judeo-
Christiano-Islamic tradition of a war against the animal, of a sacrificial war
that is as old as Genesis”. That violence or war, he continues, “has until now
been constitutive…of the very possibility of techno-scientific knowledge
within the process of humanization or of the appropriation of man by man,
including its most highly developed ethical or religious forms. No ethical or
sentimental nobility must be allowed to conceal from us that violence, and
acknowledged forms of ecologism or vegetarianism are insufficient to bring
it to an end, however more worthy they be than what they oppose” (ibid.).
Derrida does not tell us what would be required to bring this violence
to an end. I think that his not doing so is the price he pays for locating it
everywhere he looks for it, be it in Cartesianism, Kantianism, or the com-
prehensive religious tradition he alludes to. By locating the violence so
deeply and widely, Derrida risks casting it as virtually inseparable from
humans’ relationship with animals throughout modern history. It must be
said that Adorno is guilty of the same tendency, inspiring commentators
such as Deborah Cook to speak of nature as what humans have always been
busy “othering”, so that “whatever nature is said to be, we have stubbornly
defined ourselves as both superior to nature and its opposite” (2011: 46).
Formulations like this fly in the face of the fact that for the animistic cos-
mologies that have been dominant for the greater part of humans’ existence
on earth, relations with animals and other non-human species have been
perceived as pervaded by continuity and kinship. This is not to deny the
existence of violence against animals in premodern times and cultures, a
violence that would be denounced should it be considered excessive or gra-
tuitous and so failing to display the respect seen as due to animals in the
cosmologies in question.
On the other hand, Derrida is on the right track when he observes that
the violence against animals Adorno sees epitomized in Kant is one that
takes the form of hate and revilement against animality. What sort of ani-
mality, in whom? The obvious answer is the animality that marks animals as
non-human, as our “other”, the animality cited by the “bellicose hatred in
the name of human rights”, that “far from rescuing man from the animality
he claims to rise above, confirms the waging of a kind of species war and
confirms that the man of practical reason remains bestial in his defensive
124  A dog named Bobby
and repressive aggressivity, in his exploiting the animal to death” (2008:
101). Derrida goes further still, suggesting that “bad will, even a perverse
malice, inhabits and animates so-called good moral will; and that this ‘evil’,
the malady and malignity of this evil, is borne not in and on the animal, but
against the animal, to which it is a question of doing and wishing harm”
(ibid.).
Whence this “Kantian or idealist hatred of the animal, this zoopho-
bia”? Adorno tries to explain it by pointing to the “resemblance or affin-
ity between human and animality” (“die Tierähnlichkeit des Menschen”);
nothing is “more abhorrent, more hateful, more odious to Kantian man”
than the memory of this resemblance (Derrida 2008: 103). For this rea-
son, Kant allows no place for compassion between human and animal in
his ethics. Thus the animality of the human becomes the great taboo for
Kantian man (yes, man, not woman). That this should be so is in keeping
with Adorno’s overall assessment of idealism and transcendentalism á la
Kant, holding the project of human mastery over nature and over animality
to be absolutely crucial to it. Not content to leave it at that, Adorno takes his
criticism much further – he alleges that (again in Derrida’s paraphrasing)
“for an idealist system, animals virtually play the same role as Jews did for
the fascist system”. Such a fascism “begins whenever one insults an animal,
even the animal in man”; accordingly, “authentic idealism consists in insult-
ing the animal in the human or in treating the human as animal”, whereby
the insult doesn’t just imply verbal aggression, but “an aggression that con-
sists in degrading, reviling, devaluing someone, contesting his or her dig-
nity”, recognizing that insult is directed at someone, not something (ibid.).
Having already extended the idealist hatred of the animal to hatred of the
Jew, Derrida remarks that one could easily extend it further, to a hatred of
femininity, or of childhood. He concludes that insulting the animal “would
therefore be a fact of the male”, so that “the animal’s problem [mal] is the
male”, borne out historically in that “from hunt to bullfight, from mythol-
ogies to abattoirs, except for rare exceptions it is the male that goes after
the animal, just as it was Adam whom God charged with establishing his
dominion over the beasts” (2008: 104).
Regrettably, Derrida is content to paraphrase Adorno’s criticisms of
Kant; he does not engage with Adorno’s own position. He thus misses the
opportunity to dwell on the claim that what triggers the hatred of animals
is their affinity to the animality in humans, rendering the aggression against
animals a sort of self-hatred. Without going deeply into Adorno’s thinking
here, for him the domination over what Habermas calls “external nature”
is inseparable from the suppression of man’s “internal nature”. The eleva-
tion of rationality as proof of human exceptionalism and as the paramount
criterion that secures humans, and humans only, moral status, entails that
the “non-rational” features count as something negative, devoid of worth, a
view seen as corroborated by their exhibition in animals. Hence the taboo
against the animality of the human that we saw Adorno point to in Kant
 A dog named Bobby 125
works in two directions, as it were: on the one hand, in portraying the ani-
mal-like in humans as what detracts from and is at odds with what endows
us with moral status, it denies that our animal nature essentially belongs to
our humanity and to that in virtue of which we are entitled to moral considera-
tion; on the other hand, in portraying what we share with animals, and what
animals share with us, in this negative light, perceived similarities between
us and animals become themselves something negative, a reason for keep-
ing our distance from animals. What we cannot tolerate in ourselves, we
will not tolerate in our species others. Jay Bernstein puts this well when he
states that “because modern moral thought for the most part eschews ani-
mal nature as the fundament of meaningfulness, it must eschew the roles of
pain, suffering, damage, and injury as pivots for moral thought and replace
them by some broader notion of moral wrongness”; hence “it is not surpris-
ing that suffering should play such a marginal role” (2001: 198).
Adorno had a sharp eye for the many ways in which a trace of animal-
ity is regarded as a “matter out of place” in contemporary society, citing
the outcry that the smell of sweat or the sighting of hair under a wom-
an’s armpits now cause. What is animal-like is what is dirty, raw, primi-
tive, exposing what should be hidden or simply removed as unbecoming
of fully socialized individuals who have successfully and responsibly
accomplished the transition from natural to cultural beings, a transition
in the name of human dignity and freedom yet bought at the price of dic-
tatorial repression of the entire intrasubjective dimension seen as their
threat. As Michael Pollin observes, this discomfort with our animality
is being transferred onto the animality of animals as well, as exemplified
in “the anguished handwringing in some animal rights literature over the
fact of predation in nature” (2006: 321), a tendency I identified in Cynthia
Willett’s work in Chapter 2.
Rather than dwelling on the taboo against animality, Derrida pursues his
reflections on animals by engaging with Levinas. Even if Levinas submits
the subject of ethics to a radical heteronomy that stresses receptivity and
passivity in the sense that the subject is not “the first mover” but instead
is being moved by way of encountering the Other, the face that issues the
command “thou shalt not kill!” remains “first of all a fraternal and human
face”, that of my brother or my neighbour. Derrida states bluntly that “it is
a matter of putting the animal outside of the ethical circuit”, so that, if the
human subject is for Levinas a face, “according the animal or the animot
any of the traits, rights, duties, affections, or possibilities recognized in the
face of the other is out of the question” (2008: 106). That this should be so
may come as a surprise because, after all, “isn’t the animal more other still,
more radically other, than the other in whom I recognize my brother”? But
no. “It seems precisely that for Levinas the animot is not an other”. Indeed,
the issue seems fully settled, leaving no doubt as to Levinas’ position:
“The animal”, writes Derrida, “has neither face nor even skin in the sense
Levinas has taught us to give to those words. There is, to my knowledge, no
126  A dog named Bobby
attention ever seriously given to the animal gaze, no more than to the differ-
ence among animals, as though I could no more be looked at by a cat, dog,
monkey, or horse, than by a snake or some blind protozoon” (ibid.).
Does the animal have a face in the sense that one can read “Thou shalt
not kill” in the eyes of the animal? We discussed this question when exam-
ining Deborah Bird Rose’s reading of Levinas’ comments on Bobby above.
Derrida quotes the response Levinas gave to John Llewelyn in 1986: “I can-
not say at what moment you have the right to be called ‘face’. The human
face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of
an animal. I don’t know if a snake has a face. I can’t answer that question. A
more specific analysis is needed” (Levinas quoted in Bernasconi and Wood
1988: 171f.). Having said this, sounding agnostic, Levinas adds:

It is clear that, without considering animals as human beings, the eth-

ical extends to all living beings. We do not want to make an animal
suffer needlessly and so on. But the prototype of this is human ethics.
Vegetarianism, for example, arises from the transference to animals of
the idea of suffering. The animal suffers. It is because we, as human,
know what suffering is that we can have this obligation.
(Levinas quoted in Bernasconi and Wood 1988: 172)

Derrida makes much of Levinas’ remark about the “prototypical” character

of ethics as human, taken as “the space of a relation between humans, only
humans”, implying that it is only by means of a transference that we become
sensitive to animal suffering (2008: 108). In particular, he takes issue with
Levinas’ statement that “It is because we, as human, know what suffering
is that we have this obligation”, i.e., that we do not want to make an animal
suffer needlessly. But Derrida does not tell us what exactly is wrong about
Levinas’ recourse to our own (human) exposedness to suffering as the expe-
riential basis for our obligation to protect animals from suffering, nor does
he offer an alternative. Would Derrida object to a statement to the effect
that exposedness to suffering is a basis for the obligation among humans to
protect against suffering? Why is it mistaken to identify the source of moral
consideration in others, of their being in need of it, by virtue of identifying in
oneself that same source, eliciting the same need? Or is the problem Derrida
sees here a different one, having to do with giving such a prominent role to
vulnerability and suffering? Should the basis for ethical obligation – be it for
the human other, be it for the animal – be located elsewhere? In a different
capacity? Or in some other source or parameter altogether? Is the mistake
that of attempting to find (or establish) the same source for obligation to
both humans and animals? Should there rather be two different sources,
one for each ethical “other”? Does the source have to be other-than-human
when the addressee of the obligation is other-than-human? In that case, is
Levinas’ mistake that of making a move from the same to the other? Does
doing so belie his ambition to offer a genuinely other-directed ethics, one
 A dog named Bobby 127
where the other’s difference from the self is what counts, what the obligation
is all about?
It is unfortunate that Derrida omits examination of an ethics of compas-
sion, a kind of ethics that he observes Adorno misses in Kant, leaving it at
that. This is not to suggest that Levinas should be read as espousing such
an ethics (he does not), but exploring it would have had the advantage of
allowing Derrida to clarify his views about the moral significance of suf-
fering and vulnerability, considered as experiences shared by humans and
animals. Instead he focuses on Levinas’ admission that he “can’t answer
that question”, contending that “declaring that he doesn’t know where the
right to be called ‘face’ begins means confessing that one doesn’t know at
bottom what a face is, what the word means, what governs its usage, and
that means confessing that one didn’t say what responding means”, which
amounts to “calling into question the whole legitimacy of the discourse and
ethics of the ‘face’ of the other” (2008: 109). Notwithstanding the indeci-
siveness voiced by Levinas’ “I can’t answer that question”, Derrida for his
part sees no grounds for being in doubt: Levinas’ “nonresponse” is a “no”, a
“no” which “echoes everywhere, can be heard…as soon as Levinas chooses
an example of an animal in order to support his declaration of nonknowl-
edge” – the example being, as we saw, a snake, that is to say an animal
with immense mythical weight, something that makes “attributing a face to
this figure of temptation or evil highly improbable”. For, proceeds Derrida,
“where there is evil there is face. What remains faceless is pure indifference
to good and evil” (2008: 110). I take Derrida to mean by this that to deny the
other – any other – a face is to help justify the evil done to that other, to rob
it of the authority and the resistance that only the possession of a face can
muster. In choosing the snake Levinas avoids lighting on more disturbing
examples, such as “the cat, the dog, the horse, the monkey, the orangutan,
the chimpanzee – whom it would be difficult to refuse a face and a gaze”,
and hence “to refuse the ‘Thou shalt not kill’ that Levinas reserves for the
face, for the face of the human for the human, or for God’s commandment
in instituting the nakedness of the human face” (ibid.).
I have quoted so extensively to helps us examine exactly what Derrida is
doing. To begin with, the emphasis he puts on Levinas’ knowing – or rather
not knowing – precisely what qualifies as a face and what governs the use of
the word flies in the face of Levinas’ insistence that ethics is “first philosophy”,
that it is prior to epistemology and ontology, that is to say, pre-intentional
and pre-cognitive, so that responding to the other in the form of responsibil-
ity not be premised on knowledge about the other – the other’s identity, the
other’s plight. Ethics being prior to knowledge and the entire business con-
cerned with what we can or cannot know means that responsibility is oper-
ative – is received, imposed – independently of its workings and its results
in the particular case, that the latter not be regarded as a condition (presup-
position) for it. Moreover, when Levinas says “I don’t know if a snake has a
face”, he might have added two comments, both in keeping with his ethics:
128  A dog named Bobby
one, that not “knowing” this about the snake it not what matters – the fact
that the snake is vulnerable to suffering is, since sufficient to obligate me, to
posit me as responsible; and two, that not being sure if a snake is a face does
not entail being indecisive about whether a cat or a dog or an orangutan is
a face – phenomenally, the snake is a less clear-cut case than the latter, and
Levinas should not be faulted for admitting as much.
But Derrida isn’t content to leave it at that. Asking what is forbidden
by Levinas’ “Thou shalt not kill”, he notes that Levinas often translates
it as “You shall commit no murder”, i.e., it forbids homicide. This means
that it doesn’t forbid “putting to death in general”; it “doesn’t forbid one
to kill an animal; it forbids only the murder of the face”, meaning, Derrida
continues, “the face of the other, my neighbor, my brother, the human, or
another human” (2008: 110). When putting an animal to death, or exploiting
it to death, is not forbidden, this is so because the animal, “inasmuch as it is
incapable of being the victim of a murder, doesn’t die”, only humans do, as
Heidegger maintained (ibid.). Holding Levinas to leave us with an exclusive
connection between the face, murder, and the human, Derrida once again
wants to demonstrate that there is no place for animals. Yet he does so at
the price of twisting what Levinas is actually saying: the species-neutral
“Thou shalt not kill!” is Levinas’ signature formulation of the command,
and when he considers murder as a case in point he should be allowed to
do so, without this implying that killing is wrong only when the victim is
a human being. The point Levinas makes very clearly is that “the animal
suffers”; knowing ourselves what suffering is, “we can have this obligation
[to protect an animals from suffering needlessly]”. Indeed, as Levinas says
without doubt or qualification in the quotation that Derrida himself brings,
“it is clear that, without considering animals as human beings, the ethical
extends to all living beings” (2008: 108). Reference to this statement is con-
spicuously missing in Derrida’s critical commentary.
However, Derrida does have something to say about Levinas’ essay on
Bobby. Like Deborah Bird Rose and so many others before and after him,
he seizes on Levinas’ calling Bobby “the last Kantian in Nazi Germany”:
“For him – there was no doubt about it – we were men” (2008: 114). Setting
out to bring back down to earth “all the enchanted readers who dream of
reconciling Levinas’ ethics with the animals”, Derrida deems it necessary
to “limit straightaway the scope of this hymn to Bobby” (ibid.). His main
criticism is voiced in his question: “But how can one ignore that a Kantian
who doesn’t have ‘the brain needed’ to universalize maxims would not be
a Kantian?”, to which he answers: “Bobby is thus anything but Kantian”
(ibid.). Perhaps this is just as well, however. Why? Well, in light of “the cruel
and merciless war that a virtual ‘fascist’ (in Adorno’s terms) Kantian ide-
alism declares on animal life, calling Bobby a Kantian is no compliment”
(2008: 115).
On Derrida’s interpretation, then, there seems to be no way to find rea-
sonable what Levinas says about Bobby. Leaving aside for now Derrida’s
 A dog named Bobby 129
invoking of Adorno’s charge of fascism (which is hardly representative of his
assessment of Kant’s moral philosophy; see Adorno 2000: 144), a more bal-
anced reading of both Kant and Levinas would point out that when Levinas
remarks that for Bobby “we were men”, Bobby is ascribed the capacity to
recognize others, in the sense of Anerkennung so crucial in German idealism;
he is thus effectively recognized in Levinas’ portrait of him as a moral sub-
ject, not in the full-blown sense, to be sure, but in the minimal, yet impor-
tant one of making a difference to those he recognizes, the Jewish prisoners,
as I pointed out above. Since according to Kantian premises you need to be
a moral agent to qualify as a moral addressee, Bobby’s act of recognition
entails that he is fellow member of the men’s moral universe, and precisely
not excluded from it, as Derrida’s reading of Levinas’ remark has it. The
other point worth making here, made in a slightly different manner in my
earlier discussion of Rose, is that Derrida chooses to ignore the social con-
text in which Bobby acts like he does. To assess whether calling Bobby a
Kantian is a compliment or not is only half the story. To say of Bobby that he
acts like the last Kantian is to say that the Germans at the scene do nothing
of the sort: the other side of the compliment to Bobby is the condemnation
of the German guards, brought into sharp relief by way of contrast with a
dog. There is nothing here to the detriment of the dog, but everything to the
detriment of the men. That they, presumably, qua humans, have the brains
needed to universalize maxims only goes to underline their moral failure.

III
In his seminal essay “Why look at animals?”, John Berger remarks that
following the physical and cultural marginalization of animals in Western
society since the seventeenth century, “animals are always the observed.
The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance”. He adds that
“public zoos came into existence at the beginning of the period which was
to see the disappearance of animals from daily life. The zoo to which people
go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to
the impossibility of such encounters” (1980: 16, 21).
Without mentioning Berger’s essay, Derrida writes that common to the
grand forms of philosophical treatises regarding the animal is that they are
authored by “people who have no doubt seen, observed, analyzed, reflected
on the animal, but who have never been seen seen by the animal”. They have,
that is, “taken no account of the fact that what they call ‘animal’ could look
at them, and address them from down there, from a wholly other origin”.
This being so, “they made of the animal a theorem, something seen and not
seeing” (2008: 13, 14).
As we might have expected, Derrida sets out to do what so many philos-
ophers before him so painstakingly have avoided: he describes what it’s like
to be looked at by an animal, a particular one at that: a cat, one that “looks
at me naked”, where “nudity gets stripped to bare necessity only in that
130  A dog named Bobby
frontal exhibition, in that face-to-face”; and “in these moments of naked-
ness, as regards the animal, everything can happen to me” (2008: 11, 12).
What this scene actualizes is what Derrida terms the problem of “appella-
tion” and of the response to a call. We should note that this is not the call-
and-response exhibited in the interplay between a human and an animal,
or between two animals, in the sense intended by Willett and discussed in
Chapter 2. Instead, what Derrida has in mind is the eminently ethical mean-
ing of responding to the other’s call that is a leitmotif in Levinas, leading
us to ask who issues the appellation (call) and who has what is required to
respond.
So Derrida’s cat (and his cat it is) can look at him, can see him in his
nakedness, in the passivity Derrida associates with nudity. He speaks of
the impropriety that can come of “finding oneself naked, one’s sex exposed,
stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just to see”;
“the impropriety of a certain animal nude before the other animal”. Why
this impropriety? Well, says Derrida, “it is as if I were ashamed, naked in
front of this cat, but also ashamed for being ashamed”; “a shame ashamed
of itself, at the same time specular, unjustifiable, and unavowable”. But
again, why be ashamed of this nudity before an animal, “naked as they are,
or so it is thought, without the slightest consciousness of being so” (2008:
4)? That’s precisely where we must look for the answer: animals’ being
naked without knowing it is what distinguishes them from humans, since
to be without knowledge of their nudity is to be “without consciousness of
good and evil”. Accordingly, there is no nudity “in nature”: “Because it is
naked, without existing in nakedness, the animal neither feels nor sees itself
naked” (2008: 5).
What is happening here? The scene where a man is naked before the gaze
of a cat, also naked, might invite the assessment that they both being naked
puts them on an equal footing, as it were, highlighting a similarity that gets
lost once the man puts on his clothes. If anything, this in fact underlines
their dissimilarity. Why? Because for the man being naked involves a choice,
a conscious decision, a state of being he can undo any moment, or prolong
as long as he wants, circumstances permitting. None of this applies to the
cat. For the animal, being naked is a condition in the sense of something
ineluctable, a given that defines their existence. Since the animal is naked
without consciousness of being naked, it does not relate to its nakedness,
and so does not feel comfortable in it, or uncomfortable; feeling the one
rather than the other is not an issue for the animal, does not present options
for it, which is to say that “modesty remains as foreign to it as does immod-
esty”, and, by the same token, that it cannot be ashamed at its nakedness.
Only for humans can nakedness be awkward or embarrassing, something
that the person in question relates to, and is forced to relate to, as well as
something that other persons will just as surely relate to, attesting to its sig-
nificance, its lack of neutrality as it were, within both a wider cultural con-
text and the specific social one in the given situation of being naked.
 A dog named Bobby 131
Derrida doesn’t engage in comparison between being looked at naked
by a cat and by another human person, a comparison that would have
made discussion of Sartre’s famous analysis of the (human) other’s look as
shame-eliciting, as stealing my freedom and transcending my transcend-
ence all but inevitable. Sartre is never mentioned. That is just as well,
because what Derrida is getting at is the question we know he associates
with Levinas, namely whether the animal responds.
To answer that question we need to know how to distinguish a response
from a reaction. Here Derrida invokes Lewis Carroll’s work, in particular
the scene where Alice, impatient and irritated, exclaims that whatever she
says to her kittens, they always purr; and you can’t talk with someone if
they always say the same thing. So, in speaking to an animal, be it your cat,
you will experience, time and time again, that “it doesn’t reply, not really,
not ever” (2008: 10). That is Alice’s conclusion, arrived at not for lack of
trying, as is Descartes’. Indeed, it is the received wisdom throughout mod-
ern Western philosophy. To hold that animals are incapable of responding
is to hold that, for lack of actively (consciously) relating to whomever they
encounter, they merely react. In merely reacting, they are not really agents,
subjects.
Does this view survive closer scrutiny? Does it square with the experience
that Derrida takes as his point of departure, that of being looked at by the
cat? Would he feel ashamed at being looked at as naked by a cat, were it not
for the cat’s possession of what it takes to make him feel ashamed? How
does his response reflect on the cat’s powers in terms of agency? Insofar as
he feels passivized, an object, when looked at by the cat, doesn’t that go to
show that the cat is indeed a subject not an object, active not passive?
Admittedly, this way of putting the question borrows not only from
Sartre’s analysis of the look but also from Martin Buber’s distinction
between an I-Thou relationship and an I-It relationship. And in fact, in a
footnote Derrida does quote from Buber’s work: “An animal’s eyes have
the power to speak a great language”; “the beginning of this cat’s glance,
lighting up under the touch of my glance, indisputably questioned me: ‘Is
it possible that you think of me? Do I really exist?’” (2008: 164, fn. 11). But
instead of employing Buber’s distinction, Derrida takes a detour, remarking
that the animal question has been “left hanging” for about two centuries,
in the course of which “we who call ourselves men or humans…have been
involved in an unprecedented transformation”, one that affects the experi-
ence of “what we continue to call imperturbably, as if there were nothing to
it, the animal and/or animals” (2008: 24). What sort of transformation does
he have in mind? He tells us that “in the course of the last two centuries the
traditional forms of treatment of the animal have been turned upside down
by the joint developments of zoological, ethological, biological, and genetic
forms of knowledge, which remain inseparable from techniques of interven-
tion into their object, from the transformation of the actual object, and from
the milieu and world of their object, namely, the living animal” (2008: 25).
132  A dog named Bobby
The transformation takes the form of an interventionist practice “in the
service of a certain being and the putative human well-being of man”, a
practice whose cruelty “men do all they can in order to dissimulate or to
hide from themselves”, a violence which “some would compare to the worst
case of genocide (there are also animal genocides: the number of species
endangered because of man takes one’s breath away)” (ibid.).
It is to Derrida’s credit that he draws attention to these sinister facts about
the plight of animals, not to mention their sheer disappearance by way of
human-caused extinction, in today’s world; there is nothing of the sort in his
contemporary Habermas, as we saw above. But what bearing do these facts
have on Derrida’s attempt to answer the question about the moral status of
animals, actualized in his experience of being looked at by his cat? With the
megatrends seemingly locked to the trajectory of “industrial, mechanical,
chemical, hormonal, and genetic violence” (ibid.), is a way forward to be
found on the microlevel, that of one-to-one encounters such as that with
his cat?
To be sure, there are attempts to fight the organized denial of the large-
scale torture to which animals – mostly in the modus operandi of out of
sight, out of mind – are subjected. Voices of protest are raised – “minority,
weak, marginal voices”, voices not confident of their discourse and its even-
tual enactment within the law, in the form, say, of a declaration of animal
rights, thus appealing, Derrida says, “to what is still presented in such a
problematic way as animal rights, in order to awaken us to our responsibil-
ities and our obligations vis-à-vis the living in general” (ibid.). But rather
than leading him to engage head-on with the notion of rights, Derrida
turns at this juncture to compassion. In doing so he explicitly dismisses
the thesis he sees maintained from Aristotle to Heidegger, from Descartes
to Kant, Levinas, and Lacan, namely that animals are deprived of logos,
proclaiming that Bentham’s “Can they suffer?” is the question to ask. Why?
Because in referring to suffering we have to do with a phenomenon pos-
sessing no less indubitable certainty than that claimed for the experience
of thinking in Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”. Bentham’s question has
exactly that kind of answer: “No one can seriously deny the suffering, fear,
or panic, the terror or fright that can seize certain animals and that we
humans can witness” (2008: 28). Indeed, the last two centuries that Derrida
keeps referring to have been those of “an unequal struggle, a war (whose
inequality could one day be reversed) waged between, on the one hand,
those who violate not only animal life but even and also this sentiment of
compassion, and, on the other hand, those who appeal for an irrefutable
testimony to this pity” (ibid.).
This is a statement worth dwelling upon, not least because it is the clearest
acknowledgment I have found in the text of the twin dimensions of the war
Derrida talks about: the simultaneity of the war waged against animals and
the war waged against the sentiment of compassion, the capacity in us that
is the foundation for the struggle to end the war of humans against animal
 A dog named Bobby 133
life. “Whoever is hard with himself earns the right to be hard with others”,
Adorno observed in his reflections on the socio-psychological profile of the
Nazis leading the way in killing Jews (2005: 198). The violence performed
against others has a twofold relationship to the violence conducted against
oneself: the latter is both a presupposition for and a product of the for-
mer, in what over time amounts to a self-reinforcing dynamic. Conversely,
you cannot bring the outer-directed violence to an end without ending the
self-directed one. True, Adorno wasn’t thinking about the violence against
animals in making his observation, but the violence against other humans.
Yet he would certainly not want to confine the dynamic at work to the rela-
tionship between humans. Pace Descartes, the reality of suffering is just
as indisputable in animals as in humans, their fight against pain and their
agony in being subjected to it just as undeniable as in us; accordingly, the
pain humans willfully inflict on animals is just as much a moral issue as that
inflicted on fellow humans. The common denominator is the vulnerability
in being exposed to suffering, to pain, in both humans and animals; and the
capacity that resides in humans for protesting against that suffering, in ani-
mals as well as in humans. To render this capacity a one-species-only one in
its orientation and commitment, meaning “fellow humans only”, is the work
of culture and society, passed on from one generation to the next by patterns
of socialization whereby animals are excluded from the moral universe; a
work against our own capacity for compassion, and whose intention to cre-
ate indifference when confronted with animals’ suffering risks producing it
towards that of other humans as well.
It is no coincidence that I draw attention to Adorno. If Derrida had taken
into account his Negative Dialectics and not limited himself, erratically, to
his book on Beethoven, he would have been able to elaborate more fully
on the crucial role of affectivity in making the case for a notion of soli-
darity that incorporates animals alongside humans. Adorno speaks about
“the impulse of solidarity with what Brecht called ‘tormentable bodies’”,
contrasting the feeling of solidarity with the “rationalizing” of morality he
identifies in Kant’s formulation of a moral law of equality, a law Kant of
course held to apply only to humans. Solidarity in the Brecht-inspired sense
is no abstract principle but rather a somatic impulse or “spontaneously stir-
ring impatience” (1973: 286). Indeed, Adorno locates the core of morality in
something for which “Kantian ethics – which accords affection, not respect,
to animals – can muster only disdain: to try to live so that one may believe
himself to have been a good animal” (1973: 299). Christoph Menke’s com-
ment is worth quoting:

The action stemming from a feeling of solidarity is the action of a “good

animal” – of a subject that does not separate itself from its “forces” or
“impulses” for the sake of following the law and in order to make itself
freed from them but rather whose freedom, indeed, whose very strength,
consists of allowing its forces or impulses to express themselves. Only
134  A dog named Bobby
in this way, in “harmony”, even in “reconciliation”, with himself, with
his powers and impulses, can man be good to others. As Adorno puts it:
“Men are human only where they do not act, let alone posit themselves,
as persons” (1973: 277).
(Menke 2004: 320)

Having Kant as its critical target, this emphasis on affectivity as linked to

impulses in a somatic sense no doubt has a Nietzschean ring to it in promot-
ing the expression of precisely those aspects of humans’ “inner nature” that,
owing to their animal-likeness, Kant endeavoured to suppress, regarding
them as coming in the way of what characterizes humans as moral agents
and as appropriate moral addressees, namely the rationality that in both
instances founds their status as persons. This is what motives Adorno’s beg-
to-differ statement that “Men are human only where they do not act, let alone
posit themselves, as persons”. But whereas Nietzsche’s critique of the ration-
alist Kantian morality of equality rests on his wish to expose the ambition
for equality as deceitful and as arising from ressentiment, as do Christian
and compassion-based ethics as well, according to Nietzsche, for Adorno the
somatic impulse giving rise to solidarity is one that should not be disquali-
fied, neither for Kantian reasons nor for Nietzschean ones. Why? Because for
Adorno “the physical moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not
to be, that things should be different. Woe speaks: ‘Go’” (1973: 203).
The view that the existence of suffering in itself dictates this “go”, which
is to say this “no”, that it should not be, and that it should be brought to an
end, is known as moral realism. It holds that the phenomenon as such (say,
suffering) is non-neutral; it contains something of normative import, simply
in virtue of being the phenomenon it is. The normativity that thus resides in
the phenomenon, that is met upon there, as opposed to being projected onto
it, attributed to it, is such as to issue a command so as to respond to it in cer-
tain manner – that of trying to stop the suffering, recognizing it as something
that should not be. That it should not be is – if we need use the word – the
meaning of (intrinsic to) the phenomenon. To fail to respond in this manner,
with this objective, is to fail to identify the phenomenon correctly, for what
it is and therefore demands in terms of response.
True, Adorno doesn’t put it in these terms, but it doesn’t require his using
the label moral realism to recognize it as his position, as Jay Bernstein has
argued in great detail (2001). Note that in talking about how the phenome-
non at hand “issues a command” I deliberately allude to Levinas and what he
says about the face as the site of the appeal “not to kill”: that is the meaning
(again, if that word is apt) that resides in the face, in keeping with moral real-
ism as just set out. To illustrate with a formulation of Adorno’s: “The lines
‘No man should be tortured; there should be no concentration camps’ are
true as an impulse, as a reaction to the news that torture is going on some-
where. They must not be rationalized; as an abstract principle they would
fall promptly into the bad infinities of derivation and validity” (1973: 285f.).
 A dog named Bobby 135
We saw that in Derrida’s reading of Levinas, “Thou shalt not kill!” does
not forbid humans to kill an animal; it forbids only the murder of the face,
and the animal fails to qualify as a face according to Derrida’s interpreta-
tion of Levinas. He considers Levinas to remain “profoundly Heideggerian”
in holding that, inasmuch as the animal is incapable of being the victim of
murder, it doesn’t die – only humans do (2008: 110). Now, if one can put the
animal to death without “killing” it or murdering it, this is because “the
animal remains foreign to everything that defines sanctity, the separation
and thus the ethics of the person as face” (2008: 111).
This is important for the issue central to my overall discussion, namely
how to conceive of the relationship between being a moral agent (subject)
and being a moral addressee. In my understanding, to be an addressee is to
be the object of responsibility on the part of some agent. I follow Levinas
in holding such responsibility to be prior to intentionality, deliberation, and
calculation, that is, prior to choice, prior to contract, and in keeping with
moral realism I hold responsibility to take the form of responding to an
imperative issued by the other, exemplarily, by perceiving that other’s vul-
nerability to suffering, eliciting the “go” we saw Adorno speak about above.
To repeat, the promise I see in the ethics of Levinas as distinct from, say,
Kant, is that it recognizes that at its core the relationship between agent and
addressee is one of dis- or asymmetry: the addressee does not have to be an
agent. Ethics is not about reciprocity, does not rest upon (actual or poten-
tial) reciprocity as its rationale or precondition or goal; it is fundamentally
about responsibility for the other.
Given this view of the structure of the ethical relationship, let’s examine
what Derrida says about responsibility when interrogating Levinas’ posi-
tion on animals. What does he mean when stating that “the animal remains
foreign to everything that defines sanctity”?
What Derrida is getting at is that in Levinas, responsibility is linked to
“Here I am”; it implies self-representation in an autotelic, auto-biographical
sense, “exposing oneself before the law”, which in turn implies the possibil-
ity of “responding”, of “answering for oneself in the response to the appeal
or command of the other” (2008: 111). This is the crux of the matter: “The
animal, according to Levinas, seems deprived of all possibility, in fact, of all
power of saying ‘Here I am’ and of responding, hence of all responsibility. It
is nobody, certainly not a ‘person’, a word that Levinas always kept intact.
That is why the animal doesn’t die. […] Death is not for Levinas, in the first
instance, a passage from being to nothingness, an annihilation, but, as he
often says, the moment when the other no longer responds” (ibid.). Whereas
to state in the case of the dead face that “he doesn’t respond” means “he is
no longer responding”, to state it in the animal’s case means “it has never
responded” and “it will never respond” (2008: 112). Why? Because the ani-
mal will never have been able to respond. We thus have to do with a dou-
ble refusal, a twofold denial: not only is the animal “deprived of the power
and the right to respond, and therefore responsibility”; it is also deprived of
136  A dog named Bobby
nonresponse, of “the right of nonresponse that is accorded to the human
face by means of secrecy or in death” (ibid.). Given this double refusal,
might there still be a place for the animal-other in Levinas, say, as what he
calls “the third person”, taken as the first appeal of justice? “But no”, finds
Derrida: “When Levinas reflects on the other of the other who is not simply
a fellow [semblable] and who brings the question of justice to the fore, that
nonfellow remains human, a brother and not another other, not an other
other than the human” (ibid.; see Derrida 1999: 32ff.).
To sum up, then, on Derrida’s reading the animal comes up short ethically
speaking in Levinas no matter in what role or condition you consider it, be
it as the “Here I am”, be it as the other to respond to, to be addressed by in
the form of “Thou shalt not kill”, be it as “the third” who raises the question
of (necessity of) justice; be it as living, be it as no longer living. In its very
originality, concludes Derrida, what remains is a “profound anthropocen-
trism and humanism” (2008: 113). Rather than privileging the question and
the request of the animal, as one might have expected from an ethics devoted
to “a thinking of the other”, what one finds in Levinas is exactly what one
finds in Descartes and Kant before him: the same disavowal and foreclosure
directed at the animal, “just as powerful when they don’t speak of it or when
they speak of it in order to deny to the animot everything they attribute to
the human” (ibid.). Quoting once again from Levinas’ essay on Bobby – “At
the supreme hour of its institution, with neither ethics nor logos, the dog will
attest to the dignity of its person. That is what the friend of man means”
– Derrida comments that it (the dog) “can witness to us only for us, being
too other to be our brother or neighbor, not enough other to be the wholly
other”, leading him to contend, by way of summing up: “The animal remains
for Levinas what it will have been for the whole Cartesian-type tradition: a
machine that doesn’t speak, that doesn’t have access to sense, that can at
best imitate ‘signifiers without a signified’…a sort of monkey with monkey
talk, precisely what the Nazis sought to reduce their Jewish prisoners to”, the
latter being a reference to Levinas’ statement “How can we deliver a message
about our humanity which, from behind the bars of quotation marks, will
come across as anything other than monkey talk?” (2008: 117, 118).
I had to rub my eyes when I first read the sentence where Derrida charges
Levinas with replicating in his account of animals “precisely what the Nazis
sought to reduce their Jewish prisoners to”. Really?
A couple of pages before he states this, Derrida refers to “The Paradox
of Morality”, the interview in 1986 where Levinas is asked the question “Is
there something distinctive about the human face which, for example, sets it
apart from that of an animal?” However, Derrida does not quote the follow-
ing part of Levinas’ answer, by far the most substantial one:

One cannot entirely refuse the face of an animal. It is via the face that
one understands, for example, a dog. Yet the priority here is not found
in the animal, but in the human face. We understand the animal, the
 A dog named Bobby 137
face of an animal, in accordance with Dasein. The phenomenon of the
face is not in its purest form in the dog. In the dog, in the animal, there
are other phenomena. For example, the force of nature is pure vitality.
It is more this which characterizes the dog. But it also has a face. There
are these two strange things in the face: its extreme frailty – the fact of
being without means and, on the other hand, there is authority. It is as
if God spoke through the face.
(Levinas 1988a: 169)

Later in the interview, Levinas adds the following, quoted as we saw above
by Derrida: “It is clear that, without considering animals as human beings,
the ethical extends to all living beings. We do not want to make an ani-
mal suffer needlessly and so on. But the prototype of this is human ethics.
Vegetarianism, for example, arises from the transference to animals of the
idea of suffering. The animal suffers. It is because we, as humans, know
what suffering is that we can have this obligation” (1988: 172).
Do we meet here a philosopher who “denies to the animot everything he
attributes to the human”, to recap one of Derrida’s claims? Is Derrida open
to what Levinas is saying? Or does he find what he is looking for, and noth-
ing else?
Whatever the reasons for Derrida being so demonstrably uncharitable to
Levinas in this text, we are still searching for his position on the two major
issues I raised above, the one concerning the link between responsibility
and response, the other concerning the nature of ethical relationship as pro-
foundly asymmetrical. Given his criticisms of Levinas, where does Derrida
turn to sketch an alternative view?
He turns to Jacques Lacan, the seminal figure in French psychoanal-
ysis in the last part of the twentieth century. To Lacan, the animal has
neither an unconscious nor language; hence the animal remains within
the imaginary, unable to accede to the symbolic. Lacanian parlance
aside, what this means is that Lacan subscribes to the hegemonic view
according to which animals are only capable of reactions to stimuli, not
responses to questions. While bees may appear to “respond” to a “mes-
sage”, they do not respond like humans would do, they merely react in the
sense of obeying a fixed program, one they cannot deviate from or tran-
scend. Lacan goes on to found responsibility on the distinction between
reaction and response – the distinction, Derrida tells us, that he “find[s]
so problematic” (2008: 125). Indeed, he wants to cast doubt on “the purity
and indivisibility of a line between reaction and response, and especially
the possibility of tracing such a line between the human in general and the
animal in general” (2008: 126). In doing so, he is acutely aware that he will
be seen as casting doubt on “all responsibility, all ethics, every decision,
etc.”, a risk he is more than willing to take, since casting doubt on one’s
own being-ethical and being responsible should be regarded as the very
essence of ethics.
138  A dog named Bobby
Turning to Lacan’s text “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic
of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”, not the distinction between reac-
tion and response but the difference between pretence and deception proves
to be at the heart of Lacan’s account of the animal. Whereas the animal is
quite capable of pretence (warrior, predatory, or seductive suit, pursuit or
persecution), it is incapable of “the deception of speech within the order of
the signifier and of Truth” (Derrida 2008: 127f.), that is to say, deception
inasmuch as it presupposes speech, occurs within speech and between par-
ties in command of speech. In particular, this means that the animal would
not properly know how to lie, even if we grant that it knows how to pretend.
Or, to be more accurate, Lacan allows for the first degree of pretence in the
animal (pretence without pretense of pretence); what it does not do is pre-
tend to pretend, since to do so it would have to break out of the presymbolic.
Agreeing with Heidegger that the animal is “a living creature that is only
living”, that for lack of a capacity to relate to its own mortality – indeed, to
relate to anything at all “as such”, as the experience or object it is – it does
not die, Lacan stresses the importance of distinguishing deception as prac-
ticed in speech, within the order of the signifier, and the kind of pretence to
be found in physical combat or sexual display, or when animals are being
hunted (discussed above), where they show their ability to put their pursu-
ers off the scent by making a false start. Yet practices such as vouching for
one’s word, or making a promise, are precisely what animals are incapable
of, according to Lacan, presupposing as they do the gift of speech. That
animals do not give their word has its corollary in the fact that a human
wouldn’t give its word to the animal; thinking to do so would be a case
of projection or anthropomorphic transference, as if a human’s promising
something to an animal would make a difference to it.
Why is this reasoning on the part of Lacan important to Derrida? And
what light does it shed on the issues most central to his critique of Levinas,
concerning responsibility and asymmetry?
To get to that, we need to note that Derrida questions Lacan’s claim that
the animal in general is incapable of pretending pretence. For lack of offer-
ing ethological research to back up his claim, the refusal to the animal of the
pretence of pretence is nothing but “a simple dogma” (2008: 133). Pressing
further, Derrida finds that the distinction between lie and pretence becomes
precarious, likewise that between Speech and Truth (in Lacan’s sense).
Hence Lacan is not justified in asserting that the animal in general does
not cover its tracks. Yet what is at issue here, for Derrida, is not whether
Lacan is successful in refusing animals some particular power or capacity
(speech, lying, pretence of pretence, covering of tracks), or whether he has
the right to embark on the project of animal-directed refusal in the first
place, following in the footsteps of so many Western thinkers before him.
More important, says Derrida, is “asking whether what calls itself human
has the right rigorously to attribute to man, which means therefore to attrib-
ute to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever possess
 A dog named Bobby 139
the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution” (2008:
135). Even if we grant that the animal is incapable of covering its tracks,
something Derrida is unwilling to do, the truly vital question to ask is “by
what right could one concede that power to the human, to the subject of the
signifier” (ibid.)?
Unsurprisingly, this question leads Derrida to zoom in on Lacan’s con-
stant appeal to the Cartesian cogito, the “I think” that is intended to allow
for absolute certainty, a certainty that is, and must be, established in foro
interno, in the I’s relationship with itself as distinct from with something –
or someone, co-human or animal – met upon in the outside world. But of
course, for Lacan things are not that simple, not that transparent. The
Cartesian cogito has been destabilized at least twice over since Descartes
theorized it as a unique “Archimedean point” (Hannah Arendt); first by
Hegel, most famously in his Master/Slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of
Mind, and then by Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, especially in the analysis
of the Oedipus complex. In Lacan’s terminology, “the becoming-subject of
the ego passes by way of the signifier, Speech, Truth, etc., that is to say, by
losing its immediate transparency, consciousness as consciousness of the
self identical to the self”. This dynamics, says Derrida, “ends only in an
apparent paradox: the subject is confirmed in the eminence of its power by
being subverted and brought back to its own lack, meaning that animality is
on the side of the conscious ego, whereas the humanity of the human subject
is on the side of the unconscious, the law of the signifier, Speech, the pre-
tended pretense, etc.” (2008: 137f.). Contrary to the certainty arrived at by
way of transparency associated with the Cartesian cogito, where the think-
ing I in self-sufficient manner establishes itself as the indubitable ground
from which all epistemic certainties spring, Lacan exposes the lie and the
deceit “in the very heart of the cogito” (ibid.), rendering the transparen-
cy-cum-certainty Descartes had invested it with profoundly deceitful and
so the whole undertaking on the part of the ego an exercise irredeemably
liable to self-deception. Accordingly, the question of the I – “What am I?”
or “Who am I?” – shows up a lack, says Lacan; it exposes “what the sub-
ject lacks in order to think himself exhausted by his cogito, namely, that
which is unthinkable for him” (2008: 139). He (sic), Lacan continues, “lacks
everything needed to know the answer” to the question of where his being,
which “appears in some way defective in the sea of proper nouns”, origi-
nates (ibid.).
Where does all of this leave the animal? Has the animal question been
lost along the way? If so, is its being lost the very point Derrida is intent on
making? A point that can be made over and over again, forming as it were a
red thread in the Western canon?
If Derrida demonstrates that the animal question is lost, that it slips away,
again and again, in all the thinkers he interrogates, then his whole exercise
amounts to a series of negative findings and conclusions, a lost opportu-
nity. Is getting to the bottom of the question of the animal tantamount to
140  A dog named Bobby
witnessing how it is effaced in each and every endeavour to vindicate it? Or
is the truth of the matter the banal one that Derrida has picked the wrong
cast of philosophers, so that a different selection would have yielded a more
positive result?
As far as I am concerned, the selection is excellent. And by choosing the
experience of being looked at by his cat as his point of departure, Derrida
seems positioned to grasp the peculiar nature of the other as animal, the
animal as the encountered Other. So what happened?
What happened is that Derrida’s initial openness by way of being exposed
qua naked to the gaze of the cat is effectively closed once he starts asking
questions about it. Intellectualization sets in, tightening its suffocating grip
on the subject – the cat as subject, as the one looking – ever after. The opening
encounter with the cat, taking Derrida the human party to it aback, causing
him to lose his privileged point of view, to abandon it qua privileged in the
sense of superior, if only for a moment, this access-opening moment is not
allowed to play out; instead it yields to the human-philosopher’s retreat to
his abode, that of the safety of considering-at-a-distance what the encounter
amounts to, and the consequences that would follow, some of them presum-
ably ethical, bearing on how to respond to the cat in the Levinasian sense
of responsibility.
What got lost? Or who? Derrida’s analysis lost sight of the animal it set
out to engage with because Derrida all-too-quickly transformed it into
another question, a question for another subject than the cat – namely, the
question about how he as a human can possibly respond to an animal, lead-
ing to a self-interrogation – the human self’s interrogation of itself – that,
eminently Cartesian as it is, denies participation from the animal. While on
the one hand the question of the animal’s ability to respond to the human
remains tied to the nagging suspicion that it “merely reacts”, one the other
hand the human’s response to the animal is transposed from its directedness
at the animal being encountered to an inspection of the human’s interiority
in terms of possessing or not possessing the capacities it would arguably
take to respond, never to leave that introspective gaze – not the animal’s
gaze at the human, but the human’s at himself, gut Cartesisch – after having
adopted it.
It is doubly ironic that Derrida should lose sight of his cat like this, con-
sidering that he spends so much time on Levinas’ contribution to the animal
question. Even if one grants that Levinas’ answer to the question whether he
considers an animal to be a face is far from satisfactory (as Derrida asserts),
it is puzzling to witness how negligent he is about the one intuition that
carries Levinasian ethics, namely that the response-cum-responsibility
to/for the Other is prior to ontology and knowledge, to the question of
being and the quest for knowledge. That Derrida remains committed to
conceiving the question about the animal within the orbit of precisely the twin
orders that Levinas breaks with in order to establish response-responsibility
as pre-cognitive and pre-intentional, is attested to again and again, perhaps
 A dog named Bobby 141
nowhere more conspicuously than in his critique of Lacan, where what fuels
his asking what gives man (sic) the right to attribute to himself what he
refuses the animal is, ultimately, “whether he can ever possess the pure,
rigorous, indivisible concept as such, that of attribution” (2008: 135). When
everything is made to hang on issues of concepts and capacities, of what
justifies whatever is being attributed cognitively by humans to animals, and
by humans to themselves, the result is that the animal disappears.
Was not the whole point of Derrida’s effort to avoid, to subvert, to reverse
this very disappearance? If what he finds – be it in Descartes, in Kant, in
Heidegger, in Levinas, in Lacan – is so many variations of the same refusal
to let the animal “in”, the same insistence that it must remain outside of the
moral universe, then what should he do?
In my view, there are two occasions in particular where Derrida could
have taken a more constructive turn, instead of getting so entangled in the
targets of his interrogation as to reproduce rather than subvert the denial of
animals that he identifies.
First, why doesn’t he linger longer with the cat’s point of view? Why is
he so impatient to move on, beyond it – only to return to his human-spe-
cific one? Why does he disqualify every trait of kinship-likeness with the
cat that he considers, or more to the point: that he initially experiences –
undergoes, is subject to – in the Levinasian sense of exposure to the Other
as prior to intentionality and cognition; disqualify them by immediately
shifting emphasis to the traits in question being more about dissimilarity,
whereby dissimilarity is always taken by him, as by those he criticizes, to
speak against the inclusion of the animal, the solidarity with it that Adorno
insists on? If animals are partly similar to humans, partly dissimilar, why
regard the latter as always more intriguing, more important and exhibiting
the crux of the matter, ethically speaking?
True enough, says Derrida, the cat is naked like he is, but its nudity by
way of not wearing clothes carries a wholly different meaning than does
his, being a decision on his part, never on the cat’s. True enough, the cat
looks at him, but the shame it elicits on his part shifts the attention from the
cat, the cat both as subject and as object (other), that is, by way of retreat
to the human-being-ashamed-as-only-humans-are, introspecting there for
its explanation and justification in a way that has everything to with the
perspective of the human-in-the-world, nothing with the cat’s. And true
enough, the human and the cat are both vulnerable to suffering, to the real-
ity of pain; but once that capacity is thematized, the cat’s lack of sense of
temporality, ultimately of perceiving pain as at bottom pointing to the pos-
sibility of death, to an active relating to one’s own death, highlights how
differently the similarity in exposedness to pain plays out in the lives of
humans and cats. And so it goes, on and on.
Second, why follow Lacan in putting such emphasis on the animal’s “pro-
found innocence”, its being incapable of the “signifier” peculiar to the sym-
bolic order, to speech – its being incapable of lying and deceit, of pretended
142  A dog named Bobby
pretence, linked, we saw Derrida find, to the “most traditional” notion of
“the cruel innocence of a living creature to whom evil is foreign, living ante-
rior to the difference between good and evil” (2008: 130)? Why is this cru-
cial? Put aside for now Derrida’s claim that Lacan lacks the evidence to
prove that the animal “in general” is incapable of pretending pretence and
of covering its tracks, that he merely repeats a simple dogma. The question
is: what justifies accessing the lives of animals through the hermeneutics
of suspicion? Why highlight the phenomenon of deceit? Why do so to the
detriment of appreciating animals’ capacities for care, trust, and loyalty?
In trying to make sense of the cat looking at him, is its capacity to deceive
and cover its tracks really what commands attention? And why is animals’
capacity or lack of such for evil so important? What is meant: evil to other
animals, or to humans? Is this capacity required to qualify as a moral sub-
ject? Or as a moral addressee? Or both?
To ask such questions is to recognize how poorly they fit with Derrida’s
approach. He starts out admitting his cat the role of subject, only to shift the
whole analysis to the human-all-too-human embarrassment of being looked
at, whereby this response to the cat’s look revolves entirely around the ques-
tion of what difference it makes for Derrida to be objectified by a cat’s look
as distinct from a human’s. The obvious corollary is not dwelt upon: what
difference it makes to the cat to look at a human as distinct from another
animal.
To return to the capacity for evil: many would agree that the capacity for
evil, understood as the alternative choice to good, is crucial to being a moral
agent, but not to being a moral addressee. Although Levinas doesn’t put it
like this, I take him to endorse the view. This goes to confirm the asymme-
try I have talked about between agent and addressee, asymmetry not only
in terms of difference in power but also in terms of difference in capacities.
Brought to bear on what we are exploring here: Whether the animal is capa-
ble of deceit and of evil makes no difference with regard to its status a moral
addressee, only to its status as a moral agent. Again, the point of the asym-
metry is (among other things) that you don’t have to be an agent in order to
be an addressee.
That Derrida does not make this distinction has consequences for his case
against Levinas. What gets lost is his ability to address the asymmetry that
is the signature of Levinas’ ethics. In saying this I do not take Derrida to
task for not agreeing with the asymmetry and its implications; I take him to
task for not recognizing its importance and, as part of that, the way it shows
Levinas to break radically with rival conceptions of the moral relationship.
Of course, nobody knows the importance of asymmetry a la Levinas bet-
ter than Derrida – one can say that his book (based on his speech at the
funeral) Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas is one long meditation on it. But that
does not change what I just said. The point I am making goes to the heart of
what Derrida considers the core of Levinas’ teaching: the question whether
the animal has a face. Why is that important? Because for lack of a face the
 A dog named Bobby 143
animal would not be able to issue the command “Thou shalt not kill”. As we
saw, according to Derrida there is in Levinas no such command forthcom-
ing from the animal. And since only the face forbids murder, understood
as the murder of the face, denying the animal a face means that “putting to
death or sacrificing the animal, exploiting it to death – none of those, within
this logic, in fact constitutes murder” (2008: 110).
Leave aside for now that I have made it clear that I don’t agree with
Derrida that Levinas denies the animal a face; his full answer to the ques-
tion tells a different story, as we saw above. What matters here is the con-
nection Derrida attributes to Levinas when stating that “where there is evil
there is face. What remains faceless is pure indifference to good and evil”
(2008: 110). I take the implication of the statement to be that for lack of
being a face, anything goes, with impunity; no suffering brought upon what
is faceless would qualify as morally wrong, let alone as evil. But to hold that
“where there is evil there is face” has a corollary: where there is face there
is evil. This corollary, not entertained by Derrida, helps us realize that the
distinction between agent and addressee is missing from his discussion of
the significance of evil. For lack of making this distinction, the statement
“What remains faceless is pure indifference to good and evil” is ambiguous:
what is meant – indifference to doing good and evil, or indifference to suf-
fering it?
The issue of evil is a good opportunity to sort out the difference between
agent and addressee, one squandered by Derrida. I take Derrida and
Levinas to agree that ability to suffer is the pivotal criterion for moral con-
sideration, for being an addressee. Does everything (everyone) that can suf-
fer have a face? Probably not, for the two are not identical: there are more
creatures in nature able to suffer, in virtue of sentience, than there are crea-
tures about whom we will say that they have a face. Moreover, it is probably
easier to agree about ability to suffer than to agree about qualifying as face.
This goes to show that Derrida is onto something important in pressing
Levinas concerning his readiness to “attribute” a face to the animal, or
more to the point, to some animals but not to others. The deeper question,
though, is to do with why being a face should be considered necessary to
qualify as addressee, as an apt “other” for the agent’s responsibility. If there
is no one-to-one-correspondence between suffering and face, such that the
capacity for suffering need not be tied to “being a face”, need not depend on
it to qualify morally speaking, why is it such a scandal for Derrida that (on
his reading, mind you!) Levinas is hesitant to attribute a face to all animals,
and a fortiori to all sentient beings? This is a scandal only because Derrida
is committed to being-a-face having a pivotal ethical significance. But isn’t
that exactly the notion he should question? What goes to show that Derrida
is not implicated in the same scandal he pins on Levinas? If Derrida defends
the position alluded to, that there may be faceless beings able to suffer and
that it is their ability to suffer and not their not-being-face that ethically
counts, why doesn’t he make a sustained argument to that effect?
144  A dog named Bobby
This is a complicated issue, for both thinkers. For one thing, and not-
withstanding Derrida’s pretending not to know, Levinas does say “It is clear
that, without considering animals as human beings, the ethical extends to
all living beings” (1988: 172); that is to say, it extends not only to more living
beings than humans, meaning to animals too; but to more non-human crea-
tures than animals as well, since not all non-human beings are animals. But
what would it mean, in practice, to extend moral status and, correlatively,
moral responsibility towards all living beings, based on their sentience-based
capacity for suffering, and thus their vulnerability to unnecessary pain so
as to qualify as harm, as someone’s doing the being (creature) in question
wrong?
Of course, to explain what it would mean to hold that all living beings are
part of the moral universe would require the defence of some version of eco-
or biocentrism. Neither Levinas nor Derrida as much as hint at embarking
on such a project, associated as it is with, say, the deep ecology of Arne
Næss (1989). Instead they both have their hands full with humans and ani-
mals, never raising such questions as whether cutting down a tree is wrong,
a wrong done to the tree, at that. This being so, let us return to the less rad-
ical view that animals are part of the moral universe. In affirming that view,
what precisely do we mean to admit to animals, morally speaking?
I take it that the answer is: that animals are entitled to moral considera-
tion. In other words, they qualify as moral addressees. But what about ani-
mals as moral agents? My position is clear: animals do not have to be agents
in order to be addressees; nobody does. I call that the asymmetric structure
of the ethical relationship, and I take Levinas to embrace it.
But this only takes us so far. We need to be more precise. It is not only
that animals don’t have to be themselves moral agents in order to qualify as
addressees, their capacity for suffering sufficing for the latter. It is that they
aren’t agents, not in the full-blown sense of moral agency I am committed to
(recall that I observed as much in my above discussion about Bobby). Why
is that? Essentially, because animals (and here I do speak generally, gener-
ically) lack the capacities needed for responsibility and so, as part of that,
for acting in a morally blameworthy manner, so that critiquing their action
along such lines would be misplaced and unfair. It would be to commit ani-
mals to partaking in a sort of practice that is uniquely human, that is, the
practice where moral agents critique and sanction each other for failing, in
the concrete instance, for living up to the requirements that go with enjoying
the status of being such agents – it is a gift that comes with strings attached,
to do with being eligible for moral criticism. In keeping with this view, ani-
mals are not moral agents because they are incapable of evildoing; they are
incapable of killing in the morally relevant sense of committing murder.
Only humans commit murder. Only humans, that is to say, are capable of
immorality. That is an important reason why only humans are moral agents.
This is the point I alluded to above, the point Derrida had a perfect
chance to make when faulting Levinas for (allegedly) not being prepared
 A dog named Bobby 145
to acknowledge that a human’s killing of an animal is morally wrong in the
sense of being murder; animals can be murdered just as humans can. Yet in
terms of morality, of participating in a comprehensive moral universe not
restricted to humans only, the question to ask is not only Derrida’s “Can an
animal be murdered?”; it is also “Can an animal murder?” To ask the second
question is to interrogate what is required to be a moral agent, given that
only such ones can murder, that is, can do something to somebody that is
a wrong in a sense implying blameworthiness. It takes addressees – proper
ones – to be an agent; and being an agent towards the proper addressees
means being able to wrong them. In this sense, the possibility of immoral-
ity is the condition of morality. And the possibility of immorality depends
on the mortality of the addressee (the other, all proper others), mortality
understood as a dimension of the latter’s vulnerability, susceptibility to suf-
fering (see Vetlesen 1994, 2009). In this way, mortality is the sine qua non of
morality.
I do not claim that this is the reasoning I find in Levinas and/or in Derrida.
It is my own, and its relevance for my overall argument will become clearer
when we proceed to the topic of extinction, in the next chapter – extinction
being a phenomenon that forces us to appreciate head-on the connection I
propose between morality and mortality.

IV
Having completed my discussion of Derrida, I turn now to a separate dis-
cussion of Levinas. I begin by looking at how Levinas understands the
connection between responsibility and the choice involved in evildoing.
Consider this passage from his essay “Humanism and An-archy”:

The insurmountable ambiguity of Evil is its essence. Seductive and fac-

ile evil is perhaps incapable of breaking the passivity of the pre-limi-
nary, pre-historical subjection, annihilating the hither side, repudiating
what the subject has never contracted. Evil shows itself to be sin, that
is, a responsibility, despite itself, for the refusal of responsibilities. It is
neither alongside of nor in front of the Good, but in the second place,
beneath, lower than, the Good. The being that perseveres in being, ego-
ism or Evil, thus outlines the dimension of baseness itself, and the birth of
hierarchy. Here begins the axiological bipolarity. But Evil claims to be
the contemporary, the equal, the twin, of the Good. This is an irrefuta-
ble lie, a Luciferian lie. It is the very egoism of the ego that posits itself
as its own origin, an uncreated, sovereign principle, a prince.
(1993a: 137; my italics)

In no uncertain terms, Levinas maintains that his ethics does not affirm the
equiprimordiality of good and evil, that is, the theodic notion that governs
so much of Western mentality to this day. And he adds, following the passage
146  A dog named Bobby
just quoted: “The ego, brought back to itself, responsible despite itself, abro-
gates the egoism of the conatus and introduces a meaning into being. […] But
the pre-original responsibility for the other is not measured by being, is not
preceded by a decision, and death cannot reduce it to absurdity. Yet we can
have responsibilities for which we cannot not consent to death. It is despite
myself that the other concerns me” (1993a: 138).
I cite these passages partly because they are conspicuously ignored
in Derrida’s discussion of Levinas, and partly because they alert us to
something that I consider absolutely crucial, namely Levinas’ view of the
“egoism of the conatus”, casting its concern with persevering in being as
tantamount to “egoism or Evil”, as outlining “the dimension of baseness
itself”. The “shock” of responsibility, its being unasked-for, non-optional,
in the sense we are getting at here means for the self (ego) to be “always
discovered, exposed, to turn the other cheek, which is the expiation for vio-
lence undergone by the fault of another” (1993a: 133, note 11). Of course, the
ring of Christian thought is not to be overlooked; “expiation” means “pay
the penalty of, make amends for (sin)”, according to the Oxford Dictionary
that sits on my desk. But what is this “violence”, by and against whom is it
committed? And what justifies the assertion of affinity, if not one-to-one
correspondence, between the “egoism of the conatus” on the one hand and
“evil” on the other?
So far we may have got the impression that according to Levinas there is
no I (or self, or ego) prior to the encounter with the other. Yet the first part
of Levinas’ first major work, Totality and Infinity, tells a different story. Here
Levinas develops a rich phenomenology of enjoyment and need, painting
a condition where the self bathes in the elements, hungry for the warmth
of the sun, the fertility of the soil, the coolness of water. There is “nature”
everywhere, generously providing what the self needs not only to keep on
living, but to feel joy and vitality in doing so. Only there are no others. Not
yet. So, somewhat surprisingly, there is a pre-moral and pre-social mode of
existence in Levinas, such as to invite comparison with Hobbes. Yet, unsur-
prisingly, the two pictures drawn are very divergent. In Levinas’ depiction,
existence is not harsh, it is enjoyment. I do not start out as a foreigner in
the world, thrown – without warmth, without security and trust – into a life
of scarcity, a life dictated by that severe and cruel master, Nature. There is
instead immediate belongingness in the world; it is mine, I am at one with
it, and at one with myself in being so. There is dwelling; I have a home, I am
surrounded by things. They are near and dear to me by way of my making
use of them, mending them, needing them. I literally live from the elements
of my existence in the world; I live from “good soup”, air, light, spectacles,
work, ideas, sleep. These are not so many things perceived first as objects of
representations. Nor are they tools or implements in the sense known from
Heidegger’s Being and Time; their utility neither defines them nor exhausts
their existence. Instead they are always in a primordial way “objects of
enjoyment, presenting themselves to taste, already adorned, embellished”
 A dog named Bobby 147
(1991a: 110). Thus things are always more than the strictly necessary; they
make up “the grace of life”. Life is love of life; the reality of life is “already
on the level of happiness”, a relation with contents that are “not my being
but more dear than my being: thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, working,
warming oneself in the sun” (1991a: 112). True, life is not pure happiness,
pure enjoyment; we are also beings having needs. But needs do not spoil
happiness, do not frustrate enjoyment. It is the other way around: “What we
live from does not enslave us; we enjoy it.” The human beings “thrives on his
[sic] needs; he is happy for his needs”. Before anything else, therefore, there
is complacency and pleasure: “Living from…is the dependency that turns
into sovereignty, into happiness – essentially egoist” (1991a: 114).
What matters at this stage of existence is this: “In enjoyment I am abso-
lutely for myself. Egoist without reference to the Other. I am alone without
solitude, innocently egoist and alone. Not against the others, not ‘as for me’,
but entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication and all refusal
to communicate” (1991a: 134).
The I (or self, or ego) as portrayed here is thus perfectly self-sufficient,
preoccupied with enjoying things in the very act of needing them, using
them. It is an I immersed in the primordial positivity of enjoyment, a pos-
itivity opposed to nothing and therefore sufficient to itself from the first.
This, then, is the I as it exists before the entry into its existence of the other.
So the question is: How does this I receive the other? Does receiving the
other require a different I from the one portrayed here? Is a shift from a pre-
moral mode of existence to a moral (morally charged) one involved, from
primordial egoism to genuine other-directedness?
Now the “egoist” painted by Levinas is no fighter in a Hobbesian war of
all against all. It is rather that the other does not (yet) matter, and that –
coming as an intruder at night – all of a sudden he or she does. The other
passes from irrelevance to primacy.
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas tells us that “The surpassing of phenom-
enal or inward existence does not consist in receiving the recognition of the
Other, but in offering him one’s being. To be in oneself is to express one-
self, that is, already to serve the Other. The ground of expression is good-
ness” (1991a: 183). So the Other is received by the I in the mode of goodness.
Levinas also speaks of gentleness: “The Other precisely reveals himself in
his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon
of gentleness”. He adds: “The welcoming of the face is peaceable from the
first, for it answers to the unquenchable peacable Desire for Infinity”. This
“peacable welcome is produced primordially in the gentleness of the femi-
nine face, in which the separated being can recollect itself, because of which
it inhabits, and in its dwelling accomplishes separation” (1991a: 151).
Here, then, the other is welcomed in at atmosphere informed by the good-
ness and gentleness of the welcoming I, nourished by its prior state of hap-
piness fostered by the generosity of the elements, providing for every need.
If there is at all a transition, a shift, undergone by the I who welcomes the
148  A dog named Bobby
other here, it appears to be perfectly undramatic one. There is no metamor-
phosis; none seems required.
But the drama that is absent in Levinas’ first major ethical work is all
the more at the forefront in the second one, Otherwise than Being or Beyond
Essence, so much so as to recall another book title, dealing with a different
topic: This Changes Everything (Naomi Klein). Now the entry of the Other is
said to turn the tables completely, disturbing and disrupting everything that
made for calm, happiness, and peace in the existence of the self, in its entire
world. Why? Because in responding to the Other a responsibility is posited
for – not by, as in choosing and deciding – the self such as to subject it to
“a persecuting possession”, so that responsibility “could never mean altru-
istic will, instinct of ‘natural benevolence’, or ‘love’”; “under accusation by
everyone, the responsibility for everyone goes to the point of substitution. A
subject is a hostage” (1991b: 111, 112). Confronted with the Other, there is in
play “a debt preceding the loan”, “an accusation preceding the fault”, such
that “the self is a sub-jectum; it is under the weight of the universe, respon-
sible for everything” (1991b: 113, 116). Insisting that subjectivity is – comes
into being, into effect, as – subjection and substitution, Levinas advocates
a “modern antihumanism” which “clears the place for subjectivity positing
itself in abnegation, in sacrifice, in a substitution which precedes the will. Its
inspired intuition is to have abandoned the idea of person, goal and origin of
itself. Strictly speaking, the other is the end; I am a hostage, a responsibility
and a substitution supporting the world in the passivity of assignation, even
in an accusing persecution, which is undeclinable”. Humanism as we know it
“has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human” (1991b: 127f.).
Reading these statements, it is no wonder that Paul Ricoeur speaks of
hyperbole, meaning the “systematic practice of excess”, in assessing the
change of style as well as substance that strucks any reader comparing his
first and second major ethical works (1992: 337). It is as if, for Levinas, the
more “prior” to everything to do with the capacities for receptivity as facil-
itating agency in the self standing accused, being persecuted, hostage, etc.,
the better for responsibility as he came to conceive it; in the end, it is not
even strong enough, hyperbolic enough, to assert that “a neighbor concerns
me outside of any a priori”, but “before every a priori, or from an earlier
moment than that of the a priori”. Indeed, he tells us, “this is the notion
all our inquiry means to bring out, so as to reach the concept of an abso-
lute passivity” (1991b: 192, note 20). Everything that goes to portray what
happens to the self once the Other shows up is bestowed the mark of excess
Ricour points to: separation between self and Other, exteriority and alter-
ity of the Other, the passivity of the self – the word “absolute” is resolutely
placed in front of all of them.
In an earlier work I wrote that “in the end Levinas so overemphasizes his
case for the primacy of the Other that he underplays the ethical status of the
acting I-subject to the point of the wildly implausible. The Levinasian ethics
of the Other is attained at the price of the surrender of the I. Selflessness is
 A dog named Bobby 149
nothing on which to build an ethical relationship with others” (Vetlesen and
Jodalen 1997: 162), any kind of others, I now add.
To be sure, to make the point that there are various kinds of others for
(towards) whom responsibility is imperative, and not only fellow human
beings, is nothing short of an embarrassment at this stage. That said, the
question here is to what extent this is an embarrassment, in the sense of a
serious deficit, in the case of Levinas’ ethics. But isn’t this the very question
I have already tried to answer? Wasn’t my discussion of Derrida’s reading
of Levinas intended to settle whether there is an animal other in his eth-
ics? Moreover, didn’t I argue that there is a place for the animal when, in
Chapter 2, I defended his essay on Bobby against criticisms from Deborah
Bird Rose and Luce Irigaray?
I did, but since then we have gained a deeper understanding of Levinas’
overall project. We have seen that his thinking about “the Other” under-
went a radicalization to the point of hyperbole (Ricoeur), ending up in a
series of claims about responsibility assuming the form of “substitution”
and “being hostage”, raising serious questions about where that leaves the
self in terms of being at all able to respond responsibly.
In returning to the question of the place of animals, the worry is not about
the dangers involved in emptying the self of the powers and capacities it needs
to respond responsibly – a self-effacement bordering on what Freud called
“moral masochism”. There are grounds for worrying about this, but since we
are now concerned with the self’s relationship with non-human – meaning
animal – others, the danger must be relocated, as it were; it pertains to the
wider world in which the self finds itself, not simply to its partaking in a dyad.
To see where I am heading, the truly crucial statement by Levinas is the
one cited above where he speaks about “the egoism of the conatus”, about
persevering in being as “egoism or Evil”, outlining “the dimension of base-
ness itself” (1993a: 137). This connects with Levinas’ notion of responsibil-
ity in that what evil is, or effects, is the “refusal of responsibilities” on the
part of the self. Consider what is at stake. Levinas is locating the source of
evil, amounting to the refusal of responsibility, at the deepest possible level,
that of the very being of the self, its conatus, its striving to persevere in its
being. That he is upping the ante in this fashion is testimony to his eagerness
to make his case by way of radical excess. In other words, simply to be and to
have an interest in persevering in that being is the cardinal sin, is what threat-
ens the Other by way of undermining responsibility.
However, to think that this is just the familiar story – Christian or oth-
erwise – rendered one more time, is to miss the point. What matters here
is that such a view of what relationships are about and of what consti-
tutes responsibility is profoundly anti-ecological, and for that reason also
anti-ethical. Why?
To see why, recall the shift from the first to the second of Levinas’ major
works: from a situation where the self welcomes the other in an atmos-
phere of gentleness, nourished by an existence that is “good” thanks to the
150  A dog named Bobby
elements of nature (the sun, the water, the soil), to a situation where the self
is said be the other’s hostage, taking up space from the Other simply by
existing, a space that Levinas gives us to understand is meant for the Other,
not for the self. This is what is involved in locating the relationship between
self and Other at the deepest possible level: the very being of the self imposes
a threat to the Other, threatens to be at the expense of that Other.
Essentially, then, the relationship between self and Other painted in late
Levinas takes the form of zero-sum, either-or: “absolute passivity” on the
part of the self is imperative to ensure that it respects the “absolute pri-
macy” of the Other. Were this self as much as an instant to be preoccu-
pied with its own entitlement to being, to persevering in its own being, the
Other’s entitlement to being would be undone. The implication is that the
world – or the relationship – isn’t big enough for both parties, the self and its
Other, regardless who that Other is.
Where does ecology come into this, not to forget the animal other?
The insight from which ecology starts out is that no creature can live
without others. Life, going on being, is all about depending on others, not
being self-sufficient in one’s own existence, needing others to sustain it. In a
word, life is about taking up space in a web of relationships with others to
be respected as the sine qua non of staying alive. My “others” are not a threat
to me, nor am I to them.
To heed this insight from ecology is to see that Levinas has it wrong about
conatus: the one-to-one connection he postulates between having an interest
in persevering in own’s own being, termed “egoism”, on the one hand, and
evil on the other, is plain wrong. It is so not only ecologically, as a depiction
of the conditions of existence, but also – more seriously for Levinas – ethi-
cally. It does not help to point out here that separating ontology and ethics
is precisely what Levinas sets out to do, staking his entire case for the series
of “prior-to’s” that go with responsibility on that very separation, the more
“absolute”, the better.
The problem is not the obvious one that Levinas contradicts himself in
that he does locate the ethical Urszene where the Other shows up for the self
in a condition (or mode) of being-in-the-world, keen to show how drastically
that mode of being is destabilized at that very instant. How could he not,
somehow, locate it thusly? No, the problem I have in mind is even more
internal to Levinas’ stated aims. C. Fred Alford puts it like this: “What
if the human [or ethical – AJV] problem were not egoism, but instead our
terrible dependence on others? Not ‘I want my place in the sun’, but ‘I need
you in order to be me’” (2002: 22). The need for others Alford speaks about
is existential as much as ethical, a condition of life that has to be met for
any sort of responsibility for anybody else to be performed, making the
inter-dependence of the self and the other(s), the going-both-ways of the
relationships they form, a condition of ethics, not a threat to it.
Recall the first version of the self’s being-in-the-world offered by Levinas.
The impression created is that of abundance, richness, of having one’s every
 A dog named Bobby 151
need met thanks to the generosity in giving on the part of the elements of
nature. For all its abundance, however, there is something conspicuously
absent. No, I don’t mean human others – that they are absent here only to
show up later, like “intruders in the night”, is an all-too-familiar point by
now. It’s the absence of animals I think about. Animals play no part in the
abundance and richness of existence, of sheer being-alive, painted here; nor do
they show up together with the (human) Other when he or she enters the scene.
Whether it be early or late Levinas, animals make no difference, not existen-
tially, not ethically. There is only Bobby, that lone dog, showing up in the camp
during the war, only possibly – disputably, as we saw above – accepted as
a member of the moral community, making it more-than-human, contin-
gently not essentially so.
What difference, then, would taking animals into account make to
Levinas’ ethics?
In fact, the absence of humans’ interacting with animals alert us to the
absence of any sort of interaction-founded relationships at all in Levinas’
ethics. The abundance and richness so striking in early Levinas is belied
by a double absence, that of humans and animals alike. It is not a scenery
of richness but of impoverishment. You might respond that the scenery
is meant as a construct, much like Hobbes’ “state of nature” or Rawls’
placing his interlocutors behind “a veil of ignorance”. True, but such
constructs always rely on a certain degree of plausibility, otherwise they
wouldn’t succeed as starting points even for very general and abstract
reasoning.
It is tempting to say the same thing about Levinas that I said about
Habermas: that his omitting animals from what really matters, ethically
speaking, mirrors and helps reinforce their decreasing presence as so many
non-human others that play in role in making us human. Reading Paul
Shepard, as we did in the first chapter, reminds us how historically recent is
their lack of presence in the everyday lifeworld of most of us “moderns”; how
recent is, also, the situation where cats and dogs make up the vast majority
of animals we relate to when we do so. Shepard’s question – “Why do men
persist in destroying their habitat?” (1982: 1) – is just as little Levinas’ ques-
tion as it is Habermas’.
So what is lost when animals are kept out of the framework meant to
address the ethical questions that matter, in a historical situation when,
truth be told, their absence is more accurately described as taken for granted
than as conspicuous?
What is lost, most fundamentally, is the connection between ecology and
ethics: the insight that the conditions of life define the conditions of ethics,
thus making it possible for life to go on for all sorts of living beings defines
the task of ethics, its raison d’etre. The precise nature of this connection will
be a major topic in the next two chapters.
To return to Levinas: where does the connection I talk about between
ecology and ethics prove important in assessing his ethics?
152  A dog named Bobby
Shepard reminds us that life is essentially about eating and being eaten.
As Rose helps us recognize, this implies an ever-going exchange, alternation,
taking-turns between living and dying. That somebody dies is the condition
for others to go on living. Ecology is the study of the kinds of inter-depend-
encies between all sorts of creatures, and species, that this amounts to in
real life.
Does this mean that the existence of the other is a threat to that of the self,
any kind of self? In different ways, Hobbes, Sartre, and Levinas all suggest
as much – though in Levinas the roles are reversed in that the self, should it
assert itself as a self in the sense of claiming for itself the same right to live
as the other, would threaten the other; therefore, it is ethically incumbent to
renounce such self-assertion (more on this below). Either way, the essence of
the relationship is that of conflict: one party occupies the place the other is
entitled to. This is the either-or, the “ain’t big enough for both of us” referred
to above. It is an understanding of the ethical relationship that sits poorly
with ecology.

V
Alford, in his important book Levinas, the Frankfurt School and
Psychoanalysis, can help us see what is at issue here. Even though his analy-
sis concentrates on relationships between humans only, his discussion sheds
important light on humans’ relationships to animals as well.
Alford points out that Levinas is afraid of relationships. Nearness – if at
all – needs to be distant (as Habermas once said about Adorno’s position).
Why? Because the self’s engaging in relationship with the Other risks break-
ing that other. Since the self’s being at all concerned with itself, with its “per-
severance in being” (conatus), is tantamount to “evil”, response in the form
of responsibility needs to efface the self’s concern with itself entirely: for it
to raise its ugly head would be to let it override responsibility, thus risking to
destroy the Other. Separateness must be absolute and unconditional.
Appreciate that in saying this, the stakes are higher than in the case of the
worry about reducing the Other to “the same”, that is to say, the formula
in Levinas that points to a certain similarity to Adorno’s concern with the
“non-identical”. Of course, both thinkers are scared of totality, of total-
izing tendencies that amount to symbolic violence against the particular.
However, as the psychoanalytically informed Alford observes, Levinas’
notion that the Other risks being destroyed by the self’s engagement with
it because failing to be uncontaminated by any dint of narcissism, of
self-concern, is deeply misguided; it distorts the human condition and with
that the conditions within which ethically charged relationships play out.
The purity demanded on the part of the self, to the point of hyperbolic
excess, has as its corollary the frailty of the Other. Yet this frailty is exagger-
ated to a degree corrosive not conducive to the ethical task par excellence,
responsibility. Why that is so is not easily recognized when reading Levinas,
 A dog named Bobby 153
nor is it illuminated in the approach taken by Derrida. What is called for is
bringing in a view that represents an alternative to Levinas’ position, chal-
lenging assumptions central to it yet unquestioned so far.
The alternative view I have in mind is one that Alford makes construc-
tive use of in his book, that of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. To
be sure, I have discussed Winnicott above, pointing out that his notion of
“transitional objects” neglects the role of animals – Shepard’s living ani-
mals at that, not stuffed ones. Turning now to his classic paper “On the Use
of an Object”, we find an understanding of the place of destruction, and
more indirectly aggression, that makes for a highly instructive contrast with
Levinas.
Winnicott’s view is that “it is the destructive drive that creates the quality
of externality”, a view he means to counter the orthodox one that aggression
is reactive to the encounter with the reality principle. He presents his view in
the form of a sequence where

The subject says to the object: “I destroyed you”, and the object is there
to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: “Hullo
object!”, “I destroyed you. I love you. You have value for me because of
your survival in my destruction of you. While I am loving you I am all
the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.” Here fantasy begins
for the individual. The subject can now use the object that has survived.
It is important to note that it is not only that the subject destroys the
object because the object is placed outside of the area of omnipotent
control. It is equally significant that…to say that it is the destruction of
the object that places the object outside the area of the subject’s omnip-
otent control. In these ways the object develops its own autonomy and
life, and (if it survives) contributes in to the subject, according to its
own properties. […] This quality of “always being destroyed” makes the
reality of the surviving object felt as such, strengthens the feeling tone,
and contributes to object-constancy. The object can now be used.
(Winnicott 2018 [1968]: 222, 226)

How does this understanding of the constructive role of destruction in

exploring (testing) whether the object (other) survives it, help us see features
of Levinas’ teaching that we haven’t seen already? Alford puts it like this:

Man’s metabolism with nature, as Marx called it, it not confined to

inhuman nature. We eat and breathe each other. What’s needed is an
ethics of limits and responsibility. Levinas is helpful here, but not as
helpful as he might be because there really are no limits for Levinas. If
I owe you everything, if I’m responsible for your sins, if there is noth-
ing I dare withhold, then it actually becomes more difficult to think
about limits, above all the limits that circumscribe the necessary ruth-
lessness of life. Infinity is not a limit. […] Levinas does not address this
154  A dog named Bobby
issue in the spirit considered here, a morality of the inherent exploitation
that is life. If Winnicott is correct, life is inherently exploitative not just
because we use others to survive, but because in using others we discover
that they are real. Exploitation is the price of knowledge of the reality
of others. Absent this knowledge, Levinas must work twice as hard to
protect others, which is why he posits such a terrible distance between
humans.
(2002: 56; my italics)

Even though others are fragile, they are not, argues Alford in the spirit
of Winnicott, quite so fragile as Levinas (and to a certain extent Adorno)
believes. Often others are able to resist intrusion and destruction, and when
they do, “joy happens: the subject feels in his or her bones the separate real-
ity of the other, and so can engage and use the other in a responsible man-
ner” (2002: 56); “use” understood, in Winnicott, as something creative and
productive, not exploitative. As to the other’s fragility or lack of such, then,
pointing to limits, to responsibility, the ego needs to find out, to “test” the
other as object in the sense of Winnicott’s sequence. But this is precisely
what Levinas forbids.
What Winnicott allows us to see is that Levinas is so marked by fear and
trembling before the ego, at the thought of what the ego might do to the
other were it to act from anything else than “absolute passivity” as brought
on by being the other’s hostage, that he (Levinas) never for as much as a
moment will risk allowing the ego to “test” and thereupon use the other
as an object in Winnicott’s understanding – to risk that is tantamount to
jeopardizing the very existence of the other. Hence everything to do with the
ego’s need for the other must, by all means, be suppressed, most basically its
need to explore the realness of the other by way of attempting to destroy it
(in Winnicott’s non-literal sense of testing), such that what qualifies as real
is what resists me, proving it exists separately from me. This is the difficult
yet precious experience needed to make me realize that I am dependent on
others who exist in their own right, pursuing their own projects, and so
remain outside of my control, rendering my realization of being dependent
on them psychologically demanding, calling for maturity.
So Winnicott helps us realize that every existence uses others, that is to
say, uses them as objects in his intended sense, where such objects are real-life
other human persons, in keeping with Winnicott’s human-centred approach.
As Alford rightly observes, the only ethically important question concerns
“the limits of use, so that use does not become exploitation” (2002:105). He
finds no satisfactory answer to this question in Levinas, searching in vain in
his thinking for what Alford terms a sense of “shared freedom”, a freedom
that involves my participation with others, neither serving nor enslaving
them, but living with them, acknowledging my dependence upon others,
but not transforming this dependence into an idealized servitude, that is
to say, what Freud called “moral masochism”, assuming here the form of
 A dog named Bobby 155
“glorification of guilt and subjugation for the purpose of erasing the self”
(2002: 69). In psychological terms, the zero-sum, either-or I spoke about
above, seeing them as the two extreme alternatives Levinas leaves the self
with in its response to the other, resembles a borderline experience in its
quality of “all or nothing at all”, such that “either I am for myself, a narcis-
sist imprisoned in my own world, or I abandon myself to the other utterly”;
“either I impose myself and my frameworks on the other, what Levinas calls
totality, or I open myself to infinity” (2002: 115). It is tempting to say – Alford
does not, but he could have – that the stance Levinas paints with regard to
how the self responds/relates to the other has more in common with what
psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1988, 1989) calls the schizoid-paranoid posi-
tion than the depressive one, where the first disallows for the ambivalence
and ambiguity tolerated in the second, tolerated in the self (myself) as well
as in the other, acknowledging that both self and other are capable of both
good and evil. To tolerate these qualities in oneself as well as the other is
important to counter the fear that the other would shatter should I come too
close, should I try to come close at all, close enough to get it wrong, to con-
taminate the other with my badness, my greed, and my envy; close enough
to hurt and to do harm, or to neglect and forget, creating the need for, and
trust in the possibility of, reparation, implying forgiveness, and gratitude at the
willingness to forgive. These key aspects that make up the human repertoire
in relating/respond to the other are largely absent in Levinas. It is the price he
pays for exaggerating the presumed frailty of the other.
What about love? Alford quotes Levinas’ statement “Eros, strong as
death”, taking him to mean that “love, like death, seeks infinity. Because the
other is so other, to love another is like death” (2002: 70). This goes deeper
than, yet reminds us of the French saying that every time you go, I die a little.
However, I disagree with Alford that this is the most important feature in
Levinas’ thinking about death.
Common sense has it that death is the ultimate threat to love. What I
am after here is something else, though. It is to do with the implications of
bringing the psychoanalytic insights of Winnicott to bear on the constella-
tion ethics-ecology in Levinas.
Recall Levinas’ statement that “the being that perseveres in being, egoism
or Evil, outlines the dimension of baseness itself”; that “the ego, respon-
sible despite itself, abrogates the egoism of the conatus” (1993a: 137, 138).
That conatus, an entity’s striving to persevere in its being, should be iden-
tified (one-to-one) with egoism is highly contestable. To occupy a place in
the world, to persevere in being the kind of being an entity, be it the human
person, is, is not something that threatens the possibility of responding/
related to the other, to be and do something that matters to that other, but
its precondition. If the reply is that Levinas is out precisely to locate the
self’s response-responsibility prior to being – to being for-itself as well as
for- or with-the-other – my rejoinder is that what is problematic is precisely
this situating response-responsibility before being – before not simply in
156  A dog named Bobby
terms of temporality (chronology), in itself a big topic in Levinas, but before
in terms of primacy, making it imperative for the self to abandon its claim
to being, its conatus (“abrogate” its egoism), so as to give all the space to the
other, claiming none for itself.
The upshot of what I am saying is that the “egoism” of the conatus is not
tantamount to evil but the precondition for making the very kind of choice
that defines ethics, that between good and evil: rather than evil being impli-
cated in the conatus as such, it makes the choice of goodness – the alterna-
tive to evil – possible.
Then there is destruction, in Winnicott’s non-literal sense, explained
above. Because of his fear for the intrinsic frailty of the Other, a fear whose
corollary, we now see, is his fear of the interest-in-persevering in the self
(ego), Levinas is scared to death when it comes to destructiveness – scared,
that is, that were the urge to destroy the other in Winnicott’s sense of testing
what the Other can take to play out, if only for an instant, death would fol-
low, if not literally, than ethically: the chance that the Other would survive
any such use by the self can never be taken, is never worth taking.
To be sure, in advancing this critique I violate the proclaimed first princi-
ple in Levinas’ whole approach to ethics: that ethics is prior to psychology.
To grant that premise and the extreme purity it involves, however, comes
with the price of emptying the self of all resources needed to relate to oth-
ers in a responsible manner. To refer like I have done, then, to the self as
responding/relating to the Other, is already to disobey Levinas’ premise
that response in the form of responsibility be prior to, and thus clearly sepa-
rated from, any form of relating with that Other, suggesting as relating does
the participation, of both, in a relationship. Everything to do with interac-
tion, being-with the Other, comes after the self’s being-for the Other, after
both chronologically and ethically, according to Levinas. That is why the
lack of a sense of “shared freedom” that Alford charges Levinas with, a
freedom that involves my participation with others, is no deficit for Levinas
but key to his project. This explains Levinas’ criticism of Martin Buber’s I
and Thou – namely that Buber does not fully break with the traditional priv-
ilege of ontology; his failure to do so being evident in his characterization of
the I-Thou relation in terms of being, instantiating a “between” (inter) that
is “a mode of being: co-presence, co-esse” (1993b: 23). Hence for Levinas
Buber’s thesis that “in the beginning was the Relation” shows that he has
got it wrong from the start. To conceive of the I-Thou as a relationship in
the form of a dialogue is to situate it on a footing of equality, of reciprocity,
and thereby to jeopardize what is distinctive to response-responsibility in
Levinas: the I’s giving without expecting anything in return.
Let me conclude in a way that anticipates things to come. There are three
points to make, one affirmative, the others critical.
First, and foremost, the truly crucial takeaway from Levinas’ ethics for
my purposes is its insistence that the ethical relationship is asymmetric,
that responsibility is not conditional on reciprocity, and that the Other’s
 A dog named Bobby 157
vulnerability is what grounds my response qua responsibility. The suscepti-
bility to suffering that this vulnerability implies is such as to include animals
and other sentient beings as my addressees. Indeed, it is tempting to say that
the asymmetry Levinas insists on suits the human-animal constellation bet-
ter than it suits the human-to-human one (a point I shall elaborate in the
next chapter). It is not necessary to be an agent capable of responsibility in
order to qualify as an addressee; vulnerability suffices.
Second, encounter has primacy over knowledge, yet every encounter
between a self and an Other, human or animal, involves both parties in
a relationship with each other, within which alone responsibility can be
enacted in ways that may prove right or wrong, good or evil. This being
so, Levinas’ insistence that responsibility’s being asymmetric depends on
its separation from being, from the dynamics of relationships, is misguided
and comes with unacceptable costs, situating the responsive self in a psy-
chic and hermeneutic no-man’s land, casting psychology as detrimental
not co-constitutive for the attainment of maturity that is needed for any
context-­specific enactment of responsibility.
Third, there is in late Levinas a penchant for hyperbolic excess that
results in the self’s effacing itself so as to do justice to the Other as face.
This is ethically counterintuitive and psychologically counterproductive. It
involves a self-imposed suppression of engaging with the Other creatively
in Winnicott’s sense of destructiveness, thereby imprisoning the self in a
mechanic (rigid) as distinct from organic (flexible) stance where giving space
to the Other comes with the masochistic cost of claiming none for itself,
not even the space needed to do what responsibility for the other demands,
namely a minimum of resources on the part of the self, lest the appeal from
the other go unanswered. And by misconceiving conatus as egoism and
primitive narcissism, as always at the expense of others instead of as facili-
tating the self’s playing a vital part in their sustaining themselves, Levinas
misses the chance to fuse his ethical vision with ecology, with the wider
world. The present-day rhetoric promoting that the human agent minimize
or give up his or her voice for the sake of so many voiceless other-than-human
others, ashamed at being (and having for so long in Western history been)
the centre, may well be the legacy of Levinas’ ethics that regrettably proves
most influential within contemporary posthumanism, taking his proclaimed
antihumanism in a direction he did not, and perhaps could not, foresee.
4 Encounters as experiences
of conversion

I
On February 19, 1985, the Australian ecophilosopher Val Plumwood experi-
enced a life-changing encounter in Kakadu National Park. Alone in a canoe
and about to return to the shore, she noticed what she took to be a log float-
ing in midstream. It turned out to be a saltwater crocodile. Her attempts to
frighten it off did not prevent the crocodile from tightening its jaws around
her legs, dragging her down under the water in what she came to describe
as “three death rolls”. Despite severe leg injuries, she managed to break free
and reach the shore, then walked and eventually crawled the three kilo-
metres to the range station, where her cries for help were heard and she was
taken to hospital, staying in intensive care for a month.
Forty-six years old at the time of the incident, Plumwood was already a
widely recognized figure within the emerging field of environmental phi-
losophy, a status that would be galvanized by the success of her first book,
the path-breaking Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, published in 1993.
Surprisingly, though, the experience with the crocodile is not a topic in the
book, not explicitly. Only about ten years after it occurred did she start
writing about it, having taken her a long time to digest and be able to reflect
upon it in a philosophical manner.
The following is an excerpt from Plumwood’s article “Taken by a croco-
dile”, published in The Age on January 12, 2004:

Before the crocodile, I wrote about the value of nature, but after the
crocodile, I started writing about how we see ourselves as outside
nature, about the power of nature and our illusions that we can control
it, that we’re not embodied beings and are apart from other animals. We
don’t understand ourselves as ecological beings that are part of the food
chain, where we must honor our food and the more-than-food-that all
of us are, including other life forms. I don’t believe we do this when we
treat other animals as no more than food.
(Plumwood 2004)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003317692-5
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 159
In “The Eye of the Crocodile”, she addresses the incident’s profound
impact on her thinking about humans and animals:

In the individual justice universe you own the energy volume of your
body absolutely and spend much time defending it frantically against
all comers. Any attempt by others at sharing is regarded as an outrage,
an injustice that must be resisted to the hilt. In the other, Heraclitean
universe being in your body is more like having a volume out from the
library, a volume subject to more or less instant recall by other bor-
rowers – who rewrite the whole story when they get it. […] The croc-
odile event changed my emphasis to one of better understanding our
dependency on nature and our over-estimation of our powers. We need
to understand nature because we have a sense of security that is illu-
sory. The dominance of rationalism in our culture creates a degree of
over-confidence.
(2012: 35)

What Plumwood describes is a fundamental shift in her thinking, a shift

provoked by how the crocodile regarded her, namely as food. Her instant
reaction, she says, was that the crocodile had it wrong, utterly wrong to
think that she could be reduced to food; as a human being, she was so much
more than food. The experience with the crocodile forced her to acknowl-
edge the existence of a world “from the outside”, a world no longer her own,
no longer the world as defined by, and for, humans but instead “an unrecog-
nizably bleak landscape composed of raw necessity”, a world that would
go on without her, indifferent to her will and struggle, to her life and death
(1996). The “hyper-separation” of humans from nature that she so power-
fully critiqued in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature was given the lie in
most dramatic, autobiographical fashion ripe with philosophical implica-
tions, imposed upon her by an animal predator who subjected her to an
experience only non-human animals, not humans, are supposed to have,
namely that of being hunted, not the hunter, exposing her to the terror of
being the Other’s food, nothing else.
Plumwood calls the world from the outside that the crocodile forced her
to acknowledge as its world, as real as hers, undoubtedly, indisputably so,
the Heraclitean universe. Being confronted with its realness the way she
was made her realize how it happens that one predator recognizes another
predator; how the roles of hunter and hunted alternate between the species
and so may suddenly be reversed between them, according to the dynamism
of a universe from which humans are not – precisely not – exempted. To
think that we are, on the basis of some capacity-related “superiority” vis-
à-vis the rest of nature that philosophers as well as Western society at large
have insisted upon, is hubris. It attests to an over-confidence in us humans
that is not simply wrong, meaning not true to reality, but also extremely
160  Encounters as experiences of conversion
dangerous, not least for us and our prospects of survival qua species,
nothing less. What this over-confidence gets wrong is wrong not only, or
even primarily, for ethical reasons. At the fundamental level to do with
the factual conditions of life, what is wrong is the notion that humans are
independent of the rest of nature, and that nature is there for the taking,
passively awaiting whatever we, in our freedom and autonomy, may choose
to do with it or, more to the point, against it. As a culture, we hold ourselves
to be “free” to act as if non-human nature in its richness and entirety exists
as a means, as so many resources, for our purposes, inducing and justifying
us to treat as substitutable what is indispensable, as unlimited what is lim-
ited, and so on. Since this as if is in actual fact not true to the conditions of
life of which human life is a part, unconditionally and ineluctably at that,
pursuing the as if of superiority and independency on our part is not going
to “overcome” or in any way neutralize the realness of these factors – quite
the opposite, it will only amplify and exacerbate their impact, making us
more vulnerable for each year, each day we go on denying the sources of
that vulnerability.
The denial of our dependence on nature is a big topic in its own right, one
that I have addressed in The Denial of Nature and that Plumwood exam-
ines in what was to be her last monograph, Environmental Culture: The
Ecological Crisis of Reason (2002). Indeed, the title gives away her point:
What has passed as “reason” in hegemonic Western thought, to the point
of pervading the major structures and institutions of modern society to this
day, is on closer scrutiny exposed as a series of blind spots that, precisely in
being acted upon, now increasingly reveals the reason that produces them as
“actually the opposite of reason” (2002: 118).
For my purposes, the most relevant aspect of Plumwood’s analysis of how
denial of humans’ dependence on nature plays out is to do with our rela-
tionship with animals, including crocodiles. The one particular blind spot
deserving mention here is that involved in promoting “insensitivity to the
Other’s needs, agency and prior claims as well as belief in the coloniser’s
apartness, superiority and right to conquer or master the Other” (2002: 118),
what I have elsewhere referred to as a sense of entitlement, the right to have
it all (Vetlesen 2021). The promotion of insensitivity, Plumwood writes, is
the very function of the human-centred mentality, “centrism” for short, that
she talks about. Insensitivity towards non-human others’ needs and agency
is dangerous in that it “puts the centric perceiver out of touch with reality
about the Other” (ibid.). Such insensitivity must be fought on all fronts, in
all areas where it currently prevails, the positive objective being to “estab-
lish better communicative relationships with nature in all its aspects, as a
preliminary to learning to balance human needs with nature’s needs and
limits” (2002: 142).
This is Plumwood’s general outlook. But where does she stand with
regard to animals? Does she favour including them within a moral uni-
verse of rights? Are animals carriers of intrinsic value? Are they “ends in
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 161
themselves” (the status Kant reserved for humans) that would be violated
were we to treat them as food and to eat them?
Without engaging extensively with the supporters of animal rights
inspired by Peter Singer’s work in particular, Plumwood makes it clear
that she finds the extension of the rights framework to the non-human
world problematic. Why? Because the concept of rights has too many
affinities to the human-centrist framework she sets out to challenge and,
hopefully, help replace with an alternative more true to the ecological
facts just mentioned. For one thing, it is difficult to apply the concept of
rights to non-humans “beyond the case of certain animals that resemble
humans”; indeed, the notion of rights is committed to the “neo-Cartesian
moral dualism”, she critiques, a dualism that organizes moral concepts and
the status of the entities they are meant to pronounce on in hyper-separated,
all-or-nothing ways, such that a being either is ascribed a full-blown right to
treatment considered equal to human treatment, or it is not considered enti-
tled to any form of ethical consideration at all (2002: 144). The categorical
manner in which, say, Kantians make the distinction and draw the line (sets
up a barrier, a wall) between those inside and those outside the universe
of what I have called “moral addressees”, so that either an entity (human, ani-
mal) is treated as an end in itself and hence inviolable, or as a mere means,
is part of the problem, leading to what in Plumwood’s terminology is the
hyper-separation between “use” and “respect”, conceiving the two catego-
ries as mutually exclusive, something we shall see is as deeply problematic
in practice as it is in theory.
The concept of rights is also problematic for philosophical reasons of the
kind I touched upon in my discussion of Habermas in the previous chap-
ter. We saw that the moral universalism which Kant-inspired contemporary
thinkers like Habermas adhere to is wedded to a methodological, ontolog-
ical, and moral individualism ill-suited to address the status of non-human
beings, including the factors that undermine it, revealing a near complete
lack of being in sync with current ecological realities. The upshot is that
relationships considered with regard to their moral import are indiscrimi-
nately forced into the one-size-fits-all homogenizing straitjacket of the one-
to-one constellation, such as to answer, in simple terms, the question of
who is the agent and who is the addressee. Thus conceived, everything rel-
evant to determining who is what in the particular case or situation is, first,
sought answered in terms of capacities, whereby, second, everything seen as
relevant to decide about responsibilities, obligations, and rights are taken
to be qualities owned by the individual entities in question qua individual
agents and/or addressees. As I pointed out in my critique of Habermas, this
individual-centredness comes with the price (among others) of silencing the
extra-individual, structural and macro-related forces and constraints that
impact on the decision-making powers – in a word: the actual agency – of
the individuals involved. The result is that environmental problems such as
climate change per conceptual fiat have to be reduced to the decisions and
162  Encounters as experiences of conversion
actions of so many discrete individuals in some discrete spatio-temporal set-
tings in order to be made morally assessable and legally accountable, so that
the whole, complex problem (anthropogenic climate change) is regarded as
an aggregate of the actions of so many individuals, neglecting the impact of
structures and institutions much like neoclassical economists are wont to
“externalize” them, and appealing to the moral character of individuals in
order to “solve” the problem.
Plumwood’s critique of the advocacy of animal rights is similar to my
critique of Habermas. She traces the individualistic tendencies of rights
theory to the way it “takes a complex set of social and political conditions
and congeals them into a singular and apparently simple and stereotypical
quality of an individual whose rights are violated by another individual who
is responsible for their violation” (2002: 153). To be sure, these are general
statements about conceptual matters and general positions. What we need
to do is bring them to bear on the particular issue at hand, brought so dra-
matically to the fore in Plumwood’s eminently one-to-one encounter with
the crocodile: the issue of how animals should be treated by humans, with
special attention to their – and our – status as beings that can be food for
their species “others”.
Having pointed out the overemphasis on personal conviction that she sees
follow from the individualistic premises of rights theory, Plumwood con-
tends that this theory “leads to the adoption of poorly contextualized and
culturally hegemonic vegetarian strategies which condemn all eating of ani-
mals in indiscriminate terms, and do not encourage us to prioritise opposing
the most extreme examples of distortion and instrumentalization of animal
lives – the intensive farming practices that treat animals as no more than
living meat or egg production units” (2002: 154). These are practices that
effectively reduce, say, feedlot salmon to biomass, denied any agency and
individuality within a regime where humans decide everything to do with
the total life cycle of the fish, that is to say, in the description given by the
philosopher Martin Lee Mueller, “the circumstances under which the fish
will be fertilized and grow, what they will be fed, where and how they will
die, and who receives their flesh afterwards” (2017: 39). In other words, the
poverty of rights theory is not limited to the way in which it individualizes
the parties whose moral considerability and responsibility are assessed, ren-
dering morally motivated resistance and activism largely ineffectual for lack
of engaging head-on with “the responsibility of systems of economic ration-
ality for the atrocities daily committed against domestic animals, especially
in the factory-farming framework” (ibid.), demonstrating that this sort of
individualism is misguided also in terms of carrying real political traction.
The analytic poverty Plumwood alludes to goes deeper than this, though.
Her point may be introduced by reference to my experience when presenting
Deborah Bird Rose’s book Wild Dog Dreaming in my class of master stu-
dents. As recalled from Chapter 2, hunting is a central theme in the book,
especially – literally - hands-on in the section where Rose writes: “Often an
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 163
animal would look at us in the moment before it was shot. We saw it die;
sometimes we had to finish it off with our bare hands. […] When you cut
into an animal, the thing that is so surprising is the reminder of how warm
animals are on the inside” (2011 25f.). Upon my reading this passage to the
class, there was a long silence in the room, tensely and a bit awkwardly so.
Hesitant at first, the comments that eventually ensued were testimony to
the surprise, even shock that most of the students clearly felt: they had not
expected the author of a book in their environmental philosophy course to
endorse the killing of animals that takes place in hunting, let alone to par-
ticipate in it: Perhaps Rose’s being a woman amplified the shock.
It will not come as a surprise to the readers of this book that being against
humans’ killing of animals is the taken-for-granted position among, say,
the present generation of Norwegian philosophy students, as well as among
what seems to be an increasing portion – albeit still a minority – of soci-
ety at large. Especially within academia, the burden of argument is placed
one-sidedly on the part of those who, for some reason or another, are in
favour of the killing of animals for human purposes – reasons that are
assumed either to be tied to economic self-interest or to a dubious moral
and/or political outlook, or a combination of both. Hence the opposition to
killing animals has an air of moral superiority, representing the enlightened
and civilized stance.
I take the class room experience to illustrate the point on Plumwood’s
part that I am getting at: one of the ways in which the animal rights theory
is poor is its penchant for settling the question of the killing of animals in
terms of an either/or, only to advocate the position that the killing of ani-
mals for human purposes is wrong, period. The case is effectively closed, the
issue resolved, once and for all, sub specie aeternitatis, in a manner priding
itself on being exactly that: principled and universal, allowing for no excep-
tions, loyal to the Kantian exemption taboo such that no case or situation
will allow for a different view or course of action, be it on pain of the worst
sin of them all, that of self-contradiction.
Again, this is my way of putting the point, not Plumwood’s. But it is a
point we share. The question that must be asked is this: Is the question of
whether it is right or wrong for humans to kill animals one that allows for,
let alone requires, an either/or sort of answer, such that either it is right,
meaning always and in principle, or it is wrong, always and in principle?
Why should this absolutist approach, feeding on binary and allegedly
mutually exclusive answers, this strict rigour in thought and inflexibility in
action, be the approach best suited to the matter? Is the phenomenon as
such – humans killing animals – really that homogeneous, that void of com-
plexity, ambiguity, of reasoning of the “it depends” sort, of the experiences
made by others, besides oneself, meaning not only other individuals but also
other cultures, other cosmologies? Can the question be stylized into a purely
principal matter, doing without the input from past history, from current
culture, from the particularities of context? Into a matter that, in keeping
164  Encounters as experiences of conversion
with this logic, is actualized in one particular constellation as far as the par-
ties are concerned, namely that of the individual agent on the one hand and
his or her animal counterpart (addressee) on the other?
Given these criticisms, what would an alternative position look like, one
allowing for greater flexibility and for the exercise of experience-based
judgement on the part of the human agent, yet without forgetting to take
into account the impact of extra-individual structures? A position that
would welcome the factual heterogeneity of all the parties who, in some way
or another, have their lives impacted by the approach taken and the options
it either facilitates or excludes?
Eager to offer such an alternative position, Plumwood is adamant that
it “would not place the emphasis on personal purity, and it would resist
the idea that predation is inevitably fallen”; moreover, it would “refuse to
create an absolutist moral boundary between animals and plants, as a dual-
ism of conscious and non-conscious life in which only the former deserves
moral consideration” (2002: 155). In keeping with my discussion above, the
position sought for must reject the exclusionary imperative that derives
from “the reliance of rights-based forms of vegetarianism on the (unstated)
assumption that only those beings not admitted to the class of right-holders
can ever ethically become food”. Indeed, to equate availability as food with
moral exclusion is to be (however tacitly) committed to the moral dualism
that is a legacy of Cartesianism; it is a view that is forced to insist on “a
substantial outclass of living beings that are morally excluded in order to
locate any viable form of eating which allows an ethical basis for human
survival” (ibid.).
The deeper problem with the exclusionary imperative stems from its
commitment to conceptually erecting, and thereupon policing, boundaries
between humans and animals (or some animals, not all), or between animals
and plants, boundaries that are artificial, meaning constructs, and as such
imposed on the domain of planetary life rather than originating in that life,
reflecting it and matching its dynamics. Plumwood writes about the “inten-
sification of the use/respect boundary around dualised forms of moral priv-
ileging that deny the ethical continuity of planetary life” (2002: 155), which
is fine. But the point goes deeper still, since what is being denied by the end-
less exercises of boundary drawing on the part of just one species, and “on
behalf of” all the rest, is not primarily the ethical continuity of planetary
life, but its ecological continuity, a continuity in the strongest possible sense,
namely that of cross-species interdependencies, where some are the food for
others, the death of some the precondition for the life of others, and where
the very distinction-cum-boundary between the living and the non-living is
far from clear-cut, far from allowing for the inclusion/exclusion binary that
is so often invoked (in moral philosophy, not in ecology!) as were it razor
sharp. In the previous chapter, I showed how both Habermas’ and Levinas’
ethical positions, albeit for very different reasons, suffer from a blindness
to the way in which all relationships and responsibilities – not only those
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 165
among humans – depend on the intactness of a more-than-human natural
world and the multitude of non-human species and life forms it consists of –
a reminder of the earthly, including bodily and animalistic, dimension of
humankind’s existence ignored only at our peril.
But where does this leave us in terms of moral orientation? Accepting
that we have to do without sharp boundaries between different species,
and that the exclusionary imperative has to be replaced by a more flexible,
context-sensitive, and ecologically attuned approach – attuned to inter-
dependencies and shared vulnerabilities, that is – it cannot do without the
drawing of distinctions altogether, can it?
Of course, it cannot. That being said, I shall not be able to address here
the issue of appropriate, ecologically informed distinctions all across the
board, but shall concentrate on those that are crucial to the main category
under discussion, that of animals.
That animals form as richly heterogeneous category is an important fact,
one too often neglected by philosophers, but at this juncture it does not take
us beyond positing a point of departure. We recall that Plumwood faults
animal rights theory for condemning all eating of animals in indiscriminate
terms, giving “hegemonic vegetarian strategies” as her example (2002: 154).
The “extensionist strategy” (think of Singer’s “expanding circle” of moral
considerability as a model), she argues, is committed to what she labels the
Use Exclusion Assumption that “because food is inevitably a site of dom-
ination, degradation, and exclusion, ethical food practice must consist of
ensuring that nothing that is morally considerable can ever become our
food or be ontologized as edible” (2002: 156). Although this may appear to
be a perfectly plausible assumption, such a restriction of what may be con-
sidered as edible or useful – useful in the sense of being used in a morally
acceptable way – “results in a deep rejection of ecological embodiment for
those beings, since all ecologically-embodied beings are food for some other
beings” (ibid.). This is a vital observation, and it sits well with the point I just
made about how what is morally appropriate must fit with the ecological
realities of the beings (parties) involved. It also resonates with the insights I
highlighted in the work of Shepard and Rose in earlier chapters.
Surprisingly, there is no mention of her encounter with the crocodile in
Plumwood’s Environmental Culture, published almost 20 years after it hap-
pened. Consider the following passage:

The concept of meat justifies oppression by hiding responsibility for

death and the causal connection between the production of meat and
the animal’s death. The backgrounding of erasure of these connections
in the abstractly quantitative and commodified concept of meat [Carol]
Adams terms “absent referent”. “Absent referent” renders unavailable
not only the act of killing which makes meat available as a commodity,
but any recognition of the connection between the meat and the com-
municative being that it once was. […] Such a commodified concept of
166  Encounters as experiences of conversion
meat involves a strong, fetishistic form of instrumental reductionism, in
which the other is defined in narrow ways that identify them with what
is only a part of their being, the part that is of use to us as flesh, and do
not recognize that all living beings are much more than that.
(2002: 156f.)

Why cite this passage in the light of Plumwood’s encounter with the croco-
dile? Recall her reflection on the experience: “It was utterly wrong to think
that I could be reduced to food. As a human being I was so much more
than food”. We may say that what happened when she was attacked by the
crocodile is that she, a human being, was subject to being treated the way
humans typically treat animals, namely to be identified with what is only
part of her being, the part now demonstrably seized upon and used as flesh
by the other, in this case a crocodile, not recognizing that all living beings
are so much more than just flesh (food) for others. What happened, then, is
that the crocodile turned the tables on the hegemonic understanding of the
relation between humans and animals as far as “being food for some other
beings” is concerned: it acted in a way effectively reversing the roles, some-
thing Plumwood the radical ecophilosopher was forced to realize she was
simply unprepared for.
To actually make the experience of being reduced to food for an animal
is no doubt as rare as it is shocking for a modern human being: few make
that experience, and even fewer survive to reflect on it ever after. In pre-
modern times, as well as in some indigenous cultures existing today, the
experience is not only less rare; it is also integrated into the cosmology
and mentality of the people, exemplarily by the participation in hunting,
as we saw in Chapter 2 when discussing Old Tim’s relationship with the
dingoes as depicted by Rose. Presently, however, the large majority of us
have been almost completely alienated from practices where humans and
animals encounter each other in the roles of predator and prey, whereby the
human never knows for sure whether he or she will end up as the prey, and
the animal as the predator that prevails. The context-dependent attunement
that hunting relies on, together with the respect felt for the animals hunted,
acknowledging their significance as food needed for survival, attests to a
way of relating to animals that is largely lost to us.

II
We need to probe deeper still, though. Why precisely is it “utterly wrong” to
think that a human being could be reduced to food for some other beings?
What happened was that the crocodile acted as if Plumwood was nothing
but food, nothing but a means to its ends. If the crocodile is “utterly wrong”
in treating her like this, what exactly makes it wrong?
I take it that nowadays the most common, indeed obvious answer to
this question is not available to Plumwood, for so many reasons, be they
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 167
philosophical, ethical, and more – namely that what is wrong is simply that
the animal here assumes the role exclusively restricted to humans: it treats
a human being not as an end in itself but as a mere means for its own ends;
and this is something only humans can do, not to other humans, mind you,
but to animals. So whereas in the former case, something is wrong, in the
latter nothing is wrong, rather everything is as it should be, in keeping with
current intensive farming practices. To accept that this is the correct way to
view the distinction between morally right and wrong thus takes the form of
adhering to the boundaries between species, understood in the categorical
manner Plumwood dismisses.
Since the answer representative of hegemonic anthropocentrism is not
available to Plumwood, what kind of answer is?
I believe that part of the answer is contained in the following statement:
“There is injustice for any striving and intentional being in being con-
structed in reductive terms as an ethical nullity”; “instrumental conception
defines the Other in terms that assume the right of a ‘higher’ group to treat
them as a resource for their ends” (2002: 157). The context is that of animals
used in intensive farming, very different from that of Plumwood’s encounter
with the crocodile. But the point she makes certainly speaks to her own
experience as well, the key phrase being “the injustice for any striving and
intentional being” in being reduced to “an ethical nullity”. In the case taken
for granted as the standard one, the being she refers to would be an animal,
one violated in being reduced to such a nullity by human agents. Only in her
own case, she is the striving and intentional being that is nullified in being
reduced to food for another, and nothing more.
Is what is wrong, then, that the crocodile, assuming the role of the agent
who calls the shots, as it were, violates her status as an end in itself, as some-
one who is not a mere means for its purposes? To answer in the affirmative
would be to give the crocodile the compliment of being a full-blown moral
agent, one capable doing right and wrong, and so blameworthy when acting
wrongly. I don’t think that actually captures what Plumwood would answer.
I assume that she would be prepared to grant the crocodile many of the
powers of agency that our culture routinely denies animals and uphold as
uniquely human such; if anything, the way it attacked her was a demon-
stration that the crocodile’s powers of agency in crucial (life-and-death-
deciding) ways outmatch her own: she was clearly the inferior party, the
overwhelmed and outmanoeuvred one. So agency, yes, but moral agency,
no, because the capacities required to make a deliberate choice between the
morally right and the morally wrong action to take, are of a kind only found
in humans. Indeed, this is a key reason why humans have responsibilities
towards animals, responsibilities not requited on the part of the animals
towards humans, this being (among other things) what makes the relation-
ship between them asymmetric. The point is not only that human agents
are to be considered as responsible agents in a way animals cannot. It is
also that one of the features distinctive about human life is to do with how
168  Encounters as experiences of conversion
we as persons have responsibility for cultivating, for not ruining or allow-
ing to lie dormant, the capacities required for exercising such responsibility
for (different kinds of) others. As Alice Crary observes, “individual human
beings can bring themselves to states of decay with a moral ugliness that
has no exact analogue in the lives of [animals such as] horses”; we have an
ability qua humans to “injure ourselves by stunting our own emotional and
rational development” (2015: 223, 232), decisive as such development is for
our trustworthiness and maturity as agents in matters moral. To stress the
individual’s responsibility for cultivating the capacities required to enacting
that responsibility is not to deny that various extra-individual – cultural,
social, ideological, material – factors also play an important part.
Having established that what she found “utterly wrong” is not, given my
argument, that the crocodile treated her in a morally blameworthy way,
what does the “wrong” consist in? It must be linked to her being terrified by
how this animal treated her; terrified in an existential way rather than an
ethically oriented one, if the distinction makes sense here. She was afraid
that she would die, that she would succumb to the physical – but not only
physical – superiority of the animal, the way it was calling the shots, and
humiliating her sense of being humankind subjected to this by an animal, an
animal that for its part may well have thoroughly enjoyed doing so, thriving
in the brilliant display of superiority that must have been equally clear to
both of them. Was this animal playing cat and mouse with her? Turning her
from sovereign human to a plaything for its enjoyment as long as it wanted
to? Removing her from the pedestal of human supremacy she philosophi-
cally speaking is highly critical of, yet cannot help being shaped by, perhaps
to a greater degree than she is prepared to admit? And when she eventually
emerged alive from the encounter, she did so not because she outsmarted the
crocodile, but because it let her go – chose to let her go, in a way demonstrat-
ing its superiority precisely by that choice, adding insult to injury by signal-
ling that “you should be grateful that I let you go, it being completely up to
me to decide the outcome of the encounter between us”. That, I suggest, is
the true depth of the experience Plumwood made, it being no less deep for
not being essentially about moral agency, but about other dimensions of the
agency of that animal, dimensions attesting to the ways in which the animal
can be the active party, the human the one who tries to respond, as best as
it (she) can and all the while at the mercy of the animal.
Notice how I put this point: In saying “it let her go”, only the human party
to the encounter is granted a sex, the animal is not: the crocodile is referred
to as “it”, not as “he” or she”. Isn’t this species-specific linguistic prac-
tice – per convention – a sort of discrimination that speaks volumes about
how the cultural legacy of anthropocentrism still pervades our manner of
thinking about animals? Rarely is the mismatch between “word and object”
(Quine) as blatantly demonstrated as in this case: Plumwood’s experience
is all about the powers of agency of her animal counterpart, the crocodile.
Yet linguistic convention denies rather than affirms that agency in referring
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 169
to the crocodile as an “it”, and so as belonging to the same category as
nonliving, inorganic things like a table or a stone. This poverty of language,
and language’s role in perpetuating the ontological and epistemic poverty in
question, is staggering. Not only is the animal’s agency denied; so is also the
possibility of recognizing the relation between Plumwood and the crocodile
as an “I-Thou” as distinct from an “I-It” relation, to use Buber’s distinction.
To return to the encounter: this is as far as I am able to go with what
Plumwood does not say, but might have said, concerning how she came to
understand what she experienced. For her, it was a “life-changing” expe-
rience, dividing her life into a “before” and “after” the crocodile. Thus it
invites comparison with what the author John M. Coetzee calls “a con-
version experience”, much discussed among philosophers such as Stanley
Cavell, Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe, and Ian Hacking, following the pub-
lication of Coetzee’s novels Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and The Lives of
Animals. How does the notion of “a conversion experience” associated with
Coetzee’s work compare with Plumwood’s experience?

III
Coetzee’s book Boyhood, classified as nonfiction but no doubt in large part
autobiographical, contains a scene where the main protagonist, a young
boy, witnesses her mother’s treatment of three hens supposed to provide
eggs for the family. Failing to lay the expected eggs, this is what happens to
the hens:

His mother consults her sister in Stellenbosch, who says they will return
to laying only after their thorny shells under their tongues have been
cut out. So one after another his mother takes the hens between her
legs, presses on their jowls till they open their beaks, and with the point
of a paring-knife picks at their tongues, The hens shriek and struggle,
their eyes bulging. He shudders and turns away. He thinks of his mother
slapping stewing-steak down on the kitchen counter and cutting it into
cubes; he thinks of her bloody fingers.
(Coetzee 1997: 1f.)

Quoting this passage, Ian Hacking comments: The boy “sees what he sees,
right there, but he also sees what he did not see before: the steak, bloody; his
mother’s fingers, bloody; the flesh and blood of something that was once
alive, like the three chickens in the yard. He does not see it ‘as’ blood. He
sees it for what it is, blood. The experience stuck with Coetzee all his life.
There is no new information, but his eyes are opened” (2008: 147). This leads
Hacking to suggest that, instead of speaking of the “difficulty of reality” (a
notion made famous by Cora Diamond), we should speak of “the difficulty
of experienced reality, of reality as experienced” (2008: 153). In a discus-
sion with philosophers, Coetzee himself states that in regard to how we,
170  Encounters as experiences of conversion
collectively, treat non-human animals, in each of the participants “there
took place something like a conversion experience”, one that “as often as
not centered on some … mute appeal of the kind that Levinas calls the look,
in which the existential autonomy of the Other became irrefutable – irref-
utable by any means, including rational argument” (Cavalieri 2009: 89).
He goes on to talk about friendship, pointing out that “friendship is rarely
governed by reason. One does not choose one’s friends according to rules.
Becoming friends is like falling in love: one follows one’s heart”. And then
he turns to our relationships to animals: “We cannot treat animals such as
sheep and cattle as we would treat old clothes, discarding them when it is
necessary (e.g., when we have all become vegetarians). We have, in effect,
brought them into our world; we cannot conscientiously expect them to
leave it, for there is nowhere else for them to go” (2009: 90f.).
I am not concerned here with the philosophical merits of Coetzee’s case
for vegetarianism, expressed most forcefully (many will probably agree) by
his protagonist Elizabeth Costello. Rather what interests me is the nature of
what Coetzee calls a “conversion experience”. What kind of experience is it?
For a start, it is an experience in the emphatic sense of changing how the
subject sees the world, and as part of that understands his or her role in that
world, such that “after that happened”, I no longer… Things come to matter
in a different way than they used to, whereby their mattering differently is
not initiated by the subject but instead something he or she undergoes, is
affected by – thus the affinity between experience, negativity, and suffering
that, in philosophy, goes back to Hegel and his take on the Greek tragedies
(see Hegel 1977 [1807]; Gadamer 1975 [1960]; Alford 1992). Why suffering?
Because the change in my world that is not of my own making may be pain-
ful in the way if offends a certain sense of autonomy, of determining what
matters, and how, rather than being at the receiving end of the mattering,
being literally hit by it so as to never be the same person, inhabiting the same
world, afterwards – a different self in a different world. As Ian Hacking puts
it in his comment on Coetzee’s story with the three hens, the impact of the
experience is not to do with knowledge, with gaining new information; it is
more basic than that, more existential.
Granted that the two experiences at hand share this general structure, the
“conversion” they bring about is not at all the same. Coetzee, his readers
are invited to think, could not go on eating animals such as hens after the
experience. Plumwood, on the other hand, did not give up eating animals,
or supporting certain practices of hunting, “after the crocodile”. Indeed,
two instances of conversion, with very different consequences as to the kind
of change they brought for their subjects.
How to explain this difference? Perhaps the answer is simply that the
animals are so different in the two cases: three hens and a crocodile. If
anything, they certainly drive home the point made by several of the phi-
losophers discussed earlier, from Midgley to Derrida: that animals make up
a vastly heterogeneous category. To the extent that the two experiences at
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 171
all raise the same set of questions, say, about whether to hunt and to eat the
animals in question, the fact that hens make up the one case and a crocodile
the other seems to call for a differentiated answer rather than a one-fits-all
one. Obviously, what the crocodile can do to Plumwood – kill her if it (sorry:
he or she) decides to – the hens cannot do to the boy in Coetzee’s example.
Moreover, as Coetzee observer, hens, sheep, and cattle are animals that we
humans have “brought into our world”, domestic at that, which makes a
difference as to our responsibility for how we treat them. By contrast, a
crocodile embodies a distinct autonomy, sovereignty, and independence of
us humans, spectacularly and majestically so, thus hammering home a very
different point than do hens, sheep, and cattle – namely how inferior we are,
and so, as part of that, how misplaced and hubristic it would be were we to
assume responsibility for such an animal as a crocodile (whatever responsi-
bility would mean here), its being wild, its not needing to have anything at all
to do with us being, arguably, the hallmark of its existence.
Before we look more closely at the importance of distinguishing between
different sorts of animals, I wish to pay attention to a dimension that is
merely hinted at in Plumwood’s book, yet one I take to enrich her perspec-
tive – namely, the dimension of the animal soul.
In The History of Animals: A Philosophy, Oxana Timofeeva draws heavily
on the work of the Russian writer Andrei Platonov, especially the novels he
wrote in the 1920s. Platonov develops the notion of “a poor life” to describe
the life of animals and plants, and Timofeeva contrasts it with Heidegger’s
famous assertion, mentioned when we discussed Derrida, that animals are
“poor in world” (“weltarm”) and that their lack of hands goes to demon-
strate how radically different are their lives from that of humans, who alone
actively relate to their world. Timofeeva explains that Platonov is “clearly
on the side of those small, poor and weak living beings”, and he attributes to
them “a certain inner virtue of existence” (2018: 154), one denied them not
only by Heidegger but by the entire tradition of Western thought he echoes.
She quotes this passage from Platonov:

Surely not every animal and plant could be sad and wretched; this was a
dream or pretense of theirs, or some temporary disfigurement they were
suffering from. Otherwise one would have to assume that true enthusi-
asm lies only in the human heart – and such an assumption is worthless
and empty, since the blackthorn is imbued with a scent, and the eyes of
a tortoise with a thoughtfulness, that signify the great inner worth of
their existence, a dignity complete in itself and needing no supplement
from the soul of a human being.
(Platonov 2008: 120; Timofeeva 2018: 154)

If anything is poor and makes for impoverishment, then, it is not the inner
lives of animals, even small ones without any of the physical prowess of a
crocodile, but the self-imposed taboo among humans against acknowledging
172  Encounters as experiences of conversion
the qualities of those inner lives for fear of anthropomorphism. Platonov’s
rebuke to Heidegger et al., then, is to assert that, “yes, animal life is poor
in world, but the world itself is even poorer and is unquestionably in need
of the energy of this life in order to resist the forces of entropy and death”
(Timofeeva 2018: 155). Hence, “if Heideggerian animals cannot give, but
only take or grab, then in Platonov only poor life has the ability to give”;
poor life “generously shares itself, and animals give to humans their life
substance, their ‘soul’, together with their flesh” (Timofeeva 2018: 156).
Accordingly, we find in Platonov a very different portrait of humans’ eating
meat from that found in Coetzee’s work:

When his father brought birds and animals back with him, he had eaten
them thriftily and sensibly, teaching his children to do the same, so that
an extinguished gift of nature would be transformed to man’s benefit
and not go to waste down the latrine. He used to say that the meat
and bones of dead creatures should do more than just fill you up; they
should also provide you with a good soul, and strength of heart and rea-
son. If you can’t take from a bird or an animal its most valuable good,
if all you want is a full stomach – then eat vegetables, eat cabbage soup,
or bread crumbled in water. His father held that the world’s animals and
birds were precious souls, and that love for them was sound husbandry.
(Platonov 2008: 157f.; Timofeeva 2018: 157)

Timofeeva’s comment on this passage is worth quoting:

Animal flesh in Platonov serves for “feeding the soul” and at the same
time gives to the body its own “good soul”. The human soul is thus eat-
ing the animal body, while the human body is eating the animal soul.
Platonov’s soul, which eats flesh which feeds the body, is material; it has
nothing to do with the incorporeal Christian soul, ascending to heaven
after death. It is an anima, the matter of life, which is one of the names
for the sub stance circulating among bodies, from animal to human and
between humans themselves.
(Timofeeva 2018: 158)

Although the life led by animals may be “poor”, it is nevertheless a life that
has its own virtues, such as diligence – animals are working to maintain
their lives – and generosity, as displayed in their ability to give, to make a
gift, to be a sort of life that is crucial to the lives of others, including humans.
What Platonov provides is an appreciation of how animals are important to
the lives of humans in that for “us” to eat “them” is to incorporate their
soul, something spiritual in the midst of the material, a sort of existential
cross-species exchange by way of securing survival, the perseverance of life,
of the conatus that Levinas is so wary of, mistakenly at that. I see a strong
affinity between Platonov’s stance and Plumwood’s keen eye for what she
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 173
calls “the ethical continuity of planetary life”. This continuity – ethical, eco-
logical – is precisely what is being lost from view as long as the different spe-
cies – crudely: humans versus animals – are sought identified and described
separately, in splendid isolation from each other, thus neglecting the extent
to which the different species are what they are in virtue of what they are for
each other, not apart from each other.
Given this background provided by Platonov, we return to Plumwood’s
discussion of the issue of whether or not to eat animals for food.
Plumwood faults what she calls “the absolutist vegetarian” for generaliz-
ing “the animal food construction of a specific abusive culture to the con-
struction of any possible culture” and considers the work of Carol Adams a
case in point, commenting that: “To the extent that the ruthless, reductionis-
tic and hyper-separated treatments of animals as replaceable and tradeable
items of property characteristic of the commodity form and of capitalistic
economic rationality come to appear as inevitable aspects of animal food
and of human predation or consumption – which, of course, they are not –
total abstention from animal food can be made to appear the only possible
course” (2002: 158). To my mind, this criticism helps illuminate why it is so
important to recognize the richness of practices where humans and animals
interact, a richness lavishly present in the work carried out by historians
and anthropologists alike.
This historical as well as cultural richness, across epochs and societies, is
not taken into account but is instead conspicuously absent in much of pres-
ent-day philosophical discussions about “the animal question” understood
as a purely, or primarily, moral issue about humans eating animals, where
the answer is sought in a once-and-for-all fashion, strictly and rigorously
principled and universal at that, and where one particular way of treating
– with the overall objective of killing and eating – animals is taken as proto-
typical, excluding all others, namely that of present-day, large-scale factory
farming where “humans” and “animals” are not only set apart conceptually
and ethically, homogenizing what is truly heterogeneous biologically and
ecologically speaking in the case of “animals”, but setting them apart phys-
ically as well, thus entrenching a cultural and economic arrangement where
the different species do not meet, do not interact, do not coexist so as to
matter to each other. As a consequence, the kind of practices Platonov writes
about appears exotic, even though they were perfectly common, in most
parts of Europe, as recently as two generations ago. As we saw, these are
practices allowing for each new generation’s cultivation of species-specific
virtues on both sides of the now-erected divide: the diligence and generosity
of giving on the part of those creatures allegedly poor in world, and the fru-
gality, respect, and gratitude of receiving and responding on the part of the
humans who depend on, and who individually and collectively, by way of
seasonal rituals and the like, recognize they depend on that gift.
In this way, philosophical and cultural impoverishment now become
two sides of the same coin, each reinforcing the other, foreshadowing what
174  Encounters as experiences of conversion
we in the next chapter will examine in the form of the link between eco-
logical extinction and extinction of experience. What happens is that one
way of answering the question about the morality (or rather immorality) of
humans eating animals is tailor-made for one sort of economic arrangement
as to how the animals in question are treated. This one-to-one constellation
between principled stance on the one hand and practical arrangement on
the other comes with the price of precluding and suppressing alternative
stances as well as alternative arrangements, making for a poverty partly
intellectual and cultural, in terms of imagination and experience, and partly
utterly concrete and literal.
This is my way of putting it, but I consider it perfectly compatible with
Plumwood’s position. Shifting her focus from absolutist vegetarianism to
“ontological veganism”, Plumwood contends that the latter:

strives to extend the dualised human status to the non-human area, in

the name of equality, re-envisaging non-humans also as beyond any
form of use. Thus Carol Adams argues against any use of the animal
other (for food or anything else) as involving instrumentalising them.
Stating that “the ontologizing of animals as edible bodies creates them
as instruments of human beings”. […] Instrumentalism is misdefined by
Adams as involving any making use of the other, rather than the treat-
ment of the other as no more than something of use, as merely a means
to an end. We must inevitably treat the natural world to some degree
as a means, for example, to food, shelter and other materials we need
in order to survive, just as we must treat other people to some degree
as means. What is prohibited is unconstrained or total use of others as
means, reducing others to means. We cannot give up using one another,
but we can give up use/respect dualism, which means working towards
ethical, respectful and highly constrained forms of use.
(2002: 159)

To be sure, a strikingly Kantian way to argue a position that breaks with

anthropocentrism a la Kant, yet without giving up on a notion of uniquely
human responsibility for ensuring that no one – be it animals or fellow
humans – be reduced to mere means. For, to repeat, there is something
uniquely human, and it is precisely to do with an obligation that we have to
respond responsively to creatures, such as animals of different sorts, who,
to varying degrees and in various forms, share our vulnerability and our
dependence on others, yet themselves lack the capacities required to recip-
rocate our responsibility for them, this being the essence of the asymmetry
between agents and addressees that I have been talking about throughout.
Ultimately, the poverty of the moral “absolutism” that Plumwood argues
against can be said to consist in the inability to make the distinction between
use and abuse (of animals by humans): any use is tantamount to abuse, to be
considered morally suspect, morally wrong. This connects with one of my
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 175
major points when I used Winnicott to criticize Levinas: the subject must
be allowed to use the object, use it by way of testing it in practice so as to
experience its realness, its powers of resistance in being not me, different
from me, a site of agency separate from me and within reach of my powers,
yet for all that beyond my control.
Admittedly, this subject-object way of putting it is abstract and technical,
in keeping with the terminology of psychoanalytic theory that Winnicott’s
work employs. Its relevance with regard to Levinas, however, is that partic-
ipation in a moral relationship with another cannot take the form of disal-
lowing oneself to come close enough to the other to use him or her or it (if
“it” per convention stands for the animal other); cannot, that is, make “do
not touch, stay at a distance” the required stance of the agent. Rather, to
apply Plumwood’s distinction, respect for the other goes via use of the other,
use that can be – and that is the point – either morally appropriate or not.
Moral performance, right or wrong, for good or bad, is situated within that
testing-using engagement with the other, acutely attentive to his or her or its
response – unfolding within the messy and imperfect, frustratingly so, but
situated there nonetheless. There is no other arena where morally relevant
choices can be made; they can only be made where they are enacted and
where their consequences will play out, sometimes staying there, limitedly,
locally, sometimes being carried far beyond the spatio-temporal particular-
ity of the arena where agents and addressees meet.
Having said this, and as noted in my discussion of Habermas, we must
keep in mind that under present-day conditions those affected by a phe-
nomenon such as climate change will often be invisible, unknown, unen-
countered others, faceless instead of distinct faces, at the receiving end of
actions that for their part multiply and intermingle as far as their “first mov-
ers” in the sense of distinct (individual or collective) agents are concerned,
rendering the model where an agent enacts his or her responsibility for his
or her “other” within a setting of shared spatio-temporal presence – hence
“encounter” – at best a heuristic device, an “ideal type” in Max Weber’s
sense and as such often not matching the actual circumstances where the
consequences of actions travel across continents and far into the future.

IV
I mentioned that philosophers’ discussion of whether it can be justifiable for
humans to kill animals is often faulted for failing to distinguish between dif-
ferent sorts of animals, and rightly so. It goes without saying that acknowl-
edging how much various animals differ from one another is necessary for
a host of questions about how humans should relate to them besides that of
whether or not to kill them.
Plumwood approaches this topic by observing that the dissociation of
use and respect now “underlies the uncomfortable division in contempo-
rary culture between the pet animal and the economic animal” (2002: 160).
176  Encounters as experiences of conversion
The use/respect dualism is one of a long-standing and culturally entrenched
series including reason/emotion, public/private and person/property, com-
bining to construct the present-day contrast between the private pets – such
as the cat who looks at a naked Derrida in the bathroom – and the face-
less “factory-farmed” animals, whereby the pet animal is only partially
commodified whereas the “economic” animal is fully so. Constructed as
hyper-separated and complementary animal categories, the pet enjoys the
privilege of emotional attachment of its owners, though of course variably
so, whereas the economic animals are undersubjectivized and emotionally
divested such as to be reduced to mere “meat” and so a mere means.
These two sorts of animals represent the top and the bottom of the prevail-
ing hierarchy. As we saw when discussing Shepard in Chapter 1, historically
the majority of animals have belonged to neither of these two categories.
Rather, they have been somewhere “in between” as far as both classification
and treatment are concerned – a way of putting it that makes sense only
now, retrospectively, however, for lack of having been hegemonic until rela-
tively recently. Keeping animals in the wild out of the picture for now, say,
the dogs that lived on farms were neither pets nor economic animals; more
outdoors than indoors, they would contribute with their particular skills in
helping their “folks” out with protecting some animals (say, sheep) against
other animals (say, wolves), being domestic only in a semi-sense that guar-
anteed them a certain amount of independence from humans.
Do Rose’s dingoes fit into this typology? Not quite. Plumwood mentions
that in earlier times, the hunting, farming and shepherding man would
make a contract with certain wolves, so that in return for a critical task,
they would be respected, meaning that “they would never be meat”: in help-
ing construct other animals as meat, then, “not only would they themselves
never be meat, they would be ‘looked after’, given a share of the meat them-
selves”. Working animals like sheepdogs would often be a “familiar” animal
and as such the subject of deeply personal relationships, helping side them
with their human-folk rather than with their companion animals in that the
contract is essentially about mutual benefit in meat, thus having “everything
to do with complicity” (2002: 161).
Today the “familiar” animal in this role has largely disappeared. Its
place has been taken by the polarity of the now underemployed pet ani-
mal (more indoors than outdoors) and the fully instrumentalized “meat”
animal, where the latter, in increasing, staggering numbers live their entire
lives within the super-controlled and -monitored regime of industrial mass
production imposed on them from birth to death in the factory farm, the
fish feedlot or the laboratory, reduced to biomass for all practical purposes,
which is to say as commodities. When the pet and the meat animal come
to exhaust the roles available to animals in contemporary society, one of
the prices paid is precisely the disappearance of the animal “familiars”, the
animals that were at one and the same time integrated into our economic
activities and our affective lives, taking an active part in a shared life-form
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 177
at that. With this loss, what we are left with is the poverty of the pet/meat
binary, foreclosing the possibilities for humans to experience in full display
the skills and powers of animals in an outdoors setting, to being-with ani-
mals whose subjectivities are appreciated, letting them become “significant
others” in the way that only being neither a fully domesticated pet nor an
economic animal allows for.
The shift from what Plumwood terms the old contract to the new one
makes for a contradiction that did not exist before, at least not as crudely,
and that involves a distinct sort of hypocrisy: “our simultaneous claim to
love some animals and to have a right to ruthlessly exploit other animals
who are not very different, to simultaneously admit pet subjectivity and
ignore or deny meat-animal subjectivity” (2002: 163). Self-declared “animal
lovers” honour this dualistic contract when they, sometimes vegetarians or
vegans themselves, bring into existence and even breed carnivorous pet ani-
mals whom they feed on the “meat” of other animals. The problem goes
deeper than such hypocrisy, though. The bottom line is that the contract
“cannot be extended to provide liberation for all”. Why? Because there is no
way of denying that it is essentially an exclusionary contract where “some
make a living by complicity in instrumentalizing, imprisoning and oppress-
ing others” (2002: 164). As we saw, not only humans are part of this regime,
so are the animals themselves, pitted against each other so that some have
to die in order for others to live.
How can we move beyond this contract to enable a relationship between
humans and animals not pervaded by contradictions and double standards?
Plumwood proposes to start from the concept of the “familiar” animal
introduced above, observing that “the relationship with the working animal
was often strongly communicative, built-on a respect for animal difference”
(2002: 165), bringing back instead of splitting the economic and the emo-
tional connection with the animal. But wouldn’t such an animal to a large
extent be confined to the conditions of a domestic one? Not necessarily. “If
you are very lucky”, writes Plumwood, a wild free-living animal in your
local surroundings can be a “familiar” animal, provided that you can see
it (him or her) often enough to come to know individually and so become a
significant other; indeed, there is a contradiction human friendship and the
“wildness” of an animal only “if we define ‘wild’ only in the terms of the
absence of the human, rather than as ‘free-living’” (ibid.). She mentions rela-
tionships with local lizards, birds, and friendly mammals like wombats, but
she also includes some of the animals that suffered most under the contract,
such as hens, ducks, and geese as participants in “a non-oppressive form of
the mixed community” (2002: 166).
There is certainly a very delicate balance involved in this kind of relation-
ship, one easily tipped in one of two directions: either the animal is drawn
so closely into the life form of its human counterparts as to lose its integ-
rity inasmuch as it depends on its independence, or it remains so much an
animal enjoying its (relative not absolute) freedom from interaction with
178  Encounters as experiences of conversion
humans as to be beyond the reach of becoming a “significant other” for
particular human persons, persons who for their part hold some special
significance for the animal, so that there is a genuine element of attach-
ment and loyalty going both ways. I suspect that Shepard would think that
Plumwood’s way of striking the balance is too human-centred, as betrayed
in the word “friendship”, though less so than he would hold for most philos-
ophers these days.
Having distinguished between different sorts of animals, making for
different sort of relationships with humans, the issue of their moral status
remains. Predictably, Plumwood dismisses the “extensionist” position that
allocates moral consideration to non-human beings entirely on the basis of
their similarity to the human, so that the greater the similarities, the higher
the standing accorded the animals. Instead of being assessed in light of the
hegemonic human centre, an independent one “with potential needs, excel-
lences and claims to flourish on their own” should be established (2002: 167).
But what precisely would it mean to discard similarity to the human as the
basis for moral worth?
For a start, it would mean to “decenter the human and break down human/
nature dualism on the ethical front”; that is to say, to frame the issue in terms
of “studying up” rather than “studying down”, i.e., looking for the source
of the problem in the oppressor rather than the oppressed. This means that
“it is not so much a question of whether earth others are good enough for
ethically rich relationships, but of whether we (western) humans are” (2002:
168). I shall not review all the elements Plumwood lists as part of her pro-
posal for a “counter-hegemonic” framework, only observe that avoidance
of unnecessary species-ranking and making the human/other species dis-
tinction less central to our moral thinking are among them. She is adamant
about what sort of approach has come to an end and reached a stalemate,
namely the one where philosophers have stood at a safe distance from the
city gates, arguing about the applicability to non-humans of highly abstract
ethical concepts like “intrinsic value”, without actually going through the
gateway and establish specific ethical relationships. Indeed, the concepts
framing these debates are no more than “gateway concepts”; the debates
they facilitate are “empty to the extent that they evade the real moral task
of developing an adequate ethical response to the non-human world, which
they do not address in any specific, rich or useful way” (2002: 169).
Plumwood illustrates what it would mean to downplay the human/other
species distinction when she suggests that “dealing with a strange highly
venomous snake who has just moved onto your veranda may not be all that
different from [the ethical challenges involved in] dealing with a difficult
human stranger who has done the same” (2002: 170). It is sobering, and very
much in Mary Midgley’s down-to-earth arch-British spirit, to be invited
to reflect on what one would do in such a situation rather in the prisoner
dilemma-infected ones so abundant in much of analytic philosophy; after
all, it’s not that many of us who ever has to decide whom to save from being
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 179
hit by a trolley or a wheelchair, let alone to justify our decision in front
of an imagined jury of professional ethicists afterwards. The questions I
would need to answer in Plumwood’s example are utterly concrete, yet for
all that no less at the core of ethical principles, such as: whose needs should
be prioritized, mine or the snake’s, or mine or the stranger’s? What drove
them to my veranda, and are there alternative places to stay that would
offer the same protection, say, in the case of a flood or extreme rainfall?
How long would their stay last, and how much weight should be accorded
to my status as the owner of the place? Would the benefits for the snake or
the stranger in being allowed to stay as long as needed outweigh the disad-
vantages for me? Not out to come up with a particular way of dealing with
the uninvited visitor that would be “the” morally right, let alone mandatory
one, Plumwood’s goal is to establish that “in neither case, as a matter of jus-
tice, are you entitled to initiate unnecessary and disproportionate violence,
shooting the snake, or the difficult human, for example, just on the grounds
that they may become a problem” (2002: 171). The main point is that “the
same sorts of general ethical approaches can be applied in each case” (ibid.),
so that we are not well advised to take one approach when other humans
are the affected party, and another when animals are. Rather, we should
recognize that sometimes humans and animals do not differ very much but
are pretty alike as far as their needs and our corresponding responsibilities
are concerned.
This reminds us that the mere knowledge that the “other” is an animal,
not a human, is not in itself sufficient to answer the question about what
to do. What sort of animal it is matters; and in cases where we welcome
a particular animal into a shared lifeworld by, say, letting the snake in
Plumwood’s example stay on our veranda, the longer such an animal stays
in a place permitting daily encounters, the more we will come to appreciate
the individuality of that particular animal – as will it (he or she) as well with
regard to us humans. Genuine recognition requires appreciation of the indi-
viduality of the other, regardless of whether the agent or addressee is animal
or human; to be worth its salt, recognition cannot simply – crudely – refer
to species-membership but must affirm as valuable the flourishing of this
particular animal’s individuality. Pet owners do this all the time, endlessly
comparing the newly acquired cat or dog with its predecessors in the family.
There is no reason to restrict this element of recognition to pets, however,
even though of course in most circumstances it will be pets that we come to
know the best. For all that, horses, hens, and pigs are no less truly individual
beings, fully capable of distinguishing between their human counterparts,
based on good experiences with some of them, less so with others. That ani-
mals in the wild such as wolves are true individuals needs no argument here.
Plumwood writes perceptively about the importance of our willingness
and ability to recognize the non-human other’s (be it a particular animal’s)
potential for intentionality, for communicative exchange and agency; our
openness to potentially rich forms of interaction and relationship will also
180  Encounters as experiences of conversion
have an ethical dimension, bearing on who we “invite in”. To think of this
as a purely individual decision would however be to misconstrue it. From
early childhood, the culture we belong to instils in us the “correct” way
of distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate others, as we saw
in Chapter 1. Thus, to illustrate, at the age of three my son used to greet
the trees and the creek when spending his Sundays in the forest, but at the
age of six he had stopped this animistic practice of his. Why? He came to
view it as childish. It was evidently out of tune with how grown-ups like his
father acted, restricting greeting to the exclusive category of fellow humans,
excluding all other others encountered in the forest, be it a birch tree, a dove,
or a hare. For a six-year-old child in present-day Western society to stop
greeting non-human beings of any sort met upon in the forest is evidence of
successful socialization. It is something that happens as a matter of course,
so that the burden of proof is placed firmly on those who would question or
actively deviate from what is sanctioned as “correct” distinction-making.
Every culture naturalizes its impact on its individual members by way of
socialization, erasing the traces of its impact in the very act of enacting it
on behalf of the community, so that the high degree of selectivity entailed is
effectively hidden from view, depending as it does on comparison with other
cultures, or epochs, to become fully conscious to the individual member.
That things could be otherwise, that various others can be looked upon
and related to in profoundly different ways from the one internalized since
childhood, is the great counter-factual not considered. Pace Habermas and
other grand theorists of Western modernity in the wake of Max Weber,
this holds not only for so-called “mythical” (pre-modern) cultures but for
the hegemonic modern Western one as well; if anything, the homogenizing
pressures when it comes to demanding adherence to a specific cosmology
– one where human exceptionalism is a key feature – can hardly be overesti-
mated, though there are signs that it faces new challenges with the advent of
the Anthropocene (I return to this below).
Philosophers too often neglect the cultural dimension I highlight here.
Such neglect is a result of their predilection for focusing in abstract, “prin-
cipled” fashion on which (species-specific) capacities it is most appropriate
to regard as the relevant ones in determining the status of the other in ques-
tion: is it a non-human other entitled to our inviting it in, morally speaking,
or is it not? In the many cases where we decline that gesture of “inviting in”,
we usually do so (as Plumwood observes in her criticism of Daniel Dennett)
“for reasons that have little to do with differences in animal minds and abil-
ities and a lot to do with our own choices about which others to subsume
under an instrumental and reductive rationality in order to free ourselves
from ethical constraints in our treatment of them” (2002: 185); choices that
must be understood as reflecting the cultural impact I spoke about and not
as choices up to us to make in a strictly individual manner.
To be sure, there is a sense in which you may try to break ranks and decide
fully on your own, autonomously, about whom to grant full moral standing
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 181
and whom not to, say, by way of relating to a particular squirrel as no less a
“significant other” than members of your own family. But know that sanc-
tions will be quick in coming once that “freedom of choice” is identified
as the deviation from the cultural norm it truly is: if intended as a cultural
protest, it will most likely not be responded to as such but instead individu-
alized – “return to sender”-like – in a manner reflecting on the idiosyncrasy
exposed in the person, psychopathologically understood and so calling for
psychiatric treatment (should deviant behaviour persist) rather than seeing
the deviation as a possibly well-grounded corrective to dominant cultural
norms.
Thus the problem is not simply that our culture, as assessed from the
critical point of view of ecophilosophers like Plumwood, is one that draws
the distinction between those others let “in” and those left “out” in a ques-
tionable manner. It is also that individuals who criticize it as doing so, and
who enact that critique, demonstrating alternative ways of relating to, say,
certain animals, are themselves subject to a shift from being inside to being
placed outside. Excommunication works in several directions and may
target individuals on both sides of the human/animals divide posited and
monitored by the culture one belongs to, challenging the self-serving notion
that ours is a more tolerant culture than that of other societies or previous
epochs.

V
In a number of books, most notably Animals and the Moral Community
and Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism, the American philosopher
Gary Steiner discusses the issue of animal rights. He does so in a more rig-
orous manner than Plumwood, sharing many of her views and concerns.
Nevertheless, the position advocated by Steiner differs significantly from
Plumwood’s in that he regards “universal veganism as a strict ethical duty”
(2013: 198), arguing that “what is absolutely clear is that cosmic justice
demands universal veganism, the refusal to consume animal products of
any kind”, adding that “the more inured we are to anthropocentric values,
the more unreasonable, burdensome, and impracticable this proposal will
seem” (2008: 163).
First, we need to understand how Steiner’s position differs from
Plumwood’s, as well as from Rose’s and Shepard’s. All three of them hold
that, as Rose puts it, “the gift of life, like the face of death, comes wrapped in
blood”. They all support indigenous hunting, and also certain forms of rec-
reational hunting; indeed, Rose and Shepard would participate themselves.
We also know that they oppose factory farming on the grounds that within
this regime the entire life cycle of the animals is controlled and organized
with one objective in mind: to reduce the animals to the mere means of
being mere meat, maximizing their being-nothing-but-meat for the solely
human-centred purposes of consumption and profit. Thus for Plumwood,
182  Encounters as experiences of conversion
Rose, and Shepard the question about killing animals does not allow for
one answer, one that would hold “always and in all instances” in the het-
erogeneous manifold of cases where killing, in some form or another, is an
issue. Rather, the answer is that of multiple “it depends”: on the context,
on what sort of animals are affected, what sort of methods are used and
attitudes are displayed on the part of the humans, for what purposes, and
with what consequences for the larger biotic community the animals are
part of. The bottom line, where the ecological and the ethical are two sides
of the same coin, is that “all ecologically embodied beings are food for some
other beings” (Plumwood 2002: 155). Hence the three ecophilosophers find
ecologically uninformed and ethically misguided the notion so widespread
in so-called “progressive” philosophical circles, as well as in influential ver-
sions of “environmental humanities”, that “predation is fallen”, to recall
Plumwood’s formulation (2002: 155).
Why is it, then, that Steiner arrives at a different conclusion, advocating
universal veganism as a strict ethical duty, implying a refusal to consume,
for human purposes, animal products of any kind?
Steiner’s point of departure is similar to Plumwood’s: like her, he rejects
the conventional assumption that superior cognitive abilities are the basis
for superior moral status; that is, he rejects that moral status is in any way
a function of cognitive capacities (2008: xi). This means that he dismisses
appeals to what Gary Francione calls “similar minds theory”, where “an
animal’s moral status depends on the degree to which that animal’s men-
tal life is sufficiently like the mental life of human beings” (2008: 90). On
Steiner’s view, “the cognitive differences between humans and animals have
no moral significance whatsoever, just as more highly intelligent humans
do not enjoy greater moral entitlements than less intelligent ones” (2008:
129); in saying this, Steiner implicitly alludes to a well-known tension in
Kant’s position on moral status among humans. Even though Steiner deems
it important that we rethink our view about the cognitive capacities of ani-
mals, allowing them more advanced such than does the traditional view, his
fundamental point is that such capacities, having their “model” in humans,
not be taken as the standard for determining the moral status of animals.
It turns out, however, that Steiner himself does not do without invoking
capacities altogether: while consistently rejecting that humans be considered
the standard against which animals must be measured to be granted moral
worth (i.e., the greater their similarities with us, the greater their worth),
he does retain a role for capacities, namely in arguing that “sentience – the
capacity to experience pleasure and pain – is a sufficient condition for equal
consideration in the moral community”, where sentience is understood by
Steiner as “a capacity shared by all beings for whom the struggle for life
and flourishing matters, whether or not the being in question has a reflective
sense of which things matter or how they matter” (2008: xi). The important
question to ask, then, is which capacities are and are not relevant. Based
on the primacy he grants sentience in this respect, Steiner proceeds to use
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 183
the language of animal rights to argue that “humans have basic obligations
never to use animals for food, clothing, entertainment, or experimentation,
even though animals have no corresponding obligations – indeed, no moral
obligations whatsoever – toward humans” (2008: 92).
In keeping with this view, Steiner endorses what I have argued is the fun-
damental asymmetry between humans and animals, morally speaking. He
puts it like this: “This asymmetry consists in the fact that it is possible – and,
I argue, morally incumbent upon human beings – to recognize that we have
fundamental obligations toward animals…in spite of the fact that animals
are fundamentally incapable of taking on reciprocal obligations toward us”
(2013: 177). On this view, “nonhuman animals are incapable of being moral
agents” (ibid.), the point being, as I have put it throughout, that animals do
not need to be moral agents to be regarded as moral addressees. Steiner’s
way of stating this is to say that we have duties towards animals that for
their part have rights, yet without the animals having corresponding duties
towards us. As we have seen, I express the asymmetry in a way that does
without the concepts of rights and duties; instead, I submit that we humans
have responsibilities towards animals even though they have no responsibil-
ities towards us. That is the crux of the asymmetry.
A large portion of Steiner’s Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism is
devoted to a critical assessment of Derrida’s views about animals. On the
one hand, Steiner agrees with Derrida’s contention that Heidegger “effec-
tively belittles animals by reducing their deaths to the status of merely pass-
ing out of existence” and so fails to do justice to the moral gravity involved
in the death of an animal (2013: 178). I want add that what complicates the
assessment of Heidegger’s position is that he pays no systematic attention
to what sort of death “the animal” is thought to experience, its being killed
by humans being but one possible death among many. On the other hand,
Steiner considers it “ironic” that Derrida himself “avoids making any defin-
itive claims about the right of animals not to be eaten by human beings”
(ibid.). It does not help that Derrida once declared that “I am a vegetarian in
my soul” when in fact he “was neither a vegan nor a vegetarian”, as Steiner
reports. Looking in vain for a statement in Derrida to the effect that “killing
animals is wrong, period”, Steiner concludes that for Derrida, “any defini-
tive moral claim about anything at all would bring the activity of question-
ing, which is essential for authentic responsibility, to a standstill” (ibid.). In
advancing this criticism, Steiner seizes upon Derrida’s statement that he is
“not recalling [the violence that traditional philosophy has done to animals]
in order to start a support group for vegetarianism, ecologism, or for the
societies for the protection of animals” (2013: 126). When everything is said
and done, then, for Derrida as Steiner reads him calls for vegetarianism may
be well intended, but they “nonetheless are impossible to implement and
simply reproduce violence”, be it the symbolic violence of the Western phil-
osophical canon. Steiner’s comment is damning: “the abdication of respon-
sibility in these ideas is breathtaking” (ibid.).
184  Encounters as experiences of conversion
To be sure, and as we saw in Chapter 3, there are good reasons for react-
ing with exasperation to the Levinas-inspired formulations where Derrida
insists that responsibility is “without limits”, “excessive”, “before memory”,
and “exceeding all calculation”, mystifying the phenomenon of reality by
upping the rhetorical ante to such a degree that no agent can ever be sure
about what, concretely, his or her responsibility consists of in a given situa-
tion, let alone what actions it demands. Steiner raises the question whether
“deconstruction [a la Derrida] leads to irresponsibility” and indicates an
answer in the affirmative. This being so, he endorses Paola Cavalieri’s claim
that “Derrida simply erases the problem of the value of animal life by dis-
missing philosophical vegetarianism” (2013: 127; see Cavalieri 2009: 98f.).
Much as I share Steiner’s exasperation at Derrida’s rhetoric, I find the
argument he takes over from Cavalieri to be a category mistake, and so
unconvincing. To hold that not supporting “philosophical vegetarianism”
equals erasing the problem of the value of animal life is not to make a com-
pelling argument. Instead it reveals an attitude of philosophical intolerance
towards all positions that deviate from one’s own, i.e., that the moral ques-
tion concerning the killing of animals by humans has one and only one
valid answer, holding across the spectrum of cases, methods, purposes, etc.
mentioned above, namely that such killing is wrong and must be prohibited.
But Steiner’s objections to Derrida only take us so far when it comes to
recognizing how his own position differs from that of Plumwood, Rose, and
Shepard. In this regard, his reference to Aldo Leopold is instructive, taking
Leopold to task for his advocacy of hunting and his acceptance of humans’
eating the meat from animals. The question is: is condoning killing animals
compatible with truly respecting them? Or does the one exclude the other?
Steiner engages with the work of James Hatley who, like Leopold before
him, holds that respect for animals and involvement – say, by hunting – in
the cycles of predation are inseparable from one another, and so not at all
incompatible. Hatley argues that Western culture’s premium on humans’
alleged superiority in cognitive capacities has led us to forget that we are
part of nature. The possibility of being the prey of a wild animal – they
very thing that happened to Plumwood – is a vital reminder of what is sup-
pressed: “Hardly anything”, writes Hatley, “could be more intimate than
becoming the food, and so the body, of another animal in the wild” (Hatley
2004: 14f.; see Steiner 2013: 216). To take seriously that we can ourselves be
the prey of some predatory animal, then, gives the lie to the popular notion
that we exist outside the context of predatory activity. As a result of histor-
ical development, however, our appropriation of nature has enabled us to
“make over the space in which we live as if humans had become inedible and
everything else is revealed to be more or less available for ingestion” (ibid.).
This situation helps sustain an asymmetry where we are predators and never
prey, upholding the notion that we are in some profound way different from
other natural beings, including animals. We thereby, contends Hatley, fail
to acknowledge that “we only get to be a human, or a bear, or a microbe by
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 185
eating others” (ibid.). To attain a more adequate relationship to the natu-
ral world, Hatley suggests, we need to recognize that we are immersed in
that world yet also at a distance from it, owing to our unique capacities for
reflection. Yet Steiner faults Hatley for focusing more on “our making our-
selves available to predatory animals” than on animals’ making themselves
available to us. It is difficult to see how this model will work out in practice,
however. How, more precisely, are we supposed to offer ourselves, “at least
symbolically”, to predatory animals as their sustenance? Can there be, say,
an obligation to make oneself “available” to an animal like the crocodile
that Plumwood encountered in such a dramatic way?
Since Steiner offers no answer to this question, I suspect that his reason for
discussing Hatley’s model is to show that an ethics based on the premise that
human and animal life alike is about “eating and being eaten” is essentially
mistaken: it suggests a kind of reciprocity between the species that cannot
be enacted. It is simply not plausible that human persons “offer themselves”
to predatory animals in the setting of contemporary society. That this is
indeed Steiner’s view becomes clear in his discussion of the French philos-
opher Dominique Lestel’s provocative thesis that meat eating is not only
permissible but incumbent upon us. Lestel’s “ethic of carnivorism” cham-
pions the ability to receive as just as important as giving, citing indigenous
peoples who thank their animal prey’s spirit for the “gift” it has given, and
helping us see that predation should not be considered as aggression but
instead as a principle that governs the energies that circulate in the world.
On Lestel’s view, then, eating animals is not simply a biological necessity
but helps sustain a cosmic human/animal relationship of mutual depend-
ence. The upshot is not to declare open season on animals but to instil in
humans an obligation to recognize the animality that we share with them
and to recognize their subjectivity. In this spirit, the “ethical carnivore” is
not one to take meat eating lightly but instead shows appreciation of the
“infinite debt” that we humans owe to animals; rituals following hunting see
to it that we “celebrate our own animality and the sacrifice that the animal
that we eat has made on our behalf” (2013: 219). In keeping with its spiritual
significance, Lestel urges modesty in the amount of meat we eat, but warns
against stopping to consume meat altogether, since “a life without [some]
violence toward animals would lose something that is essential to a life truly
worth having been lived” (ibid.).
We have seen that the notion of a shared animality between humans and
animals is a controversial one that has met strong opposition from major
philosophers. Thinkers as different as Plato, Descartes and Kant have con-
tributed to the hyper-separation (Plumwood) between humans and ani-
mals so central to Western culture by suppressing the animality in humans,
underpinning the long-lasting resistance to Darwin that Midgley noted in
Chapter 1. We also saw that Adorno tried to oppose the destructiveness of
this suppression of “nature in the [human] subject”, where animality is ren-
dered as something foreign, thus alienating humans from animals as their
186  Encounters as experiences of conversion
“radical others”. Yet Adorno did not ask the question that Steiner’s discus-
sion of Hatley and Lestel revolves around, namely: What bearing does the
shared animality of humans and animals, understood as the fact that they
can both eat and be eaten, have on the question of whether it is ever justified
for humans to kill animals? Does one rather than the other of the two pos-
sible answers follow, so that either “can both eat and be eaten” points to the
ethic of carnivorism that Lestel advocates or it points to the sort of “ethical
vegetarianism” that Steiner defends?
A central claim of Lestel’s is that proponents of vegetarianism tend to
forget our animality and our continuity with all living beings, i.e., what
Plumwood refers to as “the ethical continuity of planetary life”. Whether
intentionally or not, they reassert the “thesis of human exceptionalism”,
mistakenly believing that “human beings can place themselves above the
evolution of all other species” inasmuch as the difference between humans
and animals is accorded primacy over their similarities: humans, then, are
the species – the one and only species – that deliberately chooses not to
kill for the purpose of eating. On these grounds, Lestel (and here I rely on
Steiner’s presentation) holds that the truly consistent ethical vegetarian is
“profoundly hostile to life in seeking to eliminate cruelty from the world,
inasmuch as the sole means for satisfying [the ethical vegetarian’s pacifistic
aspiration] would be to suppress all animal life on the earth” (2013: 220).
What such a position amounts to, however, is just the sort of denial of life
that Nietzsche so scathingly condemned as a typical “modern-day” sick-
ness. The vegetarian’s mistake is to take for granted that animals, just like
humans, have an interest in not being killed. Yet animals themselves, main-
tains Lestel, do not consider this an ethical scandal; only humans may do
so. Hence the love vegetarians purport for animals comes at the price of
idealizing them to a degree robbing them of their very animality.
Lestel also challenge the vegetarian’s categorical distinction between
animals and plants, extending Derrida’s questioning of the traditional
response-reaction distinction by suggesting that not only animals but also
plants actively respond to their environment. Steiner counters this by say-
ing that “the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence casts tremendous
doubt” on the possibility that plants exhibit sentience, citing their lack of a
central nervous system, considered a requirement for the capacity for sen-
tience (2013: 221). Thus, on Steiner’s view, we have no scientific grounds for
talking about “the intelligence of plants” as does Lestel, among many oth-
ers these days.
To be sure, the acknowledgement that the dividing line between plants
and animals is not absolutely clear goes back at least to Aristotle. Even
so, Steiner urges that we do not dismiss the response-reaction distinction
altogether. So, while we should recognize that humans sometimes “merely
react” and animals are capable of responding, there is no basis for hold-
ing that the latter applies to plants as well. However that may be, Steiner’s
focus, like my own, is on the relationship between humans and animals, not
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 187
plants. He expresses sympathy with Lestel’s concern (shared with Leopold
and other thinkers in the deep ecology tradition) that “remembering” our
animality qua humans is key to highlighting our essential continuity with
the entire living world. In Lestel’s case, this leads to the claim that “we must
eat meat in order to engage in this primordial act of recollection” (Steiner
2013: 223) – this being Steiner’s way of putting it, not Lestel’s.
But, Steiner asks, “why must an acknowledgement of our essential animal-
ity involve the consumption of meat, ritual though it may be”, and so allow-
ing for the “spiritual” dimension that we have seen Lestel refer to? True, he
does refer to the carnivorism practised by some indigenous peoples, such as
the Cree and the Sioux. Steiner counters by asking “exactly what relevance
the cosmologies of these cultures have to our own endeavor to ground our
ethical commitments in cosmic holism” – must such a position make a place
for killing and eating animals (2013: 224)? What if the situation of the kind
of cultures Lestel refers to was such that they had to consume animals in
order to survive? What if our own situation, by contrast, is such that we
simply don’t need to engage in such practices? And finally, is it not possible
to restore to us “a sense of our immersion in and obligations toward nature”
without killing animals?
The question about what “we” – presumably present-day, urban, Western
individuals and communities – may learn from indigenous cultures with
regard to how to treat other-than-human beings is complex. I argued as
much in Cosmologies of the Anthropocene, drawing extensively on the ethno-
graphic research on a number of (more or less) still intact animistic cultures
carried out by anthropologists. On my view, there is no simple answer to
be found for “us” within these cultures: the differences in circumstances
are too big for simple answers, including ethical ones. So it is not a matter
of “us” imitating or copying “them” within our urbanized societies, but of
maintaining an attitude of openness to the possibility that there are things
to be learned, local knowledge and practices to look to for inspiration,
besides helping protect the continued existence of non-Western cosmolo-
gies wherever they exist, threatened as they increasingly are with cultural
extinction, often intimately linked to biological such, the two sorts of losses
being intertwined. What we can say is that with few exceptions, the prac-
tices of killing animals in which these societies historically, and to a certain
extent to the present day, have been involved, say, in countries like Brazil or
Ecuador, have been by and large ecologically sustainable; they have, that is,
been part of an arrangement between humans and their various nonhuman
“others” where all parties have been allowed the place necessary to flourish
and to persist, as so many “ecological selves”, through the generations and
centuries (see Callicott 1994; Kohn 2013).
Importantly, this holds for a situation where the methods and weapons
used for hunting, as well as fishing, have remained “low tech” as measured
by modern standards, comparably primitive at that. The question whether
to “take out” more than might prove sustainable only becomes a practically
188  Encounters as experiences of conversion
urgent one (as distinct from a philosophically intriguing one) when the tech-
nology is so advanced as to make that “more” a realistic option. Only in
that case will an ethical, or cosmological, argument kick in, to the effect
that “yes, we would be able to take out more than we have used to do, but
we decide not to”. Here, then, a distinction is made between the (technologi-
cally) possible and the desirable, where the latter is ecologically and ethically
informed, a synthesis of the two in the way I have set out in earlier chapters,
materializing in a decision aspiring to prove prudent in the long run, that
is to say, seven generations into the future according to the cosmologies
in question (see Kopenawa and Albert 2013). In short, technological-prac-
tical capacity does not posit the limit to what is taken out (wild animals
included); ecologically informed, centuries-long in situ experience with the
way the human-animal relationship plays out, does. The role played by ani-
mistic cosmology is such as to discourage efforts to “improve” the methods
and equipment at hand with a view to making them as extensive, as expan-
sive and in that sense as “efficient” as possible. Not only is such improve-
ment not considered an end in itself. It is not even regarded as a desirable
means to the ends that matter most within the “ecology of selves” involved.
Unfortunately, such an ethnographically informed perspective is absent
from Steiner’s discussion. Its absence renders his argument abstract in a way
ill-suited to the topic inasmuch as the practices where animals are killed
and eaten by humans come in many historical forms and with diverse eth-
ical challenges and justifications. Steiner does no justice, philosophical or
otherwise, to the richness of this material when he wants to reduce the topic
to one simple question, meant to allow for one particular answer, namely:
should practices of killing animals continue if they are not (or no longer)
necessary for survival?
The question may appear precise and concrete. But it’s not. To illustrate
why I consider it abstract, consider the story philosopher Jonathan Lear
tells in his book Radical Hope. Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the
North American Crow nation, is known to have said that, after the buf-
falo went away and the hunting, even the stealing of horses, stopped, “the
hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again.
After this nothing happened” (Lear 2006: 2). When all the beaver and the
buffalo had been killed, the horses taken away, and there being no more
Sioux to fight against, the whole project and identity aimed at excelling as
a Crow evaporated before their eyes: everything that had used to matter to
them in their existence as Crow ceased to do so; henceforth it was as though
nothing happened. With the disappearance of the animals and all the prac-
tices, skills, and knowledge that their presence had helped sustain to such
an extent that the animals were the sine qua non of being a Crow, of being
able to excel in the way of life that is the distinctly Crow one, that whole
way of life was left in tatters, resulting in depression as brought on by loss
of meaning, purpose, and identity. Lear quotes anthropologist Marshall
Sahlins’ observation that every culture is “a gamble played with nature” in
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 189
that it depends on the continued availability of so many other-than-human
others (Lear 2006: 25).
The Crow example makes for an illuminating contrast with Steiner’s
approach. Steiner proceeds as if the question of eating animals can be pos-
ited in a sort of principal purity, uncontaminated by the life form within
which the humans for whom the question arises live their lives. In Steiner’s
model, there is no real encounter, no interaction between particular human
individuals and particular animals in a historical-cultural setting ripe with
particular features distinguishing it from others. Is this a deficiency weak-
ening his argument?
I think so. Steiner is representative of philosophers’ predilection for
arriving at an unequivocal answer to principal questions about right and
wrong. And indeed, there are cases to show that such an answer may be
arrived at, enjoying unanimous consensus – e.g., it is always morally wrong
for a human being to eat another human being. True, cannibalism is known
to be practised in some cultures, but its occurrence is extremely rare, allow-
ing us to talk of a universal taboo. As Shepard in particular has shown,
historically relations between humans and animals have not been like that:
that humans kill (some sorts of) animals in order to eat them has been the
normal to this day.
Yet if past history has been like that, the future may be different. Steiner
clearly thinks that the reasons for eating animals used in the past no longer
hold. The bottom line is that we can now do without eating animals; going
on eating them is simply not necessary in order to survive. But is this simply
an issue about survival? Does sheer necessity exhaust the issue as a moral
one, does it dictate the (one right) answer that Steiner is after?
I think that the Crow example (and there are many others) goes to show
that Steiner’s approach is too narrow-minded: it is reductionist and instru-
mentalist. There is so much more than sheer survival involved in the way
the Crow used to relate to the buffalo they hunted. Plenty Coup urges us
to understand “how the animals made the Crow human”, to use Shepard’s
phrase. Especially poignant here is the sense that the indispensable role ani-
mals played in the making of the individual Crow, and in helping sustain
their identity, their skills and their knowledge qua Crow as a group, is only
recognized in its full significance the moment the buffalo are disappear-
ing. It was not the arrows of the Crow that caused their disappearance, but
the guns of the white people taking over their traditional land and forcing
them into the reservation where and after which “nothing happened” (see
Netz 2004: 73ff.). Centuries before the word “sustainability” was coined,
by European academics and politicians at that, the Crow ensured that no
individual would ever take out more buffalo than sustaining them would
allow – that is to say, than sustaining the relationship between the buffalo
and the Crow (and their horses) would allow, stressing the balance between
them as precarious and as an ongoing challenge, demanding frugality and
prudence in negotiating it with a view to its intactness for future generations
190  Encounters as experiences of conversion
of animals and humans alike, there being no morally relevant difference
between the two species’ interests here, equally entitled as they are to a
future allowing them to thrive, and to do so together. Indeed, for the one
to thrive, the other must as well. That is the essence of inter-dependence, a
principle of ecology that ethics needs to recognize as its basis, its grounding,
in the conditions of life.
To return to Steiner’s case for ethical veganism and its imperative never to
eat animals, he wants to found it on “the recognition that our capacity for
reflection, and to articulate and strive to live in accordance with principles,
imposes burdens on us that no other sentient being appears to be capable
of assuming” (2013: 225). The imperative acknowledges Schopenhauer’s
endeavour to reduce suffering in the world, while recognizing that “suffer-
ing is the basic condition of existence” (ibid.). Here I agree with Steiner,
only I would add that suffering is such a condition because of the way it
springs from the constellation dependence-vulnerability that I have eluci-
dated above, a constellation-qua-condition shared by humans and animals
alike, pointing to their shared mortality. He goes on, however, to reject
Lestel’s notion of an “infinite debt” to animals, arguing that “rather than
capitulating to the inevitability of suffering and predation in the world, the
ethical vegan takes the position that we can avoid doing so”. He then says:
“Reducing all life to the amorphous category of ‘flesh’ is fundamentally
incompatible with such an expression of moral concern for animals, as is
the proposition that human life is somehow diminished by the aspiration to
eschew all violence toward animals” (ibid.).
I am not sure who in this debate is guilty of “reducing all life to the amor-
phous category of ‘flesh’”. As to what may diminish human life, the Crow
who no longer could be in a relationship with animals involving killing some
of them for various purposes, including eating the meat, is surely a case
in point, contrary to what Steiner would have us think. His reductionism
comes to the fore: he reduces, as the position he argues against does not, the
entire human-animals relationship to one aspect, that of killing for the sake
of eating. It is as if the only portion of the animals’ life cycle that counts is to
do with their manner of death, being made into the one issue around which
the entire ethical debate revolves and with reference to which the repertoire
of available philosophical positions is assessed.
Of course, it makes a difference for Steiner whether animals are mis-
treated prior to their death, as are, say, chicken produced in factories for the
sole purpose of optimalizing their commodity value on the market; chicken
made to grow (faster, bigger) by artificial means, becoming so heavy as to
be unable to move around. As is well known, this scenario is Singer’s point
of departure in Animal Liberation.
I have no doubt that the Crow would find modern-day industrialized
chicken-production just as horrible as do Steiner, Singer, and Coetzee, and
I readily add myself to the list. What this consensus shows, however, is that
Steiner’s principled, culture- and context-abstracting, one issue, one aspect
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 191
oriented approach is unsuited to the task he sets himself: that of answering,
once and for all, the question whether it can ever be justified for humans to
kill animals. His proposed answer – no, it cannot – fails to be compelling
because the way he frames the question is both too narrow and too crude. It
is too narrow in that it precludes from consideration the particular context
in which killing in some form or other takes place, neglecting the impact
of culture and cosmology and failing to address the connection between
ecology and ethics where issues of sustainability and prudence are key. And
it is too crude in that it induces us to approach the issue in a homogenizing,
simplifying manner failing to do justice to the differences between animals.
If Steiner’s claim is that what the Crow do to the buffalo is just as wrong
as what the present-day transnational capitalist agroindustry does to the
chicken – since in both cases, animals are being killed to be eaten, and that
similarity suffices to show that the two cases are equally wrong and con-
demnable – then the price he pays is unacceptably high: just as the buffalo
and the chicken are viewed as identical cases (both are being killed), so are
the humans deemed responsible, the Crow and the agroindustry bosses.
Certainly, this two-set identification flies in the face of the all-too-real dif-
ferences between the two cases: the differences in the lives led by the ani-
mals, and the differences in ways of relating to and being-with the animals
on the part of the two groups of human agents. The differences boil down to
Buber’s distinction: an I-Thou relationship in the one case, an I-It relation-
ship in the other.
I want to end my discussion of Steiner by taking up again the ontolog-
ical perspective so vital to the ecophilosophers we have looked at, and so
neglected in the approach of a contemporary American ethicist like Steiner.
Freya Mathews, a prominent member of the group of Australian ecophi-
losophers counting Rose and Plumwood, makes a distinction between axi-
ological and non-axiological societies that I find instructive. The sort of
animal ethics that Steiner represents concentrates on hierarchies (higher
and lower) and binaries (ends versus means, intrinsic versus instrumental
value) and on individuals as the basic entity with regard to which the issue
of moral standing, of rights and value, arises. But the individual is not only
morally paramount; the individual is also the ontologically basic entity, one
whose links with, connections and commitments to entities-larger-than-itself
are viewed as largely optional, to be chosen and negotiated by the individual
inasmuch as membership in extra-individual entities is not essential to the
very being of that individual – rather, group-membership may well prove a
threat to it and must for that reason be voluntary not enforced, as thinkers
from Hobbes to Nietzsche, Sartre, and Nozick have argued, covering the
entire political-philosophical spectrum and demonstrating the persistent
support such individualism enjoys (see Taylor 1989).
We will see in the next chapter that this ontological individualism
plays a crucial role in the debates between animal rights ethics on the one
hand and conservation ethics on the other: where the former is individual
192  Encounters as experiences of conversion
(exemplar) oriented, the latter is species oriented. What Mathews helps
us appreciate is the importance of tracing the ontological origins of the
two types of ethics so as to get at the deeper reasons for their reaching
different conclusions, especially on the increasingly urgent issue of species
extinction.
The non-axiological view that we may contrast with the axiological one
dominant in Western modernity, represented by Steiner, is typically found
in indigenous cultures and among hunters and gatherers. In Chapter 2 we
saw Old Tim give voice to so-called Tribal or Dreaming Law. The ontology
of this Law is one of identifying the patterns in things that enable the “living
cosmos” to renew and perpetuate itself in perpetuity. The Law explains how
humans and other-than-humans can participate in this pattern, ensuring its
vibrancy and coherence. In this function, the Law is at one and the same
time concerned with “being” and “doing”, with what is and what ought
to be, pace the separation between facts and values found in axiological
thought. Mathews puts it like this: “It is the living cosmos that has given
people existence and it details what people owe the cosmos in return, what
they need – ought – to do to ensure that this generative order is perpetu-
ated” (Mathews 2012: 13), pointing to duties and obligations that transcend
individual-oriented compassion.
Recall that the Aboriginal societies Mathews has in mind took their live-
lihood directly from nature; hunting was not an option, but an integral com-
ponent of their life form, as for the Crow. In this setting, “what contributes
to the stability of the cosmos is not an equality of individuals but of species
or kinds” (2012: 14). Thus individuals are inter-substitutable: “it does not
matter which individuals instantiate the relationships that perpetuate the
pattern”, the Law being concerned “not to protect individuals qua individ-
uals but to assure the conditions for the perpetuation of a living cosmos”.
In keeping with this view, the Law is a law of predation; “it prescribes who
can eat whom, when and where and under what conditions” (ibid.). As for
animals, the Law posits that “animals would care for themselves as part of
a living cosmos that cared for itself. Predation was a necessary and integral
part of that pattern: humans owed it to the living cosmos to hunt; the spe-
cies were sustained by hunting” (2012: 16).
In current terminology, according to the cosmology expressed in this
Law, what is ecologically required and what is morally right are two sides
of the same coin, the same reality, and not in conflict. Should the two be
in conflict, then because the balance – here: between humans and animals
– has been damaged; there is disruption instead of equilibrium, caused by
some party’s overstepping the limits of their place (niche) within the whole,
the living cosmos they are part of and whose thriving as a whole each part
depends on. Mathews addresses this situation – all-too-real today – by say-
ing that “now the global ecology is breaking down: we must take responsi-
bility for nature, look after it to the extent that it can no longer look after
itself” (2012: 17; see Rose 2000: 229ff.).
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 193
To suggest, like I did, that Steiner’s position can be identified with the axi-
ological view, is not entirely correct. In Animals and the Moral Community,
Steiner promotes what he terms “cosmic holism”, a view that would appear
to have affinity with the (Tribal, Aboriginal, Dreaming) Law whose holism
is articulated in its notion of “living cosmos” and the relational as distinct
from individualist ontology that goes with it. In this regard, Steiner rightly
highlights the relevance of Hegel’s philosophy, seeking to overcome the
individualism Hegel (1991) regards as deeply problematic in contract theory
a la Hobbes and Locke, and to a certain extent in Kant’s moral and political
philosophy. Despite the promise of Hegel’s holism, however, Steiner finds
that he, like Kant before him, excludes animals from the sphere of reciprocal
rights and obligations and so from the moral and political universe, doing
so for the standard anthropocentric reason that animals are “nonrational”
and “nonlinguistic” beings (2008: 160). This being so, Steiner seeks to “move
beyond the realm of social justice (i.e., justice among moral and legal agents)
and enter the realm of cosmic justice, a relation that obtains between mor-
al-legal agents and nonhuman moral-legal patients” (2008: 115). Differences
in terminology aside, this is on a par with my own view of moral agents and
moral addressees, stressing the asymmetry between them.
Nevertheless, the holism Steiner wants to advance differs from that of the
Law Mathews describes, where individuals are viewed as inter-substitutable.
Now this notion is considered deeply problematic not only in individual-
oriented liberal doctrines but also in animal rights theory. In this vein,
Steiner finds fault with the way a “holistic” ecophilosopher like J. Baird
Callicott focuses on “biotic community rather than on individuals” (2008:
131). Unfortunately, Steiner does not engage more deeply with the issue.
That is surprising, since the objection that holism – generally speaking – is
unwilling and unable to respect the inviolability of the individual, owing to
its (his or her) not being interchangeable or intersubstitutable, is a standard
one that any proponent of holism is expected to tackle. In my view, Steiner’s
holism is shallow rather than deep (to use Arne Næss’ famous distinction):
it lacks grounding in the cosmological dimension that Mathews highlights,
and – even more conspicuously – it lacks input from ecology, thus missing
out on the connection between the ecologically required and the morally
right that I mentioned above, a connection contested by the critics of holism
old and new, arguing that the individual is being – or is not adequately pro-
tected against being – “sacrificed” for the sake of the whole (community,
ecosystem). (I will say more about this issue in Chapter 5.)
The weaknesses in Steiner’s cosmic holism are nowhere more evident than
in his concluding statements. He follows Porphyry in holding that “to take
on anything like a cosmopolitan standpoint is to affirm our affinities with,
rather than our differences from, animals”; Steiner sees this as required to
“argue for cosmic rather than merely social justice” (2008: 162f.). But why
should – as is clearly presumed here – affirming our differences from ani-
mals undermines the project of including them in the moral universe, as
194  Encounters as experiences of conversion
“patients” or addressees? There is something undialectical and mechanic,
indeed anti-holistic and anti-ecological, in juxtaposing affinities and differ-
ences the way Steiner does. Aren’t their differences from us precisely what
we, at long last breaking with anthropocentrism, should learn to appreciate
and protect in animals? It is strange that Steiner buys into the notion that
affinities with humans per se be considered something positive, and differ-
ences something negative. I hasten to add, though, that the statement does
not sit well with the overall drift of his argument.
Consider, by way of conclusion, what Steiner says in the book’s closing
passage:

The goal of cosmic holism as I have articulated it is to reveal the licen-

tiousness of meat eating and other forms of violence toward animals
for what they are – injustices that we seek to rationalize by means of
specious arguments about the emptiness of animal experience and the
moral superiority of human beings. […] To affirm cosmic justice is to
abandon our fantasy of being “the masters and possessors of nature”.
(2008: 163)

Do I need to point out that Shepard’s The Others is conspicuously absent

from the bibliography in Steiner’s two books? And that this also goes for
the ethnographic studies I have drawn upon? To suggest that the peoples
and cultures who have historically been most engaged in hunting, killing,
and eating (certain sorts of wild) animals – as opposed to imprisoning them
within the concrete walls of factories a la present-day chicken production
– have subscribed to “the emptiness of animal experience” and thought of
themselves as “the masters and possessors of nature” is to get the historical
record completely wrong, as my discussion has demonstrated. It is disap-
pointing that Steiner ends his philosophically well-informed work on a note
of such gross historical distortion.

VI
I want to end this chapter by turning from theory to practice, looking at a
particular encounter between a human person and an individual animal.
The human person is the American author Alice Walker, and the animal a
horse named Blue. This is how Walker describes their encounter:
It was quite wonderful to pick a few apples, or collect those that had fallen
on the ground overnight and patiently hold them up to Blue’s large, toothy
mouth. I had forgotten the depth of feeling one could see in a horse’s eyes.
I was therefore unprepared for the expression in Blue’s. Blue was lonely.
Blue was horribly lonely and bored. I was not shocked that this should be
the case; five acres to tramp by yourself, endlessly, even in the most beautiful
of meadows – and his was – cannot provide many interesting events. I was
shocked that I had forgotten that human animals and nonhuman animals
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 195
can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as chil-
dren we take this for granted. […]
But then, in our second year, something happened in Blue’s life. One
morning…I saw another horse, a brown one, at the other end of Blue’s field.
Blue appeared to be afraid of it, and for several days made no attempt to
go near. We went away for a week. When we returned, Blue had decided to
make friends and the two horses ambled or galloped along together, and
Blue did not come nearly as often to the fence underneath the apple tree.
When he did, bringing his new friend with him, there was a different look
in his eyes. A look of independence, of self-possession, of inalienable horse-
ness. His friend eventually became pregnant. For months and months there
was, it seemed to me, a mutual feeling between me and the horses of justice,
of peace. I fed apples to them both. The look in Blue’s eyes was one of una-
bashed “this is itness”.
It did not, however, last forever. One day, I went out to give Blue some
apples. He stood waiting, or so I thought, though not beneath the tree.
When I shook the tree and jumped back from the shower of apples, he made
no move. I carried some over to him. He managed to half-crunch one. The
rest he let fall to the ground. I dreaded looking into his eyes – because I had
of course noted that Brown, his partner, had gone – but I did look. […] The
children next door explained that Blue’s partner had been “put with him”
so that they could mate and she conceive. Since that was accomplished, she
had been taken back by her owner, who lived somewhere else.
Will she be back? I asked. They didn’t know.
Blue was like a crazed person. Blue was, to me, a crazed person. He gal-
loped furiously, as if he were being ridden, around and around his five beau-
tiful acres. He whinnied until he couldn’t. He tor at the ground with his
hooves. He butted himself against his single shade tree. He looked always
and always towards the road down which his partner had gone. And then,
occasionally, when he came up for apples, or I took apples to him, he looked
at me. It was a look so piercing, so full of grief, a look so human. I almost
laughed (I felt too sad to cry) to think that there are people who do not know
that animals suffer. But most disturbing of all, in Blue’s large brown eyes
was a new look, more painful than the look of despair: the look of disgust
with human beings, with life; the look of hatred. (Walker 1989; 4–8; Kessler
2019: 99f.)
In his extensive analysis of Walker’s account, the philosopher Neil Kessler
seeks to understand the reasons why “what might have been a developing
close relationship between Walker and Blue has stopped”, noting that “the
failure of close relations was not because Blue didn’t have the qualities and
capacities to support closeness”. In particular, Kessler takes issue with
Walker’s attribution of the failure of closeness to “Blue’s grief turned to
hatred and disgust for all of humanity” (2019: 103f.).
Kessler’s interpretation is worth quoting, not least because of what he has
to say about responsibility, a concept that, for lack of concrete examples,
196  Encounters as experiences of conversion
tends to remain abstract when philosophers discuss relations between
human and animals. He writes:

I think closeness failed to develop in this case in part because Walker

failed to act on Blue’s behalf as an individual human in relationship with
him, the individual horse. By generalizing the object of Blue’s disgust
and hatred to all humanity, she abstracts and thus masks its very real,
tangible and personal targets. Such strong negative feelings are never,
at least at first, abstract or general. All three humans – Blue’s owner,
Brown’s owner, and Walker herself – fail to act substantively on Blue’s
behalf, to ease the suffering that was so obvious, and so obviously a
result of their actions or their lack. Blue hated those three people and
they failed to relationally respond to that hatred in any ameliorative
way. This is precisely what I meant when I suggested that human-nature
relationships are flawed first at an intimate or personal level. Rainforest
deforestation occurs because that very same suffering is ignored
on an individual-by-individual basis until it reaches some massive,
biome-disrupting scale. Just the same, clearcutting in national forests
continues because land managers charged with the care of those places
fail to recognize the possibility of these individual-level close relation-
ships and the suffering caused by their fracture or prevention.
(Kessler 2019: 104)

What Kessler is getting at is Walker’s responsibility to Blue as a relational

partner. That her responsibility for him, for taking action to support him
when he so clearly needs her to help him, has the status of a fact for both of
them is something Blue actively contributes to when he – full of pride and
happiness – shows Walker how much he trusts her and cares for her taking
part in his joy by waiting for her and then bringing his newly acquired mate
to the fence to meet her. Blue’s decision to do that – to invite her into what
matters most to him – attests to the close relationship between the two of
them as built in their shared past. Yet it also carries an expectation about
that relationship’s future, namely that Walker will do whatever it takes to
show herself worthy of his feelings for her and the trust he puts in her in that
his falling in love with Brown and fathering a foal with her is a life-changing
experience to him that, in addition to the pride on behalf of his now bril-
liantly displayed “inalienable horseness”, also carries a distinct vulnerabil-
ity: he might lose the love and happiness his finding a partner has given him.
Dyadic relationships deserving the name “close” involve the expectation
that should one party need help, the other will intervene. Why shouldn’t
this apply to the relationship between a human person and a horse?
As it turned out, Blue did lose the love and happiness that he experienced.
He lost it for no reason to do with his actions, or with Brown’s. Rather, he
lost his new relationship by way of it being taken away from him, by some
particular human individuals who decided to do so, and who in doing so
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 197
showed no regard for his (or his partner’s) feelings, no regard for what sep-
arating them meant for them. Brown had “been put with him” so that they
could mate and she conceive. Once accomplished, they were separated,
never to meet again.
Kessler faults Walker for “doing nothing” when this separation happened,
“save a tepid inquiry into Brown’s fate” that brought no result, letting the
matter rest there (ibid.). Her interactions with Blue as a relational partner,
he says, “become a using of Blue and his grief that may be to a much less
abusive degree than the using of Blue by his or Brown’s owner – or the using
of a forest by land managers – but it seems to me a difference of degree, not
kind” (ibid.). Indeed, the potential for a close human-animal relationship
did exist between Walker and Blue, and the deeper lesson here, Kessler sug-
gests, is that “it is her (and all of our) failure as modern humans to hold up
our end in such encounters – to see the more-than-human self as a Self – that
so often derails such closeness from coming to fruition” (ibid.). Specifically,
that Walker does not “act in a way that would benefit Blue – and that Blue
would be able to identify her as having undertaken – is the real failure”
(ibid.). Kessler hastens to add that he doesn’t mean this as a criticism of
Walker as a person; his point is “to show how deeply embedded in all of our
thoughts as modern human beings is that we cannot act” (ibid.).
We will never know if Walker could have brought Blue’s mate back.
Whether she agrees to it or not, Walker is part of a modern world “con-
structed to treat more-than-human beings such as horses as slaves”, as she
herself as well as Kessler points out. But, insists Kessler, Walker could have
given Blue’s owner an earful anyway, opening up an alternative scenario
where:

Blue would have seen her yelling at the owner and pointing at him.
He might’ve felt her care. And perhaps in response to witnessing this,
instead of Blue arriving at the fence by the apple tree the next time
with hatred and disgust for a humanity that included her, he might’ve
come there to rub that great viola-case of a grief-stricken head against
her shoulder to salve his broken heart with one who cared enough for
him to protest on his behalf – to feel with him instead of about him. In
interdependence theory, all the thoughts and feelings in the world won’t
amount to a hill of beans without the third vector of action.
(Kessler 2019: 105)

According to Kessler, then, it is an undisputable fact about the relationship

between them that Walker is responsible for helping Blue; and it is a fact that
she lets him down. Note that for Kessler, responsibility is an objective (fac-
tual), yet subjectively felt and confirmed, feature of that human-animal dyadic
relationship, just as he would surely – were he to consider the comparison
– say that it is when the parties are made up of two humans, say, Walker
and her husband, or Walker and a child she comes to know. If anything,
198  Encounters as experiences of conversion
responsibility weighs comparatively heavier on Walker when her “other” is
the horse Blue. Why? For the Levinasian reason that the horse is vulnerable
and dependent on her in a manner that her fellow human other is not, though
a difference in degree should be acknowledged between the adult other and
the child other. Blue, that is, is at the mercy of what humans decide to do
with him – to him – to such a degree as to make for a strong asymmetry in
his relationship to all humans, be it Walker, his close friend, or his owner,
who doesn’t appear to have entered into an I-Thou relationship with him at
all, but instead an I-It one, at least when judged in light of the event referred
to. As far as responsibility is concerned, then, the asymmetry – essentially:
in power to influence what comes to pass with Blue – in no way casts doubt
on the reality of the responsibility, or detracts from it or makes it condi-
tional; to the contrary, the more borne out by the facts the asymmetry is, the
stronger the call – or burden – of responsibility weighs on the agent.
There is a second aspect of Kessler’s analysis worth dwelling upon, even
more fundamental from a philosophical point of view. This is the way he
assumes that Blue would have responded had Walker decided to “yell at the
owner” and to point to him in doing so. He would have felt her care. Here,
Kessler is assuming a sort of transparency in the two-way communication
between Walker and Blue; or more precisely, and complexly, he assumes that
in the triad involved in the scene, Blue would be perfectly able to interpret
what Walker communicates to his (nameless) owner as – simultaneously – a
communication from her to him. More still, Blue is portrayed as getting it
perfectly right about what that communication is about – i.e., that Walker’s
intention in yelling at the owner is to criticize what he had done to Blue in
such a way as to demonstrate her support for Blue, her endeavour to show
herself – to all concerned – as his friend and as enacting the responsibility
that goes with such friendship – this as a matter of course, at that, as the
stuff of which such friendship is made, as will be apparent to all. This being
so, there is nothing “mysterious” about this sort of communication being
exchanged between a human person and a horse (recall the case against
scepticism offered by Midgley and by Crist in Chapter 1). This of course also
holds for the scenario that is the all-too-real one in this case, where Walker
fails to intervene on Blue’s behalf. That failure Kessler also sees as commu-
nicated from Walker to Blue, and as understood by Blue for what it implies,
causing him to show her his “hatred”, only she chooses to interpret it as
“the look of disgust with human beings, with life”, thus deflecting the fact
(following Kessler) that Blue’s hatred targets her, not the abstract generality
“human beings” she takes refuge behind, intellectualizing the experience
and denying her agential role in it. The question she thereby refuses to face
is whether Blue will ever be able to forgive her.
Kessler’s overarching concern is what he theorizes as “the failure to
acknowledge the thoughts, feelings and subsequent actions of more-than-
human-beings”, a failure on the part of humans that he, like Shepard, main-
tains is a historically recent development. Since Kessler’s take on this is
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 199
more philosophically rigorous than Shepard’s, we shall take a closer look
at it.
What do we mean when we say that “many animals arouse our sympathy”
or that “landscapes full of variety appear to us spontaneously as beautiful”?
The allegedly “scientific” answer, says Kessler, is that features (qualities)
such as beauty are seen, and causally explained, as emerging unilaterally
from the human, instead of as a product of the human-nature relationship
such that what happens is that we respond to the thoughts, feelings, and
actions of the more-than-human beings present in them and communicated
by them to us. As humans we need, and indeed have, what Kessler calls “liv-
ing Selves”, those of our various “others”; living Selves, not “lively matter”,
as he says, castigating posthumanism and new materialism for the “dearth
of individuation”, i.e., their failure to acknowledge ontologically and con-
ceptually “individuals as individuals-in-relation” (2019: 137).
On this basis, Kessler criticizes the error of seeing culture as a product
of human contrivance – that it is purely social – instead of human-nature
relational as well. What we risk leaving in place, unexamined, is the “onto-
logical stance that humans and more-than-human beings are foundation-
ally separate from each other, with human culture fully forming prior
to being influenced relationally or otherwise by the more-than-human
world”. Kessler’s contention, then, is that “humans don’t see the more-
than-human world through a lens of socially constructed culture, they see
it through a lens of human-nature relationships first, despite all attempts
to conceptually eradicate the latter’s influence and existence in modernist
views” (2019: 274).
It is tempting to consider what Kessler is saying as simply repeating earlier
points. But that would be a mistake. What Kessler explores is not the notion
of anthropomorphism that we discussed in Chapter 1, but the link between
ontology and culture that is required to explain the power that anthropo-
morphism continues to exert, notwithstanding the many dismissals of its
dualistic origins in Cartesianism. According to Kessler, we are still, as a cul-
ture and as a society, in a situation where “the more-than-human beings with
whom we are in relations must in actuality be a kind of relational tabula
rasa, forming only the backdrop onto which humans, by drawing from some
isolated locale inside themselves, project their concepts of what more-than-
human beings are like. By extension, the more-than-human beings them-
selves have no-more-than material nature of their own to be perceived”
(2019: 277); “to be perceived” meaning: for us to respond to, as the qualities
– feelings, thoughts, actions – that we experience in, say, animals such as the
horse Blue. Kessler points to the dualistic, post hoc conceptual movement
away from close relational interchange with more-than-human beings. As a
result of this operation, everything that emanates from both animate and
“inanimate” more-than-human beings and our close relations with them
“is largely lost to modernity”. This loss has happened gradually, not sud-
denly and all at once, so that authors like Wordsworth and Thoreau become
200  Encounters as experiences of conversion
a weigh station along this path to the present, descriptive of a time when
“modern men still felt more immediately unpleasant [or pleasant] things
that more-than-human Selves were feeling and conveying to them” (2019:
278).
There is a bottom-up as opposed to top-down logic to Kessler’s argument
that may seem simplistic, even naïve given the broader context where sys-
temic forces limit what a single individual can do. Granted, Walker could
have done more to protect Blue from the misery of being treated as a mere
means by his owner. But the practice where the match between Blue and
Brown – horses like them, everywhere – took place, facilitated for purely
human ends, not the involved animals’ ends, would continue unabated,
even if some kind of arrangement – by way of exception – were made for
Blue following an intervention from Walker. Recall Kessler’s statement
that “Rainforest deforestation occurs because that very same suffering [as
Blue’s] is ignored on an individual-by-individual basis until it reaches some
massive, biome-disrupting scale” (2019: 104). Does clearcutting continue
because land managers “fail to recognize the possibility of individual-level
close relationships” on the ground (ibid.)?
The causality suggested by saying that clearcutting continues “because”
individual failure is certainly simplistic. But Kessler’s approach is that of
an ontologically oriented philosopher, not that of a sociologist, econo-
mist or political scientist; the systemic power structures and imperatives
of growth and profit endemic to present-day global capitalism are not his
topic. Nonetheless, he has a point worth making: the level on which an indi-
vidual person’s encounter with a particular animal would make a difference
cannot, and should not, be ignored – where ignoring it takes the form of
abstracting from it, suppressing it or – simply – preventing it from occur-
ring. The modus operandi of the Nazi genocide of the Jews was a product of
a deliberate attempt to replace closeness between perpetrators and victims
by distance: no longer seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching those to be
killed, it becomes easier to take part in doing so (Bauman 1989; Hilberg
1985; Vetlesen 2005). The human psychology according to which one-to-one
(first-hand, physical, multisensuous) encounters take place and give rise to
hesitancy and qualms over killing – me killing that other person – is prin-
cipally the same where the other is an individual animal and not another
human person: the sheer experience of encounter makes for a bond, involves
a commitment, forces the agent (me, not somebody else) to decide what to
do: to heed the appeal to be protected issued by that other, or to disregard
it, pretending it isn’t issued or that it has no authority. Perhaps it boils down
to this: would the practice proceed if the individuals participating in it – the
mass killings of Jews, the deforestation of the rainforest (and I do not mean
to put the two on a par, morally speaking) – allowed themselves to experi-
ence those human and/or animal others affected by their actions as so many
distinct individual humans and/or animals?
 Encounters as experiences of conversion 201
Kessler does not raise the question quite so dramatically. Instead he cites
the seemingly less fatal practice of bird banding, often justified by reference
to how it helps the birds materially survive. He is quick to point out the
self-serving logic at work here, relying on denial and bad faith: if the aim
were to arrange things for the benefit of the birds, to relieve them entirely,
there would be no need to determine via banding just which pressure is most
disadvantageous to the birds in the first place. The scheme as such is circu-
lar as far as cause and effect go. What it helps put on display is “what we
modern humans find acceptable to do to the birds inside of a largely dualis-
tic and anthropocentric frame of reference. By carrying on in our relation-
ships with this mist net and that bird caught in it without a thought as to
how that bird feels to be treated thusly by us, is to simply continue imposing
the same old dualistic human-nature relationships” (2019: 280f.). In fact,
it’s quite straightforward: “We cannot have our highway system, our smart
phones, and even our wind power and let birds live how they will live. Not
how we think they need to materially live – but how they will choose to live
for themselves” (2019: 280).
5 Responsibility and grievability
in the face of extinction

I
A jaguar ventures out of the cover of trees. She, too, is under the close
eye of human researchers, tagged and tracked, as part of an attempt to
halt the fast downward trend of jaguar populations across the Americas.
Tonight, she is hungry and is seeking unusual prey – sea turtles. Until
recently, she had no need to hunt this well-protected quarry. The for-
est was large and held many options for her. She could take peccaries,
monkeys, agouti, or many different kinds of birds or fish. But the for-
est grows smaller, and so do her choices. […] Learning to kill a tur-
tle also involves learning its temporalities and spatialities, being in the
right place at the right time (synchronicity), hoping for prey that is both
available and reliably so. How many turtles will survive and return next
year? How much habitat will the jaguar have left? And what are the con-
servationists to do when one endangered species starts eating another?
(Bastian 2017: 160f.)

There you have it, in a nutshell. Michelle Bastian’s report from Tortuguero
beach, on Costa Rica’s Atlantic coast, brings the various elements together:
wild animals becoming fewer, their traditional prey being replaced by new
ones, with humans monitoring the predator’s every move, wondering what
the future holds in store, knowing – as do the animals too, or don’t you
think so? – that “the forests, the peccaries, the jaguars, the leatherbacks – all
are under threat” (ibid.).
The threat referred to is that of extinction. Extinction is not a novel phe-
nomenon in the history of the species. What is novel, indeed unprecedented,
are two things: the sheer pace at which extinction of animals and the shrink-
ing-cum-disappearance of their natural habitats take place, and the role
played by humans and our activities in causing the extinction.
The current form of extinction has given rise to a new interdisciplinary
field: extinction studies. Often individual researchers will specialize in one
particular threatened or critically endangered species; Bastian’s is leather-
backs. In the same vein, comprehensive studies will typically have a chapter
DOI: 10.4324/9781003317692-6
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 203
for each animal species considered. Irus Braverman’s Wild Life is a case in
point, with a chapter dedicated to each of the following animals: the Puerto
Rican Crested Toad, the Sumatra Rhino, Golden Lion Tamarin, Black-
footed Ferret, Puerto Rican Parrot, Red Wolf, and Tasmanian Devil.
I mentioned in Chapter 4 that animal rights theorists focus on individual
animals, as distinct from conservationists whose focus is species-oriented.
Historically, this has been regarded as a clear-cut distinction, and notwith-
standing their philosophical differences, the two approaches have been able
to coexist in a peaceful manner, with no need to declare the one more valid
or more urgent than the other.
This situation is currently changing, however, as a result of the pressures
on the various animals and their habitats that now threaten an increasing
number of them in their natural habitats. Questions never asked before are
now being raised with a sense of urgency nobody has been prepared for, be
it conceptually, ethically or in terms of answering the series of “what to do”
that knock on the door. Of course, many of these are questions about prior-
ities, about what sort of animal to regard as more important to protect than
others, ultimately to save from going extinct. But what does “important”
mean here? Important in what respect, in virtue of what, and for whom?
Recall the formula I have used on several occasions: that the constella-
tion we have to pay attention to, is that of the ecologically required and the
morally right. The question is: what if the two are in conflict? Can it ever be
morally right to sacrifice individuals for the sake of a species, given that
doing so is ecologically required in the sense of being necessary to protect
the habitat or the ecosystem?
Before I engage with these questions, it is useful to say more about the
context in which they nowadays arise. As indicated, I will concentrate on
the situation of endangered species of animals.
Traditionally, conservation efforts can be undertaken either in situ or ex
situ: either the animals are sought maintained and protected in their habitat
in the wild, or they are taken into captivity and sustained there, typically
in a zoo. This either/or distinction has been regarded as clear-cut, the dif-
ference between the one setting and the other as evident, and in the typical
case, conservation has taken place where the animals in question exist in
the wild, without removing them to another geographical place, let alone
into captivity.
As Braverman explains, this is changing. Conservation is currently mor-
phing into a continuum between the two poles. Endless combinations of in
situ and ex situ spring up almost daily, leading Braverman to describe no
less than seven inter situ nodes: gene banks, zoo breeding centres, conserva-
tion farms, conservation hatcheries, protected areas, wildlife refuges, and
national parks (2015: 17f.). As fluidity and hybridity come to replace the old
quasi-physical division between in situ and ex situ, the dichotomy underly-
ing the terms loses the plausibility granted it for so long, that of being true
to the facts, such that in situ would correspond to wilderness and hence to
204  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
nature, and ex situ to captivity and hence to culture. This being so, the con-
ventional division of labour with field biologists and wildlife managers on
the one hand, and zoo and lab experts on the other is also being challenged;
the involved professions and disciplines now need to collaborate in a more
integral way than ever before if their shared goal of conservation is to suc-
ceed. Despite these changes, Braverman maintains that the old dichotomy
still makes sense: “Without a wild, free, and pristine nature, conservation
in captivity is meaningless; and without the notion of captivity, wilderness
as the very opposite of captivity cannot exist” (2015: 4). Nevertheless, we
need to acknowledge that “there is not one nature but many”, as part of the
attempt to understand why the existing habitats of a growing number of
species are becoming less viable. In reality, then, what conservationists refer
to as a natural habitat must often be actively managed alongside the con-
struction of an alternative one, making for the continuum indicated above.
With increasing frequency, “the last handfuls of animals from a species on
the brink of extinction are transferred into intensively managed sites to
ensure their survival”; in this way, “a livable nature is constructed in captiv-
ity for the conservation of threatened life” (2015: 10).
Probably as much by inclination as by training, conservationists have
been committed to a hierarchy where ex situ conservation is seen as a third-
best solution, after the preferred no-management-at-all approach and the
second-best in situ management that occurs, say, in big national parks.
Misgivings about ex situ conservation, be it in zoos or in labs, still persist,
based on the notion that animals cannot behave naturally in captive settings:
in trying – having – to adjust to what may objectively be described as an
“artificial setting”, the animals lose their distinctive naturalness, depending
as it does on their living their entire lives in their natural habitat, which tra-
ditionally means in the wild, undisturbed (largely if not entirely) by human
intervention and facilitation. Accordingly, captivity cannot but produce
“artificial” animals, prompting questions like: (1) If captivity is the only
option left to save the animals in question, is it thereby right?(2) Is there a
sense in which these particular animals are lost the moment the last individ-
ual is moved from its natural habitat and into captivity – to be sure, its sur-
vival may be ensured that way, but is the animal that survives in an artificial
setting the same animal that used to live in a natural one?
Indeed, how to manage species that are extinct in the wild and now
exist only in virtue of efforts made to allow them to exist in captivity? As
Braverman explains, many conservationists hold that select species that
would otherwise go extinct are to be maintained in captivity “until their sur-
vival can be secured in the wild”, so that conservation in captivity is justified
“only when conservation in the wild is no longer a valid option – namely, as
a measure of last resort” (2015: 71). Interestingly, Braverman observes that it
is becoming more common than before to hold that captive populations are
legitimate and even necessary “in and of themselves, and not only for sup-
plementing the wild”: since surviving in the wild is becoming increasingly
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 205
precarious for an increasing number of animals, captivity would benefit
the animals in question by “saving them from the stress of surviving in the
wild” (ibid.).
But doesn’t such reasoning involve a slippery slope? Until now, the dom-
inant view has been that the very point about wild animals, the value pecu-
liar to them, is that they should be left to their own devices, their being wild
being tantamount to their being free in the wild, undisturbed and unaffected
by any sort of human interference. Of course, this throws up the issue of
whether there is, in the era of the Anthropocene, any such thing as “wilder-
ness” in the pristine sense traditionally implied. And if that quality is gone,
due to human activities that alter the very make-up of the natural world,
disrupting its ecosystems and their regenerative capacities, then many peo-
ple would say that the very distinction between wild animals on the one
hand and domesticized animals on the other has to be abandoned: even with
respect to what remains, say, of iconic predators like lions, tigers, jaguars,
and leopards in a setting where they are not fenced in and thus “held cap-
tive”, theirs will now be an existence thoroughly shaped by human activities
and decision-making – not necessarily in the form of humans directly (phys-
ically) interfering with them in their day-to-day movements but in the sense
that their staying in the (quasi-) wild – often in national parks – is now a
matter of all-around-the-clock human monitoring of the animals and their
every move, so that the lives of the animals are drawn into the use of ever
more advanced technologies (tagging them, filming them from helicopter,
injecting them so as to move them from one place to another), amounting
to an enormously resource-intensive undertaking on the part of humans
for the sake of “saving the last wild animals qua wild”, whereby the means
employed to reach that stated aim cannot but spoil it.
The end point of this trend is that the destiny of animals in the wild is
wholly at the mercy of humans: since we are fully capable of ruining (what’s
left of) the natural environment that their being wild relies upon, only a
decision on our part to abstain from that destruction will ensure, for the
time being, their survival. For all the drama of this big picture, the slippery
slope I alluded to kicks in with varying degrees of drama in each separate
case: the more stressful the non-captive form of life may appear to become
to certain animals, for regrettable human-made causes at that, the more
tempting it may become to decide to move them into captivity in some form,
tempting because seemingly the most “realistic” and so “responsible” thing to
do, everything considered. Captivity will then be chosen over existence in
the wild, for the sake of saving the last “wild” animals. Subtly or not so
subtly, then, captivity has become the default stance, the new normal for
the animals in question. For some, this will be accepted as the “last resort”
Braverman talks about. For others, it will be rejected as a contradictory, if
not outright self-defeating scheme, a perversion of the very mission of wild-
life conservation, a case of giving into, and becoming complicit in, the very
forces that must be resisted.
206  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
Although there is often disagreement about when the situation has become
so dire as to justify the transfer of individual animals from in situ to ex situ
settings, there is an increasing agreement among conservation experts that
captivity can and should serve as the last resort for a species on the brink
of extinction. Life in captivity is better than no life at all: that is the bottom
line. There comes a time when discussions about whether enough was done
to prevent the transfer into captivity from becoming the “only realistic and
responsible thing to do” become moot, of academic interest only. If this
is the current consensus among conservationists, it is a position strongly
opposed by animal rights theorists and activists alike. They question what
they take to be the privileging of the interests of species or populations over
what they maintain are the rights of individual animals, rights that should
be trump precisely as individual such pertaining to each particular animal.
Tom Regan states the argument like this: “The general policy regarding
wilderness would be precisely what the preservationists want – namely, let
it be! Were we to show proper respect for the rights of the animals who
make up the biotic community, would not the community be preserved?
And is not that what the more holistic, systems-minded environmentalists
want?” Rights, Regan submits, pertain to individuals only; “species are not
individuals, and the rights view does not recognize the moral rights of spe-
cies to anything, including survival” (Braverman 2015: 77; Regan 1983: 363,
359). Sparking much controversy, Regan has gone so far as to describe the
requirement that individual organisms be sacrificed for the whole as “envi-
ronmental fascism” (ibid.), citing Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” as a case in
point and charging that holistic approaches as such are stuck with the dan-
ger of fascism.
I shall come back to the philosophical implications of Regan’s position
below. For the people engaged in the decision-making about what to do in
the particular case, the way an animal rights theorist like Regan plays the
individual and the species out against each other is not helpful. The case
of the California condor may serve as an example. In the late 1970s, there
were 22 birds remaining in the wild. A decision was made to capture them
all; they were all subsequently put into the captive propagation programme.
The assessment of the federal agency in charge was that “if we had left the
condors in the wild, they would have gone extinct”. While the birds were
being bred in captivity, the ecological context was, to some extent, regained
for them, so that when they were released into the wild they were able to
expand their range and number. Indeed, following the reintroduction of the
captive California condor into the wild, more than 300 condors now inhabit
large areas of Arizona and California (see Braverman 2015: 77).
This is no doubt a success story, made possible by a sensible and informed
pragmatism on the part of the personnel involved rather than by the
attempt to settle a philosophical dispute. Even so, those engaged in this sort of
decision-making will ask themselves tough questions about what they are
doing given the bigger picture, such as: “Is it better to vanish in the wild
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 207
than to lead a rich life in captivity?” “Would it be more desirable to die free
rather than to live in captivity?” (2015: 80). Can one say that “the condor was
destroyed in order to save it” (Marris 2021: 112)?
Note that these questions are raised in a manner referring to individual
animals, inviting us to assess what alternative options would look like from
their individual point of view, as it were. Perhaps this “methodological indi-
vidualism” is inevitable, besides being taken for granted, representing the
culturally and institutionally entrenched individualism – conceptual and
ontological, moral and legal – that I have pointed to on several occasions.
And to be sure, questions concerning the “desirability” of one alternative
over another – say, captivity over wildness – do seem to make sense to us
only as applying to particular individuals, rather than to a species: not only
because a species consists of so many individuals whose points of view may
diverge, presumably the more so the more advanced and rich in capacities
for experiences the individuals making it up; but also because something – a
kind of life, in a certain kind of setting – can only be desirable to an individ-
ual creature, not to a species qua species.
It does seem, then, that a strong argument can be made that the locus of
experience, of having the difference between pleasure and pain, flourishing
or suffering, matter, is the individual not the species, the particular member
not the (biotic) community. If we grant this (and it does seem compelling),
does it follow that the individual is always trump, always to be given pri-
macy? Primacy over what? Well, the species, understood as the whole, as the
entity that, were we to give it primacy, would thereby crush the individual
since leading to the sacrificial logic that we saw Regan warn against?
There is something artificial and overly cerebral about this way of pitting
individual and species against each other, as were the essential relationship
between them that of conflict, of being at loggerheads, and concluding that
the choice between granting trump status to the one rather than to the other
equals the choice between right and wrong. Are the alternatives that clear-
cut, simplistic, and mutually exclusive on the ground? Is this theory at all
suited for the practical decision-making and tough choices conservationists
are presently confronted with?
To answer these questions, we need first to note that on Regan’s theory,
not all animals have moral rights. That not all animals are to be considered
as morally equal is a view Regan shares with Singer, whose plea for equal
consideration comprises the diverse interests of all sentient animals. Regan
for his part is even more restrictive: only those animals who qualify as pos-
sessors of “inherent value” should be granted rights – that is to say, only
animals who satisfy the “subject-of-a-life” criterion. To be such a subject
requires being self-conscious and having the capacity to believe, desire, con-
ceive the future, entertain goals, and act deliberately. This is certainly a tall
order. Truth be told, most animals have no chance of qualifying. The class
Regan is left with is an exclusive elite among animals, namely “mentally
normal mammals of a year or more”. As critics such as J. Baird Callicott
208  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
rightly point out, the exclusiveness of the category of animals for which
Regan, given his own definition, actually makes his case is masked by his
book’s title: it should read The Case for Mammal Rights (Callicott 1989: 40).
As a matter of fact, the vast majority of endangered species are not
made up of the rights-holding mammals prioritized in Regan’s theory;
the vast majority are plants and invertebrates. Factually, then, his is a
theory of animal rights that has nothing to offer to most of the creatures
making up other-than-human life on earth. Conceptually, Regan’s the-
ory is weakened by buying into the symmetric model I have critiqued
above inasmuch as his requirements for qualifying as a moral addressee
(in his case: a bearer of rights), highlighting as we saw overly cognitivis-
tic capacities, not only preclude most animals; more fundamentally still,
in my view the requirements are such as to be necessary and relevant
to being a moral agent, not a moral addressee. Presumably, the whole
point about making a case for the importance of introducing rights into
the domain of animals and not only humans (Regan’s very project) is to
advance their entitlement to protection, that is, to ensure their status as
beings that should not be treated as mere means, as beings available for
abuse, exploitation, and, ultimately, extinction by those who treat their
lack of consciousness- and cognition-based agency as a licence to abuse
them with impunity. It is surprising that a critic like Callicott does not
pay any attention to this point about how Regan conceives the relation-
ship between agent and addressee.
Whereas Regan and the generation of environmental philosophers he
belongs to, alongside Callicott, Paul Taylor, and Holmes Rolston, primarily
address animals in the wild, the “logic of sacrifice” that conservationists and
ecophilosophers alike are concerned with today is increasingly focused on
the issues raised by captivity. Thom van Dooren, one of the leading schol-
ars in “extinction studies”, puts the relevant difference like this: “While it
should not be forgotten that free-living birds also experience a range of dep-
rivations and stresses – the world beyond the fence is not Eden – this does
not change the fact that life as a captive breeder remains a kind of ‘sacrificial
life’, a life given, and not by one’s own choice, for the good of others. It is a
life sacrificed as part of an effort to care for a species” (2014: 114). Working
on a project to help ensure a future for the endangered Whooping Cranes,
van Dooren reminds us that it is not only individual Cranes whose lives
are drawn into the fray: “In a range of ways, a host of individuals of other
species are also positioned as sacrificial surrogates for the continuity of the
Whooping Crane” (ibid.). To illustrate, in order to do the tests necessary
to establishing the feasibility and best practices for ultralight aircraft-led
assisted migration, major hazards included predation by Golden Eagles and
collision with power lines and the propellers of ultralight aircraft; many
birds, of different sorts, were injured or killed in these tests. In this situa-
tion, experimenters will sometimes deliberately select “hazardous” migra-
tion routes with hundreds of power-line crossings to thoroughly explore the
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 209
nature of the potential danger and “trouble shoot solutions before begin-
ning with the endangered cranes” (2014: 115).
I have not seen the word “cannon fodder” used in this literature, proba-
bly rightly so. But it alerts us to the ethical dilemmas involved: Can some
animals be used as a means to further the ends of others? What are the
criteria suited to the prioritizing involved? That the “means” animals are
less important than the “ends” animals? What would justify such ranking?
In light of all the energy spent to reject considering humans as “higher-standing”
than animals of all sorts, condemning it as self-serving, dangerous, and bla-
tantly unethical, do we not risk repeating this selfsame logic of hierarchy
were we to engage in schemes deeming some animals so much “higher” in
importance and worth as to justify putting the lives of so many lower-ranking
others at risk? Or, finally, is it more about numbers than qualities, such that
we may lower the ethical bar whenever the “means” animals are (compara-
tively) plentiful and the “ends” animals so few as to be critically endangered
qua species?
Conservation efforts seem to have moved along a continuum scarcely
anticipated by the generation of philosophers who made their first forays
into the field of animal rights, animal ethics in the 1970s. At that time, the
primary task was pretty straightforward: to argue the case for the establish-
ment of national parks big enough to allow the animals to persist in their
original way of life in their natural habitat, left to their own devices qua
wild, where the preservation of that wildness – conditional on the (relative
not absolute) absence of human interference – is the quality to be protected,
valuable in its own right, such that the point about these animals is that they
are not put to any sort of use by humans, and for human-directed purposes.
The continuum I alluded to is one where, gradually, bit by bit, place by
place, species by species, the original way of life of the animals in their nat-
ural habitat as such is becoming an increasingly rare and so endangered
entity, a situation calling for measures and methods never before enter-
tained because simply not required. Accordingly, those animals still left in
what remains of the wild are less and less left to their own devices as they
are being more and more monitored, with ever-expansive advanced tech-
nologies making sure that, say, not a single wolf in my native Norway is left
unseen and unmarked for as much as a single day of its life cycle, be it in
the so-called “wild”. Then, there is the transfer to a zoo and so captivity of
animals so few and far between in the fragmented, degraded, and vanishing
wild as to be considered “unsustainable” in their original setting, whereby
captivity becomes the only realistic option for what used to be iconic wild
animals, such as the rhino, and perhaps tomorrow the orangutan. This
being so, is it not tempting to consider the employment of other animals,
less threatened and richer in number of individuals, to assist in efforts to
save those in serious trouble – even if giving such schemes the green light
involves the calculated risk that a considerable number of them are killed in
the process? When is it worth it, and when is it not?
210  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
Indeed, can a “sacrificial logic” where individuals of “least concern” are
treated as available and expendable forms of life in the service of other,
ostensibly more important and valuable beings, ever be justified? Who is to
be considered as “killable” for the sake of the greater good of conservation?
And if it strikes us that we would instinctively find this kind of reasoning
utterly problematic were human individuals the creatures involved, how can
we possibly find it acceptable in the case of animals?
Drawing on Donna Haraway’s reading of Derrida, van Dooren argues that
“refusing this sacrificial logic is about insisting that these individuals [deemed
as killable] do make ethical claims on us. The point is not that we can never
kill or cause suffering in the name of conservation, but that the decision to do
so…should never leave us comfortable and satisfied” (2014: 117). Is it worth it,
then? On van Dooren’s view, “even if the death of the last Whooping Crane
is delayed for several more decades, even if the species recuperates up to the
point that it can again be self-sustaining in multiple free-living migratory
populations, the violence and suffering that has produced this outcome will
not and cannot be erased or ‘justified away’” (ibid.). Van Dooren will not be
comfortable as long as some forms of flourishing are sacrificed for the sake of
others. This, he says, is an “all-too-common occurrence in conservation pro-
jects where care for the species is usually uncritically taken to trump all other
ethical concerns”. The closest he comes to arriving at a conclusion is his state-
ment that “refusing a sacrificial logic requires us to develop ways of caring
for cranes that take seriously the flourishing of both species and individuals”,
and so exposing us to “an imperative to constantly strive to do better than we
are now” (2014: 118). As Haraway says, we need to stay with the trouble and
not pretend there are answers that come without dilemmas, solutions with-
out casualties. The ecologist Chris Thomas, commenting on a project in New
Zealand involving the poisoning of a huge number of rats so as to prevent
the demise of kiwi, articulates an important truth when he says that “the rat
doesn’t want to die of poisoning; the kiwi doesn’t want to be attacked. I don’t
think there can be an ethically correct answer. We can trade off the deaths of
one thing versus the deaths or survival of other things. But there can’t be an
ultimate right or wrong” (Marris 2021: 199f.). Decision-making in this area
has to be carried out on a case-to-case basis.
It is noteworthy that van Dooren, a philosopher by training, completes
his discussion of this matter without once referring to the notion of rights.
Would an ethics that propagates animals as bearers of rights enrich his dis-
cussion, not to mention help him arrive at a more rigorous conclusion?
I don’t think so. In saying that, I have Regan’s version as well as its logical
alternative within rights theory in mind. Above, drawing on Callicott’s crit-
icism, I faulted Regan for prioritizing an “elite” class of animals (i.e., cog-
nitively sophisticated mammals) over all others, in effect securing – at least
in theory – respect for their “inherent value” for what in reality is a small
minority of all animals, leaving the majority by the wayside since falling
short of qualifying for moral status. The ranking of higher and lower within
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 211
the universe of animals is in danger of creating its own kind of apartheid, at
least as long as lack of inherent value is tantamount to availability as mere
means to others. Thus the binary schema of ends-in-themselves vs means-
for-others that animal rights theorists ever since Singer’s ground-breaking
Animal Liberation have been intent on attacking as a crucial element in their
critique of anthropocentrism, often taking Kant’s version as their primary
target, is not abandoned, let alone overcome, but replicated, only now with
regard to the relationship between (different species of) animals instead of
that between humans and (all) animals. Whereas this poses a challenge for
Regan, as far as Singer is concerned, and as commentators have pointed out
ever since his breakthrough as the leading animal rights theorist, he may be
charged with perpetuating a dualistic outlook where living beings are either
included in or excluded from the all-decisive, one-criterion-only category
of sentience. Accordingly, his position does not question the notion of the
merely instrumental value of nature per se, the very notion that has been the
call to arms for generations of ecophilosophers. Far from taking part in that
battle, Singer’s theory is content to merely move the borders of the category
held to include those who qualify for moral consideration, i.e., as addressees
in my terminology.
What about the logical alternative – namely, to posit that all animals are
equal as far as their inherent value is concerned, so that no species-based
discrimination between them can be justified, and an end can be put to
practices involving sacrifice? If all sorts of animals are morally equal in the
sense of inviolability, so that it will never be morally justified to treat some-
body as mere means, and to determine that the interests of some other(s) be
given primacy, then where does this take us in terms of decision-making? If
every step on the grass is morally problematic in that it harms some of the
organisms found there (to allude to a popular reading of Albert Schweitzer’s
“reverence for the sanctity of all life” doctrine), then how can we move –
make decisions – at all? If the problem with Regan’s position is that it allows
for the treatment as means of animals that we intuitively feel should not be
that readily sacrificed for the sake of “higher-standing” others, the problem
with Schweitzer’s is that it forbids our every step, every move, inasmuch as
there is no such thing as moving around – be it humans or animals that do
so – without some instantiations of life, some loci of conatus, being harmed.
I conclude that granting animals (or some of them) rights is not the ethical
position best suited to tackle the issues at hand. To be able to explore a more
promising approach, it is necessary to look more closely at the relationship
between individual and species.

II
Above I criticized Tom Regan’s depiction of the relationship between indi-
vidual and species as one of conflict, imposing upon us the choice between
prioritizing either the one or the other. I now submit that to ask: What is
212  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
trump, individual or species? is to start the discussion from the wrong place,
ethically as well as ecologically.
We need to gain a better understanding of what an individual and a spe-
cies is, one that recognizes their interconnectedness, the fact that the one
cannot be, cannot persist, without the other. Van Dooren’s approach is more
fruitful than Regan’s, since more ecologically attuned: “Each species lin-
eage embodies a particular way of life, a particular set of morphological
and behavioral characteristics that are passed between generations” (2014:
27). He hastens to add that “this is not a static way of life. More than the
sum of those individuals currently living, species are engaged in an ongoing
intergenerational process of becoming – of adaptation and transformation
– in which individual organisms are not so much ‘members’ of a class or a
kind, but ‘participants’ in an ongoing and evolving way of life” (ibid.). In
this context, “any individual bird is a single knot in an emergent lineage: a
vital point of connection between generations – generations that do not just
happen, but must be achieved” (ibid.).
In this way, then, the species Whooping Cranes needs the participation,
the contribution made, by each and every individual Whooping Crane: as
so many parts of the whole they constitute, so many members keeping it
afloat in time and space, helping sustain it as the peculiar species it is, no
individual Crane is expendable. The way it proves itself as non-expendable,
however – pace Regan – is qua means to the sustaining of the whole without
which it qua individual would not itself thrive and persist: only by being an
instrument in this way – being instrumental to the whole it partakes of –
can it sustain the value that philosophers, one way or the other, some more
cerebrally than others, wish to claim on its behalf qua individual. In other
words, to be an instrument and to have value in itself are not contradictory
statuses or roles; rather, they are mutually constitutive, the one being the
condition of possibility for the other. There simply is no species without
thriving individuals; no thriving individuals without the persistence in time
and space of its species, the one trajectory being inseparable from the other
– hence also endangered the moment the other is. To pit individual and spe-
cies against each other is to be ecologically illiterate.
At this point, conservation biologists will typically observe that whereas
individuals in plural make up a species, single individuals are still expend-
able without endangering the existence of their species (Sverdrup-Thygeson
2021). While this may be true in theory, it is not always true in real life – it
depends on what turns out to be the current plight of the species in question.
This being so, to treat, in practice, individuals per se as expendable may
prove fatal: the last remaining rhinos are not expendable but irreplaceable,
factually so, whether our philosophical position recognizes them as such
qua individuals (specimen) or not: their death will be tantamount to the
end of the species, closing down its historical trajectory forever and thus
representing a true loss.
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 213
Van Dooren makes the overall point about interconnectivity in a perspec-
tive that alerts us to the importance of continuity in time and place, high-
lighting how it comes to be that a species is the achievement of its individuals
and thus something eminently dynamic, something that is always changing
and thus never “closes” as far as its potential qua species is concerned. Here
is his description:

Individual participants in a species may not be aware of where they

have come from or where they are going in this broader evolutionary
sense, and yet, it is their striving for continuity that achieves it none-
theless, This striving is, of course, present in the individual organism’s
efforts to maintain itself, but what is equally important is the efforts of
living things to pass on that life to subsequent generations. Each year,
taking on the dangerous and demanding obstacles of reproduction,
albatrosses, like so many of Earth’s other creatures, invest their lives
in a generational continuity that exceeds them. […] Bound together by
shared inheritance and a shared fate, a species is always more than its
current manifestation. Extinction is the loss not of a single fixed “kind”,
but of a potentially limitless set of emergent and branching flight ways
from the present into the diversity of the future. Each species is ulti-
mately a flight way beyond itself.
(2014: 38)

To address this situation, which is that of mass extinction, van Dooren

proposes a new ethical imperative: “to hold open space for other species”
(2014: 40), that is, to ensure that other species than humanity have a future.
One is reminded of Hans Jonas’ version of such a new imperative: “Act so
that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine
human life”, or negatively put: “Do not compromise the conditions for an
indefinite continuation of humanity on earth” (1984: 11).
One may wonder whether van Dooren and Jonas are on the same page. Is
there a conflict between the obligation to hold open space for other species,
seeing to it that their trajectories continue into the open, change-involving
future van Dooren describes, and the obligation to ensure the permanence
of a genuinely human life? Is the one imperative biocentric, the other anthro-
pocentric? If so, do they contradict each other?
To raise this question is to anticipate a topic to be discussed below, namely
what responsibility means in the age of extinction, by which I indicate that
it cannot mean the same as before. But to return to the contrast between
the two imperatives: Can we, humans in our capacity as moral agents, hold
open space for other species without at the same time ensuring that we our-
selves persist into that open future to be shared with all our species others?
To hold that we cannot accomplish the other-directed part that van Dooren
highlights without securing the inner-directed one is of course to suggest
214  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
that, contrary to the conflict indicated, the two imperatives are not only
compatible but depend on each other.
This reasoning may well appear convincing in theory. But the real valid-
ity test is to do with how the implied claim that we humans are needed to
ensure that other-than-human species have a future on planet Earth plays
out in practice. We currently know more about the answer to that question
than most of us care to admit or pay serious attention to, attention of the
sort that makes it imperative for us to change our ways, culturally and indi-
vidually. To put it differently, Jonas may have got it plain wrong: the future
of humans’ many “others” does not depend on the “permanence of genuine
human life”; on the contrary, what we must recognize today is that their
future is put in jeopardy by our continued presence.
What do I mean by saying this? What do we do if we accept the notion
that our “others”, counting multiple sorts of animals among them, are bet-
ter off without us?
The context for this question is succinctly set out by van Dooren:

For this briefest of evolutionary moments, Homo sapiens has come into
direct and profound contact with the world’s albatrosses and countless
other species. Our flight ways have crossed, and each of us has become
implicated in the fate of the other. […] Perhaps what is most tragic
about the current situation is not the “failure” of albatrosses to adjust
or adapt to new threats and an altered environment: intensive long-line
fishing or brightly colored plastics that look like food. Rather, what is
most tragic is another failure to adapt. Our own failure – in which some
societies and some people are far more complicit than others – to come
to terms with our own relatively new capacity to systematically alter
environments in a way that undermines possibilities of life for other liv-
ing beings and, ultimately, for ourselves. Perhaps it is we who have not
yet “evolved” into the kinds of beings worthy of our own inheritances.
(2014: 43)

On the one hand, owing to the role of humans (incomparably greater in

the case of the richest and most consuming, most CO2-emitting 10 per
cent of the population than the rest) in putting the future of animals
like the albatross in jeopardy, the answer to the question about whether
they would be better off without us seems to be brutally simple: yes,
they would. I am not suggesting that van Dooren is saying this – what
one can say, though, is that it appears to be a logical consequence of his
causal analysis, factually correct at that. On the other hand, a different
response is also possible, namely that precisely because humans have
been instrumental in causing the crisis affecting so many of our others,
that very responsibility makes it incumbent on us to do everything we
can to clean up the mess and devote our most sophisticated capacities to
that other-directed task.
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 215
Even though Hans Jonas’ The Imperative of Responsibility was written in
the late 1970s, the book does, to a certain extent, anticipate the scenario that
van Dooren depicts as the present-day reality. Jonas writes: “In the choice
between man and nature as the struggle for existence poses it time and again,
man indeed comes first, and extra-human nature, even with its own right
(‘Würde’) acknowledged, must give way to his superior right”. This, he con-
tinues, is so because “the simple rule holds that egoism of the species – each
species – takes precedence anyway according to the order of life in general”.
In other words, “the mere fact of superior power legitimates its use” (1984:
137). Nonetheless, Jonas acknowledges that in the current circumstances we
have to move beyond this prerogative of our own species. We have, that is,
to “include a duty toward nature as both a condition of his [sic] own survival
and an integral complement of his unstunted being”. What we need to real-
ize is that “the common destiny of man and nature, newly discovered in the
common danger, makes us rediscover nature’s own dignity and commands
us to care for her integrity over and above the utilitarian aspect” (ibid.). To
make sure to protect what has up till now been taken for granted throughout
human history – “that there are men, that there is life, that there is a world for
both” – the proposed new ethics, born of danger, Jonas stresses, is “necessar-
ily an ethics of preservation and prevention, not of progress and perfection”,
knowing full well that man is no longer “simply the further executor but also
the potential destroyer of the purposive labor of nature” (1984: 139).
To be sure, there is something outmoded and less than state-of-the-art
environmental science in formulations like “the choice between man and
nature as the struggle for existence poses it”. Nevertheless, Jonas’ attempt to
reconceive the ethical imperative so that it may help orient our decision-making
in the age of extinction is a promising starting point in that it recognizes
what previous imperatives (say, Kant’s) did not, namely that the only moral
agent on Earth endowed with the capacities required for responsibility is
now the most powerful one in terms of capacity for destruction. This coex-
istence of responsibility and capacity for destruction of the very conditions
for continued life on Earth is unprecedented; it is the historical novelty that
defines the Anthropocene as the age of anthropogenic extinction. As such,
it not only forces us to rethink what responsibility calls for. It also calls for
a reassessment of the constellation I introduced above, that of the ecologi-
cally required and the morally right.

III
In his major work Respect for Nature, Paul W. Taylor, one of the pioneers
of environmental ethics in the United States, approaches this constellation
under the heading “biology and ethics”. Taylor points out that there are
“two different but equally correct conceptions of human beings: as biolog-
ical organisms and as moral agents” (2011 [1986]: 47). The question is: what
bearing does the one have on the other?
216  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
Taylor states that as biologically functioning organisms, our survival
requires that we “maintain a certain ecological balance in our relations with
other living things”; “we are biologically dependent upon a sound, stable
order in the Earth’s natural ecosystems” (2011: 48). However, and this is the
crux of the matter, “understanding ourselves as biological entities does not
provide us with any particular directives as to how we should conduct our
lives: our proper role as moral agents is not deducible from the facts about
our biological nature” (2011: 49f.).
That our make-up as biological entities as such should be able to guide us
in matters moral may appear so far-fetched an idea as to merit no serious
discussion. But in fact, says Taylor, the claim is frequently made that ecol-
ogy (defined as a branch of biology) shows us how to live in relation to the
natural environment: “Thus it is held that ecological stability and integrity
themselves constitute norms for environmental ethics” (2011: 50). Although
he doesn’t bring the quote, it is clear that the formulation Taylor has in mind
is the one for which Aldo Leopold will forever be remembered: “A thing
is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the
biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (1949: 224). Taylor’s
gloss on this is that “the science of ecology provides us with a model to fol-
low in the domain of environmental ethics” (2011: 51).
For reasons to do with his being a Kantian, albeit one who seeks to make
Kant fruitful outside of the anthropocentric framework, Taylor rejects the
model where ecology serves as a proto-ethics. His main argument is that the
model is not sound “from a logical point of view: it confuses fact and value,
‘is’ and ‘ought’”. The ethical question is “How should human culture fit into
the order of nature?”, and this is not a question of “biological fact”. Taylor
seeks to corroborate his argument by saying that “nothing in ecology can tell
us that it is wrong to have a wholly exploitative attitude toward nature” (ibid.).
I think that Taylor’s case against the model is much weaker than the case
in support of it. This is so because, as explained in Chapter 3, I am a moral
realist: I do not accept the claim about a strict separation between fact and
value. Quite the contrary, value is part of the furniture of the world, some-
thing we encounter in re, as objectively there, making demands on us in
terms of – precisely – what we ought to do and what we ought to avoid and
prevent, such as exploitation of particular manifestations of life. In fact, in
the course of his argument Taylor himself (if only unwittingly) subscribes to
the realist view, namely when he argues that what is worthy of the respect
of all moral agents is the natural entity’s having (pursuing) what he rightly
calls “a good of its own”, a good in the form of flourishing as the pecu-
liar species it (the individual, the specimen) is, a good the realization of
which is intrinsic to the entity in question, hence objectively present in it
and endowing it with what Taylor refers to as its “inherent worth” (2011:
72). In making the claim that these are the properties found in the entity
that merit our respect as moral agents, he is doing precisely what he faults
moral realism for: namely pointing to how the facts about the kind of entity
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 217
we encounter issue a demand on us that is normative in the action-guiding
sense of morality: a demand on us to act so as to do justice to the entity in
question, to support its inherent claim to flourishing in its species-specific
fashion. Hence, how we should act, morally speaking, is derived from the
peculiar nature (being) of the entity or phenomenon we respond to. Indeed,
I would suggest that Kant himself can be said to be a case in point, in that
Kant locates value (intrinsic worth, inviolability) in the human person, and
thereupon derives his ethics’ ought from what is deemed the relevant facts.
Kant, that is to say, locates what he considers morally speaking of utmost
significance, and so what is entitled to respect above everything else, in a
specific property (fact) found in the entity, as part of its essential being, in
his case the personhood of human individuals, personhood understood as
intrinsically linked to capacity for freedom and autonomy, these being the
facts that exhibit what is value-able about such persons, hence decisive for
how they ought to be treated.
I am not suggesting that, contrary to his self-understanding, this suffices
to make Taylor a moral realist. Nor am I suggesting that the view he dis-
misses in the version Leopold famously gave it, that ecology serves as a
proto-ethics, is sufficient in itself, providing us as moral agents with all the
guidance we need for decision-making on the ground. For this position as
for its rivals, be it the Kantian one, theory (or model) is one thing, practice
another, and so much messier one.
I turn now to the philosopher who in my view offers the most promising
approach to the relationship between ecology and ethics, Holmes Rolston.
Being a declared moral realist, engaging with Rolston’s work will allow me
to argue in greater detail why this position is the most promising one within
ethical theory given the issues we are looking at. In what follows I will pres-
ent Rolston’s position in his major work Environmental Ethics with special
regard to the primary topic of this chapter, extinction.
In a passage that may recall the problem of “sacrifice” that Braverman
and van Dooren are so preoccupied with, Rolston writes:

No species can flourish without flourishing individuals who are tokens

[examplars, specimen] of the type [species], who exemplify the natural
kind. But in the struggle for life, for adaptive fit, many individuals will
be losers; their welfare must be sacrificed to predators or competitors.
That is not satisfactory to these individuals; their preferences are not
satisfied. […] It may seem unsatisfactory that innocent life has to suffer,
and we may first wish for an ethical principle that protects all innocent
life. This principle is persuasive in culture, and we do all we can to elim-
inate human suffering. But ought suffering to continue when humans do
or can intervene in nature? That it ought not to continue is a tender sen-
timent but so remote from the way the world is that we must ask whether
this is the way the world ought to be in a tougher, realistic environmen-
tal ethic. A morally satisfactory fit must be a biologically satisfactory
218  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
fit. What ought to be is derived from what is. In that sense, humans do
follow nature axiologically and set our moral standards accordingly.
Nature is not a moral agent; we do not imitate nature for interhuman
conduct. But nature is a place of satisfactory fitness, and we take that
as a criterion for some moral judgments. We endorse a painful good.
(1988: 58f.)

Given Rolston’s reasoning, what does it mean to say – as I have on several

occasions – that the capacity for suffering is a sufficient criterion for moral
considerability? Let me put it like this. Among the candidates proposed for
a property that qualifies for moral protection, the capacity to suffer is bet-
ter suited than, say, the ability to reason or to speak (to allude to Jeremy
Bentham’s famous statement). However, we need to situate how that capacity
plays out in the environment of which the beings susceptible to suffering are
part – suffering as experienced, as lived, as opposed to as theorized within
a philosophical ethic. When Taylor states that “all living things have a good
of their own, the realization of which is the central goal of their lives (even if
that goal is not consciously aimed at)” (2011: 262), I suggest his claim can be
reformulated to the effect that to be able to suffer is to be able to have things
matter to oneself, so that whereas some things promote the realization of the
species-specific good, of what it would be like to flourish as the kind of being
it is, other things harm it – the point being that the contrast between the two,
the positive and the negative, is an objective one, residing in the entity as
such, as part and parcel of its very being, as opposed to the contrast being
projected onto it, attributed to it by some other agent, say, humans.
Rolston shares Taylor’s insistence that value – what demands and deserves
protection – is a quality residing in “all living things”. In metaethics, this is
the standpoint of moral realism, as we saw. More to the point here, it is what
the science of ecology informs us: what is value-able is what is constantly
brought forth – sustained, regenerated, replenished – in virtue of the inter-
play between multitudes of living things. In this sense, value is the essence
of nature, the modus operandi of the natural world.
Given this perspective, the crucial statement in the above quote from
Rolston is this: “A morally satisfactory fit must be a biologically satisfactory
fit” (1988: 58). Fit for whom? For which species? From which – or whose –
point of view? To connect with the discussion above: that of the individual
or that of the species?
Rolston defends a distinct understanding of the relationship between
individual and species as applying to, say, non-domestic animals. He
approaches this relationship by employing a simple distinction between the
domain of culture and the domain of nature. He puts it like this:

Whatever we say about interhuman duties within culture, humans have

no duties…to interrupt the course of wild nature. Nor, when exploit-
ing nature for human interests, have we a strong obligation to reduce
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 219
the suffering below levels found independently of the human presence.
Humans are not bound to inflict no innocent suffering. That is contrary
to nature. In the clash and interweaving of goods in an ecosystem, pain
goes with the defending and capturing of goods that characterize all
sentient life. Nothing lives autonomously, not even autotrophs (plants).
Everything crowds and competes with neighboring life. One good must
spoil another. Heterotrophs (animals) sacrifice other lives for their own.
Sentient life both suffer and cause pain. No predator can live without
causing pain. […] The wild animal has no right or welfare claim to
have from humans a kinder treatment than in nonhuman nature. What
should happen morally in an encounter with nature (distinguished from
what happens within culture) is a function of what has happened nat-
urally, Neither in nature nor in culture-nature interactions does need
imply duty. So the deer need food, the albatross and turtle need help,
but have no claim on us to provide it.
(1988: 59)

To be sure, the clear-cut distinction Rolston makes here, more than 30 years
ago, will seem untenable to many today, given that the Anthropocene is
the geophysical era where humans are the single most powerful agent on
Earth, one whose impact is ubiquitous not only within “culture” but also in
the entire natural world. As a consequence, the culture/nature distinction
as understood by Rolston becomes problematic: granted that there once
was a clear separation/boundary/difference, there is today no demarcation
such that “at this point human-made culture comes up against the limits of
its operations and their consequences, and henceforth nature takes over,
remaining what it is in a state of purity and autonomy vis-a-vis culture”.
Rather, what we find within what used to be a (more or less) autonomous
natural world is the footprint of human activities everywhere.
Even though I accept that the culture-nature distinction is nowadays
being questioned in the clear-cut fashion Rolston conceives it, namely as
two ontologically distinct and separate domains, I think that the often-
made plea for its complete rejection and for doing without it altogether is
misguided and risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The onto-
logical status of nature in the Anthropocene is a big issue in its own right,
one I shall address below.
Recall Rolston’s claim that “the albatross and turtle need help, but have
no claim on us to provide it” (1988: 59). Does this mean that he would
oppose efforts to help the individuals of these endangered species, efforts of
the kind described by Michelle Bastian and Thom van Dooren above, with
a strong sense of urgency and alarm at that?
The answer is no. In fact, Rolston provides a particularly strong case for
fighting extinction of animals like albatross and turtle. That he does so is to
do with the role of humans in causing the animals to be at peril: the greater
our role in causing them to be at risk, the more their being endangered is
220  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
a genuine ethical issue in Rolston’s sense of moral agency as arising within
culture, but not within nature. Rather than Rolston’s original distinction
between culture and nature being unsuited for the issue, the distinction is
required to make the case for why extinction is morally wrong.
Rolston proposes the following ethical rule: “Do not cause inordinate suf-
fering, beyond those orders of nature from which the animals were taken. One
ought to fit culture into the natural givens, where pain is inseparable from
the transfer of values between sentient lives” (1988: 61). So the relevant ques-
tion is not simply Bentham’s “Can they suffer?”, but “Is the human-inflicted
suffering excessive to natural suffering”. On Rolston’s view, “ethics does
not require us to deny our ecology but to affirm it” (ibid.). What we come
to understand, then, is that for Rolston suffering as such is not an ethical
scandal, a wrong to be righted; likewise, pain as such is not something that
ought to be prevented or reduced everywhere encountered and at all costs,
as were fighting pain the moral issue and the moral duty par excellence,
trumping and overshadowing all other phenomena in nature and being the
one thing that moral agents – humans – should always prioritize. Whereas
intentional infliction of pain is an evil in culture, the pain that one animal
causes another in nature is not an evil, nor is its existence there a moral issue
at all. “Pain in nature is situated, instrumental pain”, writes Rolston; “it is
not pointless in the system, even after it becomes no longer in the interests of
the pained individual” (1988: 60). Accordingly, “animals have no right to be
removed from their niche; neither have we a duty to remove them” (ibid.), we
humans being the only agents who may seek to do so. To hold that suffering
as such, pain in itself, is a moral issue in the sense of something that ought
never to be, that should be prevented or reduced whenever possible, would
mean – if consistently acted upon – that humans ought to interfere whenever
they can when one animal causes pain to another; it would mean to interfere
with the interplay between predator and prey that is inseparable from the
conditions of life of animals in nature, as opposed to animals in culture,
domesticated ones for whose conditions humans are responsible.
The specifically moral implication of upholding the distinction between
nature and culture as distinct realms, then, is that the pain and suffering
occurring between animals is morally neutral, being devoid of blamewor-
thy agents, whereas the pain and suffering inflicted on animals by humans,
being moral agents, is in need of justification, on a case to case basis, and
hence not as such morally prohibited and so always wrong. (This is in keep-
ing with my critique of Gary Steiner’s position in Chapter 4.) Having said
this, we should be in no doubt about the moral wrongness exhibited in cases
where the suffering that animals inflict on one another is a direct conse-
quence of how humans, whether intentionally or not, produce the condi-
tions where that suffering comes to pass, as when, say, pigs attack each other
as a consequence of lack of space, neglect, or sheer mistreatment.
Let us return to the key issue raised above: the constellation of the ecolog-
ically required and the morally right. As we saw, Rolston’s formula is that “a
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 221
morally satisfactory fit must be a biologically satisfactory fit” (1988: 58). What
does it mean to posit biological fit as a framework for moral assessment?
Rolston’s proposed formula is a plea for the necessity of proceeding con-
cretely where his philosopher colleagues tend to proceed abstractly – his
is not an ethics of the formal and procedural kind championed by Kant
and Habermas. For Rolston, the constellation ecology/morality is first and
foremost an ontological one, always tied to a particular spatio-temporal
location: where the entities belong and play out, the entities whose status
in terms of value, rights, and duties philosophers are typically preoccupied
within an abstract fashion, focusing on the properties-cum-capacities con-
sidered as intrinsic to the individual entity in question, neglecting to specify
the extra-individual conditions of its existence, the system (whole) it is part
of and cannot exist without.
Importantly, Rolston rejects that ecology is a proto-ethics – i.e., the view
we saw Paul Taylor associate with Leopold. Leopold was a trained forester
and a philosophical autodidact; his was an ecologically informed, natural
sciences based holism, not a well thought-out metaethical position. Rolston
is adamant that human conduct is not to be modelled on animal conduct.
And we saw that as a rule humans should not interfere with the conduct
of animals towards animals. Indeed, humans are very special, even excep-
tional. Yet in saying so, Rolston means to criticize anthropocentrism, not
to commend it; the position he advocates is a holistic biocentrism, informed
by the science of ecology but keenly cognizant of the differences between
how humans exist in the world and the way animals and other non-human
creatures do, these being the very differences that an environmental ethics
centred on responsibility needs to take into account.
This may sound like Heidegger, but the point is not to make claims about
humans being the only beings who die, who know it and are concerned with
it, to recall Derrida’s discussion. It is the other way around, meaning: the
things that make humans different from all other living creatures are the
things that help make us responsible for their plight, for the whole of which
they, as well as we, are part, meaning for the future of that multispecies
whole – ultimately, for there being a future for the whole, to allude to Jonas’
formulation. To reject anthropocentrism as we know it and have acted it out
in practice in our society, then, is not to deny or downplay what is special
about humans. Rather, it requires that we recognize the features that make
us, in some respects, unique as the very features that bestow on us the moral
assignment par excellence: responsibility for the biocentric whole.
According to Rolston, humans are in the world ethically, cognitively,
and critically like no non-human animal is. In virtue of these features,
“the human capacity for a transcending overview of the whole makes us
superior and imposes strange duties, those of transcending human inter-
ests and linking them up with those of the whole natural Earth” (1988: 72).
Moreover, “humans are not important as predators and prey; they play no
role in the food chains or in regulating life cycles. They are a late add-on to
222  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
the system; and their cultural activities (except perhaps for primitive tribes)
only degrade the system, if considered biologically and ecologically”. Again,
our differences from the rest of the living creatures place a demand on us to
protect and safeguard them: there is something value-able, value-(re)gener-
ating, and value-enriching in their differences from us, a manifestation of
value in the world, in the system, that we are obliged to respect irrespective
of its instrumental use to us: it is value-able in itself, deserving to be val-
ued because able to bring forth and sustain value in the whole natural world.
Rolston’s way of putting this is to say that “one [specifically, distinctive]
human role is to respect the ecosystems they culminate, and not merely to
admire and respect themselves, as traditional ethics urges” (ibid.). So there
is a sense in which humans are unique and superior, but it is a superiority
that is “linked in a feedback loop with the whole” (ibid.).
Humans, then, are not unique with regard to being carriers of value, to
possessing value. Value is not a human prerogative, is not the creation, pro-
jection, or attribution of humans, does not require humans to exist in the
world. To say this is of course not to deny that within culture (arts, artefacts,
etc.) humans are genuine creators of value, of valuable works and products,
including spiritually valuable such. Presently, though, the point is that value
is part and parcel of the fabric of the natural world, such that it cannot be
adequately described were value absent from the account of its very being.
“Some values”, writes Rolston, “are already there [in the natural world],
discovered, not generated, by the [human] valuer because the first project is
really the natural object, nature’s project; the principal projecting is nature
creating formed integrity. Beside this, the human projecting of value is an
epiphenomenon” (1988: 117).
Having presented Rolston’s understanding of value, we are ready to
examine in greater detail his approach to extinction.
Rolston shares the Aristotelian view endorsed by Taylor, that every
organism has a good-of-its-kind, a good that it is programmed to defend
as a good kind, as worthy of continuation and regeneration. In this sense,
everything with a good of its kind is “a good kind” and thereby has value.
Hence the living individual, taken as a “point of experience” in the web of
interconnected life – and I observed above that the individual is the locus of
experience, of having things matter to it, as being good or bad, sustaining
existence or threatening it – is per se an intrinsic value, i.e., valuable irre-
spective of its instrumental value to others (1988: 100).
However, a place has to be made, both biologically and philosophically,
for death in the system. The truth is: “Without death there can be no life. If
nothing much had ever died, nothing much could have ever lived. Even the
aging processes that break down life…are goods when incorporated into
the system, though they are evils [but not moral evils – AJV] for individual
organisms” (1988: 104). Value manifests itself in diverse kinds of experience,
a diversity neglected in the hedonist theory of value advocated by Singer
and his followers, holding that pain is nature’s only disvalue and pleasure
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 223
its only value, or at least the only value that counts, morally speaking. In
the holistic theory Rolston defends, where ethics is “not merely an affair of
psychology but of biology”, pains and pleasures are part of a larger picture,
“derivative from and instrumental to further values at the ecosystemic level,
where nature evolves a flourishing community in some indifference to the
pains and pleasures of individuals, even though pain and pleasure in the
higher forms is a major evolutionary achievement” (1988: 108).
Having argued that the pain and pleasure experienced by individuals are not
trump, what is, according to Rolston? Are there duties to species? If there are,
what about the moral status of individuals being overridden by the value of a
species, be it another species than the one the individuals in question belong to?
These are the questions that came up when we discussed Braverman and
van Dooren above, recalling the ethical dilemmas of “the logic of sacrifice”.
Rolston acknowledges that there can be duties to species, especially to
endangered species; duties that “might supplement or challenge – even
override – the duties humans have to persons or to individual animals and
plants” (1988: 138). Why can there be such duties? Is it because we are (partly
or wholly) responsible for the current situation where so many species are on
the brink of extinction? Is it a matter of responsibility for the consequences
of a devastation caused by us? If that is Rolston’s view, does it really dif-
fer from that of an anthropocentric ethics like Kant’s or Habermas’, or the
non-anthropocentric one advocated by Singer? Indeed, what is it that allows
us to hold that a species going extinct is wrong? Is the answer to be found
in our role (responsibility, culpability) as the agents causing the harm, or
is it found in the entity (individuals/species; life form) being harmed? How
important is it what precisely helps cause its going extinct?
Admittedly, there is something overly textbook-like and simplistic about
posing the questions like this. Note in particular the tendency so deeply
entrenched in Western ethical theories: to pose the possible answers in terms
of either/or. Contra this assumption, Rolston sees it as a matter of both-and:
yes, the extinction of species is wrong because human activities now help
cause such extinction at a pace unprecedented in history. And yet, at the
same time extinction is wrong because it wrongs (violates) the value present
in the species going extinct; consequently, a world where that species is gone
would be an impoverished world, one less vibrant and diverse in value. To
answer both-and means to highlight the combination of the human-related
and the natural world-related aspect of the phenomenon of species extinc-
tion. Humans qua agents are the wrongdoers, the species affected in the
natural world are the ones being wronged.

IV
I turn now to the issue that came up when we discussed Tom Regan’s case
for animal rights above: how to assess the relationship between individu-
als and species, whereby that assessment cannot be purely philosophical
224  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
(abstract) but needs to engage with the challenges posed by the ongoing
extinction of many animal species in today’s world.
Rolston notes that a consideration of species offers “a biologically based
counterexample to the focus on individuals – typically sentient and usu-
ally persons – so characteristic of Western ethics” (1988: 143). Indeed, for
the leading ethicists of Western modernity from Hume, Locke and Kant to
Rawls and Habermas, the focus on the status of individuals has been taken
for granted in the sense that they never seriously considered that the spe-
cies, as distinct from particular individuals, could be endangered. Only with
Jonas’ book The Imperative of Responsibility, first published in Germany
in 1979, did the tacit double premise of traditional ethical thought receive
questioning: that humanity would persist in the foreseeable future, and –
even more tacitly assumed – that the natural world required to support the
future existence of humans on Earth would be intact to do so. Small won-
der, then, that this tradition is ill-prepared to address a situation where what
demands attention is the endangered future of non-human species, possibly
undermining that of humanity itself.
The required shift of emphasis from individual to species also reveals the
static and hence ecologically uninformed way of conceiving the relation-
ship between the two that has prevailed historically. Rolston points out that
“in an evolutionary ecosystem, it is not mere individuality that counts; the
species is also significant because it is a dynamic life form maintained over
time by an informed genetic flow. The individual represents (re-presents) a
species in each new generation. It is a token of a type, and the type is more
important than the token” (1988: 143).
Ethicists of many stripes will surely seize upon this “more important
than”: is Rolston advocating that the individual be sacrificed for the sake
of the species? But such a reading is not only premature. It misses the point,
which is that of dynamism: species are a future-oriented medium of ongo-
ing change (modification, alteration) in a manner the individual (exemplar,
specimen) in itself is not and cannot be, existing for a limited time and yet
benefiting from the dynamism incorporated in and sustained by the species
it represents, a species that for its part depends on the contributions of the
individuals that at any specific point in time and space make it up. Rolston
stresses the connection between this future-oriented dynamism and the con-
stant (re)generation of value that is the crux of the individual-species nexus:
“There is a specific groping for a valued ought-to-be beyond what now is in
any individual. Though species are not moral agents, a biological entity – a
kind of value – is here defended. The dignity resides in the dynamic form;
the individual inherits this, exemplifies it, and passes it on” (1988: 143).
Rolston’s argument for the moral implications of his conception of spe-
cies is worth quoting in full:

Because a species lacks moral agency, reflective self-awareness, sentience,

or organic individuality, we may be tempted to say that specific-level
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 225
processes cannot count morally. But each ongoing species defends a form
of life – on the whole, good things; prolife impulses that have achieved all
the planetary richness of life. All ethicists say that in Homo sapiens one
species has appeared that not only exists but ought to exist. But why say
this exclusively of a latecoming, highly developed form? Why not extend
this duty more broadly to the other species (though not with equal inten-
sity over them all, in view of varied levels of development)? These kinds
too defend their forms of life. We humans are the product of such defenses
during long eons past. Only the human species contains moral agents, but
perhaps conscience ought not be used to exempt every other form of life
from consideration, with the resulting paradox that the sole moral species
acts only in its collective self-interest toward all the rest.
(1988: 143f.)

Surely the “perhaps” in the last sentence is an understatement. The duty

humans, the only moral agents on Earth, have towards other-than-human
forms of life and species is not only to do with the prudence of safeguard-
ing the other-than-human conditions of life that the future existence of the
human species de facto depends on. It is also a duty that reflects an attitude
of gratitude, even awe, if not exactly in Albert Schweitzer’s sense.
Though not noted by Rolston, I see a similarity with the mentality of hunt-
ers in so-called pre-modern societies committed to an animistic cosmology:
the insight that humans are an eminently dependent species, dependent on
the thriving of all the “others” that help sustain us into the future, meriting
gratitude for the indispensable services they provide to our benefit. Contra
the hubris that is part and parcel of anthropocentrism as we have practiced
it in recent history, and exposing the widespread denial of the dependence
in question, challenging as this dependence does our culturally entrenched
sense of autonomy and entitlement (see Vetlesen 2015, 2021; Orange 2017),
Rolston insists that we need to view our situation from a longer-range,
objective perspective, one where “systemic nature is valuable intrinsically
as a projective system, with humans only one sort of its projects, though
perhaps the highest. The system is of value for its capacity to throw forward
(pro-ject) all the storied natural history” (1988: 198).
We are rarely encouraged to take this perspective. Doing so may be
uncomfortable, but it is first and foremost sobering, and it has the great
merit of being true to the biological facts that situate our human existence
in time and space. On the longer-range scale Rolston talks about, the fact
is that “humans come late and it seems short-sighted and arrogant for such
latecomers to say that the system is only of instrumental value for humans,
who alone possess intrinsic value, or who ‘project’ intrinsic value back to
nature”. Dropping the moderate tone of the “perhaps”, Rolston is adamant
that “the only fully responsible behavior is to seek an appreciative rela-
tionship to the parental environment, which is projecting all this display of
value” (1988: 198).
226  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
Given this perspective, we are in a position to answer the question “why
is extinction wrong” more precisely than I did above.
Rolston’s answer combines the biological and the ethical, showing how the
former provides the conditions within which the latter must operate. “The
main thing wrong”, he writes, “is that extinction shuts down the generative
processes. The wrong that humans are doing, or allowing to happen through
carelessness, is stopping the historical gene flow in which the vitality of life is
laid and which…is the same as the flow of natural kinds” (1988: 144). Offering
a richer as well as more accurate definition of the phenomenon of extinction
than do Braverman and van Dooren, Rolston explains that “every extinction
is a kind of superkilling: it kills forms (species) beyond individuals; it kills
‘essences’ beyond ‘existences’, the ‘soul’ as well as the ‘body’. It kills collec-
tively, not just distributively”. This being so, “a duty to a species is more like
being responsible to a cause than to a person. It is commitment to an idea
(Greek, idea, ‘form’, sometimes a synonym for the Latin species). This duty is
a categorical imperative to living categories” (1988: 144).
Note that Rolston formulates the duty contained in this imperative with-
out invoking the notion of rights, thus parting company with Singer and
Regan. Rolston’s position is that we, outside of culture understood as the
domain where humans relate to other humans, better dispense with the
noun rights, since “this concept is not something that attaches to animals in
the wild”, and that we instead use only “the adjective, right, which applies
when moral agents encounter nature and find something there judged to be
good (appropriate, valuable) before human moral agents appear” (1988: 51).
Dispensing with rights, Rolston concentrates on value, value understood as
a biologically generated phenomenon, as something factually existing in the
world prior to and independent of humans, yet as something that humans,
morally speaking, ought to respect precisely in virtue of its objective qual-
ity. Ethical conduct as incumbent on humans, then, being the only moral
agents, is about the duty to value (respect, protect) the value encountered in
the wider world.
This is my way of putting the synthesis I take Rolston’s position to offer
between biology on the one hand and ethics on the other, affirming the affin-
ity discussed above between ecology and moral realism, yet without collaps-
ing the one into the other.
To elaborate on the proposed duty, what humans ought to respect is
“the living drama, continuing with all its actors” (1988: 145). Amounting
to a superkilling, we may say that ethically extinction constitutes a “super-
wrong”. It is the worst that can happen in that it is definitive – irreversible,
irreparable – in its effects. Extinction is a matter of “stopping the flow of
life”; to kill a species is to “shut down a unique story”. Extinction repre-
sents an “unnatural end” in that its occurrence is not inevitable; “humans”,
Rolston observes, “ought not to play the role of murderers” (1988: 145).
That species go extinct is a part of the history of evolution as long back
as we are able to trace it (see Barnosky 2009; Kolbert 2014). In speaking
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 227
of extinction as “superkilling”, however, Rolston concentrates on the var-
iant characteristic of the present epoch, the Anthropocene: extinction as
human-caused, hence as “unnatural” in Elizabeth Kolbert’s sense. Writing
a good decade before the term “Anthropocene” was coined, Rolston matter-­
of-factly remarks that “one form of life has never endangered as many oth-
ers”, adding that “never before has this level of question – superkilling by
a superkiller – been deliberately faced” (1988: 145). Precisely because the
superkiller species – taking itself to be a superspecies, exceptional in its
status and entitlement vis-à-vis all others – is more knowledgeable and have
more sophisticated ideas about how present-day actions and events will play
out in the form of multiple consequences in the future, that very equal-to-
none power comes with a duty that is likewise unique: duties that do not
attach simply to individuals or (fellow) persons but are “emerging duties
to specific forms of life”. If, “in this world of uncertain moral convictions,
it makes any sense to claim that one ought not to kill individuals without
justification, it makes more sense to claim that one ought not to superkill the
species without superjustification” (1988: 146). Surely no such justification
exists.
So what follows for assessing the relationship between individuals and
species? And given Rolston’s emphasis on the importance of species, what
happens to individuals?
Clearly, life on Earth cannot exist without species. Nor can it exist with-
out individuals. In reality there are only species as long as there are individ-
ual exemplars (specimen); indeed, what happens when a species goes extinct
is that its last individuals perish. Even so, there is a difference: a lost individ-
ual is always reproducible; a lost species is never reproducible. What follows
from this difference?
As we have seen on several occasions, the dominant ethical theories are
premised on individualism – ontologically, methodologically, and norma-
tively – and therefore only allow duty to individuals, not to a collection
(collective entity) such as species. Suffice it to mention here Peter Singer’s
position as a case in point, cited by Rolston: “Species as such are not con-
scious entities and so do not have interests above and beyond the interests
of the individual animals that are members of the species” (Singer 1979:
23). However, even if we grant that such things as beliefs, desires, conscious
awareness, preferences, interests, and (even) rights pertain to individuals,
not to species, this fact does not mean that only individuals, and not species,
are suited as objects of our duties. Why?
It is because what matters ethically (normatively) cannot be separated
from what matters ecologically and biologically (factually). What we value,
what merits that we value it, in the form of observing duties towards it, is
value, what is value-able; that is to say, the forms in and through which
value exists in the world, and continues to do so into the future. Absent spe-
cies, absent the existence of value in the world, comprised, sustained, and
regenerated as it is by way of species. As for individuals, their belonging to
228  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
a species, instantiating it, exhibiting it, helping reproduce it, is what facili-
tates – alongside a multitude of other species, other life forms – their having
value, their being carriers of a value that transcends each one of them qua
individuals, stretches, and lasts beyond their limited life cycle, the particu-
larities of their concrete spatio-temporal trajectory. Individuals partake of
an ongoing story of value, a never-pausing enactment of value in the world,
that is bigger than each individual in itself.
Unexpectedly, Rolston’s unconventional view of the relationship between
individuals and species has met with criticism. In The Ethics of Species,
Ronald Sandler writes that “the key mistake in Rolston’s argument for the
inherent worth of species is the inversion of which entity – the species or
the individual - is primary in survival and selection processes” (2012: 38).
In particular, Sandler takes issue with Rolston’s statement that “the species
too has its integrity, its individuality; and it is more important to protect
this than to protect individual integrity. The appropriate survival unit is
the appropriate level of moral concern” (Rolston quoted in Sandler 2012:
38). Sandler seeks to counter Rolston’s view by pointing out (as does Tom
Regan) that “the ‘survival unit’ is not species, but individual organisms.
Individual organisms are what live, die, and reproduce (or fail to do so)”
(ibid.). This, we should observe, is in keeping with Singer’s assertion that
“all our duties must be to sentient beings”, taken as so many individuals (see
Rolston 1988: 146).
Sandler’s criticism does not stand up to closer scrutiny. To begin with, the
“inversion” for which he faults Rolston seems to be based on the assump-
tion so typical in dominant ethical theories: that the possession of inherent
worth is a matter of either/or: either the species or the individual. Second,
there is something mechanic, not organic, about the way Sandler’s makes the
distinction between species and individuals. In setting them apart as sepa-
rate entities with separate properties (i.e., only individuals have interests
and integrity), Sandler fails to do justice to their being mutually support-
ive and complementary in their actual existence. In this, Sandler conspicu-
ously comes across as the analytic philosopher of the two, whereas Rolston’s
approach benefits from his background in physics and the natural sciences.
In particular, Sandler’s criticism is weakened by neglecting a crucial ele-
ment of Rolston’s view, namely: “The locus of intrinsic value – the value
that is really defended over generations – seems as much in the form of
life, the species, as in the individuals, since the individuals are genetically
impelled to sacrifice themselves in the interests of reproducing their kind”
(1988: 148). Several points are important here. First, in stating that the
locus of intrinsic value “seems as much in the form of life, the species,
as in the individuals”, Rolston’s position is conceived in terms of both-
and, not either/or. He is not denying intrinsic value in individuals; he is
arguing for it in species as well. And the value upheld in species, thanks
to everything and everyone that contributes to the transfer of that value
through time and space, is not “in addition” to the value quasi-separately
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 229
found in individuals; rather it is co-constitutive of it, helping facilitate and
sustain it through time and space.
Second, the issue of status in terms of value that Sandler is concerned
with is not a conceptual one than can be settled without taking into account
the actual life conditions of the entities in question. It is fine to hold, as
does Sandler, that every individual possesses inherent worth. But the ques-
tion is: what is required for a particular living individual (say, a lion) to
realize and maintain that worth through its life cycle? The worth that is
“in” the individual lion cannot be realized by that individual as such, apart
from other lions, i.e., other individuals of the same species, nor without its
inter-connections and inter-dependencies with other species, maintained
within a shared habitat and a wider ecological network. To save the lion,
you need to save the jungle: the relevant unit, morally as well as ecologically,
is the lion-in-the-jungle. Individualism of the sort Sandler is committed to
simply doesn’t work in the setting of the natural world where the individual
lions live their lives and manifest their value, and where the contributions of
its many others are indispensable for the very constitution, as well as suste-
nance, of that value.
Finally, there is Sandler’s individualism in the sense that “an entity’s
moral standing, when it comes to moral worth, is determined by the proper-
ties or capacities of the entity itself”, qua individual at that (2012: 41). Well,
it is not – not factually, as explained above. So, when Sandler makes his
plea for “a capacities-oriented approach”, where capacities are properties
of individuals only, “rather than a species membership-based approach”
(ibid.), he is again committing the error of either/or thinking. The deeper
problem, I suspect, is that Sandler’s reasoning is based on human-to-human
relationships as the proto-model for ethics in general and the issue of value
in particular, even though he wishes to go beyond anthropocentrism á la
Kant in recognizing what Kant blatantly denies: inherent worth in animals.
Let me put what is at stake here like this. To hold that the worth of a
human individual derives from and is dependent on his or her belonging to a
specific group (collective) of humans, be it defined in terms of sex, ethnicity,
religion, or class (not to mention race), would be ethically fatal, perhaps
also literally fatal for the individual in question, depending on the circum-
stances. Thus the sanctity of human persons, their inviolability (Kant), has
to be individual-based not collective-membership-based. Historical cases
of genocide demonstrate the danger involved once the worth of humans
is made a function of, contingent upon, which group they belong to, where
membership to one such (say, Aryans, or whites) is tantamount to being
“worthy”, and membership to others (say, Jews, or coloured) is tantamount
to being “unworthy” (see Vetlesen 2005).
In saying this, I do not deny the deep existential significance that belong-
ing to a specific collective (group) of humans has for us humans. I am only
saying that, for all its importance, such belongingness to a whole of which
I am a part (member) must have an element of freedom, of choice, namely
230  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
as to which collective I wish to belong to and to align myself with it terms of
my values and projects in life. This must be an optional matter – it is indeed
valuable in itself that it is so – and cannot be a condition of our having
moral standing as such. There is, then, a sense in which Kant got it right
when stressing the strictly individual nature of the inviolability of human
persons – this inviolability is found, and has be respected, in humans in
a stricter sense than, say, in individual animals, since their belongingness
to and alliances with a collective is never optional, a matter of choice and
freedom, the way it is for human individuals: we are free to negotiate our
relationships with our group-belongingness in ways not available to, or nec-
essary, for animals. Let me reiterate here what I said above about what is
special about us as moral agents – and we are the only such – namely that
we have a responsibility for cultivating our capacities for responsibility. The
gift of responsibility comes with the task of safeguarding it, a specifically
human task shared in practice by each individual and his or her institutions,
to put it in the spirit of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
This may appear to be a distraction from the topic under discussion, but
it is not. One of the primary tasks for a non-anthropocentric ethics is to
acknowledge that there are morally important differences between humans
and non-humans. I have just paid attention to one such, of paramount
importance. While Rolston acknowledges that there are such differences,
he should have engaged more deeply with their implications. We certainly
need to have their relevance in mind when he states, as we saw above, that
“the individuals are genetically impelled to sacrifice themselves in the inter-
ests of reproducing their kind”, adding that “the life that the individual has
is something passing through the individual as much as something it intrin-
sically possesses. The individual is subordinate to the species, not the other
way around” (1988: 149).
Would we accept this statement if it were meant to apply to humans? I for
one would not. As individuals we are not ready to “sacrifice” ourselves in
the interests of reproducing our kind, at least not if that sacrifice entails that
we willingly give up our lives – prematurely – for the sake of our species.
Often the rhetoric of sacrificing some for the allegedly higher worth and big-
ger cause of a collective of some sort has prepared for and helped legitimize
mass killing. This being so, we do not see ourselves as “subordinate to the
species”, nor should we.
However, the context in which Rolston makes these statements is his chap-
ter on endangered species, where his focus is throughout on non-human
such. The sacrifice and subordination referred to is descriptive, articulat-
ing the modus operandi of non-human species and life forms in the natural
world, which – for good or bad – Rolston as we recall distinguishes from
the human-made world of culture. His focus on non-human life is a given
premise in his discussion, as is the tacit assumption that in talking about
endangered species, Homo sapiens is not one of them. Rolston clarifies the
distinction between an individualistic framework and what he advocates
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 231
as a more “comprehensive” one, truer to the facts as he understands them
and in keeping with his formula that “a morally satisfactory fit must be a
biologically satisfactory fit” (1988: 58). If an individualist will hold that spe-
cies-level phenomena such as vitality in population and reproduction of a
life form are only epiphenomena, by-products of aggregated individuals
in their interrelationships, Rolston’s comprehensive – holistic – approach
depicts “the species itself as a kind of individual, historic lineage over time”;
to be sure, “we want individuality, too, but also at the species level; individ-
uality within community, the one as real as the other” (1988: 149). Rolston is
perfectly aware that he will meet the objection (recall Sandler) that a species
does not act on needs or with interests because there is no “it” to act, that
is, only individuals can do so. But Rolston is adamant that “the specific
type, no less than individual tokens, is an ‘it’. A specific form of life urges
survival of ‘its’ kind, defends ‘its’ life form. The ‘it’ is a historic process with
vital individuality, though it is not a single organism. This helps us to see
that the telos of a species is not a fixed end but rather one evolving over the
propagation of the gene linkage, an endless end” (1988: 149f.).
I conclude that an approach that recognizes value as intrinsic to spe-
cies as well as to distinct individuals is more suited to address extinction
than one that recognizes value only in individuals. Even if the death of
the last individual exemplar is the local event that means that the species
goes extinct, the kind of loss that extinction represents is best conceived
on the level of species: that the species is forever lost from planet Earth is
the deeper and enduring meaning of the death of the last rhino, capturing
the magnitude of the loss, the fact that its importance transcends what-
ever meaning it may hold for the single individual in question. That this
is so follows from Rolston’s claim that value is something objective, not
merely subjective. The loss implied in extinction does not hinge on the way
in which the individual animal relates to it owing to its capacities for expe-
rience, for pain and pleasure; it is neither derivative from nor reducible to
such subjective experience.
Therefore, to evaluate the entire biological world on the basis of sentience –
as does Singer, probably the most influential individualist and subjectiv-
ist within environmental ethics – is a category mistake as far as Rolston
is concerned, since from a biologically attuned point of view this position
mistakes a part for the whole; and conceptually it can only get at the whole
by aggregating the individual-based input, missing out on its qualitative dis-
tinctness and thus on what is at stake in the event of extinction (a phenom-
enon not part of Singer’s original agenda, it must be said). Rolston readily
accepts that “the highest value attained in the system is lofty individuality
with its subjectivity, present in vertebrates, mammals, primates, and preem-
inently in [human] persons” (1988: 191). But again, such products are not the
sole loci of value, “concentrate value though they do”. Rolston’s synthesis
of value objectivism (realism) and holism boils down to this: “Even the most
valuable of the parts is of less value than the whole. The objective, systemic
232  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
process is an overriding value, not because it is indifferent to individuals but
because the process is both prior to and productive of individuality” (ibid.).

V
In their introduction to the anthology Extinction Studies, Deborah Bird
Rose, Thom van Dooren, and Mathew Chrulew make a comment on
Elizabeth Kolbert’s critically acclaimed The Sixth Extinction that I find rel-
evant in light of the above discussion of Rolston. “Humans”, they write,
“really appear in Kolbert’s pages in only two forms: that of the (often heroic)
conservationist struggling to hold onto disappearing species, and that of an
amorphous and monotonal ‘threat’” (2017: 6). What is missing is “a detailed
discussion of the specific political, economic, and cultural forms of human
organization most responsible for any given extinction”, a discussion that
would need to recognize “radical inequity and highly differentiated posi-
tioning” as the name of the game (ibid.).
This criticism applies to Rolston no less than to Kolbert. Not only does
Rolston fail to provide an account of the societal forces that precipitate the
degradation of the natural world and the urgent spectacle of extinction. He
also has very little to say about the sorts of conflicts that are bound to be
generated given his distinction between entities that exhibit comparatively
“higher” and “lower” value, with human persons placed at the top.
To be sure, there are plenty of books addressing the various societal
agencies of destruction that Rose et al. are pointing to, Naomi Klein’s This
Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate being perhaps the most influ-
ential one. Despite his sparse attention to the political agents and economic
structures that Klein rightly concentrates on, two aspects of Rolston’s
approach are relevant here.
The first is to do with what Rolston says about humans. As indicated, I
find it a strength that in building his case for a non-anthropocentric ethics,
he emphasizes the ways in which humans are truly exceptional. In fact, and
despite my observation about the lack of a more comprehensive account, I
think that the current human-caused extinction of so many species is espe-
cially well suited to Rolston’s approach.
Rolston’s central claim is that the superiority of humans as compared with
all other beings is what grounds our responsibility to all those “others”, gen-
erating our duties to the natural world, geared to respecting the value found
there, constantly realized there as our never-suspended, never-ending condi-
tio sine qua non. Importantly, this value is not of our making; it precedes our
existence on Earth, late add-on that we are, even though we may rightly be
held to represent a peak value in the history of evolution in terms of subjectiv-
ity and individuality. This natural prehistory of ours obliges us to be humble
and thankful to the life forms indispensable for our emergence as a species
in the past and for our persistence into the future, humanity’s dependence
on other life forms being a given of our existence that will never cease or be
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 233
overcome. Owing to our advanced capacities for understanding and imagi-
nation, capacities that allow us to abstract from our given situation and sur-
roundings in ways not matched by any other species that we know of, we have
an obligation to make good on those exceptional capacities: to exercise them
with regard to our many “others” and not only with regard to ourselves.
Notice here how sharply Rolston’s portrait of human exceptionalism and its
implications differs from the one championed from Plato over Descartes and
Kant to Habermas and Rawls, all of whom highlight human rationality and,
as part of that, the mind over the body, whereby the mind is taken to define
the human, and the body to define non-human animals.
If the capacities Rolston foregrounds appear overly intellectual too, where
he differs from the canon is in holding that the point of our possessing them
like no others do is to direct them at others, at entities that (partly or com-
pletely) are deficient in those capacities but to be respected as value-able
nonetheless. This is in keeping with my proposed formula that not all moral
addressees are moral agents, nor need they be. The crux of responsibility as
only humans can exercise it is that in doing so we do not restrict it to humans.
It might be tempting to say that this is the cost with which these capaci-
ties are given to us. But “cost” is the wrong word, born of a wrongheaded
approach. In truth it is an enrichment, giving the capacities an ethical task
that takes our commitments beyond ourselves, directing them to the bio-
centric whole of which we are part. Humans, writes Rolston, “can be ‘let in
on’ more value than any other kind of life”; “humans are of capstone value
because they are capstone evaluators”, borne out in “our capacity to see
others, to oversee a world”. Rolston’s ethics, then, calls for “seeing nonhu-
mans, for seeing the biosphere, the Earth, ecosystem communities, fauna,
flora, natural kinds that cannot say ‘I’ but in which there is formed integrity,
objective value independent of subjective value”, to see “without as well as
within” (1988: 339f.). Thus we can achieve a comprehensive kind of altruism,
recognizing the claims of fauna, flora, ecosystems, and landscapes; this ulti-
mate altruism that puts a premium on transcending us, our preoccupation
with our own species, is the true human genius. This subjective capacity, this
capacity of the kind of subjects that we are, to be objective in appreciating
world objects is a “superiority worthy of extra valuing” (1988: 341). I take
it that it is so for the reason we saw Hans Jonas advocate above: if there is
such a thing as a responsibility among us humans to sustain our existence
qua species, it is to do with our role in making sure that there will continue
to be a world where the myriad non-human addressees of that responsibility
persist and thrive. Our specialness is not for our sake but for others.

VI
In her important book What is Nature? the British philosopher Kate Soper
contends that “since any eco-politics, however dismissive of the superiority
of homo sapiens over other species, accords humanity responsibilities for
234  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
nature, it presumes the possession by human beings of attributes that set
them apart from all other forms of life”. All ecological injunctions, she con-
tinues, are “clearly rooted in the idea of human distinctness. For insofar as
the appeal is to humanity to alter its ways, it presupposes our possession of
capacities which are singled out from other living creatures and inorganic
matter” (1995: 160, 40).
Ever since environmental ethics emerged as a distinctive field in the 1970s,
the notion of human distinctiveness has tended to be looked upon with sus-
picion – understandably so, in light of its role in justifying the exploitation
of everything non-human for human purposes (Crist 2019). Again, Rolston’s
twist on this notion, turning the responsibility it entails outward instead of
inward, is a step forward, showing that a non-anthropocentric ethics needs
to hold on to what makes humans special, not to downplay or deny it – nor,
for that matter, to conceive human impact on nature as always, per defini-
tion, negative and harmful.
There is a catch, however. It has to do with the way in which humans
are special in that we have one foot in each of two distinct domains, as it
were: culture and nature in Rolston’s account. In light of this distinction,
our being moral agents endowed with responsibility for all sorts of “others”
is an aspect of our being cultural beings, not only natural ones.
This may sound like abstract metaphysics, and so beside the point when
what we want to illuminate is human-caused extinction. But in fact the dis-
tinction is crucial to recognizing the distinctness of extinction qua anthro-
pogenic that we are after. In what follows, I shall leave behind Rolston’s
version of a distinction between culture and nature and concentrate on
more recent proposals, more suited to the present urgency of the topic of
extinction.
Soper observes that “green” thinkers have tended to reject dualism as
inherently eco-unfriendly. Their reasons for doing so with regard to the
Cartesian legacy (humans vs. animals, mind vs. body, mind vs. matter)
are well known and shall not be restated here. For Soper, though, a cer-
tain kind of dualism provides the foundation for an environmental ethics.
Why? Because “there can be no ecological prescription that does not pre-
suppose a demarcation between humanity and nature” (1995: 160). There
are two aspects to this. The first is the one just discussed, concerning how
humans are special, absent which “it would make no more sense to call upon
humans to desist from ‘destroying’ nature than to call upon cats to stop kill-
ing birds” (ibid.). Consider this the necessity of differentiating humans from
other organic and inorganic forms of being in order to make sense of human
agency in general and responsibility in particular.
The second aspect is the one we now need to concentrate on. Having
established what humans are, what is nature? Soper defends what she calls a
realist concept, equivalent I suggest to the one promoted by Rolston: nature,
she explains, refers to “the structures, processes and causal powers that are
constantly operative within the physical world, that provide the objects of
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 235
the study of the natural sciences, and condition the forms of human inter-
vention in biology or interaction with the environment. It is the nature to
whose laws we are always subject, even as we harness them to human pur-
poses, and whose processes we can neither escape nor destroy” (1995: 155).
Soper sees this realist notion of nature as essential to the coherence of eco-
logical politics. But she hastens to add that accepting it is not in itself to
take up a normative position towards nature, specifying what attitudes we
should adopt towards it. Even so, nature in the realist sense “sets certain
limits on what we can do, or even try to do, and we must observe these on
pain either of looking very foolish or else perishing in the effort to transcend
them” (1995: 159). Though real and to be ignored only at our peril, the exact
nature of the limits set by nature is a complex topic that Earth scientists now
struggle to fully understand, conceived as so many “tipping points”. But
the bottom line is that there are some “conditions in nature” that must be
observed if we are to avoid calamities and to be able to preserve nature as
a set of resources, or better – with Rolston – the natural world understood
as the site of ongoing bringing forth of value. However, Soper submits, “we
shall not ‘destroy’ nature at this level even if we fail to observe the limits in
question”. Why is that? Nature at this level, says Soper, is “indifferent to
our choices, will persist in the midst of environmental destruction, and will
outlast the death of all planetary life” (ibid.).
In my view, the realist notion of nature Soper endorses, like Rolston
before her, is far better suited to address what happens with nature in the
Anthropocene than the influential constructivism championed in posthu-
manism á la Bruno Latour, subject to extensive critique in my Cosmologies
of the Anthropocene. For the sake of the important contrast it makes with
the realist ontology I defend, suffice it to say here that Latour’s view is that
“to believe that the distinction between humans and nonhumans and the
difference between culture and nature…describe anything at all about the
real world amounts to taking an abstraction for a description” (2017: 58).
What Latour professes to aim at is nothing short of “blurring the distinction
between nature and society durably, so that we shall never have to go back
to two distinct sets” (2004: 36). This being so, Latour wants to go beyond
the no longer subversive-sounding assertion that nature is merely a cultural
construct or that wilderness is nowhere to be found in today’s world, both
firmly installed as the intellectual, and to a growing extent also political,
Zeitgeist. For him and his numerous followers, to hold that “everything is
connected” is to unreservedly, and without regret, embrace the idea that
as a matter of fact the entirety of nature has been anthropized. To protest
this state of affairs, be it philosophically or politically, is pointless, making
a fool of oneself. Instead of leaving alone a so-called nature that doesn’t
exist, we should learn to “intervene even more”, since “the environment
is exactly what should be even more managed, taken up, cared for, stew-
arded, in brief, integrated and internalized in the very fabric of the polity”
(Latour cited in Neyrat 2019: 92). So it is not only that Latour wants to
236  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
throw out, dustbin-of-history like, the realist notion that what is wild exists
as an expression of autonomy of that which is more-than-human, beyond
anthropogenic mastery and control (as argued by Rolston and Soper). It is
also that he sees no reason whatsoever to lament the collapse of nature into
society, the other-than-human into the human, egging Prometheanism and
its current entourage of techno-optimists and techno-capitalists on instead
of fighting it and bringing it to a halt. Notwithstanding the avowed radical-
ness and the air of subversion of this rhetoric, it is, in fact, as Marx-oriented
critics such as Alf Hornborg (2019) and Andreas Malm (2018) point out, an
exercise in critique dismantling and disarming itself completely, and not
merely running out of steam.
Returning to Soper’s perspective, the “elasticity” she recognizes in nature
doubtless throws up questions that are truly challenging, especially so for a
realist conception.
What, more exactly, does the elasticity consist in? Soper, employing the
term almost 30 years ago, does not elaborate. Today, following the emer-
gence of the interdisciplinary field of Earth Science, the term draws attention
to phenomena like disruption, resilience, and – last but not least – tipping
points such as defy conventional linear causality (see Hamilton 2017).
Historically novel, these phenomena attest to the current impact of human-
ity on planet Earth, impact of such a magnitude as to raise questions about
the extent to which that impact alters life on Earth, so that nature is no
longer what it used to be.
Today one can hardly overestimate the kind of change in nature brought
about by human activities worldwide. Recall how strongly Bill McKibben
put his thesis more than 30 years ago in The End of Nature: “By chang-
ing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We
have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning.
Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us”
(1989: 60f.). Though suggestive, defining what nature is in terms of its com-
plete independence from humans, undisturbed in its original purity and
autonomy, comes with a price: it is as if humans have no appropriate or
“natural” place in nature, as if nature, perfect and sufficient unto itself, can
only be harmed and eventually destroyed qua nature the moment human-
kind started to make its mark within it – an impression reinforced when
McKibben describes encountering other human persons while “in” nature
as unavoidably spoiling the experience he is seeking. This becomes especially
problematic in that McKibben explicitly laments our present-day separation
– distance, alienation – from nature. He thereby distorts our belongingness
to it and our sense that, at a profound level that helps define who we are,
we are part of nature, not apart from it. As Emma Marris points out, we
must avoid conceiving humans as somehow “unnatural” and by definition
“destroyers of nature” (2021: 254).
If the era of the Anthropocene is indeed the era of extinction, it is not
because nature has been deprived of the independence McKibben ascribes
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 237
to it. There is more at stake than the loss of such purity, if it has ever existed.
To address extinction in its current form is to confront the fact that native
ecosystems no longer exist, given that today there is no spot on Earth that
has not been influenced by human activities, indirectly and at the receiving
end if not directly, as in the case of animals who have never even been in
direct contact with humans, such as polar bears containing PCB and other
pesticides and pollutants emitted far away, or albatrosses whose stomachs
are filled with plastic.
What to do, then? Should we abandon the idea that there is such a thing as
“wilderness”, considering it as – precisely – an idea (hence the scare quotes),
as an increasing number of scholars now argue? Or should we take the more
complex view that, aside from being ideologically charged qua cultural con-
struct, buying into nostalgia for a lost Eden, the strongest case for saying
goodbye to “wilderness” is the empirical one verified by the hard sciences:
namely that it is gone in the natural world?
Notwithstanding the plausibility of the case thus made, in Abundant
Earth Eileen Crist urges that we stick to the concept, arguing that “dispens-
ing with wilderness [on the grounds cited] is like throwing the baby out with
the bathwater” (2019: 5). Why? Because “to discard the conceptual vessel of
wilderness – as referent to the natural world and as an idea in the human
imagination – is to forsake nature’s original blueprint, which lucidly reflects
back to the impoverishment that limitless human expansionism has pro-
duced. To forsake nature’s original blueprint of prodigious creativity and
abundance supports the allowance of its banishment in both reality and
memory” (ibid.).
Crist’s argument is in full agreement with my own position as well as
Rolston’s realism and his distinction between culture and nature, implying
as we saw that humans belong within both domains in a way non-human ani-
mals do not, the “cultural” one being what grounds moral agency and respon-
sibility as uniquely human features. That is the philosophical and conceptual
aspect of the agreement with Crist’s view. But the historical-ecological aspect
is equally important. Crist is not in any way contesting or downplaying the
reality of ongoing degradation, decimation, and destruction of nature. It is
precisely in order to assess the causes as well as the consequences of that
spoiling of nature, in and for the nature so disastrously affected, and to do
so in a genuinely critical manner with regard to the societal forces driving
it, that she insists we retain the concept of wilderness, without scare quotes
at that.
There are three aspects to Crist’s argument. The first two can be sepa-
rated analytically, like I did, but the crucial insight concerns their being two
sides of the same coin. Crist explains:

As the primal manifestation of nature, wilderness contains its most bio-

diverse, fecund, creative, and dynamic expressions. To dispense with
the referential vehicle for this manifestation of the natural world – as
238  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
a concept both for the real world and the human imagination of that
world – is equivalent to jettisoning the original blueprint of nature. This
jettisoning, in turn, amounts to doing away with the conceptual vehicle
that lucidly reflects the diminishment and destruction effected by limit-
less human expansionism. To discard the concept of wilderness, as cer-
tain strands of environmental thought propose, is to forgo a contrasting
baseline reality that reveals the full picture of civilization’s onslaught.
(2019: 114)

The third aspect of Crist’s view follows from seeing the conceptual and the
empirical as interconnected: to dismiss wilderness as but a modern (Western)
cultural construct and to deny the primordial reality of wilderness paves the
way for naturalizing the human impact and so normalizing nature’s domi-
nation by humans, as were there two eternal truths to be learned here: that
humans have always dominated nature with whatever means available and
that nature has always been subject to this domination.
As opposed to this historically uninformed critique, the position with
critical bite is to defend wilderness the way Crist proposes: namely under-
stood as “nature’s self-creation free from constant revamping, using, and
exploitation”, is the “core node of resistance against the natural world’s
domination”. Only by holding on to the original ontology of the biosphere
as “a vast biodiverse wilderness” will we be able to reveal – through con-
trast – “how human domination obliterates life’s richness” (2019: 115f.). The
task of capturing the comprehensiveness of the current onslaught on nature
cannot do without a comparison between what nature was like before that
onslaught and what it is changing into in our present era. Decimation to the
point of extinction has become a “normal” occurrence only in the last part
of the twentieth century, termed the “Great Acceleration”, becoming global
in impact and speeding up in particular since the 1970s (see Angus 2016).
The staggering pace and worldwide reach of destruction is doubtless
a reason why so many scholars, especially in the humanities and social
sciences, now subscribe to the notion that “native ecosystems no longer
exist” (Merchant 2016: 154) and that wilderness has become an idea out
of touch with reality. Crist warns against being so carried away by ongo-
ing degradation as to conclude that there is nothing – literally, no place on
Earth – untouched by human impact; that the entire natural world is being
wrecked, so that nothing original or pristine is left anywhere. This is the
reasoning that throws the baby out with the bathwater.
For a start, we should not be committed to defining wilderness as
100-percent pristine. Such a definition is spurious, a scientific non-starter,
suitable only to ideological distortion. In our time, writes Crist, wilderness
has a more robust and pragmatic meaning: “it consists in extensive natural
areas that are mostly undisturbed by civilized human activities; many such
regions remain in the world, and more can be restored” (2019: 116). Hence
the emergence of projects of “rewilding” so as to facilitate the reintroduction
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 239
of particular species of animals to places where they used to be prolific,
such as wolves in Italy and Spain and sea eagles along the coast of Scotland
(see Monbiot 2013). To retain the notion of wild nature conceptually so as
to help intensify efforts to preserve what remains of it “out there” while
there is still time, is not to be committed to a fiction about some “origi-
nal” and ahistorical state of nature and the species found, as if everything
to do with change and dynamism were a product of human “interference”
instead of properties intrinsic to nature and what Crist speaks of as “the
original ontology of the biosphere”. She quotes Rolston’s statement that a
truly “sophisticated concept of wilderness preservation aims to perpetuate
the integrity of evolutionary and ecological processes” (2019: 117). This is an
important point, showing that if there is such a thing as a static and ecologi-
cally uninformed position, it is that of the detractors of the wilderness view,
not its defenders: what is being disturbed, spoiled, undermined, damaged,
disrupted – so many words for harmful anthropogenic impact – is precisely
nature’s intrinsic dynamism and creativeness, its inbuilt capacities for facil-
itating and sustaining flourishing in myriad life forms and species. These
are the qualities Rolston has in mind when he says that humans confront a
“projective nature”, one “restlessly full of projects – stars, comets, planets,
moons, and also rocks, crystals, rivers, canyons, seas” (1988: 197).
Shifting the perspective from the ecological to the cultural and historical,
Emma Marris is right to point out that “wilderness” is sometimes used in
a way that “perpetuates the colonial myth that Indigenous people had no
agency and could not modify, manage, or influence the landscape around
them”; thus we should beware of, say, measuring the “ecological integrity”
of North American landscapes by comparing their current state to the “nat-
ural range of variability”, typically defined as “whatever it looked like in
the three or four hundred years just before Europeans showed up”. Indeed,
Marris goes on to observe, “Indigenous land management was in many
places creating those ‘natural’ states”; and in the cases “where colonizers
saw this management in action, they often failed to recognize it, because
of its different forms and because of their preconceived notions about the
Native people” (2021: 62f.).
Marris’ warning against mistaking “wilderness” for “the places where
colonialism left the threes standing” (2021: 160) is well taken, as are her
observations just quoted. Yet in my view they do not weaken Crist’s case for
holding on to wilderness in her well-considered sense. Crist is well aware
that there was never a situation where existing groups of humans did not
somehow impact on nature. The important point to make, though, is to do
with the ways in which that impact is nowadays dramatically reinforced, so
as to alter nature to a degree that is truly unprecedented in the history of
humans on Earth.
But, it will be objected, doesn’t the sheer comprehensiveness of the pres-
ent onslaught against nature force us to give up the ontological division
between culture and nature that we saw Rolston endorse? Isn’t holding
240  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
on to that division at odds with the pervasiveness with which culture (i.e.,
human-initiated activities and their products) now interferes with nature,
with what it used to be “in itself”?
It is indeed a well-established fact that the human and the non-human
are more intertwined than in any previous epoch, that the two blend, inter-
act, and interconnect to an extent never seen before – a development whose
implications was the topic of sociologist Ulrich Beck’s path-breaking Risk
Society, aptly published shortly after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear
plant in April 1986. This may tempt us to treat the distinction not as onto-
logical in some presumably timeless, inalterable sense but instead as emi-
nently concrete, illustrated, for example, by how various animals that until
recently lived apart from humans no longer do so: foxes, polar bears, and
seagulls become “urbanized”, forcibly so since the forest is gone, the sea
ice is melting, and the fjord devoid of marine life nutrition – prompting the
seagulls to come to my garden, looking for something to eat. This being
the sort of change imposed on an increasing number of animals around
the world, it is more apt to talk about the animals per force moving place
from their old natural habitat to their new urban one than about their being
affected by how nature and culture blend and become blurred (i.e., the
“hybridity” that so fascinates posthumanist theorists) where they were once
ontologically distinct. There is something odd about these animals entering
urban areas, relocating so as to stay there (here) for the foreseeable future,
something out of joint that brings to mind Freud’s notion of the uncanny
(“das Unheimliche”), a sense that “there is something where there should
be nothing, and nothing where there should be something”; conspicuous
presences in combination with conspicuous absences. Whereas for us it’s the
animals that change their locations in what we experience as uncanny and
erratic ways, for them it’s we humans who do so – it being our expansion that
enforces their relocation.
Take the case of tigers. As Crist notes, in 1900 there were an estimated
100,000 tigers in the wild, worldwide, consisting in seven subspecies. Today
there are approximately 4,000 individuals left in the wild, and four of the
seven subspecies have gone extinct. In other words, 96 percent of tigers have
been lost in 120 years. Such a substantial quantitative change in the history
of tigers brings with it a change in the way children perceive the qualities
peculiar to such an iconic animal. When I grew up, pictures of tigers would
elicit a sense of awe and admiration for their superiority, being majestic
animals an encounter with which a human person would stand little chance
of surviving, and so recalling Plumwood’s experience with the crocodile.
Nowadays pictures of iconic animals like the tiger and the polar bear in fact
elicit a markedly different reaction among children in particular as com-
pared with a few decades ago. Why? It’s as if these animals’ image, based
on their fabulous physical power and agility, their being fearful and admi-
rable alike because so majestic, so sovereign in their independence vis-à-vis
us humans, now gives way to an altogether different set of associations, so
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 241
that they appear weak rather than strong, frail rather than sovereign. For
most children in Western countries today, the polar bear, say, is the ani-
mal caught in the famous photo by Arne Nævra at Svalbard, going viral
20 years ago: a big bear alone on a small ice sheet, struggling to hold onto
it and surrounded by open sea, suggesting that this is an animal struggling
to find food and to take care of itself and its cubs, facing an increasingly
precarious existence where it is forced to give up hunting seals, forced to
go on land to search for birds’ eggs instead, and if that fails, forced to roam
the closest human settlement, driven, for the sake of survival, ever closer
to the one species behind the destruction of its habitat. The same process
involving ever-shrinking habitats forces the last remaining tigers in India
to enter villages where they risk being killed for coming too close to people
fearful of their presence, not to mention the risks involved for animals and
humans alike when they come into such proximity in wet markets, enabling
the transfer of deadly virus from animals to humans, exemplified by the
COVID-19 pandemic that originated in Wuhan, China, in December 2019
(see Shah 2017: 2020).
The complaint is often made that in giving pride of place to animals like
the tiger and the polar bear, their long-standing status as iconic wild ani-
mals in the cultural imaginary of Western modernity means that the large
majority of the animals now threatened with extinction are left in the dark,
attracting no media attraction, no celebrity status like that of the lion Cecil,
world famous for being shot by a rich dentist, duly condemned for his hei-
nous crime by global consensus. It is tempting to say that what we see here is
nothing new under the sun, nothing that we haven’t seen many times before,
and involving human persons at that, not individual animals. Routinely,
as a matter of fact, on average 10,000 children die from “easily preventable
causes” every day; but as long as they have no name, no face, they fail to
attract the attention their plight merits, morally speaking; they fail, that is,
to elicit the Levinasian appeal “thou shalt not kill!” (see Boltanski 1999).
For every article about the situation of, say, vultures in India, there will be
hundreds about that of the Indian tiger or the Sumatran rhino, of which
100 remain in the wild (Braverman 2015: 55). Yet the plight of the vultures
is no less critical. As van Dooren reports, today approximately 97 percent
of the three main species of vulture in India are gone, in recent years largely
as a result of the birds being unintentionally poisoned by a drug called
diclofenac, given to cattle whose carcasses vultures eat. In vulture bodies,
van Dooren explains, diclofenac causes “painful swelling, inflammation,
and eventually kidney failure and death” (2014: 47). Despite tireless con-
servation efforts, whether there will ever again be a sustainable population
of these predator birds in the wild is an open question. To be sure, vultures
are not an iconic species like tigers and lions, though it must be said that
being iconic is often a mixed blessing – think of what motivated the dentist
to seek out and kill Cecil. Indeed, as far as the role of media attention in
combination with “free” market forces is concerned, the grim fact is that the
242  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
more endangered the species to which the particular individual – say, rhino
– belongs, the higher its market value: the very last exemplar is the one that
will catch the highest price ever, propelling the efforts of professional poach-
ers to have it killed and subsequently sold so as to become a trophy only the
very rich can afford and proudly display, testifying in grotesque manner to
the perversity of the celebrated “free” interplay of supply and demand as far
as the predicament of endangered iconic animals is concerned.
To be sure, the point about human arbitrariness in the face of the suf-
fering of animals is a familiar one, first made when we discussed Midgley.
However, the point I want to make here is a different one. In observing how
children’s perception of wild animals has changed in the course of the last
few decades, the novelty worth reflecting upon is to do with what I view as
a peculiar sort of sentimentality. Small children feel pity for the big polar
bear; they relate to the wild animal not so much in terms of fearing it –
“encountering it, I wouldn’t stand a chance” – but in terms of worrying
about its plight, being struck by the increasingly precarious and stressful life
to which it is now doomed, raising questions about whether the last individ-
uals in the wild will be gone during one’s lifetime. If ours is an era of extinc-
tion for so many wild animals, it is also a time of living with the awareness
of extinction on the part of present and future generations of humans.
How to assess this change from being fearful of wild animals owing
to their majestic powers, to feeling fearful for their future owing to their
appearing so vulnerable in the face of ecological destruction? Just like there
is something odd about seagulls roaming garbage cans in urban backyards
and polar bears searching for something to eat in Longyearbyen at Svalbard
or in Siberian villages, there is something not quite right about children’s
perception of some of the mightiest mammals on earth changing from the
suspense of fear and awe to a pity that borders on sentimentality. Why sen-
timentality? And why would such a shift in perception be problematic?
If nature’s independence is its meaning like McKibben famously asserts,
perhaps we can say the same about wild animals: their independence is
their meaning, their meaning, and their identity, for them, not just for us.
Independence would here mean their being what – who – they are meant to
be as creatures different from us. For this to be an actuality, the animals have
to be free to realize that difference: as Rolston says, wild animals have to be
left to their own devices; otherwise their uniqueness will be lost. However,
when Rolston stated this in the 1980s, the context was that of conservation,
his message that humans should not interfere with the dynamics of life and
death as playing out between predator and prey. As a matter of principle, it
would never be right to sacrifice, by means of human effort, individuals of
one species for the sake of another. Rolston’s premise was that, in the long
run if not always in the short, nature would take care of itself.
What is historically novel about childrens’ perception is that they experi-
ence the life of wild animals as dependent not independent, spontaneously
and as a matter of course. This is not to suggest that animals such as tigers
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 243
and polar bears are per definition associated with life in captivity in the zoo,
where we look at them without their really looking back, so that suspense
is replaced by indifference, to recall John Berger. The point is more radical:
it is that even if in situ, in what we are used to call their original natural
habitat, the animals will be seen as living under conditions having less and
less to do with being left to their own devices, more and more to do with the
impact of our schemes, even – precisely – for their sake, the pragmatic argu-
ment being that just as pristine wilderness is now a thing of the past, truly
independent – autonomous – animals are as well, the task being to keep as
many as possible of them in a kind of semi-wild, not yet fully domesticated
environment, that is to say, the kind of hybridity between in situ and ex situ
we looked at when discussing Braverman’s work.
Notwithstanding the merits of Crist’s case for retaining wilderness both
conceptually and historically, so as to maintain the possibility of critically
exposing the degradation that is occurring, there is a shift from the old
normal to the new normal that requires investigation – a shift on the part
of human perception of the natural world that reflects profound changes
within it, hence a shift that appears reality-oriented and in that sense appro-
priate, even required, like it or not. Inviting philosophical reflection, the
shift is in fact utterly concrete: pictures of albatrosses these days will most
likely be pictures of dead birds whose stomachs are filled with plastic; ditto
pictures of whales, only the plastic will be much bigger in size, just like the
animal killed from digesting it, having either mistaken it for food or having
been short of something else to eat.
If this is the new normal, what was the old one? Crist reminds us of Aldo
Leopold’s favourite example of a “biological storm”: the passenger pigeons
“whose dung would coat thousands of acres, flight would block the sun
for hours, and forest roosting extravaganzas would bring mighty branches
crashing down” (2019: 123). “Yearly the feathered tempest roared up, down,
and across the continent”, wrote Leopold, “sucking up the laden fruits
of forest and prairie, burning them in a traveling blast of life” (1949: 111).
Today, the pigeons are gone, so that “worm and weevil must now perform
slowly and silently the biological task that once drew thunder from the fir-
mament”. Even so, we are told by “economic moralists” that to mourn the
pigeon is mere nostalgia; that “if the pigeoners had not done away with him,
the farmers would ultimately have been obliged, in self-defense, to do so”.
Leopold comments that “this is one of those truths that are valid, but not
for the reasons alleged” (ibid.). What reasons? Well, the usual ones in the
name of realism, of progress, as were the two somehow identical, two sides
of the same coin.
But is there not a fair chance that spreading the news about animals on
the brink of extinction will help alert people, perhaps children in particular,
to the urgency of the crisis, mobilizing them to act and to put forward polit-
ical demands, as did the millions who took to the streets worldwide in 2019,
following the lead of Greta Thunberg?
244  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
For the Levinas-inspired reasons alluded to, the importance of perceiving
endangered animals as individuals is not to be underestimated: the face is
what commands attention and sparks concern in the case of animals no less
than in that of humans. And in both cases the ethical-political potential lies
in the capacity of the one highlighted individual to direct attention to the
plight of the many. However, to compare the two cases is also to acknowl-
edge the differences between them. If Cecil does the trick for the lions, who
does for the vultures? It is not only that some animals appear to us humans
as more face-like than others. It is also that some strike us as incompara-
bly more attractive, or precious, or worthy of compassion, than others, this
being so for entire species. In other words, there is no match between what
is ecologically required and who we are inclined to prioritize based on how
we feel about the animals in question. If anything, arbitrariness seems to be
an even bigger problem with regard to animals than to humans.
There is a more subtle dimension to the limits of the comparison, however
– namely the shift from animals living independent lives to their enduring
ever-more dependent such, a shift we first encountered when discussing Paul
Shepard’s work. It is tempting to suggest that this shift from independence
to dependence has no equivalent in human history, lest one considers that
Cortez’ conquest of America, to allude to Tzvetan Todorov’s study (1984),
is a case in point, reminding us of how indigenous peoples have been not
only persecuted, often massacred, but also, as a form of spiritual extinction
going hand in hand with the physical one, have been deprived of their dis-
tinctive cosmologies and the various practices that go with them, showing
up how the loss of biodiversity and the loss of cultural diversity are inter-
twined in today’s world, being inseparable aspects of the same ongoing
homogenization under the banner of globalization. That said, the shift I
am talking about as involving animals can be said to represent a case of
“the new normal” in its own right, illustrated when the “average” lion or
wolf in the wild is doomed to an existence of quickly diminishing wildness,
having its “natural” existence dictated by the “culture” enacted by humans
only, to employ Rolston’s distinction. It is being monitored all around the
clock, purportedly for its own sake, for the greater cause of its preservation
in what used to be its natural habitat, comes with the price of tying its every
move, its every action, ever closer to the nexus of human-initiated struc-
tures and arrangements, risking that the very “wildness” at issue is spoiled
instead of safeguarded, making the scare quotes appropriate.
The new normal that emerges from the shift under scrutiny is not only
that wild animals are becoming few and far between, or that their wildness
qualities are diminishing, a shift whose enormity we can only truly appreci-
ate – measure – by holding onto wilderness the way Crist rightly advocates.
What is also new in a sense that commands attention is the willingness on
the part of so many of us to adapt to the shift as were it perfectly normal.
There is a whole series of concepts conceived to address this adaptability:
“shifting baselines syndrome”, “generational ecological amnesia”, and
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 245
“extinction of experience” being the most well known. Crist speaks about
“the colossal public ignorance surrounding biodiversity’s unraveling”, the
“ongoing, cumulative forgetting of the biosphere’s autochtonous nature”,
and how “dimming knowledge and shriveling experiential horizons sur-
rounding the wealth of planet Earth reveal how the human mind is afflicted
by life’s destruction” (2019: 14). Ecopsychologist David Kidner makes the
point in a way that articulates why retaining the concept of wilderness is
important for psychological and symbolic reasons as well as for the empiri-
cal ones to do with the critical function of an original blueprint: “Not only
is wild nature being destroyed in physical reality, but its obliteration is com-
pleted by its elimination from history and imagination, undermining our
sense of ourselves as embodied creatures with a natural past, so that a felt
resonance with the natural order gives way to a cognitive assimilation into
the industrial order” (Kidner in Crist 2019: 115; see Lertzman 2015).
For all its enormity, then, extinction is a phenomenon many people are
quite capable of adapting to as perfectly normal. How is that possible, and
what does it tell us about our relationship to the animals affected?

VII
To explore these questions, I turn now to the issue of grievability.
Since human-caused extinction of animals amounts to a superkilling of
which we are, at least in principle, fully aware, how do we grieve the lives
being lost?
The answer is that for the most part, we don’t. It is not only that some lives
are considered more grievable than others, applying as this (still) does to
certain groups of human beings – witness Black Lives Matter. In Precarious
Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Judith Butler speaks about the
“differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is
and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to pro-
duce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively
human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?” (2004: xv).
Butler discusses the vulnerability to suffering, to violence and death that
we all live with, “a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life”, a
vulnerability that we cannot will away, that is given to all of us as an ineluc-
table condition of our existence, as are our dependence and our mortality
(see Vetlesen 2009). The context for Butler’s discussion is political, prompt-
ing her to observe that “there are no obituaries for the war casualties that
the United States inflicts, and there cannot be”. Why? Because if there were
to be an obituary, “there would have had to have been a life, a life worth
noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recogni-
tion” (2004: 34). She offers examples like that of the Palestinian U.S. citizen
who submitted to the San Francisco Chronicle obituaries for two Palestinian
families who had been killed by Israeli troops, only to have their publica-
tion rejected because the newspaper “did not want to offend anyone”. Butler
246  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
comments by raising questions like “What might be ‘offensive’ about the
public avowal of sorrow and loss such that obituaries and memorials would
function as offensive speech?” and “What is the relation between the vio-
lence by which these ungrievable lives were lost and the prohibition on their
public grievability?” (2004: 35). Part of her answer is that “there is less a
dehumanizing discourse at work here than a refusal of discourse that pro-
duces dehumanization as a result” (ibid.).
Following Butler, the crucial task is to establish an acceptance of vul-
nerability, meant to counter attempts to repudiate it or deny it or to insist
that it is tantamount to weakness, a kind of weakness found in certain oth-
ers and as such, as it were, a reason for attacking them. To truly recognize
vulnerability as a shared condition is to humanize its bearers, the opposite
of using it as a weapon against them; it is to be hopeful that “recognition
wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability”, actualizing it as a source of
concern, of reaching out, not a liability (2004: 43). Butler further develops
her position in The Force of Nonviolence, focusing, among various groups,
on women whose status is that of being “killable”, terrorized as they are by
the prevalence and impunity of killing practices (2020: 189).
It will not be lost on the reader that Butler concentrates on humans and
humans only in her account of lives deemed ungrievable and individuals (or
groups) regarded as killable. The anthropocentrism of her approach may
come as a surprise, or even as a disappointment in being so convention-
ally held on to by a prominent radical thinker, raising questions about how
deliberate it is and whether Butler could have included other-than-humans
without undermining her objectives. I shall not attempt to answer these
questions here. The relevance of her main points and observations should be
evident even when what we want to explore is not the grievability or rather
denial of such of (certain) humans but of animals, be it some of them or all
of them.
Common to both cases is a denial of vulnerability as encountered in the
other. Granted. But that doesn’t take us very far. The sort of denial crucially
involved here is the denial of the worthiness of the bearer of vulnerability.
This is what is involved in the recognition Butler talks about: that vulner-
ability is a basis for being worthy of recognition, not a feature tantamount
to being weak or inferior and so as deficient in moral standing. The mor-
ally important thing about vulnerability, then, is that it calls for a certain
response – the response of responsibility.
Of course, this is the view we found promoted in Levinas’ ethics, the
problem being however that he is commonly taken to reserve the ethical
significance of the connection between vulnerability and responsibility to
humans. But what about animals? How to access, how to recognize their
vulnerability? And how to do so in a way that sheds light on the peculiar
nature of their grievability?
In making an analytic shift from humans to animals, Hegelian accounts
of recognition and Levinasian accounts of responsibility come up against
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 247
a limit: quite simply, they are not very helpful. Suffice it to say that they are
too general and abstract to do justice to the historical and ecological cir-
cumstances in which animals are now threatened with extinction.
The losses that add up to the extinction of a species are utterly concrete:
so many occurrences in a particular time and place affecting individual
animals. As Deborah Bird Rose reminds us, life processes take place in
time and are emplaced. This also holds for loss. Whereas scientific analyses
of environmental crisis typically deal in agglomerated figures and statis-
tics that are largely abstracted from place, loss is primarily experienced in
place. “We are”, writes Rose, “unlikely to experience the predicted loss of
twenty-one out of twenty-four species of butterflies in Australia, but we are
almost certain to encounter absences – places where butterflies used to be
and are no more”, be they forests or paddocks or one’s own backyard (2004:
49).
To illustrate, consider penguins, penguins in a particular place such as
the thin brand of rocky foreshore at Manly, inside the mouth of Sydney
Harbour, Australia. Here nests a tiny colony of Little Penguins. What is
their situation like? In recent years, Thom van Dooren tells us, an estimated
50 percent of the shoreline in question, hundreds of miles in length, have
seen the building of seawalls and other built structures; the homeowners
who can afford it erect seawalls in order to moor a boat or build a swimming
pool. Each year, the shoreline becomes more built up, more noisy, more
dangerous for the penguins who come there to breed. “And yet”, writes van
Dooren, “year after year, the penguins keep returning”. This is the fact, this
is the image that continues to haunt him: a penguin returning to a burrow,
to a breeding place, that is no longer there or has been “transformed so dra-
matically that it is no longer habitable” (2014: 66). So, while the people who
buy the houses and build the seawalls are attracted to the place as a chance
to be “closer to nature”, the cost paid by the penguins comes in the form of
their returning to lost places.
This is the bigger picture of which the penguins in Sydney Harbour is but
one of numerous examples: “All over the world, animals are drawn to return
faithfully to places that no longer exist”, van Dooren observes (ibid.). The
site fidelity of so many species of animals testifies to their being philopat-
ric, a term that literally means “love of one’s home”, employed in biology
to describe a process in which an animal returns to its place of birth or
hatching to reproduce; such loyalty to place is crucial in enabling birds to
retain high-quality nests over many years, spanning generations. Alongside
inheriting genes, organisms – animals – also inherit environments: not any
piece of land or shoreline will do, only one is “home”; more than the sum of
their ecological parts, the one place that is home carries the histories and
the stories of the particular animals who belong there.
To use a term introduced earlier but not employed by van Dooren, silent
killing is the modus operandi of the dynamics that cause more and more
species of animals to go extinct. Technically speaking and in bureaucratic
248  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
terminology, “alteration in the use of land” is the main cause: the motor-
ways, housing complexes, shopping malls, parking lots, factories, mines,
livestock grasslands, palm oil plantations, and so on and so forth, here and
there and everywhere, put up in the name of progress and development all
over the world, in each and every instance taking over, converting for novel
use and exploitation what remains of “untapped natural resources”, such as
the shoreline that used to be the little penguins home, the forest that used to
be the wolves’ home, the rivers and lakes that used to be the beavers’ home,
and so on, the homes for animals everywhere on Earth.
Silent killing kills by stealing the homes of animals, snatching them away
from them one place after the other, year after year, day after day. The causal
sequence is neither subtle nor particularly complex. To the contrary, it is as
straightforward as it gets, that of zero-sum: each new place converted from
an “undeveloped” to a “developed” state is a place taken over for human use
by way of being lost as a home for other-than-humans of all sorts, animals
in particular.
Despite being utterly concrete and real for the animals affected, the pro-
cess is perfectly abstract and invisible for most of us humans. True, we may
encounter absences like Rose mentions, say, places where butterflies used
to be and are no more. But noticing absences is only possible if you are suf-
ficiently familiar with a particular place to actually make the comparison
and thereby spot the difference between what that particular place used to
be like and what it has now become – precisely the exercise of experience-­
based comparison between past and present that is undermined by the psy-
chological mechanisms referred to above, “shifting baseline syndrome” in
particular. The upshot is that “with each ensuing generation, the amount
of environmental degradation increases, but each generation in its youth
takes that degraded condition as the nondegraded condition – as the normal
experience” (Peterson 2009: 92).
“Eco-grief” and “ecological mourning” are conceptual innovations
aimed to address the emotional response that the loss of animals, habitats,
and sometimes entire landscapes – the landscape of childhood – may elicit
(see Griffiths 2013). The Australian ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht has
coined the term “solastalgia”, defining it as “the pain and distress caused by
the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the pres-
ent state of one’s home and territory. It is the existential and lived experience
of negative environmental change, manifest as an attack on one’s sense of
place”. Solastalgia is the homesickness you experience when at home, born
of the memory of what home used to be like, home as shared and co-consti-
tuted by so many “others”, animals in particular (2019: 38).
What complicates mourning in the face of ongoing loss and extinction
is the fact that we are complicit in their occurrence. The fact of complic-
ity – though vastly, even grotesquely, unevenly distributed among nations,
regions, and socio-economic classes – makes the experience of grief at
extinction unwelcome, its articulation and public display problematic. As a
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 249
culture and as a society we lack traditions and rituals for collective mourn-
ing of animals or landscapes lost, in effect privatizing the psychic toll of the
loss and the emotional reactions to it, and so depoliticizing it. As citizens of
present-day Western societies we are not expected to feel, let alone openly
display, grief over the loss of animals (except one’s pets), be it as particular
individuals or as species, excluding animals in this regard just like in their
appropriateness as “significant others”, discussed earlier. Indeed, it’s not
only that we as a collective lack practices of commemoration like burial
ceremonies and newspaper obituaries to acknowledge that the animals are
now gone one species after the other, from one place after the other, the pace
of loss speeding up rather than slowing down year after year. We lack these
sort of practices because as a culture we persist in denying that non-humans
such as animals are worthy of being grieved in the first place – they are
denied grievability in Butler’s sense. As long as they continue to be so, the
culturally entrenched deficit just noted will continue to raise its ugly head in
the form of attacking those who publicly display their grief, the more so if
such individuals, Greta Thunberg-like, dare to point to the human, societal,
and political culpability for the loss, pointing their finger at powerful agents
particularly responsible for it, such as the oil company Equinor in my native
Norway.
In fact, the aggression with which acts of public display of eco-grief and
eco-mourning are being met, overwhelmingly by men, demonstrates that
to speak about a “lack” of cultural practices (rituals), though correct, risks
putting it much too mildly: the intolerance and outright anger with which
these emotions are met show that expressing them publicly amounts to
breaking a cultural taboo. Indeed, there is but a short way from privatizing
and depoliticizing these emotions to downright pathologizing them, stig-
matizing as “mental illness” what should be regarded as “rational responses
to irrational situations” (Albrecht 2017: 311; see Nicholson 2003: 43). The
culturally sustained sense of entitlement, of the right to have it all, to choose
individually and freely, without interference from the authorities or “mor-
alizing” from other citizens, what to do, what to buy, where to travel, as
trumping all other considerations and the rights and freedoms of everybody
else, is clearly what is offended once individuals like Thunberg points her
finger at the societal roots of the ongoing devastation of nature, roots better
left unexamined and unidentified, lest the grand narrative about progress
be challenged. If anything, there is too little mourning, understood as a per-
fectly justified response to an intolerable situation, making its public articu-
lation into an act of resistance, of non-compliance in the proud tradition of
non-violent protest that Butler rightly champions.
The upshot is that, culturally as well of psychologically, the framework
for mourning must be expanded so as to accommodate mourning for other-­
than-humans as a perfectly sane, non-irrational and non-pathological var-
iant of mourning. Morally and politically, to acknowledge such mourning
as perfectly appropriate to its object, even called for, is to recognize these
250  Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction
losses as worthy of being mourned, passing the burden of having to explain
themselves from those who feel this way to those who don’t.
This raises questions about responsibility and guilt for which not only
mainstream political and moral theory is ill-prepared, as exemplified by
Habermas and Rawls (see Mulgan 2011); so is psychology as well. Take
Freud’s seminal paper “Mourning and Melancholia” from 1917. Freud takes
it for granted that the kind of mourning worth talking about and in need of
treatment is that manifest in one person’s experience at the loss of another.
All parties to the loss involved, to the deprivation suffered, are human per-
sons as a matter of course, the mourned lost object as well as the mourning
subject. To the degree that the natural world at all enters into the picture,
it does so in the form of a piece of reality taken to be intact and solid in a
situation otherwise shot through with the disturbance incurred by the loss
suffered. Nature – typically in the form of a particular place, often cher-
ished since childhood – is relevant to the process (Freud: work) of mourning
in being attributed a role in helping keep things stable when emotionally
and psychically they are not. Nature, that is to say, is trusted as suited for
purposes of holding and containment, to use Melanie Klein’s and Donald
Winnicott’s psychoanalytic terms, nature taken as being there “for me”,
always, unfailingly and loyally, whenever my bond with other humans is
cut short, revealing the precariousness of inter-human relationships that so
starkly contrasts with the permanence and calm stability of nature, being
always itself, undisturbed by whatever disturbs us humans. Hence nature
will allow me to regain my vitality, to renew my interest in the possibilities
that lie ahead, in short, to prioritize the future over the past and so helping
me let go of the things I cannot undo, psychically liberating me from a pain-
ful loss in the past so as to thrust myself forward into a future holding the
promise of new loves and the forging of new bonds.
Evidently, that one day the natural world would lose these seemingly
rock solid characteristics, and that it would do so by way of degradation
and destruction inflicted by us humans, is a possibility not entertained by
Freud, understandably preoccupied at the time with the devastation of the
first world war. A century later, nature is subject to such devastation as to
alter it substantially – not only in the sense of the emerging Earth science of
the Anthropocene, but also in a sense crucial to psychology in general and
perhaps psychoanalysis in particular. Instead of nature being there “for us”,
meeting our need for comfort in times of trouble, we now confront a nature
so damaged as to fail us in these expectations – failing us because we have
failed it. That nature itself would become the object to be mourned is what
is truly new.
Implied in this shift of focus from the inter-human to the natural world is
also a shift in temporality, more subtle at that and so far receiving far less
attention. Freud, here at one with common sense, took it for granted that
the cause prompting the hard work of mourning would be a thing – an event,
an object – of the past, so that as time goes by, the more distant will become
 Responsibility and grievability in the face of extinction 251
the source and the point of origin of the entire process, a notion attested
to in sayings like “trust that time will help heal the wound”. In contrast to
being past-oriented like this, the sort of mourning we are only now start-
ing to grasp, because only now starting to experience and to have objective
grounds for experiencing, is eminently future-oriented: the danger we are
alerted to, the trends we find alarming, are not things of the past whose
impact peters out as time passes. To the contrary, the damage and decima-
tion to the point of extinction of species, together with the disappearance
of entire habitats and biomes, are part of a trajectory of destruction such
that we “ain’t seen nothing yet”, such that, expectedly, things will get worse,
there therefore being good reasons to fear for the future of all involved. This
means that the joy we today may feel at landscapes not altered, animals not
lost, gives comfort only up to a point: in so many cases, the not is a not yet,
knowing as we do that so much is in the process of being lost.
To conclude, what we need to recognize is not only that we may mourn
animals too, not only fellow humans; and that if we haven’t mourned ani-
mals as part of our cultural tradition, we should learn to do so now, however
complicated that learning may be owing to our complicity in their plight.
Last but not least, animals are themselves no strangers to mourning, as
everyone who has heard Jane Goodall address the phenomenon will know.
That animals have more reason to mourn for each other now than ever
before speaks to the magnitude of the loss we are inflicting upon them.
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Index

Adams, Carol 165, 173, 174 Braverman, Irus 203–206, 217,

adiaphorization 95 226, 243
Adorno, Theodor W. 51, 95, 121, Brecht, Bertold 133
122–125, 132–137, 152, 154, 185–187 Buber, Martin 83, 131, 156, 169
aggression 17–20, 124 Butler, Judith 14, 70, 245–249
Albrecht, Glenn 30, 248
Alford, C. Fred 150–155 Callicott, J. Baird 118, 207–208
animality 123–126 captivity 204–206
animism 83–85, 120, 123, 187–188 Carroll, Lewis 131
animal soul 171 Carson, Rachel 39–40
anthropocentrism 95, 120, 136, 167, 194, Cavalieri, Paola 184
201, 221 Cavell, Stanley 169
anthropomorphism 13, 19, 22, 26, 29, Ceballos, Gerardo 6, 10, 12
34, 57–48, 172, 199 Cecil (lion) 241, 244
Arendt, Hannah 42, 139 Challenger, Melanie 6–8
art 1–3, 40 children 30–32, 47, 50–53, 240–246
chimpanzees 74–75, 251
baboons 65–68, 78 Chrulew, Matthew 232
Bacon, Francis 17, 121 Crary, Alice 103, 168
Bastian, Michelle 202, 219 Critchley, Simon 105, 107
Bauman, Zygmunt 95, 107, 200 Crist, Eileen 25–27, 28, 198, 237–240,
Beck, Ulrich 240 243, 244, 245
behaviourism 22, 26 Coetzee, John 73, 169–172, 190
Bekoff, Marc 66, 68–71, 77 compassion 127, 132–134
Benjamin, Walter 46, 121, 122 conatus 145–146, 149, 152, 155,
Bentham, Jeremy 8, 108, 110, 132 157, 172
Benton, Tim 48 connectivity 92–94, 95
Berger, John 129, 243 Cook, Deborah 123
Bernasconi, Robert 105
Bernstein, Jay 124, 134 Darwin, Charles 7, 17, 24–28, 35, 37, 44,
Bettelheim, Bruno 47 66, 69–71, 79, 185
biocentrism 11 Dawkins, Richard 27
biodiversity 6, 244 de Beauvoir, Simone 104–105
biological annihilation 6–7, 11–12 de Val, Frans 66
Black Lives Matter 245 death 85–90, 94–97, 135–137, 155, 165,
Blake, William 33 221–223
Blue (horse) 194–200 dependence 11–13, 154, 160, 173, 225
Bobby (dog) 100–108, 128–130, 136 Dennett, Daniel 180
 Index 261
Derrida, Jacques 14, 105, 122–145, Hume, David 22, 79, 224
149, 153, 170, 171, 176, 183, 210, 221, hunting 11, 40, 83–93, 162–165, 181–183,
231, 245 187–188, 189
Descartes, Rene 13, 15, 24, 28, 33, 47, Hutchinson, Francis 79
51, 85, 92, 121, 131, 133, 136, 139, 141,
185 impartiality 116
Diamond, Cora 169 impunity 100–102
dingoes 80–87, 97–99, 176 independence 10, 160
Durkheim, Emile 55 individualism 117, 193, 224, 229
insensitivity 160
eagle owl 96–97, 118 instincts 17
ecogrief 14, 248 Irigaray, Luce 101, 104, 149
ecology 35, 150–152, 157, 164, 173, 182,
192, 217 Jonas, Hans 29, 35, 95, 213–215, 233
Evernden, Neil 29, 32–34 Jones, Lucy 31–32
evil 128, 142–143, 145–146, 149, 152, 156
Existentialism 15–17, 29 Kahn, Peter 31
extinction 6, 40, 80–85, 95, 202–227, Kant, Immanuel 1–5, 9–10, 12–13, 16,
232–236 24, 40, 65, 102–103, 106, 109, 117, 120,
122, 123, 124, 127, 133, 134, 136, 141,
face (Levinas) 142–144, 147 160, 161, 174, 182, 185, 193, 215, 216,
factory farming 176, 181, 190 221, 223, 229
femininity 104 Kepler, Johannes 35
Francione, Gary 182 Kessler, Neil 114, 195–201
Freud, Sigmund 51–52, 55, 240, 250–251 Kidner, David 245
Fromm, Erich 51–52, 61, 121 killing 86–93, 94, 134–137, 163–165,
181–184, 200, 246
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 65, 72, 78 Klein, Melanie 155, 250
Galilei, Galileo 33 Klein, Naomi 148, 232
genocide 95, 101, 200 Kohlberg, Lawrence 115
Giddens, Anthony 71 Kohn, Eduardo 43, 83, 87–88, 92, 94
Gilligan, Carol 93, 116 Kolbert, Elizabeth 227, 232
Goodall, Jane 13, 17, 38, 66, 73–77, 251
grievability 245–251 Lacan, Jacques 137–143
language 43–44, 111–112, 115, 168
Habermas, Jürgen 14, 38, 43–45, 51, 54, Latour, Bruno 33, 235–236
70, 109–122, 124, 132, 151, 152, 161, Lear, Jonathan 186–187
164, 175, 180, 221, 223, 250 Leopold, Aldo 37, 90–91, 217, 221, 243
Hacking, Ian 169 Lestel, Dominique 185–188
Haeckel, Ernst 35 Levinas, Emmanuel 14, 98, 99, 100–108,
Haraway, Donna 66–70, 78, 210 114, 125–129, 134–157, 164, 172, 175,
Hatley, James 184–186 246
Hegel, Georg W.F. 38, 55, 65, 139, 170, Llewelyn, John 126
193, 230 Locke, John 33, 108, 193
Heidegger, Martin 29, 73, 85, 132, 135, Lorenz, Konrad 13, 17–19, 21, 24–26,
138, 141, 146, 171–173, 183, 221 28, 37, 38, 47
Hobbes, Thomas 35, 93, 106, 146, 151, Louv, Richard 30
152, 191, 193
Holocaust 95, 101 Malm, Andreas 236
Homo mensura 80, 182 Marcuse, Herbert 51–53, 121
Horkheimer, Max 51, 121 Margulis, Lynn 83
Hornburg, Alf 236 Marris, Emma 239
262  Index
Marx, Karl 55, 121, 153, 236 Regan, Tom 206–212, 223
Mathews, Freya 62, 191–193 responsibility 106–108, 113, 135, 137,
McKibben, Bill 236–238, 242 148–150, 196–198, 232
mechanism 33–36 Ricoeur, Paul 148–149
Menke, Christoph 133 rights 162, 165, 181–184
Merchant, Carolyn 34, 114 Rolston, Holmes 11, 118, 206–233, 242,
Midgley, Mary 3–4, 12–13, 15–38, 47, 244, 247
60–61, 66, 69–70, 73, 87, 170, 178, Rose, Deborah Bird 13, 80–108, 120,
185, 198 126, 129, 149, 152, 162–163, 165, 176,
Moore, Merrill 45 181, 184, 247
moral agency 105, 113, 134, 144, 167,
224, 232 Sagan, Dorion 83
moral realism 134–135, 217 Sahlins, Marshall 188
mortality 145, 190 Sartre, Jean-Paul 15–17, 28–29, 30, 85,
Morton, Timothy 97 106, 131, 152, 191
Mueller, Martin Lee 162 scepticism 22, 26, 198
Murder 128, 145 Schopenhauer, Arthur 190
Murdoch, Iris 1–6, 8–9, 12 Schweitzer, Albert 211
Musk, Elon 97 Searles, Harold 48–50, 62
Shepard, Paul 13, 36–63, 86, 89, 93, 151,
Nagel, Thomas 21 152, 165, 176, 178, 181, 184, 189, 194,
nakedness 130–132 198–199, 244
narcissism 52, 157 shifting baseline syndrome 31, 59, 244,
nature deficit disorder 30 248
“nature phobia” 48 silent killing 119, 247
Nemo, Philippe 105 Singer, Peter 8, 11, 37, 86, 190, 207, 211,
Newton, Isaac 33 223, 227
Nietzsche, Friedrich 134, 191 Smith, Adam 79
Nightingale, Florence 60 Smuts, Barbara 64–66, 69, 72, 76, 78
Nozick, Robert 191 solastalgia 30, 248
Næss, Arne 144, 193 solidarity 133–135
Nævra, Arne 241 Soper, Kate 233–236
Steiner, Gary 14, 181–194, 220
O’Neill, Adam 98 Stern, Daniel 66
Ottmann, Henning 119, 122 suffering 125, 133, 145, 170, 190, 196, 220
Sverdrup-Thygeson, Anne 212
Patzig, Günther 109–110, 112, 113, 115, symbols 43–45
117, 119
Peirce, Charles S. 44 Taylor, Paul 118, 208, 215–218
pets 57–58, 61 Thomas, Chris 210
plants 114, 120, 164, 186 Thoreau, David Henry 199
Plato 2, 4, 16, 19, 51, 65, 103, 185, 233 Thunberg, Greta 243, 249
Platonov, Andrei 171–174 Timofeeva, Oxana 171–174
play 67–72 Tinbergen, Niko 13, 17, 24–26, 28, 38
Plumwood, Val 14, 85, 158–181, 191, 240 Todorov, Tzvetan 244
Portmann, Adolf 37 Tomasello, Michael 38, 43
Pyle, Robert 30, 31 transitional objects (Winnicott) 58

Quine, Willard 168 van Dooren, Thom 83, 208, 212–215,

226, 232, 241, 250
Rawls, John 108, 151, 250 vegetarianism 162–165, 174, 183–186
recognition 38, 100, 101, 129 vulnerability 93, 108, 126, 133
 Index 263
Walker, Alice 14, 194–200 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 23
Watson, John 128 Wolfe, Cary 169
Weber, Max 55, 114, 120, 121, 175, 180 Wordsworth, William 33, 199
Whitehead, Alfred North 33–35
Willett, Cynthia 13, 64–80, 86, 130 Yilngayarri, Old Tim 80–84, 88, 91, 97,
Wilson, Edward O. 15, 26, 37 166, 192
Winnicott, Donald W. 58–60,
153–157, 175