Being Animal: Beasts and Boundaries in Nature Ethics

By Anna L. Peterson

If nature is what lies beyond human society, then animals must be a part of it. For most people, animals are the most significant aspects of the nonhuman world. They symbolize nature in our imaginations, in popular media and culture, and in campaigns to preserve the wilderness. They are also real creatures and individual subjects with whom we have diverse and complex relationships

Scholars, however, tend to treat animals and the environment as distinct, mutually exclusive objects of interest and concern. Conducting the first systematic examination of the place of animals in scholarly and popular thinking about nature, Anna L. Peterson builds a nature ethic that conceives of nonhuman animals as active subjects simultaneously a part of nature and human society. Disrupting the artificial boundaries separating these two realms, Peterson explores the tensions between humans and animals, nature and culture, animals and nature, and domesticity and wildness, and she uses our intimate connections with companion animals to examine nature more broadly. Liminal creatures who straddle the boundary between human society and wilderness, companion animals reveal much about the mutually constitutive relationships binding humans and nature together. Through her paradigm-shifting reflections on animals, nature, and ethics, Peterson underscores the fluid and continuous character of two seemingly immutable categories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: May 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9780231534260

Book preview

BEING ANIMAL

Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science, and Law

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ANIMALS: THEORY, CULTURE, SCIENCE, AND LAW

Series Editors: Gary L. Francione and Gary Steiner

The emerging interdisciplinary field of animal studies seeks to shed light on the nature of animal experience and the moral status of animals in ways that overcome the limitations of traditional approaches to animals. Recent work on animals has been characterized by an increasing recognition of the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries and exploring the affinities as well as the differences among the approaches of fields such as philosophy, law, sociology, political theory, ethology, and literary studies to questions pertaining to animals. This recognition has brought with it an openness to a rethinking of the very terms of critical inquiry and of traditional assumptions about human being and its relationship to the animal world. The books published in this series seek to contribute to contemporary reflections on the basic terms and methods of critical inquiry, to do so by focusing on fundamental questions arising out of the relationships and confrontations between humans and nonhuman animals, and ultimately to enrich our appreciation of the nature and ethical significance of nonhuman animals by providing a forum for the interdisciplinary exploration of questions and problems that have traditionally been confined within narrowly circumscribed disciplinary boundaries.

The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation?

Gary L. Francione and Robert Garner

Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations

Alasdair Cochrane

Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity

Colleen Glenney Boggs

Experiencing Animal Minds: An Anthology of Animal-Human Encounters

edited by Julie A. Smith and Robert W. Mitchell

BEING ANIMAL

BEASTS AND BOUNDARIES IN NATURE ETHICS

Anna L. Peterson

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS             NEW YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Publishers Since 1893

NEW YORK    CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

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Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53426-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peterson, Anna Lisa, 1963–

Being animal : beasts and boundaries in nature ethics / Anna L. Peterson

p. cm.    —

(Critical perspectives on animals : theory, culture, science, and law)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16226-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-16227-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53426-0 (ebook)

1. Animal welfare—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Animal rights. 3. Environmental protection. I. Title.

HV4708.P478    2013

179'.3—dc23

2012039912

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Cover design: Jordan Wannemacher

Photo image: Hillary Kladke, Paw Prints Charming Pet Photography

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

And I, a materialist who does not believe

in the starry heaven promised

to a human being,

for this dog and for every dog

I believe in heaven, yes, I believe in a heaven

that I will never enter, but he waits for me

wagging his big fan of a tail

so I, soon to arrive, will feel welcomed.

—Pablo Neruda, Un Perro Ha Muerto

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ONE

Introduction: Animals and Nature

TWO

Animals in Environmental Perspective

THREE

Animal Ethics

FOUR

Wild Animals

FIVE

Domesticated Animals

SIX

The Debate Between Environmentalism and Animal Advocacy

SEVEN

Between Animals and Nature: Finding Common Ground

EIGHT

Being Animal

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is always a pleasure to write acknowledgments, both because it means the work of writing is finished and because it is an opportunity to thank those who have made the work easier, better, or more enjoyable. I am grateful, first and always, to my family for their support and patience. My husband, Manuel Vásquez, listened to my endless worries and reflections about the issues examined in this book, even while busy with his own writing. He also tolerated and supported the huge amounts of time I have spent not only researching and writing this book but also immersed in the activist worlds of both environmental and animal advocacy. I could not do any of it without him.

There are many people in both those worlds who helped make this book possible as well. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to collaborate with smart, dedicated, and thoughtful people who care passionately about nonhuman nature in various forms. My own moral and political commitments, as well as my academic work, have been strengthened by my involvement with these activists. I am grateful not only to those with whom I collaborate at home in Gainesville but also to the good people from BAD RAP (Bay Area Doglovers Responsible About Pit Bulls), the Berkeley Humane Society, Maddie’s Fund, and the Sierra Club, all of whom helped me think through many of the issues addressed here. I am even more grateful for the inspiration of their ongoing work.

A number of colleagues and friends also contributed to this book. In particular, I have benefited from conversations with Marc Bekoff, Laura Hobgood-Oster, Bill Jordan, LoraKim Joyner, Jessica Pierce, Katie Sieving, Sam Snyder, Dan Spencer, and Paul Thompson. I was able to present some of my early ideas about these issues at a conference at Ohio Northern University in April 2009, on the theme of Recreate, Replace, Restore: Exploring the Intersections Between Meanings and Environments. Special thanks go to Forrest Clingerman and Mark Dixon, the organizers of that very productive and enjoyable meeting. Gretel van Wieren kindly invited me to Michigan State University when I was finishing this book and needed precisely the constructive dialogue I had there. I am also grateful for many constructive conversations with my students at the University of Florida, who have offered innovative ways to think about these issues and indulged my frequent classroom digressions about dogs.

I am indebted as well to my dog and horse trainers, Monica Body and Jessica Piazza, who probably do not realize how much they have shaped my thinking about animals, nature, and ethics. Last but certainly not least, I am grateful to my endlessly fascinating and invaluable dogs, especially Tozi, who will not stay on her side of the fence.

1

Introduction: Animals and Nature

Our relations with beasts lie at the centre of moral enquiry.

¹

WHO IS THIS DOG?

This book began with questions about what my dogs and my academic field, environmental ethics, might have to do with each other. According to everything I read, these two important parts of my life were entirely separate. In scholarly writing on the environment, mentions of companion animals are scarce and usually negative: domesticated animals in general are seen as human constructs separate from and opposed to wild nature. The scorn about domesticated animals is embedded within a larger lack of interest in nonhuman animals generally among environmental philosophers and other people who think seriously about nature. People who pay attention to animals, on the other hand, rarely reflect explicitly on nonhuman subjects’ connections to natural places and ecological processes. While countless popular and scholarly books examine the natural environment, on the one hand, and animals, on the other, neither literature engages the other. Behind the separation between animals and nature lurks a host of unquestioned philosophical claims, beginning with an assumption that it is possible to understand the nonhuman world without serious reflection on animals, and vice versa.

I begin with the opposite claim: animals are part of nature. We cannot understand the environment or ourselves without confronting the mutually constitutive relationships that bind us to nonhuman subjects. The most intimate and complex of these relationships are with domesticated animals, liminal creatures who occupy the boundary between human society and wilderness. Their status points to the ambiguous relationship that all animals have with the environment. As active agents, they are never just part of wild landscapes. They are individual actors as well as members of biotic communities. Animals reveal the fluid and continuous character of categories like wild and domestic, nature and culture, and human and animal. Even the most domesticated creature is part of the vast realm beyond the boundaries of humanness. At the same time, even the wildest beast does not live in absolute isolation from human societies and meanings. These paradoxes organize my thinking in this book, especially the tensions between humans and animals, nature and culture, animals and nature, and domesticity and wildness. In each case, humans have constructed impassable boundaries between pairs that should be united.

The paradoxes of animals and nature are nowhere more obvious and more tantalizing than in companion species. Cats and dogs are unique among domestic animals not only because they live with us most intimately, frequently sharing not just our homes but our beds, but also because they are among the only domesticated predators. Virtually all the species domesticated for food and work are herbivores or small omnivores, like chicken and other fowl. Cows and horses are large and powerful and may trample humans or destroy our fences, but they do not hunt and eat other animals. Dogs, in particular, are capable of killing humans, and sometimes they do. For the most part, however, they behave like family members rather than powerful predators. Because they are both, they connect us to a more-than-human world that is at once familiar and mysterious.²

Dogs and other companion animals play unique roles in the development of Homo sapiens and the history of particular cultures. Many other species, wild and feral as well as domesticated, are also central in symbolic as well as practical ways to people around the world. They help us to make a living and also to make sense of the world. Wild animals represent the beauty, strangeness, and danger of a world beyond our own. Domestic animals reflect both our intimate connections to and our power over other species. While companion animals are at least partially incorporated into human families, other domesticated beasts are defined as livestock. They are reduced to property, recognized neither as agents of their own lives nor as objects of care. The traits that define one animal as a pet and another as livestock, and indeed even that mark broader distinctions such as domestic, wild, and feral, are the result of human interpretations and practices and not of the animals’ intrinsic capacities or subjectivity. This does not mean that animals do not define and shape their own worlds. Rather, it reflects the power that humans exercise over almost all members of almost all other species, from our pets to wild creatures living in wilderness thousands of miles away.

I live with four dogs, all complex and, to me, endlessly fascinating creatures. Perhaps the most paradoxical is Tozi, a brindle pit bull type dog. Tozi is the most domesticated of animals—obedient, affectionate, and sensitive to human moods and intentions. She loves children and not only tolerates but seeks out their sometimes rough attentions. She occupies the highest rung in our little pack, but she rarely enforces her rule with anything more dramatic than a sidelong glance and, in extreme cases, the glimpse of a shiny white canine tooth. People who do not generally like dogs often like her very much, because she is so calm, so gentle, so neat and polite.

Tozi is also an extraordinarily efficient predator. Her ancestors were bull and terrier dogs, bred in England to kill rats in cities, on farms, and in pits where men bet on the ability of dogs who killed as many rats as possible in a few minutes.³ Tozi would have been a champion in those pits. While she has never shown aggression toward humans or other dogs, she quickly, quietly, and efficiently kills every animal her size or smaller she can reach, including not only rodents but also dragonflies, cicadas, lizards, snakes, moles, shrews, possums, and, most recently, a large adult raccoon. In order to reach them, she has climbed over, dug under, and broken through fences, as well as carving out holes in drywall.

These paradoxes pose a question: What do with do with Tozi? This is a practical question we ask in my family, as we build higher, stronger fences and supervise her every outdoor move. It is also a philosophical problem at the heart of this book. Tozi provides a lens for thinking through questions that must be answered in order to construct a nature ethic that makes sense of and values animals, ecosystems, and our own animal being.⁴ What shall we make of a creature who is so tame and so wild? How can I understand this predator that kills a raccoon the same size as my child who sleeps next to her? What is the meaning of a dog who permits complete strangers to remove food from her mouth but gouges holes in the wood floor in efforts to reach the armadillo beneath the house? Who is this dog? Who am I with her, and what are we to each other? These are not rhetorical questions. Donna Haraway poses a similar non-rhetorical, deeply philosophical, question: What and whom do I touch when I touch my dog?⁵ I touch family; I touch the wild. I do not touch a machine, a social construct, or a slave.

These claims run against the opinions of most environmental philosophers, few of whom seem to have met any real dogs. They suggest that I cannot and should not think about my dogs as nature. I begin with the opposite claim: it is impossible to think about nature apart from them.

MATERIALISM AND ETHICS

Thinking about animals as natural beings is difficult in environmental and animal studies because of the theoretical limitations of mainstream approaches in both fields. Even theoretical models that challenge dualistic understandings of nature and culture or body and mind still take for granted the divisions between domesticity and wildness and between individuals and wholes. In order to build a nature ethic that does justice to animals, ecosystems, and people, we need to begin with encounter and concrete engagement with nonhuman nature. To make sense of Canis lupus familiaris or any animal, wild or domestic, human or other, requires a theoretical approach that starts with real animals, not abstractions. More broadly, an adequate nature ethic is not just applied to or grounded in real-life practice but emerges from and always returns to actual encounter and engagement with the nonhuman world.

The most important model for this approach comes from Karl Marx, who sought a theory that does not descend from heaven to earth but rather ascends from earth to heaven. Marx’s philosophy does not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh.⁶ Real individuals are not only the starting point of philosophy, for Marx, but its raison d’être. The point of philosophy, as his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach reminds us, is not merely to interpret the world but to change it.⁷ Marx’s interest lay only in living human individuals, but the power and scope of his thought makes it illuminating to apply to nonhuman subjects as well.

Some foundations for this project lie in the application of Marxian thought to the environment, a rich and growing field. One of the most prominent ecosocialist thinkers, John Bellamy Foster, contends that Marxist materialism, along with Darwinism, helped make possible contemporary ecological thought. Today, Foster argues, Marx’s thinking can help us develop a revolutionary ecological view which links social transformation with the transformation of the human relation with nature in ways that we now consider ecological.⁸ Foster and other Marxist ecological thinkers have offered new ways of thinking about both humans and nature and the mutual shaping of individuals and structures and of nature and society. Their work shows the potential of a theoretical framework in which dualism can give way to mutual interaction. While ecosocialist thinkers have paid little attention to animals, the Marxian critique of dualistic thinking and individualistic anthropology, along with his central categories of relationship, alienation, and praxis, all offer new ways of thinking about animals and nature.⁹

UNHEALTHY DIVISIONS

The separation between nature and animals is both strange and destructive. It is strange because most people readily describe animals as part of nature. Animals are, more specifically, on the nature side of a high, wide, and all but impassable theoretical boundary between nature and culture. (The practical boundary is usually much more porous.) It is destructive because it prevents us from understanding animals and nature as well as we might and also from protecting them as well as we should. The blocks to understanding can be considered in part as the result of several paradoxes that frame our thinking about not only nature and animals but also about what it means to be human. The divisions between thinking and concern about the environment, on the one hand, and about nonhuman animals, on the other, have developed in part because serious reflection about animals and nature would require us to confront both our own naturalness and our own complicated and often contradictory relationships to animals.

The first paradox involved in our conceptions of animals and nature is about ourselves: people are animals, yet animals are part of nature; nature is everything that is not human (or human-created); thus we cannot be animals. This is evident in the popular use of the term animal for all species other than Homo sapiens. When we stop to think about it, it becomes obvious that, as Mary Midgley puts it, "we are not just rather like animals; we are animals."¹⁰ Still, we use the term as though it obviously excluded us while at the same time encompassing, unproblematically, every other living organism that moves under its own power, from gnats to lizards to coyotes to whales. Maintaining this line inviolate (at least in principle) requires defining individual creatures, species, and even qualities, habits, and capacities as one or the other: either human or animal, social or natural, intellectual or physical. The effort to keep the two sides apart leads to awkward and ultimately impossible claims that human beings are blank slates, with no natural tendencies, either as individuals or as a species, because that would be biological determinism. A more realistic view acknowledges that human beings are both natural and social at the same time, all the time.

The presumed division between the categories of human and animal is related to a series of other dualisms. The broadest of these is the divide between nature and culture (or nurture). Most Western traditions of thought, religious and philosophical, portray the two as mutually exclusive and opposed to each other. This nature-culture divide is necessary to maintain the strict split between humans and animals: we are creatures of culture and education, while they are products of biology and instinct. The opposition between nature and culture also represents a division within human beings, between our bodies and our minds or souls. It describes, further, presumed conflicts or differences between people, based on gender, ethnicity, class, national origin, or other features. In each case, certain people—women, natives, slaves—are seen as more natural, closer to animals, less cultured and civilized, than people in the other category.

Human-animal and nature-culture are familiar, if ultimately failed, paradoxes. They have been widely discussed and criticized, traced back to Plato, Thomas Aquinas, and Descartes, and blamed for all sorts of problems—or given credit for advances, depending on the writer’s perspective. Well-traveled though these dualisms are, they are still worth noting and examining. They are related to another, less familiar and intuitive separation—that between animals and nature. These categories are not divided in popular attitudes as much as in scholarly and some activist thinking, from both environmentalist and animal rights perspectives. Even though animals are the most powerful and appealing aspect of nature for many people, scholarship on the environment rarely discusses animals as a distinct subject, and scholarship on animals, in turn, rarely addresses nature more broadly. This split seems unlikely, even jarring, in light of the primary opposition between humans and animals. How can animals be, on the one hand, not human and, on the other, not nature?

The conflict between animals and nature rests on the dualism between individuals and wholes, which has roots in the Enlightenment, again with a substantive contribution from the omni-culpable Descartes. Descartes and other Enlightenment thinkers, along with Protestant reformers, helped transform the Western understanding of persons from integral subordinate parts of organic collectives to rational, autonomous individuals whose liberty is ever-threatened by larger wholes. Scholars of both environmental and animal studies have failed to explore the ways this anthropology shapes attitudes about animals and nature. In particular, they have failed to question the assumption that individuals and wholes are related only in exclusionary and conflictive ways. Most, in fact, tacitly accept this assumption, insofar as they believe that it is impossible to care about both animals and the environment at the same time.

Both environmental and animal advocates assume, first, that the environment is about wholes, such as ecosystems and species, and that animal welfare is about individuals. Second, both fields presume that concern for animals necessarily conflicts with concern for ecosystems. The oppositional understanding of animals and nature is grounded in the broader conflict between individuals and wholes that pervades Western (especially U.S.) social thought, both popular and academic. Like nature and culture, individuals and collectives are seen in mutually exclusive and usually competing, rather than mutually constitutive and complementary, relationships. For example, this perspective makes government appear to threaten rather than safeguard individual liberty. This presumption of opposition means that we must choose one or the other—in our case, either animals or nature—because it is impossible to care about both.

The animal-nature split leads to a final opposition, between wild and domesticated animals. Environmental thinkers, in particular, view these two categories as absolutely separate and clearly identifiable. Wild animals are the only ones that matter for many environmentalists. They are part of nature; they belong in nature; they contribute to the health and value of ecosystems, habitats, biotic communities, and other ecological wholes. Domesticated animals, on the other hand, are by definition not wild; they were created by humans to be part of human society and fulfill our needs and desires. In the case of companion animals, they live in our homes and are often considered family members. They are border creatures, poised between the social and natural world. If they are nature, how can we—the opposite of nature—live with them so intimately? In the separation of spheres, domestic animals are double losers. On the one hand, they are reviled by environmental thinkers who see them as destructive artifacts of human design. On the other hand, within human society they are always inferior and exploited, because they can never be real persons.

If animals are Other to humans, part of the wild, the world beyond culture, then how can we understand them, and they us? What do these cross-species relationships ultimately mean? These questions can be addressed only in and through practice and encounter. Experiences with real animals are vital for understanding them as individuals, as nature, as themselves, and for understanding and challenging the theoretical categories that have been so destructive. Dualism is possible because of abstraction and reification. To challenge it, we need to make use of two categories that so far have not been central to environmental ethics—relationship and practice.

The relationships between people and animals, nature and culture, animals and the environment, and domesticity and wildness are both intimate and mutually constitutive. They emerge from and are sustained by practices of both human and nonhuman agents. These relationships, conventionally understood as dualisms, have molded our thinking about animals and nature and our ethical obligations regarding each. They also deeply influence our understandings of ourselves, both as individuals and as a species. The first challenge to these dualisms is the assertion that nature and culture are not mutually exclusive. This point has been made often and well by feminist thinkers, among others, who argue that nature and nurture are more accurately and constructively seen as mutually constitutive rather than opposed to each other.

Second, the distinction between nature and nurture does not divide humans from other animals. Nature and nurture together shape the character and lives not only of humans but also of most other animals. Individuals embody this constant interaction. All animals, including humans, are endowed by nature (courtesy of natural selection) with certain capacities and tendencies. It is foolish and destructive to ignore these innate qualities, in humans or any animal. Small children learn this when they take home a caterpillar who dies for lack of the right kind of leaves, and adults learn it all over again when their offspring have opinions, preferences, and talents that appear long before any training or social conditioning can have developed them. Nature is the first part of the equation, for humans and other animals. However, social experiences make a world of difference in what people and other animals become. The human child with innate musical talent still requires training, just as the young wolf requires instruction in order to develop her innate capacity for hunting. Recent research has shown, in fact, that many nonhuman abilities turn out to be much less biologically determined and more dependent on social experiences than previously thought. Not only do young predators require instruction in hunting, for example, but many songbirds cannot sing their species-characteristic songs without hearing it sung by adult conspecifics.

Nature and culture do not divide us from other animals; nor do they divide us within ourselves. We are both natural and social, human and animal, simultaneously, in all aspects of our lives. On the other side, other animals are much more complex than we usually allow, not only in their innate capacities but in their relations to various contexts. This is true for both wild and domestic animals, all of whom are both individual agents and members of various larger communities. These conclusions are not yet a universal consensus, but neither are they mere radical speculation. Careful research in both the natural and the social sciences, examining brains, behavior, socialization, and a host of other variables, points again and again to the mutual shaping of nature and nurture. All animals,