To the Editor:

Given our dominant culture of domineering anthropocentrism, Kathy Rudy ("A Change of Heart," The Chronicle Review, December 2, 2011) is surely right to underscore the importance of metanoia when it comes to advocating on behalf of animals. However, she is just as certainly wrong to present this as a novel outlook on animal ethics.

She charges that interspecies moralists "implore us to take the interests of animals seriously, but not necessarily to be involved with them at the bodily and emotional levels." This criticism ignores at least two decades of feminist and Continental moral philosophy that has emphasized precisely the affective and embodied aspects of animal ethics. Recent exemplars include Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan's anthology The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics and my monograph Corporal Compassion: Animal Ethics and Philosophy of Body. These volumes mark lines of scholarship that go back to the late 1980s in the work of their own authors and others such as Marti Kheel, Greta Gaard, and Elizabeth Behnke.

Nor is it plausible to dismiss this research tradition as being too abstract or insufficiently spiritual, as Rudy appears to claim or imply in the book from which her essay was excerpted. Moral-sentiment theory and care/body ethics are replete with the particulars of transspecies narratives and religious experience—as is testified by Anat Pick's contemporaneous book Creaturely Poetics (which is rooted in the thought of Simone Weil).

While Rudy's participant observations among zoophiles in the field are to be commended, they would only be enriched were she to invest more care at the library.

Ralph R. Acampora
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Hofstra University
Hempstead, N.Y.

From chronicle.com:

 As someone immersed in animal studies and posthumanism, I just wanted to say that this piece in no way reflects (does not even approach) the complexity and nuance with which theorists in these fields are exploring similar issues. This piece is either excessively watered down for a general audience or mostly ignorant of the work coming out of these fields in the last 10 years.

hoytmirbeau

This is a thoughtful exploration of different ways to understand animal rights, and as a former dog owner, I certainly agree with the author's desire to bring the actual interactions, especially the good ones, between humans and animals back into the conversation.

The problem, however, is that this piece is on the fuzzier side, pun intended, when it comes to defining the basis of animal rights in the first place. Do those animals that behave as if they have something approaching a free will deserve some protections, whereas the ones that behave merely based on instinct do not? Or is that a far too logocentric view for this women's-studies professor? Perhaps we just defend those animals that are cute and cuddly and eat the rest.

And, if we truly want to bring our evolution into this discussion, then it is worth noting that the development of the human brain is in part a result of the ability of our dumber hominid ancestors to extract more nutrition from animals that they hunted and killed, because they had basic stone tools with which they could crack open animal bones to get at the marrow, and also because they began to use fire for cooking meat.

Our very humanity thus has its origins in eating the flesh of tasty animals, and a strict vegan diet is extremely detrimental to the development of young children. So it seems that our best bet is to do the careful work necessary for figuring out which animals are intelligent enough to warrant protections of various kinds and, more important, to figure out what their intelligence is good for. Service dogs, for instance, have improved the lives of numerous individuals, and I suppose pigs could be trained to do some of these jobs as well.

jfetter

"Animals" is a term that encompasses 1.2 million-plus species, only a small portion of which have the attributes that are discussed in Rudy's essay. While evolution "tells" us that we're all made of the same "stuff," most of the panorama of animal life in no way has the capacity for reason and emotion. The most primitive animals, sponges, lack a nervous system, and the sequence of subsequent invertebrate bauplans reveal decentralized ganglionic nervous systems that respond with a complexity close to that of a mousetrap. Human interaction with mosquitoes must take into account the tremendous human suffering that these disease vectors cause. In most of this discussion, it appears that what is being discussed is really mammal rights, or bird-and-mammal rights.

There are many more complex and rigorous distinctions to be made relative to the enormous gulf between humans and other highly derived animals that are not discussed here. Those distinctions, and they are not trivial, are why we are sitting in classes studying animals and writing books about them, and not vice versa.

John Richard Schrock

On "Our Animals, Ourselves," by Justin E.H. Smith (The Chronicle Review, December 2, 2011), from chronicle.com:

A very engaging and well written article, but I have major philosophical misgivings about its conclusions.

"[H]uman beings lived in a single community with animals, a community that included animals as actors and as persons."

How is this not anthropomorphism? Likewise, talk of animal rights is anthropomorphic. This is not merely a matter of saying, yes, animals should be treated better, or no, animals are completely different from humans. It is a matter of understanding the words we use and that they matter and have important consequences.

Bear males coupling (and preferring to couple) with human females: How is this not mythology?

An imagined fox residing in a side pasture: This is fiction, not reality.

Are we animals? Yes, of course. Are all animals persons? No, this term applies to humans only. Do animals have rights? No, rights imply duties and a shared linguistic community.

That animals are part of our environment and the stories we have told that have formed us and our view of the world is not the same as saying that they are part of our community and are actors and persons.

This difference between other animals and humans is not merely a matter of Christianity demonizing animals. It is based on our living in cities with laws and morality—a matter of how having a language ties us to one another in every aspect of our lives. Think of how Aristotle characterizes the human being as zoon logon echon and how Seneca understood that as animal rationale.

maxbini