Search

Relations between humans and animals occur under myriad forms and with profound richness. However, taking account of these relations often poses a considerable difficulty. That humans have a strong interest in many other animals, and that humans give rise to a reciprocal interest among many animals, is an important cultural and evolutionary occurrence. Common living and the sharing (or co-constitution) of territory often give rise to social ties between humans and animals. It is important to study the material dimensions that render possible friendship between species. Distance often complicates the material proximity of these relations. The human voice and music are significant conduits of communication between species. Excessive focus on formal symbolic communication has often occluded the significant affective exchange that takes place between species by means of human voice and language. Music, as explored by Jim Nollman, constitutes a “privileged vector” of interspecies communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The dominant post-Enlightenment Western view of animals has seen them as some kind of machine, objects of no true moral significance, which it is permissible to subject to a range of treatments that would never be tolerated if practised on humans. In reality, defenders of animals, rather than being sentimentalists or somehow insufficiently attached to their own species, are far more in accord with scientific evidence and with the best interests of humanity itself. Animals are fundamentally makers and interpreters of meaning. The rejection of anthropomorphism and anecdote, and the illusion of the invisible observer, are the weapons of an ethnocentric positivism that should be rejected in favour of a strong heuristic position regarding the emotions, consciousness and abilities of animals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Paul Shepard, while rarely encoun- tering the other, nevertheless prove to be surprisingly complementary. Derrida acknowl- edges the impossibility and necessity of the human/animal frontier, thinking the human/ animal relation in a paradigm of seeing and being seen, conceived in particular in the context of a sphere of the intimate. Shepard's not merely biological but ontological interpretation of evolution argues that humans need animals, not only metabolically but for their mental development. From the positive dependence of the human on the animal follows an infinite debt that can never be repaid; but in attempting to do so lies the responsibility and destiny of the human, that most animal animal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To the three classic wounds to human narcissism – that of Copernicus (man does not live in a geocentric universe), Darwin (man is an animal), and Freud (man is not the master of his unconscious) – there must be appended a fourth wound: man is not the only subject in the universe. While most philoso- phers are unwilling to accept it, ethological research shows that animals are also subjects; indeed, in human/animal hybrid communities, certain animals can become individuals or even persons. Through animal biography, anec- dotes, and other often disqualified but nonethe- less empirical forms of knowledge, we can come to know these singular animals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]