Search Results

This chapter shows how Giorgio Agamben's anthropological machine not only deploys ascriptions of animality in order to include or exclude humans, but also assigns apparent similarities with, and differences from, humans, in order to subject nonhuman animals to judgements of worth and entitlement. It deploys the figuration of bestia sacer, as a mirrored other of Agamben's homo sacer, in order to argue that the anthropological machine provides a means of determining who counts, and who does not, for all animals, whether human or nonhuman. Through providing answers to the question of who is like whom, who is not, and why and how this matters, it produces rationales for practices of inclusion and exclusion tailored to circumstance. The chapter concludes by suggesting that bestia sacer, the excluded nonhuman animal, is contained not only in zones of exception outside the protection of the law, but exists also within neo-liberal citizens.

This chapter argues that the legal system should recognise animal rights one step at a time. It outlines the various obstacles to the recognition of the basic legal rights for any nonhuman animal including physical, economic, political, religious, historical, legal, and psychological rights. The chapter contends that animals should have rights if they have something called practical autonomy, and discusses the relevant issue of the abolition of human slavery in the U.S.A.

This chapter begins by asking whether infants can form category representations for nonhuman animals, via what stimulus attributes such representations might be formed, and whether infants are forming these category representations on the basis of stimulus images presented in the laboratory. It then discusses whether infants categorize humans, and whether the category structure that infants use to represent humans differs from the structure they use to represent nonhuman animals. Also considered will be the stimulus information infants use to represent humans, as well as whether infants respond to human images presented in the laboratory based on knowledge about humans acquired prior to arrival at the laboratory. The chapter concludes with the thesis that what infants know about nonhuman animals can be likened to what novices know about generic object categories, whereas what infants know about humans can be likened to what experts know about their domain of expertise.

This chapter discusses issues concerning the awarding of new legal rights to nonhuman animals. It argues that animals should, in an important sense, be allowed to own themselves, and explains what this would mean in practice. The chapter suggests that one of the main problem of the animal rights movement is the tendency of their leaders to support only the purest philosophical position, regardless of political feasibility. It also considers the present possibility of moving towards the recognition of new rights for animals by awarding them the status of equitable self-ownership.

This chapter assesses the issue of nonhuman animal research. It offers a provocative and challenging conclusion to the discussion of moral progress and to the volume as a whole. It determines some methodological considerations of an adequate non-ideal account of animal experimentation. It presents a vision of what morally permissible animal experimentation requires, why it is in the interest of researchers as well as their animal subjects to transform the practice accordingly, and how can it bring it about. It also addresses two features of considerable moral importance: dependence and vulnerability. This chapter shows that the status quo of animal experimentation is morally unacceptable.

This chapter addresses the question of how definite and how important the distinction between humans and nonhuman animals is. It begins with a survey of the very varied and often very close relations between them. It then discusses the ideas that men have souls; that men are, or that most of them, at any rate, sometimes or even often are, truly free agents, moved by will and not merely by instinct, on the one hand morally responsible for what they choose to do and, on the other hand, because of their freedom, not to be made predictable and manipulable by having their conduct explained by their nature and circumstances together with laws of human and social science; and that men alone are the appropriate objects of direct moral consideration, the only bearers of rights, the only moral ends in themselves. The chapter asks whether the actual differences between men and animals give an adequate foothold to the exclusive status accorded to human beings. It argues that in no case is the total exclusion of animals from the respect and consideration men are accustomed to giving themselves justified, although the differences that really exist between men and animals can be reasonably argued to have some qualifying consequences for the morality of our treatment of the latter. If that is right, there are, in the case of each of the interesting ideas involved, two possibilities. Either we can conclude that animals too have immortal souls, free wills, and moral rights. Or we can conclude that since they do not, we also do not.

Infantile amnesia was a term first used by Freud over 100 years ago to refer to that period very early in an organism's life when memories that are formed tend to be short-lived or become inaccessible after a relatively short time frame. Although defined slightly differently by species, this unique memory phenomenon occurs in humans and nonhumans alike. This chapter examines the behavioral and cognitive factors in infantile amnesia in both human and nonhuman animal populations.

This chapter addresses the famous joke on “the elephant and the Jewish question,” whose prominence is attested by its many iterations not only in collections of Jewish jokes but also in works of philosophy and theory. Drawing together two seemingly unrelated terms such as Jews and elephants and pointing at their close proximity, jokes do not merely comment on the preposterous character of the “rumor about the Jews” that there is an inherent relationship between Jews and nonhuman animals. The joke also points to what escapes theory and calls out its limitations, for theory takes the Jew as well as the animal as categories, singular as they might be, that can be comprehended only vis-à-vis universals. The chapter then looks at how Jewish authors have called into question the human-nonhuman animal divide in their struggle to think through European modernity.

This chapter focuses on Deleuze and Guattari's ‘becoming-animal’. Deleuze and Guattari's animal is one of the specific concepts that attracted Baudrillard's critical attention. His ‘The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses’ developed a sustained critique of their position. Here, the chapter takes Deleuze and Guattari's thesis that there are three animals — Oedipal, State, and demonic; and far from being a general taxonomy, they are ontological categories defined by the intertwinement of desire, technoscientific experimentation, and investments of capital. This chapter thus establishes the organising theme — contagion. In so doing, it seeks to show how Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Baudrillard and SF acquire a new relevance in biocapitalism.

This chapter considers more carefully the question of just what makes a category. It argues that it is a mistake to try to completely define categories in advance of empirical investigation, because such definitions are inevitably wrong and then have a pernicious effect on subsequent scientific investigation. Thus, the attempt to describe what categories and concepts are will be based not so much on a prior definition but will reflect research into different types of categories. As we discover new and unexpected kinds of categories that people apparently have, we will have a better understanding of how categories are mentally represented and of what their role is in thought. Having reviewed these examples, the chapter then turns to more controversial cases in which it has been doubted (or could be doubted) whether someone ‘has’ a category. In particular, this issue arises for young children and nonhuman animals. If our notion of categories derives from work with adult humans, and if subpopulations of humans and other species differ from those adult people in important respects, then there are bound to be psychological differences in their representations of (putative) categories.

The first chapter explores animal-friendly beliefs and practices from a plethora of indigenous peoples around the world, through topics such as myth and scripture, autonomy and interdependence, respect and responsibility, oneness and the afterlife, kinship and community, creation and the power of nonhuman animals (including human dependence, taboos, and rituals), interpenetrability, and hunting. The chapter concludes with the stories of two indigenous animal activists, Linda Fisher and Rod Coronado (who sank half of Iceland's whaling fleet). In this chapter, a variety of religious beliefs and practices from a diversity of indigenous peoples demonstrates that indigenous religious traditions around the world share critical similarities regarding rightful relations between humans and other animals.

Attention was among the first topics of study in psychology. It has been studied with monkeys, apes, pigeons, and other nonhuman animals. The methods used to study animal attention have become more homologous to those used with humans over recent years, particularly with the advent of computer-based test apparatus. Thus, both behavioral and neuropsychological research with animals is increasingly characterized by “animal friendly” versions of classic paradigms developed for testing human adults and children. This chapter identifies seven principles that emerge across the cognitive and comparative literatures. Specifically, what rule-like generalizations can be made about attention as it is manifest across species? Experimental, psychometric, neuropsychological evidence shows that attention is a multidimensional construct consisting of at least three separable factors: focusing or selectivity, scanning or orienting, and sustaining or alerting.

Natural science has succeeded in supplanting superstition and religion as explanations for countless worldly events—from eclipses and the tides to infectious diseases and the circulation of the blood. What, then, is the relevance of mentalism to the present volume, which is concerned with the intelligence of nonhuman animals? Quite simply, mentalistic accounts of animal behavior and cognition were proposed early in the history of comparative psychology by none other than Charles Darwin. This book places cognitive ethology into logical and methodological perspective and lobbies on behalf of what may be a preferable alternative to the mentalistic movement in behavioral science. The other scientific school, termed comparative cognition, counts among its growing members most of the contributors to the current volume. This introductory chapter discusses a series of central issues in the study of cognition that separate these two prominent approaches to the comparative study of human and animal intelligence.

There is much diversity of opinion about the differences between human and nonhuman animals in terms of cognitive abilities. This chapter reviews recent research that shows how visual categorization among birds transcends cognitive limitations that are sometimes attributed to nonhuman animals. This research on categorization is viewed from the larger perspective of two philosophical positions that inform discussions on knowledge, language, concepts, perception, and other themes relevant to research on categorization. The chapter suggests that each philosophy carries with it tangible implications for what is sensible research on cognition. Studies show that pigeons demonstrate flexibility in how they memorize exemplars. That is, they demonstrate memorization strategies; pigeons switch attention between local and global levels of perceptual analysis; and in some cases, pigeons achieve levels of categorization performance that approach optimality.

This book examines the culture industry of pet mortuary rites in contemporary Japan. It considers the necrogeography of the physical and mental landscapes that have produced the current configurations of pet memorial rites in Japan. It explores what religious and intellectual traditions constructed animals as subjects of religious rituals and how pets have been subjected to inclusion or exclusion in the necral landscapes. It looks at spatial arrangements produced by pet mortuary rituals that symbolize the relationships between human and nonhuman animals, as well as the boundaries—physical, legal, and spiritual—that pet mortuary rites draw to contrast the species or cross to blur their differences. Finally, the book discusses the ways in which various kinds of animal mortuary rites symbolically reify the ontological distinctions between pets and other nonhuman animals.

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Lear considers the naked Edgar to be mad, that the unaccommodated man has dissolved into nothing but a “poor, bare, forked animal,” a statement which is, in essence, a comparative reference between humans and the bodily forms and natural capacities of nonhuman animals. Lear’s lament offers a natural-historical account of human estate, a tradition that this chapter aims to explore. The chapter argues that the discourses more commonly known today as “the happy beast tradition” are given with a more scrutinizing eye as to their actual criteria and the rationales given for animal happiness. The chapter examines the traditions conveyed by Pliny and Plutarch, as well as the responses made in Gelli’s La Circe and Montaigne’s “Apologie.”

The resurgence of interest in animal cognition was accompanied by the use of increasingly complex stimulus arrangements such as temporal events and numerosities. The renewed emphasis on cognitive constructs and theories in animal learning resulted from a dynamic interplay of a set of variables, including the “paradigm shift” in the study of human learning and memory that preceded changes in the approaches to learning in nonhumans by 20 years or more. This chapter reviews research and theory on the ability of nonhuman animals to learn, remember, and discriminate between events that differ in duration and between those that differ in number — in each case, events with temporal extension. This property of time-based and number-based discriminations raises interesting questions for research and theories of the underlying mechanisms, such as the role of memory and the weighting of events early in the sequence versus those that occur later. The chapter begins with a brief history of attempts to understand how nonhuman animals discriminate temporal intervals and moves to a brief presentation of how animals discriminate numerosities.