The assumption that humans are cognitively and morally superior to other animals is fundamental to social democracies and legal systems worldwide. It legitimises treating members of other animal species as inferior to humans. The last few decades have seen a growing awareness of this issue, as evidence continues to show that individuals of many other species have rich mental, emotional and social lives. Bringing together leading experts from a range of disciplines, this volume identifies the key barriers to a definition of moral respect that includes nonhuman animals. It sets out to increase concern, empathy and inclusiveness by developing strategies that can be used to protect other animals from exploitation in the wild and from suffering in captivity. The chapters link scientific data with normative and philosophical reflections, offering unique insight into controversial issues around the ethical, political and legal status of other species.

• Brings together leading experts from a range of disciplines who provide contextualized illustrations of a variety of human-nonhuman relationships
• Connects scientific data with normative and philosophical reflections, offering unique insight into the ethical, political and legal status of other species
• Identifies the key barriers to a definition of moral respect that includes nonhuman animals, setting out strategies for increasing concern, empathy and inclusiveness

Reviews & endorsements

“Whereas everybody agrees that making the world a better place is a worthwhile endeavour, an open question remains: better for whom? The Politics of Species brilliantly highlights the scientific, moral and political importance of this topical question. Having done penance for their wrongs of racism, xenophobia, class hatred and sexism, Western societies need to engage in ethical reflexion about the merciless domination and exploitation they inflict on animals. In a series of fascinating case studies, leading experts from a broad range of disciplines supply such a reflexion with a rich factual and conceptual basis, linking scientific data with normative and philosophical ideas in a plea for a renewed moral vision of relationships between humans and nonhuman beings.”
Wiktor Stoczkowski, L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

“‘The speciesist postulate of a fundamental difference between Man and the animals, at least in some major religious and cultural traditions, may well find its chief raison d’être in that it comfortably soothes possible emotional concerns about our dealings with animals. Seeing others as different makes it easier to deny them rights and to exploit and enslave them. The editors of this book have to be complimented for bringing together a great collection of chapters by experts from a diversity of disciplines, dealing in depth with the various issues involved. There are more idealistic and more pragmatic stances in the book, but these all converge on the conclusion that our recent insights in animal behaviour and cognition force us to rethink and reshape our relations with animals to guarantee a sustainable and acceptable community of life forms on this planet in respectful co-existence.”
J.A.R.A.M. van Hooff, Utrecht University

Product details

DATE PUBLISHED: October 2013
FORMAT: Hardback
ISBN: 9781107032606
LENGTH: 310 pages
DIMENSIONS: 252 x 178 x 19 mm
WEIGHT: 0.76kg
CONTAINS: 34 b/w illus. 1 table

Table of Contents

List of contributors

Preface
Introduction: between exploitation and respectful coexistence Raymond Corbey and Annette Lanjouw

Part I. Moving Beyond Speciesism:

1. How speciesism undermines compassionate conservation and social justice Marc Bekoff

2. The rights of sentient beings: moving beyond old and new speciesism Joan Dunayer

3. Indexically yours: why being human is more like being here than like being water David Livingstone Smith

4. Apeism and racism: reasons and remedies Edouard Machery

5. ‘Race’ and species in the post-WW2 United Nations discourse on human rights Raymond Corbey

6. Addressing the animal-industrial complex Richard Twine

Part II. Sentience and Agency:

7. Humans, dolphins and moral inclusivity Lori Marino

8. The expression of grief in monkeys, apes and other animals Barbara J. King

9. Great ape mindreading: what’s at stake? Kristin Andrews

10. Intersubjective engagements without theory of mind: a cross-species comparison Daniel Hutto

11. ‘Unnatural behaviour’: obstacle or insight at the species interface? Lucy Birkett and William McGrew

12. Animals as persons in Sumatra Jet Bakels

13. Interspecies love: being and becoming with a common ant, Ectatomma ruidum (Roger) Eben Kirksey

Part III. Towards Respectful Coexistence:

14. Social minds and social selves: redefining the human-alloprimate interface Agustin Fuentes

15. The human-macaque interface in the Sulawesi Highlands Erin Riley

16. The fabric of life: linking conservation and welfare Annette Lanjouw

17. Home flocks: deindustrial domestications on the coop tour Molly Mullin

18. Entangled empathy: an alternative approach to animal ethics Lori Gruen

19. Extending human research protections to nonhuman animals Hope Ferdowsian and Chong Choe

20. The capacity of nonhuman animals for legal personhood and legal rights Steven Wise

Afterword Jon Stryker

References

Index

Kristin Andrews is a philosophy professor and Director of the Cognitive Science Program at York University, in Toronto, Canada. Her interests in animal and child social cognition and communication have led her to work with dolphins in Hawaii (Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory), children in Minnesota (Institute for Child Development), and, most recently, orangutans in  Borneo (Samboja  Lestari Reintroduction Project). In her recent book Do Apes Read Minds? Toward a New Folk Psychology (2012), Andrews brings together her empirical and theoretical work to argue that humans are not quite so fancy, and the other apes are not quite so simple, as some think.

Jet Bakels is an ethnologist specialized in human–animal relations, with a special interest in dangerous and categorially ambiguous animals, both in the wild and in captivity. She holds  a PhD from  Leiden University, the Netherlands. Bakels has conducted extensive Þeldwork in several locations in Indonesia. As a museum curator – now at Artis, the Amsterdam zoo – and writer of children’s books, she strives to bring issues around human–animal relations to a wider public.

Marc Bekoff is Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado and a former Guggenheim Fellow. In 2000 he was awarded the Exemplar Award from the Animal Behavior Society and in 2009 the Saint Francis of Assisi Award by the Auckland (New Zealand) Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). Bekoff has published more than 500 scientiÞc and popular essays and 23 books, including Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (2009) and Ignoring Nature No More: the Case for Compassionate Conservation (2013). In 2005 Bekoff was presented with the Bank One Faculty Community Service Award for his work with children, senior citizens, and prisoners as part of Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots program.

Lucy Birkett is a PhD candidate at the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent, Canterbury. She studied at Oxford and Kent Universities. The scientiÞc work by Donald GrifÞn, Jane Goodall, and Bernard Rollin focused her main research interest on the intelligence and capabilities of non-human primates, with a special interest in suffering.

Chong Choe is a Faculty Fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University and former Senior Appellate Research Attorney with the California Court of Appeal. Her areas of specialization include the philosophy of law, political philosophy, applied ethics, and bioethics. Her current research focuses on human and non-human animal rights and, particularly, issues of international political legitimacy, procedural justice, gender and minority group equality, and animal justice. Choe defends that the minimum constraints of justice apply in every social context, whether comprising humans or non-human animals, even against other competing economic and institutional interests.

Raymond Corbey, a philosopher and anthropologist, is an associate professor at Tilburg University and holds an endowed chair at Leiden University, both in the Netherlands. He has a keen interest in animal behavior and in human–animal relations in various settings, ranging from hominin evolution and extant foraging peoples to the globalized economy. His book, The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal–Human Boundary (2005), deals with the reception and rebuttal of evolutionary approaches in twentieth-century and present-day continental-European philosophy and in the humanities.

Joan Dunayer, a vegan since 1989, is a writer whose work focuses on non-human rights. Her articles and essays have appeared in magazines, journals, college textbooks, and anthologies. She is the author of Animal Equality: Language and Liberation (2001) and Speciesism (2004). Dunayer deÞnes speciesism as the failure, on the basis of species membership or species-typical characteristics, to accord any sentient  being equal consideration and respect. She advocates legal rights to life, liberty, and property for every sentient being.

Hope Ferdowsian is a physician who specializes in internal medicine and preventive medicine and public health at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. Her clinical, research, and policy work has focused on the prevention and alleviation of suffering in vulnerable human and non-human populations. She has led novel and innovative projects in the United States, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Federated States of Micronesia on issues including torture, HIV/AIDS, animal research ethics, and chronic disease prevention and management  in  resource-limited  settings.  Her  work has centered on the universality of basic needs, including freedom from exploitation and abuse and the importance of physical and psychological well-being.

Agustín Fuentes, trained in zoology and anthropology, is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Ranging from chasing monkeys in the jungles and cities of Asia, to exploring the lives of our evolutionary ancestors, to examining what people actually do across the globe, Fuentes is interested in both the big questions and the small details of what makes humans and our closest relatives tick. His current research includes cooperation and community in human evolution, ethnoprimatology and multispecies anthropology, evolutionary theory, and interdisciplinary approaches to human nature(s).

Lori Gruen is Professor of Philosophy, of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and of Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University where she also coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. Her work lies at the intersection of ethical theory and practice, with a particular focus on issues that impact those overlooked in traditional ethical investigations, e.g. women, people of color, and non-human animals. Her most recent book is Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2011). Her current work explores the ethical issues raised by captivity, which emerges from lessons learned from the lives of some of the chimpanzees she has come to know, respect, and love. She has documented the history of the first 100 chimpanzees in research in the US (http://first100chimps. wesleyan.edu/).

Daniel Hutto is Professor of Philosophical Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the author of several books, including Folk Psychological Narratives (2008) and Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content (2013). A special yearbook issue of Consciousness and Emotion, entitled Radical Enactivism, which focuses on his philosophy of intentionality, phenomenology, and narrative, was published in 2006. Hutto is a chief co-investigator for the Australian Research Council “Embodied Virtues and Expertise” project (2010–2013) and collaborator in the Marie Curie Action “Towards an Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity” initial training network (2011–2015), and the “Agency, Normativity, and Identity” project (2012–2015) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Innovation and Research.

Barbara J. King is Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary, Virginia. She is a biological anthropologist who specialized for many years in the behavior of monkeys and apes. Recently, via her love of bison, cats, frogs, and diverse other creatures, she has broadened her focus to animal cognition, emotion, and welfare. With her husband, she rescues homeless cats in southeastern Virginia. Her books include Being with Animals (2010) and How Animals Grieve (2013). She writes weekly at NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog and regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.

Eben Kirksey, a cultural anthropologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia, studies the political dimensions of imagination as well as the interplay of natural and cultural history. His first book, Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012), is about an indigenous political movement in West Papua, the half of New Guinea under Indonesian control. As a guest co-editor of Cultural Anthropology he assembled a collection of original research articles from the emerging field of ‘multispecies ethnography’ (2010). His second book, an edited collection called The Multispecies Salon: Gleanings from a Para-site, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Annette Lanjouw is the Vice-president, Strategic Initiatives and the Great Ape Program for the Arcus Foundation, the largest private funder of great ape conservation and sanctuaries in the world. She holds a BA in zoology and psychology from Victoria University (Wellington, New Zealand) and an MA in behavioural ecology from Utrecht University (the Netherlands), and has studied bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas in the wild. Before Lanjouw joined the Arcus Foundation in 2007 she worked for various nongovernmental organizations over two decades to further develop a supportive institutional and policy environment for integrated conservation in central Africa. She presently brings her experience in the areas of behavioral ecology, conservation strategy, organizational management, institutional development, and policy to her work across Africa and South East Asia.

David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Human Nature Project at the University of New England. His research interests are mainly in the area of moral psychology, broadly construed, and he has particular interests in self-deception, ideology, war, dehumanization, and Freud. He is the author of seven books, the most recent of which, Less than Human: Why we Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (2011), was awarded the 2012 Anisfield–Wolf prize for non-fiction. Livingstone Smith strongly believes that philosophers have a moral duty to address themselves to the general public and to make use of philosophy to try to leave the world a better place than they found it. Consequently, his work has received considerable attention in the national and international mass media. He lives in Portland, Maine, with his spouse Subrena, and their dog Zadie.

Edouard Machery is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, a Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (Pittsburgh-CMU). His research focuses on philosophical issues raised by psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He is the author of Doing without Concepts (2009) as well as the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality (2012) and of Thinking about Human Nature (2013). He has been an associate editor of the European Journal for Philosophy of Science since 2009 and the editor of the Naturalistic Philosophy section of Philosophy Compass since 2012. Machery is also involved in the development of experimental philosophy.

Lori Marino is a behavioral neuroscientist in the Department of Psychology and affiliated to the Center for Ethics at Emory University (Georgia). She specializes in cetacean and primate intelligence and brain evolution, including brain–behavior relationships, the evolution of intelligence, and self-awareness in other species. She is also interested in human–non-human relationships, non-invasive models of science, animal welfare, advocacy, and ethics. In 2001 she and her colleague Diana Reiss published the first evidence for mirror self-recognition in bottlenose dolphins.

William McGrew is Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Primatology at the University of Cambridge. He has studied wild chimpanzees for 40 years, across Africa, from Senegal to Tanzania. He first met these fascinating creatures at Gombe, at the invitation of Jane Goodall, and was hooked for life. McGrew has worked less often with captive chimpanzees, but has served on the Executive of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and on the Board of Directors of Chimp Haven, Inc., Louisiana. He has degrees in anthropology, psychology, and zoology, and all have proven to be useful in tackling chimpanzee behavior.

Molly Mullin is a visiting scholar at Duke University (North Carolina) in the Department of Cultural Anthropology. Previously, she was Professor of Anthropology at Albion College, where she began teaching courses on the anthropology of animals in 1997 while researching connections between art patronage and animal breeding, as discussed in the epilogue to her book, Culture in the Marketplace (2001). Her subsequent research has focused on animals as commodities and in relation to consumerism and anti-consumerism as well as on the cultural politics of domestication. To the volume Where the Wild Things are Now: Domestication Reconsidered (2007), which she co-edited with Rebecca Cassidy, she contributed a paper on the pet food industry. Mullin is currently writing a book about urban and backyard chickens, and a memoir on animals and anthropology.

Erin P. Riley is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at San Diego State University, California. Drawing from primatology, conservation biology, and environmental anthropology, her research primarily focuses on primate behavioral and ecological flexibility in the face of anthropogenic change and the conservation implications of the ecological and cultural interconnections between human and non-human primates. With notable publications in American Anthropologist, Evolutionary Anthropology, American Journal of Primatology, and Oryx, her work has spearheaded the emerging field of “ethnoprimatology.” She currently has two on-going field research projects: the behavioral ecology and ethnoprimatology of the macaque monkeys on Sulawesi, Indonesia, where she has worked for the past 13 years; and, the human–macaque interface along the Silver River in north central Florida.

Jon Stryker is the founder and President of the Arcus Foundation, a private, global grantmaking organization with offices in New York City, Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Cambridge, UK. Arcus supports the advancement of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) human rights, and conservation of the world’s great apes. Stryker is a founding board member of the Ol Pejeta Wildlife Conservancy in Northern Kenya, Save the Chimps in Ft. Pierce, Florida, and Greenleaf Trust, a trust bank in Kalamazoo. He earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Kalamazoo College as well as a master’s degree in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and is a registered architect in the State of Michigan.

Richard Twine is a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Research Fellow in the Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Before this he worked at Lancaster University for ten years. He researches at the intersection of critical animal studies, environmental studies, gender studies, and science and technology studies. He is the author of the book Animals as Biotechnology: Ethics, Sustainability and Critical Animal Studies (2010), as well as several articles and book chapters on ecofeminism, bioethics, and critical animal studies. A few years ago he took up running and can occasionally be seen representing the Vegan Runners club at various mass participation events.

Steven Wise holds a BSc in Chemistry from the College of William and Mary and a JD from Boston University School of Law. He currently teaches Animal Rights Jurisprudence at the Vermont Law School, Lewis and Clark Law School, and St. Thomas Law School, and has taught this class at the Harvard Law School, University of Miami Law School, and John Marshall Law School. He is the author of several books on animal rights and numerous law review articles. Wise directs the Nonhuman Rights Project (www.nonhumanrights.org), the purpose of which is to persuade courts that at least some non-human animals are legal persons with certain fundamental legal rights. Its first cases will be brought in 2013.