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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, The Politics of Species 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.
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 King
9. Great ape mindreading: what's at stake? Lori Andrews
10. Intersubjective engagements without theory of mind: a cross-species comparison Dan Hutto
11. 'Unnatural behaviour': obstacle or insight at the species interface? Lucy Birkett and Bill 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
Raymond Corbey is Professor of Philosophy and Anthropology at Tilburg University and Leiden University, The Netherlands. He has a keen interest in animal cognition and human-animal relations in various settings, ranging from hominin evolution and extant foraging peoples to the globalized economy. He is the author of The Metaphysics of Apes, also published by Cambridge University Press (2005).
Annette Lanjouw is Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and the Great Apes Program at the Arcus Foundation, the largest private funder of great ape conservation and sanctuaries in the world. She has studied bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas in the wild, and currently brings her experience in the areas of behavioral ecology, conservation strategy, organizational management, institutional development and policy to her work across Africa and SE Asia.
Advance praise:
"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 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
