Pets and People: The Ethics of Our Relationships with Companion Animals CHRISTINE OVERALL (ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017; 328 pp.; $36.95 (paperback) (original) (raw)
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Humans' Best Friend? The Ethical Dilemma of Pets 1
The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate the need for a reassessment of the moral status of pets. I argue that pets rest on an undefined ethical borderline, which brings several puzzling problems to both human-centered ethics and animal ethics and that neither of these fields adequately handles these issues. I focus specifically on human relationships with companion animals as one of the most significant interspecific relationship involving humans and pets. I also show that a deeper questioning of the moral status of pets is a required step toward the moral rethinking of human-animal relationships.
Humans’ Best Friend? The Ethical Dilemma of Pets
Relations
The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate the need for a reassessment of the moral status of pets. I argue that pets rest on an undefined ethical borderline, which brings several puzzling problems to both human-centered ethics and animal ethics and that neither of these fields adequately handles these issues. I focus specifically on human relationships with companion animals as one of the most significant interspecific relationship involving humans and pets. I also show that a deeper questioning of the moral status of pets is a required step toward the moral rethinking of human-animal relationships.
Ethics and Human-Animal Relations: Review Essay
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2021
This review essay considers five recent books that address the ethical dimensions of human-animal relations. The books are David Favre, Respecting Animals: A Balanced Approach to our Relationship with Pets, Food, and Wildlife; T. J.
Animal ethics in its liberal, analytic style of academic writing can suffer from a form of excessive individualism that lacks a full view of life as experienced by many animals. A range of arguments against using and enclosing animals, or in favour of certain (pre)conditions of captivity, can be found to have a tendency to focus on generic and isolated individual organisms. In its most extreme form, this type of ethical thought sets up a truncated notion of the animal as separate from their conspecifics, limits animal interests to the desires of solipsistic individuals, fails to appreciate meaning that may emerge in human-animal relations, and renders invisible a range of concerns of animal ethics in view of the communal character of animal lives. Through a critical reading of the previous four chapters, this one will trace the extent to which reasoning in terms of welfare, freedom, capabilities or dignity may lead to granting attention and value to (many) animals as the idiosyncratic, relational, sociable beings which many of them are. Or can be, even in captivity, and even in the age of humans.
Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animal Relations
Annals of Science, 2013
In 2005 a small group of academics gathered at the University of Western Australia for a modest yet highly significant interdisciplinary conference focused on scholarship in the emerging field of human-animal studies. A critical mass of academics from the University of Tasmania attended that first conference and pledged to host a second human-animal studies conference two years later. True to their word a second human-animal studies conference was held in Hobart, Australia, in 2007. The organisers called the second conference "Considering Animals" and the book under review here is a compilation of papers presented at that conference. The first striking feature of the book Considering Animals (hardback version), is the artwork on the dust jacket (Figure 1). While some may not pay a book's dust jacket much heed, I view Considering Animals stunning cover-art as quite a coup. In an age of publishing rationalisation and belt-tightening, I imagine that the editors must have fought hard for permission to display a colour image on the book's cover; and for the inclusion of such a large number of pictures throughout the book. If this is the case, then their persistence paid off. Not only is Yvette Watt's cover-art beautiful and thought provoking in and of itself, it also serves to remind readers that this book is dealing with a highly interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry. Human-animal studies is not only about words. It is about images, representation, art and interpretation. One of the most noteworthy features of the biannual Australian Animal Studies Group, and the Minding Animals, conferences is the extent to which visual and other creative artists contribute to the field. With the use of such powerful cover-art the editors give effect to the contribution made by creative arts to the emerging discipline of human-animal studies. The book opens with a forward by well-known ecologist Marc Becoff and an introduction by two of the book's editors: Carol Freeman and Elizabeth Leane. The remainder of the book consists of 14 papers by (often prominent) academics, all of who presented at the 2007 University of Tasmania "Considering Animals" conference.
Animal Training sits towards the uncomfortably overt end of human dominance. It can involve familiar kinds of harms but, as commentators such as Vicki Hearne and Donna Haraway have pointed out, it can also enhance animal contentment, capabilities and autonomy. However, unlike socialization, it is not a basic requirement for animal flourishing. The extent, and circumstances under which it is legitimate are, consequently, an area for human-animal negotiation rather than a domain in which a strict paternalism is legitimate.
Animals Are Our Relations - Preface
Relations Beyond Anthropocentrism, 2013
Two firsts are to be celebrated. The first is the inaugural volume of this journal, Relations, and the second is The Emotional Lives of Animals, the first conference of its kind in Italy. Together, they signify the continuing emergence of Human-Animal Studies in Italy and across the world. I understand Human-Animal Studies (HAS) to mean the study of our relations with animals and their relations with us. "Our interest lies in the intersections between human lives and human cultures", writes Margo DeMello, "and those of nonhuman animals, whether real or virtual" (DeMello 2010, XI).
Animal Ethics: Toward an Ethics of Responsiveness
Research in Phenomenology, 2010
The concepts of animal, human, and rights are all part of a philosophical tradition that trades on foreclosing the animal, animality, and animals. Rather than looking to qualities or capacities that make animals the same as or different from humans, I investigate the relationship between the human and the animal. To insist, as animal rights and welfare advocates do, that our ethical obligations to animals are based on their similarities to us reinforces the type of humanism that leads to treating animals-and other people-as subordinates. But, if recent philosophies of difference are any indication, we can acknowledge difference without acknowledging our dependence on animals, or without including animals in ethical considerations. Animal ethics requires rethinking both identity and difference by focusing on relationships and responsivity. My aim is not only to suggest an animal ethics but also to show how ethics itself is transformed by considering animals.