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The original versions of the papers collected in this issue were given at a conference, In the Company of Animals, held at the New School for Social Research in April 1995 which was part of a multi-institutional collaboration organized under the auspices of Social Research. It was the third in a series of such collaborative projects, all of which have certain common features. Each has entailed a public conference at the New School and collaborations with other New York City cultural institutions around a shared theme. Each of them has been motivated by a serious and contested contemporary social issue, but none of these projects focuses on the policy issues. Rather, they attempt to examine the cultural and historical roots of these issues, which are frequently forgotten in the heat of the on-going debates, by approaching them from many different perspectives.
In the Company of Animals examined our relationship with other animals over time and in different cultures through a public conference at the New School, a poetry reading organized by the American Academy of Poets, and exhibits and other public programs at the Pierpont Morgan Library, The Asia Society, The Museum of African Art, and the Jewish Museum.
The motivating issue behind In the Company of Animals is the current, and often inflamed, debate about what our proper relationship to other animals ought to be. The papers given at the conference, and revised for this issue, explore how our relationships with animals have evolved over time and place, and how they reflect different understandings of what it means to be human. What becomes clear in reading the papers in this issue, if it is not clear already, is that the delineation of human/animal relationships occurs in all cultures, and in all cultures this boundary is a matter of great significance.
The question of our proper relationship to other animals is a question with a long history-as long as the history of' our species. Throughout history and in all places, animals have been an important part of human culture. They have been hunted and domesticated, befriended and eaten, worshiped and feared, romanticized and demonized, studied and mythologized. Reflections upon our relationships with them have been continuous and are expressed in our traditions, arts, literature, religions, and sciences.
How we live with animals has changed dramatically in the course of human history. In agrarian societies, non-human animals were an integral part of daily life. In contemporary, post- industrialized society, we know animals primarily as pets and objects of occasional observation in moments of leisure. These changes have had profound effects on how we conceptualize and understand our relationships with them. Because our contemporary attitudes have deep roots in the past, an important aspect of this project is the illumination of the close relationship between how we live and the ways in which we have understood our relationships to other animals.
The last session of the conference directly confronted some of the currently contested issues surrounding the question of our proper relationship with other animals. This session of the conference had a different format than all the others which are reflected in this issue. In the concluding session, panelists responded to a series of questions posed by Andrew Rowan, the moderator of this session. For this issue, the panelists were invited to respond in writing to the questions posed by Rowan rather than presenting formal papers. This discussion was deliberately placed at the end of the conference, and is the last section of the issue, because we hoped that embedding the policy discussion about our rights and responsibilities to other animals in its cultural context would increase the likelihood of a more dispassionate and informed discussion. I think you will see that it did.
The conference would not have been possible without the generous support of the Howard Gilman Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Esther and Joseph Klingenstein Foundation, and, finally, Ms. Caroline Williams. We are deeply indebted to them. Arien Mack
Part 1. Categories
Part 2. Histories
Part 3. Keynote Address
Stephen Jay Gould
Part 4. Representations
Part 5. Sameness & Difference
Part 6. Everyday Life
It is appropriate to begin a wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between people and other animals with a section on classification. Whether acknowledged or not, this powerful intellectual act necessarily precedes any further dealings with animals, however utilitarian. Without ordered categories, there is no way to make sense of information, which is almost the same thing as saying there is no information. Both the title and the subject of this collection, and of the conference in which it originated, include significant taxonomic discriminations: the identification of animals as a significant, coherent group, and the tacit exclusion of human beings from that group.
Most bodies of material neither define their own boundaries nor provide their own indices, although this taxonomic neutrality may not be obvious to those who use them. Different people identify and structure such bodies of material in different ways, reflecting their various interests, needs, social contexts, and historical experiences. Alternative solutions to any classificatory problem are likely to be revealing. Why is one person's sacred cow another's Bos taurus? The interest and significance are heightened in proportion to the cultural centrality of the material to be classified. As the essays in this section demonstrate, animals have been among the core concerns of Western culture for at least as long as it has left records, and there is no reason to assume that they have had less importance in other cultures or at earlier periods.
Animal taxonomies reveal much more than what animals are like, or what they do, or how they are related to each other. For example, in the heroic founding period of scientific taxonomv- that is, the eighteenth century- the ability to deploy this much ballyhooed, ostensibly new intellectual technique became a marker for the classification and ranking of groups of naturalists, as well as groups of animals. In the age of Newton, structured schemes of classification gave natural history some claim to disciplinary dignity, and distinctively separated its practitioners fro the unscientific chaos that they attributed to medieval and renaissance bestiaries. The extent to which they valued this distinction is indicated by the claim of one English interpreter of Linnaeus, that whoever could not give an animal "its true name according to some system . . . does not deserve the name of naturalist" (Linnaeus, 1759, pp. xx-xxi). Without systematic classification, it was feared, naturalists might be considered "mere collectors of curiosities and superficial trifles ... objects of ridicule rather than respect" (Pulteney, 1805, p 11).
In part because of its enthusiastic appropriation by enlightenment natural history, taxonomy is often considered to be the preserve of botanists and zoologists. But scientists are riot the only ones keenly interested in the animal world; indeed the nature of their interest can be seen as partial and idiosyncratic, and their taxonomy, therefore, as an analysis produced by a particular intellectual elite. Farmers and poets, hunters and trainers, among others, have evolved classifications that express and expedite their own relationships to animals. These classifications exist in parallel to scientific taxonomy and do not yield often to its authority, even in a direct confrontation. It is, after all, thousands of years since Aristotle opined that dolphins were not fish, but many people remain unpersuaded. And non-scientific taxonomies can be as illuminating as scientific ones with regard to both classifiers and classified.
Linnaeus, Carolus, Miscellaneous Tracts..., Benjamin Stillingfleet, trans. and ed. (London: RJ. Dodsley 1759).
Pulteney, Richard, A General View of he Writings Of Linnaeus (London: J. Mawman, 1805).
In his parable Penguin Island ([1908]1931), Anatole France relates how the old, blind monk Saint Mael inadvertently baptized a group of penguins, mistaking them for human beings. When the news reached heaven, it caused, so we are told, neither joy nor sorrow but extreme surprise. The Lord himself was embarrassed. He gathered an assembly of clerics and doctors, and asked them for an opinion on the delicate question of whether the birds must now be given souls. It was a matter of more than theoretical importance. "The Christian state," Saint Cornelius observed, "is not without serious inconveniences for a penguin.... The habits of birds are, in many points, contrary to the commandments of the Church." Who could deny that a penguin, once burdened with a soul, might get into unforseen- and undeserved - difficulties? After lengthy debate, the elders in heaven settled on a compromise. The baptized penguins were indeed to be granted souls, but, on Saint Catherine's recommendation, their souls were to be "of small size."
This section of the conference continues the discussion begun in the first section of the shifting boundaries between human and animal beings. Where shall we draw the line between ourselves and them:?Who has a soul, and who has not? Who is in, and who is out? Who possesses those paradigmatically human qualities of consciousness, intelligence, language, free will, dignity, moral status, legal rights, and so on?
In most cultures, for most of human history, people's solution has been to opt-like Saint Catherine-for some less than absolute answer. While recognizing that no non-human animal can be in every way human, people have readily granted that particular animals may be more or less human in particular respects. The lion at times can be kingly, the fox can be sly, the ant industrious, the dog faithful. And equally-since the analogy runs both ways a man or woman can be lion-like, or monkeyish, or foxy, or dogged. For Shakespeare, Mark Antony's "delights were dolphin-like, they show'd his back above the element they lived in" (Antony and Cleopatra, Act V, Scene ii).
This kind of recognition of a similarity that falls short of identity has not only been descriptively convenient and poetically creative, it arguably has been philosophically and scientifically sound. To the question, "Are animals people, and should they, therefore, be granted the respect and honor due from us to others of the human family," the correct answer, biologically and metaphysically, is, obviously, "No." To the question, "Do particular animals have human sides to them, and should we, therefore-for our own sakes as well as theirs-treat them from time to time as honorary humans," the answer is, obviously, "Yes."
Such a solution is not, of course, a tidy one. It can mean in practice that our relationships with animals become complex and thoroughly non-linear. We can hold multiple, even seemingly contradictory, attitudes to the very same animal-we may choose to enslave, worship, consume, abuse, befriend, hunt, play games with, grieve for it-all depending on which aspects of similarity or dissimilarity we choose to emphasize. And if there seems to be an inconsistency in our having these criss-crossing relationships, perhaps it exists only in the minds of observers who think we are intellectually and morally obliged to think about and behave toward animals in all-or-none ways: either admit them to the human club or bounce them from it for all time; either let them through the pearly gates or lock them out; either give them full-blown souls or none at all.
The three papers which follow address this issue of "in" or "out" from different perspectives. Harriet Ritvo, from her deep knowledge of Victorian culture, examines how classical ideas about the human-animal dichotomy were forced reluctantly to accommodate to the emerging proofs of evolutionary kinship. Stephen Glickman's essay on the myth and reality of the spotted hyena brilliantly uses a single case history to illustrate the tragi-comic side of human attempts to impose our own cultural frames on nature. Jerrold Tannenbaum addresses the issue of human rights, reviewing the history of protective legislation and arguing boldly against absolutist attitudes on either side. Perhaps the one thing these papers have in common, besides their focus on the relativity of human culture, is the lesson that human beings-some of them-have small souls too.
France, Anatole, Penguin Island, A.W. Evans, trans. (London: Franklin Watts, [1908]1931).
The essays in this section represent explorations of variously fictive ways in which the representations of animals have been shaped and employed in human discourse. Humans have deified animals or given them ancillary roles in their pantheons; they have imagined them as the objects of mythological metamorphosis and given them quasi-human status; they have given them language, reason, character, and personality in both oral and written fictions; they have continued to observe animals, both domestic and wild, and tried in different ways to give what could be considered variously authentic accounts of them. Imaginative constructions of the names, natures, and dispositions of animals throughout human history, thus, have been based upon knowledge and observation and the very fabric of metaphor out of which those constructions are built. The ways in which other creatures are seen to be identified with, or similar to, the humans who construct those identifications are themselves varied, and the matters considered in the papers which follow are samples of a whole range of others.
Nicholas Howe's exploration of the realm of animal fable remarks on the long history of a literary mode starting in our literature with Aesop and continuing with undiminished fecundity to the present clay. Immune to the pressures of realism that gradually shaped the development of the novel during the last two centuries, the exemplary tale of animals possessed of human speech and displaying human moral and social traits seems to have an imaginative life of its own. In the first of these essays, Howe looks at some extremely sophisticated medieval revisions of Aesopian models.
The treatment of animals in the history of prose fiction since the eighteenth century, on the other hand, has attempted primarily to engage the actualities of- primarily domestic- animals in their interaction with humans in society. The particular interest of Gerald Vizenor in the second essay in this section is to examine some of the more poetic resources of later twentieth-century American fiction, particularly that of Native American writers, in making animals, both wild and domestic, present in non- naturalistic ways.
Similarities and differences between us and animals have been a great focus of human interest for millennia, in cultures of the most various sorts. The title of this session is striking, though, in that it does not ask us to consider samenesses or differences between us and animals but sameness and difference. The title itself, then, suggests an all-or-nothing issue: is there some really big essential difference between us and animals- or is there some fundamental sameness? The title alludes to attempts, past and present, to see the relation between us and them in these all-or-nothing terms. So, for example, Descartes asserted that our essence as rational beings marked a great gap between us and animals. We have immaterial minds which are, in this life, intimately connected with our bodies. Animals, in contrast, are material beings; they are intricate machines, utterly without the kind of awareness that distinguishes us. Hume, in contrast, argued for continuity, for a fundamental similarity between us and animals. Even our reason, in which we take such pride, is, he argued, continuous with that of animals. He rejects the Cartesian conception of reason as a distinctively human capacity and treats it instead as a kind of instinct, shared with animals, although ours is greatly superior in degree to that of animals. And later Darwin famously argued for continuity, giving many instances, including emotional and aesthetic responsiveness.
Duane Rumbaugh, one of the three participants in this session, notes that human beings have repeatedly "sought lines of argument and fact" which would mark us out as totally differem from animals. When such attempts to find a fundamental difference are made, the capacity to use language, which we have and which animals seem to lack and which is so closely linked to rationality, has been a central issue. Stephen Clark has argued about attempts to distinguish human beings from animals on the basis of the use of language that, whatever exactly we define its linguistic capacity, when animals are shown to have that, we go ahead and redefine linguistic capacity. Language is being made to serve as the basis of difference; so whatever they- the animals- can do, we shall mean something else by language.* Clark made that point in 1977; in the years since then, the developing body of experimental work on the linguistic capacities of the great apes has been met by new accounts of why what the great apes do is, supposedly, not really language. Not only is it not really language, the argument goes, it never will be-no matter what else imaginative experimenters contrive to get the great apes to do in the future. In our own thought about this issue, we can profit greatly from seeing what the data really are-what the animals actually are able to do. Rumbaugh himself provides a marvelous close-up view of what some of our nearest relatives can do when they are brought up in circumstances which strongly encourage the development of linguistic capacities like our own.
Both Daniel Dennett and Colin McGinn are concerned with a twentieth-century version of a question raised by Descartes, whether the kind of awareness associated with a self or mind is a unique possession, ours alone, or whether it is shared by all animals-all, that is, who are able to see or hear or smell or use any sense, who are able to feel fear or hunger or cold or pain. The question is an important one in part because it has been taken to have such weighty implications for our moral relations to animals. The topic of this session, thus, has a pivotal significance within the conference as a whole. We may be concerned about whether there is some fundamental difference between us and animals because such a difference, it seems, would justify subordinating them entirely to our interests. But we may ask also whether the idea of such a difference is precisely something we construct to rationalize such subordination. Both McGinn and Dennett point out that our moral views may shape our answers to the question of whether animals do share such important properties of ours as sentience. McGinn emphasizes that "invasive" experimentation on animals can be squared with our conscience more easily if we persuade ourselves that animals are not genuinely subjects of experience, and he claims too that it is no accident that psychologists who have engaged in the most morally questionable sorts of experimentation have been behaviorists. And, while Dennett does note that Descartes himself has been falsely accused of engaging in callous experimentation justified by his view of animals as machines, it is certainly true that a Cartesian view of animals has been used to justify treatment of animals which would otherwise seem to raise serious moral questions. It is easy to agree with Dennett that much thinking about animal consciousness has been distorted by people's desires to support their moral and practical commitments, but we might note that the examples which he gives of one-sided treatment of the evidence are all examples of people who take animals to share fundamental human capacities. The one-sidedness is hardly all on that side.
The dispute between McGinn and Dennett has at its center the question whether animals which have sense experiencesense experience which is important in their capacity to find food, to mate, to escape predators, and so on-are in general actually aware of what is experienced. During the conference, much discussion focused on the possibility of what one might speak of as "unfelt experience," as, for example, the "unfelt pain" caused by the position of one's limbs during sleep, which can lead one to change the position of the limbs (see the Postscript section of Dennett's paper). Might all the experiences of animals be like such experiences, that is, capable of playing a role in the adaptability of the animal to its surroundings yet not the object of any awareness? If this were so, animals could indeed be said to have pain, but they would not genuinely suffer (I might mention that the first time I ever heard it argued that although animals had pain they did not suffer, the argument was put by a man defending his experimental procedures.) Dennett himself does not argue that it' the pains and other experiences of snakes, say, are not anything the snake is aware of, it follows that we may treat snakes as we treat tires, but McGinn would claim that that conclusion does follow. And opponents of the animal rights movement have used arguments like Dennett's to draw exactly the conclusion which Dennett himself does not draw.**
Here are two questions which are suggested by the extremely interesting papers in this session: (1) We are concerned especially with the linguistic capacities of animals and with animal awareness. These are Cartesian issues, and the conception of animal awareness in the discussion was itself a Cartesian conception, in a modern form exemplified for McGinn by Gottlob Frege and for Dennett by Thomas Nagel; the conception of what it would be for animals to lack Cartesian awareness was also Cartesian. It was a conception of animals as non-conscious machines; but is the only alternative to an updated Cartesian machine view the metaphysical selfhood argued for by McGinn? During other sessions, discussions of animal capacities, and of their similarities and differences from us, were not framed in Cartesian terms. Much of Vicki Hearne's account of her work with animals, for example, is framed in terms which come from the sharing of life and work with animals. Might our understanding of questions about animals and our relationship to them be improved if we were able to break free of the hold of the Cartesian alternatives?
(2) Do we not need to examine the idea that our moral relation to animals depends on whether they share some fundamental property? McGinn begins his paper by saying that it would be widely agreed (he presumably means agreed by contemporary moral philosophers) that moral concern can be appropriate for some entity only if it satisfied some psychological condition. But should not that widespread agreement itself lead us to wonder whether we are not taking for granted something which needs more questioning than it gets? Many people, on the basis of that assumption, do conclude that a very seriously retarded infant is not a proper object of moral concern. But equally many would regard this conclusion with horror and would reject the assumption on which it rests. Our moral and imaginative vision may itself shape our understanding of likeness and difference, as came out in other sessions of the conference. "Am not I a fly like thee?"
*Clark, Clark, 1977, pp. 94-105, on the attempt to draw a sharp
distinction between us and animals on the basis of rationality and
language.
**See, for example, Carruthers, 1992, Chapter 8.
Carruthers, Peter, The Animals Issue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Clark, Stephen R.L., The Moral Status of Animals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
The three excellent papers in this session confirm the underlying truth of this conference-that a discussion of what we humans think about animals is inseparable from what we think about ourselves. From quite different starting points, the papers suggest how humans use the boundary between man and animal to negotiate a number of other boundaries central to the human experience-the boundary between men and women, between the human and the divine, between the tame and the wild, between the engineered and the natural. just as the boundary between man and animal is a blurry, shifting, and contested one, so also are those other boundaries humans use to make sense of their experience and their history.
Thus, for instance, what is it that distinguishes natural from unnatural sex? We will think differently about that boundary after reading Wendy Doniger's rich presentation on myths and bestiality. Or, in considering Matt Cartmill's masterful overview of hunting, we will be forced to reconsider how humans have frequently changed their understanding of the boundary between technology and wilderness. Andrew Rowan's perceptive account of animal research, where the boundary between human benefit and animal rights is sharply etched, leads us to reflect anew upon human standards of social Justice and compassion.
Being "in the company of animals," it is obvious, forces into human consciousness a long list of vexing questions about What it means to keep the company of ourselves.
The three papers perform a second function as well. They are a useful bridge from the wide-ranging and reflective discussion in the past few days to a review of public policy questions (the final session of the conference). For while all three of the papers are philosophical and historical, they each point toward issues which have attracted intense public attention in recent times- laws governing sexual choice and behavior: gun control and who "owns" nature; and, of course, the rights of animals in the context of scientific (or cosmetic) research. The policy questions are not resolved, but they are intelligently situated in a broader context than one gets from the conventional policy conference. In this fashion, then, the authors have well-served the rationale that led to the organization of "In the Company of Animals."
Matt Cartmill is professor of biological anthropology and anatomy at Duke University Medical Center. He is the author of "Significant Others" (1995) and "Reinventing Anthropology" (1994).
Juliet Clutton-Brock is a member of the Department of Zoology at The Natural History Museum in London. She is the editor of the Journal of Zoology and recently published "Origins of the dog: Domestication and early history" in James Serpell, editor, The Domestic Dog (1995).
Vicki Croke is the "Animal Beat" columnist for The Boston Globe. She is currently writing The Modern Ark: Zoos Past, Present, and Future (forthcoming).
Daniel C. Dennett is Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He recently wrote Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995).
Cora Diamond is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. Her most recent work is The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (1991).
Wendy Doniger is Mircea Ellade Professor of the History of' Relgions at the University of' Chicago. Site is the author (under the name of Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty) of Other Peoples' Myths: The Cave of Echoes (1995) and Textual Studies for the Study of Hinduism (1990).
Stephen E. Glickman is professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author (with L.G. Frank, P. Licht, T. Yalimkaya, P.K. Suteri, and J. Davidson) of "Sexual differentiation of the female spotted hyena" (1992).
Stephen Jay Gould is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University.
Vicki Hearne is an author, animal trainer, and poet. She is the author of Bandit: Dossier of a Dangerous Dog (1991) and Animal Happiness (1994).
John Hollander is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of The Gazers Spirit (1995) and the editor of Animal Poems (1995).
Nicholas Howe is the Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (1989).
Nicholas Humphrey is professor in the Department of Psychology at the New School for Social Research. His most recent publication is Soul Searching (1995).
Colin McGinn is professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. His most recent work is Problems in Philosophy (1993)
Joy Mench was an associate professor in the Department of Poultry Science at the University of Maryland when she prepared her article for this issue. She is currently a professor in the Animal and Avian Sciences Department at the University of California at Davis.
J. Anthony Movshon is Director of the Center for Neural Science and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Center. He has written numerous articles in the area of neuroscience.
Kenneth Prewitt is President of the Social Science Research Council.
Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Profesor of History at MIT. She recently published "Classification and Continuity in The Origin of Species in Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species (David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace, editors,1995).
John G. Robinson is Vice-President of the International Wildlife Conservation Society. He edited (with K.H. Redford) Neotropical Wildlife Use and Conservatism (1991) and recently published "The Wildlife Conservation Society 100 Years of Rectitude" (1995).
Andrew N. Rowan is Director of the Tufts Center for Animals and Public Policy. He is the author of The Animal Research Controversy (1995).
Duane M. Rumbaugh is Regents' Professor of Psychology and Biology at Georgia State University and Director of the Language Research Center in Atlanta. His most recent publications include "Anthropomorphism revisited" (1994) and "Language in comparative perspective" (with E.S. Savage-Rumbaugh, 1994).
James Serpell is associate professor of human ethics and animal welfare in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People (1995).
Kenneth J. Shapiro is the Editor of Society and Animals. He is currently working on Animal Models of Human Psychology: Science, Ethics, and Policy (forthcoming).
Jerrold Tannenbaum is clinical assistant professor at the Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. He is the author of "Benefits and Burdens: Legal and Ethical Issues in Veterinary Specialization.
Gerald Vizenor is professor of english and Director of the American Studies Summer Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. He recently published Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader (1994) and Manifest Manners (1994).
Nicholas Wade is a science editor at The New York Times.
