We are just working on this critique with https://www.tierrechte-messel.de/inhalte/
What’s wrong with ethology
from an antibiologistic animal sociology viewpoint
Criticisms: Animal sociological criticism of ethological speciesism and ethological animal objectification
1. Biologistic reductionism
Ethology assumes that animal life can be explained mainly through biological, evolutionary, or adaptive mechanisms.
→ This reduces beings with subjective, cultural, or intersubjective existence to mechanistic solely predetermined systems. It erases the own social, “symbolic”, moral, and narrative dimensions of animal existence.
2. Objectification and disciplinary boundary work
Animals are treated as objects of observation rather than as participants in a shared social world.
→ Ethology inherits the disciplinary split Noske described: humans belong to the social sciences, animals to biology.
→ This artificial division denies animals sociality, culture, and autonomous agency. It also legitimizes the methodological distance that keeps animals “voiceless” within their own study.
3. The anthropocentric benchmark
Human categories (language, reason, morality, self-awareness) are used as the yardsticks for interpreting nonhuman beings.
→ What doesn’t mirror the human form is dismissed as primitive or absent.
→ Yet, capacities like language or reason are relevant — in their own independent, plural, non-hierarchical manifestations.
→ Ethology fails to grant equal epistemic legitimacy to nonhuman forms of expression and sense-making.
4. The ideology of “instinct”
The term instinct functions as a conceptual closure: a way to name but not understand.
→ Labeling complex communication or social behavior as “instinctual” allows science to stop asking about meaning, intention, emotion, or individuality.
→ This sustains a false contrast between “rational humans” and “automatic animals” due to a lack of leaving post-anthropogenic spaces to be part of a common, communicable knowledge.
5. Selective comparison and cognitive dissonance
Human observers accept animal similarities only when convenient (e.g., when entertaining, or confirming evolutionary continuity), but deny them when ethically inconvenient (e.g., when they imply autonomous rights, uniqueness, freedom, autonomy, a right not to be subjected to human instrumentalization and destruction, moral agency, moral as socially prudent obligations, sense, meaning, completeness, … ).
→ Ethology thus enacts selective anthropomorphism—one that reproduces rather than challenges domination.
To elaborate on this point and clarify our position in this regard, we will later revisit perspectives on morality and plural animal particularity.
6. Seclusion and ethical marginalization
Animal studies, including ethology, remain ethically secluded: descriptive and apolitical when it comes to emancipative endeavors in favor of Animal Rights ethics.
→ Ethical implications are treated as external “afterthoughts” and tied to the discourse of serving human interests in nature as a resource.
→ This seclusion allows ethology to appear neutral while its findings are continuously strategically used (for wildlife management, animal agriculture, cognitive hierarchy building, political stagnation etc.).
→ Ethical relevance is downgraded in favor of technical description.
7. Interlocked speciesism
Ethology participates in what we describe as verschachtelter Speziesismus: the nested reproduction of human-centered hierarchies across science, culture, and politics.
→ Speciesism and knowledge derived from the objectification of animals are not accidental distortions, but are structurally embedded in the way questions are asked, which behaviors are considered meaningful, and which species [that are not primarily considered as animal groups and individual animals] are examined with fixed, goal-oriented questions and with what objectives [be it their schematic cataloging] are examined at all, and in what immediate way they are examined.
8. Fear of anthropomorphism as censorship
Noske notes that scholars fear attributing subjectivity to animals, lest they be accused of anthropomorphism.
→ This fear acts as a disciplinary control mechanism that suppresses empathy, relational observation, subjectivism auf Augenhöhe, and alternative epistemologies.
→ The result: animals are continuously studied through frameworks that exclude their subjectivity by design.
9. Epistemic arrogance / lack of humility
Ethology often assumes it can translate or decode animal communication through human conceptual tools.
→ However, as we describe in a fragmentary approach in our Thoughts about the languages of animals (Edition Farangis: Animal Autonomy E-Reader, Volume 5 (2024), No. 2, p. 6., https://d-nb.info/1341108945/34 , [09.06.25]), animal forms of expression may not be translatable within the semiotic boundaries of humans — and therein lies part of their value.
→ A just approach requires epistemic humility: recognizing that human knowledge is partial, and that difference ≠ deficiency.
10. Loss of context and relationality
By abstracting behavior from lived context (controlled observation, lab or statistical generalization), ethology erases relational meaning. In particular in omits the animal view on humanity as a steady factor to address.
→ Animals’ communications and interactions are stripped of personal, historical, or cultural specificity.
→ This mirrors how humans erase the social histories of those they dominate — a methodological continuation of objectification.
11. Denial of continuity in the social and cultural
Even when ethology admits biological continuities (genetic, anatomical), it usually denies social or cultural ones and on the other side independence of animality, for all that entails.
→ This selective continuity maintains the myth of human exceptionalism: only humans have “true meaning”, are ends in themselves so that they cannot be subjugated in their state of being inherently free.
→ An antibiologistic view argues instead that social and cultural continuity is also real, so is the capacity of inherent freedom and meaningfulness – plural and heterogeneous.
12. Instrumental function of “neutral” science
Ethology often claims objectivity and neutrality while its data feed directly into systems of control (zoological parks, lab research, behavioral conditioning, wildlife policy).
→ “Neutral” observation thus has material consequences — it legitimizes domination.
→ The claim to neutrality becomes an ideological shield.
13. Denial of structural causes of speciesism and animal objectification
By framing species hierarchy as “natural,” ethology conceals its historical and cultural roots.
→ It denies that speciesism and the choice to take an objectifying look at animality is produced by human cultures, individually or as institutions, and worldviews, not by “nature.”
→ The refusal to see its own foundations reproduces the very hierarchies it observes.
However, since ethology itself is deliberately positioning itself within a limited framework, thereby purposely omitting contexts that would incorporate philosophically relevant questions into its approach, a dehistoricized and non-cultural perspective, which forms the focus here, remains conclusive and sets a standard for approaching epistemological questions. History is formalized as evolution, with the assertive presumption that the crucial aspects of animal history can be summarized in such broad, highly schematic terms.
14. Exclusion of mythic, symbolic, and ethical imagination
Ethology’s worldview is impoverished by its exclusion of myth, narrative, and symbolic approximations and dialectics — dimensions through which human societies have long made sense of animal others, in affirmation aswell as in negation.
→ The antibiologistic view values these as epistemic resources, not superstitions that can be deciphered taking into account that there are two agents mirrored in any such overall referential narrations.
→ Without them, science cannot reach ethical or ontological depth, since here we find successful or destructive messages of relational history.
15. Lack of dialogue with animals’ own terms
Perhaps the most fundamental failure: ethology does not engage in dialogue with animals.
→ It measures, but does not listen, for a lack of will to employ an emancipatice inclusive approach as a bilateral process that would seek parity.
→ Animal expressions are collected and described as data points, not as distinctly referent to speaking, complete, hypercomplex voices. This caters to speciesist status quos more than seeking progress from the epistemic angle.
→ An antibiologistic animal sociology calls for conceptual frameworks that take animals’ communications as meaningful acts of world-making — not as “signals” in an equation. And finds that the lack of our understanding mirrors our closedmindedness to higher complexity in communicational systems or practices.
We summarize and conclude as follows:
Ethology, as it is commonly practiced, remains an epistemology of distance.
It translates living beings into data and denies them their world-shaping autonomy.
Its biologism transforms existence into function; its fear of anthropomorphism transforms empathy into error; its structural speciesism and objectification of animals transform domination into objectivity.
An anti-biological animal sociology rejects this arbitrary limitation.
It attempts to understand animals as social, ethical, communicative, cultural, and socio-moral subjects whose worlds and dimensionalities cannot be viewed separately from their contexts with the entire natural world—in which they are “sapient” species. And this insight cannot be reflected without breaking with speciesism and the ethology’s mode of objectification.
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