Environment and Nonhuman Animals

Antibiologistic Antispeciesist Animal Sociology: Environment and Nonhuman Animals

From: Edition Farangis: Animal Autonomy E-Reader, Jahrgang 2, Nr. 2, 2020, ISSN 2700-693X, https://farangis.de/reader/edition_farangis_animal_autonomy_reader_2020_2.pdf

The Anthropocene is the age of faunacides and the ecocide: the lived narratives of nonhuman animals carry the imprints of a human psychology that seems to be built on speciesist humiliation. Environmentalists fade out the concrete affected fates of nonhuman animals and therewith this central incidence of human destructivity is being avoided thematically.

Environmental protection and Animal Rights. Dividing lines drawn between animals and the environment

In our view environmental protection movements are relatively ‘soulless’ humancentered events these days. Supposedly progressive campaigns to protect biodiversity and against the extinction of species are hardly affected by the actual daily injustice that the nonhuman animal world in general and animal individuals/groups/families … experience.

How can the avoidance of consistently animal-ethical [1] questions be explained in large parts of today’s environmental movement? Why are animal fates not integrated into environmental issues in such a way that an indispensable link to animal rights issues would be associated with them?

Animal questions are included at present mostly only to that extent as relevant

a.) as animal existence was manipulated by humans in such a way that it can be classified as environmentally harmful,

or however

b.) to that extent in which one wants to ‘functionally’ protect “wild/non-domesticated” animal species as constituents of an ecological community.

Animal questions predominantly encountered in environmental protection contexts are:

• Damages to the environment as a result of industrialized “animal husbandry”/mass animal husbandry counts as an urgent factor that calls for action (with concern about the effect on climate and in that context human interests/survival, the subjective narratives of farmed nonhumans are considered more or less irrelevant).
• Animal fates are if at all, only of “emotional” importance, remain anecdotal and no consequences result in the direction of animal rights.
• Native animal species are worthy of protection in context of functions and sheer existence, while invasive species may be ‘destroyed’ [2].
• Animal species are to be bred – think of captive breeding programs/conservational breeding – under conditions of captivity in zoos, to preserve the genus.
• Hunting quotas are allowed, hunting is understood as being “close to nature”.
• Animals as resources for ecological products

Animals beyond their affiliation to these and related fields (farm animals that are harmful to the environment and wild animals that are supposed to appear and function in their ecologically ancestral habitats), to which they are mainly assigned, do not really play a role because of their self (yet one must add here that there is still a striking number of vegans and even animal rights activists who tend to subsume animals as a species and do not want to consistently prioritize animals as individual creatures with their own stories).

But how should one also deal with the animal other, when even “nature” – i.e.  nature in all its fine connections and living components – is regarded in a de-spiritualized way, even if “loved/admired, faced in awe, etc.” by humans, because it is the beautiful and useful foundation of our biological basic existence. The way contemporary society views nature is usually derived from a science-dominated world view. New independent, emancipative and perspectivically less restricted views of nonhuman animality and “nature” are still in the minority.

Natural sciences when used as an explanatory model for life, is non-emancipative and it does not account for the living subject. Life is being explained by the composition of individual, dissectable building blocks and does not remain intact [3]. In its examination of and contact with life and areas of life, the natural sciences would have to take the detour to the humanities and social sciences to regain “soul-relevant” starting points in relation to their subject. But “spirit” and “society” are the sphere of human self-definition, and nature and the animal world still appear there primarily in terms of anthropocentric questions of self-interest, and therewith from the perspective of explanatory models guided by natural science, [4] which show a relegation of nonhuman animality into definitory realms that seek to restrict all aspects of the defined living subjects.

Perhaps the only alternative would be a religious or spiritual view of the human environment as a whole, which is not very suitable for stepping out of its own anthropocentric traditions and dogmas though. Historically, the spiritual canon from which the present has been derived, has been handed down, and questionable views from then are still the cradle of many questionable views from today. A cultural break has not yet taken place in the history of thought with regard to anthropocentric human-animal-nature relationships. [5]

Humans are not an irrefutable center of their environments

Why doesn’t the environmental movement create a direct reference to nature as a living environment and world that requires new environmental-ethical epistemologies and not just scientific models which again depend on the state of how far societal comprehension of “environment” works? In the current animal rights and environmental movement, it is interesting to observe that a new way of thinking is being fought for, yet without rethinking the issues in such a way that we would move out of the retained definitional fetters of anthropocentrism (one has to look at the concrete thematizations of the problem complexes, so I will not continue this point here [6]).

By anthropocentrism I do not mean that one can perceive “human” existence in any particularities. Anthropocentrism is a problem because it regards certain models of human-dominant (and destructive) behavior towards nonhuman life as legitimate, and rejects as unthinkable models in which humans can adopt a pacifist, different attitude and role in a fellow world that he/she befriends with and is socially on a shared multifaceted level with.

Human “civilizing” developments could have indeed grown and flourished on nature-sensitive planes, even if the majority-conformist member of the “human” group tends endorse stances in undifferentiated ways that set forth that civilizing developments could never or cannot take place without destroying and subjugating nature.

Hence we have the strong myth about the importance of hunter-gatherer cultures as the “root” of humanity. The subjugation of “nature” was in that view indispensable for the survival of all humanity and the basis of human self-awareness. As if the survival of humans was an ideologically determined dictum that had to be done at all costs in only one conceivable form, and from which it can also be deduced that everything can legitimately be subjected as a means to an end, if it serves human survival and “progress”.

The interesting thing is, one sees “being human” as such a homogeneous mental condition, in which no other cultural and individual ideas of life could occur. At any time there will have been human conceptions, which have refrained or wanted to refrain from violence towards their fellow-world – in my opinion this cannot be excluded at least not reasonably [7].

The “human” self-image plays an essential role if we want to challenge the majority-attitudes of our fellow human beings towards their fellow world

A change in environmental protection affects all areas of contemporary life, we are in every way involved through our mere physical existence in systems and mechanisms that use and manage, monetise and destroy the world as, what human societies define as their “resource” [8]. If we persist in solely demanding that politicians alleviate the symptoms, then this is not going to change those areas of life which cannot be regulated by political decisions, for example the dynamics of markets driven by consumer demands and the associated consequences resulting from demands for and productions of “goods” [9], let alone cultural factors that imply nature-derogative activities of people and societies.

Environmental protection, as well as animal rights, must indeed include a process of emancipation for society as a whole, i.e. awareness, attention and alertness for significant issues must be created where previously there was fading out and ignorance, and the growing awareness must be incorporated into the daily social discourse. If this does not happen, stagnation will take place, as is currently the case in veganism in Germany for example: there we are increasingly deal with a reduction to the label, instead of critical discussions about animal-derogation and speciesism, which were originally the ethical drivers behind the international movement [10].

In the environmental movement similarly, the tendency towards greenwashing is often difficult to distinguish from the real thing, and the natural environment is still constantly seen as a resource rather than a living community and space that needs to be protected from human interference qua rights, because of the lack of fundamental discourse [11].

The anthropocentric view:

The nonhuman “natural” world as a “resource” should be preserved for our benefit and pleasure and for our survival (perhaps as a space of human self-realization?) seems to be the idea. The wildlife species should be preserved in the overall picture of our idea of biological diversity, even if we have to breed them in captivity and we like to release surplus specimens for shooting [12]. The domesticated animals and their problems are not understood as such, they should simply no longer be a burden on the environment and are not of socio-ethical interest [13].

The gulf that anthropocentrism creates between humans and nonhuman environments remains that only human life can be given special appreciation and sensitive perception – at least in principle. Of course our well-meaning societies as a whole also generate gaps within their communities, but at least certain ethical ideals seem settled for as goals.

This separating attitude, which divides between “humans” and “nature” in a hierarchical, judgmental way, takes place unquestioningly in the environmental movement as well. It is not the case that automatically every person who stands up for “nature” or “the animals” has a profoundly emancipatory and sensible attitude towards the cause (the same applies to human rights issues naturally). Yet such projections take place, perhaps in the hope of a new and more enlightened ‘better’ human being.

Since the animal rights movement (as already criticized above) up to now also sticks almost exclusively to the biologistic point of view, which is especially applied in the case of viewing nonhuman animals, the environmental movement does not receive any valuable impulse from that side to develop a morally more comprehensive approach in the self-critical analysis of the human-nature-nonhuman relationship.

Some people may now claim that this would leave only an “animistic view” of the world to take non-biological positions on the issues that are normally determined by the scientific view. But that would mean deliberately excluding the valuable recourse to one’s own experience and observational values and the possibilities of putting these in critical relation. The observations that the individual human being as a subject makes about their environment and their living with it, have, regrettably, often remained unused.

More specific:

We observe things about society, about ourselves and about other people, there are no or hardly any limits set for us, on the contrary, the free space of subjective experience carries a special meaning … but if humans contextualizes themselves from their own point of view with nonhuman animals, with the plant world, with the whole nonhuman existence, as it exists and tries to exist in the world, then human are supposed to distrust their subjective, own independent world of thought as a standard of assessment or of setting relations, they must instead always take the detour of certain ways of definition …

“Nature”: biology – has the supreme interpretive power for it; philosophy – ascribed specific spaces intended for nature, the same applies to spiritual religious ideas with regard to nature > everything “nature” is limited to confined spaces.

“Animals”: biology – and the very narrowly defined terrain in the history of thought that the traditional history of “mankind” has so far knowingly dedicated to animals.

There is supposedly no need for the achievements in self-thinking and one’s own observation and evaluation. And one accepts this, thus making oneself an accomplice of anthropocentric views that find their expression depending on the spirit of the times.

Our criticism of the current environmental protection movement, as it is conveyed in its mainstream, would be summarized as follows:

• one focuses on a future that places “humans” [14] at the center as the sole priority; the question of the future, let alone the present, of the nonhuman animal world as a whole does not arise. There is no expansion of socio-ethical ideas that include animals as social actors and as eco-social actors/agents
• certain aspects of environmental destruction are focused and politicized with catalogs of demands, while environmental destruction is a comprehensive process (an anthropocene development), the CO2 discussion alone represents a shortened view, but various concerns can and must be a topic simultaneously to address societal causes
• the citizen is not addressed as the key to the solution, solutions are to be decreed “from above” at the party political level by decision-makers. The lifestyle that people want to practice for themselves is not affected as long as no fundamental discussions about people’s attitudes towards “nature” are stimulated. The image of everything that is nonhuman on earth should be discussed, so that reflection and debate can be recognized as socially relevant
• the protest movements act choreographed and promote little individual exchange of ideas, which in turn would promote a basis for raising awareness in intra-societal micro-discourses
• small specialized initiatives are often not recognized as an important pluralistic building blocks
• in a society that has made itself dependent on expertise, we need concrete demands for subjects such as environmental ethics at more universities and also at schools, e.g. subjects of this kind should be able to grow openly through a lively and critical discourse on the relationship between human/environment and vice versa! It requires a broadly formulated catalog of demands to initiate discussion and awareness on the grassroots levels
• the complete and sole authorization of scientific findings on the topic of “environment” limits the discussion on “environment/destruction”. Yet social, intellectual, political, economic barriers are not automatically resolved by an awareness of the developments of climate change. Humans accept environmental destruction, as we can observe on the whole. To make a selective turnaround now, because one’s own human future is at stake through environmental destruction, is not to outgrow the old anthropocentrism. One protects nature to help oneself in the end. A slippery slope and not a process of fundamental change
• the higher valuation of concerted media effectiveness compared to less centralistically functioning communication channels. The higher value of exchange with social elites, instead of using debate and dialog as an opportunity for social evolution at the citizen level
• despite the corona pandemic, zoonoses have only been addressed as an environmental problem to a limited extent in environmental movements, some environmental influencers have highlighted the problem, but the movement as a whole has not seen the bridge that was made visible here as an opportunity to claim the environment as a habitat for wildlife (…) and to emphasize the joint protection of both

Even if something concerns mainly nonhuman animals (and also veganism), when it concerns the ecological aspect, nonhuman animal topics become thematized in very reductive ways. A quite remarkable example are ‘Animal Rebellion’, one assumes that with the name all animals would be meant, the campaign evolves however around that aspect that agricultural animal husbandry has a negative effect on the environment. The single, individual nonhuman animal killed for consumption is an untreated and unclear issue here … and the peer campaign “Extinction Rebellion” is about protecting wildlife species to preserve biodiversity. Animals as individual subjects remain marginalized in their own space, despite their right to protection. The consequences of different speciesisms for different animal groups do not seem to exist if the focus is on ecological issues.

I miss fine lines in the environmental movement and the de-technocratization in the explanatory definition of the overall phenomenon of “environmental destruction” by humans. Environment and environmental protection are not questions that can be answered technically alone. Neither is it a question of obedience to scientific data and knowledge; they are part of the observation of the catastrophe as a whole and in parts, but they do not replace the possibilities of perception of environmentally harmful behaviour on all conceivable levels, which are accessible to everyone. Destructive behavior is a problem even if the future of humanity was not affected by it. And destructive behavior towards nature is cumulative, being composed of a thousand and one harmful norms of action.

Technocratic environmental protection

Environmental issues are not just topics that can be analyzed and addressed solely from the point of view of the natural sciences. The attitudes of people towards related subjects and “nature” itself must be examined in detail, which in the history of mankind led and leads to the attitude that the environment is simply a bottom-line “exploitable resource”. There are different attitudes of people towards their environment, we should look at how this can occur in eco-socioethical ways. And, it is now a lamentable fact that on just such a technocratic and scientific and little sociological ground there is an attitude to keep questions of animal ethics out of the environmental debate. This omission expresses that it does not matter that we have torn animals out of nature and forced them into our torturous spaces conceived for them, and that the animal world may continue to be murdered and humiliated by humans as long as it is done in an ecologically sustainable manner.

Questions of injustice with regard to nonhuman animal life as “earth children” (as a thought-image or metaphor), play no role in environmental protection. A distinction is made between ecologically essential symbioses, native and ‘useful’ animal species and “the animal” itself, which is not really an issue, as autonomous subjects [15].

Why should animals be protected from human destructiveness as a matter of principle and why should a question of ethical reprehensibility about the dominance over nonhuman animal life play a role for environmentalists? What is the concrete connection between nonhuman animal life and “nature” for environmentalists? One would have to create a map to illustrate this, and one would see that the nonhuman animal as an experiencing subject does not appear explicitly on this map so far. [16]

Animal rights activists themselves often inhibit questions of injustice and refer to social levels based on “instincts” in what their think of as “species-appropriate“ ways, as if Animal Bodies were led by biological determinants and as if their lives could theoretically be completely grasped and defined by “us humans”. [17]

Freedom and injustice only play a role in humans. Don’t they?

Anthropocentrism: Very well, nature is thus to be protected, but no injustice can happen to nature and its inhabitants (in the negative), and freedom (in the positive) is only something that humans experience – such conceptions are to be found in one form or another again and again in the common-ground intellectual property – nature itself has nothing to do with “freedom” – it  is “mindless”. “Spirit” (and thus actually “sense”) is tied to human existence and human self-reflection, and such concepts serve as a knife edge between man and the earthly rest.

But humans want to breathe this “spiritless” matter, and they want that certain animals in freedom help to shape nature, bees and beetles, birds, rodents, the animals on the land, in the air, and those in the sea … but they draws clear limits to whom alone a domain over “spirit”, “freedom”, and “sense” is to be directly attributed. “Nature” seems to be understood by humans as lifeless and spiritless, and as mere matter, at least since the moment they began to use and instrumentalize its constituents on the ‘idea-level’ and the ‘practical-level’ [18].

Animals stand in the same way behind this boundary of “spirit” and “sense” (since not human) [19], some we tear out of the cycles of their self-chosen and self-designed habitats, others are allowed to live on in an administered “wilderness”, all are kept in check within human limitations, and not least in the intellectual and theoretical notions about them. Animals are denied their autonomous consciousness, and our observational parameters and the provability of certain characteristics are forced upon their existence, which leads again and again to the conclusion that their behavior is “determinable” and can be explained by “instinct”. The human paradigms about “being a nonhuman animal” provide all definitions and understandings of an “animal”: a limitation of freedom on a definitional level, which we routinely perform.

Environmentalists complain partly (I deliberately say “partly” here, because some problematics are exceptions: Hunting, Native/Invasive Species and Captive Breeding) about an unethical treatment of wild animals, but chickens, pigs, cattle … horses … everything has, if occurring in a ‘sustainable’ way, its ancestral place in the basic utilization of human environments and “the environment”. Animal self-experience, intrinsic value or self-importance do not count socio-ethically for humans, if they cannot be grasped by humans to date. And there the anthropocentrism begins again.

We should become able to accept a pacifist and protective attitude towards life in the world that we may not be able to grasp according to schemes known and/or accepted by us. It is sometimes a fine balancing act how the/any individual/group is involved in the world. As a friend or as an egomaniac and possibly more destructive.

We don’t understand this current stagnant situation and it is the point that constantly irritates us about the environmental movement: the omission of animal fates. We do not need a protected environment where animals are slaughtered and dissected, humiliated and hurt. Nature and animals belong together and we authorize ourselves to objectify their lives and the existence of “nature”, both.

We do not recognize ways to perceive nonhuman animals as subjects in a reasonable way and we do not recognize ways to understand nature not as a “means to an end” and as a “resource” to serve human interests, but as a highly complex fine “all-life”, as an ecological coexistence that manifests its own intelligences. If we were to recognize this, then we would also be able to prioritize such a view thematically.

We as authors don’t understand how one can separate the environment from the human-animal relationship and the animal world. Our existences have been in conflict with each other since humans thought of themselves as a kind of “crown of the creation”. How can this part of the history of the Anthropocene be so extremely blended out of the case analysis of what is destroying the world?

Don’t mainstream environmentalists realize that environmental destruction first and foremost has an underlying psychology, and that it is just as little a matter of course to destroy nature and animal life as it is to exert arbitrary violence against fellow human beings? Ecocide and faunacide are destructive claims to power by humans over nonhuman animals and nature.

Litter the world: factual, mental, material, immaterial

How do environmentalists want to prevent that too many other people consume goods and commodities excessively and carelessly in order to keep up with mass-effective trends, that people have no problem with producing endless “garbage”, that majorities of people still do not take the “natural” spaces into consideration, because they think of their own advancement in the way “as before”, because in their individual and social life “nature” as a whole is just matter to serve us.

It is also “serving matter” when people want to protect nature because of their own future, and when they put exactly that in front of their activism as an argument instead of drawing attention to the fact that it is about the future of the world itself. The only difference between “average people” and the classic environmentalist is that the environmentalists want to keep the environment intact longer, so that mankind can continue to be “human”; as it has always been in principle. Therefore it would be enough if everything was “sustainable” and “organic” – there seems not really much more to say about the solution and the problem solving. In the past everything was so that it could be called “sustainable” and “bio” and it was still violent, destruction, anthropocentric claim to power, etc.

The person who realizes that environment is not a determinant and not a causalistically functioning intelligence-less space (nor a place in the sense of biblical definition), but rather an end purpose as life in itself, etc. – with all the consequences that result from this realization – will not be found in the average public sphere so far.

Notes:

[1] For the sake of simplicity, I use the term “animal ethics” here in its literal sense, without taking into account a reference to other ways of using the word, such as the term in its strictly bioethical context, including its influence through its use in the animal experimentation industry to attempt to establish its own legitimacy, or in its implementation of scientific reading on the subject.

[2] A particularly good description of the conflict that arises from the question of ‚invasive species‘ between animal rights and environmental protection is provided by Vasile Stanescu: The “Judas pig”: How we kill “invasive species” under the pretext of “nature conservation”, https://simorgh.de/about/stanescu_judas_schwein/

[3] Even if Ortega y Gasset gave unforgivable expression to his speciesism with his supportive attitude towards bullfighting, in this passage he formulates an interesting attitude towards “nature”: “We humans have divided the world into subjects, for we do belong to the species of classifiers. Each subject corresponds to a science, and within it is included a pile of reality fragments that we have picked up in Mother Nature’s immense quarry. We possess the debris of life in the form of these small piles of fragments, between which there is a – sometimes capricious – correspondence. To come to such soulless possessions, we had to dissect the original nature, we had to kill it. ORTEGA Y GASSET, JOSÉ, Collected Works in Four Volumes, Volume 1, Stuttgart, 1950, p. 40

[4] Barbara Noske questions the assignment of animal themes to the biologistic by describing the situation in anthropology. She formulates it aptly:

“Biology and ethology have somehow become the sciences of animalkind. It is from these sciences that social scientists (the sciences of humankind) uncritically and largely unwittingly derive their own image of animals and animalness. Animals have become associated with biological and genetic explanations.

This has led to an „anti-animal reaction“ among scholars in the humanities. They bluntly state that evolutionary theory is all right for the interpretation of animals and animal actions but not for humans. Hardly any critic of biological determinism will stop to think whether animals indeed can be understood in narrowly genetic and biological terms.”

in “The Animal Question in Anthropology”, https://www.animalsandsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/noske.pdf , https://simorgh.de/about/noske-die-tierfrage-in-der-anthropologie/

[5] In an interview that I conducted with Kim Socha about her book ‚Animal Liberation and Atheism‘ we discuss the question of the extent to which religion and science are linked – at least in their anthropocentric attitude towards the nonhuman world, https://www.simorgh.de/objects/interview-kim-socha-animal-liberation-and-atheism/ , https://simorgh.de/about/drei-fragen-an-kim-socha-ueber-tierrechte-und-atheismus/

[6] The individual and holistically understandable life of “nature” itself is not the reason to protect it, but the reason for protection is always the importance of nature for humans. It may be that under certain circumstances people do not even know how to speak about “nature” in a different way. In poetry and novels this can work, but unfortunately not yet in the argumentation basis for environmental protection. The diffuse “love of nature” is a real treasure trove of differences in the way people think about their own humanness in the world. But there must still be ways to respect, value and protect nature and the animal world as a great human-ethical claim.

[7] Vita Activa by Hannah Arendt is a true bible about the human/natural environment relationship, although unfortunately Arendt never really dealt with the animal question. I am surprised why the environmental movement has never taken up Arendt’s ideas and observations in a broad way. Arendt also addresses interesting questions about the relationship between man and nature in:

ARENDT, HANNAH, thinking diary 1959 – 1973, first volume, Munich, 2002.

“Solidarity: All solidarity concepts still carry clear traces of the first and most original solidarity of all humans (thus humans) against nature. But such solidarity of one against everything else is never allowed among humans. There is no unconditional solidarity. The “we are all in the same boat” is an example of false, absolutizing solidarity.

The concept of group, together with its reference to the partial whole category, stems from the solidarity of man against nature.” (S. 127)

“[…] The element of destruction in all manufacturing: The tree is destroyed to become wood. Only wood, but not the tree, is matter. Matter is therefore already a product of man, matter is destroyed nature. ‘The human artifice’ […] arises when man treats living nature as if the material had been given to him, i.e. when he destroys it as nature. The wood is the death of the tree. […]

Just as God created man, but not men, and certainly not peoples, so God created nature, but not matter. […]” (S.61)

[8] The harsh mechanisms of destruction that we observe can best be described in their dimensions by the term “ecocide” that is now used. For the global problem of human destructive behavior of the nonhuman animal world there should definitely be a comparable term. I myself use the terms zoozide referring to the Greek ‘zoos’ and/or faunacide respectively. ‘Therios’ in Theriocide literally refers to mammals and might lean to incidences as singular acts of violence, not so much to ideological aspects. Professor of Green Criminology Piers Beirne coined the term theriocide as a general term for the human killing of nonhuman animals. A term is necessary and the question arises as to why, from an animal rights point of view, no summarizing word has yet been found for the atrocities committed against nonhuman animals, despite all the knowledge of the ethical catastrophe, and also why environmentalists have not yet been able to include this dimension of destruction, because the symbiosis of animals and nature alone is decisive for earthly existence and as animals in farms or labs have only brought into this situation by us humans.

[9] Ideas and practice of alternative ways of life must be implemented from the grass roots level up. Party politics will hardly be able to make themself independent of established economic mechanisms, and therefore promise “prosperity” and “progress” in the traditional form, which can be more difficult to change radically than change through mutual education and empowerment.

[10] In the first Vegan News from 1944 Donald Watson writes about the foundation of the vegan movement: “We can see quite plainly that our present civilisation is built on the exploitation of animals, just as past civilisations were built on the exploitation of slaves, and we believe the spiritual destiny of man is such that in time he will view with abhorrence the idea that men once fed on the products of animals’ bodies.” https://www.simorgh.de/objects/first-vegan-news/ , https://simorgh.de/about/vegan-news-no-1/

[11] Steven Bartlett describes humancentered attitudes in relation to the natural environment as a simultaneous cause of foreign and self-destruction. In this context he mentions the following, in my opinion, ‘in-between’ view of a biologist on environmental protection:

“One of the few ecologists brave or idealistic enough to stand up for this degree of species-selflessness was the biologist Dan Janzen, who worked on the conservation of species diversity in the Guanacaste Conservation Area in Costa Rica […] Janzen was one of the few who did not link the importance of species survival to their benefits to humans, much like Christopher Stone’s respect for the legal rights of natural objects in the environment regardless of human interests, benefits and profits. Janzen said, ‘yes, people want to save this forest because maybe they could find a new active ingredient or a new way of pest control or to attract tourists, but none of these reasons (sic) is the reason to want to keep this as a wild land. For me there is only one goal: that this biodiversity survives’. https://simorgh.de/animallaw/bartlett_33-67.pdf

[12] Topics related to this: Canned Hunting, hunting quotas worldwide, in Germany the situation of wolves e.g.: https://simorgh.de/about/woelfe-und-tierrechte/

[13] To thematize animals and their fates in the subjective perception ‘between subjects’ is an important path in the new discovery of the significance of soul-language, emotive engagement with animals and their experiences. The project ‘Faunary Press’ by Marie Houser deals with this perspective: https://www.ourhenhouse.org/2013/09/bodies-of-literature-fiction-is-activism/ ,  https://simorgh.de/about/houser-erzaehlliteratur-ist-aktivismus/

[14] Syl Ko discusses “the human being” as a construct that serves an excluding supposed ideal image to which all people who do not correspond to the one ideal image of “the human being”, and all nonhumans have been confronted as inferior, https://simorgh.de/about/an-interview-with-syl-ko/ , https://simorgh.de/about/ein-interview-mit-syl-ko/

[15] The separation between ecologically essential symbioses, native and ‘useful’ species and the animals themselves, which are not really an issue, for themselves, was described by Karen Davis in “Thinking like a chicken: farm animals and the feminine connection”, https://www.upc-online.org/thinking_like_a_chicken.html ,  https://simorgh.de/tierautonomie/JG2_2015_1.pdf

[16] Barbara Noske has made critical observations about the divisions between the animal rights and environmental movements https://simorgh.de/noske/noske_22-33.pdf, while Anthony Nocella, for example, has observed connections between the radical manifestations of both movements https://simorgh.de/about/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/kritische_tierstudien.pdf.

[17] Again and again, the rhetoric of many animal rights activists seems to follow humancentric explanatory models instead of developing their own terminology. One bends towards reductive definitions of the animal opposite instead of creating new space for own new understandings, observations and evaluations. A liberation is to take place, but not in the fundamental view of human/animal identities, https://www.simorgh.de/objects/what-is-an-animal/

[18] The world of pantheism, for example, which reveals a soulful view of nature and all its living beings, can actually only be assigned in an arbitrary way to a sole Creator God. The self-creation of the world and being in the world could never appear quite meaningless in mystical thought.

[19] Indeed, it is on the one hand not so clear how the attitude towards meaning and “human” and “animal” could have always been as it is. The discussion about animal mythologies should allow a view of partly very different views on animals. I have made these two short attempts https://simorgh.de/niceswine/mythologien-und-folklore-kroenleinnattern-und-basilisken ; https://simorgh.de/niceswine/fragment-on-insect-mythologies-and-representations  , https://simorgh.de/about/fragment-ueber-insektenmythologien/  to learn from mythology. Especially language is understood as a separating characteristic between identities, but the question what we understand as language and under which aspects we recognize communication as language should be asked. My fragment about a fundamental questioning https://www.simorgh.de/objects/thoughts-about-animal-languages/.