Intimate Strife: The Unbearable Intimacy of Human-Animal Relations

Abstract

As a direct result of our cultural practices, each day species go extinct. Each day, significant habitat is lost or poisoned. Countless non-humans suffer and die in industrialised farming and laboratories. Life forms also are used by artists as media. The freedom to utilise whatever we like in our own interests is largely unquestioned. But one must ask: are all, or any, of these practices desirable or even acceptable? And if they are acceptable, why do we find them so? Also largely unquestioned is the status of human as subject, and of all else as object—as a “what” instead of a “whom”, the value of which is determined by its utility to the subject human.

Discussion on how to better human relations with non-human animals is not new. The extension of human-centred ethics or moral standing to non-human animals has resulted in some significant wins in this struggle. However, my overall goal in this chapter is to look elsewhere for revision and change in human–non-human relations (and in the non-human I include not only what we consider the animate world, but all of nature as we think it). To that end, I argue that an alternate ontology is what is required for radical and lasting change. I also briefly consider some ideas that I think might aid us in locating such an ontology.