Contemporary Discourses about Animals

Abstract

In Chapter 1, the idea that animals were the appropriate subjects of criminal punishment for their actions was introduced as a way of illustrating how animals were once understood in a different time and in a different place. This conceptualization of animals, along with the attendant power apparatuses that generated and perpetuated it – such as use of the courts, executioners, jailers, and letters of pardon – has been essentially forgotten. The discourse about animals has changed. Reality has changed. But once-knowledge that animals could be held liable for their criminal acts is an example of a discourse within our inventory of what once passed for knowledge. Our job here is to accept that way of knowing on its face, to recognize that the truth claims made within that way of knowing were subject to evaluations for veracity based upon that particular way of knowing, and to resist inclinations to rationalize that way of knowing as an aberration or as evidence of widespread delusion in our predecessors. It emerged as an historical contingency, and the conditions that allowed it to emerge may not be discernible.