Thinking with animals: New perspectives on anthropomorphism,

edited by Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, Columbia University

Press, New York, 2005.

Brutal Reasoning: animals, rationality, and human in early modern

England, Erica Fudge, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London,
2006.

The Sacrifice: how scientific experiments transform animals and

people, by Linda Birke, Arnold Arluke and Mike Michael, Purdue
University Press, Indiana, 2007.

1. Introductory histories

It makes sense to start with some history, or rather with some histories.
There are a number of relevant histories, which introduce these three
texts and the use of history sets the scene for an exploration of the
themes that link them.

The first of these is the history of animal studies as a sub-disciplinary site

of enquiry within the contemporary humanities and social sciences. There
is now a small, vibrant and growing group of scholars exploring and
rethinking the place of nonhuman animals in different contexts. Many of
the authors here have played a key role in the vitality of this
interdisciplinary field. The Sacrifice is written by feminist biologist Linda
Birke and UK sociologist Mike Michael, working here with US sociologist
Arnold Arluke. All three have written extensively in the past on
contemporary relations to nonhuman animals, particularly within the
biosciences. The edited collection, Thinking with Animals, includes
contributions from philosopher of science Elliott Sober, filmmaker Sarita
Siegel and professor of ethics James Serpell, with the greater number of
essays from historians of science. Wendy Doniger, Paul White, Sandra
Mitchell, Cheryce Kramer and the editors Lorraine Daston and Gregg
Mitman, present their analysis of anthropomorphism in a wide diversity of
times and places including angels in medieval writing (Daston),
experimental animals in Victorian physiology (White), celebrity elephants
in conservation practice (Mitman) and digital beasts in photographic
archives (Kramer). In Brutal Reasoning, literary scholar and historian
Erica Fudge extends the chronology back with a detailed exploration of
arguments over animal and human rationality in early modern England,
until the publication of Descartes’ Discourse on Method in 1637.

It is impossible to do justice to the full set of ideas in these texts,

particularly as I am not an historian. A thorough review of the use of
historical sources and analysis in relation to prevailing interpretations will
have to wait for another reviewer, and perhaps another journal. Yet,
reading the three texts together, something important emerges about the
complex use of these histories in giving shape to a wide range of
human/animal issues likely to be of direct interest to readers of
Biosocieties. Such histories reveal the complexity of past relations to
animals, belying the way history is evoked and simplified in public debate

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over new biotechnological interventions or conservation issues. On an
individual scale, human (and animal) biographies reveal histories of
development or descent that define boundaries between reason and
emotionality, distributing rationality to certain actors whilst disqualifying
others. Stories about the weaving together of human ideas and emotions,
technological practices and animal bodies, whether in the development of
standardized laboratory animals or the emergence of a digital animal gaze,
hint that the long durée of history also involves shifting affective relations
between these actors, which may be changing what it means to be human.

There are also more immediate stories told by authors about the growth
of interest in animal studies. Many identify a shift in sensibilities to
animals and nature, evidenced through the progress of environmental
ethics and the emergence of animal rights. Mitchell suggests these new
understandings of animals are enhanced by the growth of sciences like
cognitive ethology. Yet elsewhere, there is concern about the increasingly
instrumental manipulation of animal bodies and a decreasing trust in
science (Birke et al, p.156), which may prompt the search for other
disciplinary voices to speak about and sometimes for animals. There are
also disciplinary shifts: animals occupy the rich conceptual borderlands of
the social sciences and humanities, and exploration of their position within
the networks of everyday life is part of an increasing emphasis on
materiality and other agencies, rethinking the nature of the social itself.
Taking these intellectual threads into history provides further insights and
raises additional challenges, particularly in tracing the bodily animal
through the partiality of historical and literary texts. The books thus
constitute an intriguing set of arguments about the way historical
imaginations and material practices constitute a vexed inheritance, which
is inescapable in contemporary negotiations around our different ways of
living and living alongside animals. So in turning to these complex
histories to make sense of a complex present, where do you begin?

2. The discourse of reason

‘We begin, as is often the case in these debates, with Aristotle’ (Fudge,
p.15). Divine classifications are central to early modern ways of knowing
animals and humans. As Fudge explains, these classifications are given
shape by Aristotle, who posits the existence of different kinds of soul –
vegetative, sensitive, and rational. Plants, animals and humans share a
vegetative soul, the root of nutrition, growth and reproduction. Animals
and humans both have a sensitive soul, the source of perception and
movement. The distinguishing characteristic of the human is thus the
rational soul. The capacity for reason underpins human superiority, yet it
proves to be a precarious definition.

In this discourse, the primacy of the human can only be evidence through
the exhibition of reason in action. ‘Dog’ laughter, mundane dreams,
childish exuberance, unwarranted cruelty, imprudence and intemperance
all threaten to undo the divine definition of humans based on reason.
Following the fall, the human ends up divided against itself, involved in ‘a
constant struggle of mind against body, reason against desire’ (p.13).

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Animals are central to shoring up these oscillations of identity. Four
chapters, entitled ‘being human’; ‘becoming human’; ‘becoming animal’
and ‘being animal’, elaborate the complex movement between dogmatic
classifications and empirical unfoldings in the context of England in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth, detailing the rich array of literary and
other work concerned with the relation between human and animal
behaviours.

Animal identities shift in this account as well, as they occupy the spaces of
both real animals and prompts to the abstract. Much of the book charts
the replacement of real animals with the symbolic, supporting varied
instrumental uses of animals, and of women and other cultures too, but
this is an uneasy cosmology full of emergent contradictions. The
instability of both human and animal categories causes confusion. As
Fudge suggests, ‘if an animal is the thing that a human is not, and yet a
human can cease to be (or never become) the thing it is, then an animal
is something much more than other: it becomes kin’ (p. 60). There are
several moments when alternative forms of kinship emerge. The lack of
resolution offered by the ‘discourse of reason’ offers space for alternative
philosophical views, from Plutarch and others; perhaps most famously
from Montaigne. A different kind of animal being is offered by the
empirical uncertainty of Montaigne’s question: ‘When I play with my cat,
who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?’ As
Fudge continues, ‘This cat, he insists, is his cat, not a fictional one. It is
an animal in the world and not a beast in a book’ (p.95). These everyday
interactions with animals offer another space for interpreting the hold of
the discourse of reason within this period. There are glimpses of more
mundane encounters, in the give and take of living alongside animals for
transport, sustenance and pleasure, but these are rarely recorded. It is
possible everyday understandings of animal reason diluted the reach of
the discourse of reason, but tricky for a historian to claim so. This
paradox is explored in the penultimate chapter, through the apparently
wondrous exploits of Morocco - the intelligent horse - and his master
Bankes. Yet as Fudge concludes (p.174), it is possible this animal’s
celebrity flows from the quality and humour, as opposed to novelty, of
their performance of intelligent horsemanship.

In the final chapter, the decisive metaphysics of Descartes cuts through

these confusions. Here it becomes clear what is at stake is not only
alternative ways of knowing animals, but also different epistemologies of
life itself. Descartes’ animals were automata, bereft of any kind of soul.
Descartes managed to formulate an absolute distinction between human
and animals. The only soul was a human rational one: the movement of
human and animal bodies mechanically given by organic predispositions.
It offered resolution to the endless ethical questioning about human
conduct and animal behaviour accompanying the discourse of reason. Yet
as Fudge suggests, ‘rather than presenting an ethical problem, Descartes
has it seems, solved some of the most troubling ones’ (p.162). This
included worries about the growing science of animal vivisection.
Suggestions this practice might involve both the suffering of brute
creatures and brutalizing of scientific gentlemen were anaesthetized. As

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one follower of Descartes writes, ‘I exclude them from life, that they never
die in pain’ (p.160).

The achievement of a mature form of human rationality is defined in the

same manoeuvre. The human is now always already human, and failures
of reason no longer destabilize the human/animal boundary. Yet, humans
can be childish and foolish, if they interpret animal behaviour as if animals
had individual human motivations. ‘For the Cartesian […] the almost
instinctive anthropomorphic thought processes of humans could be
countered by an act of will. Refusing to anthropomorphize, refusing to
believe one’s childish first impressions, was therefore crucial to a full
understanding of the world’ (p. 154). Whilst this is a period now
seemingly far removed, Brutal Reasoning nevertheless introduces a
concern with the human self, compassion for animals and performance of
reason, which resonate with contemporary animal controversies and the
other texts.

3. The error of anthropomorphism

Darwin once wrote a memo reminding himself never to use the terms
‘higher’ or ‘lower’, when referring to the evolution of animals (Sober p.91).
However, there is no such reticence when narratives of cultural
development are mobilized to pass judgement on individual biographies,
the status of other societies or on ethical ways of relating to animals.
Despite initial hostility to Descartes’ ideas in England, the taken for
granted dangers of anthropomorphism, as inimical to science, is the
dominant narrative explored in the nine chapters of Thinking with Animals.
Following Darwin, anthropomorphism could be traced back to animal
ancestry, it was ascendant at an early stage in the development of the
human race, retained by primitive peoples, women and children, and
overcome by the civilizing education of modern science (White, p.60).

Sober, in his philosophical analysis of the bias embedded in thinking about

the dangers of anthropomorphism, suggests this is still widespread. For
science, anthropomorphism is both a factual mistake and an intellectual
failing (Sober, p.85). ‘Emphasis on the error of anthropomorphism and a
relative lack of attention to the opposite part is part of more general
pattern in scientific culture in which tough-mindedness is valued’ (p.86).
Yet, as Sober demonstrates, both anthropomorphism and its converse
‘anthropodenial’ can be inappropriate. Further, he illustrates that
replacing concepts of ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ animals with notions of
‘ancestral’ and ‘derived’ characteristics can alter this balance. Replacing a
linear hierarchy of higher and lower organisms with more intricate
evolutionary linkages means ‘there is no presumption in favor of treating
human beings as different from the rest of nature; on the contrary there
is a circumstance in which the presumption is precisely in the opposite
direction’ (p.96).

It is in the sociological account of Birke, Arluke and Michael that we find

some reasons for the continued refutation of anthropomorphism. If
Fudge’s work demonstrated the complex histories of animal reason, Birke

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et al thoroughly document the complex present of animal experimentation
in the UK and USA. Theoretical ideas from the sociology of science
highlight tensions emerging in the practices of animal research: between
procedures inside the laboratory and the circulation of data outside,
between desires for standardization and the specificities of animal care-
taking, between avoiding public stigma and the need to enrol people into
a ‘core set’, and so on. The search for consensus in the light of these
tension is enacted both materially and socially – through the stabilization
of animals genetically, the standardization of animal housing and
experimentation protocols and through the socialization of animal
researchers. The progress of scientists, from childhood dissection classes
to medical school ‘dog-labs’, is part of a right of passage to participate in
scientific culture. It involves the development of various strategies to deal
with difficult ethical issues, including academic and emotional divisions of
labour, as well as the suppression of anthropomorphism in the process of
‘becoming a biologist’.

Yet, unlike Fudge, Birke et al, have the opportunity to integrate

expressions of public sentiments into their research, and here the
complexities proliferate. From the politics of animal rights extremism to
public opinion surveys, various forms of public voicing challenge these
scientific cultures and framings of animals. The centrality of rationality to
continued scientific practice is thrown open. Despite the work done to
exclude ‘irrational’ others, and stage a dialogue with the ‘better-informed’
members of the public (p.162), emotional repertoires increasingly figure
in political life. Those promoting animal experimentation ‘most also tackle
the tricky terrain of emotions, acknowledging some of their own
emotionality as, for example, pet-owners, while diminishing the
(over)emotionality of the public’. They conclude, ‘for all the emphasis on
rationality, emotions – passions – do run high throughout, and on both
side of, this debate’ (p.170).

4. Tracing exclusions

Writing about animals, is in a sense, about reading for exclusions. This is

a point made historically by Fudge and in the contexts of contemporary
science by Birke et al. Reading across these books it possible to suggest
they themselves encompass exclusions, which may point to opportunities
for future empirical and theoretical work. Firstly, there is the absence of
geography. With few exceptions, notably Doniger writing on zoomorphism
in ancient Indian texts, a universalized western history of attitudes to
animals is narrated and mobilised in these books, and so in this review.
What geography there is is evident in its absence. Standardization is seen
to effect placelessness in the practices of modern science (Birke et al,
p.37); suggestions of alternative epistemologies only existing in the
‘othering’ by western scientists of those not trained or working in western
contexts (Birke et al, p.158). As science becomes increasingly, but also
unevenly, globalized there is further scope to explore more symmetrically
the nature of these differences. So too, there are differences around
gender, appearing in all the books as another ‘other’ to the dominant
conception of the human, but often in a rather partial way.

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In relation to the animals, there are absences too. A relatively narrow
range of species is used to develop these analyses. Primates have long
carried the burden of personifying the human/animal divide, acting as a
vehicle from which to explore gender and family relations, and so they do
here as well. Elephants figure increasingly as emblematic of an affective
wild. Dogs occupy positions that demonstrate the ambiguities of
domestication in both home and laboratory spaces. Rats and mice
embody the instrumentalism of modern genetics as they increasingly
become akin to machines. More opaque are the lives of animals other
than mammals, including insects, fish, reptiles and amphibians. In a
different context, Descartes wrote ‘it is more probable that worms, flies,
caterpillars and other animal move like machines than that they all have
immortal souls’ (Fudge, p.155). The questions now may not be the
ensoulment of these animals, yet consideration of the affective and social
lives of such animals still has the potential to offer insights into shifting
understandings of and relations to the biosphere.

There is also, arguably, scanty attention paid to animals as other than

representatives of human practices or species traits. Sometimes this is
deliberate. Birke et al acknowledge ‘our focus is more on how humans
understand animals identities […] because it is contradictory human
understandings that underlie the controversy’ in animals research. Yet
something may be missing from this, as Fudge points out, our taken for
granted conceptions of humans and their understandings already include
the animal. It is when the lives of particular animals are explored that
they become more than is assumed in the historical category of animal
and so generate alternative potentials. Given biography, animal lives are
revealed as constituted by and constitutive of their own complex histories,
through relations that include the cultural practices of their own kinds,
material interventions with the landscape, and interactions with varied
care-takers. This is most evident in Gregg Mitman’s chapter on the active
role of elephant communities in shaping landscapes and Siegel’s
discussion of the divergent cultures of orang-utan groups. It also
emerges in considering the enhanced wellbeing of people living with pets,
not as some ‘uniform therapeutic intervention’, but as dependent on a
dyadic interaction between animal and human behaviours (Serpell, p.127).
In such accounts, animals overspill their symbolic functions with the
potential to transform both human and animal lives.

Yet conversely, there are times when it feels like the emphasis on animals
is to the detriment of other things that might have agency. This sounds a
contrary criticism of three books seeking to redress the silent effacement
of animals in social science. Yet, the risk is in implying biological entities
are unique in enacting transformations of human identity and social life.
Certainly, their often-ready responsiveness means animals are invested
with such capacities, yet, as Daston’s analysis of Medieval Angelology
alongside Twentieth Century comparative psychology shows, animals are
not exceptional in this and a comparative approach can yield insights into
the changing nature of anthropomorphism and alternative
comprehensions of nonhumans. In The Sacrifice Birke et al effectively
elaborate the sociological, institutional and technological elements that

6
embed animals in experimental systems: ‘what is represented as
comparison between animal and human bodies is thus, in actuality,
between animals-in-experimental-systems and humans-in-clinical-
systems’ (p.53). Yet, the comparative dimensions implied by this, and the
further complexities of the alignment of clinical systems, remain to be
mapped out.

The transformative transaction between animals and technologies is also

evident in suggestions that visual technologies are reshaping
contemporary sensibilities around animals. Kramer aligns a global trade
in commercial images and changes in the ‘emotional configuration of
contemporary subjectivity’ (p.139). Yet this is not a positive assessment.
She identifies a growing uniformity and lack of authentic animal in this
work, which seeks sophisticated techniques and affective registers to
move viewers as a replacement for meaningful emotional exchange
(p.167). Such pessimism is also encountered in the closing line of
Serpell’s often otherwise recuperative chapter on companion animal
relations, that we face a future living alongside a less authentic nature,
Serpell’s ‘strange little people in disguise’. Yet, if nothing else, the
complex histories of human-animal relations prompt us to read for
alternatives and silences here. We might find different sensibilities in
Mitman’s account of the role of images in elephant conservation, which
values intimacy and appears to construe elephants as active participants.
The proliferation of image sharing websites, as opposed to central digital
archives, might offer a wider reach and mundane aesthetic of animals,
with the potential to challenge contemporary statements about
authenticity in the same way Morocco the horse challenges historical
interpretations of animal reason.

5. Writing animal futures

In presenting both the complex histories and complex present of human

thinking with animals, the books demonstrate the on-going and iterative
interactions of which these are made. Therefore, in concluding, it makes
sense to ask what kind of intervention these books seek to make to these
interactions.

Birke et al declare at the outset that their account is unbiased. By this,

they mean they leave their personal judgements about the ethics of
animal experimentation unspoken. Yet, as they are no doubt aware, the
performance of politics is more complex than this. The emphasis in the
book on denaturalising certain kinds of practice, whilst leaving others
extant, is not just a methodological choice but also a political one. By
collecting together insights from work often already published in specialist
social science journals, this book is seeking a wider policy, journalist or
researcher audience. By thoroughly situating science in its varied
sociological contexts the book emerges as a powerful critique of those
who wish to bolster support for the science of animal experimentation only
through furthering the authority of science, in regulation, training or
science communication. Yet the ethical, emotional, or embodied elements

7
of debate over animal research are not subject to the same levels of
inquiry.

The impact of Descartes on the ethical oscillations around the ‘discourse of

reason’ remind us that focusing on and retaining complexities maybe an
ethical act in itself. Yet, there is perhaps an opportunity for further work
here. As Birke et al themselves identify, the emotional is an increasingly
powerful political repertoire. The turbulent history of rationality and
emotionality in understanding human and animal minds might indicate
why it has taken social sciences scholars a while to consider the use of
affective registers in their own work in this area. (Certainly most of the
forms of writing here tend to the conventional, though perhaps the
practices of writing early modern history allow a greater appreciation for
the absurd). However, it is not a social scientist, but the film-maker
Siegel, who talks most eloquently about the moments of enchantment and
disenchantment in her work with the rehabilitation of orang-utans in the
forests of Borneo, and her ambivalences in channelling these in the
practices of film-making.

Work from natural scientists is moving social scientists to reconsider the

corporeal and affective capacities of the human animal. Nigel Thrift
suggests ‘the questions now being raised by biology press on that knot of
interests formerly known as social’ (2007, p.226). There are hints at this
in these chapters. Serpell quotes Steven Mithen, an archaeologist, who
suggests anthropomorphism may be one of the defining characteristics of
anatomically modern humans (p.123). According to Serpell, the
productive transformative qualities of anthropomorphism are central to
processes of animal domestication and so to human cultural evolution.
Challenges to the standardization of laboratory animal include growing
knowledge of the richly affective worlds of these animals, some of which
we share. The limits to the mechanisation of these animals, when
acknowledged to share these capacities with humans, quickly become
evident. To standardize fully the experiences of the laboratory animal
would require the standardization of their human caretakers, including
pets kept at home, hormonal cycles, food consumption and personal
hygiene products.

Our biological, as well as our social, histories are inextricably bound up

with our animal relations, so I will leave the last word on future work to
an historian:

“In writing histories without animals, we continue to make natural the

ways of thinking that efface those animals, and we hide the fact that the
production of meaning and order is the work of many, and not always,
human agents. In this way, as well as ignoring animals, we not only
mispresent ourselves and our pasts but limit our possible futures too”
(Fudge, 2006, p.192).

Reference
Thrift, N. (2007) Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect,
London Routledge