Editor's Introduction to Society and Animals

Kenneth J. Shapiro

When we pause to reflect on it, the continued broad scope, pervasiveness and varied form of animals in our lives is surprising. The dominant image of the modern world is a human-centered and technologically dense landscape. The baying of horses in the streets has long been drowned out by the whirring of motors. Yet our world is still replete with animals in the street, home, nursing home, consulting room, at the "feeder," in the city alley and city park, in the lab, on the farm, in the stream, in the wild.... In addition to these living relations, our lives are saturated with former animals ­ the animal-based products and byproducts with which we feed, medicate and clothe our bodies. And our thought and language remains suffused with fictional animals ­ the symbolic animals that provide images and metaphors for our rituals, pastimes, names, fables, character analyses....

As social scientists we are interested in how all these animal presences inform our psychology, sociology and anthropology. The main purpose of Society and Animals is to foster within the social sciences a substantive subfield, animal studies, which will further the understanding of the human side of human/nonhuman animal interactions.

Renewed interest in human-nonhuman animal relations is also prompted by the current debate over the ethics of our use of animals. In addition to better understanding ourselves, through animal studies we wish to understand our varied relations to them, and to assess the costs ­ economic, ethical and, most broadly, cultural ­ of these relations. For those impacts are complex and often of mixed consequences for both parties, human and nonhuman.

On the face of it, this emerging field itself might contribute to the anthropocentrism which many discussants contend is the root cause of animal exploitation. For animal studies is the investigation of nonhuman animals as they influence and are present to us human animals. However, as social scientists we believe that we can provide a relatively independent set of information so that people can make more informed judgments about practices and policies involving nonhuman animals.

Most social scientists now agree that their work is itself a powerful influence on the society which we study. Whether we like or intend it, the topics we investigate, the questions we ask and the results we generate all affect the institutions that develop policy and promulgate values. Like it or not, we are important players in the current debate over our use of animals.

The emergence of an academic field of study has paralleled each of three recent progressive social movements (Civil Rights, Women's and Environmental Movements). This strongly suggests the inevitability of an animal studies subfield that will parallel the Animal Rights Movement.

In addition to providing substantive information, these cross-discipline fields also foster changes in sensibility and point of view, and the adoption of a critical interpretive stance. We can no longer read Jansen's introduction to the history of art and fail to see that there are virtually no women artists represented there, or a history of the rise of a civilization without becoming aware of the fall of a habitat, or an experiment on maternal deprivation in primates without registering the consequences to the animals involved.

Already we are seeing the emergence of programs in animal studies at universities and of academic journals such as Society and Animals, Anthrozoös and Centaur all of which provide both substantive information and critical perspective.

The disciplinary scope of S&A comprises those styles of inquiry that constitute the social sciences. However, occasionally studies from the humanities, particularly history but also philosophy and literary criticism, and from the natural sciences, particularly ethology, animal behavior and environmental science will be included.

In the two comments following this introduction, Arnold Arluke provides an overview of potential topics to be investigated in animal studies; while Mary Midgley provides an overview of the five articles appearing in this inaugural issue.

I would like to close with a few comments of my own, taking my experience editing the first issue as informal data. Of the four broad areas that in the editors' view comprise animal studies, two are under-represented (wildlife and the environment, and sociopolitical movements, public policy and the law). While the most studied area is applied uses of animals, within it agriculture is under-represented; more studies are needed in the area of animals in the popular culture, particularly of animals in literature. Generally, the methods of inquiry represented in this issue are a pleasing mix of the quantitative and qualitative. However, both approaches and particularly the latter need more rigorous designs and data-collection. Also, I would like to see more data-based discussion of issues in the current debate on our use of animals.

Finally, this first experience as editor of S&A sharply raised the issue of our use of language regarding animals. Consider the journal's title: The term "society" refers to human society, but why should we expect you to take it that way, as many nonhuman animals are social and have a society ­ by most definitions of that term? Conversely, the term "animal" refers to nonhuman animals, but, again, why should you take it that way, as humans are animals as well? Should we call the journal, the cumbersome "human society and nonhuman animals?" This has its own problems: why should we make the primary categorical cleavage, human and nonhuman, and why should we name all nonhuman animals by the negation of all but ourselves?

Of course, the more general problem is that historically we have come to use "animal" to refer to all animals except humans. Etymology notwithstanding, ( anima for enlivened with a soul; humus for soil or dirt), the appropriate generic term for all animate life has been demoted to a sub-category of that life. "Human" is given equal standing with that formerly generic term so that we have humans and animals for humans and other animals. Ironically, dating from the Enlightenment this humanistic discourse replaced the then regnant discourse of religion which had its own self-valorizing categories (Christian/heathen). Today, we have other categorical cleavers which perpetuate other us/them and in-group/outsider divisions ­ white/Black, man/woman. The latter displays the further linguistic sleight of hand of making a subcategory, male, into a superordinate category under which the categorically equivalent term, female, is then subordinated.

Other features of the linguistic degradation of animals other than humans extend to the level of species. We have "human being" but not "deer-" or "dog being." In fact, we further reduce the species-specific being of animals other than humans to a generic process with terms like "organism" and "preparation." We also deny species their being through reference to animals based on their function or site from our human point of view ­ we have pet animals, lab animals and farm animals. "Companion" is a bit of an improvement for it at least names an apparently reciprocal arrangement. "Animals in the lab" would be an improvement over lab animal, but would Lab Animal (a trade magazine of laboratory technicians) accept that new title?

On the level of individual being, we say "he" or "she" for a human individual, but, in most contexts, "it" for an individual other than a human. We, thereby, depersonalize and deindividualize animals other than humans. More subtly, we erase individuality by reifying animal species other than homo sapiens. We speak of "the deer" as a supraindividual, forgetting that the actual referent is an aggregate of individual deer.

Of course, we social scientists have contributed to this linguistic degradation through taking our concern with scientific objectivity to mean that the objects of our study must be denied their subjectivity and individuality. (Noske, 1989). We insist that our relation to them be subject to object not subject to subject.

One of the ways a field of study can raise consciousness is through changes in language habit. I hope that through the publication of S&A we can arrive at a language and a concomitant sensibility and practice that will increase our respect for individual animals other than humans.

Reference

  Noske, B. (1989). Humans and other animals. London: Pluto Press.

Associate Editor's Introduction: Bringing Animals into Social Scientific Research

Arnold Arluke

While there is abundant popular literature about the place of animals in society, the academic social science community has been slow to demonstrate much interest in this topic until recently. It is ironic that so little research interest has been paid to studying the human experience of them when animals occupy such a commanding presence in our society. Attendance at zoos, for example, far exceeds that at professional sporting events; the amount of money spent by pet owners on their animals is greater than the amount spent by parents on baby food; and the amount of mail received by Congress regarding the protection of animals was greater than that received on the Vietnam war.

Merely because the topic has not been studied, however, is not itself an adequate justification for doing so. There are both practical and scholarly reasons why Society and Animals encourages this research. As concern mounts and consciousness changes in our society over the proper use of animals, the findings of researchers will be absolutely critical to make what is often an emotionally charged and highly polarized debate more reasoned and informed. An example of this is the need for social scientists to examine the ways in which laboratory personnel actually interact with animals used for experimentation. Without such description policy makers and concerned citizens can only draw upon the typically over-simplified diatribes of animal activists or the self-serving public relations efforts of scientists.

Animals also represent one of the richest windows for understanding ourselves, and it is at this level that scholars may find great opportunities. How we think and act toward them may reveal our most essential conceptions of the social order and unmask our most authentic attitudes toward people. For instance, the use of animal images may at times be tantamount to expressing underlying racism: some of the most damning testimony given by accused police at the Rodney King trial involved characterization of King as a "gorilla"; during the Gulf War Saddam Hussein was described in the American press as a "rat"; and the actions of people in the Los Angeles riots were likened by media commentators to "packs of vicious animals."

To date, social scientists have woefully neglected the study of the human experience of animals. Yet educators, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and anthropologists and others have begun to carve out discrete pockets of research interest in this nascent field. Society and Animals hopes to expand some of these interests as well as move research in some new directions.

Primarily having a psychological and clinical perspective, the clearest and most dominant line of research over the last few decades has been the study of companion animals ­ what benefits they have for humans, what characterizes owners and those who bond with these animals, and what effects they have on the emotional and daily lives of people at various developmental stages. One major limitation of this research is that it is often biased toward demonstrating the positive influences of animals on humans. While such influences may be real, it is not clear how prolonged these influences are when they do occur, exactly what triggers a positive outcome, and what influences humans have on animals either positively or negatively. A more comprehensive understanding of human-companion animal relationships requires attention to what psychiatrist Carl Jung called the shadow ­ our vices, jealousies, and vanities. By studying the human-companion animal relationship through its shadow rather than through some preconceived notion or romantic bias, it is easier to see the relationship as it is, as distinct from how some feel it ought to be. We know, for example, comparatively little about the abuse of companion animals or the keeping of animals for reasons relating to social status, as perhaps is the case when exotic or dangerous pets are kept. The study of companion animals has also been too narrowly construed because of its clinical bent. Other topics need to be examined including, for instance, the meaning of folk concepts such as "dog person," "cat person" or "animal lover," or the place of the dog in the history of the American family.

In the past decade, the primary interest of sociologists, albeit modest, has been to study the nature of occupations involving animals, such as that in a slaughterhouse, race track, or biomedical laboratory. Many topics remain to be investigated from an occupational perspective, such as the study of the socialization process of veterinary profession and the role of animals as co-workers. We also need basic descriptive studies of the occupational perspectives of park rangers, zoo workers, animal trainers, pet shop staff, and game wardens. A more serious problem with this line of sociological research is that while it examines settings where animals are an integral part, it is often predominantly concerned with research questions that do not shed light on the nature of the particular human-animal interaction itself. Recently, sociologists have begun to use other perspectives from within the field to study humans and animals, drawing on theories from the symbolic interactionist, deviance and social movements literature. It is hoped that questions coming from these various theoretical perspectives will continue to be asked along with entirely different ones from other sociological subfields such as social stratification and social problems.

For a far longer time than either psychologists or sociologists, anthropologists have paid attention to the use and function of animals in nonindustrialized societies and to how these societies generate animal related symbols. While ethnographies have produced extensive data on how people think and act toward animals, a good portion of this data is buried within more general descriptions of culture ­ despite the Human Relations Area Files category on "ethnozoology." Unfortunately, it will remain inaccessible to many scholars outside of anthropology until it is culled from texts and subjected to analysis from a comparative perspective. Although the domestication process has been one of the chief concerns of anthropologists, they still need to study the metaphorical and symbolic classification of domesticated animals in order to more extensively test notions that are now only equivocally answered ­ such as the belief that domesticated animals serve as a link between human culture and wild nature. Also, certain domesticated animals have been largely ignored, such as the symbolism of dogs in different types of society. Many questions regarding animal practices are begging for cross-cultural analysis. Why, for instance, are there striking variations in pet-keeping practices in the industrialized world, and why are animal metaphors, so present in nonindustrialized societies, also highly present in the modern world? Indeed, I would hope that anthropological interest studying the symbolism of animals could go beyond "primitive culture" so that we can begin, for instance, to understand the meaning of animals in television and print advertising, as well as in cartoons and comic strips, and how these images have changed in recent years.

"The Four-Leggeds, the Two-Leggeds, and the Wingeds": An Overview of Society and Animals 1

Mary Midgley
University of Newcastle-on-Tyne

Recording and Reforming

This journal is a newly-sighted bird, and surely one of very good omen. Where, in the huge gaps between existing enquiries, should it make its nest and establish its territory?

I have been warned, very properly, that I must remember, in writing this piece, that Society and Animals is "primarily an academic journal in the area of animal studies, and only secondarily an ameliorative or liberational vehicle." That, of course, is quite right. There really is a fact-value distinction, and forgetting it can mess up both purposes. In particular, ameliorative or liberational vehicles that haven't got their factual wheels screwed on straight cannot possibly travel in the direction needed; indeed, they can often go backwards.

But of course, that is not the end of the story. Facts and values are not, as some people have concluded, alien entities that must, once segregated, be held firmly asunder in a kind of permanent intellectual apartheid. They are organically connected aspects of our thinking. Once we have distinguished between them, the next thing that strikes us is often an important way in which they are related.

Indeed, as has now surely been made clear, there are really no such things as antiseptically neutral facts. Values affect facts, quite legitimately, because they determine the directions of our enquiry. Since we are not omniscient we have to swing the narrow searchlight of our attention over a vast field of possible questions. It is not clear that any wholly impartial way of fixing itis possible, or indeed desirable, for any sort of enquiry. But for the social sciences in particular, impartiality at this point does not seem even a respectable aim. Though these sciences must be impartial in establishing their facts, when they are choosing their topics they rightly direct themselves to matters of serious concern in their times.

Different Lighting, Different Vision

The appearance of Society and Animals is one phenomenon among many that witnesses a shift of sensibility, making possible both a greatly extended concern for species other than the human, and a wider intellectual interest in them. It is as if a dark blind, which used to shut this vast area off from public attention, had suddenly flown up, revealing to our startled eyes that there is actually a whole world outside the window. Once we grasp this fact, we are puzzled to see the lengths to which earlier thinkers have gone in order to ignore the matter, the twists that have been necessary both in theory and in everyday attitudes, the euphemisms by which people have managed to dismiss so large a topic.

These edifying confusions are naturally a main interest of the authors writing for this issue. This is not because these authors have any unkind taste for showing people looking particularly silly, but because ­ as earlier examples have shown ­ once any aspect of life that has escaped previous scrutiny does finally get attention, the first need is to map the attitudes that exist towards it now, with a view to seeing what needs changing. This necessarily involves recording the mess in all its pristine glory. When a President of the United States ­ even one not renowned for his exactness of wording ­ can publicly defend his shooting habits by saying, "These aren't animals, these are wild quail ... I don't think I could shoot a deer" (quoted in Rajecki) 1 , then there surely exist public confusions worth investigating.

Classification Problems

Rajecki's attention to the various muddled categories by which people already class animals is very welcome, and it is a good example of how the interests of pure theoretical enquiry converge, in these matters, with those of reform. When any set of beings is seen as beneath serious attention, the tendency is to classify it in different ways at different times, according to the convenience of those who want to exploit it. This usually means choosing, at any time, the scheme that will make it easiest, at the moment, to stop thinking about the matter. Only when people really start to attend to the issue do they bring these various schemes together and examine them in a way that makes clear the grinding anomalies between them. Accordingly, research that patiently lays schemes out is equally relevant to understanding people's existing ideas and to seeing what needs changing.

What did the President have in mind? He may have felt that only quadrupeds were animals. If so, this thought will have safely evaporated by the time he went home to eat his fillet steak. More likely, perhaps, he smelt public concern and decided that, since we are now supposed not to be nasty to "animals," quails must be something different, not animals but something more shootable. Similarly, Phillips documents the effects of self-defending classification in producing callous treatment of lab animals, even in scientists who claimed to be most concerned about "animals" in general. Particularly striking here is the lack of thought ­ the careless, inaccurate excuses given for unnecessary ill-treatment, and a peculiar kind of willed ignorance of scientific facts that might prove inconvenient:

Typical was the comment of one neuroscientist who, when asked about possible boredom of monkeys kept in bare metal cages, answered with a palpable lack of interest; "We can speculate about these things but I think it's pointless." Another responded more impatiently, "Oh, how would anybody know that? There's a danger of being anthropomorphic about anything. I just, I wouldn't venture even a guess" (Phillips).

Thus, a range of facts about primate boredom which are widely known, carefully documented and discussed by a formidable battery of distinguished ethologists and zoo-directors, and also indeed by some neuroscientists, seemed quite unavailable to this highly-educated specialist, even though, no doubt, evidence for them was plainly visible in front of his eyes. Similarly, Bowd remarks that science teachers often seem simply not to notice the strong arguments that have for some time been brought forward against compulsory dissection in school biology classes, because their professional habits of mind exclude the subject entirely from consideration.

Like the President, though less explicitly, these professionals appear to hold that animals in general deserve concern and attention, but that the ones before them are exceptions. The President's method of expressing this by claiming that the latter set were not animals at all is a new strategy, not yet widely adopted, though we may see more of it. In the past, "animal" has more often been a catch-all term for something thoroughly shootable and dissectable, something morally negligible or even odious, as in "these prisoners have been treated like animals" or, "they behaved like animals." "Animals" were then, by definition, something that could not rouse concern. Since this use existed simply to mark the negative point that the creatures were not human, it neither allowed nor required any discrimination between different animal species ­ wasps, quails, and gorillas were all alike to it. The essential point was simply to exclude them all wholesale from the human moral scene.

Humans in a Vacuum

That highly abstract approach has been a most powerful conceptual bar both against reform and, what is more surprising in a science-centered age, also against theoretical understanding. Dogmatic insistence on examining the human race in isolation, as something disconnected and non-comparable with any other earthly life-form, has stunted and distorted enquiry on all kinds of interesting human issues, as well as zoological ones. Dogmatic, exclusive "humanists" in the social sciences have apparently hoped that, if firmly neglected, the topic of other life-forms would eventually go away. But it shows no signs of doing that. Even the enormous efforts which our own culture has made to shut out other animal species from affecting us practically have had little effect in clearing them out of people's imagination. Their symbolic importance remains enormous. Wildlife films have an enormous following. Imaginary predators, from sharks and tigers to cobras, continue to star irreplaceably in films and advertisements, and animal imagery of other kinds constantly surfaces in our language.

The Ethology of Pet Keeping

Even practically, these creatures have turned out to have an embarrassing importance. Pet therapy programs, such as that which Perelle and Granville evaluate, caused a disturbance as soon as they began to be reported some years back, because they call in question the human racers boasted independence and autonomy. Could the undignified suggestion that people actually needed and welcomed the gifts of these unworthy, alien beings really be true?

Repeated investigations have confirmed that it is indeed true, so that this is now an area where it is hard to continue refusing to look at the evidence. The idea that pet-keeping was some sort of pointless aberration, a meaningless, sentimental, perverse fad of the affluent West, can scarcely now be defended. The therapeutic effectiveness of pet-keeping, along with anthropological data showing that pets have been kept in all kinds of human societies, is gradually forcing attention to the meaning of such customs.

I am glad to see Perelle and Granville drawing attention to questions about the motivation that makes pet-therapy effective, and, in particular, highlighting the evolutionary angle. They ask whether perhaps "some component of humans' genetic endowment is programmed for positive association with animals" since perhaps "humans who used animals profitably may have been able to reproduce at a greater rate than those who did not make use of animals." This suggestion surely seems reasonable. But I do not know how to discriminate it from the other, more sweeping possibility that this kind of widely hospitable sociability was part of the whole human inheritance in the first place. Either way, it does not seem to me hard to see how the idea of domestication could ever have got started without some natural extended interest of this kind. We are, after all, the only warm-blooded species that does domesticate others. This fact is part of the ethology of Homo Sapiens, as much as laughter or the arts. And domestication of the complex kind that humans, unlike ants, practice can certainly not be done with the whip alone. Communication, allowing some understanding of the rich social systems which our domesticated species always possess, is a necessary condition of doing it.

Whatever the evolutionary story, I would suppose that the intense interest in animals shown by small human children is relevant here. I have found it striking how even people quite strongly opposed to having animals around usually concede that their children want pets.

Classification and Conflict Dropping the taboo on the whole topic of animal-human relation should, then, enable the social sciences to start sorting out the confusions which have been sheltered behind the excessively abstract notion of "animals" (as non-human) and the overlapping classification-systems we use when we do discriminate among different species of animals.

Here, however, we shall of course find real problems. Somehow, we do have to discriminate. No creature can live among other life-forms without treating some of them differently from others in a way that must often cost them their lives. Just by existing, large creatures like ourselves take up resources that would feed many smaller ones. However little we may consume, we always cause others to starve. Even vegans try to keep the locusts out of the crops and the rats out of granaries. Nor is it easy, outside the protected enclaves of civilization, to avoid sometimes killing other "higher" creatures, either to eat or in self-defence.

It seems plain that this fact has long worried people. Human beings, though they are prone to bloodshed, are clearly not really prone to feeling quite all right about it, even when the blood that is shed is not human. Their belief-systems are rich in excuses, in propitiation, in origin-myths which explain why it is really all right. Lawrence documents this most interestingly in the Plains Indians, explaining how the unfortunate fact of eating buffalo-meat is brought into line with their genuine admiration for the buffalo, and with the striving towards cosmic harmony which is a real centre of their culture, by all manner of carefully-adjusted myths and ceremonies. A buffalo, like other hunted animals, consents to death, but does so only on special, quite demanding, conditions which must never fail to be met.

It is surely important to recognize that modern civilization has not freed us from this basic conflict. During the Christian era, the clash was for a long time pushed into the background by a deliberate, exclusive concentration on relations between people (really, man) and God. Consideration for non-human nature was largely avoided as irrelevant to this, and commonly denounced as pagan. Then, in the last few centuries, God too has been carefully upstaged so that people could occupy the stage alone, receiving without interruption our own tumultuous applause.

Lately, however, for a variety of reasons, it has been becoming clear that this celebration must end. The blinds have been going up; daylight filters into the theatre, and we face, as our ancestors did, the awkward problems of relating our quite genuine humane and harmonious feelings towards the life around us with the grim fact of our endemic destructiveness.

Here, as with other conflicts, we must of course build our conceptual bridges with the resources of our own age. We cannot take over earlier systems of thought wholesale; our present way of life is too different. Yet attending to these other systems does give us vital help in nourishing and shaping different imaginative habits. When we see how people who were genetically much the same as ourselves could view the world so differently, we feel the bonds of our own belief-systems loosen somewhat. We become rigidly gripped by psychological dogmas about the motivations possible to us. In particular, we may begin to see how local, how bizarre on a human scale, are some recent doctrines ­ especially the insistence on psychological egoism and exaltation of competition over cooperation that have recently ruled in the West.

So we try to work out a more outgoing policy, not only towards each other but towards other species. And at once we stumble over the difficulties that Rajecki notes in trying to devise a priority system. Should we give foremost place to wild creatures or tame ones, rare or numerous, familiar or remote, animals or plants? And how, when there are real conflicts, do we judge between human interests and non-human ones? Because there are reasons for favouring all these groups, there is a slick tendency to get skeptical at this point and consider the whole effort discredited. But this is obviously out of place. The conflicts we get here are very much like those that already arise in human affairs ­ say, between justice and mercy, or between our duties to those near us and to those further away. Puzzling and agonizing though these clashes often are, we know that we can and must somehow deal with them by working out, at a deep level, proper principles for compromise. These are not lawsuits where we can come down in favour of one party and dismiss the other. They are clashes between genuine values, each of which must somehow be properly recognized.

In human affairs, we have by now some conception ­ however rough and inadequate of how these compromises should be handled. About non-human nature we have very little, because our culture has not been considering the matter. We shall have to work on the conflicts case by case, gradually evolving principles that seem, as far as possible, to do justice to the different values involved. Obviously, the essential thing here will be to avoid the zero-sum approach that expects an outright exclusive winner for all questions about priority, a single value that knocks out all the others. Nor are very sweeping, simple remedies, such as declaring all cetaceans to be citizens of Malibu (Rajecki), likely to be cure-alls. Nothing like that ever emerges in humanaffairs, and there is not the slightest reason to expect it regarding animals.

In generating the kind of balance that will be needed to sort out these difficult matters, I would think that Society and Animals promises to be very useful. Its recording and reforming functions can surely be kept in sync, so that they support each other. It should help us as we shoulder the enormously difficult task which the Plains Indians noted when they prayed, "May we be continually aware of this relationship which exists between the four-legged, the two-legged, and the wingeds. May we all rejoiceand live in peace" (quoted in Lawrence).

Note

1. All references are to articles in this issue of Society and Animals.

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