[Animals] Marta Segarra: "Non-human animals are sentient beings, not objects"

[#Wittels-]

 

Martha Segarra. Barcelona, 1963 Research professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and professor of Gender Studies at the University of Barcelona. In Humanimals (Galaxia Gutenberg) he explores our relationship with other animals.

 

It is not a term that I have invented, I have taken it from other people, in fact there are quite a few people who use it. It is a term that refers to that relationship between the human and what we call animal, as if we were not animals, humans are also animals. That term has been used quite a lot throughout the 20th century, when more awareness of this interweaving arises. And now it's a word spread around the world
Western thought has traditionally made a division between the human and the animal. Are the harms of humanity against this separation?
 Yes, exactly. But it is important to explain this well, because it does not mean that all animals are or are the same. We are very different. But not only humans from other animals, but all animals from each other. A bacterium is very different from an elephant, an ant from a dolphin. And within the same families of species, there are also great differences. But what lies behind the concept "animal" is a kind of separate category that we humans have created, as if we had nothing to do with the rest. And that separate category that we have created we consider exceptional. We believe we are exceptional, not just different, which is true that we are, but exceptional. And therefore, the other animals do not fall within any ethical or behavioral rule that we can assume as our own within humanity itself.
Does it mean that the separation between humans and animals has served to justify violence against animals?
Completely. It has served to justify violence and exploitation, which is another form of violence; not only mistreatment but also the use of animals as if they were raw material, lifeless material. Because one thing is the farmer who has 20 cows, or even a hundred, and another thing is the industrial farms, which are the ones that predominate in the West and now also in China and almost everywhere. These factory farms are actually huge protein factories where there don't seem to be any live animals, and it's where you can see how far we've come in exploiting other animals.
 Those who defend the superiority of the human being over the rest of the animals indicate that, for example, we have language while the rest of the animals do not. Is it so?

 

In reality, those of us who see specialists in ethology and animal studies - a slightly broader branch, because it includes not only biologists specialized in animal behavior but also anthropologists specialized in human behavior, people of law, philosophy or thought - is that in many animals (at least those of the species that we can observe more easily because we are closer and because they are more like us) there is also a language. Each species has its language. There are people who consider that the human is the only language that can express subtle things, that can make literature... We are all the time deciding what is better based on our human parameters, we are cheating in solitaire, because we are comparing what ours with something we can't understand, because we don't have the means to understand how other species communicate. Now there are many books on how dogs or cats communicate, but these are animals that live with us and therefore have learned to translate their language into ours, just as we have also learned to translate things for our dog or cat . But how do species communicate in the wild? We do not know exactly how birds and each bird communicate, because each species is different, chickens do not communicate in the same way as sparrows. This radical separation between human and animal has also made us consider what we call animals as a whole, when in reality they are very different from each other.
Do you think that the hierarchical vision that has been imposed in the West and that places the human being at the top of the pyramid is wrong? Aren't human beings on the cusp?

 

It's a bit like the discussion about the term Anthropocene. It is said that for a few years we have entered a new era in which it is man who dominates the earth, a new geological era. It is true that we have a power that other animals do not have, for example, the destruction of the planet, or at least of many of the Lives that exist on the planet, starting with ours. But I think that this radical separation, this hierarchy, is very harmful, and not only because of the way we treat non-human animals. Within our species, this hierarchical superiority has also been used to establish profound inequalities.
For example?
Racism, for example, is based on the same argument: that there are human beings better than others by nature, better in intelligence, or in courage, or in strength... We have invented an intrahuman hierarchy that is the same one that we apply to what is outside the human species. When the theory of races was created - totally out of place from the current scientific point of view - it was based on this type of argument. People of color were compared to animals, those people as human as whites were not preferred. Today that seems to us, obviously, an aberration. But it was the discourse that linked that hierarchical vision of humanity with a hierarchical vision within humanity. Human groups have also been animalized in order to treat them badly. It is what the Nazis did with the Jews: first they came up to say that they were like rats and then that they were directly rats that had to be exterminated. Treating someone like an animal is a pejorative expression, because we assume that we always treat animals badly.
One of the fundamental distinctions of the human being with respect to other animals is his ability to ask himself what makes us human. What makes us human?

 

It is not a question that can be answered in one fell swoop. Of course, we have specificities with respect to other species. But since, deep down, the interest in other species is very recent, we have believed that we have a series of specificities that are false, such as the language we were talking about earlier. But there are others. Many people say, for example, that the human being is the only one who has aesthetic or spiritual aspiration. But behaviors are seen, especially in animals that genetically resemble us a lot, such as non-human primates, behind which ethologists consider that there must be some desire of this type. And the same is sometimes said of animals that are farthest from humans, such as elephants, which bury their dead and seem to mourn them, something that seems to us that we human beings are the only ones who do. Your question is very legitimate, but at the same time it is dangerous because as soon as we establish a list of what makes us human, we can sometimes be leaving other cultures or other times of humanity off that list.
Do some animals have feelings like we humans do?

 

We have no idea, it is impossible at the moment to put yourself in the head of an ant or a bee. Therefore, we cannot know if they have what we call feelings. The problem is that we define the world based on our senses and therefore on what we imagine the world to be. For example, there is a very famous text by the biologist and philosopher Thomas Nagel in which he asks what goes through the head of a bat, what is the world of the bat, what is it to be a bat. It is a question that has crumb because bats, which are mammals like us but very distant from human beings due to evolution, have senses that we do not have, such as geolocation, and that humans now supply with techniques such as GPS or sonar. We cannot imagine a world perceived from other senses than ours. That is the complexity and wonder of life.
Many of those who are against animal rights argue that an animal cannot be held accountable. What do you think?

 

That is another human concept, that of responsibility. First we would have to see what responsibility means. Philosophers who have asked this in relation to animality, such as Jacques Derrida or Donna Haraway, say that the idea of response is at the root of responsibility. In other words, when they ask you why you have done something, you can answer, you can interact. Obviously, we cannot ask an animal that does not speak our language why it has done such a thing. But, instead, it is clear that animals respond in their own way, they respond to our actions, to our interaction with them. On the other hand, there are also many people who, due to a health problem or for whatever reason, cannot speak, express themselves, respond, and that does not leave them outside the law. That is not why we consider that they are not beings worthy of being treated not only with consideration but sometimes even with more consideration than the rest.
 If animals are subject to law, do they also have obligations?

 

The system of law, again, is a human system. And the moment we insert the rest of the animals into our system, things squeak, because we are applying a vision of human relationships, not human relationships. Obviously, non-human animals that live with us must be protected from mistreatment, and we must also prevent the mass extinction that is taking place of non-human animals, animals that live in freedom. I am in favor of all kinds of regulations that prevent this type of action, but I do not believe that the ultimate solution is to insert non-human animals into our world of law, because in this way we are not considering their alterity, their forms of life that they are different from ours. It is necessary to legislate on dogs, cats and other animals called companions and also on animals that are not suitable for eating or for other types of human activities because if not, there will be abuses and the excessive exploitation that we witness. Something that had also never happened in human history.
Does it mean that today we are crueler than ever to other animals?

 

Link: https://www.elmundo.es/papel/historias/2022/03/19/623462e021efa0b32d8b45e0.html