Conclusion

This concluding chapter addresses the mortality and vulnerability that humans and animals share. The destruction of harvests, the scorched fields, the forest fires, and the devastation of the countryside make no distinctions. They affect animals and humans alike. If people are willing to include animals in their thought of living-with, then they must divide the relations that compose it into two categories. First, there are the relations that bind animals—notably but not exclusively domestic animals—to the humans on whom they depend. Second, there are the relations that “attach” animals to all other animals, whether of the same or of different species. The relationship in the first case is unequal and the violence of potential mistreatment is devoid of reciprocity: the animal is unilaterally exposed to the irruption of such violence. In the second case, the relationship is inscribed in a different order, which people should not describe too hastily. When these relations are destroyed, the destruction occurs not by itself and from within the relationship, but as the result of an external force. This is to say that if people wish to qualify the relations between humans and animals as “moral and political,” they must not understand this characterization in the same way they encountered it in murderous consent. The two ways in which humans interject violence into the world of animals mark the distinction.