Interrogating the “Animal”: An Investigation into the Ethics of Man-Animal Divide

Humanity defines itself through an animal other, the animal in Jacques Derrida’s definition of “absolute alterity,” cannot return the human gaze. In this paper, I explore the possibilities of accommodation and hospitality which posthuman philosophy provides in conceptualizing the position of alterity of the “animal”. Building on the writing of Jacque Derrida and Giorgio Agamben I will argue how Posthumanism can radicalize the way in which the anthropocentric worldview looks at the animal as other, questioning the positioning and relevance of speciesism and species boundary. Also, the issue of the agency has been interrogated in this research article. I have also argued for a new mode of conceptualizing the “other” / the “animal” which abolishes the hierarchical view of anthropocentric conception of nonhuman but instead views the other from the lens of companionship, borrowing from the ideas of “companionship” and “Chuthulucene” of Donna J. Haraway. The paper is an attempt to expand the humanist exclusionary boundaries and is an exercise in developing a posthuman ethics through which the category of human can be radically questioned and can be made more hospitable.

Sociology and Animal Studies: Human Responses to Animal Loss in Times of Disaster

A number of attempts have been made to include animals in explorations in the humanities and social sciences. This is a response to the gap where animals are much-neglected entities in the said disciplines. There have been debates pertaining to the inclusion of animals in scholarly discourses in the field of sociology. Notably, human exceptionalism has been one of the key ideological drivers which prevent a more inclusive consideration of animals in the study of our social world. The anthropocentric view of the world and society has put the needs and status of humans above all other animals. This line of thinking has implications on how humanity relates and interacts with animals in a broader context. In times of crisis, humans relegate animals as conveniently expendable or an inconvenient afterthought, which easily leads to instances of animal abandonment and even abuse. However, there has been a collective shift in the way acts of animal abandonment are perceived on social media. This article examined the responses on social media pertaining to animal abandonment during the onslaught of typhoon Vamco in the Philippines in 2020. More specifically, two themes were analyzed: outrage against negligence and compassionate treatment of animals. While this article looks specifically at the abandonment of animals, the project invites further reflection on the notions of environmental ethics and the species boundary.

Chimeras, Superchimps, and Post-persons

In the world of contemporary biotechnology, our thinking about species and moral status is being challenged in new ways. First, the creation of interspecies chimeras, in disrupting the human/non-human species boundary, forces us also to go beyond species boundaries in considering how to determine the moral status of these new beings. Second, the possibility of moral status enhancement (or at least enhancing the capacities that on some accounts give rise to moral status), both for non-human animals and for humans, may lead to members of existing biological species having new moral properties, or perhaps even the creation of new ‘moral species’. This chapter explores normative and conceptual challenges raised by the prospect of crossing both biological and moral ‘species boundaries’. It examines the implications of species transitions in relation to identity, obligations towards existing beings and beings that might be created via the species transition process; and reflects on how this might advance our thinking about moral status.

Dog-Man Isomorphism: Gaze Companion Species with Empathy in Disgrace

Based on the self-built corpus, Disgrace is compared with Coetzee’s other 11 novels with AntConc to generate keyword list and the data reveals that "dogs", as an important keyword, makes a great contribution to theme construction of Disgrace and has a relationship of co-occurrence and isomorphism with man. Dogs are the objects of Lurie’ gaze, and with anti-gaze, he achieves empathy between man and dogs, clarifies the identity of dogs as companion species of human beings, showing the isomorphism between them. Lurie’s becoming dog-man, which is, in essence, a kind of deterritorialization, breaking through the species boundary between humans and animals and demonstrates the animal rights.

Factors enforcing the species boundary between the human pathogens Cryptococcus neoformans and Cryptococcus deneoformans

Hybridization has resulted in the origin and variation in extant species, and hybrids continue to arise despite pre- and post-zygotic barriers that limit their formation and evolutionary success. One important system that maintains species boundaries in prokaryotes and eukaryotes is the mismatch repair pathway, which blocks recombination between divergent DNA sequences. Previous studies illuminated the role of the mismatch repair component Msh2 in blocking genetic recombination between divergent DNA during meiosis. Loss of Msh2 results in increased interspecific genetic recombination in bacterial and yeast models, and increased viability of progeny derived from yeast hybrid crosses. Hybrid isolates of two pathogenic fungal Cryptococcus species, Cryptococcus neoformans and Cryptococcus deneoformans, are isolated regularly from both clinical and environmental sources. In the present study, we sought to determine if loss of Msh2 would relax the species boundary between C. neoformans and C. deneoformans. We found that crosses between these two species in which both parents lack Msh2 produced hybrid progeny with increased viability and high levels of aneuploidy. Whole-genome sequencing revealed few instances of recombination among hybrid progeny and did not identify increased levels of recombination in progeny derived from parents lacking Msh2. Several hybrid progeny produced structures associated with sexual reproduction when incubated alone on nutrient-rich medium in light, a novel phenotype in Cryptococcus. These findings represent a unique, unexpected case where rendering the mismatch repair system defective did not result in increased meiotic recombination across a species boundary. This suggests that alternative pathways or other mismatch repair components limit meiotic recombination between homeologous DNA and enforce species boundaries in the basidiomycete Cryptococcus species.

Streptococcus catagoni sp. nov., isolated from the respiratory tract of diseased Chacoan peccaries (Catagonus wagneri)

Novel catalase-negative, Gram-stain-positive, beta-haemolytic, coccus-shaped organisms were isolated from Chacoan peccaries that died from respiratory disease. The initial API 20 Strep profiles suggested Streptococcus agalactiae with acceptable identification scores, but the 16S rRNA gene similarity (1548 bp) to available sequences of streptococci was below 98 %. Next taxa of the genus Streptococcus , displaying highest similarities to the strains from this study, were S. bovimastitidis NZ1587T (97.5 %), S. iniae ATCC 29178T (97.5 %), S. hongkongensis HKU30T (97.4 %), S. parauberis DSM 6631T (97.1 %), S. penaeicida CAIM 1838T (97.1 %), S. pseudoporcinus DSM 18513T (97.0 %), S. didelphis DSM 15616T (96.6 %), S. ictaluri 707-05T (96.6 %), S. uberis JCM 5709T (96.5 %) and S. porcinus NCTC 10999T (96.4 %). All other Streptococcus species had sequence similarities of below 96.4 %. A sodA gene as well as whole genome-based core genome phylogeny of three representative strains and 145 available Streptococcus genomes confirmed the unique taxonomic position. Interstrain average nucleotide identity (ANI) and amino acid identity (AAI) values were high (ANI >96 %; AAI 100%), but for other streptococci clearly below the proposed species boundary of 95–96 % (ANI <75 %; AAI <83 %). Results were confirmed by genome-to-genome distance calculations. Pairwise digital DNA–DNA hybridization estimates were high (>90 %) between the novel strains, but well below the species boundary of 70 % for closely related Streptococcus type strains (23.5–19.7 %). Phenotypic properties as obtained from extended biochemical profiles and MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry supported the outstanding rank. Based on the presented molecular and physiological data of the six strains, we propose a novel taxon for which we suggest the name Streptococcus catagoni sp. nov. with the type strain 99-1/2017T (=DSM 110457T=CCUG 74072T) and five reference strains.

There is no evidence of a universal genetic boundary among microbial species

A fundamental question in studying microbial diversity is whether there is a species boundary and if the boundary can be delineated by a universal genetic discontinuity. To address this question, Jain et al. computed the pairwise average nucleotide identity (ANI) of 91,761 microbial (bacterial and archaeal) genomes (the 90K genome dataset) and found that the ANI values from the 8 billion comparisons follow a strong bimodal distribution1. The authors concluded that a clear genetic discontinuum and species boundary were evident from the unprecedented large-scale ANI analysis. As a result, the researchers advocated that an ANI of 95% can be used to accurately demarcate all currently named microbial species. While the FastANI program described in the paper is useful, we argue that the paper’s conclusion of a universal genetic boundary is questionable and resulted from the substantial biased sampling in genome sequencing. We also caution against being overly confident in using 95% ANI for microbial species delineation as the high benchmarks reported in the paper were inflated by using highly redundant genomes.