Activist as Symptom: Healing Trauma within a Ruptured Collective

Animal activists serve as symptom-bearers for trans-species collective trauma within Western-industrial society. Findings from literature on traumatology and nonhuman animal activism, contemporary discourse, and the voices of ten activists currently in the field suggest that many animal activists suffer some form of trauma. Activist trauma arises through overlapping, complex relational processes of intersubjective attunement with nonhuman animals and embeddedness within a human social context that disavows nonhuman suffering. In understanding activist trauma as a symptom of a dysfunctional system, I depathologize activist suffering and view activists as integral members of a whole society that seeks healing.

Reading Veganism

Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present focuses on the iteration of the trope of ‘the monstrous vegan’ across 200 years of Anglophone literature. Explicating, through such monsters, veganism’s relation to utopian longing and challenge to the conceptual category of the ‘human’, the book explores ways in which ethical identities can be written, represented, and transmitted. Reading Veganism proposes that we can recognize and identify the monstrous vegan in relation to four key traits. First, monstrous vegans do not eat animals, an abstinence that generates a seemingly inexplicable anxiety in those who encounter them. Second, they are hybrid assemblages of human and nonhuman animal parts, destabilizing existing taxonomical classifications. Third, monstrous vegans are sired outside of heterosexual reproduction, the product of male acts of creation. And, finally, monstrous vegans are intimately connected to acts of writing and literary creation. The principal contention of the book is that understandings of veganism, as identity and practice, are limited without a consideration of multiplicity, provisionality, failure, and insufficiency within vegan definition and lived practice. Veganism’s association with positivity, in its drive for health and purity, is countered by a necessary and productive negativity generated by a recognition of the horrors of the modern world. Vegan monsters rehearse the key paradoxes involved in the writing of vegan identity.

Are parrots naive realists? Kea behave as if the real and virtual worlds are continuous

Human psychology and animal cognition have increasingly used virtual stimuli to test cognitive abilities, with the expectation that participants are ‘naive realists’, that is, that they perceive virtual environments as both equivalent and continuous with real-life equivalents. However, there have been no attempts to investigate whether nonhuman subjects in fact behave as if physical processes in the virtual and real worlds are continuous. As kea parrots have previously shown the ability to transfer knowledge between real stimuli and both images on paper and images on touchscreens, here we test whether kea behave as naive realists and so expect physical processes to be continuous between the physical and virtual worlds. We find that, unlike infants, kea do not discriminate between these two contexts, and that they do not exhibit a preference for either. Our findings therefore validate the use of virtual stimuli as a powerful tool for testing the cognition of nonhuman animal species.

Culpable/Maternal Detectives: The Impossibility of a Caring Ecofeminist Community in Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog

In Kate Atkinson's ecofeminist crime novel Started Early, Took My Dog, the (semi-)retired investigators Jackson Brodie and Tracy Waterhouse at once collude with and wish to change exploitative capitalist patriarchal society. Trafficking epitomises its crime: the domination and exploitation of human and nonhuman animal others. Ecofeminism urges us to reconsider our complicity and embrace the vision of an interspecies community rooted in the motherly ethics of care. When confronted with a trafficked dog and female child, respectively, the tough Jackson and Tracy wish to transform into the maternal investigator of ecofeminist revision and create a caring (interspecies) family. But behind their maternal appearances lurks the noir perpetrator who mirrors his or her society's crimes. I argue that Atkinson uses the noir convention of the hard-boiled investigator shifting between identities – here borrowed from a sub-generic variant – to explore ordinary men and women's entrapment in contemporary society in the conflict between complicity and care. Through manipulation of point of view, we the readers are in fact implicated in this conflict as well.

An ecological approach to measuring synchronization abilities across the animal kingdom

In this perspective paper, we focus on the study of synchronization abilities across the animal kingdom. We propose an ecological approach to studying nonhuman animal synchronization that begins from observations about when, how and why an animal might synchronize spontaneously with natural environmental rhythms. We discuss what we consider to be the most important, but thus far largely understudied, temporal, physical, perceptual and motivational constraints that must be taken into account when designing experiments to test synchronization in nonhuman animals. First and foremost, different species are likely to be sensitive to and therefore capable of synchronizing at different timescales. We also argue that it is fruitful to consider the latent flexibility of animal synchronization. Finally, we discuss the importance of an animal's motivational state for showcasing synchronization abilities. We demonstrate that the likelihood that an animal can successfully synchronize with an environmental rhythm is context-dependent and suggest that the list of species capable of synchronization is likely to grow when tested with ecologically honest, species-tuned experiments. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Synchrony and rhythm interaction: from the brain to behavioural ecology’.

Biopolitics in the National Parks: The Life and Death of Cecil the Lion

Cecil the Lion lived in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe and was a part of an Oxford conservation study until his death by poaching, outside of Park boundaries, at the hands of an American hunter, in July 2015. Cecil’s death caused unique levels of international outrage, though wildlife poaching in general remains an all-too-ubiquitous phenomenon. This paper enquires as to why this particular death caused such outrage. I will examine this question through two Foucauldian lenses: first, through the Parks’ discursive production of subjects – human and nonhuman animal; and secondly, by investigating Parks’ practices of understanding biopower and pastoral power. I argue that though wildlife conservation in the National Parks is generally interested in conserving the species, not individuals, Cecil’s status as a named individual in a scientific study resulted in the outrage and speaks to the paradox at the heart of Foucault’s idea of pastoral power.

Questioning Empathetic Responsiveness to Nonhuman Animal Vulnerability

The author uses critical theorizations of empathy, compassion, and epistemology in order to draw out the limits of appeals to respond to nonhuman animal gazes in religious studies. Taking Aaron S. Gross’s and Donovan O. Schaefer’s recent works as exemplary, the author argues that empathetic postures towards vulnerability deny the potential violences of empathy and inadvertently reproduce the scholar as an ethical, conscious, and knowing subject. Instead, noninnocent framings of the relation of a scholar to her objects of study might allow religious studies to think more critically about the affective motivations of our desires to recognize the nonhuman animal and our epistemic limitations—especially in ways that do not presuppose the human/animal binary as a master binary whose collapse will entail the demise of racism, sexism, and colonialism.

“Agents of Description”. Animals, Affect, and Care in Thalia Field’s Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction (2016)

In this article, I explore questions of laboratory animal agency in dialogue with Thalia Field’s literary text “Experimental Animals: A Reality Fiction” (2016). Using the framework of “care” (understood, following María Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, as a multi-dimensional concept comprising affect, ethics, and practice), I consider how Field’s synaesthetic descriptions of animal suffering create an affective response in readers, alerting them to a shared carnal vulnerability. Indeed, rather than anthropomorphizing animals through narration or focalization, Field “stays with the body” to consider how animals call to us not as experimental objects, but as ethical subjects, how they become – in other words – agents of the description (Stewart 2016). To develop this idea, I introduce the “practiced” dimension of care. More specifically, I explore how Field uses narrative strategies like first-person narration and second-person address, “bridge characters” (James 2019), and juxtaposition to morally structure the text and encourage “transspecies alliances” between readers and represented animals. I argue that such devices direct and train affect, allowing us to better appreciate how conceptions of nonhuman animal agency are always contextualized within particular sets of social, cultural, historical, and disciplinary frames and practices.