Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?

by Kari Weil

Kari Weil provides a critical introduction to the field of animal studies as well as an appreciation of its thrilling acts of destabilization. Examining real and imagined confrontations between human and nonhuman animals, she charts the presumed lines of difference between human beings and other species and the personal, ethical, and political implications of those boundaries.

Weil's considerations recast the work of such authors as Kafka, Mann, Woolf, and Coetzee, and such philosophers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Agamben, Cixous, and Hearne, while incorporating the aesthetic perspectives of such visual artists as Bill Viola, Frank Noelker, and Sam Taylor-Wood and the "visual thinking" of the autistic animal scientist Temple Grandin. She addresses theories of pet keeping and domestication; the importance of animal agency; the intersection of animal studies, disability studies, and ethics; and the role of gender, shame, love, and grief in shaping our attitudes toward animals. Exposing humanism's conception of the human as a biased illusion, and embracing posthumanism's acceptance of human and animal entanglement, Weil unseats the comfortable assumptions of humanist thought and its species-specific distinctions.

Genres: Animals, Nonfiction, School

216 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 2012

Reviews

[Amanda Ramsay]

The book highlights for me the very discussion of morality and the essence of "being."

Kari Weil not only describes the great things we have learned about animals but also invokes past work on animals and how society has viewed them and how that's changed.

This book is in my permanent collection for it's brevity, it's insight, and it's relevance in a world that is currently dealing with climate change & its issues.

[Michelle Taylor]

Weil’s overview of the rise of the field of animal studies is particularly admirable for its attention to the philosophy that helped birth it; no name seems absent, from Aristotle to Rousseau to Derrida. From her we understand not only where our current attitudes towards animals came from, but how they are changing as science lets us in on the secret that the lives and cultures of animals are often similar to ours. Weil reads hundreds of years of philosophical musings about animals alongside mostly modernist literature (including Flush), always striving to answer the question: how can we know what animals are saying to us, and how do we enter into relationships with them if we can never know? If there is an answer, it appears to be “critical anthropomorphism,” in which, “(whether in theory or art)…we open ourselves to touch and to be touched by others as fellow subjects and may imagine their pain, pleasure, and need in anthropomorphic terms, but stop short of believing that we can know that experience” (20).
As Weil herself points out in her introduction, many of her chapters deal with dogs exclusively. She makes clear that this was not intentional and that dogs are meant to represent animals as a whole; still, this outcome makes me feel all the more confident that a dissertation on dogs specifically is justified. Weil recognizes that domestic animals and pets offer the best chance we have of forming true relationships with animals (though it is not entirely clear how we might think about less visible animals). She favors Haraway’s (and thus Hearne’s) ideas here in suggesting that training can open the doors of communication—that it is not an anthropocentric process requiring animal submission and obedience, but “an intersubjective relation that demands an openness to difference on both sides and an openness to be transformed by the difference” (59). Ultimately, she makes the following rationale for rejecting animal abolitionists’ views: “…the danger of such Marxist-inspired approaches to questions of domestication is that they deny the potential for any meaningful interaction between human and nonhuman animals; they refuse the ‘web of interspecies dependencies’ of which we are all a part” (132). In short, we must be critical of our desire to anthropomorphize animals, but it is just this tendency that offers us the ability to empathize with and ethically treat the animals who share our world—if also the ability to treat animals just as poorly as we do our fellow humans.

[Danielle Haig · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most relevant, helpful book on animal studies I have read so far. Weil does a wonderful job of balancing discussion of philosophy, theory, art, and literature, so that her discussion of pieces I have previously read about was much clearer and more helpful. I really appreciated her clear, simple prose and analysis. This book focused a great deal on our shared humanity with non-human animals and the value of limited anthropomorphism towards seeing animals as potential of equal value as humans but still different. She made some interesting points about how training can be seen as a non word based language between animals and humans which I would love to read more about.

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've spent the best part of a year reading books on Critical Animal Studies. This book is perhaps the best introductory work I've encountered so far. Just wish I'd encountered it sooner.

[Vasile · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deconstructionist approach. Animal issues and ethics. Representation