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Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Australian Law and The Status of Animals

It is probably amazing for most people to learn that not all states in Australia recognise that animals have feelings. For anyone who cares about animals it is pretty clear just from personal observation that they do, as the ACT only recently recognised by law in 2019. For caring pet owners, we know when our animals are sad, excited or happy. We can read the different expressions of dogs and cats and the different states of their body language. Why then is the law so far behind what I am sure the general population would consider an ethical stance?

Here I think the term Capitalocene becomes useful as it draws attention to how operations of the state enable corporations to exploit animals in highly systemised ways – ways that are likely not approved of by the general population, I would imagine. For this law that recognises how animals have feelings only applies to pets. Animals that are not permitted into our homes and beds are therefore outside the protection of the law. As the article I linked to states, this law is also largely symbolic and lacks practical application for moderating human’s treatment of animals. In this way, the law is there to appease the minds of pet owners – to placate the general voting population and yet permit the practices of big business. The law therefore does not really care about the welfare of animals but about profit and power, which does not reflect the values of the general population.

Terms like ‘Capitalocene’, created by Jason W. Moore, therefore reveal the predominant source of violence towards animals and undermine the view that humans are simply at odds with ‘nature’. A large portion of humans do want to have loving and symbiotic relationships with animals – it is predominantly rather the corporate world, as enabled by the state, that seeks to exploit them.

Scholarly Article Link: 'If Schrödinger's cat miaows in the suburbs, will anyone hear?',

This article examines how the law is inherently violent to what is feral - feral cats in particular - and provides suggestions for ways that the law can become-animal, as Delueze and Guattari would put it; ways that the law itself can sonderweave.

By Claire - z3393668.

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2. Cat Body Language 101 - Jackson Galaxy A short video by Jackson Galaxy (known as the cat whisperer) in which he describes how we can interpret often misunderstood cat behaviours. He explains how cats are often misunderstood because they are seen through the lens of dog behaviour, which is really something entirely different and not a measure by which to understand the world of cats and their own, unique sets of behaviours. This video helps grow the sonderweb by encouraging people to empathise with cats and understand that what might seem like a cat that just wants to be antagonistic is really just a cat that is maybe frightened or overstimulated. It helps individuals to sonderweave.(Added by Claire - z3393668).

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There are an estimated 23 billion chickens on earth at any given time, “three times the biomass of all the wild birds combined”.
The demand for chicken products (meat and eggs) has increased with the growth in population. Some methods of chicken farming are distressing; the lifespan only “five to seven weeks from hatching to slaughter”.

The evolution of chickens is interesting in so far as their DNA can be traced to dinosaurs before being domesticated approximately 6000 years ago. Even now chickens are becoming more prevalent as household pets in metropolitan areas. Here we can see evidence of their urbanisation as they are born directly into 'captivity'.

Chickens have been found to have the closest DNA out of 21 modern species of animals to the Tyrannosaurus Rex. This is not surprising if you’ve seen them walk.

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Evidence of the Anthropocene

Chicken bones (fossils) may provide the evidence needed to prove the Earth has transitioned into a new ecological epoch, the Anthropocene.

The broiler chicken as a signal of a human reconfigured biosphere

'It Could Be the Age of the Chicken, Geologically' — New York Times article

"New morphospecies"

'How the domestic chicken rose to define the Anthropocene' — The Guardian article

Australian Law and The Status of Animals
It is probably amazing for most people to learn that not all states in Australia recognise that animals have feelings. For anyone who cares about animals it is pretty clear just from personal observation that they do, as the ACT only recently recognised by law in 2019. For caring pet owners, we know when our animals are sad, excited or happy. We can read the different expressions of dogs and cats and the different states of their body language. Why then is the law so far behind what I am sure the general population would consider an ethical stance?

Here I think the term Capitalocene becomes useful as it draws attention to how operations of the state enable corporations to exploit animals in highly systemised ways – ways that are likely not approved of by the general population, I would imagine. For this law that recognises how animals have feelings only applies to pets. Animals that are not permitted into our homes and beds are therefore outside the protection of the law. As the article I linked to states, this law is also largely symbolic and lacks practical application for moderating human’s treatment of animals. In this way, the law is there to appease the minds of pet owners – to placate the general voting population and yet permit the practices of big business. The law therefore does not really care about the welfare of animals but about profit and power, which does not reflect the values of the general population.

Terms like ‘Capitalocene’, created by Jason W. Moore, therefore reveal the predominant source of violence towards animals and undermine the view that humans are simply at odds with ‘nature’. A large portion of humans do want to have loving and symbiotic relationships with animals – it is predominantly rather the corporate world, as enabled by the state, that seeks to exploit them.

Scholarly Article Link: 'If Schrödinger's cat miaows in the suburbs, will anyone hear?',

This article examines how the law is inherently violent to what is feral - feral cats in particular - and provides suggestions for ways that the law can become-animal, as Delueze and Guattari would put it; ways that the law itself can sonderweave.

By Claire - z3393668.
Talk is Cheep
Symbolification is defined here as “the process by which historical literary interpretation reduces an otherwise multifaceted ‘subject’ into an ‘object’, by way of using it only to signify something else”. The example of a dove is used — “the symbolification of the dove: the dove is equated with peace symbolically, and thus we have ‘symbolified’ it. It has been reduced to a sort of icon that signifies something it is not, therefore objectifying the creature and detracting from its subjective existence.”

If I understand it correctly, I find the representation of chickens both in slang terminology and in literature to be an example of symbolification. For example, “don’t be chicken”.

To call someone chicken is to insinuate or mock their cowardice or timidity. It also denotes “[the chicken’s insistence] on petty details of duty or discipline”. The intent is to convince/ force/ coerce someone to complete a dare or engage in risk-taking behaviours in order to avoid the label ‘chicken’.
Another example of symbolification is the phrase ‘to run around like a headless chook’. This idiom means to carry on in an uncontrolled, disorganised manner; running around without direction, in a panic, not calmly or logically. Moreover, it is a reminder of their title as dumb animals that are easily herded/ trapped.

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Animal Worlds: Literature Review Authors of animal literature often find themselves caught within the paradoxical process of writing about animals as a way to disrupt the binary division of humans and animals while simultaneously being restrained by the language itself, which inherently contains its own human centred lexicon. In Daniel Keyes, ‘Flowers for Algernon’ (as discussed in the close reading chapter) the author displays an awareness of the linguistic restraints of human language by directly experimenting with the written form; depictions of literacy and illiteracy, self-recognition, progress of rationality, and scientific testing are all exposed as methods in which humanity actively places markers of difference and inferiority, on both human and nonhuman beings, as a way of distancing any similarities we share with other species. While human language, both spoken and written, is a mode of communication between the human species, by its very nature, it is also the thing that perpetually isolates us from communing with and understanding animals, therefore when writers attempt to speak or write on behalf of the animal, a series of impossibilities arise.

The very nature of this oxymoron is what many have labelled as a sure sign of ‘anthropocentrism’ or ‘human exceptionalism’, the belief that the human species is the most significant entity on earth. Such ideals are instilled within Aristotle’s ‘History of Animals’ which contains his observations and recordings of nature under a lens of human exceptionalism. Firstly, Aristotle generated divisions of the realm of living creatures in plants, animals and human beings by investigating outward differences and features of species. In conclusion of these basic categorisations, Aristotle ultimately debates that animals are ‘below’ humans because only humans can reason and therefore we can use animals without the same consideration we would give to people. Due to their failure to speak, Aristotle classifies the non-human inferior to human. Yet ideas such as these have been met with much criticism in environmental, sociological, scientific and literary communities alike. Indeed, the empirical sciences of Darwinism were paramount in undermining this traditional dichotomy. Those traditional human traits which enabled us to distinguish ourselves from animals, such as our speech, knowledge of death, consciousness, etc, have either been proven to exist in similar forms in animal behaviour or to not exist in a manner that we could traditionally recognise.

Mathew Calarco, a key animal philosopher and author writes in his book Zoographies (2008) on the variety of disciplines that intersect within Animal Studies (Biology, Cognitive Sciences, Social Sciences) and proposes that while there is no standard for what defines the field, each individual who pursues this area of research are driven by two central concerns; firstly, an exploration of animality, what it means to an animal and secondly, what are the distinctions of the human / animal divide and how are they defined. The concept of animality has had many theorists question if animals have a "shared essence" yet much like critiques of essentialism in gender studies, most theorists see this idea as an easy way to divide humans from animals. In reality, the extensive array of beings we refer to as 'animal' is in itself a way to reduce those beings under a set of blanket characteristics. Calarco later writes in his book Thinking through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction (2015) that in order to establish justice for animal life we have to create continuity amongst species (both human and non-human beings) to grant animals equal access to the ethical and political community. Calarco believes that the human / animal divide can no longer and should no longer be maintained, that it is our anthropocentrism that has enabled political, legal and moral criterions to govern the continual exclusion of animals; consequently much of our understanding of animals is shaped by the limits of these societal norms.

Similarly, Latimer’s article ‘Being Alongside: Rethinking Relations amongst Different Kinds’ (2013) compels readers to challenge the normative divisions between humans and animals. Latimer seeks to redefine what makes us human by exposing the asymmetry between consciousness and physicality. In reference to Donna Haraway whose proposal that there is a need to be ‘with’ rather than ‘alongside’ other species, through the co-construction of human and non-human worlds; Latimer’s essay calls for connection between species, rather than siloed co-existence. In exploring encounters with animals as something that inhabits the life the human, Latimer’s position is evidently critical of the ‘aggressive othering’ that results in violence towards animals. Conversely, Kay Peggs writes in ‘The animal advocacy agenda’ from a sociological perspective and provides insight to how animals are socially implicated in the human world as well as how historically, they have been silenced and oppressed in academia and literature. Peggs questions the sociological field’s tradition of exploring the discontinuity between human and animals, based on social organisation and meaning making. Specifically, she closely analyses Mead’s proposition that animals are not relevant to sociology due to their lack of perception, imagination and language. To oppose this, she instead draws on ideas of the ‘zoological connection’ and how animals play an important social role within human life. Ultimately, the agenda is thus to propose that sociology is an appropriate field to give voice to animals, due to their intertwinement with human life.

Considering animals in a sociological frame is also echoed in the words of Strommen, in her article "Animals in Literature and Theology” explores animal studies within a theological conceptual frame, referring to both traditional narratives relating to animals and contemporary examples of animal research that has signalled a shift in perspective on the cognitive capacities of non-human entities. With increasing recognition of the complexities of animal consciousness revealed through ethological sciences, such advances in our understanding of the animal realm has led many to question the animal/ human divide and created an increased sense of urgency in animal rights, especially given the hyper industrialised treatment in which agricultural animals are subjected to for human purposes. In contrast, previous conceptions of animals have represented the animal as an oppressed other. Ideas from biblical creationism have insinuated that humans occupy a higher symbolic plane than animals because they are made in ‘God's image’, and therefore justifying any ill treatment to them. For Strommen, as well as other aforementioned writers and critics, it is not enough to deem animals as examples of metaphors for the 'other'; we have to recognise animals in our midst as creatures that also share sight and consciousness, and therefore rethink our notions of compassion, ethics and justice in response to animals when we have undeniable proof of their ecological and cognitive significance.

References:
Aristotle. History of Animals, Book 1,Translated by Richard Cresswell, St Johns College, Oxford, 1887, pp. 1-23. Web.

Calarco, Matthew. The Question of the Animal: On Philosophy and Animal Studies (Introduction). Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York, Columbia UP. 2008. Print.

Calarco, Matthew. Thinking through animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction. Stanford University Press. Vol. 11. No. 2. 2015. Print.

Latimer, Joanna. ‘Being Alongside: Rethinking Relations amongst Different Kinds’. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 30, no. 7, 2013, pp. 77-104. Web.

Peggs, Kay. ‘The ‘animal-advocacy agenda’: exploring sociology for non-human animals’. The Sociological Review, vol. 61, 2013, pp. 591-606. Web.

Strommen, Hannah M. "Animals in Literature and Theology (Special Section" Literature & Theology. An International Journal of Religion, Theory and Culture 31.4. (2017) 383 - 471. Web.

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