Columbia University Press

Over the past few years perhaps no field in the academy has been as vibrant or ambitious as animal studies. Scholars have examined the question of the animal and the relationship between animals and humans from a variety of fields from philosophy and law to literary studies and religion.

Columbia University Press has been publishing in animal studies for a few years now and is now working with Gary Francione and Gary Steiner, two leading scholars in the field on new series, Critical Perspectives on Animals.

Here is a description of the series from the editors:

With this series we seek to promote and give crucially needed direction to the emerging interdisciplinary field of animal studies. A generation ago the tendency in scholarship was to focus questions pertaining to animals within narrow disciplinary boundaries. This tendency has been replaced by an increasing recognition of the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries and exploring the affinities as well as the differences between the approaches of fields such as philosophy, law, sociology, political theory, ethology, and literary studies to questions pertaining to animals. At stake in these explorations is an appreciation of the subjective experience and the moral status of animals as well as of the nature and place of human beings.

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In a recent essay for Rorotoko, Gary Francione writes about his book Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation.

His essay explains his rejection of conventional animal welfare reform and his belief in the abolitionist theory of animal rights. Francione argues “that we cannot justify using animals as human resources, irrespective of whether our treatment is ‘humane’” and that animals should not be kept as chattel or property.

Francione also suggests that we suffer from a kind of “moral schizophrenia” when it comes to nonhuman animals. In one of the more provocative portions of his essay, he writes:

Our moral thinking about animals is confused to the point of being delusional. We say that we regard as morally wrong the imposition of “unnecessary” suffering and death on animals. Whatever the finer points about the meaning of necessity, if it means anything at all in this context, it must mean that we cannot justify imposing suffering and death on animals for reasons of mere pleasure, amusement, or convenience. We excoriated Michael Vick for participating in dog fighting because the dogs suffered and died only because Vick and his friends derived pleasure from this activity. But how is Vick any different from those of us who eat meat and animal products?

We kill and eat approximately 56 billion animals annually, not including fish. There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority—almost all—of these animals have absolutely horrible lives and deaths and are treated in ways that clearly and undisputedly constitute torture. The animal you ate for dinner last night—even if raised in the most “humane” or in “free-range” circumstances—was treated as badly if not worse than Michael Vick’s dogs.

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Kelly Oliver author of Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human recently discussed her book on Rorotoko.

Oliver stresses the importance of animals in Western philosophy “to make the case that humans are special.” Oliver begins:

Philosophers have argued that humans are so unique that they have transcended their animality and become something entirely other. In this book, I show how the animals “bite back” and betray the very service into which they have been corralled in the name of humanity. Our concepts of the human, of kinship, of language, and even of human rights are borne on the backs of animals, whose importance to philosophy goes unacknowledged. Philosophers unthinkingly use animals to develop their theories of the human subject and human nature.

Later Oliver discusses how her book expands upon and moves beyond conventional discussions of animal rights and welfare:

I move away from the framework of animal rights because the history of this discourse and the notion of rights are bought at the expense of animals. We need to do more than merely expand our concept of rights to include some animals. Rather, we need to rethink what it means to be animal and what it means to be human. We need to acknowledge how our conception of ourselves as superior to animals is dependent upon those very animals that we disavow.

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Taking Ford Maddox Ford’s suggestion to heart (“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you”), The Page 99 Test asks authors to focus in on this particular page.

Recently, Kelly Oliver took the test with her new book Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. After excerpting from page 99 of the book, Oliver summarizes the book’s argument and focus on how philosophers have thought about humanity in relation to animals and what we eat:

From Rousseau and Herder to Freud and Kristeva, philosophers suggest that humanity is determined by what we eat: whether they think that we are what we eat (like Rousseau and Herder) or that we are not what we eat (like Freud and Kristeva), man becomes human by eating animals. I begin by looking back at 18th Century notions of humanity and animality that define man in terms of what he eats in order to set the stage for an investigation into how philosophies of otherness from Freud through Kristeva repeat romantic gestures that exclude and abject animals. Examining texts as varied of those of Rousseau, Herder, Freud, Heidegger, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, Derrida, Agamben, and Kristeva, I argue that concepts of subjectivity, humanity, politics and ethics continue to be defined by the double-movement of assimilating and then disavowing the animal, animality, and animals…. I argue that within the history of philosophy, animals remain the invisible support for whatever we take to be human subjectivity, as fractured and obscure as it becomes in the late Twentieth Century.

Now that the Thanksgiving meal has been eaten and people have moved on to Black Friday or Cyber Monday, we thought it appropriate to mention Gary Steiner’s much-discussed New York Times op-ed from last week, Animal, Vegetable, Miserable.

In the essay, Gary Steiner, who is the author of Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship and a strict vegan, examines some of the philosophical as well as practical issues connected to not eating meat.

Steiner argues:

Many people soothe their consciences by purchasing only free-range fowl and eggs, blissfully ignorant that “free range” has very little if any practical significance. Chickens may be labeled free-range even if they’ve never been outside or seen a speck of daylight in their entire lives. And that Thanksgiving turkey? Even if it is raised “free range,” it still lives a life of pain and confinement that ends with the butcher’s knife.

How can intelligent people who purport to be deeply concerned with animal welfare and respectful of life turn a blind eye to such practices? And how can people continue to eat meat when they become aware that nearly 53 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for human consumption? The simple answer is that most people just don’t care about the lives or fortunes of animals. If they did care, they would learn as much as possible about the ways in which our society systematically abuses animals, and they would make what is at once a very simple and a very difficult choice: to forswear the consumption of animal products of all kinds.

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We are following up on yesterday’s post on animal studies with a look at the group blog The Inhumanities, which just completed its discussion of Matthew Calarco’s Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. Cary Wolfe, a leading figure in animal studies, writes, “Zoographies is that rare breed of book that manages to provide both a critical overview and incisive intervention on the terrain of what is now called ‘the question of the animal.’”

In their discussion, contributors to The Inhumanities consider Calarco’s understanding of Agamben, Heidegger, Derrida, and other continental philosophers treatment of the question of the animal. The various posts elicited many comments from readers and also includes responses from Calarco.

One contributor speculates on a possible connection between vegetarianism and deconstruction:

Here is where I think vegetarianism can make a strong claim to the practice of deconstruction. Let us imagine Derrida as a young man. He realizes one day that philosophy, the whole thing, is founded on a couple great untruths or self-deceptions. Rather than saying, “philosophy is a load of bull,” he devotes his life to working from within that tradition to mar it indelibly. He was able to deconstruct philosophy by virtue of, and only because of, a position within philosophy. Today, we find ourselves realizing that the cultural infrastructure of the meat industry called Western Civilization (“carnophallogocentrism”) is a set of self-deceptions. From where do we dismantle it? Vegetarianism is not a position outside of the world, but it is a position within it that allows for different horizons to appear. The work of deconstructing vegetarianism would multiply those horizons, disbanding some and enriching others—but it is only from within such a vegetarianism (becoming-veg!n as Scu calls it) that such futures can arrive. I’m not sure there is much more of interest to be spun out from the culture of meat sacrifice after deconstruction. Veg!sm, on the other hand, puts humans at stake in the ever more fine-grained construction/discovery of living beings.

The Chronicle Review recently featured a series of articles exploring the rise of animal studies in the academy. Articles include Creature Consciousness, which explores some of the theoretical and philosophical foundations of animal studies as well as the line that some academics juggle between scholarship and advocacy. The article includes a quote from Matthew Calarco, author of Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida, on the impact of animal studies on philosophy. From the piece:

Thinkers on both the analytic and Continental sides “are beginning to say that this primacy we give to the human-mind relationship to the world needs to be displaced,” Calarco says. “There’s a kind of implicit anthropomorphism that dominates philosophy, and that is being attacked from different angles.”

In another article, Presses, Journals, and Meetings Buzz With Animal Studies, Wendy Lochner, editor of the animal studies list at Columbia University Press is quoted and cited for developing one of the strongest lists in the field. From the article:

Columbia University Press has also established itself as a strong publisher of animal-studies scholarship. Wendy Lochner, a senior executive editor for philosophy, religion, and animal studies at the press, emphasizes work in which species functions as a critical category, like race or gender. “It requires a radical rethinking of our life on earth and how we view human beings” relative to other animals and the planet, she says.

The Web site Rorotoko has a cover interview/post with Gary Steiner in which he discusses his recent book Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship.

Steiner’s post describes his book’s exploration and critique of the Western philosophical tradition’s attitude toward animals.

Steiner writes:

More than fifty-three billion animals are killed worldwide for human consumption every year, and yet we give little thought to the inner subjective lives of animals and the remarkable extent to which their lives are in important respects very much like our own. If we were to acknowledge the fundamental similarities between human and non-human animal life—for humans, too, are animals—it would be impossible for us to ignore the moral implications of the ways in which we use animals to satisfy our desires.

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In a recent review for the online journal Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Gerald Bruns considers how two recent philosophy books explore novelist J. M. Coetzee’s philosophical views on animals.

One of the books discussed by Bruns is Philosophy and Animal Life, which includes a stellar group of co-authors: Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, Cary Wolfe.

The review highlights how these thinkers essays relate to Coetzee’s work, particularly Elizabeth Costello, and their own philosophical approaches to the question of animals and animal rights.

Here is a brief excerpt from the review:

Meanwhile Cary Wolfe’s useful introduction to Philosophy and Animal Life is balanced by Ian Hacking’s concluding remarks—a series of random but intriguing notes on the proceedings, including an observation that in breeding turkeys for food (using artificial insemination and force-feeding) we have produced a species of faux-turkeys who, being so fat, can neither walk nor copulate with turkey hens. To which he adds: “There is something wrong, morally lacking (I feel) with someone who is not . . . appalled by the way we have bred turkeys out of their turkeyness” (p. 151). Part of the difficulty of Elizabeth Costello is evidently the way she can get under a philosopher’s skin.

This still young century—maybe only now just beginning—calls us all into relations of obligation and care. This is our object lesson, among others, whether to follow our curiosity and desire—to kiss, or to be led by our lesser selves toward animosity, what we sometimes like to cordon off as animality. Only by letting our human-animal borders become more porous can we let the future materialize out of our mixed pasts.

The following post is by Frances Bartkowski, author of Kissing Cousins: A New Kinship Bestiary:

The surprises just keep on coming. There in the question and answer part of president-elect Barack Obama’s first press conference, all somber, sober news and ideas about how to deal with an economic meltdown the likes of which haven’t been seen in decades, came a question from one of the reporters. In an attempt at shifting the subject, posing a few quick questions about how the soon-to-be first family would be occupying the White House, a reporter asked whether they had yet decided on what sort of puppy the two daughters would be getting. Retaining his sober demeanor, Obama responded by citing two criteria: Malia is allergic, so the dog would need to be hypoallergenic, yet they would prefer a shelter dog, but, as he then pointed out, “shelter dogs tend to be mutts like me.”

How will this remark translate as the world continues to watch closely his first moves? So much has been said and written about the uniquely American phenomenon that was the candidacy and what will soon be the presidency of Barack Obama. Calling forth his mixed race identity in this way, making a link between humans and the animals who are our closest companions ought to go a long way toward keeping the conversation lively.

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This ran a few days ago but we forgot to mention that the second part of Gary Francione’s interview with Vegan Freak is now available. (Click here for the first part.)

The book has received a lot of notice from animal rights and animal studies blogs and sites. The following is a selected list of sites thatreviewed or mentioned the book and are also definitely worth exploring if you are interested in animal rights or the burgeoning scholarly field of animal studies: An Animal Friendly Life, Animalblog.co.uk, Animal Inventory, Animal Person, Animal Rights Malta, Practical Ethics, and Theoria: Blog.

With the recent release of some very noteworthy titles in animal studies as well as our special 50% off sale, we’ve been writing quite a bit about our books in the field. Today, we point you to Gary Francione’s recent appearance on the very popular podcast “Vegan Freak.” (This is part 1 of 2-part interview). In the interview, Francione discusses his new book Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation, the state of the animal rights movement, and the failures of animal welfare legislation.

Interviews with Francione are always engaging and provocative and while you might not always agree with his views, his ideas about the way society treats animals, even as it tries to protect them, challenge conventional notions about how we think about and regard animals. Francione, who is the Distinguished Professor of Law and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy, was the first academic to teach animal rights theory in an American law school and his ideas continue to resonate among animal rights advocates, legal theorists, and philosophers.

For more on Francione, you can also read our interview with Francione, an excerpt from Animals as Persons, or visit Francione’s Web site, Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach.

Gary Francione was the first academic to teach animal rights in a U.S. law school and has since become a central figure in the animal rights movement. In this interview he discusses his new book, Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation.

*We are offering a 50% discount on Animals as Persons and all other Animal Studies titles through August 1. 

Q: In your new book, Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation, you maintain that we suffer from “moral schizophrenia” when it comes to nonhuman animals. What do you mean by that?

Gary Francione: I mean that our thinking about animals is very confused. On one hand, we claim to regard animals as members of the moral community. We claim to embrace a moral and legal obligation not to inflict “unnecessary” suffering or death on animals. We can, of course, debate the meaning of “necessity,” but whatever it means, it must rule out suffering and death imposed for reasons of human pleasure, amusement, or convenience. If it does not do so, then the exception would completely swallow the moral rule.

The problem is that 99.99% of our animal use cannot be justified by anything but human pleasure, amusement, or convenience. For example, we kill more than 12 billion land animals every year in the United States alone for food. No one maintains that it is necessary to eat animals to lead an optimally healthy lifestyle and an increasing number of mainstream health care professionals tell us that animal foods are detrimental to our health. Animal agriculture is a disaster for the environment because it involves a most inefficient use of natural resources and creates water pollution, soil erosion, and greenhouse gasses. The only justification that we have for the pain, suffering, and death that we impose on these billions of animals is that we enjoy eating animal foods, or that it is convenient to do so, or that it is just plain habit.

We regard some animals—our “pets”—as members of our families. We see them as nonhuman persons. We love them and they love us back. We are not in any way speaking or thinking anthropomorphically when we say that dogs and cats are sentient beings with distinct personalities. That is simply a matter of fact. We have no doubt that they have an interest in avoiding pain, suffering, and death. We grieve when they die. But our dogs and cats are no different from the animals whose bodies we eat or who are used to produce dairy and eggs. We love some animals; we stick forks into others. That is what I mean by “moral schizophrenia.”

Q: You mention dairy and eggs. What is wrong with eating products that do not result in the death of an animal?

GF: Those products do result in animal deaths and tremendous animal suffering. Animals used to produce dairy and eggs generally live longer than “meat” animals, are arguably treated worse, and end up at the same slaughterhouse after which we consume their bodies anyway. There is probably more suffering in a glass of milk than in a pound of steak.

Q: So you advocate veganism?

GF: Absolutely. A theme that runs throughout my work, including Animals as Persons, is that veganism must be the moral baseline of anyone who claims to take animals seriously. Just as someone opposed to human slavery would not own any slaves, someone opposed to animal exploitation should not consume or wear animals.

Q: What about animal experiments? Is that use of animals justifiable?

GF: The use of animals to find cures for serious human illnesses represents the only use of animals in which we engage that is not transparently trivial. But this use is also not morally justifiable. In the first place, there are serious issues concerning whether the use of animals is “necessary” in that the required data cannot be obtained in any way other than through the use of animals. Secondly, even if there are some uses that are really “necessary” in some empirical sense, we cannot justify those uses morally because we rightly regard it as morally unacceptable to use any humans for experiments in which they are harmed or killed. Our only justification for using nonhuman animals in experiments is our species bias, or speciesism, and that prejudice can no more defended than can racism, sexism, or heterosexism. (more…)

We’ve had such a great response to the post by Wendy Lochner, editor of the Press’s Animal Studies list, that we are offering a 50% discount on all animal studies titles, including works by Gary Francione, Stanley Cavell, James Rachels, Lorraine Daston, and Matthew Calarco. (The sale lasts until August 1 and is available to U.S. and Canadian customers only.)

Over the next few weeks we hope to have a series of posts highlighting titles from our Animal Studies list. Yesterday, the list’s editor Wendy Lochner wrote about her interest in the field and in recent days we’ve had three Animal Studies books hit the shelves: Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation, by Gary Francione, Philosophy and Animal Life, by Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe, and Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida, by Matthew Calarco.

We also recently published A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics. One the book’s editors, Paul Waldau, recently wrote an essay for The Dallas Morning News. The essay begins with a discussion of the media attention surrounding the Chihuahua who joined in the daily prayers at a Buddhist temple in Japan. Waldau then considers the continuing fascination individuals and scholars have had regarding the relationship between animals and religion. Here is an excerpt from his essay “Religion and Other Animals”:

The debate over whether or not our animal neighbors can be “religious” is but one issue in the growing field of religion and animals. In the last decade, the field has also illuminated the significant roles played by religious traditions in our learning about and treatment of other living beings….This scholarly work emerges into a context where humans’ attitudes toward our cousin animals are more multifaceted than ever. At times, some humans seem driven by a refusal to inquire about the nonhuman lives within and near their communities. This refusal is evident in food practices, where many encounter animals most frequently. At the same time, more households in the United States today have companion animals than have children. Polls consistently indicate that an astonishing number of people–in some cases more than ninety-nine percent–hold their dog or cat to be a “family member.”

Communities of faith are among the institutions that are most responsive to the complex connections between humans and other animals. One increasingly finds that contemporary religious communities have reinstituted the ancient practice known often as “blessing of the animals.” Some communities of faith are quite creative in recognizing the pastoral value of concerns for their members’ interactions with nonhumans–some offer worship services in which believers can bring their nonhuman companions, and others provide grief counseling when a nonhuman family member dies.

Theologian Thomas Berry suggests, “We cannot be truly ourselves in any adequate manner without all our companion beings throughout the earth. The larger community constitutes our greater self.” Growing awareness of “religion and animals,” both scholarly and practical, opens the door to a fundamental question faced by people of divergent faiths–who will humans acknowledge as constitutive of their greater selves?

The following post is by Wendy Lochner, senior executive editor for Religion, Philosophy, and Animal Studies

Why animal studies now? Like many people who are interested in the fate of animals and of the Earth, I came to this issue from an activist animal-rights perspective. My background is in philosophy, and I eagerly read and absorbed the arguments of Peter Singer and Tom Regan. As I read further I became hungry for approaches that moved even further toward commonality, and I embraced the absolutist views of scholars such as Gary Francione.

But still I was troubled by the indifference of most people to the conditions of animal life. They can know about deplorable factory-farm conditions, for example, and yet not incorporate that knowledge into their behavior or ethical views. A winning argument, I felt, was not rooted in rational discourse alone; it needed to change hearts and minds by appealing to humans’ emotional connections to, love for, and kinship with animals.

I began to read work by Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe, John Coetzee, Alice Crary, and others, who convinced me of the power of literature to advance the animal issue. Soon I discovered that many ethologists, religion scholars, and sociologists were also committed to showing the scientific, social-scientific, and humanities bases for a loving involvement with animals as part of a worldview in which the “question of the animal” becomes a fundamental concern of critical inquiry, one in which the terms, concepts, and forms of evidence that we use can themselves be questioned in terms of the presuppositions they make about animals and human—and nonhuman—animal relationships. What is required is no less than a radical rethinking of the nature of humanity itself as inextricably cojoined with our nonhuman kin and in common cause with them.

It is this point of view that I (and many others) call animal studies, and it is my intention as an editor to foster interdisciplinary work from all fields that considers these and many other interrelated questions.

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For a list of animal studies titles from Columbia University Press.