Nearly 20 years age, Yi-Fu Tuan wrote his influential Dominance and Affection:The Making of Pets , which argued that human affection for domestic animals is inseparable from dominance. Today, cultural critics persist in the view that companion animals are compromised, even degraded, because they are controlled by humans. The essay attempts to rethink the relationship between humans and companion animals beyond the freedom-dominance binary. It argues for a conceptual approach that defers confidant interpretation of animals while dramatically relaxing control of (...) them within human settings. It suggests that this approach be called a "performance ethic" and offered the House Rabbit Society as a model. (shrink)

Urbanization and development of green spaces is continuing worldwide. Such development frequently engulfs the habitats of native animals, with a variety of effects on their existence, location and ways of living. This paper attempts to theorize about some of these effects, drawing on aspects of Foucault's discussions of power and using a metaphor of human colonization, where colonization is understood as an "ongoing process of dispossession, negotiation, transformation, and resistance." It argues that a variety of different kinds of human/animal power (...) relations can exist in urban areas, not all of which are examples of human domination. The paper concludes by raising a number of questions about the implications of these human/animal relations. (shrink)

Animals who live in cities must coexist with us. They are, as a result, entitled to the conditions of their flourishing. This article argues that, as the boundaries of cities and urban areas expand, the boundaries of our conception of captivity should expand too. Urbanization can undermine animals’ freedoms, hence their ability to live good lives. I draw the implications of an account of “pervasive captivity” against the background of the Capabilities Approach. I construe captivity, including that of urban animals, (...) as affecting a range of animal capabilities, understood as freedoms, and I address some tensions within Nussbaum’s treatment of human-animal conflicts. Using the Capabilities Approach as a guide, I will attempt to motivate a convergence between habitat preservation in urbanized environments, urban design guided by justice, and the individual freedoms of animals. (shrink)

AbstractMichel Foucault is well known as a theorist of power who provided forceful critiques of institutions of confinement such as the psychiatric asylum and the prison. Although the invention of factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses, like prisons and psychiatric hospitals, can be considered emblematic moments in a history of modernity, and although the modern farm is an institution of confinement comparable to the prison, Foucault never addressed these institutions, the politics of animal agriculture, or power relationships between humans and other (...) animals more generally. The few times that Foucault discussed animality or human–animal relations, animals and animality remained metaphors for humans and human experiences. Despite Foucault's failure to analyze human–nonhuman animal relations, a significant body of Critical Animal Studies literature has mobilized Foucault's work over the last decade. In particular, a number of scholars have taken up Foucault's writings to consider how relations between humans and nonhuman animals in agriculture might be conceptualized as instances of sovereign power, biopower, disciplinary power, and pastoral power, as well as why we may not think that these are power relations at all. This essay provides an overview of Foucault's accounts of power and of the Foucauldian scholarship that applies these accounts to human–nonhuman animal relations in animal agriculture. (shrink)

Animal agriculture predominantly involves farming social animals. At the same time, the nature of agriculture requires severely disrupting, eliminating, and controlling the relationships that matter to those animals, resulting in harm and unhappiness for them. These disruptions harm animals, both physically and psychologically. Stressed animals are also bad for farmers because stressed animals are less safe to handle, produce less, get sick more, and produce poorer quality meat. As a result, considerable efforts have gone into developing stress-reduction methods. Many of (...) these attempt to replicate behaviours or physiological responses that develop or constitute bonding between animals. In other words, humans try to mitigate or ameliorate the damage done by preventing and undermining intraspecies relationships. In doing so, the wrong of relational harms is compounded by an instrumentalisation of trust and care. The techniques used are emblematic of the welfarist approach to animal ethics. Using the example of gentle touching in the farming of cows for beef and dairy, the paper highlights two types of wrong. First, a wrong done in the form of relational harms, and second, a wrong done by instrumentalising relationships of care and trust. Relational harms are done to nonhuman animals, whilst instrumentalisation of care and trust indicates an insensitivity to morally salient features of the situation and a potential character flaw in the agents that carry it out. (shrink)

Urban animals can benefit from living in cities, but this also makes them vulnerable as they increasingly depend on the advantages of urban life. This article has two aims. First, I provide a detailed analysis of the concept of captivity and explain why it matters to nonhuman animals—because and insofar as many of them have a (non-substitutable) interest in freedom. Second, I defend a surprising implication of the account—pushing the boundaries of the concept while the boundaries of cities and human (...) activities expand. I argue for the existence of the neglected problem of pervasive captivity, of which urban wildlife is an illustration. Many urban animals are confined, controlled and dependent, therefore often captive of expanding urban areas. While I argue that captivity per se is value-neutral, I draw the ethical and policy implications of harmful pervasive captivity. (shrink)

As boundaries between domesticity and the undomesticated increasingly blur for cohabitants of Vancouver Island, home to North America’s densest cougar population, predatorial problems become more and more pressing. Rosemary-Claire Collard responds on a pragmatic plane, arguing that the encounter between human and cougar is only ever destructive, that contact results in death and almost always for the cougar. Advocating for vigilance in policing boundaries separating cougar from civilization, therefore, she looks to Foucault’s analysis of modern biopower in the first volume (...) of his History of Sexuality for support in favor of a more contemporary notion of biosecurity. In response to Collard’s arguments, concerned with ethical conclusions drawn on the basis of her policy-based proposal, I challenge the prohibition she places on encounter. In the first section, “Becoming Killable,” I address her use of Donna Haraway’s phraseology, and in the second section, “Biological Dangers,” I scrutinize her reading of Foucault, arguing that the appeals she makes distort the mode of argumentation at work for each thinker. The final section, “Facing Cougar, Facing Death,” advocates further ethical possibilities generated on the basis of Foucault’s correlation between overcoming the fear of death and resisting abuses of power with respect to others. My contention is that our transgressing boundaries constructed to separate humanity from the inhumane curtails tendencies toward the marginalization and subjugation of those animal others whose very existence brings us face to face with the fact of our own mortality. (shrink)

Research on ethical issues within food systems is often human-centric. As a consequence, animal-centric policy debates where regulatory decisions about food are being made tend to be overlooked by food scholars and activists. This absence was notable in the recent debates around Australia’s animal live export industry. Using Foucault’s tools, we explore how ‘food security’ is conceptualised and governed within animal cruelty policy debates about the live export trade. The problem of food security produced in these debates shaped Indonesians as (...) ‘victims’ of food insecurity due to the nation’s inability to produce sufficient quantities of protein. This understanding of the problem reproduced the dominant framing of food security as a problem for developing countries addressed by increasing global food production. The underlying premise uncritically accepted in Australia’s debates on live export trade was that intensive animal agriculture, and Australia’s live export trade specifically, were essential to alleviating global food insecurity. Drawing on our findings, we show how dominant representations of ‘food security’, and related regulatory and technological trajectories, flourish where alliances between animal and food activists, scholarship, and movements are weak. Accordingly, we argue for agri-food scholars to take up opportunities to contribute to the policy discussions about the treatment of animals to effectively expand the kinds of problems, solutions, and strategies of resistance produced in the discourses surrounding food system issues. (shrink)