Recent research on the cognitive abilities and emotional capacities of animals has fueled the animal rights movement and renewed debate over the differences between human and non-human animals. This debate has not been central to sociology, although George Herbert Mead drew a very hard line between humans and animals by asserting that the latter were not capable of symbolic interaction. Sociologists are now beginning to question this assumption, and this article falls within this new line of research. We begin by (...) presenting alternative interpretations of symbolic interaction that allow for the possibility of such activity in non-human animals. We review recent research on symbolic interaction between humans and dogs, and we present our own research findings on human-feline interaction. We conclude that there is growing evidence that symbolic interaction is widely distributed throughout the animal kingdom, and that it enables animals to survive more effectively in a wide variety of environments. (shrink)

This study explores the value of traditional ethnographic methods in sociology for the study of human-animal and animal-animal interactions and culture. Itargues that some measure of human-animal intersubjectivity is possible and that the method of participant observation is best suited to achieve this. Applying ethnographic methods to human-cat and cat-cat relationships in a no-kill cat shelter, the study presents initial findings; it concludes that the social structure of the shelter is the product of interaction both between humans and cats and (...) cats and cats and that the observed structure represents, to a large degree, choices made by the cats. The study also concludes that, within the cat community of the shelter, a distinctive cat culture has emerged, which represents the cats' adaptation to the particular conditions of shelter life. Specifically, the shelter allows for the emergence of higher order needs and goals that stress affection, friendship, and social cohesion among the cats rather than territoriality and conflict. The study further argues that traditional animal researchers have mistaken the relative equality of cat colonies for a lack of social structure, as opposed to a different structure from that found in sharply ranked nonhuman animal communities. (shrink)

In this essay, I defend a bi-constructivist approach to ethology—a constructivist ethology assuming that each animal adopts constructivist strategies. I put it in opposition to what I call a realist-Cartesian approach, which is currently the dominant approach to ethology and comparative psychology. The starting point of the bi-constructivist approach can be formulated as a shift from the classical Aristotelian question “What is an animal?” to the Spinozean question, which is much less classical but which seems to me to be much (...) stronger: “What are the capacities of the animal?”. Is it possible to conceptualize an ethology which insists on interpretation and therefore on invention, innovation and creativity, rather than on causality, the monotony of behavioural routines, and/or genetic or environmental determination? Such an ethology would be based not on the fiction of an absent observer but on fully recognizing the necessity of an observer, who is effectively present in order to get an observation. A pluralistic ethology does not dissociate itself from the marginal epistemologies of practitioners like animal trainers, hunters, stockbreeders etc., or, moreover, non-western experts. An ethology of this kind is not clamped within the boundaries of purely academic epistemology, obsessed by demarcation lines between the human and the animal. My work on the bi-constructivist approach represents a contribution towards the elaboration of an authentically biosemiotic ethology, one which is significantly different from the mechanical ethology of today. (shrink)

Central to the work of Dominique Lestel is a sustained critical engagement with the sciences of animal behaviour. He critiques the legacy of Cartesianism that sees animals as machines, at the same time as acknowledging the revolution in the understanding of animals that took place in twentieth-century ethology. Further, he offers his own methodological proposals for the future of ethology as a fully social science founded on shared existence and understanding. This profusion of new evidence and edifying approaches demands that (...) we rethink our ideas both of animality and of the nature and origins of culture. (shrink)

Creatures living under the rule of domestication form a communicative union based on shared morphological, behavioural, cognitive, and immunologicalresemblances. Domestic animals live under particular conditions that substantially differ from the original (natural) settings of their wild relatives. Here we focus on the fact that many parallel characters have appeared in various domestic forms that had been selected for different purposes. These characters are often unique for domestic animals and do not exist in wild forms. We argue that parallel similarities appear (...) in different groups in response to their interaction with theumwelt of a particular host. In zoosemiotic sense, the process of domestication represents a kind of interaction in which both sides are affected and eventuallytransformed in such a way that one is more integrated with the other than in the time of initial encounter. (shrink)