What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?

"There is some overlap around questions of animal cognition, but Despret’s book is broader in scope and less linear in its organisation. As you point out, this work is organised like one of those abecedaria that hang on the walls of elementary school classrooms. As such, the chapters are organised alphabetically by concept (“A is for Artists,” “B is for Beasts,” etc.). This means that the reader can pick and choose which chapters to read and in what order to read them, which gives them a neat sense of agency, freedom, and playfulness. The book even has little icons scattered throughout the text—a pointing hand—that point readers to other entries at key moments. So if one entry relates to something ten chapters away, one can jump to that chapter, read it, and return to the original chapter. There’s a lot of cross-referencing internally. Stylistically, it is quite interesting. Yes. It also reminds me stylistically of Montaigne’s essays and Rochefoucauld’s aphorisms, which are shorter than a typical treatise and usually in a non-linear in their organisation. Anyway, in Despret’s book, each chapter is a meditation on a topic. And the topics are very diverse: animals and art, animals and empathy, animals and politics, animals and sex, animals and research. And they are all very short—only about 5-10 pages each. Just to give you one example of this, she has a chapter called ‘Q is for Queer: Are Penguins Coming Out of the Closet?’ that is less than 10 pages. In it, she talks about how animals are used as models of morality by liberals and conservatives alike—often for very different ends. Defenders of gay marriage will go on and on about so-called gay animals in the wild, while opponents will find animals that couple in ‘heterosexual’ units for life in an attempt to naturalise classical marriage. Despret takes no position about marriage. Rather, she takes a step back from the controversy to call into question the very idea that we can extract from nature a justification for human moral or political regimes. So as you can see the book’s scope is huge, but there are two grand themes that intrigue me. She views animals as meaning makers—she’s interested in stories, anecdotes, protocols that show how animals produce meanings for themselves and those around them. She has a chapter on primates using knots to make hammocks in laboratories and in sanctuaries, a chapter on elephants who make art in Southeast Asia, and a chapter on animal companions and the bonds they develop with the humans they share their lives with. As you read, you start seeing animals not just as these passive objects that are the recipients of human power or human domination, but as active agents that also make choices and have something to contribute to a social interaction. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The the second theme is the politics of the laboratory. For Despret, laboratories are ‘dispositives’ (a term she borrows from Michel Foucault ). They are human creations that necessarily produce artificial effects. One of those effects is that they naturalise things that are in fact socially constructed. We think that behaviours displayed in the laboratory belong to the natural behavioural repertoire of a species, when often they may be unnatural effects of artificial living conditions. She has a really interesting analysis of rat infanticide. Rats will kill their children when there is scarcity. This, we are told, is an innate behavioural tendency. But if this were true, why is infanticide never observed among rats in their natural habitats? It’s only in the laboratory that they regularly eat their young. Why would that be? Despret argues that it has to do with the artificial production of scarcity and competition between rats that humans produce in order to motivate the rats to participate in experiments. The laboratory isn’t a place of discovery ; it is a place of creation. And there are a lot of chapters that that bring to the foreground how animal behaviour is de-formed and de-natured in the laboratory. I think for Vinciane Despret, the conclusion is that we should strive to study animals in non-laboratory settings, or at least we should be more aware of how the image that we get of animals in these rigid, austere, artificial spaces is a kind of mirage."