A PRAGMATIST ECOFEMINIST TAKE ON LIVING WITH LIVESTOCK
Cold, wet, a little seasick, and thinking, “I hope we don’t die,” my students and I were in a boat off the coast of British Columbia, headed toward a vortex that we were told is hazardous to navigate. Apparently there had been a big rock that got in the way of boats, so someone had the idea to blow it up. Problem solved! But while the rock no longer posed a direct danger to boats, the swirl of currents that took its place posed its own challenges. I thought, “Here is an example of the bad version of ‘being pragmatic.’ Encounter an obstacle—remove said obstacle. Without greater understanding of the context and relationships involved, such an approach is almost guaranteed to create new and more difficult problems.” Ironically, we were in the boat as part of this project to study how the history of farming animals has taken just this approach to “problem-solving” and has created a vortex of its own—a system that is bad for humans, other animals, and the environment.
This trip had become our only hope of seeing a fish farm. Few of those connected to fish farms in the United States would talk with us. Given that some philosophers have been at the forefront of the animal rights and environmental movements, I suppose it is not surprising that there was some suspicion about a philosophy professor’s motives for contacting them. However, the Canadians were taking a different approach to the growing criticism of fish farms—and of salmon farms in particular. They were running a public relations campaign inviting people “to come see salmon in the wild.” It was the “truth.” The pens were placed in the “wild” and beautiful coastal waters of British Columbia.
Once we were through the vortex, I relaxed and began to enjoy the beautiful scenery. Wooded islands, beautiful water, and emerging sunshine. Our guide told us the Canadian government was working to preserve “Canadian resources” so that they could be used by future generations. This use included recreational boating and camping, fishing, logging, and farming fish. While fish are not normally thought of as livestock animals, they have been farmed since the fifth century BCE and today humans farm more fish than they do cows. Just as with more traditional livestock, new technology allows for more intensive methods of raising these animal beings for food. However, as with the farming of cattle, pigs, and poultry, fish farming poses risks to the environment, the human consumer, and the animals themselves.
No matter who you are, where you live, what you do and don’t eat, your life is entwined with livestock. Human history, as well as our present condition, has been intimately shaped by our relationships with those animal beings now commonly seen as livestock. While there is cultural variation, in the United States those animals include chickens, turkeys, sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle. These beings have been domesticated and have long been used to provide humans with eggs, milk, meat, wool, and leather. Cattle and oxen helped make farming possible (and in some instances more problematic) by providing the power to plow and pull wagons. The bodies of these various animals have also been used to provide humans with resources such as glue and gelatin—things that moved technology and food in different directions. Today cows can be found in a myriad of products, some of which include detergents, fabric softeners, toothpaste, mouthwash, lipstick, soap, shampoo, candles, marshmallows, chewing gum, jelly beans, gummy bears, mayonnaise, Jell-O, crayons, paint, wallpaper, floor wax, cough syrup, lozenges, vaccines, and many medications (Hayes and Hayes 26–28). The list goes on and on. In addition, their manure and composted corpses made the farming of crop foods more possible. Even a vegan today, especially if she or he eats organic produce, is eating food that has benefitted from the contribution of animal by-products. There is no way to extract oneself from the lives and deaths of other animal beings.
Less commonly seen as livestock (not domesticated in the ordinary sense of the term), fish, rabbits, llamas, alpaca, bison, ostrich, and elk are farmed as food and fiber resources. Even insects are now emerging as farmed sources of food. Horses too have long provided power and poop to help increase human productivity. But horses have also been used for their hair, hide, and meat, though it is less common to breed and keep them primarily or only for those purposes. They became an important “tool” of transportation and made it possible to ranch cattle on the open range, as dogs helped humans with sheep and goats. Ranch horses are often seen as livestock. While dogs and cats are used for food and fur, they are not commonly seen or raised as livestock, though this does occur in some places. Similarly rabbits, minks, foxes, and chinchillas are kept for some combination of food and fur. Many other animals were and are hunted for these purposes but are not generally kept by humans.
Humans saw the most commonly used animals as a valuable resource and began to keep them in confinement in order to feed and care for them. As humans took greater control of the lives of formerly free-living animals, much about both those animal beings and the human beings changed. Not only did food and farming change, but the health of human and other animal beings also changed as disease resistance and gut bacteria were altered. Materials from the animals altered the possibilities of production, and their hair and hides (as well as their images) altered the form and content of art. Access to, and control of, these animal “resources” transformed social and political relations. While the animals contributed to science and technology as their bodies were used to study anatomy, disease, and genetics, humans then used science and technology to increase the production of what are perceived as cheap meat, eggs, and dairy through breeding, feeding, and confinement. As a result, chickens now outnumber humans, and there are a billion or more other livestock animals. This explosion has allowed for a never-before-experienced diet that is available in the United States and is spreading worldwide. The new diet has come at the expense of the well-being of land and animals, though, and many U.S. consumers have come to demand alternatives. Although the organic label, in the end, does not mean much for the lives of livestock, most consumers think it does. Given this perception of the label, it is interesting to note the increase in organic livestock production. In 1992 the United States produced just over 1,000 organic hogs, but in 2008 production had increased to more than 10,000; organic production of beef cattle increased from almost 7,000 to almost 64,000; organic production of dairy cows increased from just over 2,000 to almost 250,000; and organic production of broiler chickens increased from just over 17,000 to over nine million (O’Donoghue et al. 63). This increase demonstrates a concern on the part of consumers. Even if the consumers’ concern is primarily a concern for human health (and possibly the environment), it acknowledges the connectedness of humans and the other animal beings they consume. This book explores some of the complex and changing relationships among human beings and those other animal beings commonly seen as livestock.
The history of the term livestock is complicated. One source suggests that this was the original notion of stock that people today connect to the idea of stock in a corporation. The live animal beings were the real capital held by companies that financed colonization. Another suggests that it was in the Americas that the term stock, meaning wealth in general (money or goods), transferred to the animals and became live stock (Ogle 3). The term stock also has the sense of supplying and handling merchandise, as in stocking wares in a store. Before technology allowed for the keeping of meat, the best way to store or stock one’s meat was on the hoof. These understandings of the word seem to reduce the animal being in question to monetary or commodity value. These understandings also have the effect of lumping a number of different species together as if there were no real differences among them. I will argue that such a reductionist view of animals is problematic and should change, but I continue to use the term. It is a way to acknowledge and understand the really different situatedness of different animal beings who have come to be enfolded in human communities in particular ways.
There are many animal beings who live in mixed-species communities with humans. Some “wild” and feral animals live around the edges of these communities. Then there are those animal beings who have been domesticated. Those who are considered as pets often live within the homes of humans. If they are not in the home, they are generally at least well sheltered and well fed, whether they are “useful” or not. Others are seen as livestock and are cared for mainly (or only) because they are seen as providing some use to humans. Focusing on these use values, some people no longer use the term livestock. They have gone further down the road of commodification and refer to “protein-producing units,” or “egg-producing units.” Ecofeminist philosopher Carol Adams notes a USDA description of cows, pigs, and chickens as “grain-consuming animal units” (28). I do not want to follow this path. While I prefer to talk about cow beings, chicken beings, pig beings, and so on, the term livestock does serve as a historical reminder of how certain animal beings have been, and are, seen and used. It also serves as a reminder that there is an economic aspect to any relationship with animals raised for the purposes of food and fiber. While I agree with Adams that it is problematic to understand other animal beings solely in terms of humans’ desire to use them—in her words, to “ontologize them as edible or consumable”—I also think it is problematic to try to cover up the fact that we have used and do use them in these ways. Since such use is not going to stop any time soon (and I don’t argue that ending the use of livestock animals is a viable or good goal), the question here is how to find more respectful relationships that include a use component but are not reduced to that alone.
In Pets, People, and Pragmatism I examined human relationships with animal beings commonly seen as pets. There I focused mainly on horses, dogs, and cats in order to develop an ethic of respect rooted in the tradition of American pragmatism and feminist theory. I sketched an approach of living with horses, dogs, and cats that entails respecting the evolutionary history of these animals, their species-specific behaviors, breed tendencies, and individual variation. I have advocated an experimental approach that accounts for pluralistic and changing circumstances. Rather than seek absolute moral stands on issues pertaining to the relations between human and other animal beings, humans should seek to make actual relations better and seek to create dialogue and cooperation among currently opposed groups (e.g., People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA] and the American Kennel Club [AKC]).
One place where such dialogue rarely occurs is around the issue of livestock. Philosopher Mary Midgley notes, “Although both for people and animals a steady movement to eating less meat is needed, and although what the animals need most urgently is probably a campaign for treating them better before they are eaten, a tribal division into total eaters and total abstainers still tends strongly to capture our imagination” (27). But such a divide is not accurate. People who live with pets are involved in the livestock industry, whether they themselves eat meat or not. Those who live with horses are buying feed from the same system that provides feed for cattle, pigs, and poultry. Those who live with dogs and cats usually feed some amount of meat and other animal by-products (e.g., bones, hooves, rawhide) to these pets. One estimate notes that if every cat in the United States ate just two ounces of meat a day this would come to about twelve million pounds of meat each day. To put it more visually, this would equal three million chickens a day (Herzog 6). People with pets often buy this food without much thought for the lives of the livestock animals. While pets are loved and pampered, most livestock currently living in the United States have few stable social relationships (either with humans or with others of their species), live in cramped and unhealthy confinement, and are transported and killed under stressful conditions. I ended Pets, People, and Pragmatism by pointing out the irony of sacrificing one group of animal beings who are now generally kept at a distance from most humans in order to feed (and often overfeed) another group of animal beings who live in close contact with humans.
According to Hal Herzog, such an irony is not surprising since most people don’t think that deeply about other animal beings. Even those who do think about how humans relate to other animal beings often have a host of contradictory beliefs, and usually their actions contradict one or more of the beliefs they hold. For instance, in Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, Herzog shows that while many in the United States protest the killing of baby seals for fur, object to the use of primates in lab research, and promote the adoptions of dogs and cats to prevent them from being euthanized, U.S. consumers still eat seventy-two billion pounds of meat a year. Herzog writes, “It is true that an increasing number of people believe that animals are entitled to basic rights, including, one presumes, the right not to be killed because you happen to be made out of meat. But, despite our stated love for animals, . . . [we] kill 200 food animals for every animal used in a scientific experiment, 2,000 for each unwanted dog euthanized in an animal shelter, and 40,000 for every baby harp seal bludgeoned to death on a Canadian ice floe. And, in spite of what you sometimes hear, over the past thirty years, the animal rights movement has not made much of a dent in our desire to dine on other species” (176). Herzog argues that this is unlikely to change, since eating the meat of other animals is “‘in our genes’ just as it is in chimpanzee genes” (202). Although he notes that human beings have the capacity to ask questions about what is right and wrong when it comes to whom we eat and how we treat those we eat, he concludes that, in general, “other than our personal pets, the treatment of animals is not particularly high on most people’s list of priorities” (240).
I think there is some evidence, though, that many people are rethinking human relationships with a wide variety of animal beings—including livestock. In January 2015 the New York Times ran a story about the abuse of animals used in government funded experiments at the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in Nebraska: “US Research Lab Lets Livestock Suffer in Quest for Profit.” Since livestock are exempt from the Animal Welfare Act, which protects some laboratory animals, there has been less oversight of such work. Experiments done with the intent of supporting the large and powerful meat industry have gotten a pass. But, as Michael Moss noted in his article, some of the ranchers themselves objected to the work at this center. The work was supposed to help the shrinking beef, pork, and lamb industries remain profitable in the face of chicken becoming the most consumed meat in the United States in 2014. The research focused on production, often at the expense of welfare, and resulted in a great deal of animal suffering. As the Times article notes, “the center’s drive to make livestock bigger, leaner, more prolific and more profitable can be punishing, creating harmful complications that require more intensive experiments to solve. The leaner pigs that the center helped develop, for example, are so low in fat that one in five females cannot reproduce; center scientists have been operating on pigs’ ovaries and brains in an attempt to make the sows more fertile” (Moss). Here again is the approach of “blowing up the rock” and creating an equally or more dangerous vortex. Failing to take the overall welfare of the animals into account, treating them like machines with discrete parts, scientists create new problems for both human and other animal beings. It also led to less respect and care for those livestock animals at the center. Many died of starvation and preventable (and painful) illnesses.
This kind of treatment is now getting more attention. There is bipartisan support in Congress to extend the Animal Welfare Act to include livestock animals, and less than a month after his article appeared Moss wrote another: “Lawmakers Aim to Protect Farm Animals in Research.” In that piece Moss quoted representatives who found the level of cruelty unacceptable. In addition, Moss continued, “Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, has ordered increased protections for farm animals used in research at the center and other agency facilities. The department named an ombudsman to hear internal concerns about animal welfare, and started a review of its research.” The fact that such events are now seen as newsworthy and get the attention of many U.S. readers is a sign of change. This is a change that has slowly been entering the world of “livestock production” itself, though not yet the research arm of the industry. Moss noted that the center’s work ignores the increasing demands from consumers (individuals as well as restaurants and stores) for meat products that come from humanely raised animals.
This change in demand, while still small in the overall scheme of things, is indicative of a change in thinking that is starting to move into a change in habits. In this book, I will show that the animal beings we commonly see as livestock have evolutionary histories that are as rich and varied as those of pets. Their species-specific behaviors, breed tendencies, and individual variation need to be respected. And I will also argue that if one does respect those aspects of the animal beings commonly seen as pets, one should also love and respect those animal beings commonly seen as livestock. This entails working to change some aspects of the current condition of most livestock in the United States. At the same time, however, I will examine ways we can balance the needs of the animals with the environmental and social impacts of raising and consuming them. There is no clear solution to all concerns, but the pragmatist ecofeminist approach offered here entails working to ameliorate (improve) the situation in as many ways as possible.
This approach often lands one in “the troubled middle.” Herzog says,
Those of us in the troubled middle live in a complex moral universe. I eat meat—but not as much as I used to, and not veal. I oppose testing the toxicity of oven cleaner and eye shadow on animals, but I would sacrifice a lot of mice to find a cure for cancer. And while I find some of the logic of animal liberation philosophers convincing, I also believe that our vastly greater capacity for symbolic language, culture, and ethical judgment puts humans on a different moral plane from that of other animals. We middlers see the world in shades of gray rather than in the clear blacks and whites of committed animal activists and their equally vociferous opponents. Some argue that we are fence-sitters, moral wimps. I believe, however, that the troubled middle makes perfect sense because moral quagmires are inevitable in a species with a huge brain and big heart. (11–12)
Pragmatist philosophers also wrestle with this troubled middle and share Herzog’s concerns about moral absolutism. Moral absolutists tend to have an overly simplistic view of an issue or theory that allows them to be certain they are right. Usually, the more one knows, the more complex and less clear an issue becomes. Pragmatism deals with the ambiguities without falling into the arbitrary. Herzog asks, “What are the implications of living in a world that is morally convoluted, in which consistency is elusive, and often impossible? Do we throw up our hands in despair? Does moral complexity mean moral paralysis?” (264). Herzog says no, and I agree. Bringing the perspectives of pragmatism and ecofeminism to the discussion of these issues can help us sort through the myriad of choices we face individually and as a society. What’s more, I do not think all of our inconsistencies are as inevitable as Herzog suggests, nor are they harmless. Pragmatism and ecofeminism provide often overlooked ways of thinking about the issues surrounding how humans relate to other animal beings. The two approaches have the added benefit of addressing how one can move belief into action; philosophy can help change thinking and behavior.
My book on pets and this one on livestock are both representative rather than exhaustive. Here I will focus mostly on human relationships with fish, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and poultry. There is some discussion of horses, rabbits, and the emergence of insect farming. Toward the end I move to farmed bison and elk as I prepare to trace how the ethic of respect I have developed can also move to those animal beings we usually call free-living or wild. Obviously, this work builds on what I wrote in Pets, People, and Pragmatism, so I will briefly sketch some of the central points of that work. There is a great deal of overlap in the explorations, but here the focus is on our relationships with animals who serve what many see as more utilitarian purposes than the companionship that shapes many of our relationships with “pets.” However, as the title of this book suggests, there can (and should) be an element of friendship in these use relationships as the line between pets and livestock is a fairly recent one. Ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood noted that such a line emerged with the advent of intensive fishing and industrialized animal agriculture; animals have become primarily of value to humans in terms of affective or utilitarian relationships. This means that “non-privileged animals assigned to the ‘meat’ side of this dualistic hierarchy die to make meat for the pets of people who think of themselves unproblematically as animal lovers—kangaroos, dolphins, penguins, anonymous and rare marine animals in yearly billions are slaughtered at some remove to feed the cats and dogs whose own deaths as meat would be unthinkable to their owners” (Plumwood, Ecological Crisis of Reason 163). Chicken, beef, pork, and lamb are regularly used in dog and cat foods as well. With the rise in food-related sensitivities in pets, duck, elk, deer, bison, and salmon are also used but most consumers don’t realize that these “wild” animals are also now commonly farmed.
In the last sixty or so years this divide has come to entail a very different kind of care and life for those animal beings not seen as pets. Living in what Midgley calls mixed-species communities enriches our lives, but it also entangles us in a complex set of relationships with a variety of other animal beings. With regard to livestock in particular, the irony of confining and killing one set of animal beings in order to pamper others (including ourselves) is something about which we should think more carefully. Plumwood points out that our current system of “rational agriculture” leaves much to be desired. We find “chickens and calves held in conditions so cramped that in a comparable human case they would clearly be considered torture. Its logic of the One and the Other tends through incorporation and instrumentalism to represent the Other of nature entirely in monological terms of human needs, as involving replaceable and interchangeable units answering to these needs, and hence to treat nature as an infinitely manipulable and inexhaustible resource” (119). Plumwood suggests that this way of viewing the animals that people and pets eat needs to change. We need to respect the lives that sustain life and “respect animals as both individuals and as community members, in terms of respect or reverence for species life, and . . . aim to rethink farming as a non-commodity and species-egalitarian form, rather than to completely reject farming” (156). In this book I share her hope for a “non-oppressive form of the mixed-community and a liveable future respectfully shared with animals” (166).
To get to such a future, though, I begin with past and present experience. How did various animal beings come to be domesticated? What has this meant for their experience of the world? Should some aspects of these experiences change? Humans have been involved in the domestication of other animal beings for over ten thousand years, but not all animal beings can be domesticated. If an animal being is too prone to flight, too limited in feeding habits, too difficult to breed, unable to get used to some level of confinement, or unable to get comfortable around humans, domestication is difficult. While dogs may have been the first to become domesticated—over ten thousand years ago—livestock species were not far behind. Clutton-Brock argues that humans started keeping rather than just following animal beings they wanted for meat and skins around nine thousand years ago and that by 7000 BCE there were changes in the morphology of goats, sheep, cattle, and pigs (19, 66).
While many stories of this process like to focus on human intentionality and control of the other animal beings, this is among the least likely of the possibilities. Humans had neither the technology nor the experience to keep strong, flighty animals in confinement by force. There is a growing consensus that the animal beings themselves found enough of an advantage in life near humans to cooperate in forming mixed-species communities. Richard Bulliet, in Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers, suggests that the social nature of human and some other animal beings made the forming of relationships possible. He says, for instance, that the domestication of pigs should be understood “as a naturally arising symbiotic relationship, rather than an extraordinary discovery,” that occurred in multiple places at different times. “The wild porcine species sus scrofa, from which all domestic pigs are believed to descend, is widely spread geographically in Eurasia and North Africa. . . . Some societies grazed pigs in forests where they could eat acorns and hazelnuts and root for tubers. Other societies kept them close to human settlements and fed them on kitchen waste or shared with them the roots and tubers eaten by the people themselves.” Pig meat was relished as often as it was forbidden. The relationship was complicated as some “treated piglets as pets, even to the extent of women letting them suckle at their breasts. Others considered them embodiments of filth” (90). Both the human and the other animal beings had to feel comfortable around each other and even come to take comfort in the presence of the other for these relationships to form.
For many humans it feels good to be around other animal beings. While it is not often discussed, until the advent of industrialized intensive animal agriculture, most livestock caretakers truly knew and liked (or disliked) the individuals in their care. Many studies look at how being around cats and dogs improves the physical health and social well-being of humans. In fact, hanging out with other animals is credited with increasing human sociality and making it possible for humans to settle down. However, when humans settled down, so too did the animals living with them. This settling had consequences and some have been problematic. As with pets, human-controlled breeding has resulted in a number of health problems for livestock animals. Confinement, too, has harmed the well-being of many, giving rise to physical and psychological problems (lameness, self-mutilation, and stereotypies such as weaving and bar biting). It also resulted in conditions that harm both human and other animals—spread of disease, contamination of water, air and ground pollution, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and tainted food, to name a few.
In the past, and in some places still, humans and the animals on whom they depend for food and fiber are truly friends. They lived in close proximity and shared shelter and nourishment. The animals were slaughtered and eaten by someone who knew them and whom they knew. At the other extreme there is a now near-complete separation of lives—with the animals confined, artificially bred, fed and milked by machine, and slaughtered on a mechanical line, the physical and emotional contact between the human and other animal beings is minimized. With the increasing specialization and separation of the various parts of the animals’ lives, the person who breeds the animal doesn’t raise and feed the animal, and neither of these people is part of the animal’s death. The animals are slaughtered and eaten by humans who have never known them and rarely (if ever) think of them or their kind.
Further consequences fall on free-living animals such as deer, elk, elephants, whales, wolves, coyotes, rodents, insects, and birds. Classified as predators, problems, or pests, they are seen as nuisance animals from the perspective of many invested in raising livestock. Free-living horses are seen as competition for grasslands; seals as competition for salmon; coyotes and wolves as marauders; and birds, rodents, and insects as competition for the crops that feed humans and livestock. Because the ways that humans relate to nondomesticated animals are so limited, the response to these situations has often been simply to move or kill the animals.
For several years students and I have been visiting farms and talking with farmers who are grappling with these (and other) issues. How they view the natural world, their place in it, and the place of their farm and livestock will be the framing context for examining how to better live together with other animals. The experiences of the animals themselves will also be a focus. This approach developed over three separate summers of research. Our first task was to figure out how to approach the work. We wanted to understand how one’s metaphysical views translated into practice. Then we wanted to examine the ethical implications of these practices and, by extension, the ethical implications of the metaphysical views. Here I’m using the term metaphysics broadly to mean the study of “being.” What we wanted to know was how various farmers thought about “nature”—that is, about what is it to be a cow, a chicken, or a pig. How do those beings interact with the rest of their environment? How do farmers interact with those beings and the rest of the environment? We came up with two questions for the farmers in our study: (1) How do you view the human relationship with the rest of nature (animal and nonanimal)? (2) How do these views affect how you choose to farm? Our goal was to get at some of the metaphysical assumptions held by the farmers—for example, their views of what it is to be human, their views of what is and is not a part of nature, and their views on how farming fits within natural environments. We then examined their answers in light of some of the ethical and political implications of the positions that emerged.
Of course, it wasn’t simple to understand or categorize the answers to these questions. Our conversations with the farmers were wide-ranging and complex. Generally I can say that most of the farmers did not see the domesticated animals they raised for meat, milk, or eggs as part of nature. However, they did think that the livestock animals impacted “nature,” by which they meant wildlife, streams, and the ecosystem as a whole. Most, but not all, thought domesticated animals had been artificially created to serve human purposes, and this resulted in a different way of understanding them and so of treating them. I can also say they were all generous with their time and genuinely interested in talking about the issues raised in this book. Other than that, there is very little I can generalize. The farms and farmers in the study are varied. Some have a long history with livestock animals, others are just learning. Some approach it purely as a business, some as a kind of stewardship (of land and animals), some as a spiritual endeavor. Some focus mainly on human health concerns.
Just to whet your appetite, I would like to give you a taste of what one farmer had to say in an email correspondence. Wendy and Erick Haakenson run Jubilee Farm, a biodynamic farm in Carnation, Washington. While they focus on produce, they also have a herd of beef cattle. The Haakesons originally purchased the cattle to supply manure for fertilizer, as they wanted their farm to be a closed system. Over time, they have also come to focus on what kind of cattle are best, given their land and purposes. We were not able to visit this farm, but Erick responded to our questions. He began with a response to our second question first. How do these views affect how you choose to farm? He wrote, “I like this question because I have long believed that there is an inviolate relationship between the way a people farm and their beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality. I suppose it’s possible for people to act in ways incongruous with their underlying beliefs for a time, but if people ever really grow up, what they believe will be reflected in what they do (farming or whatever).” Here Erick nicely expresses the idea that one’s metaphysical beliefs play out in how one relates to the rest of the world.
In his response to our first question—how do you view the human relationship with the rest of nature (animal and nonanimal)?—he presents some of his metaphysical beliefs and how they impact his view of ethics: “It’s hard after Darwin to not recognize the continuity within all living things. Even from the narrow perspective of self-interest most of us recognize that failing to nurture every manifestation of existence will lead to potential harm to us. A departure from self-interest could, and in my case certainly does, strengthen the notion of developing a caring relationship with the rest of nature.” Here Erick argues that given the connectedness of everything even prudential self-interest should lead people to care for the rest of nature. Further, though, he thinks that same connectedness should help people develop a relationship of respect and reverence for the rest of nature: “I treat the earth with respect, and the soil with care and even reverence. I try to make myself as knowledgeable as possible about how the soil functions and try to provide what it needs, and avoid what is harmful. This has led me to be an organic farmer—and now, over the last six years, a ‘transitioner’ into biodynamic farming. . . . Thanks for the questions. I haven’t thought about these things for a while—too many 14 hour days!”
By seeing the earth, and the plants and other animal beings living on it, as persons deserving respect, care, and reverence Erick has set some clear parameters for what he is and is not willing to do in order to produce food and has become committed to biodynamic farming. Rudolph Steiner started the biodynamic farming movement in the 1920s. It is a spiritual, ethical, and ecological approach to farming that stresses developing a healthy, balanced, and diverse ecosystem when farming. On their website the Haakensons say, “Biodynamic farming treats the farm as a complete living entity and so focuses on the relationships between various plants and animals. Nature takes advantage of this synergy by never growing one thing, so we emulate that diversity on the farm by growing a wide range of vegetables, fruits, and grains. We also raise different livestock, each serving a unique purpose.” As with the methods of many of the farmers discussed here, this approach to farming requires particular attention to “the land”—the soil and the microorganisms that keep it healthy. Their website points out that “the most important group of living things on the farm are the millions of micro-organisms found in the soil. They consume plant and animal waste and make nutrients available to plants. . . . We can achieve self-produced fertility only by recognizing the natural relationships between living things.” This one example of the rich responses we got from farmers points to the importance of how one understands the human relationship with the rest of nature. My goal was to listen to a variety of farmers think and talk about what they do and why they do it. Erick’s comment about fourteen-hour days is a good reminder of the time-consuming nature of the work of farming and ranching. Time to think and talk is a bit of a luxury, but it is essential to developing relationships of care and respect.
As a pragmatist and an ecofeminist, I feel it is important that I say something about who I am as it relates to this topic. Soon after I was born, my family moved to a citrus ranch, where we had horses, dogs, and cats. We raised a few cattle for beef (their hides served as rugs in our house), and we raised chickens for meat and eggs. One of my older sisters raised rabbits for meat, and the other raised sheep. I helped feed the sheep and collected eggs. The rooster did not appreciate the theft of the eggs and would chase me. One day my mother went in with me and he attacked her; he soon went into a soup. My father killed the chickens and the rabbits and we helped. For some reason I didn’t mind killing chickens, but I wanted nothing to do with killing or eating rabbits. When it came time for the sheep to be slaughtered the butcher came to the ranch. Desperate to save at least some of the sheep, I took two and we hid under an orange tree. We were found and I had to deliver the sheep to their death. I had to be forced to eat them.
I did not like eating meat other than chicken and hamburger. I would be kept at the table and told to eat some amount of the meat I had been served. I would sneak the meat to one of our dogs, or try to hide it in my napkin. My father had said, “You need to know where your food comes from so you can make an informed decision.” I wanted to not eat meat. My parents thought I needed to eat meat. And so I did. When I went to college I ate less meat, but by then I was fully habituated to the cultural norms of our meat-based culture. I majored in philosophy, but no one taught about animals. I decided to go to graduate school in philosophy, but before I did that I taught philosophy for a year at a private high school. One of the books I was assigned to teach was Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics. In the middle of a discussion of his chapter on animal welfare a student asked me whether I was a vegetarian. I said no and she asked why not. I had no real answer. I told them about my upbringing and early aversion to meat. By then I had philosophical concerns about the status of animals and the human treatment of other animal beings. So, I decided to become a vegetarian. That was in 1987.
I have continued to have a variety of concerns about the human treatment of other animal beings and I am still a vegetarian. I do not pretend that a vegetarian diet is without many ethical problems, though, and this book does not take the position that everyone should stop eating meat and consuming other animal products. I do argue that there is much wrong with our current treatment of livestock animals, even while I realize there is no unproblematic way to eat and live. No matter one’s dietary habits, I do think there are many moral and existential problems when one eats without thinking. The same is true for other kinds of consumption as well. I hope this book can start some new ways of thinking about the human relationship with those livestock animals who have long provided humans with food, fiber, and friendship.
To do that I engage a number of philosophical perspectives throughout the book: the land ethic, deep ecology, animal rights, animal welfare, ecofeminism, and pragmatism. I work from the pragmatist and ecofeminist understanding that theory and practice are not separable, and that metaphysical views impact ethical and political choices. I take up the pragmatist and ecofeminist insight that no one person has a take on the whole; we each offer only partial and situated understandings of particular situations. For that reason, we need a community engaged in discussion if we hope to make any particular situation better. This means working with people with whom we might disagree (because they have some valuable insights) and entails embracing the democratic commitments that run through most pragmatist and ecofeminist work (the commitment to inclusiveness). Participation and consultation of all impacted parties is important for any real change to be possible. Such a process can be slow and uncomfortable as it acknowledges that no one is completely right (we are all fallible), and that we must be genuinely open to learning from one another. This usually means that more moderate (less extreme and universalistic) positions prevail, and that is not a popular position in the current political and media-driven culture of the United States, but it is one to which I am committed in this work.
I propose that a pragmatist ecofeminist perspective provides an important approach to these issues that is grounded in experience, evolutionary history, and actual relationships. It accommodates complexity and change, and it respects other animal beings as individuals in their own right. As I have discussed, the very process of domestication was, and is, a transactive relationship. I borrow this term from John Dewey, who believed that organisms grow and develop in transactive relationships with their environments—physical and social. While many have willfully misinterpreted the concept as referring to an economic transaction, this is not what Dewey meant. He meant that organisms shape their environment even as they are shaped by it, and that environments are shaped by various organisms even as they shape the growth and development of the organisms. These are mutually transformative relationships. Writing in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, Dewey was influenced by theories of evolution and the idea that beings and environments are not static, but rather changing, entities. This notion of a dynamic universe doesn’t just allow for change but rests on the inevitability of change. Since organisms and their environments are mutually transformative, change in one will effect a change in others. This is what happened, and is still happening, with the domestication of various animal beings (including human beings).
All life is connected in the evolutionary process. The evolution of human beings is connected to the evolutionary history of all mammals. The evolution of mammals is connected to the evolutionary history of reptiles, insects, plants, and so on. Your Inner Fish is a recent book that provides some interesting examples of these relationships and shared histories. Here Neil Shubin discusses examples such as how the pattern for primate limbs and hands can be found in fish: “We are not separate from the rest of the living world; we are part of it down to our bones and . . . even our genes” (43). The very possibility of humans emerged from past conditions and the continuing pressure and process of human evolution influenced the conditions in which all the life we know exists. Human beings are not outside of nature but very much a part of it. This is one reason to examine our choices and actions very carefully. Our actions impact the possibilities for life in general, not just human life. We have long manipulated other life-forms in our environment for our purposes. For example, we have domesticated plants and animals for the purposes of supplying us with food to eat, fuel to burn, fertilizer to replenish the land, canvas on which to write, and cloth and skins to wear. In the case of animals it is also clear that they have provided friendship (many also have experienced such relationships with various forms of plant life, and interesting work in this area is growing). These various forms of life have also taken on religious significance. Plants and animals have been offered in sacrifice, worshiped for their power and fertility, and feared for their ability to harm and hurt. Human lives are physically, socially, and culturally intertwined with other plant and animal life.
Donna Haraway (and others) discuss this in terms of coevolution. Various beings constitute themselves and each other through their relationships. In understanding domestication we tend to focus on the ways human beings have impacted the physical and social natures of other animal beings and forget to examine how we too have been transformed. Here I am focusing on relationships between human beings and those other animal beings we call livestock. As already mentioned, livestock changed the possibilities of being human through their use as labor, transportation, food, fertilizers, clothing, and other materials. Living and working with livestock also changed humans more intimately, as it changed the microbes that help make up humans’ physical nature and it altered immune response as we shared diseases, bacteria, and parasites such as SARS, brucella, and anthrax. Consuming the milk from these animal beings, probably in the form of cheese, made it possible for more humans to be able to digest milk products as the processing helped remove the lactose. As groups adapted to such a diet, a mutation occurred that allowed for the digestion of lactose that was passed on to offspring. Some argue that eating meat helped increase the brain size and intelligence of humans as well. Others suggest that the ability to cooperate, which made human hunting possible, was a by-product of an increased brain size that arose with humans’ increased sociality.
Humans changed those animal beings who became livestock as well. These animals were bred for docility and tractability, which changed their social nature; they were bred for the amount of meat and milk they could produce, which changed their physical shape and size; they were bred to produce meat and milk with varying fat content, which changed their physical and emotional constitution in the process. More recently they have been bred not only in traditional ways but also using artificial insemination, and most recently they have been genetically altered by the insertion of genes from other species. The first genetically modified animal approved for human consumption is now on the market—AquAdvantage salmon. But there have been consequences to these changes that are not always good for the animals involved. Congenital health issues arise when breeding becomes too focused on a few specific traits. Breeding for docility sometimes has the consequence of producing animal beings without the intelligence to think for themselves, increasing their dependence on humans to an extreme level. The increased docility has also changed the possibilities for housing, and the animals are now kept in increasingly cramped conditions that increase the physical and social ills they experience. It is clear that not everything about these relationships has been beneficial.
To get to a working philosophy that can help guide the various relationships among human beings and other animal beings, humans need an understanding of themselves that includes the evolutionary realities of their relationships while acknowledging that these evolutionary histories do not fully determine or constrain the possibilities going forward. I think a pragmatist ecofeminist framework is well suited to do this work and I would like to reiterate a point I made in Pets, People, and Pragmatism. Human life is intertwined with all other life and very intimately intertwined with the lives of domesticated animal beings. While many suggest that domesticated animals are somehow unnatural, and many suggest that the best way to approach the ethical difficulties that come with human relationships with such beings is to stop breeding and raising them, I believe that “to try to withdraw from relationships with domesticated animal beings would be to deny something central about who and what human beings, and other animal beings, are” (19).
Some of the key insights of the pragmatist tradition of philosophy are that humans are natural creatures situated within natural environments. There is no nature/culture dualism since human culture is part of the natural development of the world. This notion of development is also important as it points to the dynamic nature of a world that grows out of, and is still involved in, an evolutionary process. Many other philosophical approaches set humans outside of, and above, the rest of nature. This usually rests on either religious assumptions about God creating humans in God’s image and giving them the rest of creation to use, or on philosophical positions that point to the human use of language and reason to set them apart from the rest of the living organisms.
But humans are mammals and share mammalian physical, social, emotional, and reasoning processes. There is a continuity, and strong resemblance, among mammalian creatures of all kinds. That does not mean there are no differences between humans and other mammals, but so too are there differences among all the other mammals. There is no reason to see the ways that humans differ as making us somehow exceptional and superior. In fact, some of the differences show that humans lack some useful capacities that other mammals have. Humans are not as fast or strong as many other mammals; humans lack the sonar capacity of whales and dolphins; humans can’t use their sense of smell (at least consciously) to detect disease and find friends.
And this continuity is not limited just to mammals. Mammals share structures and capacities with other forms of life. This means humans share DNA with plant and animal life of all kinds. Some are more closely related in this way to be sure, but there is no sharp break between one life-form and another. There are differences, as different creatures have evolved at different times, under different pressures, in different environments. But often these differences also hide similarities. For instance, even when there are obvious differences in the physical structures—such as the avian brain as compared to the mammalian brain—there is often a functional equivalence. The evidence that is often used to set humans apart from the rest of life is the presence and size of the human neocortex. As it became clear that this was something shared with other big-brained, social mammals, human exceptionalism lessened a little. And now there is evidence that many birds use the dorsal ventricular ridge (DVR) part of their brain in much the same way as the neocortex functions in mammals (chickens were the birds used in these experiments).
While many individuals working within the pragmatist tradition have engaged in various forms of human exceptionalism, this perspective is not warranted by the pragmatist insight that humans are part of nature and that the same developmental processes are at work in all life. More consistent is the insight that there are many ways of being that have value and many perspectives that provide useful information for successfully navigating within one’s environment. This pluralistic perspective is another hallmark of pragmatism, and is one shared by most in ecofeminist philosophy as well. Rather than pick one way of being (human, male, European) as the norm, and then measuring everything and everyone else by the supposed norm, a pluralistic approach finds differences to be natural (not deformities or deficiencies). While pluralism obviously does not deny differences, it does tend to avoid understanding those differences in terms of hierarchical dualisms that privilege some in terms of power, rights, and the freedom to be.
When one is open to the differences, one can learn from others. Human observation of various animal beings is one important instance of this kind of pluralism, combined with a willingness to experiment with other ways of doing things in order to make things (hopefully) better in one way or another. It is quite likely, for instance, that early humans learned to find various forms of plant food by following and observing other animals and then being willing (or forced by hunger) to experiment with what they saw those animals eating. Most anthropologists agree that humans scavenged meat before they themselves became hunters. This required observation of animals such as lions, wolves, chimpanzees, coyotes, hawks, and vultures. While some of these relationships evolved into partnerships—with the domestication of some wolves leading to the partnership between humans and dogs—there was also an element of exploiting those relationships for the benefit of the humans. The dogs were useful as hunting partners and protectors. Their hunting abilities could be trained in a different direction, though, as humans used their observations of their prey to begin to domesticate and keep these animals as well. Rather than hunt wild ruminants, humans began to keep them and raise their offspring. Dogs became herding partners as the humans moved domesticated livestock to fresh grass.
The move to humans keeping livestock was one based on experimentation—all did not go well for the humans or the other animal beings. Humans were trampled, gored, and bitten; cattle, sheep, goats, fish, and poultry suffered and died as their needs were not fully met by these new conditions. Humans (and other creatures) are fallible—another important insight of pragmatism—and the willingness to accept that mistakes will be made opens up greater possibility for experimentation that leads to real learning and the possibility of making things work better (to ameliorate a situation). It also means, however, that every “solution” raises a host of new problems that need to be addressed. This is life in process; there is no fixed end point where everything works perfectly.
Human relationships with other animal beings are always in process. At any given time some things work well for the human or other animal beings and others do not; at any given time some of the living conditions and uses are fair and reciprocal and others are not; at any given time some of these relationships are respectful of the needs and desires of the various animal beings and others are not. At no time, however, is there an option to just stop being in relation with one another. Even the cessation of all livestock production (which is not really a live option anyway) would not end humans’ connectedness to these creatures. Given this, the focus should be on how to improve the relationships humans have with various other animal beings. This requires an openness to new understandings and real change in how we live together and relate. Not everything is fine as it is. For example, in “Pragmatism and the Production of Livestock” I presented a pragmatist take on the history of humans living with livestock. In brief, starting with the human need for calories, some people eventually moved from following animals (to scavenge or hunt) to controlling the movement of flocks and herds. Once plant agriculture resulted in some surplus, some humans began confining and feeding the sheep, goats, and cattle instead of moving the animals to the food. Each system has costs and benefits—herding can require less human labor and result in healthier animals, but it comes with the risks of predation and exposure to the elements. Confinement can mitigate concerns about weather and predators but comes with increased mortality due to disease. It also requires more human labor to bring food and water to the animals and remove their waste. Today drugs help mitigate disease, but this use of drugs results in health concerns for those who consume the meat and environmental issues of water contamination. The concentration of manure presents environmental issues as well. At this juncture, industrial animal agriculture seems to create more problems than it solves, and in that article I suggested that we need to explore alternatives: “When habits fail to be productive and satisfactory, then those immersed in the method of critical intelligence apply critical thought and experimentation to alter or replace them. We need to see ends-in-view that promote growth and open up possibilities. Those who refuse to examine habits are fixed and rigid. Dewey speaks of the ossification of the brain. Our culture seems ossified with regard to our habits of consuming animals and animal by-products. Today plenty of alternatives are available that require less reliance on animals. We need to start exploring these possibilities” (172). Pragmatism can help with this ongoing examination, and so I turn to some key figures in the founding of that tradition who addressed animal issues over a century ago.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), one of the “founders” of pragmatism, focused on the idea of human ontological continuity with the rest of nature. Everything is related, and this entails the possibility of understanding and communicating with the rest of nature. He also focused on the fact that life is always in process. This view places humans in a shared evolutionary process with other animal beings, which enables shared communication and mutual modification. He says, “I can tell by the expression of the face the state of mind of my horse just as unmistakably as I can that of my dog or my wife” (Peirce 379). This allows for joint activities like herding sheep or riding a horse. The communication may be mysterious but it is real. “In riding a horse, I understand him and he understands me; but how we can understand one another I know hardly better than he” (456). As Doug Anderson writes, “our relations with animals constitute an ongoing experiment that needs to be informed by a full understanding of animal life. Peirce is not blind to the viciousness of animals or humans; on the contrary, he is well aware of animal fallibility. Furthermore, he understands that community requires reciprocal relations. It’s not just that we must be nice to animals; animals too must come to join in the community’s well-being to the extent they can” (93). Domesticated animals in particular are in reciprocal relationships with humans, but all animal beings have personalities for Peirce, and we need to be attentive to these and take them into account in our relationships with them.
Along with this continuity, William James (1842–1910) calls for an approach that entails respecting others who are different. Continuity does not mean sameness, and much can be learned from stretching oneself and encountering other perspectives. While James himself sometimes failed to remain open to the differences of other animal (and human) beings, his view definitely calls on us to include such perspectives in our understanding in order to engage the world around us in satisfactory ways. In “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” James famously notes that humans need to remain open to the experiences of other human and animal beings. He points out that dogs enjoy bones more than books, and humans should recognize and respect what makes life significant for dogs. In “Is Life Worth Living?” written in 1895, he points to the failure of humans to take into account the experience of cattle and comments on the moral complexity of life in mixed-species communities. He writes, “When you and I, for instance, realize how many innocent beasts have had to suffer in cattle-cars and slaughter-pens and lay down their lives that we might grow up, all fattened and clad, to sit together here in comfort and carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put our relation to the universe in a more solemn light” (James 232). One cannot ignore the perspective of the cattle, nor the complexity of the relationships involved.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) also saw the continuity among mammalian life and often used this continuity to support her views on the need to change the lives of human women. Gilman engaged in actual experiments with changes in living conditions in order to improve the position of women in society and so to allow for the continued growth of the human species. She connected this work to improving the position of domesticated animals and called for a move to vegetarianism on ecological grounds. While the position she arrived at in regard to such animal beings (to end all domestication) may not ultimately fit with the pragmatist view I present here, her method and approach to experimentation does, and much can be learned from looking at her work in this light. In making her point that species should trump sex distinctions, she noted how the ram and the ewe were more alike than different. Under domestication, however, the females of such species were changed in some of the same ways human women had been changed—they were shaped by male human desires. Their femaleness became the whole of their being.
To make clear by an instance the difference between normal and abnormal sex-distinction, look at the relative condition of a wild cow and a “milch cow,” such as we have made. The wild cow is a female. She has healthy calves, and milk enough for them; and that is all the femininity she needs. Otherwise than that she is bovine rather than feminine. She is a light, strong, swift, sinewy creature, able to run, jump, and fight, if necessary. We, for economic uses, have artificially developed the cow’s capacity for procuring milk. She has become a walking milk-machine, bred and tended to that express end, her value measured in quarts. The cow is over-sexed. (Gilman 43–44)
Written in 1898, long before the development of the modern industrial dairy, Gilman’s observations remain an important touchstone for contemporary ecofeminist views such as those found in Carol Adams and Val Plumwood (discussed in later chapters). Her work (and the work of other ecofeminists) adds an important gender component to a more general pragmatist analysis that will be taken up here to examine human relationships with a variety of livestock animals. For Gilman, domestication is an experiment that has gone wrong, just as the limitations placed on human women failed to promote growth and development of humans and their environment. She argues that humans should admit to these errors (to their fallibility) and change.
But this fallibility and uncertainty should not stop attempts to ameliorate situations. Jane Addams (1860–1935) exemplifies this trait of American pragmatism in her work to improve the living conditions of recent immigrants in Chicago in the late 1800s and early 1900s. While less directly concerned with the livestock animals themselves, she was concerned about the diseased milk and tainted meat being sold in the city. She was involved in improving garbage collection in the city, and some women with whom she worked brought in pigs to eat garbage (more on this role of pigs in chapter 8). The Chicago stockyards were a mark of the city during her lifetime, and the conditions faced by the workers in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle are the kind she worked to improve. She is actually the model for a character in The Jungle. Addams drew attention to the plight of immigrant labor in the emerging meatpacking and factory systems. This concern remains today and will be discussed in chapter 10.
John Dewey (1859–1952) took up this Peircian naturalism and Jamesian pluralism as well as Gilman’s experimentalism and Addams’s amelioration and emphasized the indeterminacy of things with the insight that life is developmental. Life is always changing and generally seeks growth and “improvement.” Such growth, if it is to be successful, engages any particular aspect of life or situation as being in a web of relationships with other life. No one and no thing stands alone. Taking up the new science of the time, Dewey saw individuality to be a function of relationships in time. Using Abraham Lincoln as an example, he notes that his individuality was not wholly shaped from without, nor did it simply unfold from within. Dewey wrote, “The career which is his unique individuality is the series of interactions in which he was created to be what he was by the ways in which he responded to the occasions with which he was presented” (Later Works 110–11). Dewey notes that many see this to be the case for humans but not for other animals, plants, or “inanimate” objects. But he pushes back on this point. There are differences between the animate and inanimate “but no fixed gaps between them.” He continues, “The principle of a developing career applies to all things in nature, as well as to human beings—that they are born, undergo qualitative changes, and finally die, giving place to other individuals. The idea of development applied to nature involves differences of forms and qualities as surely as it rules out absolute breaches of continuity. The differences between the amoeba and the human organism are genuinely there even if we accept the idea of organic evolution of species. Indeed, to deny the reality of the differences and their immense significance would be to deny the very idea of development” (Later Works 14:108). Problems arise, however, when one reads such development as “necessarily proceeding from the lower to the higher, from the relatively worse to the relatively better” (108). Potentialities are those things that develop in interactions with other things:
Hence potentialities cannot be known till after the interactions have occurred. . . . Potentialities of milk are known today, for example, that were not known a generation ago, because milk has been brought into interaction with things other than organisms, and hence now has other than furnishing nutriment consequences. . . . With the use of milk as a plastic, and with no one able to tell what future consequences may be produced by new techniques which bring it into new interactions, the only reasonable conclusion is that potentialities are not fixed and intrinsic, but are a matter of an indefinite range of interactions in which an individual may engage. (109–10)
He further notes that freedom of thought and expression “have their roots deep in the existence of individuals as developing careers in time. Their denial and abrogation is an abdication of individuality and a virtual rejection of time as opportunity” (113). This happens to humans when they “become imprisoned in routine and fall to the level of mechanisms” (112). One argument of this book is that this is exactly what happens to animals (human and other than human) in industrial farming—they lose their individuality and their freedom.
While sometimes Dewey seems to lean in a more mechanistic direction that might justify industrial agriculture, those passages need to be understood in the context of his larger commitments. For instance he writes, “When chemical fertilizers can be used in place of animal manures, when improved grain and cattle can be purposefully bred from inferior animals and grasses, . . . man gains power to manipulate nature” (Middle Works 12:120). This sounds like animals and plants are inert things to be manipulated at will. But his larger point is to argue against the separation of mind and materiality and the separation of means and ends in both science and morality. A few paragraphs later he says, “Until the dogma of fixed unchangeable types and species, of arrangement in classes of higher and lower, of subordination of the transitory individual to the universal or kind has been shaken in its hold upon the science of life, it was impossible that the new ideas and methods should be made at home in social and moral life” (122–23). His optimism that the tendency to separate and rank had been outgrown was premature, as we still see this mentality working in racism, sexism, classism, and speciesism, but his call to rethink the nature of types and species as fluid and changing is important. Ironically the example of changing cattle and grasses proves his point and raises new problems. We now know that chemical fertilizers create a host of problems and that genetic manipulation of animals and plants (through conventional breeding or more technological genetic modification) comes with many unintended consequences that do not fit the needs and desires of those organisms and fail to respect their individuality.
For Dewey, individual and species development depends on transactive (mutually transformative) relationships with the rest of the environment (living and nonliving). His theory (if not his personal views) committed him to seeing a continuum of traits such as intelligence, emotions, and consciousness in all animal beings. Interestingly it was a relationship with a goat that finally got Dewey to see other animals as personalities in the way Peirce suggested and to consider relationships from their perspectives as James suggested. Dewey’s correspondence is filled with reference to the animals in his life: horses, dogs, cats, fish, rabbits, pigs, and a special goat. His correspondence with Arthur Bentley often focused on the nature and intelligence of animals. Over time Dewey’s position that language is something that clearly separates humans from other animals shifted as he admitted that we can’t know when animal signaling becomes animals using signs (Dewey and Bentley, letter dated March 12, 1946). In 1949 his correspondence became filled with discussion of a goat from whom he “gets three quarts a day.” He describes her as “very clearly an intelligent animal” who forms strong attachments; she even tried to go into the house (letter dated August 14, 1949). Dewey played with the goat and came to know her as an individual. He called her a person and wrote that this should not be denied to plants and animals (letter dated December 29, 1949). Here Dewey began to move in the direction of panpsychism despite earlier worries about Peirce (and Whitehead) for doing the same.
This openness to seeing other animals as having personalities and individuality and being creatures with “developing careers” that need to be respected is an important insight. It is the insight developed in this book, using a largely Deweyan pragmatism augmented and expanded by ecofeminist theory and practice. The next chapter will develop a Deweyan ethic, based in the more general pragmatist and ecofeminist perspective presented here, to examine what such respect might entail. To begin, that chapter will further explore the current conditions faced by fish. Fish are connected to poultry, pigs, and cattle, though, so that discussion will only serve to launch the larger exploration of living with livestock.