Animals speak, act, and even resist politically. Animals held captive enact resistance all the time, though it’s not usually recognized as such by humans who don’t see them as political actors.
MARINA BOLOTNIKOVA: ‘Research on animal minds depends on us: We can choose to think more deeply about what it means to think, speak, know, and love. Or, if we want to seal humans off outside biology and evolutionary history, we can define these concepts as narrowly as possible. Animal behaviorists have begun to move beyond the idea that animals should be measured against a human yardstick. Primatologist Frans de Waal’s influential book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016) argued that comparing humans to the countless ways other species have evolved to navigate their worlds is “a pointless exercise.”
Eva Meijer’s ‘When Animals Speak’ is among many recent books that argue for including animals in democracy. Meijer’s point is not merely that animals speak — we already knew that — but that they speak, act, and even resist politically. After all, if we can accept animals as creative individuals who can see and interpret and respond to the world, then we should also be able to see their efforts to change their circumstances as political acts. Animals’ political agency should drive our interaction with them and, ultimately, their liberation…
To include animals in our politics, Meijer argues, it’s not enough just to philosophize about what’s best for them by ourselves; we have to understand animals as subjects of their own stories. Animals held captive enact resistance all the time, though it’s not usually recognized as such by humans who don’t see them as political actors. Orangutans persistently figure out how to open locks and help each other escape zoo enclosures (Frans de Waal calls them “notorious escape artists”). Circus elephants attack their abusive trainers. Farm animals escape on the way to slaughter. Camels used by the U.S. military in the 1850s (this really happened) refused to cooperate…
These acts aren’t random or instinctual: “Human animals and other animal species are all driven by physiological and emotional responses to abuse, and these responses influence cognitive processes,” Meijer writes. “Different species have different ways of expressing themselves and their anger,” which invites us to rethink the meaning of resistance. Thinking in terms of animal resistance means that activists don’t have to try to prove that animals are capable of suffering or that their situations are unjust, because the animals are telling us themselves’. SOURCE…
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