I have started reading Vicki Hearne's Adam's Task. Hearne is an animal trainer (dogs and horses), a poet and a teacher of Creative Writing. I would write more but my cats are untrained and inhibit my typing.
There are already some aspects that have inspired me. One is that she considers the ability to 'talk with' an animal to exhibit a relationship of dignity, mutual trust and mutual responsibility. Training is learning how to talk with each other. This relationship is for her deeply and intrinsically moral. That is intriguing to start with...
Another is her view that this can only be achieved with domestic species. Wild animals might be conditioned to behave in such and such a way, but the relationship is not wholly reliable.
Now, Mark Rowlands, who had a wolf, might disagree (The Philosopher and the Wolf) about the relationship not being reliable. But might agree that a real relationship is founded on mutual loyalty and that a wild animal can bond that way with a human. That said, Brenin did tear his car to pieces. His view was that the wolf was not a moral agent - while Hearne might say that a 'trained' dog who bites is.
What I wondered was what makes an animal fully wild. Crows, like rats, have evolved with our communities. Living off us, in a sense.There is a parasitism, perhaps, rather than a symbiosis? And now our relationship with food animals is a parasitism in which we feed off them... Hmmm... But the crows. They have so quickly adapted to me feeding them. Turning up when they see me. Having their own ways to attract my attention, whether vocally or by flying round me.
One flies to different places so I throw various handfuls of peanuts and remembers where each batch is.
Two take the nuts one by one to a spot about twenty feet away to eat and then return for the next one.
One of the three in the photo gathers three nuts in a pile, then takes all three in his beak and flies away. The other two eat them where they are.
One crow seems to elicit anger from all sides and gets chased off.
One switches between two groups.
I'm also reading Frans de Waal's Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? He talks about how rather than thinking of intelligence we should consider attention, motivation and cognition. This is helpful. Iris Murdoch and Christine Korsgaard have both suggested that we attend to things depending on our frameworks... our perspective on the world. We are motivated by what matters to us. Only then does cognition kick in. If one has a red spot on one's head and one is a dog, who identifies others by scent not appearance, will a red spot motivate any behaviour even if you do recognise it's on your face as you look in a mirror? The dog may not pay attention to that or be motivated to care.
What all this suggests to me is that animal ethics is not about how 'we' humans respond to an undifferentiated other that encompasses all non-humans, but has to be, just has to be, far more nuanced.
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