Animal Pragmatism Edited by Erin McKenna and Andrew Light Animal Pragmatism Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relationships Indiana University Press Bloomington • Indianapolis This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail To our nieces and nephews, Alex, Bonnie, Corrine, Grace, Jennifer, Johanna, Nathaniel, Tamara, and Quentin. May the next generation live better with our fellow critters. Contents Foreword ix John J. McDermott Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Pragmatism and the Future of Human-Nonhuman Relationships 1 Andrew Light and Erin McKenna part one: pr ag matism consider ing animals 1. “What Does Rome Know of Rat and Lizard?”: Pragmatic Mandates for Considering Animals in Emerson, James, and Dewey 19 James M. Albrecht 2. Dewey and Animal Ethics 43 Steven Fesmire 3. Overlapping Horizons of Meaning: A Deweyan Approach to the Moral Standing of Nonhuman Animals 63 Phillip McReynolds 4. Peirce’s Horse: A Sympathetic and Semeiotic Bond 86 Douglas R. Anderson part t wo: prag matism, the env ironment, hunting , and far ming 5. Beyond Considerability: A Deweyan View of the Animal Rights–Environmental Ethics Debate 97 Ben A. Minteer 6. Methodological Pragmatism, Animal Welfare, and Hunting 119 Andrew Light 7. Getting Pragmatic about Farm Animal Welfare 140 Paul B. Thompson 8. Pragmatism and the Production of Livestock 160 Erin McKenna part three : pr ag matism on animals as cures , companions , and calories 9. Is Pragmatism Chauvinistic? Dewey on Animal Experimentation 179 Jennifer Welchman 10. A Pragmatist Case for Animal Advocates on Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees 193 Todd M. Lekan 11. Pragmatism and Pets: Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, Maddie’s SM Fund , and No More Homeless Pets in Utah 210 Matthew Pamental 12. Dining on Fido: Death, Identity, and the Aesthetic Dilemma of Eating Animals 228 Glenn Kuehn Contributors 249 Index 251 viii Contents Foreword How we are educated by children, by animals! —Martin Buber, I and Thou Animals indeed! If anyone thinks that the lives and habitat of the animals are not existentially central to the meaning of human life, I urge them to reconsider. At times, the presence of animals is electrifying, as in my witnessing the snarled upper lip of a ferocious leopard who was displeased by my gaze. More telling is an event undergone forty years ago, and yet as sensorially present as if it were happening now. The place is Yellowstone Park and I have ¤ve young children in the car. Several grizzly bears meander down the hillside, including a mother bear and her cub. My children want to exit the car, say hello, and toss them some forbidden food. I say, no! It is very dangerous for you and it is not good for the bears. As only children can do, they grouse. Ahead of us is a car with a more pliant and foolish set of parents. They allow their children to leave the car and, incredibly, toss Hershey chocolates at the bears. Mistake! The cub picks up a Hershey bar and instantaneously, Mama Bear belts the cub and sends it ®ying toward Yosemite. While doing this, the mother bear lets out a roar that stripped the paint from our car and sent frozen, paralyzing chills down the spines of each of the seven of us, ne’er to be forgotten to this very day. My parental response was simple. I told the children, now more than willing to listen, that they had come close to the inner world of the animal kingdom. Awe is appropriate, but pedagogically the better word is respect. As John Dewey is fond of saying, nature has its own affairings and for us as human naturals to ignore, trample, or exploit those ontological rhythms is to court disaster. More often and less dramatically, our animals are around and about, provid- ing a subtle yet pervasive sensibility as to the irreducible and ineluctable fact that we, too, are animals. Now just what sort of animals are we? Historically, the millennia-long effort to separate human animals from animals ueberhaupt is by rendering humans as “higher animals.” Such an appellation runs the risk atten- dant upon any use of hierarchy as a nomenclature entailing content. The as- sumption here is that the higher one reaches on the ladder, ostensibly the more quality is obtained. Surely, and deleteriously, this contention does not hold if one surveys the personal histories of many popes, political and military leaders, chief executive of¤cers, and, lamentably, parents. I cite but two obstacles to the acceptance of hierarchy as a positive source for evaluation of worth. First, what ladder? The long-held belief that higher is bet- ter rests on the cultural residue of a discredited geocentric cosmology. High and low, up and down are but temporal constructs, having no ultimate purchase in