The new discipline known as Animal Studies is the hottest academic fashion on campus
Most people have never even heard of it. Animal studies? Isn’t that, like, zoology? It isn’t, actually. Despite the name, Animal Studies is not the study of animals. Separate from the life sciences (where animals are indeed studied), Animal Studies is an interdisciplinary field in the humanities that looks at human ideas about animals.
The emergence of such cross-disciplinary fields is part of what has happened to college since you went there, if you are middle-aged. Since the 1980s, campuses have seen raging debates about what to study and how to study it. Traditionalists want to stick with the classics—what is known. Critics prefer to take it all apart and question what we know and how we know it.
It is this latter group that has birthed the fascinating new field known as Animal Studies, or more properly, Human-Animal Studies. So new it did not exist a decade ago, the discipline enjoys huge, expanding popularity nationwide. There are think tanks, academic journals, entire conferences devoted to it, and a growing list of majors and minors at top universities.
Why are ideas about animals worth studying? For one thing, customs and culture determine how animals are understood more than “pure science” ever did—which is why some animals are cherished family members and others are just meat. But more to the point, how we conceive of animals defines what it means to be human. That’s why the interest emerged simultaneously in fields such as anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political science, and literary criticism, in an era when everyone seems to be thinking more than ever about animals.
Albuquerque has no shortage of animal theorists. Central New Mexico Community College instructor Margo de Mello finds herself in the thick of it, as program director at the Animals and Society Institute and author of a textbook in the field. At the University of New Mexico, a handful of professors have formed the Animal Studies group, including French literature professor Walter Putnam, and Tema Milstein in the Department of Communications.
Margo de Mello
An anthropologist who had grown weary of academia, Margo DeMello changed course when she stumbled across the field of Animal Studies in 2004. A lifelong animal-lover and national president of the House Rabbit Society, she is now program director at the Animals and Society Institute of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she does trainings and publishes email newsletters for academics in the field. DeMello recently wrote a textbook on Animal Studies, and teaches in the Sociology Department at Central New Mexico University.
On the connection to animal rights: I come from social science, so I do think there should be relevance of theory to practice. But there is a bit of a rift in the field. People in critical animal studies feel there’s a problem with not having animal liberation as a goal. UNM law professor Marcia Baum teaches a course in animal law. At a conference a few years ago, she got heavy pushback because she invited some animal liberation people—she was accused of inviting terrorists. So on the left we get accused of being too “soft” because we’re not pushing animal liberation, and on the right we’re accused of being activists masquerading as a real academic subject.
What is meant by the central idea that animals are“socially constructed”: Take your dogs—you know everything about them, they’re as real as could be to you. But for someone who just sees a picture of them, there’s just the idea of “dog,” which means loyal, man’s best friend, whatever. Then you get into the breed—there may be a movie associated with it, books, ideas. All that might have nothing to do with your individual animal. It’s socially constructed.
I usually start with rabbits because most people don’t know anything about them except as socially constructed from the media, books, or movies. The source can be myths, fairytales, all of which may or may not have any basis in reality. How we perceive animals is shaped by far more than animals themselves—and that shapes how we treat them. Like the wild horses in Placitas: If the BLM decides they’re wild, they get all the protections of the Wild Horse & Burro Act. But if they decide they’re feral runaways, they’re a pest, a problem. The horses themselves don’t matter.
On animals as Internet memes: What I love about them is they come and go so quickly, and whatever our current feeling is in the country, we can use these animals to express it so perfectly. That’s again the social construction—Grumpy Cat is a meme. It may have nothing to do with the cat himself, who I hear is quite pleasant. It’s what he represents, which is us.
From Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies, Columbia University Press, 2012:
“A woman who is called a cow is thought to be fat and dull; likewise, the animal, the cow, is thought of as dull. A dull animal is an animal that, ultimately, does not deserve to live. Idioms such as “skin a dead cat” contribute to a permissive social attitude toward the abuse of animals. Language influences the ways in which animals are socially constructed and therefore treated in human society. Negative animal idioms normalize or trivialize violence toward animals. When sayings such as “flog a dead horse” are used and become a normal part of our vocabulary, we can no longer “see” the implications of human violence against animals. These expressions mask the real violence within them and demonstrate human power over animals.
...Terms such as “breeding stock,” “meat,” and “research tool” serve as absent referents, hiding the animal underneath the term. We have also talked about scientific writing, and how the use of third person passive voice (“the animals were euthanized”) makes the animals into objects and takes away all human culpability for their deaths.
...Most negative animal idioms about companion animals are about cats. This reflects a long history of cats being mistreated. ... But when we use an expression such as “swing a dead cat,” it seems funny and unreal. The rabbit is another animal that is routinely trivialized, yet subject to horrific abuse. Terms such as “dumb bunny,” “bunny slope,” “snow bunnies” and “ski bunnies,” all of which are aimed at women, paint women and rabbits as being dumb and childish.
...[W]e bestialize people (who we call bitches, cows, or foxes, or in the case of whole groups of people, beasts or vermin) and humanize animals... And although we can use animals to highlight a person’s good qualities (brave like a lion), we more commonly use animals negatively (cunning like a fox), especially to denigrate racial minorities.”
Walter Putnam
While researching European depictions of colonial Africa, French literature professor Walter Putnam became interested in how animals have been used historically as trophies, symbols of the exotic, and stand-ins for ideas about race and colonialism. This has led him to decode animal representations in contemporary life, ranging from zoos and circus acts to stuffed animals. Putnam’s popular course Zoophilosophy examines how European writers and thinkers understand humanity in the context of the larger animal world, drawing on philosophers from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Deleuze and Derrida. Putnam says this century will be dominated by “the question of the animal.”
On the current academic fascination with animals: There’s a real animal frenzy going on right now in the culture. Animals are very malleable, so they figure into anything we’re interested in. Animals have always been on the edges of things, in the liminal space where we define what’s us and them, what’s wild and civilized. They’ve always existed in the margins—that’s why animals are good to “think with” (as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss said). They straddle the neat dividing line between sentient beings and objects.
On the connection with colonialism: I don’t think colonialism has disappeared at all; it’s simply transferred onto animals. In animals we have the last willing victims. We have enslaved people over thousands of years, exploited their labor, we consider them property in the same way. But we didn’t consume them. A lot of things come to a head in the zoo, because animals are put on display, and people are led to make all kinds of assumptions based on a very small sliver (of reality). There is a whole microcosm of colonialism at the zoo—in the exhibiting, all-encompassing gaze on animals.
But it still does come down to, how do we go from an ontological view of animals to ethical treatment of them? And the flipside: Does our representation of them affect how we treat them? In a way it does all lead back to the question of animal rights.
From “Stuffed Animals and the Predicament of Culture: Lost in the Bedroom Jungle,” Reconstruction, Summer 2003:
As the animal in nature receded behind the modern, industrial cityscapes, the caged animal and the stuffed animal came to occupy center stage. Ironically, at the very moment when the greatest distance from nature seemed to be taking hold, the most feared animals were introduced into urban centers and domestic spaces. The metropolitan zoos that grew up over the course of the nineteenth century brought exotic species from the empire into the hearts of European and American cities. At the same time, the stuffed version of wildlife found its way into the most cherished and guarded of spaces: a child’s bedroom. Of course, in order to gain admittance, it had to leave its animality at the door. It became less an animal and more an industrial product, especially for a population which had less and less direct contact with the animal world. Rather than engaging people in the shared experience of viewing the same animal in the company of other people such as occurs at the public zoo, a stuffed animal allows a single child to command a virtual Noah’s ark of animals right at home. In a sense, this private menagerie replicates the oldest of human/animal relationships which was the aristocratic privilege of ownership that was the prevalent model until the French Revolution. And perhaps the last vestiges of royalty have survived in a certain privileged status attributed to children in modern Euro-American culture. A child’s bedroom is his castle, a domain over which she or he rules as absolute master.”
Tema Milstein
The field of Communications at UNM, where Milstein teaches, concerns itself not with marketing or journalism, she says, but theories about how meaning is shared. Milstein’s class in Eco-cultural Communication looks at how people understand nature through contexts such as ecotourism. Her research into whale-watching tours investigates how the culture of ecotourism—from the explanatory displays to how visitors talk about their experience—reflects our understanding of the natural world.
On terms like “animal nut”: I’ve done a lot of work on orcas, and people who like them are called “dorcas” by people coming at it from a more legitimate scientific viewpoint. That kind of put-down disciplines our relations with nature, which is about dominance: If you wander off that path, you get disciplined back, which shuts off avenues of change.
On the difference between teaching about animals and environment: My courses don’t have “animal” in the name, but I introduce animals through issues of food. That way, students aren’t facing the issue head-on, so it’s easier. Environment is more accepted as a topic of study; animals are more personal. We have a struggle separating ourselves from animals, but not from the environment, which is seen as a backdrop. But there are so many students who care about animals and nature, if you start to really talk to them about that binary—between humans and animals, humans and nature—they get it. When students start to dig into zoos, for example, how they represent ownership and rule but have a veneer of conservation, they see something new. What all these types of classes do is help students develop a critical eye.
On the difficulty of changing people’s ideas about animals: There’s a cultural struggle within us to be dominant but not entirely separate from animals, as through zoos or stuffed animals, where we don’t feel any danger in the relationship. So much of the shift we have to make is to get away from that. I am a critical scholar, so I research dominant paradigms and also look into alternative possibilities, to beneficially transform the human relationship with nature. In my research with gorillas at the zoo, or at the main whale-watching site near Seattle, the most common statement heard is “What a show they put on!” It shows our limited cultural toolbox in dealing with animals.
From “Somethin’ Tells Me It’s All Happening at the Zoo”: Discourse, Power, and Conservationism,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 2009
"Zoos are also a part of a consumer system. Even if some are fully governmental agencies, under conditions of neoliberalism, zoos are required to ‘‘pay their own way.’’ This means, no matter how well intentioned zoo staffers may be, inevitably zoos are subject to pressures to increase visitor numbers and attract corporate sponsors. As such,…[z]oos avoid particularly uncomfortable critiques and exhibit non-endangered animals precisely to be crowd-pleasing.
One major obstacle to zoos being sites for connection and action is that zoos fail to clearly identify an adversary. … When it comes to the destruction of nature, who is the enemy? [O]ne can point to specific local developments, transnational institutions or corporations, or imperialist governmental policies that coerce people out of … cooperative relations with nature and into relationships of exploitation. One can also point to the vast majority of Westerners, who… disproportionably consume nature at a higher and higher rate each year. Zoos can strive to communicate these ‘‘adversarial components’’ far more clearly.
For all the talk from zoos about conservation and education, the zoo is still a place to go for entertainment, lighthearted fun, and good times…. I will venture that zoos truly dedicated to improving animals’ lots and human environmental understandings cannot fully become sites of meaningful resistance while aligning with this model of entertainment, while perpetuating the cruelty inherent in control and captivity…. Nor can zoos achieve such goals while continuing to harbor the large-scale institutional costs associated with extensive exhibit infrastructure and to be beholden to pressures to be crowd and sponsor pleasing.”