11 - Listening to animals

Summary

The Philosopher ran a series of three events in partnership with Adam Ferner's and Darren Chetty's podcast “Do You Even Vegan?” scheduled to coincide with each of the three daily meals, and the “breakfast guest” was Dutch philosopher, novelist, and artist Eva Meijer, a pioneering thinker on the political rights of animals. In this conversation, Meijer argues that the political turn in animal philosophy allows us to look at animals not just from an ethical perspective but also from a political perspective, which opens up many new and difficult questions about how to form democracies with other animals and how to conceive of them as political groups. For Meijer, a true interspecies democracy will only be possible if humans begin to listen in a different way to animals and to the natural world. Crucially, such a listening is not just for their survival but also for our own.

EVA MEIJER is an artist and postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and the author of many books, including Animal Languages and When Animals Speak.

DARREN CHETTY is a teacher, doctoral researcher and writer with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children's literature and hip hop culture.

ADAM FERNER is a writer and youth worker based in London. His books include The Philosopher's Library (with Chris Meyns) and Notes from the Crawl Room.

Adam Ferner (AF): You argue that humans massively underappreciate the extent to which non-human animals are engaged in intelligent and meaningful communication. For example, you describe Prairie dogs meeting each other with a “French kiss” and the extensive greeting ritual monogamous seabirds perform with their partners when they return to their nest, with the males often bringing gifts for the females such as flowers to decorate their nest or to use as a necklace. These descriptions offer a picture of non-human animals with human characteristics – French kissing, gift giving, and so on. But does this not run the risk of flattening non-human animal interactions by likening – or reducing – them to human interactions?

Eva Meijer (EM): The first answer would be that denying certain capacities to non-human animals is an ideological construction that has been very popular in animal research. The Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal called this “anthropo-denial”