Centering Animals in Latin American History: Writing Animals into Latin American History

Conclusion: Loving, Being, Killing Animals

conclusion Loving, Being, Killing Animals NEIL L. WHITEHEAD Since the appearance of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975), followed by Tom Regan and Singer’s Animal Rights and Human Obligations (1976), an incremental but clearly visible shift in the public view of human-animal relations has occurred, inspired by a growing output of books, articles, and films, the appearance of organizations and grassroots movements, and lifestyle changes.∞ Previously obscured from critical inquiry, nonhuman nature became the object of philosophical discourse, mostly confined to universities in Europe and the United States.≤ The result has been a series of reforms leading to more humane treatment of animals, the spread of direct-action politics around such issues as hunting, trapping, lab testing, and animal farming, and greater public readiness to take animal interests seriously, leading, for example, to stiffer prison sentences in cases of animal cruelty. There is a general heightened awareness , thanks partly to the Darwinian legacy, that humans and animals occupy the same temporal space, their fates organically bound together within the same planetary ecology. However, this liberal cultural framework fails to escape the logic of capitalism and colonialism, since the universalization of ‘‘human’’ rights and the extension of those rights to ‘‘animals’’ begs many questions as to animality and humanity as well as about the emancipatory potential of the human rights discourse itself. This issue is important since, as Regina Horta Duarte suggests in this volume, ‘‘during the first decades of the twentieth century, the processes of constructing national identities in various Latin American countries were decisively linked to the sciences of the natural world.’’ 330 • NEIL L. WHITEHEAD Moreover, the logic of domination is inherent in our attempts to write animals in, just as with the category of ‘‘children,’’ the perceived lack of opportunity or ability to ‘‘speak for oneself’’ invites the rescuing discourse of inherent ‘‘rights’’ to supplant this silence. Thus there are both political and theoretical issues at stake here: on the one hand the advocacy of inherent value and moral rights which are part of our progressive liberal modernity, and on the other a scientifically and medically inflected perception of the human as an integral category of ontology. If we are to move forward from the arguments made over thirty years ago by Singer and Regan, then, as do authors in this volume, we must begin to not just center the ‘‘animal’’ but simultaneously to decenter the ‘‘human.’’≥ John Soluri writes in his chapter for this volume, ‘‘I am hesitant to reject liberal notions of ‘human rights’ or to affirm ‘animal rights’ where animals are implicitly understood to be individuals. The historical and ecological meanings of animals are always contextual—conditioned by when and where they live.’’ In the same way that the ‘‘human rights’’ discourse has been welded to the exercise of global domination by Western governments, so too does restricting animals to the role of historical ‘‘victims’’ threaten to reproduce the way in which liberal discourse on human social justice is apt to confine political resistance to symptoms of trauma or to historical victimization and so erase the eruptive political meanings of such resistance.∂ In this way the uncritical call for ‘‘animal rights’’ can become a disguised form of neocolonial control, as in contemporary Asia, Africa, or Latin America.∑ The legal and moral necessity for Western governments, ngos, and liberal activists to intervene in local contexts is then advanced under the guise of a ‘‘deep ecology’’ and rhetorically driven by a variety of preservationist and conservationist discourses .∏ Particularly prominent in this elision of the conservationist and neocolonialist agenda is the ‘‘free-market environmentalist’’ movement, whose guiding light, Terry L. Anderson, has produced a series of works over the last decade promoting the idea that free-market approaches can also be an effective means to conserve wildlife by giving local peoples, ‘‘tribals,’’ a financial stake in wildlife and ecological management programs.π Notably such programs often have at their core some form of wildlife conservation that fits well with the tourist and recreational priorities of rich Europeans and Americans. Overall this ‘‘free-market’’ strategy, by calling for the creation of politically stable market conditions and the use of local labor in servicing those markets, not only marginalizes existing forms of local livelihood but also recreates local peoples as market-oriented consumers. The wildlife and animals likewise are commodified as tourist and recreational CONCLUSION • 331 objects, in turn producing...