Living with Animals: Rights, Responsibilities, and Respect by Erin McKenna (review)

Building upon her work in Livestock (2018), Erin McKenna's Living with Animals delivers eight chapters about animals with which human beings share their lives: chimpanzees and other primates, horses and cattle, pigs and poultry, whales and fishes, pests, and cats and canines. This new work is carefully and beautifully constructed, consistent with her long effort of developing pragmatic ecofeminism. McKenna raises our attention to the use of pragmatism to name and address compelling problems of community—which, from this perspective, is construed in its broadest sense to include non-human animals. The focus in this text is on animals with which humans have evolved and upon whose welfare we continue to depend for our own. Acknowledging that philosophy has often been used to promote anthropocentric navel-gazing, McKenna argues that a pragmatist ecofeminist approach will help human beings "remember that their lives and deaths are intertwined with the rest of nature," and that "to be human is to be related to the rest of life—not separate from or superior to it" (xiv).

Each chapter develops a basis in history, fact, and story for our human relation to a kind or family of other animals. Echoing the practice of Jane Addams, McKenna takes stories as serious efforts of calibrating and considering the morality of our shared practices. For example, she reads and comments on stories including Curious George, Babe, Charlotte's Web, Free Willy, The Call of the Wild, and Born Free. McKenna subjects films and stories (many of which have children as their intended audience) to a skillful treatment, showing that, rather than mere entertainment, these texts offer moments of reflection that call for a fuller and more human response to animals. In an insight credited to Native North American philosophy, McKenna asserts that "[s]tories provide a way to enter this realm of knowledge and propose ethics for sustaining those relationships" between humans and animals (xv). Alongside this literature, McKenna includes evolutionary histories of her animal subjects, including the number and kinds of species, as well as life span and reproduction statistics.

Philosophical and environmental texts supplement the presentation, while voices from the pragmatist tradition expand the reflective approach. McKenna endorses Scott Pratt's argument that American pragmatism reflects the native influence that helped shape a "distinctive conception of pluralist democratic society" and is also "framed by a conception of experimental science grounded in community and a community grounded in the practices of freedom and democracy" (103). By incorporating both indigenous philosophical approaches with science and history to address a very real and tangible situation, McKenna's book is an example of contemporary American pragmatist philosophy at its best.

The depth of continuity between the agency of non-human and human animals courses through this text in a chorus of voices. Native American stories of coyotes and crows precede the ones we tell our children about spiders and pigs. The insights of classical pragmatists Addams, Peirce, James, and Dewey, along with later-twentieth-century figures Carol Adams, Val Plumwood, and Alice Walker, challenge the limiting of concern to others who express autonomy by using a merely reflective standard to limit abusive treatment. McKenna illuminates this internal dynamic of the tradition as pragmatist ecofeminism's work to "find ways to extend and prolong empathetic understanding of this kind and allow it to help guide other relationships" (117).

A related principle of pragmatism that McKenna brings into clear focus is the ideal of participatory democracy. Rachel Carson challenged the use of chemicals like DDT because it was an undemocratic choice by an "authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power," working without the informed consent of "people they are supposed to represent" (111). This systemic analysis of the assault on democracy and agency is extended to the treatment of lives of others in ways that also include our lives as well, both in terms of food and environment. Living with animals defines human life and will define the prospects and failures of our individual and collective moral character. Our ancient ancestors and our...