“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, January 15, 2016

Abuse of Nonhumans Traumatizes Children as much as Human-Human Abuse

Just collecting some nice facts for Verso.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A very Kantian extension here of why abuse is bad. But let us expand what "abuse" may mean in both contexts. There seems to be a cultural bias that the contrapositive is not true (if we change noon humans to animals or moo-cows in order to avoid a triple negative) vis a vis animal abuse. So what I mean is a societal myth holds: the abuse on animal = humans does not traumatize children as much as the abuse of non humans (possibly by non humans). So in the Lion King when a critter gets it, the child gets it via transferred psychic trauma, possibly because that part of the humans in the pluriverse which is a shared animal sense of awareness which responds to animal being is implicated. The abuse becomes literal and not abstracted as with humans (e.g. "The conditions of Guantanamo Bay are necessary because there are evil terror suspects interned"). I suspect sociologists are out writing papers and seeking grants now for more intersectional studies. This Kantian business of let's cease abusing critters because that is bad for humans is both true and crippling in forming the human worldview and I suspect perpetuates such abuse.