Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
that these are far from being spaces where nothing of concern is happening, but
rather are spaces where the ethics of the encounter are not being told.
There are plenty of instances where non-human others are lifted out of the
collective and are to a degree at least recognised as individually ethically visible. This
has been the case with both dolphins and certain primates. Dolphins have emerged
as a distinctive conservation concern because of the remarkable characteristics that
they appear to have. It is recognised that they are in some ways intelligent,
compassionate and perhaps possess some form of language. These are the things
which allegedly make humans into persons, and assertions that dolphins are persons
on such grounds, and thus worthy of individual rights on a par to a human person,
have even been tested in US courts (Midgley 1996). Similarly, considerations of
primate rights, which would recognise them as individuals, have been debated on
television in the UK, again because these beings seem to have, to a meaningful
degree, some of the attributes that we see as making ourselves into significant
individuals. Midgley (1996:116) suggests that it is emotional fellowship which make
creatures our fellow-beings and deserving of consideration in terms of being
persons, and that dolphins and apes have the 'kind of social and emotional
complexity' which makes such an emotional fellowship possible. Such gradual and
(for some) grudging extensions of ethical consideration away from its narrow
anthropocentric individualist ground is admitted not because we are truly trying to
extend the ethical community, but rather because we recognise that some of 'us', or
those like us, have been mistakenly excluded. Further, more inclusive extensions of
the ethical community would have to deal with the notion of the other, those quite
unlike us, and all of the ways in which humans and non-humans interact.
In stories such as
Black Beauty, Free Willy
or
Babe,
individualised animals do
come into focus, albeit sometimes through anthropomorphic means, and such
stories do create ripples in the exploited spaces of the collectives from which these
animals are lifted. Popular UK television programmes such as
Pet Rescue
and
Animal
Hospital
function by highlighting individual animal stories and the moving levels of
love, concern and care given to particular animals, levels which begin to approach
parity with the care of sick and injured humans.
Animals can hence emerge into individual (ethical) focus in all manner of ways.
For one, it is striking that, when animals do emerge into individual (ethical) focus in
media reports of 'animal incidents', this commonly results from some sort of spatial
'disruption' of usually unarticulated (un)ethical geographies. For example, consider
whales being washed up on a beach, or trapped in ice, where incredible efforts are
made to save them and to return them to the aquatic space where their fate again
becomes unarticulated; or consider the 'Tamworth Two', two pigs whose escape
from slaughter and eight days evading capture in the English countryside attracted
150 media crews and secured them eventual residence in an animal sanctuary (Ford
1998). Certain animals can also emerge, or be pushed, into individual focus through
the imaginative lifting of them from their common kind. This is particularly so with
'celebrity' animals such as famous racehorses like Desert Orchid, and, most
markedly, with the 'charismatic' animals which are so central to zoo economics.
