The Silences of Dominion
How humans bully animals.
‘Sit down!’, ‘come here!’, and ‘stop!’ are some of the many everyday commands we give to our dog companions. But is this right? Are we morally entitled to issue such orders? In this article I will address these questions through two illustrative examples: the aforementioned case of dogs, and pigeons used in a California research project to detect pollution.
Dogs within the stifling structure of dominion
In his subversive book The Beast and the Sovereign, French philosopher Jacques Derrida studies how humans come to assume a right to dominate animals. His analysis reveals that this right to dominion involves a “right not to respond,” or, in other words, a right to remain silent, to non-reciprocity.
To be more concrete, imagine that a person, let’s call him Thom, is at home with a companion animal such as a dog, let’s call her Blaze. Blaze appears slightly unsettled, going to the main door of the home, coming back to where Thom is, and looking at him. Thom is busy working and doesn’t pay attention to Blaze. For this reason, Blaze begins to whine, indicating that she wants to go outside. Thom tells her to stop, and Blaze is silenced.
A wide range of researchers ranging from animal behaviourists to philosophers have provided ample evidence that animals like Blaze have their own personalities, desires and perspectives; speak through body language and phonetic utterances; and want to participate in the decisions that impact their lives.
In my view, the problem is that the assumption of dominion often leads us to naturalize a right to ignore what animals such as Blaze say and request. But animals have a will of their own, and where there is a will, there is a duty to listen and be responsive.
We have so far seen that everyday relations between humans and companion animals are permeated with assumptions of dominion. One might expect animal scholars to be more self critical, but, in fact, they often aren’t.
The violence of remaining silent: Pigeonblog
Consider the analysis that some scholars have advanced of the art-project Pigeonblog, which was initiated by Beatriz Da Costa in California, United States. In this project, pigeons were equipped with “backpacks” containing a pollution sensor and a GPS device, which allowed researchers to map the levels of pollution in different parts of Southern California.
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This project involved using pigeons who had been trained for pigeon-racing and who were conditioned to go back where humans wanted them to return. The project also entailed testing backpacks of different weights on the pigeons, some of which were so heavy that the pigeons could not even fly.
Imagine someone repeatedly forcing you to sit down, placing heavy backpacks on you such that you cannot even stand up due to the weight. Imagine having to endure this against your will for months. This is exactly what the pigeons used in Pigeonblog experienced and the reason why some scholars have described these kinds of activities as a form of forced labour.
Sadly, other scholars have described these actions as a “collaboration in … multispecies art” and as the pigeons being “invited to join” the project. In my research, I show how a fair number of academic articles and books deploy discourses of what we might call innocent language. Terms such as “recuperation,” “companionship,” “working animals,” “participants,” “alliances,” and “invitation,” among others, are used to describe projects like Pigeonblog, effectively candy-coating human dominion
I think that when the latter happens and scholars simultaneously remain silent about the violence or coercion that animals such as pigeons experience, they thereby contribute to oppression. Drawing on postcolonial theory, Australian political theorist Dinesh Wadiwel puts this idea eloquently when he says that knowledge “creates frames of naturalised inferiority and superiority, a history of what matters and who does not.”
In a nutshell, I believe that one of the main problems in human-animal relationships is that we often assume that we are entitled to rule over animals, to subdue them, and to train them to obey our orders. When dominion becomes normalized it leads us to neglect what animals say, to mistreat them, and to cloak our tyranny in euphemism.
Pablo P. Castelló, PhD is a Research Fellow at PAN Works and at the Animal Law Program at the University of Denver. He is also the Faculty Co-Director for the Animals Forward Program at the University of Denver. Prior to this, Pablo held research fellowships at the University of Cambridge, Harvard Law School, and the 2022–2024 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Animal Ethics at Queen’s University. Pablo’s work focuses on deconstructing oppressions against minoritized groups, including animals, and on developing proposals to build more just political and legal systems where all animals can flourish.
Nicole Roberts is the Associate Editor for PAN Works.
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