11 - We Only See What We Know: Animal Conservation and Human Preservation

Summary

Introduction

In pre-religious and shamanistic cultures, the relationship with the natural world was strong, reality based and pragmatic. In an age of trans-humanist urges and struggles for non-human animal conservation and representation, the relationship with nature has become a matter of policy.

Notwithstanding animistic revivals, urbanization and a recreational, consumeristic and medicalized relationship with the natural world further distance us from nature from an ontological perspective.

Furthermore, the progressive commodification of life has translated, when it comes to non-humans, into the gradual acceptance of behaviours which ordinarily would qualify as moral impossibilities. Exploitation and trafficking are, de facto, regulated by international trade agreements. The latter furthers the acceptance of the concept of nature as merchandise.

The objective of this chapter is to underscore the unavoidable allencompassing nature of green criminology as it relates to animal conservation with a cross-disciplinary theoretical engagement approach, and to outline some of current animal conservation shortcomings.

Beasts of every land and time

Hearken to my joyful tidings

Of the Golden future time

George Orwell, 2021 [1945]

Philosophical framework

In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882 writes that one of man's four errors has been to place himself above animals and nature in a fallacious hierarchical order (Nietzsche 1977: 156). In the third book of the The Gay Science, he further comments: ‘I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason – in other words they see him as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal’ (Nietzsche 1977: 190).

It is beyond the scope of this writing to elaborate on the pertinent and extensive philosophical literature relevant to human– animal relations. The current predominant, and perhaps inevitable, hierarchical anthropocentric stance is long standing in western thought. It has developed inflexibly from Greek philosophy onward, through Christian-Aristotelian cosmological orthodoxy, to the more animal-friendly Rousseauian attribution of ideas and sense to non-human animals (Rousseau 1987: 45).