Interspecies Encounters: A Prolegomenon to Educational Thought Experimentation on Befriending Animals

Abstract

Human and non-human animal encounters may be educational or not. In Education Reconfigured Jane Roland Martin has formulated the educational encounter thus: “Education only occurs if there is an encounter between an individual and a culture in which one or more of the individual’s capacities and one or more items of a culture’s stock become yoked together, or if they do not in fact become yoked together, it is intended that they do” (2011, p. 17). Her paradigm case of that concept is biologist-naturalist E. O. Wilson’s wondrous childhood seashore encounter with a jellyfish; and ecofeminist philosopher Karen J. Warren’s ocean-swimming encounter with dolphins demonstrates her own “care-sensitive ethics,” which she proposes as a necessary educational aim (Warren, 2000). Human animals’ encounters with non-human animals have become commonplace in environ-mental and ecological education (Bai & Romanycia, 2013; Carson, 1956; Haraway, 2008), often emotionally consequential even when scientific.