Objectification Of Animals Research Articles

Ethical Dimension of Live Animals as Ready-made Objects in Contemporary Art

Reaction through art, observed among the 20th century artistic movements, can result in artistic works in which animals are made the object of violence. The objections caused by these works sometimes make people question what art is and its value, and sometimes result in legal interventions. It is the forms of expression in contemporary art where idea gets ahead of physical production. In such an atmosphere, 'philosophy of art activities that question what art is' have become almost equivalent to artistic production. However, the controversial works make the concepts of ethics, law or public influence determine what art can or cannot be. In the background of all these developments, advances in the field of biology blurred the boundaries between animals and humans. After such developments, through which the anthropocentric thought system has lost its power, the position of animals in the system will also change. The reappraisal of animals will fundamentally affect the behavior of the human species towards them, undoubtedly. In such a system where the determinants of the concept of ethics are redefined, objectification of animals will not be ethical as before. In this regard, art can no longer be separated from other fields. When the determinant of the boundaries of art is a non-art field, the discussions within the field lose their meaning. This study aims to investigate the limits of contemporary art by examining the reactions to the selected examples of artists whose ways of including animals in their productions are criticized.

Contesting the meat–animal link and the visibility of animals killed for food: a focus group study in Finland

Dissociating meat from its animal origins has been considered a central strategy omnivores employ to sustain their meat consumption despite their concerns for animal welfare. In recent years, the dissociation strategy has become increasingly contested as short food-chain movements promote consumer contact with farmed animals as a means to more ethical eating. This article examines how different groups of Finnish consumers construct the meat–animal link based on focus groups with gastronomes, hunters, organic consumers, rural women, and supermarket customers. The theoretical approach is based on Noëlie Vialles’s concepts of the sarcophage and zoophage logic of meat eating and on the literature on animal categorization. Supermarket customers preferred to dissociate meat from the animal, while gastronomes and rural residents regarded the presence of the animal in meat as important for its quality. Hunters valued game meat highly as animals were transformed into meat through their own effort. Although rural women and some organic consumers personalized certain farmed animals due to their proximity, these animals were still edible and killable. The research suggests that challenging dissociation does not in itself necessarily imply an increased moral valuation of animals if the objectification of animals is not confronted.

Inked: Human-Horse Apprenticeship, Tattoos, and Time in the Pazyryk World

Abstract Prior interpretations of the tattoos of nonhuman animals etched upon the preserved human bodies from the Pazyryk archaeological culture of Inner Asia have focused on solely human-generated meanings. This article utilizes an ethnoarchaeological approach to reassess these tattoos, by analogizing the nature and possibilities of human-ridden horse intersubjectivities in the present with those of the past. As enlightened by people who live with horses, including the author, the process of learning to ride can be seen as an interspecies apprenticeship process, where both humans and horses pass along social knowledge as thoughtful actors with defined roles. From this perspective, the horse tattoos are presented as polysemic materializations of the bonds between particular Pazyryk horses and people, of blended identities, and of cosmological values related to time, memory, and belonging. The article concludes that exploring smaller-scale human-nonhuman animal interactions in the present allows for fresh interpretations of similar interactions in the past and provides a means for archaeology to move beyond the objectification of animals as sets of resources or symbols.

Countering Brutality to Wildlife, Relationism and Ethics: Conservation, Welfare and the 'Ecoversity'.

Simple SummaryWildlife cruelty is commonplace in society. We argue for a new engagement with wildlife through three elements: a relational ethic based on intrinsic understanding of the way wildlife and humans might view each other; a geography of place and space, where there are implications for how we ascribe contextual meaning and practice in human-animal relations; and, engaged learning designed around our ethical relations with others, beyond the biophysical and novel, and towards the reflective metaphysical. We propose the ‘ecoversity’, as a scholarly and practical tool for focusing on the intersection of these three elements as an ethical place-based learning approach.Wildlife objectification and cruelty are everyday aspects of Australian society that eschew values of human kindness, empathy, and an understanding of the uniqueness and importance of non-human life in the natural world. Fostered by institutional failure, greed and selfishness, and the worst aspects of human disregard, the objectification of animals has its roots in longstanding Western anthropocentric philosophical perspectives, post colonialism, and a global uptake of neoliberal capitalism. Conservation, animal rights and welfare movements have been unable to stem the ever-growing abuse of wildlife, while ‘greenwash’ language such as ‘resource use’, ‘management’, ‘pests’, ‘over-abundance’, ‘conservation hunting’ and ‘ecology’ coat this violence with a respectable public veneer. We propose an engaged learning approach to address the burgeoning culture of wildlife cruelty and objectification that comprises three elements: a relational ethic based on intrinsic understanding of the way wildlife and humans might view each other [1,2,3]; geography of place and space [4], where there are implications for how we ascribe contextual meaning and practice in human-animal relations; and, following [5], engaged learning designed around our ethical relations with others, beyond the biophysical and novel and towards the reflective metaphysical. We propose the ‘ecoversity’ [6], as a scholarly and practical tool for focusing on the intersection of these three elements as an ethical place-based learning approach to wildlife relationism. We believe it provides a mechanism to help bridge the gap between human and non-human animals, conservation and welfare, science and understanding, and between objectification and relationism as a means of addressing entrenched cruelty to wildlife.