While reformism is perhaps the most mainstream approach, a growing chorus of critics is calling for deeper, more substantive change in the frameworks, assumptions, and behaviors toward non-human animals, including cattle. As books like Richard Sorabji’s Animal Minds and Human Morals, Gary Steiner’s Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents, and Stefanie Buchenau and Roberto Lo Presti’s edited collection Human and Animal Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy and Medicine show, efforts to decipher distinctions between humans and animals date at least as far back as Aristotle and informed robust debates in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Cattle figure prominently in the multifaceted field of animal studies, which explores the physical, cognitive, sensory, and emotional worlds of animals and their ethical and policy implications, as well as the roles animals play in society and human-animal relationships. While philosophical inquiry has historically focused on human-animal distinctions, recent scientific research on animal cognition has underscored how animals share with humans complex mental and emotional worlds. Several comprehensive readers offer an entry to evolving human attitudes toward animals and their implications for livestock raising, animal labor, and meat consumption. The Animals Reader, edited by Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald, for instance, compiles a range of selections from classic texts, like Plutarch’s writings on consuming animal flesh and Aristotle’s on animal histories, to works by contemporary thinkers and theorists, including Jacques Derrida’s The Animal that I Therefore Am as well as writings by Carol Adams, David Nibert, and Piers Beirne, whose books are also mentioned here. Another excellent tome is Margo DeMello’s impressive Animals and Society, which introduces readers to an array of issues in human-animal studies, including those pertaining to cattle, such as animal domestication and the production and consumption of meat. Both of these surveys are excellent teaching resources.
Recognizing the sensory and emotional capacities of non-human animals, animal advocates contend, demands a more serious consideration of their interests, desires, and needs. Some of those perspectives find expression in the collection Animals, Ethics and Trade, edited by Jacky Turner and Joyce D’Silva, which outlines recent scientific evidence of animal mental and emotional ability and consciousness and its implications for the ethics of farming and food production. The idea that sentience vests non-human animals with moral standing and renders their experience—their confinement, exploitation, pain, terror, and deaths—worthy of moral consideration, has been foundational to animal rights scholarship. In Livestock, Erin McKenna applies a pragmatist, ecofeminist approach to push past the objectification of commodified animals by emphasizing their individual variation against a backdrop of their evolutionary history and breed-specific behaviors. Barbara J. King argues for the need to fully recognize animals as sentient beings with unique characters in Personalities on the Plate. While conceding that meat consumption played a role in early human development, she posits that our knowing that animals feel, suffer, love, think, and reflect should matter enough to forge an alternative future. King’s most recent book, Animals’ Best Friends, explores how humans can operationalize this compassion for animals. Vignettes centering animal lives include a cow who escaped slaughter to live in the wild before being brought to a sanctuary, and other bovines subject to invasive biomedical experimentation to find ways to reduce gas emissions.
Considering animals as individuals with their own desires and interests has emerged as a core pillar of animal rights activism. In Stocks or Stakeholders, Michael Briscoe argues for considering animals as stakeholders within a shared world, a perspective he contends would yield benefits for humans as much as animals. Part of the struggle for animal rights involves denaturalizing the routinized violence against animals and recognizing it as a violation of their bodily integrity. In this vein, Murdering Animals by criminologist Piers Beirne situates theriocide (the murder of animals by humans) alongside murder to explore the uneven moral and legal weight afforded to these acts. Another inquiry into ethical and legal ramifications, Beating Hearts by Sherry F. Colb and Michael C. Dorf explores the parallels between two seemingly distinct moral debates—animal rights and abortion. Colb and Dorf argue that sentience, not humanity, vests a being with interests and worthiness of moral consideration, a notion that reconciles concerns over animal cruelty with pro-choice positions.
In Global Animal Law from the Margins, Iyan Offor critiques what he calls first-wave animal ethics, defined by the utilitarian animal welfarism of Peter Singer (in Animal Liberation) and the deontological approach to animal rights proposed by Tom Regan (in The Case for Animal Rights and, more recently, Defending Animal Rights). He proposes a second wave of animal ethics grounded in marginal, intersectional frameworks, as the foundation on which to reconceptualize international laws and policymaking on animal welfare.
Human and Animal Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy and Medicine
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