The Educational Significance of Human and Non-Human Animal Interactions: Blurring the Species Line

摘要

While Indigenous people across the world have recognized our kinship and relationality with other species for many centuries, it is a peculiar fact that the Western1 world has only reluctantly inched toward a view that has humans in continuity with the rest of the biosphere. This has not primarily occurred through a newfound respect for these other traditions, but rather through the ontological insights offered by evolution and then ecology, as each has risen to cultural prominence. Whereas evolution shows that humans were in fact part of a much more inclusive ancestry than once thought, and therefore have significant homologies and resonances with other organisms, ecology reveals the myriad ways in which humans and other species are mutually intertwined, for better or worse, in a shared fate. Evolutionary epistemology and comparative biology, whatever their weaknesses, have drawn us into deeper contemplation of how alleged differences between humans and other species are often rooted in unwarranted biases. Genetic advances in molecular biology reveal, in another language again, the marvelous continuity we share with others on the planet. And yet, despite this flurry of boundary breaking, continuity and kinship remain for Western culture largely something abstract and prepositional. It is not an ethical or performative connection that has been restored, and as such it still seems to lack much of what other cultural ways of engaging with other species have long nurtured.