Browsing by Subject "Animal Rights"

"Citizen Canine" explores the sacrificial underpinnings of politics via a critique of the boundary between human and animal in Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato. I argue that the concept "animal" serves a functional rather than descriptive role: it is born of a sacrificial worldview that sees violence as a necessary foundation for human life, and which therefore tries to localize and contain this violence as much as possible through a system of sacrifice. I begin the dissertation with Martha Nussbaum's recent work on the "frontiers of justice," but argue that she is insufficiently attentive to the roles that animality and the rhetoric of sacrifice play in her discourse. I then examine the concept of sacrifice more thematically - using Jacques Derrida and Rene Girard among others - which justifies the move back to the Greeks to understand the specific manner in which sacrifice, human, and animal are intertwined at a crucial moment in Western history. In the Greeks we see an inception of this sacrificial concept of the political, and the movement from Homer to Aeschylus to Plato presents us with three successive attempts to understand and control cosmic violence through a sacrificial order. I contend that a similar logic continues to inform the exclusions (native/foreigner, masculine/feminine, human/nature) that mark the borders of the contemporary political community - hence my dissertation is directed both at the specific animal/human dichotomy as well as the larger question of how political identity is generated by the production, sacrifice and exclusion of marginalized communities.

Since its founding in 1993, Taiwan’s Life Conservationist Association (LCA) advocates for laws supporting the “equality of life” as an alternative to “human equality.” According to European Enlightenment liberalism, “human equality” stems from the distinctly human capacity for rationality endowed by a creator, a reflection of a three-part ontology that separates humans from their creator and from the rest of creation. As this dissertation demonstrates, liberal humanism reproduces this three-part ontology as the distinctly separate domains of the religious, the (human) secular, and the natural. In contrast, Shih Chao-hwei, the Taiwanese Buddhist nun who co-founded LCA, asserts the equality of life stems from the capacity of all sentient beings to suffer. She rejects the entire Christian liberal cosmology, denying the existence of any eternal creator and only recognizing a distinction between sentient and insentient beings.

Based on a total of two years of multi-species ethnographic field work conducted from 2015 to 2018, this study examines how LCA and its allies promote the equality of life as an alternative to human equality in Taiwan. The study responds to (1) recent post-colonial scholarship that demonstrates how colonial powers used the institutions of religious freedom and the separation of church and state to subjugate non-Christian teachings and (2) recent scholarship in political ecology that demonstrates how concepts of nature and naturalism denied alternative ontologies of life. In response to these critiques, I put Han teachings such as Buddhism on equal terms with sciences such as conservation biology, as well as the traditional knowledge of the indigenous minorities who have largely converted to Christianity.

As an ethnographic example of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, I examine how the Tayal people are responding to a conservation law drafted by LCA as part of the colonial policies of the liberal state. The Tayal contend that unlike the Buddhist method of protecting life which prohibits killing, the method of protecting life in their own traditional law called Gaga is expressed through hunting. They resist both liberal policies that denied indigenous people’s full human equality and restrictive hunting policies based on LCA’s Buddhism-inspired equality of life. Yet, the Tayal also ally themselves with Christian churches and the global indigenous rights movement so that their arguments to restore Gaga are expressed in terms of the liberal institutions of human rights. The central argument of the dissertation is that, to resolve political disputes over the equality of life, Buddhists and indigenous peoples are both forced to appeal to and reinforce institutions based on human equality, institutions by which both were suppressed. Rather than accepting liberal narratives that frame questions of ecology in terms of competing human rights, this dissertation invites scholars to recognize liberalism as a product of Christian theology and to consider alternative notions of the ontology of life not simply as religions or forms of traditional ecological knowledge, but as contested but viable legal alternatives to liberalism.

The scriptural witness has indications that it is acceptable to kill animals for food but also indicates that originally human beings were vegetarians and will be yet again when this world is claimed as part of God’s kingdom. This thesis offers a theological analysis of the practice of humans eating animals. Is it an accommodation of humanity’s fallenness after their expulsion from the Garden? Or is it part of God’s design for the world? An in-depth look at the whole of scripture is employed for arguing both sides. Additionally, the thesis offers comparative analysis of a variety of theological approaches to animal rights and animal welfare. The thesis considers scientific revelations about animal’s cognitive abilities for language and problem solving, as well as recent studies on animal grief in order to re-assess the underlying question of ethical relationship between animals and humans. The thesis argues that God has put humanity in a set of circumstances which are meant to encourage understanding of animals as part of its own growth. Specifically, human growth toward the role of being a stewards of creation, that is to say nurturers and not exploiters of God’s creatures. Fallenness is not the issue. But growth is. Thus the provision that allows humanity to kill and eat animals is afforded, while humans still require the ability to kill animals for their own sustenance. What awaits is a time when humanity and animals are in peaceful community with each other, with no death or violence in the world and a full realization of the image of God in humanity.

The scriptural witness has indications that it is acceptable to kill animals for food but also indicates that originally human beings were vegetarians and will be yet again when this world is claimed as part of God’s kingdom. This thesis offers a theological analysis of the practice of humans eating animals. Is it an accommodation of humanity’s fallenness after their expulsion from the Garden? Or is it part of God’s design for the world? An in-depth look at the whole of scripture is employed for arguing both sides. Additionally, the thesis offers comparative analysis of a variety of theological approaches to animal rights and animal welfare. The thesis considers scientific revelations about animal’s cognitive abilities for language and problem solving, as well as recent studies on animal grief in order to re-assess the underlying question of ethical relationship between animals and humans. The thesis argues that God has put humanity in a set of circumstances which are meant to encourage understanding of animals as part of its own growth. Specifically, human growth toward the role of being a stewards of creation, that is to say nurturers and not exploiters of God’s creatures. Fallenness is not the issue. But growth is. Thus the provision that allows humanity to kill and eat animals is afforded, while humans still require the ability to kill animals for their own sustenance. What awaits is a time when humanity and animals are in peaceful community with each other, with no death or violence in the world and a full realization of the image of God in humanity.