Conference Program & Participants

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Southwestern College, Winfield, KS
Deets Library – Reference Room

Friday October 23, 2015

Southwestern College, Winfield, KS
Deets Library – Reference Room

Session Abstracts

Kara Kendall-Morwich, Washburn University

“Surviving in the Pit: Companion-Species Entanglements and Suffering in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones”

A decade has passed since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the US Gulf Coast, powerfully demonstrating the shared vulnerability and finitude of human and nonhuman animals. The hurricane and resulting floods claimed more than 1800 human lives and displaced up to 600,000 more, while an estimated 600,000 companion animals were killed or left homeless after federal and state agencies failed to include them in evacuation plans. A decade later, while the ongoing impact of Katrina has largely faded from national consciousness, the disaster looms large in the minds of advocates for racial and economic justice and nonhuman animal well-being, respectively, exposing as it did the region’s gaping wounds of socioeconomic inequality and companion-animal overpopulation. Yet the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman lives that Katrina so forcefully revealed remains an understudied lesson of the disaster for scholars, activists, and policymakers alike. In order to explore this intersectional terrain, this paper examines author and Katrina survivor Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones, which follows the family of narrator Esch Batiste, a pregnant 15-year-old growing up in a backwoods home called “the Pit” in a Mississippi bayou town, in the days surrounding the hurricane. The novel highlights both the beauty and ugliness of companion-species relations as they intersect with socioeconomic injustice, most potently in the relationship between Esch’s brother Skeetah and his prized fighting pit bull, China. In a provocative revision of the boy/dog love story, Skeetah goes to heroic lengths to care for China and the puppies she births at the beginning of the novel, then subjects her to a dogfight (harrowingly narrated by Esch) despite her compromised condition, and finally risks his life to save her during Katrina. Without condoning dogfighting, the novel insists on contextualizing it as a manifestation of the multispecies impact of racial and economic inequality. Esch’s identification with and mythologization of China as a figure of “savage” endurance and interspecies familial love further complicates the dog’s position. Through China, I argue, the novel underscores the complex entanglement of human and nonhuman suffering under the conditions of racialized rural poverty and the need for increased attention to companion-species relations in the ongoing struggle for racial and economic justice.

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Rae Piwarski, University of North Dakota

“Alpha Dog in Submission: David Lurie Following the Doomed Dog in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace”

The old adage that dog is (hu)man’s best friend has developed through the centuries for complicated reasons, but the saying boils down to a few origins. Largely for hunting and protection, but also as a sign of class, providing for animals who served no practical purpose once signified an excess of funds—something reserved for nobility and royalty. There is no doubt, however, that our relationship to animals has changed, and contemporary relationships with animals mean something different than antiquated ones. Colonialism has historically both converged and separated animals from people in an attempt “civilize,” regulate, and separate, and thus directly relates to how colonizers have separated themselves from the colonized to meet the same ends. In many ways, the way colonizers treat the colonized is the same or worse than the way they treat animals, so looking at how societies treat animals speaks to how they treat one another. The contemporary postcolonial text Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee seeks to break down notions of humanity through its depiction of human relationships to dogs. I will examine how protagonist David Lurie displays conventional animalistic behavior in his struggle for dominance against other male characters within the narrative. Disgrace is the dismal story of Lurie’s search for passion and meaning in his life as he comes to terms with his own mortality in modern, apartheid South Africa. Yet, it is not just his story—it is also the stories of the women who guide his transition from an alpha dog to a submissive dog going into retirement as he loses his dominance. In constructing Lurie as a dog of sorts, Coetzee ultimately challenges what it means to be human. With this challenge, Coetzee implores readers to question why humans construct themselves as superior entities who deserve the sort of power they maintain on earth, when their behavior is so similar to the animals they subjugate and mistreat. Perhaps then, the notion that dogs are (hu)man’s best friend comes from a subconscious identification: man can see their own behavior in the dogs looking back at them.

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John Scaggs, Southwestern College

“Dogs of War: Dog-Fighting and Crime-Fighting in Alicia Giménez-Bartlett’s Dog Days”

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Lori Brack, Bethany College

“Asking the Cat to Speak: Poetry and Voicing the Animal”

Virginia Woolf’s mock biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel, Flush, is an allegory through the life of a dog for what is unrecorded, even unregarded as invisible or impossible in history. Woolf’s Flush experiences his world through the senses of smell and touch, a “dumb” animal whose sensations were not distorted by attempts to describe them in language. Woolf frequently returns to the unrecorded, unwritten in her work. In her brilliant essay “On Being Ill,” she asks why we don’t have volumes and volumes of literature about the physical and mental experience of sickness and asserts that perhaps one reason is the impossibility of language to convey suffering. So, how can we as writers of creative and scholarly work begin to articulate a wide variety of animal experiences, including suffering, if both being animal and being in pain remain outside human language? Poet Mark Doty writes that communication between the human and animal is founded in “a long process of interpretation.” Peter Singer might reply that we need not interpret animal pain because of its obvious qualities of physical and mental distress, responses that humans also experience. As a writer of personal essays with animals often at the center of concern, I struggle not so much with interpreting “accurately” as being fair and possibly anti-anthropomorphist when reporting the lives and experiences of non-pet animals. One strategy that emerged for me as I wrote an essay recounting my experience with a seriously injured feral tomcat is a turn to the poetic. Because poems originate in the body’s breath and beats as surely as from the “doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it” (Woolf), poetry offers in its slippery mimicry of experience through sound, a way to begin to work with animal consciousness. Woolf prescribes “a new language” that she deems “more primitive, more sensual, more obscene” for writing about suffering. In my paper, I share excerpts from my essay “Accidents of Salvation” and from the poems of Philip Levine, Camille Dungy, Elizabeth Bishop and others that illustrate writers’ negotiations of unsayable animal experience.

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Alice Bendinelli, Southwestern College

“‘Nosce Te Apesum’: Traumatic Testimony in Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013)”

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Phillip Drake, University of Kansas

“Killer, Commodity, or Companion? Caring about the Bali Dog”

The status of dogs in Bali has become increasingly precarious in recent years. Semi-feral dogs have lived on Bali for millennia. Some studies estimate that the genetic lineage of these Bali dogs can be traced back to the earliest proto-dogs that evolved from wolves. Between 2008 and 2014, the population of these dogs dropped from nearly 800,000 to around 150,000 after a rabies outbreak prompted a culling effort led by the state. At the same time, purebred dogs are being imported to Bali at unprecedented rates due to demand from both locals and expats. While the preference for purebred dogs further threatens the status of indigenous dogs, imported purebred dogs also have been subjected to culling under the auspices of controlling disease and illegal trade. Finally, there remains a viable market for dog meat in Bali, with as many as 100,000 dogs – mostly indigenous – killed per year. Through ethnographic fieldwork that includes interviews with pet owners, traders, and animal welfare activists in Bali, this paper explores the importance of animal life in Indonesia via the question of the dog. While responses to my inquiry vary, they touch upon important political, economic, and cultural issues that also impact the well being of people in Indonesia. By examining the status of marginal species like dogs in contrast to marginalized people, this paper reflects on Donna Haraway’s (2008) call to “learn to live responsibly” in our interspecies entanglements, even if it means living “in and through the use of one another’s bodies.”

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Martin Wallen, Oklahoma State University

“Biting the Philosopher’s Hand: Other People’s Dogs, Other Responses”

In last summer’s HBO series, The Leftovers, one of the main characters, Kevin, is bitten on the hand by a dog he had tried to rescue from a mysterious, cud-chewing character, Dean, who has been hunting down dogs to shoot them.  Dean has already said to Kevin about his slaughter, “they’re no longer our dogs.”  Counted as one of the “prodigal sons” who find their way “home” in the season finale, the vicious dog questions – through his incessant barking, running off, then “returning” – the categories that frame relations between humans and dogs.  Would “our” dogs bite the hand rescuing them?  Would “our” dogs, run away?  When they stop being “ours,” what or who are they?  This paper extends the questioning raised by Derrida’s philosophical response to a cat’s tactless stare – questioning that has shaped much of Animal Studies over the past decade – to consider narratives of non-philosophical dogs turning away from, or attacking “their” human companions.  Beginning with the premise that Bentham’s pivotal question of “whether they respond,” has been adequately answered, I shall pursue the possibility that most troubles anthropocentrism, that of a dog choosing to attack, or to turn away from, or simply to ignore the caring human.

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Harlan Weaver, Kansas St. University

“From Suffering to Flourishing: Dog Play in a ‘Kill’ Shelter”

In 1998, Aimee Sadler, a professional dog trainer, began a program developed in tandem with a local animal shelter that quickly spread: Playing for Life!™. Sadler’s program wrought what many consider a small-scale revolution in the animal shelter world, for most shelters keep dogs separate out of fear of the spread of disease and the possibility of a bite incident. By teaching shelter staff and volunteers how to facilitate play groups among shelter dogs, Playing for Life! provided a valuable enrichment resource as well as a better understanding of individual shelter dogs’ inclinations towards dog-dog sociality, both of which increased adoption rates. Drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in a high-volume open admission shelter with a majority population of pit bull-type and chihuahua-type dogs involved in Sadler’s program, I argue that shelter play programs challenge the practice of understanding dogs by breed (already difficult in shelters, where parentage is mostly unknown) by teaching shelter staff and volunteers how to look for discomfort, joy, hesitation, shyness, and more through body language. Shelter playgroups engender what Vinciane Despret terms attunement, and what I will call better understandings, understandings that have the potential to facilitate better lives not only by gauging dogs’ interest in and style of engagement with other dogs more accurately but also because they move away from the logic involved in breed-based legislation, unfortunately widespread in Kansas, that names “pit bulls” as innately vicious and illegal. By promoting alternate and better understandings amongst both dogs and humans, shelter playgroups help build a world of human/animal flourishing rather than one of euthanasia and suffering.

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John Badley, Duke University

“Brother Dog, Sister Cow: Directions in Catholic Theology of Animals after Laudato Si’”

In the months since the release of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’or On Care for Our Common Home, the ecological papal encyclical, much has been written on its significance—perhaps too much.  But in this paper I would like to take that very popular question seriously: what are the magisterial consequences of the Catholic Church’s first ecological encyclical for a Catholic theology of animals.  First I review the contents and significance of Laudato Si’ in the context of the magisterium of the Church, then I suggest some directions for future investigations in speculative theology of animals with particular attention to animal suffering.  As such this paper will represent an foray into Catholic speculative theology in the context of this inter-disciplinary conference on animal suffering.

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Jennifer McMahon, East Central Oklahoma State University

“I Am an Animal: Bad Faith, Authenticity, and the Phenomenon of Animal Suffering”

This essay draws from existential theory and contemporary social psychology to discuss the tendency that humans have to be in “bad faith” relations with non-human animals, a tendency that increases the likelihood of animal suffering. As existential philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre explain, humans tend to exist in bad faith, or denial of their nature, due to deep-seated anxieties they have regarding their existential situation. In their article, “I Am Not an Animal: Mortality Salience, Disgust, and the Denial of Human Creatureliness,” contemporary terror management theorists (Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Kluck, and Cornwell) argue that one of the things we are especially resistant to is our animal nature. Thus, we are more likely to be in bad faith in our relations with animals because animals exemplify an aspect of being that many humans actively try to deny. Importantly, because bad faith fails to acknowledge essential features of existential situations, persons who persist in bad faith are more likely to exhibit indifferent or antagonistic attitudes. Clearly then, if we are likely to be in bad faith relative to animals this increases the potential for their mistreatment. As this essay will argue, if genuine authenticity is to be achieved and animal suffering minimized, we shall have to try and resist our inclination to deny our animality and objectify the other creatures who manifest it. Consistent with the declaration of Jacques Derrida is his "The Animal That Therefore I Am," we will need to embrace the fact that we are animals in order to sustain ourselves and engage in genuinely moral relations with non-human animals.

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Jacob L. Goodson, Southwestern College

“Haunted by Animal Suffering: Reflections on the Phrase ‘the Difficulty of Reality’”

The phrase, “the difficulty of reality,” is employed by philosophers to identify how philosophical theories – specifically deontology and utilitarianism – fail to account for the contextual demands that humans face on a daily basis.  The phrase attempts to summarize how the character, Elizabeth Costello, presents herself in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello: comparing factory farming with the Holocaust and then admitting that she wears “leather shoes.”  This phrase is found in the following places.  Cora Diamond uses this phrase to help her readers think about the animal suffering and the daily treatment of animals.  Stephen Mulhall further expands on Diamond’s use of the phrase in relation to animal suffering and the treatment of animals.  Jonathan Tran also reflects on Diamond’s use of this phrase in addressing the issue of “self-care,” and Stanley Hauerwas borrows the phrase from Diamond and applies it to the question concerning the connection between pacifism and vegetarianism.  In this paper, I introduce the audience to the different emphases each of these philosophers (and theologian, in the case of Hauerwas) place on the phrase “the difficulty of reality” and reflect on the usefulness of the phrase within animal ethics.

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Morgan Elbot, Rivier University

“Bearing the Moral Costs of Factory Farming: Apathy and Ignorance in Industrial Agriculture”

This analysis begins by briefly chronicling the drastic changes that have taken place in America’s agricultural industry. This historical account will provide the requisite context for reflecting on the consequences such changes have had on the interface between the farm and the public.  As fewer individuals are required to raise a greater number of animals, in large part the result of medical and technological advances, a greater portion of the general public is left oblivious to the source of their meat and animal products.  The social, environmental and animal welfare costs associated with confinement agriculture are able to grow uncontrolled, as fewer people and places bear their burden. The moral costs of industrial animal agriculture are defined as: those forms of animal suffering that are the product of confinement agriculture. Bernard Rollin broadly classifies this suffering as: (1) “production diseases [which] arise from the new ways the animals are produced,” (2) large-scale production which “militates against the sort of individual attention that typified much of traditional agriculture,” and (3) “physical and psychological deprivation for animals in confinement: lack of space, lack of companionship for social animals, inability to move freely, boredom, austerity of environments, and so on.” From this context, a hypothetical question is posed: is the typical individual prepared to raise an animal as though it were in a large-scale confinement facility and allow it to suffer accordingly, in order to receive the benefits of eating that animal’s meat, wearing its hide, or consuming it products?  I propose that many Americans would not be able to personally bear these moral costs due to the conflict with our moral intuitions.

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Amelia Hicks, Kansas St. University

“Boycotts and Ethical Veganism”

Most boycotts are boycotts of insensitive markets: markets that do not respond to the demands of a single consumer. Such boycotts raise the following worry. Imagine that I oppose factory farming, and am considering boycotting factory-farmed chicken. If I'm the only person—or one of very few people—to participate in the boycott, then my action will make no difference. So, if I don't know whether a critical mass of consumers will join me in the boycott (or if I think it's unlikely that they'll join me), why bother? This worry is sometimes called the causal impotency objection to consequence-based justifications for boycotts. The causal impotency objection, if successful, would undermine many non-anthropocentric moral arguments for ethical veganism and ethical vegetarianism. Thus, those who want to justify a practice like veganism or vegetarianism (and who want to maintain that their practice isn't entirely “symbolic”) need to develop a response to the causal impotency objection. In my paper, I first survey a well-known response to the causal impotency objection, namely, the “threshold” response. According to this response, there are thresholds of reduced consumer demand at which production is proportionately scaled down, and thus the expected utility of boycotting an insensitive market is approximately the same as the expected utility of boycotting a sensitive market. So, according to the threshold response, if it's reasonable to boycott a sensitive market (which it presumably is), then it's reasonable to boycott an insensitive market. However, I argue that this response fails, because it requires at least one implausible assumption about the probability of other consumers participating in the boycott. Nevertheless, I argue that even if we can't determine the expected utility of participating in a boycott of an insensitive market, we need not see such boycotts as “purely symbolic”; this is because we can reasonably participate in such a boycott out of a concern for avoiding moral recklessness. I argue (a) that under certain conditions one is morally culpable for taking a moral risk, and (b) that failure to participate in a boycott of animal products will (in many cases) satisfy those conditions.

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David O’Hara, Augustana University

“No Intimacy, No Revelation: A Philosophical Defense of Angling and Fishing”

It is sometimes claimed that angling causes unnecessary animal suffering.  I argue that some practices of angling – I focus on fly-fishing in particular – or at least practices very much like fly-fishing are important elements in the work of conservation.  Furthermore, practices like fly-fishing contribute significantly to human flourishing.  While this may not justify all the suffering a fish endures, on the whole it is better that some of us angle than that all of us fail to cultivate the kind of intimate knowledge of piscine ecology that comes from practices like fly-fishing. Henry Bugbee wrote in The Inward Morning, “that with which there is not the intimacy of touch is not truly ‘known.’ No intimacy: no revelation.  No revelation: no true givenness of reality.” This is one of the great reasons to fly-fish.  Fishing with a fly demands that we develop intimacy with a small part of our world.  This intimacy, in turn, gives rise to something new in the connection between fisher and fish.  As Steinbeck writes, when the fish is on one’s line, “a whole new relational externality has come into being—an entity which is more than the sum of the fish plus the fisherman.”  This reality depends both on the simplicity of the encounter (with minimal mediation of tools) and on the preparation of the fisher, which is part research, part courtship.  Fly-fishing, I argue, is not just a sport; it is a means of knowing the world.  It is too easy to let our lives lose their intimacies, and to replace them with conveniences.  Leopold warns us of this in his Sand County Almanac, that “there are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm.”  Both dangers are dangers of losing intimate knowledge of what grounds and supports our lives.  There is a deeper danger here as well.  Aristotle reminds us that without experience we find it easy to dogmatize about what we do not know.  Fishing with flies is a discipline of developing important experiential knowledge of watersheds, so that we may know them, intimately, as the places where we dwell.  Without such knowledge, we cannot preserve them.

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Anna Neill, University of Kansas

“Artificial Evolution and the Lettered Beast: Animals in The Island of Dr. Moreau”

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Trudy Clutterbok, Australian Catholic University

“The Death of Mr. Koala”

This paper is part of my research into violence and the idea of home and homeland in Australian children’s literature 1900-1970. I am looking at violence against animals, people and place in order to examine popular adult attitudes that are transmitted intergenerationally through children’s and young adult literature.  Animals were used in Australia in both symbolic and actual ways during Colonisation and Federation. Native animals in particular were re-named and were killed, distributed and also protected as they were transitioned from being ‘exotic animals’ to being ‘Australian animals’ – that is, being taken up symbolically as white Australian animals.

In this paper I will discuss the murder of Mr Koala in the book Blinky Bill by Dorothy Wall. Mr Koala is a condensed figure, part human, part animal, part British, part Australian. I will theorise his figure and the scene of his death with reference to Freud’s notion of condensation, Heidegger’s notion of the environment and also with reference to the related social history pertaining to trade in koala skins and conservation in the early twentieth century.  Blinky Bill contains some strong conservation themes, demonstrating that the koalas can look to white men as sources of both threat and protection. It was written fifteen years prior to the introduction of the Fauna Protection Act of 1948 and significantly prior to the contemporary Australian conservation movement that began in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and which saw broader public support for habitat preservation. The ambivalence contained in the depiction of violence and animal suffering and the concomitant gestures towards protection and conservation suggest that the appropriation of koalas by white Australians reflects the violence on the frontier between British-Europeans and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and involves koalas in this conflictual process.  By undertaking a close reading of Mr Koala’s murder and death I hope to pay attention to the actual suffering of koalas during early twentieth century Australia and the ways in which the animals were signified for political and cultural purposes.

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Michelle Boucher, Southwestern College

“The Children of Oryx and the Children of Crake: hybridity and (in)humanity in Paradice”

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