A Parrot Might Talk Back

Ellie Anderson (Bio)
Muhlenberg College

A review of Despret, Vinciane. What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? Trans. Brett Buchanan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016.

Vinciane Despret’s lively book offers an introduction to issues relevant to the field of animal studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? incorporates a wide variety of approaches, including scientific studies, anecdotal reports from animal breeders, caretakers, and trainers, as well as insights from ethology, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. The playful style and structure of the book make for an engaging read that succeeds in unsettling assumptions about anthropomorphism, the treatment of animals in a variety of clinical and non-clinical settings, and the possibilities for responsible relations between humans and non-human animals. What Would Animals Say joins recent scholarship that focuses on community between humans and their animal others as well as on the epistemological and ethical issues that arise from interspecies relationality. In the wake of the first wave of animal studies, which largely centered on utilitarian arguments valorizing the similarity between humans and non-human animals on the basis of shared capacities, much scholarship in the past decade has pivoted toward more poststructuralist approaches that insist not on showing in what ways animals are like humans, but rather on respecting differences between humans and animals while also emphasizing their interdependence. A series of questions then arises, which include: Can people understand animals on their own terms? Can we feel for and with animals, or does this always entail assuming that they are just like us? Originally published in French in 2012, the English translation of Despret’s book participates in scholarly discussions about these timely questions, joining Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, Kelly Oliver’s Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human, Cynthia Willett’s Interspecies Ethics, Lori Gruen’s Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals, and Jane C. Desmond’s Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life.

Despret’s book topples several prejudices about relations between animals and humans, especially by demonstrating that the amateurish and anecdotal are among the richest sites for conceptualizing these relations. Anecdotes from “lay amateurs”—that is, non-scientists who work with animals, including animal breeders, caretakers, and trainers—are often discounted by science for their purported unreliability and overdetermination by anthropomorphic frames of reference. According to scientists, the anecdotes offered by amateurs hastily interpret animal behavior through the naïve lens of anthropomorphism. For instance, Despret mentions Portuguese cow breeder Acácio Moura, who claims that his cow behaves like a “diva” during contests by preening for the camera, and the well-known elephants of northern Thailand who make paintings with their trunks. Scientists accuse amateurs of making unjustified assumptions about the intentions of these animals while interpreting their behaviors on models of human capacities and needs. Does the cow mean to show off for the photographers? Does the elephant mean to paint a work of art, or is she being manipulated by her caretaker who tugs on her ear to solicit each stroke? Such questions are, for Despret, not the ‘right questions’ to which the title of the book refers (2). They rely on outdated models of individual agency and willfulness that in fact hold neither for humans nor for non-human animals. Despret encourages her readers instead to consider these animal activities in light of agencements: relational agencies between individual beings that are inseparably interwoven with those of their companions and that render the question of intention useless. In this regard, Despret’s work has intersecting poststructuralist, sociological, and pragmatic undertones. In discussing a debate about whether or not a viral photo on the Internet showing chimpanzees in Cameroon “mourning” the death of one of their own attested to “real” mourning, Despret dismisses this line of thinking as misguided. The right question, she says, citing William James, is not “is it really mourning?” but rather, “what does this mourning ask of us?” (170). That is, Despret is not looking for clear answers about whether or not our modes of interpretation of animal behavior are correct. She argues convincingly that these clear answers cannot be verified anyway because of the overdetermination of our relations with animals in the laboratory as well as in the field or the home. Thus, the kinds of questions that would lead to clear answers allowing us to categorize animal behavior are misguided, because our very categories are always already human ones. The “right questions” are instead those that lead to responsibility for our companion species and to curiosity about the situations that frame our interpretations of our relations with them.

When we do not confine ourselves to metaphysical questions about the agency, subjectivity, and language of animals, but rather ask what each situation asks of us, we are, according to Despret, involving ourselves in a play of reciprocal curiosity, ethical responsibility, and provisional interpretations that are subject to correction and change. To argue that humans can have no answers to the question “what does this ask of us?” because we can never be in the position of the animal is to cut off interspecies relationality at the root. If the fact that humans can never understand animal behavior outside of our frames of interpretation means that we should not try and get close to them, then we are relegating ourselves to having no genuine relation to them. Moreover, we are neatly drawing the line of sameness and difference along the species boundary, presuming that humans can always put themselves in the position of other humans while overlooking the ways in which responding to the needs of other humans, even when they speak the same language and share the same customs, already requires translation and interpretation. To be sure, translation and interpretation are required when relating to animals, and can be undertaken in better and worse ways. Yet, according to Despret, we need not, and cannot, demand absolute certainty with respect to the needs, desires, beliefs, and intentions of animals. We can only respond to particular situations and do our best to understand what they ask of us, a task that does not require assuming that the human(s) and non-human animal(s) share the same interpretation of a situation or behavior.

In this vein, the book shares a clear lineage with Haraway, whose When Species Meet Despret frequently cites. On both thinkers’ views, humans and other animals are best figured as “companion species.” The basis for relations between humans and non-human animals is neither their similarity nor their difference. That is, Despret and Haraway reject the utilitarian strain of animal studies, inaugurated by Singer, that makes animals a locus of human concern insofar as animals suffer like humans, and also set aside Levinasian fears of violating the alterity of the other by interpreting animal behavior through a certain assimilation of it to our own. Rather, Despret and Haraway claim that animals and humans develop attunement through their relations to each other as companion species. Despret writes: “What these breeders related—and I also heard this from dog trainers—can be said in a few words: animals and people have succeeded in becoming attuned to what matters to the other, to act so that what matters to the other also matters to oneself” (34). On Despret’s view, we do not need to provide arguments for how and why animals and humans might have the ability to become attuned to one another in spite of their differences: we are already attuned to one another. This mutual attunement of companion species is a far cry from the conditions of the laboratory and the industrial farm, where the difference between animals and humans is used as an excuse not to care for, about, and with them. Communion across species only appears as an impossibility in the sterile conditions imposed by contemporary science and capital.

What Would Animals Say is at its most effective in its treatment of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. The question of whether the human treatment of animals assumes that they are like us is central to animal studies and links up with current philosophical debates about alterity. Despret has treated anthropomorphism in her earlier work, most notably in Thinking Like a Rat. In What Would Animals Say, Despret rejects the prejudice that considers the scientific method innocent of anthropomorphizing animals while taking amateur practices to fall into its trap. She shows that the exclusion of anecdote and the “manic suspicion with regard to anthropocentrism appear as the mark of a true science” (40). In a Foucauldian spirit, Despret shows that the experimental science that finds its legitimacy in the exclusion of anecdote is nonetheless subject to its own forms of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. This is most visible in the way that scientists frame the very questions that then lead to hypotheses and experiments. Take, as one of a number of examples that Despret uses to illustrate this point, studies on animal self-awareness undertaken by Helmut Prior, Ariane Schwarz, and Onur Güntürkün on magpies, and by Frans de Waal, Joshua Plotnik, and Dania Reiss on Asian elephants. Both of these studies were counted successes in showing that animals were able to “recognize” themselves in mirrors and must therefore have self-recognition. Despret, however, argues that the manipulated conditions of the laboratory contaminate any generalizable results that can be claimed here. What the experiment shows, she writes, is that “magpies (some magpies, more specifically, magpies raised by hand) and some Asian elephants (roughly thirty years old and raise in a zoo) can, in some very specific and exceptional circumstances for magpies and elephants…develop a new competency” (101). These experiments do not show that animals are self-recognizing, but rather that they are capable of developing a behavior that humans identify as self-recognition under certain rarefied conditions.

What is to say that sight and reflection would be the primary modes of measure for a magpie’s or an elephant’s self-recognition? The idea that the observational and manipulated conditions of experimentation have effects on, and even overdetermine, the results of an experiment is familiar from the philosophy of science. Despret’s application of it to the question of understanding animal behavior is a highlight of the book, made forceful by her vivid use of example. Despret concludes from the many studies she describes that “anthropomorphism is always there, for what could be more anthropomorphic than an apparatus that requires an animal to deny his own habits to privilege those that the researchers think humans themselves do in the experience of learning?” (94). Science should not seek to deny its culpability in anthropomorphism or anthropocentrism and cut itself off from the anecdotal discourse of amateurs, but rather acknowledge its own perpetuation of anthropomorphic prejudices and respond to animals in richer ways. Humans interacting with animals should not try and remove interest from the picture, because actively developing mutual interest is essential to the development of interspecies trust and understanding. Despret cites the research of Daniel Hestep and Suzanne Hetts, which explains that most scientists try to make themselves as insignificant a part of the environment as possible (139). This approach cultivates disinterest on the part of the animal and the appearance of disinterest on the part of the observer, which is in many cases misguided. Despret notes the naïveté in assuming that, just because researchers try and make themselves invisible, animals will overlook their presence in their environment, behaving as they would were the observer absent and lacking any curiosity as to the identity of their new neighbor: “the researcher is the one who poses the questions, and they are often a far cry from imagining that the animals themselves may be posing just as many questions of their own, and maybe even the same questions as the researcher!” (16). Asking the “right questions” requires the imaginative work of wondering what the animal might be wondering. It requires the development of mutual trust on the basis of interest in companion species. These activities, for Despret, have “nothing to do with identification,” and are possible without presuming equivalence and certain knowledge of the other’s motivations (17).

Despret’s book is unconventionally structured as an assembly of chapters that can be read in any order. Following the letters of the alphabet, each chapter title names a topic and asks a question, including “A for Artists: Stupid like a painter?,” “J for Justice: Can animals compromise?,” and “Y for YouTube: Are animals the new celebrities?” Readers may choose, Despret stipulates in an introductory note (“How to Use This Book”), to read the chapters in order or at random. Within each chapter, the reader can also find frequent references to other chapters (with a curious parenthetical graphic of a finger pointing to the title of the relevant chapter). This structure points to the strongest and weakest aspects of the book, which is a grab-bag of ethical and epistemological questions regarding animal-human interactions. This disorienting structure forces the reader to take responsibility for how she engages with the text, and gives rise to the experience of frequently questioning whether one is going about this reading in the “right” way. This questioning illuminates Despret’s insistence throughout the book that asking the “right questions” is a continual process of interaction and uncertainty. Moreover, Despret states that there is no “right way” to read the book (xvii). Rather, the chapter structure invites the reader to respond to the book in a manner that feels reciprocal and engaging. This experiential dimension highlights the interactive approach to relations between humans and non-human animals that Despret defends throughout, in which she shows the insufficiency of theoretical frameworks that make animals passive victims with mechanical and programmatic reactions, predictable automata who yield their labor and lives to humans in the laboratory or abattoir.

While the structure of the book complements Despret’s approach to her subject matter, it gives rise to some problems and shortcomings. For one, Despret finds herself in the awkward position of continually having to reintroduce the thinkers, studies, and concepts she cites, because the reader could in principle be reading the chapters in any order. This is done with varying degrees of success in the chapters, sometimes rendering ideas unclear and leaving them undeveloped. Take, for example, the use of Konrad Lorenz. Lorenz and the science of animal behavior that he founded, ethology, appear in four chapters in the book. In the first, “B for Beasts,” Lorenz is mentioned in passing for the “model of breaking down” by which he describes the conditions of deprivation studies of animals in the laboratory (8). The reader is not properly introduced to Lorenz until “F for Fabricating Science,” where he is named as the founder of ethology and treated in a few pages in succession. Lorenz then reappears in “R for Reaction” without a reintroduction, and makes a further flash appearance in “U for Umwelt,” where Despret writes briefly about “Lorenz’s jackdaw” (162). I took Despret at her word and read a number of chapters out of alphabetical order, stumbling upon the “U for Umwelt” chapter before the others wherein Lorenz was described. In this chapter, Lorenz’s study of the jackdaw is not explained at all, leading me to believe that she must have introduced it in another chapter. However, it turned out that a basic exegesis of Lorenz’s work with the jackdaw could be found nowhere in the book. Even in Despret’s most involved description of Lorenz, in “F for Fabricating Science,” Lorenz is introduced as if to an insider audience who must already be familiar with his work, even though the reader has not received any information about Lorenz’s practices with the animals he studies. She writes:

It’s true that the image one retains of Lorenz is that of a scientist who adopts his animals, swims with his geese and ducks, and speaks with his jackdaws. This image is faithful to his practice but less so to his theoretical work. On the basis of Lorenz’s theoretical propositions, ethology will engage in a resolutely scientific approach: ethologists who follow his approach will have learned to look at animals as limited to ‘reactions’ rather than seeing them as ‘feeling and thinking.’ (39)

This oblique style of writing fails to set up the stakes of Lorenz’s theoretical investments as well as the way that Lorenz’s work might be in conflict with these investments. Moreover, it fails to highlight Despret’s intervention into this approach to animal behavior. Structured differently, the book could pose Lorenz (and ethology) as a key player in Despret’s account of the failures of animal studies: while Lorenz’s practices with animals reveal the deep interconnectedness of companion species and the complexities of anthropomorphism in human relations to non-human animals, his commitment to the abstract and sterile conditions of the traditional scientific method overlooks this interdependence and denies the subjective experience of animals (39). However, the book’s peripatetic form relegates Lorenz and the science of ethology to cameo appearances that remain two-dimensional. This issue not only emerges in Despret’s treatment of other figures, ideas, and practices, but also goes for Despret’s own contributions. The book contains moments of original insight, but does not sufficiently build or expand on them. The same ideas are cited frequently—the work of Haraway and sociologist Jocelyne Porcher showing up at critical junctures—without being satisfyingly expounded or highlighting Despret’s original contributions. I suspect that this is largely an issue with the structure of the book, which prevents Despret from establishing and building upon her arguments beyond each brief chapter.

Despret consciously rejects a serial development of a cohesive line of argument. She notes from the very beginning, “I hope that one will be surprised not to find what one is looking for or what one expects” (xvii). This intention corresponds to her insistence that reframing interspecies relations leads to mutual surprise (49). Yet, in reading the book, one is surprised not to find much in the way of argument. Brimming with rich anecdotes and thoughtful questions, the book nonetheless leaves the reader wanting more in the way of original theory and critique. For all the playfulness of the book, Despret remains cautious when it comes to risking her own speculations or proposals. This will not be an issue for lay readers, but might limit the book’s effect on scholarship within animal studies. In sum, What Would Animals Say is a dynamic book that brings together an impressive variety of interdisciplinary research and succeeds in reframing traditional notions of anthropomorphism and interspecies relations even as its unconventional structure prevents it from satisfyingly marking its original contribution to the field of animal studies.

Works Cited

• Desmond, Jane C. Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016.
• Despret, Vinciane. Penser comme un rat (Thinking Like a Rat). Versailles: Éditions Quae, 2009. Gruen, Lori. Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals. Brooklyn: Lantern Books, 2015. Print.
• Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.
• Oliver, Kelly. Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. New York: Columbia UP, 2009.
• Willett, Cynthia. Interspecies Ethics. New York: Columbia UP, 2014.