| Tuesday, January 1, 2008 2:51PM | | | | Animal Studies and Activism | Posted By: Boria Sax
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| Tags: Animal Studies, NILAS, Education | The ways in which people can care about animals are almost as diverse as the creatures themselves. Personally, I wonder if there are really any people at all out there who are actually indifferent to animals, but many have not managed to identify or articulate the ways in which animals are important to them. My own experience teaching college seems to confirm this. In courses on human-animal relations, I often begin by telling my students something like, " I can't tell you whether or not you should hunt, eat meat, visit the zoo, or clone your pet dog, but I do ask you to consider such issues frankly and honestly." I never sermonize, but I ask my students in every stage to relate the experience of their lives directly to the material of the course, whether it is the Epic of Gilgamesh or Deleuze and Guattari. My experience is that they can talk about these things in a civil and constructive way, as long as the issues are not presented in purely abstract terms but anchored in the experience of daily life. There is surprisingly little animosity, for example, between the hunters and anti-hunting advocates, the vegetarians and the carnivores, or the religious fundamentalists and the evolutionary biologists (all groups that are pretty well-represented). More than anything else, I think there is relief at being able to talk about these issues, and a fair number of students have described the experience of the course as transformational. If you will excuse me for mentioning this, my course "Animals and Human Civilization" at the State University of Illinois at Springfield just won the Humane Society's award for the distinguished new course of 2007.
The connection between academic work in Animal Studies and activism is very tenuous at best. On the other hand, I also suspect that just about all people writing in Animal Studies feel themselves to be advocates for animals, but often in ways that are relatively private, politically incorrect, or, most frequently, simply difficult to explain. This is particularly so when we remove ourselves from everyday experience with animals using the language of academia, with its tortured syntax, jargon, and arcane references. Activist concerns rarely come up, and when they do people often seem to be helpless in dealing with them. When confronted with the sort of passions aroused by animals, all of our apparent intellectual sophistication can abruptly disintegrate.
One thing we have endeavored to do in our Nature in Legend and Story (NILAS) conferences is to make sure that academic analysis remains only one facet of our approach. At our conferences, about half of the presentations have always been non-academic. We have had, for example, presentations by bee-keepers, animal shelter workers, and many, many storytellers. I am not trying to hold us up as a model, and we have certainly had as many difficulties and hesitations as other organizations, but I have always found our conferences very exhilarating. | | | |
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