ABSTRACT
The chapter starts with concluding remarks showing how recreating the concept of the animal on the plane of immanence reshapes our thinking, going beyond “empirical” animals towards a more general universality of thinking, ethics, politics and death. Next, it makes a case for how the difficulty of thinking in this manner shows that we have not yet stopped being human in the classical sense of the term. The final parts of the chapter address practical uses of the theory presented in the preceding parts of the book, by (1) presenting a critique of the basis of the abolitionist practices proposed by Regan, Francione and MacCormack; (2) suggesting that ethics as ethology provides a better account of actual reasons for which people change their eating habits (taking examples from books by Kemmerer and Breeze Harper); (3) showing how it helps problematize the treatment of animals as mass terms, as described by Carol J. Adams.
