ABSTRACT
People in Animal Studies speak of the “laugh test,” that moment when you inform someone that you, who are not a scientist but a humanist, are working on animals, and are met with an incredulous giggle or dismissive snort. For someone in the humanities to take animals seriously seems, as Shaffer’s unhappy protagonist says, “nonsensical.” As that play glosses the role of animality in psychoanalysis, to put the horse before the boy is to violate the anthropocentric grammar of the “normal.” A similar assumption of animal irrelevance has characterized not only the humanities but also public culture, although in that sphere the assumption is comfortably camouaged by such ubiquitous and unexamined “animal-loving” practices as pet-keeping, bird-watching, safarigoing (for the wealthy), and (for the rest of us) the reverential watching of wildlife movies. In academia, the relegation of animal study to the sciences was so strictly enforced for so long that the advent of Animal Studies in the humanities and social sciences was pregured as a joke, as Kathleen Kete delightfully reminds us: back in 1974, an article entitled “Household Pets and Urban Alienation” by one “Charles Phineas,” spoofed the then-emerging trend in social history to attend to the history of everyday life. As Kete notes, the article narrowly preceded a host of publications that would soon establish the human-animal relation as an important topic and lens for the study of European social history. Not coincidentally, one of the books that the satirical article also narrowly preceded
was Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, the book that launched the current phase of the historical animal rights movement.
