ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that the connection made between vision and ethics – or seeing and caring for the Other – is problematic as a way of conceptualizing the political geography of human-animal relationships. It makes an argument for a specifically political rendering of animals that seeks to foreground the idea of power and the possibility of political struggle and community that does not presuppose the human. The chapter suggests that political geography – as opposed to more familiar models of moral or political theory – is particularly well suited to this project. Animal geographies, by virtue of studying engagements between humans and animals in concrete terms, have been particularly productive in thinking through the context-based and contingent nature of the relationship between humans and animals. The unthinkability of the eroticization of animal pain that manifests in the lower court judge's ruling indicates the sense that these practices are so abnormal and monstrous that the law cannot even recognize them.