ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, the permeation of binary thinking in animal activist histories is illustrated and critiqued through archival research. The work in this chapter draws on archival research undertaken in the archives of Richard D. Ryder, held at the British Library. This chapter grapples with the historical contingencies of multispecies worlds through different modes of animal activism in order to expose the conditional geographical contexts of animals as ‘things’ and ‘beings,’ and instead proposing relational and fluid more-than-human positions. Through archival stories of British animal activism, including Ryder's original ‘Speciesism’ leaflet, The Case of the Little Brown Dog, and the McLibel case, this chapter unpicks binary thinking in traditional and popular utilitarian and deontological animal philosophy, such as that of Singer and Regan. Following feminist and embodied geographical thinking, anthropocentric permeations of animal activism and theory are critiqued as liberal and Western reproductions or extensions of problematic views of humanity. In proposing moving beyond binary thinking towards relational (un)making of beyond-human space, especially through the experience of pain, a politics of the possible is foregrounded which calls for geographic attention to an embodied approach to the multispecies, allowing for a spatio-temporal rescaling of beyond-human relations.
