Letters to the Editor
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@dick dworkin
What I meant, Dick, was that humans (big with tooth and claw, to be sure, but even bigger with socialising, creating meaning, engineering, memorialising, etc.) want to replace "natural" order with "human" order. This is what we as animals naturally do. Humans humanise their environments.
Dogs and cats living in some human societies are made into homunculi; they are not preserved as dogs and cats. (This is not a mistake that dogs and cats make.)
Human landscapes are engineered against the grain of "nature" (if you want to anthropomorphise that concept). Part of that engineering concerns the ways in which animals advantageous to humans are exploited - as icons, as survival resources, as labour, as companions. This exploitation is undertaken through social processes that can be very different in their particulars from society to society. But ALL human societies do it. Human societies evolve through their (symbiotic, parasitic) relationships with non-human animal species.
All this to say that a convincing argument about treating certain animals (though not all) as if they were humans should begin in the world of genetics, evolutionary biology, and human social processes. Not in the *soulfulness of their eyes. And that argument is only the first premise for any cultural or political project intended to force one human society to conform in its patterns of resource exploitation to those of another, more powerful, more wealthy opponent.