Animal Influence I - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Lisa Jevbratt
Tetrachromat Simulation human/chicken, 2011 Jevbratt
one sees it, of the research that generates the data
I use is produced using invasive animal testing.
Procedures such as eletroretiongraphy that might
not be painful but are surely unpleasant. Bahvioural
experiments may not be physically intrusive but the
animals live caged, in unnatural conditions, often
for years. Those are the good scenarios. Many
“research subjects” are straight-out killed and
dissected. Animals are for sure suffering for this
research. My initial reaction was that it is good that I
use this data and make something out of it that
can benefit the animals in the end (through
increasing empathy for other species and their
experiences), but I am not sure about this. Maybe it
is not right for me to use it. I wish I could slab a big
“no animals were harmed in the making of this
project” sign up, but it is clearly not possible.
Second, a vast amount of research is being done
on animal vision. Still, there is a reluctance to use
this knowledge to create simulations. It is not that
the scientists don’t think they know how animals see.
Rather, simulating how someone sees implicates a
someone, a subject who does the seeing. In the
Western anthropocentric paradigm personhood is
reserved for humans. Scientists, and others, see
“Anthropomorphism” – assigning (what is believed
to be) human characteristics to non-human
animals – as an error of sentimentality that makes
(objective) research impossible. The etiologist Frans
de Waal (Professor of Primate Behavior at the Emory
University in Atlanta, GA) argues instead that the
anthropomorphic taboo has a rather detrimental
effect in research, and he introduces the term
anthropodenial to open up a discussion about
these effects. He writes: “I propose ‘anthropodenial’
for the a priori rejection of shared characteristics
between humans and animals when in fact they
may exist. Those who are in anthropodenial try to
84
build a brick wall between themselves and other
animals. They carry on the tradition of French
philosopher René Descartes, who declared that
while humans possessed souls, animals were mere
machines. Inspired by the pervasive human-animal
dualism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, this view
has no parallel in other religions or cultures” (de
Waal, 69). Could the resistance in the scientific
community to acknowledge non-human animals
as persons, with feelings and needs, be a result of
how animals have been, and still are, used in
scientific research? There is a paradox in the
scientific relationship to anthropomorphism. It goes
like this: Research on animals is possible/ethical
because we are not similar; they do not experience
the pain, anxiety, and stress that we do. Meanwhile,
research with/on animals is useful since we can infer
things about us, humans, from the research we
make on animals — it works because we are
similar.
Para-Science
In response to scientists’ struggle with non-human
animal agency, I decided to expand the scope of
the project to include non-scientific experts on
animals’ experiences. In many
indigenous/shamanic cultures, historical and
contemporary, the concept of personhood does
not end with humans. All animals, human or nonhuman,
are persons, with a soul and a full range of
complex emotions and sensations. Within this
paradigm, simulations claiming that an animal sees
this or that, is not far fetched. According to historian
of religion Mircea Eliade, many of these traditions
involve practices in which a spiritual leader
becomes an animal in order to see the world
through their eyes and teach his/her society what