The singular ‘farm’ is increasingly a place of ever-greater multitudes, a deceptive and porous whole that is, in so many ways, very much less than the sum of its constituent parts. What might stand as a seemingly fixed entity or unit is, in reality, a constant flow and passage of multiple life ( zoe) and individual lives ( bios). To borrow from Heraclitus’ attributed aphorism, you can never really go into the same farm twice. Yet farms are, arguably, amongst the (...) most defining sites of contemporary human/animal relations. The vast majority of the 24 or so billion terrestrial farm animals that are kept and grown for human and other consumption at any one time do so on farms, with an increasing proportion of them on large scale, industrial farm units. Here is where kingdoms most emphatically meet, collide, intertwine, entangle, respond: the sovereign and the beast, the beast and the sovereign. Three questions: who meets who on the farm, what do they meet, and how does such meeting matter? (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the different manners in which scientists’ bodies are actively engaged when interacting with the animals they observe in the field. Bodies are multiple, as are the practices that involve them: sharing the same diet, feeling similar affects, acting the same, inhabiting the same world of perceptions, constructing empathic affinities, etc. Some scientists aim to embody the animals’ experiences. Some are willing to empathetically experience situations ‘from inside’, while others ‘undo and redo’ their (...) own bodies in order to interact more closely with the animals and to respond to them more cautiously. Still others are faced with the question: what can we do or what are we allowed to do with our bodies when we are with our animals? All of these practices present a very different version of ‘embodied empathy’, a concept which describes feeling/seeing/thinking bodies that undo and redo each other, reciprocally though not symmetrically, as partial perspectives that attune themselves to each other. Therefore, empathy is not experiencing with one’s own body what the other experiences, but rather creating the possibilities of an embodied communication. (shrink)

I analyze a number of widespread misconceptions concerning species. The species category, defined by a concept, denotes the rank of a species taxon in the Linnaean hierarchy. Biological species are reproducing isolated from each other, which protects the integrity of their genotypes. Degree of morphological difference is not an appropriate species definition. Unequal rates of evolution of different characters and lack of information on the mating potential of isolated populations are the major difficulties in the demarcation of species taxa.

For the past few years the inhabitants of a hamlet on the outskirts of the village of Ingleton in Yorkshire, England, have been witnessing a strange exercise every morning. A woman, said to have been one of the most renowned primatologists in the English-speaking world, spends her day in a field in front of her house, observing animals that she has put there. As she did during her many years of field work in Africa studying apes, primatologist Thelma Rowell patiently (...) notes all the movements, anecdotes and tiny events making up the daily social life of the animals to which she is currently devoting her time. Admittedly, these animals are different to the ones she was used to spending time with: the relations are not characterized by the same intensity, the behaviors are peculiar to the species, the communication does not always pass by the same channels, and the events seem to take place at another pace. But as far as their social expertise is concerned, these animals are certainly on a par with apes. (shrink)