Uncanny Animals: Thinking Differently About Ethics and the Animal-Human Relationship

Maintaining the attention to bodily difference human and

animal ontology has long been constructed on rigid physical

characterizations seemingly untouched by culture. In

“Reframing the Ethical Issues in Part-Human Animal Research,”

Haber and Benham (2012) call into question most

of the formal elements of essentialism that an earlier mode

of thought took for granted. Two views on the nature of human

and interspecies animal bodies are in contention here.

The first offers an argument grounded in the essential developmental

properties of human and animal material and

biological systems such that giving life to “animals with human

derived material,” exemplified by animal–human hybrids

and chimeras, effaces physical distinctions between

animal and human. Dualism is invoked as an interpretive

aid, structuring thought and shaping understanding.

Against nonhuman animals, human life, in all its stages and

forms, uniquely requires some fundamental form of moral

consideration. Because of this presumptive obligation, an

“inexorable moral confusion” is an inevitable by-product

of scientific change, since fixed constructions of animal and

human bodies as unified and separate wholes are lost in any

clear-cut sense (Robert and Baylis 2003).