Marta Segarra: "Non-human animals are sentient beings, not objects"

Martha Segarra. Barcelona, 1963 Research professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and professor of Gender Studies at the...

Martha Segarra

Barcelona, 1963 Research professor at the

French National Center for Scientific Research

(CNRS) and professor of Gender Studies at the

University of Barcelona

Humanimals

(Galaxia Gutenberg) she explores our relationship with other animals

The term "human animals", what does it mean, where does it come from?

It is not a term that I have invented, I have taken it from other people, in fact there are quite a few people who use it.

It is a term that refers to that relationship between the human and what we call animal, as if we were not animals, humans are also animals.

That term has been used quite a lot throughout the 20th century, when more awareness of this interweaving arises.

And now it's a word spread around the world. Western thought has traditionally made a division between the human and the animal.

Are supporters of humanity against this separation?

Yes, exactly.

But it is important to explain this well, because it does not mean that all animals are or are the same.

We are very different.

But not only humans from other animals, but all animals from each other.

A bacterium is very different from an elephant, an ant from a dolphin.

And within the same families of species, there are also great differences.

But what lies behind the concept "animal" is a kind of separate category that we humans have created, as if we had nothing to do with the rest.

And that separate category that we have created we consider exceptional.

We believe we are exceptional, not just different, which is true that we are, but exceptional.

And therefore, the other animals do not fall within any ethical or behavioral rule that we can assume as our own within humanity itself.

Does it mean that the separation between humans and animals has served to justify violence against animals?

Completely.

It has served to justify violence and exploitation, which is another form of violence;

not only mistreatment but also the use of animals as if they were raw material, lifeless matter.

Because one thing is the farmer who has 20 cows, or even a hundred, and another thing is the industrial farms, which are the ones that predominate in the West and now also in China and almost everywhere.

These factory farms are actually huge protein factories where there don't seem to be any live animals, and it's where you can see how far we've come in exploiting other animals.

Those who defend the superiority of the human being over the rest of the animals indicate that, for example,

we have language while the other animals do not.

Is it so?

In reality, those of us who see specialists in ethology and animal studies - a slightly broader branch, because not only biologists specialized in animal behavior but also anthropologists specialized in human behavior, people of law, philosophy or thought - is that in many animals (at least those of the species that we can observe more easily because we are closer and because they are more like us) there is also a language.

Each species has its language.

There are people who consider that the human is the only language that can express subtle things, that can make literature... We are all the time deciding what is better based on our human parameters, we are cheating in solitaire, because we are comparing what ours with something we can't understand,

because we don't have the means to understand how other species communicate.

Now there are many books on how dogs or cats communicate, but these are animals that live with us and therefore have learned to translate their language into ours, just as we have also learned to translate things for our dog or cat .

But how do species communicate in the wild?