How humanity should treat the rest \nof the animal kingdom and how we should think about the moral \nsignificance of animals are questions that deserve serious \nconsideration. Are animals mere material resources for us to create, \nuse, and destroy at will? What sort of respect and protection do we owe \nthem? In the Western world, our religious heritage teaches that mankind \nis set apart from the animals; as stewards, we are elevated above them \nbut also have obligations to them. Modern science from the start has \nbeen disposed to understand humanity to have a role of mastery over \nnon-human nature, although more recent developments in ecology and other\n fields encourage us to value the diversity of life on earth. Modern \nindustrial farming practices take the idea of mastery over animals to a \nlogical and sometimes disturbing extreme, while some contemporary \nactivists go so far as to deny any morally relevant distinction between \npeople and animals, claiming for animals the same rights as human \nbeings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These matters are often entangled with other complicated moral and political issues, which can obscure the essential question: how should we regard the animals? In this symposium, we look at three animals that are not farmed for food in the United States \u2014 one animal close to us, one near, one far \u2014 and at how their \u201csouls,\u201d as Shakespeare wrote, \u201cinfuse themselves into the trunks of men.\u201d Caitrin Keiper<\/a> plumbs the depths of elephant emotion and intelligence, Noemie Emery<\/a> considers the pleasures and problems of horseracing, and Diana Schaub<\/a> examines dogs\u2019 unique relationship to their masters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":14140,"template":"","collection_type":[2247],"topics":[5006,5020],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/collection\/14138"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/collection"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/collection"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"collection_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/collection_type?post=14138"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=14138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}