Abstract

In this chapter I track our (animal) developmental path to illustrate that the ensuing complexity of this process, as converging evidence indicates, belongs to all animals, not only to humans. That is to say that other animals possess complex, human-comparable emotional, cognitive, social, cultural, and even creative capacities and needs. While I touch upon all of these aspects, I will discuss the experience of grief in more detail. Procedural and structural commonalities of animal organisms enable us to infer across species but also across temporal lines and historical periods. Technologically we are better equipped for the exploration of these commonalities than our ancestors may have been. However, the primary impediment to a more integrated view of nonhuman animals has been not technology but the master narrative that has kept the human “suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature,” as Agamben observed, “always less and more than himself.” This ontological quandary, which had for a long time fuelled misconceptions of, and violence against, other animals, is the second, parallel focus of the chapter. As we become more comfortable accepting our animal bodies and minds, fear of those petits récits that challenge dominant frameworks recedes, and narratives change.