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On May the 17th 2013 the Indian Central Zoo Authority (CZA) made an unusual decision. In response to the growing number of requests to establish commercial entertainment facilities for cetacean species, in particular in Kerala, but throughout the country more broadly, the authority recognised cetacean species as ‘non-human persons’ (CZA, 2013). From now on dolphins and other cetaceans enjoy “unprecedented protection” in India, since “the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India have decided not to allow establishment of dolphinarium in the country” (Coelho, 2013).

With a legally clever move India joins only three other countries worldwide (Costa Rica, Hungary, and Chile) that have such far ranging protection for cetacean species. From the tone of the document stating this decision, it is evident that the authority is concerned with a rising tourist industry that is more interested in the exploitation of cetaceans to extract profit than in their preservation. Conservancy is, in fact, one of the priorities that zoos the world over are embracing and defending not only to justify their role, but also to concretely tackle some of the problems that living together in the time of the 6th mass extinction implies. Simultaneously, it is also clear that the CZA is involved in a number of other discourses, both worldwide and nationwide, on the status of wildlife and on conservation. The declaration of the Gangetic dolphin as the “national aquatic animal” of India, with its charismatic and symbolic role as an endangered species in the IUCN red list since 2004, appears explicitly in the document, and so does the position of dolphins as protected by the Wild Life (Protection) Act of 1972. Furthermore, this is entangled in a long history of special attention on the side of the Indian legislators to the treatment of animals and wildlife, starting from articles 48A and 51A(g) of the Indian Constitution, which (although both non-justiciably) protect the environment and grant “compassion” for living creatures. While these issues are clearly at stake and are key to analysing and contextualising the specificities of this case, we have no space here to address such complexities, and leave it to those who are able to shed more light on the particularities of the Indian situation.

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Instead of using this as a case study, then, we are interested in this move as an occasion to reflect on the significance of the expansion of the category of personhood to include non-humans. While we applaud the decision to protect cetaceans comprehensively, we wonder what to make of this decision in the light of the conceptual moves of more-than-human/multispecies literature. Should we be pleased that the boundaries between humans and nonhumans have been blurred by inviting cetaceans into the exclusive club of ‘persons’ on this planet? Or is it –on the contrary- a reactionary move, entering simply another step on the hierarchy ladder that puts humans at the top of evolution? Does the decision imply that only intelligent species deserve protection, or as the decision statement puts it: does it warrant “specific rights”? If so, how is intelligence measured, compared and judged? The question of who is included or excluded, and on what terms, interestingly resonates with the reflections at the core of recent literature in more-than-human geography and multispecies ethnography. To better articulate our position as scholars interested in such fields, we consider this particular event, opening it up and thinking with it about an ethics of togetherness for a time of extinction. To do so, let’s first focus on one particular passage in the CZA’s document, which explicates the institution’s decision and the grounds of their position on dolphins:

“Whereas cetaceans in general are highly intelligent and sensitive, and various scientists who have researched dolphin behavior have suggested that the unusually high intelligence; as compared to other animals means that dolphin should be seen as “non-human persons” and as such should have their own specific rights and is morally unacceptable to keep them captive for entertainment purpose” (CZA, 2013: 2).

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More-than-human and multispecies thinking in the humanities is held together by its insistence that there are no strict boundaries between what is human and what is non-human. To Derrida, it is indeed the assumption of such a binary that renders animals killable and humans superior. Only humans can be murdered; the Animal on the other hand is seen as never able to respond, only to react, and thus can be killed. Thus, for Derrida the crucial question that needs to be redressed is the question of reaction and response. Recognising animals as response-able, however, does not mean to give animals a (human-like) voice, but acknowledging their being as “wholly other” (Derrida, 2002). In this sense, the connection between more-than-human and multispecies literature and the ‘posthumanities’ lays exactly in the need to move beyond a humanism that is all-embracing (or better all-informing) as it is anthropocentric. For Donna Haraway being response-able to animals means to practice shared suffering, in other words to attune ourselves better to the ways animals are sentient (Haraway, 2003; 2008). Building on this body of work, and following Acampora’s use of “somatic sensibilities”, Greenhough and Roe call attention to the growing importance of a shared bodily sensibility in shaping the field of animal bioethics (Greenhough & Roe, 2011). While this alternative to the centrality of linguistic and rational intelligence opens up to a more affective and more-than-verbal realm, to us this notion still seems to rely too much on the dichotomy mind/body, if only for the use of the more “physical” stress of the somatic character of these sensibilities. Doesn’t this run the risk of ratifying a liberal model of perception with its creation of the individual, or in our case the dolphin understood as ‘person’? In this sense, the language of affect, together with its potential of redemption in a more relational world, brings forth a mechanistic logic of still autonomous individual affecting one another.The decision to name cetaceans non-human persons is explicitly linked to their intelligence and to the scientific grounds on which this intelligence is attributed. This link was made drawing on an initiative of scientists calling themselves ‘The Helsinki Group’. The group consists of marine biologists, conservationists, lawyers and ethicists. Following the 2010 conference “Cetaceans rights: fostering moral and legal change”, the group developed a ‘Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Dolphins and Whales’, in which they refer to cetaceans as persons:  

“we affirm that all cetaceans as persons have the right to life, liberty and wellbeing” (Helsinki Group, 2013).

This declaration is done “Recognizing that scientific research gives us deeper insights into the complexities of cetacean minds, societies and cultures” (ibid.). Research with dolphins has long shown that they are exceptionally intelligent animals, they can recognize themselves in a mirror (meaning they have a sense of self, are self-aware), have a complex social life and communicate with each other via sophisticated signals. But is this really why we want to protect them? Do they deserve more protection than other non-humans? Is human exceptionalism merely extended to cetaceans?

In what follows we would thus like to pursue a slightly different argument by asking how we may think about intelligence and the protection of dolphins in a non-individualistic manner. To do so, we need to think through what we consider intelligence to be. The best place to start doing this is the realm of cognitive and behavioural sciences, the same fields that ground the CZA’s claims. Sharp criticism of simplistic experimental apparatuses that do not allow for surprising resistance on the side of the animal ‘subjects’ of such research arose early, especially in the discipline of primatology (also thanks to its permeability to feminism). Figures like Shirley Strum, Linda Marie Fedigan and Thelma Rowell voiced their concerns and revolutionised the field of primatology, offering a different style of doing ethological research that allowed for more unexpected descriptions to emerge (cf. Strum & Fedigan, 2000). Building on their work – and in particular on Rowell’s paradoxical and experimental studies of the complexity of the social behaviour of sheep (cf. Despret, 2005; 2008) – Vinciane Despret unpacked ethology’s notion of intelligence. Her work suggests that instead of starting from a clear definition of ‘pure’ intelligence to be asked of a subject that is completely free of ‘influences’, the kind of capabilities to be studied are relational ones, emerging within a living context (Despret, 2004). Then, instead of an always already identical liberal and rational subject in its autonomy and independence from the context, a number of different abilities, sensibilities and interests populate the world.

Simultaneously, effective ethics that are sensitive to the complexities and dynamics of life cannot be grounded in the same ontological currency of laws, but needs to be wary of them. Thus, in this piece we wish to emphasise that the kind of practices the move to declare cetaceans ‘non-human persons’ engenders are decidedly exceptionalist and reiterate the binomial logic of Human and Animal. What more-than-human and multispecies scholarship calls for, then, would be relational legislation grounded in relational ethics. But to do so, as we said earlier, we need to take up a different logic of causality. In other words, the protection of dolphins ought not only be about ‘the’ dolphin. Dolphins rather need to be understood in their environment, in interactions with each other, other creatures and species – in their relational entanglements within the ocean and rivers, and other beings and contexts. The decision by CZA could have for instance referred more explicitly to studies that show how dolphins are affected by being removed from their relational context – the ocean and rivers – and put in aquariums. Or they could have asked how we might protect the environments that dolphins depend on, and taken recourse to the rapid loss of habitat for many (related) species. While staying sympathetic to transformations such as the one brought forth by the CZA, then, we, as multispecies scholars, have to issue, and respond to, a call for more relational stories and ecological imaginaries of cetaceans. This means learning from scholars, such as Vinciane Despret, and questioning the causality underlying measures of intelligence and the value of personhood as a starting point for protection. Instead, multispecies ethnographies or more-than-human geographies need to focus on the complex ecologies of cetaceans that make visible the problems that cetaceans and dolphins (in particular the Gangetic one) face because of loss of habitat, and cascades in their ecosystems.What Despret achieves by attending to knowledge production practices of behavioural scientists is a questioning of the linear model of action that grounds the liberal, autonomous subject. How can we make space for a non-linear and more-than-consequential causality? How can we use this generative space of possibilities to rethink the CZA’s decision to declare cetaceans “nonhuman persons”? While the imagination of dolphins as exceptionally intelligent beings allowed such a significant shift in Indian legislation, it still falls victim of an (extended) human exceptionalism. The framing of cetaceans as “highly intelligent and sensitive” and their status as “non-human persons” strikes us for the speciesism and the monolithic attribution of such characters. This said the legal nature of the statement is an aspect we cannot discount, as overlooking it would mean accepting as ‘natural’ the categories employed by the authority[1]. Nevertheless, considering the historical change that the CZA’s decision promotes requires us to take this move seriously and to appreciate its consequences. We cannot but appreciate the effort of the legislators to create a space of possibility that allows for dolphins and other cetaceans to enjoy “unprecedented protection”. 

Notes

[1] Keeping in mind the legislative context situates the ontological currency that characterizes (modern) legal systems. Law, in its effort to transfer realities in a grid of norms and regulations, makes entities which are inflected in an ontological vocabulary. While these norms themselves emerge from on-going histories of practices and transformations, the pace of their chance is artificially (we should say institutionally) decoupled from the changes that they undergo in their lived realities. But if we acknowledge that this problem of translation and normativization is one that affects most (again, modern) legal systems, it becomes clear that the need for a conversion to a more fluid legislative vocabulary is as urgent as it may be hard to take up institutionally. 

References

Central Zoo Authority (2013) Circular Sub:- Policy on establishment of dolphinarium. Available at:http://cza.nic.in/ban%20on%20dolphanariums.pdf

Coelho S (2013) Dolphins gain unprecedented protection in India. Deutsche Welle. Available at:http://www.dw.de/dolphins-gain-unprecedented-protection-in-india/a-16834519

Derrida J (2002) The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow). Critical Inquiry 28(2): 369–418.

Despret V (2004) The Body We Care for: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis. Body & Society 10(2-3): 111–134.

Despret V (2005) Sheep do have opinions. In: B Latour and P Weibel (eds) Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 360-368.

Despret V (2008) Culture and Gender Do Not Dissolve into How Scientists “Read” Nature: Thelma Rowell’s Heterodoxy” In: O Harman and M R Dietrich (eds) Rebels, Mavericks and Heretics in Biology,pp 338-354.

Greenhough B and EJ Roe (2011) Ethics, Space, and Somatic Sensibilities: Comparing Relationships Between Scientific Researchers and Their Human and Animal Experimental Subjects. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29(1): 47–66.

Haraway DJ (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Haraway DJ (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Helsinki Group (2010) Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Dolphins and Whales. Available at:http://www.cetaceanrights.org/pdf_bin/helsinki-group.pdf

Strum SC and LM Fedigan (2000) Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Filippo Bertoni is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University.

Uli Beisel is Juniorprofessor for Culture and Technology in Africa at Bayreuth University, Germany. She is associate editor of Science as Culture.