Australia has quite a (recent) history with bushfires. Some of them very tragic, with significant loss of human life. Of note, the lives of animals rarely rate a mention, unless they are cute — pictures of a koala seeking/receiving water from a human — South Australia 2013; 2015; Victoria 2009 — or there is significant economic loss to a farmer — the death of untold numbers of ‘livestock’. The human impacts of fires, more-so at this time of year, are very much a part of mainstream media and community discussions here. Responses are routinely anthropocentric, both oblivious and willfully ignora…

A recent post on One Green Plant by Leslie Irvine, a scoiologist at the University of Colorado, outlines three options for companion (nonhuman) animals, specifically related to what we feed them. Irvine provides her rationalisations to the ‘difficult position’ in the context of ‘ethical veganism’ (for me there is one form of veganism, and coming up with labels such as ethical is as problematic that for vegetarianism — see the redicularity of the term ‘pescatarian’ for example. To create a demarcation here, anyone who is not an ‘ethical vegan’ is not a vegan: they adopt a plant-based diet). Thr…

At a recent Critical Animal Studies conference at Brock University, many of those in attendance were exposed to their own strategic ignorance: the unmarked and nonconsiered (to them) implications of words and discourse used. One of these was the term ‘standpoint’, a reference to Donna Haraway (and others) insightful standpoint theory. In seeking to address this, a term I have used in the past seems much more apt: situatedness. In much the same vein, the term widely used by Gary L. Francione and others, ‘moral schizophrenia’, has implications that are unmarked and nonconsiered by those who are …