WHY ANIMALS?

Today, routine interactions with wildlife or livestock have become uncommon in the developed world; for many of us, pets account for the majority of our interspecies encounters. Nonetheless, animals remain central to culture. Although wildlife populations have declined by nearly three-quarters over the past half-century, technological advances have produced unprecedently abundant representations of animals: nature documentaries fill our screens with high-resolution close-ups of charismatic fauna, while digitally concocted critters tug at our heartstrings and tickle our funnybones. (Perhaps the enduring fascination with animals in our increasingly animal-free reality has its roots in the psychological phenomenon known as “biophilia,” defined as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.”) And a select handful of species have multiplied in the anthropocene: we now share the planet with billions of chickens, cows, and pigs. Here, a crucial point emerges: animal studies calls us to consider the ways in which we think with animals, but it also challenges us to confront to the ways in which we might prefer not to think about animals in an era of mass extinction, factory farming, and zoonotic disease. If the pleasures of biophilia lie close to the heart of animal studies, so too do the urgent problems of biocapitalism and necropolitics.