When conferrals of “humanity” and “personhood” beget violence: an ethical examination of animal-human relations

When does the recognition of “humanity” or “personhood” to nature’s bodies enable, rather than restrict, certain kinds of violences? I focus on a few key examples: bestiality practices in medieval England, the violent taming of wild elephants in 19th century Malaya, and the sacrifices of goats to deities in rural India. In understanding the relationship between ontology and violence, does it matter what kind of “violence” we are discussing, whether it is operating within an intimately interpersonal home or at the large-scale of mass factories? How can thinking with Black scholars, such as Saidiya Hartman and Zakiyyah Jackson, give us resources to understand when recognition of humanity licenses, rather than restricts, violence? For those who are invested in both more-than-human cosmologies and environmentalism, we need a more precise ontological and ethical framework than a generic respect of agency or personhood of nature’s bodies to conceptualize nature-human relations.