When Curiosity Wrongs the Cat

People are increasingly concerned with what we owe to other animals as a matter of justice. Philosophical writing on these issues typically takes two forms. First, there is conceptual work: thinking about how existing ideas such as liberty, citizenship, democracy, and legitimacy, might apply or be extended to include other animals. Second, there is normative work: thinking about how we should treat other animals. Both projects require that we know other animals; know something of their capacities, their experiences, their relationships, and the material conditions of their lives. Thinking about justice for animals, then, necessarily involves learning more about who they actually are.

Ways of Knowing Animals

Acquiring this kind of knowledge is not as challenging as it once was. Advances in technology have produced an explosion in animal surveillance techniques, which means there are very few animals left on this planet we cannot get to know (excluding, perhaps, those in the very deep ocean). Want to know where an animal goes? We can tag them – externally, in the form of a collar, a harness, or something adhered to skin, feathers, or fur – or surgically implant the device. Want to know how animals interact in their natural habitats? We can place thermal imaging camera traps in their homes and surrounding environments, capturing their every movement day and night. Want to know what they do on the move? We have unmanned terrestrial, aquatic, and airborne drones for that, plus GPS tracking systems.

These technological surveillance methods are not the only way of knowing other animals. A different approach proceeds with researchers spending time with particular animals, sitting with them, walking with them, communicating with them, learning to notice what they notice, and accepting that what we come to know is always only part of their story. This approach to knowing matters especially for the animals whose lives are deeply entangled with our own, such as companion animals, working animals, and the urban animals with whom we share towns and cities. These animals are not (always) best understood through tags and trackers. If we are to know them at all, it must be through deliberate and careful attention.

Problems With Knowing

Justice seems to require knowing animals, and we have the methods to learn more about them, but is this something that we should do? We rarely stop to ask this question. That there is a presumed right to know other animals is not surprising given our general treatment of them. We kill billions of animals every year for all manner of purposes, including food, clothing, research, and sport. Against that backdrop of violence and instrumentalisation, it’s neither a surprise that we assume the right to know animals nor obviously a matter of pressing concern for them or us. After all, what is the harm of being known, compared to the harms of suffering and death? But this way of thinking treats knowing as more benign than it is and fails to grapple with what being the subject of human inquiry often means for other animals.

Of course, some methods of knowing animals will actively make animals suffer or kill them and are incompatible with their welfare interests. This gives us a strong reason to refrain from these ways of knowing, except perhaps in very extreme circumstances when knowing itself is a matter of life and death. Think, for instance, of intrusive physical examinations and perhaps even the trial of experimental drugs required to protect the nonhuman community of which the individual is a member.

But my concern here is not only with methods of knowing that are experienced as harmful by animals. It is also with those that are not. In addition to their welfare interests, animals also have what might be described as control interests, that is, interests in determining the terms of their own lives. For example, they plausibly have an interest in not being handled, tagged, or implanted against their will, and not being watched in environments where they do not expect us to be. And they have an interest in, for instance, choosing where they live, what they do, and with whom they share their lives; an interest in self-determination more broadly.

Crucially, these interests can be set back whether or not the animal experiences the setback as bad. The rabbit who appears content while being handled, the bird who never notices the camera in their nest, the dog who comes when called and seems pleased to see us – none of these is obviously a case where an animal is harmed. Yet getting to know another animal often involves treating their behaviour, their homes, and their inner lives as ours to access, and so diminishes their capacity to control what relationship, if any, they have with us.

Ultimately, the knowledge we gain about other animals places them in a relation of forced intimacy with us. This is most obviously true when knowing proceeds through manipulation, deception, or relentless attempts at ingratiation. But the same point holds when knowing proceeds through open, patient attention. The animal may end up revealing something of themselves to us, yet on terms that they were never permitted to set. So here is the rub: justice for animals requires knowing animals, and knowing animals often requires threatening or acting against their interests.

A Right Not to Be Known?

All this suggests that knowing other animals is not always something we should pursue, and that what we might call epistemic abstinence is sometimes the just orientation. Curiosity about how our neighbours spend their evenings does not justify putting cameras in their home. This is a clear case for epistemic abstinence. Likewise, curiosity about other animals does not justify putting cameras in their homes. Treating animals with the respect they are owed means accepting that their lives and inner worlds should often remain opaque to us.

Where does this leave those who want to do empirical research with animals, and the philosophers who urge others to do so? It suggests a much higher bar of justification for the pursuit of knowledge than has previously been admitted. Since some of animals’ most basic interests are set back by being known, knowledge cannot be pursued without strong justification grounded in their own interests, or, in extreme cases of threat to life, in the good of the wider community. To do justice to other animals, we have to know them. To do justice to other animals, we sometimes have to refuse to know them. The work of multispecies justice lies in learning to tell which is called for, and when.