Working Animals and the Transformation of the Human-Animal Relationship

Abstract

This chapter introduces a discourse of animal labour. The first part presents a historical perspective on animal labour to reflect its technological, philosophical, and social determination. The second part explores animal labour from a theoretical perspective and discusses the ethical and moral aspects of animal labour as they exist today and also its future perspectives. As the traditional concept of the animal is obsolete, ideological, and oppressive, postanimals could be those freed from the conceptual and bodily restraints of metaphysics and technology. The history of animal labour reveals that animals have been restrained both conceptually and physically.Working animals have helped human civilization to rise without any - or insufficient - appreciation. Although the human's approach towards working animals has significantly transformed, thanks to changes in human-animal relationships since the Enlightenment period, animal labour still prevails in an inhumane, objectivistic form, at least in the case of some species. We will discuss the issue of disappearing of animals and animal labour from our sights and its consequences to a human-animal relationship. Finally, the benefits and drawbacks of animal labour are explored to reflect what kind of work is good work for animals.The book Postanimality: Perspectives and Critiques understands the Animal extricated from the grip of humanistic ideologies as the "Postanimal". The volume, which features chapters by leading academicians and scholars, conceives of the encounter of the animal with the human from a post-anthropocentric perspective so to recuperate the Animal within a non-hierarchical order where the human does not emerge as the supreme standard for comparison.