S6E8: Re-Animalization with Krithika Srinivasan

Krithika Srinivasan joins Claudia on the show to talk about re-animalization, a concept that challenges the dominant ways in which human wellbeing are framed. Re-Animalization compels one to think about how development is predicated on logics of protection and sacrifice, expanding notions of longevity, and a reduction of risk. Re-Animalization offers an opportunity to shift our gaze to the most privileged and to consider how risks might be more evenly distributed. 

Date Recorded: 23 November 2023. 

Krithika Srinivasan is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, post-development politics, animal studies, and nature geographies. Her work draws on research in South Asia to rethink globally established concepts and practices about nature-society relations and reconfigure approaches to multispecies justice. Krithika is the principal investor of the project Remaking One Health Indies. She has published widely, including in journals such as the Sociological Review, Geoforum, and Environment and Planning. Learn more about the ROHIndies project on their website and connect with Krithika on Twitter (@KritCrit)

Featured: 

Re-animalising wellbeing: Multispecies justice after development by Krithika Srinivasan
The Eye of the Crocodile by Val Plumwood
Pluriversal politics: The real and the possible by Arturo Escobar 
Bed bugs are back by Heather Lynch
Respecting Nature’s Autonomy in Relationship with Humanity by Ned Hettinger

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 3:40 A bit about Krithika
• 6:42 ROH Indies and Multispecies Public Health
• 11:00 Re-Animalization Paper
• 17:00 Human Wellbeing and More-Than-Animal
• 21:34 Longevity
• 28:04 Ethically and Politically Animal
• 30:26 [Ad] Wild Times: Wildlife Education
• 31:05 (Cont.) Ethically and Politically Animal
• 31:36 Thinking the Unthinkable
• 38:56 Shoring-Up vs. Redistribution of Risk
• 41:06 Turning the Gaze back on the Self
• 50:20 The Level of the Individual
• 53:21 Quote (Krithika Srinivasan)
• 55:06 Inequality and the Re-Distribution of Risk
• 59:27 Currently Working on
• 1:00:38 Animal Highlight (Wolves)
• 1:16:01 Credits

Transcript

00:00 - Introduction 

• Welcome back to “Animals and Politics”
• Krithika Srinivasan is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, post-development politics, animal studies, and nature geographies. Her work draws on research in South Asia to rethink globally established concepts and practices about nature-society relations and reconfigure approaches to multispecies justice. Krithika is the principal investor of the project Remaking One Health Indies. She has published widely, including in journals such as the Sociological Review, Geoforum, and Environment and Planning. Learn more about the ROHIndies project on their website and connect with Krithika on Twitter (@KritCrit)
• Re-animalising wellbeing: Multispecies justice after development by Krithika Srinivasan
• Re-Animalization, bringing the future into the frame
• It sounds like a political concept because “animalization” is a thorny concept

03:40 - A bit about Krithika

• Always had animals about when she was growing up. 
• Was thinking of doing a PhD in environmental ethics and policies. Shaped by political ecology. 
• PhD on Street Dogs and marine turtles at a time when anima geographies were sort of gaining momentum as a field of scholarship. 
• Last time Krithika was on the show she spoke about how she saw differences in how animals in India and the UK were treated in policy. 
• Continues to look at street dogs 

06:42 – ROH Indies and Multispecies Public Health

• Worked on dogs before and didn’t to go back to dogs but bumped into Chris Pearson who has retained an interest in looking at dogs.
• Approaching dogs from a different perspective. Previous work on how ideas of dogs are constructed but currently it has an emphasis on how street dogs/free living dogs and public health. 
• Broader ideas abut public health, looking at the multiple dimensions of health. What are the positive impacts? What is multispecies health if you understand the public as multispecies.
• Dogs in India are often included in the idea of ‘the public’. 
• Located in India, urban, and peri-rural sites in India. 
• One Health continues to come up in the show, there are several concerns related to it. Great that humans are being decentered but there is a concern that it might be a new stand-in for sustainable development and economics is put above everything else. 

11:00 – Re-Animalization Paper

• Krithika’s first attempt at being constructive instead of being deconstructive – trying to rethink how things can be done differently. 
• This paper came out of teaching a course on political ecology. The questions and discussion in that course forced new thinking. 
• First half of the paper makes the argument that we all know that the way we relate to nature is problematic, so what is really going wrong?
• This vision of human well being that we have rests on this idea that we have to sort of be more than animal by insulating ourselves from the risks of what it means to be part of life on Earth. As well as how we distinguish ourselves from other animals. 
• Development ideas have led to a lot of social justice problems. 
• If this vision of well-being or becoming more than animal is at the root of all of these struggles then we have to think about reversing it, perhaps we have to re-animalize.
• Question of asking how we can re-animalize and become more animal. It is a positive understanding of what it means to be more animal, even though this is a concept that is often coded negatively. 
• As Val Plumwood might ask what does it mean to live as one among the rest of nature?
• The Eye of the Crocodile by Val Plumwood

17:00 – Human Wellbeing and More-Than-Animal

• A lot of people will talk about ‘more-than-human’ instead of ‘more-than-animal’
• There is this idea that as long as we are developing we are doing well but there is a challenge to that 
• Development is a mechanism through which to try and achieve a particular vision of human well-being 
• Colonialism was another mechanism used to achieve a similar vision of human well-being.
• What is common to these two visions is the idea of well-being as being more-than-animal
• All mainstream societies have norms about how a good human life is predicated on insulation.
• There are relatively universal ideas of what human well-being is and our societies are geared toward trying to achieve that. 

21:34 – Longevity 

• The Human Development Index is shaped by ideas of longevity and killability. Somehow living a long life is put above all else. Something like assisted suicide shows how this sanctity is protected. 
• Death is an integral part of life but central to the idea of human well-being but how long we expect humans to live is extending more and more, becoming more-and-more animal. 
• We expect animals who are domesticated – such as pet dogs – to live longer. But we don’t have those expectations of other wild animals, to have an ever-expanding life expectancy. 
• We remove pets from the realm of the animal to the realm of the human – this is how a lot of animal rights and animal welfare is framed. 
• Re-Animalization wouldn’t make pursuing a long life so important. Our buildings, our agricultural systems, our medical systems are all about increased life-expectancy.
• This extended life expectancy can also lead to diminishing returns for the lives of others. 
• The way we pursue our well-being always involves ideas of protection and sacrifice. “So you vaccinate your pet dogs but there are dogs who risk their lives for that” – Krithika
• Saskia Stucki and Dinesh Wadiwel conversations also speak to this causality factor.
• Right from the get-go developing systems of well-being involve sacrifice. 

28:04 – Ethically and Politically Animal

• We are animals and the way we are in the world is a way of being animal.
• Maybe instead of saying more “more-than-animal” we should say “more animal” but even the question might position humans as artificial animals.
• But maybe the idea of humans being artificial animals is not very helpful. 
• “There is an acceptance of the idea that we are animals and that we are part of nature in an ontological sense but not an ethical and political sense and that is why it has not been helpful.” – Krithika 

30:58 – Thinking the Unthinkable

• Pluriversal politics: The real and the possible by Arturo Escobar 
• “If developmental aspirations of material insulation from nature have been achieved in some form or the other, there is no reason why re-animalisation should remain in the realm of the ‘unthinkable’, and why it should not become ‘a credible alternative to what exists, and the credible to the achievable’ (Escobar, 2020, p. 131).”
• Trying to stretch the boundaries of the thinkable and as long as animalization is left in the realm of the thinkable it will never be practical. 
• We need to allow our space to think and imagine differently. 
• Val Plumwood’s idea that we could be food used to unthinkable. It has been used to argue that veganism is not plausible but an aspect of her work is that we are food and what happens when you think of us as food. 
• Being killable as food for other animals. Can we learn to live with that idea?
• The idea of causality being unavoidable is said in dominant narratives but it often overlooks the other side of it. 
• There are double standards. There are a whole bunch of things that animals do that we would consider to be objectionable but when we want to make arguments that we are animals we focus on different aspects of their behaviour. 

35:18 – Shoring-Up vs. Redistribution of Risk

• Who is considered to be killable?
• Some human lives are considered more killable than other human lives but the idea that some humans should or could be killed. 
• Inequity between different groups is often managed through trying to shore-up.
• Our approach to justice is to shore-up in politics, philosophy, and critical social sciences. 
• “We need to think about the redistribution of risk” – Krithika
• Can there be a shift in focusing on shoring up, to making the privileged more risky.
• This comes back to the dualism between protection and sacrifice. 

40:28 – Turning the Gaze back on the Self

• We have been socialized to thinking about different inequalities differently. 
• The question should be directed back at us – “How can we make our lives more like animals?” – Krithika
• “We are always focused on the other, whether the other as something that needs to be improved or sacrificed, or helped” – Krithika 
• Perhaps an acceptance of the vulnerabilities that come with the environment you are in. 
• Lots of sustainability livelihood programs are directed at the global south but whose livelihoods need to actually change? Maybe bankers in Europe?
• We are talking about different resource use 
• You can shift the gaze away from the non-human to the human as well as away from the marginalized other to the privileged self. 
• This is about stretching the limits of imagination. 
• Krithika had ants in her kitchen that prompted her to ask how she can practice what she think
• Interesting work by Heater Lynch on bed bugs in Glasgow. 
• There should be more room for negotiation. 
• It’s about vulnerability not killability 

49:42 – The Level of the Individual 

• Much more focused on the individual. Development is done at a societal scale but it is focused on the well-being of the individual. 
• A conservationist lens might thinking about the sustainability of a certain group. 
• If there was a vision of what a collective society should look like, individuals might be scarified but that’s not what Krithika is arguing. 
• “It’s an argument against the collective pursuit of human-wellbeing” – Krithika
• Animals pursue their well-being at a different scale. At the scale of the individual, family or community but definitely not at the scale of the species or whole regions. 
• But human well-being is done at the scale of society or species. 

52:43 – Quote (Krithika Srinivasan)

• Tries to summarize what the concept is trying to do 
• “From a vision of a good human life premised upon insulation from the vulnerabilities inherent in living on this planet, we need to examine what it means to live as part of nature, as one among other animals. Equally crucial is a fundamental shift in approach to inequities. Instead of addressing social, ecological and animal injustices by ‘shoring up’ and seeking protections for vulnerable human or nonhuman Others, the focus would be on more equitably distributing the risks of living on this earth so that they are not borne primarily by marginal people and nature.” Krithika Srinivasan, 2022: 361
• There needs to be a re-distribution of risk and a re-consideration of thinking about where we are looking. 
• The idea of humans living long healthy lives is the ultimately goal of everything needs to be disrupted. 
• Inequality is relational. Development needs inequality to justify itself because it is predicated on it.
• There are different ways of addressing inequality.

54:28 – Inequality and the Re-Distribution of Risk 

• When you are talking about risks you are also talking about resources. If you’ve got finite resources should they all be directed to us standing here and keeping us as safe as possible all the time. 
• Thinking about redistributing risk instead of redistributing wealth or resources. 
• When you start at looking at risk you see differently places differently. 
• Shifting your focus in this way is political.

58:49 – Currently Working on 

• ROHIndies Project, looking at multiple aspects of the street dog, human, and health interface. Exploring if there is a post-anthropocentric way of exploring these issues instead of prioritizing human health.
• Looking at animal agriculture and vulnerabilities. 
• Continuing to think about re-animalization.
• Can contact Krithika via email (k.srinivasan@ed.ac.uk) or on Twitter (@KritCrit)

01:00 – Animal Highlight (Wolves)

• Made me think of wolf agency and auto-rewilding, reintroducing themselves to places. 
• Wolf persecution went to extraordinary lengths in Britain. They have been persecuted everywhere where they have come into conflict with human interests. 
• It is based on the sacrifice-protection logic. The majority of the risks are born by wolves.
• “From a vision of a good human life premised upon insulation from the vulnerabilities inherent in living on this planet, we need to examine what it means to live as part of nature, as one among other animals ... the focus would be on more equitably distributing the risks of living on the Earth so that they are not borne primarily by marginal people and nature” – Krithika Srinivasan, 2022
• In a world where wolves live alongside humans, humans would have to have a greater acceptance of the risks that come with living together. 
• Between 2002 and 2020 only 26 people globally were killed by wolves, thousands of wolves are killed by year by humans (roughly 2000 per year in Kazakhstan alone). 
• Need to find a renewed way of co-existing. 
• Auto-rewilding is being hailed as a valued expression of animal agency and biodiversity restoration, wolves disregard for human boundaries mean humans and animals are coming into contact more and more. 
• We need to change our narrative about wolves and learn to appreciate them. 
• Wolf society is similar to human society, they have complex social structures. 
• Changing our view of wolves and indeed ourselves through re-animalization can help us co-exist with animals in the Anthropocene
• Quote by Ned Hettinger “Restoring to the rural landscape wolves which might eat our sheep forces us to change our grazing practices, adds to nature’s influence over our lives, and lessens our control of the situation; thus it … increases the autonomy of local nature in relation to humanity.”
• So much of this about control and our lack of tolerance. 
• Rats are probably one of the most persecuted animals but unlike wolves they are in cities. 
• Contact zones/Conflict Zones
• Auto-rewilding is showing how we are coming into contact because animals are recolonizing territory. 

01:15:23 - Credits 

• Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, Virginia Thomas for the Animal Highlight, and Rebecca Shen for her design and social media work. This episode was edited by Christiaan Mentz and produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder.  
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• Show notes compiled by Claudia Hirtenfelder