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Books

Nonhuman Humanitarians by Benjamin Meiches

Andrew Strebkov considers animals to be unlikely humanitarians.

Dr Benjamin Meiches’ main (academic) interests lie in armed conflict, genocide, and international law. An associate professor of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at Washington University, he is known in the field (and no, I don’t mean the battlefield) for his book, The Politics of Annihilation. He’s also known for winning the Best Article of 2019 Prize of the Review of International Studies for an article on ‘Nonhuman Humanitarians’. His new book Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics (2023) is in line with that article. The professor says he considers this topic important because nonhuman animals potentially offer a new form of humanitarian politics, through multispecies collaboration.

In the book Meiches argues that nonhuman animals do not merely support humans in humanitarian efforts, but directly affect the nature of that work. He also attempts to demonstrate the agency of the animals involved and so challenge conventional assumptions of them being merely passive instruments in the hands of humans. Meiches deplores the general ignoring of the suffering of nonhuman animals, pointing out the tension between on the one hand how much praise humanitarian animals receive, and on the other hand how humans blithely justify killing and eating animals.

Dog helping soldier to find landmines
Mine dog team photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Robert Larson 2010 Public Domain

To support his arguments, Meiches describes dogs’ role in finding land mines, the employment of rats in sniffing out both explosive and tuberculosis, and finally, the deployment of cows and goats to help malnourished communities worldwide with their meat and milk. Meiches strengthens his argument by referencing research in biology, ethology, and animal behavioral science. He also cites philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze.

He begins by providing a history of dogs’ humanitarian service since the Second World War, and cites scientific research explaining how dogs’ olfactory and other physiological characteristics allow them to identify explosives and operate in the complex environments of minefields. He describes how dogs transform demining practice, using perceptual abilities well beyond those possessed by humans. Working in minefields is incredibly psychologically difficult for humans due to the uncertainty and stress of the situation. Nevertheless, dogs demonstrate joy cooperating with humans in this environment, arguably understanding the deadly nature of the endeavor. Interestingly, the human deminers themselves report that the dogs inevitably improve their own emotional state. The different reactions to the circumstances shows how the dogs’ reactions cannot be defined within an anthropocentric framework.

In Chapter 2 the author elaborates on the African giant pouched rats’ services to humanity. Meiches describes how due to their sharp senses, low maintenance and small size, rats can helpfully identify explosives and even diseases. To argue for the agency of these animals, Meiches evokes Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘the impossible gift’ – “in effect, formally annulling the possibility of formally reciprocating a debt or responding to the gift in advance” (Nonhuman Humanitarians). Humans can never communicate their thanks to the rats in other than our inevitably anthropocentric terms. The rats provide their invaluable services to humans without awareness of the gratitude, medals and fine words directed to them in return. Yet although the rats’ behaviour constitutes a gift not reducible to or understandable in terms of existing humanitarian forms, it also shows that the care, generosity, and engagement celebrated by humanitarianism do not originate with humans.

In Chapter 3, Meiches describes the nonprofit organisation Heifer International’s initiative of sending cows and goats to impoverished communities worldwide. These animals permanently improve lives by enabling recipient families to become self-sufficient. By this, they play a significant role in humanitarian relief, and therefore should be considered part of global political life. But Meiches is critical of this initiative for what he sees as a double standard of praising these animals but killing them at the same time – which he calls ‘cannibalistic humanitarianism’. The resistance of these animals, in the form of kicking, bleating, and stamping, is silenced or ignored, but it nevertheless demonstrates their perception of the process and even agency.

In his last chapter the author affirms the ultimate interconnection of all species and discusses the need to extend the horizons of humanitarianism; to move beyond the human and include ‘third ecology’ questions of multispecies justice. He summarizes that non-human animals are not merely contributing to humanitarian projects, but instead they do “a mutual work of interspecies labor that has yet to fully consider the status, needs, and statements of its nonhuman collaborations” (p.179).

Together, these four chapters provide important insights into the emotional and psychological components of animals’ involvement in humanitarianism. The author’s argument on the joy of dogs or the ‘quiet’ resistance of cows and goats, provides a vivid example of their active participation on the one hand, and of the idea that humans should change their attitude and ‘modes of cooperation’ with them on the other.

To make his points, Meiches sometimes employs controversial ideas. For example, in the Introduction he says, “When compared in terms of their capacities, biologists, geneticists, and neuroscientists have documented few, if any, distinctive traits of humans except for sweating and throwing” (p.22). Based on this idea, the professor calls the idea of the distinctly ‘human’ a fantasy produced to reaffirm the hierarchy between humans and nonhuman animals.

The author supports his attempt to deconstruct the notion of ‘human’ by noting that recent philosophy questions the salience of the ‘human-nonhuman’ distinction. He quotes Derrida saying: “The animal is nothing more (or less) than a word that men have given themselves the right to give” (p.5). Perhaps this argument is possible only within a poststructuralist framework – in other words, by rejecting the material, objective reality behind the words. Still, even without complex scientific research there are good reasons why humans devised a different category (and word) for ‘animals’. The fact that humans spread across all continents, create atomic bombs, and build skyscrapers (with the elevator music), is by itself enough to choose different words for humans and animals.

It also must be said though that there is much scientific evidence of clear differences between humans and animals. For example, in A Natural History of Human Thinking (2014), Michael Tomasello illustrates that animals don’t demonstrate the level of sociability humans do, and can’t devise and perceive shared objectives. Whales and dolphins aside, animals do not have complex language, being limited strictly to signal communication. This means that their communication does not involve words representing abstractions that cannot be specified by pointing to specific objects or phenomena. We might say, animals only recognise particulars, not universals. For example, animals probably don’t know that they’re ‘animals’, or that a tree is a ‘tree’. But abstractions are necessary prerequisites for language development overall. Our advanced language also allows humans to learn from reading a textbook or attending a class, and not solely from mimicry.

These are not the only differences between humans and nonhuman animals, but they’re sufficient to make us ask how much human sociability and language affects our capacity for humanitarianism. These capacities may well be necessary for the emergence of humanitarianism as a conscientious endeavor, because it demands moral references, which arguably cannot develop without abstract thought. But if the author’s foundational claim that there is little difference between animals and humans is scientifically false, and if Derrida’s linguistics do not hold, this weakens the main argument of the book and calls into question the degree of agency of animals.

There are also some contradictions in the work. On the one hand, the author says that animals have highly complex thinking, therefore the distinction between humans and animals is ‘without difference’; on the other hand, he says they are “forms of life that can never make a claim to humanity in the first place” due to “cognitive, sensory, and morphological differences” (p.23). Donald Davidson argues that the ability to make claims, or as he calls them, ‘propositional attitudes’, is characteristic of rationality (see for instance his ‘Rational Animals’, Dialectica, 1982). So if animals cannot have propositional attitudes, they are not rational. But abstract thinking is necessary for such attitudes. This further reinforces the hierarchy between different species that Meiches attempts to deconstruct.

In general, Meiches provides a well-structured argument supported by examples, research, logic, and original thought. However, internal tensions and its contradictions of scientific research undermine the main argument of the book regarding the agency and defining role of animals in humanitarian work. Suppose animals are not rational and unable to comprehend humanitarianism as a concept due to an inadequacy of language. In that case, it is questionable if we can consider their aid in humanitarian work as a manifestation of their agency. In other words, it is uncertain if they are indeed capable of acting independently, and are doing so, or are instead mere ‘instruments for human ends’ in humanitarian work. Nevertheless, the book makes a strong case for expanding our understanding of nonhuman animals’ role in humanitarianism, while demonstrating how interconnected humans and nonhuman animals are. It also illustrates well the transformative psychological and emotional aspects of the interaction between humans and animals in a humanitarian setting.

Andrew Strebkov is a Canadian writer and blogger with interests in epistemology and political philosophy.

• Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics, Benjamin Meiches, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2023, £21, pb, 232 pages