Care is more than human—it's creaturely.
It's pretty hard to go on Earth at this point in time to an environment with humans and not have rats involved in it.
Stefanie Fishel:It becomes a political act just to say that humans are animals. I think there's a lot to be thought there about how we think ourselves different.
Benjamin Meiches:Hi. My name is Benjamin Meejens. I'm an associate professor of global politics at the University of Washington Tacoma. I'm here today to talk about my work, which just got published with the University of Minnesota Press, Nonhuman Humanitarians, Animal Interventions, and Global Politics. The book is an exploration of three different nonhuman animals, dogs, rats, goats, and cows, that are integrated in a variety of ways into humanitarian practices, whether that's demining and explosive identification, infectious disease management, and agricultural and food supports people in famine, and tries to unpack how humanitarians who emphasize so strongly human rights, the problem of addressing suffering in the world, and the necessity of compassion, negotiate their relationships with nonhuman animals that they bring along with them to complete certain kinds of tasks.
Benjamin Meiches:And one of the things that the books helps to show is that there's actually quite a lot of complexity baked into this relationship. Both about our assumptions around what it means to be human, or what it means to be a political actor, but then also some surprising ways that nonhuman animals not only make humanitarian practice different and often more responsive to conditions of human suffering, but often expand its scope in interesting ways to tackle questions about nonhuman welfare and nonhuman life and the ecological crises that are kind of affecting our planet. With me today is my good friend and interlocutor, Stephanie Fischel.
Stefanie Fishel:Hi. I'm Stephanie Fischel. I'm a lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. I'm really, happy to be here talking with Ben about his book. This was born from a lot of conversations and a lot of interest in the more than human and the non human.
Stefanie Fishel:I, too, have thought a lot about this. I have a book with Minnesota from 2017 called The Microbial State, Global Thriving and the Body Politic, of which I know Ben was a part of the naming of that because there was a lot of existential crises about what it should be called. We've been in and out of each other's work for a while. I also published in the long 2020, which was a piece that Minnesota put out around the first COVID lockdown year with notions of what our viral subjectivity does to freedom and agency and how it complicates that. So long term interest in thinking about how we see ourselves as human, and this book really opened up some amazing ethical ways to think about being human in terms of how we interact with our non human brothers and sisters that we pull along with us in our human escapades.
Stefanie Fishel:On that note, I thought I would pick out some quotes, and I've sent these to Ben beforehand to have some thinking around them, just because I think there are some really both beautiful pieces of prose that Ben has pulled out of some really complex theoretical interventions into a lot of interdisciplinary spaces, but also doesn't forget to care. Sometimes we see theoretical interventions around the different ways in which non humans get used tends to be really pragmatic or the next new cool thing to talk about quantum or to talk about bacteria. I don't know, Ben. Maybe we could just start off with thinking about how you got pulled into this.
Benjamin Meiches:Yeah. If you journeyed back, like, five or ten years, I would never have anticipated that this would be a part of my scholarship or repertoire. I'm not per se trained initially in animal studies, which is itself a kind of rich multidisciplinary field. I actually started to think about this in the context of a piece that came out in security dialogue in 2015 called the political ecology of the camp, which was an effort to examine concentration camps and their emergence by attending to the different material actors and conditions, rather than just human narratives and human emphasis on exclusion that's kind of in the Arendtian or Agambenian tradition, and that required kind of looking and thinking about how camps were built and where they were assembled and what the pressures were surrounding them and a lot of the different kind of actants and Brunellatura sense that surrounded it. Out of that project, I sort of started thinking about not just concentration camps, but actually humanitarian camps.
Benjamin Meiches:So in 2019, I published another piece that also bears the title Nonhuman Humanitarians with Review of International Studies, and there I tried to look at how different kinds of humanitarian compounds and humanitarian spaces, sort of generally understood, incorporated nonhuman actants. That piece looked briefly at demining dogs or explosive identification dogs, like the book does, And then it also addressed things like drones that had been appropriated or developed for humanitarian purposes, and materials that surround the construction of camps, diagrams that are used from them. And so I was already kind of plugged in there to thinking about what and how is human agency produced or mediated or changed or redirected by all of these different kinds of nonhuman things. In that process, I started thinking quite actively about nonhuman animals for several reasons. Unlike some of the obviously nonliving things that surround those pieces, there's a wealth of both centrist political debates about questions around animal rights and animal welfare.
Benjamin Meiches:And then there's actually a lot of fascinating and curious biological and biocultural, sociological work that's been done around nonhuman animals. And so I just started to kind of ask questions about, like, where do nonhuman animals appear in humanitarian practices? And I think the thing that most anchored me in this work is that there's this fascinating tension, as I see it, in humanitarianism that it's so grounded in the notion of human welfare, human compassion, human reason as the key features that should help us guide and orient our ethical dispositions and our politics, but also explain sort of who we are and what being a good person would involve, and also are, in some ways, supposed to be antidotes to other more exclusionary and more violent forms of politics, like nationalism, for instance, right, or the very classical image of biological racism, although we obviously know that there's more complex models we need there, for instance. And yet, it seemed to me that there was a a strong critical tradition alongside, you know, humanitarianism building its principles out and kind of its different practices and agendas that was always calling into question, well, who is humanitarianism defined against?
Benjamin Meiches:And that various human groups, for reasons that have to do with gender, race, class, coloniality, have been at times identified as inhuman, subhuman, etcetera, and that that was a component of the discourse. One thing that was fascinating about reading humanitarian work in response to nonhuman animals is that these are, in some sense, agents that cannot, in any way, materially make claims in the same sense or don't represent the same model of subject, if we're talking in the rights bearing language, as any kind of human group. And so it's a different way of kind of exploring the boundaries surrounding the concept of the human at work in humanitarianism. And the more that I read about it, I found really divergent approaches amongst different humanitarian organizations, depending on the nonhumans that they were connected and working with, depending on the political context that they were responding to. Often, that involved normalizing things, like the very formal exploitation of the animals for things like milk or for the production of meat and animal slaughter.
Benjamin Meiches:And other times, it involved the kinds of companionship and kinship that are often, you know, exhibited towards animals like dogs in the context of places like commercial support animals or service animals. And other times, there were kind of complete oddities. And so, you know, interesting case, it also had kind of like a cabinet of curiosities effect, just things being surprising and different than I think you might expect. And as a result of that, I spent a lot of time thinking about how humanitarianism involved and complicated itself in relationship to these different nonhuman animals.
Stefanie Fishel:I think it's a cool sideways way into looking at more broadly at animal rights thinking and animal rights literature. Or if you write on the nonhuman and the more than human, I've found teaching and I've done quite a bit of work, I think, since moving to Australia in multi species justice space and trying to think about the ways in which we actually think about the non human and the more than human and the systems in our politics. How would we do this, especially in really anthropocentric ways? And one of the things I think that comes up is that people feel really threatened. It becomes a political act just to say, that humans are animals or that we would be a human animal and a more than human animal.
Stefanie Fishel:And it becomes political in a lot of ways that you have to be aware of. And that brings a big piece of what you're doing here in one of the quotes I pulled out that I think is really productive for our thinking is you write and ask the question about what is so threatening about the possibility that nonhuman animals practice humanitarianism? This is a big piece of your argument. And that they create ethical relations to others characterized by care, generosity, or joy. Let's unpack this as we theorists say, because I think there's a lot in there about the dogs, the goats, the rats, the cows, about their life worlds and the way in which they might interact with ours through different ways.
Stefanie Fishel:And is that really less important than kind of these high politics or on the ways of understanding it through human frameworks?
Benjamin Meiches:Yeah. I think that this was a really interesting problem to see recur across the writing and engagement with the different nonhumans. And something that I found really consistent, it's pretty difficult to not demarcate other species as somehow different in some way. Like species difference versus anthropocentric difference, something along those lines, captures a lot of the way that we frame all of those kind of normative and political and ethical questions and issues. And in each context, there's a bit of a reticence to sort of fully embrace some of the oddity and weirdness that comes with seeing something like a dog or a rat or a goat as practicing a form of humanitarianism and as a more full throated agent there.
Benjamin Meiches:The two things that we tend to do is either see their actions as subordinate to the intentions of the humans who either train them or teach them how to carry out some type of action or as not really a form of ethics, just behavior as opposed to action, that is not worth any kind of redress. And so there's sort of a couple of intellectual moves we use to deflect it, right? We locate the agency elsewhere and just see the animals as mere instrument, with the book I call anthropocentric reason, or we sort of deflate their ethical capacities altogether, emotional capacities, etcetera. And those are not novel arguments by any means in, you know, animal studies literature. There's lots of other folks who have explored these questions quite richly and tried to develop all kinds of models for animal welfare and animal rights that have pointed out to questions of sentience and capacity and, you know, social world building and all these other features, you know, capacities of mind, etcetera, of complex mammals and and certainly other animals as well.
Benjamin Meiches:Point is that I think there is something even a little bit unique to the humanitarian reluctance to kind of fully delve into some of that relationship partly because it is in the in the kind of self identity of humanitarians to emphasize humanness and the status of human life as being worthy of special safeguard and protection. And so there's some interesting things where if we look through all the different criteria through which we might differentiate or think the difference between humans and nonhuman animals, we end up in kind of a thorny place where, you know, we might say it's an emotional differences, and that's not quite it. Right? We might say there's phenomenological differences in how we interpret and sense the world around us, but that doesn't really exhaust a meaningful political or ethical distinction just because we have those things. Right?
Benjamin Meiches:There's all kinds of problems even within the human community around ableism, right, that emerge mature from that kind of mode of engagement. But what there is is a need to kind of persistently insist on a difference to make the ethical goals of humanitarianism sacrosanct. And so there's this kind of constant searching for what the difference is there that I think is an interesting episode. I mean, the book begins with this brief piece from Emmanuel Levinas, which has been picked up by a couple of other folks in animal studies, especially Derrida, who talks about this quite extensively, although I don't know that Derrida would be understood as an animal studies person exactly so much as, you know, philosopher. But the question of this dog, Bobby, who shows up in the concentration camps with them, and Levinas calls the dog the last Kantian there.
Benjamin Meiches:And he does so to both kind of note that the dog is charitably interacting with these people who are in a situation of extreme, you know, violence and deprivation, but he's also sort of mocking the dog at the same time for not really having the brains or the capacities to engage in ethical reflection. And I think that that duality exists in a lot of humanitarian circles where there's sort of a wanting to see the demining dog, and pet it, and present it in pictures and imagery, and see it as something that is a companion, and yet also a double move that subtracts from it, the more full sense of political and ethical possibility. And yet, if you go out into a place like a demining field, what you see is that dogs have a significant affective effect on the way in which people interact, the way that demining occurs. I kinda wanna both promote on the one hand, then strengthen and give greater breadth and depth to the idea of animal capacities and interactions, with humans and with the kind of political or ecological context they're in. And also want us to maybe unsettle a little bit how much we, in humanitarian discussions anyways, prioritize and privilege the kind of cognizance and sentience and capacity of humans.
Benjamin Meiches:Right? I'm not really sure at the end of the day if there's a firm distinction in between action and behavior, and that really unsettles some of the basic principles that humanitarian organizations are working on. So I think that's a piece of why there's sort of a germane maybe it's not threatening so much as unsettling that that's involved there.
Stefanie Fishel:Like, reading it for me, I don't think about the dogs and the rats. The pictures you have for those who can pick up the book and take a look, there are pictures of the rats that are used in these particular activities. Frankly, from, like, my squee point of view, like, the cuteness level, the pictures just kill you. Right? It's like this beautiful and it's got this little teeny tiny gold medal.
Stefanie Fishel:They're being held on these tiny leashes. And I think part of what that shows too is you spend a lot of time on the history of rats being in this strange place for us as well. That the rat fills a different space than the dog. The piece of this book, I think, that adds a lot to it is the choice of which nonhuman humanitarians also makes a difference in which the way they are promoted and or understood by the very organizations that do it. So what was it like working with the people who do these activities?
Stefanie Fishel:Did you have much contact beyond just researching?
Benjamin Meiches:This is not a book that's based off sort of like field research out in it in direct anthropology and interact with people. There's no sort of ethnography aspect of it, per se. So most of what I ended up working with was historical materials, textual materials. I did have contact with some people at different organizations, or in the case of Heifer and the Heifer Project, which is organized by the Church of the Brethren, or Aapo, which is the organization that does different kinds of work with the rats, globally and kind of promotes hero rats as a signature model of humanitarianism. The thing that I think was interesting, though, in picking up on your comment is that there is a really fascinating difference amongst the different species and animals that we're talking about, but all of them are pretty extensively interwoven into human evolution in certain ways and have coevolved relations to some extent.
Benjamin Meiches:Right? So, like, dogs are the ones that often get the most attention for this because it feels like the, you know, you and your dog genre is itself a a model of, you know, science writing and popular attention where it's like, you know, you should understand that when your dog looks at you, it looks at this side of your face versus that side. And, like, there is some strong elements in there, but there's a lot of duality even in the case of dogs. We know, for instance, that dog interactions with humans have been used to create the barriers surrounding slave plantations and solidify and reify white supremacy in different ways. We know that when dogs are not treated well, that that often becomes a mode of commentary on the human communities that surround them.
Benjamin Meiches:So I think, like, there's some interesting cutting both ways amongst these ethical norms. And this is, I think, from from your work, sort of fascinating. Right? Like, you you think about viruses and microbes, which are much more extensively involved in certain way in making up and constituting human biology and capacity and horizons and all these things. And we have very little language to render any of that agency intelligible.
Benjamin Meiches:Right? Even though it's extensively impactful in our what's the Donna Haraway term for it? Symbiogenesis. Is that her? Or is
Stefanie Fishel:I think from Lynn Margolis. Right? Like, from this kind of symbio yeah.
Benjamin Meiches:She plays with that a lot. You find that with rats too. Right? It's pretty hard to go on Earth at this point in time to an environment with humans and not have rats involved in it because either our modes of social production and agriculture have become sort of extensive and globalized and rats can feed on that, but then there's also, you know, the domestication of sort of fancy rats as pets too. So there's kinship that's developed in the at least in the past couple centuries, much more extensively in the pet industry, which is in some ways abruptly changed.
Benjamin Meiches:You know, I was talking about the kind of relations with dogs. I remember my grandmother passed away right at the beginning of the COVID epidemic being reviled at the notion that a dog would be in somebody's house. So I think there's even generational gaps within relatively narrow communities about the dirtiness and cleanliness and the way we interact with all of these things. But one of the things that's most striking is, you know, it's arguable that goats are some of the longest domesticated and co evolved creatures with us. We often wouldn't think about them as having the same kind of emotional and affective valences with us in the same way that they might resist pieces of that.
Benjamin Meiches:In each one of these cases, I think quite a lot to unpack in terms of the ambiguity of the relations that the species form with one another. And then, obviously, we don't wanna talk just as somebody thinks a lot about assemblages in terms of species writ large, but individuals and communities and the way that all of those things interact. And so I find it hard analytically to want to start off with a series of strong generalizations about any of this. And that's maybe part of where my initial suspicion around where humanitarianism might receive animals too is sort of an interesting starting point question.
Stefanie Fishel:And as you were talking, I started thinking about the coevolutionary piece of it. And bringing in the goats was interesting. I didn't I didn't really think again, like, there's a silence for me, I didn't think about the goats being around kind of just as long, but that these three species are also very much a part of and tangled up with the way humans have lived on the planet and are part of a co evolutionary experience. We are humans thanks to dogs and dogs are humans kind of thanks to us through this long term relationship of changing each other. Always interesting to note that dogs will follow a pointing finger.
Stefanie Fishel:Right? I was just taking care of my friend's Australian Shepherd and and I'll say like, Hugo, pick that up. And if I point to it, he'll look. And apparently no other species reacts to us that way. They'll be like, what?
Stefanie Fishel:We don't understand what you're doing. Even our closer on the evolutionary scale. So I do think there's something interesting about the ways in which we come to this always already part of a community that co evolved. In some ways, especially with the goats and cows, I think this brings up a lot of conversations we'd had about, you know, meat eating and non human animal destruction, kind of under the way in which we slaughter them, the ethics around eating meat. We've talked a lot about, can you be an ethical meat eater, right, at some level?
Stefanie Fishel:You lean a little on, Coetzee's looking at the ways in which the thoughtlessness and the unbreachableness of looking at how many animal deaths support us. And I think there's a part two where you talk about there are no words to adequately communicate thanks for the gifts of rats, literally. Our ways of knowledge, and since I work at the microbial and viral a lot in a theoretical level, I think so many of our ways of understanding are based on metaphors of sight and seeing and in many cases we'll never see them, right? We have to understand the virome and the virus as an absolutely crucial part of our existence on the planet, but we will never sense it. The work that you did on, I'll say this a little flippantly, but like making visible the the sniffing portion of it.
Stefanie Fishel:Right? The sensing. But there's actually a lot of communication happening. And that part of if we come back to this animal rights discourse, which I think you did really nicely, is talk about how the way communication works in here. You're talking about meta communication and and nonchalance, the way we see it.
Stefanie Fishel:I think that's a really powerful piece of it for a very complex issue.
Benjamin Meiches:There's sort of three or four different angles in response that I feel like are useful to kind of flesh out some of the aims or ambitions of the book. I wanted to, one, mark this as a practice where I see humanitarianism as engaging in and extending a particularly pernicious form of anthropocentric violence in certain cases. And there's both that in the sense of exposing dogs to certain regimes of training and danger, which are obviously safeguarded to the best of ability and there are robust standards, but there's still, in a certain sense, the potential exposure of something to a human planted violence solely for the benefit of helping other humans to thrive. Like, there's an ecology growing around landmines, for instance, but it's not a human ecology and it doesn't help us. It's not that that doesn't involve some kind of risk transfer to the dog that would also put a human in place or that we shouldn't be able to redress landmines, but I wanted to pull out that.
Benjamin Meiches:And that's much more extensive when you go to something like providing goats or cows for the purposes of milting purposes, but also then training people in animal slaughter, in which what is supposed to be, a caring act, although sometimes it reverses a lot of the kind of colonial development discourses that have been so widely criticized when you want to teach somebody animal farming to effectively develop them and make them a part of some kind of global citizenry. There's something strange about the anthropocentrism as the means through which we do that. But then you're directly in conversation with acts of killing, which are antithetical to most models of humanitarian principles, and so you really have to double down on the fact that there is a strong human nonhuman difference to not run into some kind of tension there. And the very same organizations are at times also then promoting some of the cute photos that you started with. Right?
Benjamin Meiches:Where it's like, here's the cute in picture of a a baby cow with a human, and then several pages later, it's, and here's how you slaughter the cow for food. Right? And we could get into an extensive normative conversation around ethics and mediating like you described there. But I don't know that I wanna track that down per se so much as first and foremost, note the depth to which the fact that that doesn't even appear sometimes as an ethical quandary or question in the first place is an issue. It sort of shows the hegemony, if you will, of the anthropocentrism that embeds a lot of these practices.
Benjamin Meiches:You asked me earlier about how I got interested in this. In my first book, The Politics of Annihilation, the Genealogy of Genocide, which is also at Minnesota, traced a variety of different sort of minor discourses surrounding genocide, one of which is also about the treatment of nonhuman animals, which is another kind of background tie in here where that's been used by a variety of not animal rights or animal will for activists to also kind of call attention to this violence element. I wanted to pull that out here, because I think it's present in each case. The second point that I wanted to make, though, in response is I also see something novel in some of these humanitarian organizations' efforts that I think is also worth noting and reprising and trying to figure out what value it should have and how it came into being. Because there are some interesting questions being asked about, like, how do you take a militaristic practice, which is where demining dog efforts came from, and incorporate it and make it something that could be opposed to violence, and opposed to the ontological messiness of war, in which, you know, what we think of as a war that begins and ends on said date actually affects generations later on, right, and is entangled in this sort of deep sense.
Benjamin Meiches:I think it's fascinating that, you know, when Aapo starts working with the rats, there's this question about, like, well, what kind of sociality can we build? How would we do that? That there's innovation. And one of the things that's another touchstone between our works is, like, the rats are sniffing malaria successfully in trials, for instance, to help with disease spread, and they're effectively communicating with a world of microbial interactions at an intensity or degree of depth that humans can do some of that too, but it's sort of astonishing for us. And so it requires some sort of shift in understanding the kinds of encounters and communications that are occurring, I think, to get to that place.
Benjamin Meiches:And even in the context of an organization that, you know, supports and and Heifer International does this, but it's certainly not the only one at this point, that sends animals for the purposes of milk production and meat production. Even that organization is interestingly founded on a principle of Earth first and think about the welfare of the Earth as part of its framing. And so there's, like, an environmental ethos that's involved that you won't find if you go to some of the other large scale humanitarian organizations because it's just not part of the series of challenges that they've taken up in this work. Now that doesn't mean that I think that all of it is productive ecologically or productive for the nonhuman animals that are involved, but there are moments in it where it's reaching in different kind of directions, and I kinda wanna seize on that creativity. And the third thing I was gonna say is you pulled out this communication piece.
Benjamin Meiches:I I feel like as a theorist, I I was always kind of very scared of behavioral models of the world and, like, what does it mean to see somebody as subject to to some kind of behaviorism, you know, like, you learn kind of, you know, the horror stories of B. F. Skinner and all of that. Right?
Stefanie Fishel:Right. The twentieth century was we've come through it smarter and better. Yes.
Benjamin Meiches:It's like the first principle of thinking behaviorally is that all behavior is communication, that it's performative at some level. Right? It's signaling, and it's signaling in more complex ways than the intentions of the agent that's involved in. And that means that there's also a strong communicative aspect to behaviorism, and it requires both in the way that we apply it to nonhuman animals most of the time. It requires, like, this firmness.
Benjamin Meiches:In fact, there's, like, all these sort of ethical discussions about how to train animals, both problematically and constructively. Its best practice is the observational. What are the interactions doing? How do they change? What does something that I may not suggest is signifying something a signifying b actually indicate?
Benjamin Meiches:And so I think there's a lot of richness and complexity in that that hasn't really been fully explored or unpacked. And the end of the book tries to, like, go back and revisit some of these signature moments, like, what does it mean if the dog is experiencing joy in the process of demining? How is it that if a rat is coming for food and you have to slowly coax it into the process, it's controlling or contributing to communication around the conditions under which landmine demining can occur because that's something that the rats also excel at. What does it mean if a kid is refusing to obey the expectations of a genre that we wanna, like, see it dance around a farmyard, you know, which is what the fourth chapter of the book opens with is this goat that's supposed to have a camera on its head to show how kind of fun and joyful their life is, and it's not really doing anything that humans can fully appreciate in those terms. And in doing so, you know, kind of changing some of the conditions surrounding how we receive and visualize and all this.
Benjamin Meiches:And I I think that our pluralism has been based largely on human to human models on the assumption that there is some kind of communicative similarity there that needs a whole world of more depth theoretically to get to a nonhuman pluralism and inhabit even that there's, you know, other things happening than formal language and reference and discussion and concepts that are happening. There's probably biologists who are like, of course, we've known that for a really long time. Right? Like, there's a reason beehives are so successful, and it depends on something that's not the model that we're used to, but sometimes as as you have well pointed out in your own work, our political images lag behind the complexity of the worlds we're embedded in.
Stefanie Fishel:Or we need the complexity that you bring to be able to put a a bit of a finer point on how a science or medicine might see it. I mean, a reliance on particular science worldview sometimes I find perplexing, especially if you listen to scientists ask about their work and you think maybe every scientific team needs a someone from the humanities buried inside it to to push them. What is it that the one I've I thought of you actually, Ben, when I read this, it was that, they looked at Mars and all the life on Mars and how it had been there, but gone. And that one of the scientists said it's almost as if that life being born there was then responsible for its own demise. Do you need a philosopher right now to like, say to you, what is it about the conditions of life that bring with it its own demise?
Stefanie Fishel:It's more than just the ways in which microbes create a new kind of microenvironments that then might not be sustainable to other sorts, but were actually a deeper philosophical idea of how life works and how life works sometimes against itself.
Benjamin Meiches:That's very much in line too with the questions in multispecies justice you were raising. I mean, like, I don't think that maybe it's that a form of life is going to try to modify its surroundings based off whatever force of interpretation is guiding it. Right? And I'm not sure that that's its perspective all the time. It could be other forces that are having that.
Benjamin Meiches:Right? It would probably be a sign of kind of passive nihilism to say we should condemn it for its part, right, for for wanting to do that. I just think that the second question, right, that follows that is how do you build coexistingly? We've pretty much missed the boat on that, you know, maybe because of the, you know, success of the state model and capitalism and, you know, all of the different forces that are really productive, you know, in a biopolitical sense at making more of a certain kind of life and not so thoughtful about all the rest of it. That would also imply that moving past that force of interpretation or that, you know, point of perspective or however you wanna frame it would be kind of the next step towards making a better politics, making a better a better a different I don't really know what it is.
Stefanie Fishel:The reason I think I attached on to thinking about the play was that's one of the things we don't think about, like the role of imagination and play in creativity. We often see politics as being something in a separate sphere. Whereas if you follow certain traditions and, you know, our Western training, like, you know, Deleuze and, Elizabeth Grosz wrote that amazing book on chaos territory art saying that like basically art is the only thing that will create change. It's not policy. It's not politics as we would see it.
Stefanie Fishel:It's this imaginative ways of thinking yourself out of the problem. I use Fairbend in my book to kind of connect some dots saying, how do we imagine ourselves somewhere different? And we don't necessarily have to go far when you read your book about the ways in which play is incorporated into these very important work around mitigating certain kinds of violences. I think there's a lot to be thought there about how we think ourselves different.
Benjamin Meiches:Yeah. It's funny. Whenever you're writing a book and my my limited experience, there's these moments where you have personal contact with some of the things that you're writing about or questions you're asking in ways that are unexpected. So, like, I was in the midst of writing one piece of this when I was out jogging, and I got attacked by a 50 pound dog. And, it jumped up and bit my arm, and I have puncture wounds that scarred over there.
Benjamin Meiches:And I've lost nerve sensation in the midst of this. And it was it was just, you know, doing what the dogs do in that context. It had been off leash in its owner's yard. You know, there's a lot of ways that we could talk about something like that, right, to, you know, condemn the nonhuman animal or the the human owner that surrounds that or the person that's with it, whatever the language is you wanna kinda grasp your relationship with, or the odd partitioning of human space and fencing that contributes to changes in the way that dog sociality would otherwise work or people jogging on streets. I'm not not whatever different modes of sociality there, but it led to this interesting question for me, which is, what's my relationship with this animal that's bitten me and that had this adversarial relationship?
Benjamin Meiches:And, like, how would I go about working on and teasing that out? And, like, is play a means of interacting with it? And, like, that sounds like I'd go back and play with the dog that bit me, which is not what happened. But it led to all of these interesting questions about, you know, how defense and engagement would need to be encouraged. And what what ended up happening in that scenario is I ended up walking home.
Benjamin Meiches:I was bleeding from this dog bite, and the owner had kind of corralled the dog ex in something, and she offered to, you know, pay whatever medical expense it was. It was really pleasant. But she was, like, shocked that I wasn't angry at her and her dog initially, and I could have been really injured by this dog. I mean, it could have it was a very, very large animal, but it led to a different kind of back and forth for her. I was like, oh, you know, I we also have dogs in my house as our companion animals, and, like, I can see how this could occur.
Benjamin Meiches:And there was a back and forth interaction between her and I, and I learned a little bit about the dog. And it was a fascinating moment because it unsettled what were clearly her and I expectations about how this scenario might go, just because the question was kinda in my mind about, like, what am I doing here? What are the relations that are involved? And so I really do think there's kind of, like, a value in just posing those questions. Again, it's hard to extrapolate from an ex anecdotal example, but it kind of changed the tenor and the peacefulness to some extent to the way that all of that ended up getting handled and mutual engagement.
Benjamin Meiches:And I really believe powerfully in, like, those moments where the insight slightly changes or the visibility or the mode slightly changes, you know, the the distribution of the sensible or partition of the sensible, to use Ron Sierras' phrase, even at very sort of micro moments.
Stefanie Fishel:Yeah. And sometimes if we can channel it into what we do, I think in your book, you've got a really interesting bit then about, like, biting as play and the way I encourage everyone to read it because there's this really kind of really unpacked moments of how we might see dogs in their play and what the bite means in different contexts in ways we might see talking about human play. And I think that those moments that push us into a different space are important. I know one of my pieces that I wrote in much different form that came out about movement and the kind of ethics of movement and the the more than human in a journal for mobilities and sociology, but part of it was prompted by hitting a deer in my car. And it was a moment of like, for those who have had an animal auto collision, as they call them, they're quite shocking.
Stefanie Fishel:It was interesting in my head at the time, I thought I'm being hit by the deer. I actually didn't hit the deer. The deer hit me along the side. And that became this weird thing that I ended up fixating on. And when I went to call the insurance, the conversation that I had was, oh, we won't pay for that, but if you had hit a human, we would.
Stefanie Fishel:And I remember in a similar way, kind of that moment, you're talking about the changing, I slipped into this notion of whose deaths matter, right? It was an early early way of me thinking through who's left by the side of the road dead and who counts. What could have been a very, what I want it to be a more gendered element of who counts, you know, racialized accounts of all kinds of things in, in around colonialism and all of that. Of course we go broad when we're trained the way Ben and I are trained and internationally. So we always start at the global kind of and work our way in.
Stefanie Fishel:But I think that there are moments of clarity that lots of people have regardless of whether they can write about it in a book or not. And these are really good moments to to talk about.
Benjamin Meiches:Yeah. I I would also say on the the play model, right, like, just one other thought that popped in my head. There's a human discourse on what constitute play, and then there are probably forms of play that just don't have anything to do with that. You know, it's funny to me. It's like goats are an animal we don't think about as playing, but kidding and kids, and their rascally ness comes from a sort of kind of goat resistance, probably, to human domestication and efforts.
Benjamin Meiches:It's another moment that's here. We get some of our vegetables from a local farm. The farmer is actually a PhD in phenomenology, I think. So, you know, it's nice to have a farmer that's thinking about these questions as well. They have one goat who kind of refuses to engage in the mode of the the petting goat, right, or, like, the zoo animal goat very clearly, and watching expectations of people that will go there and, like, the goat doesn't behave in the playful way that it's supposed to, but it's still enjoying itself in various ways that you can kind of think if you watch it and engage it, but it's not participating with you.
Benjamin Meiches:So, like, you know, the idea that you have to be open to playfulness that exceeds what you might be because of your mode of embodiment and, you know, your kind of experience and everything, p sub two, I think, is also there in the background to some extent. Right? Like, play is if it's gonna be ecological, it's gotta be a lot more than just however humans interpret and perceive it or even enjoy it to some extent.
Stefanie Fishel:Or not excused is kind of a behavior. You hear a lot like, oh, well, they're playing to prepare to be violent. They're training themselves to kill. And you're like, really? Like, alright.
Stefanie Fishel:It seems like you went pretty far with that, but okay. Like, that seems to be the around, especially around cat and dog play.
Benjamin Meiches:That's that thing, fatal pragmatism, right, where it it reduces all excess to some, you know, teleological utility or endpoint. And, I mean, a lot of the play stuff here is in the background, kind of Brian Massumi's book, read animal to teach us about politics, which I engage with pretty significantly. And then some of the work that's been done on trying to think about the role of, you know, nonhuman animals and democratic structures. Right? Whether that's kind of Kamala and Sudhai Donaldson's model.
Benjamin Meiches:Right? That's probably the most popularized of that as far as I think about it now. But, you know, that there's a lot in there that is politics that just is totally miss basically nonhuman interactions with humans, but also with one another. That's also why I think that the question of how do the nonhumans change our view of what humanitarian processes are up to is so thorough in the book. Right?
Benjamin Meiches:Like, the point about demining dogs that I make is that it's not only that they're really good at finding mines or explosives, but the reasons that they're so functional in in explosive ecologies, the reason they're so successful is because it's an entirely different life world or death world environment for them. We're sort of just tapping into that whole series of interactions, some of which are very obviously playful and game like at times, even if they're not always games that incorporate humans. And I think that, you know, if you read a very functionalist literature about explosive dog demining or dog bomb detection, it's very like, well, dogs do well with atmospheric dispersion at this level and triggering mechanisms like this and the, you know, the wind and rain pressure and the volume and temperature has changed this, that, and the other, and you have to be careful about other nonhumans that they encounter. And those are all kind of important, but maybe in, like, a Spinozan sense, there's also something else going on in their joy and interaction. And that opens up a little bit of a different way of thinking about the sort of tragedy of explosives that are embedded in the ground, right, which are almost always a product of some kind of great power war or colonial warfare or hegemonic or local armed conflict of some kind that impact noncombatants extensively for generations later.
Benjamin Meiches:But there's some differences in the dispositions that come out from just that model of interaction that are pretty significant, I think. There's a way in which they change the understanding of the sets of problems that are also being encountered, I think.
Stefanie Fishel:Wouldn't we be remiss if we didn't talk about the orcas? Who knows? It might be the beginning of a larger orca movement, but at this point, it's interesting watching how these sorts of things run through, say, social media and such around orca agency, around boats. And I have a friend who's working on a cross stitch that's become ungovernable, right, within orcas. And I know you're into bird strikes and airplanes, these things around agency and how it works.
Stefanie Fishel:What do you think of the orcas?
Benjamin Meiches:I should clarify here that in in the Pacific Northwest where I'm I'm from, and I'm actually speaking right from historically Puyallup lands, where the, like, local conversation has been really interesting in that regard. The most recent touchstone that I saw that got a lot of press was actually, I think it was a chef that was talking about salmon and the absence of being able to find I can't remember which type of salmon it is off the top of my head that the orcas also eat, and, like, being involved in the production of human joy in relationship to the death of these two other species. Right? And sort of like killing off an entire ecosystem through what we put on the plate, which is not an atypical trope, the way that kind of questions of ecology get put together and try to center human power, but in a way that makes people thoughtful about their choices. Right?
Benjamin Meiches:Sort of like the economy is the how we manage our enjoyment, and you can make choices as an individual agent there, although that's often kind of a moralizing discourse. I guess from the purposes of this book and this work, I shied away from talking about nonhuman animals that were outside of the scope of humanitarianism, and I did so for two reasons. One is because I kind of envision the book as primarily about how humanitarianism has encountered this problem. Right? So it's pitched in a narrower audience than some other modes of nonhuman animal or ecocriticism or whatever the genre is that this is actually a part of.
Benjamin Meiches:The multidisciplinary conversation about interspecies affair and how they interact with one another. And then secondly, to sort of ask, like, why isn't and this might be my my point of intervention, I'm getting to it. Like, why isn't the orca a humanitarian question? If humanitarianism or anything, it's very focused on the social world and status of humans, and it hasn't always produced good outcomes on that basis, so much as entrenched certain sets of power relationships and norms and you know, that are gendered and sexed and racialized, etcetera, and that have promulgated at different historical moments, you know, anti blackness and anti indigeneity and other things like that. But it still seems like humanitarianism struggles to articulate and see itself in relationship to enfolding climate crises, which is not just climate change in the Anthropocene writ large, but species extinction, right, which is one of the things that is really kind of at stake there in the background.
Benjamin Meiches:And, again, that's one of the pieces that's kind of fascinating about these organizations is they push a little bit more in that direction than other humanitarian groups go. But it would be a really hard thing to get to the point that, like, saving or considering intervention on behalf of or practicing as nonhuman would be a part of any kind of humanitarian practice. And that's kind of the the contradiction of the paradox that I pull up the most. Right? And, you know, we're in a position where from my understanding and, you know, like, you know, I'm not a climate scientist, but we're we're not in a good place with respects to the way that the future is unfolding for many human communities.
Benjamin Meiches:We've known that for a long time, but that's also a lot of nonhuman communities that are obviously much more flagrantly affected. And it would be interesting with as many resources and considerations about the importance of suffering and attunement and mourning in some cases that are part of humanitarian efforts if those could also be appropriated to this other set of struggles that are obviously interwoven to everything humanitarian organizations are already dealing with.
Stefanie Fishel:And I think a better kind of group to think about would be, you know, elephants, African elephants. Like, that's something where one could I think one could conceivably imagine a a nonhumanitarian crisis there being having to be responded to in similar ways.
Benjamin Meiches:And there are strong resonances and tropes. Right? Like, the humanitarian subject is often positioned as suffering and vulnerable and in need of development and aid and care and sort of the powerful to come in and and control parts. And there's different iterations of that. Right?
Benjamin Meiches:There's some that are strongly white supremacist and colonial. There's some of it that's highly gendered. Right? I'm thinking about, like, you know, Chandra Mahanti under western eyes. Right?
Benjamin Meiches:Like, indicting feminism for its long standing tradition about that, which is now, what, forty years ago that critique was written or something like that. And that resonates with the things we say about nonhuman animals and children. Right? I think Lisa Mulkey's book on this, which is with Duke, is one of my favorite texts where it's like, there's a real powerlessness attributed to children and humanitarian subjects and animals that kind of make them resonate together, and I don't wanna come across as if I think that buying into what might be called sentimentality around all those is the right political response. In fact, we we kinda have to be careful a little bit of some of the emotions that come to that.
Benjamin Meiches:But I agree with you that elephants, orcas fit into this framework then very neatly. Simply popping another thing, another species, another animal into the context, though, I I don't know, kinda gets to the depth that's needed there to some extent. We've seen lots of efforts where there's sort of a one off addition as opposed to the paradigmatic changes that are necessary. And it's always then how do we accommodate this one thing, which, you know, we sort of never stop the machinations of power or economy or capital, whatever your framework is you wanna, you know, hard and articulate those things in, as long as we can sort of preserve some version of that. And I think that Tim Morton's work, Ecology Without Nature or Darkie Colleges, a whole bunch of things that they've written, I think is so powerful is that, like, in some ways, that's the fantasy that there's a still a nature out there that we can, like, preserve the one thing from, and then the rest of it will somehow, you know, might decay, might go together, etcetera.
Benjamin Meiches:And we need to kinda push past that, and I I think that humanitarians that are wrestling with how they deal with nonhuman animals are at different points along that trajectory in thinking about their politics and, you know, maybe ones that have come over the most anthropocentric bias, which in my sense is actually the folks who work with the rats who really have thought through deeply some of these questions, are opening up a lot of different issues. Like, those they're they're now exploring, you know, can the rats be used in animal trafficking to support specific kinds of capture observations that would stop things like that that are, you know, interesting experiments in multi species justice.
Stefanie Fishel:We keep kind of coming back to genres and and ideas. And at the end of your book where you're wrapping up some ideas, you talk about dogs that detect explosive, rats that track infectious disease, and goats that feed the world and nurture human kids are like a company of non human animal heroes from a children's fiction, a genre that leans into the promise of a happy world without hierarchy, without losers, where care springs from encounters with difference. Predator and prey eventually play with one another. The leaves speak their minds freely and the disturbing ends up being the result of prejudice habits rather than ontological scars. I think this is another piece of just the beautiful writing you put in it that although you're controlling one sort of affect, you're bringing another in, which I think is really productive.
Stefanie Fishel:And I thought thinking it as I was reading it, I thought, well, what genre would your book be if, if we were to make this book into a movie? We spoke a little bit before about how, like the cheekiness of it. So I'll give you some ideas and see what you think. I think you've got like a Coetzee inspired book called Nonchalance, Cronenberg type horror, which would be called Explosive Ecology. And, I think in the Lovecraft tradition, I think maybe it fits most here and kind of like if we're looking at like the color pink, the about pink coming and it's like for no reason destroying people, we could call that weird ecology.
Stefanie Fishel:And then I'm not sure where to put this one. Maybe you can help me. I've another one, which would be great, would be called Killing Silence, but I'm not sure who the director Ridley Scott. What do you think? Like, just if you wanted to think about where this was placed a bit a bit more fun, what do you think?
Benjamin Meiches:You know, it's funny. I have a small addendum that was never included in this book where I was thinking about, like, okay. So so where is there sort of, like, an interesting duality of humor and, you know, engagement that shows, like, playfulness, but is also sort of, like, sober about it at the same time as this. And I keep on coming back into my mind that it's sort of in the genre of the film Grizzly Man by Herzog, which I can't figure out a little bit. Like, is it a comedy that shows playfulness with animals that you're supposed to appreciate?
Benjamin Meiches:Is it a horror show that's about, like, the murder and engagement and, like, the death of the surrounding environment? But then there's also, like, I stare into the eyes of the bear, and I don't see anything that's, you know, productive there. And there's these wounds and tragedy surrounding that. So There's, like, all these different pieces that are involved there. I can see any one of those.
Benjamin Meiches:There's definitely a horror element creeping in here in a couple of different ways. Right? There's the horror of the mind ecology or the explosive ecology and how that impacts creatures that ambulate in different ways and differently ambulating creatures. There's definitely, as you said, like, a killing silence. Like, how can the problem of the exploitation here become more of an issue?
Benjamin Meiches:I also think there's something slightly whimsical and enchanted about the articulation that there's, you know, these fuzzy relations that can be ethically significant. I think that I actually cite David Shannon's Duck on a Bike at that particular moment, which is a children's book that everyone should have to read. I don't know. It's about a bunch of animals operate to ride a bike. There's something in that, though, that is very much about envisioning, although it's anthropomorphic extensively, right, equity.
Benjamin Meiches:And it's interesting that that gets framed through figures of nonhuman animals constantly, in which difference is foregrounded morphologically and genetically and biologically and socially and all the attributions there, and yet the lesson becomes clear. I'm thinking about Jack Halberstam's work in which childhood stories often have these kind of radical tensions to them because, like, nobody wants their kids to, like, come away and be like, oh, no. There are clear winners and losers, and it's because of who they are. You can't kind of embrace that, so there's sort of these radical equity horizons that are involved in there. And I think that this is also the case, And yet we both have this, like, strong unsettling of relations, and yet the structure of anthropocentrism never goes away in any of the moments that I explore.
Benjamin Meiches:It's always still kind of known who's leading the animal and who's exposed to danger and who's not. I both kind of wanna capture that creativity in play and also see that there's also this surrounding entrapment that occurs there. So I don't know what I don't know what film genre that is.
Stefanie Fishel:It's more Murakami than it is Disney. You undoubtedly heard my rant that there's this moment when Disney and moving in has become kind of radically more than human in many ways and that most of the films are about how the non human makes us more human. And this started out with Spirit and the Brother Bear. And it's kind of a club, not too nuanced, but I do like the way in which children's stories do, as you're saying, like something about the magicalness of the planet. We are able to learn that through something other than our human experience and how important that is.
Benjamin Meiches:Most of those are situated as some version of deep quasi mystical encounter. Right? It works its transcendent dimensions directly into the thing or promote some essence from which that emerges, whereas this is just the sheer outcome of trying to figure out historically contingent encounters. And I think that that's a very different model for where this occurs, and it requires a lot more care thinking about an encounter with a world that might not be harmonious with yours, but then figuring out how to coexist in it, which is a harder project.
Stefanie Fishel:I picked up In the Dust of This Planet by Eugene Thacker early on and kind of looked at, like, the philosophy of horror and the horror of philosophy and looking at how really philosophy is about the horror of living in the world. And I went back and read through that first book in the middle of the lockdown and went like, this is the book. Like this is the book that explains it all. Kind of you have those moments. And one of the things is that he's getting very much at what you're saying is that there's a world like without us and that the horror of facing this world that can't be anthropocentrized in any way.
Stefanie Fishel:And I think that's one of the things that this pandemic has done in part is put that world, the world that isn't about us at all, right there. And, whether you cope with that or not is a big piece of how you've weathered this pandemic.
Benjamin Meiches:I don't disagree with that. You know, I sort of wanna both hold on to Thacker's language, The World Without Us is a good one. I also really like the term that comes from, I think, at the book afterlife that he wrote, which is blasphemous life, to understand forms of life that should never exist right. Also, sometimes, it appears in humanitarian discourse. Like, I I both wanna to hold on to that kind of as a background through which contingency then kind of plays a really important role in how things materialize, and that's always been a kind of important category in political thought for me.
Benjamin Meiches:But then I also hear you about there's a certain sense of persistence that you're also describing in relationship to that text. And I think there's something in some of these practices that people have latched on to that is interesting that, you know, there's still kind of a question when you're in a relationship with a nonhuman animal because it's just different than other kinds of relationships that can be established and normalized that draw people's curiosity. It's part of what makes them a subject of fascination, not just that there are cute cat photos or whatever. And it's interesting against that broader world without us point because sometimes when I I read Thacker, and this is kind of a mild criticism where people in that genre, there's a sort of mopiness about it that I'm not sure I totally feel all the time in response to the articulation of a world without us, and there's not a human primacy and, you know, the the Nietzschean most horrible thought or whatever it is. There's still value in that kind of dog peddling or at least a possibility for value relative to just kind of giving up, and that's kind of also what I think is fascinating here, that there there is some sort of thriving and an interest and drive, revitalized almost a certain model of humanitarianism, but paradoxically done it through nonhumans, which is not at all who humanitarianism is supposed to be serving.
Benjamin Meiches:That is a signifying something to us about desires that people have that I think is important to take note of.
Stefanie Fishel:I agree. Books are funny things. They become a a funny thing that is like a forensic object at some point. And when you you've often been working on your book for a long time, you're trying not to write the next book in that book. There's kind of challenges where you identify where you go next.
Stefanie Fishel:What kind of doors has this book opened for you?
Benjamin Meiches:I think the next book project is gonna probably be back on the subject of genocide again.
Stefanie Fishel:I thought you were gonna say bird strikes.
Benjamin Meiches:In the end of the acknowledgments, I note that there was kind of a question as to whether or not I was gonna write a book that was about not the concepts of genocide, but some of the materials that were involved there. But instead I opted to write this because my partner just said that, you know, it would be better to pay attention to this because it was a different kind of interest. So it was a good moment where she oriented me and should deserve all the credit for the existence of this book, actually, a % based off a a conversation about thriving and wellness and other things like that that were involved that were well attuned to the COVID pandemic, although that happened before COVID. But it it actually has led to a lot of interesting questions I have about international studies, international relations, which is sort of if we have disciplinary homes, and I work in an interdisciplinary department where I've come from, certainly, there is a shocking lack of attention to the question of nonhuman animals in international studies. And the bird strike thing that you just alluded to is one example of that.
Benjamin Meiches:The problem of birds colliding with planes has occurred since aviation began, but it has only become a problem of security and commercial security and national security, even international security in the past few decades. And so trying to figure out some of the ways that specific nonhuman animals have shaped different types of international practice is also something I've been thinking about beyond. They exist over here in the domain of wildlife and nature and things that must be protected or can be commercially used in the following ways, and there's some agreement on that. You know, there's been some wonderful burgeoning work in the study of armed conflict that have shown how transformative nonhuman animals have been in that context. Like, Stephen Hobden and other people like that that have have written in that area, but I I think it's much more extensive.
Benjamin Meiches:There's a wonderful review of international studies special issue that had some great pieces by yourself and others like Rafia Watt and, you know, the folks that were involved in thinking along those lines.
Stefanie Fishel:We definitely find ourselves in a space that's populated by things that always remain unsaid. I think working on trees was one of the reasons moving into whatever next books we all have in us. It's it's funny the way you're pushed sometimes by things you wouldn't suspect, and I love me a good metaphor. And sometimes these ways of thinking about the world metaphorically through different kinds of actants or critters or whatever can, I think, be a part of our imagination, right, that helps us out?
Benjamin Meiches:I'm on board with that.
Stefanie Fishel:Thanks, Ben. It was awesome hanging out.
Benjamin Meiches:Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Stefanie Fishel:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Nonhuman Humanitarians, Animal Interventions in Global Politics is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.