It’s time to leave behind the theories of instinctual behavior in animals. Why did we as animal rights advocates buy into the very schemes that have been set up in the first place to legitimate animal oppression? It’s theoretically possible to establish new norms and standards, new normalities in our concept of nonhumans, with which we should be able to explain, or rather describe, all that what we want and need to express in regards to nonhuman animals.
We readily take the boxes that the sciences hand over to us, into which we place “everything animal”, but then we claim “hey animals have rights and they have rights to their freedom”. But it’s exactly with those categories of zoology and biology that we unwillingly bereave them of their own world. You can’t take a living being out of his or her contexts, but that’s what the sciences do: they dissect life, they track life, they control every bit of a living being to draw conclusions. This form of approaching nonhumans is in itself an incredibly disrespectful stance.
It must be possible to reach new shores to discuss animals and their lives in a manner that would properly fit a liberation movement dedicated to their interests.
Animal liberation is for a part a matter of expanding our own views first; we are the ones who hold the animal world hostage to our mostly wrong views of them.
These other worlds and not-human cultures have their own terms, can we open our minds to that circumstance?