Comparing Ingold's Humanity And Exploitation Of Animals

The human-animal relationship is a complicated, and long debated connection that has deep running impacts on our lives, and worldviews. The understanding of what is around us be it an insect or the beloved animal we come home to allows for a more complete understanding of not only ourselves but our relationship with the world surrounding us. In a personal contemplation of animality, stemmed from Ingold’s Humanity and Animality essay, I have been able to pinpoint specific animal relationships that have deep roots in my perspective on the human-animal dynamic. The use and exploitation of animals for human profit, nourishment, and livelihood within the dairy industry has set forth a relation to animals deeply ingrained in my life, and while

Solely from the ability to conceptualize how a variance in sense can dramatically define an intellect for an individual, is it possible our capability in understanding the animal’s senses and possible intellect can define our intellect as more powerful? My own view is that this is a defining point in the human-animal boundary and shows our species intellectual power in comparison to the animal. Though I concede that the animal has a capacity for understanding the human sense and adjusting their methods of communication to meet these capacities. As I have seen through my own experience working with livestock, in an ideal environment the cattle don’t even seem to communicate through making sounds, unless under severe distress to make others in the herd aware of immediate dangers. Yet, there is a blatant distinction in the sounds made to alert the human caretakers of different forms of distress versus the methods of expressing distress to one another. In the instances in which cattle find themselves in situations that they cannot remove themselves from without the assistance of the caretaker, the cow will make her distinct call, maintain eye contact with the caregiver and show signs of distress clearly identified by the human. Through this, I still maintain that the aforementioned example is a method of exemplifying dependency on the human abilities and intellect for continued care and wellbeing. It is interesting to note that in most cases cattle within the area don’t seem distressed by the animal’s clear predicament, and continue with their typical tasks possibly exemplifying a restricted intellect in that manner as