Document type : article published in The Conversation
Authors: Vanina Deneux-Le Barh and Sébastien Mouret
Preview: A dog that guides a visually impaired person, a galloping horse at the races or a dolphin in a show... Many more examples are available of animals at work in various socio-professional environments. All reveal the centrality of work in the encounters and collaborations between humans and animals and, more broadly, in the history of domestication. They invite us to reconsider what our Western societies have come to regard as a human attribute: work. Since the emergence of the "animal question", studies on the relations between humans and animals, also known as animal studies, have embarked on a wide-ranging review of the boundaries we. have set between these two species, embracing culture, morality, language, and emotions - a list to which work has now been added. A number of key works have revisited the Marxist labor legacies that permeate the cultural fabric of our societies, showing that animals are not simply objects to be worked on by humans, but are instead subjects of labor who actively participate in our societies' domestic and market economies of our societies. (...)
Animals at work
How can we understand our working relationships with animals? What does "being at work" mean for dogs, horses, cows, etc.? The sociology of animal work begun by Jocelyne Porcher, to which our own research makes a contribution, provides elements that are decisive to understanding by studying the collaboration of animals at work, exploring in particular what working for an animal means, drawing on the concept of working created by the psychodynamics of work as a means to study human work. For animals, working entails the mobilization of their subjectivity - their sentience and cognition - to bridge the gap between what is prescribed - what we ask them to do - and what is real - the unforeseen and the random - in the various tasks we entrust to them: caring for vulnerable people (disability, illness, trauma), in the case of guide dogs; ensuring safety in public places, in the case of police dogs and horses; competing in sporting events, in the case of racehorses and horses at equestrian centers; performing on stage (cinema; live shows); or contributing to agricultural tasks, in the case of cows. Or, as pets, meeting our expectations of love and affection. The many forms of animal work reveal that animals do much more than just the work prescribed to them: they are working partners who face up to the complexity of reality, develop physical skills and competencies, work in coordination with humans, express their expectations to be recognised, to develop emotional ties, etc. By taking into account the subjectivity of animals at work, we also assume that there is "someone" working.
Thinking about animal work
Thinking about animal work has major ethical, political and historical implications for the way we build a new relationship between our societies and domestic animals. The most important, in our view, is that animal work should not be dismissed, leading to calls for societies where no work with animals is carried out. Animal rights movements nourish this abolitionist vision, seeking an end to domestication, which they consider to bring nothing but suffering and exploitation for animals. Or the aspiration, not without a moralistic overtone, among the reformist fringe that animals should only perform good work. This rejection of animal work also runs through parts of the ecological movement, where putting nature, and therefore animals, to work effectively involves a production-based regime and the heavy hand of capitalist exploitation. (...)
But while work can be a cause of suffering, it can also be a source of pleasure and emancipation, for us as well as for animals. This postulate is central to the sociology of animal work. Work isn't just about production. It's also about humans and animals living together. And building their own identities. We need to understand what happens to subjectivity, our own and that of animals, in terms of pleasure and suffering, through the forms of cooperation and, conversely, domination that develop in the course of work. Our working relationships with animals involve exploitation, violence and indifference. This is a reality not to be denied. But they are also based on forms of respect, love and cooperation between humans and animals, where work can lead to emancipation for each partner species. They invite us to think of our responsibility towards animals in terms of instrumentality, asymmetry and inequality and this calls, in particular, for a reconsideration of the place of animal death. It would be a mistake to think about our responsibility without paying heed to necessity or to work. Such is the epistemological and political reflection we are pursuing within the Animal's Lab research collective.
