Ed Ingebretsen likely was not thinking about Ukraine as he prepared a recent presentation on the relationship between humans and animals. But when it came time to deliver his talk—during a Meetup just days after Russia sent troops to Ukraine’s eastern regions—he explicitly made the connection between humans’ willingness to dominate animals and—in Ukraine’s case—other people.

“I do not apologize for making the kinds of links I am making between situations in social history as well as current military history,” Ingebretsen told an online audience of about 70 people.

At the heart of Ingebretsen’s argument is that the assumed superiority of humans over other animals—speciesism—is comparable and even allows for other unacceptable forms of discriminiation such as racism and sexism. He points to an image of a collar, dated 1857, from Birmingham, Alabama. The inscription: “Collar for horses, mules, and dark African niggers.”

“Once we sorted out that humans were exceptions to other animals, when did we start sorting out and hierarchizing humans into higher and lower places?” he asks.

In the beginning

Ingebretsen, an associate professor in the English department and director of the American studies program at George Washington University, cites philosophers and thinkers along the entire gamut of positions on the “vexed” relationship between people and animals. But Ingebretsen places the root of this speciesism squarely with the Western interpretation of the Bible. Specifically, he says, the mindset goes back to Genesis’s mandate to exercise “dominion” over the earth.

He acknowledges that many people interpret this first book of the Bible to mean humans are, in fact, a superior species. But he maintains that reading is “careless.”

“In the beginning, there was no ‘dominion.’ Things were different. All sentient creatures shared Eden together,” he says. Ingebretesen points to another Biblical passage, Isaiah’s vision, where the “wolf shall dwell with the lamb.” Think of Edward Hicks’ “A Peaceable Kingdom.”

“Clearly, this is not a world in which we currently live.”

Ingebretsen cites numerous philosophers who have tackled the thorny topic of the relationship between humans and animals—Aristotle, Augustine, Jeremy Bentham, and John Locke as well as the Greeks and Eastern thinkers. But he also employs science in his task. In 2012, a conference in the United Kingdom on consciousness in human and non-human animals concluded that “the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” In fact, the researchers specifically noted, humans are no different in this regard from all animals and birds and octupuses.

“Most of us sit here and go, ‘It took them until 2012 to decide this?’” he says. “You can Google the top ten species for intelligence and you will be very surprised.”

Ingebretsen acknowledges he tends to ask more questions than he resolves, but insists a careful re-examination of humans’ relationship with the natural world will encourage a more thoughtful, peaceful relationship with each other. “We can’t undo the history of the last three days. What do we do with the messy world we are now making messier?”

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Meetup presentation

Dominion: What History Teaches Us, by Ed Ingebretson

Additional Reading

Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, by Charles Patterson

Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog, by Gary Francione and Alan Watson