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Countering Brutality to Wildlife, Relationism and Ethics: Conservation, Welfare and the ‘Ecoversity’

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Wildlife cruelty is commonplace in society. We argue for a new engagement with wildlife through three elements: a relational ethic based on intrinsic understanding of the way wildlife and humans might view each other; a geography of place and space, where there are implications for h...

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Autores principales: Garlick, Steve, Matthews, Julie, Carter, Jennifer
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4552203/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26486221
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ani1010161
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author Garlick, Steve
Matthews, Julie
Carter, Jennifer
author_facet Garlick, Steve
Matthews, Julie
Carter, Jennifer
author_sort Garlick, Steve
collection PubMed
description SIMPLE SUMMARY: Wildlife cruelty is commonplace in society. We argue for a new engagement with wildlife through three elements: a relational ethic based on intrinsic understanding of the way wildlife and humans might view each other; a geography of place and space, where there are implications for how we ascribe contextual meaning and practice in human-animal relations; and, engaged learning designed around our ethical relations with others, beyond the biophysical and novel, and towards the reflective metaphysical. We propose the ‘ecoversity’, as a scholarly and practical tool for focusing on the intersection of these three elements as an ethical place-based learning approach. ABSTRACT: Wildlife objectification and cruelty are everyday aspects of Australian society that eschew values of human kindness, empathy, and an understanding of the uniqueness and importance of non-human life in the natural world. Fostered by institutional failure, greed and selfishness, and the worst aspects of human disregard, the objectification of animals has its roots in longstanding Western anthropocentric philosophical perspectives, post colonialism, and a global uptake of neoliberal capitalism. Conservation, animal rights and welfare movements have been unable to stem the ever-growing abuse of wildlife, while ‘greenwash’ language such as ‘resource use’, ‘management’, ‘pests’, ‘over-abundance’, ‘conservation hunting’ and ‘ecology’ coat this violence with a respectable public veneer. We propose an engaged learning approach to address the burgeoning culture of wildlife cruelty and objectification that comprises three elements: a relational ethic based on intrinsic understanding of the way wildlife and humans might view each other [1,2,3]; geography of place and space [4], where there are implications for how we ascribe contextual meaning and practice in human-animal relations; and, following [5], engaged learning designed around our ethical relations with others, beyond the biophysical and novel and towards the reflective metaphysical. We propose the ‘ecoversity’ [6], as a scholarly and practical tool for focusing on the intersection of these three elements as an ethical place-based learning approach to wildlife relationism. We believe it provides a mechanism to help bridge the gap between human and non-human animals, conservation and welfare, science and understanding, and between objectification and relationism as a means of addressing entrenched cruelty to wildlife.
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spelling pubmed-45522032015-09-30 Countering Brutality to Wildlife, Relationism and Ethics: Conservation, Welfare and the ‘Ecoversity’ Garlick, Steve Matthews, Julie Carter, Jennifer Animals (Basel) Article SIMPLE SUMMARY: Wildlife cruelty is commonplace in society. We argue for a new engagement with wildlife through three elements: a relational ethic based on intrinsic understanding of the way wildlife and humans might view each other; a geography of place and space, where there are implications for how we ascribe contextual meaning and practice in human-animal relations; and, engaged learning designed around our ethical relations with others, beyond the biophysical and novel, and towards the reflective metaphysical. We propose the ‘ecoversity’, as a scholarly and practical tool for focusing on the intersection of these three elements as an ethical place-based learning approach. ABSTRACT: Wildlife objectification and cruelty are everyday aspects of Australian society that eschew values of human kindness, empathy, and an understanding of the uniqueness and importance of non-human life in the natural world. Fostered by institutional failure, greed and selfishness, and the worst aspects of human disregard, the objectification of animals has its roots in longstanding Western anthropocentric philosophical perspectives, post colonialism, and a global uptake of neoliberal capitalism. Conservation, animal rights and welfare movements have been unable to stem the ever-growing abuse of wildlife, while ‘greenwash’ language such as ‘resource use’, ‘management’, ‘pests’, ‘over-abundance’, ‘conservation hunting’ and ‘ecology’ coat this violence with a respectable public veneer. We propose an engaged learning approach to address the burgeoning culture of wildlife cruelty and objectification that comprises three elements: a relational ethic based on intrinsic understanding of the way wildlife and humans might view each other [1,2,3]; geography of place and space [4], where there are implications for how we ascribe contextual meaning and practice in human-animal relations; and, following [5], engaged learning designed around our ethical relations with others, beyond the biophysical and novel and towards the reflective metaphysical. We propose the ‘ecoversity’ [6], as a scholarly and practical tool for focusing on the intersection of these three elements as an ethical place-based learning approach to wildlife relationism. We believe it provides a mechanism to help bridge the gap between human and non-human animals, conservation and welfare, science and understanding, and between objectification and relationism as a means of addressing entrenched cruelty to wildlife. MDPI 2011-01-27 /pmc/articles/PMC4552203/ /pubmed/26486221 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ani1010161 Text en © 2011 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Garlick, Steve
Matthews, Julie
Carter, Jennifer
Countering Brutality to Wildlife, Relationism and Ethics: Conservation, Welfare and the ‘Ecoversity’
title Countering Brutality to Wildlife, Relationism and Ethics: Conservation, Welfare and the ‘Ecoversity’
title_full Countering Brutality to Wildlife, Relationism and Ethics: Conservation, Welfare and the ‘Ecoversity’
title_fullStr Countering Brutality to Wildlife, Relationism and Ethics: Conservation, Welfare and the ‘Ecoversity’
title_full_unstemmed Countering Brutality to Wildlife, Relationism and Ethics: Conservation, Welfare and the ‘Ecoversity’
title_short Countering Brutality to Wildlife, Relationism and Ethics: Conservation, Welfare and the ‘Ecoversity’
title_sort countering brutality to wildlife, relationism and ethics: conservation, welfare and the ‘ecoversity’
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4552203/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26486221
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ani1010161
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