The Three Ethologies: A Positive Vision for Rebuilding Human-Animal Relationships

by Matthew Calarco

A transformative vision for human-animal relations on personal, social, and environmental levels.

The Three Ethologies offers a fresh, affirmative vision for rebuilding human-animal relations. Venturing beyond the usual scholarly and activist emphasis on restricting harm, Matthew Calarco develops a new philosophy for understanding animal behavior, a practice known as ethology, through three distinct but interrelated mental ethology, which rebuilds individual subjectivity; social ethology, which rethinks our communal relations; and environmental ethology, which reconfigures our relationship to the land we co-inhabit with our animal kin. Drawing on developments in philosophy, (eco-)feminist theory, critical geography, Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities, Calarco casts an inspiring vision of how ethological living can help us to reimagine our ideas about goodness, truth, and beauty.

Genres: Nonfiction

160 pages, Hardcover

Published May 20, 2024

About the author

Matthew Calarco is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University Fullerton, USA.

Reviews

[Cleo Frances]

“Yet we cannot deny that, in an age of ecological catastrophe, mass killing, and mass extinction, learning to see the world with and alongside animals will inevitably expose us to the profound grief that attends such destruction. To live in this manner, exposed at the same time to the very worst and the very best, is to live dangerously, to risk everything—but this is a "fine risk to be run," perhaps the finest risk we can take. It is the risk of opening ourselves to our animal and earthly kin in love, resolving to live "wild" lives with them, to remain in community with them, even in the midst of irreversible planetary decline and unthinkable amounts of useless suf-fering. For those of us desiring to pursue a worthwhile life and death with animals in the age we find ourselves in, few other paths remain open.”

[Dayton Martindale]

Calarco adopts the use of ethology as the science of animal behavior into a broader practice of assessing animal subjectivities and relationships in three registers, which he calls mental, social, and environmental. A highlight is grounding each chapter in a story of human relationship with a wild animal, from the crows in the author’s yard to a herd of mule deer studied by a scientist. I found myself wanting more, though—I found the general framework promising but at 116 pages (excluding footnote) it felt like too brief of an appetizer. Maybe that’s part of the point, though, to develop a framework in which others can continue the work in different directions.