As a career ethologist, I was thrilled when I learned about Dr. Matthew Calarco’s new and highly original book titled The Three Ethologies: A Positive Vision for Rebuilding Human-Animal Relationships.1 After reading it, I highly recommend it to a broad interdisciplinary audience because of Matt’s development of a new philosophy for understanding animal behavior through three distinct but interrelated lenses: “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.” I’ve been thinking about these different views for a long time and marvel at how Matt ties them together into a coherent whole that advocates goodness, truth, and beauty. Here’s what he had to say about his landmark book.
Looking for dingoes in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney Australia. Along with many others, years ago I was criticized for “just watching” animals but in 1973, three ethologists won The Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine (see note 1).
Source: Marc Bekoff
Marc Bekoff: Why did you write The Three Ethologies?
Matthew Calarco: The main ideas and practices discussed in this book have been on my mind and part of my daily life for a very long time now, and they finally seemed ripe for sharing with others. I hope that some of the material will be of use to practitioners and scholars in animal studies and the environmental humanities.
MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?
MC: This book grows out of a longstanding interest in ethological research and its influence on animal studies and animal activism.
MB: Who do you hope to reach in your interesting and important book?
MC: People who read books in the field of animal studies and the environmental humanities come from all over the scholarly and activist map. I have tried to write a book that will reach a wide swath of that audience. I hope I have succeeded!
Source: University of Chicago Press/with permission.
MB: What are some of the major topics you consider?
MC: My general aim in the book is to present the practice of ethology in a more expansive way, including but going beyond the traditional notion of ethology as the scientific study of animal behavior in natural settings. I argue that a more expansive notion of ethology—one that encompasses attention to the domains of subjectivity, society, and the environment—can provide a fresh perspective on what is at stake in pro-animal movements.
Part of my argument is that these other dimensions of ethology are implicit in what you, Marc, once called “deep ethology”—an ethology that takes the scientific study of animals seriously but that does so from an ethically informed perspective that aims at transforming human-animal relationships. So, let me offer a brief word about the three different kinds of ethology I discuss in the main chapters of the book and how they figure in this project of transformation.
The first is mental ethology, or the study of the inner lives and perspectives of animals. I try to show how such study can have a transformative effect on researchers themselves, as it tends to foster increased empathy for animals and to break down traditional barriers that have been erected between us and other species.
The second is social ethology, which examines the collective lives of animals. Considering animals’ social lives—how they live and die together, share information, acquire culture, interact with other species, and so on—not only expands our appreciation for the complexity of the animal kingdom; it also offers us important clues for how we might restructure our cities, towns, and neighborhoods to be more welcoming to more-than-human others.
The third is environmental ethology, which is the study of the habitats in which animals live. Although it is important to value animals as individuals, it is also important to consider their environments and milieus, especially given the ways in which contemporary ecological degradation threatens animals’ flourishing and continued existence. Consideration of the land also invites us to attend to the complex intersection of pro-animal discourse and activism with critiques of settler colonialism from Indigenous studies. In what ways are movements for animal liberation and animal flourishing consonant and/or in tension with resurgent Indigenous politics involving the more-than-human world?
In the Conclusion of the book, I argue that this three-pronged notion of ethology should be seen not just as a set of research methods for specialists but as a general way of life that aims at reconstituting better and more respectful human-animal relationships. More specifically, I explain how an ethological-philosophical way of life offers a distinctive and novel way of understanding goodness, beauty, and truth.
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MB: How does your book differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?
MC: There is an emerging body of work that is similarly focused on the philosophical aspects of ethology, but much of it is—in my view, at least—rather divorced from ethical and political activism. My work, by contrast, starts from within this activist orbit and tries to tease out its implicit ethologies and corresponding way of life.
MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about your work they will reassess the nature of human-animal relationships and make them more reciprocal and equitable?
NCL Yes, I am hopeful that such reassessments and change will take place. There is an urgent need for thoroughgoing and multi-faceted change in human-animal interactions, and the book is dedicated to thinking through those some of those changes and offering (what I hope) are useful strategies and frameworks for pursuing such change.