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Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet

Article  in  Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics · December 2008

DOI: 10.1007/s10806-008-9108-7

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J Agric Environ Ethics (2008) 21:609–611
DOI 10.1007/s10806-008-9108-7

Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008. 423 + pp

Anna Peterson

Published online: 8 July 2008

Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Donna Haraway is a path-breaking feminist philosopher of science, perhaps best known for
her essay ‘‘The Cyborg Manifesto.’’ She has written about a wide range of topics within the
broad field of ‘‘science studies,’’ including primatology, technology, and science fiction.
Her two most recent books delve into the relations between humans and non-human
animals, especially dogs. In 2003 she published The Companion Species Manifesto, a
concise reflection on two questions: ‘‘how might an ethics and politics committed to the
flourishing of significant otherness be learned from taking dog–human relationships seri-
ously,’’ and ‘‘how might stories about dog–human worlds finally convince brain-damaged
US Americans, and maybe other less historically challenged people, that history matters in
naturecultures?’’ (Haraway 2003). She expands this project in her newest book, When
Species Meet, keeping at its heart ‘‘stories about dog–human worlds,’’ interwoven with
reflections on other creatures, gender, disability, agriculture, science, globalization, Marx,
and love, among other topics. At its best, When Species Meet is Donna Haraway at her best,
which is about as good as it gets.
That said, not every part of the book comes together equally well. Chapters on chickens
and on National Geographic’s ‘‘crittercam,’’ in particular, struck me as sometimes abstract
and technical, falling short of the eclectic yet focused theoretical reflection in which
Haraway specializes. In a different way, the discussions of the intricacies of ‘‘purebred
dogland,’’ specifically Australian shepherd-land, occasionally bogged down in too much
detail for non-afficionados. The brilliance of the book’s best chapters, however, more than
make up for the occasional unevenness.
Haraway’s guiding questions are first, ‘‘Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog?,’’
and second, ‘‘How is ‘becoming with’ a practice of becoming worldly?’’ (p. 3). The notion of
‘‘becoming with’’ runs throughout the book. A major part of Haraway’s project here, as in much
of her previous work, is to rethink humanness. She argues that being human is inextricably tied
to ‘‘becoming with’’ other species, and especially dogs. We ‘‘become with’’ other animals
because non-humans also have ‘‘face,’’ as Haraway puts it; they are subjects, respondents,

A. Peterson (&)
Department of Religion, University of Florida, 117 Anderson Hall, P.O. Box 117410, Gainesville,
FL 32611-7410, USA
e-mail: alp@religion.ufl.edu

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610 A. Peterson

active agents in their own worlds and our own. Our relationships and communications with
dogs and other non-human species are as much part of our history and psychology as are
interhuman relationships. (Here Mary Midgley’s notion of the ‘‘mixed community,’’ intro-
duced in her 1978 book Animals and Why They Matter, came to mind).
Cross-species interactions require different ways of relating, especially nonlinguistic
communication such as touch. They require, further, knowledge of what is polite with
regards to a particular species. Haraway cites a multi-lingual hiking brochure she
encountered in the Alps, exhorting hikers to ‘‘be on your best countryside behavior’’ and
offering instructions about how to interact politely with livestock guardian dogs and their
flocks. Haraway is struck by the brochure’s intrinsic regard for non-human animals. ‘‘The
exercise of good manners makes the competent working animals those whom the people
need to learn to recognize. The ones with face were not all human’’ (p. 42).
Manners and politeness may not seem a likely segue to Marx, but Haraway makes this
connection work. Her experiences with working dogs lead effortlessly, somehow, to a
reconsideration of Marx’s theory of value. In addition to Marx’s notions of use-value and
exchange-value, Haraway proposes ‘‘encounter-value.’’ This category is necessary once we
accept the notion that ‘‘To be one is always to become with many’’ (p. 4), and that the
many are mostly not human. Haraway finds Marx crucial for conceptualizing the process of
‘‘becoming with,’’ in part because labor is a more helpful category for thinking about non-
human animals than is the Enlightenment emphasis on rights (p. 73). Thinking about Marx
also leads her to note that while human relationships with non-human ‘‘significant others’’
are complex, valuable, and defining, they are not (usually) between equals. Because human
relations to non-human animals are so often asymmetrical, with most of the power on the
human side, they lead necessarily to consideration of ethical issues such as suffering,
wickedness, and responsibility. Haraway insists on responsibility and what she terms
‘‘response-ability,’’ on both human and non-human sides, while rejecting certain moral
absolutes, such as a prohibition on killing animals used in medical experiments. Rather
than ‘‘Thou shalt not kill,’’ she suggests, a better commandment might be ‘‘Thou shalt not
make killable,’’ meaning that no creature is simply an object of use, and that the humans
involved with any animals work continually to respond to them as subjects (p. 80). Thus
Haraway writes:
I act; I do not hide my calculations that motivate the action. I am not thereby quit of
my debts and it’s more than just debts. I am not quit of response-ability, which
demands calculations but is not finished when the best cost-benefit analysis of the
day is done and not finished when the best animal welfare regulations are followed to
the letter. Calculations – reasons – are obligatory and radically insufficient for
companion-species worldliness. The space opened up by words like forgive and
wicked remains (p. 88).
This passage sums up the emphasis on response, mutual agency, and multiplicity of
meaning that runs throughout the book. The multiplicity sometimes becomes over-
whelming, at least for readers who are less expansively literate than Haraway, but more
often than not she ties her most complex philosophical arguments to concrete and worldly
experiences, notably her dog agility work with her Australian shepherd Cayenne. In
thinking about her bond with Cayenne and about what happens between dogs and people
doing agility work, Haraway pulls a host of the book’s diverse threads together. Her
working relationship with Cayenne gives flesh to her claims that non-humans have face,
that cross-species relationships are always two-way streets, and that while we must strive
to understand each other better, complex creatures will never be transparent to each other:

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Book Review 611

Disarmed of the fantasy of climbing into heads, one’s own or others’, to get the full
story from the inside, we can make some multispecies semiotic progress. To claim
not to be able to communicate with and to know one another and other critters,
however imperfectly, is a denial of mortal entanglements (the open) for which we are
responsible and in which we respond. Technique, calculation, method – all are
indispensable and exacting. But they are not response, which is irreducible to cal-
culation. Response is comprehending that subject-making connection is real.
Response is face-to-face in the contact-zone of an entangled relationship (pp. 226–
227).
The philosophical reflections prompted by her relationship with her agility dog are inter-
twined with emotional insights: ‘‘my over-the-top love for Cayenne has required my body to
build a bigger heart with more depths and tones for tenderness. Maybe that is what makes me
need to be honest; maybe this kind of love makes one need to see what is really happening
because the loved one deserves it. There is nothing like the unconditional love that people
ascribe to their dogs!’’ (p. 215). This unconditional love runs through Haraway’s arguments
about French philosophers, globalization, and industrial agriculture, just as it runs through her
agility work with Cayenne. What holds the book’s diverse threads together in the end (besides
the author’s over-the-top intellectual power) is the grounded, nitty–gritty relationship she and
Cayenne have forged and her understanding that such relations are legion. ‘‘Animals are
everywhere full partners in worlding, in becoming with. Human and nonhuman animals are
companion species, messmates at table, eating together, whether we know how to eat well or
not’’ (p. 301). When Species Meet is a sophisticated intellectual reflection on how we eat and
work with other creatures and at the same time a passionate moral exhortation to move toward
fuller partnerships with them.

References

Haraway, D. J. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness (p. 3).
Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

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