Animal Minds, Humanitarian Designs: Interventions with Nonhuman Others

In response to the fervor of theological animosity, the zeal of nationalist xenophobia, the bloodshed of modern battle, and the creed of callous self-interest, humanitarianism strives for a politics with an expanded moral circle based on nothing more than the human condition. It is human ingenuity, human design, and human ethical capacities that make this moral expansion possible. Humanity, the fable goes, is the pathway to its own salvation. This circular proposition reveals something obvious and troubling: humanitarianism is anthropocentric. This is obvious because humanitarianism champions the unique qualities and significance of human existence. Obvious because humanitarianism seeks to improve distinctly human lives. Obvious because many of the questions posed by humanitarian interventions concern the minimal needs for warmth, water, nutrition, protection, and medicine required by a human. But it is also troubling because the notion of the “human” has historically been constructed in opposition to Blackness, disability, femininity, and Indigeneity.1 Troubling because optimizing politics for merely meeting a human’s basic needs can turn living into virtual imprisonment.2 Troubling because humanitarianism sometimes has no vision for harm beyond the horizon of humanity in an era where contemporary violence jeopardizes far, far more than human life.3 Indeed, if humanitarianism strives to produce a form of politics with an expanded moral circle, then animality is like a design flaw, the ever-displaced limit of this expansion.

Many critiques of humanitarianism point out how “human” conduct is juxtaposed with forms of uncivilized, subhuman, barbarous, or lesser existence.4 Others view humanitarianism as a mechanism for producing bare life.5 Some critics contend that humanitarianism contributes to the construction of an archipelago of control that divides those whose humanity is never in doubt from those who can never quite become human.6 In each of these polemics, the concept of the nonhuman or the animal flickers into the argument as the underside of humanitarian standards. One of the problems highlighted by these critiques is that humanitarians reduce real, living, singular humans to a lower, animal level. Critics seek to resist this logic by recognizing the value of these dehumanized lives, to see them as more than bare life. However, current critiques rarely question whether nonhuman animal lives should be equated with a lesser mode of existence in the first place. These critiques therefore almost function like supercharged versions of humanitarianism itself insofar as they aggressively fault humanitarian interventions for daring to treat a human like an animal, yet never call into question the anthropocentric conceit at the heart of this judgment. Incomplete universalism (actual humanitarian interventions) advocated for in the name of full universalism (the ideal of humanitarianism) is held to the standard of a yet more complete universalism in the guise of a critical stance (humanitarianism without fault).7 The stronger the aspiration to expand the moral circle of humanitarianism to other humans, the more that the other-than-human remains its limit, its vanishing point. Anthropocentrism, understood as a specific cultural paradigm of prioritizing the notion of human life, has become the norm in contemporary societies. What makes the problem pressing in the humanitarian context is that many humanitarian interventions now explicitly use the labor and life of nonhuman animals to deliver more effective forms of assistance.8 By foregrounding the human while directly exploiting nonhuman labor, the limit of humanitarianism becomes not just a question of a moral blindness, but of harvesting nonhuman lifeforms for the purposes of expanding humanitarianism’s politics of empathy.

Consider the practices of APOPO (Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development). Founded in the late 1990s in Belgium, APOPO employs African giant pouched rats in collaborative labor with two humans to identify buried explosive devices and has supported operations in Angola, Senegal, Cambodia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Thailand, Mozambique, and many other countries.9 In APOPO’s practices, a rat is attached to a string and crawls over an area suspected of having explosives, moving back and forth on the string between two human handlers. Rats do not weigh enough to trigger most explosive devices and remain safe through the entire process. Using olfactory capacities that greatly exceed even the most refined human nose, the rats can scent the chemical signatures of TNT or DNT and alert their handlers to the presence of the explosive.10 An excavation team may then begin to safely remove the explosive.11 From one point of view, the rat here is an efficient, inexpensive, and effective tool for identifying explosives, which reduces danger for humans. Trained to a degree of success that parallels explosive detection dogs, able to socialize with humans without fear if introduced at the appropriate age, cheap to feed and maintain, and readily available locally unlike more costly explosive clearance technology, repurposing the olfactory and other embodied capacities of rats for explosives detection work is arguably an excellent use of distinct biomorphology and ecological resources. However, this framing only evaluates the benefits of rat labor in human terms: how many landmines cleared, how many human lives protected. These are certainly important outcomes, but they neglect the complexity and nuance of human-rat interaction, as well as the surplus effects of bringing rats and humans together into the humanitarian foray. Rats are obviously not born humanitarians; they become humanitarians. Like many mammals, they have pro-social interactions mainly with members of their own species, but explosive detection work requires advanced, repetitive training, significant positive reinforcement, demonstrated capacity in the field, as well as success in social interactions between human handlers and their rat partners. The process also needed dedicated scientific research on rat livelihoods, social relationships, diet, and sensibilities to make it possible. In the language of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, APOPO’s practice emerges from real, but historically non-actual capacities in human-rat interactions.12

Humanitarianism and the Problem of Nonhuman Minds

Designing any project or space dedicated to improving the lives of others touches on the philosophical problem of other minds. What mental states, beliefs, desires, and self-identified needs does another being have? The existence of another mind is typically assumed in most human-human interactions and, as the late philosopher Daniel Dennett proposes, usually assumes a model of intentionality: “first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to future its goals in the light of its beliefs.”13 Humanitarian efforts are structured around something like this theory of mind: they identify the presumptive goals of people in need based on stipulations about their beliefs and behavior and pursue the fulfillment of these needs. If people mainly die because of lack of food, water, shelter, disease, injury, or exposure, and these are presumed to be the desires of a human mind, then the goals of humanitarianism are typically to supply remedies for these conditions, thus solving challenges presumed to be basic goals of other humans.

The anthropologist Didier Fassin maintains that humanitarianism always concerns the governance of these basic considerations regarding what constitutes a preferable or savable form of life.14 But humanitarian efforts and ideologies are not one; they neither reflect a single internally consistent set of principles nor advocate for only one image of human life. According to Samuel Moyn, humanitarianism expanded in the aftermath of the collapse of other grand visions of political equity as minimalist rhetoric or point of agreement regarding human well-being.15 Moreover, as Michael Barnett points out, humanitarianism frequently works at the service of empire, or, as Teju Cole opines, as an extension of white supremacy.16 That said, a critique of humanitarianism overdetermines both the meaning and value of its practices if it treats all humanitarianisms as the same, or assumes that they maintain an essentially uniform theory of the human mind—to say nothing of their engagement with other forms of life such as nonhuman animals. If, as Liisa Malkki argues, humanitarianism resonates with politics of animal welfare, experiments such as APOPO’s new concepts or approaches into engagements with more-than-human politics could deepen the pursuit of multispecies justice.17

Indeed, humanitarian work with nonhuman animals, such as APOPO’s labor with rats, requires constructing a very different theory of mind from the one that guides human-human interactions for several reasons. First, modern European thought historically views nonhuman animals as lacking sufficiently developed consciousness or agentic capacities and links this to their secondary moral status. This legacy informs some strands of humanitarianism and its relation to nonhuman others, but contemporary ethological evidence contests this narrow view of the sentience and sapience of nonhuman animals.18 Second, as Jacques Derrida contends, the category of the animal is used to corral vastly different forms of life without an organizing principle beyond not being human.19 Just as a presumptive model of human belief or intention has reductive effects, so too must humanitarian work with nonhuman animals engage not just one mind, but minds plural, each with its own perception or conception of the world. Third, from a practical perspective, even if nonhuman animals were seen as having minds and singular mental states specific to their mode of being, the epistemological gap between attributing these minds to nonhumans and understanding this form of experience is daunting even for professional ethologists, which extensive scientific, social, and emotional labor is required to explore, if not fully eliminate.20 Fourth, humanitarian interest in nonhuman animals tends to employ specific capacities of nonhuman animals to improve the efficacy of a given task (clearing landmines, delivering food aid, etc.) rather than, as they do with humans, employing a theory of mind to consider the needs, desires, and beliefs of the nonhuman animals they work with. The humanitarian theory of nonhuman mind, insofar as it exists, is functional, organized to elicit a particular action or behavior, and treats the well-being of nonhuman others as a secondary consideration or design element in the service of its purpose. Many organizations such as APOPO, however, also advocate for more generous relations to nonhumans like rats through exposure to their work.

Steps Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Humanitarianism

Diminishing the anthropocentric aspects of humanitarian work means more than simply incorporating some version of the needs of nonhuman animals into humanitarian projects (something they already do in appealing to discourses on animal welfare), nor is it sufficient to merely pay respects to nonhuman humanitarians through rewards and formal recognition (something that already occurs), nor to just expand humanitarianism’s moral circle to include nonhuman animals (something that happens with groups like Veterinarians Without Borders).21 Rather, the question is whether and how experiments in humanitarianism that involve mutual interaction and learning with nonhuman animals can enrich and transform humanitarian practice. Does the fact that human-nonhuman engagements in humanitarian practice require exploring a relation across forms of life—one that is often, but not thoroughly reducible to scientific inquiry, motivated by concern mainly for humans, but demanding an exploration of a very different mind, needs, and attendant world—provide a pathway for changing the design of humanitarian projects in ways that are beneficial to humans and nonhumans alike?

One common objection to this line of thought is that nonhuman animals such as rats have no conception of the broader purpose of humanitarian endeavors; their actions are motivated by hijacking simplistic behavioral mechanisms structured by stimulation and reward systems rather than an imagined horizon of political equity. In the sense of Martin Heidegger, rats are “poor in the world” and therefore poor humanitarians.22 This objection returns to the problem of design and other minds. Using Dennett’s model, for example, the rat is necessarily a rational agent, even if a simple one: its desires are presumptively mechanistic (food, water, shelter, etc.), and its beliefs concern the immediate actions associated with retrieving those rewards. Explosive identification is basically commandeering the closed circuit of the rat’s stimuli-reinforcement system in relation to food. Humans place rats in humanitarian labor and therefore rats don’t really “become” humanitarians so much as they complete humanitarian tasks. But note how this reading of the rat, as striving for bare needs, so closely mirrors the reductive terms that critics of humanitarianism indite its discourses for, which understands human needs in bare, basic terms.23 In contrast, the argument goes, humans design their lives to be humanitarian. They sacrifice better financial opportunities, volunteer time, perform service dedicated to others, and so their intentions signify the meaning of the work in pursuit of an ideal. The issues with this argument are twofold. First, research on nonhuman animals, including rats, now identifies rats’ lives (and many other nonhuman animals) as composed of much more complex beliefs, emotions, values, and interactions.24 Presuming the rat is a simplistic being is an error based off human interpretations (inherited from an anthropocentric cultural lens) of rationality that predetermines rats aren’t pursuing some version of the good. Put differently, this perspective underestimates the rat by evaluating it on human terms. Second, and simultaneously, this argument also elevates human conduct. Pro-social engagement in humans likely evolved due to similar reward-stimuli mechanisms under ecological pressures. Could it be that humans are motivated to do humanitarian labor because it simply “feels good” to do certain kinds of social work, receiving attention and collaboration, rather than some sophisticated vision of the totality and meaning of humanitarian interventions? If so, then the mechanisms bringing humans into humanitarian work aren’t all that distinct from those bringing rats into it, even if each mode is constituted distinctly based on different forms of life.

The problem with the reductive interpretation of rat humanitarian labor is that it misses this element of becoming that occurs whenever interspecies interactions occur. Even if a rat’s theory of mind is not fully knowable, the process of thinking and learning about its capacities yields its own rewards. These certainly include more effective explosive clearance, but also personal gain for the handlers of rats, protection and improvement of multispecies lives, opportunities to teach humans to fear and harm rats less, and subsequent questions about the extent or horizon of humanitarian work. Engaging with a rat—to care for it as a handler, to encounter its biases, to see others respond to it, to speculate in living practice with what its world and interests might be—strives to cross inherited anthropocentric boundaries.25 The results of this striving are fascinating. Unlike other humanitarian groups that work with nonhuman animals, APOPO maintains strong advocacy for nonhuman others. It dedicates an entire program to rat well-being. Handlers that work with rats have admitted that those rats are “just like people” with some personalities being more lively, motivating, and vivacious, and others more difficult, obstructive, or upsetting. As Darcie DeAngelo documents, work with rats encourages companionable relationships amongst human adversaries and avoids some of the militarism often produced by similar labor with dogs.26 Rat-human partnerships have also been extended to tuberculosis identification, disease surveillance, disaster relief, and the trafficking of other nonhuman animals.

Designing a humanitarian practice with a theory of nonhuman mind creates problems that do not have easy answers within traditional humanitarian frameworks. Consequently, these practices broach normative ethical quandaries about relying on a contingent or arbitrary human-nonhuman boundary as the basis of politics and ethics. In doing so, they also make humanitarian organizations ask questions beyond how to best provide basic aid to humans under conditions of resource constraints, such as the implications of ecological co-presence, the importance of striving for ethical labor in the absence of clear, transparent communication across difference, and experiments that enhance possibilities for mutual protection. While humanitarian acts coordinated with nonhuman animals are no guarantee of this rethinking, considering nonhuman minds touches on a key problem inherent in humanitarian design, one that can push humanitarian organizations towards novel political, scientific, and ecological practices and to a much different consideration of what it means to build space for the benefit of another.