Decolonizing Our Relationship with Animals to Invent a New Relationship with the World

Source: French to English Tester   Published on: 2026-04-01

Source: The Conversation – France in French (2)– By Cédric Sueur, Professor of Ethology, Primatology, and Animal Ethics, University of Strasbourg

Humans have placed themselves above all other animal species. How can we change our relationship with them to move away from a logic of domination and towards forms of coexistence and cooperation?

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Every year, somebillions of animalsare raised, transported, and slaughtered to meet the food, scientific, or industrial needs of human societies. This intensive use of living beings raises a double question. It is first ethical, as it involves the suffering and killing of sentient living beings. It is also environmental and health-related: deforestation for intensive farming, resulting pollution, and increased proximity between species promote ecological imbalances and the emergence of diseases.

The concept ofOne Health(one health) and the Covid-19 crisis remind us that human health closely depends on that of animals and ecosystems. These crises are not independent. They reveal the same relationship to living beings, based on exploitation and physical and emotional distancing. Understanding this relationship is a necessary condition to transform it.

An inherited domination: speciesism and colonization

Research in ethology has profoundly renewed our view of animals. Many species display emotions, learning abilities, forms of cooperation, and complex social relationships. In some primates, but also in elephants, corvids, or cetaceans, behaviors are observed that suggest forms ofconsciousness, empathy, ofculture and mourning.

Why, despite this knowledge, do we continue to exploit animals on a large scale? Part of the answer lies in our cultural heritage. Modern Western societies have been built on a separation between humans and the rest of living beings, associated with a hierarchy that places humans at the top.

The concept of “speciesism”, invented byRichard RyderIn 1970, it designated this discrimination based on species. It leads to the consideration that human interests systematically take precedence over those of other beings who suffer just as much. In its structure, this mechanism is not unlike racism or sexism: it is based on a difference erected as a criterion of domination.

Speciesism primarily describes a moral attitude, a cognitive and ethical bias in the way we assess the interests of different species. The notion of “animal colonization,” which I develop inDecolonize our relationship with animals(Odile Jacob, 2026), seeks to go further by identifying the concrete structures that organize and perpetuate this domination.

Where speciesism questions representations, animal colonization points to the institutional, economic, and cultural mechanisms that make them operational: animals are appropriated, controlled, transformed into economic and symbolic resources. The law partially protects them as sentient living beings, while keeping them within the property regime. The economy turns them into commodities and tends to make the violence inflicted on them invisible. These dimensions mutually reinforce each other and stabilize a system of domination that goes beyond the mere question of representations to embody itself in practices, laws, and power relations.

Other ontologies of the living

This way of thinking is, however, not universal. Many non-Western societies, such as the Achuar of the Amazon, the Aboriginal Australians, or the Japanese, conceive of the relationships between humans and non-humans differently. Rather than radically separating beings, they emphasize continuities, interdependencies, and relationships.

The works of anthropology, particularly those of Philippe Descola (the Twilight Spears, 1993) or by Bruno Latour (Investigation into modes of existence, 2012), thus demonstrated the existence of different “ontologies,” that is, ways of defining and representing what exists and how beings are connected. These societies or ethnic groups are, for example, animists and attribute to animals an interiority— in other words, an inner life made up of intentions, emotions, perceptions, and their own subjectivity, comparable to that which we recognize in humans—or consider them as partners embedded in networks of relationships.

Without idealizing these perspectives, they offer resources to move beyond a strictly utilitarian view of living beings. They invite us to think of coexistence based not on domination, but on reciprocity and attention to interdependencies.

Transform our daily practices

Decolonizing our relationship with animals first requires transforming our most ordinary practices. Food is a central lever: reducing the consumption of animal products helps to limit both animal suffering and environmental impact.

Beyond that, it is about rethinking the way we share spaces. Urbanization has long excluded other species. An approach“zooinclusive”developed by researcher Émilie Dardenne, proposes instead to integrate their needs into city design: promoting the presence of birds, insects, or small mammals, creating ecological continuities, and adapting buildings to accommodate other forms of life.

This approach is already finding concrete applications. Some European cities, such as Vienna, Brussels, or London, have integrated birdhouses and bat shelters into the facades of renovated buildings. Others have created wildlife passages under roads to allow the movement of wild mammals, or have maintained green roofs that promote pollinator biodiversity. In Singapore, the policy of “green corridors” explicitly seeks to reconnect fragments of natural habitats within the urban fabric. In France, the green and blue network, enshrined in legislation since the Grenelle Environment Forum, constitutes an institutional attempt to integrate these ecological continuities at the territorial level.

These transformations are not only the result of individual choices, but also of collective decisions in terms of planning and public policies.

Rethinking wildlife conservation

The protection of wild animals often follows a management logic: it is about regulating, controlling, sometimes eliminating certain populations deemed problematic. Carnivores are particularly targeted. In France, the wolf has crystallized tensions between breeders and nature defenders since its natural return to the Alps in the 1990s. In Africa, thelionis the subject of similar conflicts: when it attacks the livestock of rural communities, it is perceived as a direct threat to the economic survival of families, which leads to poisonings or killings, sometimes tolerated or even encouraged by local authorities.

Large herbivores are not spared: in southern and eastern Africa, theelephants, whose populations have re-established themselves in certain protected areas, cause massive destruction of crops, crush homes, and kill human beings. These human-elephant conflicts drive communities to demand culling, or even to tolerate poaching as the only response to a threat perceived as existential. Poaching itself, often presented solely from a criminal perspective, sometimes feeds off this local exasperation, even though it is also structured by international networks with considerable economic stakes. This managerial approach extends, in other forms, a relationship of domination over living beings, which historian Guillaume Blanc calls anew green colonialismÀ: decisions made from outside, in the name of nature, without taking into account the realities experienced by local populations.

Decolonizing conservation means recognizing more the autonomy of animals, their“wild sovereignty”, as defined by philosophers Donaldson and Kymlicka, and to respect their habitats. This implies shifting from a logic of control to a logic of coexistence, seeking forms of mediation between human and non-human interests. Grassroots initiatives, such as theCibel projectin the Congo Basin forest, show that it is possible to reconcile human activities and the presence of wildlife, provided that one accepts the complexity of these relationships.

Decolonize the sciences

Science itself is not exempt from these issues. Animals are often considered as objects of study or experimental models. Integrating them“animal activity”, that is to say their capacity to act and influence situations, leads to rethinking research protocols towards human–non-human cooperation rather than towards animal sacrifices.

In primatology, for example, some approaches aim to limit the constraints imposed on animals and to better take into account their spontaneous behaviors. Initiated by the ethologistTetsuro Matsuzawa, this approachparticipant observationis a human-animal collaboration. More broadly, the development of alternative methods helps reduce the use of animal experimentation. Decolonizing science does not mean giving up on research, but rather questioning the assumptions and purposes of animal use.

Animal experimentation is a major point of tension. While some studies are justified by health concerns, others seem more questionable given the suffering inflicted. Tools such as“Bateson’s cube”propose to evaluate research based on its expected benefits, its probability of success, and the harm caused to animals. But in practice,ethical reflection often remains limited. Decolonizing experimentation involves strengthening these requirements, developing alternatives, and questioning the very legitimacy of certain research.

Towards coexistence

Decolonize our relationship with animals, is ultimately about profoundly transforming our way of inhabiting the world. It is not about eliminating all relations with them, but about moving away from a logic of domination towards forms of coexistence and cooperation, which is called the“animal capital”. Animals are no longer mere materials for eating or clothing, but are social helpers, cultural transmitters (they convey information about our environment to us), and ecosystem managers (they help us manage our ecosystems).

This change is ethical, ecological, and political at the same time. It involves recognizing that humans are not outside of living things, but are part of them. In a context of multiple crises, rethinking our relationships with other species appears not as a luxury, but as a necessity for the survival of all including humanity.

Cédric Sueur is the author of the book “Decolonizing Our Relationship with Animals” published by Editions Odile Jacob, which the article references.

–ref. Decolonize our relationship with animals to invent a new relationship with the world –https://theconversation.com/decolonize-our-relationship-with-animals-to-invent-a-new-relationship-with-the-world-279056