Love and Speciesism

The first part of the essay attempts to advance the idea that animals can, like humans, become subjects of genuine bonds of attachment. The second part of the essay examines how interventions to protect, care for, or save animals, interface with various forms of alterity - related to what socially and physiologically constitutes ‘being human’ and ‘being animal’.This essay provides a frame for a discussion on whether these innate and constructed differences of being imply that the means to which we currently save, love, and protect animals in our personal relations, and through our polices, are at inherent risk of maintaining or reconstituting the same set of power relations they are supposedly obverse to. Illustrations are provided by the advancement towards human rights for Apes in Spain, as well as the increasing use of pharmaceutical medication to treat mental illness in pets. The most general aim of this paper is to broaden the interface between the discussions on empathy, moral inclusion, and a political theory of animal rights. In the most broadest sense, the contribution made here aims to provide a conceptual framework that seeks to understand the limits to, or contractions of, empathy towards animals, by exploring the ways in which our attachment is formed and becomes unbound.