Nowadays knowledge and modern notions about animals are too often based on a research development insisting on statistic data production and with that a form of data extraction, not only objectifying animals, but exposing them to oppression within research setups.
A desire to understand others to improve quality of life has become a desire to proof what a species “can do”, confirming a speciesist culture and an anthropocentric viewpoint.

[Francesco De Giorgio]

A knowledge desire similar to finding out “new features” leading animals to be objectified as number in species, not seen and understood for their own desire to be in dialogue with life.

“Nonhuman animals are trained to do things so human can measure things – or worse – and no matter how nice or positive the training method is, you still train their own attention away, one still amputate their own attention, their intrinsic curiosity to find their own information.

Even popular research on empathy and emotions is still about what else can they do, a physiological focus ignoring their attention in the research itself. Ignoring their suffering in empathy research is research to satisfy human notion needs, ignoring subjective experiences, which should actually be the basis of empathy, not a statistic notion, but the ability to SEE someone else.

The decision to step out of an anthropocentric viewpoint is a decision anyone can make from his or her own values. It is a cultural change, not a missing scientific breakthrough – we need to put knowledge in daily practice.” [TEDX] LINK !

“To improve our human understanding of nonhuman Otherness, no Other should suffer or be oppressed for the evidence-based-desire of a speciesist culture.” – José De Giorgio

“In the physio-mechanistic focus, animals become objects moved by chemical reactions, with few margins left to the will to will, of the individual-animal, of thát dog, of thát horse, thát goat, cat or rabbit.

Moving away from a physio-mechanistic view of animals – of their behavior, of their world of perception, of their social dynamics, of their emotional states and their cognitive heritage – allows us to open up to new information and modern interpretative paradigms regarding the understanding of ways of seeing the world and interacting with it.

As an animal may appear on the outside, as belonging to a certain physiological type, but is in possession of a subjectivity that partially or totally refutes that physiological category.

Overcoming the physiological paradigm of understanding is essential in order to turn the page and give recognition and dignity to subjectivity – before physiology.” (Nel nome dell’Animalita’ Francesco De Giorgio)

https://www.epona.tv/scientists-as-activists

Understanding nonhuman animal subjectivity, and animal cognition in general, means understanding that they have a world to discover. An environment that does not fixate on fitting them into human ideas of coexistence, but focuses on their alterity, on their attention, on shared experiencing, allowing our society to develop in a way that includes all different ways of being in the world, not by adaptation, but by inclusion (De Giorgio J., 2015).

A subject’s cognition is often invisible. It is related to the right to ask questions, without having to perform, or react, but simply to elaborate the possibility to create space, for other details, more questions, more understanding.

“Animal cognition refers to all those processes by which animals acquire, elaborate, create and store information about themselves and from the environment, acting on information, acting on an environment – instead of having an environment act on them.” (Learning Animals, 2014).”

In recent years mainstream animal cognition has become a sophisticated development of trainability. Studies of ethology and cognition are strangely combined with the animal training industry, where human continue to look through the anthropocentric lens, missing a world to explore and discover.

Instinct is Cognitive [Francesco De Giorgio] #staywild #staycognitive