Arts & Humanities Campus News

Book examines division between ‘human and animal conditions’

With The Human Animal Earthling Identity, author Carrie P. Freeman asks readers to reconsider the division created between the human and animal conditions, leading to mass exploitation, injustice and extinction. Freeman believes social movements should collectively foster a cultural shift in human identity away from a human-centered outlook and toward a species-centered ethic so people may begin to see themselves more broadly as “human animal earthlings.”

Freeman looks at overlapping values common in global rights declarations and in the campaign messages of 16 global social movement organizations that work on human/civil rights, nonhuman animal protection and/or environmental issues. In the book, she interviews the leaders of advocacy groups to gain insight on how human and nonhuman protection causes can become allies.