One of the deep roots of the environmental crisis lies in anthropocentric characterisations of humanity as separate from other species and the natural world. The forgetting of our animality implies a lack of understanding that we are animals ourselves, embedded in and dependent on nature, and that many forms of human, animal and environmental injustices are intertwined. The turn toward the “animal question” draws attention to speciesism, questions humanism and strives toward a socio-ecological justice that includes other animals as subjects with whom we share the world.

While education theory is preoccupied with “the human project”, and environmental education often seen as a “corrective device” that does not question the hegemonial domination of the human (Pedersen, 2010), this paper draws attention to learning in the realm of cross-species intersubjectivities, agencies and entanglements as processes of “mutual becoming” (Pickering 2005). The paper reveals practices of knowing and morality, how they are constructed and negotiated in processes of “mutual domestication” (Despret, 2004), and how such a “pedagogic space” (Spannring, in review) is possible and at the same impossible (Biesta, 1998).

This paper is rooted in an understanding of animals as living subjective Others who convey a sense of agency, coherence, affectivity and continuity, and who are incorporated within a social space. They are able to create intersubjective meaning with humans through analogous and nonverbal communication (e.g. Flynn, 2008) - a view that is supported by evolutionary biology and comparative biology (Julius et al, 2013).

The theoretical framework is the feminist ethic-of-care theory (e.g. Donovan/Adams, 2007). This perspective criticizes animal rights theory for its rationalism, individualism and formalism, questions the dualisms of human/animal, culture/nature, mind/body, and grounds knowledge and ethics in the embodied, emotional and spiritual conversation with the animal Other. Elements of the care ethic echo Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. Learning in I-Thou relationships with animals implies dialogic, integral educational processes characterised by non-conceptual awareness, mindfulness and solidarity. They call for the development of a “great character” that takes on the responsibility of confirming and liberating the animal Thou (Spannring, in review).

Such a perspective presents several challenges. First, it questions the traditionally assumed relationship between epistemology and ethics, in which ethical action is based on the knowledge of the world and the integration of animals in ethical consideration is achieved through the expansion of the category of who matters (e.g. Singer, 1975). Such an “epistemology-based-ethics” is countered by an “ethics-based epistemology”, which is “first and foremost an attempt to open up possibilities to enrich the world” (Cheney/Weston, 1999:117). Second, it contests cognitive-rationalist, dualistic, individualistic and functionalist models of learning and calls for an inclusion of the implicit, embodied as well as the relational dimension of learning. Learning understood via the concept of experience or practice “emphasises process and the quality of learning, which is seen as an essentially creative, reflexive and participative process” (Sterling, 2001:61). Both, learning and justice remain unfinished projects (Biesta, 1998).

Empirically, the question of animal ethics and human learning has so far been mainly addressed in research on ethical vegans, as for example McDonald (2000), who uses transformative learning theory to describe this process of becoming vegan. By comparison, this paper does not so much investigate how abstract moral principles are acquired/extended and behaviour aligned, but how an “interspecies etiquette” (Warentkin, 2010) is learned and lived as a “collaborative venture” (Plumwood, 2002: 195). In doing so the research strives to provide a critical and differentiated empirically based conceptualisation of an ethic of care for animals.

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