How do Animals count?

An equestrian athlete is sent home after disturbing video of horse training is released while other athletes complain about lack of grilled chicken and eggs in the Olympic village. It seems a horse has higher moral value than a chicken yet the chickens’ plight is held in higher regard than factory farmed fish and so on all the way down(?) to the simplest organisms that we are unaware of.

Perhaps Vegans have the highest moral values when it comes to life on earth but even they disregard the lives of plants that we now know can communicate with each other and remarkably other species.

In our anthropocentric world, humans by definition sit atop the pyramid. Aristotle and Theophrastus catalogued and categorised animals in a hierarchy of complexity outside humanity; Descartes propagated the view that non human animals are biological automatons living by instinct alone; both views persist deep in our psyche today

How do we apprehend the living world around us? how can we differentiate a resource from a fellow mind or choose to treat our DNA cousins as things?

Join the conversation in person with your experiences of solidarity with animals or the necessity of this hierarchy and anything inbetween.