Beastly Consent and Relationships Beyond Boundaries

This essay on animal consent, erotics, and power and love across species is part of the Companion Species series, which investigates a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer.

---

A photograph by Rosalind Fox Solomon, published in the Utne Reader newspaper in 1988, received a massive number of disgusted complaints. The photograph showed a woman, Catalin Valentin, breastfeeding a lamb— many of the complaints used words such as “perversity” or described the act as unnatural or immoral. Why the outrage? As far as we can tell, both parties consented to this interspecies act of bodily generosity and care.

“As far as we can tell”—we will return to this.

The arguments about the unnatural and immoral nature of interspecies intimacy appear across the political spectrum. Reproductions of these split, queerphobic notions of “normal” and “perverse” behaviors even appear in the animal justice movement: drinking another animal’s milk, one popular vegan argument goes, is wrong because it’s “weird.”

Opposition to sexual violence against other animals has long been located in the interspecies part, rather than in the sexual violence itself. At the same time as leaving the violence unscrutinized, this misdirected focus also reproduces notions of perversity. Framing intimacy of any kind as perverse—as in, “it’s immoral because I find the thought of it disgusting”—has been used to shame and outlaw queer and nonnormative practices of many kinds, but nonetheless has never succeeded at adequately answering the question, “Who is this hurting?”

As it relates to animals, I suggest a subtle reformulation: drinking other animals’ milk is wrong not because it’s weird, but because it’s nonconsensual. It is difficult to speak of consent, desire, and justice in our relationships with other animals since many forms of violence and erotics are strenuously denied.

When I speak of the erotic, I am invoking Audre Lorde: the erotic as an expansive, profoundly alive, spiritually awake, generous and attentive type of power concerned less with “what we do” and more with “how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.” A robust method for nonhuman consent, I suggest, recognizes not only that that interspecies intimacies and erotics exist, but that we are butchering them.

I explore not a how-to, or anything so straightforward—but an exploration, from different perspectives, of some of the questions that might be involved in a practice of honoring relationships and intimacies with other animals. A practice of taking the consent of other-than-humans seriously.

Powers and Refusals

Clarice Lispector’s strange, enigmatic book The Passion According to G.H. describes in detail a woman’s spiritually transformative encounter with—and eventual murder of—a cockroach. G.H. is confronted by the cockroach’s intolerable otherness. Despite this, G.H. closes the door on the cockroach and watches white pus ooze from their body.

In order to kill off interspecies desire, other-than-human creatures invariably suffer and perish. Bestiality laws patrol the human-animal divide, wherein the victim of the crime of sexual abuse of an animal is considered the human degraded to the level of an animal. In the Middle Ages, sexually abused animals were often executed alongside their abusers or tried for sexual crimes themselves. Perversity is cast outward, projected onto the other, always located outside of the self.

Nonetheless, there is much to ingest—and to be ourselves changed by—in Lispector’s account of G.H.’s strange transformation, described with an unrelentingly intense force of presence. G.H. experiences what psychoanalyst and theorist Avgi Saketopoulou might describe as “shattering,” wherein the psyche is drawn (back), whether through “revulsive hatred” or “ecstatic attraction,” to objects or experiences it has until then excluded—such as one’s own animality.

A “state of being disarmed of one’s ego,” Saketopoulou suggests, “is critical to the ethics of such experiences.” The force of the cockroach’s being acts upon G.H. She shatters and experiences a revulsion that threatens to destroy her. In repairing herself, she destroys the cockroach. How can humans and other-than-humans survive these kinds of encounters with difference?

One way: to deeply imagine the other’s experience, to let it be as loud as our own. To, in Saketopoulou’s words, “bend our own will” when it comes to animals—reminders upon ourselves that our context is not their context. Imagine a dog at a busy event. First, you are you, at the event. You are having a lovely time, perhaps with friends, feeling at ease. You see a dog’s soft body passing, you reach out to stroke them… But no, now you are the dog at the crowded event. You are tethered by the neck and have no choice but to follow your person through a sea of moving bodies amidst loud, unpredictable noises. You are overstimulated, possibly panicked. Then, a stranger touches you without warning.

Relationships with other animals are saturated with power differentials, which are themselves intertwined with violence and its erotics. Existing in these interspecies loves without abusing their trust is a delicate practice. It’s easy to imagine, for example, a dog’s experience of touch as benign, pleasant, or calming, since we ourselves tend to experience pleasure from touching fur.

But imagine being hugged during an emotional state—or by someone you strongly do not want to be hugged by. Imagine you also have your ability to express boundaries drastically limited: we have rendered dogs largely unequipped with tools for retaliation or expressing a “no.” Domestication—through training, breeding, and sometimes punishment—forbids dogs from expressing their limits. It is easy to mistake servility for desire.

“Pervasive captivity,” a theory offered by Nicolas Delon to understand ethics in the context of power relations over and with domesticated or urban creatures, might help us remember that human domination is endlessly—and usually unconsciously—being repeated and reproduced. Its ubiquity is often the very thing rendering it almost imperceptible: we begin, as with so many other calls to recognize privilege, power, and injustice, by going out of our way to notice it.

Tangles of Desire

Nowhere is interspecies desire for domination—an eroticism of crossing other animals’ boundaries—clearer than in accounts of hunting, by hunters. In his book about hunting, Ted Kerasote describes a dream he has in which an elk turns into a woman before his eyes. Brian Luke notes that the hunter who makes a kill “may now do something to wild animals that they generally do not permit while alive: he may touch them.”

Longstanding confusion surrounding predation, love, and the desire for violence haunts relationships—human and otherwise. There are gendered expectations of who “chases” and who is “chased,” and where a desirable woman is called “foxy,” while an undesirable woman is a “dog.”

Luke suggests that the “foxy” woman is considered desirable “because she is independent and evasive, thus exciting to run down and conquer.” Meanwhile, “because dogs come when you call them, there is no exciting challenge.” In this time of reckoning with pervasive sexual predation, the word “predation”—hunting in its broadest definition—contains a piece of the jigsaw.

How, then, can we seek conversation with a creature’s desire—to engage with their limits? I turn here to Maeve, a collie I know well. I admire Maeve, among other things, for her expression of will, which often seems to emerge, conversely, through the submissive behavior common to collies. While she has learned from life with kind humans that her boundaries are welcome, her collie instincts to please are strong. “Born to work!” people say of collies—meaning, bred to please.

On the other hand, she is a creature with her own desire. She wants what she wants, but she also wants to be good. These can be at odds. Sometimes, when I invite her to come to me for affection, she wags her tail, maintains her gaze on me, lowers her head, but remains where she is. In these ambivalent moments, she seems to want to please me but doesn’t want to cuddle. Creatively, she manages both: her display of submission demonstrates what she thinks I want. Or rather, what I think she thinks I want.

See the beastly tangles of desire we can find ourselves in?

Perhaps my interpretation is off the mark—which is always possible with others. I can insist that she come anyway, or relent. Perhaps we can be better friends to our animal companions by getting better at a difficult task: tolerating disappointment. To accept our desire being thwarted, and to yield to the confusion of ambivalence. In this muddle, it’s possible to lose sight of basic respect—even for the creatures we feel we love—if we do not ask, “What does enacting my desire do to this creature?”

Becoming Animal

Those who love and defend animals, after all, are not immune to anthropocentric fantasies and pressures. Slaughterhouse vigils—held by animal justice activists to oppose and commemorate animals being driven into slaughterhouses—came under criticism within the movement for some activists’ tactile interactions with the frightened animals.

Hands poking through the slats into the shit-covered metal container to stroke frightened creatures who do not know of, and possibly do not care about, human grief for the lives they are about to lose. It is all too easy to collapse contexts—theirs with ours. To arrive at the slaughterhouse with only love in our hearts, to know oneself as a fierce defender, a protector of life, can slide into expectations that the animals will share this context and experience our touch as comfort. To know what they experience of these gestures, in reality, is an impossibility.

And what of our desires to be animal? To be quiet, feral, muddy, loyal, pleasure-seeking, snarling, daring, retaliatory, hungry—in other words, bodied? To come into our animal bodies offers a dissolution of the human/animal binary—at long last, permission to feel our paw-pads on the ground, to run when frightened, to curl our tail around our flank at night. In this liberation, a demand for interspecies solidarity emerges—what Haraway might call response-ability, our ability to respond. To snarl when we must snarl.

Concretely, and somewhat reluctantly, I must be clear about something I dream will one day become obvious. Interspecies solidarity involves, at the very least, a boycott of industries that torture other species. Use the word “vegan,” or don’t; these days I wonder if I prefer the word “boycott,” to finally place resistance to animal exploitation alongside other forms of political refusal.

To speak directly like this—to snarl—requires more than blithe expressions of admiration for the “more-than-human” which currently find themselves wafting rather spinelessly through artistic and academic spaces. I am frequently left empty and wanting by even the most delicately imagined art and writing about other-than-humans, without an unwavering backbone of commitment to animals’ total liberation.

Tolerating Disappointment

It is true that other-than-human desire and experience are opaque: confounding, elusive, unknowable. That being said, it is vital to discern moments of clarity—especially of non-desire and refusal—that we can read with some confidence. This is where the snarl comes in: to listen to and amplify, for example, a farmed animal’s protestations against their violent conditions. Why does the cow in the abattoir chute jump back from the electric cattle-prod? We know why she recoils—we know precisely and intimately, because we, too, have bodies.

For hundreds of years, there has been a mistaken certainty that animals do not experience trauma, violation, depression, fear, love, joy, or pleasure. As Karen Joy Fowler writes, “every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique (…) some other species comes along to snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we’d have learned to be more cautious over the years.” If we can—modestly—imagine-experience what it could be like to want, through our creaturely selves, we can also imagine-know-recall what it is like to not want.

We might ask ourselves:

What am I wanting from this creature in front of me, and how will I put this desire to work?

Am I committed to doing the best I can to honour their communications?

How am I intervening to mitigate the strong likelihood that my interpretations of their desire(s) are no more than projections of what I want?

Do I silence this other being, and then, unconsciously, use their muzzled mouth to express my own desire?

It requires a bending, a willful and sustained interruption to the social fabric of humanness, to recognize the (animal) other as a distinct person. To understand them as both distinct from us and divergent; and nonetheless, as a person.

I suppose my provocation is something like this: you, reader-friend, have a responsibility to discern an ethic in how you personally behave toward other creatures. Those you know, those you will never meet. A reflexive and interrogative practice of relating is not reducible to, “Do you like animals?” Nor can it be contained solely within intellectual discourse about “The Nonhuman” or “The More-Than-Human”—although some bright and beautiful things emerge there.

A practice committed to animal dignity and integrity is experiential and experimental: ongoing, live, curious, interrogative, and open to challenge. It remains light-footed. It inches forward and retreats back, rarely still. It is resolutely bodied—nose-in-the-air, sensing. Capable of curling an upper lip, it can tolerate other-than-human refusal. It dares us to love creatures, in their vast differences and specificities, bravely enough to make refusals on their behalf.

---

Featured image: A dog surrounded by unrelenting human hands. Image by author, 2017.

Vita Sleigh is an independent researcher and illustrator exploring human–animal relations through queer, anarcha-feminist, and interspecies frameworks. Their work—spanning activism, creative writing, and visual storytelling—foregrounds relational ethics as a method of worldbuilding. Grounded in grassroots animal justice movements, Vita’s practice merges theory with playful, accessible forms like illustration. Instagram. Contact.