Irati Jiménez-Pérez ABSTRACT

“The Usefulness of the Figure of Talking Nonhuman Animal Characters in the Current US Animal Rights Context”

Irati Jiménez-Pérez, University of the Basque Country, Spain

The representation of nonhuman animals in literature has always been characterised by a process of anthropomorphisation. On the one hand, this may be due to the traditional human exceptionalism present in Western cultures in most historical periods; and, on the other, to the difficulty that humans face in imagining other ways of being. Although fiction was seen during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as key to raise awareness about animal welfare, many interpreted these works from a human point of view, pointing out that “the animal is overlaid with metaphors of human characteristics or becomes the bearer of purely human concerns” (Burt 2007, 332). These fictional nonhuman animal stories ended up being understood as depictions of other human cases of discrimination, such as sexism or racism. In this paper, I will explore the attempt to overcome anthropomorphisation constituting a key action in the battle against human exceptionalism. In order to do so, due to its poor performance in the last Animal Protection Index, I will take the United States as a case study.