Derek Ryan on Animal Consciousness, Literature, and the Ethics of Being Human

We eat animals with indifference, wear their hides as fashion, and subject them to every form of cruelty our ingenuity can devise. What made us so certain that the world was made for us? Why do we cling to that belief, refusing to see the vitality that exists beyond the human sphere? To reconcile ourselves with the suffering we cause, we invent psychological alibis—whole grammars of denial. Can literature pierce those defences? Can it truly imagine the consciousness of another species?

I put these questions to Derek Ryan, who teaches literature and animal studies at the University of Kent and has recently published Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Our conversation moved between ethics and aesthetics, from factory farms to Virginia Woolf, circling one persistent question: what does it mean to think, and to write, beyond the human?

Are we living through a crisis in human–animal relations, or merely an intensification of a historical pattern of abuse?

I believe we are living through a genuine crisis. The scale of factory farming, the amount of meat consumed, and the number of animals used in laboratory experiments have all risen dramatically. So too has the number of animals skinned alive for their pelts. Companion animals suffer increasing neglect and mistreatment, often confined or abandoned in isolation.

What do the numbers actually show?

The figures are deeply disturbing. Each year, around sixty to seventy billion animals are bred and slaughtered for food worldwide, the vast majority through industrial farming systems. At least one billion animals are killed annually for their skins, and over a hundred million die in laboratory testing. The environmental consequences are also striking: animal agriculture is estimated to produce roughly half of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Given the scale of this violence, why don’t more people recognise it as a crisis?

Most people wouldn’t call it that. There’s a strange paradox: as awareness of animal cruelty grows, animal exploitation increases. Jonathan Safran Foer remarks on this in Eating Animals. In one American survey, ninety-six per cent of respondents said animals should have legal protection; seventy-six per cent claimed animal welfare mattered more than cheap meat prices; and two-thirds supported strong laws for farm animal welfare.

The question, then, is why such convictions rarely translate into action. Perhaps the real crisis lies precisely in that disjunction—between what people believe and what they do.

Is this failure rooted in denial? Are ideas like “humane slaughter” or “sustainable meat” simply ways of disguising brutality?

Language itself conceals cruelty. That’s the heart of the problem. Foer lists, alphabetically, the words we use to disguise what we do to animals—and then dismantles them. “Free-range,” for example, often means a shed packed with hundreds of chickens and a token hatch or window. Even “organic” offers no guarantee that an animal has been spared suffering.

Such terms nullify moral reflection. They let us imagine that we are behaving ethically, that our consumption is somehow virtuous. The very comfort they provide shows how complicit we are in our own deception. The global meat industry thrives on secrecy, but thanks to activists and journalists the truth is a click away—and still, most people prefer not to look. I can’t count how many friends and relatives have told me, “Don’t tell me any more; I don’t want to give up meat.”

What kind of fear is that, do you think?

It’s a fascinating fear. Eating meat has become such an essential marker of identity that relinquishing it feels like a threat to the self. We’ve been taught to see meat-eating as natural, normal, even inevitable. Recognising that it’s a cultural construction, however, is already a step toward change.

When we talk about human–animal relations, we tend to generalise. Can we even speak of “the animal” in universal terms, or does every context demand its own understanding?

The problem begins with the word animal itself. With roughly 8.7 million known species, the term can’t possibly capture such diversity—let alone the local, contextual dimensions of our relationships with different species.

When we say or hear animal, which beings come to mind? Pets? Livestock? Endangered species? The hawksbill turtle? Or perhaps even humans? We have an odd relationship with the term: we are part of the animal kingdom, yet we place ourselves at its apex.

Jacques Derrida explores this in The Animal That Therefore I Am, describing animal as a name humans arrogate to themselves the right to bestow upon all other living beings. The asymmetry of that naming mirrors the asymmetries encoded in human itself. Feminist and postcolonial theorists have done valuable work here, linking gender and cultural difference to the exploitation of animals, and suggesting that animal oppression is entangled with patriarchy and colonialism.

How would you define anthropocentrism—the ideology that places the human at the centre of existence? Should it be read alongside patriarchy, colonialism, or racism?

Anthropocentrism is not merely the belief that humans are separate from other animals; it’s the conviction that our entire worldview is structured around the human. What benefits humanity is assumed to benefit the world.

The related concept of speciesism emerged about forty years ago, coined by the activist Richard Ryder in the early 1970s and later popularised by Peter Singer. Speciesism describes the human bias that privileges our species over all others.

Can speciesism truly be compared with patriarchy, colonialism, or racism?

In structural terms, yes—they all depend on the logic of “the other.” But speciesism is distinct because the only group capable of opposing it is the one that profits from it most: Homo sapiens. That raises profound questions about whether animals can ever acquire political agency or a voice in their own defence.

Singer’s theory of speciesism led him to the “marginal human argument,” which was controversial. Do you think he was misunderstood?

Singer’s utilitarian approach places us in an ethical dilemma. He argues that moral reasoning should aim to maximise pleasure and minimise pain for all sentient beings, human or animal. The virtue of this view is that it disregards inherited hierarchies of value. Its weakness is that it denies intrinsic worth.

This is why disability rights advocates have criticised Singer: in utilitarian terms, an act that benefits many may still harm a vulnerable few, and that is deemed acceptable. In response, a rights-based perspective has emerged—one that treats every living being as possessing inherent value and deserving protection, not merely as a means to a greater good.

The difficult question, of course, is which rights should be universal, and how their recognition could materially improve the treatment of animals. Scholars like Martha Nussbaum are exploring these complexities today, proposing more rights-oriented ethical models.

Yet in practice, neither utilitarian nor rights-based ethics seem to prevail. Human-centred thinking still dominates. Why has anthropocentrism proved so durable?

From antiquity onwards, the most influential systems of belief and knowledge have been anthropocentric. Yet there have always been dissenting, even vegetarian, traditions.

In classical Greece, for instance, most remember Aristotle’s assertion in Politics that “man is a political animal,” a claim distinguishing humans through language, reason, and ethics. But others, such as Plutarch, argued for abstaining from meat on moral grounds. He believed animals to be intelligent, sentient, and rational beings, worthy of ethical consideration. He also observed that our bodies are ill-suited for killing—that we must rely on artificial tools, and can consume flesh only after cooking or curing it.

Why, then, do people perceive eating meat not as a choice but as something inevitable, even natural?

That question lies at the heart of my recent work. I wanted to understand how we reached a point where animals endure unprecedented suffering, yet vast populations regard meat consumption as an ordinary fact of life.

Your research focuses on early twentieth-century literature. How did writers of that period engage with animals?

One of the era’s defining features is its confrontation with what Freud called the “narcissistic wounds” to humanity—Darwin’s theory of evolution, psychoanalysis, and before them, the Copernican revolution.

Writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence were simultaneously experimenting with language as a means of exploring consciousness and challenging anthropocentric perspectives. The most compelling literary works on animals are not simply condemnations of cruelty; they are attempts to understand what these intellectual upheavals meant for the human–animal relationship.

Some argue that such innovations brought literature closer to animality itself. Gilles Deleuze once remarked, “To write is to push language to the point where it becomes animal.” Writing, in other words, that drives human language to a place where it almost begins to speak for the nonhuman—an idea radically opposed to the traditional belief that language alone separates us from animals.

Given that literature is a human creation and language its medium, what difficulties arise when representing animals in literary form?

Two paradoxes emerge. First, literature’s foundation is language—a faculty denied to animals and often cited as proof of their inferiority. Second, animals in literature tend to appear symbolically, metaphorically, or allegorically rather than materially.

The challenge is therefore to consider seriously that literary texts featuring animals might tell us something about the animals themselves, while still acknowledging the human frameworks through which those meanings are produced.

Is that, then, the struggle—to believe that literature can somehow voice a being whose voice we’ve never truly heard?

Our approach to the “animal voice” in literature often begins with narratives centred on animals, whether through direct personification or more complex techniques. There have been many attempts to “give voice” to animals: Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty or Virginia Woolf’s Flush, for example—animal autobiographies that recount a life from a nonhuman perspective, yet inevitably humanise their subjects.

That tension—between speaking for animals and representing their consciousness—sits at the heart of the debate. Can anthropomorphism reveal something genuine about animal experience, or is it always merely a mirror for our own concerns?

And yet, even the most earnest attempt to take animals seriously in literature seems unable to overcome the uncanny silence of the animal itself.

In The Animal Claim, Tobias Menely argues that humanity’s obsession with animals’ inability to speak actually underscores the many meaningful ways they do communicate—and reminds us that animals inhabit worlds not organised around us.

To attend to the potential of the animal voice, then, is also to confront the limits of our own.

* Derek Ryan, Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)

For the full interview in Turkish https://www.k24kitap.org/