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Animals and War: Anthropocentrism and Technoscience

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Abstract

We are at the crux of a return of animals to the battlefield. Framed as an improvement over current limitations of biomimetic devices, couplings of microelectrical mechanical systems (MEMS) with insect bodies are currently being designed and created in laboratories, with funding from military agencies. Moving beyond the external attachment of computerized ‘backpacks’, MEMS are being implanted into larval stages to allow for living tissue to envelop otherwise fragile circuitry and electronics: the creation of bioelectronic interfaces. The weaponization of animals, with insect cyborgs as a first step—a foundation for the remaking of more complex species—is an anthropocentric solution to an anthropocentric problem. Speciesism is the normative context in which technoscientific discourse and such approaches to nanoscience and nanotechnology are situated. This is a network of actors and relationships within and across science and society. Animals are framed as mechanical devices that can be dis/enhanced for human ends. This paper engages with the remaking of species, the blurring of boundaries between mechanism and organism, and the implications of the effective disappearance of the animal as key sociotechnological challenges.

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Notes

  1. The concept of speciesism was first coined by British psychologist Richard Ryder in 1970 and popularized by Peter Singer’s [40] groundbreaking treatise Animal Liberation. As an ideology, speciesism is a socially constructed belief system. It enables human decisions and actions at the expense of members of other species and perpetuates anthropocentric assumptions about species superiority (i.e. speciesism functions in much the same way as racism).

    The terminology ‘other animals’ is used throughout this paper to locate the values ascribed to nonhuman animals. Specifically, animals are constructed as other to enable the anthropocentric uses engaged with here, as well as more broadly.

  2. See Butler [6].

  3. Peter W. Singer, personal communication, 29 March 2011

  4. A recent example is that of Flipper, one of 75 dolphins used for mine detection during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Flipper went ‘AWOL’. Alongside the specific capabilities for which the use of dolphins was based—a 99.8 % effective detection rate—their intelligence proved a challenge as they figured ‘out how to game the [reward-based] system’ of their deployment (see [41]).

  5. Of note, in 2012, global military spending fell by 0.5 % in real terms. Whereas, this was the first decrease since 1998, it was still higher in real terms than the peak near the end of the cold war.

    Military expenditure in the USA fell by 6 %, comprising 69 % more than that of 2001. By way of contrast, military expenditure in Russia increased 16 % and China 7.5 %.

  6. See also Twine [49] and Adams [1].

  7. For an engagement with strategic ignorance, in a different context, see Sullivan and Tuana [46].

  8. ([11], p. 161) describes the convergence as a ‘military-industrial, corporate-academic milieu’. I have engaged with this elsewhere as a military-animal industrial complex [36].

  9. The implications extend beyond other animals. As an evolution of asymmetrical, risk-free, war, such a vast imbalance of risk fundamentally undermines the just war doctrine and the principles of laws of war (see [21]).

  10. The notion of other animals as components of hobby kits is exemplified in a controversial yet successfully crowd-funded (2013) project in which a smartphone is used to control electrodes implanted in cockroaches: The RoboRoach: control a living insect from your smartphone! (see [33], [38]).

  11. For example, in seeking to distance himself from being labeled as a technophobe, Zerner lauds the potential for insect-cyborgs to prevent (human) nuclear accidents and undertake (human) medical procedures (ibid, p. 319).

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Acknowledgments

Shirin Demirdag, Arianna Ferrari and two anonymous reviewers provided valuable suggestions and feedback on an earlier draft.

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  1. University of Wollongong, PO Box u153, Wollongong, NSW, 2500, Australia

    Colin Salter

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Salter, C. Animals and War: Anthropocentrism and Technoscience. Nanoethics 9, 11–21 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-014-0217-7

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