Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations

The title of this essay points to two sets of interrelated diffi culties.1 Those in the fi rst set arise chronically from our individual psychologically complex and often ambivalent relations to animals. The second set refl ects the intellectually and ideologically crisscrossed connections among the various discourses currently concerned with those relations, including the movement for animal rights, ecological ethics, posthumanist theory, and such fi elds as primatology and evolutionary psychology. I begin with some general observations on kin and kinds—that is, relations and classifi cations—and then turn to the increasingly complex play of claims and counterclaims regarding the so-called species barrier.