WE, ANIMALS AMONG NON-HUMANS
Between Utopia and Ecological Equilibria

Throughout my ethnographic experience situated around the theme of longevity in the Blue Zones of Sardinia (Ferraro, 2025), particularly in Ogliastra and Barbagia, a number of elements of profound anthropological relevance emerged with great force, especially regarding the interspecies relations that run through the practices and activities typical of mountain and rural communities marked by high rates of longevity. I am referring explicitly to the relationship human beings maintain with the “non-human,” that is, with the environment and its elements—mountains, waterways, the fruits of the earth, wind, air—and, no less importantly, with the other great non-humans: animals.

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In my first work on longevity, slowness of life emerged as a determining factor, together with the persistence of cosmologies still deeply centered on a relationship of interdependence with Mother Earth as Goddess. Far from being archaic or out of step with a modernity that has learned no longer to recognize such a relationship, in Sardinia these dimensions continue to intersect actively with the real lives of people inhabiting the present. These are not folkloric survivals nor symbolic residues, but worldviews still capable of orienting everyday life.

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In the reflections I shared with the protagonists of my research, slowness never appeared as an expression of some supposedly lazy or unproductive disposition. On the contrary, it revealed itself as the cultural outcome of a symbiotic and interdependent relationship with the environment. Slow living is not, first and foremost, a human intention, nor an abstract moral choice: it is the result of a practical necessity. In certain contexts, the only possible way to live is to attune oneself to an external rhythm, that is, to the rhythm set by the seasons, the land, and the animals. The privileged custodians of this vision are often shepherds, who know from experience that nature cannot be dominated: it can only be understood, listened to, and perhaps entered into alliance with.

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But what, exactly, is nature?

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Superficially, one might say that nature is what lies “outside” us: the external world. Many of the images crowding our modern imagination are still shaped by this opposition: man and nature, culture and nature, inside and outside, human and non-human. Two apparently irreconcilable worlds, conceived as separate, often in conflict, and governed by the idea that the human being is ontologically superior to all other beings.

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In Beyond Nature and Culture (2005), Philippe Descola showed with great clarity how historically situated and culturally arbitrary this scheme is. Human beings are not the center of the world, not the center of life, and not absolutely superior to other beings. Like other non-humans, they are caught within a network of necessary relations with the living and non-living elements of the world. We are not outside nature: we are deeply part of it. There is no human being outside nature. Our presumed superiority has been built around the idea that what distinguishes us—our intelligence, our technique, our language—authorizes us to dominate everything else. But that authorization is a cultural construction, not an ontological truth.

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If we return to shepherds and slowness, we then understand that slowness is the result of an interaction with the non-human, and that this relationship expresses a certain degree of attunement with the environment, a form of vital coherence between what we are and what we live. Under these conditions of possible harmony—or better, of dynamic equilibrium among subjects, and not between subjects and objects—the potential that bodies express, even in terms of the duration of life, becomes more intelligible. Those who live long do so because the real conditions exist for them to do so. The environment, together with our capacity for adaptation, contributes decisively to the quality and duration of existence.

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In 2025, Gallura, specifically Arzachena, was recognized as a Blue Zone. This deeply intrigued me because, beyond easy generalizations, the Gallurese context appears significantly different from the other areas I had previously investigated, namely Ogliastra and Barbagia. The territory changes, the landscapes change, the non-humans change, the variables change, the forms of life change. Every ethnographic experience is, by its very nature, situated.

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Thus, the actors and subjects change as well. The mountains become gentler and less harsh, the air saltier, the landscape more open, and lived experience includes new interlocutors. Goats, omnipresent in Ogliastra and in many areas of Barbagia, give way in Gallura to cattle. Here, in fact, there exists a flourishing and historically grounded tradition of cattle breeding. I am not referring to intensive farming, but to small family-run farms that still live—and do not merely survive—as an integral part of a moral and territorial economy aware of the value of a dense and meaningful interspecies relationship.

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It is precisely this relationship—specifically between human beings and cattle, though the argument could be extended to all domestic animals—that now stands at the center of an often polarized debate. On one side are the more radical animal-rights and vegan positions; on the other are supporters of intensive and often purely extractive uses of animals, what we might call “capitalist carnivores.” At the heart of the debate are ethically decisive issues: animal suffering, the non-necessity of killing, the critique of exploitation, the systemic violence of industrial farming. On the other side stand economic interests, ideologies of necessity, and, not infrequently, practices that are not always legitimate or lawful, grounded in the conviction that the fate of these animals is to be exploited.

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This is not the place to intensify that conflict head-on. Yet an anthropological gaze can suggest less simplified and less ideological visions, helpful in understanding what kind of sustainability we can realistically aspire to as animals among other animals and non-humans. The first objective should be to weaken the hierarchies and superstructures we have culturally constructed in order to justify our actions. The concept of interdependence may be useful precisely because it does not erase differences, but relativizes hierarchies. Interdependence delineates a field of interspecies relations in which the human species, animal species, and other non-humans all find themselves within a shared relational condition.

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For a long time, anthropology was concerned almost exclusively with the “human point of view” on the world. It has gradually shifted, however, toward a more holistic perspective, in which the human being is resized in its presumptuous centrality and reintroduced into the world that receives it as one species among species, a subject in interaction with other subjects, human and non-human alike.

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In The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), and later in When Species Meet (2008), Donna Haraway offers one of the sharpest formulations of this shift. For Haraway, interspecies co-constitution means that humans and animals do not preexist the relation as already completed entities; rather, they become what they are through historical, bodily, affective, and practical relations. This is the core of the concept of companion species: species that do not merely coexist, but are reciprocally formed over time.

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Haraway rejects the modern idea of an autonomous human subject, separated from the rest of the living world. Against this view, she argues that life is always the product of a becoming-with. There is no human first and then a relation with the animal; on the contrary, the human emerges within networks of cohabitation, training, labor, care, affection, body language, and mutual dependence. In this sense, the relation with the domestic animal is not secondary: it is constitutive of the human itself.

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For Haraway, co-constitution never coincides with harmony or innocence. Interspecies relations are not idealized: they are historically situated, ambivalent, marked by asymmetries, violence, discipline, dependence, and power. Yet precisely for this reason, Haraway also rejects the simplistic narrative according to which, in domestication, only the human acts while the animal merely suffers. Domestication, in fact, should not be read solely as unilateral human domination over the animal, but as a shared history of reciprocal transformation. Over the long durée of coexistence, both species change: in their bodies, behaviors, perceptual capacities, and social worlds. Domesticity thus becomes a laboratory of historical and relational coevolution.

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The domestic animal, then, is a co-author of the human. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in the concrete sense that human life, especially in societies of close coexistence with animals, is organized within forms of mutual dependence, embodied learning, sensory proximity, care, and shared adaptation. It is precisely here that interspecies relation becomes interdependence.

Applied to the relation with cattle, Haraway’s perspective suggests that the human-cattle relation should not be understood as the simple economic use of the animal, but as a relation of reciprocal co-formation. The herder does not remain identical to himself and then merely “manage” the bovine; his body, rhythms, attentiveness, practical knowledge, and way of inhabiting the landscape are themselves formed in the daily relation with the herd. This is fully consistent with the horizon of multispecies ethnography, which today interprets relations between humans and farm animals as intertwined social, ecological, and material relations.

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In the case of cattle, this co-constitution unfolds on at least three levels.

The first is the plane of shared labor. Cattle are not merely affective companions or symbolic presences, but animals that have historically participated in the production of human life: milk, meat, labor power, manure, the fertility of fields, and the organization of pastoral mobility. This means that their presence has helped shape not only the economy, but also settlement patterns, infrastructures, seasonal calendars, and social organization. Studies of ancient and historical pastoralism clearly show that herd animals have profoundly shaped human social and political spaces.

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The second is the plane of reciprocal corporeality. With cattle, the relation is never abstract. It passes through gaze, distance, touch, smell, voice, posture, the ability to read the movement of the herd, the timing of milking, birth, illness, and grazing. It is here that Haraway’s perspective proves especially fruitful: the bovine is not merely a “resource,” but a being that obliges the human to develop a situated and embodied form of attention. To know animals means to enter into practices of observation, response, and mutual adaptation.

On this point, the contribution of Thomas Csordas (1990) is particularly useful. If we think of embodiment not as mere biological corporeality, but as the existential condition of being present in the world, then the relation with cattle can be read as a true embodied pedagogy. The human body is educated within the relation: it learns measures, rhythms, distances, ways of using force, capacities for dwelling in space and time. In this sense, pastoral knowledge is not merely mental or technical: it is profoundly bodily. The bovine educates the human body to a different kind of presence—more attentive, more sensory, more situated.

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The third is the plane of reciprocal biological transformation. Here Haraway productively meets evolutionary biology. Domestication is today often read as a process of mutualistic coevolution rather than a purely unilateral act of domination. In the case of cattle, this is visible both in the selection of breeds and, on the human side, in the processes linked to milk consumption and the selection of lactase persistence in certain pastoral populations. In this sense, cattle have not merely accompanied human history: they have contributed to modifying some of its biological traits.

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From this point of view, the link between lactase and dairying (the production and consumption of milk) is exemplary. Lactase persistence into adulthood shows with particular clarity that the relation with dairy animals is not only social, symbolic, or economic, but also biological. A cultural practice—namely animal husbandry and the consumption of milk—has helped generate new selective pressures on the human body. This does not mean reducing the relation to biological determinism, but it does show that coexistence between species can leave traces in human biology itself. Here interdependence reveals itself to be fully biocultural.

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In this regard, the contribution of Natasha Fijn is fundamental, as her work broadens the perspective on how humans and animals live together, read one another, influence one another, and are mutually formed in everyday practice. In Living with Herds: Human-Animal Coexistence in Mongolia (2011), Fijn shows how herd animals concretely shape the lives of pastoralists and, in turn, how pastoralists shape animal behavior. The decisive formulation here is simple but radical: animals influence human lives and are active partners in domestication.

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With Fijn, we can read the bovine not as a merely productive animal, but as a presence that helps shape the times of the day, paths through space, labor gestures, bodily attention, local knowledge, care, and the very sense of coexistence with other living beings. Domestication thus generates an extended interspecies sociality: it is not merely a matter of keeping animals at home or on the farm, but of living within a system in which the landscape is also organized for cattle, the human body is educated by them, and local knowledge is built with them.

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Melinda Zeder, too, in The Domestication of Animals (2012) and in other works, insists that domestication should not be thought from the domesticator’s point of view alone, as if everything depended on intention, control, and domination. For Zeder, domestication is an evolutionary and historical process founded on a two-way relationship between humans and target species. Domestic animals, in this framework, are not mere objects: they are partners in a relation that modifies both sides.

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Applied to cattle, this means that the human-cattle relation cannot be reduced to the formula “humans use cattle for meat, milk, or labor.” Rather, over the long term, cattle and humans enter into a history of co-adaptation. Humans reorganize space, diet, protection, mobility, reproduction, and productive calendars around livestock; cattle, in turn, change within a selective environment transformed by human presence. The bovine must therefore be thought of as part of a coevolutionary relation, not merely an economic chain. It contributes to shaping the landscape, labor rhythms, practices of care and protection, food systems, and, indirectly, even certain traits of human biology.

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In this sense, Zeder authorizes us to read the relation with cattle as a form of historical and ecological mutualism, while still acknowledging that it remains an asymmetrical relation marked by human control. The point, then, is not to absolve every form of animal husbandry, nor to deny animal suffering, nor to romanticize domestication. The point is to distinguish between the critique of cruelty and the negation of relation. There is indeed a risk, in some radical positions, of identifying every human-animal relation with exploitation, as if the very fact of dependence or asymmetry made a real relation ontologically impossible. But anthropology, just like the biology of domestication, shows that interspecies relations can be dense, formative, historical, embodied, and transformative even when they are not perfectly symmetrical.

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The ethical question, then, is not simply whether a relation between humans and domestic animals can or cannot exist. The question is: what kind of relation? What degree of violence, what degree of care, what recognition of alterity, what limit, what responsibility, what form of coexistence? From this point of view, perhaps the most radical critique should be directed not at the relation itself, but at the form that capitalist and industrial modernity has imposed upon that relation, emptying it of reciprocity, proximity, and recognition.

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In this sense, intensive farming represents the extreme deformation of interdependence. In it, the relation is almost entirely erased and replaced by technical management, the serialization of animal bodies, and the separation between production and perception, between consumption and responsibility. The non-human disappears as another living being only to reappear as product. Yet there still exist, in certain contexts—as still partly happens in Gallura—forms of family-based, non-industrialized husbandry in which the bovine is not completely reduced to a thing, in which mutual dependence remains visible, in which labor retains a formative character, and in which the animal continues to be perceived as a presence rather than merely an output.

In such cases, speaking of a “healthy” relation with the animal does not mean evoking an innocent or tension-free relation. It means, rather, recognizing a relation in which the non-human has not yet been entirely dissolved into exchange value, a relation in which animal alterity remains visible and in which the human is still compelled to measure himself against another center of life. In this sense, the bovine is not merely a farmed animal: it is a co-participant in the pastoral world.

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Perhaps it is precisely here that anthropology can offer its most important contribution: not by producing moral absolutions, but by reminding us that we have never been anything other than animals among other animals and non-humans. And that true utopia does not consist in imagining a humanity purified of every relation with the non-human, but in seeking forms of ecological and moral equilibrium in which coexistence among species may once again become visible, responsible, and thinkable.

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References

Csordas, Thomas J., 1990. “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology.” Ethos 18(1): 5–47.

Csordas, Thomas J., 1994. Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Descola, Philippe, 2005. Par-delà nature et culture

Ferraro, Giuseoppe, 2025. Blue zones. Pratiche di longevità e agency dei luoghi sacri in Sardegna. Tesi di laurea specialistica in Scienze antropologiche ed etnologiche. Università degli studi di Milano – Bicocca.

Fijn, Natasha, 2011. Living with Herds: Human-Animal Coexistence in Mongolia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haraway, Donna J., 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Zeder, Melinda A., 2012. “The Domestication of Animals.” Journal of Anthropological Research 68(2): 161–190.