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Summary Of Captive Kin By Darra Gruen

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Lori Gruen's "Captive Kin" takes a look at what it is like being held captive. She asks the reader to look at whether imprisoning apes or humans does harm to them even though they may deserve captivity as a punishment. She goes on to explore whether animals engage in autonomous behaviors, not by verbalization, but by non-language behaviors. Lastly the author brings to light the need to hold some animals’ captive due to the moral implications of releasing them back to the wild. In “Captive Kin” Gruen gives us a glimpse of the fear that can arise just watching a movie. It is through the imagination that the author first asks the reader to imagine what it is like to not only be imprisoned, but be treated less than human, she says “I think what …show more content…

“Autonomous action is not just doing what you want to do…” she goes on to say that being autonomous shows a purposeful thought process which most animals are not thought to possess. Caesar had been altered, therefore he was able to reason things out, and thus he used autonomous action. (172) Like humans Caesar saw himself as independent and took action to free himself, his relationship to Will had changed due to his new understanding and perception of his situation, Will could not have known how his experiments would affect Caesar in the …show more content…

For an animal that supposedly doesn’t think piglet has some very specific ways to let me know she wants more food. Piglet is persistent in her efforts to remind me that her food bowl is empty and she would like more. She will sit next to me and gaze at me steadily, if I don’t respond she will then reach for my face with her paw. If I don’t fill her bowl she will persist by running in front of me and dashing around the living room and bouncing off of the chair or couch. Finally I will get the cup for her food and she will run back to her bowl and wait. There has been a lifetime of examples like this from other pets that show that, although not verbal, animals can and do communicate and act with autonomy in profound and meaningful ways, which raises’ the question of the moral implications of domesticating or caging

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