Animal Sociology: Beyond Biology, Beyond Speciesism
In Germany and the DACH region, “animal sociology” barely exists as a field. Internationally, people discuss multispecies sociality, interspecies relations, and the ways animals co-constitute social worlds. But here? Even activists often fall back on a biological template: behavior, instincts, cognition, health (…). Everything “good” or “bad” about animals is read through biology. In this framework, animals remain objects. Relationality, interdependence, and social embeddedness vanish.
Animal sociology refuses biology-first thinking. It does not treat animals as instinct machines, cognitive calculators, or ethical abstractions. Instead, it sees them as interrelational beings: every gesture, every interaction, every pattern and idea of co-existence exists in a network of relations — with other animals, humans, social institutions, and the cultural and material worlds they inhabit. Animals are actors in social worlds; they are co-constitutive of social life, not objects to be measured, categorized, or biologized.
This perspective exposes speciesism as a social fact. Hierarchies that make some lives disposable are not “natural”; they are cultural, structural, and embedded in institutions, norms, and everyday practices. Biology alone cannot reveal this. Sociology — relational, activist-informed, and ethically grounded — shows how humans construct value, oppression, and exclusion.
The German animal rights movement risks missing this point. Discourse too often stays polite, abstract, or moralized. It debates vegan ethics or welfare reform, but ignores how social structures, cultural norms, and everyday practices perpetuate speciesist hierarchies. Without a relational lens, activism flattens animals to ethical tokens, sentimentalized victims, or biological curiosities.
Animal sociology insists on three inseparable truths:
- Animals are relational actors, embedded in networks of interaction that include all life.
- Speciesism is real, structural, and morally urgent. It cannot be softened, ignored, or bracketed.
- Activist and grassroots knowledge is valid knowledge. Those working in solidarity with animals are generating insights that matter — institutional approval is neither necessary nor sufficient.
Our responsibility is clear: universities, cultural institutions, and journals may resist or distort this. But we theorize, share, observe, and write anyway. We connect ethical critique to relational insight. We make the homocentric invisible visible. We insist that society confront the normalized, refined, and upheld oppression of animals — not politely, not abstractly, but fully, relationally, and urgently.
Animal sociology in the DACH countries will not grow by waiting for academic blessing. It will grow through radical, unapologetic critique, by observing animals as they live, move, and relate in intertwined social worlds, and by exposing the speciesist hierarchies humans reproduce — even within the activist movement itself.
This is the only way to understand animals without betraying them and to honor our shared interests in fundamental justice.