In an exciting epistolary exchange, the philosopher Corine Palluchon and the former breeder Jocelyne Porcher, who has become a sociologist, nourish a strong reflection on the animal cause.
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Book. Corine Palluchon is a philosopher specializing in ethics applied to medicine, the environment and animals; Jocelyne Porcher A former breeder who has become a sociologist and research director at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE). From the fall of 2021 in the spring of 2022, these two intellectuals maintained, at the request of the editors Sophie Nordmann and Mazarine Pingeot, a nourished correspondence around a subject which gladly generates passions: the animal cause. Over the course of this long conversation, Corine Palluchon and Jocelyne Porcher examine the multiple facets of a dizzying philosophical question: do we have the right to kill animals?
page after page, letter after letter, this reflection with two voices offers all the charms of the somewhat outdated genre of the epistolary exchange – the effort of argumentation and rigor which often accompanies the writing, but also ‘Elegance of politeness formulas, the pleasure of literary quotes and the courtesy of the wishes of Happy New Year. This delicacy does not erase disagreements, even tensions: if Corine Palluchon, who says “vegan and abolitionist”, is opposed, in principle, to the breeding and the slaughter of the animals, Jocelyne Porcher defends with conviction Family farms that work in a “peaceful and respectful” manner with animals – even if they are promised to death.
Corine Pelluchon and Jocelyne Porcher share a single certainty: both radically criticize the industrial, scientific and taylorized model of animal production which has imposed itself in the West. “He transforms animals into machines, opposes the sense of breeding which is a relationship with the living and divests breeders of their know-how”, accuses Corine Palluchon. He establishes a relationship “of indifference and institutionalized cruelty towards animals”, analysis in Jocelyne Porcher. For the rest – and in particular the question of whether the end of breeding constitutes, or not, a “desirable horizon” -, an abyss separates the two intellectuals.
“illegitimate right”
For Corine Palluchon, the killing of a young and healthy animal is a major transgression as soon as we can meet our nutritional needs otherwise. “It is a right that we grant ourselves on a being, and this right is illegitimate when this killing is not absolutely necessary, she writes. It is not based on the nature of things, on The fact that animals were created to serve us as food or resource, but on an agreement and a habit, on a custom. “A tradition, she adds, which is the fruit – unhappy – of separation radical between nature and culture which governs, in the West, our relations with the living.
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