Chapter 2 places great emphasis on giving a clear definition of care and explaining its applications to animals. Care is informed “by ideas about who animals are and how they should be treated” (49). Moving past the basic needs of sustenance and veterinary care, there is care that includes mental enrichment and socialization. To this requires animals to be engaged with as subjects rather than property. This links ideas around autonomy, consciousness, and agency to the state of being for animals and direction in regards to care. How can an animals agency be determined? Is there a way to offer fufillment to an animal and can that be measured?
The idea of caring for an animal in a way that claims that have the ability to utilize agency or craft desires is a very interesting one. I think that the ways in which the lines between desires and beingness are blurred creates a new opportunity to move past humanism. Though this does not apply directly to the text, there are pre-existing ideas around who is human and deserving of certain rights, care, considerations, and who is not. If Black people are not human, if disabled people are not human, or if they exist in some middle ground, through this understanding of property vs. subject we can reject the idea of humanity as a condition of a happy, fulfilling life.