In his book Animals on Television (2017), Brett Mills states that “representations of animals often function to highlight cultural understandings about what it is to be human.” Nonhuman animals have been unwilling objects of the human gaze: humans have been exploiting animals (real and imagined) on the basis, and the attendant continued perpetuation, of self-assigned human superiority and centrality. This anthropocentrism is also why humans primarily define animals, their agency, their intelligence, their emotional lifeworlds, etc. by projecting onto them human ideas and discourses.
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