Zooanthropology: The new concept within the old on animal welfare

Abstract

The man-animal relationship underwent several modifications over decades, at first man was regarded as the center of the universe, an anthropocentric view, which made the animals placed in an inferior position and subdued by humans. Starting from this principle, the animals were treated like beings without feeling and painless, so much that were submitted to procedures of scientific nature without any type of zeal. These concepts began to change through Darwin, who believed that man was the fruit of animal evolution and not a divine creation. From then on, the connotation of man as the center of all things began to lose strength. Subsequently, then comes the zooanthropology that is a branch of science that studies the relationships between humans and other species with the objective of providing answers to questions of human and animal interaction, seeking to obtain contributions from the analysis of animal diversity. This science admits a true dialogue between humans and nonhumans and believes that humans have built much of their predicates through reference to the nonhuman animal through a process of reciprocity, where the relation is first "the That unites the interlocutors ", not being an end in itself.