Yoga: The Essence of Animal Ethics, Kinship, and Rewilding |
I'm always interested in how various nonhuman animals (animals) make their presence known in activities that seem far removed from who they are and what they do. This happened when I learned about Alison Zak's book Wild Asana: Animals, Yoga, and Connecting Our Practice to the Natural World and this past week when I learned about Kenneth Valpey's new open-access book Yoga and Animal Ethics. In his eclectic and eye- and heart-opening work, Valpey "reorients our understanding of yoga by placing animals and the environment at the heart of the tradition’s ethical teachings" and suggests that by "decentering our anthropocentric presuppositions on horizons of continuity across divine, human, and animal domains, we may yet be able to recover our fundamental kinship with the presence of personality in the world." I envision yoga as playing a large role in rewilding each of our hearts in highly unexpected ways.
Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Yoga and Animal Ethics?
Kenneth Valpey: As environmentalism has gone mainstream in recent decades, increasingly people are seeing the connection between how humans (mis)treat animals and environmental degradation. Yoga’s rising popularity tells me a similar........