The possession and non-possession of language has historically determined our ethical obligation to animals (Dillon, 2011). Descartes believed that only humans can use language creatively: no animal is capable of “arranging various words together and forming an utterance from them” (Coren, 2006). In the novel Under the Skin, humans are factory-farmed by aliens; in a … Continue reading ‘Living by voices we shall never hear’: the limitations of an anthropocentric understanding of animal communication