Lori Gruen

“We can critically reflect on the influences that have shaped us. We can evaluate the quality and meaning of these various relationships and explore our dependency as well as our power and privilege in them. This reflection can be a kind of perceptual therapy that helps us develop our ethical skills. The goal, however, is not to transcend the relationships but to understand and improve them, in part by improving our self-conceptions. Our relationships with human and animal others co-constitute who we are and how we configure our identities and agency, even our thoughts and desires. We can't make sense of living without others, and that includes other animals. We are entangled in complex relationships and rather than trying to accomplish the impossible by pretending we can disentangle, we would do better to think about how to be more perceptive and more responsive to the deeply entangled relationships we are in.”
― Lori Gruen, Entangled Empathy: An Alternative Ethic for Our Relationships with Animals