Challenges to the Cross-Species Study of Rhetoric

This chapter anticipates some challenges to a cross-species paradigm, and shares some challenges it’s already had to deal with. These include the general hurdles of an ambitious interdisciplinary project, like the struggle to serve multiple masters and still be an expert, which is a challenge every project of this scope has to address. More specific to this particular study are challenges that arise from the strong urge in many humanistic disciplines to denounce science, a general human nature, or animal similarity in the late-twentieth century, or the strong urge in Western religion and philosophy to draw distinct lines between one species and all of the other species (which it ironically then groups into equal categories of the human and the animal).