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CITIZEN ANIMAL: Animals deserve political rights and representation

Many people acknowledge that animals have an intrinsic moral status, but this isn't enough. We’ve made much less progress on the idea that animals might rightly be seen as members of society with membership rights. If they cannot make themselves heard in the dominant political discourse because they do not speak in the language of power, in shaping society and its laws, then we should figure out how to include them.

BRANDON KEIM: At a gathering of scholars and activists called Minding Animals, there was an intellectual exuberance to the “animal turn,” as this blossoming interest in animals is known, and a new term kept coming up at the conference: a “political turn,” away from simply examining the ethics of our relations with animals and toward political organizing and including animals in institutional decision-making. Toward the idea, to put an American spin on things, that We the People ought to include animals as well.

That it doesn’t can seem self-evident. How could politics not be a strictly human endeavor? Dogs might be like family, but they can’t vote or write letters to the editor. Yet this attitude, argues the Dutch philosopher Eva Meijer, is rooted in a philosophical tradition of human exceptionalism. Aristotle defined humans as the only political animal, singularly capable of making moral decisions and articulating the reasons; subsequently animals were seen as voiceless, literally incapable of participating in the linguistic exchange of ideas at the heart of human politics.

In her doctoral thesis, titled Interspecies Democracies, Meijer excoriated this notion. “Other animals have languages and express themselves in many ways,” she wrote, “but they cannot make themselves heard in the dominant political discourse because they do not speak in the language of power.” She drew upon the scientific insights we explored earlier, about how a great many animals communicate in ways comparable to what we call language and live in complex communities where they negotiate — sometimes democratically — collective decisions. In light of this, argues Meijer, they should not only be seen as intelligent but recognized as a political group.

The Canadian philosophers Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson explore what this could mean in a book called Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, which was published in 2011 and, among people interested in animals and philosophy, was perhaps the decade’s most influential work. At its heart is the proposition that — for animals as well as humans — moral status isn’t enough. It’s also important to be considered a member of society.

Prior to Zoopolis, Kymlicka had spent two decades theorizing about human social membership—specifically, about what it means to belong to multiple groups at once, especially in liberal, democratic societies. His Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights and Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity were not exactly airport-bookstore fare, but they were widely lauded within the world of political theory. It was Donaldson, to whom he is married, who introduced him to animal ethics when in the late 1980s a friend convinced her to go vegetarian. She in turn convinced Kymlicka. But it wasn’t until the late 2000s that, at Donaldson’s urging, the two considered the connection between animals and his ideas about human rights. Out of that came Zoopolis.

“Many people acknowledge that animals have an intrinsic moral status,” Kymlicka explained at a Minding Animals panel, “Justice and the Political Status of Animals,” so crowded that people ended up sitting on the floor. “But we’ve made much less progress on the idea that animals might rightly be seen as members of society with membership rights.”

Membership rights, he explained, are those that come from being part of a shared society: my rights as an American citizen, for example, and then the rights that come with being a resident of the state of Maine, rather than the universal rights owed to me as a human being. It’s the former sorts that figure most prominently in our lives, argues Kymlicka. Access to health care, the social safety net, necessary goods and services, political representation: all reside in group memberships rather than simply being human. And who qualifies for membership? Who gets to be part of what ancient Greeks called the demos: the recognized participants of what’s now known as democratic society? In sixth century Athens, it was unenslaved adult men. Nowadays, at least in principle, it’s every human being, but there’s a tension at the heart of this expansion.

Some disability theorists critique how norms of citizenship implicitly presuppose a certain type of cognitive and linguistic sophistication. (Norman Rockwell’s famous “Freedom of Speech” painting, of a man standing up and testifying at a town hall, always comes to mind when I think of this.) Children and people with cognitive disabilities are effectively excluded. This is unfair, say the theorists; all members of society should be considered citizens, and if it’s presently difficult for them to participate in shaping their society and its laws, then we should figure out how to include them. This argument’s implications for animals are clear: Humans and nature should not be understood as mutually exclusive, intrinsically opposed categories…

All of this might sound impractically radical as well as academic — something for ivory-tower theorists oblivious to the profound disagreements that exist about representation for fellow humans, much less animals. Yet it’s still vital to grapple with what it means to see animals as fellow society members.

It’s now widely accepted in environmental and conservation circles that humans and nature should not be understood as mutually exclusive, intrinsically opposed categories, with human presence inevitably blighting a nature that flourishes only in our absence. Contemporary nature writing is animated by a spirit of imagining new relationships of mutual thriving—yet animals remain largely invisible in politics and governance, even theoretically. When in her best-selling Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of “the democracy of species,” the possibilities of that beautiful phrase remain unexplored. In this way the human-nature divide remains intact.

Though it’s presently difficult to envision for some domestic animals — not pets, perhaps, but certainly those used for food, labor, and research, which are industries that animal citizenship would challenge — it wouldn’t be hard to include wild animals in the way Kymlicka and Donaldson suggest. Killing them for sport or convenience is unjust; so are the harms of pollution, vehicle collisions, and climate change. Respecting and representing their interests isn’t so complicated, and I suspect many nature – and animal-loving people would like to see it. The practice just needs to catch up with the theory — and, far from being radical, these ideals are already, at least in some places, being realized. SOURCE…

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