Wild Flourishing: Should animals have territorial rights?
U.S. state governments and governments around the world routinely treat nonhuman animals as resources to be counted, managed, controlled, and, when deemed convenient, killed. Terms such as ‘ecosystem integrity,’ and even ‘biodiversity’ frequently obscure that animals are individuals and members of social communities with relationships, knowledge, traditions, and homes of their own. Yet policymakers continue to permit killing animals for recreational purposes through hunting. They fail to build enough wildlife crossings and allow development to fragment, and sometimes even destroy, the territories on which wild animal peoples depend.
MARC BEKOFF: Philosophers, legal scholars, and people interested in the growing, diverse field of animal studies often ponder alluring, important, and rather difficult questions. Some of these queries involve whether or not wild animals should be granted the right to own their homes, or whether they are merely renters, and whether we should try to reduce the suffering of wild animals, and where we should draw the line and let things be, no matter how horrific they are.
Along these lines, another important question arises that centers on the territory/residency rights of wild animals and what they may be. This is among the reasons why I was very interested in an essay titled “The Territorial Rights of Wild Animals: Justification” by Pablo P. Castello. Focusing on mule deer—but his discussion is relevant to other nonhumans—he argues that deer do not simply inhabit landscapes and that their ability to lead social and cultural lives that they have control over depends on residing in their territories or homes…
“The Territorial Rights of Wild Animals” speaks to this concern by offering new reasons for recognizing wild animals and their communities as right-bearers—rights that would help prevent biodiversity loss.
There are two key messages. The first concerns what I call the “rich lives of animals” and why they matter. The article makes visible the depth and breadth of animals’ social, cultural, and political lives, showing that wild animal communities—specifically, mule deer communities—often have intergenerational cultures anchored in specific places. They also make their own decisions and organize their own social life.
The ethnographic evidence I analyze suggests that we should understand some wild animal communities as animal nations whose cultures, identities, and forms of social organization are so tied to their territories, and so morally and politically important, that they place duties on us humans to respect their territorial rights.
The second message is more practical. U.S. state governments and governments around the world routinely treat nonhuman animals as resources to be counted, managed, controlled, and, when deemed convenient, killed. Terms such as “populations,” “ecosystem services,” “ecosystem integrity,” and even “biodiversity” frequently obscure that animals are individuals and members of social communities with relationships, knowledge, traditions, and homes of their own.
Yet policymakers continue to permit killing animals for recreational purposes through hunting. They fail to build enough wildlife crossings and allow development to fragment, and sometimes even destroy, the territories on which wild animal peoples depend. SOURCE
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