The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
S6E1: Politics with Will Kymlicka
Claudia launches Season 6 by talking to Will Kymlicka about politics. They discuss how animals remain largely sidelined in political philosophical thought, as compared to other areas of ethics and social theory. Will delves into three different models for how to bring animals into politics: politics “on behalf of” animals, where humans represent animals; politics “by” animals, where wild animals exercise self-government; and politics “with” animals, where humans and animals do politics together and co-author decisions. As examples of joint politics, they discuss recent efforts to share power with domesticated animals in farmed animal sanctuaries, in the family and in the workplace.
Date Recorded: 30 September 2023.
Will Kymlicka is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, where he has taught since 1998. He is the co-author with Sue Donaldson of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, published by Oxford University Press in 2011, and now translated into German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, and Polish. Zoopolis argues that animals belong at the heart of democratic political theory - defending rights of citizenship for domesticated animals and sovereignty rights for wild animals – and its ideas have helped launch the recent `political turn’ in animal ethics. Will and Sue have continued developing their model of a zoopolis, and its implications for animal advocacy, legal reform, and alliances with other social justice movements. Their recent work has appeared in Politics and Animals; The Philosophy and Politics of Animal Liberation; Journal of Animal Ethics; Canadian Perspectives on Animals and the Law; the Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies. Will co-directs the Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics research group at Queen’s University, including its postdoctoral fellowship program, and teaches courses in animals and political theory and in animals and the law.
Featured:
- Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rightsby Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka
- Doing Politics with Animals by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, forthcoming in Social Research
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
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SPEAKER_03:And so it was just it's just been assumed for like you know 3,000 years that animals the the question of politics has no relevance for animals because or put another way that politics is in fact understood as this the domain in which we separate ourselves from the animals. So everyone acknowledges that there's some ways in which humans and animals are similar, but what distinguishes us, what what enables us to rise above animality, is that we alone have the ability to make collective choices about how to live. And so the very idea of politics, it as in the Western tradition, is kind of inherently exclusionary of animals.
SPEAKER_01:Yay! I bet you thought I wasn't gonna get another season out this year, but you were wrong. It's season six, and this season we're focusing on animals and politics. Now, this season's quite intimately related to season one where we looked at animals and the law, but I think retake and a look at animals and politics is really important and in kind of a nice, beautiful synergy. My first guest for this season is Will Kimmelka once again. I am absolutely delighted to have him back on the show. As always, Will is, you know, he's an incredible thinker, and his ideas with regards to animals and politics and the ways in which they can be included in society, as well as how their society should be thought about, are fascinating and, you know, challenging academically and personally. And I'm really, really excited that I managed to get him back on the show. So I hope you enjoy a little bit about him, if you don't know who Will Kimmlikke is. He is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy in the philosophy department at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, where he has taught since 1998. He's the co-author with Sue Donaldson of Zoopoulos, a political theory of animal rights, which has been mentioned many, many, many, many times on this show. It's now been translated into German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, and Polish. So it's out there for you. Zoopoulos argues that animals belong at the heart of the democratic political theory, defending rights of citizenship for domesticated animals and sovereignty rights for wild animals. And its ideas have helped to launch the recent quote-unquote political turn in animal ethics. Will and Sue have continued developing their model of Zoopoulos and its implications for animal advocacy, legal reform, and alliances with other social justice movements. We speak about some of those developments today. We spend considerable time talking about some of the ideas that Will and Sue have developed, and I hope you enjoy.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, thanks. It's great to be back.
SPEAKER_01:You were my very, very first interviewee on the show, and it's it's there's actually a really nice kind of circle to all of this because it was near at the beginning of my time at Queens and learning about animal studies. And we were sitting in your office. Yeah, it was gosh, this was just like pre-these were pre-COVID times, right? So long ago. And now um the PhD is done and the podcast continues. So I'm really, really, really happy to have you back on the show. It feels like a moment of progress for the podcast.
SPEAKER_03:Well, congratulations on all the great success you've had so far with the with the podcast.
SPEAKER_01:Well, thank you. A lot of the credit also goes to you and Sue for all the support you've given throughout throughout the podcast. The mentorship from both of you has been phenomenal, and I and I cannot thank you enough. But before we get all mushy and gushy, because that's my tendency, I'm gonna get all squishy. I'm hoping that today we can focus on politics as a concept, because this whole season is going to be looking at animals and politics. And as we start the season, I tend to like to just unpack the broad idea. So, what is politics and why should animal studies scholars be interested in politics? And kind of in a nutshell, I'm hoping that that is what we can get done in our conversation today. And I know we've had you on the show before, but for folks that maybe haven't listened to that episode, maybe you could tell us a little bit about you and how you came to be interested in kind of animals and asking these political sorts of questions.
SPEAKER_03:Right. So I'm a political philosopher in the philosophy department at Queen's University. And so my work has always been in the field of political theory, which have focuses on issues of justice, rights, democracy, legitimacy, sovereignty. These are the core concepts that are used in my field to discuss basically how societies are governed. And what struck me is that animals are virtually completely invisible in political theory. That's changing slowly recently, but certainly when I was being trained as a political philosopher, I never once had a reading or a lecture or a course in which anyone raised the question where do animals fit in our theories of democracy, sovereignty, the state. And what struck me in particular was how different that is from the field of moral philosophy. So political philosophy and moral philosophy are two different subfields. And within moral philosophy, the animal question has been has been quite high profile, at least since the 1970s. So if it almost anyone who took an introductory course in moral philosophy or ethics, applied ethics, would probably be introduced to the animal question. It's now one of the core questions in moral philosophy. But the question they ask is: what is the moral status of animals? Do animals have moral status? If so, is it the same as humans? Whereas, so the animal question has a foothold in moral philosophy. It's still relatively invisible in political philosophy, and Sue and I actually confirmed this by looking up political philosophy textbooks, and it is still amazing that the vast, vast majority of textbooks in political philosophy make no reference to animals. And so that got us thinking: why is it that animals have, as it were, made an entrance into moral philosophy and into debates about moral status? There obviously was, in retrospect, not that much resistance to including the animal question in moral philosophy and ethics. But political philosophy has remained highly resistant. And I think that's because I mean there's all sorts of potential reasons. We're still actually trying to, it's still to my mind a bit of a puzzle wh, why this considerable asymmetry between moral philosophy and political philosophy. But I think part of it is that the idea of politics, the very idea of politics, at least as we've inherited it in the Western tradition, it's it's very, if you like, human exceptionalist. It's it assumes that only humans can engage in politics. That politics is something that involves making collective decisions about the kind of future one wants to lead. And it's just assumed that animals can't have politics, can't do politics, because they are essentially biologically determined. They're just they don't have choices, they don't have alternative futures. They just enact some biologically determined script that as a result of evolution. So so they there are no choices for them to make. There are no alternative futures, there's just instincts and drives that are biologically determined. Whereas humans are unique in having the capacity to actually make collective judgments, collective decisions about alternative ways of living, of living together. So we as individuals make individual decisions about what kind of lives we want to lead, but politics is when we need to make collective decisions about how we want to live. And so it was just it's just been assumed for like you know, 3,000 years that animals, the the question of politics has no relevance for animals because, or put in another way, that politics is in fact understood as this the domain in which we separate ourselves from the animals. So everyone acknowledges that there's some ways in which humans and animals are similar, but what distinguishes us, what what enable us to rise above animality, is that we alone have the ability to make collective choices about how to live. And so the very idea of politics, it as in the Western tradition, is kind of inherently exclusionary of animals. It's it's and in a in a way that's proven to be more of a barrier than the idea of moral status. People are able to think about how animals are included in the moral circle. You know, Peter Singer famously said the task of the animal advocacy movement is to expand the moral circle. And I think that the advocacy movement has had some success in including animals in the moral circle, but had virtually no success in including animals in the political circle, in this the circle of beings who are conceived of as having a stake in and a right to participate in politics.
SPEAKER_01:Why the separation between morals and politics? Is that a common way of thinking about politics? Is politics normally construed as being separate from moral questions? Or is this just a divide in philosophy where you've got this kind of sub-separation of moral philosophy and political philosophy? Or is you know political science, for example, does that also not contend with these types of moral questions? Or is this just kind of, am I just smashing together different disciplines here that think about politics in variable ways?
SPEAKER_03:So I think the the distinction between m morality and politics is it it may it may be particularly strong in philosophy, but I I don't think it's unique to philosophy, and I don't think it's so moral philosophy is really focused on how an individual agent should reason through their moral choices. And so it's an attempt to kind of map what are the moral moral philosophy, at least in the contemporary tradition, is just you start with a an agent, a moral agent, who who tries to map the moral reasons that are that are germane to a particular decision. But what distinguishes politics is that someone it it it there's a requirement that we make a decision collectively and that that collective decision be enforceable. And so politics involves the idea of authority, at least in the in the Western tradition. And and the goal is to create, I mean, political philosophy is often described as having as its goal how to think about the creation of legitimate authority. How is it legitimate that there's somebody, something like the parliament, that can that has the authority to govern me, to order me to do things. And so there, the fundamental question of political philosophy is not what are the how to map the moral reasons that an individual moral agent faces, it's how to construct relationships of authority, relationships of governance, such that we can point to some body, some person or collective body who has the legitimate power, the legitimate right to make decisions that are binding on others. And as soon as you ask that question, then what you're asking about, you're raising questions about jurisdiction, like over what decisions does this body have the right to make choices. You're raising questions about sovereignty, over what territory does this body have a right to govern, but also, uh, in a way fundamentally of representation. This authority is likely, at least in the Western tradition, this authority is only legitimate if it truly represents those it's governing. So the so one of the one of the you know classical questions in political philosophy is how do we think about the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed? And how do we make sure that the those who govern track the interests of the governed? And that's so that raises issues of representation, accountability in the modern era, democracy, elections, and so on, and and about justification. How does this governing body justify itself to those it governs? Uh, and so then you get ideas about deliberation and oversight and yeah, and so we've built this kind of complex set of concepts that are fundamentally about the relationship of author uh they're about how to theorize relationships of authority and how to determine when relationships of authority are legitimate, as distinct from this question about just thinking of ourselves as an individual moral agent and trying to map a moral reason.
SPEAKER_01:I see. So it operates at two separate levels as well. So there's a definite collective, I think legitimate authority helps me think about this in several ways. One, when we think about politics now, I'm I'm inclined then to say, well, if we're thinking about legitimate authority and animals, there's one way in which we could look at animal societies and collectivities and think about how they have structured legitimate governance structures themselves. And this kind of dismantles that idea that politics is in and of itself a human-centric idea. And then the second way is well, how do we include or animals in human political structures? So how are animals part of our existing collectivities? Now, which of those, like do you look at both of these two types of structures, or which of these are you are you interested in, or at least would you agree with that kind of synopsis of you could think about legitimate authority in these two ways?
SPEAKER_03:So Sue and I actually just finished a paper in which we talk about three models. So one is how do we include animals in human decision making? So we we start from things like existing national political systems and ask how do we ensure that the interests of animals are adequately represented? And this is typically the what the way this model works is to imagine that we might appoint some humans to speak on behalf of animals. So these could be animal advocates, animal representatives. So either they're modest and ambitious versions of this. The modest version is just that you might have someone who would be asked or authorized to speak on behalf of animals at a parliamentary committee, say, but who wouldn't necessarily have a right to vote. They're just a kind of advice, they'd have they have an advisory function. The ambitious version is you might actually imagine setting aside parliamentary seats for animals. And some people have proposed it, like 10 seats in the House of Parliament would be set aside for people who are whose task it is to advocate for and represent the interests of animals. So we call that politics on behalf of animals. So that and that's one way to include animals, is we can think about who appointing, appointing or electing some humans to act on behalf of animals within human politics. The second model, as you said, is to instead think about the ways in which animals govern themselves, that they they too face this task of making collective decisions. They too have to construct legitimate authority. Precisely because animals aren't just biologically determined, they they they confront a whole slew of complicated decisions they need to make and often need to make collectively. And so just like humans, they face a challenge about how to ensure that that that authority, that there is some authority in the community to make these decisions, and that that authority is perceived as legitimate by others. And so there's this is actually a huge area of ethological research, which I think is just fascinating, that that is all the different kinds of procedures that animal communities use to basically construct legitimate authority. And in some cases, it's about seniority, you know, so that the elder members of the community have uh have a more of a vote on certain decisions. In other cases, it's a bit more majoritarian. In some cases, it depends on what issues at stake. Certain members of the community are seen as having authority on some issues, perhaps because they have specialized knowledge about it, but on other issues, they may not be the authorities. So it's not like there's a single authority structure for all issues. Anyway, so so we can start thinking, so from our view, this is we call this politics by animals. So we have politics on behalf of animals, which humans speak on behalf of animals, and here we have politics by animals, in which they are governing themselves and they are they are making choices, they're making decisions according to authority structures. And I think it's really important to acknowledge that they do that and that they have a right to do that, and that what we should be trying to do in our relations with wild animals is not only or necessarily to be thinking about how we relate to them one by one and respect their individual rights, but also respect, if you like, their collective right to govern themselves. They have a right to politics, they have a right to engage in their own politics, and that means we should we should uh not do anything that would undermine their authority relations. And there's some really interesting work that's done on how humans do intentionally or unintentionally undermine these authority relations within wild animal communities. So there's these famous studies about with elephant troops that what that if the elder like matriarchs are are hunted, then sometimes the younger elephants go rogue because they're not subject to a legitimate authority within the community, and and then they become dangerous to other members of the community as well as to other animals and humans nearby. And and so it's really important for the well-being of that community and its uh relations with others that these authority structures be maintained.
SPEAKER_01:Isn't another example with wolves? And I think this is quite topical right now, when when folks hunt wolves, they tend to the whole packs can kind of uh disentangle.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So that's the second model. So we have politics on behalf of animals, we have politics by animals. And then the third model, which is harder, you know, which which which I think we need to think more about, is what we call politics with animals. So are there times and places? So in the first model, it's basically humans are doing all the politics. Some of them are are asked to speak on behalf of animals, but it's politics is understood as humans deliberating with humans about what to do, even if some of those humans are asked to speak on behalf of animals. The second one is politics is by animals amongst with other animals. But is it possible to imagine that we're doing that we have politics with animals? This is something we do together, something that we jointly do. So we sometimes call it joint politics. And so that's our our one example that we've looked at for that is farmed animal sanctuaries. So in that case, we think we can think about farmed animal sanctuaries as micro-sites in which these uh formerly farmed animals who've been rescued from industrial agriculture and the humans need to make a bunch of decisions. And at least in some sanctuaries, they are really committed to trying to make these decisions together. And so they're trying to think about it's not just that they'd have someone speaking on behalf of animals, and it's not just that they'd let animals make their own decisions, although both of those also happen, but that there would be trying to think about a process by which you know the animals could propose something to the humans, and the humans could propose something to the animals, and that what would emerge is uh the outcome of an iterative process of bargaining, negotiation, trial and experiment. And so we think that at least at some farmed animal sanctuaries, we we could really, you know, these are not for all sorts of reasons, they're they're they're not, as it were, ideal, these are not the ideal conditions to be experimenting in in joint politics, partly because the animals often are highly traumatized, you know, from their experience in industrialized agriculture and their limits on resources and so on. But still, I we think that that many of the decisions that are made about routines, about the way in which physical space is organized, about what kinds of activities are undertaken, about what kinds of relationships within and across species, all of these really can be described as jointly authored, the result of joint politics. And so that's one example of joint politics. And then we're also thinking about some forms of urban design with urban wildlife, so what we call liminal animals, as possibly also falling under this heading of joint politics. And so, you know, there's a lot of interest amongst urban design people, urban planners. Cities, cities historically have been uh have been planned by and for humans to the almost complete neglect of the interests of animals. I know you've you had a whole series on the city, but there's growing recognition that the the liminal animals have a right to be there. It's it's their city as well. So, how can we moving forward, how can we plan public spaces and infrastructure and so on in a way that take not just takes the interests into account, because that could be politics on behalf of animals, but is also jointly authored with those animals. How can we think of this as a process of a kind of iterative process in which we're looking for what they're trying to tell us? We make suggestions to them about, yeah. So though that's what we're working on these days.
SPEAKER_01:So so to make this more tangible, following through with the kind of city example, and I imagine the same would be true with sanctuaries. So I know, for example, a lot of urban animals like to use, you know, there's often like riverbanks or I don't know the word of it now, like depressed riverbanks. Any ecologist who's listening to you is probably cringing. But you know, waterways that are often underdeveloped by human designers are often used as kind of highway systems for many liminal animals that move through there's there's pathways, and a lot of actually wildlife activity happens in areas that many humans might look at as and think as being neglected or you know not used. And I can imagine that as we become more sensitive to animals in cities and animals having a claim to urban space, that these spaces and when when development does come or developments do change, the area that they're done in a way that's sensitive to how perhaps foxes move through those areas or cranes come into those areas. That is this kind of part of that iterative process where before developments would happen there, maybe this would stop a development from happening there, or it would mean a development that happens in a way that's sensitive to how these animals have historically used that space.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so that's definitely part of it. And and another part of it is, you know, with with climate change, there's just going to be a lot of you know, kind of retrofitting of urban space. And so forms of, you know, many, many urban animals, wild animals have urban wildlife have managed to find often under very you know unjust conditions and so on, but they but uh but they found accommodations and so on. But we're going to have, as a result of climate change, probably new animals moving into the city, and some of the ways in which existing liminal animals have adapted may become unsustainable if you know the temperature rises and so on. And so even for those animals for whom the city has sort of worked as a home in the past, it it may not be the future, may not be so bright unless we start thinking about how we can proactively create forms of mitigation and adaptation for them as well as for us.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I had Daniel Clode on the show not too long ago who spoke about koalas and how koalas are moving into Australian cities in numbers never seen before following the wildlife fires, and that chances are koalas and other animals are going to increasingly move into cities as resources become, you know, more and more fraught. So I really appreciate this kind of idea of politics on behalf of animals, politics by animals, and politics with animals. You know, and I'm assuming here when you say by animals, it's not just happening at a species-specific level here. When you're saying politics by animals, you're not saying, oh, it's, you know, it's just monkeys with monkeys. It's also how monkeys navigate a shared space with other species.
SPEAKER_03:So there's two different things there. One is politics by animals is done primarily at the level of not like there's not a single whale politics, there's not a single monkey politics. It occurs primarily at the level of flocks, herds, pods, troops. There may be, and there are, interesting variations between different herds, pods, flocks in how those authority structures are organized. And so, and that's related, uh, as you know, to all this growing evidence that that animals have cultures. So the culture, the the kind of, if you like, political culture of one baboon troupe may be different from the political culture of another baboon troupe. And and so that's that's the unit of of animal politics is not not species, but but communities who develop so that they have these communal group norms about how decisions are made and so on. Yeah, but then uh a second question is we we need to think about how you know that that both animals and humans are part of ecosystems, and there needs to be kind of, you know, if you like the governing of ecosystems. And so with respect to that, one of the one of the ideas that Sue and I have been working on is the idea of an interspecies commons. And so that in again, if you think about this from our perspective as political theorists, the the way in which political theory thinks about land and space is in terms of sovereign territory. So the political theorists look out at the world and see 192 countries, each of whom has exclusive jurisdiction over its territory. So every piece of land belongs to one country, and one country has exclusive claim over its territory. And so that that way of thinking about territory obviously completely ignores animals, many of whom cross these international borders. And it it so in in some cases, it it I think it's it's appropriate for humans. And I I think it for some of those areas, it's it's appropriate for us to say that that territory belongs to the wild animals who live there and not to us. And that we and that you know, we should not think of ourselves as having the right to colonize and develop the homelands of wild animals. But in other cases, and particularly with with respect to liminal animals, we we are we are sharing territory. And so we need to be able to think of territory on the one hand, it is that there are ways in which existing you know national legislatures are governing territory as as part of our right, because humans as well as other animals have rights of self government. So we govern ourselves on on territory, and that but but this this territory. Over which we exercise self-government is also the territory that belongs to other animals. And so we need to think of it as a commons. And then the question is what are the how do we think about the governing of a commons in a way that acknowledges the right to belong of all of the animals that live off of and depend on the commons? And so this is, I mean, it's it's really quite a complicated challenge, but we're trying to think through, in terms of political theory, the relationship between these inherited ideas of kind of national sovereignty over political territory with these ideas of an interspecies commons, because we think you actually need both.
SPEAKER_01:And I, you know, I have Steve, Steve Cook coming on where we speak a bit about habitat rights. And I've I've kind of done a little bit of an inverse where I've interviewed him before interviewing you, and I know he speaks about the need to recognize that animals use this space and that it's it's important to their survival, to their cultures, to their well-being, and that their claim to land needs to be acknowledged. But what I find really interesting about this idea of politics by animals is one, you were using collective nouns there, which made me realize that maybe we've almost always implicitly known that animals do govern themselves in these particular types of settings, right? Pods, troops. These are all, I don't know, we've almost always known that animals don't operate at a species level, but that they self-govern, you know, based on familial connections. There's there is some animals that leave a specific group and will join another group, but that this also happens across species. And I think you can look at many herd animals across the African savannah, right? Who will move with one another. Very rarely do Vildebias just move alone. They move with a whole host of other animals. And I think that when you start to think of a savannah as a you know a multi-species political space where these animals are moving together, they're migrating together in a in what's a very organized way, actually. And when you start to think of that as a political movement, it changes the tenor and the significance of it in different ways. This is no longer only a question about conservation and protecting their land. It's also a matter of protecting their social groups, their claims to be the way they've always been or want to change and respond to things like climate change, as you mentioned. What I also think is quite fascinating about this conversation so far is it it disrupts some of my kind of traditional ideas of politics. So for me, politics has always been, you know, who gets what, when, where, and how. The kind of classical, you know, resource allocation. And to some extent, that is what we're talking about. Who has claim to land, who has claim to healthcare, who has but you're not just talking here about policy and governance in this like big overarching way. You're speaking about how politics is practiced. Is that is that fair? So politics goes beyond just institutions and governments and policy and voting. It's also about how social worlds and societies are practiced.
SPEAKER_03:So this is it's it's a very good question. And one of the it's actually goes, in a way, it goes to the heart of political theory and political philosophy. So our if you think about the way academia has developed, there is this divide between anthropology and sociology on the one hand, which studies society and then political science, which studies politics andor the state or the government. And so the partly because of this kind of professional disciplinary division, a lot of a lot of discussion in politics has a kind of, it's almost invested in exaggerating the difference between politics and society, between political life and social life. Whereas my own view is that basically we are social animals, humans and and other animals are social animals. We have we have a social life. Because we have a social life, there are certain things we need to do, we need to get done, certain decisions we need to make. And politics is a vehicle for a community to do things. And so it's it's we can't we can't really understand politics. And so from our point of view, you know, the the the distinction between so to give a concrete example, um the we could one can spend quite a bit of time and effort trying to conceptually distinguish social norms from political norms, from legal norms, and and and there's huge debates about how exactly we distinguish these. But you know, from my point of view, what they share is that there are norms about how we are going to live together. And there needs to be mechanisms for deciding what those norms are, but also for contesting them. In any group, there's going to be contestations over what the norms are, about how we do things around here. And so I I think of the that what we need is essentially a kind of rich understanding of the social life of social animals. And then, and then we'll see, and then we'll see politics there. I I and I'm in a way I'm I'm I'm less obsessed than some of my colleagues about policing the uh you know, trying to figure out exactly what what part of this social life of social animals we're gonna put under the heading of politics. In a way, I'm less obsessed with that question. I I I think that that that's again that the the point is we're social animals, we have a social life, we therefore need social norms, we need process mechanisms for making decisions about social norms, and there's there's the and that and therefore we need authority relations, and then we need mechanisms for for contesting and challenging authority relations. And all of this, to my mind, we're we're just we're we're inevitably getting into politics.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I mean this goes back to that kind of example you mentioned earlier with with elephants and that I brought up with with wolves, is when you start to just pay attention to the ways in which they're social. And at least if you at least if you put on a political imagination, and I think this is key to what you were saying earlier, you know, for a long time we were just saying animals uh behave according to instinct. So that made all of these really intricate decision-making mechanisms, contestations, it made them invisible in in in some ways, or we just simply didn't see them because that was just written off as instincts, right? Or it's purely just got to do with reproduction or you know, continuing the species. But when you start to put on a political lens of sorts, you start to think about this maybe with a bit more nuance, with saying, okay, well, what what how how is conflict resolution happening here? Is what appears to be aggression initially aggression, or is it actually conflict resolution if you've paid attention to it over a longer period of time? And I think with wolves, if I if I'm not mistaken, and you might know this better than me, but I know that that whole alpha wolf idea has been dismantled for a long time because we had this tendency of thinking about wolves as you know, alpha male has to be the boss, and and this has gone into how we train and treat dogs, how we think about numerous other species. And since then, a lot of ethologists have come back and said, well, actually, wolf society is much more based on collaboration and cooperation than it is domination. So, yeah, there's there's this interesting kind of step, I think, with political imagination, because we use our politics and we often imprint it on the ways in which we understand animal politics.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and I know it's it's it's a great point. I mean, it's so all all that stuff about dominance hierarchies, it was so which which you know dominated science, although it turned out to be completely unscientific. And and so, and as you say, part of that is we were projecting our ideas onto animals, but then but then that was used to justify the claim that that certain forms of dominance are innate in humans as well. And so I that you know, the sociobiologists, you're too young, but uh well when I was when I was a student, there was all a rage about sociobiology, which was trying to say that dominance hierarchies are are kind of evolutionary encoded in all of us. And yeah, I mean, so fortunately we're getting beyond some of those ideas.
SPEAKER_01:It's interesting how that slippage works, how sometimes we use animals as a way of justifying our own behavior, and then other times we imprint our behavior on them. And and I mean, sometimes it's maybe, you know, it's reasonable to do so, but oftentimes I think there is there is reason to pause and question why particular theory is being pushed so hard at a particular moment in time. But of course, we're in it, so how do we get out of it? But before before I get carried away, I wanted to bring up just something I know that you've been working on a little bit in terms of thinking through politics and the significance of animals and political structures. So you've spoken a long, you've you and Sue have both written about social membership for a long time, how animals should be considered members of our societies, particularly domesticated animals, because we brought them into the domus. So if we make them part of our societies, we should at the very least recognize that they they they should share in some of the benefits of belonging to a society. But more recently, you've been interested in how animals have been included in kind of the development of policy and regulation related to family relations and labor relations. And I assume that this is more kind of politics on behalf of and politics with animals. But why do you think looking at how animals are considered in labor law or of family law, why do you think this is important when thinking about animals and politics?
SPEAKER_03:Right. So the so one way to think about it is that in the case of domesticated animals, no, let me step back. With respect to all sentient animals, we we think there are certain obligations we have to animals, human and non-human animals, simply because of that they're sentient. They have an experience of their lives going better or worse, and that that should set limits on how we treat them and generates a set of universal rights. And a lot of uh historically, a lot of the animal rights movement has been focused on getting recognition of what we owe animals simply in virtue of the fact that they they are sentient and have an intrinsic moral status. But in the case of domesticated animals, in addition to those basic rights that flow from being a sentient being, we think that justice requires acknowledging their membership in our society. We brought them into our society through domestication. They have over generations they've been bred in order to live and work amongst us, and that therefore we should think about the society as belonging to them as well as to us. So then Sandra, that's an argument we've made many times, but then the question is what's the what is going to so if we're thinking about these this membership domain, so uh this means that the animal advocacy movement has has you know we need to be moving on two different tracks. We still need to keep fighting for recognition of sentience and for the universal rights that flow from sentience, but we also need to be fighting for membership, recognition of membership and the distinctive rights and responsibilities that flow from membership. In the case of domesticated animals. And and there, I just think in that if we think about other movements who have been confronted with this challenge of how do you make claims to social membership? I mean, the idea of society is kind of abstract, and and and so it's useful to try to think about what are the concrete moments, what are the concrete contexts where membership is really visible. And I think that two of these are the family and work. So it's there's just so much overwhelming evidence that many people view their companion animals as members of the family, as members, not just as sentient individuals, but as members of a of a of a family, which they view as a collective unit. And so, and and they they talk about we, and they, you know, we went for a walk, and they're including the companion animal in the we. And then they and and and they and so I think it's really important that we we think about families as multispecies families. And I think the legal and and we see legal trends in this direction, and one of the most interesting is about divorce. When when a when a couple divorces, in the past, the companion and they had a dog or cat, the companion animal was just seen as a piece of property, and so was subject to the same rules as the division of a couch or a closet or something. Whereas if we instead see the companion animal as a member of the family, the way that children are a member of the family, then the rules are that custody should be based on the interests of the animal, not on ownership principles. So different norms apply to members. And I think there's growing recognition that for legal purposes, companion animals really should be seen as members. And as I said, that's how I think that's already part of the way most people think. Many people think about the companion animals, but the law is recognizing it. That membership is the right way to think about companion animals in relation to the family. And then in work, the the historically at least, the way in which many groups have staked claims to membership is by making some kind of contribution to collaborative, to some form of social cooperation. And of course, we have recruited animals into the workplace in all sorts of ways, many of them completely unjust and exploitative. But there are at least some examples of interspecies workplaces where the humans and the animals view themselves as members of a work team, let's say. So if you if you read the descriptions about humans and tracker dogs or sniffer dogs at the airport, they really but the the the humans think of the dog as a coworker and they think of they they often train together, they work the same hours, they work and and they as colleagues. And they they and so I I think again, certain kinds of work, certain kinds of interspecies workplaces, you could also think about therapy dogs, are very visible. It's really so I guess what I what I'm saying is that in these specific contexts, it's really hard not to acknowledge what we have here as a case of social membership. There's just no way to understand that relationship except through the idea that we really are part of a social relationship, that we're we're members of a social cooperative scheme. And so I do see, I do see some legal recognition in these contexts that we don't just have obligations to animals because they're sentient and suffer, but because they they are members of a of a social unit, and that it's really important to us that they be members, it's important to them, and and we should treat them accordingly.
SPEAKER_01:So you're not saying here that normatively they should be part of the workplace or they should be part of the family. You're saying that it seems to be that regulation and laws are starting to recognize that they are part of families and workplaces, and that regulation and law is starting to recognize them as such.
SPEAKER_03:So this there's two different so the the I I think that because we have brought domesticated animals into our family into our homes as companion animals and into our workplaces as as working animals, we owe them membership rights, which are above and beyond the universal rights owed to all sentient beings. I don't think we have the unilateral right to force them to stay. And so I think it's really important to simultaneous at the same moment that we acknowledge legally their membership, we also need to be thinking about how can giving them the possibility of exiting. So I I the initial domestication of animals was was coercive and unjust. And and so we need to contemplate the possibility that some domesticated animals will actually, given the choice, would like to exit from human society. And that could be exiting from a particular family or exiting from a particular workplace, or more generally, even exiting from human like kind of rewilding more generally. So I we're soon are very committed to the idea that we have these kind of exit options or off-ramps. So we've brought domesticated animals into our society. It's up to them, on our view, it's up, should be up to them whether they want to stay with us, and if so, under what where and under what terms and so on, acknowledging the possibility of that they may they may exit. But my hunch is that in many cases, even if we provided effective options for animals, domesticated animals to exit, that if if if we we we treat animals truly as members of a shared society and respect their rights, that there are ways in which their lives can go better from interacting with us, just as our lives are enriched by interacting with them. I think there is something in the idea of interspecies sociability. The way in which humans and domesticated animals have developed the capacity for interspecies sociability immensely enriches the possible lives we can have. And I think it enriches the possibilities for the animals as well as for us if we stop exploiting them, harming them, killing them, and so on. And so my hunch is I mean, Sue and I have argued this, that we we would likely see quite a wide range of reactions if we institutionalize these exit options. So we we we're obligated to acknowledge the membership. We're also obligated to give them the option of exiting. So our hunch, we we've said, is that we think many horses, for example, might exit. It's not clear to me that horses really get a whole lot out of their interaction with humans. Maybe they just prefer to live amongst other horses in a kind of re-wilded. But I think with with many other domesticated animals, not just dogs, but also animals that are currently in the industrial agriculture, with pigs and sheep and chickens and so on, it it looks like they often enjoy human company and they may enjoy kind forms of relationships and activities and cooperation that they can do with humans. We need to find out what those are, but but it's not I I I think we would see, and it's important to find out. Of all these animals who leave domesticated, who of them want which of them want to spend time with us?
SPEAKER_01:And and again, that might not be at a species level. There might be some, there might be some who who don't want to leave that are maybe more antisocial, some that are more social. But I think I just wanted to make like clear that what you're not saying, because I could see how some folks might hear this saying, okay, we want you know animals to continue working and we want animals to continue being in our families as a kind of endorsement of breeding practices, which I know, which I know is not something that you also would ever kind of put on the table. It's not to perpetuate this kind of you know, breeding of animals so that they can continue to be sniffing dogs or breeding. It's more a matter of thinking deeply about how they want to socialize and work and get satisfaction from being in our families and work. Because what you also don't know is, again, it's kind of weird because I'm interviewing you after having done some of the later interviews in the season, is pet pets come up quite a bit in the the upcoming episodes as being kind of our pet relationships has been quite it's it's been a difficult set of conversations to have up, you know, with Dinesh Wadiwell, with Angie Pepper, kind of this idea that we we have pets in our homes. A lot of us have dogs in our homes, but the kind of ways in which they're included in our homes are quite coercive. You know, if they have to wear muzzles or leashes, they don't have freedom of movement or autonomy. So even though I view Linus as being a member of my family, and and I have very little doubt that he loves me too, the ways in which I've included him in my family are need to change. And I guess this is where the political question comes in is is it fair, is it politically right that he is included in my family and in our society in this way?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so exactly. So this is why the the the focus on on family and work are meant to be entry points to establishing the real goal, which is social membership. So these are meant to be just the the most likely sites for people to be able to see social membership. But once we but so they're not just members of the family, they're not just members of a workplace, they are members of society, and that means they have claims on society, not just claims on family members, not just claims on co-workers, they have claims on society regarding social institutions, public institutions, public spaces. So, how how do we organize things so that they don't need to be muzzled and leashed? Because public space would be organized in such a way as that there'd be much greater mobility for companion animals. And how to make sure that they're not that the only option that they have is not to live with just a singular nuclear family, but maybe, you know, in in many parts of the world, dogs are like they're village dogs. They sort of belong to everyone, but belong to no one. And that's it, it's entirely possible that that's the kind of so it's not that they want to exit human society, they very much live in the village and and interact very much with humans, but not as as members of nuclear families, but as neighbor, you know. So I I I I totally agree with the observation that the existing the the fact that people view companion animals as members of the family does not yet do anything to change the fact that the broader social and political structures of society are profoundly unjust. But but so the question is just from my point of view that if we want to overcome that injustice, I still think we need this two-track strategy. On the one hand, acknowledging the universal rights that flow from all that flow to all sentient beings, and on the other hand, acknowledging the distinctive obligations that arise because of the way in which we've brought them into our society.
SPEAKER_01:And and I wonder if a third one of those, which you also raised earlier, is this kind of urban politics and spatial management, because again, here in Vienna, you know, comparing Vienna to Kingston and the ways in which domesticated animals are, and let's maybe just speak explicitly about dogs, are catered for in the urban environment is so different. And this to me also says that politically, at least in terms of policy and regulation and policing of the urban environment, animals have been thought about in pretty distinctive ways. So for example, here in Vienna, Linus can get on a bus, he can get in a subway system, he can come into restaurants. There are so many dogs, what they're called dog zones here, or fleash dog areas. There's entire like forested areas where dogs can be off-leash. Whereas in Kingston, you know, most restaurants and buildings I couldn't go into with Linus, public transport didn't allow him. And I think that this is really a clear example of how the regulation, the municipal regulation of different places can afford the same species in different places, very different access to resources, to the benefits of that society. So even though in both situations Linus was my property, whether I like it or not, he still had he has a substantially different life in these different settings because of how the municipal regulations see him, which I think is quite like another really interesting kind of inroad. It makes me think of Singapore as well, in terms of how Singapore is building different infrastructure to cater for how animals move through the city and the kind of provisions that it's creating for humans to not go into some areas so that animals have space to do their thing. So it's yeah, anyway, I wonder if that's a third kind of inroad with with labor, family, and also just urban regulation.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so but the the question is what if we too if we think about the dog park case or or the regulations about public transportation, what what is I I think that one way to understand that is that once people see companion animals uh as members of the family, then it's just to my mind the the the kind of obvious next step is well because because we are a family, you know, we want to travel together, we want the holiday together, we want to have leisure together. And so all of these uh you know bizarre restrictions in Kingston and and in other places, they they are inhibiting, I mean, the you know, we can talk about why though why these restrictions emerge, but the the consequence today is that they're putting severe limits on the ability of families understood as interspecies families to to do to do family things, right? And so I think I think it's it's my reading of the you know changing rules about public transportation is in part that that's it's because there's been this change around the family that there's been political pressure to change the rules about transportation.
SPEAKER_01:That would be an interesting research project because I I would certainly I would certainly assume that folks in in Austria versus Canada, there isn't, you know, one society that views the other as pets being more or less part of the family. I would say, kind of coming back to what you mentioned in the beginning, that that moral versus political, I think, I think most people would speak of their animals as being part of the family in both contexts. And obviously I'm just speaking here anecdotally, but then it becomes a kind of historical question of why why have why has it manifested so differently in these different spaces, um, which is really, really interesting. Well, we're we're at literally every single episode. Before I keep you here forever and ever and ever, do you have a quote ready for us?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So this is a quote that really struck me when I first read it. It's from an article by Gwendolyn Blue and Melanie Rock from 2014 called Animal Publics. And it just gets to this point about the distinctiveness of politics. Anyway, I'll just read it. Developments in social theory over the past few decades have unsettled deeply entrenched assumptions about what constitutes the human by exposing the tenuous divisions that separate humans, non-human animals, and technologies, and in turn affording a more active role to non-human entities in the constitution of social worlds. The concept of the public, however, remains persistently, stubbornly, and somewhat curiously entrenched in anthropomorphic imaginaries. Within and outside of Academe, it is commonplace to suppose that publics are purely human and that publics arise from the unique human capacity for symbolic communication. So I remember when I read that in 2014, that that just struck me as completely accurate. So what they're saying is when we talk about the social world, we have become accustomed to recognizing that, you know, the the idea that the social world is interspecies is increasingly acknowledged, at least in academia and in wide swathes of social. Theory, but as soon as we put on, as soon as we start looking at the world through this, to what I'm calling political concepts, like the public, as soon as you put on the lens of the public, all of a sudden all you see is humans. So if you put if you do put on the society lens, you you may be able to see animals. You know, you you you walk down the city park, you can see it there are animals in our society, but you put on the lens of the public and you just see humans. And I think that's true. I I so so they're talking about the concept of the public, but I would say the same thing is true about democracy, representation, sovereignty, jurisdiction, all of the words we use to describe politics, as soon as we look at the world through those lenses, all we see are humans. I think it's really interesting.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I wonder how much of this comes back to, again, this like imagination which came up in there as well. Myself included, and I think many people, when they think about politics, they think about voting. And it's maybe a very deficient idea of what politics is. As you've kind of shown throughout this episode today, is you know, politics is a whole range of different practices that make up society, it's the ways in which we collectively decide or resist or negotiate how we want our societies or respect other societies. I think these are all political moves. But so often when we think about politics, I think in our imagination, we imagine people sitting in the House of Commons shouting, order, order, and and and somehow that's where politics begins and ends. But it's so much more diverse and tricky and more interesting than than that. And I think when you start to look at animals, it it opens it up in just really fascinating ways.
SPEAKER_03:So we we we you're right, but the way in which this has played out in political theory is complicated. So so the the You're right that for people's first mention the word politics, people first think of voting, and uh and we'll seem excluded from that. In political theory, there's been a reaction against this reductive idea of politics as being just about voting. But what people so in in starting in the 1980s, so in the 60s and 70s, the dominant account uh really just was people talked about electoral democracy and vote-centric uh conception of politics. Starting in the 1980s, people realized we needed a richer account of politics, but the way in which they enriched it was through the idea of deliberation. And so we went from this old idea of electoral democracy or aggregative democracy aggregating votes to deliberative democracy. But deliberative democracy turned out to be just as human-centric as vote-I mean, if so, if the way in which you enrich your account of politics is is by going beyond voting to deliberation, then many people's idea of deliberation is in a way even more human-centered, right? It's so preoccupied with proposition, the giving in propositional form of reasons. And so I actually think that the turn to a richer theory of democracy in political theory, from aggregative democracy to deliberative democracy, actually made things worse for animals. So luckily that people are now recognizing we need to do yet another way of enriching politics. It's not just from voting to deliberation, it's going beyond deliberation to thinking about a much wider range of ways in which people express aspirations, in which they resist illegitimate authority, a much more embodied idea of political agency, much more relational and distributed and so on. So I so I'm I'm optimistic about the things moving forward in terms of getting a richer account of politics, but it's interesting that that initial shift from merely voting to an enriched account of deliberation, deliberative doxy actually did not help animals much. Has this third move with politics now towards thinking about it as being embodied, etc., is this is this born of kind of a feminist turn in political philosophy or yeah, so it's it's uh it has its roots in in feminist theories of uh relational autonomy and and it also has been picked up very strongly in the disability movement. I mean the reality is that that the the the picture, particularly in its early the early versions of deliberative democracy, were really quite exclusionary in their picture of I mean you know the the sort of joke was that this is you know largely white university educated theorists imagining politics as being a bunch of them getting together and talking and deliberating, it was so disconnected from the way in which many people I mean for most people politics is there's an emotional element to it. There's there's all sorts of elements of social connection and it's highly ritualized, and then there are these moments of just in a frustration and resistance, and all of that was very hard to make sense of in these highly rarefied images of deliberation.
SPEAKER_01:That's really interesting. I've got one more question for you before we we close things up, and I just want to bring it back to that kind of model you raised earlier on behalf of animals with animals and by animals. When you're looking at these things, and other animal study scholars maybe want to pick up your ideas and go with it. Are these primarily are you asking here empirical questions? Are you asking how are animals doing politics or how are humans doing politics on behalf and with animals, and how are animals doing politics by themselves? Or is this kind of future imagination work where you're trying to think about how the future of human-animal and animal-animal relations could be with behalf on behalf by and with animals? Or is it both? Just a kind of final thought.
SPEAKER_03:Well, so the the our our interest is definitely imagining a better future. And so we're we're trying to think of what would politics at its best look like? So what would what would good politics on behalf of animals look like? What would good politics by animals look like, or what would good politics with animals look like? But we're not interested in fabricating images of a future that are that are just completely unrealistic. And so we're we're we're keen to think about that insofar as we're thinking about, for example, joint joint politics. I mean, we want we want we want to see for each of these, we really want to find some real-world examples that are prefigurations of what what this future ideal would be. And so we're we're our ultimate ambitions are are are very ambitious, and we would like to live in a very different world in terms of how we do politics behalf and by and uh with animals, but we want our story about that future to be tied to some real-world examples of how this might work.
SPEAKER_01:Awesome. Thank you so much, Will. This has really been a fascinating conversation about yeah, just the many ways in which we can think about politics, explore politics, the number of questions that have yet to be thought about deeply, but explored and answered. So you've given me and and I'm sure listeners a lot to think about in this episode. Before we say goodbye, do you want to tell us what you're working on now? And if people want to get in touch with you about your research, how can they do that?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, well, Sue and I are well embarked on uh on a book that'll be about exactly this uh doing politics with animals. And I've stopped making predictions about exactly when it's gonna be finished and published, but it is it's in the works and we hope to have it done relatively soon. And yes, please, anyone who's interested, feel free to get in touch with me. So my email is just kimlica at queensu.ca and I'd be happy to hear from people.
SPEAKER_01:Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's been uh it's been great having you on.
SPEAKER_03:I enjoyed the chat. Thanks.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, hi, Virginia. Welcome to the Animal Highlights. Hi, thanks for having me. It's great to have you, and you're gonna have you with me for for the next couple of months because you're you're a new fellow with the Animal Tone. Congratulations. I'm very happy to have you. Uh but you're gonna be helping us this season focused on animals and politics with the animal highlights, which is very exciting. Um, I love the animal highlights. So I'm delighted to have you. Before we dive into the animal highlights, though, maybe you could tell me a little bit about uh about yourself and the kind of work you do.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, when I said thank you for having me, I realized that probably wasn't quite the right expression since I'm I'm here for a few months. Thank you. I work at the University of Exeter in England, and I work on environmental sociology or environmental social science, sorry. So I'm really interested in people's relationship with their environment and people's relationship with animals and particularly wild animals. So at the moment I'm looking at species reintroductions in Britain and how that affects people and how people affect it.
SPEAKER_01:People get pretty passionate about which species are allowed to run around and which aren't. It's wild boars, right, at the moment, where there's a lot of kind of contention.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, um definitely in Britain, but also across Europe. It's they're they're such an interesting species, and it's so I guess their similarity to us is what brings them into conflict with us. Like, you know, the way that the things that other people do that irritate you the most are the things that you do yourself. I think that's how we maybe feel about boar. They're so resourceful and so assertive and just so adept at living in human society, so we find that quite challenging.
SPEAKER_01:Well, is it it's badges as well in the UK that you guys have been having a lot of talk about?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, well that's that's a subject closest to my own heart. The interesting thing about badges in in the UK is that they're implicated in the transmission of bovine tuberculosis, which is a big zoonotic disease and it's a big problem from a one health perspective. But the the jury is still out on whether the kind of things that we're doing to control badgers are actually helping control bovine tuberculosis or whether there are other things that could be done.
SPEAKER_01:Um but we're not going to be speaking about any of those animals in today's animal highlight, right? Uh who are we focusing on today?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, in this animal highlight, I want to focus on the domestic dog and particularly domestic dogs as citizens of human animal societies. Yeah, they are a really interesting species to think about, partly because they were domesticated around 15,000 years ago and became the first species that we actively included in our emerging societies. And over millennia, dogs and humans have developed incredible and complex relationships. Dogs have been workers, kept us pets, and eaten us food. And often these relations involved exploitation. But following on from what Will Kimliker has been talking about in this episode, is what happens if we reconsider dogs in terms of how we include them in society. So in his book Zoopolis, written with Sue Donaldson, Will Kimliker discusses how domestic animals must be seen as full members of a human-animal community with the rights associated with that membership. He writes, and I quote, having brought domesticated animals into our society and deprived them of other possible forms of existence, we have a duty to include them in our social and political arrangements on fair terms. As such, they have rights of membership, rights that go beyond the universal rights owed to all animals, and which are hence relational and differentiated. End quote. So according to Donaldson and Kimmlicher, these dogs and other domesticated animals are afforded relational rights as members of a multi-species society which extends beyond the universal rights which other non-domesticated animals have. And Donaldson and Kimlicker go on to say that citizenship is the appropriate conceptual framework for thinking about these relational membership rights. They highlight that domestic animals' rights for citizenship were not automatically granted when they joined human society, but are suggesting that they should be now. And the very definition of domestication is that animals are adapted to and compatible with human society, more accurately, multi-species societies. So although we might include them in society on what Donaldson and Kimberly could call fair terms, as well as giving them rights, we expect responsibilities from them. And there are schemes in countries like the US, the UK, and New Zealand, which have what they call canine good citizen schemes, which are interesting in that they place stringent responsibilities on dogs, but don't afford them the rights of full citizenship that Donaldson and Kimlika suggest. The responsibilities might be more those awards than citizens, where good behavior is expected, but the agency of the subject isn't fully recognized. Therefore, the responsibilities demanded of them don't allow them to fulfill their role in society to their full potential. And while even some animal rights theorists might be reluctant to extend the concept of citizenship to domesticated animals because it requires capacities and capabilities which many animals don't have, in the case of dogs, their intelligence, their adaptability, and their social natures and structures make them eminently capable of functioning as all citizens of a human dog society and of performing their duties as citizens. Donaldson and Kimlika stressed that we should recognize domestic animals' competency in exerting their agency to cooperate and participate in human-animal communities. And it was this ability which made them capable of domestication in the first place. In some cases, even of self-domestication. So let's look at the kind of responsibilities which canine good citizens schemes would be demanding of dogs. And I'm going to use the American Kennel Caleb, the canine good citizen test as the example. The responsibilities expected of dogs are the ability to allow a friendly stranger to approach their human companion, the ability to allow a friendly stranger to approach and pet them, the ability to allow someone to groom them, the ability to walk on a lead in a controlled manner, including in crowds of people, the ability to respond to basic instructions, and the ability to deal with common situations such as meeting another dog, distractions or disturbances, or being left with a stranger for a short period. And comparing these responsibilities with the kind of responsibilities envisaged in zoopolis highlight how far we are from recognizing dogs as full citizens of a multi-species society in the way that Donaldson and Chimlicker imagined. The kinds of responsibilities outlined in canine considerations and schemes focus on a dog's conduct rather than enabling or allowing them to contribute to society in a way that fosters their own mental and physical well-being and human respectfully. They're not the kind of roles that Donaldson and Kimlicker might have imagined, but we might think of feats of strength and endurance, like that of Togo and Balto, who were lead sled dogs in the race to transport Ethereum antitoxin across Alaska after an outbreak in 1925. Or we might think of the acute senses of detection dogs, whose senses of smell is thought to be 40 times more acute than that of humans, and are therefore invaluable in detecting all manner of things from disease to drugs. And in a multi-species society, there might be more scope for dogs to perform such roles, allowing them to flourish and to contribute to society and enhancing human respect for them. And Donaldson and Kimlikar argue that dogs display an excellent capacity for negotiating the social rules of human-dog society. And that one of the most striking differences between dogs and wild canids is that dogs are highly attuned to humans and look to them for social clues and guidance. Tamed wolves and coyotes don't do this. In other words, the dog's repertoire of skills for social cooperation has evolved in a dog-human community. Dogs are remarkably adept at reading human behavior and negotiating terms of cooperation. If we allowed dogs more agency in our shared society, we might be better able to recognize them as full citizens and enable them to contribute in a way that avoids exploitation and encourages mutual flourishing.
SPEAKER_01:That's quite beautiful. I was thinking when you were talking about the good, good canine citizen project. Yeah, that those did sound a lot like kind of polite expectations more than responsibilities, right? Like for me, a responsibility is something that entails you, you know, like I do think guardianship or protecting your person is probably a bigger responsibility than being polite to a stranger or or having to deal with a stranger patting you. Um but it's interesting because that to me is part of a politeness, not responsibility. Do you know what I mean? Like you've got a lot of arsehole in society, human arsehole who have a responsibility to pay their taxes, but they they don't have to be nice to me. Do you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I mean it's it's almost more like a cycling proficiency test or a driving test. It's proving that you can or demonstrating that you can function in society. Yeah, but not necessarily participate.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. And I think I think those types of markers are really, you know, important and good that that uh dogs are and and I think you know it's interesting that these types of uh tensions don't exist for cats, for example, that that you've got these kinds of markers for how to move through society and that you will abide by kind of social norms, uh, right? But I I hear what you're saying, that there is perhaps a scope to giving dogs more responsibility. Um but what's always tricky is kind of what that line between responsibility and exploitation is. So I think it's fun phenomenal that dogs can do this type of work and and labor law is fascinating. But at what point does expecting dogs to work become exploitative, right?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and that's why you know, even those examples I gave of sled dogs and detection dogs, even though you know they're they're really allowing dogs to use their abilities that we don't have, there is that that danger, that slippery slope that um Donaldson and Kimmerka talk about is that you the line between yeah, between allowing participation and slipping into exploitation is is very thin.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, uh for sure. Thank you so much for an awesome start to our animal highlights of the season. Uh I look forward to hearing from you more next time. Great, talk to you soon. Thank you to Will Kimmlicker for being an amazing guest, to Animals of Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics, Apple for sponsoring this episode, to Jeremy John for the logo, and Gordon Clark for the big music. This episode was edited by Christian Menz, produced by myself, and the animal highlight was done by Virginia Thomas. Thank you to all of you.
SPEAKER_00:This is The Animal Toon with me, Cordia Hurzenfogger For more great IRL podcasts, visit irallpod.com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.
