Abstract
Consideration of fox hunting in the UK is used to argue that the complexities of negotiation between multiple and competing considerations, associated with multiculturalist theory, are probably an ineradicable feature of any practical animal politics within a liberal context. And in this respect, the analysis is sympathetic to the familiar defence of multiculturalism as a component part of animal politics set out by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka . However, insofar as the question of fox hunting also focuses attention strongly upon cruelty, it departs from the familiar suspicion (which they share) that a cruelty-focused discourse must also tend to reinforce anthropocentric norms.
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Notes
- 1.
Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 243, locates value in beings who are “subjects of a life”, a view which excludes non-sentient life forms and non-life forms.
- 2.
The closing section of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 203–207, is the classic statement of ecological holism based around the biotic community.
- 3.
Even Alasdair Cochrane, who shifts significantly from the Regan picture, rejects the extension of interests or moral standing to non-sentients, Animal Rights Without Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 36–38.
- 4.
The classic accounts of the animal rights/environmentalism tension are Mark Sagoff, “Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics”, Osgoode Hall Law Journal 22 (1984), 297–307 and J. Baird Callicott, “Animal Liberation: A Triangual Affair”, Environmental Ethics, 2: 4 (1980), 311–338. However, Callicott’s position is moderated a good deal in “Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Back Together Again”, in Eugene C. Hargrave (ed.) The Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics Debate, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 249–262.
- 5.
Paula Casal, “Is Multiculturalism bad for animals?” Journal of Political Philosophy, 11: 1 (2003), 1–22 explores the grounds for suspicion.
- 6.
Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, “Animals, Multiculturalism, and the Left”, Journal of Social Philosophy 45: 1 (2014), 116–135. They deal with “performing whiteness” at 123–124.
- 7.
Tony Milligan, “Putting Pluralism First: Cruelty and Animal Rights Discourse”, in Robert Garner and Siobhan O’Sullivan, The Political Turn in Animal Rights (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).
- 8.
Gary Francione, “The anti-hunting ban in the UK: A great business opportunity for animal welfare groups”, http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/the-anti-hunting-ban-in-the-uk-a-great-business-opportunity-for-animal-welfare-groups/#.Vyi3k8vmrug. (Retrieved 03/05/2016). This follows up on a 2009 blog “The Great ‘Victory’ of New Welfarism”, promoting the same view. And so, what we have is not an occasional case of careless wording but an entrenched view that “The ‘ban’ on fox hunting is a classic example of the futility of single-issue welfarist campaigns”. http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/the-great-victory-of-new-welfarism/#.V_4Ino1TGUl. (Accessed 12/10/2016).
- 9.
Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution (1899) and Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920) are the classic statements of the necessity for accepting certain limitations of the existing practice of politics such as reforms which do not comprehensively end wrongs, in order to subvert the regular practice of politics and secure ultimate, revolutionary, goals.
- 10.
These are the stable numbers over the past two decades, with veganism slightly over 0.5% in the USA and slightly under in the UK. A 2016 survey in the UK, funded by the Vegan Society and Vegan Life magazine, suggested a surge to over 1% but this still lacks any independent support. The same survey in the May 2016 edition of Vegan Life suggested that the long-standing gender imbalance among vegans, with a ratio heavily weighted towards females, was also well on the way to being overcome. Although widely reported in the national press, the survey painted a conveniently rosy picture.
- 11.
Donaldson and Kymlicka (2014), 124.
- 12.
Milligan, Civil Disobedience: Protest, Justification and the Law (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 51.
- 13.
Scruton’s rationale for supporting hunting is not merely a matter of tolerance but enthusiasm for its apparent cultivation of the virtues. Roger Scruton, On Hunting (Yellow Jersey Press: 1998).
- 14.
Milligan, 49–50.
- 15.
Francione (2015) no pagination.
- 16.
Bonnie Greer, in a much-cited interview on Sky News during the election, referred to the emergence of an insidious “Scotia-Phobia” with overtones of misogyny directed towards the SNP’s leader, Nicola Sturgeon, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM1XwCJyM28. (Retrieved 08/09/2016).
- 17.
The figures here are the 2015 General Election figures. Afterwards, Labour’s position worsened amid in-fighting between different wings of the party and a lost referendum on EU membership but then recovered among younger voters.
- 18.
Donaldson and Kymlicka (2014), p. 127.
- 19.
The Francione critique borrows, in turn, from Tom Regan’s suspicion about the lack of universality in an appeal to cruelty. See Tom Regan “Kindness, and Unnecessary Suffering”, Philosophy, 55: 214, 532–541.
- 20.
Susan Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79.
- 21.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Shklar (1982), 44.
- 22.
The charge of dividing motivation and justification originates in Michael Stocker “The Schozophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories”, The Journal of Philosophy, 74: 13 (1976), 463–466.
- 23.
The indefensibility of the asymmetry here owes a good deal to the presuppositions of social hierarchy. My suggestion is not that all self/other asymmetries are indefensible.
Bibliography
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Milligan, T. (2017). Group Privilege and Political Division: The Problem of Fox Hunting in the UK. In: Cordeiro-Rodrigues, L., Mitchell, L. (eds) Animals, Race, and Multiculturalism . The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66568-9_2
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