Abstract
Even though nonhuman animal communities make group decisions—they vote, negotiate, and sometimes even deliberate—political philosophers traditionally see democracy as human territory . This view has in recent years been challenged. Research in fields of study as biology and ethology shows that nonhuman animals have their own cultures and languages, and that differences between human and nonhuman animals are of degree and not of kind. Recent work in political animal philosophy draws on these insights and focuses on relations between groups of animals and human political communities, proposing to view nonhuman animals as political actors. This requires not only rethinking our relations with them, it also requires rethinking the concepts attached to those relations, such as ‘politics’ or ‘democracy’, non-anthropocentrically. In this chapter I focus on nonhuman animal democratic agency and investigate possibilities for rethinking democracy with other animals. I first discuss the recent political turn in animal philosophy, in which I focus in particular on the advantages of moving from seeing animals as sentient individuals to seeing them as political groups. I then turn to political animal agency in the Anthropocene and discuss how nonhuman animals are silenced politically. Building on this discussion of silencing I then contrast the liberal democratic interspecies citizenship model developed by Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011) with agonistic pluralism. In the following section I discuss the concept ‘recognition’ in relation to interspecies democracies. The final section investigates possibilities for rethinking democracy with other animals.
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Notes
- 1.
Ted Kerasote (2008) describes an interesting experiment in which he taught his dog companion Merle the rules of the town in which they lived and then installed a dog door. Merle could come and go as he pleased, and determine how he wanted to spend his days. This enlarged his freedom, made him smarter and more capable of dealing with new situation, and it improved their relationship. We could view this as letting dogs choose, step by step, how they want to shape their lives. The precise model will differ from individual to individual. Certain groups of stray dogs are good examples of independent communities who choose to co-exist with humans in different ways.
- 2.
- 3.
See Wolfe (2003) for a discussion of this problem.
- 4.
Here they explicitly move beyond the atomistic liberal individual, and emphasize the importance of relations for all beings.
- 5.
While dogs perceive the world in a dog manner, and fish in a fish manner, through interaction understanding is often possible, see also the discussion of Hearne (1986) below.
- 6.
A description of his standpoint can be found on the website of the VVD: http://www.vvd.nl/nieuws/368/meeuwen-bestrijden-niet-beschermen.
- 7.
A summary of their response can be found here: http://www.vogelbescherming.nl/actueel/vogelberichten/q/ne_id/1484.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
Who are seen as unruly, similar to nonhuman animals.
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Meijer, E. (2016). Interspecies Democracies. In: Bovenkerk, B., Keulartz, J. (eds) Animal Ethics in the Age of Humans. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44206-8_4
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