For millennia, animals have been treated as property or passive recipients of moral concern rather than as political beings with agency. Political philosophers Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, authors of Animals and the Right to Politics, argue that decades of research reveals that animals are members of complex political societies capable of negotiation, cooperation, and collective decision-making. We explore what it would mean to recognize animals' political rights and build a meaningful politics with animals, and why that requires transforming our laws, institutions, and everyday relationships with animals from violence and domination toward coexistence. Highlights include:
Why we need to move beyond the idea of the "minimal animal," which focuses on the animal's capacity to suffer or engage in species-specific behaviors, toward the "maximal animal" recognized as an agent with personality, culture, and political capacities;
Why we must learn to elicit and be responsive to animals' needs and wants - their political communication - and not assume that humans can represent animals' interests easily and accurately;
Why animal politics requires attending not only to animals' resistance to violence and domination but also to the many ways they express cooperation, preference, and consent;
Why the "cosmopolitan bias" in animal ethics privileges humans' global mobility over the place-based lives of both animals and indigenous and local human communities;
How meaningful coexistence and honoring animals' rights to politics differs for domesticated, liminal, and wild animals - from expanding freedom and choice, to redesigning shared living spaces, to respecting territories and habitats.
See episode website for show notes, links, and transcript:
OVERSHOOT tackles today's interlocked social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. The podcast explores needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. With expert guests from wide-ranging disciplines, we examine the forces underlying overshoot: from patriarchal pronatalism that is fueling overpopulation, to growth-biased economic systems that lead to consumerism and social injustice, to the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all beings.
Hosted by Nandita Bajaj and Alan Ware. Brought to you by Population Balance.
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