Animals and the Right to Politics

Animal LiberationHuman Supremacy

Jun 30

Written By Population Balance

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.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Sue Donaldson (00:00:00):
The first step is recognizing how animals are themselves doing politics in very many ways. Politics is about how do we navigate group life together and that involves coordination and communication and making decisions together. It involves reconciling the needs of individuals with the group. And so we can think about things like, okay, so how are animal groups making decisions about how to defend the group, how to feed the group, how to raise the young? This requires that decisions are made. It requires that norms about how activities unfold are in place. It requires authority and leadership in animal communities, for example.
Will Kymlicka (00:00:42):
One of our goals in the book is to challenge this idea that animals are incapable of anything other than brute force and violent instincts and so on. So on the one hand, we want to emphasize there are all these different strategies and techniques that are often quite sophisticated for managing the challenges of group living and how successful many animal groups are, but also doing that within the ecological limits of their environment and that that too should be seen as a competence. And it's not clear that humans have shown that we are competent to be able to manage our issues without getting trapped in these consumerist lifestyles that are unsustainable and so on.
Alan Ware (00:01:26):
That was Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, authors of Animals and the Right to Politics. In this episode of OVERSHOOT, they discuss the need to radically shift the animal rights debate from questions of animals' moral status to questions of animals' political status and agency.
Nandita Bajaj (00:01:52):
Welcome to OVERSHOOT, where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative behavioral and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with our life on Earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware (00:02:17):
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests covering a range of topics, we examine the forces underlying overshoot - the patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and 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 of life. And now on to today's guests.
(00:02:57):
Sue Donaldson is a research associate in the Department of Philosophy, Queens University in Canada. She writes about animals and politics and is a passionate walker and swimmer in the Frontenac Arch region of Eastern Ontario. Will Kymlicka is a professor in the philosophy department at Queens University in Canada, where he has taught since 1998. He teaches courses in animals and political theory and in animals and the law.
(00:03:25):
His research interests focus on issues of democracy and diversity and in particular on models of citizenship and social justice within multicultural and multi-species societies. Sue and Will are co-authors of the 2011 book, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights and the 2025 book Animals and the Right to Politics. They both also co-convene the Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics Research Group at Queens University. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj (00:04:00):
Hi, and welcome to the OVERSHOOT podcast, Sue and Will. We are thrilled to have you both here. Thanks very much for joining us and for your radical work in animal rights and ethics.
Sue Donaldson (00:04:12):
Thank you for the invitation. We're really delighted to be able to speak with you.
Nandita Bajaj (00:04:16):
And we've had several guests on the podcast to discuss the complex, rich, and varied social and emotional lives of animals and the moral foundations of animal ethics, but we haven't gone deeply into a discussion of what's known as the political turn in animal rights. Your book Animals and the Right to Politics builds on your 2011 book, Zoopolis, and helps, as you note in your book description, shift debate from questions of animals' moral status to questions of animals' political status and agency. Your invitation to move beyond compassion and protection of animals to include them as agential participants in broader political life is a welcome and radical addition to expanding our notion of what is conceivable in regards to animal rights. We are so excited to unpack these ideas and their practical applications with you today. So before beginning, it might be useful to get a clearer idea of what you mean by politics.
(00:05:20):
In the popular imagination, many people might believe politics means only political campaigns and voting. So in the sense that you're using the term, can you describe politics?
Will Kymlicka (00:05:34):
Yeah, so we use politics in both a broad and a narrow sense. So in the broadest sense, politics refers to all of the different ways in which a group manages the challenges of living together. So whenever people need to live together, there are going to be needs to coordinate, to cooperate. There are going to be disagreements that need to be resolved, conflicts that need to be overcome, reconciliation of adversaries. So there are all of these practices, procedures, techniques for managing the challenges of living together. That's a very broad definition of politics and it's too broad because one of the ways you can manage these conflicts is simply by killing your enemy. If someone disagrees with you, you could just try to kill them or expel them or exterminate them or imprison them. And so in our field of normative political theory, people often articulate a narrower conception of politics that's about renouncing the use of violence as a way of resolving conflicts and instead making a commitment to addressing these challenges of group life peacefully.
(00:06:53):
And so on this view, politics actually only emerges when people renounce war, violence, slavery, expulsion and so on. So politics in this narrower sense is actually, it's a normative achievement. It's a good thing when politics emerges and people renounce the use of violence. And so this has been a core question of the tradition of Western political theory and other traditions of political thought. What are the conditions that make it possible for a society to have politics rather than violence and war? And you look around the world today and you can see this is an issue that's still with us, the ever present possibility that politics will be replaced with violence. And what we're really interested in is kind of two questions. One is although we have these 2000 years of thought about how do you create the conditions for politics in place of war and violence, we've never really asked that question about our relations with animals.
(00:07:50):
We govern animals through violence rather than through politics. So Dinesh Wadiwel says that our relations with animals are basically a state of war. Whenever they get in our way, we kill them, we expel them, we cage them. And so it's a kind of paradigm of the use of violence and war rather than politics as a way of negotiating coexistence. So what we want to propose is that we need to shift from violence and war to politics in our relations with animals, but that raises a second question, which is whether animals themselves can engage in politics. In order for us to engage in politics with animals, that presupposes that animals can also in some way renounce the use of violence and engage in some forms of peaceful interaction and negotiation and compromise and coordination and so on. And of course there's a very widespread perception that animals are just incapable of anything other than brute force and violent instincts and so on.
(00:08:53):
So basically what we're trying to do in the book is on the one hand make the case that animals themselves engage in politics and not just in violence and then that we can engage in politics with animals and that our goal should be to respect this right to politics for both humans and animals.
Nandita Bajaj (00:09:11):
And you rightly said that so much of the animal rights movement and a lot of the discussions with animal rights is still kind of centered on this idea that if we just expand the circle of concern and compassion for animals, somehow that'll automatically morph into political concern for animals. And so I think this idea that animals already are engaging in their own politics is already a radical idea because it's not that we need to expand our politics to help them engage in politics. It's just that we need to acknowledge that the politics exists and we need to expand our understanding of that politics. I wonder if you wanted to add anything more to that.
Sue Donaldson (00:09:59):
I really like the way you put that. Yes. So the first step is recognizing how animals are themselves doing politics in very many ways. And so as Will said earlier, politics is about how do we navigate group life together and that involves coordination and communication and making decisions together. It involves reconciling the needs of individuals with the group. So we thought it was very important in our new work to look at how animals actually do this, the nuts and bolts. I mean, I think it's now fairly well recognized that animals are more complex social and cultural creatures than what's once realized and that they're engaging in all kinds of interesting cultural behaviors and their material cultures, how they acquire food for example, but recognizing that they have political cultures, that this is part of their cultures is politics has had not nearly enough attention. And so we can think about things like, okay, so how are animal groups making decisions about how to defend the group, how to feed the group, how to raise the young?
(00:11:06):
This requires that decisions are made. It requires that norms about how activities unfold are in place. You can think about authority and leadership in animal communities, for example. So once we set aside the idea that this just happens through kind of so-called brute politics of just kind of domination hierarchies, of course there's some of that, but what is now clear is that there's a much greater diversity of ways in which leadership and authority happen in animal societies. And so for example, if you think about an elephant matriarch, she doesn't lead her group through coercion and the threat of violence. She's the leader. She's the matriarch because she has long experience and knowledge. The group members trust her to know what to do in a dangerous situation or when a 10-year drought happens and the young members of the group have no idea what to do.
(00:11:59):
So it's her experience, her knowledge. That is the basis of her authority. And you can see that it would be very devastating when an elephant group loses the matriarch, that all of that structure of how the group manages key parts of their life that gets undermined. So this is one question is about leadership. Also, even in groups where there are dominance hierarchies, what's being discovered is that there's much more sort of dispersed kinds of authority. So when it comes to deciding if the group should be looking for somewhere to sleep for the night or should be heading off for a hunt or any number of decisions that the group may be making as a group, there can be many different individuals who initiate those. If you look at, for example, wild horses, when it comes to a threat to the group, it'll probably be the lead stallion who's in charge, but there'll be many other situations about where the group should go and graze for the day or whether it's time to find a place for the foals to bed down for the night and that'll be adult mares who are making those decisions.
(00:13:06):
So this is another whole area is just understanding how decision making is dispersed. And we also see lots of things that look more like voting kinds of behavior in animal community. So if you see a flock of birds, sometimes one bird will just do a little jump up in the air and then land back down again. And I never understood what that was, but often what it is, is it's taking initiative, it's proposing that it's time for the flock to move. Now, if a bird proposes that but everyone else is just continuing pecking seeds or whatever, then the bird will go back down to what the group is doing. But if others join in, then the flock will move. That happens in all kinds of ways. One that I really like was the study that came out a few years ago about African wild dogs who sneeze to leave.
(00:13:53):
So when it's time for the group to move off, the individual dogs sneeze, that's how humans hear it as a sneeze like sound, to indicate that yes, they agree with the idea of moving off for whatever the next activity is. So that kind of voting, but which is really fascinating is that it's weighted voting. So this is where it kind interacts with something more like a dominance hierarchy. So more dominant dogs, their sneeze counts for more than somebody who's lower on the hierarchy. So again, we have this really interesting overlap of what we've noticed for a long time in terms of dominance and all these things that we haven't noticed about how actually decision making is dispersed. And I could go on all day about different really cool ways in which that happens, but I should just mention another key dimension of politics is these are groups that are made up of individuals who have many interests in common but also have distinct personalities and while sometimes have conflicting interests.
(00:14:53):
And here also I see really fascinating things that animals do to try to manage potential conflict. So one is kind of what biologists would call fission-fusion activity. So if you think about say going back to those wild horses, a certain number of the adult mares in the group are going to be feeding foals or they're going to be pregnant. They need more food and water on a given day. So they have a strong interest to go off in search of food and water when maybe the other mares just want to hang out and relax. And so if everybody had to agree, there was potential for conflict, right? So instead what they do is they simply break into two groups for the day. So the mares who need more food and water go off and do that and then they meet up again later. So fusion.
(00:15:44):
And then the other thing we see is all kinds of interesting strategies for reconciling groups. So when there's been somebody has lost the vote for whatever the activity is going to be at a certain moment or is feeling generally sort of outcast in the group because they feel like their needs and interests aren't being met. Well, so then we see all these attempts to bring individuals back into the fold, whether that's through grooming or through group bonding activities like playing together or think of wolves howling together. There's lots of ways that animal groups harmonize their emotional states together and so on. And that also can be political as well, right? When it goes to these questions about, well, how do we gel and stay together as a sufficiently cohesive group to do what we need to do as a group in a way that is going to not lead to open conflict or individuals feeling like they just have to leave.
Alan Ware (00:16:42):
Yeah. I thought that was fascinating. All the examples you gave of animals doing politics. One of them, as you mentioned, just the sheer voting that you also mentioned Eurasian deer voting to move by standing up and that they only move when about 60% a majority have stood up and African buffaloes, you mentioned voting with their heads pointing in the direction they think the herd should move. And of course with honeybees, now we've learned, right? They're doing some kind of negotiation about where to move the hive or where to go for food. And I thought it was interesting what you said about the dominance hierarchies, that there's a fluidity to that, that we've also seen within human civilization and hunter gatherer forager humans having a much more fluid egalitarian kind of competence-based hierarchies than a domination type of hierarchy that it seems we would be good to learn from animals who seem to be able to have stable coordination and peaceful politics without the kind of organized violence, domination, empire, conquering that humans have been able to do.
(00:17:55):
But that the animals also recognize these ecological constraints that they have, the limits that we humans have overpowered and gone beyond those limits, the natural constraints that is threatening through the process of overshoot and potential collapse to preclude our ability to continue doing peaceful politics. So it was a fascinating discussion of all the forms of animal politics and then thinking what we could learn from animal politics.
Will Kymlicka (00:18:26):
So one of our goals in the book is just to challenge this idea that animals are incompetent. So on the one hand, we want to emphasize, as Sue has said, there are all these different strategies and techniques that are often quite sophisticated for managing the challenges of group living and how successful many animal groups are, but also as you just said, Alan, doing that within the ecological limits of their environment and that too should be seen as a competence. And as you say, it's not clear that humans have shown that we are competent to be able to manage our issues without getting trapped in these consumerist lifestyles that are unsustainable. So when we discuss the competence of animals to do politics, we emphasize both the capacity for internal peaceful negotiations, but also the ecological sustainability of their politics.
Nandita Bajaj (00:19:22):
And it's useful that you've laid the groundwork for the growing evidence for what we've learned about animals' cognitive and social abilities. And within that context, we'd like to explore two concepts, the minimal animal and the capacity contract that you argue are critical in understanding how thought about animal rights has been constrained. As you just said, we just don't think that they are competent. So how do these concepts of the minimal animal and the capacity contract shape and fundamentally limit how many proponents understand animals' ability to participate in politics?
Sue Donaldson (00:19:59):
Right. So this idea of the minimal animal, we take this phrase from Dominique Lestel who talks about the least that animals have to be in order to warrant moral consideration. And so often people are just trying to get animals into the moral realm as it were and often point to things like the capacity for suffering pain as something that clearly is of moral concern and should draw our attention to animals and what we do to them. The problem is that we often don't get beyond the minimal animal. So in certain kinds of debates, animal advocates and rights proponents have just been in this position of, you've got to agree that this matters, that feeling pain matters. And so they're often in that rhetorical space, but we can't get stuck in that rhetorical space. And also sometimes we get a slightly more expanded version of the minimal animal in terms of that what animals need is the opportunity to exercise their species-specific behaviors, for example.
(00:20:57):
That's a very common kind of basis for animal welfare guidelines and so on so that if a pig can't root or if a chicken can't scratch, these animals are feeling frustration. And so this is a more capacious idea, but it's still in our view of the minimal animal. We're still talking about animals in terms of what they are basically as genetically evolved beings and doesn't recognize at all the fact that they are individual personalities, first of all, but also that they are agential beings who are part of societies and cultures. So we miss all kinds of ways that we are affecting animals and harming animals if we're not thinking about this much richer conception of who they are and who they can be, whether that's how we're disrupting their cultural practices and social practices. I mentioned earlier about if something happens to the elephant matriarch.
(00:21:53):
Well, obviously if we're focused on pain and suffering, we might say, well, that's a harm to that elephant matriarch, obviously, but we're missing that there's a whole group of elephants who've now had undermined their capacity as a group to function and to flourish because they've suffered this disaster of loss of leadership. So we need this much richer idea of understanding of who animals are and can be and who they are, not just as individuals, but in society with one another. And without that, yeah, we're just not doing a very good job of articulating the ways that they are being harmed. And I think it's not just that, that we're missing the way that humans can maybe connect better with other animals. Insofar as we think of animals as just victims who suffer and who have these genetically kind of encoded behaviors that can be frustrated, well, that's not how we think of ourselves.
(00:22:51):
And so it's a very distancing place to leave animals, whereas in fact, we are all animals together. We share a much richer array of capacities and interests and ways of doing things. And so to break down that distance just seems absolutely vital to talk about the maximal animal, not just always focus on the minimal.
Nandita Bajaj (00:23:15):
Yes. And I think at the heart of why this misperception of animals' capabilities has really taken root in the contemporary animal rights movement, I think is this very utilitarian worldview that emerged with, I think, a lot of Peter Singer's work of just suffering and pain, minimize suffering, maximize welfare and we see concern for animals suddenly becomes heightened when they are on the brink of extinction and then they are captivated from the wild and then they breed them and then they put them back in the wild imagining somehow that they are just wired to know what to do when they're in the wild. And I think it's a very stark example of our inability to understand their social lives, that they are socialized beings, that these are learned behaviors, that information and knowledge and wisdom is passed down. It's not just a genetically driven response. And so when they don't succeed and they die immediately in the absence of all of the social supports, then we are surprised.
(00:24:24):
So really appreciate the work that you are expanding in terms of considering, as you say in the book, this really wonderful quote, "our goal is to explore an alternative political imaginary with the view to how ideas are embodied and grounded in places, practices, and relationships."
Will Kymlicka (00:24:43):
I was just going to pick up on the other part of Nandita's question, which is about the capacity contract and it's in a way related. So we sometimes say that the failure to think through the relationship between animals and politics is because we get both of them wrong. So we get animals wrong because we think of them as a minimal animal in the way that Sue just described. We also get politics wrong because we think about politics through the capacity contract. So when I took politics 101, intro to politics, I was told we have universal franchise in Canada, everyone has the vote. And of course that's not true that in order to have the right to vote, you need to pass a competence threshold. And so children don't have the right to vote, people with dementia don't have the right to vote, people with severe cognitive disability don't have the right to vote.
(00:25:33):
So the way we actually organize politics is we divide society into two groups, the competent who have the right to engage in politics and who are seen as having the natural right to govern the incompetent. So the capacity contract, as Clifford describes it, looks out at society, divides society into a group of competent political actors and then incompetent members who are governed by the competent. So the capacity contract is used to exclude animals on the grounds that they're allegedly incompetent, but it's not just animals who get excluded. Stacy Clifford is a disability theorist, and so she's actually most interested in the way in which people with cognitive disability have been excluded by the capacity contract. But what she argues is, and we agree, that we should think about politics not as this mechanism by which the competent govern the incompetent, but rather we should start from the question of there are people who are subject to processes of governance, who are subject to power.
(00:26:36):
And then the question is, what forms of political action, what forms of political communication are meaningful to them such that they can have a say over their lives and over the societies they're members of? And if we start from that question, then we can see that children, for example, have yearnings and aspirations about what kind of world they want to live in. People with cognitive disabilities have aspirations and yearnings about what kind of world they want to live in. Animals have aspirations and yearnings about what kind of world they want to live in and the task of politics should be to elicit and be responsive to the political communication of all of those people who are subject to forms of governance. So the capacity contract, it kind of imagines this very idealized image of politics as basically the exchange of rational arguments and then it looks around and asks who is capable of engaging in that kind of politics and gives them political rights including the right to govern everyone else whereas the alternative, what Clifford calls a solidarity contract, starts from the idea that everyone who's subject to processes of governance and power has the right to a say.
(00:27:50):
And then it falls on us to figure out what are the mechanisms, what are the spaces and places, what are the practices that would allow us to elicit and be responsive to the aspirations and yearnings of everyone who's a member of society - animals, children, and so on. And so that's a much more expansive view of politics that as you say, it's more embodied, it's more relational, it's often more place-specific, but it starts from the question, what kinds of political agency are available and meaningful to everyone rather than starting from some hyper-idealized image that's only accessible to those who are above some alleged threshold of a capacity contract.
Alan Ware (00:28:33):
So yeah, that discussion of an embodied and relational capacity to practice politics instead of supposedly rational primarily language-based form of communication also gets at some of the critiques that you have made in the book related to the political turn in animal ethics, particularly the political wardship approach, the resistance approach and cosmopolitanism. And why don't we start with political wardship? Could you outline what that approach is and why you see it as important but ultimately limited?
Will Kymlicka (00:29:10):
Yeah. So what we're calling the political wardship approach is actually I think the dominant view in the political turn and it starts from the idea that we need to take animals' interests into account when we make decisions that affect them. And since animals can't themselves vote or testify in parliamentary commissions or submit petitions, humans have to do this on animals' behalf. And so the task is to figure out some way of identifying the right kind of human representatives to speak on behalf of animals in parliament or in city councils. These animal representatives could be elected or they could be appointed. There's lots of different models that are out there. Some of them are quite sophisticated in thinking about how one would elect or appoint different kinds of representatives in parliament or city councils. And just to be clear, we think that we need some version of that, that there does need to be someone speaking on behalf of animals in parliament or in city councils.
(00:30:16):
But too often on our view, these models of political wardship, far from challenging the minimal animal and the capacity contract, they actually completely endorse the minimal animal and the capacity contract. So they start from the assumption that animals are incompetent and they start from the image of politics as the exchange of reasons, rational argumentation. And just for that reason, they think of animals as entirely politically incompetent. Whereas our view is we should start from the premise that animals are competent beings and they have views about what kind of world they want to live in and they're able to express those views. And so what we need to do is to start from the question of how can we elicit and be responsive to the political communication of animals. We should start from the assumption that they are always already engaging in forms of political communication with us.
(00:31:11):
We need to learn to elicit and be responsive to that political communication and then filter that up into forms of more formal political decision-making, including things like national legislatures. And so that's why we need someone to speak on behalf of animals in national legislatures. But what they say in those national legislatures should be grounded in learning processes that are understood as political processes of communication, negotiation, experimentation, proposals. So what we are trying to imagine is what would be, again, the spaces and places, the embodied forms of political interaction between humans and different kinds of animals that could elicit and be responsive to their aspirations, their fears, their anxieties, their hopes, and so on, and feed that into more formal political processes. But also then whatever gets decided at the level of the national legislature needs to then be accountable. It needs to be checked.
(00:32:15):
It needs to come back to these more local sites of negotiation and communication with animals to see whether we've got it right or see what they think about the decisions we've made. And so on our view, this political wardship, the humans speaking on behalf of animals, it's necessary, but it should be seen as one moment. It's just one moment in a much larger process that's much more interactive, iterative, and involves many broader forms of embodied political interaction and not just the rational argumentation that so often is used to define politics.
Alan Ware (00:32:52):
Yeah. And it seems like it'd have to be informed by a real observational attention to their behavior, individual and social, the way the animals are doing politics, giving their voice a hearing and coming at it in a very humble, non-linguistic, observational type of manner. And as I think you mentioned in the book, a lot of times having a political ward can be associated with tyranny among humans when somebody's, Well, I'll speak for you. You don't have the right to speak for yourself. So there's a certain domination there. And of course, these human spokespeople can be co-opted by powerful human interests. So you constantly would be having to push back against the capture of these human wards.
Will Kymlicka (00:33:41):
Yeah. This is one of the puzzles for us of the existing literature is that people are surprisingly optimistic about the ability of these basically proxy representatives to effectively, authentically, fairly represent the interests of animals, even though democratic theory in general starts from the premise that we shouldn't be optimistic about the prospects about some people speaking on behalf of others. We should, on the contrary, assume that they're likely to get it wrong, partly because of potential conflicts of interest, but also just partly for epistemic reasons. It's very difficult. I mean, it's particularly difficult for humans to be able to understand what are the likely interests and aspirations of the animals that we've been exploiting for centuries. We have so many built-in epistemic biases as well as self-interested biases. And so yeah, everything we know about the history of democracy and the history of wardship should lead us to be skeptical about these wardship models and need to really make sure that they're constantly being held accountable to what animals themselves are telling us as best we can tell.
Nandita Bajaj (00:34:55):
Right. And in terms of actually understanding what animals are telling us, we recently had Christine Webb, she's a primatologist and she just came out with the book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism. And she talks about how deeply science is human supremacist, just given how science emerged out of so many of these enlightenment ideas and the way we conduct science and the way we try to understand even animal cognition is always done from this null hypothesis worldview of like, let's just imagine they can't do anything. And then the little that they can do is measured through a human yardstick with human subjects, and in captivity without their social and geographical habitat and structures in place. And so what we do understand is then even more further limited because of our biases in not wanting to hear their language. We do it through our language and our norms.
(00:35:58):
So then you take that to the wardship approach and imagine, well, how far can we really work or speak on their behalf if we understand so little in the first place? So there's like so many layers of what's wrong with that approach. As you're saying, we really should not be optimistic. You also talk about a second approach within the animal rights political term is the resistance approach. And we've talked a little bit with Dinesh Wadiwel about that, but you also acknowledge though it's important, it can also be limited, maybe further reinforcing the minimal animal idea about their subjectivity. Could you speak a little bit more to that, the resistance approach?
Sue Donaldson (00:36:47):
Yes. So again, this is a very important part of the picture. Humans have been very good at just not recognizing that animals are saying no to us all the time in our interactions with them and saying, Stop that. I don't want that. So a very important contribution of this focus on resistance is first challenging as Dinesh does the idea that humans have this kind of sovereign right to control and govern animals and to determine all these things for them and animals overwhelmingly say no, at least when they even have the opportunity to say no. They don't want humans capturing them, taking over their lives and they've explored all these fascinating cases of animal resistance and even just labeling it resistance, of course, puts it into a political frame. So if you think about these famous cases in zoos, for example, of elephants or orcas or others fighting back against or harming trainers, things that might traditionally have just been seen as poor training or acting out or a rogue elephant or something.
(00:37:51):
So reframing this as somebody fighting for their life and fighting their captivity is really important. And similarly, well, if you think about all those pigs who are housed in factory farms in North Carolina and when hurricanes and floods come, many of those animals just die, of course, because they're unable to get out of their pens, but some get away. And so there are these colonies of pigs in the swamp regions of North Carolina who keep evading capture and have managed to eke out a life there for themselves. And so this is another kind of groups that resistance theorists pay a lot of attention to is animals or cows who escape on the way to the slaughterhouse. So again, animals saying no and trying to take back some agency or animals who as groups respond to human ways of trying to control them. So you could think about herds of elephants who will break down fencing, for example, that is blocking their travel routes.
(00:38:54):
So there's all kinds of fascinating cases of animal resistance and it's really important to think about these as resistance because then we start asking the right questions about, well, what are they resisting? What are they doing? But it's too limited a story because it doesn't get at all the ways that animals don't necessarily want to say no, but want to say yes either to things that they're doing themselves or want to do themselves or even sometimes to things that humans are doing. And so if we go back to the earlier discussion of how animals are being political, all those ways that they're being political in their own communities, that's not primarily about saying no and about resistance, that's about active collective agencies to accomplish important things - to raise their young, to protect the group, to forage and find food for the group, whatever it is.
(00:39:44):
So when we're thinking about animals, again, their agential capacities, we need to have a picture that captures all of that. I mean, in the end that resistance, it's an unfortunate phenomenon. What we really want is opportunities for animals to be fully agential in their world making and in their creation of their flourishing societies.
Alan Ware (00:40:04):
And you also talk about something called the cosmopolitan bias or the cosmopolitan temptation in animal rights thinking. What is that bias and why do you think it should be resisted?
Will Kymlicka (00:40:17):
It's an interesting feature of the animal ethics and animal politics field that many people assume that the most pro-animal form of politics would be the one that's most cosmopolitan. So it would be a form of politics that doesn't draw distinctions between insiders and outsiders, between members and non-members, but would just try to encompass everyone, human and animal everywhere insofar as their interests are affected. So the cosmopolitan image of politics would basically think about every political decision as we would just try to look out at the world and see everyone who's potentially affected by this decision and give them all equal political standing and then try to figure out some kind of mathematical formula for adding up their interests and then figuring out what would be best for the most people or whatever. So that's the kind of cosmopolitan image of politics. The problem from our point of view is that that way of thinking about politics runs a quite grave risk that the interests of distant people, including distant humans, are going to outweigh the interests of local populations.
(00:41:37):
And this is a problem that arises in the human case and a problem that equally arises in the animal case. So if you think about it in the human case, think about some indigenous peoples whose traditional territories are, say, rich in certain oil resources or mineral resources. There could be like eight billion people on the planet who have a vested interest in exploiting and developing those indigenous lands. And if you're cosmopolitan about democracy, it looks like the interests of the eight billion should outweigh the interests of the local indigenous peoples. And the same would be true about the animal case, that there are going to be lots of cases where wild animals are living in a habitat and there's just billions of humans who have an interest, a vested interest in developing that land and exploiting it, settling on it. And so on our view, politics needs to respect the rights of local communities, local groups to govern themselves and their territories.
(00:42:35):
That's just an inescapable dimension of politics is that we're not just all one big global demos. There are distinct societies and peoples, both human societies and animal societies and mixed human and animal societies, but we live in more local communities and we have, we argue, rights with respect to our communities and the lands and territories we inhabit. And that's true about animals as well as humans. So we propose an image of politics that starts from the idea that all social groups, again, human and animal, have kind of inherent rights of self-government. That should be the starting point. And that does require that we distinguish the members of that group from outsiders. If the decision of the members of the group have particularly harmful effects on outsiders, we need some way of acknowledging that and building in safeguards for the interests of distant people, but that there are rights of self-government attached to the members of social groups and including rights in relation to homelands and territories and so on.
(00:43:41):
And we argue that this is, again, a fundamental feature of justice in the human case. We really are at grave risk of kind of endorsing colonialism with respect to many local communities if we endorse a cosmopolitan image, but it's even more true in the animals. Many animals are even more dependent on the protection of their lands and habitats and environments. They have an even more strong interest in being able to protect their communities and their lands from the often voracious appetites and interests of distant people. And so we're quite strongly committed to ideas of self-government that are in conflict with this, what we're calling the cosmopolitan temptation.
Alan Ware (00:44:22):
Right. And maybe idealistically, cosmopolitanism would give all the eight point some humans equal say, but as we know, it's those with the money and the power have decided where economic activity happens, what natural environments are destroyed and like you said, indigenous people not having the right to their territory, but global capital having a huge impact on what cosmopolitan means culturally, economically, politically, and destroying other human cultures in the process. I think you mentioned somebody's quote in there that the cosmopolitanism is the class consciousness of the frequent traveler and it does, as you say, privileges as an elite of mobile humans over the majority of relatively sedentary humans and we've seen that. And certainly, as you noted, animals have a certain territory or habitat. They need certain water, plants, a certain limited territory. And even if they're migratory, they need various territories to achieve that.
Nandita Bajaj (00:45:28):
And then we'd like to explore what animal politics might look like across the three groups that you discuss - domestic animals, liminal animals who share territories with us, and wild animals. And as you discuss in the book, there's no single model of inter-species politics or blueprint, as you emphasize the particular forms of politics will be very localized and context dependent. So maybe we can start first with what animal politics looks like for domesticated animals.
Sue Donaldson (00:46:00):
So by domestic animals, of course, we mean those who've been held and brought into captivity by humans and selectively bred over generations to serve human ends, whether that's for food or in research or as companions or for various kinds of work and so on. So when we think about first of all, what it means to liberate domesticated animals, on our view, that can't just be that we open the cages and let everyone go because as we have been discussing, animals are who they are in social and cultural community. And so just suddenly leaving animals to go who've lived in these restricted human-controlled worlds to fend for themselves is obviously just going to be disaster for not all of them, but for many of them. So in our view, over time, maybe these animals will be able to exit from their tight kind of relationship with humans and we will need to set up a situation where they can do that over time if they choose.
(00:47:00):
But in the shorter term, what we advocate is a citizenship model for domesticated animals. So we think, well, insofar as we are still going to be part of a shared society, they have every right to be full members of that society along with humans. So that means not just that a fair share of the benefits and burdens. So currently, of course, they get all the burdens and very few benefits, but it's not just about sort of distributive justice with these animals who should be viewed as full members of society, but from a democratic perspective, we think that members of society should be able to shape that society. So currently we have domesticated animals in human societies that have been completely constructed for human benefits and human ends. If we imagined that domesticated animals had instead been welcomed as immigrants into human societies in the past and we had been co-creating those societies together with everybody having input into what that looks like, we would be living obviously in a completely different world.
(00:48:04):
So now, I mean, we don't know what might emerge, but we have to start by rethinking about what it means for domesticated animals to be able to fully participate in shaping a society with us. So we've talked about how political participation for animals is going to be more local, more embodied, this is very much true for thinking about how domesticated animals can be part of shaping our society together from the ground up. So instead of thinking of society in some big sense, I think we should be thinking about shaping our neighborhoods and shaping our towns and shaping our cities and what does a process where they participate in doing that, where we are paying attention and seeking their input about how they want to live, how they want to move around space, what kind of social networks they want to have. And basically we see this happening a couple key dimensions to starting this process and one would be simply it's about mobility and non-confinement, right?
(00:49:04):
I mean, we can't begin to see how animals want to shape a shared environment with us if they are always at the end of a leash or in a barn or wherever it is. So that's a first step. Of course, that needs to be done safely, but immediately we can see all kinds of implications of that, right? You can't have cars speeding around the city if you're going to have many more free-living domesticated animals sharing and moving around that space. It means that we can engage in processes of co-design of these spaces with animals. So if we think about animals who use say public transportation, there's some really smart animals who figured out how to use subways or how to use a bus to go to their dog daycare and bring themselves home on the bus at the end of the day. This is by and large dogs and other animals figuring these things out for themselves, right?
(00:49:53):
But what if it was built into, what if the idea was, well, of course the transportation system has to serve these members of society as much as the human members. And then what would these forms of transportation start to look like? So you can start to see all kinds of implications for the town or the city in terms of green spaces and play spaces, control of cars, ways for animals to move through the space or enter buildings or make use of other dimensions of the city or town, like how do they get to the waterplaces or the swimming places? What would they like in terms of places that we can play together? How do we rethink the idea that animals belong with a particular human or in a particular place and instead open it up so that they can form a social network. There's just a lovely study that was just published in Animals about dogs and their social networks and how they thrive on a kind of predictable sort of medium-sized social network, maybe six to eight other dogs and then also of course humans and other animals as part of their networks, how they ideally want to interact, that they have a few people that they really are attached to and want to play with, others that they just want to check in with on a given day.
(00:51:21):
We're just starting to understand what these social networks, and that's just dogs who are more studied. We have no idea what it might look like for other animals, although so Will and I have done some research in sanctuary communities for formerly farmed animals and there we see this just kind of fascinating emergence of multi-species societies and cultures where at least in the best sanctuaries where animals are sort of given the lead in terms of organizing how they do things around there. And humans have to be responsive in this process, right? Humans try and understand what's being communicated and are responsive or make proposals. Maybe you bring in a new kind of structure to the sanctuary or you try a new kind of swimming hole and then you see how does the community respond? Is there uptake? Do the animals or some animals respond by doing something completely that you didn't anticipate that they were going to do when you introduce that new structure or that new swimming hole.
(00:52:23):
And then again, Will was talking earlier about iterative processes of careful observation and interaction, mutual responsiveness, experimentation. And the whole reason that domesticated animals were domesticated is because humans are able to have with these animals proximate relationships, communicative relationships. I mean, the whole reason they were domesticated is because we could get them to do things that we wanted them to do, but that's because they had ways of understanding us. So all of this is premised with domesticated animals on us being able to have these kind of close and potentially trusting relationships, cooperative relationships where there's mutual communication and understanding so that there is some legitimacy to when humans are interpreting what it is that domesticated animals are saying about how they want to live, how they want to world build, what humans then say or what policies they try to implement or initiatives they propose, whether it's in the city council or at higher levels of politics, that that's grounded in these actual embodied interactions with domesticated animals.
Alan Ware (00:53:36):
And then you also discuss in addition to these domestic animals, what you call the liminal animals that share spaces with us like the squirrels, rabbits, coyotes, all of the birds, what does practicing politics look like with them?
Sue Donaldson (00:53:52):
Right. So yes, the liminal animals, we're sharing the same places, but on our view, we're not sharing society in the same way that we do, or at least can do with domesticated animals. With domesticated animals, it's not just that humans have confined, controlled their breeding all of these things, which of course with liberation would end, but that we have, as I was discussing, these possibilities for trustful interaction and engagement for proximate relations. If you think about many liminal animals, they don't want to have that kind of close relationship with humans. They don't want humans to be involved in their education or socialization. They take care of that for themselves. So my friend Ava Meyer has this project outside of Amsterdam in the town she lives in where there's lots of canals and ditches and salamanders and frogs every spring season have to move back to their breeding areas.
(00:54:55):
They're squashed by cars and bikes and they get stuck in these water gullies and drown. And so she's been doing this wonderful project for some years now where volunteers go out and help the frogs and salamanders get through the dangers across the road or whatever. But they're very aware that A, these animals don't want to be handled by humans and B, it actually, like for some amphibians, I think the oils on your hand can actually be a bit disruptive to their skin ecology and so on. So it's important to A, that people be really skilled at doing this in a way that causes minimum touching, but also one member of the group designed a ladder. So instead of humans having to fish the frogs out of these gullies with concrete sides that they can't get out of, designed a ladder for the frogs to climb out.
(00:55:43):
And as of this year, the town has got on board and I think they produced, I don't know, five or 600 of these ladders and are now installing them around. So here's an example of A, sort of the difference I think between liminal animals and domesticated animals in terms of the frogs just need help with that one thing. Humans have created this terrible intervention in their lives by building roads and having these vehicles where people don't even see them, let alone stop for them and humans need to address that issue, but they don't need to be monitoring how the frogs are conducting the rest of their lives or be involved in that or being trying to solicit ideas from the frogs about the structure of the town more generally. So when we think about liminal animals and how we share this place, but we don't necessarily share society, the way we sort of theorize that is that there are different kinds of polities. We call one a place-based polity and one a society-based polity.
(00:56:46):
So humans and domesticated animals, I was talking about how we share a societal-based polity. I mean, we're sharing all the benefits and burdens of what a political theorists call a shared cooperative scheme. We're world making together and trying to do full kind of consultation and participation about what that world looks like. That's a societal-based polity, but a place-based polity is something that we talk about in terms of shared denizenship. So it may be happening in the same space as societal polities, but the place-based polity is about everyone who is resident there regardless of what social community they belong to or how imbricated those social relationships are. No matter what, they need to do politics together because they share a place and sharing a place has implications in terms of how do you arrange things like mobility so that everybody can move around and do what they need in the space.
(00:57:42):
It has implications for making sure that everybody can get to the resources that they need. It means it's necessary to think about, well, how do we cause unnecessary impediments to one another just getting on with our lives? So we want the salamanders and the frogs to just be able to get on with their lives. So how do we make sure that we're not impeding them from doing that? And again, we can engage to some extent in experimentation and feedback to design sort of better cities for this kind of coexistence. I don't want to give the impression that we're not going to have conflict and that cities can be these completely harmonious places for humans and animals. There's going to be all kinds of potential for conflicting interests and conflict. But if we start from the assumption that everybody has the same right to be there, the frogs and salamanders have every right to be there just as the human denizens of that polity have the right to be there.
Alan Ware (00:58:38):
And as you mentioned in the book, it would be wonderful if we were socialized in our educational system to these norms of interspecies citizenship as you call it and that could start at a very young age where we could actually learn about the social lives of squirrels, which most of us know very little about. We learn more about exotic animals from very far away, more than rabbits and squirrels and birds that we see right outside of our window. So I think that would be a critical way to start that at a young age, that interspecies citizenship - caring, concern, paying attention to them, getting to know them and thinking about what they need in this, as you say, the shared territory, the shared space.
Sue Donaldson (00:59:25):
A nice example, Alan, of what you've just described goes back to expecting the maximal animal instead of the minimal animal, right? So I'm thinking of squirrels in our city of Kingston. There's a particular section of road where squirrels get hit by cars all the time and I don't know how often I hear humans say something about stupid squirrels or whatever. So that's where you go if you start with the minimal animal. If you instead think, Well, what are the squirrels doing? What's going on here? What are they trying to accomplish and how have we impeded them? They are trying to get from the one park that has enough large trees where they can nest across a busy road to an important food source, which is a black walnut tree and to the lake, which is a source of water. It's all very intelligible behavior on their part.
(01:00:12):
And once we ask the question, Well, wait a minute, why is this happening? Why are they doing this? And assume that they have reasons for doing what they're doing. And in fact, what they're faced with is this horrible conflict of the danger of cars or getting to food and water. Then we can think about how do you address that? And it might be a very easy matter of having overpasses over the road, squirrel bridges of some sort. Obviously, they try to use the telecom and so on wires where they can, but some place times they can't. And so how do we actually purposely think about the city that way and design the city so that their mobility is part of the basic design of the city?
Nandita Bajaj (01:00:52):
And then there's a last group of animals, the wild animals that you also discuss in terms of practicing politics. Can you share a bit more of what that could look like?
Will Kymlicka (01:01:03):
Yeah. So our first point about wild animals is just to insist that there are still such things as truly wild animals. There's been a lot of talk about in the anthropocene, there are no such things as wild animals or wild animal habitats. Everything is now influenced by and essentially humanized. Obviously, things like human-caused climate change are affecting wild animals. And so one point we want to make is that there are still really important parts of the globe where it's primarily the wild animals living on their own and humans have not yet settled or developed their territories. And so one thing we just want to strongly make the case that those animals have a right to their habitat and a right to govern themselves on their habitat. And we should think of it as their land, their habitat, not ours. And this goes back to the earlier discussion about cosmopolitanism.
(01:02:01):
It's not our land. It's not our commons, it's theirs. And so we should respect their rights to self-government and territory. But there will inevitably be impacts. There will be border conflicts, but there may also be risks about disease transmission, or there are issues about how to deal with climate change. We may need to assist wild animals to move as a result of climate change. Even if primarily we should just basically leave them alone, they're competent to govern their own societies and it's their territory, unlike in the case of liminal animals where we share that territory. In the case of truly wild animals, it's theirs, but we still need to negotiate some elements of interaction. And so we've been partly inspired by some ideas of the indigenous peoples in our part of the world who have this idea of treaty diplomacy with wild animals. And so there are these traditions in certain indigenous communities in Canada and the United States to think about having a treaty with the deer or the bison or with other animals.
(01:03:06):
And there would be some member of the human community who's appointed to speak on behalf of the animals that they have these treaty relationships with. And so one thing we like about this idea of thinking of it as a treaty relationship is it starts from the assumption that we are distinct in self-governing groups. So it's got these kind of rights of self-government built into the very idea of a treaty, but it also builds in the idea that we want to have peaceful relations. So international diplomacy is about trying to think about the sources of potential risk and conflict that self-governing communities sometimes get into. And it's evolving, at least on these indigenous views, this treaty diplomacy is something that continually needs to be reaffirmed and renewed in the light of changing circumstances and so on. And so in one sense, the core of the idea is basically self-government, territorial rights, leave them alone.
(01:04:03):
But particularly in light of climate change, we also need some political mechanisms to negotiate the inevitable risks we impose on them. They're going to be changing circumstances due to climate change. So we may need to negotiate corridors. In international law, they have this idea of 'innocent passage' that you should be able to move freely through someone else's territory if you need to in order to get to someplace you need. And so if we think about international diplomacy, there's actually a lot of principles and practices that I think have lessened for how we think about how we should deal with what are primarily self-governing animals that we should basically leave alone, but then we supplement that with these ideals and practices of international diplomacy.
Alan Ware (01:04:49):
And you've already mentioned this to some extent, but summarizing what would you say are the fundamental conditions that must be present if we humans are to meaningfully engage in politics with animals?
Will Kymlicka (01:05:02):
I mean, there's so many. So many things need to change. It's hard to know where to start, but we do try to identify some of the most urgent and important preconditions for these changes. So one of them that many others have already discussed is a change in the legal status of animals. They're currently defined as property, as things, as resources. It's a massive obstacle to any meaningful change. So we need to think about how do we get animals out of the property box into some other legal status that acknowledges their basic rights, including their right to politics. There are various proposals by people who specialize in animal law about what exactly that status should be, but that's one step is getting them out of the legal status of being property or resources into something like personhood or subjectivity or beingness, something that is a bearer of basic rights, including a right to politics.
(01:06:00):
I mean, a second big precondition is cultural. We've already talked a lot about this. We've got to overcome these images and ideologies both of animals and of politics. We've got to overcome the ideology of the minimal animal and also we argue overcome this ideology of the capacity contract as our image of how to do politics. So those are deeply rooted ideas. I mean, it's actually an interesting question how deeply rooted some of these ideas are that some people say it's capitalism, that it's the cause of this idea of animals as resources. Other people say it was the enlightenment, other people say it was Judeo-Christian theories of dominion. I mean, others say it was domestication and all of these undoubtedly played a role in deeply sedimenting these very distorted images of animals. So that's a big cultural shift towards what we would suggest as the maximal animal.
(01:07:00):
But there are also changes to the political economy. I mean, all of the examples we've given basically require changing neoliberal capitalist dynamics about property rights. And so in some cases, this means returning to older ideas about the commons or about usufruct rights rather than private property rights, but it also involves challenging, as you said, Nandita, about the kind of growth ideologies. So we need to think about for animals to have a right to politics, we need to recognize their territorial rights. That's a big challenge to human property rights and to capitalist theories of economic development. We also need to change the way in which property operates in the city in order to create more common spaces and public goods and public services and public things. So all of these, the changes to the law, the changes to culture, the changes to the political economy, these are all huge asks.
(01:08:03):
None of these is simple, but we need changes on all of them. There's no way that our image could possibly work if we're not being able to make progress along all of these dimensions. It's a long haul. It's a long struggle. We used to talk about the long march through the institutions in the human case for social democracy and socialism. It's absolutely going to be the case with animals as well. It's a long march through a lot of institutions to make these kinds of changes.
Nandita Bajaj (01:08:29):
Indeed, yes. And in our work too, we talk a lot about contracting the outsized human impact, the population and consumption pressures that keep driving animals off the face of the Earth. So if there are fewer and fewer spaces left for them to practice sovereignty and self-governance, then we run into more of these issues of human supremacy-driven ideologies. So we really appreciate the combination of understanding and recognizing the reality of where we're at today, working within the politics that are available to us today and then on our side of just working towards changing these narratives and behaviors around human domination. And how would you answer the criticism that imagining a robust animal politics is utopian, something that you've also written about in your book?
Sue Donaldson (01:09:25):
Well, the first thing I like to say is that imagining that we can continue business as usual, that's utopian. So we are in an era of, people call it polycrisis, whether it's the climate, it's food and energy security, it's viruses, it's pollution. So obviously we need some fundamental changes and I think people have all kinds of ideas about how we should be doing that. Many of the changes about which there would be quite broad consensus I think are things that aren't directly motivated by concern for animals but would have implications for animals. So if we are tackling greenhouse gas emissions, then obviously animal agriculture is a huge contributor and so we need to rethink how we feed ourselves and start at the plant level of the food chain. So that would be one of the more obvious examples of growing consensus about the challenge that animal agriculture poses for climate change, food security, water security, all of these things.
(01:10:37):
And so that change I hope will be gradually coming. We may go through disaster before it happens. I'm quite expecting that we will be confronted with many disasters before we make these changes, but they will come. And even in a case like that, if it's not motivated by concern for animals and the lives they lead and could lead, it could open up space. So this is, I think, a critical thing for all of us animal people is to be ready. If what we're looking at is a future of crises and people having to figure out, okay, well, what are we going to do? How are we going to shake things up? We need to be there with our ideas and we need to be prepared to insert them into those moments of political opportunity that can arise out of the blue. Suddenly the moment is there and you have to take it.
(01:11:34):
I'm not a political strategist, so I know people are thinking about these things, but that's sort of how I see possible change happening. And I also think that the kinds of changes that we would like to see are self-reinforcing and self-energizing. So I think the more that people have changed relationships with animals, the more they'll see, oh my goodness, what's possible in terms of joyful and meaningful ways to live and make worlds together? And that becomes self-fulfilling, self-generating, virtuous kind of circle. I often think with great shame about dogs that Will and I lived with decades ago when we were less attuned to what it is to actually share a world together, build a world together. We thought about, let's say our dog, Cody, is at that point we were vegans, we took very good care of Cody, but we didn't have this idea that he was a full and equal member of this dynamic and should be part of shaping a life together and that we should be attending to what he might have to say about how to do that.
(01:12:43):
I often think how stupid he must have thought we were basically. And so now we try with our dog, Roxy, and we have a very different relationship and I'm just constantly tickled all the time when I realize some new way that she is communicating to us. Now that she knows that we are actually trying to listen and pay attention, there's all these subtle vocalizations that she makes that have very distinct meanings and so it just blows me away and it's such a joyful and exciting feeling. And so I think if we can start a process where people in small little everyday ways start to get that sense of, Oh, this is possible. And so start building on drawing out human creativity and curiosity and drawing on those kinds of human impulses. I think those are where you can get real political power actually manifesting quite dramatically and sometimes quite quickly. So that's how I kind of imagine it.
Nandita Bajaj (01:13:47):
Yeah, that's a really wonderful way of wrapping things up, this example of how do we practice this politics within our own relationships. As you say, politics is inherently unpredictable and we are under no illusion that disaster is not happening. It's underway for a lot of human and nonhuman communities today, yet we continue to do this work with the same aspiration as yours that whenever there's an opening, our ideas need to be there for people to take up. So yeah, this has been such an expansive conversation and you both have added such a remarkable layer to how we learn to imagine our relationships with animals. We're really, really grateful for the work you are doing. Thank you so much for this amazing conversation.
Alan Ware (01:14:39):
Thank you Sue and Will.
Will Kymlicka (01:14:40):
Yeah, thank you.
Sue Donaldson (01:14:41):
Thank you. It was really enjoyable and I really appreciate how carefully you've read our work and your great questions. It was just a pleasure.
Alan Ware (01:14:50):
That's all for this edition of OVERSHOOT. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you will consider a one-time or a recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj (01:15:19):
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.