'Do Animals Need Citizenship?' (Georgia State University College of Law, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2014-36) by William A. Edmundson
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An ambitious proposal by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka seeks to break out of an impasse that animal-rights advocacy seems to have reached. They divide the animal kingdom into three categories and distribute rights accordingly. Domesticated animals are to be treated as citizens enjoying the same rights and duties as human citizens (adjusting for relative differences in ability, just as we do for children and the severely cognitively handicapped). Wild animal species are to be treated as sovereign nations having rights to their territories. Liminal animals are to be treated as resident aliens. This article is a critique of this "Citizenship Theory" of animal rights. One theme of the critique questions whether citizenship and sovereignty are in fact doing the normative work that Citizenship Theory represents them as doing. Another theme questions whether rights of citizenship and sovereignty can be of use to the animals Citizenship Theory would bestow them on.
Edmundson argues
Animals need rights. The value a right has, for the one holding it, derives mostly from the
set of duties it imposes on others. But the value of a right is not exhausted by that set. A set
of “indirect” duties can protect a variety of animal interests, but it cannot coherently protect
an interest in maintaining dignity. Someone to whom a duty is owed, i.e., is directed,
occupies a higher plane than one who is the mere object of an impersonal duty. Rights, and
their correlative directed duties, respect the dignity of the right holder in a special way.
Rights are also more amenable to enforcement by proxies than indirect duties are. A proxy
speaks for someone, and not merely for something. Rights, in contrast to mere collections
of directed duties, serve a generative function. The set of duties correlative to a right is
open-ended; and sensitivity to another’s rights means recognition of a host of directed duties
that might otherwise go unnoticed. Finally, rights serve a fallback function, which comes
into play when sympathy and affection are attenuated or absent.
But do animals need the rights associated with citizenship? Do they need the right to
exercise sovereignty over a territory? Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka have argued that
these distinctively political rights can not only be held by animals but can also be distinctively
beneficial to them. Moreover, these rights can be forensically effective instruments for
animal-welfare activism (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011, 2013; Kymlicka and Donaldson
2014).
Donaldson and Kymlicka ruefully observe that advocacy of universal animal rights on
the model of universal human rights has gotten traction only among certain activists and
academics. It has “virtually no resonance amongst the general public” and remains “a
political non-starter” (2011, 5,6), even though electorates have increasingly shown a degree
of worry about the treatment of animals. Apart from scattered, incremental reforms, the
picture is depressing: an “Eternal Treblinka” (2011, 2) whose moral and political
superstructure remains largely unquestioned.
Why the impasse? Selfishness (both individual and corporate), selective blindness,
and cultural tradition are contributing factors, but Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that the
way animal rights theory, or “ART”—their acronymic designation for a certain typical
development of animal rights theory—has been framed is itself an important obstacle. The
“classical model of ART” recognizes “only one acceptable relationship to animals: treating
them ethically means leaving them alone, not interfering with their negative right to life and
liberty” (2011, 9). Typical negative rights are the right not to be murdered, not to be raped,
not to be experimented on, while a typical positive duty would be to render aid to someone
who is in distress, and a typical relational duty would be a duty to support one’s family and
to stick up for one’s friends. The nearly exclusive theoretical concentration on universal
negative rights for animals contrasts to the human context, in which, they claim, “the vast
bulk of reasoning and moral theorizing concerns not [the] universal negative rights but
rather the positive and relational obligations we have to other groups of humans” (2011, 6).
Many of the rights and duties humans owe each other arise out of relationships: parent and
child, teacher and student, master and apprentice, and the typically asymmetrical
dependency of latter on the former gives normative content to the positive duties—and
correlative positive rights—that arise. So, they have urged, let’s talk about positive and
relational 3 rights for animals.
The Relational Turn
At first, citizenship rights for animals seems to be an odd prescription. If a short list of
negative rights for animals is a hard sell, one would expect that enlarging the list to include
positive rights would be harder still. But what Donaldson and Kymlicka propose is not a
wholesale enlargement. (In effect, as I point out below, the position they advocate contracts
the scope of both positive and negative rights that wild animals might enjoy.) Rather, the
relational turn begins by articulating certain underlying joints in the moral landscape. The
first step is to extract three salient, morally relevant categories from the manifold variety of
human-animal interactions. There are domesticated animals, that we have bred to be
dependent upon us and live amongst us, such as household pets. There are wild animals, who
wish to, and are capable of, living apart from us, and with whom we have little interaction
unless we are animal ethologists, zoologists, or zookeepers. Finally, there are liminal animals,
such as pigeons, raccoons, squirrels, and feral cats, that live amongst us but do not normally
affiliate with or depend upon particular humans, although they are dependent upon access to
human settlements and the food waste they produce and the niche habitats they provide.
Donaldson and Kymlicka propose to rescue ART by structuring it around these three
categories.
The rescue is completed by making a second turn, from the relational to the political philosophical.
Because domesticated animals live among us and must for the most part
continue to do so, they are to be treated as citizens, enjoying the same rights and duties as
human citizens — adjusting of course for relevant differences in ability, just as we do for
children and the severely cognitively handicapped. Wild animals species are to be treated as
sovereign nations having rights to their territories. Liminal animals are to be treated as resident
aliens. All three categories are protected by certain universal negative rights; but integrated
with these are “differentiated positive rights” (2011, 11) that largely track the three
categories. This, in a nutshell, is the “expanded citizenship-based ART” (2011, 15), or “the
citizenship approach” (2011, 16) Donaldson and Kymlicka propose. I will refer to it as
Citizenship Theory.
The Citizenship Theory crucially depends on the “citizenship logic” (2011, 15) that
analogizes a threefold division of domesticated, liminal, and wild animals to categories based
on sovereignty and citizenship. To get a clearer sense of what citizenship logic is intended to
do, it helps to first review what Donaldson and Kymlicka see as ART’s weaknesses. Classical
ART gravitates toward two particularly extreme and therefore vulnerable positions. The
first is an “abolitionist” position on domesticated animals. Interaction between humans and
the animals they domesticate is inevitably exploitative and unjust, according to ART. But
domesticated animals are, by definition, dependent upon human interaction for their
continued existence. Therefore, the abolitionist wing of ART calls for the (humane)
extinction of all species of domesticated animals. That puts an end to unjust exploitation,
but it also puts an end to all dogs, cats, horses, pigs, chickens and other domesticated animals
that cannot be returned to a viable wild state. Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that the
abolitionist position not only alienates many of ART’s strongest allies, it heedlessly overlooks
the possibility of citizenship for domesticated animals.
ART’s second unsatisfactory position is a “let them be” injunction with respect to wild
animals. This position may resonate with a popular “laissez faire intuition” about animals of
species that typically avoid human contact with humans. But it does not allow for positive
duties toward wild animals; nor could it, except in an ad hoc way, provide limits on any such
positive duties. ART thus gets caught in a “‘too little—too much’ dilemma” (2011, 11):
either stick with a narrow negative-rights conception of the universal right to life, and turn a
blind eye to habitat destruction and ecological spillovers that do not injure identifiable
individual creatures. Or broaden the right to life in wholesale fashion, and license massive
wholesale intervention and management of wild species, going even as far as to try to
prevent or extinguish predatory behavior. Citizenship Theory unravels the dilemma: it
supports positive rights but embeds them in a principled structure that defines sensible
conditions and limits.
'Theriocide: Naming Animal Killing' by Piers Beirne in (2014) 3(2)
International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 49-66
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In this essay I recommend ‘theriocide’ as the name for those diverse human actions that cause the deaths of animals. Like the killing of one human by another, theriocide may be socially acceptable or unacceptable, legal or illegal. It may be intentional or unintentional and may involve active maltreatment or passive neglect. Theriocide may occur one-on-one, in small groups or in large-scale social institutions. The numerous and sometimes intersecting sites of theriocide include intensive rearing regimes; hunting and fishing; trafficking; vivisection; militarism; pollution; and human-induced climate change. If the killing of animals by humans is as harmful to them as homicide is to humans, then the proper naming of such deaths offers a remedy, however small, to the extensive privileging of human lives over those of other animals. Inevitably, the essay leads to a shocking question: Is theriocide murder?.
... The variety of ways that we kill animals seems without limit. Animals can be boiled, cooked, crushed, electrocuted, ensnared, exterminated, harpooned, hooked, hunted, injected with chemicals, netted, poached, poisoned, run over, shot, slit, speared, strangled, stuck, suffocated, trapped and vivisected. However, operating in tandem with the strategic invisibility of animals in slaughterhouses is the increasing elusiveness of their deaths in various discourses of lethality. Euphemisms rule here. Varying according to such factors as the social class of the hunters and the species of the hunted, many hunting discourses, for example, describe the dead bodies of ‘game’ as the ‘catch’, ‘bag’, ‘yield’, ‘take’ and ‘harvest’. Specialty hunting often requires specialty language. Among the euphemisms for the killing of foxes, for example, hunters refer to the imminent killing or the moment of killing of their quarry as ‘to account for’, ‘bowl over’, ‘break up’, ‘bring to book’, ‘chop’, ‘deal with’, ‘punish’, ‘crush’ and ‘roll over’. Heads of killed foxes are named ‘masks’, their paws ‘pads’ and their tails ‘brushes’. Animals dissected and killed during ‘scientific experimentation’ and ‘vivisection’ become ‘sacrifices’, ‘subjects’, ‘objects’ and ‘products’. Animals killed by the military are referred to as ‘collateral damage’. Animals are ‘humanely’ killed and ‘put to sleep’ and ‘euthanised’ in ‘shelters’ under the guise of ‘pest control’ and ‘nuisance avoidance’.
Some killing euphemisms do duty in different discourses. Among these are ‘cull’, ‘catch’, ‘crop’ – both ‘live’ and ‘dressed’ – ‘harvest’ and ‘sacrifice’. ‘Cull’, for example, is used by ecologically‐ minded hunters to refer to the killing and ‘removal’ of weaker animals in a herd or to police and ‘eliminate’ undesirable predators which threaten more desirable species. In this capacity ‘cull’ competes with ‘animal population control’, ‘artificial selection’, ‘nuisance wildlife management’, ‘selective breeding’ and ‘game management’. Sometimes, as well, culling or ‘putting down’ is used as Orwellian‐speak for the killing of cattle infected with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. A harvest also refers to the killing of fish or to the number of animals killed, as does a ‘strike’. When the harvest is coupled with or intersects self‐stated ecological practices, the killing of animals is termed ‘sound’ or ‘responsible’ or ‘ethical’ or ‘sustainable’. When human intervention practices lead to the killing of an entire species, such as happened with mammoths and passenger pigeons, animals become ‘extinct’, though ‘speciescide’ or, even, ‘genocide’ might be a better term here.
The recitation of these euphemisms here is not a prelude to some immediate moralizing on the wrongfulness of animal killing. Rather, it is intended as a step on the path towards greater honesty in how we talk about our killing of animals. My present aim, therefore, is to name the diverse sites of animal killing as theriocide. This I begin by juxtaposing how we presently talk about humans killing humans, on the one hand, with how we describe humans killing animals, on the other.
Further definition of theriocide
Theriocide refers to those diverse human actions that cause the deaths of animals. As with the killing of one human by another (for example, homicide, infanticide and femicide3), a theriocide may be socially acceptable or unacceptable, legal or illegal. It may be intentional or unintentional. It may involve active maltreatment or passive neglect. Theriocides may occur one‐on‐one, in small groups or in large‐scale social institutions. The numerous sites of theriocide include intensive rearing regimes; hunting and fishing; trafficking; vivisection; militarism; pollution; and human‐induced climate change.
Etymology
Theriocide is the killing of an animal by a human. It combines the ancient Greek ... (an animal other than a human) and the Latin cædere. ..., first, is a prosaic variant of θηρ, which seems originally to have meant a beast of prey. Later, ... was extended to other animals, probably including wild and domesticated animals and metaphorical monsters. ‘Cædere’ denotes the action of cutting or felling or killing. It is the source of the French word abattoir, where the felling of trees is used as a euphemism for both the rendering of animals to a horizontal position and also the site of their slaughter.
It is impossible to know with certainty when and where any given word originated. As a word, theriocide has been used at least four times previously (Beirne 2007: 63, 2009: 17, 182; Nihan 2007: 407‐08, 413 n.76; Schwartz 1996: 7, 31).
In my own case, in 2007, it was inserted, vaguely and with little thought, into a critical assessment of evidence on the progression thesis: namely, the claim that there is a link of escalation or graduation between animal cruelty and violence between humans. My argument, which still stands, was meant not only to welcome the scholarly and activist interest in individualized cruelty to animals but also to problematize a widespread reluctance for investigation of those institutionalized cruelties where theriocide is committed on a much greater scale.
Quite coincidentally, later in the same year, the rabbinical scholar Christophe Nihan used ‘theriocide’ as his translation of the Hebrew phrase for ‘wrongful animal killing’ (2007: 408; and see Schwartz 1996: 7). Nihan’s choice of theriocide stemmed from his interpretation of the strictures in Genesis 9: 4‐6 and Leviticus 17: 3‐4 against the shedding of human and nonhuman blood. These rules entailed, on the one hand, that any wrongful killing of humans was condemned as homicide and subject to divine sanction by the Hebrew god Yahweh. On the other, the judgment of an animal’s death as wrongful killing – that is, as theriocide – was limited to the profane sacrifice of three species of domestic quadrupeds: namely, oxen, sheep and goats (Nihan 2007: 407‐08 and 413 n.76; and see Milgrom 2008: 1456‐1457). (Interestingly, it is unclear in both Genesis and Leviticus and also in Nihan’s and Schwartz’s accounts whether or not the unlawful killing of animals was intended to be regarded as a lesser and lower‐key derivation of homicide laws.)
Etymologically speaking, at least two sorts of objection may be made to the employment of theriocide in lethality discourse. Purists might object, for example, that theriocide is a hybrid and therefore inferior to constructions with simpler pedigrees. But stuffiness towards hybrids has been waning of late. None of us shudders very often or, at least, not for that reason, when we use words like television or criminology.
Moreover, two other constructions can also be mentioned: ‘zoocide’ and ‘animalicide’. Against zoocide, first: on the one hand, though the ancient Greek 'zoon' means a living being, including an animal – as opposed to a plant, phyton – the verb with which it is cognate (zao) is also used for human life. In other words, zoocide locks us into a Wittgensteinian vicious circle that ironically privileges humans. On the other, though it has the apparent advantage of being very popular as the name of a site where animals are used as objects of spectacle and entertainment, ‘zoo’ is overloaded with cultural baggage. The would‐be ‘animalicide’, second, entails one of the same problems as zoocide: namely, that it refers both to humans and to animals other than humans. Worse still, animalicide would be an anthropocentric derivation from the Sanskrit origin of the word ‘animal’: namely, ‘that which is to be feared’.
Scope
The number of other animals we humans kill seems limited only by technology and our own ingenuity. Among the major sites of theriocide are intensive rearing regimes; hunting and fishing; trafficking; vivisection; militarism; pollution; and climate change.
