Interspecies Democracies

Abstract

Even though nonhuman animal communities make group decisions—they vote, negotiate, and sometimes even deliberate—political philosophers traditionally see democracy as human territory. This view has in recent years been challenged. Research in fields of study as biology and ethology shows that nonhuman animals have their own cultures and languages, and that differences between human and nonhuman animals are of degree and not of kind. Recent work in political animal philosophy draws on these insights and focuses on relations between groups of animals and human political communities, proposing to view nonhuman animals as political actors. This requires not only rethinking our relations with them, it also requires rethinking the concepts attached to those relations, such as ‘politics’ or ‘democracy’, non-anthropocentrically. In this chapter I focus on nonhuman animal democratic agency and investigate possibilities for rethinking democracy with other animals. I first discuss the recent political turn in animal philosophy, in which I focus in particular on the advantages of moving from seeing animals as sentient individuals to seeing them as political groups. I then turn to political animal agency in the Anthropocene and discuss how nonhuman animals are silenced politically. Building on this discussion of silencing I then contrast the liberal democratic interspecies citizenship model developed by Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011) with agonistic pluralism. In the following section I discuss the concept ‘recognition’ in relation to interspecies democracies. The final section investigates possibilities for rethinking democracy with other animals.