Doing Politics with Animals (2023)

Doing Politics with Animals Sue Donaldson, Will Kymlicka Social Research: An International Quarterly, Volume 90, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 621-647 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2023.a916348 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/916348 Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka Doing Politics with Animals the western tradition of social and political thought is built on human “exceptionalism”—and a human/nature divide. Whereas nature is ruled by biological imperatives, humans are assumed to have the capacity to rise above nature and animality through reason, language, and culture. Humans make choices about how we want to live, and politics is the vehicle by which we exercise this supposedly unique human capacity for jointly and deliberately shaping the life of the community. As Aristotle put it, only humans are zoon politikon—animals capable of formulating and debating different visions of the good life and the good society. Human freedom and dignity, according to this tradition, are measured by how far humans have distanced themselves from, and risen above, animality. This human exceptionalist view of politics is increasingly challenged on both empirical and normative grounds. Many commentators argue that it has played an important role in perpetuating the ongoing moral catastrophe of human-animal relations and that living justly with animals requires bringing them into the political realm. But what does it mean to do politics with animals? We consider three recent developments that shed some light. These are (1) proposals for the institutional representation of animals’ interests in human political decision-making processes; (2) growing ethological evidence for animals’ own capacities for language, culture, and collective decision-making; and (3) new theoretical accounts of political © 2024 The New School social research Vol. 90 : No. 4 : Winter 2023 621 agency and community that emphasize its embodied, emplaced, and interdependent nature. Each, in its own way, illuminates potential futures for animal politics and for just human-animal relations. REPRESENTING AFFECTED ANIMAL INTERESTS Every day, across the globe, human governments, businesses, NGOs, and other organizations take actions that harm or kill innumerable nonhuman animals, and yet these impacts barely register in policymaking decisions. When humans are debating the national interest or public good, distributing the benefits and burdens of collective life, or brokering social conflicts, animals’ interests aren’t taken into account. To rectify this situation, political theorists have offered proposals for ensuring that animals’ interests are counted in democratic governance and decision-making. In the human case, being counted is typically implemented through protecting individual rights of political assembly, speech, and the vote. Some theorists, deeming animals unable to vote or deliberate, believe they should instead be accorded a right to “political consideration” (e.g., Hooley 2018). Humans can and should find a way to ensure consideration of animals’ interests when making political decisions, typically through some form of trustee representation (such as appointing a human to serve as an animal advocate in political deliberations). On this view, the core task of democratic politics is to identify, weigh, and aggregate affected interests, and since animals’ interests clearly are affected by political decisions, they must be counted. And since animals are unable to self-represent their interests, they should be represented by others; in other words, they are “political wards” or “political patients,” not active political subjects. Advocates of this position note that this situation is not unique to the animal case: liberal-democratic states already have various examples of how guardians and trustees can represent wards, such as children. And there are increasing calls to extend this model of “political consideration” to future generations (of humans), who cannot self-represent but whose interests are at risk from politi- 622 social research cal decisions taken today. The task of including animals in politics, therefore, is a matter of extending this trustee model to them. One standard proposal is to appoint an animal ombudsperson or other oversight body authorized to challenge legislative decisions that might harm the basic interests or rights of animals. Others propose giving intervenor status for animal advocacy organizations in legal or political processes. More ambitious proposals would set aside a certain number of seats in the national legislature for animal representatives, to be elected either by voters at large or by a subset of voters deemed particularly qualified to speak for animals, such as members of animal protection organizations, veterinarians, and others involved in animal care (Cochrane 2019; Garner 2017; Hooley 2018; Magaña 2022). All these propositions draw on related proposals regarding the political representation of the interests of children or future generations (González-Ricoy and Gosseries 2016; Reif 2020). These proposals raise both theoretical and practical challenges. Would an animal ombudsperson have the power of veto over legislation or an advisory role only? How many seats in a parliament should be set aside for animal representatives? Would they have a say on all legislation or only on decisions affecting animals?1 Democracy requires that affected interests are represented, but it also requires that power is held accountable, so who would hold animal representatives accountable for the way they exercise their power? How do we prevent them from simply advancing their own interests or those of their political party rather than animals’ interests? These are important challenges, but defenders respond that there already exist successful examples of trustee representation, and in any event, the only way to address these questions is to experiment with different models and see what works. There is a risk that animal advocates/representatives would abuse their powers, but this would surely be more than offset by the way they can serve as a check on the tendency of parliaments to entirely ignore interests that are not formally represented. Doing Politics with Animals 623 This trustee model for representing animals deemed incapable of self-representation is one important vision of a more-than-human politics. While no national parliament has yet set aside seats for representatives of animals, there are experiments at the local and regional level in appointing animal advocates, such as the office of the Animal Protection Advocate in the canton of Zurich (Gerritsen 2013), and this trend is likely to continue and expand. Given how often the most basic interests of animals are sacrificed for the most trivial interests of humans, institutional reforms that require representing and counting animals’ interests in political decision-making could be truly revolutionary. For the past 50 years, animal ethicists and animal advocates have often focused on defending the moral status of animals—“expanding the moral circle,” as it is often called. And public opinion polls suggest that an increasing number of people do include animals in the moral circle. However, while individual moral attitudes may be changing, animals remain entirely excluded from the political circle, and proposals for trustee political representation are a pivotal step in moving the animal question from morality to politics. In our view, however, this first vision of animal politics is incomplete and, if taken on its own, is potentially counterproductive. For one thing, it still treats politics as something that is done to animals, not something that animals themselves engage in. Defenders of this vision are often quite explicit that they accept Aristotle’s assumption that only humans can exercise political agency: animals can only be “political patients,” not “political agents.” In its own way, this plays into long-standing tropes of animals as voiceless and incompetent. It also rests on a narrow view of politics as an essentially abstract, linguistic activity. It may indeed be true that animals cannot exercise the sort of idealized and highly cognitivist political agency that is celebrated in traditional political theory, premised on assumptions that political subjects are independent, self-sufficient, able-bodied, privileged, white, male, and adult. However, as feminists, disability advocates, children’s advocates, postcolonial theorists, and others 624 social research have long argued, there are other forms of embodied, emplaced, and relational political agency that should be attended to (Kallio and Häkli 2011; Krause 2013; Simplican 2015), and political theory should be open to the possibility that animals exercise these broader forms of political agency. Moreover, this vision uncritically assumes that humans exercise sovereignty over animals. On this vision, it is right and proper that humans govern animals and their territories, so long as animals’ interests are adequately represented. But who gave humans sovereignty over animals? Critics argue that it is precisely this assumption of human sovereignty over animals that makes possible mass violence against them, and so any truly post-anthropocentric vision of politics must start by questioning claims to human sovereignty (Castello 2022; Wadiwel 2015). This suggests a different way of thinking about more-than-human politics. Rather than trying to fit animals into existing ideas of politics with their problematic assumptions that political subjectivity/agency requires rising above dependency, the body, and place, the idea of politics should start from the realities of interdependence, embodiment, and embeddedness in ecology and place. And rather than asking how to represent animals’ interests in human decisionmaking, a better starting place is to ask what kinds of politics animals themselves engage in. ETHOLOGIES OF ANIMAL POLITICS Consider the growing ethological evidence of how animal communities themselves do face-to-face politics. Many readers will be familiar with the recent explosion of empirical evidence concerning animal societies and cultures. A century of orthodoxy that viewed animals— from horses to hyenas, from crows to cuckoos—as tightly scripted and instinctive creatures is being overturned. It turns out that many animals are genuinely social and cultural beings—reasoning, normcomplying, and behaviorally flexible individuals who come to be who they are within a particular social and cultural group whose practices Doing Politics with Animals 625 are passed down through social learning, not (or not just) instinct. Birds speak in dialects—indeed, animal languages in general are far more complex and variable than humans ever imagined, as is increasingly revealed by new technologies for listening to bats, birds, whales, elephants, and others. Chimpanzees learn to use different tools depending on what community they are born into (or join in late adolescence), orangutans learn different styles of nest construction, some communities of orcas eat salmon while others eat seals, and so on.2 These variations within species exist despite similar ecological conditions. By making different discoveries, and different decisions, different groups develop different ways of doing things. Many animals are primed to learn “how we do things around here” (i.e., they are motivated by a desire to learn and conform to local group norms, rather than simply being compelled by instinct) and to put their own spin on song repertoires, or bower-building skills, or hunting roles and techniques. Sometimes individuals innovate entirely new skills— for accessing or cleaning food, for example—skills that others in their community witness and adopt. Indeed, some animals actively share knowledge and ideas beyond their immediate group. Consider how humpback whale song eventually travels around the world, shared from one community to the next. Or how sperm whales learned how to outwit nineteenth-century whaling boats and quickly disseminated this knowledge between different communities (Whitehead, Smith, and Rendell 2021). Also notable are the many animals who develop cooperative arrangements across species boundaries, for hunting, mutual protection, shelter, and so on. Some of these are evolved symbioses that may have a strong instinctive basis; others are minded and deliberate adaptations to new situations and opportunities (Cantor, Farine, and Daura-Jorge 2023). Animal cultures aren’t just about tools, survival skills, and language. They also concern social and political norms and arrangements. Striking evidence of animal social norms has emerged in the study of play, as in the path-breaking research of Mark Bekoff and Jessica Pierce on canids (2009). Wolves, coyotes, and dogs develop 626 social research play-specific rules and norms. Actions (like biting, growling, rolling, mounting) that have one meaning in the context of hunting or sex can be modified and deployed differently in the play context, by mutual agreement of the participants. This means that members of the group need signals to indicate that they are playing (and stopping play). It also requires that participants submit equally to the requirements of play. High-rank individuals need to accept what would be considered insults or failures of deference to their rank in other contexts, for play to succeed. And physically strong individuals need to restrain their power to level the playing field. The normative world of play provides insight into the ways coordination, decision-making, and power work in animal societies more generally. So, there is growing evidence that many animals exhibit social learning, behavioral flexibility, and innovation, as well as cultural practices and social norms that play an important role in shaping both individuals and communities. But can one talk about animal politics? Do animals have political cultures—that is, norm-governed practices for navigating the complexities of group living? It is important not to reduce the idea of animal politics to standard tropes about the brute exercise of power, such as the idea of “dominance hierarchies” where the strongest or most aggressive animals make all the decisions, exercising power through coercive threat (although this is certainly a dimension of politics in many animal societies, as in the human case). Animal politics is much broader than this, involving myriad practices for navigating the complexities of group living, especially when the group is made up of diverse individuals with both shared and competing interests. Imagine a herd of wild horses in which some of the mares are expending energy nursing foals and therefore need to eat and drink more than other members of the group. This gives rise to different preferences—some horses might prefer to sleep, while the nursing mothers wish to move to a new grazing spot. What does the herd do? This is not an unusual scenario. Indeed, many kinds of animal communities must make ongoing decisions in the face of diverse interests Doing Politics with Animals 627 about when to move, where to go, where to sleep for the night, how best to evade predators and other risks, how to organize eating and mating to avoid conflict, how to play safely, and so on. And it turns out that animal communities have developed a fascinating variety of practices not just for coordinating one-to-one behavior, but also for navigating group-level decisions (Conradt and List 2009; Kerth 2010; Meijer 2019).3 One general strategy is fission-fusion. This means that sometimes an animal group in which members have different interests breaks down into smaller subgroups of individuals whose choices are more aligned—for example, the nursing mares who have a common desire to find nutrient-dense pasture, while other members of the herd prefer to rest. At other times, the group comes together and makes decisions for the whole, especially when collective security is concerned. Decisions might be made by leaders (e.g., elders recognized as having special knowledge or skills for avoiding conflict or acting in the best interests of the group) or by voting, to achieve either quorum or majority decision. Such voting is accomplished in various ways. In some cases, animals orient their bodies in the direction they think the group should move. There are African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) who announce their desire to move by a sneezing sound, deploying complicated rules for achieving quorum (with “votes” of high-status individuals given greater weight) (Walker et al. 2017). From a political theory perspective, fission-fusion in animal societies looks something like federalism in human political arrangements—in other words, different levels or scales of decision-making that correspond to different kinds of shared, overlapping, or conflicting interests. This entire area of research is in its infancy, and we don’t wish to overstate commonalities between human politics and the ways different animal communities resolve the challenges of group living, and the balancing of individual interests and collective flourishing. But the research to date is sufficient to disrupt received ideas of who can do politics and what politics is. Many animals actively, consciously, and purposefully navigate group living. As humans better under- 628 social research stand the fascinating and ingenious ways animal societies manage to cooperate and coordinate, despite the inevitable conflicts of group living, it becomes clear that humans are not the only zoon politikon. If animals have the capacity to act politically, do they also have a right to politics? Glimmers of this idea are emerging within the field of wildlife conservation. It is increasingly recognized that if wild animals are to survive and flourish, they must be able to maintain and adapt their processes of cultural transmission and collective decisionmaking. This has direct policy implications. Wildlife conservation used to prioritize the protection of young animals with the highest reproductive potential, but it is older animals who are the bearers of cultural knowledge and political authority. The evidence in relation to elephant herds is particularly striking. Where elder elephants have been hunted, disrupting the normal forms of authority, younger elephants turn “rogue” in ways that increase violence among the elephants and between elephants and members of other species (Bradshaw et al. 2005). Forms of conservation that preserve reproductive potential but disrupt cultural transmission and collective authority are therefore self-defeating (Brakes et al. 2021). Also crucial are the ways animal politics is embedded in ecological and material environments. Consider the case of an elephant matriarch whose authority in the herd is based on her long experience and ability to make good decisions for the group. When a generational drought occurs, the group’s survival depends on her ability to remember the existence of a distant, reliable water source and how to get there. If humans, meanwhile, have obliterated this route (by building a dam or an uncrossable highway), this not only diminishes the chances of survival but also undermines the basis of the matriarch’s leadership (McComb et al. 2011). The flourishing of the group, the integrity of its cultural and social structures, and some level of stability and resilience in its ecological and material situation are interwoven. The social sciences emerged during the twentieth century at the height of human exceptionalism, but the growing recognition that many animals are also social, cultural, and political beings sug- Doing Politics with Animals 629 gests that core concepts of social and political theory need to be reinterpreted. For example, given that animals’ decision-making processes and collective agency are vital to their flourishing yet highly vulnerable to social, cultural, and ecological disruption, some theorists suggest that wild animals should be viewed as self-determining political communities or “nations,” with rights of self-government, territorial sovereignty, or grounded jurisdiction (e.g., Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011; Papadopoulos 2022; Rizzolo and Bradshaw 2019), and that relations between humans and wild animals should be seen on the model of international diplomacy. This is a radical departure from mainstream Western political theory, which takes for granted human sovereignty over animals, but it is a familiar idea in some Indigenous cultures, which have long understood their relations with wild animals as “nation-to-nation” treaty-based relations (Simpson 2008). This, then, is a second vision of more-than-human politics, which starts from the idea that wild animals are competent political actors who form their own self-governing communities and who have the right to political autonomy. It offers a strikingly different image of more-than-human politics from the first vision, which emphasizes representing animals as “political patients” within existing human political institutions and decision-making processes. However, they share a gap: neither offers a vision of politics as something humans and animals do together. The first insists humans should take animals’ interests into account while continuing to exercise sovereignty over their lives; the second insists animals have the right to exercise their own forms of collective political agency. But neither offers an account of how humans and animals can exercise political agency together as part of shared political communities, how they can be mutually responsive and accountable and coauthor social norms and ideas of the public good. AN OVERLAPPING POLITICS OF SHARED PLACES What might a model of joint politics look like? This is a complicated question, given the dizzying diversity of human-animal relations 630 social research around the world. A useful first step is to distinguish two dimensions along which humans and animals can be entangled. First, there are varying degrees of shared sociability. At one end of this spectrum, humans and domesticated animals typically share the enabling conditions for thick interspecies sociability: safe proximity, mutual communicative intelligibility, and reduced fear. At the other end, there are animals with whom this sort of sociability is unlikely or inadvisable (e.g., cobras, grizzly bears) and many wild animals who avoid contact with humans due to either experience or more evolutionary fight-orflight responses. Second, there are varying degrees of territorial overlap or spatial entanglement. At one end, there are animals who live and thrive in human homes and urban backyards (e.g., pigeons, squirrels), agricultural areas, and other human-modified environments; at the other end, there are animals who live in habitats that are inhospitable to humans—in the deep sea, desert, or mountains—or whose ecological niche is simply too fragile to withstand human presence. These distinctions matter for joint politics. In our view, the more humans and animals share a common social world and/or a common territorial and ecological space, the more joint politics is called for.4 It is important to note that some animals are neither socially nor physically entangled with humans. We might call these “truly wild” animals, living on ever-shrinking parts of the earth that humans have not yet colonized and settled. In such cases, the priority should be halting further human encroachment and, where possible, reversing it through rewilding, connectivity corridors, marine sanctuaries, and so on. The goal in this case is not to further entangle humans and truly wild animals, but to keep them disentangled, through strong rights to territorial autonomy. However, an ever-increasing number of animals are now entangled with humans, socially and territorially, to varying degrees, generating a need for joint politics. As noted, this includes both domesticated animals and many undomesticated animals who live in physical proximity to humans, because they have either gravitated to human settlement for the opportunities it affords or survived being Doing Politics with Animals 631 enveloped by ever-expanding human development of cities, suburbs, and industrialized areas. These animals may not have the shared sociability with humans that many domesticated animals do and may actively avoid human contact (e.g., by becoming more nocturnal to avoid crossing paths in the city), just as many humans adapt their houses and behavior to minimize contact with so-called pests. We use the term “liminal” animals to capture this combination of physical proximity / territorial overlap without strong sociability.5 How can humans do joint politics with the domesticated and liminal animals who are entangled with us along these social and physical dimensions? Consider two real-world examples where humans have committed to sharing power to shape joint living arrangements with animals: sanctuaries for formerly farmed animals and cities where planners and architects engage in codesign with animal residents. Farmed animal sanctuaries provide a permanent home for domesticated animals rescued (or escaped) from farming. Many of the humans who live and work at these sanctuaries are committed to ideas of animal liberation and to allowing animals to decide how to lead their own lives. (There is enormous variation in the ethos of sanctuaries; our focus is on those with a commitment to animals’ self-determination.) But this raises questions. What kinds of lives do cows and chickens and pigs want to lead? What kinds of social relationships and norm-governed communities do they want to form within and across species lines? What kinds of physical spaces and environments do they want to explore and appropriate? What kinds of activities do they want to engage in? And to what extent do they want to do all of this in community with humans, and when do they instead want to lead their lives apart from humans? As some farmed animal sanctuaries confront these questions, they are discovering that there is no way to answer them except to engage in politics with animals (jones 2014). A number of recent studies have explored how sanctuaries are micro-sites of joint human-animal politics, revealing a rich world in which animals are making proposals to humans (and to other animal members of the sanctuary com- 632 social research munity), communicating preferences, resisting oppressive norms, and negotiating new norms—as well as where and how the humans are responding in kind (Blattner, Donaldson, and Wilcox 2020; Donaldson and Kymlicka 2015; Gillespie 2019; Meijer 2021). Consider, for example, freedom of association. Some farmed animal sanctuaries routinely segregate animals by species, each in its own confined area, arranged to be visible and accessible to human visitors. Sanctuaries committed to animals’ self-determination, on the contrary, exercise the least restriction possible, and only when in the interests of the animals themselves, allowing them to freely roam large and diverse territories and choose their own company, often leading to surprising interspecies relations in unpredictable spaces. Restrictions and impositions are inevitable—to protect animals from injury and disease, or from each other—but they can be negotiated and responsive to animals’ proposals. For example, many chickens dislike being picked up by humans, especially in open areas. However, selective breeding has made chickens susceptible to a great number of health problems that must be addressed immediately when they are manifest. This means the birds have to be checked daily by a human who lifts them up and examines them briefly. At VINE Sanctuary (Vermont), it was clear to human care providers that most of the chickens disliked being handled, and so they worked to find the best solution. Through careful observation they discovered that the chickens are far less troubled if humans pick them up as they exit the coop in the morning, rather than in open areas, and this was adopted as sanctuary policy. VINE offers many such examples of careful observation and response to what animals propose about how to organize space, how to use objects, how to engage newcomers to the community, how to alter routines, and many other practices (Blattner et al. 2020). In this way, sanctuaries prefigure the kind of joint human-animal politics that will become possible and necessary once domesticated animals’ right to self-determination is recognized and supported more broadly. Doing Politics with Animals 633 Such prefiguration is also occurring in relation to liminal animals within the world of urban design and planning. All too often, humans have either tried to expel liminal animals from what they consider human places or ignored them if they aren’t seen as a threat (and, equally, ignored their needs and interests). But there is growing recognition that liminal animals, too, have a “right to place”—and hence a “right to the city” (Shingne 2022). It is their home, and they know no other. Numerous city planners, architects, and designers are actively exploring what it means, not just to design cities and buildings with liminal animals’ needs in mind, but also to engage animals in the process of design. This can involve simple observation—for instance, watching how animals use spaces and things (e.g., creating paths to water sources, using rail lines as travel corridors, avoiding crossing roads by using overhead wires instead), treating these as proposals, and designing with them in mind. For example, architect Joyce Hwang’s careful observation of how bats repurpose abandoned buildings in Detroit directly inspires her own work of designing new buildings and structures with their needs in mind (Hwang 2017). Another way involves embodied consultation by creating options and opportunities for animals and seeing how they respond (e.g., experimenting with an overpass and underpass option for animals to safely navigate a road crossing to see what choices they make). For example, from 2011 to 2016 the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals sponsored an annual design fair to construct winter shelters for feral cats, involving many of the city’s top architects. This was primarily an awareness/funding initiative, but an obvious follow-up would be to monitor whether and how free-roaming cats use the shelters, then refine the designs accordingly. Thus, even in the case of animals with whom humans don’t share a social world of trusting intimate relations, it is possible to engage in forms of direct consultation and deliberation for political purposes such as negotiating shared use of place and resources (Meijer 2019; Roudavski 2020; Westerlaken 2020). Sanctuaries and interspecies urban design offer glimpses of what joint politics could look like, and many other sites of interspe- 634 social research cies politics remain to be explored. Indeed, we argue that humananimal politics exists all around us. Unfortunately, people often fail to see this reality due to a number of theoretical blinders. Making sense of joint politics requires rethinking many of the concepts used to describe politics, but we focus on two concepts in particular: political community and political agency. First, human-animal politics requires rethinking what is meant by political community. Mainstream Western political theory conceives the world as neatly divided into separate and independent polities (typically nation-states), each of which is seen as occupying its own exclusive territory and exercising its own exclusive political jurisdiction. As philosopher Cara Nine (2022) has argued, this model fails even in relation to humans, ignoring how political communities exist at multiple, overlapping levels. The inhabitants on either side of an international boundary may occupy the same watershed, for example, making them acutely interdependent with respect to drinking water, sanitation, power generation, recreation, and so on even though they belong to different states. The conflicts and questions that inevitably arise in situations of entanglement like this generate an obligation to form a new political body of overlapping communities to govern the place (the watershed) that is shared. This new political community does not replace preexisting states (and the citizenship and public goods they are empowered to create). But all those who share the watershed have a responsibility to enter a new political relationship with each other, regardless of their national citizenship, specifically to address the issues arising from shared occupation of a place that grounds its own specific relations and responsibilities. On Nine’s account, place-based polities, defined by reference to interdependence arising from physical proximity, coexist alongside more familiar polities defined in terms of thicker norms of citizenship and social membership. Nine’s account has resonances with Elinor Ostrom’s influential theory of “the commons” (1990). The commons are not intended to provide a full-service government concerned with the full spectrum Doing Politics with Animals 635 of citizens’ needs and desires. That is the task of the political communities that are built upon ideas of citizenship or social membership. Rather, commoning arrangements arise when people from different social groups depend on the same physical space and resources and need to ensure that everyone can access resources without conflict, and without degrading the place to the cost of all. Norms emerge from the ground up in such contexts and tend to focus narrowly on place-based use rights and responsibilities. In short, for both Ostrom and Nine, there are plural and overlapping forms of governance, with a division of labor between them. Not all political communities need to be “dense” (to encompass the full spectrum of responsibilities and authorities from defense to health care to education to justice) to be recognized as self-originating sources of authority. The commons as a form of political community may have a narrow mandate or jurisdiction, tied to the rights to place of residents and their responsibility to care for that place, but within that jurisdiction its authority should be upheld, not assumed to be subordinate to the authority of nation-states. Nine and Ostrom only apply their theories to human politics, but these are helpful in understanding interspecies politics, including the examples of sanctuaries and urban interspecies design. In the sanctuary case, there are (at least) two overlapping forms of political community. One political community is composed of the sanctuary’s members (rescued farm animals and humans), bound together by certain thick forms of interspecies sociability, with shared social norms and close social relationships of affection, care, interdependence, and cooperation. At their best, sanctuaries are committed to the self-determination of their members—and to coauthorship of this shared social world. However, sanctuaries are also a particular kind of territorial community, and as such, they are home to various liminal animals, such as wild turkeys, rats, skunks, deer, foxes, and myriad other animals. These animals also have a right to place, even if they do not share in the thick forms of sociability that connect the resident humans and formerly farmed animals. In that sense, sanctuaries 636 social research are both a thickly social membership-based community (linking humans and domesticated animals) and a thinner interspecies commons that includes liminal animals as well. To mark this distinction, we describe all those who physically reside in the territory of the sanctuary—humans, formerly farmed animals, and liminal animals—as denizens of the interspecies commons, with distinctive place-based rights and responsibilities to the commons. But within that space, and within the limits set by their duties as denizens of the commons, humans and formerly farmed animals are also building relations of co-citizenship tied to ideas of social membership. The “citizen” members of the sanctuary have diverse relations with the liminal animal denizens—some cordial, some less so—requiring the creation of specific practices to maintain the peace or at least establish a modus vivendi. Liminal denizens may not be part of the dense webs of sociality connecting citizen members, but they share an attenuated connection related to joint occupation and navigation of place and the interdependencies arising from this. Thus, sanctuaries are a microcosm of the complexity of boundaries and political community—of complicated layers of ecological, social, and place-based overlap of individuals and communities with often widely diverging interests. A sanctuary is not a single community, but a messier place of overlapping communities, and this requires a way of understanding communal self-determination that starts from interdependence and overlap, not separation and independence. Cities raise similar challenges of overlap. Humans and domesticated animals living in cities often share thick social relationships of cooperation and mutual responsibility, and as such can enter relations of co-citizenship in a membership-based political community authorized with a broad spectrum of shared concerns (e.g., social services, distributive justice, inculcation of norms of civility, etc.). But the city is also a territory that operates as a commons for a wider range of liminal animals like peregrine falcons, monkeys, rats, squirrels, and blue jays who live in the same place, use the same resources, are ecologically connected, and in many cases share place-based meanings, Doing Politics with Animals 637 practices, and norms (like not defecating in the drinking fountain, or not stealing out of someone’s hands and instead waiting until they drop a piece of food). This multispecies commons has a narrower political remit: it is focused on maintaining the peace between the different human and animal residents who need to coordinate their use of space and resources and ensure the resilience of their ecosystem. So here too we can think of two overlapping political communities. At one level, humans, domesticated animals, and liminal animals are all co-denizens of the city understood as a multispecies commons. But within that space and within its limits, humans and domesticated animals can seek to establish thicker relations of cocitizenship in the city as a membership-based demos. The Western political tradition contains rich discussions of the rights and duties associated with citizenship in political communities built around ideas of shared social membership and peoplehood, but it has failed to explain the rights and duties associated with sharing a place and caring for that place. This idea does resonate with some traditional Indigenous ideas of right relationship to the land. According to Shiri Pasternak (2017), the idea of “grounded authority” is at the heart of the conception of politics among the Algonquin peoples of Barriere Lake in Canada: to claim authority or jurisdiction in a territory one must be knowledgeable and respectful of the land and the environment. This idea of responsibility for place is in stark contrast to traditional Western political theory, in which the land is conceptualized strictly as resource (a view that has brought us all to the brink of extinction). And if political authority over territory is tied to knowledge of and respect for land, then animals too should clearly qualify for grounded jurisdiction (Papadopoulos 2022). Indeed, if anything, animals have a much better track record than humans of living in an ecologically responsible way, and various Indigenous traditions have insisted that humans need to learn from animals how to live respectfully on the land (Simpson 2008). This, then, is one theoretical blinder that needs to be overcome. Envisaging human-animal politics requires moving beyond 638 social research unitary and exclusive notions of the political community to recognize that there are multiple and overlapping forms of political community, some more tied to citizenship arising from shared social membership, others more tied to denizenship arising from proximity and interdependence in occupying the same particular place or territory. This leads to the second key theoretical blinder, which is about political agency. As noted earlier, the traditional conception of political agency is highly cognitivist, focusing on the individual capacity to articulate and evaluate abstract propositions about competing visions of the future, and animals have been assumed to be incapable of political agency in this sense. However, here again, there are good reasons to think that this model fails even in the human case. Feminist theorists, among others, have long argued that political agency is not the activity of independent, atomistic individuals exercising their autonomous will. Rather, as Sharon Krause (2013) argues, political agency is often “relational” and “distributed,” coproduced in interdependent social relations.6 Humans become agents if and when other subjects are willing and able to be the “bearers” and “holders” of our subjectivity, providing “uptake” of our expressions and actions, interpreting, responding, supporting, and extending them. (Consider, for example, how the speech of a high-status person is “taken up” by others in deliberation.) Agency also depends on whether and how the material environment bears our agency. (Consider how an ablebodied person has easier access to the council chamber located up a flight of steps compared to a person using a wheelchair or how the destruction of an open and accessible gathering space for large crowds undermines the possibility of engaging in certain kinds of protest.) In short, agency depends on the “holding environment” and how the social and material context holds people’s identities and subjectivities. Understanding this holding environment of agency and identity has been the focus of innovative work in recent political theory. According to Bonnie Honig (2017), for example, politics requires “public things,” from playgrounds to courts to railways, which operate as the durable repositories of collective identities and aspirations and Doing Politics with Animals 639 remind individuals who they are and how they belong together. There is also a growing literature on how the material environment operates as “extended mind.” Insofar as humans have stable and enduring identities, these are not solely located within our (easily distracted and forgetful) individual minds. Rather, the material environment plays an essential role in holding subjectivities and identities. As Cara Nine (2022) notes, this is one central function of “the home,” to serve as the extended mind of an individual, and the same applies at a collective level: the shared territory of self-governing groups serves as the holder and bearer of collective identities. As she and others have noted, this is one reason dispossession is such a great political injustice, even if the dispossessed are offered other places to move to, and why humans have such strong rights to place. Material and ecological environments in this sense are not just the containers or settings within which politics takes place, but also play a central role in bearing and holding individual and collective subjectivities. As we have noted, these ideas about distributed agency have been elaborated to make better sense of human politics and, in particular, to help illuminate the political agency of traditionally excluded groups like children (e.g., Kallio and Häkli 2011). In our view, however, they apply equally to animals—and to joint human-animal politics. Indeed, one could argue that animal politics illustrates all the ideas we have just been discussing about what makes for good politics. Animals are political agents when their social relations and material environments provide uptake of their subjectivity and serve as the holders of their identities. Just as for humans, specific places serve as the “public things” and “extended mind” for animals, holding and bearing their subjectivity. Perhaps even more than humans, animals have located lives tied to specific habitats. And so they too should be seen as having powerful place-based rights. This is true not just of the truly wild animals who depend on specific habitats, but also of many liminal animals living in the city. Consider the peregrine falcons who now use tall buildings instead of cliff faces as nesting areas or animals who rely on human food waste 640 social research to feed themselves or on human presence to guard against (other) predators. Some of these adaptations occur at the evolutionary level, but many seem to be cases of animals purposefully innovating “city ways” for finding safe shelter, food sources, or entertainment, as well as norms for limiting conflict with humans and others in the sharing of space. “Relocation” of city animals is notoriously unsuccessful, and this is hardly surprising. A raccoon who has lived her life in central Toronto and has social networks and survival skills emplaced there will be completely at a loss if removed to a wild area outside the city. The rural woodland does not operate as a holding environment for her; rather, her possibilities for being part of a self-determining community evaporate. The distributed account of political agency also helps to explain how and when joint human-animal politics is possible. In the case of many wild animals, the bearers and holders of their subjectivity are other conspecifics within their herd or pod or flock—for example, the other wild African dogs who sneeze together to decide on where to move. But in the case of many domesticated animals, because of the accumulated knowledge and adaptations of a long history of living and working together, humans can be the bearers and holders of animals’ subjectivity, just as animals can be bearers and holders of humans’ subjectivity. In the case of domesticated dogs, for example, studies have shown that humans are capable of distinguishing a remarkable range of different dog barks, often without even realizing that they have this knowledge (Pongrácz et al. 2005). And conversely, dogs are capable of distinguishing and interpreting many different human sounds and bodily movements. Of course, the vast majority of domesticated animals are kept in factory farm conditions that do not allow them to express themselves or humans to respond to those expressions. But in contexts like farmed animal sanctuaries, humans and animals are becoming the bearers of each other’s agency, providing “uptake” of each other’s expressions of subjectivity, enabling matters of common concern to be identified and addressed. Doing Politics with Animals 641 Moreover, as the example of urban interspecies design shows, even where this strong interspecies sociability is lacking, it may still be possible to do politics together with liminal animals. In both farmed animal sanctuaries and urban design, the actions of humans, far from compromising animals’ autonomy or self-determination, are crucial to maintaining the holding environment of extended and relational agency. This sort of joint politics may not always be possible or desirable—the preconditions for effective joint politics may not be present with some truly wild animals or can only be created through wrongful acts of capturing and confining them. In these cases, politics may take the forms discussed earlier: trustee representation of animals’ interests and respect for wild animals’ own self-governance. But where humans and animals live together in a shared social world and/or shared commons, joint politics is possible and necessary. And the political reforms that would make that possible—namely, a shift toward a more pluralistic conception of political community and a more emplaced, relational, and distributed conception of political agency—are precisely the reforms we need in any event to have any prospect of an ecologically sustainable and inclusive politics. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to the wonderful members of the animal studies workin-progress group at Queen’s University for helping us improve this article. NOTES 1. For example, would they be able to engage in logrolling politics, agreeing to support a proposal that doesn’t affect animals in exchange for other parliamentarians’ support for an animal cause? For speculations on how animal representatives might operate in parliamentary politics, see Hooley 2018; Vink 2020. 2. For reviews of the “cultural turn” in ethology, see Safina 2020; Whiten 2021. 642 social research 3. Because these processes are learned within specific groups, they do not necessarily exist at the level of species: there is no one “wolf politics” or “whale politics.” Rather, as in the human case, there are the politics of specific wolf packs and whale pods. As Rafi Youatt notes, “Just as human politics requires subspecies concepts such as nations, communities, and networks, so too does nonhuman life benefit from a richer subspecies vocabulary” (2020, 5). 4. Of course, social relations are often inseparable from the “place” in which they are embedded (Ochoa Espejo 2016). 5. Even where sociability in a thick sense doesn’t exist, humans and liminal animals often share a thinner sense of sociability, along the lines of Erving Goffman’s “interaction order”—mutual awareness, respecting the other’s space, signaling “no threat,” and in other ways engaging in mutually intelligible behavior. There are many instances of humans and liminal animals developing personal friendships and other forms of thick sociability. This is precisely as one would expect given that animals and humans are minded individuals, not automatons playing out a species script. Similarly, there is great variation in the shared sociability of humans and domesticated animals, depending on interplays of genes, culture, context, and individual inclination. We are describing broad patterns of relationship here, not inherent traits and limits. 6. There are now several versions of “distributed” agency in the literature. They all share a commitment to decentering the idea of a sovereign will as the unique source of agency and to emphasizing how agency emerges out of social and material interactions in ways that exceed intentionality. However, there is disagreement about whether decentering the sovereign also requires decentering the idea of subjectivity. For Krause, distributed agency still involves subjectivity; agency is “the affirmation of one’s subjective existence through concrete action in the world” (2013, 197)—even if this affirmation of subjectivity exceeds intentionality. By contrast, some theorists— including some posthumanists (e.g., Donna Haraway), new materialists (e.g., Jane Bennett), and actor-network theorists (e.g., Bruno Doing Politics with Animals 643 Latour)—want to decenter subjectivity and attribute “agency” to non-sentient life or even to nonliving matter. Critics have argued that these latter accounts of agency-without-subjectivity are conceptually incoherent and politically paralyzing (e.g., Giraud 2019; Lemke 2018). We would just add that in a world where the exploitation of animals is built upon denying their subjectivity, posthumanist and materialist theories that decenter subjectivity, and that lump animals in with bacteria, soil, and technology, are at risk of simply reinscribing animal exploitation. REFERENCES Bekoff, Marc, and Jessica Pierce. 2009. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago: U. Chicago Press. 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