Sovereign Wild Animal Communities

PY 4647: Humans, Animals, and Nature (Ben Sachs)
Thom Almeida (110003776)
Word count: 2,177

Intervention in Sovereign Wild Animal Communities
Introduction
In Zoopolis, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka propose the notion that wild animals should be regarded as sovereign communities. Whilst noting that such sovereign entities would be fundamentally different from human societies, they argue that wild animals have the competence necessary to be accorded sovereign status within such communities. This paper will demonstrate that Donaldson’s and Kymlicka’s notion of sovereign wild animal communities is a sound position to determine in what kinds of situations human intervention in these communities is permissible. In the first section, I will explain

Section I: Extending the Scope of Sovereignty to Include Wild Animals
Traditional animal rights theory (ART) advocates a ‘laissez-faire’ approach towards human interaction with wild animals, as we cannot be sure what kind of negative repercussions we might bring about if we involve ourselves. In addition, AR theorists say that animals seem to manage perfectly well in the wild without human interference. It is for these two reasons that ART discourages human intervention in wild animal communities. However, in particular cases it seems almost intuitively permissible or even necessary to intervene in the lives of wild animals. We can think of instances where we can prevent large-scale animal suffering without too much effort, such as vaccinating a wild animal population against a lethal disease. The difficulty for AR theorists is that their laissez-faire approach to dealing with wild animals cannot take into consideration positive obligations we might have towards them. As a response to this issue in animal rights theory, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka expand upon the traditional AR theory in their book Zoopolis to be able to

Donaldson and Kymlicka say that this entails: ‘‘(1) the ability to respond to the challenges that a community faces, and (2) to provide a social context in which its individual members can grow and flourish’’ (Ibid., 2011, p. 175). Opponents of this view are likely to point out that, in comparison to human societies, wild animals communities are marked by Hobbesian characteristics, in which the lives of most animals are ‘nasty, brutish and short’. The majority of wild animals are ‘r-strategists’ in the sense that they produce lots of offspring, of which most dies shortly after birth. Additionally, the animal that do make it to adulthood suffer from many other threats to their survival (e.g. predation, starvation, disease and natural disasters). If a human society displayed these characteristics, it would be regarded as a humanitarian catastrophe or ‘failed state’, where we would normally intervene. Yet Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that features like these are not an indication of catastrophe or failure, but are rather inherent to the environment wild animals