Natural Enemies: People-Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective (Routledge, 2000)

“One of the main contentions of this book,” states John Knight in the introduction to Natural Enemies: People-Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective, “is that many people-wildlife conflicts can be understood as people-people (or people-state) conflicts” (2). From this premise, he continues, the essays in the book focus on themes such  as pestilence discourses, conservationism, symbolism, and shapeshifting.

The book pays particular attention to the deep history of animal displacement by human settlement (6-7).  Citing Leach (1992) and Richards (1996), Knight remarks that a narrative “of an original conquest over wild animals is evident in many local rites and myths relating to land reclamation or pioneer settlement” (7). However, conflict resolution and settlement patterns vary from culture to culture. These variations, in turn, generate further variations in human-animal narratives across a given cultural history or mythology.

The book sets out to make a distinction between “subjective” and “objective” instances of wildlife pestilence. The distinction is fairly straightforward insofar as the authors want to investigate some of the reasons why certain animals in certain contexts are constructed as pests (8). Knight’s claim here is that the “case studies” that make up these sections of the book “challenge the self-evident status of pestilence discourse by setting them in their wider social context and analysing them alongside the cultural symbolism of the animal in question” (9). This is an important intervention, but I find that the argument doesn’t do enough to complicate the formal structures of the binary it highlights, the question of whether it’s either animals that are disrupting some sort of human interest or the odd moment where a group of humans see themselves as pests that have disrupted the animals. That is, I’d like to know more about the premises within a given social group’s own collective mythical structure—it’s narrativization of itself—that lends these sorts of discourses their particular quality. What are the qualities that contribute to a particular construction of an animal as a particular type of cultural object in a particular context? What sort of cultural norms motivate  a forest officer in British India, for example, to constructs the tiger as vermin, and then decide that the tiger deserves to be punished even though humans have driven it to act as it does? What are the conditions under which these authors construct their own representations of both themselves and animals as well as the relationships between them, and under what conditions are audiences receptive or unreceptive to these constructs? What might such an analysis tell us about our ongoing relationship with non-human animals in the popular narratives through which we encounter them?

Knight also considers the way that pestilence discourses change with social and economic development. While a pre-industrial farmer might be forced to maintain non-destructive concessions for animals who steal from their crops, industrial pesticides establish this expectation of complete elimination of the animal.   It is in the context of such historical development that an animal once treated with a sort of resigned tolerance comes to be seen as an unnatural problem (10). Indeed, the drift of pestilence discourse dovetails into something that resembles hygiene, the eradication of an unwanted presence that simply “doesn’t belong here,” the animal as “matter out of place,” in Mary Douglas’ famous formulation of dirt. I wonder what this means when we hit the threshold at which wild nature exceeds human control, an extra-something outside the boundaries of what we deem appropriate or recognizable? A question I would like to posit here to Knight is whether it might be the case that we do not only exclude animality from cultural discourses, but that we preemptively foreclose lifeworlds that escape our ability to reason.

Then there is conservationist discourse, particularly the trope of the “protected pest,” a paradoxical situation in which animals associated with “excess and proliferation” need to be protected (11). This gets still messier when conservationists seek to displace local people while protecting the animals that were disrupting those people in the first place. Knight observes that mainstream wildlife conservation relies on a “dualistic view of nature and society” whereby nature is cordoned off as a discrete sphere to be protected from human intervention or resource exploitation. Consequently, in a rural or Indigenous context, local people are scapegoated and sometimes displaced. Ramachandra Guha sees this phenomenon as a form of authoritarianism that creates a “lebensraum” for protected animals that can then go ahead and invade vulnerable communities (Guha 1997: 16). To this we can also add Kay Milton, who maps the “nature-culture” boundary alongside the species boundary. The nature-culture boundary is basically the construction of a discrete sphere of nature as outside human intervention. This leads to all kinds of problems when certain animal populations are themselves deemed unnatural because they disrupt the preconceived order of nature within a preservationist/conservationist paradigm.

The exclusivism of the preservationist movement has prompted the emergence of “participatory conservation,” which emphasizes participation from local populations. Because participatory conservation unquestioningly proceeds from a utilitarian strategy in the same vein as preservationism, its logic begs certain questions, maybe none more salient than the assumption that all species have to be useful, or that they have to serve a recognizable function within the social context into which they are incorporated (Knight 13). This brings us back to the initial problematic of species boundaries, where everything has to fit into a symbolically coherent circuit.

If animals are  made to perform a given position within a society’s symbolic structure, any instances of disorder or deviance from that structure situates those animals as pests, as surplus or unnecessary excess. This excess is read in terms of space, where space is understood in both the material and the abstract sense. Animals that cross certain geographical, social, or symbolic/spiritual boundaries renders them anomalous or problematic, maybe even uncanny (see Tambiah 1969: 450-451; Condominas 1994: 116-117; Jackson 1975: 398-399; Fiddes 1991: 142-143; Glickman 1995: 527-528). NB Simon Leach (1964), who talks about the role of “vermin” in animal symbolism and boundary crossing. This should shed some light on the tiger as vermin discourse.

Expanding on his premise that “much wildlife pestilence is not reducible to an elemental conflict between people and wildlife, but is also the site of conflict with other people” (20), Knight outlines three key relations.

1. “Human social divisions are present in conflict with wildlife” (20 emphasis in original).
   1. This refers to everything from basic subsistence systems to displacement of rural populations in a globalized context
2. “[H]uman divisions are evident in conflict over wildlife” (20 emphasis in original)
   1. People-wildlife relations are predicated on human interest, and human interest is predicated on social and cultural context. To take a simple example, a wild herbivore can be food for the hunter but vermin to the farmer. This leads to conflict amongst humans as well as between some humans and animals, especially power conflicts and displacement.
   2. “Secondary conflict over wildlife can also be generated by the primary conflict with wildlife” (21 emphasis in original).
   3. Animal culling can become an agent of popular protest.
3. “Human conflicts are sometimes projected onto wildlife” (21 emphasis in original).
   1. An animal comes to represent a human-human social conflict. The marginalized Other is sublimated onto the animal.
   2. Or, to flip it around, the animal becomes the representation of the state favouring animal interests over those of human struggle.

Further reading:

Condominas, G. We Have Eaten the Forest. New York: Kodansha, 1994.

Descola, P, and Palsson, G., eds. Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1996.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.

Fiddes, M. Meat: A Natural Symbol. London: Routledge, 1991.

Glickman, S. “The Spotted Hyena from Aristotle to the Lion King: Reputation is Everything.” Social Research 62.3: 501-537.

Guha, Ramachandra. “The Authoritarian Biologist and the Arrogance of Anti-Humanism: Wildlife Conservation in the Third World.” The Ecologist. 27.1: 14-20.

Leach, E.R. “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” New Directions in the Study of  Language. E.H. Lenneberg, ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1964.

Tambiah, S.J. “Animals are Good to Think and Good to Prohibit.” Ethnology 8.4: 423-459.

Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002)

Concerning discussions at the 2000 IWC about Japan’s refusal to stop whaling, Matthew Scully stakes a position against cultural relativism:

While we are dealing with different people, different cultures, and different standards, we are still dealing with the same whale. Whales, when they swim into Japanese waters, do not assume a different nature, transformed at that instant from beings with moral claims into moral nonentities whose individual suffering or collective extinction suddenly become meaningless. Morally, a whale is one thing or the other. It’s not whatever we decide it is at any given moment in any given culture. (298)

This position is entangled in problems of ethics, international law, and cultural relativism. The apologist for Japanese whaling will typically assert that the international community has no right to tell the Japanese to stop whaling because whaling is historically embedded in the fabric of Japanese culture. The premise upon which this claim rests draws its authority from the history of imperialism. European or American styles of Western liberal democracy—saddled as such histories are with the baggage of imperialist and colonialist practices that continue into the present day (everything from Orientalism to the current situations in the Middle East or settler colonialism in North America and Australia)—have no ethical right to infringe upon non-Western cultural practices, so the argument goes.

In the context of an argument around animal abuses in the current legal framework of the international community, Japan’s attack on the cruel legacy of imperialism is fallacious. However, if we consider the inherently fraught history of imperialism and the law, we do encounter a further wrinkle in the Western position if we consider the flaws embedded within something like contract law. That is, we get entangled in the immediate problem of the difference between treating an animal as a living thing that innately deserves to live a cruelty-free life in the realm of morality and the ethical-legal status of an animal as property in the case of something like a pet or a farm animal. So there’s this difficult problem of what the whale “is,” so to speak, at a juridical level; I think the claim that goes implicit but ultimately inexpressible in Scully’s assertion that “Morally, a whale is one thing or the other”—regardless of the national border it crosses at any given moment—is the articulation of that moral status itself. We can set up any number of juridico-legal frameworks to posit an ethics that works in the service of what is moral, but the whale’s status as a moral thing will always exceed the symbolic order of this sort of ethics—Wolfe (2003) attends to the problems inherent to contract law and animal rights in his critique of Cavell and Hearne; Derrida (1998), following Lévinas (1961), address this as well, with respect to response and responsibility as qualities that fall under the more general category of ethics and morality.

In saying this, I don’t want to just surrender to an aporia, or make a weak utopian gesture toward an indeterminate moment in the future where the legal system or ideology will ultimately untangle this problem through the teleological march of history. I’m simply making the claim that, in the here and now, we do not have the words or the legal mechanisms in play to make a decision about whaling without first breaching our ethical codes. Again: The whale’s moral status exceeds this sort of understanding.

But I suppose a pragmatist would disregard this dimension of the problem as too abstract and bring it all back to the simple fact that the Japanese and the Norwegians continue to kill whales despite the international community’s protests and threats of sanctions. The Japanese will continue to slaughter whales because it is their prerogative to do so, end of story. But this brings us back to the web of legality; we can threaten sanctions but such sanctions don’t go anywhere because the self-serving logic of bureaucracy effectively blocks any real action. So we’re back to my premise; that real action or the real moral status of the whale remains unspoken and unspeakable before the symbolic order of the law as that which speaks through the bureaucratic apparatus. The Japanese breach the law but they still work within it insofar as they attend the IWC each year and continue to play along with the formation of committees and more sub-committees and ultimately adhere to the infinitely delayed threat of sanctions that won’t ever really add up to anything beyond a warning.

So how do we cut this Gordian Knot? If the concrete assertion of the whale’s moral status lies in actions like breaking international law and forcefully stopping the whale hunt, what does that sort of event mean? What does it gesture toward? Is this a positing of the indefinite against the forces of the present? A momentary rupture in the symbolic of ideology that expresses the extra-semiotic, like an act of terror? Is this why environmentalists or animal activists, when pushed past a certain threshold of action, will be harangued as eco-terrorists? Is terrorism the Real? Or, if it’s too much to venture into Lacanian territory (though Zizek is probably fair game for this diss), let’s call this a moment wherein the symbolic order of ideology hits a temporal and spatial limit; this isn’t to say that we’ve momentarily raised the veil on morality as some universal Platonic or Kantian property (as this isn’t really the place for ontology in the realm of speculative philosophy), but we could say that the present architecture of ideology hits a limit at which its cracks begin to show and we can act on our knowledge of the unspeakable qua morality despite the fact that that unspeakable as such must necessarily remain obscure. To evoke a version of Lévinas, knowledge of the other’s presence remains infinitely outside of me, as it must, and this imperative of the infinitely outside implies our shared imperative of ethical responsibility to each other.

Concerning ethics and the ambiguity of morals, Scully is unequivocal. He asserts the ultimate moral imperative as the dominion of a Judeo-Christian god. We can refer to this as a form of Neo-Platonism, I suppose, insofar as Scully posits a universalism in the form of the Good that pre-exists and supersedes human intervention. Indeed, his attack on Peter Singer’s position comes about from this premise. Given that Singer denies the existence of any moral authority outside of people themselves, it is left up to those people to draw the moral and ethical boundaries upon which we should act. For Scully, Singer’s “theories are not an appeal to morality or justice in any recognizable form, but a redefinition of justice” (327) because justice itself cannot constitute any sort of a priori category. The upshot here is that people must create and accept a moral code that is “produced ex nihilo” from Singer’s brand of preference utilitarianism; Singerian ethics becomes a primium mobile of sorts. Scully cannot accept this because his own moral paradigm infers an a priori preexisting morality, a claim he justifies through the pragmatic and common sense assertion that, all things being equal, most people have an intrinsic aversion to killing other living beings, and that intrinsic aversion isn’t calculable through any sort of utilitarian ethics; it’s just there in the way that we think. Implicit in Scully’s claim is that this everyday sensibility should be enough to dictate our moral choices while at the same time leaving room for a monotheistic God as the authorial locus of our ingrained morality and as the final reference point for any moral ambiguity. It’s up to us to do our best to find the best answer to difficult moral dilemmas that cannot be answered according to human logic, but with the faith that the answer itself is part of the great mystery of creation that exceeds human faculties.

At the risk of dredging up a variation of Marxian poststructuralism in which the subject gets lost in its own enunciation of itself by way of a symbolic order that both overdetermines and is overdetermined by that very subject, I confess that I am, nevertheless, interested in a third term that is left excluded in both of the universalist and preference utilitarian positions. Specifically, there remains the question of morality as both exterior to yet contingent upon subject-object relations. That is, morality doesn’t pre-exist us in the crude Platonic sense, but at the same time, just because it depends upon the subject-object relation for its articulation doesn’t mean that morality simply constitutes a placeholder for convenience vis-a-vis a Singerian ethics. That is, the relation itself produces a new term, what Levinas calls the radical exteriority of infinity, which, in turn, is couched in the idea of infinity. Scully proclaims that “With Professor Singer we step into the abyss, denying that moral truth exists and we must answer to it” (333). This is true, but where Scully thinks that Singer steps off into nothingness, I think that Singer doesn’t go far enough into the abyss, the so-called Derridean abyssal limit. The Form of Morality that informs Judeo-Christian strains of Western humanism is assumed to simply exist on a positive plane. Derrida, after Lévinas, would find here an aporia wherein morality is simultaneously external and internal to a subject that must efface itself before the Other, and the form of that relation itself is such that morality springs from the subject-object relation while at the same time exceeding it. Just as the self must efface himself before the other, morality must both exceed and limit itself to the two subject positions that it produces and from which it is produced. The real pressing ontological question here is not morality or subject-object relations; all of these things are concretized categories of a more abstract relation concerning any pair to be deconstructed at a general level (but, of course, the concept “pair” can only exist if there are subjects and objects to fill it). So the basic Derridean schema is one of infinite effacement before the Other. While ontology begins for Lévinas at my encounter with the Other, Derrida dwells in the ruptures that ontology begets.

With that said, rather than dwell in a crystalline structure of infinite abstractions brought about by the complexity of aporias atop other aporias, it is perhaps more productive to simply accept this abstract complexity as an unknowable given and focus instead on the complexity of the real-life, practical relations before us. For Lévinas, the subject starts at his responsibility to the other. Effacement to some extent does not matter because a deconstrucive schema won’t really get us anywhere insofar as how we act in the world that we see before us, and this latter condition, to many ethicists, is what is really important. Derrida, admittedly, is tricky on this because a text such as The Animal that Therefore I am works in the classical Derridean model of effacement but it also does so much more (or maybe less, given that the paradigm of aporia looms over the whole thing like a spectre). The text is haunted by aporia, but it also does a pretty rigorous job of critiquing the anthropocentric egoism of Western philosophy while submitting philosophy itself to deconstruction. So it is through his deconstructive method that we’re exposed to the anthropocentric violence of Western thought, and it at this limit that we face our responsibility both to ourselves and to others precisely because of our inability to really know what lies beyond us.

Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford UP, 2011)

Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s argument for animal sovereignty in Zoopolis: A Political Theory for Animal Rights (2011), begins with the assertion that “we need to think about wild animal communities as organized and self-governing communities, whose relations to human societies must be regulated through norms of sovereignty and fair interaction.” (166). As an explicitly legislation-oriented position that aligns itself with a call for animals’ inviolable rights to exist, this position attempts to substantiate Martha Nussbaum’s concept of flourishing. “Part of what it is to flourish, for a creature,” asserts Nussbaum, “is to settle certain very important matters on its own, without human intervention, even of a benevolent sort” (Nussbaum 2006: 373).

Donaldson and Kymlicka seek to substantiate Nussbaum’s claim through “a theory of sovereignty which recognizes that the flourishing of individual wild animals cannot be separated from the flourishing of communities, and which reframes the rights of wild animals in terms of fair interaction between communities” (167). From this, Donaldson and Kymlicka call for a social-justice framework based on the establishment of “international norms” similar to those between weak states and strong states as an attempt to curtail the exploitation of the weaker state by the stronger (a system that, they admit, undergoes constant shifts and struggle). The idea here is to cordon off a given parcel of land for animal use with little or no human intervention: This might take the form of, say, wildlife sanctuaries or national parks that are to then be recognized as sovereign territories. Donaldson and Kymlicka propose a sovereignty model in which visitors recognize a given territory as one which that visitor has no right to control or reshape. In short, “if and when we humans visit [wild animals’] territory, we do so not in the role of stewards and managers, but as visitors to foreign lands” (170). (With that said, postmodern theories about the state tend to argue that sovereignty, with the emergence of intranational bodies such as the European Union as well as international human rights laws, is an outdated concept [e.g. Smith 2009]. Donaldson and Kymlicka assume a reformist view in order to claim that a new sovereignty framework that takes the dispersal of power across the international community into consideration can “rehabilitate” sovereignty [172].) For Donadlson and Kymlicka, sovereignty starts with any community that has an interest in autonomy. From this, according to Donaldson and Kymlicka, a theory of sovereignty for wild animals takes into account “positive interventions,” which orthodox animal rights theory doesn’t articulate beyond the imperative to simply leave animals alone (180). The orthodox position is, ultimately, unrealistic and untenable because resource exploitation and man-made species extinction has disrupted the ecosystem to the point where humans must intervene, if in no other respect than to at least impose limits on ecologically destructive practices.

To a liberal theorist, inviolable rights for animals might appear controversial or counterintuitive because animal exploitation constitutes a fundamental aspect of human development throughout history (be it for domestication, labour, or food). As Donaldson and Kymlicka explain, the inviolable rights position—especially in contrast to welfarist and ecological positions that grant some rights to animals but ultimately leave human exceptionalism intact—remains marginalized because most people balk at the notion of granting inviolable rights to animals, rights that we wouldn’t think twice about granting to human beings. While intriguing, Donaldson and Kymlicka’s discussion of “positive intervention” doesn’t shed any new light on the problems inherent to sovereignty in a liberal democratic framework, and they also fail to offer any sort of meaningful critique of the power inequities implicit to the structure of sovereignty itself (cf. Alfred 2001). Ultimately, Donaldson and Kymlicka implicitly invoke neo-colonialism when they claim that a sovereign territory be parcelled out such that it is “free internally to evolve along its own autonomous course” (191). This claim doesn’t mean anything if the legal framework around autonomy is predicated on Western sovereignty, which is implicitly vulnerable to, and indeed depends upon, manipulation and corruption in a globalized capitalist economy. So when Donaldson and Kymlicka claim that “[r]ecognizing wild animal sovereignty …. means that human ‘management’ of wild animal territory must go through a process akin to decolonization, replacing unilateral extraction with fair trade, and replacing ecologically destructive cost-externalizing practices with sustainable and mutually beneficial ones” (194) they assume that colonization is over. At the same time, they disguise a tolerance for ongoing resource exploitation under a vague notion of “sustainable and mutually beneficial” practices. My question, bluntly put: what would things like “sustainable models for agriculture, resource extraction, or wilderness/leisure activities” (194) even look like? how are we to maintain animal sovereignty without overhauling the exploitative logic of the resource sector?

As a proponent for animals and a critic of liberalism, I don’t see any supporting premises for the authors’ central claim that animals should be afforded inviolable rights within a liberal framework. While they speak at length in latter chapters about granting animals legal standing or of cordoning off sovereign zones, their logic is fuzzy, at best, and appeals to vague generalizations about reorganizing human infrastructure or establishing mechanisms of sustainable use for natural resources. The fact is, governments, corporations, and NGOs began to engage in the sorts of practices that Donaldson and Kymlicka describe decades ago. Admittedly, conservation in this vein works to some extent—insofar as large bodies no longer tolerate, or even sanction, the outright eradication of species as they did in the 19th century (e.g. MacKenzie 1988; Ritvo 1987) but Donaldson and Kymlicka fail to provide any innovative or substantial critiques at the level of policy, and at the same time fail to address the degree of animal exploitation embedded in the systems already in play. Instead, they launch into a fairly tortuous defense of inviolable rights for animals that draws on the usual attacks against human exceptionalism, but their argument overlooks two key issues. First, to claim that humans balk at violating the rights of other humans is anecdotal at best and outright false in practice. Without getting into an exhaustive and exhausting list of the current human rights crises in just about every country in the world, including developed nations like Canada (the Residential Schools legacy; the ongoing marginalization and extermination of the Inuit in Nunavut) and the United States (Guantanamo, to choose the most notorious instance), we can safely assert that the world witnesses countless human rights violations everyday. While a concept of inviolable rights for animals is a nice thought, it lacks practical purchase; given our historic legacy of human rights abuses, how can we assume that legislation to protect the inviolable rights of animals would not be broken just as easily and just as quickly as legislation to protect the inviolable rights of humans?

At the same time—and this is a key point in Donaldson and Kymlicka’s argument, one that bears tremendous potential but one that they omit—the long history of animal exploitation also contains salient instances of cooperation, co-existence, and respect for non-human life (Crosby 1986; cf. Green 2006; Haraway 2008; Wylie 2008). A longer meditation on this history would highlight the shortcomings of Western legal discourse insofar as how we are made to imagine animals and our relationships with them (see, for instance, Chen 2012; Derrida 1998; Nussbaum 2006; Scully 2002; Wolfe 2003). To consider the productive complexities of this relationship, however, would undermine the logic of Donaldson and Kymlicka’s argument. But this is the key blind-spot in their thinking; their insistence on reform through a liberal rights approach conceals its lack of imagination through an appeal to practicality. Even a cursory analysis of the practical aspects of rights theory reveals its utter impracticality, given the ease with which human rights are violated. In this respect, Donaldson and Kymlicka claim to offer a new paradigm of animal rights based on citizenship, but the actual program—described in Chapter 6 by way of vague conceptualizations of “animal sovereignty,” “reciprocity,” and the remapping of human and non-human territories—fails to confront its own potential problems, opting instead for ill-conceived calls for a new paradigm of human-animal relationships that, in reality, looks little different than the already existing current initiatives such as the establishment of sanctuaries and wildlife reserves such as the Jim Corbett National Park in Uttarkhand, India.

Moreover, if recognizing animals as citizens comes down to an issue of granting territorial sovereignty to animals, on what grounds is such sovereignty to be upheld, given that humans can’t even agree upon sovereign territory amongst themselves? How will we put this policy forward without getting bungled up in bureaucratic procedures or the retrenchment of sovereign practice when faced with the lobbying power of the resource sector? Moreover, what about the rights of Indigenous peoples who share territory with wild animals? Can we now officially declare war on animals if their sovereign territories impede a state’s economic growth? Are animal citizens subject to criminal law? Will migrating birds require passports? Who draws up this policy and how is it enforced? Some of these questions might appear facetious or even absurd on the surface, but given events such as the Chinese government’s recent forced reallocation of nomadic herders in Qinghai (http://nyti.ms/1fywnCg), such issues bare consideration.

What we really need is an analysis of how conservation sites work vis-á-vis global capital, especially with respect to the often startling and disturbing ways in which the displacement of human groups by legally sanctioned conservation bodies lead those humans to side with poachers and other practitioners of animal abuse who, in reality, often have some sort of stake in the apparently legitimate bodies that displaced the rural groups in the first place (Ramachandra Guha 1997; Scully 2002). We can’t start making claims about legislation and policy before first understanding the unofficial, and often illegal, structural dynamics that undergird policy to begin with.

further reading:

Alfred, Taiake. “From Sovereignty to Freedom: Towards an Indigenous Political Discourse.” Indigenous Affairs 3 (2001): 22-34.

—. “Sovereignty.” Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Strategies for   Self-Determination. Joanne Barker, ed. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2005. 33-50. /

Casal, Paula. “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Animals?” Journal of Political Philosophy. 11.1 (2003): 1-22.

Cavalleri, Paola. The Animal Question: Why Nonhuman Animals Deserve Human Rights. Oxford UP, 2001.

—. The Death of the Animal: A Dialogue. NY: Columbia UP, 2009.

— and Peter Singer, eds. The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity. London: Fourth Estate, 1993.

Cohen, Carl and Tom Regan. The Animal Rights Debate. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.

Nobis, Nathan. “Carl Cohen’s ‘Kind’ Arguments for Animals Rights and Against Human Rights.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 21.1 (2004): 43-59.

Nussbaum, Martha. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006.

Palmer, Clare, ed. Animal Rights. Farnham: Ashgate, 2008 —. Animal Ethics in Context. NY: Columbia UP, 2010.

Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. NY: Random House, 1975. —. “Animal Liberation at 30.” New York Review of Books 50.8 (2003).

Smuts, Barbara. “Encounters with Animal Minds.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8.5-7 (2001): 283-91.

Sunstein, Cass and Martha Nussbaum, eds. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. Oxford UP, 2004.

Vaillant, John. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. NY: Alfred and Knopf, 2010.