Josh Milburn

When considering the possibility of intervening in nature to aid suffering nonhuman animals, we can ask about moral philosophy, which concerns the actions of individuals, or about political philosophy, which concerns the apparatus of the state. My focus in this paper is on the latter, and, in particular, the proposal from Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka that nonhuman animals should be offered sovereignty rights over their territories. Such rights, among other things, seriously limit the occasions on which we might intervene in the affairs of the sovereign “community” in question, even if such intervention is in the interests of some of its members. In this paper, I first outline Donaldson and Kymlicka’s proposal as well as (what I call) the failed state objection – the suggestion that, if nonhuman animals are to be considered sovereign, then their “communities” are failed states. I then critically examine Donaldson and Kymlicka’s responses to the failed state objection, arguing that they fail. However, I claim that the failed state objection, even if successful, is not fatal for Donaldson and Kymlicka’s account of nonhuman sovereignty, and that the objection could be read as an internal critique of their project. There are at least two ways that this could be so: First, we could retain a sovereignty account but nonetheless argue for day-to-day intervention to alleviate suffering in nature, or, second, we could argue that though nonhuman animals live in failed states, there are other good reasons to oppose day-to-day intervention. In closing, I compare Donaldson and Kymlicka’s claims about sovereignty to another recent proposal, namely, John Hadley’s account of nonhuman animals as property holders. I suggest that the two proposals are not so far apart, but suggest that neither is appropriate for immediate implementation. Instead, the focus of activists keen to deploy political tools to aid those nonhuman animals suffering in nature should be on changing the ways that nonhuman animals are perceived and treated more generally. On the simplest level, this means adopting veganism and encouraging those around us to do the same.