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The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals Oxford Handbooks Online The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals Clare Palmer The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp and R. G. Frey Print Publication Date: Oct 2011 Online Publication Date: May 2012 Subject: Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Philosophy of Science DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195371963.013.0026 Abstract and Keywords This article considers whether a morally relevant distinction can be drawn between wild and domesticated animals. The term “wildness” can be used in several different ways, only one of which (constitutive wildness, meaning an animal that has not been domesticated by being bred in particular ways) is generally paired and contrasted with “domesticated.” Domesticated animals are normally deliberately bred and confined. One of the article's arguments concerns human initiatives that establish relations with animals and thereby change what is owed to these animals. The main relations of interest in ethics are the vulnerability and dependence in animals that are created when humans establish certain relations with them on farms, in zoos, in laboratories, and the like. Domestication is a pervasive way in which humans make animals vulnerable, and thereby duties of animal care and protection arise in a persistent way. Keywords: wild animals, domesticated animals, wildness, ethics, vulnerability, dependence, domestication title of this chapter advances a controversial claim: that a morally relevant distinction could turn on whether an animal is wild or domesticated. This claim, although intuitively appealing, has not been carefully defended and remains undeveloped in animal ethics. To explore the claim further, I will first explain how I use the terms “domesticated” and “wild.” Then I will argue that most approaches to animal ethics have focused on animals’ perceived capacities, making factors such as wildness or domestication appear to be morally irrelevant. While animals’ capacities are central to animal ethics, I will argue that they are not all that matters morally. Humans can establish certain relations with animals that change what is owed to them. THE The relations on which I will focus in particular are those of vulnerability and dependence. In the human case, we normally think that making vulnerable people or making people vulnerable creates special responsibilities toward them. Likewise, I argue that making vulnerable animals, or making animals vulnerable, also creates (p. 702) special responsibilities. Domestication is one pervasive institution by which humans make vulnerable animals. When we domesticate, I argue, we owe such animals care and protection that we do not owe to wild animals that are born and live independently of us. However, domestication is not the only way in which humans make animals vulnerable. Other kinds of human-induced vulnerability such as captivity and habitat destruction are also of moral relevance. In general, I will claim that certain relations we can have with animals should be considered alongside animals’ capacities when deciding what we morally owe to them. The Meaning of “Wild” and “Domesticated” The term “wildness,” in the case of animals, can be used in at least three different ways; I will call these locational wildness, dispositional wildness, and constitutive wildness. Only the last of these is generally paired with “domesticated.” Page 1 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals (a) Locational uses of wildness concern place. On this interpretation, wild animals are those animals that live in environments on which humans have had little influence or impact. Though it is difficult to give a very precise account of what this means, it is easiest to think of human influence on the environment here along a spectrum, with highly urbanized or otherwise developed places at one end, and undeveloped, sparsely populated areas, wildernesses, or the deep oceans at the other. The wildest animals in this sense, then, are those who live their lives in the places least influenced by humans, such as bears whose habitat is in remote mountain ranges or toucans who live their lives deep in tropical forests. In contrast, animals that are not wild in this sense live in close proximity, or within, environments wholly or largely created by humans—companion animals, garden birds, urban rats. Many other animals—such as badgers living on agricultural land—fall toward the center of the spectrum. (b) Dispositional uses of wildness: here, “wildness” refers to animals’ dispositions and behavioral responses toward humans; a wild animal is one that is not tame. A tame animal shows little fear of people (interpreted behaviorally) and is not aggressive toward people, except when seriously provoked. A “tamed” animal, more specifically, is one whose fear or aggression has been deliberately reduced by human actions or settings. Unlike the case of locational wildness, and (arguably) constitutive wildness, humans can create animals that are dispositionally wild—highly aggressive dogs and cocks used for cockfighting, for example. (c) Constitutive uses of wildness: here, a wild animal is an animal that has not been domesticated, that is, humans have not bred it in particular ways. To give an account of this sense of wildness, then, I will first have to explain how domestication is best understood. (p. 703) Most frequently, the term “domesticated animal” is used to mean something like “an animal that has been bred in captivity … in a human community that maintains complete mastery over its breeding, organization of territory and food supply.”1 However, this definition can be parsed in different ways; some accounts emphasize the economic benefits to humans of human control over animal lives, while others focus on the biological effects of human control over breeding. Yet other accounts of domestication, in contrast, emphasize animals’ property status. Nerissa Russell, for instance, maintains that “the most crucial thing about animal domestication is that ‘wild’ animals are converted to property.”2 Finally, other interpretations of domestication focus on cooperation and exchange, taking domesticated animals to include, for instance, urban sparrows or squirrels. This sense fits the original meaning of the term “domestication” as “becoming accustomed to the household.”3 These differing interpretations of domestication correspondingly suggest different interpretations of wildness in the constitutive sense: for instance, wild animals as those animals from whom humans do not benefit economically, or those that do not cooperate with people, or those that are not property. However, here I will adopt the most commonly used interpretation of domestication, as referring to animals intentionally controlled by humans with respect to breeding, in particular by selective breeding. Although there are persistent scholarly disagreements about the history of animal domestication, in particular concerning how far domestication was, initially, deliberate on the part of humans, more recently animal domestication has been intentional, with the aim of enhancing the utility of domesticated animals to people. Domestication by selective breeding can change animal physiology in a variety of ways, though such changes vary by—and within—species, and with respect to the purpose for which animals have been domesticated. In general terms, domesticated animals are smaller than their wild ancestors and have reduced brain size and smaller teeth. They are frequently thought to be characteristically neotenous, displaying the persistence of juvenile characteristics into adulthood.4 Particular domesticated animal species have, in addition, been bred by humans in ways that exaggerate, diminish, or shape a variety of other characteristics, such as temperament, body shape, fattiness, the possession of horns, muscling, the presence or absence of body hair, and fur and eye color. Sometimes selective breeding can produce unintended effects; for instance, the deliberate breeding for large breast size in turkeys had the unintended effect of making it impossible for turkeys to copulate normally.5 Such domesticated characteristics often result in it being difficult or impossible for domesticated animals to live, or to live well, without human protection or provision. I will return to this point later. There are, then, a number of different interpretations both of “wildness” and “domestication” in widespread use. An individual animal might be wild in several different ways; for example, a constitutively wild animal could live in a relatively undeveloped area and behave in fearful or aggressive ways toward human beings. On the other hand, an urban squirrel may be constitutively wild but not locationally wild, and may not be dispositionally very wild either. Further, wildness, in all (p. 704) three senses, may come in degrees. The sense of wildness in which I am Page 2 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals most interested in this chapter is wildness as non-domestication. But wildness and domestication here also form a spectrum; there are many animals—feral animals and captive-bred populations, for example—that are neither fully domesticated, nor fully wild, in terms of the impacts of human breeding on their bodies. The Focus on Animals’ Capacities Most work in animal ethics has focused on questions about whether animals are of direct moral relevance at all— whether they have “moral status”—and whether, if they have such moral status, how comparatively morally important they are with respect to other beings, particularly human beings. I will call this comparative importance “moral significance.” These debates have turned on what capacities are morally relevant, which animals possess such morally relevant capacities, and how much moral weight particular capacities should be thought to carry. Candidate capacities for moral status have included rationality (understood in various different senses); being able to feel pain and pleasure; being conscious (again, interpreted in various senses); having preferences; being goaldirected; having a sense of oneself as a being that persists over time; or some combination of these. None of these capacities though, however interpreted, maps easily onto a distinction between “wild” and “domesticated.” The kinds of animal capacities that humans shape by domestication are not (currently, at least) the kinds of characteristics that are usually thought to affect either an animal's moral status or its significance.6 While domesticated housecats and African wild cats—often thought to be the historic ancestors of domestic cats— have different body shapes and temperaments, they do not obviously differ (for instance) in terms of their capacity to feel pain and pleasure, nor their possession (or lack of possession) of reasoning ability. In accounts of animal ethics in which individual animals’ capacities determine moral status and moral significance, wildness and domestication seem to be irrelevant. This is not surprising since, after all, wildness and domestication are not themselves capacities, even if we can identify a domesticated animal by brain size, tooth size, neotenous behavior, and so on. “Wildness” and “domestication” are more like relations, or perhaps relational properties, than the kinds of capacities that have featured in debates about moral status. The idea of “wild” and “domesticated” animals only makes sense because there are human beings in the world with whom animals may or may not have particular relationships. This is not true of a capacity such as sentience. Wildness—in the sense of nondomestication—emphasizes the absence of a particular kind of human-animal relation, while domestication signals the presence of that relation. The irrelevance of an animal's being wild or domesticated holds, at least directly, for most prominent theoretical approaches to animal ethics. That an individual (p. 705) animal's capacities alone are all that is of moral importance has, in particular, been central for those advocating some form of philosophical animal liberation. Strong opposition to any claim that species membership—which is also not a capacity—could be of moral concern has been critical to philosophical animal liberation. This focus on capacities, which I will call “capacity-orientation,” is central both to utilitarian and rights-based approaches to animal ethics. While different forms of utilitarianism aim at maximizing different goods—some focusing on pleasure and pain, others on preference satisfaction, for instance —neither pains nor preferences have any direct relationship to wildness or domestication. Animal rights theorists, likewise, may disagree on the capacities required for rights possession—being an “experiencing subject of a life” in Tom Regan's case, or being sentient in Gary Francione's, for instance—but again, wildness and domestication are of no direct moral significance on this basis.7 (Some rights theories may be able to find a place for the moral relevance of a wild/domestic distinction, but this distinction has not yet played a role in existing accounts; I will say more about this later.) Equally, those who deny that animals have moral status at all, or who maintain that animals are of much less moral significance than some or all human beings, also base their judgment on animals’ lack of critical capacities such as moral agency, language, or autonomy, capacities that, in contrast, are shared by (most) humans.8 In none of these leading accounts of human ethical responsibilities to animals has animals’ wildness—or otherwise—played any direct part. This is not to deny that, in such capacity-oriented views, wildness or domestication may be of indirect moral relevance. What is in the interests of domesticated and wild animals will diverge. I am likely, for instance, to have to treat a domesticated housecat and an African wild cat differently in order to protect or to promote their respective interests. But in capacity-oriented views, the fact that one cat is domesticated and the other wild does not, in itself, mean that I should privilege protecting or promoting the interests of one over the other. Wildness and domestication are only relevant to what is in an animal's interests, rather than to whether an animal has morally Page 3 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals relevant interests at all, or to how significant those interests might be. Such capacity-oriented arguments have rightly been central to the development of animal ethics. That an animal can feel pain is—as Robert Nozick famously argues—a good reason to think that there is a moral distinction between smashing an animal's head with a baseball bat and smashing a baseball with that same bat.9 In this chapter, I will accept that the capacity to feel pain is a reasonable basis for moral status. However, it is not necessary to deny that certain basic capacities are key to establishing moral status in order to argue that other factors—including wildness and domestication—might also be of moral relevance. Other factors may underpin the creation of additional responsibilities to animals that we already accept to have moral status on the basis of their capacities. This is widely, though not uncontroversially, thought to be the case in the human sphere. We may, for instance, have special obligations toward family members or owe compensatory justice to people we have harmed in the past. As I will go on to argue, factors like these, alongside capacities, can also be of moral relevance in establishing what we owe to animals. (p. 706) Making such an argument supports a distinction that appears, at least, to be widely held, particularly with respect to assisting animals. For example: thousands of wildebeest drown every year crossing the Mara river in Kenya on their annual migration. No one suggests that humans should attempt to reduce the animal suffering involved by rescuing the drowning wildebeest, or by redirecting the migration toward safer river crossings, though this would be feasible. In comparison, the Humane Society of the United States spent millions of dollars rescuing ten thousand companion animals from drowning in flooded homes and streets in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. Both these cases are, of course, complex. But they do illustrate that, in practice, a distinction between what is owed to wild and domesticated animals does often seem to be at work. I will argue here that there are good reasons to make such moral distinctions between wild and domesticated animals, particularly in the context of assistance. Capacity-orientation and a Wild/Domesticated Distinction The first move in defending a form of wild/domesticated distinction is to clarify, in a broad sense, its scope. I am not arguing that animals’ capacities are irrelevant to animal ethics, nor that relational properties such as wildness and domestication are all that we need to take into account morally. While animals’ capacities are rightly thought to be central in terms of establishing that they have moral status at all, and in terms of what we should not do to them, I will argue that particular human-animal relations can establish additional moral responsibilities toward the animals concerned. The most helpful way to develop this distinction is by setting it in the context of an existing theoretical approach to animal ethics. This will indicate how a moral distinction between wild and domesticated animals can be built into an approach to animal ethics that is otherwise capacity-oriented. I will use animal rights theory here, as it is the most straightforward theoretical approach to work with in this context. However, I am not suggesting that one must accept rights theory in order to accept the kind of distinction for which I am arguing. Other capacity-oriented views —including other deontological approaches to animal ethics, and some forms of indirect consequentialism—could also provide a foundation for, or at least be compatible with, the argument I will make here. However, animal rights theory shows most clearly how the kind of relational distinction I am making can be taken on board by a position that is currently capacity-oriented. Different theorists ground animals’ rights in different capacities, such as sentience or being an experiencing subject of a life. Whatever the relevant capacity, any being that has it has the relevant right. As Regan maintains: “If any individual (A) has a right, then any other individual like A in relevant respects has a right.”10 Almost (p. 707) all animal rights accounts understand such rights negatively, in terms of non-interference of various kinds (not harming, not killing, not infringing on liberty). We may, though, have duties to assist where there have been prior rights infringements, a claim to which I will return.11 On all such accounts, only moral agents can violate rights; and since, as far as we know, only (some) humans are moral agents, only humans can violate animals’ rights. What happens in wild nature—for instance between predator and prey, where no moral agents are involved —is beyond the scope of rights claims: “Nature has no duties; only moral agents do …. Nature no more violates our rights than it respects them.”12 No one's rights are infringed when the lion pulls down the wildebeest. On the basis of rights, at least, humans have no duties to act in the wild in the context of predation, flood, or drought, for instance. It is only when harm is being committed by a moral agent that any rights violation is involved. Were there Page 4 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals convincing evidence that any nonhuman animals are moral agents—able, for instance, to evaluate reasons for acting—the ability to violate rights might extend beyond humanity. But since there is no such convincing evidence, rights violations can only exist where human moral agents impact on animals. As negative rights theorists maintain, wild animals should just be left alone to “carve out their own destiny.”13 Although there are difficulties with such animal rights positions, I will not pursue them here, since as I have noted, the position I will develop here is compatible with other theoretical approaches to animal ethics, as well as with animal rights theory. I want, instead, to focus on questions about which a primarily negative animal rights account gives us little guidance. Most work on animals’ rights has concerned what not to do to animals; that is, not to violate their basic rights. This may be sufficient to govern human interactions with animals that live independently of us—those animals that are locationally and constitutively wild. But we also create animals, make them dependent on us, and bring them to live alongside us. We accept that these kinds of relations underpin positive responsibilities to provide support and assistance of various kinds, but a negative rights view, in itself, has nothing to say about these matters. Although assisting animals is not impermissible, a theory of negative rights alone provides little guidance for thinking through occasions when helping or providing for an animal might be morally desirable or required. Of course, a negative rights theorist can reasonably respond—as Regan does—that “the rights view is not a complete theory in its present form.”14 It is perfectly possible for a rights theorist to accept that there may be “additional, non-discretionary obligations” that arise not from negative rights, but rather “from our voluntary acts and institutional arrangements.”15 The view I will be defending here takes this possibility as its starting place. Alongside general negative duties not to harm animals in certain ways, I will argue, our “voluntary acts and institutional arrangements” create certain additional, nondiscretionary obligations toward some, but not all, animals. Domestication, I will argue, is one such arrangement. Of course, I am not the first to defend this claim. There is already a diverse—though often not well-developed— body of work arguing that various relations and relational properties, which sometimes include wildness or domestication, are (p. 708) of moral relevance. Such accounts may be based on a variety of different understandings of relations: social relations,16 kinship relations,17 affective relations (which can be understood in very different ways), community relations,18 and contractual relations. The last two of these maintain—for different reasons—that wildness and domestication are morally relevant. Although these relational approaches are either poorly developed or seriously problematic in other ways, I discuss them because they are helpful in thinking through why we may have different moral responsibilities—in terms of assistance, at least—toward wild and domesticated animals. Two Existing Moral Distinctions Between Wild and Domesticated Animals Community Membership One ground for a moral distinction between domesticated and wild animals is “community membership,” though this expression serves as a rough marker for a number of different views. Those who adopt this position maintain that we have different moral responsibilities toward animals that belong to communities in different relations with humans. So, for instance, domesticated animals may be understood as members of close, mixed communities with humans (an idea first proposed by Mary Midgley), whereas wild animals may be understood either to constitute their own, more distant, separate species communities, or to be members of broader ecological communities.19 Admittedly, a wild/domestic distinction may not map exactly onto this community distinction—because, for instance, some constitutionally wild animals can be kept as companion animals in the mixed community—but a rough-andready distinction does hold here. One version of this community approach maintains that, while some basic moral norms, such as negative rights, should operate when humans act in the wild—there would, for instance, be something morally wrong about gratuitously torturing wild-living, constitutively wild animals—additional, special obligations apply within humananimal mixed communities. J. Baird Callicott is a prominent advocate of such a view, arguing that humans and some animals are bound together into communities by affective bonds of sympathy and trust that create particular kinds of ethical obligation. Companion animals, part of the intimate, familial community, “merit treatment not owed either to less intimately related animals, for example to barnyard animals, or, for that matter, to less intimately related human beings.”20 In contrast, wild animals living in the wild should be “treated with respect” but are not owed more Page 5 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals than this qua individuals (though the wild communities of which they are members should be protected). (p. 709) There are difficulties with Callicott's argument, but a community model is one way of conceptualizing morally relevant differences between wild and domesticated animals. This “animal communitarianism” roughly parallels some communitarian arguments directed at human communities. For instance, while it is often argued that members of one community, say a national community, should not harm members of other nations and should respect those nations’ territorial boundaries, frameworks involving assistance—such as to provide health care or social security—remain internal to specific communities. A parallel argument in the animal case is that while there are only negative duties to wild animals, who live in their own, distant communities, where animals are members of close mixed human-animal communities, they may be owed certain special kinds of support and assistance. I find Callicott's basic thought here—that more is owed toward animals with whom we have certain close relations— very plausible, and I will develop a similar view later in this chapter. However, there are significant difficulties with the specific “communitarian” form Callicott's argument takes. There are substantial (though not insuperable) problems involved in extending the idea of “community” to include animals, and the sense in which we normally use “ecological communities” is very different from the intersubjective and participative sense in which we understand interhuman communities.21 Although there might be a way of making this communitarian model work better, I will not develop it further here. However, I will draw on some of the ideas embedded in this sense of community—the importance of relations of created dependence, in particular—in developing my own account. A related argument, based on a political model of national sovereignty rather than a model of ethical community, has been proposed by Robert Goodin, Carole Pateman, and Roy Pateman.22 Focusing on the great apes, they argue that apes have an “authority structure in place over a particular territory” and that, as such, great apes could be regarded as “sovereign” over their territory by international law. This idea of “simian sovereignty” suggests that we could regard great apes, at least, as living within sovereign autonomous communities that demand certain kinds of respect. This proposal has not been put into practice, nor extended to wild animal species more generally, though John Hadley has developed an argument that wild animals should be given property rights over their territory.23 Because the idea of animal sovereignty could not be extended to domesticated animals, any extension or implementation of this proposal would inevitably create distinctions in practice between what is thought to be owed to wild and to domesticated animals. However, such “sovereignty” proposals essentially focus on ways of providing stronger protection from human interference for wild animals and as such provide no guidance for thinking about moral responsibilities toward the animals that we produce and live alongside. The Domesticated Animal Contract A second argument for a moral distinction between what is owed to wild and domesticated animals rests on the idea of a “domesticated animal contract.” This is not an attempt to locate animals within a general interhuman moral contract (p. 710) (though there have been several such attempts). Rather, it refers to the idea that there is a special contract relationship between human beings and domesticated animals, a contract that does not include wild animals. A number of different accounts of this idea exist, but all provide a backward-looking, historical story about the increasing entanglement of humans with certain species of animals.24 Prior to domestication, animals had to obtain vital scarce resources and protect their lives against a range of threats—hunger, storms, disease, predators. Domestication marks the transition, a change of state, a crossing from “wild nature” into “human society” or “culture.” Various versions of the domesticated animal contract deliberately draw on social-contract language. The role animals themselves played in this transition varies between accounts. Budiansky, most prominently, argues that members of certain animal species associated closely with human communities because they gained from the association. He claims that animals can be thought of as “collaborators” in domestication.25 The idea of the domesticated animal contract posits that domestication is a win-win deal; it offers both humans and animals benefits that outweigh the costs the contract may incur to both parties. In the animal case—assuming, of course, that the “contract” is actually kept—the benefit is lifelong protection from predators and provision. The cost is a slow change in animal “nature” as a consequence of human breeding; a restriction of liberty; and being used in various ways, including being killed, in the case of most agricultural and laboratory animals. In the human case, there are costs in terms of labor, the use of resources to provide for animals, to shelter them and give them medical attention. These costs are offset by the fact that humans are benefited in turn by animal work, companionship, entertainment, and by the food and clothing their bodies provide. Wild animals are outside this Page 6 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals contract and unaffected by it (directly, at least). The domesticated animal contract, it is argued, changes the moral relationship of humans with some animals—the domesticated ones—while leaving the moral relationship with wild animals, whatever it might previously have been thought to be, essentially untouched. That is, whatever might be thought to be owed to all animals on the basis of their capacities alone is augmented, on this account, by the extra assistance or benefits conferred on domesticated animals by the domesticated animal contact. Although the idea of a domesticated animal contract provides grounds for a moral distinction between what is owed to wild and domesticated animals, it is a deeply problematic idea for several reasons. Contracts are normally made between free and equal rational agents who understand and assent to them. Taken in any literal, historical way, animals could not have understood domestication as, in any sense, making a contract. One possible move here is to suggest that consent should be seen as hypothetical, not historical; animals would consent to the deal of domestication, were they able.26 However, hypothetical contracts are inherently suspicious because they exclude content; and for all of this to be plausible, we would have to accept that domestication is a good deal for animals. They could not be supposed, hypothetically, to agree to a contract under which they would be worse off, but there is considerable scholarly debate about whether animals can be thought to have (p. 711) gained from domestication.27 Domestication is—for all the individual animals involved—irreversible; unlike most versions of the social contract, there is no way out for individual animals if humans break the contract. Yet it is often advantageous for humans to break the contract, both because all and only those who could punish the contract-breakers have something to gain from the contract being broken and because someone who broke an animal contract would not be regarded by other humans as someone with a disposition to break contracts with humans.28 There is a deeper difficulty. On this view of the contract, individual domesticated animals are actually brought into being, with particular “domesticated” natures—such as playfulness, lack of aggression, high milk-producing capacity, and so on—because of the (putative) contract. Without it, some entirely different animals would have lived. So asking of an individual domesticated animal (even hypothetically) whether domestication is something to which it would have agreed is a strange question. Without domestication, that particular animal would not have existed. It has no possible constitutively “wild” or “non-domesticated” alternative existence.29 The deep, fundamental ways in which domestication brings beings into existence in certain ways makes domestication stand out from any other form of social contract. The idea of the domesticated animal contract, then, is too deeply problematic to accept. However, one need not adopt contract language to accept the claim that domestication changes humans’ moral relationship to animals. Many of the factors that feature in the domesticated animal contract—in particular the ways in which domestication changes animals’ natures, making many of them dependent on human beings—are, I will now argue, morally relevant. I will, in particular, argue that changing animal natures in the process of selective breeding creates a special moral relationship with the animals concerned, and that this is one among several relations that have this effect. Developing a Framework for a Wild/Domesticated Distinction: Parallels with Human Cases The framework I will now develop is situated in the context outlined above. It is built onto a capacity-oriented, negative rights approach that gives us an account of general duties, telling us what we should not do to animals, though this is not the only theoretical approach onto which a framework like this could be built. The framework also draws on ideas discussed in “community relations” and “domesticated-animal contract” accounts, where it is argued that relations with certain animals—such as domestication—can give us reasons to assist or to provide for them. I will further develop such reasons here, arguing that where humans create certain relations with (p. 712) animals, in particular relations of vulnerability and dependence, they create special obligations to such animals. I use “special obligations” here just to mean “obligations owed to some subset of persons in contrast to natural duties that are owed to all persons simply qua persons”—though in this case, the relevant set and subset is composed of animals rather than humans.30 Domestication, I will argue, is the primary example of such a special relation. Equally, where humans have previously violated animals’ rights, or otherwise seriously harmed them, leaving animals worse off in ways that significantly affect their well-being, humans owe these particular animals, not animals in general, something like compensatory justice. When describing the effects of domestication earlier in this chapter, I noted that domestication changed animals in Page 7 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals various critical ways. Animals that are locationally and constitutively wild, I suggested, live their own lives, independently of human beings. The physical and psychological capacities they possess have come about independently of humans; they eat, play, fly, swim, and produce offspring independently of humans. They live apart from us, in something like “other nations.” Domesticated animals, in contrast, are deeply entangled in human society. Their natures are shaped by us. They are bred by us. Their bodies have the forms that we have selected, and, to some degree, at least, their minds reflect human influence. They may not be able to provide for themselves, and even if they could, they are often confined in ways that makes this impossible for them. So, while wild animals provide for themselves, the existence, nature, and situation of domesticated animals is causally bound up with humans. These differences, I maintain, make a moral difference. To explain this, it is useful to draw on arguments often used in human cases to determine when we should assist, and when assistance may be permissible, but is not required. In Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick uses a thought-experiment that runs something like this: suppose there are a number of separate islands, each of which is occupied by a Crusoe. These islands differ with respect to the natural resources they have available; in addition, the Crusoes have differing abilities and dispositions for work, so they have different amounts of wealth and comfort. Later, the Crusoes discover one another through radio transmissions. Not only do they discover each other's existence, but they also have the ability to transfer resources between themselves, allowing for the possibility that better-off Crusoes could assist worse-off Crusoes. Is there any duty for the better-off Crusoes to assist the worse-off Crusoes? Nozick argues not. In particular, because the Crusoes have lived completely independently of one another, no question of justice is raised by the differentials in each Crusoe's holding (and hence in his well-being). Nozick maintains, “In the social noncooperation situation, it might be said, each individual gets what he gets unaided by his own efforts: or rather, no-one can make a claim of justice against his holding.”31 Where inequalities have been generated without injustices, there are no duties of justice for the better off to assist the worse off, or to try to move toward equal distributions of resources. There are reasons for thinking that these arguments are problematic in the human case. But this thoughtexperiment does help to illumine the wild animal (p. 713) case. Take constitutively wild animals living in a designated wilderness. These animals are in a “social noncooperation situation” with respect to human beings. They live independently of human provision; they may have good or poor access to vital resources; some of them do well, some do badly; some are sick, some are healthy. No rational moral agents are causally responsible for their well-being; their rights have not been violated; if these animals are hungry, or suffering, or being preyed upon, there is nothing obviously unjust or (given the animal context) even loosely analogous to injustice about how they fare. So, on the grounds of injustice, at least, there is no reason to assist them, although this does not mean that assistance would be impermissible. Many other animals, however, are not in the situation of independent existence and self-subsistence that characterizes constitutively and locationally wild animals. Domesticated animals are the prominent example. They are not the equivalent of animal Crusoes, living self-sufficiently on their own islands; rather, they normally depend on human support to live well. This dependence has not just come about serendipitously. It has been brought about by deliberate human activities. In most cases, humans are largely responsible for (a) the actual situation in which domesticated animals live, often closely confined in spaces that prevent them from finding food, mates, and the like independently of human provision; (b) key facets of domesticated animal natures, including in many cases an inability to be self-sufficient owing to physiological or temperamental changes; and (c) the very existence of most individual domesticated animals, because they are bred by humans. Domesticated animals—as I will maintain later—are not the only animals whose lives have been impacted in very significant ways by human beings, such that they cannot be thought of as independently living Crusoes. To extend Nozick's analogy further, we could see humans as conducting “raiding parties” on the habitat and resources of wild animals, or as colonizing their “islands,” killing them or forcing them to live in the barely viable borderlands of human settlements. In neither of these cases—of created dependence or prior serious harms—do animals live in the kind of situation Nozick envisages as grounding non-assistance. Where, in human cases, there is either created dependence or prior serious harm leading to continuing disadvantage, we generally think that some kind of special responsibilities to assist or make good follow. One analysis of this kind—with a focus on requirements to assist in the case of prior harms—has been developed by Thomas Pogge.32 Pogge uses fictional inhabitants of Venus to ground his comparative thought-experiment. Page 8 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals Suppose we found a population of starving people on Venus, a population that was hungry for reasons completely unrelated to people on Earth. Should we assist these hungry people? Pogge thinks that our duties to assist here, if we have them at all, are very weak. So, does this also mean that the affluent have no duties to assist those who are distant and poor, or starving, on Earth? No, because people on Earth are not in the situation of the Venusians (or Nozick's Crusoes). Even if the poor on Earth are spatially distant from the affluent, they are not distant in what Pogge understands to be a morally relevant sense: the sense of entanglement and causal responsibility that (p. 714) underpins social justice. On Pogge's account, the affluent are at least in part, even if indirectly, causally responsible for the situations of the poor and suffering on Earth; that is, the affluent are failing or have already failed in their negative duties not to harm. The poor on Earth, unlike the fictional poor on Venus, are victims of injustice. This injustice, Pogge maintains, has three possible forms (it is not necessary to accept all three; any one will do the job for him): the effects of shared institutions; the uncompensated exclusion from the use of natural resources; the effects of a common and violent history. The better off shape institutions that benefit them while harming the worse off; and/or enjoy advantages from which the badly off are excluded without compensation; and/or benefit from a violent history that gives them a good start in life while depriving others of theirs. The wealth of the affluent has not been achieved independently of their relations to the suffering poor; though physically distant, the affluent and the poor are causally entangled, in particular through common institutions. This entanglement, in which the affluent violate their negative duties to those who are poor, in turn generates responsibilities to end such harms and to compensate those who have been harmed. I will adapt Pogge's argument for certain animal cases. I will argue that where humans have become entangled with animals by practices or shared institutional frameworks that have made animals especially vulnerable, there are special obligations to assist or care for them. Such obligations are not general; that is, they do not apply to those wild animals that live independently of human beings. Equally, where humans have violated animals’ rights or seriously harmed them, for instance by destroying their habitat or denying them access to vital resources, they owe animals compensation. I will look closely, in turn, at the two kinds of special relation in which I am particularly interested: first, created dependence and vulnerability, and second, prior harm. Created Dependence and Vulnerability All animals—including humans—are by nature vulnerable to certain kinds of threats, such as those from disease and disaster. Vulnerability is, as Martha Fineman rightly maintains, to some extent ineliminable, a consequence of being embodied, “a universal, inevitable, enduring aspect of the human condition.”33 However, for most people most of the time, and frequently for wild animals, this enduring vulnerability does not generate strong, ongoing dependence on others for care and provision. Although humans are dependent as infants, and often dependent when aged, their dependence is “episodic, sporadic, and largely developmental in nature.”34 But this is not the case for many domesticated animals. Dependence on humans, for these animals, is permanent, enduring, and lifelong. This is particularly true of animals bred in ways that meet specific human requirements—such as cows that can only give birth through cesarean section, cats bred without fur or claws, turkeys selected to gain so much fat that they cannot walk or fly, genetically modified laboratory mice created to be susceptible to specific cancers. Even less dramatic forms of domestication can make survival without human care highly tenuous. For example, (p. 715) domesticated horses released into the wild are often attacked by wild horses and fail to grow a sufficiently thick winter coat to be protected from cold; many are unlikely to live long in the wild. For these domesticated animals, we might say, vulnerability is realized as a result of their dependence on humans. Does this created dependence mean that humans owe assistance to domesticated animals that they do not owe to animals in general? Yes. If humans close down animals’ options by external constraints on their movements and environments, preventing them from fulfilling some or all of their needs in other ways, then by making animals vulnerable, special obligations are generated to relieve the animals of the additional burdens that they have been forced to assume. In short: if we make animals vulnerable, we should reduce or eliminate the problems for the animals the creation of such vulnerability generates. Likewise, when humans deliberately create morally considerable, sentient animals, who have no other ways of fulfilling their needs and are constitutively profoundly dependent on and permanently vulnerable to humans, they create special obligations to provide and care for those animals. The first kind of dependence we can call “external dependence.” Here animals are restrained or prevented—by Page 9 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals cages, walls, fences, being tied, being denied roaming territory, and the like—from supporting themselves or seeking support elsewhere. This kind of dependence applies to most domesticated animals and some nondomesticated ones, including many zoo animals, who, even if they could support themselves in certain wild contexts, are prevented from doing so. As Keith Burgess-Jackson argues of companion animals, once they have been taken into our homes or confined in some other way, their alternative options for living have been shut down.35 Animals confined in feedlots or labs are in similar situations. They have access neither to other humans who could support them nor to the resources to allow them to be self-sufficient. Because other options have been closed, and because humans are responsible for their closure, humans should provide for them. The second kind of dependence, in which domesticated animals are unable to be self-sufficient because of their human-shaped natures, we can call “internal dependence.” This kind of dependence creates special obligations. It is familiar in the human case that where we create internal dependence and accompanying vulnerability we also create special obligations. It is sometimes argued that just being a member of an especially vulnerable human population (even where there was no deliberate intention to create such vulnerability) is sufficient to ground a moral responsibility for extra care and protection. This is not the argument here, however. The realized vulnerability of domestic animals is not by chance or merely unfortunate; it is deliberately created by people. It is not, for instance, as though people just stumbled upon mice populations especially susceptible to forms of cancer, or hairless cats that burned when exposed to the sun. Animals have been shaped to be as they are by people, who have deliberately made them to be vulnerable and dependent by nature. The closest human parallel (though it is admittedly far from exact) is the human choice to have a child. It is widely agreed that this choice generates special obligations (p. 716) toward the resulting child not just because any child is needy and vulnerable, but because you are responsible for this vulnerability. It is your child, and thus you have special obligations toward your own child that you do not have toward children in general. So, if a couple voluntarily decides to procreate, they undertake obligations to care for their child, either themselves or in some other way that will be good for the child. As Onora O’Neill maintains, “a standard way of acquiring obligations is to undertake them, and a standard way of undertaking parental obligations is to decide to procreate.”36 Suppose someone decides to procreate, but denies any obligations to the infant, neglecting it or failing to provide for its basic needs. The neglectful parent is morally culpable in a way that would not apply to some other adult who, though knowing that there are neglected infants nearby and being able to adopt one of them, nonetheless chooses not to do so. The decision to procreate brings with it special obligations to the offspring that results from that decision, obligations that are backward-looking to the decision itself. Human procreation is relevant as an analogy because when humans breed domesticated animals, they create particular sentient beings that would not otherwise have existed. The sentient beings that are thus created are usually dependent on others to survive and flourish; that is, dependent on their creators to care for them or to organize alternative care for them. There are, though, key differences here. First, in the typical case of human children, physical dependence diminishes over time, and children eventually become independent of their parents. This happens to a much lesser degree, if at all, with domesticated animals. Second, human children are not deliberately created in particular ways. Though some forms of human embryo selection and gene modification now occur, and may be on the increase, moral justification for these practices usually rests on arguments that such selection will enhance the welfare of the child produced and increase the likelihood that he or she will live a healthy and independent life. (Although “savior siblings” may be selected for the good of someone else, this practice is not to the disadvantage of the selected embryo; and the deliberate creation of deaf children by deaf couples in part follows from the argument that a deaf child would fit more comfortably into deaf family culture than a hearing child.) In the case of domesticated animals, however, breeding and genetic modification are only rarely undertaken in the interest of enhancing individuals’ welfare; instead, these practices much more commonly enhance both individual animals’ long-term dependence on humans and their vulnerability to environmental stress. Where animals’ welfare is improved by particular breeding practices, this is usually to allow animals to live better only within the context of the closely confined and stressful conditions of intensive farming. These differences do not undermine the relevance of the analogy; indeed, they highlight the comparatively permanent and deliberate nature of created dependence in the animals’ case. If we have special obligations when we create dependent, vulnerable, morally considerable children, then we also have special obligations when we create dependent, vulnerable, morally considerable animals. My argument, then, is that domesticated animals and animals that humans have made dependent in other ways are Page 10 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals in a different moral relationship with humans than animals that are locationally and constitutively wild. This provides a (p. 717) reason for thinking that while it is permissible not to assist migrating wildebeest drowning in the Mara River, we should assist companion or agricultural animals trapped in houses or fenced fields by rising flood waters and unable to escape by themselves. Similarly, while there is no responsibility to feed or shelter starving locationally and constitutively wild animals in a hard winter, we should provide food, warmth, and shelter to animals we have confined in zoos, especially where they are located in climates very different from those to which they are native. Where we have created dependence and vulnerability in animals, whether the dependence is internal, external, or both, we should assist them in ways that allow them to overcome the obstacles to living well that such dependence and vulnerability has created. Prior Harms Domestication and confinement are not the only ways in which humans can make animals vulnerable. Harming animals in ways that have long-term negative effects can also do so. Since I am working with an account of animal rights, I will take “harms” here to mean violation of an animal's basic rights; but other theoretical accounts of serious harms would also work. Regan mentions, but does not develop, the possibility of “compensatory justice” in an animal rights context; my argument can be described as developing such an account.37 In the human context, claims for compensation, reparation, or other forms of special treatment on the basis of prior harms or injustices—such as slavery, displacement from land, and other human rights offenses—have become increasingly common. It is widely accepted that where human individuals or groups suffer serious, continuing disadvantage on the basis of some prior significant injustice, action should be taken to “make good” that prior harm. Pogge's account of affluent individuals’ responsibilities toward the poor takes this form. Those who are affluent, Pogge maintains, benefit from arrangements that impoverish others, authorize the institutions that produce such arrangements, and neither take compensating action nor shield victims from the effects of these global institutions. Inasmuch as benefits could be refused (but instead affluent individuals eagerly accept them) and the systems involved could be opposed and the victims protected (but individuals do not act to do so) on Pogge's account some moral responsibility for compensating for these harms falls on affluent beneficiaries. Arguments of this kind raise complex issues, even in human cases. Should it be the perpetrators or the beneficiaries of prior harms (where these groups are not identical) who have primary responsibility to “make good”? How should we deal with intergenerational claims where both original perpetrators, beneficiaries, and victims have died? What is an appropriate response to claims that rest on counterfactual conditions (about, for instance, what the position of some human group would be now, had the relevant past offense not occurred)?38 Although these problems are difficult to resolve, they do not overwhelm the basic principle that if rights have been violated or substantial injustices have been committed, these have persisting negative effects, and others have perpetrated or benefited from those rights (p. 718) violations and injustices, then there is a moral case for some form of “making good” to the victims. I want to extend these arguments to certain animal cases. If serious prior harms or rights infringements are grounds for compensatory or reparatory actions in human cases where they cause persistent and serious negative effects, so they should also be in animal cases where similar effects occur. Admittedly, animals’ claims are likely to be weaker than human claims. In human cases, reparations claims (for example) are normally directly made by those who have been affected. Animals can neither recognize that their rights have been violated, nor can they actively make claims with respect to their situation. This is likely to be important in terms of the kind of benefit that might be owed them. For instance, they would get no satisfaction from an apology, or from a sense of “just desert,” were perpetrators deprived of some benefits they had unjustly gained. The fact that animals are not capable of understanding that their rights have been violated, or of actively claiming any reparation, does not mean that they have no claims at all. In the human case, were the victims severely mentally disabled, we would not deny all claims, even if guardians or trustees were required to represent the claims. To take a particular case: suppose that a number of coyotes have been displaced by a housing development. They cannot move to new territory, as the land is occupied by other coyotes, but they are no longer able to access their former hunting grounds or their denning areas. On most accounts of animal rights, this housing development has violated their rights; on any account that takes animals’ moral significance seriously, the housing development constitutes a serious harm. It has persistent negative effects on the coyotes’ well-being; additionally, Page 11 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals they are vulnerable to new hazards, in particular to heightened traffic danger. This case is a relatively simple one in at least one sense: it is a roughly same generation case, that is, we are thinking about what is owed to the very same coyotes that were displaced. These coyotes are constitutively wild (we have not selectively bred them) and they are not directly confined (we have not caged them). However, they have been made extremely vulnerable on account of human actions. So the situation of the coyotes, in practice, shares important characteristics with the domesticated and confined animals in the previous section: the coyotes are unable to be self-sufficient on account of deliberate human actions. On the same grounds, then, we should help the coyotes in overcoming the obstacles to living well that their vulnerability has created. This claim, though, raises a further question: who is responsible for helping these coyotes? This question is relevant not only to this case but to all the claims about assistance I have been making. Who Should Assist? Throughout this chapter, I have argued that where animals have deliberately been made vulnerable or dependent, whether by domestication, captivity, or serious (p. 719) prior harms such as habitat destruction, “we” should compensate, protect, care for or assist those animals in ways that relieve the burdens “we” have created. Is my suggestion, then, that everyone has some responsibility toward these displaced coyotes, even though very few people were in any sense involved in the housing development or have benefited from it? Do I have special obligations to rescue a threatened domesticated animal, even though I have never bred one myself? An objector will argue that these kinds of compensatory responsibilities or special obligations should instead be confined to narrow contexts, in particular to cases where I have in some sense consented to, or voluntarily accepted, particular obligations.39 This objection raises complex issues to which I cannot do full justice here. However, I will make some points in response. First, there are some special obligations that do not seem to be voluntarily assumed. Siblings do not voluntarily enter the role of being a sibling; children do not voluntarily enter the role of “being x's child,” but these are generally thought to be relations that carry special obligations.40 So, if my elderly, pet-loving parent dies leaving a houseful of hungry cats, I have a special obligation to care for, or to find care for those cats, even if I have not volunteered for the job, and indeed, even if I find it distasteful. Second, there are many cases where the context of responsibility is indeed narrower than “everyone.” The coyote case is an example. It raises many of the difficulties that human-reparations cases generate, and in this sense poses no special problems. In human cases, as noted earlier, there are questions about whether perpetrators, beneficiaries (where the two groups are not identical), or both are responsible for reparations to those whose rights have been violated. The same questions arise here. Planners, developers, and contractors are to different degrees responsible for displacing the coyotes from their habitat. They also benefit in terms of profit from the development of the land. But the perpetrators are not the only beneficiaries; the new residents of the housing estate, who now occupy what was formerly the coyotes’ territory, also gain from the coyotes’ displacement over the long term. The scope of responsibility to the coyotes can be construed relatively narrowly; just as in human cases, we can confine it to direct perpetrators and beneficiaries, and consider how best to “make good” from within this context. In practice, in this case, it is likely that the new human residents would best be able to “make good” some of the ongoing negative effects of the development on the coyotes (in other cases, it may be more appropriate to focus on perpetrators). The new residents here can partially accommodate the coyotes’ interests by habitat restoration, traffic calming, messier land use, and generally being willing to tolerate coexistence, even though this will result in some inconvenience to them. In some cases, then, “we” can be understood narrowly, to refer to those who directly caused, or who directly benefited from, rights violations or other serious harms to animals. However, the claims I made about domesticated animals were broader than this, maintaining that everyone has special obligations to assist domesticated animals that they do not have toward constitutively and locationally wild animals, even if they have not consented to such obligations, nor bred domesticated animals themselves. On what basis could everyone have such obligations? (p. 720) A form of beneficiary argument, I suggest, also holds here. Almost all individual humans are, in some way, tied into the institution of animal domestication (and other forms of utilization, though domestication is my particular focus here). We all benefit from the existence of domesticated animals, even where we are not directly Page 12 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals involved in creating them. We eat them, wear them, live with them, are entertained by them. If we accept benefits from an institution that creates dependent, vulnerable individuals, then we should also accept the responsibility to care for those individuals, to protect them from hazards (for instance, when trapped by floods, as in the Hurricane Katrina case), and to provide food, shelter, and medical care for them. This need not mean that we all have exactly the same responsibilities. If you breed a kitten, certainly you have primary responsibility to care for it. But if you were to abandon it in a dumpster and I find it there, then I have a responsibility not just to walk away. However, we are not inescapably saddled with these special obligations; an exit is possible. It is possible to reject the benefits of animal domestication by not using products derived from domesticated animals, not living with domesticated companion animals, protesting against domestication, and otherwise disassociating from domestication. If one refuses the benefits of animal domestication, then one does not share in the obligations that acceptance of the benefits brings. I have argued here that we have special moral responsibilities of various kinds toward animals that we have made vulnerable (either by creating them to be vulnerable or rendering them vulnerable by captivity or habitat destruction) and from whose vulnerability we benefit. This vulnerability includes most domesticated animals, and constitutively wild animals where human actions have closed down other options for self-sufficiency. However, questions are now raised about animals that do not easily fall into either of these groups: urban rats, for instance. Am I suggesting that we should assist them? Other Animal Contexts Many animals do not fall into any of the groups I have considered. They are not currently bred by humans, but humans have had some significant influence on them. For example, they were once bred by humans but have become feral; they were deliberately relocated by humans but now are locationally wild; and so on. What implications do my claims have for animals in these situations? I do not think that there is any single general answer here. My view is that, alongside animals’ capacities, we also need to consider animals’ contexts, and the kind of human involvement there is or has been in creating those contexts, in order to make decisions about what we owe them. There will be different conclusions depending on humans’ causal role in animals’ situations, the kind and distribution of human benefits gained from animals, and so on. Here I will consider one case mentioned above: urban rats. (p. 721) First, I should clarify the kinds of rats I have in mind, since we have rather different relations with different members of the rat family. I am not thinking of fancy rats that have been selectively bred as companion animals. I mean urban rats that live alongside human beings in drains and houses and that scavenge on human waste. These rat populations are dependent on human beings, because the presence of human settlement has permitted the significant expansion of the rat population. Although these rats are constitutively wild, we have not selectively bred them, and they are not locationally wild. There are significant differences between the situation of these urban rats in comparison with domesticated animals or the displaced coyotes. Domesticated animals are being deliberately bred for human benefit. The coyotes were constitutionally and locationally wild until human development intruded into their territory. The urban rats are in neither of these situations. Humans are not responsible for breeding them, shaping their natures, or for physically restricting their movements. The rats are less vulnerable and dependent than most domesticated animals. They are not physically constrained, and generally have other options for survival than particular human beings (although those options may be less satisfactory). Humans do not benefit from their presence; quite the contrary. So, the same special relationships that give rise to special obligations in domesticated animal cases do not hold for the urban rats, and the rats are not living in wild habitats that humans developed. They are opportunists in human territory; their presence in urban areas is not on account of a prior rights violation or other serious harm, unlike the coyotes. The rats’ habitat is urban. So, neither the arguments that I used to make a case for special obligations to domesticated animals, nor those that I used in the case of prior harms, apply here. We do not have responsibilities to assist urban rats. There are other cases of animals living as urban opportunists, however, that are less clear-cut than urban rats. Some constitutively wild animals are deliberately encouraged to live and reproduce in particular places, such as the flocks of pigeons that were once regularly fed in Trafalgar Square in London.41 Here, the creation of dependent Page 13 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals relations can be easily be foreseen, and follows from a deliberate human practice that gives many people pleasure. In the case of pigeons: the feeding of pigeons significantly influences flock size, generating more frequent breeding seasons and creating more pigeons. Given that surrounding pigeon habitats are already occupied, a proposal suddenly to terminate all feeding, as happened in London, would result in the starvation of birds that have been brought into being by deliberate human practices. In this case, unlike the rat case, continuing food support is owed to the pigeons, even if it is gradually reduced over time to slowly bring down flock numbers, since this is a case where humans have deliberately brought vulnerable and dependent sentient animals into being. These two cases—urban rats and Trafalgar Square pigeons—indicate that even in situations that superficially look similar, different human relations can give rise to different responsibilities. In some cases, humans have no responsibility to assist urban animal opportunists. In other cases, humans may have created relations that entail ongoing responsibilities, ones that should not be abandoned without careful (p. 722) consideration. On the argument I have developed here, we need to know about the particularity of each case in order to make a wellrounded judgment about what is owed to the animals involved. Conclusion This chapter is entitled “The Moral Relevance of a Distinction between Wild and Domesticated Animals.” I have argued that, understood in a particular way, there is a morally relevant distinction between wild and domesticated animals. What is relevant is not so much “wildness” or “domestication” in themselves, but what these terms signal about human effects on animals’ ability to be self-sufficient. Animals that have not been bred by humans, and that live largely beyond human influence, are self-sufficient. Like Nozick's Crusoes, they live their own independent lives. Domesticated animals, in contrast, are normally deliberately bred and confined in ways that make them both vulnerable and dependent. For this reason we have special obligations to them that we do not normally have to wild animals. But if it is the creation of vulnerability and dependence that is of moral relevance, then something resembling such special obligations can extend beyond domesticated animals. We owe assistance to constitutively wild animals who have been made vulnerable by habitat destruction, and to urban opportunist animals, if they have been deliberately and predictably made dependent, for instance by regular feeding. Accordingly, what if anything is positively owed to animals in particular contexts needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis. What we owe to a barn cat, living partly on mice and partly on what humans provide, will be different both from what we owe to an African wild cat and to a confined housecat. I have argued here that, with sentient animals as with fellow humans, we live in a complex world of intention, creation, dependence, and vulnerability. Although respecting the rights of, or refraining from causing serious harms to, animals is an appropriate starting point for animal ethics, where we have deliberately created animal vulnerability or dependence, we should also care for or assist the animals concerned. Suggested Reading BUDIANSKY, STEPHEN, Nicholson, 1992. The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication. New York: Wiedenfeld and BURGESS-JACKSON, KEITH, “Doing Right by Our Animal Companions.” Journal of Ethics 2 (1998): 159–85. CALLICOTT, J. BAIRD, “Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Back Together Again.” In The Animal Liberation/Environmental Ethics Debate: The Environmental Perspective, edited by Eugene Hargrove, pp. 249– 62. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. CASSIDY, REBECCA, and MOLLY MULLEN, eds. Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008. CLUTTON-BROCK, JULIET. Hyman, 1989. FINEMAN, MARTHA. The Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism and Predation. London: Unwin “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition.” Yale Journal of Law and Page 14 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals Feminism 20 (2008): 1–20. (p. 725) GOODIN, ROBERT E. Protecting the Vulnerable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. —— , CAROLE PATEMAN, and ROY PATEMAN. “Simian Sovereignty.” Political Theory 25 (1997): 821–49. HADLEY, JOHN. “Nonhuman Animal Property: Reconciling Environmentalism and Animal Rights.” Journal of Social Philosophy 36 (2005): 305–15. MIDGLEY, MARY. Animals and Why They Matter. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983. PALMER, CLARE. “Placing Animals in Urban Environmental Ethics.” Journal of Social Philosophy 34 (2003): 64–78. —— . Animal Ethics in Context. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. POGGE, THOMAS . “Eradicating Systematic Poverty: Brief for a Global Resources Dividend.” In Ethics in Practice, 3rd ed., edited by Hugh LaFollette, pp. 633–46. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. REGAN, TOM. 2004. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983; 2nd ed., TELFER, ELIZABETH. “Using and Benefitting Animals.” In The Moral Status of Persons: Perspectives on Bioethics, edited by Gerhold Becker, pp. 219–32. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Notes: (1.) Juliet Clutton-Brock, The Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism and Predation (London: Unwin Hyman 1989), p. 21. (2.) Nerissa Russell, “The Domestication of Anthropology,” in Where the Wild Things are Now: Domestication Reconsidered, ed. Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007), pp. 1–26, esp. p. 36. (3.) Rebecca Cassidy, “Introduction,” in Where the Wild Things are Now, p. 3. (4.) Stephen Budiansky, The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication (New York: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1992). (5.) Edward O. Price, “Behavioral Development in Animals undergoing Domestication,” Applied Animal Behavior Science 65 (1999): 245–71, esp. p. 253. (6.) See Adam Shriver, “Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed where Morality has Stalled?” Neuroethics 2 (2009): 115–24. (7.) Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983); Gary Francione, Animals as Persons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). (8.) For example, Carl Cohen, “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research,” New England Journal of Medicine 315 (1986): 865–70; R. G. Frey, Rights, Killing and Suffering (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). (9.) Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia. (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 35. (10.) Regan, Case for Animal Rights, p. 267. (11.) Tom Regan, Defending Animal Rights (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 50. (12.) Regan, Case for Animal Rights, p. 272. (13.) Regan, Case for Animal Rights, p. 357; Francione, Animals as Persons, p. 13. (14.) Regan, Defending Animal Rights, p. 51. Page 15 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals (15.) Regan, Defending Animal Rights, p. 51. (16.) Leslie Pickering Francis and Richard Norman, “Some Animals are More Equal than Others,” Philosophy 53 (1978): 507–27. (17.) Gary Steiner, Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status and Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). (18.) J. Baird Callicott, “Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Back Together Again,” in The Animal Liberation/Environmental Ethics Debate: The Environmental Perspective, ed. Eugene Hargrove (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 249–62. (19.) Mary Midgley, Animals and Why they Matter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983). (20.) Callicott, “Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics,” p. 256. (21.) Ernest Partridge, “Ecological Morality and Non-Moral Sentiments,” in Land, Value, Community, edited by Wayne Ouderkirk and Jim Hill (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 21–35, esp. p. 22. (22.) Robert Goodin, Carole Pateman, and Roy Pateman,“Simian Sovereignty,” Political Theory 25 (1997): 821–49. (23.) John Hadley, “Nonhuman Animal Property: Reconciling Environmentalism and Animal Rights,” Journal of Social Philosophy 36 (2005): 305–15. (24.) Desmond Morris, The Animal Contract (London: Morris Books, 1990); Budiansky, The Covenant of the Wild; Callicott, “Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics”; Catherine Larrère and Raphael Larrère “Animal Rearing as a Contract?” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 12 (2000): 51–58; Elizabeth Telfer, “Using and Benefitting Animals,” in The Moral Status of Persons: Perspectives on Bioethics, ed. Gerhold K. Becker (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 219–32. (25.) Budiansky, Covenant of the Wild. (26.) Jan Narveson, “On a Case for Animal Rights,” Monist 70 (1983): 30–49. (27.) See F. E. Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals (London: Hutchinson, 1963), p. 37; D. R. Harris, “An Evolutionary Continuum of People-Plant Interaction” in Foraging and Farming: The Evolution of Plant Exploitation, ed. D. R. Harris and G. Hillman (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 11–24; Clutton-Brock, Walking Larder, p. 27; Budiansky, Covenant of the Wild. (28.) See David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 162. (29.) Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 349. (30.) Diane Jeske, “Special Obligations,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Spring 2008), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/special-obligations/ (accessed April 20, 2010). (31.) Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 185. (32.) Thomas Pogge, “Eradicating Systematic Poverty: Brief for a Global Resources Dividend,” in Ethics in Practice, 3rd ed., ed. Hugh LaFollette (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 633–46. (33.) Martha Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20 (2008): 1–20, esp. p. 8. (34.) Fineman, “Vulnerable Subject,” p. 9. (35.) Keith Burgess-Jackson, “Doing Right by Our Animal Companions,” Journal of Ethics 2 (1998): 159–185, esp. pp. 168–69. (36.) Onora O’Neill, “Begetting, Bearing and Rearing,” in Having Children: Philosophical and Legal Reflections on Parenthood, ed. Onora O’Neill and William Ruddick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 25–38, esp. p. Page 16 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015 The Moral Relevance of the Distinction Between Domesticated and Wild Animals 26. (37.) Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), p. xl. (38.) Jeremy Waldron, “Superceding Historical Injustice,” Ethics 103 (1992): 4–28, esp. pp. 8–10. (39.) Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 98. (40.) Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances, p. 64. (41.) See Clare Palmer, “Placing Animals in Urban Environmental Ethics,” Journal of Social Philosophy 34 (2003): 64–78, esp. pp. 76–78. Clare Palmer Clare Palmer, Department of Philosophy, Texas A&M University Page 17 of 17 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: Texas A&M University; date: 20 April 2015