Animal Studies Journal Volume 6 | Number 2 Article 6 2017 Duties to Socialise with Domesticated Animals: Farmed Animal Sanctuaries as Frontiers of Friendship Guy Scotton University of Sydney Follow this and additional works at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/asj Part of the Art and Design Commons, Australian Studies Commons, Creative Writing Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Education Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Philosophy Commons, Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: research-pubs@uow.edu.au Recommended Citation Scotton, Guy, Duties to Socialise with Domesticated Animals: Farmed Animal Sanctuaries as Frontiers of Friendship, Animal Studies Journal, 6(2), 2017, 86-108. Available at:http://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol6/iss2/6 Duties to Socialise with Domesticated Animals: Farmed Animal Sanctuaries as Frontiers of Friendship Abstract I argue that humans have a duty to socialise with domesticated animals, especially members of farmed animal species: to make efforts to include them in our social lives in circumstances that make friendships possible. Put another way, domesticated animals have a claim to opportunities to befriend humans, in addition to (and constrained by) a basic welfare-related right to socialise with members of their own and other species. This is because i) domesticated animals are in a currently unjust scheme of social cooperation with, and dependence upon, humans; and ii) ongoing human moral attention and 'social capital', of which personal friendships are an indispensable source, is critical if their interests are to be represented robustly and their agency enabled in a just interspecies community. I then argue that participation in farmed animal sanctuaries is a promising way to fulfil this duty, lending support to conceptions of sanctuary as just interspecies community. This journal article is available in Animal Studies Journal: http://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol6/iss2/6 DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 86 Duties to Socialise with Domesticated Animals: Farmed Animal Sanctuaries as Frontiers of Friendship Guy Scotton University of Sydney Abstract: I argue that humans have a duty to socialise with domesticated animals, especially members of farmed animal species: to make efforts to include them in our social lives in circumstances that make friendships possible. Put another way, domesticated animals have a claim to opportunities to befriend humans, in addition to (and constrained by) a basic welfare-related right to socialise with members of their own and other species. This is because i) domesticated animals are in a currently unjust scheme of social cooperation with, and dependence upon, humans; and ii) ongoing human moral attention and 'social capital', of which personal friendships are an indispensable source, is critical if their interests are to be represented robustly and their agency enabled in a just interspecies community. I then argue that participation in farmed animal sanctuaries is a promising way to fulfil this duty, lending support to conceptions of sanctuary as just interspecies community. Keywords: friendship, animal ethics, interspecies justice, sanctuary, moral psychology, love, partiality DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 87 Introduction The political turn in animal ethics has enriched and concretised notions of interspecies moral 'kinship' and 'community' of the sort developed in moral philosophy, reframing questions of what humans should and should not do to other animals within visions of how to live well with them as members of multi-species communities.1 Donaldson and Kymlicka, for example, enjoin us 'to see animals not solely as vulnerable and suffering individuals but also as neighbours, friends, co-citizens, and members of communities ours and theirs' (Zoopolis 24; cf. 40). These categories – neighbours, friends, community members – are not, I suggest, just evocations of a central theme or structure, but are irreducible and indispensable to any sufficiently robust conception of interspecies justice. On any substantial understanding of membership, whether Donaldson and Kymlicka's group-differentiated citizenship model or another scheme, domesticated animals are owed rich forms of moral regard as well as duties of assisted agency so that they can participate meaningfully and equitably in social and political life. In turn, as Donaldson and Kymlicka make clear, any such process of 'expecting agency, looking for agency, and enabling agency' (Zoopolis 110), however it is framed by formal procedures of justice, must be borne out in lived experiences with nonhuman animals as individuals. In providing a provisional roster of rights and responsibilities for nonhuman community members, Donaldson and Kymlicka stress that this process is embodied, experimental, and ongoing, drawing on examples of personal relationships between humans and dogs, cows, and donkeys (Zoopolis 119-122). Intimate, reciprocal relationships including friendships thus provide crucial substance and motivation for the project of just interspecies community, since 'the nature of dependent agency is that it is created through relationship, not deducible from the innate capacities of individuals' (Zoopolis 122). In this article, I elaborate on the transformative potential of personal friendships in constructing a just interspecies community. My proposal here is addressed to the political turn: granted a broadly liberal animal rights framework, I explore how particular practices and patterns of interspecies friendship might contribute to interspecies (in)justice. This article consists of three parts. In the first section, I review some arguments about the ethics and moral psychology of human-nonhuman friendships, identifying an impasse in their over-reliance on DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 88 dominant modes of interspecies companionship. In the second section, I supplement this work with some recent arguments in the (human-centric) ethics of friendship and sociability to argue for the existence of a duty for humans to socialise with domesticated animals in ways that make new and diverse friendships possible. In the final section, I ask how this duty might feasibly be exercised within present conditions of injustice and segregation, identifying the farmed animal sanctuary movement as a particularly promising avenue for a renewal of interspecies amity. In turn, the duty to socialise with farmed animals offers normative support for conceptions of sanctuary that prioritise the building of diverse, resistant communities of justice. 1. Ethics, Moral Psychology, and Interspecies Amity The existing philosophical literature on interspecies friendship has several notable limits for the purpose of linking personal friendship practices to the political turn. One branch of this work, drawing in particular from the feminist ethics of care, recuperates interspecies love and friendship from their earlier dismissal in the mainstream of animal ethics, often by positing the affective and relational as alternatives to discourses of animal rights and justice, in tension with the foundational principles and methods of the latter. Only now is work being done to overcome this impasse within a liberal orientation to interspecies justice, most notably by Tony Milligan ('The Politicization of Animal Love'), but the impetus for my proposal here can be found in the earlier claims of scholars such as Brian Luke: [R]ather than focusing exclusively on logic and considerations of formal consistency, we might better remember our feeling connections to animals, while challenging ourselves and others to overthrow the unnatural obstacles to the further development of these feelings. This process of reconnecting with animals is essentially concrete, involving relations with healthy, free animals, as well as direct perceptions of the abuses suffered by animals on farms and in laboratories. (312) In the same vein, Anca Gheaus argues that interspecies friendships disclose a crucial dimension of reciprocity missing from the models of exchange and cooperation often found in moral and political theory (592). This way of appreciating our 'common predicament' with DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 89 other animals as loveable and love-giving creatures, with strong roots in the ethics of care tradition, offers a countermeasure to (though not a replacement for) an animal ethics focused on specifying the distinct interests and capacities of different animals (595). Partiality, appropriately inclined by the moral imagination, might then be seen not as a hindrance to but rather a foundation for further moral striving: 'Actual love, as well as the ability to love and be loved by people with whom we have personal bonds, is one basis for valuing distant others and helps identify people in general as morally significant. [...] [S]ympathies can be extended outwards from pets to other animals' – in Gheaus's example, from a dog companion to a liminal mouse (595). This approach 'legitimize[s] special consideration for pets and animals who might become pets, and rejects the status quo of excessive care for pets while, at the same time, we as a society destroy, abuse, and exploit, for mere comfort, innumerable other animals' (596). But since Gheaus does not directly challenge the distribution of 'actual love' between animals who are pets and animals who are potential pets, her admittedly provisional appeals to the moral imagination are left to do much of the legwork. As I will consider below, this opens up psychological and practical questions about how this imaginative extension should be cultivated. As for the ethics of interspecies friendships developed within a broadly liberal rights discourse, three features are of note. First, this work has tended to focus on the nature and ramifications of relationships (real or hypothetical) that are already under way, a feature carried across from the literature on human friendship (Goering 401). Second, taking 'companion animals' such as cats and dogs and conventional institutions of pet-keeping as paradigmatic, this scholarship traces the obligations and limits that follow from partiality, connecting with work on an array of important applied issues such as companion animal diets, reproductive rights, and healthcare. Third, to the extent that this area of the literature has considered the connection between personal friendships and interspecies justice, it has tended to draw lessons from moral psychology based solely on relationships developed within these existing dominant practices. Cynthia Townley, for example, argues that humans may indeed form robust friendships with (some) nonhuman animals – seen best in relationships 'with dogs and perhaps cats' ('Animals as Friends' 46) – but concludes that 'acknowledging friendship with animals is less of an advantage for animals than might be hoped' (54). This is because, according to Townley, the DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 90 moral leverage gained from appealing to (existing and putative) interspecies friendships has limited psychological traction: As humans, we are good at inconsistency, bad at consistency, so an appeal to consistency seems unlikely to engender much change. In any case, a deeper problem is that friendship seems to be about partial and preferential rather than consistent treatment, so it isn't the right conceptual mechanism to motivate a general concern. ('Animals as Friends' 56) Bernard Rollin is more sanguine about the moral leverage that might be gained by cultivating reasonable partiality in our 'love/friendship' relationships with companion animals (Rollin 119). The most effective sorts of ethical dialogue, Rollin suggests, non-adversarially assist interlocutors in disentangling and reweaving their pre-existing sentiments, practical commitments, and principles (107-109). In matters of animal ethics, this involves reflecting on our own personal relations with nonhuman animals. Improving the treatment of companion animals, then, should be prioritised both for its own sake as a relational duty, and also in order to consolidate interspecies philia as a social resource for thinking well about nonhuman animals more broadly. Yet Rollin is not clear here on how this prioritisation and consolidation should occur – other than, presumably, through incremental reforms in animal welfare policies – and he, too, draws a cautious conclusion: [W]e can anticipate that improving the treatment of companion animals will raise our moral sensitivity to all animals, and eventually change our current willingness to accept moral exploitation of certain animals for essentially selfish reasons. But, for the moment, moral common sense will continue to draw a distinction, not easily eroded, between animals we care for and animals we use. (121) There are some good reasons to think that Townley and Rollin are right to be cautious here. As Siobhan O'Sullivan has detailed, while some companion animals may function as 'gateway animals', inducing moral reflection about the plights of non-companion animals (103), human-nonhuman relations are riven with 'internal contradictions': wide disparities in the norms and legal frameworks governing how members of the same species may be treated in DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 91 different institutional contexts within a given society. Recent empirical work indicates that public opinions on animal experimentation do not differ appreciably between that conducted on companion animal species and non-companion species (Cox and Montrose), suggesting the limited moral leverage of relationships with companion animals in themselves for overcoming these contradictions – let alone the 'external contradiction' of the moral status of nonhuman animals at large. If this is right, then proposals for a substantial role for love in animal ethics of the sort advanced by Luke and Gheaus are at risk of being psychologically under-motivated. Nonetheless, as Milligan contends, practical reason can only unseat the deep background picture of animal exploitation as the 'authentic' or 'natural' way of life if animal advocates develop a sufficiently rich 'combination of argument and of representing (picturing) what it is to live well' (Beyond Animal Rights 4). Such a picture includes, in Milligan's own rendering, a thickening of the political turn by re-engaging with the moral emotions in general, and with the political valences of interspecies love and friendship in particular ('The Politicization of Animal Love'). How, then, might we connect the practices and institutions of personal friendship with interspecies philia as a civic ideal? In the following section, I propose a bridging concept: a duty to socialise with domesticated animals that challenges existing patterns of sociability and calls for practical change to invigorate the moral imagination of interspecies justice. 2. 'Choosing One's Friends' in an Interspecies Community Both Townley's argument about moral leverage and Rollin's emphasis on the gradual evolution of norms through best practices are concerned with acknowledging and cultivating relationships within the conventional companion animal paradigm. As one of the central legal and cultural institutions structuring human-animal relations, this pet paradigm is undeniably important to examine in its own right. By shifting focus to the ethics of beginning friendships, however, I broaden the terms of this discussion beyond 'gateway animals' to include the domesticated animals currently bracketed out of many of these discussions; that is, animals whose predominant social classification is (for example) as 'food', 'farm', or 'laboratory' animals. This DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 92 move accomplishes three things. First, it expands the framework for moral leverage: instead of just 'acknowledging friendship with animals' (Townley, 'Animals as Friends' 56), or appreciating that some other animals 'might become pets' (Gheaus 596), it puts the prospect of renewed human relationships with a variety of domesticated species within the scope of plausible friendship practices. Second, by raising issues about fairness, diversity, and discrimination in the formation of friendships and social groups, this shift responds to Townley's worry that friendship is the wrong framework for motivating broader moral concern for other species because all particular friendships involve partial and preferential treatment. Third, my discussion addresses the concern I raised with Rollin's approach: that his view of the inertia of 'moral common sense' is overly concessive, since he does not consider how interspecies philia outside the pet paradigm might be consolidated as a resource for moral change. I do so by highlighting the emerging possibilities of farmed animal sanctuaries as pioneering sites of interspecies amity, lending the ethics of interspecies friendship a proactive, institutional focus with bridges to political theories of animal rights. I begin by returning to some arguments in the human-centric ethics of friendship and sociability which so far have not, to my knowledge, been applied to animal ethics.2 Sarah Goering, reflecting on feminist challenges to the principle of impartiality as 'epistemologically and emotionally impossible' (400), suggests that we might nonetheless steer our personal relationships in light of an impartial ideal such as fairness by purposefully cultivating difficult and diverse opportunities for friendship. She stops short of calling this possibility a duty, but does not rule out doing so, arguing here only 'that a number of goods are achieved through the diversification of friendship, and that such diversification is not only psychologically possible, but also morally admirable' (401). These goods include a more equitable diffusion of the personal pleasures and benefits of friendship, but also moral experiences brought about by intimate, reciprocal immersion in the perspective of another, along with potential moral resources: the bridging of social capital, and motivation and support for newly common causes (Goering 406-7). More recently, Stephanie Collins has argued for a position strongly anchored in impartialism, with the more demanding conclusion that there is indeed something like a 'duty to DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 93 make friends' in accordance with impartial principles, and even to steer other special relationships, such as the decision to adopt a child instead of conceiving one. For Collins, 'impartial justifications can ground special duties in a coherent and satisfying way' by positing prior 'duties to perform actions and adopt attitudes that increase the chance of special relationships being formed' (920), where those relationships would align the moral reasons and motivations of partial duties with impartial requirements. Neither argument devotes much attention to specific patterns of discrimination within partiality, or to the institutions and policies that scaffold our social lives. Since Goering is focused on getting her argument off the ground with a provisional definition of 'impartiality, and its goals of reducing bias and promoting fair treatment' (410), she does not explicitly invoke a conception of oppression or extreme disadvantage, except by way of briefly discounting racism and sexism as morally legitimate sources of partiality (400) and productive diversity (405). She defers the question of just how the many possibilities of choosing one's friends should be evaluated: 'We need to figure out what it is that we do value, and how that is supported by certain kinds of diversity' (406). Collins refers only to a speculative case – 'a society which has a strong taboo against friendships between persons of different classes' – in order to establish that some opportunities to fulfil her duty may only be feasible with a collective effort, or with institutional support, though she suggests that this may be 'a lot to ask of governments' in liberal societies (919). Goering's and Collins's arguments, however, would seem to apply with particular urgency to efforts to breach the more extreme patterns of (un)sociability shaped by enduring injustices. In such cases, Goering's argument too may come to look less like an advisory ideal and more like a distinct duty. Granted the existence of a dialectic of oppression, wherein disadvantage and ill treatment promote the many modes of social invisibility, and social invisibility reinforces disadvantage, the need for the moral resources nurtured by friendships becomes keener, and the prospect of transformative moral experiences sharper, if more challenging. Friendships that reach over the fault-lines of oppression may open our moral attention not only to the particular ways in which our social horizons are structured by prejudices, material inequalities, and forms of spatial segregation, but also to the particular DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 94 personal qualities and forms of goodness that endure under oppression, and the many ways they might flourish in its absence. Lori Gruen ('The Faces of Animal Oppression') provides one framework for understanding how nonhuman animals face such a dialectic of oppression, and why they may have corresponding interests in social representation and human 'cultural capital' even when they cannot comprehend these phenomena as such. Adapting Iris Marion Young's analysis of the 'five faces' of oppression, Gruen observes that nonhuman animals in factory farms, laboratories, and other forms of intensive animal 'use' suffer not just from systemic violence, exploitation, and powerlessness, but also from Young's less obviously applicable categories of marginalisation and cultural imperialism: whether exoticised in zoos or infantilised as pets, 'nonhuman animals are forced to conform to the human rituals and practices' that confine them to expedient and stereotyped spaces, relationships, and behaviours (161-165). These stereotypes shape what we think nonhuman animals can be or do, and so what we might be or do with them. An integrated analysis of oppression attunes the moral imagination to the cumulative, structurally reinforcing effects of these factors in ways that utilityor rights-based enumerations of the harms involved do not readily accommodate (171-172). Combined with arguments that friendships with nonhuman animals can be mutually meaningful and motivating in sufficiently involved ways (for example, Milligan, 'The Politicization of Animal Love' 195-197; Townley, 'Friendship with Companion Animals'), a duty to (take reasonable steps to) socialise equitably with domesticated animals begins to look like a plausible extension of human-centric arguments that we ought to 'think much more carefully, and much more morally' (Collins 920), about how, where, and with whom we hang out. Or, to put this conclusion in terms more appreciative of the ideal of assisted agency from which I began, domesticated animals have a claim to opportunities to befriend humans from diverse backgrounds. In light of Gruen's account of oppression, the practical focus of this duty should be members of those species most vulnerable and marginalised in our society, which I take at present to be those exploited in industrial animal agriculture and biomedical research. For reasons of space, I focus subsequently on the case of farmed animals, and so speak also of a 'duty to socialise with farmed animals'. A move beyond the ethics of friendship within the DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 95 conventional companion animal paradigm, this duty to socialise with farmed animals calls even – or perhaps especially – to self-professed 'animal lovers,' and to city-bound animal ethics scholars and activists (myself included). The notion of 'choosing one's friends' or a 'duty to make friends' may sound, at first blush, sterile and onerous. Neither phrase is strictly accurate: the duty is rather about cultivating new opportunities for friendships to develop, as they always must, through mutual interest and affection. Nonetheless, could this duty be formally sound, but socially and psychologically self-defeating, including in the interspecies case? Goering addresses this concern by acknowledging that the duty calls for certain special efforts at the outset which may involve awkwardness and discomfort (406), as many social situations do. However, she points out that most friendships develop from some coincidental interest or situation which brings people together; caring for some particular other for their own sake may result from, but is not a precondition for, the social circumstances which lead to friendship (408). As such, it is not clear that an initial conscious inclination of the sort provided by this duty would eclipse the 'natural warmth and ease' (407) which we rightly expect, in time, of a good friendship. As Collins specifies, 'the duty is just to increase the chance of a process succeeding whereby a relationship develops organically. Special relationships are two-way streets: one cannot form or stay in a special relationship on one's own. One can only make it likely' (917, emphasis in original). This duty, then, is instrumental in that it aspires to steer our social lives in the interests of impartiality – but the new friendships it aspires to bring about need not, and certainly should not, be primarily instrumental relationships. The goal is to redirect equitably, not to dissipate, rich forms of partiality and the goods these encompass.3 However, it is important here to distinguish this duty from the rights of domesticated animals to have their social needs met. I take these rights to be prior to and constraining on any duty to socialise with domesticated animals, meaning that any program encouraging humans to socialise with farmed animals will need to be conscientious in appreciating and enabling these animals' needs with respect to their own and other non-human species: needs for (amongst other things) group affiliation, play, family life, and solitude. This is why the duty I outline applies only to relationships with domesticated animals: even though wild and liminal animals4 also are subject to oppression in DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 96 human campaigns of dispossession and extermination, and so also are owed forms of justice buttressed by moral esteem of the sort cultivated by friendships, their own social and environmental needs, and the increased risks to both parties, preclude the sort of concerted socialising that would make such friendships possible and desirable.5 Martha Nussbaum captures something akin to this distinction between intrinsic social needs and the broader set of needs to which social duties may respond by separating nonhuman animals' basic entitlement to affiliation into two parts. According to Nussbaum's adaptation of her list of central human capabilities, nonhuman animals are entitled: to engage in characteristic forms of bonding and interrelationship. They are also entitled to relations with humans, where humans enter the picture, that are rewarding and reciprocal, rather than tyrannical. At the same time, they are entitled to live in a world public culture that respects them and treats them as dignified beings. (Nussbaum 316) Nussbaum here imagines this 'world public culture' in formal terms ('world policies that grant them political rights and the legal status of dignified beings'; 316), yet she follows this with another principle: If human beings are entitled to 'be able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature,' so too are other animals, in relation to species not their own, including the human species, and the rest of the natural world. (Nussbaum 316-317) A human duty to socialise with domesticated animals offers one way of elaborating how these entitlements fit together, and how we might also contribute to a 'world public culture' of regard for nonhuman animals at the scale of personal relationships and local institutions. As J. S. Reinders observes, the 'politics of inclusion' has advanced an effective mandate for bringing people with intellectual disabilities into public spaces, providing critical opportunities for their agency and social visibility; yet this is not all that a politics of inclusion can or should mean. Reinders suggests: DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 97 If community living is a human experience, we should expect that people with disabilities want to be included in the lives of others ... not only as bearers of institutional roles, but as friends and companions who have chosen them to be part of their lives. (Reinders 3, emphasis in original) Reinders grounds this point in a claim about the nature of humans as the sort of beings who 'long to be welcome and accepted by others' (3) whereas, as I have acknowledged, the fulfilment of this social longing in other species may be completely separable from friendships with humans, though many domesticated animals surely express this want too. However, Reinders is also making a point here about the sort of regard embodied by these social others towards people with intellectual disabilities in building 'a moral culture in which they can flourish' (4); here, the challenge in supporting those with intellectual disabilities is 'not so much what we can do for them, but whether or not we want to be with them' (5). Provided it is compatible with intrinsic rights to social fulfilment and psychological wellbeing, I suggest that to endorse a vision of just interspecies community – community living as a more-than-human experience – is to endorse a comparable politics of inclusion for domesticated animals that entails proactive forms of both institutional and personal inclusion. This appeal to the case of humans with intellectual disabilities suggests a second qualification of the duty to socialise with domesticated animals: just as this duty is constrained by the social and psychological needs of nonhuman animals, so too it must be sensitive to the diverse needs of humans with, for instance, different social capacities, animal phobias, or traumatic experiences related to animals. For some people, there may be no reasonable moral demand to socialise with nonhuman animals at all, while for others the experience may only be mutually constructive in certain circumstances and with special assistance. In these latter cases, the duty suggests a new framing for the mutual goods expected of an 'animal-assisted activity' paradigm. A third question about the scope of the duty arises when considering how it should accommodate the freedoms of domesticated animals to pursue their own lives, including opportunities to 'completely opt out of shared human-animal society' (Donaldson and Kymlicka, Zoopolis 121). This prospect will always stand in some tension to positive obligations DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 98 of assistance and inclusion, but in a given institutional context, an approach that emphasises the importance of friendships might in fact lend greater consideration to arrangements that prioritise mobility and flexibility over protection and oversight in animals' day-to-day lives (more on which in the next section). After all, we can only know that someone wants to be our friend if they have ample opportunities for recreation and socialising that do not involve us. Qualified in these ways, and responding to a complex of harms that it cannot by itself overcome, the duty to socialise with domesticated animals is an imperfect duty. As in intrahuman versions of the duty, its demandingness cannot easily be specified in the abstract, and will depend on all parties' social capacities, existing relationships, and resources. In the next section, I approach the practical implications of the duty less from the perspective of individual agents and more from the complementary perspective of institutions, suggesting that farmed animal sanctuaries could conceive of their mission in part as assisting people in feasibly exercising this duty. 3. Farmed Animal Sanctuaries: Frontiers of Justice, Frontiers of Friendship Where can we go to socialise with farmed animals? It should be a place where the reasonably minimal generative conditions of friendship are present: an environment where (to make some non-exhaustive suggestions) both parties are comfortable, secure in their basic needs, and free to initiate and exit interactions with one another; where mutual interests and purposes can be explored over time; and where a 'presumption of authority' (Goering 403) is not manifest for either party. This already rules out the vast majority of the domestic populations of cows, pigs, chickens, and other species who are sequestered in intensive animal agriculture operations which work hard to limit even perfunctory access to, and oversight of, their operations. This spatial and legal segregation of farmed animals is buttressed by a profound cultural denigration of interspecies sociality, the companion-animal paradigm notwithstanding. To illustrate just one strand of this culture of human supremacy, the neglect of animal friendships even in the study of animal behaviour is perhaps unsurprising, but nonetheless striking: only in 2011 did ethologist Anne Dagg write the first book-length treatment of animal friendships.6 DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 99 Detailing a wide array of intraand inter-species amity, she reflects: 'All zoologists in the field keep copious notes and records of what animals are doing each day, but these have tended toward documentation of aggression and reproduction,' even though these activities are rare relative to everyday practices of non-sexual intimacy and companionship (Dagg 4). Not so long ago, 'friendship' was 'the F-word' of primatology (Silk 421); and, as Frans de Waal observes of his own experience in studying chimpanzees, this conceptual policing looks less like scientific parsimony and more like the expression of an anthropocentric bias in its own right: Whereas terms related to aggression, violence, and competition never posed the slightest problem, I was supposed to switch to dehumanized language as soon as the affectionate aftermath of a fight was the issue. A reconciliation sealed with a kiss became a 'postconflict interaction involving mouth-to-mouth contact.' (de Waal 18) Without venturing any specific ethological claims in response, the point here is that the motif of 'animal passions' continues strongly to connote spectacles of mating and aggression of the sort favoured by animal documentaries, and not the moments of easy-going curiosity and affection that also suffuse animal life, and make the prospect of interspecies friendships possible. Yet the concept of a duty to socialise with farmed animals comes at what is, in other respects, a propitious moment. As sanctuaries and rescue operations for farmed animals are consolidating and defining their own missions in conversation with each other and with the broader animal advocacy movement, scholars are beginning to examine sanctuaries as ethical and political spaces, at the frontiers of interspecies justice (for example, Abrell, Saving Animals, 'Lively Sanctuaries'; Donaldson and Kymlicka, 'Farmed Animal Sanctuaries'; Emmerman, 'Sanctuary, Not Remedy'). Sanctuaries are also frontiers of interspecies friendship; and, taken together, these dimensions form an opportunity to fulfil the duty I have outlined. Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that farmed animal sanctuaries should re-evaluate their operative model of care, with important consequences both for the internal organisation of sanctuaries and for the movement's self-conception as a set of institutions negotiating a public presence. They term the prevailing model, as reflected in the stated commitments of various sanctuaries, the 'refuge + advocacy model' ('Farmed Animal Sanctuaries' 51-52). In its place, DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 100 they suggest an intentional community model: a vision of sanctuaries as transitional and transformative experiments in interspecies justice. Drawing critical lessons from 'total institutions' for human care such as asylums and orphanages, the intentional community approach challenges some established sanctuary procedures for giving care, making decisions, and negotiating risks.7 Donaldson and Kymlicka stress the need to view freedoms of movement, association, and labour as opportunities for animal residents to 'explore different possible lives' (57) in ways that may confound even the best-intentioned human assumptions. One distinct sort of moral experience afforded by socialising with diverse others is a window into their other relationships: how they navigate their friendships, communities, and family lives. In sanctuaries, the results can upend our expectations of what is possible, not only in terms of rescue and rehabilitation, but in new forms of social life: 'indeed the evidence suggests that when opportunities for wider cross-species friendships exist, they are often seized upon' (Donaldson and Kymlicka, 'Farmed Animal Sanctuaries' 57). The intentional community model also suggests a changed approach to sanctuary visitors: rather than prioritising a single sanctuary visit as an 'educational moment' aimed at individual transformation oriented around veganism and participation in advocacy (52-53), sanctuaries could adopt a long-term residency program with diverse participants, while fostering partnerships with the local community (68). Darren Chang offers a different response to the limitations of the existing sanctuary model, calling into question the ability of Donaldson and Kymlicka's intentional community model to challenge the legal, spatial, and social partitions of 'speciesist segregation'. Considering models of integration and voluntary separation advanced in the context of human struggles for justice, Chang instead proposes to disrupt segregation by promoting a third strategy of 'infiltration': [I]nfiltration involves adopting farmed animals into urban homes, finding creative ways to ensure they can flourish within relatively confined and 'unnatural' spaces, and work towards enabling their microand macro-agency within urban areas. So long as these urban farmed animals are able to sustain their clandestine presence from authorities, they can subversively form relationships with other humans and animals in their environment, as family, friends, neighbours, and so on. (Chang 14-15) DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 101 The risks to the animals involved – namely, discovery and capture by the authorities – would seem to rise in proportion to the main benefit of increased exposure to communities disinclined to visit sanctuaries. Finding creative ways to encourage more diverse participation in farmed animal sanctuaries, then, seems to be the most promising way to promote the duty to socialise with farmed animals. But in circumstances where legal risks and relative opportunities for animal flourishing could be managed in concert with community support and with the cooperation of sanctuaries, as Chang envisions, infiltration strategies could form a complementary exercise of the duty to socialise with farmed animals. Correspondingly, the duty that I have sketched here offers a distinct line of normative support to the proposals of both Donaldson and Kymlicka ('Farmed Animal Sanctuaries') and Chang, both of which call for more involved forms of interspecies relationship-building as a strategic priority for the sanctuary movement. While I have argued that recognising and pursuing such a duty for ourselves and for others widens the framework for moral leverage, this does not, of course, overcome or resolve the limitations of moral psychology identified by Townley and Rollin. Some people do, in fact, presently enjoy relationships of mutual affection and intimacy with members of farmed animal species while consuming the products of other members of those species. On smaller farms, people may slaughter and consume the very animals with which they have these relationships. On the models of friendship which inform my argument, these latter relationships might be excluded as instances of genuine friendship. In contrast to conceptions of friendship that locate its moral meaning not just in particular obligations, but in the characteristic open-endedness and mutual freedoms of the relationship, the day-to-day operation of such farms enacts a radical power imbalance. Moreover, the farmer's standing commitment to terminate the relationship – indeed, all of the animal's relationships – at an expedient moment in order to render the animal into a commodity sunders the prospects of mutual change in response to one another. To what extent can we be said to be immersed in and responsive to another self when we know exactly where and how they will end up in life – and at our doing? However understood, such relationships point nonetheless to propensities for compartmentalisation and rationalisation that are undeniable (but not immutable) features of human moral psychology. DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 102 The successful pursuit of this duty in a sanctuary setting will depend, in part, on how such projects are integrated with the running of the sanctuary, and with other education and outreach initiatives. Whether, and to what extent, this changes hearts and minds will depend on the design of the program in accordance with demographic and cultural contingencies, all of which should be open to empirical substantiation. As Donaldson and Kymlicka aver, '[u]ntil such research is available, claims regarding the impact of sanctuaries, and of the visitor experience, remain speculative' ('Farmed Animal Sanctuaries' 53). Programs encouraging diverse friendships with farmed animals would therefore best be conducted in conjunction with research on the moral psychology of sanctuary experiences, an area that I hope will begin to emerge as the interdisciplinary scholarly interest in sanctuaries as frontiers of human-animal relations grows. The future of interspecies amity will also depend on how sanctuaries build relationships of solidarity with other human communities and social justice issues. Sanctuaries are, after all, also sites where human friendships grow; and the intersectional mission of communities such as VINE Sanctuary (vine.bravebirds.org/connections/) indicates the potential of viewing duties to overcome multiple forms of social segregation as an integrated project. Farmed animal sanctuaries can pursue exchange programs, social and fundraising events, and collective labour drives in conjunction with other community organisations and social movements, renewing bonds of philia with the larger polity as an integral part of their experiments in just interspecies community. Notes 1Tony Milligan argues that a renewed emphasis on positive duties is a defining characteristic of the political turn, yielding a thicker (albeit contested) conception of equality in the light of other liberal commitments, 'a context in which justice is done to connections of a more communitarian (or 'fraternal') sort' ('The Political Turn' 11). Cochrane, Garner, & O'Sullivan DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 103 demur, pointing on the one hand to prior elaborations of positive duties within animal ethics, and on the other to works within the political turn focused on negative rights (4-6). Here, it suffices to note that the turn has not yet offered much analysis of the 'more communitarian' themes suggested by the concepts of friendship or fraternity, and this paper offers one step towards that project. 2 An exchange between Fröding and Peterson ('Animal Ethics', 'Animals and Friendship') and Rowlands ('Friendship and Animals', 'Friendship and Animals, Again') on the ethics of interspecies friendships touches on the point I am considering here. Rowlands argues that Fröding and Peterson's conclusion – that it is morally worse for a farmer to slaughter a cow than it is to hunt a wild animal, because the slaughter violates the terms of an Aristotelian friendship of mutual advantage that does not exist between hunter and prey – can only be generalised if farmers are in fact always or usually friends with the animals they own, or if it can be shown that they ought to be friends, both of which Rowlands denies ('Friendship and Animals, Again' 193). Of this second approach, Rowlands remarks: 'Friendship is not the sort of relationship into which one can be obliged to enter, no matter how worthy the other in question. It is a matter of decision, not obligation.' ('Friendship and Animals' 73) I agree with Rowlands that an obligation to be friends with someone is a self-defeating proposition, and with his general tack in defending a more involved conception of human–nonhuman friendships and the virtues therein which, though it does not hew to Aristotle's categories, involves both pleasure and admiration as well. However, I hope to show in what follows that the conditions under which we make such decisions about friendship can involve matters of justice, and that we can be obliged to make efforts to change these conditions without jeopardising the constitutive freedoms of friendship. 3 It is possible to pose the separate question of whether people spend too much (or too little) time and effort on partial relationships versus impersonal moral activity as a whole; but even if one is committed to the view that the overall levels of partiality are too high and should be reduced, a duty to socialise more equitably would still bear upon the resulting distribution (Collins 918). 4 By 'wild animals', I mean free-roaming animals whose habitats do not generally overlap with human settlements and who do not rely upon human infrastructure or intervention for their DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 104 subsistence. By 'liminal animals', I mean those free-roaming animals who carry out their lives amidst human populations, finding opportunities for food, shelter, and sometimes even company alongside humans, but who do not generally depend on particular human provisions or relationships to meet their needs. 5 I cannot pursue here the question of how else we might cultivate moral regard for necessarily distant and unfamiliar species, but remedial projects of education and cultural representation for particular species – proposals more familiar to conservation biology than animal ethics – offer one avenue for further investigation. 6 This sort of observation is not without precedent. In his corrective to a late nineteenth century Darwinian social imagination that intoned the apparent law of 'mutual struggle' between individuals as the motor of (social and biological) evolution, Kropotkin illustrated the adaptive pervasiveness of relations of mutual aid and support amongst humans and numerous other animal species: 'Sociability...only now begins to receive due attention from the zoologists.' While Kropotkin grounded this sociability in a prototypical sense of solidarity and justice – 'a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy' that binds both human and nonhuman communities together – he readily acknowledged forms of love, friendship, and compassion in birds and mammals on a continuum with their human counterparts. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the connection to Kropotkin's work on mutual aid. 7 Elan Abrell ('Lively Sanctuaries') offers a biopolitical reading of these same institutional dilemmas of care, suggesting that sanctuaries might press beyond the conflicts and paradoxes of competing schemes of pastoral governance by attending to the political liveliness of sanctuaries as 'zones of exception' in which multispecies negotiations are already in progress (149). DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 105 Works Cited Abrell, Elan L. 'Lively Sanctuaries: A Shabbat of Animal Sacer.' Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities, edited by Irus Braverman, Routledge, 2016, pp. 135-154. ---. Saving Animals: Everyday Practices of Care and Rescue in the US Animal Sanctuary Movement. 2016. City University of New York, PhD dissertation. Chang, Darren. 'Resisting Speciesist Segregation: Integration, Separation, and Infiltration with Farmed Animals.' 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Pets and People: The Ethics of Our Relationships with Companion Animals, edited by Christine Overall, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 21-34. DUTIES TO SOCIALISE WITH DOMESTICATED ANIMALS 108 Acknowledgements This paper began life as part of my work on a model of interspecies civic friendship, presented at a panel on 'The Political Turn in Animal Rights' at the 2013 MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory, held by the University of Manchester. The questions and comments I received there have benefited this work; I am developing my argument for interspecies civic friendship in a complementary paper. I thank Sue Donaldson for bringing J. S. Reinders' work on the politics of inclusion to my attention, and two anonymous reviewers for comments that substantially improved the paper.