Conservation after Sovereignty
Deconstructing Australian Policies against Horses with a Plea and Proposal
Originally published in Cambridge University Press
by Dr. Pablo Castelló and Dr. Francisco J. Santiago-Ávila
Dr. Francisco Santiago-Ávila is a Fellow and board member of PAN Works, as well as the Science & Ethics Manager at Project Coyote. Fran researches and practices the application of nature ethics to our mixed-community of people, animals and nature, with a focus on the promotion of worldviews rooted in non-anthropocentrism, an ethic of care, and justice. Dr. Pablo Costelló is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Animal Ethics in the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University. Pablo’s research focuses on his theory of “zoodemocracy” — which centers political agency in more-than-human animals. In drawing on multidisciplinary theories, he seeks to leverage mechanisms by which to concretize and systematize animals’ legal and moral rights in accordance with their claims to wellbeing.
Posted here is the abstract, followed by a series of core quotations, from their paper; the full article can be found here.
Abstract
Conservation scholarship and policies are concerned with the viability of idealized ecological communities constructed using human metrics. We argue that the discipline of conservation assumes an epistemology and ethics of human sovereignty/dominion over animals that leads to violent actions against animals. We substantiate our argument by deconstructing a case study. In the context of recent bushfires in Australia, we examine recent legislation passed by the parliament of New South Wales (NSW), policy documents, and academic articles by conservationists that support breaking communities of horses and/or killing 4,000 horses in Kosciuszko National Park (KNP), NSW. Theoretically framing our deconstruction against human sovereignty over animals and anthropocentrism, we affirm an intersectional, ecofeminist approach that values animals as relational and vulnerable agents. We uncover first the epistemic violence of categorizing horses as “pests,” and the anthropocentric nature of recently passed legislation in NSW. We analyze next the deficient ethics of NSW’s government, and the argument that killing animals is justifiable when they suffer from starvation and dehydration. We close with a realistic proposal that does not involve breaking horses’ communities and/or killing horses, and a plea to the government of NSW and conservationists not to harm any horses in KNP.
“The combination of discourses and practices changes regimes of truth and transforms reality (Foucault 2008). The reality of who horses are and how they live is discursively reduced to “pest” and “threatening process.” It is easier to kill and eradicate that which is a threat and a pest.”
“Ethico-politically speaking, we insist that it is paramount to reorient our position in relation to other earthlings so that humans become plain members of the earth. A position of nonsovereignty would entail that we do not have the self-proclaimed right to decide whether to break horses’ communities, friendships, or to kill animals and manage ecosystems according to human-centered views.”
“…given that the research undertaken until now has occurred within the anthropocentric paradigm of human sovereignty over animals, it seems necessary to undertake and encourage new research taking a position of nonsovereignty as the starting point. In fact, our proposal, or so we hope, might promote further technical research.”
Kim Hightower is the associate editor for PAN Works.
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