Politics with Animals: Supporting their Struggle
Paola Cavalieri (Independent Researcher)
The passport is the noblest part of a human being… One might say that a person is merely the mechanical holder of a passport.
Bertolt Brecht
The project of extending citizenship with its prerogatives to non-human animals is a lesson in universality and consistency in a world mostly dominated by inequality and exploitation. We have learnt that in the intra-human case, the lack, or better, the deprivation of citizenship – whatever its defects and the necessity of corrections –means disaster, as Hannah Arendt has argued with reference to the period when, in the first half of the twentieth century, millions of people were denaturalised, and no institution remained to claim their rights (Arendt 1980). Even now, there are at least four and a half million stateless people worldwide (Stateless people | UNHCR) who are denied the Arendtian “right to have rights,” a right linked to membership in some kind of political community.
In this light, the proposal of extending citizenship and the right to politics to non-human beings is a far-reaching step, which, by directly challenging speciesism as the worst form of discrimination, as Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka stress, necessarily challenges also other exclusions associated with ideas of citizenship that appeal to a biased, selective attribution of political qualification.
Politics: Animals that we are
For in every city these two diverse humours are found, which arises from this: that the people desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and oppress the people.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Is politics the prerogative, and the flagship, of the human species? Is the aspiration to, and the capacity for, the resolution of disagreements within a society through peaceful cooperation a mark of human history?
As Donaldson and Kymlicka amply illustrate, and as it is reasonable to imagine in a post-Darwinian world, social beings from different species engage in politics, in the sense of finding ways to navigate their common life. And probably, for a hundred thousand years, small groups of human primates – and, going back and back in time, innumerable wandering hominid micro-communities – practised emplaced and embodied ways of doing politics similar to those of the other social animals. After the Neolithic Revolution, however, everything changed. For our species generated great societies which, far from fostering peaceful coexistence, were characterised by rigid hierarchies, gross social and sexual inequality, despotism, complex and lethal forms of warfare, and the enslaving of previously free-living nonhumans (Diamond 1987). If, following Alain Badiou, one sees capitalism as merely the ultimate phase of the restrictions that the Neolithic form of society imposed on human life (Badiou 2018), the few times and places in which some degree of decent cooperation has been achieved are certainly not enough to prove the political superiority of the human species. And yet… And yet, the dialectic of human culture can not only keep nurturing the existing seeds of fairer alternatives to the dominant reality through the efforts of social justice movements and of the feminist currents from which Maneesha Deckha draws inspiration, but can also move beyond the present to envisage radical challenges to what exists. Donaldson and Kymlicka’s idea of a trans-species Agora is one of these challenges. Is such an idea a utopia in the exemplary sense? In one respect, yes, for it offers a powerful vision of a more just society to come– and we know that utopias play an important role in history, advancing regulative ideas that can guide civil progress. It is, however, also a utopia in the problematic sense that the existing conditions are a long way even from its necessary prerequisite, that is, the extension of basic equality to animals. When Hannah Arendt, in the human case, demands to redress the fate of beings who, lacking recognition from existing political communities, and being within society without being part of society, find themselves liable to be coerced or killed en masse, what she has in mind are individuals who have been deprived of communal relations they once had, and have become vulnerable to the damages they could before avoid. Animals in our societies are not the subject-object of communal relations and could never avoid the damage we inflict on them.
Politics: Animals as they live (and die)
Wingless, featherless, blind, and brain-damaged, entrapped in the hell of humanity, do they recall their wholeness in the phantom limbic soul of themselves? When hens in a battery cage fall asleep, perchance to dream, how do they feel when they wake up?
Karen Davis
No doubts that nonhumans naturally engage in many forms of autonomous politics. Donaldson and Kymlicka assume that “domestication […] generates an interspecies version of […] social and psychological preconditions of politics. Domestication is only possible where animals are able to engage in social learning and trust with humans, and domestication in many cases has operated over time to strengthen these capacities for interspecies sociability that underpin interspecies politics.” But how can this generally be the case in a world in which industrial agribusiness includes such facilities as China’s 26-storey pig tower programmed to slaughter one million pigs a year(The Guardian 2022)? The truth is that industrial farms mark the apogee of that mode of enframing in which living organisms are turned into raw material to be unrestrictedly tampered with. How can most existing intersections between human and nonhuman lives be defined as relations, if relations are interpreted as interactions between conscious, responsive beings? Where is the place for Deckha’s nuanced attention to animal family life, or what can be the destabilizing power of the reality of sanctuaries for formerly farmed nonhumans that Donaldson and Kymlicka single out as models in the face of the fact that, while the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms has been described as one of the worst crimes in history (Harari 2015), the social opposition to it is not able to reverse the situation, and is not merely silenced but often actively repressed by the dominant system?
Of course, this is no excuse for a social movement to give up the struggle for change, as the diversity of the present panoply of initiatives and schemes indeed shows. It seems, however, undeniable that neither the subjective nor the objective conditions for an interspecies Agora are currently in place. Is doing politics with animals then doomed to failure, or at least relegated to an all too distant future? Not necessarily.
A different view of politics?
… this political question: where and how do animals put up resistance, and where and how have they done so? And subsequently, where have humans and animals been comrades-in-arms?
Fahim Amir
In an article dating back to the dawn of the revolutionary ethical reappraisal of the status of nonhuman beings, Steve Sapontzis wrote: “It is striking that when animals occasionally turn the tables and prey on us, e.g., shark and bear attacks, we usually brand such animals “renegades,” “monsters,” or even “murderers” and pursue them with unbridled vengeance” (Sapontzis 2011).
Indeed, when possible, where possible, animals resist. Can’t we say in such cases that they autonomously enact within our society a particular form of politics – what Jacques Rancière (2000) called politics as dissensus? Emphasising the moment of conflict rather than that of accord, politics as dissensus can be seen as an activity of individuals who bring forth a wrong that has been done to them and refuse to recognise the existing order of things. No wonder that the defenders of the status quo condemn those nonhumans who, through their mutiny, interrupt the taken-for-granted social order.
Animal defiance can take many forms. If most often “life in captivity can lead to hopelessness,” subjugation can, and does, elicit forms of opposition (Colling 2020). Sometimes it is refusal – it is the painful attempt by the newly confined cows to retain their milk for their calves, or the rebellion of horses overworked in the mines. Sometimes it is escape – the flight from the death row of the wandering Ann Arbor Sheep and of the young bull Frank. And sometimes it is resilience, as in the case of the tribe of pigeons, stubbornly refusing to get expelled from the cities. There are also acts of revenge, as when trapped orcas pin their instructors to the bottom of the tank until they die, or when exasperated elephants rampage through the villages of the forest settlers. And then there is the bull Ratón (“el toro asesino”!) who, forced for years to perform at Valencian fiestas, leaves behind a legacy of fatal gorings and a trail of wounded people.
Heterogeneous political acts cannot immediately affect the power of the dominant. But, as shown by the political explosion of the 1960’s, molecular acts of rupture may, for a while, expose the face of oppression, and, arousing the conscience of the neutrals, can draw new lifeblood into the struggle.
Thus, the question of politics with animals may be pushed upstream to a preliminary level which, since access to equality must not be presupposed, but is instead what is at stake, is less out of reach. If political animals are those who resist oppression, doing politics with animals can take the form of supporting their struggles. This involves defending the individuals – saving the fugitives from conviction, shielding the rebels from punishment, supporting the fight for life of the stigmatised. The relevant political tools are currently at work: sanctuaries not only as the small islands of an archipelago of comfort and interspecific community but also as loci of refusal of that which is (Weisberg 2025), social campaigns coupled with a juridical mobilization making the legal institutions somewhat become the “patients” of activist agency (Bevilaqua 2015), or spontaneous interspecies alliances like those between pigeons and their intrepid elderly feeders (Amir 2026).
But doing politics with animals also should, and does, involve the intellectual production and diffusion of an oppositional discourse which might justify and defend nonhuman resistance by challenging the paradigm of human supremacy (Kymlicka 2018; Cavalieri 2007). This can not only amplify the resonance of rebel acts, but can also confer the status of public theory to a contrasting interpretation of animal gestures that are routinely distorted and defused by constant reinstatements of the current doxa.
What all this amounts to is a kind of meaningful political praxis which is already underway, and which needs to be enhanced in view of any potential future achievement. Resistance as a practice challenging power, though it has rarely demolished the overall oppressive fabric, can still be worthwhile insofar as it gets in the way of the blind operation of the machine, disrupting its smooth working.