Sovereignty for Animals?

Chapter 5 considers whether, within the proposed sentientist global political order, some groups of wild animals ought to be granted their own political communities. Indeed, Donaldson and Kymlicka have claimed that wild animals ought to be recognized as having sovereignty over their territories. This chapter evaluates this claim and concludes that the best way of protecting the basic rights of wild animals is not through granting them sovereignty, but through recognizing them as equal members of mixed human–animal communities. It then addresses a potential problem with regarding wild animals as equal members of our political communities: that it leads to our having positive duties of assistance to wild animals, requiring us to ‘police nature’. The chapter argues that while we do in fact have positive duties of assistance to wild animals, these do not require or permit immediate massive interventions by humans into nature.

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