Abstract
AbstractConservation 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.
Highlights
We first outline the history of horses’ introduction to Australia, horses’ impact on ecological communities, and Kosciuszko National Park (KNP)’s legal foundation. This is followed by a deconstruction, based on our theoretical framework, of: the epistemic violence of categorizing horses as pests; the anthropocentric nature of recent legislation passed in New South Wales (NSW)’s parliament; the NSW government’s ethics— a recent report that was instrumental for recommending the killing of “feral” horses in KNP—which we argue, in light of Dinesh Wadiwel’s work, has been constructed from a position of human sovereignty over animals; and the argument that killing animals is justifiable when they suffer from starvation and dehydration
We close our analysis by directing a plea primarily to the government of NSW not to kill any horses and not to break any communities of horses in KNP
Traditional animal ethics and animal rights literature has argued that animals should be valued insofar as humans and animals are the same in some respects that are ethically relevant. This literature tends to be associated with the writings of Peter Singer and Tom Regan (Regan 2004; Singer 2009). These approaches stem from different philosophical lineages, they tend to homogenize what is real and unique about animals, and have the enlightened, able human as the paradigmatic ideal of what is worthy of moral consideration (Gruen 2015, 8–26)
Summary
The Western field of conservation was developed in response to perturbations in nature perceived as harmful to biological diversity and human interests (Soulé 1985; Primack and Sher 2016). Environmental ethicists have developed the notion of ecocentrism that considers nature’s intrinsic value (Leopold 1949, 237; Batavia and Nelson 2017), especially Baird Callicott’s interpretation of Aldo Leopold’s statement: “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” [Leopold 1949, 224–25; see Callicott 1980, 320]); 2. This implies that animals are regarded as worthy of moral consideration only by virtue of their ecological relationships and are, in themselves, of secondary concern to wholes (24); 3. organisms with no historical in situ ecological relationships such as those considered nonnative, overabundant, “feral,” and “domestic” are treated as inherently harmful to the native and “historical” biotic community, and of little or no value (123–26);2 4. in practice, conservationists tend to call for urgently mitigating either ecological harm or extinctions, which leads many to circumvent careful moral reasoning out of concerns that nonecocentric axiologies will hinder the entire conservation endeavor (Lynn et al 2020; Wallach et al 2020); 5. ecocentrism’s logic operates within the logic of human sovereignty over animals, which enables establishing value hierarchies such as native–feral and whole–individuals. 6. we understand interventions in a broad sense, including indirect interventions caused by phenomena such as climate change.
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