Politically Engaged Wild Animals

My dissertation is called Politically Engaged Wild Animals; in it, I suggest that wild animals live in a politicized world, which gives their behaviour unintended political meanings—if humans will listen appropriately. To arrive at this conclusion, I start with Dinesh Wadiwel's (2015) biopower critique according to which any proposals to conserve wilderness or protect wild animals, which relies on human representatives, suffer from a particular sort of risk, namely that of transforming the current overt domination into a neoliberal form of continued human supremacy. I find this critique has traction against proposals like Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's (2011) suggestion of Wild Animal Sovereignty. However, it has less traction against Anishinaabe (Indigenous) legal traditions, which prioritize respect for wild animals and the ecosystems we share with them. In these legal systems, wild animals are not under the jurisdiction of human societies; they are in independent communities that are part of a shared interspecies world. Thinking of wild animal communities as independently entitled to share the land, water, and air with humans can highlight the interspecies political meanings of conflict between human society and wild animal communities. I suggest we can listen to the behaviour patterns of wild animal communities to reveal unintended political meaning (e.g. protesting human activity or negotiating boundaries with neighbouring groups). Further, researchers are already developing ways to better communicate with wild animals so we all might safely share contested spaces. The moral-political implications of these research projects are typically left in anthropocentric terms. In my view we should reframe this communication as a way of respecting the relationships we already have with wild animal communities. If we can communicate with them, negotiating mutually beneficial boundaries, then we ought to take this communication as a form of political participation. Wild animal communities are speaking for themselves, on land they share with humans, in a politicized world.