S1E1: Animal Rights with Will Kymlicka

Claudia talks to Will Kymlicka about the concept of Animal Rights and how it pertains to the law. They touch on what the relationship is between law and ethics and what this means for scholarship in ‘The Animal Turn’. This episode opens-up the first season of the podcast, focusing on Animals and the Law.

Guest: Will Kymlicka is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen’s University, where he has taught since 1998. He has published eight books and over 200 articles, which have been translated into 34 languages. His books include Contemporary Political Philosophy (1990; second edition 2002), Multicultural Citizenship (1995), Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (2007), and most recently Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (2011), co-authored with Sue Donaldson. He was awarded the 2019 Gold Medal from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

Host: Claudia Hirtenfelder is a PhD Candidate in Geography and Planning at Queen’s University and is currently undertaking her own research project that looks at the historical relationships between animals and cities. 

Featured readings: Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights written by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka; Animals and the Law by Lesli Bisgould; Social Membership: Animal Law Beyond the Property/Personhood Impasse by Will Kymlicka

Bed Music created by Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @con_sol_ ) 

Podcast Logo created by Jeremy John (Website)

Sponsored by Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics – A.P.P.L.E (

We have a range of book titles to give away. To be entered into the draw share your favourite episode of The Animal Turn via social media and tag us. Competition ends on the 31st of December. 

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• 17:35 (Cont.) S1E1: Animal Rights with Will Kymlicka

Transcript

Untitled - December 23, 2025

00:00:00 Will Kymlicka: We all grow up with the idea that there is some sort of effective protection of animals, and that we have something called animal protection law. It's it's just totally not true. Um, and it's important to figure out why it's not true.

00:00:19 Claudia Hirtenfelder: In this first episode, we speak about animal rights with Will Kymlicka, a decorated philosopher and Canada Research Chair in political philosophy department at Queen's University, where he has taught since nineteen ninety eight. Will has published over eight books and two hundred articles, and most pertinent for today's episode is his book Zoopolis A Political Theory of Animal Rights, which he co-authored with his partner Sue Donaldson.

00:00:48 Will Kymlicka: Thank you so much for having me. And it's really exciting.

00:00:51 Claudia Hirtenfelder: That, um, to have you as my first, um, speaker. We've known each other now for almost a year, actually, which is kind of great. As you know, the first season of The Animal Turn, we're going to be looking at law. Um, I'm not a lawyer in a very little about law, actually, except that it protects me. But, you know, a fair deal about law in particular about rights. But you're not a lawyer either, are you?

00:01:18 Will Kymlicka: No. So I'm a political philosopher. And political philosophy is largely about the state and how the state governs us. And the state primarily governs through law. So there's a pretty intimate connection between political philosophy and law. And much of what I do is about what kinds of laws, um, are, are desirable and legitimate, uh, for governing humans or animals.

00:01:53 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So law is not just, um, people standing in courtrooms and shouting, objection! It's it's more involved than than just what we see in popular media.

00:02:06 Will Kymlicka: Well, so law means legislation. Okay. So, uh, so I think, I guess you are thinking about litigation so that there are legal disputes and citizens every once in a while sue each other in court, and then you have legal cases that involve litigation. But, uh, and so that you do need to be a professional lawyer, uh, let's say, to be, to be, uh, an expert on litigation.

00:02:43 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Okay.

00:02:44 Will Kymlicka: But most but law but law, it concerns anything that is the subject of legislation. So, uh, the the state Legislates well, everything. So it legislates what kinds of identifications we need to have. It legislates what kind of credentials you need to be engaged in, what kinds of activities. It legislates, uh, permissible ways in which you and I can interact, permissible ways to engage in economic transactions. What kinds of marriages are valid or invalid? What kinds of property title is? I mean, every everything, every feature of social life takes place against a background of legislation which lays out what are the permissible ways for individuals to interact.

00:03:45 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So where would philosophy then fit in this realm of thinking about legislation? What would you, as a political philosopher, play in terms of Conversations about law.

00:03:54 Will Kymlicka: So there are really, um, at least two different routes, uh, from from political philosophy to law. So one is, I mean, in a way, the original question, perhaps in political philosophy in the West for two thousand years is why is there? Well. Why does the state have the right to govern us in the first place? So how is it possible that somebody or something can tell me? What I'm allowed to use, what I'm allowed to own? Um, so and more specifically, we might say, how do we distinguish legitimate governing through law from simply the brute exercise of power? So Saint Augustine asked, um, what's the difference between a state and a band of robbers? So you encounter a band of robbers on the road, and they hold you up at gunpoint and demand money. So we think we typically think that's totally illegitimate. But on the other hand, you have a state which puts up a toll booth and says demands you hand over money if you're going to proceed over a bridge. So how do we distinguish a legitimate state from a band of robbers? And that's so that's a question about the legitimacy of the state. What are the circumstances under which some this institution comes legitimately to govern us?

00:05:49 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So you use a philosopher would be considering those forms of legitimacy. Yeah. About what makes that power dynamic work.

00:05:56 Will Kymlicka: Exactly. And or what makes it legitimate work? Sounds a bit, uh, kind of utilitarian. So sometimes legitimate governments aren't very effective, and you can have very effective forms of states that are illegitimate. Okay. Right. So so the so the question is when is when is it legitimate for a state to claim the right to govern us, to claim the legitimate authority to set the rules for how we interact? And the usual answer to that question in the Western tradition is that a legitimate state can can legitimately govern us if it governs in our interests. So it's so this is what distinguishes the state from the band of robbers. The band of robbers is taking our money for its own purposes. A legitimate state is doing this for the good of the governed. And so so then the question is, how can you structure a state so that the laws that it passes are, in fact in the interest of those who are subject to the laws? How do you make the law responsive to the interests of the governed? And for two hundred years or so, we typically assume that that requires democracy, that democracy is the mechanism. So Augustine didn't think it required democracy. But today we think that a legitimate state. Most people think that a state, in order to be legitimate in its laws, must be responsive to the interests of the governed. And that's only going to happen if the if the state, if the government is in fact accountable to the people through some kind of democracy. So one of the things that I'm interested in. Is how do we how do we think about that in the context of animals? So I think we can ask the same question that Augustine asked. How do we distinguish the legitimate governing of animals from just exploitation or oppression? Uh, for tyranny. Right. So that's that's actually the kind of in, in the, in the in the tradition of political philosophy, this is the we distinguish legitimate governance from tyranny. That's that's for two thousand years. That's been kind of one of the foundational questions of political philosophy. How do you distinguish a legitimate state from tyranny?

00:08:12 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So that's broken up into a whole bunch of smaller components to try and see. Okay.

00:08:17 Will Kymlicka: And so so my view is looking around, I think the way in which we govern animals is just tyranny. So we have these mechanisms in place to ensure that the governing of humans is not tyranny. Sometimes those mechanisms work, sometimes they don't. But at least we have we have a theory. Political philosophy has a theory about how we ensure that when humans are governing humans, it's in the interests of the governed. Um, but we have no comparable story about how we ensure that when we are governing animals, we're governing in the interests of animals. Um, we don't even pretend to ensure that the way in which we govern animals is responsive to the interests of the animals themselves.

00:09:01 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Now, this takes us quite nicely, I think, into the theme of what today's episode is about is rights or animal rights. What does, um, I think in in you wrote you and and Sue together with a fantastic book Zoopolis. Um, and you've written a fair number of articles, so over two hundred articles. Will you blow my mind? Um, not all about animals, but also about multiculturalism. So you're fairly, you know, a great deal about rights, yet you spend a significant portion of the beginning of your book speaking about animal rights and then speaking about some of its failings or some of the some of the, I don't know, failings is the right word, but some of its shortfalls. Perhaps. Um, could you maybe give me a sense of what what what is animal rights? When I say animal rights, does that just mean that? Oh, I need to make sure that a cage is slightly bigger for the chicken or, um, it's it seems like two basic words, animal and rights. But I think it's far more complicated. So what does animal rights mean?

00:10:04 Will Kymlicka: Right. So in popular terminology, in popular debate, I think the term animal rights is used in a very, very broad way to refer to any proposal or reform that would improve the the treatment of animals. And so increasing cage size in public debate is often described as an animal rights reform. So. Um, but as a political philosopher, uh, I think that's an unhelpfully broad use of the term rights and that, uh, in fact, that whole idea that we could legitimately keep a chicken for its entire life inside a wire cage is only possible because we actually don't think that the animal has rights. So, um, so I in our own work, we. Think about rights in a narrower way, which is that, um, which is connected to the idea of inviolability. So there are certain the idea of the concept of rights is intended to capture the idea that there are certain things we simply must not do to others. So if you think about it in the human case, when you talk about human rights and we say, for example, that torture is a violation of human rights, what we mean is that it's intrinsically wrong to treat a human that way. And and that's true. Even if we thought that torturing someone might generate some useful result. Um, and the same is true about, uh, experimenting on people. So, you know, after World War two, uh, the international community decided that it was a violation of human rights to engage in the and to use human beings as medical subjects for experimentation the way the Nazis done. But the way, uh, many countries had done. Um, so. In many of those cases, the people engaged when they were using humans as experiments, just experimenting on humans. They thought they would get some useful knowledge from it. But to say that there's a human right not to be experimented on is to say it doesn't. Even if there would be some beneficial consequences, it's still an inherent violation of the way in which we should treat each other, to experiment on people, or to torture them, or to subject them to, uh, uh, you know, solitary confinement or violation of physical integrity, various kinds, you know. Uh, okay.

00:13:17 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So.

00:13:19 Will Kymlicka: So those are. So in the first instance, those are negative rights. And they, they are intended to, um, express the idea that other individuals. So and I believe this is true about animals as well as humans are not simply resources for us to use in order to achieve some collective outcome that we desire. They are owed some intrinsic respect, and that respect that they're owed sets limits on how we can treat them. So the idea of rights is intended to to draw those limits on how we can treat others. Um, so that's that's the core idea of rights. And that's what, um, we can call those intrinsic rights and we can have and as I say, I think humans have intrinsic human rights. I think animals have intrinsic animal rights. Um, these are primarily negative. And that's what that's one level, if you like, of rights. And it's in many ways the most important for both humans and animals is to have their intrinsic basic rights respected. But there's a second category of rights which, um, think about, which we call which soon, I call membership rights. And again, think about this in in the human case. So. Um. Every human being has their intrinsic human rights. But here in Canada, there is a second level of rights which are owed to Canadian citizens and which are not owed to all human beings simply because they're human beings. They are. They're tied to one's membership in Canada. So the right to vote, for example, is a membership, right? So when tourists come to Canada, they don't have the right to vote. They have they have their intrinsic human rights. So you think about a tourist who comes to Canada. We cannot experiment on them. We can't torture them. Can't throw them in solitary confinement. But. But they don't have a human right to vote in Canada just because they're visiting for for a month. So the right to vote is a right, not a human right. And I think that's true generally about the welfare state in Canada. Tourists don't. If a tourist needs a hip replacement, they don't have a right to to have a hip replacement here in Canada. Um, so in the public health.

00:15:58 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Yeah.

00:15:58 Will Kymlicka: So so we have um, so Canadians have membership rights. They have rights that are, that we owe to each other as members of a shared political community. Citizenship rights, if you like, rights that are tied to our citizenship status rather than the mere fact that we're human beings. And, uh, I think that these membership rights, um, if you think about what makes. I think that they are as important. If you think about about our lives as human beings. And you think about the kind of whether people are able to lead decent lives in our societies. It's often as much about the quality of their membership rights as their. So it's not protecting these fundamental intrinsic rights is really, really important. But but if that's all you have, if you don't have membership rights, if everywhere you moved around the face of the earth, all you had were your intrinsic human rights, and there was no place on earth that recognized you as a member with membership rights, you'd have a very difficult time.

00:17:15 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So an example of a membership right for for human would be the right to vote.

00:17:19 Will Kymlicka: The right to vote, but also the right to, to, to, to, to kind of full access to the welfare state, um, which includes things like higher education, job training. Um. yeah. So, so, um, a range of, of social rights.

00:17:37 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Does membership only extend as far as the states or when you speak about membership, you're also speaking about membership at the organizational level? Uh, well that's right. Sorry. Would those be rights?

00:17:49 Will Kymlicka: Uh, so, I mean, I don't I'm not, um, they could be organizational rights. Could be could be described as rights. I, I'm I'm as a political philosopher, I'm really I obsess about what the state does. Okay. Um, in part because the state claims the right to govern us, which I think that's a very specific sort of relationship and, and needs to be held accountable. Whenever someone claims the right to govern us, we can demand some justification. Um, and so. Uh, so as human beings, we have created a political order that that recognizes these two levels of rights, intrinsic human rights and membership rights. And I think we need I think people need both. So, um. In the animal case. Uh, so I think one of the things we need to think about in the animal case is do animals also need two levels of rights? And so. The the traditional focus of animal rights theory has been on the first level, trying to establish these very basic intrinsic rights of sentient animals not to be killed, not to be subject to experimentation. Um. Uh, these basic fundamental rights. So that's what the animal rights movement has has tried to establish that there should be these basic limits on our that we don't have the right to harm animals. And so we try to establish these limits on the harmful treatment of animals. Mhm. Um, but as I said in the human case that we wouldn't think that's sufficient. Um, so, uh, so Sue and I and Zoopolis are, are interested in the question of whether there aren't at least some circumstances where animals can also claim membership rights. Uh, in, in a, in a, in a society that they share with us so that we should think about society not as a human only, uh, phenomenon, but as an interspecies society, as an interspecies society. And it has human members and animal members and that and that the animal members of these shared societies should also have access to these membership rights.

00:20:31 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So how do you square something along the way? I mean, this obviously brings up some, I think, historical examples of the relationship between humans and humans. Right. Where there are potentially membership rights that are afforded to all humans and not afforded to all humans equally. Um, I mean, slavery is is a classic example. But then what also comes to mind? Uh, and I think slavery, again, provides a useful ways of having this conversation is that the rule to govern and animals are currently governed by ideas of property. So how can you be a member and property? Is there a way to square these two?

00:21:12 Will Kymlicka: Right. So, so in my view, absolutely not. So the first the first step towards um. Recognition of rights at either level. Either intrinsic negative rights or membership rights is to get animals out of the property box. So since Roman times, animals have been defined as property. It's not true about every society and every culture around the world, but in the West, since. Since the ancient Romans, uh, animals have been defined as property. And I, I think that that categorization of animals as property effectively makes it impossible to recognize them as the bearers of either intrinsic rights or membership rights. So, uh, in. So ultimately, I don't think there's any way. I mean, I think that's that's, uh. Yeah, we just absolutely need to get animals out of the need to change that categorization of them as property. I should note that there are some people. Alistair Cochrane, as one who have argued that property that we don't, that we can get recognition of animal rights without changing their property status, including membership rights, because he he endorses the idea that animals should be recognized as members of society with membership rights. Um, we don't he thinks we don't have to abolish the property status because he thinks that property in the law is essentially whatever society says it is, that there is no kind of necessary and sufficient content to the idea of property, and that it would be perfectly conceptually possible for a society to say that animals are both property and yet also rights holders, um, and or, and similarly, that society could say that I own my dog. So that's an ownership relationship. And yet also say that that what ownership entails is that I have all sorts of responsibilities and no real rights over. So. So you can define property in such a way that it's more about assigning responsibilities and assigning rights to property.

00:23:45 Claudia Hirtenfelder: You can't destroy someone else's property, for example. Right. That's that's your.

00:23:49 Will Kymlicka: Right. Right. And and there are some forms of property which do come with kind of, if you like, custodial responsibility. So if I'm certain kind of like heritage properties or certain kinds of works of art, I don't have the right to. It's not just that other people don't have a right to destroy property. I don't have the right to destroy my property because it comes with certain, uh, guardianship responsibilities or custodial responsibilities. So. So there is a I mean, I think so, You know, Ulster is a philosopher and so he's interested in what's logically possible. And I think it is logically possible. We could imagine a universe in which a society, I mean, it's hard for me to imagine, but I think it is conceptually possible that you could, that you could have a legal system that recognizes animals as rights holders while still defining them as property. I think that's logically possible, but I do not think in our world, with our history, that there's any way to square that circle. Um, just as in the human case, there would be no way to say that we'd be able to create, you know, equal citizenship amongst whites and blacks and still have whites owning blacks. I mean, it's just not I mean.

00:25:02 Claudia Hirtenfelder: The power dynamics involved.

00:25:03 Will Kymlicka: Yeah.

00:25:04 Claudia Hirtenfelder: And having control over your decision making or agency, um.

00:25:07 Will Kymlicka: And, and I think that that whatever whatever Ulster says about the logic logical concepts involved. I think that we developed ideas of property. Primarily to express use relationships. We we developed the category of property because people wanted to be able to control the things that they use and they benefit from. And so, um, I think that property is sociologically, historically and sociologically an instrumental relationship. He thinks you can have kind of a non instrumentalized conception of property. But again, logically maybe, but historically, I don't think so.

00:25:52 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So if properties got too much baggage as a, as a concept and as a, as a legal idea, I guess to bring any sort of meaningful rights to animals, what then is the alternative? What's the alternative? What do we what are animals.

00:26:08 Will Kymlicka: Yeah. So in the in the law at the moment The only.

00:26:15 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Or who are animals.

00:26:16 Will Kymlicka: Yeah. Um, so this is this is this is really, I think the central question in, in animal law is what what's the right status, what's the right kind of legal status or legal subjectivity, if you like, for animals. And um, so almost everyone who, who cares about animals and who works on animal rights think that property is not working and, and can't really be fixed. And so we need some alternative. And in the again going back to the Roman tradition, the alternative to property is personhood. So according to the Romans there are there are two things in the world. There's property and there's persons. Yeah. So, uh. Persons have legal standing and legal rights. Uh, they're recognized as subjects of the law. Persons have subjectivity and as subjectivity. They have standing in the law. And they have. And they're eligible to possess rights. Uh, whereas anything that's property does not have legal standing and does not have is not the bearer of rights. That's that's the Roman tradition, uh, which we still we still live under. So many people argue that that the only alternative to property is personhood. So that we should we should be fighting for recognition of animals as persons. And that's, uh. And we have projects. We have legal campaigns to do precisely that. Um, the main ones that people may have heard about it, but the great great Ape project. Um, and the Nonhuman Rights Project, and they both are engaged in, um, either political advocacy or legal litigation to recognize specific, specific animals as persons. So both the Great Apes Project and the Nonhuman Rights Project has made the strategic decision that rather than fighting to get all animals or all sentient animals recognized as persons, that the right strategy is to pick a much smaller class, great apes or with Nonhuman Rights Project. They're also looking at elephants and perhaps cetaceans, whales, um, and saying that they should be recognized as persons, in part because they are, um, seen as the more advanced or higher animals, And that it's much more difficult.

00:29:11 Claudia Hirtenfelder: You can't see will was using quotation.

00:29:13 Will Kymlicka: Okay.

00:29:13 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Right.

00:29:16 Will Kymlicka: Yeah. Thanks. And the the idea is that if we if we focus on those animals, we can see more clearly how arbitrary it is to treat humans as persons. But great apes, their evolutionary ancestor as as property like the that on so many criteria, humans and great apes are so similar and we and you know, they evolved together and that the very similar nervous systems, very similar social lives, very similar emotional lives. The idea that one should be accorded personhood and the other treated as property just seems quite arbitrary.

00:29:57 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Have we already proven that the arbitrariness of this? I think just with human to human relations, like we were speaking earlier. I mean, doesn't that already show the arbitrary nature of the idea of humanity or human.

00:30:10 Will Kymlicka: Um.

00:30:11 Claudia Hirtenfelder: At least in a social sense.

00:30:13 Will Kymlicka: So. Um, there's a so this is, um, this is actually a this is really, in some ways, what the big debate is about. Um. Because. So we know that the way in which the idea of the human, uh. Quotation marks in quotation marks has been used historically that societies have historically have treated some human beings as subhuman, as deficient in humanity. So, uh, different racial groups, religious groups, ethnic groups, but That also. Uh, you know, men and women are able bodied and people with disabilities. We've we've created hierarchies of people who are seen as fully human and deficient in human. And and one way to look at that history is to say, well, this just shows that our our ideas about what it is to be human are kind of arbitrary. They're socially constructed. Um, so they so we shouldn't put much they can't really bear the moral weight that. Yeah, they're kind of arbitrary. But other people look at that history and say, okay, the only the only way to avoid those sorts of hierarchies amongst humans is to draw a very sharp boundary between humans and the rest of the animals. So some people look at. So we're both looking at the same history but drawing opposite conclusions. So one way, one way to look at that history is to say, look these ideas of who's human and who's not human. They're arbitrary. We should instead just acknowledge that that that there are continuities, that we're all vulnerable, embodied beings. And that's what the law should protect. That's my view. And that's what I think the view of many people in the animal rights community. But the humanists, if we can call them that, they look at the same history and they go, okay, it's clear we have this tendency to draw distinctions amongst humans about who's more human and who's less human. We need to stop that. The way to stop that is to render sacred the category of Homo sapiens. So we're going to draw. We're going to make species membership the basis of human rights, of personhood, of sanctity that we're going to we're going to we're going to make we're going to sanctify the human and say that that humans are radically distinct from, from animals.

00:33:12 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So it's another form of biological reductionism then.

00:33:15 Will Kymlicka: Yeah. But it's it's in part I mean, I think that many of the people who engage in this move, they actually know perfectly well that the biological facts do not support. They know that if you just looked at this scientifically and asked, you know, what? Really? What are the real differences between human beings and non-human animals that the answers are going to be, you know, complicated and murky, and it's going to be more continuities and discontinuities. So but their view is we need to politically commit ourselves to creating a radical distinction between humans and nonhuman animals that the only way. A so basically there there remedy for the historic problem about the fact that some human beings have dehumanized others is to sanctify the human.

00:34:13 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Is that not a pawn of. I think that in those practices of dehumanizing humans, it's a it's a strange sentence to say, but, um, you know, in making in those who had power, making those who did not have power feel less than human, kind of. I mean, the hierarchy you're speaking about, it glorifies the idea of human and puts it at the apex of a hierarchy, but that in those practices and processes, in those relationships, I think animal tropes were constantly used to achieve that. So I think in Reifying, I mean, I'm very much with you in the destabilizing, I think of the categories rather than the, you know, the cementing of them. But the fact that animal tropes were used throughout these processes, I think might be part of the reason why there's this need to call. But then coming coming back to speaking about rights, what do these kinds of, um, discursive moves, these quite rigid ideas about human animal, um, may mean materially, I think in terms of rights. Like what? What rights do animals actually possess? Are there any, um, you know, legally speaking, do animals have any rights, uh, as it currently stands now?

00:35:30 Will Kymlicka: Well, so not in Canada, um.

00:35:32 Claudia Hirtenfelder: At all.

00:35:33 Will Kymlicka: No no, no, there's no, no, no animal rights in Canada. So we we the so again, part of it depends on what you what what we mean by rights. So again in this in this very broad public in the sense that it's used in the public, um, certain kinds of animal welfare Regulations, um, would count as an animal rights measure, but there are, in fact no, um, I mean, I would say we're missing animal rights in two. In two. There are two different ways of showing that you don't have animal rights. One is that there are no, uh, principled limits on the extent to which animals can be harmed for human benefit. So, um, there is no form of of harming or killing animals that is prohibited. Um, even, you know, so if humans think they have some legitimate interest or benefit from harming or killing animals, there is no the law does not say, you know, you must never do X to an animal. Um, uh, because Because that would be a violation of of the animals, uh, integrity, integrity or whatever. Um, and so, you know, that can I mean, obviously there's there's there's, uh, any, any form of animal experimentation. There's no, there's no there are no forms of animal experimentation that are prohibited. Uh, animals. There's there's no form of confinement. That's that's, uh, kind of inherently prohibited. No, no, no, no animal has a right to basically no animal has a right to life in Canada. There's no there's no animal that we could point to and say that animal has the right not to be killed. There is no such animal.

00:37:33 Claudia Hirtenfelder: I have no inherent right to say my life is.

00:37:35 Will Kymlicka: Yeah.

00:37:36 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So?

00:37:37 Will Kymlicka: So let me just finish. So that's that's one. So there's no animal rights in the sense that there's no, in principle, limit on what a human could do to an animal. A related way of showing that there's no animal rights is that animals have no standing in court. So that's to say if anything. So there are so there are for example, cruelty laws. And so if, if someone was charged with um or someone if someone engaged in an action that we reasonably thought was a violation of the cruelty provisions, the obviously the animal cannot sue the the perpetrator. The animal cannot demand that that that be prosecuted. There's um, I mean, this is actually a, a problem that even when we know that there are humans who are violating existing laws. There is no way because animals don't have stand because their property, they don't have standing in the law. Therefore they have no way of insisting that the law be enforced. So there are actually cases about this in Quebec. Recently, um, some animal rights advocates tried to sue the provincial government for not enforcing the laws, but it didn't work because the, the, um, in these kinds of cases, the only people who are allowed to bring suit are those who are affected by the state's failure and the animal rights advocates. They're just third parties, right? So they're saying, well, it's the animals that are affected, but the animals don't have legal standing. So there's it's actually just this there's this. I mean, some jurisdictions have tried to change this, but in Canada we haven't that they're there is because animals are not to have no legal subjectivity. You could have a law, but there is no way for the animals to to actually insist that the law be enforced and so so as in Quebec. But it's true in other provinces, even if there is demonstrable evidence that the laws are being violated. Um, there's no there's no mechanism because because animals don't have standing. Um, yeah.

00:40:06 Claudia Hirtenfelder: But people who are who are listening might think, okay, so you've got an animal who has standing. Let's imagine a universe in which an animal does. How would they do that? How would they bring a case forward?

00:40:18 Will Kymlicka: Yeah. So so, you know, if you think about this in comparable human cases. So if you think about children, uh, or people with cognitive disabilities, we, we, they're persons and they have rights, they're not able themselves to go to court. They may not have the cognitive capacities to to understand what it would mean, but we appoint, um, guardians or trustees, uh, to, to act in the interests of the individual that they are a guardian for. And the courts. And we do that precisely to make sure that their legal subjectivity, their personhood, can be effectively pursued in the courts. Um, so it's a it's a fundamental right. Uh, one of our fundamental rights is that we have that if we are not able to, to, um, make legal claims on our own behalf, that the court appoint someone whose job it would be to represent us in court.

00:41:27 Claudia Hirtenfelder: That was it. There was it in. I'm going to get it wrong, but I think it was in Switzerland, where they've now got someone who's like the appointed no.

00:41:37 Will Kymlicka: Yes and no advocate. Uh, yeah. I mean.

00:41:41 Claudia Hirtenfelder: To bring forward like legal cases. Yeah.

00:41:43 Will Kymlicka: But so, so that's. yes and no. So they have they, they, they, they had um, an office of an animal advocate. Um, but it, it was uh, and, and it was intended to bring, uh, cases, but only for the enforcement of existing laws. So, so then everything depends on how good the laws are that are being enforced. And if the laws basically say that humans can harm animals whenever they whenever they have an interest in doing so, which is essentially what our laws say then, then all the animal advocate can do is really go after cases of just, um, sadistic mistreatment.

00:42:35 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So one of the things you propose, which I think is, um, in your claim to fame, yours and sues in the book, um, is the idea of citizenship rights. And I think to to just come full circle. So we've spoken now about negative rights, um, that, that no one, no one should be harmed. And, and you believe that that should be extended to, to animals as well. Uh, and then you spoke about membership rights. Um, but in your book, you spend quite a bit of time speaking about the idea of animals as citizens. Could you just briefly, maybe tell us how how these are all connected to one another and what it's got to do with animal rights.

00:43:12 Will Kymlicka: So. So if you think so, we have these two levels of the kind of basic intrinsic rights and the membership rights and. One way to think about it is. So the basic rights prohibit certain kinds of mistreatment, but they don't tell us anything Yet about how we should relate. To animals. Just as they don't really tell us anything about how we should relate to humans. Um, they they tell us a bunch of things we must not do. Thou shalt not do X or Y, but they don't tell us anything about how we should relate. What kinds of relationships we should build. Um, and. Some people, they look at the history of human animal relationships. And they conclude, not unreasonably, that humans are prone to instrumentalizing animals and to oppressing animals and exploiting them, instrumentalizing them. And. So. So they're deeply skeptical about the idea that there can be just. Relationships between humans and animals. And the conclusion they draw is that, uh, yeah. Whenever humans and animals become entangled, you can just get oppression. Instrumentalization. And so we need to disentangle humans and animals, and we disentangle them either by kind of physical segregation so that humans live here. Animals live there. Um, which, uh, so you have kind of areas of human urban settlement and then areas of wild animal habitat, but you try to keep them as far apart as possible. And, and in that world, uh, yeah. We respect animals basic rights by having nothing to do with them. So we respect the rights of these wild animals living on their own territory, but we have no relationship with them. Um, and that that model just doesn't work for domesticated animals. I think that can work for some, for some wild animals, and I think it should. And we should largely for, for for many types of wild animals. I think we should basically just leave them alone. And, and we best respect their rights by just having nothing to do with them and, uh, staying, staying away from them and vice versa. But with respect to domesticated animals, that's just not a viable picture. And so, uh, our our lives are entangled with domesticated animals. They've been bred to be dependent on us. Um, and so. I think if we if we want to think about just relationships with domesticated animals, it can't be on this model of let's sever relationships. Let's, uh. Uh. what what, uh, Acampora calls, uh, species apartheid. This this idea that we, we try to keep animals and humans as far apart as possible. In the case of of domesticated animals, we need to think about what it means to live together in proximity. Indeed, in kind of intimate proximity, uh, as members of a shared society. Um, and if that's the case, that that then then we need to think not just about respecting their negative rights. We need to think about what would what kinds of rights would be required for a society, uh, to be for these intimate, these close, proximate, intimate relationships between humans and domesticated animals? To be fair, to be just how can how can we make sure that the the norms, the rules, the institutions that govern this shared society of humans and domesticated animals living in close proximity. How can we make sure that those rules and institutions and so on, are responsive to the interests of animals as much as they are to the interests of humans? So this goes back to the very beginning about how do we ensure that that the governing is legitimate and not tyranny. So I think at the moment, what we've got is a situation in which the governing of animals is essentially tyranny. Um, because there's no mechanism to ensure that the governing of this shared society is responsive to the interests of animals. And that would be true even if we even if tomorrow we respected their basic rights and we no longer slaughtered them or experimented on them, it would still be the case that there's no mechanism to ensure that the rules governing the shared society are responsive to the interests of animals.

00:48:26 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So you think so you've mentioned things such as like medical care for animals as something a society being responsive to animals interests, or potentially even in reading your work. I was thinking about like, education. You know, we think about children and what what responsibility and services, I guess. Does the government have to you to help you, uh, meet your, your needs and I think quite interestingly, is, um, also some ideas about mobility. Yeah. Um, you know, in whose interests is it to have dogs on leashes all the time or, uh, to limit the mobility of of animals and even in listening to you speak now, um, you speak now about animals in close proximity. But of course, there are domesticated animals that were not in close proximity to, uh, you know, we've had the oldest, I think domesticated relationship is with dogs. If I'm not mistaken, it's fifteen thousand years. And then the second oldest was with cows. So twelve and a half thousand years. But in most urban or many urban settlements, primarily ones in the North, um, You're not going to find them in close proximity, but they're still deserving. I think of some of these.

00:49:38 Will Kymlicka: So I um, so we have at some point, um, in the Western tradition, uh, in Western societies, the category of, of domesticated animals became subdivided into companion animals and farmed animals. Um, I don't think those categories, actually. I mean, those are historical. That's that sharp split that in today's society that is a very sharp split. Um, so the companion animals, we would never think about eating, um, and we think of that as, as a, as a relationship of companionship and, and, and as family members. So the statistics are I mean, amazing, like ninety three percent of people who have dogs or cats think of them as members of the family. So, so, um, whereas farmed animals have been reduced to this extraordinarily abject status of just just being resources. Um, and we don't want to see them. And so we forced them out of the city and put them into these invisible, uh, factory farms and so on, and, and try not to think about them. And now there's, you know, when there's thousands of them in a in a factory farm, no one, no one pretends that they get to know them. They wouldn't have names. And but if you if you think back even not that long ago, uh, that, uh, families would have had, you know, they might have had a cow and a pig and a dog and they, they they were um, uh, there wasn't this kind of rigid separation. And they all lived in, in the in the family household and um, um, and they all would have been known and often all would have been named. And so, um, so I, I think we need to dissolve. So we've got so we have, in my view, a kind of double challenge. One is to, to, to reduce is to challenge the hierarchy of humans over animals. But we have a second challenge within the category of animals, in particular within the category of domesticated animals. We need to challenge the hierarchy between companion animals and farmed animals. Um, and I think I mean, a lot of the strategies that apply in the first case also apply in the second. So if you look at the at the the ethological evidence, we know that pigs are just as smart as dogs. All the stuff that you know about animals and humans, continuities and social life. Emotional life. This this distinction between companion animals and farmed animals is is totally arbitrary and has no relationship to sentience, to needs, to interests, the capacities. So, um, I don't think that um, so in our, in our image of a utopia, the there would be no, there would be no distinction between companion animals and farmed animals. There they are domesticated animals, which means that they are capable of, um, uh, interspecies social relationships that couldn't have been domesticated unless they were capable of having certain kinds of social relationships with us, of trust and communication and cooperation and so on. And we have a duty with respect to both to find what kinds of social relationships they want to have with us. Yeah. And I. So that's as important in relation to cows and pigs and chickens as it is with dogs and cats. And, um. And so and I would expect that that would involve I mean, there are all sorts of complications, but, um, uh, you know, that would involve rethinking this, this assumption that we've grown up with that kind of dogs belong in, in the, in the city. But cows don't. I mean, we might well end up creating various forms of, uh, or restoring, uh, urban commons, urban parks in such a way that we would we would start to see pigs in cities, the way which was absolutely common in earlier periods.

00:54:10 Claudia Hirtenfelder: two hundred years ago. Um, yeah. It's it's really just interesting to think about some of the ideas you're speaking because you speak about rights as being intimately involved with, um, the states in many regards, but the relationships with with animals are multi-species. Communities have extended far beyond, you know, the nation state. We were we were in these communities, these relationships for for, you know, have been for thousands, thousands of years, which I think both dogs and cows and, and cats, um, they start to illustrate how long those relationships have gone and I think are therefore deserving of the kind of consideration you give them. Um, I've got two more questions, because I fear that you and I could, uh, I could just listen to you for hours. Um, so I've got two questions. Uh, as you know, I'm a PhD student, and I'm entering the realm of of animal studies. This is, for me, the kind of beginning of a journey. And in thinking about early career, um, academics or people that are maybe beginning to think about animals or animals in the law. Um, what are some key areas or advice or tips? I guess I'm just leaving a kind of open ended that you would give to people that are starting to ask these types of questions about the relationship between animals and, and rights or law.

00:55:29 Will Kymlicka: Well, so I do think, um, it's. It's important and useful to understand something about the structure of, um, I mean, the basic building blocks of animal law, which is because, I mean, I confess, I did not understand how truly awful, uh, animal law is. I think we all grow up with the idea that there is some sort of effective protection of animals, that we have something called animal protection laws. We all grow up with that idea that we that the law protects animals, right? And that we have something called animal protection law. It's it's just totally not true. Um, and it's important to figure out why it's not true. Um, so, uh, the animal law does not exist to protect animals. I mean, this is just we've just got to. I mean, it's really it's really important to get over that fundamental misunderstanding that I certainly had. The animal law exists to authorize humans to harm animals. That that that is the purpose of animal law is to ensure that people are legally protected in harming animals. It's animal law is essentially about distributing authorizations to harm animals. It's animal use. We have animal use law. That's what we have. We have laws authorizing people to use and harm animals. Um, and uh, so the, the, the it's just The. The premise of animal law is that humans have the right to use animals for our benefit. That is the starting point. The starting point of animal law is not that animals are intrinsically worthy of respect, and therefore should be protected. The starting point of animal law is humans have the right to use animals and law entrenches, affirms, entrenches, and protects that fundamental claim that humans have the right to use animals. That is, that's the base of animal law. Um, and then what we call what we think of as animal protection law, um, is essentially this prohibition on cruelty, which is, uh, which is not it's not that the law identifies a particular form of inflicting pain as being cruel. It's not that the law recognizes certain interests of the animal that must always be respected and against which cruelty is undefined. Cruelty is defined as the unnecessary infliction of pain on animals beyond what's necessary for achieving the use that we assert that we have the right to use them for. Right. So animal law says humans have the right to use animals basically for whatever purpose. We want that and they can be. And the law says it's very explicit in the Canadian cases, but in others that these can be quite trivial interests like it can be just the fact that we like the taste of their flesh, or that we like the feel of their fur. You don't have to be important or profound human interests. We can harm animals for whatever interest we want. All the law says is you can't inflict more pain than is necessary to achieve that use. So even if our reason for inflicting pain is essentially trivial, like we just like the feel of something, or we like watching something, that's okay. But we can't gratuitously we can't impose more gratuitous, basically sadistic pain beyond what was needed to achieve the use. The use itself doesn't have to be. It's not like we need to eat meat or we need to wear fur. The law is very clear on this. It's not that the test is not. Is this harming animals necessary for us in the sense that we need to do it in order to survive or to flourish? We can just do it because we. Because it's for our pleasure. Because. Because, as I say, we like the taste of flesh or they like the feel of fur. Um, we just we should just take steps to ensure that there's no gratuitous infliction of pain in the process of using animals for our benefit. So that's I mean, that's just so. So there is no interest that animals have that is inherently protected. We can, we can, we can sacrifice their most their most basic interests in order to advance our most trivial interests. The law's totally, totally okay with our sacrificing the most basic interests of animals in order to advance our most trivial interests. We just can't be sadistic when we do it. We can't impose gratuitous. I mean, this this is I mean, it's again, it's to my mind, it's just a complete misrepresentation to describe that as animal protection law. That's that's animal use law. It's animal harm law. We're authorizing people to upholding the right of humans to use animals. And so it's I think it's important to understand how weak and how basic my view essentially meaningless, uh, this cruelty, unnecessary suffering. People think that, you know, when the law prohibits unnecessary suffering of animals, that that imposes some sort of substantive restriction on how humans treat animals, but it doesn't. We can we can do again. We can sacrifice their most basic interests in pursuit of our most trivial interests.

01:01:20 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So you think a an early career, someone, someone who's interested in this, should at least grapple with and have a look at these to understand what the foundation of these are.

01:01:31 Will Kymlicka: So I think that there's no way to understand human animal relations. So everything that humans, every feature of how humans and animals interact is governed by law. And the foundation of the legal regulation of human animal relations is that animals are property and we have the right to use them for our benefit. That's the baseline. So the law creates this structure in which every time a human and animal interact. The law has structured that relationship in a way that the human that the animal's property, the human, has the right to use the animal for their benefit. That's the law has every we we move around in a social world that has been structured by the law around these ideas of animals as property and human rights to use animals.

01:02:32 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So to fundamentally change these multispecies relationships, we need to change.

01:02:35 Will Kymlicka: Change the law. I so you can you can as an individual. You can try to. Distance yourself, as it were, from those legal presumptions. You can try to interact with your own dog or cat in a way you can. So the law says you own your dog. The dog is your property. You can decide you're not going to treat your your dog as as property. You can decide you're going to treat your dog as a member of the family. And then some people. For some people, that's just rhetoric. Others try to think through what that means. But so as individuals, we can choose to interact with animals in a way that departs from the legal presumptions. And so we can do that as individuals. We could even try to do that as collectivity. So if you think about farmed animal sanctuaries, they they are set up in order to create a space that's in fact challenging the whole purpose. And if you go to a farmed animal sanctuary and you listen to the tour, the introduction that they will, they will explicitly say, the law treats the pigs and the sheeps and the chicken as property to be used. We reject that. And so we're trying to create, in this farmed animal sanctuary, a legal space that treats animals differently from what the law says. That's it's very explicit strategy to try to contest, to try to get people to see animals as something other than what the law says they are.

01:04:09 Claudia Hirtenfelder: So to practice an alternative universe.

01:04:11 Will Kymlicka: Exactly. But even there, you know, there's only so much you can do when the when the law says one thing about who animals are, namely that they're property that exists for us to use. You can try to create this space either in your own home or in something like a farmed animal sanctuary, that that operates on a different logic. But, um, you're still so these farmed animal sanctuaries, they are still governed by agricultural law, by property law, by zoning laws, by laws about food, about laws, about vaccines, about public health. And so, you know, you hear these horrible stories about sanctuaries that try to create this alternative space. And then, you know, an illness shows up in a farm, you know? Uh, yeah. I mean, you.

01:05:09 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Have to.

01:05:10 Will Kymlicka: Put.

01:05:10 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, no.

01:05:14 Will Kymlicka: So you can't you can't escape. You can try to distance yourself from the law, from what the law says animals are. But you can't. You can't. You can't just opt out of the law. It's still the law still governs human people.

01:05:27 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Practice. Um, I think the law is the starting point at which, if I'm gathering, the law is the ground zero for starting to. I mean, practice definitely starts to make those laws seem like they should be changed. Yes. And these alternate you know, it's it's a it's not a clear the law comes and then practice comes. I think often practices start to shape. What laws.

01:05:52 Will Kymlicka: Yes. And I and I believe that the existing law is every day is getting more and more out of sync with. us. Public opinion. This idea of animals as property that we have a right to use. I mean, it's a very old idea and it's quite deeply rooted in Western culture. So it's it's but it's the law. The law is a kind of, um, unreconstructed expression of that very old idea. And, um, there are all sorts of domains in which the general public no longer believes that that's the right way to think about a relationship with at least some animals for some purposes, in some contexts. And so the law is, is out of out of touch with the way many people think about some of their relationships with animals. Um, and uh, and it's, it's, it's creating interesting conflicts. I mean, this is particularly true about companion animals. So the fact that the law, the law treats companion animals as property. Here in Canada. And so just as an example, um, that means that, uh, in the case of a divorce. The determination of where a companion animal goes in case. So the question so in so many families have companion animals. So now there's a divorce. Who gets custody of the dog or the cat? So in the case of the if it's if there's a human child, the answer is it's got to be in the best interest of the child. So we ask who, who the child. Who would the child be better off with the mother, the father or shared custody or whatever? We ask from the perspective of the child, what's in the best interest of the child? That's the legal standard, the best interest of the child, the dog or the cat is property, and therefore the rules are the same as govern the distribution of property. So for the purposes of custody decisions, the question is basically who bought the dog? Who has the better property title? So it's like a couch. Exactly. And so and there are cases in which judges say, I mean that the so and this is true even if the, the, the, the couple, they want custody to be decided on the basis of who's, who's whose custody would be in the best interest. They love their dog or cat. And so they would prefer that the court make this decision based on the best interests of the animal, and they make arguments about why it would be better for the dog to go with them. But then the judge will say, I don't care what's in the interest of the of the dog. That's not my job. My job. This is a piece of property I'm going to. And so the judges will say that the best interests of the dog has no more legal standing than the best interests of of a motorcycle or a couch. This is what the judges actually say in the courtroom. And it's shocking to the to to the to the couple because they've never thought of their.

01:09:12 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Because this is also a being with the person.

01:09:13 Will Kymlicka: Exactly. And so yeah. Yeah. And so we have a growing number of cases in which people come to the courts with a, with a view about how they relate to an animal as something other than property. And, and the courts are saying, you've got to think of your animal as a piece of property. That's when you enter the courtroom. This is how we we think of the animal as property. You've got to start thinking this way. And people don't like it. And so people are I mean, there's a whole slew of cases where this it's also about about things like, um, you know, if, if. So here's another case, um.

01:09:49 Claudia Hirtenfelder: We are going to be. Yeah.

01:09:51 Will Kymlicka: Well, I'll stop with this about about, uh, interesting.

01:09:55 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Though.

01:09:55 Will Kymlicka: Um, uh, damages in the case of, uh. So imagine that a neighbor runs over your dog in a car. So so the. Okay. And let's say it's the so so your dog now needs medical care. So let's say the leg was broken. Uh, and so you sue for, for damages. Um, so the standing. So from the point of view of the courts, the dog is a piece of property. So the question is what's the value of the dog? And under property rules, that's a question of what's the replacement cost. What would it cost to replace that dog. And so let's imagine it's an eight year old mutt that you that you adopted from a shelter. What's the what's the replacement cost. Zero. You could go you can get another dog from a shelter for, for adoption like for a fifty dollars fee. Right. So. So you could it may cost like eight hundred dollars to get the dog medical care. The courts will say you don't have a claim to eight hundred dollars.

01:11:01 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Out of sync with people's relationship and response to.

01:11:04 Will Kymlicka: So yeah. And so it's interesting that some American jurisdictions have changed these laws, both about custody of animals and about property, about damages under tort law. Uh, Canada hasn't. So we're behind the US on this as on other. Yeah. So but but the point is that this is again, we've got this basic it's really fundamental structure of animal law that animals are property and that our relationship with them is basically we use them for our benefit. That's what the law structures are. And and and there are increasing number of contexts where people go to the courts and are shocked to find that that's what the law says.

01:11:44 Claudia Hirtenfelder: I mean, also what's interesting is how these relationships with the law are mitigated, I guess, by how closely the animals are related to humans, right? So in the case of the dogs that you've spoken about here in terms of custody or, you know, damages, it's mitigated through their relationship with humans. Yet. What kind of custody or damages are due to liminal animals? Right. So actually walking here to to get to the interview, I saw a squirrel that had been run over, and I found myself a bit paralyzed because there was a squirrel lying in the middle of the road. And I wanted to to move it. I feel like it needed that respect, at least to be moved. But then I found myself, um, you know, somewhat crippled by the task of being like. But then I knew that no one would take responsibility for for this being, like, who owes damages, whose interests are for the squirrel that it's been knocked by a car or that there are no, um, you know, infrastructure necessarily in place for squirrels to cross roads? I mean, they're very good with cable lines and stuff. Um, but I think it is just interesting. And this drives back to the beginning about what are animals interests, what are their legal needs, and that these are not necessarily the same for all animals. Yeah. Um, particularly because of how they relate to society. Um, I'm going to ask my final my final question here, which is a bit of an odd one. I'm going to see how this works. Um, I'm going to do it for the first couple of interviews. Um, so I asked you to see if you could find a piece of literature or a journal, article or book and to see if there was a quote you wanted to read that you think people would find interesting. And then I'll share the title of that in, in the, in the credits for the podcast. So who did you say?

01:13:28 Will Kymlicka: Well, so I had, I had um, so I wasn't sure what was what would work.

01:13:37 Claudia Hirtenfelder: That's hard.

01:13:38 Will Kymlicka: Yeah.

01:13:38 Claudia Hirtenfelder: I was trying to think of an answer to the question myself, and I was like, who would I pick? I have no idea.

01:13:43 Will Kymlicka: So I have, I have, I mean, so I, um, So I do have a short quote from Leslie, who I guess you will be interviewing later. Yeah.

01:13:55 Claudia Hirtenfelder: From her book, The Introduction.

01:13:57 Will Kymlicka: Uh, um, which is just in a way just summarizes a lot of what we've been discussing about the, in my view, basically the, the, the misnomer of animal protection law. Um, well, so I'll just it's a very short quote. So she, she, she's, uh, explaining. So this is from her book animals in the law, which is really the main, um, textbook on animal law in Canada. Um. So she's explaining the anti-cruelty provisions of the Criminal Code in Canada. And she says these laws protect the routine practices that are common in a given activity by drawing out for condemnation only singular acts of extraordinary behavior. If many people find it convenient, enjoyable, or profitable to do things that hurt animals, those things are not legally cruel. So long as causing animals to suffer is not the only object of the act, the fact that they suffer as a result becomes almost entirely irrelevant. So that's the end of the quote. So it's just it's just a nice summary that it that what we call what we consider, what we call anti-cruelty provisions, um, are not are not about avoiding suffering of animals. They don't in any way actually limit um, the, the actual, the suffering of animals, as she says, is basically irrelevant in deciding whether something violates cruelty provision. The suffering of animals is essentially irrelevant. What matters is, is what they did is what the human did to the animal, something that many people find convenient, enjoyable, profitable. And if they do, then it's fine.

01:15:44 Claudia Hirtenfelder: I like how her. She contrasts the idea of extraordinary that it's seen as extraordinary versus what is systematic. Right? Um, you know, the systematic abuse becomes invisible and only extraordinary cases are brought to light, which I think is, um, really drives home a lot of what you've been saying here, um, in this and I think we don't have too much. We don't have time to, to get into it now. But I, you and Sue are working on some pretty exciting stuff about trying to think of what the future of law and the future of these societies would look like. Do you have any upcoming stuff that people might look forward to, to seeing what some of your answers to that might be?

01:16:21 Will Kymlicka: Well, so.

01:16:22 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Um, some of your thoughts.

01:16:24 Will Kymlicka: So I have a, I actually, I mean, I published recently an article on of a, um, on animal law, uh, which tries to, um, explore the interaction between um. Membership rights and intrinsic rights. So basically, as as we discussed earlier, um, most people who care about animals in the field of animal law have been fighting for personhood as the main legal strategy and for a variety of reasons. But as we but as we discussed, they've tended to focus on just some very high profile cases, like great apes or elephants or cetaceans. Um, but but basically for many people, the, the, the way they think about reforming animal law is how to get animals out of property into personhood. And I just I think absolutely, that is ultimately the long term goal. Um, but we're a long way from that. And so I'm interested in the question of whether one step on the road towards recognition of these of personhood is through the recognition of membership rights.

01:18:04 Claudia Hirtenfelder: And what what general what.

01:18:06 Will Kymlicka: So it's in it's in the Dalhousie Law Journal and I can send you the reference, but so so basically so but I'm looking at things like the recognition in some jurisdictions, not in Canada, but in some jurisdictions of animals as family members, that some provisions of family law have been amended to, to basically recognize that for some legal purposes, animals should be seen as members of the family rather than property of the family. And there have also been some jurisdictions which have sort of recognized that for some purposes animals should be seen as workers, not as the property of of a workplace. And those, I think, are implicit recognition of what I'm calling membership rights, even though they don't yet have personhood rights. And I actually think that's an interesting so many people that I talked to in animal law, they they think that the sequence has to be you first are recognized as a person, and then you'll be eligible for membership rights as well. But personhood has to come first. And, uh, I actually think I mean, I'm increasingly interested in the possibility that that might be the wrong sequence and that it might be that there's room in the legal system and in the political system, because these legal changes require political coalitions and so on, that there might be scope for recognition of some of these membership rights prior and as a step towards, and it will be easier to get recognition of animals as persons if we've already recognized them for some purposes as members of society. Mhm. Um, I mean, so that's, that's partly a, you know, it's in part just a question of strategy, um, that whether there's more room for success, uh, for effective advocacy in relation to membership rights, given that I think the route to personhood rights is blocked for the foreseeable future, at least in Canada.

01:20:18 Claudia Hirtenfelder: Well, it sounds very exciting. And I think, um, thank you for all of the work you've done and for thinking through these complicated problems. And I look forward to. So you've raised some important things here about personhood and, um, and, you know, subjectivity. So hopefully through season one focusing on law, we're going to get to some of these. But for now, I just want to say thank you so much for giving me so much of your time. And, um, fingers crossed everything goes well.

01:20:46 Will Kymlicka: Thank you, thank you. And.

01:20:54 Claudia Hirtenfelder: A big thank you to Gordon Clark for doing the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, and a huge thank you to Animals and philosophy, politics, law and ethics. Apple for sponsoring this podcast. This is the animal. Turn with me, Claudia Herzfeld.