The forthcoming article “The territorial rights of wild animals: Justification” by Pablo P. Castello is summarized by the author below.
The field of territorial rights focuses on justifying why a given human people, state, or nation should have a moral right to a particular territory, why human displacement is a source of harm, and how the boundaries of human communities should be drawn, among other things. Yet, wild animals are usually left out of these debates. Virtually all territorial rights theorists develop their arguments on the assumption that wild animals are mere natural resources, such as minerals. This article explores whether that assumption is justified.
Taking mule deer in Wyoming as a case study, I argue that some wild animals have moral rights to reside in the territories to which they are attached, use the resources those territories provide, and control their fate as individuals and social collectives. This means that the lives of some wild animals can go better or worse for them, and that their ability to thrive depends so strongly on access to specific territories that this imposes duties on humans, such as duties not to displace them.
Recent scientific evidence demonstrates that mule deer herds have collective identities and cultures that have developed over many generations and are embedded in the territories they inhabit. Moreover, older members of mule deer communities pass on social knowledge about how to live peacefully in community, how to migrate back to their intergenerational calving grounds, how to safely raise their young, where to find food, and more. Familiar territories play a crucial role in this process of knowledge transfer because they provide security of place and access to nutritious food. Moreover, these territories serve as repositories of mule deer intergenerational knowledge and identities.
The implications of these findings are significant. Roads, fences, housing developments, energy projects, hunting policies, and wildlife management practices should no longer be evaluated only in terms of human interests. They should also be assessed in light of animals’ own claims to remain in, use, and shape the territories on which their lives depend, including their socio-cultural and political lives.
This does not mean that mule deer should have exclusive claims over land, or that humans and other non-mule deer animals must abandon all territories over which mule deer have territorial claims. Rather, it means that wild animals should no longer be treated as mere resources, and that we should abandon the idea that humans hold exclusive sovereign authority over the territories in which those animals reside. Instead, many nonhuman animals are agential beings with their own individual and collective relationships to place and should be understood as subjects of justice, with moral claims to reside in the territories to which they are attached.
About the author: Pablo P. Castello is a Research Fellow and Faculty Co-Director of the Executive Certificate Animals Forward: Advancing Interspecies Justice at the Animal Law Program, Sturm College of Law, University of Denver. Their research “The territorial rights of wild animals: Justification” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.