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ABSTRACT
We argue that extreme endurance sport can be valuable for some nonhuman animals. To make the case, we focus specifically on dogsled racing. We argue that, given certain views about the nature of self-affirmation, perceptual agency, and affordances, sled dogs are capable of realizing significant value through extreme endurance running. Because our focus is on the axiological question of the nature of the value of the sport for its participants, we do not claim that extreme dogsledding is ethical; indeed, we acknowledge the morally objectionable aspects of the practice in its current form. Still, we offer our argument as a critical step in providing an adequate moral justification for a reformed model of dogsled racing. If it is permissible, that is likely because it offers some significant benefits to sled dogs. Given some assumptions about sled dogs’ capacity to be guided by both internal and external affordances, those benefits include self-affirmation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. See, for instance, ‘Four-Time Iditarod Champ Implicated in Dog-Drugging Scandal’ (https://www.peta.org/blog/iditarod-scandal-dogs-drugged-opioids-forced-race/); ‘Iditarod 2018 Upgrade: Will it Be Skiing Humans, Not Suffering Huskies?’ (https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/iditarod-2018-upgrade-will-skiing-humans-not-suffering-huskies/). World record-holding ultrarunner Fiona Oaks has also urged Iditarod CEO Rob Urbach to ‘[replace] dogs with elite athletes who demonstrate their own skill and stamina … and spare dogs a life of pain and misery’. (https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/world-record-winning-ultramarathoner-tells-iditarod-ceo-leave-dogs-out-of-it/)
3. We thank an anonymous reviewer for urging us to be clearer about the limitations of our thesis and how the arguments we offer might be used as a basis for a more ambitious position on the ethics of extreme dogsledding.
4. Kuhl (Citation2011), p. 28.
5. Bryce and Williams (Citation2017).
6. See, e.g. Mushing (Citation2022).
7. For a recent defense of the view that many animals are capable of informed consent, see Fennell (Citation2022), which offers a model of animal-informed consent which considers the subjective experiences of animals as well as their cognitive and physiological needs.
8. Morris’s (Citation2018) notion of ‘tacit consent’ may also be helpful here; even if sled dogs are incapable of giving informed consent they may be capable of giving a kind of tacit consent to their involvement in dogsledding (or at least to some aspects of such involvement). We note further that the distinction (if any) between tacit consent and assent, as Healey and Pepper understand the notion, is not clear; in any case, the important point is that some nonhuman animals seem capable of a kind of willful affirmation which falls short of informed consent but which nevertheless seems to enable certain permissible interactions with them.
9. Healey and Pepper, p. 13.
10. Healey and Pepper, p. 16.
11. As Martin points out, many think that language alone barriers prohibit informed consent. However, as Martin notes (Martin Citation2022, 67), there’s much more at stake: ‘namely, cognitive capacities such as rationality, the ability to know how to act intentionally in one’s best interest in the long term, understanding complex circumstances, and the like’. Even supposing that animals could clearly communicate to humans using language this would not mean that they have the ability to give informed consent.
12. Martin, p. 64.
13. Russell (Citation2005), p. 2.
14. Russell (Citation2005), p. 15.
15. We should distinguish dangerous sport from extreme sport. Russell defines dangerous sport as ‘sport that involves activity that itself creates a significant risk of loss of, or serious impediment to some basic capacity for human functioning’. (By ‘significant risk’ Russell means ‘a risk that is substantial enough that it is, or should be, an expected outcome from time to time that is directly attributable to the specific activities involved in the sport itself and that exceeds the risk of such injury found in participants’ day-to-day life outside of sport by more than a modest degree’.) Although some extreme sports (e.g. Formula One racing, BASEjumping) clearly are very dangerous in this sense—they involve extreme risk, after all—it’s not clear that this is true of all extreme sports. Consider for instance extreme endurance events, such as Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra (bigsbackyardultra.com), or the Self-Transcendence 3100-mile footrace. (3100.srichinmoyraces.org) These events seem at least far less dangerous than Formula One racing, BASEjumping, and extreme alpine mountaineering. This may be because the latter sports involve a fairly high risk of death or severe injury in the moment. However, even the sorts of endurance events mentioned may nevertheless qualify as dangerous to a degree, on Russell’s account, because of the kind of cumulative risk they involve, i.e. the cumulative stress they put on the body and their potential for causing organ failure and other serious health problems due to conditions like rhabdomyolysis and hyponatremia. So, we might distinguish dangerous sports that have a high degree of risk of death or severe injury or loss of a basic capacity in the moment and dangerous sports that have a cumulative high degree of such risk.
There is some question, then, of how inherently dangerous dogsledding is, and of whether Russell’s account of the value of dangerous sport applies to dogsledding. Regardless, we think that self-affirmation accounts for much of the value of extreme endurance running—whether it should be classified as a dangerous sport, or instead as an extreme remote sport which is not inherently dangerous—and that sled dogs may be capable of realizing this value to an extent.
16. See Abbate (Citation2020).
17. The claim that this is constitutive of self-construction might seem too strong. After all, doesn’t an individual count as constructing an identity simply in virtue of developing her abilities and talents? And doesn’t she do that as long as she’s exercising those abilities and talents to some degree? Exercising them to the fullest does not seem required. However, we suggest that what counts as exercising one’s capabilities to the fullest is something that keeps changing as one develops them: The conditions for the full exercise of one’s abilities are influenced by the full exercise of those abilities. It is not implausible, then, to say that activity that constructs the self is always activity that involves fully exercising its abilities.
18. Howe notes (Howe Citation2008) that there are different kinds of self-affirmation: ‘[Self-affirmation] might be entirely social, as when one seeks the recognition of the public, one’s peers, or superiors, or it might be of the profoundly inward and existential sort, as when like Sisyphus with his rock one applies oneself to a task that concerns a self-worth of which no one else will ever know’. As we read Russell, he seems concerned with the latter kind of self-affirmation. At any rate, the distinction between what we’re calling weak and strong self-affirmation is independent of Howe’s distinction between ‘social’ and ‘individual’ self-affirmation.
19. Cf. Sebo (Citation2015).
20. Sebo (Citation2015), p. 6.
21. For further discussion of the agency of nonhuman animals see Korsgaard (Citation2018).
22. Gibson (Citation1979), p. 127.
23. For further discussion and clarification of Gibson’s theory see SCARANTINO (Citation2003).
24. Bermúdez (Citation2003), p. 47.
25. Sebo (Citation2015), 6–7.
26. Proust (Citation2017).
27. Frankfurt (Citation1971). We note that Frankfurt does not take mere coherence between first-order and second-order desires to be sufficient for freedom of the will, as he conceives it. According to Frankfurt, a free will is one in which the agent’s second-order volitions—i.e., second-order desires that certain first-order desires be effective in motivating action—correspond with their effective first-order desires.
28. Hochstetler and Hopsicker (Citation2012), 119 (emphasis added).
29. The ‘borderland existence’, as Anderson understands it, is a place that lies between under-civilization and over-civilization. The borderland provides a ‘risk in context, of spontaneity within constraint’ (Anderson Citation2001, 142).
30. Hochstetler and Hopsicker (Citation2012), p. 119.
31. Dummett (Citation1993).
32. Bermúdez (Citation2003), p. 43.
33. Scarantino (Citation2003), p. 954.