https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7725-2770
The role of animals in the realm of sport is the focus of this special issue which delves into the nuanced intersections of sport, animals, and ethics. For millennia, humans have forged multifaceted relationships with animals in various athletic endeavours, and to date, the literature on this phenomenon remains limited.
The two of us (S.P. Morris and Gabriela Tymowski-Gionet) have been thinking and writing (mostly independently) since the early 2000s about the use and abuse of animals in and for sports. The ethical import of the subject ought to be all but self-evident to readers of this journal. There is broad consensus at this point—across disciplines like biology, zoology, ethology, and philosophy—that other animals (i.e. non-human animals) have what Shelly Kagan calls moral standing: ‘to say that something has standing is to say that it counts, morally speaking, in its own right’ (Kagan, 2019, p. 7). There is almost no serious debate on this point today. Philosophers who write about animal ethics tend to accept moral standing as a given, focusing their attention on moral status, rather than on standing. Again, Kagan’s description is laconic and helpful: ‘moral status consists in the elements of [the animal’s] broad normative profile that are highly general and relatively stable … [it] provides the underlying explanation for why the creature has the particular moral status that it does’ (p. 10). Moral standing answers the question of whether the animal counts and moral status answers the question how or how much the animal counts. Several prominent philosophers have written book-length expositions on animal ethics and a common feature of those works is that the authors are all—more or less—explicitly debating moral status and either assuming or affirming moral standing. A few keystones include (in alphabetical order):
Beauchamp, T. and R.G. Frey (2011). The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. [the only anthology included here].
DeGrazia, D. (1996). Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gruen, L. (2011). Ethics and Animals: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kagan, S. (2019). How to Count Animals, More or Less. New York: Oxford Univeristy Press.
Korsgaard, C. M. (2018). Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals. New York: Oxford University Press.
Midgley, M. (1983). Animals and Why They Matter. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2006). Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2022). Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Palmer, C. (2010). Animal Ethics in Context. New York: Columbia University Press.
Regan, T. (2004). The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: The University of California Press.
Rowlands, M. (2002). Animals Like Us. New York: Verso.
Singer, P. (2023). Animals Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed. NewYork: Harper Collins.
This is by no means is this an exhaustive list. These references represent diverse views on animal ethics in the sense that there are consequentialists, deontologists, contract theorists and virtue ethicists included. That non-human animals have moral standing and some kind of moral status is fairly universally accepted at this point which is at the core of our rationale for organizing a special issue on the subject of Sport and Species for Sport, Ethics and Philosophy.
It is our hope that readers will read and consider these contributions in totality rather than as stand-alone articles. Considering them together helps bring into focus the diverse and complex connections and debates that occur around status which are in-turn tied closely to ontology. For instance, Morris and Humphreys are writing about hunting, which focuses primarily on complex mammalian life, although also often include avian species and even many types of fish (if one thinks of fishing as under-water hunting). Similarly, Campbell and Holt are dealing mostly with equine species (a subject Campbell has written about extensively) and so they too are concerned mostly with complex mammalian species. Much the same for Gilbertson and Fischer, who are writing about canines. Deckers and Pezzetta’s contribution is possibly the most novel of the lot in the sense that they are focused entirely on pigeon racing, which of course deals with avian species, which have received far less attention in the literature on ethics in sports (Humphreys being a notable exception in that she has written several articles about bird hunting). Finally, and also relatively novel in this literature, is the contribution from Foreman and Sailors that considers not only with the use and abuse of animals in and for sports but also within the broader framework of ‘entertainment’, broadly understood.
As co-editors it is our hope and intention to build-out, further develop, and expand the literature on this topic. In the spring of 2021 we organized an online conference titled ‘Sport, Animals, and Ethics’ and many of the contributions in this special issue were first presented at the conference. Of course, many other presentations were given as well and one of the happy outcomes of the conference, from our perspective as co-organizers, was the sheer number and diversity of presentations that were given. Subjects from the conference that are not printed here included the effects of sport on the environment and the obvious next-level effects that that has on animals (e.g. the engineering of ski resorts, the engineering and maintenance of golf-courses, etc.), the ways in which animal body parts are utilized for sports equipment (e.g. leather), cultural, religious, and social sporting practices that involve animals (e.g. rodeo, jallikattu, whaling, vaquejada, etc.), and lesser-known esoteric ‘sports’ including flyball, canicross, bikejoring, camel racing, falconry, and dressage).
People have amalgamated animals into their sporting practices the world over, for millennia, and there are complex, nuanced, and deeply fascinating stories to tell about these phenomena. While not all such practices are universally recognized as sports, many of them are, and certainly many others are sports-adjacent. Some of them are fairly mainstream and while others are more obscure, in the collective they are somewhat ubiquitous. It is more holistic and parsimonious to write whole-cloth theories of animal ethics through a broader lens—which is what the list of authors cited above do—but our orientation here, and our hope going forward, is that the communities of people who think seriously on these matters will progress the intellectual discussion to a more fine-grained analysis. Guiding principles and theories are indispensable, of course, and that is what the broader texts deliver. What the current collection of essays does, in our view, is to advance these discussions under finer scrutiny (by ‘finer’ we mean more narrowly focused, not (necessarily) superior, though we hope that will be the case as well).
Much has been said under the umbrella of animal ethics and a lot has been said about the nexus of ethics with sports, but the nexus of sport, animals, and ethics is still a fairly nascent field of inquiry. We have made an effort to collect essays here that showcase the breadth, depth, novelty, nuance, and interconnectedness of subjects and ‘sub-subjects’ in these domains.
There is no perfect order in which to arrange these essays. We have arranged them from general to particular (i.e. broadest to narrowest) and from mainstream to novel. This is an imprecise taxonomy, to be sure.
Madeleine Campbell’s paper maps broader ethical theories of animal ethics on to sports and aims to provide a clear picture of what they each conclude; her conclusion is that ‘only an absolutist rights theory’ may rule out the use of animals in and for sports.
S.P. Morris’s paper discusses and critiques Shelly Kagan’s work and argues that, while the (ostensible) duty to aid applies to animals (including wild animals), it is not strong enough to justify lethal intervention.
Rebekah Humphreys has written a response and critique of Morris’s earlier work and argues that blood-sports are neither a game nor a sport despite the role played by fair-chase codes, which she argues are self-contradictory.
Eric Gilbertson and Bob Fischer focus their attention on sled-dog racing and 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 racing’ without necessarily concluding that such racing is ethical.
Jason Holt’s essay focuses on equine sports and the relations between horse and rider. Utilizing the work of Bernard Suits, in conjunction with ethological understandings of equine ontology and his own experiences as a rider, Holt argues that ‘horses are game players that sometimes consent (or assent) and sometimes refuse to play equine sports’.
Jan Deckers and Silvina Pezzetta have contributed a novel piece to the discussion (compared to the overall literature on animal ethics in sports) with their essay dedicated to pigeon racing. Their conclusions are both moral and legal: ‘an ethical form of pigeon racing is not possible’ and the sport ‘ought to be prohibited’.
Elizabeth Foreman and Pam Sailors also provide a novel contribution in their analysis of ‘sporting captivity’, which refers not only to the keeping of animals for sporting purposes but also for entertainment more broadly conceived. The authors rely on Martha Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’ to explore whether Nussbaum’s ‘respectful paternalism’ is compatible with sporting captivity and if so, under what conditions.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our contributors for their hard work and patience though the publication process as well as Andrew Edgar for his care, diligence, and patience with us as guest-editors for this special issue. We would also like to thank you, reader, for your time, attention, and consideration. We hope that you will learn from and enjoy this scholarship, and perhaps elect to join the conversation yourself.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).