Animal Capabilities and Freedom in the City

ABSTRACT

Animals who live in cities must coexist with us. They are, as a result, entitled to the conditions of their flourishing. This article argues that, as the boundaries of cities and urban areas expand, the boundaries of our conception of captivity should expand too. Urbanisation can undermine animals’ freedoms, hence their ability to live good lives. I draw the implications of an account of ‘pervasive captivity’ against the background of the Capabilities Approach. I construe captivity, including that of urban animals, as affecting a range of animal capabilities, understood as freedoms, and I address some tensions within Nussbaum’s treatment of human-animal conflicts. Using the Capabilities Approach as a guide, I will attempt to motivate a convergence between habitat preservation in urbanised environments, urban design guided by justice, and the individual freedoms of animals.

KEYWORDS:

• Animals
• ecology
• captivity

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the audience at the meeting of the 2019 meeting of HDCA in London and my co-panelists Amy T. Lynch, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and Martha Nussbaum. I’m especially indebted to careful and detailed comments by an anonymous referee for this journal.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hereafter I mostly refer to the Capabilities Approach as ‘the Approach’ or by the acronym ‘CA’.

2 See Jamieson (2003), chapters 11 and 12, and Rachels (1976).

3 A surprisingly rather recent development in animal ethics. The first and only volume, to my knowledge, specifically dedicated to the ethics of captivity and its many forms is Gruen (2014a).

4 I discuss Gruen’s account at length in Delon (2020).

5 Gruen specifies that the captive must be a ‘normally functioning adult’ to avoid the implication that adults with severe cognitive disabilities and children are captive. As I argue elsewhere (Delon 2020), it’s a bullet we can bite.

6 The next two sections borrow from Delon (2018, 2020).

7 Recent evidence suggests that in coyote parents who experience extended contact with humans, habituation leads, through phenotypic plasticity, to the transfer of fearlessness to their offspring over the course of just a couple generations. Each litter of pups was bolder than the previous litter (Schell et al. 2018), both an asset and a liability in risky areas.

8 Another interesting example are the bobcats in the city of Thousand Oaks who, between 2002 and 2005, were ‘cut off from the rest of the population by Route 101’ and as a result ‘suffered from an epidemic of mange’ (especially those whose immune systems had been weakened by eating poisoned rodents). Ironically, the resulting bottleneck may have helped them adapt quickly to the challenge. Genetic fragmentation can, over time, drive evolutionary adaptations (Schilthuizen 2018, 118; cf. Serieys et al. 2015; Riley et al. 2007).

9 1. Life; 2. Bodily Health; 3. Bodily Integrity; 4. Sense, Imagination, and Thought; 5. Emotions; 6. Practical Reason; 7. Affiliation; 8. Other Species; 9. Play; 10. Control over One’s Environment (Nussbaum 2006, 392–401).

10 We could, however, push animals into a low-reproductive form of the relevant functionings in order to make them and their offspring less dependent on human provision. Thanks to anonymous reviewer.

11 This also illustrates the ambivalent effects of corridors, which can break down ‘delicate adaptations’ (Schilthuizen 2018, 237).

12 Nussbaum’s emphasis on dignity also lends itself to a powerful critique of many forms of captivity, especially zoos, aquaria, marine parks and circuses; While improved zoos may be acceptable for certain species (2006, 375–380), Wichert and Nussbaum (2019) think captivity is incompatible with cetaceans’ flourishing and dignity, at least not as we see it in captive facilities such as SeaWorld. It’s less clear, however, whether pervasive captivity runs afoul of dignity. For a discussion of the relation between dignity and captivity, including of Nussbaum’s account, see Gruen (2014b, 2018).

13 Nussbaum writes: ‘The capability approach insists from the start that the elements of life are plural and not single and thus that the core social entitlements are also plural. It would be a grave error to single out any one of the ten to bear the weight of indexing relative social position: all are minimum requirements of a life with dignity and all are distinct in quality’ (2006, 84).

14 Language in this paragraph is indebted to very helpful suggestions by an anonymous referee.

15 Thanks to an anonymous referee for helping me to frame this possibility.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicolas Delon

Nicolas Delon is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at New College of Florida. He specialises animal ethics, with a focus on agency and moral status. His work has been published in journals such as Ethics, Policy & Environment, Philosophical Studies, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and Utilitas, among others. He holds a doctorate in Philosophy from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2014).