Donaldson and Kymlicka have developed their political theory of animal rights as an alternative to the traditional animal rights theory. Due to its one-sided focus on the intrinsic moral status or standing of animals as the sole basis of our moral obligations towards them, the traditional animal rights theory seems unable to resolve a wide range of pressing issues regarding human-animal interactions, and is thereby at least partly to blame for what Donaldson and Kymlicka perceive as the political and intellectual impasse of the animal advocacy movement. To overcome this impasse, they have made an attempt to shift the debate from the field of moral theory to the field of political theory, focusing on the differential obligations that arise from the varied ways that animals are related to human societies and institutions.

In Zoopolis, Donaldson and Kymlicka draw upon the concepts and categories of political theory to illuminate the specific rights and responsibilities we have in our various relationships with animals. They distinguish three types of morally significant human-animal relationships: domesticated animals, such as companion animals and farm animals, should be considered and treated as our co-citizens; wild animals should be recognized as members of separate, sovereign nations, entitled to protection from infringements of their right to self-determination; and, lastly, “liminal” animals, i.e., non-domesticated animals such as rats and raccoons who live among humans, should be designated the status of “denizens”.Footnote 12

Similarities and Dissimilarities with Capabilities Approach

Donaldson and Kymlicka concede that they are sympathetic to Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, and that, at the most abstract level, their own citizenship model could be described in broadly capability terms (2011, 95; 275). Like Nussbaum, they treat animals not just as passive victims of human domination and mere objects of compassion but rather as subjects with a clear capacity for agency. And like Nussbaum, they consequently also challenge the one-sided focus of most accounts of animal ethics on negative rights—“thou shall not kill, use, or keep animals” (id., 254). It is the dominant view within animal ethics that the abolishment of animal exploitation and the liberation of animals from enslavement will ultimately rule out virtually all forms of human-animal interaction—“there should be no human-animal relations” (ibid.). According to Donaldson and Kymlicka, this narrow vision of animal rights is at the root of the impasse of the animal advocacy movement because it may discourage all efforts to find out what non-exploitative relations might look like, and what kind of positive obligations we owe to animals, be they domesticated, wild or liminal.

So there are important similarities between Nussbaum’s capabilities approach and Donaldson and Kymlicka’s political theory of animal rights: both consider animals as moral agents rather than as moral patients, and both aim to complement negative rights with positive rights. But there is also a distinct difference: Nussbaum attaches considerable importance to species membership, whereas Donaldson and Kymlicka focus on community membership, thus taking account of the sociopolitical context of animal justice. They acknowledge that Nussbaum’s species norm of flourishing is probably a reasonable standard for animals living in the wild, but they deny that this norm makes sense with respect to domesticated and liminal animals. Another drawback of the preoccupation with species norms is lack of sensitivity to the associations between species and individual variation within species.

Competence and Risk

According to Donaldson and Kymlicka, the argument that the flourishing of wild animals would be undermined by interfering with wildlife to prevent predation is “perhaps the most important one, but also the least developed” (2011, 165). This “flourishing argument”, as they call it, needs qualification and clarification. Similar to Cripps’ critique of Schlosberg, they argue that it is difficult to see how preventing a deer from being killed by a predator is detrimental to her flourishing. And just like Cripps they invoke the notion of ‘risk’ to address this question. For societies with an interest in self-determination, eliminating the risk of harm or suffering “would involve a terrible curtailment of freedom, including the freedom to fully develop and explore one’s capabilities. Individual action to protect a human child at the moment of harm contributes to her flourishing; collective action to prohibit the actions or processes that create the risk of harm is likely to undermine human flourishing. So, too, with animals” (id., 166).

Donaldson and Kymlicka believe that, when it comes to the daily management of the risks of living in the wild, it is reasonable to assume that wild animals are fully competent in general to address the challenges they face: they have the skills to secure and store food, to find or construct shelter, to care for the young, to cover long distances, to hunt, and also to reduce the risk of predation.Footnote 13 Because wild animals are competent to manage their own affairs, we are not obligated to systematically intervene to end predation or to control natural food cycles. Respect for the sovereignty of wild animals, in fact, rules out this kind of intervention as it would condemn wild animals to a permanent state of dependency.Footnote 14

Positive and Negative Duties

It would, however, be a mistake to think that respect for sovereignty requires a complete hands-off approach with respect to animals in the wild. Donaldson and Kymlicka mention two broad categories of assistance and intervention that do not threaten but may even promote values of autonomy and self-determination: large-scale interventions to prevent or mitigate natural or human-caused disasters, such as deflecting a large meteor on a collision course with a wilderness zone populated by numerous animals, or halting an aggressive new bacterium which is ready to invade and destroy an ecosystem; and small-scale or micro-scale interventions aimed to aid or rescue individual animals in distress, such as saving an animal who has fallen through the ice from drowning or releasing a beached whale to open water.

In addition to these positive duties to aid, assistance, and intervention, there are also important negative duties that derive from the respect for sovereignty we owe animals in the wild. We should never infringe on the rights to their own territory and to autonomy on that territory, which are key components of the principle of sovereignty. These rights impose, first of all, immediate and drastic restrictions on human expansion into wild animal territories and the ongoing fragmentation and destruction of wild animal habitat. They also impose stringent limits on human actions that have harmful impacts beyond the borders of wild animal territories, such as water contamination, air pollution and the various effects of climate change. To avoid such cross-border impacts we will have to reduce our ecological footprint and replace our environmentally destructive behavior and cost-externalizing practices with fair and sustainable ones.

The Limits of a Place-Based Approach

Donaldson and Kymlicka contrast their sovereignty model with the ‘stewardship’ model, often found in environmental science, philosophy and policy. In this model, habitat for wild animals is created in the shape of wild areas such as wildlife refuges, nature reserves, and national parks, where humans enjoy sovereign authority and exercise stewardship over wild animals. The sovereignty model, on the other hand, doesn’t grant humans the right to govern wild animal territory, but is based on the principle that sovereign entities are entitled to the same or similar claims to authority, and should deal with each other on an equal footing. This means that when we humans enter wild animal territory, “we do so not in the role of stewards and managers, but as visitors to foreign lands” (id., 170).

Both models, however, have one thing in common—like the classical stewardship model, the sovereignty model has taken a place-based approach with regard to wild animals. Donaldson and Kymlicka argue for an immediate check on the expansion of human settlement, for giving wild animals back control over their own territories, for returning vast areas of land currently devoted to animal agriculture to wild animals, for re-establishing wildlife corridors and migration routes et cetera. But such a place-based approach seems to fall far short of what presently is really required to maintain or restore wild animals’ autonomy (Sandler 2012).

Hitherto, place-based or in situ conservation is usually given priority over ‘out of place’ or ex situ conservation. The latter is considered to be justified only as a supportive measure to the former. This hierarchical understanding of the relationship between in situ and ex situ conservation reflects the importance of the place of origin—‘wild nature’ (Braverman 2015, 33). This understanding is however increasingly being called into question given today’s ecological challenges that can be summarized under the denominator of the ‘Anthropocene’, the current geological epoch in which human activities are so profound and pervasive that humanity itself has emerged as a global geophysical force, at least as important as natural forces (Keulartz and Bovenkerk 2016).

Blurring Boundaries

Under Anthropocenic conditions many wild populations are no longer viable on their own. Mainly due to habitat fragmentation and habitat loss, there is an ongoing conversion of what originally were continuous populations to so-called ‘metapopulations’: collections of subpopulations, that are spread geographically over patches of habitat. Because these patches are usually small and because the movement of the animals between these patches is restricted for lack of connectivity, an increasing number of subpopulations are declining and are teetering on the edge of extinction. In this situation ex situ conservation has a more prominent role to play and is now regarded as equivalent, rather than subordinate to in situ conservation.

Because it is no longer considered effective to manage wild and captive populations in isolation from one another, practitioners of species conservation therefore increasingly use the so-called One Plan Approach that was officially proposed to the IUCN World Conservation Congress in 2012. The One Plan Approach promotes the interactive exchange of animals between in situ populations (in the wild) and ex situ populations (in captivity) for mutual reinforcement, a management approach that is also referred to as inter situ conservation (Braverman 2014) or pan situ conservation (Minteer and Collins 2013). With animals moving in both directions, the stability and sustainability of wild and captive populations can be greatly enhanced. On the one hand, captive populations can be used for restocking in areas with declining populations or for reintroduction in areas where populations have gone extinct; on the other hand, the demographic and genetic viability of ex situ populations can be boosted by supplying genetic founders from wildlife populations (Byers et al. 2013).

With the One Plan Approach captive populations can be used for the conservation of in situ populations on the brink of extinction as a result of habitat fragmentation. But what if in situ conservation itself is being undermined by that other major environmental stressor—rapid global climate change—, that makes the species’ historic indigenous ranges increasingly inhospitable? And when, moreover, populations are not able to move on their own to other areas with more suitable environmental conditions? A conservation measure that may prevent species that are unable to keep pace with rapid climate change from going extinct is assisted migration or assisted colonization, i.e. the intentional movement of ‘climate refugees’ to new habitats outside their historical range, which they otherwise could not reach (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2008). Whereas inter or pan situ conservation involves the movement of animals from one location to another within the species’ indigenous range, assisted migration or colonization relates to animal translocations outside the species’ indigenous range.Footnote 15

The emergence of these new conservation strategies makes it clear that the distinction between classic in situ (on-site) and ex situ (off-site) conservation is becoming blurred to the point of disappearing entirely. We witness what Braverman (2015, 15) has called a shift “from bifurcation to amalgamation” of in situ and ex situ conservation: the increased development of hybrid approaches, that integrate the wild and the captive. (Pritchard et al. 2011; Redford et al. 2012, 2013; Minteer et al. 2016).

It is clear that with the ongoing blurring of the boundaries between in situ and ex situ conservation, placed-based models such as the classic stewardship model but also Donaldson and Kymlicka’s sovereignty model, are increasingly rendered meaningless. Under Anthropocenic conditions positive interventions can no longer be limited to providing assistance in the event of natural or human-caused disasters, or to micro-level individual acts of compassion only. Apart from these isolated, incidental cases, Donaldson and Kymlicka believe that we should leave nature to its own devices—“in general, a hands-off principle towards wild animals is a sound one” (2011, 185). But that ship seems to have sailed already.Footnote 16 Ironically or not, but today we are morally obligated to systematically interfere with wildlife, not to prevent predation, as utilitarians in particular would have it, but to assist endangered species in maintaining and improving their competences to survive on their own in the wild, including the skills to hunt and to avoid predators, something which is already taking place on the ground.

Learning to Hunt and to Avoid Predators

Especially zoo-based expertise in sustaining small but demographically and genetically sound populations of captive animals has been proven useful for the conservation of small and declining populations in the wild. Zoo-based skills in animal handling may, moreover, be helpful at many of the main stages of animal translocations, from capture, transport, and captive breeding, to pre-release training (Fa et al. 2011, 210). The later is particularly important because captive animals may lack the behavioral competences needed for survival in the wild, and may thus compromise the ability of captive populations to contribute to the recovery of wild populations. Pre-release training is aimed at maintaining or developing the skills that may have been lost in captivity such as orientation and navigation, finding or building suitable nest sites, hunting and foraging behavior, and predator avoidance (Earnhardt 2010; McPhee and Carlstead 2010).

Predator avoidance training is vital to the success of conservation efforts that rely on captive animals because a substantial number of post-release deaths are due to predators. It usually consists of exposure to live predators or to predator models paired with some aversive or stressful stimulus such as an alarm signal. Given that many animals are so-called ‘mesopredators’, i.e. animals which both predate and are predated upon, antipredator training has often to be combined with developing predatory skills. A case in point is the black-footed ferret.

In 1986, the population of ferrets had diminished to a mere 18 individuals, but thanks to a captive breeding program, between 500 and 800 now roam the prairie of the US state of Wyoming. The program was not, however, entirely plain sailing. When the kits were released they were far too blasé to make themselves scarce when predators such as eagles, coyotes and badgers arrived on the scene. The researchers tried to resolve this problem by building a mock predator. They attached wheels to a stuffed badger, which would win fame as RoboBadger. The only way the ferrets could escape RoboBadger was to find a burrow. The researchers then tried to increase the ferrets’ aversion to RoboBadger by firing rubber bands at them. (McCarthy 2004, 196/7).Footnote 17

But the ferrets have not only to learn how to avoid predators, but also how to locate and kill prairie dogs which make up between 65 to 90 percent of their diet. In addition, they have to learn how to invade and inhabit prairie dogs burrows because they do not build their own burrows. Their preconditioning period lasts for 30 days. During that time the ferrets ideally kill four prairie dogs and live in an actual prairie dog burrow system. The survival rate of these animals is about ten times higher than animals released straight out of the cage (Braverman 2015, 119–123).Footnote 18