Animals and Democracy

ANIDE will offer the first study on whether embodied expression can have a significant role in sustaining, or holding together, the ‘fabric’ (the social norms, values and practices) of democratic communities. It will then explore how these embodied forms of expression can be taken up by political institutions. This is crucial because forming more inclusive democracies requires understanding both ‘who’ can sustain democracies’ fabric, and ‘how’. To this end, ANIDE will: (1) provide a theoretical model to identify the elements needed to sustain the fabric of democratic communities and participate in our shared social life; (2) conduct fieldwork to assess whether domesticated animals (DAs) possess those relevant capacities to sustain the fabric; and (3) study the concrete political mechanisms and processes, if any, that may enable DAs to effectively participate in shaping norms. There has been increasing scientific evidence of the remarkable communicative powers of animals: from cows’ greetings to dogs’ use of words through soundboards. This has been combined with related—but separate—debates about whether DAs can exercise forms of political communication that our institutions should pay heed to. In addition, feminist and disability studies scholars have argued that inclusive democracies require institutions to be responsive to preferences that may not be expressed linguistically, such as embodied expressions. But as yet these literatures have not been synthesised into a comprehensive framework to study how embodied forms of communication can maintain democratic communities (1). Further, we do not have the empirical evidence to explore whether DAs have the capacities to engage in practices and communications that sustain—and thus should be taken up by—our democratic communities (2, 3). These are the gaps in the literature that ANIDE will fill.