Liminal animals are animals that live around people or in human built environments, but are not domesticated (or formerly domesticated). Examples include mice, rats, pigeons, foxes, raccoons, and coyotes, when they live in urban or suburban environments. Liminal animals do not fit neatly into the norms of consideration and treatment that have been developed for companion animals, wild animals, working animals, or agricultural animals. This project aims to develop an ethic for liminal animals – i.e. frameworks for and approaches to ethical evaluation for cases involving liminal animals.
Project Outputs
Abstract: Historically, conservation has focused on species, ecological communities, systems and processes, rather than on individual animals. Even among advocates for compassionate conservation, the focus on animal welfare or animal rights only relates to conservation activities. However, in recent years the idea of managing ecosystems primarily to improve wild animal welfare has been gaining traction among animal ethicists and animal welfare researchers. Managing ecosystems for animal welfare is generally antithetical to management to support ecological and evolutionary processes, since essential features of those processes, such as predation, privation and competition, are sources of animal suffering. Our aim in this paper is not to defend the proposal that ecosystem management should focus primarily on improving wild animal welfare. It is, rather, to situate this proposal in relation to concerns about wild animal welfare expressed by the public and conservation biologists; to connect it to the rise of subjectivist theories of animal welfare; to introduce the ethical arguments used to support elevating the importance of individual wild animals; to explain the advocacy context; to outline potential implications for conservation; and to review critiques of taking a wild animal welfare focus in ecosystem management.
Affairs Quarterly 31 (3):231-254. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44732794
