Animal Rights and Aboriginal Rights

• Author: Will Kymlicka & Sue Donaldson
• Pages: 159-186

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 

Animal Rights and Aboriginal Rights

Will Kymlicka & Sue Donaldson

A. INTRODUCTION

Animal advocates in Canada are stymied by the relationship between ani-

mal rights (AR) and Aboriginal rights, and have failed to f‌ind a way of

discussing the relationship that is morally coherent and politically viable.

A recent illustration of the challenge took place in St. Catharines, Ontario,

where the Haudenosaunee Council claimed the right to hunt deer in Short

Hills Provincial Park — a park that had prohibited all hunting for decades.

The Haudenosaunee argued that the park falls within their traditional ter-

ritory, and that a treaty (the Albany Deed of ), which they were now

reasserting, guarantees their right to hunt in this territory. Local animal

advocacy groups were deeply split. Niagara Action for Animals protested

the hunt, whereas the Niagara Animal Defense League defended it in the

name of respecting “the autonomy and sovereignty” of Aboriginal peoples

— stating that “honouring treaties means doing so not just when conven-

ient or when it f‌its within our moral framework” — and criticized the pro-

testing animal advocacy groups as racist and colonialist.

 Deed from the Five Nations to the King of their Beaver Hunting Ground ( July )

in Iroquois Indians: A Documentary History, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois

(Reel ), –, online: en.wikisource.org [Albany Deed of ].

 Niagara Animal Defense League, “Statement on Haudenosaunee Hunt at Short

Hills” ( January ), online: NiagraADL.com.

160     

Given the political quagmire that accompanies attempts to address

Aboriginal practices, many animal advocates in Canada simply avoid the

problem, taking no explicit stand on whether or how Aboriginal practi-

ces should be legally regulated, or even the extent to which such practices

should be subject to moral scrutiny. We call this the strategy of avoid-

ance, and will discuss the many good reasons for adopting it. Yet we will

also argue that it is unstable, and that progress on AR requires a strategy

of engagement.

We will begin by sketching the account of AR that we have developed

elsewhere, and how it radically diers from the current status of animals

in Canadian law. We then note the overlap between our account and

traditional Indigenous views of human–animal relations, including the

shared opposition to the instrumentalist and property-based assump-

tions that underlie the current legal framework. On many dimensions,

recent AR theories are much closer to Indigenous perspectives than to the

instrumentalist perspective that def‌ines contemporary Anglo-American

law. Yet important dierences do exist, and some traditional Indigenous

hunting, f‌ishing, trapping, sealing, and whaling practices are unlikely to

pass the strict test that AR theory sets for the justif‌ied killing of sentient

beings. We then consider how animal advocates in Canada try to avoid

this issue, oen by according some form of legal exemption for Aborig-

inal practices. We will argue that this strategy fails to do justice to either

AR convictions or to Indigenous convictions about ethical human-animal

relations. Aer all, Aboriginal peoples do not simply believe that they

have a legal right to hunt deer in Short Hills Provincial Park, but also

consider that this practice is an ethical one, rooted in a fully adequate

conception of the ethics of human-animal relations. We believe that any

attempt to address the ARAboriginal rights nexus will be doomed to re-

criminations and misunderstandings — and to alternating perceptions

of paternalism or racism — until we engage these ethical convictions.

We will outline a strategy of engagement that seeks to unpack the under-

lying assumptions about the ethics of human-animal relationships and to

identify areas of agreement and disagreement, and suggest directions for

constructive dialogue.