When the butcher calls the hunter foul,and the muddied politics which follow: speciesism and the EU opposition to the Swedish wolf hunt

Abstract

Rarely does the death of animals cause conflict between governments. However, the killing of some animals, such as seals, wolves, and other exotic wildlife, can cause heated conflict over whether the act of killing is itself justifiable. This paper provides an overview of a recent disagreement along these lines: between the EU and Sweden over the management of wolves. It juxtaposes the recent politicalization of the wolf hunt with an overview of two very different moral frameworks that humans use to conceive of the value of animals. This paper argues that these two moral frameworks share in employing a human-centrism which consequently restricts how the issue of justice can be introduced into policy discussions regarding the treatment of animals. However, the primary assertion made here is that while these two frameworks are constituted by speciesism, they represent two different positions which as is illustrated by the debate surrounding the justifiability of the wolf hunt, provide very different points to which questions of justice are truncated or introduced. Therefore, the assertion made in this paper is that the conflict between the EU and Sweden, over the justifiability of the wolf hunt stems from competing speciesist positions.     

The case for a victimology of nonhuman animal harms

For the last twenty years ‘victimology’, the study of crime victims and victimisation has developed markedly. Like its ‘parent’ discipline of criminology, however, very little work has been done in this field around the notion of environmental victimisation. Like criminology itself, victimology has been almost exclusively anthropocentric in its outlook and indeed even more recent discussions of environmental victims – prompted by the development of green criminology – have failed to consider in any depth the victimisation of nonhuman animals. In this paper, we examine the shortfall in provision for and discussions of nonhuman animal victims with reference to Christie’s notion of the ‘ideal victim’ and Boutellier’s concept of the ‘victimalization of morality’. We argue that as victimology has increasingly embraced concepts of victimisation based on ‘social harms’ rather than strict legalistic categorises, its rejection of nonhuman victims from the ambit of study is no longer conceptually or philosophically justified.