Interspecies Encounters and the Political Turn: From Dialogues to Deliberation

In her chapter, Eva Meijer investigates whether a deliberative model of democracy has value for institutionalizing interactions and dialogues between human and nonhuman animals, and for promoting nonhuman animal political voice. Meijer notes how the question of how to translate nonhuman animal agency, and interactions between human and nonhuman animals, to existing political institutions, practices, and structures, has not received much attention. This is unfortunate from the perspective of nonhuman animals and from the perspective of democracy. Meijer therefore investigates the concept of deliberation in an interspecies context in order to bridge the distance between small-scale dialogues between human and nonhuman animals an human political systems. She discusses how deliberation between human and nonhuman animals already takes place and how it can be improved.