What’s Not to Love? The Antipolitics and Global Animal Welfare

In May 2021, the UK government pledged to put animal sentience at the heart of government policy. The strategy’s stated purpose is to improve standards and eradicate cruel practices for animals both domestically and internationally. The Action Plan for Animal Welfare and other initiatives from the Global North to protect biodiversity outside its borders warrant critical scrutiny. This chapter examines the moral assumptions embedded in the Action Plan for Animal Welfare and the skewed – but not unfamiliar – power relations invoked by imposing northern-centric rules on the management of animals everywhere. Bourdieu’s (984) concept of habitus demonstrate that an appeal to animal rights and welfare is not a superior, objective ethical standpoint, but rather, it is an expression of cultural taste and the advancement of subjective aesthetic sensibilities. Imbuing animal welfare with absolute moral righteousness is analyzed as a type of antipolitics which obscures the Plan’s geopolitical overreaches. A vignette focusing on elephant management in Southern Africa highlights the social, cultural, political, economic, and ecological risks that ensue when powerful actors in the North impose idiosyncratic values on human-nature relations in the South. These impositions contradict decades of progressive conservation management philosophy and have negative practical consequences for local people in the South. Yet, alternative and endemic human-nature relations prevail in Southern Africa, despite their assiduous suppression by northern animal rights activists. Such relations remain embedded in concepts like sustainable use, community-based natural resource management, and environmental justice. A practical case in the South shows that “either-or” framings of wildlife management options (moral/immoral, preserve/utilize, consumptive/nonconsumptive) must be challenged and that polarizing viewpoints need not be in eternal opposition to each other.