Multiple studies now point towards the idea that animals have language and speak to each other, sometimes in great detail. In this interview, University of Amsterdam philosopher, Eva Meijer, argues we should include animals and other species as political actors, with voices, in a democratic community. Drawing on Wittgenstein, political philosophy and philosophy of language, Meijer argues for the need to continue expanding our notion of politics to include animals, plants, and other natural entities on moral grounds and in order to make better decisions in an age threatened by climate disaster.

We are here to discuss your recent book, which has a proposal for an experimental new way of organizing humans and other species for politics. Could you briefly explain what this proposal, which you call a multispecies assembly, is and how you developed it?

The idea of a multispecies assembly comes from different directions. On the one hand, it recognizes that we as humans need to rethink democracy in order to move forward in a time of climate crisis and democratic threats; and on the other, it recognizes the abundance of new research on non-human animal capacities, but also plant capacities, and the forms of interdependence between humans and what is often called the natural world, other living beings, now and in the future.

Multispecies assemblies are spaces for decision-making in which different species that live in a certain place come together and discuss questions of common importance. Sometimes directly, in processes of question and response, similar to how humans speak to one another; and sometimes much more indirectly, through interventions in the landscape, learning processes between different species, and political experiments.

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Multispecies assemblies can in our times function as spaces for getting to know more-than-humans better and developing forms of interaction that are respectful and holistic. But they can perhaps also function as a form of government in shared multispecies communities.

I think a lot about the connections between language and politics. Due to the influence of social media on political discussion and debate, as well as the form our news media takes, many humans speak in monologues – they have one-sided conversations by themselves that follow only one kind of logic.

This is very problematic because we share the world with many others who have different views from us, different lives, different perspectives. So I have been thinking a lot about how to include these different perspectives and voices into another kind of democratic model.

When I was researching this I soon encountered the model of the assembly. There’s currently a lot of attention on Citizens’ Assemblies. These are models for doing democracy where a representative group of citizens is brought together, informed and educated about the question they will discuss, and then enters a process of decision-making. Citizens Assemblies are, for example, used in decision-making on the climate crisis. Political parties, in contrast, often do not think past four-year election cycles and are tied to the interests of the group that they represent. Citizens Assemblies come up with better solutions. The assembly, by the way, is an ancient model of political decision-making, used by the ancient Greeks and also different non-Western cultures for collective decision-making about their community.

But all the existing models of Assembly have a problem, and that is that only humans have the right to speak in them. Now you might think: well of course only humans have the right to speak because we are in human societies and they are making decisions regarding these human societies. But we share the world with many non-human beings: for example, non-human animals, plants, and natural entities (which are viewed as beings in certain traditions).

What is the importance of language in discussions on animal politics?

I’m a political philosopher who focuses on more-than-human justice and multispecies relations. In the past years I’ve been looking at animal languages, and also plant languages and social lives. This has dramatically altered the way I view the linguistic capacities of other beings and also the way I view society and the world.

I should probably give you some examples. Many humans think it’s a fantastical idea that we can speak, for example, with non-human animals. But there’s actually a lot of research that shows that human beings are not the only beings in the world that speak. One non-human animal language that has been studied extensively is that of the prairie dog. Prairie dogs are ground squirrels who live in North America, and their language has been studied in detail over the past 25 years by a biologist called Con Slobodchikoff. He discovered that prairie dogs describe humans that enter their habitat in detail. When they walk onto their habitat, the prairie dogs tell each other in very short alarm codes that there’s a human entering their territory, the size of the human, the speed with which they approach, the color of their t-shirt (if it’s yellow or blue), if they’re carrying something like an umbrella or a gun.

Prairie dogs are not the only animals that speak about humans. A very interesting example is that chickens that live with humans give them names. Chickens have many vocalizations and they speak to their chicks when they are still in their eggs. When they live with multiple humans, they also sometimes develop special sounds for these humans that function as names. And there are many more non-human animals that use names. Dolphins utilize signature whistles; parrots also use names; bats use names. There are scientists that think bats like to gossip because they argue a lot, and when the bat they are arguing with flies away, you can hear them speak about the bat for a very long time.

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This is funny and interesting research. It shows us a lot about the inner and social lives of other animals. But these studies also indicate that there is more going on behind the surface than we think. Because when many humans, especially in Western parts of the world, see other animals, they perceive them as mute. But they are actually not. And of course this is not the sole reason that we should take them into account morally, because the fact that they are sentient, that they have their own experiences that matter to them, and lives that matter to them, is enough for that. But it is important democratically. Because our societies are not separate: humans determine the lives of other animals and more-than-human beings in great detail, sometimes very directly as in the case of domesticated animals like dogs, or animals in intensive farming like pigs and chickens, and also in the case of wild animals because humans encroach into their habitat, they pollute the seas and land areas. Our lives are very thoroughly intertwined.

Why do you believe the model of democracy and assemblies is the most appropriate and necessary one for more-than-human species? For instance, wouldn’t a kind of custodianship be sufficient, one in which respect and an understanding of our entanglement with nature plays a central role? Like the relationship we have with an infant, who we are unable to communicate with at the same level we can with each other.

There are three reasons why I think this is important. The first reason is that when we as humans decide what is right for other beings, we repeat anthropocentrism, or the idea that humans are special animals and the standard to which other animals should be measured. This is a problematic form of supremacy. From a social justice perspective, anthropocentrism does not just inform our relation with other animals, but also with other humans. Many scholars now speak of hierarchical anthropocentrism in which some humans, like those who are white, male, and so on, are seen as superior to other humans. But also, from a pragmatic perspective, anthropocentrism is problematic because we humans don’t really know what we’re doing. We have made quite a mess of ecosystems, leading to a loss of biodiversity, extinction of species, global warming, and so on.

The second reason is that other beings have voices and it’s paternalistic to speak for them. I think that when it comes to humans, we are getting much better at recognizing how power structures inform our attitudes towards each other, as well as the importance of humans speaking for themselves, for example when they are neuro-diverse or belong to a historically marginalized group. There is power and strength, and equality, in the idea that we have a right to express our truth about life.

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[Wittgenstein] writes that if you enter a human community with a fully different set of rules and habits and ways of life, you can have a dictionary, but you would still not really understand them.

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And the third reason has to do with what we know, or the basis on which we would make decisions for other animals, plants, and other species as we have until now. Our research has been colored by anthropocentrism and this has led to a selective view of what other beings are capable of and what is good for them. We don’t know a lot about how other beings want to live their life because we have not begun asking them. In fact, our actions and energy have been aimed very much at dominating others. And in order to create other forms of knowledge – because the multispecies assembly model is not just a democratic model but a model for knowledge creation – we need to engage differently with other species.

This is increasingly recognized in scientific approaches towards the inner lives of animals. For a long time, animals’ expressions, forms of community, and general ways of being were always researched in relation to how much they resembled humans. But for many non-human animals, this paints a distorted picture. Take language research as an example, which became very popular in the 1940s and ‘50s. This research mainly consisted in researchers trying to speak to non-human animals in human language. They tried this, for instance, with chimpanzees and bonobos, but also dolphins and parrots. But their physical makeup does not allow them to speak in human words. Many researchers are now more aware of this and try to study other species on their own terms, being more flexible in what they understand to be meaningful cognition, emotion, language, and cultures.

I think this is a very important movement and one that should not only take place in science, but also in political life. Because political life is how we organize our societies and determine what is just and who has a right to what. And it’s very problematic to determine as humans what is just for other beings.

What do you think of this quote from Wittgenstein, who claims that if a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand it. Because it’s not just our means of communication, but also our lived experience that is so fundamentally different from it. Aren’t you afraid that in our communication with other species there’s a lot of presumption of comprehension?

That is definitely something to be aware of. It’s important to keep checking in in different ways whether you are on the right track.

Regarding the Wittgenstein quote, in the passages before he writes it, he discusses human communities that he doesn’t understand. He writes that if you enter a human community with a fully different set of rules and habits and ways of life, you can have a dictionary, but you would still not really understand them. And then comes the sentence, if the lion could speak, we would not really understand the lion.

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The first step to creating more just relations with other beings is to recognize the relations that are already there.

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Throughout the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein mentions dogs a couple of times as examples for when multispecies knowledge or understanding is possible or already exists. I think it’s very important to take into account the social relations that already exist between humans and other animals. We always already live in multispecies communities, whether we recognize it or not. For those of us in Europe it’s sometimes easy to forget it, especially in big cities where we are more attuned to other humans and human practices. Cities are obviously not only human environments, but we humans get confused about this. 

The first step to creating more just relations with other beings is to recognize the relations that are already there. We have this responsibility as humans because we are so dominant, and also to ensure our own survival and that of those who will come after us in the future.

We don’t tend to think of animals on the level of social relations. We are used to taking the rights and obligations of social groups seriously only when it comes to humans. Animal philosophers are now, however, also looking at the category of social groups, for instance discussing the rights of animals who are workers, or looking at forms of oppression of certain groups of animals like farmed animals, and trying to articulate human obligations towards these specific groups.

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There’s a great potential not just in story-telling, but also in language more generally to create a bridge to the world of others.

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You are using language such as “oppression,” “assembly,” “right to be heard.” Yet at one point in your book, you say, referencing the rights for nature movement, that “rights are a human concept.” And I wonder, if we don’t want to be paternalistic, isn’t there something dangerous in applying our concepts to other species and assuming they want them? Democracy is not even a pan-human concept but a Western one, especially the form with assemblies and representatives. And anyway, are ants democratic if they have a queen ant? Might they not prefer a different model?

That’s a lovely question because it’s not actually just a question about paternalism and power relations, but one on the meaning of concepts and the way language works and we as humans make sense of the world. I work as a philosopher, but also as a novelist and poet, so I really love to think about language and how we can use human language to show the world differently. I think this is something we are used to in relation to art and poetry, which reflect our reality but in a different way, allowing the spectator, reader, listener to encounter it differently.

There’s a great potential not just in story-telling, but also in language more generally to create a bridge to the world of others. The political language that I am using wants to do precisely that: describe the relationships between humans and other animals differently by using concepts normally reserved to human relations. These are obviously not going to be exactly the same relations.

Wittgenstein writes that the clothing of our language makes everything alike. So concepts confuse us a bit, because when there’s a word called love, we think, oh that’s love, love is one thing. But when you live a bit longer, you learn that there are many kinds of love: many kinds of romantic love, of friendship love, of love between humans and other animals. When I think about the love between me and my dog-companion Doris, that is yet another kind of love for me, and I think probably for her. We are never saying that things are completely the same, but yet concepts gesture in a certain direction and can clarify aspects of reality. This is also why we need pluralism in our thinking, because we need to shine light on different aspects of reality to get a better feel and navigate better. That is one of the jobs of philosophy.

To return to your question, it’s important to not impose our systems, forms of decision-making, and forms of political organization on others. It could very well be that once we enter more respectful forms of political communication and relation with other animals and beings, they will choose to not want to be a part of our communities. But it could also be that non-human animals who are now afraid of humans, like deer for example, will not be afraid anymore and come closer. So the future is a question mark.

I see the model of the multispecies assembly as trying to take into account the agency of others in how we move forward. It’s meant to be a step forward in a larger process, not the final answer to the problems we are facing, or the final statement on multispecies justice.

Let’s look at this idea of non-human animals choosing to leave a community. Many would see animals, and even more other species, as responding more to instinct or environmental factors than choice. Why do you defend the notions of agency and choice as essential?

When you look into the history of human thought, you find that the concept of instinct as we know it now, as something opposed to intelligence, is actually quite recent. Instinct became a popular concept when Christianity began to grow in Europe, and it began to be contrasted with intelligence. Before that, there wasn’t such a strict separation. This is just a very small example of a linguistic intervention that colors our worldview.

Subsequently, there has been a lot of research into instinctual impulses in non-human animals, reinforcing the idea that they act more on instinct than humans. Now in moral psychology and fields of study like biology and ethology there’s a very mixed view of the role of instinct and intelligence in humans and other animals. Some of our behavior is innate and other things are learned, and this is equally true for many different species.

The idea that animals only act upon instinct has been challenged from so many different directions by now that you can’t really defend it anymore. But it’s an ongoing and open-ended discussion. For example, when it comes to plant cognition and the ways that plants navigate the world, perhaps make choices, or are aware. All of these concepts do not just refer to a neutral truth outside of us, but they are also a way of interpreting the world.

So, if I understand correctly, ascribing desires to, for instance, plants or rivers, instead of just interests or needs, is an almost poetic intervention in how we see them and their place in the world?

Yes, definitely. Many non-Western traditions of thought and practice like indigenous traditions in different parts of the world, including Maori thought and aboriginal thought, but also Daoist thought, begin from an ontology where human beings are part of a larger structure or system where many different beings express themselves and coexist in a fundamentally different way from our current European ontology.

It’s also a starting point for new discussions. Because the questions we ask of others will determine the answers they give. Vinciane Despret, a Belgian philosopher who studies ethologists, wrote the book What would animals say if we asked the right questions?, and I think this is a very important question to keep in mind.

It’s also important to keep in mind that there are many different kinds of differences. On the one hand, it matters that we recognize the agency of others; but on the other, different kinds of agency matter differently. In the model of the multispecies assembly, it’s important that many non-human animals can speak for themselves, such as domesticated animals who have experience with humans and are not too afraid of them. But not all.

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A good rule of thumb is to replace the word for the animal in question with a human or a human group, and then see if it’s still respectful.

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The agency of plants, for instance, functions differently because they are rooted in one place and have developed other mechanisms of dealing with their environment. There’s currently a lot of discussion about the question of whether or not plants are sentient, if they have experiences. This is, of course, at heart a philosophical discussion: what does it mean to have an experience? Do you need a brain for it, a central nervous system? In the case of animals, we know that some don’t have a central brain, but one spread throughout different regions of the body. And when it comes to rivers, mountains, and forests, these questions function in yet another way. So it’s very important when we think about how to relate to others to consider what we know about their capacities, what we want to find out, and what we need to find out.

There’s a strong tendency in humans to want to find out everything about the world. I understand because the world is a miraculous place, and everything becomes much richer if you see many things and map or understand them. But this mapping or understanding is sometimes also oppressive. So I’m also not in favor of communicating with everybody all the time. Others may not want anything to do with us and that’s totally fine. Politeness should also be part of the project.

Could you provide an example of a multispecies assembly in practice?

Right now working on a very small multispecies assembly with an art collective I’m part of called the Multispecies Collective. We created a fountain in a dry place next to an art space and we are in the middle of negotiating with birds and insects about what they want the fountain to look like; we’re also having conversations about water justice with the other humans and beings living next to the art space. This is a very small experiment.

A more robust example is VINE sanctuary, which is a sanctuary with many animals who either escaped from intensive farming or were rescued by humans. The way the community is organized, the day-to-day routines, and even the processes of decision-making are very much based on the agency of the non-human beings. They take on different roles in the community. They find jobs for themselves. There are, for example, cows that greet newcomers: they come out to meet trucks coming in and help them settle in. There are roosters, many which were rehabilitated from cock fighting places and practices. The roosters will warn others when there’s, for example, a predator coming, and then the dogs and perhaps others will scare them away. The humans that work there and are also part of the community have developed many different practices for consulting the other animals when decisions need to be made. So they have a rule that they only make decisions about them when they are actually with them. In addition, after a certain amount of time, habits and a sort of shared cultural awareness come into being. There are for example cows who are the matriarchs of the group and actually make a lot of the decisions. And the community has a lot of rituals and habits as well. For example, in the morning, the birds sing, and the chickens and everybody joins in, and sometimes the wild turkeys who live close by also come and join in for the morning choir.

Lovely! But when it comes to decision-making, aren’t expediency and trade-offs necessary? What about those decisions that may need to be taken faster and not in a fully consensual manner – because if every single voice were included the discussions would be truly endless?

This is something that will need to evolve in practice. But what you say matters a lot. In getting to know other beings, the process is really important. This is our job now, as humans: to begin these processes and to learn a different attitude. Not individually, but ideally as societies. But given the state of the world and the existing political practices and institutions, we need work in different directions. We need activism, we need swift decision-making when it comes to the climate, and we need to curb the power of big companies. And we need these kinds of experiments to know what to move towards, to find out what other beings want from us, and to learn how to live better with others. That is the pragmatic answer.

Perhaps when we move to more equal societies that include humans and non-humans, and when we learn to live better with the land and all the others on it, there won’t be a need for that kind of swift decision-making as often as there is now. Sometimes humans may need to intervene, but at other times other animals may need to intervene.

I was sick with long Covid for two years. I was very ill and very alone and couch-bound. And my great support and caretaker at that moment was my dog companion Doris, because it was too hard to interact with human beings. There’s a great lack of care in Dutch society for humans who have this disease. We often think of care as something that humans do for other animals. But there are different forms of support and care and decision-making that matter at different points in time. And thankfully for me, there was the care of Doris when I needed someone.

In terms of the potential transition towards a more multispecies society. One difficulty is the way animals are already enmeshed with culture. You mentioned cockfighting, for instance. There are many respectful forms of co-living with animals that even involve killing them and are central to other cultures’ way of life. How do you delineate respect in those cases, in which treatment towards animals is not always pure or involves a kind of violence?

A good rule of thumb is to replace the word for the animal in question with a human or a human group, and then see if it’s still respectful. Because many humans are speciesists. They regard species differently, they give them different values. This is not something that we are born with. Research shows that human children don’t make the same classifications about moral value as adults in the same community. Children will see the value of dogs and humans and pigs as similar. This gradually changes when they are around 11-12 years old, and then they begin to make distinctions and categorizations: these are the animals that we eat, these are the ones that are our companions, these are those that we like to look at in the wild. This is cultural. It’s the same as with other forms of discrimination, like racism, sexism, or ableism.

New knowledge should make us reconsider our cultural views. You see this with religious practices as well. Many religious traditions have been similar for a very long time. But our insights on other beings – humans, women, other animals, etc. – have changed. Our world has changed a lot, both in terms of practices, because we now have intensive farming for example, and also in terms of morality, scope of justice, and so on.

These are conversations we need to be having in our societies and cultures. In these conversations it matters a lot not to be speciesists and to simply discriminate on the basis of species. Because no one is responsible for the species they are born into.

What would you say to someone who is sympathetic to your vision but believes we should prioritize first the terrible afflictions affecting humans?

That goes to the heart of it. Because I think it’s the same thing. In order to deal with vulnerability in other species or humans, we cannot be enacting violence towards any others. This is true for animal activists who are racist for example. It’s all part of the same structure of justice. This is why the concept of hierarchical anthropocentrism is important, because animality (having an animal nature or character) is not separate from other forms of oppression, and in fact often plays a role in vilifying others – for instance, when they are compared to animals to degrade them. Also, when it comes to poverty and marginalized human communities, they suffer more from the degradation of ecosystems, pollution, and so on. So different forms of oppression are really intertwined on many, many levels.

Do you have a utopic end goal in sight?

I think if we actually start takings others seriously democratically, which we should do for reasons of justice, it is only going to make matters more difficult. Especially at the start. It will ask for quite large changes in our society. I mentioned anthropocentrism, but capitalism is also a big factor in how certain humans and the structures under which we live routinely use others for profit. But to interact with others who are different from us we will also need to make an effort. This is something we need to learn though, also in relation to humans who are different.

In terms of a utopian vision: I don’t think that’s up to me. For me personally, it matters a lot to be a decent being for others, for humans and also other animals. Of course we should all go vegan as well. But in the end, the shapes of our society will depend on what the others want from and with us, and I think that’s a very hopeful idea that we can learn from.