I seem to have stirred up some unintended consternation -- due, it seems,
to a poor choice of words. By "psychic" I did not intend to say that
animals have interior lives like ours. I have no idea how one would go
about even determining that question -- it sounds rather like a SciFi
parody ("Do Whales Dreams of Yellow Krill?").

My point was simpler -- that there is an anthropocentric perspective that
denies animals any ability to plan, learn, emote, etc. Descartes offers
this perspective in its most distilled form. But there is something of
that perspective in the reductionist excesses of some science. (Present
company -- if one has "company" in hyperspace -- excepted.) Market
economics offers a similar reductionist view of human activities.

This perspective is implicit in the line between humans and "nature."
>From a legal perspective, humans have rights and nature doesn't. More
bluntly, people count; nature doesn't. As Chris Stone titled his book
<Should Trees Have Standing?>

Lest I be mistaken for an animal rights activist -- I would happily
volunteer to shoot feral cats and cowbirds. It is like Oppenheimer's
famous story of witnessing the explosion of the first atomic bomb at
Alamogordo and remembering the line from the <Bhagavad-Gita>: "I am
become death, the shatterer of worlds." Humans have assumed the power to
destroy and thus have some responsibility to protect -- and that includes
killing feral animals.

It has occurred to me in typing this rambling response that part of the
difficulty is the difference in frames of reference: I am currently
writing a legal treatise on the Endangered Species Act. My focus thus
has been: how to provide legal protection for biodiversity? The
Anglo-American legal system is part of the problem: for example, it accords
property rights great importance but gives little credence to the
social/biodiversity obligations that should accompany property
ownership. Within such a system, Descartes is far from dead -- he is
indeed the dominant paradigm.

But then this is simply another example of why the law is maladaptive.


Dale Goble
U of Idaho
College of Law