The Dog and his Philosopher: A Call for Autonomy and Animal Rights - Softcover

Balluch, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3744896420 ISBN 13: 9783744896429

Publisher: Books on Demand, 2017

Synopsis

The dog "Kuksi" lives together with his human friend Martin Balluch on an equal footing. Especially on their long excursions into the wild, they can only survive if they communicate, cooperate and help each other. Indeed, Kuksi turns out to be someone, not something, who is acting responsibly and with reason. These experiences, recounted at the beginning of the book, are supported by findings in behavioural science and ethology, detailed in the following chapters. It leads the author, a learnt philosopher, to conclude that his dog friend must be considered as a person with free will, over and above any genetic drive and operant conditioning. Usually, the ethics of animal welfare and even animal rights are supported by arguments based on the capacity to suffer. In his book "The Dog and His Philosopher", the author Martin Balluch uses a different approach. He observes that even if animals are considered capable of suffering, as in animal welfare laws, they are not considered as self-aware beings with their own view of the world, wanting to run their lives in their own way. In other words, beings with their own will to autonomy. Using his experiences with his dog friend Kuksi, he claims that dogs, and hence other sufficiently similar animals, must be seen as beings with reason in the sense of Immanuel Kant, a central philosopher of the enlightenment, on whose work the idea of fundamental human rights as a means to protecting human freedom is based. Reformulating Kant with an evolutionary understanding of reason, the author concludes that nonhuman animals are also capable of what Kant considers freedom and autonomy, and hence must be protected by rights too.

About this title

About the Author

Martin Balluch has started his activism in 1979, when he participated in the campaign to get nuclear power stations banned in Austria. He was arrested for the first time in 1979 while occupying the meadows outside the imperial palace in Vienna. Since then, more than 25 arrests have followed. In 1985, he started his first animal rights group at the University of Vienna. For the last 20 years he has been campaigning with the organisation VGT (Association Against Animal Factories) to achieve an impressive long list of law reforms and bans, amongst them bans of fur farming, wild animal circuses, battery farms, vivisection on apes, sow stalls, caging of rabbits and breeding of wild fowl to be hunted and shot. In 2008, he spent 105 days in prison and then 14 months on trial for charges of leading a criminal organisation in animal rights. After 3 years, he was found not guilty on all accounts because of proven innocence. The latest of his victories was a national ban on hunting enclosures in Austria. For that he is again on trial on different charges, ranging from taping police officers to fly posting and insulting rich huntsmen with his campaigning style.

Edition details

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3744896420
• ISBN 13: 9783744896429
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 202