About

Animals build structures such as dams, nests and burrows for purposes including shelter and breeding. Many animals also make choices about how and where to build in order to form social bonds, display cultural traditions, or explore their creativity. Despite the agency that animals exercise when they build, and the important role building plays in animals’ lives, animal building activities have received little philosophical or political attention. 

My thesis addresses this gap by establishing building as a distinctive type of agency with ethical and political significance. Destruction of habitats, human building activities, and anti-animal designs such as anti-bird spikes and fences, severely limit animals' opportunities for building. This in turn diminishes the ability of animals to live good lives – determined by their own choices that fulfil their physical, social and emotional needs. In short, the use and construction of environmental space can engender conflicts between species or facilitate co-existence, meaning that animals’ capacity to build generates particular ethical and political demands on humans. My thesis will develop an account of these demands, namely, how animals’ interests in building should be factored into human building practices and political decision-making about environmental use.

The project will establish what counts as a building constructed by an animal agent requiring ethical attention. Using an interest-based theory of rights, I will consider which rights – particularly property rights, privacy rights and rights to self-determination – might attach to animals’ agency as builders. Building on recent scholarship on interspecies deliberative democracy, the thesis will investigate animal buildings as a form of communication between species that could help to give voice to animal interests in political decision-making.