Research is a core commitment of PAN Works. It directly informs all our efforts at education, outreach and public policy.
Our research is highly interdisciplinary and results in peer-reviewed writing published in leading journals and books. This work is not, however, ‘dead letters’ for academics alone. We translate the insights of our research in into educational and outreach activities with an eye to changing public policy for the better.
Research informs our education efforts in PAN U. There we offer educational content for courses, seminars, trainings, and workshops. PAN U also serve as a platform for the global network of fellows who are part of PAN Works.
Research also impacts our outreach. This involves direct community engagement with the public via social media, popular essays, keynotes and presentations, and our podcast “PAN Thinks.”
Taken altogether, these are the platform from which we campaign for improvements to public policy for the wellbeing of animals. Policy briefings and commentary, legal and legislative testimony, and the convening and facilitation of policy deliberations, are the means by which this is done.
Compassionate Conservation
Compassionate conservation (CC) is a new paradigm of conservation, and PAN Works is a leader in its development. With roots in an integration of animal welfare science, conservation biology, and ethical reasoning, CC stresses the intrinsic moral value and wellbeing of animals as both individuals and communities, and the practical steps people may take in this light. This emphasis has strong and often controversial implications for conservation policy and practice. It challenges notions that lethal control and habitat preservation are the unquestioned manner by which to protect wildlife. And it contests nativist ideas about species cleansing as a pillar of biodiversity. Instead CC informs conservation science with an ethics of care for the entire community of life.
The Compassionate Conservation Delphi is one example of our manifold efforts in CC. The project facilitates a formal dialogue among compassionate conservation experts on the field practices that best promote the wellbeing of wildlife. Structured rounds of questions and responses are analyzed to helps us think through how ethics and science may best inform conservation policy and practice. As represented in the multiple scientific articles arising from this study, we find that compassionate conservation is an ethics-aware theory and practice that seeks the wellbeing of individual animals as well as their communities in over a hundred areas of conservation practice.
Moral Panic
Controversies over human and animal interactions are frequently characterized by moral panics. The extreme rhetoric around cats and wolves in conservation politics are cases in point. These panics cloud our moral and political judgement and generate policies that wrongly harm wild and domesticated animals. This project is an ongoing effort to address such panics, and reframe such debates to emphasis coexistence and wellbeing for the entire community of life.
Moral panics are rooted in often irrational fears that a social or environmental problem is an existential threat. Seen as a crisis requiring an immediate and extreme response, it is often blamed on individuals, communities and species who are profiled as evil. Even real problems are subject to moral panic when their scale or impact is exaggerated. Fanned by moral entrepreneurs in the media, politics, religion and science, moral panics thereby foment a rush to judgment resulting in unwise and unjust actions by a community.
Examples of moral panics include the Salem witch trials in the 1690s, the Red Scare of the mid-twentieth century, and contemporary debates over same-sex marriage and gender identity. Each of these panics is characterized by irrational fears over a fictitious crisis fanned by vested interests seeking to exploit the panic for their own benefit.Moral panics also involve the relationship between people, animals and nature. These panics usually arise over the introduction of novel species, zoonotic threats to public health, claims of economic ruin, or fears over personal safety. Rhetoric around outdoor cats decimating biodiversity, urban wildlife spreading disease, marine mammals denuding the seas of fish, and wolves threatening people and their pets are all examples of animal-related moral panics.
Some moral panics are fictitious and require debunking. Others are rooted in a real if exaggerated problems. In both cases, strict ethical and scientific scrutiny is needed in the development of policy responses grounded in reason and evidence as opposed to fear mongering.
Multispecies Justice
Multispecies justice (MSJ) asks what we owe people, animals and nature as a matter of justice, now and in the future. MSJ parallels the ‘rights of nature’ as the newest discourse in sustainability and nature ethics.
The consistent conceptualization of justice as fairness is indispensable in social and political thinking. This is especially true given the unavoidable tension created by limited resources and the struggle to secure them that pervades the lives of people and animals alike. Yet despite its widespread use in social situations, justice as a moral concept has a long anthropocentric tradition in Western philosophical thought which excludes nonhuman animals from consideration.
Nonetheless, ethical, philosophical and scientific advances in the last centuries have made short work of arguments to exclude animals from the spheres of justice. Today, the view we have of all animals, humans included, is more nuanced and accurate. The weight of our current knowledge highlights a gradient of cognitive, emotional, and physical capabilities, and a diversity of types of rationalities, within and across all animal species. Sentience, sapience, sociality, autonomy and a diverse array of other morally-relevant capabilities are in play, and characterize the needs and relationships that are widespread throughout the animal kingdom and nonhuman world.
Moreover, as humans we are embedded in an inevitable diversity of interacting relationships and have unavoidable responsibilities towards nonhumans. These social and ecological relationships highlight the lack of a purely ‘human community’, promoting instead what Mary Midgley named a ‘mixed-moral community’. Multispecies justice therefore promotes the appropriate consideration of individual nonhuman beings as members of our mixed-moral community through the establishment of baseline duties to others, individually and collectively.
One Health Ethics
One Health is the concept that the health and well-being of people, other animals and nature is interdependent. Drawing from the field of bioethics, it asks us to envision how we ought to live in a world where the optimal health and well-being of humans, animals and the natural world are considered as a goal for a sustainable and just future. This project seeks to map out this vision.
All life on our planet faces wicked problems of our own species’ making. Examples include a warming climate, the collapse of biodiversity, contamination of our oceans, drinking water and air, and emerging infectious diseases. One health spurs us to appreciate the interdependencies of health and wellbeing between and across three domains of moral and scientific concern – people, other animals, and nature.
Yet as it stands today, One Health is applied overwhelmingly for the benefit of people, privileging human health and wellbeing over that of animals and nature. This is particularly true concerning questions about emerging infectious diseases. Yet the ethics and science of nature, society and medicine increasingly appreciates the complex interdependence of living beings in ecological and social systems. One Health needs to keep pace and develop a rigorous multispecies ethic.
Placing Animals
Animal geography explores the intersections between space, place, scale, and time with regards to human-animal relations and nonhuman animals themselves. Where something happens is fundamental to understanding why and how something happens. A geographical perspective provides a contextually based framework for exploring the plurality of ethical opportunities that can promote flourishing across species and with the natural world..
When we consider the variety of relationships we have with nonhuman animals such as dogs, the list might look something like this: dogs are pets, dogs are food, dogs are to be experimented upon, dogs are for protection and/or policing and/or war, dogs are for fighting, dogs are significant in religious practice, dogs are mascots, and dogs are for racing. Dogs are also considered the greatest angels in earthly form, or property of value and ownership, or disgusting and dirty, or evil. How is it we’ve come to have this incredible continuum of relations with this one domesticated species? If we trace the developmental context of each of these relations, what we find is that it comes down to where you are. We cannot understand why we have the relations we do with other species without understanding the geographical context of these relations.
Animal geography’s contribution to helping scholars and society-at-large think through the ethical conundrums we are faced with has been to continually ground us in the places and spaces where these relations occur. This situated ethics perspective helps provide a pathway for proscribing normative positions based on locational complexity rather than abstract arguments or rigid universal doctrines. Animal geography can provide a space for plurality, yet its practitioners must constantly reflect upon themselves as to what ethical biases and blind spots they might be bringing to their research. The result of doing the internal reflection is that animal geographers can become better facilitators of public discourse around ethical choices/options with animal-related issues.
Ethics of Rewilding
Rewilding has grown into a movement for continental-scale conservation, with avid proponents across the globe. Despite its success, rewinding has lost its guiding moral vision. This project seeks to recover the ethical meaning behind the theory and practice of rewilding.
Rewilding is a relatively new paradigm of conservation. Its proponents believe we need to rewild (preserve, conserve and restore) up to half of the earth’s terrestrial and marine habitat to protect biodiversity, fight climate change, and sustain human and other life now and in the future. While the science and need to maintain the earth’s life support systems is certain, ethical justifications for rewilding have increasingly focused on the instrumental benefits to current and future generations of humanity alone
This focus on human benefits betrays the early roots of rewilding. Born out of critiques of human supremacy from animal protection, deep ecology and ecofeminism, the ethics of rewilding ought to concern more than humanity and recognize that we owe a direct moral responsibility to animals and nature.Like all paradigm shifts in society, rewilding is fundamentally rooted in changing values and ethics. Recovering the ethical meaning of rewilding is indispensable to its long-term success, which depends on articulating a compelling moral and political vision that reframes the personal and political.
Key to an ethical vision of rewilding is recognizing that many animals are sentient beings, who should not be reduced to their functional role in ecology or membership in a species. As individuals, their wellbeing counts in rewilding. What we need, and what this project works towards, is a deep rewilding that embraces our ethical responsibilities to people, animals and nature, as both individuals and members of social and ecological communities.
Wildlife Management and Public Values
Part of our Compassionate Conservation Initiative, this PAN Works project seeks to discuss with state and federal wildlife agency personnel, wildlife management academics and students, and policymakers how changing public values toward wildlife conservation and animal wellbeing suggests reforms in wildlife agency purpose, governance, expertise and decision making.
Society wildlife values are shifting from an emphasis on domination and consumption of animals toward placing greater prominence on the intrinsic value of nature, biodiversity conservation, and the social connections between animals and people. This changing ethical landscape, supported by an improved science-based understanding of life, has created challenges for wildlife management agencies.
Most wildlife departments and their governing bodies cling to traditional worldviews and organizational structures focused on the sustained use of animals for human purposes. Despite changing public values, wildlife agencies are understaffed in the social sciences and rarely employ ethicists or apply tools for values assessment. As a result, wildlife agencies continue to prioritize managing a relatively small number of commercially and recreationally important species for the benefit of human use, and consequently, biodiversity conservation and animal wellbeing suffers.
Animals and Sustainability
Two crises of nature imperil our planet — climate change and the collapse of biodiversity. These crises are interconnected, with climate change driving species and ecological damage, and the loss of biodiversity making climate adaptation that much harder. All of this impacts the ecological services that animals and nature provide for themselves as well as humankind. As importantly, it affects the wellbeing of animals as both individuals members of their social and ecological communities.
The underlying driver of these crises is a matter of values — the ethos and practice of human supremacy that generates the rampant exploitation of people, animals and nature. This program addresses the need to change our values and challenge human supremacy so we may coexist with other forms of life. This reflects the true meaning of sustainability, that is, the perpetual preservation of the entire community of life.