Animal Labour
For scholars who specialize in animal labour, those rights and institutions include the right to remuneration, safe working conditions, retirement, medical care, and collective bargaining (Cochrane 2016). These rights flow quite naturally from the concept of animal labour and help us envision more just working relations with animals, but are they sufficient to ensure work is a place of happiness and meaning for animals? In the case of human workers, we claim to prevent their exploitation by acknowledging their right to freely choose their work and the concomitant prohibition of forced labour. Does the right to self-determination form part of the emancipatory project of ‘animal labour’, too? Should animals be able to decide whether they want to work or not, or what type of work they want to do? These questions form the centre of the first part of this chapter. In the second part, the author explains how animals’ right to self-determination could be secured at work, examining different models of dissent, assent, and consent and the best way to design these to secure animals’ agency, both in theory and practice.