Ubuntu in Elephant Communities Assignment

Assignment Task

Abstract

African (Bantu) philosophy conceptualizes morality through ubuntu, which emphasizes the role of the community in producing moral agents. This community is characterized by practices that respond to and value interdependence, such as care, cooperation, and respect for elders and ancestral knowledge. While there have been attributions of morality to nonhuman animals in the interdisciplinary animal morality debate, this debate has focused on Western concepts. We argue that the ubuntu conception of morality as a communal practice applies to some nonhuman animals. African elephant communities are highly cooperative and structured around elders; they alloparent, protect their communities, mourn their dead, and pass on cultural knowledge between generations. Identifying these as important moral practices, ubuntu provides a theoretical framework to expand our ethical concern for elephants to their communities. In practice, this will deepen our understanding of the wrongness of atrocities like culling for population management or trophy hunting.

Introduction

In the 1990s, several African national parks saw a streak of gruesome massacres. For instance, between and Pilanesberg National Park, lost more than white rhinos (Slotow et al, their bodies battered and with deep stab wounds. The unlikely perpetrators turned out to be adolescent male African elephants (henceforth: elephants) who had gone on a killing spree. While this behavior had been unheard of in elephants before, this was also a special generation of elephants in another regard: they were the first to reach adolescence after having been purposefully spared during the large-scale culling of elephants in previous decades (Slotow et al). As infants they witnessed the violent deaths of their mothers, aunts, and older siblings and were often also removed from their wider communities through relocation (Bradshaw and Schore). In effect, they were not only traumatized, but also went on to miss the secondary socialization they would have normally received as youths from older males.

so-called bachelor herds (Poole and Moss; Slotow et al). Left to their own devices, traumatized children turned into ‘delinquent’ teenagers (Slotow and Van Dyk). In hopes of mitigating these unforeseen consequences of culling for population management, older elephant bulls were introduced into these populations, which immediately stopped the rhino killings and regulated aggression among the young elephants (Slotow et al).

According to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), after widely shared objections put a stop to culling in thes (IFAW ), several African countries are revisiting debates about taking up culling for population management again (IFAW Muchinjo ), and some are considering lifting the ban on the international ivory trade (Stiles; IFAW ). The commercial killing of elephants has also been used as a means to generate funds for conservation, rendering elephants into commodities serving a market-based, neoliberal global policy framework applied to biodiversity conservation (Batavia et al.; Hewitson and Sullivan . Welfare-oriented animal ethics has little to say against this. Suffering during killing is usually considered avoidable by implementing ‘humane’ methods, involving ‘appropriate calibre weapons’ targeting ‘clean kill’ spots in the frontal or temporal brain (Slotow et al. ). And the troubling case of traumatized survivors can be easily avoided—by leaving no survivors. Indeed, this has been recommended as a welfare-friendly strategy in conservation guidelines.

1. What is Ubuntu?

1.1 Moral Community in Ubuntu

1.2 Muntu: Moral Agents in Ubuntu

2. Anthropocentrism in Ubuntu

3. Identifying Ubuntu Communities Across Species

3.1 Alloparenting

3.2 Helping Behavior

3.3 Maintaining Relationships in a Wider Community

3.4 Protecting the Community

4. Moral Standing for Elephant Communities

5. Conclusion

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