Why that poor woman fed stray dogs
In the winter of 2008, I was in Sofia, Bulgaria. One early morning, under the arcades of a Stalin-era building, I saw an old, poor woman feeding canned pet food to stray dogs. I was troubled.
Troubled because stray dogs in Sofia in the 2000s were nothing like pets. They were aggressive, loud, and dangerous. Why would someone actively support them? And why would she spend a non-negligible amount of money to do so?
At the time, still in the heydays of neoliberalism, I was fresh from universities where I was spoon-fed utilitarianism. In this perspective, none of this old woman’s behavior made any sense.
I recently read Zoopolis, by animal rights scholars Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka. The book is not good by a wide margin. It goes into details to the point of ridicule, for instance when discussing over pages how many hours a day a dog should be allowed to work. And its frequent comparisons between the treatment of animals and chattel slavery or the Holocaust are, at best, distasteful.1
For all its failings, the book provides a great framework to think of animal rights. Instead of attempting to find out what a humane treatment of animals should be, Donaldson and Kymlicka say from the get-go that we should treat them as citizens. Society is not made of humans, they say. It’s made of all animals that partake in it, whether humans, cows, rats or crows (they foresee a special status for wild animals that live outside society). Our institutions should be designed accordingly.
The book is largely utopian, and another of its failings is to consider the liberal democratic order as a timeless given. They wrote it in the late 2000s, when I was at university, so I’ll forgive them that.
Even though they acknowledge that the fight for full citizenship is “the paradigmatic form of political action”,2 they don’t explore at all how seeing animals as co-citizens plays a role in political struggles. However, for readers of 2026, it is the most relevant part of their theory.
Which brings me back to that old woman in Sofia. Seeing stray dogs as citizens changes the meaning of her action. Stray dogs, like rats, are seen as a nuisance by most humans, especially the most powerful ones. They are a problem to be solved, and the solution always involves massacre, from Paris in the 20th century to Sofia in the 21st.
Feeding stray dogs as living objects is a hobby. In this perspective, perhaps she was attempting to soothe her solitude, hoping to see a flicker of gratitude in their canine eyes. But feeding dogs as co-citizens is a political act. It shows solidarity against the wishes of the powerful. She was fighting the established political order.
Of course, she never read Zoopolis and I, a speaker of neither Bulgarian, Turkish or the Romani language she might have spoken, did not attempt to discover her actual motives.
Nevertheless, seeing animals as co-citizens, as Donaldson and Kymlicka argue, is a powerful way to resist tyranny. At a time when empathy is explicitly condemned, displays of empathy become acts of resistance. Given that authoritarian rulers will never admit that animals are anything else than objects, thinking of them as co-citizens opens an asymmetrical plane where resistance can grow.
If the meaning of feeding stray dogs (or destroying rats’ traps, or feeding pigeons) is not the same for the regime at it is for the person doing the feeding, the consequence of the action are unequally considered, too. The regime can only see it as a low-level offense, since animals are insignificant (were it to treat it as a crime, it would raise the status of animals and go against its own ideology). But for opponents, helping a co-citizen is a significant action.
This distinction is irrelevant if the only person thinking of animals as citizens is the one displaying empathy. But as soon as this number grows, the asymmetric nature of the action begins to matter.
Notes
1. In the framework of the authors, the comparison makes sense as they claim that both humans and animals should be considered citizens. By equating man-made animal suffering and man-made human suffering, they nevertheless merge the social and biological together. Of course, the cow’s suffering is a social phenomenon. But the cow’s being a cow plays a role, too. It follows that either the racism that enabled slavery and the Holocaust is the same force that leads to animal suffering, or that Jews and Blacks share biological traits with non-human animals. The first proposition is untenable, the second is racist in the crudest way.
2. p. 104.