Interspecies Violence and Crimes of Dissent: Communication Ethics and Legitimacy in Message Crimes Involving Wildlife

Creator(s)

Erica von Essen, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet
Michael Allen, East Tennessee State UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-1-2017

Description

In this article, we consider the phenomenon of message crimes involving harm to wildlife from a sociological and criminological perspective. Using a case study of dissident Nordic hunters killing protected wolves to send a message to the state agencies responsible for their conservation, we engage philosophically with the question of wildlife victimhood and why interspecies violence is unjustifiable as a mode of political dissent. As an alternative to the species justice perspective in green criminology, we examine how the acts disrespect animals as moral subjects of public communication and frustrate dialogue regarding what is owed to them in terms of political justice.

Copyright Statement

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Citation Information

von Essen, Erica; and Allen, Michael. 2017. Interspecies Violence and Crimes of Dissent: Communication Ethics and Legitimacy in Message Crimes Involving Wildlife. Critical Criminology. Vol.25(2). 261-274. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-017-9358-7 ISSN: 1205-8629