When conflict erupts between humans and animals, the former always wants to emerge victorious. Unlike the legal principle of in dubio pro reo, which encourages favouring the accused in doubtful cases, this mercy is not extended to animals. The encounter with wolves illustrates this attitude clearly. When wolves kill livestock, there is never uncertainty—they are invariably sentenced to death. Political decision-makers, who pass judgment, love Little Red Riding Hood, the Brothers Grimm’s version of the fairy tale, which tells of the hunter who discovers the wolf, kills it, and rescues the grandmother and her granddaughter from its belly. We kill wolves, but we do not recover the animals they have torn to pieces and eaten.
This narrative raises serious doubts. Therefore, we sketch a tentative fairy tale drawing on three sources: Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), astrophysicist Margherita Hack (1922-2013), and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). Leonardo foresaw a time when knowledge of animals’ souls would make killing them as serious as killing humans. Hack argued that animals are a great blessing from nature. They are living beings who embrace us with their free spirit and love. Wittgenstein warned that philosophical problems arise when language goes on vacation.
The word “person” has been on leave for too long. Humans have arrogated to themselves the right to be persons and have not granted it to so-called animals. “Persona” is a word of Etruscan origin, meaning “face” or, according to Ancient Greek, “mask”. Like us, animals have faces and masks that represent something. So? The difference would be that they do not possess a soul. Yet, we call them “animals.” In the sense of being animated? Not only that, according to illustrious philosophers and writers who believe they are not soulless.
Continuing the tale, are the wolves and bears attacking, or are we the ferocious ones who occupy and destroy their natural habitats? This causes enormous damage for generations to come. Wolves require large areas of wilderness to hunt and raise their young. Human activities, such as deforestation and urban development, reduce the availability of these areas, forcing wolves to move into smaller and less suitable spaces. Furthermore, the incessant construction of roads for the transit of growing numbers of tourists is fragmenting their habitat, making it more difficult for wolves to move between areas. Using a legal analogy, consider if wolves were granted, like us, the habeas corpus—the right of the arrested person to know the cause of their imprisonment—and could answer for their crimes in a court of law. Would their actions truly be offenses, or have our expansion forced them into situations that bring them into conflict with us? Alternatively, were they compelled to approach human settlements to provide vacationers a sense of wilderness, as is sometimes the case with bears? Recognizing the involuntary nature of these interactions would shift our understanding of responsibility. The mauling of sheep, goats, and other farm animals would result from the pressure humans exert on wolves by forcing them into contact with us. The resulting increase in encounters raises safety concerns, which in turn lead to further persecution of wolves.
How can we bring animals, deprived of the ability to express themselves in our language and, therefore, to answer judges’ questions, to court? The core question is whether animals can be granted rights and legal standing as entities whose interests require representation. In 1972, jurist and economist Christopher D. Stone sparked global debate by proposing that nature be given legal personhood. Stone reasoned that if institutions like multinationals and nation-states enjoy legal rights, so could nature, natural objects (seas, lakes, rivers, forests), and other beings endowed with the capacity for sensation (the “human-animals”) could also enjoy them. According to this logic, why not grant these rights to the wolves in question? A human agent would be appointed to represent them.
At the end of this fairy tale outline, Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) and Epicurus (341 BC-270 BC) enter the scene. The Austrian zoologist and ethologist reminded humans that the distinction between themselves and nature is not a biological reality, but a perception or a vision of the world. Further emphasizing this point, he added that Homo sapiens is an animal and that animals help us re-establish contact with the wise reality of nature —a connection that, according to him, has been lost to civilized man. Founder of one of the most influential philosophical schools of the Hellenistic age, Epicurus reminds us that the simplest pleasures, when enjoyed in good company, are often the most enjoyable. It is humans who have waged war on the nobility of nature and animals. The time is ripe to be, and learn to be, happy with both. Otherwise, despite having killed many, the wolves will prevail, as the damage done to nature and their natural habitats will turn against us. As a result, the wolf will prevail in Charles Perrault’s version of Little Red Riding Hood. The happy ending would be completely absent.
