Making the invisibles visible : Including animals in sustainability (and) accounting

Abstract

In this essay we draw attention to a crisis that touches upon a great number of individuals: the plight of non-human animals. Billions of farmed animals are slaughtered each year to produce for instance food and clothes, while wild animals experience various degrees of human-induced harms. Yet, non-human animals are largely invisible in discussions of sustainability and associated accounting efforts. This is due to a problematic ontology that leaves domesticated animals hovering between society and nature while grouping wild animals with their habitats and inanimate things. Our purpose is to consider how to make animals visible in sustainability (and) accounting. To that end, we first illustrate how sociology and philosophy, among other disciplines, have begun to shift towards the view that non-human animals are worthy of our moral, political and legal consideration. We then develop a view of sustainability that explicitly includes animals and introduce an accounting framework with examples of indicators to track progress from no rights to fundamental rights for non-human animals.