ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the following question: What are the prima facie rights of wild otherkind? It focuses on wild nature, on the rights of non-human life in their natural environments. The recognition of biotic rights raises troublesome problems, some of which would be considerably reduced by fixing some boundaries. Many people view the concept of biotic rights as bizarre. The very concept of rights is rejected by many utilitarians and some teleologists. Rights are a way of conceptualizing the basic demands of distributive justice and of giving substance to its abstract and formal principles about who should get what and why. The criterion of conation — a striving to be and to do, characterized by drives or aims, urges or goals, purposes or impulses, whether conscious or unconscious — provides a workable rights boundary. The usual boundary-setting criteria include rationality, sentience, and self-consciousness.
