Beyond the Human: Animals as Facilitators and Subjects of Multispecies Inclusion
本文挑战以人类为中心的包容观，提出动物作为包容的促进者和主体，构建了包含表征、分配和能动性三个维度的多物种包容框架，并分析了动物在市场中作为伴侣、服务者和娱乐者的角色及其对包容的影响。
Marketplace inclusion has largely been conceptualized as a human-centered concern, focusing on consumers’ access, participation, and representation, while marginalizing animals. Challenging this anthropocentric orientation, this commentary acknowledges animals as facilitators and subjects of inclusion, grounded in recognition of their consciousness and moral value. Building on multispecies justice, it develops a framework with three dimensions—representation, distribution, and agency—to show how multispecies inclusion can be produced through market visibility, the allocation of benefits and burdens, and recognition of animals’ capacity for choice. To operationalize this framework, the commentary outlines three roles animals occupy in marketplaces. As companions, animals are embedded in consumption relationships shaped by human decision-making. As service workers, animals enable consumers’ market access, such as in assistance and therapy contexts. As entertainers, animals perform in tourism and media industries as commodified actors. The commentary highlights how markets involving animals and human-animal ensembles expand human inclusion while constraining animals’ inclusion. It argues that this occurs by normalizing commodification, externalizing costs and risks of animal labor, and curtailing agency when animals cannot rest, withdraw, or retire. It concludes with policy implications, including reframing ownership, legitimizing human– animal ensembles as units of participation, enforcing welfare standards, and institutionalizing rest and exit conditions.