As the Christmas shipping season buries me under a never-ending torrent of data, I find myself with little time to read and write about politics. I am, however, never too busy to bask in the latest insanity to come out of Vox: “Should dogs be citizens? It’s not as crazy as you think.“

“Not as crazy as I think” is a bar set so low as to be underground, and clearing it is not a feat worth bragging about. Just how crazy is it, Vox?

What if domestic animals — pets such as dogs and cats as well livestock like cows and chickens — were granted citizenship rights? That may sound like a crazy question, but Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka thinks it’s a critically important one.

Kymlicka, a professor at Queen’s University, is a well-regarded figure in modern political philosophy. He’s also the author, along with writer Sue Donaldson, of Zoopolis, a book making the case for animal citizenship. Their basic premise is simple: animals are already part of our society, as pets and work animals, therefore we should formally recognize them as such.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am eating a bacon cheeseburger from Five Guys as I write this. Kymlicka believes that the cow and pig which provided me with this delicious meal should have roughly equal standing in our legal system with me.

That’s not just a head-in-the-clouds thought experiment.

Yes it is.

If we really want to improve animals’ lives, Kymlicka and Donaldson argue, we need to stop thinking in terms of merely treating animals better. Rather, we need to acknowledge on a fundamental level that animals are a part of society and deserve to be treated as such. That leads you, however improbable it might sound, to citizenship.

Of course they are a part of society — just a part that goes in my belly. But citizenship implies not only rights, but responsibilities. Will dogs and cats be called in for jury duty like the rest of us? Will we soon find ourselves standing in line to vote behind chickens?

The right to vote doesn’t apply to animals, but the deeper ideas behind them do. So we need to find mechanisms that ensure their interests are counted in determining the public good. And we need a way for them to have a say in matters that affect them. It won’t be through voting, so we need to find other ways of soliciting and responding to their preferences.

Though I am not a cow, I think it is safe to assume that they prefer to not be eaten. Kymlicka agrees:

Yeah. We can’t go around eating our co-citizens.

Though identified as a philosopher, Kymlicka appears to have given his own idea of animal citizenship very little thought. First, he argues that cows, pigs, and chickens are members of our society because we domesticated them and that, therefore, we should afford them citizenship. It never occurs to him that if we can no longer eat or milk cows, we no longer have any reason to domesticate them and include them as members of our society. How does he envision these animals contributing to society in his future animal utopia?

We’re very interested in the idea of animals as workers.

Of course you are.

We’ve been thinking about cases like, say, sniffer dogs at an airport. Here you have a dog with a human, they’re both working. I see no reason why that couldn’t be, in principle, an expression of membership for both.

But, if it’s to be consistent with our citizenship model, there would also have to be workers’ rights. The sniffer dog would need maximum working hours, a right to a safe environment, the right to a retirement, the right to disability pensions, and so on and so forth.

If I classify the sniffer dog as an independent contractor, do I still need to provide him with a pension? Can they unionize? Will some dogs cross the picket line as others hurl epithets such as “scab” at them?

This hypothetical doggie strike is so adorable that I am now on board with this plan. How can we use bloated and inept bureaucracies to codify the inferred preferences of cows into law?

In the Netherlands and several other European countries, they have animal rights parties. [The Dutch] party has actually elected representatives in the national parliament. This is a feasible option in countries that have proportional representation. And those animal rights parties — they have elected members both in the national legislature and the European Parliament — are very effective spokespersons for the interests of animals.

Both leftist and moderate canines agree: more biscuits. The far right is more reactionary, and focused primarily on the removal of squirrels from their yards. The squirrels themselves have a fascinating array of opinions across the political spectrum, though the prohibition of cars trumps all other concerns.

This is not the first time I’ve written about animal rights extremists. Watching their struggle to imagine a framework of ethics where human life is of greater inherent value than animal life is, if nothing else, always good for a laugh.

English singer Morrissey has opined on how Christians can believe in natural rights without believing that animals have them as well, all without noticing that whole “created in God’s image” thing setting us apart from beasts. I’m forced to wonder how such people can care so deeply about granting citizenship rights to animals, while callously denying unborn human children their right to life.