hmmmm! san francisco is trying ban the sale of all animals, including, like, goldfish. what do y'all make of that?
obviously, an anarchist can't really endorse the legislative approach. but it would be interesting to think about more and more creatures and things as stuff that cannot be bought and sold. if a cultural consensus started moving that way, it would be an immensely dramatic change: you'd get to 'post-capitalism.' we're a long long way from treating animals that way, of course, and people have been buying and selling animals since the hebrew bible, or long before. it more or less seems to go with the concept of domestication, i suppose, or comes soon thereafter. it seems pretty central to the practice of having pets. but it could be and perhaps should be re-thought.
one would like to think of the national park system, for example, as taking some land out of the possibility of ownership, or moving it into collective ownership. and to some extent these are not mere ideologies, even if in other respects state ownership is anything but collective ownership. but the national park system is actually a reasonably good anti-anti-statist example (something which, in my own head, i've found a little difficult to square with my position), and it comes at least with the notion that some plants (redwoods) or inanimate/animate ecosystems (the grand canyon, say, or the tetons) are beyond ownership. if we could cultivate this attitude, it would change our relation to the world.
