Kyle Johannsen

Kyle Johannsen is a Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University, and he's a podcast host on the New Books Network's Animal Studies Channel. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Queen’s (2010 – 2015), and his research is in animal and environmental ethics, and in political philosophy. His animal-related work focuses specifically on wild animal suffering. Though many political philosophers and ethicists have the intuition that we should leave nature alone, Johannsen argues that we have a duty to research safe ways of providing large-scale assistance to wild animals. His monograph Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021), explores how a collective, institutional obligation to assist wild animals should be understood. His edited collection Positive Duties to Wild Animals (Routledge, forthcoming) further develops the interventionist literature on wild animal suffering using different theoretical frameworks, including some that have never previously been used to ground our duties to assist wild animals. Johannsen's collection was originally published as a special issue of Ethics, Policy & Environment.