 Over the last forty years, disability advocates and scholars have contested this view of the disabled, insisting that they should be seen and treated as citizens, not as wards. In the last few years, some philosophers and political theorists have rallied to this view and questioned the conception of agency presupposed in the common view of democratic citizenship as unduly exclusionary (Nussbaum 2006, Arneil 2009, Arneil and Hirschmann 2016). Building on the work of disability theorists, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka (2011, 2016) have argued further that if we accept — as we should — that a capacity for complex discursive agency is not necessary for citizenship, then we should also recognize domestic animals as co-citizens since they qualify as members of  society.[35]