Solidarity has long been recognized as a powerful tool for mobilizing collective action, particularly in public health, social justice, and political movements, where it has been invoked to foster social cohesion, mobilize resources, and inspire cooperative action during moments of crisis.Footnote 1 The Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, drew on solidarity to galvanize global support against racial injustice.Footnote 2 During the COVID-19 pandemic, heads of state often appealed to societal solidarity to encourage compliance with public health measures, while global health leaders and multilateral institutions used the language of solidarity to advocate for equitable access to vaccines and other life-saving resources across countries.Footnote 3
However, despite its growing prominence and use, solidarity remains dominantly framed in anthropocentric terms—broadly understood as a shared practice grounded in a collective willingness to bear various forms of “costs” (financial, social, emotional, or otherwise) in support of others, where the “others” are typically other humans.Footnote 4 Such anthropocentric framing of solidarity overlooks the broader web of interdependence in which human life is situated and constrains its use due to challenges such as involving only humans.Footnote 5 In a world under the threat of multiple interconnected crises like antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and climate change crises, which transcend species boundaries and implicate deeply entangled relationships between humans, animals, and ecosystems, such a narrow framing of solidarity may be inadequate.Footnote 6
Recognizing the unused potential of solidarity to facilitate support across species differences, scholars from climate justice, environmental humanities, public health ethics, and multispecies justice are increasingly questioning its anthropocentric framing.Footnote 7 This questioning has led to an expansion of what solidarity is understood to mean, and who it can include, prompting the emergence of new terms such as more-than-human solidarity, ecological solidarity, and solidarity for the Anthropocene, each seeking to reimagine human relationships with nonhuman life.Footnote 8
Tong et al., in their paper “Solidarity for the Anthropocene,” advocate a shift from exploitation to symbiosis and stewardship, grounded in the understanding that humans and nonhumans share planetary needs and depend on livable environments. Similarly, Moyano-Fernández defines ecological solidarity as the human responsibility to repair harm inflicted on nonhuman beings, thereby establishing a moral connection between human actions and the nonhuman world. Scholz argues that political solidarity can be exercised on behalf of “earth others,” while Rock and Degeling describe the willingness of humans to bear costs or make trade-offs for the sake of nonhuman beings or ecosystems with whom they recognize shared vulnerability as more-than-human solidarity.
These scholarly contributions mark important efforts to push at the boundaries of anthropocentrism, expanding who solidarity might include and how it might be enacted. Yet, they still retain the human, at least to some extent, as the central moral agent. Solidarity remains something humans do for the nonhuman others, often justified through appeals to shared risk or ecological interdependence that ultimately serve human survival and flourishing. This framing tends to be unidirectional and representational, rooted more in advocacy and responsibility than in reciprocity or mutual recognition. As a result, it risks reproducing the asymmetry embedded in many Western conceptions of solidarity and stops short of a deeper relational ethic that would allow humans to stand with, rather than simply for, the more-than-human world.
In contrast, many Indigenous and relational ontologies offer a fundamentally different orientation: one in which humans, nonhumans, ancestors, and spiritual entities are seen as co-constitutive members of a shared moral and ecological community.Footnote 9 In these worldviews, solidarity is not an act of extension from humans toward nonhumans but is lived through ongoing kinship relations that already include the more-than-human. This orientation shifts the focus from moral obligation or advocacy to interdependence and mutuality. The distinction is significant: to stand in solidarity for nonhuman beings implies a one-way gesture of protection, often grounded in human-centered moral reasoning. To stand with nonhuman beings, by contrast, invokes a relational ethic, one that acknowledges shared being, responsibility, and the potential for mutual transformation.
While this theoretical shift is well underway, they risk remaining abstract unless anchored in lived realities. To meaningfully engage with the idea of more-than-human solidarity, we need empirical inquiries that document, examine, and reflect on how such solidarities are enacted, nurtured, and challenged in everyday life. This article contributes to that effort by drawing on a lived example from an Indigenous community in the western Himalayas of India. It explores two main questions: how and why these communities chose to collectively abandon animal slaughter, trans-Himalayan cattle trade, and hunting practices once central to their culture, livelihoods, and way of life; and second, in what ways does this practice illuminate, extend, or challenge the existing theoretical framings of more-than-human solidarity?
1. Methodology
This research employed a case study method, an empirical approach that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between the phenomenon and its context are blurred or overlapping.Footnote 10 The case presented here is part of a case series under the Global Health Solidarity project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, which seeks to expand understandings of solidarity through the study of community-based, apparently solidaristic practices in everyday life in select Himalayan communities.
To identify potential cases, we engaged with grassroots organizations and regional networks working across the Himalayan region of India, generating a shortlist of 12 community-based, apparently solidaristic practices embedded in everyday life.
For selection, solidarity was understood as collective action by a group of individuals who identify with others (potentially including nonhuman beings) in some meaningful way, working together to meet needs or overcome challenges through mutual assistance and shared responsibility, in ways that promote collective welfare. From the shortlist, five cases were purposively selected based on two criteria: first, their location in marginalized or often-unheard of geographies; and second, their ability to illuminate conceptual gaps in existing understandings of solidarity. Practices judged by the first author to be motivated primarily by charity, extractivism, instrumental gain, disempowerment, or the diminishment of dignity, or those that explicitly counter to justice, were excluded.
This particular case was selected in response to a growing body of scholarship calling for a rethinking of solidarity beyond its dominant anthropocentric frames and also the recognized absence of empirical studies documenting how more-than-human solidarities are practiced, sustained, and at times challenged in lived practice.
The unit of analysis in this case study is the community-led ban on hunting, animal slaughter, and trans-Himalayan cattle trade and the moral and social practices through which this ban was negotiated, enforced, and sustained over time. The six villages in the relatively remote valley in the western Himalayas of India function as the contextual setting. Throughout this paper, these six villages and their inhabitants are referred to collectively as “the community,” while internal distinctions between the subgroups are noted where analytically relevant.
Data collection was preceded by engagements with community members and elders in the valley and spending 3 days with families who seasonally migrate out. These were facilitated by a field researcher from the community to help introduce the study, seek permission, build trust, and refine the data-collection approach.
Data collection involved spending 3 weeks with the community and utilizing multiple qualitative methods, conducted by AG and a field researcher (SC). SC is from the region in focus and is fluent in Bhoti and Hindi. AG understands Hindi, which is also commonly used, but does not speak Bhoti (referred to as Bhot by some participants). The field researcher’s linguistic and cultural familiarity facilitated access and enabled translation during key informant interviews (KIIs) and focus group discussions (FGDs)—particularly with older participants with limited Hindi, and thus reduced the risk of misinterpretation of culturally specific terms.
In total, 4 FGDs involving 23 participants and 7 KIIs were conducted. KIIs were held with community elders and leaders who were recognized as holding knowledge and decision-making power, including with a former member of Mahila Mandal who had moved out of the valley.
One FGD each was conducted with elderly men (55–65), and elderly women (50–65) separately, as gender-based dynamics were strongest in this age group. Another FGD was conducted with youth aged from eighteen to twenty-two years. The last FGD was conducted with a group of married men and women of a younger age group. Both the interviews and the FGDs were audio-recorded.
Additionally, the first author and the field researcher each spent 1 week conducting independent participant observations, guided by a semistructured observation guide (Supplementary Annexure 1). Through observation and informal conversations, they built familiarity with the village layout, local institutions, day-to-day activities such as farming and animal grazing, and norms of interaction and social relations in households where researchers were welcomed. They also observed interactions and social relations during special occasions that occurred during their time in the community, including a wedding, the welcome of a senior reincarnated monk (Rimpoche), and a local herding festival. The observations did not include individual-specific observations and were made without personal identifiers.
Recruitment began with purposive sampling, where individuals identified during participatory observation and confirmed by community members as knowledgeable and able to speak on the themes of interest were invited to participate.Footnote 11 All invited participants agreed, except one, who expressed being shy. As interviews and discussions progressed, snowball sampling was also used, with participants recommending others whom they believed could offer valuable insights, a common approach in qualitative research to reach socially connected or hard-to-reach informants.Footnote 12
Observation notes were qualitative and in English. They were coded and thematically analyzed separately from FGD and KII data and generated contextual themes around collective work, shared ritual life, and social interdependence. This was used primarily to deepen contextual understanding and triangulate participants’ accounts rather than to generate stand-alone themes.
The audio recordings of the KIIs and the FGDs in English were transcribed by AG, while those in Bhoti were transcribed and translated to English by SC. Culturally specific terms were referred back to the community’s youth, who spoke both Hindi and Bhoti, to find the closest possible English equivalent and avoid misinterpretation. The culturally specific terms were retained in the transcript with meaning added in brackets.
Three transcripts were shared, read, and discussed by all authors to familiarize themselves with the nature and range of the data and to support later collaborative interpretation and writing. AG and EN then independently coded two transcripts using NVivo 15.0 (QSR), applying principles of deductive thematic analysis, while remaining open to the addition of inductively identified codes.Footnote 13 Deductive codes mapped back to the research questions, were descriptive, and included parent codes like setting, motivation, costs, and characteristics of solidaristic action. Following this parallel coding, AG and EN met virtually to discuss their respective interpretation of the data and compare inductively identified codes. Discrepancies in the naming of codes or location of excerpts from interviews were then resolved by renaming, merging, overlapping, or creating new codes. AG coded the remaining transcripts using the resultant codebook and consulting with EN as needed. A network map has been added as Supplementary Annexure 2.
All participants were informed about the aims and scope of the study, and verbal informed consent was obtained prior to participation. To protect anonymity, identifying information was removed or anonymized during transcription. Ethical approval for the study was obtained from Sigma, an Independent Ethics Review Board (ID—10117/IRB/23-24).
1.1. Positionality
AG was born and raised in the Himalayas and has worked closely with Indigenous communities across India at grassroots and policy levels. His academic training at the University of Oxford and current involvement in the Global Health Solidarity project have deepened his familiarity with interdisciplinary conversations on solidarity, pluriversality, and decolonization. This journey has challenged earlier internalized assumptions—common in his upbringing—that positioned Western knowledge as inherently scientific and universal and Indigenous worldviews as local and “traditional.” This research reflects AG’s commitment to revaluing Indigenous ontologies and grounding inquiry in plural ways of knowing.
The field researcher (SC), is originally from the study region and currently living and working in Delhi. Positioned between the community and an urban professional context, he brought both familiarity with local social norms and a degree of analytical distance. His insider status facilitated access and trust but may also have increased the risk of social desirability bias, as discussed in the limitations.
Supervision and collaboration on analysis were provided by an interdisciplinary team of experts, none of whom are intimately acquainted with the region in focus. EN is a medical anthropologist and an Associate Professor at Western University; CA is a Health Ethicist and an Associate Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of Ghana; BP is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Vienna. All authors are part of the Global Health Solidarity project. All authors contributed to the study’s conceptualization. CA and AG developed data-collection tools; EN and AG developed the initial codebook, and all authors participated in analysis and interpretation.
Study reporting was informed by the COREQ 32-item checklist for qualitative research, serving as a guide rather than a strict framework.Footnote 14 Two departures were made, which are as follows: geographic and administrative details were generalized or omitted to protect the community’s anonymity, given the legal sensitivity of the practice discussed; and participant quotations were identified by role, gender, and age group rather than by participant number.
2. Results
2.1. Context and setting
The case is based in a relatively isolated valley in the western Himalayas in Jammu and Kashmir, India. The narrow V-shaped picturesque valley has six villages—three Hindu and three Buddhist, separated from the Buddhist Villages by an hour’s uphill climb. The Hindu villages are larger, with approximately 150–200 households and three distinct castes. The Buddhist villages, on the other hand, are smaller, situated at higher altitudes, and do not follow caste divisions. These trans-Himalayan traders are believed to have settled in the valley at different points in history, although the exact period remains unclear. The valley is isolated from the rest of the country due to the formidable Himalayan terrain. The nearest narrow, winding road is two to three hours away on foot, with only one small vehicle arriving daily. During the 6-month-long winter season, this service is halted, and snowfall of 6–10 feet further isolates the region. With limited external influence, few livelihood opportunities, and scarce financial resources, the valley’s residents depended heavily on each other and on nature to meet most of their needs. Given the legal sensitivity of the practices discussed and the unique geographic location of the setting that could enable identification, specific geographic and other identifiable details have intentionally been generalized or omitted.
2.2. Relational foundations: Interdependence as a way of life
Historically, the Hindu community believed to have settled earlier, considered itself distinct from the Buddhist one, which is in the minority. However, with time, the boundaries have become more permeable, giving way to closer intercommunity ties that now include not only intermarriage but also ritual kinship relations that symbolically establish bonds of mutual obligation and respect across caste and religious lines.
Collective work and mutual support were central to the community’s way of life. People took turns helping one another with agriculture, wool shearing, and foraging. Community members regularly visited each other’s homes, often sharing meals and celebrating cultural and religious events together, where resources were collected and work shared. During major life events such as marriages or funerals, resources and labor were shared, with the entire community participating as though these were collective events. Disputes between individuals that could not be resolved directly were settled through community intervention.
2.3. Relationship with animals and wildlife: Entangled and shared worlds
Economic poverty and dependence on the environment were defining characteristics of the valley. The community relied heavily on natural resources, including wood, herbs, mushrooms, and medicinal plants, while agriculture and government rations supplement their diet. Animals, both wild and domestic, have been crucial historically for survival. Until the changes described below, cows, yaks, and sheep were kept and they provided milk, wool, and meat. Old cattle were sold beyond the valley when they aged, while every family slaughtered one or more sheep, which became an important source of protein during the harsh winters. The nearby forests were home to bears, musk deer, deer, and snow leopards, which were hunted for meat, medicine, and trade despite hunting being deemed illegal and punishable under the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. The sale of musk from deer was particularly rewarding, as it was highly valued by traders for its medicinal and cosmetic properties. However, money was not the only motivation for hunting. It was conducted in groups and provided meat for social gatherings, becoming a cause for celebration and community bonding, passed down through generations.
The relationship with animals changed 10–12 years ago when the women of the Buddhist community came together to form an alliance—Mahila mandal and imposed a ban on hunting, animal slaughter, and the trans-Himalayan cattle trade—a significant cultural and economic shift that continues to be upheld today. This transformation is the focus of this present case study on more-than-human solidarity.
2.4. Mahila Mandal—The women’s alliance
Over the past 12–15 years, as roads extended closer to the village, the community’s engagement with the outside world, mobility for trade, children leaving for education, and visits from respected monks gradually reshaped local interactions and aspirations.
Amid these changes, an elderly woman who had travelled beyond the region observed how women had created alliances called Mahila Mandal that collectivized together to support one another, sharing workloads; assisting during community events, bereavements, weddings, and illness; and taking collective action to ban alcohol consumption and regulate overgrazing and deforestation. Inspired by these experiences, she returned with a vision to form a women’s collective: the Mahila Mandal . This led to the formation of the Mahila Mandal, a women’s collective, approximately 12 years ago.
Over time, the Mahila Mandal has emerged as a vital support system within the Buddhist community. They have collectively organized and institutionalised existing indigenous traditions and practices of mutual care and interdependence, thereby reinforcing the spirit of social and cultural cohesion. The women pool their financial resources and take turns providing hands-on assistance to those in distress, whether due to poverty, illness, or lack of familial support. They actively mediate disputes, rebuild relationships, and play a crucial role during weddings and mourning periods, times of heightened communal need. For example, after death, they take turns cleaning and lighting 100 butter lamps for 49 days at the home of the deceased, an ancestral Buddhist practice believed to nourish and guide the departed spirit toward reincarnation and uphold the community’s spiritual interconnectedness.
Through this shared responsibility and mutual care, the Mahila Mandal binds the community together through practices that convey and ensure that no one is left to face hardship alone.
2.5. Extending the moral circle: The ban on hunting, slaughter, and trade
While there is no equivalent term for solidarity in the local language, attending to the Mahila Mandal’s action of supporting community members in need, assisting families during death and marriages, and the banning of hunting, animal slaughter, and trans-Himalayan cattle trade provide insight into how and why at least some human societies are working together to meet needs, overcome challenges through mutual assistance and shared responsibility, and promote collective welfare, based on identification with others that includes nonhuman beings.
In this paper, we explore one such action. At one of its earliest meetings, the Mahila Mandal called for a complete ban on hunting and the trans-Himalayan trade of aging cattle throughout the valley, along with a ban on animal slaughter in the Buddhist villages. An exception was made only for weddings, where animal slaughter was allowed in a controlled way, considering community’s responsibility to honor outside guests.
This call for a ban was not adopted all at once across the valley: rather, it was initiated, argued for, and gradually extended across the communities over time, leveraging existing relationships and trust and negotiated using different moral idioms and pressures and was upheld through varying degrees of commitments. This was done, as a middle-aged man from the Buddhist community recalls, with the argument that emphasizing spiritual enmeshment and compassionate coexistence:
The spirit is immortal, only the body dies; the spirit does not. The spirit will have to take a new life. Also, not everyone will die together, like someone’s parents might die early or their grandfather or brother, and they might be reborn as sheep, who knows? And one day you kill the sheep, and you may not knowingly kill and eat them.
Ultimately successful call for a change to traditional practices of hunting, animal slaughter, and the trans-Himalayan trade of aging cattle significantly redefined the boundaries of solidarity, extending ethical responsibility beyond human relationships to include the well-being of animals.
2.6. Shifting ground: Enabling material and moral openings
The ban on hunting, cattle trade across the valley, and animal slaughter in the Buddhist villages did not have a specific trigger or a discrete moment of change. While participants consistently pointed to the formalization of the Mahila Mandal within the Buddhist villages, and its first meeting as a key moment in initiating collective discussion and action, many participants also described broader changes that made such action conceivable and practicable.
These included increased connectivity and mobility to places like Leh, Zanskar, Pangi, Manali, Paddar, and Bodh Gaya, through which participants were exposed to organizations like Mahila Mandal, and access to religious teachings, alongside exposure to and skills for other livelihood opportunities that reduced dependency on hunting and cattle trade.
Improved access to markets enabled the sale of their produce, the transport of food supplies for winter, and allowed dietary substitution of meat with dry fruits, nuts, cashews, and dates. Roads also opened opportunities for seasonal trade, allowing people to escape harsh winters, making it possible to leave the former practices behind.
These changes were uneven and ongoing. Taken together, these developments did not constitute a singular cause but rather a set of enabling conditions that made the collective decision both conceivable and sustainable.
2.7. Negotiating the ban: Enforcement, conflict, and repair over retribution
The ban initiated and led by the Mahila Mandal did not immediately emerge as a valley-wide consensus. Although it was eventually upheld across the community as a collective normative boundary, it took shape through a phased and contested process. Highlighting the contested nature, a man from the Buddhist village said:
Some men said they wanted to hunt, while others considered it a sin and believed it shouldn’t be done. We had to make decisions and enforce rules. For example, anyone who hunted was fined ₹20,000. After that, people gradually stopped hunting.
Hunting, animal slaughter, and trade in old cattle were activities that were primarily led by men and held deep historical, cultural, social, and economic significance, making the proposed ban highly contentious. Resistance emerged swiftly from both Buddhist and Hindu communities.
The women employed multiple forms of pressure, drawing on arguments and tools based on religious, legal, economic, and other social norms. They began with Buddhist men, framing the ban as a spiritual, religious, and moral imperative while also outlining the economic consequences of violating it. Men who continued to hunt were identified and their wives and other female family members were asked to intervene. Being singled out was considered a matter of shame, and so women took responsibility upon themselves to ensure that men from their family complied. A middle-aged man explained this, saying:
So, it was like this, the women’s group would tell once or twice and then if they did not listen, then they would tell the females of the family to look into it. So then the women of the family would tell the husband that you are embarrassing me, how will I face other women members? Sometimes it used to get heated, but you know some people will not listen.
These pressures were further reinforced through religious influence. Monks from the local monastery declared that prayers performed during death, weddings, and childbirth would not be conducted in the homes of those who defied the ban. A woman participant of the mixed FGD explained:
Because if they say that we will not listen and agree, we will continue hunting and selling cows and animals, then lamas say that if you do this business then we will not come to your house to perform rituals during birth and death because of that they feel some pressure and as a result, they have to walk with the community.
Once the Buddhist men were largely aligned, they collectively informed the Hindu community of their decision, limiting the ban to hunting and trading old cattle, emphasizing the spiritual, moral, legal, and economic bases for the ban. While many agreed, some, particularly among the older generation, were resistant. A member of the Hindu community articulated this saying:
So this (ban on hunting) was initiated by the women in the Buddhist community most people, maybe around 80% people agreed that killing animals is like killing other humans; some men from the older generation who had been doing this (hunting) for a long time found it difficult to agree immediately.
To enforce compliance, the women took turns guarding trails to the hunting grounds, physically blocking hunters, confiscating firearms and hunted animals, and threatening legal action. These measures led to confrontation and in at least one instance, the women endured physical assault. As one of the women who was assaulted, the current Pradhan (head) of the Mahila Mandal elaborated:
They ran away with the antlers to offer them at the temple, as was their custom. Later, when they brought the meat here, a fight broke out and some women were hit with the butt of the rifle.
This incident further united the Buddhist men and women, who threatened legal action. Both communities were aware that escalation could trigger serious legal consequences, as hunting was prohibited under the law and could irreparably damage intercommunity relationships.
Instead of pursuing legal action, leaders from both communities came together to address the issue internally, following a tradition that prioritized relationship over retribution; they called for a large meeting, inviting members of both communities, during which apologies were made, legal proceedings were set aside, and a collective commitment to ending hunting was agreed upon and upheld. One woman recalled:
The next day, we left for the police station and were ready to file a complaint…. The elders and the lambardar (village head) came and said they would make those who fought with us apologise. They asked us to resolve the issue there and not take it further. So, we settled the matter on the spot, and they apologised, promising that they would not hunt again.
This prioritization of relationship over retribution was repeatedly highlighted. A middle-aged Buddhist man explained:
Over here, relationships are important. So when we have a fight or disagreement and you are angry, I will not say anything and I will bow down. Tomorrow I will be angry and you will bow down.
Solidarity in this case was neither abstract nor effortless. It required sustained and strategic actions that came with significant consequences—personal loss and violence, as well as the possibility of fracturing generational bonds between the two communities. What held it together was the strength of longstanding relationships, deep interdependence built on trust, and a value system that prioritized repairing relationships over swift retribution or punishment provided a foundation through which inevitable tensions were navigated without breaking the social fabric.
Yet, collective commitment to the ban did not remain uniformly stable over time and required constant negotiations and active efforts to sustain it. Highlighting this, a woman from the community went on to point out that the collective ban was violated as recently as 3 years back:
3–4 years back, I once again heard gunfire. I called 2 women and we saw migrant herders with guns. We confiscated their guns and told them that this is not allowed here.
2.8. Many reasons, one ban: Overlapping motivations, uneven commitments
The ban that was gradually implemented and eventually collectively sustained did not rest on a single shared motivation. Participants instead described multiple, often overlapping motivations. These included identification with animals as living beings capable of pain, fear, and loss; a sense of moral responsibility associated with being human; karmic and reincarnation beliefs that blurred the boundary between human and animal life with the possibility of role reversal; and avoiding shame and legal consequences and the value of preserving harmony within the community. These motivations were not mutually exclusive. The same person could at once be moved by Buddhist ideas of karma, rebirth, and role reversal, by a sense of responsibility that comes with being human, and by the importance of preserving harmony within the community.
One important strand was cosmological. As the valley became more connected to the outside world, Buddhist teachings became more accessible, and core doctrines such as karma and reincarnation reinforced a worldview in which humans and animals are understood as spirits temporarily inhabiting specific forms that shift over time through cycles of rebirth. In this cosmology, killing an animal could be tantamount to killing a former human—or even a family member from a past life. A young married man captured this sense of continuity and moral proximity:
Another perspective is that while you might be eating for your taste, scriptures say that after going through 84 lakh (8.4 million) cycles of rebirth, one gets a human life. It’s possible that you could be from their family. You might have been someone’s (animal) son, or even a husband or wife.
Additionally, the notion of karmic retribution meant that those who hunt or kill animals in this life may find themselves in reversed roles in a future existence, experiencing the suffering they once inflicted. As an elderly woman from the community explained:
When we die, the roles are reversed. You become the deer, and the deer becomes a human and kills and eats you.
By highlighting the continuity and reversibility of life forms, this perspective challenged the rigid boundaries between humans and animals. These beliefs underscored an ethical duty to coexist with compassion, not because human beings were seen to owe respect to animals as beings different from themselves, but because they were all seen as temporarily fixed instantiations of beings that could change their form, meaning that any human killing an animal could be killing the reincarnation of another human.
While Buddhist teachings and beliefs were an important motivation, on their own they were insufficient to fully explain what underpinned the bans. Contending the idea of framing the decision to ban as merely a religious following, a young man from the community reflected:
One cannot justify it solely on religious grounds. It’s about recognising that animals are living beings with a right to live. Regardless of religion, it’s a matter of respecting their right to life. They have the right to live in this world just as we do, so it’s not appropriate to take their lives.
Similarly, the current Pradhan (head) of the Mahila Mandal rejected the idea that religion alone drove the decision, saying,
duty (in the context of protecting animals) is our true religion. Just as I have a duty towards my parents, that is my real responsibility. It’s not just about being Buddhist.
The deep recognition of, and identification with, the suffering and abandonment experienced by animals, paralleling the vulnerabilities of human existence, was another important motivation. The community viewed animals as sentient beings with (assumed) consciousness capable of feeling pain and fear and valuing their lives. Emphasizing this kind of sameness, a male participant of the FGD with youth explained the reason for the ban by saying,
Because it’s obvious that every life values its own existence. Just as you wouldn’t want to be harmed, the same goes for animals who can’t speak for themselves. We relate to this from our own perspective.
This recognition of animals as sentient beings like humans with (assumed) consciousness and capable of fear, pain, and loss dismantled the hierarchical distinction between human and nonhuman life. Affirming that just as no person deserves to be harmed or discarded, neither do the nonhuman lives that share our world.
Another motivation for the ban was rooted in the moral responsibility that comes with being human. The current Pradhan (head) of the Mahila Mandal articulated this ethical obligation that comes from being human as,
As humans, we have the ability to think and care, and we should protect and do good for others. That’s why we say to take better care of them…
Drawing a parallel with institutions of protection, she continued,
Yes, a human should think about others. Just as we have police and soldiers to protect us, we should also protect mute animals. Just because they are mute doesn’t mean we have the right to kill them.
The ability to think, reflect, and make ethical choices was seen as a defining characteristic of humanity, framing nonviolence toward animals not merely as a religious principle but as an essential aspect of what it means to be human.
2.9. Costs, sacrifice, and moral recalculation
These efforts came at a cost and as Prainsack and Buyx emphasized, solidarity is not only an inner sentiment, but it requires some “outer” expression by practice.Footnote 15 This practice, in turn, typically includes some “costs” in the widest sense of the word. In our case, these costs took three major forms. First, there were social conflicts, verbal threats, and, in some instances, physical violence. The women faced backlash for challenging entrenched norms, particularly as they physically intervened to stop hunting. A woman from the Mahila Mandal described this experience
The men of the Hindu villages weren’t really happy about it. They used to call us names, and they even tried threatening us and came to fight with us a few times. But we did not stop and told them that no matter what happens, we won’t let anyone hunt, and if we catch any of you, we will directly report it to the police.
Despite these risks, they demonstrated a profound willingness to absorb these burdens and, despite initial resistance, they secured wider communal support from men and women across both communities who came to recognize their ethical and spiritual significance along with their importance to harmony in the community.
Second, enacting solidarity required substantial lifestyle changes. Men and women alike had to adopt new dietary habits, unlearn inherited customs, and embrace alternative sources of livelihood and meaning, which demanded emotional and cultural labor. Third, there were material and economic losses, families forgoing income from the cattle trade or hunting. The husband of the former cashier of the Mahila Mandal shared:
So after that, they started thinking about different sources of income. They planned to engage in woodwork or other types of work. Then they earned money from those sources. If the money wasn’t from a sinful source, they continued doing that work.
These costs, while real, might have been made more bearable by the gradual changes that came with increased road connectivity, like dietary alternatives and diversified livelihoods, as mentioned earlier. Even so, the community did not describe these as costs. They instead spoke of the joy of seeing animals alive, the spiritual satisfaction of having saved lives, and the karmic merit believed to accrue from such actions. The traditional healer expressed this feeling by saying
By not killing animals, avoiding meat, or preventing the sending of livestock to Zanskar, we have gained a lot. We have saved many lives, and this has made a significant difference…. Saving lives in this way ensures that in the future, whether in this life or the next, we will receive support and blessings.
The cost that solidarity that has been included here for those practicing it was perceived by them as fulfilment—a choice that brought emotional, moral, and spiritual reward, and it maintained social cohesion. This was not because the costs were insignificant, but because the moral economy within which these decisions were made offered an alternative calculus, where saving a life, securing harmony, and honoring interdependence and associated rewards in the long-term held greater value than material profit and pain and discomfort in the immediate short term.
While many participants expressed a deep moral and spiritual commitment to the ban on hunting, this solidarity with animals is not absolute, nor uniformly held across the community. Rather, it exists along a continuum—deeply felt by some, conditionally upheld by others, and acknowledged as vulnerable to strain and held together through a combination of spiritual beliefs, community norms, and social accountability.
Older women, in particular, spoke with conviction. “Even if we become poor, we won’t hunt,” said one. “No matter what happens, we say that even if our lives are at stake, we won’t give this up,” echoed another. However, some individuals cautiously acknowledged that not everyone in the community shares the same degree of commitment. Acknowledging that there may be limits to costs that some members of the community may be willing to bear, a middle-aged man of the community said
I think if these incidents increase and continue to happen regularly, then some people might be forced to change their minds. See, not everyone is the same; we are all different and no two people think alike… Even recently, they killed a bear because it was killing their sheep.
Like this participant, others also recognized that if wild animals continued to kill livestock or if extreme poverty returned, a few people might resort to retaliatory killing.
There was also an awareness that solidarity must be actively sustained. While talking about the threat to the action of banning hunting and their current way of life that prioritizes collective flourishing, the current head of the Mahila Mandal pointed to the increasing exposure to different teachings and value systems, saying:
Yes, when they go abroad (outside the valley), their perspective often changes drastically. For example, they learn about the local practices here, but abroad, they are taught different things. They learn that there are no concepts like ‘sin’ and are taught how to live freely and for themselves.
This reflects a subtle yet persistent anxiety that the community’s ethical commitments are deeply rooted in a shared worldview and relational accountability, and without continual cultural transmission, those commitments could begin to unravel.
Therefore, solidarity here is not static or uniformly held, but continuously negotiated and socially maintained and potentially susceptible to both internal pressures (economic hardship, grief) and external influences (migration, changing belief systems).
3. Discussion
A growing body of scholarship has begun to expand the concept of solidarity beyond its anthropocentric boundaries, where solidarity has typically been understood as collective action by humans to support humans grounded in recognition of relevant connection and a willingness to bear costs for others.Footnote 16 Extending this argument that solidaristic praxis can and should include more-than-human others, Melanie J. Rock and Chris Degeling’s development of the concept of more-than-human solidarity, which they define as “human activity directed towards carrying costs and making trade-offs of various kinds with the intent of assisting others, especially when those ‘others’ include non-human animals, plants, or places with whom people recognise sameness or shared circumstance.”Footnote 17
Using this as a baseline, we interpret the present case as solidaristic because the ban became a shared collective commitment across villages and was maintained through accountability infrastructures that made the commitment durable. These included household-level social pressure and shame, mobilization of religious and ritual authority, and the credible possibility of legal reporting, alongside direct interventions to prevent hunting. The commitment also required trade-offs, as participants described sustaining it amid risks of conflict and retaliation, including threats and physical violence, and reorganizing livelihoods away from income associated with hunting and trade. Finally, the practice was animated by more-than-human identification: participants emphasized that animals feel pain and are vulnerable, and many articulated obligations toward them through cosmological reasoning about rebirth and role reversal that framed nonviolence as a responsibility of being human.
Our findings affirm Rock and Degeling’s argument that more-than-human solidarity is both ethically desirable and empirically possible, demonstrating that people are capable of taking on personal and collective costs to protect nonhuman life, while also pushing further on some existing boundaries.
3.1. Cosmological grounds for solidarity: From standing for to standing with
Much of the existing literature grounds more-than-solidarity and the need for it on shared ecological vulnerability, mutual interest, or ethical deliberation.Footnote 18 While there is pushback and argument for a more expansive view, even in some of the recent and expanded accounts, such as Rock and Degeling’s notion of more-than-human solidarity, multispecies justice, and more-than-human entanglements, the emphasis remains on cohabitation, interdependence, symbiotic survival, and ethical reciprocity.Footnote 19 While these framings broaden the scope of who can be included in solidarity, they often remain rooted in instrumental reasoning.
The current case does not align with such reasoning as participants did not speak in terms of ecological interdependence or shared risk, but of recognizing pain, fear, and vulnerability in animals and of their responsibility, as humans endowed with conscience, to think, reflect, and act with restraint. Crucially, the cosmological beliefs described in the Results—that all beings cycle through 8.4 million rebirths and that today’s animal may once have been one’s parent, child, or spouse—collapses the ontological boundary between protector and protected. Karmic role reversal means that those who hunt in this life may themselves be hunted in the next, and those they protect may one day protect them. This is not a one-directional gesture of care extended from a morally superior human subject toward a vulnerable animal object. It is a relationship of deferred reciprocity and mutual agency across the rebirth cycle, in which both parties occupy, at different moments, the position of the other.
This distinction moves the case from “standing for” to “standing with” where solidarity emerges from spiritual and cosmological entanglement—from affective identification with shared vulnerability—rather than from ecological threat or instrumental calculation. This expands the ethical foundations of more-than-human solidarity by showing that care and responsibility can be shaped by cosmological commitments and embodied through everyday acts of restraint and reverence, rather than through moral obligation alone.
3.2. Not a leap but a deepening: Solidarity rooted in relational and ritual life
The decision to ban hunting in the valley did not emerge in isolation but was enabled by a broader social and moral fabric in which interdependence, mutual care, and relational responsibility have long been central to everyday life. As Prainsack and Buyx argued, institutionalized or collective expressions of solidarity are often grounded in and supported by pre-existing, interpersonal solidarities.Footnote 20 Our case finds that, like humanistic solidarity, higher tiers of more-than-human solidarity emerge from existing social, ritual, and religious ties.
The act of extending care to wild animals was not a sudden ethical leap, but a deepening of long-standing practices of support, visible in mutual aid during marriages, farming, illness, and other life events. These relationships of trust and obligation formed the groundwork upon which more-than-human solidarity could take root.
Furthermore, it could be argued that this was not the first instance of more-than-human solidarity. Many of the community’s spiritual and ritual practices illustrate a longstanding ethic of care that extends beyond the human. Rituals such as lighting 100 butter lamps and conducting 49-day ceremonies after a person’s death, intended to nourish and guide the spirit into the next life, already reflect a cosmology where the living, the dead, and the more-than-human are entangled in ongoing relationships of care. While the community may not describe these acts in the language of solidarity, they embody a moral orientation toward beings beyond the human, shaped by beliefs in rebirth, karmic consequence, and spiritual continuity across species and generations.
From this perspective, the hunting ban can be seen not as a radical break, but as an extension of an already-embedded ethic, one that recognizes and responds to suffering, interdependence, and the moral responsibilities of human beings who are, in this worldview, endowed with conscience after cycles of rebirth.
3.3. Solidarity, obligations, and moral tensions
While the findings reveal that solidarity in this case extended moral concern beyond human boundaries and contributed to the protection of nonhuman life, they also show that its institutionalization imposed real social, ritual, and material burden on some humans. The ban was widely described as grounded in identification with animal pain, moral responsibility, and an expanded sense of relationality with nonhuman beings, yet its maintenance included actions like public identification of hunters, the withholding of religious services, and the threat of legal and financial sanctions—forms of pressure, exclusion, and vulnerability that warrant closer examination.
This tension is not, however, unique to more-than-human solidarity, nor to this case.Footnote 21 As Prainsack and Buyx argue, solidaristic practices often evolve from voluntary acts at the interpersonal level into institutionalised forms that entail expectations and obligations such that participation may be required even when motivations are not uniformly shared.Footnote 22 Similarly, Sangiovanni suggests that solidarity can be sustained through joint action without requiring uniform belief or commitments among participants.Footnote 23 Read in this light, the present case shows that as solidaristic commitments become formalized, they may come to rely on unevenly distributed motivations, obligations, and pressures.
What more-than-human solidarity changes is not the existence of this tension, but the moral field within which it is judged. If the analysis centers only on the humans who were publicly shamed, pressured by family members, denied ritual services, or exposed to legal and financial consequences, then these practices appear as coercive, and that concern is valid. But if one also centers the animals, whose killing was prevented and whose suffering was reduced through the ban, as having equal moral value, the ethical picture becomes more complex. As Johnson et al. argue, solidarity and coercion do not carry fixed moral valences in themselves; their normative significance depends on the context, the goods at stake, and how harms and benefits are distributed.Footnote 24 In this case, the issue is therefore not whether coercion was somehow absent, but how its ethical meaning shifts once nonhuman life is treated as morally relevant rather than morally invisible.
This does not resolve the tension. The protection of animal life does not erase the seriousness of the burden imposed on some humans. Rather, the case makes visible a difficulty that runs through solidarity more broadly: the institutionalization of solidarity may protect some forms of lives and improve their welfare, while exposing others to obligation, pressure, and costs. What distinguishes this case is that the lives at stake are not only human, unsettling the anthropocentric assumptions through which that problem is usually assessed, and requires that the preservation of nonhuman life also enters moral evaluation.
3.4. Limits and fragility of solidarity commitments
Another important insight from this study concerns the limits of solidaristic commitment. In human-to-human contexts, such as solidarity-based health systems like the NHS and even during COVID-19, research shows that public willingness to share burdens often declines when costs rise too high or when recipients are perceived as undeserving.Footnote 25 Similarly, in this community, more-than-human solidarity, while strong, is not unconditional. Several participants noted that if human–wildlife conflict intensified, or if economic hardship deepened, adherence to wildlife protection could weaken, with some even acknowledging the possibility of secret killings.
These thresholds reveal that more-than-human solidarity, like its human counterpart, is contingent, shaped by material conditions, competing values, and the moral calculus of what costs are acceptable. The entry of external norms (e.g., market-driven or individualistic values) can further strain these commitments, challenging the relational ethics that currently sustain them. Rather than diminishing its significance, this fragility underscores that solidarity is always negotiated, context-specific, and embedded within the broader social, economic, and moral landscape of a community and leaves us with the question of whether solidarity can be rebuilt once broken.
4. Standing with more-than-humans: Cosmological grounds for a socially embedded and negotiated practice
This research contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to expand the conceptual boundaries of solidarity beyond its dominant human-to-human framing. Through the lived example of a Himalayan community that collectively abandoned hunting, animal slaughter, and trade, the case illustrates how more-than-human solidarity can be enacted not as a response to crisis or calculated risk, but as a spiritual, affective, and cosmologically grounded practice.
Four insights stand out. First, solidarity here is rooted not in shared ecological vulnerability or strategic alignment, but in identification with pain and abandonment, belief in karmic continuity, and the moral responsibilities of being human. Second, solidaristic care for animals was enabled by longstanding interpersonal solidarities and relational responsibilities embedded in daily life, underscoring that more-than-human solidarity builds upon human-to-human trust and mutual aid. Third, while deeply held, these commitments remain contingent—vulnerable to strain under conditions of poverty, conflict, or cultural change and are often sustained through plural motivations and uneven commitment across individuals and groups. Finally, as solidaristic commitments become institutionalized, they may bring new forms of expectation and pressures pointing to the need to understand more-than-human solidarity not only as an ethical orientation but as a socially embedded and negotiated practice—one that may protect some forms of life while exposing others to obligation and cost.
4.1. Limitations
This study presents a single case situated within a specific valley at a specific point in time and shaped by particular historical, social, and material conditions. The findings, therefore, should not be read as representative of all Buddhist or Hindu communities broadly. The practices documented reflect a community at a specific moment in time and may shift in response to changing economic conditions, mobility, or generational change. The relatively short fieldwork period, despite prior community engagement, means some dimensions of community life, particularly dissenting perspectives and quiet noncompliance, may not be fully captured. Finally, as practices widely regarded as morally desirable within the community, participant accounts may be shaped in part by social desirability, particularly regarding adherence to the ban and expressions of moral commitment.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at http://doi.org/10.1017/pub.2026.10192.
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the contributions of Mr. Stanzin Caleb and Mr. Eagyal for supporting logistics, facilitating data collection, and assisting in translation. We would also like to acknowledge the support of Mr. Anmol Ghale, Miss Devana Elias, and Miss Ashlesh Joshi for supporting the translation of the transcripts.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Data curation: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Formal analysis: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Funding acquisition: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Investigation: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Methodology: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Project administration: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Resources: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Software: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Supervision: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Validation: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Visualization: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Writing - original draft: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.; Writing - review & editing: A.G., C.A., E.N., B.P.
Funding statement
This research was conducted as part of the project—“Moving Beyond the Solidarity Rhetoric in Global Health Project” (Global Health Solidarity). The project is funded by the Wellcome Trust through its Discovery Award funding scheme, Grant ref number: 225230/Z/22/Z.
Conflict of interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
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