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Paper short abstract

Recent Rights of Nature litigation and AI bioacoustics claim to amplify nonhuman voices through legal personhood and machine translation. How do care practices risk silencing alterity by concentrating interpretive power, revealing care itself as sovereign control over cross-species communication?

Paper long abstract

Recent developments in Rights of Nature litigation and AI-powered bioacoustics promise new possibilities for interspecies communication. Legal personhood grants rivers agency through human guardians; "digital conservationists" propose translating whale songs into English using machine learning. Both claim to care for nonhuman voices by making them legible within human systems. Yet translation is never neutral care work. Drawing on Serres, Luhmann, and cultural techniques theory, this paper examines how legal and technological media simultaneously enable and constrain ethical interspecies relations. AI translation platforms perform care while concentrating interpretive authority, risking what they purport to remedy: the silencing of nonhuman alterity. Understanding these techniques as pharmacological, that is, as simultaneously remedy and poison, reveals care itself as a sovereign practice determining who speaks, for whom, and how vulnerability becomes politically legible across species boundaries.