Articles

This Comment explores the current conflict between federal wildlife protection and Indian religious use of animals which reflects this philosophical debate.

This article explores the historic and current barriers animal law advocates face in pursuing litigation on behalf of animal interests.

Ms. Campbell analyzes the federal witness competency standards and applies them to the current scientific knowledge of chimpanzees and bonobos. Such comparisons indicate that chimpanzees and bonobos could potentially meet these standards and therefore be legally competent witnesses in certain circumstances. The federal competency standards for witnesses testifying on the stand are fairly liberal. Witnesses must be able to distinguish right from wrong, understand the concept of punishment, perceive events, and remember those events to communicate them in the future. Chimpanzees and bonobos are able to do all of these things to some degree, and therefore, arguably satisfy the federal competency standards. In some situations, this indicates that these nonhuman apes should be allowed to testify in court, subject to the federal competency and interpreter rules.

This essay is written by a legal advocate in a socio-legal movement, the crime victims' rights movement, to legal advocates in the animal rights movement. It addresses three issues from the perspective of an outsider to the animal rights movement. First, the essay addresses the problems in the relationship between rights philosophy and successful legal rights advocacy; second, the essay reviews two animal rights legal advocate strategies of incrementalism and the common law coup; finally, the essay concludes with three practical suggestions for the animal rights movement about joining a part of the victims' rights movement to reach mutually identified goals.

Law is anthropocentric. With the limited exception of its treatment of the corporation, law is a system of rules that privileges the concept of the human and ascribes reality through a human perspective. Appreciating this, it is truly impressive that animal issues in the law have become so prominent throughout the legal education system. With this increased exposure to posthumanist critiques of the legal system and its status for and treatment of animals, an increasing number of those involved in legal education are rethinking the law’s species-based hierarchy that places humans at the apex. This flourishing interest in animal law is paralleled by growth in the field of Critical Animal Studies (CAS). However, these two disciplines have developed independently of each other. Acknowledging this, animal law scholarship is currently poised to incorporate the insights of CAS. Integrating such insight into the analysis of animal issues in the law will rectify the speciesist and otherwise exclusionary formulations of the socially constructed differences between various species, which have so far been unquestioned assumptions. CAS offers an understanding of these socially constructed differences and advances a common mission between issues identified as animal injustices and those identified as human injustices. CAS stresses the interconnection between human and animal issues, not simply parallels. This important synthesis can subvert the confinement of animal issues in the legal sphere and is key to extending these essential issues into a more diverse community.

This Article investigates how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the courts are implementing the Endangered Species Act's prohibition on “adverse modification” of “critical habitat.” That prohibition appears to be one of environmental law's most ambitious mandates, but its actual meaning and effect are contested. Using a database of over 4,000 “biological opinions,” interviews with agency staff, and a review of judicial decisions considering the adverse modification prohibition, this Article assesses the extent to which the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the courts are relying on the adverse modification prohibition to provide habitat protection.

This final rule is a collaborative effort between the FWS and the states of Tennessee and Alabama and Conservation Fisheries, Inc. to reintroduce the boulder darter (Etheostoma wapiti), an endangered fish, and the spotfin chub (Cyprinella (=Hybopsis) monacha), a threatened fish to its historical habitat in Lauderdale County Alabama and Lawrence County, Tennessee. This rule provides for Non-essential Experimental Populations (NEP) within the designated area and it establishes limited allowable legal takings in that area. Additionally, this rule also changes the scientific name of the spotfin chub from Cyprinella (=Hybopsis) monacha to Erimonax monachus, to reflect a recent change in the scientific literature.

Final rule by the FWS designating a critical habitat for the Buena Vista Lake Shrew, consisting of 84 acres, in accordance with the 1973 Endangered Species Act. The shrew was listed as endangered through a final rule that was published in the Federal Register on March 6, 2002 (67 FR 10101). The designation of the critical habitat for the shrew was made pursuant to a judicial order from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California. The order arose from Kern County Farm Bureau v. Badgley, U.S. Dist, LEXIS 24125, 2002.

The FWS has designated designate 13 river and stream segments in the Tennessee Cumberland River Basins, for a total of approximately 885 river as critical habitat for five endangered mussels: Cumberland elktoe (Alasmidonta atropurpurea), oyster mussel (Epioblasma capsaeformis), Cumberlandian combshell (Epioblasma brevidens), purple bean (Villosa perpurpurea), and rough rabbitsfoot (Quadrula cylindrica strigillata). All five mussels belong to the Unionidae family.

This final rule downgrades the Mariana fruit bat from endangered to threatened throughout its range in the Mariana archipelago, which is subject to US jurisdiction. The reason for the down grade is the FWS initially made a mistake in the taxonomy of the Mariana fruit bat. When the FWS listed the bat as endangered on Guam in 1984, it believed that the bat was a species only endemic to Guam. Since that time, the FWS has discovered that the bat is endemic to the entire Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) and the Territory of Guam.

FWS has designated critical habitat pursuant to section 3 of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) for the federally endangered riverside fairy shrimp that encompasses 306 miles within Ventura, Orange, and San Diego Counties in California. The riverside fairy shrimp is a freshwater crustacean that is found in vernal pools (a shallow depression that fills with rainwater and does not drain into the lower drainage section) in the coastal California area. The shrimp is the second most primitive living crustacean and is the most recently discovered crustacean in California.

Under this final rule, the FWS has designated critical habitat for the Santa Ana Sucker, in 3 noncontiguous populations in The lower and middle Santa Ana River in San Bernardino, Riverside, and Orange counties; the East, West, and North Forks of the San Gabriel River in Los Angeles County; and lower Big Tujunga Creek, a tributary of the Los Angeles River in Los Angeles County. We have identified 23,719 acres (ac) (9,599 hectares (ha)) of aquatic and riparian habitats essential to the conservation of the Santa Ana sucker.

This final rule is written to designate a critical habitat for the Klamath River and Columbia River populations of Bull Trout. The critical habitat designation includes approximately 1,748 miles of streams and 61,235 acres of lakes and marshes. The reason for this designation is that at the time of listing, there are only seven remaining non-migratory populations of bull trout, and the designation is mandatory pursuant to a court order.

This rule is a correction to a previous final rule designating critical habitat for the Topeka Shiner (Notropis Topeka), published in the Federal Register on July, 24, 2004 (69 FR 44736). In the previous final rule, the FWS designated as critical habitat 1,356 kilometers of stream in Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska. They excluded from designation all previously proposed critical habitat in Kansas, Missouri, and South Dakota, and excluded the Fort Riley Military Installation in Kansas from critical habitat designation.

This article describes the procedures of tail docking and ear cropping, the history of the procedures, their place in modern veterinary care, and discuss the positions of advocates both for, and against these procedures. Additionally, this article explains the ways in which the law is being used internationally in preventing these unnecessary procedures, and the ways that current and future American anti-cruelty laws can be used to put a stop to this epidemic.

Abstract: Although settlers hunted gray wolves to near extinction more than a century ago, the animal remains one of the most enduring symbols of the West. In 1994, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service authorized reintroduction of gray wolves into Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming under recovery provisions of the Endangered Species Act. Fourteen years later, the Service delisted wolves in these states, contending that the reintroduced population met the numeric and distributional criteria established for recovery in 1994. Months after a district judge enjoined the Service's 2008 delisting rule, the Service again delisted gray wolves. This Note asserts that both the 2008 and 2009 delisting rules violate provisions of the Endangered Species Act guaranteeing adequacy of state regulatory mechanisms prior to delisting, and fidelity to the best available scientific data. The Note also contends that the Service unlawfully deployed conservation tools as delisting instruments contrary to congressional intent. Lastly, the Note illuminates administrative defects in the delisting rules, namely the Service's decision to disregard its own requirement of genetic linkage among the entire gray wolf population without providing a reasoned explanation.

The Supreme Court has recognized the uniquely non-intrusive nature of a canine sniff means that using dogs in certain situations does not involve a search. This has encouraged the use of detection dogs in law enforcement, and limited the costs associated with producing evidence of canine alerts in court. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court’s decisions do not mean that any claim that a dog may have alerted can justify a further search, and courts have recognized that a dog must be reliable for an alert to have this consequence. Thus, a high level of reliability must be expected of a canine team, and a failure to conduct adequate training or maintain complete records to establish that reliability will not exclude the possibility that a called alert may actually have been cued, precluding the use of the alert at trial.

This Article examines the extent to which animals may be used by individuals with disabilities in a particular setting--postsecondary institutions. Part I of this Article provides an introduction to Section 504, Title II, and Title III. It also summarizes the OCR guidance, which adopts the Title III service animal standards for Title II and Section 504 purposes. Part II analyzes the text and purpose of Title II and Section 504, as well as the practical realities associated with the postsecondary setting, and argues that all animals, not just the service animals of Title III, may be permissibly used by individuals with disabilities under Title II and Section 504.

A discussion of the state of the Swiss law on the issue of damages for companion animals after the changes of the 2003 legislation.

Compared to other non-human animals, dogs generally share a privileged relationship with humans. Recent government trends have been to classify dogs “dangerous” to force “irresponsible owners” to better control their dogs. While some “owners” are undeniably irresponsible and deserve to be held accountable, a fair analysis of some of the factual situations underlying dangerous dog classifications indicates that too many local governments declare dogs dangerous who are not truly dangerous. With the United States human population now at more than 300 million, it is foreseeable that this trend is only going to continue as developable land decreases, forcing humans to live closer together and to come into greater contact with neighbors' dogs.