Animal Rights

Currently there is no international agreement that ensures the welfare and protection of animals. Nor is there any international standard that regulates and defines the acceptable treatment of animals. This lack of international consensus leads to the current disparate treatment of animals around the world, echoing the need for an international framework addressing the issue. This Article discusses a proposed umbrella treaty, the International Convention for the Protection of Animals (ICPA). This umbrella treaty would enable animal welfare issues to gain international recognition and protection by setting the general guidelines and polices regarding the treatment and use of animals. This Article argues that this is the best way to successfully pursue international protection by reconciling the conflicting goals of making a treaty enticing to as many countries as possible, without eliminating enforcement mechanisms. This Article also suggests four companion protocols that would further delineate specific animal welfare standards and requirements. With the present economic climate, it may be difficult to convince countries to pass such a treaty. However, the ICPA could make it possible to begin the process of enacting groundbreaking international animal protection.

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 contains the introductory remarks for Volume 18, part 2.

Drawing upon various schools of legal thought, this Essay explores how ideological and non-legal factors influence the adjudication process in animal law cases. The Legal Realist and Critical Legal Studies movements highlighted the indeterminacy present in legal doctrine and undermined trust in judges’ ability to arrive at “correct” answers to legal questions. In the midst of such indeterminacy, where legal texts do not predetermine legal outcomes, judges tend to render decisions that are consistent with pervasive societal norms and existing distributions of political power. Starting from these premises, the Author questions whether innovative and creative impact litigation by the animal law movement can succeed in fundamentally challenging speciesism through a legal system that is pervasively hostile to the interests of animals. Although incremental and meaningful gains are possible through litigation, we must recognize the limits of legal reform in the short-term. Although such limitations are typically seen as cause for despair, the Author argues that recognizing our powerlessness can be a source of compassion and an opportunity to experience our shared existential vulnerability with animals.

The legal system generally does little to protect animals, and one aspect of its inadequacy is a matter of formal structure: under United States and Canadian law, animals are not legal “persons” with an independent right to the protections of the legal system. There are calls to expand the status of animals in the law by providing them with legal standing, the right to be represented by a lawyer, and other formal protections. But, in a way, some of this has happened before. There is a long history, primarily from the medieval and early modern periods, of animals being tried for offenses such as attacking humans and destroying crops. These animals were formally prosecuted in elaborate trials that included counsel to represent their interests. The history of the animal trials demonstrates how, in a human-created legal system, legal “rights” for animals can be used for human purposes that have little to do with the interests of the animals. This history shows us that formal legal rights for animals are only tools, rather than an end in themselves, and highlights the importance not just of expanding formal protections, but of putting them to work with empathy, in a way that strives (despite the inevitable limitations of a human justice system in this respect) to incorporate the animals’ own interests and own point of view.

This book review examines Lee Hall’s new book, which presents an innovative animal rights theory: wild animals, due to their autonomous nature, are endowed with rights, but domesticated animals lack rights because they are not autonomous. With that theory in mind, Hall outlines ideas about how humans are obligated to treat both wild and domestic animals. Hall first argues that the rights of wild animals require that humans let them alone. Yet, despite the fact that domestic animals lack rights under Hall’s theory, Hall argues that humans are required to care for them because it is humans who brought them into existence. While the reviewer believes that Hall’s theory is indeed innovative and appealing, he ultimately concludes that it cannot explain why domestic animals completely lack rights and that the implications of the theory for how they are to be treated are unsatisfactory.

Animal protection laws have traditionally categorized animals according to the manner in which humans use them. Animals have been categorized as companion animals, animals used in medical testing, animals raised for slaughter, and wildlife, and the protection afforded to animals has been ostensibly commensurate to their use categorization.

This Article focuses on two alternative strategies that provide legal protection for animals without relying on human use as their primary mode of categorization. First, the Article looks at protecting animals as a single category, in particular through the use of constitutional provisions. The Article then looks at a species-based model that seeks to extend some traditional “human rights” to Great Apes.

Ultimately, the Article concludes that the species-based model provides a more effective alternative to the use-based model, since it provides an alternate means of categorization that shifts focus to the needs and capacities of animals. While generalized protection at the constitutional level may be rhetorically effective, it does not offer an alternative form of legal category that would allow for precision in legal rule-making.

The author gives an overview of the progress of the Nonhuman Rights Project.

This Essay challenges laws’ hegemonic humanist boundaries by analyzing the challenges involved in mainstreaming posthumanist subjects into the legal curricula. Posthumanist subjects in legal education are perceived as marginal and unworthy of serious discussion and scholarship. The author identifies the problems that can arise in introducing posthumanist critical content through her experience of teaching animal law as an optional course and as a part of a compulsory first-year course on property law and in advising on an upper-year student-led conference.

This reader-based FAQ provides information on how to begin animal advocacy.