This unique book establishes potential future avenues within the law to enhance the welfare of animals and grant them recognised legal status. Charting the direction of the animal-human relationship for future generations, it explores the core concepts of property law to demonstrate how change is possible for domestic animals. As an ethical context for future developments the concept of a ‘right of place’ is proposed and developed.
This book focuses on animal laws and animal welfare in major jurisdictions in the world, including the more developed legal regimes for animal protection of the US, UK, Australia, the EU and Israel, and the regulatory regimes still developing in China, South Africa, and Brazil. It offers in-depth analyses and discussions of topical and important issues in animal laws and animal welfare, and provides a comprehensive and comparative snapshot of some of the most important countries in the world in terms of animal population and worsening animal cruelty. Among the issues discussed are international law topics that relate to animals, including the latest WTO ruling on seal products and the EU ban, the Blackfish story and US law for cetaceans, the wildlife trafficking and crimes related to Africa and China, and historical and current animal protection laws in the UK and Australia. Bringing together the disciplines of animal law and animal welfare science as well as ethics and criminology with contributions from some of the most prominent animal welfare scientists and animal law scholars in the world, the book considers the strengths and failings of existing animal protection law in different parts of the world. In doing so it draws more attention to animal protection as a moral and legal imperative and to crimes against animals as a serious crime.
This handbook is a guide to the federal Endangered Species Act, the primary U.S. law aimed at protecting species of animals and plants from human threats to their survival. It is intended for lawyers, government agency employees, students, community activists, businesspeople, and any citizen who wants to understand the Act--its history, provisions, accomplishments, and failures.
Gary L. Francione is a law professor and leading philosopher of animal rights theory. Robert Garner is a political theorist specializing in the philosophy and politics of animal protection. Francione maintains that we have no moral justification for using nonhumans and argues that because animals are property or economic commodities laws or industry practices requiring "humane" treatment will, as a general matter, fail to provide any meaningful level of protection. Garner favors a version of animal rights that focuses on eliminating animal suffering and adopts a protectionist approach, maintaining that although the traditional animal-welfare ethic is philosophically flawed, it can contribute strategically to the achievement of animal-rights ends. As they spar, Francione and Garner deconstruct the animal protection movement in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and elsewhere, discussing the practices of such organizations as PETA, which joins with McDonald's and other animal users to "improve" the slaughter of animals. They also examine American and European laws and campaigns from both the rights and welfare perspectives, identifying weaknesses and strengths that give shape to future legislation and action.
Alasdair Cochrane introduces an entirely new theory of animal rights grounded in their interests as sentient beings. He then applies this theory to different and underexplored policy areas, such as genetic engineering, pet-keeping, indigenous hunting, and religious slaughter. In contrast to other proponents of animal rights, Cochrane claims that because most sentient animals are not autonomous agents, they have no intrinsic interest in liberty. As such, he argues that our obligations to animals lie in ending practices that cause their suffering and death and do not require the liberation of animals. Cochrane's "interest-based rights approach" weighs the interests of animals to determine which is sufficient to impose strict duties on humans. In so doing, Cochrane acknowledges that sentient animals have a clear and discernable right not to be made to suffer and not to be killed, but he argues that they do not have a prima facie right to liberty. Because most animals possess no interest in leading freely chosen lives, humans have no moral obligation to liberate them. Moving beyond theory to the practical aspects of applied ethics, this pragmatic volume provides much-needed perspective on the realities and responsibilities of the human-animal relationship.
In 2011, in one sign of a burgeoning interest in the morality of human interactions with nonhuman animals, a panel hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science declared that dolphins and orcas should be legally regarded as persons. Multiple law schools now offer classes in animal law and have animal law clinics, placing their students with a growing range of animal rights and animal welfare advocacy organizations. But is legal personhood the best means to achieving total interspecies liberation? To answer that question, Impersonating Animals evaluates the rhetoric of animal rights activists Steven Wise and Gary Francione, as well as the Earth jurisprudence paradigm. Deploying a critical ecofeminist stance sensitive to the interweaving of ideas about race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and species, author S. Marek Muller places animal rights rhetoric in the context of discourses in which some humans have been deemed more animal than others and some animals have been deemed more human than others. In bringing rhetoric and animal studies together, she shows that how we communicate about nonhuman beings necessarily affects relationships across species boundaries and among people. This book also highlights how animal studies scholars and activists can and should use ideological rhetorical criticism to investigate the implications of their tactics and strategies, emphasizing a critical vegan rhetoric as the best means of achieving liberation for human and nonhuman animals alike.
Chapter I. Animals : a topic for international law --Chapter II. An overview of international rules on animals --Chapter III. The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling : dead or alive? --Chapter IV. Farm animals in the law of the European Union --Chapter V. Animals in international trade law --Chapter VI. Animals in the law of armed conflict --Chapter VII. Towards international animal rights --Chapter VIII. Towards a global animal protection law.
