The hope for a kinder future through animal law
“The biggest problem currently is ‘anthropo-denialism’, the human tendency to ignore that we are animals and the other species are our evolutionary, biological and psychological kin ... “ Dr Joe Wills on movements in animal law.
In 2018, Dr Joe Wills, a lecturer in law at the University of Leicester, wrote an article in the UK Human Rights blog, positing a utopian possibility for animals. ‘Expanding the Circle of Dignity: For a Universal Declaration of Animal Rights’ compellingly challenges the claim that humans possess rights and animals do not, on which so much animal (and, in the end, human) suffering relies upon. That is changing: since 2018, groups are rising that are dedicated to recognising and protecting animals in law, as the vital connections between human and animal rights are finally drawn. The transformation may be slow and it already faces significant threats in so-called ‘ag-gag laws’ - but the implications are too important to miss, for the health of the human race, for the health of the planet and of course for the well-being of animals.
“There have been significant developments in the animal rights legal movement,” agrees Dr Wills. He cites new developments just in the UK: the launch of: Advocates for Animals, the first law firm dedicated to animal protection; The Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law, the UK’s first academic centre dedicated to the study of fundamental legal rights for non-human animals and Goldsmith’s Animal Rights, the first animal rights team in a UK Barristers' Chambers. Currently, a legal team working alongside renowned human rights lawyer Michael Mansfield QC are mounting a campaign to scrap factory farming.
“These developments not merely signify a growing interest in animal law, [they also show] enthusiasm for new, proactive ways of doing animal law,” says Dr Wills. “For too long in Britain, animal law practitioners have focused most of their efforts almost exclusively on prosecuting cruelty to cats, dogs and horses. Now, people are going beyond this and seeking to use the law to challenge entrenched anthropocentric practices and attitudes.”
What hope does this offer for a Universal Declaration for Animal Rights? “We’re still a long way off, sadly,” he says. “When I wrote that post, it was more in the vein of utopian reimagining than a policy intervention - although I think it’s possible that a combination of technological, economic, climatic, ethical and public health factors in the near future could create the material conditions for a global animal rights law in a faster timeframe than we might think. In the meantime, there are renewed efforts to adopt a Universal Declaration of Animal Welfare, although the uptake on that is quite slow.”
There are other areas of hope, specifically in the linking of animal protection to environmental and human rights protection. “We already have developed legal frameworks to work with in these areas – especially human rights law,” says Dr Wills. “There is now a growing awareness of the link between environmental destruction and human rights violations. And, over the last couple of years, there have been lawsuits filed across Europe, in the US and before international tribunals challenging government inaction over climate change on human rights grounds.”
The next link in the chain to make is the connection between environmental breakdown and industrial animal exploitation, especially in the food system, points out Wills. “It is now beyond dispute that meaningful action on climate breakdown is impossible without a global transformation to a predominantly plant-based food system. Yet at present, governments are not merely standing on the sidelines when it comes to proliferation of torture farms [what Wills calls factory farms: “because it more accurately captures what is morally repugnant about them”], they are actively helping their growth through, amongst other things, vast public subsidies.”
In 2020, government cheques constituted 40% of US farmers’ income. The EU common agricultural policy also pumps tens of billions of euros into factory farming every year. ”Aside from the barbarous outcomes for animals, these subsidies are patently incompatible with climate objectives, and accordingly, human rights obligations,” says Wills. “The animal rights and environmental movements urgently need to collaborate to bring lawsuits to end governmental support for torture farms.”
The world’s loneliest elephant, 35-year-old Kaavan, formerly at Islamabad Zoo, has now found sanctuary in Cambodia. On 21st May 2020, Chief Justice Athar Minallah affirmed “without any hesitation” the rights of nonhuman animals and ordered the relocation of all animals from the Islamabad Zoo to appropriate animal sanctuaries.
But, for many, the link between climate, ecology and animals remains complex and culturally difficult to accept. Wills highlights the connections between public health and animal suffering as offering potential for mindset shifts. “Two cases from 2020 highlight the potential of making these links,” he says. “The first was the Pakistani case of Islamabad Wildlife Management Board v. Metropolitan Corporation Islamabad, which was formally about the appalling conditions of captivity for the nonhuman inmates of Islamabad zoo, but in an extraordinary judgement, Justice Minallah explored broader themes of human hubris and arrogance, COVID-19 and the interconnections between human rights, animal rights and environmental protection. It’s a beautiful and powerful judgement even non-lawyers will appreciate.”
The second case of note is Mckiver v Murphy Brown. “This was a successful nuisance lawsuit brought predominantly by poor people and people of colour against an industrial pig ‘farm’ in North Carolina. What was particularly striking in the ruling is the separate, concurring opinion of Judge Wilkinson who excoriated not just the farm’s trampling over the rights of its poor neighbours but also the ‘deplorable conditions of confinement’ for the pigs, noting that the model of industrial exploitation exemplified by the faculty ‘created serious ecological risks that, when imprudently managed, bred horrible outcomes for pigs and humans alike.’ These two cases are model examples of how courts can deliver rulings that span environmental, social justice and animal rights issues. They show what I attempted to highlight in my original article: animal rights and human rights are not zero sum, they are intertwined.”
There is the continuing impact of COVID, its origins and the likelihood for further zoonotically derived pandemics. “Yes, COVID and the risk of future zoonotic diseases has the potential to be a game changer,” he agrees. “After all, it’s not just wet markets in China that pose threats for future pandemics; Western torture farms in which animals are reared in cramped conditions, living in their own excrement and urine in windowless, unventilated warehouses are breeding grounds for disease. And zoonotic disease is a walk in the park compared to the potential consequences of antibiotic resistance in humans arising from their routine use for ‘livestock’.”
Even setting aside the animal rights and environmental arguments, the public health case for wiping out factory farming is obvious. Yet, left to their own devices, governments have shown that they will continue to support Big Ag. “We need a social movement to fight to get rid of them,” says Wills. “We need vegan, environmentalist, animal welfare, animal rights and public health activists to work together to bring about this change.”
Another important external condition is the availability of alternative protein sources palatable to individuals raised on animal flesh and secretion-heavy diets, he says. “Once people stop eating animals, the material conditions for the abolition of animal exploitation will be in place. The range of plant-based alternatives to flesh and secretion products is now unbelievable. This year, a record half a million people signed up for Veganuary and the shelves of supermarkets and menus of restaurant chains are awash with vegan convenience foods. Last year also saw the first commercial availability of cellular meat in Singapore and Israel. Though not entirely unproblematic from an animal rights perspective, cellular meat has the potential to spell an end to animal farming as we know it, which can only be a good thing.”
Despite underpinning much of human culture, the depth and extent of animal suffering remains unknown - but Wills warns against assuming that confronting reality does not always lead to behaviour change. “Exposés alone are not a panacea,” he says. “People have a variety of psychological defence mechanisms to manage or ignore inconvenient truths. But while giving slaughterhouses glass walls probably wouldn’t, as Paul McCartney claimed, make everyone vegetarian, raising awareness of the plight of nonhuman animals trapped in systems of exploitation is likely to help contribute to a moral awakening for many.
“The animal exploitation industries are aware of all this, which is why they are doing everything in their power to keep animal abuse hidden from the public. A particularly pernicious legal means they’re deploying to this end is so-called ‘ag gag’ legislation which imposes legal sanctions of varying degrees of severity on undercover investigators who expose the routine atrocities in torture farms and killing factories. Animal lawyers in the US have won a series of legal victories against these anti-whistle blower laws on First Amendment grounds, but in recent years these laws have spread to Canada and Australia too. They will be a key legal battleground for the animal advocacy movement in the coming years.
Are animal activists and advocates the sentimentalists they are portrayed to be? Do those who care about animals assign to them capacities that they should, like the vast majority of people, ignore? “The biggest problem currently is ‘anthropo-denialism’, the human tendency to ignore that we are animals and the other species are our evolutionary, biological and psychological kin,” says Wills, firmly. “We share many capacities with the animals we exploit – our emotions, our vulnerability, our desires, our preferences, our relations of care – yet people chose to live in denial about these connections because they impugn present practices.” Wills cites psychological research by Brock Bastian that has demonstrated a link between seeing animals as food and viewing them as having diminished mental lives: “It’s much easier to think of the slab of flesh on the plate as coming from a simple life form rather than an emotionally complex individual with relationships and a capacity for pleasure and suffering.
“Fostering an empathetic connection to the other species is crucial for the animal rights movement and this is often a challenging thing to do in the legal sphere whose official discourses tend to emphasise rationality, detachment, abstraction and universalism over emotions, relationality, situatedness and particularity,” he continues. “An interesting trend in animal legal advocacy in the US, Canada, Colombia, Argentina, India and Pakistan that potentially could redress the law’s tendency to abstraction is efforts to enforce the rights of particular animals in the courts – animals with names and biographies. Telling stories about animals as individuals rather than as tokens of abstract categories may go some way to promoting empathy through the legal domain.”
In these and other efforts, there is a long-awaited conversation between the fields of animal and human rights. “Back in 2018, animal advocacy lawyer Jay Shooster wrote an article about how human rights groups are beginning to support animal rights,” agrees Wills. “Similarly, in the animal rights movement, there have been efforts to make the movement more inclusive, more diverse and to avoid campaigning in ways that reinforce oppressive attitudes or practices against humans. There is still much to be done in both directions but at essence, the human rights and animal rights movements should be natural bedfellows. As Martin Luther King said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
