Literature Review

Briefly, at 543, Couto notices that Australia Capital Territory has amended its Animal Welfare law in 2019 to formally recognize animal sentience as the overall sense of how animal is coping both mentally and physically allowing for a more robust framework for protecting animals from cruelty and issuing citations to that end. Interestingly, a duty of care is imposed on humans as a result of this amendment, which is a novel approach to the framework that departs from the anthropocentric model.

In her article, Cohen proposes an interspecies right to breastfeed. She explores the state of American jurisprudence as affecting the breastfeeding relationship between mother and young as anthropocentric in the context of the dairy industry. She identifies several animal protection laws that protect the calf-young/lactation. For example, at the state level, individual legislatures may tailor their animal welfare or anti-cruelty law to directly protect the breastfeeding relationship. Additionally, Cohen briefly identifies private, self-regulation by farmers to promote, mother-bonded calf-breeding. She finally notes that the positive right to breastfeeding--as a relational right involving both the child's right to be breastfed and the mother's right to engage in it--is absent from our Constitutional law which construe the right to breastfeed mostly in circumstances where the undeniable right to do so was violated by state policy. In most contexts, the right to breastfeed is overguarded beyond that which the Constitution commands by protections through maternity leave. Finally, Cohen proposes an interspecies right to breastfeed. She notes that reforming the anthropocentric view of breastfeeding to an interspecies protection of pregnant or child-rearing humans and nonhuman animals to safeguard the immediate period following birth where breastfeeding takes place would benefit crucial stakeholders, specifically, the environment, presently unregarded by the current paradigm. She identifies an inverse relation: a robust right to breastfeed for human mothers would in turn decrease reliance on the need for dairy formula protects, which in turn would make room for greater animal welfare, insofar as the dairy formula industry is heavily reliant on weak protections for breastfeeding human mothers.

Class actions are commonly used to redress mass wrongs against humans—but what about mass wrongs against animals? This Article provides a comprehensive overview of the types of animal-related class actions that have been filed in the United States, predominantly in the field of consumer law, and explores how these actions can be used as a strategic tool to advance protections for animals within the confines of their legal status as property. This Article also highlights the challenges that have been faced by these animal-related class actions in obtaining class certification pursuant to Rule 23 and offers some practical strategies for overcoming them in the future. In doing so, the author hopes to provide a clear and concise guide for the animal protection movement to successfully utilize the class actions for the benefit of animals. Vickey explains how in our jurisprudence, the framework for redressing injury is completely anthropocentric. Animals do not have standing and are property before the law. The Nonhuman Rights Project by Steven Wise is laudabable in that it has made headway in bringing attention to the rights of highly intelligent and sentient animals held in captivity by bringing habeas corpus petitions on their behalf, but these have been unsuccessful. Standing, in the sense of the right to sue, is conferred on an animal's owner, a nonprofit that claims an aesthetic harm, or the People/State in context of animal cruelty law violation (penal). Vickey then explains the various challeneges that face those with standing to bring a case individually in the context of class actions -- finding that certification is often denied for a confluence of reasons that are unique to the property status of animals.

This article discusses critical comparisons between the human and nonhuman abolitionist movements in the United States. The modern nonhuman abolitionist movement is, in some ways, an extension of the anti-slavery movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the ongoing human Civil Rights movement. As such, there is considerable overlap between the two movements, specifically in the need to simultaneously address property status and oppressive ideology. Despite intentional appropriation of terminology and numerous similarities in mobilization efforts, there has been disappointingly little academic discussion on this relationship. There are significant contentions regarding mobilization and goal attainment in the human abolitionist movement that speak to modern collective action on behalf of other animals. This article will explore the human abolitionist movement and discuss possible applications of movement organization, tactical repertoires, and goal attainment to the current nonhuman animal rights movement. Specifically, the utility of violence and legislative activism in the antislavery movement are discussed as potentially problematic approaches to abolishing nonhuman animal exploitation. Alternatively, the nonhuman animal rights focus on consumer resistance and nonviolence represent an important divergence in abolitionist mobilization.

The previous chapters have argued that human rights can and should be extended to animals. This final part advocates the recognition of animal rights as new human rights. Accepting animal rights as the next generation of (non)human rights would constitute a seismic shift and likely lead to the formation of a new (post-)human rights paradigm. Based on the indivisibility and interdependence of human and animal rights, this chapter proposes One Rights as a novel, holistic human rights paradigm for the Anthropocene.

Animal rights is an idea whose time has come. This book looks at animal rights through the lens—and as a phenomenon—of new human rights. It revisits a question once famously asked by the philosopher Paola Cavalieri: are human rights human? In other words, can and should animals have some of the same fundamental rights that have traditionally been reserved for humans in the guise of ‘human rights’?

In April 2017, a mock tribunal issued an advisory opinion from the seat of the Internation Court of Justice in Hague declaring that the congolmerate Monsanto was, among other things, accountable for human rights violations, complicity in war crimes, and potentially the crime of Ecocide. On the question of Ecocide, the IMT found - based on scientific studies and empirical evidence - that it is possible Monsanto has been responsible for damage to whole ecosystems 95 or, at the very least, possibly presided over and was complicit in supplying toxins (specifically, Agent Orange) that significantly and durably altered ecosystem services [*233] that people relied upon for well-being and survival. 96 The Tribunal proffered the opinion that the time is ripe for a formal legal conceptualization of the crime of Ecocide and to integrate it into an amendment to the Rome Statute. These symbolic findings may have served as the impetus towards the proposedRome statute amendment.

Scientific experiments on crabs and lobsters could be curbed when the animal sentience bill becomes law, the Guardian has learned. There are few restrictions on how crustaceans and decapods can be treated in scientific studies, in contrast with mice and other mammals, for which there are strict welfare laws.

A ruling against the state’s Prop 12 animal welfare law could affect a range of regulations across the country

Granting legal rights and protections to non-human entities such as animals, trees and rivers is essential if countries are to tackle climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, experts have said. The authors of a report titled Law in the Emerging Bio Age say legal frameworks have a key part to play in governing human interactions with the environment and biotechnology.

Cruelty to animals is illegal in Maryland, as it is across the country. The state’s animal protection laws are detailed, covering a wide range of things from puppy sales to conditions in kennels. Below, we’ve summarized the most important laws that pet owners and animal lovers should know about.

Learn about the practical and legal consequences of adopting a pet, including pet adoption contracts.