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Article Contents

1. introduction: the need for legal animal rights theory, 2. can animals have legal rights, 3. do animals have (simple) legal rights, 4. should animals have (fundamental) legal rights, 5. conclusion.

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Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights

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Saskia Stucki, Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies , Volume 40, Issue 3, Autumn 2020, Pages 533–560, https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaa007

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With legal animal rights on the horizon, there is a need for a more systematic theorisation of animal rights as legal rights. This article addresses conceptual, doctrinal and normative issues relating to the nature and foundations of legal animal rights by examining three key questions: can, do and should animals have legal rights? It will show that animals are conceptually possible candidates for rights ascriptions. Moreover, certain ‘animal welfare rights’ could arguably be extracted from existing animal welfare laws, even though these are currently imperfect and weak legal rights at best. Finally, this article introduces the new conceptual vocabulary of simple and fundamental animal rights, in order to distinguish the weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law from the kind of strong legal rights that animals ought to have as a matter of future law.

Legal animal rights are on the horizon, and there is a need for a legal theory of animal rights—that is, a theory of animal rights as legal rights. While there is a diverse body of moral and political theories of animal rights, 1 the nature and conceptual foundations of legal animal rights remain remarkably underexplored. As yet, only few and fragmented legal analyses of isolated aspects of animal rights exist. 2 Other than that, most legal writing in this field operates with a hazily assumed, rudimentary and undifferentiated conception of animal rights—one largely informed by extralegal notions of moral animal rights—which tends to obscure rather than illuminate the distinctive nature and features of legal animal rights. 3 A more systematic and nuanced theorisation of legal animal rights is, however, necessary and overdue for two reasons: first, a gradual turn to legal rights in animal rights discourse; and, secondly, the incipient emergence of legal animal rights.

First, while animal rights have originally been framed as moral rights, they are increasingly articulated as potential legal rights. That is, animals’ moral rights are asserted in an ‘ought to be legal rights’-sense (or ‘manifesto sense’) 4 that demands legal institutionalisation and refers to the corresponding legal rights which animals should ideally have. 5 A salient reason for transforming moral into legal animal rights is that purely moral rights (which exist prior to and independently of legal validation) do not provide animals with sufficient practical protection, whereas legally recognised rights would be reinforced by the law’s more stringent protection and enforcement mechanisms. 6 With a view to their (potential) juridification, it seems advisable to rethink and reconstruct animal rights as specifically legal rights, rather than simply importing moral animal rights into the legal domain. 7

Secondly, and adding urgency to the need for theorisation, legal animal rights are beginning to emerge from existing law. Recently, a few pioneering courts have embarked on a path of judicial creation of animal rights, arriving at them either through a rights-based interpretation of animal welfare legislation or a dynamic interpretation of constitutional (human) rights. Most notably, the Supreme Court of India has extracted a range of animal rights from the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and, by reading them in the light of the Constitution, elevated those statutory rights to the status of fundamental rights. 8 Furthermore, courts in Argentina 9 and Colombia 10 have extended the fundamental right of habeas corpus , along with the underlying right to liberty, to captive animals. 11 These (so far isolated) acts of judicial recognition of animal rights may be read as early manifestations of an incipient formation of legal animal rights. Against this backdrop, there is a pressing practical need for legal animal rights theory, in order to explain and guide the as yet still nascent—and somewhat haphazard—evolution of legal animal rights.

This article seeks to take the first steps towards building a more systematic and nuanced theory of legal animal rights. Navigating the existing theoretical patchwork, the article revisits and connects relevant themes that have so far been addressed only in a scattered or cursory manner, and consolidates them into an overarching framework for legal animal rights. Moreover, tackling the well-known problem of ambiguity and obscurity involved in the generally vague, inconsistent and undifferentiated use of the umbrella term ‘animal rights’, this article brings analytical clarity into the debate by disentangling and unveiling different meanings and facets of legal animal rights. 12 To this end, the analysis identifies and separates three relevant sets of issues: (i) conceptual issues concerning the nature and foundations of legal animal rights, and, more generally, whether animals are the kind of beings who can potentially hold legal rights; (ii) doctrinal issues pertaining to existing animal welfare law and whether it confers some legal rights on animals—and, if so, what kind of rights; and (iii) normative issues as to why and what kind of legal rights animals ought ideally to have as a matter of future law. These thematic clusters will be addressed through three simple yet key questions: can , do and should animals have legal rights?

Section 2 will show that it is conceptually possible for animals to hold legal rights, and will clarify the formal structure and normative grounds of legal animal rights. Moreover, as section 3 will demonstrate, unwritten animal rights could arguably be extracted from existing animal welfare laws, even though such ‘animal welfare rights’ are currently imperfect and weak legal rights at best. In order to distinguish between these weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law and the kind of strong legal rights that animals ought to have potentially or ideally, the new conceptual categories of ‘ simple animal rights’ and ‘ fundamental animal rights’ will be introduced. Finally, section 4 will explore a range of functional reasons why animals need such strong, fundamental rights as a matter of future law.

As a preliminary matter, it seems necessary to first address the conceptual issue whether animals potentially can have legal rights, irrespective of doctrinal and normative issues as to whether animals do in fact have, or should have, legal rights. Whether animals are possible or potential right holders—that is, the kind of beings to whom legal rights can be ascribed ‘without conceptual absurdity’ 13 —must be determined based on the general nature of rights, which is typically characterised in terms of the structure (or form) and grounds (or ultimate purpose) of rights. 14 Looking at the idea of animal rights through the lens of general rights theories helps clarify the conceptual foundations of legal animal rights by identifying their possible forms and grounds. The first subsection (A) focusses on two particular forms of conceptually basic rights—claims and liberties—and examines their structural compatibility with animal rights. The second subsection (B) considers the two main competing theories of rights—the will theory and interest theory—and whether, and on what grounds, they can accommodate animals as potential right holders.

A. The Structure of Legal Animal Rights

The formal structure of rights is generally explicated based on the Hohfeldian typology of rights. 15 Hohfeld famously noted that the generic term ‘right’ tends to be used indiscriminately to cover ‘any sort of legal advantage’, and distinguished four different types of conceptually basic rights: claims (rights stricto sensu ), liberties, powers and immunities. 16 In the following, I will show on the basis of first-order rights 17 —claims and liberties—that legal animal rights are structurally possible, and what such legal relations would consist of. 18

(i) Animal claim rights

To have a right in the strictest sense is ‘to have a claim to something and against someone’, the claim right necessarily corresponding with that person’s correlative duty towards the right holder to do or not to do something. 19 This type of right would take the form of animals holding a claim to something against, for example, humans or the state who bear correlative duties to refrain from or perform certain actions. Such legal animal rights could be either negative rights (correlative to negative duties) to non-interference or positive rights (correlative to positive duties) to the provision of some good or service. 20 The structure of claim rights seems especially suitable for animals, because these are passive rights that concern the conduct of others (the duty bearers) and are simply enjoyed rather than exercised by the right holder. 21 Claim rights would therefore assign to animals a purely passive position that is specified by the presence and performance of others’ duties towards animals, and would not require any actions by the animals themselves.

(ii) Animal liberties

Liberties, by contrast, are active rights that concern the right holder’s own conduct. A liberty to engage in or refrain from a certain action is one’s freedom of any contrary duty towards another to eschew or undertake that action, correlative to the no right of another. 22 On the face of it, the structure of liberties appears to lend itself to animal rights. A liberty right would indicate that an animal is free to engage in or avoid certain behaviours, in the sense of being free from a specific duty to do otherwise. Yet, an obvious objection is that animals are generally incapable of having any legal duties. 23 Given that animals are inevitably in a constant state of ‘no duty’ and thus ‘liberty’, 24 this seems to render the notion of liberty rights somewhat pointless and redundant in the case of animals, as it would do nothing more than affirm an already and invariably existing natural condition of dutylessness. However, this sort of ‘natural liberty’ is, in and of itself, only a naked liberty, one wholly unprotected against interferences by others. 25 That is, while animals may have the ‘natural liberty’ of, for example, freedom of movement in the sense of not having (and not being capable of having) a duty not to move around, others do not have a duty vis-à-vis the animals not to interfere with the exercise of this liberty by, for example, capturing and caging them.

The added value of turning the ‘natural liberties’ of animals into liberty rights thus lies in the act of transforming unprotected, naked liberties into protected, vested liberties that are shielded from certain modes of interference. Indeed, it seems sensible to think of ‘natural liberties’ as constituting legal rights only when embedded in a ‘protective perimeter’ of claim rights and correlative duties within which such liberties may meaningfully exist and be exercised. 26 This protective perimeter consists of some general duties (arising not from the liberty right itself, but from other claim rights, such as the right to life and physical integrity) not to engage in ‘at least the cruder forms of interference’, like physical assault or killing, which will preclude most forms of effective interference. 27 Moreover, liberties may be fortified by specific claim rights and correlative duties strictly designed to protect a particular liberty, such as if the state had a (negative) duty not to build highways that cut across wildlife habitat, or a (positive) duty to build wildlife corridors for such highways, in order to facilitate safe and effective freedom of movement for the animals who live in these fragmented habitats.

(iii) Animal rights and duties: correlativity and reciprocity

Lastly, some remarks on the relation between animal rights and duties seem in order. Some commentators hold that animals are unable to possess legal rights based on the influential idea that the capacity for holding rights is inextricably linked with the capacity for bearing duties. 28 Insofar as animals are not capable of bearing legal duties in any meaningful sense, it follows that animals cannot have legal (claim) rights against other animals, given that those other animals would be incapable of holding the correlative duties. But does this disqualify animals from having legal rights altogether, for instance, against legally competent humans or the state?

While duties are a key component of (first-order) rights—with claim rights necessarily implying the presence of a legal duty in others and liberties necessarily implying the absence of a legal duty in the right holder 29 —neither of them logically entails that the right holder bear duties herself . As Kramer aptly puts it:

Except in the very unusual circumstances where someone holds a right against himself, X’s possession of a legal right does not entail X’s bearing of a legal duty; rather, it entails the bearing of a legal duty by somebody else. 30

This underscores an important distinction between the conceptually axiomatic correlativity of rights and duties—the notion that every claim right necessarily implies a duty—and the idea of a reciprocity of rights and duties—the notion that (the capacity for) right holding is conditioned on (the capacity for) duty bearing. While correlativity refers to an existential nexus between a right and a duty held by separate persons within one and the same legal relation , reciprocity posits a normative nexus between the right holding and duty bearing of one and the same person within separate, logically unrelated legal relations.

The claim that the capacity for right holding is somehow contingent on the right holder’s (logically unrelated) capacity for duty bearing is thus, as Kramer puts it, ‘straightforwardly false’ from a Hohfeldian point of view. 31 Nevertheless, there may be other, normative reasons (notably underpinned by social contract theory) for asserting that the class of appropriate right holders should be limited to those entities that, in addition to being structurally possible right holders, are also capable of reciprocating, that is, of being their duty bearers’ duty bearers. 32 However, such a narrow contractarian framing of right holding should be rejected, not least because it misses the current legal reality. 33 With a view to legally incompetent humans (eg infants and the mentally incapacitated), contemporary legal systems have manifestly cut the connection between right holding and the capacity for duty bearing. 34 As Wenar notes, the ‘class of potential right holders has expanded to include duty-less entities’. 35 Similarly, it would be neither conceptually nor legally apposite to infer from the mere fact that animals do not belong to the class of possible duty bearers that they cannot belong to the class of possible right holders. 36

B. The Grounds of Legal Animal Rights

While Hohfeld’s analytical framework is useful to outline the possible forms and composition of legal animal rights, Kelch rightly points out that it remains agnostic as to the normative grounds of potential animal rights. 37 In this respect, the two dominant theories of rights advance vastly differing accounts of the ultimate purpose of rights and who can potentially have them. 38 Whereas the idea of animal rights does not resonate well with the will theory, the interest theory quite readily provides a conceptual home for it.

(i) Will theory

According to the will theory, the ultimate purpose of rights is to promote and protect some aspect of an individual’s autonomy and self-realisation. A legal right is essentially a ‘legally respected choice’, and the right holder a ‘small scale sovereign’ whose exercise of choice is facilitated by giving her discretionary ‘legal powers of control’ over others’ duties. 39 The class of potential right holders thus includes only those entities that possess agency and legal competence, which effectively rules out the possibility of animals as right holders, insofar as they lack the sort or degree of agency necessary for the will-theory conception of rights. 40

However, the fact that animals are not potential right holders under the will theory does not necessarily mean that animals cannot have legal rights altogether. The will theory has attracted abundant criticism for its under-inclusiveness as regards both the class of possible right holders 41 and the types of rights it can plausibly account for, and thus seems to advance too narrow a conception of rights for it to provide a theoretical foundation for all rights. 42 In particular, it may be noted that the kinds of rights typically contemplated as animal rights are precisely of the sort that generally exceed the explanatory power of the will theory, namely inalienable, 43 passive, 44 public-law 45 rights that protect basic aspects of animals’ (partially historically and socially mediated) vulnerable corporeal existence. 46 Such rights, then, are best explained on an interest-theoretical basis.

(ii) Interest theory

Animal rights theories most commonly ground animal rights in animal interests, and thus naturally gravitate to the interest theory of rights. 47 According to the interest theory, the ultimate purpose of rights is the protection and advancement of some aspect(s) of an individual’s well-being and interests. 48 Legal rights are essentially ‘legally-protected interests’ that are of special importance and concern. 49 With its emphasis on well-being rather than on agency, the interest theory seems more open to the possibility of animal rights from the outset. Indeed, as regards the class of possible right holders, the interest theory does little conceptual filtering beyond requiring that right holders be capable of having interests. 50 Given that, depending on the underlying definition of ‘interest’, this may cover all animals, plants and, according to some, even inanimate objects, the fairly modest and potentially over-inclusive conceptual criterion of ‘having interests’ is typically complemented by the additional, more restrictive moral criterion of ‘having moral status’. 51 Pursuant to this limitation, not just any being capable of having interests can have rights, but only those whose well-being is not merely of instrumental, but of intrinsic or ‘ultimate value’. 52

Accordingly, under the interest theory, two conditions must be met for animals to qualify as potential right holders: (i) animals must have interests, (ii) the protection of which is required not merely for ulterior reasons, but for the animals’ own sake, because their well-being is intrinsically valuable. Now, whether animals are capable of having interests in the sense relevant to having rights and whether they have moral status in the sense of inherent or ultimate value is still subject to debate. For example, some have denied that animals possess interests based on an understanding of interests as wants and desires that require complex cognitive abilities such as having beliefs and language. 53 However, most interest theories opt for a broader understanding of interests in the sense of ‘being in someone’s interest’, meaning that an interest holder can be ‘made better or worse off’ and is able to benefit in some way from protective action. 54 Typically, though not invariably, the capacity for having interests in this broad sense is bound up with sentience—the capacity for conscious and subjective experiences of pain, suffering and pleasure. 55 Thus, most interest theorists quite readily accept (sentient) animals as potential right holders, that is, as the kind of beings that are capable of holding legal rights. 56

More importantly yet for legal purposes, the law already firmly rests on the recognition of (some) animals as beings who possess intrinsically valuable interests. Modern animal welfare legislation cannot be intelligibly explained other than as acknowledging that the animals it protects (i) have morally and legally relevant goods and interests, notably in their welfare, life and physical or mental integrity. 57 Moreover, it rests on an (implicit or explicit) recognition of those animals as (ii) having moral status in the sense of having intrinsic value. The underlying rationale of modern, non-anthropocentric, ethically motivated animal protection laws is the protection of animals qua animals, for their own sake, rather than for instrumental reasons. 58 Some laws go even further by directly referencing the ‘dignity’ or ‘intrinsic value’ of animals. 59

It follows that existing animal welfare laws already treat animals as intrinsically valuable holders of some legally relevant interests—and thus as precisely the sorts of beings who possess the qualities that are, under an interest theory of rights, necessary and sufficient for having rights. This, then, prompts the question whether those very laws do not only conceptually allow for potential animal rights, but might also give rise to actual legal rights for animals.

Notwithstanding that animals could have legal rights conceptually, the predominant doctrinal opinion is that, as a matter of positive law, animals do not have any, at least not in the sense of proper, legally recognised and claimable rights. 60 Yet, there is a certain inclination, especially in Anglo-American parlance, to speak—in a rather vague manner—of ‘animal rights’ as if they already exist under current animal welfare legislation. Such talk of existing animal rights is, however, rarely backed up with further substantiations of the underlying claim that animal welfare laws do in fact confer legal rights on animals. In the following, I will examine whether animals’ existing legal protections may be classified as legal rights and, if so, what kind of rights these constitute. The analysis will show (A) that implicit animal rights (hereinafter referred to as ‘animal welfare rights’) 61 can be extracted from animal welfare laws as correlatives of explicit animal welfare duties, but that this reading remains largely theoretical so far, given that such unwritten animal rights are hardly legally recognised in practice. Moreover, (B) the kind of rights derivable from animal welfare laws are currently at best imperfect and weak rights that do not provide animals with the sort of robust normative protection that is generally associated with legal rights, and typically also expected from legal animal rights qua institutionalised moral animal rights. Finally, (C) the new conceptual categories of ‘ simple animal rights’ and ‘ fundamental animal rights’ are introduced in order to distinguish, and account for the qualitative differences, between such current, imperfect, weak animal rights and potential, ideal, strong animal rights.

A. Extracting ‘Animal Welfare Rights’ from Animal Welfare Laws

(i) the simple argument from correlativity.

Existing animal welfare laws are not framed in the language of rights and do not codify any explicit animal rights. They do, however, impose on people legal duties designed to protect animals—duties that demand some behaviour that is beneficial to the welfare of animals. Some commentators contend that correlative (claim) rights are thereby conferred upon animals as the beneficiaries of such duties. 62 This view is consistent with, and, indeed, the logical conclusion of, an interest-theoretical analysis. 63 Recall that rights are essentially legally protected interests of intrinsically valuable individuals, and that a claim right is the ‘position of normative protectedness that consists in being owed a … legal duty’. 64 Under existing animal welfare laws, some goods of animals are legally protected interests in exactly this sense of ultimately valuable interests that are protected through the imposition of duties on others. However, the inference from existing animal welfare duties to the existence of correlative ‘animal welfare rights’ appears to rely on a somewhat simplistic notion of correlativity, along the lines of ‘where there is a duty there is a right’. 65 Two objections in particular may be raised against the view that beneficial duties imposed by animal welfare laws are sufficient for creating corresponding legal rights in animals.

First, not every kind of duty entails a correlative right. 66 While some duties are of an unspecific and general nature, only relational, directed duties which are owed to rather than merely regarding someone are the correlatives of (claim) rights. Closely related, not everyone who stands to benefit from the performance of another’s duty has a correlative right. According to a standard delimiting criterion, beneficial duties generate rights only in the intended beneficiaries of such duties, that is, those who are supposed to benefit from duties designed to protect their interests. 67 Yet, animal welfare duties, in a contemporary reading, are predominantly understood not as indirect duties regarding animals—duties imposed to protect, for example, an owner’s interest in her animal, public sensibilities or the moral character of humans—but as direct duties owed to the protected animals themselves. 68 Moreover, the constitutive purpose of modern animal welfare laws is to protect animals for their own sake. Animals are therefore clearly beneficiaries in a qualified sense, that is, they are not merely accidental or incidental, but the direct and intended primary beneficiaries of animal welfare duties. 69

Secondly, one may object that an analysis of animal rights as originating from intentionally beneficial duties rests on a conception of rights precisely of the sort which has the stigma of redundancy attached to it. Drawing on Hart, this would appear to cast rights as mere ‘alternative formulation of duties’ and thus ‘no more than a redundant translation of duties … into a terminology of rights’. 70 Admittedly, as MacCormick aptly puts it:

[To] rest an account of claim rights solely on the notion that they exist whenever a legal duty is imposed by a law intended to benefit assignable individuals … is to treat rights as being simply the ‘reflex’ of logically prior duties. 71

One way of responding to this redundancy problem is to reverse the logical order of rights and duties. On this account, rights are not simply created by (and thus logically posterior to) beneficial duties, but rather the converse: such duties are derived from and generated by (logically antecedent) rights. For example, according to Raz, ‘Rights are grounds of duties in others’ and thus justificationally prior to duties. 72 However, if rights are understood not just as existentially correlative, but as justificationally prior to duties, identifying intentionally beneficial animal welfare duties as the source of (logically posterior) animal rights will not suffice. In order to accommodate the view that rights are grounds of duties, the aforementioned argument from correlativity needs to be reconsidered and refined.

(ii) A qualified argument from correlativity

A refined, and reversed, argument from correlativity must show that animal rights are not merely reflexes created by animal welfare duties, but rather the grounds for such duties. In other words, positive animal welfare duties must be plausibly explained as some kind of codified reflection, or visible manifestation, of ‘invisible’ background animal rights that give rise to those duties.

This requires further clarification of the notion of a justificational priority of rights over duties. On the face of it, the idea that rights are somehow antecedent to duties appears to be at odds with the Hohfeldian correlativity axiom, which stipulates an existential nexus of mutual entailment between rights and duties—one cannot exist without the other. 73 Viewed in this light, it seems paradoxical to suggest that rights are causal for the very duties that are simultaneously constitutive of those rights—cause and effect seem to be mutually dependent. Gewirth offers a plausible explanation for this seemingly circular understanding of the relation between rights and duties. He illustrates that the ‘priority of claim rights over duties in the order of justifying purpose or final causality is not antithetical to their being correlative to each other’ by means of an analogy:

Parents are prior to their children in the order of efficient causality, yet the (past or present) existence of parents can be inferred from the existence of children, as well as conversely. Hence, the causal priority of parents to children is compatible with the two groups’ being causally as well as conceptually correlative. The case is similar with rights and duties, except that the ordering relation between them is one of final rather than efficient causality, of justifying purpose rather than bringing-into-existence. 74

Upon closer examination, this point may be specified even further. To stay with the analogy of (biological) 75 parents and their children: it is actually the content of ‘parents’—a male and a female (who at some point procreate together)—that exists prior to and independently of possibly ensuing ‘children’, whereas this content turns into ‘parents’ only in conjunction with ‘children’. That is, the concepts of ‘parents’ and ‘children’ are mutually entailing, whilst, strictly speaking, it is not ‘parents’, but rather that which will later be called ‘parents’ only once the ‘child’ comes into existence—the pre-existing content—which is antecedent to and causal for ‘children’.

Applied to the issue of rights and duties, this means that it is actually the content of a ‘right’—an interest—that exists prior to and independently of, and is (justificationally) causal for the creation of, a ‘duty’, which, in turn, is constitutive of a ‘right’. The distinction between ‘right’ and its content—an interest—allows the pinpointing of the latter as the reason for, and the former as the concomitant correlative of, a duty imposed to protect the pre-existing interest. It may thus be restated, more precisely, that it is not rights, but the protected interests which are grounds of duties. Incidentally, this specification is consistent with Raz’s definition of rights, according to which ‘having a right’ means that an aspect of the right holder’s well-being (her interest) ‘is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) to be under a duty’. 76 Now, the enactment of modern animal welfare laws is in and of itself evidence of the fact that some aspects of animals’ well-being (their interests) are—both temporally and justificationally—causal and a sufficient reason for imposing duties on others. Put differently: animal interests are grounds of animal welfare duties , and this, in turn, is conceptually constitutive of animal rights .

In conclusion, existing animal welfare laws could indeed be analysed as comprising unwritten ‘animal welfare rights’ as implicit correlatives of the explicit animal welfare duties imposed on others. The essential feature of legal rules conferring rights is that they specifically aim at protecting individual interests or goods—whether they do so expressis verbis or not is irrelevant. 77 Even so, in order for a right to be an actual (rather than a potential or merely postulated) legal right, it should at least be legally recognised (if not claimable and enforceable), 78 which is determined by the applicable legal rules. In the absence of unequivocal wording, whether a legal norm confers unwritten rights on animals becomes a matter of legal interpretation. While theorists can show that a rights-based approach lies within the bounds of a justifiable interpretation of the law, an actual, valid legal right hardly comes to exist by the mere fact that some theorists claim it exists. For that to happen, it seems instrumental that some public authoritative body, notably a court, recognises it as such. That is, while animals’ existing legal protections may already provide for all the ingredients constitutive of rights, it takes a court to actualise this potential , by authoritatively interpreting those legal rules as constituting rights of animals. However, because courts, with a few exceptions, have not done so thus far, it seems fair to say that unwritten animal rights are not (yet) legally recognised in practice and remain a mostly theoretical possibility for now. 79

B. The Weakness of Current ‘Animal Welfare Rights’

Besides the formal issue of legal recognition, there are substantive reasons for questioning whether the kind of rights extractable from animal welfare laws are really rights at all. This is because current ‘animal welfare rights’ are unusually weak rights that do not afford the sort of strong normative protection that is ordinarily associated with legal rights. 80 Classifying animals’ existing legal protections as ‘rights’ may thus conflict with the deeply held view that, because they protect interests of special importance, legal rights carry special normative force . 81 This quality is expressed in metaphors of rights as ‘trumps’, 82 ‘protective fences’, 83 protective shields or ‘No Trespassing’ signs, 84 or ‘suits of armor’. 85 Rights bestow upon individuals and their important interests a particularly robust kind of legal protection against conflicting individual or collective interests, by singling out ‘those interests that are not to be sacrificed to the utilitarian calculus ’ and ‘whose promotion or protection is to be given qualitative precedence over the social calculus of interests generally’. 86 Current ‘animal welfare rights’, by contrast, provide an atypically weak form of legal protection, notably for two reasons: because they protect interests of secondary importance or because they are easily overridden.

In order to illustrate this, consider the kind of rights that can be extracted from current animal welfare laws. Given that these are the correlatives of existing animal welfare duties, the substance of these rights must mirror the content laid down in the respective legal norms. This extraction method produces, first, a rather odd subgroup of ‘animal welfare rights’ that have a narrow substantive scope protecting highly specific, secondary interests, such as a (relative) right to be slaughtered with prior stunning, 87 an (absolute) right that experiments involving ‘serious injuries that may cause severe pain shall not be carried out without anaesthesia’ 88 or a right of chicks to be killed by fast-acting methods, such as homogenisation or gassing, and to not be stacked on top of each other. 89 The weak and subsidiary character of such rights becomes clearer when placed within the permissive institutional context in which they operate, and when taking into account the more basic interests that are left unprotected. 90 While these rights may protect certain secondary, derivative interests (such as the interest in being killed in a painless manner ), they are simultaneously premised on the permissibility of harming the more primary interests at stake (such as the interest in not being killed at all). Juxtaposed with the preponderance of suffering and killing that is legally allowed in the first place, phrasing the residual legal protections that animals do receive as ‘rights’ may strike us as misleading. 91

But then there is a second subgroup of ‘animal welfare rights’, extractable from general animal welfare provisions, that have a broader scope, protecting more basic, primary interests, such as a right to well-being, life, 92 dignity, 93 to not suffer unnecessarily, 94 or against torture and cruel treatment. 95 Although the object of such rights is of a more fundamental nature, the substantive guarantee of these facially fundamental rights is, to a great extent, eroded by a conspicuously low threshold for permissible infringements. 96 That is, these rights suffer from a lack of normative force, which manifests in their characteristically high infringeability (ie their low resistance to being overridden). Certainly, most rights (whether human or animal) are relative prima facie rights that allow for being balanced against conflicting interests and whose infringement constitutes a violation only when it is not justified, notably in terms of necessity and proportionality. 97 Taking rights seriously does, however, require certain safeguards ensuring that rights are only overridden by sufficiently important considerations whose weight is proportionate to the interests at stake. As pointed out by Waldron, the idea of rights is seized on as a way of resisting, or at least restricting, the sorts of trade-offs that would be acceptable in an unqualified utilitarian calculus, where ‘important individual interests may end up being traded off against considerations which are intrinsically less important’. 98 Yet, this is precisely what happens to animals’ prima facie protected interests, any of which—irrespective of how important or fundamental they are—may enter the utilitarian calculus, where they typically end up being outweighed by human interests that are comparatively less important or even trivial, notably dietary and fashion preferences, economic profitability, recreation or virtually any other conceivable human interest. 99

Any ‘animal welfare rights’ that animals may presently be said to have are thus either of the substantively oddly specific, yet rather secondary, kind or, in the case of more fundamental prima facie rights, such that are highly infringeable and ‘evaporate in the face of consequential considerations’. 100 The remaining question is whether these features render animals’ existing legal protections non-rights or just particularly unfit or weak rights , but rights nonetheless. The answer will depend on whether the quality of special strength, weight or force is considered a conceptually constitutive or merely typical but not essential feature of rights. On the first view, a certain normative force would function as a threshold criterion for determining what counts as a right and for disqualifying those legal protections that may structurally resemble rights but do not meet a minimum weight. 101 On the second view, the normative force of rights would serve as a variable that defines the particular weight of different types of rights on a spectrum from weak to strong. 102 To illustrate the intricacies of drawing a clear line between paradigmatically strong rights, weak rights or non-rights based on this criterion, let us return to the analogy with (biological) ‘parents’. In a minimal sense, the concept of ‘parents’ may be essentially defined as ‘biological creators of a child’. Typically, however, a special role as nurturer and caregiver is associated with the concept of ‘parent’. Now, is someone who merely meets the minimal conceptual criterion (by being the biological creator), but not the basic functions attached to the concept (by not giving care), still a ‘parent’? And, if so, to what extent? Are they a full and proper ‘parent’, or merely an imperfect, dysfunctional form of ‘parent’, a bad ‘parent’, but a ‘parent’ nonetheless? Maybe current animal rights are ‘rights’ in a similar sense as an absent, negligent, indifferent biological mother or father who does not assume the role and responsibilities that go along with parenthood is still a ‘parent’. That is, animals’ current legal protections may meet the minimal conceptual criteria for rights, but they do not perform the characteristic normative function of rights. They are, therefore, at best atypically weak and imperfect rights.

C. The Distinction between Simple and Fundamental Animal Rights

In the light of the aforesaid, if one adopts the view that animals’ existing legal protections constitute legal rights—that is, if one concludes that existing animal welfare laws confer legal rights on animals despite a lack of explicit legal enactment or of any coherent judicial recognition of unwritten animal rights, and that the kind of rights extractable from animal welfare law retain their rights character regardless of how weak they are—then an important qualification needs to be made regarding the nature and limits of such ‘animal welfare rights’. In particular, it must be emphasised that this type of legal animal rights falls short of (i) our ordinary understanding of legal rights as particularly robust protections of important interests and (ii) institutionalising the sort of inviolable, basic moral animal rights (along the lines of human rights) that animal rights theorists typically envisage. 103 It thus seems warranted to separate the kind of imperfect and weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law from the kind of ideal, 104 proper, strong fundamental rights that animals potentially ought to have as a matter of future law.

In order to denote and account for the qualitative difference between these two types of legal animal rights, and drawing on similar distinctions as regards the rights of individuals under public and international law, 105 I propose to use the conceptual categories of fundamental animal rights and other, simple animal rights. As to the demarcating criteria, we can distinguish between simple and fundamental animal rights based on a combination of two factors: (i) substance (fundamentality or non-fundamentality of the protected interests) and (ii) normative force (degree of infringeability). Accordingly, simple animal rights can be defined as weak legal rights whose substantive content is of a non-fundamental, ancillary character and/or that lack normative force due to their high infringeability. In contradistinction, fundamental animal rights are strong legal rights along the lines of human rights that are characterised by the cumulative features of substantive fundamentality and normative robustness due to their reduced infringeability.

The ‘animal welfare rights’ derivable from current animal welfare laws are simple animal rights. However, it is worth noting that while the first subtype of substantively non-fundamental ‘animal welfare rights’ belongs to this category irrespective of their infringeability, 106 the second subtype of substantively fundamental ‘animal welfare rights’ presently falls in this category purely in respect of their characteristically high infringeability. Yet, the latter is a dynamic and changeable feature, insofar as these rights could be dealt with, in case of conflict, in a manner whereby they would prove to be more robust. In other words, while the simple animal rights of the second subtype currently lack the normative force of legal rights, they do have the potential to become fundamental animal rights. Why animals need such fundamental rights will be explored in the final section.

Beyond the imperfect, weak, simple rights that animals may be said to have based on existing animal welfare laws, a final normative question remains with a view to the future law: whether animals ought to have strong legal rights proper. I will focus on fundamental animal rights—such as the right to life, bodily integrity, liberty and freedom from torture—as these correspond best with the kind of ‘ought to be legal rights’ typically alluded to in animal rights discourse. Given the general appeal of rights language, it is not surprising that among animal advocates there is an overall presumption in favour of basic human rights-like animal rights. 107 However, it is often simply assumed that, rather than elucidated why, legal rights would benefit animals and how this would strengthen their protection. In order to undergird the normative claim that animals should have strong legal rights, the following subsections will look at functional reasons why animals need such rights. 108 I will do so through a non-exhaustive exploration of the potential legal advantages and political utility of fundamental animal rights over animals’ current legal protections (be they animal welfare laws or ‘animal welfare rights’).

A. Procedural Aspect: Standing and Enforceability

Against the backdrop of today’s well-established ‘enforcement gap’ and ‘standing dilemma’, 109 one of the most practical benefits typically associated with, or expected from, legal animal rights is the facilitation of standing for animals in their own right and, closely related, the availability of more efficient mechanisms for the judicial enforcement of animals’ legal protections. 110 This is because legal rights usually include the procedural element of having standing to sue, the right to seek redress and powers of enforcement—which would enable animals (represented by legal guardians) to institute legal proceedings in their own right and to assert injuries of their own. 111 This would also ‘decentralise’ enforcement, that is, it would not be concentrated in the hands (and at the sole discretion) of public authorities, but supplemented by private standing of animals to demand enforcement. Ultimately, such an expanded enforceability could also facilitate incremental legal change by feeding animal rights questions into courts as fora for public deliberation.

However, while standing and enforceability constitute crucial procedural components of any effective legal protection of animals, for present purposes, it should be noted that fundamental animal rights (or any legal animal rights) are—albeit maybe conducive—neither necessary nor sufficient to this end. On the one hand, not all legal rights (eg some socio-economic human rights) are necessarily enforceable. Merely conferring legal rights on animals will therefore, in itself, not guarantee sufficient legal protection from a procedural point of view. Rather, fundamental animal rights must encompass certain procedural rights, such as the right to access to justice, in order to make them effectively enforceable. On the other hand, animals or designated animal advocates could simply be granted standing auxiliary to today’s animal welfare laws, which would certainly contribute towards narrowing the enforcement gap. 112 Yet, standing as such merely offers the purely procedural benefit of being able to legally assert and effectively enforce any given legal protections that animals may have, but has no bearing on the substantive content of those enforceable protections. Given that the issue is not just one of improving the enforcement of animals’ existing legal protections, but also of substantially improving them, standing alone cannot substitute for strong substantive animal rights. Therefore, animals will ultimately need both strong substantive and enforceable rights, which may be best achieved through an interplay of fundamental rights and accompanying procedural guarantees.

B. Substantive Aspect: Stronger Legal Protection for Important Interests

The aforesaid suggests that the critical function of fundamental animal rights is not procedural in nature; rather, it is to substantively improve and fortify the protection of important animal interests. In particular, fundamental animal rights would strengthen the legal protection of animals on three levels: by establishing an abstract equality of arms, by broadening the scope of protection to include more fundamental substantive guarantees and by raising the burden of justification for infringements.

First of all, fundamental animal rights would create the structural preconditions for a level playing field where human and animal interests are both reinforced by equivalent rights, and can thus collide on equal terms. Generally speaking, not all legally recognised interests count equally when balanced against each other, and rights-empowered interests typically take precedence over or are accorded more weight than unqualified competing interests. 113 At present, the structural makeup of the balancing process governing human–animal conflicts is predisposed towards a prioritisation of human over animal interests. Whereas human interests are buttressed by strong, often fundamental rights (such as economic, religious or property rights), the interests at stake on the animal side, if legally protected at all, enter the utilitarian calculus as unqualified interests that are merely shielded by simple animal welfare laws, or simple rights that evaporate quickly in situations of conflict and do not compare to the sorts of strong rights that reinforce contrary human interests. 114 In order to achieve some form of abstract equality of arms, animals’ interests need to be shielded by strong legal rights that are a match to humans’ rights. Fundamental animal rights would correct this structural imbalance and set the stage for an equal consideration of interests that is not a priori biased in favour of humans’ rights.

Furthermore, as defined above, fundamental animal rights are characterised by both their substantive fundamentality and normative force, and would thus strengthen animals’ legal protection in two crucial respects. On a substantive level , fundamental animal rights are grounded in especially important, fundamental interests. Compared to substantively non-fundamental simple animal rights, which provide for narrow substantive guarantees that protect secondary interests, fundamental animal rights would expand the scope of protection to cover a wider array of basic and primary interests. As a result, harming fundamentally important interests of animals—while readily permissible today insofar as such interests are often not legally protected in the first place 115 —would trigger a justification requirement that initially allows those animal interests to enter into a balancing process. For even with fundamental animal rights in play, conflicts between human and animal interests will inevitably continue to exist—albeit at the elevated and abstractly equal level of conflicts of rights—and therefore require some sort of balancing mechanism. 116

On this justificatory level , fundamental animal rights would then demand a special kind and higher burden of justification for infringements. 117 As demonstrated above, substantively fundamental yet highly infringeable simple animal rights are marked by a conspicuously low threshold for justifiable infringements, and are regularly outweighed by inferior or even trivial human interests. By contrast, the normative force of fundamental animal rights rests on their ability to raise the ‘level of the minimally sufficient justification’. 118 Modelling these more stringent justification requirements on established principles of fundamental (human) rights adjudication, this would, first, limit the sorts of considerations that constitute a ‘legitimate aim’ which can be balanced against fundamental animal rights. Furthermore, the balancing process must encompass a strict proportionality analysis, comprised of the elements of suitability, necessity and proportionality stricto sensu , which would preclude the bulk of the sorts of low-level justifications that are currently sufficient. 119 This heightened threshold for justifiable infringements, in turn, translates into a decreased infringeability of fundamental animal rights and an increased immunisation of animals’ prima facie protected interests against being overridden by conflicting considerations and interests of lesser importance.

Overall, considering this three-layered strengthening of the legal protection of animals’ important interests, fundamental animal rights are likely to set robust limits to the violability and disposability of animals as means to human ends, and to insulate animals from many of the unnecessary and disproportionate inflictions of harm that are presently allowed by law.

C. Fallback Function: The Role of Rights in Non-ideal Societies

Because contemporary human–animal interactions are, for the most part, detrimental to animals, the latter appear to be in particular need of robust legal protections against humans and society. 120 Legal rights, as strong (but not impenetrable) shields, provide an instrument well suited for this task, as they operate in a way that singles out and protects important individual goods against others and the political community as a whole. For this reason, rights are generally considered an important counter-majoritarian institution, but have also been criticised for their overly individualistic, antagonistic and anti-communitarian framing. 121 Certainly, it may be debated whether there is a place for the institution of rights in an ideal society—after all, rights are not decrees of nature, but human inventions that are historically and socially contingent. 122 However, rights are often born from imperfect social conditions, as a ‘response to a failure of social responsibility’ 123 and as corrections of experiences of injustice, or, as Dershowitz puts it: ‘ rights come from wrongs ’. 124 Historical experience suggests that, at least in non-ideal societies, there is a practical need for rights as a safety net—a ‘position of fall-back and security’ 125 —that guarantees individuals a minimum degree of protection, in case or because other, less coercive social or moral mechanisms fail to do so.

Yet, as Edmundson rightly points out, this view of rights as backup guarantees does not quite capture the particular need for rights in the case of animals. 126 It is premised on the existence of a functioning overall social structure that can in some cases, and maybe in the ideal case, substitute for rights. However, unlike many humans, most animals are not embedded in a web of caring, affectionate, benevolent relations with humans to begin with, but rather are caught up in a system of exploitative, instrumental and harmful relations. For the vast majority of animals, it is not enough to say that rights would serve them as fallbacks, because there is nowhere to fall from—by default, animals are already at (or near) the bottom. Accordingly, the concrete need for rights may be more acute in the case of animals, as their function is not merely to complement, but rather to compensate for social and moral responsibility, which is lacking in the first place. 127 To give a (somewhat exaggerated) example: from the perspective of a critical legal scholar, meta-theorising from his office in the ivory tower, it may seem easier, and even desirable, to intellectually dispense with the abstract notion of rights, whereas for an elephant who is actually hunted down for his ivory tusks, concrete rights may make a very real difference, literally between life and death. Therefore, under the prevailing social conditions, animals need a set of basic rights as a primary ‘pull-up’ rather than as a subsidiary backup—that is, as compensatory baseline guarantees rather than as complementary background guarantees.

D. Transformative Function: Rights as ‘Bridges’ between Non-ideal Realities and Normative Ideals

Notwithstanding that animals need fundamental rights, we should not fail to recognise that even the minimum standards such rights are designed to establish and safeguard seem highly ambitious and hardly politically feasible at present. Even a rudimentary protection of fundamental animal rights would require far-ranging changes in our treatment of animals, and may ultimately rule out ‘virtually all existing practices of the animal-use industries’. 128 Considering how deeply the instrumental and inherently harmful use of animals is woven into the economic and cultural fabric of contemporary societies, and how pervasive animal cruelty is on both an individual and a collective level, the implications of fundamental animal rights indeed seem far removed from present social practices. 129 This chasm between normative aspirations and the deeply imperfect empirical realities they collide with is not, however, a problem unique to fundamental animal rights; rather, it is generally in the nature of fundamental rights—human or animal—to postulate normative goals that remain, to some extent, aspirational and unattainable. 130 Aspirational rights express commitments to ideals that, even if they may not be fully realisable at the time of their formal recognition, act as a continuous reminder and impulse that stimulates social and legal change towards a more expansive implementation. 131 In a similar vein, Bilchitz understands fundamental rights as moral ideals that create the pressure for legal institutionalisation and as ‘bridging concepts’ that facilitate the transition from past and present imperfect social realities towards more just societies. 132

This, then, provides a useful lens for thinking about the aspirational nature and transformative function of fundamental animal rights. Surely, the mere formal recognition of fundamental animal rights will not, by any realistic measure, bring about an instant practical achievement of the ultimate goal of ‘abolishing exploitation and liberating animals from enslavement’. 133 They do, however, create the legal infrastructure for moving from a non-ideal reality towards more ideal social conditions in which animal rights can be respected. For example, a strong animal right to life would (at least in industrialised societies) preclude most forms of killing animals for food, and would thus certainly conflict with the entrenched practice of eating meat. Yet, while the current social normality of eating animals may make an immediate prohibition of meat production and consumption unrealistic, it is also precisely the reason why animals need a right to life (ie a right not to be eaten), as fundamental rights help to denormalise (formerly) accepted social practices and to establish, internalise and habituate normative boundaries. 134 Moreover, due to their dynamic nature, fundamental rights can generate successive waves of more stringent and expansive duties over time. 135 Drawing on Bilchitz, the established concept of ‘progressive realisation’ (originally developed in the context of socio-economic human rights) may offer a helpful legal framework for the gradual practical implementation of animal rights. Accordingly, each fundamental animal right could be seen as comprising a minimum core that has to be ensured immediately, coupled with a general prohibition of retrogressive measures , and an obligation to progressively move towards a fuller realisation . 136 Therefore, even if fundamental animal rights may currently not be fully realisable, the very act of introducing them into law and committing to them as normative ideals places animals on the ‘legal map’ 137 and will provide a powerful generative basis—a starting point rather than an endpoint 138 —from which a dynamic process towards their more expansive realisation can unfold.

The question of animal rights has been of long-standing moral concern. More recently, the matter of institutionalising moral animal rights has come to the fore, and attaining legal rights for animals has become an important practical goal of animal advocates. This article started out from the prefatory observation that the process of juridification may already be in its early stages, as judicially recognised animal rights are beginning to emerge from both animal welfare law and human rights law. With legal animal rights on the horizon, the analysis set out to systematically address the arising conceptual, doctrinal and normative issues, in order to provide a theoretical underpinning for this legal development. The article showed that the idea of legal animal rights has a sound basis in both legal theory as well as in existing law. That is, legal animal rights are both conceptually possible and already derivable from current animal welfare laws. However, the analysis has also revealed that the ‘animal welfare rights’ which animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law fall short of providing the sort of strong normative protection that is typically associated with legal rights and that is furthermore expected from legal animal rights qua institutionalised moral animal rights. This discrepancy gave rise to a new conceptual distinction between two types of legal animal rights: simple and fundamental animal rights.

While the umbrella term ‘animal rights’ is often used loosely to refer to a wide range of legal protections that the law may grant to animals, distinguishing between simple and fundamental animal rights helps to unveil important differences between what we may currently call ‘legal animal rights’ based on existing animal welfare laws, which are weak legal rights at best, and the kind of strong, fundamental legal rights that animals should have as a matter of future law. This distinction is further conducive to curbing the trivialisation of the language of animal rights, as it allows us to preserve the normative force of fundamental animal rights by separating out weaker rights and classifying them as other, simple animal rights. Lastly, it is interesting to note that, with courts deriving legal animal rights from both animal welfare law and from constitutional, fundamental or human rights law, first prototypes of simple and fundamental animal rights are already discernible in emerging case law. Whereas Christopher Stone once noted that ‘each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been … a bit unthinkable’ throughout legal history, 139 the findings of this article suggest that we may presently be witnessing a new generation of legal rights in the making—legal animal rights, simple and fundamental.

This article is the first part of my postdoctoral research project ‘Trilogy on a Legal Theory of Animal Rights’, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. For helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, I am indebted to William Edmundson, Raffael Fasel, Chris Green, Christoph Krenn, Visa Kurki, Will Kymlicka, Nico Müller, Anne Peters, Kristen Stilt, MH Tse, Steven White, Derek Williams and the anonymous reviewers for the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.

Seminally, Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (University of California Press 1983); Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (OUP 2011).

See, notably, Matthew H Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (2001) 14 CJLJ 29; Tom L Beauchamp, ‘Rights Theory and Animal Rights’ in Tom L Beauchamp and RG Frey (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics (OUP 2011); William A Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (2015) 23 Journal of Political Philosophy 345; Gary L Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (first printed 1995, Temple UP 2007) 91ff; Steven M Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution—The Eligibility of Nonhuman Animals for Dignity-Rights in a Liberal Democracy’ (1998) 22 Vt L Rev 793; Anne Peters, ‘Liberté, Égalité, Animalité: Human-Animal Comparisons in Law’ (2016) 5 TEL 25; Thomas G Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational and the Emotive in a Theory of Animal Rights’ (1999) 27 BC Envtl Aff L Rev 1.

Much legal scholarship deals with animal rights in a rather cursory and incidental manner, because it typically focusses on parallel debates that are closely related to, but seen as preceding, the issue of rights. For example, much has been written about the systemic shortcomings of animal welfare legislation, which—within the entrenched animal welfare/rights-dualism—has served to undergird calls for shifting towards a rights -paradigm for legal protection of animals. Another focal point of legal scholars has been to change the legal status of animals from property to person , which is taken to be a prerequisite for right holding. Yet, even though legal rights for animals may be the ultimate goal informing these debates, surprisingly little detailed attention has been given to such envisaged legal animal rights per se.

Joel Feinberg, Social Philosophy (Prentice-Hall 1973) 67.

See eg Alasdair Cochrane, Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations (Columbia UP 2012) 14–15, 207 (whose ‘account of the moral rights of animals … proposes what the legal rights of animals ought to be ’); cf Joel Feinberg, ‘In Defence of Moral Rights’ (1992) 12 OJLS 149 (describing this indirect way of referencing legal rights as the ‘“There ought to be a law” theory of moral rights’, 156).

As noted by Favre, what is required is ‘that the legal system intervene when personal morals or ethics do not adequately protect animals from human abuse’. David Favre, ‘Integrating Animal Interests into Our Legal System’ (2004) 10 Animal Law Review 87, 88.

Even though moral and legal rights are intimately connected (see HLA Hart, ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’ (1955) 64 Philosophical Review 175, 177), a somewhat distinct (or at least modified and refined) theorisation is warranted because, unlike moral animal rights, legal animal rights are constituted by legal systems, and their existence and scope have to be determined based on the applicable legal rules. As Wise puts it: ‘philosophers argue moral rights; judges decide legal rights’. Steven M Wise, Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Perseus 2002) 34.

Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [27] [56] [62ff]; see further Kerala High Court 6 June 2000, AIR 2000 KER 340 (expressing the opinion that ‘legal rights shall not be the exclusive preserve of the humans’, [13]); Delhi High Court 15 May 2015, CRL MC no 2051/2015 [3] [5] (recognizing birds’ ‘fundamental rights to fly in the sky’).

Tercer Juzgado de Garantías de Mendoza 3 November 2016, Expte Nro P-72.254/15; this landmark decision was preceded by an obiter dictum in Cámara Federal de Casación Penal Buenos Aires, 18 December 2014, SAIJ NV9953 [2] (expressing the view that animals are right holders and should be recognized as legal subjects).

Corte Suprema de Justicia 26 July 2017, AHC4806-2017 (MP: Luis Armando Tolosa Villabona). This ruling was later reversed in Corte Suprema de Justicia 16 August 2017, STL12651-2017 (MP: Fernando Castillo Cadena). In January 2020, the Constitutional Court of Colombia decided against granting habeas corpus to the animal in question.

Similar habeas corpus claims on behalf of chimpanzees and elephants, brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project, have not been accepted by US courts. See, notably, Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336.

On the ambiguity of the term ‘animal rights’, see eg Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, ‘Rights’ in Lori Gruen (ed), Critical Terms for Animal Studies (University of Chicago Press 2018) 320; in using the umbrella term ‘animal rights’ without further specifications, it is often left unclear what exactly is meant by ‘rights’. For example, the term may refer to either moral or legal animal rights—or both. Furthermore, in a broad sense, ‘animal rights’ sometimes refers to any kind of normative protection for animals, whereas in a narrow sense, it is often reserved for particularly important and inviolable, human rights-like animal rights. Moreover, some speak of ‘animal rights’ as if they already existed as a matter of positive law, while others use the same term in a ‘manifesto sense’, to refer to potential, ideal rights.

Joel Feinberg, ‘Human Duties and Animal Rights’ in Clare Palmer (ed), Animal Rights (Routledge 2008) 409; the class of potential right holders comprises ‘any being that is capable of holding legal rights, whether or not he/she/it actually holds such rights’. Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 29.

See generally Alon Harel, ‘Theories of Rights’ in Martin P Golding and William A Edmundson (eds), Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (Blackwell 2005) 191ff.

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’ (1913) 23 Yale LJ 16; Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, ‘Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’ (1917) 26 Yale LJ 710.

See Hohfeld, ‘Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 717; these Hohfeldian incidents of rights are merely ‘atomic’ units, whereas many common rights are complex aggregates, clusters or ‘molecular rights’ consisting of combinations thereof. ibid 746; Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’ (2005) 33 Philosophy & Public Affairs 223, 225, 234.

First-order rights (claims and liberties) directly concern someone’s actual rather than normative conduct, whereas powers and immunities are second-order rights (‘meta-rights’) that concern other legal relations; by prioritising, for the sake of this analysis, first-order rights regarding (in)actions of and towards animals, this is not to say that second-order rights are not important to accompany and bolster the first-order rights of animals. For instance, just as many complex (eg fundamental) rights contain immunities, that is, the freedom from the legal power of another (the disability bearer) to change the immunity holder’s rights, animals’ claims and liberties may be bolstered by immunity rights that protect those first-order rights from being altered, notably voided, by others. For example, one of the most basic rights frequently discussed for animals, the ‘right not to be property’ (Gary L Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (first printed 2000, Temple UP 2007) 93ff), may be explained as an immunity that would strip away the legal powers that currently go along with the state of legal disposability entailed by animals’ property status, and would thus disable human ‘owners’ to decide over animals’ rights. As passive rights, immunities are quite easily conceivable as animal rights, because they are specified by reference to the correlative position, that is, by what the person disabled by the animal’s immunity right cannot legally do (see generally Matthew H Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ in Matthew H Kramer, NE Simmonds and Hillel Steiner, A Debate Over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries (OUP 1998) 22). By contrast, a power refers to one’s control over a given legal relation and entails one’s normative ability to alter another’s legal position (see Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55). Prima facie , powers may thus seem ill-suited for animals. This is because, unlike passive second-order rights (immunities), powers are active rights that have to be exercised rather than merely enjoyed and, unlike first-order active rights (liberties), powers concern the exercise of legal rather than factual actions and thus require legal rather than mere practical or behavioural agency. Notwithstanding, it may be argued that animals, not unlike children, could hold legal powers (eg powers of enforcement) that are exercisable through human proxies (cf Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Legal Competence and Legal Power’ in Mark McBride (ed), New Essays on the Nature of Rights (Hart Publishing 2017) 46).

For a discussion of Hohfeldian theory in the context of animal rights, see also Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution’ (n 2) 799ff; Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 96–7; Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 6ff.

Joel Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ in Joel Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty: Essays in Social Philosophy (Princeton UP 1980) 159; Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55.

So far, animal rights theory has largely focussed on negative rights. See critically Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 5ff, 49ff.

cf Wenar, ‘The Nature of Rights’ (n 16) 233.

See Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions’ (n 15) 55; Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 10.

See eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 162; but see Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 41–2 (arguing that it would not be impossible, though ‘cruel and perhaps silly’, to impose legal duties on animals).

A ‘liberty’ is the negation of ‘duty’ and may thus be redescribed as ‘no-duty’.

On the distinction between naked and vested liberties, see HLA Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ in HLA Hart, Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory (OUP 1982) 172.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 171, 173.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 171.

eg Richard L Cupp, ‘Children, Chimps, and Rights: Arguments from “Marginal” Cases’ (2013) 45 Ariz St LJ 1; see also Christine M Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals (OUP 2018) 116ff.

See David Lyons, ‘Rights, Claimants, and Beneficiaries’ (1969) 6 American Philosophical Quarterly 173, 173–4.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 42.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 42.

In this vein, Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336, p 4, 6; but see critically New York Court of Appeals, Tommy v Lavery and Kiko v Presti decision of 8 May 2018, motion no 2018-268, concurring opinion Judge Fahey.

For example, the Supreme Court of Colombia explicitly departed from this reciprocity paradigm and held that animals are right holders but not duty bearers. Corte Suprema de Justicia 26 July 2017, AHC4806-2017 (MP: Luis Armando Tolosa Villabona), 14ff; for a refutation of the contractarian reciprocity argument, see also Brief for Philosophers as Amici Curiae Supporting Petitioner-Appellant, Nonhuman Rights Project v Lavery 2018 NY Slip Op 03309 (2018) (Nos 162358/15 and 150149/16), 14ff.

See Peters (n 2) 45–6; David Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness: The Legal Personhood and Dignity of Non-Human Animals’ (2009) 25 SAJHR 38, 42–3; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 163; but see Tommy v Lavery NY App Div 4 December 2014, Case No 518336, 5.

Leif Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (2013) 123 Ethics 202, 207.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 43.

See Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 9.

For an overview, see generally Matthew H Kramer, NE Simmonds and Hillel Steiner, A Debate Over Rights: Philosophical Enquiries (OUP 1998).

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 183, 188–9.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 30; Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 185.

A problematic corollary of the will theory is its conceptual awkwardness, or inability, to accommodate as right holders not just non-human but also human non-agents, such as infants and the mentally incapacitated. As noted by Hart, ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’ (n 7) 181, the will conception of rights ‘should incline us not to extend to animals and babies … the notion of a right’; see also Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 69.

As pointed out by van Duffel, neither the will theory nor the interest theory may be a ‘plausible candidate for a comprehensive theory of rights’, and it may be best to assume that both theories simply attempt to capture the essence of different kinds of rights. See Siegfried van Duffel, ‘The Nature of Rights Debate Rests on a Mistake’ (2012) 93 Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104, 105, 117 et passim .

Under the will theory, inalienable rights are not ‘rights’ by definition, as they precisely preclude the right holder’s power to waive the correlative duties. See DN MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ in PMS Hacker and J Raz (eds), Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of HLA Hart (OUP 1977) 198f; Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 73.

The will theory is primarily modelled on active rights (liberties and powers) that directly facilitate individual autonomy and choice, but is less conclusive with regard to passive rights (claims and immunities) which do not involve any action or exercise of choice by the right holder herself. cf Harel (n 14) 194–5.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 190, conceded that the will theory does not provide a sufficient analysis of constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights; legal animal rights, by contrast, are most intelligibly explained as public-law rights held primarily against the state which has correlative duties to respect and protect.

The will theory appears to limit the purpose of rights protection to a narrow aspect of human nature—the active, engaging and self-determining side—while ignoring the passive, vulnerable and needy side. Autonomy is certainly an important good deserving of normative protection, but it is hardly the only such good. See Jeremy Waldron, ‘Introduction’ in Jeremy Waldron (ed), Theories of Rights (OUP 1984) 11; MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 197, 208.

See Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 10ff; for an interest-based approach to animal rights, see eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19); Cochrane (n 5) 19ff.

Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 29; MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 192.

J Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (1984) 4 OJLS 1, 12; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 12, 14.

See William A Edmundson, An Introduction to Rights (2nd edn, CUP 2012) 97; Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Clarendon Press 1986) 176; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 167.

See Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 33ff, 39.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 166, 177ff; see also Neil MacCormick, ‘Children’s Rights: A Test-Case for Theories of Right’ in Neil MacCormick, Legal Right and Social Democracy: Essays in Legal and Political Philosophy (OUP 1982) 159–60.

See RG Frey, Interests and Rights: The Case Against Animals (OUP 1980) 78ff; HJ McCloskey, ‘Rights’ (1965) 15 The Philosophical Quarterly 115, 126; but see Tom Regan, ‘McCloskey on Why Animals Cannot Have Rights’ (1976) 26 The Philosophical Quarterly 251.

Harel (n 14) 195; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 33.

See eg Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 166; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 39–40; Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights: Reconceptualizing the Legal Person’ in Visa AJ Kurki and Tomasz Pietrzykowski (eds), Legal Personhood: Animals, Artificial Intelligence and the Unborn (Springer 2017) 79–80.

See eg Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (n 35) 207, 227; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 54; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 166.

See also Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights’ (n 55) 80.

See Thomas G Kelch, ‘A Short History of (Mostly) Western Animal Law: Part II’ (2013) 19 Animal Law Review 347, 348ff; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 44ff; in this vein, the Constitutional Court of South Africa (8 December 2016, CCT 1/16 [57]) noted that ‘the rationale behind protecting animal welfare has shifted from merely safeguarding the moral status of humans to placing intrinsic value on animals as individuals ’ (emphasis added); the well-established German concept of ‘ethischer Tierschutz’ expresses this non-anthropocentric, ethical thrust of animal welfare law. See Margot Michel, ‘Law and Animals: An Introduction to Current European Animal Protection Legislation’ in Anne Peters, Saskia Stucki and Livia Boscardin (eds), Animal Law: Reform or Revolution? (Schulthess 2015) 91–2.

1999 Federal Constitution (Bundesverfassung) (CH), Article 120(2) and 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (CH), Article 1 and 3(a); 2010 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (LI), Article 1; 2018 Animal Welfare Act (Loi sur la protection des animaux) (LU), Article 1; 1977 Experiments on Animals Act (Wet op de dierproeven) (NL), Article 1a; European Parliament and Council Directive 2010/63/EU of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes [2010] OJ L276/33, Recital 12.

See eg Steven M Wise, ‘Legal Rights for Nonhuman Animals: The Case for Chimpanzees and Bonobos’ (1996) 2 Animal Law Review 179, 179; Richard A Epstein, ‘Animals as Objects, or Subjects, of Rights’ in Cass R Sunstein and Martha C Nussbaum (eds), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (OUP 2005) 144ff; Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 91ff; Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 18; Court of Appeal of Alberta, Reece v Edmonton (City) , 2011 ABCA 238 [6]; Herrmann v Germany App no 9300/07 (ECtHR, 26 June 2012), separate opinion of Judge Pinto de Albuquerque, 38; Noah v Attorney General HCJ 9232/01 [2002–2003] IsrLR 215, 225, 232, 253.

This type of current legal animal rights will be called ‘animal welfare rights’ in order to indicate their origin in current animal welfare laws.

See eg Cass R Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals (with Notes on Animal Rights)’ (2000) 47 UCLA Law Review 1333 (claiming that current animal welfare law creates ‘a robust set of animal rights’ or even ‘an incipient bill of rights for animals’. ibid 1334, 1336); Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 43ff, 48–9 (concluding that ‘the existing statutory framework can already be seen to confer certain legal rights upon animals’: 50 fn 61); Jerrold Tannenbaum, ‘Animals and the Law: Property, Cruelty, Rights’ (1995) 62 Social Research 539, 581; Beauchamp (n 2) 207; Wise, ‘Hardly a Revolution’ (n 2) 910ff; this view was endorsed by the Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [27] (stating that the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act ‘deals with duties of persons having charge of animals, which is mandatory in nature and hence confer corresponding rights on animals’).

See eg Joel Feinberg, ‘Human Duties and Animal Rights’ in Feinberg, Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty (n 19) 193–4 et passim ; Kramer, ‘Do Animals and Dead People Have Legal Rights?’ (n 2) 54; Wenar, ‘The Nature of Claim Rights’ (n 35) 218, 220; Visa AJ Kurki, A Theory of Legal Personhood (OUP 2019) 62–5.

Matthew H Kramer, ‘Legal and Moral Obligation’ in Martin P Golding and William A Edmundson (eds), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory (Blackwell 2005) 188.

eg, for Sunstein correlativity seems to run both ways: ‘Not only do rights create duties, but the imposition of a duty also serves to create a right.’ Cass R Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (1995) 70 Notre Dame L Rev 727, 746.

On this objection, see also Kelch, ‘The Role of the Rational’ (n 2) 8–9.

See Lyons (n 29) 176; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 10; critically Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 85ff; Visa AJ Kurki, ‘Rights, Harming and Wronging: A Restatement of the Interest Theory’ (2018) 38 OJLS 430, 436ff.

See eg Beauchamp (n 2) 207; Feinberg, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’ (n 19) 161–2, 166; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 45–6; in this vein, a German high court held that, based on the criminal law justification of necessity (‘rechtfertigender Notstand’), private persons may be authorised to defend the legally protected goods of animals on behalf of the animals, independently of or even against the interests of their owners. OLG Naumburg, judgment of 22 February 2018, case no 2 Rv 157/17, recital II; on why animals need directed rather than indirect duties, see Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 350ff.

See also Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 100.

Hart, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 25) 181–2, 190.

MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 199.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 167, 170f; see also Alan Gewirth, ‘Introduction’ in Alan Gewirth, Human Rights: Essays on Justification and Applications (University of Chicago Press 1982) 14.

See Kramer, ‘Rights Without Trimmings’ (n 17) 40.

Gewirth (n 72) 14.

For the sake of the argument, I am only referring to biological parents.

Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 166, 180–1.

See MacCormick, ‘Rights in Legislation’ (n 43) 191–2; Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 49) 13–14.

According to some scholars, legal rights exist only when they are enforceable. See eg Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Harvard UP 2011) 405–6 (stating that legal rights are only those that the right holder is entitled to enforce on demand in directly available adjudicative processes).

A significant practical hurdle to the legal recognition of animal rights is that in virtually any legal order, animals are legal objects rather than legal persons. Because legal personhood and right holding are generally thought to be inextricably linked, many jurists refrain from calling the existing legal protections of animals ‘rights’. See critically Kurki, ‘Why Things Can Hold Rights’ (n 55) 71, 85–6.

See generally Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 91ff.

On this, see Kai Möller, ‘Proportionality and Rights Inflation’ in Grant Huscroft, Bradley W Miller and Grégoire Webber, Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning (CUP 2014) 166; Harel (n 14) 197ff; Waldron, ‘Introduction’ (n 46) 14ff.

Ronald Dworkin, ‘Rights as Trumps’ in Waldron, Theories of Rights (n 46) 153.

Bernard E Rollin, ‘The Legal and Moral Bases of Animal Rights’ in HB Miller and WH Willliams (eds), Ethics and Animals (Humana Press 1983) 106.

Tom Regan, ‘The Day May Come: Legal Rights for Animals’ (2004) 10 Animal Law Review 11, 15–16.

Frederick Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (1993) 27 Ga L Rev 415, 429 et passim .

Jeremy Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ in Jeremy Waldron, Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–1991 (CUP 1993) 209, 215–16 (emphasis added); see also Frederick Schauer, ‘Rights, Constitutions and the Perils of Panglossianism’ (2018) 38 OJLS 635, 637.

Correlative to Council Regulation (EC) 1099/2009 of 24 September 2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing [2009] OJ L303/1, Article 4 and Annex I.

Correlative to European Parliament and Council Directive 2010/63/EU of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes [2010] OJ L276/33, Article 14(1)(2).

Correlative to 2008 Animal Welfare Ordinance (Tierschutzverordnung) (CH), Article 178a(3).

The permissive character of animal welfare law was highlighted by the Israeli High Court of Justice in a case concerning the force-feeding of geese. Commenting on the ‘problematic’ regulatory language, it noted that the stated ‘purpose of the Regulations is “to prevent the geese’s suffering.” Clearly these regulations do not prevent suffering; at best they minimize, to some extent, the suffering caused’. Noah v Attorney General (n 60) 234–5. See also Shai Lavi, ‘Humane Killing and the Ethics of the Secular: Regulating the Death Penalty, Euthanasia, and Animal Slaughter’ (2014) 4 UC Irvine Law Review 297, 321 (noting the disparity between ‘the resolution to overcome pain and suffering, which exists side-by-side with inhumane conditions that remain unchallenged and are often taken for granted’).

As MacCormick, ‘Children’s Rights’ (n 52) 159, has succinctly put it: ‘Consider the oddity of saying that turkeys have a right to be well fed in order to be fat for the Christmas table’; this is not to minimise the importance of existing animal welfare protections. Even though they are insufficient and weak compared to proper legal rights, that does not mean that they are insignificant. See, on this point, Regina Binder, ‘Animal Welfare Regulation: Shortcomings, Requirements, Perspectives’ in Anne Peters, Saskia Stucki and Livia Boscardin (eds), Animal Law: Reform or Revolution? (Schulthess 2015) 83.

eg correlative to 1972 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (DE), § 1 and 17(1).

eg correlative to 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz) (CH), Article 1 and 26(1)(a).

eg derived from Animal Welfare Act 2006 (UK), s 4.

See eg Supreme Court of India 7 May 2014, civil appeal no 5387 of 2014 [62] (extracting from animal welfare law, inter alia , the right to life, to food and shelter, to dignity and fair treatment, and against torture); similarly, Court of Appeal of Alberta, Reece v Edmonton (City) , 2011 ABCA 238, dissenting opinion Justice Fraser [43].

For example, the prima facie right to be free from unnecessary pain and suffering is, in effect, rendered void if virtually any kind of instrumental interest in using animals is deemed necessary and a sufficient justification for its infringement.

See Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 346; Harel (n 14) 198; Laurence H Tribe, ‘Ten Lessons Our Constitutional Experience Can Teach Us About the Puzzle of Animal Rights: The Work of Steven M Wise’ (2001) 7 Animal Law Review 1, 2.

See Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ (n 86) 209–11.

See Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 17ff, 109.

Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law (n 2) 114.

For Schauer, a certain normative force seems to be constitutive of the concept of rights. He argues that a right exists only insofar as an interest is protected against the sorts of low-level justifications that would otherwise be sufficient to restrict the interest if it were not protected by the right. See Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (n 85) 430 et passim .

In this vein, Sunstein holds that animal welfare laws ‘protect a form of animal rights, and there is nothing in the notion of rights or welfare that calls for much, or little, protection of the relevant interests’. Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals’ (n 62) 1335.

On the universal basic rights of animals, see eg Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 19ff.

‘Ideal right’ in the sense of ‘what ought to be a positive … right, and would be so in a better or ideal legal system’. Feinberg, Social Philosophy (n 4) 84.

In domestic public law, fundamental or constitutional rights are distinguished from other, simple public (eg administrative) law rights. Likewise, in international law, human rights can be distinguished from other, simple or ordinary international individual rights. See Anne Peters, Beyond Human Rights: The Legal Status of the Individual in International Law (CUP 2016) 436ff.

Indeed, substantively non-fundamental simple animal rights may be quite resistant to being overridden, and may sometimes even be absolute (non-infringeable) rights.

Nonetheless, the usefulness of legal rights is not undisputed within the animal advocacy movement. For an overview of some pragmatic and principled objections against animal rights , see Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 325ff.

See generally Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2); Peters (n 2) 46ff.

Today, animals’ legal protections remain pervasively under-enforced by the competent public authorities as well as practically unenforceable by the affected animals or their human representatives for lack of standing. See eg Sunstein, ‘Standing for Animals’ (n 62) 1334ff; Tribe (n 97) 3.

The link between rights and the legal-operational advantage of standing was famously highlighted by Christopher D Stone, ‘Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects’ (1972) 45 S Cal L Rev 450; see further Cass R Sunstein, ‘Can Animals Sue?’ in Cass R Sunstein and Martha C Nussbaum (eds), Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (OUP 2005); Peters (n 2) 47–8.

See Stone (n 110) 458ff; Tribe (n 97) 3.

See eg Constitutional Court of South Africa 8 December 2016, CCT 1/16 (affirming the National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ statutory power of private prosecution and to institute legal proceedings in case of animal cruelty offences).

See Frederick Schauer, ‘Proportionality and the Question of Weight’ in Grant Huscroft, Bradley W Miller and Grégoire Webber (eds), Proportionality and the Rule of Law: Rights, Justification, Reasoning (CUP 2014) 177–8.

See generally Saskia Stucki, Grundrechte für Tiere (Nomos 2016) 151ff.

For example, under the Swiss 2005 Animal Welfare Act (Tierschutzgesetz), life itself is not a legally protected good, and the (painless, non-arbitrary) killing of an animal does not therefore require any justification.

See also Noah v Attorney General (n 60) 253–4 (pointing out that balancing different interests is ‘part and parcel of our legal system’).

See generally Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 346; Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (n 65) 736–7.

On this threshold-raising conception of rights, see generally Schauer, ‘A Comment on the Structure of Rights’ (n 85) 430; Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Harvard UP 1978) 191–2 (noting that a right cannot justifiably be overridden ‘on the minimal grounds that would be sufficient if no such right existed’).

At present, the overwhelming portion of permissible interferences with animals’ interests can hardly be said to be necessary or proportionate in any real sense of the word. See Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights (n 17) 9, 55.

As noted by Teubner, animal rights ‘create basically defensive institutions. Paradoxically, they incorporate animals into human society in order to create defences against the destructive tendencies of human society against animals’. Gunther Teubner, ‘Rights of Non-Humans? Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in Politics and Law’ (2006) 33 Journal of Law and Society 497, 521.

See eg Mark Tushnet, ‘An Essay on Rights’ (1984) 62 Tex L Rev 1363; Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (Free Press 1991); for a modern reformulation of the rights critique, see eg Robin L West, ‘Tragic Rights: The Rights Critique in the Age of Obama’ (2011) 53 Wm & Mary L Rev 713.

See generally Alan Dershowitz, Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (Basic Books 2004) 59ff.

See Sunstein, ‘Rights and Their Critics’ (n 65) 754.

Dershowitz (n 122) 9.

Jeremy Waldron, ‘When Justice Replaces Affection: The Need for Rights’ (1988) 11 Harv JL & Pub Pol’y 625, 629.

See Edmundson, ‘Do Animals Need Rights?’ (n 2) 358.

More generally, the practical need for rights as complementary or compensatory guarantees will vary depending on social context, and may be more immediate and pressing for the disempowered, disenfranchised, marginalised, victimised, vulnerable, disadvantaged or even oppressed portions of society. See generally Patricia J Williams, ‘Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights’ (1987) 22 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 401.

Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 40, 49; see further Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (University of California Press 2004) 330ff, 348–9; Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 69.

See Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 69.

On the aspirational dimension of human rights, see generally Philip Harvey, ‘Aspirational Law’ (2004) 52 Buff L Rev 701.

ibid 717–18; Raz, ‘Legal Rights’ (n 49) 14–15, 19; ‘rights are to law what conscious commitments are to the psyche’. Williams (n 127) 424.

See David Bilchitz, ‘Fundamental Rights as Bridging Concepts: Straddling the Boundary Between Ideal Justice and an Imperfect Reality’ (2018) 40 Hum Rts Q 119, 121ff.

Donaldson and Kymlicka (n 1) 49; see also Gary L Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Temple UP 2007) 2.

cf Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 331–2.

On the dynamic nature of rights and their generative power, see Raz, The Morality of Freedom (n 50) 171; Waldron, ‘Rights in Conflict’ (n 86) 212, 214.

See David Bilchitz, ‘Does Transformative Constitutionalism Require the Recognition of Animal Rights?’ (2010) 25 Southern African Public Law 267, 291ff.

Bilchitz, ‘Moving Beyond Arbitrariness’ (n 34) 71.

cf Harvey (n 130) 723 (noting that human rights will always remain a ‘work in progress rather than a finished project’); similarly, Kymlicka and Donaldson (n 12) 333.

Stone (n 110) 453.

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Animal Law Research

Primary sources: cases, statutes, regulations and treaties, secondary sources: books, articles, news, current awareness, research and advocacy, getting help, credit and cc license.

Animal Law is concerned with the rights and welfare of nonhuman animals, as well as the requirements, responsibilities and liabilities associated with keeping or interacting with them.  Under this umbrella are wild animals as well as animals used for food and research, in entertainment, and as companions, pets or service animals.  This guide contains some research recommendations, highlighting key primary sources, secondary sources and current awareness sources. 

Know that you may not find "animal law" as a discrete topic area in research databases.  Instead, you might look to elements of property law, contract law, tort law, criminal law, environmental law, and agriculture and food law.

"farm animals"  by  lboren2687

Federal legislation

These are among the most researched and cited of animal laws at the federal level:

• Animal Welfare Act (USDA)
• Humane Methods of Slaughter Act (USDA)
• Horse Protection Act (USDA)
• Twenty-Eight Hour Law (USDA)

Congressional Research Service (CRS) and U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports provide additional context on the federal legislation.

• CRS Reports relating to Animal Agriculture Congressional Research Service reports organized by the National Agricultural Law Center
• GAO Reports on the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act GAO 10-203: Actions are Needed to Strengthen Enforcement
• GAO Report on the Animal Welfare Act GAO 10-945: Oversight of Dealers of Random Source Dogs and Cats Would Benefit from Additional Management Information and Analysis (2010)

State legislation

• Massachusetts Law About Animals A compilation of MA laws, regulations, cases and web sources on animal law from the Massachusetts Trial Court Law Libraries.
• NCSL Environmental and Natural Resources State Bill Tracking Database National Conference of State Legislatures tracks environment and natural resource bills introduced in the 50 states, territories and Washington, DC. Search here for wildlife bills, including invasive wildlife species and pollinators.
• National AgLaw Center - State Animal Cruelty Statutes A compilation from the National Agricultural Law Center of the animal cruelty statutes across the 50 states.

Applicable U.S. Government Agencies

• USDA, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service
• FSIS (Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service) Part of the USDA.
• Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)
• US Dept of Health and Human Services: National Institutes of Health, Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare

Some Relevant International Agreements

• Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals
• Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora
• Agreement on the Conservation of Small Cetaceans of the Baltic and North Seas (ASCOBANS)

Using Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are a great place to begin if you're new to animal law research, or to consult later in your research for legal interpretation and analysis. To learn more about different types of secondary sources and how best to use them, visit the following guide:

• Secondary Sources: ALRs, Encyclopedias, Law Reviews, Restatements, & Treatises by Catherine Biondo Last Updated Apr 12, 2024 3890 views this year

Selected Treatises and Other Texts

Tips on Finding Materials on Animal Law in Hollis

Try the following Library of Congress subject searches in the HOLLIS online catalog  to find additional materials. You can also substitute another country's name or region of the world (such as "Latin America")  where "United States" appears.

Animal welfare --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Animal rights --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Animal industry --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Animal experimentation --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Laboratory  animals  --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Working  animals  --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Domestic  animals  --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research. ; Animals  in the performing arts --  Law   and   legislation  --  United   States  -- Legal research.

Legal blogs (or "blawgs") are a good way to tap into current conversation.  Here are links to two blog listings:

• Justia Blawg Search - Animal and Dog Law Blawgs
• ABA Journal Animal Law Blog Index

Research and Advocacy

• Harvard Law School - Animal Law & Policy Program Started in 2014, the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at HLS is "Committed to analyzing and improving the treatment of animals through the legal system"
• Animal Law Resource Center A site for current information on animal law and advocacy maintained by the National Anti-Vivisection Society, with assistance from Chicago-area law students.

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Thank you to Stephen Wiles and Terri Saint-Amour for their work on the initial version of this guide.

This guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License .

You may reproduce any part of it for noncommercial purposes as long as credit is included and it is shared in the same manner. 

• Last Updated: Sep 12, 2023 10:46 AM
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The Case for the Legal Protection of Animals pp 175–230 Cite as

The Link Between Human Rights and Animal Rights

• Kimberly C. Moore 4  
• First Online: 23 December 2023

54 Accesses

Part of the book series: The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series ((PMAES))

Human rights and animal rights are inextricably linked. Violating the rights of animals has profound implications for the rights of humans, including fundamental rights to food and water and the right to a healthy environment. This chapter examines how the interests of humans and animals are aligned when it comes to threats faced by all life on the planet. Humanity and animals both suffer from the effects of deforestation, environmental destruction, the loss of biodiversity, the emergence of zoonotic diseases, world hunger and freshwater scarcity. Issues of national security and violence in society are also considered. This chapter explores humanity’s deep connection with animals and builds the case for more meaningful legal protection for animals based on our shared destinies.

Cruelty to animals and cruelty to humans are two sides of the same page on which history is written in blood. —Ulrich Erckenbrecht

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See , World Report 2021, Events of 2020, Human Rights Watch . ISBN 978-1-64421-028-4; see also , World Report 2020, Events of 2019, Human Rights Watch . ISBN-13: 978-1-64421-005-5.

Freeman, Carrie P., The Human Animal Earthling Identity . University of Georgia Press, 2020, at 37. ISBN: 9-780-8203-5819-2. Carrie P. Freeman, PhD is an Associate Professor of Communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (1892–1984).

See , Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Forward by BAN Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, United Nations, 2015.

The Introduction to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims that there are “inalienable entitlements of all people, at all times, and in all places—people of every colour, from every race and ethic group; whether or not they are disabled; citizens or migrants; no matter their sex, their class, their caste, their creed, their age or sexual orientation.”

The Declaration of Independent, signed on July 4, 1776, states that “[w]e hold these truths to be self-evidence, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

Universal declaration of animal rights (15 October 1978), solemnly proclaimed in Paris on 15 October 1978 at the UNESCO headquarters, Preamble and Articles 1 and 2.

Judge Maurico recognized a chimpanzee as a “legal” person in 2016. See , Tercer Juzgado de Garantias de Mendoza, “Presented by A.F.A.D.A. About The Chimpanzee ‘Cecilia’ – Non Human Individual”, File No. P-72.254/15, November 3, 2016.

For further information on the similarities between humans and chimps, see , Luskin, Casey, “Human-Chimp Similarity: What Is It and What Does It Mean”, Evolution News & Science Today , October 20, 2021; see also , Deziel, Chris, “Animals That Share Human DNA Sequences”. Sciencing , July 20, 2018, at https://sciencing.com/animals-share-human-dna-sequences-8628167.html ; see also , Ramsey, Lydia and Lee, Samantha, “Humans share almost all of our DNA with cats, cattle and mice”, Independent , April 6, 2018.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change defines “climate change” as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods”.

See , Lynas, Mark, et al., “Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature”, Environ. Res. Lett. , Vol. 16, No. 11, 10.19.2021. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966

Ripple, William J., et al., 15,364 scientist signatories from 184 countries, “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice”, BioScience , Vol. 67, Issue 12, Dec. 2017, at 1026–2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix125

Ditlevsen, Peter and Ditlevsen, Susanne, “Warning of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation”, Nature Communications , 14, No. 4254 (2023).

Tabuchi, Hiroko, “101 °F in the Ocean Off Florida: Was It a World Record?”, New York Times , August 18, 2023.

See , “Causes and Effects of Climate Change”, United Nations , Climate Action, The Science, n.d., at https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/causes-effects-climate-change

See, e.g., Tigue, Kristoffer, “Experts Debunk Viral Post Claiming 1100 Scientists Say ‘There’s No Climate Emergency’”, Inside Climate News , August 23, 2022.

Causes and Effects of Climate Change.

Lehner, Peter and Rosenberg, Nathan, “Legal Pathways to Carbon-Neutral Agriculture”, Environmental Law Reporter , Vol. 47, at 10845, 2017, at http://ssrn.com/abstract=3040919

Eisen, Michael B. and Brown, Patrick O., “Rapid global phase out of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century”, PLOS Climate, 1(2): e0000010. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000010

See, e.g., Hubbart, Sarah, “Understanding the New Normal: Extreme Weather and Climate Change”, The National Environmental Education Foundation , July 30, 2021; see also , World Meteorological Organization, “State of Climate in 2021: Extreme events and major impacts”, October 31, 2021 (released at UN Climate Change negotiations, COP26, in Glasgow) at https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/state-of-climate-2021-extreme-events-and-major-impacts

Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community”, April 9, 2021, at 18, at https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/reports-publications-2021/item/2204-2021-annual-threat-assessment-of-the-u-s-intelligence-community.pdf

Bressan, David, “2022 At Levels Not Seen For Millions of Years”, Forbes , June 5, 2022.

Borenstein, Seth, “Scientists Link Climate Change to July Heat Waves in Europe, China, and the U.S.”, Time , July 25, 2023.

Dickie, Gloria, “July 2023 set to be world’s hottest month on record”, Reuters , July 27, 2023.

Issues Brief: “Species and climate change”, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) , Oct. 2021, at https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/species-and-climate-change

See generally , “the impact of climate change on our planet’s animals”, IFAW, February 28, 2022, at https://www.ifaw.org/journal/impact-climate-change-animals

Urton, James. “Climate change to fuel increase in human-wildlife conflict, UW biologist says”, University of Washington, News Release, July 7.29.2021, at https://www.washington.edu/news/2021/07/29/human-wildlife-conflict-climate/

See, e.g., Evans, Simon, “Analysis: Which countries are historically responsible for climate change”, Carbon Brief, October 5, 2021 (concluding that the US is responsible for the largest share of emissions, more than 509GtCO2 since 1850, or 20% of the global total); see also , “2022 Environmental Performance Index Finds World is Not on Track to Meet Climate Commitments”, Yale School of the Environment , May 31, 2022 (concluding that the US, China, India and Russia are responsible for more than 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions). Note that per capital estimates differ.

Ghebrezgabher, Mihretab G., et al., “Long-Term Trend of Climate Change and Drought Assessment in the Horn of Africa”, Advances in Meteorology, Vol. 2016. https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/8057641

Hansen, James, et al., “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous”, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics , 16, 3761–3812, 3.22.2016. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-3761-2016

Moore, Andrew, “Climate Change is Making Wildfires Worse – Here’s How”, NC State University, College of Natural Resources News , August 29, 2022.

“Our Risk of Infectious Diseases Is Increasing Because of Climate Change”, CDC, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases , August 2, 2022.

See , Ripple, William J., et al., “World Scientists’ Warming of a Climate Emergency 2022”, BioScience , Vol. 72, Issue 12, December 2022, at 1149–1155. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac083

Rosane, Olivia, “10 costliest climate disasters of 2022”, World Economic Forum, Climate and Nature , January 5, 2023, discussing the report “Counting the Cost 2022: A Year of Climate Breakdown” prepared by U.K. charity Christian Aid.

Global Sustainable Development Report 2019, at p. xx.

El-Sheikh, Sharm, “New Health Data Shows Unabated Climate Change Will Cause 3.4 Million Deaths Per Year by Century End”, V20 Press Release, November 12, 2022.

See generally , Choi-Schagrin, Winston, “Medical Journals Call Climate Change the ‘Greatest Threat to Global Public Health’”, New York Times , September 7, 2021; see also , Sommer, Lauren, “Climate Change is The Greatest Threat To Public Health Top Medical Journals Warn”, NPR , September 7, 2021; see also , Dewan, Angela, “More than 230 journals warn 1.5 °C of global warming could be ‘catastrophic’ for health”, CNN , September 5, 2021.

“Human cost of disasters, An Overview of the last 20 years (2000–2019)”, U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), October 13, 2020, at 3, 6 and 13.

EPA Press Office, “Climate Change on Socially Vulnerable Populations in the United States”, EPA, News Releases, September 2, 2021.

Human Cost of Disasters, An Overview, at 7 and 18.

Human Cost of Disasters, An Overview, at 3.

IPCC, “Synthesis Report of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6)”, draft dated March 19, 2023.

Id. at A.2.2.

Hijazi, Jennifer, “Hawaii Supreme Court Ruling Bolsters Rights-Based Climate Cases”, Bloomberg Law , March 17, 2023.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sixth Assessment Report, at 11.

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP & WHO, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020. Transforming food systems for affordable healthy diets”, Rome, FAO, at v. https://doi.org/10.4060/ca9692en

Tuomisto, Hanna L. and Teixeira de Mattos, M. Joost, “Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat Production”, Envir. Sci. Technol. 2011, 45, 14, 6117–6123. https://doi.org/10.1021/es200130u

Forests perform the critical role of removing carbon dioxide from the air.

“Deforestation”, Encyclopedia Entry, National Geographic , at https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/deforestation/

Pendrill, Florence, et al., “Agricultural and forestry trade drives large share of tropical deforestation emissions”, Global Environmental Change , Vol. 56, May 2019, at 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.03.002 . ISSN 0959-3780.

The net loss of forest area during the 30 year period, taking into account new forest areas, is 178 million hectares, roughly the size of Libya. See , FAO, “Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020: Main Report”, Rome, at 18. https://doi.org/10.4060/ca9825en

The State of the World’s Forests (2020 Edition), produced by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, p. 10.

The State of the World’s Forests, at 81.

Ritchie, Hannah and Roser, Max, “Deforestation and Forest Loss”, 2021. Published online at OurWorldInData.org . at https://ourworldindata.org/forests-and-deforestation ; see also , Report: Consumer Goods and deforestation, An Analysis of the Extent and Nature of Illegality in Forest Conversion for Agriculture and Timber Plantations (Forest Trends Report Series, Forest Trade and Finance, September 2014), at iii.

“What Are The Biggest Drivers of Tropical Deforestation? They May Not be What You Think”, World Wildlife , Issue Summer 2018, at https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/summer-2018/articles/what-are-the-biggest-drivers-of-tropical-deforestation# ; see also , Schiffman, Richard, “Demand for meat is destroying the Amazon. Smarter choices at the dinner table can go a long way to help”, Washington Post , March 9, 2022.

The State of the World’s Forests, at 9.

Semper-Pascual, Asuncion, “Biodiversity loss in deforestation frontiers: Linking occupancy modelling and physiological stress indicators to understand local extinctions”, Biological Conservation , Vol. 236, 2019, at 281–288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.05.050 . ISSN 0006-3207; see also , Ritchie, Hannah and Roser, Max, Deforestation and Forest Loss.

See , “Why do animals and plants become endangered?”, USGA , n.d., at https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-do-animals-and-plants-become-endangered#

Boulton, Chris A., et al., “Pronounced loss of Amazon rainforest resilience since the early 2000s”, Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 271–278 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01287-8

“Habitat Loss”, National Wildlife Federation , n.d., at https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Threats-to-Wildlife/Habitat-Loss

Haddad, N.M., et al., “Habitat fragmentation and its lasting impact on Earth’s ecosystems”, Science advances, 1, e1500052 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1500052

FAO and UNEP, “The State of the World’s Forests 2020: Forests, biodiversity and people”, Rome, at xvi-xvii. https://doi.org/10.4060/ca8642en

“NASA Satellites Help Quantify Forests’ Impacts on Global Carbon Budget”, NASA , February 3, 2021.

FAO, Forward to “Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020: Main Report”, Rome, at https://doi.org/10.4060/ca9825en

FAO and UNEP, The State of the World’s Forests 2020, at xvi.

Nicol, Susan, “The Deadly Effects of Animal Deforestation and Why it’s a Major Cause of Concern”, World Animal Foundation , January 6, 2022.

For more on the impact of habitat loss on wildlife, see , Sepp, Tuul, et al., “Urban environment and cancer in wildlife: available evidence and future research avenues”, Royal Society , January 9, 2019. ISSN 1471-2954. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.2434

FAO and UNEP, The State of the World’s Forests 2020. at xix.

“Background Briefing: Deforestation”, Survival International , n.d., at https://www.survivalinternational.org/about/deforestation

For more on halting agriculture-driven deforestation, see , “Deforestation Position Paper: Preventing Agriculture Driven Deforestation and Conversion of Natural Ecosystems”, Rainforest Alliance , December 10, 2020.

See , “Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use”, February 11, 2021, UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021 , committing “to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2023”; see generally , Einhorn, Catrin and Buckley, Chris, “Global Leaders Pledge to End Deforestation by 2023”, New York Times , November 10, 2021.

Moore, Andrew, “COP26 Deforestation Pledge: A Promising Solution with an Uncertain Future”, NC State University, College of Natural Resources News , November 10, 2021.

“Plan to Conserve Global Forests: Critical Carbon Sinks”, The White House , n.d., at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Plan_to_Conserve_Global_Forests_final.pdf

Forest Act of 2021 - S.2950/H.R.5508, 117th Congress (2021–2022), prohibiting the importation into the U.S. of commodities produced by illegally deforested land.

Ripple, William J., et al., 15,364 scientist signatories from 184 countries, “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice”, BioScience , Vol. 67, Issue 12, December 2017, at 1026–2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix125

Tuomisto, Hanna L. and Teixeira de Mattos, M. Joost, “Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat Production”, Environmental Science & Technology, 2011, 45, 14, 6117–6123. https://doi.org/10.1021/es200130u

The estimate includes the impact of animal feed production. See , Domingo, Nina G. G., et al., “Air quality – related health damages of food”, PNAS, May 10, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2013637118

Price, Larry C. and Price, Debbie, M., “India: Toxic Tanneries”, Pulitzer Center , March 9, 2017.

Hribar, Carrie, “Understanding Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and Their Impact on Communities” (Ed. Mark Schultz), Environmental Health , 2010, at 2–10; see also , Wang, Jackie, Nicole Tyau and Chelsea Rae Ybanez, “Farming activity contaminates water despite best practices”, Californian , August 15, 2017.

Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, at 18.

See , Wing, S., Cole, D. and Grant G., “Environmental Injustice in North Carolina’s Hog Industry”, 108 Environmental Health Perspective 225 (2000), at 31. https://doi.org/10.1289/ehp.00108225

CERCLA, 42 U.S.C. §9603 (Notification requirements respecting released substances).

EPCRA, 42 U.S.C. §11004 (Emergency notification).

CERCLA/EPCRA Administrative Reporting Exemption for Air Releases of Hazardous Substances from Animal Waste at Farms, 73 Fed. Reg. 76,948, 76,956/1 (December 18, 2008).

The court rejected arguments that “the source and nature [of air releases from animal waste] are such that ongoing releases make an emergency response unnecessary, impractical and unlikely.” See , Waterkeeper Alliance, Et Al. v. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, No. 09-1017 (April 11, 2017).

Beitsch, Rebecca, “EPA exempts farms from reporting pollution tied to animal waste”, The Hill , June 5, 2019.

Fobar, Rachel, “USDA accused of ignoring animal welfare violations in favor of business interests”, National Geographic , October 13, 2021.

Michele Merkel, co-director of Food & Water Justice, left her job as an attorney at the EPA because animal agriculture “has avoided any effective regulation and accountability for a long time.” See , Flesher, John, “Factory farms provide abundant food, but environment suffers”, Associated Press , February 6, 2020.

Environmental Topics, Nutrient Pollution, E.P.A. , n.d., at https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/issue

“The Effects: Dead Zones and Harmful Algal Blooms”, EPA, Nutrient Pollution at https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/effects

“Water Contamination from Animal Feeding Operations”, CDC, Water, Sanitation & Hygiene-related Emergencies & Outbreaks, Sanitation and Wastewater , n.d., at https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/emergency/sanitation-wastewater/animal-feeding-operations.html

Rivin, Gabe, “Bills Allow Idled Hog Farms to Return Under Old Environmental Standards”, NC Health News , May 22, 2015.

Reports vary. See. e.g., Rivin, Gabe, “Bills Allow Idled Hog Farms to Return Under Old Environmental Standards”, NC Health News , May 22, 2015, citing 30,000 pig deaths; but see , Moon, Emily, “North Carolina’s Hog Waste Problem Has a Long History. Why Wasn’t It Solved in Time for Hurricane Florence?” Pacific Standard , September 16, 2018, citing 110,000 pig deaths.

Reports vary. See, e.g., Ferreira, Becky, “At Least 3.4 Million Farm Animals Drowned in the Aftermath of Hurricane Florence”, Vice , 9.19.2018, citing 5500 pig deaths; but see , Polansek, Tom, “Hog deaths, manure flooding from Florence seen surpassing 2016 hurricane”, Reuters , September 18, 2018, citing 2800 pig deaths.

Polansek, Tom, “Hog deaths, manure flooding from Florence seen surpassing 2016 hurricane”, Reuters, September 18, 2018.

See, e.g., Moon, Emily, “Hurricane Florence has Already Flooded Pits of Toxic Waste in North Carolina”, Pacific Standard , September 18, 2018.

Paris Agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, December 12, 2015, T.I.A.S. No. 16-1104.

“Global arrests and seizures: INTERPOL-WCO operation strikes wildlife and timber trafficking networks”, INTERPOL , November 30, 2021, at https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/2021/Global-arrests-and-seizures-INTERPOL-WCO-operation-strikes-wildlife-and-timber-trafficking-networks

The proposal would define ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”. See , Fischels, Josie, “How 165 Words Could Make Mass Environmental Destruction an international Crime”, NPR , June 27, 2021.

See generally , “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment”, United Nations General Assembly, Human Rights Council , A/HRC/34/49, January 19, 2017, § II(B)(1)(17) (Mental Health); see also , Jimenez, Marcia P., et al., “Associations between Nature Exposure and Health: A Review of the Evidence”, Int J Environ Res Public Health , May 2021, 18(9): 4790. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18094790

“Access to a healthy environment, declared a human right by UN rights council”, United Nations, UN News, Global perspective Human stories , October 8, 2021, at https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/10/1102582 . Resolution 48/13 calls on nations to work together to implement this newly recognized right.

Aguila, Yann, “The Right to a Healthy Environment”, IUCN, 10.29.2021.

Germany’s Constitution of 1949 with Amendments through 2012, Art. 20(a) (Protection of the natural foundations of life and animals), Constitute Project , at https://www.constituteproject.org/

Slovenia’s Constitution 1991 with Amendments through 2013, Art. 72 (Healthy Living Environment), Constitute Project.

Brazil’s Constitution of 1988 with Amendments through 2017, Chapter VI (The Environment), Art. 225, §1(VII), Constitute Project .

Bowman, Emma, “Amazon deforestation in Brazil hits its worst level in 15 years”, NPR, November 19, 2021; see also , Silva Junior, C.H.L., et al., “The Brazilian Amazon deforestation rate in 2020 is the greatest of the decade”, Nature Ecology & Evolution 5, 144–145 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-01368-x

Samuel Blum, et al., “Deforestation in Brazil”, ArcGIS StoryMaps, July 25, 2019, at https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/38535a937f82494a8e37094d9efc6121/print

For more the politics and the environment, see Hoffarth, Mark R. and Hodson, Gordon, “Green on the outside, red on the inside: Perceived environmentalist threat as a factor explaining political polarization of climate change”, Journal of Environ. Psychology , Vol. 45 (March 2016), at 40–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2015.11.002

See, e.g., Krupnick, Matt, “EPA sued over lack of plan to regulate water pollution from factory farms”, The Guardian, October 19, 2022; see also , “After Long Delay, Groups Sue EPA for Response on Factory Farm Water Pollution Rules”, Center for Food Safety, October 11, 2022.

See, e.g., McSweeney, Eoin, “Covid-19 PPE litter is killing wildlife”, CNN , 3.30.2021; see also , Krosofsky, Andrew, “Plastic Pollution Kills Millions of Animals Every Year”, Green Matters , January 7, 2021.

Report, “Fueling Extinction: How Dirty Energy Drives Wildlife to the Brink”, Endangered Species Coalition , n.d., at https://www.endangered.org/campaigns/annual-top-ten-report/fueling-extinction/

More than 10 years ago, David Robinson Simon made the case that animal agriculture imposes at minimum a staggering $414 billion of costs on society that are not paid by producers, including increased health insurance premiums, higher taxes, lower home values and natural resources impacted by factory farms. See , Meatonomics at xx.

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP & WHO, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020.

McCarthy, Niall, “The Countries That Eat the Most Meat”, Statista, May 5, 2020; see also , “Per capital eat consumption by type, 2019”, Our World in Data , at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-type?country

See, Encyclopedia Entry on “Biodiversity”, National Geographic Resource Library.

Convention on Biological Diversity, June 5, 1992. 1760 U.N.T.S. 79; 31 I.L.M. 818 (1992).

Argent, Gemma, “What are the Benefits of Biodiversity?” Sciencing, January 9, 2018, at https://sciencing.com/list-6177330-benefits-biodiversity-.html

Biodiversity and Health, World Health Organization , June 3, 2015, at https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/biodiversity-and-health

See , Kunming-Montreal Global biodiversity framework, Draft decision submitted by the President, UN Environment Programme, Convention on Biological Diversity, Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, Fifteenth meeting – Part II, Montreal, Canada, December 7–19, 2022 (CBD/COP/15/L.25, December 18, 2022).

See , “Connecting Global Priorities: Biodiversity and Human Health, a State of Knowledge Review”, World Health Organization and the Convention on Biological Diversity , 2015, at x. ISBN 978-92-4-150853-7.

Report: “Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’”, Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) , May 6, 2019.

Chappell, Bill and Rott, Nathan, “1 Million Animal and Plant Species Are At Risk of Extinction, U.N. Report Says”, NRP , May 6, 2019.

See , Human Development Report 2020.

Almond, R.E.A., et al. (Eds), “Living Planet Report 2022 – Building a Nature-Positive Society” , WWF, at 4 and 16. ISBN 978-2-88085-316-7.

See, e.g., “What are the extent and causes of biodiversity loss?”, The London School of Economics and Political Science, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment , December 2, 2022, at https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/explainers/what-are-the-extent-and-causes-of-biodiversity-loss/#

Brooks, Brad, “Exclusive: Huge chunk of plants, animals in U.S. at risk of extinction”, Reuters , February 6, 2023.

Global Sustainable Development Report 2019, at xx.

“Living Planet Report 2022”, WWF , October 13, 2022, at 4 and 32.

Wagner, David L., et al., “Insect decline in the Anthropocene: Death by a thousand cuts”, PNAS , January 11, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2023989118

“Biodiversity & Extinction, Biodiversity, Loss and the Extinction Crisis”, Tropical Conservation Fund , n.d., at https://www.tropicalconservationfund.org/biodiversity.html

Maxwell, S.L., et al., “The ravages of guns, nets and bulldozers”, August 10, 2016, Nature, 536, 143–145. https://doi.org/10.1038/536143a

“People and Invasive Species”, National Geographic , June 2, 2022.

Rodrigues, Meghie, “To end illegal deforestation, Brazil may legalize it entirely, experts warn”, Mongabay , December 20, 2021.

“War in Ukraine has devastating consequences for biodiversity”, IFAW , February 24, 2023.

Harari, S. and Annesi-Maesano, I., “The War in Ukraine is an Environmental Catastrophe”, The Union, December 7, 2022.

See, e.g., McCarthy, Joe, “Why Climate Change and Poverty are Inextricable Linked”, Global Citizen , February 19, 2020.

See generally , “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment”, United Nations General Assembly, Human Rights Council , A/HRC/34/49, January 19, 2017.

Morgera, Elisa, Study: “Biodiversity as a Human Right and its Implications for the EU’s External Action”, req. by European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights, April 6, 2020, at v. ISBN: 978-92-846-6489-4. https://doi.org/10.2861/104569

Biodiversity as a Human Right, at 3.

Ceballos, Gerardo, et al., “Vertebrates on the brink as indicators of biological annihilation and the sixth mass extinction”, PNAS, Vol. 117, No. 24, June 1, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1922686117 ; see also , “Biodiversity & Extinction, Biodiversity, Loss and the Extinction Crisis”, Tropical Conservation Fund , n.d., at https://www.tropicalconservationfund.org/biodiversity.html

“Highlighting U.S. Efforts to Combat the Biodiversity Crisis, Fact Sheet, Office of the Spokesperson”, U.S. Department of State, January 15, 2022.

“America the Beautiful: Spotlighting the Work to Restore, Connect and Conserve 30 Percent of Lands and Water by 2023”, U.S. Department of the Interior , at https://www.doi.gov/priorities/america-the-beautiful

United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 70/1 (Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development), adopted on September 25, 2015.

See , “The 17 Goals, The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Sustainable Development (adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015), n.d., at https://sdgs.un.org/goals

“The Sustainable Development Goals Report, 2022”, United Nations , 2022, at 3. ISBN 978-92-1-101448-8.

UNODC World Wildlife Crime Report, Trafficking in protected species, May 2020, at 3. ISBN: 978-92-1-148349-9.

Vidal, John, “Pandemics: Humans are the culprits”, UNESCO, The UNESCO Courier”, e-ISSN 2220-2293, at https://en.unesco.org/courier/2021-3/pandemics-humans-are-culprits#

“WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard, World Health Organization , at https://covid19.who.int/

Gaspar, Vitor, et al., “Global Debt Reaches a Record $226 Trillion: Policymakers must strike the right balance in the face of high debt and rising inflation”, IMF Blog , December 15, 2021.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) aims to secure prosperity and sustainable growth for its 190 member nations by encouraging trade and economic growth and by further global monetary cooperation. See , https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/IMF-at-a-Glance#

Shalal, Andrea, “IMF sees cost of COVID pandemic rising beyond $12.5 trillion estimate”, Reuters , January 20, 2022.

Joint statement by ILO, FAO, IFAD and WHO, “Impact of COVID-19 on people’s livelihoods, their health and our food systems”, World Health Organization, October 13, 2020.

See , “UN Secretary-General warns of educational catastrophe, pointing to UNESCO estimates of 24 million learners at risk of dropping out’, UNESCO, June 8, 2020, reporting that in June 2020, 94% of the world’s student population (~1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries) were impacted by the closure of educational facilities at the peak of the pandemic crisis; see also , Martinez, Elin, “A Generation of Children Impacted by Covid-19 School Closures: Governments Should Act to Avert a Greater Global Education Crisis”, Human Rights Watch , March 9, 2022.

Hafner, Marco, et al., “The global economic cost of COVID-19 vaccine nationalism”, Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020, at www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RBA769-1.html

“Zoonotic Diseases”, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , at https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html

“Zoonoses: Key Facts”, World Health Organization, July 29, 2020; see also , FAO and UNEP, The State of the World’s Forests 2020, at xix.

“End Wildlife Trade, An Action Plan to Prevent Future Pandemics”, Center for Biological Diversity and the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. , May 2020, at 1.

“Livestock and Meat International Trade Data”, USDA Economic Research Service , updated July 7, 2023, at https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/livestock-and-meat-international-trade-data/

“Zoonotic Diseases”, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Angulo, F.J. et al., “Antimicrobial resistance in zoonotic enteric pathogens”, Rev Sci Tech , 23(2) (2004), at 485–96. https://doi.org/10.20506/rst.23.2.1499

Murray, Christopher J. L., et al., “Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis”, The Lancet, Vol. 399, Issue 10325, at 629–655, February 12, 2022 (pub January 20, 2022). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02724-0

“COVID-19: U.S. Impact on Antimicrobial Resistance, Special Report 2022”, CDC, Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, CDC; 2022, at 3. https://doi.org/10.15620/cdc:117915

For more background on zoonotic diseases, s ee generally , Adekunle Sanyaolu et al., “Epidemiology of Zoonotic Diseases in the United States: A Comprehensive Review” , Journal of Infectious Diseases & Epidemiology . Vol. 2, November 15, 2016. https://doi.org/10.23937/2474-3658/1510021

See, e.g., Daly, Natasha, “Seven more big cats test positive for coronavirus at Bronx Zoo”, National Geographic , April 22, 2020; Maron, Dina Fine, “Denmark to cull 15 million mink after coronavirus spillover into humans”, National Geographic, November 4, 2020.

Bubola, Emma, et al., “Denmark’s Leader Apologies for Botched Mink Cull During Pandemic”, New York Times , July 1, 2022.

Ramos, Sean, “Impacts of the 2014–2015 Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Outbreak on the U.S. Poultry Sector”, USDA , December 2017.

“2022 Confirmations of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in Commercial and Backyard Flocks”, USDA , April 21, 2023 at https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/animalhealth/animal-disease-information/avian/avian-influenza/hpai-2022/2022-hpai-commercial-backyard-flocks

Cholera originated from microbes living in the water, while tuberculosis originated from microbes living in the soil . See , Weiss, Robin A. and Sankaran, Neeraja, “Emergence of epidemic diseases: zoonoses and other origins”, Fac Rev ., January 18, 2022; 11:2. https://doi.org/10.12703/r/11-2

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is caused by two viruses, HIV-1 and HIV-2, both of which are the result of multiple cross-species transmissions of immunodeficiency viruses naturally infecting African primates, with the HIV-1 group being the principal cause of the AIDS pandemic.

See , Sharp, Paul M. and Hahn, Beatrice H., “Originals of HIV and the AIDS Pandemic”, Cold Spring Harb Perspect Med . 2011 Sept;1(1):a006841. https://doi.org/10.1101/cshperspect.a006841

FAO and UNEP, The State of the World’s Forests 2020, at xix.

“US Outbreaks of Zoonotic Diseases Spread between Animals & People”, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Healthy Pets, Healthy People ”, at https://www.cdc.gov/healthypets/outbreaks.html

Goodman, Brenda, “Two people caught swine flu after visiting pig exhibits at agricultural fairs, CDC reports”, CNN , August 4, 2023.

Adekunle Sanyaolu et al., “Epidemiology of Zoonotic Diseases in the United States: A Comprehensive Review” , Journal of Infectious Diseases & Epidemiology , Vol. 2, November 15, 2016. https://doi.org/10.23937/2474-3658/1510021

“CDC Takes Action to Prepare Against “G4” Swine Flu Viruses in China with Pandemic Potential”, CDC , July 2, 2020. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/2019-2020/cdc-prepare-swine-flu.html ; see also , Cohen, Jon, “Swine flue strain with human pandemic potential increasingly found in pigs in China: New study spotlights influenza virus that could wreak havoc if it adapts to humans”, Science , June 29, 2020.

Wakabayashi, Daisuke and Fu, Claire, “China’s Bid to Improve Food Production? Giant Powers of Pigs”, New York Times , February 8, 2023.

Aysha Akhtar, Animals and Public Health: Why Treating Animals Better is Critical to Human Welfare , Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, Ch. 4.

“Antibiotic resistance”, World Health Organization , July 31, 2020.

“Stop using antibiotics in healthy animals to prevent the spread of antibiotic resistance”, World Health Organization, November 7, 2017.

Van Boeckel, Thomas P., et al., “Global trends in antimicrobial use in food animals”, PNAS , Marcy 19, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1503141112

“Where Resistance Spreads: Food Supply”, CDC , n.d., at https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/food.html

Moyer, Melinda Wenner, “Travel from the Farm to your Table, Antibiotic-resistant bacteria from livestock pose a deadly risk to people. But the farm lobby won’t let scientists track the danger”, Scientific American , Vol. 315, No. 6, December 1, 2016, at 70–79. www.jstor.org/stable/26047254

“Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States, 2019”, Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, CDC; 2019, at www.cdc.gov/DrugResistance/Biggest-Threats.html

For a history of the Swine Flu (H1N1), see Walters, Mark Jerome, “Birds, Pigs and People: The Rise of Pandemic Flus”, Nature Public Health Emergency Collection , at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7122937/

For background on the Bird Flu (H5N1), see “H5N1 Avian Influenza: Timeline of Major Events”, World Health Organization , January 25, 2012.

Singh, Bhumika, et al., “Towards More Predictive, Physiological and Animal-free In Vitro Models: Advances in Cell and Tissue Culture 2020 Conference Proceedings”, Alternatives to Laboratory Animals, 2021, Vol. 49(3), 93–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/02611929211025006

U.N. General Assembly Resolution 75/311.

“Preventing the next pandemic – Zoonotic diseases and how to break the chain of transmission”, United Nations Environmental Program. United Nations , July 6, 2020, at https://www.unep.org/resources/report/preventing-future-zoonotic-disease-outbreaks-protecting-environment-animals-and

UNEP, EA.5/Res. 1, Nairobi (hybrid), 22 and 23 February 2021 and 28 February – 2 March 2022.

“One Health”, World Health Organization, at https://www.who.int/europe/initiatives/one-health

“One Health Basics”, CDC, n.d., at https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/index.html#

For a comprehensive report on zoonotic risks in the U.S., see, Linder, Ann, et al., “Animal Markets and Zoonotic Disease in the United States”, Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program, Harvard Law School and Center for Environmental & Animal Protection, New York University , 2023.

During the Trump administration, environmental rules and regulations that prohibit mining and drilling activities in protected natural reserves were rolled back, increasing the risk of new zoonotic diseases. See, Popovich, Nadja, et al., “The Trump Administration is Reversing Nearly 100 Environmental Rules. Here’s the Full List”, New York Times , October 15, 2020.

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP & WHO, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, Repurposing Food and Agricultural Policies to Make Healthy Diets More Affordable”. 2022. Rome, FAO, at xiv, xix. https://doi.org/10.4060/cc0639en

“Global Issues, Food”, United Nations , at https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/food

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP & WHO. The State of Food Security, 2022.

“Food Security in the U.S.”, USDA, Economic Research Service, at http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-u-s/interactive-charts-and-highlights/

University of Bonn, “Meat consumption must fall by at least 75 percent”, Science News, April 25, 2022, quoting study author Prof. Dr. Matin Qaim of the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn.

Springmann, Marco, et al., “Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits”, Nature, 562, 519–525(2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0594-0

Ruiz, Neil, et al., “Coming of Age”, International Monetary Fund, Finance & Development , March 2020 (projecting a world population of 9.7 billion in 2050); but see , “World Population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100”, United Nations, Dept. of Econ. And Social Affairs , n.d., at https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-projected-reach-98-billion-2050-and-112-billion-2100

Van Dijk, Michiel, et al., “A meta-analysis of projected global food demand and population at risk of hunger for the period 2010–2050”, Nature Food, 2, 494–501 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00322-9

“The link between meat and social status”, University of Technology, Sydney , September 7, 2018.

University of Bonn, “Meat consumption must fall by at least 75 percent”, Science News, April 25, 2022.

Eisen, Michael B. and Brown, Patrick O., Rapid global phase out of animal agriculture.

This is true even if the full amount of its “external costs” are not included in the price. See generally , Lymbery, Philip, Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat. Bloomsbury Publishing plc (2014). ISBN: 978-1-4088-4644-5; see also , David Robinson Simon. Meatonomics . Conari Press (2013). ISBN: 978-1-57324-620-0.

See generally , Seymour, Frances, “Forests and Poverty: Barking Up the Wrong Tree?”, Center for Global Development, May 8, 2017.

Dockrill, Peter, “There Is Not Enough Land on Earth to Support the Diet Recommended by Authorities”, Science Alert, August 14, 2018.

Ritchie, Hannah, “Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture”, Our World in Data, November 11, 2019, at https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture#

“American Cancer Society Guideline for Diet and Physical Activity”, American Cancer Society , at https://www.cancer.org/healthy/eat-healthy-get-active/acs-guidelines-nutrition-physical-activity-cancer-prevention/guidelines.html#

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, The State of Food Security, 2022, at 71.

See generally , Reynolds, Sharon, “Pattern of DNA Damage Links Colorectal Cancer and Diet High in Red Meat”, National Cancer Institute , July 22, 2021; see also, Bingham, S.A., et al., “Does Increased Endogenous Formation of N-nitroso Compounds in the Human Colon Explain the Association between Red Meat and Colon Cancer?” Carcinogenesis 17(3) (March 1996): at pp. 515–23. https://doi.org/10.1093/carcin/17.3.525

“Red meat, processed meat and cancer”, Cancer Council , n.d., at https://www.cancercouncil.com.au/1in3cancers/lifestyle-choices-and-cancer/red-meat-processed-meat-and-cancer/

“Cancer: Carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat”, World Health Organization , October 26 2015.

Gerten, Dieter, et al., “Feeding ten billion people is possible within four terrestrial planetary boundaries”, Nature Sustainability , 3, 200–208 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0465-1

The United Nations recognized the right to water as a human right in 2010. See , U.N. General Assembly Resolution 64/292 (The human right to water and sanitation), adopted July 28, 2010.

“Water for Sustainable Food and Agriculture, a report produced for the G20 Presidency of Germany”, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , Rome, 2017, at 1. ISBN 978-92-5-109977-3.

Roberts, Alli Gold, “Predicting the future of global water stress: MIT Researches find that by 2050 more than half of the world’s population will live in water-stressed areas and about a billion or more will not have sufficient water resources”, Massachusetts Institute of Technology , January 9, 2014.

“Water scarcity: Addressing the growing lack of available water to meet children’s needs”, UNICEF , n.d., at https://www.unicef.org/wash/water-scarcity

“Water Scarcity – One of the greatest challenges of our time”, FAO of the United Nations, March 20, 2019, at https://www.fao.org/fao-stories/article/en/c/1185405/

“Global WASH Fast Facts: Access to Clean Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene”, CDC , n.d., at https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html

“FACT SHEET: United States Announces $49 Billion in Commitments to Global Water Security and Sanitation”, United States Mission to the United Nations . March 23, 2023, at https://usun.usmission.gov/fact-sheet-united-states-announces-49-billion-in-commitments-to-global-water-security-and-sanitation/

Contamination of drink water by feces is the greatest threat to safe drinking water. See , “Drinking Water, Key Facts”, World Health Organization , March 21, 2022, at https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/drinking-water#

“Connecting Global Priorities: Biodiversity and Human Health, a State of Knowledge Review”, World Health Organization and the Convention on Biological Diversity , 2015, at 3.

“UNICEF: Collecting water is often a colossal waste of time for women and girls”, UNICEF , August 29, 2016.

“Water and Gender”, United Nations, Water Facts ”, n.d., at https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/water-and-gender ; see also , “Why Water is a Women’s Issue”, Concern Worldwide US, April 26, 2021.

See , “The Water Footprint of Food”, Food Print , October 8, 2018 (last updated June 2, 2022), at https://foodprint.org/issues/the-water-footprint-of-food/#easy-footnote-bottom-2-1286 , noting that agriculture uses 80% of all water consumed in the U.S.; see also , “Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’”, IPBES , May 6, 2019, noting that “nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to cop and livestock production”; see also , “Water for Sustainable Food and Agriculture, a report produced for the G20 Presidency of Germany”, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , Rome, 2017, at 1–2. ISBN 978-92-5-109977-3, noting that agriculture accounts for 70% on average of total freshwater withdrawals.

Libauskas, Rebecca, “Commentary: Animal agriculture’s ‘water footprint’ is putting the planet in peril”, Phys. Org., March 16, 2022.

David Robinson Simon. Meatonomics . Conari Press (2013), at p. xix. ISBN: 978-1-57324-620-0.

“Facts about water use and other environmental impacts of beef production in Canada”, Beef Cattle Research Council, February 27, 2019.

“Food Facts: How Much Water Does it Take to Produce …?”, Water Education Foundation , n.d., at https://www.watereducation.org/post/food-facts-how-much-water-does-it-take-produce

“Challenging Foster Farms Slaughterhouse’s Illegal Water Use, Animal Legal Defense Fund v. Foster Poultry Farms”, ALDF , December 18, 2020.

See generally , “California Droughts Compared”, U.S. Geological Surv ., at https://ca.water.usgs.gov/california-drought/california-drought-comparisons.html

“Solutions to Address Water Scarcity in the U.S.”, Nature Conservancy , March 31, 2022.

Yurkevich, Vanessa, “American farmers are killing their own crops and selling cows because of extreme drought”, CNN , August 18, 2022.

Morgera, Elisa, “Biodiversity as a Human Right and its Implications for the EU’s External Action”, European Parliament Study, at 3. ISBN: 978-92-846-6477. https://doi.org/10.2861/60672

Sullivan, Brian K., “The World’s Rivers, Canals and Reservoirs are Turning to Dust”, Bloomberg, August 26, 2022; see also, Croker, Natalie, et al., “The world’s rivers are drying up from extreme weather. See how 6 look from space”, CNN , August 20, 2022, showing impact of heat waves on rivers.

See generally , Borunda, Alejandra, “How beef eaters in cities are draining rivers in the American West”, National Geographic , March 2, 2020.

Environmental Topics, Nutrient Pollution, United States Environmental Protection Agency , n.d., at https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/issue

See generally , “Plant-based meat for a growing world”, Good Food Institute , n.d., at https://gfi.org/resource/environmental-impact-of-meat-vs-plant-based-meat/#

Poirot, Bryce, “Lab Grown Meat – An Emerging Industry”, University of Boulder, Environmental Center , October 20, 2021.

“Water Insecurity Threatening Global Economic Growth, Political Stability”, U.S. National Intelligence Council’s Strategic Future Group, Global Trends, Structural Drivers of the Future, Environmental and Resource Trends, March 2021.

In law, national security is generally defined to refer “to those activities which are directly concerned with the foreign relations of the United States, or protection of the Nation from internal subversion, foreign aggression, or terrorism”. See , 5 CFR §1400.102(a)(3).

See, e.g., “Climate change the greatest threat the world has ever faced, UN expert warns”, United Nations Press Release , October 21, 2022.

WWF, Living Planet Report 2020 - Bending the Curve of Biodiversity Loss, at 13. WWF describes biodiversity as a “self-preservation issue” due to its critical role in providing, inter alia, food, water, energy and medicines.

“Talking Point: Ask Boutros Boutros Ghali,” BBC News , June 10, 2003.

Tindall, James A. & Campbell, Andrew A., “Water Security: National & Global Issues”, USGS , November 2010, at http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2010/3106/pdf/FS10-3106.pdf

See, e.g., Stuckenberg, Majoro David J., “Water Scarcity: The Most Understated Global Security Risk”, Harvard Law School National Security Journal , May 18, 2018.

See generally , Dilleen, Connor, “Turkey’s Dam-Building Could Create New Middle East Conflict”, The Maritime Executive , November 6, 2019.

Gleick, Peter H., “Water as a weapon and casualty of armed conflict: A review of recent water-related violence in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen”, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 6, June 4, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1351

Iran launched a number of cyber-attacks against Israeli water facilities in 2020. See generally , Kovacs, Eduard, “Iranian Hackers Access Unprotected ICS at Israeli Water Facility”, Security Week , December 4, 2020; see also , Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, at 14.

“Cyber Security: Water Systems”, U.S. Senate, Republican Policy Committee, Policy Paper, May 19, 2022.

Haga, Marie, “Breaking the vicious circle of hunger and conflict”, United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development , n.d., at https://www.un.org/en/food-systems-summit/news/breaking-vicious-circle-hunger-and-conflict

Espinosa, Patricia, “The Climate Change Story Is a Security Story”, United Nations Climate Change, February 18, 2017, at https://unfccc.int/news/patricia-espinosa-the-climate-change-story-is-a-security-story

Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, at 4.

Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, at 4 and 18.

See, e.g., Hubbart, Sarah, “Understanding the New Normal: Extreme Weather and Climate Change”, The National Environmental Education Foundation , July 30, 2021; World Meteorological Organization, “State of Climate in 2021: Extreme events and major impacts”, October 31, 2021 (released at UN Climate Change negotiations, COP26, in Glasgow) at https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/state-of-climate-2021-extreme-events-and-major-impacts ; see also , Tower, Amali, “2021 Deepened Climate Migration as Survival”, Climate Refugees, January 7, 2022.

Russia has cited several reasons to justify its invasion of Ukraine, including NATO’s eastward expansion and Ukrainian genocide against ethnic Russians.

See generally , Udasin, Sharon, “How a Ukrainian dam played a key role in tensions with Russia”, The Hill , March 12, 2022.

“Russian troops destroy Ukrainian dam that blocked water to Crimea – RIA”, Reuters, February 26, 2022.

Czech, Brian, “Putin the Practical Wants Ukraine Grain”, Steady State Herald, January 27, 2022.

President Putin has cited NATO expansion to include Ukraine as grounds for its February 24, 2022 invasion. See generally , Moskowitz, Ken, “Did NATO Expansion Really Cause Putin’s Invasion? A seasoned diplomat considers this question in light of his own experience”, The Foreign Service Journal , October 2022, at https://afsa.org/did-nato-expansion-really-cause-putins-invasion

National Security Council, “Transnational Organized Crime: A Growing Threat to National and International Security”, n.d., at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/administration/eop/nsc/transnational-crime/threat

See generally , “Study on the interaction between security and wildlife conservation in sub-Saharan Africa”, European Commission, July 2019. https://doi.org/10.2841/178

“Wildlife trafficking: organized crime hit hard by joint INTERPOL-WCO global enforcement operation”, INTERPOL , July 10, 2019.

U.N. General Assembly Resolution 75/311; see also , U.S. General Assembly Resolution 73/343.

“Fact Sheet: Elephant Ivory and Rhino Horn Bans”, National Caucus of Environmental Legislators , July 27, 2021, at http://www.ncelenviro.org/resources/elephant-ivory-and-rhino-horn-bans-fact-sheet/

WWF, Living Planet Report 2020 - Bending the Curve of Biodiversity Loss, at 6.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Statement on Behalf of the United States at the London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference , October 11, 2018.

INTERPOL, Wildlife crime: closing ranks on serous crime in the illegal animal trade.

Department of Justice for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Oklahoma. January 22, 2020, quoting Edward Grace, Assistant Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Office of Law Enforcement, when “Joe Exotic” was sentenced to 22 years in prison after being convicted of nine counts of violating the Endangered Species Act, eight counts of violating the Lacey Act for falsifying wildlife records, and two counts of murder-for-hire.

Platt, John R., “Wildlife Trafficking: 10 Things Everyone Needs to Know”, The Revelator, March 9, 2021.

van Uhm, Dean, South, Nigel and Wyatt, Tanya, “Connections between trades and trafficking in wildlife and drugs”. Trends Organ Crim 24, 425–446 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-021-09416-z

Maron, Dina Fine, “Mexican cartels are increasingly moving into wildlife crime”, National Geographic , February 25, 2022.

Yuhas, Alan, “Interpol Operation Seizes More Than 10,000 Animals in Anti-Trafficking Campaign”, New York Times , July 10, 2019, quotes Ginette Hemley, senior vice president for wildlife conservation at the World Wildlife Fund.

“Global arrests and seizures: WCO-INTERPOL Operation Thunder 2021 strikes wildlife and timber trafficking networks”, World Customs Organization, November 30, 2021; see also , Wildlife trafficking: organized crime hit hard by joint Interpol-WCO global enforcement, Interpol, July 10, 2019. https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/2019/Wildlife-trafficking-organized-crime-hit-hard-by-joint-INTERPOL-WCO-global-enforcement-operation

“Depleting fish stocks fueling transnational crime”, INTERPOL, December 15, 2021, at https://www.interpol.int/en/News-and-Events/News/2021/Depleting-fish-stocks-fueling-transnational-crime

Bynum, Russ, “Indictment accuses 12 of illegally trading sharp fins, drugs”, Associated Press , September 4, 2020.

Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Georgia, “Federal Agents Seize 63 Dogs from Suspected Dogfighting Ring”, March 30, 2018, quoting Acting U.S. Attorney Peter D. Leary for the Middle District of Georgia, at https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/final-defendants-sentenced-federal-dog-fighting-case

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, “Final Defendants Sentenced in Federal Dog Fighting Case”, September 27, 2021.

Daugherty, Phillis M., “Dog Fighting is Thriving in U.S. – Hundreds of Pit Bulls Seized in 2021”, City Watch, June 13, 2021.

The report is issued pursuant to Section 6206 of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020.

“Financial Threat Analysis, Illicit Finance Threat Involving Wildlife Trafficking and Related Trends in Bank Secrecy Act Data”, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network , for data filed between January 2018 and October 2021.

U.S. Role in the World: Background and Issues for Congress, January 19, 2021. Congressional Research Service Report prepared for Members and Committees of Congress, p. 1.

See generally , Patterson-Kane, Emily G. and Piper, Heather, “Animal Abuse as a Sentinel for Human Violence: A Critique”, Journal of Social Issues , Vol. 65, November 3, 2009, at 589–614.

Ascione, Frank and Shapiro, Kenneth J., “People and Animals, Kindness and Cruelty: Research Directions and Policy Implications”, Journal of Social Issues , 65(3) (2009), at 569–587. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2009.01614.x

Ascione, Frank R., et al., “The Abuse of Animals and Domestic Violence: A National Survey of Shelters for Women Who are Battered”, Society & Animals , 5 (3), 1997, at 205–218.

Carlisle-Frank, P., et al., “Selective battering of the family pet”, Anthrozoos, 17, 26–42 (2004). https://doi.org/10.2752/089279304786991864

Arkow, P, “Form of Emotional Blackmail: Animal Abuse as a Risk Factor for Domestic Violence”, Domestic Violence Report , 19(4), (2014), at 49–60. Corpus ID: 42401869.

Santiago, Roberto, “DAs Link Pet Abuse, Domestic Violence,” New York Daily News , November 5, 2022, at www.vachss.com/help_text/archive/pets_dv_nydn.html

Ascione, Frank R, “Emerging Research on Animal Abuse as a Risk Factor for Intimate Partner Violence”, In: Kendall-Tackett K. and Giacomoni S. (Eds), Intimate Partner Violence . Kingston, NJ: Civil Research Institute, 2007.

See , “Animal Cruelty and Domestic Violence”, National Sheriffs’ Association, n.d., at https://www.sheriffs.org/animal-cruelty-and-domestic-violence

Petrosky Emily, et al., “Racial and Ethnic Differences in Homicides in Adult Women and the Role of Intimate Partner Violence: United States, 2003–2014”, MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep , 2017, 66:741–746. https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6628a1

Lockwood, Randall, “Making the Connection between Animal Cruelty and Abuse and Neglect of Vulnerable Adults”, Winter 2002, at https://nationallinkcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/ElderAbuse-Lockwood-.pdf

Phillips, Allie, “Understanding The Link between Violence to Animals and People. A Guidebook for Criminal Justice Professionals”, June 2014, at v.

Ascione, Frank R, “Children who are cruel to animals: A review of research and implications for developmental psychology”, Anthrozoos, 6(4), 226–247. (1993).

Hodges, Cynthia, “ The Link: Cruelty to Animals and Violence Towards People”, Michigan State University College of Law, Animal Legal & Historical Center, 2008.

Mead, Margaret, “Cultural factors in the Cause and Prevention of Pathological Homicide”, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, Vol. 28, Issue 1 (1964). PMID: 14076148.

Phillips, Allie, “Understanding The Link between Violence to Animals and People. A Guidebook for Criminal Justice Professionals”, June 2014, at 5. https://ndaa.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Link-Monograph-2014-3.pdf

Currie, Cheryl L, “Animal cruelty by children exposed to domestic violence”, Child Abuse & Neglect , 30(4), 425–435 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2005.10.014

Becker, Fiona & French, Lesley, “Making the links: Child abuse, animal cruelty and domestic violence”, Child Abuse Review , Vol. 13, Issue 6, at 399–414 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1002/car.878

Elkins, Faye, “Animal Cruelty: A Serious Crime Leading to Horrific Outcomes”, USDOJ Publications . Vol. 12, Issue 3 (2019).

Henry, Bill C. & Sanders, Cheryl E., “Bullying and Animal Abuse: Is There a Connection?”, Society and Animals . 15, 107–126 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1163/156853007X187081

See, e.g., the Animal Fighting Venture Prohibition Act (2 U.S.C.A. §2156 and 18 U.S.C.A. §49 (adding enhanced criminal penalties for bringing a child under the age of 16 to an animal fighting event); Oregon: O r . R ev . S tat . A nn . §167.320 (2003) (making it a first-degree felony to commit animal abuse in front of a minor child).

Simmons, Catherine A. & Lehmann, Peter, “Exploring the link between pet abuse and controlling behaviors in violent relationships”, Journal of Interpersonal Violence , 22(9), 1211–1222 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260507303734

Hermann, Henry R., “Killing Humans”, in Dominance and Aggression in Humans and Other Animals . Ch. 15. Academic Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-0-12-805372-0.

Holoyda, Brian, et al., “Bestiality Among Sexually Violent Predators”, Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law , Vol. 48,3 (2020). https://doi.org/10.29158/JAAPL.003941-20

Johnson, Scott A., “Animal cruelty, pet abuse & violence: the missed dangerous connection”, Forensic Research & Criminology International Journal . Vol. 6, Issue 5 (2018). https://doi.org/10.15406/frcij.2018.06.00236

Stefany Monsalve, Fernando Ferreira, and Rita Garcia, “The connection between animal abuse and interpersonal violence: A review from the veterinary perspective”, Research in Veterinary Science , 114, 18–26 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rvsc.2017.02.025

Feldman, Irwin, “ Where Violence Begins: Animal Industries and the Cult of Aggression , n.d., at http://whereviolencebegins.org/aggression.html

Phillips, Allie & Lockwood, Randall, “Investigating & Prosecuting Animal Abuse: A Guidebook on Safer Communities, Safer Families & Being an Effective Voice for Animal Victims”, National District Attorneys Association , at https://ndaa.org/wp-content/uploads/NDAA-Animal-Abuse-monograph-150dpi-complete-1.pdf

Gold, Liza H., “Domestic Violence, Firearms, and Mass Shootings”, Journal American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law , 48(1), 35–42 (2020). https://doi.org/10.29158/JAAPL.003929-20

See generally , Levin, Marc, “We Need to Talk About Animal Cruelty and Mass Shooters”, Time , June 29, 2022.

Arluke, Arnold and Madfis, Eric, “Animal Abuse as a Warning Sign of School Massacres: A Critique and Refinement”. Homicide Studies , Vol 18, Issue 1, 7–22 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1177/1088767913511459

See , Sullivan, Kevin, et al., “Fla shooting suspect had a history of explosive anger, depression, killing animals”, Washington Post, February 15, 2018; see also , Arluke, Arnold, “How reliably does animal torture predict a future school shooter?”, Washington Post , February 21, 2018.

Rhodes, Wendy, “Police often miss link between animal abuse, mass shootings”, Florida Sun Sentinel , February 26, 2018.

American Psychological Association, “When working with animals can hurt your mental health”, Science Daily , August 9, 2019, at https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190809113026.htm#

See, e.g., Lang, April, “Understanding Sensitivity to Institutionalized Animal Abuse”, Social Work Today n.d., at https://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/exc_0318.shtml

Encyclical Letter Laudato Si′ of the Holy Father Francis On Care For Our Common Home at §92.

Wisch, Rebecca F., “Domestic Violence and Pets: List of States that Include Pets in Protective Orders. Michigan State University, Animal Legal & Historical Center , at https://www.animallaw.info/article/domestic-violence-and-pets-list-states-include-pets-protection-orders

A Pew Research Center survey found that 85% of dog keepers and 78% of cat keepers considered their companions to be family members. See , “Gauging Family Intimacy: Dogs Edge Cats (Dads Trail Both)”, Pew Research Center , March 7, 2006, at https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2006/03/07/gauging-family-intimacy/#

Slade, Jessica and Alleyne, Emma, “The Psychological Impact of Slaughterhouse Employment: A Systematic Literature Review”, Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, Vol. 24, Issue 2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380211030243

Eisnitz, Gail A. Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry. New York: Prometheus Books, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-1-59102-450-7.

Amy J. Fitzgerald Linda Kalof, and Thomas Dietz, “Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates: An Empirical Analysis of the Spillover From “The Jungle” Into the Surrounding Community”, Organization & Environment , 22(2), 158–184 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026609338164

See , Dillard Jennifer, “A Slaughterhouse Nightmare: Psychological Harm Suffered by Slaughterhouse Employees and the Possibility of Redress through Legal Reform”, LSN: Transnational Labor Issues (Topic ) (2007); see also , van Holland B.J., et al., “Workers’ health surveillance in the meat processing industry: work and health indicators associated with work ability”, Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation , 25(3), 618–26 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10926-015-9569-2

Human Rights Watch , Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants , January 24, 2005. ISBN: 1-56432-330-7, at https://www.hrw.org/report/2005/01/24/blood-sweat-and-fear/workers-rights-us-meat-and-poultry-plants

See generally , Gail A. Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry. Prometheus, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-1591024507.

Wasley, Andrew, et al., “Two Amputations a Week: The High Cost of Working in a US Meat Plant”, The Guardian , July 5, 2018.

Roesel, Kristina and Fries, Reinhard, “Occupational Disease Risks for Handlers of Pigs and Pork”, pig333.com , April 20, 2018, at https://www.pig333.com/articles/occupational-disease-risks-for-handlers-of-pigs-and-pork_13618/

Kalupahana, Ruwani S., “MRSA in Pigs and the Environment as a Risk for Employees in Pig-Dense Areas of Sri Lanka”, Front. Sustain. Food Syst , Vol. 3 (2019). https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00025

“John Oliver on the US meatpacking industry: ‘Things are critical right now’”, Guardian , February 22, 2021.

See generally, Emily A. Spieler, “Risks and Rights: The Case for Occupational Safety and Health as a Core Worker Right,” in James A. Gross, ed., Workers’ Rights as Human Rights . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Human Rights Watch, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear, Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants”, January 24, 2005. ISBN: 1-56432-330-7.

Dolsten, Josefin, “Holocaust survivor likens treatment of livestock to Shoah”, The Times of Israel, October 7, 2016, quoting Alex Hershaft.

Ricard Matthieu, A Plea For The Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion , Shambhala, 2016, at 155. ISBN-13: 978-1611803051.

McNicholas, June & Collis, Glyn, “Animals as supports: Insights for understanding animal assisted therapy” (2006), In, A.H. Fine (Ed.), Handbook on Animal-Assisted Therapy: Theoretical Foundations and Guidelines for Practice, 2nd ed. San Diego: Academic Press, 49–71.

See generally, Roberts, Nicole E., “8 Reasons Pets Improve Your Health and Wellbeing”, Forbes , May 12, 2019. See also, Dasha Grajfoner, Guek Nee Ke, and Rachel Mei Ming Wong, “The Effect of Pets on Human Mental Health and Wellbeing during COVID-19 Lockdown in Malaysia”, Animals: an open access journal from MDPI vol. 11,92689 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3390/ani11092689

See, e.g., Kogan, Lori, R., et al., “The Psychological Influence of Companion Animals on Positive and Negative Affect during the COVID-19 Pandemic”, Animals , 11(7), 2084 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3390/ani11072084 ; see also , Carr, Dawn, et al., “Dog Walking and the Social Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Loneliness in Older Adults”, Animals , 11(7), 1852 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3390/ani11071852

Martin, Francois, “Depression, anxiety, and happiness in dog owners and potential dog owners during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States”, PLoS One , 16(12) (2021). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.prone.0260676

See, e.g., Abrahamson, Kathleen, et al., “Perceptions of a hospital-based animal assisted intervention programs: an exploratory study”, Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, 25, 150–154 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctcp.2016.10.003 . See also , Derting, Terry, “Effects of pet therapy on the psychological and physiological stress levels of first-year female undergraduates”, North American Journal of Psychol ogy, 17, 575–590 (2015).

Friedmann, E., Son, H., & Tsai, C.C. (2010). The animal/human bond: Health and wellness. In A. H. Fine, ed., Handbook on Animal-Assisted Therapy: Theoretical Foundations and Guidelines for Practice (3rd ed.). San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 85–107.

See generally , “What to know about animal therapy”, Medical News Today , March 24, 2022, at https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/animal-therapy

Fullerton, Nicole, “Pets & PTSD: How the Human-Animal Bond Complements Treatment for Veterans”, Penn Medicine News, June 24, 2021.

See generally , McCullough, Amy, et al., “The Use of Dogs in Hospital Settings”, Habri Central Briefs , January 18, 2016.

Hogle, Pamela S., “Going to the Dogs: Prison-Based Training Programs are Win-Win”, Corrections Today , 71(4), 69–72 (2009). NCJ No. 228214.

Mariani, Jill, “Courtroom Dogs Help Ensure Victims Voices Are Heard”, ABA, The Public Lawyer Winter 2022 , January 12, 2022.

Robino, Ariann, et al., “Sustained Effects of Animal-Assisted Crisis Response on Stress in School Shooting Survivors”, Human-Animal Interaction Bulletin . CABI International , October 10, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1079/hai.2022.0019

Geerdts, Megan S., “(Un)Real Animals: Anthropomorphism and Early Learning about Animals”, Child Development Perspectives , 10(1), 10–14 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12153 ; see also , Melson, Gail F., “Child Development and the Human-Companion Animal Bond”, American Behavioral Scientist, 47(1), 31–39 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764203255210

Hughes, Michael J., et al., “Companion Animals and Health in Older Populations: A Systematic Review”, Clinical Gerontologist, 43(4), 365–377 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1080/07317115.2019.1650863

For more on animal-assisted therapy, see , Cameron, Melainie, et al., “Working Like a Dog: Exploring the Role of a Therapy Dog in Clinical Exercise Physiology Practice”, Animals , 12(10), 1237 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3390/ani12101237

Oaklander, Mandy, “Science Says Your Pet is Good for Your Mental Health”, Time , n.d., at https://time.com/collection/guide-to-happiness/4728315/science-says-pet-good-for-mental-health/

Lautz, Jessica, “A Stunning Stat: There are More American Households with Pets than Children”, National Association of Realtors, March 13, 2023.

Orth, Taylor, “Dogs, cats, and other pets play a meaningful role in the lives of many Americans”, YouGov America , May 31, 2022.

Written testimony of the Animal Law Committee and the Civil Rights Committee, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation Hearing on Proposed Rule: Prohibition on Feeding Wildlife in Parks, Reference Nos.: DPR-14. March 1, 2019. https://www.nycbar.org/member-and-career-services/committees/reports-listing/reports/detail/opposition-to-proposed-prohibition-on-feeding-wildlife-in-parks-testimony

The World Health Organization, Report by the Director-General – Health, environment and climate change – Human health and biodiversity, A71/11. 2018.

See, e.g., Winer, Stuart, “Israelis, Palestinians pull together to rescue lion”, The Times of Israel, August 10, 2016; see also , Kamisher, Eliyahu, “Israelis and Palestinians partners to save animal shelter”, The Jerusalem Post , August 29, 2016.

See , Yuhas, Alan, “A third of Americans believe animals deserve same rights as people, poll finds”, The Guardian , May 19, 2015; see also , Riffkin, Rebecca, “In U.S., More Say Animals Should Have Same Rights as People”, Gallup, Social & Policy Issues , May 18, 2015.

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Moore, K.C. (2023). The Link Between Human Rights and Animal Rights. In: The Case for the Legal Protection of Animals. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46065-4_4

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• v.8(6); 2007 Jun

Animal rights, human wrongs? Introduction to the Talking Point on the use of animals in scientific research

Frank gannon.

1 Frank Gannon is the Senior Editor of EMBO reports and senior scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany [email protected]

The balance between the rights of animals and their use in biomedical research is a delicate issue with huge societal implications. The debate over whether and how scientists should use animal models has been inflammatory, and the opposing viewpoints are difficult to reconcile. Many animal-rights activists call for nothing less than the total abolition of all research involving animals. Conversely, many scientists insist that some experiments require the use of animals and want to minimize regulation, arguing that it would impede their research. Most scientists, however, try to defend the well-established and generally beneficial practice of selective experimentation on animals, but struggle to do so on an intellectual basis. Somehow, society must find the middle ground—avoiding the cruel and unnecessary abuse of animals in research while accepting and allowing their use if it benefits society.

In any debate, one should first know the facts and arguments from each side before making an educated judgement. In the Talking Point in this issue of EMBO reports , Bernard Rollin provides ethical arguments against animal experimentation ( Rollin, 2007 ). Rather than simply demanding adequate regulations to ensure animals are well treated and do not suffer unnecessary and avoidable pain, Rollin questions the assumption that humans have an automatic right to make decisions for other animals. In his expansive and stimulating article, he concludes that there is no logical basis for the way in which we treat animals in research; in fact, we would not tolerate such treatment if the animals were Homo sapiens ; therefore, we cannot tolerate such treatment for other sentient creatures that, like us, are able to experience and suffer pain.

Practicing scientists will be comforted by the views of Simon Festing and Robin Wilkinson from the Research Defence Society in London, UK, who emphasize the extent to which legislation already limits the use, and ensures the welfare, of animals used in research ( Festing & Wilkinson, 2007 ). With a particular focus on the UK, they highlight how public opinion and legislation have worked together to control invasive research on animals within a legal and ethical framework, despite objections from the scientific community to the additional bureaucracy and costs that such laws engender. It is ironic then, that the UK is also where militant opponents of animal research have committed the most attacks against scientists and research institutes.

Turning to the wider picture, the European Commission is now rewriting its 1986 Directive on the protection of animals used for experimental and other scientific purposes. The Commission intends to reiterate its emphasis on the 3Rs—replacement, reduction and refinement—as a way to reduce the number of animals used in biomedical research ( Matthiessen et al , 2003 ). However, the recent passage of the REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals) directive, which calls for the additional testing of tens of thousands of chemicals to determine if they pose a danger to humans and/or the environment, inevitably means bad news for laboratory animals. According to the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, the implementation of REACH will involve the killing of up to 45 million laboratory animals over the next 15 years to satisfy the required safety tests ( Hofer et al , 2004 ).

Although optimists might think that cell-based tests and methods could replace many of the standard safety and toxicity tests for chemicals or medicines, regulatory bodies—such as the US Food and Drug Administration, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products—are not in a rush to accept them. After all, their task is to protect society from the devastating side effects of new drugs and other compounds, so any replacement test must be at least as reliable and safe as existing animal-based tests.

There are also good scientific reasons to retain the use of animal-based tests. Most scientists who work with cell lines know that they are full of chromosomal anomalies; even cells from the same line in two laboratories are not necessarily biologically identical. Cell-based tests also have other limitations: they assume that the cell type in which side effects manifest is known; that there are no interactions between different cell types that are found in many tissues; and that culture conditions adequately mimic the whole organism. Even if cell-based tests could replace animal-based tests, there are still no alternative methods available to test for teratogenicity or endocrine-disrupting activity, which require animal-based tests over several generations. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that cell and tissue cultures can sufficiently replace animals in the short term.

In the absence of safe alternatives to replace the animals used in research, the emphasis shifts toward reduction and refinement. However, this implicitly accepts the need to use animals in the first place, which is the point that Rollin challenges. Following his arguments, it is easy to see how anti-vivisectionists question whether humans have the right to decide how to use animals in what is generally thought to be the common interest. Similarly, it is easy to understand why researchers and society pass over these difficult questions, believing that the end justifies the means.

In my view, the most important point in this debate is the cost–benefit analysis used to justify certain types of research while prohibiting others. Society at large already relies on this: it accepts the use of animals in biomedical research but does not tolerate their use in cosmetics testing. This is a pragmatic distinction based on weighing the benefits to society—such as drug safety—against the costs to animals: pain, suffering and death.

In some cases, the benefits seem to outweigh the costs. If a cure for cancer was found, or a vaccine against malaria developed, the treatments would have to be tested on animals—for toxicity, unexpected side effects and efficacy—before being administered to millions of people. Here, the benefit to society might be obvious, and the use of animals morally justifiable. In other cases, the costs seem too high to justify the benefits. In experiments that could and should be done with cell lines, using higher animals as ‘laboratory consumables' is ill-conceived and expensive. Such unnecessary use of laboratory animals was widespread in the 1960s and 1970s, but thankfully is no longer officially tolerated.

Between these extremes, however, is a huge area in which the balance of costs and benefits is more difficult to achieve. Understanding ourselves and the world in which we live is not merely an intellectual exercise—it defines us as humans. To gain this knowledge relies on experiments, some of which require the use of animals—for example, generating transgenic mice to understand the function of a gene. These might reveal crucial information for tackling a disease, but in general it is hard to justify every such experiment with potential benefits for human health. Consequently, it is not possible to determine a priori whether an experiment is morally justified if its outcome merely advances understanding rather than producing a cure.

In my view, we should adopt a pragmatic attitude. An experiment that uses animals would be justifiable if it is done in such a way that causes minimal pain to the animals involved and if all possible alternative methods have been explored. When scientists take the lives of animals into their hands, they have a particular duty to avoid unnecessarily cruel treatment—not only during experiments but also in the way the animals are kept and handled. In this regard, a legally binding regulatory framework that reflects ethical considerations is not necessarily an undue intrusion on the freedom of research: it provides scientists with a good guide of what is socially permissible, and instills a greater awareness that animals are sentient beings, which are able to suffer and experience pain as much as humans do. If it strikes the right balance, such a framework might do more to reduce the number of animals used in research than any attacks on scientists and scientific institutions. To guide lawmakers in drafting regulations that both address valid criticism and enable valuable research, scientists and society must continue this debate to define what is needed and what is necessary.

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Extending Animal Cruelty Protections to Scientific Research

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INTRODUCTION

On November 25, 2019, the federal law H.R. 724 – the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act (PACT) prohibiting the intentional harm of “living non-human mammals, birds, reptiles, or amphibians” was signed. [1] This law was a notable step in extending protections, rights, and respect to animals. While many similar state laws existed, the passing of a federal law signaled a new shift in public tone. PACT is a declaration of growing societal sentiments that uphold the necessity to shield our fellow creatures from undue harm. Protecting animals from the harm of citizens is undoubtedly important, but PACT does nothing to protect animals from state-sanctioned harm, particularly in the form of research, which causes death and cruelty. It is time to extend and expand protections for animals used in research.

There is a long history of animal experimentation in the US, but no meaningful ethical protections of animals emerged until the 20 th century. Proscription of human experimentation and dissection led to animals bearing the brunt of harm for scientific and medical progress. For instance, English physician William Harvey discovered the heart did not continuously produce blood but instead recirculated it; he made this discovery by dissecting and bleeding out living dogs without anesthesia. [2] Experiments like this were considered ethically tenable for hundreds of years. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Thomas Aquinas, and Rene Descartes held that humans have no primary moral obligations to animals and that one should be concerned about the treatment of an animal only because it could indicate how one would treat a human. [3] During the 20 th century, as agriculture became more industrialized and government funding for animal research increased, the social demand for ethical regulations finally began to shift. In 1966, the Animal Welfare Act (Public Law 89-544) marked the first American federal legislation to protect laboratory animals, setting standards for use of animals in research. [4]

There has been progress in the field of animal research ethics since Harvey’s experiments, but much work remains. In the US alone, there are an estimated 20 million mice, fish, birds, and invertebrates used for animal research each year that are not regulated by the Animal Welfare Act. [5] Instead, the “3Rs Alternatives” approach (“reduce, replace, and refine”) [6] is one framework used to guide ethical treatment of animals not covered by federal protections. Unfortunately, unpacking the meaning and details of this approach only leads to ambiguity and minimal actionable guidance. For instance, an experimenter could reduce the number of animals used in research but subsequently increase the number of experiments conducted on the remaining animals. Replace could be used in the context of replacing one species with another. Refining is creating “any decrease in the severity of inhumane procedures applied to those animals, which still have to be used.” [7] The vague “ any ” implies that even a negligible minimization would be ethically acceptable. [8] An experimenter could technically follow each of the “3Rs” with minimal to no reduction in harm to the animals. One must also consider whether it is coherent to refer to guidelines as ethical when they inevitably produce pain, suffering, and death as consequences of research participation.

Other ethical guides like Humane Endpoints for Laboratory Animals Used in Regulatory Testing [9] encourage researchers to euthanize animals that undergo intractable pain or distress. This is a fate that an estimated one million animals face yearly in the US. [10] However, to use the word “humane” in this context contradicts the traditional meaning and undermines the integrity of the word. Taking living creatures, forcing them to experience intractable pain and suffering for human benefit, and killing them is the antithesis of what it means to be humane. During one of my Animal Ethics classes as a graduate student, our cohort visited an animal research facility to help inform our opinions on animal research. We observed one of the euthanasia chambers for lab mice – an enclosed metal lab bench with a sign above describing methods for euthanasia if CO 2 asphyxiation were to fail. The methods included decapitation, removal of vital organs, opening of the chest cavity, incision of major blood vessels, and cervical dislocation. [11] Behind us were rows and rows of see-through shoebox-sized containers housing five mice in each little box. Thousands of mice were packed together in this room for the sole purpose of breeding. If the mice were not the correct “type” for research, then they were “humanely” euthanized. “Humane,” in this context, has been deprived of its true meaning.

One can acknowledge that animal research was historically necessary for scientific progress, but those that currently claim these practices are still required must show empirically and undoubtedly this is true. As of now, this is not a settled issue. In the scientific community, there is contention about whether current animal research is actually applicable to humans. [12] Many drug researchers even view animal testing as a tedious barrier to development as it may be wholly irrelevant to the drug or medical device being tested. Since 1962, the FDA has required preclinical testing in animals; it is time to question whether this is necessary or helpful for drug development.

The scientific community should stop viewing animal testing as an unavoidable evil in the search for medical and technological innovation. PACT should be amended and extended to all animals and the FDA should modify the requirement for preclinical animal testing of all drugs and medical devices. It is time to encourage the scientific community to find alternative research methods that do not sacrifice our fellow animals. We use animals as test subjects because, in some sense, they resemble humans. But, if they are indeed like humans, they should receive similar protections. Science builds a better world for humans, but perhaps it is time for science to be more inclusive and build a better world for all creatures.

[1] Theodore E. Deutch, “Text - H.R.724 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act,” legislation, November 25, 2019, 2019/2020, https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/724/text.

[2] Anita Guerrini, “Experiments, Causation, and the Uses of Vivisection in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Biology 46, no. 2 (2013): 227–54.

[3] Bernard E. Rollin, “The Regulation of Animal Research and the Emergence of Animal Ethics: A Conceptual History,” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 27, no. 4 (September 28, 2006): 285–304, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-006-9007-8; Darian M Ibrahim, “A Return to Descartes: Property, Profit, and the Corporate Ownership of Animals,” LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS 70 (n.d.): 28.

[4] Benjamin Adams and Jean Larson, “Legislative History of the Animal Welfare Act: Introduction | Animal Welfare Information Center| NAL | USDA,” accessed November 3, 2021, https://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/legislative-history-animal-welfare-act-introduction.

[5] National Research Council (US) and Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on the Use of Laboratory Animals in Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Patterns of Animal Use , Use of Laboratory Animals in Biomedical and Behavioral Research (National Academies Press (US), 1988), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218261/.

[6] Robert C. Hubrecht and Elizabeth Carter, “The 3Rs and Humane Experimental Technique: Implementing Change,” Animals: An Open Access Journal from MDPI 9, no. 10 (September 30, 2019): 754, https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9100754.

[7] Hubrecht and Carter.

[8] Hubrecht and Carter.                           

[9] William S. Stokes, “Humane Endpoints for Laboratory Animals Used in Regulatory Testing,” ILAR Journal 43, no. Suppl_1 (January 1, 2002): S31–38, https://doi.org/10.1093/ilar.43.Suppl_1.S31.

[10] Stokes.

[11] “Euthanasia of Research Animals,” accessed April 21, 2022, https://services-web.research.uci.edu/compliance/animalcare-use/research-policies-and-guidance/euthanasia.html.

[12] Neal D. Barnard and Stephen R. Kaufman, “Animal Research Is Wasteful and Misleading,” Scientific American 276, no. 2 (1997): 80–82.

Chad Childers

MS Bioethics Candidate Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics

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Paper: To understand cognition—and its dysfunction—neuroscientists must learn its rhythms

Thought emerges and is controlled in the brain via the rhythmically and spatially coordinated activity of millions of neurons, scientists argue in a new article. Understanding cognition and its disorders requires studying it at that level.

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Historically dismissed solely as byproducts of neural activity, brain rhythms are actually critical for organizing it, write Picower Professor Earl Miller and research scientists Scott Brincat and Jefferson Roy in Current Opinion in Behavioral Science . And while neuroscientists have gained tremendous knowledge from studying how individual brain cells connect and how and when they emit “spikes” to send impulses through specific circuits, there is also a need to appreciate and apply new concepts at the brain rhythm scale, which can span individual, or even multiple, brain regions.

“Spiking and anatomy are important but there is more going on in the brain above and beyond that,” said senior author Miller, a faculty member in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. “There’s a whole lot of functionality taking place at a higher level, especially cognition.”

The stakes of studying the brain at that scale, the authors write, might not only include understanding healthy higher-level function but also how those functions become disrupted in disease.

“Many neurological and psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy and Parkinson’s involve disruption of emergent properties like neural synchrony,” they write. “We anticipate that understanding how to interpret and interface with these emergent properties will be critical for developing effective treatments as well as understanding cognition.”

The emergence of thoughts

The bridge between the scale of individual neurons and the broader-scale coordination of many cells is founded on electric fields, the researchers write. Via a phenomenon called “ephaptic coupling,” the electrical field generated by the activity of a neuron can influence the voltage of neighboring neurons, creating an alignment among them. In this way, electric fields both reflect neural activity but also influence it. In a paper in 2022 , Miller and colleagues showed via experiments and computational modeling that the information encoded in the electric fields generated by ensembles of neurons can be read out more reliably than the information encoded by the spikes of individual cells. In 2023 Miller’s lab provided evidence that rhythmic electrical fields may coordinate memories between regions.

At this larger scale, in which rhythmic electric fields carry information between brain regions, Miller’s lab has published numerous studies showing that lower-frequency rhythms in the so-called “beta” band originate in deeper layers of the brain’s cortex and appear to regulate the power of faster-frequency “gamma” rhythms in more superficial layers. By recording neural activity in the brains of animals engaged in working memory games the lab has shown that beta rhythms carry “top down” signals to control when and where gamma rhythms can encode sensory information, such as the images that the animals need to remember in the game.

Some of the lab’s latest evidence suggests that beta rhythms apply this control of cognitive processes to physical patches of the cortex, essentially acting like stencils that pattern where and when gamma can encode sensory information into memory, or retrieve it. According to this theory, which Miller calls “ Spatial Computing ,” beta can thereby establish the general rules of a task (for instance, the back and forth turns required to open a combination lock), even as the specific information content may change (for instance, new numbers when the combination changes). More generally, this structure also enables neurons to flexibly encode more than one kind of information at a time, the authors write, a widely observed neural property called “mixed selectivity.” For instance, a neuron encoding a number of the lock combination can also be assigned, based on which beta-stenciled patch it is in, the particular step of the unlocking process that the number matters for.

In the new study Miller, Brincat and Roy suggest another advantage consistent with cognitive control being based on an interplay of large-scale coordinated rhythmic activity: “Subspace coding.” This idea postulates that brain rhythms organize the otherwise massive number of possible outcomes that could result from, say, 1,000 neurons engaging in independent spiking activity. Instead of all the many combinatorial possibilities, many fewer “subspaces” of activity actually arise, because neurons are coordinated, rather than independent. It is as if the spiking of neurons is like a flock of birds coordinating their movements.  Different phases and frequencies of brain rhythms provide this coordination, aligned to amplify each other, or offset to prevent interference. For instance, if a piece of sensory information needs to be remembered, neural activity representing it can be protected from interference when new sensory information is perceived.

“Thus the organization of neural responses into subspaces can both segregate and integrate information,” the authors write.

The power of brain rhythms to coordinate and organize information processing in the brain is what enables functional cognition to emerge at that scale, the authors write. Understanding cognition in the brain, therefore, requires studying rhythms.

“Studying individual neural components in isolation—individual neurons and synapses—has made enormous contributions to our understanding of the brain and remains important,” the authors conclude. “However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that, to fully capture the brain’s complexity, those components must be analyzed in concert to identify, study, and relate their emergent properties.”

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