Abstract
Legal animal rights may, in the short term, offer an efficient means to improve the living conditions of animals and how they are treated by human societies. This article argues that this shift to adopt an animal rights framing of the human-animal interaction might also risk producing certain counterproductive effects. It suggests that there is a need for a broader reassessment of the relationships between the human and animal worlds. This article posits that the adoption of legal animal rights as a workable legal solution for the better protection of animals has been increasingly accepted because rights frameworks rely upon a core premise of Western jurisprudence, namely legal subjectivism and the epistemological and axiological assumptions it conveys. The article argues that such an individualistic and dualist approach to legal animal rights will ultimately reveal itself to be insufficient and unable to capture animals as members of concrete social and environmental entanglements. Rather, a true legal revolution is required, which would evoke an ecological understanding of law itself.
Highlights
The debates over moral and legal animal rights, they may still seem esoteric to regular jurists, reveal an unavoidable mutation in the relationship between human and animal in the Western world
In order to assess whether legal animal rights represent a ‘revolution’, that is, a reversal of the above-mentioned legal paradigm based on legal subjectivism, I will distinguish
The discussion above has shown that legal animal rights, as promising as they may be for advancing equality of arms among human and certain animal legal subjects, will probably leave us midstream in the broader task of legally retying the Gordian knot
Summary
The debates over moral and legal animal rights, they may still seem esoteric to regular jurists, reveal an unavoidable mutation in the relationship between human and animal in the Western world. My goal is to put animal rights into perspective, and to show that they may be, at a certain point, unfit for that broader ethical-legal task: to construct an understanding of law that is capable of reassessing human-animal relationships in view of their social and environmental interconnectedness, in order to shape new ways of living together.
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