On the safe handling of animals in pre-revolutionary Russia

Abstract

The relationship between human society and the animal world is on the verge of a fundamental, qualitative reboot! When analyzing the prospects for changes in the legal status of animals in the Russian Federation, it is customary to turn to Western European experience. At the same time, the fact that pre-revolutionary Russian jurisprudence considered the problems of protecting animals from harsh treatment through the legalization of their rights is either forgotten or deliberately suppressed. In part, this oblivion is explained by the ideological alienation of the Soviet legal ideology of the institutionalization of the legal personality of animals, and the approximation of their legal status to the legal status of man.Progressive-minded practicing lawyers, as well as legal theorists, need to get rid of ideas about the bourgeois pseudoscience of owning animal rights and stop considering animals exclusively as things. The theoretical support in this paradigm shift of public consciousness is the views of Russian humanist jurists of the late XIX-early XX century.In this article, the ideas about changing the legal status of animals contained in the works of Y. Levandovsky, P.V. Bezobrazov, S. Fischer are consistently analyzed. Giving an idea that before the revolution of 1917, domestic jurisprudence was in the trend of global trends, the humanization of relations between human society and the animal world. Expressed in the desire of the most liberal and progressive part of jurists to legalize the natural rights of animals, that is, to guarantee them the right to life. After a long period of oblivion, the ideas of the validity of animal rights have become the property of caring environmentalists, as well as truly liberal-oriented jurists of modern Russia.