Where the Wild Things Are: Animal autonomy in EU Law

Abstract

This article discusses how EU law makes sense of the encounters between wild animals and humans. Using the case law of the ECJ that involves wolves and hamsters, this article suggests that EU law is faced with the complex challenge of creating legal categories that can articulate and reflect animal autonomy. Two such legal categories are traced. A first focuses on animal agency and their mobility, assimilating – in legal terms – the movement of wild animals to that of persons crossing borders. A second focuses on animal alterity, that is, the fundamental otherness of wild animals. It is argued that only the latter allows us to make legally legible the conditions under which wildness manifests itself – not as a counterpoint to humanness, but as a meeting between species. animal autonomy, animal agency, animal alterity, Habitats Directive, Birds Directive