Animal Property Rights

Humankind coexists with every other living thing. People drink the same water, breathe the same air, and share the same land as other animals. Yet, property law reflects a general assumption that only people can own land. The effects of this presumption are disastrous for wildlife and humans alike. The alarm bells ringing about biodiversity loss are growing louder, and the possibility of mass extinction is real. Anthropocentric property is a key driver of biodiversity loss, a silent killer of species worldwide. But as law and sustainability scholar Karen Bradshaw shows, if excluding animals from a legal right to own land is causing their destruction, extending the legal right to own property to wildlife may prove its salvation. Wildlife as Property Owners advocates for folding animals into our existing system of property law, giving them the opportunity to own land just as humans do—to the betterment of all.

"Pain is pain, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the victim," states William Kunstler in his foreword. This moral concern for the suffering of animals and their legal status is the basis for Gary L. Francione's profound book, which asks, Why has the law failed to protect animals from exploitation? Francione argues that the current legal standard of animal welfare does not and cannot establish fights for animals. As long as they are viewed as property, animals will be subject to suffering for the social and economic benefit of human beings. Exploring every facet of this heated issue, Francione discusses the history of the treatment of animals, anticruelty statutes, vivisection, the Federal Animal Welfare Act, and specific cases such as the controversial injury of anaesthetized baboons at the University of Pennsylvania. He thoroughly documents the paradoxical gap between our professed concern with humane treatment of animals and the overriding practice of abuse permitted by U.S. law.

Discusses extending property rights to animals in order to preserve habitats and satisfy animal needs. -- Back cover.

In Animals as Legal Beings, Maneesha Deckha critically examines how Canadian law and, by extension, other legal orders around the world, participate in the social construction of the human-animal divide and the abject rendering of animals as property. Through a rigorous but cogent analysis, Deckha calls for replacing the exploitative property classification for animals with a new transformative legal status or subjectivity called "beingness." In developing a new legal subjectivity for animals, one oriented toward respecting animals for who they are rather than their proximity to idealized versions of humanness, Animals as Legal Beings seeks to bring critical animal theorizations and animal law closer together. Throughout, Deckha draws upon the feminist animal care tradition, as well as feminist theories of embodiment and relationality, postcolonial theory, and critical animal studies. Her argument is critical of the liberal legal view of animals and directed at a legal subjectivity for animals attentive to their embodied vulnerability, and desirous of an animal-friendly cultural shift in the core foundations of anthropocentric legal systems. Theoretically informed yet accessibly presented, Animals as Legal Beings makes a significant contribution to an array of interdisciplinary debates and is an innovative and astute argument for a meaningful more-than-human turn in law and policy.

This unique book establishes potential future avenues within the law to enhance the welfare of animals and grant them recognised legal status. Charting the direction of the animal-human relationship for future generations, it explores the core concepts of property law to demonstrate how change is possible for domestic animals. As an ethical context for future developments the concept of a ‘right of place’ is proposed and developed.

The issue of collective and multiple property rights in animals, such as cattle, camels or reindeers, among pastoralists has never been a subject of special cross-cultural and comparative study. Focusing on pastoralist societies in East and West Africa, the Far North and Siberia, and the Eurasian steppes, this volume addresses the issue of property rights and the changes these societies have undergone due to the direct or indirect influence of modernization and globalization processes. The contributors also investigate the interplay of older sets of rights and modern marketing policies; political, ecological and economic effects of collectivization and de-collectivization; the existence of collective and private property in the Soviet Union and its successor states; state taxation and destocking measures in African dry lands; and the effects of quarantine, as well as import and export regulations. The rich and well-researched ethnographic, historical, and economic data in these chapters provides new theoretical insights into the matter of property rights in animals.

Animal Property Rights: A Theory of Habitat Rights for Wild Animals represents the first attempt to extend liberal property rights theory across the species barrier to animals. It broadens the traditional focus of animal rights beyond basic rights to life and bodily integrity to rights to the natural areas in which animal reside. John Hadley argues that both proponents of animal rights and environmentalists ought to support animal property rights because protecting habitat promotes ecological values and helps to ensure animals live free from human interference. Hadley’s focus is pragmatist – he locates animal property rights within the institution of property as it exists today in liberal democracies. He argues that attempts to justify animal property rights on labor and first occupancy grounds will likely fail; instead, he grounds animal property rights upon the importance of habitat for the satisfaction of animals’ basic needs. The potential of animal property rights as a way of reinvigorating existing public policy responses to the problem of biodiversity loss due to habitat destruction is thoroughly explored. Using the concept of guardianship for cognitively impaired human beings, Hadley translates habitat rights as a right to negotiate – human guardians ought to be allowed to negotiate, on behalf of wild animals, with human landholders whose development activities put animals at risk. In addition to a theory of animal property rights, Animal Property Rights affords a critique of Donaldson and Kymlicka’s wild animal sovereignty theory, a defence of indirect approaches to animal rights, an extensive discussion of euthanasia as a ‘therapeutic hunting’ tool, and the first discussion of Locke’s theory of original acquisition in animal rights literature.

Part I. Animals in the landscape of law, politics, and public policy. Animal rights / Gary Francione and Anna Charlton -- Animals in political theory / Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka --,Animals as living property / David Favre -- The human-animal bond / James Serpell -- Animal sheltering / Leslie Irvine -- Roaming dogs / Arnold Arluke and Kate Atema -- Misothery : contempt for animals and nature, its origins, purposes, and repercussions / James B. Mason -- Continental approaches to animals and animality / Ralph Acampora -- Animals as legal subjects / Paul Waldau -- The struggle for compassion and justice through critical animal studies / Carol Gigliotti -- Interspecies dialogue and animal ethics : the feminist care perspective / Josephine Donovan -- Part II. Animal intentionality, agency, and reflexive thinking. Cetacean cognition / Lori Marino -- History and animal agencies / Chris Pearson -- Animals as sentient commodities / Rhoda WilPart I.kie -- Animal work / Jocelyne Porcher -- Animals as reflexive thinkers : the Aponoian paradigm / Mark Rowlands and Susana Monsó -- Part III. Animals as objects in science, food, spectacle, and sport. The ethics of animal research / Bernard Rollin -- The ethics of food animal production / Paul Thompson -- Animals as scientific objects / Mike Michael -- The problem with zoos / Randy Malamud -- Wolf hunting and the ethics of predator control / John Vucetich and Michael P. --Nelson -- Part IV. Animals in cultural representations. Practice and ethics of the use of animals in contemporary art /Joe Zammit-Lucia -- Animals in folklore / Boria Sax -- Part V. Animals in ecosystems. Archaeozoology / Juliet Cluton-Brock -- Animals and ecological science / Anita Guerrini -- Staging privilege, proximity, and "extreme animal tourism" / Jane Desmond -- Commensal species / Terry O'Connor -- Lively cities : people, animals, and urban ecosystems / Marcus Owens and Jennifer Wolch -- Animals in religion / Stephen R.L. Clark.