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Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice 53
Deborah Cao
Steven White Editors
Animal Law
and Welfare -
International
Perspectives
Ius Gentium: Comparative
Perspectives on Law and Justice
Volume 53
Series Editors
Mortimer Sellers, University of Baltimore
James Maxeiner, University of Baltimore
Board of Editors
Myroslava Antonovych, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
Nadia de Araújo, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Jasna Bakšic-Muftic, University of Sarajevo
David L. Carey Miller, University of Aberdeen
Loussia P. Musse Félix, University of Brasilia
Emanuel Gross, University of Haifa
James E. Hickey, Jr., Hofstra University
Jan Klabbers, University of Helsinki
Cláudia Lima Marques, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
Aniceto Masferrer, University of Valencia
Eric Millard, West Paris University
Gabriël A. Moens, Curtin University
Raul C. Pangalangan, University of the Philippines
Ricardo Leite Pinto, Lusíada University of Lisbon
Mizanur Rahman, University of Dhaka
Keita Sato, Chuo University
Poonam Saxena, University of Delhi
Gerry Simpson, London School of Economics
Eduard Somers, University of Ghent
Xinqiang Sun, Shandong University
Tadeusz Tomaszewski, Warsaw University
Jaap de Zwaan, Erasmus University Rotterdam
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7888
Deborah Cao • Steven White
Editors
v
vi Contents
vii
About the Authors
ix
x About the Authors
Nicki McGrath is currently studying for PhD in chicken vocalisations and their
interpretation with the Centre for Animal Welfare and Ethics at the University of
Queensland’s School of Veterinary Science, Australia. She has a master’s in applied
animal behaviour and welfare from Edinburgh University, for which she conducted
a study of public understanding of animals’ experiences of grief in Brisbane. She
also spent 2 years setting up and running a wildlife research expedition in the
Amazon, where she was responsible for bird call research. She has 11 years’ experi-
ence in the corporate workplace.
About the Authors xi
Joy M. Verrinder is currently studying for a PhD in animal ethics education with
the Centre for Animal Welfare and Ethics at the University of Queensland’s School
of Veterinary Science, Australia. She has a master’s in professional ethics and gov-
ernance and a master’s in business administration focusing on public policy and
strategic planning. For the past 10 years as strategic development officer of the
Animal Welfare League Queensland, she has been progressing legislation and pol-
icy changes at local, state and national levels to prevent the killing of abandoned
cats and dogs in pounds and shelters in Australia. Joy has served on government
animal ethics committees and boards of various animal organisations. She has also
been an educator and deputy principal in secondary schools.
Paul Waldau is an educator, scholar and activist working at the intersection of ani-
mal studies, law, ethics, religion and cultural studies. A professor at Canisius
College in Buffalo, New York, Paul has been the lead faculty member for the master
of science graduate programme in anthrozoology since its founding in 2011 and
director of the programme since September of 2015. Paul has also taught animal law
at Harvard Law School since 2002. He also teaches Harvard’s summer term course
“Animals: Religion and Ethics”. The former director of the Centre for Animals and
Public Policy, Paul taught veterinary ethics and public policy at Tufts University
School of Veterinary Medicine for more than a decade. Paul has completed five
books, the most recent of which are Animal Studies: An Introduction (Oxford
University Press, 2013) and Animal Rights (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is
also coeditor of A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics
(Columbia University Press, 2006) and An Elephant in the Room: The Science and
Well-Being of Elephants in Captivity (Center for Animals and Public Policy, 2008).
His first book was The Specter of Speciesism: Buddhist and Christian Views of
Animals (Oxford University Press, 2001).
1.1 Introduction
In our increasingly interconnected and wired world, some of the biggest global stars
have been nonhuman animals. On blogs, on Facebook and all around the Internet,
claws and clicks go hand in hand or paw in paw, with the furry claiming cyberspace.
In 2014, one of the most emailed stories on The New York Times’s website was
about the biology of cats.1 According to media reports, there has been a sharp rise
in the proportion of American dog and cat owners with provisions in their wills for
their pets, with nearly one in every ten now making such arrangements.2 One of the
most fervently embraced documentaries of 2013 was Blackfish, shown over and
over on CNN. And these are not just “feel good” stories about cute and cuddly ani-
mals. They are about animal suffering, animal science, animal intelligence and cog-
nition, animal behaviour and social life, animal welfare and law, and above all,
animal dignity, rights and justice. For instance, in a New York Times’s op-ed piece,
the commentator writes about “according animals dignity”.3 These topics are not
academic jargon but increasingly entering the popular cyber parlance. In the mean-
time, apart from stories and images of animals going viral in traditional and social
1
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/science/cat-sense-explains-what-theyre-really-thinking.
html
2
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/opinion/bruni-according-animals-dignity.html?_r=0
3
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/opinion/bruni-according-animals-dignity.html?_r=0
S. White (*)
Griffith Law School, Griffith University,
Brisbane, QLD, Australia
e-mail: steven.white@griffith.edu.au
D. Cao
Law Futures Centre, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
e-mail: d.cao@griffith.edu.au
media around the world, significant legal battles are being fought on behalf of ani-
mals, for instance, in the International Court of Justice in the Hague and in the
courtrooms of New York. At the end of 2013, a team of lawyers was filing writs of
habeas corpus in New York on behalf of four captive chimpanzees as part of the
Nonhuman Rights Project.4 At the other end of the world, in Australia, a group of
animal lawyers, scientists and scholars was gathering to discuss animal law and
animal welfare, the result of which is this edited book.
The symposium, held on the Gold Coast in Australia in early-December 2013,
was designed to provide a small number of animal law and animal welfare science
scholars the time to meet for 2 days of intensive discussion and debate. The sympo-
sium, by contrast with the usual conference format of a short paper and sometimes
desultory question time, allowed for extended, collegial discussion across a range of
inter-related animal law and welfare science issues. The impetus for the symposium,
and for the chapters in this book, derive from a sobering reality: despite the develop-
ments in animal protection law over the last 200 years, and, in particular, the devel-
opments in the legal front over the last three decades, animal cruelty is not decreasing
but increasing world-wide. We are witnessing the globalization of animal cruelty.
This is so despite laws for protecting animals being accompanied and increasingly
informed by the deepening of knowledge in animal welfare science, and despite the
recognition of the legal and moral wrong of acts of cruelty against animals in both
law and in the general community in most countries. Animal cruelty is increasing in
terms of scale and in more varied forms, for both domestic animals and, increas-
ingly, for wildlife. Factory farming, which originated in the West, has now been
introduced to developing countries and is expanding rapidly; wildlife is being used
and abused for various kinds of human consumption on an unprecedented scale,
especially in Asia and we are facing the real possibility that African elephants and
rhinos may become extinct in the next decade; indiscriminate killing of different
species of animals occurs every so often in different countries on a massive scale due
to health scares and panic fuelled by a fear of the spread of disease. Given this
expanding cruelty, what are the possible solutions in terms of animal law and wel-
fare? In an age of globalization, a global solution through international cooperation
and communication of animal matters is essential to deal with animal cruelty. Such
a response must be based on a multi-jurisdictional understanding of the phenomenon
of animal protection, addressing both the particular forms it takes in different juris-
dictions and, at a broader level, the potential for sharing knowledge and resources to
improve the living conditions for animals across all jurisdictions. While there are
several texts that address animal law from international perspectives (for instance,
Globalization and Animal Law by Kelch (2011) and A Worldview of Animal Law by
Wagman and Liebman (2011)), this book is distinctive in bringing together the dis-
ciplines of animal law and animal welfare science, as well as others such as ethics
and criminology, in a way which allows for an integrated exploration of animal
protection across a range of jurisdictions. The range of jurisdictions canvassed in the
4
For original filings and subsequent developments of the chimpanzee case, see http://www.nonhu-
manrightsproject.org/category/courtfilings/.
1 Introduction: Animal Protection in an Interconnected World 3
book reflects not only the work of those who participated in the symposium, but also
of others who subsequently and generously agreed to contribute a chapter.
The chapters included in this book address some of the most topical and impor-
tant issues in animal law and animal welfare in different jurisdictions in the world.
International law related to animals is examined, including E.U. animal welfare law,
the latest World Trade Organization (W.T.O.) ruling on seal products and the E.U.
ban, the Blackfish story and U.S. law for cetaceans, wildlife trafficking and related
crimes concerning Africa and China, an examination of both historical and current
animal protection laws in Australia, and the laws concerning animal protection in
Israel, South Africa and Brazil. The book deliberately seeks to draw out perspec-
tives across a range of jurisdictions which mostly have not been the subject of exten-
sive consideration in the animal protection literature. This is particularly so for
those jurisdictions which have received comparatively little consideration in the
English language literature. Questions which have been explored extensively else-
where in the literature, including in the areas of moral philosophy and ethics con-
cerning animals, feminist approaches to animal protection, animal protection
activism and the doctrinal law of animal cruelty, are not specifically addressed here,
although these and other aspects of animal protection are drawn on in various places
through the book.
The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, the chapters address general issues, in
animal law and welfare science, which cut across all jurisdictions. Building on this
base, Part II explores developments in animal legal protection in different jurisdic-
tions from five different continents: Australia, Africa, Asia, Europe, North America
and South America.
In Chap. 2, Paul Waldau addresses the need for “a second wave of animal law”.
Animal Law is now taught in many law schools around the world. However, Waldau
argues that it is time to examine the future direction of animal law, including its
place in the broader realm of Animal Studies. He poses four key questions for guid-
ing this process: (1) how should animal law courses in law school proceed given the
obvious interdisciplinary reach of the larger field of Animal Studies?; (2) what is the
place in second wave animal law for answers to the root question “who, what are
‘animals’?”; (3) why is the field of “Animal Studies” important to legal education
and, more broadly, education as a whole?; and, (4) what roles have personal connec-
tion with and meeting of nonhuman animals played in first wave animal law, and
what roles might they play in second wave animal law, the larger field of Animal
Studies and its sub-disciplines, and the educational mega-fields we know as “the
humanities” and “the sciences”?
In Chap. 3, Donald Broom brings an animal welfare science perspective to bear
on a range of animal welfare law questions. These include the role played by wel-
fare law in addressing issues of sustainability and food quality, grounded in
4 S. White and D. Cao
Wolfson also provides insights into Israeli animal protection law which might oth-
erwise only be available to those with knowledge of Hebrew, bringing to the reader
his practical experience as a lawyer involved some of the important Israeli animal
court cases and his expert legal knowledge.
Chapter 9 canvasses the emergence of animal protection law in Brazil. Tagore
Trajano de Almeida Silva draws parallels and identifies overlaps with the develop-
ment of other areas of law, including human rights law and environmental law. A
key change occurred in 1988, with a new national Constitution formally requiring
protection of animals against cruelty. Trajano argues that the change effected by this
provision provides a new status for animals, no longer to be regarded as mere natu-
ral resources or mere property, and instead subjects deserving of individual consid-
eration. The ramifications of this change of status are yet to be fully explored, but
the potential now exists for courts and legislators to embrace a stronger commit-
ment to animal dignity.
Questions of regulatory governance are examined by Jed Goodfellow in Chap.
10. Although focussing on Australian governance of animal protection, the insights
from Goodfellow’s chapter are likely to resonate in many other jurisdictions. Claims
of industry capture are frequently aired by animal protection advocates, in a context
where agriculture departments are the usual home of institutional responsibility for
animal welfare. Rather than taking such claims at face value, Goodfellow scruti-
nises them through the lens of regulatory capture theory. While he finds that the
public interest in animal protection has indeed been subverted by conflicting depart-
mental priorities and reward structures, his arguments bring much-needed analytical
rigour to this aspect of animal law. Goodfellow then canvasses some changes in
regulatory design which might address existing shortcomings.
Grounding her analysis in recent tragic examples of cetacean confinement in
United States theme parks, including the story of Tilikum told in the film Blackfish,
Joan E. Schaffner in Chap. 11 argues the time is ripe for improving the protection
of cetaceans under U.S. law. Apart from increased public consciousness of the
plight of cetaceans through films such as Blackfish, there has been an international
campaign for cetacean rights since 2010, greater scientific understanding of the
complexity of cetacean cognition, and heightened concerns about public and
employee safety in theme parks confining cetaceans. Schaffner addresses the legal
possibilities for improved protection of the interests of cetaceans, arguing the need
for a shift away from utilitarian considerations of welfare to protection of funda-
mental rights.
Part II closes with a chapter by Deborah Cao who focuses on crimes against
wildlife as illustrated by the wildlife law and ivory trade in China. She outlines the
legal framework and law for wildlife protection in China and in particular highlights
the inherent problems in the law that regards animals, including protected and
endangered species, as resources for exploitation. Despite the legal protection at the
international and domestic levels, African elephants and rhinos are facing brutal
onslaught and possible extinction due to the growing trade for such animal products
and the ineffective protection system for their preservation. She argues that a funda-
mental change of attitude and conception in wildlife protection is required, that is,
6 S. White and D. Cao
wildlife and animals in general need to be protected irrespective of their species and
wildlife must not be seen as resources for human exploitation to their detriment. She
also proposes that wildlife victims of human harms are recognized as victims of
crimes, not just as valuable resources, and the definition of crime against wildlife
needs to be expanded to include harms done to them both legally and illegally.
laborative venture, and we extend our thanks to each of the contributing authors for
their participation. The diversity of the contributions lays the foundations for what
we hope will be a growing focus on the possibilities of global responses to the need
to overcome animal cruelty. Finally, we thank our publisher, Springer, and in par-
ticular, Neil Olivier and Diana Nijenhuijzen, for their editorial and other support in
bringing this collection together.
References
Kelch, Thomas G. 2011. Globalization and animal law: Comparative law, international law, and
international trade. Alphen aan den Rijn: Wolters Kluwer.
Wagman, Bruce A., and Liebman Matthew. 2011. A worldview of animal law. Durham: Carolina
Academic Press.
Part I
General Issues in Animal Law
and Welfare Science
Chapter 2
Second Wave Animal Law and the Arrival
of Animal Studies
Paul Waldau
Abstract Many societies today reflect that animal protectionists are going beyond
efforts to establish fundamental protections of the kind signaled by terms like “ani-
mal rights,” “animal welfare,” and even “animal liberation.” This Chapter uses four
interrelated questions to explore this new stage of animal law: (1) how should ani-
mal law courses in law school proceed given the obvious interdisciplinary reach of
the larger field of Animal Studies?; (2) what is the place in second wave animal law
for answers to the root question “who, what are ‘animals’?”; (3) why is the field of
“Animal Studies” important to legal education and, more broadly, education as a
whole?; and, (4) What roles have personal connection with and meeting of nonhu-
man animals played in first wave animal law, and what roles might they play in
second wave animal law, the larger field of Animal Studies and its sub-disciplines,
and the educational mega-fields we know as “the humanities” and “the sciences”?
2.1 Introduction
How do we go about our attempt to see the future of animal law? We can speak
rather specifically, of course, about the near-term projects on which we will focus in
the coming few years. But what I’m after is our need to assess the possible direc-
tions and shape of animal law decades out into the future, which takes an altogether
different imagination than does looking only at possible projects in the coming
years. To meet this need, I examine the burgeoning academic field known as “Animal
Studies,” but which is known variously under other names such as “Anthrozoology,”
and “Human-Animal Studies” (there are at least a half-dozen other options that I do
not list here. For further discussions, see Waldau 2013). In order to see why the field
of law and the subfield of animal law need perspectives from Animal Studies, I
employ what I will refer to as three lenses—these include a generalization, a warn-
ing about social movements, and an imaginative image to help us see the terrain we
walk as ethical creatures. The generalization is this pithy observation by Robert
P. Waldau (*)
Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, USA
e-mail: pwaldau@gmail.com
Cover (1986): “Law is the projection of an imagined future upon reality.” The warn-
ing is embodied in this observation about social movements: “It’s hard enough to
start a revolution, even harder still to sustain it, and hardest of all to win it. But it is
only afterwards, once we’ve won, that the real difficulties begin.”1 The third lens is
a simple, three-word phrase that I take to be an imaginative image luring us into a
healthy intersection with lives beyond our species—this image is “the animal invita-
tion.” This image suggests that other animals have lives that, if we notice and take
them seriously, call out not only to the deep ethical instincts so characteristic and
defining of human lives but also to our desire for communion or relationship with
the larger life community. Other-than-human animals invite us to inquire about
them, to take them seriously, to take enjoyment in our similarities and differences,
and even to relate to them as community members. Using these lenses, this chapter
tries to look at both mid- and longer-term issues. So I will speculate about the future
of animal law out to, say, the year 2030 and also about longer term issues regarding
the shape of animal law at the end of this twenty-first century.
Peer with me through three lenses as we attempt an honest, humble, and imaginative
view of the future of animal law.
The generalization: Law is the projection of an imagined future upon reality.
The warning: It’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder still to sustain it,
and hardest of all to win it. But it is only afterwards, once we’ve won, that the
real difficulties begin.
The three-word phrase: The animal invitation.
These lenses can do more than help us see further into the future. They can also
help us today as we try to recognize what is currently happening in law, animal law
more specifically, and allied fields such as Animal Studies. Seeing such things bet-
ter, we can begin to talk to one another about what might happen in the near term
with animal law, as well as the mid-term prospects and the long-term future of both
animal law and Animal Studies.
One important problem that complicates any attempt to see the future of animal
law is the widespread ferment one easily discerns in humans’ relationship with
other animals. One indication of the pervasive changes is that the Animal Law case-
book from Carolina Academic Press, which first appeared in 2000, went into its fifth
edition in 2014. Another indication of change in the offing is the increasing number
of schools offering an animal law course. A third indication of our society’s opening
up to animal issues is the rapid emergence of the field of Animal Studies. It is not,
in fact, at all hard to find other signs that people are reevaluating humans’ possible
1
Said by Larbi Ben M’Hidi to Ali la Pointe in the 1966 documentary “The Battle of Algiers”
directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. This influential film in the history of political cinema focused on the
1957 revolution in Algeria.
2 Second Wave Animal Law and the Arrival of Animal Studies 13
relationships to other living beings—these signs are all about us in media, art, busi-
ness opportunities, scholarship of many kinds, religious communities, local and
state government, national policy debates, and on and on.
This rich, extraordinary ferment in humans’ relations with other living beings
has three important backgrounds or contexts. One is that the changes in the way we
think and feel about “animals” are taking place even as much else is in ferment in
our culture. Another background or context for increasing concern for nonhuman
animals is that the increase takes place against prevailing human-centerednesses
that are pervasive and often altogether unhealthy. Finally, shifts in attitudes about
animal issues are going forward even though we have very serious unresolved
human problems. I take it for granted that today there is a great deal of first-rate
evidence for three claims: (1) that change of many kinds is happening all about us
(this has been going on for centuries, of course), (2) that our society has an astonish-
ing number of features that attest we are decidedly “human-centered,” and (3) that
our societies are plagued by myriad unsolved human problems.
At the end of this chapter and in both Animal Rights (Waldau 2011) and Animal
Studies (Waldau 2013), I argue that we will handle our human-on-human problems
far better if we stay open-minded to animal law prospects. To explain why this is so,
and especially to make the point that animal law is in and of itself an extraordinarily
important field even if it does not generate mostly human benefits, let me ask you to
look through the following three “lenses” with the goal of seeing better the possible
futures of animal law.
This warning humbles anyone who seeks major changes in prevailing political reali-
ties, social practices, or ethical visions—all of which any legal system embodies.
It’s hard enough to start a revolution, even harder still to sustain it, and hardest of all to win
it. But it is only afterwards, once we’ve won, that the real difficulties begin.
a revolution. They struggled for decades, and today we can see well how their
insight and persistence paid off.
The revolution has thus started, and it is easy to see that legal education’s embrace
of animal law courses thereby reflects that a first wave of the field “animal law” has
arrived on our shores. From 1977, when the first such course went forward at Seton
Hall Law School, to the year 2000, difficulties in getting this revolution off the
ground must have been formidable, for fewer than a dozen such courses in the
United States were started. But with Harvard Law School’s offering of an animal
law course (called “Animal Rights” and taught by Steven Wise in 2000), the field
took off nationally and internationally—within only a decade, for example, the
United States saw a ten-fold increase in the number of such courses. Such an
increase would be significant in any field, of course, but particularly so in the case
of animal law—there are just under 200 accredited law schools in the United States,
and with well over 140 schools offering an animal law course in 2014 (virtually all
of which were the result of student petitions), a large majority of American law
schools now offer this kind of course. This also means that thousands of law stu-
dents are taking this course each year around the world—given lawyers’ proficiency
at getting their voice heard in public policy circles (compare them to, say, veterinar-
ians who historically have not been successful at having their voices heard, let alone
taken seriously, in public policy discussions), the emergence of so many animal law
courses means that future policy discussions touching upon “animal issues” will
likely be attended by graduates of these courses, all of which augurs more critical
thinking, technical sophistication, and compassion-driven content for future policy
discussions in this area.
In the spirit of critical thinking, let me call attention to some important disputes
and even the polarization that attends much discussion of the animal law phenom-
enon—it is likely that this phenomenon will seem wonderful if one is interested in
and favors (i) the ethics-tenor of contemporary animal law education (by which I
mean the prevalence of ethics-based and justice-focused concerns as students
express why they pursue and hope to expand “animal law”), or (ii) a similar concern
for animal protective values and outcomes in the field of Animal Studies, or (iii)
developing ever-greater sophistication when scrutinizing law for evidence of com-
passion. But if one works in one of those institutions, professions or businesses
where the use of law to protect nonhuman animals is seen as a threat to humans’
hegemony, then these developments no doubt create a chill.
My own sense is that all burgeoning social movements include any number of
these features, if only because they are energy-driven rather than parasitic on estab-
lished values, as is an economics-driven field like patent law. My observations here
may be biased—I’m personally interested in “the cause” and have confidence that
the future of animal law is robust. Even after I correct for such “biases,” it seems
“obvious” to me that the vast majority of criticisms of the animal law phenomenon
are based on a failure to see the movement for what it is—the opening up of law
beyond the species line.
16 P. Waldau
It seems to me that these initial stages of the animal law movement have opened up
so many questions and issues that it is clear that first wave animal law reflects a true
revolution. Caution is in order, for there are always difficulties when one attempts
to assess the future of a young social movement, which contemporary animal pro-
tection is even though it is sustained by roots in ancient cultures’ visions that we, as
humans, are capable of rich forms of animal protection. But celebration is also in
order, as it were, for this early phase of modern animal law has surmounted the chal-
lenges of the first part of Larbi Ben M’Hidi’s warning— It’s hard enough to start a
revolution. But no one who celebrates this will fail to recognize Larbi Ben M’Hidi’s
caveat that revolutions are even harder still to sustain. So let me use this warning to
raise some issues about what I have characterized as first wave animal law.
First wave animal law has prompted forms of animal law education that relies
greatly on the following:
• use of traditional law school methods (such as casebooks, teaching of income
making skills);
• traditional legal reasoning patterns in litigation;
• a foregrounding of questions about “legal rights” as if that important legal tool is
the “be all and end all” of legal protections;
• preoccupation with those animals we dominate and live with, and which were
commonly termed “pets” until the late twentieth century when a certain political
correctness prompted emergence of the now favored term “companion ani-
mals”—there has been much discussion of research animals, too, and more
recently food animals (wildlife, it seems to me, receives much attention because
this category of nonhumans is the focus of species-level discussions dominated
by extinction risks, but the sentience of the individual “wild” animals is less
talked about, although there are many substantial efforts to protect and rehabili-
tate injured wild animals of both endangered and non-endangered species);
• preoccupation with the special cognitive abilities of nonhuman animals, all of
which risks a surreptitious affirmation that the human mind, often seen as the
pinnacle of cognitive abilities, is the definitive measure of the universe; and,
• forms of activism that work primarily within established public policy circles,
particularly courts, legislative bodies and administrative agencies as if these cir-
cles are where we (our modern, industrialized societies) create and sustain broad
social values.
These are achievements both interesting and important—in many ways, they
have so far proven a good road map to starting the revolution. While there can be
little doubt that these achievements will continue to play important roles in the
future, below I suggest that these features of contemporary animal law education
2 Second Wave Animal Law and the Arrival of Animal Studies 17
and activism are first wave “stuff,” if you will, and that the future of a robust animal
law field requires more and different approaches.
Consider how each of the achievements of first wave animal law listed above might
be enriched by an imaginative, humble, ethics-sensitive and interdisciplinary
engagement with other living beings. The result can be a qualitatively different
stage of animal law.
• Use of traditional law school methods—While animal law educators’ use of tra-
ditional law school methods (such as casebooks) will very likely always remain
essential, much more is needed. The typical form of animal law education, with
a few notable exceptions, is a survey/introductory course taken as an elective by
interested law students. Second wave animal law must be creative in reaching
beyond this important but clearly preliminary offering. As anyone who has
taught an animal law course will attest, there is no way that a single course can
address the many different dimensions and possibilities of animal law. Some of
the creativity needed to create a battery of courses that cover animal law ade-
quately will come from liaisons that animal law creates with (i) other law courses,
such as environmental law, and (ii) other academic disciplines that have informa-
tive perspectives on nonhuman animals.
• Traditional legal reasoning patterns in litigation—Animal law activists and liti-
gators should be experts at traditional legal reasoning patterns and in litigation
techniques, since these forms of expertise have often been used in support of
oppression of human “others.” First wave animal law has had success engaging
legal systems’ technicalities, many of which have been designed to limit non-
lawyers’ access to courts. Such mastery has been important because such techni-
calities have long been utilized by the wealthy and powerful segments of modern
societies who can hire the most accomplished and politically connected lawyers
for the purpose of limiting claims that might divest the powerful of their privi-
leges. There are, in addition to standard legal reasoning patterns, important per-
spectives that non-lawyers have to offer animal law that help illuminate the
values that drive the legal system. Both law insiders and those outside law have
helped everyone see that legal systems clearly have birthed and nurtured some
very oppressive ideas and practices, such as oppressive notions of property and
business that have been historically used against not only nonhumans, but
humans as well. Further, since legislative fiats can override the breakthroughs
achieved in courts (even at the constitutional level via amendments authorized by
a super majority), in liberal democracies one must get to the people who are the
ultimate drivers of consumer patterns, economics, and legislative pronounce-
ments, all of which will play key roles in the future of animal law.
18 P. Waldau