Aren't Animals Already Protected by the Law?

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume IV, p. 69 of the PDF edition · English translation

A common belief is that animals already have rights guaranteed by law, and that animal exploitation happens because the laws are systematically violated. However, that is not how things are. Animal exploitation is legal. It takes place within legal systems that legitimize it and ensure that it can continue to exist, protecting humans' interest in using animals as resources.

It is important to remember that we live in speciesist societies, and legal systems generally reflect the prevailing thinking in societies. Thus, the legal status in which animals are placed protects the interest in using animals as resources, since it prevents them from having rights, given that they are considered things, items of people's property. We will see this in more detail below.

Rights are guarantees that protect their holders¹⁵³ (for example, they protect their physical integrity, their life, their liberty, and so on). Rights can be legal or moral. Moral rights are independent of whether or not they are recognized by law. Legal rights, by contrast, are protections guaranteed by legal systems.

Whatever the legal system in force in a country, in terms of legal status there is usually a clear distinction between two categories: persons and objects. Only persons can be holders of legal rights. Objects are items of people's property and, as such, cannot have rights. Persons even have the right to exploit their items of property.

The legal status of nonhuman animals is usually that of items of property¹⁵⁴. In practice, this means that as long as they remain in this category, they cannot have legal rights, and so no truly meaningful protection of their interests will be possible (given that their owners would still have the right to exploit them).

That is why, despite the existence of animal welfare laws, in practice they do not prevent animals from being exploited and living a veritable hell¹⁵⁵.

A common objection to recognizing rights for nonhuman animals is the claim that, to have rights, one must understand the notion of rights, since this would be necessary in order to respect the rights of others and to claim one's own. However, if it makes sense to recognize rights for humans who lack these capacities (such as children and adults with cognitive impairments), then it makes no sense to say that nonhuman animals cannot have rights because they lack these capacities.

There are, therefore, reasons to advocate changing the legal status of animals, removing them from the category of things and granting them the status of holders of legal rights¹⁵⁶. However, this is unlikely to happen as long as most people consume animal products, the demand for which entails the existence of an entire system of animal exploitation to meet it. For this reason it is necessary, alongside the call for a change in the legal status of animals, also to seek to get more and more people to stop using animals.

However, to achieve such a change in behavior, it is necessary to change the way people see animals. That is why it is extremely necessary, both to get more people to stop using animals and to change the legal status of animals, to spread the arguments supporting equal consideration for all sentient beings.