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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Animal Protection Commission: Advancing Social Membership For Animals Through A Novel Administrative Agency, John Maccormick
The Animal Protection Commission: Advancing Social Membership For Animals Through A Novel Administrative Agency, John Maccormick
Dalhousie Law Journal
If the state sought to improve law's treatment of nonhuman animals, what form should its intervention take? This paper questions the assumption that the state would have to choose between incremental welfare reforms and an immediate transition to animal personhood. Drawing on Martha Nussbaum's capabilities theory and on Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka's political approach to animal rights, it argues that the focus should be on how the relationship between human and nonhuman animals can be improved. It suggests that the state could intervene by creating an administrative agency with just this task; and that it could look to labour …
Connexion: A Note On Praxis For Animal Advocates, John Enman-Beech
Connexion: A Note On Praxis For Animal Advocates, John Enman-Beech
Dalhousie Law Journal
Effective animal advocacy requires human-animal connexion. I apply a relational approach to unfold this insight into a praxis for animal advocates. Connexion grounds the affective relationships that so often motivate animal advocates. More importantly, it enables animal agency, the ability of animals to act and communicate in ways humans can experience and respond to. With connexion in mind, some weaknesses of previous reform efforts become apparent. I join these in the slogan "abolitionismas disconnexion." In so far as abolitionism draws humans and animals apart, it undermines the movement's social basis, limits its imaginative resources, and deprives animals of a deeper …
Social Membership: Animal Law Beyond The Property/Personhood Impasse, Will Kymlicka
Social Membership: Animal Law Beyond The Property/Personhood Impasse, Will Kymlicka
Dalhousie Law Journal
While animal law has been subject to frequent reform in Canada and abroad, the basic legal foundations of animal oppression are largely unchanged. There are many reasons for this impasse, but part of the explanation is that legal reforms are caught in what we might call the property/personhood dilemma. In most legal systems, domesticated animals are defined as property and so long as this remains true, reforms are likely to be marginal and ineffective. However the main alternative-to shift animals from the category of property to personhoodis politically unfeasible, particularly for the domesticated animals who are most intensively exploited in …