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Full-Text Articles in Animal Law

Legal Recognition Of Animal Sentience: The Case For Cautious Optimism, Jane Kotzmann Jan 2022

Legal Recognition Of Animal Sentience: The Case For Cautious Optimism, Jane Kotzmann

Animal Sentience

Rowan et al.’s target article provides a valuable indication of the work that was required to reach the point where animals are recognised as sentient in various laws. To ensure this work was not in vain, the language of sentience needs to be used as a moral currency to demand further cultural change involving greater human respect for animals.


Animal Sentience: History, Science, And Politics, Andrew N. Rowan, Joyce M. D'Silva, Ian J.H. Duncan, Nicholas Palmer Jan 2021

Animal Sentience: History, Science, And Politics, Andrew N. Rowan, Joyce M. D'Silva, Ian J.H. Duncan, Nicholas Palmer

Animal Sentience

This target article has three parts. The first briefly reviews the thinking about nonhuman animals’ sentience in the Western canon: what we might know about their capacity for feeling, leading up to Bentham’s famous question “can they suffer?” The second part sketches the modern development of animal welfare science and the role that animal-sentience considerations have played therein. The third part describes the launching, by Compassion in World Farming, of efforts to incorporate animal sentience language into public policy and regulations concerning human treatment of animals.


Living With Owning, Matt Ampleman, Douglas A. Kysar Jan 2016

Living With Owning, Matt Ampleman, Douglas A. Kysar

Indiana Law Journal

In October, 2011, Terry Thompson committed suicide by gunshot after cutting open the cages of fifty-six exotic animals on his farm in Zanesville, Ohio. Fearing for pub-lic safety, law enforcement officers systematically hunted down the escaped animals in an episode that garnered international attention and prompted renewed discus-sion of the propriety of exotic animal ownership. This Article retells and discusses the circumstances surrounding Terry Thompson’s unhinging, applying frameworks of legal theory, chiefly in the realm of property law, to assess the fabric that held Thompson’s delicate system together and the tensions that led to its unravelling. As an autopsy, the …


Breaking The Silence: The Veterinarian’S Duty To Report, Martine Lachance Jan 2016

Breaking The Silence: The Veterinarian’S Duty To Report, Martine Lachance

Animal Sentience

Animals, like children and disabled elders, are not only the subjects of abuse, but they are unable to report and protect themselves from it. Veterinarians, like human physicians, are often the ones to become aware of the abuse and the only ones in a position to report it when their human clients are unwilling to do so. This creates a conflict between professional confidentiality to the client and the duty to protect the victim and facilitate prosecution when the law has been broken. I accordingly recommend that veterinarian associations make reporting of abuse mandatory.


Living On The Edge: The Margins Of Legal Personhood, Symposium Foreword, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan Jan 2008

Living On The Edge: The Margins Of Legal Personhood, Symposium Foreword, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

All Faculty Scholarship

In January 2008, at the Association of American Law Schools' annual meeting, the Jurisprudence Section conducted a panel on "The Margins of Legal Personhood." The goal of this panel was to draw (or sever) connections between and among different "marginal" entities: the psychopath, the animal, and the embryo or fetus. As is perhaps immediately apparent, these entities are not marginalized in a political sense, but rather lie at the margins of our moral and legal communities. Prima facie, they may have some, but lack all, of the capacities necessary for full membership. Because they live on the edge, we must …


The Evolution Of Animal Law Since 1950, Steven M. Wise Jan 2003

The Evolution Of Animal Law Since 1950, Steven M. Wise

State of the Animals 2003

Over the last half century, the law has assumed an increasingly important place in animal protection even as it has begun to point in the direction of true legal rights for at least some nonhuman animals. In this chapter I briefly discuss five aspects of the law: anti-cruelty statutes; the necessity of obtaining standing to litigate on behalf of the interests of nonhuman animals; evolving protections for great apes; the movement toward legal rights for at least some nonhuman animals; and the state of legal education concerning animal protection.