Is there a need for a new, an ecological, understanding of legal animal rights?

Abstract

Legal animal rights may, in the short term, offer an efficient means to improve the living conditions of animals and how they are treated by human societies. This article argues that this shift to adopt an animal rights framing of the human-animal interaction might also risk producing certain counterproductive effects. It suggests that there is a need for a broader reassessment of the relationships between the human and animal worlds. This article posits that the adoption of legal animal rights as a workable legal solution for the better protection of animals has been increasingly accepted because rights frameworks rely upon a core premise of Western jurisprudence, namely legal subjectivism and the epistemological and axiological assumptions it conveys. The article argues that such an individualistic and dualist approach to legal animal rights will ultimately reveal itself to be insufficient and unable to capture animals as members of concrete social and environmental entanglements. Rather, a true legal revolution is required, which would evoke an ecological understanding of law itself.