What Happened to US Animal Law?

I’ve spent the last few days at the Animal Law Conference in the UK. And my main conclusion is that the animal law community in the UK is much more ambitious than in the United States. US animal law is tactical and incremental. “This is how to sue a road-side zero.” “Here’s how we can pass an animal welfare law.” “That’s an example of effective regulatory enforcement.”

In contrast, UK Animal Law is visionary and long-term. Michelle Strauss spoke about the need for, not just rights, but political representation for animals. (I asked her at dinner if that included the vote; she bit the bullet and said it did.) Ankita Shanker argued for seeing animal law as a fundamental set of principles beyond legislation, based on concepts such as the rule of law and due process. And numerous speakers, including Shreya Padukone, discussed their ambition to protect, not just farm animals, but animals in the wild — including insects!

The incrementalists might laugh at discussions of this sort, but there’s evidence that ambitious long-term goals are important to inspiring a movement – and aligning it towards a long-term strategy. The visionaries, in contrast, might mock the limited ambition of incrementalists. Yet there is immense value in getting real-world data from incremental projects; among other things, it allows us to refine our approach to long-term strategy.

I don’t want to be accused, however, of “both sides”-ing the debate. So I’ll be clear on where I stand: the movement needs more vision and long-term strategy. I have written about why this is the case: you cannot inspire people to fight, or align your work towards progress, if you don’t have a big hairy audacious goal. But a recent podcast with Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, provides another reason I hadn’t considered: big goals attract the best talent.

Talented, ambitious people don’t want to work on rinky-dink projects. They want to change the world. And the deep irony of working on ambitious, long-term projects is that they often achieve the greatest incremental progress simply because they create talented and motivated teams.

Here are some of the other highlights from the conference.

Justin Marceau updated his critique of US animal law’s focus on criminal prosecution as a tool for change. Justin’s theory, set out in this piece in the Harvard Law Review, is that criminal prosecutions – typically of poor, underprivileged, and often non-white defendants – serve as a “palliative” that reassure the public that animal abuse is being appropriately addressed. But, in fact, the biggest and most flagrant animal abusers are virtually never held accountable to these laws; indeed, animal lawyers often engage in a Faustian bargain in which they pass enhanced animal cruelty laws accompanied by exemptions for the largest category of animals: farm animals. The update from the Animal Law Conference is that Justin presented research showing that white people in the United States are significantly more likely to support criminal prosecutions for animal abuse, and also significantly less likely to say they know someone who has been charged with animal cruelty. The result is a system that is not just racially biased but that avoids legal prosecution of the most horrific abuses – which are largely inflicted by white people in farm country.

A number of speakers discussed animal law paradigms that go beyond the right to be protected from abuse, and toward the promotion of flourishing. Martha Nussbaum, in particular, is a name that came up a number of times. Martha, a distinguished philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago Law School, has increasingly made animal rights a part of her work. And her focus has been an ethic of care, rather than rights. This includes considering a wider variety of capabilities that she argues must be respected by the legal system.

There was surprising agreement that animal law should challenge, rather than endorse, animal welfare. It is a strange conference where I am the most aggressive proponent of animal welfare reforms. But that’s what it felt like in Birmingham. A presentation asking whether the RSPCA Assured program promotes or protects animal suffering was anti-climatic: the entire conference seemingly agreed with the presenters that the program was a scam. This is the opposite of how things usually go in the United States. The vast majority of animal lawyers (and NGOs) in the US are extremely supportive of animal welfare. I’ve been trying to understand what explains the difference. Perhaps Animal Rising and other groups have done a better job of educating the public, and movement, about the risks inherent to animal welfare. Perhaps the large NGO sector in the US, funded by a few pro-animal welfare donors, biases the US movement towards these programs. But, whatever the cause, the difference is striking.

Animal law in the UK expressly aims to integrate into broader campaign ecosystems – but mostly fails to do so. A former judge and RSPCA trustee, David Thomas (who, incidentally, was very critical of the RSPCA Assured scheme), gave an excellent presentation about how legal advocacy needs to be integrated into broader campaigns, including investigations, protest, and education. But everyone in the room acknowledged that this form of integration is often more aspiration than reality. I was particularly struck by the fact that lawyers in the UK seemed more interested in engaging directly with activists, yet very few of the lawyers were actually engaged in this way! This seems partly because the conference, and perhaps animal law generally in the UK, is primarily an academic discipline. Academics are notorious for being stuck in their ivory towers.

But I think it’s partly for a more simple reason: activists, especially in the grassroots, simply don’t think about the law. Across many movements, it appears that the grassroots hasn’t integrated legal advocacy in their campaign toolkits. (This is, generally, one of the pathologies of grassroots movements; they rightly organize outside of mainstream institutions but then make the mistake of assuming they can ignore them, even when those mainstream institutions clamp down and crush their efforts.) I am hoping this isolation of law from activism changes. My own wife’s freedom may depend on that!