By Adithi Rao, student at ILS Law College, Pune, India During this pandemic, the Indian judiciary has been open only for urgent matters, which included a writ petition filed by a gentleman in Eranakulam, Kerala. Due to the rampant closures of lockdowns, the man experienced a specific problem in taking care of his pets. Fortunately, the details of his petition caught the attention of the bench sitting at the Kerala High Court, and they decided to hear the matter through […]
By Mina da Rui, LLM student In 21st century Great Britain, legal reasoning paths are slowly widening as human rights, environmental dysfunction, and animal injustice come to the fore of public consciousness. Animal law is a niche area of law, a tentative but growing jurisprudence. This growth paved the way for an animal law success story recently, one that captured the imagination of our nation’s people, governments, parliaments, media, and celebrities, after almost 10 years of hard campaigning. Author Marc […]
By Erin Lanza During the early part of 2020, environmental and animal advocates turned their attention toward the devastating losses of wildlife in Australia. In a vastly different habitat, irresponsible human activity threatens the lives of seahorses. These animals now face a risk of extinction due to water pollution in coral reefs, mangrove swamps, and sea-grass beds in coastal regions. Indeed, Save Our Seahorses reports that, without vastly improved legal protection, seahorses may become extinct within 20-30 years. Unlike the […]
By Daniel Ball, solicitor Somewhere in the bleak and unforgiving Scottish Highlands, golden eagles are persecuted for so-called ‘sport’. Grouse shooting is the hunting of red grouse between August and December each year. Large areas of land were devoted to grouse shooting by the early 1880s, when driven shooting (using beaters to drive the grouse towards waiting guns) became fashionable. Because gamekeepers did not want their grouse stock affected, they controlled predators. The legal control of predators such as foxes, […]
Review by Erin Lanza In this book, media studies scholar and theorist Aph Ko presents a novel approach to considering animal rights, one that destabilises colonial logic and locates problematic racial hierarchies as central to our exploitation of nonhuman animals. Ko asserts that white supremacy uses the concept of animality to denigrate minority peoples, thereby committing conceptual (and then physical) violence against both nonwhite humans and nonhuman animals. Ko’s commitment to situating anti-racist and animal rights theory as necessarily compatible […]
Ed. note: Please enjoy this piece originally intended for World Aquatic Animal Day in April. We share in support of the Aquatic Animal Law Initiative and the Animal Law Clinic at Lewis & Clark Law School, as part of their Center for Animal Law Studies. More information at end. by Lydia Robinson, Trainee Solicitor What is the Aquatic Animal Law Initiative? The Aquatic Animal Law Initiative (AALI) is a programme set up by the Lewis & Clark Law School […]
By Alice Kennedy, trainee solicitor Lanta Animal Welfare In the summer of 2014, I volunteered at Lanta Animal Welfare (LAW) in Koh Lanta, an island in Thailand’s Krabi Province. The animal shelter and veterinary practice needed people to live on site and assist with the care of, at the time, 40 cats and a further 30 dogs. Volunteers worked six-hour shifts, six days a week. Our role included walking the dogs, preparing food, cleaning cages, assisting the vet staff […]
by Imogen Mellor Cats Protection campaigns for the mandatory microchipping of owned cats. They state that “cats are independent and curious creatures – part of the reason we love them. But this means that they can end up lost, perhaps far from home. Microchipping is a safe and permanent way to identify a cat and the best way of ensuring lost cats are returned to their loving families.” The hope is that mandatory microchipping will lead to fewer unidentified […]
Book Review by Michelle Li Sze Cheng Dr. Sohini Mahaptra dedicates her book Nonhuman Animals and the Law to “all of the wonderful animals around us – companions, strays and the wild, whose contribution in our lives goes unacknowledged.” Reading this dedication promised me that this book would be an enjoyable and memorable journey, and it was. In this book, Mahapatra intends to address the grey areas of animal law protection within the Indian legal discourse. She discusses how ‘societal […]
By Sophie Lunn, student at Nottingham Trent University Covid-19, the human illness caused by the novel virus SARS-COV-2, has been causing worry and disruption since it first emerged. Attention immediately turned to its origin: where did this new virus come from? Despite all the efforts made in China to contain the virus, it has become a pandemic. Cases have been confirmed in more than 110 countries, and the number of lives lost to the virus continues to rise. The economic toll is likely to run into trillions of US dollars. The first cases of infection appear to trace […]