Uncovering the Legal Vulnerability of Hunting Dogs in France and Spain

Hunting has deep historical roots as a means of subsistence and recreation, evolving over time to encompass various social, cultural, and economic dimensions. A crucial aspect of hunting is the use of dogs, which have been bred and trained for millennia to aid hunters in tracking and capturing prey. This paper delves into the legal safeguards extended to hunting dogs in France and Spain, focusing on their unique role in the hunting tradition. Both France and Spain recognize the sentience of domestic animals, including hunting dogs, which grants them some level of legal protection. Nevertheless, the absence of dedicated provisions for hunting dogs leaves them vulnerable. The legal landscape concerning domestic animals is extensive and fragmented in both countries, with laws spreading across multiple texts. Spain’s recent move towards a national animal protection law presented an opportunity for reform. However, a controversial amendment that excludes hunting dogs raises questions about equality before the law, potentially granting preferential treatment to hunters. This argument claims enhanced legal protections for hunting dogs in France and Spain. The contention underscores the role that the European Union (EU) can play in ensuring compliance from Member States with European values and, in particular, with Article 13 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). As the EU has been at the forefront of animal welfare improvements, it holds the potential to influence change in Member States, ultimately fostering greater compassion and fairness in the treatment of hunting dogs

Comparative Animal Law!

This contribution argues in favour of the synergy between two fields: animal law and comparative law. Comparative law will allow for the development and improvement of animal law. Animal law, for its part, can move comparative law beyond the narrow confines of its traditional research agenda. The paper highlights a select number of key issues that are particularly relevant for undertaking serious comparative legal research with respect to animals

The Challenges of Global Animal Law

Animals play a formidable role in human affairs across a wide range of areas including, but not limited to, religion, food, governance, commercial activity and culture. Law being a tool to create order, it becomes necessary that the law regulates the many facets of humananimal interaction. The prominence of this role explains various attempts at regulating these activities both at the domestic and the international level. Zooming in on the international plane, there have been many attempts at regulating animal activity both for economic purposes, disease control and in a limited sense, welfare. As global animal law continues to advance at a faster rate, it is pertinent to smoothen out edges and analyze the possibilities in international law for progressive development. The situation is further worsened by the discrepancies that already exist between the global south and the global north. These discrepancies are not exclusive to animal protection but also arise in other sociolegal headways. This paper seeks to analyze the challenges of global animal law. The analysis shows that existing structures, like that of the African Union through its agencies, offer pathways of surmounting these challenges by bringing many states under the same normative force concurrently and seamlessly. To make progress on the advancement of animal law internationally, a harmonious approach is needed, and that approach cannot be achieved until the international community retreats and considers diverse perspectives and cultural patterns that might stand in the way of a clear understanding of what is at stake, and what is to be achieved

From Local to Global

The ever-increasing global animal death rate in disasters is a product of our anthropocentric bias. The disasters, unfortunately, do not discriminate and devastate both human and animal life, further exacerbating climate change. Institutions such as factory farming are major drivers of such disasters and as a result, we need an immediate inclusion of an animal disaster protection framework in International and national disaster laws as a mechanism to prevent disasters and ensure human and animal safety

Speciesism in Climate Change-Related Disasters: Billions of Animals are Excluded from the Continuum of Disaster Management

The warming climate and increasing rate and strength of disasters resulting from shifting weather patterns affect both humans and animals. As disaster management agencies globally are forced to become more effective at preparing and responding to climate-related disasters, the most populous farmed species are being left out of these plans. As the number of animals at risk of disaster events increases, it is mostly companion animal species that have been given more consideration for evacuation and sheltering. Species such as chickens, the most populous avian species on the planet, along with the rest of the eighty billion other farmed land animals that are killed every year for human consumption, have little to no protection in both intensive and extensive farming systems, whether in high or low-income countries. The speciesism prevalent in society is mirrored in disaster management to the detriment of public health, the environment, and animal rights

The Bio-Zoopolitics of U.S. Military Working Dog Policy in the U.S. “War on Terror”

This paper analyzes the differential positioning of military working dogs in U.S. militarypolicy with particular attention to the period from 2000-2023, during which, among other shifts, thesedogs were reclassified within U.S. law and military code from “expendable equipment” to “militaryanimals.” This time also aligns with the time of the U.S. “war on terror.”1 The paper draws on feministand postcolonial animal studies to consider the larger cultural contexts under which these shiftsemerged, particularly within the biopolitical and racialized contexts of this war. Considering the culturalcontexts of these legislative shifts helps illuminate the biopolitical and zoopolitical entanglements ofanimality, nationalism, and war in determining how military working dogs gain a certain limited “rightto life” through U.S. military policy within the racialized sacrificial economies of this war

The Inescapable Harms of Animal Agriculture: How Might Sanctuaries Respond to Threats from Climate Disasters and Diseases

Farmed animal sanctuaries are upheld as refuges, spaces demarcated materially anddiscursively, where formerly farmed animals have the right to grow old, participate in multispeciescommunities and collaborate in larger political projects that imagine the freedom for all and resistanceagainst animal exploitation. Sanctuaries disengage and agitate against food production narratives ofhow these animals ought to live both spatially and relationally. However, the reach of the animalagriculture industry is creeping into sanctuary spaces through ever-increasing risks such as diseases(e.g., avian influenza), the climate crisis (e.g., fires and floods), and other disaster events, revealinginescapable harms that must be addressed. This article considers the shared, albeit unevenly experienced vulnerability to disasters for farmedanimals, as well as what the inescapable harms imposed by animal agriculture mean for sanctuaries.We first identify human sovereignty as the source of intensifying crises and disasters that sanctuariesare forced to confront, as well as the overarching context that sanctuaries are operating within.Following that, we engage with biological and climate disasters as two main case studies, examininghow sanctuaries have responded to them, and what alternative actions sanctuaries could take. Finally,we consider how sanctuaries might take up the labor and responsibility of participating in broaderstruggles for institutional change beyond the sanctuary-gate, educating people about the relationshipsbetween the climate crisis, disease risk, and all scales of farmed animal production and the subsequentchallenges they pose to sanctuaries. Through a multispecies justice framework, we suggest that disasterevents represent key opportunities for sanctuaries to engage with the political project of ending animalproduction at all scales to ensure a safer future for humans and more-than-humans alike

Radiant Ecologies: The Biopolitics of Animal Photography in Exclusion Zones

This article wishes to examine photographic representations of animal life in the postdisasterlandscapes of Chernobyl and Fukushima. It seeks to articulate how documentary andinvestigative modes employed by a visual repertoire developed in relation to these disaster zones,intersect with a biopolitical imaginary, which, by creating an ontological collapse and interchangeabilitybetween radioactive spaces and nonhuman materialities – including the matter of animal lives– enactsan exclusionary paradigm that is rooted in speciesist violence. A common trope used to frame animalsin these sites of nuclear disaster is that of resilience and rewilding. This framing has been deployed inrecent times by scientific analyses (James Smith, Nick Beresford et. al., 2019, 2005; Lyons et. al., 2020)as well as popular discourses to depict animals, particularly wildlife, as prolific and invasive, governedby an inhuman excess that allows them to thrive in environments otherwise hostile to humans. Thisnarrative of an alien affinity towards forms of toxicity, while positioning animals on a common spectrumof danger and alterity in which they share attributes of anarchic and uncontained growth, dispersal, andmutation with nuclear waste and the action of radioactivity, simultaneously obscures other narrativesof precarity and harm accruing to nonhuman lives and habitats through their proximity to nuclearpollution, and pollution's ties with anthropogenic, military-industrial regimes. (Sohtome et. al., 2014;Itoh 2018). Drawing on recent work by Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, and Kate Brown, my paper explores thefiguration of animals in disaster zone imagery in relation to questions of ruination, haunting, decay, andwaste as constituting what Tsing calls "disturbance regimes." (2015) The nexus of toxic exposures andecocidal effects of nuclearization of environments not only impinges on existing ecological relations,altering and corroding these, but also enforces new and saturated chemical ecologies. Through a closereading of the works of Julia Oldham, Yasusuke Ota, and Pierpaolo Mittica, my article engages with theimplicit dialogue between such radioactive ecologies in post-disaster sites in the wake of evacuation andabandonment, and the ways in which visual media, particularly photography, participate in theseecological (dis)arrangements by encoding animal life and its survival in the post-human aftermath ofhuman departure, within various symbolic and semantic codes, codes whose stability is furtherchallenged and complicated by what Daniel Burkner (2015) identifies as the material politics ofphotographing radioactive spaces

The Living Stock of Antiquity

The human species is often painted as a perennially productive one. Human animals, through millennia of evolving skills, aptitudes, and awareness, have rendered ourselves, according to our hierarchically pattern seeking minds, at the top of an ostensibly ‘natural’ tree of life. So the tale, in the unique vernaculars of countless disciplines, is often told. We now live in an age where that tale is starting to be seriously and massively questioned and unravelled. Lenses of care, collaboration, and cooperation are blossoming. This article serves as a small part of that movement: to question and reappraise the once ‘perennial’ dominance of ‘man’ and seek a better comprehension of that narrative. It does this by honing in on one of the most dominant assumptions that have pervaded ‘man’s’ relationship with ‘animal’: that non-human animals have been ‘used productively for human gain’ (in other words, ‘exploited’) for so long that there must be something ‘natural’ about this use. This article serves, then, as less of a challenge to the expansive timeline of human animals’ use of non-human animal, and more of a ‘awareness expanding tool’ of where and how this use arose in some of the earliest examinable periods of our species’ history. By digging deeper into both the zooarchaeological and related written source materials that reveal elements of this ‘use relationship’ during distinct ‘snapshots’ of ancient world, we may bolster the seriousness of critiquing the ‘naturalness’ of this relationship. Only from such ‘points of un-revelation’ can the consequential harms of this dominant narrative be truly appreciated, and subsequently unwound for the sake of the non-human animals that are continually and massively exploited in our modern world