Brooks Animal Law Digest

A painting by Canadian artist Nancy Friedland appears in the March 10 2022 issue of the New York Review of Books accompanying an article written by American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, a free sneak peak of which is available here. The painting is called “Night Deer #5, 2022.” Nussbaum’s very rich review covers a number of scientific books, specifically Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves by Frans de Waal, Dolphin Communication and Cognition: Past, Present, and Future edited by Denise L. Herzing and Christine M. Johnson, and Deep Thinkers: Inside the Minds of Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises edited by Janet Mann. The review essay focuses on the theme of culturally transmitted learning among nonhuman animals and the body of “new learning about animal lives and their complexity” into which these books all fit. It also argues that the “so like us” argument for animal respect and protection of the “small group of animals whom judges are likely to view as close to humans” (apes and elephants) is misguided. Nussbaum also explains the application of a “capabilities approach” to nonhuman animals, which will presumably be explored in more depth in her forthcoming book Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility in December 2022.

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada & Province of Manitoba, 150 Years of Farming in Manitoba (published online, 2022).

Summary: The governments of Canada and Manitoba have launched 150 Years of Farming in Manitoba, an e-book developed in partnership with Keystone Agricultural Producers (KAP) that shares the 150-year evolution of the agriculture and agri-food sector in Manitoba, federal Agriculture and Agri-Food Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau and Manitoba Agriculture Minister Derek Johnson announced today. The e-book highlights the economic, societal and environmental benefits of agriculture in Manitoba, with a particular focus on the innovations of the last 50 years including those related to animal care, crop production, soil research and food safety.

Chapters addressing animal agriculture include chapters three “Return of the Bison,” six “Protein Explained,” nine “Hogging Headlines,” fifteen “Here’s the Beef,” and eighteen “Supply Managed.”

Summary: Animals are here with us and not for us. We can do better for our animal friends when we work together collectively and individually to make a difference; by joining hands in this next great, important social justice movement. A Voice for Animals offers insight on animal issues and the animal rights movement. The first part of the book examines the close connection we share with our beloved companion animals, and the plight of homeless animals. It bridges the gap between beloved pets and homeless pets in shelters. It offers solutions to end the shelter debacle. The second part discusses the lives of other species: farm animals, animals in research, animals in captivity, and wildlife. This book provides heartfelt real life animal stories, celebrates animal victories, and explores the deep connection of animals to humans and our biological need to share our lives with them. It inspires readers to take action and get motivated for animals: adopt animals from shelters and rescues, live a cruelty-free lifestyle, and go vegan. This book advocates for the better treatment of animals by inviting you to gain an understanding of the special human-animal bond.

Angela Fernandez, “Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment by Justin Marceau (review)” 12:1 Journal of Animal Ethics 114-117.

Summary: Justin Marceau’s book Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment shines a light on three very serious problems in the U.S. animal protection movement brought on by its connections to the criminal justice system: (i) implicit racism baked into the race neutral or color-blind position the movement takes; (ii) reliance on faulty “link” research used to justify harsher sentences for individuals who harm animals; and (iii) having accepted in the 2000’s, either explicitly or implicitly, the availability of tougher felony convictions in exchange for industry-wide agricultural exemptions for cruelty prosecutions involving food animals. Marceau argues that these issues have seriously compromised the animal protection movement’s aspirations to be a civil rights and social justice movement.

This review explains each of these three problems in turn and asks, given how racist, human-centered, and punitive the past has been, whether the movement deserves to wear the mantle of a progressive social justice movement. It argues that we need to understand Marceau’s critiques of the animal protection movement as a series of challenges that need to be met. What he writes of the movement is stinging, and, really very damning; however, it also provides important and explicit direction on what needs to be done in order for the movement to occupy the moral high ground that it should.

Angela Fernandez, “Henry Bergh, The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the Horse” (21 February 2022) The Journal of Things We Like (Lots).

Angela Fernandez reviews Ernest Freeberg’s 2020 book, A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animals Rights Movement. The book details the history of Henry Bergh as he founded the first American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in 1886. The title of the book refers to Bergh as a traitor to humanity, and more so a pest to the population of New York where Bergh conducted his activism. Fernandez highlights how Berg was particularly moved to activism by horses, which were prevalently used by humans in the late 1800s. Fernandez draws a comparison between a flu that spread through North America’s horses in 1872 to the current COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on animals.

James A Schaefer, “The Conservation of Caribou: Matters of Space, Time, and Scale” in In Our Backyard - Keeyask and the Legacy of Hydroelectric Development, edited by Aimée Craft and Jill Blakley (2022 Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press). Download here.

Summary: Beginning with the Grand Rapids Dam in the 1960s, hydroelectric development has dramatically altered the social, political, and physical landscape of northern Manitoba. The Nelson River has been cut up into segments and fractured by a string of dams, for which the Churchill River had to be diverted and new inflow points from Lake Winnipeg created to manage their capacity. Historic mighty rapids have shrivelled into dry river beds. Manitoba Hydro’s Keeyask dam and generating station will expand the existing network of 15 dams and 13,800 km of transmission lines.

In Our Backyard tells the story of the Keeyask dam and accompanying development on the Nelson River from the perspective of Indigenous peoples, academics, scientists, and regulators. It builds on the rich environmental and economic evaluations documented in the Clean Environment Commission’s public hearings on Keeyask in 2012. It amplifies Indigenous voices that environmental assessment and regulatory processes have often failed to incorporate and provides a basis for ongoing decision-making and scholarship relating to Keeyask and resource development more generally. It considers cumulative, regional, and strategic impact assessments; Indigenous worldviews and laws within the regulatory and decision-making process; the economics of development; models for monitoring and management; consideration of affected species; and cultural and social impacts.

With a provincial and federal regulatory regime that is struggling with important questions around the balance between development and sustainability, and in light of the inherent rights of Indigenous people to land, livelihoods, and self-determination, offers critical reflections that highlight the need for purposeful dialogue, principled decision making, and a better legacy of northern development in the future.

Vincent Chapaux et al (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of International Law and Anthropocentrism (UK: Routledge, 2023).

Summary: This handbook explores, contextualises and critiques the relationship between anthropocentrism – the idea that human beings are socially and politically at the centre of the cosmos – and international law.

While the critical study of anthropocentrism has been under way for several years, it has either focused on specific subfields of international law or emanated from two distinctive strands inspired by the animal rights movement and deep ecology. This handbook offers a broader study of anthropocentrism in international law as a global legal system and academic field. It assesses the extent to which current international law is anthropocentric, contextualises that claim in relation to broader critical theories of anthropocentrism, and explores alternative ways for international law to organise relations between humans and other living and non-living entities.

This book will interest international lawyers, environmental lawyers, legal theorists, social theorists, and those concerned with the philosophy and ethics of ecology and the non-human realms.

Christopher J. Preston, Tenacious Beasts: Wildlife Recoveries That Change How We Think about Animals (US: The MIT Press, 2023).

Summary: An inspiring look at wildlife species that are defying the odds and teaching important lessons about how to share a planet.

The news about wildlife is dire—more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction: bears in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? What shifts in thinking did it demand? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and challenges at the heart of these resurgences.

Drawing on compelling personal stories from the researchers, Indigenous people, and activists who know the creatures best, Preston weaves together a gripping narrative of how some species are taking back vital, ecological roles. Each section of the book—farms, prairies, rivers, forests, oceans—offers a philosophical shift in how humans ought to think about animals, passionately advocating for the changes in attitude necessary for wildlife recovery.

Irus Braverman, Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (US: University of Minnesota Press, 2023).

Abstract: Settling Nature draws on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork to document how the administration of nature in Palestine-Israel advances the Zionist project of Jewish settlement alongside the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this space. Highlighting the violent repercussions of Israel’s conservation regime, Braverman plants the seeds for possible reimaginings of nature that transcend the grip of the state’s settler ecologies.

Carol J. Adams, Alice Crary, and Lori Gruen (eds.), The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism (US: Oxford University Press, 2023).

Summary: The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does is the first edited volume to critically engage with Effective Altruism (EA). It brings together writers from diverse activist and scholarly backgrounds to explore a variety of unique grassroots movements and community organizing efforts. By drawing attention to these responses and to particular cases of human and animal harms, this book represents a powerful call to attend to different voices and projects and to elevate activist traditions that EA lacks the resources to assess and threatens to squelch. The contributors reveal the weakness inherent within the ready-made, top-down solutions that EA offers in response to many global problems-and offers in their place substantial descriptions of more meaningful and just social engagement.

This book is now available for pre-order and will be released on January 31, 2023.