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.
La dignité de la créature est un concept juridique flou, mais non pas vide. Elle fixe un programme ambitieux : le respect du vivant par une communauté humaine et une responsabilité à son égard. Malgré ses 30 ans, cette innovation du droit helvétique est encore en quête d’une concrétisation juridique. Afin d’envisager plus précisément les formes que cette dignité du vivant pourrait prendre à l’avenir, il est utile de lui tendre un miroir grossissant : celui de l’animal. C’est en effet sous la guise de la dignité animale que se laissent aujourd’hui le mieux percevoir les deux voies possibles de la concrétisation de ce concept innovant (droit subjectif ou principe). L’alternative mérite qu’on s’y arrête, car elle trace sans doute les contours de la société multispécifique de demain.
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