Is there a need for a new, an ecological, understanding of legal animal rights?

Abstract

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.

Transition rather than Revolution: The Gradual Road towards Animal Legal Personhood through the Legislature

“…87 The alternative approach, in contrast, challenges the premise that the dichotomy between persons and things is an invariable given of our legal ontology, suggesting that the existing simple rights of animals can be strengthened into fundamental rights, and at least some of the appropriate incidents of personhood can be established for 84 them through legislative change, without the need to change their status to persons first. 88 The more pluralized image of the legal sphereas consisting of a range of various legal entities that hold rights and incidents of personhood in differing degreesmight also be relevant for legal approaches to other non-humans. One could imagine that, for artificial intelligence or robots, a legal status might be envisioned that encompasses several incidents of legal personhood (such as the capacity to be held accountable) and simple rights, while excluding some of the fundamental protections that humans and animals might need (such as the protection of bodily integrity).…”

Civil Responsibility in the Medical Industry for Artificial Intelligence Applications: the Legal Rules of AI Responsibility

“…The proof of this is given some states legal personality to some rivers, forests, and animals to protect them from encroachment. (9) Besides, the recent proposal by the European Council to present the legal nature of the most independent robot, the Council of The People has reasoned to have this decision due to the difficulty of meaningful lying to the traditional rules specified for responsibility for damage to artificial intelligence and the inability to absorb such damages. Therefore, granting the legal personality of applications based on artificial intelligence at the comparable level does not represent a traditional luxury as much as a reality and an urgent need to contribute to technological development and minimize human errors as much as possible.…”