Literature Review

This thesis conducts extensive research in animal rights comparing two contrasting settings of France and Nigeria, while emphasizing societal and ethical aspects. The essay presents an elaboration on the complexities of both countries approaching the treatment of animals with a particular notion of meat consumption. In the case of France, a Western country in Europe, a framework of industrialization and urbanization influenced the evolution of animal rights with various conventions and declarations, whereas the Nigerian population is still closely tied to its traditions, habits and spiritual beliefs. Both countries tend to have more similarities when the question is strictly about the consumption of meat, the debate differentiates in hunting practices and the existence of bushmeat in Nigeria, mainly at local markets. Bushmeat is hard to find in France, but it does exist in hidden places and shops in big cities of the country. Animal rights are important to both groups, French and Nigerians. Certain people believe that animals should be granted complete or differentiated rights in comparison to those who argue for animals being a source of food. There is a difference between pets, domesticated animals and wild animals in both places, as well as the dietary habits of people living in urban or rural areas. Such diversification is particularly crucial in Nigeria as these two groups of population are more divergent than in the setting of France.Esta dissertação realiza uma extensa pesquisa sobre os direitos dos animais, comparando dois contextos contrastantes: França e Nigéria, com ênfase nos aspectos sociais e éticos. O ensaio discorre sobre as complexidades do tratamento dado aos animais nos dois países, com foco especial no consumo de carne. Na França, um país da Europa Ocidental, uma estrutura de industrialização e urbanização influenciou a evolução dos direitos dos animais, com várias convenções e declarações relevantes. Por outro lado, a população nigeriana ainda mantém fortes vínculos com suas tradições, hábitos e crenças espirituais. Os dois países têm mais semelhanças quando se trata estritamente do consumo de carne, mas o debate difere quando se trata de práticas de caça e da existência de carne de caça, especialmente nos mercados locais da Nigéria. A carne de caça é difícil de encontrar na França, embora exista em lugares escondidos e lojas nas grandes cidades do país. Os direitos dos animais são importantes tanto para os grupos franceses quanto para os nigerianos. Algumas pessoas acreditam que os animais devem ter direitos plenos ou diferenciados, em comparação com aqueles que argumentam que os animais são uma fonte de alimento. Há uma diferença entre animais de estimação, animais domesticados e animais selvagens em ambos os lugares, bem como nos hábitos alimentares das pessoas que vivem em áreas urbanas ou rurais. Essa diversificação é particularmente crucial na Nigéria, pois esses dois grupos populacionais são muito diferentes.

In Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals, I explore a range of overlooked practical questions in animal ethics and the philosophy of food, developing a new approach to animal ethics. According to the position I defend, animals have negative rights based on their possession of normatively significant interests, and we have positive obligations towards (and concerning) animals based on our normatively salient relationships with them. Gary O’Brien, Angie Pepper, Clare Palmer, and Leon Borgdorf offer a range of insightful challenges to my framework and its applications. Here, I respond to them around five themes: extensionism, agency, predation, interventionism, and environmentalism.

This paper contributes to the ongoing construction of non-human rights. I will argue that international law should move towards the recognition of animals and nature as subjects of rights (positive and negative). I will propose to combine two paths that show ways out of the anthropocentrism of international human rights law. The first is the capabilities approach of Martha Nussbaum that, while remaining indebted to Rawlsian liberalism, can provide a framework for the protection of non-humans in human rights practice through an understanding of rights as basic capabilities to flourish. The second path is the Earth Constitutionalism and jurisprudence in Latin America. Heavily influenced by indigenous legal philosophies, Latin American jurisprudence highlights ways in which we could move beyond the thin social goods of liberalism and promote human rights as a harmonizer force that protects nature as having worth by itself. These approaches combined pave the way for a postliberal approach to rights in which we move from the rationality-autonomy-freedom justification of rights towards a capabilities-harmony-sustainability approach to rights.

In the context of today's global structure, many changes and effects have gained a significant scope. In the light of this scope, many social awareness actions and models have emerged. Among these emerging models, the digitalisation of activism and the electronification of lynch culture have had the most significant impact. Especially in recent years, increasing awareness of animal rights all over the world has also been shaped within this scope. It would not be wrong to say that one of the biggest contributions to the increase in animal rights awareness all over the world is the Save Ralph short film. Cos in addition to the effect created by the Save Ralph short film, lynching culture is generally a negative situation thanks to both street and internet activism created by the activist society created by the digitalisation of activism, while lynching actions created through animal rights have gained a more positive and sanctioned perspective. For this reason, semiotic analysis was used to evaluate the Save Ralph example in the article produced from this thesis. In addition, 250 tweets posted on Twitter using the hashtags "#saveralph and/or #hayvanhakları" within a 22-day period between 29.03.2021 and 19.04.2021 were analysed by content analysis in 17 different categories.

This article examines the handling of snakes for ritual and religious purposes, namely a “tradition” that some groups consider “good to think”, as well as “necessary” for the survival and moral identification of the group itself. For at least four centuries, the inhabitants of Cocullo (a tiny village in the province of L’Aquila) have been capturing and handling non-venomous snakes in honor of Saint Dominic Abbot, who resided in the area in the eleventh century. The extra-ordinary tradition of using snakes in a Catholic rite has been handed down to the present day, with the difference that the snakes are not killed now but released in the same spot where they were captured, in compliance with a zoological monitoring plan (snakes are becoming extinct) sponsored by the Italian Ministry of the Environment. This is the result of a three-decade mediation managed by collaborative anthropologists. In this case, the macroscopic tensions between local traditions and animal rights are overcome by the moral obligation to respect the environment that originated the village’s ritual, and which is a cultural legacy of collective interest. From a cultural point of view, Cocullo represents a biodiversity and a cultural diversity where tradition helps safeguard nature. This path towards an anti-speciesism dimension embodies a true moral examination of humanity in an equal relationship with animals and plants. Here lies the main cultural device of humankind, so much so that all the others derive from it.

The paper focuses on the growing problem of human–wildlife conflicts that are reported in urbanized areas in the Republic of Poland. The twenty-first century is the period of increased synanthropization and synurbanization of animals. The presence of animals in urbanized areas has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, contact with nature is considered beneficial for our psyche, but on the other hand wild animals damage property, participate in road collisions and sometimes pose threat to human health of life. Once the problems occur, citizens expect the authorities take some action. The aim of the paper is to present frequently conflicting social expectations concerning the problem at hand, legal solutions available and laws of nature. The research methods applied included: the analysis of legal provisions binding in the Republic of Poland combined with the interviews with representatives of institutions enforcing law in that respect, empirical observation of social attitudes and analyses of pertinent literature. The results reveals that inhabitants of cities in general opt for solutions that seem to be non-lethal for animals as they do not realize the risks involved for humans and animals. At the same time legal provisions are not sufficiently exhaustive to enable efficient problem solution.

This research examines the public discussion around animal production in Finland. Applying a dialogical approach to social representations theory, we elucidate the hotly debated nature of animal production by analysing news articles (N = 50) and the related reader-produced comments (N = 1501) in Finnish newspapers. We employed qualitative methods for analysing multivoicedness and dialogue to identify ego–alter pairs constructed in the material in relation to the object of animal production. Four prevalent ego–alter pairs were identified: advocates for animal rights–animal production defenders, producers–consumers, orthodox–unorthodox Christians and provincials–urban dwellers. The study contributes to the study of everyday knowledge by showing how various contradictory understandings of the same topic are generated in public discourse. The research also demonstrates how the theoretical concept of ego–alter embedded in the social representations theory can be empirically utilised in analysing debates in contemporary media environments and to shed light on the dialogical dynamics around the discussions.

The article considers the influence of I. Kant’s ideas on the development of philosophical and bioethical discourse on animal rights. The doctrine of I. Kant, with its inherent anthropocentric attitude, is usually regarded as opposed to the spirit of the biocentric po­sition that has been characteristic of Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism since the time of I. Ben­tham. The Kantian approach is supposed to ignore the issue of animal rights. In the arti­cle, the author argues that the teachings of I. Kant had a significant impact on the for­mation of the discourse on animal rights not only in the sense that animal rights activists perceived the ideas of I. Kant as arguments of their ideological opponent, which should be questioned, but also in the sense that they were accepted and developed in the 20th cen­tury as part of the biocentric discourse and were used to protect animal rights.

Activism in favor of non-human animals is on the rise throughout Mexico despite ongoing and episodic violence. Activists, also known as animalistas, represent themselves as the “voice” of non-human animals as they seek rights and well-being for animals. In Ciudad Juárez, a border city once considered the most dangerous city in the world (2008–2012), animalistas engage in complex ways with non-human bodies as they seek to “speak” for them. This article analyzes the relationship between injured bodies and voice in Ciudad Juárez’s animalista movement, with the act of the rescue as the point of inception. Injured animal bodies prove central for activists because anthropogenic violence transforms dogs’ bodies. Non-human injured bodies, and their visual representations, allow animalistas to position themselves as the voice of an animal that survived an abuse while also individualizing and depolitizicing—through the discourse of pathology—violence against dogs.

Global environmental law is characterized by Eurocentric cultural paradigms that perceive humanity as external and superior to Nature. This supremacy over Nature reflects a legacy of Western colonial domination. Accordingly, environmental regulations have been complicit in sustaining the paradigms that have given rise to the Anthropocene. It is against this backdrop that this article seeks to investigate how global environmental law could engage in transformative reform by embracing Southern epistemologies, particularly through the legal subjectivisation of Nature, i.e. by conceptualizing Nature as subjects of rights. Rooted in Indigenous worldviews, the emerging Rights of Nature movement provides a critical opportunity to re-envision global environmental law through historically colonized and marginalized forms of knowledge. In particular, this article explores the instrumentality of litigation to act as a catalyst for diffusing Southern conceptions in Eurocentric legal cultures to decolonize international law. This article specifically analyzes the animal rights dimension of the broader Rights of Nature paradigm. It argues that the recent wave of litigation awarding rights to animals - primarily in the Global South - reflects an evolving inter-judicial dialogue between domestic judges, whose interactions could potentially feed into a cosmopolitan global jurisprudence for animal rights in a bottom-up manner, which captures the plurality of ways of understanding and conceptualizing Nature.

The idea of rethinking speciesism beyond the quarrel of utilitarianism and animal rights, which invaded the cause and generated continuous dissensions, has as its central objective to show that the animal cause is also, in depth, a human cause, because the struggle for animal goes through the profound confrontation of our tyranny, which is responsible for also destroying our own species. This understanding of the extension of what the animal cause itself is depends, and this is what we intend to show here, on going deeper into the meaning and direction of the concept of speciesism, from the British psychologist Richard Ryder. Intuited as a “selfish emotional argument, instead of a rational one” that leads us to believe that we have legitimate rights to subject all species to our interests, the concept lacked, however, greater elaboration, greater consistency, that is, it needed to go through rigid stages of a conceptual construction and, this, who provided it was not Ryder himself, but the Australian philosopher Peter Singer in the pioneering work, in the classic of the cause, Animal Liberation. It is here that the concept becomes popular and causes very significant changes, such as the exponential growth of veganism itself as an ethical way of existing that says a generalized “no” to the exploitation of lives, but which, at the same time, generated disagreements by such a concept will be activated and develop on utilitarian soil. Decidedly, we think that such a quarrel can be minimized in view of the perception that speciesism is much more than a prejudice that can be overcome by humanity and compassion. It is something that is intrinsically linked to a type of power that gave rise to a specific type of man (which concerns all of us who live under this structure of power) that needs to be uncovered and deconstructed with the utmost urgency.

This paper presents an exploration of the conceptual terms within vegetarianism and veganism, tracing their historical context and theevolution of their meanings in ethical discourse. We delve into the originsand development of these dietary practices, from ancient religious tenets to modern animal rights movements, to understand the multifaceted motivations behind them. The study critically examines the conceptual delimitation of veganism and vegetarianism, highlighting the behavioral heterogeneity and terminological multiplicity that pose challenges for scholarly research. Through a review of the literature, we identify a taxonomy of adoption processes and motivations, including health,environmental, ethical, and social justice considerations. We propose theuse of two novel terminological approaches, 'use-animalism' and omnitarianism' to better capture the ideological nuances and behavioral implications of human-animal relationships. The paper argues for the importance of precise conceptualization in understanding the varied pathways and reasons individuals adopt VEG* lifestyles. It contributes tothe ethical consumption and VEG* literature by providing clarity on the different practices and their underlying moral and philosophical orientations, with implications for both researchers and practitioners in the field of sustainable and ethical consumption.