Literature Review

The article covers legal history of animals rights and protection legislation in Croatia. Legislation existed since 19th Century and all was abolished by the end of World War I and creation of Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia never had any umbrella legislation covering animal rights and/or protection. The Republic of Croatia enacted its own legislation in 1990s.

Upon the enaction of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, American animal rights activists and advocates secured a huge victory for many introduced and indigenous animals that lived within the United States and earned them long-deserved dignities and protections.1 The Act, referred to as the ESA, expanded the cognizant trend of previous Congressional Acts made in the 1960s which had addressed a growing public concern regarding animal rights, particularly through establishing protections for endangered animals.2 Prior to the enactment of the ESA, Congress had passed the Endangered Species Preservation Act in 1966 which prohibited the ‘taking’ of federally recognized ‘endangered species.’3 Although these acts were substantial steps in the preservation movement— leading to the recognition and protection of threatened animals—and reflected a favorable public consensus towards extending humane protections to animals, they were not entirely comprehensive in their scope.4 These enactments were deficient in numerous regards with some of these deficiencies having been remedied by amendments to the ESA, but others still remain unaddressed.5

Animals ought to be granted the legal status of personhood, and if not, a viable alternative should be for humans to have the ability to file lawsuits on behalf of animals as their legal guardians. To support this thesis, in the upcoming sections, I begin by delving into the prevailing legal characterization of animals as mere property, a classification that has persisted for generations. This property status has long confined animals to a legal framework that has not adapted well to our evolving understanding of their sentience and complex lives. Within this context, I examine the urgent necessity for fundamental alterations in our legal treatment of animals, alterations that would confer upon them the status of “nonhuman legal personhood.”

The article discusses the evolution of animal rights in common law, legislation, and standing in the U.S. and around the world by examining nonhuman personhood and the liberty interests for highly sentient animals. Other topics include the modern jurisprudence on the use of habeas corpus to free said animals from tourism and exhibition, and the remedies to legally challenge the treatment of animals like the public nuisance claim.

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.