ABSTRACT
Species-based inequality is embedded in our institutions of law, government, and property. Legal distinctions between people and animals drive biodiversity loss. Recent environmental movements – including the rights of nature, animal rights, and wildlife property ownership – seek to lessen the gap in law’s unequal treatment of humans and other living things. Despite growing popular support for such reforms, legal scholars have yet to directly grapple with the mindset underlying the legal status quo.
This Article identifies and challenges institutionalized speciesism in law. It critically examines the legal treatment of non-human animals. It also presents an alternative legal worldview – one informed by scientific, cultural, and religious inputs. Current legal discussions operate in terms of ‘humans and animals’; such conceptions should shift towards a conception of ‘humans as animals’. Laws do not merely govern human relationships with one another; they also govern human relationships with the broader natural world – which is itself alive and filled with other sentient beings …
Bradshaw, Karen, Humans as Animals (November 27, 2020). Utah Law Review, 2021.
First posted 2021-02-04 05:55:12
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