A common means of diminishing animal-focused research is to claim that the author is merely an animal-rights advocate seeking to push a particular barrow. This is a load of academic nonsense, most likely born of snobbery.
SIOBHAN O’SULLIVAN: Guilty Pigs traverses the world of nonhuman animals – and their human owners, guardians, and policy makers – as they brush up against the law in a myriad diverse ways. The book is not jurisdictionally specific, nor is it temporally bound. It is startling in its breadth… Explicitly intended for a broad, educated audience, Guilty Pigs is written in accessible language, pausing from time to time to offer the reader a brief yet illuminating introduction to key legal principles…
One of the important things the book establishes is that there is almost no aspect of the law that does not apply to animals in some way. That includes family law, the laws governing inheritance, and the rules associated with property searches. Animals are implicated at seemingly every turn…
The authors, Katy Barnett and Jeremy Gans, were “crestfallen”. I know the feeling all too well. As a political scientist interested in animals and public policy, I have experienced the sting of indignation that comes with my academic research being dismissed as a “pet project” – pun intended – and not the domain of serious academic scholarship.
In this case, “serious” means “important”, or more specifically, “human focused”. In research undertaken with my colleagues Yvette Watt and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, we surveyed animal studies scholars to find out if they feel their interest in animals “creates challenges for an academic career”: 44% said it does, a further 7% claimed it “jeopardised” their career.
A common means of diminishing animal-focused research is to claim that the author is merely an animal-rights advocate seeking to push a particular barrow. This is intended to stand in contrast to everybody else who is, presumably, ideologically neutral. This is, in my view, a load of academic nonsense, most likely born of snobbery. As such, I must admit to a certain disappointment upon reading Guilty Pigs…
To me, this represents a missed opportunity. To eschew a swathe of scholarship in the fields of law, political science and much more beyond on the basis that animal studies scholars are writing from an “animal rights perspective” is akin to taking the position that human rights theorists are intellectually suspect if they express an intellectual opposition to the use of torture…
If the authors of Guilty Pigs decide to continue publishing in the field of animals and the law, I would encourage them to think more fully about consulting the existing literature. They may be pleasantly surprised. They are likely to find that many of the concepts they work through in the book have already been subjected to rigourous academic consideration…
Elsewhere, I have argued, along with co-author Clare McCausland, that if you know what a battery cage looks like – and sales of cage-free eggs suggest many people do – then you should thank an animal advocate. Egg production occurs exclusively on private property, inside windowless sheds. Egg growers have no incentive to make the conditions under which battery hens live visible to the community. That work – seemingly important public policy work – is undertaken by animal advocates.
Interestingly, Guilty Pigs does not deal with the battery cage to any great extent, despite it being at the centre of trespass legal action, as well as perhaps the most famous animal-related legal case – the so-called “McLibel” case brought by McDonald’s in 1997 against a small group of environmental activists. Despite my criticisms, the authors do include some legal cases driven by people who would be popularly considered animal-rights activists.
For example, the case of Arna the elephant is discussed in chapter six. Arna was kept as a lone circus elephant for many years, despite the well understood social nature of female Asiatic elephants. That case, Pearson v Janlin Circuses Pty Ltd (2002), was initiated by Mark Pearson, former president of Animal Liberation NSW, and more recently NSW MLC for the Animal Justice Party. I happened to be at the circus protest on the day in 2000 that became the subject of the legal proceedings discussed in Guilty Pigs…
If Barnett and Gans had stuck to their opening proposition of eschewing cases centred around “how the law should engage with animals”, the Arna case might have been excluded. Thankfully, it was not. My central point is that there is a world of bright, well-educated, highly innovative scholars out there studying animals and the law. Many of them do so because they have a keen interest in animals, usually not in harming animals. More often, they are interested in protecting animals from harm.
So long as those scholars produce work that can withstand rigorous peer review, their work should be viewed as a solid foundation upon which all scholars who engage with animals and the law can build. Animal law is a growing field of higher education teaching, with courses increasingly offered by law schools throughout the English-speaking world, and perhaps beyond. As such, I anticipate a big readership for this book…
But perhaps the gift of Guilty Pigs is that is can be used to excite readers about animals and the law broadly construed. Either way, it is a valuable contribution to the field. I recommend the book as an accessible work full of fascinating insights into the lives of animals and the laws that constrain them, liberate them, and much in between. SOURCE…
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