Breaking news in animal rights! Well not necessarily breaking you know I’m not a news channel
so it happened a couple days ago. Recently there have been some interesting developments
on the legal side of animal rights both at the state and federal level. And I’m going
to tell you all about them.
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. Today we’re going
to look at some very recent changes in the legal classification of animals and animal
cruelty. There will be links to the original court documents and other resources in the
blog post for this video, which is linked in the description below. First let’s head
over to Oregon where the Supreme Court issued two rulings recently granting animals legal
protections formerly only given to humans. As reported by Arin Greenwood of the Huffington
Post. in a severe animal neglect case, State v. Nix, the court held that the 20 goats and
horses found starving on Arnold Nix’s farm amongst the bodies of others who didn’t
make it could each be considered individual victims under the law. And in a second case
State v. Fessenden, the court upheld the warrantless seizure of a starving horse under the “exigent
circumstances” exception of the Fourth Amendment.
So what does this mean exactly? Well, typically in animal abuse and neglect cases, multiple
animal victims are merged into one count, denying the individuality of each victim and
their right to justice. This happened initially in State v Nix, the case with the starving
goats and horses, but was overturned at the Oregon Court of Appeals as the court found
nothing in the statutes saying explicitly that the term “victim” was limited to
human beings. And the Fessenden case, allowing for the warrantless seizure of animals in
imminent danger, has removed a lot of the red tape that often led to animals dying before
law officials could obtain a warrant.
While these are certainly advances in our legal view of animals, I feel that their celebration
should be taken with some caution. Neither case changes the fact that animals are legally
considered property. Animal rights lawyer Dane Johnson of the Animal Legal Defense Fund
brings up the critical lacking of these developments, saying “Why…do we consider the recognition
that individual animals are as much victims of inflicted suffering as human crime victims
significant when we kill billions of sentient animals in violent and painful ways every
year unnecessarily for food? And that, to me, is the main point her. The vast majority
of animals abused, neglected, tortured and killed are our food animals- and they remain
without any legal protection. But again that is not to say that these advances aren’t
a good thing.
Now let’s move on to the federal level development: the Associated Press reported on October 1st
that the FBI has now deemed animals cruelty a top-tier felony. Up until now, animal cruelty
was filed under a label of “other” making it difficult to find, track and count. The
main motivation for this change was to keep better track of potential serial killers in
the making. It’s widely known that in their youth, most serial killers abused, tortured
and killed animals before later moving onto their human victims. The FBI hopes that better
tracking of animal abuse can head off the development of future killers.
While this reclassification was motivated solely by the interest of protecting humans,
it does give more legal clout to the crime of animal cruelty. However, it is again limited
mainly to pets and those animals deemed “worthy” of protection by our society, excluding the
150 billion animals that we kill every year for our consumption.
So here is my take on all of these developments: it’s great seeing some legal advances which
benefiting animals but with the extent of animals suffering and death in the world,
these developments are barely a drop in the bucket. We need to protect those animals who
are most exploited- our food animals. Until we can rectify our collective cognitive dissonance
and speciesism that allows us to place the rights of one species of animals above another,
there is no true victory.
Now I’d love to hear your thoughts on this news. Do you think these are great victories?
Do you think that the battle for animal liberation be won in a courtroom? Let me know what you
think in the comments below and please share this video around to spread the news and get
the discussion going. And if you’re new to my channel I would love to have you subscribe-
here at Bite Size Vegan I address all aspects of veganism and always in 5 minutes more or
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Now go live vegan and I’ll see you soon!