Animal Rights Law: The Debate of Personhood

By Rowan Rutherford

In 2022, The UK’s Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act legally recognised the sentience and consequent welfare needs of all vertebrate animals. This landmark legal recognition of sentience acknowledges that animals have a capacity to feel emotions such as pleasure, pain, joy, and fear. Scientific research has found that in more nuanced cases, animals can even experience emotions like grief — for example, the mourning rituals of elephants, who cover the body of their deceased with leaves and dirt. Recent research by LSE Professor Johnathan Birch has also found sentience in invertebrate species like lobsters and crabs, which has led to calls for culinary practices such as boiling lobsters alive to be banned. As scientific research is increasingly finding evidence for animal sentience, the need for proportionate animal welfare representation is also increasing. In the past two decades, activist groups and charities have been pushing for changes to the historically limited and inadequate animal welfare laws across the world.

The growing acknowledgment of animal sentience has introduced a particular legal issue: the problem of personhood. Animals are legally classified as ‘personal property’ across the majority of countries, which means that they do not possess any individual rights. However, if animals are sentient, can we really think of them as property? In 2013, The Non-human Rights Project tried to challenge the captivity of four New York chimpanzees on the basis of ‘habeas corpus’ (the bodily liberty of a legal person). However, the New York appellate courts rejected this claim, stating that despite being cognitively complex, chimpanzees cannot hold legal responsibilities or societal duties and thus cannot be regarded as ‘persons’. But in New Zealand, the Whanganui river and Te Urewera natural park were both granted legal personhood as a form of environmental protection against pollution and unauthorised activities, a decision benefitting local tribes. Alternatively, corporations also enjoy legal ‘personhood’ as well, having the right to enter contracts, sue, own property and even exercise free speech. The growing call for animals to be recognised as legal persons points to more than the obvious fact that they are not inanimate objects, and instead incorporates a wider concern that their welfare is inadequately represented in the law. However, several complicated issues would arise, should such classification be adopted.

‘Personhood’ is defined as the capacity to have legal rights. But just because animals are sentient, this does not necessarily mean that they possess the cognitive capacity to hold legal rights. Could we start convicting animals with the murder of other animals? Could animals vote, or testify in court, or sign contracts? Are pet-owners merely enslaving animals? The answer undoubtedly points to no. Indeed, the question of who determines what is best for animals (who have interior thoughts and feelings we are unable to access) is itself subjective — should activists, scientists, owners, or governments be representing animals’ best interests? The reality of granting animals legal personhood is more complex in practice than theory. Additionally, acknowledging the ‘personhood’ of animals could provoke a divisive philosophical and sociological reaction. Not only would the conventional definition of a ‘person’ have to be expanded, but the identity of humans as a species would also be challenged. As put by Yale Professor, Verlyn Klinkenborg, “humans deny they are animals, by denying that animals are persons.”

Although the growing calls for legal personhood move animal welfare in a progressive direction, the implications of this are complex and unrealistic. What we need is more regulation of human rights, limiting our own usage of animals and presumed species superiority. Unethical industries such as factory farming, hunting, wildlife trading, and animal entertainment should be globally banned. Another potential solution is the introduction of a new definition (as a midpoint between ‘personhood’ and property), a ‘quasi-person,’ that grants animals limited, realistic rights.

Scientists, animal welfare activists, and even judges are calling for progress, uncomfortable with the current legal status of animals — but when will we ever decide what this change should look like? The central moral issue in this debate is best voiced by UCL’s spiritual founder, Jeremy Bentham: 

“The question is not, can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But, can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?”

Acknowledging the capacity of animals to suffer as an argument for legal personhood, rather than focusing on cognitive capacity, leads us to an unshakeable answer: changes need to be made, and fast. 

Sources:

• LSE, Seeing animals differently: the science and ethics of sentience, https://www.lse.ac.uk/research/research-for-the-world/politics/ethics-and-animal-sentience

• Non-human Rights Project, Chimpanzee rights progress ten years ago today, https://www.nonhumanrights.org/blog/chimpanzee-rights-progress-jaffe-decision/

• BBC News, The New Zealand river that became a legal person, https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20200319-the-new-zealand-river-that-became-a-legal-person

• Yale E360 (Verlyn Klinkenborg), Animal ‘Personhood’: Muddled Alternative to Real Protection, https://e360.yale.edu/features/animal_personhood_muddled_alternative_to_real_protection#:~:text=It%20suggests%20that%20humans%20deny,right%20through%20the%20looking%20glass.

• Jeremy Bentham, https://www.utilitarianism.com/jeremybentham.html

Edited by Artyom Timofeev

Image Source: https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/animal-welfare