Angus Nurse

Beyond the property debate: animal welfare as a public good

Abstract Animal protection is socially constructed through laws specifying which animals should be protected and how. Most jurisdictions codify animal abuse by specifying the legal protections granted to animals. While these vary between jurisdictions, western legal systems generally provide for better levels of animal protection by incorporating animal welfare and wildlife crime laws into criminal justice systems. UK legislation has long held that animal welfare is a public good, thus animals should be protected in the public interest. However, despite the protective provisions of animal protection laws they generally fall short of giving animals actual rights, protection exists only to the extent that animal and human interests coincide. Animals’ legal status as property dictates that much anti-animal abuse and wildlife crime legislation is about allowing animal exploitation commensurate with human interests. However, UK legislation in the form of the Animal Welfare Act 2006 subtly shifts this position in respect of domestic animals by imposing a duty of care towards companion animals. This paper argues that by requiring owners and responsible persons to give active consideration to the needs of individual companion animals, the Animal Welfare Act provides animals with a level of protection that amounts to a form of legal rights.

Perspectives on Criminality in Wildlife

This chapter examines criminality in wildlife crime, a distinct aspect of green criminology (Beirne and South, 2007; Lynch and Stretesky, 2003) within animal abuse (Henry, 2004; Linzey, 2009) and species justice discourse (White, 2008). The legal protection afforded to animals is socially constructed, influenced by social locations, power relations in society, and the need to both promote and protect specific ideological positions on animals by legislators and policymakers. Attitudes towards wild animals both on the part of offenders who harm them and the society that punishes them, or in some cases allows the harm to continue, reveal much about tolerance for different forms of violence within society, sympathy towards the suffering of others, the capacity for empathy (Beetz, 2009), or an inclination towards violence or other forms of antisocial behaviour (Linzey. 2009).

Cleaning Up Greenwash: A Critical Evaluation of the Activities of Oil Companies in the Niger

While many corporations embrace the concepts of social and environmental responsibility, numerous examples exist of corporations who claim to act in a sustainable and responsible way while at the same time causing considerable environmental damage. The activities of multinational oil companies in sub-Saharan Africa have been damaging both for the environment and for those communities directly and indirectly affected by their actions.

The Geography of Environmental Crime

In the twenty-first century, environmental harm is an ever-present reality of our globalised world. Over the last 20 years, criminologists have made great strides in their understanding of how different institutions in society, and criminal justice systems in particular, respond (or fail to respond) to the harm imposed on ecosystems and their human and non-human components. Such research has crystallised into the rapidly evolving field of green criminology.

Creative Compliance, Constructive Compliance: Corporate Environmental Crime and the Criminal Entrepreneur

Abstract Purpose While corporations may embrace the concepts of social and environmental responsibility, numerous examples exist to show corporations claiming to act sustainably and responsibly, while simultaneously showing disregard for the communities in which they operate and causing considerable environmental damage. This chapter argues that such activities illustrate a particular notion of Baumol’s (1990) criminal entrepreneurialism where both creative and constructive compliance combine to subvert environmental regulation and its enforcement. Design/methodology/approach This chapter employs a case study approach assessing the current corporate environmental responsibility landscape against the reality of corporate environmental offending. Its case study shows seemingly repeated environmental offending by Shell Oil against a backdrop of the company claiming to have integrated environmental monitoring and scrutiny into its operating procedures. Findings The chapter concludes that corporate assertion of environmental credentials is itself often a form of criminal entrepreneurship where corporations embrace voluntary codes of practice and self-regulation while internally promoting the drive for success and profitability and/or avoidance of the costs of true environmental compliance deemed too high. As a result, this chapter argues that responsibility for environmental damage requires regulation to ensure corporate responsibility for environmental damage. Originality/value The chapter employs a green criminological perspective to its analysis of corporate social responsibility and entrepreneurship. Thus, it considers not only just strict legal definitions of crime and criminal behaviour but also the overlap between the legal and the illegal and the preference of governments to use administrative or civil penalties as tools to deal with corporate environmental offending.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid of … the Environmental Activist? Ideological War, Coercive Justice, and Orwellian Dystopia

Referring to the Red Scare, the fear of communism creeping into Western democracies (Skoll and Korstanje 2013), the term ‘Green Scare’ has been coined to describe the perceived threat posed by environmental activists (Potter 2009). A range of repressive legislation has been passed against various environmental activists with the term eco-terrorist appearing in the public lexicon in 1983 and some states going as far as to employ anti-terrorist legislation against environmental activists (Elefsen 2012). This chapter explores whether the political ‘violence’ used by radical environmental activists can legitimately be defined as terrorism, or whether this term is inappropriately used to widen the net of social control (Cohen 1985), protecting the interests of neoliberal markets against environmental activism. Arguably, the term ‘terrorism’ loses its true meaning if used by the state and policing agencies as an umbrella term for everyone pursuing political dissent. Accordingly, the vilification of environmental activists warrants further attention. This chapter underlines that through propaganda and smear campaigns in the USA, corporations and their partners nurture the War on Terror to instil fear about this new ‘bogeyman’—the environmental activist. Their goal is to silence opposition and intimidate potential critics to protect economic interests and preserve the functioning of neoliberal markets irrespective of their associated environmental harms (Lynch and Stretsky 2014). We can indeed witness the complicity of law enforcement agencies through their ubiquitous use of surveillance which erodes civil liberties. One may wonder if this is a new era of repressive social control.

What Is Wildlife Crime

Wildlife crime involves transnational actors, the threat of extinction to certain species and limitations in the range of others and crimes committed by both legal and illegal actors and even crimes committed by states. Given the diverse nature of wildlife crimes and their impacts, wildlife law is required to serve many purposes such as protection of wildlife, regulation of wildlife use and prevention of behaviour towards wildlife which society finds unacceptable, albeit not all wildlife ‘offences’ fall within the remit of the criminal law. In practice, most jurisdictions have laws protecting both companion animals and wildlife while falling short of providing either group with actual legal rights or legal personhood (Wise, 2000; Nurse and Ryland, 2012). Instead ‘the law in most all countries characterizes animals as “things” who are owned as personal property’ (Schaffner, 2011: 19). Companion and farm animals have a recognisable ‘owner’ or ‘responsible person’, whereas ‘wild animals reside within the common and belong to no one as long as the animal remains wild, unconfined, and undomesticated’ (Schaffner, 2011: 19). Wildlife law’s protective role differs considerably from that of domestic animal protection given the reduced reliance wild animals have on humans for food and the greater potential for conflict between wildlife and human interests, particularly in developing world settings.

Theoretical Perspectives on Wildlife Law Enforcement

This chapter examines theoretical perspectives on wildlife law enforcement and wildlife crime, situating wildlife law enforcement primarily within green criminology’s environmental justice and ecological justice perspectives (White, 2008: 15). These two perspectives respectively argue that: environmental rights should be perceived as an extension of human or social rights and environmental justice enhances the quality of human life (which includes access to natural resources such as wildlife) and that the quality of the environment and the rights of nonhuman species should be considered within justice systems. Accordingly, the quality of law enforcement that protects the environment, including wildlife resident in and dependent on it, should be a core concern of criminal justice, although green scholars have highlighted that this is not always the case (Wellsmith, 2010, 2011; Nurse, 2012).

National Wildlife Legislation and Law Enforcement Policies

This chapter examines aspects of national wildlife legislation from within a green criminological perspective, explaining how different models of wildlife legislation and enforcement exist. It includes discussion of national wildlife law’s basis as criminal law or civil law, and the nature of wildlife law sanctions. In considering the purpose of wildlife law this chapter also considers federal wildlife law enforcement, for example, the US and Canadian Fish and Wildlife Service approach of a specialist state wildlife enforcement agency, the NGO-led approach of the UK and the UK’s Wildlife Crime Officer network, and the role of CITES and other enforcement authorities. It also briefly discusses wildlife law enforcement through conservation legislation, national parks and wildlife services and conservation bodies, themes expanded upon in later chapters.

Issues in Policing Wildlife Crime

This chapter discusses current issues in wildlife law enforcement and the policing of wildlife crime. It includes discussion of different policing models, the nature and practices of green NGOs and their role in the investigation of wildlife crime and the development of wildlife law. In doing so, it considers contrasting notions of activism in the policing of wildlife crime from the ‘hard’ activist approach of prosecuting NGOs like Earthjustice and the Sierra Club with the ‘soft’ or campaigning activism of organisations like the Environmental Investigations Agency (EIA) and the advisory role of other NGOs like the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) which while maintaining a full-time investigations section primarily works to support the police service as the main investigator of wildlife crime in the UK and the statutory prosecutor, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in England and Wales.