Steven William White

Companion Animals, Natural Disasters and the Law: An Australian Perspective

Simple Summary One of the issues raised by recent natural disasters in Australia is the management of companion animal welfare in disaster planning, response and recovery. Official inquiries following these disasters uncovered a number of shortcomings in addressing the management of animal welfare issues. This article suggests that despite some reform following these events, disaster management still fails to take seriously the interests of companion animals. Abstract This article examines the regulation of companion animal welfare during disasters, with some context provided by two recent major disaster events in Australia. Important general lessons for improved disaster management were identified in subsequent inquiries. However, the interests of companion animals continue to be inadequately addressed. This is because key assumptions underpinning disaster planning for companion animals—the primacy of human interests over animal interests and that individuals will properly address companion animal needs during times of disaster—are open to question. In particular these assumptions fail to recognise the inherent value of companion animals, underestimate the strong bond shared by some owners and their animals and, at the same time, overestimate the capacity of some owners to adequately meet the needs of their animals.

Into the Void: International Law and the Protection of Animal Welfare

Animal welfare is not currently regulated by a single, comprehensive international law instrument. This article considers prevailing frameworks in international law that address animal welfare in some way, but by themselves do not meet the hallmarks of an effective global protection regime, including comprehensiveness and enforceability. Emerging frameworks that might fill the gap in global animal welfare protection include a universal declaration on animal welfare, the entrenchment of World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) animal health standards and an international convention for the protection of animal welfare. While the prospects of any of these models succeeding in the short term are uncertain at best, the challenge now is to think carefully about what legal form an international framework for animal protection might take.

Regulation of Animal Welfare in Australia and the Emergent Commonwealth: Entrenching the Traditional Approach of the States and Territories or Laying the Ground for Reform?

Human treatment of other animals has been the subject of intense scholarly and more general public deliberation for many years, especially in the wake of the 1975 publication of Australian philosopher Peter Singers book Animal Liberation. In the United States, this debate has permeated the discipline of law to the extent that there are now more than 90 animal law courses conducted in universities around the country, a significant and growing scholarly literature, multiple edition textbooks and dedicated law journals. Despite the Australian provenance of a major contributor to the contemporary philosophical debate, the Australian legal academy has shown relatively little interest in this important area. The aim of this article is to contribute to the fledging Australian legal scholarship in animal law by critically analysing the respective roles of the Commonwealth, States and Territories in the regulation of animal welfare, focussing principally on the welfare of companion and farmed animals.

Animal Protection Law in Australia: Bound by History

This chapter examines changing attitudes to the treatment of animals in nineteenth century Britain, tracing the effects of change through to the first British animal protection legislation in 1822, and beyond to the law of the Australian colonies. By the early part of the twentieth century a number of key facets of animal protection regulation were established: the adoption of the generic ‘no unnecessary suffering’ standard in assessing the extent of cruelty to animals allowed; the use of exemptions from the generic prohibition against cruelty; the imposition of duties to provide for the needs of an animal; and the establishment of one of the key institutional actors in the animal protection field, the RSPCA. As well, the Australian colonies faithfully reproduced an understanding of domesticated animals as personal property. Analysis of the development of animal protection law in Queensland provides a “representative sample” of the adoption of animal protection law in the States and Territories more broadly. In Queensland, as in other similar jurisdictions, the question remains whether the present day animal protection regulatory framework amounts, in essence, to a nineteenth century answer to twenty-first century concerns.

Introduction: Animal Protection in an Interconnected World

In our increasingly interconnected and wired world, some of the biggest global stars have been nonhuman animals. On blogs, on Facebook and all around the Internet, claws and clicks go hand in hand or paw in paw, with the furry claiming cyberspace. In 2014, one of the most emailed stories on The New York Times’s website was about the biology of cats. According to media reports, there has been a sharp rise in the proportion of American dog and cat owners with provisions in their wills for their pets, with nearly one in every ten now making such arrangements. One of the most fervently embraced documentaries of 2013 was Blackfish, shown over and over on CNN. And these are not just “feel good” stories about cute and cuddly animals. They are about animal suffering, animal science, animal intelligence and cognition, animal behaviour and social life, animal welfare and law, and above all, animal dignity, rights and justice. For instance, in a New York Times’s op-ed piece, the commentator writes about “according animals dignity”. These topics are not academic jargon but increasingly entering the popular cyber parlance. In the meantime, apart from stories and images of animals going viral in traditional and social media around the world, significant legal battles are being fought on behalf of animals, for instance, in the International Court of Justice in the Hague and in the courtrooms of New York. At the end of 2013, a team of lawyers was filing writs of habeas corpus in New York on behalf of four captive chimpanzees as part of the Nonhuman Rights Project. At the other end of the world, in Australia, a group of animal lawyers, scientists and scholars was gathering to discuss animal law and animal welfare, the result of which is this edited book.

'Kangaroos vs. Cattle and Sheep: Animal Welfare, Animal Protection, and the Law'

In 2008 the Garnaut Climate Change Review: Final Report made a bold recommendation: >>For most of Australia’s human history—around 60 000 years—kangaroo was the main source of meat. It could again become important. … [Modelling shows] the potential for kangaroos to replace sheep and cattle for meat production in Australia’s rangelands, where kangaroos are already harvested. … [B]y 2020 beef cattle and sheep numbers in the rangelands could be reduced by 7 million and 36 million respectively, and … this would create the opportunity for an increase in kangaroo numbers from 34 million today to 240 million by 2020 … [leading to a] net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (Garnaut 2008, 547–548).<< Perhaps inspired by the Garnaut Report, the Committee on Sustainable Agriculture and Environment, in the case study presented by Irvine (2012), is proposing to substitute rangeland domesticated animal farming with kangaroo harvesting to improve the ecology and soil quality of semi-arid regions in Australia. As laudable as this goal may be, the committee’s policy prescription rests on key assumptions about animal welfare that are open to question.