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| Volume 106, No. 5 (March 2008) |
| An Online Symposium on Agricultural Animals and Agricultural Law |
The New Jersey Supreme Court will consider this term whether regulations promulgated pursuant to a law mandating humane treatment of farm animals go far enough. The regulations reportedly do not prohibit castrating male piglets without anesthesia, removing chicken beaks and turkey claws without painkillers, or confining veal calves and pregnant sows in cages small enough to restrict turning around. As this ongoing debate shows, the extent to which animal protection laws should apply to the agricultural industry remains in dispute. In addition to considering the merits of factory farming and animal protection, the symposium poses the larger question: Should laws criminalizing animal abuse apply to animals raised for food? |
A Case Study on Cruelty to Farm Animals: Lessons Learned From the Hallmark Meat Packing Case[HTML] [PDF]
Nancy Perry & Peter Brandt, Humane Society of the United States
One morning in January 2008, images of horrific animal cruelty were blasted by Internet, television, and print media throughout the country. The story was all the more shocking in that the animals at issue were cows at a commercial slaughter plant—a place from which Americans usually avert their gaze. The images of dairy cows so ill or injured that they could not stand, being battered, shocked, and nearly drowned to force them into the kill box, struck a chord with the American public. Abusing downed animals is at odds with our venerable national public policy against torturing animals. |
Animal Cruelty Laws and Factory Farming[HTML] [PDF]
Joseph Vining, University of Michigan Law School
“Should laws criminalizing animal abuse apply to animals raised for food?” The answer is yes, and yes especially because farm animals are generally now under the control of business corporations. State and federal criminal law have proved critical in modifying corporate policy and practice in other areas, a current example being worker safety. Criminal liability today would include criminal liability of the corporate entity itself, and would thus also introduce the most effective regulation of individual handling of farm animals—regulation by the corporation, which has methods and resources public agencies cannot match. |
An Argument for the Basic Legal Rights of Farmed Animals[HTML] [PDF]
Steven M. Wise, Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights, Inc.
The most abused beings in the United States are those whom we raise and kill for food. The numbers of dead are staggering. Most are victims of the severe and almost entirely unregulated practices that Americans permit on their factory farms. According to the United States Department of
Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, in 2007, a total of 10.4 billion land-based animals were killed by the American food industry. These included 9.4 billion broiler chickens, 450 million laying hens, 317 million turkeys, 121 million pigs, 39 million bovines, 28 million ducks, 10 million rabbits, and 4 million sheep and goats—fifty times the number killed in biomedical research, for sport, as pests, and for all other reasons combined, carrying a value of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The degree to which animal enslavement is embedded in our society is difficult to calculate or fathom. |
One Bad Day: Thoughts on the Difference Between Animal Rights and Animal Welfare[HTML] [PDF]
Neil D. Hamilton, Drake Law School
The lawsuit pitting the New Jersey Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals against the New Jersey Department of Agriculture brings into sharp focus the issue of animal rights versus animal welfare that has been dividing animal activists, farmers, and society for decades. On one side are proponents of animal rights—a set of rights articulated by humans but granted to animals to govern how we treat them. For many believers this includes the right not to be owned and certainly not to be eaten. On the other side are proponents of animal welfare—also a set of human derived standards governing how we care for animals under our control. Animal welfare concerns are reflected in laws prohibiting cruelty and criminalizing certain abusive behavior. |
Animal Ethics and the Law[HTML] [PDF]
Bernard Rollin, Colorado State University
Everyone reading this Article is doubtless aware of the woeful lack of legal protection for farm animals in the United States. Not only do the laws fail to assure even a minimally decent life for the majority of these animals, they do not provide protection against the most egregious treatment. As both a philosopher who has helped articulate new emerging societal ethics for animals, and as one who has successfully developed laws embodying that ethic—notably the 1985 federal laws protecting laboratory animals—I will stress the direction we need to move in the future to enfranchise farm animals. |
The Environmental Effects of Cruelty to Agricultural Animals[HTML] [PDF]
Kyle H. Landis-Marinello, University of Michigan Law School
Laws criminalizing animal abuse should apply to the agricultural industry. When we exempt the agricultural industry from these laws, factory farms increase production to unnaturally high levels. This increased production causes devastating environmental effects, such as climate change, water shortages, and the loss of topsoil. In light of these effects, the law needs to do much more to regulate the agricultural industry, and the first step should be to criminalize cruelty to agricultural animals. This would force the industry to slow down production to more natural levels that are much less harmful to the environment. |
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