Shelby Giaccarini made a presentation this October concerning the legal status of animals. In it, she called for an intermediate group to be considered under law. We currently operate with legal things and legal persons, but this neglects many cases that do not fall properly within these two categories. So she proposed that we develop a group called legal subjects that would deserve some rights but not all.
This approach seems far superior to attempting to bestow upon animals the status of personhood. Not only is this idea alien enough to not be viable in this particular political landscape, but it is still unclear what granting personhood would actually do. Which of our rights are begotten by personhood, and which are not?
Perhaps we need to start with not treating them as property and going from there. But this is still an unnecessary complication. The category of legal subjects would avoid the apparent equalizing that calling them people would have. Yes, I know that there are those that wish to claim that we are equal to animals, but we are not. If there is any objectively agreed upon point, it is that.
Which is the better route to take? Do we call animals people, or do we fashion them a new category?
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ReplyDeleteAnother option is to accept that companion animals are property (of a certain sort), but redefine property in terms of need and obligation rather than absolute right (the latter idea, I suspect, a remnant of divine-command monarchism). Unrealistic as this sounds in terms of predominant ideology, we may well need to treat all ownership as a form of guardianship if we are to craft a sustainable human presence on the planet.
ReplyDeleteBut then we will need to fashion distinct kinds of property -- animate and inanimate property, for starters, since, even on a more ecologically sustainable model, how I ought to treat my toothbrush will be very different from how I ought to treat my cat.
ReplyDeleteTrue enough, though we are already familiar with several such distinctions within the general concept of property as currently conceived (I may legally kick my porch but not my cat, I can let my old shed decay, but not to the point that it becomes a health hazard to the neighborhood or an attractive nusiance...)
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