Introduction: Protecting Animals in an Age of Globalization

In this introduction to Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders, readers are introduced to the topic of extraterritorial animal law and given a roadmap for the book. The chapter explains how animals are bred in one country, slaughtered in another, processed in another, then exported, and that highly mobile multinational corporations systematically exploit weaker animal laws to decrease production costs. Evidence is offered to show that states, policymakers, lawyers, and the public all seek to determine whether and how animals can be protected across borders. The chapter describes the arc of subsequent chapters and their interrelation, making the case that these complex problems can only be solved if they are analyzed from multiple perspectives, including trade, public international, and animal law. The final section outlines the author’s methodology to solve the problems the text raises.

Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders

Extraterritorial jurisdiction stands at the juncture of international law and animal law and promises to open a path to understanding and resolving the global problems that challenge the core of animal law. As corporations have relocated and the animal industry (agriculture, medical research, entertainment, etc.) has dispersed its production facilities across the territories of multiple states, regulatory gaps and fears of a race to the bottom have become a pressing issue of global policy. Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders provides enough background to allow readers to understand why extraterritorial jurisdiction must respond to these developments, counters objections that readers might raise, and describes how to improve animal law in tandem. The heart of the work is a fully fledged catalog of options for extraterritorial jurisdiction, which states can employ to strengthen their animal laws. The book offers top-down perspectives drawn from general international law and trade law, and complements them with a bottom-up view from the perspective of animal law. The approach connects the law of jurisdiction to substantive law and opens up deeper questions about moral directionality, state and corporate duties owed to animals, and the comparative advantages of applying constitutional, criminal, and administrative animal law across the border. To ensure that extraterritorial animal law does not become complicit in oppressing ethnic, cultural, or any other minorities, the book offers critical interdisciplinary perspectives, informed by studies on posthumanism and postcolonialism. Readers will further learn when and how extraterritorial jurisdiction violates international law, and the consequences of exercising it illegally under international law. This work answers questions about how and why extraterritorial jurisdiction can overcome the steepest hurdles for animal law and help us move toward a just global interspecies community.

Comparative Vantage Points of Extraterritorial Animal Law

Chapter 9 provides legislators with a full description of the comparative advantages of applying animal law across the border. It first clarifies the scope of extraterritorial jurisdiction by examining what kinds of administrative, criminal, and civil animal laws can be used extraterritorially. Using a functional comparative approach, the author describes the benefits of extraterritorial applying animal law extraterritorially, including constitutionally enshrined state objectives, rights and prohibitions, and duties of compassion. Criminal animal law (including advanced rules on corporate liability) and administrative animal law (including advanced standards on keeping, transporting, and slaughter) can also create significant advantages for animals when used to protect them across borders. The author describes these in detail and concludes that there are good reasons to believe that only a few of the existing animal laws can operate as exemplary models. For animal law to yield substantial benefits in extraterritorial application, it first must emancipate itself from the dominant animal use paradigm.

Parameters of Substantive Law

Chapter 8 shows ways to meaningfully connect the various jurisdictional tools to protect animals abroad to substantive law, and determines whether substantive law puts constraints on them. A central question at this intersection is whether states can use extraterritorial jurisdiction to lower standards abroad, for example, as a side effect to lucrative trade deals. Insights from general international, trade, and animal law will help illuminate this question. The author then determines the level of consistency animal laws must maintain to survive the scrutiny of international law. The author creates a hierarchy of presumptions to guide public authorities in their decisions about which animal laws, at a minimum, meet the requirements of beneficence and consistency. The chapter concludes with an argument that states should have a duty to protect animals abroad, and that corporations should have a duty to respect animals abroad, akin to the obligations set up under the UN “Protect, Respect and Remedy” framework.

Unowned Free-Roaming Domestic Cats: Reflection of Animal Welfare and Ethical Aspects in Animal Laws in Six European Countries

Besides the population of pet cats, another feline population that has regular and frequent relationships with the human population, is represented by unowned, free-roaming domestic cats. It is incontestable that part of human beings is responsible for the growing number of unwanted cats. The problems raised by the existence of free-roaming cat population range from acoustic and hygienic nuisance (because of loud vocalizations during the breeding season and bad smell due to sprayed urine from tomcats) to public health threat (because of the potential spread of zoonotic diseases and of diseases to pet cats and other species), to predation of wildlife (it can cause disruption of ecosystems). Undoubtedly, unowned free-roaming cat population has to be managed but, in the third millennium, human control strategies have to have an ethical dimension. In this paper, we propose an analysis of the National Laws in France, Spain, UK, Austria, Portugal and Italy. Based on the knowledge of domestic cat behavior, we suggest that when the TNR strategy for controlling domestic cat populations is applied by law in the mentioned countries, the basic needs and welfare of the species are respected.