Law and the Question of the Animal by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-135-09528-4
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Chapter 7

Dressing the sow and the legal subjectivation of the non-human animal

Victoria Ridler

Introduction

Her crime was infanticide, and her punishment was not only hanging, but to have the same kind of wounds inflicted upon her as she had inflicted upon the child. One of the most striking elements of the process, however, was that she, the sow, was dressed in a man’s clothes for her execution in the public square.1 This personification of the non-human animal as a subject of the law is troubling. Not simply because the sow was harmed or may have suffered in the process, but because in holding her accountable for her crimes (to a law she cannot know nor meaningfully participate in), the trial performs a legitimating function that renders the violence toward her as a necessary violence in the service of justice. Her trial took place in the Norman city of Falaise in 1386, and was an example of what are commonly described as the ‘animal trials’ that took place in Europe (predominantly) during the Middle Ages. The last criminal animal trial occurred in Switzerland in 1909, and since then the criminal prosecution of animals has been largely abandoned.2 Rather than appearing as a defendant with the necessary mens rea to be tried and held accountable for their actions before the law, the non-human animal now appears either as an object of possession (relevant only in terms of the rights of its owner) or as the recipient of humanitarian concern through animal welfare or anti-cruelty legislation. Contemporary academic thought has shown a particular concern over this latter categorization, proposing that (some) non-human animals ought to be understood as subjects of the law rather than as property. This move from ‘property’ to ‘subject’ however brings its own difficulties – difficulties exemplified by the ways in which we might find the trial of the sow of Falaise troubling.

In the following chapter it will be argued that shifting the non-human animal from the category of property to that of the legal subject may be little more than a shift from claiming dominium in the non-human animal, to claiming imperium (the right to rule) over it. In the first section, ‘Man’s dominium,’ some of the arguments opposed to the categorisation of the non-human animal as ‘property’ are considered. As opposed to Gary Francione’s characterization of the difficulties presented by this categorization, it will be suggested that it is specifically property conceived of as dominium in another being, with its correlate assumption of a hierarchy of being, that offends against our moral sentiments. In the second section, ‘Man’s imperium,’ the theoretical move from a premise that animals are morally relevant to us (human animals) to the position that they ought to be subjects of our law is critically interrogated to suggest that the legal subjectivation of the non-human animal lacks the kinds justifications we can provide for the subjectivation of the human animal. As such, its subjectivation (and subjugation) sustains the kind of hierarchy of being we opposed in the category of property in the first place.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.