Citizen Canine by David Grimm

Author:David Grimm [Grimm, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nature, Animals, General, Animal Rights, Pets, Dogs, Science, Life Sciences, Zoology, Mammals, Philosophy & Social Aspects, Technology & Engineering, Agriculture, Animal Husbandry
ISBN: 9781610391344
Google: iRmoAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2014-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

A Meeting of the Minds

The day after Joyce Tischler’s pep talk at the Benson Hotel, the Animal Law Conference begins in earnest. Lewis & Clark has been the host every year since first launching it in 1993, and the meeting has been sold out for months. Hundreds of students and lawyers from around the country have gathered for two days of presentations and workshops at the school’s wooded campus, a collection of modern glass and steel buildings connected via narrow paths that cut through a canopy of plants and trees. It’s a legal powerhouse in a national forest.

Things kick off on Saturday morning with a breakfast for the SALDF chapters. Over vegan donuts, forty students representing various law schools share ideas on how to fund-raise and spread the word about animal law. Some have organized charity races or Bob Barker Beer Pong Tournaments. Others have taken photos of pets on campus and turned them into calendars. A lot of them entered law school never having heard of animal law, but they got hooked once they joined an SALDF. “I came here to learn, to network, to get ideas, to find out what’s hot right now,” one of the students tells me. Her contempt for dog fighting and animal neglect makes her want to go into animal criminal law. “But in this job market, you’ve got to be willing to work anywhere,” she says. “Everyone in this room wants to be an animal lawyer.”

Later that morning, ALDF senior attorney Matthew Liebman and the ASPCA’s senior vice president of government relations, Nancy Perry, tell a packed room about the field’s recent successes. Last year alone, more than one hundred animal protection laws were passed, Perry says, including new felony anticruelty legislation and crackdowns on puppy mills. The duo offers advice on crafting ballot initiatives and rallying public support around court cases. Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Deborah Knaan hosts a subsequent session on how to litigate animal cruelty cases. She shares her struggles to create the country’s only animal cruelty prosecution program and speaks about her work with Detective Hector Sanchez and the Animal Cruelty Task Force. “I am living proof of the fact that you can create your own job,” she says. “Never, never, never give up. See a need, and go for it.” Another session advises attendees that even traditional areas of law can be applied to animals: contract law can be used to forge agreements between divorcing spouses in pet custody cases, for example. “You can incorporate your love of animals into any practice area,” says Valparaiso University Law School professor Rebecca Huss, who was appointed the legal guardian of the pit bulls rescued from football player Michael Vick’s dog-fighting operation. “You just have to be creative about it.”

The following day, ALDF’s director of litigation, Carter Dillard, broaches two questions that have haunted his organization since its inception: Should animals have rights? If so, what would these rights look like? Critics have argued that animals can’t have rights because they can’t comprehend them.

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