Legal Pioneers Seek to Raise Lowly Status of Animals
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: August 18, 1999
More than a generation after civil rights and environmental lawyers took their battles to the courts, there are now lawyers who say they are following in those footsteps on behalf of clients with names like Freckles and Muffin and Rainbow.
Fighting for creatures like performing orangutans and dogs used in experimentation, the lawyers are creating a new field of animal law with far more ambitious goals than traditionally weak anti-cruelty laws. They are filing novel lawsuits and producing new legal scholarship to try to chip away at a fundamental principle of American law that animals are property and have no rights.
These lawyers are more than brief-writing counterparts of animal activists who throw paint on fur wearers.
And they are influenced by developing scientific and ethical scholarship showing animals to have far higher levels of cognition and social development than previously believed.
This summer, the fledgling field of animal law took an important step toward legitimacy when two of the country's most prestigious law schools, Harvard and Georgetown, announced that they would offer courses in animal law for the first time.
The animal lawyers have also gained a handful of court victories in recent years, the most important of which was a Federal appeals court decision last year that gave a human zoo visitor the right to sue to get companionship for chimpanzees. And since 1994, legislatures across the country have given these lawyers a potent new tool by sharply upgrading animal cruelty crimes to felonies from misdemeanors.
''We have created a field of law,'' said Joyce Tischler, executive director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, an organization based in Petaluma, Calif., with an annual budget of $3 million. ''We've learned our trade, and now we are focusing on the next steps.''
Critics ridicule animal law as the latest example of absurdity in the legal system. They see it as an attack on the economic system's reliance on animal products that could wreak havoc in the courts.
''Would even bacteria have rights?'' asked Richard A. Epstein, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. ''There would be nothing left of human society if we treated animals not as property but as independent holders of rights.''
The animal lawyers say the idea that animals are mere property evolved centuries before modern notions of some animals as sentient beings with perceptions and even emotions. The lawyers have been moving on many different fronts to establish precedents that they say could provide a foundation for direct attacks on the property status of animals.
In civil cases involving veterinary malpractice or pet deaths, some lawyers have won verdicts and settlements of $15,000 or more. Lawyers have also had success in battling what they call execution orders, the sort of routine euthanasia that occurs when dogs bite people.
In Washington, D.C., two lawyers who had worked in Ralph Nader organizations started a firm specializing in animal law six years ago. The firm, Meyer & Glitzenstein, now with five lawyers, handles complex cases involving animal issues, like filings with Federal agencies concerning standards for the treatment of circus elephants.
Yesterday, the firm's lawyers announced an important victory in a legal battle that had gone to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The organizers of an annual pigeon shoot in Hegins, Pa., canceled the event. The animal lawyers were seeking an injunction to stop the shoot, which has taken place for 65 years, on grounds of animal cruelty.
Last year, a groundbreaking ruling was issued in a case that involved an apparently lonely chimpanzee named Barney. In its decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit gave a zoo visitor the legal standing to sue the Government to try to force it to issue regulations assuring chimpanzees group living arrangements and appropriate amenities.
The suit involving Barney (and a female monkey named Samantha who was alone in a cage near Barney's at the Long Island Game Farm Park and Zoo) was filed under amendments to the Federal Animal Welfare Act that had received little judicial interpretation. The amendments, passed in 1985, said conditions of confinement must assure ''the psychological well being of primates.''
Valerie J. Stanley, a lawyer who worked on the case, said the law ''does not mean you throw them a toy and you give them an orange once a month.'' The decision has been widely viewed as giving people new powers to challenge the living conditions of animals that are publicly displayed.
The suit is still being fought in Federal court, but Barney was shot to death by a zoo employee in 1996 after he escaped from his cage, bit someone and uprooted a sign, which he threw at a merry-go-round.
Some lawyers say they are in the field to advance their ideology, but some note that it is an area of legal practice that could be profitable. The lawyers in private practice charge fees to human clients, like pet owners. Some groups, like the Animal Legal Defense Fund, pay salaries to staff lawyers. And lawyers for industry groups that battle the animal lawyers say millions of dollars are available from animal welfare groups to pay for work that advances their goals.