Before the Law: Animals in a Biopolitical Context

Abstract

Using examples such as factory farming and the recent decision by the Spanish Parliament to grant fundamental rights to great apes, this commentary explores the extent to which our current legal frameworks (including the legal discourse of “rights”) provide satisfactory responses to the question of justice for non-human animals. After briefly sketching appeals to the rights model (both pro and con) for non-human animals in legal pragmatism and in animal rights philosophy, I turn to recent work in biopolitical theory to rearticulate not just the ethical but also the political status of our treatment of non-human animals.