Denying Animals Childhood and its Implications for Animal-protective Law Reform

Abstract

The current state of statutory and common law denies even minimal protection to the vast majority of animals. Much animal law scholarship focuses on moral justifications for increased legal protection on the basis of animals’ capacity to suffer physical pain or their cognitive ability. This commentary describes the state of the law and argues that the law will not change as long as animals’ capacities beyond physical suffering or cognitive ability are not recognized. That animals as individuals have experiences, such as “childhood,” and relationships with each other, such as “parent-child” relationships, must be recognized before the law can shift significantly enough to provide protection even from physical suffering. Disclosure laws, in and of themselves, do little without transformative understanding of the information disclosed.