Paper's abstract

Florence Burgat, Is the substantial coherence of animal law at risk ?
Animal law, that is all rules concerning animals, shows today internal contradictions strong enough to jeopardize its coherence, possibly foreshadowing its desirable revision. Of course law has no calling to build a systematic and founded ontology, but it is the very illegitimacy of what it regulates that is looming, as we intend to pinpoint. For some designations concerning animals in regulations state that they are subject to “pain”, but also “suffering”, “anguish” and “distress”, thereby indicating an intense phycho-physical life lived in the first person, whose existential dimension cannot be missed ; they also state moral principles and injunctions, such as the respect of the “intrinsic value of the animal” and of its “well-being” in the midst of the very texts organizing and legalizing activities which, as such, scorn fundamentally and heavily what they just granted to animals. From this stems a state of double constraint. Will animal law take the full measure of what sciences of the mind and phenomenological approaches tell about animals, be it at the price of a disruption of the legal order which would sanction another anthropological order in which animals would enter the community of equals?

Key Words : animal rights, violence, sensitivity, legal epistemology
tome 55, 2012: p.247-268

---