Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment

Description

For all the diversity of views within the animal protection movement, there is a surprising consensus about the need for more severe criminal justice interventions against animal abusers. More prosecutions and longer sentences, it is argued, will advance the status of animals in law and society. Breaking from this mold, Professor Justin Marceau demonstrates that a focus on 'carceral animal law' puts the animal rights movement at odds with other social justice movements, and may be bad for humans and animals alike. Animal protection efforts need to move beyond cages and towards systemic solutions if the movement hopes to be true to its own defining ethos of increased empathy and resistance to social oppression. Providing new insights into how the lessons of criminal justice reform should be imported into the animal abuse context, Beyond Cages is a valuable contribution to the literature on animal welfare and animal rights law.

Justin Marceau is Professor and Animal Legal Defense Fund Professor of Law at the University of Denver. He has been retained as an expert witness in the fields of criminal law and animal law, and has published leading articles in both disciplines. He is the inaugural chair of the Scholars Committee for the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy, and the current chair of the Animal Law Section of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS).

'A groundbreaking call to conscience. Marceau firmly positions animal advocacy alongside broader struggles for social justice, and speaks to our shared values. This is the future of animal law.' Will Potter, author of Green is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege 'Beyond Cages challenges the animal protection movement to critically examine its historical reliance on criminal law. Marceau rightly claims that the movement is ready for this internal critique, and he draws upon his expertise in animal law and criminal law to deliver it with great eloquence and persuasion. The animal protection movement will not - and indeed should not - be the same as a result of Beyond Cages.' Kristen Stilt, Harvard Law School 'In this bold book, Marceau critiques the abject alliance between US animal rights organizations and the criminal justice system, and calls out the moral and political hypocrisy of celebrating racialized imprisonment, deportation, and privatized prosecutions as strategies of progressive social change. I hope Beyond Cages augurs a wholesale rejection of simplistic scapegoating in favor of alternative strategies inspired by more thoughtful illuminations of our collective complicity in deeply interconnected structures of oppression.' Timothy Pachirat, author of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight 'Arguments that cruelty to nonhuman animals render humans cruel to each other date back to at least the eighteenth century. In this groundbreaking book, Justin Marceau explains how the criminalization of animal cruelty - often justified by the link between the human propensity to harm others humans if they are violent to nonhuman animals - has been a mistaken focus for the animal law movement. A law-and order approach, what Marceau calls 'Carceral Animal Law', does not fit with a civil rights movement for nonhuman animals. This is a very important intervention, working with what is often treated as common sense and breaking it down by asking the hard questions that need to be put about what is appropriate, effective, and humane when dealing with those who harm or abuse nonhuman animals. Beyond Cages is a must read for anyone interested in animal law, criminal law, and the (at times errant) logic of social justice movements past and present.' Angela Fernandez, University of Toronto