Document type: article published in The Conversation
Author: Isabelle Doussan
Preview: Recognition of the legal personhood, or personallity, of animals is often perceived as a progressive, even revolutionary position. Yet this solution is far more conservative than it seems. The legal treatment of animals is rarely thought of in relational terms, even though the relationships between humans and animals fall under diverse categories - utility, threat, protection, attachment, etc. This diversity should not, however, blind us to the fact that the law is also an instrument of the power exercised by humans over animals. The latter's sentience, often recognised by the law as an inherent property, can call this power relationship into question.
In "Droit et animal : pour un droit des relations avec les humaines", published by Quae, jurist Isabelle Doussan, a Research Director at INRAE, looks at the treatment of domestic and wild animals within the purview of the law. However, she does not succumb to the temptations of legal personhood. She explains why in the following excerpt:
The recognition of legal personhood for animals is often presented as progressive, in line with the increased regard in which they are held. Yet, beneath its revolutionary appearance, this solution seems to us to be profoundly conservative, preserving an established order. To think of animals in terms of the subject/object dichotomy confirms this dichotomy as the legal framework for reading the world. In so doing, we reinforce the dominant paradigm which adopts a binary approach to our relationship with the world.
It is precisely the case of animals that anthropologist Charles Stépanoff (2021) chooses to highlight the duality of approaches in our Western societies. A utilitarian perception of animals, thought of as consumer goods and without internal worlds of their own, is contrasted with the contemporaneous perception of animals as beings endowed with individuality and the innocent victims of human powers.
The author describes these visions as complementary poles, Siamese twins, highlighting the dissociation of these two moral universes, presented in the West as two disjunctive poles, as separate moral mutually exclusive universes, even though it is not hard to see that real-life situations are far more complex and their boundaries more porous.
This approach echoes the writings of Philippe Descola (2005), where "nature to be exploited" and "nature to be protected" are simply two sides of the same coin - the dualism that characterizes the Western worldview, which he terms naturalism.
Animals as, objects or subjects in law? [The ambivalence of our relationship with the living world[...]
