Document type: article published in The Conversation
Author: Réjane Sénac
Preview: In the twentieth century, the fight to achieve greater equality enabled many social groups to become legal subjects. This growing inclusiveness could turn the 21st century into the century for animals. But how are they to be integrated into our legal texts? If animals have rights, do they also have duties?
In this extract from his essay "Par effraction. Rendre visible la question animale" (Breaking In. Making the animal issue visible), Stock/Philosophie Magazine (2025), political scientist Réjane Sénac explores these questions. (...)
The antispeciesist approach accords a moral status to animals that recognizes them as subjects with rights. It does not set out to accord them rights equivalent to those of humans (e.g. the right to vote or marry), but rights that are adapted to their needs. This then creates the challenge of thinking through what would be the fairest possible way for the potentially divergent interests of different species, human and non-human, to co-exist. In Considérer les animaux. Une approche zooinclusive (Taking animals into account, an animal-inclusive approach) Émilie Dardenne proposes a progressive approach to the consideration of the interests of animals other than humans. She presents concrete pathways for transition at both individual and collective levels, ranging from consumption to public policy choices, education and training. She offers practical tools to help bring about lasting change. At the individual level, animal-inclusivity means, for example, taking into account the needs of the animal you wish to adopt and the commitment - financial, time-related, etc. - that such a step would entail, before deciding to take on a 'pet'. In terms of public policy, animal-inclusivity would, for example, enshrine animal rights in the French Constitution, going beyond the simple announcement of their recognition as "living beings endowed with sentience" (Article 515 of the French Civil Code since 2015) or "sentient beings" (Article L214 1 of the Rural Code since 1976), and enable them to acquire a legal personhood which would carry specific rights adapted to their needs. The core role of the French Constitution is highlighted by Charlotte Arnal, an animal rights activist, for whom "social projects begin with the Constitution and, since animals are part of society, it must include them". This measure, which she describes as symbolic, "will also unfold in practical ways over time, in the courts". With this in mind, Louis Schweitzer, President of the Fondation Droit Animal, Éthique et Sciences (LFDA), aims to turn the Declaration of Animal Rights proclaimed at UNESCO in 1978, and updated in 2018 by the LFDA, into an educational tool that can be disseminated in public places and schools, before being transposed into law.
Through his work at Animal Cross, a general animal protection association he co-founded in 2009 and now chairs, Benoît Thomé, too, is committed to this goal. He argues for the introduction of an Article 0 to form the basis of the French legal system, and would read as follows: "All living beings, as part of the domains of nature - mineral, human, vegetable, animal -, are born and remain free and equal in their duties and rights." In answer to the argument that animals cannot be granted rights because they cannot carry out duties, he asserts that "animals more than fulfill their duties, given everything that they do for us and for other living beings." (...)
Benoît Thomé stresses his disagreement with the view taken by Tom Regan that animals are moral patients rather than moral agents in the sense that, like vulnerable people, children or people with disabilities, they have rights but cannot not perform duties. He points out that animals carry out "their duties to us human beings, to nature and to ecosystems for wild animals, naturally and freely, not as a duty. We therefore need to 'de-anthropize' the concept of duty, understanding it in the sense of gift, a service to other living beings, and participation in ecosystems". He points out that "the direction of history" has been to extend rights "from the majority to the most vulnerable"; this has been the case for humans, and now the time of non-human animals has come. (...)
