ANIMAL LAW IN AUSTRALIA - A NEW DIALOGUE
Editors Peter Sankoff and Steven White
Published by The Federation Press
ISBN: 978186287 719 1
Reviewer: Claudette Vaughan

Animal Law In Australasia – A New Dialogue is a scholarly examination of existing legal relationships between humans and animals.  It is an indispensable guide into a vast inaccessible reality that exists for animals, which has yet to be challenged by society as a whole.

It is destined to become a standard in the literature of Australian and New Zealand animal law.   Here is a book that poses vital questions serving to underline how inadequate is the data on which to base answers to legal problems concerning animals and how inadequate is the current data concerning animals and their protection in law.

Editors Sankoff and White have produced a work that is desperately needed in Australasia. Corporate Australia and New Zealand will surely be forced to sit up and take notice of the fact that its fairy stories about the treatment of animals in an industrialized system of animal husbandry is a deception that is fast becoming exposed.

For example, the scare posed by the new strain of swine influenza thought to have originated in the village of La Gloria, 200 miles east of Mexico City, is once more revealing links between cases of human viral infections and intensive piggeries.  One British commentator claims “surveillance is a failed patchwork of state jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals”.  (1)

It’s been a long time view of the animal rights movement that mismanagement is not the nub of the problem.  It is the deception and misrepresentation concerning the total nature of modern animal husbandry.  An elaborate ideology of mystification conceals the sordid reality underlying factory farmed pig flesh.   The causes of this deception are mutually reinforcing; the social order sustaining the benign appearance of the system, combined with the enormous clout wielded those who occupy the commanding heights of the present economic order and its centrality to the stability of the political economy of the current system.

 There will be huge corporate gains irrespective of whether fears about the possible mutation of the H1n1 virus are fulfilled. The manufacturers of anti viral drugs, Swiss-based Roche, and GlaxoSmithKline are just a sample of the corporations set to make increased profits from increased sales of Tamiflu which, incidentally is not a cure but moderates the symptoms of the disease.

Given such intimate involvement by multinational corporations it is not to be wondered that our political representatives, fearful of inciting panic amongst their constituents, obediently toe the line and stockpile tens of millions of doses of such medication.  This system of control also serves to convince or intimidate our political representatives against taking decisive action to legislate for meaningful change.

It’s all too easy to forget that the dominant, dominating culture that bulldozers its way into legislation will violently protect its interests at any cost. The weighing of an animal interest in favour of a human interest looks good on paper but animal interests are non-existent as are "animal rights" as we currently know them.  There is a very real danger that the selling of "animal rights" will go the way of branding and the selling of a logo -- selling something corporately that doesn't exist substantially nor is there any intention of it ever existing -- the facade being because we all know the domineering culture makes its money out of meat, milk and wool.  It's difficult to say whether much can be achieved without pressurizing big business in a meaningful way.   Animal lawyers, so-called, are a new commodity in the market place. Choices are offered, opportunities are offered where none existed previously and let's never forget the consumer is a willing collaborator in the cover-up.

As the book moves through the methodological terrain of animal jurisprudence it becomes clear that many existing statutes already provide an ample basis for successful prosecutions in cruelty cases.  Yet meaningful prosecutions are comparatively rare.  Why is this so?  It may be the result of inconsistent provisions contained within relevant pieces of legislation themselves, which lawyers paid by the corporations can exploit for the maintenance of the status quo. 

Ultimately animal rights, insofar as it succeeds, will bring about a gradual restructuring of the present economic order.  Under the present system, animals are things; commodities to be used and abused to maximize profit.  An eager public, accustomed to an abundance of cheap, readily available animal protein, which they have been conditioned to equate with success and the good life, appear strangely unmoved to the appalling suffering the present system inflicts on its animal victims.

How would proprietary rights and animal rights be reconciled, if indeed they can be?  How will the present property paradigm be addressed in years to come?  At the moment laws relating the live export of animals are being debated along cruelty lines, but even in the unlikely event of the cruelty ceasing or even being ameliorated, this would still leave the animals trapped in the property paradigm, necessitating the struggle for their liberation to be fought again and again?

Animal Law in Australasia – a new dialogue is a serious study from serious people with a serious agenda. Anyone working for a saner world faces the hard reality of why suffering is an agent for social control. As Professor Sankoff annunciates in this book, Animals do matter. How does it vastly differ from say Temple Grandin’s analysis on why animals matter? Primarily because this book never assumes that providing a happy death for an animal is the answer to the problem. What is plausible to change in law is the cavalier assumption that an animal's reason for living, is to die.

The dubious satisfaction with commodity driven abundance evolves out of a world of automatized human submission to the existing social order of things and its seemingly immovable empire.

Here is a book that will strike at the conscience of anyone who has ever eaten fast food chicken at $3.90 a leg or feasted on the remains of a bobby calf or baby lamb.

A real movement transforms existing conditions from the dominant social force. This really is a parody of how the system works when Christian symbolism uses a sacrificed lamb as a true record of Jesus Christ. There’s been a very old system in play for many, many years and it lends much thought to what constitutes existing conditions on this planet for both human and animal alike.  

The father and daughter team of Brian and Ondine Sherman are changing the face of animal law in Australia and around the world. It was only by the Voiceless generous grants program this book was able to manifest in the first place.

A must read book.

(1)  Mike Davis: The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry, www.guardian.co.uk 29/04/2009.