DAVID FAVRE'S INTERVIEW FOR THE ABOLITIONIST
Interviewer: C.Vaughan

David Favre received his J.D. from College of William and Mary and his B.A. in chemistry from the University of Virginia. He is a Professor of Law at Michigan State University College of Law and served as Interim Dean, Michigan State University, Detroit College of Law (1999-2000). He has authored many books, including: Animal Law and Dog Behavior; Wildlife Law, 2nd ed.; Animals: Welfare, Interests and Rights; International Trade in Endangered Species; and Animal Law. He chairs a Web site. His articles include: “Elephants, Ivory and International Law,” “The Risk of Extinction: a Risk Analysis of the Endangered Species Act as Compared to CITES,” “The Development of anti-Cruelty Laws in the 1800s,” and “Some Thoughts on Animal Experimentation.” He speaks on animal and wildlife subjects throughout the world, including the U.K., Spain, Portugal France, Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, China, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Senegal, and Malawi. Favre has chaired the Wildlife Special Interest Group of the American Society of International Law and was on the Board of Directors for the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the National Center for Animal Law.

As Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan State University College and Legal Web Center tell us about the website David because it’s an important tool in the emerging animal law movement and it provides a rare, free resource for people interested in animal law and all it’s aspects.

As I worked in this area as long as I have it became clear that legal materials were very hard to access and even for most lawyers, particularly young lawyers without the budget of a large firm that can’t always get into the large data bases that have the laws and even in those places it’s hard to find the laws. My goal was to provide basic materials within the United States and also some global materials, and provide them in such a way that’s relatively simple and straightforward to get to and also has explanatory components as well. So large numbers of the public read are materials on dog-fights, on dog liability, on dog leases – anything to do with dogs since there is a lot of people who want to try and find out what the law is here.

How did you get involved with Animal Law?

Back in the early eighties I became involved with a group of people that then formed “Attorneys for Animal Rights”. Later on it transformed it’s name to “The Animal Legal Defense Fund”. I sat on their Board for 23 years and we tried to push the envelope forward and I’m still trying to do that today. For a long time now I have been involved with the full scope of animal issues.

Animal Law Welfare, Interests and Rights is your book that represents over a decade of your work. Please talk about this.

It’s interesting when you first go to the Dean of a Law School and say you want to teach animal law they think it’s some very narrow, modest little component but in reality animal law is one of the broadest bases of topics you can deal with in the legal system. It touches on everything. Animal issues are present in all parts of society. The two most important ones are fundamentally the philosophical ones and very pragmatic ones that deals with harm caused by animals for instance. I’ve been accumulating legal materials for a long period of time. I wrote my first book in 1983 so I have been building pieces of that over a long period of time.

Isn’t there already enough legislation in place at the moment to protect animals theoretically but the problem is one of enforcement?

We would be moving much further ahead if we could simply enforce the laws we already have on the books. I think clearly there’s room for more laws but I agree that the critical component is the lack of enforcement of what we have.

Ever since the NLC player Michael Vicks was indicted on dog fighting charges there’s been a spate of images emerging in the media as to the brutal nature of dog fighting. It’s good to expose it however on a animal rights list dog fighting is right there as the most obvious example to a banned, abolished and criminal charges brought against the human perpetrators so why then is it so difficult to get the most obvious animal brutality attended to by law? Why has the law been remiss in charging these people caught in the act?

It’s a lack of priorities on the enforcement side. All thinking people and the legislature outlaw dog fighting so when everybody talks about it in the abstract, everybody agrees that it’s an inappropriate activity. The problem is when you go down to the level of police, the police are worried about drug busts, murder, rape and an assortment of other human crime activities, what priority will they give dog fighting? They see the only victims are the dogs themselves and therefore they don’t investigate further. With dog fighting a lot of the humane societies are willing to do a lot of the investigatory work and then go to the police and say, “Okay. I know where a dog ring is and we have heard there’s going to be a fight here – Come bust this fight.” This is about a lack of concern by the police and that’s a worldwide problem.

What is your moral perspective on animals, David?

I have just finished writing a book on that point. Clearly animals are objects of moral concern. They have interests and we have a duty to take into account their interests. The use of animals by humans is a different and more complex question in my opinion.

How plausible, in your experience, is personhood rights, written in law, for non-human animals?

It’s reasonably good on a more limited basis than perhaps what some people would say. Do I foresee that animals are going to be put into a position where animals will have equal legal status as humans? No I don’t see that in the near future. I see where Judges will look to an animal in a particular situation and say, “I need to decide what’s in the best interests for this animal?” I do see that in the future. They are already starting to do that in divorce cases, and in Trusts and Wills in the United States. Perhaps the most important threshold we have to cross is can an animal get damages for being hurt? I think this will come. It might take 5 years, 10 years even 20 years but in my mind that will be a very important threshold.

Have you looked at the laws regarding breeding dogs because nobody seems to be addressing this?

Yes you are right. There are no laws about breeding dogs!

That perception of the dog being bred for economic value is something that will have to fought.

What is your definition of the term “wildlife?”

From a legal point of view that’s pretty clear-cut. Wildlife are animals not in the control of any particular human being.

What is your analysis of the Animal Terrorism Protection Act.

I have read it. I don’t see it quite as bad as what some of the other people in the Movement have declared that it’s going to be. There are things in this Act that could wind up having bad consequences for activists but I don’t think it is necessarily going to happen. Remember that a particular prosecution has to be brought by a Federal prosecutor and for the most part they are pretty pragmatic people. They are not going to be on witch-hunts. They have other things to do.

You asked me if Bush is out next election, can any of these free speech laws that actually prohibit free speech be reversed? If in fact an action is an activity of free speech then it can’t be a criminal act under the US Constitution. Clearly most Judges consider free speech to be one of the most important rights Americans have. That would not lightly be given up by a Judge. For example if activists are standing in front of a place that sells furs with a poster saying, “Don’t buy furs” that’s classic American free speech. I cannot imagine a Judge allowing a criminal conviction for that kind of thing.

What about the privacy laws that are non-existent in the US at the moment. What do you think about that?

It’s a mess and it goes much further than listening in on the animal rights movement. We may or may not be caught up in it but whatever happens will happen because of forces outside the animal rights movement.

You have said, “There is nothing in our legal system that says we can’t implement tremendous advantages to animals if we have the vision and the political force to make it happen”.

Yes, the difficulty in the United States is that animals have almost zero visibility in the political system. We need a candidate that’s willing to talk about animal issues, for some reason, it appears that they don’t think that it’s important enough. So the challenge to our community is to make it legitimate enough so that people who aren’t part of the animal rights movement could be comfortable in advocating on an animal’s behalf.

How do you envision the future, David?

Where I see progress is in the law schools themselves. I think the latest count is now 90 law schools now have student organisations that want to help animals and now over 80 law schools are now offering a course in animal law. That’s up from about 10 five years ago. So in the world of education it is a topic that is exploding. This is happening because it’s based on people from different cultures. Young people are now saying, “Of course we are going to think about animals because this is important to us.”

Lastly, what’s the book you’re currently working on called?

We Are The Gods. It’s about how we ought to think about animals as an integral part of environmental and social activities and how we might get it on the political agenda that we were just talking about. My attempt as a scholar is to push it forward in such a manner that ‘animal rights’ becomes part of a public conversation naturally. We Are The Gods focus is on industrial animals, that’s the obvious bad guy in the book and speaking about global corporations as being one of the parts of the problem.

Website is: http://www.animallaw.info