Seven Reasons Why Animal Law Starts with One Basic Reform
The lives of animals are fundamentally determined by their relationships with humans, including humans currently entering the world. Yet somehow our current legal system exploits both groups, offering inadequate protections. This exploitation occurs at multiple levels, from direct interaction to systemic impacts through environmental degradation and habitat loss. When we examine anyone claiming to do good in the world, we must ask how they account for this critical variable: How do children being born into the world and their subsequent development impact the claims being made?
The answers often reveal surprising contradictions. While we may advance animal rights and personhood on a micro level—through individual court cases—we simultaneously undermine that personhood on a macro level through outdated, inequitable, and growth-based family law and reproductive policies that fuel factory farming, laboratory testing, and wildlife eradication. Time is running out.
The Foundation of Rights and Legal Protection
Animal rights and law cannot legitimately begin by exploiting the most vulnerable entities—both nonhuman animals and the future children with whom they will interact. Yet the current U.S. legal system—like most worldwide—offers no meaningful protection to either group because it fails to financially entitle would-be parents to plan well, in an equitable and regenerative way that would prevent harm to both children and nonhumans.
This system has, on balance, undone many claimed victories of animal advocates at a macro level, contributing to animal extinction and exacerbating the climate crisis for the most vulnerable humans in what can accurately be described as racist ecocide. If micro-personhood means we can't treat animals as property in specific cases, macro-personhood means we can't make rules impacting our species' future without liberating nonhumans in the process. This requires policies ensuring fewer, more empathetic humans with genuine stakes in real democracy.
Animal lawyers and legal scholars have traditionally incorporated food and disability law into their analysis due to their impact on animals. However, many practitioners—myself included during years as an animal rights lawyer—ignored how population growth was undermining any net positive change for animals. We engaged in flashy but low-impact work while quietly undoing progress to benefit in other ways.
Animal law that actually benefits nonhumans orients from family law. For example, not all animal law involves food - all animal law involves humans, including their creation and development.
Maximum Long-Term Impact Through Systemic Change
Family reforms create exponentially greater long-term benefits for animals than investment-based reforms focused on dietary changes or other consumption patterns. Dietary changes are great, but they largely ignore the problem of growth. When activists risk imprisonment for their cause, they should include policies that make their actions truly effective rather than symbolic gestures whose benefits are being systematically undone. Some funders backing direct action have shown little concern for this undermining effect, often failing to disclose their investments in growth-based models and companies that perpetuate harm.
The commitment to advancing animal rights and law represents a commitment to massive fundamental change. While academics may theorize about animal rights in the abstract, these rights rarely manifest in actual human-animal relations when there are no limits on human population growth, no minimum standards for developing children's empathy, and no meaningful role for animals in the legal system meant to protect them.
Foundational Rather Than Competing Reform: An Accelerator for Social Justice
Family reforms precede rather than compete with other animal welfare initiatives, aligning animal rights with broader social justice movements instead of treating them as separate issues. This makes animal rights an accelerator toward social justice, not an off-ramp. Who we are fundamentally flows from the power relations established at birth and through development.
The human relationship with the nonhuman world presents an opportunity for fundamental change—regardless of whether funders appreciate how this focus highlights their own entitlements and liabilities. For example, ensuring women's reproductive rights helps reduce human population growth and environmental impact while simultaneously advancing human liberation.
Legal Framework Coherence: The Essential Foundation
Animal law that excludes family reforms cannot effectively protect animals because it fails at an existential level. Growth is responsible for factory farming, mass extinction, climate impacts on nonhumans, and the expanding pet industry. Legal theorists typically evaluate law's legitimacy based on its derivation from social sources and processes, particular values, and/or values specific to law itself.
All these criteria become problematic without accounting for how children enter the world and develop—and the fundamental power relations this creates on a spectrum of equitable to inequitable.
Democracy Over Consumerism: True Civic Engagement
While dietary reforms like veganism are valuable, teaching people that consumerism rather than citizenship is their primary means of empowerment dangerously undermines democratic participation. We must not replace democracies only with economies.
Democratic systems should be defined by how we enter society, develop, and eventually exercise influence over the rules governing all life. Would animal welfare have advanced more effectively if advocates had demanded birth equity as a means of collectively saving animals, rather than allowing wealthy individuals to profit from vegan consumer products?
Beyond Traditional Environmentalism: Redefining Human-Nature Relationships
Traditional environmentalism often functions as inadequate animal rights advocacy, treating the homes and habitats of nonhuman families and communities as human resources—an approach now devastating impoverished human communities worldwide. Some environmental and animal rights leaders have treated the nonhuman world as a resource rather than recognizing it as a space for mutual liberation to minimize even climate-related human deaths. Animal liberation is human liberation.
Certain effective altruism advocates focusing on wild animal suffering could be seen as attempting to evade climate reparations by discounting wild animals' lives. This strategy is fundamentally flawed, as these funders have benefited from legal systems whose legitimacy depends on the self-determination enabled by the nonhuman world—while externalizing deadly costs to accumulate wealth, personally benefitting from human and non-human suffering.
Immediate Action Through Re-entitlement: Justice Cannot Wait
Family reforms can re-entitle future children and nonhumans immediately. While incremental change and empirical research have value, those dying in the climate crisis need resources now. This requires treating creation as an allotment of property rights that considers all interests and enables immediate action. Animal law at many leading institutions has been framed by large law firm partners who defined the field in ways that protected wealth rather than liberated nonhumans or the impoverished children whose interests align with them.
The Fair Start Movement works to create a new long-term paradigm for animal rights as fundamental law—protecting the most vulnerable and rejecting might-makes-right principles. We cannot effectively protect animals without accounting for how the children enter the world. This idea shifts from asking how humans should treat nonhumans—an arrogant mindset that contributed to our climate crisis—to asking what our species must become for all beings to be free.
This approach recognizes that true freedom and self-determination can only come from nature's restoration, achieved through delayed parenting and entitled through birth and developmental equity funding inversely proportional to wealth. This represents the first and overriding human right, enabling each person to be relatively free from others' ecological and social influence—and thus capable of participating in true democracy.
Those who accumulated wealth through misplaced notions of freedom—freedom from environmental regulations, responsible parenting, and fair resource distribution—must now pay the true costs they externalized. These organizations and individuals owe climate reparations, including equitable family planning entitlements, as our primary obligation even before taxes. The right to a fair start in life comes first, for every single child entering the world, regardless of their geographical location, religion, skin color or legal status.
This process doesn't require violence because, unlike our current system, it is politically inclusive and constitutive. All rules should be fair, and the rule determining our creation must be the first rule. This contains an inescapable logic: If government truly derives from the governed, young women would have primary justification to obtain funds for life-saving, equitable family planning entitlements, in order to actually constitute legitimate nations.
These solutions are more effective than the top-down enforcement of illegitimate entitlements. Equity and the relative self-determination that flows from it requires an equal and influential share in one's democracy so that each can limit the influence - climatologically or through wealth, for example - others have over them. Each voice or share, if we are politically equal, offsets each other's share equally, relative to a concrete nonhuman baseline. This ensures optimal ranges from democratic communities to form and reform.
The transformation begins with high-profile individuals engaging in this public process of reorienting our first and basic obligation. Through this fundamental shift in how we approach human-animal relations, we can create lasting, meaningful change that benefits every living soul