Should Environmental Law Learn from Animal Law? Compassion as a Guiding Principle for International Environmental Law Instead of Sustainable Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Environmental law and animal law share many common elements and goals, but also exhibit many fundamental differences. Generally, conversations about the two are primarily concerned with what animal law can learn from environmental law. However, if one accepts the argument that environmental law needs to be, at the very least, reformed in order to afford real protection to the environment, or even revolutionized, then perhaps environmental law can also learn from animal law. What would the main lesson be? I argue that a turn to compassion, rather than sustainable development, as a guiding principle for international environmental law and its related scholarly discourse could be one of the main contributions offered by animal law. To illustrate this argument, I first present ecofeminist animal theory’s critique of the environmental movement. I expose the problematic nature of the concept of “sustainable development”, from an ecofeminist standpoint. I then use ecofeminist animal theorist Deane Curtin’s compassionate practice framework to develop the idea that another guiding principle for international environmental law must be adopted, drawing also on other contributions from ecofeminist animal theorists. Finally, I demonstrate how a compassionate guiding principle is already present in different animal law instruments, using examples of existing international legal norms on animal welfare, and insisting on the theme of the recognition of non-human animals as relational individuals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".