The Challenges of Global Animal Law

Abstract

Animals play a formidable role in human affairs across a wide range of areas including, but not limited to, religion, food, governance, commercial activity and culture. Law being a tool to create order, it becomes necessary that the law regulates the many facets of humananimal interaction. The prominence of this role explains various attempts at regulating these activities both at the domestic and the international level.

Zooming in on the international plane, there have been many attempts at regulating animal activity both for economic purposes, disease control and in a limited sense, welfare. As global animal law continues to advance at a faster rate, it is pertinent to smoothen out edges and analyze the possibilities in international law for progressive development. The situation is further worsened by the discrepancies that already exist between the global south and the global north. These discrepancies are not exclusive to animal protection but also arise in other sociolegal headways.

This paper seeks to analyze the challenges of global animal law. The analysis shows that existing structures, like that of the African Union through its agencies, offer pathways of surmounting these challenges by bringing many states under the same normative force concurrently and seamlessly. To make progress on the advancement of animal law internationally, a harmonious approach is needed, and that approach cannot be achieved until the international community retreats and considers diverse perspectives and cultural patterns that might stand in the way of a clear understanding of what is at stake, and what is to be achieved.