Q&A: LEAP Student Fellow Laura Street Cole Analyzes Intersection of Environmental Justice and Animal Rights
Laura Street Cole is a Master of Arts in Religion candidate at Yale Divinity School and a student fellow with the Law, Environment & Animals Program at Yale Law School. She is interested on understanding animal rights within moral and ethical frameworks. Her recent article in the Colorado Environmental Law Journal, “Towards Multispecies Environmental Justice,” articulates a holistic view of justice. In the paper, this view encompasses animal rights, environmental justice, workers’ rights, public health, and climate justice by emphasizing the explicit link between environmental justice and farmed animals.
Street Cole discusses her paper here, responding to questions from LEAP Program & Litigation Fellow Naomi Jennings.
Your paper, “Towards Multispecies Environmental Justice,” stands at the intersection of environmental justice, animal rights, sentience, and law. How did you become interested in these topics?
It all started with a book club. A couple years ago, we read Gary Francione’s Animals as Persons, an essay collection arguing against the exploitation of animals by morally recognizing them as persons and not property. All of us — and it’s a small book club with just my husband, a close friend, and myself — became vegan after reading this book. Our discussions also ignited my passion for multispecies justice, which I have had the chance to nurture through my graduate coursework and my role as a volunteer at an animal sanctuary.
What are some of the harms to humans and non-human animals caused by animal agriculture?
What some people might not realize about industrial animal agriculture is that humans suffer, too. People who work inside Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), often incarcerated people or undocumented immigrants with few employment options, experience both physical and psychological trauma from processing the animals that become food. Rural communities surrounding CAFOs experience a wide variety of health harms — respiratory illnesses from fumes and waterborne illnesses from animal manure — from the air and water pollution emitted from these facilities. Certain aspects of animal agriculture also pose a public health threat due to the strong link between processed meats and cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes.
Farmed animals, on the other hand, live in conditions of severe torture and neglect for the duration of their short lives. Cows, pigs, and chickens have been genetically manipulated to maximize the production of milk, muscle mass, or eggs, often leading to chronic pain and ailments that go untreated. Mutilations such as tail-docking and beak-cutting routinely occur without pain relief. These highly social beings are forced to live in a perpetual state of loneliness, boredom, and fear, resulting in maladaptive behaviors like aggression towards other animals. All these animals go to slaughter while they’re still very young, only being allowed to live a small fraction of their natural lifespans. Even dairy cows and egg-laying chickens are slaughtered once their output is deemed unproductive to the industry. And the practice of “stunning” animals, designed to make death less painful, often fails. These harms are just the tip of the iceberg.
You discuss theories by scholars such as Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and Angela Fernandez, and ultimately argue that “[t]he best vision that links the normative rights of farmed animals to environmental justice falls somewhere between [Gary] Francione’s argument for personhood and [Maneesha] Deckha’s argument for beingness.” What does it look like to link animal rights to environmental justice under this vision?
The most important step is to reject animals’ property status and to recognize their existence as sentient beings. The difficulty lies in selecting the framework that most effectively organizes animal rights — and when I say rights, I am mostly referring to the right to continue existing and the right not to be used as a commodity toward human ends. The appeal of personhood is its legibility in existing legal systems, creating an immediate designation that can guarantee equal protection and due process. But personhood unfortunately relies on an anthropocentric legal ontology that does not fully recognize the uniqueness of each animal and the range of duties we might owe across species.
I am drawn to Maneesha Deckha’s argument that we should legally recognize animals for their “beingness,” which allows a more nuanced legal and ethical approach than the property-personhood binary allows. Her argument also carves a workaround for another issue with the pursuit of personhood for nonhuman animals: its focus on primates and other animals who bear the most similarities to humans, at the expense of the animals that are least like humans.
In my view, advocacy efforts should begin by working within the terms of personhood while aiming towards a world in which nonhuman animals’ beingness can be considered a realistic starting point to advance animal rights. This emphasis is a partial concession, because I think the answer lies beyond personhood, but I don’t think we will get far with beingness right now. In the United States at least, even efforts to grant personhood status to certain nonhuman animals have failed. Yet we should not lose sight of the possibilities of relating to nonhuman animals in all kinds of ways: not only should we refrain from harming them by making them our property, but we should also focus on setting the conditions for their flourishing.
It is also critical to put these efforts in the greater context of environmental justice. Advocacy on behalf of animals should not mean that we are focusing on humans less. Environmental justice should encompass everyone affected by the harms of animal agriculture.
Your paper has a serious interest in practical application of these ideas. For example, you favor Deckha’s view over Fernandez’s because Fernandez’s proposed sliding scale of quasi-personhood “risks not sliding at all,” allowing animals to remain property in practice. However, I read your paper to also be concerned with assigning correct moral weight to sentience. Is your paper making a normative argument, a practical argument, or both, and is there any tension between these concerns?
My paper’s argument balances the normative with the practical. On the normative side, I did not hold back on the ambition of what I think environmental justice should look like. I did not want to shrink this world-building project because of the practical constraints currently in place. Central to this normative aim is to understand the moral significance of animal sentience and the gravity of unnecessarily harming sentient beings. I think there are a lot of people who would agree that animals are sentient, but most have not yet taken the important step of understanding what that really means in terms of responding to the systems that routinely disregard animals’ conscious experiences of pain. Yet I also believe in applying these ideas practically by recognizing animal sentience legally, while also using this recognition as a tool toward the vision of environmental justice I describe.
The conclusion of my paper takes an even more practical turn, outlining some of the necessary legal, social, and economic steps towards an integrated framing of environmental justice that includes nonhuman animals. Despite the boldness of my argument, I want the first practical steps — such as the opportunity for as many people as possible to become vegan — to feel accessible.
This said, there is a significant gap between what I want the legal recognition of animal sentience to be and what it has accomplished so far. I see this gap as an ongoing and unfortunate tension. For example, the state of Oregon has recognized animal sentience since 2013, but animals have never won in court because of this. I want the legal recognition of animal sentience to also recognize farmed animals as unique beings with whom we can relate in many ways, including by refusing to raise them for food and other consumer goods. This has not yet been the case — not even close — so it is difficult to make such an ambitious normative argument when the practical constraints lag far behind. We are so distant from a world in which sentience recognition represents anything more than a weak signal, but I believe this signal could strengthen if we better understand what is truly at stake with animal sentience.
What would it look like to fully incorporate animal sentience into the law? Is there a particular case, law, or approach you find particularly compelling?
I would say animal sentience would be successfully incorporated into the law if two things are true. The first is that animals become more than property. For example, in 2016, an Argentinian court granted Cécilia the chimpanzee’s writ of habeas corpus and declared her a nonhuman legal person, prompting her relocation from captivity to an animal sanctuary. I love this case because it connects sentience recognition to personhood, generating a meaningful positive outcome for a nonhuman animal. However, as I mentioned, part of the trickiness with the personhood designation is that it automatically sets up a comparison between animal and human rights, which might make it easier to advance the rights of nonhuman primates but not farmed animals. So, while I am thrilled that Cécilia was released from captivity, I acknowledge these drawbacks of working within the property-personhood binary.
This leads me to the second point: animal sentience would be successfully incorporated into the law if its positive effects extended not just to “humanlike” animals, but also to all animals, not least of whom are the farmed animals who suffer at a truly horrifying scale. The black box of industrial animal agriculture, protected by all kinds of laws and regulations, will be very difficult to break down. But I don’t think animal sentience will be completely incorporated into the law until the animal agricultural system itself crumbles.
Your framework sketches out a new framework with many dimensions: legal, social, economic, and an integrated framing of justice. For those of us with an interest in animal rights, where should we start?
Becoming vegan is the best place to start! To me, veganism is not just a personal choice but an act of protest. By refusing the animal products in food, clothing, and household items, we can meaningfully take a stand against animal agriculture’s intersecting harms towards animals, humans, and the climate at large. Veganism proclaims a moral recognition of animal sentience, and it produces the economic consequence of decreasing demand for animal products, even by a little bit. And it often carries immediate social consequences, encouraging uncomfortable but essential conversations with people who are open to learning about the destructive realities of our food system.
Are you hopeful about the future of animal rights?
It will be a long road ahead, but I am hopeful. It is easy to be depressed about the state of animal advocacy now, but it is equally important to recognize the wonderful efforts taking place. I am encouraged by the persistent work of both individuals and organizations devoted to advancing the cause of animals, both in spaces explicitly dedicated to animal advocacy and those adjacent to it. I am also hopeful that more people — both interpersonally and in our legal system — will become receptive listeners to the arguments in defense of animals, especially ones that illuminate a broader system of harm to humans and the climate at large. I am hopeful despite all the practical reasons I should not be, but I think the animal rights movement needs precisely this type of hope.
