Social Membership: Animal Law beyond the Property/Personhood Impasse

While animal law has been subject to frequent reform in Canada and abroad, the basic legal foundations of animal oppression are largely unchanged. There are many reasons for this impasse, but part of the explanation is that legal reforms are caught in what we might call the property/personhood dilemma. In most legal systems, domesticated animals are defined as property, and so long as this remains true, reforms are likely to be marginal and ineffective. However, the main alternative—to shift animals from the category of property to personhood—is politically unfeasible, particularly for the domesticated animals who are most intensively exploited in our society. In this paper, I explore a third option for legal reform, which is to include domesticated animals into…