Document Type

Article

Disciplines

International Law

Abstract

The history of multilateral treaties for the protection of animals can be traced back to the turn of the century and beyond.1 Early examples include the 1900 Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa2 and the 1902 Convention to Protect Birds Useful to Agriculture.' These particular conventions, however, no longer can be considered especially enlightened. First, they were concerned predominantly with direct and immediate human interests rather than motivated by any more elevated or altruistic ideals." Second, they encouraged the destruction of certain creatures that were judged harmful to those interests. These included, in the former case, lions, leopards, crocodiles and poisonous snakes and, in the latter, eagles, falcons, herons and pelicans. Not surprisingly, these treaties, in regard to their particular concerns, effectively have been superseded by later instruments and, more generally, supplemented by a substantial array of new international agreements aimed at protecting wild animals and their habitats throughout the world. 5 The broad acceptance of these new agreements demonstrates a growing recognition by the international community of the importance of this whole question.

The significant feature of this substantial body of international legislation, however, is that the protection which it extends to animals is accorded to them as representatives of a species and primarily on account of the rare, threatened or endangered state of the species. It is not based upon the notion that animals are individual living creatures worthy of respect and consideration in their own right. The vast amount of cruelty and unnecessary suffering inflicted upon common or domestic animals ex hypothesi falls outside its scope. Yet this, it might be argued, is equally a matter which demands international regulation.

Animal welfare on the one hand and the protection of animal species as an aspect of environmental conservation on the other undoubtedly are distinct matters. Those who hunt or trap animals for sport or financial gain are sometimes keen conservationists, but are seldom moved by any consideration of animal welfare. Yet at the same time, the two questions are closely related. Many methods of hunting or trapping wild animals which are opposed by the animal welfare lobby on account of their appalling cruelty also are regarded as questionable by conservationists on account of their indiscriminate nature and hence the threat they may pose to the survival of endangered species. Similarly, the appalling mortality rates which are such a pervasive feature of the transportation of wild animals for use in exhibitions, experimentation or the pet trade threaten, in time, to pose a conservation problem. At a more fundamental, philosophical level, it seems doubtful whether public opinion ever can be educated fully and successfully to the desirability of conservation of species unless it first embraces respect for, and recognition of, the legitimate interests of non-human lifeforms generally. This paper, therefore, considers the extent to which individual animal interests currently are protected under international law and the need to extend and develop that protection.

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