ABA TIPS Animal Law Committee News

David Cassuto Not a lot of blogging from our hero for the next week or so as I am hosting my Pace Law School comparative environmental law class and we are travelling a lot (including to the Amazon).  However, good work is being done and you can read about some of it in the ABA [...]

CITES Folderol Continued

David Cassuto The banner times at the CITES Meeting continue.  No protection for sharks either.  Earlier in the week, delegates declined to protect several key species of coral.  And, of course, let’s not forget last week´s debacle with the bluefin tuna and the polar bear.  

Nonfiction Animal Writing Opportunity

David Cassuto   For all you writers and writers-soon to be:   Call for Submissions: Animals  For an upcoming issue, Creative Nonfiction is seeking new essays about the bonds—emotional, ethical, biological, physical, or otherwise—between humans and animals. We’re looking for stories that illustrate ways animals (wild and/or domestic) affect, enrich, or otherwise have an impact on [...]

Pondering Michael Vick & Grandma´s Turkey

David Cassuto From the Recommended Readings Desk:  This from Sherry Colb over at Dorf on Law – a very thoughtful essay furthering a discussion begun when Gary Francione lectured at Cornell Law School.  Among other queries, the piece explores the relative morality of dog-fighting vs. cooking a Thanksgiving turkey.  The name of the essay is ´Animal Rights, [...]

Injustice, Texas Style

Bridget Crawford   NPR reports here on the shooting of 51 buffaloes who wandered from one Texas ranch onto another.  NPR reporter Wade Goodwyn missed the irony in a statement by the owner of the ranch whence the buffaloes roamed: “Slaughtering animals, to me, and I think the state feels the same way — in fact [...]

Dangerous Dog Ordinances Can Be Vicious and Dangerous – Like People

Bruce Wagman Over the years I have been practicing I have probably handled a dozen cases in which I was hired by the owner-guardians of a dog who had bitten someone, whether that someone was a person or another dog or cat.  These cases seem to be getting more common these days, but that is [...]

RIP: Stewart Udall

David Cassuto Stewart Udall has died.  Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Kennedy & Johnson, congressman from Arizona, and architect of many the nation’s most powerful environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, Wilderness Act, and others, Udall was a visionary and a politician — a combination rarely seen then or since.  [...]

Money Talks When Animals and (Some) People Cannot

Bridget Crawford  The New York Times reported earlier this week  (here) on state legislation under consideration in three jurisdictions.  The proposed laws would allow courts to prohibit animal abusers from having pets in the future.  According to the NYT, 27 states now have similar laws.   Animal lawyers and law scholars long have acknowledged the connection [...]

(Another) Bad Week for Polar Bears and Tuna

David Cassuto It’s been quite a week over at the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).  Up for discussion was a ban on hunting polar bears and bluefin tuna.  The discussions yielded some predictably (and yet still astonishingly) shortsighted conclusions. The delegates rejected a ban on polar bear hunting because [...]

Survey Says: 100% Mercury Contaminated Fish

David Cassuto In case you were thinking of celebrating the efficacy of the Clean Air Act and/or the Clean Water Act, consider this: a recent study by the U.S. Geological Service revealed mercury contamination in 100% of the fish tested from 291 freshwater streams in the United States.  That is not a typo.  Every single [...]

Big Macs are Cheap and McNuggets are…

diet food?  Maybe it’s all the Portuguese I’m hearing but it feels like English has stopped making sense.  David Cassuto

Upcoming Critical Animal Studies Conference

 The 9th Annual Conference on Critical Animal Studies will take place on April 10th, 2010 at SUNY Cortland in Cortland, NY.  Get the lowdown here.

In Case You Were Wondering…

via h/t Prabhat Gautam

Endangered Sei Whale Sushi — You Just Have to Know Who to Ask

The Hump, a chic Japanese restaurant in Santa Monica, served sushi made from the flesh of the endangered sei whale to customers willing to fork over the appropriate dough.  Two patrons went to the restaurant with an undercover film crew and, after racking up a $600 tab, requested whale meat.  The chef served it up [...]

What We Talk About When We Talk About Industrial Agriculture & Climate Change

David Cassuto Santos was interesting.  First, who knew there was a significant mountain range between Rio & Sao Paulo?  Even having flown this route many times, I was surprised by the size and extent of the range which we drove over. My talk on biofuels, industrial agriculture and climate change was well-received in an odd [...]

Biofuels, Climate Change & Agriculture

David Cassuto Our hero is off to Santos, south of Sao Paulo, to participate in a congress on biofuels.  I will speak about the tangled relationship between biofuels, climate change and factory-farming.  I’m interested to see the reactions.

Giving Words Meaning (or Taking It Away)

David Cassuto So here’s a new linguistic turn: putting words in quotes to indicate uncertainty as to accuracy (as opposed to putting words in quotes to indicate irony or sarcasm).  Contrast, for example, It was a ‘good’ idea for California State Senator Roy Ashburn, a closeted gay man with a ferociously anti-gay agenda to drive [...]

Thinking About Animal Law

Bruce Wagman Lately, I have been thinking about animal law almost constantly.  That has been the case for some time actually.  I’ve had the honor of being involved in the field for about eighteen years at some level, and pretty much had a full time animal law practice for the last five years.  I’ve been [...]

Still Thinking About Dogs (and Cats Too)

Bruce Wagman There’s so many issues that come up with dogs that I am still thinking about them.  And much of this applies to cats as well.  Let me be clear to start that I live with three dogs, five cats and one wife, and it’s the rare event that I get to sleep on [...]

Circus Blowback

David Cassuto The good folks at Ringling Bros. (aka Feld Entertainment Inc.) have taken some time out from bullhooking elephants to file a RICO suit against HSUS and the other plaintiffs in the recent lawsuit about elephant mistreatment and the Endangered Species Act.  The gravamen of the suit lies in the claim that the plaintiffs [...]

Thinking About Dogs

Bruce Wagman I have had dogs on my mind lately.  They are the main players in many of my (and many animal lawyers’) cases, and they are the species I get the most calls about.  This week I had a call about a sheep owner shooting a roaming dog, with the caller wondering about the [...]

Breeding Ignorance

David Cassuto Wherever you go, there it is.  Or something like that.  Settling into Rio means (for me, anyway) drinking my bodyweight in tropical juices and running on the beach.  It also means working really hard on my Portuguese, which involves spending a lot of time with the dictionary and the newspaper.  Of course, some [...]

Thinking About Pigs

Bruce Wagman Pigs have been on my mind a lot lately.  Years ago I met several of them at the Farm Sanctuary home in Orland, California, and while I already had appreciated their complex personalities and emotional lives, getting to spend time with them changed the knowledge to revelation.  We sat on a riverbank with [...]

Thinking About Elephants

Bruce Wagman I have been thinking about elephants.  The recent disappointing judgment in the hard-fought Ringling Brothers case is really only one reason.  I’ve been involved in a few nonlitigation matters trying to help make life better for elephants in zoos in different states, have visited the elephants at PAWS in California, and have spent [...]

Thinking About Wild Horses

Bruce Wagman Lately I have been thinking about wild horses.  I discovered the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, 16 U.S.C. §§ 1331-1340 (Wild Horses Act), when I was collecting materials for the first animal law class at Hastings College of the Law in 1996.  Like several laws written for animals, on its face it [...]

Thinking About Chimpanzees

Bruce Wagman Lately I have been thinking about chimpanzees.  I have been fascinated by them since one spit on me as a child, and then overwhelmed by my first visit to Gombe National Park in the months before I began practicing law, when I saw their natural lives, as perfect as anything I could have [...]