Fernando Araújo, Ph.D, is a professor of law at the University of Lisbon Faculty of Law, where he teaches Law and Economics, Philosophy of Law, and Bioethics. He is the author of the first Portuguese book on animal rights. We recently asked Professor Araujo the questions below. If you have questions of your own, please select the 'new topic' heading in this forum and Professor Araujo will respond as soon as possible this month.

Our Interview with Fernando Araujo

1.   How did you become involved in the field of animal rights law?
I became involved through my studies in Bioethics. In 1999 I had published a book on the subject and somehow I felt then that I had to go a little bit further – some topics were challenging, others seemed to be implied, on a deeper level, by the issues I had just studied. In Bioethics we are dealing in matters of life and death, the same problems facing all living creatures, not just humans. Is there something specifically human in the way our bodies let us live and make us suffer and die? Then I read Peter Singer and Steven Wise, one thing led to another, and I ended up writing another book, this time a philosophical overview of the main topics of animal welfare, A Hora dos Direitos dos Animais (roughly, (Now's) The Time for Animal Rights). Only after that did I have any contact, first with the Portuguese movements for Animal Welfare and Animal Rights, and then with the international scholars on these topics.

2. What are some of the big issues for animal protection lawyers in Portugal?
I would separate two levels:
a) the visible issues, those with cultural / symbolic impact, where any solution would reach the media and could therefore have an impact on the general attitudes towards the treatment of non-humans: bullfights, circuses, pigeon shooting, hunting. The numbers of non-humans involved may not be very significant, but the gains in pedagogical terms could be (and sometimes have been) huge.
b) the invisible, or let's say the less visible, issues, those having an impact on the day-to-day suffering of large numbers of non-humans: the poultry, meat, cosmetics and fur trades, farming and agribusiness, scientific research. On those issues we cannot rely on the support of the media and public opinion, we have a much longer road to travel, relying much more on the administration, the courts, the legislators.

3.    Do you think that the formation of the EU has affected the status of farm animals in your country?
In purely legal terms, the EU has had a very positive impact, without a doubt. However, as any lawyer anywhere must know, there is a wide gap between the statutes, the black-letter law, and compliance with those statutes and directives.
In my view, not much remains to be done in terms of animal law at the EU level: the legal frame is very comprehensive and very sophisticated (and not only on the issue of farm animals). My opinion – which is not shared by everyone – is that, on the contrary, there is even a danger of excess legislation and over-sophistication, a problem not only in itself but also in that it can distract the legal system from reaching its more immediate goals, i.e., creating a true law-in-action, a routine of compliance with those statutes.

4. You taught animal law at the University of Lisbon in 2004. What were some of the recurring questions that were raised by your students? Do you plan to teach the course again?
The recurring questions all pointed in the same direction: why is there such a low level of effective protection of the interests of non-humans, if we have such excellent laws? The problem is obviously not exclusive of the area of Animal Law, so the answer must be reached elsewhere.

Let's hope I'll find a critical mass of students in the near future – the Faculty is still a little suspicious of Animal Law as an academic subject.

5. Do you view animal protection as a social justice movement? If so, what are some of the main lessons that advocates for animals can draw from those movements?
Of course I do. At least since Immanuel Kant, and his idea that our protection of non-humans should be based on indirect duties towards our fellow humans, that animal protection has been explicitly taken to be a social justice movement. On the other hand, while I am not a materialist or determinist, I must concede that part of my optimism lies in the hope that, apart from the efforts of activists, the economic progress of societies will translate into an expansion of the demand for many social goods, among them a more humane treatment of all animals – including ourselves.

6. To what extent do you think animals can be protected (e.g. through litigation or legislation) within a system that classifies them as property?
In my opinion, property is not a serious obstacle to the protection of non-humans, and we must be cautious here. Many Civil Law countries have modified their Civil Codes in order to put an end to that classification of non-humans as property, and Portugal is also a candidate to that reform (it is foreseeable in the near future), but in my view that move is more important in the symbolic and pedagogical level than in practical terms: it reminds us all of the emancipation of slaves, obviously, but we must not lose sight of the kind of protection that benefits some non-humans (some pets, some farm animals) and is associated with property. I fear that a sudden liberation of all those non-humans would only result in more suffering, in the sudden multiplication of stray and defenceless animals.

Law is a human convention – no law of nature forbids our giving full legal standing to living property, recognizing its interests, giving them legal weapons against the conflicting interests of their owners.

7. Do you have any words of wisdom to share with Australia's budding animal lawyers?
The very idea of Animal Law seems, at times, quite bizarre: after all, Law is a human creation, a social game to be played exclusively by humans. But the moment we realize not only that there are marginal cases among humans (people unable to play the game by themselves, being permanently incapacitated), but also that we all are, at certain moments in our lives, dependent rational animals – then we can realize that the fight for animal rights is also a fight for a new and improved understanding of human rights, one that aims at a more full and permanent eradication of suffering in all species, including our own.

Animal lawyers should contribute to making people aware that the fight for animal rights is, therefore, the more sophisticated (and the more sustainable) form of anthropocentrism. Human rights can drown in useless wordplay if they do not address, and try to solve, the problem of our own (animal) suffering. In more philosophical terms, Law should avoid the hubris of ignoring our place in nature, in the continuum of species.