Animal welfare has emerged as a pervasive concern in modern international law. The purpose of this study is to situate the international legal principle protecting the welfare of animals within the broader framework of international law. The study uses a constructivist model to develop a theory of the place of animal welfare in the international legal regime that has due regard for cultural differences and the diversity of international society. The historical antecedents for an obligation to protect animal welfare in various global cultures are considered. The argument posits an internationally recognized principle of humane treatment of animals based on a test of necessity, in accordance with which the infliction of suffering on animals can only be justified by balancing means against ends. It proposes that Canadian criminal law on animal cruelty, particularly as it relates to animals raised for food, is inconsistent with this internationally recognized principle.

Prior to the streetcar lines being electrified in the late 1800s, equines pulled the cars. The quadrupeds that pulled the horsecars in New Orleans, Louisiana, were area specific: New Orleans had mules, not horses. The mule in the South is typically associated with the rural South; however, in nineteenth century urban New Orleans the mule played an integral part in daily commerce and society. New Orleanians admiration for the animals turned into concern when the rigors of work became apparent to the public, as mules suffered from the abuses of drivers, the seedy practices of street railway companies, malnutrition, and exhaustion. As a direct result, the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was established and many New Orleanians took to defending the voiceless laborers. Animal rights, not the drive for more modernity, was the central factor to convince the city to electrify the street railway

What does it mean to be cruel to an animal? What does it mean for an animal to suffer? These are the questions embedded in the term "cruelty to animals," which has seemed, at first glance, a well defined term in modern America, in so far as it has been codified in anti-cruelty statutes. Cruelty to animals has been a disputed notion, though. What some groups call cruel, others call business, science, culture, worship, and art. Contests over the humane treatment of animals have therefore been contests over history, ideology, culture, and knowledge in which a variety of social actors-- animal scientists, cockfighters, filmmakers, FBI agents, members of Congress, members of PETA, and many, many others--try to decide which harms against animals and which forms of animal suffering are justifiable. Behaving Like Animals examines these contests in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, focusing on four practices that modern American animal advocates have labeled cruel: malicious animal abuse, cockfighting, intensive animal agriculture, and the harming of animals on film. These case studies broadly trace the contours of American attitudes toward human cruelty and animal suffering over the last century. They also trace the historical evolution of the ideas embedded in the term “cruelty to animals.” Cruelty to animals has been the structuring logic of animal advocacy for two centuries, and historians have followed its development through the nineteenth century as a constellation of ideas about human and animal natures, about cruelty and kindness, and about suffering and sentience—very old ideas rooted in western intellectual thought and given shape by nineteenth-century sentimental culture. Behaving Like Animals follows this historical and intellectual thread into the twenty-first century, and reveals how these old ideas adapted to modern and evolving regimes of knowledge, science, and law, as they became thickly knotted in America’s varied and transforming social, cultural, intellectual, political, and legal contexts. That process has had varied and far-reaching implications in modern American culture, structuring social relations among Americans while shaping understandings of the place of animals in American society. Behaving Like Animals tells this history.

This thesis examines the development of vivisection as a method of physiological research between 1875 and 1901 in Great Britain, by examining some of the arguments, discussions, and ideas put forth by physiologists for the utilisation of vivisection in their research. Because this study operates within the context of medical history, questions of legitimacy, scientific development, and professional image are lifted. The development of vivisection during this period took place with a larger shift in scientific practice playing out in the background, where experimentalism began overtaking the previously more analytical approach to medicine and the sciences. The First Royal Commission on Vivisection in 1875 marks the beginning of this study, and the discussions within allow for a more nuanced picture of the professional debates on the practice, where both proponents and sceptics at times found common ground. Technological and societal aspects were central to much of the argumentation for the further development of vivisection, with technology easing the practical aspects of the method, and the concept of the "gentleman" allowing British "vivisectors" to argue against charges of cruelty, pointing rather to continental schools of physiology as the culprits, whilst lifting the "humanity" behind animal experimentation in Great Britain. In conjunction with pointing out the importance of the method for the development of medical science, the Cruelty to Animals Act and the lobbying on behalf of the professional journals British Medical Journal and The Lancet helped legitimise the practice in Great Britain. The Act allowed vivisection under set circumstances, and the two journals served as megaphones for scientific development on behalf of vivisection, at times even openly criticising sceptical opinions. At the same time, some saw experimental research through vivisection as merely one aspect of medical practice. One which needed to gain foothold in order to help advance medical science for the larger benefit of all humanity.