Beingness

Welcome to Courts of the Living. Today we have with us Manisha Decah, Professor and Langstown Chair in Law at the University of Victoria. Professor Decah's research interests include animal legal studies and critical animal studies, feminist animal care theory and feminist analysis of law amongst other areas. And her manuscript, Animals as Legal Beings, has been published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021. She also serves as the Academic Director of the Animals and Society Research Initiative and amongst her other outputs, Professor Decah directed the Open Access Documentary series, A Deeper Kindness, which educates viewers about why animals need much more protection in the law. Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Decah. Thank you so much, sir, that's such a pleasure and honor to be invited. Thank you. Can you share a bit about how you got started in this field, what brought you to studying animals from a legal perspective and really grew as a critical animal scholar? Yes, well, I think a fair like many people, it was like a family relational connection. I was a teenager in high school and my elder brother had gone off to university two years ahead of me and then came home with some animal rights literature, you know, leaflets and the sword, I remember, and I read one of them and was just so affected, immediately it was a story I recall correctly about a mother and child's family being separated from transport on route to slaughter. And yeah, so my family did not grow up vegetarian, although, you know, it wasn't a big element to eat animals, but yes, so I immediately became vegetarian at least at that point and then wanted to, you know, learn more about this and think about it more. So when I entered university, a little later in my undergrad years at MacKill in Montreal, I was able to pursue that through kind of my essays and in several courses, although no one course at that time focused on animals at all. So a lot through my feminist philosophy and theory courses. And then I always wanted to go to law school since also being influenced as a teenager and just be an academic. And I always kept this interest what I learned a lot about in my undergrad years at that time in the early 1990s was a lot of feminist theory, post-colonial theory, just the sense and mood of deconstruction, you know, taking naturalized boundaries like men, women, culture and nature and deconstructing them. And so I was motivated to think about that beyond the human boundary and pursue that again and where I could in my own writing for classes. And then in law school it was a little bit harder because the curriculum was more structured in the first year, but in uppiers I was able to do that. And then with encouragement from my professors at the University of Toronto, law school, I pursued graduate studies and at this was the feature of my job talk as well. And just also my abiding interest in the field. Thank you for sharing that, I can imagine also because I think from my very limited experience at law school, while animal law was a course, it was not really taught from a critical animal perspective, critical animal legal perspective or even feminist perspectives. It was really just on the basis of what specific provisions existed in legislations. And the perspective of animals themselves was really a minor key in a discourse which was dominated by a very human centered approach. So I can imagine, because I think critical animal scholarship is also quite moving, many of the writers, including yourself right in powerful ways. So I can imagine that to be a very pivotal moment. You note in your book and in your writings that animal law cannot be separated from his chase of colonialism and race, can you elaborate on how colonial legal systems shape the way animals are imagined in law and why decolonial approaches are essential to thinking about multi species justice? Yes, certainly. So if you think about my home context and Canada, we, you know, now's in law school and certainly up until, I would say, the last five to 10 years, we are taught that Canada is a bidural nation with the histories and colonization that we have, but of course, nobody can call it, called it really colonization. So we have the, at that time, we have the British colonial system, which is a common law in most of the country. And we also have the French civilian code in Quebec. And these systems, which have global eyes because of global histories, treat animals in a certain way, which is to say they treat animals as objects or as property in terms of the legal classification. So the common law system is the one I know are the best of us speak more about this. One of obviously is also the one that is in Indian other countries. When you have a system of animals as property that's obviously based on a cultural idea of what animals are and who animals are. And although Western traditions themselves are just a great diversity, you have an ascendant idea, really strengthened from the light and period onward that animals are resources for humans to use. And the legal idea dates back to Roman times as well, but it really gets hardened socially and then that reinforces decal judgments in all types of cases that animals are just than objects to which no rights attach. So there's no legal subjectivity for animals, even as we have for over 200 years something called inter-coolty legislation, which itself I have as I have argued is we can make sure it is a colonial influence piece of legislation. So I can say more about that in a moment, but let's contrast how animals could be imagined otherwise, i.e. other than as being as objects and then legally classified as property. And most for example, could be imagined as family, we could be imagined as part of an ecosystem element, and also as part of family that way. Animals could be imagined as many spiritual religious traditions too as being part of a religious network, a spiritual network. So animals could be imagined as friends. All of these options are different ways of thinking about animals as fellow planetary beings, and that could be another trope for them as a fellow or sister planetary being. All of this is quite different from saying animals are property, like any other type of object. So what is available now in all countries that have a legal system influenced by the British common law or the French sugar code is this classification. And there are other legal systems, for example, Triad or Canada, what we now recognize as part of our legal tradition, indigenous legal orders, so Canada is now more and more understood and certainly we teach this to law school and amongst the legal community that are well passed law school and practicing or judging. The Canada is a multicultural order, composed of not just two colonial legal orders but multiple. So here you will have a different imagination of animals. Of course, given the global realities, these systems do intermingle quite a bit and certainly open up. Every country, animals occupy a property status in law that affects what happens to them in the industries in which they're ensnared. So I don't want to suggest that it's a rosy picture for animals really anywhere, but the dominant legal orders in the world are at least the common sense of a law and that property conceptualization came from Western philosophy that increasingly suggested animals are more machine like war atomic. like then more people like or more as we think of living beings. So then this colonial classification infuses a contemporary reality and we can even see it then in laws that are ostensibly there to protect animals. So let me now go back to the enduquility laws I was mentioning. So can what are enduquility laws? Enduquility laws are basically laws that say we must be kind to animals by not inflicting unnecessary suffering on them. So that's like the gist of these laws. They've been around for more than 200 years starting in England and we can understand even the histories of the British Empire as affecting the genesis of these laws. As I've argued, one of the precipitators, let me just back up, you have to think about how the laws were argued for, were promoted, right? What was happening? People were seeing on the streets of London and elsewhere in England, the horrible treatment that animals were working, we're receiving into animals in general. And this started to offend different sensibilities and that got articulated as a class-based issue saying, you know, we need to civilize the lower classes in England to treat animals better. And that was also kind of an argument that became integrated or became influenced by the colonial aspirations at that time that the existence and augmenting of empire, because the argument was that we, you know, we can't very well call elsewhere and tell people what to do and how to live and to kind of spread the civilizing mission. If we ourselves at home acting in civilized ways. So it's a very colonial discourse and anti-culture legislation, of course, was taken forward by animal advocates who were really concerned about animals, but of course, when you argue for a law, you have to bring forth arguments that are going to persuade their wider community who may not have those same sensibilities. Right in the civilizational rationales, were influential, given the politics and that were so deeply embedded at that time. And so antiquity laws come forward and they're understood as part of a civilizing mission, not just in England, but elsewhere, because antiquity laws were introduced also in the colonies. And this is not to say that antiquity laws were wrong and that we shouldn't have them, but at the same time, it's to notice how the colonial embassies for these laws also can be seen in the scope of these laws. Now, what do these laws do and what do they do today? They just tell us there should be no unnecessary suffering. So legally, that term unnecessary does a lot of work because then how do we know what is necessary and what's not? Well, that's going to largely be left up to prosecutorial discretion as to when to consider something as being unkind to animals and coming under the purview of an antiquity piece of legislation. And then if it ever gets into court, which is where you would have a judge in having to interpret this word unnecessary, this object of unnecessary. Through a scholarship that has looked at the legal and judicial treatment of antiquity laws, you probably the most influential work here, early work was Gary Francione's work in his 1995 book and most probably the law looking at all 50 jurisdictions in the United States, which have state criminal codes that house antiquity legislation as well. You have a picture where you can see the antiquity legislation was always meant to target kind of the culturally aberrant behavior, not the standard industry practices. And I've done a similar investigation at the federal level in Canada, and I've made the same argument also in my book, Animals and Sequel Beings, that we never think of normalized practices as cruel as unkind. We rationalize those economically, or they're just so entrenched, we just don't even put, you know, like agricultural industries or animal research in the same conversation and the same mental space as intercultural legislation because we just think those are important and necessary and good and perhaps even benign even though we may be aware of, especially for animal agriculture, all the negative externalities. So, antiquity legislation is informed by kind of colonial status of animals as property. We have some intervention trying to see the sentience of animals and be kind to animals yet that idea is also informed by colonial imaginations of animals as first and foremost property. And then also this idea of civilization, which kind of, you know, melts together to produce a piece of legislation that's interpreted in a very narrow way. And even today, at narrowness is there, we know all types of practices on animals that are not seen as cruel and never questioned legally as being unnecessary. Even though, you know, scientifically, we know it's not necessary to keep animals and have an animal agricultural system based on them to feed humans. But and we know about the, you know, the horrible practices that go on and incredible, just, you know, unfathomable suffering for animals yet that all continues as business practice. And when you look at these legislation, these types of legislation often within the statute itself, the words themselves say normal business practices are not meant to be affected by this antiquity legislation or, as I've said, the legislation, it may not say that explicitly, but then it's just implicitly interpreted that way. So when we think of histories of colonial ism and histories of phrase, we see how they come into something as specific as antiquity legislation. And then we can even note the few instances where this legislation isn't forced in the contemporary era as scholars have argued and myself I've built on that word. What happens is that the legislation is enforced against practices that the majority finds offensive. Even if the level of suffering is equivalent to a majority practice as in industrial farming. So famous cases are the one in the United States where kind of the ritual sacrifice of a minoritized racialized religious side was happening on the sidewalk, quite in full public view. And you have municipalities trying to stamp that out. Of course, what is happening is horrible. And I'm not suggesting that it's anyway ethical or fine. But the poigness is the hypocrisy of the antiquity legislation is that it doesn't then get extended to equally horrible majority in practices. So if we analyze antiquity, we see that it as this type of differential enforcement. We can also think of another era where people feel, okay, like animals are being protected, like what is known as endangered species legislation. And so this is at the species level, not at the individual animal level, but we feel like, okay, this is legislation that's trying to protect species from extinction and conserve them and that's for animals. But again, if you look at the legislative rationales and even if in the preambulatory texts, like the preambles, like the opening statements of these legal statutes where legislatures can talk about what they hope this statue will do in the values animating a lot, you will very quickly see that it's statements about, you know, it's kind of the human right of future generations to enjoy animals and conservation of animals today is important for, you know, human knowledge and biodiversity tomorrow, not really for the animals safe, but for humans. And again, as animal studies post-human scholars have looked at, and you know, what we call wildlife, which is a legal designation in the law, considerably tracks on to our understandings of nature versus non-nature. So the concept of nature, we can see as a colonial concept related to kind of the spread of empire, how we think about who are naturalized beings and who aren't, which. animals, we think are worthy of protection in the law. Our views on specific species is very much influenced by cultural ideas. So if we relate positively to whales, for example, and we don't relate positively to wolves, we can see analysis by scholars suggesting that that tracks our ideas about gender, how we think about the tuteness or friendliness or goodness of animals, very much tied to cultural suppositions about them. So all of that comes from like mindsets that are informed by who animals are, what they represent. And in jurisdictions, where enlightenment thinking becomes pronounced culturally and is given kind of form in laws, it is hard to escape this idea that animals are subordinate to us, that animals are inferior, even as we might try to be kind to them and help them and think of them as megafauna, which command our respect. The laws we have don't ever center animals, they're always coming from an anthropocentric mindset. Thank you so much. Yeah, I think in most of our legal systems, also in our previous conversations in this podcast, when I speak to people from different countries in the Shepard-Sweik region, we see a similar provision because of our colonial heritage, the provision that you spoke about in prevention of cruelty, legislations, about, you know, we cannot inflict unnecessary suffering, but it leaves a gap of what is deemed necessary. Moreover, what you said about the type of animal that we regard with respect, depending on the charisma that we are caught in them, because there are so many more animals and more than human lives that we discard as pests and vermin and there's very little care afforded to how we treat them. And it doesn't really raise eyebrows, it's not in the public discourse beyond the fact that they need to be eradicated. But I also realized that while this legal system continues to function by entrenching anthropocentric hierarchies, I see some cracks. I see that your work pushes us towards recognizing animals as legal beings. Can you explain what this shift might entail and why it matters for justice? Yeah, certainly. So in this book, I argue against personhood for animals. And when we think of why am advocates are desirous of personhood, we can easily understand that from what I just said about what's wrong with property, because when we're classified as property, we are objectified and commodified and made available to be used through the rights of legal persons. And so we can understand, I mean, some scholars are argue that even as property animals all some rights, but even those who believe that the meaning of rights there doesn't really conform to what we think of as rights, which are fundamental rights, what's called, it's called fundamental rights or thick rights, meaning those rights that protect us from other people using our body against our will or killing us obviously against our will. And so I argue against personhood, not because I don't want animals to have that type of fundamental rights or protections. Of course, I do. But my argument informed by my background in critical theories and knowledge of them, especially feminist theory, feminist animal studies, also known as eco-feminist theory, is that personhood is likely not going to be protective for all animals as we would hope. So if we understand personhood as being the shield against instrumental treatment that enables the staggering kind of production of animals for human use and the staggering levels of harm and killing, we can still observe that personhood when it's understood in the law. Yes, it is meant to be fundamental legal rights, but when we conceptualize a person, we are typically conceptualizing a human being. Even us for centuries non-humans, one type of non-human has enjoyed or a few types of non-humans rather have enjoyed the status of person. So we can think of corporations and ships that centuries ago were treated in the common law's legal persons, and that also has the relationship to empire building and industrialization to make a facility business and to facilitate going to other countries on ships. The common law system is one that operates by legal president. Judges today, if they're asked for specific legal remedy, they're supposed to look at what other judges have said in the past, even in the very distant past, and decide accordingly, not do something that's a bold difference. So when animal advocates come to court asking for personhood, they're relying a lot on the corporate personhood cases, that suggests that non-humans can be persons, and they're also making arguments about, well, and we also know from moral philosophy that animals deserve personhood because they can pass, you know, they have language, they have a certain level of cognitive capacity, they can pass a married test, and so all of this kind of goes into a mix in front of a court, or maybe even legislative submissions, asking for personhood for animals, and usually the animals are issue are ones that are culturally favored. The person receiving that legal ask, a judge or a politician with voting power, can relate to in terms of, yeah, you know, this animal can, it does have human like qualities in terms of intelligence or certain levels of intelligence, and I can relate through it favorably to them. So usually that means it's the kind of non-humid primates that are the subject of this type of litigation or the elephants or the cetaceans. Okay, so now we have to think, how do those arguments play out for the other animals? Even as much as we care about kind of the suffering of the humanized animals like elephants or cows or guerrillas, chimpanzees, and the horrible things they experience in captivity and why animal advocates would want to free them from that, we can ask our, is personhood going to be, you know, viable and something that will actually reach, let's say, the farmed animals, the ant, the chickens, right, that are, or even the fish, the animals that are just produced or killed in such astonishing numbers globally, right, or the pigs or, right, even the cows in kind of countries outside of India, but as we know also there are legal entitlements for cows in India as well. So we have to think, personhood may not be that effective because the arguments typically rely on showing a certain level of intelligence, and even as we may know that farmed animals, for example, pigs and cows are supremely intelligent. We're not enculturated to view these animals that way. Again, right, certain animals are very cultured as specific, so if you think of Canada, we just don't think of farmed animals, goats, cows, chickens, pigs as being intelligent and as having a mind or being able to pass a merit test, and these are the legal submissions. So in my book, I argue, you know what, I understand the arguments for personhood. It may be that personhood can't extend to farmed animals, but likely it's not going to give in what personhood scholars have shown that even as personhood has no stable legal definition and jurisdiction let alone globally, it's usually associated with this kind of paradigmatic functioning human adult, paradigmatic meaning they reason at a requisite level. They have this level of intelligence that we respect, and that's why they're persons. So even as we say corporations are persons, we don't recognize them as being this type of, you know, a material human being. We still kind of humanize corporations in this way, in cases about corporate personhood. So in my book, I argue, it's not likely that personhood will soon protect the farmed animals. Even if it protects the culturally favored animals, and the farmed animals are the ones that wear the numbers I in terms of what animals need. And this is, you know, we're not even thinking about, kind of the insects, right, who are such greater numbers. And we know some insects are increasingly now, kind of being targeted for farming. Okay, so I say in my book, if we really valued animals or who they were and who they are, we would want to have a legal status that's not based on like intelligence according to human standards, which is an exclusionary status, but can just respond to vulnerability where it lies. Whether that vulnerability comes out of animals embodiment, so there are physical needs and the physical pain they can experience or psychological and also relatedly where that vulnerability may come from, their relationality, such that they want to be in relation with family or for animals that aren't located in family units, right? Or never start off, let's say, with being raised by a parent. They will have other relational interests in terms of how they want to lead their lives. So how about we create a legal subjectivity that can respond to this type of vulnerability rather than only favoring animals, which would be much more inclusive. That's the key point of all animals. And I know that practically that is still years and years away. But I don't think it's such an impediment to animals because personhood really from most animals these years and years away, we have some cases in countries in South American Asia that recognize a level of persons for animals, but really it's like the zoo animals or at the most, for example, a cartoon Ecuador with the Constitutional Courage and their Asjandiza case from about 10 years back now, recognizing the wild animals as kind of coming under the rights of nature provision in the Ecuadorian constitution. So even there, and the court even spoke there, how they can't extend that recognition of the rights of nature to the animals we eat and made some kind of compromise arguments there about why not? And my view is that that is a compromise accorded to reach to make their initial kind of holding about wild animals parallel. So being this, as I argue in my book, is meant to center not kind of autonomy and independence and a disembodied legal actor who's all about the mind and ability to reason on a certain level. It's meant to center the embodiedness, the relationality, and the vulnerability that can arise in these two elements as what the law should think about when it's trying to protect animals. So in my view and in the argument, that would be much more inclusive of more animals. And also, kind of lightly more protected than what personhood can offer. - Thank you, that sounds fascinating. And while, as you mentioned practically, it might still seem years away, but I think it is so necessary to think about the potential of the cracks in our current anthropocentric anthropocentric and racial colonial legal system. As we work with that system, sometimes as that might be necessary, there have been critics who might ask if animals cannot speak for themselves, then how can they be legal beings? And how do you respond to that? Because you have also suggested that there are representation and guardianship models that might be viable. Can you elaborate on that a bit more? - Yes, so even this idea of like speaking for oneself can be understood as being somewhat of a colonial byproduct, right, and this idea that speaking is associated with language and we assume that humans are the only ones that have language or anything important to say and we can trace that history of like who's allowed to speak publicly, who's seen as being in the public sphere, and being able to participate in this type of conversation. And so while a human equality story that has expanded with anti-colonial struggles, struggles for racial quality, gender equality, children's equality, so that we have this idea that all human adult humans should be speaking. We still see that the law kind of sets out a different ambit for, for example, human children or has a more complicated relationship to adult humans who are nonverbal or otherwise have a disability status that prevents them from speaking. So the law has tried to respond to this reality by having, yes, like guardianship models and proxy models. And so we understand that children's are legal persons and even as we constrain them, and of course is a whole area of children's rights literature that explains this and the vulnerabilities for children, human children, we allow them legal standing through a basically adult representation. It, in some instances, right? In some instances, adults just get to decide for children, but in some instances, children can have their own separate representation through an adult proxy. For adults who are not legally capable, deemed legally capable of voicing their own interests, we also have proxy models that's understood as substitute decision making. And as disability rights activism has promoted, you have also a less paternalistic model called supported decision making, where the adult is not so much a proxy, the support person is not so much a proxy for the affected person, but tries to actually articulate their views, even if they're nonverbal or otherwise, it makes hard to communicate with others. We already have in our ecosystems these proxy representation models that could be extended to animals and scholars have argued that as well. Some say, okay, well, it's gonna be way more complicated because even as we might have nonverbal human beings as adults or children, as infants, aware human, and we can kind of know what kind of share and the interiority of their minds more and know what they're thinking or just kind of relate more. Okay, perhaps, but we know from human psychology and communication and language, that language is never so straightforward. And actually, that most communication amongst humans is nonverbal to start with, right? It is not the words really that are said that it's the center of communication amongst our between humans. It is the nonverbal elements of communication. So it's another kind of argument or a frame to suggest that communicating with animals needn't be seen as so foreign or alien to us because again, if we think of animals as nonverbal, then we could see that we could still communicate with them and extrapolate what they might be intending, what their intentions are, even if they're not saying any words to us. So animals have language that we cannot understand, but that does not mean that we cannot communicate with them. So the idea of a supported decision making, not where it's just substitute decision making, we're acting vanilla, so substitute decision making is more of a benevolent model. It's still patrilisted because you're trying to, you know, articulate what are the best interests of animals and how can we put forward? That is, of course, so much better than the property model, which doesn't ask about the interest of animals at all. Board needs some completely, but a supported decision model asks, okay, well, you know, what is the animal trying to tell me? I'm not just gonna make a decision about the best interests myself. I'm really gonna try to engage in empathetic relationship with this animal and figure out what is it that they need and what are they trying to tell me? And so the theory that is going on in academic spaces and also, you know, public-facing spaces, amongst the general public, about how to think about our communities as multi-species, about how to live with animals, coexist, about how to take into account their interests, let's say, in urban planning and certainly in the legal system, although that is very nascent and more theoretical at this moment. This theory kind of takes to heart what we've just said about language and communication, that it's not the daunting obstacle that we often think it as. And if we hold on to anything, we can just think, you know, how do we communicate with human infants? Typically, for the first two years, an infant is not speaking, and typically after that time, they start speaking, but still they're not speaking like an adult. I don't think And you would say we don't know how to communicate with a human effect, right? We do, we do not communicate, that's not to say that people are communicating well or responding to the cries of children, which is a form of communication. And the children write such a jar of, of course, is there to suggest to us how we need to do much better by children. Yet the idea that we cannot communicate with them, that is not a prevalent idea at all. And so I suggest it should not also be for animals. We can't communicate with them. And so their interests can come into our deliberations in terms of politics and our conclusions in terms of law. What really, and I think anybody who has had the opportunity to take care of an animal at some point in their lives, would definitely agree with you. I think animals are quite communicative and expressive in their needs and preferences. So, but I think, you know, the thing about anthropocentric and auto poetic legal system is that it kind of puts a pause on imaginations outside of it, which is why I think it can appear initially difficult to imagine a model outside of it. But if courts and legislatures and communities were to truly embrace animals as legal beings, certainly it would require rewriting of our relationship with animals, but also as you mentioned, some of the deepest and foundational elements of our colonial legal systems, such as property, labor, and capital. Can you help us understand how might this transform our vital legal imagination? Yes, yes, so certainly it would be like a cessation of all the many industries that exploit animals and you would have to transition out of these industries fairly quickly. That, you know, is already on the table in many jurisdictions in the included about animal research, right? That even the scientists, some scientists are saying and to their colleagues, we need to transition away from animal research, they're much better alternatives and the outdated models aren't useful. Anyway, so in terms of the foundational legal concepts to do that, my own strong view is that, yes, property has to be jettisoned, animals cannot exist, continue to exist in our legal imagination or our legal actuality as property and they would need to receive a much different status. I have suggested being this. And this would help create a new generation going forward and even adults today, the idea that animals are perhaps our kin are part. They're in their own families and they are part of our families as well. I'm not so sure that I would advocate the latter just because I think that animals really have to say they probably wouldn't want anything to do with humans for most animals that are not come, so I don't want to suggest that this is something that animals would choose for themselves, but definitely we could have a different legal status for animals. But this is also to say that everything in the legal system, even like in a common law legal system has to be completely thrown out the window or that it would just be an upending of everything. Certainly, it would be a dramatic upending of the capitalist industries that rely on animals and we would have to much different relationships with them. But as I've recently kind of argued in, and I have a few papers I will be coming out soon about this, a foundation principle that comes from the British system, right? The rule of law has now been globalized, even beyond common law jurisdictions, even beyond kind of legal, professional institutions like courts and legislators to like development studies, then convolve the professionals that work in this, like in the UN, and otherwise. The rule of law is such a foundation principle. And it's such a well-regarded principle, even if it's not implemented, where in jurisdictions that's profess that they are rule of law societies, and we know that they're horrible legal violations going on just routinely. But if you think about what the rule of law is, nobody's going to agree. There's so many different theories. But as I, in other scholars have argued, really, this foundational principle that comes from the British heritage, and spread through empire, that the rule of law is really a value about anti-arbituriness. It's about government not acting arbitrarily and about a sense of legality that people can rely on. All right, can this principle be extended to animals projectively? And I have argued that personhood, because it's so chathered to kind of this paradigmatic, intelligent, reasoning human, doesn't seem to be that inclusive. And it's quite mired at that, and it's hard to get out. And let's just think of a new status for animals. That would be more and more friendly. But I don't think the same with the rule of law, because the rule of law is not, when I say the rule of law, when we're sharing it now, we don't really think of a human. We don't think of like a human reasoner, an intelligent human being. The rule of law doesn't have that association. The rule of law has an anti-arbitrary association, which certainly can be extended to animals. And so we could think of a society based on beingness or another product of the capacity as actually respecting this foundational principle of the rule of law, which is really that you need to have an anti-arbitrary system. And it's hard to think of something that is more arbitrary than anthropocentrism. All the rationales we have for it can be combated by argumentation and not speculation. And that is actually the history of anti-recentrism. Every time we try to think, OK, what makes human special? What makes us as obsessional? Always tool use, always language use, always the ability to empathize. Science comes along and so debunks that. So there is nothing that makes humans stand out from all other animals. There's nothing. And that is just arbitrariness, parent simple. And we have legal systems based on this arbitrariness. So yes, a lot would change. But that doesn't mean everything would change. And some foundational pillars of legal systems would actually be better respected, such as the rule of law. Thanks a lot for that explanation. And I think that is really crucial for us to take forward, which also brings me to the last question I have, which is something that I typically ask the podcast guests. It's based on the fact that much of our writing and work on more than human rights, animal rights, et cetera, is often emanates from a place of deeply personal interaction or experiences with more than human life around this. So if you could share one's story about your entanglement or experience with animals, which listeners could carry with them beyond this conversation, what would it be? You know, Shada, I grew up without any kind of companion animal in my life. So I think that was partly cultural coming from. And then where my parents were coming from India, immigrating to England, coming to Canada, and what was in their normal purview, although my mother, growing up in India, did grow up with animals, but mostly like farm animals around her. And so for me, as I said at the beginning, it was actually looking at kind of text and thinking of imagining more oh my goodness, like what that suffering entailed that led me down this path. I will share, I would think the most profound personal experience I have had in terms of cementing my commitment and educating me really was the experience of nursing my own human child. When I started to do that, that was just 10 years ago, the decades after I started this work. And I was aware of fiction, I had read stories, I had read, but also even academic texts that embed stories. And there is an eco-famous article by Greta Gard called "Tort of Feminist Post-Colonial Milk Studies," which talks about really how we can understand the global rise of milk, like how did milk-- drinking another mouthful of milk-- become not only globalized but naturalized, and that really is the story of imperialism and patriarchy, extended to animals. And so she ends that story-- ends that-- sorry, academic article with this story about whether it's real or not, we don't know with stories she heard about a cow who [BLANK_AUDIO] at her babies are going to be taken away from her and has twins. And in this novel, in that rendition, the mother cow tries to keep one of the babies for the farmer to take because the person is going to be expecting that and tries to hide the other. And before I had a child into my nursing, like that story affected me, it's one of the things I always kind of um, think about, uh, uh, and it's like a story that haunts me that I can't really get out of my mind. Even now, like I feel very affected by it, but when I nurse my own child and had that um, bodily embodied experience of that and had the sense of like what it must mean to lose your child and then be put in the service, have your body appropriated to to keep milk to to humans, like um, you know, I just couldn't fathom that. And some days I felt like I just cannot get this story out of my head and like it just want to get to do as much as I can to visualize that suffering. I've just not other cows, but other mother mammals and just all animals in general, although I do think gendered familial and relational bonds are really important in visualizing the harm of animals. And you know, and since Yamuni Nairan's book, mother calm, mother India, I mean, it's just such a service to anyone who reads that book for the Indian contacts, but just generally about dairy and the harms of it, which can make sense to also other industries. So, God is really like the most personally affecting entanglement I've had with animals is to kind of imagine that type of gendered familial relational harm and continue to be motivated to do the work I do and hope that the empathy I have in that situation can always influence me in my personal life and also the bit of professional work I do. Thank you so much, Professor Deca, for sharing that important and powerful story. It's been such a pleasure and honor to have you here as a guest. Thank you so much for sharing about your work as well as the ways in which the legal system entrenched these kind of hierarchies, these anthropocentric hierarchies, but also the way there can be, you know, possibilities and visions of a future which need not be so exploitative and so hinged on inequality. So thanks a lot for sharing your work and for appearing as a guest for this podcast. Always my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me and thank you for the wonderful podcast opportunity here as well. Thank you.