“Today’s animal rights movement is hindered by an unmet need: While relying heavily on activists and insiders to uncover wrongdoing and urge systemic reform, there has historically been a dearth of available legal support. The Animal Activist Legal Defense Project fundamentally alters this state of affairs, with significant and distinctive benefits for the future of the animal rights movement and for the future of animal well-being.”
—Professor Justin Marceau, Director, Animal Activist Legal Defense Project
That statement is not accurate. Relative to what standard does Marceau benefit animals?
I co-founded the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project with Justin, in the wake of serious misconduct at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, including illegal baselining skewing how courts evaluate harm to the environment and in ways that hide liability for philanthropists’ and nonprofits’ role in exacerbating the climate crisis.
Part of the founding, in records now removed from the school’s website, was a commitment to total liberation that accounted for many forms of justice.
In the years that I served with the program we never implemented that standard, but used the same illegal and racist standard based for evaluating the value and impact of our work, the standard the Animal Legal Defense Fund has used and still uses.
Fact: Inequitable growth that enriched mostly wealthy, white children at deadly cost to countless children of color did exponentially more harm to animals than we, at the program, ever did good.
Relative to that harm, on many levels, our work was insignificant and thus performative.
To protect animals requires accounting for the relations they have with humans, relations that start as humans enter the world. But that entails accounting for things like racist child inequity, the countervailing impact of growth, questions of what we owe future children harmed by the climate crisis, etc.
We, like the Brooks Institute for Animals Rights Law and Policy, chose greater harm to animals than we did good in order to evade these questions.
The programming is further evidence that public interest interventions often do more to protect the growth-based wealth that funds low-impact charades, made at cost to children’s and animals’ rights, than to actually further those rights.
The baseline for progress in the programming, and the school in general, was set closer to growth economics than animal welfare, exacerbating situations like the ejiao trade in equines and it’s projected growth. Original intent in the founding of the programming aside, that standard used is illegal because it violates a host of laws, including the fundamental rule that persons obligated to a legal system should first be empowered by it.
The University of Denver, and its funders, now have an opportunity to change the way it assesses value and report impacts – to eventually be able to substantiate its claims of furthering animal rights and liberation, the highest standard of environmental protection one can imagine and something that cannot be separated from the future prospects and lives of all children.
Fair Start and Truth Alliance activists have called upon the University to join the Tell the Truth campaign, and back preemptive standards for human rights and constitutional reforms that would truly liberate all animals.
The University has done the micro version of animal liberation and personhood. Now it can do the macro.
If it’s illegal to use a business model that prohibits hiring or housing persons of color, it’s illegal to structure cost/benefit business models to enrich some children at deadly cost to children of color. Use of that model hides liability for the deaths of tens of millions as the climate crisis intensifies, and reflects the academic and public interest practice that ensured the polycrisis: Constantly moving goalposts away from the infant-health-as-enfranchisement standard necessary for political legitimacy in order to falsely claim truth, or victories, and to thus raise funds.
Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world – and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from the climate crisis, autocracy deadly inequity, etc. – the person or company making the claims was using an illegal baseline, a Ponzi/equity-fraud standard that benefits them at deadly cost to others, and mostly children of color.
