The field of animal law, rights, and protection has been around for a long time. It is one of the most aspirational areas of justice, aiming to protect and liberate nonhumans from the horrors humans inflict upon them. But as the climate crisis unfolds, and more animals are harmed each day by humans, we should look for what must have gone wrong in the field to bring us to today.

Brad Goldberg has been one of the most influential figures in the field of animal rights and law, having used his wealth to in a definitive way, funding and advising organizations, academics and activists for decades. He seeded animal law programs at some of the leading schools in the nation, and has written extensively about funding and activism for animals.

He funded much of the work that today is considered “animal law,” much of which is based on assumptions about legitimacy and human rights that allow investors (like Brad) to make money on growth-based markets that do more harm to animals than any granular reforms do good.

But if one closely analyzes his public statements, his giving, and the results of his giving, something foundational is missing. He never seems to account for how children entering the world, and the very different resources they have when they do, impact the lives of animals.

That’s not ideal, given that is the largest determinant of animals’ lives. Claims of animal protection, in the face of the growth and inequity driving the climate crisis, are some of the most falsifiable impact claims being made in philanthropy. Growth and inequity has done more to harm animals than those working in the field have done to save them.

 

 

Is there a more macro way to think about animals? 

Humans are animals. Seeing ourselves as such moves us away from anthrocentric thinking that ensured the climate crisis, and will kill millions. So, what we refer to as animal rights and law would focus on nonhumans not because of their species, but because of their unique vulnerability. In other words, animal law cannot merely be law that happens to refers to animals.

A more functional and less abstract form of animal law would have to start with the capacity to actually protect nonhumans, especially in the creation of their relations with future humans who will determine much about their lives. Animal law in the best sense thus starts with inclusive birth and child welfare policies that create empathetic relations capable of benefitting animals. Nonhuman and human liberation are tied because the creation of our mutual relations is the biggest driver of outcomes.

 

 

Neither business nor government has been historically tasked with defining the ideals of social justice. The wealthy families behind philanthropy generally did that, and in avant garde movements like animal rights and liberation. But by simultaneously individualizing the idea of reproductive autonomy to isolate women, evade child equity, and ensure unsustainable growth, they created a false reference point for self-determination- both for humans and animals.

The base – and in this case the base of what Brad assumed as a legitimate legal system – treated children of color as worth exponentially less investment in birth and development, and by fundamentally enabling growth, triggered a climate crisis killing some while enriching others. 

This base has historically subverted the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements by undoing with family inequity upstream the good these families claimed to be doing downstream – a move that exponentially catalyzed the climate and related crises, while aiming the harm of the crises towards the least responsible for it and most vulnerable to it. If the Three-Fifths Compromise in U.S. history fractionalized the worth of persons of color, the one-tenth and greater illegal disparities in generational wealth that violate legally enforceable children’s rights regimes will now mean the death of millions of children of color in a climate crisis caused primarily by white wealth.

These unsustainable practices and systems ensured children entering under just thresholds, and thus overshoot of ecological carrying capacities, the degradation of those capacities, and the disempowerment of the average person to respond to the ensuing crises. They allowed wealthy white families to amass wealth, at illegal and deadly cost to generations of black families. 

Activists now with the Fair Start Movement, in prior employment, had to omit facts that would have shown public interest information and interventions being vastly undone by growth and inequity. This was a charade of environmental sustainability and social justice that is still today being vastly undone every day as children enter the world without the resources they need. Activists working with fair start can literally attest to using wealth made at cost to their stated missions to drown out the voices of the vulnerable – especially communities of color –  who could actually accomplish the mission through more fundamental reforms.

 

 

If those Fair Start engages truly value the things (like animal rights) they took credit for protecting, they will be eager to now cover the costs to others of not having previously included the value in our basic language and systems of constitution and obligation, and to include these things they claim to value as we constitute relations going forward. 

Fact: When impacts are correctly measured, not prioritizing a measurably fair start in life for all children did exponentially more harm to most stated missions of organizations than those organizations did good.

Intergenerational justice legitimates nations, making them capable of representing their constituents. We all do this together, by ensuring no child is born beneath a threshold of investment that would give them an influential equity stake in their democracies. Not having done this to date has condemned millions to die in a climate crisis, while the children of the wealthy families who benefited from illegitimacy have been enriched.

 

Why Fair Start? 

Funding that ensures no child is born beneath a set level of entitlement, consistent with the Children’s Rights Convention and Right to a Healthy Environment, is exponentially the most just and effective way to protect our future and free all of us. The creation of power relations – through birth, development, and emancipation – is usually the biggest driver of social justice outcomes because it operates on many levels, compounding impacts simultaneously.

Fair Start’s recent action before the United Nations asks anyone relying on any legal authority to derive back to the most preemptive source of legitimacy, an exercise that inevitably ends with the need to prioritize entitlements that would measurably empower all children through improved birth and development conditions, ensuring them a fair start in life and share equity in democracy. 

Under the universally preemptive standard that ensures fair starts in life for all kids, we can remove extractive birth entitlements where children of color get a tenth or less of the wealth as white kids, are largely excluded from the political system, and bear the deadly cost of an ecocide they did not create.

 

 

In this effort Fair Start is urging officials to contrast the claims of beneficial public impact being made by many entities and those they fund with actual harms to women and infants – correctly measured relative to a neutral position rather than the fictitious standards that created the climate and related crises.

Not omitting the impacts of children entering the world, admitting the use of failed and fraudulent standards, and inverting our obligation from the powerful to first women and children, can save both human and nonhuman lives. 

TAKE ACTION: Urge Brad here to assess how children entering the world over the last several decades impacts his claims about the field of animal law, rights and protection, how that impact alters his legacy, and to consider how – in light of this factor – he would alter his advice to those he funded.