Publisher Description

Dogs are getting lawyers. Cats are getting kidney transplants. Could they one day be fellow citizens? Cats and dogs were once wild animals. Today, they are family members and surrogate children. A little over a century ago, pets didn't warrant the meager legal status of property. Now, they have more rights and protections than any other animal in the country. Some say they're even on the verge of becoming legal persons. How did we get here -- and what happens next? In this fascinating exploration of the changing status of dogs and cats in society, pet lover and award-winning journalist David Grimm explores the rich and surprising history of our favorite companion animals. He treks the long and often torturous path from their wild origins to their dark days in the middle ages to their current standing as the most valued animals on Earth. As he travels across the country -- riding along with Los Angeles detectives as they investigate animal cruelty cases, touring the devastation of New Orleans in search of the orphaned pets of Hurricane Katrina, and coming face-to-face with wolves and feral cats -- Grimm reveals the changing social attitudes that have turned pets into family members, and the remarkable laws and court cases that have elevated them to quasi citizens. The journey to citizenship isn't a smooth one, however. As Grimm finds, there's plenty of opposition to the rising status of cats and dogs. From scientists and farmers worried that our affection for pets could spill over to livestock and lab rats to philosophers who say the only way to save society is to wipe cats and dogs from the face of the earth, the battle lines are being drawn. We are entering a new age of pets -- one that is fundamentally transforming our relationship with these animals and reshaping the very fabric of society. For pet lovers or anyone interested in how we decide who gets to be a "person" in today's world, Citizen Canine is a must read. It is a pet book like no other.

"Pain is pain, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the victim," states William Kunstler in his foreword. This moral concern for the suffering of animals and their legal status is the basis for Gary L. Francione's profound book, which asks, Why has the law failed to protect animals from exploitation? Francione argues that the current legal standard of animal welfare does not and cannot establish fights for animals. As long as they are viewed as property, animals will be subject to suffering for the social and economic benefit of human beings. Exploring every facet of this heated issue, Francione discusses the history of the treatment of animals, anticruelty statutes, vivisection, the Federal Animal Welfare Act, and specific cases such as the controversial injury of anaesthetized baboons at the University of Pennsylvania. He thoroughly documents the paradoxical gap between our professed concern with humane treatment of animals and the overriding practice of abuse permitted by U.S. law.

Gary L. Francione explains our historical and contemporary attitudes about animals by distinguishing the issue of animal use from that of animal treatment. He then presents a theory of animal rights that focuses on the need to accord all sentient nonhumans the right not to be treated as property.

Property is an evolving construct awarding power over resources and allocating nuanced individual rights among competing claimants. Notwithstanding the multiple lenses through which the law of property can be viewed, some core principles reign consistent. In the United States, property law remains divided into two broad categories, namely, real property (realty) and personal property (personalty). Ownership rights, including the right to exclude others from, to transfer, or to destroy the property, are central to, but vary between, the classifications of property as realty or personalty. Shifting societal norms together with advances in science have stretched this binary property classification system beyond workability and necessitated the legal recognition of a third broad category of property: specialty.Emerging against the backdrop of well-settled property law are two unrelated yet remarkably parallel growing areas of law: pet custody and human reproductive rights within the framework of assisted reproductive technology. Both areas have challenged existing property classifications, as partners seeking to disentangle their unique property interests confront ill-suited, yet legally decisive, labeling in the division of their interests. Without any apparent reference to the other, the genesis of pet custody laws and the jurisprudence of addressing the status of frozen embryos offer parallel justifications for recognizing a third classification of property. The time has come for the law to experience growing pains and to acknowledge that the rigid (and exclusive) divide between that which is person in the eyes of the law and that which is mere property fails to capture the truth: some special things, while clearly not persons, are more than just personal property. This Article argues that the recognition of Specialty Property will empower legislatures and courts to craft and implement more nuanced rules of property “ownership” and division.