Ireland’s First Undergraduate Animal Law Module in a Law School

Abstract

Keywords

Animal Law, Ireland, vegetarian, vegan

Suggested Citation Style:

O’Sullivan, Maureen (2026). Ireland’s First Undergraduate Animal Law Module in a Law School. Journal of Animal Law, Ethics and One Health (LEOH), 41-61. DOI: 10.58590/leoh.2026.011

* Dr. Maureen O’Sullivan is a lecturer in law (Above the Bar) at the University of Galway. She holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh entitled “Morality Patently Matters: The Case for a Universal Suffrage for Morally Controversial Biotechnological Patents”. This was published as a monograph with Routledge in 2019 and is entitled "Biotechnology, Patents and Morality: A Deliberative and Participatory Paradigm for Reform”. She holds a Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education from UWE in Bristol, an LLM thesis from the University of Warwick (in socio-legal aspects of free and open-source software licences) and a BCL and BA (Philosophy and English) from UCC. She is Chairperson of the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University. She was Chairperson of the Vegetarian Society of Ireland from 2013-2019. She is the Irish correspondent of the UK Vegan Society’s International Rights Network and is the legal spokesperson of the Vegan Society of Ireland. She has published widely on intellectual property (artistic copyright, Creative Commons licences, patents and biotechnology), property law and themes related to animal law, ethics, vegetarianism and veganism. She has introduced the first course on Animal Law at a Law School in Ireland. Maureen completed an animal law teaching certificate with the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law in 2022 and has been a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics since 2014. She can be contacted at maureen.osullivan@universityofgalway.ie.

Content

• I. Introduction and My Academic Background
• II. Teaching Law Relating to Animals in the Absence of an Animal Law Module
• 1. Sociology of Law
• a) Personhood, Property, Human Beings, Companies and Natural Objects
• b) Industrial and Intellectual Property; Artistic Copyright Law; Advanced Intellectual Property Law and Development; Publishing Law: Theory and Practice
• aa) Copyright and the Issue of Art
• bb) Patents
• III. Do Human Rights and Animal Rights Align?
• IV. Human and Animal Interests: Never the Twain Shall Meet?
• V. How My Animal Law Module Came About
• VI. My Theoretical Approach to Teaching
• VII. Background to the Contents of Animal Law
• VIII. Substantive Material
• IX. What Students Think
• X. Conclusion

I. Introduction and My Academic Background

This article is an account of what led me to set up Ireland’s first undergraduate Animal Law module in a law school in January 2025. It is a 12-week module, and I ran it for a second time in September 2025 so at the time of writing, I have taught two academic years in total. I went from having 68 students to 149. The students are a mixture of final year law students; LLB students (these are postgraduate students from a different discipline whose primary degree did not cover all mandatory law modules); Erasmus students; Law and Human Rights students; and BA students who take some law modules.

Ireland has seven universities under the governance of the Irish Universities Association^[1] but due to the granting of university status to several institutes of technology in recent years, that number has now increased significantly.^[2] I have worked at the University of Galway, formerly known as NUI Galway, since 2006. My background is multi-disciplinary as my first degree from University College Cork was a BA in English and Philosophy with a minor in History and European Studies in 1989. I then took a TEFL course and taught English as a Foreign Language in Spain for five years in several different institutions. These included private language academies which taught late evening and night classes, an engineering school where I taught Business English to engineers, and a primary school where I taught English and Art to children between the ages of 9 and 11. I also taught private, solo classes to a variety of students who were preparing for different exams including Spanish civil service exams and Cambridge English language proficiency. While in Spain, I studied Spanish and I hold a Certificate in Spanish proficiency from the Escuela Oficial de Idiomas (Official School of Languages) in Zaragoza.

I loved my job but decided that I did not want to be in the same profession at the age of 40 so I went back to Ireland in 1995 and did a law degree in University College Cork by night while working full time as a legal secretary by day. This convinced me that teaching and researching rather than practice was my vocation. Next, I went to the UK to do an LLM by research at the University of Warwick. My topic was a sociolegal study of free and open-source software licensing during the early days of the development of the Internet. An underlying theme of the study were informal property rights that emerge in unowned resources, such as software which had been developed at universities and by AT&T, the American telephonic company before copyright law was extended to software. These licences were written by computer programmers and were enforced informally and largely respected, unlike proprietary software licences. Although this degree had nothing to do with animal law on the surface, I learned many principles about social attitudes towards formal law but more importantly, about the factors which lead people to observe the law – or otherwise.

At Warwick I also led seminars on the Property Law course for three years. Our teacher training was very useful and focused on teaching in large and small groups. The module was very creative and my colleagues who designed it had an enquiring and critical approach which involved examining how we capture and convert into property common spaces or things. Hence, I learned to think very expansively about property and later supervised two PhDs in Nigerian land rights: the rights of the Diobu people to overturn compulsory acquisition of their lands and a comparative study of adverse possession in England and Wales and Nigeria. Property law is the bedrock of how we treat animals, so this early grounding that I received has proven very useful for my subsequent studies.

After finishing my LLM, I got a full-time position lecturing in law at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol in 2003. I taught Land Law and Computer Law at undergraduate level and a Masters module in computer licensing and legislation there for three years. Unlike Galway, the classes were resourced more generously and students had fortnightly tutorials as well as lectures meaning that there were better structures for feedback and for small-group learning. At Warwick, these seminars were weekly. In my first year at UWE, I did a year-long Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in which I was introduced to many concepts which I still use today. These include the use of reflective logs rather than examination and theories about different types of learners on which I elaborate below.

I felt very restless in Bristol and decided I wanted to return to Ireland and was appointed as a lecturer in law at University of Galway in 2006. I have taught a wide range of subjects which include the following: at undergraduate level, Industrial and Intellectual Property Law, English (and Welsh) Land Law, Irish Land Law, Sociology of Law, Law and Social Policy, Irish Legal System, Legal Research and Methods, and Advanced Legal Skills. At the Master’s level I teach Advanced Intellectual Property Law and Development, and I assisted with setting up the MA in Public Policy in the School of Political Science and Sociology where I contribute to teaching and supervision. I set up and taught for many years several modules, outside of the School of Law. One was Irish Artistic Copyright Law in the MA in Arts Policy and Practice in the Huston Film School which was a very hands-on course that I designed myself. Students had to make a piece of art in class and then evaluate its legal protection against what we had studied in Copyright Law. I later brought this practice into the classroom in my undergraduate Industrial and Intellectual Property Law class and the transfer from small groups of approximately 10 students to large groups of about 60 was seamless. Students would then have a question in the exam based on legal themes we had explored in copyright law relating to art. To turn my teaching into research, I published a major article on Irish artistic copyright law to accompany these modules in 2015.^[3] I also established a module Publishing Law: Theory and Practice on the MA in Literature and Publishing in the English Department which I taught for 10 years but due to a restructuring in the School of Law in 2019, all these specialised modules were cancelled and generalised teaching was returned to the School. I have continued to use aspects of these modules and have also developed new topics to distinguish sharply my undergraduate from postgraduate teaching where the subjects are essentially the same.

II. Teaching Law Relating to Animals in the Absence of an Animal Law Module

After the collapse of my English Land Law class numbers due to Brexit^[4] in 2021 – as Irish students stopped going to Britain to study and practise law – I introduced a module on Animal Law which I will discuss in depth below. However, I have been teaching elements of animal law across several modules for many years, long before I had an exclusive module on this subject. In Sociology of Law, I devised my own syllabus as some of the available textbooks concentrated on crime whereas my legal education has led me to conclude that law is deeply interconnected with property. In additional to theoretical material, I taught three case studies to observe the law in action, one of which was on themes of personhood. In copyright law, a subject which arose in four different modules that I have taught, we studied the question of ownership rights of animals and, indeed, of human beings whose status has not always been equal. In patents and biotechnology law, the invention of human-animal hybrids and other beings of mixed human and animal DNA are on the threshold of persons and property, and this gave students plenty of food for thought across a range of modules that I taught.

1. Sociology of Law

a) Personhood, Property, Human Beings, Companies and Natural Objects

Nowadays, in a post-colonial world, most human beings are classified as persons and slavery, which treated some people as property, is no longer an acceptable practice. An essential feature of being a person, apart from rights such as the right to life, is being able to enjoy a right to liberty, which animals do not. Before exploring the implications of not having such a right, we used to do a sweep of the personhood and property dividing line and observe that inanimate entities such as companies are classified as legal persons but animals, although now recognised as sentient beings, are not. An interesting example of how human rights extend to companies is in the well-known so-called McLibel case in the UK which McDonalds took in the 1990s against two activists with London Greenpeace, who had criticised their products.^[5] The duo were eventually vindicated on the grounds that they did not have a fair trial as legal aid was not made available to them but the rights that McDonalds claimed were infringed related to reputation and libel. The implication of legal personhood means that companies have legal rights and duties, and this involves the right to sue and be sued and to enter into contracts. The US Supreme Court notes that the treatment of corporations and natural persons is equal^[6] regarding rights which are capable of being enjoyed and exercised. Similarly, in the English case, Salomon v Salomon^[7]separate legal personality was granted to limited liability companies and over the years, these entities have acquired rights under human rights legislation, including the European Convention on Human Rights, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and national constitutions, and other legal instruments. This identification of human rights applying to some humans and not others and to all companies was explored further with the intention of raising questions about how animals should be classified in the law.

Gender and race have been used to discriminate against various peoples and sectors of society. For instance, the Married Women’s Property Act 1882 in the UK was introduced to allow married women to own their own property after marriage. Before this enactment marriage had signified a civil death for women as wives, their possessions and children became the property of their husbands once married. In the US, in Standing Bear v. Crook,^[8] Native American rights to habeas corpus were recognised by Judge Dundy who stated that “An Indian is a person” demonstrating that equality for all humans was not a given. The Irish, too were sometimes portrayed as being akin to animals and in an article in Punch’s Magazine in 1862, they were deemed to be the “missing link” between apes and men.^[9] Racism against Aborigines in Australia was prevalent in the law until 1967 as before then they were classified as “flora and fauna” and had been excluded from the census.^[10]

The next part of this class traversed the area of environmental law and studied how laws on personhood have been extended to natural objects to protect them better. Rights for rivers and mountains have been advocated for decades and Christopher Stone’s groundbreaking article on the issue of legal rights for trees was published in the 1970s.^[11] This article influenced Justice William O. Douglas’ dissenting judgment in Sierra Club v. Morton^[12] which approved of granting personhood rights to natural objects. We discuss whether this paradigm has been developed in the interests of the objects themselves or for humans. New Zealand granted the River Whanganui personhood status in 2017, and it has also been extended to protect other natural objects such as woods and mountains. The legal framework involves an agreement between state-appointed trustees and the Iwi tribe^[13] both of whom work together in the interests of the river. This agreement has extracted the river from a property law paradigm in which the river has standing and a bill of rights of its own. Similarly, some South American countries such as Ecuador, Bolivia,^[14] and Colombia^[15] have introduced rights for nature in legislative and constitutional form and they have been upheld by the judiciary.^[16] Implementation, of course, can be a challenge.^[17] When environmental entities are protected, animals are included but a key difference is whether the animals are protected as species or as individuals with their own rights. We also discussed the work of academics such as Michael Marder on the nature of plant life. We noted the rise of political parties which focus on animals^[18] and several European countries now have such groups.^[19] I use material such as Singer and Cavalieri’s Great Ape Project^[20] to show that differences between humans and animals that we assume often do not exist and this work adopts an evidence-based approach to animals and their capabilities, such as speech. Cavalieri believes that rights should also be extended to cetaceans as they can also recognise speech and language.^[21]

I then dealt with cases on animals from international jurisdictions, mainly taken by the late Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP). These include the use of habeas corpus to argue that chimpanzees are persons with a right to liberty. Several of the cases attracted a lot of publicity and one of the chimpanzees, Tommy, was pictured on the front page of the New York Times magazine in 2014.^[22] Details of the cases are as follows: Tommy^[23] was a chimpanzee who lived in a shed. Another chimpanzee, Kiko^[24] was held in a cement building on his owner’s property and other chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo^[25] had been loaned to a university for the purposes of research. A habeas corpus petition was filed by the NhRP on behalf of Tommy,^[26] but this was not successful in the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court. They rejected the claim that a chimpanzee was a person and therefore entitled to rights and protections under the writ of habeas corpus.^[27] The court opined that beneficiaries who held rights also had duties, and as chimpanzees were incapable of the latter, they were ineligible for the former. The point that not all persons are capable of bearing duties such as the very young and people with certain disabilities was ignored. Habeas corpus was deemed to be the exclusive preserve of human beings.^[28] Judge Jaffe in another hearing of the same court, denied Hercules and Leo habeas corpus relief because of the binding decision in Tommy, however, both chimpanzees were moved to a sanctuary. Kiko’s fate differed in 2015 because the NhRP was not seeking his “immediate release”.^[29] In a subsequent case, in the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, in a joint hearing of the cases of Tommy and Kiko, the court declined to grant a writ of habeas corpus.^[30] One of the judges, Justice Fahey did not dissent but in his concurring judgment, he reflected on the ethical issues which the cases raised and admits that he questioned whether the decision was correct. He made some profound comments, as follows:

• (…) I continue to question whether the Court was right to deny leave in the first instance. The issue whether a nonhuman animal has a fundamental right to liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus is profound and far-reaching. It speaks to our relationship with all the life around us. Ultimately, we will not be able to ignore it. While it may be arguable that a chimpanzee is not a “person,” there is no doubt that it is not merely a thing.^[31]

Students react extremely well to the judicial acknowledgment that a chimpanzee is not a thing as most everyone who thinks about these issues will face the same ethical questions. Moreover, it is intellectually expansive for the students to realise that in other jurisdictions, personhood for some apes has been considered or, indeed, already recognised. In Argentina, Sandra, an orangutan was liberated under habeas corpus and moved to a sanctuary in Florida^[32] and another Argentinian case recognized a chimpanzee named Cecelia as a person.^[33] In a Colombian appeal case, Chucho, a spectacled bear was recognised as a person^[34] although this decision was overturned by a higher court^[35] and an appeal to Colombia’s Constitutional Court which is the highest court in the land was also unsuccessful.^[36] Very recently in Pakistan, the High Court has accepted that an elephant has a right to life and he has been sent to a sanctuary in Cambodia where the climatic and living conditions are more suitable.^[37] As these cases hail from both common and civil law jurisdictions, they are very educational not only for their content but also for the development of students’ analytical skills in a globalised judicial world. These are covered very thoroughly in Fasel and Butler’s book, Animal Rights Law.^[38]

There have also been several cases involving elephants, the first of which was a Canadian case of Reece et al. v. Edmonton.^[39] In this 2011 case, the chief justice of Alberta in a dissenting judgment opined that animals’ interests were insufficiently represented as humans prioritise their own interests and courts interpret these laws narrowly.^[40] The judge also discussed whether animals should enjoy legal standing in their own right.^[41] Although the Canadian Supreme Court denied leave to appeal, Lucy, the elephant in the case, would be the last elephant at the zoo.^[42] This shows that such cases have brought about a change of policy among zoo officials regarding the types of animals that they keep. In the US, the NhRP instituted proceedings in Connecticut and New York on behalf of three elephants which had been used in a circus in 2017. Habeas corpus claims were dismissed on the premise that they relied on human rights concepts that animals could not enjoy.^[43] The NhRP’s appeal was unsuccessful, but they went on to file another case on behalf of an elephant by the name of Happy who lived alone in the Bronx Zoo in New York. Happy was denied habeas corpus relief due to a lack of precedent but the judge, Justice Alison Y. Tuitt, stated that Happy is “is more than just a legal thing”. The judge opined that Happy should be treated with respect and dignity, and that she may be deserving of liberty.^[44] This ruling was appealed to the Court of Appeals in New York.^[45] The Court upheld the ruling of the Supreme Court but there were two formidable dissenting judgments from Wilson and Rivera JJ. Once again, the majority of the judges found that habeas corpus relief was only available to humans.^[46] They feared that a favourable decision on behalf of the elephant could have a profound effect on the way in which animals are used and that there would be a domino effect.^[47]

The first dissenting judgment by Justice Wilson delved into detail on the use of the writ of habeas corpus while not determining that Happy is a person. Habeas corpus has both common law and legislative sources and the former is flexible. It does not have to be confined to benefiting human persons only and has been used in the past both to free slaves and women who had been imprisoned by their husbands. Wilson J asserted that rights do not necessarily co-exist with obligations because some humans cannot fulfil obligations and it is therefore illogical to deny animals rights on this basis. Furthermore, we now know much more about animals’ cognition and sentience and law should be updated accordingly.

The second dissenting judgment was given by Rivera J who opined that habeas corpus should be available to Happy to challenge her confinement, although she is not human. The judgment focused on the animal’s right to liberty rather than seeking to equate animals and humans, although Dr Joyce Poole, who is an expert on elephant behaviour, was cited regarding the similarity of certain aspects of human and elephant behaviour. Rivera J and Wilson J both agreed that habeas corpus could be invoked to transfer Happy from one facility to a better one rather than setting her free as this could be both dangerous for humans and for Happy.

I examined this course through reflective logs and an essay of 2,500 words. Students had to write up six logs, each of 300 words, in which they were encouraged to describe, analyse and give their opinion. They enjoyed this exercise a lot and engaged with me regularly, asking questions about format and content. It reduced stress greatly as they could start writing from day one and this meant that they worked hard and sought perfection. It did take longer for me to mark but when students have time to attend to their writing, the lecturer also learns from their research.

Students can do independent research projects for one of their modules which involve essays of 5,000 words and every year I used to give the students essay titles on the issue of personhood. Some years there was a very good uptake in terms of numbers, and this was of note as it was an optional module for students.

b) Industrial and Intellectual Property; Artistic Copyright Law; Advanced Intellectual Property Law and Development; Publishing Law: Theory and Practice

aa) Copyright and the Issue of Art

I also managed to teach issues relating to animals in all the modules I have taught of which copyright forms a component. One of the principal cases of interest is the case taken by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) against a photographer in 2016. The background to this case is that a freelance photographer called David Slater, was taking photographs in the Indonesian jungle. When he put his camera down, a macaque grabbed it and took a selfie. Slater published a book of wildlife photography which included the photograph.^[48] Subsequently, the photograph appeared on Wikimedia and other online news sites, and Slater asked Wikimedia to take down the photograph, claiming copyright. Wikimedia asserted that it was in the public domain on the grounds that in copyright law the person who takes the photo as opposed to the owner of the camera is the copyright holder. As the monkey took the photo, there was no copyright. Shortly afterwards the US Copyright Office issued guidance^[49] that animals cannot own artworks they create as authorship is a human right.^[50] PETA then took a copyright case on behalf of the macaque, endeavouring to assert his copyright in the photograph and claiming damages from Slater.^[51] This was neither successful at district level nor on appeal and the district court judge in a federal court in San Francisco stated that while Congress could extend rights to animals, this had not been done in the Copyright Act.^[52] On appeal, the parties settled the case but the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the judgment of the lower court.^[53]

At undergraduate level, Industrial and Intellectual Property is assessed by exam only due to large numbers and at postgraduate level, students do a 5,000-word essay. If it is a supervised written module, they can write up to 15,000 words.

bb) Patents

I teach patents and biotech law in two Intellectual Property modules: one at undergraduate level and the other at postgraduate. My PhD was in this area, and I have published a book on it too. Once scientists discovered the DNA helix in the 1950s, long before there was any regulation in place, biotechnologists were mixing human, animal and plant genetic material across species and seeking patents on their “inventions”. These activities were discussed in fascinating literature from the US as many constitutional issues were raised.^[54] In an effort to slow the process of patent approval, two activists, Jeremy Rifkin a biotech campaigner and Stuart Newman a scientist applied to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for a number of patents known as the “Newman-Rifkin” patent^[55] in the late 1990s. The patents included applications for inventions described variously as “humanzees”, “humice”, and other human and animal genetic combinations. The aim was twofold: either to be granted the patents which would allow them a monopoly over the licensing of the inventions for twenty years - which could kickstart a public debate about the ethics of this technology - or else a refusal, with clear reasons as to why not. Seven years after the application, the patents were refused but the grounds were unclear. The USPTO called on Congress and the courts to provide clarity but raised issues of privacy, the right to procreate and the constitutional prohibition on slavery – relevant as patents are a type of property right.^[56] One of the difficulties was that pronouncements on constitutionality are not within the jurisdiction of the USPTO as only superior courts can interpret the constitution. Since a legislative enactment in 2011 it is no longer possible to get patents on “human organisms”,^[57] although this term is undefined. Such legislation is not retrospective and does not revoke patents on human-animal hybrids and chimeras that have already been granted. This research brought me to the “edge of reason” or the area that we traditionally conceptualise as the border between the human and animal kingdoms.^[58] Studies in this area of patent law are what initially sparked my interest in animal law – while humans are treated as persons and cannot be patented, animals are property and can be patented. What would become of beings of mixed DNA? It raised unsolved and potentially unresolvable questions about what makes us human, what distinguishes us from animals and what should become of beings which have been engineered. Are they property or do they have rights and, if so, which are they? If some animals now have a right to liberty, should inventions with large percentages of human DNA also enjoy an array of rights or will they exist in a twilight zone while these are fought over, possibly for decades to come? This part of my Industrial and Intellectual Property module brings students into the area of science fiction, except it is in no way imaginary anymore. There are multiple techniques including hybridisation, where parents from two different species procreate, or through the creation of chimeras, which may have a multitude of parents and distinct organs from different parents. Sheep have been engineered with human livers for transplantation, while the rest of the animal can be consumed. The science has become so complex that a group of European scientists have coined the term “chimbrids” to indicate beings that are neither hybrids nor chimeras.^[59] These inventions add a potential layer to the rights regime of animals, humans and beings in between.

In sum, before I ever had a dedicated module on animal law, I was able to reflect various subjects in what I taught. It was very advantageous to have developed these topics down through the years because when the opportunity arose to put on the module in animal law, I was able to cannibalise and cobble pre-existing material. Given that we do not yet have a textbook on animal law, this made my task much easier and, indeed, this material will be included in the textbook which I am currently writing to accompany my module. Moreover, it is very advantageous to be able to speak knowledgeably about biotechnology as it will also affect to a greater or lesser extent the consumption of meat. If the cost of cultivated meat comes down and its use becomes more widespread, there will still be ethical issues which need to be considered. When giving thought to the content of the module, I decided to take an empirical approach and to look at the way in which we treat a variety of animals with a search for the principle underlying our legal approach.

III. Do Human Rights and Animal Rights Align?

I sometimes get asked whether human and animal rights converge and I can categorically refute this. Human beings for the most part are classified as persons and animals are property. Human beings in Kantian deontology are ends in themselves and animals are merely means to ends. This boundary is beginning to fray somewhat as our knowledge about the lives of animals increases in tandem with a significant increase in our use, abuse and exploitation of animals. It is true that in rights discourse, the extension of the rights umbrella to cover animals in a neo-Kantian framework can be helpful. For instance, appropriate rights such as that of liberty is at the advent of consideration for some animals, at least, and this extracts them from their habitual status as property. However, the rights terrain is one of winners and losers: if your right is not recognised you get nothing and rights do not appear to accommodate a recognition of inequalities which could serve as a foundation for compassionate treatment. An appeal to morality or ethical values is often considered to be subjective and paternalistic and certainly rights, if recognised, do afford protection if they are enforceable. If, however, rights are not recognised then the potential rights-bearer gets nothing at all.

A parallel development of a culture of compassion, consideration and empathy with beings which are different to us but similar in certain ways and not necessarily equal, would not be detrimental. Change in our treatment of animals will be best approached through a multi-faceted approach and will not come through legal change alone. Law on the books can be impeccable but unenforced and/or unenforceable if the public in general do not accept it or if authorities are underfunded or disinterested. Even when there is acceptance, a small minority sometimes dominates our treatment of animals as seen in the use of animals in entertainment or, indeed, in sport or hunting. This can occur especially where other untoward behaviour such as illegal betting, gambling and criminal activity is tied up with the exploitation of animals. Where there are political alliances, change can prove challenging.

It is useful to examine how some injustices in the human realm came to an end: music helped achieve a cultural shift in making racism disagreeable and ultimately illegal but currently, there has not been any such cultural shift in favour of the interests of animals. The use of social media has helped to spread information about cruelty rapidly and widely and certainly helped to bring cruel practices such as fur farming to an end.

Animal rights thinkers prefer to avoid animal welfare legislation as it does not challenge animals’ status as property. Jeremy Bentham also wrote about animals^[60] and held that the significant line that should be drawn between humans and animals was at the ability to suffer or sentience. If an animal could feel pain, it should not be tortured, Bentham argued, although his theories fall short of advocating animal liberation. Sentience has become embedded in European law and whether this means more welfare for animals or the establishment of a rights regime remains to be seen as this area evolves.

IV. Human and Animal Interests: Never the Twain Shall Meet?

In my view, the biggest threat to animals is the human right to property which gives human beings and legal persons such as corporations, draconian rights over animals. Corporations are inanimate entities yet their place in the hierarchy is one of control over non-human sentient beings. This is significant because there are many more animals on the island of Ireland than there are humans (and this is echoed throughout the world) and as they cannot communicate, we control their narrative. We have imposed upon them our own interpretation of their state of being and until recently we acted as if they were not sentient. They were considered automatons who just behaved robotically when subjected to pain and torture so we could treat them as we wished.

The recognition of sentience in EU law did not change much overnight but it is beginning to have some effect on animals whom we hold dear such as our pets or, if we are being very politically correct, our companion animals. They are now receiving consideration as family members in various European countries such as Spain^[61] and the UK^[62] both in cases of separation and divorce or domestic violence where a beloved pet might be tortured to coercively control a partner or child.

Another somewhat oblique way in which the expansion of human rights might help animals has arisen under EU laws on equality. Beliefs, which originally were hemmed in by religious boundaries, have expanded to embrace matters which stoke the conscience including environmental beliefs, beliefs against fox hunting^[63] and rights afforded to vegans.^[64] Vegetarianism has been recognised by the House of Lords,^[65] which later became the Supreme Court over 20 years ago. However, it was not recognised in a lowly tribunal case, Conisbee^[66] in which the judge found that vegetarianism was not a coherent belief within the parameters of what the law recognises as protected. This meant that if colleagues spiked a vegetarian’s food, no redress could be sought. This decision is clearly wrong and, indeed, legally ill-founded: tribunals should follow the general law and pronouncements of the upper courts. Unfortunately, this case has not been appealed although it would be likely to have been overturned had it been so. It is out of synch with over a century of jurisprudence. The first case in which vegetarianism was recognised as a human right was in the Irish Court of Appeal in 1898.^[67] This case has been quoted with approval by our former Chief Justice, Ronan Keane^[68] and it was noted that a belief would be recognised and not interrogated from an objective perspective providing that it was not harmful to society at large.^[69] Recognition of rights often get publicity – whether negative or positive and can help to change the way people think. Judicial recognition can be a powerful vehicle in that it normalises what may have been considered as fringe behaviour.

V. How My Animal Law Module Came About

My interest in animals came from home. My late mother who was born in 1935 became a vegetarian at the age of six when the woman who lived across the road fattened a goose for her family’s Christmas dinner. When my mother found out the tragic fate of the goose, she nicknamed the woman “Mrs. Kill-the-Goose” and did not speak to her for many years. My mother did not raise us vegetarian but as a child I would watch her prepare food for us all and the vegetables were separated from the meat, a lot of hand washing took place, and she impressed on me very strongly the need for hygiene in the kitchen because meat is full of bacteria. I was never allowed to cook meat, not that I wanted to and it came across as a disagreeable chore. I was encouraged to bake and prepare salads from a young age. When I was 12, I went to stay with a friend of hers in the country for a weekend. As we ate our steaks, I saw streaks of blood on the whitewashed buildings around the farm. I connected what was on my plate with the dehorning of the cows and that was that – when I went home, I told my mother I didn’t want to eat meat anymore and of course she supported me. My motivation was utter disgust rather than animal welfare as such, although the two are not necessarily disconnected – I took a turn against the taste and idea of meat and especially the blood. Many vegetarians go off red meat first and other meats follow. I had never been a fish lover after my father caught some river trout and brought them home and after gutting them, he left the innards in a bowl on the kitchen windowsill momentarily. When I saw this, it put me right off and my parents did not force use to eat anything we did not want. The last meat that I ever ate was white meat – chicken which I couldn’t swallow and from that point on I have never eaten meat.

Vegetarianism was so normalised in our home that I developed the idea that married women did not eat meat and so the first time that I witnessed a friend’s mother eating a typical Irish breakfast at teatime, I was profoundly shocked. I was around six years old at the time. That has taught me that nurture is very powerful: what we witness as children really can form our ideas as we grow up. Objectively speaking, there is an immense amount of cruelty throughout the animal food chain, but it becomes normalised and we become desensitised through example and through habit. In my late teens and early twenties, I spent a lot of time in London and vegetarianism was very easy there and it became more so in Ireland. I started to experiment with veganism in my early twenties and gave up dairy and later eggs. I had never eaten much honey so that was not an issue. I then lived in Spain for five years and it presented its challenges but on the other hand there were some very good vegetarian restaurants. When I moved back to Ireland I cooked a lot at home. During my law degree and at work, food was not really a problem. Once I moved to the UK to do my Masters, vegan food was widely available. Both Coventry and Bristol where I lived were easy and more products were becoming available. On my return to Galway in 2006, vegetarianism was becoming more popular. There was a local group of vegetarians that used to meet regularly, and I started to go along. Networks sprang up all over the country and as I was used to the motorways in the UK, I made full use of them in Ireland and got to know the vegetarian establishments in several cities and towns. The Vegetarian Society of Ireland (VSI) was a registered charity which was founded in 1978, and I attended their AGM in 2012. They did not have a secretary, so I volunteered and the next year I become chairperson, a position which I held for six years. We organised a yearly festival on World Vegetarian Day and for this we would hire a hall in Dublin, usually St. Andrew’s Resource Centre in Pearse Street and we would host about 40 stalls. These were a mixture of food, crafts, animal rights charities and NGOs and we also hosted talks on a variety of related issues. This helped me to get to know businesses and activists in the scene throughout the country. Food businesses that supported us included longstanding restaurants and food companies such as Cornucopia, Govindas, Blazing Salads and other food enterprises, such as Buttercream Dream and other cakeries, some of which had a short life span. I also became known to students around the country and was invited to give talks to student societies about animals and biotechnology in UCC (2012), UCD (2017) and NUIG (2017 and 2024).

In the VSI, we used to invite a group of speakers every year and these included John Carmody from ARAN,^[70] Bernie Wright from AFAR,^[71] Laura Broxson from NARA,^[72] the journalist John Gibbons, author and cancer survivor Bernadette Bohan and Paula Cavaliere, the joint author with Peter Singer of The Great Ape Project. One of the speakers was Dr. Clair Linzey from the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and she invited me to apply for a fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics of which she is the deputy director. I have been to every one of their conferences and started to write up my talks and get them published as review articles, articles and chapters. It has also led me to write a book on the Vegetarian Society of Ireland 1978-2024 which is currently under review and which I hope to get published soon. In the meantime, I wrote some articles on the rights of vegetarians and vegans in European, British and Irish law. Then the teaching fellowship at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law came up and I went to Antwerp in June 2022 to do a week-long workshop on setting up an animal law module. When I finished this, I proposed a course and received a great deal of support from my then head of school, Dr. Charles O’Mahony. The course was put on the curriculum as an optional module for final year law students and Erasmus students and the first year I ran it in January 2025, it had 68 students. We decided to put it on again in September 2025 and it now has 149 students.

VI. My Theoretical Approach to Teaching

In my first appointment as a lecturer in UWE in Bristol, I did a year-long Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Three messages stood out to me. The first most important one was the VARK model of learning and that hypothesised that one has four different types of learners in every class: the visual, the audio, the read and write and the kinetic or kinaesthetic type of learner. This model has served me well especially to analyse myself and how I teach. As technology has improved this has become clearer.

Once upon a time there were no pictorial representations in the classroom and we used overheads. As platforms such as Blackboard, Moodle and Canvas became available, we could share materials with students. As PowerPoint became ubiquitous, I was interested in developing the most interesting slides not only for the students but also for me so that I would enjoy the classes more. I have a deep love of art and have written a major article on artistic copyright in Ireland. So, unusually for a lawyer I do not use much text on the slides but provide notes and the slides are visual stimuli for me to talk about and to engage the students in class. They are time consuming to set up but they are a creative work and very enjoyable. They create a type of visual narrative. This satisfies the first letter of VARK and speaks to the visual learners. Technical issues are described much more accurately when there are pictorial representations, and more senses are engaged. I could teach complex matters relating to biotechnological patent law much more clearly and in a much shorter time than with text alone.

The “R” of the VARK model is easily satisfied in traditional law modules where there is a lot of text. When I taught on Property and Land Law courses in the UK, there was always a favoured textbook and, indeed, a variety of high-quality material from which to choose. I have had to design my own materials for most of the subjects that I have taught during my career in Ireland. There is a very good book on intellectual property law, but it is not a suitable text for a 12-week module as it is geared more towards professionals and is therefore highly detailed. I provide my own notes, I cover seven topics which evolve over time and the class slides are also made available. My own material is a mixture of visual and read and write for intellectual property modules both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Whilst time consuming, this has given me a lot of freedom to specialise in what interests me. Intellectual property is vast, and I believe that one could teach a degree programme in copyright alone, given that it spans so many disciplines such as literature, art, music and film, to name but a few.

For subjects such as English Land Law I used many diagrams, bringing out the “K” or kinetic qualities in my students who were so inclined. Several areas are very detailed, and many property interests benefit from being visually located side-by-side with their counterparts in different systems so that students get a holistic overview. Many land law rights grew organically, and sometimes statutory intervention did little to clarify particular rights but, rather, added a more complex layer to an already complicated area. Diagrams drawn on a white board help the students’ understanding and it is a way of telling a story, creating a narrative and giving an appreciation of the whys and hows.

I had not really dealt with the “A” or audio students up until quite recently as I believed originally that most would be studying music. However, the longer I spend in academia the more I realise that most of us exhibit all four traits or learning channels to greater or lesser degrees. So, the challenge was how to stimulate my audio learners and, as it turns out, Animal Law has provided the perfect platform to enable this. While writing my notes for this module, I also wrote some poetry about various animals and bought an autoharp during the summer of 2025. It is a relatively easy instrument to play as to sound a chord, you just press a button, and the instrument obliges with an enchanting, resonant sound. Putting the poems to music was easy as I was trained in classical violin as a child and I have decided that over time I will write a song about each significant animal whose lives and fates we study in the module. This will be sung at the end of each class and will be an original way of providing a summary of the day’s work. I first experimented with this in November 2025. We sang the Christmas Carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas in which we are told that several presents of birds were made by the singer’s “true love”. These included a partridge, two turtle doves, three French hens, four calling birds, and so on. We sang to honour all the birds who had been slaughtered because of the outbreak of avian flu in Ireland. The students joined in and really enjoyed it, some continuing singing on the way out of the class. Music is therapeutic and relaxing and enables a comfortable learning environment.

VII. Background to the Contents of Animal Law

In the absence of a textbook, I was very free to pick and choose what I would include in the classes. The Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law workshop which I attended in 2022 provided invaluable material and encouraged us to think about what we would cover. I decided not to start with a theoretical focus as many of my students come from rural backgrounds and I did not want the content to be too abstract at the outset: theory could come later.

The Irish national broadcaster, RTE has done several documentaries on animal abuse relating to the export of cattle, greyhound racing, puppy farming and the horse racing industry in recent times. Fur farming was banned in Ireland in 2022^[73] and although hare coursing and fox hunting continue, most people want to see their abolition. However, at the moment, political will is weak. People are becoming more aware of the ills of industrialised farming and its negative effects on the environment, on the health of rivers and human health. Concern for the animals is also rising. Moreover, animals are gaining status in legislative initiatives, and their sentience is now largely recognised around the world.

Originally, I thought that I would find this subject very boring compared with intellectual property. It seemed a very black-letter subject where there was legislation but very little recorded case law. Many of the cases are heard in the District Court or the Circuit Court and these cases are not reported. Recently, however, there have been some High Court cases, and they are interesting in that they unequivocally classify animals as property. Courts in other jurisdictions are beginning to question this doctrine, so Irish courts are not progressive in this domain. Secondly, the textbooks in the UK are excellent^[74] but do not cover Irish law. I searched in Brehon law – the Irish legal system which predated colonisation – for a clearer trajectory of animal rights and did not find very much.^[75] As I continued to search, I found a goldmine in Irish mythology: our stories abound with shape shifters and time shifters and as I started to explore this realm further, I became mesmerised with our myths and legends. The purpose of this exercise was to connect students to the animals in the same way in which theory can be used to foster empathy – Irish mythology resonates deeply with Irish students and is also of interest to our Erasmus cohort.

The best-known Irish myth of all is the Children of Lir. It is so iconic that there is a statue of the children in the Garden of Remembrance in the main street of our capital city. When Queen Elizabeth visited Ireland in 2011 – this was the first visit of a British monarch to Ireland since our independence – she was brought there. Lir was a king and his four children were bewitched and transformed into swans by their jealous stepmother for a period of 900 years. They endured great hardship during this time and when they enchantment lifted, they were very old and died soon afterwards. As I pondered on this tale and its underlying meanings, it became evident that there was a transmigration of the soul and that the body was a vessel of the spirit: a concept with which many legal systems are profoundly uncomfortable if not outrightly sceptical. This is in part due to the secularisation of Western society which has led to a struggle to address ethical and moral questions.^[76] However, our treatment of animals demands that we engage with these fraught issues, and I found that when I start talking about our creation myth, then students engage. In Ireland, our creation narrative tells that our original inhabitants were known as the “Tuatha de Dannan” or the People of the Goddess Danu. Danu appears in the Hindu Vedic Scripts, gave her name to the River Danube and was worshipped in Ireland some 3,000 years ago. This was documented recently by the late Manchán Magan in his book “Brehons and Brahmins”.^[77] Themes of reincarnation abound in our mythological stories and there are two in particular that question our use of animals as food. The first story is the White Trout of Cong^[78] in which a woman whose lover died buries him near a pond and transforms herself into a trout so she can live nearby. A taboo grows up around her but an adventurer from other parts comes and decides to catch her and cook her. When he pops her in the pan she continually hops off until she finally adopts human form, and her attacker desists. Another story tells of Oisín, a member of a mythical band of warriors known as the Fianna who was out one day hunting hares. He shot a hare who raced down into a Dún or a fort and when he pursued her, he entered a palatial room in which a beautiful woman was seated nursing a wound in her leg. Oisín vowed never to partake of hare meat again^[79] and this seems to suggest that we need to watch what we eat for it may be human flesh disguised in animal form.

This led me on a philosophical enquiry in which we came to realise that we divide all matter into persons and property. This is not a human-animal divide or, indeed a human-natural object or inanimate matter division but, rather, a contrived partition which suits human beings. Not all humans are or have been persons as noted earlier. Animals, however, are property. We wax lyrical about lovely animals in the wild for the most part and now largely condemn trophy hunting and, indeed, hunting too. However, our true tyranny lies in our treatment of the other 96% of animals which we farm. The French philosopher René Descartes can be credited with justifying our brutality: while articulating that “I think therefore I am” he hypothesised that animals were automatons who did not feel but, rather, reacted in a reflexive manner to pain stimuli. This provided a powerful philosophical framework that helped to legitimise the practice of vivisection, which involves experimentation on animals in which they are used to provide models for human disease. This was fought over vociferously for many decades and, indeed, an antivivisection hospital along with a vegetarian hospital were present in London for a time.^[80] As investigation into disease using animals increased and cures became available, the resistance to vivisection waned and the practice became entrenched. Only recently have animals been recognised as sentient beings in EU law and the effect is beginning to be felt, slowly but surely in the treatment of animals we care about such as our companion animals or pets. Farm animals, which make up 96% of mammals on the planet do not fare so well. Their suffering is permissible if necessary, so a concept of unnecessary suffering is permissible. Of course, enforcement is very difficult as animals are enclosed in their dwellings at our mercy. The treatment of animals has been influenced by the Brambell Report which set out guidance, called the five freedoms. These include freedom from hunger and thirst, discomfort, pain, injury or disease, fear and distress and the freedom to express normal behaviour.

In Irish law, however, there are exemptions for fishing in the normal course of events, hare coursing and hunting. Apparently, necessary suffering is something that occurs, is normalised and subjective.

My aim was to get students thinking about the way in which we treat different animals in a non-judgmental environment. I started with two weeks of presentations about various animals around Ireland with a quest to find the underlying principle on which our treatment of animals rests. I explained that principles underpin our laws and justice is an important tool through which to evaluate their legitimacy. For human beings, equality is a central feature of our law-making.

We considered the life of Fungie, a famous dolphin who lived in the bay of a touristy town called Dingle in the south-west of the country. We concluded that he was a de facto person as we neither trapped nor tagged him, nor was he bred nor captured. When he disappeared after 40 years, people genuinely mourned him. He was never treated as property. We wondered though whether his special treatment depended on good behaviour and this would appear not to be the case when examining the life of Dusty or Fáinne, another well-known dolphin who swims between the beach of Lehinch in the west and the Aran Islands. She is a much less friendly character who some people say has tried to drown them. Nonetheless, when she appears, swimmers get out of the water – no one would contemplate killing her, but we do not really know why. We do hold these animals in some reverence, and we also read a poem about a dead dolphin by a famous poet, Sinéad Morrissey (winner of the T. S. Eliot poetry prize) called “Achill”, an island off the west coast. This is a lament. In addition to thinking about appropriate legal protection for dolphins, the students – Irish and Erasmus alike – benefit from learning about different parts of the country and of literature that is not within the discipline of law.

We contemplate our treatment of horses as Ireland prides itself on being a nation of horse lovers. We remark on how the horsemeat scandal some years ago horrified most people who would not normally contemplate consuming horsemeat. We look at different birds – from swans that we refrain from eating, although this was not always the case, to chickens that we farm industrially. We conclude that we do not have a coherent underlying principle on how we treat animals.

VIII. Substantive Material

We then have a brief overview of Irish law and start with a backdrop to this by examining British law which was its precursor. As Britain changed its law, so did we. We consider some Irish case law in several different areas. One treats of a High Court judge’s claim that a principle of law had been good law in Ireland since the sixth century in the case of St. Colmcille a famous Irish saint who also became known in Scotland as St. Columba. This case was about a copyright infringement of a copy of the Bible in sixth century Ireland and it is known as the world’s first copyright case. The principle which the judge sought to draw from this case related to property rights. This case was heard in 2010, and the judge was deciding on the issue of quantum in compensation to a farmer for cattle which had been confiscated by the Minister for Agriculture. The farmer was successful in establishing a higher amount of compensation, but the case is also interesting in that it is arguably heretical. After independence, a line was drawn under former rights, especially property rights, that could not be revisited as to do so would cause significant upheaval.^[81] Another compensation case arose after the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK and Ireland in 2001 and again what was at issue was the amount of compensation being paid.^[82] Bird flu has also given rise to cases where damages are claimed against the government.^[83] Some other cases involve challenges to the extent of the rights of authorised officers to enter premises and confiscate animals or, indeed, to impose any level of restriction on owners who have little regard for the animals in their care. The higher courts were all engaged with several appeals of a woman who simply refused to accept the courts’ jurisdiction, the rules relating to confiscation and any notion that challenged her idea that she could do whatever she liked with her animals.^[84] All of the Irish cases accept unequivocally that animals are property, here for our use and, indeed, abuse.

The next line of cases that we examine are cases from various jurisdictions in which animals have been recognised as having rights of liberty or where they have been recognised as persons. As I had already taught this part of animal law in my Sociology of Law module, I was able to use my material from cases in the Americas and update this material with more recent cases. I have learned over the years to keep a printed copy of everything that I do and to send it to myself by email. Laptops go out of date and break down and vital material that has taken a long time to put together can be lost otherwise. The case of Kaavan from Pakistan^[85] was part of the updated material and is an especially useful case. In addition to its groundbreaking decision: elephants have rights in Pakistan that are not yet recognised in North America – the judge in the case grounded his decision very firmly, in true common law style, quoting the Pakistani Constitution and the Quran but also revising thoroughly all the other cases on the rights of animals from countries such as India, Argentina and the US. These have arisen both in civil and common law jurisdictions and are of interest to students in that civil law cases are not often quoted in common law courts. This indicates both the scholarly expertise of the judge but also the fact that this area is at the cutting edge. In invoking the Quran, he said that it is incumbent on people to treat animals humanely and with compassion, tinging the judgment with a welcome dose of ethical consideration. 

As I now have more scope in terms of the time I can allocate to Animal Law, we observe other features of these cases such as the reliance in the US on amici curiae briefs and expert evidence. Furthermore, the distinction between the development of habeas corpus as a flexible common law doctrine and its more rigid legislative formulation was noted. Attention to this sort of detail helps students develop their legal skills and to think critically about different legal frameworks in a vibrant, rapidly moving globalised world.

Once this case analysis has been completed, we again consider the Irish legislation which can now be examined in greater depth. I have found that legislative analysis works better when a brief overview is given first, followed by an examination of the cases which brings the statute to life. Then when I talk about the legislation again in greater depth, it acquires a life of its own and becomes more interesting. We note particular sections which have been cited in the case law and when the students revisit the legislation, it provides a contextualisation of what they have already seen. It allows them to study the law in an interactive manner and embeds good practice in that they become accustomed to going back and forth from the legislation to the cases, reinforcing their understanding as they do so. It enlivens the study.

I gave a presentation at a conference in Oxford in August on Dublin Zoo and I reused this for one of my classes – with slight modification. It is a very topical issue in Ireland at present because some protected disclosures had been made by staff at the zoo to a number of politicians. They then used privilege in the Dáil, which is the Irish parliament to publicise the revelations and the matter is ongoing. It also gives students another lens through which to see animals: at the same time, a large wildlife park in Cork, Fota, had to close due to bird flu. Tens of birds were slaughtered, and the park had a large shortfall in funds which the government had to pay for. Otherwise, the animals would have starved.

In my first year of running this module, I had a guest speaker, Marie Louise Heffernan who is an independent ecologist. Her talk was entitled “Terns and Turbines”, and it examined the clash between the protection of birds and the construction of turbines very close to the shore which are predicted to kill many birds. It showed that environmental measures are not always in harmony with the lives of animals.

Another topic for which I either provide notes or else teach in person, depending on time is that of the so-called “Spy Cops” debacle: the scandal in Britain about the infiltration of animal rights groups by the police. Several women had relationships, unbeknownst to them, with undercover policemen, some of whom disappeared out of their lives suddenly. Helen Steele who was one of the defendants in the aforementioned McLibel case was one of the victims of this activity and she has received a state apology. The undercover police did not receive any sanction at all.

I provide written material about vivisection which gives students an appreciation of the influence of the philosophy of Rene Descartes, alluded to earlier. In a 12-week module I have found it necessary to be selective about what I teach, and I chose the course content based on a number of principles. I wanted to get students thinking about how inconsistent we are about the way we treat different animals and to encourage them to inquire into theories of justice. If equality is the founding principle of human rights law, there is no such equivalent in animal law. However, there has been some progress, and, for instance, we banned fur farming in Ireland in 2022 after a sustained social media exposure of the cruelty of the farms, so change is possible. We also note that legislative reform is very advanced in countries such as Switzerland and the work of lawyers such as Antoine Goetschel has received international attention for many years.^[86] I make students aware of the international database of animal rights laws that Goetschel has established, Global Animal Law.^[87]

The final topic that I chose for my module was a study of the Irish hare, which is a native animal. I talked about the nature of the animal about which we know very little. A recent novel Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton^[88] revealed a lot of information about this animal and was written by an author who rescued a hare and then got to know the animal very well. John Fitzgerald an Irish activist for animal rights and a campaigner against bloodsports has also written two books about hares,^[89] giving perspective on having been persecuted by hare coursers. This gives a nice literary hue to the class. I explore poems about hares and talk about hares’ mythological features – how they are associated with the moon and with the Otherworld. Sometimes their manifestation is good and others it is not and they are associated with both good and evil. Their timidity is known, and they are wild animals which are not easy to domesticate, unlike rabbits. We examine the law which in Europe protects them as a native species under the Habitats Directive. The Irish Animal Health and Welfare Act 2013 list protected animals which cannot be subjected to unnecessary cruelty, but hares are exempted because they are both hunted and coursed. Little principle is evident in the law, and we then talk about their conservation. Hare coursing clubs claim to look after the hare, feeding them while they are captured and killing their predators. Approximately three or four in every hundred hares die in coursing but often where native animals are left to their own devices, they do less well simply because of habitat destruction and the tensions of modern agriculture. This is an ethically fraught area in which there are several different points of view.

IX. What Students Think

Student feedback has been very good because the class is inclusive and not judgmental. Students with dyslexia thrive in the creative space within the classroom where we get to take an uplifting approach to a difficult subject through poetry and music. Introducing new forms of examination which raises questions for the students is a very worthwhile exercise because they engage with me, asking for clarification and it helps me to improve my communication skills when I see that certain points are not entirely clear. It has created a continuous or perpetual motion feedback loop where students gain confidence in asking questions and become accustomed to being treated with respect and dignity. Their writing skills are also honed and improved because they can get started from the first month, writing, editing, consulting and then finalising their works.

Such has been the success of the module that the University has asked me to put on a micro credit which will make the course available online for a small fee for those who cannot attend in person.

X. Conclusion

Our relationship with animals is changing as we become more knowledgeable about their lives. This has happened in an environment where we have intensively raised them for our own uses. Human beings have destroyed a lot of Planet Earth’s environment which is affecting our lives directly and those of animals which also depend on those ecosystems. The more we know about animals and how similar many of them are to us, the more we need to rethink the way in which we control them. My teaching work to date has sought to raise knowledge in historical, legal and scientific contexts about the lives of animals and to encourage students to think about justice. My method of examination through reflective writing and creative pieces which can be short essays, poems or songs encourage students to express themselves and thus, I hope, to become better lawyers who do not shirk but, rather, engage deeply with one of the most ethically significant and fraught issues of our time.

Copyright (c) 2026 Maureen O'Sullivan

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.