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In recent decades, public attitudes regarding the treatment of animals have changed dramatically. As recognition and understanding of animal sentience grows—meaning animals’ ability to experience pain, fear, pleasure, and other complex emotions—so too does the pressure to improve and expand legal protections for animals. Yet the direction of legal reform remains contested, and competing philosophical perspectives have given rise to two primary approaches: animal welfare and animal rights. These are among the philosophical debates that students explore in our course Animal Legal Philosophy.
While both animal welfare and animal rights philosophies are grounded in the idea that sentient beings generally deserve to be free from unnecessary suffering, the differences in their respective philosophical underpinnings lead to divergent advocacy strategies and policy efforts.
Animal Welfare Philosophy
Most legal protections for animals fall within the animal welfare framework, which aims to improve animals’ living conditions while preserving their legal status as property. Animal welfare laws are generally based on scientific insights regarding species-specific needs, and can act to prohibit as well as require certain actions. For example, anti-cruelty laws generally prohibit humans from physically abusing animals, while also requiring that humans provide adequate food, water, and shelter for the animals in their care. As a whole, these laws are grounded in a utilitarian approach that weighs animal suffering against human interests, such as economic efficiency and social practices. Essentially, the philosophy of animal welfare suggests that practices that inflict suffering on animals are wrong, unless such practices can be justified. This helps explain why many laws prohibit “unnecessary” cruelty, but still allow harmful practices if they are considered customary or beneficial to humans. Likewise, animal welfare laws often discriminate between species, excluding entire groups of animals from legal protections based on political, economic, or societal interests. One of the most obvious examples of this is the US federal Animal Welfare Act (AWA), which excludes farmed animals and mice and rats bred for research purposes from the definition of “animal.” As a result, over 98 percent of land animals used in the US for food or research are not covered by the AWA.
Animal Rights Philosophy
By contrast, animal rights philosophy challenges the moral correctness of this framework altogether. This perspective argues that animals possess inherent value and should not be treated merely as a means to a human ends. From this view, legal reform must go beyond improving conditions and instead must recognize animals as rights-bearing subjects rather than property whose worth is tied to human ownership and use. This approach calls into question entire categories of common practices including raising and killing animals for consumption, because harming and killing animals violates the animal’s basic rights. The focus then is no longer on making animal exploitation more humane but on illustrating that animal exploitation can never be justified because it is ethically and morally wrong.
This tension between animal welfare and animal rights is reflected in how animal advocates approach and consider legal reform. On one hand, incremental welfare improvements may reduce suffering in the short term, but critics argue they risk entrenching the very systems they seek to regulate by making exploitation appear more humane. On the other hand, welfarists often critique rights-based approaches as focusing too much on future ideals instead of challenging and reducing the tremendous amount of suffering that animals are currently experiencing. Additionally, welfarists point to the human-centric nature of the legal system making the feasibility of granting animals legal rights depend upon a fundamental overhaul of the system. The strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, requires animal advocates to grapple with difficult questions regarding animal ethics, the practicality of legal reforms, and long term goals within the animal protection movement.
The Animal Legal Philosophy course takes up this task by considering the core question at the heart of animal law: how should the law treat animals and how do we get there? By situating the contemporary disagreements within their broader intellectual history, the course outlines how animal welfare policy is currently the dominant framework and how animal rights policy has emerged as a response to, and as an alternative to, measures that fail to challenge the underlying legal status of animals. The course then moves beyond this traditional dichotomy, introducing students to newer and evolving philosophical approaches that challenge, refine, and sometimes transcend the welfare-versus-rights divide. These perspectives provide important tools for grappling with some of the animal law field’s most difficult and unresolved questions, such as, which animals should be recognized within the legal community and what kinds of rights or protections should they receive.
By connecting theory to practice, Animal Legal Philosophy encourages students to think critically about how these philosophical approaches have and will continue to shape the laws that dictate the treatment of animals. It also asks students to confront what meaningful change for animals would require, specifically whether reform can occur within existing structures or whether a more fundamental reimagining of animals’ legal status is necessary. In doing so, the course not only deepens understanding of the current debates but also equips students to participate in shaping the future of animal law.