Abstract With legal animal rights on the horizon, there is a need for a more systematic theorisation of animal rights as legal rights. This article addresses conceptual, doctrinal and normative issues relating to the nature and foundations of legal animal rights by examining three key questions: can, do and should animals have legal rights? It will show that animals are conceptually possible candidates for rights ascriptions. Moreover, certain ‘animal welfare rights’ could arguably be extracted from existing animal welfare laws, even though these are currently imperfect and weak legal rights at best. Finally, this article introduces the new conceptual vocabulary of simple and fundamental animal rights, in order to distinguish the weak legal rights that animals may be said to have as a matter of positive law from the kind of strong legal rights that animals ought to have as a matter of future law.

Tierethik sich "mit der moralphilosophischen Reflexion der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung [beschäftigt], d.h. mit sämtlichen Aspekten der Rücksichtnahme auf Tiere als Individuen (Tierschutz)". 37 "Wie die Hausfrau, die die Stube gescheuert hat, Sorge trägt, dass die Türe zu ist, damit ja der Hund nicht hereinkomme und das getane Werk durch die Spuren seiner Pfoten entstelle, also wachen die europäischen Denker darüber, dass ihnen keine Tiere in der Ethik herumlaufen." SCHWEITZER, S. 295. 38 Zum traditionellen Schweigen der Moralphilosophie betreffend Tiere und zur impliziten Normativität der Aufnahme der Tierfrage in die Ethik siehe GERICK, S. 148 f. 39 Zu den beiden Ebenen RIPPE, Ethik, S. 94. 40 Erst wenn der moralische Status von Tieren grundsätzlich bejaht wird, treten nachfolgend die Modalitäten der moralischen Berücksichtigung von Tieren innerhalb der moralischen Gemeinschaft in den Vordergrund (welcher moralische Status?).

The contemporary human-animal relationship is highly ambivalent. It is characterized by both the exacerbating exploitative use of animals and a progressing moral concern for the life, dignity, and welfare of animals. With regard to the agricultural use of animals (which is the quantitatively most significant area of animal use and accounts for more than sixty billion land animals slaughtered globally each year), these two poles stand in particular contrast. On the one hand, agriculture has been increasingly industrialized and intensified over the course of the Twentieth Century. The modern system of industrialized animal production (or the "animal-industrial complex" 1 ) is marked by a high degree of rationalization, automatization, efficiency, mass production, and profitability, and has turned animals into mere production units-biomachines that convert feed into meat, milk, and eggs. On the other hand, the transformation of agriculture to industrialized animal production has raised grave ethical concerns, and societal discomfort at the systemic disregard for the welfare of farmed animals has grown. Most people cringe at the sight of footage showing the horrifying conditions prevailing in factory farms and slaughterhouses, and the vast majority of society subscribes to the basic moral principle that inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering on animals is wrong (a dictum also underlying the nearly universal prohibition of animal cruelty and which is so ingrained it could be considered a "rule of civilization," as noted by the dissent in a Canadian appeal decision regarding an elephant in a city-run zoo). 2 While the growing moral concern for animals has not stopped or reversed the process of industrialization of animal production, the juxtaposition of these two antithetical forces generates a strong dialectical tension. One way of reconciling or harmonizing these two conflicting impetuses is the idea of humanizing animal production. This idea informs, for one, farmed animal welfare regulation which sets minimum standards to be respected in agricultural practices. The idea of humanizing animal production is embodied even more clearly in humane (animal welfare) labels that react to consumers' demands for higher welfare standards beyond that which is minimally required by law.

Animal rights: interconnections with human rights and the environment THE EMERGENCE AND MAINSTREAMING OF LEGAL ANIMAL RIGHTSLegal animal rights are on the horizon. 1 Not too long ago, the notion of animals as holders of legal rights still seemed utopian to most. However, the idea of animal rights is not novel; it finds its early roots in the works of philosophers and social reformers such as Jeremy Bentham 2 and Karl Christian Friedrich Krause. 3 Since the advent of modern animal ethics in the late 1970s, sparked notably by Peter Singer, 4 animal rights have become widely theorized and popularized in moral philosophy. Though it has taken several decades for these philosophical developments to be reflected in legal arenas, the landscape has started to shift.Animal law, and the corresponding academic field of legal animal studies, is flourishing. There is now a lively scholarly debate dedicated to establishing, elaborating, and advancing the theoretical foundations and practicability of legal animal rights. Moreover, animal rights are gradually beginning to emerge and solidify in case law. Most notably, courts in Argentina 5 and Colombia 6 have extended the constitutional human right to habeas corpus and the underlying right to freedom to captive animals. Furthermore, courts in India have developed case law recognizing a range of fundamental rights of animals, among them the right to life, dignity, and freedom from torture. 7 And in May 2020, the Islamabad High Court, too, recognized legal animal rights and, moreover, linked the protection of animals to the human right to life in light of the current pandemic crisis, which has highlighted the 'interdependence of

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