Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders: Extraterritorial Jurisdiction and the Challenges of Globalization by Charlotte E. Blattner (review)

It has become almost a cliché to note the impact of our global economy on a field of study, yet the obligatory nod to the relevance of globalization is often pro forma and shallow. The antidote to the surface level treatment of these issues is Charlotte Blattner’s timely and careful examination of the way that globalization and animal law intersect. At bottom, it is a call to appreciate the vast repercussions of globalization for animals and the “need for solutions freed from territorial” limits (p. 81).

The book covers a tremendous amount of material in considerable depth, and no brief review could adequately summarize the topics covered. Like the law of jurisdiction itself, the book tackles “questions that defy succinct summation” (p. 11), so by necessity this review will focus on a few of the book’s key contributions.

A central claim of the book is that persons are now properly “concerned with the status and well-being of animals” (p. 4). The “animal turn,” or the emergence of the field of animal studies, has its origins in figures like Jane Goodall, but from the hard sciences the field quickly spread to philosophy and social science. Only after basic scientific discoveries and an explosion of writings about ethics and animals did “what is now known as animal law” emerge. Yet this is not to suggest some linear progression from sciences and humanities to law. Quite the contrary, it appears that the next stage of animal law development may turn on scientific advancements in the fields of animal sentience and cognition and social science research about how to translate that science into law and policy (p. 74). Animal law, Blattner recognizes, is constantly informed by other fields and evolves in response to developments. Animal sentience “rightfully occupies this central stage” in the understanding of the role of law in protecting animals (p. 74), and the law itself must acknowledge a need for solutions that respond to the global problems presented by animal industries. Animal law, it seems, can never be truly free from deep historical connections to other fields, nor can it be regarded as the domain of any one sovereign country.

This latter point is the focus of Blattner’s project—the realization that protecting animals cannot be done in a geographic vacuum. The world is interconnected, and indeed in other areas of law it is well established that states have an interest in applying their national standards beyond geographic boundaries (p. 5). Food production and thus animal welfare issues are often assumed to be matters of uniquely local concern. But this sense of local interest is probably borne out of the mythical “Old MacDonald” type farms, which, if they ever existed, are almost fully supplanted in modern times by large corporations. The world’s vast demand for animal products is satisfied by multinational corporations that raise animals for food on a global level. The idealized family farm making decisions over the dinner table about the adjacent field has been superseded by the corporate board-room that makes decisions about raising pigs halfway across the globe.

This globalization trend means that companies can scour the earth for the most minimal animal protection laws and locate animal production operations in these countries. The global economy, in other words, facilitates a race to the bottom in animal agriculture such that corporations can “move production facilities to [nations] where standards are less stringent” (p. 63). Some readers may doubt that there is a wellspring of interest in protecting animals by governments that is unrealized because of a fear that businesses will outsource their production, and indeed future projects might provide more examples of these phenomena. But Blattner provides a few carefully selected examples in support of her claim that fears of lax animal laws in neighboring countries has deterred nations from improving...