“Nations Like Unto Yourselves”: An Inquiry into the Status of a General Principle of International Law on Animal Welfare
Summary This article proposes that there is a general principle of international law concerning the humane treatment of animals. Preoccupation with “animal rights” has been associated with Western cultural imperialism masquerading as a universal ethic. Animal welfare is thus an instructive case study of what Jutta Brunnée and Stephen Toope have identified as the key challenge for international law, that of “construct[ing] normative institutions while admitting and upholding the diversity of peoples in international society.” This article applies the framework of interactional international law set out in Brunnée and Toope’s recent book Legitimacy and Legality in International Law, while raising questions about the weight that their analysis accords to practice and their willingness to conclude that widely recognized principles to which states fail to adhere in practice lack legal force. The article also examines how laws prohibiting cruelty to animals have emerged precisely from an interactive cultural exchange between East and West, in particular, between England and India. It concludes that Brunnée and Toope’s framework, although it does not deal at any length with general principles of law (a source of international law in which practice plays a relatively minor role), is nevertheless a useful tool for understanding how a culturally contested principle fits into international law and ultimately supports the view that there is a general principle of international law concerning animal welfare.
Studies in Global Animal Law
The introduction explains key concepts and methods. It defines global animal law as the sum of legal rules and principles governing the interactions between humans and other animals, on a domestic, local, regional, and international level. Global animal law reacts to the mismatch between almost exclusively national animal-related legislation on the one hand, and the global dimension of the animal issue on the other hand. The merely national regulation of animal welfare within the states’ boundaries runs aloof in the face of globalisation. This gives rise to an animal welfare gap. Moreover, animal use creates global problems ranging from climate and soil degradation over antimicrobial resistance to food insecurity. This requires a global law response. The introduction also gives a brief overview over the book and its main findings. 1 Global Animal Law in a Nutshell The essays assembled in this volume analyse both foundational and current legal aspects of human—animal relationships from a global animal law perspective. Global animal law refers to the sum of legal rules and principles (both state made and non-state made) governing the interaction between humans and other animals, on a domestic, local, regional, and international level. Given that the various ‘levels’ of regulation are normally not neatly separate but rather intermesh and criss-cross, the image of ‘marbled’ regulation might be preferable to ‘multi-layered’. The body of global animal law comprises hard law in the form of statutes and treaties and soft law such as standards issued by international organisations and voluntary labelling A. Peters (*) Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg, Germany e-mail: apeters-office@mpil.de An alternative label would be ‘transnational animal law’. However, the term ‘global’ expresses better that some relevant problems are currently addressed only in national law. In addition, the © The Author(s) 2020 A. Peters (ed.), Studies in Global Animal Law, Beiträge zum ausländischen öffentlichen Recht und Völkerrecht 290, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-60756-5_1 1 schemes or industry norms and codes of conduct. So the actual producers of global animal law are parliaments, governments, international institutions, business, civil society organisations, the latter often acting transnationally and in collaboration with governmental agencies. The scholarly analysis and commentary on these bodies of law constitute the academic discipline of global animal legal studies, or—for simplicity’s sake—the discipline of global animal law. Global animal law comprises but significantly moves beyond the international legal instruments which seek to conserve endangered species, to protect wild animal habitats, and to uphold biological diversity. These rules pay attention to collective goods, mainly for anthropocentric reasons. In contrast, they barely address the welfare of individual animals or potential rights of some animals which results in the notorious wild animal welfare gap. Global animal law also seeks to emancipate itself from classic environmental law and bears some overlap with the novel branch of biolaw. Speaking of ‘global animal law’ conveys the message that animal law can be best understood, applied and analysed when legal practitioners and scholars have an eye simultaneously on the various layers of the law, and on various norm types. The corpus of domestic, international, and local law, of state-made and privately generated, of hard and soft law relating to the treatment and welfare of animals has reached a critical mass which justifies summing it up as a cross-cutting matter or as a legal field of its own, under one overarching heading. 2 A Globalised Problem Requires a Global Solution Global animal law is the response to the mismatch between almost exclusively national animal-related legislation on the one hand, and the global dimension of the animal issue on the other hand. States increasingly regulate animals unilaterally qualifier ‘global’ in a wide sense conveys that the approach is universalist, comprehensive, and holistic. See Brels, ‘Global Approach’ 2017, 105. Such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), 3 March 1973, 993 UNTS 243 (entered into force 1 July 1975) and the Bonn Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), 23 June 1979, 1651 UNTS 333 (entered into force 1 November 1983). See, e.g., Council of the European Communities, Council Directive 92/43/EEC on the Conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora, 21 May 1992, Official Journal EU L 206, 22 July 1992, 7-50. See, e.g., Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), 5 June 1992, 1760 UNTS 79 (entered into force 29 December 1993). See for a recent scholarly collection seeking to expand and intensify the international law approach: L’Observateur des Nations Unies: Revue de l’Association française pour les Nations Unies 45 (2018), ‘L’animal’. See, e.g., Carporale/Pavone, International biolaw 2018. 2 A. Peters
Exopolysaccharide biosynthesis and related enzyme activities of the medicinal fungus, Ganoderma lucidum, grown on lactose in a bioreactor
Exopolysaccharide (EPS) production and biosynthesis were studied in Ganoderma lucidum, a fungus used in traditional Chinese medicine, grown with lactose in a bioreactor. β-Galactosidase activity, which implies the existence of a lactose permease system, was induced by lactose. Lactose feeding also increased α-phosphoglucomutase activity and EPS accumulation but decreased phosphoglucose isomerase activity and lactate concentration in the culture broth. A maximum cell density of 22 g l−1 and EPS at 1.25 g l−1 were obtained in fed-batch bioreactor culture.