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5 Can. J. Comp. & Contemp. L. 77 (2019)
The Save Movement and Farmed Animal Suffering: The Advocacy Benefits of Bearing Witness as a Template for Law

handle is hein.journals/cajccl5 and id is 87 raw text is: 









The Save Movement and Farmed

Animal Suffering: The Advocacy

Benefits of Bearing Witness as a

Template for Law

Maneesha Deckha*


This paper critically analyzes the practices and legal regulation of the growing global
phenomenon of the Save Movement, a (human) social movement directed at bearing
witness to and raising awareness of the suffering of animals brutalized in intensive
farming. Save activists typically hold vigils as animals are transported from the
warehouses in which they were raised to their deaths in a slaughterhouse. Through the
lens of feminist relational theory and critical animal legal studies, the paper considers
the benefits of the Save Movement forfarmed animals as well as the capacity of the
law to participate in the act of bearing witness to farmed animal suffering that the
movement advocates. I argue that bearing witness is not only aproductive activity for
animal advocates to engage in, but also serves as a modelfor how the law can respond
to animals. Put dfferently, I argue that the law should strive to bear witness to animal
suffering, and that this subversive and partly socially subjectifying move for animals
can occur even in the present anthropocentric legal culture where animals are legal
property and clearly non-subjects.






      Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the
      University of Victoria. Her research interests include critical animal
      studies, animal law, critical food studies, postcolonial theory, feminist
      theory, health law, and reproductive law and policy. Her scholarship has
      appeared widely has been supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health
      Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
      Canada. She also held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law and Society
      at New York University and currently serves as Director of the Animals
      & Society Research Initiative at the University of Victoria as well as on
      the Editorial Boards of Politics andAnimals and Hypatia. She is currently
      completing a book project on feminism, postcolonialism and critical
      animal legal studies.

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