Litigating on the wild side of history

Interview with Michelle Strauss

Michelle is a solicitor (admitted to the bar in New Zealand in 2007 and in England and Wales in 2019) and a doctoral researcher at Birmingham City University, working on a dissertation on improving international environmental law by enabling the participation of non-humans in the legislative process. She became involved in animal and environmental law work in 2015/2016 while living in Dublin, initially through activist work opposing the puppy farm industry in Ireland. She is the founder of The Animal Advocacy Project. For Philosophy in the Wild, she will chat with us about some of the legal aspects that relate to our work. We are going to meet live here on Substack covering personhood (24th of June 2025), more-than-human normativity (23rd of September 2025) and the laws we should hope for (23rd of December 2025) – at 6 pm, UK time. We hope that you would like to join us for these sessions or come back for the recordings.

Thank you so much for joining me here, Michelle – you are a wonderfully passionate person with many talents. Perhaps for context: we met at an event organised through A-law – could you please explain what A-law is?

Thanks so much for having me – it’s been an absolute delight to meet you! A-law is a fantastic charity that uses the law to achieve better outcomes for animals. For example, they might research how a particular animal welfare law isn’t being enforced and call for better enforcement, or they may find that a piece of legislation isn’t achieving its purpose and call for reform. But there is a lot more to their work – I’d encourage people to have a listen to their podcast if they would like to learn more.

Thank you! I am interested in your perspective on our project for two reasons. First, Mary Midgley said that “great philosophers […] must be lawyers as well as poets” – poetry is already well represented, law not so much. Second, what philosophers (and others) consider as “the wild” is actually replete with various sets of legal norms not many people really know about. And yet, the law can be crucial in moving from hope to actual progress.

I think you want to stress ‘can’ here. Years of practice and activism in the area of animal and environmental law have made me a bit sceptical. My first hands-on involvement was when I was working on campaigns relating to puppy farms in the Republic of Ireland around 2016. At the time, there was an exposé that revealed how the conditions in these places were just awful – severely overcrowded, dirty, lacking in any kind of enrichment or stimulation – these were essentially factory farms. The exposé revealed flagrant breaches of the law. And yet these were facilities that had been inspected by the local authority and given the green light to carry on operating. When all these issues became public, the response was to give the puppy farmers a slap on the wrist and allow them to keep going, and the local authority doubled down and said they had done nothing wrong.

It subsequently turned out that some of these farms didn’t even have planning permission and were situated in or straddling Natura 2000 sites – which is a particular area of land that is conferred with protection under EU law because it has threatened species and habitats. We discovered that throughout the whole of the country, including Natura 2000 areas, puppy farm waste (faeces and soiled bedding) was being disposed by landspreading. Dog faeces is incredibly high in nitrogen and for this reason is a terrible contaminant if it enters waterways (not to mention the health risks it can pose). This was plainly in breach of the law and posed a real threat to the fragile ecosystems in Natura 2000 sites. We raised this concern with various government departments and local authorities and quickly learned that nothing was going to be done. So we made a complaint to the European Commission who similarly told us they weren’t bothered. Once again, the law failed to provide the check and balance that was so needed.

But that’s not to say things can’t get better. The law has undoubtedly evolved and continues to do so, and this evolution is often closely tied to philosophical discourse. Which is why I am looking forward to this project “running wild” and perhaps articulating ideas that may not be considered realistic, or perhaps easy to implement now – but push the law to evolve.

I love that idea. How do you view the relation between law and philosophy?

Law calls on philosophical scholarship to answer questions like – who counts and why? These ethical considerations often frame how the law will provide protection to certain groups or redress for infringement of those protections. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the law often builds on the philosophical views that are most supported by the majority in any given society. Law, especially when it comes to animals and nature, is conservative. Animals are often considered significant only because they have a value for the human “owner” – they have only instrumental, no intrinsic value. The law responds by treating most animals as property.

In 1822, the first law in the UK to protect animals from cruel and improper treatment was passed. Nicknamed “Martin’s Act” it was a piece of legislation that prevented the cruel and improper treatment of cattle. Today, we have the Animal Welfare Act 2006 for instance. Internationally, there are some non-binding standards such as the OIE standards and WHO regulations. Often these norms, both at domestic and international level, do not prevent killing or suffering at the hands of humans, they just limit when and how this can occur. And the legal concept of animals as property persists.

Let’s move on to animals who are not owned: wild living animals – but then I suppose some of them are owned, or “kept” at any rate. I had come across the World Charter for Nature, which seems to be less anthropocentric – but then it is not binding. I find it sometimes frustrating to know what is what: highflying intention or justiciable norm. Could we try and map the law that actually applies to some of the animals we are going to cover?

Let’s start with the UK. For certain wild animals, we have the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. It provides different degrees of protection largely depending on whether an animal is ‘native’ or not. The Act prevents all wild animals from certain forms of capture (e.g. snares) and killing (e.g. by automatic or semi-automatic weapons). The Act also protects ‘certain animals’ – native animals, and there is a list of these in Schedule 5, from ‘being intentionally killed, injured or taken’. But all of this legislation and surrounding policy still embed the dualism between people and everything else – we pit nature against culture and progress. It is nowhere better seen than the government webpage titled ‘Managing Wildlife on your land’. Consider this extract:

‘You may need a wildlife licence to kill, cull, remove or disturb the habitats of particular species if they’re legally protected. You’ll usually need to have a good reason too (for example they’re attacking your crops or causing a public health problem)’.

Animals matter – but only when they aren’t messing with us.

The problem starts with its description: “Managing Wildlife on Your Land” – as if the land didn’t belong to other animals, too. And as if “wildlife” was unruly per definition. You only need to buy land, find a “good reason” why some non-human resident “bugs” you and you can count “Wildlife and Countryside” on your side. Honi soit …

Exactly. This anthropocentric thinking is why we face biodiversity loss and species extinction on levels never seen before. I think the way forward is to embrace ‘wildness’. We must challenge the notion that wild is bad – that the wilderness needs to be tamed. Our law yearns for certainty, and predictability. Too often ideas to transform the law, ideas that may reflect the realities of our entangled world, are critiqued because they are considered to produce unpredictable outcomes. Yet we live in an unpredictable world, and with environmental degradation, species extinction and climate change increasingly so. Perhaps we need to recognise that our legal framework that seeks to impose order to our wild world is no longer fit for purpose (perhaps never was).

I really look forward to our deep dives. You will join us for three live chats – on personhood, more-than-human normativity, and the laws we should hope for. Now, I know that you are not only interested in law and philosophy, but also in the arts. What is your favourite example of the arts pushing the imagination, perhaps even leading to some legal change?

There are so many good examples in film, photography and installation art. But one that immediately comes to mind is the science fiction novel Terraformers by Annalee Newitz that helps us think through ethical and practical questions about multispecies relationships. These don’t lead to legal changes but I think literature can start important conversations.

Perfect. And your answer to my FAQ: What is your favourite scent?

Freshly brewed coffee!