You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog

You’re no better than a dog, a skunk or a hyena.

Why, even a tree or a river is in no sense inferior to you. And I do mean in no sense: moral, social, intellectual, you name it.

In spite of that, you have perfidiously usurped human and legal rights, while denying them to plants, animals and minerals. That’s a gross miscarriage of justice, insist experts in jurisprudence, who are evolutionally superior to you and me.

Nor is it just empty theorising. The legal experts in question banged their heads together and came up with practical legislative proposals. These were laid down in a Law Society report, titled Law in the Emerging Bio Age and written by Dr Wendy Schultz and Dr Trish O’Flynn.

The report is long, but its conclusion can be summed up in a few words: human and legal rights must be extended to animals, trees and rivers, to start with. Otherwise climate change and diminishing biodiversity will put paid to ‘our planet’.

One would think that the case for this overdue measure would be difficult to construct in a single document. After all, its implications touch not only on law as such, but also on biology (micro- or otherwise), philosophy, history, anthropology, religion and all sorts of other disciplines that add up to our civilisation.

A daunting task, one would think, but it’s nothing The Law Society can’t handle. “We sometimes see ourselves as outside nature, that nature is something that we can manipulate,” says Dr O’Flynn. “But actually we are of nature, we are in nature, we are just another species.”

Fair enough, no modern person can argue with that. This is the canonised principle of equality, as applied to biology. Despite the self-serving claims made by some inveterate reactionaries, all species are equal. Hence they must all have equal rights, what’s not to like there?

That way a pig, a tree or a river will be “allowed to reach its full cognitive, emotional, social potential,” explains Dr Flynn. Here I must stop to think.

Granted, my neighbour’s spaniel Jack has a cognitive potential to develop. He can learn to perform increasingly difficult tasks: sit, lie down, fetch, get off the bloody sofa, and for heaven’s sake not on the floor.

Jack’s emotional potential is also beyond doubt. He wags his tail when he is excited, jumps up high in the air when my neighbour comes through the door and is vociferously enraged when anyone else does.

One can’t gainsay Jack’s social potential either. After all, ‘social’ derives from the Latin socius, which means friend. And we all know who a man’s best friend is, so no problem there.

Problems start when we extrapolate all the same thinking to your average tree or, for that matter, the Thames. True, willows can weep, but I’ve always thought that’s just a figure of speech.

‘Thought’ is the key word there. My thought is hopelessly mired in Judaeo-Christian misconceptions, which The Law Society has set out to correct.

Dr Schultz is aware of my limitations (even if she’s unaware of my existence) and she is ready to tackle them head on:  

“Granting something that is culturally numinous rights just so you can preserve it gets us to a kind of valuation that, among other things, is a cultural shift away from the Judaeo-Christian great chain of being – dominion over nature. This is reconfiguring it to place us where we have always been and where we should be thinking of ourselves as belonging, as just a node in this greater web of life on the planet.

“If that worldview can be enshrined in law, essentially granting personhood rights to the spirit of the river, the spirit of the trees or the spirit of the elephant, you’re talking about enshrining a kind of neo-pantheism into 21^st-century legal frameworks.”

While in no way wishing to trespass on the legal territory where my footing is uncertain, I’d still like to signpost the area where I’m more comfortable. Thus, what the authors are describing has little to do with any kind of pantheism.

That doctrine starts from the premise of God, but then postulates that He is identical with nature. This goes back to the ancient Hindus, and in Europe pantheism is mostly associated with the 17^th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. However, though it has been a while since I cracked his Ethics, I don’t recall reading any statement equating man with a spaniel, both being equal parts of the natural continuum.

“Granting personhood rights to the spirit of the river, the spirit of the trees or the spirit of the elephant” takes us much further back, all the way to a world of hirsute humans running away from similarly hirsute mammoths and ducking giant flying reptiles.

The reactionary in me would be happy to backtrack to the thought of the 13^th century AD or, if you held a gun to my temple, perhaps of the 4^th century BC. But going back to Jurassic times is a bit too far for my taste. And there I was, hanging on to my wobbly faith in steadily meliorative progress.

Arguing against this sort of thing is both tedious and futile. It’s like trying to convince a madman that he isn’t Napoleon. In the psychic world he inhabits, that’s precisely who he is, even if it’s not something any outsider can grasp.

However, I’d sleep better at night if I thought that our top legal minds realise that any kind of rights presuppose the existence of moral agency. Hence they are dialectically inalienable from responsibilities: a man has a right to legal and moral sovereignty only if he accepts the responsibility of exercising it in a legal and moral way.

Since trees and rivers can’t tell right from wrong, applying the concept of rights to them is a basic category error. They, along with that spaniel Jack, have their whole lifespan predetermined by their physical or biological makeup. In that sense, Jack is infinitely closer to the turd he left on my neighbour’s carpet than he is to the neighbour himself.

That’s me done. I told you arguing against lunatics is tedious, although one could be justified in thinking that lunacy describes not just those two academic ladies, but modernity as a whole.

After all, The Law Society of England and Wales isn’t your local loony bin or methadone clinic. It’s a highly respectable professional association that since 1825 has been the driving force of law reform.

Yet the reform it’s driving now does smack of your local asylum run by its inmates. One has to think that our sanity can survive for only as long as we stubbornly cling on to what’s left of the Judaeo-Christian worldview.

You know, the sort of thing The Law Society wishes to leapfrog, jumping back to the good old primordial times.