LESLI BISGOULD INTERVIEW
Canadian Animal Rights Lawyer speaks with the Abolitionist-Online.
By Claudette Vaughan

Lesli Bisgould is one of the new and exciting voices of ethical animal rights lawyers currently coming through to defend animal rights in a court of law. Called to the bar in 1992, she began her private law practice in 1995, where she focused solely on animal rights law for ten years, the first such practice in Canada. Some of her past work has included working on a successful municipal prohibition on exotic animals in circuses (unfortunately later overturned); trying to protect advocates who observe and publicise the atrocities in Canada’s annual seal hunt, working to stop the poisoning of city pigeons and helping to stop spring bear-hunting in Ontario.

Abolitionist: What features are written in law that makes us ‘human’?

Lesli Bisgould: That’s a very good question. Assumptions that nobody ever questions. It’s more that exceptions come up from what is the assumed norm and we have to deal with these. There really is no law establishing what sort of legal entity a so-called human being is.

What are your views on personhood rights for animals?

We have to be careful how we go at it. On the one hand it makes perfect sense because if corporations can have legal personhood and go to court to assert their rights and Trusts and Estates and ships in some cases, all sorts of non-sentient and non-living entities are able to advance their interests in court so it makes no sense that actual living entities with interests are prevented from doing so. I do think that is the potential way to go. The flip side is we want to be a little bit careful about how we do it. For example; while initially the Great Ape Project is a very interesting idea to me it may not be the right way to go to try and get rights established just for the kind of animals that are most like us. I don’t know if we want to do it one species or one little group at a time. It may be that we need to go all in and try to push the boundaries for all animals. So instead of accepting, as we all do, that the law already says that animals are property and we to go there and prove why they shouldn’t be, I want to turn the tide and start expecting other people to explain to us why shouldn’t animals have the rights of personhood and the rights to have their interests considered. If we start breaking it down one species at a time I think that may take us in the wrong direction and will lead to a much longer fight than there is time for.

Where would the critical mass come from? Would animal activists be convincing judges and magistrates or would it come from the general public and convincing them on why animals should have rights and then that pressure would naturally flow on to the law courts to ultimately change the law?

My experience over the years has taught me that the answer is: All of the above. When I go to court they say, “Well that’s not how the law is interpreted. You have to change the law, go and talk to the politicians.” And then you go and talk to the politicians and they say, “That’s not what the public want, go and talk to the public.” Then we go and do a demonstration on the street and they say, “Well if you don’t like what’s going on, go to court and challenge the law.”

Every institution in our democracy is very well equipped at defending itself against making changes that are going be inconvenient and so change seems to be granted a little bit at a time in all directions when everybody is getting nudged. When your neighbour is talking to you about isn’t it horrible that this is going on? And then you study at school and there’s a course where you can learn that animals are sentient and why that should have their interests regarded. It’s very rare in society that you have these massive singular transformations. It really does happen a little bit here and there and slowly, slowly, slowly the ideas are normalised and they don’t seem foreign and then one day you make an argument and the judge says, “Of course, this is completely consistent with what has been happening in our society”. I think there is a role for everybody to play and that allows everybody to be an animal rights activist. Every place in society is an important one. It’s about taking a very difficult idea and normalising it and making it seem not so unusual so the more players the better.

Films like ‘The Corporation’ have brought it to our attention that corporations can be granted autonomous personhood rights, but looking at it the other way, if personhood can be achieved and as this happened so easily without any debate or consultation, this occurred because it reinforced the law and its property rights status, not challenged it. Our struggle is to do away with the property status for all animals. Have I got it right?

That’s a question that gets right at the heart of why our society is so screwed up in the first place. It has been organised in such a way that it affords some individuals so much power over so many other individuals. We have all been convinced to believe that property rights are quintessential – but the truth is – only for some. The few profit at others’ expense and that is a problem that manifests itself I think in all of our institutions. I see it in courts, you see it out there in the world, you see it in your daily life that corporations have a pretty strong sense of personhood but I think it’s important to take a step back from that.

It’s easy to feel disempowered because corporations have the laws written in a certain way to suit them but we have to step back from that and realise there’s no such thing as law. A law is not a thing, it’s just a word we give to an idea that then translates to certain power dynamics but it really is just an idea and there’s no reason why we have to have one or the other. Historically this is how it’s all developed so theoretically at least it’s perfectly open to us to change direct and redefine the kind of things that law does. Take tobacco for instance. Tobacco is an example of where corporations had a lot of power. They made sure they had laws in place which protected them for many years. They got very wealthy and now you can’t go anywhere to smoke. In a generation what you would have said a generation ago could never happen has happened and all of a sudden the world is completely different. The paradigm has changed. Kids will now grow up thinking this is normal so ‘normal’ is sometimes a trick we play on ourselves.

So much of what we do and fret about is in our own mind. If we change our way of thinking about it, we can change what happens.

Just before women gained the vote there was a lot of discussion over would it make things right for women. Of course giving women the vote wasn’t the full answer but it was necessary in the process of granting women’s emancipation. In a animal rights sense then, giving animals their rights as sentient beings still might not make it right. Do you have an alternative preferred method Lesli?

I think animal rights is a term that scares people. They are not ready for what they think it implies. It seems to be suggesting a complete overhaul in their way of life and to some degree, over the long-term, that maybe true. But what’s more true is I think Society has very slowly adapted to ideas that makes sense to us and we have in the past rejected ideas that don’t and so when you talk about the vote that’s a really good example. Women had to struggle incredibly hard to gain that right, which they now have in the West but would we argue that we actually have an egalitarian society? Hardly. It’s a step towards real change but it certainly isn’t the end. The legal system is very limited in what it can do and I spend a lot of my time as a lawyer trying to disabuse people of their assumptions that, “We have to fight this by going to court”. Courts are proud of being slow to change.

Legislators are political and sometimes make decisions for the wrong reasons so I think we have to think much more broadly about change as it has to happen in all parts of our Society. We can go to court and win an important victory and that’s fantastic but it’s limited, it’s always limited. We just have to be thinking about making a change in consciousness. For example take laws on murder. I don’t think our laws on murder much prevent anyone from committing a murder. I think we don’t murder one another because we don’t want to live in a society where people murder each other. Along those lines, I think the real role of the animal rights community is to just do what it is already doing so well which is talking to people and challenging their misperceptions.

Animals are not things. Animals are not objects. They do have families. They do feel pain. They do feel love. So then people choose not to go to marine parks and zoos and circuses. If you stand outside the circus and stick a sign in their face they get irritated. You are interrupting my nice day with my family but if they read something on their own or if their kids don’t really want to hurt animals it’s a much broader social change but there’s not just one victory. There’s got to be a lot of little things. Thinking of one little victory doesn’t mean it’s over - to the extent that it does, there’s going to be a backlash so it’s a constant job to encourage human beings to be constantly respecting one another and others. It doesn’t seem to be our natural state of being so we constantly have to work at remembering why it’s important to respect one another and try not to profit and benefit from hurting one another. That’s valid in the human realm as well as the non-human realm.

Are you heartened about the new law movement that’s currently underway for animals?

I think it’s very exciting. I think of the famous quote by John Stuart Mill: Big social movements all go through the same three phases. First is ridicule. The second is debate and the third is adoption. Once you start getting the subject into universities and courts and lawyers and judges start to feel the pressure to take it seriously it’s a really good sign that we have moved out of the ridicule part - where animal rights has been for a long time, ask anybody who has ever cared about animals and expressed it - but it’s not ridicule anymore. It is a serious idea. It has been regarded as such in our most serious institutions and I think that really is a most positive sign.

You are co-author of the work Anything Goes: An Analysis of Canada’s Legal Approach To Animals On Factory Farms. What did you find?

That was a very depressing analysis of the way farming has been transformed. It’s depressing on a lot of levels. For what it means to rural parts of the country, to families who have been farming but certainly from the animal’s perspective what’s been happening at least in North America and I think elsewhere but I’ll comment on what I know best. Since the second world war a lot really changed. We got antibiotics which allowed farmers, which is what I’ll call them for now loosely, to start to accumulate and keep together a lot more animals than they would have been able to before because they would have shared illnesses that would have been harmful. So antibiotics No 1 was a huge development through WW2 that allowed farms, and what we think of as farms, to really expand. Then there was a constantly increasing demand for meat and all sorts of corporate changes where corporations were becoming bigger and bigger and moving into fields that were not traditionally their own and all of these things have coalesced in what has become a factory approach to the creation of meat. There’s a different language, how animals are referred to the same way any other product in a factory is referred to. You can look at the process of which it’s done, where there’s absolutely no recognition for the living creature except to the extent that you have to come up with horrible practices to try and trick their biology. Trick the biology of chickens so they will molt faster or trick the biology of veal calves so they don’t develop properly the way they are supposed to…

We now have got in Canada a very quickly dying system of family farms. There are still small farms around and when I drive in the country I still occasionally see cows around and a few other animals but it is increasingly rare. You almost never see chickens, you almost never see a pig and even the cows most of them have gone inside in factories. What that report does is summarises all of the legislation in Canada that basically allows that to happen. It allows it by the particular language it uses and I find the language is very similar across North America. We prohibit the causing of unnecessary pain and suffering to animals so anybody who’s not seriously interested or not paying attention looks at that superficially and thinks, “Oh great we prohibit unnecessary pain and suffering”. When you start to think seriously about how that term gets interpreted and what gets read into it you see that actually those words mean absolutely nothing on paper. When we prohibit the causing of unnecessary pain and suffering that means that in our law we are granting ourselves permission to cause necessary suffering. Necessary by what standards? When is suffering ever necessary? We determine that in how we describe the obligation, we pre-determine that one party is more important than the other. We have already predetermined the results of any conflict that’s going to arise by deciding that one is more important than any other so it makes the law almost completely useless. Sometimes even worse than useless because it purports to give protection and in the end it doesn’t. It allows people to think that there is nothing really to worry about.

You once said for animals in law there is personhood or there is nothing and asked: Is there anything in-between that can be of any use for animals in law currently? Previously when a mass of people have been on the streets aggressively protesting for animal rights the next step was the law courts but animal rights lawyers weren’t in place at that time to work further on what was being accomplished on the streets. For example; The Bill C-15B. The Fur Institute representative Alan Herscovici identified 2 key objectives which is pretty much what we want and exactly what they don’t want in law. First, he was totally against the moving of the animal cruelty provisions from out of the section on special types of property into a section that is right beside one on public morality issues and second, he was so threatened by what he claimed was a “radical and irresponsible expansion” of the definition of the word “animals”. These Industry people are astute and this is why the new animal law movement is important. Previously we have had the activists on the ground but not a mountain of animal rights lawyers for continuing the struggle.

I think you are right but I slightly disagree with what you said at the end. What the industries have is a tonne of money. They get to hire lobbyists who get to do nothing but go around and try and make politicians worry about the implications of their legislation and they certainly do spend a lot of time paying attention to the animal rights movement and getting copies of everything that they are writing and so they have that benefit for sure but I don’t think what they say is accurate very often. They twist language. They misinterpret it. They say things that aren’t true. They are trying to fear-monger. They are trying to distract us from the real subject.

The man you mentioned, Alan Herscovici, spoke just before I did at the Committee hearings into some very modest amendments to Canada’s anti-cruelty criminal laws. It was shortly after 9/11 and everybody was talking about anti-terrorism legislation and what we had to do to protect ourselves so Canada had some anti-terrorism legislation in the works and there was much public debate about it. He got up and generally said that the Bill C-15B that we are here discussing today, the animal cruelty stuff, was much more of a threat to Canadian security than the concerns being addressed by the anti-terrorism legislation. He effectively said the animal rights people are terrorists. They are a serious threat to us. The industry spokespeople do that all the time. They always fear-monger and misinterpret.

I heard a lot of Industry people saying that if the Bill was passed the way it was worded, it will then make it illegal to bait a worm on a hook and it was going to be illegal to go fishing. All these things that I wish were true! (laughter) but it couldn’t actually be further from the truth. They pick words out of context and say, “this is what they mean”. That’s why we have lawyers in courts. That’s all they do all day, every day is fight about the meaning of words. You can’t pretend it’s going to be exactly what you say, you have to look at the record and the history of how these words have already been interpreted to mean nothing like you are saying. These lobbyists can be very misleading and that’s the real danger. Bill C-15 had several other names before it finally died. There have been a number of efforts to try and get our Criminal Code provisions changed. They date back at the moment to 1892 and we have still not been able to do it. It really has largely to do with serious misinformation essentially spread by animal using industries and their lobby groups, who claim to both love animals and fear that their particular kind of love may actually be a criminal offence.

The changes that were proposed that I supported were minor, so minor, if it wasn’t so sad it would be laughable.

Let me ask you the question you yourself have asked: Why are animal laws, anti-cruelty laws in the most obvious situations where the guilt of the person or persons is evident, so difficult to get a result? What is so hard about wanting to help animals?

Lots of people make lots of money hurting animals. I think that really is the short answer. Lots of people make money and they organise themselves and know how to play the political game. Those politicians don’t want to do something that is going to upset the corporations that now run the agriculture industry in many parts of the world as well as other animal-using industries, and they have nothing to gain by doing so. They understand perfectly well that lots of people care about animals but few people are going to swing their vote because of animal laws because there are so many other issues to deal with where the cattle industry will certainly organise to herd a particular politician if there is a threat to their industry so there’s a political power behind industry that individuals have not yet been able to match in any sense. You know, who ever has the power makes the laws. That’s not what we get taught in grade schools about democracies and what the majority of the people want. It’s no where near the truth. It’s not at all what happens in our political system. Whoever has the money can buy the lobbyists, take out the politician to lunch and that’s how laws often get made.

What laws, if any, are particularly effective for any of Canada’s animals?

Interestingly I find municipal laws can be very effective. Municipalities are still in place where you can actually go and meet your politician and they do feel a certain amount of obligation to you. Once you get higher into the provincial federal level the Member has so many constituents that the odds that they are going to take you seriously decrease. Municipally you can still face your councilor, you can still organise locally enough to swing a vote and there have been initiatives I’ve seen all around the place e.g., by-laws that prohibit the keeping the keeping of wild animals in a municipality – that will keep circus animals away. Or even just the keeping of certain pets. We have all kinds of tigers and lions you can buy for $50.00 bucks as a pet but then municipalities start passing these by-laws that say you can’t keep a lion in your basement and sure enough things start to change. Municipalities have passed by-laws, more so in the US, to change the terminology dealing with animals to ‘owner’ to ‘guardian’. I think that’s a pretty big deal. It’s going back to what I said earlier. Change is how we conceive of animals. Is this a thing I own? Or is this not a human child but is the relationship more comparable to that of a parent-child where this is a more vulnerable being that needs my protection. It is not an object that I own to hurt as I please. There have been some important municipal initiatives. I think those are good and we have some not bad international Trade laws, effective to varying degrees but those laws often become effective after the fact. The laws are not great and any success we have with laws at the moment really depends on the determination of the prosecuting party, how determined they are to want to stick with it and to build the facts to really make a case even when the wording of the legislation isn’t the greatest.