ACA attends UNSW Animal Law Conference

Two of ACA’s Species Representatives, Tracey Dierikx (Exhibited Animals) and Karri Nadazdy (Horses & Livestock) attended the UNSW Animal Law Conference on 10 September 2022, for a full day of Animal Rights indoctrination.

The “Animal Law” Conference was aimed at undergrad and post graduate lawyers, to encourage them to be more involved in Animal Rights activism, and showcase what has been achieved by pioneering Animal Rights Lawyers in Australia so far. It was sponsored by Animal Rights groups, and the gift bag handed out on the day was full of glossy and expensive animals rights propaganda.

Tracey and Karri arrived to find a wonderful university venue for a conference, overlooking Randwick racecourse and a small group of eager, disillusioned young people waiting to be let in. Once inside the venue and the speakers were labelled with name tags, we could discern that around a third of the 100 or so people in attendance were the speakers and organisers. The majority of the remaining attendees were fresh faced under grads, and we also spotted some well known ARE figures in the audience.

The Conference was opened by Siobhan O’Sullivan, the senior lecturer at UNSW on social policy, who told us that changing Ag Gag laws were a key current focus for Animal Rights Lawyers. She stated that POCTAA and agricultural laws in NSW was problematic because it supported “confinement” of animals, and was therefore anti animal, “hypocritical by protecting some animals more than others” and needed to be thrown out in its entirety and redrafted from an Animal Rights perspective.

Interestingly she also offered some encouraging statistics that only 30% of enrolled Animal Law students were vegans, and how disappointed she was in this, as it showed students are not committed enough.

As ACA continues to highlight, the “Animal Law” title is misleading – it should be called Animal Rights Law – perhaps this figure (30%) proves that students are not getting what they think they are signing up for?

The Conference moved on to a Panel Discussion called ‘Protecting Companion Animals’. This included Animal Justice Party MP Emma Hurst, Anna Ludvik the founder of Lucy’s Project, and Anne Greenaway, from Lawyers for Companion Animals.

Ms Hurst stated that it’s a “legal fiction” that animals are property and that “our laws are designed to fail animals”. She repeated her usual trope that puppy farming is completely legal in NSW, and that it was deliberate that one state’s laws (such as an animal keeping ban) cannot be enforced in another state. We thought the many lawyers in the room would correct these statements, but no correction came forward. She felt that Sentience will not be recognised soon, despite the Greens recent motion looking to insert sentience into the NSW Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, and that the real problem is that animals are referred to as property in all legislation, and that has to be tackled at every level, which will take time and has many hurdles.

Ms Greenaway said that animal ‘Guardianships’ (where breeding dogs live in normal family homes as normal family dogs) are problematic and need to be banned. Hurst said that this is something she is pursuing.

Via an anonymous online portal, Karri asked “how is Guardianship different to fostering?” Ms Hurst stated fostering is to get the animal into a loving home, while Guardianship is to dodge puppy farming laws and profit from lots of puppies. She said that, Guardianships is an issue because the breeder retains ownership and the guardian cannot override the wishes of the owner, if they decide they don’t want to breed the dog after agreeing to, and the breeder has the audacity to take legal action to get their dog back. She continued, fostering is different because dogs are being permanently removed from breeding. Ms Greenaway added, foster animals belong to a rescue group, and guardian animals are owned by breeders, and are probably illegal. She then continued to describe the many issues rescue groups experience getting foster dogs back from rogue foster carers who won’t return animals they don’t actually own, and the rescue group has to take legal action, which is something she assists the rescues with.

Yes, our heads spun round too. They illustrated that these two situations are exactly the same, and encounter the exact same issues under the exact same circumstances.

Karri’s other question to Ms Hurst was, “Emma Hurst said puppy farms are legal. The RSPCA Puppy Farm Taskforce reported that larger facilities were not the problem and were not puppy farms. They have only found 3 small operations to prosecute so far. Do we need to change the definition of puppy farm to close down more breeding operators?”

Ms Hurst’s response was that the overwhelming testimony in the NSW Inquiry was that puppy farm didn’t need to be defined.

ACA notes, this was only stated by the Animal Defenders Office who have declared they drafted Ms Hurst’s Anti-Puppy Farm Bill on her behalf!

Ms Hurst then also (incorrectly) stated that the more animals someone has the higher the welfare risk to the animals, but then she said, “some groups stated it’s not about numbers.” She continued to say that this legislation is about encouraging people to ‘Adopt, Not Shop’, by reducing the number of other available puppies.

Ms Hurst also said that she was offended that euthanized animals were being disposed of by councils in landfill, and she implied that pounds were built next door to tips specifically for this purpose to the horror of the audience (in reality, pounds and tips are both built on land owned by the council, and in actuality few are located alongside each other — there’s nothing sinister about it).

Ms Ludvik quite correctly said that we can’t separate humans and animals in a legal context (she was specifically referring to Domestic Violence issues) and that she sees this as a reason to elevate animals to the same level as humans instead of property. She said she “… doesn’t even know what a companion animal is.” and that the term was legally irrelevant.  ACA would argue this is exactly why animals need owners to be responsible for them. She said that, “We are at war” referring to Lucy’s Project’s struggle to get donations, and then plugged their website. She said she was embarrassed to do this. Later, she said it was great how laws can be changed incrementally to firstly ban puppy farming, including kitten farming, “…and then can we ban greyhound and horse breeding!”

The next Speaker was Peter Dunning QC who mounted a legal challenge to so called ‘Ag Gag Laws’ on behalf of Animal Rights Extremist Group Farm Transparency Project, run by former AJP Candidate, Chris Delforce, to give animal rights extremists legal protection to invade any agricultural business. Genuine whistleblowers are already protected under the law, and Dunning’s Challenge was to make Trespass and installing cameras or filming a strangers property without their knowledge legal if it’s for the purpose of ‘public interest’ and to protect animals.

His speech was a long, painfully monotonous timeline of the courts decisions against his challenge, which were very convincing, and sounded absolutely reasonable! He encouraged the law students in the room to continue what he started, by “Exploiting to the fullest what I AM allowed to do under the law…”, and other than feeling exhausted listening to him speak in circles without offering much to say, we were thoroughly convinced that the Court made the correct decision to throw his Challenge into the trash where it absolutely belonged.

We took a much needed break from the conference while the next panel discussed environmental law and issues outside of ACA’s purview, and returned for the Animal Law Institutes presentation on Consumer Law. The “issue” of animals as property and described as “goods” was key to their concerns with current laws. The example given to consider while looking at the various clauses relevant to animals was of a $10,000 poodle with severe hip dysplasia and worms, being sold by an evil greedy breeder to a loving innocent family (who don’t want to give the dog back). This was a hypothetical example, not one they have actually encountered, and the real life examples were of misleading marketing claims by egg and meat producers that were all settled out of court (and not by the presenters!).

The irony of misleading political claims being exempt from all legal recourse was not lost on us.

The final Panel of speakers was comprised of Mike Rosalky and Namaan Kranz of the Animal Law Institute, Meg Good of the Australian Alliance for Animals, and Tara Ward, of the Animal Defenders Office. This panel was geared at promoting Animal Law careers to the undergrads attending but the speakers all confirmed that there is no money in animal law (they are all funded by grants/donations/sponsors and other jobs with very few paying clients) and that the only real money to be made would be by entering becoming university lecturers, politicians or becoming a bureaucrat. While we were somewhat reassured by this, the students were probably not so!

Tara Ward amused the whole audience by talking about her incompetence and how to pretend to be normal to get a foot in the door. A student asked what other careers would support Animal Law, and Ward answered this question with how there really are no careers, but that the Animal Rights movement desperately needs scientists who will provide research that can back their legal claims, because they don’t have that.

Yes, we were as surprised to hear this as the rest of the audience. A vocal Animal Rights Activist stated that Animal Rights has no scientific backing and the cognitive dissonance did not melt her brain enough to realise its probably because she’s on the wrong side of the fight. Oh wow, were we glad the day were over by this point!!

Throughout the day, questions were fielded from the audience by the online portal, which was very handy as we could pose questions anonymously, and we could see everyone else’s questions even when they weren’t asked of the presenters (most were not). Funnily enough, 80% of the questions were posed by ACA’s attendees, and most of the other questions were out of date, out of touch, or completely unaware of the present animal law issues. Questions such as “do kitten farms exist?” were very reassuring to us, as it clearly showed that the up and coming ARE of the future are not yet well informed or engaged with the issues that they are claiming to support. This also meant that most of the questions asked of the speakers were ours, as they were actually relevant to the topics discussed, which was very helpful to us to counter-act the claims.

The flip side of this is that it confirmed what we already assumed, which is that people are voting for parties like Animal Justice and the Greens with a very superficial understanding of the issues and ignorantly believing that the Animal Right propaganda is about helping animals.

The Conference was very interesting (and frustrating!) for us to attend, it confirmed that the newly emerging “Animal Law” departments are geared towards recruitment and indoctrination of Animal Rights, not Animal welfare. The various organisations involved in the conference were all interconnected, and worked for each other through their histories, with very little independent thinking. We were reassured to see that the attendees were disengaged from current issues, and not actively participating in extremism. There were a few topics that we will look into further and address through Animal Care Australia.

We have an uphill battle to counter the well funded marketing and propaganda that is being spewed out en masse from these groups. The ARE influence in politics is very real and very vocal, but not representative of 97% of Australians. There’s a lot of work to do for a small number of us at ACA, and we need all the support we can get to fight these bad ideologies from continuing to gain traction.

By: Karri Nadazdy – Animal Care Australia Horse & Livestock Representative. Originally published: December 2022 ACE Newsletter.