And they are influenced by developing scientific and ethical scholarship showing animals to have far higher levels of cognition and social development than previously believed. This summer, the fledgling field of animal law took an important step toward legitimacy when two of the country's most prestigious law schools, Harvard and Georgetown, announced that they would offer courses in animal law for the first time. The animal lawyers have also gained a handful of court victories in recent years, the most important of which was a Federal appeals court decision last year that gave a human zoo visitor the right to sue to get companionship for chimpanzees. And since 1994, legislatures across the country have given these lawyers a potent new tool by sharply upgrading animal cruelty crimes to felonies from misdemeanors. We've learned our trade, and now we are focusing on the next steps.
Critics ridicule animal law as the latest example of absurdity in the legal system.
They see it as an attack on the economic system's reliance on animal products that could wreak havoc in the courts. There would be nothing left of human society if we treated animals not as property but as independent holders of rights. The animal lawyers say the idea that animals are mere property evolved centuries before modern notions of some animals as sentient beings with perceptions and even emotions. The lawyers have been moving on many different fronts to establish precedents that they say could provide a foundation for direct attacks on the property status of animals. Lawyers have also had success in battling what they call execution orders, the sort of routine euthanasia that occurs when dogs bite people.