Nonhuman animals' property status: contesting the Western approach

Despite the growing recognition of animal sentience in Western societies, nonhuman animals continue to be systematically exploited and killed across various economic sectors for the overall benefit and wealth of humanity. In fact, most civil law and common law systems formally differentiate entities as either persons or property, reserving the definition of personhood for humans and relegating nonhuman animals to the status of mere goods. Drawing from different animal rights litigation cases, this thesis analyses the conceptual and psychological barriers to a possible animal law reform, suggesting how an intersectional view of oppression, together with nonwestern and indigenous cosmologies of human\animal relationships, could be a constructive way to dismantle the human exceptionalism of legal systems and possibly give rise to a new concept of rights and subjectivity for nonhuman individuals within the law.