De jure naturae et gentium, “The law of nature and of nations,” is the title of Samuel Pufendorf's eight-volume masterpiece of philosophical jurisprudence, first published in 1672. It provides the tag by which an entire discourse is known, one that dominated legal philosophy at European universities for over two hundred years. Pufendorf's Protestant articulation of its principles was pivotal both for transmitting it to the Eighteenth Century and for giving it a history, which in his eyes began with his fellow-Protestant Hugo Grotius. In fact, however, its roots stretch back to the early Sixteenth Century, to the lawyers whom Philip Melanchthon gathered around him at Wittenberg and (more importantly for the future structure of the discourse) to the Catholic scholastic theologians who were originally based at Salamanca in Spain but subsequently spread out over the whole of Counter-Reformation Europe. In the confessional conflict that would burn throughout the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, theologians on all sides used law to define the space of the political, and used the idea of natural law to underpin that space, even while shaping it differently according to their divergent narratives of sin and redemption. While the ius naturae et gentium was an academic genre, therefore, its content was not. It was a theory and a legitimation of the state, and the arc of its reasoning from nature to the nations ran through the institution of political power. The state and its power are constructed not so much upon right (ius) per se but on the potential for the violation of right (iniuria), and the demand for such violation to be vindicated, by law or ultimately by war. At its very barest—although this is to traduce the richness and complexity of the discourse—the ius naturae et gentium is thus a theory of legitimate violence. When it comes to animals, what we find is that they are systematically excluded from the potential to suffer violation of right and therefore from political space and political justice. As we shall see, however, this did not always mean that they were totally excluded from any kind of right or that every act of violence against them was always legitimate.

We are used to the view that historically “what counted as fully human always depended … on a sharp contrast with ‘the animal’.” As a consequence, “[w]omen and slaves, in being denied full humanity, were therefore necessarily partaking in animal nature.” Questioning this view, this essay traces how some early modern thinkers defined the relationship of human beings to animals generally, and, more particularly, how they saw the relationship of women, slaves, and animals in the human household. The picture presented, while being far from complete, aims to show that Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century thinkers had nuanced arguments to offer when they discussed the relationship of human animals to nonhuman animals, and the relationship of nature and culture, neither of which were presented as clear cut opposites. At the same time, the equation of women with animals and slaves was not something that was commonly found in Sixteenth Century philosophical treatises, which might lead us to rethink our own ideas about equating one disenfranchised group with the other.

Greta Gaard writes that “[t]he pervasive availability of cows’ milk today—from grocery stores to gas stations—is a historically unprecedented product of industrialization, urbanization, culture, and economics.” To these factors, I would add colonialism and international law; the latter understood broadly to include the rules considered binding between states and nations, transnational law, legal transplants, international food aid, and international trade law. Until the end of the Nineteenth Century, the majority of the world population neither raised animals for their milk nor consumed animal milk. Humans are unique in the mammalian realm in that they drink the milk of other species, including beyond infancy. With the European conquest of the New World and other territories starting in the Sixteenth Century, dairying began to spread worldwide—settlers did not set out to colonize lands and people alone; they brought with them their flora, fauna, and other forms of life, including lactating animals such as cows and sheep.

In times of war, the first instinct is to relieve the suffering of human beings. Environmental and animal interests are always pushed into the background. However, warfare strongly affects natural resources, including animals, which makes animal issues a matter of great concern. Certain species have been vanishing at a rapid rate because of wars, often with disastrous effects on the food chain and on the ecological balance. Indeed, belligerents rarely take into account the adverse consequences of their military operations on animals. They even take advantage of the chaotic circumstances of war in order to poach protected species and to engage in the trafficking of expensive animal products. While generating billions of dollars each year, such poaching and trafficking allows armed groups to grow and to reinforce their authority over disputed territory. States have also trained, and continue to train, certain animals—principally marine mammals such as bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions—to perform military tasks, like ship and harbor protection, or mine detection and clearance. Millions of horses, mules, donkeys, camels, dogs, and birds are obliged to serve on various fronts (transport, logistics, or communications) and become particularly vulnerable targets.

The contemporary human-animal relationship is highly ambivalent. It is characterized by both the exacerbating exploitative use of animals and a progressing moral concern for the life, dignity, and welfare of animals. With regard to the agricultural use of animals (which is the quantitatively most significant area of animal use and accounts for more than sixty billion land animals slaughtered globally each year), these two poles stand in particular contrast. On the one hand, agriculture has been increasingly industrialized and intensified over the course of the Twentieth Century. The modern system of industrialized animal production (or the “animal-industrial complex”) is marked by a high degree of rationalization, automatization, efficiency, mass production, and profitability, and has turned animals into mere production units—biomachines that convert feed into meat, milk, and eggs. On the other hand, the transformation of agriculture to industrialized animal production has raised grave ethical concerns, and societal discomfort at the systemic disregard for the welfare of farmed animals has grown. Most people cringe at the sight of footage showing the horrifying conditions prevailing in factory farms and slaughterhouses, and the vast majority of society subscribes to the basic moral principle that inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering on animals is wrong (a dictum also underlying the nearly universal prohibition of animal cruelty and which is so ingrained it could be considered a “rule of civilization,” as noted by the dissent in a Canadian appeal decision regarding an elephant in a city-run zoo).

The international trade of live animals, especially animals sold for slaughter, creates significant challenges for international law. Nonhuman animals do not fit neatly into the legal world created by humans. In nearly every jurisdiction, animals are property, but they are not like all other property. The sentience of animals has been widely recognized and it forms the basis of anticruelty laws where they exist. You may destroy your toaster any way you like, but the laws of most jurisdictions protect how you treat your dog. This fractured point in the law, animals as property and yet not exactly property, is the source of confusion in national laws, leading to unsatisfactory answers to questions such as what damages should be paid when a companion animal is negligently killed or whether individuals should own wildlife as “pets.”

The aim of this essay is to show how international law relates to the interaction of indigenous peoples and animals across international borders. While colonial borders have affected the lives of herding communities in Africa and while there are cross-border indigenous activities in different parts of Latin America, the situation in Northern Europe is particularly noteworthy. This is because cross-border activities are possible there not simply because effective border controls are difficult to ensure in such remote areas but mainly because several of the relevant states have the long-term political will to allow for cross-border activities. Particular attention will be given to the situation of the indigenous Sámi people. Their homeland, Sápmi, is governed by Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. The borders between Norway, Sweden, and Finland have been open since the Nordic Passport Union of 1952, significantly predating the Schengen Agreement of 1985, which allows for unhindered travel in large parts of Europe, including these countries.1 Finland and Sweden are members of the European Union, while Norway is part of the European Free Trade Area and of the Schengen Agreement; Russia imposes visa requirements on citizens of the three other states. With such limitations, the Russian part of Sápmi is effectively cut off from the Western parts. While the borders between Finland, Norway, and Sweden have long been open for many purposes, this openness does not fully take into account the needs of the indigenous Sámi people, who consider themselves to be one people and consider the Sápmi homeland as a whole.2 Today, only part of their ancestral homeland is recognized as Sámi home areas in the legal sense of the term and the Sámi are a minority in their own regions virtually throughout Sápmi. The transnational characteristic of the Sámi people serves to illustrate some of the challenges faced by indigenous peoples with traditional activities such as animal herding as a result of borders imposed on them by the nation states that govern their homelands, yet in which they usually constitute only a small minority.

In China, the wild animals and animal products that are sold through illegal trafficking are mainly those that can be made into medicines; are raw materials in the form of ivory, rhinoceros horns, and turtle shells; and are edible or have ornamental value, such as birds, monkeys, turtles, and lizards. Due to its rapid economic development over the past decade, China has become one of the world's largest wildlife markets. The main reasons for trafficking are a lack of viable substitutes for raw materials used in traditional Chinese medicines (e.g., bear bile, bear bile powder, pangolin, and other products); a preference in traditional food culture for delicacies made from wildlife; and of the private consumption by some rich and corrupt government officials of tiger's meat, bear's paw, pangolin and other wild animal products—bear's paw and pangolin being the most popular. This type of wild animal trafficking endangers the safety of animal species protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and damages the international image of the government and people of China. Since 2013, under the frame of construction of ecological civilization, China has taken stricter measures on legislation, administrative enforcement, judicial adjudication, and international cooperation on prevention and punishment of illegal trafficking.

The goal of this essay is to sketch how, and with what effect, the problems of corruption and endangered animal trafficking have been linked in international law. To that end, I first compare and contrast the “hard law” legal frameworks on corruption and on animal trafficking. After that, I illustrate how those two regimes have been related in international reports, “soft” (nonbinding) international instruments, and UN Security Council resolutions. Finally, I caution against an automatic merger of these areas of law and agendas for global law reform. Like other transnational criminal laws, the anticorruption treaties have practical limitations, ideological biases, and potentials for unintended consequences. These features qualify their utility as “tools” in the fight for animal welfare. They may also mask the ways in which efforts to prevent and suppress wildlife trafficking are both anthropocentric and sources of human insecurity.

Cross-border trade, industry outsourcing, and increased animal migration are becoming pressing issues for numerous states and fundamentally challenge our conceptions of animal law as territorial. Instead of proposing that nations try to solve these problems by coming to agreement on low and mostly ineffective standards, this essay opens an unexplored and promising avenue for animal law: extraterritorial protection. Using the example of trophy hunting, the essay reveals the many established jurisdictional options that can help animal law to overcome regulatory gaps, and showcases how animal issues can thereby gain visibility on the international plane.