Lesli Bisgould will teach a course on animal law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Click here to see full sized version.

Animal law is a fascinating academic field with courses cropping up at law schools across Canada. But will students in these classes be able to put into practice what they learn when they graduate? Will animal law, like environmental law did in the past, move from a niche area for impecunious idealists to a burgeoning area for enterprising specialists?

If the law schools are any indication, animal law is a growth area. University of Toronto has just become the seventh law school to offer animal law on its curriculum, after McGill, Dalhousie, University of Alberta, University of Ottawa, University of Victoria and Université du Québec à Montréal. Lesli Bisgould, who also chaired a recent program with the Law Society of Upper Canada on animals and the law, will be teaching the course at the University of Toronto. Bisgould had what she terms an “animal rights law practice” for a number of years, although she now practises with Legal Aid Ontario in a different area. She represented various animal rights organizations, and advocated “on behalf of humans who didn’t want to have to hurt animals in various endeavours.”

Bisgould moved out of the area but her ongoing work proves she is still keen to be involved in exploring how animals intersect with the law.

But if Bisgould left the area, is there a void left to be filled?

Much of the debate in this area, as it is in many emerging areas of the law, centres on definitions. Bisgould says her practice was not just about working on legal issues touching animals, but about “moving toward animal rights.” But other lawyers who practise animal law do not see it as quite so political.

“I am not an animal rights person at all in any way, shape or form,” says Geordie Duckler, who practises exclusively animal law at his Portland, Oregon law firm. “I am an owner’s rights person.”

Duckler, who represents dog, cat, horse, exotic animal and livestock owners, ranchers and many other animal owners, takes issue with many of the underlying assumptions of the more political animal rights arguments. Duckler, who is also an active research scientist at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who studied, lectured, and published extensively on animal anatomy and the role of disease in animal populations, thinks that “when you leave the law school, finally with a degree in your hand and you go pass the Bar, when it is time to go out in the world and actually have a job and work, the fact that you would like to assert rights for animals, isn’t going to get you very far in terms of either having a client, or having a case or getting paid or making a living.”

But Duckler says a lawyer can only make a living doing animal law in a large urban centre, where people are willing to invest enough money in their animals to hire a lawyer to get involved in the case of a dispute. A large part of his practice, for example, involves representing wealthy Alpaca farmers that often get into legal disputes when their animals stray too far from their enormous ranches (Alpacas are related to llamas and are raised for their fibers which are used in fabrics). This is clearly a niche practice that is not ready for hundreds of lawyers to join.

So does Canada have that critical mass that would allow a lawyer to make a living practising animal law? Victoria Shroff practises mainly civil litigation in Vancouver, but she has developed part of her practice in representing pet owners. This work includes veterinary malpractice, trespass, cruelty cases and acting for breeders in their businesses. Shroff thinks it’s unlikely that we will see lawyers devoting their practice entirely to animal law until the damage awards for the loss of an animal go up. “As soon damages start to increase then more people are going to say ‘Hmm’, and raise an eyebrow of interest. I think the way it is now is that it is not really huge and the quantums just aren’t there.”

Shroff does think this area is increasing in popularity, though, and her sentiments seem to be shared by many other people who have been involved in animal law. “In the years that I did that work and increasingly, I get phone calls from students who say ‘I only went to law school to be an animal rights lawyer’” says Bisgould. And with her course at the University of Toronto adding to the list of animal law courses in Canada, future judges will have taken these courses and may be more likely to take animal rights, or at least higher damage awards for the loss of an animal, more seriously.

Andrew Brighten, who is currently studying law at McGill, will be doing an internship at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, a U.S.-based animal welfare legal organization. In the U.S., animal law is much more established, and 89 of the 196 American Bar Association-approved law schools now offer animal law as part of their curriculum. Brighten became interested in animal law when he took an animal law course at McGill. Although he is interested in animal law, he is not sure there are enough opportunities to actually practice in the area in Canada yet. “I feel like there is nothing better I can do than helping to represent beings or entities that inherently are unable to represent themselves.”

Brighten’s situation may reflect the idealism of a law student coming up against the realities of practising for profit, but it may also reflect changing views of the new breed of lawyers coming out of law schools. Just as actually practising environmental law was seen as a pipe dream of law students in the ’60s and ’70s, but then became a reality for thousands of lawyers, animal law may become more than just law school courses and philosophical debates. As views change about the rights and realities of animal lives, so too may the laws and case law that cause lawyers to catch onto to societal trends. Just look at the students in Bisgould’s first animal law class at the University of Toronto. You just might mind find a future successful animal law lawyer.