PLYMOUTH, MI – There’s a new civil rights movement that has been steadily accelerating in recent years, mainly off the radar.
“In short, the goal is legal personhood for animals,” said Bee Friedlander, a lawyer who is a founding member and past president of Attorneys for Animals. Her husband, Don Garlit, also an attorney, is a co-founder of an allied group, the State Bar of Michigan’s Animal Law Section.
Both groups are about much more than fighting anti-cruelty and animal abuse, though they are fully invested in those causes too. What they want is for animals to no longer legally have the status of mere property — and there are signs their message is catching on.
Earlier this month, nearly 100 committed activists came to Ann Arbor and paid $25 each to attend a special screening of a new movie, Dogs Are People Too: A Four-Legged Civil Rights Movement.
Though the producer and director are both British, much of the movie is set in Detroit and its suburbs. In one horrific episode, Detroit police searching for a suspect shoot and kill two large dogs who were just taking a bathroom break in their own backyard.
Christopher Olson, an attorney who specializes in animal law, sued and won $260,000 for his client, who says he would much rather have his dogs back, a sentiment echoed by others who won large amounts when their pets were needlessly killed by authorities.
The movie later shifts to Connecticut, where pressure has gotten state law changed to allow attorneys and even some laymen to be appointed to represent the interests of animals in court — what they call CAAP, for Courtroom Animal Advocate Program. Maine has since also enacted a CAAP.
In Michigan, State Rep. Stephanie Young (D-Detroit), a strong advocate of animal rights, has introduced a package of bills that would, among other reforms, establish an animal advocate program in Michigan and require judges to take animal cruelty into account in sentencing convicted offenders.
Young, an ordained minister who likes to say she has “three sons, two who are two-legged and one that is four-legged,” managed to get considerable bipartisan support for her bills, several of which passed the House by large margins but are awaiting action in the state senate, possibly after the national election.
Bipartisanship is crucial, said Friedlander, a 73-year-old Columbus native and Ohio State University graduate who has been dedicated to animal rights since she saw a little notice in the Michigan Bar Journal in 1990 that said, “All attorneys interested in animal law contact Wanda Nash.”
Suddenly, she realized that was what she really wanted to do. “For 12 years, the one constant in my life, as I changed careers and moved around the country was my German shepherd Ericka,” Freidlander said. She was one of 20 attorneys who responded, and soon Attorneys for Animals was created, followed by the Animal Law Section of the State Bar of Michigan.
Nash, who died in 2008, was the first leader of both organizations. “She was really our inspiration,” Friedlander said last week as she prepared to leave for an annual animal law conference in Oregon.
Interest in animal rights and animal law has steadily grown. There’s little doubt that millions of people regard animals, particularly companion animals, as far more than property; the American Veterinary Medical Association estimates that almost half of all American households has at least one dog and more than a quarter at least one cat.
That adds up to approximately 85 million dogs and 60 million cats in the country. The number rose during the Covid pandemic; adoptions soared and shelters emptied when people were cut off from society and often forced to work from home for many months.
Polls show many regard their dogs and cats as family members, and people today also seem far more sensitive to concerns about animal abuse. When South Dakota governor Kristi Noem revealed in April that she’d dragged her misbehaving wirehaired pointer puppy Cricket to a gravel pit and shot her, that ended her chance of being vice president, and possibly her political career.
But legally, even in Connecticut, dogs don’t have the status of “non-human persons” that animal activists are striving to win for them. According to Nila Bala, a law professor at the University of California-Davis, the law there is written to protect the “interests of justice,” rather than the animal itself.
Even if some states do begin to recognize dogs and cats as persons, it is hard to imagine people extending that to house mice or mosquitos. “It’s definitely easier to make the case for companion animals,” Friedlander said. Nor do animal rights attorneys have an agreed-on strategy yet (referendum? legislative action?) for winning recognition in Michigan or, so far as I know, any other state.
Still, don’t count them out. As we’ve often seen, when people start talking about something happening in the future, it sometimes happens fast. There are indeed, as JD Vance painfully learned, a lot of “childless cat ladies,” and people of all ages and genders who think of their dogs and cats more as family than pets.
This columnist, incidentally, is one.
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
