ABSTRACT
Integrationism engages with the legal personhood of animals. Animal rights law is concerned with the basic framework required for the just treatment of animals by social systems, the categorization of animals as actual or potential property, and questions of rights and animal personhood. Advocacy of animal rights essentially proposes to upgrade certain categories of animal to the level of human beings for some legal purposes, in this sense expanding rather than undermining the fundamental anthropocentricism of law. Speciesism operates as a rhetorical device within discourses about human beings in the sense that oppression and genocide have been justified by the labelling of certain human groups as animals. According to climate pessimists, the relative stability of the Holocene has given way to the Anthropocene as humans impact dramatically on the planet's overall ecological balance. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
