ABSTRACT
The relationship between property, humans and other animals is a complex and frequently contentious one. Throughout the academic and advocacy literature, there is a persistent and meaningful engagement with property’s anthropocentrism, particularly in popular discourse, invariably leading to calls to end the characterisation of nonhuman animals as mere property. However, the interaction between property frameworks and animal welfare laws charts a more complex and potentially more fruitful relationship between suffering, property and personhood – from the introduction of suffering as the basis for accountable relations within property frameworks to the interaction with contemporary accounts of sentience and personhood in their varying contexts and meanings. This chapter argues that the relationship between nonhuman animals and property is at heart a welfare issue. Through an analysis of the concept of welfare, the potential of propertied relations of nonhuman animals towards personhood within the current legislative environment will be explored. The concept of suffering, integral to welfare frameworks, is considered for its significance for modern animal welfare legislation and sentience. Furthermore, suffering will be shown to be central to an ethological approach to different capacities and critical for property relationships and personhood more widely. It will be argued that animal welfare legislation provides a basis for propertied personhood, outside of rights discourse, and at the same time presents a resocialisation of the law towards more sociable and relational understandings of property. These interactions between welfare and property will be opened out through the development of an ethological jurisprudence of nonhuman animal properties,, revealing the relevance of welfare frameworks for a multispecies resocialisation of property and personhood, both for nonhuman animals and more widely.
