To Really Stop Ecocide, We Need to Stop Zoocide

Among the important recent legal developments to protect the environment is the law of ecocide, which makes killing the environment an illegal, criminal offense. The Stop Ecocide campaign is advocating for ecocide to be a crime at the International Criminal Court (ICC), like genocide. 15 countries and the EU have already made ecocide illegal, and several more are considering it, including the UK, Scotland, and Mexico. Countries making ecocide illegal can adopt the Independent Expert Panel’s 2021 one page legal definition of ecocide. In this post, I explore whether the law against ecocide goes far enough to stop one of the biggest causes of environmental destruction: animal agriculture.

Food production is the biggest driver of biodiversity loss across the world. The livestock sector accounts for about 20% of total greenhouse gas emissions,^[1] and about 35% of the world’s habitable land use.^[2] Claims that livestock farming can combat climate change don’t hold up under scientific scrutiny ^[3],[4]. By rewilding the land and sea currently used for grazing, animal feed, and fishing, we can draw down CO², create habitats for wildlife, and make it possible to return land to displaced indigenous people.^[5] The research is clear: if we want to achieve Net Zero we must tackle food production. With this in mind, I propose that the campaign against ecocide be broadened to include a campaign against a sub-genre of ecocide: zoocide, the mass killing of animals.

Legge and Brooman propose the inclusion of a crime of Animal Ecocide to strengthen protection for wild animals, which could be used to outlaw almost all forms of whaling, and to challenge the highly contentious and ineffective badger cull in the UK, which is promoted by the cattle industry to address tuberculosis. This would be a positive step, but doesn’t go far enough to challenge the food system.

1. Stop Zoocide

Buddhist monk and author Matthieu Ricard proposes using the term zoocide in cases where animals are systematically put to death in large numbers, such as in the food system.^[6] Using the UN’s definition of genocide as a guide, he proposes a five-point definition for an international convention on zoocide: 

a) Slaughter of members of an animal group;

b) Serious attack on the physical or mental integrity of members of the group;

c) Subjection of the group to painful conditions leading up to their systematic slaughter;

d) Measures intended to encourage maximal number of births within the group with a view to subsequent slaughter;

e) Forced separation of the offspring of the group from their parents.

As Daryll Robinson points out: ‘ecocide’ is probably most useful because of its shock value— it is ‘striking’ and has stirred the public interest, just as the terms ‘genocide’, ‘war crimes’ and ‘crime against humanity’ helped galvanize public understanding and support.^[7] Alongside Deborah Cao’s ‘crimes against animality,’^[8] the term ‘zoocide’ can help garner public support by putting a label on the mass killing of billions of animals every year, including farm animals. 

2.  Can the Law of Ecocide Protect Animals?

The terms ‘zoocide’ and ‘crimes against animality’ may be useful in changing the conversation about animals, but they are obviously a long way off from becoming law. So can ecocide law be used to protect animal victims, and stop zoocide, to some degree? One potential example of ecocide is illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing, an activity that the World Wildlife Fund regretted was not listed as one of the activities constituting an offence under the recently passed European Union environmental crime directive.

In order to understand how to protect animals using the law of ecocide, in the rest of this post I will analyse the definition and then explore examples of the offence.

2.1 How the Definition of ‘Ecocide’ Applies to Animals

The official proposal (‘the proposal’) defines ecocide as: “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.” The test is cumulative; the harm must be both severe, and either widespread or long term (WLS).

Animals are Organisms, are Part of the Biosphere, and are Part of the Environment.

To what extent are animals covered by ecocide? The proposal defines the environment as including the biosphere, which has two dictionary definitions, the second of which is: ‘living organisms together with their environment.’ NASA’s explanation is more descriptive: ‘the biosphere encompasses all life on Earth and extends from root systems to mountaintops and all depths of the ocean.’ While definitions vary slightly across languages, since animals are living organisms they are part of the biosphere and therefore part of the environment.

‘Widespread’

The proposal states that, ‘“widespread” means damage which extends beyond a limited geographic area, crosses state boundaries, or is suffered by an entire ecosystem or species or a large number of human beings;” An ecosystem is “a biological system composed of all the organisms found in a particular physical environment…” As Marina Lostal notes, requiring an entire species to be affected sets an impossibly high bar.^[9] However, damage to animals within a large geographical area crossing state boundaries, or within an entire ecosystem, would meet the requirements of the definition of widespread.

‘Long-term’

The proposal also gives two definitions for “long-term”— either ‘irreversible’, or ‘which cannot be redressed through natural recovery within a reasonable period of time’. One need hardly point out that once animals are killed, this is irreversible, so any mass killing of animals would be caught by the definition of long-term. The second definition reflects a conservationist approach, which could be useful in the case of wild animals, including fish.

‘Severe’

The proposal says, ‘“severe” means damage which involves very serious adverse changes, disruption or harm to any element of the environment, including grave impacts on human life or natural, cultural or economic resources.’ Animals are both an element of the environment, and often considered a natural, cultural, or economic resource. It follows that serious harm (such as death) to animals is severe.

‘Wanton’

The proposal continues, ‘“Wanton” means with reckless disregard for damage which would be clearly excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated,’ As  Robinson explains, the biggest problem with implementing a crime of ecocide is that international environmental law has very few absolute prohibitions, but consists mostly of a balancing act, in which environmental damage is managed through a system of permits and licences. Where killing of animals is absolutely prohibited, such as certain wildlife crimes like poaching, this could easily meet the unlawful or wanton definition.

2.2 Illegal, Unregulated, and Unreported Fishing is Ecocide

Clearly, IUU fishing meets all the requirements of the ecocide definition. It is a global phenomenon, occurring across all fishery types, sectors, and geographies, including inshore and on the high seas, impacting both finfish and aquatic invertebrates.  If documented over a wide geographic area it would be widespread, and long-term is satisfied if there is already some presence of overfishing or risk of extinction of marine mammals, sea turtles, sea birds, or fish. The decline in fish populations due in part to illegal activities would consist of “serious adverse changes” to the ecosystem, and could therefore be called severe. IUU fishing likely carried out with reckless disregard for the damage it causes to marine life, so it is also wanton.

2.3 Ecocide of Animals

Stop Ecocide’s website includes two examples of ecocide directly involving animals:

1. ‘Insect populations are all seriously affected by industrial agricultural chemicals and monocrop practices.’

2. ‘Overfishing and overextraction: Unsustainable practices like bottom trawling, factory fishing and open pen aquaculture wreak massive damage on marine wildlife ecosystems threatening the health, resilience and productivity of our ocean.’

How does the law apply here? If pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer are used beyond the legal limits (i.e. the activity is unlawful), there might be a criminal offence, since damage to insect populations is widespread, severe, and long term. 

In the case of factory fishing, one example of ecocide might be the escape of farmed fish into the ocean, an ongoing and frequent problem around the world. The harm is severe because wild fish are considered a natural, cultural, and economic resource, for example by coastal tribes in the pacific northwest.

2.4 Can ecocide apply directly to farmed animals?

The definition of environment does not explicitly exclude farmed animals, so could we use the law to prosecute activities that directly kill farmed animals?

One argument might be to identify the risks to humans of bird flu and antibiotic resistance as grounds for the offence. Researchers Knight and Mace found that ‘there is exceptionally strong evidence for a link between low animal welfare levels and high zoonotic risks, exacerbated by animal crowding, low genetic diversity, compromised hygiene, and high animal stress levels which compromise immune systems.’ In the case of unlawful overcrowding leading to risk of bird flu, or illegal antibiotic overuse, the widespread risk to human life could constitute grounds for the offence of ecocide.

Going further, an example of a potential offence might be lice infestations killing mass numbers of fish in factory fishing.^[10], ^[11] Imagine a company owns several Atlantic salmon farms in three countries, on which violations of welfare laws lead to massive fish deaths due to lice infestation over a period of 10 years. Is this ecocide? The harm is widespread as it occurs in three countries, and unlawful and wanton if welfare laws designed to protect fish from lice infestation are repeatedly violated. The death due to lice is irreversible to those particular animals, but even if this is a stretch (after all, the population of the Atlantic salmon species is not damaged), as long damage is widespread, it need not be long-term, so it’s irrelevant if the damage is not to the entire species. Is the damage severe? The death of thousands of fish would constitute ‘serious adverse harm’ to the fish as both an economic and natural resource, and as elements of the environment. In this way, all of the definitional requirements for the proposal are met.

Similarly, we could argue that the death of large numbers of chickens on farms (but not in slaughterhouses, where chickens are legally killed) in several countries due to illegal overcrowding and illness was both severe and irreversible for those animals, again meeting the definitional requirements for widespread, long term, severe, and wanton.

2.5 Pollution as Ecocide

The Environment Agency has prosecuted privately owned water companies in England for illegal sewage discharge on a yearly basis for several years, which means that ecocide may be an appropriate prosecution in future if parliament passes an ecocide bill.

Like sewer pollution, agricultural pollution could also be ecocide. Factory farming produces a lot of waste, and fertilizer use contributes to ocean dead zones, which form when excess nutrients enter coastal waters and fertilize algal blooms. In England and Wales, agricultural pollution accounts for 40% of pollution of waterbodies, so could we prosecute the meat suppliers and grocery stores for ecocide of the River Wye, for example? Not all diffuse pollution is a result of a violation, much probably comes from legal activities. However, if slurry spreading in contravention of the Farming Rules for Water is documented enough times, we could potentially prosecute for ecocide.

More strategically, on the basis that fertiliser overuse causes ocean and river ecocide, the law may make it possible to challenge government decisions on issues such as setting overly generous legal limits for fertilizer use, as well as planning policies that allow for the unchecked development of factory farms and anaerobic digesters.

3. Recommendations

Just as genocide law protects human rights, and ecocide law is an ‘essential pillar’ to protect rights of nature, zoocide law would support animal rights. The zoocide of billions of animals every year for food is an underlooked and important part of ecocide, so we should aspire to an international treaty to stop zoocide in the long term. But in the meantime, we should tackle the zoocidal and ecocidal food system by ending subsidies for the animal farming and fishing industries, and using ecocide law to deter and prosecute the activities to which it applies.

When implementing ecocide law, it should be made clear by lawmakers that the biosphere explicitly includes animals. Importantly, lawmakers should also specify the following activities as examples of ecocide to strengthen the law for animals:

• Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU fishing);
• Illegal sewage discharge;
• Illegal fertiliser and pesticide overuse;
• Illegal hunting (such as of endangered species) and wildlife trafficking;
• Overcrowding of livestock leading to a risk of bird or pig flu outbreak;
• Illegal antibiotic overuse in livestock;
• Illegal welfare violations leading to mass deaths of farmed fish due to lice infestations.