Animal protection as animal welfare and anti-cruelty: a genealogical re-examination of the EU seal products ban

This article suggests a way to inquire into animal protection politics as a specific field of international politics which regulates human-animal relations. Based on a genealogical analysis of the emergence of animal protection thinking in 19th and 20th century Great Britain, it argues that animal protection is structured by two specific strategies, anti-cruelty and animal welfare, that constitute our knowledge of what animal protection is and how it can be achieved. Whereas animal welfare suggests that animal protection means the meticulous technical standardisation of animal use along the scientific knowledge about particular species’ stress levels, anti-cruelty takes a moral approach and suggests that animal protection can be achieved by taming the cruel human subject by means of legal prohibition. The article uses these strategies as an interpretative lens for analysing the EU’s behaviour in the seal products case. It argues that the ban of the trade in seal products can be understood as the result of the anti-cruelty strategy gaining dominance in the EU debates on its seal policy. Moreover, in the ensuing WTO struggle the moral undertones of anti-cruelty made it possible for the EU to frame the ban as the protection of public morals under Article XX (a) GATT and thus to establish animal protection as a legitimate ground for trade restrictions. The antagonistic identity construction attached to anti-cruelty moreover made it possible for the EU to constitute itself as a morally superior subject and to re-emerge as a normative power in the context of animal protection. The article concludes by reflecting about further avenues for research on international animal protection politics.