This chapter explores the scope of application of international criminal law with respect to the repression of international crimes affecting animals during war. It considers how war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide could apply. It then reviews all judgments – up to July 2020 – from the ad hoc/hybrid international criminal tribunals and the International Criminal Court where war crime allegations were adjudged and animals featured therein. It thus gives the first ever detailed account of how international criminal law has been used to address and repress international crimes that affect animals during war. The chapter then explores international criminal law’s limits and gaps in this area. It submits that animal cruelty during war should be recognised under international law in the same way that it is during peacetime under domestic law. It proposes that ‘other inhumane acts’ under the heading of crimes against humanity could be a means to potentially achieve this aim.

No animal is immune from becoming a victim of human abuse and cruelty. Whether wild, or domestic, animals unfortunately often suffer at the hands of humans. This chapter explores how the criminal justice system, specifically within the confines of Colorado law, aims to hold animal abusers accountable and provides an overview of applicable statutory provisions and case examples. Written from one Colorado prosecutor’s perspective, this chapter asserts that the prosecution of animal cruelty offenders is essential for three primary reasons. First, the pursuit of criminal charges can be the impetus for the removal of the victim animal from the defendant-abuser’s custody (and thereby helps to safeguard the victim animal). Second, the levying of criminal charges sends a strong message to both the defendant-abuser and society as a whole that the proper and humane treatment of animals matters. Third, the imposition of a sentence upon conviction – whether punitive, rehabilitative, or a combination thereof – serves as an intervention and helps to ensure that the conduct is not repeated

Animal protection organizations and lawmakers continue to invest in carceral responses to animal cruelty. This chapter argues that carceral responses will fail to meaningfully address animal cruelty because prisons are not human-only spaces. Instead, prisons prescribe a multiude of human-animal relationships, some of which train prisoners for labour fields that are explicitly premised on cruelty against animals. The chapter focuses on relationships between prisoners and liminal animals, farmed animals, and animals used in prison animal programs, such as wild horse and dog training programs. The human-animal relationships that structure the prison are also placed within the contexts of settler colonialism and enslavement that are inseperable from the making of race and species in the Americas.

Animal protection organizations and lawmakers continue to invest in carceral responses to animal cruelty. This chapter argues that carceral responses will fail to meaningfully address animal cruelty because prisons are not human-only spaces. Instead, prisons prescribe a multiude of human-animal relationships, some of which train prisoners for labour fields that are explicitly premised on cruelty against animals. The chapter focuses on relationships between prisoners and liminal animals, farmed animals, and animals used in prison animal programs, such as wild horse and dog training programs. The human-animal relationships that structure the prison are also placed within the contexts of settler colonialism and enslavement that are inseperable from the making of race and species in the Americas.

Early modern European sport victimised animals in two broad ways, both building on medieval and classical precedent: through hunting methods and traditions, and spectator sports such as cockfighting, bear-baiting and bullfighting. With hunting, early modernity witnesses the decline and/or transformation of medieval practices in response to the introduction of gunpowder weapons. The shift to firearms leads to increased carnage as European hunters deplete the supply of indigenous game and export their methods to colonies in the New and Old Worlds. Likewise, European imperialism induces a shift in the social function of hunting, as colonists leave Old World countries where the sport is an attribute of privilege and travel to colonial settings where it figures as an essential life skill. Like hunting, animal-based spectator sports developed out of earlier practices, and these sports, too, participated in systems of hierarchy and privilege. As with firearms, they were exported by European colonists, but with varying results: bullfighting, for example, survives in Latin America, whereas the bear-baiting introduced to North America by English colonists has largely disappeared under Protestant sectarian pressure. Likewise, back in Europe, sectarianism influenced festival pastimes, such as Katzenmusik processions, deriving originally from pagan practice.