Material vulnerabilities and interspecies relationalities: a critical appraisal of the legal status of animals in disasters

ABSTRACT As liminal, exigent moments in time, disasters cast light on the significance of animals’ relationships with humans. Through their materialisation, human–animal relations are revealed as taking myriad forms: loyal, neglectful, salutary, harmful, benevolent, deleterious. This article examines how a pervasive failure by the Western legal imaginary to acknowledge and account for the relational aspects of animals’ lives amplifies their susceptibility to harm during disasters. To this end, the article analyses two major dimensions of animals’ legal status: their status as property; and statutory provisions governing animal welfare and wildlife habitat. It consults three temporally and geographically disparate disasters which affected jurisdictions within the Western legal tradition, namely Hurricane Katrina, the Victorian Black Saturday Bushfires and New Zealand’s Canterbury Earthquakes, to scrutinise how each dimension of animals’ legal status aggravates their vulnerability to the adverse effects of hazards. Drawing from critical literatures which foreground and fault Western law’s inattention to the nonhuman material world, the article attributes this condition to an ingrained feature of animals’ legal status: that it overlooks the determinative role played by animals’ relationships with humans in securing or compromising their wellbeing and survival during disasters.