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COMPANION ANIMALS: A LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL TO REDEFINE THEIR LEGAL WORTH Angie Vega 98 Tul. L. Rev. 961 Companion animals are part of today's American family. As family members, people spend time and resources to ensure their nonhuman family members are healthy and happy. This emotional connection is increasingly being recognized and has started to permeate some areas of the law. Yet, when a companion animal is killed or injured, they continue to be valued economically by the legal system. Fair Market value is the predominant approach in damages compensation when companion animals are injured or killed. Ironically, there is nothing fair about this approach. There is a social interest in companion animals' health and well-being based on the emotional bond shared with them. Sadly, after six decades, this area remains underdeveloped. Current damages available when a companion animal has been harmed cost owners their mental health and tranquility, while tortfeasors get away with the harm caused. There is an imbalance that ought to be recalibrated. Should companion animal owners be compensated for their emotional injuries when their companion animals are injured or killed? That question has been answered numerous times before. They should, indeed. This article answers a different question: how and to what extent should noneconomic damages be awarded in companion animal cases? Suggestions to expand existing causes of action, allowing noneconomic damages for trespass to chattel, and taking animals outside the property classification have been proposed. This article presents a novel legal framework that focuses on the status of companion animals within their family. Still, it is based on public policy and existing legal doctrine that is adapted to the unique situation of animals: beloved integral members of the family unit that are categorized as property by the legal system.
Detailed Discussion of Damages for Death or Injury of Companion Animals Angie Vega Animal Legal & Historical Center This is an overview of how the law compensates pet owners for injury or death of their companion animals caused by the wrongful conduct of another person. Even though the rules for the award of pet damages vary from state to state, the traditional and governing legal approach only recognizes the fair market value of the companion animal, with some exceptions that have allowed the recovery of veterinary costs, and cost of services provided by the companion animal as well.
Brief Summary of Pet Damages Angie Vega Animal Legal & Historical Center This brief summary explores the issue of damages for loss or injury to pets. Despite the value most people assign to pets in their families, the legal system considers pets as personal property. The scope of damages available is also affected by this legal classification, as noneconomic or emotional damages such as pain and suffering, emotional distress, and loss of companionship are usually not recoverable for harm or destruction of property. As it stands in most states, fair market value is the approach used by most courts.
Overview of Pet/Companion Animal Damages Angie Vega Animal Legal & Historical Center This overview examines compensation for loss of pets, typically known as "pet damages." When a companion animal is injured or killed, it is commonly accepted that the injury suffered by the family members transcends a monetary value. In fact, the majority of pets are of mixed breed and therefore, have a very low commercial value. When a companion animals owner decides to pursue the legal route, it is usually the sentimental value of that companion animal that drives the pet owner to pursue litigation. However, fair market value is still the governing view in most states. There is a patchwork of different approaches addressing the type of damages and extent of recovery available across the country.
Detailed Discussion of Dog Auctions and Retail Rescue Kayla Venckauskas Animal Legal & Historical Center This paper first describes a typical dog auction. Next, the paper details the factors that have led to dog auctions being fueled by well-intentioned rescue groups, relevant law that applies to dog auctions and what other legislative factors impact this trend. Finally, the paper offers potential solutions to shore up this growing problem.
Brief Summary of Dog Auctions and Retail Rescue Kayla Venckauskas Animal Legal & Historical Center This brief summary explores the recent changes with respect to dog auctions and the role of rescues. The limited federal and state oversight is discussed as well as new retail pet store bans that have inadvertently fueled "retail rescue" phenomenon.
Overview of Dog Auctions and Retail Rescue Kayla Venckauskas Animal Legal & Historical Center

Rescue groups and animal welfare advocates alike are at the forefront of speaking out against the puppy mill and commercial breeding industries. They are often natural enemies yet recently have found themselves in the same room doing business together.
CONFINED TO A PROCESS: THE PREEMPTIVE STRIKE OF LIVESTOCK CARE STANDARDS BOARDS IN FARM ANIMAL WELFARE REGULATION Lindsay Vick 18 Animal L. 151 (2011) In recent years, livestock care standards boards have emerged as an innovative way for state agencies to regulate farm animal welfare. Far from improving farm animal welfare, however, these boards are frequently a way to codify existing industry standards. The Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board, for example, had a nominal mission to establish regulations governing the care and well-being of livestock and poultry. Other states have created similar mechanisms for regulating farm animal welfare. This Comment maintains that the Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board regulations merely codify the existing status quo on Ohio factory farms rather than improving the health and welfare of animals. This Comment also discusses the successes and failures of other livestock care standards boards. This Comment then considers ways that livestock care standards boards, or alternative methods, could improve farm animal welfare.
The Least of the Sentient Beings' and the Question of Reduction, Refinement, and Replacement Joseph Vining Vining, Joseph. "'The Least of the Sentient Beings' and the Question of Reduction, Refinement, and Replacement." Law Quad. Notes 46, no. 2 (2003): 82-8. The subjects of this article are biomedical research and animals. In raw percentage terms, the animals involved in experimentation are now overwhelmingly rats and mice, and, perhaps because they are rats and mice, they are used in large numbers, numbers in thousands and tens of thousands at some institutions. Legal, ethical, and practical accommodation to this fact on the ground presents a host of questions. There are questions of the cost of care. There are questions of the training of veterinarians, principal investigators, and laboratory personnel. With mice particularly, there are questions about the creation of conditions in an animal that do not yet exist, a future animal, by knocking out a gene and, as we say, "seeing what happens": new questions, really, that move us away from the traditional focus on the details of how an investigator treats a living animal. Then there are the central questions of weighing costs and benefits, of justification and the application of the three R's of reduction, refinement, and replacement, where it is not dogs or primates or marine mammals that are concerned, but rats and mice - for many, the least on the scale of concern for animals. Rats, mice, and birds have of course been recently exempted from the Animal Welfare Act. But that may be viewed as making the questions only that much more difficult, thrown back into the laps of researchers themselves and review boards, veterinarians, laboratory assistants, and university and corporate administrators, who for the moment can expect to have that much less outside guidance or mandate in deciding what to do. The overarching problem, which is how to think about rats and mice, not a new problem at all, but newly pressing.
Human Identity: The Question Presented by Human-Animal Hybridization Joseph Vining 1 Stan. J. Animal L. & Pol'y 50 (2008) What makes each of us, as individuals, human to one another, or, more generally, what makes an individual creature human? We have not often had to ask the question because of the species line based on reproductive capacity and incapacity, although “degrees of humanness” were explored in the various eugenic programs of the last century. Now the biotechnological possibility of fusing human and other forms of life is presenting the question in a new and serious way. If the traditional biological means of defining species are no longer reliable, what other criteria might determine what is “human” and what is “nonhuman”? The issue is not just how to conceive of an individual hybrid presented to us, but how to act toward the creature, at the most basic level. Drawing on animal law and theory as well as the history of human eugenics in law and policy, Vining identifies criteria that may one day be used to gauge relative humanness, qualitative and quantitative. He observes that ultimately the difficulty of deciding or agreeing upon what identifies us as human will make even more problematic the current treatment of creatures deemed purely “animal.” In the end he suggests that what the human distinctively brings to the sentient world is general responsibility itself, and that wider contemplation of the real possibility of human-animal hybridization may lead to new ways of thinking about animals, in law and beyond. Human Identity was presented recently as a talk to a longstanding interdisciplinary faculty seminar at the University of Michigan. It is presented largely in its original form here, with footnotes added.

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