When is it right to speak of animal rights?

This article examines the ways in which the language of legal rights is invoked by those seeking to improve the treatment of animals. Drawing from a range of analytical, realist and critical legal and social theorists, it argues that certain argumentative techniques commonly employed to justify the extension of legal rights to animals may serve to strengthen and reproduce the very forms of exploitation they seek to challenge. The article begins by identifying and critiquing the binary characterisation of rights/welfare and property/personality in liberal animal law scholarship. It then employs the insights of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin to expose and critique various appeals to an ‘exterior’ or ‘extra-legal’ domain which functions to stabilise the meaning of these doctrinal categories. In doing so, it explores the strategic-viability of rights discourse in the animal advocacy movement with a view to highlighting the limitations of liberal constructions of animal rights.