Legal frameworks for wild animal welfare

摘要

There is a strong, and continually improving, scientific basis for how climate change, land clearing, and other anthropogenic processes affect Australian wildlife and, specifically, for how these processes impact on the lives of individual animals.1 However, while legal frameworks for wildlife conservation are robustly debated, legal frameworks for wild animal welfare have received much less attention. At present, no Australian jurisdiction has created a legislative scheme specifically focused upon wild animal welfare. However, each state and territory does have a patchwork of statutory provisions, generally located within nature conservation and animal cruelty legislation, which operate to make some forms of harm to individual wild animals "legally cognisable" and to regulate some human actions that cause those harms.