Developing Declarations of Nonhuman Animal Rights

The original concept behind this book was to propose and discuss a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Nonhuman Animals analogous to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) adopted in 1948. However, it soon became clear that a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Animals that encompasses all animal species would be difficult to formulate and might not be effective. Instead, a separate declaration needs to be developed for each species (Benz-Schwarzburg 2012, 407). Stucki (2023, 96) seems to be in agreement here, when she states that “animal rights must be differentiated in correspondence with animals’ specific capacities, interests, and (functional) needs.” After all, the UDHR is also limited to one species.