Although still perched on the periphery, scholarship asking how the law can remedy human harms against animals and other nonhuman life is proliferating. A foundational question is how legal systems can embed equality and justice as values that would apply across species and not simply among humans. A corollary is how to influence more humans to support a legal system that regards animals as beings or entities whose interests matter alongside humans’.
When fashioning dramatic reform like this, we may be tempted to focus on the present as we hope for a much less anthropocentric future. But it also helps to look to the past. Jesse Arsenault and Rosemary-Claire Collard’s Crimes Against Reproduction: Domesticating Life in the Animal Trials is instructive in this regard. It helps readers understand how the earliest instances of European human-animal legal regulation centuries ago can shed light today on the need to see the legal treatment of animals and marginalized humans as entwined, and anthropocentrism as an all-species gendered equality problem.
Distilling a rich array of scholarship about laws against bestiality, infanticide, and witchcraft between the 1200 to 1700s in France, the United Kingdom, and other western European countries, Arsenault and Collard offer a compelling, if provisional, analysis of how such laws cohere as a gendered interspecies triad. The authors argue that laws against bestiality, infanticide, and witchcraft (involving small animals known in folklore as “familiars”) not only helped produce a gendered reproductive ordering of human society, but also one of animal life that set the stage for the extractive capitalist economy that devastates so many beings today, humans included.
Arsenault and Collard unpack how these laws were not simply about how humans, particularly women, should behave in matters of sex, family, and intimate life, but also about how humans should relate to animals. The latter dimension, the authors note, is often overlooked when thinking about infanticide and the witch trials or even bestiality even though the animal trials have been compared to the witch trials. Adding to this literature, but taking the trials for all three categories as their focus, Arsenault and Collard innovatively suggest how the trials set expectations for human reproduction and social reproduction of the family. The authors also show how the law fostered a gendered worldview of human extractive domestication over animal bodies and animal life rather than conditions of interspecies care.
The article is invigorating in its scholarly breadth and navigation through multiple literatures. There are so many ideas assembled about how hierarchy was normalized through the reproductive orders the trials reinforced and a richness of critical feminist and animal studies insights about the multispecies lens needed to understand them more fully. For example, Arsenault and Collard analyze the trials to show how what the law thought about the innocence of animals in the trials is suffused with gendered expectations about humans. Their unique historical legal window and focus enrich existing feminist animal studies literature demonstrating the mutually constituted nature of species and gender ideologies.
No less important is the illumination of Arsenault and Collard’s historical reading for our present planetary moment. While women enjoy formal legal equality in many countries, significant cultural and legal contestations continue to prevail regarding reproductive norms, both biological and social. And, remarkably, centuries onwards from the fifteenth-century bestiality prohibitions, animals continue as property in Europe and every other country where imperial projects amplified the common law and civil law Enlightenment worldviews of animals as commodities. As well, the legal subjectivity ascribed to animals in the trials, however performative given the overwhelmingly brutal outcome for the animals involved, has long since been eliminated.
In fact, we cannot easily dismiss the striking argument that the legal plight of animals has more or less stagnated since the time of animal trials nor the perspective that this is due to the feminization of animals, particularly the tens of billions of land and ocean-based farmed animals whose domesticated reproduction lie at the heart of our social order. Consider also that we have reinforced the civilization veneer of humane animal use through lax anti-cruelty laws even as staggering amounts of these and other animals suffer enormously in captivity. Or consider that we ascribe no legal agency to animals today despite the exponential rise of scientific knowledge regarding the thoughtfulness of so many species and the decisions and choices they make in leading their lives.
In 2025, there is no doubting the need to connect the concept of “reproductive order” to one that arrests the cycle of intensive animal reproduction at the heart of the harm-ridden global food system, a point the authors highlight in their concluding remarks. (P. 35.) With Crimes Against Reproduction, we are indeed reminded of the incompleteness and impoverished impact of our equality and justice analyses when animals and nonhuman beings are excluded. But, as the authors also hopefully note, we are also reminded that how we look at animals can change and “that there are other possible ways of relating to animal life than capital’s totalizing mastery allows” (P. 36.)
