The Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA) asks for Wednesday, October 27, in the newspaper The world, the creation of an animal rights defender, as there is a (human) rights defender. “It would be a real political decision”, declared its president Jacques-Charles Fombonne on Franceinfo Thursday. “Appointing an Animal Rights Defender is a step that is easy to take, costs nothing and would be very effective”, assures the president of the association, which intends to question each candidate in the next presidential election on the animal condition.
franceinfo: Having an animal rights defender like there is a human rights defender, what would that be for?
Jacques-Charles Fombonne: It would serve a lot of purposes. This will first serve to have a single interlocutor in a field which requires a lot of transversality. The animal condition, animal rights, is shared between several actors: the State, associations, local communities. It is also shared between many laws and regulations such as the Rural Code, the Penal Code, the Code of Communities. Having an Animal Rights Defender would allow someone to have the opportunity to federate all these texts, to federate the normative framework, and then to have the mission of being able to intervene as a force of proposal, as a force of control. Why not as a person who can respond to reports of abuse that are made to us? There are hundreds of thousands of them. For example, we have 15,000 reports made to the SPA every year. We believe that the Animal Rights Defender could be the tutelary authority with the powers of someone who would be independent and who would have been appointed by the President of the Republic. Obviously, the more the nominating power comes from above, the greater the power of the one who obtains it.
We are six months away from the presidential election. Would you like the animal cause to be a more important topic in the campaign?
I think it is indeed the moment for associations like ours to point our noses up and say what would be good to do in terms of animal protection. Appointing an Animal Rights Defender is a step which is easy to take, which costs nothing and which would be very effective and which, symbolically, would be a real political decision. I think this is a normal progression. There is really a growing awareness of the condition of animals. Little by little, all things are falling into place and I think that an Animal Defender would indeed be a unifying authority. I find that it is the word that could best characterize this function, that is to say that it would be a referent to know what is the state of the animal condition, how we can improve it and how we can remedy anything that prevents animal rights from being fully recognized in our country.
As the hunters have planned to do, do you plan to question the presidential candidates on the animal cause?
Absoutely. It’s planned. As I told you, we plan to point our noses out during this presidential campaign. The idea is to ask what each candidate proposes for the animal condition. We are not a militant association and we will obviously not give any voting instructions. It will simply allow voters to be fully informed about the intention of each candidate. Then, of course, everyone will decide according to their personal choices, but this is the opportunity for everyone to put the cards on the table. We would like a question of principle which would be that, between man and animal, there must be a relationship of respect. From there, the exceptions which will be made to this respect must be extremely reduced and must, for example, not unnecessarily infringe the right to animal health. We have the right to use the animal for consumption, the right to use the animal for work, but every time we do it must take place with minimum suffering. Then we can talk about bullfighting, dolphinaria, traditional hunts, ritual slaughter, all the things we think are against that respect.