My experience as a practising barrister involves advocacy in all its forms from tendering advice to representation in court. I specialise in criminal law and human rights and animal law plus an emerging offshoot in environmental law. Whatever the subject the aim of advocacy remains the same, namely how to reach the respective judge and the jury.

My interest in human rights legislation springs from its impact on English Law. The practice and principles embraced by it are relevant to our ‘rights’. Such rights are so fundamental they can apply no less to the question whether an animal has a right to live.

Human rights can enhance our common law. Indeed even before they were embedded in our law, a judge in the Knightsbridge Crown Court Case [1996] delivered a sapient judgment that saved the life of a dog that was due to be destroyed:

It is important in my judgment, that if the application were to be made, no steps should be taken which would prevent the dog having a fair trial…the Commissioner made it well nigh impossible for the Applicant to get a fair trial for his dog.

The judge was wisely underlining the life-and-death judgment that rights as a principle run with life itself.

The foundation stone laid by Alice Walker underlines that undeniable truth:

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites or women for men.

Given that Walker’s insight strikes at the roots of the inherent prejudice towards those three potential victims, it is perplexing so many of us are blind to the transparent truth it evokes. For the manifest connection between racism and sexism and speciesism is as negatively natural as breathing within our universal society and law.

Yet a century earlier Henry Salt showed us that our system was oppressive and unfit for its purpose in being fair to all within its mantle:

It is only by the spread of the same democratic spirit that animals can enjoy the ‘rights’ for which even men have for so long struggled in vain. The emancipation of men from cruelty and injustice will bring with it in due course the emancipation of women also.

My experience centres around representing the underdog, be it of the human or animal kind. That is why in 2013 I wrote the seminal work on the role of animals in criminal law, Animals-in-Law. It presages the changes we need to ensure that ‘all lives matter’ within the law. That is the only way that each life can be counted and made to count.

In 2013, three radical black organizers, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, created a black-centred political project called #BlackLivesMatter. It was in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the killer of a 17-year-old black teenager, Trayvon Martin. Although his victim was unarmed and Zimmerman shot him at close range, he was acquitted by the jury. The three black activists started their project to honour the dead teenager and ensure it did not happen in the future.

The Black Lives Matter movement gathered momentum following the murder of George Floyd. Yet when we say ‘All Lives Matter’, we limit the idea to humans. I wrote An Animals’ Charter to analyse ‘animal rights’ as the major moral crusade of the 21st century. Animals are secondary to human interests because they do not have the ability to resist us. We have always made and continue to make money by subjugating animals much as our slave traders of every hue made their money by subjugating people. However, unlike their human counterparts who could resist and revolt and riot, animals are forever hamstrung by being denied a human tongue. Consequently they need An Animals’ Charter to reflect the truth that Animals’ Lives Matter too.

Ultimately law is the only means by which animals are and can be protected from us. Law is the means and mechanism that can drive the machinery of justice towards such a vital change that recognises animals are entities per se and not our playthings. Equally we are not their masters or tasters. While ecology and philosophy can aid the course to be taken, the changes we need to make so animals possess ‘a legal personality’ can only be achieved by law. The change must reflect their unique personality through our mirror of morality.

‘Animal rights’ as a concept for a new generation is explored in Doris and the Grumpy Judge.  It is tale that parents could read to their children as a bedtime story. Based on a true story, it seeks to teach children the value of kindness to animals and the true meaning of justice. Doris is a ‘rescue’ dog who is sentenced to death. Doris ends up abandoned, left alone in a cell to face her fate. She can only be saved by the man who sentenced her: the Grumpy Judge.

The current crisis of ‘climate change’ has highlighted the significance of bees to our planet. In Defence of Bees shows that although they are small in size, their rise and fall reflects the health of our planet. Bees are our bellwether as well as being a lodestar for our law. So to save ourselves we could start by saving bees from us and our prevalent pesticide. Similarly we should avoid sitting on a spiked fence and become their advocates. Our stark choice is between doing nothing and perhaps a forlorn death worse than fate. For In Defence of Bees shows in some small way how the world can exist without us, but cannot survive without bees.

The absence of animal rights affect all aspects of our lives and theirs too of course. Straying from any academic text, I wrote an anarchic rock ‘n’ roll road trip novel, English Hungers. Sam Spurns, a lawyer and a singer with the band, English Hungers, prosecutes three thugs who abuse an animal resulting in her death. Like victims portrayed in the BLM movement, regardless of the evidence, they are all acquitted. Spurns feeling her failure has betrayed the victim, changes her life, burns her legal bridges and becomes an eco-outlaw, Joan of Arc style. English Hungers become a nomadic rock band of avenging angels against all animal abusers.

Poetry has long been a powerful medium for a message worth the hearing. With that intent in motion I wrote Blue-bird sings the Blues. It is lightning-strike poetry illuminating the roots of racism, sexism and speciesism. The poems range from trophy hunting to a Suffragette force-fed as if she was foie gras. The poems do not shrink from gunning for the English slave traders whose history is told in the Voyage of The Zong. Meanwhile our politicians are intent on killing badgers and bees oblivious to the real solution of culling their dullard brethren in the Commons. As to the future, the poems ask whether we are heading towards an Animals’ Armageddon while the last Blue-bird sings the Blues?

Until the late 19th century the Great Plains of America and Canada were a home to indigenous Indian tribes. Yet with more rights to the historical sacred ground, it was a home to 60,000,000 bison. That is until they were slaughtered by the European settlers, including the invading English traders, who together killed the native Indians and the animals and destroyed their land. The invaders destroyed the environment, spread disease to the animals and killed them in a historical holocaust consistent with the etymology of the word. While it was not a religious sacrifice, the analogy is valid as it was an annihilation of the animals for a purely human purpose. When they destroyed the land, they killed the animals that roamed there so all that was left aliuve at the start of the 20th century was 600 bison.

Even now it is unfathomable to wonder why the English invaders and traders figured it was acceptable to slaughter all the bison. Yet given the several levels of killing and culling that presently prevail, is it any different now?

In 2021 the archaeologists discovered 1000-year-old rock carvings signifying the demise of the bison. The petroglyphs were discovered by a certain irony as they were unearthed in the dust raised by the few remaining bison hooves. Their hoof marks marked the site of the dig. The hooves prove the redolent massacre outlined with a reverse revenge result in one of the poignant Blue-bird poems, Stag-spanner Ambush at Wounded Knee. 

Outside of law I tend to wander through the fields of music and poetry and wood. I have collaborated with the legendary Liberation Drummer on songs with an animal rights theme. His work has enhanced my words towards a natural beautyas his music reaches every open mind and heart. I am keen on rambling with no aim except to ramble. With enforced solitude I have passed the time by making a pendulum wall clock. Most of my mulling and musing and scratched writing is done at a Shaker desk I made of American black walnut. My ideas ferment on the rambles. The many wild sights fly by to satisfy any hiking mind beneath a wind-chilled sun-streamed Somerset sky. The best ideas arrive as if from a distant world.

The countryside rambles among the brambles are often the catalyst for the ideas and images and sights that unfurl to prove that by saving a single life you can save the entire world.