Animals in the Public Debate: Welfare, Rights, and Conservationism in India Daniela Berti To cite this version: Daniela Berti. Animals in the Public Debate: Welfare, Rights, and Conservationism in India. Reli- gions, MDPI, 2019, 10 (8), pp.475. 10.3390/rel10080475. hal-02291943 HAL Id: hal-02291943 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02291943 Submitted on 19 Sep 2019 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. religions Article Animals in the Public Debate: Welfare, Rights, and Conservationism in India Daniela Berti National Centre for Scientific Research, 75016 Paris, France;
[email protected] Received: 16 June 2019; Accepted: 5 August 2019; Published: 13 August 2019 Abstract: This paper proposes a survey of the many ways in which people look at and deal with animals in contemporary India. On the basis of ethnographic research and of multiple written sources (judgments, newspapers, websites, legal files, activist pamphlets, etc.), I present some of the actors involved in the animal debate—animal activists, environmental lawyers, judges, and hunter-conservationists—who adopt different, though sometimes interconnected, approaches to animals. Some of them look at animals as victims that need to be rescued and treated in the field, others fight for animals in Parliament or in Court so that they can be entitled to certain rights, others are concerned with the issue of species survival, where the interest of the group prevails on the protection of individual animals.