Center for Animal Rights and the Environment (CARE)
The Center for Animal Rights and the Environment (CARE) is a research and learning centre dedicated to the study of animal rights and their interdependence with human rights and the environment. At CARE, we are concerned with the protection and status of animals in law and society, as well as the manifold interconnections between animal, human, and environmental rights and sustainability. Animal rights law investigates the current legal treatment of animals, the rights that animals (ought to) have, and future legal developments. Contemporary animal law increasingly operates in the context of pressing ecological challenges: zoonoses, climate change, species extinction. These require us to consider the interdependencies between humans, animals, and the environment and to develop new, holistic approaches, such as One Health or One Rights.
News
CARE Welcomes Two New Team Members
The Center for Animal Rights and the Environment (CARE) welcomes two new team members: John Hader and Katherine Hermans!
John Hader joins CARE as a researcher in the “Transformative Meat Governance” project. With a background in environmental science and a focus on environmental pollution and food system sustainability, he brings valuable interdisciplinary expertise to our team. Having previously worked for an environmental consulting firm in the United States, he completed his PhD at Stockholm University and a postdoc at Empa in Switzerland. At CARE, John will explore the relationship between our current food system built around animal agriculture, the legal frameworks that support it, and how this can be transformed towards a system that better supports One Health Goals.
Katherine Hermans joins CARE as its Coordinator. She brings more than 20 years of leadership experience in sustainability. As the founder and former director of Global Changemakers, she led an international NGO dedicated to youth-led sustainable development. She later built and co-directed the Open Science department at the University of Zurich and has provided strategic advice to governments and international organizations while serving on the boards of several sustainability-focused organizations. Katherine holds an MA from Leiden University and an MSt in Sustainability Leadership from the University of Cambridge.
CARE officially launched with inaugural conference
On 15 January 2026, the Center for Animal Rights & the Environment (CARE) was officially launched with its inaugural conference “Animal Rights: Between Idealism and Realism” at the Casinotheater Winterthur.
The conference brought together approximately 100 international scholars and practitioners, including highly renowned speakers such as Prof. Cass Sunstein (Harvard Law School), Prof. Julia Hänni (Swiss Federal Supreme Court), Prof. Anne Peters (Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law), and Prof. Saskia Stucki, Founder and Director of CARE.
Defund Meat Symposium on Verfassungsblog
Drawing on the Defund Meat Conference held in Heidelberg in January 2025, the symposium features selected conference papers and additional contributions of experts in the field.
The series opens with an introductory piece by CARE Director Dr. Saskia Stucki, explaining the idea of defunding meat.
Read Saskia Stucki’s introductory piece: https://verfassungsblog.de/defund-meat-intro/
Explore the full symposium: Defund Meat Archives - Verfassungsblog
Learn more about the project: Defund Meat | ZHAW Institut für Regulierung und Wettbewerb IRW
Director and team
Coordinator
Team
Visiting researchers
We welcome expressions of interest from scholars whose work broadly connects with CARE’s research at the intersection of animal rights, human rights, and the environment. If you are interested in a visiting research stay with us, please get in touch with a brief outline of your proposed project, your CV, and your preferred dates. Visiting research stays are primarily self-funded, though limited scholarships may be available for scholars from the Global South.
Partnerships
Donors
We thank Martin Haefner, Dr. Florentina Dietrich and the Haldimann-Stiftung for their generous donations, which enable the long-term funding of CARE.
Events
Past events
Research projects
Oxford Handbook of Global Animal Law
The Oxford Handbook of Global Animal Law establishes the field of Global Animal Law, which engages with the legal status and protection of animals in today’s globalised world. It is co-edited by Anne Peters (MPIL Heidelberg), Kristen Stilt (Harvard Law School), and Saskia Stucki (ZHAW), and involves more than 130 authors from all over the world.
Defund Meat
Meat is a (perhaps the) symbol of contemporary, interrelated environmental and health crises: climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, pandemics, unhealthy and unsustainable diets, and institutionalized animal suffering. While (not) eating meat has long been cast as a private choice, it has become an increasingly politicized issue. This project critically examines the status quo of meat governance and envisions the future shape and instruments of a transformative meat governance.
Supervision of Bachelor’s Theses
ZHAW students interested in writing a bachelor’s thesis on a topic related to animal law are invited to contact us with an initial topic idea or to discuss possible topics.
Media
- Ebranler l’anthropocentrisme par le droit - Le Courrier, Le Courrier, 29 January 2026
- "Headwinds have been a constant presence in my work", Interview, UZH News, 16 September 2025
- „Klimakiller Fleisch?“, Interview mit RadioX, 17 July 2025
- «Trans-Farmation»: Mehr Vielfalt vom Acker bis zum Teller, SRF Trend, 7 March 2025
- «Fleisch müsste mehr als doppelt so teuer sein», Interview, 20 Minuten, 20 February 2025
- Kunnen we met rechtspraak de vleesindustrie en overheden tot de orde roepen?, Studio Plantaardig, 14 February 2025
- Shitstorm gegen Veggie-Days? Die Zeiten sind vorbei!, der Freitag, 30 January 2025
- Can We Stop Paying the Polluters? A Report on the Defund Meat Conference, Vegconomist, 29 January 2025
- „Wir müssen über Fleisch reden“, Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, 21 January 2025
Publications
Andrea Ford, Lisa Boden, Paulo Ferinho, Saana Jukola, Lucy Robertson, Saskia Stucki, Jakob Zinsstag: Defining One Health: Environment versus ecosystem, CABI Digital Library, 20 May 2026
Saskia Stucki, Defund Meat: A Call for Transformative Meat Governance, VerfBlog, 2025/10/01, https://verfassungsblog.de/defund-meat-intro/, DOI: 10.59704/2340b81ccf69dbc1
Saskia Stucki, Zur Notwendigkeit einer transformativen Fleisch-Governance, 2 Nachhaltigkeitsrecht 147-154 (2025)
Saskia Stucki, Emerging Animal Rights and Their Anthropo-, Zoo- and Ecocentric Justifications, EJIL:Talk!, 23 April 2025
Saskia Stucki, André Nollkaemper, Cesare Romano & Anne Peters, The Heidelberg Declaration on Transforming Global Meat Governance, EJIL:Talk!, 13 March 2025
Saskia Stucki, One Rights: Human and Animal Rights in the Anthropocene (Springer 2023)
Saskia Stucki, Animal Warfare Law and the Need for an Animal Law of Peace: A Comparative Reconstruction, 71 American Journal of Comparative Law 189-233 (2023)
Saskia Stucki & Visa Kurki, Animal Rights, in: Mortimer Sellers & Stephan Kirste (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, 98-103 (Springer 2023)
Saskia Stucki, Zur Sache: Es geht um die Wurst, MaxPlanckForschung 1/2023, p 12-15
Saskia Stucki, Klimaschutz geht durch den Magen: Die Schweizer Massentierhaltungsinitiative und ihre klimapolitische Bedeutung, Verfassungsblog, 13 September 2022
Saskia Stucki, Guillaume Futhazar, Tom Sparks, Bruce Ackerman, Fatou Bensouda, Lalit Bhasin, David R. Boyd, Chunghwan Choi, Martyn Day, Eduardo Ferrer Mac-Gregor Poisot, Idayat Hassan, Donald W. Kaniaru, Helen Keller, Viviana Krsticevic, Antonio Oposa Jr, Anne Peters, Paulo Sérgio Pinto de Albuquerque, Flavia Piovesan, Caleb Pollard & Christina Voigt, World Lawyers' Pledge on Climate Action, 51 Environmental Policy and Law 371-376 (2021)
Saskia Stucki, Menschenrechte für Tiere: Zur Verrechtlichung einer Idee, deren Zeit gekommen ist, in: Frank Adloff & Tanja Busse (eds), Welche Rechte braucht die Natur? Wege aus dem Artensterben, 147-158 (Campus 2021)
Saskia Stucki, Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights, 40 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 533-560 (2020)
Saskia Stucki & Tom Sparks, The Elephant in the (Court)Room: Interdependence of Human and Animal Rights in the Anthropocene, EJIL: Talk! 9 June 2020
Tom Sparks, Visa Kurki & Saskia Stucki, Editorial: Animal Rights – Interconnections with Human Rights and the Environment, 11 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 149-155 (2020)
Saskia Stucki, (Certified) Humane Violence? Animal Welfare Labels, the Ambivalence of Humanizing the Inhumane, and What International Humanitarian Law Has to Do with It, 111 AJIL Unbound 277–281 (2017)
Saskia Stucki & Juan C Herrera, Habea(r)s Corpus: Some Thoughts on the Role of Habeas Corpus in the Evolution of Animal Rights, International Journal of Constitutional Law Blog, 4 November 2017
Saskia Stucki, Die Nutzung kommt vor dem Schutz – und andere Lehren aus der neuen Küken-Rechtsprechung, 7 Rechtswissenschaft 521–541 (2016)
Saskia Stucki, Toward Hominid and Other Humanoid Rights: Are We Witnessing a Legal Revolution?, Verfassungsblog, 30 December 2016
Saskia Stucki, Grundrechte für Tiere: Eine Kritik des geltenden Tierschutzrechts und rechtstheoretische Grundlegung von Tierrechten im Rahmen einer Neupositionierung des Tieres als Rechtssubjekt (Nomos 2016)