One Health – One Welfare – One Rights
The projected WHO Pandemic Agreement, as currently under negotiation, will most likely contain a detailed prescription of a One Health approach (Art. 1(d) and Art. 5 of the INB negotiating text of 30 October 2023).
This contribution examines the legal potential of a One Health approach for laws and policies towards animals raised, kept, and slaughtered for providing meat, milk, fur, and other body products for human consumption. My main argument will be that, taken seriously, the idea of One health defies a hierarchy between the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems. The inner logic of One Health is to exploit the positive feedback loops between safeguarding human, animal, and ecosystem health. This approach should modify the still prevailing unreflected and unchecked prioritisation of measures in favour of human health at the expense of and to the detriment of animal health and life. I will illustrate my claim with two policy examples.
Challenge No. 1: zoonotic spill-over
Zoonotic spill-overs, which occur when there is a transmission of pathogens from animals to humans, are of the three main health related challenges of our globalised world today (International Law Association (ILA), White Paper No. 22: One Health 2022). The most dramatic zoonotic spill-over was the Covid-19 pandemic which came over humanity either from the pangolins on the wet market in Wuhan, or from the bats in the Wuhan laboratory.
Expert bodies predict that this will not be the last zoonotic pandemic, and highlight that the industrialised global food industry is an important risk factor. The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the mentioned ILA White Paper, and the UNEP explain that the clearing of land for farming and grazing, linked to an excessive meat demand, increased human encroachment into wildlife habitats, and the intensive, industrialised livestock farming frees microbes and brings humans closer to wildlife and its pathogens. New zoonotic pandemics are the predictable outcome of how human source and grow food, and trade and consume animals.
Until today, the standard response to zoonoses is culling. Such ostensibly cheap but ethically repulsive mass killing was also performed during Covid-19. In the Netherlands, Denmark, the US, and other countries, several human–mink contaminations with Covid 19 were registered. This led to the culling of in total 23 million minks (see also here), and sped up the phasing-out of the mink fur farms in the Netherlands.
Another case of mass killings of animals for fear of a zoonotic spill-over was the culling of millions of pigs in China infected by swine fever. The American Society for Microbiology reported the death of around 225 million animals in 2018-2019.
A historically famous case was the culling of 4.4 million cows in the UK alone in the course of the BSE crisis of the 1990s. This epidemic was entirely man-made and profit-driven, feeding cows (who are herbivores) with meat and bone meal from animal cadavers to make them reach slaughter weight quickly or give more milk. Less well-known is the culling of 40.000 pregnant goats in the Netherlands after a 2009 Q-fever outbreak in humans.
These examples could be multiplied. They all share the feature that huge, even gigantic numbers of perfectly healthy animals are killed preventatively, mostly in a hurry and in disregard of the normal slaughter procedures and precautions. The minks in Denmark were so numerous that there was not sufficient burying space. The rotting corpses contaminated groundwater, and popped up over the surface, mink zombie-like. The fate of the 225 million Chinese pigs was probably even crueller, as many of them were buried alive.
Challenge No. 2: Antimicrobial resistance
The second big health-related challenge, according to the ILA White Paper, is “antimicrobial resistance, which occurs when pathogens no longer respond to medicines”. A major cause of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in livestock as prophylactics and growth promoters. A recent spread of mycoplasma pneumonia in China is mainly attributed to the high level of antimicrobial resistance in the country, which is in turn linked to the overuse of antibiotics in livestock (and humans). If AMR reaches a critical point, it can trigger a new pandemic through the contamination of the food chain for which other medicines may be insufficient.
The standard response to this problem is to cut back the use of antibiotics. For example, the EU has since 2019 explicitly prohibited the use of antimicrobial medicinal products in animals for the purpose of promoting growth, increasing yield, or for prophylaxis other than in exceptional cases (Art. 107 and Preamble (cons. 44) of Regulation (EU) 2019/5).
One Health-informed alternative responses
One Health advises that much more profound responses are needed. The risks of both zoonotic spill-overs and AMR need to be tackled at their roots by radically reducing human contact with and consumption of non-human animal body parts and metabolic products.
Large-scale culling is not in line with the idea of One Health, because it does not mean health but death for the animals. One Health suggests looking much more carefully for non-lethal alternative policies which are equally suited to protect humans, even if they might be more expensive in purely monetary terms.
In order to contain AMR, the use of antibiotics in farming must be radically reduced. This requires a complete overhauling of factory farming as invented in the global north and spreading in countries of the global south. After all, it is mainly the extremely high stocking density of huge flocks which necessitates the generous administration of all kinds of drugs in order to prevent the slightest infection in one animal. Only under industrial conditions, does one single sick animal risk to lead to the infection of entire stocks and risks to cause huge economic damage.
Inspiration can be found in “Solutions Scan”, published by a Cambridge-led team of wildlife and veterinary experts. They recommended the reduction of animal density both within and between farms, basic welfare standards to reduce stress and resulting susceptibility to disease, licencing systems for the transport of live animals or animal parts to ensure hygiene and welfare standards, the development and commercialisation of synthetic alternatives to fur, leather and meat, and consumer education to increase the acceptability of lower-risk substitute products (food, clothing or medicine) instead of animal products, particularly those from high-risk species. According to the IPBES, “[p]andemic risk could be significantly lowered by (…) reducing excessive consumption of meat from livestock production.” Gidon Eshel points out: “To prevent future pandemics (…) we must rethink our relationship with animals, and livestock in particular.” This mainly means “to eat less animal-based food, including markedly reducing our consumption of beef”.
Overcoming the anthropocentrism of One Health
In order to unfold its proper potential and become more than a buzzword, One Health, first of all, needs to be de-anthropocentered.
The acceptation of One Health in the policy texts circulated (including in the proposal for the negotiation of the Pandemic Agreement) is still too anthropocentric. In the current approaches, the animal and environmental sectors are perceived primarily as a risk to human health. Maintaining these two sectors healthy is instrumental for achieving human health (see the critiques by Kamenshchikova 2019 and Rock 2017). Such an anthropocentric understanding of ‘One Health’ distorts the message normally conveyed by the word ‘One’ in this context. ‘One’ expresses interdependence and indivisibility. The normative expectation is that equal consideration of all three sectors will create a virtuous circle, a positive feedback loop among the measures. It is exactly the aim of One Health “to overcome silo-thinking linked to anthropocentrism” (ILA White Paper p. 9). That basic idea is perverted into its opposite when One Health policies (implicitly) establish a hierarchy among the beneficiaries, instead of considering animal health and nature’s health on the same footing as human health. The (unacknowledged) hierarchy risks depriving all parties, including humans, of the benefits of a more integrated approach.
The de-anthropocentered One Health approach suggests drawing in further international institutions and regimes. The collaboration of the Quadripartite (since 2010: FAO, WOAH, WHO; since 2022 joined by UNEP) should be enlarged to directly involve not only the WTO (notably via the Codex Alimentarius Commission and the SPS-Agreement), but also the animal-related regimes such as the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
One Health, once codified in the prospective pandemic treaty, would mandate the systemic interpretation (art. 31 sec. 3) lit. c) VCLT) of all relevant legal instruments, including – again – the animal related ones. For example, a One Health-oriented reading of CITES could seek a progressive interpretation of the Convention’s scope in the direction of covering not only cross-border trade in endangered species but also intrastate trade that deploys substantive transboundary (international) effects. Such a reading would be dynamic, but not absolutely excluded by the Convention’s wording (Art. I lit. c)). The necessity to expand the scope of CITES is illustrated by Covid-19. The pangolins that were probably an intermediate host for Covid-19 between the bats and humans are listed in Appendix I of CITES (CoP18 Doc. 75 (2019). If this were constructed as prohibiting not only international trade in the species, but also as being relevant for the inner-Chinese Pangolin trade due to its enormous international effects, the health gains would be sizeable.
On a different matter, also in the spirit of One Health, the Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime has proposed an amendment of CITES to make the impact of wildlife capture and trade on human health a criterion for listing the species. The authorities responsible for issuing export and import permits could be obliged not just to look at the impacts of trade from a conservation perspective, but would also need to satisfy themselves “that such import will not result in significant risk to human or animal health, and that appropriate sanitary and biosecurity checks and measures are in place to prevent such risks from emerging”, as the proposed amendment says.
Conclusions: One Welfare and One Rights
The conceptualisation of One Health as an approach that properly embeds humans into the web of nature suggests overcoming the legal hierarchy between humans on the one side and animals and the planet on the other side.
It also suggests complementing One Health by One welfare, as the United Nations Environmental Assembly (UNEA) is doing. In a 2022 resolution, the UNEA, ‘acknowledging that animal welfare can contribute to addressing environmental challenges’, commissioned a report by the executive director on ‘matters related to animal welfare and its nexus with human health and the environment, through a One Health approach’ (preamble and para 3; see also the African Union Animal Welfare Strategy 2017, p. 11, Area of focus 2).
Ultimately, One Health and One Welfare might lead to One Rights. Once we acknowledge that animal rights and rights of nature are mostly good for humans, too (Saskia Stucki 2023), the human monopoly on legal rights becomes questionable. An example of a One rights approach was offered by the Islamabad High Court in the 2020 Kavaan-case. The court reasoned that “welfare, wellbeing and survival of the animal species are the foundational principle for the survival of the human race on this planet. Without the wildlife species there will be no human life on this planet. It is, therefore, obvious that neglect of the welfare and wellbeing of the animal species, or any treatment of an animal that subjects it to unnecessary pain or suffering, has implications for the right of life of humans guaranteed under Article 9 of the Constitution” of Pakistan. With this One rights consideration, the court ordered the release of the elephant from the zoo into a sanctuary.
Ultimately, One Health, One Welfare, and One Rights can be developed into a consistent and sustainable legal concept fit for the Anthropocene.