An Article Series from All-Creatures.org 

 

Animal Rights/Vegan Activists' Strategies

Kim Stallwood's Meeting with Tier im Recht

From Kim Stallwood
September 2024

Tier im Recht - We Give Animals a Legal Voice. TIR has been advocating for a strong legal protection of animals since 1996. The main purpose of TIR's actions is the continuous improvement of the human-animal relationship in a legal, ethical and social sense.

In August, Joyce Tischler and I briefly met with Tier im Recht in Zurich, Switzerland.

Joyce is Professor of Practice at the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, OR. She teaches Fundamentals of Animal Law (survey course) and Industrial Animal Agriculture Law. She founded the Animal Legal Defense Fund in 1979. Also that year or possibly 1980 (our memories are hazy), Joyce and I met when she visited England. We’ve been friends and colleagues ever since.

Kim, Joyce, and TIR's Vanessa Gerritsen and Gieri Bolliger (l to r)

Tier im Recht (Foundation for the Animal in the Law) is an independent charity whose mission is to work for the ‘continuous improvement of human-animal relations in a legal, ethical, and social sense.’ TIR acquired the Stallwood Collection in 2021 and is now part of the institute’s library of animal law and related issues. The TIR library is a world-class repository of animal law, animal ethics, animal studies, and related issues.

I arranged with Joyce, who was already in England, to join me in Zurich to learn more about TIR’s professional legal work in animal law, see firsthand the breadth and depth of information held by the library in many formats, and meet the institute’s lawyers and staff. I considered it to be important that someone as internationally important in animal law as Joyce is that it behoved me to take advantage of her European visit to see first-hand the importance of the TIR library.

TIR very kindly arranged a three-day schedule of meetings and briefings thereby making Joyce’s first visit to their offices productive and informative and adding to international relationships among colleagues. A reception was held one evening in the library when local advocates and leaders were invited to hear Joyce speak about her lifetime’s work in animal law. I also discussed the biography I’m writing about Topsy the Elephant. The library was open for visitors, and I described some of the unique materials held in the Kim Stallwood Collection.

My discussions with Joyce made possible some conversations with colleagues in the United States about their archives.

To learn more about the visit, please visit the TIR website, including more photographs of the trip.

---

Posted on All-Creatures.org: September 11, 2024
Return to Animal Rights/Vegan Activist Strategies