Swiss May Give Animals Free Lawyers

March 4, 2010, 6:23 pm
Swiss May Give Animals Free Lawyers
By ROBERT MACKEY

afgoetschel.com
Like a duck needs a lawyer. Antoine Goetschel with potential clients.

Barely three months after Swiss voters approved a measure to restrict the rights of Muslims to build minarets, they return to the polls on Sunday to consider expanding the rights of animals to get free legal representation.

At the moment, only one Swiss canton, Zurich, employs an attorney to represent abused animals in court. But if the voters agree with the 144,000 animal lovers who signed a petition to get the measure on the ballot, next week each of Switzerland’s 26 cantons will be required to appoint a lawyer to act as a public prosecutor for the region’s animals.

According to Antoine F. Goetschel, the attorney who has been spending part of his week representing the interests of Zurich’s animals since 2007, the new measure is necessary since other regions of the country are failing to enforce laws against animal cruelty.

In a typical year, most of Mr. Goetschel’s 150 to 200 clients are mistreated dogs. Last month, though, he got a lot more attention than usual when he represented a dead fish in court.

Asked by The Associated Press why he took a fisherman to court and charged him with torturing a large pike by taking 10 minutes to kill it, Mr. Goetschel said, “It’s the same reason why a prosecutor goes after a murderer: to make sure that people are suitably punished for their crimes.” After losing the case he noted, “Fish don’t get much sympathy.”

That might be true of wild fish, but Switzerland does have a law on the books against what Mr. Goetschel calls the solitary confinement of goldfish. As Cathrin Schaer of the German magazine Spiegel pointed out in an interview with Mr. Goetschel this week, “Since 2008, it has been illegal to keep animals that usually live in groups — such as goldfish, canaries or guinea pigs — alone.”

The country also requires dog owners to take a course training them to be good and will ban tying up horses inside their stalls within a few years.

While he acknowledged to Spiegel that the country already has far-reaching laws to protect animals, Mr. Goetschel says that state-appointed lawyers are necessary “to ensure that existing animal-welfare laws are adhered to.” In many parts of the country, he said, the laws “are not taken seriously.” Since his position was created in Zurich, he said, “everyone involved — the police, local veterinarians and animal-welfare organizations — takes these things more seriously.”