The issue of animal rights has been gaining ground in the national and international legal landscape for only a few decades, yet it already appears to be one of the most prolific topics in terms of regulatory production. Starting from a general definition, animal rights mean the extension to the animal species of some of the fundamental rights of man, primarily the right to live in freedom and not to suffer unnecessarily. These are topics that over time have led to generate a great debate first philosophical and later legal. Let's go to order. During the last century the current of the animalist philosophy developed in the philosophy of post-modern law, which studied why it was necessary to protect animals. There are three main theses in this regard.

According to a first theory, object animals become subjects of law or, in any case, centers of primary interests. The exponent of this thought is Tom Regan according to which animals do not need to have subjective rights but can be a center of public interests of primary importance that someone must protect as it happens for children and the incapable. A second theory asserts, on the contrary, that animals are holders of subjective rights proper because they are equated to us as living beings and that any form of speciesism (ie the distinction in the recognition of certain rights according to the species of belonging) should be eliminated. In short, the modern jurist's commitment should be directed towards extending the category of rights beyond the species by first checking whether conditions exist that preclude this expansion or if the lack of animal subjectivity is merely the result of an anthropocentric and specistic attitude of the legal systems.

A last theory asserts that animals, not being people, do not have subjective rights but are sentient beings and this is enough to guarantee their needs. The exponent of this theory is Singer. The latter argues that animal rights are not genuine rights similar to those in relation to persons because they can not be classified either as absolute rights or as related rights. Despite having many of the characteristics of fundamental rights can in fact be relied on only against man (so they are not absolute) and not towards other animals. For example, according to this philosophy, man can not kill an animal even to feed on it, but the animal can be killed by another animal and, therefore, does not have a real right not to be killed. For this reason, many consider it more correct to talk about human duties towards animals rather than animal rights. Singer also introduces the principle of equal consideration of interests. If indeed all human beings deserve a full and equal moral status that distinguishes them from other species they should have some peculiarity to them alone. Since the characteristics considered to be exclusively human are the rationality and use of the word which, however, are lacking to some human beings such as newborns or mentally ill (the so-called marginal cases), the status of human and human should not be recognized the protection that derives from it. On the other hand, all the characteristics common to all men (such as the ability to feel pain for example) are also typical of animals. Hence a change of perspective that, instead of restricting the need for protection to humans only, extends it to animals too. Today, in fact, animals are subject to rules whose legal nature is multilevel. In particular, there are six levels of standardization that concern them: first of all there are international sources, then there is the ECHR, the sources of the European Union, Italian laws, regional sources and, finally, local sources.

At the international level we mention first of all the Washington Declaration of Animal Rights of 1978 which, however, had nothing but a mere political value and numerous other conventions in which animals are only marginally protected as annexed to the environment in which they live. . Just think, for example, of the Ramsar Wetlands Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and the Montego Bay and Paris Conventions. The agreements specifically designed to regulate the issue of animal welfare are numerically small and in any case concern specific species: the Whaling Convention, the Convention on the Trade in Endangered Wild Flora and Fauna, the Convention for the Protection of Seals Antarctic and finally the Convention on Migratory Species. All agreements that do not appear to be applicable to the majority of animal species existing on our planet.

On the European level, on the other hand, the first source to be treated is the ECHR, which does not even mention animals once. These, in an interpretative way, come to be considered like goods and as such they are exclusively affected by the protection granted to them by applying the private property institution. The following is the European Convention on the Transport of Animals, the Convention on Livestock and Slaughter, and finally the Convention on the Use of Vertebrate Animals in Scientific Experimentation. They are all conventions of the Council of Europe whose preambles (of the few that possess it at least) show an interesting detail: it seems, in fact, that these conventions are born in order to ensure the welfare of the animals but earlier show how the protection real does not have as its direct recipient the animal but the man. The interest of the experimental animal convention is, in fact, that of protecting public morality; that of the Convention on animals for slaughter, on the other hand, is health. Animal welfare appears to be in both the secondary examples. But what exactly does it mean for well-being? Well-being can be defined as the measure of the animal's positive adaptability to the stimuli coming from the environment. The first reflection on animal welfare dates back to the 60s in Great Britain, where the development of intensive breeding led the British government to set up a technical commission the Brambell Report with which the famous list of five freedoms was developed (Five freedoms) of which farm animals must enjoy: freedom from thirst, hunger and poor nutrition, freedom to have an adequate physical environment; freedom from pain, from wounds, from diseases; the freedom to manifest normal species-specific behavioral characteristics and, finally, freedom from fear and discomfort. These freedoms and the consideration of animals as sentient beings made explicit reference to the international conventions that in the 1970s initiated a legal-normative consideration of animal welfare and the European legislation that followed. Animal welfare has thus become a cornerstone of agricultural and rural development policies and one of the components of the safety and quality of agro-food products, although it should be specified that animals that are considered in animal welfare analysis are essentially those from income.

With the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon animal welfare has found a new position in Article 13 TFEU which states that in the formulation and implementation of Union policies in the fields of agriculture, fisheries, transport , of the internal market, of research and technological development and of the space, the Union and the Member States take full account of animal welfare requirements as sentient beings, while respecting the legislative or administrative provisions and customs of the Member States as regards, in particular, religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage. The same position of the principle in this article is studied: Article 13 of the TFEU is, in fact, the third of a group of norms Articles 11, 12 and 13, which concern the environment, consumers and wellbeing respectively. of animals, providing that their related protection needs should be taken into account in all Union policies. L art. 13 of the Treaty of Lisbon is not by chance because of its guiding principle of European politics it is directly applicable in all the States of the Union. The protection of animals is taken into account even if indirectly also in the Italian Constitution in articles 9, 10, 11 and again in article 117.

Starting from the first, already in the past it was asked to reform it to introduce the principle of merit of protection of animals that would otherwise only be reflected by the interpretative reading of the expression the Republic protects the landscape from which it derives the protection of the environment and only consequently that of animals.

The second form of protection derives from articles 10 and 11 of the Constitution concerning the implementation of international standards and the participation of the country in international organizations that allow the application in Italy of all international and European conventions concerning animals. In reality, even these two articles provide adequate protection, and this can be understood precisely from the reading combined with the aforementioned article: even that the constitutionality of a principle of animal protection with consequent modification of the art. 9 Constitution of the Constitution would then arise a second problem, that of the controlimits deriving from the application of foreign rules in our legal system: in the matter of animal interests it would, in fact, be possible to control such a right to disapply international law if it does not comply with the principle constitutional expressed by this eventual new article 9 Cost? It would also be necessary a change of approach in this sense because to date only the protection of human rights as expressed in the fundamental principles of the Italian Constitution can act as a control against a rule of international law, nothing else.

As regards Article 117 of the Constitution, this divides the legislative competence between the State and the Regions and at least for the regions with ordinary statute this division also involves the division of powers with regard to the phenomenon of animal protection. In fact, the division of legislative functions also includes the division of administrative and regulatory functions as well as those of authorizations, concessories, ablations, declarations and knowledge. Among these, the authorization functions in particular may be either permissible or forbidden with a permit reserve (for example, a general ban on experimenting with live animals if they are not authorized), while the declarative functions consist of checks and releases of certificates, attestations and certazioni. Article 117 of the Constitution remains in any case a norm of organization, not of conduct. The problem arises with reference to the fact that the protection of nature is so important as to spark a debate on how it is possible to separate the territory into several parts each subject to the interests of one region rather than another. The discipline in this area should be as homogeneous as possible throughout the territory to be really effective but this will not happen until in Italy a legal system based essentially on the allocation and exemptions will remain in force. At the level of national legislation, animals are protected under criminal law which reserves them the whole of the nine-title title of the code to combat crimes such as killing and mistreatment, but even here the purpose of this intervention is not to protect animals but the protection of common sensibility. Leaving aside the code, other sources on the matter are given by specific laws concerning stray dogs, slaughter, hunting, fishing, slaughtering or transport.

On the other hand, the Italian Civil Code and the relative procedural code that only recently provide for a regulation concerning the lignitability of animals, as per art. 514. In conclusion, all that remains is to mention regional and local sources: the protection established by them is small and not very guaranteed. In this sense, a rational reorganization not only of these normative sources but also of the higher ones would be desirable. This, together with other solutions such as the overcoming of cultural resistance in the matter, the constitutional recognition of animal dignity without the need to compromise the specificity of human rights and the overcoming of the concept of the animal as res, is a basic element for the creation a regulatory system that ensures that animals have the legal protection they need.

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