Ch. 14— State Regulation of Animal Use • 315 
to act as legal guardians of an animal’s welfare. 
The requirement of standing is satisfied either if 
it is conferred by statute or if a court holds that 
the plaintiff has a legally protectable and tangi- 
ble interest at stake in the litigation. 
One State trial court was called on in 1982 to 
decide whether the Animal Welfare Act or either 
or both of two Connecticut laws confer upon a 
private citizen a right to compel enforcement of 
the statutes against, and the right to seek damages 
from, a research entity on behalf of an animal. 
In Friends of Animals, Inc. v. U.S. Surgical Cor- 
poration, the plaintiffs filed a complaint alleging 
that the defendant's use of dogs in teaching its 
technical field representatives how to use surgi- 
cal staplers violated both the Animal Welfare Act 
and the State's general anticruelty law. The Con- 
necticut anticruelty law is a general misdemeanor 
statute with no qualifiers and contains no re- 
search exemption. (Similar attempts by this group 
to get a Federal hearing on these charges are de- 
scribed in ch. 13. For a complete chronology of 
the lawsuits between these parties and a more 
detailed examination of the attempted use of the 
act and the State's anticruelty laws against a re- 
search enterprise, see the case study at the end 
of this chapter.) 
The group, claiming for its members “a personal 
stake and an intense interest in the prevention 
of cruelty to animals,” asserted a private right of 
action against the company to enforce the laws 
and recover damages. The defendant moved to 
strike the complaint for failure to state a claim 
on which relief could be granted, a pleading that, 
under Connecticut rules of procedure, automat- 
ically tests the legal sufficiency of the complaint. 
The court struck the anticruelty counts, finding 
no legislative intent to create a private right of 
action and noting that the plaintiff introduced no 
legal authority in support of its contention that 
such a right existed. 
To support the alleged right under the Animal 
Welfare Act, the plaintiff claimed the act was anal- 
ogous to the Marine Mammal Protection Act (5). 
(A Federal court had previously interpreted the 
latter to support a private right to sue, as dis- 
cussed in ch. 13.) The Connecticut court rejected 
this analogy. Citing a judicial-review provision in 
the latter statute that is not found in the Animal 
Welfare Act, the absence of any proof that the 
Congress intended to create a private right to en- 
force the Animal Welfare Act, and the absence 
of supporting case law, the judge struck the bal- 
ance of the Friends of Animals complaint, leav- 
ing no issues for trial before the court (45). 
Recent Initiatives to Create Legally 
Enforceable Rights for Animals 
Support is growing in the animal welfare com- 
munity for establishing independent and legally 
enforceable rights for animals, on the theory that 
effective enforcement of animal interests will 
never occur as long as they are balanced against, 
and almost always outweighed by, competing hu- 
man or social considerations. This reflects a gen- 
eral historical progression toward treating ani- 
mals as intrinsically valuable and away from 
treating them as mere chattels or personal prop- 
erty (7,29). 
Interest in this concept is fed by the success of 
animal welfare groups in expanding the reach of 
statutes like the Marine Mammal Protection Act 
by winning the right to sue on behalf of protected 
animals, at least in a limited sense (5,120). Accept- 
ance of other statutes with similar objectives, such 
as the Endangered Species Act, has led to a widen- 
ing circle of protected and judicially enforceable 
interests for animals (22,29). Conferring standing 
to sue on animals would allow humans to sue on 
an animal’s behalf (or on behalf of a class of 
animals) to protect the interests of the animal. 
Groups such as the Animal Welfare Institute have 
used their judicially conferred standing to sue the 
Federal Government and others under the Endan- 
gered Species Act, for example, on behalf of in- 
terests they believe are not being protected suffi- 
ciently (29). 
Standing proposals have led naturally to other 
interest -protecting roles for those seeking to pro- 
tect animals’ rights. In particular, application of 
the familiar principles of guardianship is sought. 
Under guardianship principles, the legislative 
status of animals, especially companion species, 
would be changed from property to possessors 
of specified rights, while the definition of a guard- 
