When Dr Maureen O’Sullivan first ran her animal law module at the University of Galway in January 2025, she had no idea what she was walking into. The class that replaced her old English Landlord and Tenant course, which had withered to three or four students after a change to UK solicitor entry requirements, started small. By the time she ran it again the following September, enrolment had jumped from 68 to 149 students.

“I’ll be honest, you could have knocked me over with a feather,” she says.

It’s a striking example of what is still, in her own words, “cutting edge law” and a sign of just how much appetite there is among Irish law students for a subject that, until recently, had nowhere to live in the country’s legal education.

From patents to persons: a change of sight during her PhD

O’Sullivan’s route into animal law wasn’t obvious. Her PhD, back in 2009, was focused on patents and biotech inventions specifically; the strange legal territory opened when scientists began hybridising human and animal cells. Did a lab-created hybrid fall under European human rights law, or something else entirely? That question led her to Gary Francione’s Animals as Persons, which she credits as the book that first got her thinking seriously about the legal classification of animals as property.

Her supervisor, only half-joking, told her she seemed to be running two PhDs at once: “Is it animal rights, or is it patents and biometeorology?” She insisted it was the latter. But the interest kept running in the background.

Socially, the pieces were falling into place too. After years abroad, O’Sullivan returned to Ireland in 2006 and found the country’s vegetarian and vegan communities were plentiful but disconnected: “you have your Limerick group, you’ll have your group in Cork, and they don’t really know about each other.” She got involved with the Vegetarian Society of Ireland (now the Vegan Society of Ireland). It was through the society’s annual World Vegetarian Day event that she met Claire Lindsay of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics in 2014, a connection that led to a fellowship, publications, and her entry into the academic side of animal law.

The final piece came via Cambridge University. The Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law, having built a successful undergraduate module of its own, invited O’Sullivan to a teaching workshop in 2022 and shared their course material, making it far easier for her to design and pitch a module of her own at Galway.

What the course actually covers

The module doesn’t shy away from difficult territory. Alongside the expected coverage of the Animal Health and Welfare Act 2013, O’Sullivan is blunt about its limitations: “it’s quite detailed, but it’s undecipherable.” Assessing “unnecessary cruelty,” she points out, requires expertise from multiple disciplines that Irish courts simply don’t have easy access to and unlike courts in the US, which regularly admit amicus curiae (Friends of the Court) briefs from outside experts, Irish courts have shown little appetite for that practice.

She’s equally clear-eyed about the Act’s inconsistencies: exemptions for fishing, hare coursing and fox hunting that sit awkwardly against the law’s broader protective aims. “There is no principle in terms of how we use the animals,” she says. “It’s basically political.”

The course pushes students toward that kind of clear-eyed thinking rather than emotional appeal. O’Sullivan avoids “horror stories or guilt-tripping” in the classroom, focusing instead on getting students to notice the disconnect between how animals are discussed and how they’re actually treated, pointing out, for instance, that most students have never seen a pig outdoors, despite pork being one of the most commonly eaten meats in the country.

Assessment is structured to build a specific skill: precise, disciplined writing to a word count. Undergraduates complete a 5,000-word reflective log plus a 1,000-word essay, a format designed less for showing off knowledge and more for training students to describe an issue clearly before offering an opinion. “A lot of people, when they write, it’s page three or page four before they’ve told you what they’re talking about,” she says. The reflective log format asks for description first, analysis second and opinion last, which was often revealing, over the course of writing, that a student’s initial view has shifted.

A micro-credential version of the module is now in development for those without an undergraduate background in law, built around a single 5,000-word log rather than the two-part undergraduate assessment. O’Sullivan says it will be “almost identical” to the undergraduate content, aimed at people who missed the chance to study animal law the first-time round, or practitioners looking to get a handle on the subject just with a single combined 5,000-word log replacing the two-part assessment, since the target-word-count discipline matters less for that cohort.

Student voices

The numbers back up the anecdotal buzz. A survey of over 30 students from this year’s cohort returned an average rating of 4.2 out of 5 (which was independently run in accordance with this interview), though a rating out of 5 may vary from module to module. What stood out more than the score, though, was why students had signed up in the first place. Asked about their motivation before starting, the answers split cleanly into two camps: a straightforward love of animals, and a more analytical curiosity about the state of Irish legislation, why it looks the way it does, and whether it’s likely to change.

That second group’s instincts turn out to be largely correct. O’Sullivan’s own assessment of the current legal framework is measured rather than damning: “Actually, it’s not too bad,” she says of the Animal Health and Welfare Act, before immediately qualifying it with the enforcement and coherence problems described above. Her honest answer to students who assumed the law must be a lost cause is, in effect: the drafting is reasonable, the application is the weak link.

Interest in the micro-credential has also come from an unexpected direction: non-law students curious whether they’d be able to keep up without a legal background and current students asking whether the workload would differ from the undergraduate version. It’s a sign the appetite for the subject extends well past the law school itself.

Teaching outside the textbook

One of the module’s more unusual touches came up repeatedly in student feedback: music. O’Sullivan has begun experimenting with bringing an autoharp into class not as a gimmick but drawing on emerging pedagogical research into music’s role in legal education. The idea traces back to her years in Coventry, home of the politically charged 2 Tone ska movement, where music was used deliberately to break down racial barriers. She sees a parallel use for animal law: shifting a subject that’s often approached purely intellectually into something that also reaches people emotionally and culturally. About ten students contributed their own musical pieces as an optional adjunct to the course last year.

It’s a small piece of a larger belief she holds that legislative change alone won’t be enough. “You can change the legislation all you want; it’s probably not going to be enforced,” she says.

What’s needed, in her view, is a genuine societal shift in how animals are regarded, not just a better-drafted statute.

Beyond rights: welfare, ethics, and technology

The module doesn’t confine itself to statute. O’Sullivan spends real time with students on the philosophical scaffolding underneath animal law and she’s sceptical of leaning on a “rights” framework alone. “The rights paradigm” has its limits, she argues; rights function as a zero-sum contest, and “if I’m up against you and we’ve got competing rights and you win and I lose, I have nothing.” She points instead to virtue ethics, the older idea that a person should simply strive to be good, rather than doing something merely because they’re legally permitted to. Drawing on AWH Bates’s history of anti-vivisection, she notes that doctors once resisted animal experimentation largely on grounds of personal character and the Hippocratic commitment to do no harm, before medical advances gradually swallowed up that resistance. It’s a thread she wants students to sit with: 
“I will do because I can do” is not the same as asking what one ought to do.

That same forward-looking curiosity extends to technology. O’Sullivan, whose PhD background in biotechnology gives her an unusually firm grip on the science, is genuinely enthusiastic about developments like cultivated meat, cell-cultured “meat” grown without slaughter, and the broader move toward cell banks that could eventually remove animals from product testing altogether. She’s realistic that not every animal advocate will be satisfied by that shift: some will still object that lab-grown meat lacks the animal’s consent, but her view is pragmatic: “if it means that you’re not killing animals anymore, well, I think that’s a huge advantage… morality is a spectrum in this area.” She’s equally clear that any transition away from animal agriculture must bring farmers along with it, rather than leaving behind the people whose livelihoods are built entirely around it.

Artificial intelligence comes up too, more tentatively as a possible alternative to animal testing in labs but weighed against AI’s own environmental costs in water and energy. It’s not an area she claims to have settled views on, but it’s clearly part of where she expects the subject to keep evolving.

A field gaining ground

The module’s growth mirrors a wider surge of interest O’Sullivan has watched build across the UK and Ireland. She’s been invited to speak at FLAC UG (Free Legal Advice Centres) sessions, where attendance jumped from around 15 the previous year to 70 or 80 this time round, and she regularly attends the annual animal law conference run jointly by the Animal Law Centre and the Multi Species Collective at Birmingham University where, this year, a French academic recognised her name because a former Erasmus student of hers had gone on to pursue further study in the field after taking the Galway module.

Much of that momentum is networked rather than isolated. O’Sullivan is close friends with Christina Warner, the award-winning barrister and family lawyer behind the UK’s proposed Ruby’s Law legislation that would use the Convention on the Rights of the Child to protect children from witnessing domestic violence involving companion animals and would recognise pets in their own right as family members (a step Spain’s parliament has already taken). Warner’s work has been cited as far afield as Chile and Canada and she visited Ireland in May for a launch event O’Sullivan attended. Their shared view is pragmatic rather than idealistic: as O’Sullivan puts it, echoing Warner, “it’s not one thing that’s going to solve it”; new legislation only matters if there’s the political will and public buy-in to back it up, which is part of why she keeps returning to the idea of a cultural, not just legal, shift.

On her own plate: a rolling sabbatical, teaching each autumn term and stepping back each January, specifically to write a textbook on Irish animal law. She’s also in the process of taking on a practice-based PhD student, a stonemason and sculptor by trade, whose past work includes public sculptures in Kilkenny and Ennis, who will build a graphic novel following the Morrígan, the crow of Irish mythology, across centuries of Irish history to trace how animal rights have progressed or regressed over time. O’Sullivan will supervise the legal content, with the student’s own faculty guiding the creative and design side.

Advice for students looking to go beyond the module

Asked what she’d tell students hoping to build a career in the space, O’Sullivan’s advice is practical rather than aspirational. A PhD is one direct route; she’s already supervised one on animal protection law, with a second underway. For those heading into legal practice, she points to the UK, where the infrastructure Ireland still lacks already exists: Advocates for Animals, Britain’s first firm dedicated entirely to animal advocacy, which has challenged the approval of fast-growing “Franken chicken” breeds and individual solicitors elsewhere building similar specialisms, including one based in Co. Leitrim working across animal and environmental law.

Her core message is to seek out people already doing the work rather than starting from scratch. “Look at the pioneers,” she says. “Then you’re not beating around in the dark, looking for the way forward.”

For a module barely eighteen months old, that’s already a lot of ground covered. If enrolment figures and the pace of activity around it are any indication, still a great deal of room to grow.

Emma Dumpleton is a summer intern at Animal Law Ireland and a law student at the University of Galway