Animals in law: legal standing, a Commissioner, and ending factory farming

The document’s foundational claim is that animals are property under New Zealand law, and that this makes them very hard to protect in any meaningful way. The proposed framework defines sentience in legislation, recognises animals as sentient beings, imposes positive welfare obligations rather than only prohibitions, and grants animals legal rights — alongside advocating legal personhood for ecosystems and species.

Animal welfare is currently regulated by the Ministry for Primary Industries, which the party notes is the same department responsible for export opportunities and agricultural productivity. Their argument is that this is a conflict of interest and that welfare decisions are consequently driven by industry stakeholders. The Commissioner would be independent, hold real powers, and answer to the public.

The long-term goal is stated plainly as abolishing animal farming and moving to plant-based, cellular and sustainable agriculture. The nearer-term steps are banning the most harmful farming and fishing practices, tougher enforcement, and financial support for farmers to change — the document is explicit that the transition takes time and that change leaving rural communities behind is not good change.

The problem named is structural rather than about individual dogs: short timeframes to claim a dog, upfront costs families cannot pay in one go, and shelters past capacity. The policy makes rehoming and no-kill the national default, and aims to reduce how many dogs go unclaimed in the first place.

The party supports protecting indigenous species but rejects mass killing of cats, arguing there is no reliable way to distinguish a feral cat from a companion animal or a community cat. Its alternative is nationwide desexing, Trap-Neuter-Return, habitat restoration and predator-proof fencing, framed as compassionate conservation.

Recreational hunting and hunting competitions would be banned. The stated reasons are the suffering caused to target animals and to non-target species taken unintentionally, and the effect the party argues competitions have in normalising killing — it names school activities such as “Toss the Poss” as teaching children to treat some species as disposable.

The environmental case runs through agriculture: a shift to productive land use without farming animals, which the party argues opens up rewilding of farmland and carbon sequestration alongside habitat restoration and action on pollutants and pesticides. It frames this through kaitiakitanga and guardianship of the land.