This innovative and prescient book offers a multidisciplinary framework which reconceptualizes maltreated animals as crime victims. Articulating more active and involved responses to animal maltreatment, Animals as Crime Victims provides guidance to attorneys, law enforcement personnel, veterinarians, and educators by reimagining how animals are positioned within the law. Lacey Levitt, David B. Rosengard, and Jessica Rubin bring together expert contributors from various fields who argue for reconceptualizing animals as crime victims and examine the legal ramifications of doing so. Chapters explore how recognition as crime victims not only makes animals and their own interests visible within the law but affords them substantive rights. Alongside a proposed legal framework, this incisive book details modern scientific discoveries regarding the complexity of animals' cognition and emotions and the historical and contemporary sociological shifts in our relationships with animals. Animals as Crime Victims will be a vital read for academics, students, and practitioners whose work focuses on animal maltreatment, animal law, or human-animal studies. Including in-depth examples, practical information, and exploration of substantive law alongside legal theory, this book will be useful to lawyers, law enforcement personnel, criminologists, and veterinary and mental health professionals confronting crimes against animals or the humans committing them. ' Animals as Crime Victims is an outstanding resource for numerous professionals, including lawyers, veterinarians, social scientists, police officers, academics, and others. It recognizes violence as the problem, and animals as beings who deserve the protection of the criminal justice system, for their own sake and that of society.' -- Kathy Hessler, George Washington University Law School, US ‘In this seminal work, the editors have assembled an impressive array of experts in psychiatry, animal behavior, veterinary medicine, forensic science, and rights of crime victims, who explore how to enhance the legal status and protections for nonhuman animals through the criminal justice system. A must read for practitioners and scholars.’ -- Joyce Tischler, Center for Animal Studies at Lewis and Clark Law School, US ‘A fine, well textured, and pioneering work that offers a new paradigm for animal protection law. Admirably well done.’ -- Andrew Linzey, Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, UK Edited by Lacey Levitt, Ph.D., California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, David B. Rosengard, J.D., LL.M., Animal Legal Defense Fund, California and Jessica Rubin, J.D., University of Connecticut School of Law, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.