Justice & Law Quote by J. M. Coetzee

Coetzee’s line lands like a moral verdict delivered in the calmest possible voice. It begins with an apparently unassailable premise - the right to life as the first domino in any rights regime - then pivots to a bleak forecast: domesticated animals won’t get it. The sting is in the phrase “cannot foresee,” a novelist’s way of saying: don’t hold your breath for human decency to scale beyond our own species.

The intent isn’t to argue legal technicalities; it’s to expose the machinery that keeps animal suffering socially invisible. “Domesticated” is doing heavy work. These aren’t wild creatures beyond human governance; they’re beings produced by us, bred into dependence, then processed into commodities. If any animals were candidates for legal protection, it would be the ones most entangled with human responsibility. Coetzee’s choice of category spotlights the central hypocrisy: our intimacy with animals (pets, farms, labs) doesn’t expand their moral status; it often shrinks it, because their usefulness is precisely why the law avoids recognizing their full vulnerability.

The subtext is a critique of rights language itself: modern liberal societies treat “rights” as a badge of personhood, and personhood as a gated community. Granting a right to life to animals would force a collision with everyday habits and vast industries - meat, dairy, leather, testing - that rely on killing as routine. Coetzee is writing from the tradition of unsettling the reader rather than consoling them, suggesting that the obstacle isn’t ignorance but the durability of convenient cruelty, protected by law’s careful, species-specific blinders.